Plug Suits and Penguins

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Chapter 12: Adventures in Pilot-Stalking

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It was not a girl thing, after all, Shinji decided. Penguins turned out not to be universally loved by females. After living with Asuka for a few weeks, he felt confident saying she hated Penpen. And Penpen, for his part, was none too fond of her. It was not simple disinterest or apprehension. She complained about the bird being a freeloader, being smelly, being greedy, for hogging the TV remote, for stealing her shampoo, for trying to eat her A-10 connectors, for barging in on her in the bathroom three times and counting, and for generally being a useless sack of stinky old feathers.

Granted, Shinji agreed with the bulk of that diatribe, but he had the manners not to say it out loud. Asuka also told him, in her own words, "I hate Penpen." She also told Penpen. And three separate minimart clerks. And Misato, which spurred a very loud, very unpleasant two evenings running at the apartment. They eventually brokered an armistice of sorts, but an uneasy, hair-trigger argument remained hanging in the air.

His default of conflict avoidance was rapidly becoming even more untenable. Asuka was, if nothing else, conflicting. To the people around her, to animals, to the environment as the hinges on her bedroom door could attest to. She shut it like she was angry at the walls. Shinji was mildly upset after she declared his room her own and he was forced into the smaller spare, but, conflict avoidance. So he accepted it. He imagined, once upon a time, that acquiescing to her every demand was indeed the smart thing to do. But it often made her angrier, like she wanted the fight he refused to step into the ring for. But changing one's default is not a light lift.

So when Misato chewed the two of them out for a few substandard exam results due to a lack of time to study due to endless sessions of DDR: Save the Planet Edition a week back, he agreed with her order to focus harder on school. And after she left for work, when Asuka ordered him to fetch their laptops from class, he agreed to that, as well. And instead of doing the normal, polite, non-insane thing and thanking him, she hurled an empty pudding cup at his face and called him stupid. Girls were complicated, was his main takeaway.

So Shinji travelled to school. The grounds were deserted except for a few stray janitors. The halls were empty. Class 2-A was vacant. Because all of his peers were on their school trip to Okinawa. His friends waved as they left, like they couldn't wait to be rid of him and Tokyo-3, like the effort to hoist their hands in the air wasted precious energy better utilized for their impending super fun time adventure. Even Hikari, despite sparing a few condolences in his general direction, looked like she was off to an extended play date with a few dozen penguins. And they flew away, to sandy freedom. As he trudged to an empty school to try and wrap his head around entry-level physics.

He found his laptop, and briefly considered not finding Asuka's. She'd be furious with him if he did not deliver it. But she'd be furious with him if he brought it to her, too.

The unknown possible unpleasantness of telling her to get it herself felt greater than the known unpleasantness of playing electronics courier. So be it. He would face his impending confrontation with head held high. Maybe.

He paused after lugging both laptops into his satchel. There was an innate awareness he unconsciously developed piloting an Evangelion. A kind of extra eye tuned to unusual environmental changes that almost predicted action. In short, paranoia. Something that always clung near to him, but more so since engaging in life or death battles in a giant robot.

Shinji glanced around the room, reconfirming he was alone. He stood still and silent, straining every sense to reach out and find something abnormal. He waited.

And found nothing. He sighed. Oh, paranoia. You familiar, clammy turtleneck.

He walked into the hallway outside the classroom. And almost into Nozomi Horaki.

"Oh," he said, thrown off by the complete lack of context. "Hi."

"Oh, hey," she replied, like they were supposed to meet up in his abandoned school hall. "It's Mr., um…"

"… Ikari," he helped out.

"Yeah, yeah. Mr. Ikari. How are you?"

"… Fine."

"Great. I'm fine, too."

"… Good." They stared at each other. "What are you doing here?"

"Huh? Oh. Uh, you know. Not much. How about you?"

"I…" Shinji stopped. Closed his eyes, hoping when he opened them Nozomi would be gone, a figment of his increasingly frazzled brain's attempts at processing his increasingly frazzled life. Nope. She was still there. "This is my school," he told her, like that should spur her to explain her continued presence.

"Sure is." Her eyes circled the otherwise abandoned hallway they occupied. "Kind of bland. Is this all I have to look forward to?"

"Did you come here to get something for your sister?"

"Hmm? Oh, uh, sure. Yes. That is why I'm here alone by myself."

"Okay."

He escorted her back into class 2-A. He watched her casually poke around several random desks.

"… Ms. Horaki's seat is there," he said, pointing. "By the podium."

"Oh, yeah." Nozomi meandered over, rooting inside. She emerged with a well-worn eraser nub. "Got it."

She returned to Shinji. He was fairly positive now this was some sort of fever dream. Reality was odd enough nowadays without all this. He shook his head.

"Ready to leave?" he asked Nozomi and his fragile ego.

"Uh, hold on. Stay here."

She darted out of the room. She darted back into the room.

"Sure am. Thanks for the help, Mr., uh, uh, Ikari!" She pumped her fist gently, proud of her recall.

Shinji was shaking his head again. "No problem. I hope your sister gets that… eraser."

"The what? Oh, yeah, yeah."

He headed out, got three steps and realized he was alone. "Ms. Nozomi?"

"Yeah?" she called from the classroom.

"Um." He suddenly felt a mild responsibility for this unaccompanied minor. "Do… you need me to walk you home?"

"Huh? Oh, nah. I'm good. See you later, Mr. Ikari."

Totally convinced this was a hallucination, but still lucid enough to realize a thoroughly grumpy Asuka awaited his speedy return, Shinji nodded. "Alright then. Goodbye."

"See ya."

He left. Nozomi waited until she no longer heard his footfalls echoing in the hallway. She groaned and stalked down the opposite path.

"Hey," she demanded as she turned the corner. "What the heck happened to you?"

"Sorry," Sakura Suzuhara said, crouched behind the bend of architecture. "I got nervous."

Nozomi frowned down at her. Her leg was still braced but she was mobile via a pair of crutches. Which she was, depending on the audience, either unnaturally adept at manipulating or a helpless klutz with. Sakura was always good at reading a room and extracting the most from it. Balled into an anxious pile of conflicting emotions, busted leg and crutches poking out in every direction, hiding in an empty school, the desired effect for sympathy radiated off her in nearly palpable waves. Nozomi was having none of it.

"You're the one who begged me to go meet him," she complained. "Tailing a teenager across town is not my idea of a fun half-day."

"I know. I'm sorry. I just… I got nervous."

"You said that already."

"Well, it's justified," Sakura stated. "How can you be so, so, cavalier about interacting with him? Don't you realize who he is?"

"He's just Mr., um, Ikari."

"He's the pilot of the robot protecting our city," she echoed Nozomi from a few weeks ago in the hospital.

"Huh? Oh, yeah." Nozomi waved all that off, somehow forgetting why they were out here to begin with. "He's also just a guy."

Sakura looked to the heavens for some guiding light, some ray of divine inspiration to make her dear friend understand the gravity of who was in her presence a scant two minutes ago. None came.

"He is not just a guy."

Sakura felt confident saying that. And thinking that. And writing about that in the journal she hid inside a carefully sewn-off incision on the underside of her pillow at home. Shinji Ikari was more than "just a guy." He was more than a pilot of a real life giant robot. He was more.

"Seems like just a guy to me," Nozomi said.

"You barely know him," Sakura grumbled, deftly getting to her feet.

They began walking out of the empty middle school together.

"I know him better than you do. And I've actually talked to him."

"I will. I will." Sakura frowned. "I just need to properly prepare. Big Bro was less than helpful."

"He knows Mr. Ikari?"

"They're friends."

"Huh. I'm surprised he told you that."

"I… convinced him to tell me."

Nozomi involuntarily shivered at the ice in her tone. "Well, then why not have your brother arrange a meeting?"

"No," Sakura groaned. "It has to be organic and natural. Big Bro wouldn't know where to begin. A first meeting is crucial in this sort of thing."

"… But you asked me to help follow him today."

"Well, he doesn't know that."

They departed the school. Early afternoon sun beat down upon them from a cloudless blue sky. Sakura was undaunted, forging ahead on her crutches with half-leaps and bounds over her thin shadow. Nozomi trailed after, kicking loose stones under the school gates.

"You know where he lives, right?"

"Yeah, yeah."

That was intel gathered from Hikari's class roster at home. Nozomi knew that was wrong. But so was defying Sakura in matters related to mecha. And Hikari was off on some class trip or something, so it felt more like robbing a ghost.

"Poor Mr. Ikari," Sakura was saying with a grin. "Having to stay behind while his friends leave for Okinawa." More intel gained from the Horaki household. "All alone in a city he is destined to protect."

"Not alone. That girl is still around."

Sakura halted in mid-bound, both feet in the air. She balanced there for a moment, before her sneakers, piped with permanent marker to simulate some manner of robotic detailing, hit the earth.

"Who?"

"That girl," Nozomi repeated, loath to utter her name because voicing it somehow reaffirmed her existence. "Uh, Soryu."

"The other pilot," Sakura muttered. Toji had been expansive in that regard, filling her in as to the unholy aggravation he and Aida and Ikari suffered at the cruel twisted hands of Asuka Langley Soryu. "Yeah, I guess they must both be on standby here."

"And, since, you know, they live in the same apartment."

"… Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!"

"Yeah. Hikari said she said it was like, tactical, or something. Technical? No, no, tactical. Like they had to? That's what Soryu says when she complains all the time about it. Completely out of the blue, she'll bring him up. When she stays over for dinner, or monopolizes our TV watching trivia shows to show off how smart she is, when she's walking down our front hall. She just keeps talking. Usually about Mr. Ikari but there's dozens of topics she harps on, all weirdly joined together, like all she can feel about anything is an all-encompassing annoyance with how she's so much better and prettier and smarter and more talented than—"

Nozomi noticed she was talking to herself. Sakura was a distant speck of hair and crutches on the horizon leading to the city. Nozomi sighed and started after.

Despite the panic-speed, she caught up to Sakura quickly.

"What's the rush?"

"Big Bro never mentioned they were living together. That changes things!"

"What does it change?"

"My timetable! If Soryu shares a roof with him, she has an advantage. A one-up. We have to find him!"

"He's right there," Nozomi said, pointing to a street corner under a pedestrian bridge directly in front of them.

Sakura nearly dove into an open dumpster down a nearby alley.

"Again?"

"I… I need more time to prepare!" Sakura whispered. "Should I say thank you first? Or introduce myself? He knows Big Bro so we're practically friends already and—"

She noticed she was talking to herself. Nozomi had wandered towards Shinji at a discreet angle, getting close enough to overhear him talking on his cell phone.

"… Yeah, I have the laptops. No, I… What? Now? I'm on my way back home and… But the only shop that sells that is the weird windmill place in the international district and…" He sighed hard, exhaling a longstanding internal debate. "… Fine. I'll get it. But—"

He held his phone away from his ear to glare at the dial tone. He tucked it away, hitched his bulging school satchel higher on his weary shoulder, and headed off across town, further from home than before.

Nozomi reported back to the dumpster.

"Okay," Sakura said, getting back to her feet and dusting some stray litter off her. "Target acquired." She ground her crutches into the dirty alley floor. "Deploying now."

Off they deployed. Through the city, at a respectable pace, but dragging their heels just enough to give Shinji time to arrive first. They found the tall, narrow international market with windmill vanes painted on its façade and staked out a nearby bench. They waited.

Nozomi idly read the store name. "Asbad As It Gets." She frowned. "What?"

"Who knows? Foreigners are weird." Sakura sat, tapping her good foot against a crutch. "Soryu is a foreigner, right? What else do you know about her?"

Entirely too much. No likes so far, but a catalogue of dislikes. A veritable encyclopedia of exasperation that she was forced to peruse. Not that she wanted to research the extent of Asuka's disgust with birds, school, school food, the climate, the Tokyo-3 primetime television programming block, the newly pigtailed morons of class 2-B, the morons of class 2-A, her guardian, her guardian, and her guardian, but Nozomi didn't have a say in the matter. She tried but when Asuka spoke everyone had to listen. Or else. Especially when she spoke about Shinji Ikari. Her most visited subject, cross-referenced and cited in nearly every entry of the aforementioned encyclopedia.

Nozomi had worried that the sheer volume of criticism leveled at him in the Horaki household might sway her sisters from the path. Kodama, when conscious, sort of tuned it out. Nozomi kept forgetting to ask how. But Hikari bore it with a peculiar patience. She did not agree or disagree but allowed her friend to run through her lines, then offered words of encouragement. Careful not to contradict or challenge Asuka, but also careful not to confirm Shinji was a lazy, unmotivated walking garbage fire. Hikari had weird taste in friends, was Nozomi's main takeaway.

"What was the question again?" she asked.

"Soryu," Sakura repeated. "What is she like?"

"Oh, yeah." She thought a moment. "Loud."

That was the gist of Toji's assessment. "And?"

"Hungry."

"And?"

"Not a fan of her roommates."

Sakura bristled. "Oh? She doesn't enjoy living with Mr. Ikari?"

"I don't think she enjoys anything."

"Well, good."

"Good?" Nozomi echoed.

"I mean, it must be a challenge for him. The fewer distractions the better."

"Uh, what do you mean?"

"Mr. Ikari is handsome," Sakura stated. Not in a dreamy manner, but like it was an immutable cosmic truth. Sixty seconds in a minute, earth revolved around the sun, Shinji was hot. "He must attract all sorts of girls."

Hikari did complain a few times about her classmates hollering at him during gym. "Modesty, please!" she always said.

Nozomi shrugged. "If you say so."

"If only his hair was longer…"

They waited.

"Want to go inside?" Nozomi posed, tired of the bench.

"Heavens, no! Some bizarre foreign food shop is so not the proper place for an introduction. This isn't much better but it will provide a good cover story. Here we are, just waiting for the bus, minding our own business, when out of the blue Mr. Ikari, our hero, happens upon us, like it was meant to be. And we strike up a conversation and just click so naturally that—"

The market doors slid open. Shinji appeared, lugging his school satchel and a small plastic bag. And a considerably lighter NERV debit card. Asuka had expensive taste. Not that his bills were sending him to the poor house. It was the principle. He tucked his wallet away and made to depart, once more, back to the apartment. And he saw, once more, Nozomi Horaki before him.

"Hi," he said once more.

"Oh, hey," she tried to sound casual, one arm hung over the back of the bench. "We're—"

Nozomi glanced beside her. Sakura was gone. To paraphrase her sister, shooty bags filled with shoot.

"… I mean, I'm glad to see you. Again. Funny running into you like this. Again. What are the odds, right?"

"Yeah. Funny."

"It is funny. Ha ha ha."

Shinji surprised her by sitting beside her on the bench. Exhausted, less from hauling the laptops across town, more from the how the day was turning out emotionally.

"How are you doing?" he asked.

"Huh? Uh, okay. Can't complain. You?"

He could complain. "Okay, too." But not to an eleven-year-old. "Were you ever able to give that candy to your friend in the hospital?"

"Yup."

"Good. Did she like it?"

As in, eat any of it? Nope. Like, as in, build an elaborate shrine in her bedroom with mecha models guarding it like the last source of water in some blasted hellscape in a far-flung dystopian future?

"Yup."

"Ah. Good. Uh, how's that show you're watching?" Shinji searched his very limited pop culture memory files. "CuSpaReCo?"

"Huh? The season's over." Nozomi banished it from conscious thought. "Now I'm watching Beanut Putter."

"… Oh. Uh, how's that?"

"Great! See, Beanut inherited a magic putter from his Grandpa, and is on a quest to a bunch of enchanted mini golf courses to rid the world of cruelty and injustice. Like last week, there was a diabolical course owner who was overcharging customers and purposefully making each hole unwinnable. But Beanut did this crazy trick shot off a real live alligator in a water hazard and got an impossible hole in one on the last round, and reawakened the owner's love of mini golf. Like, it was so awesome he saw what was so great about it all again, long forgotten to the twisted, corrupt clutches of greed."

"Oh."

"And the week before Beanut was challenged to a putt-off to save his oldest childhood friend from a notorious local mini golf gang leader who wanted sole use of a public course. And they had to wear blindfolds and a freak thunderstorm came out of nowhere. But Beanut believed in his Grandpa's putter and hit a ball so hard it blew away the storm and beat the gang leader, who was so impressed he promised to open the course back up to the public and teach orphans how to golf."

"Oh." Shinji sensed a pattern.

Which Nozomi confirmed by running through the rest of the season of the virtuous Beanut and his magical putter reforming a mini golf-adjacent rogue's gallery of wickedness.

She sighed pleasantly after she wrapped up and smiled at her captive audience. "It's nice to be able to talk about this with somebody. Kodama has, three different times, fallen asleep when I'm trying to explain stuff. Hikari complains I should be studying instead of watching TV. Sakura still eats, sleeps and breathes mecha. Thanks, Mr. Ikari."

"You're welcome." Anything to prolong the confrontation waiting for him at home.

His cell phone rang. Shinji read the caller ID screaming Asuka at him. Harsh reality, line one.

"You need to take that?" Nozomi asked.

"Yeah." Shinji directed the call to voicemail. "But it can wait a bit."

They smiled at one another. Even as his phone kept ringing. Over and over. A continuous stream of tinny chimes that somehow morphed into Asuka's voice promising swift, unrelenting retribution. Shinji sighed. In for a penny, in for a pound.

"You hungry?" he asked, digging into the shopping bag from the windmill shop.

He produced a small, wildly expensive box of foreign candy displaying a smiling sun sipping a steaming espresso, with a name neither of them could read. Yes, it was what Asuka requested, and yes, she would be livid if he returned without it, and yes, she was still calling him, and yes, Shinji felt an overdue spark of rebellion charring the outskirts of his cowardice.

"Really?"

"Really."

Shinji opened the box and shook a few unappetizingly colored candy lumps into Nozomi's hand. He helped himself to some, too. They cheered thumbs, and ate.

"Huh," he said.

"Yeah."

"This is awful."

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah."

They sat on the bench, fighting every natural urge to spit out the chewy yet gritty, stinging exotic fruit/dark coffee concoction.

"Sorry," Shinji said again. "This really is awful." He glanced at Nozomi. "Um, but maybe your friend might like one, too."

"… What?"

"I, uh, saw her when I was in the store. There's a tinted window under the left windmill vane."

"… Oh."

"It's Ms. Sakura, right?"

"… Yeah."

"She was at the school, too, huh?"

"… Yeah."

"Have you two been following me all day?"

"… Yeah."

"Why?"

Nozomi sank on the bench. "She really wants to meet you. But she's also really weird about it. So when we found out you weren't going to Okinawa with Hikari and everybody, she begged me to help find you. But she keeps chickening out at the last second. And I'm not supposed to tell you all that but I did."

She impossibly slumped even lower. Nearly bent in half, weighed down by shame and the need to spit out this atrocious candy that would not dissolve and be done with her.

"I'm sorry."

She looked up at Shinji. "What are you apologizing for?"

"You tried to help Ms. Sakura, all day," he said. "She's lucky to have a friend like you. I'm sorry it didn't work out."

Sorry for her. Not for himself. Knowing Sakura Suzuhara was out of the hospital, mobile, and hunting him was terrifying news. He'd try to negotiate some sort of protection plan with Toji but Shinji got the impression he was afraid of his sister, too.

"Yeah," Nozomi said. "She'll be bummed. I'm sorry about her. And for today. She's super stubborn about stuff she's into."

He involuntarily shivered. "Th-That's okay. But she's wasting a lot of time and energy on me."

Nozomi smiled. "Aw, don't worry about that. We still think you're cool."

Shinji smiled, without humor. "Yeah. Because I'm a pilot."

"Huh?" She forgot about all that again. She shrugged. "Oh. I guess. But you're cool without that."

She hopped off the bench, finally done with the candy. The aftertaste might well linger for some time. The memory, longer still.

"I'd better go find her. I guess. I'm sort of supposed to be looking after her until she's better. Mr. Ueda's orders and all. It'll be my head if she slips and breaks her other leg."

They exchanged a pleasant farewell. Shinji watched her go, rooting down alleys and side streets trying to find Sakura. He watched and felt different. Not cool, he never knew that sensation, but lifted, at least a little. Not by Nozomi erroneously believing he was cool, or by whatever Sakura's exact designs on him entailed, but by the concept that people out there harbored something other than violent malice towards him. Even if they were just eleven-year-olds and he only sort of knew one of them. It was a different kind of emotion.

He looked around the busy downtown street. Pedestrians flowed past him through the city's arteries. He couldn't pick out anyone he recognized. A few weeks ago, Nozomi would have blended in with the rest. But now she didn't. She met and parted with him today smiling. It was still awkward and scary for him. But it was also not quite the living hell he thought human interaction had to be.

People still surged around him. If he got to know them, would they believe anything good about him? Would they see past his shortcomings and failures? Would they dare think of him as anything other than a pilot? Would he dare think of himself as anything else?

His phone rang still. He answered.

"I can only assume you were brutally mugged," Asuka greeted, "and that your phone was stolen after a vicious struggle. And you somehow managed to finally track the thief down and, I don't know, pay to get your own cell phone back."

"Sure. That."

"You better be bleeding and concussed when I see you. And you better have the candy."

He looked down at the open box in his hand. "Uh, they were sold out."

"Unbelievable," she muttered. "It's Mr. Kaji's favorite. Now what am I supposed to bring him today, other than my radiant presence? I can't show up empty-handed. Like you."

"… I could go to some other nearby, discount shop…"

"Too late. I'm at HQ by the pool."

"… Oh, that's too bad. I guess I'll see you at home later—"

"You will see me at HQ by the pool, now. Misato left two separate voicemails aggressively reminding me about our dumb homework. So bring me my laptop so I can breeze through whatever our senile teacher keeps yapping about in class. And on your way in you can scout the vending machines in NERV for something dignified and edible for Mr. Kaji. Does NERV have a gift shop? Look for that, too."

Get them yourself, Shinji's brain told her.

"Will do," Shinji's mouth told her. As his body stood and began heading to the nearest train depot. All in the least cool way imaginable.

Maybe Nozomi and Sakura were wrong. He was ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent sure they were. But they saw something he did not or could not see. Maybe he was wrong, as well.

Carrying on an extended internal dialogue was nothing new. Carrying one on while Asuka carried on an extended external dialogue was becoming less new. The two were not compatible.

"My cell batteries are almost dead," he got out during a quick breath between her complaints about Rei hogging NERV's Olympic-sized swimming pool which were somehow morphing into complaints about Penpen again. "Sorry. Gotta go."

Shinji put his phone away as it began ringing again. He held the open box of candy. He sighed and tossed it in a public trash can. And said a quick prayer over it, both for Kaji not getting his favorite treat, and for his own relative peace. He was fairly certain Kaji would forgive him. He was a cool guy, after all.

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Next chapter: Take the Money and Don't Run: The Kodama Horaki Story.