Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ Normal to Reality ❯ Chapter 1 ( Chapter 2 )

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

 

Normal to Reality: Chapter 1

 

By Midnight_Cereal

 

 

“You know how dirty these things are?”

 

“No. But you're going to tell me right now, aren't you?”

 

“I'm doing you a public service. There isn't enough Pinesol and bleach in the world to keep this train from being a bacterial death trap.”

 

“A death trap? Like my cubicle's a death trap? Like my passenger seat was a death trap, and my living room? And my two year-old daughter?”

 

“Did she or did she not eat that cricket?”

 

“You know the funniest thing about this? You're not even a hypochondriac. You don't wear gloves or a mask or even have a handkerchief. You pick your nose when you don't think anyone's looking. So just get on the train and just shut up today. Just…shut up.”

 

“Well, don't blame me one day when you find your…shit.”

 

“When I find my what?”

 

“Holy shit…”

 

“What?”

 

“Look, he's…is he dead?”

 

“He's breathing.”

 

“Holy shit, I know him…he's bleeding.”

 

“He works for Nerv, too. Great, there's a med station a block from here.”

 

“Not anymore. But there's a CALBOX at the front gate.”

 

“He's just fifteen. Wait...he's…”

 

“Holy shit…”

 

“Will you stop saying that?”

 

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Kensuke Aida liked being prepared, no matter how sickeningly benign a non-situation was, which more often than not made his coworkers sickeningly annoyed. He liked calling it Surveillance and Assessment of All Probable Contingencies; sometimes his coworkers called it something that made it sound significantly less official, and sometimes they called it things the sandy-haired officer chose not to dwell on. He wanted to be in a good mood when he talked to Shinji.

 

Doesn't he ever want to be in a good mood when he talks to me? Aida helplessly wondered. He openly stared at his friend's profile as the former pilot's blank gaze drifted listlessly over the paint-chipped guard rail and down to the ground below. It just felt right trying to talk to Shinji Ikari on the roof of a building. Nearly every meaningful conversation the bifocaled young man had- or tried to have had- with the Nerv veteran had taken place on top of their junior high school. “What're we standing on, again?”

 

“It's the architecture school.” Shinji folded his bare arms across the top bar and rested his chin on top of them. “My cubicle's on this side, two floors down.”

 

Kensuke was thankful for the silent breeze as it slipped past him. The seasons may have been back, but summer was summer was summer. “Isn't it weird, though? No matter what job you go to you always end up behind a desk?”

 

A twitch from a nervous puppet master; the taller black-haired man quickly shrugged his thin shoulders. “If I do my work right, sometimes it's like you end up someplace else, anyway.”

 

“Man…” Kensuke shook his head, looking up and away nostalgically while working on his preconceived notion. “I just wish I coulda joined up during the war, you know? Just for something to do in between the paper work and coffee brewing.”

 

Shinji raised his head to expose his sickly upturned mouth. “Something like fighting to the death or feeling like you had your arms blown off?” He paused and lowered his head back behind his arms. “Sorry.”

 

“Otakus die hard, man. I deserved it. That's why you said it.”

 

“So…this is why you brought me up here?” Shinji easily ventured.

 

“If you want to come down, you can speed this up by telling me why Miss Ibuki nominated me Mister Intervention. I'd like to think she loves my potential, but…”

 

Kensuke noticed him hesitate, then again before something finally spurred him into quiet narration. “I think I scared her when I kept zoning out on her at the grocery store.”

 

For a moment Kensuke debated if celebrating the first meaningful conversation with Shinji Ikari since ninth grade was unfathomably pathetic. In the next moment, he realized he had spent a moment staring at Shinji, whose eyebrows bent confusion. “What?”

 

Kensuke shrugged. “Maybe she just felt put off you were ignoring her. You'd have to be looking at something pretty interesting to not pay attention to someone who looks like that.”

 

“I think Asuka's pretty interesting.”

 

Ah. Progress.

 

Disturbing, disturbing progress.

 

Kensuke tried to laugh. “You see dead people, Cole?” he asked with a knowing, referential smirk.

 

“No. Just her.”

 

The smirk vanished. All that could be heard above the aggregation of ambient aural pollution was the incessant shrieking of cicadas.

 

“I like Maya,” Shinji began, “but she was talking about her work and it's always so complicated. I was never that good at all that math. And Asuka…Asuka kept talking over her. You know how she is.”

 

“Do you talk back to her? Tell me you don't…” His finger tips were numb.

 

“Something tells me that wouldn't be a good idea. Really, I don't want to know if she can hear me. If she could…would that make me less crazy or more crazy?”

 

Aida shook his head and stared. “I'm really not…qualified to answer that.”

 

Shinji's eyes were stationed somewhere around his friend's heart, and then turned back to again peer over the edge. “I think I was asking myself as much as I was asking you. I'm just…living, you know, Kensuke? It doesn't matter whether or not I see her. It doesn't change the fact I'm still alive. I've seen her ever since I stepped off that beach, when I eat lunch, or I'm in class, on the bus or the train. I'm still breathing. It doesn't affect anything.”

 

There was some way to refute that obvious, naked lie. Someone somewhere had intimate, supreme knowledge of the how's itemizing the unmitigated deconstruction of…whatever it was that made somebody like Shinji think this was okay. Kensuke was not that person. He had been prepared, but not for this. Arguments made proposals and he turned them down before unhappily settling on stating the insultingly obvious.

 

“That shouldn't be normal, Shinji.”

 

“It is for me.”

 

“…Do you see her now?”

 

“No.”

 

So what else do you say to something so disconcertingly, impossibly…impossible?

 

“I don't…I don't know what to say.”

 

“You don't have to say anything.” Shinji's plastic stare never left the pavement five stories below. “If she leaves…she'll leave on her own. It's out of my hands, and that makes it okay. That's all I have to know about myself. Do you understand that?”

 

“No.” Aida was as close to understanding the Third Child now as he was when the largest, angriest stooge had published his displeasure all over the newcomer's right cheek, nearly six years, two schools, and one extinction-level event ago.

 

How did this get so complicated so fast? Despite his scripted chicken hawk lament for a war he had the pleasure of never fighting, Kensuke was now thankful on at least twelve different levels he hadn't been drafted the Sixth Child. There were enough people left from five years ago for Kensuke Aida to hear stories; being part of the old Section-2 meant knowing where Rei and Asuka and Shinji were, who they were with, what they were eating, what they were saying.

 

Why they were crying.

 

Why they were screaming.

 

Why they were tearing their rooms apart in choleric fits of adolescent rage.

 

Why they were staring -just staring- for seconds and minutes and hours…

 

And then the veterans would shake their heads in disbelief and speak in hallowed, haunted tones about alternate universes microns thick, cloned albinos that could fly…fly, embryonic Angels fused to human flesh, and Children solidifying from a few orange splashes of congealing LCL. Then they would stare at nothing for seconds and minutes…

 

But Shinji lived through all that! He was strong enough, wasn't he? He was a functioning adult, a dedicated student, a hard worker. Shinji Ikari was normal enough, right?

 

Kensuke slid his finger over the scrap paper in his pocket as the questions encased his mind in a slug of cascading mud. Giving Shinji that piece of paper -and the name and address scribbled on it- meant they were going to be someone else's questions soon. He couldn't decide yet if that was fair to her. But Kensuke produced it, anyway. He held it out, and his troubled friend eyed it with achingly subtle wariness. Why? What the hell did he think it was? A letter bomb?

 

“What's this?”

 

“It's someone who wants to know you completely.” I hope…

 

Shinji reached out to it before his hand receded like a boom. Kensuke knew he was going to do that. “I-I don't think…I don't know-”

 

“Will you just take it?” the veteran otaku tiredly pressed. “Would I even be giving this to you if she didn't want to see you?”

 

Much too slowly, Shinji came back with, “No. You wouldn't.”

 

“I'm not Touji. And I don't have a sister who was crushed by masonry who was used to damn-near blackmail me into piloting Eva.” The man with glasses internally cringed. “But I'm the one that came back. I'm the one that's trying to help. What's this going to hurt?”

 

“I can't tell, yet.”

 

But Shinji held his hand out anyway, and Kensuke shoved the parchment into the half-closed fist. He pointed at it. “She came back too. Will you keep that in mind?”

 

Kensuke -shamelessly, audibly- exhaled when his personal hero wordlessly stuffed the name and place in his own shorts. “One day you're gonna have to tell me how you do it, Ikari. You're not even trying and you get to see two beautiful women…”

 

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Three. Three beautiful women.

 

Sometimes he saw Misato, too. Sometimes she talked to him, too.

 

Shinji Ikari never talked back to her, either.

 

s in the case of stain-glass windows. Unfortunately, vaulted load-bearing walls would be severely overstrained. By transferring the load to an external ar

 

It was well enough he did not mention his former guardian to Kensuke, as the occurrences of Major Katsuragi frequenting his immediate vicinity had recently become…well…less frequent.

 

uvais, Le Mans, as well as Paris' Notre Dame, where flying buttresses combined functionality and ornate, aesthetic appeal. Most apparent in th

 

He had been the lone passenger on a train, slumping against the bay window, allowing his slack eyes to drift over the blending foreground. There was a rushing tide of sound and then the endless maw of the Geofront, basking in the amber of an artificial dusk. He remembered an nth degree of indifference to the awesome sight which was nurtured by familiarity and innumerable fresh brutalities. He remembered an honorable Nerv discharge being ten minutes and three security checkpoints away.

 

“How's it going, dummkopf?”

 

He remembered looking at her as a piece of his brain splintered. He remembered her sapphire eye, because it had been slick and glinting, and filled with mischief. And life. Not like the rest of her -her matted locks of auburn mange or her ruined arm- permeated by the anti-glow of death half-warmed. As if some dumbass undertaker had buried her with an open coffin, and she had crawled out, intent on chewing his negligent ass off.

 

ering, wooden frames constructed by carpenters, that temporarily supported and defined the shape of the eventual ston

 

He remembered being too lost in back draft delirium to be grateful no one else had been present in the car to watch and hear him scream. A sooty black had raced in from the periphery of his vision, and he remembered nothing.

 

When he had woken, Asuka was gone. So were the splinters.

 

And maybe that was why he had grown accustomed to it. He had no other reasonable explanation for why he didn't scream anymore, why he hadn't bothered to even blink when -not even a week later- Misato had sat across from him as he ate a shrimp bento at school.

 

“I wish I could just touch you. That's all. Just once. Maybe it could change things. Just once...”

 

He had almost forgotten how he had shuddered, then stilled himself before swallowing a clump of jasmine rice. Just an aberration, a spectral heart massage. She couldn't touch him, and he didn't have to talk to her. Treat it like a video diary; sooner or later, she'd have to sign off.

 

isted into place. Finally, the newwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

 

The splinters were gone. Picked away or clipped and tossed out so that the rest could be filed and sanded down and lacquered. A finished gleaming slate, as if nothing had ever happened. No more Eva, no more Nerv, no more Father. No more splinters.

 

Just him. And the w's.

 

Shinji allowed the present to reclaim him. He removed his heavy fingers from the keyboard and the cursor in the white screen finally paused to take catch its breath. His rusty gate glare swung over to Kensuke's scratch paper laying to the right of the glowing monitor. As the screen illuminated his apartment bedroom in cascading hues, he thought.

 

No…Kensuke had no reason to worry about his mental health, or lack thereof, because the only thing that made Shinji want to kill himself was this assignment.

 

Yes…he had felt something when he had read the name on the paper.

 

No…he did not know what it was that he had felt.

 

Yes…something might possibly come of it, something wonderful that would make him feel…just feel. Like Yukie had tried to make him feel, with her words and her eyes, her mouth and her breasts. In the end, she had been the one that had strong feelings.

 

“Fuck you, robot.” Her words, eyes, mouth, breasts, venomous, glaring, frowning, heaving.

 

Worst of all, she had left with his cake. It had been a good cake.

 

No…he had no idea who would call him at twelve-sixteen at night.

 

God, just please don't let it be Yukie again.

 

“It's me,” Maya bashfully pointed out when he answered his phone. “You said you stay up pretty late, so I thought it'd be okay.” There was a pause. “Is it?”

 

He softly answered, “I don't mind,” and then looked away from his monitor, swiveling slowly in his seat so the flickering glow slid into darkening shades of indigo and then voracious carbon black. He was oddly, genuinely pleased he had been fully prepared to see shadows in the corner of his room that probably shouldn't have been there. If these walls truly could talk, he'd ask them what to say next.

 

“Um…so what's on your mind?” Nice.

 

“I just…you talked with Kensuke today? How'd that go?”

 

“I think he's trying to find me a date. And I guess it could be more awkward, but I know her already. From…school.” Where was this going?

 

She took a breath that was faintly unstable. “Well…you deserve it. To be happy, I mean. Be happy, Shinji.”

 

He mouthed `okay' to himself before he said it over the phone. There was a gentle crash of static as the Nerv scientist laid her own receiver in its cradle. Then a dial tone. As he prepped himself for another hour of cramping his fingers and ruining his eyesight, Shinji Ikari mouthed another word. Perhaps he could convince himself that living dreams of the two of the most important people in his former life constituted even abstract normalcy, but a midnight drive-by phoning by Maya Ibuki was just too-

 

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“Weird.”

 

“What's weird, Hikari?”

 

The woman in question shrugged even though her friend was out of sight and making cluttering noises in a back storage room.

 

Hikari Horaki, undergraduate Keio University occupational therapist, surveyed the sterile enclosure with a half-dozen sweeping glances and crinkled her nose. Something smelled like sulfur. “I've been going here for more than a year. I never knew they had all these chemistry labs.”

 

“They didn't have them not too long ago, not until they expanded their environmental information department. You still wouldn't know all this stuff was her if you hadn't visited me.”

 

“Yeah. I guess so.”

 

The woman in the back gave a short laugh, followed by what sounded like rubber gloves snapping. “This is gonna sound so mean…why are you visiting me? It's just…we talk like once every two weeks, now. We live in the same apartment, and this is the most I've seen of you since last Friday.”

 

“I'm sorry about that-”

 

Her friend cut her off, “Nah…I know you're busy and all,” and sighed. “Always so freakin' busy. What's that say about me if I make it all personal?”

 

In the short pregnant pause that followed, Hikari glanced to the open doorway leading to the empty main corridor.

 

“So are you waiting for something, Hikari? You never answered me.”

 

“No.” Someone. “Maybe I can help you with some of this stuff?”

 

“Uh…yeah. Sure. Thanks.”

 

“What's this?”

 

“What's what?”

 

As the former junior high school class representative held two beakers up to an overhead fixture, refracted light tainted with deep and varying hues danced across her mahogany eyes. “Well, one of these has some blue liquid with little gold-looking flecks, the other's just red.” She slightly swirled them. “So do I just pour these in the sink?”

 

“Sure. Why not? You like being on fire, right?”

 

Hikari stopped swirling. And put them down. Slowly. She looked back at the door again and clucked her tongue. Where was he? It should have been a straight shot from Tokyo-3 on the Tokaido line…“What?”

 

“I said when I'm done back here, let's go see a movie. When was the last time we even did that?”

 

The freckled woman bit her lip, which led to hemming, which eventually gave way to hawing.

 

Stall.

 

“Nothing's out I'm really interested in. You know I'm not a big movie person. And don't you want to…I don't know…take a shower?”

 

The voice in the back was briefly hijacked by real or feigned offence. “Just what're you trying to say, roomie?”

 

“N-nothing! I mean, you've been in this lab all day with all these chemicals…”

 

“Don't even pretend you don't like being around smelly people. I mean, you liked Touji, didn't y…dammit…”

 

“It's okay.”

 

“I'm so sorry-”

 

“No, it's okay.”

 

“I wasn't being serious. I didn't bring him up on purpose. It just slipped out.”

 

“It's okay. I know.”

 

The apologies got closer as their owner began making her way from the storage room. “I'm so stupid!”

 

“It's okay.” It was, really. The brunette left the compassionate young man, her pigtails and Asuka, her sailor fuku and the city of Tokyo-3 with her turbulent adolescence. She bit back the guilt in her heart that surfaced when she thought of it that way, that somehow she was the one that had abandoned him. Hikari knew better, and began long ago to abolish stubborn, virulent strains of self-condemnation and bitterness. It was helped to a small degree thinking that wherever Touji now was, his sister would likely be close by.

 

The middle Horaki sibling had learned since to be content with seeing Touji Suzahara in soft flashes of fond remembrance, like the face that quickly poked in and out of the doorway in her peripheral vis-THAT WAS HIM!

 

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This was a bad idea.

 

This was a bad idea.

 

This was a bad idea.

 

This was a bad idea.

 

Shinji saw her standing there in that lab, and could only think to duck back and find the nearest public restroom before she even knew he was there.

 

He ran away. Should've felt bad about it, didn't.

 

Kensuke didn't have a reason to lie; Shinji believed the young man with glasses who adamantly conveyed her desire to see him. But…to know him completely? No way, no one wanted that. He didn't even want that, and the thought of someone else knowing about…

 

But she had been kind to him, always. And he was certain that with all her might she'd try to understand him.

 

This was a bad idea.

 

The Third Child turned from the hard face coolly staring him down in the bathroom mirror. It was more angular now than he would have liked, and he should have taken better care shaving. Shallow stubble hugged his jaw, a living shadow. Now he took great care not to scowl, because doing so meant someone else's face staring him down.

 

Shinji Ikari didn't want to think of it, did not have to. All he had to do was go to the bathroom, then get off the Keio campus and back on the Tokaido line to Tokyo-3. He'd use the train ride home to think of an excuse for why he had chickened ou…changed his mind.

 

The most important person in the history of the world finished his business, flushed, and zipped up.

 

And that was when he heard it.

 

It was fine sandpaper against a burred wood grain, an insect scuttling across the floor as its carapace scraped the bottom of the door…

 

The door.

 

He turned around in the stall -slowly, as if modeling his Izod on a rotating dais- and looked down. That was when he saw it.

 

A piece of folded red paper worked against every conceivable natural law, or at least every natural law forbidding inanimate objects from slowly propelling themselves to his frozen feet. The young man could only blink before Technicolor oil-slicks blotted the dry eyes he trapped behind his tight lids. That scraping sound, he could still hear it. When he again opened them, it was even closer.

 

Some shady invisible man was offering him some under-the-table deal, and he stupidly bent down to accept it.

 

It's real.

 

It was opaque, precisely creased, and felt less coarse than it looked. It was real. His fingers were steady as he turned it over and over in his hand, running his thumb across the spine of the sharp fold. It had been folded with care. It had been folded with love.

 

It was real, oh God…

 

Shinji Ikari finally took a breath, first shallow, then rolling in the troughs and peaks of unseen waves. He unfolded it. He assessed the black-marker kanji written with the precision of someone still struggling to master the myriad characters. Then, he read it.

 

Look at me. I'm right here…

 

He read the very bottom, utterly numb.

 

…dummkopf.

 

And all at once, a diseased legion of harried, half-formed, nonsensical thoughts converged greedily on Shinji's mind, a murder of mangy crows. All of them led to the exact same action, him frantically tearing at the silver latch on the lavatory stall and very nearly tumbling out of the small compartment like he had been shoved. The Third Child caught himself from busting his sweaty forehead wide open on the slick countertop and looked up, the head on his and his reflection's neck swiveling in desperate sweeping arcs.

 

She's right here. She just said so. Why can't I see her? WHY CAN'T I SEE HER?

 

Something faintly shuffled to his right and he froze, vainly attempting to dampen the rhythmic pumping in his ribcage. He heard it again anyway, emanating from the stall next to his. One long, purposeful stride brought him there and he jostled the handle, which resisted.

 

Shinji was oddly confused by the voice that answered him, which was neither female nor German. “O-occupied!” It was, however, annoyed.

 

“Sorry, but please! You need to tell me something!”

 

The man became incredulity incarnate. “DUDE, WHAT…WHAT THE FUCK?”

 

“I-I have something here, it's…it's red, the paper's red! Did you see anyone in here with this? Did you write this? Someone told you to do this?”

 

“YOU THINK I CAME IN HERE TO WRITE YOU POETRY, ASSHOLE?”

 

Shinji supposed not, a fact that did precisely nothing to tranquilize the burgeoning panic that had engulfed him like a pure oxygen flashover. All he knew for certain was that wherever she was, she wasn't here; he jerked into motion, crashing into the heavy lavatory door as his slow lope became a sloppy ramshackle sprint.

 

A tangerine tint streaked through a line of large windows in swaths of descending light that laminated the walls of the adjacent hallway. In the floor, diffuse nitrogen tank, trashcan, and vending machine doppelgangers patiently hung upside down, adjoined to their real-life counterparts. She was not to be found in either world.

 

Here it is again. Splitting wooden whiskers, irritants.

 

He gulped a ragged clump of moist air and shot his searching gaze to the right, where perspective pinched the corridor into a small box at its faraway bookend. Shinji remembered struggling to match her long sauntering gait, which unfailingly reminded him of his place relative to hers…

 

Needling intimate inflictions wriggling into me it's always where I am and I am here and it is always here and here and here and here and here…

 

He ran to his left. Dogged vital questions chased him. She was doing this. Why? Why was she doing this to him?

 

Why is she punishing me?

 

He rounded a corner to search for her. Or an exit.

 

He found neither.

 

“GLARPHH!” Hikari incomprehensively shrieked. She drew her arms away from her face when she realized a moment later the young man wasn't going to plow into her like some raging drunk. “There you are! I thought that was you back there, where'd you go?”

 

“I…huff…I just, I …wheeze…phew…”

 

“Take your time…” He took for granted that nothing on the brunette's face -still peppered with a smattering of light freckles- gave any indication she thought it a bit odd he was blindly charging around a building filled with insanely volatile chemicals. The class representative always made things easy, allowed him to prep a suitable lie to fill the ensuing silence. A third voice beat him to it.

 

“Hikari, don't leave, please? You know I wouldn't say anything to hurt you, you…know…that…”

 

As the owner of the voice shut down her apology, bit her tongue and reassessed the current situation, Shinji stared at her.

 

Mana Kirishima stared back.

 

End of Chapter 1

 

 

A/N: Y'know, it wasn't until I had finished the first chapter I had realized; the one plot twist -Shinji seeing Asuka even though she's dead- sounds awfully similar to The Sixth Sense. Oh well. I'm not changing it. I can safely say other than that, this story and M. Night Shyamalan's movie have nothing in common.

 

So…yeah. Mana's in this story. Lots of things can happen, though; perhaps she and Shinji end up friends, perhaps lovers. Maybe enemies. Maybe she gets into a fight with a speeding bus. I don't know.

 

Random A/N: And you're right, Warp. Blueberries. Well, I did say blue balls, so technically I still had it right. Ah…saving face, a time-honored MidnightCereal tradition. And thanks for the pub. Kinda thoughtless of me not to have mentioned it before.

 

Psycho Z: You know what? I think I do like Maya. Go figure. Perhaps it's the way she says “THIS CAN'T BE!” It's so cute. Then this goes through my mind:

 

“Hi Maya, it's mom. Just want to let you know; um…Kenta had plugged in some things in your old room without a surge protector…and we were able to save your Preakness-Edition My Little Pony Stable Mates, but we had to trash everything else….we're still coming up for Christmas, see you then!”

 

“THIS CAN'T BE!”

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“Sorry, we don't have any two percent milk left…we do have skim.”

 

“THIS CAN'T BE!”

 

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“Ms. Ibuki, the reason you've been getting sick is because you're three weeks pregnant.”

 

“THIS CAN'T BE! Wait…girl or boy?”

 

“Boy.”

 

“THIS CAN'T BE!”

 

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I'm tired.

 

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.