Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ Normal to Reality ❯ Chapter 3 ( Chapter 4 )

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 3

By MidnightCereal

Shinji stood at his workbench in the architecture building and looked down to see what kept slapping his calf; it was just Mana's foot, dangling as she peered at the plans on his inclined desk. She caught his calm, curious glance, correctly interpreting it.

“My ankle's a little sore, that's all,” she quietly informed him, maintaining her soft but penetrating gaze. He wilted under its conviction when he tried meeting it.

“I could get a stool for you. I don't know why you'd want to see my work, anyway.”

“I didn't come here just to see your work. You know that.” She paused a beat, smiled and impossibly, her shoulder and arm and chest pressed further into him.

He gave an ineffectual `hm', certain he gave no indication he steeled himself to keep from shivering. Whether they were fourteen of nineteen, junior high or college students, she was moving on him, continually. He might've well been standing still. Shinji may not have known what to do, but God, Mana did. She always did. She seemed to have been trained for this. There was more than a good chance that she was.

So what're you drawing up here?” she asked, pointing at an elaborate and ornate architectural schematic…bailing him out.

“This,” he quickly scanned it under the cone of light that scraped at the near darkness, “is for a project where we had to design something that used elements of gothic architecture. You know, like Notre-Dame Cathedral?”

“No, not really,” she admitted, looking a little embarrassed.

“Well, take these, for example. They look a little like legs? Those are flying buttresses, they help support the…what?”

“Nothing…” Her straight-laced smile lasted for another split second before she snickered again.

“What?”

“Could…could you possibly say that again?” she asked sweetly, turning to him and batting her eyelashes.

“Say what again? Flying buttresses?”

She laughed again, the sweet sound carrying beyond the cozy cluster of lonely fringe workspaces and into the dim open center of the building, bouncing off the vaulted glass ceiling, down to the cloister below. “But you have to do it with that super-serious look on your face!”

“But that's just what it's called!”

“And that's why it's funny,” Mana pointed out.

“Just how old are you, anyway…” he muttered, not quietly enough, seeing as she then kicked him in the shin.

“Old enough to know a funny word when I hear one. Jerk…” She pouted while he rubbed his leg, but soon looked pleasant again. No…not pleasant…

“Can I see this?” The young woman waited all of zero-point-zero seconds for his answer before reaching over to roll his precious blueprint into a tight scroll. With half of his class grade in her palm, Mana slid her foot back and away. Then the other.

“Um…what're you doing with that?”

She shrugged, impishness bubbling up again as she continued to back out of his clean workspace. “I don't know yet.”

The young man couldn't tell exactly when impishness crossed the bridge over to mischief, but he knew -from months of Pavlovic conditioning by Asuka and Misato- that the distance between him and Mana was directly proportional to the degree he was about to get clowned.

She began wagging his project behind her like a rice paper tail. “This building's pretty big. A little creepy though, this empty. They just let you in here to work late?”

“It gets so noisy during the day. I did all the work on that…” he pointed to the tube of paper she tried twirling like a baton, “at night.”

“Hm.” Mana stepped onto the walkway that ringed the third floor, peering over the railing to whistle down at the atrium, which was touched by swaths of dull auxiliary nightlights. She was still retreating.

“What're doing with it?”

“I told you already, I don't know yet. You're afraid I'm gonna trash it?”

“No. So you don't need to back away.”

“Then you don't need to chase me.”

“I'm not chasing you.” He stepped forward. She stepped back. “Didn't you say your ankle hurt?”

“Oh…” She wiggled her foot. “Yeah, it comes and goes. It's gone now and, um…so am I.”

And before Shinji decided between playing at her little game and standing in place, she was halfway down the hall, her pleated skirt bouncing as she gleefully loped away from him.

Guess that ankle's okay, he thought, the door to a far corner stairwell opening with a loud, echoing click as she pushed through.

What time was it? If this went anything like the requisite teasing sessions proctored by his former roommates, he could be here for hours. Hours searching for his assignment, hours spent trying not to curse Mana into oblivion for being unable to just leave him the hell alone.

 

Why couldn't he ever meet a normal female human being? Why was he either the object of their ridicule of their to-the-marrow scorn? Half of the women that existed had disappeared from the face of the Earth at the end of two-thousand and fifteen, and for all the world it seemed as if only the craziest ones had remained. He wondered, more than he cared to admit, whether Mihiro Kamakura's inability to follow his explicit and oft-repeated instructions resulted either from being raised in a household with non-existent parental supervision, or simply the worst case of ADD never diagnosed.

 

Yukie had been hurt before they had met, so her harassing phone calls and emails could nearly be excused.

 

But not that thing with the vegetable oil.

 

“Hope you like french fries, Shinji, because you're going to smell like them for a week.”

 

And he had.

 

Even good ol' vanilla bean Maya Ibuki got in on the act today, sniping at his would-be girlfriend with appallingly practiced ease. Here he was tonight, and though Mana would probably hand his project back over when she tired of pulling his strings, the simple fact was he did not like to be teased. No…he hated it, actually. He simply had forgotten. Mana was here, and he was starting to remember all sorts of things…

 

“What're you still doing down there?”

 

He searched for the source of Mana's echoing voice a level below.

 

“Down there, Shinji. What're you doing down there.”

 

She was leaning comfortably over the railing of an atrium walkway a floor above him. The light was dim as he stared, but even if it had been so weak as to hide her grin, he would have heard it in her laughing voice, anyway. “I'm flattered, but I don't see how you'll get your project back just gawking at me like that.”

 

“What did you do with it?”

 

Her shrug was devoid of any trace of culpability…or sympathy. “It's around. I put it someplace.”

 

“Where?”

 

She errantly picked at something beneath a fingernail. “Come on, if I was just going to tell you, why bother hiding it in the first place? Where's the fun in that?”

 

The Shinji in Shinji's mind was screaming his brains out. “Fine. You win, okay?” He sculpted a mask of stone over his naturally warm visage. “Flying…buttresses.”

 

“Nice try. But I can't really see your face all that well from up here.”

 

“But I can see you just fine!” he yelled, wondering what it was that compelled young, beautiful women to jerk him around like the last car on a wooden roller coaster…and also if he could cut it off.

 

“Newsflash, Mr. Twenty-Twenty!” she huffed, “Myopia runs in my family. I'm getting fitted for contacts next Tuesday, so if you want your precious little blueprint you're just going to have to catch my flying buttress!”

 

“Are you still mad about that thing I said last week? I thought we were even!”

 

“No, I'm not mad. All you have to do is catch me. I won't even move for twenty seconds. Will that even things out enough?”

 

“NO.”

 

“One…”

 

“I'm not chasing you around this stupid building all night!”

 

He broke down when she got to two.

 

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Kensuke sat in a public park on a cool sloping knoll, which gradually dove into a lamp-lit trail running along it its base like a black stream. The grassy land again dipped past the asphalt path, and somewhere far below the lush greenery likely diffused into the infinite array of urban utilities and modern conveniences perforating Tokyo-3 proper. Over the glowing machine city a night sky tapestry yielded a black canvas warmed with a crimson backlight; one needed only to look at the half moon floating over Asia to know why that was.

 

On a completely unrelated note, Maya was still yelling things at him.

 

“-ssibly pick her, out of all the people in the world? What were you thinking?”

 

“I was thinking she's beautiful, she's nice, she's close, she's gonna get Shinji laid-”

 

“What she is going to get him is hurt, or worse. She's a spy. She is a known, documented spy.”

 

“Exactly, and that's the most harmless kind. And she's one who worked for a rival government Angel defense agency that hasn't existed for at least five years.”

 

“I don't see why that means I have to trust her.”

 

Kensuke finally began to feel irritated. “What you meant to say was you don't see why that means Shinji has to trust her. So why does all this have to be about you?”

 

“It's about me looking out for someone who's in some type of trouble. You understand me, Aida? If you had seen the way he looked at me when I caught him two weeks ago, it's…” Her voice became momentarily strained. “It's like he wasn't even there!”

 

The rookie Nerv security officer wanted badly to retort in some poignant, concise manner; agreeing with the person against whom you are debating typically makes it difficult to get a word in edgewise. So Kensuke listened and waited.

 

“It's like Shinji wants to leave…is that it?”

 

“No.” The young man couldn't tell if he had just lied.

 

“Good. Because he had his chance to go with everyone else.”

 

“I think Mana'll do a good job keeping him here.”

 

She had been standing, and kicked her sneaker-clad heel into a clump of damp sod. “I just don't trust her.”

 

“Why is this about you?”

 

“Why do you think he should trust someone who'd committed to lying to him once already?”

 

“Because she's just this normal girl who got caught up in this crap and just wants some peace!”

 

Maya snapped to him with an absurdly severe expression. “Not at Shinji's expense!”

 

He could actually feel his mouth, brow and eyes carving disbelief into his face. Where was all this anger coming from? “Are you just going to act like he doesn't have any say in this? If I understand right, we're talking about the only person in the world to ever have complete free will. Yeah, I dragged him to a waterhole. I can't make him drink, and you can't keep him from drinking, either.”

 

“We…” Maya rapidly flicked her wrist between her and Kensuke, shaking her head, “are not talking about God. Shinji Ikari attracts born liars like-”

 

Now.

 

“Mana wasn't born a liar. She was born September thirteenth, two-thousand and one in Ibaraki Prefecture. Her father was killed three days later at the Battle of Tokyo Bay. He was a high school teacher. His wife was a cardiologist. She committed suicide two years later, so Mana's paternal grandmother took her in. She was a cardiologist, too. Lucky, because she was able to diagnose the cause of Mana's heart palpitations and prescribe atenolol. The reports didn't say anything about her parents being liars, either. They're dead, but not liars.”

 

“Alright. Fine, she-”

 

“When Mana was three, her favorite stuffed toy was a little cloth monkey with black button eyes. She found it one day in the washroom, already half-eaten by a huge Norwegian Rat. Even now she has an irrational fear of large rodents. Anything bigger than a mouse. A computer mouse. She was seven when she suffered a compound fracture in her left arm after an accident on the school jungle gym. It healed funny and now she's double-jointed, but it didn't make her anymore of a liar.”

 

“Kensuke…” Maya sighed.

 

“She was bullied constantly in fifth grade by a Mitsuko Souma, until Valentine's Day, when she found the girl eating the chocolates she gave her very first crush. Mitsuko spent the rest of the day in the school infirmary. The only one that was lying was the boy, and when Mana found out he had given Mitsuko the chocolates, he spent the rest of the day in the school infirmary.

 

“Mana stopped taking her heart medication at twelve and she went out for track at Izubuchi Junior High a year later. Without cheating, she set Ibaraki Prefecture records in the four-hundred meters, four-hundred and forty meter hurdles, and the triple jump, even beating out Hitomi Kanzaki in one out of three head-to-head races at the Saitama Relays.”

 

“You…Hitomi `The Vision' Kanzaki? Olympic silver medallist?”

 

“The last gift Mana's grandmother gave her before she died from breast cancer was a white sundress, and a hat with a big-ass brim. Mana named the hat Eclipse-chan. Her new child services-appointed guardian was Hirotoshi Sana, just a cover, a lie to mask her induction into the Trident Angel Defense Program, run by the R and D wing of the JSDF. Her name disappeared off the enrollment list at Izubuchi Junior High two weeks after custody was finalized. Six months after the initial Trident activation experiments, Mana was enrolled at Tokyo-3 Junior High to spy on Shinji. It was the first formal education she had received since her grandmother's death.

 

“From the time Trident Unit-02 was incinerated by a called-in N-2 air strike until five months after Third Impact, Mana did not exist. The reports say she may have returned from a LCL body identified west of Busan in South Korea, but information from that time is so scant we'll probably never know for sure. Hirotoshi Sana never returned, and the government officially disavowed any knowledge of Project Trident. At fifteen she was allowed to enroll at Ledford International Academy in Tokyo-2. Wouldn't you know it, she was accepted into one of the premiere multinational institutions in Kanto, and she didn't even have to lie to get in.”

 

“I get it, Kensuke. Stop.”

 

“That year she was nearly killed when a school bus driver in an oncoming lane sideswiped her boyfriend's coupe.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Mana needed sixty-three stitches in her head and three screws in her foot to stabilize her ankle.”

 

“STOP.”

 

“She weighs forty-nine kilograms, her blood type is AB, she's one-point seventy-eight meters tall, she's a C-cup…and they're spectacular.”

 

Maya screwed her eyes into her head, and then held her hands up to ward off something unpleasant. “Kensuke-”

 

“After Senior Prom she lost her virginity to So Naka-”

 

“STOP!” she finally yelled. “Stop. Don't-”

 

“Don't what? Don't humanize her? But why not?”

 

Doctor Ibuki only shook her head.

 

“You didn't think I checked on her? You thought, what, I just fed one of my best friends ever to the nicest shark I could find? I work for Nerv Security. Why wouldn't we know everything in the world about Mana Kirishima?”

 

Maya hesitated and visibly worked at pushing her halting words from her mouth. “I wasn't…”

 

He almost snorted. “You were.” He couldn't help himself. The woman had gone an insanely long way to demonize Mana, paint Shinji as an emotionally fragile dependant, and then portray him as a negligent incompetent inconvenienced by her request to look out for the Third Child. She had practically begged him to set Shinji up on a date.

 

And could the fact that she was hiding something have been anymore obvious? That was the most insulting thing. Kensuke had been personally trained by the head of Nerv Security and formally of Section-2, Warren Choi.

 

He could smell a lie a mile away.

 

“Now you know. Mana is not a born liar. If she were dangerous, we'd know. I would know. So don't you think it's about time you tell me why you hate the idea of…”

 

Oh no.

 

She peered down at him, eyebrow arched when he clutched his head and groaned. “What?”

 

“Why didn't you tell me, Maya? I took for granted you cared about him, but I didn't know you-”

 

Her eyes lit up. “Oh no! No no no no no no. It's not like that, honest!”

 

“Really?” He looked at her. She wasn't lying. Thank all manner of Kami she wasn't lying.

 

Maya made a small sound in the back of her throat. Her gaze was solemn, and it rose from him to the black heavens, to the moon, to its own satellites, approximately one and a half billion luminescent spores hanging in a weightless red cloud. “It'd be like dating my brother.”

 

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Mana stood with her hands on her hips in a runway-lit lecture hall aisle as she tried, successfully, to look complacent. Shinji stood in the adjacent aisle, trying not to vomit shawarma.

 

Oh, sweet, sweet oxygen. “Don't you…why don't you…why are you so fast?”

 

Mana flicked a wrist at him, smiling bashfully. “Oh, you're just saying that because you've been chasing me for the last half hour. I don't know why you look so surprised. If your training was like mine you guys had to be like fighter pilots.”

 

If by `like fighter pilots', Mana meant having smore-eating contests with Misato, Asuka and Pen-Pen every Friday night they weren't sitting in a vat of liquid while trying to link with giant human beings, then she was right. Their training regimens couldn't have been anymore similar!

 

“Did I tell you I could once bench press ninety kilograms?” she asked him with sickening enthusiasm.

 

“Really? Because I couldn't tell by the way you had dragged me up that flight of stairs…”

 

“It wasn't a big flight of stairs,” Mana echoed to him, and then across the line of empty ledgers she started doing jumping jacks. He felt drained (and a little horny) just looking at her, and he couldn't help but grumble to himself. “Hey, I don't even want to hear it. If you weren't enjoying this you wouldn't be smiling like that.”

 

He was smiling?

 

“Maybe,” he began, a fifth wind coming to him, “maybe I am enjoying this. Misato said once I had a masochistic streak.”

 

“Really now?”

 

He nodded and peered at her. “Then again, Misato said lots of things. Especially when she was blasted.” The image of a giant rabbit named Frank popped into his head.

 

Mana's eyes widened as the final piece of an old puzzle fell into place. “So that's what that smell was coming off her…”

 

“Nope, you're thinking of turpentine. Long story.”

 

She blinked. “I bet.”

 

They lapsed into a mutually agreed silence…

 

…and on an equally silent cue he sprinted across they aisle. He was only halfway across before she had dashed all the way up the ramp and through the lecture hall exit.

 

“Get back here!” he demanded of Mana's shapely calf just as it vanished into another stairwell on the opposite side of the second floor.

 

Got her now. There wasn't any exit above the second floor for that stairwell, and the exit below them would trip a fire alarm if she pushed it. All he had to do was stand at the landing for this level and she'd be trapped, he'd have his project back, and he could finally go home to replenish his electrolytes.

 

Half a minute passed before he stood at the stairs leading to the first and third floors, massaging his legs to ward off a charlie horse, which he knew from pick-up basketball games with Touji was the gunshot wound of muscle cramps. Just a second longer, then she'd bound up or down these steps and the game would be over. And he would stop smiling…

 

She had been right. Mana had been having sport of the Third Child for the better part of the ten o' clock hour, and what had he done? He smiled, grinned a big, goofy, sweaty grin, like he had won some sick lottery.

 

And he would do it all again in an irregular heartbeat.

 

This was Mana Kirishima. This was a woman he had come to save in another distant, dark lifetime. This had been the girl he had shared his first real kiss with, a thing born not from a desire to humiliate or dominate him, not something rushed and hard and self-serving, not something which required oxygen deprivation. Not something from someone who tirelessly sought to ridicule everything about him that was light and warm, even when she had no reason to, even when all he wanted was to help her help him help her.

 

Even when she was dead.

 

He could smile tonight, because Mana Kirishima was different.

 

Mana Kirishima was coming up the stairs. He bounced down to meet her, energized.

 

“You think I wouldn't know this building like the back of my hand?” he asked her, squinting in the darkness and just making out her auburn tresses.

 

Wait.

 

His eyes adjusted more, and met her pair. No, not a pair, just one, narrowed shining sapphire. Something in him broke, and as if to show her he lost his balance. His leg folded back as his tailbone clipped the tread of a concrete step, and he painfully skidded the rest of the way down. Shinji came to rest at the same place he had been for most of that brutal, terrible year, and that was beneath Asuka Langley Sohryu.

 

That blue, living, violent sea was nothing but a contemptuous slit now, but he was still adrift in it, becoming lost as thoughts of school projects, leg cramps, and Mana floated away aimlessly.

 

“Do you know what I think? When I see you laying there?” The question barely carried to him, but Shinji jumped as if there was an explosion of sound. He couldn't begin to imagine what she was thinking, and was too cold, too numb to guess. She had caught him. He had lowered his guard, and she had been right there to drive something jagged into him.

 

“I'm thinking,” and here she flicked at a dirty strand with the arm that wasn't hanging from her shoulder in bloody, sinewy ribbons, “why I bother to come, anymore. I wonder…how you're able to do this to me. I mean, it's been forever, you know? I'm trying to convince myself I don't care, like I used to. It was so easy back then. But when you have nothing, things like caring, things like you, they get magnified. And I can't stand it. It feels like dying, it really does.”

 

This was going to end like the bad times. This was a bad time. Armor eluded him, and he searched for it, searched again and failed again and again. Things were going to get bad, he would be crushed into nothing because he had no armor to shield him from the space where her eye should have been but only a hollowed bloodied hole remained.

 

The dead thing dipped its head like a girl would, when she was insecure and heartbroken, when she was alive.

 

“Why won't you talk me?” it whispered, Asuka whispered. Her cracked lips trembled. “Do you hate me? Do you hate me for what I did to you? I'm sorry. That's what you want, Shinji? An apology? I'M SORRY.”

 

I don't hate you. I just didn't understand you. But it should have been too late for apologies, for understanding. Reconciliation was a thing of his past, not his present. It shouldn't be here to sully him now and to splinter and fester and infect newer, cleaner memories. He shouldn't be hearing this. He shouldn't be seeing this. He shouldn't-

 

“Just look at me. Just talk to me. Get up and touch me. I'm right here. You asshole, I'm right here. Get up and touch me.”

 

He almost did. An unnamed will kept him down and he closed his eyes, cupped his ears, not knowing whether to swallow the sick scream in his hitching throat or unleash it.

 

“GET UP AND LOOK AT ME!”

 

He got up and ran. He wouldn't be able to recall how he had done it, but Asuka was two flights below him when he had finally opened his eyes again. Up another flight, another, just to get away from the voice, echoing inside him as though he were hollow. It filled him and he rose higher and higher to escape her scream, her angry unshed tears, the socket filled with nothing that tried swallowing him so he became nothing, too.

 

A serrated thing bit into and immolated his calf. Shinji fell as the exhaustion crashed into him. He clutched his leg as muscles clinched and unclenched, then clenched again of their own volition.

 

“Let me see. Hold still.”

 

At first, he thought Asuka had risen from the second floor to snatch him and drag him back to wherever it was she came from. But he imagined her hand having the warmth of a dead fish. Mana would have warmer hands. Mana would have two hands…

 

“It's just a cramp. Come on…” As her arms slipped beneath him, Shinji steadied himself on his good leg. He kept his head down to keep her from guessing what the hell made his face look like…like that. “Okay, okay. I've had my fun. Let's get your project and get out of here. I'm pretty good at making these cramps go away. You'll feel like dancing when we get you home-”

 

“You don't have to do that. I'll make it back just fine.”

 

Mana hesitated, and as Shinji leaned against her for support he swore he could feel her heart sink.

 

“You're kidding, right? You can barely walk.” She chuckled weakly.

 

“It'll be good in a few more minutes, and I don't live too far from here. I'll even walk you to the train station, okay?” And then he looked up and into her eyes, regretting the decision immediately. He should tell her, let her know this wasn't her fault, so she could stop looking at him as if he had personally just ended her world. Again. “I'm just tired and I have some more work to-”

 

“I understand,” Mana lied. She flinched suddenly as if someone had sucker-punched her.

 

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“You're still mad I sucker-punched you, aren't you?”

 

“That's not it, Mana.” They were close to the elevated platform inside the train station. Great. More stairs. “I'm not mad.”

 

“I'm sorry about your project, taking it and teasing you like that. I didn't think you'd cramp up.”

 

“I know.”

 

She winced for the fourth time.

 

“I thought you liked it.”

 

“I did.”

 

“Look at me.”

 

LOOK AT ME!

 

“Shinji…what's wrong?”

 

“I have dry eyes,” he managed with disturbing ease. They were on the platform now, which was barren save for them and an empty Tokaido line train waiting to whisk its sparse cargo to Keio University and points beyond. Overhead median lights held the darkness at a diffuse brim as Mana turned suddenly to tightly hug him. He wanted to return it, but something blue and accusing was out there, waiting for him to do so. He wanted to cry. It was waiting for him to do that, too.

 

“I had a really good time tonight.”

 

He mentally kicked himself as soon as the chuckle escaped him. “But we didn't really do anything.”

 

She pulled back just enough to look up and smile at him. “And I still had a good time. What does that tell you?”

 

He shrugged. “That…you're really, really tired?”

 

The bell sounded and she released him, her smile morphing until it stood for something bittersweet. It was time for her to go, but she stood and stared and tapped her lips with equally soft fingertips. He could only stand and allow her to study him. He owed her that, at least. The woman puzzled over him for what seemed like a minute; sixty seconds studying his own smiling mouth and his eyes, trying to dissect those things to discover what was making them lie.

 

He should tell her, but sixty seconds wasn't enough time to convince himself that he could.

 

She moved, wordlessly taking those fingers and pressing them to his own lips, and then pivoting to board the departing train. Shinji Ikari still felt the warmth of her fingerprint, and he almost told her. But the doors were closing now. The train was moving now. She was looking at him now, still wearing that studious, bittersweet simper. Electricity arced across the third rail as the train slid into a black tunnel, taking her away from him, now.

 

He was alone now.

 

And yet, he was not.

 

End of Chapter 3

 

A/N: From what I understand, Mana Kirishima was practically designed to be the old Shinji's soul mate in the original game. “She's like a Mary-Sue, for goodness sake!” mikomi exclaims on his/her Girlfriend of Steel information site (Thanks, by the way). So what happens when much of what made them the perfect couple is outdated because of the changes Shinji has undergone since then? So I feel justified in jerking Mana around a little bit.

 

So what happens now? Well, I know. The problem is I have yet to write it. I'll be back on this literary horse when I've completed the next three chapters. In between that time I might have something else out. No really, I've written the first page of the Battle Royale / ITDR crossover, and there's already a dead body in a warehouse! Isn't that unbelievably pleasant?

 

Random A/N: Thanks be to my reviewers, and whoever invented cheesecake, because I just can't get enough of that sweet creamy stuff. Yeah, that's right, I rhymed something that involved cheesecake. Recognize.

 

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.