Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ Normal to Reality ❯ Chapter 6 ( Chapter 7 )

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 6

By MidnightCereal

Thousands Lost For Words, Time

Mass Spiriting Away Yields Countless Questions, Few Answers

By Akemi Ando

Kanagawa Shimbun Staff Writer

Sunday, July 5, 2020; Page A01

TOKYO-3 - When Hiroki Hamada has last seen his girlfriend, Hana Maruyama, they had been arguing loudly over whose television would sit in the living room of their new apartment.

“It was such a stupid argument at first,” he recalled.

It was an argument that had escalated into a shouting match about children, then Hiroshi's parents, and finally ended with Hana storming from their Tokyo-3 flat in tears.

It was an argument that had taken place five years ago.

Hiroki never expected to see her again after Third Impact, an assumption he said was disproved when he, along with 4,000 to 7,000 others, allegedly vanished at approximately 3:16 yesterday afternoon. Hamada claimed to have returned two minutes later with new memories of Hana Maruyama; visions he said were too vivid to simply be dismissed as hallucination.

“I saw Hana right there in front of me,” Hamada said. “She didn't just talk to me. She touched my face and she kissed me. And then it was like I fell asleep and woke up at the same time. That's the best I can explain it.”

Added Hiroki, “She felt more real (on Saturday) than she ever had. Ever.”

That sense of realism is a sentiment shared by many of the absentees, along with detailed accounts of conversations and physical contact with departed loved ones, as well as the sensation of sleeping and waking all at once.

Saturday's alleged disappearances - reported as far north as Shibukawa and as far south as Omaezaki - have not always generated as positive a reaction as Hiroki Hamada's. Kanagawa Prefectural Police and Security Bureau officials alone had received over 1,700 combined emergency calls in a thirty second span minutes into the event.

The negative impact of the purported exodus extended to area hospitals, where patients continue to be admitted, primarily for shock and anxiety-related ailments. The event is being blamed for the death of an elderly Shizuoka man who succumbed following a major heart attack, as well as eleven minor car accidents in Kanagawa Prefecture.

While Kanagawa Governor Daichi Unryuu and neighboring prefectural officials have since called for calm, police, regional security bureau, and CIB investigators have yet offered a public explanation. Several reputable social psychology experts - including Tokyo-3 University's Kazuki Nishimura - have publicly or unofficially hypothesized the cause as mass hysteria.

Numerous mass hysteria occurrences have been historically documented, most notably by philosopher Motoori Norinaga in 1771. More recent examples include epidemic hyperventilation of Old Tokyo railway passengers following the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack, and the Phantom Flood of White Day 2009. The only commonality presently associated with the absentees is that their visions consisted of persons lost before or during Third Impact.

As of late Saturday night, over 300 of those claiming to have disappeared have agreed to be interviewed by either local or regional authorities.

© 2020 Kanagawa Shimbun Group

-----

The second hand twisted from one to five above Megumi Sato before she spoke again. Smoke once more curled turbulent up and over her frown to spill out into the dark and empty break room.

“So you read it,” she said to her phone.

“I did,” he answered, though it hadn't been a question. “Of course I did. It turned out this way because I asked. Why wouldn't I like to see the results?”

“If you're going to insist on talking about this in degrees of `like', Daichi, expect this to be the last time we talk for about, say, a decade. Can you honestly tell me we have a good twenty years between us?” Megumi's elbow poked the wall at her back. All the while she bored snaggy holes into the First Print Sunday Edition, which suffered in her right fist along with an expertly handled Red Apple cigarette.

Daichi Unryuu sounded complacent, and it was all the forty-six year-old could do to draw another reliable lungful of nicotine.

“It's not about liking or disliking,” he explained. “This hardly has anything to do with me, at all. It's beyond me, or any of the other Prefectural governors. They're no better off in Gunma or any place there's been disappearances and reporters to cover them. Tokyo-2 was on this like shit on a pig.”

“That's not disgusting at all,” breathed Megumi, hearing herself in her receiver and bouncing through the fog off an opposite wall.

“Sorry, but that's life for a farm boy. Simple life.”

“Some farm boy. I'd say you achieved a pretty good grasp of this city's political inner-workings. All it took was five years, and you knew what to say, when to say it, what to do,” she paused, admonishing that artifact in her that lusted after theatre, “how to lie.”

He laughed. “Praise from the master?”

“Business and pleasure, Daichi. Not that I get satisfaction from being dishonest. It just has no place at Kanagawa Shimbun, never has. But things are mingling today and it bothers me.”

“It really does, doesn't it?” Unryuu asked, and Sato took a moment to hate him and his fake, insulting ignorance.

“There's a new hire here,” she began. “Photojournalist. A sophomore at T-3U and she's from the States. The sweetest little thing. But I swear to God she has these…eyes. They're this beautiful green and you never look at her, she looks at you, finds the lie in you, finds it and then just fucks it to death.”

“Sweetest little thing.”

“Oh, shut up,” Megumi barked, spouting tufts of smoke that grasped her phone like grey spirits. “All I'm asking is when she reads this half truth -and she will- what do I say to keep from having my brains screwed out?”

“Maybe nothing, Megu. Or maybe you tell that Yankee girl what it means to take one for the team. And you're making sounds like you don't agree.”

“It means what it means, jerk. That there're things that people would want to know, and we're not telling them-”

“Because if we do, there really will be mass hysteria,” Daichi finished with authentic gravity. “Please try to remember that I don't think this is some dick-measuring contest. I'm better than that and you know it.”

Guilt segued through Megumi and laded her shoulders. Her eyes listed from one side of the sterile box to another, and something about the diffuse bath of vending machine light made her feel old and sad.

“Of course you are,” she sighed. “Good enough to know this is all wrong, at least.”

Unryuu said, “What we're doing is trading one right for another, on the advice of people that know better than me and you.”

“No,” she seethed, her fatigue instantly vanquished. “They never knew any better. Never. That's why we are where we are and not some place…” Goddamned theatre, “far away. For all we know, this whole thing is they're own damned fault. So at the least, they don't know better than the new girl, or my grandfather.”

“`Who founded this paper,' said Miss Sato.”

“Make fun if you want, but remember that this whole shit storm, Daichi, it's like getting knocked up under his portrait.”

Megumi could hear Daichi Unryuu flair his nostrils and blow, a ridiculously histrionic display that usually meant the time for platitudes was very nearly over.

“Fine. Since you're so intent on analogizing sex and degrees of journalistic integrity, you'll be happy to know that most picture frames have two sides; face up and-”

“And you when the Prime Minister snaps his fingers.” Grandpa was rolling over like shrimp kabob, and she could do nothing but crush the remnant roll of ash and tar and red embers into a homely ceramic dish. “Face down it is, then.”

“Yell at me tonight, Megu. About nine. My house. Amaya and Kaito'll be up from Yaizu. I think you need to have a laugh.”

That was true. She was starting to forget what it sounded like. “I'm there. But until then…fuck you, Daichi.”

Megumi Sato thumbed a backlit key, and they were once again separated by distance as much as they were by profession and ideology.

The grey handle to the break room door stole the heat from Chief Executive Officer Sato's hand.

“But fuck Nerv more…”

She left.

-----

“Can I put my shirt back on?”

“Hn?” Maya straightened from the papers splayed out over the stainless steel countertop, twisting to Shinji and snapping back like a torsion spring. “Yeah. Go ahead.”

Shinji was sitting and she was standing in an examination room that was small, cold, stocked with sharp metal things with equally long names, and identical to about twenty other suites in Nerv Medical's capacious west wing. The Third Child was fine with all of these things except the temperature, so it was with considerable internal fanfare he tossed his black tee over his head and filled it.

“So…what's wrong with me?”

“Hn?” Maya straightened from the papers splayed out over the stainless steel countertop, twisting to Shinji and snapping back like a torsion spring. “That's a little like wanting the answer to a fourth-order pde without a numerical difference equation solver.”

“So…you don't know yet?”

Her back to him, Maya seemed to shrink. “If we're going off the results we're getting, we won't know for a good long while. I…” She paused, and soft white tubes droned above them like restless hornets.

For once, Shinji found himself wishing Maya would spin on her heel and bombard him with facts, a wish he respectfully withdrew when she turned around and looked him in the eye.

“When we got your MRI back, we almost took apart that machine,” she told him, “but the Magi ran full diagnostics on it. I'm happy to say we have a fully functioning Magnetic Resonance Imager. TPR Medical Systems should be proud.” Her hands swept over her face, her fingertips teasing her hairline as his mind similarly brushed against phantom memories; her fingers on his scalp, soft. Had he imagined that?

“Shinji, there are small…places inside your lungs where your alveoli just aren't there. Like they were just plucked off like grapes. That's why I asked if you were having any breathing problems.”

“Hmm.”

Maya's eyebrows collapsed. “Is that all you can say? `Hmm?” Alveoli oxygenate your blood and get rid of carbon dioxide, Shinji. This could be like Emphysema to you. What if you're not able to breathe at all?”

“Then I'll die.”

“Shinji-”

“I'm just saying, what do you want me to do about it? Is it a person or an animal? I can't fight it. It…” Sagging as he sat on the stiff examination bed, he kicked his jean-sheathed legs like oars. “It's not an Angel. Maybe it's me. Or my lungs.”

The woman seemed to trace his outline with her dour doe's eyes. “Or your brain…”

His face remained placid, patient. Her shoulders rose and fell with a sigh. “Our psychographs kept picking up these anomalies. At first, we didn't know what they were. So I took a look at your EEG, and I separated the composite brainwave, so SMR waves, theta, alpha waves…am I speaking Japanese to you?”

“You're going to say I, what, I have brain damage?”

The young doctor shook her head, and then looked up as if amending her assessment on the fly. “Not in the sense of wave amplitude or frequency, no. But there should be one SMR wave. One theta wave…” Maya looked plainly at him. “Why do you have two of each?”

“How should I know that?”

“I didn't expect you to, it was a rhetori…” Maya breathed molasses. “So we can only pick up these ghost waves off and on. They're weak signals, really, two orders magnitude smaller. Until you get tired. When your alpha waves attenuate they're consistent, and the phase difference between those signals and the waves that represent you shrinks…”

She shook her head, “and I have no idea why. Who knows what being disincorporated twice does to a person? I just…I don't know…”

“That's alright,” he said gently. “It's not like I was really expecting you to.” There was once more sound like an electric hive. He nodded to it before hopping off the bed.

“Where are you going?”

“Mihiro's.” Shinji slipped into his socks and shoes, which were huddled under a chair in an antiseptic corner. “It's Tuesday and I tutor her about half an hour from now.”

Fingers clasped his arm, and they weren't very soft at all. “Just what in the world are you going to teach her that she won't figure out all on her own in the next week? Next day? I want you to tell me what's more important than this.”

When he stood at full height and had to look slightly down into her eyes, he suddenly, oddly, felt like a man. If only for a fleeting moment. “Nothing is. But you had a look at me, and you don't know what's wrong. That's all there is to it, isn't it?”

Maya released him, visibly taken aback, and he was once more a boy before her. “Do you have to say things like that? Listen to me, I didn't want you to come here because you felt the need to give me a `chance'. Come back to this place that was so terrible to you because you want to be saved. You want me to keep trying, right?”

He opened his mouth to respond when he thought of the train ride back from Fujikyu Highlands, of the suffocating, quilting silence; of how Mihiro had pinned her knees to her chest and found a nook on Hikari to curl into; of how Kensuke had stared at nothing for seconds and minutes…

Of how Mana's hand had found his and never lost it.

And suddenly, he was very afraid.

“Can…can you?”

Hesitation filled her eyes before she wordlessly reached up and studied his face with a cool, steady hand, fingertips lingering as she pulled it back.

Shinji only blinked at first. “Why did you…?”

“I don't know,” Maya confided to the floor. Raising her brown eyes to his questioning frown, the doctor smiled tenuously. “Doctor Akagi didn't teach me everything she knew, but everything I know I learned from her. Hopefully, that'll be enough.”

-----

“Right. Hopefully. When you find out for sure, I'll know where to be.”

“You shouldn't be leaving at all, Shinji. I understand not wanting to stay at headquarters, but if you hadn't already been discharged I'd order you to remain here on emergency standby.”

“But I was. So you can't.”

He left. She just let him leave.

That was the thing about learning from Ritsuko Akagi. You internalized the scientific method. You were immersed in the knowledge, the methodologies of vast disciplines you never knew existed. You mastered the tools at your fingertips so that innumerable fractions, digits, decimals all whirled to a calculated waltz. You coddled your subordinates sometimes, squeezed them others, and you learned whether the first or second was most appropriate.

You learned how to lie and withhold information so as to manipulate situations and suit your own selfish objectives.

She looked down at his psychograph, the image warped by refractions of unshed tears.

“I did it because I was saying goodbye.”

-----

“Are you going to die?”

Shinji did not first realize Mihiro was speaking to him. After all, her music - wordless lyrics, somber, rich and wreathing through tenor chords - had never stopped. Maya was right; he had nothing more to teach Mihiro Kamakura, and he was beginning to wonder if he had ever actually taught her anything. If not for the fact that he had the privilege of attending these private slices of string heaven, he'd also be convinced he was wasting his-

“I asked you a question.”

“You remember Maya, don't you?”

Her expression remained smooth as glass, eyes shuttered behind static lids. “You're talking about that old lady.”

“She's not that…yes, her. She's been solving problems like mine her whole career.”

There was a shift in her sitting posture. Mihiro opened her eyes, abruptly putting the sonata to its end with a sigh three divorces too worldly. She had been like this the moment she had opened the front door; the young teen had gone through her practiced motions on minimum power alone, not bothering to bound around or crack wise or filthy, not even finding the energy to look him in the eye. Most unlike her.

Or most like her? Perhaps the mask had slipped today.

“What was that piece you just finished?” he asked, unwilling to further to dwell on the subject. “I've never heard it before.”

“Of course not.” She stared down the neck of her instrument and past its bulging spruce bout. “I did just make it up.”

“It's beautiful. But it was so sad, though.”

“Good.”

“To tell the truth, when I imagined you composing your own music it wasn't anything like what you just are you crying?”

Shinji was witness to her broken, pitiful huffing, and wondered if someone somewhere was laughing at the fact he was yet again being dragged into a socially awkward situation involving a teenaged girl.

Not me, he thought as he crouched before Mihiro, whose hair fanned out over her face as she leaned forward. “If you won't look at me, will you at least listen? I promise I'm not dying any time soon-”

“No,” she sputtered out, “It's not just that, it's…Shinta broke up with me, alright?”

“What?”

Mihiro snapped to him, glaring through a curtain of hair. “YOU'RE GONNA MAKE ME SAY IT TWICE? HE DUMPED ME! HE SAID I WAS ANNOYING!”

“……………………&# 8230;no…no, you're not…no…”

“Well thank you so much,” she spat. “It's great to know that when life hands me lemons, you'll be right there to squirt me the eye!”

“I-I was only trying to-”

“STOP TRYING. I knew I shoulda told someone else. Someone that can relate, Mister Perfect.” She wiped her tears on a short pink sleeve before jumping up to stow away her cello.

“It gets better.”

Why did he say that? Why did he say that?

Why…did he say that?

It wasn't his place to burden her with that insidious hope. It never gets better.

But Mihiro had already seated herself on the floor in front of him, staring into him with large brown eyes. “How? How do you…did it get better for you? With Mana?”

A shake of the head. “That's not who I mean. I couldn't have been anymore than a year older than you. And Asuka-”

“What'd she look like?”

The moon. A spirit beauty washed white over obsidian, her expression black like the far side, holes in her face from celestial violence, and yoked by scarlet olive branches. She chased you if walked or ran or drove, or if you flew.

“She had red hair. She was German, and-”

“I heard those foreign chicks are crazy, man.”

“Yeah, heheh, she-”

“Oh shit, I was just kidding! She was really crazy?”

“No. Yes. I don't know. Can I finish a sent-”

“You just did.”

“Mihiro.”

“Sorry.”

“You wouldn't have to be sorry if you could be serious for one damned…” Shinji tried to relax, the subject matter pinching, pricking and prodding him all the way. “I'm trying to help you. I'm sorry, but, please, can you try not to be so-”

“Annoying?” she finished darkly.

“No, you're not…you think this is easy for me? I don't like talking about her. Or for her.”

“Then don't.” He blinked at her suggestion, but listened. “C'mon, teacher. Let's role play. I'll be Asuka, your beautiful, barbarian unrequited adolescent love interest…”

“…okay…”

“And you'll be Shinji, the skinny, pervy pizza-faced shut-in with a closet full of sticky Urabon-”

“This is going to be stupid…”

“Nein!” Mihiro chided. “Eez zat any vay to talk to your strudel kuchen?” Gawd…

“Asuka didn't…” He sighed, and reminded himself that in her own special way, Mihiro was trying to help him to help herself. “You didn't talk like that. Your mom was half-Japanese. You just had trouble with kanji.”

“So…since I couldn't write you love letters, I'd settle for match after sloppy match of tongue tag in the music room, where you'd show me how to use my `spit valve'?”

He just stared at Mihiro as if she were some species of deranged goat. “No.” He stared some more.

“Didn't write you love letters, didn't grope that which is gropeable…” Mihiro smiled at him. “I wasn't a very affectionate girlfriend, was I?”

“You weren't really my girlfriend, I…” I can't believe I'm telling you this, “I just admired you. I thought you could help me because you were the greatest…thing when we met. I thought you were perfect, and, and if you leant a piece of yourself to me…I could be happy.”

Her smile leaked a bit of air. “But I didn't make you happy?”

Shinji abandoned a queued-up exposition and sagged. “No.”

“But…” she winced once as she sifted through his secrecy, “you made me happy, didn't you?”

He shook his head.

“Because when we talked we realized it just wouldn't work between us?”

“We never really talked about anything important. Or about anything.”

“But we got along okay,” she ventured,” and even though we never really got involved, we-no?”

He shrugged.

“Did I even like ONE strand of hair on your big-ass head?”

“I don't know.”

“But you'd know when you asked me. So what'd I say when you asked me?”

“…I never asked you.” Not until it had been too late.

“Why the hell not?”

He grimaced at her, feeling tired. “Because you had your defenses up, Asuka. I couldn't ask you that. I couldn't ask you anything. And if you would've given me the chance, you'd have just laughed in my face and told Hikari.”

“But…” A flash of desperation arced across her eyebrows, “you never asked. Maybe I was scared, or maybe I was a little bitchy-”

He said nothing.

“-but it wouldn't have hurt to take some initiative-”

“Yes,” he snapped, “it would have. It would've been like dying and there wasn't anything about you that made me think any different. You were a walking fortress and we both knew it. I was always ready, always nice. It was your job to open up, not mine.”

“And I never did? Ever? I never gave you any sign or anything at all?”

“I don't know. I mean…” He shook his head as humorless laughter fled him. “I would catch you looking at me out of the corner of my eye. And that time I was in the hospital, when you pretended not to check on me. You…”

He remembered something he couldn't believe he had forgotten. “You kissed me! You kissed me, and made this big show about washing your mouth out!”

She looked confused. She had the nerve to look confused. “…so I did like you?”

“I don't know!” he said, not quite talking, not yet shouting. “I don't because you didn't want me to know, Asuka, because you were a hypocrite. Okay? You were the coward. Everything here is sad and cheap because of people like you.”

“And you.”

“And me. You're right. But I never tried to hide it. I never pretended I was better than that when I was just a child myself.”

Her rubber band smile grew and shrank and grew, and then she answered. “You know what your problem is? You were fooling yourself. You built up this whole ideal, of what you thought I was, and that wasn't really me.”

“That's not true.”

“I think you made me out to be some compliment to you, and when you found out I couldn't complete you, you hated me. But I'm not a doll, Shinji. I had my own problems…didn't I?”

“You think you had to go through all of that crap alone? Now who's fooling themselves?”

“You are, still. Because when it all comes down to it, I'm not here with you.”

“You're not here because you were weak!” he yelled. “You're not here because you'd rather be dead!”

“Wait, I'm…she's dead?” Mihiro's eyes negotiated with her tan shorts as she fell out of character. “That…then that was rock bottom? And after that-”

“And after that I dated a classmate of mine because she wouldn't take no for an answer. After she finally realized everyone and everything is a joke and you're always the punch line, she punched me. And after she hated me for about two years Mana showed up. Guess what happens next.”

Having languished long enough, Mihiro sighed behind her canopy of black bowed willow. “Can we stop, now?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what do I mean? The whole point of this was to cheer my ass up. It didn't work.”

“It doesn't seem like it now, does it?” he asked, watching her lower lip tremble. “Just wait, wait until the next one. You'll see I did you a favor, and so did Shinta. Now you know what to expect, Mihiro. They're all the same.”

“You're full of shit.”

“I'm the only person in the world that knows these things are a fact. So you don't believe me.” He shrugged. “Fine. But I told you this in the first place because I'm that bad of a liar. You deserve to know the truth, Mihiro, and I wish someone had told me so I didn't have to figure it out all by my…self…”

His words became bottlenecked when Mihiro drew her knees up and hugged them. Somewhere behind those spindly appendages and hair he heard persistent whimpering, which grew in urgency as she rocked forward and back, her shoulders hitching and…and for God's sake, she's only a puppy.

“Mihiro…?”

One taste. She had been trying to antagonize him, had succeeded, and he had meant only to give her one small taste of his world to teach her a lesson…and he had poisoned her.

“Forget it. Everything I just said. Mihiro?”

He reached over to her forearm, but the girl twisted up and away from him. He stood and approached her as she methodically folded her chair.

And she wouldn't look at him. Or make a sound. He had scared her.

“You have to be so mad at me. And you should be. That was my story and my truth and no one should have to think like I do because it isn't healthy.” She was the absence of sound. She was scaring him. “Things got out of control for me, and…and maybe I lost sight. Maybe you're different enough and things will work ougharagarraaahhHHH!”

`OugharagarraaahhHHH', because he had just been cracked in the kneecap with a steel chair.

OugharagarraaahhHHH: When `Ow' just won't cut it.

No sooner had he toppled over like a drunken stork had Mihiro towered over him, all fire and brimstone, rainbows and lollipops. And steel chairs.

“YOU THINK I NEED YOU TO TELL ME THINGS ARE GOING TO WORK OUT FOR ME?” She took another jagged breath and reloaded. “I ALREADY KNOW I'M NOT GONNA END UP PISSY AND BITTER AND WHIPPED LIKE YOU JUST BECAUSE SHINTA WOULDN'T PUT OUT!”

“You…” He hissed as his knee and the body connected to it throbbed in pain. “You were trying to get in his pants?”

“NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, JERK! LIKE I'D EVER LET YOU DWELL ON MY PAST!”

The girl was out of breath, presumably from all the screaming at the top of her lungs until she was out of breath.

“And you know what else? You are not a bad liar. Dad is a bad liar. Shinta is a bad liar. You. Are the worst. Liar...”

And then the long, loud moment had passed.

No it hadn't.

“EVAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!”

There was something about having a thirteen year-old scream piercingly a centimeter from your cochlea that made you deaf. Percussion thrummed through Shinji like some slapdash ensemble, but he was able to make out her concussive stomping, diminishing and then punctuated by a resounding slam someplace above him.

The young man that was Shinji Ikari decided no one would mind terribly if he lay there for another few minutes or weeks, however long it took for him to regain his equilibrium and the feeling in his left foot. Maybe he would not mind so much if something good offset the…the owies. Something told him -his brain, perhaps- that the good feeling thing was not here. Nothing, no one here would hold his hand…

“Class dismissed.”

-----

Maya was sitting in the darkness and worshipping at the altar of a glowing digital god. She prayed in her executive chair, head bowed in penance, her hands laced on top her crown like a knotted headscarf. This splendid deity's glory shown forth from a box brimming with baptizing white, and Maya bathed in it while repenting wordlessly.

Absolution: It came all too slowly for the woman. So her head bowed lower. Her fingers bleached as she laced them tighter. Maya prayed harder. She had to, so as to adequately compensate for her meager devotional.

Shinji,

This is not

No, confession was the most appropriate descriptor. It was a request for forgiveness made requisite by her deadly sin of silence. If anyone was still around to read it, it would speak for her and that was all it could do, since saving her soul was out of the…

A synthetic hymn. An intruder, someone somewhere somewhy. People in places with reasons chopstick flimsy and as significant as a speck on the lens of a telescope.

Thank God.

“Crazy,” she heard Doctor Ueto say. “Everyone. Is crazy. Until this Saturday, my phone only rang on the hook. None of my patients knew my nickname was Kiki.” She pulled air past her teeth. “An hour ago, a young cadet -whose dead mother nagged her about her short skirt- passed all the way out in my lunch.”

“That sounds, uh, saturated. Late lunch, too.”

“That's the thing,” said Kiyohiko. “I didn't actually get to eat it. So you realize how nuts I am, don't you, asking for another patient?”

“Who?”

The woman sighed. “Your phone call from Saturday, Maya. I'm returning it.”

Ibuki could not help but wonder if her friend could discern feigned ignorance over the phone. “Ohhhh…oh. Thanks, but it's all going to work itself out. It was a friend.”

“I see. And this friend wouldn't happen to work at Nerv, would she?”

“Weren't you the one telling me you've memorized detailed psychological profiles on all upper level staff? You should already know whether or not I'm going crazy.”

“Maybe.” Maya imagined Doctor Ueto typing something up on her Hi-Def monitor. Something about her. “But the dossier's only part of the story. I hate novellas.”

“Too bad my friend -and she's a he, by the way- is going to come to a resolution all on his own, then. The guy's a walking epic. Don't think I'd want to live his story, though.”

Doctor Ueto made a sound that was not quite a chuckle. “I think we should leave the prognostics to the Magi, don't you?”

“I am the Magi.” Her eyes flickered to the screen:

Shinji,

This is not

“But thanks for worrying.”

“Everyone here is so scared. Or happy. Or angry. It's like being in that soup, again. I can't help but worry.”

“You might as well,” said Maya. “Get it out of your system. My guess is that in a few days you won't feel a thing.”

“Perfectly perfect desensitization, huh?” She could see Kiyohiko nodding to herself contemplatively. “Bye bye, Maya.”

“Bye bye, Kiki.”

Well, that had been a pleasant diversion. Now back to feeling like a manipulative, backstabbing traitor. Back to feeling like Ritsuko; Shinji was on to something. But he wouldn't be around for any I-told-you-so's.

So why write anything to him? The shortest -and most correct answer- was that she was writing for herself. At least, she was trying to-

And it came to her, a rising tide of truth to inundate deception; she was worshipping the wrong god.

Maya stood and stretched past textbook towers, drawing a thin notepad past hardcover sentinels. She pushed her keyboard to the side to make space for it, then found a pen to fill the stationery's own blank space. The woman touched the wet black tip to the paper, allowing herself a small selfish smile after the first full sentence.

Amen.

-----

Mana hid her surprise quickly, projecting calm as she leaned easily against her apartment doorframe and squinted happily at him. “Now, Shinji, how am I going to bite you if you're standing all the way out in the hallway?”

Hmm…now that was an oddly pleasing image. “I don't…but why would you want to bite…”

“Just get your dumb ass in here,” she sighed, rolling away from the entrance to grant him passage.

He obliged and stepped through, sensing their aloneness. “Where's Hikari?”

“Nanny work.” Mana hefted a basket of clean clothes onto her couch. “Surprised she hasn't choked the little beasts, yet. Don't tell her I said that.” She found him, a drop of light in a sea of darkness. “You didn't come out here to see her, I hope?”

“No.”

“Then what does bring you to Uyeda Undergraduate Hills Apartment Complex, Building Six, Room 204?”

“Well…” He paused as Mana busied herself like a nesting robin. “I visited Maya today. She wanted to run more tests, but I left after I depressed her. I made Mihiro cry. So now I'm here and…” He shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe I'm going for the trifecta.”

“So you're going to make me cry again?” Mana asked somewhere behind him.

The young man said, “No. I…I just wanted to see you. But the way things are going today, I'll probably have done something to you by the time I go back home.”

“Let's hope so.” Her voice was suddenly at his ear, and she seemed to be all around him as she brushed past. The woman must have felt him tense, because she smiled so weakly as to nearly frown. “What did you mean by `more tests'?”

“It means I'm fine and Maya's just being thorough, like always.”

“Or that something is really wrong and she just doesn't know what.”

“Could be.”

“You're not at a place with `could be's'. Either there is a problem or there isn't, and I doubt she'd let you leave unless you had a good answer.” Now Mana really was frowning. She shook her head of scarlet hair while sitting on the arm of her couch. “Do me this favor and pretend, just for a second, that I'm not Mihiro. Just do that and I won't keep things from you. I don't remember it ever being this hard for you to be fair.”

The Third kept his eyes trained somewhere just below her chest. “I'm not worried about you keeping things from me,” he said, truly believing it. “I told you before, all the stuff that happened, it's not important.”

She reached around a couch cushion, picked something up and flung it at his head.

“And that's why it is important, dummy!” He grinned weakly at the laugh in her voice, staring down at her fluffy projectile -a pair of white socks. “It's important because it isn't. You know what I mean?”

“I know,” he lied.

“Now we can talk about all those things because we know it won't change us. It should be nothing, Shinji, like telling stories. Aren't you the least bit curious? I am.”

He brushed off Mana's antiquated reasoning. Perhaps she was fine with telling `stories' about her past, but Shinji Ikari did not have stories. He had cautionary tales. He had Greek tragedies. Some of them seemed not quite over.

“Come on…” she gently coaxed, “what do you want to know? About my parents? About Trident? How I almost lost my foot? My…” she leaned forward and lowered her voice, “my first? You want to know about Souichi?”

She sat back up when he made his `too much information' face.

“Sorry…just putting it out there…” Mana laughed sheepishly then stopped and tilted her head, holding him with an innocent gaze as she folded a clean pair of pants. “Are you a virgin?”

“No.” He wasn't. Yukie had seen to that.

Mana lifted a red shirt to her lap and folded that, too. She brandished sympathetic eyes. “It's okay. I mean, you're quiet and you don't initiate a lot of talk…or touch.” She might have paused briefly. “And you're alone all the time and you're…alone. It's okay.”

“Okay…but I'm not.”

She might have growled briefly. “Fine,” she snapped, fitfully gathering up her laundry.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you angry?”

“I'm not angry!” she said angrily. “I'll be back. I made some lemonade. Just try not to choke.”

I will never understand females, he silently lamented while Mana stomped down a back corridor. Not girls, not teenaged girls, not women. Not ever.

Mana couldn't have been that upset. She had offered liquid refreshment, and even expressed some desire not to see him die because of it.

Ikari retrieved the pitcher from a crowded refrigerator shelf, poured and sipped and choked. How much sugar did she put in this? Good God, he was dating a fly. Oh well. He drank again because diabetes was overrated. Perhaps sugar shock would lift him up when so many things in this place pushed him down.

Bathed by early evening sun, Mana and Hikari's residency shown full and radiant, a starkly mocking contrast to his own place, which was a glorified funeral parlor (Yukie contended it was the other way around). The two women had managed to stock their home with a kaleidoscope of vibrant memories, florid colors and noises.

It was saturated with manifold mellifluous smells. A medley of aromatic orchids held gentle sovereignty over their small living room. As Shinji wandered past the kitchenette, faint but insistent scents confronted him. He could taste the champon. His own place often smelled of food, as he cooked his own meals more often than not…and ate them alone more often than not…more often than more often. The smell of dinner, knowing you had someone to share it with, it was like comparing sex to…this place just smelled like life.

Their lives. Not his.

Never, ever his.

He couldn't let Mana see the piece of him sadness had found and gleefully crushed. She had been looking so hard.

Like him, right now.

He was seeing something pinned by a refrigerator magnet shaped like a penguin. It was a picture, and some thing about it -in it- grabbed him. It began stripping him…of heat, sound, air and with it those full smells he loved so much that he hated them. And then it ripped hate from him as though it were a kite in a typhoon's grey maelstrom. He was not strong enough to hold onto anything, or feel or think, just stare.

And he stared.

And he stared.

And he stared.

And he stared.

And he stared.

And he stared at it before pinching it between cold fingers -he could feel cold- and turning to shamble down the back hallway, slowly, dazed. Shinji could feel his mind forming word shapes, placing letters, punctuations and pictures, ideas one after another, all shaped by some cardinal design.

God God God, he thought, and he did not know why.

The door knob for Mana's room was cold, too. However, the space behind it was warm and white, and she was a blotch of snow and peach topped off by a shock of bouncy red. Shinji managed to focus by the time she drew herself up, looked back at him and smiled gently, questioningly.

So he questioned her.

“How do you know Kaworu Nagisa?”

“I…” Mana tossed a pair of panties on her bed. She blinked once and again. “Who?”

“Him.” He advanced on her with unthinking, primal urgency, and held the photograph a quivering inch from her ashing face. “HIM!”

He watched every expressive thing on her twist from the worst confusion and fear, feeling no sympathy. He just wanted an answer. Just once, he was going to have answers…

“That's Souichi,” she whispered. A leaky laugh as if he had punctured her, a terrible, sick plea. “Souichi. You…are you jealous?”

A million fingers touched him everywhere, touched everything. They made him think, which was making him sick.

“Answer me,” she demanded, color and righteousness flooding her. “I can't ever understand you if you don't talk to - where the hell do you think you're going?”

Away, Mana. Away from here.

“Don't run away from me. Not from me. Please.”

Away from you.

“Shinji? Shinji Ikari, I am talking to you.”

Away from HIM.

“GET BACK HERE AND EXPLAIN YOURSELF JUST ONCE! ONCE, YOU FUCKING COWARD!”

She caught his arm at the landing for the front door. He tried snatching it back but she hung fast like a Bullmastiff.

“Oh no. No. You're not leaving until you start talking and don't stop until you make sense.”

“I'm not the one that needs to explain anything!” he shouted, finally looking on Mana with wide, wild eyes. “How can I make sense when no one else does? Nothing is right in this place! Nothing! People don't even stay dead when I kill them!”

She paled again, her fingers digging into his skin. “You killed my ex-boyfriend?”

“He was not your boyfriend!” He pulled again and she tugged again. “I…I crushed him! He was the last damn Angel and I saw his head pop off and you're posing with him!”

“…you're scaring me.”

They were small words, but they reached him, tamed him. Something delirious broke out on her face. She made a sound, weak and disbelieving. “This is so…I'm not laughing at you, just the situation…I was ready for anything but-”

Her shoulders shook again before she composed herself and continued. “Okay…let's play this game. Souichi Nakajima isn't a real person. Okay. He's some, some alias for this Nagisa, or whatever the hell his name is. Prove it, Shinji. Make me a believer, or I'm just going to laugh again,” her grip tightened almost imperceptibly, “and you're going to join me.”

Shinji knew he had already lost. As always, he knew nothing. He had nothing. Just a picture. Hell, the boy in the exposure had brown eyes and black hair. Shinji just had a feeling and that face and smile that had been seared into him, a memory brand black and flaking.

But there was a reason Asuka invaded and shredded his peace; why Misato would put him to sleep to drown him; why he coughed up primordial soup; why Maya thought he had two damn brains. Those items and this boy who had Kaworu's face and grin, whom Mana was cheek-to-cheek with, all added to a sum he was too small to calculate.

So he lost.

“What's the matter?” A smile slid across her features, oil-slick. “Not going to say anything? Then I will. I knew Souichi Nakajima. He never let me down or left me alone or lied to me. He was a little obtuse, but he never really hid a single piece of himself. He treated me as if he'd been born just to meet me, like I deserved every bit of the empathy he ever had. I'm saying he loved me, Shinji.”

Mana looked at him and softened, somehow mistaking his vindication as her own.

“Love. Can your aliens do that? Can your monsters do that? He's the best kind of angel. He's the best…person I've ever met. And he's the only reason I'm talking to you right now.” She slowly rubbed his arm. But she wouldn't shut up. She would not stop damning herself.

“And besides, he, he liked things! He had favorite foods, favorite clothes and TV shows. Favorite music -he loved Ode to Joy- loved it. He liked the beach, he…”

And the most important of truths filled her eyes at once, snatching the air out of her. The woman's fingers fled from him, curling over her mouth as she gasped.

“…he liked the beach. We went…went to New Goza because he loved the seashore…oh no…” He watched as Mana allowed a wall to support her. She searched the ceiling, the floor, the living room, the ceiling, never finding what she was looking for.

But she did not look at him. She would not face him. That was what made up his mind.

He moved to put on his shoes.

“How…how could I know that?” she asked from behind him. “How could I know? How? Why'd I react the way I just did? If I knew, would I just leave pictures of him out for you to find? Would I do that?”

He didn't answer as her voice came closer. “Shinji? Why would I let him kiss me? And put his hands on me? W-why would I let him…” He heard her choke up as he reached for the door. “I didn't know. Why would I lie?”

“Because you're…you.”

There was a moment when he could not tell a living person flanked him. It wasn't just the absence of speech or breath. Mana had simply stopped existing for a quantifiable period of time.

Then a force viced his shoulder and spun him.

She was smiling, an impossibly cherubic visage. It nailed him place, and he would have believed her had her eyes not been so wet. She should stop smiling.

“What's that mean?” Her voice was rusted by the wetness. “`Because I'm me.' What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing.”

“No.” She shook her head, laughing and crying softly, and it was terrible. “Not nothing. It's not. You said it, so you should know what you meant. You should know me. So what am I going to do next, Shinji?”

He could smell the lemonade on her breath, she was so close. Crying and getting closer.

God, she shouldn't laugh. She shouldn't be so angry while she adjoined their chests and stomachs and pelvises, while she made him feel her fluttering heart through her pressed flesh and thin tank top. Her tears became his, smeared across his cheek from hers. No. Not like this. Please. Stop.

But she didn't, because velvet was at his ear. “What happens next? Hn? What do I do now, because I'm me?”

Nothing, he wanted to say, because by leaving here I'll have killed Kaworu for good. Betrayal and false hope would die again.

Shinji couldn't leave. Not with Mana kissing him like that.

He almost didn't feel the door at his back, because everything that was not Mana became irrelevant. The world reduced to the warmth covering him, the hands clutching the back of his foggy head, the other tongue in his mouth, expertly slipping, curling and licking inside. Only when it ran along the roof of his mouth did he try kissing her back, but she was having none of it. He conceded the run of him and she used it to deny all his initiative while externalities bleached in her light.

What had he been doing? Why had he been trying to leave a minute, two, now three minutes ago? That very good reason was whispering in a chorus of barbarous screams, feeling like tree bark while wearing winter gloves. The points of firm skin poking his ribs were much more tactile. He knew what they felt like, had felt them, erect and supple in his palm while waiting in line at Fujikyu Highlands.

She let him feel. She made him feel, it had been so long, she had been so patient and had suffered him, and he had nearly slammed her own door in her face. God. God, he was going to slip into her and never come out…

It was love. She was love. He understood, finally, that she was an unremitting, tender force of nature. He had been fooling himself by thinking he could leave her, because she was not a person in a finite place. She was everything, all the time, and everywhere.

She had hunted him mercifully, a pack of one and all, and just happened to finally consume him in this apartment, taking away from him while giving back just as much. She was everything Asuka was trying to be. He had tried to turn his back on her, for some stupid reason.

It must have been stupid, whatever it was, because as Mana Kirishima pulled back, as his lower lip slipped from between hers like pulled taffy, he was certain that had been, without a doubt, the most loving thing anyone had ever done for-

“Get out.”

The wherewithal to formulate questions failed Shinji. He just blinked at her trembling smile as his lungs malfunctioned. Mana's worked just fine.

“GET. OUT!”

-----

And he did. He just…got out.

Spent, she had waded back to her room on rubbery legs before the front door had even closed. She had listed to a wall kind enough to hold her up.

She was sitting on her bed, now. Her elbows and knees formed a tripod with her brow and palms as she leaned forward.

She was quiet, just breathing. Not crying, not laughing or shaking - she was not a broken toy in a child's hand. Just sitting.

Then she was staring past her knees, between her bare feet. Something there was not crying or laughing, either.

But it was staring. And it was-

“Stop. Smiling.”

-----

At first, Mihiro thought she imagined the sounds. She was, like always, the only thing in her house that could make sounds, had been the only thing since teacher, presumably, limped out. Steel chairs were made of steel.

All one had to do was ask any Swahili-tongued Antimatter Shuttlecock or Razorbacked Armenian Jungle Cow, and they would likely tell you Mihiro Kamakura had a wonderfully active imagination. They would then proceed to devour you with their gamma mouths.

The girl could still discern reality and imagination, at least for now, so her head dipped back between her knees as she sat and sulked on the floor. Her bed frame was hard against her spine but was ignored, as were the ribbons of warmth that came through her window, mapping her arms with Tuesday's amber dusk, burning her-

Well, not really burning, because the sun's peak radiant power flux was a little more than a thousand watts per square meter at sea level, and even if it were assumed that Japanese skin did not have intermediate eumelanin levels -and it certainly did- burning only began at around forty-five degrees Celsius. Shit.

She was doing it again. Not intentionally. Would do this voluntarily?

That was why she sometimes hated learning new things. She was a walking, breathing critical information threshold, where the understanding of an equation, a law of nature, a musical composition, and the sexual practices of the Emishi came to her, satellites captured in the gravity of a LBV-class star. Sometimes, times like now, the understanding was too great, the knowledge too small, and it would veer into her like an airburst above Tunguska in Siberia, Russia, at approximately 7:17 AM on June 30, 1908. Shit.

All of the trivia she had amassed like so much dreck, she'd give it all up to know someone's heart. The one thing you couldn't find in a book. Or on the internet. She knew. She had actually tried. Lord, Allah, Vishnu, Yahweh, Flying Spaghetti Monster, they all knew she had tried. It was the one knowledge that filled glasses half-empty and half-full, and Mihiro did not understand. The irony didn't escape her. Of course it didn't. Nothing escaped her except for that one thing. That happened to be ironic also and why wouldn't it cut off?

Because she needed a person to cut it off, someone to distract and put up with her while she filled the space between their ears to empty her own. That was the problem, wasn't it? No one wanted to listen to her. Not anymore. She was not the conference call at three on Sunday afternoon. She was annoying. She couldn't be serious for one damned…second? Minute? Vighati?

Teacher -that compassionately cruel man- had been right.

She was born alone. She would die alone. And somewhere in between, the most she would ever be to some fool's gold of a pretty boy was a story recounted to pacify a whimpering thirteen year-old. Bullshit. The universe had answers stacked up like rice in a silo…and someone saw fit to put `genuine fidelity' all the way at the bottom. Mega Ultra Bullshit-chan.

And she hated rice as much as she hated crying. Both came all too easy, the latter coming now, gentle moonlit waves on a midnight beach. Mihiro found it odd she could not cry harder; no one was here to hold over her head those dollar store platitudes about how her problems were nothing compared to those of the real world.

Then what was making that noise?

Kamakura turned the wave machine off and stood. It got louder as she approached the door, and it wasn't noise. It was music. Mihiro opened the door, and she realized it was beautiful music, floating up from the first floor.

Teacher did not play the viola, to her knowledge. Dad didn't play any instruments. Besides, he was at work. He was always at work. Shinta, quite simply, wouldn't know a viola if she had rammed one all the way up his…he didn't have a key -he wouldn't take anything from her.

Mihiro descended noiselessly, now intensely hoping the instrumentalist was a woman. It was widely believed the Municipal High School Butcher was. Perhaps her, then?

This new person was in the study room Mihiro had used as she wrung every last second of companionship from her instructor. She was sitting in Mihiro's folding chair with text-book posture as her bow cut back and across her viola's c-bouts. Finely-tuned alabaster fingers curled over the wooden neck, dipping and rescinding to anoint each string with tenor lyricism. Her eyes closed, the intruder was oblivious to her intruder. She was a she. Fourteen years-old. Or fifteen, or seventeen; the white face and thin body were somehow free of…age.

Mihiro found herself clapping before she consciously acknowledged the stoppage in play. The older girl or young woman's face split with a brief, serviceable smile, as if she had been ordered to do so, before slipping back into easy neutrality. Kamakura eagerly returned the gesture as her eyes washed over the face framed with…Jesus, that wasn't a dye job.

“You mind if I'm straight with you?” said Mihiro, stepping into the room. “You kinda look like a psychopath.”

“Then you wish me to leave?” She had the voice of a ghost. The look and voice were pale like a copy of a copy of a copy. Yet, if she was not really here, why would she be asking if she should leave?

“No…” Mihiro shook her head as she stood before her guest. “You're the only one that can tell me why you're here. You can't go. I don't even know your name, yet.”

“I am the words `I love you', cast by the Other as final messenger.”

“Yeah, I used to know a Rei,” Mihiro kicked a heel before flopping to the carpet, “but she never had eyes like yours.”

“I hate my eyes,” Rei said, shuttering once more as Kamakura gave a delighted gasp.

“Hey, I hate things, too! We're practically sisters. We sit in chairs, we play string instruments, neither of us has a chest, we…” They both attended Tokyo-3 Junior High. Administrators possessed of infinite wisdom -or at least fashion sense- had changed uniforms just in time for her freshmen year, but she knew that garish cyan fuku anywhere.

Had Rei transferred? Was she a graduate? In any case, why was she still wearing it?

She should ask Rei. About where she's from and why she's in her house. How she's in her house, because Limpy McKari always locked the front door behind him. What did Rei intend to do? All of these were valid and exceedingly fair questions, none of which Mihiro felt exceedingly compelled to vocalize.

“What was that you were just playing?”

“I don't know.” Rei swept the floor with a frigid glance; neither Shuttlecocks nor Jungle Cows could imagine red eyes ever being so cold. “I played only what I had been ordered to.”

“Oh. Well, since I have no idea what the hell you're really talking about, I'll just go ahead and assume you made it up, like me.” Harsh light filled Mihiro's mind in that instant, painting its every corner with some screaming, quintessential instinct. And she ignored it.

She was just so tired of being alone. In the end, that made more sense than anything else.

“Do you think you could play it again?”

“Of course,” this time, Rei's smile came with canny trim, “for the reason that this song is yours and no one else's.”

That scream in her head again, it was stifled by the first chord and it died on the second. Mihiro could hear the viola and nothing else, a sonorous cascade like sound colors, rich crimsons, blues and greens that composed an aural spectrum. Her spectrum.

It really was her song, and Mihiro could do nothing but close her eyes and allow it to fill her, to drown the child's sorrow that choked her when she thought of hating father or touching Shinta or kissing teacher. That adolescent despair drifted away in the swift currents of each successive sound phrase, swirling down to a place with her eyes, her mouth, her tongue and feet and fingers. The whole of her was found again before realizing she had even been lost.

Before she even knew to scream.

She heard vibrant, resonating melancholia. She could feel it where her chin and the viola met. Her viola. Of course it was hers. It was her song, after all, as much her property as her fingers, delicate and dancing like spider's legs on shimmering threads; her elbow, sweeping through arcs punctuated by shifting melody; her buttocks, warmed in the folding chair by the wait for her to come downstairs, so that she could begin and listen and end it all…

So she lowered the long bow and the instrument it coaxed sound out of, placing them on the floor as she rose from her seat. She walked out of the room, pausing at the front door just long enough to slip into her shoes.

And then she left to end it all.

End of Chapter 6

A/N:

MC: That was a pretty good guess, sean!

(Closes door and locks it)

MC: I didn't know at first if I should go ahead and make that connection, but it began making sense to me in the long run.

(Disconnects phone)

MC: To be honest, I was waiting for someone to bring it up, and when no one had mentioned it to me, I began to worry a bit.

(Turns off lights)

MC: It was a difficult balance. I didn't want to make it too obvious who So actually was. Maybe it was obvious to other people. I don't know…

(Shuts blinds)

MC: But if I didn't leave enough clues in previous chapters, the revelation would just feel like some super cheap Deus ex, you know what I mean? Just like some people thought it was obvious, perhaps others did think it was cheap.

(Puts on black gloves)

MC: Hopefully, now it'll make a bit more sense why I had those scenes with So interacting with Mana, and why he had directed Hikari to take the other bus home.

(Turns on stereo full blast)

MC: Or maybe not. There are a lot of things about this story that I want to be better. But I'll leave that bit of perfectionism to my next story, which will be a one shot. I want that to be truly publishable. Ambitious? Unrealistic? Maybe. Probably. No hurt in trying, though.

(Gets out spool of wire)

MC: You know what really worried me about this chapter? The fact that I promised Rei Ayanami, and she only showed up within the last thousand or so words of a ten-thousand word chapter. But hey, the story was never really about her. She's the most popular bit player in the world, but a bit player nonetheless. She served her purpose, and I just hope I characterized her fairly.

(Pulls wire taught over hands)

MC: Now…what other secrets do you know about?

Random A/N: You know I'm just playing, right, sean? Thank you and everyone else for the feedback.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

Next Chapter: The Girl Who Loves You Inside and Out

Yes. I know that `somewhy' isn't a word.