Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ Normal to Reality ❯ Chapter 7 ( Chapter 8 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

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: The Girl Who Loves You Inside and Out

By Midnight_Cereal

His refrigerator hummed approvingly.

Why was that? To Shinji's knowledge, all he had done was sit at his apartment's dining room table, helpless as the darkness and the moon's light tirelessly quarreled. They were a stalwart and righteous pair, each entirely used to having things entirely their way. As the young man could attest, coexistence was a bitch, for which -if the tempestuous hag persisted- the whelming shadows and the ethereal glow eventually compromised.

He could see, then, reluctant silhouettes, the edges of blue-black surfaces salvaging wayward luminescence as though it were cast away from a sunken ship of light. It was just enough to see his small dinner table stretch to his left and right and in front of him.

And the person sitting across, a still shape doused indigo.

Nevertheless, Shinji could trace thin arms and round shoulders up to long hair - long because it was likelier they had two necks than one that was that thick. He filled with hawkish queries, and was surprised that when the refrigerator ceased to hum approvingly that answers lost their fear and emerged.

A sharp crack between him and the blue-coated woman (it was probably a woman, with the long hair and all) was followed by an interminable hiss, a sighing snake.

Or the breath of God, transcendent heat that thawed the blue arms until they were infused with grainy ashy grey shifting into white, chameleon-quick. It diffused all along the biceps, down to forearms laid flat against the table, soaking the wrists and fingers wrapped around a small glinting cylinder. The whiteness ran up to the shoulders as well, an alabaster current streaming beneath the strap of a tank-top bridge. It shot down her chest -it was a woman- and up her neck, injected into her slender jaw…and it was Misato.

He opened his mouth to make her alive, but she beat him to it, the marble in her eyes shining as she opened them and peered across.

“Hope you don't mind,” she said, apology coloring her voice as she blinked down to her Yebisu. A smile tugged at the mouth flushing weakly with what might have been spray paint peach. “I know I'm not supposed to have these things in here. Or…at all.”

Misato took the smile off. “But it's…you. You know? And I know that's no real excuse for not coming to see you for all this time. But I really did need another reason, and I finally got it. Asuka acts like she doesn't understand.”

When the woman looked up this time, his vision had adjusted enough to make out a ghost of color in her irises; earthen brown washed with moisture, and for a moment he could see the flash of hatred in them.

“But she always does that, acts like you're insulting her if you assume she doesn't know every damned thing. Until there's something she doesn't want to know. She thinks she has a monopoly on pain or something.”

The former pilot watched bankrupt hues spill over and fill her with frail pastels.

“And…and I guess that's just it. It's that it hurts, that's it. You…hurt. And before, that was such a bad thing that I just couldn't come here, anymore. Couldn't take it. It's worth it, now. At this moment, right now, it's worth being hurt by you. I want to feel as bad, as low as possible.”

He tried extrapolating something vivid, spreading as she spoke; it was a rich violet, blossoming just below Misato's pale breasts. It had more color, more life than anything he could see. It was growing.

She ignored it, taking a modest sip from her beer.

“And no, you don't have to tell me how you get when I pile all my shitty hopes and dreams on you, because if there's anyone that knows, she's speaking to you. I know better than Asuka. No matter what she says.”

It was growing, like spilled red wine on a linen table cloth. She ignored it.

“But that's what's going to make this wonderful.” She sounded as if she were going to be a mommy. “Sometimes I forget how hard it was for you, because they had to do so much before you finally gave up.”

It was the strain in her voice, like fatigued steel, that pulled his gaze up from the living stain and back to her eyes, now spilling over with tears.

“But no one's doing a thing to you now, are they? So this should be so easy, like breathing, and I'm counting on it. Because…” Her composure failed her and she nearly choked on her words. “Because if this doesn't work I don't know what I'll do!”

And before Shinji could figure out how to ask what it was that would or wouldn't work, before he realized the heartache carving up her face had been scoured, Misato had slumped forward, face down.

Uncompromising silence fell upon her.

His eyes ran past the hands still wrapped loosely around the beer can, before stopping at the tresses tumbling over her arms and the face he knew he did not want to see. The spray paint pastels seeped back into whatever reservoir they had first issued forth, abandoning her to a pixilated grey and powdered milk winter.

Abandoning her to the stain.

There was an execrable, cancerous voracity to the way it clambered. It never would slow, would it? It would dye her shirt, and perhaps hesitate briefly, gauging, before leaping onto her dead skin like a river overwhelming its shallow bank. It would color the nape of her neck, her collar, and the piece of spine peaking between the hem of her shirt and the top of her sweat pants. All of her, and then she'd be lost to it.

He would lose her again and they would never do the rest.

His hand was rising from his lap, autonomous and dark against the whiteness of the form stretched out across the table except for the mark like an ink well conquering her.

Touch her and wake her up. Touch her and give life to whatever hope she clung to by shaking her alive and washing that malignancy off of her. He was craning over her, hovering, realizing it was blood beneath the cosmetic quick fix of perfume, balking at the copper-coin taste of it. Touch her, and she'd have no good reason to bleed or smell like the end of all things.

Touch her.

But then a voice of polite, feminine, and unapologetic plasticity said, Hakone-Yumoto Station. Tokyo-3 University. Hakone Garden Museum. This is the Orange Line to Gora.

Shinji was awake the first moment, alert the second, and abandoning the dream on the window seat as the third moment closed off with a two-tone chime. Sick of violet, he ignored the peek-a-boo twilight shuffling between the train station's concrete columns, and sifted past unfamiliar faces, a dozen shades of indifference.

He was halfway to ground level when the voice reminded him with genuine artificial concern, Railway passengers; please make sure to have all of your personal belongings in your possession before exiting the train.

He gave a grease-film smile.

He could never forget anything now, not ever.

Shinji Ikari would never be allowed to leave anything behind.

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“Hello, I'm Hikari Horaki, class representative.”

“Hi, I'm Mana Kirishima, thousand miles an hour.”

Eh. It had been funnier when they were freshmen. And drunk.

Hikari stood in her apartment with arms folded, stalwart amidst a blur she was fairly certain was her roommate. Her hunch would be validated every few minutes when the dervish would stop flipping pillows, cracking open the fridge, and turning on the kitchen faucet. Kirishima would be sporting another essential article of clothing, in complete ignorance of how difficult it actually was to look thoughtful, hopeful, and deeply angry all at once - pulling it off with spectacular ease. She'd then spin back to her room as something occurred to her, and say:

“Shit.”

Mana, being a rubber band, almost never swore. You'd pull at her, you would watch her get thinner and longer and thinner, right before she snapped back to make an attempt on your eye-

“Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.” Mana paused. “Shit.”

“At least try and call first,” said Hikari. “You don't even know where he is.”

Mana didn't look at her, just tucked a carmine lock behind her ear as she mined the space behind a couch cushion. She allowed herself a brief, triumphant smile when she produced a set of keys.

The smile vanished, and Hikari said, “I was listening, heard every word you said, and you're right. He was wrong. You could've hit him over the head with a chair and I would've understood.”

The woman with burnt umber hair poured a glass of water, put on her last shoe, drank a glass of water, tied her last shoe, and cinched the last button of her flower-print blouse. Because none of these things were complemented by half a syllable of a single word, Hikari tried the direct approach.

“I don't think you should see him anymore.”

Kirishima stopped and restarted. “His phone was busy. He said he'd be going home.” She unfastened the shirt buttons with impatient idiot fingers. “And I know he was wrong. I know he deserved it. I didn't hit him with a chair because these are all your chairs in here and you'd notice if there was blood all over the woodwork.”

The de-facto Horaki matriarch nodded. “I would have. Forget him.”

Mana looked down at her shirt, satisfied she had dressed herself like a big girl, before looking at Hikari. “But you know bludgeoning him might've been better? Better than what I did? It's so easy, hurting him, it's…” She shook her head, walked over to a power outlet in the living room and unplugged her cell phone.

“But listen,” Hikari flatly offered, “he lied to you. He said…you told me he didn't care about what happened when you were all kids and he lied-”

“Because he thought I was lying.” The chemist thumbed a key on her phone before pocketing it in her dark blue jeans. Hikari watched Mana's shoulders rise and fall, pins-and-needles nervous.

“I mean, can you just think for a sec about how all this played out in front of him? Tell me you would've reacted…well, not different…better. He doesn't have all the facts, Hikari.” A hostile entity overwhelmed Mana. “Souichi does.”

“Why are you making excuses for him?”

Kirishima gave a laugh. A warning. “You know…just because you call it an excuse doesn't mean it's not someone else's fault. So you can stop trying to convince me it's not worth working this out. You know he's not some ordinary jerk.”

“I know that. He's the special kind. The kind that doesn't even try.”

Mana froze.

“He's my friend,” breathed Hikari, force-fed empathy like curdled milk on her tongue. “He is. He doesn't, doesn't mean any of this, and I don't blame him, but…but he will kill you if you let him-”

“JUST WHAT IS WITH YOU TOKYO-3 PEOPLE? WHY DON'T ANY OF YOU HAVE A GODDAMN FAITH?”

Mana's steel-blue eyes were already filling with shame, an apology surging from her, too late. Hikari knew she had sounded cold, and still hadn't been able to bleach the stain of that blemish from her demeanor.

It had been found; that black vestige of mottled hatred, reptilian fear and old love like glass shards shifting beneath scarred pink skin. Every cold, dormant thing from that time ignited and expanded, purging her of a sob muffled in Mana's shoulder.

“I didn't mean that,” Kirishima lied. “Not to get at you.” Oh.

Mana's chest expanded against hers, and the former spy pulled back.

“I don't know what…maybe I'm just jealous,” the brunette managed after a calming breath. “You have all this conviction and…I don't know…”

“It is my conviction, isn't it?” Mana slipped by Hikari to make her way to the front door. “I know that just like I know I love Shinji. Just like I knew that So would never ever lie or hide anything from me…and there you go.”

Hikari stood, a living shadow painted on the dying day beyond the patio, as her roommate patted herself down to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything. When Mana reached for the knob, she looked back; Hikari Horaki would recall seeing nothing but fear.

“Hikari…what am I doing here?”

She was gone.

She was gone and it was all Shinji's fault. It was and it wasn't.

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Sayyadiah, as delicious as Kensuke Aida decided it was, would never again be as interesting as it was now. This was because in observing Shinji Ikari, the spectacled man could see in his mind's myopic eye a man or woman, and the day they invented the word acheronian…right before they drowned themselves in the nearest open sewer.

Shallow-fried fish with rice was impossibly fascinating. Yes.

Kensuke sat in Mimi's Café across from the man impersonating a cadaver impersonating a sac of wet rice, and decided to get this over with.

“So you blew it, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“So she's pissed, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Aida pushed his meal underneath the condemned's forehead. “D'you want some? I'll go get an extra fork, or some chopsticks.”

Shinji's head yawed. “I don't think I should eat anything, right now.”

Kensuke agreed. He had no desire to see what sayyadiah looked like coming back up. At least not for free. The young security agent frowned, floating a sullen glance to the red clay walls before docking at the only other restaurateurs; two young women sitting beneath a cone of light at a side booth. Kensuke looked them off when one of them frowned back.

“I…all I can offer is food, Ikari. You think if I had phone numbers just lying around for dozens of beautiful girls I'd be working for Nerv?”

Shinji pulled himself up from his misery bog long enough to raise an eyebrow.

“Okay, yeah,” Aida conceded, “that came out a little pimpish. But you know what I'm talking about because, well, you never let me see you like this, anymore.” He gave a guilty shrug in his shirt and tie. “You know you messed up a sure thing that's not computer-related. I can't troubleshoot this.”

“Kensuke…” The corner of Ikari's mouth coiled up and in on itself in a writhing spiral, more worm than smile, “if you had the power to fix my problem, you'd be part of it.”

“Part of what?” the glassed man asked, but fringe curiosity wanted to know why the frowning young lady was boring smoldering coal holes in the side of Shinji's bowed head.

The former Child took no notice, saying, “That's something you have to ask Mana about. Better yet, ask Souichi. Ask him why he won't leave me alone.”

“So that's what all this is? This guy's been bothering you?”

“He's not a guy at all.” Then Shinji leaned forward and told him.

Fan blades churned above them, spectral whorls whipping around pistils of light. The Mediterranean styling of Amr Diab belted over the gentle snoring of a busboy slacking in the corner. The woman stared and frowned.

“Are you shittin' me?” asked Kensuke. “Are you shittin' me? I gotta abso-fucking-lutely believe you are shitting all over me.”

“No. I'm not.” Shinji looked at him. “I'd know him anywhere, no matter what he looked like. And it was him.”

Kensuke Aida the Man had long since been exposed to the air of the real world, finding it polluted with sicknesses that choked people with things like…it was fear.

The last Angel. Alive. That wasn't totally awesome. That wasn't fantastic. Just fantastically terrifying.

Aida sighed. “You think Maya's going to love this? I mean, it isn't like she's busy enough with the disappearances and-”

“Why would she have anything to do with any of that?” Shinji interjected, bothering to look as confused as Kensuke felt.

“Why wouldn't she? What, you saw her today and she didn't tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“God, Shinji…” Seeing that the two women had occupied themselves with a civil disagreement, Kensuke felt secure in ducking forward and whispering. “Those people? They didn't vanish, okay? No one, no one just logged off and respawned. They melted. Ikari, they melted into LCL. And some of them haven't come back.”

“But,” Shinji struggled to reconcile something behind his darting blue eyes, “but the Daily said that it wasn't known-”

“Forget the stupid paper,” Kensuke hissed. “What happens if this gets out? What do you think? Would there be a party?”

“…are you asking me?”

“Shinji, you got to get your head…” Kensuke cupped his face, exhaling slowly, and then pulled his hands back to wipe away the frustration beneath. “Go see Maya. You can explain all this much better than me.”

“I never want to have enough information to be able to explain all this.”

“Then just go to her and open your mouth and start saying things,” pressed Kensuke. “Between this and all the missing people and Asuka she might be able to see the forest…uh…in the, the forest of trees, or some shit like that.”

Relief waged pitched battle with dread in the pit of Kensuke's stomach when Shinji managed genuine shock. “She…Maya knows, knew? About Asuka? You told her?”

Kensuke fell from the stupefied tree, hitting every branch on the way down. “Of course I told her! You're killing me! She sucked a pint of blood out of your ass today, she was looking at pictures of your brain…and she never mentioned she knew?”

The Third Child merely shook his head, staring slack-jawed and dumbfounded.

Dread won, and Kensuke sat back heavily with fitfully folded arms. “I don't like this, man. I didn't sign up with Nerv just so even more secrets could be kept from me.”

“You signed up with Nerv,” intoned Shinji, and that was all he said, and they grew quiet.

Until.

“You still look cute when you're down in the dumps.”

Someone not named Kensuke or Shinji had said that, had reached them and straddled the chair next to Ikari's, her forearms cream-colored cake layers topping the metal backrest. The woman had first looked just as sweet, and it was a moment before Kensuke realized she had been the one frowning from the booth, her charcoal eyes fluctuating between something not as sweet as cake, and perhaps cake that had been laced with ricin.

“I'm fine, Yukie,” Shinji mumbled, his own gaze never surfacing.

Aida thought of harp seals (when harp seals still existed) bobbing like fat grey corks through watering holes in the arctic ice (when the arctic still existed), only when they felt the need to breathe or have their faces ripped off by a polar bear, the last of which could be found in the `Ghosts of the Great White North' exhibit at the Como Park Zoo in Minnesota.

This was all to say that Yukie had creepy black eyes like a polar bear's, or that she was really some predator, or that Shinji looked as if he were to come up for air, the girl would rip his face off and send it to Minnesota. Something like that.

But the long, luxuriously dark-haired Yukie just smiled at Shinji's temple. It was a wide, empty smile that hid her teeth and never touched those disaffected eyes she probably stole from some poor shark, while her friend watched on from the booth, bracing herself for the inevitable…

Oh.

“I want to tell you what I did today.” Yukie (Utsumi, from class 2-A) paused, reaching out to pick lint off his black sleeve, touching him and never really touching him. “I took a test. See, City College has a good program for English, but, well, it's like some of the prerequisites are just this busywork bullshit.” She smiled at Kensuke. “Sorry for the language.”

Kensuke said nothing. She expected nothing and turned back to her ex-boyfriend. “So it was pretty easy, an essay at the end and somehow I wrote a page and a half about interpunction. Interpunction, I mean…huh? Then I went back home, had some soba Aki made-”

The other woman frowned disapprovingly when Yukie twisted around and waved.

“I went and ran a bit,” she continued in her rosewater timbre, “I pulled up lame after about a kilometer, so I walked back to my place. Showered.” Her lips were tweaked by a fond memory as she leaned close, canting to his eye level. “Remember, Shinji? When we took showers together? How good did that feel? Good enough to wish it wouldn't end, right? Good enough to make you wish you didn't blow it-”

“He's had, like, two years to get over it,” Kensuke said to her, “and so did you.”

She pulled herself up and scanned the freckles on the Nerv rookie's face. “I thought you looked familiar! Mixed-match volleyball for the sports festival, remember Kensuke?” Her laughter was as brutal as a mother's lullaby. “Now fuck off.”

“No, he's right,” Aki interjected, “Ikari's not doing anything to you-”

“HE'LL ALWAYS DO SOMETHING TO ME.”

In the ensuing quiet, Kensuke could have sworn someone said, “Not again.” Exactly what the young man in glasses was thinking.

And it would go on like this. Yukie would circle above him, swooping down periodically to pick at him until she had her fill and flapped away in a storm of oily rainbows on feathery black prisms. Belly full of hatred, laughter rotting in her gullet. And Shinji Ikari would do nothing, because Shinji Ikari was dead.

His friend was dead.

“So I was showering,” Yukie reiterated. “Finished up and watched the news. That thing about people just disappearing?” She shook her head solemnly. “It is crap. Amazing what you hear when your roommate's sister writes for the Daily.”

Those black pearls swiveled to Kensuke. “How about it, Nerv boy? It sounds like you'd know something about this. That's why you signed up, right?”

“I get it,” said Kensuke, “you have good ears.”

Yukie shrugged. “Men can't whisper. You just can't. And when shit goes down here, it's usually Nerv's fault. Me and Aki just think good food gets your mind off bad things, you know, Shinji?” The color of her voice shifted, the shade of fire. “And you're here.”

Kensuke saw something flicker across the dead man's face, life like a flint spark, but warped and strange and not Shinji Ikari.

Utsumi didn't notice as she went in for the kill. “But you know the thing about my day, what makes all the stuff I did amazing?” Shinji didn't say anything. “It didn't happen. None of it did. I made it all up, except for us being here, obviously. Actually…I was in my room and I saw this commercial that ruined my day, because it was about wine and it reminded me of you, which in turn reminded me of how much I wish you were dead. And that Jin wasn't. That's it.”

“I could die for you.”

Yukie recovered first, seemingly unfazed by Shinji's offer to…he had offered to cease existing, and all she did was wag a finger at him, a mother admonishing a disobedient son.

“Who do you think you're talking to? I'm not here for equivalency, Shinji, because to expect that much from you is to court disappointment. So I'll settle for honesty, for knowing who hurt you and I want you to tell me exactly how they did it. Every little detail.” She did touch him this time, fingers sweeping over his lap. “Make me happy. For once.”

Shinji was a flat, inert thing in one moment, and in the next he resurfaced, towing along with him a shipwrecked smile, the worst Kensuke had ever seen.

“Honesty…” Ikari tasted the word, turned to look his ex-girlfriend in the eye, and imbibed. “Fine. Yukie, every time we were…together, I pretended that you were Asuka. Every single time. Are you happy, now?”

There was stunned silence in the same way Fat Man had been a big bomb. Yukie blinked, looked down then back up, and softly said, “I'm going to kill you.”

She let him draw close, and then nearer, her eyes fluttering closed as he stood and kissed her lips. Shinji pulled up and away while Yukie silently admired the sickness carved like a great wave in his wooden face.

“I would've whispered,” Shinji told her, “but I mean, you said it yourself.”

Utsumi did not answer, simply sat, staring -waiting for a bus whose route looped within the terracotta walls- as Shinji walked out and merged into the evening's sidewalk traffic. The bus was late.

“Let's go home,” Kensuke heard Aki say. “Yukie, please? Talk to me when we get home-

”

Yukie stood and raked fingers through her brunette roots as though coming to terms with an irrefutable truth, pushing it through her skull to hasten her acceptance of it.

And she too was out the door.

Aki watched Kensuke watch Aki. “Don't worry,” she said, looking and sounding worried. “The worst she's ever done to him is splash him with vegetable oil, and it wasn't even all that hot.”

She fiddled nervously with a spoon. “I can't ever remember Shinji provoking her, though…but trust me, Aida, at the most she'll do something that'll wear off in a few days.”

“Oh…” he mouthed. “Okay…as long as we don't have to chase after them.”

“Agreed.”

Kensuke slid his plate back over to his side of the table. For him, the only consolation for the last five minutes or so was that his food had come out of it in…tact…

“Where's my fork?”

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The night was new and the pavement brimmed.

Shinji's death row gait slowed as he went against a grain of parasite singles, but more and more by the thought of what had just occurred.

The Third Child had done what he did best when the world worked to break him; he went away, and so could hardly be held responsible when everything died, wept, choked beneath the tutelage of his savage understudy. Yukie drove into him those tainted daggers, had inadvertently jutted into that reservoir from which he had drank so deeply. He had huddled beneath the warmth of its familiarity.

Shinji had been kind enough to bring her close and smash her like Touji, like Asuka, like Enemy. The least she could do was kill him.

Shinji slowed down.

“Why are your legs so damn long? You're not even all that tall.”

He shrugged. “Don't ask me, Mihiro. Ask my father. He's who I God!” Shinji composed himself and looked down at his side. Mihiro took long strides and blithely smiled back. “What…what're you doing here?”

The girl took the moment they were separated by a passing salary man to assemble a thought. “I'm walking next to you is what…what I'm doing here. Thinking how I'm going to say and present what I have to say and present. Filching forks.”

“What?”

“Forks, Ikari.” She produced one, examining its greasy silver prongs. “Twirl it, poke it, stab it. She was gonna fork you from behind. Couldn't have that, now could we?”

Kamakura stopped walking, turned and grinned smugly at Yukie Utsumi…who stood off a stride's length, scowling at her palm as though she were about to scold it for being empty.

Mihiro raised the utensil while ignoring the glares from displaced pedestrians. “Looking for this?”

“How did you…” Yukie started, but anger surged forth and so did she, snatching the girl's wrist and a fistful of her pink shirt. Shinji looked on helplessly, passerbies stupidly. “Give it back, you little shit! It's mine!”

“No, this is…” said Mihiro, and she laughed. He would remember her laughing. Then raising her free hand and extending a little pinkie up to the forehead of Yukie Utsumi.

Who predictably exploded in a fine orange mist.

Someone saw and screamed, just like the man next to her, and the woman behind him who shouldered a young couple fleeing, who had probably also seen along with the mother whose children shrieked from confusion and pain when an escaping man knocked them to the ground which sounded with a thousand singular swarms of chaos, marrying and swelling like the dust soaked with hollers and hearsay and herding thunder drummed out by the hooves of men.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, Shinji Ikari was beached by shock on an island of tranquility. The world moved around Mihiro Kamakura, and soon he faced her, knowing that she was the eye of blood at the center of the storm…

He joined everyone else.

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The walls of the recording booth were adeptly padded with pyramidic foam teeth, perforating heretic sounds from the outside world between the thighs of a phonophobic iron maiden.

But Souichi Nakajima heard something, anyway.

“You're zoning out a bit,” a woman called behind him. “If you wanna call it a day, just say when.”

He turned away from the nothing no one could hear with a smile that said he completely knew her. “But you haven't finished recording. Only my heart breaks, never my promises. We'll stop when you want to stop.”

“You can't be real,” she chuckled. “Anyway, if you only knew how hard it is to find a good pianist, nowadays, and one that works for free is just…you are a godsend.”

He laughed. “I prefer deliverer, one who is vigilant and hears all cries for help.”

“Dude, there were, like, six muggings last week. You heard my cry for a cheap musician over all that?”

“They didn't have an ad in the paper.”

Her mouth slanted with a teasing smirk. “But you heard something just now, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then, Clark,” she mused, believing it a game and playing at it, “shouldn't you be finding a phone booth or making up some stupid excuse to leave?”

“Soon,” he said, walking to her, “but as of now, it is just you and I.”

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Shinji was alone, the safest thing he could be. A minute previously he had collapsed into the safest place, a wreck of jagged breaths, sticky with sweat and a blood-scented coat of what seemed a liter of premium Yukie Utsumi; enough of her to fuel his flight home.

It mattered little that the oil of commingled sounds and sights from his panicked dash had been skimmed off the surface of his mind. Shinji didn't want to remember anything from the past fifteen minutes. So he sat alone in the dark, wishing only to starve the embers dining on the oxygen in his lungs.

Wishing, as he leaned against the heat sink he called a front door, that Mihiro Kamakura would stay as far, far away as inhumanly possible as she said, “What? So I don't even get a, `Oh, Miss Kamakura, may I just say how positively messianic you're looking tonight'? No wonder Asuka didn't come back.”

Her small black-on-black form squatted at his side, and he could tell she was cupping her chin in upturned palms. He could feel her looking at him, that she was reaching out to touch him…

“GET AWAY FROM ME!” He scuttled further into the darkness.

“Ikari, let's get real,” she chided, scoffing in exasperation or amusement or both. “All running from me does is get you tired. You still got some Yukie on you, that's all.”

Shinji grasped the edge of something, pulled himself to his feet, gasping. “She's…Yukie, she,” he sputtered, breath choppy in the wake of sorrow, “she's all over…”

Yukie Utsumi was all over. He wept for her.

“Yeah, I know, I know,” Mihiro sighed. Her non-empathy drew near to him. “Boohoo. Sob. Because you two had such an excellent rapport. But I didn't kill her. She just had no respect for personal space, so I took hers. Now she is suspended in the glass between this place and the place that mirrors it. She's a refugee without a homeland She is totally screwed.”

Whatever she had become, Mihiro Kamakura still made footsteps, from which the distraught man blindly retreated. “Don't do this to me,” he pleaded.

“Oh, how easy would that have been?” she rhetorically asked. “That's the thing about removing parasites from their hosts. Or hosts from their parasites? Whatever. The point is that you have to want the parasite removed. You, Ikari, it all has to be your choice. Otherwise, we really would just end up killing you.”

“WHAT HAS TO BE MY CHOICE? WHAT?”

“Asking questions?” She sounded pleased. “Good sign. First step is always the most important. Because now I am allowed to show you-”

“Don't you touch me! Don't touch me!”

“What makes you think you have anything to fear from my magic fingers?” Her child's tone filled with placating things, he discerned her thin arms sweeping out, offering up to him an embrace and a terrible unknown. “I won't turn you into goo. How good of a salesman would I be if I lost my only customer?”

“No means no, sweetie,” said a woman.

There was a click as the world revealed itself at the price of sixty flickering watts, and Shinji and Mihiro turned. In response to the question written all over their faces in ninety-point italic font, Mana smiled out at them from the kitchenette with a shrug. “Hey, I was a spy.”

Mihiro faced him, puzzled. “Why do you even bother to lock your door?”

“Because he's sick of people forcing themselves on him, right, Shinji?” Mana paused as she joined them in his threadbare living room with careful footsteps, standing off from Mihiro and pointing as if the girl were a witch. “She doesn't understand that. No matter what she says.”

“You don't even know why I'm here,” Mihiro condescended, her innocence all but vanquished.

“I don't need to. I didn't hear you come in, you're trying to touch my boyfriend, and for some reason he's scared to death of you.”

The being faced Mana fully, and Shinji finally saw the danger of the situation reflected in the woman's sobering eyes; Mihiro Kamakura was terribly amiss.

The image came to him unbidden. Yukie's face like the swollen rubber of a bloated water balloon, ruptured and racing from Mihiro's pinkie as though it were a needle, and then hot sheets of amber erupting from the broken membrane, wild like liquid flames. It froze him.

Then the thing said to Mana, “He has to be as afraid of me as he is of you. I wouldn't have come out here if we just wanted him killed, because he already would've drowned in his bathtub. Or choked in the park, lungless. It really is a complex reaction. His death in this falsehood is only the catalyst.”

“I've had my fill of this,” Mana flatly declared. “Get the hell away from him. We're done with you assholes and we don't want whatever it is you're selling. Do you understand?”

Mihiro impersonated herself: “You're talking to someone who writes haiku in binary. Of course I understand.” She laughed a performer's laugh. “You silly woman. There is no away for me. I am always-”

There was no space between her and Mana.

“-here.”

Kirishima was stuck in the past, still reconciling the face in front of her that had been paces off during the last moment anything made sense. In the now, Mihiro shot a palm to Mana's forehead while Shinji loosed a silent scream.

Mana cried out, lashed out, catching the grasping girl with a sloppy right cross and it had to be some trick of light, because Mihiro seemed to have barely reacted. Mana pulled her fist back as if from a muddy bog, chopping at the girl's outstretched arm, and this time he saw…

The woman was trapped. Mana's hands were lodged inside the teenager's forearm as her fingers poke through the other side of the appendage, storm-splintered wood stock ventilating tree trunk. And they were all bloodless, seamless wounds. A perfect fusion.

A bear trap.

Mana tried jerking away from the absurdity she found herself arrested by. Wide-eyed panic swam into her, its alchemy transmuting every resolute thing on her face into blind fear; it all did nothing to Mihiro, holding fast as the woman let out pleading sounds.

Her back to him, Mihiro was saying, “I know you had your heart set on showing me up and marking your territory, Mana. But I'm just a little tired of men telling me `no' today. He's not yours, anymore.”

He was snatching the heavy clubbed base of a lamp and hurling himself towards the thing in the Mihiro mask. He jetted past the memory of trains, keening air raid sirens, shelters with people packing bento and hording despair. Then flitting by calamitous memories, crushing memories smeared into a paste of blood, meat, offal. Past the words from someone wise and dead, watering melons.

“No one is forcing you…”

An exhausted vision, gasping with hands on its knobby knees, and when that memory collected and unfolded itself, it was the pilot of Unit-01, Shinji Ikari.

He was not allowed to lose.

“No one is forcing you…”

Mana peered out from beneath Mihiro's planted palm and over the girl's shoulder, the plea etched in her pained, tear-streaked visage for and against-

“Oh no, sweet little Mihiro! Someone came in here and bashed your head in with-”

The brass base blurred through a crescent sweeping down to the black hair haloed by a saw-toothed sheen of light. And still she faced away, inviting murder and a new bloodstain on his art smock conscience.

He was the pilot of Unit-01, Shinji Ikari.

He was not allowed to be clean.

•NOT ALLOWED•

The world's thunder exploded in his head, its lightning in his cobalt eyes. Its power smashed him across the room, where a wall waited to steal his breath and any sense of orientation. He was a heap on the floor, ears ringing with high-pitched aria and distant shouting. Breathing shot blooms of pain into his stomach and he curled around it, toppling over like a bald tire. He hadn't been allowed.

Mana had been the one shouting, was still shouting, shackled and spitting, crazed with hope and dismay. He saw its back was still to him, and between them the shivering plain of light fostered by the thing's aggregated soul. He saw and knew he could do nothing.

Mana was still fighting. The hand on her twitched and she stopped.

“I really wish,” it said conversationally, “that I had the power to synthesize Prozac. I'm serious, relax. She wanted to give me a piece of her mind, and now I'm curious.”

The child's hand pushed forward like pressing concrete, like molding clay, like treading water. Mana's cerulean pools watched him, the light of fear in them fading along with everything else…

“…if you're waiting on me to turn into Yukie and just go away…”

There was a terrible shriek of pain, a volatile splash…

“…well, good for you that you're a patient guy.”

Mana was not there, and he had forever, now.

Mihiro clutched the hand that took his reason away, held it to her body, a wounded bird. She was changing, and when she turned haltingly to look on him he knew she was shuddering at the onset of humanity reclaimed.

“Wha…w-what was in her?” she asked, her fingers flexing. He had forever to lie on the floor, to starve, to atrophy. “It was like…in my mind and touching…it was like…”

The girl was hurt, frightened, on the verge of tears, and he did not think to console her. Shinji couldn't think of anything. He watched her creeping to him, not really seeing anything.

“Why aren't you saying something? I didn't mean to do that to…I just felt something biting me and it happened, Ikari, it just happened and I'm sorry.”

She knelt, her folded legs floating through his glaze of surrender, total and mute-

“Say something! I-I can't help unless you say it's okay. I was…” A frustrated sob, trickling from a fissure in her lips. “I was trying to help…teacher…say something.”

“I want to die.”

Mihiro joined him in defeat, growing sullen and quiet. A moment passed them by before a small hand rose from her lap, its shadow swinging over him. A warm, pristine palm mapped his temple.

She felt like mother.

“I wish that wasn't the second step,” she told him.

And there was the sensation of having his brain pulled through the side of his sk

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“Godammit…”

Maya Ibuki heard, stopped writing, stopped breathing, and stopped praying for forgiveness. The plastic in her chair squeaked laboriously as she spun around, her shadow larger and fuzzier than life on a far denim wall.

There was something shifting between her and her flat-screen projection, dark and beautiful.

“Is…” Maya paused to lick her parched lips, “is Ritsuko with you?”

“Eh, she's around,” Kenta muttered. He wiped fussily at a mark below one of his drowsy eyes. “Oneesan, you don't have any witch hazel or anything in here, do you?”

Laughter, abrupt and buoyant, bubbled up from inside her as she stood. “Witch hazel? Ta-chan, do I look like I'm fifty?”

“When you squint.”

“Ass.” His jibe, every wonderful thing about his sloppy face tugged at the corner of her lips as she neared him. “But you wouldn't need any disinfectant if you stopped giving that Tanaka boy a reason to bust your lip.”

“He wouldn't have a reason to bust my lip if he'd just leave Haruka alone.”

“Well, maybe he'd leave Haruka alone if she wasn't such a slut.”

“Well, maybe she wouldn't be such a slut if…I hate you, Maya.”

The twelve year-old in her stuck her tongue out. “That's too bad, Ta-chan. Because I love you.” She discreetly licked her thumb, looking him in his large brown eyes. “Now move your hand. Let me see…”

She touched him. It wasn't such a bad cut.

----------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------

ull. When it died away, Mihiro was gone and the world had righted itself. However, the moment he had picked himself up off the floor, entered the bathroom and sat on the toilet lid, had been surgically removed from his concussed memory. The file that included when and why he replaced his washiki squatter in favor of a western-style john had also been corrupted.

And yet here he was, sitting, trying to determine who would have reason to bang on his door like a drum major's drunken, jealous brother. He wondered when he had replaced his shoji with something hinged and able to withstand a misplaced hand or a bad day.

And just who was Mihiro? The name and face were hazy ships distant and wedged in the crease of his mind's horizon. He'd come back to it later, as the need to explain his current station pressed him with a random staccato generator.

Then a breakthrough: What if the person thumping on his bathroom door did so because it was actually their bathroom door, and more pointedly, their bathroom door belonged to their bathroom? This would make this a place other than his apartment which, when the young man tried envisioning, merrily fluctuated between a scrupulously over-furnished sanctuary, and a glorified funeral parlor. Which residence was actually his?

Whose home was this?

Shinji was unlocking the door before he realized he was standing and walking over and unlocking the door.

Belligerence stormed past him.

“What the hell were you doing in here, cooking opium?”

Belligerence, as it were, was only a few centimeters shorter than him, berated him with an incredibly light but distinct and tightly controlled accent, and was arrayed in silken auburn which cascaded down to her shoulder blades.

Belligerence pierced him with expectant eyes of royal blue, and he knew he would never see anyone as beautiful again, and also that somehow that wasn't true, but he was hard pressed to explain why.

Belligerence was unfastening her pants.

“Look, idiot, we've come a long, long way in five years. But if you think I'm going to let you watch me go…”

His mouth was moving and sounds were coming out. “Then…what?”

“Oh I don't know!” she snapped. “I can't think of anything good because I really have to pee!”

With that, Belligerence shoved him into the hallway, which dimmed as she slammed her door.

Her refrigerator hummed approvingly.

End of Girl Who Loves You Inside and Out

A/N: N\A

Random A/N: I want to see Castillo-Corrales III. No, really, that's it. I can't think of anything to say. I'm thought-out. Time to eat Singapore Rice Noodles and call the friends I haven't spoken to in about a month.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.