Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ Normal to Reality ❯ Chapter 8 ( Chapter 9 )

[ 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: Chapter 8

By Midnight_Cereal

“It worked.”

“His psychograph activity is stabilizing, and his brain's recovered from his gamma wave crash. S2 output is out of its ramp-up phase and holding at ninety-three percent of its transient peak. So I'd say that it's working. He's officially a resident of the House of Dirac. Rei did her job.”

“May she rest in pieces.”

“That remains to be seen, actually. There really isn't any way to tell how well she may have integrated with the third party. Here's hoping that they've come to some sort of compromise…what's funny?”

“Hoping. For her. It's funny. That's more than she's ever done for herself. So it's funny.”

“This has to be weird for you…”

“How so?”

“It's ironic, that's all.”

“I really don't care about the irony. It has my eyes, my hair, my ass, but that thing in there with him? It's not me. You told me yourself you can't digitize a soul.”

“Of course not. But between the personality transplant OS and the dummy plug you can come pretty damn close. This isn't exactly off-the-shelf technology.”

“You're not about to get into it with me about the fucking costs, again. Do you really think sacrifices bother me at this point?”

“No. But then again, I'm not the one who'll have to tell him that Rei isn't here, and why.”

“I'll cross that bridge when he crosses ours.”

“I think he'll love the fact that you sound like his damned father.”

“You'd know what his damned father sounds like.”

“Fuck you.”

“No. I'm not his damned father.”

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“Hello again,” you say.

And of course, when my head swings up from between my knees -just to confirm you'd have the audacity to be smiling- you are there. I think of a sufficiently wry response, like shaking my head and going, `I can't believe I let you pop my cherry', something that doesn't let on how angry I am.

But I am angry. And I'm naked for some reason.

Maybe you're smiling because things are okay, or they're going to be. I'd like to think you know the reason I am curled up on a hillside that slopes downward, gently, into nothing, why there are serpent-back mountains on the other side of that nothing, why it's night here. Then I remember that you always smiled like that before, always. So that smile means everything. It means nothing. You don't know how to look any other way, do you?

“This is the border.”

Eat me. What border? This is easier than asking how you know what it is I'm thinking. I have an idea of what the answer to that might be. I just don't want to hear you say it.

Right now you're making this big production of scoping out the scenery like some stupid tourist. “Your interpretation of this place, it's beautiful to me. Quite lonely, perhaps, yet befitting nonetheless. That which is fabricated to insulate two truths from each other should be utterly void. You would agree your being here is a problem?”

…yup.

And I am just going to fucking choke you if you don't start making sense.

But I'm really not, though. I'm not jumping up because I don't ever want you to see me naked again.

Your face falls a bit. Didn't know it could do that. “My choices were limited. Either seek an avenue so as to preserve the truth with which I had been entrusted, or concede that it is the lie. I was unwilling to consign oblivion to so many. They deserved the opportunity to be…” You hesitate. This is about me. Whatever you are, somewhere along the way you learned shame, “validated.”

Apology not accepted.

Validation, that's what I am. I've been boiled down to a tool. A wrench, and I'm fixing some big machine. Yippee.

Mihiro was saying something right before she started tickling things between the wrinkles in my brain. Something about removing hosts from their parasites? She was talking to Shinji. About Shinji, about him being needed.

Even when you and I were itemized and I was falling all over you, you couldn't get his name out of your perfect mouth. It couldn't just be one of your little quirks. Couldn't be because you knew it was a sure-fire way of getting my hot, no. Because that would've been too easy. Too fair. Somehow, Shinji justifies you, everyone. Can't see why else someone would make or send a thing like Mihiro.

That little girl did something to me. I mean, besides sending me to my own special version of purgatory. I feel her now, and her fear is like…it's like a four year-old's pissy mattress. I think, at this moment, she is running. She was like a god, what's she got to be scared of? But I suppose it just works out that everyone has a master. Maybe she belongs to the other truth you're going on about, just like right now I belong to you.

“You do not belong to me.”

That's a first for you, you know, an outright lie. Not revealing that you were a transcendental being of inconceivable power doesn't count in my book, `cause it never crossed me to ask if you were a transcendental being of inconceivable power. My bad.

“Any effort I had made to bind you to him would have been at best futile, had there not already been a seed of fidelity within you. There is a chasm, vast and deep, between the uncovering of one's true heart and the insertion of a false precept. I merely showed you what was already there.”

See, now you're messing up. You will never have enough power to convince me there's anything `mere' about being hostage to a name and face that are not being held hostage by you. I was not merely waiting to take in his words and his smell, wasn't going to merely make love to him. I wasn't ready to just have his babies and possibly get fat and old and if I feel up to it, die with him. Those are not merely simple things you just kinda happen to feel like doing whenever for the hell of it. That's the real chasm, you pretentious asshole. The word is `unrequited'. Look it up.

I'm curious, now; when did you sneak into me to upend what I had managed to compartmentalize, jar away with years of denial and discipline? Was it when I told you about my silly little mouse phobia? How about that time we were sitting in the music room and you're tuning a piano while Mister Sana, Musashi, Shinji and Nana pour from me? When I paused and kinda licked the side of your mouth like there was ice cream on it? When I whispered `don't ever hide from me'? Were you even listening?

Or maybe it was when you were heavy on me, inside me and pushing through while I bit my lip and screwed my eyes so tight the spots behind them were shaped like Ikari? Was that when you did it, you rapist?

I think it's time you changed the subject. You do, looking shaken, which is not nearly good enough.

“Your most pressing concern should be escaping this place. If you linger, you will become nothing but a mote in a swirl of massing consciousness. You will mingle with the fragile hearts and minds of the growing lost. They will scavenge your identity to supplement their own, there will be more and more of them and you will never again be whole. You are not like them, which is why you can still leave. But you need my help.”

I hope you're lying again, at first because I am getting used to the idea of hating you. Then something snakes into me, right behind my eyes: I am six, dragging myself up out of the Nishii Park public pool and I notice it's a tad drafty down you-know-where. Everyone's staring, speechless, and next they're still not talking because they're too busy laughing, like I can help it if the water's cold and my…wait, I don't have a penis.

This isn't my memory.

In exchange, the thing behind my eyes devours my mother's shining face as she bends down to comb my rust-colored bangs…

And I hate you anyway, because you were right.

Wherever `here' is -call it the border, I don't really care- there are things massing at the edges of it, more and more arriving at its fringes by the second. They are trying to push into it, and I realize the one reason they aren't succeeding is because I am pushing back. So they are grubs in the hillside, tunneling under me. They're picking their way down the slope of the old mountains like wayward Sherpa. They are crossing the black valley below me and hiking upwards, all to get at me.

And…so what? What if I let them skeletonized me, dissect my will, divvy up and trade my memories like baseball cards? You never know, maybe right before I forget my name I'll be able to see what part of me does what I do because I want to do it, and not because you have your hand shoved up my ass.

“You do not belong to me.”

Well, if I go back with you I'll never find out for sure, now will I? You act as if Hikari won't move on and over me, but I'm not her mom. I'm somewhere between Touji and that creepy penguin that took hot baths, what the hell. So how about I sit here and weigh being deconstructed piece by piece against the slightest chance of you living the rest of my life for me, how's that sound? If you want Shinji so bad you can get him yourself and…

And you don't have him, do you? No. That's why you used me, to trap him. With me, there'd be no reason for Mihiro. She was sent by someone else…

What is he being sold?

“The other truth. If you must, think of it as a…a free trial.”

In the space of time it takes me to turn back an attempt on my first day of school, I go from not liking this to hating and then being sickened by it. Deep and natural, like a bodily response to food poisoning.

They're using him. Just like you used me, just like Mister Sana did. Just like offering up protection and pretty smiles you've wrapped around road kill lies. Just like hiding the fine print with pizza night or a tongue that tastes like a comet's tail, just like me…

Like me.

I need them to fail.

Whoever has them, I know I need them to fail. So completely. I need to be the one to kill the dreams they have riding on what Shinji provides.

Care to tell me what that face is for, Captain Pious? Don't approve of me going left when you want me to go right? I really don't see the problem, here. Say I find Shinji, bring him to you and die trying. That's more than a fair trade, for you it is. He's the whole reason you touched me to begin with. I have to get away from here in any case, don't I?

“Yes. Away with…with me…”

Oh. You change as you say it. Oh, you're shuddering and you glide in front of and hover over me as you say it. Even though I'm burying the only son I never had and I can't believe you'd stretch a chalky hand out to touch me, I'm able to find enough of my own voice.

And crush you.

“Show me where he is, how to get there. And then get out of my life.”

It's odd how I only notice you have red eyes just before you close them and really, truly frown. I do not think that you'll smile again for a very long time. I was wrong about you, though; you know how to look like lots of things.

I was wrong about you.

You can't even look at me as you raise your arm and flick your delicate wrist, sending me away; I can't afford to care now, so I don't. I'm being pulled up, caught in the updraft of some flighty thought. I hope it isn't yours, it probably is. Most of the dirty, desperate fingers clinging to the ledge of my mind lose their grip and fall to you, the sliver of white and grey in a sea of night-shade evergreen that goes on forever in all directions. Then it seems to be hectares in every direction. A square mile. An acre, a square meter, a pinhead of jade floating in the universe.

Something is still clinging to me. It better not be you.

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“No, it's not.”

“Here?”

“No.”

“This one?”

“The other one, Shinji.”

“This other one or that other one?”

“It's…it's like you were on time for the stupid train, today. Now which cabinet do I usually keep all my cups in?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, you should. You cook in my kitchen more than I do.”

“I forgot, I guess.” He guessed. Yes he did.

“Lookit. See my finger, where it's pointing?”

“Yes. No.”

Asuka nodded solemnly and slapped a stack of mail down on a low table next to her sofa.

“Zero to retarded in four seconds flat, a new record.” She stormed over, fishing a happy little mug from a compartment he had failed to inspect. “Was that so hard? I just wanted some root beer. That's all. What else have I asked you to do today?”

“Nothing,” he said, not having to try very hard to play dumb. He just started here minutes ago, loitering in her bathroom for reasons known only to…well, he guessed no one actually knew. He was only sure of his name, and who she was.

His stomach clenched as he watched Asuka open the fridge, retrieve and pour herself a cup of the fizzing brown beverage. It was as if he hadn't seen her in years, which was ridiculous because last Saturday they had together locked half of his things away in storage.

Why did he know that? How did he know that his girlfriend -wait, she was his girlfriend?- wasn't being completely honest when she reminded him she hadn't asked anything else of him? He said as much, because telling Asuka Langley Sohryu that she's wrong builds character.

“Because you always go out and get the damn food, Shinji. I don't know…that's your thing.”

It was his `thing' to shop for someone else? To be privy to their bizarre cravings and the scornful, fearful stares from cashiers as you religiously marched up to the counter with a box of extra absorbent Kotex?

He knew the answer was yes, had been for five years.

Because it had saved her.

“I've…” He hesitated, unsure of entrusting his words to his deadbeat memory, “I've been all over the place, today. To be honest, I really don't remember going into the bathroom.”

“You don't have to hide it from me,” she said, voice breezy-tease-y. “Now that you're moving in you and Little Shinji were going to have to sort things out sooner or later.”

He sighed. “Do you have to give it a name? That's just disturbing.”

“You don't want to talk about it? Fine, but whoever drops it bops it.” Her lips creased mischievously as her sultry eyes narrowed. Vintage Asuka, and Shinji instinctively braced himself for an uncomfortably long round of…of having her feel his forehead to check for fever.

“Hn. You don't feel warm.”

You do.

Her hand remained. “You just don't want to do things for me, anymore?”

Shinji recognized the current of terror running just behind her sandbag smirk, but couldn't quite choke down a small laugh. It was just a silly question, silly like knocking back thirty-three aspirin just because you suggested far too early how great she would feel when she was well enough to not need him anymore, and he stopped laughing.

“If there's something special you want me to pick up while I'm out…”

She dropped her hand and glided back to her living room, arranging, rearranging. “Special like what? The regular old snacky crap not good enough for everyone else? It's a housewarming party. Apartment-warming. Whatever. It's not a royal orgy.”

She paused, considered something, then shrugged and carried on.

“So I guess I need to get going…now? Or soon? Or later-”

“Only if you're going to carry all of the food yourself. Those Nerv clowns spend forty million yen a year? On recruitment? If Misato farts enough'll fall out of her bra to buy that little scrubby Honda everyone keeps going on about. You know the one. The…the…”

“…the Scrub?” Shinji blindly offered.

Air burst from Asuka, a short laugh. “What a shitty name for a shitty car…wish we had one.”

Ah. That was right. He was going to leave when Misato got off from work, seeing as the sub-commander of Nerv had practically begged to give him a ride. Shinji couldn't yet recall why their former guardian had been so adamant, but there couldn't have been any justification for saying the word `please' so many times.

Sohryu was tumbling over and cursing at a pair of dog-ear leather sandals as he occurred to something. “Not much chance of that happening. If Misato had any extra money she'd probably repair her Alpine.”

“Or get a new one,” Asuka appended, scooping up the tattered footwear with perfect fingers. “She should just take that thing out behind a garage and shoot it in the back of its gearbox. Promise not to let her go crazy in that deathtrap, okay?”

“If it bothers you all that much I could call Kensuke, instead. He's always looking for an excuse to-ow!”

“Don't even joke,” she intoned gravely, leveling the hand that had hurled the flip-flop shuriken at his unprotected nose.

“A-about what? All I said was-”

“Shinji. Don't.” Severe gravity permeated her inflection, her level blue-eye stare, and she couldn't understand what there was for him to be confused about…

Of course. Of course. Making jokes at the expense of The Lost was revered in much the same was as, say, funeral crashing. It could have been worse. He could have mentioned Hikari, in which case Asuka would have thrown real ninja stars.

The young lost man could only hope he survived until this place, its people, his life, revealed itself in more than random jigsaw splotches. Shinji hated puzzles. He didn't even know what was making that noise.

“Get the intercom, Shinji! Dammit…” Those long sculpted legs carrying her to the foyer were a crafted renaissance masterwork, and much more pleasant that her baleful sideways glare. “You know that's probably Misato.”

“But, this is still your apartment. Technically.”

“Touche, jerkface.” With that, she turned and began hurling insults into the poor little wall-mounted kiosk, which returned with its own fiery tirade of defensive bitchy static.

It was all music to his ears, though in a way it annoyed him that everything that was worth missing was just standing there like it hadn't been dead for years and years.

In a small, small way. Itty bitty.

Teensy weensy.

So it didn't annoy him in any perceivable way at all. Shinji decided to instead chalk his unease up to Survivor Syndrome; it was something an abrupt woman with lots of wall-framed pieces of paper behind her said he would experience thanks to his torturing days…piloting days. Same difference.

“She's downstairs,” said Asuka, twisting away from her apartment com to look up at him. How long had he been standing beside her? “Can you at least remember to pick me up some aspirin?”

“…why?” he asked, wariness spilling into him.

“Because I feel like pulmonary edema tonight,” she said, donning a suit of armored sarcasm and shielding them both.

“How come it's okay for you to joke about something like that and I can't?”

“Because…” She fixed his red cotton collar, “you're the one that has to die. And I was at least forty-six tablets short of eternal peace. Or damnation. Depends on how much you weigh and who you talk to, though. What do you think?”

Nothing. He just…held her, at first. He pressed harder against her, harder, and it seemed to squeeze something static and fading from him, some forlorn poltergeist. He felt someone else's breath washing over his cheek, someone else's breasts, full and jutting gently into him, the warmth of their blood and their percussing heart right before they tried ripping out his own; that was something Asuka had yet to do.

He pressed harder.

Somewhere in between the end of the world and now, he could hold her. Shinji kept waiting for her to yell, look down her elfin nose at him, make him feel her cartilage warp beneath his throttling hands.

She wasn't saying no.

The woman melted against him as her surprise wore thin. “Okay, okay,” she breathed behind his ear, “here I am trying to put a happy face on a bad experience and you try to take advantage of it, after we just finished and everything.”

Really? No wonder he was sore…and why her sleep-creased shirt looked so familiar. It was his.

She pulled away and gave him a two-hand shove to the sun-striped door. “Now hurry up and put your shoes on. I can almost hear Misato's ass getting fatter.”

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Shinji Ikari still liked Tokyo-3 best from his vantage point on the hardscrabble roadside vista. It was easiest here to conglomerate the teeming wards, the financial and tech sectors, the schools, all the people living and talking and teasing in it.

Macroscopy could be a wonderful thing. At least, this was what Ritsuko would have had him and his classmates believe while giving a guest lecture during his junior year at Tokyo-3 High School. Perhaps they all would have had agreed had any of them been smart enough to know what in freezing hell the polymath had been talking about.

Luckily for Shinji, he already understood the appeal of viewing complex systems on a global scale. After all, people were messy things, and lots of people were…well…they were lots of messy things. Through the lens of casual observation their troubles resolved themselves, homogenized, until all you saw were those distant towers rising above it all with indifferent twilight luster.

But he couldn't live that way. Neither could Asuka. They had snagged each other on endless reels of emotional red tape, and it was pretty clear to the Third Child that here, at least, neither of them wanted to be set free. He hated that it took five years from Third Impact to get this close to Sohryu.

He hated that it would be at least that long before he'd be able to convince Misato that her ass was not fat.

“She only said that because she knew you were still listening on the intercom and you'd go ballistic.”

“I know that!” his former guardian barked, snapping away from the view to look on him with sober petulance. “And it worked, okay? It worked like monkey paw!”

“You're not fat, Misato.”

“I'm just chunky in all the right places.”

“That's right.”

“Damn right, and damn good for someone who's paid to sit behind a desk all day with a big honkin' rubber stamp.”

“Good point.”

“I'd use the stairs at Nerv, believe me!”

“I do.”

“If Nerv had any stairs. Think back to when you were there, was there any place you went, any trip from point A to point B that didn't involve an elevator or a moving platform, or, or a freakin' catapult?”

“No.”

“See? See? That is not a place for healthy people. Stupid Ritsuko, smoking her lungs out like there're rabbits living in them and she's lost weight.”

“Maybe she's just got good genes.”

“She's got me sick is what she's got. I hate her. Cancer slut.”

“You don't mean that.”

“Maybe I should start smoking again.”

“Misato-”

“Well, I have to do something, because if that redheaded stepchild calls me fat one more time you're gonna be a widower!”

“We're just living together, we're not getting married.”

“And you never will be if she says something, tonight. I can't help it if I don't have some hot young stud working me out every night!”

“I doubt that. Did you just call me a stud?”

“Isn't that better than `Heavy Ikari', or whatever that cashier at the front kept calling you? Because that was…what was that about?”

“Nothing. I'm, um, a preferred customer, that's all.”

“Oh…” The rant bled out of Misato as she sighed through her nose and settled next to him. For the first time since she had picked him up from Asuka's place, the not-fat-just-chunky-in-all-the-right-places-thank you very much thirty-four year-old didn't fill the space between them with so many dirty words. Something had lurked around the corner from every filthy limerick and ear-burning double entendre, anyway. Perhaps now, it was the right time, the right place, to reveal it.

“They're late, you know,” she announced quietly, tilting her head in the direction of the stunted mechanized skyline. “I guess not waiting to die makes it all little more than a drill.”

He was shaking his head. “Drills are good, compared to everything else that could happen.” Did happen, a voice amended. “If all they have are evacuation drills for the next fifty years, shouldn't everyone be happy with that?”

Misato shrugged a soft shoulder against him. “You sound like you know better than me.” She answered the question in his eyes. “Don't hate me for saying this, but I had thought that showing you this, that first time, it'd make you feel…I don't know…connected to them. We were kinda screwed if you decided to leave.”

“I couldn't hate you, Misato. I'm just sorry that you” someone always always “needed someone like me. I know it wasn't easy for you, either.”

“Stop it,” Misato chided sharply, “like you're the only one” that has to die “in history to ever run away from anything. You ever ask yourself why my best friends in the world have been a mad scientist and a mutant penguin?”

“Not really.”

“Oh…” she said, squeaking off as a jet ripped a gash along the blazing edge of the world. Behind them, the Alpine creaked like the settling bones of an old great cat in a mangy blue pelt. She smiled, oddly. “Why not?”

Huh? “It's just a weird thing to think about, that's all.”

“So now thinking about me is weird?” she asked, ice forming at the fringes of her voice.

“No…I didn't mean it like that.”

“I know you didn't” she said tiredly, “Woulda thought you'd be able to tell when I was kidding, by now.”

He could tell. And she hadn't been kidding. All of their interactions of late seemed to end with her making a face as if he had accidentally broken some ancient family heirloom of hers; this was quite extraordinary to Shinji, seeing as Katsuragi had no close relatives to speak of. No uncles, no aunts, cousins or in-laws. She had no one.

“And I would've thought you'd realize that I'm always going to be flinchy.”

“Yup!” She leaned into him, imbrued by the busy amalgam he had come to know simply as Misato's Smell, “Your backbonelessness, Asuka's bansheeness, my flawlessness, pillars of civilization, Shin-chan. Goes together like us and this mountaintop.”

“It is like a tradition. You always drive here to tell me things.”

“Things…” She looked directly at him, uncaring of the closeness of his face. “Maybe you can take your kids up here one day. Imagine how easy it'd make explaining where babies come from when all you'd have to do is point to the growing buildings?”

The young man only shook his head and gave a short, breathless laugh. “You know who I'm going to introduce you to? Mihiro. You two would be like sisters.”

She blinked. “Who?”

“She's…” Shinji bit his tongue, realizing the person that belonged to that name was as familiar to him as she was to his former guardian. He'd have better success holding onto a thrashing carp. “Nobody. Anyway, Asuka's not trying to have any kids.”

He swallowed. “And why should we? We'd make awful parents. Our first child would be a mess. And our second, our grandchildren…their cats.”

“You wanna curb some of that youthful exuberance before you put someone's eye out?” Misato muttered, then humming with resignation, “I saw this coming, honestly. Just…some people have more love in them to go around than others. To tell the truth, it's a miracle she just go around hating everything.”

The former pilot agreed, and silently mulled while some solicitous daydream propositioned her. Unthinkingly, he asked, “What would you…what would happen to her, you think, if something happened to me? If something happened and I didn't come back?”

The moment that she misunderstood was unbearable. “Why are you asking that? Is something wrong?”

“She said something strange about me having to die…forget it, I probably just misunderstood.”

“Of course you misunderstood. I don't really see what she has to gain by watching her world fall apart, and having to figure out how to be alone again while simultaneously finding a new reason to live. It all sounds a bit counterproductive to me.”

“She told you that?” he asked.

The woman's voice turned with lukewarm humor. “Do you think she'd let me walk around with that kind of information? I was nearly assassinated for less.” Her mouth became a neutral crease before parting, “I just know it's twice as hard to find yourself when you have to do it in the dark.”

“It sounds almost like I did something to her. Like I made her weak.”

“There's nothing wrong with being wanted,” Misato stated, the words solidifying into fact in the stale muggy air, “And don't ever let her hear you say that. You should be used to the idea of Asuka needing you by now.”

There was no warning. Otherworldy malice fell upon him, viral, eating lustily, picking away at subconscious niceties and bearing to the world his heart. Injured. Beating.

Black.

“Everybody needs me…”

The cry of a synthetic beast stretched over the city now soaked with sound and sunset amber. A city that began growing, and Misato hadn't even the courtesy to marvel at it; she was too busy crushing the life out of her former charge.

“This sure is happening a lot today,” Shinji wheezed.

“Shut up. We're having a moment.” His cheeks bulged when she squashed them, and their noses touched. He wondered what it would be like to kiss her without a mouthful of blood, which, he mused, he'd have anyway if his girlfriend knew he'd allowed Misato to touch him like this.

She whispered, an injured rustling, “You don't say that like it's a bad thing…the worst thing. No one would rely on you if you couldn't handle it. You're a big boy, now…” Then, with infinitely puckish glee, “I don't care what Asuka says…”

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“God, I didn't mean anything by it,” Asuka sighed. “Do I go around saying things just to get a rise out of peop-don't you answer that!”

Shinji shut his mouth.

She turned, flinging the refrigerator open with extraordinary pomp. “Where's that big thing of somen Hyuga brought with him?” He told her. When she was finished asking why'd you put it all the way in the back, no, you did it because you can't get enough of this view, isn't that right you milkshake-loving closet ass-bandit, she extracted the food and unfolded herself in time to be buzzed by a four-foot blur.

“Hey!” Asuka palmed the fidgeting girl's black-haired crown, twisting her like a pickle jar until they faced each other. “Short Round, what do you say?”

“S'cuse me,” the preteen instinctively blurted, too busy grabbing at a bag on the kitchen counter to be cowed by the German's formidable…everything. “I need the chips.”

“You need to spend some time with me before you turn into your stupid brother. You're not a stooge, you're a princess, so start acting like one. Got me?”

“Gotcha.”

The woman waited a beat before releasing Mari Suzahara into her natural habitat. Shinji watched the girl passively, unknowing of what kept him from asking her about her cello lessons-

“Wha…huh?”

“I asked who's the new guy out there?” Asuka repeated, ripping the cellophane from the large cold bowl. “The one next to Akagi.”

It was harder to breathe than to remember. He was now used to both the air and his past. “That's her new assistant, Ed, I think. They haven't been working together that long, though. Three weeks, maybe.”

“Hey everyone…” a voice tipsily distinguished itself from the ubiquitous clamor in the living room.

The redhead murmured dissentingly and handed him a paper plate meal. “What was wrong with Chiaki? Or Lee? I like them better than this Ed clown. He has no elbows.”

“What?”

“Where're his fucking elbows? Watch him walk and tell me he's not made out of rubber.”

“Everyone, I have an announcement…”

Shinji twisted his palms up, careful to keep his disposable dish level. “They weren't Maya, that's what was wrong with them. Neither is Ed, but Ritsuko's not stopping anyone from applying.” He chewed on a ragged spool of noodles. “And Ed's a girl.”

“I know you can all hear me…”

Asuka looked down at herself before sparing him a slanted smile. “See these? I think I know a girl when I see one.”

“HEY, SHUT YOUR STUPID CAKEHOLES! I'M DRUNK AND POIGNANT!”

The commotion beyond the kitchen withered.

“She's drunk, at least,” Asuka muttered. “You said Misato didn't buy any booze.”

“She didn't,” he quietly affirmed, following her back to the party. “We had some soft stuff, last cabinet on the left and I passed that out. Maybe she had something stashed and spiked her drink?”

She glared at him over her shoulder. “She spiked her alcohol?”

“There you are!” Misato called to them with a lurching drawl. Her shot glass pitched forward as she shook a free rubbery finger. “All recharged from your evening quickie?”

As one, the assembly turned to the couple like satellite dishes tracking a link across the sky; Touji and his sister, Ritsuko, Aoba, Hyuga, a half-dozen other faces, splitting embarrassment, bemusement, and butt-nekkid curiosity amongst themselves. All of their faces were so damned familiar. And patient.

“W-we were only gone a minute,” Shinji stammered.

“Hey, I said quickie.”

“Misato,” warned Ritsuko, “you're about to get stupid…”

“And you're about to get dropkicked,” Katsuragi cheerfully threatened. “It isn't like it isn't one of those things that you shouldn't not talk about. I'll chance that Miss Sohryu's begging for a few pointers, anyway.”

“A fat chance,” Miss Sohryu helpfully pointed out.

“HYUGA! WHERE'S MY GUN?”

“You told me to hide it from you in case Asuka called you fat.”

“Good man.” Misato nodded sanctimoniously. “Remind me to fire you.”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Misato, didn't you have something ignorant to say?” asked Asuka.

The woman's head whipped over to her former charge with steely beer goggles. “Ignorant? Is proposing a toast to you and Ikari ignorant? Is using this little soiree to dredge up every humiliating thing I've known you to have done ignorant? Is blowing chunks all over your carpet ignorant?”

And people moved.

“I'll tell you what's ignorant, Rotkäppchen. Expecting someone who's logged all of six hours in a first-gen Arm Slave simulator to pilot a Halberd. Do I look like Sergeant Sagara?” She waited. “I'm asking you a question, Touji!”

“Um…?” the large young man said neutrally, careful not to show fear.

“No! No I don't! Just because I like dick doesn't mean I ever want to own one. Mari here knows what I'm talking about!”

“Stop her,” Asuka hissed.

“Why me?” Shinji parried.

“Because if she really has to throw up it might as well be on the one she likes best.”

But no one stopped her, so Misato bumblebeed further into some antagonizing, liquor-warped memory.

“But nuthin' could eeeevvvveeeer be easy with you, could it, Mao? `Sir, I can't adjust the tension in my Muscle Packages.' `Figure it out, Katsuragi.' `Sergeant Major Mao, why am I losing real-time uplink for the health of my jamming subsystem?' `Figure it out, Katsuragi.' `Sergeant Major, how is it that Mithril routinely thwarts embedded terrorist networks but can't find me a pair of panties that won't make my ass look like it was carpet bombed?' `Figure it out. Figure it out. Figure it out.' Oh, I figured it out, alright! Figured out you're a bitch!”

At that, Ritsuko rose with a viscous put-on sigh. “I think you're done being poignant tonight, Misato,” She pursed her thin glossed lips, “and you're scaring Mari.”

In the corner of Shinji's eye, a short head of black hair bobbled vigorously.

“Wha-no!” In a surprisingly crisp motion, the alcoholically-devastated woman transferred said source of devastation to the hand furthest from her best friend's reach. “Hands off, Smokey the Clown! I haven't finished congratulating them!”

“Consider them congratulated, so we should go before you do something that will have you owing them money. Again.” The blonde clasped Misato's shoulder, the jaws of a friendly pit bull. “Just guarantee me that your blue rust box won't crap out in the middle of Shinjuku-3 and you'll have a ride home, tonight.”

A single moment hung in the air.

Then Misato's face abruptly crumpled.

“But I want to stay here!” she mewled pitifully. Shinji realized with sucker punch swiftness; that hadn't been the alcohol talking, or vandalizing her face with desperate candor. “Please, Ritsu, they don't need me, anymore. Let me talk to them, I hardly get to talk to them, anymore. Let go!”

“No.” Akagi snapped rigidly, and Shinji could see her will press against their squirming guests. “Now put the glass down, Mihiro, you're embarrassing them.”

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

It hadn't been long before Ritsuko successfully corralled and sedated her college roommate. Not many people said no to Commander Akagi nowadays, as it had roughly the same effect as receiving a transfusion of the wrong blood type.

Soon afterwards, people left in a smokescreen of thanks-for-the-food's and be-seein'-ya's, with the snatch of Asuka's red satin whisper filling the lull between each departure. He remembered how to do everything she asked of him, and in return he had been allowed to forget the graphic sadness that had butchered all the happy things jitterbugging in Misato's earth-hued eyes.

Had forgotten.

“Why are you moving so damned much?” Asuka asked, her voice parched with arid sleep. She was laying on her side, the outline of her bare shoulder a sinuating ribbon of smoke.

“Sorry,” he said, breathing on her neck in the darkness.

“Don't be sorry. Be still. You should be tired.” Her contour warped. He adjusted to match it. “Really, really tired.”

Asuka settled some, her breath a slow but conscious thing. She was waiting.

“You know what it's probably like for her?” he asked. “We were all together for a just a few months, but she could still say it was me, you, and her. And now it's me and you. And then her. I think tonight just drove that fact in. Like if her kids don't call her own place home, anymore.”

“Please don't talk like we're siblings while we're spooning,” she calmly intimated. “So what do you want to do, have her move in with us? I still don't know what that smell was that came from her room, but I do know I'm done having that shit up my nose. Verstehen Sie?”

“Yeah, of course,” he said quickly, “but we can't shut her out. I wouldn't even be surprised if she planned what she did, tonight. I don't think she has anything. Just us.”

“So you're magnified,” she said, and he imagined Asuka's smile scythed cruelly across her mouth.

Maybe that was why he got up, because of the odd way she said it. “I'll be back. I gotta take a whiz, or something.”

He picked his way through the smother of midnight blue, reaching the bedroom door when her tongue clicked dryly. “Shinji? Shinji, wait.”

He hadn't heard that quiet urgency in years. “Yeah?”

“I just…Shinji, I just want you to know…”

“Yes…?”

“I want you to know…that if you leave the seat up…I'll pile drive you into the stove.”

He liked that stove. He liked its clean industrial lines and the way it cooked rice noodles, and the fact that his head had not yet been driven forcefully into it.

Shinji's hands worked themselves into a soapy froth beneath the amber of a cycloptic nightlight, and the idea rose in him. I'll make rice noodles for her, tomorrow. He'd make some for Misato, too.

Asuka would be content keeping the older woman distant and phasing around the world her and Shinji were beginning to make for themselves. That was clearer than the piece of abstract crystal Ritsuko had presented them with when she walked through the door. The truth of the matter was probably rooted in the German's meager capacity to love…to love Misato, which was only as easy as loving herself.

It would be like that until Katsuragi grayed, sagged, until her zeal for f-bombs and f-bombing faded, until she was so diluted and asexual that her hugging him could no longer be seen as an act of war.

Good luck with that…

Shinji screwed off the hissing spigot, looking into the mirror and the face which peered dutifully at him from its shallow shadowed coves. He looked worried, did not feel it scrawled on his face or squirreling in his stomach. Ritsuko said it was his default face, and if Doctor Akagi said it, then it must be true. So he and his reflection turned from each other, and that was when some asshole stuck their foot out in front of him.

There was a moment between losing his balance, corkscrewing and the rattle-thud of his tailbone smacking into the lip of the doorframe; his mind had washed over with burnt umber cello lessons, steel-blueprint ledger instrumentals, ascending rollercoaster scales in octaves.

They shouldn't be there. They were assorted hills of junkyard memories, clashing and jutting up like tombs for a garage sale pharaoh, but they were there.

Mana Kirishima was there.

Shinji could only gulp like a stranded perch as he reclined on the points of his elbows. He stared at the -no, not a girl, anymore- propped up into a sitting position, her legs shooting out from the flared herm of her virgin sundress. Mana's head lulled to the side from her rubbery neck, but he saw movement, just enough so that he knew she wasn't like Kensuke or Hikari or Maya. Pain slid across her mouth and fluttering eyelids as if fighting the exhaustion from her wearisome trip.

From where?

“Mana…?” Shinji whispered, his hissing strains bouncing off the tiles. She didn't stir. She was hurt. Maybe. Or just tired, or anesthetized, or, oh hell, who knows, maybe some witch wriggled her nose and Mana was there and he didn't know how…

“Say if you can hear me.” Nothing. The hush lifted off his voice. “It's been forever. How'd you get here…Mana?” Nothing. Louder. “Mana!”

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?”

He felt every decibel of Asuka's booming query. Mana's brow shot down before smoothing out again, that was it.

He began to worry.

“Asuka! You need to come see this-”

“I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOUR KIDNEY STONE!”

“No, it's important, it's…” Shinji started to pull himself into a kneeling position, his foot dragging over Mana's want to touch her she's so close traitors are all so close but she's kind patient don't you see that she's trying so hard she'd die for an ounce of trust and I always kill her kill her every time and she broke once but came back like a lion to save me until the fingers in her mind sprayed her all over my living room shin.

Ow.

Then Asuka kicked him in the back.

“Ow!”

“You even left the seat up!” she snapped as she loomed behind. “This better be good, Ikari, because I'm not liking the prospect of stubbing my toe on your ass anymore than…”

She saw.

“What is she doing here?”

It was the right question, of course, but the way it had been asked…two left feet, sound in outer space…

“She hasn't moved since…” Shinji paused, craning toward the slumped-over woman. “Mana…she was just here. I don't know how but we're not going to sit and watch her-”

“Don't touch her.”

“What?” His face whipped up to Sohryu, and again he puzzled at her deviant inflection. “But…something is wrong with her-”

“And you don't know what, do you? You want to make it worse?”

Asuka didn't sound like she cared whether or not he made it `worse'.

So he got closer.

“Shinji.” Lurid, queer urgency.

“I'm just going to check her pulse.”

“Shinji, don't.”

He did.

And this time something stuck. It buried itself and cracked open to cast thirsting tendrils through him. The world seemed to…twist around where he clasped her soft wrist, spiraling outward in night-lit peppermint swirls. Real places couldn't do that.

He should touch Kirishima. He should be all over her, because she was real, he knew suddenly. And everything else here was…was what?

He had to practically wean himself from Mana before standing.

“Shinji…?”

He hated the desperate tinge of Sohryu's voice, now, its fragility, its perfectly rehearsed theatricality.

“I need to use your phone.”

“I don't have a landline, remember?”

Shinji remembered, only because it jogged into him like a lawyer's smirking son forty minutes late for his final exam. Like everything else here, it was a second late, a synapse short, a millimeter off. Off, off, off, off…

“Then your cell phone, do you have it on-” He stopped himself. She was between service plans. He was going to get the same stupid plan. Free Minute Fridays.

Shinji stilled himself, thinking and deciding, jerking into a lanky stride. He swam past her in a swift current, swinging the bedroom door wide open to grab the snaking leg of his denim jeans from off the carpet. A shadow slid over the false twilight in the hallway.

“What're you putting your clothes on for? Where are you going?”

Stop talking like that, like you're acting. I love you so stop acting around me.

“The neighbors,” he answered, “downstairs, flag down a car, I don't know. Someone needs to look at her, I don't know.”

“Don't leave. She'll be fine.” He snapped to the doorframe silhouette, muted by incredulity. “She's probably just sleeping off-”

“How do you know?” he pressed, finally sick of the weirdness and Asuka's newfound, stupid opaqueness. Frustration surged over him like a tide of magma, like the hatred that had consumed him in the sunset overlooking the city. “How? You said yourself we shouldn't move her. Fine. We don't move her. But she's just sitting there-”

“Ikari, calm down-”

“-we don't know what the hell is going on with her and…and she needs me, she's been waiting for me to do something for her and now-”

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

I've been faxed. Faded and compressed, but approved.

At least I'm wearing clothes, now. I think I am, but it isn't worth the effort to open my eyes. Or talk or stand. I'm dressed and sitting, having that dream where I tell myself to wake up in T-minus 5…4…3…2…

Mission aborted. I'm jetlag-on-Jupiter tired.

I feel myself come online by the molecule, and familiar lacey frills dance along the nape of my crooked neck-oh jeez, I'm wearing that? At least I don't have Eclipse-chan; the air is cool on my head.

A tug on my ankle, the bad one. Something crashes in the darkness beyond my eyes, I don't hear it but it reverberates through my legs, my backside, through the dollhouse wall at my back.

Someone's clumsy, someone is moving like they're dizzy-drunk slobbering over me, and maybe going through all the ways he can have with me. Don't let it be that, please, don't touch me, don't use me again, why can't I wake up and tell him to stop, sound won't come out even though it's now coming in…

“-ay if you can hear me how'd ou get ear Ma a…Mana!”

So now what? What's the point of coming here if I can't even say `Stop yelling, Shinji, I can hear you just'…

Oh shit, it's you. Moving around me. You're fretting. You're a fret machine, and your frets per minute increase when a voice shrieks at you through the thin walls.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?”

God, Mihiro. That's who you were talking about? I was up against a dead girl and I still couldn't win?

She doesn't sound very dead right about now. She doesn't sound like a girl anymore, either.

“What is she doing here?”

I'm ruining your little rendezvous as soon as I remember how my tongue works, you loudmouthed life-wrecking bitch. You told me you weren't spoken for, Shinji. This feels like revenge…

“I'm just going to check her pulse.”

I'm okay, I am, but I don't complain. Can't. You touch me on the wrist. So gently, always so gently, always on the hand or shoulder or piece of damn lint on the inner thigh of my pants leg, way up there but never, ever all the way.

Was she the reason? Were you scared that she was watching you? Judging you if you ended up on top of me? Why do her jealousies override mine? What makes her more real than me? For five years I was more real than she could even hope to be, and all you had to do was find me, take me. I was the one that came back. Who hurt you more, me or her? I'm not the lie, Shinji, she is…

You drag yourself away like I'm fire in Siberia. Fatigue courses to me. By the time I find myself, I'm alone again.

“-utting your clothes on for? Where are you goi-”

No.

“-wn a car, I don't know. Someone needs to look at her, I-”

No they don't! I'm fine, you idiot! Don't go, please don't leave me with this crazy dead German in this strange place! Talk, touch me, again! I came all the way here for you, I might be dead right now for you! Why can't you see that? You have to see, I have to make you see now-

“-you're telling me I can't? WHY?”

My eyes slam open.

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

Her outline, framed by the shining doorway, stiffened.

But he had to yell, to let her know that this was different. So let Asuka scream back, throw things, kick his-

“You're seeing her,” she said quietly.

“I do see her.” He took his sloppy shirt with its musk of spilt wine and lavender perfume, pulling it over his head as he walked to her. “I see her flying apart. It happened yesterday. How's that possible, Asuka?”

“You are all over the place, today,” I love you, “that's how,” she said, her face glowing strangely. “You're the one that needs to see a doctor, not her.”

“I don't think so, anymore.” He made a move forward and stopped. “I can't get to my shoes if you're standing in the way.”

“Shinji, don't lea-”

“PLEASE.”

He briefly considered shoving her -shoving Asuka!- before she swung open like a rusted gate. Before she watched him switch on the lights and march into the living room - past the kitchen and the couch draped over with someone's forgotten jacket. He was at the foyer and leaving and she was always watching and following.

“When are you going to be back?”

“When I find help.” His Converse fit like a mother's hug. Asuka knew his shoe size-

“So when the hell is that going to be?”

“Whenever it is I find help. A phone. Doctor Akagi.” Looping the laces up and under. “Miss Asai-”

“She's sixty! You have any idea what time it is?”

“This is important.” Threading, pulling.

“More important than me?”

“What does that even mean? This isn't about you!” Knotting. Tightening.

“Answer the question, Shinji!”

“No, because it's a stupid question!” Tighter.

“Tell me to my face! Look at me, I'm right here!”

“NO YOU'RE NOT! YOU'RE NEVER WHERE I AM! YOU WERE NEVER ON THE BEACH AND SHE IS MORE IMPORTANT BECAUSE YOU ALWAYS SAY NO!”

He was shaking apart, so close to her he swore he could see his reflection in her shock-reamed eyes.

There, he did it. Right to her face which, when he blinked, was no longer there.

Just a featureless rouge-tinged canvas framed by auburn swept across it like rusty cirrus clouds. He was going to be sick with fear, because there was nothing there but that heart-shaped template, you could pick out Asuka's face from the spring catalogue and snap it in place with cheap plastic fasteners.

It's never her. Always some fetid judging corpse or walking doll, not her…

Shinji Ikari blinked again. Her mouth coiled upward with a defiant, crippled smile.

“That is the craziest thing I've heard since I quit Eva.” She shook her head as if following a microscopic ping-pong match. Her eyes were there, wet. “You're crazy, Shinji. It finally happened.”

“I…” He swallowed, looking and waiting for her mask to slip from its layman moorings, “I'll be right back…don't touch her.”

“You're…good to me. You keep me sane.” She was reaching up. He saw her, fourteen again, blue eyes gabled as she stared down at him with disdain. He just couldn't reconcile that with the charity in this…this fake. “If you're sick, you won't have to be sick alone-”

Don't you tou

“ch me. Don't touch me.” Shinji was stepping back towards the door, fingers searching for the `Open' chevron. “Don't touch her. Don't move.”

His hand ran over a soft, smooth patch in the wall. Shinji depressed it. There was a whir and a whoosh. He had to hope there was something real beyond this diorama, this life-sized playhouse and the animated mannequin that stretched his shirt with its pert plasticine breasts. Someone down the hall, someone real, please, he shouldn't be leaving Mana but she needed help…

As he was busy remembering that Miss Asai was out of town, his foot slipped back into emptiness.

It was a giant step, the next tread swallowed by depth and darkness. His stomach launched itself at the rectangle of light and the etched figure peering out from it, but the aperture was rising and shrinking so fast.

There wasn't any wind snapping at his sleeves or billowing his shirt or pants, but Shinji knew he was falling away from the imposter that said everything he ever wanted to hear. He was falling away from Misato, from Touji, his sister who had grown so much and was turning beautiful and he knew forgave him.

He was falling away from Mana, falling and failing her again.

Leaving her behind.

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

They stopped when the bank of lights above them clapped off, once again plunging them briefly into mute pitch blackness before powering up.

And then down.

“Stay with us, Itabachi,” said Sayed Rahman. He was a tall bronze-skinned man composed entirely of hard, straight lines.

The corridor bloomed with misty predawn azure. Kensuke could see Matsuo Itabachi's jowls fold as he looked across to their immediate superior. “Why the hell're you picking on me?”

The light snuffed out. Bloomed.

“Because you're Itabachi,” Rahman said matter-of-factly.

Matsuo smirked before the world went black again. “Hey, my dad's been dead for ten years and I never even knew my mom. Plus it's not like I had a girl to cry over or anything.”

Rahman stopped just short of gasping. “Get out?”

Lukewarm luminescence. “Sir, I just want you to know that if for some reason I don't make it through the night, that you can kiss my fat ass.”

“It's against my religion to eat pork, Itabachi, you know that.”

“YOU CAN TAKE YOUR…it is?”

The Saudi man looked at Kensuke. “How about you, Aida? Are you holding up?”

Before Kensuke Aida had received the call to accompany Rahman and Itabachi, his mother had slipped out from the dusty crevice between the coffee and snack vending machines in the level 2-A lounge. She had her broomstick arms thrust out as she pleaded for her brave little soldier to give her one more hug, just one more.

She seemed to have towered over him, smelling of vapor rub and ammonia with that floral print hospice gown hanging from her bones like paper skin. That was the only way he knew she hadn't been real.

“I'm holding up.”

“Try to show a little enthusiasm,” agent Rahman suggested. “You were dying for a little responsibility, and this happens. Think positively.”

Kensuke did not want to think at all. He could open a door down here and mom could be behind it, he could turn a shadowed corner and she could be around it. She'd have those hands and those veins that rose up like blue snakes wriggling against the tent of drawn skin. Her hands would be begging him to finally die with her…

But it wasn't real.

She wasn't real.

The three of them had minutes ago dropped swiftly though seven levels of headquarters before gravity peaked and the elevator yawned open.

It had deposited them onto a floor delegated to Tech Division One, and it was here, Kensuke knew, that the sub-organization ran many of their experiments, anything from single process DNS to prognostics for cavitation near high-velocity screws. The high-end tools for ongoing tests occupied some of the spaces behind sliding steel doors; they walked past those and other rooms, where equipment from previous successes and failures were horded by some technophilic pack rat. There they huddled and dusted over.

The corners of the hallway stretched past the three, congregating at a faraway vertex. With so many doors, so many experiments, it was hard for Aida not to think about how much this little disaster was costing Nerv. And by little, he meant national.

“Here's where we gotta be,” Itabachi breathed.

The trio stopped in front of a seemingly random door. When the lights again shuttered on, the numbers 0932 blinked irritably at Kensuke from the automated bulwark. From the outside, the room seemed all too much like the others that obediently lined this high-tech catacomb.

And that was exactly the way that Maya Ibuki liked it.

She was the inheritor of the curiously bright and sunny affair that had been Ritsuko Akagi's office. Bright and sunny suited Maya just fine, and the space itself was located on a floor accessible to all personnel, who invariably came to her with all manner of Nerv-related dilemmas. Great things. Small things.

Impossibly tiny, stupidly, incredibly Lilliputian, microscopically, hugely insignificantly small things.

Although general clearance extended two floors below this one, hardly anyone voluntarily came this far. It was where ideas went to die.

“So…” The word languished in Itabachi's thick, strong neck, “you really think she popped?”

“Well, that's what we're here to find out,” Rahman answered. A sense of surrealism crept in from the corners of Aida's weak eyes as he watched the man press the room's intercom button.

Then an amazing thing happened. Nothing. And it happened for about ten seconds before Kensuke realized he was being stared at. “Huh, y-yeah?”

“The card, Mister Aida,” Rahman said carefully, “I was saying to give me the card.”

The bifocaled young man fished around in his black pants pocket and did what he was told.

They were still watching him. Itabachi's mouth flattened in a way Kensuke associated with apprehension.

“Are you holding up?” the bronze-skinned man asked. “Aida?”

She wasn't real. Is this how it's like for you, Shinji?

“I'm holding up.”

Sayed Rahman didn't pursue Kensuke's D-plus conviction. The skeleton card key swung though a magnetic reader, which was persuaded to see the world with its green eye instead of its red one.

The large sliding door whined a quarter of the way open…and froze as the electricity petered.

“Aw, crap,” Matsuo groused, reaching into the folds of his suit-

“Mister Itabachi,” Raman said tiredly, “my dear stupid son, what on Earth are you doing?”

“My gun…” The heavy set man shrugged. “You know…just in case.”

The Saudi man slipped through the frozen glowing mouth. “In case Doctor Ibuki leaps out from behind her desk and crushes your throat? She's the head of Tech One, not our ninja clan.”

Matsuo's power hand fell to his side. Muttering something about smart-ass superiors, he sucked in his sumo gut and followed. Kensuke realized he was turning sideways and shuffling in as well. In there he could at least ask if whatever he was seeing was actually there.

Not that there was much to see, just the clutter of a scientific intellectual. Four of five tables aggregated in a far corner like giant scrabble pieces. They were burdened with crates, boxes, tall dog-eared decks of bound journals, magazines and textbooks. The same could be said of the bookshelf pushed against one of the walls, two of its levels a makeshift shrine to instant coffee and cheap filters.

A boxy ventilation duct ran the length of the ceiling. It glowed obscenely in the blue strobe shading all aspects of the space and radiating from an impressively large computer monitor. In the middle of the room, Mister Rahman and Matsuo milled about.

Other than that, there was nothing. No one.

“You're sure Ueto said she'd be in here?”

Itabachi was addressing him “What I said was that Doctor Ueto was the last person to have contact with her. That was at five-thirty.”

“That was five hours ago, Kensuke.”

Aida's brow dipped as he eyed Matsuo. “I know what time it is. What do you want me to do about SOP? This is the best lead we have and we're going on it, alright?”

C'mon, Maya, you didn't, tell me you're stronger than that and you didn't-

“Mister Aida's right,” said Sayed Rahman from a small empty nook. “Would you invest in a pair of glasses on Monday if you knew your eyes would be plucked out on Tuesday?”

“I wear contacts,” Itabachi said tempestuously, “All I'm saying is this: if we knew things were gonna suck like today is sucking we woulda tagged this woman, because her ninjitsu is fucking best.”

“I was just joking about the ninja thing.”

Matsuo Itabachi huffed and stepped toward the older man. “Christ, Sayed, I'm not stupid! You now exactly what I know, exactly nothing. The only person that knows more than that should be here and she-”

The sound was faint, but they all heard and froze. It was the wet rippling creep of something dropped and spilling. Itabachi looked down, and Kensuke watched his smile turn sweet like a slit wrist.

“Sayed? She…just like the others…”

“Stay with us, Itabachi.”

“I'm standing in her, sir. I can see her socks…her bra…I'm standing in her.”

Sayed Rahman held his hands out peaceably. “Itabachi, be cool.”

“I am cool, sir.”

“Step out of her, Itabachi…good.”

Kensuke tried not to cry.

“Now,” Rahman continued, the chill of professionalism frosting him, “I want you to contact Choi. I want you to tell him that Doctor Ibuki has been found. Tell him she's been disincorporated-”

“And that we're screwed…”

“Look at me.” The older man's voice whetstoned as he pointed at Matuso. “We don't have time for this. It's a simple order and we need to know what to do next.”

“Yes. Yes sir.”

Itabachi had presumably skulked around the copper-tang puddle that used to be Maya, and squeezed out into the corridor before contacting HQ.

“Aida.”

Kensuke hadn't noticed, his attention rooted to Ibuki's cherry wood desk, in front of the flickering screen.

“Mister Aida?”

It was a ledger, and a letter scrawled onto it with hasty, desperate strokes of ink. The characters seemed to blend, to bleed into one another like handoffs in a relay race, running until the white lined sheet was filled.

But it wasn't filled.

“I'm holding up,” said Kensuke, and he tried very hard not to cry.

End of Chapter 8

A/N: I think I agree with Someone's assessment most. I was planning on NTR on being a little more involved than In the Dark Room. I didn't want to hurt people's brains. I tried to have the first scene, second and last scene provide useful info. Then again, I originally wanted NTR to be three 5,000-word chapters. That's funny. No it isn't.

I should probably also speak on the delay for this chapter. It's what it always is. I'm in school, school follows me home, it looks over my shoulder and asks what I'm doing, it tells me that it's late and I have to go to bed because I have to pay attention to it tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.

If things go as planned, formal schooling ends forever in exactly one week for me. I would have a job, and -this is how the legend goes- I can actually stop working once I leave the office, and this would be around 5:00 or 5:30. And I'll only have to work on weekdays. Can anyone confirm?

So I'll start the final chapter in about a week, I guess. Even in my head, it's long, but it's tighter than this one, which was always awkward, because there are long swaths where Shinji and Asuka and Misato just say things.

The intent was to demonstrate a type of funhouse mirror slice of life, where the facts that he's having these domestic discussions and he's talking to people who should be dead and gone are really the point. It was too abstract, even for this story, so I added the first scene, whose purpose is to give context to all of that talking. Tried to make it interesting.

So…everyone, thank you very much for being patient. I'm going to do my best to clear things up during the last chapter.

Stop laughing.

Warp: I remember you having a thread where you had coupled Full Metal Panic and Eva. Was it because Allison Keith voices Misato and Melissa Mao? I just thought that was funny, as one of the ideas I had for a story happened to be a NGE/FMP crossover about Misato. Pre-Sachiel. It might even be my next story after Valley Girl. In my head, I don't see Mao and Katsuragi getting along. They're way too much alike.

Random A/N: Why does everyone think I'm crazy? It's not my fault I have Kool-Aid for blood.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

No offense to all you lawyer's sons out there.