Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ Normal to Reality ❯ Child of Glasgow-3 ( Chapter 10 )

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: Child of Glasgow-3

By Midnight_Cereal

 

Shinji,

This is not how it was supposed to be and I regret I never took it upon myself to know what Ritsuko knew as well as she knew it but our time here was wrong and this place is incomplete, this I'm sure of. I don't blame you, I just cant, they shoved you and forced you made you crazy and so I helped and lives were split down the middle on the grain of your pyscghe pysh psyche. You split us all up and it's odd how it isn't your fault. But I miss my brother I miss Ritusko. And someone misses you, theyre looking for you too. Asuka is calling and you have to answer the girl and when you do I pray the world will start again. But I dn't know what will happen when everyone leaves this place, we could all be loast forever in a sea of nothingness that would suck. But the last five years…that is not life. It's not fair it is NOT worthwhile its not filled. IT IS NOT COMPLEMENTATION you have to understandwhy I've decided to let it melt away because it's a slashed tendon that won't stop bleeding it just winks at you. I was forced to look at it for years and pretend it didn't make me so sick. But she's looking for you It's finally going to be buried. Maybe we will too because I don't have the knowledge Not ENOUGH TO build our half of the bridge, soo maybe we'll have to leap not make make it and then we'll fall and be buried together forever. I may never see you again and if what happens what I think is going to happen you'll never even see this. I guess I wrote this for myself God do everything for myself except be Ta-chan so THANK YOU for being Ta-chan. For letting me put youto sleep. His cheek was always so hot whe I kissed you to sleep. Thank you. Nobody here could have have benn Ritsuko and definitely not me because I could never be that good not if you gave me all the time of all the lives in all the worlds because otherwise I'd make sure that we ALL got back and finish the job you started o why did you spl

-----

“You're…good to me. You keep me sane. If you're sick, you won't have to be sick alone-”

“Don't you touch me. Don't touch me. Don't touch her. Don't move.”

Chords of anguish danced in the back of her throat. She breathed tremulously.

But she didn't move.

He watched her like a wounded deer, his fear laid open and gaping. His hand blindly wandered along the wall, prodding, punching it. Then the absence of everything lay uncovered behind him. He backed into it with confusion molding his face before that too sank beneath the sea of shadows.

The door closed.

She stopped shaking.

The pout in her lip diminished.

She wiped the wetness from her eyes before neatly folding her arms beneath her breasts.

She watched the door as the apartment was steeped in silence to which she numbly accepted and shrugged.

“Well…I suppose that could've gone better,” was all she got out before there was a shout drawn out into a wiry, pure scream, a gust of conditioned air, and Mana.

She stood off and watched Kirishima assault the `open' chevron, still stamped with his vaporizing fingerprints.

“Shinji, don't do this…”

The door reopened.

And Mana gaped at the blinkered lighting bay casting a nearby section of the concrete corridor in stuttering shadows, and beyond that the apartment complex freight elevator with its meshing metal mouth.

The door closed.

Mana shook her head but let the motion die out. “He left me…”

“You make it sound so premeditated.”

Kirishima whirled.

“YOU! THERE WASN'T SHIT THERE A SECOND AGO! WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HIM?!”

“Me?” Royal blue eyes flitted chastely. “Do you think if I had any control over what he says or does that I would have let him go home so early?”

Mana's anger briefly evaporated as her mouth wrapped around that silent, terrible word.

“Where the heart is,” the auburn-haired woman said, brow pitching downward. “Is that…how it goes?”

The sides of Mana's mouth went up with a souring curve as she drew her fist back just as slowly.

Then she dropped it.

“I am so through with you…”

The gossamer hem of Mana's dress corkscrewed as she spun and stalked back through the shadowed hallway.

“Where are you going?” the woman calmly asked as Kirishima paced her.

“I'm going home.”

“And you propose to do that how?”

“I propose to get out the same way I got in,” snapped Mana.

“And how did you get in?”

“Stop talking to me,” snarled Mana.

They were back at the restroom as amusement fluttered in her voice. “Do people always plan these excursions with no identifiable means of transportation? It's true that life experience is no indicator of common sense, isn't it?”

Mana looked at her again. “You want me to say I had help? Fine! I had help, alright?”

“Someone powerful.”

Mana shrugged irritably. “I don't know. I guess-”

“But they're not here.”

“I know that! I fucking know.”

“They did not or could not follow.” The woman gave Mana a half-lidded once over. “You don't seem very powerful to me.”

Kirishima could only sneer. “So why can't I save him? Why's it so bad, can you tell me that? If I'm not strong enough, then what've you got to lose if I try?”

“I was only making an observation. I, personally, have nothing to lose. I have nothing.”

“What the hell do you mean?!” Mana erupted. “I bet…I bet every weird, wrong thing that's happened to me is your fault, Asuka!”

The woman appraised herself and then looked at Mana with all the warmth and flavor of vanilla ice cream. “Ah…I can see why you'd believe that I'm Asuka.”

Mana balked.

The Woman That Was Not Asuka continued, “You shouldn't worry about him. If by save, you had meant sending him back to the Secondary, you've done well enough. You, however, can't go back that way or the way you arrived without your friend.”

“That thing is not my friend.”

“I only meant friend as a general term for a person from whose association you may have benefited.”

“I already knew that, Asuka,” Mana huffed. “I'm being difficult.”

“That is not who I am.”

Mana lapsed into a silence the woman then adopted. They stared though each other before the auburn-haired woman crossed her arms and slipped away from the bathroom door. As she padded serenely towards the kitchen, Mana deflated and followed.

“Mana, was it?” she asked in Asuka's accented nasal soprano. “Do you like to drink root beer, Mana?”

“I…” Kirishima didn't bother to wipe the puzzlement from her face. “I don't dislike it…”

“I'm asking because I'm about to offer you root beer in an effort to placate you.”

“Uh…okay…” Mana paused in pulling a kitchen chair out for herself. She had the look of someone who had just been struck in the face with a rubber chicken filled with jello. “You know, usually when you're planning to coerce someone, it's not a good idea to let them know when you're actually doing it.”

“I'm not doing it, yet.”

“Great,” said Mana. “You just let me know when you are and I'll shoot myself full of valium to get the ball rolling.”

Not Asuka was emptying the bottom of a three-liter bottle into a glossy black mug when she looked back. “Are you being sarcastic?”

Mana rolled her eyes. “Of course not. The suggestion that I'll self-medicate to make this more convenient for you was meant to be taken in the most literal sense possible.”

“Are you being sarcastic, now?”

“Just give me the stupid soda.”

The woman topped off the mug, brought it over and slid it across the table so that the large embroidered fig leaf faced Mana. Somewhere in Kirishima a rack of drunken giggles suddenly crashed and spilled. Her hostess didn't frown. She didn't smile, either.

“Don't look at me like that,” Mana laughed, swiping at her misted, smiling eyes. “It's working, okay? I'm placated. You have any idea how precious you are?”

“No.”

“Of course you wouldn't,” sighed Mana. “Why would you?”

“I'm afraid the fidelity of the transplant OS drops off appreciably when I'm forced to interact with anyone but Shinji Ikari.”

A deft toss and the plastic jug caromed into the trash bin. The woman joined Mana at the table but didn't bother to match the bewildered stare. “I'll admit that it's difficult to even hold a conversation with you, Mana. I would've been more interesting three minutes ago. I could have been twelve people three minutes ago. Right now I'm reminding myself to breathe.”

“Because…” Mana processed something behind her darting eyes. “Is that because you weren't expected to interact with anyone else?”

“That's right.” The hostess looked up from the styrofoam cup she was rolling along the flats of her palms. “I just remembered something about you.”

“I thought you said that you weren't Asuka.”

The woman continued, “She always thought that you were too dumb to be an idiot, and I think now I understand what she meant.”

“Thanks…I guess…” Mana's mouth tweaked upward. “She's right in a way. At least up to this point I've been smart enough to stay out of my own Guadalcanal.”

The eyes were flat and staring.

Mana's mouth tweaked downward. “Oh…well, see, Kirishima was a battlecruiser during World War Two…”

And staring.

“…and she was sunk at the Battle of Guadalcanal...”

And staring.

“…and my surname's Kirishima, so…” She futilely searched the blankness blinking across from her and slowly shook her head, “so you just could not care any less, could you?”

“I don't have enough experience in judging how little I should care about one pointless story relative to another.” She paused as something occurred to her. “I'm sorry. I was being rude.”

“Asuka's never sorry.” Mana held her hand out to keep the consternation from settling on the other woman's face. “I know, okay, okay. I get it…but you are wearing her pretty adult face for a reason. Even if all you can do is breathe and serve root beer.”

“How is it, by the way?”

Mana brought the mug to her lips and back down before nodding curtly. “It's good. But I took a trip to Okinawa once and I liked it when I went there. I'm not surprised.”

The same could not be said of Not Asuka as curiosity splashed vibrantly across her rented canvas. “They actually exist?” The table wobbled as she planted her elbows in its burnished wood and leaned in. “Okinawa? Root beer?”

“Well, the last time I checked they weren't any less real than…” Mana whipped her head around until she nodded at a clock radio in a kitchen corner, “than Sony, or…” On top of the fridge she saw a white cat, cruelly anthropomorphized with cauterized stumps jutting just beneath its grotesquely swollen and mouthless head, its sightless eyes wild with a thousand sable nightmares, “or Sanrio. Pretty accurate for a place that's fake.”

The other woman tucked a sour smile away in a dimple and her sinking eyes, but she said nothing.

Mana tiredly explained, “Look, I didn't say that to be cruel. I know better than to just see everything in black or white, but things are either real or they're…not. It's how I got here. And the outside hallway. And you. Mostly you.” Her grey-blue gaze drew past the swell of her breasts. “And there's the little fact that I'm supposed to be about three years and a cup size past this…this.”

“If you hate the dress so much then why are you wearing it?”

“Please shut up.” Rubberized chair studs croaked as Mana pushed away from the table top and stood. Mug in hand, she roamed the small space, curator for a miniature museum of cookery.

“You know that was the day I realized I was a great liar?” She raised a finger to index her point. “Not good. Great. You don't understand, I opened that white box and this…doily abortion was staring back at me. And I almost said something too, but there was this thing in Nana's face which was so…desperate.

“I thanked her. Kissed her on her cheek, which I was scared to do because it had started to sink into her face by then. And I wore this and smiled.” An empty chuckle. “I mean, I did pirouettes, for God's sake.”

A burnt umber lock snuck across Kirishima's face as she stared down into her mug, back into cold, murky memories. “I think that's the easy part for me because I'm all asymmetrical warfare. I get honest and stupid when I know I'm dealing with other liars.”

The imposter flashed a low-wattage grin. “Then I suppose you and I have something in common.”

That was when Mana looked her squarely in her stunning glass eyes. “Who are you?”

“Autonomous Coercive Template, Responsive Extraction, Supraliminal-Subliminal.”

Mana couldn't say anything at first, and then squinted. “Ak…A-ku-tores-u?” she ventured, the transliteration grinding off of her rusty English tongue.

“I've heard that before…” Actress said, but she wasn't looking at Mana. “I heard that when I woke up.”

Mana looked around as frustration once more began to concentrate in her pinching brow. “What the hell are you talking about? You mean, when you woke up today?”

“No.”

“Yesterday? Help me out here! ”

“I've only woken up once and I couldn't tell you what day that was. I don't know.”

Mana winced as if shying away from a brutal light. “Don't…don't you get tired?”

“I get very tired.” Actress looked Mana off and she sagged. And sagged. “I'm very tired. Is that…abnormal?”

“Uh, yeah.” Kirishima nodded as her eyebrows climbed high on her face. “I'd say that's something you'd have to ask your boss about. But we're getting off track-”

“I watched Shinji.” Mana stopped talking. “And now it makes sense to me, how vital rest is to people. I watched him today, how active he was in the beginning of it. How the hours seemed to grind on him in small increments. He didn't seem to notice. He was used to it. He had been used to it his entire life.

“I noticed. His eyelids coming down and he didn't realize he was struggling against it. I watched. Now I know. He became alert again when he was given an activity. I realized that it doesn't take much. He would get my brush. He would see someone to the front door. He would take out the trash. He would have sex with me. He would wash the dishes. He would close the blinds for the balcony. It doesn't take mu-”

Muddy liquid sheets and ceramic chips exploded at the back of the sink. Actress calmly watched Mana fold over its stainless steel lip and mouth savageries behind her dirty red awning. Her shuddering dampened as the root beer climbed down the back wall like a melting shadow, and she swung up.

“I gotta be honest with you, I'm not feeling very placated right now.”

“I can see that.”

“Tell me you tricked him.”

“Okay,” said Actress. “I tricked him.”

“There are things I have to know and I swear you better not lie to me, I swear to God.”

“I couldn't tell you if I've retained the ability to lie or the incentive, or the ability to discern when I should or should not be lying. I think I understand why you're upset, but threatening me is a waste of your time.”

“Oh. Well, then fuck you.” Then Mana waved her off then, the smile slashed across her face scar-like in its brutality. She paced the kitchen with caged predatory steps and cupped her outstretched hands to weigh candidate responses and she voted, “Do…do you understand revenge, lady? Why you can't manipulate and brainwash and take people?”

“But you can. Because we did.” Actress leaned back and slowly lifted Asuka's full calves. “It's true that I am an invasive agent that supplanted Shinji's own memories with a false set, but I'm only required to comply with a preexisting template.”

Actress deployed her legs back to the hardwood floor and sat up. “The final form and content of the false memories relied entirely on his desires, latent or otherwise. Shinji wanted to -how does it go?- to fuck Asuka. She was counting on it.”

She primped her folded hands in her cream-colored lap. “And she was right. All I had to do was show him what he had hidden from himself.”

“And you wonder why you failed,” Mana cut in.

“No I don't.” Actress flicked a lidded glance up and down her guest. “It was only because you had intervened. This was despite the fact that Asuka had accounted for the possibility of interference from additional parties.” Actress smiled. “It takes exceptional power to breach the walls of the House of Dirac.”

Mana's brow traced a sick arch. “You're proud of that…”

“Asuka is proud of that,” Actress corrected. “Any pride exhibited by myself is an artifact of hers. I don't care that you've saved him or stopped us, however you define what happened. But if you hadn't arrived, we would have succeeded eventually.”

“Wait…” Mana Kirishima stopped at her hostess' side, voice low and guarded, “just how do you define `succeed eventually'?”

“It depends,” Actress claimed. “How long can the human body survive without food and water?”

Two things happened.

First, nothing.

And then Mana shot forward to roughly pull the passive woman to her feet by fistfuls of her wrinkled and ill-fitting jersey. Kirishima jerked back, and they were nose-to-nose.

“Inflicting bodily harm won't help you.”

“It'll help you a whole lot less.”

Actress mulled this over. “I never thought of it that way.”

“I don't care!” Mana yelled. “Why do you, why's Asuka trying to kill him?!”

“She's actually trying very hard not to kill Shinji. It's just turning out to be very difficult to remove his tethers and I don't think that is meant literally. He's not actually physically anchored.”

“Of course he's not! What are you, stupid?”

“Now who sounds like Asuka…?”

In that bare moment Actress had been the vehicle for something wholly perverse and human, and Mana frowned as if the closeness was making her ill. She dumped the fake in the nearest chair. “Make me understand.”

“I don't know if I can do that. I'd just be repeating information that was transferred to me during the transplant procedure. It's fragmented and compressed. I think it's incomplete.”

“Try. I'll…” Mana gathered something on the floor with her eyes and came back up with it. “I will hurt you if you don't try.”

Actress' smooth gaze deburred Mana's frayed edges, but she didn't answer at first. When Mana blinked Actress said, “I assume that Asuka meant eliminating the physical and emotional bonds that have prevented his full integration with the Primary.”

She anticipated the question in Mana's stone-set façade. “I offer an allegory: Your life and the air that you breathe, the people that you interact with, are undeniably real to you. You cannot measure what you can't see or what you cannot feel or hear, or what is imperceptible to listening and measuring and seeing machines. You cannot make decisions based on things you are completely unaware of. So they fade into the background. They are Secondary. To Asuka, you are Secondary. To Asuka, your air and your people are Secondary.”

“Bullshit.” Mana laughed and shook her head to keep the information from settling in. “And you're crazy if you think I'm going to take that from someone who never even bothered to come-”

“-back?” Actress finished. “Perhaps you are the one that never came back.” The empty mask briefly shifted with a borrowed smirk. “Haven't you once considered that Asuka could not possibly make me and this place by herself?”

Something made contact very far from Mana's sweet spot, and she shuddered.

“Oh you're…” Then she said it again, quieter, until the weight of Actress' words was pressed into her and she could only tear up and gulp down silence. Mana didn't spit it back out until she had joined it with choked noise. “You are lying. You people wouldn't do all this to bring us together.”

“You're right. We wouldn't. It's neither an objective nor a probable corollary,” said Actress. “Secondary is a term of differentiation and also a statement of priority-”

“Who cares?” Mana stumbled over her cobblestone words. “What's it matter to say one place is more important that the other?!”

“Because although the stated objectives were the recovery of Shinji Ikari and his full integration with the Primary, liquidation of the Secondary was determined to be a likely consequence.” Pause. “I'm sorr-”

A cry of sick, coherent rage. The chair pitched back on one leg like a toppled tree. Actress reeled from Mana's burst of sound and movement, hiccupping air as she careened backward into the hollow cabinet below the sink.

“I was going to say I was sorry…”

That made Mana search for sorry, but as Actress slowly gathered herself all Kirishima received was an enormous, heartfelt…

…blink.

“You don't even care!” Mana wailed. “He was choking that day in the park because you were taking him away! You were trying to kill us!”

“I had nothing to do with the failed direct extraction. That was Asuka. Killing everyone that exists in the Secondary wasn't a stated objective.”

“And that's supposed to make me feel better? How in the world is that supposed to make me feel better?!”

The imposter's eyes tightened with the ghost of pity. “It's not supposed to make you feel anything.”

“Try again.” Kirishima drew her forearm across her face with a shaking breath. “You'd make a wonderful human being.”

“Thank you.”

“GET ME OUT OF HERE, YOU OBLIVIOUS, TACTLESS BITCH!”

Actress started to say something, but she caught the wild glint in Mana's eyes, and then caught herself. When she couldn't keep up with the things racing across Mana's face, she lowered her head.

“I understand.” And she sagged. “I have to retrieve something, so it'll take a moment.”

She didn't look at Mana as she pushed off the counter and wandered toward the kitchen entrance, behind Kirishima. But she stopped. Mana unwound to see what was there between them and the rest of the apartment.

The refrigerator abruptly sputtered off as Mana's even breath caught in her throat.

Because there was a brunette standing in a cyan fuku, and she held up a pistol to the milky bulb on the kitchen ceiling. There were her coal eyes transfixed as ribbons of light slid along the weapon's obsidian finish.

“Never mind,” said Actress. “I see it, now.”

-----

As he lay wheezing on his back on the decimated sidewalk, Shinji realized he didn't want to see anymore. But the End filled his nostrils and ears, and washed up like cold vapor to mist the corners of his stinging eyes. He was breathing in the End, choking on deft fingers of smoke and an advected bloody fragrance.

He had woken up on his apartment floor, tasting sleep and stale wet copper. He had remembered.

Then he had run, and that had worked pretty well until his body decided to mutiny. At the moment he had no choice but to take in the fire and billowing black streamers swaying up to the waxy day light.

He remembered again. Tried to move again.

Something plastic popped and smoldered behind a knee-high wall running alongside the boulevard; its firelight and smoke swapped places with acrid frequency, and he had to settle for being reminded of his clock radio faithfully blinking an ignorant time in his kitchen. In his bedroom.

Dead batteries had relegated his cell phone to microchip paperweight status. NHK had been experiencing technical difficulties, while T2BS apologized for its disruption in daily broadcasting service with a bulletin of black kanji and Keiko Matsui.

TV Tokyo-2 had endured a salt-n-pepper squall flashing over to a rapid of faces flowing by on a dark burning street just like this one, and there had been driftwood shrieks which were so happy as they were swept away by a salt-n-pepper squall flashing over to a rapid of faces.

That had been Thursday night, if the date that had been stamped in the anarchic footage was accurate. Today was at least Friday.

Mihiro had touched him on Tuesday.

He had turned the television off after that, bent on not wasting another second orienting himself of curling around his stomach which was overstuffed with hunger. Stepping around the empty denim jeans and the white shirt patterned with sakura blossoms, he had gained all of the clarity he would need.

Mana Kirishima was not the coagulated Orange plastered to his wall. He had abandoned her to the cruelest joke anyone could have ever played on him. Lying in the bathroom of that half place, limp and helpless. In the dark.

He had run. But discounting the chaos that had apparently razed this place while he was playing house, Mihiro still lived on the other side of the city. If Mihiro lived. If there was an other side of the city.

There had been, at least four blocks away from home, as he'd sprinted in the shadow of a high rise. His heart was pumping cold blood when he had heard it. Shrill peals of terror and ecstasy. Vile, mingling brews of each. Cascading down the sheer grey precast concrete. He surged past before he was doused and drowned in it.

The sixth block had looked like the ninth looked like the eleventh, and on one of them Misato had covered her face and sobbed. He had tried not to look at her chest which had been a hitching swell of ground chuck.

After that the buildings had grown taller, into steel and glass sleeves that threw shadows over broken shops and burning cars. The conflagrations had spread from the debris-strewn boulevard to his lungs, legs, and arms until his blood wasn't cold. He had slowed down, anyway, just enough to see a caravan of luxury sedans ponied up to the curb of a skyscraping condominium. A part of him had noted that the pearl roof of one sleek Acura was crudely convex, the bowl savaged by crimson smears. A part of him had noted there wasn't any body.

There wasn't anybody.

There were only trampled newspapers and crushed cans. Thrashed shirts and blood-washed jeans wrapped around and pinned beneath rubble. There was only flaming, popping detritus. Papers fluttering down through sunrays like eraser streaks through graphite canyons but Shinji knew they were really confetti to usher in the successful End.

The sounds were here, also. Keening subhuman drizzle too fickle by half to extinguish the fires on any of the streets he had flown then huffed then wheezed by.

And not the street on which he had crumpled when his legs had finally become nerveless rubber stalks. It was all he could do to roll onto his back and shut his eyes away from the perfectly ruined face hovering between him and his soaring steel witnesses.

“I think I get it, Shinji. I'm not good enough. I get it. I do.”

He took a ragged whistling breath, and that wasn't good enough to keep that delirium from lyricizing her fractured voice.

“I can't…I can't help that I'm an all or nothing kind of girl. I play to win. I win to live. I think you know I can't just unlearn that. Which is why it annoys the piss out of me that you couldn't find it in yourself to not be a conflict of interest.”

Shinji looked.

Her eye clouded over with false calm. Her blood, perfume and plastic filled his nose and pooled in the back of his brain.

He started searching for sounds beyond her.

“But don't feel too bad. I'm here to congratulate you, Shinji. You win. Good game.” She shook her head beyond the cage of his fingers. “And not just that, no. I want to show you that I can let go of things, too.”

A lull as she sighed poisonously and he heard something turning over, churning pitifully like a lost machine child. Shinji slid out from beneath her and staggered to his prickly feet.

“Oh no!” she demurred. “Don't be gracious in victory on my account, because what's the point of settling for a clean break when you can have a compound fracture, right?”

A coupe idled across a broad, empty intersection, its candy apple hood humming in the shattered entrance of the café it had plowed into. Aluminum chairs, tables and umbrellas lay brutalized in its wake.

The driver side door was open.

Shinji made due with a stiff amble. She hadn't moved, but even as he neared the car her words hijacked invisible cords channeled straight into his goddamned inner ear-

“That's what you did. It should be something you can see. Splinters of splinters, Ikari. Just sticking out of me. You'll never see them, now.”

He flung a bistro chair by one its gimpy legs and swung down into the plush leather cabin.

The seat was wet. The steering column, dash, the tinted windshield, all varnished in runny amber.

He ignored those things, the cloudy, claustrophobic memory they conjured, and threw the car in reverse. Thank God it wasn't a stick, and he drove in blissful silen-

“You know, you are talking to me. In your own special way.”

A slaughterhouse squeal of rubber as they whipped around a ruined corner. Inertia tugged at him but passed over his passenger like she was second-born. Only her eye and mouth moved, and even they were untethered from silly physical tenets.

Until they powered over a hard charcoal lump in the road and in the corner of his eye her plastic guise slipped like a tilted portrait. Eyebrows and iris, sanguine stripes of grime and the pink simpering fault of her lips, all listing and sinking crazily.

Just fix your face. Why can't you ever fix your da-

Another scouring of tread as a truck and its cargo bed of fire ghosted by the driver's side window. He checked the sideview mirror, which was no longer there.

“Why couldn't you tell me? How the hell else was I supposed to know you wanted this?” Laughter skittered along her slanted lips. “No one ever told me I was working on outdated information. No one told me…”

Words hung in him for a moment. Then

they shuffled

out

over some fulcrum

and they

came

down.

“Sh…shut up.” He swallowed but they came back up. “Shut up.”

“I'm invested now, you selfish little boy. Do you understand what you've done? Everyone's invested.”

“Fix your face.” But she didn't and the glue behind her drifting features was weak and molten.

“Why couldn't you just take no for an answer?”

“I…but I-”

“Why?”

“You treat it like the worst thing, you treat it…”

Shinji took in air that bubbled down his throat like lead that cooled and crushed his diaphragm. His knuckles frosted over the knotted tan wheel, the ridges of cracking bone blurring together. Everything married in a creeping tide of funhouse quartz and only his voice was brittle.

“You treat it like the worst. THING if I leave just a piece of me near you-”

“WHY?!”

“Just a part of me!” he cried. “Until I didn't need you anymore, I just thought it!”

The grinding engine stole over them like the empty city blending behind her.

“It doesn't really matter, does it? Forget it, Shinji. Can you do that? I think so. You're good at forgetting things.”

“Shut up!”

“You forgot yourself with a great deal of help. They're why you won't talk to me.”

“I am I am! I am talking to-”

And he cut the wheel again to avoid an empty school bus with orange windows as she said, “It must be great.”

“She is great and you're helping me kill her!”

“I'll kill her, Shinji.”

He couldn't say anything as she set her melting jaw and expounded. “If by some miracle I find my way to you…she'd better not be there.”

He bit down on a piecemeal sob and with self-loathing itchy in his throat spoke to scratch it. “She's not…” It still itched. “You did this!” 

“You finally get some heart and you won't even let me see it.”

“YOU CAN'T SEE AT ALL!” he roared, turning on her and forgetting everything. “YOU'RE NOT EVEN HERE! YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO FIX YOUR FA-” 

The world got loud and abrupt as Shinji's insides leapt towards his outsides. White flowered out to him as if shot from an explosive pistil. It was like being in a pillow fight with God or a very large chimpanzee.

Either way, he lost.

-----

“Poor thing,” said Yukie. “I've never seen a USP so beat up, before.”

She paused and torqued her wrist to see the other side of the dark scarred weapon. “What I want to know is how the hell you scratch up a black oxide finish. It's like they were trying to dig up a fossil…is it yours?”

She was looking at Mana, who shook her head like it was filled with sloshing water.

“Figures.” A tweak of Yukie's tight lips. “Don't take this the wrong way, but you don't look like the concealment holster type.”

“Who does?” the former spy asked and then swallowed. “But then I'm not the one wearing the middle school uniform.”

The brunette cocked a thin chestnut eyebrow. “Ouch! Daddy's little gunsmith cat gets taken down a peg.”

“I wasn't trying to.”

“Which, of course, makes it okay.”

Now Mana's eyes were crawling all over Yukie's pastoral veneer. “Are you asking me?”

“I'm just seeing how much more we have in common.”

Mana clipped the remaining words on her tongue and closed her mouth.

Actress did neither.

“It's mine and that's how it's always looked. If the same attention to detail was given to functionality as was to appearance, then it should work, also.”

“I was about to say,” Yukie laughed, “it doesn't make much sense to have it if you can't even use it.”

“I agree,” said Actress. “Can you give it to me?”

“Sure.” And Yukie beamed.

And she brushed past Mana Kirishima and stepped inside of Actress' outstretched hand. And she lifted her own hand which swept upward and missed the fake's fingers. And the hand with the gun curved high until it was above all of them while Mana's mouth formed an O.

And Actress watched as it all came down on her forehead with a searing crack.

Mana mutely gaped at that sound, the absence of it, and the hollow crash at the hardwood floor until she couldn't look anymore and had to snap to Yukie. “What the hell is wrong with you?!”

The brunette watched Actress coil into herself like a pill bug and gingerly staunch the scarlet tributaries trickling out from beneath her palm.

Yukie said, “Her.”

“You…” Mana's face was twisted by horrible comprehension. “You don't have any idea what's going on here, do you?”

“I bleed…” said Actress.

“You're damn right you bleed.” Yukie hissed. She raised the black arm as a lethal extension of her own and aimed it just behind Actress' vacuous eyes. “You can have little pieces carved out everyday until you're all used up. Just like you did with him so that when he got to me he didn't even know how to laugh. So yeah, you bleed, Asuka, and in this…place, no one will give a fuck.”

“I will.” When Yukie didn't spin on her heel and empty her magazine into her chest, Mana continued. “You don't like Asuka. Okay. I understand that much better than you think.”

“Don't be so sure about that.”

Mana's eyes fluttered at some irritant. “Look, would the real Asuka just let you hit her in the face like that?”

“You know Shinji, don't you?”

And they fluttered. “That should be the furthest thing from your mind right about now-”

“Because you smell like him and he's just all over your childhood.” Yukie paused as Actress pitched over on her knees and scraped a low moan from the back of her throat. “Your mom was beautiful, by the way.”

“That's not important.” Something wet traced a crooked trail down Mana's cheek. “This? It doesn't help us get out of here. Or home. You blow her away, and we'll both be stuck here until we die. Do you want that?”

“…I don't know.”

“That thing on the floor is just some pathetic copy, you moron!”

“But you're not…”

The muzzle whipped through an arc that terminated at Mana's sternum. Kirishima watched the steady metal slide and then slowly surrendered her hands behind her head.

“So you're really going back to bury that broken little man?” Yukie asked.

“I'm going back because I've got a life outside of him and I deserve the chance to find it…okay?”

The smile slowly infected the edges of Yukie's narrowing eyes. “No. Of course it's not. Because stepping all over someone who's lived their whole life with their face in the mud is generally a very not okay thing. Okay?”

“You could be talking about me and that's why I regret what I did to Shin-”

“For example, Mana, do I deserve to go home or should I be punished for lowering myself like you and all those other selfish tools that fucked him up?!”

“Does a bear shit in the woods? Is that how it goes?”

No sooner had the hazy voice drifted up from the floor did the smile drain from Yukie, the pleasantry whirlpooling away like reason from her eyes as she twisted to shut Actress up once and for all.

Until Mana crashed into her ribs.

Yukie's cry was lost in a clap of packaged thunder. They left their feet as the momentum flung them into the kitchen table and the USP from Yukie's strained grasp. Mana watched it scrape over its reflection before spinning off of the opposite edge…

And she got caught reaching. Her palms squeaked across the mahogany surface as she was roughly pulled off and away from it. She found her feet until something butted up against her heel which made her eyes go cerulean and wide until she slammed back into the refrigerator.

Mana rushed up again until the whiplash caught up with her. She shrank with a leaky hiss, clutching the back of her head as she slid down the rattling white box.

“What's up?” Yukie stalked over, peering out from behind her sweeping chestnut bangs. “I thought you like being on your back, Kirishima. Don't lie.”

“Y-you're Yukie.”

“Y-you're smart.”

Mana pushed up to her hands and knees, away from the maple slats. “I know why you're doing this.”

“Listen good, unless you know why I'm wearing this jailbait cosplay, you shouldn't be telling me anything.”

“I know about Jin.” Mana waited. Nothing happened. “I…I don't think he'd want to see you like this, if what Hika-”

Yukie's foot plowed into her ribcage and liberated her of air. Mana curled around her abdomen, gasping asthmatically.

“You know what Jin would want…?” The words were frigid at first, their heat absorbed by the eyes sooted by black wildfire. Which was spreading. “He would want someone to care. Shinji would've cared, he would've and you ruined him. I saw what you did to him, you liar.”

“We c-can't…stay here...”

“Liar! You're LYING!”

“Look around…” Mana began unfolding from the chrysalis of pain. “It's all…stale. Do you hear any neighbors? I bet you couldn't talk to them. Any cars outside? You couldn't drive them. We live outside of this and you know it.”

“I know! I know I-I…” Yukie lifted her chin to keep above the rising despair.

Mana looked up at her. The rest poured out.

“BUT NO ONE CARES AND EVERYONE'S PRETENDING AND THEY DON'T. CARE AND I CAN'T DO IT ANYMORE I JUST CAN'T OKAY I CAN'T AND IF YOU'RE SAYING I HAVE TO GO BACK AND LIVE THERE FOR JUST ONE MORE SECOND I'D RATH-”

There was a clap of packaged thunder.

Yukie's head snapped down so that Mana could see the cobbler of tufted hair and blood in the back of it. Then she glanced off Mana's shoulder and crumpled because there was nothing left to hold her up.

Behind her, Actress was lowering the pistol. “I don't think I like being struck in the face.”

“So that's it, huh?” Mana was standing as she wrapped an arm around her crooked waist. “That's why you shot her.”

“I was showing you the way out.”

Mana stood up straight.

They watched each other.

Kirishima shuffled out of the smooth pane of scarlet glass gliding out from beneath Yukie Utsumi and took a bloody step back into the living room.

Actress took a step towards her.

Mana stepped back and Actress took a step towards her.

 

-----

He stood before a cyclone of ash waltzing up to him from a white floor. The crooked dervish bulged then fell away like petals from a midnight tulip and she had been in the middle of it. She was reaching to him from across the moat of settling char, but her offer was the tainted color of rust.

Her eyes dropped to the beckoning curl of her stained fingers. “Oh, don't worry,” she laughed. “It's not my blood.”

Mercurial pellets pooled in some basin in his mind.

It wasn't her blood or his, but sacrifices all in his cursed name because everyone was invested now, you selfish little boy.

In this dream he knew enough of what she had done to say, “Goodbye, Asuka,” and turn his back and wake up for the second time that day.

-----

The black-blue truck rested on its broadside, driveshaft and warped chassis the underbelly of a felled steel beast. But Shinji wasn't interested in those so did not linger, passing the rear run-flat tires spinning madly in place and the bumper whose left corner was obscenely clefted.

He looked back across the street, feeling like he owed the horse he had rode in on, and Shinji had to admit; the half that wasn't a crumpled ruin of metal, plastic and leaking fluid was a really nice car. He had been sitting in the other half, but his neck still hurt and things like having a face made his face feel like one giant bruise.

Shinji seethed when he crouched to look beyond the paddy wagon door, which was laid flat against the scoured asphalt. The interior was stocked with slanted shadows and an aftermath of empty body armor, shoulder pads and gauntlets, headless helmets with tinted visors. And as he approached the toppled roof his fingers bit savagely into his grimy palm.

Someone drove the damn truck. It didn't shift gears or accelerate or hurl itself through the abandoned business ward because it just felt like it.

“There's a curfew, you know.”

Asuka hadn't said that. Shinji looked up, and she wasn't sitting on the riveted edge of the roofline. Her legs weren't dangling over the bold white letters stenciled along the navy finish. She wasn't Kaworu.

A number of choice words sprang to Shinji's mind when he looked at the wreckage he'd crawled out from. `Survivable' was not one of them.

“Why did you save me?”

The seraphic laughter in his bloody eyes was sharing the space. Was that why he wasn't smiling?

“The soldiers that drove this truck were JGSDF. They'd been ordered into the city to support the Tokyo-3 riot police, who'd finally been overwhelmed and could not enforce the martial law that had been authorized. They had been flown in directly from joint exercises with the Middle Army after having been directed midair and inadequately briefed.”

“Can't you just answer my question?”

“The soldiers wore reinforced helmets, steel-toed boots, and wrist guards. They had shields. Employed Janweija Sick Sticks and thought they were immune. They could not know there was only one true armor. They're not like you and I-”

“Kaworu.”

His eyes resurfaced and fell on Shinji. “I am doing as poorly as I can to keep a promise. Technicalities are the height of the Lilum culture. Wouldn't you agree, Shinji Ikari?”

You're not doing this to me, again. “If…if you're going to talk in riddles, I guess I can't do anything about that. But it doesn't help me understand what you want from me.”

Kaworu considered this at length. When he spoke again his airy melody was oddly heavy with what Shinji thought might have been the truth. “I want your happiness. I want you to live here. I want you to immerse your heart and realize that which you'd abandon like a troublesome dream we wake and live and die in.”

“Would you die?”

“I am at your mercy.” Mercy was underlined and a mile high. MERCY. “We all are. Isn't that enough?”

“I never asked anyone to be at my mercy.”

“But we are.”

“If you want me to, I can die with them. And that's about it. After I'm finished with what I'm doing here, kill me, if it'll make you feel any better.”

“This is not about me.” Kaworu started honing his words like cold shivs. “This is hardly about you, this is about the people you would leave to the darkness.”

“I won't tell them to find their own light.” Shinji shrugged off the voice whispering that he and the Angel should be switching arguments. “I won't tell them anything.”

“You don't have to tell them anything! All you have to do is be here and like it!”

Kaworu changed after he had said it...yelled it. Disdain or envy, or maybe it was malice was three sizes too small for him, which was probably why he shucked it off. And laughed. Mortality bubbled into the sound, warped it. He opened his eyes, and to Shinji they were a bit clearer.

“I feel better, now.”

“Are you mad that I popped off your head? I always wanted to ask.”

“Perhaps.” The truth was there again, on his shoulders this time, and he finally shirked it off. “Yes. It hurt. I had to remind myself that I offered you the choice. And it's still your choice, but if you truly think yourself incapable of the things I've just asked of you, then you are a fool.”

“Probably.” Shinji smelled pyre smoke on the dead wind. He turned into and breathed it in. “Thanks. For saving me.”

“It wasn't for your sake.”

“Good.” Shinji lurched forward and stifled a hiss for his own benefit more than anything else. He still had some ways to-

“She did not know…”

Shinji stopped.

“You must understand…she was a future you could live for. If I hadn't used the opportunity…”

“But you did.” Then Shinji nodded to himself and sighed through his nose.

When Kaworu saw this, he dipped his head between his coat rack shoulders. “You cannot ask me to save her…”

“I wasn't going to.”

This was over.

As Shinji straggled off, a child's laughter drifted with the smoke on the back of a summer breeze. Something, someone, choked it off.

-----

“Wait. No. Wait. Stop. I can't do this. Don't do this. Stop. Stop. This means stop. Don't. Wait. Listen to me. Wait. I'm sorry I pushed you I was mad okay you made me-STOP. STOP. Hold my hand. You did this to me you put your fingers in my head and did this. Can I get a do over. YOU DID THIS. Take my hand. I'm through because of YOU. Don't let go of my hand. She's really going to do this. Don't look. She won't stop. Don't let go don't look. Will it hurt. Don't look. Will it hurt will it hurt WILL IT HURT. Let's find out together,” said Mihiro.

-----

The Kamakura's neighborhood didn't seem real to Shinji. Dark dwellings rose over the vegetable soup dusk like uptown dollhouses daddy wouldn't people because he'd have to shell out the extra ten-thousand yen. Maybe the surrealism was aided by the hunger that plagued him. Nothing about today should have been real.

As it were, Shinji solemnly crunched his way up the Kamakura's rose quartz driveway. He slowed when he realized it was entirely empty.

And finally, the thought that had chased him down his apartment's piss-permeated stairwell was all kinds of heavy.

FULL STOP.

Mihiro might not be here. What if she's just not home? Wandering the bones of the city, like him? Lost in it or her mind or crushed by the gravity of it all?

She blamed herself. She couldn't even look at me…

Shinji had dismissed these reasonable things because he had been so determined to just do something. But now he faced the stone façade of her home and the ghost of his reflection in the front bay window. Beyond that haggard, translucent man, the interior was a sliver of darkness between pearl curtains.

There was no where else to go. Nothing else to do when not even her father seemed to care that she could bend words and numbers, sounds into art. That she'd had a boyfriend and had been dumped only after she had tried to have Shinta tongue and feel up and deflower her.

Shinji tried to stop himself but the transference was completely involuntary…and light speed. He didn't even know the man. He'd never even met the mother, but Ikari couldn't bring himself to condemn her, too. Perhaps because in a great number of ways -ways that counted- Shinji had never met his own.

Not everyone's nuclear family eventually melted down. Look at the Horakis. The Suzaharas before he had wiped them out. Mister Kamakura had stood his daughter up at her cello recital, had copped out on at least half a dozen other double pinkie promises that Shinji could recall. That only meant he had to be there to sell those lemons.

He had been there. They lived in the same house, ate from the same table, sat in the same leather seats in the same damn car when he drove her spoiled ass to school.

Mister Kamakura would remember her birthday and know what her scream sounded like as it hurtled through the drywall, stone and glass that Shinji flew by as he exploded to the front door.

The key twittered on his cat's cradling fingers before it scraped into the deadbolt, and he twisted.

There was a brittle snap; it had been a cheap brass copy belonging to her former instructor and he was Shinji Ikari, so it broke.

Desperation and a newfound hatred for doors lined up behind the shoulder he drove into the red wood veneer. The bolt slipped from the doorframe and deposited him onto the foyer as the portal slammed open.

The world capsized as Shinji jumped to his feet, but he crushed his eyes away to right the hallway and the shaded rooms branching off from it, the stair case to his right chasing up to the second floor.

Ikari closed the door to seal off the red light dusting the entrance, a waning evil. He was wasting a moment in the near dark trying to hear where the sound had come from when it leaked out again. It was different, this time.

She was crying.

And he was trundling up the stairs, sputtering at the top landing as a charlie horse scrambled up his left calf. The outline of six or seven doors rose from out the darkness, but only one had a luminous red rim that scraped the carpet beneath its sill like, like…toys?

Where was that from?

As Shinji wandered in, he didn't see her at first. He surveyed the bed or maybe it was a well-kempt rat's nest; then he inspected the ripped sheets and stained pillows spilling over the mattresses pulled halfway off the frame; the valley of books with shattered spines and magazines, the snarled layers of socks and pleated skirts, crumpled windbreakers and training bras; the gutted dresser, a toppled monument to an ousted despot with his bullshit propaganda half ripped from her walls. All imprisoned by the hellish dusk streaming through the vertical window blinds.

She was staring at him from below them. Her old, quavering eyes, her matted black bangs, they belonged in here.

“Mihiro…” He tasted phlegm. Unwashed flesh. “Just…whatever you do, please don't make me run…”

She blinked at him.

“Mihiro…?”

The girl lifted a damp palm up to her forehead like some Lilliputian slave. She came away with nothing, which she scrutinized.

“Are you okay?”

“She…she shot…”

“What?” Shinji started wading through her bedroom mire.

Her breath was coming in urgent, puttering bursts. “D-don't…”

“Mihiro, what hap-” He had to catch himself as something hidden clipped him. When he looked back up it was just him and the fluttering blinds.

And someone was pounding down the stairs.

How is she doing this?

“Mihiro!”

By the time Shinji had reached the top landing she was already opening the front door. Trying to. Mihiro lost her grip and sprawled backwards in a flustered heap.

“I have to know something! Please!”

She flailed upright, scampering back into the first floor and out of view. Shinji caught dirt smudges, tear streaks and rampant dread in a spare sunbeam before he staggered down after her. He didn't feel like chasing anyone that didn't want to be caught, but he couldn't leave her alone just yet, not in this empty crippled home.

It mattered little how small Mihiro was or where she was hiding, not with her broken, scattered breathing. After a minute, Shinji traced it to a room with a sepia leather couch wrapped around the edges of its sunken floor. An enormous plasma television clung to the far wall above a fire mantel while amber twilight filtered through the curtains; all the world was a candle lit egg yolk.

“You know I can't leave until you talk to me…don't you?”

Shinji didn't know how long he stood there at the edge of the room, a tired and famished invader.

Worst. Viking. Ever.

Until the fireplace door creaked open to surrender a reluctant sooty arm, then a foot, and Mihiro was shaking beneath the marble ledge.

This was a start. Okay. Shinji just hoped his smile didn't look as plastic as it felt as he stepped down onto the Berber carp-

“DON'T HURT ME!”

The air around her pulsed.

Then it detonated over the walls and shivering window panes in breaking waves, stopping just short of crushing him beneath the depth of her fear. It was hard staying smart enough to mend his piecemeal thoughts or even to see her through the rippling distortion. The concussing pressure was starting to recede and he could hear things again, but even so…

What can I possibly say to her? I don't know what to say…

Mihiro did.

“I don't know how to bring her back…I don't know how to do anything…” She choked something back but when she read something hateful in her grubby palms she let it go. “I can't even turn this stupid thing off!”

Shinji ignored the part of himself that atrophied. “It's okay.”

“It's okay?” Her eyes became the smoldering orbs of an untempered sage. “You know I did this, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“When I took you away?”

“Yes…I'm not going to hurt you…”

“You're the keystone here, Ikari. Everywhere.”

“I know.”

Her baby face screwed up beyond the simmering bulwark before she buried it behind her knees. “I did ALL of this. They're never coming back and it's all my fault!”

“No it's not.”

“Get the fuck out of here! You don't think I know you better than you know yourself? What makes you think you can ever lie to me, Ikari?!”

“Nothing.”

Mihiro looked up. Between them the barrier shuddered like the rainbow-Jovian tempest on a thinning soap bubble, and when he defeated her with her own hysterical logic…it popped.

She blinked vapidly before seeming to realize that just the furniture, trampled by her vanquished ego, stood between them. She rose on ramen noodle legs and shook her head at him, which likely freed the last of her resolve and was why she swooned.

He surged forward to grasp a wiry forearm as Mihiro recovered and wrenched and bristled.

“No!”

Her hand whipped around, cracked him in the cheek and broke skin before he seized it. Mihiro didn't think to kick, bite or spit in this reduced state of flailing fight or flight.

Just say things.

“SHE SHOT US IN MY HEAD, SHE BLEW OUR BRAINS OUT!”

Shinji had the stupid thought of asking what she'd meant before she abruptly reversed course and launched herself into him. He wasn't keen on letting her arms go, but the girl only reached up to wreathe his neck. He was leaning over slightly to accommodate her as she said something stifled by her own wet sobs in his tortured shirt. Shinji felt the squalling pulse of them slow against his stomach before they petered out in a somber breeze.

She got heavy. What had first been token rage was a gram short of critical mass by the time she'd unconsciously tightened the noose around his collar and whimpered.

He hooked his arm behind her knees to collect her, and nearly dropped her like a clan name; her legs and lolling head spilled awkwardly over the crooks of his elbows and he was Shinji Ikari, so she was heavy. She was heavier with every step so that he had to stop and catch his breath on the third riser up to the second floor. The fifth riser. The sixth. The sixth.

By then, Mihiro's fire-ashen face had twisted into a charred Rorschach's Blot; it was a ninja butterfly riding a Sumatran Elephant that had commandeered a turtle. Who was a ninja.

He was walking pregnantly back to her quarters until he recalled that HOVELICIOUS was an exceedingly kind, if not downright irresponsible, descriptor. So Shinji backed into a room whose door had been ajar at the dim end of the corridor. Mindful of her head, he turned and gazed into the vacant space, marveling at the perfect, antiseptic order. Then he sneered at the perfect, antiseptic order.

This was her father's room.

She murmured sullenly as he lowered her onto the bed. Maybe a bad dream, being jostled, or the -snicker- support from the concrete slab impersonating a king-sized mattress. Probably the third. Everything about the room had a hard, clockwork splendor. A razor must've been used the crease the made bed sheets. Just looking at Mister Kamakura's cherry-black wardrobe and work desk dirtied them; Shinji was passing judgment even as he rolled the bastard's leather desk chair over to the bed, as he sank into and sullied it.

This had to stop.

It was just that it took so little effort for him to square-peg every single coincidence; the shape or size of them hadn't mattered for years. Bemoaning the lack of photographs on the walls or tabletops wouldn't change the fact that some people were satisfied with keeping everything in their hearts. It wasn't like he had any pictures of Mana…

The glow from outside soaked one shaded window off to the side of the cedar headboard. The square twilight wasn't strong enough to breach the frame of the indigo walls but Shinji swiveled away, just in case Mihiro was on the verge of wakefulness.

If she saw him crying, he'd never hear the end of it.

-----

“What're you doing in here?”

“Oh, I'm just looking for something of yours that I happen to need.”

“Wrong answer. I'm ready to get on with the rest of my life, and so is everyone else here who is sick of wasting their careers and our resources on what was at best a futile money pit of a pipe dream to begin with. We tried, okay? Misato and I really tried for both of you.”

“Did you fail for us, too?”

“It happens. And guess what? That's all you're going to get.”

“I disagree.”

“Fine. Go to Central Dogma. Go ahead. Look out over that command bridge. You won't see any soldiers, and that's because there is no war. There aren't any enemies. Nobody else is going to sacrifice themselves for you.”

“Rei doesn't count, and you know it. She volunteered, anyway.”

“I don't care-”

“It almost worked.”

“Almost is not an absolute! There are more Reis and there are no Reis, are absolutes. No one else has the power to reach the Secondary, and there are no more S2 organs in the world are colossal, insurmountable absolutes.”

“…I know that it's over…”

“I'm sorry. I really am. But I don't owe you anything else. Please. Leave my office.”

“Doctor Akagi…do you think I'll ever see him, again?”

“I hope you do. But I'm smart enough to not give you a straight answer.”

“Maybe you weren't smart enough to begin with.”

“I don't have to take this, Asu…what're you doing with that chair?”

-----

Nurse Sayuri Ogawa put on a practiced, platonic smile, and began.

“And if you would please turn to your right, you will see a collection of works by Shinji Ikari. These pieces were of course individually crafted but since their conception and arrival here at Nerv Cranial they've become known collectively as the `Wall of Vitals'. Despite the universality of this umbrella term, the uniqueness of each artifact cannot be overstated, and is perhaps most evident in the contrast between EEG and Psychograph, paradoxically the most similar works.

“While both are, to varying degrees, methods of quantifying mental, emotional and physiological wellbeing, EEG measures electrical activity of the brain. Psychograph, on the other hand, is more suited to graphically illustrating the relative strength of an individual's personality traits.”

Sayuri eyeballed the full side of the suite dedicated to medical imaging for a little longer; the imbedded plasma screens of metered, chirping vacillations, serial cutaways of meat and bone and brain.

“Now, look closely at EEG, at the decomposition of the brain waves, and you'll notice a second set which is subservient to the principal array. This is highly characteristic of Ikari's early `Wet Dream' period.

“The question, then, is how to evaluate Ikari's `Wall', and the answer is quite literally inherent in the design of Cardiograph, CT, Intra-Cranial Pressure, Psychograph, and the like. How does a man who's been unable to speak for five years communicate with the world beyond his damaged brain?”

Sayuri's upturned palm swept out as if the plate of hor d'oeuvres atop of it existed. “This is how. They're portraits etched in high-resolution displays. Or perhaps an autobiography translated from scrawling lights and rhythmic pulses. These biometrics are certainly a pale substitute for Ikari's words or a legacy of friendship and laughter, but for now-”

Sayuri fell out of character as the buzzer grated through the hospital suite. She huffed loudly, circumnavigating the Smartbed to answer the door as she allowed her gentle, round features to briefly darken beneath the cast of a drifting cloud.

Sayuri took a long sideways stare at the sinuating lines of neurological activity, and then bumped a blinking gray box next to the door with a small bulge in her hip. When the door slid open with a high motorized peal her maroon eyes fluttered up and down the two tall men peering suspiciously into the room. 

“What're you dicks still doing here?” Sayuri groaned.

“Why don't you ask Doctor Marshall?” said the one with hair like short, brown bristles. He frowned back at her while the other man looked past Sayuri. “Like I don't have anything better to do than stand here all day and listen to you talk to yourself.”

“Shinji, Takeda. I'm talking to Shinji.”

“Same difference. Just don't let Sub-Commander Crazy catch you striking up a conversation with her man. Right, Shobu?”

“Yeah,” muttered the other man, taller than Takeda with his navy hair slicked away from his long, gaunt face.

Sayuri scoffed. “Just because you're all scared to death of her doesn't mean I have to be.”

“Afraid doesn't have a thing to do with it,” Takeda warned, smirking jauntily. “You get any comfier with him and you're going to find yourself at the Third Branch, like Shou.”

“Yeah,” said Shobu.

“Shou,” Sayuri pointed at Takeda while Shobu folded his arms and yawned, “got packed to Germany because he was a class-A pervert who couldn't keep his hands to himself. I touch Shinji because it's my job. See the difference?”

“Yeah, but I don't think she does. See the difference?”

“Then she can come here and sponge him down herself, and it's as simple as that.” She waved her hand between them. “You two can help when you're finished soaping each other up.”

Takeda looked at Shobu. “You're catching.”

“Yeah,” said Shobu, then his eyes flashed with understanding. And concern. “What?”

She rolled her eyes and slapped at the wall. The door sighed shut in their faces.

Sayuri turned to scrutinize the other occupants of the room; the three metal chairs beneath a set of pleated beige curtains; the television anchored to the pale ceiling and tuned in to The Static Channel; the sun-bleached reproductions of walled Japanese murals; the heavy door that divorced the main suite from its modest medical supply room and toilet; the dwarf refrigerator squatting stubbornly beneath the bowed legs of an ironing board, and the fat-bottomed corduroy recliner next to them.

And then Shinji Ikari.

“Well, I don't hear you coming up with ways to pass the time,” Sayuri sighed, slumping heavily. “Do you even care how long I practiced that speech in the mirror?”

A scale-down city block of diagnostic machinery crowded Shinji's Smartbed. The vein of his gastric feeding tube snaked across the starched custard sheet pulled tight against him up to mid-chest. Plastic tubes suckled at his thin arms while he breathed, smelled of triclosan and linen, and that was about it.

“Alright, alright. Relax.” She raised a pacifying hand to him and paused for half a beat. “Oh, of course not…look, no one's mad. I even got you a present, see?”

Sayuri picked up a pillow from a padded chair and played it like a feather-down accordion before ministering to him.

“Here ya go…” Her fingers stretched through the dark cropped hair she washed and combed daily, between the hard plastic nodes strategically posted across the back of his skull. Shinji slept in the V of Sayuri's forearm and the cranberry trim of her short polyester sleeve. She hosted a thin frown.

“I don't blame you,” she intimated in a clipped hush. “I wouldn't wake up either if it meant putting up with that crazy bitch...”

Then she yawned.

-----

Andre Marshall watched as Major Hyuga volleyed each of Misato Katsuragi's orders with a solemn, mechanical nod. The doctor pulled back and hazarded a glance away from the split screen monitor as the video feed briefly reduced his superiors to a mosaic of flesh-colored tiles.

Nerv Medical staff of varying rank and occupation swam past the wired glass of his office window. They either stopped to collect dockets or deliver them to the front desk across the way. Or they were dutifully lost in their digital clipboards as they bused themselves down the long main hall, their white coattails and black hair billowing as they sashayed out of view-

“Doctor.”

He snapped back from the coiled tension in Commander Katsuragi's voice as Hyuga ceded his half of the screen.

“Having fun, yet?” she smiled.

Andre threw his arms up with an effacing smirk as Katsuragi expanded to fill the vacuum, and returned the look. “I love my job,” he yawned. “Too bad this doesn't have a damn thing to do with it.”

“Or maybe you'll get a chance to save more people than you could possibly imagine.”

“That's a sick, selfish fantasy of mine, Misato, and you've no idea how grateful I'd be if you were to help me see it to fruition.”

“I'll do what I can.”

Doctor Marshall gave up his hands to the crown of his head and sobered, as did Katsuragi as she began. “Alright…The Magi put Sohryu either on level six or below level thirteen. Six, most likely. Now that discrepancy comes from the closing of the bulkheads, so either she went down through seven nine-meter stories in a fraction of a second or she's stuck on the sixth floor.”

“She could be caught in between,” he pointed out.

“Then we'd be home free. We had halothane pumped into those sections.”

He gave a small shake of his head and slowly blinked his tacky eyelids. “Wouldn't put my house on that, though.”

“I wouldn't put your house on that, either,” she admitted. “Now, as chief medical officer in HQ, you have the authority to relieve any personnel you deem unfit for duty.”

“Was there a promotion I didn't know about? What about Ritusko?”

“We can't seem to locate her at the moment. You help us get out of this, you will be getting a raise.”

“But still…” Doctor Marshall blew a breath out between his flapping lips like a deflating balloon. “What in the world makes you think she's going to listen to anything I have to say? You're practically her mother and look how much that's helped you.”

“I'm just using every advantage that we have in a dire situation, Doctor.”

“Not every advantage,” he yawned.

“Let it go, Mulder.” Something severe flashed across her face before she could reset herself. “You don't need to know anything special. All I want you to do is let your staff know that she's not supposed to be down there. Section Two is on their way.”

"One flight of stairs at a time."

"The elevators don't run on Murphey's Law," she reminded. "They're not going to work for her, either. Just make sure your staff is informed."

“I've done you one better. I've had two orderlies posted in front of his room since ACTRESS failed. Nurse Ogawa is in the room. I'd do you two better…” He stared through the monitor and Misato's flickering frown.

“Andre…?”

“…and seal us off from the rest of HQ,” he suddenly restarted, “but we can't seem to initiate the system-wide quarantine. And we can't use the EPO to restart nonessential systems or bring the elevators back online. Even if they did work they'd just send you back up to the first floor. And MedNet is down. Why is that, Commander?”

“We don't know yet and that's not your problem to solve,” she declared. “In a few minutes we'll have personnel down there that know something about crisis management.”

“Please, there's over twelve-thousand total hours of E.R. experience between my people. We are crisis managers. We are not, however, clairvoyants. What the hell is going to happen if she gets to the Third Child?”

“I just told you a minute ago, Andre. You really should've been paying more attention.”

“You're sure? I noticed that Hyuga was about to shit himself.”

Misato nodded her acknowledgement. “Good for you.”

“And we can't use the EPO to restart nonessential systems or bring the elevators back online. Even if they did work they'd just send you back up to the first floor. And MedNet is down. Why is that, Commander?”

The metal in Katsuragi's spine began to crystallize and she stiffened.  “You…just said that…” She squinted warily at him, measuring his heavy grey eyes. “Are you alright?”

“No...”

"When was the last time you slept?”

“Isosceles…”

“...what?”

“I'll be blunt, Commander,” Andre Marshall arched far back in his cushioned desk chair and smiled drowsily, “this `need to know' bullshit is getting old. Especially when you act like I don't need to know anything. Give me a reason to take all this seriously…”

“I don't think that it'll do any good to tell you with the way you're acting.”

“I'll be the judge of that, Pythagoras…” And then he fell out of his chair.

For the next ten minutes, lots of people in Nerv Medical fell out of their chairs.

Had they been lucky enough to have been sitting.

 ----- 

 “Sayuriiiiiiiiii...” slurred Sayuri.

She lifted her head a full centimeter off the floor before her cheek dropped back into the pool of saliva and spit-distilled blood issuing from her mouth. 

“...wish you were here...”

 

She dragged a low, long croak out of her mouth before consciousness sieved out of her again.

----- 

 “-ow, you are talking to me. In your own special way.”

Sayuri shuddered. Rolled away from the puddle of cold drool, coughing with great, whooping gulps of air, then whimpered. She brought a rusty arm across her face to block out the high noon ceiling lamps, and cried herself into oblivion as her eyes rolled up into her skull. 

 “-ver see them n-”

 

-----

 

“WHY?!”  

She threw her eyes open. 

Sayuri kick-started with a feral snarl and wheeled onto her stomach. She surged towards a steel chair beneath the window in a modified army crawl, gathering her elbows onto the thin burgundy padding. Sayuri sneered, lifted her dead weight until her torso was sprawled across the seat, smirked triumphantly,

-----  

“You finally get some heart and you won't even let me see it.”

and woke up.  

Sayuri blinked slowly, then feverishly as she refused to be shuttered off. She sent her eyes to different shapes, new lights with each exposure, and they picked up speed. She brought her right leg and then her left underneath her as they came back online, storing them against the rubber hoof of the chair leg with unwavering sloth. The woman righted her head, which had settled like a toppled boulder in the nest of her folded arms. She blanched at the taste of ass-worn vinyl and blood, and was suddenly more awake then than she had been in the last fifteen minutes.  

Sayuri rediscovered her hand, and hesitation, the will to touch her fingers to her cheek, and finally the need to recoil as if the flesh was on fire.

“Must've been quite the fall.”

Sayuri followed the thin, low words, catching something tall, white and black and peach at the side of Shinji's bed. It stopped talking. It shifted and Sayuri didn't blink at all.

Sayuri's left leg was unaware that she was trying to stand and she toppled sideways with a panicked gasp. Her palm slammed into the aluminum sill before the glass could knock her out again.

“Shiesse, Ogawa! You're a nurse, not an oak tree! Get your shit together!”

Sayuri did. When she pushed off of the sill she managed to stand and sway upright.

“Good girl. Don't tell anyone I said this, but I like to see you do well. You took such good care of him, Sayuri. I almost feel bad that I'm relieving you of duty.”

Ogawa looked at the white-black-peach shape again. This time, she saw.

 “Wh...where're...” The wrinkled words crawled back down Sayuri's throat.

“Take your time...you have all the time in the world, so take it.”

Nurse Ogawa only took a minute. “Where's Takeda...?”

“I relieved him of duty. He's big, and not just for a Japanese dude. But halothane makes you small and reasonable.”

“...Shobu?”

“I relieved him too, and at the cost of dramatic tension, Sayuri, I relieved every damned man, woman, and German Shepherd within five floors of us.”

“Doctor Marshall...?”

The other woman -because that was what she was- could only tilt her head and look nonplussed. “Don't you want to ask me about my hair?” She spooled a jet black ringlet around the crook of her little finger. “I think it's a pretty good job, considering I had about thirty minutes to do it all myself.”

Sayuri wasn't looking at the hair. The intruder examined the hem of her lab coat before letting it fall back around her hips. “Oh, don't worry,” she laughed. “It's not my blood.”

“I-I don't...I...” She waited while Sayuri fastened her tongue. “I'm sorry, Commander Sohryu...I-I don't think that you're supposed to be in here...”

The eyes behind the oval frames were patient and royal blue. “Why?”

“I just...I heard things. And-”

“From who? Who, Sayuri?”

Ogawa opened her mouth, which went slack. “I don't remember...”

“Oh.” Sohryu nodded. “It's just as well. I was asking because that's technically information reconnaissance, which is way above your pay grade. People who're smart enough to piece secrets together should also be smart enough to keep them to themselves, wouldn't you agree?”

“Yes. Yes, Ma'am.”

Sohryu shook her head. “But you're not that smart, are you?”

“Ma'am...?”

“No. You're not.” Sohryu began to coarsen. “And I know because you've worked here with Marshall for two years, feeding him updates, giving him urine samples, EEG data files, cardiographs for two years, and if you didn't notice the change in Shinji yourself, you've gleaned half a dozen times today from people who've been in and out of this miserable room. But let's pretend for a second that you don't know what's going down. What do you think it was closing in on the back of your tiny mind? What did it feel like, Sayuri?”

“Commander, I really don't know what you're talk-“

“What did it feel like, Sayuri?”

 Sayuri's eyes scraped the ceiling before they crawled back to the half-dead man between them. “...it felt like he wasn't coming back. Shinji's never going to wake up.”

Sohryu's lupine smile exposed gleaming ivory canines. “See what happens when you apply yourself?” She wagged a finger at Sayuri. “You should've done more of that, Ogawa. Did you think that you could slump after you got out of school, that we'd let you hit your glass ceiling in some cellar-dwelling government slog?”

“Being a nurse here isn't a government slog-”

“But this is Nerv, Ogawa. We're upwardly mobile. Read the goddamn mission statement. People don't waste two years as nurses here because they're too busy becoming doctors. Major Hyuga is twenty nine. Commander Katsuragi -Gott bless her defeatist, gin-pickled heart- she's just thirty-four. You're six years older than me and that brig-bunny Suzahara. Fuck half a decade, Sayuri, where do you see yourself in five minutes?” 

"W-why..." Sayuri's voice cracked under the strain of professionalism. “Why are you saying these things to me...?”

“Because, nurse, I'm going to do for you what years of college and shitty resume workshops couldn't, which is make you special. You're the one that doesn't belong in here. You've been given every chance to be somewhere else, and what did you do? Nothing. So now you can just stand there and watch.”

Sayuri jumped, now fully awake from the scene playing out in front of her and the resounding, desperate beat being drummed out on the other side of the automated door, where there was yelling.

“Don't worry about them,” and as Ogawa looked back, Sohryu waved a handheld display glowing with three boxes arranged in a loose trefoil. They wavered between lime green and emergency red. Sohryu grinned. “I told you. You're special.”

 

“Don't hurt him…please?” Sayuri's jaw muscles momentarily bulged. “He…he's just lying there…he's helpless.”

 

And for her troubles, the nurse earned a look reserved for exceptionally intelligent species of chalk.

 

“You stupid noob in stockings, is that what you think? When are you going to realize that you've been caring for a one-way mirror? He's not helpless, Sayuri. He's always been making decisions, always had choices. He couldn't convince me otherwise back when he could actually speak to me, so what makes you think that you can convince me, now?!”

 

Sayuri was reeling. “I'm not…nothing…”

 

“Then look at him…LOOK!” Ogawa flinched out of her stupor and did what she was told. Sohryu still waged her eyes on her. “I promise that all you'll ever see is the reflection of the total worth that Shinji Ikari has assigned to us. And you can watch that empty shell until your eyes shrivel up like prunes, you can talk to it for years on end, when everyone except for you has given up, and you still won't be good enough!”

 

The pounding on the door doubled, tripled in intensity. “Don't hurt him,” said Sayuri.

 

“But it's us that he's been hurting.” The false brunette thumped her breastbone. “Us. I've had it. I won't let him do it, anymore.”

 

“I won't let you hurt him.”

 

“Oh, I know you wouldn't, Sayuri.” Sohryu lazily raised a hand with the PDA as if testifying to Sayuri's gathering resolve. Her thumb made small circles over the touchscreen. “You'd take a bullet for someone when they had a howitzer pointed at them.”

 

“What does that mean…?”

 

“It means that I really don't see how you're going to keep the potassium chloride I injected into him from stopping his heart.”

 

Sayuri stood and blinked at what she'd been told.

 

Sohryu pressed a button. The medical imaging leisurely calligraphing Shinji's life story frittered away and the flame of them snuffed out, leaving the wall a de-energized black.

 

They all exploded back in seismographic seizuring lines, winding, vagrant trails that chased and escaped one snaggletooth apex after another, and then did not.

 

The wall went black again. It stayed that way.

 

“It's not your fault, Sayuri.” Sohryu's eyebrows knitted sympathetically. “You wanted him to do well. You wanted him to get better. To talk to you. To understand you because, well, you deserve it. Anyone who invested that much time and care in him deserves that. Wanting to save him is natural because you know in your heart that he'd want to be saved. And you could've, had you known what I was planning, had dextrose and insulin or calcium chloride on hand to counteract the potassium overdose.”

 

Sayuri stood and blinked at what she'd been told.

 

“But that's it, isn't it? When it comes down to it, you just didn't have enough information. For example, I lied. You don't have any time left at all. No one here does. You were cut out of the loop before you had a clue there even was one.” The pity stored up in Sohryu's pinching brow melted down into feverish, quixotic glee. “Welcome to my world.”

 

Her smile warped and ruptured. She was orange, a cascade of thrashing liquid sheets emptying out onto the birch-patterned floor. Tides of her raced beneath the bed to dash themselves against the shores of Sayuri's nursing clogs. What didn't soak Ogawa's crumpled skirt and tunic stretched out into crude runnels.

 

The halls outside of Shinji's lovely suite went quiet. The world went quiet.

 

-----

 

The sensation of having his heart stop was as real and completely inaccessible as the murder of a first memory, and was why Shinji woke up the third time that day. As he blinked away germinal sleep, the feeling disintegrated like all dreams rent by the tension of the real world.

 

“Why did you bring me in here?”

 

Mihiro's voice was grainy from disuse. Shinji could just make out the marble of her half-shuttered eyes, so he looked there. “I was going to put you back in your room, but I don't think that would've been…safe.”

 

“I hate this place.”

 

“Well, I'm sorry, okay? If I knew, we would've just stayed down stairs. I did have to carry you.” Shinji massaged the back of his sore neck as he leaned forward in Mister Kamakura's chair. “So…how're you feeling-”

 

“Like I effectively ended the lives of seven million, three-hundred and seventy-eight thousand, six-hundred and forty-two people.”

 

He let her cry for a while.

 

-----

 

“This is what they do, Mihiro,” Shinji eventually explained. “They find out what they need from you, they do what they have to in order to get it. They use you. And when they don't need you anymore they throw you away and leave you with all the blame.”

 

“They're really, really good at it.”

 

“Asuka's good at everything.”

 

“But not good enough for you to go with her?”

 

Shinji hesitated, realizing Mihiro wasn't asking as much as she was flipping to the back of him to skim his catharsis. “I…just can't look at her, anymore.”

 

“Then she will not ever bother you again.”

 

“She'll always bother me.”

 

Fabrics whispered as her edges pulled inward and reduced her in the darkness. “I hate this place.”

 

“It's not like I'm holding you prisoner in your own house, but you really shouldn't go outside, and-”

 

“It's over, Ikari.”

 

“You should be in here, anyway. For when your dad gets back and, who knows, that could be any second from now.”

 

“You think so, huh?” Silent laughter briefly wracked her, but he persisted.

 

“Your mother could call. This is world news and I'm pretty sure they have phones in…um…”

 

“Toronto.”

 

“Right.”

 

“No…wait, she's in Brisbane, now.”

 

“Okay. They have phones there, too-”

 

“Did I say Brisbane? I meant she's networking a tech symposium in Bristol. Silly me.”

 

“But I thought she was in Bristol last month, why-”

 

His mother's face was a charcoal eclipse that God had smudged with an errant thumb. Her hands stretched down from the corona and

 

Yes mommy yes this is more than enough

 

he sighed, long and hard.

 

Mihiro went on.

 

“She's selling a proposal in, well, west of Taiyuan might not mean anything to you. Her flight was cancelled at Hartsfield-Jackson, they screwed up her itinerary in Marseille but she was like whatever, because she's got old girlfriends there and lots of catching up to do. They thought she was sick, teacher, they quarantined her in Singapore thinking she had Troy Sullivans Type-B when it was really just Yeoman's Yellow Farts.”

 

“…you made that up?”

 

Her head came up, her hand came down, and there was sound like a popped balloon.

 

“Of course I made it up! Or do you really think she was held over for a night because there was ice on the wings in Bali?! Bali! Why won't you rent a clue?!”

 

“You…you mean buy a clue…?”

 

This was the part where she'd blink herself out of her stupor, fill the room with righteous, ephemeral light, and send him further away than any living man could possibly go. It had come out sounding like a joke at the expense of her mother. Shinji Ikari, castoff from a woman he'd never spoken to and a man he couldn't even look in the eye, making light of a thirteen year-old girl's dead parent. It was enough to make Mihiro smile. Because that was what she did.

 

“I was embarrassed,” she said.

 

“Why?”

 

“Well, at first for you, actually.” Mihiro wiped something invisible from her face. “I started making these stories up and waiting for you to get it, but you didn't. So I just made them dumber, and dumber, and dumber-”

 

“Okay.”

 

“-and dumber.”

 

“Alright. Okay.”

 

“I swear to you. I started running out of material.”

 

“I was just being polite,” said Shinji. “It wasn't any of my business, and I was getting paid.”

 

“Don't you mean, PAID?”

 

He laughed weakly, and maybe she joined him so he wouldn't feel so guilty about it. “That too,” he said.

 

What little exuberance she had fizzled out. “I'm a coward...”

 

“No you're not. And don't be embarrassed. It's your dad's job to tell people things like this, not yours.”

 

“He was a weak man, Ikari.”

 

Oh.

 

His vision had adjusted by then and so had hers; she was looking at him. Or watching over him or looking through him. Shinji couldn't tell which, and was relieved when Mihiro finally rolled onto her back and interweaved her fingers behind her head. Before she could relax, her profile quickly turned curious. Offended. Horrified.

 

“What's that smell?” she wondered. “Is that you? Are you that smell?”

 

“What smell?”

 

She reluctantly sniffed her armpit. And then stopped.

 

“Holy shit.”

 

“I wasn't going to say anything.” Shinji shrugged. “I probably need a bath just as bad.”

 

“Hm.” The dark air was filled with the sound of her not disagreeing with him. “Teacher?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“You ran all the way here?”

 

“For the most part, yeah. Why?”

 

“Nothing…from your place?”

 

“Yeah. Why?”

 

“Nothing…really?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Stop lying.”

 

“Why would I lie about that?”

 

“I don't know…for real?”

 

“Yes. Why?”

 

“Nothing.” She blinked. “Why didn't you just ride your bike?”

 

-----

 

Epilogue

 

Hikari laughed.

 

Shinji didn't understand why, seeing as he'd only related a story about one of Kensuke's strange coworkers, and hadn't meant it to be funny at all. He was just filling the empty space between them, which seemed further than the distance between his Tokyo-3 and Keio University, nowadays. They'd been talking for ten minutes and Shinji still didn't know why.

 

He would think that she'd have the courtesy to at least try to make her laughter bright and buoyant, but Hikari never did. She had this way of making the sound go play outside with the other pudgy noise that lived down the street and sucked at life and Nintendo.

 

And if he had just heard right, Hikari also had pictures of Mana.

 

Shinji stood away from his light breakfast to weave in and out of his living quarters as he listened.

 

“They're not very many, Shinji. Eight. No. Ten.”

 

“Ten is more than eight,” he said.

 

“I realize that,” she said. “It's just that she's not even the focus in half of them.”

 

“But I don't have any pictures of her.”

 

“Well…okay,” she breathed. He was putting the orange juice away and imagined her giving a conciliatory nod. “I actually thought you'd say that, but I just wanted to be fair and warn you.”

 

“I think you're being more than fair.”

 

“Not really. I have plenty of pictures. And I knew her. You can't really say the same.”

 

“No…” He blinked at Friday's nascent daylight and either remembered to move or forgot to stay still.

 

After a wistful puff of static, she told him, “Good. Then I'll just send these out and they should get there by…when do you think, Tuesday?”

 

“If you mail them, sure, but I know where you live. I mean, I can just pick them up.”

 

She doled out laughter again like it was a consolation prize. “Ikari, it's not a package or anything. Don't feel like you have to go out of your way for me, okay?”

 

“But you're doing me a favor.”

 

“I know, Shinji.”

 

“It's just going to bother me until I do something for you.”

 

“You've already done enough.”

 

“I…okay. Okay.”

 

That was it.

 

As usual.

 

Shinji lowered the phone to the kitchen counter, having momentarily misplaced the receiver.

 

He was oddly resigned to the way he'd just been marginalized. Even in high school, when Asuka and Touji weren't warring between them, their friendship had never progressed past scripted lunchtime pleasantries. They read their lines and went to their trailers and had take two during clean-up duty. They both seemed content in their half-assedness, so why would it be any different, now?

 

Why would it be better, now?

 

For Hikari, there was always a project. Or a test. Or dinner to prepare. Or Kodama struggling to sound sincere before telling him that she'd stepped out. Oh no, Shinji, that's okay. She'll call you back.

 

Shinji didn't want to spend time with Hikari as much as he wanted to keep the weight of her from swaying over his head. The problem was that she wouldn't talk to him long enough to allow that to happen.

 

In any case, he was satisfied with the company he kept, which consisted of Kensuke and his coworker, Shinji's roommate, and the soccer ball she had just punted into the sink. Which was brimming with dishes she had promised to wash. Six days ago.

 

After two years of living with her, Shinji didn't bother getting mad, anymore. Now, it just kinda happened all on its own.

 

“What did I tell you about kicking that ball in here?!”

 

“Something that I completely forgot,” Mihiro chirped. She drifted in on an odd half-waltzing skip and bumped him as she removed the hex-checkered ball from the standing water. Shinji instinctively went to work uprooting her from his mind. She was always tacky to the touch that way.

 

“I don't even know why you have that thing,” he wondered aloud. “You hate football.”

 

“But I like tripping people,” Mihiro pointed out. “It's World Cup week in Phys-Ed, that Miyazawa tramp plays for class 1-C, and I'm gettin' while the gettin's good. She's fast, but she's got the reflexes of a dead cat.”

 

“You just sound hungry to me. Have one of my muffins if you want.”

 

“Pass.” She stopped toweling off the ball to pat the hips of her plaid uniform skirt.

 

She was joking, right? Shinji was almost scared for her when she had started living with him, but that was before he realized she could eat her weight in flan. Apparently it all went somewhere, seeing as she had eventually grown up a few centimeters and grown out a few more.

 

“You look fine, Mihiro.” She did. Honestly and truly.

 

She waved at him. “I'm not going CLAMP on you or anything. It's just that our homeroom's going to Ocean Dome next week and I'm wearing that two-piece. You know that red one?”

 

He looked away. “No.”

 

“With the watermelon seed print?”

 

“No.”

 

“And when I leaned forward you could see all the way to Okinawa?”

 

“No.”

 

Her eyes bounced away and back to him before narrowing. “But you helped me pick it out.”

 

“Fine, I remember, okay?” Mihiro grinned at his admission. She was beginning to like this game, which was dangerous. “I just hope you don't go around broadcasting that. Enough people talk as it is.”

 

“Wait…about us? Who?”

 

“No one.” Which would last about as long as a napkin in Sparerib Hell. “You know Mister Hamamoto? On the third floor?”

 

“You mean Humbert Humbert-san?!” She popped up from where she'd been leaning against the dinner table and crowed. “That old dirty bastard! He's just mad I'm legal. You shoulda seen the way he looked at me when I first moved in.”

 

“You mean…looking looking? Why didn't you say anything to me?”

 

“Because he's harmless, Ikari.” She arranged a preemptive, apologetic smile. “You aren't.”

 

-----

 

Shinji fast forwarded through his breakfast, clearing the table, eyeing the dishes, email, caving in, washing the dishes. After he'd helped Mihiro find the navy blazer she was already wearing, she huffily took a comb to the hair that tumbled down her back in black-licorice wavelets; she hadn't bothered cutting or straightening it in months. Shinji organized a pile of architectural drawings that had grown increasingly renegade as the semester dragged on.

 

“Don't worry about walking me home,” she said as she gusted behind him, presumably to her room. “I'm sorta meaning someone.”

 

“Finally,” he whispered.

 

“What do you mean finally?”

 

“I only-” Shinji turned and pulled back to avoid whipping his face through hers. It was a nice little trick, but after the eleventy-thousandth time he just wanted to know where she was getting all those fucking rabbits. “Do you have to stand so close when you do that?'

 

“What do you mean finally?”

 

“Nothing. You could stand hanging around someone your own age, that's all.”

 

Her smile turned thin and smug. “But I didn't say he was my age, now did I?”

 

He shrugged. “You're a better judge of character than I am.”

 

“You're doing a piss-poor job of preserving my chastity,” she admonished.

 

“I'm not your dad, Mihiro.”

 

Her eyebrows arced high as she shook her head. “You've got no idea how much that improves my estimation of you.”

 

“Yes I do.”

 

Being this close to her was like velcro snagging on his heart. Shinji would've been compelled to tell her his darkest secrets if she hadn't already known them all.

 

Mihiro turned to leave, slinging her satchel across her body as she hustled to the door. “Take an umbrella, teacher.”

 

“I will.”

 

“FYI, he's just a friend. A good guy. He just doesn't know it yet.”

 

“That he's a friend or a good guy?” he asked.

 

“Both.”

 

“Then please don't break him down, like you did with what's-his-face. That was terrible. Try to have fun. Make it a good day.”

 

“I'll make it a great day…”

 

When Mihiro looked back, he just barely kept from frowning like he had guzzled an unpasteurized liter of chunky cat milk. It was just impossible to return that smile, broader than the border of her face. But it wasn't so much felicity as it was a show of force, and he knew it.

 

It was going to be a great day. There wasn't much that Shinji Ikari or anyone else could do about it.

 

-----

 

Shougeki-4 was an hour's drive from Tokyo-3. Each trip to the lake -because Kensuke thought that was what it was most like- was accompanied by hillside forestry and pulled-cotton clouds; layers of the world grinding past each other as he navigated the winding mountain blacktop between the rock walls. The final stone bend reliably peeled back to reveal water turned into orange, brackish wine in a basin a hundred meters below.

 

Kensuke had at times driven down the mountainside fast, other times slow. That only meant he had the choice of being quickly engulfed by the glittering amber mouth, or having time to think about all the people devoured there, their lives indefinitely suspended.

 

After looking out over the receding grass line of its trampled shore, over its fifty-million murky liters, Kensuke thought of the smell in much the same way that fish thought about drowning. He was posted there one day of the week, after all, and so was Itabachi, who was leaning heavily on his flimsy and load-bearing cubicle wall.

 

“What the hell kept you?” asked Itabachi.

 

Kensuke had been slumped in his desk chair for all of negative three seconds. Driving was prohibited on the west and south shores. His feet hurt, he was tacky from dried, salty sweat, and his feet hurt. But Itabachi knew how far he could lean on Aida, and he'd eventually give Kensuke the days-end minutes he had learned to cherish. All Kensuke had to do was indulge him.

 

“Yukimura thought he saw footprints today.”

 

“No…” Itabachi pulled back with a snake-bitten look “From the fucking lake? He's always finding shit up there, Aida. Why are you encouraging him?”

 

“I'm not. We document claims of sentient activity so that's what I did.”

 

“And…?”

 

“It was a footprint…” Itabachi refused to be baited. Kensuke sighed and oscillated in his desk chair, “from a DEPE-LCL diver. Yukimura forgot they were doing salinity tests.”

 

Some small, petty triumph pushed up on the bigger man's cheeks like tent poles beneath a heavy tarp. Kensuke countered with a frown. Itabachi's expression appropriately dampened.

 

“What're you so happy about?” asked Kensuke. “It was an honest mistake and you seem to be the only person that doesn't want to make it.”

 

“It's just depressing, man. Going up there and seeing everyone get there hopes up, you know? Nothing ever comes out of that place.”

 

Kensuke was tired. “I was just doing my job.”

 

“If you say so.”

 

“I wasn't getting my hopes up.”

 

“Chill. Alright.”

 

They left it at that, letting the conversation drift down to less volatile reactants, like food, where to and with whom to consume it; Dinner, at Mimi's Café, and with Shinji in that order, because Kensuke had no strong desire to eat Shinji at Dinner with Mimi's Café. If Mihiro came, things would be only slightly less volatile. But she was cute. That mattered.

 

Matsuo reared back to peer outside of Kensuke's labor box before turning back. “I'ma get going. You should do your duty station report now. If you wait, you know Sayed's just gonna ask you at the ass-end of the day.”

 

“I finished it at the lake.”

 

“You see that candy-raping sonofabitch, you tell him the next time he touches my werthers I'm gonna sit on his face.”

 

There was simply no way for Kensuke to convey just how less hungry he was thanks to what had been said. He could only blink until Itabachi blundered an explanation, and then skulked off.

 

He liked Itabachi, though he couldn't pinpoint why. Maybe Hikari had been on to something when she'd told him that every Moe and Larry needed a Curly. Maybe not. The important thing was Kensuke was now in the right frame of mind.

 

Aida pulled open the thin drawer below the monitor and the mad Technicolor logo bouncing across its dozing black screen. He saw a ruler, a pocket calculator and napkins embroidered with a `C' that stood for chicken or cookies, he couldn't recall. Kensuke pulled back a layer. His eyes glazed over the March 2022 edition of Combat Magazine, the May 2021 edition of Combat Magazine, the October 2021 edition of Combat Magazine, January 2022 ed-there it was.

 

Kensuke picked it up, relaxed, and fingered its fraying edges.

 

The paper was now a tainted, dusky shade away from its christened white. It was coming apart at each of its fatigue creases. A sizeable corner had long been ripped away like an outlaw continent and mended at its fault with masking tape. The written words were slurred by damp fingers, muttered by fading ink, coerced by scribbled additions and subtractions.

 

It wasn't his, at first, had been destined to be evidence or sealed away forever as the personal effects of a disappeared. Neither had he planned on keeping it. That was all before everyone knew that what had happened two years ago had been bigger than Nerv or Tokyo-3. When reports of people crashing to the ground in tang puddles started filtering in from Korea, from Siberia, from trawlers lurching in the Bering Strait, Kensuke knew no one would give a damn about some anonymous missing stationary.

 

Shinji might have, seeing as it was originally addressed to him. However if the former pilot knew it existed, it was a secret he guarded with forgiveness and that burdened smile. And if Shinji didn't know…

 

Kensuke,

 

This is not-

 

…it was much too late to give it back, now.

 

-----

 

It poured hissing silver needles as Souichi Nakajima arrived on Eri Suzuki's front porch. He had come through the early evening deluge unscathed but for the damp bells of his slacks, the thin toolbox in his left hand, and the umbrella he was shaking free of crystal droplets. Miss Suzuki stepped aside to let him in, and looked out at her short soaked yard and the narrow alley beyond her property wall.

 

“Wow…” Her effacing smile airbrushed shallow lines of advancing age. “You could drown out there. You could've just rescheduled.”

 

“The rain isn't a problem.”

 

“Dedicated, are we?”

 

“Poor.” He bent over to park his sneakers next to a pair of sandals at the foyer. “So yes, I'm very dedicated.”

 

“I know what just what you mean,” she laughed warmly, wringing her garden-gloved hands, “for a few months when I was in college -a long time ago, mind you- I was a waitress and a librarian, and a photographer at the same time. Money makes a mailman out of you when you don't have any.”

 

“I suppose. Can you show me where it is?”

 

“Rain, sleet, and snow…” she ventured, “get it?”

 

“Yes. Can you show me where it is, please?”

 

Miss Suzuki ironed the creases out of her cheerful visage as they appeared, and nodded compliantly. Souichi paced her as she twittered with a graying lock of hair and pattered down the right wing of her house. Thunder drummed on the base skin of the Suzuki ancestral home as he locked eyes with the time-weathered portrait of a stout, mustachioed man. Then another.

 

“I'm…” She spoke without looking back. “I'm sorry if I was being presumptuous, Mister Nakajima.”

 

“Do not-” He cut himself off, grimacing to himself. “Don't worry. I'm eager to get started, that's all.”

 

“I see. So do you like playing pianos, too? Or just tuning them?”

 

“Both.”

 

“Good!” She was beaming again. “Now I don't feel so bad about asking.”

 

“Asking what?”

 

“I want you to teach someone…my sister's grandson.”

 

“I don't teach.”

 

“Oh. I didn't mean for free, of course.”

 

“Of course. But I don't teach.”

 

“Ah…” she mouthed. “That's too bad…”

 

The warmth had slipped from her for a second. Far too long for him not to have noticed.

 

“He…your great nephew plays?”

 

“Like a one-legged man runs a race,” she laughed. “That's the problem.”

 

She ventured into a room populated by a baby grand Yamaha piano and a small window high on the opposite wall which was broadcasting the wet and windy world. Miss Suzuki crossed the bare wood floor to run her fingers over its buxom case. She came away with a swath of dust that had settled over its rich walnut surface. Some glowing memory touched her thin lips as So looked on from the doorway.

 

“You know, I wouldn't even have bothered to have it fixed. But he can't stop pounding on it. I don't have the heart to stop him, and neither does Yomiko- that's my sister.”

 

“But why are you asking me?”

 

“What do you mean? You're here now, aren't you? I like your rates.” Eri poked the air between her and his neutral face. “I like you.”

 

He shook his head, denying something only he knew was there. “You just met me.”

 

“And just what does that have to do with anything, Mister Nakajima?”

 

Souichi stopped looking at her. “It's your family's piano, isn't it? If you're worried about the money, couldn't you ask a loved one?”

 

“That would've been my husband, who had great fingers,” she said, snapping her own. “And Shiro would've taught the boy, too. At least, when he wasn't screaming at him at the top of his lungs-”

 

“But he's gone.”

 

“Very. Lung cancer. Being first was Shiro's real talent, now that I think about it.”

 

“I,” His voice was scratchy, but he smoothed it out. “I wonder at a talent that deprives a wife of her husband. At the worth of it.”

 

Eri Suzuki looked up, startled at the truth in Souichi's abysmal muddy eyes. “Now what would ever make you say such an obvious thing in such a profound way?”

 

“My real talent,” Layers of him recovered as he stared down at the grains of the storm-shadowed slats, “which is profundities that do nothing to improve the circumstances of those around me.”

 

She nodded as her mouth migrated to her cheek in puckering contemplation. “Have you ever considered that maybe you just haven't met the right person yet to pawn all that wisdom off to?”

 

“Never.”

 

“Well, if you ask me, and you're not but work with me here, `never' is only going to last until you learn how to smile. Believe me, you're a very handsome boy.” Eri approached him with a wide familial grin he couldn't match, and patted his shoulder as she slipped past. “She's all yours. I'll be in the greenhouse if you need me.”

 

“I…very well.”

 

Halfway down the hallway gloam, the graying woman glanced back. “And don't feel at all like you have to teach the boy. I was just throwing it out there. Alright?” The she stepped through a door at the end of the hallway.

 

“Alright. But in all honesty, I've recons-”

 

She closed it behind her.

 

Souichi's mouth hung open a moment after, and then with great deliberate slowness, closed it and sighed. He waited there as the summer rain tampered with the walls and rooftop. When nothing happened to him he stepped into the room, where the Yamaha was basking in the faded glory of refracted, storm-filtered daylight.

 

So hefted the toolbox onto the plain piano bench he had dragged from beneath the keyboard. The seat had chamfered edges with chipped enamel, hand and fanny prints in its layer of dust. He opened the keyboard cover and when eighty-eight wide coffee-stained dentures smiled up at him, Souichi pushed down on a discordant ivory tooth; it was a drunken middle-C that perished at the walls.

 

His fingers floated over similarly unkempt D's, F's and G-sharps before they settled on a plaquing A. He started there, propping open the piano lid and laying out two tuning forks, a hook-nosed tuning lever, and felt rolls of muting gauze from his kit.

 

So sat down and peaked over the rim, into the soundboard and the field of taut, disfrequented cords. The tuning pegs were tucked on the inner lip of the case like auxiliary teeth in a Tiger Shark, and he gripped the wooden haft of the tuning lever to play dentist.

 

The silver ratchet side of the lever clapped over the tuning peg. Souichi kept it there as he reached for the muting strips-

 

“Would you smile for me?”

 

-and groaned.

 

Mihiro blinked incuriously at his tired, pleading frown from where she sat.

 

“You should go,” he started, deftly plucking the tuning fork from her sloppy hands. “This is neither my home, nor yours.”

 

“Why don't you just tell her I'm your sister?” She grinned. Scooched over until their hips touched. “Or your girlfriend? She'd swallow that, I think.”

 

“I wouldn't.”

 

“Like I'd bother telling you such an obvious lie, So.”

 

“Hm.” Souichi unwrapped a length of muting strip, stood, and leaned into the soundboard to tend to a piano string. Until she kicked him. “What is it?”

 

“How much do you get paid for this? I'm just curious.”

 

“It depends,” he said.

 

“On what?”

 

He sighed. “Stuff.”

 

“That's not a very good answer,” Mihiro chastised. “It lacked…I don't know… words?”

 

“I'm busy, Mihiro.”

 

“We're all busy, Nakajima.” Kamakura shook her head. “You're just lucky that I like you. I usually charge a flat rate when people blow me off.”

 

“I've always wondered how much you were being paid to harass me.”

 

“It's a labor of love, So.” She testily poked him in the ass with a tuning fork. “And all I've done so far is asked if you'd turn that right side up frown upside down.”

 

“I'll consider it if you stop tampering with my equipment -let go of that- and display an once of self control.”

 

Mihiro looked annoyed. “Hey, be fair. When I said you were blowing me off I so could've made a joke out of that.” She folded her arms and muttered, “To say nothing of `tampering with your equipment' while I stabbed you from behind with a cold, stiff, vibrating rod.”

 

So placed the lever on a new tuning peg and removed and replaced the strips. “Hm,” he said.

 

“Just admit it,” she huffed, “I've changed. It's easy when you're held down and you have it forced on you.”

 

“Don't say that.”

 

Her good cheer was quickly and brutally squandered. “What?”

 

“Forget it.” His words got small. “What I said. Forget it.”

 

“I don't forget anything you say. Ever.” She squinted at him as he tried to lose himself in routine. “What's the matter? Did you know what it was I was talking about? Was I preaching to the choir, So? Look at me.”

 

“Stop saying my name like that.”

 

“Is how people change one of those things you take notes on when you watch us?”

 

“Mihiro…” Souichi paused and smirked awkwardly. “I see no need to get contemptuous.”

 

“Too late,” she declared loudly, “I'm offended now.” Mihiro swung a leg over to straddle the dark wood bench. “Do you even know why you can't be bothered to look at us without your microscope? Any time you handle us you have to wash your hands. Why, So?”

 

When he didn't answer she leaned in, eyes smiling and boring into his temple. “It wasn't like that when you first got here, was it? You didn't mind getting dirty. You liked fighting us, at least until you got a bloody nose. Be honest. You can't even be bothered to laugh or drink with or fuck us anymore.”

 

“Those things,” he murmured, “are none of your concern.”

 

“Oh, sure they are,” she volleyed. “I was one of those specimen. As their representative I'm asking you to put up your dukes or get the hell out of the ring, So. The truth is we don't need you. Eri Suzuki doesn't need you.”

 

That last bit finally snagged him. He mirrored the indignation in her young face. “Is that why you think that I'm here?”

 

“Of course not, no. You're here to tune a shitty piano. Earn your keep. You fix enough of them, maybe you can afford a new stupid human suit. Lord knows you're getting hot in that one. Maybe I wouldn't notice if you were boring but you're a grand ol' porn and I enjoy watching you.”

 

The way she was watching him now.

 

He folded. Snapped away. Operated above the spruce soundboard. “I need to do this.”

 

Mihiro flicked a limp wrist at him. “Go right ahead. Don't let me stop you…So.”

 

Something bulged in his slender jaw but he saved it. For a while, Mihiro let him work on the Yamaha, its harmony slowly but steadily behind restored, string by string. Thunder boiled down into the room while she regaled him with complete and silent attention.

 

For a while.

 

“Are you gonna help her out?”

 

“Perhaps,” he answered, not looking up.

 

“Go for it. You need the money, though I don't understand why you don't just take first chair violin for the TSO.”

 

“I don't want to become conspicuous.”

 

“Whatever,” she scoffed. “At the moment there's like, three people on Earth that know who you really are, and two of them are talking to you right now.”

 

“You were saying why I should tutor her nephew?”

 

“You're patient.”

 

Laughter before he could rein it in.

 

“Yes, yes, I'm an ass. Epiphanies on the cheap. Now seriously,” Her eyes floated over the stained ivory keys, “how're you going to let the boy know what he's doing wrong?”

 

“I will speak Japanese to him. I'm good at that.”

 

“And by to you mean at, right?”

 

“You know what I mean, Mihiro, and I will not argue semantics with you.”

 

“Semantics don't have anything to do with it. You needing a translator has everything to do with it.”

 

A perfect, polished scoff. “You?”

 

“I don't see any other damn applicants,” Mihiro said loudly, and her tinny voice echoed against the low ceiling. “You laugh, but you wanna know why you let me hang around you?”

 

“No.”

 

“I can help you understand.”

 

So shrugged and switched out the ratchet head of his tuning lever, but she held firm. “Why don't you try talking to me instead of talking me away? Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to remind yourself to use contractions every time you open your…”

 

She trailed off this time, staring at his back and sitting up like there was a wall between them she hadn't noticed before.

 

Mihiro frowned. “At least, it would, if you'd just let go of your stupid pride for a second and ask me straight up.”

 

“I don't believe in pride.”

 

“You were proud of Mana.”

 

Souichi…stopped. When he turned around she could see the roots of his hair drinking up ephemeral silver though each black follicle. When he bent down to cast her in his shadow, she could see the scarlet outbreak migrating inward from the edges of his irises. She could see everything, he was so very close, and his voice spiraled down in a brutal hiss:

 

“I keep you around for that shameful vestige in me that delights in your flailing attempts to amend the hearts of distant strangers, when you cannot even manage the one beating a door down from where you sleep. For that alone you are perfectly. Un. Qualified.”

 

And because he was so close, she could not hide the cracks in her oblivious façade. It was why he didn't notice her slamming the keyboard cover on his fingers. Which, in turn, was why he jumped up, danced a little pain dance, and was Souichi again. Who gritted his teeth to no avail.

 

“Sssssshhhhiiittt! THAT HURT!”

 

“One-up, fuck face! Now take it back!”

 

“Why should I do that?!”

 

“Because if you don't apologize, I promise I'll never speak to you again.”

 

“…I repeat. Why should I do that?”

 

Mihiro swiped irritably at half-shed tears. “You think about this, So.”

 

Souichi could only mouth his blushing knuckles and glower from behind them. “I'm sorry,” he blurted. “I will make it up to you-”

 

“You're telling me or you're asking me?” She pointed out, “there's a difference.”

 

“No there is not!” At that point So just put his hands on his hips and craned his neck to see just how far he had fallen. When his eyes finally leveled with the girl, he smiled gloriously.

 

“Mihiro Kamakura. I realize that my words have unduly caused you great harm. How do you wish for me to atone for my spectacularly rude and injurious behavior?”

 

“I don't know,” she snapped. “Why don't you tell me?”

 

His face fell. “Get out.”

 

“I don't see how me getting out makes up for hey!”

 

It wasn't token resistance Mihiro offered, but So easily wrenched her from her seat by the scruff of her school blouse collar. She flailed at his hip as they alternately plowed and stuttered down the dark hall.

 

“I just told you to think about this.”

 

“I have.”

 

“Who else is gonna talk to you, let alone know how, let alone go out of their way-”

 

“I will manage.”

 

She tripped and recovered and grinned. “I'm sure Miss Suzuki will chat with you. There'll be tea and scones. She's such a nice, lonely bird.”

 

“This is not about her!” he yelled as they careened into the wide wood entrance.

 

“Right, it's about you being so out of touch that you that's desperation in her eyes.”

 

“Shut up.”

 

“She is ready to die, So, but only because she had a love and sons and memories your floods can't drown and your wars can't trample-”

 

“SHUT UP!”

 

“-so that unless you rape her mind she's beyond sharing pity with you.”

 

“GET OUT!”

 

So had the door open when he planted a hand in the small of her back and shoved her out onto the covered porch curtained by grey rain. Mihiro stumbled, but when the fluster bled out of her arms and legs she turned back to bask in the afterglow of her perverse victory.

 

“Poor little Souichi…all this time amongst the Lilum has made your heart fragile like gla-”

 

There was a sharp wooden crack as So slammed the shoji in her beaming face. He had managed to stop shaking by the time Miss Suzuki called out from the doorway to the greenhouse.

 

“Do you usually yell this much when you're tuning a piano, Mister Nakajima?”

 

“Sorry… I had, I'd injured myself. It's nothing serious.”

 

“Don't be afraid to ask for something if you need it.”

 

“I don't.”

 

“Shit smack. Don't be a tough guy. I'm going to get rid of those bandages one way or another.”

 

“I don't need anything.”

 

“Oh. Okay…” Eri Suzuki and the greenhouse light silently withdrew. He did as well, shuffling back to the room, where the piano and the window and Mihiro were sitting.

 

“Guess what? I know how you can make up for being a he-douche!” She clapped her hands and greedily rubbed them together for emphasis.

 

Nakajima put his hand together, too. “If I were to do this,” His Adam's apple lurched buoyantly, “would you then give me peace…?”

 

“Yes.”

 

-----

 

The sky stormed away at ever-longer intervals. For a time, dust motes that had been cloaked in overcast burned white in the uncovered sun. He let Mihiro appraise something behind his eyes as he performed off-key test renditions.

 

After the seventh test, ash-colored clouds once again stirred closer. The dust slowly flickered off like dying galaxies as the shade grew malignant, then expanded and pooled as the afternoon relapsed. The world clapped and the old house shuddered. Warped waterfall projects cascaded over So's slight form as he collected his tools, snapped the plastic case closed, and stored it beneath the Yamaha.

 

He eyed Mihiro suspiciously even as he eased himself next to her.

 

“I thought you played the cello,” he said.

 

“That too.”

 

“And the viola.”

 

“That too.”

 

His eyes dashed to the left and right of her. “Well? What is it that you want to play?”

 

“I don't know. Pick. You're the penis.”

 

“Pianist.”

 

“You heard me.” Mihiro glanced at the wristwatch she wasn't wearing. “Look, are we making beautiful music together or what? I'm all for this existential bonding crap, but if I miss out on Shinji's fresh tempura, you and I are gonna have issues.”

 

Nakajima went still, and then thawed decisively. “Brahms. Fifteen. A-Flat Major.”

 

-----

 

I think I hear music.

 

I go outside, and I'm not surprised when flowers and melody sail in on a breeze. I have all the time in the world to kill. Or none of it, but I enjoy the sounds, the grass beneath my bare feet, and the apple all the same.

 

I really don't think that I need food here, but then again I don't need a bathroom. They both came with the house. It just wouldn't be right if I didn't get full use out of it, so I take advantage of the stocked fridge and make due.

 

Ew. That was bad. Mihiro's rubbing off on me.

 

That would make a strange sort of sense, seeing as she helped me build the place. My grandmother's home was a split foyer with terra cotta siding and a fired clay roof. Exactly like this one. There's even a driveway that curls around to the back, and we both kinda laughed at that.

 

The driveway empties out into the main road, which is always freshly paved and cuts down the hill that gently slopes into nothing…which we covered up with some trees, and a stream overarched by a cobblestone footbridge. We laughed some more until she said I won't be the day a car winds up the road to pick me up. She told me she wasn't old enough for a license, that someone else would have to be driving.

 

That's fine with me, now.

 

So long as he wipes his feet, removes his shoes, and stays away from Nana's door, which has always been shut because I'm afraid she's behind it. I just couldn't deal with that. I know the day I'm not able to deal with things is the day I lose the house. It's nearly happened twice, already. It's no secret that I am bankrupt in companionship here, so Mihiro visits often enough to stave off foreclosure.

 

Plenty of people want to get in. But I know they'd eat up all my food, take my radio and my pictures, they'd open Nana's door, turn on the gas and light a match, and then I'd have no choice but to stay outside with them.

 

That would be the end of me.

 

The only person I've let in is Yukie. The problem was she was never comfortable, and at first I thought it was all the pictures I had of Shinji. Or the ones of what I want to do to Shinji. I turned them down and away the next time she'd visited and I still found myself asking what the hell it was she kept muttering under her breath.

 

“So quiet.” Then she'd rock forward on the edge of Nana's couch and rub her hands over her starched pants legs. “Aren't you cold?”

 

So I buried her in comforters and chided her when she apologized for asking me to turn the heat up. Like I pay bills or something.

 

The last time I saw Yukie she thanked me for the ravioli and closed the front door behind her. She took my damn wool hat, too, but I knew better than to follow her out.

 

But now? Now now? It feels good outside. Ripples of sunlight blow over the graded field as I breathe in flowers and mus-no, wait. It stopped.

 

I give the finger to the part of me saying I sigh with far more dejection than I actually feel. How's that for honesty, Adulthood? Pretense is as good as million-yen notes here, seeing as it's only me.

 

At last.

 

The apple seeds are capsulated bitter concentrate. I spit them out and almost drop the core where I stand, but the trashcan came with the house. I turn to go inside, laughing in the exact way I won't be the day pretense and money are good again.

 

Just wipe your feet, remove your shoes, and stay away from Nana's door. You'll be just fine.

 

-----

 

Mihiro squared up to accommodate So's crumpling face as he buried it in her shoulder, huffed and sputtered.

 

He cried harder.

 

“I told you we make beautiful music together…”

 

End of Normal to Reality

 

A/N: Eh. I can do better.

 

Random A/N: That being said, I thank everyone who stuck it out, and I hope you enjoyed it. Before I get on with my next story I'm going to revisit Dinner Time and do a tiny bit of plastic surgery. Thanks to sedemihcrA for post-reading that story and subsequently beating the Disney out of me. Thanks to everyone who provided me words of encouragement. I hope to do better next time.

 

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

 

Next Project: Valley Girl