Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ Story Number Ten ❯ Chapter 1 ( Chapter 1 )

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.

Story Number Ten: Chapter 1

By MidnightCereal

Shinji awoke to talk radio trickling through the orange hospital walls. Dusk, then.

Thin linen sheets pooled around his waist as he sat up in bed and contemplated rolling off the mattress to pee; fatigue and routine overwhelmed him. He collected his shoulders and showed his back to the door, folding himself just enough so he could see the inverted Tokyo-3 sprawl punching downward outside his window - and frown at it.

As far as Shinji concerned himself, the day had begun with his chest puffed out and an airy cadence he had made up on the spot. It had been harder to breathe like that at the end of the day, with Misato's weight shuddering against his sternum and Asuka's voice drawn out into that thin, smug film.

Weren't you going to punish him?

Let's catalyze the anxiety, hmm? Why should he lie in bed and wait for it?

So here we go: Sitting naked in metal tubes and pushing synch rates while women logged alpha waves and the temperature of your junk; psychosomatic compound fractures; then Asuka's breast huddled against her tank top like a plump white cub in a shallow cave; and then sinking into a localized night, realizing oblivion wasn't only black but had a diameter and the consistency of quicksand and was filled with reflections that didn't need your permission to speak to you.

Shinji stopped there. He didn't feel anxious. Did having to pee more count? Might as well be waiting for a flu shot. And Ritsuko or Misato, whoever owned him at the moment, seemed content in facilitating the downtime. Fair enough.

He had placed the muffled broadcast -- a national syndication Misato listened to whenever she felt opinionated, so always -- before he heard his door slide open and sterile sounds tumble in from the hallway. It couldn't have been the short medical supply robot, the MedMECH he'd seen trolling Nerv Medical, because he'd noticed it squatting in the corner of his room, snoozing.

The nurse, then. By now, Shinji had reduced the woman to a tight, full-figured grin crowned with a bun of brunette hair, someone who bumped into his bed and assured him hourly that Doctor Akagi would soon be there to stick things in him. Shinji hadn't seen the nurse since he'd been admitted for the latest incident, which worked great. He was sick of fishing out that pocket lint smile for her and insisting he felt fine, just fine.

He considered feigning sleep, but his hospital pajamas were, impossibly, a size too small. Also, the nurse hit him in the back of the head with an orange.

“Feeding time for all little piglets...”

Shinji rubbed the back of his head and rolled over. Squinted across the tray of rehydrated poultry Asuka had carted in to meet the indignity in her blue eyes.

“Don't ask,” she said.

“I wasn't going to,” he said.

“You were thinking it.” Well, yeah. He shrugged and started to remove the orange from beneath him so he could lay his head back down on the only soft thing in the room. “Hey, get up! You think I rolled this cafeteria crap in here for my health?”

“I'm just tired. I really appreciate it.” Shinji locked his elbows, back stiffening as he tried to sound grateful that she had brought him crap to eat. “Really.”

“Better,” said Asuka. She made a face at the nutritional label on the milk carton before setting it back down and wiping her hands on her pleated hips. “You're starving anyway, unless you're one of those sleep-eating freaks.”

“How do you know?” asked Shinji.

“Hm? Oh, I don't.” She started skinning an apple with a stubby paring knife, watching as the red peel coiled down to his food cart like a broken spring. “I just assumed, you know? Normal people usually solve the no food thing after a day or so without eating.”

“It's Monday?”

“Misato called you in sick tomorrow, too.” Asuka stopped peeling long enough to pitch her fist into her hip, making a chicken wing with her arm before sighing down at him. The sound drew bubbles up in him like the bends. “Why bother going to school at all? That place is one big proxy box, if you know what I mean. I could tell you things, Shinji.”

“Like?”

“It's just a theory I have,” she said. “We'll talk when you feel better.”

“It's Monday?”

“No, it's Monday.” One of her auburn eyebrows ticked down. “Try not to look so constipated. Why else would I be wearing my uniform?”

Shinji's stomach burbled mutinously beneath his demure print pajamas. Just cramps or stomach acid, but he couldn't give back the limber smile he had just eased out of Asuka. That meant pulling the food cart closer to his bed while Sohryu nodded sagely. Then she made a worried sound in her throat. “I don't know, Shinji. Marinating all day in that slimy plug? You forget all sorts of things after any real stay in an oxygen-depleted environment.”

“I'm just tired, Asuka.”

“Let's hope so,” she said. “God knows you're slow enough as it is.”

“If you say so.”

“So. So so so so so so so. So…” She put down the apple and knife, and anointed his meal with a schmaltzy sweep of her arm. Someone argued persuasively for retaliatory trade sanctions against the Oceanic Union, “what're you waiting for?”

“I…” he started. “I pretty much have to be okay, right?” Asuka started to frown -- new world record. “I mean, Ritsuko was supposed to run some tests on me. Because she always does after something happens, but if what you're saying is true, it's already been a whole day.”

“What the hell do you mean, `if'?”

“Then why am I still here?” he asked. “I'm ready for this to be over. I want to go home…”

“Oh, you don't know what you want. Gimme.” Asuka leaned in to snatch the orange before he could pluck it out of a cotton fold.

-----

“I really wish you wouldn't walk behind me like that,” said Ritsuko.

Misato stopped pacing long enough to have her eyes comb through Doctor Akagi's short blonde hair. “Faster, please,” said Katsuragi, starting up again, stalking her invisible cage.

“Work faster? Of course you meant work faster, you little…” Ritsuko had muttered the last bit and then punched another keystroke, a landmark. Two dozen closed circuit windows scrolled open on the view screen in front of and above her. A gridded monolith of blue screens and salt-and-pepper blizzards. “About you not walking behind me. That's code for `if I knew I'd end up stuck in the Reserve Control Center with you, I'd have had you scanned first.' Very thinly veiled.”

“I'm not one of those sick assholes out there, okay?” said Misato. “Okay? We're a thousand miles from any of the children and we don't even know in which direction, and I'm just…”

Ritsuko leaned back in her chair while the video feeds resolved themselves or snapped to still life portraits of stairwells or parking garages. “You're welcome to go back out there and look for them, if you like.”

Misato fingered the jagged hole in the elbow of her Nerv-issue jacket and allowed a swear to leak out of her. “Hyuga almost took my damn arm off…do you see this?”

“We know Shinji's in his recovery suite,” said Ritsuko, sighing through her nose as the vid windows began rifling through snapshots like the video board for a game show. Akagi laid her hands on the keyboard. “How much are you willing to bet Asuka and Rei are within spitting distance?”

“I don't want to think about it.” Misato slowed down. “Who's scanning you, Ritsuko?”

Once Doctor Akagi thawed, she swiveled away from the screen, found Misato's eyes orbiting the space behind her left shoulder, and grinned. “No one.”

Beep. Ritsuko turned around, tapped the `Return' key.

The mosaic on the view screen unified, the electronic tiles ceding to a larger, grainier whole…and Asuka was there, snatching an orange from beneath Shinji Ikari's ass.

“Why did you tell me that you locked his door?!”

“I did lock his door,” Ritsuko said. She shrugged beneath Misato's grip on her shoulder. “Well. Doesn't this just turn your soap brown…”

Misato blinked at first. “And what the fuck does that mean?”

-----

“What do you mean, `what do I mean'?” Asuka stopped peeling the orange long enough to spare Shinji a glance. “This is just my take, so don't take it personally.”

“Alright,” he said.

“Who the hell am I kidding? Shinji, you have no clue what you want out of anything. It's like, uh…” Asuka kept snapping her wet fingers, and then pointed at him when she settled on a code word to describe how hot she was, “my…bearing. Right?”

“Right,” he said.

“Natural. Effortless.”

Sigh. “Right.”

Her hand spun an invisible spool. “I'm trying to say it's self evident.”

“I see.”

“Then why aren't you looking at me?” she asked.

His eyes leapt up from his calcified legs. “You haven't seen Ritsuko today, have you?”

“No, I haven't seen Ritsuko, or Misato, or Kaji, or the commanders. Or that dick from admin. I don't ever remember you being this anal about getting back home.”

“I just don't think there's anything wrong with me,” said Shinji.

“So, what, is it the nurse? Is she sneaking in here past visiting hours?”

“No!”

All the tension in her face seemed to migrate to the wound-up corners of her mouth. “She subjecting you to extensive oral examinations?”

“You're so weird…” he muttered.

“You're so gay…”

“What?”

“I said, I promise to rattle some cages for you to see what Akagi's up to. Happy? Just…” Asuka dropped the skin onto the tray as she probed the meat of the orange with a fingernail, “humor me a little more.”

“It's not like you ever needed my permission to laugh at me before,” said Shinji.

“I didn't say laugh.” She scowled, taking umbrage with the way he did absolutely nothing to refute her. “No, seriously. You won't stand up to your dad, your best friends are pro asshats, and you hate the only thing I love…what's so funny about that?”

“You'd hate it too if you went through what I just did.”

“Yeah. That's pretty much the most irrelevant thing ever, since I'd never let my guard down like that. Napkins…” She swore around a suckled thumb. Shinji wished she had more thumbs. “It's so funny the way you keep forgetting that you're fighting a war, you know that? When you get down to it, Ikari, it's just the Angel, and the city. And you.”

“Someone else was in there.”

Her face jerked up from a chipped blue saucer. “With me,” Shinji explained, but the liquid memory of his time inside the Twelfth Angel slipped down between the wrinkles in his brain. “I haven't told anyone this. She was warm. She was a she, and real, and…I was dead. I was gone, and she kept me warm.” He shook his head. “I didn't do anything…”

Asuka stared. Laid the naked orange on the saucer, and stared.

“I think it's like that. With all the Evas.”

“Not all the Evas,” she said.

“But…” he croaked, “the cross-activation tests --”

“Which I took no part in.”

“I - okay, but you observed them.”

Her shoulder's popped up and down. “Yeah, I watched. You're about to say something stupid.”

“But something in Unit-00 stabbed me! From inside my brain…wow.” Asuka just turned her palms up and shrugged again. Shinji ignored the queasiness flirting with full-blown nausea and a tinny, disembodied pitch for Yebisu Lite. “Can we just agree that I didn't make Unit-00 total the observation deck?”

“Can we agree that only one person ever tells my liebchen what to do, and you're trying very hard not to stare at her breasts?”

“I'm not trying not to stare at your breasts,” said Shinji. “Don't hit me.”

“I'm not going to hit you,” she said.

“Oh. Is something wrong?”

“ No. You saw what you saw. There's nothing to be angry about.”

“What's the matter?”

“You wouldn't understand.” A huff or a weak sneeze from her. Shinji smelled lavender. “Guess it's appropriate you picked such a weird time to get observant.”

Maybe. Or maybe he should've spent the lull in conversation reflecting on how he wasn't aware he'd gotten any more aware. All Shinji could notice was Asuka leaning over him like a galleon figurehead. How that orange slice hovered from her flawless oak fingers. He forced his lips sealed - maybe he was gay.

“God, stop making faces,” she breathed. “You know I do weird things when I'm bored.”

“I --” His moth clicked shut, popped open. “You don't have to…”

“Make a wish foundation. One day you'll sit next to a fire that burns nostalgia. And you get to tell your great-grandchildren how the greatest pilot who ever lived waited on you hand and foot.” Asuka launched her eyebrows high behind her autumn bangs. “If you tell anyone else, I'll kill you.”

Despite what some of his teachers, most of his classmates, and all of his coworkers thought, Shinji Ikari wasn't acutely interested in dying. He just wasn't acutely interested in living, which, consequently, might precipitate death. He was neutrally buoyant on a great number of these subjects, and thanks to Asuka, that list now included sanitizing past trysts with beautiful foreign girls for the sake of his great-grandchildren's virgin ears.

It all sounded so preposterous, anyway. So harmless.

His mouth opened.

The door opened.

Her mouth opened. `Verdammt,' it sounded like, but her face jarred into a blur of pain and flaring tresses before he could ask.

Shinji lost her in the tackled mass wheeling over his knees and shedding cold entrees and limbs as it plunged over the opposite side of his bed. He heard thin bodies slam into the base boards as he flailed at the citrus spray that had maced the hell out of his eyes.

Shinji could make out watercolor blotches spilling upwards from the floor, dividing before it gelled into two heaving shapes. He couldn't tell which one was carving feral, scrawling breaths from the air; just that one offered its back to him as its amorphism snapped into Junoesque boundaries and polyester creases topped off with unruly, impossible blue.

Rei?!

The other one screamed. Launched itself at Rei and slammed the two of them into his bedside. The locked castors squealed over the floor as Shinji clawed at the sheets to keep from being bucked off. He took a long, flushing blink, and Asuka was digging uppercuts into the First Child's ribcage.

Rei sloughed the barrage off and sprawled backwards but Asuka was selling out, her haymakers driving Ayanami to the far wall and, and…

In fact…

Asuka was doing it wrong. Shinji's mind orphaned his legs and arms and tongue to seize on the thought, on the vulgar blows glancing off Rei's elbows and scraping the crown of her head. It was wrong.

I'll show you how it's done, Asuka.

That derailing hate and spittle that had replaced pinpoint aggression in the dusk burned across Asuka's face…by the German's own crisp, haughty admission, all wrong. It was probably why Rei caught her in the chin with a stool.

Shinji watched Rei watch Asuka go down like a condemned project, watched Rei's alabaster face fill with a voltage that infiltrated her eyes. She faced him; he'd last seen this look when she'd been asked by Mister Iwakura to diagram a sentence on the blackboard.

“Ikari…” She paused, hummingbird eyelids flittering as

A•su•ka needs a doc•tor

she dabbed at her scalp. She came away with bloody currency she rubbed between her thumb and forefinger. A c-note trickled down Rei's forehead.

“R-Rei…you” should just shut up, oh, don't be a part of this, you “should probably get that looked at.”

“There's no time. Get up. I will explain la-”

Rei stopped talking and started levitating, which was news to her, too. She flung her arms out to control her pitch, but Asuka had a sure grip around the back of Rei's knees. Right up until she dumped the pale girl onto the MedMECH loitering in the corner. The dumpy little droid toppled over, cooing as its contents skated across the floor.

Rei waded crookedly through spilt gauzes and aspirin, fresh linens and bouffant caps. Hypodermic needles. Shinji thought about asking if she was okay, but he'd only get those red flecks and that broken cough of hers. Thank God Asuka swooped behind her to make it better. Shinji tried hard to see the charity behind her sickled frown and its bleeding edge, or the hand towel she snapped around Rei's windpipe.

I'll show you how it's done if you just “stop…”

Asuka emulated the gleaming pearl snarl tugging on her busted lip and wrenched the white cloth, determined to pass basic seamanship through Ayanami's neck. Rei's cheeks bloomed a rare exquisite rose as Asuka rode her down into forced oblivion.

Which was okay. Someone would step in. Any moment now, Doctor Akagi or Kaji would pry the girls apart and then look on him with that diluted pity.

Rei got tired of waiting and launched the back of her head into Asuka's face. Sohryu shouted and scuttled off the electric girl, watching as carmine ichor started to pool from her nose into a cupped hand. Rei breathed luxuriously.

Asuka just breathed; then she wasted a second to scoop up the paring knife, and wasted another second slipping the business end of it into Rei's back. Ayanami's spine arched so splendidly that Shinji could have strung hemp from the top her head to her tailbone. He still wasn't used to hearing her scream.

Didn't bother Asuka, already holding supply drawer she'd wrenched out of the MedMECH, winding it up behind one of her mangled neural clips…

No no no no no no no turn around look out look “OUT.”

Rei brought her arms up and whirled. By the time her hair and skirt caught up with the rest of her, the broadside of the drawer had mailed her to the foot of Shinji's bed. He couldn't place Rei beyond the porcelain calf that popped up over the bed frame, but Asuka plunged down after her, the ordinance behind her blue eyes suddenly accurate. At least Sohryu was smiling, again.

Wasn't I going to punish her?

That wasn't quite right, was it? No. He should let Asuka know so she could give her fists a rest. So she didn't have to enjoy this so much…

“BLEED LIKE YOU MEAN IT, YOU CLOCKWORK BITCH! YOU'R ALWAYS IN MY FUCKING WA-”

A wet snick cut through Asuka's words. Replaced them with a bubbling squelch. She came up over the footboard for air, eyes so wide she could've been trying to breathe through them, and it might've helped if she'd quit choking herself.

Shinji half expected to hear water crack open below her as she fell away and Rei replaced her, swaying upright like switchgrass in a stiff breeze. Then Ayanami spat a wad of strawberry phlegm, swiped at a marbled cheek with the back of her hand, and staggered to the door.

Echizen over Kunimitsu vibrated across his skull. Three sets to two. Right on, set and match, expertly contested to the hilt. Damn good show, lad. None of that, now, no. Head high. You can get up, now, “Asuka…?”

She must not have heard him; Rei hadn't stopped rooting through a tennis bag he hadn't noticed until then. Frigid tributaries funneled into his legs as he moved them - he wouldn't be ignored. “Asuka.”

Shinji shed the covers wrapped around his legs, shivering as he swam over to the footboard. Not feeling anything when he peered over.

It wasn't her. Too pale. That was it, the pallor that burbled out through her fingers in silent, liquid ribbons and stranded her blue eyes in a desert of achromatized flesh. And it was the sibilating breaths that staggered past her lips like water over flaccid gills, less and less a means of fomenting textured innuendo and insults or accents. Things like voice had been pruned as the business of simply being consumed her.

Asuka wasted her eyes on him. Maybe. He couldn't tell, because they'd lost their precision. He needed a closer look to be sure.

“No, Ikari.” Shinji had interpreted Rei's bruised whisper by the time he knelt by Asuka's head. Tidal scarlet glided from his knees and broke over auburn shoals.

He still couldn't tell if Asuka was looking at him

“Get away from her.”

because the clutter was gone. The strength that had crowded her brow and teemed brazenly in the spokes of her irises had vacated, sucked into the vast, dilated blackness in the centers of her eyes.

Asuka wasted her breath on him, out from blue lips fumbling noiseless words

“Get away from her, Ikari.”

that yoked themselves over his neck and yanked him down to her mouth. Shinji listened, and watched the peaks of her chest crumble.

“Pilot Ikari.”

He'd been imagining Asuka's lips on him, on a dedicated hi-fi synaptic loop, since they'd kissed. These brain flicks never ended with her biting him. But the real Asuka always surprised Shinji. And this little pressure on his earlobe, it was a dying thing that bled off as her teeth released him -- as damp elfin fingers hooked into the crook of his elbow,

“Listen to me…”

and wrenched him away from Asuka and the paring knife shedding a bloody archipelago next to her hip.

“Shinji” smelled lavender.

Weren't you going to punish her?

He shut down or came on. Either way, Shinji noticed how Rei's bruised neck guided her throat down to the depression nestled between her collar bones. He noticed how he placed the smiling edge of the knife there.

“She was going to eat you,” said Rei.

Shinji watched the blade fall between several stories of them and throw a tantrum at her hopelessly ruined white canvas shoes. He watched her shoes. Rei's slight pigeon toe was too precious for words.

-----

“Diethyl ether, a colorless general anesthetic,” said Rei. She held up a small burgundy vial and sniffed its baster before recapping it. She handed it to Shinji and walked back to her bag. “She had doped the orange using a hypodermic needle and masked the smell with her perfume. Due to its low boiling point, the ether would have vaporized in your mouth once you had masticated the orange. Once you had been incapacitated, she would have consumed you at her leisure…I can't hear you.”

Shinji doubted Rei needed good ears to line up the notched sites on her hand gun, or to pocket that extra magazine. People prepared to war in funny ways. Ha ha.

As she brushed past in one crooked stride, he found himself staring at the tennis bag bucking across her ass. “I said is someone coming for me? It - because you were saying that -”

“Assume all persons informed of your present location following the recovery of Unit-01 from the Sea of Dirac,” said Rei.

“Alright…isn't that everyone?”

Rei reached the window, where widescreen dusk cooked her to a crisp silhouette, and swept her face from one corner to the other. “The location of hospitalized active duty pilots is limited to Class One officers and relevant medical and security personnel. However, it is safer to assume everyone.” Her profile twisted, became slight. “Where are your shoes?”

“I don't, I don't know --”

“Where are your shirt and pants?”

“I don't know where any of my things are, okay?!”

Rei flattened against the early evening so that her eyes massacred stray motes of light that wandered in front of her. Shinji looked at the floor between them where nothing moved, and he did not scream.

“I did not do this out of…dislike.” Her voice approached and her fingers entered view as they unhooked a black plastic plug from Asuka's ear. Rei froze for a moment and then tossed it back to the floor. Her voice tumbled past him. “I dispatched her because she demonstrated a clear and present danger. That is all…I can't hear you.”

I said “Can't you even call her by her name?”

Nothing. Shinji waited, though, even as the room became a stinging wet blur that drowned Rei in complicit silence. Even pivoting towards Rei and the door, he was killing seconds or hours of this dream he could see and smell, and that could bleed all over him.

Why wouldn't someone wake him the hell up?

Shinji could never imagine Rei hesitating, yet now he could see her starting sentences in her head to stop them, could see the silk cords of muscle beneath her hand bundle around the pistol grip. He was a little embarrassed for her.

“Dry your eyes, Shinji.” There. The final, reworked product. Satisfied with it, Rei looked forward and fronted the exit. “You'll need them to see where you are going.”

End of Chapter 1

A/N: I can't really say much before thanking FreshC and FlyByWire for indulging me this lunacy for the past year or so. Concept, execution, stuff…yeah. My foster betas. Thank you. A lot.

I'd originally meant for this to be ready by Halloween. Of 2007. So, this last year? I'd like to think I spent it doing things to improve how I write - deleting extra words, extra sentences, paragraphs and scenes; minimizing adverb usage; employing effective word order and parallel structure. Blah, blah, and blah. I'll say nothing more. Right now, I'm just glad to be offering something up for public consumption. Trick or Treat!

As I've stated on my profile page, I have completed Chapters 2 and 3, and will type and publish them in short order, preferably on or a few days after Halloween. Then I'm going to write something else. If people are still having the readability issues with Story Number Ten that they've had with my past stories, I'm scrapping the second half. I just don't think it would be worth it. I have other, better story ideas, and I would like to get to them before I get sick of fan fiction.

Random A/N: I don't hate Asuka. I don't hate any of the characters. I don't absolutely love any of them, either. I like it that way.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.