Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ The Weaver ❯ Three ( Chapter 3 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: the mustachioed cat 
Anime/Manga: Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 04.25.2006 | Pages: 1 | Words: 2.8K | Visits: 230 | Status: Completed
Anime/Manga: Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 04.25.2006 | Pages: 1 | Words: 2.8K | Visits: 230 | Status: Completed
Three
Shinji woke up at around three in the afternoon. He woke up without being yanked out of bed or whispered to by giant spiders. Everything seemed fine until he looked down and saw what he was wearing. After noting this, he stared up at the ceiling for a while, and absently drew a white-gloved finger across his face. It came away smudged with red and white compact. The Third Child got up, checked the hallway to make sure Asuka had not stayed home from school, and waddled into the bathroom.
A clown. He was wearing a baggy, white, single piece of clothing. Five red poofballs adorned his lower and upper chest in a row. His collar was frilly and extended over the length of his shoulders, splitting in an inverted V in the front so as to not cover up the red poofball there. The same frills extended from the end of either sleeve. His face had been painted with a permanent red frown, and two painted tears ran down each cheek. His hair had been swooped up and made a deep red, the same shade as the red makeup on his face.
Shinji stared at the mirror, and then at the ground, where he found two pairs of comically oversized, black and white checkered shoes.
There was no zipper, so he went into the kitchen and got a pair of scissors. Pen-Pen emerged from his fridge briefly, then made a hasty retreat. Shinji sat on the couch and cut upwards, starting at the right wrist and cutting up to the neck. He repeated the process on his left side, with a bit more difficulty because the cloth was tight around the wrist, and he couldn't slide it off the hand as he could the stump where his right arm ended. Stripping the the waist he found that his nightshirt had been removed. It did not appear he was wearing shorts or underwear, either.
The Third Child carefully removed the oversized shoes, and slid out of the clown outfit completely. He stood in the living room, naked, and the compact on his face began to run. He quickly gathered up the clothing and rushed back to the bathroom, where he locked the door and turned on the shower faucet and the sink. Then he sat on the toilet and sobbed.
It wasn't really crying, but more a series of jerks and contortions. He pulled at his swooped-up hair, feeling the grease in it come off in his hands. He clawed his face, and the compact gathered under his fingernails. Droplets of white and pink rained down on his folded arms and legs.
After a few minutes, when his body felt like it was under control again, Shinji got up and turned off the sink. He stayed at the front of the restroom for a moment, listening for any sign that Misato or Asuka had returned. He heard nothing.
When he stepped into the shower, the white and red makeup began coming off even before the water hit him. Shinji had taken a pocket mirror from the bathroom medicine cabinet and watched as the steam coming off the scalding-hot water clung to his face, grouping in large splotched, and then dripping down and off his chin. This transfixed him until his face became merely wet, the white and pink running down his chest. He hung the mirror on the shower faucet and then forced himself under the hot water.
Soon his hair was matted against his skull, the blood-red rain pooling on the shower floor, circling the drain. The pink of his face re-emerged.
As this happened, as his real face was revealed again, as his hair slowly became brown again, Shinji's body stopped shaking. His tears, which had long stopped flowing, became another shameful memory.
It was like being on the battlefield, except he wasn't. This sort of emotion growing inside him, this surge of adrenaline that he had only felt before in Eva, and once, when he had met his father that first time before Unit One... it was something he was unaccustomed to. But it felt summoned, it felt controlled, and slowly Shinji found himself in the grips of real rage.
This Weaver thing, he knew what it was saying. There had been a lot of sadness in his life, and the Weaver found this... hilarious? entertaining?
Shinji thought about his time in the mountains, when he had run away from Misato. He thought about sitting next to steep cliffs and thinking horrible thoughts. He was beyond that now, he had recognized that even before Asuka had come into his life, but he did not think it was funny. What else? Sadness from injury, sadness from isolation? from rejection? from shame?
Enough of the red paint was out of his hair, so he lathered it up with shampoo. He turned around and settled under the water so it could get the paint off the back of his neck.
Should he tell the others now? Now that it seemed the thing wasn't going to leave him alone? They would think he was crazy, at least at first. Rei would probably believe him, but he was still nervous about talking to her, worried that she would mention it to someone because it would never occur to her to keep a secret, and then Shinji would really look crazy. He couldn't tell anyone. He was being toyed with by this crazy spider-thing, and he couldn't breath a word of it to anyone. Shinji was starting to doubt they could do anything to help him, anyway.
His rage abated, and for a moment it seemed bleak depression would set in. The situation seemed hopeless, if not dire. This thing was really going to really drive him crazy. Shinji did not know how he was supposed to sleep again.
Somewhere deep in the apartment, a phone rang.
***
Shinji could only sit in the entry plug of Unit One and watch Rei and Asuka engage the Angel. The Commander had put the Third Child's pilot status on hold until an investigation of the incident that had taken his hand was complete. Apparently Doctor Akagi thought mental contamination by Unit One was the cause. Shinji could not understand this rationale at all, but he was still drained and had only protested half-heartedly. Apparently Misato had done most of the protesting for him.
From shower to entry plug, thirty minutes had elapsed. Shinji had barely toweled off before Section 2 was knocking on the door. He had been whisked to Nerv and in his plugsuit before anyone told him he was on permanent standby.
Shinji sat and watched Units Zero and Two manuver closer to the target, a larger black-and-white sphere hovering among some of the taller buildings. On impulse, he activated a comm channel to Rei and Asuka, and wished them good luck. He cut the channel before either could respond.
Running away still. He wondered at his sudden cowardice. He almost wished Asuka would reopen the channel and tell him to shut up. Anything was better then watching from the tactical display as the two drew closer and closer to the Angel.
It was about then that everything went to hell.
Comm channels blinked open. Asuka was screaming something about a shadow, and the Major was yelling at the two pilots to get to higher ground. Rei came on, telling "Pilot Sohryu" to take her hand.
Shinji pulled the trigger on his left control handle. This should have initiated the synchronization sequence. Instead, a display window bigger then the comm channel windows came up and informed him that "Activation is Unauthorized". Shinji screamed something and hit the side of the entry plug, his fist bouncing off with little effect.
Asuka was now reporting, in an amazingly cool tone, that the shadow appeared to be pulling her down, despite her efforts to scale a building. It was only right before her signal cut out that Shinji heard that tone in her voice, the one he had heard beneath the Pacific, and the night the Weaver had taken him. He heard real fear.
Rei was reporting that Unit Two was completely submerged within the shadow when the first webbing drifted across Shinji's peripheral vision. The boy spun, and found only the wall of the entry plug. Doctor Akagi was reporting that all response from Unit Two's entry plug had cut off, and Shinji sat still and observed, as well as he could, the weird, weaving cilia that seemed to be drifting just outside his vision. When he turned to look at it full on, there was nothing there, but when he stared straight ahead... always in that one spot, something festered.
This is it, the Third Child thought. I've finally snapped.
***
He was chewed out for trying to start up the Evangelion without orders. Doctor Akagi and his father told him that his status was already in jeopardy, that if he ever disobeyed an order to stay put again, or even try to, that he would be sent away. Until his pilot status was reinstated, he would not be allowed near Unit One.
Shinji looked at the doctor, at his Father. Around him people were orchestrating a rescue operation, and these two were talking about something that seemed so little, so small. An apology, a desperate apology, floated through his mind. His father had complimented him during the Tenth Angel incident, he had felt a connection to the man then, but now... he simply said "Yes", and left.
Misato had come after him, and asked him if he wanted to come to where they were setting up the staging area.
"We will get her back," the Major assured him, trying to hold eye contact "we're going to beat this thing. You should come with me, you could talk to Rei."
Shinji shook his head, but asked where the staging area was. He might go there a bit later. From the sound of things in Central Dogma, whatever Nerv was planning would take some time to come together.
The Third Child left the Nerv complex, and walked down the mostly-empty streets. The evacuation was still in effect, and only the occasional military vehicle passed by. Each slowed when they saw him, but apparently recognized him and did not stop. This confused Shinji until he realized he had neglected to take off his plugsuit. Of course they weren't going to stop an Eva pilot.
As he walked, he saw things here and there that weren't here or there when he looked at them full on. He was starting to do more then see them, too. Subtle changes in the air and a particular smell accompanied each strange not-sighting. The spots grew on cars, benchs, and seemed to blow down the street against the curb.
He eventually came to the shadow. It was black in depth and circular in unnatural ways. On the other side of this black lake, Shinji could see an Evangelion power cable slowly being sucked down. Some distance to the left was Unit Zero, kneeling down, entry plug ejected.
blue and green and orange oh yes but black so black this I find strange maths and dimensions deeper here and
Shinji turned around.
I see my lovely dandy-clown mourning his fallen such harmony and skill my Web do you like
Shinji did not think, he simply threw himself at the thing which had appeared behind him, and now danced from side to side. He grabbed the edge of one of its mouthparts, one that never actually descended into the churning black maw, and wildly jabbed at the thing's eyes with his right arm. But the eyes were like the rest of the creature, hard as stone, with a unnaturally smooth texture. So smooth that Shinji's hand slipped off the dangling mouthpart and sent him tumbling into the Weavers arms, and suddenly
the sky melts away and stays there there is blue but also depth insane depth and between and within that depth and other deep spaces there are the threads the things he once saw in the corner of his vision what he sensed intuitively the Web the Weaver talked about everywhere from his fear that branched and spiked out and there were the ghosts of past selves and others to the stars moving and invisible in the daysky and the great gulfs of space between here and there bound together so close neat bundles of ropey emotion and magnetism and light thoughts-thick
and then Shinji tumbled out of the thing's grasp, onto oddly yielding gravel. The Third Child screamed in a beastial way and threw his head back, tearing clumps out of his hair and trying to purge those terrible, complex and utterly objective images from his mind.
you saw the Weave I saw so strange yes you are a Weaver who can weave
"What wasz thaa" Shinji gasped, each word a moan.
your world my world where I can crawl from emotion to movement to probability where blue and black and deepblack meet and bleed and are cut and sewn into such wonderful splendid tragedy
The webbing - the Weave - Shinji could see it now. He saw it everywhere he looked! It was not the deep and complex weave of the Web, but its detrius, extensions into the normal expression of reality. The fact that he suddenly knew that illicted another sob.
Its killing me, he thought. This thing is going to burn me down to nothing.
And that thought was what finally calmed him down.
I am not nothing, he thought with a grim expression on his face. And I am not a clown!
Slowly the shaking stopped. Slowly, Shinji rose. He walked over to the edge of the roof and looked twenty stories down, to the black lake that had swallowed Asuka. He was on the same side of the lake as Unit Zero now. He watched as the power cable that had been descending into the black lake was wheeled back in. He saw the frayed end where an Eva was supposed to be.
And he saw the Weave that stuck to the world, against the people operating the cable retrieval system, blowing down the street... and clinging to him.
He tore the scintillating stuff from his body, and suddenly felt much better. He looked at the stuff that was slowly vanishing in his hand. Despair, he realized.
Shinji turned again to the Weaver, who was dismantling with great interest what appeared to be an engine block. A brown car lay next to the spider, in pieces.
necrophagic how romantic to run on ancient blood the thing crooned to itself.
"What do you want with me?" Shinji finally found his voice.
The spider looked up as its blade-hands flashed forward and bisected the engine.
a small favor between thee and thine I though such a lovely vector
"A favor? What vector?!" Shinji was finding it much easier to follow the Weaver now.
your friendgirl the one you think about at night inside your head and outside in spurts perhaps
Here, Shinji reddened.
that lovely black thing with lines of absolute stark reality the thing I coaxed into being so droll and dumb as
"You did this? You brought that here?"
came before and before the stars were right I Weaved a marvelous wave of space that flowed around it just outside the outside where it slept and waited and dreamed its simple carnal delights
"Well, can you make it go away? Can you..."Shinji could not believe he was even thinking this.
"...can you bring Asuka back?"
At this the Weaver discarded the engine block and with a causal flick of one hand sent the entire car spinning off the edge of the building. Then it came at him.
Weaver the Genocide wonders at my beautiful work my carefully planned event I admit my cameo but oh so dismayed for this Weaver who can not walk on its own four feet I wonder and ponder what shall happen if this Weaver were to go splatty-wat and cover the ground with that bag of bluewater so foolishly composed a Weaver who wished to die once today shall be resolved
And then the Weaver picked Shinji up, and threw him off the building.
Shinji woke up at around three in the afternoon. He woke up without being yanked out of bed or whispered to by giant spiders. Everything seemed fine until he looked down and saw what he was wearing. After noting this, he stared up at the ceiling for a while, and absently drew a white-gloved finger across his face. It came away smudged with red and white compact. The Third Child got up, checked the hallway to make sure Asuka had not stayed home from school, and waddled into the bathroom.
A clown. He was wearing a baggy, white, single piece of clothing. Five red poofballs adorned his lower and upper chest in a row. His collar was frilly and extended over the length of his shoulders, splitting in an inverted V in the front so as to not cover up the red poofball there. The same frills extended from the end of either sleeve. His face had been painted with a permanent red frown, and two painted tears ran down each cheek. His hair had been swooped up and made a deep red, the same shade as the red makeup on his face.
Shinji stared at the mirror, and then at the ground, where he found two pairs of comically oversized, black and white checkered shoes.
There was no zipper, so he went into the kitchen and got a pair of scissors. Pen-Pen emerged from his fridge briefly, then made a hasty retreat. Shinji sat on the couch and cut upwards, starting at the right wrist and cutting up to the neck. He repeated the process on his left side, with a bit more difficulty because the cloth was tight around the wrist, and he couldn't slide it off the hand as he could the stump where his right arm ended. Stripping the the waist he found that his nightshirt had been removed. It did not appear he was wearing shorts or underwear, either.
The Third Child carefully removed the oversized shoes, and slid out of the clown outfit completely. He stood in the living room, naked, and the compact on his face began to run. He quickly gathered up the clothing and rushed back to the bathroom, where he locked the door and turned on the shower faucet and the sink. Then he sat on the toilet and sobbed.
It wasn't really crying, but more a series of jerks and contortions. He pulled at his swooped-up hair, feeling the grease in it come off in his hands. He clawed his face, and the compact gathered under his fingernails. Droplets of white and pink rained down on his folded arms and legs.
After a few minutes, when his body felt like it was under control again, Shinji got up and turned off the sink. He stayed at the front of the restroom for a moment, listening for any sign that Misato or Asuka had returned. He heard nothing.
When he stepped into the shower, the white and red makeup began coming off even before the water hit him. Shinji had taken a pocket mirror from the bathroom medicine cabinet and watched as the steam coming off the scalding-hot water clung to his face, grouping in large splotched, and then dripping down and off his chin. This transfixed him until his face became merely wet, the white and pink running down his chest. He hung the mirror on the shower faucet and then forced himself under the hot water.
Soon his hair was matted against his skull, the blood-red rain pooling on the shower floor, circling the drain. The pink of his face re-emerged.
As this happened, as his real face was revealed again, as his hair slowly became brown again, Shinji's body stopped shaking. His tears, which had long stopped flowing, became another shameful memory.
It was like being on the battlefield, except he wasn't. This sort of emotion growing inside him, this surge of adrenaline that he had only felt before in Eva, and once, when he had met his father that first time before Unit One... it was something he was unaccustomed to. But it felt summoned, it felt controlled, and slowly Shinji found himself in the grips of real rage.
This Weaver thing, he knew what it was saying. There had been a lot of sadness in his life, and the Weaver found this... hilarious? entertaining?
Shinji thought about his time in the mountains, when he had run away from Misato. He thought about sitting next to steep cliffs and thinking horrible thoughts. He was beyond that now, he had recognized that even before Asuka had come into his life, but he did not think it was funny. What else? Sadness from injury, sadness from isolation? from rejection? from shame?
Enough of the red paint was out of his hair, so he lathered it up with shampoo. He turned around and settled under the water so it could get the paint off the back of his neck.
Should he tell the others now? Now that it seemed the thing wasn't going to leave him alone? They would think he was crazy, at least at first. Rei would probably believe him, but he was still nervous about talking to her, worried that she would mention it to someone because it would never occur to her to keep a secret, and then Shinji would really look crazy. He couldn't tell anyone. He was being toyed with by this crazy spider-thing, and he couldn't breath a word of it to anyone. Shinji was starting to doubt they could do anything to help him, anyway.
His rage abated, and for a moment it seemed bleak depression would set in. The situation seemed hopeless, if not dire. This thing was really going to really drive him crazy. Shinji did not know how he was supposed to sleep again.
Somewhere deep in the apartment, a phone rang.
***
Shinji could only sit in the entry plug of Unit One and watch Rei and Asuka engage the Angel. The Commander had put the Third Child's pilot status on hold until an investigation of the incident that had taken his hand was complete. Apparently Doctor Akagi thought mental contamination by Unit One was the cause. Shinji could not understand this rationale at all, but he was still drained and had only protested half-heartedly. Apparently Misato had done most of the protesting for him.
From shower to entry plug, thirty minutes had elapsed. Shinji had barely toweled off before Section 2 was knocking on the door. He had been whisked to Nerv and in his plugsuit before anyone told him he was on permanent standby.
Shinji sat and watched Units Zero and Two manuver closer to the target, a larger black-and-white sphere hovering among some of the taller buildings. On impulse, he activated a comm channel to Rei and Asuka, and wished them good luck. He cut the channel before either could respond.
Running away still. He wondered at his sudden cowardice. He almost wished Asuka would reopen the channel and tell him to shut up. Anything was better then watching from the tactical display as the two drew closer and closer to the Angel.
It was about then that everything went to hell.
Comm channels blinked open. Asuka was screaming something about a shadow, and the Major was yelling at the two pilots to get to higher ground. Rei came on, telling "Pilot Sohryu" to take her hand.
Shinji pulled the trigger on his left control handle. This should have initiated the synchronization sequence. Instead, a display window bigger then the comm channel windows came up and informed him that "Activation is Unauthorized". Shinji screamed something and hit the side of the entry plug, his fist bouncing off with little effect.
Asuka was now reporting, in an amazingly cool tone, that the shadow appeared to be pulling her down, despite her efforts to scale a building. It was only right before her signal cut out that Shinji heard that tone in her voice, the one he had heard beneath the Pacific, and the night the Weaver had taken him. He heard real fear.
Rei was reporting that Unit Two was completely submerged within the shadow when the first webbing drifted across Shinji's peripheral vision. The boy spun, and found only the wall of the entry plug. Doctor Akagi was reporting that all response from Unit Two's entry plug had cut off, and Shinji sat still and observed, as well as he could, the weird, weaving cilia that seemed to be drifting just outside his vision. When he turned to look at it full on, there was nothing there, but when he stared straight ahead... always in that one spot, something festered.
This is it, the Third Child thought. I've finally snapped.
***
He was chewed out for trying to start up the Evangelion without orders. Doctor Akagi and his father told him that his status was already in jeopardy, that if he ever disobeyed an order to stay put again, or even try to, that he would be sent away. Until his pilot status was reinstated, he would not be allowed near Unit One.
Shinji looked at the doctor, at his Father. Around him people were orchestrating a rescue operation, and these two were talking about something that seemed so little, so small. An apology, a desperate apology, floated through his mind. His father had complimented him during the Tenth Angel incident, he had felt a connection to the man then, but now... he simply said "Yes", and left.
Misato had come after him, and asked him if he wanted to come to where they were setting up the staging area.
"We will get her back," the Major assured him, trying to hold eye contact "we're going to beat this thing. You should come with me, you could talk to Rei."
Shinji shook his head, but asked where the staging area was. He might go there a bit later. From the sound of things in Central Dogma, whatever Nerv was planning would take some time to come together.
The Third Child left the Nerv complex, and walked down the mostly-empty streets. The evacuation was still in effect, and only the occasional military vehicle passed by. Each slowed when they saw him, but apparently recognized him and did not stop. This confused Shinji until he realized he had neglected to take off his plugsuit. Of course they weren't going to stop an Eva pilot.
As he walked, he saw things here and there that weren't here or there when he looked at them full on. He was starting to do more then see them, too. Subtle changes in the air and a particular smell accompanied each strange not-sighting. The spots grew on cars, benchs, and seemed to blow down the street against the curb.
He eventually came to the shadow. It was black in depth and circular in unnatural ways. On the other side of this black lake, Shinji could see an Evangelion power cable slowly being sucked down. Some distance to the left was Unit Zero, kneeling down, entry plug ejected.
blue and green and orange oh yes but black so black this I find strange maths and dimensions deeper here and
Shinji turned around.
I see my lovely dandy-clown mourning his fallen such harmony and skill my Web do you like
Shinji did not think, he simply threw himself at the thing which had appeared behind him, and now danced from side to side. He grabbed the edge of one of its mouthparts, one that never actually descended into the churning black maw, and wildly jabbed at the thing's eyes with his right arm. But the eyes were like the rest of the creature, hard as stone, with a unnaturally smooth texture. So smooth that Shinji's hand slipped off the dangling mouthpart and sent him tumbling into the Weavers arms, and suddenly
the sky melts away and stays there there is blue but also depth insane depth and between and within that depth and other deep spaces there are the threads the things he once saw in the corner of his vision what he sensed intuitively the Web the Weaver talked about everywhere from his fear that branched and spiked out and there were the ghosts of past selves and others to the stars moving and invisible in the daysky and the great gulfs of space between here and there bound together so close neat bundles of ropey emotion and magnetism and light thoughts-thick
and then Shinji tumbled out of the thing's grasp, onto oddly yielding gravel. The Third Child screamed in a beastial way and threw his head back, tearing clumps out of his hair and trying to purge those terrible, complex and utterly objective images from his mind.
you saw the Weave I saw so strange yes you are a Weaver who can weave
"What wasz thaa" Shinji gasped, each word a moan.
your world my world where I can crawl from emotion to movement to probability where blue and black and deepblack meet and bleed and are cut and sewn into such wonderful splendid tragedy
The webbing - the Weave - Shinji could see it now. He saw it everywhere he looked! It was not the deep and complex weave of the Web, but its detrius, extensions into the normal expression of reality. The fact that he suddenly knew that illicted another sob.
Its killing me, he thought. This thing is going to burn me down to nothing.
And that thought was what finally calmed him down.
I am not nothing, he thought with a grim expression on his face. And I am not a clown!
Slowly the shaking stopped. Slowly, Shinji rose. He walked over to the edge of the roof and looked twenty stories down, to the black lake that had swallowed Asuka. He was on the same side of the lake as Unit Zero now. He watched as the power cable that had been descending into the black lake was wheeled back in. He saw the frayed end where an Eva was supposed to be.
And he saw the Weave that stuck to the world, against the people operating the cable retrieval system, blowing down the street... and clinging to him.
He tore the scintillating stuff from his body, and suddenly felt much better. He looked at the stuff that was slowly vanishing in his hand. Despair, he realized.
Shinji turned again to the Weaver, who was dismantling with great interest what appeared to be an engine block. A brown car lay next to the spider, in pieces.
necrophagic how romantic to run on ancient blood the thing crooned to itself.
"What do you want with me?" Shinji finally found his voice.
The spider looked up as its blade-hands flashed forward and bisected the engine.
a small favor between thee and thine I though such a lovely vector
"A favor? What vector?!" Shinji was finding it much easier to follow the Weaver now.
your friendgirl the one you think about at night inside your head and outside in spurts perhaps
Here, Shinji reddened.
that lovely black thing with lines of absolute stark reality the thing I coaxed into being so droll and dumb as
"You did this? You brought that here?"
came before and before the stars were right I Weaved a marvelous wave of space that flowed around it just outside the outside where it slept and waited and dreamed its simple carnal delights
"Well, can you make it go away? Can you..."Shinji could not believe he was even thinking this.
"...can you bring Asuka back?"
At this the Weaver discarded the engine block and with a causal flick of one hand sent the entire car spinning off the edge of the building. Then it came at him.
Weaver the Genocide wonders at my beautiful work my carefully planned event I admit my cameo but oh so dismayed for this Weaver who can not walk on its own four feet I wonder and ponder what shall happen if this Weaver were to go splatty-wat and cover the ground with that bag of bluewater so foolishly composed a Weaver who wished to die once today shall be resolved
And then the Weaver picked Shinji up, and threw him off the building.