Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ Understanding ❯ Understanding ( Chapter 1 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: AHGrayLensman 
Anime/Manga: Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction | Genre(s): / Psychological | Type: One Shot | Uploaded On: 07.19.2004 | Updated On: 11.15.2004 | Pages: 6 | Words: 5.8K | Visits: 1.2K | Status: Completed
Anime/Manga: Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction | Genre(s): / Psychological | Type: One Shot | Uploaded On: 07.19.2004 | Updated On: 11.15.2004 | Pages: 6 | Words: 5.8K | Visits: 1.2K | Status: Completed
"Understanding"
by AHGrayLensman
Disclaimers: Evangelion and associated characters are property of Gainax. The lyrics of "Possession" (Sarah MacLachlan), "Run" (Collective Soul/Ed Roland), "My Immortal" (Evanescence/Ben Moody, Amy Lee, & David Hodges), and "Understanding" (Evanescence/Ben Moody & Amy Lee) are similarly the property of their respective authors. I liked all these works well enough to buy it, so please don't sue me from borrowing for them a little.
Ever wonder why Shinji's so attached to his SDAT? And what's on that tape, anyway? Asuka begins to wonder these same things after Shinji is absorbed by Unit-01... Side-story during episode 20.
Rated PG for some profanity.
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THE SECOND DAY
Asuka lay fuming on her futon when the phone rang. She stormed over to the phone and angrily answered it. "WHAT?!?!"
It was Misato. She was babbling something about Rei being alright.
"I know Wonder-girl's OK, Misato! Don't call me for such a stupid reason!"
She slammed the phone back in its cradle and cast herself face-down onto the futon, then pulled a pillow over her head.
"I couldn't do anything... I was outdone by that idiot Shinji... I can't stand it!"
Asuka wanted nothing so much as to take out her frustrations on the aforesaid idiot... but that wasn't possible. Something had happened when Unit-01 went berserk and destroyed the Fourteenth Angel... something terrible. Misato hadn't been entirely clear about what had happened to Shinji, but Asuka had gathered that somehow he'd been absorbed into Unit-01. Misato had become even more evasive when Asuka asked if they had a plan for getting him out...
It suddenly hit Asuka that she might never see Shinji again, that he might be trapped in Unit-01 forever. For all her complaining about him, she missed him.
"It's only because I'll be stuck eating Misato's cooking if he's really gone for good," she tried to convince herself aloud. It was not a very effective self-deception, though. She'd known better for quite a while, ever since Shinji had used Unit-01 to pluck her and Unit-02 from that volcano after the failed attempt to capture the Eighth Angel a few months go. It was something she would have vigorously denied if she'd been asked about it openly, but there it was: she did care about him.
Without really knowing why, Asuka roused herself out of bed and walked across the darkened apartment to Shinji's room. She regarded the "Shin-chan's Lovely Suite" sign on the door for a moment before she slid it open.
The room beyond was almost pitch-black, since there were no windows or room lights on, and only minimal ambient light coming in from outside. However, she saw a lump on top of the bed, and for a split second Asuka thought it might've all been a dream, that she'd found him here, silently asleep. She groped blindly against the wall, trying find the light switch. When the lights did come up, Asuka had to shield her eyes for a few seconds as her eyes adjusted to the light.
The lump on the bed wasn't Shinji; it was a small suitcase. Shinji, being the idiot that he was, had apparently forgotten it when the alarms for the Angel attack sounded. Misato had gotten a call about it yesterday and picked it up from the train station where it was found. She must've left it in here.
"He was supposed to leave... but he came back. He swore he'd never pilot the Eva again, but he did anyway and look where it got him. Why'd he do it?" Asuka angrily forced back the tears she could feel coming on. She'd sworn never to cry again, certainly not for her idiot roommate.
She noticed Shinji's omnipresent SDAT player sticking out of a pocket at one end of the suitcase. She'd never understood why he was so attached to it. It was so outdated that it must've been almost impossible to find tapes for it; everybody used portable music players with flash memory cards or holographic storage these days... Come to think of it, she'd never even seen him change the tape. Knowing Shinji, he might only have one.
"I wonder what the heck that idiot listens to when he hides inside this thing..."
At that moment, she heard the front door slide open and saw the lights in the living room come up; Misato must be home. Asuka braced herself for the inevitable question.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN SHINJI'S ROOM?!?!?!" Misato bellowed.
"Nothing! I couldn't sleep... and it's not like there's anything in here anyway!" Asuka replied haughtily.
"I put Shinji's bag in there on the bed after I got it back from the train station yesterday," growled back Misato, sounding only slightly less irate.
"Yeah, I noticed. Any news... about Shinji?"
"No... I'll tell you as soon as I find out anything myself, Asuka," came Misato's flat reply.
"...OK..." Asuka said quietly.
"Asuka, I'm sorry I snapped at you just now. I'm just really stressed out with... everything that's going on. I know that's no excuse, but I'm sorry. I'd appreciate it you stayed out of Shinji's room, though."
Asuka said nothing for a few moments. "Misato...?" she finally asked hesitantly.
"What is it, Asuka?"
"Do you think Shinji would mind if I borrowed his SDAT player? Just till he gets back?"
"No, I don't think he'd mind. Don't you have a digital Walkman of your own, though?" Misato asked.
"Yeah, but..." Asuka trailed off. She really didn't want to have to explain her curiosity to Misato.
Misato considered her request for a moment. "OK, just be careful with it, and for heaven's sake, don't tape over anything. As far as I know, Shinji only has that one tape."
"OK, I'll be careful with it. 'night Misato, I'm gonna try to go back to sleep."
"Good night, Asuka. I'll call you as soon as I know anything about Shinji."
"Thanks. 'Night." Asuka said sleepily as she retreated into her own room with the SDAT player in hand.
After Asuka's door closed, Pen-Pen poked his head out of his fridge as if curious. Misato looked over at him and asked, "What the heck was that about, anyway?" The penguin seemed to shrug in response.
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THE THIRD DAY
Misato slid open the door to Asuka's room. "Asuka, get up. It's time to go to school."
The lumps under the blankets began to shift, then stopped abruptly. "Whaaaaa... Misato, it's Sunday you idiot!"
"Oh, right... Sorry." The slight grin on Misato's face hinted that she wasn't nearly as sorry as she claimed to be. "Anyway, I'm headed in to Headquarters. I'll call you if I find out anything about Shinji."
"OK..."
"I'll probably be at work until late, so go ahead and order takeout from that Chinese place around the corner. I left some money on the counter, so make sure you save some for me."
"OK, thanks."
"I'll see you tonight, Asuka."
"OK, bye." Asuka mumbled as she rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.
After about ten minutes without success, Asuka concluded that it was probably time to get up. She stumbled out of her room and toward the bathroom, half-expecting to see Shinji in the kitchen making breakfast.
"Scheissekopf, of course he's not here..." she chided herself aloud. Oh great, now she was talking to herself. Isn't that supposed to be a sign of insanity?
After showering and getting dressed, Asuka fired up the apartment's computer (which she would've considered woefully underpowered for her under normal circumstances) and looked up the make and model of Shinji's SDAT player. She hoped that if she could find a new one, or new tapes for his old one, she would surprise Shinji with it if... no, when he got back. Unfortunately, she'd been right last night; SDAT players hadn't been made in 8 or 9 years, and tapes for them were somewhat hard to find outside of speciality shops. Leave it to Shinji to use a nearly extinct recording format. SDATs had apparently not been used very much for commercially produced music, so the tape in Shinji's player was clearly a mix tape... but who made it? Shinji? Maybe his former teacher? Or somebody else...?
She decided to fall back to her Plan B, which was to make Shinji a new mix tape. One shop in Toyko-3 claimed to stock the same type of 80-minute SDAT media as Shinji's existing mix tape, although they were a bit expensive; shorter 60-minute SDAT media was also available. The problem was, she had no idea what kind of music he liked. She knew he played some classical pieces on his cello, but other than that, she knew almost nothing about his musical tastes.
All Asuka really had to go on was what was on Shinji's mix tape, but unlike her digital player the recordings on the SDAT didn't include metadata like the names of the song and artist. She began listening to it for a second time; she'd started listening to it when she went to bed the night before, but she'd fallen asleep after the first two or three songs, which were all somber classical pieces she didn't recognize. She hoped the whole tape wasn't like that.
The tape was just over a minute into track 04, an instrumental with piano and electric guitar that she found herself liking quite a bit, when the phone rang. She stopped the SDAT and practically leapt across the room to answer the phone. "Hello?!?!?"
"Hi Asuka, this is Hikari."
"...Oh... Hi, Hikari."
"What's wrong?"
"...Nothing. Misato said she'd called if she found out anything about Shinji, and I thought this might've been her."
"Did something happen to Ikari?!?!"
"There was... an accident with Shinji's Eva after the last battle. I don't think I'm allowed to tell you more than that, sorry." Asuka hated to hold out on her best friend like this, but Misato had made it very clear in her debriefing after the last battle that Asuka was not to tell civilians any specifics about what had happened to Shinji... especially not Kensuke. The little four-eyed geek made Section 2 extremely nervous for some reason.
"Is he OK? He wasn't hurt like Suzahara, was he?" Hikari was seriously worried about all the Eva pilots' safety after what had happened to Toji at the hands of EVA-01's dummy plug. While Toji had a special place in the class rep's heart, she considered all the Eva pilots her friends, even Rei.
"...I don't know. Misato said she'd call when she found out anything."
"Oh... I'm sorry Asuka, this must be tearing you apart... I just called to ask if you wanted to come over. You can, if you want."
"Sorry Hikari, I should probably stay here, in case Misato calls. You can come over here if you want, though. I could use the company."
"OK, I'll be over in a little while. See you then!" Hikari said before hanging up.
"Well," Asuka mused to herself, "I guess I'll have to listen to Shinji's stupid SDAT later."
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THE FOURTH DAY
The teacher was, as usual, droning on and on about how much life had changed because of the Second Impact. Asuka didn't mind, though. She was working on a little project of her own.
While she had been waiting for Hikari to come over the day before, Asuka realized that she could easily copy the contents of Shinji's SDAT onto the apartment computer or her own portable music player. She made copies on both, with the computer copies squirreled away in a hidden directory and heavily encrypted. Someone would have needed to borrow the Magi even to figure out what the files were.
So, as she and Hikari had talked, gossiped, and generally acted like normal teenage girls, Asuka had her music player plugged into Misato's stereo system, quietly playing its copy of the SDAT's contents in the background.
"Asuka, what's with the music? I didn't know you liked classical..."
"Oh, it's an extra credit assignment for my music class. The teacher gave me 26 songs to identify." Asuka had come up with the fib when she remembered that Hikari was taking home economics rather than music this year.
"Well, I'll help you out with it a little if I can, but I'm not much use on this classical stuff..."
Asuka was suddenly brought back from her reverie into the present by a half-heard question from the teacher.
"...I'm sorry sensei, could you repeat the question?"
"Miss Soryu, I asked if you had any thoughts comparing what I've been talking about here in Japan with conditions in your native Germany."
"Uh..."
It was going to be a long day at school...
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Despite the teacher's attempt at ambushing her with economics, Asuka made a fair amount of progress at identifying a couple of the songs from Shinji's SDAT while she was at school. She made even more progress after she got back to the apartment.
Twelve of the 26 tracks were classical pieces; some, like the "Hallelujah Chorus" and "Die Valkyrie", she recognized, while others she did not. Another six were modern jazz or rock instrumentals, including the one she'd been listening to when Hikari has called yesterday. The remaining eight were pop songs, four of which were in Japanese, with three in English and one in what sounded to her like Spanish or Italian. She'd decided to start with the songs in Japanese, since it would be easier to search for lyrics on the net than for music. She started feeding lines she was able to recognize from the songs into a lyrics search engine.
She found the last track, number 26, almost immediately. It was very odd; while the lyrics were in Japanese, the title was in German. The lyrics were rather... disturbing, and Asuka couldn't shake the feeling that the female singer sounded sort of like Wonder-girl for some reason. Most disturbing of all was the title, though: "Komm Susser Tod." Come, sweet death...
Asuka pushed aside the dark visions of dolls and nooses which followed that thought and started to work on the English songs instead.
One, the track just after the instrumental she liked from the previous day in fact, was called "Possession", by a Canadian singer/songwriter named Sarah McLachlan. It seemed to about an unrequited love that bordered on obsession:
And I would be the one
To hold you down,
Kiss you so hard
I'll take your breath away,
And after I wipe away the tears,
Just close your eyes, dear.
It had apparently been moderately popular in North America for a while during the mid-'90s, several years before Second Impact. It was a bit mellower than Asuka's standard musical tastes, but she really liked it.
The second, appearing some where in the middle of the tracks, was called "Run", by an American rock band called Collective Soul. Asuka couldn't quite make out what it was supposed to be about:
Are there times contagious?
I've never been this bored before.
Is this the prize I've waited for?
Now as the hour passing,
There's nothing left here to insure.
I long to find a messenger.
So far as she could tell, it had been popular in 1999, just a few months before Second Impact. Asuka found it merely OK.
She was about to dig into finding the last English track when the phone rang. She again raced across the apartment to answer it, nearly flattening a hapless Pen-Pen in the process.
"Hello?!?!?" Asuka answered breathlessly.
"Asuka, it's Misato." The older woman sounded exhausted.
"Misato! Why didn't you come home last night? What's going on with Shinji?" Asuka practically screamed at the receiver.
"That's why I'm calling now. You'd better sit down, Asuka."
Oh God. Something must be really wrong...
"OK, what's going on?" Asuka asked nervously after sitting down.
"The good news is that Ritsuko and Maya think they have a procedure for getting Shinji out of Unit-01." Misato's tone belied serious misgivings with their plan.
"What's the bad news?" Asuka asked as her dread grew.
"A couple things, unfortunately. It'll take them almost a month to get it ready, for one thing."
"OK, so it takes a while to get the idiot out... What's wrong with that, aside from me having to eat your awful cooking for a while longer?"
Misato ignored the bait. "The last time they tried this, the procedure failed and the pilot... died."
"THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE?!?!? TO WHO?!?!?" Asuka asked furiously.
"Shinji's mother. She was killed in a contact experiment with Unit-01 in 2004."
Asuka was speechless, almost physically ill. Part of her mind dimly realized this was why Misato had told her to sit down.
"Asuka, are you still there?"
"...Yeah... Misato, we're going to lose him, aren't we?" Asuka asked shakily as she choked back tears.
"Asuka, calm down. Ritsu's pretty sure she's found all the mistakes they made last time."
"But what if she's wrong...?"
"You can't think like that, Asuka. Look, I have a few things I need to take of here, but I'll be home in about two hours. We'll talk more then. Have you eaten yet?"
"No, I'm not really hungry." In truth, Asuka didn't think she could eat anything with how she felt right now.
"Are you sure? I'll pick up you something on my way back from Headquarters if you want."
"No really, I'm not hungry Misato."
"OK. Hang in there, kiddo. I'll be home in a couple hours."
"OK. Bye, Misato."
"Bye, Asuka."
Asuka hung up the phone and lay her head down on the table for a few minutes to collect herself. Trying desperately not to think about what Misato had just told her, Asuka went back to working on tracking down the last English song on Shinji's SDAT, as if that might somehow improve the odds of his recovery.
The last English song, Asuka found, had been popular in late 2003 and early 2004. It was a haunting piano ballad by an American band called Evanescence, one of the first really popular musical acts to appear after mankind started to rebuild from Second Impact. The name of the song was "My Immortal".
Asuka loved the singer's voice... but she was crushed when she realized the song was a goodbye to a lost loved one:
I've tried so hard to tell myself that you're gone,
But though you're still with me,
I've been alone all along.
Tears stinging her eyes again, Asuka quickly retreated into her bedroom and tried to go to sleep.
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THE FIFTH DAY
Asuka slowly opened her eyes and rolled over to look at the clock. 7:12am.
"OH SHIT, I HAVE A 7:30 HARMONICS TEST!!!" she yelled as she realized just how late she was going to be. She threw off her covers and bolted out of the door to her room, where she collided bodily with Misato. "DAMN IT MISATO, OUT OF THE WAY!!! I'M GONNA BE LATE!!!"
"Calm down, Asuka. That's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about last night -- with Units 00 and 02 still under repairs, and with Ritsuko and Maya tied up working on the extraction procedure for Shinji, harmonics and synchronization tests are cancelled until further notice."
"Oh great, now you tell me!"
"Well, if you'd stayed up till I got home last night like I thought you were, I would've told you then! It's not like I was out till all hours... I think I was home before 10, and you were already asleep by then!"
"But what if an Angel attacks?"
"If that happens in the next three weeks, we're screwed. The only Eva capable of fighting right now is Unit-01, and after what happened in the last battle, the brass ordered it put into cryostasis. Ritsu thinks the repair crews will have Unit-02 back online in three weeks or so."
"Oh... I suppose I should start getting ready for school then."
"Hey, as far as your school knows, you still have a harmonics test today. I won't tell if you won't..." Misato said, winking at her and grinning. "Besides, you must've had a rough day yesterday if you were out by the time I got home."
"Yeah, you could say that."
"Wanna talk about it?"
"Not really." Asuka had no intention of telling Misato what she'd been doing last night, as it would bring up too many uncomfortable subjects.
"Well, if you change your mind, let me know Asuka... Hey, I have an idea! Let me check on something." Misato picked up the phone and dialed a number. "Kaji, this is Misato." Asuka instantly perked up at the mention of Kaji's name. "I'm fine, thanks. How busy are you today? Oh, good. Would you mind if Asuka stopped by for a while? OK, great. I'll bring her by when I come in to Headquarters in a little while."
Asuka was a little confused by this turn of events, but it meant that she would be spending time with Kaji so she tried not to think about it too much.
"Kaji says he can spend some time with you today, so you'd better go get ready. I leave for work in 20 minutes." Misato never saw Asuka move so fast in all her life.
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"So, how's my favorite Eva pilot doing these days?" Kaji asked a beaming Asuka after they had taken their seats on the commuter train that ran between the Geofront complex and Tokyo-3's eastern edge. They were headed to a mall on that side of town that had made it unscathed through the last couple Angel attacks.
"Much better now that I'm with you." Asuka replied, smiling broadly.
"That's good. How's Katsuragi holding up after... what's happened?"
The smile left Asuka's face. "This morning is the first I've seen her in a couple days. She's been at Headquarters all the time... probably fussing over her favorite, that idiot Shinji."
Kaji was visibly upset by her response. "Asuka, let me ask you something... If your place was switched with Shinji's and you were the one trapped in the Eva, do you think Misato would be spending as much time at work as she is now?"
"No! And if she did, it would only be because it's her job!"
"Then you don't know Misato very well. Give her a little more credit than that."
Neither of them said anything for a few minutes after that. Asuka felt stung; that was the closest thing to a rebuke Kaji had ever given her.
Kaji finally broke the silence by changing the subject. "So, are we looking for anything in particular this time? You're not going to subject me to the swimsuit section again, are you?" he asked with a look of mock horror.
"No, I'm looking for some music this time." Asuka decided that the ruse she'd used with Hikari would probably work on Kaji as well. "My music teacher gave me a bunch of songs to identify as an extra credit project, and I kinda like some of them so I'd like to get them on audio disc. I'm having trouble identifying a couple of them, though... Do you think you could listen to them?"
"Well, sure, but I can't make any promises. NERV didn't hire me as a musicologist, you know."
"Here, listen to this..." Asuka handed her mentor the headphones of her portable music player and started playing back the song she thought was in Italian.
"Hmmm... I've heard this before, but it was in English. You'd like the band; it's a German group called Blind Guardian. I used to listen to them in high school."
"Why are they singing in Italian if they're German?"
"I think it's Spanish, actually; they did most of their music in English, but they sometimes did songs in other languages. If I remember right, the name of the song in English is 'Harvest of Sorrow'. It's based on Tolkien."
"Tolkien... The man who wrote those Lord of the Rings movies they started making before Second Impact?"
"Well, he wrote the novel those were based on, but yeah. The guys in Blind Guardian were huge Lord of the Rings fans, and they wrote a bunch of songs about it. This one's based on a story in another Tolkien book called the Silmarillion ."
"OK, thanks... How about this one?" Asuka switched to the guitar-and-piano instrumental she'd liked so much.
"I've heard this before too... It's called 'State of Grace', I think. Asuka, where did you find this?" Kaji asked, with a strange intensity she'd never seen from him before.
"My music teacher gave it to me..." Asuka found Kaji's sudden focus a bit unnerving, especially in light of her deception. "Why do you ask?"
"Because I've overheard Commander Ikari listening to this on business trips, and I'm sure you can imagine how... singular the Commander's tastes are."
Asuka tried to hide the shock that she was sure was written all over her face.
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THE EIGHTH DAY
Asuka was beginning to reconsider the whole make-a-new-SDAT-for-Shinji idea.
It wasn't for lack of source material; Asuka had bought three Sarah McLachlan discs, one Collective Soul disc, two Blind Guardian discs, and three Evanescence discs during her shopping expedition with Kaji a couple days ago, to supplement her own music collection. She was pretty sure that two of the Evanescence discs were bootlegs, but they had several songs that weren't on the one disc she was reasonably sure wasn't a bootleg, so she didn't mind as much. She's also picked up a disc called Liquid Tension Experiment , which a clerk at the music store had thought (correctly) was the source of "State of Grace".
No, Asuka's problems with this project were two-fold. The first and lesser of the two was that if she were to give Shinji this mix tape in person, he might take it as a sign of romantic interest on her part, and she definitely didn't want to head down that road... not right now, anyway. She might consider it if Shinji came back with some backbone and stopped showing her up as an Eva pilot, especially now that Kaji was seemingly off the market thanks to Misato. However, she'd had more than enough of the "newlyweds" catcalls from Shinji's stooge friends as it was. In any case, Asuka decided it would be best to give the tape to Shinji anonymously to reduce the number of potential... complications. She hadn't decided it it would be better to leave it here in the apartment or at school, though.
The larger problem facing her was Kaji's revelation that Commander Ikari listened to at least some of the same music as was on Shinji's SDAT. That raised the possibility that Shinji's father had made the tape for Shinji, and the last thing Asuka wanted to do was give Shinji yet another reminder of his father. But if the tape and the SDAT player were from Commander Ikari, Asuka found it hard to believe that Shinji would've kept them after the incident with Toji and Unit-03; Shinji had been so angry at his father that he was ready to blow up NERV Headquarters just to get at the man.
There was something else bothering Asuka too, although she couldn't put her finger on exactly what it was. The fact that all of the songs were at least ten years old seemed a little weird for a teenager's mix tape, even that of a teenager as messed up as Shinji. Most of them were from before the Second Impact, and the most recent was from 2004... then it hit her.
Shinji's mother had died in 2004.
"Mein Gott... The SDAT must've been his mother's! No wonder he's so attached to it."
Asuka didn't have any proof of this, but she knew she was right. Everything fit, from Shinji's attachment to it to the dates of the music and the Commander's listening to the same music.
She had never realized how similar she and Shinji were before... Both had lost their mothers to Project E. Both had absentee fathers who only acknowledged their respective child's existence when it suited them. They had reacted in opposite ways to their situation -- Shinji with introversion, Asuka with self-aggrandizement -- but it was the same essential loneliness and need for acceptance that drove them both.
She thought for a while longer, then made a list:
1. "Paradigm Shift", Liquid Tension Experiment
2. "Good Enough", Sarah McLachlan
3. "Broken", Seether
4. "Precious Declaration", Collective Soul
5. "Building a Mystery", Sarah McLachlan
6. "Haunted", Evanescence
7. "Schism", Tool
8. "Imaginations from the Other Side", Blind Guardian
9. "Understanding", Evanescence
10. "Full of Grace", Sarah McLachlan
Asuka thought the next-to-last song summed up her relationship with Shinji, such as it was, pretty well:
The pain that grips you,
The fear that binds you,
Releases life in me.
In our mutual shame we hide our eyes
To blind them from the truth that finds a way to who we are.
Asuka grinned as she started dubbing songs onto the blank SDAT she'd bought. She would do something nice for Shinji and probably expand his horizons with regard to rock music at the same time.
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THE THIRTY-THIRD DAY
Shinji was still a bit wobbly on his feet as he got out of Misato's car and made his way to the elevator lobby of their apartment building. Misato was hovering just behind him like a mother hen. The NERV hospital had released him and pronounced him fit for duty, following 36 hours of observation and tests after his extraction from Unit-01.
Misato turned to him after they got on the elevator. "Shinji, are you sure you don't want me to stay with you this afternoon? I can call work and tell them I'm not coming in..."
"Misato, I'm fine; I'll be OK. You've probably got a million things to take care of at Headquarters, too."
"Well yeah, but you're an important part of my job, you know?"
"Yeah, I know... Hey, where's Asuka today? Did she have a sync test or something?"
"No, she's at school. I gave her the option to take today off and come with me to get you, but she said she had too many exams coming up to miss any more class."
Shinji sighed; he'd been alternately looking for forward to and dreading seeing the German girl again. "That's OK; I'm so tired I'll probably just sleep all afternoon anyway."
They got off the elevator and walked over to the door of their apartment. Misato unlocked and opened the door for Shinji. "I've got to head back to Headquarters, but I want you to call me immediately if you're not feeling well. Asuka should be back around 6, and I gave her strict orders to be nice to you for a few days."
"OK..." Shinji replied noncommittally.
Misato looked at the boy for a moment, then bear-hugged him. "It's good to have you back, kiddo."
"Th...Thanks." Shinji felt a bit embarrassed by her show of affection.
"Now go get some rest. I'll see you tonight." Misato waved to him as she turned and headed back toward the elevator.
Shinji made his way across the apartment and almost to his room before he was attacked by an overjoyed warm-water penguin. "Hi Pen-Pen, I've missed you too."
After detaching Pen-Pen from his leg, Shinji opened the door to his room. It was empty, which was pretty much how he'd left it, with two exceptions: his small suitcase, which he realized with a start that he'd left at the train station what seemed like a lifetime ago; and a note on his desk, which read:
Dear Shinji,
Welcome back; I've missed you. Hope you like the new SDAT.
Love,
Your secret admirer
Underneath the note was an SDAT labeled "For Shinji."
Shinji took the SDAT, placed it in his player, and pressed the Play button as he lay down for a nap. A small smile stole across his face as he drifted off to sleep.
The smile was still there when Asuka looked in on him a few hours later and said quietly, "Welcome home, Shinji."
by AHGrayLensman
Disclaimers: Evangelion and associated characters are property of Gainax. The lyrics of "Possession" (Sarah MacLachlan), "Run" (Collective Soul/Ed Roland), "My Immortal" (Evanescence/Ben Moody, Amy Lee, & David Hodges), and "Understanding" (Evanescence/Ben Moody & Amy Lee) are similarly the property of their respective authors. I liked all these works well enough to buy it, so please don't sue me from borrowing for them a little.
Ever wonder why Shinji's so attached to his SDAT? And what's on that tape, anyway? Asuka begins to wonder these same things after Shinji is absorbed by Unit-01... Side-story during episode 20.
Rated PG for some profanity.
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THE SECOND DAY
Asuka lay fuming on her futon when the phone rang. She stormed over to the phone and angrily answered it. "WHAT?!?!"
It was Misato. She was babbling something about Rei being alright.
"I know Wonder-girl's OK, Misato! Don't call me for such a stupid reason!"
She slammed the phone back in its cradle and cast herself face-down onto the futon, then pulled a pillow over her head.
"I couldn't do anything... I was outdone by that idiot Shinji... I can't stand it!"
Asuka wanted nothing so much as to take out her frustrations on the aforesaid idiot... but that wasn't possible. Something had happened when Unit-01 went berserk and destroyed the Fourteenth Angel... something terrible. Misato hadn't been entirely clear about what had happened to Shinji, but Asuka had gathered that somehow he'd been absorbed into Unit-01. Misato had become even more evasive when Asuka asked if they had a plan for getting him out...
It suddenly hit Asuka that she might never see Shinji again, that he might be trapped in Unit-01 forever. For all her complaining about him, she missed him.
"It's only because I'll be stuck eating Misato's cooking if he's really gone for good," she tried to convince herself aloud. It was not a very effective self-deception, though. She'd known better for quite a while, ever since Shinji had used Unit-01 to pluck her and Unit-02 from that volcano after the failed attempt to capture the Eighth Angel a few months go. It was something she would have vigorously denied if she'd been asked about it openly, but there it was: she did care about him.
Without really knowing why, Asuka roused herself out of bed and walked across the darkened apartment to Shinji's room. She regarded the "Shin-chan's Lovely Suite" sign on the door for a moment before she slid it open.
The room beyond was almost pitch-black, since there were no windows or room lights on, and only minimal ambient light coming in from outside. However, she saw a lump on top of the bed, and for a split second Asuka thought it might've all been a dream, that she'd found him here, silently asleep. She groped blindly against the wall, trying find the light switch. When the lights did come up, Asuka had to shield her eyes for a few seconds as her eyes adjusted to the light.
The lump on the bed wasn't Shinji; it was a small suitcase. Shinji, being the idiot that he was, had apparently forgotten it when the alarms for the Angel attack sounded. Misato had gotten a call about it yesterday and picked it up from the train station where it was found. She must've left it in here.
"He was supposed to leave... but he came back. He swore he'd never pilot the Eva again, but he did anyway and look where it got him. Why'd he do it?" Asuka angrily forced back the tears she could feel coming on. She'd sworn never to cry again, certainly not for her idiot roommate.
She noticed Shinji's omnipresent SDAT player sticking out of a pocket at one end of the suitcase. She'd never understood why he was so attached to it. It was so outdated that it must've been almost impossible to find tapes for it; everybody used portable music players with flash memory cards or holographic storage these days... Come to think of it, she'd never even seen him change the tape. Knowing Shinji, he might only have one.
"I wonder what the heck that idiot listens to when he hides inside this thing..."
At that moment, she heard the front door slide open and saw the lights in the living room come up; Misato must be home. Asuka braced herself for the inevitable question.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN SHINJI'S ROOM?!?!?!" Misato bellowed.
"Nothing! I couldn't sleep... and it's not like there's anything in here anyway!" Asuka replied haughtily.
"I put Shinji's bag in there on the bed after I got it back from the train station yesterday," growled back Misato, sounding only slightly less irate.
"Yeah, I noticed. Any news... about Shinji?"
"No... I'll tell you as soon as I find out anything myself, Asuka," came Misato's flat reply.
"...OK..." Asuka said quietly.
"Asuka, I'm sorry I snapped at you just now. I'm just really stressed out with... everything that's going on. I know that's no excuse, but I'm sorry. I'd appreciate it you stayed out of Shinji's room, though."
Asuka said nothing for a few moments. "Misato...?" she finally asked hesitantly.
"What is it, Asuka?"
"Do you think Shinji would mind if I borrowed his SDAT player? Just till he gets back?"
"No, I don't think he'd mind. Don't you have a digital Walkman of your own, though?" Misato asked.
"Yeah, but..." Asuka trailed off. She really didn't want to have to explain her curiosity to Misato.
Misato considered her request for a moment. "OK, just be careful with it, and for heaven's sake, don't tape over anything. As far as I know, Shinji only has that one tape."
"OK, I'll be careful with it. 'night Misato, I'm gonna try to go back to sleep."
"Good night, Asuka. I'll call you as soon as I know anything about Shinji."
"Thanks. 'Night." Asuka said sleepily as she retreated into her own room with the SDAT player in hand.
After Asuka's door closed, Pen-Pen poked his head out of his fridge as if curious. Misato looked over at him and asked, "What the heck was that about, anyway?" The penguin seemed to shrug in response.
--------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------
THE THIRD DAY
Misato slid open the door to Asuka's room. "Asuka, get up. It's time to go to school."
The lumps under the blankets began to shift, then stopped abruptly. "Whaaaaa... Misato, it's Sunday you idiot!"
"Oh, right... Sorry." The slight grin on Misato's face hinted that she wasn't nearly as sorry as she claimed to be. "Anyway, I'm headed in to Headquarters. I'll call you if I find out anything about Shinji."
"OK..."
"I'll probably be at work until late, so go ahead and order takeout from that Chinese place around the corner. I left some money on the counter, so make sure you save some for me."
"OK, thanks."
"I'll see you tonight, Asuka."
"OK, bye." Asuka mumbled as she rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.
After about ten minutes without success, Asuka concluded that it was probably time to get up. She stumbled out of her room and toward the bathroom, half-expecting to see Shinji in the kitchen making breakfast.
"Scheissekopf, of course he's not here..." she chided herself aloud. Oh great, now she was talking to herself. Isn't that supposed to be a sign of insanity?
After showering and getting dressed, Asuka fired up the apartment's computer (which she would've considered woefully underpowered for her under normal circumstances) and looked up the make and model of Shinji's SDAT player. She hoped that if she could find a new one, or new tapes for his old one, she would surprise Shinji with it if... no, when he got back. Unfortunately, she'd been right last night; SDAT players hadn't been made in 8 or 9 years, and tapes for them were somewhat hard to find outside of speciality shops. Leave it to Shinji to use a nearly extinct recording format. SDATs had apparently not been used very much for commercially produced music, so the tape in Shinji's player was clearly a mix tape... but who made it? Shinji? Maybe his former teacher? Or somebody else...?
She decided to fall back to her Plan B, which was to make Shinji a new mix tape. One shop in Toyko-3 claimed to stock the same type of 80-minute SDAT media as Shinji's existing mix tape, although they were a bit expensive; shorter 60-minute SDAT media was also available. The problem was, she had no idea what kind of music he liked. She knew he played some classical pieces on his cello, but other than that, she knew almost nothing about his musical tastes.
All Asuka really had to go on was what was on Shinji's mix tape, but unlike her digital player the recordings on the SDAT didn't include metadata like the names of the song and artist. She began listening to it for a second time; she'd started listening to it when she went to bed the night before, but she'd fallen asleep after the first two or three songs, which were all somber classical pieces she didn't recognize. She hoped the whole tape wasn't like that.
The tape was just over a minute into track 04, an instrumental with piano and electric guitar that she found herself liking quite a bit, when the phone rang. She stopped the SDAT and practically leapt across the room to answer the phone. "Hello?!?!?"
"Hi Asuka, this is Hikari."
"...Oh... Hi, Hikari."
"What's wrong?"
"...Nothing. Misato said she'd called if she found out anything about Shinji, and I thought this might've been her."
"Did something happen to Ikari?!?!"
"There was... an accident with Shinji's Eva after the last battle. I don't think I'm allowed to tell you more than that, sorry." Asuka hated to hold out on her best friend like this, but Misato had made it very clear in her debriefing after the last battle that Asuka was not to tell civilians any specifics about what had happened to Shinji... especially not Kensuke. The little four-eyed geek made Section 2 extremely nervous for some reason.
"Is he OK? He wasn't hurt like Suzahara, was he?" Hikari was seriously worried about all the Eva pilots' safety after what had happened to Toji at the hands of EVA-01's dummy plug. While Toji had a special place in the class rep's heart, she considered all the Eva pilots her friends, even Rei.
"...I don't know. Misato said she'd call when she found out anything."
"Oh... I'm sorry Asuka, this must be tearing you apart... I just called to ask if you wanted to come over. You can, if you want."
"Sorry Hikari, I should probably stay here, in case Misato calls. You can come over here if you want, though. I could use the company."
"OK, I'll be over in a little while. See you then!" Hikari said before hanging up.
"Well," Asuka mused to herself, "I guess I'll have to listen to Shinji's stupid SDAT later."
---------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------
THE FOURTH DAY
The teacher was, as usual, droning on and on about how much life had changed because of the Second Impact. Asuka didn't mind, though. She was working on a little project of her own.
While she had been waiting for Hikari to come over the day before, Asuka realized that she could easily copy the contents of Shinji's SDAT onto the apartment computer or her own portable music player. She made copies on both, with the computer copies squirreled away in a hidden directory and heavily encrypted. Someone would have needed to borrow the Magi even to figure out what the files were.
So, as she and Hikari had talked, gossiped, and generally acted like normal teenage girls, Asuka had her music player plugged into Misato's stereo system, quietly playing its copy of the SDAT's contents in the background.
"Asuka, what's with the music? I didn't know you liked classical..."
"Oh, it's an extra credit assignment for my music class. The teacher gave me 26 songs to identify." Asuka had come up with the fib when she remembered that Hikari was taking home economics rather than music this year.
"Well, I'll help you out with it a little if I can, but I'm not much use on this classical stuff..."
Asuka was suddenly brought back from her reverie into the present by a half-heard question from the teacher.
"...I'm sorry sensei, could you repeat the question?"
"Miss Soryu, I asked if you had any thoughts comparing what I've been talking about here in Japan with conditions in your native Germany."
"Uh..."
It was going to be a long day at school...
-----
Despite the teacher's attempt at ambushing her with economics, Asuka made a fair amount of progress at identifying a couple of the songs from Shinji's SDAT while she was at school. She made even more progress after she got back to the apartment.
Twelve of the 26 tracks were classical pieces; some, like the "Hallelujah Chorus" and "Die Valkyrie", she recognized, while others she did not. Another six were modern jazz or rock instrumentals, including the one she'd been listening to when Hikari has called yesterday. The remaining eight were pop songs, four of which were in Japanese, with three in English and one in what sounded to her like Spanish or Italian. She'd decided to start with the songs in Japanese, since it would be easier to search for lyrics on the net than for music. She started feeding lines she was able to recognize from the songs into a lyrics search engine.
She found the last track, number 26, almost immediately. It was very odd; while the lyrics were in Japanese, the title was in German. The lyrics were rather... disturbing, and Asuka couldn't shake the feeling that the female singer sounded sort of like Wonder-girl for some reason. Most disturbing of all was the title, though: "Komm Susser Tod." Come, sweet death...
Asuka pushed aside the dark visions of dolls and nooses which followed that thought and started to work on the English songs instead.
One, the track just after the instrumental she liked from the previous day in fact, was called "Possession", by a Canadian singer/songwriter named Sarah McLachlan. It seemed to about an unrequited love that bordered on obsession:
And I would be the one
To hold you down,
Kiss you so hard
I'll take your breath away,
And after I wipe away the tears,
Just close your eyes, dear.
It had apparently been moderately popular in North America for a while during the mid-'90s, several years before Second Impact. It was a bit mellower than Asuka's standard musical tastes, but she really liked it.
The second, appearing some where in the middle of the tracks, was called "Run", by an American rock band called Collective Soul. Asuka couldn't quite make out what it was supposed to be about:
Are there times contagious?
I've never been this bored before.
Is this the prize I've waited for?
Now as the hour passing,
There's nothing left here to insure.
I long to find a messenger.
So far as she could tell, it had been popular in 1999, just a few months before Second Impact. Asuka found it merely OK.
She was about to dig into finding the last English track when the phone rang. She again raced across the apartment to answer it, nearly flattening a hapless Pen-Pen in the process.
"Hello?!?!?" Asuka answered breathlessly.
"Asuka, it's Misato." The older woman sounded exhausted.
"Misato! Why didn't you come home last night? What's going on with Shinji?" Asuka practically screamed at the receiver.
"That's why I'm calling now. You'd better sit down, Asuka."
Oh God. Something must be really wrong...
"OK, what's going on?" Asuka asked nervously after sitting down.
"The good news is that Ritsuko and Maya think they have a procedure for getting Shinji out of Unit-01." Misato's tone belied serious misgivings with their plan.
"What's the bad news?" Asuka asked as her dread grew.
"A couple things, unfortunately. It'll take them almost a month to get it ready, for one thing."
"OK, so it takes a while to get the idiot out... What's wrong with that, aside from me having to eat your awful cooking for a while longer?"
Misato ignored the bait. "The last time they tried this, the procedure failed and the pilot... died."
"THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE?!?!? TO WHO?!?!?" Asuka asked furiously.
"Shinji's mother. She was killed in a contact experiment with Unit-01 in 2004."
Asuka was speechless, almost physically ill. Part of her mind dimly realized this was why Misato had told her to sit down.
"Asuka, are you still there?"
"...Yeah... Misato, we're going to lose him, aren't we?" Asuka asked shakily as she choked back tears.
"Asuka, calm down. Ritsu's pretty sure she's found all the mistakes they made last time."
"But what if she's wrong...?"
"You can't think like that, Asuka. Look, I have a few things I need to take of here, but I'll be home in about two hours. We'll talk more then. Have you eaten yet?"
"No, I'm not really hungry." In truth, Asuka didn't think she could eat anything with how she felt right now.
"Are you sure? I'll pick up you something on my way back from Headquarters if you want."
"No really, I'm not hungry Misato."
"OK. Hang in there, kiddo. I'll be home in a couple hours."
"OK. Bye, Misato."
"Bye, Asuka."
Asuka hung up the phone and lay her head down on the table for a few minutes to collect herself. Trying desperately not to think about what Misato had just told her, Asuka went back to working on tracking down the last English song on Shinji's SDAT, as if that might somehow improve the odds of his recovery.
The last English song, Asuka found, had been popular in late 2003 and early 2004. It was a haunting piano ballad by an American band called Evanescence, one of the first really popular musical acts to appear after mankind started to rebuild from Second Impact. The name of the song was "My Immortal".
Asuka loved the singer's voice... but she was crushed when she realized the song was a goodbye to a lost loved one:
I've tried so hard to tell myself that you're gone,
But though you're still with me,
I've been alone all along.
Tears stinging her eyes again, Asuka quickly retreated into her bedroom and tried to go to sleep.
----------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------
THE FIFTH DAY
Asuka slowly opened her eyes and rolled over to look at the clock. 7:12am.
"OH SHIT, I HAVE A 7:30 HARMONICS TEST!!!" she yelled as she realized just how late she was going to be. She threw off her covers and bolted out of the door to her room, where she collided bodily with Misato. "DAMN IT MISATO, OUT OF THE WAY!!! I'M GONNA BE LATE!!!"
"Calm down, Asuka. That's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about last night -- with Units 00 and 02 still under repairs, and with Ritsuko and Maya tied up working on the extraction procedure for Shinji, harmonics and synchronization tests are cancelled until further notice."
"Oh great, now you tell me!"
"Well, if you'd stayed up till I got home last night like I thought you were, I would've told you then! It's not like I was out till all hours... I think I was home before 10, and you were already asleep by then!"
"But what if an Angel attacks?"
"If that happens in the next three weeks, we're screwed. The only Eva capable of fighting right now is Unit-01, and after what happened in the last battle, the brass ordered it put into cryostasis. Ritsu thinks the repair crews will have Unit-02 back online in three weeks or so."
"Oh... I suppose I should start getting ready for school then."
"Hey, as far as your school knows, you still have a harmonics test today. I won't tell if you won't..." Misato said, winking at her and grinning. "Besides, you must've had a rough day yesterday if you were out by the time I got home."
"Yeah, you could say that."
"Wanna talk about it?"
"Not really." Asuka had no intention of telling Misato what she'd been doing last night, as it would bring up too many uncomfortable subjects.
"Well, if you change your mind, let me know Asuka... Hey, I have an idea! Let me check on something." Misato picked up the phone and dialed a number. "Kaji, this is Misato." Asuka instantly perked up at the mention of Kaji's name. "I'm fine, thanks. How busy are you today? Oh, good. Would you mind if Asuka stopped by for a while? OK, great. I'll bring her by when I come in to Headquarters in a little while."
Asuka was a little confused by this turn of events, but it meant that she would be spending time with Kaji so she tried not to think about it too much.
"Kaji says he can spend some time with you today, so you'd better go get ready. I leave for work in 20 minutes." Misato never saw Asuka move so fast in all her life.
-----
"So, how's my favorite Eva pilot doing these days?" Kaji asked a beaming Asuka after they had taken their seats on the commuter train that ran between the Geofront complex and Tokyo-3's eastern edge. They were headed to a mall on that side of town that had made it unscathed through the last couple Angel attacks.
"Much better now that I'm with you." Asuka replied, smiling broadly.
"That's good. How's Katsuragi holding up after... what's happened?"
The smile left Asuka's face. "This morning is the first I've seen her in a couple days. She's been at Headquarters all the time... probably fussing over her favorite, that idiot Shinji."
Kaji was visibly upset by her response. "Asuka, let me ask you something... If your place was switched with Shinji's and you were the one trapped in the Eva, do you think Misato would be spending as much time at work as she is now?"
"No! And if she did, it would only be because it's her job!"
"Then you don't know Misato very well. Give her a little more credit than that."
Neither of them said anything for a few minutes after that. Asuka felt stung; that was the closest thing to a rebuke Kaji had ever given her.
Kaji finally broke the silence by changing the subject. "So, are we looking for anything in particular this time? You're not going to subject me to the swimsuit section again, are you?" he asked with a look of mock horror.
"No, I'm looking for some music this time." Asuka decided that the ruse she'd used with Hikari would probably work on Kaji as well. "My music teacher gave me a bunch of songs to identify as an extra credit project, and I kinda like some of them so I'd like to get them on audio disc. I'm having trouble identifying a couple of them, though... Do you think you could listen to them?"
"Well, sure, but I can't make any promises. NERV didn't hire me as a musicologist, you know."
"Here, listen to this..." Asuka handed her mentor the headphones of her portable music player and started playing back the song she thought was in Italian.
"Hmmm... I've heard this before, but it was in English. You'd like the band; it's a German group called Blind Guardian. I used to listen to them in high school."
"Why are they singing in Italian if they're German?"
"I think it's Spanish, actually; they did most of their music in English, but they sometimes did songs in other languages. If I remember right, the name of the song in English is 'Harvest of Sorrow'. It's based on Tolkien."
"Tolkien... The man who wrote those Lord of the Rings movies they started making before Second Impact?"
"Well, he wrote the novel those were based on, but yeah. The guys in Blind Guardian were huge Lord of the Rings fans, and they wrote a bunch of songs about it. This one's based on a story in another Tolkien book called the Silmarillion ."
"OK, thanks... How about this one?" Asuka switched to the guitar-and-piano instrumental she'd liked so much.
"I've heard this before too... It's called 'State of Grace', I think. Asuka, where did you find this?" Kaji asked, with a strange intensity she'd never seen from him before.
"My music teacher gave it to me..." Asuka found Kaji's sudden focus a bit unnerving, especially in light of her deception. "Why do you ask?"
"Because I've overheard Commander Ikari listening to this on business trips, and I'm sure you can imagine how... singular the Commander's tastes are."
Asuka tried to hide the shock that she was sure was written all over her face.
------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------
THE EIGHTH DAY
Asuka was beginning to reconsider the whole make-a-new-SDAT-for-Shinji idea.
It wasn't for lack of source material; Asuka had bought three Sarah McLachlan discs, one Collective Soul disc, two Blind Guardian discs, and three Evanescence discs during her shopping expedition with Kaji a couple days ago, to supplement her own music collection. She was pretty sure that two of the Evanescence discs were bootlegs, but they had several songs that weren't on the one disc she was reasonably sure wasn't a bootleg, so she didn't mind as much. She's also picked up a disc called Liquid Tension Experiment , which a clerk at the music store had thought (correctly) was the source of "State of Grace".
No, Asuka's problems with this project were two-fold. The first and lesser of the two was that if she were to give Shinji this mix tape in person, he might take it as a sign of romantic interest on her part, and she definitely didn't want to head down that road... not right now, anyway. She might consider it if Shinji came back with some backbone and stopped showing her up as an Eva pilot, especially now that Kaji was seemingly off the market thanks to Misato. However, she'd had more than enough of the "newlyweds" catcalls from Shinji's stooge friends as it was. In any case, Asuka decided it would be best to give the tape to Shinji anonymously to reduce the number of potential... complications. She hadn't decided it it would be better to leave it here in the apartment or at school, though.
The larger problem facing her was Kaji's revelation that Commander Ikari listened to at least some of the same music as was on Shinji's SDAT. That raised the possibility that Shinji's father had made the tape for Shinji, and the last thing Asuka wanted to do was give Shinji yet another reminder of his father. But if the tape and the SDAT player were from Commander Ikari, Asuka found it hard to believe that Shinji would've kept them after the incident with Toji and Unit-03; Shinji had been so angry at his father that he was ready to blow up NERV Headquarters just to get at the man.
There was something else bothering Asuka too, although she couldn't put her finger on exactly what it was. The fact that all of the songs were at least ten years old seemed a little weird for a teenager's mix tape, even that of a teenager as messed up as Shinji. Most of them were from before the Second Impact, and the most recent was from 2004... then it hit her.
Shinji's mother had died in 2004.
"Mein Gott... The SDAT must've been his mother's! No wonder he's so attached to it."
Asuka didn't have any proof of this, but she knew she was right. Everything fit, from Shinji's attachment to it to the dates of the music and the Commander's listening to the same music.
She had never realized how similar she and Shinji were before... Both had lost their mothers to Project E. Both had absentee fathers who only acknowledged their respective child's existence when it suited them. They had reacted in opposite ways to their situation -- Shinji with introversion, Asuka with self-aggrandizement -- but it was the same essential loneliness and need for acceptance that drove them both.
She thought for a while longer, then made a list:
1. "Paradigm Shift", Liquid Tension Experiment
2. "Good Enough", Sarah McLachlan
3. "Broken", Seether
4. "Precious Declaration", Collective Soul
5. "Building a Mystery", Sarah McLachlan
6. "Haunted", Evanescence
7. "Schism", Tool
8. "Imaginations from the Other Side", Blind Guardian
9. "Understanding", Evanescence
10. "Full of Grace", Sarah McLachlan
Asuka thought the next-to-last song summed up her relationship with Shinji, such as it was, pretty well:
The pain that grips you,
The fear that binds you,
Releases life in me.
In our mutual shame we hide our eyes
To blind them from the truth that finds a way to who we are.
Asuka grinned as she started dubbing songs onto the blank SDAT she'd bought. She would do something nice for Shinji and probably expand his horizons with regard to rock music at the same time.
------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------
THE THIRTY-THIRD DAY
Shinji was still a bit wobbly on his feet as he got out of Misato's car and made his way to the elevator lobby of their apartment building. Misato was hovering just behind him like a mother hen. The NERV hospital had released him and pronounced him fit for duty, following 36 hours of observation and tests after his extraction from Unit-01.
Misato turned to him after they got on the elevator. "Shinji, are you sure you don't want me to stay with you this afternoon? I can call work and tell them I'm not coming in..."
"Misato, I'm fine; I'll be OK. You've probably got a million things to take care of at Headquarters, too."
"Well yeah, but you're an important part of my job, you know?"
"Yeah, I know... Hey, where's Asuka today? Did she have a sync test or something?"
"No, she's at school. I gave her the option to take today off and come with me to get you, but she said she had too many exams coming up to miss any more class."
Shinji sighed; he'd been alternately looking for forward to and dreading seeing the German girl again. "That's OK; I'm so tired I'll probably just sleep all afternoon anyway."
They got off the elevator and walked over to the door of their apartment. Misato unlocked and opened the door for Shinji. "I've got to head back to Headquarters, but I want you to call me immediately if you're not feeling well. Asuka should be back around 6, and I gave her strict orders to be nice to you for a few days."
"OK..." Shinji replied noncommittally.
Misato looked at the boy for a moment, then bear-hugged him. "It's good to have you back, kiddo."
"Th...Thanks." Shinji felt a bit embarrassed by her show of affection.
"Now go get some rest. I'll see you tonight." Misato waved to him as she turned and headed back toward the elevator.
Shinji made his way across the apartment and almost to his room before he was attacked by an overjoyed warm-water penguin. "Hi Pen-Pen, I've missed you too."
After detaching Pen-Pen from his leg, Shinji opened the door to his room. It was empty, which was pretty much how he'd left it, with two exceptions: his small suitcase, which he realized with a start that he'd left at the train station what seemed like a lifetime ago; and a note on his desk, which read:
Dear Shinji,
Welcome back; I've missed you. Hope you like the new SDAT.
Love,
Your secret admirer
Underneath the note was an SDAT labeled "For Shinji."
Shinji took the SDAT, placed it in his player, and pressed the Play button as he lay down for a nap. A small smile stole across his face as he drifted off to sleep.
The smile was still there when Asuka looked in on him a few hours later and said quietly, "Welcome home, Shinji."