NGE "Once more with Feeling" Alt fic

[Setzer]

Just avoid dwelling on Angst and you'll do just fine. Heaping shit on the story is okay, so long as you don't let it stink. Stopping to sniff at the pile every 5 goddamn seconds is the surest way to do that.

[FA Xerrik]

Right now, Rei’s nervous system was near overloading with sensations she had never felt before as the quartet of hands, without mercy, worked along her back, legs and sides. She almost felt as if she was melting, being ‘relaxed’ into a puddle that was spreading across the table from all the attention…and all she cared about was that it not stop.

This part had me a bit worried, seeing as how it's about a perfect match for what the Sea of LCL is meant to feel like. I thought Rei might decide, come Instrumentality, that maybe she liked the idea of a warm ocean of goo and decide everyone should enjoy that sensation. Luckily, it seems by the end that instead she favors instead keeping everyone whole and separate, so perhaps this will affect the outcome of Instrumentality later in the story? Either way, a really great chapter and a very well written insight into a difficult character. Can't wait to see the final perspective.

[Academia Nut]

Sweet as always Chris, and you take all the time you need getting out that last part, no matter how much we might be biting our nails waiting for Shinji's part. I currently have what appears to be the flu, so I can definitely say that not being able to update quite when you originally planned is something I can understand.

Oh, and any plans for dealing with Sandalphon? I can't see Shinji wanting to let Asuka dive into boiling hot magma towards what he knows is a trap.

[LadyTevar]

wow.

Rei's point of view was just fantastic... and I -loved- her comments in the gamestore. Such a geek-girl ... they should get her into gaming and see how badass she is

[Sidewinder]

Such a geek-girl ... they should get her into gaming and see how badass she is

Should Rei play as the Eldar (she acts alien enough), Dark Eldar (she could benefit from... being more emotionally expressive), or the Adepta Sororitas?

[LadyTevar]

Such a geek-girl ... they should get her into gaming and see how badass she is

Should Rei play as the Eldar (she acts alien enough), Dark Eldar (she could benefit from... being more emotionally expressive), or the Adepta Sororitas?

Grey Knights.

[Chris OFarrell]

[Academia Nut]

Did you see my colourization of Battle Sister Rei?

[Chris OFarrell]

Well I have now. Awesome work...but you need to do Rei's armor blue with white highlights like her Eva

[Sidewinder]

We've seen how Shinji would act if he was raised by a Thousand Sons Space Marine (Academia Nut's fan fic) or a Space Wolf (my lemon-- okay, his uncle's not a real Space Wolf, but he certainly acts like one). Now I'm curious how the Third Children would act if Space Marines from other legions/chapters got in on the act.

Can we say Shinji acts like an Ultramarine in this fic?

[Academia Nut]

I was going more for the colouration of her plugsuit, although I did make her cloak blue like her Eva, although I'm fairly certain I got the shade all wrong.

[KlavoHunter]

We've seen how Shinji would act if he was raised by a Thousand Sons Space Marine (Academia Nut's fan fic) or a Space Wolf (my lemon-- okay, his uncle's not a real Space Wolf, but he certainly acts like one). Now I'm curious how the Third Children would act if Space Marines from other legions/chapters got in on the act.

Can we say Shinji acts like an Ultramarine in this fic?

Evil Imperial, myself, and a few others once MST'ed a fanfic where Shinji became gifted by Slaanesh and had the most HILARIOUS adventures... For various values of 'hilarious'.

Such as 'using a staple gun on Gendo Ikari's head while he rapes him in the ass", and "Fucking Pen-Pen to death, cooking the penguin half-alive in the oven, and then eating it". And human-on-Evangelion sex.

Can't seem to find it again... Perhaps that's a GOOD thing.

[Glimmervoid]

We've seen how Shinji would act if he was raised by a Thousand Sons Space Marine (Academia Nut's fan fic) or a Space Wolf (my lemon-- okay, his uncle's not a real Space Wolf, but he certainly acts like one). Now I'm curious how the Third Children would act if Space Marines from other legions/chapters got in on the act.

Can we say Shinji acts like an Ultramarine in this fic?

You could do an interesting Eldar one. It would start in the real 40k universe were a counsel of Farseers predict that without the soul of Eldrad Ulthran the birth of Ynnead will lead to disaster. They in a major effort find the Blackstone fortresses and add his soul to the Eternal Matrix, this however adds a chaos taint to the matrix.

Seeing this Cegorach, the Laughing God the God of the Harlequins enters the matrix him self to attempt to stop disaster. Taking with his part of the shattered Khaine and Anaris.
Shinji would be the laughing god reborn in the matrix, the shard of Khaine would become Asuka and Rei (or rather the soul of Lilith) is the Ynnead most favorable to the Elder and Gendo Ikari would likely be Eldard Ulthran reborn (but twisted by his experience in the Blackstone Fortress).

But that’s real just back ground, things start to change when a Harlequin troop frantic from the disappearance of there God fall through the webway with only the Shadowseer surviving and he dieing soon after arriving and being found by Shinji. His soul is then absorbed in to Shinji (as happens to most Harlequins upon death) who changes some what from Canon from this.

And then a Shinji with Shadowseer powers which are mostly manipulating emotions, creating illusions, telepathy and some knowledge of what is really going on will go through the Angles and interacting with the characters in different ways. It is similar to Thousand Shinji obviously probably too similar to really write and I would not have the skills anyway but it might be fun for someone to do.

Any way it turns out the entire Evangaelon earth is really just happening in side the Entreaty circuits, and the third impact is the birth of Ynnead, but depending of how it happens Ynnead could be anywhere from the Eldars salvations to a new Chaos God. The Lance of Longinus is Anaris (the 100th sword maid by Vaul) and depending on how you want to do it the entire elder Pantheon could also be reborn (probably based on the some of the characters in the series). Finally the Angles would be the Choas taint introduced by Eldrad Ulthran soul.

A good title might be "The Laughing God" but since I only really played Warhammer Fantasy and have only watched NGE once some one else could probably find some more similarlys to exploit. .

[Chris OFarrell]

This chapter...I hated.

Mostly because I hated myself. I wrote myself into a corner without even realizing it.

I mean think about it. A 'debriefing' is really just sitting around and regurgitating information. Its like 'Okay, we've seen Evangelion, we have the DVD boxsets, can we move on?' followed by 'Okay, yes we GET it, you have Angst issues! Enough already!'

By the same token, it feels horribly cheap to say 'Okay then, so I arrived at Tokyo-3...' followed by a 'scene change', then back to 'Wow, that was an amazing story that answered all my questions!'

Making it twice as hard was that this was part of a non conventional trilogy which is written from one of each of the pilots perspectives, with only an occasional 'switch' of camera focus, still on the main character, without the ability to simply 'cut' somewhere else to show a time cut.
Nor just have Shinji fall asleep and go through some stupid dream on a stupid train that only apparently runs as sunset as he cries over the fact that Gendo kidnapped Pen-Pen and will kill him if he doesn't marry Rei or something.
Not to mention the fact that a lot of this we've still already SEEN, albeit not from this perspective, so its somewhat redundant and silly...

Okay, rant over.

I think I'm not entirely happy with this chapter. It was part of a grand experiment sure with the other two, but I would find it irritating if everyone loved Red and White only to have it finished with a 'So-So' chapter of 'Purple', mostly because the 'old Shinji' had to come out a bit here at times.

Frankly though, I'm just glad its done. The three chapters together are insane weighing in at 56,666 words.

Is THAT a terrifying sign or what? Sometimes Eva just gets a little too weird for me.

Anyway.

And so we come to the final third of this chapter. Enjoy. It'll be a while before you see any more, this hasn't exactly burned me out, but watching the Apollo and Daedalus on Stargate Atlantis bitch slap Ancient warships around, silencing the people who for no logical or 'in universe reason' kept screaming that the Asgard were a second fiddle race and would have been slapped down if the Ancients had sent an Aurora or two against them, has revived my need to write more Derelict.
Fast.

Enjoy!


Three Colors: Purple

Shinji Ikari did not see the sun rise over Tokyo-3.

This was not because, as one might assume, he was asleep.

In fact he was wide awake in his small room, lying on his bed with a blank mask over his face as he considered and rejected the idea of trying to go to sleep as the Earth rotated at a thousand miles per hour towards the dawn, his entire focus remaining on the ceiling tiles above him. This ‘familiar ceiling’ had been a source of comfort for him the ‘last time’ he had faced every trial in his life, an anchor for his sanity that would always be here, the place he could run away from the world.
On the other hand, he had spent far too many sleepless nights hiding from the world around him by doing exactly this. Lying with his SDAT and listening in vain to find some kind of peace by running from reality into the bars of Mozart or Bach.

His first considered act after he had settled ‘this time’ into Misatos place and pulled his SDAT out of his bag, had been to take that tape and tear it to pieces, throwing it into the bin in an uncharacteristic rage at how many wasted days he had spent moping around feeling sorry for himself. He had seriously considered throwing the SDAT in after it, but it was one of his few precious personal items, a ‘hand me down’ from his Uncle and while he could now easily afford a modern MP4 player, he had ultimately decided to keep the SDAT and redeem it into something of joy and not simply an escape hatch that ultimately led nowhere.

This morning however, he found himself wishing, if only for a second, that he hadn’t destroyed the tape and its selection of classical music. His replacement tapes had included a rather eclectic mixture of music from around the world he was quite enjoying…but he would have killed to escape from reality, if even for a few minutes.
Then the second passed and he sighed in annoyance at himself for entertaining any such thought of running away when today might be the day he changed the course of history for the better.
History…changing history. Such a terrifying thought when he really thought about it and the responsibility it meant he was taking into his hands. He had never really considered wider concerns outside his immediate world when he was piloting the ‘first time’ around. Defeating the Angels was just something that needed to be done and that was that. But suddenly the idea that a hundred years from now, some school kids would open their books and learn about ‘The Angel War’, about the heroes and villains, write an essay on what a fucked up guy Shinji Ikari must have been…
Well, if humanity is around to read about me a hundred years from now, well, then I guess that’s a win he decided as he struggled to his feet, putting the thought out of his mind as he glanced at the clock.
Six AM.
Oh well, late enough.

Shinji exited his room quietly, sliding the door open and shut carefully so as to not disturb anyone else who was actually managing to get a good nights sleep. There was just enough light for him to make his way up the corridor so he decided not to hit a light…but he paused at Asuka’s room, noticing the door was slightly ajar.
Which meant either she was awake for some reason –not bloody likely, Asuka HATED early starts- or she had left the door open accidentally. Quietly, he stepped up, and despite the very real risk he would end up roasted for daring to look into her sanctuary, he had a quick peak inside…
Just to make sure she was okay.
At least that’s what he firmly told himself.
He was not hoping to catch her in minimal clothing without sheets…not in the slightest.
Absolutely not.

Looking in, his worries vanished…and it was all he could do not to laugh out loud at the sight that greeted him.
Asuka had half fallen off her futon.
Her upper body remained on it, somehow, but her legs were kicked out towards the middle of her room at an almost 90 degree angle to the bed. One of her pillows was still under her head –for now- but the other was held tightly to her chest, almost like she was holding on to someone or something in her sleep, as she shifted slightly with a sigh…the movement showing that she had somehow managed to tie her legs together with her sheets.

How she had done that, Shinji didn’t know…but it looked very impressive.

If only she had an alarm clock I could set, make her jump up…

Controlling himself, he dared to drink in a final look at her soft, beautiful face, wreathed by her uncontrolled hair that splayed all over her pillow and shoulders before sighing and easing back to slide the door closed gently. Turning, he tiptoed past the snoring sound of a lawnmower set onto a pile of gravel coming from Misato’s room with a shake of his head, easing past the kitchen and up to laundry at the far end of the hallway, hitting the light and shutting the door behind him.

Humming softly to himself, he set up his guardians ancient but largely unused ironing board with practiced ease as he idly thought about how Misato was not just lazy enough to pay for her laundry to be done, but so lazy that she ordered Hyuga to drop it off and pick it up as part of his job. It was something he had tried to change, using simple short words to walk Misato through the process of washing and drying clothes, but for all his knowledge he might as well have tried to stop the tide coming in as get Misato to do her own laundry. Not that it stopped her complaining in righteous indignation over the cost of having it done of course, but logical consistency was never one of Misato’s strong points.

Fifteen minutes later he gathered his clothes for the day -typical black pants and a simple white polo shirt would suffice- before carefully packing everything up and heading for the bathroom, stepping around Asuka’s still plentiful boxes and resisting the urge to rife through them while she wasn’t looking. Instead, he grabbed a fresh towel from the small cupboard next to the bathroom and ducked inside, deciding he would at least get some advantage to getting up so early when he had the bathroom unquestionably to himself.

One long, hot shower later and he dried off, looking around with a slight smile on his face at how, despite sleeping here for barely two nights, Asuka had managed to take over half the bathroom shelf space with her own ‘stuff’, shrinking Misato to half and forcing him to find a few scattered locations on the floor for his few body care products…and he wasn’t stupid enough to get in the middle of the fight as Misato and Asuka slowly started to test their ‘new’ relationship. Shinji knew that Misato had been Asuka’s guardian for a time before Kaji and they had gotten on at least moderately well, but now they were in the unusual and frictional relationship of an adolescent girl going through puberty and on the cusp of womanhood, living in the same house as her Guardian and Commanding Officer….

As with any of Asuka’s relationships, Shinji recalled her interaction with Misato as loud, noisy and full of turbulence, but under it all Shinji knew there was a bond from Asuka, as she latched onto the one women she had truly started to make some kind of maternal connection to, one who didn’t try or seek to replace her real mothers place as her Step Mother had done…
He didn’t know if Asuka had ever seen the way Misato had quietly and almost unwilling started to love her back, despite what a damn pain in the ass she could be. He had been too caught up in his own self pity at the time to notice, but now that he had the luxury of looking back, Shinji could see the heartbreak, the despair and utter helplessness after the battle with the 15th Angel on Misatos face as she had tried everything she could to reach out to Asuka, only to be rebuffed by the newly titanium reinforced castle walls around her heart. Nor had Asuka seen the vigil Misato had kept both by her bedside in the hospital then at home near the phone after she had been left catatonic by the 16th...
Nor would had Asuka have ever seen or known the shear rage that Misato had felt when Akagi had snickered that her ‘perfect family’ was breaking down around her…nor just how close Misato had come to sending her once best friend flying across the room with a back-spin kick for her thinly veiled sneer at Asuka’s mental state compared to her mother after she had been brought into protective custody.

Well, they might have been a dysfunctional family, but they were his family none the less…and as always, that thought was more powerful then anything else in banishing the doubts, the fear and anything else that might make him step back from doing whatever it took to protect them.

Fighting for humanity was an ideal.
Fighting for the people he loved, that…thatwas real.

Taking care to not disturb any of his housemate’s toiletries, he got dressed quickly and stuffed his clothes in the hamper. Heading outside into the living room as he finished combing his hair into something approaching nearness, he noticed to his surprise that the sun had risen while he showered. Glancing at the clock, he saw over an hour had passed since he had gotten up, he must have spent more time in the shower then he had thought.
Thankfully, the building had plenty of hot water.
He opened the verandah door to hang his damp towel out on a small railing before gently closing it back up, turning-
And almost yelping and falling back in surprise as he came face to face with Misato, still in her rather minimal sleeping attire.
“G’morning’ she yawned as she walked –or stumbled- past him for the kitchen, either not noticing or not at this point caring about her appearance as she moved for the nearest supply of either alcohol or caffeine…

And damn her legs were smooth-
No Shinji that’s a bad Shinji! He mentally slapped himself around before shaking his head as Misato managed to slap at the coffee machine and start it peculating.

“Well” he said, closing the verandah door and heading into the kitchen after Misato, “you’re up early”.
“Don’t remind me” she groaned as she reached for a beer and cracked the can. Shinji wasn’t exactly pleased to see her back to starting the day with a beer, but she only did it infrequently and, as a minor miracle, only ever cracked one can. She had even confessed to him that she found that she wasn’t quite so tired in the morning anymore, which Shinji only took as a good sign…though he still held out hope that he could completely wean her off the morning beer, given enough time…
Gulp…gulp…gulp…gulp…burp….and at that point, Shinji reached over and placed a hand over her mouth, to the surprise of Misato who caught on when he raised a finger to his lips in warning and jerked his head back towards Asuka’s room.
She caught on to his meaning and nodded, looking a little sheepish as Shinji removed his hand.
“Yee-ha” she whispered with a playful wink and a sticking out of her tongue at him.
“Oh act your age” he muttered with his own smirk as he stepped past her to start lifting out the various things needed for a breakfast, including some purchases for Asuka he had made yesterday.
“Say” she commented in an interested tone as she flicked the can to the garbage bin with a negligent looking toss -that flew right into the small bin and spoke of a well honed skill in this area, “how did you know to get all of this for her?”
“I sort of did some research on European breakfasts” he lied with a shrug.

Well it was sort of true. Perhaps not this lifetime, but after two weeks of Asuka moaning about his the breakfasts he had cooked for her and doing nothing but saying ‘I’m sorry!’ again and again back at her, he had surprisingly worked up the courage to ask her what she wanted…and gotten a rather categorical and exacting list from her…and the most brilliant smile when she had walked out the next day and found it all laid out for her, directed right at him…

Not that she had said anything but ‘needs more salt’, but that look and those two eyes had communicated more to him then words ever could…

“Earth to Ikari” Misato droned out in a mocking voice. “The fridge is about to reverse over you”
“What?” he demanded, glancing around as he snapped out of his flashback. Indeed, the fridge was beeping quite insistently at him much as trucks did when backing up…mostly because he was holding the door open and staring off into space.
“Heh, sorry” he smiled at her. “Just thinking”.
“About Asssukkaaaa?” she teased with a wicked grin.
Damn it got to throw her off course he thought in a worriedtone. He didn’t want to ruin this day for Asuka and Rei by having Misato butt the Second Child into ‘a mood’ before they even left the house!
“Actually about Kaji” he replied, throwing back at her the one thing, the only thing he could think of that might bring her to a sudden, crashing halt.
“Eh…what about him” she asked, nay, demanded as he eyes narrowed.
Excellent…
“Oh, he might show up for a while today” Shinji shrugged.
Misato stared at him with an expression that suggested he had just said his Father had canceled Christmas for Tokyo-3.
“Why?” she demanded.
He shrugged at her with the same wicked smile she had teased him with.
“Guys stuff” he said. Her eyes narrowed even more.
“Now don’t you let him go start corrupting you Shinji” she exhorted him as her toast popped and Shinji started to lay out the cooking utensils. “Under that smirking, messy, stubble covered face is a monster!”
“That’s not what I heard you saying in your sleep last night” he commented idly.
Misato slapped him playfully on the back of his head, causing him to stumble slightly as he maneuvered the grill inside her oven.
“I don’t need that kind of lip from you boy” she said with a mock scowl. “I’ve grown up since that immature jerk and I broke up”.
“And perhaps he has as well?” Shinji suggested with a smile.
“Who the hell are you, the matchmaker?” she rolled her eyes. “Look, just trust me, that guy is just bad news”.
“Oh I know he is”Shinji nodded with a slightly knowing smirk. Bad news to my Father, to Chairman Keel…
“Ugh, you’re incorrigible” she muttered at his smirk, rolling her eyes and reaching for a clean mug –a NERV mug she had shamelessly stolen from work- and poured the hot coffee into it, along with a shot of milk and a little sugar. “Ah that hits the spot” she sighed happily, and then to Shinji’s astonishment, she downed the entire scalding hot mug in a handful of gulps and threw the cup down on the bench with a loud burp. “Well I’m off to have a shower before the princess wakes up” she declared, sauntering with much more energy off towards the bathroom as Shinji shook his head and continued to put together the pieces for the breakfast.



How the hell can Asuka eat this and still keep that figure? Shinji wondered, not for the first time roughly fifty minutes later as he carefully laid out the European style breakfast of meats next to the toast he and Misato preferred. Misato had taken a surprisingly short shower before heading back to her room to change, possibly because he had heard Asuka stir –or more accurately the yelp and thud of Asuka falling to the ground from her tangled legs followed by twenty seconds of cursing in German- then proceed to demand unfettered access to the bathroom over the loud screaming come nails on blackboard sound Misato probably classified as ‘singing’ while inside the shower…
Ah mornings in the Misato Household. How he had missed this…

Shrugging, he cooked up a quick meal for his other housemate, placing Pen-Pen’s sardines in his bowl on the floor before he walked to the table and looked over it with a critical eye. He had cheated when buying the food yesterday morning, already knowing exactly what Asuka liked and didn’t like was a great help…but it meant he had what he hopped to be a perfect breakfast just about…done.
“Breakfast is ready!” he shouted. He had just enough time to walk back to the kitchen and scoop the last of Asuka’s breakfast into place before she emerged and moved to the table…something about her getting his attention…though he couldn’t see what exactly…
“Ohh, that smells good” she said with a look of surprise, then pleasure on her face as she stepped around Pen-Pen, flopping onto the floor onto a floor cushion and scooting closer as she looked in some minor approval at his efforts. “Well I have to say, having a house broken male around is a more useful thing then I gave Misato credit for” she declared in her usual indirect way of saying ‘Thank You, Shinji’ that he had long become used to, before she grabbed some cutlery and dug in.

Shinji slowly chewed down on his toast as he stared at her as she ate before it finally clicked…it was her hair. For all the time he had known her, she had let it hang free behind her and it had almost always included her A-10 clips which she used partially to hold out her hair, but mostly to advertise her superiority…though Toji had –privately- declared them to be a pubescent stage development of ‘the demons horns’. He could barely recall any time he had seen her without them and combined with her suddenly tied back look…she looked…well-

“What?” Asuka suddenly demanded, dropping her fork and looking up at him.

Shinji swallowed slightly in surprise at her sudden outburst and the look he was receiving, not realizing he had been that blatant as he stole glances at her, just unable to help himself…
“Your hair” he said, after swallowing his latest mouthful of toast past a suddenly dry throat. “It’s just…well…without your A-10 clips and with it pulled back like that…you just look…”
“Yes?” she asked impatiently, but with a steady look that warned him louder then words of the consequences of not finishing his sentence truthfully.
Shinji’s mind spun as he tried to think of a word that fit the bill that would not get him physically assaulted or mentally burned-

“Really, really stunning”.

The words slipped out before Shinji’s conscious mind was emailed by his un-conscious mind about its intentions, expressing his exact thoughts of the person sitting across from him without bothering to seek the approval in triplicate from the ‘tact’ or ‘streetwise’ departments in the active parts of his mind.
Asuka maintained her stare at him for a good three seconds before she blinked and looked away, muttering something unintelligible in German before pushing her empty plate forward and standing without a word to head back to her room.
Shinji made a mental note to fire everyone working in his unconscious mind with a sigh, closing his eyes as he leaned back against the wall separating the kitchen from the living room, enjoying the dull pain as he thumped his head into the wall as he heard the first thundercloud on today’s horizon rumble in the distance.
“Wark”.
Opening his eyes, Shinji glanced at what he couldn’t help but think of as a sympathetic look in Shinji’s third housemate’s eyes as he Pen-Pen waddled over to place his own now empty bowl on the table.
“Well I screwed that up royally, didn’t I?”
“Wark wark, wark?” the genetically engineered penguin inquired, moving over to join him.
Shinji snorted.
“It’s simple” Shinji said to the Penguin, suddenly feeling dangerously whimsical, leaning in and dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “See, I’m actually a time traveler from the future who’s come back to stop my Father and/or SEELE from kicking off Third Impact. During the pre game entertainment to the main event last time, I managed to utterly betray Asuka and abandon her when she needed me the most, despite the fact that I thought I had fallen in love with her and thought I’d do anything for her, up to and including dying…so I feel a little guilty right now whenever I look at her. But don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret” he finished with an admonishing look before he rocked to his knees and started to gather the plates.

The genetically engineered penguin stared at his back for several long, long seconds before continuing into the kitchen, retrieving a can from Misato’s stash, stopping in consideration, retrieving a second, and retreating into his fridge.

“Yeah” Shinji muttered as he stacked the plates in the dishwasher. “That’s about what I thought you’d say”.



After he finished cleaning up, he flopped down onto the floor in front of the TV and flipped through the channels idly before turning it off after nothing much hit his interest, trying to marshal his calm and stay away from the thought that he might have screwed this entire days exercise up before it even started. As always around Asuka, it was all too easy to work himself up into a frenzy of worry, but with a little effort, he kept his thoughts at least reasonably calm. It had only taken him ten minutes to clean up breakfast and another five to finish getting ready, brushing his hair more carefully and finding a clean pair of socks, but Asuka still had not emerged from her room. Glancing now at his watch he saw it was getting very close to Eight Thirty, the time Asuka had ‘told him’ they were going to leave last night.

Still, he marshaled his calm and waited, praying that he hadn’t screwed up what he had hoped to be the start of a new day-
“Well don’t you look handsome” another voice almost purred from the other side of the house. Feeling his fretting diminish slightly, Shinji turned a wry grin on Misato as she ‘heal-toed’ her way towards him in her favorite brown dress. A dress Shinji vaguely recalled had been ruined by the N2 detonation when he had first arrived ‘the last time’, but this time was still around to hug her figure like a second skin.
“And you look…um…”
“Yes?’ she asked with an arch expression that caused Shinji to grin.

He at least knew Misato was teasing. Asuka…God only knew half the time. And probably not even him.

“I’d say at least an eight point seven on the cuteness scale”
“What? That’s it? She exclaimed in an astonished voice with a roll of her eyes. “I think we need to buy you some glasses while we’re out shopping!”
“Will that make you look better or worse?” he asked with a confused mock grin, that resulted in his guardian pouncing and ruining his carefully brushed hair despite his muffled protests…which even to his ears came out half hearted. Misato, also quick to pick up on his moods released him and settled next to him with a slightly more serious expression on her face as she studied his.
“So” she said. “Where’s Asuka?”
Shinji glanced at her, somehow unsurprised that she had picked up that something had happened…but then again, this was only Asuka’s second night here, so it wasn’t exactly like it was difficult to guess at what might have caused his slight mood shift as he sat out here, alone.
“In her room” he said back, returning her gaze. “I…think I might have insulted her or something…I was just trying to say how I liked the way her hair looked but…I think I might have uh-”
“Baka” a second voice broke into the conversation carrying the tone of a sigh of sarcasm mixed in with amusement, causing Shinji’s eyes to widen slightly before he got himself under control and turned to face behind him.

Asuka stood there, leaning casually against the wall.

“Only in your mind would you consider complementing someone as a reason for her to leave the table. For future references, I went to finish getting ready.”
“Uh…noted” was about all he could say, barely managing to dodge apologizing as she slowly levered herself off the wall, her combination of shirt and denim shorts leaving her perfectly toned midriff bear and showing a maximum amount of skin off, while still being cut in such a way to suggest maturity.
It wasn’t a look many people could pull off, but Asuka wasn’t just any person.
Her hair, Shinji couldn’t help but smile at. She had brushed it into a smooth, silky ponytail, gathered at the middle of her neck with a bright red ribbon, the silky threads shimmering slightly in the light, making it look like an auburn waterfall that lived and danced as she flicked her head.
“Well?” she challenged him with a smirk, whirling around in place and causing her hair to splay around like a multithreaded whip. “How does my hair look now Third Child?”
“More stunning” he said without hesitation this time, a slight smile on his lips.
“Well, did you expect anything less?” she pointed out with an arch look that thawed after a few seconds into a slight smile, as if she was pleased that he was pleased.
“Come on Asuka, stop trying to make Shinji fall unconscious from blood loss, we have shopping to do!”
At the magic ‘S’ word, Asuka promptly forgot all about him and giggled almost manically, making Shinji cringe into the lounge.
If Kaji isn’t on schedule to ‘extract’ me from all of this Shinji thought to himself, I am a dead man…





One terrifying car trip later and again, Shinji felt himself slowly believing in Religion.

It was a rather simple process, starting with the assumption that no mortal could possibly defy luck as much as Misato did.

In turn, this proved the existence of divine intervention.

Thus, by definition, the existence of deities.

QED

Offering a short prayer of thanks to whatever (or whoever) watched over him when inside the blue car, Shinji stepped out after Asuka to the steadily filling up parking garage smack bang in the middle of the Tokyo-3 shopping district, noting the small groups of ordinary people moving around even this early in the morning and reflecting on what it meant for the city at large.
The twenty five percent initial drop in civilian population after the Third Angel’s attack was slowly being drawn back, mostly because property prices in a city made largely up of brand new state-of-the-art housing had plummeted after the initial Angel attacks and evacuations. Rather quickly however, more then a few people started to notice the absurdly low prices being asked for by near desperate real estate corporations. Combine that with the fact that actual direct civilian casualties from the Angels inside Tokyo-3 were still at zero and more then a few business minded individuals started to narrow their eyes and think.
For the same price as a tiny two bedroom apartment in Tokyo-2, one could buy an apartment six times the size in Tokyo-3. With money left over! In a city which had better then full employment, with the construction and repair operations working almost overtime, with rumors going around that the long delayed 7th Construction Phase of NERV’s intercept system was about to be approved, meaning even more work and more contracts…
Suddenly, the same factors that had caused the economic downturn and population exodus were causing a boom and attracting countless people from all over Japan. It was utterly crazy, but as Shinji had read in one of Pen-Pen’s papers that was just the way economics worked, where perception was probably more important then truth. The population was up to a stabilized ten percent drop from the Pre-Angel numbers and was expected to stay there, partially because more then a few high density housing structures damaged in earlier battles were being rebuilt into weapons blocks.

But it hadn’t stopped them finding a place for Rei…

That meeting with the Vice Commander had taken place yesterday. As Shinji had fully expected, Fuyutsuki had been uneasy over the idea of moving his Fathers ‘pet project’ without consulting him, but was trapped, again, by the fact that Rei was just a ‘strange kid’, nothing more or less.
Asuka had opened up with a full time on target bombardment of questions over the buildings safety and its near condemned status, followed by the danger of her living alone out in the middle of an area that was increasingly becoming a wasteland of new construction and development, finishing up with a scathing rebuke over the unsanitary conditions that would warrant a biohazard sign being placed on her door.
It was deeply amusing to Shinji Ikari to see the Professor struggle to counter the fiery young Undergraduates points, mostly because Shinji knew there were perfectly logical reasons from his point of view.

One; Rei was expendable.
Of course point two; Rei was expendable.
And if all else failed, three; Rei was expendable.

The only reason Rei lived by herself in the middle of nowhere, as best Shinji could work out, was that her entire life had been something of a form of sensory deprivation. Far more mild to be sure then eliminating all stimuli, but enough to dull her perceptions of the world around her during the early, critical years of development. Asuka and Shinji’s protests had trapped the Vice Commander who clearly wanted to defer to the Commander, but as the nominal person in charge of personnel, he didn’t really have any realistic excuse to do that, especially given the horrible conditions Rei was living in.

Magnanimous in victory, Asuka had profusely thanked Fuyutsuki, walking up to give the surprised elderly man a quick peck on the cheek before whirling and heading out of the office.
Shinji settled for a giving him a shrug, which he thought the professor was grateful for.

The paperwork had gone through yesterday afternoon. Very fast, but it helped that Tokyo-3 was very much the ‘company town’ –literally as NERV owned 58% of the buildings either directly or indirectly- and tomorrow, Rei would move into an apartment in a building just across the road from their own that Asuka had dragged Shinji to inspect and declared ‘acceptable’. Without asking for his opinion, which made him wonder why he had had to come…
But first, Asuka insisted on buying several metric tons worth of things they had nowhere to put as yet.

[Chris OFarrell]

“Damn it, we’re still five minutes early” Asuka pouted as they came up to the doors to the massive shopping center that formed the heart of the shopping district of Tokyo-3. “Hey Misato, try your access card and code on that lock!” she said, pointing to the security panel next to the door, Shinji starting to worry slightly that Asuka was taking this whole thing a little too far…

Fortunately, Misato still had her head screwed on straight…for now.

“Asuka” Misato replied with a patient tone, “that code is for emergency use only”.
“But this is an emergency!” Asuka wailed, pointing down the street. “Ayanami is coming and she needs new clothes, stat!”
Shinji turned to look. Yes, that indeed was Rei, he would recognize her anywhere…and sure enough, she was dressed in her omnipresent school uniform, which even Shinji had to admit would probably look a little odd on a Saturday outside of school grounds.
“She can’t go shopping looking like that!”

What, Asuka is going to call this whole thing off?

“She…needs to go shopping, to go shopping?” Shinji protested in confusion. Sure he had seen inside Asuka’s mind to a very deep level during the blending of Third Impact, but there were some things, as a male, Shinji was just still predisposed to not understand in any shape or form-
And instantly at his moment of ‘male’ weakness, Asuka was on him like a shark that sensed blood in the water.
“What are you, stupid?” Asuka demanded, turning on him and causing her gathered hair to whirl around in a stunning display in the early morning light that elected a faint moan from half the males roughly their age in the immediate area. “She can’t go shopping looking like that! It’s just not done, don’t you know anything?”
“I…uh….” was about all that came out of Shinji’s mouth in reply as her eyes stabbed into his own.
“Humph. I thought as much! A typical male” Asuka replied in a dismissive –but subtly teasing and amused- tone that suggested she was bearing far too much in her life, before turning back towards Rei. “Hey! Ayanami, over here!” she hollered out as Shinji gathered his wits and turned to Misato.

“Typical male?” he appealed, as if she was the umpire in this game he didn’t know he had apparently been playing.
His purple haired guardian, who had been watching their interplay with a tolerant but amused expression simply laughed at him.
“Yes Shinji, you are a typical male, but we women need typical males along with our shopping trips” she said, reaching over to ineffectually tussle his hair again and thus missed noticing the person approaching her from behind.
“Well I am so glad to hear you say that” Kaji said, causing Misato to suddenly freeze in place, her eyes almost popping out of her face in shock before she whirled.
“KAJI!” came Asuka’s expected shout before she crashed across the five meters that separated them in a blur to latch onto his arm in delight.

She however, wasn’t the only person happy to see him, Shinji breathing out a slow sigh of relief at his presence.

“Hey there Kido” Kaji smiled down at the girl clinging onto him with what looked like an iron grip, “I love that hairstyle” he added, somehow not surprising Shinji that he had instantly spotted the change in Asuka’s head…given that he was looking more or less directly down at her head from where she was holding onto him.
Well that and Shinji knew Kaji was paid by at least three different groups to watch out for things, so at a guess, Kaji’s powers of observation had probably been trained to a rather formidable level by now.
“Really?” Asuka breathed in an all too ‘girly’ voice at Kaji at his freely given complement which she instantly took, held close to her heart and ran away laughing with as Shinji got ready for the long ‘I did it all for you!’ speech-
“It was just an impromptu decision” Asuka replied, crashing Shinji’s thought processes to a halt.

Did Asuka just pass up a chance to flirt with Kaji?

“So! You’re coming shopping with me…err…us?”

Well, perhaps not…

“Well actually, yes and no” the Inspector shrugged, getting Shinji’s instant attention, Asuka’s confusion and Misato’s cautious relief. “I came to grab Shinji; I thought we might go shopping for some boys stuff while you ladies have fun”.
Shinji exchanged a smile with Kaji, a sudden feeling of relief passing through him at the almost offhand comment, combined paradoxically with a sudden buildup of deep tension as he realized this was it, the chance to set the ball rolling was only hours, possibly minutes away and for good or ill, he was about to cast his lot in with the Japanese Government…

The same Government that had given orders to storm NERV, shoot, stab, burn, gas and otherwise slaughter thousands of people, only a handful of which were even remotely deserving of such a fate…
You’ve made your choice Shinji reminded himself as his mind wandered, now accept the consequences and make sure that it doesn’t happen again!

Shinji opened his mouth to accept the gracious invitation from Kaji, when Asuka suddenly butted in as she slowly let go for Kaji with an odd look in her eyes.

“But…but I –we- need him to…carry everything!” she whined in protest.

That’s a dodge he thought at once, narrowing his eyes ever so slightly as Rei stepped up to the group out of the corner of his eye. What did she really want me along for? Must be a prank…but what prank?
His thought was not answered when Rei ‘offered the services’ of the Section Two agents dutifully following them, Asuka and Misato at once press ganging them into service and Shinji could only pity the poor fools, wondering if his Father would here after make ‘mule-men for the Second Child and Captain Katsuragi’ a punishment detail for NERV personnel in the future.

Even if the rest of this day ended up being a blowout, not having to follow those two around and carry their bags for hours on end could only be a good thing…

Focusing his attention back, he noticed Asuka and Misato were busy laying down the law to the poor quartet of Agents who had ‘won’ the ‘honor’ of being their packhorses, but Rei was standing slightly apart, looking –at least to him- more then a little unsure about herself, so he edged over and gave her a smile.
“I know this might seem a little overwhelming” he said softly into those twin scarlet eyes that had such hidden depth to them, “but Asuka and Misato really mean well by all this”.
“I understand” Rei replied in the same tone as if he had just given her an order, causing him to try and recast his thoughts...
“Think of it as a learning experience” he suggested getting a suddenly interested look at that suggestion. “If you want to understand more about…human interaction” he said, feeling himself stepping dangerously close to relieving his knowledge about Rei and managing to hold back on the side of caution, “then think of this as a lesson in the kind of thing most girls your age dream of doing”.
“Then…I will endeavor to show my appreciation” Rei said.
“No, its not about showing appreciation Rei, though I’m sure they’ll…um…appreciate it” Shinji said with a faintly amused look. “It’s about you having fun!”
“Perhaps” she said with a slight sigh. “But I am not sure how I will do this…if I do not understand”.
“That’s what learning is about” Shinji replied, resisting the urge to reach over and shake some sense into his ‘sister’ and her circular logic. “Life isn’t a textbook Rei, some things you can only learn by doing”.
“Then I will do” she declared. “But…I am not sure about what I will purchase to wear”.
“Well…” he considered slowly, a vague thought slowly coalescing as he recalled something Hama Tanaka, the leader of Unit Ones ‘tech crew’ had mentioned about his Mother once…and how she loved the feel of silk…
“You might want to try something made of silk” Shinji suggested, not entirely sure if genetics worked that way…but hell, it was a place to start.
“I will do so” Rei said, looking slightly more cheerful now that she had at least an idea of what she might be looking for, but any further conversation was cut off as with a rattle, the gates started to open at exactly 9AM.

“Alright! Lets do this thing!” Asuka cried out suddenly as the gathered crowed started to surge inside. “Misato, where is-”
“Right this way!” Misato barked in her professional tone, grabbing one of Rei’s hands as Asuka grabbed the other, the two yanking the, for once, very surprised looking First Child inside, four men following looking not quite miserable, but close to it.
“What about the Third?” one of the two who stayed behind for a second asked, looking over at Shinji.
“It’s alright, I’ve got him” Kaji smiled reassuringly as he came across to rejoin Shinji. The two agents, well aware of Agent Kaji’s credentials as both a NERV officer and former Section Two agent nodded, and headed in after their poor comrades…albeit at a safe distance.

“That…was close” Shinji breathed in relief after the crowed had shuffled in, leaving only a handful of people around who were probably waiting for other people.
“Oh come on, would it have been that bad to sit around for a few hours waiting as the ladies got their faces painted, nails done and…and…”

Shinji just stared at him.

“Okay, fair point. Let’s go shopping”
Stepping inside the huge brightly lit mall, Kaji took an immediate left turn, wandering through the mall in a seemingly random series of directions as he casually chatted with him about how he found living with Misato, sharing some stories that made him either crack up in laughter or blanch in horror, finally starting to understand why Misato had been so utterly adamant that she would never go near Kaji again at first, but able to eventually ‘snap’ and, well, screw his brains out after reaching a certain point down the road.
They really were two sides of the same coin.

Kaji, while finding Shinji’s opinions on Misato genuinely intriguing had most of his attention elsewhere at this point in time. They walked as they talked of course, Kaji flirting from store in almost a random fashion, but in a steady line away from the women’s fashion areas, all the time using shop windows, reflective surfaces and all manner of other checks to look for any sign they were being tailed. Half a dozen JDA personnel orbited them, ‘sanitizing’ the area of any people who might not be who they appeared. One agent, an elegant young Japanese woman in business clothes briskly passed them with nothing more then a glance –not looking could be as much a giveaway as looking- her ‘suit’ crammed with sensors that sniffed the air around Shinji for any strange electronic signals. Two JDA agents inside a van in the car park squinted at their displays but found nothing, not even a Cell phone which Shinji had wisely left at home, a factoid that would probably earn him a rebuke from Misato, but not a major issue given that Kaji was with him.

Ultimately deciding that neither Shinji nor Kaji were being either electronically tracked, or, being followed, the team leader inside the same van raised an encrypted radio to his mouth and ordered the extraction with a single, completely nonsense sounding codeword.
Inside the shopping center which was steadily filling with more and more people, a man browsing in a book store replaced a book he was reading on the shelf and turned his back on the door as Kaji approached. Taking note of the signal, Kaji angled away to a nearby set of doors just as Shinji was wondering if he had misread Kaji’s intentions today and he really was going to take him shopping, the pair exiting into another car park and descending a stairwell in silence to the basement level, a nimble four wheel drive with tinted windows pulling up as they reached the bottom level.

Inside the C4I van, a switch was thrown and the 7th Generation computer back at JDA Headquarters via datalink already hacked into the surveillance network, activated, Kaji and Shinji now visible on the monitors strolling out of the shopping center car park and into the more wild fleet markets, arcades and street stalls around the major shopping center, where surveillance was almost non existent.

“Get in, quick” Kaji ordered as the car door opened.
Shinji complied, Kaji ducking in behind him. The door was barely shut before the driver pulled away and out, driving up the exit ramp at a sedate speed and exiting into the streets easily, with by far the majority of traffic heading in, not out at this early morning hour.

After getting his seat belt on, Kaji turned to Shinji.
“Okay, this is what’s going on” the older man said with a smile. “We’re going to have a long talk with some people who have some questions for you, who want to hear what you can tell them. We’ll have you back in the shopping center in three, possibly four hours, in plenty of time to grab a few things, and then meet up with the girls as they get out”.
Kaji very deliberately didn’t mention the JDA by name. Although it was extremely unlikely they were being monitored, until they got into the ‘dead’ room in the safe house, he wouldn’t risk it. After all, if NERV was watching, Gendo would probably just jump to the conclusion he was still working for SEELE…which would be a large problem, but far better then the alternative of blowing Shinji’s cover.

“Three or four hours? The girls can’t possibly take that long getting a beauty treatment, can they?”
Kaji smirked and shook his head slightly as the car accelerated down towards the safe house, feeling pity at Shinji’s utter naivety. “Oh Shinji you poor boy, you have no idea…”




Shinij Ikari had gotten hopelessly lost by the time the car came to a halt inside the garage of a detached villa, somewhere in downtown Tokyo-3. From some of the skyscrapers he had seen before they had turned in, he could guess their *rough* location, but if had been asked to find his way here again, he would have been utterly incapable of it, which spoke rather well of the skill and professionalism of the people into whose hands he had placed his life…which was probably a good thing. But he still couldn’t help but feel slightly uneasy. Almost as if he had seen himself step into a valley in the distance, without any clue if he would see himself walk back up the other side. He was truly AWOL now, no-one other then Kaji knowing where he was, with no way to contact anyone if he needed help…and he didn’t even have a clue where he was…

And all it took to step out of the car when Kaji opened the door was the memory of Asuka’s scream as a Lance of Longinus crashed through ‘her’ eye.

“Alright, we’re here” Kaji spoke up in a startlingly smooth professional voice as he opened the door, but a confident and still friendly smile took some of the edge of it. It was a warning Shinji thought, that from this moment on, it was business time and Shinji nodded in acknowledgement as he stepped out into the otherwise empty garage.

A door opened in front of them and a business suited man who looked disturbingly identical to a generic Section Two agent stepped out, giving a polite bow as he held up a thin, half meter rod connected via a slim wire to a PDA.

“Electronics sweep” Kaji explained at Shinji’s questioning look. “Just to make sure none of us tracked in anything like a locator or microphone. You’d be surprised how easy it is to hide things like that these days”.
He nodded his understanding as the man professionally ran his device up and over the two of them, one eye always on the screen until finally, apparently satisfied, he nodded and shut it off, gesturing them into the house. Kaji led him inside what looked like a rather normal Japanese house, sparsely furnished but clean and tidy, probably two stories, but he couldn’t tell for sure before Kaji stopped in front of a door, a real, solid looking wooden door rather then a sliding screen, a voice inside at once calling for them to enter.
The room was larger then he had thought it would be, probably twice the size of his bedroom. There were no windows inside it, clearly the room was at the center of the house where it would be difficult to eavesdrop, a sensible enough precaution when he thought about it. Shinji was growingly impressed by the level of paranoia shown by Kaji’s employers, for the first time he felt paradoxically safe as he realized the odds of SEELE or his Father catching onto this meeting were low.

Waiting for him in the center of the room was a heavy and expensive looking wooden table with one chair on his side and two on the other, a video camera on a tripod sitting behind the two chairs and what he guessed was a microphone sitting in the middle of the table. Sitting in one of the twin chairs facing the door was a man dressed relatively casually without a suit or tie, who looked up as they entered and nodded, gesturing Shinji to the chair opposite him as he stood.
“Mister Ikari” the man said with a polite bow which Shinji returned by reflex, sitting down in his surprisingly comfortable chair. “My name is Koga Hayashi. I’m the agent who has been put in charge of your debriefing. Agent Ryoji is along primarily as a friend, but also because as our expert on NERV and SEELE, he might be able to help at certain points in this by offering his own insights. We are taping this interview as you can no doubt see, I take it you have no objections?”
“None at all” Shinji shook his head, hearing the professional at work with the calm, controlled voice and again feeling a little better about the seriousness this was being taken with. Secretly, he had had a horrible feeling today that he wasn’t going to be taken seriously, getting a ‘well we thank you for your story Mister Ikari, don’t call us, we’ll call you’ response, but increasingly he was starting to think that he had managed to get the attention of some very powerful people…and he knew who had been responsible for getting him this far, giving Kaji a slight smile which he returned briefly.
“Excellent. We have limited time, as I’m sure you can understand” Koga continued as he sat, Kaji taking the seat on his left. “We are doing everything we can to make sure neither NERV nor SEELE find out about this meeting, but the best defense against that is to make sure this moves as fast as possible”.
“I appreciate that” Shinji nodded.
“Good” Koga replied, leaning back slightly in his chair and glancing down at his papers and the pad he had ready to jot his own notes down. Sure everything was being tapped by four different microphones, three cameras and Shinji’s vital signs were being monitored by carefully hidden sensors in his chair that served as a lie detector of phenomenal accuracy…
But Koga trusted his own observations and notes above all else. And so did his boss.

“Well, shall we begin then? First, Mister Ikari, can you formally state your name for the record, along with your current position at NERV?”
Shinji did so, knowing they knew all of this, but guessing there was some legal requirement for it. Kaji and Koga also announced their presence for the record, though only their names and not their positions.
“Well. I have been fully briefed on everything you’ve told Agent Ryoji on Over the Rainbow, but perhaps you would like to start from the beginning again?”
“If there is such a thing” Shinji shrugged
Koga let the side of his mouth twist upward in slight grin at that, understanding how concepts of time and space might have become slightly…twisted in Shinji Ikari’s mind after what he had been through.
“You have somewhere else you would like to start from?”
“Second Impact” Shinji said. “And what I know about history from that point on.”
So, he also has significant knowledge of the Second Impact Koga thought as he scribbled some notes down. Unsurprising given how closely related that catastrophe had been to everything that came since…and it was as good a place to start as any to start, clearly Shinji had been giving this some thought, which was a good sign.
“Whatever pleases you Shinji; go right ahead. We’re just here to listen” the Agent said, meaning every word. The trick today was to get everything possible out of Shinji. They could collate it into an organized store of information later at their leisure, but this meeting might be a one off chance, so he had to push forward.
Shinji took a deep breath, opening his mouth to go back in time ‘sixteen’ years-

Then he sneezed.

“That’s a novel way of putting the Second Impact” Kaji said dryly, earning a brief chuckle from Shinji as he reached for a tissue box on the table and blew his hose carefully before continuing, closing his eyes as he cast his thoughts back.

Memories, he didn’t know from whom –or what- flashed through his mind as he returned to the nearest thing to hell on Earth.




Half an hour later, he opened his eyes as a woman’s voice echoed through his head, from much more recently then the ill fated Katsuragi expedition.

“Man” he echoed it softly “found God and in his folly, tried to make Him their toy. For that arrogance, mankind was punished. That happened fifteen years ago. And the God that man found, was lost. But man continues to resurrect the God…and from that God, Adam, man attempted to make a man that was like a God himself. And that, was Eva”.

“Interesting perspective” Koga said politely but evenly as he flipped over a new page in his notebook. Much of the facts Shinji had just given meshed up exactly with what Kaji and a few other agents had found out, at least in terms of Katsuragi’s setting off of the whole thing.
But that it hadn’t been an accident; that SEELE had –after evacuating their people- set the whole thing off…that was new. This information would probably be enough on its own to have the members of the SEELE council executed for crimes against humanity, if they could get the proof…

And they hadn’t even gotten started on more recent events yet!

“It was something Doctor Akagi said to me, just as she lost her mind” Shinji replied clinically, managing not to throw up as he recalled the manically crying and laughing Doctor falling to the floor in a complete breakdown, while the ‘spare’ clones of Rei dissolved around her into the enormous LCL tank with their own laughter…

He would get to that in due time however.

“Then…” he continued, “that’s about all I know about Second Impact. The Lance is still down in Antarctica and, at least the ‘last time’, was recovered by a naval expedition roughly the same time as the Tenth Angel attacked which was…is…about two months from now”.
“And Adam was reduced to an embryonic form during all of this recovered from the middle of all that mess” Kaji muttered, frowning slightly. “That’s a neat trick; I wonder how they managed it?”
Shinji could only shrug. He had wondered the same, but none of the disjointed bits of memories burned into his mind from the trio of Angels involved in Third Impact including Adam itself, had included that fact.

“So, moving on from second impact…” Koga said with a pointed glance at the clock, “how much do you know about GEHIRN then NERV between then and the 3rd Angel appearing?”
“Bits and pieces” Shinji said slowly as he expanded his mind forward. The countless memories that had been burned into his mind from merging with the minds of those close and well known to him were far from complete and were often disjointed…but he had enough.

Fuyutsuki being given a so called ‘Hobson's choice’ to either work for SEELE or ‘vanish’, after he discovered the truth, then slowly being assimilated by the organization into a loyal scientist who soon realized his choice to work with them had left him no choices at all.

His Mother and Father working side by side with Naoko Akagi and the Professor to develop the prototype Evangelion technology…and the failures in the ‘graveyard’ deep in Terminal Dogma until they had gotten it right with Units Zero and One…and the sacrifice they had needed to make, to quicken the beast.
He managed, barely, to hold his composure as he retold the story of his Mothers contact experiment and precisely where her soul currently rested to the disbelief, then amazement of Koga, followed by his Father sending him away as a useless, broken irrelevancy.

He sketched in as much as he knew of Rei Ayanami, while stressing that the current Rei deserved nothing more or less then respect for being a unique and beautiful person who had had a life that made his and Asuka’s look like a picnic, his emphatic statements getting an approving nod from Kaji and a dutiful scribbling from Koga.

Then he got to Unit Two and Asuka’s Mother.
“So, Asuka’s mother’s soul is trapped inside Unit Two” Koga said, keeping a level, calm tone from long practiced ease, even over concepts he would have previously dismissed as absurd, such as peoples souls being swallowed by giant robots…but his instincts, honed to a fine edge told him Shinji was telling the truth.
And if it was the truth, then…did these people, Keel and Ikari have any limits at all in their madness?
Or their threat?

“Yes” Shinji nodded slowly as he forced away the memory that had haunted Asuka’s mind for ten years of a door opening into a room with her mother and that doll…
“Asuka doesn’t know, but I felt her presence during the battle with the Sixth Angel, at least this time around”.

Kaji’s expression narrowed slightly as he put two and two together-

“When your Synch ratio dropped off to zero…and Asuka’s rose to one hundred percent…”
Shinji nodded, not that surprised that Kaji had figured it out.
“…I couldn’t help Asuka” he admitted, fighting back tears to little use as his reaction was instantly noted by the two experienced men opposite him, confirming a growing suspicion in Kaji about his feelings towards the Second Child. “The last time, we were able to work together and get Unit Two to open its mouth, but…this time, I couldn’t concentrate. Then I remembered there was someone else riding inside Unit Two with us…”
“Kyoko” Kaji nodded slowly.
“Yes” Shinji agreed. “I was able to reach her with enough of an impression of Asuka in mortal danger that she…well, reacted”.

“It’s strange that Zeppelin Soryu was not physically absorbed as yourMother was” Koga frowned.

“As far as I understand it, she didn’t reach that same level, I don’t know why. And unlike my Mother who was absorbed whole, her soul was…well, shattered. Only a fragment, the part that recognized Asuka as her daughter was absorbed, while the rest-”
“Which is why she thought that doll was Asuka” Kaji said with a snap of his fingers, finally getting an answer to that question after all these years, the mental breakdown that had defied the best medical experts in the world who simply couldn’t understand the nature of her insanity…

Shinji nodded.

“As far as I understand, the piece of her Soul in Unit Two acted as an anchor for the rest, drawing it back together after she ‘died’, but Asuka had closed off so much of herself by that point that she never felt her presence…until the end”.
Kaji looked up at that ominous statement, but held off his questions guessing he would get an answer soon enough.

“Naoko Akagi, Doctor Akagi’s mothers soul somehow got trapped in Unit Zero” Shinji continued. “I don’t know how but it must have happened sometime around the point my Father goaded her into killing herself”.
“I always wondered about that” Kaji muttered. “The timing, just after she completed her major projects and the day before NERV was formed…it was just too…odd. Still, it makes a degree of sense given that in Unit Zeros first activation, its first considered act was to try and kill your Father”.
“Mores the pity it didn’t succeed” Shinji muttered. “But, that’s about as much as I know about what happened before I arrived in Tokyo-3”.

“Well in that case, this is as good a time as any to take a five minute break, I think we need it” Koga said in a tone that didn’t invite refusal, pressing a hidden button under the desk. Five seconds later the door opened and a pair of female JDA agents walked in with trays of light snacks and gave Shinji supportive smiles as they set the food down. Koga didn’t partake, instead going over his pages of notes to scrawl a series of questions and mark possible allusions to future events Shinji would need to clarify, pleased however to see Ikari had laid everything out so precisely and carefully.
He’s probably had plenty of time to think about what we might want to know Koga thought to himself, waiting for Shinji to have several light snacks before finally looking up.
“So…are you ready to continue?”
“Yes”.
“Well. At your own pace, why don’t you take us through each of the Angels attacks? It’ll serve as a basis for the timeline; feel free to add other major events that happen as we move along”.
“Fair enough” Shinji said softly, knowing this couldn’t be put off any more. Taking a deep breath, he thought back to that nightmarish day when he first arrived at Tokyo-3.

First though, he sneezed a second time, much louder then before, frowning in annoyance as he grabbed a handful of tissues.

“There must be some kind of dust in here or something” Koga muttered, looking around at the room for any possible source, before he shrugged, glancing at the time. The clock was definitely running now.

And so Shinji told them the story that had defined his life, at first moving along quickly as he filled them in on the ‘past’ last time, leaving it up to them to consider the differences as he thought over the events of his first life.

Father

Sachiel.

Misato.

Shamshel.

Rei.

Ramiel.

Asuka.

Gaghiel.

Israfel

Then finally, he reached the ‘future’ and both Kaji and Koga leaned forward, their expressions intent.

Sandalphon. Lurking in its volcano as it lured Asuka in and damn near killed her, only to be saved by his insane, impulsive and against orders action that had had Misato first shouting at him, then hugging him and even earning him a rare, real smile from Asuka, not the Second Child, for saving her life…even as she muttered about him being an idiot for showing off as he dragged her out of the magma.

Matariel. An agreeably easy Angel to kill…if not for the chaos of a convenient power outage that his Father had been convinced was the work of a human enemy…
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?” Shinji asked with a raised eyebrow
Koga simply smiled, twirling his pen expertly in thought.
“If the JDA did perform -and was now planning- such an operation, neither of us would have a need to know” he shrugged before shooting a wry smile at Kaji. “Though I wouldn’t be that surprised if our friend here had something to do with it, given how many people he works for, as I wouldn’t put it past SEELE doing some snooping on Ikari either”.
“Well I think we can rule himout” Shinji smiled, turning his gaze on Kaji. “You got to spend five hours trapped in an elevator with Misato, who desperately needed to go to the bathroom”.
Kaji’s face paled slightly at that thought, drawing a rare smirk from Koga before he got himself back under control and inclined his head at Shinji.
“Please Mister Ikari, continue”.

And so he did.

Sahaquiel. The first Angel to appear in Earth Orbit, which was an interesting change from the Pacific Ocean, but a terrifying sight to watch as the Angel crashed to Earth wreathed with plasma from the friction of its reentry, its AT field, raised like a gigantic sledge hammer against Tokyo-3 until it was halted by the efforts of the Three Children…
And his Father down in Antarctica recovering the Lance, for the first –and only- time directing words of praise at his son, which in the end were as hollow as his heart, just another method of control to exert over him that meant utterly nothing.

Ireul. Harder to explain given that he had heard about its attack from second hand accounts after his Father had, for whatever reason, systematically deleted every record concerning its attack. He hadheard from Misato that the Commander had told the Committee it was a false alarm, though the fact that NERV then referred to the next Angel as the twelfth and not the eleventh was a clear indicator this hadn’t worked.
Kaji expressed great interest in the first real indicator of a crack between Gendo and Keel, but Shinji had nothing more to offer them on it, so Koga urged him to keep going.

Leliel.
An even odds contender for ‘weirdest’ Angel, it took depressingly little effort to put himself back into that entry plug as hour after hour after hour passed, the LCL slowly lost its oxygen and he fell into something like a dream.
But the ghostly, white phantom that had entered his entry plug to ever so gently cradle his head in her arms as he lay there dying, before turning loose the power of Unit One in a rage…
She, she had been real and he spoke with a hint of pride at how his Mother, although he hadn’t understood it at the time, had never left him and refused to let him die.

The ‘disappearance’ of the Second Branch in Nevada he knew little about, but the suspicious looks his ‘hosts’ exchanged at the news suggested they were looking far deeper into it then he ever had. He had never really though about it, he had been far more concerned with the soon following news that the US Government had shipped Unit Three to NERV Central, apparently wanting it the hell off their soil.

Leading to Bardiel.

And the 4th Child.

[Chris OFarrell]

Kaji watched with a detached feeling as Shinji, in a flat, and chillingly almost emotionlessvoice, recited the events that had started his downward spiral.

The Dummy Plug activating and his Father refusing to stop it.

Even after Unit Three was torn apart piece by piece.

Even after the Angels waveform had vanished.

Even after Unit One picked Unit Three’s Entry Plug…and despite a glimpse of hope when Shinji had felt his Evangelion hesitate as if confused, as he threw his will against it, it crushed the plug and damn near killed his best friend, instead ‘mercifully’ just leaving him minus an arm and a leg.
Now, he had put a second Suzuhara into hospital.

Shinji freely talked about how he had come within milliseconds of tearing NERV Central to pieces in retaliation, before admitted an almost grudging thanks that his Father had stopped him before he compounded Gendos actions by killing more innocents. After which his Father had been all to happy to let him leave and never see him again, letting him go much as one would throw out the spare part of a machine that had lost its use, designating Rei as the Pilot for Unit One.

And Shinji talked of his utterly certainty that this was the right thing to do. No terror or anguish as he ran away, just a strangely calm feeling that this time, he wouldn’t be coming back, that this time he knew he was doing the rightthingand saving anyone else from getting injured or killed because of him.

Then the Angel of Might had taken the field.

“I was standing on the train platform when the sirens kicked in. How the Angel had gotten so close without being detected, I don’t know. But before I could get to a shelter, I saw it. It flew up slowly as it passed over the Mountains, then the cities defenses all let loose, all at once. All the missile launchers, all the buildings all of it just opened up. I thought I would go deaf from the noise…but that was nothing to the explosion when it returned fire”. Shinji shook his head, still in a slight disbelief at the memory.
“It took the Third Angel took a lucky shot to penetrate the Geofront armor, right down an unarmored building. The Fifth took ten hours to drill through it. The Fourteenth…it blew through eighteen of the twenty two layers in one shot. Then, as I was dragged into a shelter down in the Geofront, I saw it blast six city blocks with still active weapons simultaneously, just to shut them up before it got back to work and you know what I did about it?”

There was silence as both Koga and Kaji recognized the rhetorical question.

“Nothing!” Shinji said with an emphatic disgust at himself, his emotions returning suddenly and forcefully. Kaji stirred slightly as if to offer a defense, but stopped at a look at Shinj’s face.

He needs to get this out, even if he’s being far too hard on himself…

“Oh no, I was too tied up in my self pity and vendetta against my Father! About the same time I found a corner of a shelter to hide in; the Angel blasted a hole in the Geofront and started to descend. Asuka, in the only fully operational Eva met it with everything she had, neutralizing its AT field and emptying two rifles into it. Then two more. Then two rocket launchers…and she didn’t even scratch the thing. It hovered there on the ground very politely, letting her do her do her best, then it sliced her arms from her Eva. Then, in God only knows how much pain she charged it in a rage and it sliced her head clean off”.
“Did…was she-” Kaji started to ask feeling a sudden ball of ice in his stomach forming before Shinji shook his head.
“No, Misato and Maya were fast enough on the ball to cut her A-10 links before Unit Two was decapitated. That head, ironically, crashed right into the shelter I was staying in, glaring at me from not five meters away. I mean here was a sign from the God’s if there was one, Unit Two looking at me as if to say ‘well get off your damn ass and help!’, but no, I just stumbled outside, telling myself that I had promised never to go back”.

Shinji remained silent for ten seconds and no-one pushed him until he finally looked up at Kaji.

“Then I ran into you. Your ‘second job’ was now ‘public’ knowledge, though I don’t think anyone really had a clue who you worked for, but you were off the combat roster and…well…just watering those plants. You told me that this was the place you wanted to be if you died, then explained the whole deal with Adam and the Angels and what would happen if they combined. And still, I just stood there! Humanity itself was on the line but no I couldn’t act. Instead, I watched as Rei was deployed in a half crippled Unit Zero, Mother rejecting both her and the Dummy Plug, refusing to activate for him…Rei only had one arm but, as she thought she was entirely expandable, she used it to pick up an N2 warhead and charge at Zeruels back”.

Silence greeted that statement, broken only by the slight hum of the electronics in the room until Shinji exhaled his tension again and continued in a soft voice, his eyes now fixed on a spot on the table as he thought over Rei’s literally suicidal charge.

“At the last second, the Angel spun around and threw up an AT field, but Rei managed to break through and detonate. The blast was contained somehow so I wasn’t given a dose of instant sunrise, but the Angel protected its core, somehow, then hacked Unit Zero damn near in half, before getting back to work blasting its way into Headquarters.
.
Now Shinji again met Kaji’s gaze.

“Then, you told me that I had a choice” he said in a level tone.




(“Shinji, the only thing I can do is stand here and water. But you, you have something that you can do. That only you can do. Nobody is forcing you. Think for yourself, and make the decision by yourself. Think about what you ought to do now. So you don't have any regrets later.”)-

“And I made it”.

“You went back” Kaji said to him a look of real pride on his face that made Shinji feel slightly embarrassed, but at the same time unreasonably proud of his pride, snorting as he remembered how finely he had cut finding a shred of courage.

“I was almost too late. By the time I made it to the Eva bay, the Angel had blown open the main shaft and started down into Central Dogma, then crashed across into the command center. It was about a half second away from vaporizing Misato, the technicians and the Vice Commander when I jumped in and started an all out brawl through the Evangelion bays, before I managed to force it onto an Eva lift and Misato sent both of us back to the Geofront. It blew off my arm, so I ripped off its face off…and was just about to try and crush its core…when the batteries ran out.

Kaji shut his eyes and sighed and even the normally impassive Koga winced.
It would have been funny if it wasn’t so bloody serious.

“The Angel” Shinji continued in a tone as calm as if he was ordering dinner, “as you might imagine was rather…irritated by now, so it took its time to tear and blast Unit One into pieces. As my entry plug started to shatter around me, I screamed and begged for it to do something, to move…and someone heard me”.

“Yui Ikari” Koga said. It was a statement, not a question, but Shinji nodded.

“Unit One reactivated and my Synchronization Ratio reached over 400 percent, it absorbed me just like my Mother as it went berserk, ripping the Angel apart and swallowing its S2 engine, incorporating it directly into itself. Why it did that I don’t know but I can tell you SEELE was utterly furious with the outcome, apparently this was slightly at odds with their scenario.” Shinji hesitated. “I don’t think I can easily describe what went on while I was stuck inside Unit One…but it wasn’t pleasant”.
“Then we won’t go into it” Koga assured him. “So, what can you tell us about SEELE’s response to all this?”
Shinji looked Kaji square in the eye as he started talking.
Kaji deserved to be told the truth of how he had died.




“It utterly destroyed Misato”.
The smirk Kaji had worn when Shinji told him of his ‘death’ vanished. That either Gendo or Keel had been irritated enough to order his death was actually quite flattering, even amusing.

That it had robbed Misato of any happiness from their newly rekindled relationship, wasn’t.

How in the hell could I have been stupid enough to let her back into my life, knowing this could happen Kaji cursed himself, but held back his emotions for the sake of Shinji as he continued.

“You left her a final message, left her everything you had found out to her about NERV and SEELE, enough to let her try and finish the fight…and from that moment…she wasn’t Misato, she was just a shell with nothing but revenge to live for”. Shinji stopped in thought for a few seconds as he fiddled with a half eaten snack on the table in front of him. “Of course by this time, I wasn’t in much better condition”.
“I see…” Kaji said, now fighting emotions he normally kept tightly under control. His death was one thing; fucking over Misato because of it on the other hand…
Oh yes it was going to be pleasant when Ishiba took the gloves off and pointed him at Keel or Gendo…

Or happily, both.

“So” Koga said softly, leaning forward intently. “Kaji was killed; there was no reaction from the JDA or Japanese Government?”
“Oh yes there was” Shinji said darkly. “But that comes after the final Angel. First…Asuka got to face the Fifteenth and have her mind destroyed, then Rei the Sixteenth and have her body destroyed” he said as his face turned increasingly bleak “Then I faced the Seventeen and had my soul destroyed”.




Thirty minutes later, Shinji held his head in his hands as he fought off tears, once again declining an offer, this time from both of the officers, to call it a day, almost recklessly pushing on. It was as if a dam had burst and he couldn’t stop, almost as if he felt he was confessing everything and desperately looking for some kind of forgiveness or even understanding from the two people opposite him.

“I just didn’t care anymore” he hissed. I just sat under the stairs and ignored everything, living, dying; none of it meant anything to me!”
“It’s okay” Kaji tried to start, only to be snapped at in return.
“No, it’s NOT okay!” Shinji snapped back. “People were dying all around me, innocent people against an enemy who didn’t take prisoners, didn’t accept surrenders from civilians trying to get out of the way, people who were looking to murder everyone I ever cared about, and I just sat there! I just…how could they be so cruel?”

Kaji had needed to close his eyes for a good ten seconds before he could guarantee his face would remain blank as Shinji walked both he and Koga through Misato’s final actions, as Misato died a Hero with a capital H. It had been all Kaji could do to at that point to keep his own composure; how proud he was of her, he didn’t think he could put into words. Koga, probably sensing this, had smoothly stepped in to continue, though Kaji could tell that while throughout the interview ‘The Warlock’ had faked most of his emotional responses…he was finally starting to show real feeling under his mask-

“Here, drink this” Koga said, handing over a class of water in a tone that didn’t accept refusal. Shinji took it and slowly drank, not aware that it was laced with a light sedative. Nothing major that he would really notice, but enough to calm him down from the state he had worked himself into. Koga gave it thirty seconds, before leaning forward and placing his pen on the table, to talk directly to the poor person across from him.

“Do you know how the JSSDF was formed Mister Ikari?”
“Um…” Shinji said with a frown after he wiped the tears from his face. “Wasn’t it something to do with China back after Second Impact?”
“Indeed” Koga nodded. “The JSSDF was created to address a weakness with the traditional JSDF, the fact that as a self defense force it was designed to defend Japan from direct attacks, but lacked any real ability to forward deploy around the world. What sets the three JSSDF Divisions apart from the turn of the century JSDF is that each division has a massive logistical trail. They have enough heavy lift aircraft, ships and so on to deploy a full combat ready regiment anywhere in the world in twenty four hours, with the rest of the division following in forty eight. Now as you may or may not have learned in school, China was in deep trouble after Second Impact. In between the India – Pakistani war, Islamic insurgencies, the second Tibetan uprising and border skirmishes with a few other nations, China was looking disturbingly unstable. The Japanese Government was very worried about the possibility of a nuclear power like China devolving into a civil war, so they decided to intervene”.

Watching Shinji carefully as Shinji started to calm down, Koga removed his glasses and brought out a handkerchief to polish them absently as Kaji took up the story, giving the drug time to slowly work through his system.
“Despite the historical enmity between Japan and China” Kaji continued, the Government made the decision to deploy the JSSDF to help the Chinese hold the line in the Far East, freeing up huge numbers of more poorly equipped Chinese troops to put out brushfires all over the place and reassert Beijing’s authority. The Third Division was sent in…and for nine months, they fought through hell, as the nut jobs who slaughtered most of the progressive Islamic states tried to incite an uprising, then tried an invasion in the far East of the PRC.

“I don’t think there has been anything similar in our history since World War Two” Koga muttered. “Those poor bastards fought in miserable conditions against an enemy who outnumbered then ten to one, defeating them by calling down shear firepower again and again as they refused to budge. So the Jhiadists switched to unconventional tactics. The one that damn near opened up a hole they could exploit was was sending children, six and seven year olds who looked like refugees, wearing suicide vests –they called them ‘heavenly jackets to the kids- under their clothes, charging into their lines. The division lost the forward platoons and a huge attack followed that went damn near hand to hand until they got reorganized and pushed back. As a result, orders came down to shoot to kill any children, women or non combatants who approached their positions. So they did so”.

“The thing you have to understand…no…that I think you do understand, Shinji” Kaji said emphatically, “is that we’re only, at best, half civilized. This…thin veneer of civilization we share is the only imaginary line that keeps us from acting out our own darkest impulses. It allows our ‘humanity’ to resist justifying butchery.”

“Where did you read that?” Shinji asked with a raised eyebrow and a smirk back in his voice. Kaji shrugged, hiding his thought that Shinjis returning humor was a good sign.

“Oh, somewhere on the internet I think. But the point is, that these troops didn’t just step over that line…they shredded it. By the end of their campaign, nine months of constant, bloody, slaughter of kids, women, hand to hand more then a few times…they just didn’t have anything left to restrain them. Oh they tried to paint it all back on after, but half the current Third Division are made up of veterans of that campaign…and their reputation among the rest of the JSSDF and the JSDF is not exactly….”
“Pleasant” Koga supplied, placing his glasses back on his head. “The rest of the JSSDF are the shiny, wonderful Katana the Government waves around. The Third….they’re the serrated knife held behind their back, against the need for some kind of dirty work. I’m still not entirely sure how SEELE got the Government to react the way they did…though” Koga raised an eyebrow at Kaji. “If you had died…and the finger had been pointed at Gendo Ikari…”
“As if I was getting too close to something” Kaji added in thought…
“And we now know Gendo was truly seeking to initiate a Third Impact…”
“Then me, the other pilots and everyone else who didn’t have a clue at NERV just became acceptable losses to stop it” Shinji said in a rather dark, but resigned voice, the sedative clearly starting to take effect.
“It doesn’t excuse their conduct Shinji, just explains it” Koga said, beforeh e blinked as he realized he had used Ikari’s name without intending to. A bad sign, he was getting too close to the subject…though it was getting harder to not do so.
How did Wallpaper screw up so badly? Koga wondered. The JSSDF were deployed to stop one Third Impact at the behest of SEELE to allow their Third Impact to proceed…

“So…the JSSDF invaded, you were rescued by Misato, Asuka was with Unit Two in the bottom of the lake, and Rei Ayanami was taken by Gendo down to the Second Angel to start Third Impact?” Koga summed up what his notes said, getting a nod from Shinji. “So…when did SEELE get involved then?”
Shinji actually smiled, expressions of fierce pride and bleak sorrow strangely warring for prominence on his face at the same time.
“When Asuka woke up”.



“You would have had to have been there to see it” Shinji said softly, his eyes distant and not at all focused on the room or the two people inside it with him. The light sedative he didn’t know about had had its effect, leaving him much calmer but not to the extent that he couldn’t feel or think properly as they reached the end of his story. Koga, amusingly despite technically working for the Japanese Government, nodded approvingly as Asuka tore the JSSDF combined arms battalion in the Geofront to pieces…then narrowed his eyes as SEELE deployed their trump card, his hand blurring as he scribbled notes.
“On one side, Evangelion Unit Two with Asuka barely having awoken from a catatonic state, three and a half minutes of power, a single progressive knife and no support infrastructure. Opposing her, all nine advanced Production models; Evangelions Five through Thirteen, each capable of unassisted flight, each with a dummy plug that would ignore pain or damage, each with an S2 engine allowing unlimited power and regeneration, each with a replica of the Lance of Longinus that could cut right through an AT field like a knife through butter…”
Kaji listened and again fought back tears as Shinji prepared to detail what Kaji knew would be Asuka’s last stand. Shinji hadn’t actually said as much so far, but he had given away the truth countless times; to say he was loaded down with survivor’s guilt would probably be one of the greater understatements of the century. Kaji, even if he had been inclined to blame Shinji, for some insane reason, would have found it impossible to find fault with his actions in the JSSDF assault. After what he had been put through since coming to Tokyo-3, the minor miracle was that he hadn’t eaten a gun several months beforehand. The question of how SEELE had tricked the JSSDF into helping them start Third Impact had been finally answered with the appearance of the Mass Production Evangelions and Shinji’s revelation of their role in the whole process. It was so utterly perfect even Kaji had to give SEELE credit for their plan.

Start with the premise that the JSSDF would, of course, insist the other NERV branches send the Evangelions to help with their assault, to fight off NERV-Centrals own pair of Evangelions if Gendo deployed them. Or more likely, SEELE would instruct the other branches to offer the services of the nine units to ‘stop that madman Ikari from ending the world’ or something.
The aforementioned Evangelions of course, would ultimately be under SEELE’s control the whole time, no matter what the JSSDF or any NERV branches outside SEELE’s information loop might think. Like the classic Trojan Horse strategy, the Japanese Government had been once again duped and played right into SEELE’s hands, employed by SEELE to deliver the final piece of the puzzle that was Third Impact, right into place.

Kaji couldn’t help but shake his head. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault, though it probably wouldn’t stop Ishiba from raging when he read this report. How Third Impact would be set off was, after all, a veryclosely held secret neither the JDA nor Kaji had come close to figuring out and there would be no way to know the Evangelions once inside the Geofront, wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon…
It was a valuable lesson in not getting cocky despite the progress they were making with Shinji’s help. SEELE and Gendo were very powerful and clever people to play the game with, at this level.
As Asuka had clearly found out.

“You would have been so proud of her” Shinji said suddenly, looking up at Kaji with a level expression and this time Kaji did let a tear flow down his that he wiped off gently as Shinji continued with a distant look in his eyes.
“I couldn’t have come close to what she did. On my best day, even today, with everything I know, everything I can do with Unit One…I couldn’t have touched her. Asuka and her Mother fought together with such a tempest, such a focus…I don’t think I can describe it. Nothing, I have ever seen, none of the battles against the Angels…nothing comes close. She didn’t cry about how unfair it was, she didn’t give up anything to them…it was as if she had been born for this battle. And if she had had just known a little more about Units she was fighting; known to go for their S2 organs or their dummy plugs, or if she had still had her power cable and been able to take a little more time…she would have succeeded. I know it”.
Shinji slowly let out a shuddering breath, probably only the sedative was keeping him calm and collected right now.
“But she didn’t…and Unit One then activated. It blasted into the Geofront a minute or two later…and I saw the remains of Unit Two being chewed, literally chewed on by the Eva series. And guessing what had happened to her, what she had felt as she was ripped apart…I lost the last shreds of my sanity. And while I sat there screaming, the Eva series ‘captured’ Unit One and ascended to unite with Liltih, who in turn had already united or perhaps re-united with Ayanami after she defied my Father…and that’s when Third Impact started”.
There was a good five seconds of silence from everyone.

“Well” Koga said, closing his notebook and replacing the lid on his pen in a visible signal that the ‘debriefing’ was at an end as he looked at the clock and clearly decided they had pushed as far as they could. “You have given us a great deal of data to go over, as I’m sure you can imagine…and we’ve spent too long here already”. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and check the shopping team status”
“Shopping team?” Shinji asked in an uncertain voice with a raised eyebrow. Koga actually grinned.
“Well, it would look slightly suspicious if you had not spent any money, nor purchased anything over four hours” the older man pointed out reasonably. “A team of agents, very fashion wise agents for the record, were out helping to diminish your account”.
“But…won’t the records show it wasn’t me? Not to mention the surveillance cameras all over the city-”
“Have already been carefully hacked to show Shinji Ikari and Ryoji Kaji browsing through the incredibly busy markets around the major shopping centers” Koga assured him as he stood, “and your bank account has been reduced by just over a hundred thousand Yen I’m afraid. Oh, and I hope you like Egyptian cotton” Koga smirked before offering a sincere bow of the greatest respect and heading for the door. “Until the next time we meet, Mister Ikari he added, exiting the door and taking his notes with him.
Shinji stood, feeling slightly jarred at the sudden ending as he realized it was all over.
“Well…should we get going?” he asked, also standing as he noticed Kaji was till sitting.
“In a minute” Kaji said without budging an inch. “First…” he pointed at Shinji’s seat.

Shinji sat back down again with a slight, tired sigh wonder if he was going to be lectured.

“Shinji…I don’t think anyone can ever come close to understanding what you’ve been through, nor the courage you’ve shown in being willing to go back thoughthis hell for the sake of your friends…but I have one last question”
“Yes?” Shinji asked, bracing himself as he wondered what it could be…
“Do you love Asuka?” he asked in a blunt tone that brooked no falsehood.
“More then anything else in this world” he replied softly, shutting his eyes as the guilt clearly started to flow. “Well at least, as much as I love Misato like a Mother…and Rei as a Sister-”
“It’s okay, I get it” Kaji nodded, squaring his shoulders as his gaze intensified. “Then if you do, you are going to have to do something that you’re not going to like”.
Shinji opened his eyes again and looked at him with a haunted look that suggested to Kaji that Shinji knew exactly what he was going to say.

“You’re going to have to forgive yourself for not being able to save her” he said simply.


“I…I don’t know if I can” he confessed in an almost tiny voice. “It was my fault…I could have done something but-”
“Oh, so her own choice to stand and fight an impossible battle didn’t have anything to do with her death? SEELE’s decision to deploy the Evangelions against her? They are innocent of responsibility? Nor Misato for ordering her into combat in the first place?” Kaji ruthlessly asked him.
Shinji couldn’t meet his gaze, but Kaji continued without care.
“Shinji, countless choices by countless people, including Asuka herself, led to her death. It is the height of arrogance to assume that you could change it. That kind of wishful thinking is both destructive and flawed and I know you are smarter then you pretend to be. So stop, close your eyes…and look back”.

Kaji simply stared at him until Shinji relented with a sigh and closed his eyes, marshaling his feelings for some pointless exercise.
He knew what he had done…what he had failed to do.

“You had just spent a month trapped inside your Evangelion, right after you had watched the Dummy Plug system damn near kill Toji” Kaji started without preamble. “You then had the pleasure of watching Asuka get her mind rapped without being able to do anything about it as she fell into a catatonic state, watched Rei die without being able to do anything about it, killed Kaworu, who may have left you no choice but was still the only person to freely offer you his love and affection unconditionally…” Shinji heard Kaji’s chair creak as he leaned forward…

“But you know what tells me you were in no shape to fight? Ignoring the fact that you just admitted you had sat there and damn near let those grunts blow your head away? It’s the fact that you didn’t go berserk when you saw what they had done to Unit Two. That when Unit One did finally activate, instead of going on a rampage with your Evangelion and tearing them apart in her name and yours, the real Lance in your hands, you just sat there and cracked up. Hell, the only surprising thing about that is that it took this long for it to happen…but it leaves us at an impasse. At this point, you can either run away from the truth” Kaji saw Shinji flinched at those words “or accept it, difficult as it might be”.

“And what is that?” Shinji asked, opening his eyes and not even bothering to hide the haunted feelings of guilt that were flooding through his eyes.

“That she was dead the second SEELE decided to attack NERV” Kaji said flatly. “If wishes were horses, we wouldn’t be here now, I’d be still dead” Shinji flinched as that realization came across, “Misato would have probably killed herself in a futile stand against the JSSDF and SEELE…” Kaji paused to consider this with a shake of his head. “Of course it’s also just as possible that you choosing to fight might have led to Rei simply obeying your Father and kicking off his own private Third Impact, meaning none of us would even be here”.

Shinji blanched, that particular though had never occurred to him

“So, do you disagree with any of my conclusions?”

Shinji just shook his head, how could he disagree when everything was laid out so calmly?

“Good. Because you have a choice here; either you can accept that you couldn’t do anything, or you can ignore Asuka for the rest of your life”.
Shinji blinked at the rather stark choice in confusion.
“You’ll never get close to her unless you accept that” he said in a suddenly earnest and almost pleading voice. “Every time you try Shinji, you’ll just hear her scream as she died and run away. And you, better then anyone must know what kind of damage you could do, if she opens her heart up and you run from her. She doesn’t deserve that, and frankly, neither do you. I can’t stop you if you want to be an idiot and carry around all this guilt, thumping your chest and moaning about unfair life is. Well I have news for you, it is unfair. It does suck. But you can either sit there in self pity about something that technically has not happened, or, you can actually apply some of that same courage you’ve shown in coming back and fighting. . If you truly love Asuka, you have to let it go. If not for your sake Shinji, then for hers, unless this time, when you can do something about her, you want to abandon her”.




Oh that was a low blow.

It was hard to let go of his guilt. Despite the battering rams of Kaji’s forceful, logical arguments undermining his oh so comfortable self pity. And as much as he wanted to swim in the guilt over Asuka’s ‘death’ -which now existed only in his mind - no matter how he tried to turn away from it, increasingly he had to look at it in the face.
Kaji was right.

But it didn’t make it any easier.

But his final statement finally shattered the prison he had built out of his guilt. Perhaps he couldn’t forgive himself for his own sake…
But he had to for hers.
Because he couldn’t abandon Asuka again. Not when he could do something about it this time.

“Come on, we need to get you changed’ Kaji said after Shinji sighed and offered him a wan smile, leading him out of the room. Koga was nowhere to be seen nor were any other agents as Kaji led him into a nearby bathroom. A pair of eye drops administered by Kaji diminished, and then amazingly eliminated both the puffiness and ‘red eye’ effect of Shinji’s tears, followed by a quick wash of his face, then changed into an outfit layed out for him in an empty bedroom as Kaji waited outside.
“This is…different” Shinji commented to himself in the full length mirror there. Now instead of his rather plain white shirt and school pants, he was dressed in a gray turtleneck short sleeve shirt that looked, in his opinion, disturbingly close to Asuka’s own high collar shirt with a light singlet under it and felt incredibly smooth on his skin. Over it he put on a light leather Suede jacket that he left unbuttoned as he pulled on stiff, but expensive looking jeans of such a dark blue, they almost looked black, with high laced desert boots…
“Trust me, you look just right” Kaji assured him. “I decided to skip the sun glasses, we don’t want people to think you’re turning into your Father or anything” he chuckled.
“I’d still need the white gloves” Shinji joked back, suddenly feeling much more confident in himself. He didn’t know if it was because he had managed to more or less forgive himself…or if the clothes just made the man…
But damn, he didn’t look half bad.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded the reflection in the mirror.
The reflection, didn’t answer.
Kaji however, did as he reappeared without warning.

“Someone willing to go through hell again, with no guarantee of any kind of salvation at the end because he loves the people around him” Kaji said simply and if it wasn’t for the eye drops, Shinji might have damn near started crying again at that, the shear confidence in Kaji’s voice directed at him was something that had been missing from his life for a very long time.
“Thanks” he muttered instead.
“I’ve got a present for you” Kaji added, extending a package in a brown paper bag of some kind towards him, the shape and weight of a picture frame.
“It’s from my boss, the head of the JDA” Kaji added. “He’s been briefed on your situation and he has a…bit of a sense of humor” Kaji said delicately, not entirely sure about how this would be taken, but deciding to risk it, judging that Shinji needed some cheering up after that intense debriefing. Koga was already one his way back to Tokyo-2 with his team and Shigeru would have ‘first impressions’ probably within three hours, a full report by tomorrow evening and a briefing to give to the PM the day after.

Funny how fast bureaucrats could work if the fate of the world really was in the balance…

“Anyway, he thought you might like this” Kaji finished, handing over the bag.
Shinji raised an eyebrow, but without further comment, reached into the bag. Inside, there was indeed a picture frame, a very nice looking wooden frame in fact. Inside…was one of those ‘motivational’ posters he had seen around…

His laughter started low, like Asuka’s the one time he had told her about their time in the playpen as kids, but within seconds, all race of his sadness and lingering horror had vanished behind an utterly impossible to stop wall of laughter that took him at least two minutes to get over, though he had to work terrifically hard not to think about it because if he did, he was set off all over again…

“So. That’s the easy part of today out of the way” Kaji said lightly as the car as their car pulled out of the garage, ‘his’ four bags of purchases safely next to him. “Now. Lets get down to the real problem, how we are going to convince a certain red headed Evangelion pilot that she needs a date for this dance…”

If there was anything more then a challenge that Ryoji Kaji loved…it was a sneaky challenge.





A Four Wheel Drive halted briefly on the far edge of the markets around the massive shopping center at the heart of Tokyo-3, two men easing out of the seats and vanishing inside, without any camera noticing their presence as they headed in. If anyone had been watching the cameras in the area, they might have caught a glimpse of them entering this area from another direction several hours ago and now watch them exit, the younger man dressed in much more fashionable clothes and carrying bags as they made their way back.

But for all the glorious effort, it was a waste of time.
No-one was watching.
Countless man hours of work, computer time and hacking expertise could have been spared the effort, but the saying ‘better safe then sorry’ wasn’t JDA Intel’s unofficial motto for nothing.

The shopping center Shinji noticed was far more crowded then it had been in the morning as they reentered it, countless people bustling here and there, not that many young Children around, but quite a number of teenagers his age appearing to hang out near the food court.

Kaji was on his cell phone as they entered, looking around to get his bearings as he chatted with someone before thanking them and hanging up.
“Well, they’re just coming out of their makeover now” he said, nodding off to the side and leading Shinji onward. “Katsuragi just took the Section Two agents through hell”.
“Dress shopping?” Shinji asked in sympathy.
Kaji shook his head grimly.
“Women’s toiletries”
“The poor bastards” Shinji said in a genuinely sorry voice. Not even Section 2 agents deserved to be put through that kind of hell.
He recalled once when Asuka had found him ‘sneaking out’ to go shopping –that he hadn’t informed her, only Misato apparently classified as ‘sneaking out’- and she held him in place, while writing up a list of ‘things’ she needed, without so much as a ‘please’ or ‘thank you’.
And idiotically, he had not checked the list before accepting it from her.
It took five minutes of standing at the front of a packed checkout isle while a clerk demanded a price check on ladies soaps, body washes, panties and….other items before he had been able to escape with a face as red as Asukas Evangelions paint job.

Expertly, Kaji led him through the shopping center. For some reason, Shinji felt a profound reconnection as he walked through the sea of humanity. The shear normalcy of it struck him as odd. In a city under constant attack by creatures both devastating and terrifying, parents were still being dragged by their kids into toy stores, husbands into women’s clothing stores, wives into electronics stores, boyfriends into chick flicks and girlfriends into the latest shoot’em up. Kids still screamed loudly when the toy they had to have or they would die was denied and shy young guys braved rejection to ask the girl of their dreams out.

Life moved on…and something inside Shinji rejoiced in the chaos of individuals living their lives in the world of the AT field.

“Something wrong?” Kaji asked as they ascended an empty glass fronted elevator from the ground floor.
Shinji just looked out in joy at the energetic and damn near chaotic mass of humanity living in their singular, but unified way.
“No. Just something very right” he chuckled with a smile.
“Hold onto that thought, whatever it was” Kaji smirked right back. “We’re here. It’s Showtime!”

Kaji, as a matter of having finely tuned survival instincts necessary for someone in his position had excellent situational awareness as they walked along the upper level towards the beauty center in the distance. So when Shinji froze in place without warning, he quickly turned his attention back, his eyes automatically tracking across the area for any sign of a threat as his right hand drifted towards the Sig Sauer holstered under his jacket. Seeing no immediate threat, he switched tracks and locked in on Shinji’s astonished and flabbergasted look, tracking along it to the ground floor and…and…

[Chris OFarrell]

“I think Rei just broke him” Shinji commented with a raised eyebrow from his vantage point with Kaji as Rei ‘strutted’ –there was no other word for it- away from a shop on the ground level.
Shinji hadn’t even recognized his ‘sister’ at first, just seeing one of his best friends following a very cute looking girl out of a store. Shinji had damn near run down the stairs next to the elevator to intervene for the sake of Rei and his plans to set her up with him…then his jaw had dropped as he had finally recognized that it was Rei, trying to say something, but utterly unable

Sure he had known she could look great with a little work…but damn…
Even Kaji looked impressed.

Shinji’s first unconsidered impulse had been a desire to grab something blunt -and heavy- then start attacking all the men he could see staring at his sister with expressions of unabashed lust on their faces, including a few men who looked disturbingly old to be going after someone Rei’s age.
His second, unconsidered impulse was strictly biological as once again his memories darted back to that day in her apartment, his hands trapped without warning on top of her rather large, warm-

SISTER SISITER SISTER SISTER SISTER!

His third, more considered impulse was to grin goofily at Rei, suddenly proud of her, walking up to the stairs as she ascended the final flight towards him….
Except it wasn’t Rei walking towards him…

It was Asuka.

Rei was flaunting…God yes, REI was flaunting her body in the exact same way Asuka did, her shoulders set as she strode up the stairs, everyone making way as if the force of her personality was opening a path for her.
Well either that or she was manifesting an AT field, but the fact that people were not being thrown out of her way as opposed to moving out of her way suggested she wasn’t ‘enforcing’ her personal space.
The fact however that she could generate a defensive field that was probably strong enough to shrug off an N2 warhead did give him some comfort for Rei’s virtue when she was out of his sight…

The ‘sex kitten’ image flickered for a second however as Rei turned the final twist in the staircase and spotted him and Kaji at the top, that part of her inside him jolted as their gazes connected, the slightest smile coming onto her face before it returned to the same ‘too cool for you’ look Asuka had practiced to perfection on half the males of Tokyo-3.
Clearly, shopping wasn’t the only thing Rei had taken time out to study today…

“Wow” was the only word to come to his mind as Rei halted in front of him, hovering right on the border of what one might consider personal space, again just like Asuka –who had no concept of personal space except her own- would have.
With an astonishingly almost casual flick of her head, Rei –somehow- retracted her fringe, leaving her scarlet eyes open to view with the slightest hint of mirth in them at his stunned expression.
“Wow” he repeated, for lack of anything better to say out loud.

You touch her Father and I swear to any God you might believe in that Unit One will touch you right back was the more complete thought that ran through his mind.

“You like?” Rei cooed at him, almost causing him to faint as she twirled, her skirt lifting provocatively as, with a perfect balance only a lifetime of piloting an Evangelion could give her, she rotated in place and promptly fried Shinji’s mind.

I was too late! This isn’t Rei II, its Rei III! And Akagi spilt some of that bleach she uses on her hair in the cloning tank!

…

Or not.

Okay, calm down Shinji he told his pounding heart –and hormone factory- as he felt his stunned status rapidly being overtaken by a bursting pride. It might be cliché to talk of Rei exiting her cocoon, but damn if the analogy didn’t fit as he looked at the mind blowing transformation.

“I very much like” he said, letting the grin he was feeling burst onto his face. “I didn’t even recognize you at first. And I think you might have broken Kensuke” he added with a laugh as he tore his glance away from her down towards the gaming store, where an odd chanting about some new God being born was droning…

“It was a convenient opportunity” Rei defened her decision in a very Rei tone that started to calm him down…until she added “now I have a date for the major social event of this year”.

She…waked in there and asked…him…OUT? He thought in shock.

“You walked in there and asked him out?” he then said in shock…and not a little pride.

“Yes” she said, then her voice ‘went Rei’ again as she frowned ever so slightly with an unsure look at him. “Should I not have?”

God I love you Rei he thought, silently thanking Asuka and Misato and resolving to find a way to do something nice for both of them for this.
“Oh no, its just that it’s just that…well…I’m so proud of you” he admitted through a suddenly tight throat as he stepped over and hugged her tightly, ignoring the suddenly disappointed looks from four fifths of the male humans in the vicinity between the ages of thirteen and sixteen as a surprised Rei brought her arms up and gently at first, but increasingly firmly hugged him back as the connection between them suddenly exploded into a kaleidoscope of feelings that made both of them blink in unison, before they mutually and gently released each other.
Shinji felt a tingle of embarrassment at his overt display of emotion and made a note to restrain himself a little, God only knows what Section 2 would tell his Father about that hug.
Kaji was probably thinking the same thing as he cleared his throat in amusement.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you two lovebirds” he said lightly, causing Shinji to wince and Rei’s cheeks flushed –how she was able to flush on demand was another mystery he had to ask one day- “but we should go and join up with the others” Kaji suggested, inclining his head in the direction they had come from. Rei obediently started to ‘strut’ towards them as Shinji tried not to smile, looking at his other companions. Misato who was grinning from ear to ear, but Asuka…

Asuka’s face could have been carved from granite. The look wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t exactly friendly either, it was a rock solid mask that gave nothing away which was odd to say the least, but she was a complicated woman…which was probably why he cared about her as much as he did.

Kaji, on the way back to the shopping center had drilled him ruthlessly on his carefully laid plans to ‘invite’ Asuka to the dance as his partner, leaving Shinji stunned and even slightly scared at his ruthlessness…and finally starting to understand why Misato had viewed him as an underhanded, Machiavellian and just downright sneaky player.

Simply stated, he WAS an underhanded, Machiavellian and just downright sneaky player.

His plan was elegant in its simplicity; manipulate Asuka until she invited him as her partner rather then try to break through her walls to invite her as his. The whole process made him feel slightly uneasy, as if he was tricking Asuka. At least until Kaji had dryly pointed out that all they were doing was putting Asuka into a position where, if she even thought of him as someone trustworthy enough to escort her to the dance –which Kaji was convinced was a non starter, even if Shinji wasn’t so sure- she would be able to ask him to go with her.
And if the two of them actually enjoyed their time together? Then what was the harm in that?

The key, Kaji had repeated again and again as they had sped towards the shopping center, wasn’t to look on this dance as some kind of ‘Cinderella’ ball where in one night he would have Asuka fall madly in love with him, sweep her off her feet then carry her back to Misatos and well, ‘take their synchronization training to a whole new level’ as Kaji had unsubtly put it.
No. This wasn’t an attempt to storm the walls of Asuka’s heart, Kaji had explained, telling him to think of it more like a reconnaissance in force.

And hell, he thought with a slight smile, who else was she going to take?
Assuming of course she didn’t just execute him for not telling her about the dance in the first place. But hey, that was the risk you took when you went to a dance with the red devil in the pale moonlight…

Rei, Asuka and Misato were chatting as he stepped up, the conversation petering out as the two other shopping group members turned their attention on him. Misato with an impressed look on her face and a smile that he was only peripherally aware of, as Asuka…

Kaji had told him emphatically to wait. To not exactly ignore Asuka, but to let her make the first move.
It was much harder then he had anticipated.

She looked amazing.
It was like she had taken what she had done to her hair this morning and moved it to its ultimate conclusion. Her hair sat flush against her skull, pulled back tightly and gathered into an astonishingly intricate braid of some sort that started at the crown of her head to halfway down her neck, where it was died off with that red ribbon of hers and allowed to splay loose, looking so silky and smooth that he had to fight a sudden desire to gently run his hands down it…
Her fringe was still somewhat loose from the rest of her hair however, darkened slightly with mixed streaks of darker reds that generated an almost smoky haze in front of her sapphire eyes, an image helped by the narrowed state they were held in as she ran her eyes over his new clothes, Shinji suddenly feeling more then a little self conscious..
If she disapproved of ‘his’ choices…

“Well, I’m impressed” she finally responded after those few seconds felt like they would stretch into eternity. “With Kaji’s fashion sense to guide you, you don’t actually dress up half bad Baka”.

Again the backward complement, as Kaji had predicted.
Go to phase two.

“And you…well, you’d look amazing no matter how you did your hair…but I really like it” he said with an easy smile after deliberately letting his eyes glance over her body briefly in a way he never would have done if he hadn’t been told to, bracing for the slap.

It didn’t come.

Asuka is surprisingly self conscious Kaji had explained as they turned onto Main Street. She is very proud of her body as I’m sure you’ve noticed, but she needs to know you appreciate it and are properly impressed by it. Sneak an occasional look when you know she is watching you, but whatever you do, DON’T then just look away in embarrassment; look her in the eye and complement her. No gushy platitudes please, make it come from the heart.

He tried, he really tried, but he couldn’t tell if he was able to project the confidence Kaji had demanded into his voice….

“Well of course you do” she responded with the slightest edge of a smile on her face that made him feel he had just scored his first direct hit, at least until she quickly hid it as she turned back to Kaji. “So, what do you think Kaji?” she asked in a tone of pure ‘cuteness’

Fortunately, Kaji batting for his team.

“I think you’re growing up far to fast” he smiled with an abbreviated bow that mutated into a twist and step close to Misato, who blinked as he suddenly appeared in front of her and presented his best ‘sloppy grin’ at her, the ‘gift’ he had talked about ‘appearing’ from behind his back. “And for you, Misato-Chan” - he tried not to smile as Misato and Asuka both reacted to the intimate term - “as a token of my undying esteem. I’ll see you all later” he said, looking pleased at Misato’s bewildered face and shooting him a smile that said ‘well, go get her!’ to him, before he backed away and somehow vanished into the busy crowds as Misato, slowly, started to open her package to reveal the book, a smile suggesting she really did find it funny…but she would kill Kaji the next time she saw him.

Phase Three.
Asuka is actually a very playful person Kaji had told him as their car waited patiently at a red light. Her insults and her fists are the equivalent of jokes and, well, light flirting. You’ll get no respect from her if you run but I’m sure you’ve realized that. I take it ‘this time’ you’ve been giving as good as you got? Excellent. Now we just have to take that to the next level where you ‘flirt’ back at her.

“They were all out of ‘Parenting for Parents with Temperamental Germans’” he apologized, saying the line Kaji had suggested and he had nearly choked on, until the older man had insister he recite it again and again until he could deliver it flawlessly.

It did however, have the predicted effect as Asuka’s eyes brightened slightly –like targeting sensors- and her fist crashed out into his arm with enough force to cause him to instinctively jump back and rub at his pinched skin, but he managed not to break eye contact, trying his best to mirror Kaji’s confident smirk.

“You’ve made progress today Third Child” she finally said to him with an almost polite tone that didn’t really do much to hide the threat under it. “Don’t push it”.

The ‘last time’ around, he was sure he would have apologized and run away.

Several times ‘this time’ he had pushed back against her in a mild way, though mostly when they were too busy to really get into it, such as when they had been in combat with the Sixth Angel…or when they had been in separate Evangelions on the way to fight the Seventh and she couldn’t hit him…and where he could close the communications channel.

But this time, she was two meters away and he had her full attention…

And he threw down the gauntlet.

““Jawohl Mein Fuhrer” he replied with a grin.

Her eyes flashed in shock, at the idea that he would dare stand up for himself, then precipitously narrowed in what he could only describe as a kaleidoscope of emotions that passed too quickly for him to take note of…
Then she took an implacable step towards him as her glorious eyes settled on anger…and he suddenly had a distinct feeling that his first attempt to scale her outer walls was going to end with a torrent of boiling lead washing over him-

“Alright, cool it you two, playtime can wait” Misato said, surprisingly quick on the ball and forcing Asuka to back off…
Physically.

Her eyes didn’t shift an inch from him however and he didn’t look away either as he tried to think of where to go from here…
Unfortunately, experience counted for much more at this point…and Asuka was a veteran of this type of campaign.
She smiled…and Shinji fought the urge to take a step back.

“Well! Now that the Baka has rejoined us, we can finally get this day underway!” Asuka declared in an all too pleasant singsong voice, finally breaking eye contact to look over at the Section Two agents they had dragged around all day. “You four are dismissed” she commented, to his surprise, the four men not even waiting for confirmation from Misato as they jolted off the wall.
Shinji’s male derived sympathy for what Misato had put them through probably slowed down his thought processes…as he didn’t really take notice of the fact that all the bags were now at his feet until Misato dumped hers there as well…and then, it clicked.

“Hey!” was all he could say in protest as he, two point six seconds too late, realized what she had done, before looking up at Asuka and feeling his lip twitch in an involuntary admiration.

She isn’t the Red Demon he decided as he felt the waves of ego rolling off the superior smirk she was giving him, she’s the frigen Red Baronhe identified his fellow (Prussian) pilot, finding a strange, reluctant admiration for the way she had reacted instantly to the changing tactical situation to pull victory from the jaws of defeat.

Letting his admiring smirk show for a second, he bored into her eyes with a frank admiration for her move that promised death the next time they dueled in the skies, a look that only widened her own smirk, an almost telepathic ‘bring it on, Third Child’ passing from her before he glanced at Misato and Rei, as if to judge the possibly of an appeal against the move.

Misato, having dumped the bags at his feet was clearly no help…and Rei was, for whatever reason channeling Asuka again, her gaze also saying ‘well hurry up’, even if Shinji detected the faintest true humor in the corner of her eyes at his situation.

Well no help there he thought to himself in a slight depression. He had escaped sitting outside the beauty salon for a few hours…only to return just in time to have the real shopping started.
And damn Kaji for running!

“Well, what are you waiting for Asuka taunted?” she twisted the knife in. “Be a man and get moving!”

His ‘don’t push it look’ utterly ignored, he wrapped himself in a cloak of great dignity and knelt, carefully and methodically gathering the bags evenly onto his arms, before standing and testing the weight, deciding that it wasn’t actually that bad…for now.

“Good!” Asuka said in an all too happy tone, an unmistakable undertone of triumph in her voice as she turned back to Rei.

Just wait Asuka…just wait… he thought to himself as he followed them into the next gallery, feeling slightly awed, then fearful at the shear number of stores visiable, with the horrible feeling that Asuka planned on dragging Rei through every one of them…

Rei…
He couldn’t loose track of her, as he glanced over at ‘too cool for you’ Rei as she talked to Asuka and he tried not to smile. Ultimately, this day was for her benefit. Not Asuka’s…He would just grin and bear it. If Rei could find the strength somewhere to-

“WHAT?” Asuka suddenly screamed loud enough to blast through his distracted mind as he stumbled to a halt. Asuka was staring at Rei with a very focused look, not of anger, but of shock.

Rei, clearly taking Asuka’s shouted command literally started to explain.

“Because the Summer Dance is only-”

“WHY wasn’t I TOLD about this?” Asuka demanded, suddenly in a near panic as her eyes widened. “How long has this been planned? Oh my GOD I don’t have anything to wear…” then she blinked and her eyes widened slightly. “I don’t have a DATE!”

Okay Providence, batter up Shinji thought, throwing his shock –and caution- to the wind and thinking about how he could seize the opportunity as she looked around and glared at him for a second, before turning back to Rei in a hurry, something passing through her eyes that Shinji wasn’t exactly sure of-

“What about you Rei?” she asked Rei, who looking oh so amazing simple smiled back at her.
“I am…taking classmate Aida to the dance”.
“That Stooge?” she muttered, looking strangely…annoyed at the answer. “Oh well, I guess he’s not as bad as Toji, what Hikari sees in him I have no idea...” she muttered, then visibly snapped her concern back to herself, her mind working as Shinji felt sweat start to generate throughout his body, his chest feeling simultaneously hot and cold as nerves started to fire off randomly, before he with great force demanded calm as Asuka turned to her other classmate-

“What about you Third Child?”

Oh boy he –non visibly- sweated at that loaded question, taking his first step out on the tightrope, distinctly aware that the safety net had been removed, striving to present his most ‘unconcerned’ and not worried at all persona-

But he clearly either took to long, or Rei assumed Asuka was still talking to her.

“Classmate Tanaka offered to accompany Pilot Ikari to the dance, but he declined and let it be known that he was disinclined to participate in the Summer Dance, to a great deal of disappointment by most of the female classmates in class 3F”.

If it wasn’t for the fact that it would have ruined the moment, he could have kissed Rei for that as he saw Asuka blink in confusion, then narrow in thought, then focus on him with an intenisity he had rarely seen on her face outside of Evangelion combat…

“What are you, stupid?” she demanded. “Why the hell wouldn’t you want to go? It’s a DANCE”

Phase Five. Defensive Anger Kaji had instructed him as they had turned into the car park. Don’t let her push you around too much or tease you. She ‘knows’ you are a socially awkward ‘stooge’ after all, so play to that persona to some degree, but at the same time, show that you’re not a whimp, just stubborn. She needs a date remember, and if you’re right and you turned down every other girl, that just makes it even more impossible for her to not bring you and, well, rub it in everyone’s face that Asuka got and/or forced Shinji to go with her…and they didn’t.

“Because I’m not anything like a sociable as you!” he didn’t quite snap back, meeting her gaze with just the slightest anger in his voice. “Because…because I didn’t know any of the girls who had offered to go with me at all and didn’t want to go just because I was the almighty hero they thought I was, because” -and now he broke the gaze and looked past a disbelieving Asuka- “I don’t know how to dance, because I’ve never been good in those kinds of situations. Happy?” he added a slightly accusing tone as he slightly set his jaw.

It was a gauntlet he had thrown down in front of her, now the only question was-

“You really are an idiot” Asuka said, again with a slight smile as she shook her head, before a look that combined pity and amusement crossing her face as she crossed her arms in front of her, almost aggressively. “Well, fortunately for you, your stupidity is also your gain. I need a date, you’re it”.

Phase Six. Asuka will ‘ask’ you, but won’t offer you the illusion that she is asking you. In fact, it’ll probably sound downright suspiciously like an order Kaji continued as they walked across the road towards one door of the gigantic shopping complex. She won’t offer you the slightest chance to reject her; that she fears more then anything.
So I say yes? Shinji had asked.
Kaji looked at him and laughed.
Hell no he smirked. She at least has to work a little for it…

”Wh…what?” Shinji asked, suddenly starting to understand how some people could enjoy this game as Asuka unknowingly danced to Kaji’s tune, letting shock, fear and a flash of interest pass across his face.

“It’s simple” Asuka explained in an overly patient tone. “We’re already learning to dance together on that damn machine Misato is forcing us to-”

“Asuka” Misato warned from behind her, clearly trying not to laugh at both of them.

“-nice machine that Misato is generously loaning us for our very important training” Asuka rolled her eyes, probably because Misato couldn’t see her, in a grudging tone of voice.

Phase Seven. If you don’t immediately consent, Asuka will lay out an utterly logical rationalization for the fact that she doesn’t think of you as such a bad choice to take in on her arm, anything to avoid saying ‘because I sort of like you’.

“We’re learning to dance together anyway, what the hell is a couple of more dances to learn? And besides, I need a Date, I can’t show up alone! And while I’m sure every boy in our class would probably drop to their face at my feet begging for a chance if I asked them, I’d rather not make an enemy of an ‘ex-date’ who got dumped for me and…well…you showing up with me can frankly only help your social standing significantly” she cheerfully said, in a tone that Shinji suspected door to door salesmen trying to sell vacuum cleaners fifty years ago must have used…

Then we hit Phase Eight Kaji sighed as they reached the shopping center door and he paused, turning back towards Shinji as he carefully unbuttoned his top collar and removed his tie, to the Third Childs amusement. She’ll not quite let down her walls completely…but she’ll definitely peek out while she dares you to reject her generous offer and suffer the consequences. Kaji paused with a grin. At this point I’d probably say yes.

“So, well…I need you, it’s that simple” Asuka finished in a somewhat lamer voice as she glanced away from a fraction of a second, before turning back with a look that Shinji knew full well she was far more unsure then she pretended. “Any objections?”

He simply shook his head, not trusting his suddenly tight throat as a thousand little Shinji’s inside his head leapt from their consoles and cheered, dancing, clapping and hugging each other as he realized he had just successfully asked -or been asked out- to the school dance; Asuka Langley Soryu.

“Good!” she declared in a dismissive tone, as if she had wasted too much time on this distraction…but from the way her tensed up shoulders dropped, Shinji was thinking she hadn’t quite been as unconcerned as she had let on…
Suddenly, he was glad the JDA shopping team has brought him a singlet to wear under his shirt that would absorb any sweat…because he was sure that otherwise there would be rather impressive stains under his arms….
“Well first we’ll get Rei’s shopping done, then you can go home while I find something to wear. Damn it, so little time!” Asuka redirected her attention to the present, quickly turning to sprint into the first store, followed by Misato.

Rei however paused long enough to give him a very level stare that, in that strange way they could communicate without words, told him she had seen right through his entire preplanned exercise…even if she didn’t quite understand why.

He gave her a sheepish little smile at being caught out, but there was no time to explain anything as Asuka yanked her into the first store.
It was only by an act of God that Shinji made it to his room five and a half hours later before his legs buckled, crashing down onto his bed with a groan as he took the time to wonder if his ‘Parenting for Parents with Temperamental Germans’ joke had really been worth Asuka’s revenge.

True, eventually Misato had taken pity on him and called over the two remaining Section Two agents to help. And true Rei had looked utterly stunning in some of the outfits Asuka had found her, so much so that even Asuka had looked faintly envious.

Some stores however Shinji had categorically refused to enter, hanging out the front with the Section Two agents…such as the lingerie store.
His face had burned as Asuka, Misato and utterly mind bogglingly Rei called out for him to come and give an opinion at different times, but he knew he was safe as long as he stayed outside and didn’t look in. Not even Asuka was so adventitious as to stalk out in public in nothing but underwear.

Asuka however wasn’t one to be put off quite so easily, when he found a wonderful, soft chair to collapse into in a large general clothing store, Asuka had pounced…

In that Bikini.
She wore an itsy tiny peony winy red and white stripped Bikini! That she wore and caused my stroke!

It wasn’t so much the Bikini itself as much as the fact that Asuka had placed her legs on either side of his, then her hands on either side of his head, trapping him as she leaned in close and demanded his opinion.

His mind, rather tired from a day of reliving events he would rather have forgotten had finally signaled its surrender as he stuttered out a series of random noises, his attention squarely on her firm, tight breasts –barely- contained in a Bikini probably a size too small, less then thirty centimeters from his head as his face worked to match the shade of red on the thin fabric…

Fortunately at about that point Asuka for reasons of her own had released him, leaning away and smirking as she walked off and purchased it, apparently taking his stuttered stammering as some kind of approval.

Fortunately Misato had apparently taken pity on him at this point and declared the days shopping over, Asuka apparently in a magnanimous mood agreed and without protest from Rei who also looked happy, they had headed out, dropping Rei, who Shinji thought looked quietly happy in a way he had never seen, off -with the three point two six metric tons of shopping- before they had headed home.
Now, he found he wanted nothing more then to fall to sleep, but an uncomfortable feeling in his legs stopped him. Rolling off and throwing his new jacket in the general direction of his half dozen bags full of clothes he had never seen but were apparently the ‘in’ thing this season, he found his gift from the Japanese Defense Agenecy.

Sighing, he stood and exited his room, running into Misato as she exited hers in her usual ‘at home’ shirt and shorts, Asuka already tearing a strip of liquorish apart rather violently in the kitchen, her eyes tracking him as they got closer.

“What’s that?” she demanded as she locked in on the package, a spark of interest in her eyes as he walked towards her clearly saying that she thought he might have brought her some little gift today…

Hell no Asuka, I already carried enough for you today…

“It’s a…picture Kaji got me. If it’s okay Misato, I’d like to hang it on the wall”

Misato smiled.

“Of course you can” she said warmly, “this is your house as much as mine”

And one day, somehow, I’ll find a way to tell you how much that means to me he thought as he carefully removed the paper bag, hesitated as he wondered how this would be received, then carefully hung it up, his Fathers grim visage somehow having much less of an effect then normal on him.

Sure it was hilarious, but it was also a valuable, if subtle reminder of what his Father had been perfectly willing to do to Rei when he first arrived. He would never forgive him, nor could he ever forget.
The icy cold, logical part of his mind told him that this Gendo Ikari wasn’t the same one who had finally been abandoned deep inside the Geofront by Rei III, his dreams and hopes undone as Rei made a choice to side with his son over him…
But some things transcended time and space…and Gendo Ikari’s soul, Shinji was infinitely sure, was one of them.

Then he forced those thoughts out of his mind, shaking his head as, unable to help himself, he chuckled as he stepped back with a slightly sheepish grin on his face.

It was just too ridiculous not to laugh at if you stared at it long enough.

Misato instantly fell onto her back, barely missing Pen-Pen, who glared at his mistress before waddling off towards the kitchen as she thrashed around on the floor trying desperately to catch her breath, tears streaming down her face. Asuka, clearly interested by the noise stepped around the corner and burst out laughing, if not quite to the same degree as Misato, but clearly finding it highly amusing as Misato slowly regained her composure, her bursts of laughter slowly becoming less and less frequent until she managed to pull herself onto the lounge.

“Oh…my” she breathed with a huge grin on her face. “I…I can’t wait until I show this to Rits” she got out, which set off another fifteen seconds of snickering before she calmed herself as she struggled to her feet.
“Well…uh…there is a new pizza place down the road that just opened up, whose up for ordering in?”

Asuka at once agreed enthusiastically and Shinji nodded as he headed for the lounge and flopped down, while Misato left to hunt for the phonebook, still occasionally snickering as he flicked the TV on, idly moving through the channels as he looked for something to watch.

One of the often overlooked annoyances of time travel has to be that I’ve already seen all these ‘all new episodes’ he sighed, leaning back as he settled on an older movie from before the second impact about aliens invading, watching as the national monuments across the United States were blasted to pieces by huge hovering spaceships with a somewhat detached interest.

“Hey guys, their delivery time is forty minutes” Misato yelled faintly from further down the house near the front door. “I’ll just drive down and get it, okay?”

“Sure” Shinji yelled back in a detached voice, echoed by Asuka’s agreement from the kitchen.

Forty minutes? Misato driving to get it shouldn’t take more then forty seconds he thought to himself with a smile as the front door opened and closed, before blinking and looking up as with a muffled ‘thump’ and wave of displaced air, Asuka landed on the lounge next to him, looking slightly tired herself.
“Anything on?” she asked as she brought her legs up beside her…which had the curious byproduct of shifting her somewhat onto ‘his’ side of the couch.
Or would have if she hadn’t landed right in the middle of it when she sat down rather then the far side, meaning she was now very much pushing into his zone.
“Uh…not that much” he confessed. “You wana look?” he asked, offering the remote, which she took.
“Nah, this looks good enough” she noted as New York city was vaporized before their eyes, before slowly stretching her legs and pushed her back into his side, which instantly started to wash away Shinji’s fatigue.
Even more so when she just sighed somewhat contently and with a flex of her muscles, settled into place, ‘propped’ up with her legs on the far armrest and her back against him, the thin shirts they were wearing doing little to hide her body warmth as her scent slowly started to intrude on his senses.
“Uh…Asuka” he said delicately.
“What?” she asked in a tone of oh such perfect innocence at her taking up 85% of the lounge area and using him as a backrest.
“…nothing” he finally decided with a smile, turning his attention back to the TV.
Asuka ‘humphed’ and continued to settle into place over the next minute, Shinji simply luxuriating in her presence, her head resting on his left shoulder and she watched the movie…

And don’t forget the final phase; Phase nine Kaji had added as they walked through the doors. At some point later that day, when it’s just you and her and the moment seems right…without any fancy words…

“Asuka?”

“Hmm?” she replied in a disinterested voice.
“…Thank you” he said, in a soft, even tone as he kept his gaze locked on the TV.

That got her head doing an impressive twist to glance back and up at him.

“For what?” she asked, causing him to turn back and glance down into those glittering, if confused eyes…
“For asking me to escort you to the dance” he said in a softer voice, letting a slight smile come across his face that he had practiced for a very long time, staring into shopping window reflection after shopping window reflection…

“…Oh” she finally responded, blinking and turning away.

Oh well, he sighed mentally as he turned back to the TV, watching as F-18’s dueled with invincible alien fighters. That’s still progress I guess.
They remained liked that for the next ten minutes, until they both heard the distinct screech and crash of Misato’s car tipping up on its side and down into its parking space outside, Asuka legs kicking up then down, using the momentum to half roll and half cartwheel up to a more vertical position.
“We should set the table” she suggested.
“Right” he agreed, flicking the TV off casually as an alien fighter, too stupid to watch where it was going crashed into the side of a canyon wall. Asuka grabbed a trio of plates as Shinji fixed Pen-Pen’s dinner, a relatively simple affair that got him a hurt look from the Penguin, who ‘Warked’ in a suspiciously sighing like manner, before heading off for his fridge-
“Shinji?” Asuka suddenly said as he turned, to see her at the junction of the ‘T’ formed by the living room/kitchen and hallway, clearly heading for the bathroom, her back turned towards him.
“Yeah?”
“Bitte schön” she said, before vanishing around the corner as Misato crashed through the front door with a stack of boxes.
“Woho! Lets EAT!” his guardian said as she reeled into the living room, dumping the boxes onto the table and dropping down next to it as she cracked a beer.
“Misato?”
“Ya?”
“What…does bitte schön mean?” he asked in a curious tone as she chugged her can.
Misato belched, then shrugged as she cracked her second, clearly retail therapy took its toll on her.
“Uh, ‘You’re Welcome’ I think” she answered in a distracted voice as she hunted for her super deluxe meat Pizza, too occupied to catch the smile that passed across Shinji’s face.

[LadyTevar]

I think that the Purple is just as good as the other Chapters, hon.
*smooches*
And hopefully we'll get a new Derelict up soon as well.

[Trogdor]

I really like the bit where Shinji asks Asuka why Rei needs to go shopping to go shopping. Something about that clash of male and female logic strikes me as hilarious and totally believable. The bit where he tells Pen-Pen the truth is also really funny.

I have to say I'm surprised at finding out what Shinji did and didn't do deliberately. When I read Asuka's chapter I was sure he'd complimented her without the A-10 clips seeking the reaction that he invoked, and I had no idea he had things so carefully planned when Asuka asked him to the dance.

There's one little thing I don't get. I thought the Japanese believed that you sneeze when people are talking about you, but nobody mentions Shinji the two times he does so.

All in all, I thought all three parts were brilliant, and I wish I knew enough about the series involved in Derelict so I could read it and know what the hell is going on.

Koga assured him as he stood, “and your bank account has been reduced by just over a hundred thousand Yen I’m afraid. Oh, and I hope you like Egyptian cotton”

Is that what I think it is?

[Sidewinder]

A good chapter-- you've developed Shinji's character quite well. By the way, were you referring to events in TBOverse when you described the JSSDF's actions against Islamic insurgents?

[Academia Nut]

I saw that reference as well and got a little chuckle out of that. I also feel that while it was only a passing reference, your diction as to how many little Shinji's stood up and cheered to be also amusing.

All in all, I felt it was just as good as the other three parts. Best of all, you set things up nicely in the future. Anyone else think it would be hilarious if with this information, when SEELE orders the JSSDF to attack NERV, instead of the bloodthirsty 3rd division they send in another group to reinforce the position while simultaneously hunting down Gendo? The looks on the faces of SEELE when they find themselves betrayed before their own betrayal can kick in would be delicious.

[Sidewinder]

JASDF fighters could shoot down the transports carrying the Mass Production Evangelions, buying Shinji time to... do whatever he can do to prevent Third Impact.

[Vehrec]

I can see what you did there. It was a good compromise between revisiting known territory and the new stuff. I also noticed that this chapter took up more of the day, starting earlier and ending later than the others.

The genetically engineered penguin stared at his back for several long, long seconds before continuing into the kitchen, retrieving a can from Misato’s stash, stopping in consideration, retrieving a second, and retreating into his fridge.

“Yeah” Shinji muttered as he stacked the plates in the dishwasher. “That’s about what I thought you’d say”.

That and and abundance of "BAD SHINJI!" moments helped generate good feelings to get me throught the rough bits. Nice work man. Looking forward to Derelict.

[Darth Fanboy]

Great stuff.

[Publius]

“Heh, sorry” he smiled at her. “Just thinking”.
“About Asssukkaaaa?” she teased with a wicked grin.

You've gotten very good at capturing Misato's personality (one can almost hear the lilting tone of voice). Well done.

There are a few errors in spelling and phrasing, but nothing too serious. One does notice, however, that when Shinji describes the fight against the Mass Production Evangelions to Kaji and the interrogator, you wrote that he described "Misato's final actions, as Misato died a Hero with a capital H." Presumably you meant Asuka?

On the whole, brilliant work (the explanation for the 3rd JSSDF Division's savagery is particularly well-thought out).