Ok, thanks for everyone who came by the IRC. You helped spur me to 1725 words of the promised interlude. This should be set between Chapter 4.2 and 4.3. Work on Chapter 8 will hopefully commence soon.
Chapter 4.25
Before the Storm - Interlude
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Shinji had learned a lot in the time since Asuka had first kissed him. He'd learned that kissing was an amazingly fun was to spend time with someone. He'd learned that seeing someone he cared about in danger could make him act uncomfortably like his father. He'd learned that just having Asuka near him made him feel simultaneously happier and more nervous.
And he'd learned that Asuka, the indomitable tower of courage and determination, would in fact cry during and after sex.
The first time he'd been doing it too. The emotions of their first time together were too strong. It hadn't surprised him much that she would cry too. The relief and happiness he'd felt at seeing her alive again and in his arms after she'd spent the day vanished inside Leliel had been overwhelming. And then she took possession of his heart once and for all by telling him she loved him, and wanted all of him.
So the tears on both of their faces had not surprised him too much. It was only when it happened again the next night that he began to worry. Asuka had silenced his concerns with a fervent kiss.
But it kept happening. By the fourth night, Shinji couldn't stand it anymore. The idea that he was somehow hurting her, making her cry, was almost physically painful to him. His need to keep the one who loved him happy was burning in him like nothing he'd ever felt before. So this night, he made himself ask.
"A-asuka? I really like this, but... I... I can't stand the idea I'm hurting you. I don't want to make you cry we don't have to do this if it's... painful or making you sad or something..." he ventured once they'd finished.
"Just... shut up." She'd wiped at her face and burrowed into his side. "You're not making me sad. I'm... crying because you're making me happy. And that's making me remember the last time I really felt that way. That's what's making me cry."
"....huh?" Shinji commented astutely.
"Baka. I haven't let anyone see me cry in ten years. Feel honored." She sniffled.
"I... what? You'd have been just..."
"Yes, that young. I... made a promise. At my mother's funeral. I wouldn't let anyone see me cry. That I'd grow up fast and not need anyone. That I'd be the best, and make people look at me."
"W...why would you do that?"
Asuka was silent a long, long time.
"Because the last time I felt this happy, this... worth something, was before my mother..."
Shinji stiffened. He knew this was something they'd both been avoiding. "You don't have to..."
"I want to." Asuka stopped him. "I... the last time I felt this happy was the day I was told I was the Second Child. But that was also the day... Let me start at the beginning."
Asuka rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. "My mother... was wonderful. She had an important job, but she always made time for... for her Asuka. One day, she told me she was going to do some really important thing, a 'Contact Experiment'... and something went wrong."
The words echoed somehow with Shinji, but he put it aside for later.
Asuka went on, her voice getting cool and brittle. "She... they wouldn't let me see her for days. I was almost frantic. And I can see now why they tried to stop me."
"Mama didn't know me."
Asuka shivered and wiped at her face again. "She... they'd cut her hair short. She looked... terrible. I could see some kind of burns or scars on the back of her neck. She... she looked at me once, and then just told the doctors to 'make that girl go away!'. Then she...went back to cradling and talking to a... a doll she'd made."
"It had my name on it."
Shinji winced himself from the raw pain in her voice. He rolled onto his side to put his arm around her, tugging her back into a hug. She came easily, latching onto him hard.
"She... didn't recognize me at all. I begged her not to stop being my Mama, to look at me... not to ignore me... But she kept talking to that damned doll like it was me instead. The... whatever that experiment was, it did something to her mind. She..." Asuka sniffled again. "She...just went on like that for months. Papa started..." Venom filled her voice now. "'Carrying on' with one of Mama's doctors in the next damn room. I could hear them sometimes. And Mama...never got better."
"Then one day they told me that I was chosen as the Second Child. I was going to be an elite Eva Pilot, defending the world! I was overjoyed. I finally had something I could show Mama, make her see me again. I was so happy..."
"Then I got to her room."
Asuka stopped, and just breathed slowly and deeply into his hug. "She... she'd found some rope, somehow... She was... hanging from the ceiling..."
Shinji felt his skin go cold and clammy. "No..."
"And... she'd hung the doll, too. Right next to her." Asuka began to cry more deeply. "She wanted me to die with her... After that, I just promised myself that I would live for myself. That I wouldn't need anyone. That I would be the best so people would have to look at me... and not stop like Mama did."
Shinji tried to get a grip. He thought his own lonely childhood had been bad enough. The endless nightmares of seeing his father walking away, dumping him at the train station and just leaving had been enough. But Asuka had seen... that?
"But... why no more crying?" he finally mumbled.
"I had to grow up fast. I had to be the best, to be worth something. If even my mother didn't want me, what good was I? I... I'd have died if I tried to cry that much. So I locked it away and tried not to remember it. But it haunts me every night. Or it did... I haven't had that nightmare since... we started." She sighed and rested her forehead against his. "Thank you, Shinji."
She just laid against him, the anguish in her face slowly ebbing. "But with you, us being together at night like this... and us... finally going all the way... I... I can feel you. You let me have all of you. You..." She swallowed. "No one has made me feel loved since Mama. No one, not Misato, not even Kaji. Not the way I wanted to be, that makes me feel... wanted, just for being Asuka."
Shinji was glad the darkness hid his blush. Hearing anyone talk about him like this was still almost impossible to believe. That it was the most beautiful girl he knew who had said flat out she loved him was even more so.
"I... you're welcome? Um... I don't know what to say."
A tiny bit of her usual fire returned to her voice. "Don't say anything. Just hold me, baka. That's all you need to do to make me happy right now. Be here."
Shinji smiled in the dark, barely able to make out her features, but could feel the heat of her blush anyway. "I will."
He closed his eyes, letting the warmth of her chase out the chill of the images she'd conjured up. As bad as his memories of his father abandoning him were, Asuka's were even worse. But... that phrase... it stuck with him... He'd heard it, somewhere... but where? He didn't think Doctor Akagi had said it since he came to Tokyo-3 or anything like that. Was it in that guidebook Misato had given him? Something Lieutenant Ibuki had said during a synch test?
He tried to let his mind drift. That had been how he recalled things in the past.
A... a voice. There. He remembered... his mother's voice? No... it sounded like Doctor Akagi, but older, cooler...
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"Why is there a child in here?"
"It's Chief Ikari's son." It was Doctor Akagi... almost?
A voice he knew... Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki? "Ikari, this is not a day school. This is a very important day."
"Sorry, Fuyutsuki-sensei! I brought him here." His mother's voice!
"Yui-kun, it's your Contact Experiment today."
Mother again. "That's why. I want to show the promising future to my child."
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His eyes shot open and he bit down on a scream. He'd been there. He'd watched mother vanish forever!
Asuka felt his muscles lock rigid and lifter her head up. "Shinij?"
"I was there! I saw it! Mother!"
"What?"
Shinji spilled it all out. The lab, the Contact Experiment, his mother... vanishing. The panic. His father just dumping him at a railway station a few days later, beginning years of near-isolation. Then nothing, abandoned by his father for years, until the summons to come to Tokyo-3 again.
Asuka stared, holding him. "Jesus Christ... you are just like me." She looked suspicious. "Shinji, what are the odds we'd both see our mothers die like that? Call me paranoid, but this is... it strains coincidence and then some to think it would happen to both of us like that and then we'd meet like this? Yes, we're both tied to the Evangelion program, but still... this wasn't a couple of accidents, I don't think."
Shinji nodded, still shaking and clinging to her like a drowning man to a life raft. "N-no. It's... we're so alike... it... this can't be coincidence."
Asuka nodded. "There's something else going on here. We have to find out what. There's too much weird around NERV." She squeezed him tight. "But we're not going to figure it out tonight. Right now... I don't care. We'll have to keep our eyes open. As long as I've got you, the rest can go to Hell."
Shinji managed a single, sad laugh. He understood that feeling. "Asuka... if I didn't have you, I'd be... a nobody. I'd go crazy. You're the best thing in my whole world. I won't let anything take that away."
"Good." Asuka laid her head back down, gently stroking a hand along his temple. "You're just like me, Third Child. And we've got to take on the Angels and whatever's behind this 'coincidence.' And for once, I'm looking forward to taking it all on together."
