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New Century 2318 [NGE]

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Yla said:
In some places Natsu's inner voice reminded me of Rei Ikari. I would describe it as a "I'm sitting on this train and I'm going to keep riding it whatever happens" mindset. Take care that your characters don't become identical.
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In some places her inner voice is being colored by outside sources.
 
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Chapter 13
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter 13:

    Weiße Hexe des Roten Planeten​





    Sweat down my back and bruises on my ribs wasn't my idea of a good time but it was the job, or at least part of it. Training, both physical and of skills, was meant to make me better at my job; Piloting Evangelion, but more than that, using it to fight and kill.

    If I was meant to kill, I had to know how to fight in Eva, but to do that I had to know how to fight outside of Eva, and for that I had Touji. When we were done I could pay him back, as long as our professional relationship didn't have a negative impact on our personal relationship.

    I threw an aggressive and wild left hook that I should have known better than to even attempt, but by the time my brain caught up with my swing it was too late but to commit to it. He ducked low and to his left and I stumbled on my follow through and lost my balance.

    He ducked under and what I assumed to be a fist was actually an open hand as he caught me by the stomach and pulled me up and over with his off-hand. My feet left the mat and my ass ended up higher than my head for the moment before he finished his move and had me laying across his shoulder.

    There were worse places to be.

    With my hips on his shoulder I had the perfect positioning to thrust my palm into the back of his knee to throw him off balance. As the blow landed his grip on me weakened and I kicked myself free and into a heap on the mat.

    It was only in my immediate hindsight that I considered the possibility that such a move could have broken my neck and killed me, but as I was successful it was a thought that quickly left me. Dwelling too much on that kind of thought wasn't conducive to being the fighter I was supposed to be.

    Charging headfirst into battle without a plan any more complex then a battle cry and a devil may care attitude would only get me so far, and the destination at the end of that path was a gravestone and a plaque that read 'at least she tried', at least assuming I killed myself in a way that left survivors.

    If I was meant to save people who wouldn't give half as much of a damn about my own well being if they knew half of what my father did about me. But if I was to be generous with my estimations then at least half of them would still give a damn.

    The world was far from perfect and the people who lived in it were even less so but it was the only one they had and it was the one I had to live in for better or worse, so it was worth it to strive for better. There were people who deserved it and would get the feeling of smug satisfaction that the ones who didn't deserve to be saved would owe their lives to someone they'd rather see strung up.

    But it all came back to the same place in the end; I had to be better. I had to take it more seriously. I had to win every single time without fail and I had to come back alive every single time without fail.

    Still, much as Rei could not do it alone, neither could I. She would not have survived the last fight without me, but I wouldn't have survived it without her. If I was going to be her partner in this war I had to be better than lucky, I had to be good.

    Touji reached down and pulled me up to my feet by my right hand, then pulled me up against him. A stolen kiss here or there, if Nerv hadn't already known what we were up to in our free time, they certainly had an idea. If they knew they didn't care. If they didn't know, I didn't care. They weren't going to stop me.

    "Not bad, space girl." he congratulated in a much softer tone than he'd have used with his guy friends. A tone reserved for a girlfriend, or at least someone who's lips his own had just touched.

    "Is that what you're going to call me now?" I asked him with a smirk and another quick peck on the lips. Other physical activities entirely unrelated to combat training came to mind, but I pushed those back down. There would be time and time again for that, but later.

    It had been half a month at least. I was getting stronger but I still needed the mechanical assistance most days, if only to keep from wearing myself out. I still felt like 'space girl' more than I felt like 'earth girl' and if he liked it, well...

    He pulled me into a kiss and after a few all too short moments he released me again. "I think it has a nice ring to it."

    I let myself fall into just that one moment, the one right after the kiss, right after his words, right before--

    Right before the alternating shrill and baritone notes of the alarms would have the sense of timing necessary to ruin the moment and perhaps even the memory of it. "That doesn't have a nice ring to it at all."


    ***​


    The acceleration to the surface had become old-hat in a way that anything related to an eighty meter war machine never should be, but so it was. Air temperature slightly above normal at a balmy thirty-nine point eight. Humidity at eighty-five and atmospheric pressure at the textbook average of one-oh-one point three-two-five kilopascals.

    Wind came in from the north at a glacial pace of two kilometers per hour. The sun still sat high on the horizon and we had plenty of daylight left in the valley that our city sat within. Rays of light, at least the ones that made it through the scattered clouds, reflected off towers of glass and steel and concrete and heated the air and I was glad for the temperature controlled LCL that I sat in.

    It would have been a good day to go to a beach, or so I had read. I'd never been to a beach, at least as far as I remembered. It didn't seem like something my father would have wanted to do and it wasn't something my mother would have had time for.

    I'd never seen a whale in person, for that matter. Most people hadn't, after what second impact had done to the planet. Still, the thing falling through the sky above me did bear a passing resemblance to what a whale might have looked like.

    If a whale had no eyes, teeth long enough to be arms, and skin of the finest shade of beige.

    The rifle in my hands was of a large enough caliber that it could be used to punch a hole through a battleship lengthwise, according to Aoba, and it felt wholly inadequate for the task at hand, given the monstrous space-whale the size of a high-rise office building that I was being faced with.

    "Misato..."

    "Try shooting it. I don't have anything else for you right now. Use your judgment. We're going to hold Rei back until we can get Unit Zero equipped with some heavier weapons."

    A harpoon felt like a better choice, still, I shouldered the rifle and Unit One moved out into the open. "Call me Ishmael."

    "You didn't really seem like the reading type." Misato commented with a frown visible even through the fuzzy video link.

    "I have hidden depths." I deadpanned as I squeezed the trigger on the rifle and peppered out half a dozen bright red lances of tracer fire into the moist and leathery hide of the Angel, because there was nothing else it could be but an Angel.

    Each impact pockmarked the surface of the skin and no AT field stopped it, but given the lack of meaningful damage it didn't seem that it needed to use one in the first place.

    Or maybe it was taunting me.

    The mouth opened and in the back of it, the blood red gem that was the Angel's core, and it's weakspot. Nothing to be done if my bullets couldn't hurt it, and if they could I was sure it would flash an AT field as they always did.

    Of course, I was too far away to do anything about it as I was in a machine that rode on two legs and, while I did have thrusters, I still wasn't a flying space whale. I could jump and use the thrusters to boost me, probably close enough to touch it, but with teeth like that I didn't feel like getting eaten alive.

    Eaten dead was also off the table, but the Angel didn't seem terribly interested in actually doing anything. It had more or less ignored my gunfire entirely and seemed content to 'swim' through the air.

    My sensor display snapped up on the right side of my field of view along with a shrill tone that told me that the passive receivers had picked up a radar signal and it was nuclear hot. Someone or sometthing up there with the Space-Whale-Angel had their eyes peeled in a big way.

    Above and behind the whale, the clouds burst apart as the prow of a ship, rust red and covered in plasma fire, tore through them. I would have recognized the class of ship anywhere; a Martian battle-cruiser.

    They weren't meant to fly this low, or in Earth's atmosphere at all. Whoever was in command was probably an absolute lunatic, but then I'd ridden a gunship to the ground chasing an Angel too so there was at least precedent for it.

    If I was Ishmael, and the space-whale was Moby-Dick, that'd make this Martian ship Pequod if I was going to continue the metaphor.

    Railgun batteries opened up in ways nobody'd probably ever seen before. Full powered shots lit the sky on fire as the tungsten rods ignited the air around them, having left the barrels of the weapons far in excess of escape velocity.

    They were tearing themselves apart to do it; none of those weapons were ever meant to be fired in an atmosphere of any kind. That was part of the reason we'd had to do what we'd done to kill the last Angel we'd fought instead of using a ship in orbit.

    But with the ship this low, there was no backstop, so there was no risk to the city. At least, not one so great that the Martians weren't willing to do what they were doing anyway.

    Streak after red-hot steak peppered the beige hide of the monster and blood trailed behind it, but no hit seemed to keep it wounded for long enough for it to matter, though not for lack of trying. The light being given off caused my viewer to dim to protect my eyes and the thermal output completely blinded my infra-red sensors.

    "Well, I didn't see that coming."

    She was not the only one. All I could do was reload the rifle and continue standing in place like an idiot because while the Martians didn't seem to have the kill locked down there was still almost nothing I could do until the whale got down to where I could punch it.

    The ship pitched nose-up in what almost looked like an uncontrolled maneuvering failure. I half expected the ship to break in half or burn up until the lower hold doors burst outward and the main engines throttled back up.

    From the hold leaped a white armored giant holding a spear. Four green eyes set into the head, two shoulder pylons just like mine and lit thrusters on its back. Evangelion? If Earth had two of them it made sense that Mars would have at least one.

    The Evangelion in the sky launched itself onto the whale's back as the battlecruiser clawed its way back towards space. The white used the spear like a climbing axe, each thrust into the beige flesh helped it climb further and further along the spine, towards the head and the core of the Angel.

    If that ship was Pequod, that would make this Ahab.

    And it looked like he had his Beige Whale. The two of them were locked together by the spear and they were losing altitude together. In another minute they'd be on the ground and I could finally do something useful in the fight.

    The white Evangelion leaped from the back of the Angel and drew distance away, connected to its pray only by a tether linking it to the shaft of the spear. Whoever the pilot was knew more about flying than I did, because the bursts from the jets controlling the attitude of the Evangelion were either random or incredibly well thought out and the results made me think it was the latter.

    And whoever it was, they were doing nothing by half measures.

    A bright flare from the main drive signaled the Eva descending back towards the whale. A burst of the control jets spun the giant around until it was falling feet first, and then the bottom of the right foot slammed into the end of the spear shaft and both the shaft and the foot drove downwards into the monster's flesh.

    An instant later, the whale burst like a water balloon and blood rained from the sky around the no longer white Evangelion.

    "Hey, Misato?" I finally asked as the other unit retro-fired to slow down before landing.

    "I know. Nobody told us Mars Fleet was getting involved. Stand by, but don't take any hostile action, that's still our Evangelion. It's just not supposed to be here."

    I nodded at her. I never really felt like picking fights anyway. Violence was more something to be reserved for when it was needed, right?

    I looked over at the white Evangelion to see that it was looking at me, when a point to point laser transmission connected and a call window opened up.

    A girl around my own age was smirking at me. Blue eyes, white hair with a single red streak. I couldn't tell which color came out of a bottle, if either. Her plugsuit was the same color as her Evangelion and she had the look of someone who knew something I didn't.

    "If you can't make an entrance with style you shouldn't make one at all. Don't you agree?"
     
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    • ...Oh I get it. Mars didn't finish Unit-02's paint job in time so Asuka left early to use an Angel to finish the last coat. What a clever girl.
     
    Dealer said:
    ...Oh I get it. Mars didn't finish Unit-02's paint job in time so Asuka left early to use an Angel to finish the last coat. What a clever girl.
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    I know this is a bit of a joke but it's actually because of asuka

    Red is flashy on earth

    But on Mars, keeping anything white with all that red dust is a chore, so her glossy white color scheme is just her flexing about how awesome she is.

    The white witch of the red planet.
     
    I'm just thinking of how much stress must have been put on the battleship's frame. For all that Misato wasn't involved, it was a pretty Misatoesque plan - and they're all lucky that the ship didn't break apart and fall in very large pieces over Tokyo-3.

    Which implies its commander had a much better relationship with Asuka than the captain of the Over The Rainbow, though this seems more like Rebuild than Series.
     
    JennyDracos said:
    I'm just thinking of how much stress must have been put on the battleship's frame. For all that Misato wasn't involved, it was a pretty Misatoesque plan - and they're all lucky that the ship didn't break apart and fall in very large pieces over Tokyo-3.

    Which implies its commander had a much better relationship with Asuka than the captain of the Over The Rainbow, though this seems more like Rebuild than Series.
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    Or they've been chasing it for a while ;)
     
    I'm really happy to see another chapter of this :)

    Though I am partial to anything red, I do like the white Eva and Asuka's new hair.
     
    That would make fit! It really was just like Aoba taking the corvette after the first? Angel, only a battleship instead of a corvette, and an Eva on the battleship instead of under the city.
     
    Jackie said:
    A stolen kiss here or there, if Nerv hadn't already known what we were up to in our free time, they certainly had an idea.
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    I think there's an 'and' missing in there. And yeah, not really making much effort to hide it, are you, kids?
    Jackie said:
    From the hold leaped a white armored giant holding a spear. Four green eyes set into the head, two shoulder pylons just like mine and lit thrusters on its back. Evangelion?
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    Girl knows how to make an entrance.
    Jackie said:
    If that ship was Pequod, that would make this Ahab.
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    What, not Queeg Queeg? :p

    And yep, that's one sure way to splash an Angel. Saddening that she didn't just get to railgun snipe it from above. Feels like her style as much as SPEAR TO THE FACE.
     
    Chapter 14
  • Threadmarks


    • Chapter 14:

    Let your first not be your last.​




    Style. An entrance with style she'd called it, she wasn't wrong. The thermals were still peaked out and I was blind in that regard, but everything else was still pinging. Sonar, radar, optical sensors all kept hitting the Evangelion in front of me. Two kilometers out, she'd came crashing down in a torrent of blood on the outside of the city, out in the forest surrounding the eastern edge.

    If she'd planned it that way to avoid collateral damage she was great. If she was only lucky then that was fine too.

    Well, two kilometers wasn't too far. I started walking without being told, if for no other reason than she'd need to be told where and how to get into the base.

    I would've been lying if I'd said that there weren't other reasons. I was curious, I wanted to see who this new player was, see this new machine. I wanted to be close and I wanted to be prepared and I wanted to be sure. Things too good to be true usually were.

    A new pilot and a new Evangelion dropping from the sky like an avenging angel at the time when we needed them most gave me the unshakable feeling that we were really only waiting for the other shoe to drop.

    But the Evangelion was all I could see, the red mist spray and smoke and steam mixed into a macabre soup in the air and it was obscuring everything near the ground and everything behind the other unit.

    Two kilometers passed quickly when you were nearly a tenth of a kilometer tall on your own and moved like you weren't the size of a small cruiser. A few long strides, no more than a dozen or two, that was all it took when your head was eighty meters above the ground.

    But it still felt off. Like standing in the darkness on a rooftop on a windless night while the moon cast just enough light to see but not quite enough to feel confident in what it was you saw. Nothing but you and the stars and the feeling in the back of your mind that you're not quite alone. The little perturbations in the calmness of the warm air that might be just a wisp of breath or the sounds that you couldn't quite make out among the almost unnatural silence.

    Isolated in the way that being encased in a giant war machine might make you feel, but without quite feeling alone.

    Because it was too easy and she was too confident. Because I couldn't accept that it had been that clean, not when it hadn't been that way before. No gimmick and no trick, just a one hitter quitter off the deck of a battle-cruiser.

    That hadn't been the hard part; the battle-cruiser had done nothing. It had chased and fired but that wasn't really useful in the end and it never really had a chance to be. It was a distraction to deploy the Evangelion.

    And she'd stabbed it in the head, right where the core was supposed to be--

    There was always a trick, always some special technique or something to throw us off. It was never as simple as just shooting it, stabbing it. Why would now be any different? I could prove it, and if I was wrong it would mean nothing, but if I was right?

    I closed my eyes and reached out to the Evangelion. I let my implants immerse me into-- yes, that was it, right there. "AT field to maximum."

    "Natsu I said do not attack!" Misato screamed in my ears, but she didn't know and I wasn't listening.

    In my mind I was building something that looked like an onion, layers upon layers in a sphere around me, pushing outward. Hands out to the sides, I had to focus in on what I needed it to do. One by one, each layer peeling away from the one under it, pushing outward, pushing on the air--

    A hand clamped down on my shoulder and my concentration shattered, the AT field collapsed and evaporated out into nothing. I snapped my head to the left, the white unit had my left shoulder gripped tightly in its left hand, my wrist in its right. She'd made the same assumption that Misato had made.

    And she looked like she was getting ready to flip me onto my back. "I don't know what your problem is but you need to shut it down!"

    I hadn't been entirely unsuccessful in clearing the fog. The blood spatter on the ground was much more visible, as were the pockmarks from debris impacts after the 'killing' blow that the white unit had landed on the Angel.

    And it cleared enough that the motion sensors started tracking again.

    I looked over to the view screen that showed the transmission from the other Eva pilot. She was on the aggressive side of upset and her teeth were showing in a snarl that was, if not predatory, at least carnivorous.

    I shook my head at her, "You've got the wrong idea--"

    The motion sensor shrilled at me and I jerked my head to the right as the tone got louder, as teeth burst through the fog. Teeth and a tongue in an impossibly big mouth. The creature kicked off the ground and was in the air almost faster than I could think.

    Time slowed and the world shifted into greyscale. I knew where it was headed and I knew I had to act. My right hand was clenched into a fist and in motion. The timing would have to be perfect, but it would be because my math was never wrong.

    My fist connected with lower jaw of a creature that looked like it may as well be all mouth and the wet crunch and pained hissing the answered was proof I hadn't been wrong. The grip on my left arm released and I pulled it back, and then continued through an aggressive backhand that sent another of whatever the creatures were flying.

    The first one I'd hit recovered and got back to it's feet. It looked like a rat the size and color of a killer whale with a full half of it's body length taken up by an eyeless torpedo shaped head with red lips and a lot of teeth.

    Thermal sensors told me there were at least ninety of whatever it was, and they were circling us. I didn't know if rats were pack hunters or not, but that didn't seem right. It looked like these ones would be though.

    Everything was still in greyscale, but I felt more in control than the other times. It was also lasting longer.

    Both of my shoulder pylons opened up and I drew out the knife and the pistol and held both of them at the ready in front of me. Ammo would be a concern before they were all gone even if I was a perfect shot.

    I looked over at the link to the other pilot and she looked every bit as perturbed as I felt by the situation. "Any plans, Ahab?"

    She looked over at the window as if she'd forgotten it was there, and then shrugged. Out of my viewer I saw her pull her right shoulder pylon off of her Evangelion and push and pull on it until it was reconfigured into something that looked passably like a gun.

    The gun-looking-thing was definitely actually a gun, as a moment later a flash at the muzzle erupted and a black streak moving almost too fast for sensors to track speared through one of the creatures and split it in half.

    "Well, that's something." I muttered under my breath as I took a shot at the one I'd punched. The bullet impacted the rubbery-looking flesh and blasted out the other side, and took a bunch of blood with it.

    "Whatever they are, I don't think they're quite angels. There's no AT field reading and bullets seem to kill them." The other girl finally said.

    "Do you have enough shots for all eighty eight of them?"

    "I do not."

    "Well, next time bring enough for the whole class or leave it at home!" I yelled as one of the rats charged me.

    I spun the knife around into a reverse grip and raised my arm into a forearm block. The rubber flesh on the side of the head bounced off my armor and the knife blade dug into the corner of its lip, and momentum did the rest.

    Hot entrails poured out and steamed against my armor and the ground as what was left of the monster lay twitching in its own blood. They did die, and they did so quite readily. But so would we with eighty seven more of the things.

    I patched Ahab into the comm channel I had open with Misato at headquarters and turned to Misato's window. "We could use some help, or we're going to die and I don't wanna do that today!" I yelled at the link as I started firing my pistol at another charging rat.

    I didn't feel right in the head; I was greyscale for too long. It felt like a sort of slowly spreading derangement, a shifting away from what was real or at least what real felt like. Being in the fight wasn't helping matters in that regard either.

    I let myself get distracted and almost missed the rat attacking from my right flank, and my evasion was clumsy and incomplete. I survived, my gun did not. The whole thing was eaten by the rat, but it was better than losing the hand.

    One knife, zero guns. Time to change that number up a little. "Ahab, give me your knife!"

    "What? No, get your own!" She yelled back.

    I really wished I hadn't dropped my rifle back in the city.

    My right fist connected with teeth as they started coming on in pairs of two. They were either learning or escalating in some per-programmed way, but it was a little unnerving how they started getting braver after I lost my gun.

    "Ahab give me the knife! I am not going to die to giant rats because you didn't want to give me your knife!"

    "Natsu, hold on! We're sending Rei!" Misato yelled from her window. Took her a minute to get up to speed?

    But then, we'd only been going for about twenty seconds and I was finding it really hard to pay attention to other people unless I tried really hard.

    "Hey there Misato! It's been a while! My gun just ran dry. I don't think we're gonna last long enough for your spare to get here." Ahab answered in my stead.

    "Well it's not like they've got ranged attacks. I'm gonna be real mad if I die because I didn't have a gun while fighting the only thing that's ever actually been vulnerable to them." I complained as another rat started chewing on my leg before I could stab it through the brain.

    There was too much vegetation and smoke to see them far beyond the edge of the scorched-bare earth that the white eva had left when it landed.

    "Actually... I have a bad idea. Or a good one. I'll let you know which after we don't die. Ahab, put me in a headlock and stand by on your fusion drive so I don't push you backwards." I explained as I started bringing up my reactor output. I'd used it before, but she gave me the idea.

    "Is this really the time?" Misato asked, surprising me because what I was about to try was definitely something she'd think of.

    I shook my head and grabbed onto the throttle control. "I read books! The Kzinti Lesson!" I yelled as if that explained everything.

    "What--"

    "A fusion drive is a gun. Let's do it." Ahab answered as her left arm wrapped around my neck.

    I put my arms around the white unit's waist and throttled up as far as I dared without knocking the other unit down. The pressure against my shoulder was incredible, but it would hold. I hoped.

    The exhaust flare blinded thermals, but I could tell by the almost gleeful look on Ahab's face as she spun me in place that she was doing a well-enough job of burning the rats to death as they approached us.

    "Maybe I need to start reading books..." Misato muttered under her breath before clearing her throat and speaking up. "Rei will be there in thirty five seconds and it looks like you'll be able to hold out that long."

    If we could keep it up, but I was starting to have my doubts. Typically I'd be moving if I was producing this much thrust, which would prevent heat soak of the surrounding environment. As it was it was starting to get warm.

    And that would solve the problem of the rats being close to us, but it would also solve the problem of us being close to us, because we'd cook alive. Pyrrhic victories weren't really my idea of a good time.

    "Martian fast-mover in fifteen seconds. Between them and another Evangelion I think we'll be okay!" Ahab yelled from her comm window. I could tell by the look on her face that despite all the fun she was having she was feeling the heat just like I was.

    I felt my vision starting to tunnel in and I rolled the throttle back to idle, shutting down the fusion drive. If I didn't cut it before I passed out there wouldn't be anyone to cut it before we cooked alive. As it was I could hardly keep my eyes open.

    The arm around my neck released and I pulled myself back up onto my feet. We'd probably taken out half of the rats between the fusion drive trick and everything we'd done before, but that left us with an empty bag of tricks and a crowd that still needed to be entertained.

    Radar pinged an approaching object and I risked a glance to the sky; the clouds parted around the bow of a much, much smaller ship. Twice the length of the Tengu and easily another half as wide. I didn't think it was made for atmospheric flight, but they didn't seem to care.

    "Asuka Soryu to M.R.N Nikola Tesla, passing you my targeting data now." So that was Ahab's name.

    "Ahab you've got some really interesting friends if they're willing to drop two starships into the atmosphere for you." I commented as the point defense guns on the Nikola Tesla hemorrhaged tracer fire into the surviving rat creatures.

    "Really just the one, but she's fantastic. Don't let yourself get distracted, it's not over yet."

    I looked down to my left hand and realized that at some point I'd lost my knife, so I took up a boxer stance and stood back to back with Ahab's unit. Thermal was still blinded, motion was picking up at least fifteen, which was better than forty.

    Three were charging towards me, mouths open. I couldn't tell what was happening on Ahab's side of things but I didn't imagine it was much better. One or two would be fine, three might be a problem.

    The first leapt into the air and a bullet tore through its brain case, followed by two more that shifted its direction enough that it missed me completely. Two more bursts of fire took out the remaining pair before they even left the ground and they ended up with mouths full of dirt, dead mid-sprint.

    I looked over to my right, the direction the fire had come from to see Unit Zero retro-burning down into our position. Her landing was rougher than the white unit's had been, but Rei's was a combat landing and so I expected it, even if it made my teeth rattle.

    Wordlessly the blue unit handed me the rifle in its left hand and I took it up and shouldered it. Somehow, despite that my vision was in greyscale, I knew what colors I was looking at, even if I couldn't see them. Was it psychological or something else?

    I switched my targeting computer over to the motion tracker and snapped my head and the rifle over to a pack of four that was stalking on my left flank, then fired a fully automatic burst into them. That had to take us down to about seven or eight left.

    The motion tracker said... one? "Is this right? There's only one?"

    "I killed seven by myself, so yeah, one left."

    Radar returned off the one that was left, which hadn't happened with the others. When it stepped out of the fog I understood why.

    It looked the same as the rats, but it was much, much bigger. Big enough to eat an Evangelion if it wanted to, it looked like it was the size of the head of the whale angel that Ahab had 'killed'.

    "Give me your gun." Ahab's voice was not a request, it was a command.

    I handed her the rifle without question. If she wanted to make up for not getting a real kill earlier, I was willing to let her have that redemption. It didn't matter to me as long as they all died, so if it mattered to her I'd let her.

    The big rat charged her and she stood her ground, maybe a hundred yards in front of me. The rifle was at her shoulder. The rat's mouth was open. There was a core in the back of its mouth. The rifle fired.

    Bullets lanced through the center of what had to be the angel controlling it all, and blood sprayed out of the back. Ahab didn't stop firing until the rifle was empty and as the rifle stopped the angel fell into a rolling heap that slowly dissolved into blood.

    My motion sensor showed all clear and I looked around me to confirm it. There were dozens of corpses, but none moving. The fog was even starting to clear up, so I had to wonder if the angel was causing it.

    "We're not seeing anything else from here. The two of you should come back in. Rei can stand watch for a while just make sure." Misato ordered. Well, asked, but I knew it wasn't optional.

    "Roger that. Uh, I need to have my implant looked at when I get back in. I'm still seeing in greyscale."

    The response was immediate, almost frantic, but closer to 'concerned.' "This is Akagi. I'll meet you in the cage."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter 15
  • Threadmarks


    • Chapter 15:

    Hold on to me​





    I'd always known that there was more to life than fighting, the life I'd lived before the fighting proved that. I'd have a life after fighting too, assuming I lived that long and of course I had every intention of doing so.

    Unfortunately in the time in between before and after I found that the parts of life that weren't fighting all too often relegated themselves to being times that tested me, far more literally than I ever wanted. Synchronization tests, physical tests, and now, for one night only, to round out the trifecta: medical tests.

    She didn't have to shave my head, and for that I could find it in myself to grant her thanks for that. If it had come down to that I'd have expressed that monochrome could still be a valid alternative and maybe we didn't need to figure this problem out anyway.

    We'd won the fight, after going the long way about it, and even this disconnected sensation I'd developed wasn't wholly dissimilar from some of the sensations I'd experienced with Touji. I could live with that and maybe a few more if they decided they wanted to join the party.

    An electric 'zot' sound and the smell of burnt hair derailed my train of thought before it had a chance to arrive safely back at the station and I blinked the wetness and sudden fatigue out of my eyes. Color had returned to me, not just the knowledge of it but the full technicolor experience.

    "You fix me, doc?" I asked with a half-sloppy smirk that betrayed exactly how out of sorts I still felt. Akagi wasn't bad to look at either, she was no Maya by any stretch of the imagination but if you were into bottle blonde forty year olds she was the right kind of sexy.

    "You're an Ikari and I'm not that kind of doctor, so no. Your implant was trying to tell you that data security protocols were compromised, but that damage is done."

    "So..."

    "So I turned them off. You don't feel like going on a killing spree do you? Probably not." She shrugged and threw her clipboard across the room onto a table. "You've had full read and write access to the command and control systems this whole time and you're still alive."

    "So..." I said again and blinked a few long slow blinks. "What does that mean for me?"

    She took a deep breath and let it out, and her face turned to one of understanding and some small measure of concern. "Fifty-fifty you're not gonna die of old age but at this point I'm not sure old age was something you had to look forward to anyway. There's some brain damage but nothing worse than a concussion."

    I felt brain damaged but that'd been true before I'd agreed to pilot in the first place; I'd agreed to pilot in the first place. Brain damage was the only explanation for that other than a terminal case of the stupids. Well, half terminal anyway.

    "Do I have to keep fighting?" I asked her as I pulled the electrode off the back of my head and sat up in the chair.

    "You never had to keep fighting, it was always your decision," she answered me as she walked out of my field of view and towards her terminal. Likely entering her observations about the proceedure?

    "Do I get to keep fighting?" I asked, changing my question with a sideways glance at her.

    "I'm not going to stop you, if that's what you mean. Fighting might kill you but stopping now isn't going to save you so flip a coin if you're conflicted about it." She seemed dismissive at the end, but maybe that was the lit cigarette hanging off her lip that gave the impression.

    "You got a spare?" I asked with a gesture of my hand.

    She pulled the cigarette off her lip and seemed to consider it in front of her, rolled it around her fingers before passing it over to me and pulling another one out of her pocket in almost the same motion.

    The smoke filled my lungs after a shallow drag and I leaned back again. Wasn't a big hobby of mine but it was something I'd indulged in before. Stress relief or sometimes just chasing the call of the void just a tiny bit at a time.

    Menthol, but that didn't surprise me. Woman who took hair color no Japanese woman was ever born with from a bottle was the right kind of vain to smoke the cigarettes that smelled better, even if she wasn't vain enough to kick the habit completely.

    The nicotine muted the edges of my derangement and the smoke chilled my lips on the exhale. One, two puffs. I wasn't hitting it like it was gonna take me to the top but enough that I knew it was there. It seemed to dial everything back half a notch and that was enough.

    "So," I asked the seemingly nonchalant doctor. "Sleeping with my father?"

    She blew out a long stream of smoke and rolled her head back up to look towards the ceiling. "Yeah. Sleeping with Touji Suzuhara?"

    I took another drag and stared at the burning red hot cherry on the end of the paper stick, then blew the smoke across it and watched it burn just a little hotter. "Yeah."

    The cherry popped off the end of the cigarette with a flick of my finger and it stopped burning at the same time. I could finish I later, or I might not. Still tasted like Akagi's lips and I was okay with that.

    "You think he cares about me?" I finally asked her with what I hoped wasn't too desperate of an expression on my face.

    "Suzuhara?"

    I shook my head, "My father."

    She looked at her cigarette and opted not to take another drag. "Well," She started, finally turning to lock eyes with me. "I think that he wants to, but I don't think he knows how to. I don't think he knows what caring about you, or anyone other than your mother, is supposed to look like. There were pieces missing from that man long before he met your mother and there are more pieces missing with her gone."

    I found myself staring into the palm of my hand and wondering if that was an answer that would satisfy me or if it just made me want to know more. Make me want more. "Then why do you sleep with him?"

    She smiled at me, at that. Not a smile of mirth but closer to one of resignation. She shrugged and then set the cigarette back on her bottom lip. "He's not the only one around here with pieces missing."

    "Yeah... Yeah."


    ***​



    Rei's blue dress was probably the only consistent thing in my life. At the very least it was in the top five: ahead of turmoil and just behind pain. I had no illusions that I'd ever give it back and I'm sure she'd realized the same.

    I was leaned over the railing on a balcony over the lake, one of more than a dozen observation decks within a square kilometer I was sure. I wasn't trying to stay hidden but I had been trying to get lost. I might die, she'd said. Not today, not tomorrow, and not even next week.

    Mortality, but only maybe. Lose myself before that if it was going to happen but I'd been lost before and not found myself until it was almost too late, and even then only after people had died around me.

    And without that push, what the hell would I have become? The man I never wanted to be? Never, not really. Even when I could suck it up and play pretend I really didn't. Could've been better, could've been worse. Wasn't that always the case?

    I had always treasured a pretty dress, either on me or someone else.

    The way it had turned out for me, when it could have been so very different and I had to tell myself it was the right decision and then I had to wonder...

    Wonder if my mother would have recognized me. Either for who I had become while I was away or for what I'd done since I'd been back. All the things I'd done since I'd come back.

    I slipped the cigarette out from behind my ear and set it on my lip, sparked a match stick against the railing and lit it back up. I'd finish it as a distraction or for that the nicotine might grant me. Cool menthol smoke rolled off the end of my finger as the sun slowly set up above.

    Orange light scattered through countless mirrors cast against the lake and turned what counted for sky in the geofront an arterial red. It was beautiful, like a certain girl's eyes. It was a reminder of how the rest of my day had gone, and how my future would follow.

    It wasn't the life I'd dreamed of, that much was true. I never expected I'd be here or meet the people I'd met, form the connections I had. It hadn't been for long, we weren't the same as life long friends, but they were connections all the same.

    All that Touji had been to me and the need I felt for him, would I have found someone or something else out in the stars instead?

    The door behind me opened and I turned around with the burnt out filter of the cigarette hanging from my lip. "Rei."

    Her hair was wet but her tank top was dry and her shorts left little of her legs to the imagination. There was no way she'd ever had a skin tan in her entire life. I'd written on paper that had a darker tone than her thighs, but for her it worked.

    "Doctor Akagi did not say how your exam went, but I suspect it has not gone well." She said to me with a concerned look on her face. She let the door close behind her when she took the few steps to place herself next to me against the railing.

    "Piloting might kill me but not piloting might kill me too. That's the short version." I muttered with less respect than she deserved. I felt bad immediately for taking my frustrations out on her.

    "I'm sorry--"

    I shook my head, "No, Rei, I'm sorry. It's not your fault it's just... It's just..." I grabbed my hair and slid down against the railing until I was sitting and staring down at the concrete.

    "It's just what?"

    "Rei, if I was... if I was exactly what my father had expected me to be when I answered his summons, do you think that you would recognize me? Do you think if my mother could see me now, she'd recognize what I've become?" My eyes hurt, nose was starting to run. Dammit, dammit, dam--

    Her arm snaked around my shoulder and she pulled me against her. It wasn't like her but it was just like her, in a roundabout fashion. She felt... maternal.

    "You would still be who you are, nothing can change that. Your soul and your heart beating in your chest remain the same, and would remain the same. Even if your body changed, anyone who didn't recognize you would only fail to do so by not looking."

    I let out a short laugh and shook the tears off my cheeks, "Rei, are you telling me that you make a habit of looking at my soul?"

    "Where else would I look?"

    I had nothing to say to that. I hadn't expected her to say yes to it. I could accept it though. Sitting there in her embrace reminded me of feelings long forgotten. I knew I'd been here before, years ago--

    My phone buzzed against my hip and I pulled it free from the elastic waistband under my dress. One text-only message from Misato: 'You should see this.'

    I tapped the screen and the web browser opened up, it was a news article, published three minutes ago.

    The headline was all I needed to see before I dropped the phone and went stiff:

    'Who is Shinji Ikari?'​
     
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    • Jackie said:
    The headline was all I needed to see before I dropped the phone and went stiff:

    'Who is Shinji Ikari?'​
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Well, fuck. If there is a worse way for your new boyfriend to learn some facts about your medical history he might not be entirely comfortable with, I really don't want to know what it is.
     
    I wish I had three likes to give. The brokenness with Ritsuko at the start, then Rei in a tank top, then public relations in Evangelion.

    Edit: Wait, was that Kensuke?
     
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