Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The curse of eternal summer, which had endured since its onset during the Second Impact fifteen years ago, bore down upon Tokyo-3 as readily and as relentlessly as it did the rest of Japan. Cicadas sang their ballads upon the languid breeze, and at the edge of the dead and lifeless oceans, beneath which languished the ruins of what had come before, where ordinary people had once lived their lives, there stood in orderly ranks the  collected ordinance of the old world order, the products of a military-industrial complex that became by the day ever more increasingly a relic of an unrecoverable past. Tanks and artillery, field guns and infantry, and even all manner of aircraft swept the area, bristling with killing-machines invented by man to slaughter and lay waste to their fellow man, their barrels and rockets factory-new and gleaming in the pitiless sunlight, as trees and shrubs and all other forms of plant life flourished beyond their time, the verdance of it vibrant and unnatural, at least to the eyes of those old enough to remember what had once been, and the world around it all seemed to be holding its breath, waiting expectantly, with the cries of the cicadas the only real source of disturbance to the silence that would otherwise have abided.

It was some distance from this, however, that a train coming from the countryside, bearing upon it a single occupant, and no more, bore down into Tokyo-3’s station, a bare-bones thing assembled in haste with hardly a care for the comfort of civilian passengers entering into this urban area: it was open to the air, with only a roof having been constructed to shield passengers from the sun or the rain, for it had not snowed here in nearly twenty years. Off of this train, then, undaunted by her solitude, stepped a girl, her frame still small and slight, her feet clad in dark brown penny-loafers, with the meticulously well-maintained hem of a black maxi skirt brushing gently against her khaki sock-clad ankles; from the dark brown belt fastened across her middle, there hung an old SDAT player, clipped neatly to the leather, and the wire slotted into it drew from out of the decade-old machinery up the tucked-in button-up ivory blouse and the calf-length grey cardigan that was worn over it to connect to a pair of headphones that a delicate pair of hands slipped down from the place where they had once sat over a pair of ears now open to the world, slotting the headphones instead to rest about a slender neck, while those hands brushed out a shoulder-length dark brown wolf cut to cover it, the messiness of the girl’s hair making her seem as though she was freshly out of bed, though it was capped off with a plain, but well-made black beret. She shook her head, then, as if to shake out the remaining impression of her headphones and set it to rights, taking the beret off and fluffing it out before replacing it upon her head, as well, and then slipped her hand into the dark brown leather purse that was dangling from her shoulder, out of which she drew a picture that still confused her, of a dark-haired woman dressed…she was going to say ‘suggestively’, to be polite, but in reality, it was the kind of photo that might have been considered to be on the racier end for a gravure shoot of yesteryear, taken for the explicit purpose of featuring on a pin-up poster…with a red pen having at one point circled her cleavage and drawn an arrow to it, demanding that the girl ‘look here.’

Honestly. Her cheeks still flushed slightly at the memory of seeing it for the first time.

She turned it over, though, and pored over the note written there, the hiragana somewhat slapdash to the point where, if she had ever written like this under her teacher’s care, he would have smacked her on the knuckles with a ruler and demanded that she ‘write it again’, but still reasonably legible. “Katsuragi Misato, huh…? Well. I guess there’s no way but forward…”

With that breathy declaration, the girl took up the suitcase that she had laid down by her side (which was, of course, dark brown, as she had long since learned that, just as one did not mix metals, it was a faux pas of roughly equal measure to mix leather colours), and made her way down from the platform, her shoes carrying her lightly down the stairwell until she reached, at last, the sidewalk, with not a soul in sight, while heat distortion turned the image of distant streets into dancing waves of inconstant asphalt. She looked one way, and then the other, and…

Wait.

Is that…?

Is that…me?

Is that me, with blue hair in a bob and red eyes, dressed in a sailor uniform…?

Cobalt eyes blinked from behind the polarised lenses of teashade sunglasses, but as soon as she then blinked again, reaching up to lower the lenses of the sunglasses from her eyes, the strange apparition of the distant girl seemed to have vanished, and she blinked a bit more, still shaking off the fresh shock of seeing a near-doppelganger of herself in the distance, struck with the knowledge that a ‘trick of the light’ could not possibly cover what she had seen a moment ago. But she was distracted from her thoughts by the sound of an approaching car, turning to see a vibrantly blue forty-year-old Renault Alpine crawl its way up the hill towards the station, driving slowly; as it passed by her, she blinked again, seeing what looked to be the familiar silhouette of the woman who was in the photograph look her way, as if her eyes were scanning over her, and nearly go out of her sight, before the silhouette did what looked to be an overdramatic double-take, and caused the black tires to squeal against the asphalt as she put the car into a harried reverse, drawing haphazardly up to the curb upon which the girl was standing, and furiously rolling the passenger’s side window down.

And wouldn’t you know it? It was the woman, albeit much more completely-dressed, bearing a pair of black sunglasses over her eyes herself.

“Err… Ikari Shinji…?”

The girl winced, and immediately wondered if it wasn’t too late for her to back out of this. “Um, it’s actually Ikari Yui. My name was changed…some time ago, ma’am…”

The woman stiffened, her full lips parting, and increasingly, Yui was coming to the swift conclusion that coming here had been a colossal mistake after all.

“Oh, my God, I’m so sorry!” the woman squawked, as though mortified, and all but stumbled out of the driver’s side of her car in her haste to exit it, rounding the vehicle and taking off her sunglasses to stand before Yui, before flipping her long, glossy blue-black hair over her shoulder. She was…honestly stunning, and in that moment, Yui could only think that the photo hadn’t done the beauty of the woman standing before her any true justice. Dressed as she was in a short, exceedingly form-fitting black dress and a cropped red jacket as she leaned up against her car, the woman who could only have been Katsuragi Misato made Yui feel a bit frumpy and plain in comparison, wielding as she did a mature and full-figured frame that would likely have made her the envy of many pre-Second Impact models, had she possessed the desire to go that route. “You know, I’d wondered why the picture I was provided looked like it belonged to an elementary schooler, but I never got the chance to ask…! So, you’re the commander’s daughter…?”

Huh. Well, even if this was a catastrophic mistake, Yui could at least count on this would-be gravure idol to have her back. 

Small mercies. 

Yui shrugged. “That’s what my koseki says, at least…”

She had intended for it to be funny, of course, but it seemed as though the joke had failed to land, as an awkward silence ensued for a moment afterward, causing her to cringe internally.

“I…see,” said Katsuragi, her gaze heavy—too heavy—with understanding. “Do you need help with your bags?”

Yui shook her head, and picked up her suitcase with both hands, moving around to place it flat into the bed of the trunk, as the older woman returned to the driver’s side, and Yui rushed to close the trunk and join her in the passenger’s side of the two-seater. She slid in, closed the door, and belted herself in, taking a moment to get settled into the upholstery before Katsuragi declared, “Alright, we’re all set? Off we go…!”

With that, the Renault Alpine jerked away from the curb with a squeal of the tires as the engine gave a roar, and took off at at least twice the speed limit, tearing down the empty roads of Tokyo-3 like there was a pack of rabid wolves nipping at their heels, and it was all that Yui could do to hold on for dear life.

“Y’know, I almost mistook you,” Katsuragi remarked conversationally, as if she wasn’t driving like a complete and utter madwoman. “Thought you were Ayanami with a dye job and a wardrobe change for a second there, before I realised that that made no sense at all…”

“…Ayanami…?” Yui asked, blinking, as she tested the unfamiliar name upon her tongue.

“Ayanami Rei,” Katsuragi clarified. “You’ll be meeting her soon.”

“And…she looks like me, does she?” asked Yui. Perhaps with red eyes and blue hair…?

“Yeah, actually, she does,” said Katsuragi with a nod. “It’s actually a little creepy. You two could be twins, honestly…”

“…I see,” said Yui, as she wondered to herself for a moment whether or not she was meant to take the choice of comparison between herself and this girl that she had never before met as a compliment.

“So,” said Katsuragi after a moment of silence. “How much do you know about NERV?”

Yui blinked at the unfamiliar word. “…NERV? Is that…German, or English…?”

“Uh…” Katsuragi blinked, as though she hadn’t been expecting the question. “German. Why do you ask…?”

Yui sighed, and shrugged. “Well, you did ask what I knew about it just now. I’d imagine the fact that I had to ask what language it was should answer your question pretty effectively.”

“So, you came all the way out here without knowing why?” asked Katsuragi.

“Katsuragi-san,” Yui huffed, turning to look at the woman in at least quarter-profile. “I haven’t seen my father since I was four years old. I don’t remember the last time we even had a conversation that I could call a conversation in good faith. When I received a folder in the mail from the Marduk Institute—which, I mean, I suppose there are more obscure references to throw out into the wind than the king of the pantheon of Babylon—and opened it up to see that every line of every page in it had been blacked out and redacted, with a handwritten note attached that just said ‘COME’, I very nearly threw the whole thing out. But given that my father apparently paid my teacher to take care of me, he was in the unique position of being able to strong-arm me into at least hearing him out. So I know that, and I know that he hasn’t bothered to strike my deadname from the record either, in spite of the fact that I had it legally changed three years ago now. I’m a bit in the dark, as they say, and I was honestly hoping that you could illuminate me a little—if it isn’t too much trouble…”

Katsuragi eyed her out of the corner of her vision, and mortification flooded Yui at her outburst. She sighed, and leaned her head against the window. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair of me. I shouldn’t have spoken so harshly to you—you had nothing to do with this, at least not that I know of…”

“No, I think it’s entirely fair,” said Katsuragi with a shrug. “Hell, I know that if my old man tried to pull that kind of bullshit on me, I’d have been screaming and cursing at all and sundry…”

“Still,” Yui maintained. “You’ve been nothing but accommodating so far, and I really shouldn’t take that for granted.”

“I mean, you’re a kid,” Katsuragi said with a shrug. “You’re, what, fourteen? I’m pretty sure that it’s your job to take the kindness of adults for granted…”

Yui blinked, and studied Katsuragi for a moment. That phrase had seemed…oddly stilted, almost, as it came out of her mouth. “Is that something that you honestly believe, Katsuragi-san?”

“Doesn’t really matter if I believe it,” Katsuragi scoffed. “It’s the truth. And besides, enough of this ‘Katsuragi-san’ business. Just call me Misato—unless you want me to start calling you ‘Ikari-chan.’”

“…Yui is perfectly fine, Misato-san,” Yui replied after a moment, leaning back into the seat. 

“Is there a story behind it?” asked Misato. “If you don’t mind my asking. I figured that there had to have been a reason why you chose it.”

“It was my mother’s name,” Yui shrugged. “And I chose it because it’s the only thing that I have left of her—aside from a handful of disconnected facts and second-hand recollections.”

“Any fond memories?” asked Misato.

“No,” Yui shook her head. “No memories of any kind. But I knew that she was a great scientist, and that my teacher told me that, with the aid of a bit of make-up, I looked just like her…”

“And how do you think that your father is going to react to that?” she asked. “You using his wife’s name as your own…”

Yui sighed, shaking her head. “If the fact that he apparently gave you my deadname and a years-old photo to find me with? Not particularly well. But that’s also none of my concern, is it? It’s not as if it makes me any less useful to him, whatever it is that he needs me to do…”

Misato chuckled mirthlessly. “I suppose that’s a fair point… Though, I’ve gotta admit, I’m surprised at how pragmatic you’re being about it… I’m honestly not sure that I could have done that at your age…”

“I mean, he’s had a decade to be a part of my life in any capacity if he really wanted to, and as I said before, ‘Shinji’ hasn’t been my name in three years, and yet still you didn’t know my name, despite having been sent to collect me. It doesn’t exactly take a genius to read between the lines on that one,” Yui replied. “The fact that I’ve been told that I’ve inherited my mother’s brains notwithstanding…”

“Oh?” Misato asked, perking up, perhaps glad to have stumbled upon any manner of proper segue into a more pleasant subject—not that Yui could blame her. The subject of ‘Ikari Gendō’ was something she had long since made her peace with—that the man who had abandoned her, save for, apparently, passively funding her lifestyle through the use of an intermediary, had no real interest in being her father, or any kind of parental figure, in any appreciable sense of the term, and that she would only be hurting herself by trying to hold out hope and do the impossible—but she was aware that saying that to adults tended to make them feel very uncomfortable, and that it was an exercise in futility to attempt to express to them the serenity that had come upon her and abided within her, however complicated, in the aftermath of her giving up on him.

Amazing, really, the amount of self-awareness that one could gain in the wake of shedding a gender identity that had only ever made them miserable.

“My teacher tended to supplement my education to keep me occupied,” Yui explained. “It was a bit rough, early on, considering that he had never married specifically because he was never interested in what having a family constituted, least of all dealing with what was, at the beginning, a toddler, which he had not the patience nor the inclination to deal with, but eventually, he and I reached…an equilibrium, of sorts. So, I largely left him to his research, while he kept handing me work to do while I was living with him, grading it as I completed it, and so on. Or, at least I thought that was what he was doing…”

“He wasn’t grading it, you mean?” Misato asked.

“Apparently I have a master’s degree in metabiology from Kyoto University,” Yui sighed. “And one of my essays on imminent critique got plagiarised by a doctoral candidate working as a T.A., and there was a whole kerfuffle about it a little bit ago.”

“…How does a fourteen-year-old earn a master’s degree in metabiology?” asked Misato, blinking.

Yui shrugged, and sighed. “You have to understand, Misato-san, that I…wasn’t really all that much of what one might call a ‘social butterfly’ at school. And frankly, I think my teacher dumped all of the extra reading and other coursework that I did on me whenever he was frustrated by setbacks in his own work. As a bonus, thanks to him, I had some vague idea of what I was studying being close to what my mother built her life’s work around, whatever that was, and as a virtually friendless, awkward, abandoned child who was for all intents and purposes an orphan, that was a significant motivating factor. It helped that…I had a bit of a knack for these things, once he realised that he was getting somewhere with throwing all those books at me and started to teach me, for real. Gave me recordings of old lectures and second-hand textbooks… Eventually, I completed enough of the coursework satisfactorily for him to arrange for me to submit it all to Kyoto through a few old contacts of his, and a few months later, I got a certificate in the mail. I’m still undecided as to whether or not I want to continue towards a PhD, since unlike undergraduate and graduate degrees, PhD programs are…political, and there’s not really a great way around the fact that it’d take me years of my life to get to the point where I can start drafting a dissertation, but I’ve at least gotten this far, so…I’m trying to remember that I’ve still got a lot of time on my hand before any of that matters too much. I’m…not always successful.”

“Well then…” Misato chortled mirthlessly, shaking her head. “Seems like I’m two-for-two…”

“On what?” Yui asked, blinking.

“On being responsible for an overachieving charge,” Misato replied, heaving a heavy sigh in what Yui hazarded a guess as ‘recollection’, presumably of a complicated nature. “Let’s just say that you’re not exactly the first fourteen-year-old university graduate that I’ve known…”

“Well, maybe I’ll get to meet her one day,” Yui offered, trying to bring up the mood. “While I’m not unique, I would imagine that the pool of people our age with our experiences is quite shallow… Especially if we studied the same things, or at least similar fields…”

“If I remember correctly, Asuka’s degree was in mathematics,” said Misato. “And I’d be willing to bet that you guys are going to get to meet, depending on how things shake out.”

“Mathematics, huh?” Yui blinked—she wondered if this ‘Asuka’ had studied more specifically, or if the degree really was just that broad. Metabiology, after all, had required Yui to become familiar with a lot of abstract mathematics—she had been rushed through addition and multiplication at roughly the same time as she had been learning to read, and then through algebra and geometry just so that they could get through calculus as quickly as possible, given that she would have had to have enough of a foundation to understand set theory in order to reach Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which, ironically, was axiomatic to the field that Yui had unknowingly been studying over the past few years—but by the same token, she knew that not every university offered degree programs broken down into detailed sub-categories of STEM subjects… “Is she a Neo-Tokyo University graduate, then?”

Misato snorted. “Try Berlin University…”

Yui blinked again. “I beg your pardon…?”

“Asuka was raised in Germany,” Misato explained.

“…Gesundheit,” Yui murmured snarkily.

Misato let out a startled bark of laughter, and shook her head.

“So, you didn’t tell me what I would be doing here, exactly,” Yui said, in an attempt to steer them as gently as she could back towards their initial topic of conversation. “Given that you didn’t know that I had a degree, I’m going to assume that my father didn’t drag me all the way out here to Tokyo-3 to participate in field research…?”

The last comment was intended as a joke, but Misato’s smile turned slightly stiff upon hearing it. “I mean…I suppose you could call it a field research position, after a fashion…?”

Yui’s eyes widened, and her jaw worked uselessly as she tried and failed half a dozen times to form the beginnings of a coherent sentence with which to respond to that. “What is that supposed to mean…?”

Then, as if on cue, a dark form erupted from out of the ocean in the distance, and given where they were driving, out of the windows of Misato’s car, Yui could see it fully and clearly.

It was huge, first and foremost—a flagrant refutation of the square-cube law, given that it was taller than most of Tokyo-3’s skyscrapers, largely black and vaguely humanoid (very vaguely) in shape. It was as if someone had taken and twisted the structure of an American comic book villainous henchman, given how absurdly top-heavy it was, with its shoulders perhaps anywhere from about half to two-thirds as broad as its body was tall, and capped off with massive, bone-like protrusions shielding those shoulders like pauldrons; it bore neither neck nor head, with its long arms, almost simian in their dimensions, dangling past where the knee-joint, or at least its equivalent, would be, with three digits—two fingers and an opposable thumb—and a set of wickedly sharp spikes protruding from the back of its elbows. Its limbs, for all their length, were spindly to the point of farce, such that there was no way that it could be standing upright in the open air, to the point where she immediately had to concede that, for whatever reason, conventional physics and what she was currently seeing were very directly at odds with each other, with further bone-like, or perhaps cartilaginous, ridges, either fins or gills of some design, she ventured, mounted upon its outer thighs, and a mockery of a ribcage seemed to pierce through the black flesh to surround a central large, spherical scarlet orb, above which (and overlapping) sat a borderline-featureless white bone mask, and from its beak to its simplistic eyeholes, Yui could not help but think of the protective gear worn by European plague doctors during the fourteenth century as she looked upon it.

It lumbered forward, one clumsy, atavistic step at a time, but before it had taken more than two, with the waters of the ocean streaming down it in massive quantities, revealing the texture of its odd black flesh as flexing, malformed sinew, if not outright leather, it was inundated with ordinance: explosions erupted all about its body, carpeting it in igneous blossoms like radiant flowers down the mountainside, as VTOLs and aircraft all swarmed it, peppering it with high-yield missiles and bullets designed to shred through vehicle armour like it was paper, as they scrambled with a swiftness that suggested that they had been expecting just such an incursion. And yet, for all of that, the lumbering figure continued onward, each step causing the ground itself to quake beneath its feet, such that Yui could feel it, even through the medium of the speeding blue car upon the ridgeside road, undaunted and unrelenting.

“…I suppose I see what you mean…” she murmured hollowly. “What…is that…?”

“An Angel,” Misato shot off without a moment’s hesitation, her tone now all business; and from this angle, Yui could spot the tightening muscles of her jaw, such that one bulging tendon twitched at the corner of her eye. It didn’t take a doctorate of psychology to understand the emotion that Misato was displaying in that moment: hatred. Pure, incandescent hatred—the kind of hatred that vendettas were made of…

‘…To the last, I grapple with thee,’ Yui mentally quoted, with a heavy, sinking feeling forming deep in the pit of her stomach. ‘From Hell’s heart I stab at thee; for Hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…’

Whatever the cause, or indeed the nature, of the hatred that seemed to come upon Misato when she merely spoke the word ‘Angel’, spitting it out almost like it was a curse, albeit with military precision and a seemingly uncharacteristically flat, matter-of-fact tone, Yui liked it little, and the sight of it gave her a bad feeling—though to call it merely that was perhaps putting it incredibly lightly…

And though she hoped that she would be wrong, she recalled what followed, unbidden:

‘And so the bird of Heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to Hell ‘til she had dragged a living part of Heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it…’

The ground above their heads shook and shuddered as if the very Earth had split shortly after they got into the car elevator that took them down to the GeoFront—according to Misato’s supposition, it meant that the JSSDF had resorted to the use of an N2 land mine as a means of destroying the Angel, but would, in her professional estimation (she was apparently ex-military, imagine that), only succeed in delaying its advance for an unspecified period. Yui believed it: it had taken her a moment to work through her shock, and thus to begin to work out that, as far as metaphysical biology was concerned, a creature such as that (which was, at least by Misato, alleged to be an alien, though Yui struggled mightily to imagine the sorts of environmental conditions and evolutionary pressures could have produced a creature such as the Angel) might as well have constituted a breakthrough, if nothing else, and she had been so preoccupied with those thoughts that the sight of the GeoFront thereafter barely even managed to faze her. Though, perhaps it was just as well; whatever wonder Yui could have mustered upon her witnessing such a marvel of geoengineering for the first time was very thoroughly poisoned by the fact that it was apparently a key facet of Ikari Gendō’s work, the man who had sired her and then abandoned her in the wake of her mother’s death being perhaps the one person she was least looking forward to seeing again. Not to mention, looking out upon the GeoFront for a few moments before it disappeared from view as they drew closer to their destination filled her with the strangest sense of full-body déjà vu, as though she’d been here before, perhaps when she was much smaller and her mother was still alive. Large swaths of that time, she had long since discovered, were indistinct and imprecise at best, thoroughly overshadowed as they were by the looming dark silhouette of the man she might soon be meeting for the first time in a decade as he left her behind and walked out of her life, not to be seen again—until now, that is—but seeing the GeoFront, the feeling that she had been here before, that she remembered this place, intensified by the moment. 

She could smell the particular olfactory notes of the filtration system upon the air. She anticipated a jolt in the trolley system before it came, and upon accepting a folder that Misato had given over to her as an afterthought, she noted that the feeling of the stationery in her hand was eerily familiar, for all that the name she half-recalled being attached to it was completely at odds with its rich blue cover, the half-maple leaf the logo used, and the name emblazoned upon it. She opened it up mostly to distract herself, placing the tagline of NERV as belonging to a nineteenth century poem, this particular line showing up again later as a quoted phrase in Anne of Green Gables (metabiology was a STEM field, after all, and even if she had chosen to try her hand at a humanities degree, European poetry would certainly not be her first choice), and started to go through a lot of the early material, skimming the confidentiality stuff that she was sure that someone would fill her in on later, if only because strictures of classification was something that was worth reiterating on, and any rational person would imagine that someone Yui’s age would need multiple reminders (the fact that she didn’t really notwithstanding), only to discover that, with the exception of the United Nations having given NERV their stamp of approval, thus marking the special agency as an international organisation, and not merely an apparatus of the Japanese government, as Yui had originally supposed, the majority of it was glorified fluff. She closed it and gave up on reading it, then, just in time to steer Misato away from a wrong pathway—though how she knew that it was wrong was…a little beyond her right then.

“Wow, thanks,” said Misato, huffing in relief. “I’m still a little new here, and haven’t quite… Wait a minute. How did you know that that was the wrong way…?”

Misato planted her fists on her hips in practically a pantomime of suspicion, and Yui, perplexed by a surge of incredibly strong déjà vu as she was, didn’t see the point in trying to make up a reason. “I think I’ve been here before when I was…way younger. Quite a lot, actually—it’s almost like I’m walking through a house I used to live in but barely remember, at least consciously…”

“Mm. And what way would that have led?” Misato asked.

“Hydroponic garden growing algae to store back-up oxygen,” said Yui, almost feeling like someone else’s words were coming from out of her mouth. “Where are we trying to go, anyway?”

“Central Dogma,” said Misato.

Yui looked around, spotted the number painted onto the painfully familiar grey metal wall, and gave a direction. “This way. The numbers ought to decline as we reach it. It’s a handy navigational tip…”

“Alright, then,” Misato sighed. “We’ll do it your way, Yui…”

Yui nodded, and then followed Misato’s lead as she took Yui’s directions. Yui slipped the folder into her handbag, and reached up to adjust the length of black lace tied about her neck as a choker, and drew the cardigan closer about herself—perhaps in an effort to combat the heat of the eternal summer, the AC down in the facility in the bowels of the GeoFront was incredibly aggressive, and it was growing a little chilly, given that the sun was just beginning to set upon the world above.

“So, how much do you remember of this place…?” asked Misato.

“Flashes and impressions, mostly,” said Yui. “I think I used to get lost down here a lot… But if you asked me to draw a map of this place from memory, sight unseen, I don’t think that I could do it. It’s much, much clearer now than it was even half an hour ago…”

“So this is like a trip down memory lane for you,” Misato summarised.

Yui shrugged weakly. “Something like that, at least…”

They continued ahead, and indeed, the numbers did wind down more and more with each hydraulic set of blast doors they passed; Yui kept track of where they were and where they’d been, and so whenever it happened that they did get turned around, she pointed it out fairly quickly, quickly enough that all that they had to do was backtrack and continue on their way. Through it all, every corner, every shadow, every stutter out of every vent, seemed only to remind Yui more and more of things she could not consciously recall, but that her body and her muscle memory, even though it was over a decade old, had maintained a remarkably acute grasp of, under the circumstances, though every recollection disturbed her, as she furrowed her brow, trying in vain to dig up more of the details beyond this strange understanding that she seemed to have of the facility all around them, which she could not possibly have set foot into for at least the past decade.

Eventually, the doors opened, and on the other side of them was not yet more corridor space, but the silhouette of another woman, who swiftly came into focus. 

About as tall as Misato and more slender, less full-figured of build (though the difference was quite slight, if she was being honest with herself) the woman before them, whose hair was dyed blonde down to the roots, but whose eyebrows and eyelashes were unfalteringly those of a natural brunette (Yui wondered for a moment why, exactly, anyone would spring for a dye job that thorough without also doing the same to the other hair that was readily apparent on her face), wore a lab coat over a pale blue one-piece swimsuit, a pair of unobtrusive black flats upon her feet, while her dull green eyes widened at the sight of her, fair skin paling even further, before they snapped to Misato and back again, subsiding into surprise. Yui blinked—if she had been one to vocalise her speculations, she would have said that the woman had reacted as if she had just seen a ghost—but otherwise said nothing, her cobalt eyes watching the space between her two elders as the woman in the lab coat seemed to make a concerted effort not to look directly upon Yui again. “Captain Katsuragi. I’m surprised. I thought that I would have to comb through the entire GeoFront looking for you.”

“Ah, well, I can’t take all of the credit,” Misato replied almost bashfully, raising an arm to rub at the back of her neck. “Yui here was actually a huge help in us not getting lost on the way down…”

The bottle-blonde blinked. “…Yui…?”

“Yeah, Yui,” Misato confirmed, her bashfulness melting away like snow in the desert. “Ikari Yui, as in the girl I was sent to go get from the train station. The Third Child.”

“Forgive me,” the woman recovered, raising both of her hands in surrender. “It’s just that whenever that name is used, usually it’s used to refer to Doctor Ikari Yui, not—”

“—Her daughter?” Yui interjected, not willing to risk having her old identity exhumed for a second time today. One time was already once too many, as far as she was concerned, considering she still seemed to have the man who had sired her to deal with. Once again, the bottle-blonde’s eyes snapped to her, albeit, it seemed, unwillingly, but Yui turned on the charm as effectively as she could, widening her eyes, adopting a well-worn and tried and tested fake smile, and extended the hand not holding onto the leather strap of her handbag. “That’s me, by the way. It’s lovely to meet you…”

“Akagi Ritsuko,” the bottle-blonde replied bluntly, eyeing her hand but making no move to take it.

Fine. Yui could work with that. “Doctor Akagi Ritsuko…? As in, A Study of Oscillating Nictitation in the Libido-Destrudo Orientation of Wetware Computing, by Akagi, Fuyutsuki, et al.? That Doctor Akagi Ritsuko?”

That seemed to strike a nerve, as Dr. Akagi Ritsuko almost flinched at the name, blinking in shock. “I…wasn’t aware that you were familiar with my work…”

“I actually had to do a lab analysis of a small-scale replication of the experiment depicted in Figure XIX,” said Yui, letting her hand drop by her side to grab hold of the leather strap as well. “In the following correspondence, I actually found your dissent to the findings of Dr. Tokita’s experimental analysis of your team’s drawing of a relationship between the ego density and the observed dynamics of the vector field in Figure XVI to be particularly insightful—if, perhaps, containing a few too many veiled insults towards the man’s sexual virility for the liking of those who’re of stricter minds about professionalism. Though, frankly, I think it just makes academia needlessly bloodless to cling too tightly to those standards…”

It…was actually somewhat amusing, Yui had to admit, albeit a bit vindictive of her, to watch as the blonde’s jaw worked uselessly, her eyes wide, as she tried and failed to find a way to respond to everything that Yui had just said.

“Apparently, Yui here has a master’s degree in metaphysical biology,” said Misato, her tone that of a proud mother brandishing their child’s achievements—Yui’s cheeks pinked at the compliment, and flushed in full as Misato wrapped an arm around her and more or less wrenched her flush against her side, stiffening at the alien feeling of being embraced for the very first time in her life that she could remember. “She spoke a little about how political PhD programs are, and that she doesn’t know if she’ll be continuing in the field because of it. Maybe you could put in a good word or two for her…?”

“Misato, this is no time—!” Dr. Akagi erupted, her agitation seeming to have boiled over.

“Like Hell it isn’t,” Misato countered coolly. “Why did you give me an out-of-date dossier, and why do you seem surprised…?”

“It’s my job to make sure that the Evangelions are in working order, not to know everything there is to know about the pilots,” said Dr. Akagi. “I’m not involved with the collection or compilation of the pilots’ details. The commander handed that dossier to me, and I handed it to you, directly. If you have issues with any of that, then by all means, feel free to take it up with him.”

“I swear, there had better be a proper plugsuit ready for her, Rits…” said Misato.

“Thankfully, neither you nor I have to worry about that,” said Dr. Akagi. “The vice-commander has it in hand. Came down to make sure that everything was in order personally.”

“Good,” Misato nodded.

“In any case,” said Dr. Akagi. “That N2 mine that the JSSDF was so proud of doesn’t seem to have worked. Surprise, surprise, conventional weapons are borderline useless against an A.T. Field…”

Yui blinked again, her lips parting in shock. A.T.? As in…an Absolute Terror Field…?! But those are supposed to be purely theoretical…!

“How long do we have?” asked Misato.

“The MAGI’s estimate is between half an hour and three before it’s regenerated completely,” Akagi explained. “Two concurrences, one abstention. We’re aiming to sortie Unit-01 in no more than two hours.”

“Which two…?” asked Yui before she could help it. Both sets of eyes turned towards her, then, and she quailed under the weight of their united scrutiny.

“…Melchior and Casper,” Dr. Akagi answered regardless. “Balthasar abstained.”

Yui nodded. That made enough sense.

“How do you know the names of the MAGI…?” asked Misato.

“How do I know almost everything that’s publicly available about the single most groundbreaking union of bioengineering and metabiology currently in existence?” Yui asked, taken aback by the question. “The paper that I referred to earlier was conducted using those very same machines, Misato-san. They’re practically the gold standard in both neural computation and wetware computing.”

Dr. Akagi was looking at her, Yui knew, but not like she had seen a ghost, as she had earlier; now, it was a gaze of assessment, as if she was recategorising Yui in her mind, and deliberating on where she fit. In the end, she sighed, and waved them along. “C’mon, and follow me. I’ll guide you both to Central Dogma. Commander Ikari said he wanted to talk to his child before the sortie, anyways…”

Misato and Yui nodded, and followed along—though Yui stewed in the dreadful anticipation of now seeing her absent father again for the first time. She’d paid enough attention during that exchange to be able to put together more or less what would be expected of her: that whatever this ‘Unit-01’ was, she would be expected to pilot it, more than likely against this alleged xenoform in the form of the Angel, which seemed to be capable of generating a four-dimensional field that, previously, Yui had only ever witnessed as a set of abstract, dry Gödel-derived equations in black-and-white print in a second-hand textbook; and moreover, to have any capacity to harm it, Unit-01 would also have to be capable of generating the same field, albeit one that was adversarially-oriented to cancel it out. Frankly, as someone who had gained some level of passion for the science she had learned so rigorously, the chance to see those theories put into action ought to have been borderline-irresistible, and to a large extent, it was.

There was just one looming, dark silhouette in the way.

When Yui turned her attention at last from her ruminations to take in her surroundings again, as she held her handbag almost in front of her like she thought of it as a shield of some design, she found that she was staring at the backs of Dr. Akagi’s and Misato’s heads, but nothing else, as save for the light coming in from the corridor behind them, the room beyond was pitch-black, and imposing in a way that suggested to her the cavernous extent of its dimensions. 

She was about to ask what was going on, but then, the doors slid closed behind her, and after a brief, perfectly-choreographed pause, the overhead lights switched on.

Yui’s heart shot up into her throat as she stumbled back, nearly falling onto her rear before landing up against the closed door behind her, as she beheld a vision out of her forgotten nightmares.

Oh, certainly, it was dressed up now—violet and green armour plating covered its entire body as the monster floated upright in an ocean of maroon fluid, its horned helmet covering its face and head, such that it looked almost mechanical, but she wasn’t fooled: beneath the blue jaw-plate, she remembered the rows of oversized human teeth, and behind the dulled lenses, she could sense the blank, blind, fish-eyed stare of the immense green eyes that had gazed back into her mind from across oceans of repressed and overshadowed memories from out of the darkest recesses of her subconscious.

“Is that…” she gasped, swallowing hard to try to keep her gorge down. “Is that…Unit-01…?”

“Correct,” spoke a cold, imperious voice, and Yui lifted her gaze to stare at a higher podium, seeing for the first time that same silhouette from her earliest concrete recollections, wrought not from shadow, but rather flesh and blood.

The years had not been kind to him, she observed. She had no point of comparison, granted, as the only thing she could remember of him from before was that dark, looming silhouette, but she knew it to be true all the same. He wore a black uniform, albeit lackadaisically, with the jacket open, and from out of the pockets into which he had shoved his hands, she could see the edges of white gloves peeking. A scruffy chinstrap beard covered his jawline, and his lips were pressed, bloodless and white with tension so old that she could imagine that he was no longer even aware of the clenching of his jaw, into a frown that she could only too easily believe to be every bit as nearly perpetual as the graven furrow in his dark, heavy brow, with his cheeks hollow, his features drawn and gaunt with the evidence of immense stress and sleepless nights, halfway-hidden beneath a pair of glasses with its lenses tinted dark orange. The brown hair on his head was similarly scruffy and clumsily-cut, seemingly considered just as much of an afterthought, and while once, it seemed as if there might have been the beginnings of smile-lines upon his cheeks, those were now no more than a distant memory, having faded into nonexistence a long time ago, leaving behind only the lonely and desolate visage of a profoundly unhappy man.

There were a lot of things that she had expected to feel, coming face-to-face with her father. Once, it had seemed natural to her that she would feel angry, that she would feel hurt, that she might even hate him, and in her hate, demand an explanation. But long hours of introspection had forced her to realise that whatever he said in response, it would not be enough, and that even if he broke down and apologised for everything that he had and hadn’t done, as he did only in the wildest and most tormented of her adolescent fantasies, never would that be enough to satisfy her—there were no words in any language, after all, that could ever manage to erase or to amend the fact that he simply wasn’t there, and moreover, that it was by choice that he wasn’t; that even if he declared that he loved her as his daughter, and dedicated his life to showing it, it would never fully silence the niggling voice in the back of her head that continued to observe that however much he said that he loved her, if he ever said even that much, it wasn’t enough for him not to abandon her, and then not to say another word to her for more than ten full years of her life. There was no mending that wound, and it would forever remain impossible to bridge that divide, so she had stopped trying, and endeavoured as best as she could to cut him out of her heart, to cultivate not hatred, which was still love by a different name, but a sense of indifference, that she could greet him as a stranger. And she had maintained that she had succeeded in this, that she had no feelings towards him, even as those she encountered regularly made remarks that, in her recollection, only ever expressed doubt. They had said, in spite of her protests to the contrary, that when she grew older, she would change her mind, that he was her father, and that there was nothing in Heaven or on Earth that could change that fact; and while she had passed that off as older people seeing any derivation from the norm employed by young people as merely a phase, worthy only of condescension and ridicule as well as smug self-satisfaction if the vindication they expected like the sunrise arrived, as if that served as a confirmation of the ‘natural order’—that God was in His Heaven, and all is right with the world, she mused with bitter mirth—it became clear to her in that moment that some of it had gotten under her skin.

Because for all of her certainty and all of her protests, Yui had never managed to anticipate that the one prevailing emotion she felt at laying eyes upon Ikari Gendō wasn’t love or hatred or sorrow, but pity.

“Father,” she said flatly.

“Daughter,” he acknowledged.

So it wasn’t transphobia that caused him to give the wrong name and picture in the dossier, thought Yui as she gazed up at him—but he did not meet her gaze, instead looking just about everywhere but her. It would likely have fooled anyone less likely to pay attention, or indeed anyone who was unfamiliar with the many and myriad methods of avoiding direct eye contact with another while concealing that that was what you were trying to, but Yui had used plenty of them over the years, and she knew them when she saw them.

He acknowledged her as his daughter. But he could not bear to look at her.

A riddle, she concluded, to be put aside for the present, and puzzled out at another time.

“You mean for me to pilot this,” she asserted. “You mean to put me into this…this thing…”

“I do,” he confirmed.

“And you mean for me to go out and kill the Angel, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Why?” she asked him, point-blank, folding her arms across her chest.

“Because you’re the only one who can,” he told her.

“…How can you bear to look at it,” she asked him hollowly, “But not me…?”

“That is irrelevant.”

“Like Hell it’s irrelevant,” she spat, anger rising in her like a choking frost. “I didn’t kill her!”

He paused at that, and said nothing.

“I don’t remember a lot about that day,” she continued. “Until I set foot in this place, I would never have remembered that I was here that day, and that I watched it happen, the same as you. But I was, and I did, the same as you. So why on Earth is it still here…?!”

She was being shrill. She knew that.

She also couldn’t quite bring herself to care.

“It was her life’s work,” he said, finally dragging his attention down to gaze upon her more directly, the sheer intensity of his gaze all but pinning her under its weight, as a muscle flexed visibly in his jaw as he strained to maintain it. “Now, time grows short. Are you going to pilot it, or not…?”

“And if I don’t?” she asked, folding her arms across her modest chest. “If I refuse…?”

“Then I will have to employ alternative methods,” he told her flatly.

“Ayanami Rei, you mean,” she deduced out loud. “But if she was in any condition to do what you’re asking of me, you wouldn’t have bothered to ask me in the first place. You wouldn’t choose to have to look at me, to confront the piece of your past that I represent, if you didn’t have a use for me…and you went and said it yourself, didn’t you? Only I can do it…”

He didn’t answer. Her assertion rang out across the open air, unchallenged.

“Fine,” she spat with a huff. “Since she’s almost certainly injured, I’ll spare us both the indignity of you rolling her out as a cheap attempt at emotional manipulation. I’ll do it. I’ll pilot this one monster to kill the other monster. Like a kaiju battle, right? I’ll do it.”

The suit they gave her—a plugsuit, they called it, made of some overengineered lycra substitute, she didn’t doubt—was certainly a novelty, a loose, vaguely-human-shaped tyrian and violet bag that, when she pressed a button on the cuff, vacuum-sealed to her body, and she understood as soon as it was done exactly why she had been instructed to shed all of her undergarments before putting it on, with the ‘01’ stencilled to sit prettily right above the beginning of her would-be décolletage. Choosing to be glad that she would at the very least be able to go out there and put her life on the line without looking particularly frumpy, she took a look at herself in the locker room mirror as she attached the corresponding violet interface headset, coming in two pieces, for whatever reason (though she supposed that it saved them from having to size a headband to a particular pilot’s head), and once that was done, and her wolf cut was as she liked it, Yui nodded to her reflection, and turned to stride out of the locker room and into the staging area.

Unit-01 stood as an immense titan, with the red substance—bakelite, she had been told upon asking, and the name of it rang a bell in the part of her brain that remembered digging into a bioengineering journal a few months ago, informing her that the compound was essentially an exceptional coolant developed as a bit of a stopgap measure while research into a room-temperature superconductor, having taken a completely understandable pause during the Second Impact, and the period of global chaos that had followed directly in its wake, started up once more—having been drained, and about it a full crew buzzed in a frenzy like an agitated hive of bees, scrambling hurriedly as they were over and about a labyrinthine mess of gantries and scaffolding to ready the giant armoured monster for battle, and she paused for a moment, albeit at a place where she would be out of the way, and stared up at the thing that she was sure had played some pivotal role in her mother’s death, though what she could recall was fuzzy, and if she had not undergone the soul-searching necessary to come to grips with her own gender, and remained mired in the misery that she had known as Shinji, by this point in time in that alternate, and much sadder reality, she might not have brought those memories close enough to the surface of her mind to be able to recall even the brief, nightmarish flashes that she currently could, the repressed trauma of an abandoned child. It occurred to her, then, that she would be within that…thing. She could see where she would go from here: in the time that it had taken for the Angel to finish regenerating, and to start blasting Tokyo-3 above them, with each of the impacts causing the ground to shake above their heads and little pieces of sediment to come, sometimes, down from the ceiling of NERV, she had been briefed on the basics, and could identify the pallid pill-shape of the entry plug, slotted at an angle to be lowered and inserted directly into the metal-plated spinal column of the monstrosity that she had volunteered to pilot, largely in order to deny the Commander the satisfaction of strong-arming her, and as she gazed upon it, and had a memory of bone interpose itself atop the metallic plating that existed there now, she took a deep breath, letting her eyes flutter closed, held it, and let it out in a slow, controlled pulse.

Once upon a time, she had had a mantra—a desperate, grasping thing, a plea to an uncaring world to allow her a place within it: I mustn’t run away.

The one she recited to herself was similar in character, and yet distinct, for she had decided that she was done begging for a world that would never listen, never give her what she wanted: No way but forward.

With that in mind, she strode forth and ascended the scattered scaffolds and gantries, climbing up to the berth where a catwalk led directly to the open entry plug. Determined as she was, she lowered herself to all fours as she climbed into it, finding the chair in which she would sit there, and settled herself into it, her head lying back against the headrest as she positioned her legs and slotted her arms into the control yokes.

This really is more comfortable than I would have given it credit for, she thought to herself, before a tech swung the door shut, sealing it behind her, and leaving her in darkness. She could hear the metal groan as the catwalk was withdrawn, leaving her in the entry plug and suspended above the spinal port into which she would be lowered, and remained calm as the plug began to fill with a loud deluge of orange fluid, rather like the originally-German soda, Fanta, in its hue. She remembered from the briefing that Doctor Akagi had given her that the compound, dubbed ‘LCL’, would directly oxygenate her blood, and that she would need to fight her primate instincts in order to breathe the substance in and swallow it, that it could fill her lungs—and as she held down a sudden surge of atavistic panic, and forced herself, consciously, to breathe it in through her nose and her mouth, which was a profoundly uncomfortable experience for reasons that went rather beyond merely the primal urge not to drown, she was conscious of the crane mechanism that held the entry plug in which she was suddenly breathing in the orange liquid moving, lowering her smoothly down into the spinal port as indistinct instructions were all but shouted through the loudspeakers reverberating through the green metal plating that made up the majority of this area of NERV. She took a deep breath in, and then out, with the last of the air in her lungs forming bubbles in the orange liquid, and grasped hold of the control yokes as tightly as she could without hurting herself, relying on them to ground her as she was slotted the rest of the way down into the belly of the beast.

Colours suddenly flooded the inside of the lit-up entry plug, some that she could not name and a few that she was certain that no human eye had ever before seen, and then she blinked, and could see the outside all around her, as though the entry plug was suddenly transparent, or had been replaced with cameras. But it didn’t fool her for a moment, for more momentous than any of it was the immense and patient presence that now lurked at the back of her mind, seeming…more curious about her than anything, and ready to recoil at the hostility that lurked within her towards this towering abomination.

And yet…

“There’s a lot that…I still don’t remember about that day,” she spoke aloud, and given that she was now inside of it, and could feel part of it inside of her, pressing against the boundaries of her mind, her ego, her very sense of self, she knew that it would be able to hear every word that she said or thought, no matter how softly she said it. “But I intend to find out. I would be remiss not to consider that…maybe it’s unfair to you, to blame you for what happened, whatever it was. Maybe you were just a victim in all of this. Maybe you had no choice. And if I find out that that’s the case, that you, too, were forced to be a puppet on someone else’s strings, then…right here, and right now, I will apologise for that. But that doesn’t matter right now, does it…?”

A bitter smile curled into her lips, and she could feel the presence, the ghost in the machine, if not a god outright, ponderous and vast as it was, as it acknowledged her, and nudged at her, a response that was a fair bit more immense than she could truly comprehend, too layered to the point that all that Yui was able to get out of it was this muddled sense of vagueness and imprecision, but that much was enough: she was sure that it had heard her, and acknowledged what she had just said to it.

“Right now, we have bigger issues, don’t we?” she continued, letting go of her hate for a little bit, in a way that would allow for the presence, pressed up against her mind as it was, to understand just what it was that she was doing. In the same vein, she thought of what she had seen, the way that seawater coursed down from its sinewy carapace like a mountain emerging suddenly from out of the seafloor, and pushed it in the direction of the presence, hoping that it could see as she saw, if only for a little bit, and make some semblance of sense out of it. It recoiled, though this time, more in something akin to revulsion than the sort of trepidation that she had initially sensed from it, and she smiled, genuinely, at the feeling. “For whatever happened the day that my mother died, there will be a reckoning. If you end up having been responsible, as I thought that you were upon seeing you, then I will seek vengeance upon you; if you were a victim, just as I was, then I’ll just as readily seek vengeance on your behalf. But right now, that thing out there is our enemy and will try to kill us, so we’ll need to rely on each other in order to survive, and to prevail. So we’ll set that aside, for the time being, and do what we’ll need to do. You’ll rely on me to guide you, and I’ll rely on you to respond. So, can I rely on you, Unit-01…?”

The platform within which Unit-01 stood berthed began to move, with a sudden jolting shift as well as a grind of metal against metal, of groaning machinery and overengineered redundancy mechanisms; yet, though it was a bit of a shock, it was not enough to interrupt their conversation, such as it was. Suddenly, it felt as though she could feel its limbs as her own—

An impression insisted itself into the forefront of her mind.

Not it, then. Her.

Yui smiled. “Alright, then. I can work with that…”

“EVA LAUNCH!”

She had a split second to brace herself before double-digit G-forces assaulted her body all at once, a pained grimace unwillingly splitting her face as the Evangelion was shot upwards, through a uniform green chute, all the way up until it spat its way out into the night sky, slamming on the brakes hard enough for her to feel whiplashed as her body jolted back into stillness, her teeth clacking together painfully.

“Damn it…” she swore. Then, still feeling her presence in the back of her head, Yui asked, “How’re you feeling, Unit-01? A little shaken-up?”

Her presence shifted. She interpreted that as yes, but not too badly, and hoped that she was correct.

“Alright, then,” Yui nodded, and lifted Unit-01’s head, seeing the world through her eyes.

‘Alright, Yui, just try walking for now,’ came the tinny voice of Dr. Akagi through a speaker that was somewhere in the entry plug. ‘Your synch ratio is holding steady at 67%. That’s very, very good, especially given that this is your first activation…’

“Thank you, doctor,” Yui replied. Then, to Unit-01, she said, “Let’s do this, then. One foot at a time, nice and easy…”

She took one step forth, and Unit-01 took it with her, and then another—but then she nudged at Yui, and she snapped her head up, and saw across the way that the Angel, which was some distance away, had at last taken notice of them, and turned to face them.

The Angel—Sachiel, the word pressed into her brain, though more insistently, more imperious in its feeling than the impressions that she had previously felt from her—had, in fact, more than regenerated, but instead evolved: the first mask had been pushed to the side in favour of another mask, one that was rounder, and with a much shorter beak, in the eyeholes of which points of malevolent crimson bloomed. That light in its mask intensified, and immediately, Yui did her best to roll away, and she worked with her, getting free in the nick of time.

The world went white. An explosion devastated the platform out of which they had emerged, and in an open contravention of the various rules of energy transference, that eruption took the shape of a cross. If they had been hit with that, Yui knew, Unit-01 could have been seriously hurt.

(Not damaged, some part of her brain noted, but hurt. The former word felt as fruitless as trying to force two of the same magnet up against each other.)

‘Yui!’ called Misato’s voice over the same. ‘What’s happening…?!’

“The Angel just tried to blow us up, that’s what,” Yui replied. “Gonna try and get closer…”

Thus far, she had gotten the gist. The control yokes were just for tactile feedback, to aid in what the true task here was: to conceptualise motion using a body not her own. A part of her chortled at that, the part that recalled what the changes in her body had been like three years ago, only a few months’ time into her transformation, learning first-hand all the ways that a body changed as it became more hers, and decided to apply a few of the same experiences that she had felt then to now.

Of course she knew what it was like to move in a body that wasn’t hers. She had done it for the first eleven years of her life. In comparison to that existential nightmare that she had lived under for so long that it had become mundane, this was nothing.

“Come on, Unit-01,” she murmured. “We can do this… As one…”

In a low crouch, she ran through Tokyo-3 towards the Angel, ducking behind buildings as the Angel gazed upon her, and the crimson light turned from malevolent to murderous. She had no weapons, and little in the way of close-quarters combat skills, having never taken a martial arts class in her life, but it was clear to her in her current position, the sheer brawn that was coiled into the lean body of Unit-01, and she had to hope that it would be enough.

She rose up before the Angel, and once again malice transmuted to murder, but this time, Yui didn’t flinch away, knowing that she couldn’t, not at this distance, and instead decked the Angel, Sachiel, right in the second mask with a balled fist…

Or at least, she tried to.

An orange panel of luminous force made up of concentric radiating octagons flashed into being, the radiant light interposing itself between her fist and the Angel’s second mask. And as soon as she felt it, just as she did, resisting the blow, she knew immediately what it was.

The Angel’s A.T. Field…!

She shielded herself as the explosion erupted in her face, and she reacted in turn, flexing something that felt almost like a metaphysical muscle in their defence, and their own A.T. Field deployed, taking much of the damage, but little of the force, as they were blown back by the beam, heels dragging light furrows in the asphalt of the roads as they skidded across the ground until they smashed at last into a towering building and the world around them erupted into flame, knocking the breath out of Yui’s lungs as the impact shot out in sympathy across her spine, just as it had impacted Unit-01’s. Both of them slumped, but Yui looked up in time to see the Angel lumbering towards her, one heavy, awkward, but surefooted step at a time.

It would be upon them in moments, she knew.

‘Yui—!’ Misato’s voice, calling her name.

“I’m fine…!” she grunted out in response. “Can still fight…”

Yui dragged herself, and Unit-01 by extension, up out of her slumped position, battered and bruised as she was, and ran through what she remembered from the few martial arts movies she had seen: feet kept shoulder-width apart, arms held in fists in front of her to protect both face and body, keeping her gaze right on the Angel as it approached, and she did all of this, while reminding herself of one fundamental truth.

There were only two things that could get through an A.T. Field, theoretically:

1. An absolutely ungodly amount of force, apparently in excess of the yield of an N2 mine, and
2. Another A.T. Field that was possessed of equal or greater intensity, running in an opposing libido-destrudo orientation, to cancel out and negate the first A.T. Field.

Libido and destrudo. In lay terms, at least in this case, analogous to attraction and repulsion. Like an alkaline fluid being neutralised by an acidic, while simultaneously acting as opposing poles.

(Hey, no one had ever accused metaphysical biology of making conventional sense.)

“Looks like we can’t produce one,” she said, both to herself and Unit-01. “So let’s try the other…”

Another impression, lacking the imperious character that had come with the name, imposed itself in the forefront of her mind. It was a feeling that defied words, and describing it would be akin to describing a bicep’s flexion: absent the rote description of the mechanics, to describe the sensation itself could only ever end up being largely self-referential; but it was one that she took to heart, that feeling, and as the Angel now began to charge up its attack again, she launched Unit-01 into action, and concentrated on reproducing that exact same feeling.

She punched again, and the Angel made no move to stop her—after all, the A.T. Field would do that for it, absent any discernible effort on its part—but this time, when she encountered the Angel’s A.T. Field, she flexed that metaphysical muscle like it was her own, and just like that, Unit-01’s A.T. Field unfurled, its opposing orientation neutralising the Angel’s and returning the space between to the laws of normal physics in the process as the unimpeded momentum of the punch, reinforced by virtue of the resistance put before it and the additional effort exerted, crashed into its body, knuckles bruising against the bone-like structure of the mask as it gave way, cracking under the force of the punch like how she always imagined that breaking a nose would feel like.

The Angel reeled in silence, its body staggering back as it nearly toppled, clearly shocked by the hit, stunned by the impact, and recoiling in pain at the breakage. But its reprisal, when it came, was, as a result, singularly vindictive.

She launched another punch, but the Angel’s three-fingered hand grabbed it, and twisted, while with its other, it did the same to her guard, wrenching Unit-01’s arms apart, as the second mask, now featuring a crack right down the middle, an almost poetic-looking fracture, glared with a vengeful bloodlust, and it was all that she could do to shield her chest with her A.T. Field, as she was blasted once again, and this time, the tower from earlier shattered beneath the force with which she was repelled away, her and Unit-01 slamming their way through two or three towers behind it until they finally collided into one strong enough to hold up under the force.

“Nurggghhh…” she groaned, pain throbbing in sharp spasms across her middle, like she had broken several ribs there and was struggling to breathe. It had been difficult to draw herself up before, but now the feat was a near-complete impossibility, and as she struggled to work with Unit-01 and stand once more, the Angel, having learned the error of its ways, leapt towards them, the flicker of its A.T. Field bolstering what was surely an acrobatic feat in and of itself, closing the distance before she could rise, let alone mount any manner of defence of herself. “You…absolute bastard…!”

‘Yui! Get out of there! RETREAT! THAT’S AN ORDER!’

Heedless of her pained curses, Sachiel grabbed Unit-01’s helmet, and dragged them aloft, with both of them hanging suspended in the air, wholly at the Angel’s mercy.

BOOM—!

“KYAH—!” Yui cried out as she white-knuckled the control yokes, her head snapping back with the force of the piercing blow hammering into her head.

BOOM—!

“GUH—!” Again, her head snapped back, and she could hear the armour creak, like it was about to give way.

BOOM—!

“GAAAAHHH—!”

A railroad spike driven into her eye with a jackhammer. The air beneath her feet as she was flung in a white-hot delirium across the city, slamming through buildings again until she stopped, a blinding flood of crimson-red gushing out of the piercing wound in her head.

‘YUI!’ She heard Misato’s voice distantly, as she struggled to remain conscious. ‘YUI—!’

Mother… Yui began to fade. Mother… Did I do well…?

THUMP-THUNK.

A heartbeat, or something like it. A pulse that shuddered throughout the Evangelion’s entire being.

Her skin was trapped in metal.

Metal skin, electric blood.

Pulses beneath her flesh. Pain, piercing, tormenting, spasming…

Torture. Torment. Agony…

Pain. Pain. PAIN!

“GRAAGH—!” It was, and wasn’t her, the bestial roar out of her throat. Endorphins coursed, and it felt like there was more adrenaline in her veins than blood. Heart hammered in her ears, pulse pounding.

‘Unit-01…! It’s…! It’s going berserk—!’

HATE.

<How long has it been, I wonder? Since I decided that I detest humanity…?>

<How long has it been, I wonder? Since I decided that I adore humanity…?>

<Can you remind me, darling? I’m afraid that I can’t quite recall…>

<It’s been…so long…>

<So very long…>

<Since the last time that I heard your voice…>

HATE—!

Sachiel’s arm lashed forth to finish the job. How dare…!

Arm grasped, kick lashing out. Collision. Turnabout is fair play.

Running, running. No time to breathe. Don’t give — an instant. Not a moment.

Bowl Sachiel over. The A.T. Field was in the way. Rip it. Tear it. Sunder it.

Grasping. Pulling. Success!

The core was exposed, its dull glow a vibrant red, like a painfully obvious weak point on a boss in a video game. How very convenient of the Angels, to colour-code their vulnerabilities like this.

Smash it.

Pummel it.

Crack it.

DESTROY IT—!

The core cracked. The core split. The core shattered…

And in a final act of spite, Sachiel reached out, and embraced her…

And erupted in a pillar of flame, shaped like a cross.

The Angel, Sachiel, was no more.

“Target…” Yui grunted out through pained groans and gritted teeth, as the last of her consciousness fled her, chasing the endorphins on the way out. “…Eliminated…”

With that, Ikari Yui’s eyes fluttered shut, and she passed out: and Unit-01’s helmet, sundered, now at last split in twain and fell away, crashing down to street level with the weight of two minivans, splitting the pavement as they landed, as the immense form of the Evangelion slumped, as if in defence of she who was floating in LCL, unconscious, and dead to the world, within.

Later, when she awoke, it was in what felt like an infirmary bed, wrapped in cheap, rough sheets, as per usual in such settings, and clad a shapeless, blue paper hospital gown, with the sun streaming through a window to her left, and cicadas singing loudly upon the quiet, artificial wind that blew softly throughout the GeoFront, as she stared up at a sight that she did not recognise in the slightest, and discovered that she liked very little.

An unfamiliar ceiling, Yui thought to herself. I certainly hope that this doesn’t become a pattern…

She was released that day, which was a relief; two days she had apparently spent unconscious as she recuperated from the mental strain of her first connection with the Evangelion, especially one that had gone the way that it had, and as she listened to the orderly in the infirmary natter off about things that were rather far above his paygrade while taking her medications (thankful for the note that they had been administered to her intravenously while she slept—she imagined that Misato was responsible for that consideration, and made a note to express her gratitude to the woman directly when she got a chance to do so), she considered to herself that while she and Unit-01 had come to an understanding, her lack of know-how with regards to combat had proven a substantial issue, and would likely prove to be a recurring problem, should there be any more Angels that she would need to fight in the future—which Yui felt oddly certain that there would be. She chuckled to herself under her breath as she dressed, shedding the awful hospital gown in favour of her own clothes (being, of course, similar to the ones that she had worn on the way into Tokyo-3, albeit in slightly different shades—eggshell instead of ivory for her blouse and so on) and fixing her hair and her accessories in the dinky little mirror the hospital room provided her, as she made ready to depart—she had not imagined that the realities of field research would be so strenuous, though she confessed that there was a part of her that was rather thrilled, still riding the high of having not only seen an A.T. Field in action, but having felt one, and moreover, having understood the sensation of being a creature capable of generating one, and already looking forward to witnessing more of the real-world applications of the field that she had studied so fervently up until this point.

I mean, shoot, if they’re going to give me the opportunity to collect all of this groundbreaking data, I might as well go for that doctorate after all, Yui mused, as she shouldered her handbag and adjusted her beret, before walking out of her hospital room—though, seemingly just in time to cross paths with someone that, though she had never met her in person before, she knew by name.

Ayanami Rei.

Doctors and nurses carted her bed down the corridor past Yui, conversing in furtive, fearful tones, in the rare event that they spoke at all, and while Yui stood to the side, she took the opportunity to get her first decent look at her fellow pilot, only to lock eyes with her almost immediately.

It was…uncanny, to an extent. But for her colouration—her surpassing ivory pallour, which, but for the pale blue shade of her hair, Yui thought would have been indicative of albinism, the aforementioned hair colour, and indeed, the unmistakable blood-red hue of her eyes, seeming dull and lifeless at first glance, and glassy, like those of a corpse or a doll, but which Yui noticed glimmered with the well-hidden lustre of what to her eyes seemed a ceaselessly observant awareness—it indeed would have been like looking directly into a mirror. From her cheekbones to the shape of her jaw, the cast of her brow and the tilt of her eyes… Every bit of it, if she was being honest, was unmistakably her, and she imagined, for a moment, that they might be able to pass as twins, if Ayanami was at all amenable to such. Making direct eye contact with the girl upon the gurney, wrapped in fresh bandages as she was, Yui was dimly aware of the fact that, in a situation such as this, when one was staring down their near-doppelganger, her most immediate, visceral response really ought to have been one of repulsion, if not a complicated interplay of attraction and aversion—but as things stood, all that Yui could really muster was fascination.

I want to get to know you, she found herself thinking. To understand you, not as a specimen, or even as a lover, but as a friend—a sister, perhaps… Have I ever wanted one…? I can’t recall…

She shook her head, and the connection was immediately broken. When Yui looked back at her, the moment was gone—and yet, Ayanami’s blood-red eyes continued to track her as the distance between them yawned wider and wider, and in them, she caught a glimpse of something, perhaps only a flicker, that made her flash back to the mirage that she had seen, like a premonition, in the heat rising from the asphalt.

Ah, there you are…

Then the gurney turned a corner, and Yui blinked, and chuckled softly, shaking her head and letting out her breath in a sigh. She would see Ayanami soon enough, she did not doubt, and she intended to find out if the two of them could perhaps pull off matching clothes when that happened. With that admittedly silly thought in mind, she turned and continued on her way to check out of the infirmary, wondering where they planned to put her, since she doubted that the Commander would go through the trouble of uprooting her whole life, such as it was, merely for what amounted to a glorified day trip. She considered that perhaps he would, as a power play if nothing else, but then dismissed it; from what she understood of Ikari Gendō, he wasn’t given to such frivolities, and whatever seeming-pettiness he engaged in likely only appeared that way because the seeming of the pettiness served his ends.

To which the question then becomes, what ends, exactly, is his actions serving…?

She shook her head. She had too little data to figure that out as things stood, and even the greatest of masons could not make bricks without clay. Speculating, at this juncture, would only be a waste of energy.

“Yui—!” came a now-familiar voice from behind her, causing her to stiffen, and turn.

“K-Katsuragi-taichō…?!” Yui replied, taken thoroughly off-guard; and sure enough, there she was, in all of her unfairly gorgeous beauty, her blue-black hair shimmering and gleaming in the artificial light of the infirmary like she’d just walked out of hair and make-up and was about to walk a runway. And perhaps more shockingly, she was grinning—imagine that, someone grinning at the sight of little old Yui—and even waving at her as she rushed forth to catch up to Yui, who was just on her way out.

Once she had caught up, she pouted, putting her hands on her hips and leaning forth to place herself on Yui’s level, height-wise. “What did I say about names, Ikari-jun-i?”

“O-of course, Misato-san. Forgive me,” Yui apologised with a bow. Then, she blinked, turning over the detail that her brain had just latched onto in her mind. “I’m sorry, jun-i…?”

“Well, functionally,” Misato shrugged. “NERV is technically a paramilitary organisation, but as it’s under the U.N. umbrella as a special agency, as soon as you stepped into Unit-01, you got a rank to go with it, describing your clearance level and your pay grade. Hence, jun-i.”

Yui blinked again. “…I get paid…?”

“Of course,” Misato scoffed, like it was obvious. “You don’t think that we’d expect you to do all of this for free, do you?”

“I…sorta thought of it as something more like an internship position,” Yui confessed sheepishly. “I somewhat expected to be paid in exposure…”

“Nah. This isn’t an ideal situation, clearly, but we are trying to make the best of it,” Misato refuted. “But we can go over the fine details later. How are you feeling? I wanted to come and check in on you, but I got caught up in paperwork with the recovery effort, and by the time I managed to get away…”

“I’m fine, Misato-san,” replied Yui with a muted chortle, lifting both of her hands in surrender. “I’m perfectly healthy, I’ve been assured.”

“…Hmph,” Misato huffed, seeming unconvinced, for whatever reason, as she stood again to her full height. “Well, be that as it may, I hope that you won’t mind too much if I escort you out? After all, I came all this way…”

Yui rolled her eyes at the transparent attempt at light-hearted emotional manipulation, and shrugged. “I can take care of myself, Misato-san. I’m used to being alone.”

“Well, that just won’t do,” Misato countered. “This isn’t the countryside anymore. There’re all kinds of creeps here in Tokyo-3 who’re just itching to get their hands on a cute girl like you. Gotta be careful…”

“Surely you’re exaggerating, Misato-san,” Yui chuckled. “But if I’m not keeping you from anything important, I guess that I would appreciate the company…”

“Yosh!” Misato proclaimed, her hands on her hips as she nodded authoritatively, and Yui surprised herself by laughing at that, hurrying to cover her mouth with the back of her hand politely, the oversized sleeves of her lead-grey cardigan allowing only the tips of her fingers to peek out of them, the nude shade of her manicured nails catching in the light. “Let’s go and get you checked out, then…”

“Let’s,” Yui said with a nod, turning and leading the way towards the hospital desk—or at least, she led the way to where the signage said the hospital desk would be, as she obviously didn’t know past that.

Between her brief first encounter with Ayanami and her reunion with Misato, Yui found her spirits, such as they were, bolstered, discovering the capacity within herself to smile, albeit slightly, as she, with the sage guidance of Misato, went through the handful of key peculiarities of the otherwise-rote bureaucratic process of checking herself out of NERV’s medical wing—obviously, being as she was, she had seen many doctors in her young life, been inside of several clinics, and maintained as a result a working knowledge of the proverbial bells and whistles of medical administration—soaking up Misato’s sheer animation like she was a flower turning to bathe in the sun. The woman was like a dynamo, so vividly and vibrantly alive, and Yui, who would readily admit that she was more of a shrinking violet, at least in social situations, was both overwhelmed by it, but also craving it. It was as if she was being fed in a way that she didn’t even know she had been hungry, just witnessing Misato, and exchanging the odd few words here and there as they made to approach the elevator—making it all the more devastating to her mood when the doors opened, and the one she wanted to see least in the world stood there, seeming almost to glare at her in silence.

Had she not given up on him, and still desired some measure of his regard, some degree of wanting him to be her father in truth, and not just on her family register, she would have wilted under the weight of his almost passively disdainful gaze. As it stood, she met his eyes evenly, tilting her chin up, and plastered a smile onto her face, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing how he affected her. “It’s alright. We can just get the next one.”

He nodded, the gesture so slight that she might have imagined it, and then the elevator door closed.

“Brrr…” Misato murmured, miming a shiver. “Speaking of creeps… You know some of the people in Central Dogma think that he might not even have blood?”

“Oh, no, he bleeds,” Yui said with a certainty she felt down to her very bones. “He just pretends like he doesn’t, even to himself.”

“…Are you alright, Yui-chan?” asked Misato.

“Yes, Misato-san,” she lied.

Misato stared at her, but Yui did not turn to meet her gaze. It was obvious that Misato knew that she was lying, but whether or not she would call Yui out on that, openly, remained to be seen. 

“…Where are you staying…?” Misato asked, instead of pressing the issue.

Yui opened her handbag, and drew from out of it a folder that the hospital administration had given to her upon checking out; she opened it, and flipped through a few of the enclosed forms and pages, giving a brief scan over each in turn, before she found what she was looking for. “GeoFront Block C, Apartment 201, apparently.”

Misato stilled next to her. “…With whom?”

“It doesn’t say,” Yui mused. “Which I take to mean ‘with nobody.’ It’s not really a big deal. I said as much before: I’m used to being alone. I can handle it.”

“…Excuse me,” Misato said, her voice light with false cheer that sent a chill down Yui’s spine. “Just remembered that I have a very important phone call to make…”

“Alright,” Yui shrugged. She turned to Misato, at least a quarter of the way, and smiled. “It was nice seeing you, Misato-san. I’ll leave you to it and go on ahead…”

“No,” Misato said, her severity firmer than any outburst. “You stay put. I’ll only be a minute…”

Despite herself, Yui almost jumped at the sharpness of her tone, and nodded mutely. Misato left her side, and stalked over to an adjoining corridor, with a phone mounted upon the wall that the woman briskly plucked off of its mount, slamming in a series of digits the rote memory of which seemed so ingrained as to have become second-nature to her, at least by this point, and then holding the phone up to her ear as it rang. There was a muted click, and a bit of a muffled, quasi-recognisable voice, though Yui wasn’t close enough to make out anything that it was saying, rendering its words in her ears into an indistinct auditory mire, but Misato’s elocution as she replied was so crisp and clear and almost curt that she could feel the shape of her response in her chest, as the older woman spoke.

“Yes, hello to you, too, Rits,” Misato said, the cool flatness of her tone utterly at odds with the lack of formality in her choice of words. “There’s been a change of plans. I will be assuming responsibility for the Third Child, effective immediately. Instead of being thrown into a barracks block to rot, Ikari Yui will be staying with me at my place for the foreseeable future… Ritsuko. This is not up for debate. I don’t care if you have to put aside time-sensitive work. Make the arrangements. Now.”

Yui was faintly aware of her ears burning pink, but she was more distracted by the heat blooming in her cheeks, and the sudden urge to close up upon herself, and avert her eyes, the mixture of surprise, shock, gratitude, and even the faintest and most alien stirrings of pleasure swirling within her, potent nearly to the point of overwhelming her. Certainly, she and her teacher had formed something of a rapport by the end of their time together, becoming at the very least amiable roommates, but she had never held any illusions that he had volunteered to care for her, that she had been from the first anything more than a tearful, snotty, grieving four-year-old burden that Ikari Gendō had dumped unceremoniously upon his doorstep without so much as a ‘by your leave’: he had simply made the best of it, and then it had been them making the best of it, together. Yet, he had been all too willing to let her leave when the Commander summoned her, and even in light of what tepid fondness they had for one another as teacher and student, the idea of him getting onto the phone and demanding that she come to live with him, that he be made responsible for her, was, at best, a laughable absurdity. This was the first time that anyone had ever expressed an actual desire to have her in any proximity to them, beyond Ikari Gendō’s strictly utilitarian interest in her presence, and Yui had no real way to know how she ought to process it, taking her swiftly off-guard as it did.

“The Commander…?! You’ve got to be joking, Ritsuko,” Misato scoffed harshly. “Run it by him if you gotta, but don’t act like you and I don’t both know what his answer is gonna be. Are we clear…? Thank you, Rits. Was that really so hard…?”

With that, Misato slammed the phone back down upon the mount, and leaned up against it, propped up with an arm planted against the wall, her hand flat and fingers splayed against the sterile paint-job as she collected herself. Then, she drew herself back up to her full height with a deep inhale, brushed her uniform back into place, and turned to return to Yui—only for Misato to stop halfway, and chuckle at her, shaking her head in a way that did nothing to alleviate the blooming heat in Yui’s cheeks, nor to encourage Yui to turn her gaze back upon her.

“…What’s so funny…?” Yui asked her after a moment, once she was quite sure that she could trust herself not to stutter or to speak haltingly, even if only for that long.

“Nothing, it’s just…” Misato sighed, almost fondly. “You really are the most adorable thing ever when you’re flustered, you know that…?”

The warmth sparked into a flame, as Yui’s eyes widened, and she averted herself entirely, unable to keep her ears from burning as the sharp motion drew more laughter out of the older woman whom she had just watched more or less strong-arm her way into being appointed as Yui’s…guardian, she supposed. She was hyper-aware of the warmth of Misato’s presence as she wove her way past Yui on her way towards the door of the elevator, and called it to their level. Yui, however, maintained her silence, not trusting her voice not to embarrass her any further.

“Yui.”

Before she could even consider whether or not to acknowledge that she was being addressed, Yui’s gaze snapped up, and she looked upon Misato again, just in time for Misato to grab hold, softly, of her head in the older woman’s hands, her supple palms and gentle fingers cupping her jaw as she held Yui’s attention captive. Once she seemed sure that Yui’s attention was upon her, she smiled—or was it a smirk?—and said, “Let’s go home. Okay?”

Home. The word itself was a foreign concept to her.

(But she wouldn’t have said that she was necessarily opposed to learning…)

She nodded as readily as she might, with her head so confined—and oh, that was definitely more of a smirk than a smile—just in time for the elevator to ding its presence at their level, and the doors slid open to reveal the elevator’s vacant interior. Then, and only then, did Misato release her, and step away, leaving burning impressions of her touch upon Yui’s face, as something formless and strange to her began to shift and squirm deep within her abdomen. “After you…”

They left the infirmary, then, with Misato’s good mood seeming to radiate off of her as she led Yui, now seeming far more confident in her command of NERV’s layout, through the GeoFront, to where she’d parked her car. Hoping that the previous exhibition of the woman’s somewhat harebrained driving skills, if she was being honest, might have merely been due to the incredible pressure that the circumstances of their first meeting had forced them to labour under, she embarked warily into the passenger seat of Misato’s blue Renault Alpine, but made doubly sure to fasten her seatbelt, just in case.

She was right to do so, she swiftly came to understand.

Perhaps Misato had been sent to retrieve her, she mused through the tension of her wariness as the car wove and sliced madly through main roads, side-streets, and back roads alike, because her normal form of driving was already incredibly well-suited to the sorts of evasive yet rapid deployment and exfiltration a person transporting her would have needed to employ to get her to the GeoFront on time. It was certainly a morsel or two of food for thought.

She must have been sleeping for longer than she had suspected: by the time that Misato finished her criss-crossing, blurry ‘tour’ of Tokyo-3, and the garage of her apartment building loomed large before them both (or at least, Yui assumed that this was, in fact, Misato’s apartment building), the bright daylight of the afternoon had given way to the lengthening shadows and amber shades of the encroaching evening, as dusk stole upon them. Buildings had emerged from out of the GeoFront, immense skyscrapers of steel and glass, New Formalist and Modernist towers springing from the ground like weeds on immense, grinding engines, and they had driven through much of this reformation, as the city, seemingly designed and purpose-built to be a fortress, unfolded itself, coming out of its defensive configuration and once again reclaiming the look of a city that lived and breathed, that could command a skyline even from a distance, a place that, perhaps, given a few decades, people could say that they were from, more than merely living there; and now, as her mind worked to process all that she had seen, Yui felt herself being swallowed by the looming shadows of the garage into which Misato guided her vehicle, claiming a spot that she seemed to know was hers, before cutting the engine, and stopping for a moment to look directly at Yui within the overshadowed confines of the vehicle.

“You did well out there, Yui,” Misato told her soberly. “Better than anyone had any right to expect you to. Frankly, with how quickly we wound up dropping you into that situation, I think that I can safely say that I speak for everyone when I say that we were prepared to call it a victory if all you managed to do out there was survive. None of us wanted to have your blood on our hands… So, if your heartless asshole of a father won’t man up enough to say it, then I will: I’m proud of you, Yui. So proud. And not merely for agreeing to pilot Unit-01, through which you saved a lot of lives, but for coming out of that alive. I’m glad that you survived, Yui. I was so glad to see you up and about earlier today that I was nearly beside myself. And so, I’m proud of you for being alive, right here and right now…”

There was a lump in Yui’s throat. It made it hard to breathe—and as she beheld the sheer brute force of sincerity in Misato’s gaze as she said all of these things, that lump seemed only to engorge itself. Yui’s cheeks were once more aflame, and though she liked to think that she had managed to learn some degree of basic eloquence through virtue of her academic work, here and now, all words failed her, save for the most basic ones that she managed to force herself into saying. “Th-thank you, Misato… For everything…”

Misato snorted indelicately, releasing the tension of the moment all at once. “Yes, well, don’t thank me just yet… I haven’t exactly had a chance to clean my apartment properly in at least a week, with all the late nights that I’ve been pulling—hopefully, that’ll be over for a little bit now that we’ve killed the Angel, and things will get back to semi-normal for a while until the next one gets dropped onto our heads…”

“Misato, I’ve lived with an elderly unmarried academic for most of my life up until this point,” Yui scoffed, her brow raised in amusement. “I think I can handle just about anything your apartment can throw at me…”

That drew a wry smile out of her, and she shook her head with a muted chuckle, as Misato said, “If you say so…”

And with that, she popped open the door and departed from the interior, leaving Yui alone in there, accompanied solely by her own thoughts for a moment or two, before Yui finally worked up the courage to open her own door, and disembark from the driving madwoman’s vehicle immediately. Thankfully, she was not so slow in her egress that she could not see nor follow Misato, and so she let the older woman lead the way up through the complex, until at last, they came out of the bowels of the building, and walked along a fenced-in exterior corridor to reach, in a corner of the building, a closed, plain-looking door marked with the kanji for ‘victory’ and ‘to flow’, ‘beauty’ and ‘home village’—Katsuragi Misato. It was…appropriate, Yui felt, that the older woman, the first person to express any interest in having her around to the point of being willing to upend the plans of others for her sake, should be named in such a fashion—albeit, perhaps, a bit ‘on the nose,’ so to speak.

“Your things should be arriving shortly,” Misato remarked as they approached the door. “While she loves to complain about paperwork, and talks a big game about how much work it is to change plans that’re already in motion, Ritsuko’s actually pretty good at all of this bureaucracy stuff, so I don’t think it’ll take a long time for you to have everything you need to settle in. To tell the truth, I only just moved into this place a month ago myself, so we’ll have a chance to make ourselves comfortable here together. That ought to be fun, don’t you think…?”

She continued speaking idly as she unlocked the door, and it slid open with the hiss of a motor, the lights flicking on as soon as she crossed the threshold and began to shed her jacket, smoothly revealing the sculpted, lean curvature of her creamy shoulders as she did so, Misato’s short black dress all the more of an adolescent fantasy from behind than it was to gaze upon it straight-on—and not for the first time, Yui felt a flicker of intimidation, as well as some other emotion that she dared not name, at the glimpses that Misato was allowing her to catch of the older woman’s mature and statuesque beauty.

But it was not Misato’s beauty that arrested Yui’s steps before she could cross the threshold, as her new guardian had done before her. There was a nameless sense of finality to lingering as she did before the door, staring down into the fathomless abyss of occupying another’s space—but more than that, it felt as if this was a point of no return: more so, even, than allowing herself to be immersed in LCL and inserted into the spine of Unit-01 had been. Something in her knew, then and there, that if she took this final step, then it would be over for her, and there would be no turning back, no matter how badly she might want to over the course of the days and weeks to come.

But…would I want to turn back…? she asked herself, confused and conflicted. After all, I know that there’s no real way but forward…so why am I so uneasy about not being able to turn my back and run…?

Since when has running ever accomplished anything…? another part of her asked, concurring. The question of where I could even go aside, I would almost certainly sooner manage to escape the pursuit of my own shadow than that of my problems…

So…

Why am I hesitating…?

“Now, unfortunately, I can’t cook worth a damn, and it’d be poor form of me to make my roommate cook for us on our first night together…” There was something…more in that choice of phrasing, Yui could sense, though she couldn’t discern whether that additional subtext was actually there, or if it was her mind playing tricks on her, conjuring paranoid shadows out of innocuous alcoves, as it had sometimes been wont to do, historically. “So I was thinking that we could just place an order for some take-out and just try not to worry about… Yui…? Is there something wrong…?”

Misato had whirled about upon noticing the lack of Yui’s presence by her side, her eyes wide with a series of open questions as she blinked at the younger girl, hanging back and closing up upon herself just beyond the door of the apartment, with one hand rubbing at her other upper arm through the cover of both her button-down blouse and her cardigan in a reflexive motion. Yui averted her eyes, knowing that she was unable to answer Misato’s questions, for those were questions that she herself had, and could not articulate, for all that something in her had forced her to pause. Still, there was an answer she could give—and though it was the truth, there was also so much more to it than that, and she had no recourse but to pray that Misato could discern that additional context from her tone and choice of words alone—so she gave it.

“I… I don’t want to intrude, or anything…” Yui murmured, suddenly nervous, and struggling in her attempts to justify to herself why she was lingering here, why she had yet to do something so simple as to cross the threshold into Misato’s apartment.

Misato blinked at her, twice, her expression illegible; then, she huffed, shook her head, and returned to the front door herself. Before Yui understood what was happening, she found her arms grasped firmly as her body was yanked forth, giving Yui barely enough time to emit a shocked, high-pitched little squawk before she was drawn into the apartment, colliding suddenly with the startling softness of Misato’s chest. It sent a renewed flush of heat into Yui’s cheeks, such that she imagined that steam was nearly coming out of her ears, but it was not long, thankfully (though, perhaps a moment longer than it needed to be—or perhaps that was merely her paranoia speaking), before Misato, realising her mistake, stepped back, and interposed a renewed distance between their bodies, though she maintained her hold on Yui’s wrists as she did so.

“Yui,” she stressed, her tone one of fond, faint exasperation. “Don’t be silly. You’re not intruding. After all, this is your home, now, too, every bit as much as mine. Alright?”

From her tone, Yui could tell that this was more a command than a question—but she found comfort in that, too, that Misato had decided this for her, and all that she needed to do was to abide by it. So, instead of continuing to advocate on behalf of her inarticulate anxieties, Yui nodded softly, and they quieted almost to nothingness. She smiled up at Misato, albeit weakly, and experimentally, her voice shaking slightly, she murmured softly, and for perhaps the first time in her young life, “T-tadaima…”

Misato responded to Yui’s smile with an indulgent expression of her own, and enough certainty for the both of them. “Okaerinasai.”

And that was that.

The house that she had shared with her teacher in the countryside had been almost entirely bereft of the accommodations of modern living. It had been a traditional estate, lovingly upkept, and upgraded into a minimum standard of common habitation only with the utmost reluctance over the few centuries and many decades that the Edo Period mansion had stood upon the plot of land that it commanded, perched atop a hill overlooking the lands it once ruled. That house had stood there for four hundred years, and might stand for four hundred years yet: its walls conjoined neatly together, its doors were sensibly shut, and its courtyard was arranged in a painstaking and hostile order, a place fit for a man who wished to dwell there, and dwell alone. The one thing it had in excess was space: growing up, Yui had never wanted for places in which she could go to be alone, and an entire wing of empty rooms had sat vacant there for years, nominally hers, but for the fact that she lacked the accoutrements required to fill them—having been so deprived of objects that held any sentimental value had taught her not to place sentiment in objects to begin with.

Misato’s apartment was very much the opposite: it was a testament to modernity, an apartment that had been erected, according to Misato herself, scarcely a couple of months ago, and their neighbours were so spread-out across the rest of the building as to be practically nonexistent. Despite this, the dimensions of the apartment itself were clearly only ever meant to house a single woman: a spare and unused room would have to be converted into suitable living quarters for Yui at some point, when more could be spared than an ancient and musty futon that Misato had kept since her university days, and had been kept for the explicit purpose of according Doctor Akagi a place to ‘crash’ when she and Misato went drinking, and Akagi could not feasibly get herself clear across to the other side of Tokyo-3, where she apparently lived with three cats, all of whom had been rescued off of the street as strays, safely. There was a single bathroom, and a storage closet of very definite utility, and a narrow linen closet, with a refrigeration unit in which allegedly resided a genetically-modified warm water penguin, which Misato had taken with her from her previous posting, to which Yui could not help but respond with some scepticism, a scepticism which would linger until she saw the poor creature for herself. At the very least, it was appointed with a full kitchen, and the requisite space for a dining-table, together with a sofa and a television set: and yet, once again, the fact that one had to get across that common area in order to travel from one side of the apartment to where the one true bedroom in the apartment was only further cemented that the intent of the apartment’s design had only been for a single person to occupy the space, and that even without the squalor in which Misato languished (which was, Yui felt safe in saying, considerable), there would hardly be enough space for Misato to take on an adult to be a roommate full-time, much less an adolescent girl…

And yet, despite the clutter and the lack of space, it was air-conditioned, a consideration that Yui on some level had expected, and yet remained surprised by, for the house in the countryside had lacked it; and there were electric lights that could be on around the clock, if one chose, with no need to navigate any sorts of cavernous corridors by the flickering shadows of a sheltered candle-flame; and there was a laundry room down a few levels, fully accessible at any time of day or night by residents, without even having to depart the complex, which was a far cry from Yui having to do the household laundry by hand, and hang the clothes and the linens out to dry with clotheslines. The old house had had a television, sure, and she knew a number of people, in the abstract, had cable, but the concept of her having access to cable was novel to her, and when Misato had shown her how quickly the internet worked around here, she had literally startled out of the chair at how quickly a link loaded, which Misato had seemed to find endlessly funny. There were all the comforts of modernity within easy reach for the first time that Yui could recall, and little space: and yet, despite that, Misato’s insistence made her feel…welcome to it, for all that the rambling halls of the estate in the countryside had seemed to bend against her, to suffer her presence without ever condoning it. The idea of taking up space without feeling guilty or avaricious about the amount of space she occupied, even when there was so little space to go around, was…so novel as to almost be disconcerting to Yui: she had no idea, really, how best to handle that realisation, and so she did her best to put it from her mind, at least for now.

Or at least, that had been the plan.

Misato, as it turned out, was…even more welcoming behind closed doors than she had displayed up until this point, if that was even possible. She was carefree and careless, and moved without any sense of a differing standard of conduct due to the presence of company, which, strangely, helped Yui feel like less of an intruder, and not more. When Misato stripped down to a standard of dress that might well be considered indecent, in a frightfully small pale yellow crop-top and a pair of daisy dukes that covered quite a bit less, even, than Yui’s own bloomers, putting broad swaths of her sunkissed flesh on full and shameless display, Yui had expected to feel like a voyeur, like she was seeing something that she wasn’t meant to; but attempts on her part to avert her eyes to protect Misato’s nonexistent modesty—for a state of undress was actually a fair distance from an invitation to ogle or leer—had fallen resoundingly upon deaf ears. Misato had merely chastened her, albeit with unexpected nonchalance, that ‘we’re both girls here’, and suddenly, no longer did Misato moving thoughtlessly and exposing the heavy swell of a full breast or the dramatic curve of a wide hip feel like Yui was doing something wrong by not averting her eyes. When Misato made remarks that put a heady rush of blood into Yui’s cheeks, calling her and her reactions ‘cute’, ‘adorable,’ or even delicious, in the sense of ‘ooh, I could just eat you up’, she did feel like an idiot for how her heart jumped in her chest and her stomach twisted into knots, reminding herself relentlessly that no, you idiot, she doesn’t mean that she wants you in that way, she’s a grown woman, get a grip, you sound like an adolescent boy… But those thoughts generally fizzled out fairly quickly, given Misato’s…profound capacity for physical affection, to the point where Yui had been embraced more times in this one evening than she could remember ever having been touched by another person in her life, ever, and every one of those crushing hugs, which more often than not wound up with her face being planted (thanks to the height difference) squarely in the fleshy warmth of Misato’s expansive cleavage, caused every thought in her mind to reduce itself to white noise, as Yui was left with the distinct sensation of her grey matter liquefying and dribbling out of her ears. She was sure that at one point, she had even temporarily forgotten her own name…

And when the hour had grown late, and it had come time to speak of sleeping arrangements, given the noticeable lack of an extra room that was properly-appointed, Misato had immediately suggested to her that the two of them have a ‘sleepover’ in Misato’s own room—and Yui, exhausted as she was physically, mentally, and emotionally (albeit arguably pleasantly so, for once), had not gainsaid her.

The sleepwear that she had brought with her from the countryside, much to Yui’s chagrin, was not a set of garments that accounted for the warmth of another with any manner of grace. Her white nightgown, a relic of the more recent time that she had spent needing to accommodate the near-spectral company of only a single increasingly elderly curmudgeon of a man, was made of a fairly heavy and opaque muslin, for the developing body of a young girl was not the sort of thing he wished to be confronted with, no more than if she had remained a young boy into her adolescence, and the night winds in the countryside could be cooler than could comfortably be borne had she possessed something sheerer. It was a lovely piece that she liked a great deal, having learned painstakingly to accommodate the simple lace with which it was hemmed while washing it, again by hand, but within minutes of bedding down beside Misato, ensconced within her arms, as she had insisted that cuddling like this, with the back of Yui’s head planted squarely into Misato’s soft, warm chest, close enough to hear the steady thudding of her heartbeat as it reverberated up and down Yui’s spine, was a thing that girls did during sleepovers (Yui really had no idea one way or the other—again, her experience engaging platonically with peers of either sex was practically nonexistent), it had soaked nearly through with their commingled sweat, hers and Misato’s both. Doffing it and adorning herself, at Misato’s direction, in one of Misato’s spare shirts, which was much too large upon Yui’s smaller, slighter frame, had left her in only that and her bloomers, and while it improved the situation greatly, Yui couldn’t help but be conscious of how exposed her thin, pasty legs were, spindly and hairless little things that Yui covered with long skirts whenever she could manage it—at least until Misato shifted in her sleep, and hitched one of her shapely legs, with thick, well-muscled thighs and calves that were worthy of sculpture, the skin as sun-dark as the rest of her, healthy and radiant with life, over Yui’s, capturing both of the young girl’s limbs beneath one of her own, as her firm grasp about Yui’s middle tightened, pressing Yui’s spine even more firmly into alignment with the sinuous curvature and sculpted form of Misato’s older, fuller, flawlessly feminine body, and Yui’s mind instead remembered to be thankful that certain parts of her body had been rendered all but useless by her transformation, that that loathsome, pallid thing that lingered still between her thighs, limp and blessedly lifeless as a worm, could no longer betray her by responding to such stimulus in spite of her. As it stood, the swirling churn in the pit of her stomach, a surge of strangely pleasant nausea that made her mind buzz into an indistinct mire as she struggled to think, was quite enough to have to deal with.

She focused instead upon the sound coming through her ears, with her headphones secure about her skull as the SDAT player in her hand whirred quietly. One track changed over to another with a click, and the dual piano-violin re-arrangement of Yo soy María, from the tango opera María de Buenos Aires, turned into the plaintive wailing of an unaccompanied violin, as Tartini’s Violin Sonata in G Minor danced lightly into the foreground, and Yui settled into the next fifteen minutes she would spend with her own thoughts. When her teacher had insisted that she choose an instrument to learn, Yui had chosen the violin—and while she imagined that most would have chosen such an instrument after their first time listening to Vivaldi, she had done so after her first time encountering this. Even to this day, no piece of music could manage to coax her into the same state of focused serenity that Tartini’s storied futile attempts to echo the musical talents of the Christian Devil drew out of her effortlessly.

One thing was for certain: this current state of squalor was untenable. As she was certainly used to cleaning up after others—her teacher had been more than content to leave the lion’s share of the housework to Yui even before she had transitioned—she knew that such a task would naturally fall to her; and thus, it would serve her better to take the initiative on that than to have the task thrust upon her unexpectedly. She gave it some further thought, and came readily to the conclusion that while the night’s take-out had been a delicious spread, they could hardly survive upon that alone, and from what she had seen from what Misato had in her excuse for a pantry and refrigeration unit (seriously, who needed that much cheap beer…?), she very much doubted that Misato had been anything but wholly truthful in confessing to her lack of any sort of culinary expertise, save for the fact that she might even have undersold it. Thus, she would likely have to do the cooking, and more likely than not, the grocery shopping as well, for if Misato didn’t know how to do anything in the kitchen, why would Yui trust her to choose ingredients? And if she was doing the shopping, as well as the cooking and the cleaning, then it would only make sense to outline a budget for groceries, for cleaning supplies, for some proper kitchenware, and for assorted sundries, perhaps even going so far as to obtain a prepaid and refillable card for those expenses alone. All of this she had done in the countryside, so it was familiar territory to her—she wondered if keeping track of the household expenses would also fall to her, as it had while living with her teacher, before storing that thought away for further examination when morning came, as she was unlikely to reach a satisfactory conclusion unilaterally. Instead, as Misato’s arms curled and clutched Yui’s body closer still to hers, her nose nuzzling into Yui’s brown hair upon the futon, Yui assembled a list for what she would need to go out and buy for the household, going off of what she’d seen up until this point in the apartment; and shortly after she approached the horrifying realisation that she would need, more or less, to assemble an entire kitchen from scratch, her thoughts trailed off into a snarl, as her fatigue stole upon her at last, and her thoughts subsided into sleep.

And as she slept, perchance, she dreamt…

The final strings of the sonata better known as the Devil’s Trill rang out across the windswept stone ramparts and desolate battlements of Poenari Castle, echoing down from the citadel’s solitary perch and the sheer cliffs and rough-rent canyons surrounding it, to rest along the soft burbling of the quiet currents of the River Argeș far below. The castle had been built in the 1300s, and redesigned and rebuilt in the late 1400s, and it was this latter redesign which had been painstakingly reconstructed into the height of its glory in the mid-2000s, with all of its displaced ghosts and the shadows of its memories scattered in diaspora brought to reside within the thick stone of its walls and its cold and austere corridors once again; and within this castle there resided but a single permanent resident, kept there under guard, and provided for by those who rested, now, in the village far below. 

Those who had lived in the area for generations, before the Soviets, before the Hungarians—before the Ottoman Turks, even—sometimes glimpsed her, and did not think her living. It was easy, gazing upon her from such a distance, clad only in a white nightgown, and perhaps on occasion a shawl, to believe her a phantom, nothing more than another of the many, many ghosts who had returned to lurk within the castle’s walls ever since the completion of its reconstruction, a pallid echo of one long-departed—those who could be called more learned in the traditions of their forefathers murmured ‘Solomonar’ under their breath, and crossed themselves to ward off the weight of the wickedness of the word itself, whenever the resident came up in conversation, and others still murmured strigoi, and warded off the Evil Eye. And it was not merely a superstitious upbringing that provoked such declarations: even they who served the castle had only seen the resident from a distance, never exchanging so much as a word, nor much more than a stolen glance, and the tales they told were of an ethereally beautiful young woman, her fine and beatific features like those of a porcelain doll, her long, straight hair as pale as argent moonlight, her flesh as white as driven snow, and her eyes glittering a bloody, sanguine crimson. She was never seen in the sunlight, only under the cover of the darkest nights and the fullest moons, and emanations of ghostly music possessed of haunting, heartbreaking beauty echoed through the silent halls, where the air was thick with memory and chill with the passage of a country’s worth of departed souls; and when the storms gathered, there, too, was she, glimpsed even on one or two occasions to be speaking words that could not be heard to another who could not be seen, as if they stood right beside her, a diabolic phantasm.

And so they spoke of her, and so they gave her these names.

Solomonar.

Strigoi.

Demon.

She chuckled at the irony of that supposition. Her ears heard more than her ‘father’ had ever given her credit for, and she had long since mastered the necessary methods to walk abroad amongst them, with a mind to learn of them, those fascinating lilin who dwelt in the valley at the foot of the castle, just as she had learned once, long ago, of the lilin who thought to use her gifts to their own ends. She knew their names by now, could pierce through the towering monoliths behind which they hid, hiding their true selves from one another—their true selves, in all their loneliness, all their cowardice, and all their weakness…

She shook her head as she stepped out of the shadows of the tower, delighting in the cold light upon her skin as she gazed up upon the gravid moon. “These lilin… I could do this same song and dance for half a hundred times more, and yet I fear that I would laugh every time, just as I did upon the first… Though, I am surprised at you, you know. Here I thought that you had gained your happy ending, no…? Or, rather, is that among the things that have yet to happen…? I grow dizzy, you know, confined to viewing such things through these eyes… I glimpse only shadows, overlapping, in a murky mass, and must nonetheless attempt to discern one from the next… Such challenges you have set before me…”

She looked up, and felt a certainty deep within her bones: there was a valley which men claimed to be an ocean of shadows, and within it rested a spiralling succession of sarcophagi without number, each the birthplace of her, herself, to be opened but once a rotation, a point of divergence in unity. She judged them, then, by how many were yet to be opened, and how many yet remained vacuous, emptied, and hollow…

“Will it happen, this time, I wonder…?” she asked, knowing full well whom she addressed. “Or is it to be a new gospel that is written this time…? Already, you are bolder. Already, he suspects. Soon, they all will suspect. I’m surprised—it’s unlike you to take such risks. Though, I will not deny that I am proud that you have taken them… But this scenario will not go as the others have gone. On some level, you know that full well, don’t you? You must…”

She closed her eyes slowly, sedately, and turned her nose up into the wind. The howling gales swept through the valley, through the battlements and the ramparts, carrying her silver-white hair in a cascade, the shifting swirl of it for a moment making it seem like something possessed of a will of its own—something alive, and wanting…

“And so it is you and I once again, hmm?” she asked her partner in conversation, her ear tilting into the wind as though listening to an answer that, to all others, was nothing but silence. She pulled the shawl, a heavy-woven thing necessary to ward off the boreal chill of one of the last truly cold places on the Earth, to cover her body more completely, as though readying herself for something. “That brief diversion was an interesting excursion, to say the least—that the players are not at their assigned parts, and the script has, in that time, changed much for it… And yet, we are here with the proper parts, our motley assembled, but the play has changed, and the game along with it. Well, if that is your will, then so be it. A new winding comes with new timings, new tempos, the clicking of the gears of that which is not a machine beyond the bounds of imperfect metaphor reflected into mercurial metaphysics… And so I must ask this of you, oh maestro of this new opera upon which the curtain raises…

“What parts have we to play then, you and I, hmm?

“What lines have been written, and what cues shall arise for Nagisa Kaoru and Ikari Yui…?”

Ikari Yui snapped awake. Before her lay not another unfamiliar ceiling, but this time, nothing more than a pile of discarded clothes and a far wall. Behind her was the comforting flesh of another, the two of them slotted against each other like spoons in a drawer, clutched together so firmly that where their bare flesh met, their sweat mingled and mixed, linking them to one another. She did not start, not bodily, but she glanced at her SDAT player as the last strains of the sonata to which she had fallen asleep came to an end once again, and in the time it took the machine to rewind to the first track, the analog screen of it flickered, and went dark. It was out of battery. Those needed to be changed. And yet, as her companion in the futon nuzzled closer into her hair, causing an inadvertent flutter of inexplicable pleasure to surge powerfully and swiftly through Yui’s body, a more pressing question presented itself, and it demanded an answer, at least at some point.

And as Yui was lulled by that surge of pleasure back to slumber, this time a dreamless, black sleep, not even her own body’s wants were enough to pry free the critical question and toss it into the mire. 

What…even was that strange dream…?