30Disclaimer: There are many people and organisations who could be considered to own all or parts of Neongenesis Evangelion, Gainax and Hideaki Anno chief among these. I am in no way one of them. Considering the tragicomedic awesome that is NGE, this is probably for the best.
Anyway…
Rating: T
Warnings: standard NGE fare – that is, mild-to-moderate variants of violence, language, nudity, sexual references, horror and all that lovely, lovely stuff. Also: spoilers. And: while I've gone to a pretty thorough effort to avoid unnecessary OOC-ness, my characterisation will probably not be as crisp as I'd like it to be. (Hey, I gotta start somewhere. Always looking to improve, though…)
Canon: Largely animeverse/EoE, with some aesthetic elements imported from other sources (nothing drastic plotwise, though).
Pairings: Officially, 'To Be Determined'. Unofficially… leaning towards no central pairings worth calling as such, for reasons which will soon become obvious.
Summary: A tale of the closing movements of the Groundhog Apocalypse, and the eternal boy ensnared at its nexus. One: Hate is life.
(And one more quick note: there will be action and fan-service and so on scattered throughout the story, as should be the case in all (relatively) light-hearted NGE ffics…but this chapter is more to set the scene for what follows, and so will be moderately heavy on the psychobabble.)
The Eighteenth
Chapter 1: Seventeenth (Rinse…)
—ox-oxo-xo—
It was, in many ways, a calm night…
(It always was, afterwards. Once, driven by a morbid curiosity, he had spent his first few hours back on God's scorched red earth finding a mobile phone which hadn't been wrecked by the titanic forces unleashed by Third Impact. He'd thus calculated by virtue of having long ago memorised the moon's position that it always took a little under fifteen hours for him to emerge from the Red Sea, no matter the circumstances in which he entered – a fact that meant little to him. He had, however, been grimly amused the next time round to note that the Apocalypse, for all its might and fury, seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the applicable 'yesterday's' weather predictions – clear skies, muggy days and warm nights. Just as predicted by the week's forecast.)
…Just as predicted.
The moon hung full and luminous as always in the sky above his forlorn, floating form, bisected artistically from below by a frozen, crystallised spray of Lilith-blood trapped in mid-orbit. It was as familiar to him as the back of his hand. More familiar, in fact. It wasn't like he made a habit of staring fatalistically at the back of his hand.
The palm of his hand…well, that wasn't exactly a habit either. He didn't always jerk off over her comatose doll-form on the penultimate morning. Far from it, though he had this time around – more for tradition's sake than anything, really.
(Sometimes he covered her up. Sometimes he didn't shake her. Sometimes he didn't visit. A few times he'd somehow managed to arrange that she wasn't hospitalised in the first place, not that it ever made any difference at the end of der Tag. Conversely, once he'd been caught by the nurse mid-coitus…which, while excruciating at the time, hadn't made any difference either. And more than once, he'd just strangled her, whether to death or just until the gibbering, fucked-up mess that was Shinji Ikari's autopilot-run body felt a little better.)
The internal autopilot cackled and whimpered, clawing away absentmindedly at his cage-bars, still wallowing in the shellshock that always took him at times like this. Shinji ignored him with the reflexive sort of expertise that came with decades of experience. The spineless little wimp had just been given free rein for the whole damn rinse-cycle, after all. He could wait for a while, until everything reset again.
It wasn't as if Asuka was going anywhere, after all. She'd float there until he had the time and energy to haul her out and begin choking her in the time-honoured fashion. Or until she died of dehydration. Right now, he just couldn't muster up the attention-span to devote to giving a care. Or more accurately, the required attention was focused elsewhere.
Shinji Ikari was asking himself an important question, one of the very few left to him even if he often suspected there was no real answer:
Why am I even bothering?
This latest episode, the one which had just drawn to its customarily explosive, gooey close, had essentially been one long exercise in déjà vu. For once, Shinji had more-or-less decided to sit back and let everything run as it had in the beginning. To let the perennially miserable boy he had been custom-neglected to turn out as just follow the strings and play the singular, contradictorily subservient role intended by every deliberate or subconscious puppetmaster he'd met along the way.
It had also been surprisingly enlightening.
The first time around this stale old carousel, he had been blinded to the reality of things by two major factors. The first, the one that even Shinji had eventually begun to notice in a resentfully dim way back then, was that a great many men and organisations had a vested interest in keeping him blind. (After all, the most efficient way to get someone to jump off a cliff was often simply to hood them and set them walking in the desired direction.) The second, of course, was due to the way the boy's thought processes tended to operate.
Those he cared about – Misato, Rei, Asuka, Kaworu, Kaji, many of those who he had come to know – had done their best to help him. But even if they hadn't had their own problems, the vast majority of them had gone about attempting to enlighten him in their own ways – each unique to themselves and their own paradigms, and each unsuitable for safe consumption by one with a mindset such as Shinji had been cursed with. And so he had been unable to process their wisdom until far, far too late.
The eternally lost, eternally hurting, eternally hating little boy-on-autopilot that was Shinji Ikari… He had always been blinded, both by those who shuttered his sight and by his own willingness to take directions instead of simply taking off the blinkers. The pain of his own ignorance had always appeared more easily bearable than the pain of reality.
The eternally watching, eternally pondering, eternally searching little man-in-a-boy's-body that was Shinji Ikari, the spurned identity born and inextricably bound into all the memories and nightmares that the boy simply could not turn around and face without descending straight into screeching, face-shredding insanity… He could certainly attest to that truth. The pain of reality was worse. He just didn't have the luxury of believing that it would go away if he ignored it for long enough.
Misato and Rei and Asuka and all the others might have been gratified to know that all that time (or rather, all this time), there was a hidden corner of Shinji's mind that actually did take their advice in the spirit in which it was offered, even if the boy had only ever acted on it for long enough for said advice to drift out of his grasp due to his underlying inability to understand it, and even if the man had merely turned it every-which-way for its utility and context, only to shove it to the back of his mind as but one more datum among thousands. Then again, they probably would have been disappointed (and furious in the case of some people). It was not as if they had the option of taking the long view. Frenetic life-and-death struggles tended to get in the way of introspection, for those who hadn't been witness to just how fucking pointless it all was.
Yes, it had been surprisingly enlightening. A great many clues to their collective predicament had flown right over his head the first time. A great many more had been buried so poorly that in retrospect, he was almost amazed that he hadn't spent half his time tripping over the corners. And if only he had noticed all those clues, and acted on them…
…he'd still be right here. Which led straight back to his question.
Why AM I even bothering?
The comfortingly uniform-clad image of Rei Ayanami flickered over the bloody sea in his peripheral vision. Shinji gave her shade an absentminded nod before she vanished, still mulling over the question.
Seventeen Third Impacts. Seventeen choices. And every single damn time, Shinji Ikari had made the choice to expel himself from Lilith's Black Moon and allow three billion souls to follow at their own leisure. (And every single damn time, Asuka was the first to follow him – but he had long stopped puzzling over that. The reasons had become obvious after a while.)
Every single damn time, Shinji Ikari had decided to save humanity. No matter how much he hated it and all its representatives, deserving or nominal. No matter how many times he decided they should all just die, each time that decision was proved both subject to later reversal and ultimately without meaning in the long run.
So: why?
The boy, some portion of his own scattered thoughts aimlessly tumbling down the same lines, hesitantly answered. The hesitance was a measure of his own nature rather than the nature of the response, which followed the well-worn, discordant cadence of thousands of similar pathetic musings. Shinji could almost hear the wheels spinning and rattling over the train tracks. 'I want to be praised, I want to be acknowledged, I want to be accepted, to be loved. I want to be seen as I am, I want them to look at me. Why won't they love me, why won't they look at me, WHY WON'T YOU LOOK AT ME…?'
The man grit his teeth and restrained his body from the act of turning to grab Asuka and drag her out of the primordial soup, having no patience for such trivial matters. The boy's thoughts span away into a dozen self-perpetuating dunce corners, leaving the man to incorporate the largely rhetorical response into his own train of thought.
…Selfish, Shinji mused, for far from the first time. That much at least made sense – after all, the operative part of the word was self. Certainly that sense of self(ishness) must have an important part in why he kept choosing to retain it when the choice came. Even the ignorant, wilfully blind boy he had been so very fucking long ago would concede the point if he was ever made to pull his head out of his ass for long enough to consider it seriously.
Probably many people would agree with him on that point. It stood to reason, really. People sought bonds to validate their own existence, to give it meaning to themselves. They looked to others for their own selfish reasons.
And yet…
Shinji Ikari's perspective was utterly unique, across ten thousand years or more of human experience. The closest that could compare would be that of the consciousness that was called Rei Ayanami. At least she tended to die and be resurrected relatively often.
Shinji had, quite literally, lost count of the number of times that he had died.
Seventeen Third Impacts did not equate to seventeen rebirths. It equated to hundreds.
(Sometimes he would experiment with the scenario of the time, hoping for an overall better result, and take it too far. Sometimes the order of his memory would just run against him. For quite a long while back then, he had simply devoted his time and energy to killing himself in any way his feverish, desperate mind could arrange. Sometimes he'd allowed himself to become so invested in some minor compulsion to learn anything and everything about some topic or some person that he would suffer death after horrible squishy death to repeatedly adjust the current timeline and so examine a different facet or perspective or response, or just take the opportunity to watch it happen again in case he'd missed anything.
Hell, he'd died several dozen times over just to dash over to the perennially doomed manga store two streets away from that fateful phone box, just so he could get around to finishing that incredibly rare manga Hyuga had told him about that one time. (In his defence, it was seriously riveting. Even with Sachiel constantly stomping him into paste every two-and-a-half minutes.)
It never mattered, although some of the ways he'd died still caused even him to suffer the odd nightmare. He always, always came back.)
He always came back.
No-one else had that so-called luxury. Even Rei could only return if there was a spare vessel ready and waiting. And even Shinji himself, that very first time living through this eternal nightmare, had begun to grasp at the edges of that contradiction inherent in attempting to justify his motives.
It was perhaps Kaworu Nagisa, for all his pale, imitation shades of the human condition, who best encapsulated Shinji's dilemma.
If we're all so selfish, then what's the point of self-sacrifice? What's the point of self-validation if you're dead? How does that even make sense?
Sure, soldiers on whatever frontlines were applicable fought with the knowledge that they might perish. (Even Shinji had known that, for all the lengths that he'd sometimes taken to avoid thinking about it.) Sure, mothers might suffer terrible agonies and die so that their children might be safe. (Rei, of course, serving as the prime example of that.) But surely that was all really a matter of risk versus reward, wasn't it? Give and take?
Kaworu, on the other hand, had flat-out told him, over and over again, that he must die in order for Shinji to live. And once the gentle goading was done and his point was made, he invariably waited for Shinji to make that inevitable choice, without the slightest visible inclination towards saving his own life. To everything and everyone that was Shinji Ikari, it stood as the ultimate example of a concept which just made no sense!
He must be missing something.
He was just so tired.
Not because of the latest bout of Instrumentality. It had taken him thirteen tries to successfully unbind himself from the process, but he'd eventually managed to master the intricate highwire act of distancing himself just far away enough from the epicentre of its nexus to examine its myriad spread of life's lessons without being sucked into the psychedelic mental overload that came hand-in-hand with serving as the gateway for three billion souls to enter into something that a few cynical, ridiculously naïve old men persisted in perceiving as a paradise. It was something the boy could not escape, but since the boy tended to subsequently and automatically dump the vast majority of that trauma on him, it was something that the man had acclimated himself to as well.
(Shinji – his more knowledgeable self, at least – had noticed that both Rei and Kaworu had been…kinda careful at times since then. As if presented with a puzzle that not even Instrumentality could solve, one that might ensnare even their ethereal, Angelic selves if they looked too closely for the knot at the centre of the jumbled yarn.
Suffice to say, he had been more than slightly amused.)
He wasn't tired from that. If he had been, Asuka would have been insufficiently strangled and quite properly disgusted and Shinji would be in tears by now, if not on his way back to run the tired old nag to its frothing collapse once more.
No.
He was tired because he was trapped in an ever-downward spiral of ever-repeating, ever-nescient death, madness and utter meaninglessness. Because in purely subjective terms he had grown older than even ex-Professor Fuyutsuki, and more isolated than even his father. Because at heart, after all that time, he was still technically no more than a voice in the back of an eternal fourteen-year-old's mind, and without a clearcut purpose there would be no point in changing that. Because the entire universe and all its glittering marvels had only one thing left that he could bring himself to want. And it wasn't giving it to him.
Mankind was never meant to be immortal. No sentient lifeform was ever meant to be immortal. If Kaworu's sacrifice(s) had in any way been selfish, perhaps that was how – death, to escape the loneliness that was inevitable when you were immortal and everyone you loved was destined to die, forget or otherwise abandon you.
So perhaps he was misphrasing the question.
Why the fuck did Shinji Ikari constantly find himself choosing to live?
Hope? Hope was out. Shinji was all out of that. Seventeen completed cycles and hundreds of incomplete cycles merely served to underline the lesson. And the boy was of no help there, was never of any help there, especially right now—
And then Hell froze over and a ballistic cannonade of pigs flashed across the moonlit sky over Shinji Ikari's prone, floating body.
Which was to say, that one single, disparate fragment of the boy's atomised mind turned to disconsolately whisper his own forgotten opinion to the despairing whole:
'I just want everyone to be happy.'
And Shinji froze as if struck by lightning, rocked to a wondering standstill as the second epiphany he had ever experienced, ever, made itself clear to him at long, long last.
(The first had been, at the time, world-shaking, even if it was really his mother's revelation more than his own:
"I am me."
He had drawn desperately from that, throughout the heaven-to-hell clusterfuck that his second time down the road to Third Impact had ended up so rapidly morphing into. In the end, it had been as futile as everything else except in one crucial aspect: the internal, subconscious construction of someone who was capable of remembering that one deceptively vast, immeasurably destructive truth: that Shinji Ikari was what he perceived himself as, and not merely what others dictated him to be – that was, someone who wouldn't treat advice as orders, only to forget the lessons once the situation changed.
It was from that pivotal decision that his most central inner dichotomy had been perpetuated, eventually resulting in his own creation…)
He couldn't believe it. Some portion of the boy's mind had actually come out with something worth listening to.
And it was so SIMPLE!
Like many such epiphanies, it was something that had probably been printed in innumerable self-help publications. But there was a world of difference between reading the words and being presented in a heady flash of inspiration with the perfect example of their meaning.
The first step in enacting change in yourself is to identify exactly what it is you want to change. The second step is to suborn everything of yourself to the goal of enacting that change.
Though he'd never really found a use in quantifying it in quite such a way until now, Shinji's life – all of Shinji's lives, in fact – had been ruled by four paired directives: two overt and two hidden. But, his mind suddenly found itself in the ideal position to comprehend as the jigsaw pieces finally aligned into place, each pair was and always would be mutually exclusive. And one pair, Shinji realised at last, was not merely contradictory but unnecessary. Given the correct adjustment of his perspective, one half of it could be rendered utterly irrelevant.
I want to live and find happiness.
I want to help those around me to live and find happiness.
I want to die and cast myself into oblivion.
I want those around me to die and be cast into oblivion.
Dying didn't work, because he wanted to live. Living didn't work, because he wanted to die.
Simply dying hadn't worked, and never would. Because in doing so, he was being selfish – just running away from life and the bonds intrinsic to it. He was constantly attempting to ignore the second directive, and therefore would never, could never be truly wedded to the concept of ending himself in all the ways he had attempted to date.
Simply living hadn't worked, and never would. Because in doing so, he was still being selfish – just running away from death and the breaking of said bonds. Never mind that everyone else was unaware of Shinji's endless reiterations of the perpetual black second. Never mind that the boy tended to do his level best to forget that himself. They were still trapped the same way that he was. And as long as he – and they – were trapped, the second directive remained impossible and forever unsatisfied except in a sickening mockery of its letter.
In trying to satisfy both the first and the third directives, he doomed himself, everybody he had ever cared about, everyone they had ever cared about, and so forth and on to every single soul on the planet, to failure. To eternal unhappiness.
And as for the fourth directive… well.
"Nothing ever changes, so they can all just die!"
That was just it. They couldn't. And he couldn't. Seventeen Third Impacts and countless suicides had made that crystal-clear to him.
"I love you." Kaworu…
"I HATE YOU!" Asuka…
Each emotion – each forming one side of the same coin. Each integral to all four of the directives.
Remove the coin, and nothing mattered – even Rei at her most doll-like could attest to that. Seventeen Third Impacts, countless suicides, all rendered utterly without meaning. Beyond the bounds of that coin, the self was irrelevant. Love or hate – both formed an acknowledgement of the other's existence. An acknowledgement of the other's life, even if only of a desire to end it – and therefore, an acknowledgement of one's own life. In other words: a bond.
Seventeen Third Impacts, and he could satisfy none of the directives that drove him. His reasoning, the definition of his purpose to this point had been faulty. He therefore needed to come up with something different. And when though of in such simple terms, the solution suddenly become transparently obvious:
Forsake utterly one directive. Render another directive irrelevant in the process. Embrace the others. Henceforth decide upon your methods and then fulfill your chosen purpose without further ado.
If he lived, he would hate. This was inescapable, an integral part of the human condition. For most humans, this was merely a fact of life. A truism, even. For Shinji Ikari, at this time and in this place, that hate would doom everyone and everything to the ends of eternity…including himself.
And he was tired of hating.
Certainty, the very essence of genuine certainty, filled Shinji Ikari for the second time in…well, ever.
When Shinji finally allowed his inner autopilot to take Asuka's uninjured left hand and gently tug her to shore, she made no sign of having noticed. She never did. But the mere fact that he grabbed that hand instead of the closest one to him – and always had…
That, if anything, served to validate his decision. He understood it all now.
Kaworu died, happy that Shinji would live and perhaps find happiness. Finding one purpose to be unattainable, he spent himself in fulfilling another. Nothing changed except for his own perceptions – so he changed himself instead of trying to deny them.
It was time that Shinji finally set about following that finest of examples.
Hah. He'd had enough. If the universe wasn't going to give him what he wanted, he was just going to go ahead and take it!
…Shinji…
The Eva-pilot around which her every thought orbited.
…Hooray for her.
Asuka could go on for ages about how many ways she was pissed off at Shinji Ikari right then. She had a rather long list, and it would most certainly be expanding just as soon as she could think straight. Which would be a while, after that nice long sojourn within the mindscape of that pervert!
('Oh well – at least it's keeping my mind off Mama right now,' she most certainly DID NOT think. That was just one of a whole stack of worm-filled cans she didn't want to even approach with a ten-foot prog knife until she was feeling a little more rational. Having one's mind, then body, then mind (again) ripped apart and cello-taped back together in quick succession tended to inculcate a certain timidity, after all. Not that she was thinking any of this. Because she WASN'T!
If someone happened to somehow have a window into the frothing mess that was what passed for her psyche at that moment, they probably wouldn't be too impressed with her current attitude. Suffice to say, repeated mental and physical evisceration did no favours there, either…)
Sadly, there was a problem with the idea of voicing her plethora of baka-related complaints. Namely, the fact that the focus of said complaints was currently engaged in throttling the life out of her, and she therefore couldn't breathe. Well, it was probably him. Who else would be around? Her life always seemed to run like that nowadays. Damn baka…ruining her life…why was it always…
Hmm, she appeared to be dying. And as much empty, posthumous satisfaction as she might have gained from just ignoring him until death did them part, Asuka Langley Sohryu once again found herself not wishing to die just now, thank you very much. Her hand reached up, a wraithlike white blob of pain in her malfunctioning eyesight, to rest against the vaguely shadowed white blob hovering over her. The constriction at her throat lessened and then became something approaching a caress for reasons she didn't really want to analyse just then.
Asuka blinked, and became properly aware that she had working eyes. Or one working eye. Either hadn't seemed particularly relevant up until then. She also became aware that the body over her own appeared to be quivering spasmodically. Figures. He's probably crying again. Or maybe jerking off.
"…How disgusting…"
Then she blinked again, focusing harder on the spectacle above her in an effort to confirm what she suddenly realised was the sound her ears were registering.
Shinji was…laughing…?
One brief, blissful moment of nothingness. One fleeting taste of peace before the war began anew. That was what it should have felt like. Indeed, that was what it usually felt like.
Instead, it was filled with the sounds of a boy's impotent, panicked screams. Shinji Ikari had long been fed up with the eternal brat's vacillations, awaiting only a purpose and a plan to make his move.
(The Plan itself was actually quite simple, something he'd come up with after Third Impact the Thirteenth and fleshed out after three more iterations. And had he truly embraced the Plan, it might have even worked. But at the time, it had more-or-less taken the form of an extraordinarily long and detailed daydream. The Plan, after all, was in essence a mere expression of the Purpose.)
And now girded fast with that Purpose and Plan, Shinji Ikari had struck.
That was the last time, Asuka, he swore, mercilessly engulfing the last lonely remnants of the boy he had been. Never again will you fall victim to my incompetence. It was time for a tearing down of the barriers which had compartmentalised his mind into so many disparate, fatalistic splinters. Never again will others suffer for my indecision. It was time to embrace his truest purpose at last. And against that purpose, that certainty, the boy simply could not stand. This time… I WILL end it. The sheer immovable certainty of his next vow sucked every pleading, malingering shard of his soul into the newly formed composite that Shinji had forged of it for the task ahead. All except one. I WILL NOT RUN.
One last little fragment, the long-sundered shard of one kind little boy who once-upon-a-time just wanted everyone to be happy like he was, whimpered and cowered before his looming adult might.
Shinji knelt down, and offered the frightened phantom his hand with a kind little smile. One last promise, a tribute to where he had truly begun, and how its innocently given advice had gifted him the key to attaining his ultimate desire.
For all the bone-deep changes he had wrought in his own psyche, it was imperative that this one aspect remain unaltered. There were plenty of reasons for that, some of them intrinsic to the Plan or the Purpose, many of them hard to put into words.
This I promise.
But perhaps the most simple reason was that he just felt the need for some company. And Shinji Ikari had always been adept at creating his own.
…
…
…
The empty streets. The forlorn storefronts and dwellings. The heavy silence of a city in hiding. The calm before the firestorm.
"Due to the special emergency, all lines are currently unavailable."
Why he always returned to this point, he didn't really know. Why strangling Asuka seemed to be the trigger to returning… well, he'd figured that out long ago.
As of this point, he knew to the marrow of his bones, both matters had become utterly irrelevant. His bridges were burned. This time, they would not be rebuilt.
No more hate. His purpose held no room for it.
Shinji hung up the phone and turned to smile at the point where Rei's pallid image would shortly flash into his sight and herald the endgame. Time to enjoy a rare breath of air that, while not particularly fresh, was at least not smothered in the stench of LCL, antiseptic and high-explosive munitions. A little under ten seconds to steel his resolve before Tokyo-3 plunged into war against the heavens.
"All right, here we go… One last time."
Ending A/N: Well, I hope you've enjoyed it so far. Updating will be…fairly sporadic most likely, sad to say, but I'll keep at it as long as I can keep the attention-span on track. There will probably be minor edits along the line, but it'll be restricted to the aesthetics unless I make a major fuckup somewhere…which is the whole point of the sporadic updating, so that's hopefully unlikely.
A minor note on the non-English language use: for the most part, I won't be using the Japanese, particularly the honorifics. If I was confident that I could do it without looking like a pretentious twit, then I might. I ain't, so I'm not. German, though, is a different matter – especially in the case of someone who slips into using it when they're annoyed. There will be the odd exception to this – quite frankly, baka is just such a useful, all-purpose term…
Anyway… Thank you for taking the time to read, and I hope you enjoy the next instalment when it appears. In the meantime, your opinions would be most appreciated and serve as good motivation to help me continue in timely fashion.