mille2ml@jmu.edu wrote:

NGE belongs to and was created by GAINAX. This fic therefore
also belongs to GAINAX. I doubt they care. This is the first
thing I've written in several years. It's something of a what if.

Miashara
 

% Hey, hey, nice to have you back. Curiously, I was just thinking of you 
back when we met at Nekocon in '01. What a conicidence. I know this is 
late, but I've been letting the stuff I want to C+C pile up.

Prologue

    "Sir."
    "Yes, Misato?"
    "I've found him. What's the Angel's ETA?"
    "Twenty minutes. What is the condition of the pilot?"
    "He's useless."
    "Can it be fixed?"
    "Maybe. But I need an order to do it, and I need carte
blanche."
    "Do whatever you have to do to make the pilot capable.
Do it now. If you fail, humanity has no future."
    "Yes, sir. Understood." Misato hung up and looked down.
Shinji was curled into a ball, rocking. In the distance
smoke was rising from Tokyo 3 and the giant figure of an
impossible monster was walking through the city, breaking
homes and setting fires. Misato pocketed her phone.
 

    "Come with me," she said, pulling Shinji to his feet.
He half-resisted, but Misato muscled him into her can

% car. Either that or she really muscled him, or it was a large can. ^_^

and
slammed the door shut. She walked around and got in on the
drivers

% driver's

side. "You're not wearing your seatbelt."
    "I don't care any more. I just want to die, and you
don't care enough to see it."
 

% Misato: Wait a second. I think I have some cheese in back to go with 
your whine. :)

    "Fine then."
    She shut her own door and turned on the car.

% started the car.

It beeped
and flashed a red `Fasten Your Safety Belt' sign. Misato
ignored it and removed the parking break.
    "What do you want?" Shinji whined.
    "No, Shinji. What do you want?" Misato slammed down the
accelerator.
    "I want to-what the-"
    Misato yanked the wheel hard to the left and the car
shot off the road. The mountain side had been paved, and the
car rocketed down, bouncing and jumping off rocks and
stones.
 

% Okay, maybe turned on is more appropriate.

    "Do you want to die?"
    "Yes!" screamed Shinji.
    "Good. Then so do I."
 

% Misato: And some people say I'm hard to get along with.

    The car crashed through a safety rail and back onto the
road. She swerved and ran along the cutback, shifting
quickly as she raced up through the gears. They hit two
hundred kilometers per hour when they approached a hairpin
curve.
    "What!? The turn-"
    "I don't want to turn."
 

% Heh. I guess this is one way to go about it.

    The car crashed through another flimsy guard rail and
sailed through the air. Bits of the bumper came off and fell
with them. The car slammed into the slope further down.
Misato downshifted and smashed the gas to

recommend adding pedal, since it sounds like she litteraly smashed some 
gas into it.

the floor. The
engine screamed. They kept picking up speed.
    "What do you want, Shinji?" Misato's voice was
mechanical.
    Shinji screamed again and covered his eyes. Misato
swerved again and hit the road. Her transmission was making
noises never intended, 

% That bit is awkward. Not sure how to reword it, though.

    Shinji desperately clawed at his seat belt and managed
to get it on. Misato noticed that the passenger safety alarm
went out and dug her hand into a compartment on her door.
Sometimes she had to take her other hand off the steering
wheel to shift, but she never let up on the gas. They hit
the first street light, pointlessly blinking red to an empty
city, and the speedometer was off the scale. Misato found
what she was looking for, a large, military issue survival
knife.
 

% Heh. Thought she was going to light up there

want?"
    "To stop!"
    Tears and snot and blood were pouring off Shinji's
face, and the car was gyrating too quickly for them to fall
down. He was surrounded by a halo of grief and pain, and
somewhere inside he was weeping.
 

% Weeping on the outside too, with all the tears you mentioned with the 
snot and blood.

    "Now listen and listen really well, because we're going
to be dead before I have time to repeat myself. You don't
want to die, you've never wanted to die, and you never will.
You just want you father to love you, and he doesn't. He
doesn't care about you. He never did. He never will. You've
loved him hoping he would love you back and it didn't work.
You hated him so he'd at least hate you back, and he
doesn't. You're nothing to him. You never were. I'm sorry.
 

% And he's not.

     "I love you. I love you more than you can understand
because no one's ever loved you before. I love you so badly
I don't understand it and I've loved, been loved, and been
in love before. I bleed when you get hurt, my limbs ache
when you fall, and every time you get in that damn machine
my heart breaks a little more.
 

% Nice paragraph.

    "And it doesn't matter that you shouldn't have to do
it, that no one else does it, and that you're just a kid.
I'd kill myself to stop it and do it gladly. I'll take the
gun out of your hands, shoot every bullet into my face, and
fall down so you can walk over my body and all you'll be
able to see on my corpse would be a smile. But it doesn't
matter. This is you mission,

% your mission

your life, and now your
purpose. You have a goal that's clearer, brighter, harder,
and more mixed with good and evil than most people see in
their lifetimes, and believe me, people spend all their
lives trying.
 

% True. Black and white are rarly choices we're given. It's usually a 
varying degree of gray.

    "And it won't matter. Nothing will matter because in a
few minutes you, me, and every living being will be dead
including that emotional void you have for a father and 

father, and

even
then he won't hate you for failing. I won't either, but I
won't love you any more because I'll be dead. You've wanted
love your whole life and I'm giving it to you now but you
have to fight for it and fight with every bit of good, evil,
hate, and despair within you, and you have to do more than
that because you've got to fight with love, happiness, and
anger and everything else you've never had or never let
yourself want and you've got to do it now.
    "So I'm sorry, and I'm dying a little right now and you
have to get in there anyway, do the thing you hate more than
anything else in the world, but at least I understand and
I'll be with you, crying, bleeding, and fighting to breathe
harder than I ever thought I could.
    "You're fighting for everything. You're fighting for me
and fighting so I can show you what love really is.
    "If you win and you think I've done wrong, I'll spend
the rest of my life making it up to you and do it gladly.
Take me to court and I'll be your witness. Sue me and I'll
give you everything I have and spend the rest of my life
slaving to make money so I can give you more. But it won't
matter unless you win, and I can't make you understand how
much I love you when I'm dead.
    "So win, Shinji. Get in that machine and kill. For
yourself."
    Shinji burst into tears and ran, towards NERV.
 

% Very, very nice emotional passage.

    Sometime later, in a small and mostly deserted
hospital, Misato was thumbing through a fashion magazine.
She found a picture of a model in a dress she liked sitting
 

liked, sitting (I think)

on the hood of a car that looked like hers. She sighed and
tossed the magazine down by her feet.
    The door chimed, and Ritsuko walked in. "Morning,
sleepy head.

I think that's usually either one word or hyphenated.

it."
    They both laughed.
    "So what's the prognosis?"
    "Well, whoever looks out after fools is ready to ask
you marry him. Nowadays, with NERV technology and all,
anything that doesn't kill you can be fixed and for some
 

% fixed, and

strange reason nothing killed you. We're going to put you in
a LCL 

% an L (pronounciation thing)

bath for a few days, maybe a week, but when you get
out of that you should be good as new. Not even a scar."
 

% Except her old ones, I assume.

    Misato laughed and then coughed up some blood. 

% Nice

"How is
he?"
    "He's all right. I've put him on some mandatory
therapy,

% Which should have been done from day one.

    "Most importantly, I care about him, and I respected
him. He was killing himself, and we were all going to die
with him. I had to make Sophie's choice. He wanted to die,
and I was willing to let him die to prove that he didn't. I
didn't have time to do anything smart, so I rolled the dice
and hoped."
    "That may be the stupidest thing I've ever heard. If I
was in charge you'd be shot."
    "But you aren't. And the commander gave me free reign."
    "What if he'd died? Could you live with that?"
    "I wouldn't have had too." 

% to

Misato almost shrugged but
stopped herself. "Rei was out, Asuka was out, and there was
no way Shinji could have won as he was. We were all going to
die."
    "But to do that? How could you hate him enough?"
    "I don't hate him. In fact, I think I love that kid
more than anyone else ever has."
 

% And sometimes people need kicked in the teeth when they're being 
exceptionally dumb. And god knows Misato is the type to do it.

    "I am fine. People like me," Shinji's voice came by
rote. He was paying attention to the tiny spiders that were
pouring out of the sewers. They began to colonize the
sidewalks, and build a fair, through which tiny people were
walking and talking and buying little ice cream cones. They
all seemed to want chocolate. "Misato is my friend. Ritsuko
is my friend. I will trust my friends. I am fine. People
like me."
 

% It's just the hallucinations that you have questions about. :)

    "I think so. I'm very tired and everything seems a
little weird."
    "Are you sure you don't want to come back to NERV? You
could get something to eat and sleep."
    "No! I can't stand that place. I just wanted to know,
um, when the city would be fully up again." Ritsuko's voice
was quiet and he thought they had had been disconnected.
    "Not long now. Why don't you come back to headquarters
Shinji. 

% Shinji?

    "Rei?"
    "She might join you later. We're holding her under
medical care until her appearance becomes absolutely
necessary."
    "Who?" Shinji appeared confused on the large screen.
With his face enlarged to fill four hundred square meters of
screen, surrounded by orbital recognizance and histograms,
every minor twitch and expression was clear for the bridge
crew to see. There were none. Except for mild bewilderment,
Shinji's face could have been computer generated, young,
smooth, and emotionless.
    "Who's holding her under medical care? I am."
    "Then why did you say we?"
 

% Ritsuko: It's a royal 'we', like queens use.

    Ritsuko did not immediately answer.
"When will you come back?"
    "I don't know. You can talk to me now."
    "But-" Shinji did not finish.
    "Don't worry about them. Just talk if you need to.
Ritsuko may give orders if I can't, but I'll be here."
    "What about my father?"
    "Forget him. He's irrelevant."
 

% Actually that's largly true. :)

    The technicians gasped, and Ritsuko almost swallowed
her cigarette.
    "As long as you win, he doesn't mean anything. He
doesn't matter, Shinji."
    "Target has changed entry pattern!" Takeru interrupted
them. "Lupus has begun air braking."
    "ETA?" Ritsuko demanded.
    "Changing fast. Target could arrive within ninety
seconds if it is capable of sustaining its current
deceleration."
    "Shinji, it's time. You're fighting again. Do you
remember why?" Misato sounded too tired to be anything but
serious and gentle.
    "To kill the Angel?"
    "To live, Shinji. You have t 

% to

    He whimpered.
    "Shinji?"
    He wished he could look away; the fear was too great.
    "I meant everything."
 

% Hmm. Not the ending I expected. Interesting piece. I liked the early 
parts more than the latter, but they were exceptional. Very nice story. 
Thanks for sharing.

DB Sommer




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