Arise...
Just to make it clear it wasn't all in his head....
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Quote:-------
Shinji’s eyes opened again.
He was met by his own reflection in the window. The boy in the glass stared back at him. The only way to be certain would be to smash the window, but he couldn’t smash the window unless he was certain.
He felt his stomach go tight as his mind fell back to those few seconds in the lake when he actually tried.
The reflected image in the window went foetal. A few tears trickled down his cheeks while he forced it out of his mind.
It wouldn’t go away.
Why won’t it go away?
A merciful knock on the door banished it from his mind. The latch went chack as someone opened it. His body winced. It sounded so much like the pistol...
Pushed against his head.
“There are messages for you in the control room, if you’d like to go up and get them.”
For a brief moment, Kotono Ito almost sounded like his Misato. It was close enough that, for a heartbeat, he almost felt that he could turn over and see her standing there in the doorway.
He chose not to disappoint himself.
She was just trying to get him out of bed, There was one obvious flaw with the attempt.
“Why would there be any messages for me?”
“Because we asked for help, and people figured out who you were. There’re a lot of people out there who care about you.”
One more point for this all being a fantasy created inside his own mind. It was giving him what he most wanted, trying to claw him in. It refused to go away, no matter how hard he begged.
“You can’t stay in bed all day.”
She was starting to sound annoyed. Good. Then she’d get frustrated. Then she’d snap. Then she’d finally leave him alone. Shinji just curled.
“What if you need to go the bathroom? You did have a lot to eat and drink yesterday. And it’s all got to come out?”
She was trying to sound like she was teasing him, but didn’t really have her heart in it like Misato did.
She also had a point. Unless he wanted to make a dirty protest of it, there was no way he’d be able to just wait her out. As far as he guessed, Kotono didn’t have to work shifts. His determination ebbed away as he thought about pushing things that far.
They may not have been real, but he still worried about what they thought about him.
“Could you please leave?”
He tried to phrase it as politely as he could manage.
“I won’t leave until you get up, Shinji,” she stated.
“I’m naked.”
His tone was perfectly deadpan. Just a statement of fact.
An impishly embarrassed giggle. “Sorry. I forgot we took your clothes off last night,”
Wait. They took his clothes off? So that meant they’d all.....
It felt like every single muscle in his body contracted at once, curling him down into a defensive little ball under the mylar sheet. It ripped across his back, allowing a cold draft of air to crawl down his spine.
“I’ll just leave you to get dressed.”
He swore to himself that he heard her wink right before the door closed.
A few minutes later Shinji emerged from his room, dressed in more clothes he was certain were borrowed from Mackie. They were still much too large.He groaned, slouching along like a convict being led to his execution.
Kotono was wearing leg-warmers. Striped leg warmers. Like she was trying hard to match that woman from Bubblegum Crisis, Linna Yamazaki.
She was hired specifically because of it, like Anika had told him right after watching. Shinji took a deep breath. At least he could be certain of one thing... he wasn’t the craziest person on the asteroid.
Kotono looked up at him, a relieved smile spreading across your face. “Glad to see you’ve decided to join us again, Shinji,”
“Um....well.”
That was as far as he got.
“Anika’s up in the main control room. There’s a mail drone up there for you.”
“I don’t know the way.”
It was a half-truth. He had an idea where it might be, if he traced his steps from the previous day. It was an excuse, really.
“There’s a navigator on the table that’ll take you to where you need to go.”
In other words ‘You’re out of bed, now get going.”
Again, Shinji sighed. “Alright, I’ll go.”
“Good.” her smile broadened. “Though, if you don’t want to walk around I suggest you go down to the motorpool. Ford will give you something to get around in,”
It was only a suggestion. A small part of him jumped at the idea of being allowed to drive the Warthog again. That had been fun. Just thinking about it made him smile again. It brought up a little giddy rush from deep inside him.
The motorpool was, according to the navigator, twice as far away as the control room but Shinji decided he wanted to drive.
He made sure to close the door behind him as he left.
----
Kotono smiled as she picked up her communicator.
“He’s on his way down now.”
She received a quick thank you before she closed the channel and turned on the television. Through the eyes of an exocomp, she followed Shinji down.
----
Shinji suspected a few of the little hoverbot things were following him. Two of them kept their distance, being discrete but still noticeable. He reminded himself that he’d been warned they’d be curious.
Aside from their whirring motors, or a distant creak of metal, it was dead quiet. The air was dead still and dry as a tomb. It closed in around him, compressing down on top of him, forcing him to wonder why he hadn’t ask for some music, for anything to make this lonely quiet go away.
It was worse than the beach. At least there’d been the sea
There was a rawness to the solitude, enhanced by the sense that he was in the centre of somewhere that might once have been a living town. There were open areas that’d been abandoned and stripped, places which might’ve been community meeting points. One was still labelled as a playground, with painted murals on the wall of green fields and sunshine and the ghosts of children’s amusements still etched into the floor.
It reminded him of some of the near-abandoned towns near the coast, kept alove solely by a final few stubborn residents.
Anika’s apartment had a paper sign on the door letting anyone know she was up in the control room, and would be for some time. These should’ve been family homes he was passing but instead they stood empty. His navigator signaled a left turn onto a new corridor. Windows to his right allowed a view of the rock outside. He could see lights on where he guessed Kotono’s apartment was. Two others were lit up. The rest of the accommodation block was dark.
So that’s what Asuka meant, about lights making a city seem alive.
He had only his footsteps for company.
Shinji tried to fill the world with the noise from his mind, but that just dredged up more bad memories instead. His body demanded he stop... just to find somewhere to curl up under and hide and make them go away.
Sorry kid, nothing personal.
You’re own your own now Shinji. You have to make your own decisions.
Asuka... Unit 02 is...
He heard himself scream.
You’re everything you have and you never even learned to like yourself.
He stopped dead in the middle of a corridor. The following exocomps waited in anticipation. Shinji just stood there with his hands pressing into the side of his skull trying to squash the memories out of his mind.
He stood on the beach, watching the waves roll in as what had been Rei dissolved into the ocean. He nailed Misato’s cross to the scorched stump of a telephone pole snapped like a matchstick.
He had days alone. Time to go hungry. Time to forage. Time to carve little grave markers for everyone he could think of. Time to understand what it truly meant to be alone with only the rhythm of the waves for company.
And here he was, alone.
“Somebody,” he whimpered.
He turned about half sold on the idea of turning and running back to Kotono’s apartment just to see someone human, to convince himself that there was human life on Frigga.
“I don’t want to be alone.”
Asuka was there beside him on the beach. Alive and smelling of blood and lavender and so real when her hand brushed against his face that he felt tears welling up in his eyes just thinking about it. He screwed his eyes shut.
I would never let myself be killed by the likes of you.
He went to sleep beside her in the ruins of a house, then woke up in that bed under a plastic blanket. Alone again.
“You are not alone.”
His eyes shot open.
Rei was there, standing in front of him. Red eyes regarded him with deep curiousity which. He could see the universe in her gaze. He could see a reflection of himself staring like a rabbit in headlights.
The faintest smile softened her face.
Shinji blinked.
Rei was gone. He was alone again. The exocomps were watching.
----
Kotono edged forward on her seat. A fresh cup of green tea was steaming beside her laptop computer.
“That’s funny. What did he see?”
-----
“That’s funny,” Anika said, staring at the grid display. She rewound it a few seconds. A momentary spike in current through an otherwise stable circuit. It was like someone’d switched in an electric motor, but there was nothing down there that should’ve been switching in.
“Probably nothing,” she concluded.
She got back to her IM’s. There were far more important things to worry about.
Like making the eyes on the monitors follow the LARPers around the room, rather than just randomly glance.
----
Just to make it clear it wasn't all in his head....
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?