DISCLAIMER: The characters, story, universe, etc. of Neon Genesis Evangelion belong to GAINAX. They're not mine, and I make no claim to them. Foreword: Remember those mind-f**k episodes, 25 and 26? This chapter was written to feel like them. Be prepared. I also take this moment to remind you about the spoilers for End of Eva, which are particularly extreme for this chapter. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- " " = speech ^ ^ = thoughts _ _ = italics ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Angels of Armageddon Author: Ryan Xavier Side Story 3: The First Eclipse: Innocence Murdered The concept of "nothing" is almost impossible to imagine. A blank sheet of paper still has itself, and even the void between stars still has the cold and the light. Nowhere can there be nothing. Even in the realm of the mind, the idea remains elusive, perhaps existing in the space between the end of a dream and consciousness. Only nothing truly is nothingness. and Shinji was, verily, insuperably, irrefutably, and absolutely nothing. Nothing but awake. ^What...what is this place?^ Body? Nonexistent. Senses? Blind. Deaf. Dumb. Mind? Shrivelled, shrunken, afraid. Surroundings? No feeling of presence. Nothing. ^Is there...anyone...anyone?^ Vertigo... A snapping together. Apprehension. Uncertainty. ^Why...?^ Frustration. Fear. ^Why?!^ Claustrophobia. Panic at having one's entire universe reduced to one's own puny, idiotic, and incalculably worthless mind. ^_Why?!!!!_^ His mental scream, powerless against the absolute silence. A pulse of light, like the call to awaken when he didn't know he was dreaming. A dull thump sounding, reverberating through the blackness around him. Sight at last, if only momentarily. Hope? Light, first white, then dimming to dark orange. Perceptions of shapes ...others, with him. Humans? Monsters? Worse? ^Who...^ Peals of childish laughter. Pulses and thumping again, now regular, now multiplying. Clearer and clearer vision of surroundings. Shapes... Forms... Humanoid. Identical. ...And feminine? ^Who?^ Again a child's laughter, mocking and cruel in its innocence. Pulses and thumping so fast they blurred together, becoming a constant hum in his immaterial ears. Light intesifying, slowly bringing focus to the haze around him. Others, the same human female form, copied ad infinitum. Inert. Still. Dead? ^They're all...^ A small twitch, passing through all their bodies like a ripple through water. ^all...^ The bodies lazily turning, without direction, without will. ^all...^ Anxiety. ^Lidless is the eye that is stricken with terror.^ Not his own thought. Not his own self. ^dead...?^ Then, as one, they moved. The movement so quick it may have been a simultaneous muscle spasm, their heads looked up. All of them turned, to look straight at him. All with the same gaze, the same eerily smiling mouth, a feminine face that had crimson eyes - ^NOOOOO!!!^ - they were upon him, relentlessly advancing, coming upon his paralyzed, unresisting self like giggling hyenas on a carcass. They set on him with multitudes of identicals, raping and violating, tearing and rending, consuming and devouring until there was left no trace - * * * Somewhere else. A shape. A heartbeat. Senses. A surface to stand on, and feet to stand _with_. All were his once again. Another unfamiliar place. A dank, dusty room. Him sitting in a chair, next to an unmade bed, its only coverings being the dust and grime of age, and where old bloodstained bandages lay, the blood long since turned to a crusty brown. A mail slot filled to overflowing, on the distant door that he had not come through, and all throughout the air a feel of disuse and abandonment. And more disturbingly, a strange sense of familiarity, loss, and... regret? "Where...where is this place?" No answer. A table off to the side, occupied by randomly placed bottles of medication and a glass beaker. The latter had apparently been placed so as to catch the light from the window. The beaker was untouched by the hands of time and decay; the clearness of the glass showed that. Even the water inside seemed immune to the slow process of evaporation... Water? Looking at the glass, he saw it was empty, without even the slightest drop of liquid clinging to its sides. Had it not been full until just now? There was another object beside the strangely clean beaker. It, like the rest of the room, was coated in dust. Some...sort of container. To hold something delicate and also valuable. A slow recollection in his mind. ^When have I seen that...when?^ Memory, just out of the reach of his consciousness. A squeal of rusty hinges, and the growing glow of light being let in. Sounds of footsteps, and the shadow of another one in the room with him stretched to just out of his sight. "Who are you?" He turned, saw the white void that was all that the newly-opened door revealed. A shadowy figure emerged from the glow, flashed across the room so quickly it appeared to vanish. There was a moment of cold contact and - A sound of breaking glass, followed by that of the shards tinkling to the floor. ^I don't remember.^ Not his thoughts. The feeling of being alone. The light from the door, gone. Turning around, to find the strange container open, and inside it were unrecognizable bits of plastic and glass. What had this once been, for someone to destroy it as thoroughly as they had? Was it because - ^I am the third, I think.^ "G. Ikari" was written on one of the larger shards of plastic. A name? Familiar. A mark that these had once belonged to... "Father? Why?" "Why not?" A voice, different from his own. A pause. "Who...who are you?" His voice. Suspicion. Child's laughter, perverse in its innocence. "Who are _you_?" The voice taunted. The mirror on the wall. His own reflection gazed back as he came closer, nothing out of the ordinary. Around his own reflection, an all-consuming blackness. Nothing beyond himself showed in the glassy pane. ^Mankind fears nothing more than the darkness.^ He reached out to the mirror, toward his own reflection, and it reached for him. Difficult to tell which had moved first. Was it trying to tell him - or was he trying to tell _it_ - that there was something beyond this place, this darkness of nothing? He blinked, and in that instant the reflection changed. "Ayanami?" The mirror shattered soundlessly, the countless pieces falling at his feet and disappearing before they could even seem real. His only emotion was faint surprise. Something in the corner of his eye. "Who are you?" The other's voice. The window. The glass was undamaged, and the window itself was shut tightly. Outside was the same white light from the door, only duller...weaker, somehow. In the place of his own reflection there was another, different image looking back at him. It was...foggy, undefined, and blurred, but still vaguely human. "I am the one you know." "Who?" "I am not as I appear to you now. But this pale reflection will suffice, for the moment." The figure's eyes - nothing but dark holes against the white light - narrowed. The sensation of falling, as the so-treasured ground was taken out from under his feet. And then, Disintegration. * * * Darkness and cold, but not loneliness. Someone had come with him. "Are you the enemy?" A voice, dead and cold, but at the same time vaguely familiar, from his mist-enshrouded companion. It continued. "Are you the enemy? "Am I the enemy? Who _is_ the enemy? _What_ is the enemy? "Is it they?" Its voice nearly taunting, now. A brilliant flash as memories alien to him were forced across into his being. * * * He was a towering giant, impossibly lanky limbs at his sides while he marched carelessly through a city of shimmering white, tiny planes buzzing like insects around him. Futilely they loosed a hail of fire, but he swatted them away with the same care he gave to vaporizing any building or barrier in the way of his mission. Slowly he turned around, and for a moment he saw, reflected in a wall of glass, the two wide white shoulders, the three-pronged claws, the round red sphere, and the two bone-white faces, one beaked, one blunt, both with holes for eyes that were his own. The wall opened to reveal another giant, a challenge to the success of his mission and thus something to be destroyed. It took two tottering steps and fell forward. He took its head up in one hand and an arm in the other. Faintly he heard screaming below, and then screaming from - not the giant's lips, but somewhere within - as he twisted farther and farther until the arm snapped. The screaming intensified, but he was not yet done. In his first claw he began to pound on the giant's head, energy striking metal until the beam pierced its head and hurled it against a wall. Silence. "Was it _your_ enemy?" And then... A cry of rage dredged from the deepest nightmare. The moment of confusion...the pain of being torn limb from impossibly long limb...the tinge of humiliation as it became his turn to be torn apart, under a gauntlet of blows...and the sweetness of promised vengeance as he died in a final act of blinding light. "_Who_ was it?" Flash. * * * He had a misshapen body trailing behind a strange head with eyes that did not see. Extensions from the body, just above the blood-red sphere, then ends clasped as if in prayer. The same white city, only brightly lit this time. The same guardian, stronger, more confident, and armed with a new weapon. A challenge came, borne of fear and violence. "_What_ was it?" He unleashed his own arms, bright and shining whips of energy that cleaved through the guardian's weapon in an instant. In cowardice it seemed to run, but there was no escape. He flung it through the air; cornered it. Then a moment of weakness as it lay before him, having last regrets before the coup de grace... ...that was caught in its hands. Then _he_ was flung through the air, before getting up, and hearing again the scream of fear - within the guardian - as he was locked in a contest for survival that he lost, dying as he did with a cold, whispered plea for revenge - "Why?" Flash. * * * He floated above the white city, untouchable, invincible, and immovable from his task. The guardian had made his expected appearance, but had been unarmed and helpless before his thunder. It would no longer trouble him. Soon the pitiful barriers the Lilim had thrown up to hide Father would be torn down, and the last revelation would overtake the Earth. The city beneath darkened, throwing a veil of suspicion over his nonexistent eyes. Now he saw the faint glow in the distant mountains that, slowly but surely, outlined the shape of the guardian, and a lesser, stranger companion - Realization of their subterfuge. All-consuming anger at the underhanded attack. There could only be one response to this presumptuous strike, as the anger within him was mirrored by a buildup of the thunder he would rend their copied flesh with. Everything in moments - - a crossing of two paths, a scream of fright, a second moment of weakness, a second scream of panic...and a killing blow so quick it was almost painless - A fading, incoherent thought for retribution crossed his dying mind, but it was mostly unheard over the wave of confusion, loss, and a burning need just to know _why_... * * * "Why?" He found himself with another body, and another, and another, in an endless whirlwind of fantasy and nightmare. He flew through the air; he skulked in the sea. He went above the air itself; he spent the whole of his all-too-short existence in the bowels of the Earth. He had the strength of mountains; he was weaker than tears. He was more untouchable than the soul itself; he was nothing more than a batch of rogue data lurking in a machine. He was born, he had lived, and he did countless times, he had faced the guardian, its controller, and the guardian's allies the same number of times, and at the end of every life he whispered, declared, screamed, a plea, a call, a roar for vengeance, retribution, death to the Lilim... But still the same question remained: "Why?" "I don't know." The only reply he could muster. "A most inadequate answer. If you cannot answer my own question, how am I to answer yours?" "I don't know." A feeling of exasperation. Not his. "Do you know this?" A glow in the darkness. It took no shape, flashing and flowing like fog, but...it seemed vaguely feminine, like his companion. Almost could be seen in the blurry depths, but there was _something_ there. "I'm not sure..." A brief sound of derisive laughter. "A pity. She came here, leaving behind all she held dear, risking her very soul, and you foolishly ignore the key she has placed in your hands." A more definitive shape now, colours slowly seeping into the features as they hardened and became more and more recognizable. The hair remained a blank white, but the eyes - they were peaceful rather than icy, pacifying rather than mystifying, inviting rather than alienating. Their colour was - not the red of spilled blood, but lighter, a shade of rose, the exact tone and hue of cherry blossoms in spring - "She was not always like this. Unfortunately, you never saw what came before, but _I_ have. I suppose I can spare you another glimpse." The feminine figure disappeared, dissolving into the dark. Another, more celestial form replaced it, spreading slender, white arms of light so like wings against the blackness, simultaneously beautiful and terrible. "And you know what she desires." A stirring of a recent memory. "She wants someone...dead. Is it me? "She...wants _me_...dead? How? Why?!" Another short stint of laughter, as he asked the same question he had been asked so shortly before. "You know what you know, though you may not remember." A shiver through him. Heartbeat thundering rapidly in his ears. Fear becoming desperation. "What...what do you want?" "What do you want?" The apparition echoed. "I...want to know..." "I want to know," much less hesitantly than when he'd said it. A smile. Flash. * * * A classroom, with empty desks arranged in neat rows, facing an empty podium with an empty blackboard. Glancing at the windows, watching glassy light filter in from the grey void beyond. The place was alien at first, but then it seized upon his mind and impressed itself until it was as surely known to him as it would have if he had been there for years...and had he been here before? A day, a week, a year? Never? He no longer knew. Sitting at a desk, near the back of the class and away from the windows. Felt natural. Working hard, furiously penning a report for an absent teacher that was part of an absent past, trying to accomplish a goal for a long-gone guardian. Somehow, he looked up from his desk to find his solitude taken from him. Someone else was in the room. Body seeming to move on its own, perhaps from a habit the conscious mind had long forgotten. His eyes followed the line of the windows until they rested upon a small figure, seated by the windows, eyes turned away from him. Unlike him, his fellow occupant was not doing any work. Instead, she was looking, seemingly absentmindedly and uncaring, out the window into the blank grey void. What was so interesting outside, anyway? As if she heard him, she slowly turned to face him. Only then did he truly see why she had intrigued him so. The hair and the eyes... could never belong to any other girl he ever knew. And the look on her face; a mixture of surprise, fear, and - She opened her mouth to speak. Outside, it began to rain. "This is what you know." Not the girl's voice. But yet still - Flash. * * * A classroom, with empty desks arranged in neat rows, facing an empty podium with an empty blackboard. Looking out upon the gray void outside, ignoring the book on the desk. The text on the pages seemed a blur; a strange indistinctive jumble that almost became something one moment, and then seemed something else the next. No matter. It deserved no attention. And since there was nothing worth doing, her eyes were diverted to where there literally was nothing; outside the window, as she awaited the change that might or might not come. Except for a vague sensation from behind. A feeling of vague pressure...not physical. What could it be from? She had endured much pain, and could normally ignore it, but this was not pain. It was...odd. An uneasy feeling that could not be ignored. She turned around - - to find the boy staring at her, not with intent to examine, to intimidate, or to harm - just looking at her. She opened her mouth to speak. Outside, it began to rain. "This is what she knows." The same voice; not her own or the boy's. At the back of the room: another shape, indistinct, hiding in shadows that the light from the windows could not touch. But the silhouette of a young child, a girl perhaps, difficult to tell for the short hair. A thin smile on the child's lips. Flash. * * * Dressing up to die would have been the best way to describe it. Stripped to the bare skin, he slowly pulled on the cold, slick pseudofabric of the plugsuit, trying not to shiver at the sudden chill. He had come to hate doing this, this being asked to go out and die at his father's command, but it _was_ his father. There was nothing he could do but obey, and try his best not to wince as the plugsuit compressed with the touch of a button, taking his body into its icy clutch. On the first few times, he had changed in solitary silence, much in the way those who are sentenced to die are allowed to eat their last meal alone. Had his father arranged it this way? It could only remind him that every time he was called upon stood a good chance of being the last. But then, if this job carried such a risk, why wasn't he dead already, or running away, like last time? His father still...needed him. Yes, that was it, he had to come down here to change, then go back up there to that monster, and be ready to die, like a good son should. This time was different, though. On the other side of the barrier, _she_ was there. Stripping, changing, and getting ready to die, managing it far more efficiently than he ever could. Why? Because she had done this many times before? Because she was simply unafraid of death? Well...he hardly ever saw her fill her life with anything else other than Eva. Why did she do it, anyway? And what _were_ her feelings about his father, anyway? Did she pilot because of him? Because of what he might have done for her in the past? Or something else he didn't know? All he knew was that brief glimpse he had had of her, talking with that man freely, as though she were his father's true child, and he...just a stranger. Her slim silhouette - all that was visible through the barrier - turned to face him, and he could feel the weight of the unseen eyes, killing his unasked question before it could leave his throat. And all he could do was wonder why. "You wanted to know why." The apparition. A glimpse of a child's form at the edge of his vision. He tried to look - Flash. * * * She wasted no time drawing the loose plugsuit on, and then hitting the switch that compressed it about her form. She had to prepare to do battle with enemies from places and with purposes unknown. The prospect of death was of no concern to her. She would fulfill her purpose in this battle. She would fight with or without this boy, as she had trained her entire life to do. He would learn his place sooner or later, whether or not he remembered the incident from the escalator. Somehow the sounds of changing had stopped. He had already compressed his plugsuit, so why had he not departed? It was not her role to deal with such things; if it was necessary, the Commander would deal with them. Her place was to do what she was told, and now she had been told to pilot Eva. But he still had not moved. Was it because he was looking at her again? Why? "She also wanted to know why." Flash. * * * He was standing near one of the last two spots of light to be found in Japan, next to a...creature, with a demon's visage. He'd...they'd... received the signal to attack. He watched as the blue-haired girl turned away, going to do her duty as always, without hesitation or complaint. He stood there, again intrigued, wondering how and why she did what she did. Was she really this dedicated, possessing a strength he could never know? Did it have something to do with his father? He had asked, and she had given him an answer, but what was he to make of it? Would he even get the chance to ask again? This could be his last day alive. Some part of him deep inside shivered at the prospect, but the rest remained indifferent, perhaps even _wishing_ that death would visit him and end this slow torture at the hands of the man he was supposed to call Father. ^No matter how great the storm, the moon will always show the same face.^ What was that? "Ikari." He almost jerked in surprise. "You won't die." Bewildered silence was the only reply he could muster. "I will protect you." A brief glimpse of those crimson eyes, as she actually looked _at_ him instead of _through_ him, perhaps for the first time since he'd met her. In that half-second, he saw something there. But _what_? Flash. * * * A new place, but again strangely familiar. But something dark about the familiarity. His mind fighting _against_ recalling. The memory of the place threatening to tear the very fabric of his psyche apart. A simple place, but built to the scale of giants. A lake of orange ahead of him, the land ending abruptly. Out at the far side...a titan, limp and unresisting even with its hands nailed to a gigantic cross. Its face hidden behind a seven-eyed mask. "They saw, though you did not know it." A voice...seeming to come from the mask itself. "What?" "As you saw them." "... " "They saw you, as they see you now. A strange place you gave them." A pause. "And an even stranger place they gave you." "..." "But why did they give you a place at all?" "..." "Why were you kept, and not discarded, released, forgotten, as she did with so many other things when she unleashed the final reckoning on your unwilling world?" Something in that voice, betraying curiosity. It was not asking a question to which it already knew the answer. "Final reckoning...?" Exasperation. "You do not remember? She did it for you, know that at least. Of all things she ever did in her lives, she did it for you." "Lives...?" "To think she was so certain of her choice being the right one..." Sad consideration of what might have been. Switching rapidly over to anger, directed at him. "And you are a poor, pitiful, pathetic boy, completely unchanged from the final reckoning. I have practically given you the answer, and yet you refuse to see the truth. But perhaps a taste will remind you." A flash of something so quick it was almost unseen. Pale flesh rippled, flowed like liquid as it came away from the cross. A great, terrible, white foe rose up before him - Pain wracked his mind, in spite of the shortness of exposure. He fell to his knees, trying to breathe. His chest heaved at the ghost of the memory...but of what? "Wh...what are you doing?" His chest heaved. "Wrong answer." The sound of crying. And sobbing. His own. Hiding his head uselessly in his hands while clutching desperately the symbol of sacrifice one who might have known gave him, just before her pitifully useless death - "Do you remember?" - getting into the demon that might prove the world's only salvation against their might. Getting out of the ravaged building, but control was no longer his own, as he was taken along to fulfill a purpose he did not know - "Do you _remember_?" - the pain of the wings exploding from a back that was not his, unable to control events anymore. Seeing the ravaged body of his friend as the monsters turned from their bloody feast and raise him up, screaming and pierced in three places - "remember-remember-remember-remember-remember-remember" - hands exploding as holes were bored through them. Being pulled, shoved, dragged bodily further and further into the sky, but no longer by the wings of his once-eyeless captors. Being held between the hands of the giant now, whose eyes were nothing but points of light, like stars almost, against the empty sockets of its eyes - "--REMEMBEREMEMBEREMEMBEREMEMBEREMEMBEREMEMBEREMEMBER--" - seeing those eyes close, then open again, to see the color was a luminous red, round, and just like, no he could not, no he would not - REMEMBER. REMEMBER. NOW. * * * Curled up, his head buried in his knees, trying to hold himself together against something. Something hot flowing down his cheeks. He stood up, immediately wiping the tears from his face, to behold a small, deserted playground the hue of burnished gold. Home? No. There had never been any home. In the middle of the playground lay a sandbox, and in it lay a young, short-haired girl who was strangely devoid of colour, her entire form in shades of gray. She was playing - toying would have been more like it - with something in the hands. A featureless white doll. "You came here looking for the answer, didn't you." He found himself approaching the sandbox, much as he wanted to run away from it. His body seemed no longer under his command - as if something, or someone - was using it for another purpose. Whether to show him something or to destroy him, he did not know. "You wanted to know, didn't you?" Such a childish voice she had, and yet so damning. He could not speak. Only watch as things unfolded before his eyes. "You wanted to know what we wanted." She wasn't actually toying with the doll at all. She seemed to like throwing it, tossing it from hand to hand, one moment petting it, the next trying to pull its limbs off, with the same childish innocence that tainted her voice. "But you can have it now." She busied herself with burying it up to its neck in sand, then left. His hands found themselves digging through the golden grains, quickly scraping away until the doll was uncovered. Though its body still seemed unrecognizable, he felt growing unease at what the head looked like. It had somehow...become more human, as it were, with short hair and colorless eyes. He held it in one hand, studying it, trying to make out the - CRUNCH. The sound of something falling, and the briefest glimpse of spurting blood. Sight again. Only fine sand flowed from his hand where the doll had once been. Sand and drops of blood that flowed down his hand and stained the grains beneath. The severed head rolled away, and he could almost see the red eyes crying blood, and the short hair turned a calm colour - "You can have it now." Flash. * * * Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Starting from nothing, and now back to nothing. Back in the void from whence this had all come. Perhaps close to escape? Or perhaps teetering on the edge of a tumble into further nightmares. "I wonder..." the same voice, from all around him. "Can your uselessly narrow mind comprehend, yet?" "What do you want?" Helplessness. "WHY?! Why are you doing this? WHO ARE YOU?" Sigh. "Perhaps you need focus. I cannot help but forget your human frailty." A body, again. The sensation of ground under his feet. But still surrounded by blackness. Ahead of him, an almost-discernible misty form. With form comes, by necessity, limits. The shape in front of him appeared humanoid, roughly his size. Perhaps it was not as strong as it wished him to think... "Why? A rather general question. What do I want? I want for nothing...I merely serve the wishes of my mistress." Perhaps it was coalescing. Or perhaps it was his imagination. Difficult to tell. A wisp of the mist surrounding it trailed away from its neck, stretching out into the blackness until it could no longer be seen. "Please..." pleading on his part. "Please...stop." Interest. Curiosity from the form in front of him. Like that of a child examining a bug, just prior to crushing it. "Let me out..." he whispered. "I don't...I don't understand." Sigh, again. "And where would you go, then? Back to that wasteland you so desperately cling to? To that pointless life you try to remake, when death is all you should have received? The reign of Man is drawing to a close. Your worthless efforts can do nothing to avert your true destiny, death." Shinji had taken several steps towards the shape as it continued speaking. Years of his life, years of incessant toil, were being struck down by just a few words from something which hadn't even bothered to identify itself yet, and which even so terrified him. "S...stop it," he muttered. "Don't...d-don't say that." He took another few steps towards the figure. The figure only regarded him cooly, watching his movements. "Just...let me go." A narrowing of the eyes. Painfully familiar concentric hexagons materialized as he took another step, and his body seemed instantly glued to them, in the pain of being electrocuted a million times over. ^What...what is this?^ "You should recognize the wall of the soul, if nothing else I have shown you." Blasted away from the pain, sailing backwards to stop suddenly, suspended above the imaginary ground by an unknown force. "The thing that will always bring you pain, and which, when offered the chance to eliminate forever, _you_ demanded to keep." Shinji found he could still speak. "Who are you? What is it you want with me?" "I am the one you knew." A simple answer. The figure became more distinct. Gradually, the mist surrounding it drew together, congealing into a human form. Almost human. A girl, in her late teens, with blue hair and red eyes that he was finally able to recognize. She was nude, her arms crossed over her chest out of what, in anyone else, may have been modesty. Her skin was luminescent, the pale glow lighting the area around her and Shinji but nothing else, being absorbed by the void around them. And on her back was an array of wings, a total of three pairs. His eyes grew wider in beats, as recognition dawned and his mind immediately tried to reject what it saw. Breathing accelerated. Shinji tried to back away, his feet scrabbling for traction where there would be none. Anything to try to put distance between him, and... and..._that_. "No...you c-can't be - " "No." Cutting him off before the fear could consume him. "I have only borrowed this form to appear before you, and her." As she became more defined, the tendril around her neck also coalesced, forming a finger- thick cord cinched tightly about her throat. She took this gingerly in her hand, holding it absentmindedly. Shinji watched, his eyes drawn to the cord like a moth to light. He thought that, perhaps...it looked like it was fraying. "But my strength grows," the girl-ghost asserted. "There will soon be a day, when all resistance will end, when I will break free of this shackle imposed on me." A smile at the reaction of her catch. "You need not fear me now. For the moment, I remain leashed. But a leash _can_ work both ways." Eye contact, gaze burning straight into his soul. "Chain a slave to her mistress, and both are prisoners." The girl seemed oblivious, both to Shinji's bewildered expression, and of the emergence of a dark form behind her. Something huge, titantic even. Humanoid. She advanced on him, about to say something further. But she cut off, turning to look off to the side, as though hearing a faint sound. Whispered: "They're coming." "Who?" Freeze. Shinji went bolt-stiff, as something touched his shoulder from behind. A heartbeat later they were on him. Hands. Countless, clawed hands, like the wraiths of nightmare, coming from the nothing behind him, and reaching for him. "The fools." Still inattentive to her charge. "Their quest for final death is useless now, but now they have only turned to revenge. No matter." A brief smile. "We will destroy them for you." Pause, as another gigantic, indistinct form appeared behind her, coming to stand alongside the first. "You are not surprised?" Mild interest. "That there would be a second?" Brief laugh. "She is weaker than I. But she is of the same essence as I. We will exist together. For your _benefit_." The last word said as a curse. The hands had come for him. Grabbing, pulling, tearing, clawing into him. Helplessness. Nothing with which to fight. Terror. The girl smirked, and behind her the two giant forms shattered, shedding what might have been skin but looked too solid for that. Underneath...brilliance. Light without shape. The two coming together, merging into one being. Sight obscured; a hand over his eyes, clawing at them, trying to tear them out. And then... _Power_. Unstoppable. Unquestioned. The hands blasted away, blown aside and scattered like leaves. Warmth, protection. Opening his eyes - Horror. The same girl, only enormous. Sitting helpless in her hands, looking up into her massive eyes, regarding him with that cold, sadistic glare. Being brought up towards her face, to her forehead - Screaming. A voice, as reality is rent apart: "But the day draws near when _I_ will be master." * * * Awake. He felt the ground under him again. For some reason, he felt happy to feel even that. What had just happened? He wasn't sure. For the dream - and that was what it had to have been - had already slipped away into the recesses of his mind, inaccessible and forgotten, just as all dreams are. He slowly got to his feet. ^Better for me not to remember it anyway,^ he thought. The only thing he could recall was that it had been very frightening. Shinji slipped into thought, remembering why he'd come out here. He shook his head, as the memory surfaced. But as he walked away, his eyes caught the dark shape of Unit-00, looming overhead like a gigantic stone gargoyle, its eye staring off into infinity, searching for any threat to its keepers. He found his heart was thudding quite loudly in his chest. His stomach began to churn, looking at the machine. But the strangest part was that he didn't even know why he should feel this way. ^Tired,^ he reasoned. ^Just tired.^ He began to walk away, finding he had to fight the urge to run from Unit-00. This feeling just wasn't natural, even if he was exhausted. ^Maybe Kaoru would be able to explain. Or maybe even Rei...^ The prospect of an explanation was excuse enough. He started off at a light jog, which quickly accelerated. Very soon, he was running as fast as he ever had in his life. Yet, even having lived away from civilization for years, Shinji was still able to make mistakes out here. Such as running in the dark, over uncertain terrain. As such, he did not see the rock until it was too late. His foot caught, and he stumbled, trying to catch himself and failing, going over the edge of a small cliff with a brief cry of shock. It wasn't a very long fall, a meter or so, but he could not break the fall with his arms alone. The last thing he saw before unconsciousness snatched him away was the ground rushing up at him, slamming him in the forehead like a sledgehammer. Not far off, the single eye of Unit-00 flickered once, then died. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Endnote: Well, I figure that was enough of an acid trip for one chapter. Don't feel bad if you're left wondering what the hell just happened. But yes, that last section actually _did_ take place in the 'real' world. Special thanks go to the Avatar of Dragonia for prereading this chapter, and whose work was essential in working this thing over into what you have just read. Whether or not this is a good thing, I leave up to you. ^_^ Final note: OK, I'm through procrastinating, at least for now. Everyone can expect me to keep a more regular schedule on this fic. So don't let the incredibly skewed dates below throw you off. Also, in case anyone didn't notice, Chapter 11 of this fic is newly rewritten and available both on my site and ff.net. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Started: December 11, 2001 Version 1 Ended: January 1, 2002 Version 2 Ended: March 3, 2002 Version 3 Ended: May 16, 2002 Version 4 Ended: May 17, 2002 Thanks go to the Avatar of Dragonia, Heavyarms Kai, and Judging Eagle, as always, for being my prereaders, and putting up with my hopelessly long delays. New site location: http://www.angelfire.com/anime4/srfics/index.html e-mail: otakusadist@hotmail.com