Chapter Text
As little sheep come forth from the fold
By ones, by twos, by threes, while the rest stand timid,
Their eyes and muzzles to the ground,
And others follow the first, pressing up against it if it stops,
Simple and quiet, and they know not why;
So I saw the head of that fortunate flock come forward then,
Shamefast in face and modest in walk.
-Dante, The Purgatorio, Canto III
Snowy clearing among the dark pines, babbling stream (words incomprehensible) off to one side, a steep hillock to another with a small playground sitting at its base. A place Asuka knew a long time ago, where children often gathered after a snowfall to sled around, build forts, play with each other. Sometimes, with buried envy, she saw their parents there too. Now it was empty. The sun was rapidly setting on the short winter day.
Little Asuka aimlessly trudged about the deserted place. What had she hoped to find here? There was nobody around. Trees irritatingly groaned and whined under the rising wind. Worthless place.
Unsure why, she stooped down to the snow and began sculpting, giving shape to the vast and helpless potential.
Clumsy little hands couldn't make much. So she just piled the chilling frost up into a low mound. It was familiar and nostalgic, though she wasn't sure how. More, more, more. Bare fingers were numbing, sometimes banging on rocks hidden under the snow. Orange rays peeked through needles down onto her back, onto the growing pile, casting her tiny shadow, now suddenly casting several more.
"Hey Asuka! Can we build too?"
She glanced backward to see the chubby little forms of a crowd of bundled-up children approaching her. Their faces were all
wrong
The jaws and teeth were ugly and leering, almost sharklike, the lips peeled back horribly to show off blunt teeth and devilish grins, chins jutting out unnaturally, some with deformed skulls and brows; above their scarves and chubby cheeks, the beady eyes were barely there at all, but she felt seen all the same by the abhorrent little things, and they just kept smiling at her, God, go away, go away
"GO AWAY!"
and a disgusting whiny sound was their cherub chorus reply, they kept coming closer closer closer, circling in like vultures, offering help and comfort, dealing destruction and pain; she reeled back in a rising cocktail of rage and despair and
"I'LL KILL YOU!"
But no matter how she beat and stabbed (stabbed? Yes, stabbed) and pushed them all away from her pathetic little construction, they just moved closer closer
Their stupid little feet trampling and repulsive bodies falling and ruining it all
Red, the red of misty rage, the red of a vague beast outline, the oily red of spilled—
No good. All kinds of footprints and stains on her stupid snow pile now. Desperately she tried to pack more back onto the damaged mound, to smooth it out. It just got her hands all red and gutsy, her eye blurry, throbbing pang of a headache, gnawing feeling of unreality. A lonely crow cawed somewhere in the trees. The sunlight was dying; night crept up on its grave.
She fell to her knees and broke her old promise.
———
That kitchen—gone, graying out, fading into endless fog. The pressure of hands crushing her throat with maddened strength…and…nothing. Slipping, slipping off into nothing. Muscle tone was beginning to feel a bit slack, just a bit loose as sleep overtook. She would just rest here a little while, wherever 'here' now was, nice and easy; murmurs and screams echoed around, muted to her ears but ever-present in the background, lapping like soothing waves on an empty shore.
Asuka laid down gently and simply forgot for a time, was not, drifted in and out like a lost specter. Too tired to sleep, too tired to move. Steady thump of the heart now easing and decelerating. Breathing nice and regular to cool burning lungs. Whisper of air, /
"...Then where is my reality?..."
whisper of word, faint as a distant bell toll, in her ear. How pleasant. Good to flow with the fatigue, like chimes in the breeze. Existing: a weighty thing.. drift.
…
She (who?) opens her eyes. It is a little place she(?) knew a long(er) time(?) ago. Ringing around a limpid, circular pool in the middle, red rose bushes dig into the earth, play jubilantly upon broken columns scattered around the basin, guard their blossoms with a jealous eye. The low, thrumming sound of their painstaking growth is a coaxing lullaby.
A strip of thick, lush, clear lawn surrounds the bushes. Further, low walls of moss-bearded, pinkish-gray cobblestones wrap around and embrace it all, perfect enshrouding from the dark trees trying to peek over, perfect shelter and enclosure. Perfect little thorns. Thorn of stone, thorn empty, lovely thorn guarding the flowers. Here it is good (though perhaps lacking something). All hers.
Her?
The whispering pond draws her soul in like Tantalus. With lazy, sleepy limbs she crawls up to it. Crystalline water reflects the deep, boundless blue sky placidly smiling upon them all, far above the singing roses. It does not flee from her presence. Perhaps there is something at the bottom; a little pebble of quartz?
She looks and—looks. It looks back. Eyes dissimilar, eye red, hateful. She gasps sharply and rejects the sight, tries to back up—no, legs falling asleep. Center of gravity lurches forward, and she tumbles down headfirst, down into the glassy surface where she lurks. Sensation of falling persists in the darkness and time bends and twists with river-whorls and /
The primeval forest, dense and dark green and grey, like the old fairy tales always told—not the happily-ever-after, but the little children terrorized by shapeless beasts lurking in the depths and unswept corners of the malignant world. Her heartbeat was a bit slower, her skin a little cooler. Something in the back of her brain prickled and oscillated. She scratched at it in defiance.
The sound of snapping branches and crushed leaves behind her—something was coming, trying to catch up, trying to surface. Awful, familiar growls and grins in the darkness. The gasp of her desperate panting as she fled, flitting among the encircling, encroaching, enshadowing pines of the nameless wood guiding her inevitable path. I don't want to die, I don't want to die. Rushing limbs felt strangely light and weightless. Light up ahead, orange light filtering through needles—yes!
She broke through the chaos of tangling brambles and ruinous branches and came out onto the dusky seashore, the tinted waves of Lethe musically rising and smoothing the immaculate sand. The ocean: infinite, inward-bent, eternal. She heard the murmur, the tug of her desire, as she approached, set foot in the laughing riptide, submerged, and perception expanded and /
At last.
「Is this your wish?」
The dreamer revels in the unadulterated, unconditional love and acceptance washing over her, the nasty nameless darkness left far behind in this orange-lit, formless, malleable place. Location, boundary—nonsense. The roar of a cheering crowd, the world wrapping about her, sprawling beneath her feet. No, rather, it hangs upon a thread, upon her, the center, the hub, the raison d'être. She towers dizzyingly high above it all, above the faceless crowds on city streets, the train tracks and skyscrapers, the fields and fens, the seas and shores. Yes, this is what she(?) had been searching for!
See! Do you see now?! I can be here! You need me!
She cannot die, nor fade, nor disappear now. They all look at her, congratulate her, prove her reality. Their features cannot be discerned, lost in mist and distance. That does not matter; why should one such as herself care? She revels in the unlimited, rapturous approval, stands tall and finally praises herself, the archon, the core of all that was (and might have been) and is and will be (and will have been).
This is what it means to be lovely, to be loved.
Though, at length, a stray thought, a slight lack, crosses her mind, just as in the garden before: a face that she misses, strangely enough, just a little bit.
She?
…What is the shape of her face?
Her face, her face—
Blink. The garden again. The rose bushes (breathing their last) are shriveled up, fallen lethargically from their columns and playgrounds onto the fading-grass-deathbed. The walls are eroded, the orange of the setting sun bleeding through a breach in the tumbling cobblestones, the prismatic veins and tendrils of light snaking up to the middle and coiling within it. Coppery scent. Lonely place of solitude, the final hour, the end nigh.
The water in the pool is murky, oily, dancing alight with maddening fire in the silent sunset. Though fuming with hatred and frustration at the interruption, this time she is wise enough not to look. What good is a face? Instead she plunges her arm in, her right arm—
A bolt of pain like lightning shoots up the middle of it. What? What? What?
「Who are you?」
The center!
「Who are you?」
The best!
「What is your name?」
Uncontrollable flames roar up and ravenously consume the dying petals and darkening thorns and forgetfulness alike. No hand reaches down to help. The crystal pool evaporates, its stones left bone dry and scorched as a desert. A withered seed lingers at the bottom. The heavens are falling, clouds descending; all is solemnly closing inward like a fading star. She sinks down; so, so tired. She rubs at her twitching eyes, feeling truly slack now. Time slips and solidifies, now in the wrong place as memory intrudes /
"What?…No, no no no," she faintly, helplessly choked out. "You do what I want. What I want."
「What do you want?」
She dug down into the depths and ravines of her mind, strove to conjure the perfect vision, the adoring cheers, the sense of completeness and everpresence, the world that existed for her, but it
was
so
exhausting.
The center collapsed, the floor fell through, the garden at the end of the world vanished. There was only the lightless chasm, the real infinite.
"LOOK AT ME!" she commanded nothing at all.
No eyes turned. There were no eyes here.
"PRAISE ME!"
No one applauded. There was only a gentle rolling sound like faroff thunder or giant footsteps.
"…Love me." She sank down to her knees and clutched at her head. Her eyes stung with a mixture of shame and hatred.
Nobody listened.
Perhaps that was what she had really expected, all along—
Purgatorio
Cornice I, Part I: Among the Excommunicant
Distant, repetitive words became more definite as she was shaken and blearily drawn up from sleep. It was her name being called. She felt so cold except for a warm hand tightly gripping her shoulder.
"Asuka. Come on, it's alright," the voice murmured. "It's alright."
The dark room around her…the abyss?! No, the thin futon underneath her, dim half-shapes and spinning images. Asuka twitched as she awoke all at once. The outstretched hand pulled away and gave her space to come to her senses. She rubbed her itching eyes.
"I heard you as I was passing by."
She wearily glanced up at the dark figure crouching over her, backlit by the light from the open door. An unfamiliar sight and sensation. Her room (wherever it happened to be) had always been a space strictly forbidden to anyone else since she was little. This intrusion made her feel small, like a kid being woken up from a nightmare. Embarrassing, but not necessarily inaccurate, unfortunately. The surreality of that dream—no, that memory—always deeply disturbed her. She must have been sleeptalking again.
"I'm fine," she whispered, easing back down again with a sigh. "Just the usual."
Misato nodded. There were weary shadows under her brown eyes—it must've been a late…whenever…for her, again. What time was it? To her disoriented mind, it felt like it could be four in the morning or afternoon.
"Anything I can do?"
Small war between irritation and gratitude. This would've been nice in the distant past, although she certainly would've rejected it fiercely back then. She clutched at her slightly aching arm. "No. We've all got our own stuff to deal with. But thanks."
Her guardian/roommate smiled back sadly and squeezed her shoulder again. "It's possible to share, you know. But I get it." I'm just not ready for that. "I'm here for you, though."
As Misato straightened up and paced to the door, she glanced back.
"By the way; a favor to ask. The Shore's been having issues at their well. Could you tag along with the mechanical team today, lend a hand?"
Asuka did not like that area one bit, but she had already agreed to learn more about maintenance along with some other students. It was good to keep the hands busy, and she was proving pretty adept; it seemed as if Instrumentality had left someone else's knack for machines in her subconscious. Many returnees found themselves with random skills or muscle memory they didn't have before Third Impact.
"…Sure. When are they going down?"
"Around noon, I think." Then she considered Asuka's disorientation. "It's about seven, right now. I'm going to get some sleep, but I can make you breakfast."
The former Second Child chuckled weakly. "I'll stick with protein bars."
"Hmph. I swear I'll find a cookbook one of these days," her roommate pouted. "You'll see."
If only you had come back with a chef's taste.
Asuka carefully picked her way through the sloping, forlorn labyrinth that was the lower ruins.
Civilization, or what passed for it nowadays, was the definition of ad hoc. If it had four walls and a good roof, it was passable habitat. Actually, some people were content with three walls. Especially…down here.
This place was a claustrophobic mess of shanties and little shelters haphazardly put up along or inside ruined, hollowed-out buildings. Clotheslines dangled across alleys and stretched over the almost deserted main street. Stained and rumpled shirts, pants, and other things hung down from them. It smelled very human.
The place where she lived now, a set of apartment complexes intact enough to become the unofficial urban center, was not really much more luxurious (they only recently got running water again), but it was a lot more cared for. Things here felt neglected and slapped together.
She grimaced in frustration as she stepped ankle-deep into a murky pothole she hadn't noticed. There went another pair of socks. The boots would need a long time to dry, too. Her beat-up jeans would weather it, at least. Whatever. She dealt with way worse nowadays.
Asuka glanced at the rough spaces between the hedging, leaning buildings. The terrain, so thoroughly upheaved by…by all of that stuff, rose and fell in the vast ripples of tectonic shockwaves radiating from the Geofront. One sunken alley steeply sloped down into a parallel street-turned-canal, with detritus and slime floating atop the stagnant water. Not exactly Venice.
Though smoke rose from the occasional makeshift chimney (or hole in the roof), the rickety doors along the pitted road were tightly shut, windows blocked with curtains or boarded up. The silence was unnerving. She only occasionally glimpsed a stray soul or two far away or peeking between makeshift shutters. People here were present and absent at the same time. Only a certain type hung around these ghost streets so near the shore.
Asuka frowned in a mix of confusion and aversion. She hated this place; living here was just incomprehensible. There were far better spots free for the taking. Why would anyone voluntarily waste away in a dump like this?
"Synch-rate zero…"
Her frown softened a bit. It wasn't like Third Impact had solved every problem. Everyone had at least some baggage, that was just life; the one positive was that most people had learned to lean on each other a bit more. But not everyone returned for the same reasons.
Picking her way through the shanty-town exasperatedly and with some growing anxiety, Asuka finally approached her destination. The sun was shining right overhead. She blinked in annoyance as her left eye itched again. Its vision was variable, almost clear on some days, pretty blurry on others. Not too bad today.
One of the downtown skyscrapers had, at some point, been sent flying far from the obliterated center of the city. Now an upper portion lay horizontally atop crushed buildings, with bent beams poking every which way out of the framework. Mountains of shattered glass littered the ground on either side of the makeshift entrance, swept aside for safe passage. Infections were a serious danger these days. She passed through the beast's maw of the fallen tower.
The inside was surprisingly spacious; there must've been some multi-floor atrium here originally. It was dim and dusty. Scant beams of burdened sunlight peeked through the sides and 'roof'. The vertigo was overwhelming, like she was defying physics and walking up and down the walls.
In the middle of the skyscraper-cavern, there towered a complex of hydraulic machines and a series of water tanks. It was responsible for getting fresh drinking water out of the ground and storing it here for the locals to use. It was the most likely place to find the elusive and troubled Shore-dwellers, since they still had to come here regularly.
She recognized the people around the system right away. A bunch of the old NERV technicians and engineers were scattered around inspecting the generators and pumps. Many of them were accompanied by kids about Asuka's age learning the basics of the trade in lieu of school. At a distance, near the far wall of the place, a ragged-looking man was watching the work, probably a local.
"Ms. Soryu! About time!" Mr. Hyuga called out with a grin from the center of the operation. Like everyone else, he'd long since ditched his uniform for work clothes, his sleeves rolled up and forearms stained. It was hardly the neat and tidy life of the NERV bridge, but he seemed happy enough directing the mechanics instead of watching Angels rip and tear at his city, or fending off invading soldiers.
"Hey. What are we looking at?"
The tech laughed at her flat greeting. "All business, huh? Well, we're mostly just looking over everything. We already narrowed down the current problem to Pump 2. The whiz kid's working there, how about you join him?" He gestured to a long, cylindrical machine behind him. A pair of legs was unceremoniously sticking out of an open panel where the geek was hard at work, a toolbox by his feet.
As Asuka moved to join him, Hyuga called out again. "You two are great coworkers, you know! Careful there!"
She whirled around and gave him the good old death glare that she had not lost despite everything. "Now what kind of moron do you have to be to—" She cut herself off as she noticed people around them starting to laugh like a bunch of stupid chimpanzees. "Idiots!" The roar only grew louder. "Go bean each other with your wrenches before I tell you where to stick them!"
Like water on a grease fire, her best efforts to dispel the chorus only fueled it. Finally, she gave up and moved on. They all knew perfectly well who she thought about, and it was not the guy waist deep in the oily guts of a broken pump system right now.
Storming up to the unwitting source of her latest grievance, she gave one foot a decent kick. The owner's whole lower body jerked and she heard the satisfying bang of something, an elbow or his head, on the inside, followed by a complaining whine.
"What gives?! This is delicate work!" he yelled as he crawled out feetfirst. She smirked as the stained and freckled face of one Kensuke Aida emerged from the mechanical cave and rubbed at a slight knot on his forehead. His shaggy hair was made even dirtier by patches of oil and soot.
"Oh, it's just the devil," he said as he rolled his eyes and removed his glasses to wipe them off. "If you were in a bad mood, you could've stayed home."
"Hey, stooge. I was feeling better before Makoto tried 'setting us up' again," she greeted (verbally) and crouched down over the toolbox, graciously ignoring his snark and deciding to let the whole incident slide for now.
"Dear God. Well, you still didn't have to kick me," he pouted.
"Eh, toughen up; the girls like that. You'd get a date in no time." She glanced around for his usual partner-in-crime. "Where's Suzuhara? Slept in again?"
Kensuke chuckled as he put aside a grease-covered monkey wrench almost the length of his own forearm. "Nah, he's with the med team on their rounds today, I think. He's taken a shine to them." He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Plus, Hikari likes it, too."
She never would've expected a jock like Toji to get into doctor stuff, but now it was believable; Instrumentality left people with all sorts of new interests. The ape's case was far from the most unusual. That label was better reserved for stuff like Maya's newfound fascination with MMA, or on the flipside, how Aoba was quickly becoming an expert at knitting and playing bridge with the old ladies in the community center. And those still weren't the weirdest.
I wonder if Shinji's been affected too.
"Good for him, then. What's the deal here?" She braced herself as he brightened up and launched into a technical breakdown of an issue they would probably resolve within a few minutes now that she was on the job too. This guy really, really needed a girlfriend. Maybe Hikari could set him up with someone, although her track record with that wasn't fantastic.
"Well, at first Mr. Hyuga thought it was a problem with the valves, and they aren't doing too hot, but I pinpointed the real issue to be a failure in the actuators way in the back…"
And on it went for about ten minutes of tense narration. The stooge's interests had shifted a bit (fortunately to something more useful), but alas, his mannerisms had not.
Though, after a lifetime of stress, anxiety, and an identity inextricably bound up with a war-god-machine…this nonsense wasn't so bad. Better than the Instrumentality fever dreams. Even if Hyuga's sense of humor was nightmarish.
When I had denied ever having seen him,
He said: "Now look," and showed me
a wound high on his chest.
"After I had my body broken by two mortal blows,
I gave myself up, weeping,
To the one who gladly pardons.
Horrible were my sins;
But the infinite Goodness has such open arms
That it takes whatever turns to it."
-Dante, The Purgatorio, Canto III
Cheers went up as the well and its systems hummed to life once again. Now that was satisfying work. Kensuke rushed over to Hyuga to gush about the work and their solution, totally forgetting to check the pressure and intake meters to see if the pump was actually functioning properly. Of course, since Asuka was on the job, it was working like a charm. She watched quietly from the sidelines as the crew gathered up to head home for a well-earned meal. A few of the local loners were gathering about to observe the restoration of their system. The raggedy-looking guy she'd seen earlier went up, presumably to thank Hyuga.
There. Not so bad.
It was good to fix things for once rather than break them.
As she was packing up to leave, the man approached her as well. His camo pants and tan shirt were ripped and mended, stained and faded, and altogether in dire need of replacement. The green jacket on top was a size or two too big on his thinned-out frame.
"…You were a pilot, weren't you?"
She tensed instinctively and glanced around. Her group hadn't left yet, so there shouldn't be any dire problem here. She still didn't like having that subject brought up. It hadn't brought her any ire so far, but she was far from proud of it nowadays.
"I was," she granted coolly, scrutinizing the stranger. "Who's asking?"
"I just wanted to thank you," he murmured, not offering a name. "For back then, and for now. I keep watch over this place, and try to help out the folks around here." He gestured to a far entrance where the thin, even emaciated, stragglers like himself were clustered, watching nervously. It was like a pack of shy animals trying to approach an interloper, sending one out ahead to see if they were a friend…or a wolf. "They're grateful, too."
"Don't worry about it," Asuka replied, relaxing a bit. "Who are you people, anyway? The hell are you doing out here? We still have room in the settlement." Misato hadn't talked much about the Shore besides agreeing about how sad a place it was.
The man shook his head regretfully and scratched at his ill-shaven cheek. "It's best to stay out here. We wouldn't really fit in. Demons to fight, and all that…"
She glanced back over at his group (or rather, loose collection of loners). While a lot of their outfits were mixed and ad hoc, and no particular markings stood out besides the odd tattoo, scraps of old camo and fatigues were a common motif. Many of them were wearing the same kind sturdy-looking boots and had similar water canteens hooked on their waists. As she looked back, the stranger moved his jacket aside to reveal a familiar insignia on his shirt.
"You were JSSDF."
The spokesman winced and nodded his head meekly. "A lot of us. I wasn't in the fight, but…"
But most of you were. And we probably fought; maybe I killed some of you, maybe some of you watched me die.
She knew they were thinking the exact same thing over there.
To say that this would've made her go nuclear once upon a time was an understatement. Knowing not just that she and they had personally fought, but also knowing from half-memories and the accounts of NERV returnees how cruel the JSSDF had been in the last battle, Asuka would've had every right to be bitter and vindictive. She had already been like that without any legitimate pretext in the really bad days. And now here these people were, wasting away on the Shore or else limply calling for help. That kind of behavior brought bad memories to mind.
But she could also remember her side of things. Back then, she hadn't even given a second thought to how she was killing human beings. Even if it was justified, it should've left a bad taste in her mouth. Instead she drank it all in eagerly, intoxicated with the high of finding Mother, and half-feral from just emerging from induced sleep, depression, and prolonged starvation. And she didn't care to give or take any help by the end.
"We…I don't even know where to start with all that," the veteran sighed mournfully and bowed deeply. "But maybe you see now."
She struggled to find any words. What the hell was anyone supposed to say in a case like this? Instrumentality had taught her a lot of things. One of them was how little she understood how anyone thought, or how to reach out to them. If only that was a knack she could've come away with, instead of a propensity for fiddling with wheels and gears. For better and for worse, people were as far from machines as anything could get. Her chest tightened with frustration as the words refused to come.
"Hey Asuka! We're heading out in a minute!" Hyuga called out from the main entryway. "Come along with us for once!"
The clock was ticking. Asuka crossed her arms.
"Yeah, what some of you guys did was horrible," she started plainly, though she was nervous as hell on the inside, even more than her debut against the Sixth Angel. "Several of our people came back with the scars. The burns looked really bad."
She could see what little flickering hope her audience held start to wither away, and she started feeling disappointed herself. But finally, she felt a click of relief as she remembered at least one thing to offer them, something that Misato had told her a while back when she'd been feeling especially bad about how she'd treated her fellow pilots, even doubting if it would be worth tracking Shinji down when the chance arose.
"But it's not up to you whether people forgive you or not. You're bullshitting yourselves if you think you can decide that on their behalf. So come up sometime and ask; maybe they will, maybe they won't. Take the chance."
"…What about you?" the man asked quietly as she turned to leave. She stood for a long moment, pondering the question.
Did she forgive them?
—The earth-rending quake of the barrage hitting the Geofront, the abject terror of death as the mines detonated around Unit-02's head, the living image (memory not hers) of Unit-01 encased in bakelite, the smell of burning bodies and stench of crushed hopes, the agony of being shredded piecemeal with tooth and claw.
…The crunch of a VTOL under her foot. The weight of a battleship as she heaved it at a bunch of trucks. The hard feel of metal helped keep the experience detached, but those vehicles obviously were not just robots, and certainly not Angels—
"I don't know. We all hurt each other…I guess I don't hate you, at least. Ask me again sometime."
She left it at that as she stalked away to her companions. Hopefully the Shore-dwellers would take Misato's advice to heart. Asuka had found a lot of value in it herself.
'Course, you'd better learn that lesson too, Shinji. We'll both have some things to settle when I find you. And it will not be easy.
The scouting parties were supposed to come back in a few days to report on the condition of the roads in the area. If it looked good, she would absolutely be pressing to get out there and start looking. Misato would back her on that. Even though things were stabilizing and becoming more pleasant by the day, there was no time to waste.
On the remains of a cracked and buckled highway, two people sat on the median. Crashed and burned-out cars littered the asphalt. Even this far away from Tokyo-3, the devastating effects of the Black Moon had uprooted and damaged infrastructure; it probably affected the whole country. The young traveler, now packing up his med kit, had yet to see any area truly untouched. Most places were at least damaged by the many fires that sprang up when everyone was…taken.
"I…I don't know how to thank you," one stranger, a thin businessman, murmured to the other. The wound on his leg was now cleaned and bandaged up neatly. It would sting for a long time, but the stitches (painful as they were) ensured that it would not be deadly, with proper care. A new bundle of clothes (fresh socks, especially) sat next to him on the concrete divider they had turned into a makeshift operating table.
"It's alright," the youthful, dark-haired interloper replied gently. "It's no trouble to me; I'm sorry there was no anesthetic or anything. Just—are there other people back? That you've seen?"
The other man shook his head. "No idea, sorry. I just sort of…found myself, out by the lake over there, a couple days ago."
Shinji nodded thoughtfully. "You know this place?"
"I lived just down the road."
He felt torn. On the one hand, he was trying his best not to burst with joy; this was the first other he'd encountered. People were coming back! He needed to hit the road immediately.
…On the other hand, he could hardly just leave this guy to fend for himself. An idea crossed his mind. He pulled a bit of rope out of a compartment of his rucksack and tossed it over to the man. He seemed to be a white-collar kind of man, but it was worth a try.
"Tie a knot. A bowline, maybe."
He got a confused frown in response. "I've…never done anything like that, sorry."
"Try it anyway. Just let your hands work."
Shinji showed it off once, and watched as the other man mimicked him—clumsily, but correctly, on the very first try, much to his own surprise. He had the memory in there; so there was something to work with. They twisted and turned through all kinds of knots, with Shinji pointing out their uses in case his new friend could not un-forget them.
…I'll have to make sure he can get by. But at this rate, I think I can move on soon.
He glanced at the setting sun. As it had for millennia upon millennia, it scorched the sky with gorgeous oranges and reds and tinted the feathery clouds violet far above. It was a reminder, up to this point, while he followed his stars. Now it was a hope: for reunion, for renewal, for…for something that could only be given, not deserved. The sunset was his beacon, now. He knew the way forward. The next ridge to climb.