Chapter Text
Asuka dreams of Kaji. His face swims in front of her, scruffy, angular, adult, tantalizingly close. She smiles, and he smiles too, that lazy, roguish smirk that somehow feels like it’s just for her, and she shuts her eyes and leans forward and presses her lips against his. And he reciprocates! His mouth is warm motion on hers, his arms come up around her and hold her close to him, and when she opens her eyes, her face freezes because it’s not Kaji holding her but Shinji, Stupid Shinji, his eyes as gentle and warm as a worn-in blanket. He smiles softly, just for her. Because of her. He kisses her again and one hand tangles in her hair and it’s utterly unbearable, how close he is, how hot his skin is, how much he seems to want her –
Her eyes snap open. It’s still too hot. She feels rivulets of sweat creeping down her face. Her whole body is damp. She rolls over, stickily, and discovers she’s kicked the blankets off in her sleep. The faint sound of the television reaches her ears, a muted slush of indistinct Japanese.
“Disgusting,” she whispers, and gets out of bed.
She shucks off her t-shirt, her shorts, her panties. The air is unpleasantly humid. She decides to take a shower. Douse herself in cold water. Rid her skin of the disgusting residue curdling on it, amplified by the heat. She grimaces and snatches a discarded towel from the floor, wrapping it around herself. If he tries anything…he won’t try anything. She forcefully tamps down on the sudden, stinging humiliation prickling at the corners of her eyes and leaves her room.
She pauses as she’s passing through the living room, greeted by a strange sight: Shinji Ikari, naked save for a pair of shorts, lying spread-eagled on the tatami, eyes closed. She’d think he was dead if she couldn’t see the rise and fall of his skinny chest. She frowns. His nipples are brown. His body glistens with a thin sheen of sweat. His cheeks are a little flushed. His lips are parted just a bit.
The thought of leaning down and waking him up flashes through her head, unbidden. She thinks of her dream. Her lip curls. The reality of his kiss was nothing like that at all. The reality of him is –
She doesn’t let herself finish the thought. She whirls on her heel. The washroom door crunches shut. The TV murmurs on. Shinji breathes.
He hasn’t moved when she exits, refreshed but no less disgruntled. Her feet come to a stop just behind his head. She frowns. She hears cicadas, birds, distant traffic. Blazing rectangles of light strain hungrily towards the boy’s prone form, stopping just short of his feet. She traces the edge of one of them to its source: the patio door, thrown wide open. She squints. The city outside wobbles gently.
…breaking? Yes, it’s incredible! Japan hasn’t seen temperatures this hot in twenty years! The high today is expected to be 44 degrees…
“Dummkopf!” Asuka snarls, slamming the patio door so hard the glass shudders in the frame. “Are you stupid? Why do you have the doors OPEN during a HEAT WAVE?!”
“Uh?” Shinji blinks up at her muzzily, uncomprehending.
She groans wordlessly in fury and stomps over. Shinji, sensing danger, tries to get out of the way, but he’s not quick enough; her foot makes forceful contact with his back. He cries out and goes limp, slumping bonelessly on his face. She scoffs.
He turns his head so he can frown confusedly at her knees, cheek smooshed into the mat. “What was that for?!” There’s a distinct whine in his voice, dulled by the heat.
“Because it’s your fault I woke up in a puddle of my own sweat!”
“How is that my fault?”
“Are you deaf? You opened the damn patio door!”
“Because the air conditioners broke! Both of them!”
“What?!”
Horrified, Asuka turns and beholds the wall-mounted air conditioning unit in the living room. It taunts her with its complete and perfect silence. She clutches her towel, whirling towards the dining room.
“I kept telling Misato-san, hey, the one in the dining room isn’t blowing cold air anymore, and the one in the living room is making funny noises,” calls Shinji from behind her. “And she tells me, don’t you worry Shinji-kun, I’ll take care of it’…” His scoff is quickly swallowed by a yawn.
“So you’re just going to lie here and…and marinate?!” she shrills incredulously, turning to look at him. He’s on his side and looks very resigned.
One shoulder lifts in a shrug. His collarbone is very sharp. “Can’t really do anything else.”
“Mein Gott, you’re hopeless. I’m going to change.”
She emerges from her room clad in a bikini top and the shortest pair of shorts she owns, her hair pulled into a ponytail to expose her slender neck. Shinji is laying where she found him. His eyes land on her for a brief moment and dart away again. His expression doesn’t change. The redness in his cheeks is the one that’s been there since she saw him. She grits her teeth. The patio door is open again.
(that’s all he ever does, look, his eyes darting away as soon as she catches him – furtive, hiding)
She turns her head. “Isn’t there a fan, or…or anything?” She can’t keep the frustration out of her voice.
“Nope,” says Shinji glumly. “Believe me, I looked.”
“Well, obviously you didn’t do it hard enough!”
Asuka gets sweaty all over again as she tears through the apartment with no luck. Rage courses through her as she wrenches open the door to Misato’s room and finds it empty.
“Diese Schlampe!” she shrieks. “She totally planned this!”
“She left really early this morning,” sighs Shinji when she stomps back into the living room. “I know because I heard the front door close.”
“Did you spend all night in here?!”
“Pretty much. I woke up at two and couldn’t get back to sleep, and there’s no window in my room, so…”
“Hmph.” She flops down on the floor. Silence falls between them. Asuka mentally curses the lack of central air conditioning, the weather, the stupid boy beside her. There’s some blisteringly brainless game show playing on the TV. She stares at it, numb.
“Actually, you know what,” says Shinji, getting to his feet. “There’s one thing we can do…”
The sound of quiet footsteps. A cabinet door opening. The creak of cardboard. A metallic rasp.
She turns. Shinji is coming towards her with a roll of aluminum foil in one hand and a pair of flip-flops in the other. She smiles before she can stop herself.
“Good thinking, Third! I’m impressed.”
He smiles back. “I’m just sorry I didn’t think of it sooner.”
Shinji slips on the sandals and steps onto the veranda.
“No, Idiot Shinji,” snaps Asuka, clambering to her feet. “You’re doing it wrong.”
Shinji pauses, frowning. “I don’t think so. The foil – “
“Goes on the inside, not the outside.”
His frown deepens. “Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around.”
“And I’m pretty sure it’s my way around!” Quick as a snake, she snatches the roll of foil from Shinji’s hand.
“Ahss-kahh,” he whines. Her name comes out as a tired hiss, dissolving quickly in the heavy air.
“Sheen-jee,” she singsongs back. “Remind me, which one of us has the university degree?”
“Was it in advanced aluminum foil origami?” he grumbles, grabbing at the roll.
She yanks it out of his reach. “No! That’s not even a thing, stupid. It was applied mathematics.”
He makes another grab for it. She dances out of the way, further into the apartment. Shinji follows.
“Asuka,” he says, patiently, desperately, like he’s trying to talk down a mischievous toddler – irritation flares – “putting the foil on the inside is going to bake us like potatoes. The reflected heat will – “
“Don’t you dare lecture me on physics, Third! You’ve got some nerve. You were the one who didn’t know anything about thermal expansion.”
His face scrunches up. “Whatever, that’s not the point. When I was a kid I –“
“Don’t care, didn’t ask! Besides, you still are a kid, dummy.”
She leads him all around the living room, smirking at his protestations. He doesn’t share her amusement, only getting more and more aggravated until finally he abandons all sense of self-preservation and launches himself at her like an American football player. Asuka is caught off-guard, and his torso slams into hers, sending them both toppling to the floor in a tangle of limbs.
Her face contorts. Shinji is everywhere and his sweat is everywhere and he’s heavy on her, surprisingly so for such a skinny bag of bones. The smell of him is thick in her nostrils, soap and salt and teenage boy. His bare, slick skin rubs against hers as he wrestles her for the roll.
“Gross! You pervert!” she shrieks, heat erupting in her cheeks. She extends her arm out as far as it’ll go, determined to keep the roll out of his reach. She starts thrashing, trying to disentangle herself.
“Asuka, just give me the – wait, stop, you’re – EEP!”
Her knee makes contact with something soft, and then one of Shinji’s flailing limbs smacks her in the face, so she hits back as hard as she can with the roll of foil still clutched in her fist. Shinji yowls and scrabbles blindly off of her, finally managing to free himself.
“That hurt,” he says, shooting her a wounded look from where he’s curled in a ball, out of her reach. His face is flushed. No doubt hers is too.
“Good,” she pants, glaring back, daring him to say something. She gets to her feet, yanks her bikini top back into place, and tightens her now-messy ponytail. Shinji looks away and keeps his mouth shut. She tosses her hair, suddenly tired.
“Now,” she snaps. “Watch and learn.”
The living room windows are covered in foil in record time, casting the apartment into dimness. Shinji eyes her impassively.
“Please don’t scream at me later, saying it’s all my fault again,” he grumbles. “Because it’s not. Putting the foil on the inside was your idea. I want to make sure you to know that.”
“Shut up!” She smacks the foil roll into her free hand menacingly. Shinji flinches.
She flops back down on the mat and begins flipping through the channels. Shinji doesn’t protest any further. Good. It’s too hot to tussle anymore. Eventually she settles on a soap opera.
One episode finishes. Then another. Then another. Then another. Asuka isn’t feeling any cooler. In fact, if anything, she feels warmer. The air has become oppressive, almost physical, hot and humid and smothering. It’s hard to breathe. She thinks of Angels, of waiting, skin itching; it’s that feeling, externalized, everywhere, cooking her alive. She looks at Shinji. He’s propped up on a pillow, watching the TV upside down on his back. His eyes have a glazed quality to them. Sweat drips gently into his hair. His shorts are hiked up past mid-thigh. Thanks to the angle of his hips, canted by another cushion, she can see the slight bulge of his junk through the fabric. Her mouth turns downward. Boys are so crude. She thinks about smacking him, but her limbs feel too heavy. Truthfully, and she hates this truth, it’s not anything she hasn’t seen before. Between the plugsuits, and those vulgar exercise outfits Misato made them wear for a week straight…at least the plugsuits have a crotch-guard. She grimaces.
She and Shinji share a special purpose, a classroom, an apartment, bathwater – damn the Japanese and their backward customs! their too-thin walls of literal paper! She hears him rustling in his room at night, is sometimes woken by a quickly stifled cry because he’d had a nightmare. Does he hear her too? He does her laundry. He makes her lunches. They’re on top of each other, mashed together, Asuka coated in Shinji and Shinji coated in Asuka, and no amount of baths in this thrice-damned pressure cooker of an apartment will wash that out. She hates it, hates how comfortable she’s become, resigned utterly to this unfamiliar closeness. And yet – and yet – somehow, insultingly, Shinji Ikari remains as distant as the moon, totally remote despite hanging over her every move. Dull. Boring. Inscrutable. His mouth, unmoving on hers. His arms, resolutely at his sides. She was kissing him, for God’s sake!
When she finds his face again, she sees that he’s watching her with half-lidded eyes, mouth impassive. She turns quickly away from him, embarrassed at being caught staring.
“Hey, Asuka…doesn’t it feel much hotter in here to you?”
“Nope!” she says. “Not a bit!”
“Hmm…that’s odd…”
She grits her teeth. What’s with that attitude? She turns back to him, intending to attempt to verbally hammer him into submission, but his head is turned away from her, looking towards the dining room.
Pen-Pen stands in the doorway. He looks at Asuka and Shinji. Asuka and Shinji look at him. Then he turns around and waddles away towards the kitchen. The fridge opens. Pen-Pen reappears, holding a beer. There’s something almost like sympathy in his eyes. Then he disappears. There’s the sound of another fridge door opening. Then silence.
Asuka and Shinji look at each other.
The race to the refrigerator is short and brutal. Shinji has a head start since he’s closer, but Asuka grabs him by the hair and launches herself ahead. It ends with Asuka splayed in the prime spot against the shelves and Shinji at her feet. He starts grabbing beer cans and moans when he puts one on his stomach.
“Stop making that sound, it’s disgusting.”
“Mmnnnh…they’re like ice packs, Asuka, seriously…”
She grabs one and presses it against her face.
“It’s…nice,” she manages, just barely holding in a moan of her own. She watches as Shinji covers himself as best he can in Misato’s alcohol stash. Ooh, she won’t be happy about that one. Asuka smirks.
They’re woken an undeterminable amount of time later by Misato’s shriek. Asuka only has time to open her eyes before she finds herself being thrown bodily from the fridge. There’s a heavy cacophony of falling cans and then Shinji shouts as he, too, is presumably violently dislodged.
“As if my electricity bill isn’t already high enough! I ought to make you kids pay rent! You’ve probably broken the fridge!” Suddenly, Misato’s eyes widen in horror. Her face goes pale.
“My beer,” she whimpers. “My beer.” She grabs a can. She closes her eyes.
“You know. I’ve had a very, very tiring day. And there is no more cold beer and it’s all your fault.”
Asuka wipes drool off her cheek and watches, awe-struck, as Misato’s face turns from ashen to traffic-light red in a matter of seconds. The color clashes magnificently with her hair. A vein throbs in her temple. She’s never seen the older woman this angry before in her life. When she barrels toward Asuka she wonders, for a fraction of a second, if this is how she dies. But instead Misato grabs her by the arm and hauls her to her feet. She drags her across the kitchen where Shinji is pressed up against the cabinets, eyes wide, and grabs his arm too. Then she drags them both into the entryway and shoves them out the door.
The air is oven-like against her refrigerator-chilled skin. Asuka snaps out of her shocked stupor and starts hammering on the door.
“Hey! Let me in! I’m not decent!” She turns to Shinji and glares. “Why are you just standing there?! Back me up here!”
He shoots her an anxious look but joins her, adding his voice to her own.
“M-Misato-san! Please let us back in! We’re sorry!”
“No we are not,” snaps Asuka. “This is all her fault! If she’d have just fixed the damn air conditioners when you told her to –“
The door opens. Asuka is cut off mid-sentence by a t-shirt to the face. By the time she recovers, the door is shut again.
“Bitch!” she shrieks before yanking the shirt over her head.
Misato was kind enough to also give them shoes and their wallets. She bends down and snatches hers off the ground and jams her feet viciously into a pair of flip-flops.
“So,” says Shinji. “Now what?”
“Now you shut the hell up, that’s what,” Asuka snaps, sticking her face into his. He backs off, looking startled.
“Well…it’s Misato’s problem now,” he says. “Her turn to become a baked potato.”
“Hmph. Yeah, whatever. She deserves it. Come on, Shinji, let’s go somewhere with a functional AC.”
The two pilots traipse through the parking lot, Asuka in the lead. She can feel the heat of the asphalt through her shoes. The sun beats mercilessly down from above. She imagines she can feel the skin of her legs crisping gently like bacon in a pan. She walks a little faster.
The train station appears ahead of them like an oasis in the desert. Asuka throws herself onto a plastic seat, grateful for the shade. Shinji leans up against a pole to her right. It’s not very crowded. Most people have the good sense to stay inside. Most people have working air conditioners. Most people are competent, well-adjusted adults. The cicadas are very loud, an insistent buzzing, saturating everything. She thinks of Germany, of Berlin. They weren’t as loud there. It wasn’t as hot. Not for the first time, she feels a slight pang of homesickness. She shifts her legs and grimaces. She’s sweating like a pig. The plastic is slick where her thighs were resting on it.
“Hey, Asuka,” Shinji murmurs. She looks at him. He’s looking at the empty train tracks, brow slightly furrowed. “What do you think winter was like?”
“Heaven, probably,” she grumbles.
That provokes a laugh. “It’s so hard to imagine,” says Shinji. “The air being that cold. To the point it could kill you.”
Asuka stretches. “Mm. Dying of cold sounds pretty nice right now. Better than melting into a puddle of goo.”
“It’s winter in the southern hemisphere, isn’t it? Let’s go to Australia.”
She snorts. “Sure, Third. The train will take us all the way there.”
“Not right now! I meant…later…maybe…”
The train appears. The doors open with a hiss and a wave of crisp, air-conditioned air pours out. Asuka and Shinji sigh in unison. They sit side by side on the bench. Asuka leans back, crossing her arms behind her head and stretching her legs out in front of her. Afternoon sunlight streams through the windows, painting everything with warm golds. She peers at Shinji out of the corner of her eye. Later maybe, eh? She turns her gaze to the ceiling. If she went to Australia…no way would NERV let them go. Because of Eva. But if there were no Eva…no Eva…if there were no Eva she wouldn’t be a pilot anymore. And if she wasn’t a pilot…
Asuka frowns. No point in thinking of useless impossibilities. She’s the best pilot and therefore necessary, always and forever.
They get off near the airport. It’s much more crowded this close to downtown. People are everywhere, walking, skipping, running. A sea of dark hair and bright clothes, the susurration of humanity punctuated by music, laughter, too-loud voices. Smells, too: food, body odor, melting asphalt. She inhales, wrinkling her nose. The whole scene shimmers, cooking gently in the heat.
“Where are we going?” asks Shinji. He looks a little nervous, limbs tucked close to his body. Asuka fights the urge to roll her eyes. He’s the pilot of a giant war machine, and crowds like this make him nervous? She reaches out and closes her fingers around his wrist and tugs him along behind her, so he doesn’t let himself get swept away.
“There’s a nice ice cream shop around here. I’ve been once or twice.”
They walk side by side down the sidewalk, weaving through people. Asuka does her best not to bump against anyone, disgusted at the mental image of their sweat, their stink, their essence, freely soaking into her clothes, brushing her bare legs. Her hand creeps up Shinji’s arm, tugging him closer, because he keeps lagging, and it’s slowing them down. Finally, blessedly, they reach the ice cream shop. To Asuka’s dismay it’s filled to bursting with people. There’s nowhere to sit, but damn it if she didn’t come all this way. She takes a deep breath and plunges inside. The door bell tinkles entirely too cheerily.
The noise inside is incredible. The press of the crowd forces them to stand close together. She sighs, feeling her shoulder blade bump against Shinji’s chest. Someone passes too close by her and she leans back on instinct, further into him. His left hand comes up, resting lightly on the side of her shoulder through her t-shirt, steadying them both.
They order. Once they get their ice cream they emerge by mutual unspoken agreement back into the street.
“Ahh,” sighs Asuka, “I didn’t think it’d be so crowded…how disappointing! That’s no way to treat your Eva pilots.”
Shinji hums in assent. “The ice cream is delicious, though.”
“Yep, so I’ll let it slide this time.”
The roar of a jet engine fills the air. Asuka and Shinji look up, squinting. The big, bulky cargo jet sails serenely over them, obscured slightly by tangled power lines and signs and stumpy buildings. It’s so close yet still untouchable. Removed. Above it all. To something like that all the humans below are as ants. Asuka rocks onto her tiptoes. Contemplates reaching upwards and running a finger along its underbelly. Out of all these people, she could do it. She and the boy beside her.
He’s an inch shorter than her. He nudges her with his sharp, bony elbow. “Hey…there’s a laundromat across the street. Wanna just eat in there?”
“It’s better than standing out here.”
The inside is a bit dingy, but there’s not very many people inside and she and Shinji are quickly able to find seats. She licks her strawberry cone and listens to the whirr of the machines and watches people walk blithely by. The people of Tokyo-3, that blocky, austere, military city that’s on the edge of its seat, braced for the destruction of everything it knows and loves. She’s one of three things between it and that destruction. Her life. Her self. All of her being hangs in the balance, always, burning, waiting, straining. Ready. None of that is reflected in those people out there, on their smiling faces. Do any of them recognize her? Can any of them imagine what it’s like?
She looks at Shinji, quietly eating his green matcha ice cream. He’s looking at his sandaled feet, kicked out in front of him. Not paying attention to anything. Eyes far away. She sighs through her nose and shakes her head.
“Idiot,” she murmurs.
He doesn’t look at her.