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Kensuke must be selfish. At least, that’s what he tells himself in the minutes, hours, days, weeks following his awakening on a gritty black shore, a sea of sopping orange beating up on his trousers. Why did he choose individuality, he asks himself, when this was the outcome? The half-submerged half-head of Lilith grinning wide-eyed on the horizon, the moon ringed by red. His mother always taught him that selfishness was stupidity, so choosing personhood must have been a stupid act, too. It’s transitive. He knows it was a moronic decision because in the first full day of wobbling again to his legs, shaky and knobkneed, he’s nearly died more than a few times. Japan is a pockmarked hellscape of craters now, gray and withered, and in his aimless tumble across the land, trying to find a scrap of anything recognizable, he nearly trips and falls five times into pits he can scarcely see the bottom of. And, when the dark, hot night melts into an even hotter day, the sun beats down relentlessly. He takes one look at the bizarre orange liquid that seems to have replaced all the sea, and despite his thirst, despite the painful cracking of his lips, he can’t bear to try drinking it.
When he first sees Shinji, Kensuke thinks he’s a mirage. The boy, slight, wavy in the heat of the day, hovers along the path, cresting the hill that Kensuke has collapsed in the shadow of. He thinks he’s dying until Shinji’s hand, blissfully cool, clammily real, settles across the crown of Kensuke’s head.
“Oh, Aida,” Shinji says, and Kensuke remembers fuzzily that he has a family name, always will, even if his family does not extract themselves from instrumentality like he did.
He doesn’t know how he knows any of this stuff.
Shinji pulls a bruised, dented metal flask out of a sling on his shoulder, uncaps it, and presses it, ever so gently, to Kensuke's mouth. Water spreads along the dry line of his lips and he begins to swallow greedily. Shinji’s still wearing his starched, white school shirt, but it seems like it’s been many days since it’s had a good wash. It’s taken on a tired, gray dusty shade. As Kensuke sits up, he realizes he’s wearing the same shirt. He’d run to the shelter from school before whatever happened happened.
“God, thanks, Shinji,” Kensuke croaks. Shinji rocks back on his ankles and just nods. His face, ever cast downwards, reflects a tiredness, a knowledge that Kensuke’s never seen there before. He sifts through the thoughts in his mind like so many loose leaf papers caught in a wind tunnel and presses his eyes shut, feels the grit in his lashes lacerate the inside of his eyelids.
“Shinji,” he asks, feeling a tremble start radiating outward from a spot between his ribcage and his belly, “what happened out here? What’s going on?”
Shinji lays a hand, just for a moment, on Kensuke’s. He looks at it like it's a reflection of a recent memory, a haunting one. And then, he pulls back and tells Kensuke about instrumentality, about LCL, about Lilith, about the angels, about NERV, about SEELE, and gives all the twisted half-memories in Kensuke’s head, the ones that feel like invaders, lodged parasites that won’t be flushed, meaning.
Kensuke screams. He doesn’t stop for quite some time. And Shinji just sits there, cantered back in a crouch, face pale, eyes distant.
When the wave of instrumentality rushing across the globe took Kensuke, ceaseless and unforgiving, he saw Toji. He doesn’t know what that means. It would help if he remembered it fully, but the edges of the memory are smeared by the slowly-fading recollections of the rest of humanity’s collective experience, and it makes him feel ill. One moment, he’s crumpled up against the corner of the shelter, and the next, Toji is there, standing over him, a miracle made manifest. He reaches a hand, boyish, sharp-lined, crooked-fingered, down to Kensuke.
“Why are you scared, man? I’m right here.” Toji says. Kensuke finds it quite confusing. His friend’s smile is blinding.
“How…” Kensuke asks. “How are you here right now? Shouldn’t you be in the hospital? Back in Tokyo-3? Your leg…”
Toji laughs. Kensuke is drawn to the tiny lines that feather across on his face as he does so. “Where we’re going right now,” Toji says, “I don’t really need to walk, man.” He leans down, placing his hand closer to Kensuke’s. The building rumbles with the shockwave of a too-close impact. The air tastes like blood, but Kensuke remembers no wounded entering the shelter.
“Just take my hand, Kensuke,” Toji says. It’s senseless, really, there’s no reason to, but the world feels infuriatingly soft, even as tremors jackhammer through the building and jolt Kensuke’s ribs. His hand finds its way into Toji’s. It’s warm, deceptively soft behind the calluses on the pad of his palm. He thinks, hazily, that he sort of likes how his friend’s hand is just a bit bigger than his—
The memory ends, etched out by the euphoric, monstrous din of instrumentality. Kensuke focuses on what happens next until his head pounds, but nothing more can be found of Toji.
He and Shinji are trudging back to Shinji’s camp. The sun has abated, slid to the horizon, lighting up one of the corpses of the ghostly mass-produced Evas from behind. Over the sea, a thunderstorm, born of the cool air snapping over the warm water, rages. Kensuke stops, momentarily stricken by a bout of nausea. Shinji turns, looks, and somehow knows what’s going through Kensuke’s mind.
“You shouldn’t try,” Shinji says, voice thin and exhausted. “You shouldn’t try thinking about it. It’s not worth the strain, I don’t think.”
Kensuke looks up to the sky, eyes swimming. The moon gleams, brazen and arrogant, a marble crossed by a cosmic smear of blood. “I saw Toji,” he admits. His cheeks heat.
Shinji blinks. “Suzuhara? You saw Suzuhara?”
Kensuke swallows the gorge in his throat. “What does that mean, Shinji?”
Shinji rubs a thumb along the crook of his opposing elbow. His eyes flick across Kensuke’s embarrassed face, discerning, oddly probing for him. “I don’t know,” he finally says. He says it so deliberately it’s clear it's a lie. “Best not to worry too much about it.”
“Who did you see?”
Shinji does not answer.
Before the Third Impact, life on Earth had ground its heels into the dirt and was holding on for dear life, trees green, proud, in the eternal summer heat. Now, there is hardly anything left at all. Kensuke sits at the crest of the embankment that Shinji and Asuka have built their little outpost under and stares across the endlessly rolling gray hills that, when people lived on the planet, used to be called the Hakone region. Some forests remain only as skeletal graveyards, trunks bleached white in the heat of the excavation of the Black Moon.
“Hey, Kensuke,” Asuka yells from below. Kensuke starts and finds Asuka’s form, still clad in her red plugsuit, waving at him from the slope down into the upper hillside suburbs of Tokyo-3. The buildings, cracked, disfigured, shimmer in the sunborne haze. “Get your ass up and help us find some clean water!” Her posture is proud, despite everything. She has bandages wound around much of her body, but not her neck. Even from here, Kensuke can see the dark discoloration that wraps around her throat. And since he’s been here, he’s watched as Shinji doggedly avoids eye contact with the girl.
The nausea is back, bile prickling the back of his throat. He swallows it down fiercely. Is this the gift of individuality?
He gets up and picks his way down the slope. Shinji emerges from the shaded half-cave they have all taken to pathetically calling home. As they both approach Asuka, she starts laughing, doubling over in her uninflated plugsuit. Shinji looks away. The noise is joyous, sure, but alien in the landscape they’ve grown accustomed to.
“What,” Kensuke says. Shinji cocks his head like a clueless puppy at Asuka, confused.
Asuka flaps a hand at the two of them. “Nothing,” she snorts. “It’s just that the two of you still look like schoolboys. The world’s over, everyone’s dead, and you two still got your uniforms on.”
Kensuke looks down at his own shirt, half-buttoned over his undershirt, and then at Shinji’s, crisply tucked in despite the grime that has only spread across the fabric, gray over the dark red undershirt beneath. Shinji shrugs; a hand drifts down to the fold of the shirt where it’s tucked into his belt and tugs, the only hint of self-consciousness. Kensuke pops open the last buttons of his own shirt and ties it around his waist. The breeze, conflagrant as it is, feels better without the stiff white fabric draped over his back. He stands a little straighter.
Asuka gestures at him. “Can you hand me the shirt?”
“Hm?”
“Are you deaf? Just give me the damn shirt.”
Before it all, Kensuke might feel a thrill jump through him at such direct attention from a girl, especially one as pretty, as forward, as Asuka. But the strange look Shinji gives her, a mixture of fear, self-disgust, and want, fills that space with an uncomfortable thrum. Kensuke unties the shirtsleeves and tosses the shirt across the gap between him and the former Eva pilot. Asuka catches it fluidly.
“Thank you,” she says, and then turns around. Before Kensuke can ask what she’s doing, she slips her plugsuit off her back. It hangs limply around her waist, where the suit remains fastened and snug. Kensuke doesn’t really feel anything at the sight of her back, pale and lithe, but looks away out of deference anyways. Shinji doesn’t. Not for the first time since being rescued by Shinji, Kensuke wonders just what exactly happened between the two in the negative space of time between Shinji rejecting instrumentality and Kensuke’s own return to personhood.
“Alright,” Asuka says. There’s the noise of fabric shifting and rustling. “You can look now, Kensuke.”
Kensuke looks up. Asuka is wearing his uniform shirt now. It is a little long for her, draping down to her waist, untucked. It’s a ridiculous look, the blend of schoolboy scruffiness and cutting-edge NERV technology, but he supposes that fashion isn’t really relevant in a world where even the ants seem to be wary of the midday sun.
“There,” Asuka says, shoulders held a bit looser now. She shakes an errant tangle of hair out of her face. “Now I can be out of uniform, too.”
There is an ancient, rusty pump well in the little hovel back up top the hill. But the water comes out dirty, and Shinji is worried its days are numbered. Every day now, the trio spends time fanning out from camp to see if they can find any ponds or springs untouched by the cataclysm of Third Impact. They haven’t had any luck. Case in point: one day, instead of finding water, they find a body.
Maybe it's the old cameraman habit in him that he hasn’t been able to shake, but he can’t look away. The man lies face down on the ground, surrounded by rubble. The base of his neck is an open, festering wound, blackened by rot and exposure. A jagged stone, covered in viscera, lies off to the side of his head; his fingers curl up inches from its edge. The story tells itself. Kensuke suddenly feels queasy yet again; he finally looks away. Shinji and Asuka don’t. He supposes that makes sense.
“This is actually a good sign,” Shinji says. The words are flat. “This means that people are choosing to reject instrumentality. They’re coming back. It’s not just us.”
Asuka snorts. Kensuke forces himself to look back at the faceless man, at the gore trickling down his neck and skull, garnishing the parched earth. “Some bedside manners you have,” Asuka says. “This man came back, couldn’t find anyone else in the whole world, and promptly decided a rock to his brain was better than doing what we’re doing, and you’re seeing the positives?”
Shinji shrugs. Kensuke realizes with a start that if not for Shinji, he’d be like this man, sprawled out somewhere in the corpse of Hakone, face kissing the earth, his back to the sun. And if Toji ever comes back, if Kensuke isn’t around, the same fate might await him.
“Why aren't more people choosing to come back?” Kensuke hears himself ask.
Asuka finally looks away from the dead man. There’s a tired edge to her steely eyes that Kensuke doesn’t recognize. “Look around you,” she says, sweeping an arm at the crumbling hillside that offers them their current refuge from the sun. “Does individuality really mean anything if it’s in hell?”
“If it means spending it with your person, then yeah, I’d say so,” he retorts. “Isn’t that what you two chose?”
There’s a terrible, overwhelming silence, only disturbed by the small shifting noise of Shinji nudging pebbles into a tiny pile with his shoe.
“No,” Asuka says. “And don’t even suggest that, alright? That’s disgusting.” Her voice is cold, knife-sharp. Kensuke feels his heart knock in his chest, swoop low into his stomach. He throws up his arms in surrender. “Shit, I’m sorry, Asuka, I didn’t mean anything by it—”
“— I chose to come back because I had more to say, do, by myself,” she seethes. “I don’t need to be part of everyone else to feel complete. And I don’t need a person —” she wraps the word in venomous mocking, “—to manage the world on my own. That’s fucking stupid. You can die, Shinji can die, and I’ll be just fine. Life will go on.”
Asuka turns away from the hollow and starts hiking back up the slope towards camp. “I don’t know why you chose to come back. Even if it’s for a stupid reason, though, it’s courageous.”
“How so?” Kensuke asks. Shinji shrugs at no one and passes the dead man, clearly still on a quest to find water.
“Because,” Asuka calls over her shoulder, arms spread wide in a mirror of the crucified Eva corpses that pepper the landscape, “you chose to chance pain over whatever nonsense ecstasy you were promised by Lilith. You saw the most tempting thing you could see to butter you up, the most important person in your life, and you still chose to reject that. It’s selfish.” Kensuke can hear a crooked grin in her voice. “That’s good.”
Shinji disappears around a bend down the valley. Asuka vanishes over the crest of the hill. Kensuke stands with the dead man at his feet, frozen in place, and considers. When instrumentality reached him, he saw Toji, and Toji alone. It’s dizzying.
Kensuke doesn’t remember a time without cicadas. Thanks to perpetual summer, the little monsters always thrived, buzzing loud into the night no matter the time of year. Now, though, they are silent. The beach Kensuke stands on is dead quiet, save for the gentle lapping of LCL-tinged water along the gray sand. The wind is strong, but it barely makes a whisper. This isn’t the ocean. It’s a constituent of the constellation of craters blasted into existence by Third Impact, flooded with sea water. There used to be life here, people, civilization. Buildings and roads and towns and schools. Kids. And now it’s a monument to humanity’s destructive transcendence. He wonders if Toji crawled out of the muck in a pit like this, or if he tried and floundered, sinking back down to meet his maker. Or if he didn’t try at all; if his body is still part of the global sea of lifeblood that Kensuke stares blearily at now. Maybe the atoms that used to make up Toji are orbiting the earth in that horrid, infernal bloody ring.
Kensuke decides to stop thinking about that.
Behind him, gravel crunches and skitters down the slope. He can tell from the careful, shy footfalls that it’s Shinji approaching. He joins him at the water’s edge. Kensuke crouches and extricates a small, smooth stone from the sand. He rubs a finger around its rim, feels the not-quite-sticky tack of LCL left behind on it. Shinji stands there, quietly, wavering back and forth. Kensuke goes to skip the stone across the sea, just to have his hands do something. He twists back his arm, and then remembers that the sea isn’t water, really. It’s filled with the essence of so many human beings. The thought completely arrests his arm’s momentum. He lets the rock drop back into the sand and sighs, rough and harsh against the soft whistle of the wind. It’s nearing sunset, and is, for once, almost cold out, the chilled wind whipping up a fervor of goosebumps on Kensuke’s exposed arms.
“How long were you here alone before you found Asuka?” he asks Shinji.
The skinnier boy huffs and shifts on his feet. His sneakers, Kensuke notices, are scuffed beyond recognition, rendered gray by constant exposure to dust and stone, ash and grit.
“A few weeks, I think?” Shinji eventually says. He halfheartedly tries counting the days on his fingers and gives up, dropping his hands.
“A few weeks,” Kensuke echoes.
Shinji nods. “I had a lot of time to gather supplies and scope out the area. Like Asuka’s bandages. The warehouse,” he says, mentioning the covert storehouse in the hills NERV kept rations in that they regularly raid for food. “I hadn’t found the camp yet, though.”
Kensuke is grateful for Shinji’s careful planning, but beyond that, he finds that he doesn’t really care all that much what his friend was up to. “And how long was it until I popped up?”
Shinji shrugs. “Another week or so, I think?”
“And we’ve only seen evidence for a few other people besides us, haven’t we?”
Shinji looks sideways at Kensuke, amusement faintly coloring his features. “Why are you asking me that?” he asks. “You know that as well as I do.”
Kensuke ignores him. “How many people do you think have emerged from instrumentality? It’s been months. Surely more people are like us, right? Selfish…”
Shinji turns from him and gestures at the sea. “It’s less orange than before,” he says. Kensuke squints at the amber horizon. He supposes the color is less strong, more diluted now, than it was when he woke up. And, sometimes, when a particularly stiff wind blows, it smells like the sea again, salty and good.
“Look up,” Shinji says, nodding at the ring of LCL arcing overhead. “It looks thinner, right? People are coming back. Slowly but surely, people are choosing individuality. Choosing to be.”
“Do you think Toji will?”
The wind stills. Shinji looks back at Kensuke with something akin to pity, and it almost makes him sick.
“Do I think Suzuhara will what?” Shinji asks.
“Come back.” Whatever. Kensuke may as well bear the brunt of this indignity and see if he can get the answers he seeks.
“I don’t know,” Shinji says, chewing on his words. He backs up from Kensuke, like he’s afraid his friend will hit him. “At the end, he was totally alone. In the same hospital as his sister, sure, but bedridden. Did you ever visit him?”
Kensuke blinks. This conversation has twisted into something very different from what he expected.
“I tried,” he answers, “but they never let me see him.”
“They let me. But I couldn’t bear it.” Shinji says, staring with a low gaze directly at Kensuke. For an instant, he looks like a cruel reflection of his father. “I ruined him and then left him.” It sounds like Shinji should be crying. Kensuke is; he scrubs furiously at his hair, dragging his bangs down in front of his eyes. Shinji continues, his voice barely wobbling. “If he doesn’t reject instrumentality…if he doesn’t come back to you…it’s because I left him with no one. And instrumentality has changed that.”
Kensuke drags the heel of his palms across his tear-tracked cheeks. “God,” he chokes. “Shinji. It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t in control. They used you, man. Used Toji. Asuka. Spread propaganda to make people like me fall in love with the idea of the Evas. It was all so perfect. ”
Shinji’s shoulders shake. He turns away from Kensuke entirely. He thinks he hears a sniffle, faint and hollow.
“We’re children, Shinji,” Kensuke says. He presses the rock he was going to skip across the water deeper into the sand, feels the hard smoothness press back against the sole of his shoe. “We’re children trying to figure out the end of the world, and the sick part of it is we have been our whole lives.”
Shinji deflates at that. His shoulders, rigid, fall into an easier slope. The almost-casual posture strikes Kensuke as one he’d see Toji carry before he was selected to be a pilot, when he was light despite the weight of the world, and the thought threatens to bring a smile to his face.
“If Suzuhara was your person,” Shinji says suddenly, still facing away from him, “then I hope you were his.”
Kensuke laughs. It’s involuntarily, a crazed giggle that bubbles up from the part of him he thought he’d locked away when he woke up into the death throes of this new world, cursed from its inception. Birthed and in the same instant doomed by the slight, unassuming boy standing in front of him. “And why is that?” he says.
“Because,” Shinji replies, rubbing his nose into the crook of his elbow, “if that’s how it was, maybe you’ll see him again.”
Days pass. It can’t have been too many, but Kensuke loses count regardless. The situation with the well gets worse. One day, Shinji goes to fill up their basin—only enough for drinking, not bathing—and Kensuke, who’s coming up the hill with Asuka, bundles of rations from the storehouse in their arms, hears faint cursing echoing from inside the tin shack.
“Shinji?” Asuka calls out, voice sharp. “What’s going on?”
Shinji emerges from the shadow of the shelter carrying the basin in both arms. He tilts it downwards to show them the contents, a frown etched across his face. “This is all I could get out. I think it dried up,” he says. The basin, already rusty, is nearly empty, with only a thin layer of even rustier, ruddy water resting in a film on the bottom.
“We shouldn’t drink that,” Kensuke points out, a little obviously. Sweat drips down his brow and gets caught in the bridge of his glasses.
“No,” Shinji says. “We have to find water. We can’t really wait anymore.”
Asuka snaps her fingers. “On the other side of the GeoFront crater. Northeastern quadrant. We haven’t really surveyed over there yet.” Kensuke suppresses an eye roll. Asuka likes to use very official language to describe all of their tasks. He can’t even be annoyed by it because before instrumentality, before NERV, SEELE, whoever, it doesn’t fucking matter, tore his best friend from him, he’d be enamored by it all.
Shinji nods. “All right. I’ll, uh, pack this up then and we can head out. It might be a long trip.”
He turns out to be right.
They head out immediately, and they don’t round the far limb of the still-smoking carter that used to be the roof of the GeoFront until the sun has kissed the horizon, reducing its broil to a mere simmer, manageable in comparison. The ground here is warped, twisted, by the dual catastrophe of the N 2 detonation and then the ascension of the Black Moon. The land has been torn asunder, stone melted and blasted to bits and reformed all in the span of a few hours. As they pick their way close to the crater, they can see that the disaster has charred the earth into glimmering black glass. There is no life here, no ants, no moss, no hard-scrabble lichen clinging to a windward obelisk. And there is certainly no water.
The wind picks up as they reach the lip, where the ground is the smoothest and thus easier to navigate. It’s like the crater wishes to swallow everything around it. Kensuke, for the record, despises trekking so close to what seems to be a bottomless pit, and the errant thoughts that this is the former site of Tokyo-3 doesn’t calm him any. This is a graveyard, or should be, if physics would permit such a thing to exist. Even at night, the ground here is sweltering, radiating the trauma from the dual disaster back up into space. Kensuke looks ahead at Asuka and Shinji, who are coolly and emotionlessly picking their way around the ever-bending rim, maybe fifty meters ahead of him. If they are bothered by the remnants of their former reason for existing lying just one trip and fall from them, whistling, steaming, yawning, a horrible maw where there used to be the pinnacle of technological innovation, and young love, and life and death and plants and pets and hospitals and cicadas and mothers and little siblings held tight within its gleaming towers, they don’t show it. Kensuke grits his teeth, eyes blurry, and looks up from the pit, only to meet the deadened gaze of Lilith’s unrotting corpse, hulking and marble-smooth in the distance, bloody under the illumination of the LCL ring overhead. Kensuke decides looking down at his feet will suffice.
They make camp that night upslope from the crater, in a hollow where the landscape has reclaimed its normal post-instrumentality appearance. Still dead and desiccated, but with the potential for life. As they set up camp in a dusty crag under a small cliff, Shinji smiles, a wonderful break from the impassive gloom usually stapled onto his face, and points.
“What is it?” Asuka asks.
“Moss,” Shinji says in a small voice. He breaks off a piece of dirt and presents it to Asuka and Kensuke. They squint at it. Indeed, there's a soft little green pad covering the soil. Life, chlorophyll. And water, at least in the shade, even if it’s effervescent.
“We really oughta do this bit at night,” Kensuke calls out to Asuka and Shinji, who have again taken the lead as they climb higher and higher into the Hakone peaks. The day after Shinji’s moss discovery began exciting, but circumstance crushed their hope as the sun climbed ever higher into the sky and the temperature grew more unbearable. The day after that was almost better, in that Kensuke’s expectations were already so low.
Shinji turns to Asuka and mutters something to her. They’re a bit too far away from Kensuke for him to make out the exact words.
“Are you sure?” Asuka asks, skepticism painting her voice.
“Yes,” Kensuke gasps, resting his hands on his knees. “If we keep on walking during the day like this, we’re gonna use up whatever water we have left so quickly.”
Shinji checks the huge cooler he has slung over his back, twisting it around to check how low the water is getting, and looks back at Asuka, silently communicating his assent. Their weird Eva pilot telepathy annoys Kensuke. He huffs and presses upwards. The pair wait for him.
“So?” he asks once he catches his breath. “What’s it gonna be?”
“We’ll stop and wait for night,” Asuka says.
They set up camp on a nearby downwards-facing slope, with a view towards the actual, bonafide sea. Under the setting sun, the amber-tinged water close to shore glitters beautifully. If Kensuke squints, he can see uninterrupted patches of deep blue water many kilometers out to sea, a little bit of the old world untouched by the pollution of instrumentality. For the first time during this expedition, Kensuke feels profoundly far away, not only from their original campsite, but from Tokyo-3, the cratered sepulcher of their old life, as well. As the ocean does, Kensuke almost feels his life opening up in front of him, wide and hazy at the edges. There is no longer a hard stop limited to how long he can live without water, an ever-pressing three day countdown.
The day shrinks to night, baptizing the Izu Peninsula in blissful cool shadow. As they pack up their makeshift camp and get back on their aching feet for an evening of walking, the weight on Kensuke’s shoulders as they migrate further from the ruins lifts. He realizes something.
“If we find water this far out, before we loop back around towards the crater, we’re not going back to the old camp at all, are we?”
There is a beat of silence. Then, Asuka turns around, her eyes glittering in the dim glow of the zodiac. “That wouldn’t make much sense, would it?”
Kensuke, for a brief, shocking moment of simple clarity, is completely fine with that outcome. And then, lingering in the corner of his mind, like he’s been waiting, waiting, abandoned, Kensuke sees Toji, mouth dipped small, eyes downturned.
Asuka is halfway back around front when Kensuke speaks. “Will…will we be leaving behind anyone who comes back around there?”
Asuka turns back to face him. “I didn’t know that was our job,” she says.
“That can’t be our responsibility, at least not right now,” Shinji interjects, adjusting the water cooler against his back. Kensuke reaches out in an offer to give Shinji a break, but the gloomy boy just fastens the makeshift strap tighter around his shoulder.
“Why not?” Kensuke retorts. “If you hadn’t been there for me when I came back, I don’t think I’d have made it a day.”
Shinji shrugs. It’s desolate. Kensuke’s throat dries up.
“I don’t say this to be an asshole,” Asuka says, “just being dead honest. But it was a complete coincidence that Shinji found you that day. If we hadn’t had water close to Tokyo-3, we would have left the area a long time ago.”
“Well, I think we have a duty to help anyone who might come back!” Kensuke says petulantly. He feels like a child arguing with his parents. It’s disorienting. “Some of those people are our friends!”
Asuka laughs, honestly cackles, the noise splitting the night. “Friends? Maybe they were yours, Kensuke. Shinji and me were pretty bankrupt in the friends department.”
“So what? You’d leave people lost and alone, people we know, friends or not? They deserve help! Didn’t I?”
“We don't owe them anything,” Shinji says quietly. His voice is wound tight. “Half of those people are why the world ended anyways. I don’t care about what happens to them.”
Kensuke screws his eyes shut for a moment. “What about Toji? I know you both were at least okay with him.”
Asuka rolls her eyes and looks into the middle distance. Shinji presses his mouth into a thin line and plants his hands on his hips.
“Aida, I’m sorry,” he starts, “but we just don’t have the resources to prioritize people who aren’t here right now. We’re almost out of water! We could die if we’re not careful!”
“What about Asuka?” Kensuke nearly shouts. Shinji’s eyes widen; Asuka wheels around back into the conversation. “You waited around weeks for her, you told me. Found bandages to patch her up.”
The stars that whirl in the sky above the broken husk of the world are brighter than ever, pinpricks of spectral brilliance glowing multicolored high above, and they reflect in Shinji’s eyes when he looks at Kensuke. They’re bright, fluid, but resigned. “I knew Asuka was coming back. I knew it. It was different.”
“You told me that you hoped Toji would come back,” Kensuke says. It’s a half-sob. “If he does, what are we gonna do? What am I gonna do? What if he comes back far out to sea or something? He’s missing a fucking leg!”
“He has two good arms, doesn’t he?” Asuka spits. “He’ll swim just fine.”
Kensuke has a lot he’d like to say, a lot he should say instead of acting like a child. But anger blots out rational thought. He leaves his vocabulary behind and surges forward and shoves at Asuka angrily. But the girl is light on her feet and less unbalanced by this argument than Kensuke is; she doesn’t fall at all. Kensuke’s momentum carries him forward and he trips awkwardly into Shinji, slamming into his chest, and then they both topple over. There’s a crunch of plastic underneath him that shocks them all into silence. Then, the quiet happy trickle of water into the starved earth.
Asuka helps Shinji up, and leaves Kensuke to scramble to his feet on his own.
“You fucking idiot,” Asuka spits. “You’ve fucking doomed us.” She spins away from them and starts stalking into the night.
Shinji unclips the battered plastic cooler, now empty, from his shoulder and lets it drop to the ground. He shoots Kensuke that look that makes his insides boil with fury, the one that’s half apologies and half pity.
“Of course I hope Suzuhara will come back,” Shinji says. He shakes rusty water off his arm. “He’s my friend, and I…well. I don’t need to speak for you. But if I sit around like an empty house, we’re just going to die out here. Sometimes, we have to just move on.”
“Easy for you to say,” Kensuke says, nodding at Asuka’s rapidly receding form. “You have her. Your person.”
Shinji’s face twists in pain and then snaps back into impassivity. “No,” he says in the tiniest, most fragile voice Kensuke’s ever heard. “It wasn’t Asuka who I saw.” Then, with another quick shake of his arm, the former pilot of Eva Unit-01 turns and hurries down the slope towards his comrade-in-arms, leaving Kensuke alone and confused, isolated on a fragmented hillside far from a nonexistent home.
They never had much of a choice, thanks to Kensuke’s fuck-up the night before, but they find water the next day. As they traverse down the slope further towards the eroded, crumbling shoreline of the Izu Peninsula, the gray dirt, crumbled loose, begins to change, becoming tentatively packed tighter. Green patches of moss spread across the landscape, softening the edges of the rocks in the sun’s first light. And then, past a bend, they stumble onto a field of thin grasses, spreading past the next hillside. Kensuke stands for a long moment and lets the blades, dry but still very much alive, whisper against his ankles. There’s something eerily familiar about this place. Slow and inexorable as the sunrise, Kensuke realizes that he’s camped out here before, slept under the stars in this very field, back when it was green, resplendent with boughed trees, buzzing with life.
The trees are gone now, but there is a distant shadow of Kensuke in this very field, frolicking in the grass, drinking in the stars.
Asuka keeps moving. Shinji beckons him forward out of his stupor.
Past the hulking heights of two more hillsides, they find it. Kensuke admires the softly rounded bend of the reservoir’s shore; a little vestige of pre-Third Impact life. He lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. The dense range of hills that line the spine of the peninsula seem to have provided a sort of windblock from the cataclysm; besides the sheath of downed trees lining the reservoir’s rim, the environment here looks nearly untouched. The water in the lake is deep blue, untouched by LCL. Clean to drink, safe to bathe in, a comfort. The surface mirrors the sky, ignited a delicate floral purple by the rising sun. Kensuke watches as the growing light washes out all but the faintest etch of the red ring high above.
A few steps ahead of him, Shinji stands dumbly, arms loose at his sides, staring agape at the bizarrely typical sight. And just ahead of them, Asuka, as always, breaks the truce. She starts determinedly unbuttoning her shirt and casts it off, before stepping out of the bottom half of her plugsuit. Chin held high, she marches towards the water.
“Um,” Shinji says intelligently, lifting a hand slightly, as if to implore her to stop.
Asuka looks over her shoulders and just shakes her head. “No,” she replies. “I haven’t had a bath in…well, I don’t know how long.” She leans down and grabs her clothes, roughly bundling them in the crook of her arm. “And I’m gonna wash my clothes.” She points an accusatory finger at Shinji and Kensuke. “And you two better join me! You’re both disgusting.”
Kensuke looks at the expanse of water ahead of him, feels its pull, its primeval gravity drawing him forward.
“We don’t know if it’s safe,” Shinji complains, but it's evident that he’s lost this fight. His voice is not nearly loud enough to reach Asuka, all the way down the slope, meeting the water, and certainly not stony enough to make her rethink this. Asuka surges into the reservoir and splashes up to her neck and, after flopping around for a minute without dying or being dissolved by acid or piranhas or bursting into flame or any other appropriately cinematic demise, yells back “the water’s fine!” Her voice is looser than Kensuke’s ever heard it, and that’s enough for him. He pinches off his glasses and shucks off his shoes and socks and shimmies out of his pants and undershirt, bundles it all up like Asuka did, and, ignoring how oddly self-conscious he is about being naked in front of his two friends, walks into the water. Instinctually, he immediately collapses to his knees, dropping his clothes. They unfurl in the water like sails and drift away from him. It’s hot, of course. The apocalyptic sun has heated the reservoir to just a touch cooler than an onsen, even after the full extent of nighttime, and it’s honestly all the better for it: it melts through his tightly-bound muscles instantly. For the first time since Third Impact, no, before that, Kensuke feels himself relax. He lies back in the water and groans wordlessly. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Shinji, all knobby bones and protected posture, slide into the water. He freezes and looks down at the rippling surface, wide-eyed.
“Oh, wow,” he says.
Ahead of him, Asuka lets out a laugh that’s half-submerged burble, and Kensuke allows himself a tiny smile.
They lay their clothes out in a thin patch of grass about half an hour later, just as the sun crests the closest peak, and it’s not even midday by the time it’s cooked them dry. Asuka hurries off to explore the nearby area without a word to Kensuke, leaving him laid out on the sloped berm of dirt he’s pretending is a beach.
“You probably shouldn’t just lie in the sun like that,” Shinji says from above him, slightly reproachful. He’s shrugging back into his shirt, now stiff and searing white. Kensuke notices he’s left his undershirt behind. “You’re going to cook.”
Kensuke shrugs and closes his eyes, letting the heat from the dark earth below him and the bright glow of the sun above him, red through his eyelids, radiate into his body, letting it push out his achiness, his longing.
There’s the soft thump of fabric against his chest, then his stomach a second later.
“What the—”
He opens his eyes to see his shirt and pants strewn across himself. Shinji’s standing above him still, Kensuke’s socks balled up in his fist. A frown tracks across his face. He tosses the socks at Kensuke’s head; they bounce off his nose and plop into his lap.
“You can’t just waste away,” Shinji says angrily. “I know you heard things you didn’t want to hear yesterday, but we need you now .” He kicks his shoes towards Kensuke. They bounce to a stop an arms’ reach from his hip. “We’re not going to abandon you, but know that if you shut down like this, you’re going to screw us over too. And I know you don’t want that.” He leans down and puts out a hand. “So, please. Just get up.”
Kensuke sighs harsh and long. It scratches against his throat. He pushes a phantom image of Toji out of his head and pushes himself to his feet, ignoring Shinji’s outstretched hand.
“Are you gonna see what’s on the short side of the reservoir?” he asks. As Shinji nods, Kensuke rifles through the pile of clothes on the ground. “I’ll join you,” he says flatly. “Just let me get dressed.”
He looks back at Shinji, but sees that his friend is already clambering up the berm without another glance backwards.
The reservoir is shaped somewhat like a bean. Thankfully, the beach they stumbled on first is on the concave side of it, so the two boys have a much shorter walk to reach the small pass of overlapping hillsides that waver in the day’s heat. It’s maybe two or three kilometers away, and properly rejuvenated by his dip in the water, Kensuke finds the distance much easier to cover. As the soft, mossy slopes grow larger and more definite, Kensuke revels in how his clothes, clean, sun-stiff, feel against his skin; the sheer luxury of nearly unlimited water, unthinkable just a night ago, made manifest. He considers just how much he missed being clean, and maybe that, despite his feelings, Shinji and Asuka are right. Maybe moving to this secluded little valley is the right thing to do. Other than that corpse, the trio has yet to see another human being, and certainly not a living one. For all of Shinji’s certainty that people are returning to personhood, there is paltry evidence. The countryside is still shattered, crumbling, utterly devoid of human life, condemned. It’s full of blown-out burnt houses with doors open like mouths screaming in agony, windows shattered like broken bones. Kensuke has yet to see anything alive bigger than a shrew. Until this expedition, it’s been many weeks since any of them have seen even plant life. What are the odds the exact person Kensuke so desires to see again will materialize out of the awful amber sea, and right in front of his nose, at that?
Toji would tell him to move on.
In the last few days before the fateful destruction of the third Eva, Toji had sunk into himself. The wry smile endemic to his face had drifted away, and he floated hazily through school, through the streets of Tokyo-3, through Kensuke’s living room. Kensuke remembers wondering if he’d done something to set his friend off.
Kensuke remembers asking Major Katsuragi if he could pilot the Eva himself. If he’d been listened to, if he’d been a little less of a childish, pushy freak, maybe he would have been selected instead of Toji. Maybe he’d be the one with the gored leg. Maybe he’d still be instrumentalized.
Maybe if Toji does come back, instead of his good pal Kensuke, he’ll see a selfish, lost kid who’s never had a real responsibility in his life, someone without a mother who hides his grief behind a shallow and phony infatuation with girls, someone who thrilled in doing the very thing that took Toji’s leg away and aided in the destruction of mankind. He’ll see a guy who made the selfish decision of choosing to be an individual only to lose it chasing after someone else. Or maybe Kensuke is deluding himself. He never thought he liked boys before, and certainly not Toji. Maybe he’s just lonely, and his best friend was the first thought to anchor himself once he returned to the desolate world post-Third Impact. Maybe Shinji and Asuka are wrong, and that Kensuke saw Toji as his guide to instrumentality wasn’t all that meaningful; a fluke, a glitch.
Maybe Toji is just an ideal to Kensuke at this point, and he’s helpfully erased all of his flaws. Toji is, of course, overly masculine, confrontational, proud. Unwilling to bare his flaws to the world, to appear weak. He’s never joined Kensuke on any of his nights out camping in the Hakone wilderness, despite Kensuke’s pleas. Toji doesn’t listen, won’t listen, to anyone. In fact, now that Kensuke thinks about it, it’s been so long, the distinct features of Toji’s face smear all blurry in his mind. Are both of his eyebrows a little bit crooked, or just one? Kensuke can’t quite recall…
Maybe Toji will come back, and maybe he won’t want him.
Maybe Kensuke’s thinking too much.
The pair finally reach the far end of the reservoir, where the land itself pinches around the curved coastline. There’s an old sluice gate clamping the flow of the water down the precipitous slope towards the ocean, crashing orange and viscous against a pebbly beach perhaps a kilometer down. A concrete culvert, massively tall and wide, nearly rectangular, traces the path of least resistance down to the beach in a sort of switchback. Looking over the vista, Kensuke sees something glinting in the ocean. He takes off his glasses and squints. There appears to be a figure, clad in all-dark, hovering above the water. It’s hard to tell from here, but it makes Kensuke’s stomach squirm.
Shaking his head free of the odd phantasm, he follows Shinji and slides down the slope to the side of the old dam. They walk alongside the aqueduct for a spell, looking for an entrance. About two hundred meters down, right at the edge of a small ledge, Shinji finds what he’s looking for: a ragged tear in the concrete, big enough for the boys to slide through if they sidle in sideways.
The inside of the culvert is cavernous, dank, smelling strongly of earthy mildew and sharp rust. It’s also pitch black, with only the thin slice of light from outside sneaking through the crack breaking up the shadows. Kensuke crouches and waits for his eyes to adjust and enjoys the blissful cool and damp. He rubs the sweat off his glasses on his shirt. Eventually, he can make out the faint impression of the culvert’s interior. There are two wide ledges that surround on either side a slowly flowing rivulet of water that descends into the depths towards the sea. From up ahead, near the sluice gate, Kensuke hears a constant trickle. If he squints, he can see massive metal doors standing guard in an alcove recessed underneath the gate. In pale paint that just barely catches the sunlight shining in, Kensuke sees NERV printed across the metal in audacious block letters.
“You see that?” Shinji asks, pushing past him on the narrow shelf.
Kensuke’s first instinct is to shrink from the foreboding letters. Shinji is already at the door, running his hands across its metal planes. At shoulder-height is an access touchpad, not like it matters. The locking mechanism that would usually keep the tunnel sealed is completely rusted through; Shinji is able to push one of the doors open with nothing more than a little bit of elbow grease. He looks back.
“I might stay out here,” Kensuke says. “Might be better to have someone watch your six, right?” There’s a growing itching feeling surging in his shirt, urging him to get to fresh air, to find something. He doesn’t know what.
Shinji shrugs. “It’s probably just a storeroom. I’d like some help with hauling up supplies if we can find them…are you okay?”
Kensuke is decidedly not okay. He’s crawling now with that horrible feeling, the need to flee, to run, to do something and be anywhere else, and he has no idea why. He clutches at the neckline of his shirt while Shinji looks at him with tired concern. It’s genuine, but Shinji being Shinji, he doesn’t move toward his friend to comfort him.
“I—I need some air,” Kensuke gasps, and bolts.
He emerges from the culvert’s crypt-like interior into an explosion of midday heat and light. The transition is so sudden, Kensuke whines and squeezes his eyes shut until the pounding in his head subsides. It barely does. He windmills his arms about to try to dispel this bout of nervousness that’s overtaken him, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. It feels like he’s being watched. He scans his surroundings again, and, finding nothing in the moldering hillside above him, casts his gaze back down at the ocean and jumps. The same apparition is there, maybe five meters out to sea, floating just right above the surface of the breaking waves. Kensuke can’t quite make out its face from here, but there is something tremendously familiar about its posture, about the crook of its neck, about the way its ghostly clothes hang off of its frame. He finds his throat dry and he swallows greedily.
Kensuke begins to pick his way down the switchbacks, launching himself down each level with successively greater speed and successively less care. All the while, the strange figure continues to stare directly at him, not a single muscle moving. On the second-to-last switchback, Kensuke, not watching his footing, takes a bad tumble, rolls across the rocky ground painfully, and springs back up. He thinks he’s torn one of the knees of his pants, but he can’t find the energy or self-control in him to slow down and assess the damage. His feet are just a few seconds from sand, from the ocean. It doesn’t matter how he gets there, only that he meets this ghost head-on. The closer he gets to the beach, the less oppressive the terrible scratchy feeling in his chest gets. He can almost breathe again.
He meets the soft silt of the beach at full tilt and instantly crashes to his hands and knees. Kensuke digs his fingers into the sand, grounds himself, lets the air seep back into his lungs. His glasses slip off his sweaty face; he just barely has time to whip up a hand and catch them before they hit the ground. He can feel, somehow, the ghostly figure not too far away, appraising him. Ever so slowly, Kensuke finds the courage to tilt his head up.
It’s Toji.
Well, it isn’t really. Kensuke knows that, logically, whatever this thing is cannot be his best friend, in the flesh, supernaturally floating above the foamy surf of the worldwide LCL sea.
Kensuke blinks, rubs his eyes, takes it all in. If he strains his vision, really concentrates, he can see the horizon, red-rimmed and hazy, behind the apparition. But if he lets his vision go hazy and just drinks in the sight in front of him, he could be convinced.
The beat-up, oversized sneakers, wet from the waves beating just centimeters below them. The baggy tracksuit, zipped to the collar. The olive skin. Everything about Toji Suzuhara is crooked, from his eyebrows—yes, both of them, Kensuke remembers now—from his messy hairline, to his hands, folded over his arms, to the slight bend in the bridge of his nose, only noticeable if you get close, to his craggy smile, scrawled across his face as if done in crayon by a ham-fisted child.
Dear god, Kensuke’s heart hurts.
Yes, Toji’s smiling, a sad one, or maybe it’s one painted by knowledge. Toji knows, as Kensuke does, seeing him now, that Toji is not back among the living, and perhaps won’t ever be. Toji knows, as Kensuke does, seeing him now, that if he does return, and even if he doesn’t, the understanding of what each boy means to the other has been twisted by the events of instrumentality. Maybe it’s an echo of being of every other human soul, Kensuke somehow knows, feels it bubble up from the same place the manic drive to race down the mountainside and meet this faux Toji face-to-face, that just as Toji’s was his, he was Toji’s. That they were once, and will now forever be, each other’s.
Kensuke’s known this for seconds now, but he feels like it’s been eons. Bizarrely, despite secretly hoping for this, holding his desires close to his chest like a child does a firefly, he doesn’t know what to do. How could he possibly? Does he let it go, catch a thermal, illuminate tiny in the dark din of the night? Clutch it closer? Or does he crush it, wings smeared thin and waxy between his fingertips?
Toji reaches out a spectral hand across the meter of ocean separating them, and Kensuke, unthinking, raises a hand to meet the waiting one. His hand grasps nothing but air, of course, and with a final wistful grin, Toji fades back into the ocean spray he emerged from. Kensuke, off-balance, careens forward and half-falls into the oncoming rush of LCL-tainted water. By the time he gets to his feet, gasping, he’s soaked in the stuff, almost-red almost-blood on his palms, blooming across his elbows and his knees, smeared across his chest, like he’s a murderer.
Shinji finds him a few hours later. Kensuke hears him picking his way down the last few terraces of loose rock, before alighting softly on the beach.
“Oh, Aida,” he says, mirroring his first words to Kensuke many weeks ago. Shinji loops around to face his friend and crouches in front of him, settling softly backwards into the sand. He reaches out a hand towards Kensuke’s LCL-soaked clothes, and drops it an inch away.
“Are you…” He doesn’t finish his sentence. Shinji moves back a bit; the soles of his shoes settle into the surf.
Kensuke shakes his head. “I saw him,” he says. “Just now.”
Shinji’s eyes widen. “Suzuhara?”
Kensuke nods. “Yeah. Here, right over the waves.”
“You’re shaking,” Shinji says. He clamps his mouth shut like he doesn’t want to allow anymore to be said, but then he shakes his head. “Kensuke, can I give you a hug? I think you need it.”
Kensuke’s already cried once in front of Shinji in the last twenty-four hours, and he desperately wants to keep it that way. He can feel the pressure of emotion battering behind his eyes, so, instead of letting it out, he just lets himself fall into Shinji, who barely has time to open up his arms. He presses his eyes shut as tight as he can muster and breathes in the smell of Shinji’s shirt, which thankfully only smells like reservoir water and the crackle of sunlight. His friend is surprisingly solid. Warm. Kensuke tries to ignore the feeling of the LCL on his clothes smearing onto Shinji’s. A wave rushes up against their legs and he, even unseeing, catches how Shinji shudders.
“I saw Ayanami,” Shinji offers. His hands link tighter around the small of Kensuke’s back. “In a place just like this. Where I woke up. She was hovering over the water, in the spray, like a rainbow in a fountain’s mist.”
Kensuke exhales raggedly.
“She looked at me like she was saying bye. I glanced away, and when I looked back, she was gone.”
“Toji reached out to me, and I tried to reach back,” Kensuke breathes. Shinji hums. “I think he was saying goodbye, too.”
The sun beats down. The awful orange waves crash around them, soaking them more and more as the tide continues its inexorable push up the gray beach, swelling over its stones and smoothing out the ululations worked into the sand by the night’s storm winds. The two boys do not move for quite some time.
The towering metal doors do herald the entrance to an old NERV storeroom, and the trio quickly get to turning the reservoir’s cliffside end into their new home. It’s perfect. There is a near-endless stock of food, clean water, and of course, the shy but resilient plant life. They make the dilapidated dam pumphouse, some hundred meters upstream from the culvert, their new sleeping quarters. The damp concrete keeps it cool during the day, and all they have to do to relieve the humidity is open the slatted windows and let a furnaced wind blast away the moisture. Considering that it’s the apocalypse, Shinji, Asuka, and Kensuke have it pretty damn nice.
At night, while Shinji fiddles with the ham radio kit he found, trying desperately to gather other returned people who might be scattered around Japan, and Asuka dedicates herself to mapping out the storeroom’s labyrinthine corners, Kensuke sits on one of the thick concrete windowsills and watches the storms rage out across the sea. Angry blue lightning lashes out across the dark sea, glowing ruby for many quick instants. The horizon is painted purple with the light. It flickers for hours, until the sea cools, matching the sky. Rinse and repeat day in and day out and Kensuke has a light show to watch every single night. He knows that there are tasks that he could be doing. The night is the only time they can meaningfully explore the outdoors, and Kensuke wastes it getting lost in the thunderclouds towering many tens of kilometers over the sea. Sometimes, he thinks of Shinji extolling him for being an albatross around his and Asuka’s necks, and he feels guilty. But there are shapes in the clouds, twisting and melting shadows that look almost like the Evangelions stalking across the deep, bathed in shadow and lightning both. He looks every night, squints through his smudged glasses across the waves, to see Toji. He never does. He is thankful every day the coast they sit over is not facing the still pristine corpse of Lilith. Kensuke isn’t sure he could stomach making eye contact with an unseeing Ayanami Rei as he looks for someone else.
After about a week of this routine, of sleeping longer than he should, of scarcely eating, of gazing across the orange ocean to see someone who’s there, really, if you think about it, but is unreachable, he can tell Asuka is at wit’s end with him. She stalks by his sleeping bag loudly, footsteps echoing in the cavernous concrete chamber. She shoots him dirty glances’ and generally makes it clear that she wants nothing to do with him. One evening, she kicks his glasses away from him as he rolls over to give her space to walk by. The kick is light, the glasses are unscathed, but the reproachful glare she gives him is enough to make it quite clear to Kensuke that he’s being a bother.
But he can’t fix it. He can’t let the ocean go. Not quite yet. So Kensuke waits for Shinji and Asuka to vacate the pumphouse, and then he picks his way down to the beach, lonely and windswept in the dwindling light. He stays there, staring unseeing at the waves, until the sun crawls its way above the horizon, angry and scalding. When he’s certain that Shinji and Asuka have retired into the pumphouse’s cool interior to sleep, he climbs back up the cliffside. Then he heads out again before sunset.
Rinse and repeat.
The nights are cool. The winds are strong, and though they still smell of blood, on lucky nights Kensuke can smell salt as well, sharp and fresh, like a promise. He doesn’t see Toji in the waves, froth gleaming blue by moonlight. He doesn’t see Toji in the hollows hammered out by the shadows of the clouds. He doesn’t see Toji in the stars, a crude outline pinpricked by light that left its birthplace before humanity was more than muck stuck to rock. He certainly doesn’t see Toji in the depths of the LCL carried in by the tides, untouched by the apocalypse. He certainly doesn’t see Toji spread across the endless lengths of the bloody ring transecting the sky.
He doesn’t see him on the beach.
Kensuke doesn’t see Toji anywhere, and his hope begins to wear thin.
He wants this longing gone.
Days pass, his routine continues, and he knows that Shinji and Asuka have him figured out. On the third day, Shinji begins to make time a little bit before sunrise to bring him some food from their stores, climbing down the mountainside delicately, arms full of stale protein bars hidden away a decade or more ago. He’ll drop off the food, awkwardly hover around his friend, kick at some sand.
“Are you gonna say anything?” Kensuke asks the first time. Shinji doesn’t. He just deposits the food onto the sand like he’s placating a feral beast and starts the hike back up the cliff.
He comes down the cliff, stays by Kensuke’s side for shorter and shorter each day.
One day the footfalls are different, less like a careful rodent, more like a panther, confident and brimming with energy. He turns to see Asuka hopping off the final rocky promontory above the beach. Sometime in the last few days, she’s finally abandoned the lower half of her plugsuit and found herself some functional trousers from somewhere in the depths of the storehouse. She’s still wearing Kensuke's old school shirt. He thinks she might be wearing her hair differently. He wouldn’t know for certain; besides Shinji’s quick, cold visits, he hasn’t been around the others really since the discovery of the reservoir.
Asuka shucks her shoes through the sand, kicking it up in great roostertails behind her as she strolls towards Kensuke. When she gets to him, she wordlessly extends her arm right in front of his face. She’s holding a crinkled-up bundle of protein bars. He grabs them from her and mumbles his thanks.
“Shinji told me to bring these down to you,” she says, feigning an airy indifference.
Kensuke snorts. “Yeah, sure. No way, Asuka.”
Asuka tilts her head and smiles, not unkindly. “Yeah. Nah.”
Kensuke turns to get a better look at her. “So what’s the deal?” Asuka raises an eyebrow. “Why are you down here? I know you wouldn’t come all this way to talk to me if you didn’t have an excellent reason.”
Asuka settles into a crouch next to Kensuke. Together, they look out over the wide stretch of surf. Lightning splashes down in the distance. They can’t hear the thunder.
“I think,” Asuka says, slowly, too deliberately for her, “that you are toying with your own emotions.”
It’s a jolt of cold. Kensuke lets it overtake his heart, fill his chest, overrun his lungs, cramp his stomach.
“The nature of Third Impact has made it so that we can pretend that loss is a temporary thing, but it’s not,” Asuka continues. She dips a finger into the sand and traces a pattern that perhaps has some significance to her. Maybe it doesn’t. It’s not Kensuke’s to know. “Some people are just gone. Miss Misato is dead, gone forever.” The familiar name makes Kensuke jump. “My parents are dead, and have been for a while. I can’t get them back. Shinji’s father isn’t returning, if you get my drift.” She looks at Kensuke. Her eyes are flat, her shoulders held stiff, metallic. “There’s a lot of people who aren’t in the ocean right now.”
Kensuke’s mouth is open. He shivers, and then he rolls his shoulders back, suppressing it, shoving it deep down below his sternum, forcing his innards around the cavity. He will not let it wrack his body.
“Hmm,” he acknowledges. His mouth is dry, chapped; he licks his lips. “The math doesn’t favor me, huh?”
Asuka doesn’t reply in words; she only nods. There is a melancholy in her eyes that scares Kensuke.
“You used to be so…free,” she says. “Me and Shinji were branded by NERV, doomed from the very start to deal with all this weight.” She gestures at the fractured world around them. “You saw what happened to Suzuhara when he got chosen.”
Kensuke thinks, not for the first time, about the smile melting off his friend’s face, his shoulders held up as if iron, the distant looks. And he hadn’t even been stuffed into an Eva yet.
“Compared to us,” Asuka finishes, wringing her hands, “you were always uncaged. You got sick of everyone and disappeared into the mountains for days. You didn’t rely on anyone.”
Kensuke scowls. “What’s your point?” He knows what she’s getting at.
“You don’t need him, Kensuke. You navigated life just fine without him, and—”
“—I was never without him, Asuka!” Kensuke snaps, whirling in place to fully face her. Asuka doesn’t flinch; she sets her jaws and tilts her chin defiantly. “I shaped my life around him and didn’t even know it.”
Asuka nods slowly. “And now you have a choice and I think it’s really simple. You can learn independence and live again, actually let yourself grow, or you can rot into a little shadow because you’ve pinned yourself to someone who’s never coming back.”
Kensuke feels his face grow red. There’s pressure behind his eyes. He tries to hold it back.
“Kensuke,” Asuka says, tortuously gentle, “would Toji want you to be living like this?”
He wouldn’t.
Toji was loyal, yes, a good friend and a dedicated sibling, but he was independent to a fault. While Kensuke would chase him or Shinji around, scrabbling for validation, Toji would hold his head high and burn his own path into the universe. Insulting Asuka upon meeting her, beating up Shinji to defend his sister, then forgiving him once he realized he was wrong all without turning himself out from shame like most boys would, accepting his duty as the Fourth Child and demanding NERV do right by his family in the same breath, he was his own, radically so. Toji made the universe revolve around him, all things, no matter how cosmic, drawn to him inexorably by his subtle, intense, blinding gravity.
Maybe it’s time, Kensuke thinks, to break free.
Just as Second Impact jostled the earth into an eternal summer, Third Impact seems to have brought back some temperate weather as the planet slowly crawls into autumn. It’s barely perceptible at first, but the sun shines less and less each day on their cliffside abode, and the wind grows stronger, strafing through the tall grasses that become ever more green and resilient as the temperatures moderate.
There is a seed vault in the NERV storehouse, and at his friends’ suggestion, Kensuke becomes a bit of a farmer. He’s not great at it, and it’s not imperative that he master the art quickly, as they have a near-infinite supply of spoil-safe food down below. But it gives him a passion nonetheless, something to fill his nights, and as the days melt into something more pleasant, with the aroma of sprouting seedlings and clean water, to fill his time under the sun as well. It’s sweaty, dirt-splashed work, labor that cracks his fingernails, but it’s something. The ocean becomes more blue, less amber. No matter to them, the last human being the trio saw was the dead man back in the blazed wastes near the GeoFront.
Kensuke liked camping out in the wilderness before the apocalypse because it made him feel like he was flying; like he was a rootless thing who belonged to nothing and no one but the stars. He falls in love with his garden for the opposite reason: he likes being needed, he likes the callouses that blossom across his fingertips, the sunkissed tan that spreads across his brow, his shoulders and his arms. Sometimes, when he catches his reflection rippled back at him in the reservoir, he thinks it makes him look a little like Toji, but he chases the thoughts away like pests. The garden is a reminder that Kensuke is real, with a touch that can bring life. He isn’t free, he’s needed more than he needs, and that reassures him.
The thunderstorms do not abate. Every night, they bubble up from the face of the ocean, and rage across the water. The winds they kick up are powerful, they buffet the cliffside and rattle the metal shutters of the pumphouse, but the sound of Shinji muttering in his sleep and Asuka snoring, if Kensuke is even up to hear it, drown out the distant percussion of the thunder. The shadows cast by the clouds slowly shift; they no longer shelter cosmic reflections of Toji, and Kensuke likes that the clouds, towering behemoths on the horizon, can just be themselves.
Their strange autumn becomes an even stranger winter. The temperatures become almost cool. The plants thrive, growing, pods bursting, seeds spilling out. Fruits and beans, resolute in their life, grow and tumble into the soft dirt on the shores of the reservoir. Kensuke has his first harvest. For the first time in many, many months, the trio eat real, homemade food, vegetables, on the concrete eaves of their little homestead. Asuka holds Shinji’s hand; Kensuke does his part and looks away. Shinji smiles, wan and warm. It might be Christmas. Kensuke doesn’t know for sure. He hasn’t known the date since before Third Impact. He finds it doesn’t matter.
As the ocean whirls underneath the cliff face and the wind follows its pattern like a desperate lover, Kensuke reaches a conclusion, an acknowledgment that must be seen. He looks out at the orange ocean, shimmering like blood, and silently shares his heart with Toji. His love is here, it’s in his heart, it’s in the food Kensuke picked for their little feast tonight, it’s in his dry, cracked fingertips and the curled tips of his hair, grown long and unruly. But Toji no longer owns the ocean, or the space between the clouds. He does not live inside the core of the lightning bolts he sees pepper the distant expanse of seawater, deadly and sudden. Kensuke doesn’t want that same lightning to spear him through just so he can be close to Toji. His love is an ache, and not an earthquake.
Kensuke thinks that maybe selflessness is a virtue, after all. The world has seen his enlightenment, maybe, and rewards him.
Winter has become spring; the days begin to lean towards unpleasant once again. Kensuke is in the process of storing away the final vestiges of the harvest as the weather grows untenable again. Asuka has finished mapping out the NERV tunnels beneath the reservoir and has nearly constructed a makeshift generator to give them power. Shinji has yet to make contact with anyone on the ham radio, but he perseveres every day.
It’s evening. A golden sun glows nuclear across the golden ocean, and Kensuke picks his way down the mountain to take a quick walk away from the others. The surf is loud, crashing against the sand of the Izu Peninsula, and Kensuke lets it drown out his thoughts. If he ignores the true nature of the amber water, he has grown to almost find the sight beautiful, consistent in its color, its painted simplicity.
The ocean is empty, a blank canvas. The beach is just the same. Kensuke likes its solitude, it’s content desolation.
A splash to his right shatters the peace. It’s a noise that sounds out of place. There shouldn’t even be fish in the water to cause such a disturbance. Kensuke furrows his brows, figures he’s imagining something.
Another splash. It’s accompanied by the slightest wheeze. Kensuke freezes.
It’s undeniably human. Kensuke turns.
It takes him a very long time to understand what, who, he is looking at.
Lumped right at the place where the ocean kisses the sand is a person, a young man, curled around himself. He is clad in the pale blue of a NERV hospital tunic. His hair is in a soaked dark shock around his head. His skin is sunkissed, darker yet than Kensuke’s, even after all of his time toiling in his garden. The figure uncrooks his head from the fetal position and gazes blearily up the beach towards Kensuke. He is taken by the set of his mouth, the crook of his brows, the slight bend in the bridge of his nose…
The young man splays out in the shallow water, groaning, and Kensuke sees that he only has one leg protruding from the hospital gown.
Suzuhara Toji’s eyes, like someone waking up from a deep, interminable sleep, slowly focus. They set on Kensuke’s face, parse through his familiar glasses and his alien unkempt, long hair. He frowns, mouth curled into a little pout, and Kensuke bursts into shocked, joyous laughter.
“Kensuke…?”
Kensuke is down the beach, slipping into the surf before he even realizes that’s what he’s done. He’s on his knees, the LCL soaking into his trousers, but Kensuke can’t be damned. He collects Toji into his arms and pulls him out of the water, off the grit of the beach, and against his chest. Kensuke’s had a couple months of personhood to continue growing, but Toji is still taller, still a heavy, warm presence, even just back on this side of the living.
“I’m here, I’m here,” Kensuke whispers. “You came back?” his voice breaks.
The tide whispers back, leaving them high and dry. Toji places one wonderful, wide, crooked hand on Kensuke’s forearm. “I had to,” he says, as if it was the most obvious conclusion in the whole horrible world. Kensuke smiles wide at the Kansai dialect painted across Toji’s words. “I thought that instrumentality was enough, being with everyone and all that, but I guess I’m selfish.” He looks up at the other boy, and his eyes go starkly vulnerable. “I knew you weren’t there,” he squeaks. “And once, I knew, it wasn’t the same. It made me more me, and I chose to find you.”
Kensuke is kneeled in the same place he was months back when he saw the spectral form of Toji. “I thought you came to say goodbye,” he whispers.
Toji shakes his head violently and grasps Kensuke’s arm tighter. His hand is warm, a reassurance, but, Kensuke notes with something akin to awe, no longer a necessity. A gift, nonetheless.
“No,” Toji says. He chuckles and presses his eyes shut. “I was tellin’ you to wait for me, dumbass.”
Kensuke slips his head downwards, hurting his back in the process, whatever, and clunks his forehead against Toji’s. Toji always ran warm; there’s something wonderful knowing that a journey out of individual personhood and back has not changed that.
After a blissful moment in the LCL-stained muck, Kensuke opens his eyes and tugs on Toji’s wrist.
“We have a little home here, me, Shinji, Asuka,” he says. “An old NERV storehouse that has everything we could ever need. You’ll be well taken care of.” Toji cocks his head, listening.
“Toji,” he says, and he can’t hide the swell of emotion in his voice, raw and honeyed, as he speaks, “I have a garden. Fresh food. We’re…we’re not struggling.”
Toji grimaces. “Did you give up on me?” The words are quiet, laden with sudden despondency. “You did, didn’t you.” Toji sits up on his own and places his hands in his lap, bending his leg. Kensuke doesn’t know what to do, where to touch, so he lays a hand just above Toji's ankle. He smiles a little at the touch.
“I don’t think I need you anymore,” Kensuke says. “And I don’t think you ever needed me. You already chose me though; that’s why you’re here. But I haven’t moved on. We both have a choice, now. And now that I’m being given that opportunity, I am choosing you. I always will.”
The sun shines across Toji’s face, across the limp strands of his hair obscuring one of his eyes, casting shadows in the curves of his chin, his dimples. He smiles, and to Kensuke, Toji’s in this instant more radiant than the sun itself.
“Then let’s make the most of our choices, yeah?” Toji says. It’s still just barely a question. He’s asking for permission, a request to disrupt Kensuke’s routine. He’s asking for Kensuke to need him again. It, in Toji’s trademark style, is a hard-chinned challenge.
Kensuke meets it, head-on. “Yeah,” he says, and smothers his tears by diving across the chasm between them and hugging the boy he loves tight. “Let’s.”
There’s a lot they’re going to have to do. Kensuke will have to start by climbing the mountain and locating crutches or a wheelchair or something to aid Toji’s mobility. They’ll have to be careful now in how they ration their food. Shinji and Asuka, and yes, Kensuke too, will have to adjust to living with another person finally. Toji will simply have to adjust to living again. It’s all part of the challenge, and life in the apocalypse, in the shattered ruins of the world that have taught Kensuke to value the slowness of this life, to take things one shuffling, unsure step at a time.
Toji’s never thought like that, of course. It’s part of his gravity.
“Hey,” he murmurs into Kensuke’s chest, voice muffled, hands digging into the fabric of his shirt, “I would really like it, I think, if you finally took me camping one of these days.”
Maybe Kensuke will start by smiling. He’s beaming now, at this. Maybe that’s a good enough start. He relaxes into Toji’s hold, and lets gravity do its work.