Chapter Text
Sitting in the train station, Shinji Ikari read his copy of the Wilkie Collins novel “The Moonstone.” Next to him was his dear friend Asuka Langley-Soryu, wearing a red dress while he himself was wearing a purple blazer and dress pants.
“Oh, Shinji, look!” Lowering his book, Shinji looked at Asuka. She was pointing over to a man of about thirty. Puzzled, Shinji just stared at Asuka, an eyebrow raised and his mouth slightly open. “It’s Ryoji Kaji! You know? The famous pilot whose baby son was kidnapped and murdered!”
Shinji continued to stare. He really hadn’t been keeping up with current events. “O-Okay…” Standing, Shinji took a look at Kaji. He was going into the train station’s barber shop. “He doesn’t seem to be with anyone. Where is his wife?”
“Misato?” asked Asuka. “Shinji, the shock that her baby was murdered killed her. Kaji is a widower.”
Shinji looked at his watch while going over everything he had just learned. A man who had lost both his wife and his baby… His wife Misato… Misato? Why did that name sound so familiar? Didn’t some scientist have a daughter with that name? A Dr…. What was it?
Dr. Katsuragi! That was it! Dr. Hideaki Katsuragi, a colleague of Shinji’s father Dr. Gendo Ikari, he’d never had much interaction with his father’s colleagues and barely had any memories of meeting them.
According to his father, Dr. Katsuragi had not been seen since his own daughter died… Could it have been possible that Dr. Katsuragi’s daughter and Kaji’s late wife were one and the same?
No, it couldn’t have been. Katsuragi was a common surname, it was just a coincidence… And yet, what if it was not?
Shrugging, Shinji looked at his watch again. It would be quite a while until the train went there. Dr. Langley was unable to go himself, so he had asked his daughter to go in his stead and so here he was accompanying her.
Shinji was not sure if he understood Germanic myth anymore than he did the Bible. He understood the stories of his own culture so much better, but he had heard the music of Wagner, specifically his opera cycle “The Ring of the Nibelung” and it had been a fine introduction to Germanic myth for him with Asuka helping him to expand his knowledge of it. Could the item they were being sent to fetch for her father’s collection actually have been Gram, the very sword of Sigurd himself?
Gram, Sigurd, Shinji had always known the sword as Nothung and its wielder as Siegfried, the son of the incestuous union of Siegmund and his twin sister Sieglinde. Asuka had told him that Siegmund was also known as Sigmund and Sigurd’s mother had been… What was it? Beginning to pace back and forth, Shinji tried to remember her name, she was completely unrelated to Sigmund, not his sister, he remembered that much. Sieglinde’s basis had been called Signy.
Snapping his fingers, Shinji tried to remember her name. Finally, without even looking at him, her eyes on a magazine she was reading, Asuka said: “In Norse she is Hjordis, in the Nibelungenlied she is Sieglind.”
Turning, Shinji asked: “How do you know what I’m thinking about?”
Looking up from her magazine, Asuka replied: “Shinji, I’ve known you for quite a while and ever since I explained Germanic mythology to you, the name of Siegfried or Sigurd’s mother had always slipped your mind.”
“It was so much simpler.” Shinji said, his mind wandering as he thought about his introduction to that opera cycle. He’d been at his grandparents’ one afternoon when he was nine and his grandfather had put on a record of one of the operas, he couldn’t remember which it had been. He supposed it didn’t matter which it was, it was some of the most beautiful music he’d ever heard and while he thought of himself as not being very good with the cello, he dreamed of being able to play music like that!