Archive of Our Own ^beta

        Misato found herself shaking, stuck to her bed, and unable to move. She felt as if she was sinking through the blanket, through the mattress, and into the floor. Very slowly. Very, very slowly. Geometry danced and undulated across the ceiling , the walls, everywhere. It flowed seamlessly across the furniture and curtains, the shapes gracefully touching each other and blossoming. It was too much. Misato closed her eyes, which provided only a modicum of relief. The patterns changed from pastel to neon in color and tumbled smoothly across black, turning inside out and right side out and inside out and then right side out again. She still felt as heavy as ever but was able to summon the strength to turn on her side and hug herself, still shaking.

        With no warning, the heaviness left Misato, and she sat up. She felt as if she were a piece of dust floating in front of a sunny window and opened her eyes. The shapes turned pastel, and this time, she could see larger images comprised of the small bits of geometry. On the ceiling appeared an oval, where the geometry was both inside of the shape and the structure of the shape itself. Everything was rotating. Misato exhaled and was filled with an understanding that this oval was her; she was watching herself do the same thing over and over, spinning around with no real change or improvements each time. The oval grew in size to encompass the entire room. It grew so large that it no longer existed, and a new set of twisting geometry filled the ceiling. It looked like pure noise at first, or maybe the pattern on an ugly sweater from 20 or 30 years ago, but soon the shapes shrunk, sharpened, and assembled themselves.

        The image became clear, and Misato felt her chest tighten as she recognized it: it was Ritsuko during the past few weeks. Not one particular moment, more like all of them together in a blender. Ritsuko's face had become even sharper. There was no color in her face at all, just a white sheet with her eyes, eyebrows, lips, and mole puncturing the sheet to let in some color. She didn't think she'd witnessed Ritsuko eat anything since Shinji disappeared into Unit 01, only drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Her fingernails were all different lengths, Misato had noticed -- some trimmed short, others jaggedly broken or bitten off, and two were so long the free edge was totally transparent. In this moment, watching these images, a feeling of uneasy warmth rushed over Misato in her body and in her mind. The images of Ritsuko left her feeling that everything else -- Kaji, Shinji, the angels, everything else -- could all be left alone right now, that what she did about them wouldn't matter nearly as much as it would with Ritsuko. Just as that conviction solidified, Misato manifested the memories of her slapping Ritsuko onto the ceiling. The first time was last month, when Shinji disappeared into the angel. The second time was just the other day, when Ritsuko had told her that Unit 01 willed for Shinji to disappear. But even the usually unsettling knowledge that the Evas may be alive or sentient didn't bother Misato now.

        On the ceiling, fine, red rings bloomed across Ritsuko's cheeks. They pulsed and rotated, turning pink, then red, then burgundy. Misato's eyes welled with tears as the images morphed to show Ritsuko with red cheeks and dry eyes. Misato's tears spilled across her face and down towards her jaw. The angry, pained Ritsuko morphed startlingly quickly to the Ritsuko that Misato had first met 10 years ago. She had the same face, just fuller and more colorful. What had happened to Ritsuko in the past 10 years? In the past 31 years? Misato knew she'd played a part in it. The images and geometry on the ceiling shuffled themselves like a deck of cards, faster and faster until the images themselves were merely the kaleidoscopic geometry that had characterized the beginning of the trip. Yet Misato felt them just as she might feel granules of salt under her fingernails or a blast of chilly air from the air conditioner after walking through the front door. She was hit with the realization that Ritsuko was 3D. She was a real person. She was lonely, struggling, and Misato had hurt her more than she needed to. Ritsuko had never been loved as she had needed to be, and the weight of that knowledge felt like a giant, solid glass marble resting on Misato's stomach. At some point, things had gotten badly misaligned and needed fixing. Misato didn't know how to fix things, or if Ritsuko even wanted her to.

        Across town, Ritsuko's ears were hot, and she was dealing with a bout of restless legs. A lemon sat rotting on the kitchen counter, and Ritsuko couldn't remember when or why she'd bought it. She looked at the cloudy sky. Today should be cooler, she thought.