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Your name is Ikari Shinji and you are twenty-four years old. Ten years ago the world ended. It came back, but it was a real mess at the time. Nowadays people don't remember much about it — not even you. Nowadays you're busy sorting sheet music and making lesson plans. You work as a music teacher at a local high school in Tokyo-2. Your high school education was a mess thanks to the end of the world, but you made it through university and a graduate program, and you suppose being a UN person of interest can count for something now and again. They remember the end of the world — or parts of it anyway.
This particular morning you're not getting ready for school, though. It's a holiday week, and you've been asked to speak at a biomedical conference. People are still always asking things from you even though you're now thirty pounds too heavy and ten years too pubescent to do the thing you're famous for (in some circles). You ignore the reporters and most of the foundations looking for endowments or your mother's patents. Your savings are decent enough and you usually don't need the speaker's fee. You would have ignored this one, but it was one of the reconstruction foundations, and the chairman mentioned having sat in on one of your mother's presentations years ago.
“I don't think I can do that presentation,” you said on the phone. You used to stop yourself from saying things like that. You gave up around age fifteen.
“That's all right,” said the chairman's secretary, unfazed, “he'd just like to meet you, and we'd appreciate your support.”
They will also pay you. It's a little more of an incentive than you'd like it to be. Your savings are a little low that month.
The conference begins at 9:30 am. They asked you to be there around 8. You wake up at 5 after a predictably sleepless night. After ten years, you're all right at the routine of getting up. You shower, you shave, you put in your contacts, you tie your tie. You're usually a little stubbly, anyway, and your tie's always dangling under the second button of your collar, but you tried. It's annoying, but it's the cost being alive, and being you, and of the world not having ended, the way it did and didn't ten years ago.
At 6 am your roommate finds you in the kitchen, staring at your speech. You cobbled it together last minute. It's part biography, part jargon you've come to understand from trying to read the few copies of your mother's surviving research papers, translated in German. Your speaking German is still terrible, but your reading comprehension's become pretty good — so long as it's research papers. Right now it's your own notes that are throwing you. It's wrong. It's all wrong. You want to cross it all out and write it down on a napkin instead.
“I don't know why they always want me at these things,” you say, glowering at your own perfectly neat handwriting like maybe it will explode if you look at it hard enough. “I'm a terrible speaker. I'll just glare my way through it and they'll never invite me again.”
Your roommate laughs and asks if you want breakfast. No, you say, breakfast is part of the programming — not that you wouldn't mind some toast, but you do really mind this stupid speech. You've practiced it three times already and it sounds dumber by the minute: the meter is wrong, the ideas are wrong, and you will have to call to cancel. It would be for the good of humanity.
Your roommate leans over your shoulder and has a look.
“Don't be silly. They will love you,” he says, in that way that makes it sound like a universal truth. He kisses the side of your neck, over your pulse, in that way that causes all your worst racing thoughts to go flowing from your head in one dizzying whoosh. “In all the ways that I do.”
You put your head on the table.
“I don't think they'll do that,” you mumble, your cheeks burning their way through the finish.
Your roommate smiles. He taps the counter while he looks for the bread. His heel beats out the harmony. You watch him. You really like this Kaworu. He's younger and more jittery than the one you remember. You've gotten taller than him. He technically reports on you to the UN, but you both understand it's just a formality, and that's okay. Even if his idea of breakfast probably would have involved hot sauce. Or pickles. Whatever tastes the strongest to him, that day.
You throw your speech in the trash on your way down the steps of the complex.
You take the train. It breaks some kind of rule about these things: most guests either take a cab or a limo or something good and important. Cars are expensive, and anyway you have a bad habit of trying to steer them with your mind. The hotel's two stops, a transfer, and six stops after that. You spend the train ride jammed into a corner, drumming your fingers and rewriting things in your head. You have your ear-buds in. The train starts out empty and grows more packed with each stop. There was a time you'd have blotted it all out, just went to that odd, slippery place in your head where you didn't have to deal with things that made you queasy. Now that head place is occupied by someone else, and you don't really think she'd appreciate you stopping by if it's not really important. You don't like worrying her, though she'd understand.
Now, the world stays where it is in your peripheral vision as you try to rebuild the smoldering remains of your keynote. Harmonics. Business men. Sync rates. Laughing teenagers — not your students. Flashing count-downs. Mother and small child. Medical exams. Guy trying to take an upskirt shot with his phone of the woman in front of him. Getting cut out of your first plugsuit. Sticking out your foot as the train sways at just the right time to kick the man's leg out from under him. He stumbles face first into the opposite wall with a loud “Oh, excuse me, excuse me!” The woman gets off at that stop.
When you were a kid, people talked a lot on the radio about how the first step to regaining civilization after the Second Impact had been the return of the rail systems. Adults took great pride in it. You don't know what life was like without it, they'd say. We were living like refuges, but once it came back, we were citizens again.
You didn't like trains when you were fourteen. Ten years later, you still don't like them very much.
At the hotel, the organizers are very happy to see you. They were worried you might cancel. They've had speakers cancel on them before. There's been a bad storm on the radar, over the ocean, and that's been messing everything up. The chairman takes the time to greet you personally while you pretend you remembered all the names and introductions. He's a greying, well-fed German who looks like he might have once played for some kind of sports team when he was young, but there's a sharpness in his eyes when he shakes your hand.
“Ikari,” he says, his eyes flickering over you. His says the name with a faint question in it, and you know what on his mind. You don't look a lot like your mother, and that absence usually leaves people thinking of the alternative. You can always tell the people who knew your father by how nervous they look when they greet you. “Thank you for your contributions to our foundation. We hope it hasn't been too much trouble for you.”
“Thank you for having me.” You duck your head on reflex. You try not to wear that 'what am I doing?' look that so many people mistake for arrogance. “It's all right. I prepared my talk on the train.”
He smiles. It changes his demeanor entirely. “I'll see my secretary e-mails you the files you requested.”
You wonder if he knows you weren't joking.
They throw you brochures and agendas and complimentary pens and give you a flashy, white card with your name on it. Most of them wear cards with their name and company logo on it. Yours just says 'Shinji Ikari' and 'guest speaker.' You're given a seat at a table close to the podium. You're given breakfast. This you're a little more excited about, even though the train took most of your appetite away. Your roommate can't eat meat, and you don't as a matter of personal preference, but one thing about these conferences is they give everyone any option they could ever want, to the point they're left wanting absolutely nothing at all.
You sit through an endless row of lectures and Q&As about an industry in which you've only ever participated in as the main product. You drink about four glasses of water. You give your keynote. It's terrible — like you thought it would be. It's complete rambling, and you don't know what you're talking about, you're just remembering all the complex words you were told and what was being done to you while you were told them. You talk about how it felt less like saving the world and more like a weird after-school club: the tests, the constant medical exams, being told you were underweight almost constantly, the special hell of wearing a plug-suit for the very first time. People laugh. They think you're being candid. There's a little light at the back of the room which tells you how much time you have to talk, and when it hits the corner of your eye you think you're back in the plug, which makes it easier to just talk. Still, it's really bad. You're sure the audience only applauds because you glared them into it.
You must have done something right, because everyone has questions once you're done. There are a sea of shoulders and lab coats and eager hands raised for attention. It reminds you so much of your students it's hard not to laugh. You answer questions for a few minutes and vanish into the restroom until the next session is halfway through. You come back and find a chair close to the door, half-hidden behind one of the columns in the hotel's ballroom. The speaker's a woman in a suit. She introduced herself earlier and all you could think at the time was: huh, she looks like a dark haired Ritsuko! She talks about artificial fibers and sync responses in ways that you've never heard before. Halfway through you give up and slip one of your ear-buds out of your pocket. You're a good way into Bach's Cello Suite before you notice the woman seated at the third table from the front at the far-side of the ballroom.
She sits with her agenda on her knee. She stares straight ahead at the speaker, but you know she's not listening because her foot is bobbing in that way it always does when she's getting tired of a conversation. That foot always felt like a ticking time bomb to you. Ten. Nine. Eight. No telling what would happen when it went off. Her hair's redder than you remember. It's gone from brown-red to gold-red, tied over her shoulder in a disheveled ponytail. For a scary moment you think: maybe you're wrong, maybe she's just some stranger... but, no, you couldn't have made up that twist in her lips. The way her bangs fall over her left eye as she tilts her head. Her face has gotten sharper. Her legs have gotten longer. She's wearing a yellow sundress over the black combat boots laced up to her knees. She's got a bomber jacket on over that and it's such a ridiculous sight in that sea of professors and scientists and corporate clients you know it couldn't be anyone else. It's so like her to stick out so blatantly.
It isn't that you really lose track of her between sessions. It's just she slips out of the corner of your eye. You don't have time to wonder if you imagined it. You're too busy having wine poured for you and people crowd around you. You drop your ear bud back into your front pocket before they notice.
“I don't know why you want to talk to me,” you tell the head of a major overseas developer of techno-organic medical devices. “I don't know anything at all. I'm here because the chairman bribed me.”
He laughs. He thinks you're joking. You lean to the side to look past him, hoping to find a flash of red somewhere in the sea beyond. You needn't have bothered. She's introduced to you a second later, by a man who was introduced to you as one of the conference's bigger sponsors. He calls her his colleague in that way that really means either girlfriend or bodyguard.
“Good morning,” you say, cutting off the next stumbled introduction in a way that would've never gotten you anywhere as a salaryman. “Why are you wearing those indoors?”
“The Invincible Shinji,” she says, her eyebrows quirked over the rim of the movie star sunglasses. You can make out the little red line of scar tissue that cuts through her left eyebrow. You can see the other side of it poking out across her cheekbone. “Still knows nothing of style. First, why don't you tell me why they're having you talk about harmonics.”
“I know, it's kind of silly isn't it?”
“Did you even listen to anything they told us about those?”
“I listened the first time,” you say, with that defensive lilt she's always so good at bringing out in you.
“You're the worst guest speaker,” she says.
“I thought you might say something like that.”
“Did you throw out the real speech on your way here?”
“Maybe.”
“You're hopeless,” she whirls on the sponsor, “and you take me the worst places. Henri, I'm done here. My contract's up.”
The sponsor flounders. He's clearly hasn't known her for very long. “But, ah. I thought I had you til 6...”
“It's 6 somewhere in the world,” she answers over her shoulder, as she flicks one gloved hand in a bored goodbye, turns on her heel, and storms with great dignity out the ballroom doors.
“Ah,” you say, in that awkward space. “Thank you for this excellent event!”
She's waiting outside the hotel doors when you stumble out. Her arms crossed and her fingers drumming against her folded arm. “You know that's kind of creepy. I should call security. I am security. I should have you kicked out.”
You nearly fall as you turn back around. You're panting. You were terrified you wouldn't catch her before she grabbed a cab. You raise an eyebrow at her like you expected nothing else but this. “Were you waiting?”
She twirls the ends of her ponytail and says, “What took you?”
She glares at you over her sunglasses. It's hard to be cowed by it. She's glared at you so many other times in your life. “It's really good to see you again,” you say.
“No way. You're going to do this. You're actually going to do this.”
“Really good,” you insist. The smile hurts. You think her fingers stop drumming, for just a second. “It's been forever. Can we talk?”
“Can we talk, he says. Like we aren't.”
Speaking with her was always a little like catching a falling star. You ought to know. You've done it. It saved a whole ton of people. You don't put it in with your job experience. It was before you changed careers.
“Somewhere else, I mean,” you say, grasping. “You're right, you know. This place is kind of the worst.”
That earns you a raised eyebrow. She slips her sunglasses off. You had hoped she would. The one eye that isn't covered by her hair fixes on you. She's not glaring anymore, but her mouth is pressed into a firm line. Her jaw's a lot sharper than you remember. She's taller, too. You can see that when she shoves off the wall.
“My contract is up at 6,” she says, “and I really hate hotel food. There's a place on the corner two blocks east from here. A good place. 6:15. If you don't turn up looking like some hobo I'll let you treat me.”
Oh, well, you think. You didn't need that speaker fee that badly.
The directions she gave you were for a cheap ramen house and you get there at six. You unbuttoned your blazer and took off your tie, but you're still the fanciest-dressed by far. She's waiting in the corner, checking her phone and telling off the men who have the nerve to try and speak to her in swift, ruthless succession.
“Fourth or fifth?” you ask.
“Die in a fire,” she says, sticking her middle finger up with great pride. Then she sees it's you and puts her phone away. She's taken her hair out of her ponytail and unzipped her jacket just up past her abdomen. “Two sizes bigger, by the way.”
“Eh?”
“My cup size,” she says, flicking her fingers in the general vicinity of the anatomy you may or may not have taken note of when you saw how her jacket was zipped. “Since I know you're wondering. I'm also three and a half inches taller and fifteen pounds heavier. Don't assume those two are related, pervert, it's mostly muscle, and, yes, since you're probably curious I can see out of my left eye, but, no, since you won't ask, can't see as well out of it as my right, but if you try to get all, 'Oh, that had to be hard!' about it I'm going to point out you're only three inches taller, you're about nine pounds lighter than me, and I break faces for a living. So.”
She waits, expectantly.
You try to think of one thing she hasn't covered. You cheeks haven't burned this hard in a long time. “I wear contacts now?”
“Show me,” she says.
You do. You lean over the table, and pull down your eyelid. She leans up to meet you half-way. You know people are probably staring, but this is kind of par for the course with her.
“That's disgusting,” she says. “You just stick those in every day?”
“More or less,” you say.
“Why?”
“My visions terrible and I hate glasses.”
“Well, there goes my appetite.” Then, with great professionalism, she asks: “How do you get them out?”
You show her that, too. You're more pleased than you want to admit by the face she makes. Still, it seems you passed whatever test she's laid out, because she kicks the chair out across from her and tells you to sit down. You haven't put her too off her appetite because she orders for both of you. She orders vegetarian for you. You're not sure how she knows. You don't question it.
She does break faces for a living, although these days it's called being a private defense contractor. She tells you all about it while walking her chopsticks through her bowl. Four months ago she had a corporate espionage job in Saudi Arabia. Half a year ago she was stationed with the Wunder BBB, working in partnership with with a UN paramilitary branch on an investigation into arms proliferation in South America. You heard a little bit about that. It was in the news. You got a postcard addressed from Buenos Aires in the mail. 'Wish you were here!' it had said. You don't think Misato really meant that. You heard there'd been some fighting. You heard there'd nearly been another war.
The version you hear now has way more explosions, a helicopter rescue, and a couple of gunfights. You forget to pick up your chopsticks more than once.
“I hear the beaches are nice,” you say. “Do they let you keep the guns?”
“I have five in my hotel room, and like you care about the beach.” You never did learn to swim, in spite of a your roommate's few friendly attempts to teach you. “And don't think I don't want to know what you've been up to. You're not going to tell me the Invincible Shinji's just slacked off.”
You haven't, but there isn't much to talk about. You spent a year in UN facility in Switzerland, but she already knows that. You went to Germany for the trial, but she knows that, too. You went back to Japan, and she doesn't seem surprised. There isn't much else to tell. They gave you a monitor in a UN-appointed apartment in a government district of Tokyo-2. They let you go to university. You're told that used to mean something in the days before the Second Impact, but you think it had less to do with your test scores (which were adequate) and your recommendations (which were okay), and more to do with your status as a person of interest (left over equipment) and the UN's strong desire to keep you busy, and content, and easy to track. You studied music theory. (You used to wake up screaming.) You graduated five years ago. (You used to get counseling.) You got a teaching certification two years ago. (You used to see Ayanami.) You got brought in by the police seven years ago for a fight (you started) on a subway, but your hand (which you broke on the guy's jaw) healed just fine and, anyway, no one (who deserved it) got charged for anything (Kaworu had to pick you up), it was really stupid (you cried on the way home), and you never did anything like it again (true). You're a music teacher (not a soldier). You're off for the week on holiday. You like your students this year (they don't know what you did at their age). Last year one of them got into a very good music program overseas. You play in a little community orchestra that meets up on Sundays (they don't know much about you). You're meeting them tomorrow (they don't talk about the war), actually, but it's nothing big, you're all amateurs, you all just do it because it gets you out...
“Not much to talk about, huh?” You paid and left the restaurant about twenty minutes ago. You're on the overpass looking out across the whole business district. It's close to twilight and the lights have come on. The wind blows her hair in her eyes. You put your hand out without thinking. She looks at it a moment, hovering just over her cheekbone. You put your hand back into your pocket.
You shrug. “It makes it harder for them to write reports about me if I'm really boring.”
“Boring?” she says. “I think you might need to pinch me. I think I fell asleep. I think I might be dead.”
“You're awake,” you say. “You're alive.”
“And you're a stiff.” She grips the railing of the overpass. She puts a heel up between the bars. Heights never bothered her. It was just one of the million things that tricked you into thinking she was completely fearless.
“I'm okay,” you say.
She stops. “Just okay?”
“I'm getting the hang of it,” you say. “Living. It's not as bad as they made it seem.”
She doesn't say anything.
“I missed you,” you say. “Asuka.”
She looks away.
“I really missed you,” you say again. Your spoken German's still pretty terrible, you remember, but you've gotten yourself into this one and there's no running away. “I'm glad I got to see you again. I'm glad you're doing all right. It's been really great. I hope... I hope I get to see you again. That is. If you would like to. I'm a real idiot, though. You were always right about that."
You think, maybe, she's about to tell you to leave, but she leans back from the railing and says: “There's two men in suits with binoculars parked by the underpass. They were in the restaurant. Yours or mine?”
“...probably mine,” you admit. “I left my monitor at home. I think they think I'll run off when I go to these things.”
“They don't know you very well, do they?”
“No.” It takes you a moment to realize you're smiling. “Guess not. I try to get them coffee sometimes. It's a pretty bad assignment.”
“I'll say. I've been running around with you for a few hours and I'm already bored out of my mind,” she says. “Well?”
“'Well?'”
She tips her head at you. You can see both of her eyes when she does that. Sharp and dancing with intent.
“Want to give them something to really report back about?”
She grabs your nose.
“Oh,” you say.
“Stop breathing.”
“Can't,” you say.
“You're really the worst,” she says.
Still, you think, pulling back a second later with your hand on her shoulder and her arm hooked through yours, after ten years you're not completely terrible at it. She's just invited herself to your rehearsal tomorrow. Her plane doesn't leave for a few more days, and since you'll be staying over with her anyway, she may as well drop by.