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Misato needs to watch Kaji's watermelon patch. Eventually, she will, she keeps telling herself. There's no reason not to. As soon as she finds her father's cross, she'll tend to Kaji's garden.
Her morning begins as it usually does since she retired from teaching, when the sun is low on the horizon and the fabric of her curtains is not enough to shield her from the day. When the smell of Shinji's cooking sneaks into the room, and Asuka's voice shifts from gentle to annoyed after a few knocks at her door.
"Morning, Pen Pen."
Misato reaches out to pet Pen Pen's head. He squawks and nuzzles her hand before dropping to the floor, paws smacking loudly against the wood.
"Misato, you have to tend to Kaji's watermelons," Pen Pen says, and he pulls the sheets from the clutch of her hands.
There's something off about this, but she doesn't know what it is.
If she thinks too hard about it, everything about this day feels strange, even though this is the way her life has been for the last couple of months. A clean room. Her hair, too tangled to bother to brush it. The blinking red light of pending messages in the answering machine.
She knows what she'll find. If it's from Kaji, she's too busy to listen to his rambling about watermelons. If it's from her father, he shouldn't have trusted her with his cross in the first place if he didn't want to lose it. It's not like her life revolves around them. No one is stopping them from doing any of it themselves.
Until then, they can wait.
Shinji changed the ingredients of the stock again. Pen Pen waits patiently until his lithe fingers remove the spines from the fish and set it on his bowl. Shinji's hands are hesitant in everything he does, but when he cooks, the gentleness turns into precision. The knife slices through the carrots with no resistance, and they break into flawlessly thin matchsticks. His thumbs press into the flesh of the chicken, cracking its ribs open and pulling out the insides. Not a stain touches his clothes.
Misato shivers, dizzy and suddenly nauseous at the noises of butchery. Misato should be proud. "Look at you, cooking like a grown-up," she tries to sound sincere, because she means it. She really does. There was a time when he had to look away, even if the edge cut too dangerously near his fingers.
"I am a grown-up, Misato-san," Shinji retorts, dropping a wet chicken leg with a face fully flushed with embarrassment. "Unlike some people I know. Why are you not dressed yet?"
Misato sighs. She hates being lectured, especially when she deserves it. It's fine. Laughing it off is an art she has perfected. No need to drop to the level of a pair of moody kids (or Ritsuko's low blows). This has been their routine since she allowed Shinji and Asuka to stay at her home. She thinks it's comforting, to know they feel safe enough to be themselves.
"Asuka will pick us up in half an hour," Shinji insists. It's comforting, but she can only take so much of Shinji's judgmental stare while sober. She walks towards the fridge, and her benevolence leaves her soul as she faces the betrayal of the freeloaders she has loved until now as her own children.
It's a trap. She won't complain about it.
"Don't be mad," Shinji murmurs. "It's our last New Year together, and you drink too much when Kaji-san is not here."
"Shinji-kun, you can come home for the holidays when you move to Kyoto. It's not that far away," Misato tries to reassure him. The old habits of her career as a teacher are the reason why it sounds like an order. It's not her intention. They will come back, and she's not going anywhere. She'll never leave them.
"Yes, ma'am."
For a moment, it feels as though the eager shine in Shinji's eyes fades from existence. A blink, and her ears remember the merciless sound of his knuckles pushing against bone, crushing the dead animal. She reaches out and presses her palms against his warm cheeks. It's a little like holding a frightened kitten. One wrong move and he'll twist and run and claw one of her eyes out in the process.
"It's Kyoto, not the end of the world," she says, and releases him. "And you don't have to come home unless you want to."
"I do want to, but then you'll ask me about your cross all over again."
"Well, you never should've lost it," she says smugly.
"You're the one who shoved it into my backpack!"
"You're the one who wouldn't stop crying for a dumb exam."
"It was my entrance exam to culinary school."
"In that case, you're welcome."
Shinji scoffs and walks off to continue his endless cooking. "That reminds me. Remember the day I borrowed your credit card?"
"You are a big idiot!" Asuka slams the door to their apartment open, completely ignoring Misato's presence until her eyes zero in on a clueless Shinji, humming in the kitchen. She stomps across the room and snaps the headphones off his ears. Misato has trouble pitying him as they bounce off and land on Pen Pen's water bowl. It really is annoying to try to talk to Shinji when he's wearing them.
"What did I do now?" Shinji asks, and Asuka picks a package she left at the door and shoves it at him.
"What did I do now?" Asuka mocks, and turns to Misato. "This is why you should've let me borrow your credit card for today's dinner instead of him."
Shinji pushes past her and tears the package open. Misato doesn't recognize the machine, but it looks like something her father would like.
Asuka fiddles with the buttons as Shinji reads the manual. The machine beeps incessantly. Each beat is like a hammer flung straight at her chest, asking her to get up from the kitchen chair and run to her car, drive Shinji and Asuka really far away from her and from each other to keep them safe.
"What is that?" she asks.
"A metal detector," Shinji explains, proud of himself. "We're going to find your cross today."
Tokyo-3 is lively today. Lights dance across the buildings in synchrony, and every few streets, Misato sees the remaining Christmas markets. The sound of music reaches them between the alleys as her car stops in traffic. It's the first time she sits in the passenger seat, and she's glad she can entertain herself with something instead of yelling at Asuka for taking turns with too much speed. It's only this one time.
When they reach the beach where Shinji says he lost her father's cross, she's surprised to find it empty.
Misato gets tired of following Shinji around the beach, and she finds a small hill to sit as she waits.
"Has dad called?" Asuka asks as she stands restlessly beside her.
"Dad?"
"Kaji-san," Asuka says. "He said I could call him dad. He's always so busy."
Kaji thinks too highly of himself.
"Dads are all the same."
Asuka scoffs. "Maybe if you tended to his watermelon patch, he'd come back."
"I don't see you tending to it either," she counters, but the thought lingers.
"I've been busy," Asuka retorts, and looks out to the sea. "I hate paperwork. I've already been to college once. Shouldn't they just let me in?"
"You're the one who wanted to be an adult. Being an adult takes a lot of paperwork. Next time, I'll help you."
"I didn't want you to help me," Asuka sighs. "I didn't want anyone to help me."
"Next time," Misato repeats. Her words echo oddly in the vast landscape surrounding them. It is only then that she notices how quiet everything is. She only hears the sounds of the waves clashing against the shore and the noise of Asuka kicking the sand idly with her new shoes. "Something is wrong."
Asuka walks forward towards the shore. It's too early for the sun to set, but soon the clear white clouds are dusted in red. Under this light, Asuka's yellow dress has taken the color of fresh blood. There are no trees, no buildings or mountains around them, only the eternal view of the sea. Somehow, one side of her face remains obscured. "Do you think he'd be proud of me?" Asuka asks.
"Maybe you should stay a little longer," Misato says. "Help me look after the watermelon patch."
"I'll go see what that idiot Shinji is doing."
With each second, the figures of Shinji and Asuka look farther away, like ants. She can still distinguish the movement of Shinji's hand as he waves around his metal detector. It's peaceful but unsettling.
The machine beeps, and the warm hues of sunset have already broken into gray.
"He found it," a small girl says, sitting at her feet. Two fluffy white pompoms hang from the collar of her pink dress. She drinks from a bottle of orange soda, uncaring of how a stray droplet stains her clothes.
"Did you get lost?"
"No, you did," the girl says, her red eyes staring blankly as she offers her hand. "I'll bring you there, if you want to."
Misato takes her sticky hand as she leads her away.
"Do you dream?" the girl asks.
"Don't we all?" Misato replies. She doesn't mention that she can't recall the last time she had a dream, not even a nightmare.
"I had a dream in which you were my teacher, and I was tall. I ate breakfast and went to school."
"I am a teacher," Misato explains. "This was my last year at school. I retired."
"Good," the girl says, taking another sip from her soda.
"Aren't you going to ask why?"
"Because you are old," the girl says without a hint of doubt. "Isn't that why people retire?"
"Yeah," Misato says. The girl is too young to explain she realized she wasn't a very good teacher. She didn't really care about the future of all the kids she taught, about the way they would shape the world. She didn't care if they were happy. Misato simply wanted to get revenge from her father, but lately she couldn't remember why she was so angry at him.
Misato's father hadn't been around in years. He called once in a while, but she didn't pick up. His presence during the last decade of her life had been limited to a cross hanging from her neck. Every day, she closed the clip herself, she bore the weight of it as if it were another part of her body. She had been like a scared child, murmuring a prayer she didn't understand when darkness was too oppressive, willingly binding herself to the possibility of hell in return for the delusion of safety.
She really doesn't want that cross back, but as the darkness on the horizon of the red sea sets in, she knows it's better than nothing.
"You did a lousy job," Kaji says when she arrives, holding an enormous watering can over the remains of the watermelons. "Most of them are dead."
"Well, you're a lousy father," she argues back. The anguish and the guilt of his absence drip from her voice, even though all she wants is to hold him until the oxygen in his lungs runs out. "The kids are going to college now."
"Are they?" Kaji laughs, bright and fond like she imagines a real father would. "I'd say we'll have more time for ourselves, but I have to teach her to take care of them while you're gone. Right, Rei?"
Rei picks up a straw hat from the ground and tries to grab the handle of Kaji's can. She winces at the weight before dropping it.
"Hang on," Kaji says, as he assembles the spout to another watering can. This one is small, made of plastic, and end of the spout is decorated with a yellow sunflower. As she takes it between her arms, bandages peek under Rei's sleeve.
The darkness is here. She has seen this before.
"I hate you," Misato says and offers Kaji the cross. "You'd make a terrible parent."
He hums in agreement and takes the cross as she turns around and lifts off her hair. He clasps it around her throat, pinching her skin in the process. "You know that I'm sorry, right?"
When she turns, Kaji's clothes are replaced by his father's protective suit, snow and ashes have accumulated over his shoulders. "This is pathetic," she says, and then a younger version of herself is staring back at her. The words come out jumbled and raspy from her dry mouth after so long without speaking.
"I had to try. Wouldn't it be great to deal with this before going back to work?"
"They're both dead."
"Yes," the younger Misato says. There's a gaping wound at the center of her stomach, and no comfort in her voice as the illusion she'd been indulging in fades.
Misato is glad she's completely alone in the world when her knees fail, and she drops into the patch of grass, her limbs bruising against the empty shells of the watermelons. Her legs are soaked in their red entrails, sticky and sweet like blood.
"Crying won't solve anything," young Misato says.
"I know."
"But we can wait a little longer."
"I don't know if I can do this again," Misato stutters. "I don't know what I'll find back there. What if I'm alone?"
Young Misato kneels by her side. Her hands dig up an intact watermelon under the rotting fruit, a long vine clings from its shell, green and vibrant. Young Misato slips her twisted fingers under the curl of a small tendril. She thinks she sees the tendril squeeze her back. Clearly, she now remembers that watermelons don't grow in winter.
"Never underestimate the human capacity to adapt."
In the distance, Shinji's machine keeps beeping.
She clenches her fist as the beeping settles. The first thing she feels is the wind of the train brushing her cheek as it rushes past her.
Misato is not sure if this is her destination. She has never liked taking trains. There's too much waiting involved. Her best course of action is to walk.
"Misato-san!"
She looks back, outside the train station and towards the street. From below, Shinji waves at her hesitantly, while Asuka bangs the horn of her car. Rei sits at the back, holding a pot with flowers on her lap.
This is not Tokyo-3, there are no buildings in sight, none of the structures that kept the city safe and that she knew like the palm of her hand.
Shinji waits in silence. He gives her a way out, a chance to move on with her life, just like she did during the many times he ran away.
"I'm home," she says at the top of her lungs.
The smile on Shinji's face is blinding.
"Welcome back."