Neon Genesis Evangelion
A Thousand Years of Secrecy
Disclaimer: I did my best to stick to the story guidelines here. That said, seriously, this is an M rated story and you need to understand that you shouldn't be reading it if you can't handle M-rated content.
Thirteen – The Death and Rebirth of Shinji Ikari
"He wandered the desert in his madness, comforted by neither man nor beast. The dead were his company."
The room was small. His feet were very cold. They had taken his shoes and socks. His cheek stung from its position on the dirty floor. He was drooling. Slowly he willed the limbs back into action. They ached with every stretch, every tensing as he tried to fold into himself, to curl up and touch his feet in their numb suffering. He was not in his old clothes.
The hospital gown stank of regurgitations and urine. After minutes spent rubbing absently at the pins and needles galloping up his ankles he gave up on the revival and tried pulling himself off of the floor. As he sat up his head spun and the motion ended prematurely, smacking his temple back onto the grimy floor. He moaned at the sudden jolt, conditioning unable to kill the reflex in time. It hovered behind a gray fog of drugs and a tingling amnesia.
He heard the sounds of a lock jingle as he winced, scratching at the wound on his head.
A door somewhere near his feet slid open. And slid shut again. The lock jingled again. The moment blew through him. Captured. Alone. SEELE.
I'm going to die here.
He refused the fear of the realization, as did his conditioning.
They might have picked him up later that day. He assumed it could not have been much more than a few hours because hunger was only beginning to manifest when he heard the sounds of the lock again. They would have set it up that way on purpose. It would become a mnemonic to try and play on his terror—he would come to associate that sound with fear if he did not temper himself carefully.
Two of them entered huge and muscular; they spoke terse angry Russian to which Shinji pretended he couldn't understand. The conditioning leapt at the chance to keep a one up and in return he was beaten for his hesitant movements. Not very hard, just enough to get the point across that he should listen to them regardless of language.
They put on the blindfold and led him with steel cuffs around his wrists. Shinji felt the strange, cardboard-like presence of old derms still stuck to his arms in clusters. They had been keeping him under for some time he imagined.
The walking stretched into slow pain as various surfaces passed under the raw skin of his bare feet. He entered some other chamber after a swift shove to his back when the arms released him. There was still cold in this place, a different sensation to the air telling of a larger room and ventilation. He shivered. It smelled like diesel fuel galvanized metal.
"What is your name?" a voice demanded of him.
Conditioning froze his tongue. Give them nothing, it said, and Shinji listened.
"What is your name?" the voice said again, patience reeking from its tone. The conditioning recognized that as a person in complete control and well aware of it.
Shivering and waiting, he said nothing. A blow to the head threw him to the floor but the blindfold held. He did not bother to waste his energy on a struggle. No point yet.
"What is your name you fucking retard!" it shouted at him but the patience slipped through the false anger.
A kick to his stomach. He tasted blood in his mouth.
"Tjaden, put him in the chair," the same voice said in the soft Russian of an educated background. Middle class, a family man perhaps, with a good paying government job; but it also had the undertone of dangerous, hard work.
Large hands moved him onto a wooden stool with a back. Shinji held limp and did not respond to the touch.
"Last chance: what is your name?"
Shinji quivered a little in the freezing air but held fast. His conditioning allowed him an inner, smug defiance.
"Okay, fuckface. We have other ways of asking."
Someone pulled off the gown's pants suddenly so that he was nude from the waist down in the chair. He already knew what would follow. Shinji tuned his ears to steps of the large man, ignoring the Russian comments about the "little boy" and such; when the boots' soft click returned he timed his dive springing from the chair. He aimed well and his cuffs knocked wind out of the large fellow in a hollow gasp as the two of them heaped to the floor. From somewhere else in the room he could hear Russian voices laughing and jeering at this "Tjaden."
The bigger man retaliated swiftly, fists pummeling the blind boy easily. Shinji refused to give him any verbal satisfaction for his part, remaining silent through the onslaught. His nose began to bleed, trickling into his lip.
"That's enough Tjad', put him back in the chair."
The blows ceased. The plastic cups of the electrodes came next. The large hands tried to place them onto his genitals but he struggled, shouting and kicking at them; he bit and clawed at what little he could find of the larger man. A fist connected below his jaw, painting the black of the blindfold into swirling fireworks. When he awoke, his fists were chained behind himself and his legs cuffed to the legs of the chair. He tried standing but the chair was bolted to the floor. The sticky adhesive of the electrodes made his testicles itch.
He trembled in the silence and the cold licked anew at his exposed skin.
"Shall we have one more go then? Your name, Ikari? Your full name?"
Shinji shook in the silence, waiting for the sterile cups to ignite. They did.
The pain was like condensed and constricting fire. It shot through his loins into the rest of his body, muscles jumping into spasm with the surprise of it. He screamed, unable to contain it as his jaw wrenched open. He howled part rage, part suffering. The blood pouring from the bite in his tongue seemed invisible under its barrage. His thighs convulsed, trying desperately to sheer the circles off with quivering inability. His screams continued, until his lungs ran out of oxygen and then his mouth just hung open, wet sounds sputtering out of his throat as it gasped and then released the breath immediately. It did not stop, and though he could count his rapid heartbeat, the searing in his flesh seemed to last longer. It ended as quickly as it began and his stiff spine slumped back into the chair, nerves exhausted. He hung in place now like a marionette with ruined strings.
"Your name, Ikari?" said the voice, gentle and patient. Almost sympathetic.
He held the silence and the pain came again. A little longer this time. He howled again until it too resigned itself to quick panting gasps. It stopped.
"Your name is Shinji Ikari. Say it."
Give them nothing, conditioning murmured. He trusted its voice.
It started again. His howl grew wet, drunken. The noise was like a slobbering dog now.
"Name. Now."
He refused his lips.
Started again. He gurgled as the spit sloshed over parched lips.
"Your name."
And again…
Sometimes they came in the night. Sometimes in the day. Sometimes while he slept. Soon they stopped him from doing that. The cold seeped through everything—the paper-thin scrubs—his bones. He never touched the bread and water. They let him wear himself into weakness, slapping derms on often enough to keep him alive and nothing more.
They gave up on the drugs. Conditioning had eaten the receptors in the brain and spat out every cocktail they could put into him leaving him dazed and unresponsive to even the most violent of stimuli.
A lifetime's training evaporated under sagging malnutrition. Bruises took longer to heal. His outbursts became feebler, sluggish. They would make an old man out of him yet.
He began to find his other place, the conditioning's last reserve. They'd trained it into him with minimal hurt and heavy doses of meditation: Envoys knew all contingencies, even though they were supposed to be dead long before torture could occur.
He began to watch himself being tortured. Always by shadows. Always in the darkness. Kensuke began to speak to him, asking how he was doing. Talking about old times.
At first he was a voice. Then he would be in the corner of the room sometimes, back against the wall, just watching with a disinterested gaze and making idle chitchat. Eventually Shinji joined him over there. And watched the little boy be tortured.
Time bled. It became uncountable. Agonies stretched. Peaces evaporated. But he gave them nothing—nothing.
Misato would come. One day. Some day. And they would die. Oh they would die, in the most wonderful of ways. It delighted him to imagine them making the same sounds that they produced from him. Some day they would get theirs. Oh yes. Yes.
"Man he's a fucking mess," Kensuke muttered. "I've never seen him like this."
"He's hurting alright," Shinji replied. They both starred at the boy curled fetal into the corner of the room.
"What's today? Any ideas," the other asked. They wore the identical black and white of their Tokyo-3 high school uniforms. Both kept their hands in their pockets. Shinji leaned against the wall and Kensuke stood beside him.
"Nah. Can't have been more than a week or two though," Shinji replied.
"Started him off pretty hard didn't they…"
"Yup. They haven't even started on the psychological stuff."
"They're the Spetz'. I read up on them. All they know how to do is brute force," Kensuke cajoled darkly.
"They know how to do plenty of things," Shinji replied in equal tone.
"Does he sleep much?" Kensuke adjusted the glasses on his nose slightly, dainty care revealing itself behind the freckles. He ran fingers through the blonde scruff.
"Not really. Just a little awake all the time, you know."
"You're his conditioning, why can't you just… put him to sleep?" Kensuke replied, confused.
"He doesn't… listen as well as he used to," Shinji replied, eyes narrowing at the dirt-smeared scrubs. The pale blue was fading fast under the dark grit of the room.
"Well you've gotta admire his determination," Kensuke said with an inevitable sigh.
The lock jingled. The boy twitched nearly invisibly.
The shadow hands came and dragged the youth to a stand, not bothering to inflict any further violence on the mess of a human. The boy could barely hold himself upright with their thick arms supporting him. They we're gentle now. The sympathy was still false but it yanked at heartstrings Misato had never cut properly, daring the child to cry.
"Come on little one."
"Fucking sadists," Kensuke shouted at the shadow hands, trudging out of the room and after them. Shinji followed at his shoulder.
The boy's feet scraped limply on the linoleum, occasionally bouncing over some obstruction. They put him in a new room and sat him down into a steel chair.
"I smell butane," Kensuke said, voice shaking slightly behind the mask of control. Fear lurked somewhere in that voice. It's medical calm and clarity shook.
They pulled the blindfold off him revealing a room with high windows and two bearded European faces methodically setting up a variety of steely looking equipment on the table before him.
They could see snow flurries dancing through the frosted glass in an endless downward waltz.
"Siberia," Shinji whispered, walking over to them to get a better look. But too much of the view was obscured by the blizzard outside to give him any more detail.
"I smell butane, Shinji," Kensuke mumbled again.
One of the Russians withdrew a tiny chrome gun, its hose attached to a white canister on the table. He brought it in front of the face of the child and waved it back and forth playfully.
"You know what is?" he asked in his best cordial English.
"Give them nothing, child," Shinji reminded from his spot beside Kensuke's nervous stare, glancing away from the window.
The boy did not look at the tool, eyes drifting on the gunmetal floors.
The Russian growled, giving up and storming back over to his partner.
"Are the antibiotics ready?" he said under the Ukrainian accent.
"Ja," the other replied.
He returned to the sitting child swiftly. As the flame of the torch ignited, the child's eyes jumped to it momentarily. Then locked onto it—an expression of total confusion was his face.
"Oh God," Kensuke muttered, turning away.
They started asking the child questions. After several were left unanswered, the man stuck the blue point of light under his earlobe. The scream was a bubbling groan that grew to a shriek as the undamaged nerves shook his brain. The sobs didn't end when the heatgun pulled away.
"There, there," the Russian said softly, patting him on the shoulder. He started asking questions again.
The child's jaw shook, clinching unclenching, as his eyes searched uselessly for the black and crimson line driven through his ear. The man brought the blue point close again and grabbed hold of his second ear. The boy screamed before they brought the point of light any closer.
"You remember the time we saw Keiko undressing through the crack in the door of the girl's locker?" Kensuke shouted desperately at him. "Man, do you remember that?"
"Yeah, she was… pretty," the boy replied, voice wobbling.
"Good," Shinji said to Kensuke quietly. "Keep him there. Keep me out here."
The Russian turned to look at his partner, shrugging.
"Progress," the man said. "Try the other ear."
They tried the other ear. The boy made animal noises and struggled against the chains.
"NOOO!" the scream boomed as the blue touched his flesh.
Shinji grabbed at his ear, then released it, his hand coming away with blood.
"Fuck… they're getting through. Keep me talking Kensuke."
Kensuke kept the boy talking. They had a conversation about all the good times in Tokyo-3. They moved to his fingers. They talked about times with Misato. Now the thumb. Its pink flesh blistered white and then crumpled to a black flakey substance. They talked about Rei. Now the other digits. One by one, changing the colors. They talked about fantasies about Misato and nights spent drinking. They moved down to his left foot. The toenails boiled away, become part of the skin beneath. They talked about Asuka. Talked about his first kiss. Now the right foot. The blue light moving like a lazy moth in slow, delicate circles. They talked about the bike ride to the Second Branch. Talked about her eyes. Those beautiful eyes.
"I love those eyes," the child sobbed from his hunched position in the chair as his feet kicked and then gave up on kicking.
His feet were black flakey blobs now, vaguely conforming to their original shape. Sheets of ashy skin rose from the surface, blown free by drafty gusts through the room. His left hand had a similar quality. Several of the fingers fused together under the carefully maneuvered fire, turning it into a stump beneath the wrist.
"This is going nowhere," the Russian at the table announced, annoyed. "Give him the meds and take him back."
They slapped the derms on the boy's arm and led him back out of the room. As his feet scraped the floor he screamed again but his voice was ruined now, so they were wet strangled noises instead. Pieces of his flesh trailed behind on the gunmetal floors while the Russian beside him hummed some folk song, ignoring the agony he inflicted.
"No feet…" Shinji said. "Can't run now. With the swelling I won't fit into their boots. The storm would kill me without boots. Can't get outside."
"Ritsuko will grow you new ones," Kensuke reminded from his side as they trailed in the red and black streaks of the whimpering child.
Shinji regarded him with an air of indifference. "They aren't coming," he said gently.
"Of course they are, Shin—"
"Too long. They would have been here already. SEELE has either killed them or they're fighting to live. They won't expend resources on me. The council has plenty of viable alternatives. The Child Envoy program is already over."
"You don't know, maybe Misato…"
"Misato will follow orders. And the orders are to leave me here."
"That is then?" Kensuke asked, defeated.
"I'll stop his heart when they start electrocutions again."
Kensuke stuck his hands in his pockets, expression still glum. "It's for the best I supposed."
The child quaked as the misery of the swelling, mutilated skin scrapped itself on the metal floor with each subtle movement. The shakes would not leave him as the antibiotics from the derms they'd slapped on his unscarred skin tried desperately to fight infection against the germs itching to get to the under-cauterized flesh.
The pain drowned Shinji's vision, making him dizzy. He sat on the floor next to a pensive Kensuke as they watched the crippled boy struggle against the signals his nerves kept sending. Shinji panted, fighting to stay in control.
The stench of the room was one of cooked meat. The olfactory reminder tugged at memories of the abuse Shinji struggled to strangle.
"This is getting bad," he muttered, rubbing at his temple. "They're using me up on the pain. I can't dissociate for much longer if they keep this up."
"They knew Envoys have anti-torture routines. Why bother with all this?" Kensuke whispered behind him, tracing the scar lines of fire across the bare ankles and into the pulpy mess below.
"Don't know."
The lock jingled. The shadow hands raised him up and mercifully placed him in a wheelchair with a minimum of screaming. The squeaky wheels echoed off metallic walls and Shinji quickly recognized the turns in the route as leading back to the largest chamber and the voice with no face.
They secured the chains on his wrist, not at all careful to avoid the scarring which made the child shriek and pull away. A slap to the head lulled him back into his previous stupor.
"Not too hard Tjad'. We want him here this time."
"Take it off."
The shadow hands blurred into a slow focus as someone removed the blindfold. Colors jumped out of the darkness, forming into a myriad of uniforms. Across the room a collection of disinterested soldiers smoking and speaking to one another greeted his slow acclimation to the harsh fluorescents.
"Nice to see you again," said the one in the center. Shinji recognized it as the man from the first electrocution session. The terribly patient voice.
"What are they up to?" Kensuke growled from over the strapped down boy's shoulder. Shinji mirrored his pose behind the other shoulder.
"Bring her in," the man said aside and one of the soldiers disappeared out a different entrance. Shinji recognized the squeak of another wheelchair.
"What…" Kensuke said. His eyes blinked rapidly behind the eyeglasses.
She rolled through the entrance, red hair obscuring the face aimed down. But then she looked up at the boy.
"Who the—oh, oh my God. You—what are you doing here—oh…"
The tears began as if of their own accord as the girl's eyes traced the damaged form of the person she'd once knew. The horror knitted into her brow further and further with every second as she was pushed and close and closer towards him and the details were revealed in all their gory care.
This was no Shinji Ikari. It was a pale, mangled imitation of the original. Three of his limbs ballooned in to sickening imitations of their previous shapes. They were all shades of black and gray and pink. Raw and bleeding. His face was a collection of bruises like a perpetual mist covering over any recognizable expression. His muscles were nearly evaporated, hidden behind clusters of fresh and peeling derms.
"No… no, my Shinji. No, no, no, no… what have they done to you? What… have they done?" she whispered, eyes never leaving his form.
"Asu…" the boy gurgled.
"Hold it. Hold onto yourself," Kensuke pleaded, shaking Shinji. He too watched her with planted fixation.
"Ka."
"You fuckers." She turned away as the clear lines drew down her cheeks; she cried, head shaking under red bangs.
"You will find her unharmed, Shinji. And that is exactly how she will remain if you answer a few questions for us," the voice began.
"I—I can't—" Shinji struggled against Kensuke's restraining grip, grasping at strands of the red hair and coming up short. The boy looked towards the man with the voice dumbly, then back at the girl.
The questions started. Shinji looked at the trembling form of Asuka, then back to the interrogators. All of the bored men and turned their gazes on him, like hungry tigers. They waited, licking their maws behind smoldering ends of tobacco.
"No? Nothing? Very well." The voice sighed. "Tjaden, you may undress her. Slowly, please."
Asuka struggled in place as the silver glinting knife appeared from its sheath and went up silently through the sleeve of her scrubs. One shoulder cut free, flopping forward to reveal the teenager's bare chest. Tjaden grinned, the whites of his teeth gleaming in the gloom of the room.
Asuka spat and the phlegm landed in his eye. He chuckled, then backhanded her swiftly.
Dad backhanded her swiftly.
"Not in the face, Tjad'," the voice disapproved.
"Shinjiii," Kensuke growled. "Don't go there, Shinji. This is not that place…"
The knife slipped through the other sleeve.
She struck her feet into his nearest shin, weeping.
He punched her stomach.
Dad. Punching her over and over again. Why? Why daddy? Mommy's hurt, can't you see?
Asuka grunted as her body sagged. Tjaden ripped the rest of the scrubs free, revealing her pale naked body to him and the rest of the room. The men grinned from behind their cigarettes watching with a dulled fascination.
Dad was smiling as her tooth came out and skittered across the kitchen floor. He'd never looked so happy.
"Shinji!" Kensuke said from some far away place. His skin was melting away to nothing, like Shinji's ruined limbs. The hair on fire in the nuclear holocaust and should have turned him to ashy nothing in less than a second. He isn't so near now, hard to hear. Behind the explosion.
Tjaden began unbuckling his belt, motions clumsy with the anticipation. Asuka shook, fear reeking from the blue eyes that stared up at the huge Russian.
Mommy's eyes, looking at you from the floor. She was so scared. Why couldn't you do anything? "Run" she mouths at you. "Run away." Is that what you're going to do?
Tajden's pants slipped to the floor. He looked back at the voice.
"Shinji?" the voice asked, looking at him. But the boy's vision was locked firmly on the pair of them. Another sigh. "Go ahead, Tjaden."
Mommy was hurting so bad. And daddy, bringing his fists down on her over and over again. So you crack the door open even further and pounce at him. But what can you do? Your hands are so small and his so big. You couldn't protect her then. You can't protect her now. When will it be enough? When?
Misato's crumpled form on the floor, kicked again by the grinning JSSDF. Mother's soft smile as the blood pools into her eye. Asuka's blue eyes, terrified.
When will it be enough?
Now.
"That's fucking enough," the boy did not say. He bellowed with the wind of a thousand mountaintops, the roar of a thousand lions, the boom of a thousand N2 mines. The voice was like boiling lead in a blast furnace. It did not make sound—it annihilated it.
The darkness of the room evaporated under the white shinning butterfly's wings. They sprouted from somewhere behind the wheelchair and grew larger, filling up the volume of space. Their intricate filaments divide and sub-divide into a fractal fudge of luminescence. The lines are white and blue majestic, burning like the nucleus of a sun. Tjaden's uncomprehending eyes are split in two by them. Then the stunned mouths with cigarettes falling away and the voice that was always calm, always patient. And her blue eyes shut as the blinding brightness grows further still. The light of a thousand years of secrecy revealed fully.
Thirteen Fin
A/N: Hmm. Sometimes I hate this chapter. I feel like I came close but missed the mark. I guess I'll leave that up to revising. I'm sorry if I disappointed anyone or any expectations for this chapter. It's a little short. It's a little repetitive but I like to tell myself that's on purpose. Mostly, it's just supposed to be clinical, horrible, and all to real. This is why you should be afraid of the word "rendition" when this administration says it. This is why people really don't like the idea of Gitmo. Not to get too political, but lets face it, torture really sucks. No Japanese lesson this chapter.
I'm not sure what happened to some of my readers (okay most) but I'm always glad to see new excited faces. I'd be lying to say I'm not a little disappointed by this story's reception but I know it's far from perfect--if you could see what I'm doing with my revisions of the earlier chapters you'd do backflips. Anyways, I won't stoop to pleading for reviews or anything like that. But spread the word if you enjoyed it. As I've said before, I'd rather have five enamored readers than fifty half-interested ones. Find someone you know that would like this and is missing out. Or just enjoy it yourself. Blah. I'm getting all whiny. Please excuse my blunt tongue; I'm home for the holidays and my parents come back the day I'm leaving. Love and peace guys. Here's hoping you have a better week than Shinji just had. ;)