Cosmonaut

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Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion belongs to Studio Gainax & Hideaki Anno. I'm just applying another coat of paint.

For once again putting up with my wild rambling, I thank anime-freaksg for beta reading this fic.

"Everything dies, baby, that's a fact.
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back."
- "Atlantic City", Bruce Springsteen

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PART ONE - UPRIVER

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Once every two days, Ayanami Rei strips the Commander down and helps him with his bath.

She manoeuvres him right up to edge of the bathtub in the cramped bathroom. There, she massages his legs, wraps her arms around his chest from behind and hoists him to his feet. She presses his back to her, grappling with the loose band of flesh around his sternum. She places him in the lukewarm water like she would a very expensive keepsake on a crowded shelf.

Finishing the transfer from wheelchair to filled bathtub causes her to get soaked through with bathwater. So she disrobes to the bare minimum to maintain her modesty and then lathers him with antibacterial soap.

It takes fifteen minutes, or twenty. His hands quiver when she raises them to scrub the grit from his armpits, but he doesn't make any other movements. She knows he'll be compliant to everything she does. She twirls a cloth around her fist to clean under his legs, between his crotch. Sometimes he's aroused. Most of the time he isn't. When he needs it, she shaves the white cloud of stubble from his cheeks and chin.

He seats him on the toilet bowl, and allows him to drip while she towels him dry. Naked and wet against the harsh porcelain seat, she can see how much he's shrunk with age. Sometimes at the end of this whole process, he summons some unknown strength, dabbing her wrist or arm with a finger. Sometimes he even leans over and mutters, "Yui?"

She doesn't respond to anything he says now. Instead, she dries the gaps between his fingers and eases his hands away.

In the living room, she sets the Commander by the coffee table, parallel to the window, facing the butterscotch-coloured shelves that Shinji bought. Once the Commander is comfortable, she arranges his things on the table, like symbols only the two of them can understand: two magazines, a book on Biochemistry, 12 sets of medication and a glass of water. She puts on some Shostakovich on the speakers.

Most of the time he stares at whatever object's on his lap, gingerly thumbing through the pages. Otherwise, he just glances out the window, waiting for the blue sky to bleed away into grey and black. The music swells, and she wonders if he's thinking of the Siege of Leningrad or something similar, like the battle of NERV HQ.

In the hum of the adjacent kitchen, she reads the newspapers from cover to cover, does their clothes and prepares dinner.

"What have you cooked today?" he always asks.

They eat silently, facing each other –until the Commander's frail hands shake the soup from his spoon. Then she feeds him, fitting her fingers over his, sliding soup into a corner of his lips. When she's done, she wipes the slick of spilled food from his chin. It's around this time when he begins to nod off, so she brings him to his bedroom. She lifts him to bed and wraps him so smugly that he looks like a cigar.

"Goodnight, Commander Ikari."

"Goodnight -" he stutters. A name dies in his throat. "Good –"

She never knows if he will speak her real name or once again refer to his deceased wife.

Before she retires for the night, she cleans the thin sheaf of dust from the mostly empty shelves. The Commander doesn't have many possessions, just loose memories. All his photographs are assembled on one shelf like holy statues on an altar.

The images there chart a fragmented history of the individuals involved in Project E and the aborted Third Impact. There's the Commander after the Trials, the now deceased Professor Fuyutsuki, the Doctor and the Major. But her favourite is still the one of all the four pilots, taken decades ago, at the height of their post-Third Impact popularity. The photograph is so old its dog-earned corners have faded into sepia.

In that image, she stands with Shinji's left arm folded around her right-angled shoulders, already accentuated by the military cut of her overcoat. In that image, she's not a day over fifteen. When she tilts the photo for a closer look, she sees herself mirrored in its glass: a watery, pale shadow of the girl in the image.

Everyone has a story of how they emerged from the sea. Some 30 years on, even with a new generation who never endured Third Impact and its aftermath, people still talk of how they survived the end of the world. Shinji and Asuka can talk about the lonely weeks on the seashore. Toji's become synonymous with his story of being washed up on the beach at Yugawara like driftwood. Even the Commander remembers waking up on some beach with sand between his teeth.

But Rei can't remember anything. No shuffling through sand, or stepping out of shallow water, or clearing LCL from her lungs. She just was. She recalls waking up in a chair in the ruined NERV HQ, opening a door and walking outside to curious survivors. She tries, but her recollections of Third Impact end with exiting her LCL bath to meet Commander Ikari. Everything beyond that is just a deep, long whiteness.

She knows the government that emerged after Third Impact took all this into account during the Trials. Like the other pilots, she answered questions and testified in front of collection of judges and investigators. For four months she was at their beck-and-call, with the world as a willing audience, sometimes baying for blood and desperate for someone to blame.

Looking back, she can't find reasons to blame anyone. She knows – like the other pilots – it was necessary. She - they - everyone - had to move on.

They did not find her culpable for Third Impact. She knows the inability to recall anything prior to the event and her service for humanity as a pilot probably saved her. But she had help. Everyone from the technicians at NERV to the other pilots vouched for her. The verdict: she had been under the age of consent, and an unwilling participant in Instrumentality.

The Commander and his immediate subordinates did not fare so well.

She remembers the verdicts on NERV's high command. Everyone, who in the past was involved in getting her to pilot, was found guilty of crimes against humanity. They had recommended 50-year prison sentences, confiscation of private property, revoking citizenship and lifetime bans from being employed by any existing government or research institutes. But there had been mitigating factors, and when it was all over, the Commander walked awaywith home detention for life.

Not everyone had been satisfied with the outcome. She still thinks it had been extremely lopsided: pardon the soldiers, screw the generals. But the Trials had concluded one sorry chapter of human history. She was free, she could move on.

Or at least, that was what she thought.

In the mornings before breakfast, she takes the Commander on a walk. She brings him out from the apartment and down the hill to the river. Dawn struggles to make its mark on the city, and last night's lights burn and shiver on the surface of the water. It's still cold enough that when the Commander coughs, she sees warm breath tusking from his nostrils.

She wheels him back past the grey blur of refurbished, pre-Third Impact blocks, covered in smudgy fingerprints of water stains. Her neigbours begin to stir and prepare for work. On the elevator landing she meets two middle-aged housewives who live on the same floor. She greets them. They smile back – too politely, the edges of their mouths tapering into frowns. She doesn't know if they disapprove of a young thing like her living with an older man, or they are repulsed by their real identities, or both.

After breakfast at nine o'clock, a UN-approved caregiver arrives to watch the Commander. Once all handover procedures are complete, Rei goes to the Commander, gives him a chaste kiss on his temple and tells him she'll be back for dinner.

"Yui?" he asks. And she leaves.

She spends the window of time away from home walking across the city. She starts at the river, and follows its luminous bends and curves through glassy buildings and crowded junctions. When she comes to the eighth bridge, she crosses over to the university on the other bank.

She has to cross an open square to get to her daily haunt at the library. Sometimes when she strolls through this place, she sees her surroundings in multiple layers. There's an asphalt quadrangle with electric trams, a bombed out collection of buildings, a courtyard of glass and steel buildings flooded with LCL – each scene superimposed on the other.

She sees them all in a blur, with a misplaced sense of nostalgia.

She questions: are these past, present, and future? Someone else's memories? The net effect of Instrumentality?

And more importantly: why does she see these things?

But there are no answers. She reads, reviews and researches all the material on Third Impact. At the library she pours over scientific theories, witness testimonies, survivors' stories and medical reports. She studies every resource in the ever-growing archive on Third Impact and the meta-event that was Instrumentality. Once, her studying helped her understand what happened on the day NERV was stormed. Yet, nothing comes close to explaining why she sees things that she has no memory of.

More importantly, who (or what) is she?

When she feels the chatter of all the unanswered questions echoing in her mind, she stares out of the window, like she did years ago in school. She watches the clouds like wadded tissues, their patterns indiscernible as Sanskrit.

"Miss, you asked for these new arrivals?"

The librarian sets three bound journals on her table. He's a young, agile thing, who waxes his hair into a faux Mohawk and wears skinny jeans that show off the curve of his buttocks. As he puts down the volumes, she can see his biceps pulled taut, an elegant strip of lean muscle.

"Thank you," she says.

"You're welcome, Miss."

He winks at her and stands so close that their shadows blend. We-ll, she thinks. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and avoids his stare. She's not sure if she wants to play along or just flattered at the attention.

Then, she reminds herself he's just a kid born after Third Impact. And she's at least three decades older.

"Thank you," she says again.

She stands and leaves the library. At the threshold, just before the doors, she looks out at the square. If she watches long enough, she can still see three different scenes mashed together, like shadowy images from an old photograph. She wants to filter them out, but when she tries, a headache blooms at the back of her head.

On Friday afternoons, she tries to return early to catch Shinji Ikari when he visits his father.

She meets the caregiver in the common corridor. With just a curt nod and some hand signals, he tells her that everything's in order before leaving. They don't exchange a single word. Rei doesn't need to be genius see the obvious: even the caregiver seems afraid of her.

She smells the dense flourish of his cologne before he sees him. She hears soft, continuous words trail from the living room. Within, Shinji's on his knees, talking silently to the Commander in his spot by the window. Shinji speaks. The Commander stares past him, looking down, his mouth curled into an unresponsive O.

"Talk when you're ready, Father," he says. He relives him of the books, and steers his wheelchair so it faces the window, where needles of sunlight are receding into the evening.

She doesn't intrude or linger. Instead, she stores photocopies of her research in folders by the door and busies herself preparing dinner. Twenty minutes later, he finishes his time with the Commander, his looming steps advancing on her from behind.

"Hello Rei," he says.

The first thing she sees is the knobby bones on his hands, the only part of his arms exposed by his blazer. He stands at the entrance of the kitchenette, framed as if in a portrait. In one movement, he fetches a cup and fills it easily, as if the kitchen were his second home. As he stands to face her, she sees that the planes of his face have sharpened. His hair, a flat comb-over like a noodle on his head, has begun to show faint flecks of grey. Crow's feet edge from the corners of his eyes.

"Good afternoon, Ik – Shinji."

"How's Father doing?"

"Good. He has flashes of lucid memory." She doesn't tell him about the Commander's mentioning Yui Ikari's name.

"You look good today."

"Please. It's just a hoodie."

He returns the cup, dashes an arm across his forehead. She notices drops of water clinging to his moist lips.

"Would you walk with me, Rei?"

She looks past him to the Commander in his wheelchair. His head has listed to the right. There's no hint of movement, save the slow heaving of his shoulders.

"Ok."

They get as far as the river before Shinji begins to vent.

"Because of the stigma surrounding Project E, no government ministry has been willing to excavate NERV HQ and catalogue all the remains. They're actually contemplating filling the whole hole with cement and Bakelite –"

She looks across the river, at the water wrinkled with rising waves. A flock of birds carve a black circle in the sky. A man cuts a deep V in the channel on a banana-yellow kayak.

"Toji confirms it. He was given an offer by the Russians as well to help out in some psychoanalytic research and human-machine interface. They're willing to relocate their testing facility here because of his family. They pay good money too –"

For a brief moment she sees the buildings by the river fall away like cards and the water bleed away into LCL. Instead of the estuary dotted with ships, she sees the reclining profile of a hideous pale face, its massive eyes shiny and black as an oil slick. The vision lasts less than a second, and when she blinks she sees the waves in the wake of the solitary kayak hit the embankments.

"The Prime Minister will make the announcement that the Defence Science Agency will be taking over the research into Father's old research on organic science. Persuading the public that this isn't going to be Project E all over again is the tough part –"

"Shinji?"

He stops talking. She realises she still can silence him with a word.

"Does coming here inconvenience you?"

"What? No, no - Is that what you thought I meant? I'm just talking about work," he pauses. "And after all, he's my father."

"He doesn't remember you."

"He's old and ill."

"Yes." Again, she thinks about the Commander's mutterings about Yui Ikari, but she holds her tongue.

"At least he's comfortable," he says. He leans over the railing. The wind wrecks havoc on his hair. "At least you're making him comfortable."

"It's your money supporting everything."

"But it's your life, Rei."

She's mapped out that life with mental images: dragging the Commander to his bath, changing bedpans, washing soiled bedsheets, wiping spilled food from the floor.

Now, she looks at the opposite bank instead. Moss floods the cracks in the stonework, calcium greens the railings. A jogger lopes across the street in fitful, limping strides. A couple walk hand-in-hand, their linked hands a solid black line against the washed-out grey scenery.

"Yes. It is."

"I've said before: if you need anything, please let me know."

"It's nice having you around," she says. She tries to be honest with him, but the words come out as a statement of fact rather than a compliment on his company. "Really."

"Well, I - I like visiting. I like the company too."

He closes the distance between them, curls his hand on the hollow on the side of her hip.

She picks out the couple on the far bank, imagining how she and Shinji would look like to them. A middle-aged man and his younger companion? A mismatched pair loitering at the waterfront? Just two people peering out over the city?

No. She thinks of the two of them - former children of Project E, supposed successors of Instrumentality, a pair of pilots who saved the world - as water flowing upriver.

She takes his hand and leaves it on her shoulder instead.

He withdraws his arm, as if he's been scalded by hot water. He clears his throat, turns away from the river to gaze at the buildings instead. The slapping of breakers replaces the soft back-and-forth of their conversation. The couple on the far bank has left.

Before he can apologise, she changes the subject:

"How is Asuka?"

After Shinji leaves, she returns home to find the Commander asleep in the wheelchair. His head slouches to the left, stable against the back of the wheelchair. She gently wakes him, gives him his usual bath and dinner. He dozes off even before dinner is over. Shinji's visit has worn him out.

When the Commander's in bed and the house is quiet, Rei finds herself staring at the photographs again. In the image with the other pilots, she's always seen each person distinct from the other, clear boundaries in personality defined. There's Asuka's photogenic smile, Toji's bravado-laced grin, Shinji's gaze bordering somewhere between relief and uncertainty, and her own neutral, if somewhat blank stare.

She notices other things too. Asuka and Toji standing beside each other but clearly apart. How Asuka leans in just so slightly towards Shinji. How these three pilots appear to dominate the image, with her inclusion at the far left almost like a graphic afterthought. Then there's the arc of Shinji's right arm on her own shoulders, his fingers hovering like a leaf near her cheek.

The picture of the four pilots is the only photograph in the Commander's collection – and the whole house – that has her in it. Delicately, she wipes it clean from her fingerprints, places it in front of the others.

She's drawn to that dark shade where both Shinji and her become indistinguishable in the photograph. She isn't sure if it's a fixed image set in the past, or a possible window into a future she can't yet see.

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End Part One

Edited - 17.10.2013

Credits: Image for this story from smiledotjpg at Livejournal. Lyrics at the start from Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City", off his album Nebraska (1982).

End Notes: This idea has been in my head for a long time. Most post-3I fics talk about the immediate aftermath or the well-adjusted lives of the semi-adult pilots. I wanted to write something long and far in the future. I wanted the characters to deal with ageing, finding personal closure and death - all anticlimactically (after surviving Instrumentality, waiting to die alone at home seems anticlimactic). In particular, I wanted to explore Rei's nature, with her coming to grips with her former life now that people and herself are getting old.

Rei - like Gendo - isn't someone who I feel will grow old gracefully. Was I successful? Up to you to decide.

Questions - (a) Is Gendo's condition clear enough? (He's supposed to be immobile, old and struck down with dementia). And (b) How do you find Rei's 'voice'? These will help me tweak the fic for Part Two.

This fic will be a two-chapter short story. Part two will conclude everything. Unless I get a spark of inspiration to extend the fic, that's how it'll look. Part Two will be up mid to end November (hopefully).

Thanks for reading! As always, do check out my other Eva fics.