Covenant Red

Chapter 1: Baptism

Disclaimer: I do not own Evangelion.

/\/\/\/\

His alarm buzzed. He groaned into his pillow, flailing one hand from under covers to hit the snooze button. He allowed his body to relax into a blissful warm negligence and his eyes fluttered shut.

"Kensuke," his father spoke from beyond the bedroom door. "Don't be late for school."

"I know," Kensuke said back, face buried in his pillow.

He waited for his father's footsteps to pad away before kicking his sheets off. He spilled out of bed onto the floor. He grabbed his glasses from the bureau on the way up and stumbled to the door. He willed the other side to be different this time. He opened the door and stepped out into his home.

Home was a cramped apartment his father used for sleep between work shifts. Décor was understated by use, not design. The living room was owned by unpacked boxes. The only TV was in Kensuke's room. Sanitation was minimal; they did not own a vacuum.

The kitchen was camouflaged under a layer of empty frozen meal packs and old newspapers. Kensuke found his father at the table, hunched over one of each as he idly finished a piece of toast. His eyes scanned the print behind thick glasses. He held the paper by the edges with bony fingertips.

Kensuke passed by him to their tiny freezer and found the last waffle. He cleared a few empty boxes away before the microwave and tossed it in.

He sat by his father at the narrow table and stole the front section of the paper, dominated by local election results. Extended reporting on the surrounding prefectures ensured a loyal print subscription beyond the diehard old guard like his father who refused to make the jump to digital.

Reconstruction continued after another isolated attack outside the capital, he read, skimming down to national headlines. Over two dozen injured, but no fatalities thanks to evacuation shelters. Exact details on the incident were murky, buried beneath a thick veneer of nationalistic pride. The government and media seemed determined to keep the rhetorical jingoism at a fever pitch, if nothing else than to perpetuate themselves. Exclusive photos sold new editions, enhanced defenses eased another tax hike.

The microwave beeped and Kensuke retrieved his waffle. His father rose from the table. The toast was gone, his section of the newspaper was folded shut. Kensuke lingered over his meal as he waited out the last his father's morning pre-work ritual. He brushed his teeth, peed, checked his email, then padded to the front door for his shoes.

"Don't be late for school," his father told Kensuke.

"I know," Kensuke said. Kensuke decided to be late for school.

His father left. Kensuke waited for the door to click shut before fishing the comics out of the newspaper.

/\/\/\/\

He locked the front door behind him on the way out. He'd be the first to open it again. His father worked through lunch every day but still stayed late, catching dinner from a street vendor and eating it on the train. Kensuke was usually online under a pair of headphones when his father did return. The only hello was the thin shadow passing over the strip of light beneath his bedroom door.

Kensuke took the stairs to ground level, remembering his vow to be late to school. On the way down he crossed paths with two other residents of the apartment building. The first was a neighbor from down the hall, a short mother of two children in diapers. She offered an exhausted smile as a general greeting. Kensuke responded with his best nod of encouragement. The second resident was the landlord's unemployed son, tasked with maintenance and general upkeep in return for shelter. He passed in a daze, without a word. Kensuke smiled and waved anyway.

School was close enough to avoid public transportation. The streets were cramped and noisy, jammed with traffic and humanity in the long shadows of narrow buildings. Kensuke reached school grounds in less than fifteen minutes, pushed by the tide of the crowd. He checked his watch. He loitered outside the main building for another five, watching the clouds pass overhead.

The bell for first period rang. He snuck inside during the commotion, reminding himself to bug the class rep later to add him to the attendance roll. He found his desk and slid into the expected role of willing disciple to public education. He took notes when other students did. He made sure to look interested, sponging in the information the teacher dripped out.

During a fourth period spill about global economics his inbox silently alerted him to a new prioritized message. It was a summons to meet at lunch in-room, as he expected. Kensuke dutifully responded with an affirmative.

The Tech club, as it was generously called, met Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, and informally nearly every day during school. A fair portion of class was also spent multitasking between what teachers shot at him and keeping up with what the club directed his way. The school's network linking terminals was disappointingly standard-issue and offered no real challenge. Working around and through its gaps to set up private rooms or peek into lazily guarded files was a dull thrill of irresponsible rebellion, but ultimately fruitless.

Computers were always a passing fancy, and he made himself content with his silver medal. Everybody seemed to talk about computers and jobs in the same breath. There was a dull comfort gleaned from assuming his future was secure. He heard a few students were already taking college prep courses and cramming for entrance exams. Active pursuit of a professional desire seemed alien.

The lunch bell sounded. The teacher departed for parts unknown and the students responded with practiced relaxation. Some left the room to eat but most stayed, quietly rearranging desks and chairs into a socially aware obstacle course. The jocks sat near the windows, the popular kids crowded around the door to keep within earshot of any new teenage scandals, the academics studied over their meals.

Kensuke passed by them all without incident to the back corner of the classroom. In the shadow of the supply closet he met four boys, already deep in conversation.

"Yo," he said to the group, who greeted him with the appropriate amount of teenage enthusiasm.

He was the fifth and newest addition to the club, formally welcomed after a week of preparatory tests imposed by the existing members used to gauge his knowledge and dedication but also bring him up to speed. In a sense, it was reassuring that the group was so particular. It certainly dissuaded the uninitiated. It was a safe bubble of existence he could use to coast by in.

"Yo," the club leader greeted back. "We were going over the specs of the PockeTech 4."

"Cool." Kensuke hesitated, making sure it was okay to offer further opinion. "The hardware doesn't seem worth the cost."

"Exactly," another member said, proudly. "Looks like you read the analysis I sent out last night."

If I was a moron, he thought. Anybody could tell they're jacking up the price.

"Of course," he said. "It was really well thought out. Thanks for that."

Kensuke offered a politely receptive smile for their benefit and they indulged in it. He was still the new guy, and he learned even simple school clubs observed rigid hierarchies of seniority and experience.

But it was important to have friends. It was important to blend in. The less he stuck out, the better. The faculty looked over his average grades with passive attentiveness. Sports clubs accepted then ignored his lack of physical inspiration. Student council saw another nameless uniform below their ranks.

No cause for concern. Just another round peg in a round hole. No need to take a closer look.

And he was okay with that. Things could always be worse, Kensuke remembered his father used to say. But things could always be better.

"Hey," he said during a lull in the conversation, "did you hear about the UN fleet sailing here today?"

Four pairs of eyes turned on him.

"Huh?" one of the boys asked. "The UN?"

"Yeah." Kensuke reflexed a grin. "It might be fun to go to the port after school." He kept his voice breezy, enticing without being invested. "The paper said they were just passing by but we might be able to see some fighters on the decks or…"

A delayed gauge of his audience finally caught up with him. At least they were trying to be polite.

"I don't know," the club leader said. He was a sickly boy with an unfortunate haircut. "I guess that stuff is technically in our interest but without any kind of planned demonstration or anything…"

Another boy, looking skeptical at best, nodded. "If something special was going to happen, they'd announce it beforehand. Like, to show off some new piece of equipment. Otherwise, what's the point? It's just some boats."

Consensus was reached. Kensuke held up a hand and offered a self-deprecating grin.

"Sorry. I haven't read all the club bylaws yet."

The delivery earned a round of chuckles and the boys returned to their pre-fleet discussion. Kensuke's eyes strayed towards the classroom windows.

A pair of birds swam through the air together outside and for a split second was perfectly framed by the middle windowpane. He snapped a picture in his mind, even as his hands itched upwards to grasp a phantom camera. After nearly a half year, the impulse still bobbed to the surface when he wasn't careful.

/\/\/\/\

School ended with dull inevitability. Kensuke gathered his belongings and walked out with the Tech club members who were chattering about a rumored new third party game console. They parted ways at the front gate and Kensuke watched the other boys disappear in a sea of bland uniforms. They disappeared, and he lost all thought of them.

Kensuke ambled down the five blocks from school to home. The thought of visiting the port alone to watch the fleet struck him sour. The thrill was gone, battered back into place underneath his obligations, buried with the rest of his real desires.

He rounded the final corner and spied his home, a lean apartment building resting between a business complex and a small park. He waited at the crosswalk, strumming his fingers against the strap of his backpack. He saw his neighbor from down the hall on her balcony, shaking out a bed sheet. The neighbor folded it with expert precision and speed. She smoothed out the wrinkles and spotted Kensuke. She waved and smiled. He waved back.

Keeping good terms with the neighbors was part of blending in. If he shut himself in his room, people would talk. If he aggressively pursued interaction, people would talk. Skating the line between the two extremes was easier than he imagined and he developed a kind of manipulative passivity around other people. His father called it "office manners." Force positive agreement, ease around disagreement, all within the veil of extreme civility. Never take offense and always look interested.

Kensuke called it "being a soulless dick." But he was resigned to it until he was out of school and on his own. The present was absorbed by a debt of obedience to his father, who casually accepted it. His father wasn't particularly adept at child rearing, or anything that didn't involve financial spreadsheets. His mother was a brief, warm memory obscured by time and his teenage stubbornness. He didn't want to rely on a parent, let alone a dead one.

At sixteen a deceased mother was less of a tragically cool back-story and more of a practical inconvenience. No one cooked or cleaned at home, laundry was hit-or-miss, there was no mediator to bridge the awkward, unspoken divide with his father. Maybe his mother could have eased the gnawing stress of the situation. Or maybe Kensuke would be dealing with two disappointed parents.

He turned away from his apartment building. His eyes landed on the market squatting across the busy street from his home. Maybe he'd visit it today, like he did nearly every day. He checked his wallet. He headed to it.

The chain market was bright and colorful, oversized tags displaying sales on racks of vividly artificial processed convenience. Kensuke perused the manga selection, taking his time to blend in and dull any worries. He neared the register with practiced indifference.

The cute girl behind the counter glanced up from her magazine at his approach and her face rearranged from agonized boredom to cheerful approachability.

"Can I help you?"

Kensuke casually tossed the book down. "And the usual," he said.

"Hmm?" the cute girl said, blinking at him. "What kind?"

"… Liquid Crystal Lite."

"Sure thing!"

The cute girl turned and opened the shelved cooler behind the counter to retrieve the expensive foreign soda. From the front, the cute girl was just a pretty face floating above the unfortunately frumpy convenience chain uniform apron. Nothing but jagged edges and bad hemlines. But this was a carefully crafted façade to fool the dull-witted supervisor and public at large. Her rebellion against corporate fashion edicts started small, from the strand of bright green dyed hair casually falling out of the uniform hat, and escalated to the cutoff jean shorts she hid under the apron.

The shorts were immaculately hand-torn, with a carefully frayed puff at the edges. None of that straggly, disorganized, single thread jutting down like a drowned rat's tail crap. The cut was tasteful enough to avoid showing side pocket, too. It only added to the tantalizing appeal. Sometimes encouraging the eye's imagination with a less-is-more approach works wonders.

The jean shade complimented her milky skin tone, the rough fabric providing a thrilling juxtaposition to her smooth, blemish-free legs. There were no razor nicks or moles, no discolorations or unwelcome bumps. Just the soft warm silk of her legs as they flowed from the jeans and poured into her delicate ankles displayed above a pair of beat up sneakers.

She bent at the waist, forming a perfect, if elongated heart from the curves of her hips sloping down to the hollows of her knees. Her left calf splayed slightly with careless allure. She twisted her foot at the toe as she dug through the cooler with a series of gentle clinks.

The cute girl plucked the orange colored soda with two fingers by the neck and turned back around to place it on the counter. The glass bottle sweated.

"Thanks," Kensuke said.

He had the performance timed perfectly and positioned himself to avoid a tiptoe stare, sure to attract the cute girl's peripheral vision. He was positive she employed fulltime radar for perverts, even beneath her minimum wage ensuring mask of friendly helpfulness. A girl this cute had to be careful.

"Thank you for your patronage!" the cute girl said with a modest bow after he paid. The green-dyed strand of hair swayed before her.

Kensuke left the market. He headed back to the crosswalk and waited at the light, idly nursing his soda as he looked for a discreet trash bin to drop it in. It was a thick, fizzy chemical concoction that stuck to his insides the whole way down. He grimaced. It was like swallowing a damp wool sleeve.

He was used to the bittersweet denouement. A mild karmic punishment for the brief bout of voyeurism. That, and he was paranoid someone might have seen him buy it just to throw it away and unravel his love of cut-off jeans. Not that he was ashamed, just cautious to the sensibilities of public morality and all the hypocritical ridicule and possible legal ramifications thereof.

He sighed with the bottle against his lips. It wasn't even a fifth empty yet.

Something like thunder cracked the sky. Everyone around him on the sidewalk stopped, looking for the source. Kensuke saw someone across the street pointing to a string of black smoke snaking into the air from the direction of the port.

Sirens sounded behind him and a line of police cars blurred past, followed by two fire engines. He watched them tear away as the string of smoke grew to a cloud.

An accident at the port? Kensuke thought. Now he wished he went, club or not. He set the soda by a bench and headed after the sirens. He wouldn't settle for photos in tomorrow's paper.

A VTOL swept low overhead, rattling building windows. That made him pause. If the SDF was involved maybe discretion was the better part of valor. It wouldn't be too long before the carrion flock of news vultures descended and filled him in via TV, anyways.

He shrugged in defeat. Home it was. Not that he was scared, but it might be best not to get in anyone's way. He headed back to the crosswalk.

He peered up at his apartment building. He tilted his head. The tall grey structure was leaning towards the street. Steel groaned. Glass cracked. Concrete crumbled. Individual floors began collapsing and folding together like an accordion.

And then the building gave completely and the top shuddered to the ground into the market with a thunderous cloud of agonized sound. Kensuke saw potted plants flying from balconies on the way down, lost with TV dishes and hanging clothes and his flailing neighbor before it was all swallowed by a dense shadowy explosion of dust that rolled along the street like a tidal wave.

Kensuke curled his arms over his head. All he heard was a dull bell tone. People and objects collided with him and he stumbled into a streetlamp, crouching against it for support. He remembered he needed air, and coughed every breath. The debris cloud lifted a few yards as he hugged the post, obscuring his surroundings and the height of the city in a grey-brown fog.

His hearing returned with a jolt. Sirens lit the air. People screamed. Someone was in his face, yelling. The sound ricocheted around his brain before coalescing into language.

"—of here!" the soldier was barking at him. He was a beefy man in a dark UN uniform, a rifle clutched against his chest. "Get out of here, now!"

A stuttering crackle broke through the noise and dim lights flashed in the thick air around the fallen apartment building.

Gunfire, Kensuke thought, peering at the soldier's weapon. It was louder than he imagined.

The UN soldier gave him a hard shove to get him moving before ducking towards the battle. The gunfire continued, noisy fireflies winking in and out of the dusty haze. Then a strange hissing whoosh swept over it all, followed by human screams for a piercing, stunning moment, and then silence.

Something moved in the haze.

Kensuke was running before he realized it. He blindly fled as fast as his thin legs would carry him. The small town he spent the last three months of his life in became alien. The school, the mall, the office circle, he saw them all for the first time as the only thought he could manage was to escape whatever destroyed his home and neighbor and the soldiers and the cute girl in the market.

He tripped over a baby carriage. He tumbled onto his side and saw the street around him filled with screaming, disorganized terror. He clawed his way to his knees and stopped. Within the horrified mob he picked out a single figure standing in the center of the intersection calmly observing the situation.

It was a girl, maybe his age, pretty, even at this distance, with flowing red hair clad in a long, heavy coat. She leisurely pulled a wheeled suitcase behind her. She looked bored with the whole scene, like all the destruction and death was a cheaply made horror film and she was sick of her stale popcorn and flat soda. Then she walked forward and Kensuke lost sight of her.

He scrambled to his feet and fled with the rest of the crowd. He ran without any sense of direction except keeping the chaos behind him. All he saw when he looked over his shoulder was the cloud of dust, stained over the sky.

A stuttering whir drew Kensuke's eyes. A VTOL drunkenly lurched between buildings, trailing a plume of dark smoke where its right stabilizer should be. It arced over his head and dropped to the street, breaking the cockpit open with a hard crunch. It pitched sideways, crushing its ordinance-packed left wing.

The explosion was a brilliant flowering white heat that consumed the street. Kensuke shielded his head on instinct. The din wavered to a metallic whistle in his ears and he peeked between his forearms. The white heat faded to orange patches of flaming wreckage dotting a jagged crater. The air was sulfur and oil.

Through the flames something tall and dark appeared, a spindly nine feet of skeletal arms and legs hanging off a wiry frame. It sluiced through the smoke and fire, glistening in the manic light. Its feet sank into the asphalt with a hissing steam, melting the surface on contact.

Its head was obscured by a strange white mask, cracked down the middle to expose an inhumanly large red eye. The eye did not move, but stayed unnaturally fixed on some distant point, its body treading through any obstacle in its way.

Kensuke scrambled on hands and knees into an abandoned clothing boutique and curled into a ball under the hem of a mannequin tilted against the broken display window's wall. He stared out at the devastated street in mute terror as the tall thing calmly strode away with a hunched, loping gait. The crowds were gone, dispersed or disappeared or dead. Kensuke stayed beneath the mannequin.

A bent car rolled across the street before him at preposterous speed, end over end until it smashed into the front steps of a bank with a tremendous crunch.

"Bull's-eye!" someone faintly hollered.

A boy entered the street, clad in a fitted suit of dark body armor with black piping. He ducked behind an abandoned sedan and peeked out as the car on the bank steps trembled, then lifted and fell to the side, revealing the tall thing. It struggled to right itself, then proceeded forward again.

The boy sighed. "Just stay down, man."

He pulled his right arm back, then punched the sedan he was hiding behind. The car dented on impact and went spinning across the asphalt into the tall thing. In an almost leisurely motion, it lifted a gaunt arm and sluiced it through the car, an acidic coating oozing from its palm. The vehicle clattered to the street in a melting heap of metal and rubber. The creature continued forward.

A street away, the boy casually backed up, hands on hips. "Making us do it the hard way…" He held a hand to his ear. "First, where are you?"

The redheaded girl appeared at the edge of the street. She moved behind cover, deftly handling her suitcase as she shed her long coat to reveal body armor with red piping. Her movements were fluid and composed. The girl stopped behind a small truck, bent to one knee and opened the suitcase. Inside was all polished, gleaming metal. Kensuke's eyes landed on a slick SMG propped among a collection of smaller arms. The girl hefted the gun out and held it for a moment, then lugged it into firing position and peeked out from the truck's back bumper.

The boy cracked his knuckles. "Here we go."

He ran to another car and punched it towards the tall thing. Before it made contact the girl attacked, peppering the undercarriage with short burst fire until it erupted in flames. The creature lurched through it, waving an arm towards its assailants, sending out a spray of acid across the street. The boy and girl had already moved to new positions, repeating the previous attack.

Each successive blow forced the tall thing back. Its reaction time slowed and its arm swipes turned random. Its spindly body began showing damage, blistering streaks of charred skin bubbling up in disorganized patches. Its left arm absorbed the full force of a car impact and hung limply at its side. The attack did not cease.

The creature stumbled backwards towards Kensuke's hiding spot. It collapsed to one knee and emitted a long, shrill cry. The effort made its burnt, broken body tremble. It wheezed and shuddered. The boy and girl relented, slowly closing the distance.

The tall thing made one last attempt to move forward. The girl leveled her weapon at its head and fired.

The red eye burst open. The back of its skull exploded behind the mask, sending hunks of fleshy matter and bone darting through the air. Blood splashed across the abandoned storefront and saturated Kensuke cowering between the mannequin's legs.

A million red needles dug into him, diving into pores to boil him inside out. He opened his mouth to scream. Darkness enveloped him before he heard any sound.

/\/\/\/\

End of chapter 1

Author notes: I like Kensuke a lot more now than when I first met him, ages ago. Writing stories around him helped. Now I enjoy his mania, his good-natured calculations, his frustrated optimism and grasping deviancies. I hope you will, too.

This is my first multi-chapter fic that I bothered planning out. So the disappointment will come with unprecedented focus and forethought.

Next chapter: Good news, Kensuke. You get to join an elite, high-tech agency staffed with super hot chicks. Bad news, Kensuke. It's still an Eva-verse, which means no one will ever be happy without an apocalypse or two.