Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: Prologue

By MidnightCereal

Second Lieutenant Maya Ibuki was home. This, a simple innocent germ of knowledge, grew into a feat of great accomplishment when magnified under the context of her current life station; this was to say she had a more important place to be than her parent's house in Amagi, Fukuoka Prefecture. Maya had a more important reason to be at that more important place.

"How was the flight?"

"Fine, mom." By fine, Maya meant fast. "So he's still up there, huh?"

Mom's face squirmed, and she shook her head as if slowed by the inertia of heavy memories. She was, probably. "I just don't know what else. I wouldn't have called if I could get to him. He won't…your father stopped trying a while ago. But Kenta listens to you."

"Well, it looks like it's my job to get him out, then, doesn't it?"

As they stood in the foyer, mom fidgeted, bunching and kneading the towel in her hands. "I wasn't trying to make this your responsibility, honey. God, I know you're so busy, and I bothered you with this. I'm sorry-"

"It's not a big deal. And it's not your fault. You're not the one who shut yourself in your room for weeks on end. I just used some of my emergency leave, that's all."

Ritsuko had stared bug-eyed at Maya for what felt like half an eternity, then yelled at her for what seemed like the other half of that eternity. Then Ritsuko had sat and sagged and thought, cupping her face and running her palms over her blonde hair with shallow brown roots.

Ritsuko had sighed, and granted her emergency leave.

Fifteen hours. That's all.

"I just wish dad was here. Who knows when I'll get the next chance to come back?"

Just for a second the older woman didn't sport that terrible frown. "He'll be here before dinner, just a short meeting with a client. Maybe we can all eat together, if…" Misses Noriko Ibuki trailed off as the cloud moved over her crow's feet once more.

"My flight won't be until ten-thirty tonight. That's plenty of time." The young Nerv officer leaned forward and kissed the top of her mother's graying head before padding up to the second floor.

"Maya, you like katsudon, don't you?"

"Katsudon's my favorite. But anything's good." This was as close to gospel truth that the twenty-four year-old technician ever wanted to get. Anything other than carry-out rice noodles out of styrofoam trays or her own culinary disasters, attempts to replicate her mother's recipes that always ended up looking like the vomit of the genuine article. This was reason enough to be happy she was home.

I am happy, she realized as she reached the top stair landing. It wasn't just the prospect of an actual, honest-to-God home-cooked meal. Finally, she was home and there was something here that could be easily fixed. Here the stakes weren't the continued existence of humanity, or at the very least the lives of fourteen year-old soldiers who were far too old to ever be actual children.

She navigated the dim hallway which smelled like pine, like when she was five years old and seventeen years old. It smelled like Playstation and pillow fights, week-long groundings and chicken pox. Like breaking news from NHK, mommy collapsing from despair. Like Spring Festival. Like Prom.

Not Senior Prom.

She stopped at his door, right across from her own childhood sanctuary. Sanctuaries were meant to be breached.

"Kenta?" she softly ventured while tapping on his door. "It's Oneesan. Let me get a look at you, I haven't seen you in, well, who's counting-"

"Two years, one month, sixteen days…" His voice was low and muffled. Deep like dad's now. Deeper. "…twenty-one hours."

"Look…I don't know how much longer this crazy mess'll go on at Nerv. It might be another two years before I get back to you. Let's make the most of this, okay, Ta-chan?" Maya twisted the western-style knob, gently shoved, and was gently rebuffed. Well, of course he locked it. If he hadn't she wouldn't have had to fly back home in the first place, would she have?

The young Lieutenant had internalized many wonderful, practical things under Sempai, the sub, and supreme commanders. Like devising contingency plans. Like not taking no for an answer.

The lock yielded as the key scraped inside of it, and when the oldest surviving Ibuki sibling pushed this time, she was rewarded with reflective weightless motes of dust swimming in filtered sunlight, and warm funk. And stale funk. There were several other species of funk well represented in Kenta Ibuki's personal disaster area, but Maya could not place them. Also, she did not want to.

Kenta himself sat on his futon, sour and scruffy with clammy-looking skin. Short black bristles circled his frowning mouth and chin in a fledgling goatee. His brown eyes were heavy with ineffectual wrath, and were very nearly hidden by a wild black mane and the bowed angle of his head.

He looks like a rock star, his sister thought, a skinny hobo rock star.

"Who the hell gave you a key?"

Familiar adolescent choler immediately rose within her like nitrogen bubbles, but it was way too early to get the bends. "I helped install that lock with Uncle Miyabi, remember? You knew he had arthritis."

"No I didn't."

"Fine." Before picking her way through the ubiquitous floor clutter to stand at the center of the room, Maya pushed the door closed. "I want you to tell me why you smell like my clothes hamper."

"Because you insist on wearing briefs; told you boxers would solve that problem-"

"I'm not taking the bait," she quietly informed him, clearing some musty jeans and a grimy PSP from his computer chair, indignation from her mind. She sat and tried to look into him. "You get snarky, you get a bit cynical. But you are no hikikomori."

He shrugged and scratched his…himself. "Maybe I am and you just don't know it yet. How would you know, anyway? It's not like you're ever here."

"Except right now, right? Aren't I?"

Kenta bit his tongue and looked to a poster on a far, dirty wall, where a perky anime idol was bent ov- oh God, what was she doing? Is that even possible in real life?

"What hurt you?"

"I don't feel good. That's all."

"Because…why?"

He wiped at his unwashed face. "I'm not hurt."

Big sister nodded and licked her lips. "You, know what you're not getting? Our kids, our pilots, I work with them everyday, talk to them. I'm not really friends with any of them, and I'm no therapist, but for my job I have to know them better than they know themselves, maybe. Not maybe. And they can laugh and joke, they smile. Well…two of them. They've got brave faces they've been practicing since they were old enough to walk, and they still can't fool me. So stop trying to fool me, Ta-chan."

"Then I won't try. I just won't tell you." He snorted. "Fuckin' orator…"

"Now…" Maya managed through her gritted teeth, "…you are being unreasonable."

He leaned back on his sloppy bed and laughed like steel wool on a blackboard. "Well, you know what? I'm sorry about that, really. Sorry I'm not cooperating with your tight-ass schedule."

"Kenta-"

"Sorry it's inconveniencing you to sit here, and you can't fit 'troubleshooting younger brother's nose-dive-from-ten-thousand-meters flaming wreckage of a social life' in before going back home. To your real home. And I don't want to waste anymore of your time."

"What?" Maya upturned her sweaty palms and glanced around the room, but she failed at finding the inexhaustible source of her brother's misplaced anger. "You're not a waste of time," she tried assuring him, shaking her head.

"Go. No one's stopping you. And you don't want to keep Ritsuko waiting, right?"

Now, she may have played the meek, subservient underling to strong-willed and snappish black heart superiors, but she had never, not even once, taken any crap from her baby brother. "You'll do real well by keeping Sempai's name out of your smart mouth."

"What the hell, Maya? What do you want me to say? We phone like once every other month and we got email and every other damned word is 'Ritsuko'. Who is she, your pimp?"

In her mind suddenly, was the long, tapering, smiling maw of a saltwater crocodile. Okay, then. If that's the way you want it, time to put in the starting lineup.

Maya started sweetly, "You know what I want you to say. But you want to know a secret? I already know your answer."

Kenta had the good sense to look up with a start. He gave a hiccupping sound, freezing with cold dread.

"Mom already told me about Haruka, over the phone. And she knows because Haruka's mother told her that you and her broke up-"

"WE DIDN'T BREAK UP!" he snapped. She jumped. "SHE GOT TIRED OF ME, AND THE BITCH DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH DECENCY TO EVEN TELL ME TO MY FACE!"

"Thank you," Maya managed, "that's a start."

"What the fuck do you mean 'that's a start'? You already knew! What was the point of that?"

"To get you to open your mouth."

"Well I did. Happy? I opened my mouth and words came out. Enough dirty, filthy words to get you out of my room. Because I need to be alone." Kenta just…deflated. The morose teen suffered a grimace wile lowering his gangly frame onto his cluttered mattress.

"What you need is some perspective."

"I see. Or I don't, because I need 'perspective'. Duly noted, Lieutenant Sis." He rolled like pulled taffy so his back was to her. "See you in two years."

Maya Ibuki had had enough. "Kenta Ibuki…GROW UP. I am sitting here talking to you while God-knows-what is going on at Nerv! I came all the way back here just for you, and for all I know all my friends and my coworkers are all being blown away, they all could be dying right now to save you. That's how much I care. You're doing everything in your power to piss away all that sympathy and it's not making any sense."

"I didn't ask anyone for sympathy-"

"Breaking news, Kenta! Locking yourself in your room, starving yourself and refusing to take a bath for three weeks, and snapping at your mother and sister is generally considered a big fat cry for help!"

Appropriately enough, he began to cry.

Maya reached out but stopped halfway to his jerking shoulders, unhappily settling back in her chair to watch him quietly sob. "It's okay to cry."

Kenta managed to sound stupefied, heartbroken, and pathetic. "Oh, really? That's what I'm doing? And this whole time I've been in here I thought I was just laughing my ass off!"

"Let me finish. I said it's okay to cry, but don't ever try to convince me all…this is fine. You are not dying. I didn't die, nothing happened to mom or dad…" And here Maya winced, "and you weren't like this when Koji died. So this has to stop. Tell me everything you want to. Tell me everything, period. Then I want you to come out, take a shower. I want you to eat dinner with mom and dad and me. And when I get my bag and I'm walking out the front gate to catch my plane, I want to turn back to the door and see you waving from it. I love you. But you are going to have to give me something."

The boy gave her something over his still back. The finger.

That's what he was; still just a boy. That's where she had gone wrong. Maya had tried reasoning with him as though he was even remotely capable of substantial, logical, linear thought. So she finally gave in and laughed at him.

"So how much longer do you think you can stay up here and pretend like the world has ended? Another week? A month more? There's only one person in this room that has any idea what the end of the world looks like, and it's sure as hell not you."

"It's not my fault you're the older one-"

"Shut up. Take my advice now, because I might not be around in two years. I might not be around in two months. You could die two minutes from now. All of us. That's our world, right now. Get out of here. If Haruka growing apart from you and not getting to see me are the worst problems you have in the next year, treat it as a miracle. That's what I do. This…this bullshit is not a problem. You're only seventeen."

He did not speak, breathe, or move at first. Then he slowly did all three, turning over to fix her with a cryogenic glare. "What did you just say?"

The woman couldn't help but balk at the hint of cold sharp steel in his permafrost tone. "Kenta…all I was saying was-"

"That I'm seventeen? Only seventeen? Okay. I'm only seventeen." Maya Ibuki took in a strained breath, not sure she liked where he was going with this until he spoke again, and allowed her to justify the fear the direction of the argument began to instill in her. "You had Prom when you were seventeen, didn't you?"

Suddenly, she could not breathe at all. "You…you said you'd never talk about this again," she wheezed.

He sat up again. "No…I said I'd never tell mom and dad. And I didn't. But what's it matter? It was a long time ago, so it shouldn't be a problem bringing it up now."

Her throat tried closing as if she was choking on thick harsh dust, and she shook her head disbelievingly. She was being injured. By Kenta. "Why…why are you so mad at me, Ta-chan? I came here to help. It's me, you can trust me. I wouldn't hurt you. Why are you trying to hurtme?"

He wagged a finger as his eyes, glowing with tainted glee, locked on their misting counterparts. "You misunderstand. It's not like I'd bring up something important. Yeah, you loved your date even though you knew he was slime. And he ditched you midway through the second dance to bang the class slut-"

"I-I have a job to do. Why can't you just accept that? I wasn't ignoring you. Please-"

Kenta had leaned forward, and he was nearly standing now as he homed in on the wavering, wilting kill. "Sure you had to walk back home the three kilometers, and you were so depressed that I caught you trying to O.D. on aspirin a week later. But, hey, what's the big deal? It isn't like it was anything more than a speed bump on your way to bigger and better things, and even though you didn't eat for three damn days it's all water under the bridge, because YOU WERE ONLY SEVENTEEN!"

Maya would later recall blinking, just once, and when her eyes opened again she was towering over his prone, bedridden form, her palm hot and stinging, her quivering frame fueled by high-octane rage and oxygenated by ragged breaths.

Something moved over his face as the shock and pain dissolved. Maya knew what it was, and knew it was one breached, unspoken promise, one betrayal too late. Too late to acknowledge it. Too late to care that he was rising now and tugging on her wrist as she turned, stubbing her toe on a camouflaged dumbbell in her mission to rip his door off and escape his vile snake pit.

"I just got tired of people leaving, Maya. Wait."

Too late.

"I was sick of it! I was just mad and I don't even really know why. I'm sorry. I'm just so sorry. I'll go wash up. Let's eat, okay? Make the most of this, right? Wait..."

She nearly snarled while ripping her thin forearm from his poison grip. She didn't feel like katsudon, anyway. She had to go home, to her real home, to her real life and her real work. Three more steps, then down the stairs to kiss mom goodbye, and get on the bus to the train for the airport; then a call to Nerv to change her itinerary, and she'd be debugging subroutines five hours from now.

"I'm sorry. You know I am. Don't leave. Oneesan, please…"

She stopped at the door and took a deep, steadying breath…

Too late.

"You can just die in here, Kenta."

And as far as Maya knew, he did.

Doctor Maya Ibuki tried not being offended she was being ignored and succeeded for the most part. The five years since Third Impact were not satisfied with passing merely for the sake of accumulation, and eroded her acute empathy for anything and everything, dulling her sensitivity to the real and perceived slights inflicted by the lilum…people…whatever.

She should have endured enough withering glares from cutthroat contemporaries envious of her brains and her success (and perhaps her looks), and enough condescending, patronizing denouncements of her life's work by shortsighted and sexist superiors, to earn not giving a rat's ass what the man in front of her thought. She wouldn't have cared had he been most people.

Shinji Ikari was not most people. Sure, she had only been grocery shopping when Not Most People entered her line of sight in the condiments aisle, deliberating between brands of paprika. Maya was very certainly not the most important person the young man knew from his Nerv days. However, it became obvious as she spoke his politely vacant smiling and head nodding were afterthoughts, and that…irked her.

"Is there someone behind me? Who're you looking at?"

Something was wrong. Maya wondered just how he was able to look so focused with eyes so dull as he turned his attention from "No one" over her shoulder and back to her. "So you're okay with Kensuke coming to you for advice? I'm sorry for pointing him in your direction. I know he can be…"

Persistent. Enthusiastic. Thorough. Ambitious. Tenacious. Anno-

"Persistent," Maya decided, moving to the side so that a woman could pass by with her small, petulant daughter, who wasn't going to get Loco Puffs © cereal when she had Loco Puffs © at home, so honey, I'm not buying Loco Puffs © until you finish what you already have and don't you make that face at me, young lady!

Kensuke was an entry-level intelligence officer for Nerv Security, which were essentially the toothless remnants of Section-2. Hearing the young Aida speak and watching him move gave the impression double agents still roamed Nerv's labyrinthine halls, that at any given moment nigh-omnipotent extraterrestrial colossi would besiege headquarters with a vast and varied array of particle beam and kinetic energy weaponry.

Watching Kensuke, Maya could pretend half the human population was not already billions of points of crimson light affecting a lunar orbit.

The truth was nobody was needed to watch over the last surviving Evangelion pilot, and everyone that was still alive and had reason to care thought this was a very good thing.

"You wouldn't be apologizing if you knew how hard it is to find enthusiastic people to work there, now. Too bad he isn't into computers, or he could've worked right under me."

His eyebrows knitted oddly enough. "Yeah, too bad."

She had to ask. She'd ask, and he'd lie, and she'd have to accept it. She did not have to like it, though.

"So things…how are things? You're doing okay, Shinji?"

"I'm just…" He froze, and just as suddenly thawed. "I'm good. Classes aren't that tough this semes-"

She didn't like it. Maya justified her hypocrisy by reasoning she had no obligation to pay attention to what he said was going on with his life, when it was no different from what she already knew. It was how he told her about his continued education in architecture at Tokyo-3 University, his part-time job as a freelance cello instructor, his unwavering commitment to just existing, that pulled fire alarms in her head as she mutely nodded.

The young man had a metaphysical biologist for a mother and a geneticist for a father, and now it seemed as if he had turned apathy into a science as well.

"-ust existing, Iguess. But don't think I'm complaining or anything. I don't mind being bored."

You're not just bored. You're hiding something.

He chuckled. She wished he hadn't. She wished he would stop lying to her. She wished that the pervasive wrongness beneath the placid surface of his maturing face was only the byproduct of the all-nighter she had pulled finalizing a proposal the night before.

Then he looked at nothing beyond her shoulder.

The truth was nobody was needed to watch over the last surviving Evangelion pilot, and everyone that was still alive and had reason to care thought this was a very good thing.

Except Maya. And perhaps also the anno…persistent entry-level intelligence officer that came between her and a generous bowlful of raspberry sorbet as she sank into her couch later that night.

"The NO-B Security procedural?" she asked, blinking at Kensuke's request and the soft burst of static from the receiver at her ear. The burst came again and she realized he was exerting himself somehow. Maya tried remembering her first days and weeks as a layman officer under Ritsuko Akagi, and for the life of her could not recall being so damned energetic. "You've been a NO-A level nine for maybe two months…and you're already thinking about a promotion?"

He huffed again. "They just have me on detail for the infirmary wing…and that's if I'm good. And you know what's exciting about monitoring closed circuit cameras in the cafeteria?"

"No. What?"

"Miss Ibuki…" he whined. She could almost see him glaring over the top of his glinting silver frames. Oh, how that was ever creepy. "Can't you just make a copy of the report for me? Please? I have the IBD number!"

How did he get that?

"Does it really matter how I got it?" Kensuke answered almost offhandedly.

Yes it did, actually. In all likelihood, he copped the document I.D. from an unwitting desk clerk in the research center on the eighth level (Mirielle was a sweet woman, really, just not the sharpest prog knife in the arsenal, was all). This was very likely, and as perfectly innocent as that woman who presented herself as secretary to a supposedly secret U.N. envoy that had visited Central Dogma three months ago…and then presented the security detail that intercepted her halfway to the diplomats with a perfectly innocent briefcase bomb.

Maya cut the memory before it could cut her, but not before she was reminded of her uncanny, peerless ability to cripple any and all vestiges of her good mood. She considered his request while gazing pensively at the bowl of chilled sorbet sucking the warmth from her lap. The heat from her thighs was already liquefying it, the red syrup pooling around an island of cream, a monochrome moat. She began nursing it before it entirely melted down.

Hmm…meltdown…

"Kensuke, I'll tell you what; I drop the whole potentially fatal breach of security issue if you tell me what's going on with Shinji."

Distorted white silence came between them for a moment. "Why? What's going on with Shinji?"

Maya sighed and rolled her eyes up to tall shadows looming in a corner of her apartment living room. "Look, I know you're the best friend he has left. Only friend, maybe. What do you know about him?"

"Just whatever he tells me."

"Well, okay…what does he tell you?"

"Nothing." He must have sensed her growing agitation with his sudden evasiveness. "Would you believe me if I said I wasn't the one he really confided in? Still isn't? That was really Touji's thing, after what happened to his sister."

"Touji isn't here…and I cannot believe I just said that."

"But you're right, though," he tiredly conceded. "It's okay. It's that…Shinji just never tells me anything. That's how it's almost always been, so I never really bother trying to understand him anymore. You know how he is."

"Actually…no I don't. And that's pretty much the point. But you'd tell me if he was in some type of trouble?"

"You wouldn't even have to make it an order."

Without warning, something fearful seized her gut. "Talk to him, Kensuke."

End of Prologue

A/N: I'm back…well, sorta. Normal to Reality will have seven more installments. I am currently finishing chapter three, and will try to post one finished chapter per week, as I have always done. I know how just about everything is going to go, but the second half of the story might be a little slow in coming. You know how it is. Yes you do, don't lie.

Random A/N: I ended up getting two bags of Jolly Ranchers for Trick or Treaters. None came, so I had the bags to myself, and took it upon myself to eat all the green and red ones so as to appease the teeth-rotting gods. Now, they represent sour apple, cherry and watermelon, I believe. And purple Jolly Ranchers are grape-flavored…supposedly. Then there are the blue ones. What? What fruit are they supposed to represent, blue balls? Help me out here, people.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.