Plot Closet

--

"Oh, boy!" Kensuke shouted as he skipped alongside Toji onto the set. "I even heard that there were guns!"

"Yeah, yeah," Toji muttered, sounding bored. "Hey, there's Shinji ... and Beelzebub."

"Hey, Shinji," Kensuke shouted as he raced up to where he and Asuka were sitting, "Is it true? Is it? Did a fight really break out?"

"What does it look like, twerp?" Asuka muttered as she readjusted the ice pack she was holding to one eye.

"Yeah," Shinji said quietly, "It was pretty bad."

"I even heard that some people got killed!" Kensuke burst out.

Asuka examined something on one of her hands. "Yeah ... there were three—extras I think. No big deal though, it wasn't like it was anyone important. Plot-wise, anyway."

Even Kensuke paused for a moment as everyone around them stopped and stared at her. Asuka continued looking at her hand for a handful of heartbeats until the silence caught her attention. She looked up, her face fighting off embarrassment.

"What?" she demanded, looking around. "That's why they're called extras. They're replaceable."

One of the younger girls in a Nerv uniform burst out crying, but some of the other men in uniform just nodded glumly as they pulled her along and the set began moving again.

"I just wish I hadn't missed it!" Kensuke said from behind his camcorder as he began spinning around to zoom in on the most visible signs. "Can you at least show me where the best of the action happened?"

"You mean where they died?" Shinji asked, sounding as though he was trying to decide what degree of horrified to employ.

"Over that way, nerd face," Asuka pointed with a bored voice. "And take your jock strap with you."

"All right!" Kensuke exclaimed, "You can still see the blood! Come on!"

"But isn't that sort of ..." Toji began uncertainly, "Unethical—"

But Kensuke jerked his arm and consequently the rest of him out of contemplations about annoying little things like that. Asuka watched them go with a disgusted expression before losing interest in maintaining the effort.

"I'm sooo bored," she groaned. "At this rate we'll never get to my episodes."
"Then why don't you just go?" Shinji asked, wincing as he dabbed a cotton swab of alcohol against his skinned elbow.

"Why don't you just mind your own business?" Asuka shot back, and then grabbed the swab out of his hands. "And if you're going to do it, do it right! I swear, you have to be such a baby about everything—"

She leaned forward to do it, but her head inadvertently also had to come closer to Shinji's elbow, which happened to be connected in a roundabout way to Shinji's face and—

other things, which in due sum brought her face to a remotely closer proximity to his face—

which meant that they both paused—

which of course, due in no small part to raging teenage hormones, necessitated staring deeply into each others' eyes—

which caused fragile breaths to stutter and young hearts to quicken as—

There was the barest hint of a third person breathing.

Shinji and Asuka both turned to find Rei sitting next to them. Observing. Emotionlessly.

They both stared at her wide eyed for a long moment. Rei eventually moved back a little.

"Just ... pretend I'm not here," she said quietly, giving a small nudging gesture.

"And how in the bloody devil is that possible?" Asuka demanded angrily.

"Anything is possible in fanfiction," Rei pointed out, "Now ... back to the—"

"—Back to the nothing!" Asuka said, "There is absolutely nothing going on between us, so why don't you just drop it already?"

"Yeah," Shinji agreed, "And it's ... sort of creepy just to think about it."

"Oh, so now I'm creepy, huh?" Asuka whirled on him. "Well—that's just—just wonderful coming from you two! Especially with the—the—the thing you two have going on!"

"Huh?" Shinji asked weakly.

"Oh, please!" Asuka snapped. "Don't think just because they're completely unimportant that I haven't seen these first few episodes of you two—you two all over each other! Acting, ha! Mein Esel."

"But—but—" Shinji stammered, "I thought you didn't watch any episodes you weren't in, on general principal—"

"Yeah, I just bet that was what you were hoping," Asuka crossed her arms and looked away, "I just happened to be surfing through the late night channels the other day and just happened to see episode five. Ha! It was even worse than most of the stuff on the other channels."

"But it's only for amusement," Shinji tried a nervous chuckle as he looked around at the growing audience of crew members that Asuka's raised voice was attracting, "Just a little fan service. It doesn't mean anything seri—"

"Oh, give me a break!" Asuka exclaimed, "It has a naked teenage girl, it has prolonged groping, it has airborne feminine undergarments, and it has YOU on top of HER for TWENTY-SEVEN SOLID SECONDS!"

Shinji jerked his head back from the surprised faces that were multiplying around them and stared at her weakly.

"You ... timed it?"

"That's right!" Asuka shouted as she advanced on him with a jabbing finger, "And even in the crappiest animes there's no way twenty-seven seconds can be justified with ordinary fan service, oh no!"

There were low voices and whispers running around the circle that was tightening around them. Shinji's eyes were frantically trying to take all of this in—everything but the closing finger and furious pair of eyes that began to push him further and further into the ground.

"Asuka—people—" he mumbled in panic, "Watching—closing in—I—"

"—pathetic kind of perverted!" Asuka finished with a flourish, breathing hard as she stared down at Shinji, who'd retreated to the ground with his arms around his knees. She groaned at this and turned to where Rei was still watching. "You see? It's absolutely ridiculous! Me and him, ha! If anything, hedgehog boy has the hots for you. The only scene with us that comes close is—oh yeah," she said sarcastically, "The one where he tries to strangle me. And don't even bring up the whole kissing scene, because it was because I was bored, that's all. You and emo kid get way closer to anything resembling real action than we do."

The crowd began to murmur with hints of agreement. Shinji continued to mutter incoherently to himself from the floor.

There was a long pause.

"But what about the deleted scene from episode ten?" Rei asked quietly.

"Huh?" Shinji perked up, looking horrified.

"Episode ten? What deleted scene?" Asuka frowned.

"Deleted scenes don't count!" Shinji said, waving his arms in the air.

"The deleted scene—" Rei began.

"That's why they're de-le-ted!" Shinji struggled up to his knees.

"—is after Shinji observes your back roll entry into the swimming pool. He goes into a lengthy and graphic fantasy involving both of you practicing a non swimming related variant of that phrase—"

"WHAT!" Asuka screeched. And exploded. She actually kind of screeched and exploded. It was a screechy sort of explosion.

"It was cut! It was cut! It wasn't filmed!" Shinji protested. "The back rear entry—no! I mean the back roll entry scene was—"

But no one was listening to him as Rei clinically continued to go on about the details and Asuka ranted at unhealthy volumes about not being informed about unfilmed contract violations.

The people that weren't speechless were all engaging in some form of expressing humor.

"So—humiliating—" Shinji murmured as he curled up into a fetal position on the ground and began rocking back and forth, "People—watching—mommy—"

The rest was lost behind his thumb.

--

Moving—the hallway was moving—moving past him as he was dragged down it, arm—burning arm first. The routinely placed hallway lights were passing above him and the sound of his failing lungs—everything was hot and every part of his body that required oxygen felt as if it were dying noisily and—

"Asuka!—" Shinji gasped, "Slow down! Please? I can't—can't—"

Asuka barely bothered briefly glancing back from the other end of his arm that she was forcibly transiting. "Quite your whining! I swear if you pass out before we get to the elevators, I'll kill you myself! Because I'm not carrying you! Don't you pay your personal trainer?"

"I—He—" Shinji wheezed, and then all in one breath, "—The-script-describes-me-as-weak-and-pathetic," *gasp* "So—"

"Mission accomplished," Asuka muttered as they reached an intersection in the hallway and she skidded to an abrupt halt.

Shinji, however, dutifully followed Newton's first law and continued on past her and then to the ground after his lower limbs failed to produce the proper placement of friction. He tumbled, skidded, and then softly rolled to a stop on his back, where he lay heavily harvesting oxygen.

"Stunt double ..." he weakly murmured between lung compressions.

Asuka, however, didn't pay him any attention as she stood in the middle of the intersection, softly catching her breath and frowning down the rightmost pair of corridors.

"Okay, Wonder Girl," she said without turning to face their third companion who was calmly standing behind them, "This is the part where you justify me letting you tag along. Which way is it?"

"Where—" Shinji raised his head up blearily, "Where are we going?"

Asuka rolled her eyes wearily. "I already told you, dummkopf."

"No," Shinji said, succeeding somewhat in weakly dragging himself up, "You suddenly grabbed me, told me we had to go now, hit me when I asked where, and then dragged me and what's left of my right arm socket here—"

"Yeah, yeah," Asuka waved him off, "Close enough. I thought it would be obvious enough to the Big Star to figure out what's going on—like maybe everything with this movie is going wrong and that might—just might­—have something to do with Anno not having the Script of Longinus anymore."

"What?" Shinji felt something dark and terrifying jerk inside him as he abruptly finished sitting up all the way. "He doesn't have it anymore? How do you know?"

"Dummkopf!" she swatted at his head, and then again at his upraised hands and the annoying distress sound he produced, "Haven't you noticed Anno listlessly wandering around the set for the past three hours incoherently muttering, 'Where is it? I've lost the script, I've lost the script'?"

Shinji rubbed at his dummkopf. "Oh, yeah ..."

There was a throbbing Asuka-sized hand print pulsing on the top of it.

Asuka smiled with a smug expression as she looked down at him. "Fortunately for us, I'm the only one who knows where it actually is."

"You do?"^2 Rei and Shinji said at the same time. Shinji looked over at Rei, then back at Asuka.

"That's right," Asuka crossed her arms and looked up and off, "Thanks to my dazzling intellect, we may be able to salvage this train wreck of a fanfiction yet."

Shinji felt suspicious. "But how do you know where it's at?"

"Simple," she said, "I asked." She inclined her chin heavenwards. "Could you repeat it one more time for the less intellectually gifted?"
"It's with Gendo Ikari, in his office," came the glum, heavenly confirmation.

Shinji felt something die inside of his chest. And it felt as though it had previously been an important organ.

The floor was promptly within his reach again.

"Thank you," Asuka said upwards, primly, "You know, you should really stick around. You come in handy every once in a while."

"Umm ... I'm always here."

"Oh, that's nice—" Asuka froze, "Hey, wait a second! I just went to the bathroom a few minutes ago!"

"Don't worry—I didn't peek—"

"Oh, right," Asuka exclaimed, "I bet you just preoccupied yourself with something else—like maybe your Asuka doll collection!"

Rei quietly cleared her throat.

"Anyway," Asuka bit out, "We need to sneak in and get that script back before anyone notices that we're ... gone ... oh, great. Here we go again."

"Father—mustn't run away—mustn't run—mustn't—" Shinji was murmuring over and over to himself from his ground-borne fetal position.

"Which way, Wonder Girl?" Asuka asked wearily.

Shinji found himself too preoccupied to protest when she grabbed a handful of his shirt and dragged him behind her.

Rei pointed and all three/two-and-a-half of them started in that direction.

--

Why does she have to smell so good?

"But I still don't know—" Asuka said uncertainly. "Would you add it or ... maybe ... Well, let's start over. If the First and Third Children, aka the Wonder Duo, got together—eww—and had children—double eww—what would that make the child of the Children?"

Shinji involuntarily shifted a little and nearly lost his precarious perch over Asuka's shoulders from which she was carrying was precarious for a number of reasons, but the most prominent one (one that was even able to peek through his admittedly jumbled thoughts) was the precarious proximity of his hands to certain Asuka phenomena—more specifically, her two phenomena that resided below her neck where his hands were just within—

"Mmurph—" he muttered as Asuka continued rambling about offspring mathematics, proving sufficient to jar his thoughts from provocative bodily geographies, "Children—Parents—oh, God—Father!—"

Asuka let out a sigh, but continued as if he hadn't spoken. "If you would add it, it would turn out to be the Fourth child, but—Hey. Wonder Girl. What's your opinion on Shinji's numerical value? Would he be counted as a positive or negative entity?"

Rei paused for a moment, ignoring her and staring down at the hallway where it turned to the right up ahead of them.

"Someone is coming," Rei said quietly.

"What?" Asuka said, peering ahead and letting go of Shinji. "Who?"

His descent quickly escalated from sliding to plummeting off of Asuka and back to the cold and very flat, very hard floor. His throat involuntarily produced a sound that probably verged on pathetic, but his attention quickly shifted from his contemplations on the Ways in which his life was a miserable experience to the Source that ensured it.

"Father—" he said, "It's my father—"

"What?!" Asuka whisper-exclaimed. "How would you know?"

Shinji was spared the effort and traumatic experience of trying to explain the Gendo radar he'd developed.

"It is indeed one Gendo Ikari," said a heavenly voice.

"'It is indeed?' What are you, reading subtitles?" Asuka irritably snapped heavenwards, but she was paying more heed to her two companions and their lack of reaction, "Why are you two doing just standing—laying there? Quick, hide!"

She proceeded to spin frantically around the rather unfavorable-for-hiding-hallway with a handful of Shinji's collar in one hand. He made pathetic sounds and motions as she turned furious circles around him. And he, consequently and unfortunately, turned furious circles as well.

Rei pressed the button to the hall's solitary door, which she was standing beside. "There seems to be a closet here," she said as it opened.

"Oh, great," Asuka said as she spun Shinji that way and dragged him towards it, "Look, I found a closet. Quick, stop gawking and get inside Wonder Girl."

They did just that, ingressing into what turned out to be an excessively dim, excessively cramped little cubicle that had excessive claustrophobia written all over—

"WAIT!" Shinji shouted as he turned and tried to leap up, his arm reaching for Asuka where she was already shutting the closet's solitary— "No! I can't—"

But then Asuka was on top of him, trying to push him back away from the door controls while simultaneously pressing her hand against his mouth and doing her best to avoid his outstretched arms that were flailing in the general direction of the controls.

"Shh! Shut up!" she whispered frantically into his ear, "He'll hear! ... Please?"

But polite requests became quite unnecessary at this point, as Shinji felt himself becoming lightheaded under the decrease in oxygen Asuka's hand was perpetrating, coupled with the stringent amounts of oxygen that the anxiety of the situation was requiring. Not to mention that infuriating smell that was all but assaulting his helpless scent sensors—and he and Asuka touching in far too many places—and her soft hand on his lips and—

"Murmph," he murmured, sinking back onto his knees as reality unfocused itself.

However, the following loss of direct contact with her hand unfortunately brought it back. That and the sight of Asuka looking over her shoulder at the door, her face a dim outline in the gloom, her profile craning and urgent, that feeling deep and warm and stirring, and—

The footsteps from the outside hall were now audibly nearing them.

Closer, and closer, and—Were they slowing?—and—

Was that someone whistling "Fly Me to the Moon" outside? And—

click

Then the steps and the whistling lost their hesitation and continued on—

"WIENER SCHNITZEL!" Asuka swore as she leaped for the door controls and pounded on them, but to no avail. A red icon blinked and the door didn't move.

"No! No, no, no!" she cried, pounding her fists on the door to the rhythm of her cries.

"It seems that we're locked in," Rei said.

"No, kidding!" Asuka sank to her knees, about as close to honest weeping as a teenage girl could get. "You dummkopfs, why didn't you see this coming? If he has the script, he can see everything we do! Everything!"

"But—" Shinji murmured, doing his best to keep the hysterical fear down in his stomach, where it was threatening to forcefully elevate itself. Clawing—clawing at the bottom of everything— "We're stuck then? We can't get out?"

"Why?" Asuka sobbed, turning around on her knees and half heartedly throwing her hands at him, "Why do you have to be so completely useless all of the time?"

"Trapped—" Shinji whispered to the beating of Asuka's hands on his chest, "Closing in—" —whispered to the beating of his heart inside his chest, his chest that was collapsing.

Everything was pressing down into him, overwhelming the overwhelming fear that was screaming and frantically fighting to get out—

During his subsequent and quite involuntary excursion to the floor, where he writhed and sobbed in the dim light, some nearly unconscious part of him that was always keeping track of Asuka kept track of Asuka.

She facilitated mostly pulling herself together by sniffing, whipping at her nose and eyes, and then gingerly getting to her feet. There was something of a hopeful smile on her face. "Don't worry ..." she whispered, her voice growing stronger, "Don't worry, it's okay. We're going to be fine ... because I'm smart and independent enough to get us out of this, and I'm—Hey! You! Up there! We need your help!"

For a moment all three of them grew still as they looked up to the ceiling. But the expected prompt answer didn't promptly come, and the seconds began to drag into much larger units of time.

"Hey! YOU!" Asuka cupped her hands, as if that would help. "Are you listening?"

But there was no response.

"Ah, great!" Asuka threw down her hands. "That's it, then. We're all going to—"

"—DIE!" Shinji finished, following his adrenaline and madly scrambling to his feet. "We've gotta—I've gotta get out of here! There has to be—something—" he muttered, nearly incoherently even to himself as he tore into the closet's assorted cleaning supplies.

"Unfamiliar ceiling," Shinji tore his eyes down as he worked, "Unfamiliar walls—" and down further, "Unfamiliar floor—GAH!

"Coffin—crypt—cave—submarine—" he involuntarily chanted under his breath as his hands failed to produce anything above the usefulness of a mop—useful relative to the situation anyway. "My father has buried me alive! My father has—Wait! Oh, my God, wait a second!" There was a sudden and heady pounding in his chest. "Chuck! Chuck will save us!"

Shinji whipped out his phone.

Asuka was regarding him with a small, sad sort of expression.

"Wait—What?" Shinji screamed. "No—no—No—NO RECEPTION! AAAH!"

"Sometimes ..." Asuka murmured to herself as she watched him madly scamper around each of the closet's corners, waving his phone in the air, pausing to check the signal, giving his rehearsed End of Evangelion scream, and then repeating the process.

"Quick—help me build a—a tower! Yeah, a tower! Or maybe some other phallic shaped symbol of Freudian significance that we can climb onto—Oh, where's Anno when you need him?" Shinji was foaming as he frantically herded all of the closet's larger items with his free arm into one corner. "There!" he cried upon completion, and then did his best to crawl to the top of it, even as a large percentage of it fell apart underneath his feet. Grabbing a handhold of the paneled ceiling, he jammed his phone up through the top of them.

Even Rei seemed to hold her breath (or maybe she just never breathed at all) as there was silence and Shinji peered up into the darkness at the reception. This time, however, there was no overt confirmation of success or failure. Shinji just stood/hung there, remaining very still until he finally whispered,

"I'm in a closet ..."

Asuka crossed her arms and leaned back against one of the walls. "This isn't the only closet he needs to come out of," she muttered.

"I'm in a closet ..." Shinji said, a little more frantically. "I'm in a closet—I ... I can't breathe!" He gasped, clutching at his throat as he half scrambled, half fell back to the ground.

"So ..." Asuka looked over at Rei casually, "What do you do for fun anyway, Wonder Girl?"

Shinji was running in circles, trying to locate the coordinates with the best "—Air! I need air, I'm suffocating!"

"I mean ..." Asuka continued, ignoring him, "You never come out of that run down trailer of yours. What do you do all the time?"

Rei looked at her blankly. "Write Asuka and Shinji fanfiction." She said it as if it were difficult to contemplate anything else one could possibly do with free time.

Asuka glared up at heaven. "Sick. You're sick. Sick and twisted."

Why weren't they listening to him? For Sigmund's sakes, he was S-U-F-F-O-C-A-T-I-N-G.

"Air, I need air! I need—" He cried, throwing his arms up at them. He suddenly spied Asuka looking at him, Asuka and her slightly parted lips and— "Air! You have air! Give it to—"

And then base, completely animalistic instincts took over and he slammed his mouth into her remarkably surprised expression.

Suddenly there were colors. All sorts of colors. And heat, and fuzziness, and birds singing, and bees buzzing, and honey being produced and reproduced, and all sorts of other oddly enjoyable phenomena. But above all there was that wet, sultry, glorious friction. Time, there was also time. And her lips, and that smell, and—

Shinji found himself staggering backwards, looking around in horror as he gasped. "What—what just happened?"

Rei didn't verbally answer, and the '9.8' sign she was holding up wasn't exactly a lot of help either.

Asuka was the epitome of pleasantly dazed.

He was gasping. "I didn't ... I mean—" Shinji didn't know what he meant, "That was ... sorry. Sorry about that. I almost lost my cool there. But that was completely, um, professional. Yeah, completely professional and completely necessary."

Rei looked smugly unconvinced. If Rei was capable of looking like anything. And Asuka had progressed from dazed to dreamy, as she listlessly stared up at the ceiling with a slight smile on her lips.

"Yeah," he rambled on, "Completely necessary. After all, air is one of the necessary, uh, necessary parts of survival. And since we're in a survival situation, we need to start thinking about those things. So, uh, there's air. That's one. Then there's food. And uh ... oh yeah, shelter. We're good on that one ... well, actually that's kinda our problem, but ... there's another one, isn't there?"

Rei merely stared back at him.

"I, uh," Shinji scratched at his head, trying to think. "There's another one, I know it! It's um ... well, okay. Start over. In order to survive, people need air, food ... uh, shelter, and ... uh ..."

"Reproduction ..." Asuka murmured dreamily.

"Oh, yeah, that's right," Shinji said, then remembered himself, "No! That's not ..." he scratched at the back of his head again, "Well, maybe I guess it does depend on how long term you want to ... pursue ..." Asuka's eyes finally floated down to his, which was guaranteed to make everything hot and uncomfortable again.

Shinji gulped.

"—Survival ..."

Rei gave a happy little sigh.

--

Things didn't progress all that favorably from there. For his part, Shinji thought that the others turned out to be more or less the antithesis of helpful. Rei was too busy doing nothing, aka being Rei—although there was a maddeningly intangible bit to her that he would've bet his copy of Die Traumdeutung resembled being content. Or at least what a normal human being would be like when content. And Rei content over anything to do with him and Asuka—as in him and Asuka together—freaked him out, even more than the whole touching/seeing Rei naked while she was a pseudo clone of his mom did. Well, the two instances were actually probably somewhere close to tying, but still—

And then there was Asuka, or rather there really wasn't Asuka. For the remainder of their situation she spent it moonily murmuring about baby names ... babies that they would presumably be producing. Together.

Be producing TO-GETH-ER!

Not that even the best of Shinji's admittedly well honed streaks of denial could deny that the idea of the initiation of such said producing seemed all that off putting ... in a manner of speaking ...

Things might have gotten even worse if their salvation hadn't appeared quite abruptly, even anticlimactically. Not that Shinji was particularly unfamiliar with that adjective.

"What are you guys doing in there?" asked a heavenly voice.

"Hey, is that you?" Shinji asked upwards, but turned to glare at Asuka, who was still in the midst of the dilemma of deciding—

"—that won't work, if the first one is a boy," she murmured, heedless of reality in general, "But would it really be all that cheesy to go with Shinji Jr? After all—"

"Asuka!" Shinji shouted, horrified. "Snap out of it!"

He slapped her.

Mrs. Ikari evidently filed for a divorce in record time as her expression did indeed snap out and into a furious expression, followed by a furious fist that left a furiously throbbing sensation in his jaw.

"And just what the heck was that for?" she demanded.

"I just—" Shinji murmured as he clutched at his imploding jaw and teetered on his heels, "... I ... We're saved."

And then gravity "graciously" eased him backwards down to the ground.

It was some time before he was capable of being moved, with Asuka once again donning the honors rather noisily.

--

Shinji missed most of this, however, as he regained consciousness only just before they reached the door to Gendo's office.

There was some teetering at the threshold by Asuka, but Rei wordlessly entered and they followed, rather anticlimactically, again, and fanned out, examining it.

"It's ..." Shinji whispered, looking around, "... Just an office."

"What are you, stupid?" Asuka asked as she assumed a superior tone, "Of course it's an office. What did you expect?"

"... Torture devices?" he murmured, looking up perplexed at a picture of a sunny river hanging on the wall.

"I still don't get it," Asuka said, looking sideways at Rei, who was quietly looking around. "Okay, let's assume for the sake of the argument the completely ridiculous idea of me and the human hedgehog getting together, but ... I don't get it. What's it to you? What do you get out of it?"

"I don't understand," Rei said quietly.

"I mean ..." Asuka struggled for a moment, "Why do you like it so much?"

Rei looked at her. "For the same reason that many people enjoy love hate relationships."

Asuka looked taken a little aback. "And why is that?"

"In such situations, where the two characters are presented to be in initial conflict with each other, it draws out the elements of what attracts them." Rei paused. "With so many obstacles put in the way of their relationship forming, it creates a greater sense of satisfaction when it does. It also reinforces romantic notions that love can conquer anything."

Asuka stared at her.

"And there's ..." Rei said slowly, "A sort of power in acknowledging a force above the characters. Something that makes their relationship inevitable, no matter how much they try to resist. And once it comes to it ... after everything that has happened ... there's something powerful in the characters saying 'I choose you' ... to each other. There's ... something powerful about that ultimate submission."

Shinji turned his stare over at Asuka, who was looking at the ground with a frown, her mouth moving softly as if she was working through something, through some grand, startling revelation that was—

Asuka abruptly looked up and burst out laughing.

"Ah, that's just a load of strudel!" She craned her neck up heavenwards. "And what's your theory, huh? How come you weren't here when we needed you?"

"Me?" asked a heavenly voice, somewhat defensively. "I had to get up for a minute. Geez, I just wanted to get a Kit Kat bar."

Asuka glared a deadpan expression. "Oh, give me a break."

Rei was seated at a drum set.

dedum chhhh

Shinji didn't move as the canned audience applause slowly receded. He felt his fists slowly clenching and unclenching; he threw them down on the edge of the desk in irritation.

Behind him, Asuka was still chatting animatedly about the absurdity of them ever getting together. Or really, just the absurdity surrounding him in general.

Shinji stared down at his father's stress ball, which had carelessly been left at a lopsided angle. The eyes weren't quit at the proper alignment to be staring back up at his.

He tried laughing, but ended up with a forced sort of result. A shaky kind of result. "I ... I really should talk to Chuck about this merchandising thing. It's really getting out of hand."

"Hmm?" Asuka asked behind him, presumably looking over at him. "What did you say?"

"I said it's not fair," he murmured, almost too quiet for even himself to hear.

There was a dead sort of silence behind him. The kind that made his back crawl.

"Shinji ..." It was Asuka's voice, whispered in a quiet sort of question.

"I said it's not fair!" he shouted as he slammed his hands on the desk.

The stress ball was jostled slightly, turning it's face off to the side.

"I said it's not fair!" he wretched his arm across the surface, throwing the stress ball off onto an adjacent bureau, "It's not fair, It's not fair, It's not fair!"

He shoved the computer monitor off to the floor, where it crunched and hissed, and then tore the keyboard away and brought it down again and again at the stress ball.

But long before his arms began to burn and ache, and certainly long afterwards, when everything was still and stinging, nothing changed. Nothing was better. Nothing ever was.

He stood panting,

staring down at the shattered plastic at his feet,

not brave enough to look up to the others and their own stares.

--

AN: Wow. This is like my worst update time ever (over four months). Sorry for the outside chance anyone was really looking forward to this. But yeah, this time this is probably really the last part. Thanks everyone for reading; hope y'all like it.