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When the plug is finally released from Unit-02, when she is finally freed from the Evangelion, she is dizzy, not exactly unconscious but no longer completely aware, either. The comedown from the Berserk mode is bad- her head is pounding, and there are phantom pains in her arm and hip. Her teeth ache, her jaw sore as if it was her own mouth ripping through the AT fields. Her tongue tastes like static.
It's blurry, but she can tell she's back inside NERV, or what's left of it. The fight must be over, one way or another. She can hear voices, urgent, frenzied. She's not sure if her lungs are breathing air or are still clogged with LCL. There is blood on her. She is not sure if it is her own or the ichor of Unit-02, splashes of the divine marring her flesh.
She thinks she can make out Kaji’s voice. She wants to ask if Rei made it. She wants to ask if Shinji… wait… her memories rush back to her now that the adrenaline of being in the Eva is wearing off. She remembers what she saw, and the first sound she makes, still laying in the damaged plug is to laugh.
It's a primal reaction, a distraction from coming back into her corporeal form. She likes fighting as an Eva pilot, that wasn't a lie. At least then she could push past her limits, synchronize with a giant monster, try to change Fates that seemed stacked against her. At least as a pilot she had a chance.
But now she is human again, or something like it, so very small, so inconsequential. Shinji has set things into motion now, and all she can do is laugh.
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“What were you doing in Unit-02?” Misato demands. She’s stressed, Mari can tell, and not just because she’s lost her puppy boy. She knew Gendo was keeping information from her, but the idea that a pilot could know more than her, to know secrets of the Evas is a shock.
Mari shrugs, playing up her own carelessness in the way Kaji might before she realizes that this is her, this is Kaji’s loved-and-lost. “Happened by it, thought you could use the assist,” she offers.
God, she is tired. Her limbs are heavy, and her mouth is still numb. She was released from the infirmary directly to Misato, and her vision is still a little shaky, but she refuses to allow the captain to know she is feeling ill. It’s a matter of pride that she can appear carefree at all times.
Misato grows impatient. “Why are you in Tokyo?” she tries again.
"It’s right there in my record, I am a transfer to NERV. Whew, I picked a bad day to transfer in, huh?” she laughs. Misato does not join her. She does not tell Misato she has been in Tokyo-3 for months. She does not tell Misato that she witnessed Unit-01 defeating the Angel in Unit-03, and the pilot along with it. She does not show evidence on her face of seeing the massive entrails and bones, teeth even, evidence that the Evas really and truly are organic, rather than machine. She tries to look bored.
“We did not receive any authorization of your transfer. You were not authorized to enter that Evangelion unit. You could be court marshalled.”
Mari leans back in her chair, leaning on two legs instead of four. The strain of the chair leaning reminds her of Unit-02 going into overdrive, the tendons stretching and metal plating erupting. She had wondered for a bit if that was it, if she would lose her humanity at last. “Yeah, and we can debate if I made things worse since Unit-00 and I didn’t even kill the Angel, and I led the puppy boy right back to the scene.”
Misato’s eyes flash, and Mari isn’t sure if she hadn’t quite put together these implications, or if she was just irritated at Mari’s nickname for Shinji. “But,” Mari continues, trying to hold Misato’s attention, tenuous as it is, “That’s over and done with now. All your pilots are out of commission, so you only have me. Shouldn't we try to work together?"
=================================================================================
Mari has nothing but time to herself as Tokyo NERV headquarters verifies her credentials. She knows she’s done them perfectly, she knows they’ll have to let her out of this cage. Still, there’s nothing for her to do but wait, so she lays on the bed and daydreams, occasionally interrupted by Misato or Ristuko or someone else coming to interview her. She sees Fuyutsuki once, through the glass wall of the chamber they keep her in. He doesn’t spare her a glance.
Mostly, it’s just hours and hours in her own mind. Memories that are both hers and not hers, a past remembered of her own life, and memories from before the Second Impact, distant ideas of the world that she’s never truly experienced, not in a physical sense.
The timelessness here is different from being in the Eva, because here she is completely alone, completely by herself. Her mind keeps looping back to the notion of before, whether the memories are her own or… well she supposes they’re her memories either way. Green fields, forests, blue oceans, the cycles of the moon. Her throat aches painfully. Leaves falling in the autumn. Her chest tightens. A honeybee.
She wonders if she’s strange, that she misses things she’s never seen with her own eyes. Then she laughs a little at herself, both purely and in self-derision. Of course she’s not special, she thinks. Everyone misses the cherry blossoms. Everyone misses the seasons. The difference between most people and herself is that she has the chance to get in an Eva and try to do something about it.
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Everyone she wants to hold on to slips away so easily, and everyone she wishes would just disappear is eternal, unyielding. Gendo, of course, is the epitome of this, standing on a distant, elevated platform overseeing her first sync tests at NERV in a test plug. Fuyutsuki is over his shoulder, just a pinprick in her distant vision. Once upon a time a version of her would have wished to cling onto him. Now, he can die with the rest of them. Iscariot? It is he who is the traitor.
Settled now into the pilot’s seat, she can hear the techs in Command over the comms, but she blocks them out, at least for a moment. This is just the final hurdle, and then she will be back to piloting a complete Eva. Gendo and Fuyutsuki slip away as the plug is lowered into the LCL. They were wearing traveling clothes. She has a feeling she won’t be seeing them for a while. She’ll have to see what she can dig up, see if they are in SEELE’s bad graces, or if they are leaving for their own nefarious purposes.
Once the test has started, she knows she should clear her mind of extraneous thoughts. But it’s hard to focus here. The plug without an EVA is a debilitated fragment, to which no soul is tethered. She is as alone here as she was in the quarantine chamber, so she wonders how in the world she's supposed to sync. The LCL floods the plug and she breathes it in, and she doesn’t know if she can remember a time before. Before LCL and before she knew what it was like to know another soul in every way and before she knew what happened after death and before she forgot the names of the flowers and-
“Makinami-san, are you sure you’re really a pilot?” One of the command staff- Ibuki, she thinks- addresses her. She can feel what might be electrical impulses, perhaps a simulation of nerve impulses to trick the pilot into thinking they were in an Eva, to trick her into synchronizing. But how could that work? At least once she knows how an Eva works.
Just put me in Unit-02, and this won’t be a problem, she thinks. She know Gendo knows it too. He doesn’t doubt her status as a pilot, she’s in here because he doubts her allegiance. She’s in the test plug because he’s worried she can’t be trusted in his precious real Eva units.
“Aw, Maya, don’t be hard on her, it’s her first time.” Another voice. Hyuga, perhaps.
If only it was her first time.
===============================================================================
Back when she met Kaji for the first time, she was a little put off by his incredible lightness of being, especially as a double (triple?) agent after the Second Impact. Her humanity was already tainted by being submerged in LCL pretty often over the years in training for being a pilot, but her naivety was fairly high, and she trusted in NERV.
“You’ll like the other pilot candidate, Asuka, she’s a spitfire,” he said.
He laid back on the upper deck of the ship they were both stationed on and lit a cigarette, offering it to her, though she turned it down. She was fourteen and unsure of what to make of Ryoji Kaji.
“You’ve got the talent, easy. You’ll make it, if that’s what you want.”
She wanted to ask him what else she could possibly want, what else there is any point in pursuing beyond NERV when she saw it, glinting in his hand. It was a little metallic chip, about the size of a postage stamp, shining golden in the sun. She took it because it was clear he is offering it to her. “What is this?” she asked.
“A gift. From your original.”
“What? She died.”
Kaji nodded, taking a long drag. “She had this made before then, as a contingency. It’s her memory files. She wanted you to receive them, if you wanted, when you were fourteen. All you need is a neural-link helmet.”
“Like the one used for piloting.”
Kaji shrugged, indicating she was correct. She could see her fingers trembling around the chip, which felt too delicate in her hand for what it was. “Be careful with that, Makinami-san,” he said, his tone touching on the serious for the first time since she met him. “What is learned cannot be un-learned.”
==============================================================================
She finds Kaworu deep in NERV HQ now that they’ve given her a little more freedom. She was looking for information about overlapping the Evangelion units, and wandered deeper than she planned, but she was following a path of abandoned labs that had promising filings.
Kaworu, for his part, was working at one of the tiny desks in one of the darkened, tiny offices, and the two of them had startled each other so badly that they didn’t ask the other what they were working on.
“I am Mari Makinami,” she introduces, belatedly, once she has gathered up the files she scattered on her initial jump.
“Kaworu Nagisa,” he answers back.
He does look the right age to be a pilot, but she has never heard a word about another pilot in their facility, and she hasn’t heard his name prior to arriving here either, though she had heard about Rei, Shinji, and Asuka. SEELE, she thinks, but she can't be certain. She can look into all of this later, she knows better than to start relationships with hostility.
“I’m sorry for frightening you. I was just collecting information about making repairs to my Eva,” she explains, and it’s the truth, just not all of it.
He seems to relax, though it’s only after he does so that she realizes how tightly he had been drawn. “You have an Eva?” he asks.
“Well… no, not yet,” she admits.
He laughs. “Me either.”
=============================================================================
The first time Mari saw Asuka was a month prior, when she snuck into Unit-02. Mari caught a glimpse of Asuka in the infirmary, still sedated, the angel-sealing hex pillars giving the Lilin some assurance while she was studied, or healed, or whatever they were doing.
The first time Mari meets Asuka, it’s when Asuka is still recovering from the Angel attack and Unit-01’s attack with the dummy pilot system. They’ve patched Asuka up pretty well, all things considered. She’s walking short distances without the physios help, she looks intact aside from the eyepatch, and she’s back to going to the mess instead of receiving her nutrition solely through the IV drips.
Psychologically, Mari is sure it’s a different story. Asuka is wary of her, which is natural, but her only reactions seem to be anger and a flare-up of her superiority complex.
She sits with Asuka in a corner of the mess, the rest of the crew avoiding them, probably less because they’re pilots and more because she’s new and cannot yet be trusted, and Asuka is potentially dangerous now. Asuka, for her part, is not interested in sharing her meal with Mari, and seems divided between pointedly ignoring Mari and snapping at her.
"So you're the one who busted Unit-02?" she asks, all ice.
"Mari Makinami, your new partner," she answers back.
"I work alone. Why are they even keeping you around?" Asuka asks before turning away from Mari and focusing on her meal.
Apparently the question was rhetorical, but Mari is starved for company, so Asuka will have to do. They were living through the evacuation of Tokyo-3 and an unprecedented isolation of NERV deep in the Geofront. "Listen, you're good, Princess, one of the best, but… there are some things you can't do alone. And well… it's nice to have more than one pilot." She doesn't mention Kaworu. She can feel the tension radiating off of Asuka even across the table.
Asuka eats her dinner with efficiency even though Mari can tell she doesn’t like the taste of anything but the fruit. “What? Are you just here to watch me eat?” Asuka snaps at her, nodding towards Mari’s barely touched tray. Mari looks at it. Her mouth is still static. She hasn’t been able to taste anything since she piloted Unit-02, though that was just the final blow, her taste had started going the first time she piloted Unit-05. It doesn’t matter anyway, as long as she eats a ration bar every once in a while.
She shrugs, lifting the tray to smell it properly. “Not in the mood,” she says at last.
“Suit yourself, weirdo,” Asuka says, standing to toss out her trash.
Mari follows, since she isn’t going to finish her dinner or sit around to endure the crew’s stares.
On the way out, she sees Asuka stumble a bit, likely from the extra exertion since getting out of the infirmary. When Kaji rounds the corner, Asuka fully trips, and he is just in time to catch her. “Careful, Shikinami-san,” he says, righting her.
“Kaji-san, what are you doing here?” she asks.
“This and that, they keep me busy,” he says, running his hand through his hair in a show of casualness. “I see you met Makinami-san?”
Mari can’t see it, but she knows Asuka rolls her eyes. “You mean the brat who broke my Eva?”
Kaji laughs. “I suppose she did that, too. Come on, why don’t you tell me how you’ve been doing in therapy?” he asks Asuka, and she lights up, dragging him away from Mari.
=============================================================================
Mari doesn’t have an Eva, so she is there, in the lab when Kaworu is brought in for sync testing. Asuka is not, and now she is wondering if they're purposely keeping the other boy a secret from Asuka, if they think that she'll become upset with his presence. Mari thinks they're underestimating Asuka, she thinks that they've always been overlooking and underestimating Asuka, but she supposes that is the nature of their work. They overlook and underestimate everyone, only doling out the absolute minimum knowledge, even to the adults. It's why she has to go out of her way, digging and clawing around for information.
Since the pilots are children, it is even worse. Only Shinji, the anointed one, appears to be prioritized, the others are only protected because they are so hard to train, and difficult to replace. Suddenly she can't help but let out a little laugh again. 'Look where that got them,' she thinks, with Shinji locked inside his Eva and the Third Impact barely averted, at least temporarily.
Kaworu looks over at her at her interruption. He's in his plugsuit now, and he does look like a pilot now, but also not. He's too calm, too detached. Even she, who has been in battle in multiple Evas, still fears the moment of submersion, the moment when her soul is merged with another's. But Kaworu listens to the directions as they direct him to the test plug, and she knows: he knows at least as much as she. He knows the Secret of the Evas, and he knows this plug is barren, his humanity is in no danger.
But unlike her, Kaworu's sync rates in the test plug are excellent. She can't focus on her own task, as her focus is locked on the numbers on screen. His sync is as high as hers has ever been in an actual Eva unit, and she knows, or at least she strongly believes, he knows this is a poor simulation - there is nothing here to actually sync to.
Definitely SEELE, she thinks. But what did it mean?
=============================================================================
Mari knows Kaji had patched things up with Misato, so when he comes to her room after hours, she knows it’s strictly business. Still, she can’t resist teasing him. “I didn’t know we had a date tonight, I would have dressed up,” she says. She invites him in, but he loiters in the doorway, eyeing her shelves upon shelves of books as he indicates he wants to go for a walk. She sits to put on a pair of outdoor shoes.
“My love letter must have gotten intercepted,” he teases right back. “Perhaps Katsuragi-san saw me writing it and got jealous.”
“Please don’t get me in trouble with the captain,” she says, standing and indicating that she’s ready to go.
Kaji, for his part, steps inside and grabs a book on botany from her shelf. “I’m borrowing this,” he says. He leads her deep into the ship, down corridors even she hasn’t been down.
“It'll be here soon, your Unit-08,” he says as they walk. She knows what he means, or she can guess. Your Eva is arriving soon, which will give us enough firepower to stand against Gendo. It's nearly time.
But Mari doesn't know what she can say, who might be listening, so she doesn't reply. She was called out here to listen, anyways.
“You're sure you can pilot it?”
“Honestly, you sound like Akagi-sensei,” she teases.
He sighs, pressing his palm to a door and they step into an elevator. “Rit-chan just wants you to be safe.”
Mari has another comment about how her safety might come second to pleasing Gendo in Ritsuko’s eyes, but she holds it in with her present company. “And the captain?”
“Of course she cares about you. If I…” he pauses for a moment, and they are surrounded by the whirring of the elevator plummeting them downward. “If anything were to happen to me, I've asked Misato to keep an eye on you, not as a guardian, just as a confidante.”
She doesn't want to hear this, doesn't want to think about how mortal he is, how finite his life is. “What is this?” she asks, as the elevator doors open and they arrive in a massive chamber, what appears to be a warehouse.
“This is my special little project,” he says, his voice teasing as he leans in to whisper the words into her ear. Kaji is warm, and she can feel his body heat around her, can feel the firmness of another person against her. She can smell the undeniable odor of a body untainted by another soul, uncorrupted by the divine, untouched by the Adams.
And maybe because it's Kaji, or maybe because it's anyone who's dared to get this close to her, but for the first time their proximity feels intimate, and there is a faint and unfamiliar arousal caused by just his lips at her ear and his chest against hers. She wants to push closer into his touch, to abandon herself to impulse, to take what is being offered.
It is not thoughts of Misato that stay her hand, that step out of his space. It is something inward, something she’s lost along the way. She feels both older than Kaji and younger than him, more naive and less human, a strange wrongness in her soul that contradicts any physical desire her body may feel. She bites her lip before forcing her mouth back into her easy smile. “Where did you take me?” she asks, looking around at what appears to be a massive storage vault.
And Kaji answers back with his own sheepish green, his expression marred with deeper emotions that she can’t interpret, but she imagines are similar to hers - a confusing mixture of temptation and shame.
She thinks about how she had seen him with Misato earlier that day, eating lunch together and flirting playfully. But Kaji is like this, she thinks. It irritates her that he can’t just reach out and grab the one thing he wants, when it is right there in front of him. Maybe it’s because they’re similar, and she feels doomed for the same fate.
“Come on, I’ll give you a tour,” he says, snapping her from her thoughts.
==============================================================================
When they ask her what color she wants her new plugsuit, she says pink. Maybe it’s the red of Knowing Asuka mixed with the white of Knowing God. Maybe it’s the red of the Doors of Guf mixed with the white of the Death she’s crossed to get there. Maybe she just misses the cherry blossoms.
==============================================================================
The first time she gets into Unit-08, it is bliss. She can hear the chattering over the comms, talking about her sync rate and plug depth, but she knows it’s fine: for the first time in perhaps her entire life, she is complete. The soul in Unit-08 is undoubtedly her original’s, though she isn’t sure the history there, whether it was given willingly or when. The memories she received exclude any Contact experiment, certainly.
But the flavor, the feeling in Unit-08 is unmistakable. She breathes in the LCL, submerged in herself, unworried about what it is to be two souls of the same person. “Makinami-san, you’re descending rapidly,” she hears Ritsuko say.
“Yeah, but this sync is record-breaking.” This is Misato.
Vaguely, she remembers Asuka, on standby to enter the theater in Unit-02 if anything goes wrong. And then she forgets them all.
She is back on her feet, standing in a lush forest. Not that she’s ever been in one: although she was made just before the Second Impact, she has no memories of that time, nothing but the fallout. But now, all around her are birds, cicadas, the sound of trickling water. Her throat feels tight and she realizes she has been holding her breath. In the distance is Mount Fuji and then she does exhale, or maybe sob.
It’s verdant, it’s dynamic, it’s alive.
“-depth decreasing ra-”
She steps forward and the ground is lush beneath her feet. The birdsong is overwhelming. In the nearby stream she can see fish splashing. She wonders if this is rapture, if perhaps entering the Eva was fatal, actually.
“Makinami-san, get a grip!” Misato’s voice cuts through the dream.
That’s right, it is a dream, a shared delusion, or a memory, or a desire, of herself and the soul inhabiting this Eva. She takes a deep breath to steady herself, but she can feel herself being dragged down. She wants to step into the stream. She wants to drown in it. Clean, blue water into her lungs instead of this LCL.
“-at dangerous levels, unable to-”
She steps in, and the water is cool around her feet. The little fish nip curiously at her ankles, then swim off. The sun is low now, tainting the water the rosy color of the sky, almost the color of LCL. She wants to move forward but she is stuck in place. She wants to move back but she cannot.
“Makinami-san, you need to-”
She looks down, where the fish were. Floating in the LCL, peaceful in death, is Rei Ayanami’s corpse.
==============================================================================
She wakes up in the infirmary with an irritated-looking Asuka beside her. “Do you intend to destroy every Eva you pilot?” she asks.
“You heard about Unit-05?” she asks. She means it to be a joke, but her voice comes out like a croak. She shifts up in the cot, surprised at the soreness, as if all of her muscles were strained. Her mouth is static as always, and her vision is blurry. Just as she is squinting, Asuka shoves her glasses back on her face and holds a cup with a straw before her mouth for her to sip.
“What. The Hell. Is Unit-05?” Asuka asks as Mari sips.
Mari bites her lip as she finishes drinking. Apparently Asuka hadn’t been aware of that one. “Nothing. And no, Princess, I always go in with intentions to keep the Evas in tip-top shape. But sometimes things happen. Speaking of which…”
Asuka raises her eyebrows skeptically at the nickname, but doesn’t protest. “You don’t remember?”
Mari shakes her head. She isn’t looking at Asuka, though, but at the wall of the infirmary, where there is a poster about some regulations, or at least she thinks there is. She can see the words, but they’re not making sense in her brain, like there’s some kind of disconnect.
“You synced with Unit-08 really well for a minute, and then everything went to hell. I think they were afraid you were going to go on a rampage, but it was more like you decided to just hole up inside of the Eva. They cut the power, but your numbers were still dropping. I used Unit-02 to pull the plug by force once you let your guard down for a moment. I don’t think the forced breach went well. The Eva is in for repairs because the plug insertion area is a mess now."
Asuka, for her part, looks sheepish about this. Mari supposes she was just acting on Misato’s command. “Dr. Akagi!” she calls out, hoping the doctor is nearby.
She comes around a corner, raising a perfectly plucked eyebrow at Mari. Mari supposes she has probably looked better than however she looks right now. “What’s wrong with me?” she asks.
=================================================================================
She is discharged from the infirmary, back to her room filled wall to wall with books. But the words on the page don't make sense in her brain, as if the written word was the price for piloting Unit-08. It doesn't matter, her muscles ache too much to move from bed to shelves, so she stays put, sipping water from time to time but not doing much else.
Every time she closes her eyes, she sees Rei Ayanami's head in the river of LCL. But also she sees Yui Ikari's head. She never knew Yui, but she supposes she never knew Fuyutsuki either. Why does she love and hate them both?
She can still feel it, the arm of Unit-00 pushing her backwards as the N2-missile exploded. All so Shinji wouldn't have to pilot another Eva.
There is a knock on her door, and it takes her a while to answer it. Her muscles hurt, and she's hoping whoever it is might just go away. It's late, though, so it is probably not an 'official' visit.
To her surprise, it's Kaworu, and he beckons her to come with him. She's tired, she's sore, but more than that, she craves information. If she can't read it right now, she will go find it herself.
"What is this, a SEELE plot you're showing me?" she coos quietly, following him down the hall. They've met a couple times now, so she feels comfortable enough to show a bit of her hand. He obviously came to her because he knows she knows more than she lets on - or he talked to Kaji.
"Something like that," he says. "I want you to meet a few people," he says in the same patient voice he always uses.
"Nothing to do with Gendo, right?" she checks, as they descend a lift. The base is broken, thanks to the Near-Third Impact, but there's segments of it that still work, and he is taking her to a very old section.
"Everything comes back to Ikari, sooner or later," he says. "But this visit isn't on his radar."
Mari thinks that they couldn't say the same for Fuyutsuki, but she doesn't say as much. She follows Kaworu to a sub-basement where there are little rooms set up, the flourescent glow eerie and off-putting. "Makinami-san, please meet the latest of the Ayanami series."
From a shadowed corner, she sees four clones, perfect replicas of Rei Ayanami who died before the Near-Third Impact. Near replicas of Yui Ikari. Mari is a clone herself, but a single clone, or at least she thinks there was only one. It is strange to see four together. "It's nice to meet you," she says, bowing politely.
==================================================================================
“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Asuka sighs as she closes the book, and Mari is certain that she is thoroughly annoyed that such a strange, meandering novel was Mari’s choice for downtime entertainment.
“Excellent. Even better than when I read it myself!” Mari says, leaning back against her headboard. She's back in her own room, but still on leave from training until Unit-08 finishes repairs and Dr. Akagi clears her to try piloting the Eva again. Asuka, strangely enough, has taken to joining her in the evenings, probably because Misato and Kaji are back together and despite her statements otherwise, Asuka does get lonely easily.
“You’ve already read this one?” Asuka asks, now looking irritated. “Why did you pick it, then?” Asuka flips over from where she was laying on the foot of Mari's bed, stretching out on her back.
Mari shrugs. “Doesn’t it remind you of Puppy Boy, in a way? Curled up in his Eva, just a bunch of thoughts and rambling ideas? Unsure of what is reality?” She wasn't sure why she chooses any of the books she reads, really, just a compulsion, mostly. Just a feeling that if she isn't piloting, she needs to actively be taking in information. But something in the sync had messed with her ability process language, at least according to Dr. Akagi, and Asuka, perhaps out of guilt had offered to "read a book or two because I can't sleep anyways."
There's a knock on the door and Asuka jumps up, her bored expression from a moment ago all vivacity once she opens the door. “Kaji-san!” she greets, ushering him inside as if this was her own room.
“Yo,” Mari adds coolly. It’s hard to do anything, lately, let alone stand up, so she hopes Kaji will give her a pass.
“Heard the sync test with Unit-08 went worse than expected,” he says, settling into the only chair in the room as Asuka comes back to the foot of the bed, legs now swinging off the edge.
She knows what he is really saying. Will you be ready when it is time to stand and fight? “Au contraire, the sync was excellent!” she boasts. “Too excellent, perhaps.”
“Your sync was great but what good is that if you can't even move the Eva?” Asuka asks. "As usual, I'm the only reliable one around here."
“I can do it," she says. "Unit-05 was jerry-rigged together, and Unit-02 was made for Asuka. This was my first time in an Eva just for me. I was just… unprepared."
She doesn't know if Asuka knows the Secret of the Evas. She doesn't know if Kaji knows everything, though even if he did, how does she explain what it is to understand apotheosis, to harness such power with such little payment? Her taste? Easy. The written word, harder to swallow, but a worthy cost. She is careful with her words to them.
"Ritsuko says you can try again tomorrow," he offers.
Her muscles still burn. Her brain is still foggy. She is ready this time, prepared to face herself.
===============================================================================
She has her chance to redeem herself sooner than she anticipates, as the Eleventh Angel attacks HQ in the early hours of the next morning. A part of her wonders what's even left to defend, but Misato answers for her, her voice steady and commanding into the comms of Unit-02 and Unit-08. "Protect Unit-01 and Central Dogma at all costs. Do not let that thing near Lilith!"
Mari can practically hear Asuka rolling her eyes. "We know, we know," she quips back. "Four-eyes, you protect the nepo baby, I'll make sure it can't get to Central Dogma."
"Roger, Princess. I should still have a shot if it comes around that way."
As the plug is fully inserted and the LCL fills the chamber, the sensation begins again, but she is ready for it, ready for the assault on her mind. She accepts the soul reaching out to her - there is no other way to sync, after all - but she does not dive in.
She might be a clone, but she is herself. She has lived her own, separate life, for better or for worse. She does not know life before the Second Impact, not really -her eyes have never seen a forest of trees, and her skin has never felt the bite of winter. Melding with the Eva is the illusion of completeness. Her memories of Rei are not the same as her original knowing Yui.
She marches out in the Eva to Unit-01, now surrounded by Angel-Sealing Hex Pillars, and who remains impaled by the spear. It is disconcerting, to say the least, so know that Shinji is in there, or some remnant of him is, but there's no time to dwell on this, as the Eleventh Angel is approaching them quickly.
It is large, bigger than an Evangelion, some sort of floating torus with several ribbon-like arms with razor-sharp protrusions on the ends.
It seems to consider Unit-01 before continuing on towards the Geofront, and Mari settles in, trying to get a good shot with her rifle. She hears Ritsuko on the comms. "It's prioritizing Lilith over the spear. We must stop it."
"I know, I know," Asuka says, as if this was a routine chore and not a deadly mission. "Any time now, four-eyes," she adds. "I need the core exposed."
"Your wish is my command, your Highness."
Mari takes a deep breath and she is back, in the lush greenery, in the organic, in the blue, clean stream. Unit-08 is fascinating, a labyrinth of secrets it will take her a lifetime to unravel, but for now she sinks deeper in order to focus. Her plug descends a bit, just enough to make Control nervous, but any concern is balanced by her increased sync rate. She aims the rifle, not through the noise of the real world but through the branches of the quiet trees in the world of her Eva, takes a deep breath, and fires.
The shot is perfect and strikes the Angel right where she aimed, on the inner section of its donut-like shape. It unravels into a large plane, upon which she sees it - the red, glowing core, before the mirrored panels all turn over, glistening in the sun, and it reappears in a new spot. An annoying trick, for certain, but she has faith in Asuka.
"Get- over- here- bastard!" Asuka shouts, each syllable a grunt as she thrusts the prog knife at the Angel. There is one, terrible moment as the arms of the Angel drop into Unit-02, but Asuka impales it the next moment and the battle is won. Unit-02 falls back.
"You OK, your Highness?" She wants to lighten the situation with a joke, tell Asuka she needs to watch for those arms, but she thinks of the first time she saw Asuka, laying motionless after an Angel attack, and holds back.
"Just fine," Asuka says, and Mari can tell she is fine, just in a lot of discomfort. "Gotta stay healthy, I'm the only reliable one around here."
==================================================================================
Fuyustuki finds her as she’s rushing to get to the cages during the insurrection, and it’s the first time he’s spoken to her since she’s joined NERV. She wonders why now, why he’s waited so long to even acknowledge her, but then she wonders - albeit too late - if he’s just there to shoot her in the head before she can pilot.
“Professor,” she says, trying to keep her normal levity in her voice, despite the gunfire she can hear echoing throughout the corridors, “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Indeed,” he replies, as if this was actually a chance meeting. She can tell he will not let her pass until she hears him out. Or well, she supposes she could try, but she assumes there is a sniper somewhere. “If you are heading to the Evangelion, remember,” he intones, “The rebels do not have your best interests in mind.”
“And you and Gendo do?” she laughs. It's funny to use his first name, when her only familiarity is through memories gifted to her. But it’s her own small rebellion, she supposes.
“Of course not. But I assume you’re seeking your own self interest.” Fuyutsuki’s posture is straight and his voice is as quiet and steady as ever, as if he were speaking to her as student and professor in the corridor of his university and not in a battlefield.
“What is there for me in NERV anymore?” she asks, her gaze moving past him towards the cages. Command will be expecting her by now.
Fuyutsuki sighs. “Knowledge, mostly. All of our research, better technology, understanding the true nature of SEELE and the mysteries of the Eva.”
She knows what he means. She doesn’t have to help them. She could come as a spy, or a whistleblower, but he wants her with them now, at this moment. She pushes this offer away before it even has a chance to settle. She knows enough, thanks to her original’s data transfer. Staying with Fuyutsuki and Gendo would just be torture in exchange for a small chance for more information.
“And we have captured Kaji Ryoji,” Fuyutsuki finishes.
This, on the other hand, stills her for a moment. She knows Kaji will die before he lets himself get captured alive, and that Fuyutsuki is likely just bluffing, but still, it’s Kaji. The one person who got her this far, the one person she felt was like a kindred spirit. She likes to believe, had their roles been reversed, he would come for her.
But she moves past Fuyutsuki without a reply, gets in Unit-08, and defends the newly formed WILLE.
===============================================================================
She wonders how to move past it, how to keep going. The true end to the Near-Third Impact feels like a dividing line between Before and After, like she suddenly doesn't know what's to come. She's still holding her cards, but she can't read them.
WILLE has launched and extricated itself from NERV. She and Asuka are the pilots WILLE has retained - Rei, at least one of the originals, and Kaworu are with NERV. She is not sure Kaworu's intentions, exactly, but she is at ease that Kaji trusted him, at least. Misato is the commander now, but that is about all that is familiar. They had to leave headquarters, of course, after everything that had happened, just when Mari had gotten used to Tokyo-3 and the Geofront. It was also strange to see Misato without Unit-01 or Shinji, but NERV had apparently predicted Misato's interest in them, and hid them away.
Everything that once was is changed, and Asuka remains the only constant in her life. Even Kaji, who was there before she knew Asuka, is-
"Makinami-san, are you even trying?"
She isn't, she knows it. She never tries in the test plugs, but after her initial failure she had been able to get some positive reads. Today, however, absolutely nothing. She's sure it would be the same in an Eva, though. Fortunately, Ritsuko is focused on Asuka's numbers, and Misato is busy with something else. They've just got the Wunder operational, though she's only a naval craft currently. There's always someone or something that needs Misato's attention.
Soon enough, they are ejected from the test plugs, sent to shower off the muck of the LCL. But Ritsuko is waiting for her before she can walk back to her room, and leads her back to the medical bay.
Ritsuko has cut her hair, now that she’s joined WILLE. Mari wasn’t sure that she would join at all, to be honest, but she’s relieved that the doctor came along. Although she wasn't paying attention before, to Mari, Ritsuko’s haircut makes it obvious what has happened. It makes her ill to think about the doctor and Gendo in such a way…
"What was that? I know you can sync." Ritsuko rounds on her as soon as the door is shut, her voice low and clipped. It's an unexpected barrage.
It's enough for Mari to maintain a more serious tone, at least this once. "Sorry, I wasn't focused. Just thinking about everything that happened…"
"You were thinking about Kaji." She says this as a statement, not a question, and if Mari were less skilled at stealth, she might have blushed.
It takes Mari a minute to realize Ritsuko is looking out for her best friend. The third monitor over Ritsuko's desk had been pulled up to some prenatal image when she entered, now that she thought about it. "They're having a child."
"Does that make you jealous?"
She wants to laugh with how absolutely off the mark Ritsuko is, with how strange her question sounds, but there is no way to convey that. She cannot imagine intimacy with a person who does not understand what it means to touch the divine, to bear the sin of godslaughter. She cannot imagine carrying a child in her cursed body which does not age, which does not change, which is itself a perfect replica of someone else's genome. It's laughable, absurd.
But Ritsuko cannot know this. Ritsuko's perceptions are warped from knowing Gendo, from vying for scraps of his affection, and seeing Kaji and Misato from the outside looking in. So she gets up to leave, but not before shooting back. "No. You?"
================================================================================
She sees Fuyutsuki in the window of an abandoned building through the scope of her sniper rifle after battling several Mark.04s. It’s six months after declaring themselves as WILLE, three months since Kaji died. She isn’t sure what compels her to clamber up the building, isn’t sure it will even support her weight in Unit-08. But it does, and she studies him in a way she didn't get to when he accosted her during the insurrection. She sees the age that has colored his hair and drawn lines on his face, and the way his tall body seems to sag with the guilt of his sins in a way Gendo's never will. Growing old is a privilege, they say.
Iscariot, he named her original, back when they were both out to expose the lies of Human Instrumentality. A joke, a code name. Now he was furthering Instrumentality as if it was a just cause, and she was inside a cyborg with a soul lashed to it, powerful enough to smash him under a single finger.
Fuyutsuki is small and old and weary, as if he knows he made a fatal mistake dozens of moves back but he needs to see the game through. But Mari’s heart aches, in a petty, childish way. It’s Gendo, she wants to cry. Why would you pick him over me? But it was never about him, or her, at all. It was always about Yui, in the end.
Does that make you jealous?
She remembers he had a codename too, back when they had to send encrypted mail and still had hope of exposing everything.
Et tu, Brute?
===============================================================================
The next time she sees Ritsuko, she's not smoking. The amount Ritsuko smokes is one of those things that is only apparent in its absence, the empty ashtray, the lack of a permeating smell of smoke in her lab. This, of all things, reminds her that Misato just had her child, a baby boy named Kaji Ryoji.
Misato went ahead of the others to a small village in the countryside, somewhere survivors of Tokyo-3 had gathered, and the rest of them were to follow once she and Asuka had gathered some necessary supplies. She hoped everyone survived that long with the tiny Anti-L System they had sent Misato with.
"Overlapping?" Ristuko asks. Her fingers twitch, and Mari wonders why she doesn't smoke now that Misato has left the ship. The negative part of her mind thinks there's no way they'll live long enough to see the long term negative effects of smoking. Perhaps that's the joke Kaji was making when he offered her a cigarette at 14.
She nods. "Yeah, piloting two Evangelions at once."
Her face is strange for a moment, as if Mari said something she shouldn't have. "One pilot and two Evas?"
"Yes, is that strange?" Mari knows it's strange. She knows she's the only pilot who would think to ask for such a thing, but they both know what she's really asking. Why did you ask that clarifying question?
Ristuko had been standing, leaning against a metal table in her lab, but now she sits back down. She leans in close to Mari, and speaks quietly, despite their constant patrolling for bugs. "One of our spies reported that Gendo is looking to create one Evangelion controlled by two pilots," she says.
She immediately wonders who the spy is, but she can only think of one person: Nagisa Kaworu. Then she wonders where Gendo is going to get two pilots, but she remembers Karowu's impressive sync tests, and the Rei clones. "What? Why?"
Ritsuko shrugs. "No idea. Why have some people looking into it. What you want… is it even possible?"
"I'm sure it is, theoretically possible, to combine them." Now, Mari leans close. "The hard part is layering that many souls inside one pilot and maintaining humanity."
Ritsuko is quiet for a moment, the secret of the Evas sitting between them like a live bomb.
Mari had long since accepted the burden of her cursed existence, long since understood she was no longer the Same as the Lilin around her. Did that make her a god or a devil or a beast, she could not be sure, but she was both more broken and more encompassing than she had ever been before. After the challenge of syncing with Unit-08, she felt adding an additional soul would not be a problem. She would lose something, certainly, but to have two Evas - three Evas? - at once, she was ready to make that deal.
===============================================================================
Asuka can’t sleep - Mari learns this fairly quickly after working with her at WILLE. There is always a payment, their own bodies rended somehow when accommodating a second soul. For Asuka, this seems to be the ability to turn off, and Mari will find her wandering the halls at all hours, or just sitting in the locker room much too early for training, or occasionally in Mari’s own room, browsing her collection of “dumb books” for lack of something better to do.
Perhaps it is fatigue that makes Asuka snappy and irritable. Perhaps it is just who Asuka is. Either way, Mari finds herself spending more and more time with the other pilot, perhaps because now that Kaji is gone, Asuka is one of the only people who understands a bit of what is happening to her.
“Why do you pilot your Eva?”
Asuka is nosy, always asking direct questions Mari would find ways to subtly lead into. Asuka stands now at Mari’s bookshelf, thumb between two tomes and eyes on Mari as if this was a simple enough question to answer. Mari can tell she will not be able to joke her way out of this one.
Because there's still trees in this world, and cats and a watermelon patch. There's still soil and grass and… books, “There's still so many books to read,” she answers.
Asuka cracks the barest hint of a smile and turns back to the shelf. “That sounds like you, nerd.”
====================================================================================
Perhaps her relief at Ritsuko choosing WILLE makes Mari a little more forthcoming with the doctor at her next exam, when Ritsuko wants to know who she is and what she knows. She’s sure Gendo never gave the doctor actual answers. They're at a makeshift clinic in the village Misato scouted out, and they are alone, for now, but once the clinic opens for the day, Ritsuko and her volunteers from the village will have nonstop ailments to treat until close.
“I’m not really her,” Mari says, unprompted. This seems to surprise Ritsuko.
Ritsuko takes her in, obviously having thought their conversation ended when the medical exam was finished. She doesn’t reply but she waits, listening. She looks tired, older than just weeks ago on the Wunder. They all do.
“I’m not the scientist who knew Gendo and Yui, and I am not Fuyutsuki’s student, I am a clone.”
“The first one.”
Mari shrugs. She isn’t sure if she was really the first, but she knows what Ritsuko means. Before the Shikinami series and the Ayanami series. “As far as I know, I was the prototype, there was only one ‘Makinami’. It’s also why I’m a bit older than Ayanami-san and Shikinami-san.”
“But twenty years isn’t enough time for you to know the things you know. It isn’t time to-”
“I received a data transfer from my original that she made before she…” Mari looks away. It wasn’t like she was allowed to see her original very much, wasn’t like she would call her a parent, teacher, mentor. The loss wasn’t emotional for her - it was the gain. The loss of innocence. The taking on of more than 30 years of someone else’s memories into a 14-year-old’s mind. “That’s why I don’t think it much matters that I’m not her in most people’s eyes. Fuyutsuki and Gendo don’t seem to think there’s a difference.”
She sees it, the almost imperceptible flinch at the mention of Gendo’s name. “No, I suppose not,” Ritsuko agrees.
===============================================================================
Kensuke and Toji live in the village, as well as the class rep from the school Shinji, Asuka, and Rei used to attend. Asuka doesn't much care to see them, but they do want to see her. It's only then, seeing them all together, that Mari can see the time that has passed. They all look like young university students, and Asuka looks like… Asuka.
And even though Asuka resists their invites, she can't downright reject them every time, so she ends up at one of their houses for dinner at least once a week, and the others join. Mari, of course, is left on call on the Wunder, and while she doesn't particularly want to spend time with Toji or Kensuke, she does like spending time with Asuka.
Even Ritsuko and Misato go out together now, since they're reunited, so as she is on standby in the Wunder, she wanders to the bridge, where Maya is on duty monitoring the radar. "Ah! Makinami-san, you surprised me," Maya says, sitting up a little straighter.
"It's alright," Mari assures her. "Just wanted to see if you wanted my dessert." She did eat her dinner in the cafeteria as Asuka had berated her, 'You can't survive on those disgusting ration bars', but dessert with no flavor was just cruel. Besides, Maya had a known sweet tooth.
"Oh! Are those actual pineapples? I love being back on land!" Maya took the dessert and ate it with pleasure, her eyes darting back to the radar readouts every few seconds. "So what brings you up here?"
Mari shrugs. To be honest, she doesn't really have a good reason, she just doesn't like being in her room alone where reading takes exhaustive effort and Asuka is gone, and now Kaji is dead and Kaworu and Rei are on the other side. "Asuka is with her school friends," she says, in a voice that is childish to even her. She would never let anyone but a near-stranger like Maya hear such a thing, but she is tired of being on the Wunder, tired of her brain being scrambled and her mouth being numb, tired of being fun and happy and endlessly light all the time when she was really a jealous god who was never allowed to be a child.
This seems to give Maya pause, and she holds the fork just above the cake. And Mari is filled with shame for a moment as she realizes Maya isn't a stranger, Maya reads her numbers every time she is in an Eva, she watches her on dozens of screens every time she runs tests or fights. She knows Mari intimately, just in a different way. "So is Ritsuko," Maya says after a moment, leaning her head towards Mari with a wistful, knowing smile.
==================================================================================
Asuka's body doesn't age, but she doesn't sleep either. Slowly, the distance between them lessens, whether it's from the the fact that they spend countless hours training and in their off time together, or because they've had each others' backs in literal life threatening situations.
It's hard to keep track of time, but after months? Years? They leave the little village where they established KREDIT and are back on the sea, and it feels good to be doing something even if it was nice to play house for a while. Not that she and Asuka socialized much with the villagers.
Unlike Asuka, Mari needs to sleep, and she still needs to eat, despite the lack of pleasure it brings her. Asuka tosses a ration bar at her when she wakes. She chews on the empty flavor and watches as Asuka taps on the controls of her handheld game, her feet swinging at off the end of Mari's bed. The Wunder rocks with the distinct feeling of the open sea. "You're on lookout tonight."
Lookout duty is a deceptive name. It just means being tethered to the outside of the Wunder in the Eva, for hours at a time, in the dead of night. The control room will scan for any threats, but having someone already suited up and ready to apprehend anything incoming will save them precious time, and might save the ship, if there were to be an attack. Mostly, though, it was just biding her time inside the Eva.
So she sits inside the plug, lungs filled with LCL as the rain lashes across the ship, and also, of course, at Unit-08. It's the exact kind of night Gendo would use for an attack, with the low visibility and poor weather conditions, so she understands why she's out there, but there's not much to do, so she sinks back into the psyche of Unit-08 to pass the time. She also mutes her comms for a bit of privacy.
By this point, command is used to her plug depth slipping negative and is content to sit by and monitor her numbers, and she's sure they're not complaining about not having to hear her near-constant humming. But it's a thunderstorm inside of Unit-08 tonight, as well, the lush greenery inside of her original's soul replaced with a monsoon, and standing in the middle of it is neither Yui or Rei, but rather Asuka.
This dream Asuka is soaked, her hair heavy sheets around her face like it is just after they emerge from LCL in the Evas, but she's wearing the casual pajamas set she preferred to wear when relaxing in Mari's room in off duty hours. Thunder rolls ominously as Mari steps closer, and lightning strikes the ground just beside her, residual shocks running through her, electrifying her nerves, and then she understands.
Unit-08 is conflicted because her original's love was for Yui, and so her friendship with Rei was to be expected. But Asuka… Asuka was different, loving Asuka was proof that they were not the same - that Mari holding memories of her original could only connect them so much - she still had her own soul.
It's hard now to focus on this entirely as the scene has become entirely erotic. Asuka's pajama's are soaked to her body with the rain, and the adrenaline from the near-lightning strike has made Mari decidedly aroused. She can't move, she can't touch, neither Asuka or herself, but it doesn't matter. She can feel herself growing closer to release, the tension and the vision are enough. And then there is another strike of lightning - either real or in Unit-08 she cannot be sure - and she is pushed past the precipice, gulping in lungfuls of LCL as her vision is white for a moment.
The storm clears and she is back in the cockpit of Unit-08, the night outside still black, but the rain lessened a bit. She laughs a bit at the fact that she's just come inside the Evangelion, the sheer wrongness and rightness of it competing in her mind. It doesn't really matter, she supposes. Everything in her life was decidedly gray now.
=================================================================================
Mari avoids Asuka for a few days after the euphoria within Unit-08. She's confused, not about Asuka, but about herself. She has never had classmates, never had a crush, never had a girlfriend, of course. She has observed relationships in others, naturally, just as she observed Gendo's plans for world domination or the ways to increase her power while piloting an Eva. It was impossible to miss.
But her own sexuality was… well, she wasn't aware of it, really, except for rare instances that it was elicited and she remembered she was more than just a pilot. Her entire life was spent ascending to play the Demiurge to Gendo's Supreme Being, a role that was much more important than well, human intimacy.
But was it? She wonders, as she passes the lab. Misato and Ritsuko are inside the glass, speaking so closely their foreheads are nearly touching. If Gendo's goal was transcending, surpassing humanity until all traces of the organic, of sin, of individual life was eliminated, Mari's was to mix the human and the divine. Why live if she couldn't see babies born and lovers meet and hearts broken and cherry blossoms bloom and leaves fall and her own stuttering efforts to try to connect to the one person who might understand her?
She had watched the way Asuka flirted with Kaji, and the way Rei sacrificed her life for Shinji, and thought herself defective, but perhaps she just never gave herself the chance, perhaps she literally needed to get shocked into realization.
And it's easy to return to training, easy to pick up the light-hearted banter with Asuka that she's been maintaining for years now, and Unit-08 is calm again as well. She is not ready to act yet, but she's come to terms with her feelings.
===============================================================================
It's routine, now, the way they live. Mari sleeps, Asuka plays her game, they eat, they train. They fight whatever NERV sends at them. They gather supplies for the village and send them along. They work to get the Wunder airborne. Years pass, and everyone around them ages, though their own bodies are unchanging.
Except the hair. Asuka sits on the chair of the deck of the Wunder, reading aloud, while Mari cuts her hair, a cigarette stolen from Ritsuko dangling from her mouth. Ritsuko was back to nearly chain smoking, and certainly wouldn't notice one missing, and no one was going to fault Mari the small vice.
"I feel like we just cut it," Asuka complains, closing the book for a break. The sun is shining, and it's a rare beautiful day on the open sea.
"That was months ago, back when we last fought near Osaka."
"Osaka was months ago?"
Mari nods, though she knows Asuka can't see. She snips a few more strands off and lets them go in the breeze where they're carried off to sea. "How's your eye been, Princess?"
Asuka shrugs, but gently, so as not to bob her head. "Same as usual. The runes are holding. Keep the bangs over it, though."
"You got it."
"Makinami-san, put that out!" Misato calls as she approaches them.
"Oh lay off, Misato, let her have a treat. She saved your butt last week," Asuka shoots back.
Mari doesn't comment, but she also continues smoking. She knows Asuka isn't much for affection, at least not in public, but that was about as romantic a gesture as Asuka was liable to show. Misato seems to know it too, from the small smile she shows, before she drops the subject. "I didn't come here to tell you not to smoke. I came to tell you about a special mission we need to brief you on later today. When you're finished, come to the bridge."
"What's going on?" she asks.
Misato steps a little closer, even though they're alone on the open sea. "We're going to retrieve Unit-01 from orbit."
====================================================================================
After being briefed on the plan to retrieve Unit-01, she is tense, but pleased at least that they are moving forward. But the stress gives way to exhaustion, and she falls into a dreamless sleep soon enough. To Mari's surprise, she wakes up to Asuka with her arms around her, laying against her chest. The book Asuka had been reading to Mari before bed is on the other side of them, now abandoned, and it looks as though even sleepless Asuka had been laying with her eyes shut, a rare moment of relaxation.
"Comfortable?" she asks, trying not to raise Asuka's defensiveness, though she knows it's an impossible ask.
As if on cue, she feels Asuka stiffen, though she doesn't sit up. Her arms stay around Mari, even, and Mari takes the opportunity to pull Asuka in closer until Asuka bristles like a cat. "You know you're always welcome here, Princess."
"I was just making sure your heart was still beating. You sleep like you're dead, Four Eyes," Asuka shoots back.
Mari smiles. "By all means, please make sure I stay alive, I think I have another hour of sleep left in me."
"Mein Gott, you're the laziest woman," Asuka quips, but she does settle back down, her fingers toying idly with Mari's loose hair.
As Mari drifts off, she wonders if this is it, if her feelings for Asuka will be the cost of overlapping the Evas. She knows she can't know before she accepts the bargain, but even so, she knows this is it - her most valued possession. Still, she would agree - the price is not too high. Their work is too important for one single relationship to stop them. It's the lesson Shinji did not understand, and likely would never understand. She supposes that is what Gendo and Fuyutsuki are after, all along as well. Like father, like son.
Laying here now, with Asuka settled beside her, it does give her pause. She does understand the temptation to unmake the world for one woman. She knows they will not have the chance to do so - that at best they will get to stop the unmaking of the world due to another man's hubris - so she must do what everyone else does - try her best with the finite time presented to her.
"Guess we're going to space," she murmurs, sleep threatening to overtake her again.
"You better not mess up this mission," Asuka chastises, but her fingers are stroking gently through Mari's hair.
"I bet we can see the moon up close. Romantic."
She feels it, the faintest kiss on her temple as Asuka settles back down. "Sure. Go to sleep."