FALL OF EVA - Page 6 (Shinji) by ProfessorDoctorC on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

_Full StoryI feel parts of this will be autobiographical no matter what, so the question you should ask is which parts. When Asuka barges into the door i imagine that's a rude thing to in any culture, but i'm sure in Japan there is some specific set of actions one should do to be polite when entering someone else's home. I knowthat the formula for returning home is "tadaima" and in Eva that's used pretty often. Depicting or ignoring little pleasnatries like that i think can serve to create a lot of connections and subtle cues about character's mood, status and relations to one another. The problem with that is that they change a lot across cultures and i'm an Italian writing about a Japanese series in English to an international audience.
October 8th 2018 - 18 years and 35 days after Second Impact
There has been an emergency in the Purification Project.
We will be away for a few days.
If the emergency sirens go off, don't go to the evacuation point. Take this security card to the LCL plant and you will be admitted into the Pyramid.

Shinji reread the note left on the kitchen table. It wasn't the first time his parents had to leave the house to attend to some urgent business, but there was an odd, impersonal feeling to that note. Almost like a military order.
And why would he have to go to the LCl plant if he heard the alarm sirens? he always figured that if there was a source of danger in the Geofront it was the LCL plant itself, the core of the Purification effort in the area. He always thought that the obsessive level of attention the schools dedicated to teaching evacuation and safety procedures was in prepartion of a chemical spill from the high-tech facilities needed to convert LCL into water. Walking right to the Pyramid itself seemed like running right into the lion's den.
He was distracted from his thought by a loud knocking at the apartment door. Before opening he knew it was Asuka - as aslways she was less knocking and more trying to bash the door.
He opened to see her wearing a tracksuit and carrying a huge duffel bag. She barged in immediately, pushing him aside.
"So your parents had to leave too, right?" She asked, as she dropped her bag on the floor and threw herself on the sofa.
"Yeah... do you know what happened?"
"No idea. But my mother wrote that the whole team is going to be busy for days with this crisis."
"So..."
"So i decided in the meantime we can live together."
He was caught off guard. It took him a little lime to even process what she had said.
"Together?"
"Yeah. I mean, you have a lot of room here, right? I'd rather not be... i mean, i just don't want to cook. So you can take care of that."
He bit his lip. This was something he had never really considered- living with Asuka.
Actually, hw thought, they pretty much alrady lived together. Their homes were so close to each other, their parents worked together, they attended the same schools...
Back in middle school everyone had taken up calling them husband and wife, and no matter how mad she had been about that they didn't stop for years. Shinji didn't know how to feel about that. He never knew how to feel about her.
They weren't dating, not reallty.
He didn't even want to date her, did he?
Did he even like her?
If he didn't, why would he still be spending so much time with her?
In a way, she was a status symbol.
There were guys who had trouble ever getting a girl to pay attention to them, and he had a girl who spent almost all of her time with him.
An attractive girl.
And she had been handed to him on a silver platter.
Maybe that's why he still hung around her, because he didn't want to throw away such a precious gift.
Or maybe he just never had the strenght to walk away from her.
He never even had the strenght to imagine what that would have been like.
Right now she was lying on his couch, idly flipping channels on the tv.
"So do you have any snacks lying around?" she asked, without even turning to look at him.
Since the diet had officially ended a couple weeks prior she hadn't missed an opportunity have an extra meal or two, often at Rei's expense. She didn't seem to have gained much despite that.
Or did she...?
Shinji realized that she had to have been holding her belly in when she entered, because her t-shirt was now riding up her belly, which seemed to expand with every breath. As the white fabric left space to more and more pale, freckly skin it became obvious that she had been sucking in a lot of extra fat, and now she seemed relaxed enough to let it hang out.
Maybe that meant she trusted Shinji, since she didn't mind showing something she otherwise kept hidden.
Maybe it meant she really couldn't care less about him.
...