31_days fic: The very beginning of "Under the Winter Moon"
I'm going to have to play catch-up over the next couple of days, as there are two entries I wanted to work on and post, though I'll have to save them for 31_days's Amnesty Day. I've been busy going to the Topsfield Fair with my folks, and also finding other areas to pursue in the quest for the elusive Volume 9.
Title: "The dream of a brightful day in the end"
Day/Theme: Oct 13. This world of dew/ is only a world of dew-/ and yet... oh and yet..
Series: Neon Genesis Evangelion (post End of Evangelion, part of an on-going project)
Character/Pairing: Kozou Fuyutsuki, Shinji Ikari, Asuka Langley Sohryuu OFC
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: At last, the very opening of "Under the Winter Moon" the second part of "Neon Enoch Evangelion", aka the ambitious NGE project! Things should get a little more coherent from here on (Well, as coherent as anything inspired by Evangelion can be...). Chapter title shamelessly stolen from the availible-only-in-Japan PSP game "Evangelion 2: Another Cases".
He awoke to the sounds of wavelets lapping on the shore and the coppery smell of blood in his nostrils. He opened his eyes and sat up, leaning on one elbow as he gazed at the reddish sea just below him.
I must have washed up on the shore and fallen asleep, he thought. He pulled himself onto his knees, drawing in a long breath. He let it out, expecting something to happen... yes, the usual coughing fit that shook him most mornings, the remnant of the respiratory illnesses that had plagued his youth. But it did not come. He gazed into the palms of his hands, turning them over. No change there: the skin on the backs of them just starting to turn thin with age, the veins more visible than ten years before. I haven't changed a hair on the surface, but what about within? he thought.
He stood up, no signs of the stiffness that had started to set into his knees. Perhaps passing through Instrumentality was a way to cleanse the body, but at what cost? he thought.
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he glimpsed a small, slender form, a girl with blue hair and crimson eyes, clad in a blue school pinafore, but when he turned to look at her, the image vanished. Are you still here, keeping watch, Rei? he thought. If you're making sure we don't make the same mistakes again and turn our world into a world of blasted earth and reddish fluid, you can stand down. It won't happen, or at least it won't recur any time soon.
He turned to walk up the sandy slope, but he stopped in his tracks and emitted a loud gasp. The head of the Shekinah, the unholy triune composite of Rei, Adam and Lilith, now turned to stone lay about half a mile ahead, cradled between two hills. Her one remaining eye stared down at him silently, as if in the gentlest yet most searing rebuke imaginable. There's no need to look upon the last of your sons like that: I never intended this horror to happen, or at least, not in so total a loss.
Or, am I projecting my own guilt upon this silent image? he asked himself with a sad smile.
He turned away and walked along the shore, watching and listening for any sign of life. But he heard no movement, no sound, except the roll of the waves below him and the sigh of the lonely wind in his ears. The breeze felt cool on his back; he found, the further he drew from the shore, the cooler it grew. Has the earth cooled off? he thought. Has the world managed to heal the ravages left on the climate, by man's folly when he tampered with beings which he thought he could control?
Up ahead, he caught sight of two small shadows on the shoreline, just out of the reach of the waves. Are they rocks or are they other survivors? he wondered, quickening his pace.
At length, the shadows became two young forms, laying stretched on their backs on the sand, their feet pointed south, their heads north: the pilots of Unit 01 and Unit 02. The boy lay with his face turned to the water, the girl with her chin to the darkening sky. The sympathetic wounds from the Mass Production Units still marred her body: the right arm of her plug suit lay half-torn from her lacerated arm, and from the injuries she had sustained to her left eye, should probably lose the eye. Behind them, someone, probably the boy, had set up a crude cemetary of broken boards plunged into the ground, one knocked down; from a rusty nail sunk into one board hung Major Katsuragi's silver cross, now spattered with blood.
He could not move them, better to let them awaken on their own, but he could not leave them here, either. Miss Sohryuu's injuries had to be treated. He knew there was a small resort town to the north, up a small pass, where he could find the necessary antiseptic and bandages. Drawing in a breath, he arose and leaving the Children behind, he headed north into the town.
Shards of glass and splinters of wood and twisted metal covered the road, but not enough to render it impassible. He found a long stick to push aside the largest pieces. Will anything be left standing? he thought, knowing the blast that had uncovered the GeoFront had scoured the earth, leaving behind the crater which had become the lake of LCL.
He found a few buildings had collapsed, but fortunately a drug store remained standing, its windows cracked but unshattered from the safety mesh embedded into the glass. He tested one door, finding it unlocked, clearly a sign that the shopkeepers had left in a hurry during the evacuation. Letting himself in, he found a box of gauze pads, a box of cotton wool pads, several rolls of bandages and a bottle of peroxide, then headed back to the shore.
The two Children must have fallen into an especially deep sleep: Miss Sohryuu did not even stir the whole time he cleansed and dressed her wounds; the bite of the peroxide alone should have awakened her.
He rose and finding a large rock at some distance from the shore, but close enough that he could keep watch, set his back to it and closed one, allowing himself a moment to rest...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Light... light glinting off water... or was it water? was it dew on the grass? She had not felt such light since she had awakened from Adam's side so many eons before and gazed out over the first sea, condensing as the earth's crust cooled down. Nor had she seen such light since the days when the children of Lilith started to manifest, catching the attention of Shemyaza, which displeased Adam to the point of wrath, when Shemyaza had chosen to assume the form of a Lilim. She remembered that day clearly, but she could not recall what had lead to this place...
The form of a name, her own name returned to her mind. Penemue... The one within... Yes, this name had belonged to the one who had lain hidden with her self the past few months. Another name had veiled this self... a name denoting sweetness and bravery.
She arose to her full height, the light of her soul spread like three pair of wings about her lean form. Her gaze turned about the valley where she stood, looking down past the shattered head of Lilith, to a sea of reddish fluid, the stuff of life on which the fragments of her had floated, once that part of her which had become human had suffered dissolution. Memories of the pain flickered in her minds eye. She gazed down at her self, realizing this was not the form she had had before. She had the rough form of a Lilim, but her shape was taller, leaner, her hands longer, and though she could not see her face, she knew it looked thinner, even viper-like, the face and form she bore as Shemyaza had shown her what form she would need to take in order to mingle with the Lilim. The face and form which she could show only in front of other Grigori. She reached deep into the archives of her mind and searched for the image of her human face. The image fluttered like a torn photograph on a strong wind, but her recall captured it and held it up for her to see. She focused on it and a burning sensation strained at her form, wrenching a cry from her lips as she remolded herself to resemble it.
She let her knees go slack and knelt on the blasted earth at her feet, waiting for the pain to subside. As she waited for it to pass, she let her awareness scan about her.
Down on the shore below her, she sensed the presences of three Lilim... no, three humans, two males and a female, two youngsters and one adult. Something about the older male twigged something in her recall. A name started to take shape in her mind, something about a wintry moon... And she remembered why his image hung her mind's eye, like the moon caught in the bare top branches of a tree: it was for him that she let herself descend into the hell that was Instrumentality, and it was for him that she chose to rise from it again.
She stood up and putting one foot in front of the other, found her way down from the hills, following the sound that only her ears could hear, the sound of his life in the silence around her...
Title: "The dream of a brightful day in the end"
Day/Theme: Oct 13. This world of dew/ is only a world of dew-/ and yet... oh and yet..
Series: Neon Genesis Evangelion (post End of Evangelion, part of an on-going project)
Character/Pairing: Kozou Fuyutsuki, Shinji Ikari, Asuka Langley Sohryuu OFC
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: At last, the very opening of "Under the Winter Moon" the second part of "Neon Enoch Evangelion", aka the ambitious NGE project! Things should get a little more coherent from here on (Well, as coherent as anything inspired by Evangelion can be...). Chapter title shamelessly stolen from the availible-only-in-Japan PSP game "Evangelion 2: Another Cases".
He awoke to the sounds of wavelets lapping on the shore and the coppery smell of blood in his nostrils. He opened his eyes and sat up, leaning on one elbow as he gazed at the reddish sea just below him.
I must have washed up on the shore and fallen asleep, he thought. He pulled himself onto his knees, drawing in a long breath. He let it out, expecting something to happen... yes, the usual coughing fit that shook him most mornings, the remnant of the respiratory illnesses that had plagued his youth. But it did not come. He gazed into the palms of his hands, turning them over. No change there: the skin on the backs of them just starting to turn thin with age, the veins more visible than ten years before. I haven't changed a hair on the surface, but what about within? he thought.
He stood up, no signs of the stiffness that had started to set into his knees. Perhaps passing through Instrumentality was a way to cleanse the body, but at what cost? he thought.
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he glimpsed a small, slender form, a girl with blue hair and crimson eyes, clad in a blue school pinafore, but when he turned to look at her, the image vanished. Are you still here, keeping watch, Rei? he thought. If you're making sure we don't make the same mistakes again and turn our world into a world of blasted earth and reddish fluid, you can stand down. It won't happen, or at least it won't recur any time soon.
He turned to walk up the sandy slope, but he stopped in his tracks and emitted a loud gasp. The head of the Shekinah, the unholy triune composite of Rei, Adam and Lilith, now turned to stone lay about half a mile ahead, cradled between two hills. Her one remaining eye stared down at him silently, as if in the gentlest yet most searing rebuke imaginable. There's no need to look upon the last of your sons like that: I never intended this horror to happen, or at least, not in so total a loss.
Or, am I projecting my own guilt upon this silent image? he asked himself with a sad smile.
He turned away and walked along the shore, watching and listening for any sign of life. But he heard no movement, no sound, except the roll of the waves below him and the sigh of the lonely wind in his ears. The breeze felt cool on his back; he found, the further he drew from the shore, the cooler it grew. Has the earth cooled off? he thought. Has the world managed to heal the ravages left on the climate, by man's folly when he tampered with beings which he thought he could control?
Up ahead, he caught sight of two small shadows on the shoreline, just out of the reach of the waves. Are they rocks or are they other survivors? he wondered, quickening his pace.
At length, the shadows became two young forms, laying stretched on their backs on the sand, their feet pointed south, their heads north: the pilots of Unit 01 and Unit 02. The boy lay with his face turned to the water, the girl with her chin to the darkening sky. The sympathetic wounds from the Mass Production Units still marred her body: the right arm of her plug suit lay half-torn from her lacerated arm, and from the injuries she had sustained to her left eye, should probably lose the eye. Behind them, someone, probably the boy, had set up a crude cemetary of broken boards plunged into the ground, one knocked down; from a rusty nail sunk into one board hung Major Katsuragi's silver cross, now spattered with blood.
He could not move them, better to let them awaken on their own, but he could not leave them here, either. Miss Sohryuu's injuries had to be treated. He knew there was a small resort town to the north, up a small pass, where he could find the necessary antiseptic and bandages. Drawing in a breath, he arose and leaving the Children behind, he headed north into the town.
Shards of glass and splinters of wood and twisted metal covered the road, but not enough to render it impassible. He found a long stick to push aside the largest pieces. Will anything be left standing? he thought, knowing the blast that had uncovered the GeoFront had scoured the earth, leaving behind the crater which had become the lake of LCL.
He found a few buildings had collapsed, but fortunately a drug store remained standing, its windows cracked but unshattered from the safety mesh embedded into the glass. He tested one door, finding it unlocked, clearly a sign that the shopkeepers had left in a hurry during the evacuation. Letting himself in, he found a box of gauze pads, a box of cotton wool pads, several rolls of bandages and a bottle of peroxide, then headed back to the shore.
The two Children must have fallen into an especially deep sleep: Miss Sohryuu did not even stir the whole time he cleansed and dressed her wounds; the bite of the peroxide alone should have awakened her.
He rose and finding a large rock at some distance from the shore, but close enough that he could keep watch, set his back to it and closed one, allowing himself a moment to rest...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Light... light glinting off water... or was it water? was it dew on the grass? She had not felt such light since she had awakened from Adam's side so many eons before and gazed out over the first sea, condensing as the earth's crust cooled down. Nor had she seen such light since the days when the children of Lilith started to manifest, catching the attention of Shemyaza, which displeased Adam to the point of wrath, when Shemyaza had chosen to assume the form of a Lilim. She remembered that day clearly, but she could not recall what had lead to this place...
The form of a name, her own name returned to her mind. Penemue... The one within... Yes, this name had belonged to the one who had lain hidden with her self the past few months. Another name had veiled this self... a name denoting sweetness and bravery.
She arose to her full height, the light of her soul spread like three pair of wings about her lean form. Her gaze turned about the valley where she stood, looking down past the shattered head of Lilith, to a sea of reddish fluid, the stuff of life on which the fragments of her had floated, once that part of her which had become human had suffered dissolution. Memories of the pain flickered in her minds eye. She gazed down at her self, realizing this was not the form she had had before. She had the rough form of a Lilim, but her shape was taller, leaner, her hands longer, and though she could not see her face, she knew it looked thinner, even viper-like, the face and form she bore as Shemyaza had shown her what form she would need to take in order to mingle with the Lilim. The face and form which she could show only in front of other Grigori. She reached deep into the archives of her mind and searched for the image of her human face. The image fluttered like a torn photograph on a strong wind, but her recall captured it and held it up for her to see. She focused on it and a burning sensation strained at her form, wrenching a cry from her lips as she remolded herself to resemble it.
She let her knees go slack and knelt on the blasted earth at her feet, waiting for the pain to subside. As she waited for it to pass, she let her awareness scan about her.
Down on the shore below her, she sensed the presences of three Lilim... no, three humans, two males and a female, two youngsters and one adult. Something about the older male twigged something in her recall. A name started to take shape in her mind, something about a wintry moon... And she remembered why his image hung her mind's eye, like the moon caught in the bare top branches of a tree: it was for him that she let herself descend into the hell that was Instrumentality, and it was for him that she chose to rise from it again.
She stood up and putting one foot in front of the other, found her way down from the hills, following the sound that only her ears could hear, the sound of his life in the silence around her...