School was a relatively normal affair. Or at least, it would have been, had Shinji not been constantly glancing over his shoulder, mumbling something like 'He's still standing there...' over and over again. Asuka stared at the boy's back in front of her, wondering if he had finally snapped. He had screamed most of their neighborhood awake earlier, not to mention the unexplained 'nightmare' he'd had and the way he had...
Asuka blushed furiously as she remembered how tightly Shinji had been holding her earlier. She would have preferred a slightly more romantic situation, but her curiosity was starting to get the better of her. Why had he been crying? Why had he been acting like she had been killed or something?
By the window, Rei Ayanami was having similar thoughts, albeit with some jealousy of not having received a hug herself. Spinning her lead pencil in her hand, her crimson eyes glared at Shinji's back.
There! He did it again. Looking over his shoulder, not at her, but at something in the back of the class, his eyes quivering as they found what they were looking for. Those same eyes quickly darted towards her, meeting her own, before quickly turning back to his desk, back hunched, sweating profusely.
What on Earth had Shinji Ikari so spooked?
Not being able to bear it any longer, both Rei and Asuka had frogmarched Shinji to the roof as soon as the lunch break bell had tolled, with Mana, Toji, Kensuke and Hikari following suit.
"Shin-man, you feeling okay?" Toji, ever-so-delicate in these situations, opened the interrogation as directly as possible. But to no avail.
""I'm fine, I'm okay, I'm not crazy."
"Shinji, no one's calling you crazy. Yet." Asuka was really beginning to consider calling the mad scientists Shinji had for parents, but felt it was best to wait just a little longer before calling in Shinji's funny farm family. The feeling was replaced with the idea that she should call in the big guns with all haste when she caught him looking at what must have been a strange looking patch of oxygen floating over her shoulder.
"Shinji, what in god's name are you looking at?" She groaned as she physically turned around to see what it was. But all she could see was the remainder of the roof, overlooking the school sport's field.
"Wait a minute..." She squinted. Something was... bending light? Or at least, that was the only way she could accurately describe it. Something was weird with the air in the direction Shinji was looking at. Was she going crazy too?
She was suddenly distracted by Rei standing up violently behind her. Her bracelet arm was outreached and pointing to the same patch of weirdness Asuka had been looking at.
"WHO ARE YOU?! SHOW YOURSELF!" Everyone in the surrounding area jumped at Rei's sudden outburst. Hikari, who hadn't yet noticed the oddity in the air around them, giggled slightly.
"Rei, not you too. There's nobody the-..." Hikari's voice caught in her throat as she turned to face what everyone else was suddenly looking at.
And saw Ghost Shinji, looking as maniacal as ever, grinning to the crowd of astounded teenagers. Save regular Shinji, who looked ready to climb over the roof's fencing and launch himself into oblivion.
"What..." Asuka began.
"...the actual..." Toji continued.
"...fuck." Rei finished, eyes wide in shock. Asuka tore her eyes away from the spectral version of Shinji for a moment to glare at the blunette.
"Since when did you learn how to curse?"
"I must admit, I'm just as surprised." Shinji's ghostly twin laughed, the same mirthless and almost evil laugh the original had heard before. "The Ayanami in my world would have never done something like that."
"Your world?" Asuka whispered back, not sure she had understood what she had just heard. The Shinji she was now describing as Shadow Shinji just laughed at her words, raising a hand.
"NO, DON'T DO IT!" Shinji screamed, standing up, attempting to run towards the ghost.
But he never made it. Shadow Shinji had changed their world into the one from his dream, and once again the world was bathed in a crimson sky and destroyed remnants of what had once been society.
"I told you before." Shinji faced his shadow, whose grin had turned into a deadly serious expression. "You are my only hope. Save this world."
"And I still don't have a clue how!" Shinji whimpered as he took a step back.
"And that's why I have brought your friends along. A certain someone once told me..." Shadow Shinji glanced over at Rei. "You are not alone."
---
"So you're telling me..." Asuka repeated for the umpteenth time. "That this is something like a parallel world to our own."
"With Evangelions..." Mana, her eyes stretched open wide, still hadn't recovered from the fact that her childhood-induced story about giant robots fighting weird aliens was a reality in this world.
"And that everyone is dead, except they're all floating in that ball of souls..." Asuka continued, pointing towards the sky, where there was indeed an ethereal sphere the size of a huge moon swirling not far from the planet's surface.
"To top it all off, we're going to visit my corpse, after having just seen Ayanami's..." Asuka looked back at Rei with some degree of pity. She looked visibly traumatized and had thrown up outside the 'Entry Plug' after visiting her dead counterpart in this world. It hadn't given Asuka any confidence about how she was going to react herself, and she wasn't sure she really wanted to check out how her bones looked on the inside.
The trip to the remains of the Geofront was equally as spooky, with the whole group silent as they rode the tram to the underground. For his part, Shinji was surprised there actually was still power for them to ride it. The familiar view of Unit 02's rotting corpse was back, a sight he was never going to get used to.
"I still don't understand what you think we can do." Shinji said softly as he gazed over at the dead robot. His eyes briefly drifted over the second Entry Plug, their destination. His shadow smiled grimly.
"You'll see when we get there."
They got there after several more minutes, and found themselves standing outside the Entry Plug. After several more minutes of deep breaths and panic, Asuka finally climbed into the hatch.
An agonizing silence followed. Nobody else had dared go into the plug with her, wanting to respect her time alone with her deceased self. Shinji kept glancing over at his shadow self, who was looking oddly... concentrated on the plug in front of him. As though he was waiting for something.
His patience had paid off. A scream echoed from inside the plug, reverberating through the chilled air of the ruined Geofront.
"ASUKA!" Shinji ran to the plug's hatch, letting himself inside to save her.
What he saw stopped him in his tracks. The Asuka from his world was there, looking horrified as she pointed towards a second Asuka, clad in the crimson Plug Suit bearing Unit 02's insignia. And more importantly...
This Asuka was no longer a corpse. She was a living, breathing, and very pissed Asuka who no longer looked nothing like a skeleton.
The dead had been resurrected.
---
"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING, THIRD CHILD!?"
The newly resurrected Asuka had living Shinji raised in the air by his shirt collar. Struggling for breath was about the best he could do as the raging girl continued to scream bloody murder at him.
"THE WORLD'S DEAD BECAUSE OF YOU!"
The screaming continued, shaking the living Shinji not only physically, but mentally.
"WHY!? WHY DID YOU DO IT!?"
He could hear years of anguish and sorrow from the girl in front of him. Her eyes were wild with fury, and he was starting to worry that this Asuka was genuinely going to kill him.
The rest of the gang piled in to separate the soon-to-be murder attempt, with Toji and Kensuke having to physically restrain the out-of-control redhead. Even with Toji's athletic build, he was still having trouble holding her still.
"Suzuhara!? You're supposed to be dead!" Her eyes bloodshot with fury, her rage quickly began to subside when this world's Asuka took a look around at the people in her vicinity.
"Hikari...?" The class president nodded nervously.
"Aida?" Kensuke also nodded.
"How... are you...?" Raising her hands in front of her, she continued, her voice trembling. "How am I...?"
"You've been resurrected. You are the first to come back."
Rage flashed through her eyes once again as this world's Asuka heard Shinji's voice. But when she turned to face the source, her rage once again vanished when she noticed it came not from the living, but from the ghost.
"What...?" She began, looking between the two Shinji's. "Why are there two of you? And why is one of you... dead?" Her gaze fixated itself on the ghostly Shinji.
"Tell me everything."
---
"So you're telling me..."
Déjà vu hit the group strong as the newly reborn, crimson-clad Asuka repeated for the umpteenth time. "That they're from something like a parallel world to our own?"
"Is that how I honestly sound to other people?" The Asuka wearing her school uniform had her face in her hands as the group continued their trek back to the remains of Unit-00. Rei was glued to Shinji's arm, understandably panicking at the thought of having to go visit her corpse one more time.
The idea was, just as they had done with Asuka, they were going to try and revive the Rei Ayanami from this world. However, according to the semi-living residents of this world, they needed to take utmost caution with this revival.
One wrong move, and they could resurrect a hostile Angel.
The group as a whole were still a little unfamiliar with the concept of what these 'Angels' were, but something that sounded like a godsent alien bent on world destruction didn't sound like something they wanted to awaken anytime soon. Silence fell on the group as they continued walking, well aware that they could be walking towards their own doom.
"And what about you?" The plugsuit-wearing Asuka asked her otherworld counterpart, who looked almost frightened of her destroyed world variant.
"W-what!?"
"I'm asking about your world." The two sides of the mirror had fallen back from the main group and were talking quietly amongst themselves. For her part, the Asuka who was alien to this world was still processing the fact that she was essentially talking to herself, realizing that she had no idea how to talk to a reflection that had clearly seen some traumatic stuff.
"My world? What about it?"
"How are things any different from here?" Her doppelgänger waved her arm around, indicating the destruction around them. "How is your world different from a world that died fighting alien messengers of God?"
It took a while to formulate a response. She had no idea where to begin. How were the two worlds any different? The problem was basically everything was different.
"In my world... For the moment at least, everything is peaceful."
There were no Angels. Evangelions were apparently Mana's childhood-induced recipe for some crazy manga. Their godhand-powered bracelets were a thing, but she had still yet to master how to use it completely.
"The only thing I've had to worry about lately is some clandestine organization that apparently wants to steal the power of the bracelets. We have no idea what they want with them, but apparently you can take over the world or something if you know how to use them..." Asuka said sheepishly. She was almost ashamed at how little she actually knew about what they were up against.
"Who's trying to take them?"
"Uhhh..." What were they called again?
Mana had been a spy for them. Shinji's parents knew about them. It was on the tip of her tongue, but...
"Shinji!" She called out to live version, but both Shinji's turned around.
"What?" They said in unison.
"Uhh, okay so this question is directed to the Shinji with a pulse, but what was the name of that creepy organization that wants to steal the bracelets?"
Shadow Shinji had the audacity to look slightly offended, but the living Shinji just scratched his head. Mana fidgeted next to him, looking awkward as she remembered her previous employers.
"I think..." Shinji concentrated as he thought back to his 'interrogation' of Mana. "Weren't they called..." His eyes lit up as he remembered the elusive name.
"Seele?"
The temperature of the atmosphere dropped rapidly. The second the last syllable left Shinji's mouth, both the Asuka and Shinji from this world looked ready for murder.
"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!? SEELE!?"
"This is bad." Shadow Shinji looked at the living replica's with a deadly serious expression.
"If there's an incarnation of Seele in your world, we need to move fast."
"Seele helped turned this world into the sea of crap it is. I don't care what world you're from, but Seele are bad news." The plugsuit Asuka grabbed the shoulders of her schoolgirl reflection, shaking them violently. "We need to do something to stop this from happening again!"
The group fell silent once more after the outburst over Seele. They had made it out of the Geofront, and were slowly walking over the destruction of Tokyo-3 to where the remains of Unit-00 lay. Along the way, destroyed world's Asuka and Shinji explained the machinations of Seele, Gendo Ikari, the Angels and the Evangelions as briefly as they could.
To those from the peaceful world, it sounded worse than hell on Earth.
The brief history lesson was beginning to conclude when Unit-00 came into view once again. Rei whimpered at the sight of the intimidating Evangelion, clinging at Shinji's arm. He was sure his circulation was going to stop at any second with Rei's iron grip.
The two Asuka's were at the back of the group once again, mumbling about the differences between the two world's.
"Wait, Rei and the idiot are technically engaged!? And that girl... Mana was it? She used to be a spy for Seele, but now work's for Shinji's parents as a bracelet-user and a double-agent to spy on Seele?" Plugsuit Asuka smiled grimly.
"She sounds like Kaji. And you're saying she likes Shinji too?"
"Yup."
"And what about you?" Her plugsuit reflection asked nonchalantly.
"Did your Shinji ever manage to topple the 'impenetrable wall of Jericho'?"
"What in the world are you talking about!?" Asuka hissed at her irritating counterpart. She could hear hints of a sexual innuendo with the 'Jericho' spiel, and god knew her nerves weren't ready to begin thinking of how good Shinji might be in bed, her imagination immediately conjuring a muscular, shirtless Shinji with strong arms that wrapped around her like silk, pressing against her whilst they-
"Oh my god, STOP!" Asuka internally screamed at her wildly out-of-control imagination.
"Do you love him?"
Looking ahead at where the living and Ghost Shinji were, walking towards their depressing destination, Asuka smiled at herself as she found her eyes fixated on the back of living Shinji's head.
"Yeah, I do."
The Asuka of this world smiled too, albeit a smile that looked almost sorrowful, as her line of sight found the back of Shadow Shinji's head.
"That sounds kinda nice."
Unlike when Asuka went to revive her other self, there was no feasible way the traumatized Rei was getting back into the Entry Plug by herself. Shinji went in first, holding Rei's hand. As irritated by the idea as she was, Asuka allowed it to happen, realizing they wouldn't get anywhere otherwise.
Plugsuit Asuka glared angrily as Ghost Shinji, as though he had done something equally offensive. For his part, he just looked fairly confused.
"No no no no..." Rei was wide-eyed in fear, crying behind Shinji as she looked at the skeletal remains of this world's version of herself, looking the same as the day Shinji first laid eyes on the corpse in the fetal position.
"I can't... I can't look at her... No, please, I need to get out of here..."
"It'll be fine Rei." Holding her hand tightly, Shinji silently begged the girl to stop crushing his arm, before he seriously considered amputating it. "I'm right here, it's going to be okay."
Crimson eyes looked up at him fearfully. Rei nodded silently as she raised her bracelet arm, pointing it towards the corpse. Shinji could hear the cerulean blue bracelet rattling with nerves as Rei held it towards her target. Wrapping an arm around her shoulder, Shinji felt the frightened girl calm down a little. Inhaling deeply, Rei held her breath for a moment, before exhaling her nerves, a sliver of determination returning to her eyes.
"Resurrection!"
An eerily green glow surrounded the skeletal form of Rei Ayanami. Bones creaked, organs and skin rapidly regrew, all whilst the skeleton was pulled out of it's fetal position and into a sitting position on the Entry Plug's control seat. It was slightly gruesome to watch, but it was like watching a person melting in reverse. Bright blue hair regrew rapidly, and as a noticeable difference to Shinji, was growing way past Rei's normal hair length. It fell long, way past shoulder-length, and stopped at what he guessed would reach her lower back if she stood up.
The frightened Rei had been watching in terror-stricken awe up until this point, when the skin on her face starting regrowing, and the corpse's eyes popped back into the sockets with sickening, slimy sound. Shinji's ears had started to ring with Rei suddenly screaming at the horrifying image.
But as quickly as it had all started, it was over. A fully-restored, plugsuit-clad Rei Ayanami from the destroyed world was sat in her chair, eyes closed but breathing.
At Rei's scream, the rest of the group had clambered onto the Entry Plug and were now peering into the darkened depths.
"Rei! Are you ok...ay..." Asuka started to shout into the plug, but stopped when she noticed the restored girl in the chair.
"I... think so..." It hadn't been the Rei she was used to talking. The newly resurrected Rei had just awoken, rubbing her head as though some nameless pain was annoying her.
And then she opened her eyes. Everyone present gasped in surprise as they noticed something else different to this version of Rei Ayanami. Her eyes were no longer the penetrating crimson they had been before.
Unit-00's Rei Ayanami, had bright green eyes. Eyes that looked around the plug around her, and in a scared voice, quietly whispered.
"Who are you?"