Kaiju Slaying For Death And Profit Ch 25
Good evening y'all.
Hope you had a good weekend. One that allowed you to rest, recuperate, and gird yourself for the week to come.
So...not the weekend I had.
Not complaining too much, I got to set aside enough time to finish this chapter, I got to rest some. It'll do.
Now! This chapter! It was originally longer, like, a thousand words longer. But upon editing, I realized that it was a thousand meandering words that went nowhere and did nothing but bloat word count, so as much as it pained me, that had to go.
The chapter ended up leaner, but still good, I think.
I will say, most of the time spent on this chapter was spent on the first scene, cause I wanted to get it just right. It's not immediately obvious, but quite a bit is going on in the first scene, so I'm kinda proud of it.
Okay I've waxed poetic enough. Have chapter. Hope you enjoy. If you feel like it, drop me a comment.
=][=
“Hmm? Oh yes…” Said the grey haired kid. “I heard it while walking through the city.”
“Whatever dumb dumb!” I snapped, pointing at his nose. “The important bit is you did it wrong!”
He blinked and looked owlishly at the piano keys. “I could have sworn I recreated the melody without flaw.”
“You did! Dumbass!” I chastised. “But fuck’s sake it was like listening to a recording on the computer! It’s The Ode to Joy! The song literally written to be a celebration of happiness and brotherhood! An expression of hope for a better, more united tomorrow! You can’t just perform it like hitting play on a goddamn recording! Where’s the feeling!? Where’s the passion!? Where is the damn joy!? You are supposed to pour yourself into the piece! To embrace the literal hope for a better tomorrow! What you did is an insult to one of the greatest achievements humanity has managed as a species!”
He blinked several times, having attempted to get a word in edgewise during my rant, but I’d inadvertently ran over him. He opened and closed his mouth several times before stating. “I…I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“Fuck’s sakes!” I snarled and stomped over to the seat. “Move over! I can only do the right hand, so you’ll take care of the left hand bits!”
He didn’t answer, instead looking at me with mild curiosity as I sat down, placed my hand over the keys, and tried to recall how to play the song.
I wasn’t the best at the piano, but I’d picked it back up (or I should say, made use of my Prime’s memories) while on break or at leave from my job on Titan maintenance.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and ran through the song in my head, before starting to play.
I didn’t bob my head back and forth dramatically as I’d seen a number of performers do, merely nodding to the rough beat of the song, flubbing a few keys, but keeping to the spirit of the performance, the song managing to pull a few scraps of genuine joy out of the frozen lump of grit and callus I called a heart.
The red-eyed boy, by contrast, was affably confused. He reached out awkwardly to play the keys, my barrel chest and wide frame all but pushing him to the edge of the seat. His playing was immaculate, he almost managed to match my tempo, but failed as I sped up or slowed down as I tried to remember the next part of the song.
The performance, if you could call it that, was at best bipolar, half a flawless, uncaring repetition. Half flawed, but thoroughly earnest, joyful effort.
Halfway through the song, things changed, his tempo changed, it stopped being a flawless rendition, it finally had soul.
But two thirds of the way through the piece, I realized it had nothing of him. He was just copying me. Every amateur stroke of the key, every bit of emotion he poured into the performance, even the way he hesitated after a mistake and sped up to compensate was a perfect copy of me.
I punched the keys, bringing the song to an unsatisfying dissonant end. “Fuck’s sakes man! Wrong!”
He tilted his head. “In what regard?”
“I told you. You’re supposed to pour yourself into the piece!” I ranted, slamming the keys angrily. “You show respect to the Ode to Joy by sharing your Ode to Joy! Just matching my fuckups doesn’t do that!”
“But why? I followed your lead.” He asked guilelessly.
“You didn’t ‘follow my lead,’ you copied me exactly! Which is literally what I told you not to do!” I snapped back. “I told you to put yourself in the performance! To show me your Ode to Joy! What you did was take my Ode to Joy and parrot it back to me! Only unlike when a parrot does it, it’s neither cute nor impressive!” I pointed at his nose, our close proximity making it so I actually squished his nose with the tip of my finger. “So I’ll say it for the third time, and I hope for your autistic ass that the third time’s the charm, cause if not I’ll get upset. Show me your Ode to Joy!”
I pushed off the seat, giving him the whole piano.
He hesitated for several long seconds and tried a third time. And it was strange, a halfway point between the flawless rendition of the first time he played it, and the amateur hour fuckup that was my own best attempt.
It was the most horrid thing I’d ever heard. It lacked the immaculate recreation of a by-rote rendition, and it was missing the earnest spirit of doing one’s best to do justice to something they lacked the skill to do.
“That’s awful and you should feel bad!” I shouted to be heard over the piano. “Don’t know what your damage is! Don’t care! I’m leaving!”
I turned my back on him and walked away, out of the corner of my eye, it seemed as if the eyes of the archangel in the stained-glass window followed me as I left him behind.
As I stepped outside the church, a tiny but demanding ‘Mew!’ brought my attention to the floor.
There, a brown and black kitten tottered about, looking up at me.
“And don’t you start!” I grumbled at the kitten.
It squeaked another meow.
“Nope, can’t and won’t happen. I broke my arm! Run along now.”
“Mew!”
“I can’t, not again. It’ll never work out between us.”
“Mew!”
“You’re a cat, I’m an asshole, and I don’t wanna be hurt again.”
“Why are you arguing with the cat?” Grey-haired pencil-neck asked, evidently having followed me.
“Cause it’s meowing at me.” I replied.
“Mew!”
I pointed at the tiny feline. “What did I just say?”
“Mew!”
“Why I oughtta!”
“Will you not adopt the cat?” He asked as I shook a fist threateningly at the tiny animal.
“Do I look like a cat person to you?” I said, glaring over my shoulder at him.
“I see.” He said, reaching down to gently pick up the kitten.
Huh, maybe I was wrong about him. He can’t be all that bad if—
The ‘crunch’ of the kitten’s neck being wrung was surprisingly loud in the still air outside the ruins of the church.
I took a deep, centering breath.
“There.” He said, gently laying the cat down.
“Do yourself a favor.” I said, my voice utterly lacking in any kind of emotional intonation. “And grit your teeth.”
“Hmm?” He asked, turning just in time to catch the briefest glimpse of my fist as I drove it into his chin so hard his head whipped to the side, and I scraped the calloused skin off my knuckles on his jawbone.
He fell to the floor like a puppet with cut strings.
Before I could decide how much farther the lesson would continue, the search helicopter finally found me, and a few seconds after that, a whole fire team of SAT rappelled down and did their best to tackle me to the ground ‘for my own safety,’ while one of them radioed back about ‘Assets secured.’
Bright side, considering how different organizations loved to drag their feet even when the city was on fire, I was probably going to get to skip school.
=][=
“Shinji what were you thinking!?”
“Wow Misato, can’t I even get a chance to sit?” I asked with faux offense, taking said seat.
“NO!” She shouted so hard that spittle flew all the way across the desk in her office to spatter on my cheek.
Gross.
“I’ve had my phone blowing up since before my shift even started! We scrambled helicopters, SAT fire teams, emergency responders, and the JSDF! We feared that another group like the Seekers of Revelation had targeted you, that an assassin might have gotten the jump on you! What possessed you to leave your security detail behind!?”
I sniffed. “I wanted some bloody ‘me time.’ And was willing to force the issue.”
Her eye twitched. “You wanted…‘me time.’ This is why you sent several intelligence organizations and the UN leadership into a panic.”
“Yup.”
“Shinji…you are an international asset of extreme importance.” Misato said, her tone that of an adult explaining something simple to a particularly dull child. “One we already almost lost to crazy people that want the world to end, one of whom was in our very staff.”
“Not saying you’re wrong.” I said glibly. “But a guy gets tired of being watched every second of the damn day.”
Her eye twitched more violently, she really should get that looked at, it could be something serious.
“Shinji…”
“Look, I’m just saying. Maybe we could do something other than having several dozen grown-ass men and women spying on me twenty-four-seven? It’s getting on my nerves, and the intrusive thoughts are only gonna get louder.”
Misato took a deep breath, maybe she was getting ready to get a really good shout in?
To my immense surprise and, strangely enough, disappointment, she let it out slowly, then spoke in a measured tone. “I will see…what compromise we can reach on that front, we cannot leave you unguarded, Shinji. You are simply too important. But…I will see what can be done to give you back some of your privacy. Now…Why did you strike the Sixth Children?”
“He picked up a kitten and wrung its neck for no reason.” I said.
She blinked. “He…He killed a cat?”
“A kitten. Yes.” I corrected. “The kitten was minding its own business, meowing at us so we’d give it a treat. He picked it up, wrung its neck, and put it down. So I punched him in the face.”
Misato rubbed her temples. “Shinji…Shinji you should not strike your coworkers.”
“Then he shouldn’t do shit to make his face so utterly punchable.”
Misato sighed again. “Just…Just go. It’s too late to bother sending you to school now, Ritsuko will move up some tests she wanted to run, don’t punch your coworkers in the face.”
“What if they have a knife?” I asked.
Misato pinched the bridge of her nose with her right hand and pointed at the door with her left. “Leave.”
“Okay fine, jeez.”
I stepped outside and ran straight into the cat killer.
“Joy.” I growled, glaring at him.
“Hello.” He said with an utterly genuine seeming smile, but there was something off about it. Something missing. It lacked something small but utterly vital, making a feeling of instinctive revulsion rise up my gorge. “My name is Nagisa Kaworu, and you are Ikari Shinji.”
“Didn’t ask for your name. Don’t call me Ikari.” I said, brushing past him and resisting the urge to slam my shoulder into him as I walked past.
I’m not some barbarian.
“Why are you angry that I killed the cat?” He asked without preamble.
My hands balled up into fists. But I resisted the urge to split his lip open because I didn’t wanna have to go back into Misato’s office so soon after she told me not to punch this dumbass in the face. “Because it was just a cat, and you decided that was reason enough to kill it. Now politely fuck off.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him tilt his head, not unlike a bird. “But its mother was dead. If you weren’t going to adopt it, then letting it go alive would have been unnecessarily cruel.”
“We don’t know its mother was dead, dumbass!” I snapped, walking faster, forcing him to break out into a jog to keep up with my longer strides. “It was just walking around, and cats leave their young around to go hunt, then come pick them up all the damn time!”
“Huh? But the wound on its soul was evident.”
“People can’t see souls!” I snapped back. “If I’d known its mother was dead, I’d have taken it to an animal shelter! We have a few of those in Tokyo-3!” I stopped and whirled on him, pressing my index finger into the tip of his nose and squishing it against his face. “And now, mister ‘I can see souls so I killed a kitten,’ the cat is dead. For no fucking reason! And since people can’t see souls, then it looks like an excuse you put together just so you could kill a random cat you ran across on the road! So, politely fuck off. If you continue to follow me, I will get angrier and punch you in the face. Again!”
He smiled again, the smile different from the last one, but just as lacking. “But I need to go to Doctor Akagi for her to run some tests, and I’m afraid I don’t know my way around this base!” His smile widened. “Would you please help me, Shinji-senpai?
Was there any way for me not to be inappropriately impolite and still tell him to go fuck himself?
…
Shit!
I ignored his attempts at conversation as I took him to Ritsuko’s office, then, with nothing better to do, I followed along to see how the new kid would do on all his tests.
As it turns out…
“Incredible.” Maya said, looking over the new kid’s readouts. “His synchronization is holding steady at ninety-five percent!”
I grunted, squinting at the inhuman little shit.
Why was I having such a visceral reaction to Kaworu? He’s the same kind of creature as Rei, yet her presence did not cause me to want to get away from her because she might have some infectious disease.
“It’s a shame that he’ll be a backup pilot.” Maya said, biting her thumbnail. “We don’t exactly have an Evangelion ready for him.”
I grunted again, staring at the picture of him on the screen. Behind me, I heard Ritsuko go into detail about one bit or another of technobabble with Maya.
Kaworu was currently synchronized through a test plug with Unit 04, he’d already tested in the other Units, with the only Evangelion that flat out rejected him being Unit 01. Something that seemed to have surprised him.
In the plug, he opened his eyes and then seemed to stare at me through the intervening camera. He smiled softly in that ‘normal but somewhat plasticky and missing something’ way of his, and his synchronization rose to ninety-seven percent.
Son of a….
“Oh wow…to think he’d manage to break Shinji’s out-of-combat record.” Maya said guilelessly, unaware of how the abomination mocked me.
“Getting all the good grades in the world won’t help if he panics on deployment.” Ritsuko said, absently. “The real test will happen when an Angel shows up and we are forced to send him out.”
“But when would we send him out?” Maya asked, looking at Bottle Blonde over her shoulder. “Swapping out the personality matrices of the Eva takes too long to do it after an Angel has been detected.”
I grunted in agreement. But still, he’d probably do well enough. The real question being, if this guy kills an Angel, is it fratricide?
Interesting but ultimately unimportant questions aside. I turned to Bottle Blonde and asked the question that had been bothering me all day. “So why was he sent? Like Maya said, we don’t even have an Eva to put him in.”
Maya sighed and answered. “He was sent as a replacement for the Fifth Children, the time that the MAGI predicted she’d take to become an adequate Pilot was deemed unacceptable. But Hokari’s improved performance and rapid growth as an Evangelion Pilot makes her replacement unnecessary now.”
“We can find use for him to run tests on the Evas if nothing else.” Ritsuko said, sipping from a cup of coffee.
Maya scowled. “That seems like a terrible waste of talent.”
“Welcome to the military industrial complex.” I muttered. “We have graft.”
His being here…it probably wasn’t a complication. On the one hand, having him where I can monitor him is a good thing, but on the other, if he went Angel, he’d already be at the heart of NERV, no need to traverse the Fortress City, which could be bad.
Kaworu met my eyes through the camera again, his smile was different from the last two, but I could swear there was something eager in the curve of his lip.
…
Fuck it, I’ll deal with it when it happens.
He would be the only Angel that isn’t the size of a damn building. How hard could it be anyway?
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