Evangelion 1.0 3.0 -

Shinji Ikari didn't remember the 14-year gap. To him, one moment he was pulling the Spear of Cassius from Unit-01's core, the next he was staring at a sky the color of old blood, standing beside a man named Kaworu Nagisa on the cracked deck of the Wunder .

"Shinji," Gendo said, his voice a fracture. "In one world, you wanted to be brave. In the other, you wanted to die. I need you to do neither. I need you to split ."

A soda can rolled to his feet. He looked up. Misato—not Commander Misato, not the scarred captain, but a Misato, with a beer in her hand and a bandage on her cheek—shrugged. evangelion 1.0 3.0

Shinji laughed. It was a young laugh, rusty from disuse. It was an old laugh, tired from too much use.

"You have to choose," Kaworu said, his AT Field flickering like a candle. "The pure boy who never failed. Or the broken man who never stopped failing. One timeline survives. The other evaporates." Shinji Ikari didn't remember the 14-year gap

Shinji looked down. His left hand was young, the skin soft from Misato's reheated meals. His right hand was scarred, knuckles thick with calluses from piloting a mangled Eva through a radioactive hellscape. He saw Rei Ayanami—no, two of them. One stood beside Asuka in a dusty plugsuit, her hair short and white. The other waved from the Wunder's bridge, her hair long and dark, wearing the same blank expression.

Shinji looked at his two hands. The young one trembled. The scarred one was steady. "In one world, you wanted to be brave

The battle that followed wasn't against Angels or EVAs. It was against memory. Shinji dodged a lance of light that was actually the first sunset he'd ever watched with Toji and Kensuke. He parried a blast that tasted like Misato's coffee, lukewarm and kind. Asuka fought beside him—both Asukas: one screaming in German, the other silent, her eyepatch weeping tears of LCL.

The white-haired Rei simply vanished, leaving behind a single pair of glasses that had never belonged to her.