Loving Care: The Stories of Lola Trechlyn

Chapter 9
C2 - Just Another One of Those Days: A Neon Genesis Evangelion Fic

Chapter Description: F on M, Physical AR. / Originally published on July 22nd, 2007.

for scott

Shinji sighed as he soaped up in the locker room showers of NERV’s training headquarters. It had been just another one of those days. The morning had started off innocuously enough - a tall glass of water, a sunrise jog, a breakfast “lovingly” thrown together by Misato from leftover slabs of cold pizza - but things went awry, as they often did for the poor boy, when Asuka de-pantsed him in the kitchen. Shinji still could hear the girl’s howls of laughter, still could see the incandescent flash of Misato’s digital camera as Shinji fell to the tile floor, struggling to pull his boxers back up over his denuded form.

But he never dared fight back. Never dared to give the mischievous females a taste of their own infantile medicine. After all, it was just another one of those days.

The boy couldn’t help but smile as he shut off the water. Or was it?, he thought.

Shinji stepped out of the shower and toweled off, riding a natural high of cognitive dissonance as his sudden burst of adolescent resolve conflicted with the jangle of his nerves. The teenaged pilot’s heart thumped in his ears. Could he do it? Would this really be the afternoon during which he would be rewarded by his resourcefulness, his oh-so-simple plan?

He threw on his clothes and grabbed his own camera from his backpack. A picture is worth a thousand words.

It was but a hop, skip, and a jump to the ladies’ locker room, wherein Asuka Langley was rejuvenating from the trials of her own EVA training flight. The showering girl hummed a tune, her eyes closed, as the sudsy, hot water washed over her body. She didn’t notice a thing as Shinji Ikari slipped ever-so-stealthily into the room, snapped a few choice digital photographs of Asuka’s naked stature, and slinked out again, with only a few barely-withheld, self-satisfied chuckles posing the risk of exposing the boy’s daring sortie.

He had done it! Shinji felt more proud than he had ever felt in his fourteen years of existence (though, in this storyteller’s opinion, this was not saying much). He slung his backpack over his shoulder and headed through NERV’s winding corridors towards its exit and a hard-earned siesta.

“Shinji Ikari,” called a voice, crackling authoritatively over the headquarters’ public address system. “Shinji Ikari. Please report to the office of Ritsuko Akagi at once. That is all.”

Dammit, thought the young pilot. Just when I’m sure it’s finished, this day keeps pulling me back in.

Elsewhere at NERV, head technician Ritsuko Akagi pored over spreadsheets of data referencing her latest pet project. It had taken the better part of her diligent career to scrape together the funding for the CRB - Cellular Restructuring Barrier - but the woman’s day had arrived at last. A gentle, barely-perceptible blue glow, displayed as a five-foot-by-five-foot square frame arranged perpendicularly to the office floor, hummed with life between two Tesla coils.

This is it, thought Ritsuko. Do or die - and live again.

The scientist picked up an old hammer, weathered and rusted by over a decade of use, and stood up from her desk. She crossed her fingers with her free hand and tossed the hammer through the force field.

What clattered to the floor on the other side of the CRB was nothing short of a vindication of Ritsuko’s career. EVA units were one thing - saviors of life in and of themselves - but the CRB was quite another: the gift of life itself.

Ritsuko stepped behind the CRB and picked the brand-new hammer up from the floor. It glinted with newness, reflecting light with a shimmer that had it had lost long ago. The scientific applications of the CRB were boundless.

The fight could very well be over, Ritsuko thought with a smile. This could be the thing that turns the tid...

The technician gasped as a knock at the threshold of her office door derailed her train of thought. Shinji Ikari, slouched over with exhaustion and the weight of his backpack, stood in the doorframe, a curious look on his face.

“Dr. Akagi?” asked the boy. “You wanted to see me?”

Ritsuko nodded and returned to her desk, setting the hammer upon a stack of papers. “Have a seat, Shinji.”

The boy did so. Ritsuko followed suit, sitting in her chair and crossing her legs and arms.

“You’re a fine young pilot,” Ritsuko stated the obvious. “What are you doing, Shinji?”

“Umm... I’m sorry?”

“This bickering between you and Miss Langley,” said Ritsuko. “It really disrupted your work today. Did something happen this morning?”

Shinji gulped and shivered with embarrassment as a memory of his A.M. de-pantsing flashed through his head. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Ritsuko nodded and scratched her chin. “We all expect big things from you, young man, and you’ve done nothing but deliver, however much you don’t want to admit it, let alone shoulder the responsibility. I, personally, feel you’re beyond whatever petty squabbles transpire between you and Miss Langley. Can I have your promise of a little more - adult comportment in the future, Mr. Ikari?”

Shinji nodded. “Of course. I...”

“You little WEASEL!!” shouted Asuka, storming into Ritsuko’s office like a woman possessed. “I can’t believe you, you little...”

“Miss Langley!” Ritsuko shouted. “What is the meaning of this intrusion?”

Asuka reached into her bag, procured Shinji’s digital camera, and slammed it down upon Ritsuko’s desk.

Shinji felt his insides being torn in twain by an infinitude of fishhooks. Could he really have been that careless? He dove into his backpack and shuffled through it. Rationally, Shinji didn’t know what he expected to find... but what he indeed found was a confirmation of the dumb truth. He remembered setting the camera upon a bench in the ladies’ locker room, the pressure of the moment precluding him from returning it to his backpack before making his daring escape.

Just another one of those days, the boy thought.

“Ritsuko,” Asuka declared, “this little scoundrel broke into the girls’ locker room not more than ten minutes ago and snapped some, shall we say, inappropriate photos of yours truly’s gorgeous self in a most compromising situation.”

NERV’s head technician turned to Shinji, the boy visibly shaken, half the blood of his body coursing through his cheeks in a deep and fearful blush. “Mr. Ikari, is this the truth?”

Shinji didn’t know what to say. How could he have been so stupid? For better or worse, the flustered young man didn’t have time to come up with an answer. Asuka slid up to him and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt.

“Oh, this is it,” she said. “You’re really going to get it this time, boy.”

A droplet of sweat leapt from the terrified pilot’s head as Asuka took total control of the situation. Displaying a strength ill-befitting a 14-year-old girl such as herself, Asuka lifted Shinji off of the ground and tossed him aside in disgust and fury.

Aside - and right through the blue field of the Cellular Restructuring Barrier.

“Asuka!!” Ritsuko shrieked. “What have you done?!”

How was the female EVA pilot to answer? She had no clue whatsoever. But she got an inkling of an idea when Shinji began to shrink.

“I...I’m sorry, Ritsuko...” Asuka stuttered. “I had no idea...”

But it was too late for remorse on anybody’s part. The process had already begun. As confused and as shocked as the two others in Ritsuko’s office were, Shinji Ikari began to grow younger, the cells of his adolescent body rejuvenating themselves with haste as the boy squirmed weakly on the floor behind the CRB unit.

Shinji hadn’t the will nor the fortitude to move as he returned to his 13-year-old self. His entire outfit, all of its components less than a year old, regressed to impeccable newness before vanishing completely. The 12-year-old Shinji lay on the floor behind the CRB field, naked as the day he was born.

And, Ritsuko feared, such a day would be the one to which she and Asuka would shortly bear witness. The technician, in the furor of the moment, couldn’t recall the strength to which she had set the CRB field - and she had completely neglected to install either a cessation or a reversal setting. The unit was meant for repair... how could Ritsuko ever have conceived of a need to unrepair a tool or EVA part?

Shinji screamed, a mixture of horror and humiliation overwhelming him as he stared down at himself to find all outward signifiers of his pubescence disappear. He was eleven years old, then ten. Bereft of body hair and virtually a foot shorter in stature than he had been a mere twenty seconds ago, Shinji gathered up the strength to move into a sitting position as his body’s cellular structure rebuilt itself. Bones shrank, muscle tone disappeared, flesh tightened. The nine-year-old pilot managed to bring himself to his hands and knees and crawl out from behind the force field, slowly but surely moving toward the awestruck women.

“Dr. Akagi!” Shinji squealed with the feminine voice of a young child. “What’s happening to me?!”

Ritsuko fluidly moved to the horrified child but dared not pick him up. She knew the cellular restructuring process to be an incredibly delicate one, and her scientific acumen imbued her with the knowledge that any direct physical contact with Shinji prior to the completion of his regression could compromise his body - and, indeed, his health - perhaps fatally.

Shinji Ikari, now six years old and three feet tall, felt a wellspring of childlike emotion whirl through his brain. It, too, was regressing. The vengeful anger of an assaulted teenager was not the feeling which permeated his consciousness. Rather, the boundless fear of the unknown, innate to all toddlers, crippled the boy as he returned to his three-year-old self.

Shinji burst into tears.

Asuka Langley, despite herself, found the tableau hilarious. She had long ago overcome her shame at abusing Ritsuko’s life’s work and instead found herself endlessly amused by the image of the toddler Shinji. The two-year-old pilot was pudgy with baby fat and his penis had shrunk to a pitiful, amusement-inspiring nub.

Shinji rolled over onto his tummy and helplessly beat his fists against the floor. Ritsuko shook her head, gazing upon the 18-month-old baby on the floor of her office and, for the first time, wondering whether her intelligence had gotten too big for its britches. The best EVA pilot in the world was now nothing more than a squealing, helpless infant. The hope of a nation, of humanity, wasn’t even potty-trained anymore.

The cellular restructuring process slowed to a stall when Shinji Ikari reached the age of twelve months. The former teenager rolled onto his back, kicked his tiny, naked legs in the air, and loosed a babyish shriek that caused Asuka to cover hear ears in pain. All of the boy’s knowledge, from the intricacies of piloting EVA-01, to the simple act of reading, to the mere acknowledgement of when he had to use the restroom, was gone. What little remained was comprised mostly of vague but hardwired notions of what he had been, what he had become, and how Asuka Langley had emerged from this battle the indisputable victor.

And, oh, the humiliation.

“Miss Langley!” Ritsuko shouted, her voice barely audible over the squeal of the infant on the floor between the two ladies. “Consider your afternoon forfeit. If you’re going to treat science as a toy and NERV as your own personal playground, then you can damn well be the one to go out and get the supplies we’re going to need.”

Asuka groaned. “But, Ritsuko...”

“Enough! I won’t hear of it.” The scientist looked down at Shinji, who had finally stopped crying after discovering the hidden joys of sucking on his feet. “Go to the store while I devise a way to reverse the restructuring process.”

Asuka resentfully stormed out of the office. At last assured of the safety in doing so, Ritsuko picked up the tiny baby Shinji and held him to her chest, stroking his tuft of hair and whispering reassuring nothings. Workaholic as she was, Ritsuko had had no intention of becoming a mother. And babysitting certainly wasn’t on the schedule.

() () ()

“I’m glad you’re enjoying this so much,” Ritsuko said as she laid Shinji’s infant form upon the unfolded disposable diaper.

“I’m sorry,” Asuka chuckled, the hand over her mouth failing to disguise her obvious pleasure with the situation at hand. “I’m not enjoying this at all. Not one bit. May I powder widdle Shinji? Please?”

Ritsuko sighed and handed Asuka the baby powder the teenaged girl had purchased at the nearby grocer. Asuka leant over Shinji, who was sprawled across a cleared-off corner of Ritsuko’s desk, and puffed a few squeezes of powder over his naked crotch. The light, fluffy concoction settled into the tiny boy’s flesh and covered the fabric of the diaper beneath his bottom.

Shinji kicked his legs and howled in humiliation. He had never felt so exposed and so helpless. And completely at the whim of the girl who had quickly become his least favorite person on the planet.

Asuka Langley cooed a lullaby as she proceeded to massage the powder into Shinji’s groin. The boy’s flesh was soft and yielding to Asuka’s feminine touch.

She could scarcely recall an afternoon she had savored more.

“Alright,” Ritsuko said. “That’s quite enough manhandling of the poor boy for now, Miss Langley.”

Asuka took the waistband of the diaper in her grasp and pulled it up between Shinji’s legs. The boy pilot squirmed weakly, rivers of embarrassed tears coursing down his cheeks. There was decidedly little he could do as Asuka held the diaper firmly to his tummy and secured the tapes on either side. Shinji Ikari decided right then and there that death would have been a fate more preferable to the tickling sensation of Asuka’s fingertips tucking in the thick diaper’s plastic legbands.

“I have to hand it to you, Asuka,” Ritsuko noted as she pulled a baby-blue onesie from the grocery bag. “This is the most adorable little thing I’ve ever seen!”

Asuka moved her hands underneath Shinji’s tiny armpits and lifted his diapered body onto its feet. “I’m glad you approve, Doctor.” The two women wrestled with the squirming, screaming Shinji as they gently, but firmly, wrestled the ex-teenager into the cotton onesie.

Shinji’s head was spinning. He felt as if he were in a nightmare from which not even Heaven’s most earnest blessing could awaken him. The thick, crinkly diaper forced his legs apart and made him feel deprived of every last inkling of his once-budding manhood. The soft cotton of the onesie teased his young flesh. But it was almost cozy.

Almost... pleasurable.

Baby Shinji fought against this sentiment. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want this at all! He was sorry he had taken those photographs... truly sorry! He wanted his old life back!

“Will this weasel ever stop crying?” Asuka asked, picking Shinji up and cuddling the baby against her breast. “I should’ve bought some paracetamol to go with all this stuff. My head is pounding.”

“He’s hungry,” observed Ritsuko, tapping her chin. “Hand me the bottle and formula.”

Asuka complied with her request - as much as circumstance would allow her. The girl had made sure to buy the most babyish, adorable bottle the store carried... but she had forgotten to purchase formula entirely.

“The formula, Miss Langley,” demanded Ritsuko.

“Y...Yes, about that...” Asuka stuttered, blushing. “It seems the store was all out of that, I’m afraid.”

Ritsuko sighed. She had so much work to do. The scientist, adept as she was, had made barely any headway in concocting a reversal process for the CRB whilst Asuka was on her shopping trip. There wasn’t time for any of this.

“Alright, Miss Langley,” Ristuko said. “Would you please excuse yourself?”

Asuka tilted her head with curiosity. At last, it dawned on her. The girl beamed with realization.

“Yes, Ritsuko,” she said, picking up Shinji’s digital camera and stashing it in the boy’s backpack, which she slung over her shoulder as she marched towards the door. “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”

“Thank you,” said the scientist, and Asuka was gone, the door closed firmly behind her.

() () ()

Ritsuko Akagi had as much occasion to blush as Shinji had to cry as the scientist held the squirming infant to her chest and unbuttoned her blouse. Of all the things she had expected to spend her evening doing, feeding her finest pilot in the most intimate of fashions was definitely among the last items on the list.

Shinji squirmed, humiliated and helpless, as his thick diaper served as a constant and emasculating reminder of what he had lost. He wanted to cry still harder as Ritsuko offered her naked breast to him, but he was hungry. Hungry and mortally exhausted. There was no fighting the inevitable.

“There there, little Shinji,” cooed Ritsuko, holding the infant boy’s head in her left hand. She cradled him lovingly as she moved the nipple of her perfectly-rounded breast to his toothless mouth. “It’s okay, little baby. It’s perfectly okay. Mommy is here for you.”

Shinji sniffled and stopped crying. He opened his eyes and looked up at Ritsuko. His and the scientist’s eyes met. And Shinji saw only love in her eyes.

“Mommy is here for you.”

Shinji relaxed. The 14-year-old baby stopped fighting. And he took Ritsuko Akagi’s stiff nipple into his soft, warm mouth, and began to suck.

Ritsuko’s eyes rolled back slightly as a sensation she had never felt before overtook her. She stroked Shinji’s soft hair as the baby nursed from her breast, kicking his tiny legs gently and helplessly.

Shinji Ikari let his eyes fall shut as the first few warm squirts of milk struck his tongue and filled his mouth. The drink tasted funny, as no milk he could recall ever drinking, but it satisfied his aching need. He swallowed his first few tiny gulps and proceeded to engage in an earnest sucking motion he thought he had long since left behind.

Ritsuko smiled and hummed a lilting, reassuring lullaby as Shinji suckled from her teat. She was surprised to find that she was actually enjoying what she had envisioned to be a most awkward predicament. Despite herself, Ritsuko felt motherly. And as her warm, pure milk proceeded to slide down Shinji’s throat and into his rapidly-filling tummy, Shinji felt like a baby. And he enjoyed it.

Shy, unconfident EVA pilot Shinji Ikari kicked his right leg one final time before allowing his bladder to release and fill his diaper. He moaned uncontrollably around Ritsuko’s giving nipple as the warm flow of urine coursed over his tiny penis and saturated the soft fabric covering his infant bottom. In any other theatre, he would have tried to stop, tried to hold back, tried to release himself from this final humiliation. But as his warm urine pooled into his diaper and Ritsuko’s breast milk puffed out his cheeks in rhythmic squirts, Shinji was happy to resign himself to the reality at hand. For this one brief moment, he was, on the outside, who he was on the inside: an uncertain little baby, in need and in want of little more than love, and of care. Care Gendo would never have allowed himself to bestow upon his own son. Care Shinji could have never hoped to get anywhere... from anyone.

Shinji giggled with unadulterated delight, softly and baby-like, as a few involuntary muscle spasms cut off the flow of his pee, and Ritsuko “aww”ed in response. The moment was so mutually pleasurable for the both of them that they were unpleasantly surprised, though not startled, when Asuka Langley burst into the office and snapped a few juicy photographs of NERV’s head technician breastfeeding the pilot of EVA-01.

“Oh, Miss Langley,” Ristuko sighed, rolling her eyes as Shinji stopped nursing. The beautiful moment had come to its most unnatural end. “You are incorrigible.”

Asuka slid Shinji’s digital camera into the boy’s backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” she said. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Ritsuko?”

The scientist buttoned up her blouse, laid a terry rag against her neck, and rested Shinji over her shoulder. She patted his tiny back a few times, stopping only when the teenager burped a small amount of pabulum onto the rag.

“No, Asuka. That will be quite enough.”

Asuka nodded and turned to leave.

“Miss Langley?” called Ritsuko.

“Yes?” Asuka asked with a sigh.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Ritsuko gently pulled Shinji away from her shoulder, discarded the terry rag, and motioned to hand the tiny infant to the teenage girl. Shinji’s saturated diaper ballooned out noticeably through his onesie. Asuka was less than allured by the idea of having to change her rival’s soiled diaper.

“What is it that you expect of me?” she said.

“I have plenty of work before me,” declared Ritsuko. “I never thought I’d have to construct a reversal protocol for the CRB, but it appears as if you’ve left me no choice. Now, I can either do that, or I can become Shinji’s surrogate mother. But I haven’t the time to do both.”

Asuka groaned. It was with no small degree of despair that realized she and Misato had a very busy week ahead of them.

“You really can’t expect me to...”

Shinji Ikari closed his eyes, smiled brightly, and pushed a most disgusting load of soft mush into the seat of his diaper. It filled every crevasse of his skin and coated his nub of a penis in a warm, aversive goop. The sensation was disgusting to the infant pilot, but it was a small price to pay as he watched Asuka dry-heave at the smell which assaulted her nose.

“I most certainly can,” declared Ritsuko, handing the very messy, very stinky baby to Asuka. “Take him home to Misato and see what you can manage.”

Shinji giggled.

“But Ritsuko...” Asuka groaned, but she knew it was in vain. The young lady was about to sleep in the bed she had made...that is, of course, if she could manage to get any sleep at all.

“That will be all,” Ritsuko said, guiding Asuka and Shinji out the door and shutting it behind them. She wondered what she had done to deserve dooming NERV to such an infantile crew.

Just another one of those days, Ritsuko decided, and she sat at her desk to busy herself with her work.

with love,

lola trechlyn

Retrospective

I was in way over my head with this one. I wrote it at age 23, and up to that point, I had not watched a single anime anything, a fact which is just as true now as it was then. I know it’s some big huge nerd obligation, but I’ve been physically addicted to video games since 1986 and the Internet since 1995 (unless you count my sordid dalliances with Prodigy in 1990), so I’m pretty much fully booked right up until my death.

Nonetheless, I didn’t want to disappoint the client who requested "No Child Left Behind," who followed up that request with this one. He was kind enough to donate roughly 400 pages of fan-written Evangelion background and analysis, which, I believe, is more than has ever been written about revolutionary mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. But I did my duty, and, for the first time, I had to do research to write an AR story.

My client remarked that the final product, released on July 22nd, was everything he had hoped for, but he may have just been being nice. Every once in a while I’ll come across a story written by an anime fan... half the words are in Japanese, not counting the names. It would be like watching Inglourious Basterds without the subtitles.

Well, to each his own. Maybe this valiant attempt at Japanifying myself will find a new and forgiving audience.

Thanks for reading. -lt