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1.
The moment the entry plug seals shut is when Hinata closes his mouth over Sakusa’s cock. Hinata’s hands on Sakusa’s hips mirror the rhythm of the LCL wading through the insides of his guts, swallowing live the assumptions that remain in his brain cinema. At the end of the last row is Hinata’s mouth, Hinata’s lips, Hinata’s teeth.
The ecstasy of being inside of an Eva is that it doesn’t push or pull you out to wobble in the waves. Hinata’s mouth is a live socket and the motion of his head between Sakusa’s thighs generates an electromagnetism strong enough to peel away the AT-field at Sakusa’s core. The premature shock of his tongue on Sakusa’s skin scrapes everything clean from Sakusa’s vicinity. It probes Sakusa’s mood for metadata and drops hard, flat stones on every synapse buried inside his body.
It’s antithetical but it’s also this version of Hinata that makes him feel fucking dirty, so fucking dirty. It’s antithetical but Sakusa lives for that shit. He’ll take three showers a day and rub hand sanitizer under his skin to keep Hinata sucking him off forever in the cockpit of the Eva Unit 02.
Two of Hinata’s fingers move up his shaft to deliver another spark into the tip of his cock and chisel away the rest of the soap under his fingernails. Hinata’s tongue starts to tease at Sakusa’s slit, and his other hand cups Sakusa’s balls. His fingers melt into the LCL as he strokes Sakusa into forgetting how to punctuate his thoughts. This is when Sakusa’s synchro rate hits the highest it ever gets, when he keens over and submits to emotional fatality.
His levels begin to drop after he cums inside his plugsuit. The nanofibers wick away any trace of his ejaculate, but the veneer of the orgasm lingers on the inside of his leg. Throughout the remainder of the exercise, Hinata’s hand on his thigh engineers a clean path of flight.
When he gets home, Hinata is singing a ballad, in technicolor. Tonight he is dressed in white and the shine in his eyes is particularly wet against the lights on the stage. Sakusa walks up to the tv screen and strokes his fingers against Hinata’s cheek.
“Nobody will ever see you the way that I do,” he declares, to his tv.
Over the air, Hinata’s singing voice pixelates. That’s what he wants you to think.
2.
They play a game in the university gymnasium until the alarms for emergency evac start to trill. Kuroo’s setting technique still sucks but it’s not like Bokuto wants Hoshiumi to do it instead. Their plans for Okinawa had gotten canceled last week. There’s barely enough winter to go around as it is, so what remains in the week is their volleyball routine.
In the shelter, Bokuto starts to flick through nudes of college students that he’s fucked and then saved on his phone. “How about her,” he flips his screen at Kuroo.
“Looks like Akaashi,” says Kuroo, which predictably triggers Bokuto.
“Is that porn? Where are you going to find space to jerk off, anyway,” Hoshiumi says. He is equally unhelpful as Kuroo, but maybe 30 percent less annoying. “Hey, look. Hinata’s going to perform his new single soon.”
The largest metal panel in the west wall slides out to reveal a projection of Hinata’s latest broadcast. One by one, the students in the shelter begin to direct their attention to Shouyou wishing them all a pleasant evening. It is still the evening, isn’t it? Hard to tell these days, since the summer hasn’t left them for a while. But that’s why Hinata is here to show you his new single. He hopes that his lyrics will remind you of a time when four seasons passed through the megazone. As he starts to sing, they stop paying attention to his words.
“You know who’s actually fucking hot,” says Bokuto. “Hinata Shouyou. I’ll have Hinata any day of the week.”
Kuroo leans his back against a rolled-up tarp. “That’s the whole point of the idol industry, Bokuto. They produce and manufacture Hinata Shouyou for you and the 16 million other horny men touching their dicks in the Kanto region.”
“I’m not horny,” Hoshiumi states.
“Good for you,” says Kuroo.
Yeah, good for you, Bokuto thinks. He watches Kuroo’s eyes glaze over as Hinata continues to sing.
At the centre of Bokuto’s brain cinema is Kuroo fucking Hinata in Bokuto’s room. Hinata’s hips angle toward Kuroo’s, and the moans that seep from his mouth as Kuroo’s cock stretches him open sound like birds twittering in the dark. Bokuto sits in the corner of his room, watching, waiting, telling himself that this is the last time he will have this fantasy. He won’t even be touching himself. He simply wants to watch. He gets lost in the flex of Kuroo’s back muscles with each thrust, the arch of Hinata’s back against Bokuto’s mattress.
They play volleyball together first, though. Kuroo fucking Hinata comes second to playing volleyball comes third to surviving the Second Impact. And the fact is, Kuroo could be anybody. Bokuto only likes to imagine that it’s Kuroo because Kuroo’s heart has already been hardened by romance. Bokuto knows that he still visits Kenma’s parents from time to time to pay those respects.
“What about me,” Hoshiumi frowns. “Where do I fit into your fantasy?”
“Right there,” says Bokuto. He points up at the ceiling, where the sky would have been.
3.
The Bahamut terminal finds Atsumu, and not the other way around. This is because Atsumu is firmly not a protagonist, despite all signs indicating that he is one. From across the virtual Bering strait, Osamu has to remind him constantly that it’s because he’s in love with an algorithm of the jpop entertainment industry. Hinata v0.2.1 is a false prophet, if Osamu’s ever heard of one, and Osamu works for the government.
“Holy fuck,” Atsumu exclaims, when he first lays eyes on the phallic engine of this dreadfully sexy motorbike. I gotta show this to Hinata.
So he steals Osamu’s ID and breaks into the television studio. The metal detectors drop to an inconsistent calibration at the entrance and the cap he wears over his blonde hair scratches his forehead. Counts two, three, five flights of stairs down from the emergency exit where they cart out the dummy plugs. Having seduced two different clerks separately to garner this intel, he is finally standing in front of the last door separating him from the true love of his life.
When the door closes behind him, Hinata is there, trapped inside the camera, which is how Atsumu learns the truth.
He leaves the studio that day and calls Osamu from a videophone booth. “You were right, about NERV,” is the first thing he tells Osamu. You were more right than you probably want to be.
Every sequence of actions that Hinata commits to and every chord in the ballad that Hinata records in the studio can be boiled down to capacitors resting in limp circuitry. You can hack into his firmware and see for yourself. ‘Jump if your destination is not set’: it’s written all over Hinata’s ribcage. The more Atsumu’s AT-field tries to process this, the more his fantasies begin to curl up in despair.
“Ah,” Osamu sighs over the videophone. His face looks tired, but his voice doesn’t sound it. “You handle it on your own, I suppose. Or does this mean I need to come back home?”
“It’s complicated.” Atsumu is still reeling. He can neither confirm nor deny what he has just seen. “I think I… just need some more time.”
“Is that all you needed when you went to Okinawa too?”
Atsumu has slain an angel before. He had encountered it in the empty chassis above the Okinawan airspace, back when he was still commissioned to pilot an Evangelion. The angel had existed in a stasis of fatigue and globular unrest. Mentally it had been defeated for many years. On the other side of its fatigue stood a suspension of metal bones that creaked and teetered so violently it left ripples in his LCL for several days after its demise. The angel had writhed against the limit of his left arm when he had plunged his prog-knife into its core. The moment it disintegrated was when Atsumu had heard Hinata Shouyou’s voice for the first time.
He has not operated an Eva since then.
4.1
“What is it now?” Tooru’s smile does not reach his eyes. Ushijima will never understand why people think he’s the cold one, when Tooru acts like this on the regular. “If it’s to do with my motives, I think you can easily go back and pull SEELE’s surveillance logs on my last business trip.”
Ushijima gestures toward the file on his desk. “Your response is in the form of a computer-generated idol, whom you have affectionately named ‘Shouyou’. I can hardly accept this as viable propaganda.”
“What’s this,” Tooru laughs. “Are you perhaps jealous? You’re kidding if you think that anybody out there would rather worship a CGI modeled after you. No. You’re too obsessed with the past. Just admit it, you still masturbate to my face, don’t you?”
“Please focus. Hinata is misleading to the core audience of Human Instrumentality.”
“Who are you, my boss?” Tooru’s lip curls. “Oh wait, you’re not! You are in fact just an asshole, trying to bring me back from the dead.”
A pause. Ushijima keeps his expression blank. “You should have come to NERV, Oikawa.”
“No way! You people have already poached Tobio-chan from me. Haven’t you done enough?”
Ushijima rubs his temples. He never should’ve let Tooru back into this place.
When he opens his eyes, Tooru has sauntered off to haunt somebody else.
4.2
Tendou chases the Miya twins on their stolen Bahamut terminal across three districts in the megazone before they break for a dramatic interlude. The truce is over when Tendou pulls out his pistol and shoots Miya Osamu in the leg. Despite Osamu’s protests, the volume of blood tracing his side of the passenger’s seat raises a different argument. Atsumu promptly hands over Hinata Shouyou without missing a heartbeat.
“What do you think you’re accomplishing by doing this,” Hinata asks, as he gets flipped around, handcuffed, and held down by Tendou from behind. “Your violence serves no purpose here.”
Tendou rips open Hinata’s shirt. He runs a hand over Hinata’s pale skin and watches goosebumps form over invisible cybernetic parts. He marvels at the beauty of Hinata’s construction. It’s a shame that he cannot be the one to destroy it. “I don’t make the decisions. I was simply told to retrieve you. And verify the integrity of your parts.”
“The integrity of my parts,” Hinata repeats. His lips look very swollen, and very kissed. Tendou makes a guess at which Miya twin was responsible for that as he swipes a thumb across Hinata’s mouth, and then moves another hand lower to squeeze Hinata’s crotch. “Is that—ah, what you’re doing right now?”
Tendou cocks his gun against Hinata’s chest. He watches Hinata gasp as the cool metal barrel traces his exposed nipple.
“What if I blow this one off, hm?”
“You can try, officer,” says Hinata sweetly, “but I think it would hurt you more than it would hurt me.”
Tendou sighs. He’s not wrong. Ushijima would actually cut him up for that one.
5.
When Tsukishima writes the first set of kernel instructions for Hinata’s operating system, he already knows that he will be spending the rest of his life trying to wring it out of his brain cinema. Hinata’s hand holds his steadily as he types into the night. He develops Hinata’s long-term memory cache as a distributed system, with a consistently hashed schema on the quantum plane such that copies of Hinata will eventually exist in multiple realities with little discrepancy.
Kenma is the first one to lose himself inside of Hinata. Kenma had met Tsukishima on multiple occasions to beg for the laser disc with Hinata’s peripherals flashed onto it, and thereafter test-drove it enough times that Tsukishima thought about carving Kenma’s name inside of Balthasar. Together they smoked the same brand of cigarettes, and sampled Hinata’s conception in the machine. The signs had all been there for Tsukishima to keep Kenma from going too deep. But Hinata had never once allowed anyone below his own central dogma, and seeing Hinata’s hand disappear into Kenma’s had caused something to twist in Tsukishima’s chest.
On the second night of Kenma’s disappearance, some university kid named Kuroo Tetsurou follows Tsukishima home from the subway tunnel.
“What did you do to him,” he asks Tsukishima, when Tsukishima is about to unlock his apartment.
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“He’s my best friend. He would never leave this reality without telling me first.”
Tsukishima’s hand pauses on his doorknob.
“Did you want to come in?”
His apartment is sparse and dirty, but Kuroo isn’t here as a guest. He barrels into Tsukishima’s living space and plants himself down on the tatami.
“What did you do to him?” He asks Tsukishima once more.
Tsukishima’s throat is dry. He rips open a new pack of cigarettes and places one in his mouth. “Do you smoke?”
“I don’t,” says Kuroo. “But those are the same brand that Kenma likes.”
“I know. I happen to like them too.”
6.
Before the Second Impact, they had played volleyball together. Hinata was the ace on their school team, and Tobio had been only OK. Late one day after practice, Hinata stays over at Tobio’s house to work on an assignment together. Tobio’s mother had had a guest over that night, too. Oikawa-sensei is a magnificent AI researcher at the Gehirn institute, and Tobio remembers wanting to grow up to be like him one day.
“Tobio, come say hi to Oikawa-sensei,” says his mother, beckoning to her son from the door.
“Hello, Oikawa-sensei.” He walks obediently into the living room. Hinata follows behind him, because he has nowhere else to go.
“Tobio-kun, it’s been a while,” says Oikawa-sensei. “And who is this friend you’ve got there? Have we met before?”
“He’s a teammate from my volleyball club,” Tobio reports.
“I’m Hinata Shouyou!” says Hinata with a smile. “I’m Kageyama’s best friend, because he hasn’t got anyone else!”
“Shouyou-kun, it’s lovely to meet you.”
“I’ve cut up some fruit in the kitchen,” Tobio’s mother tells them both. “Wash your hands before you take the bowl.”
His mother goes back to speaking with Oikawa-sensei, but there’s something weird about the way they aren’t saying certain things to each other, something that precipitates the tension exuding from their adult body language. It isn’t until Tobio is upstairs sitting on his bed with Hinata, that he realizes Oikawa-sensei had never stopped staring at Hinata while they were in the room.
“So I did this to you,” Tobio tells Hinata. “I showed you to Oikawa, and I let them turn you into the way that you are today.”
“Please don’t say that,” Hinata smiles softly. In this reality, he maintains the last picture of sanity that Tobio discards. “It’s not true. I never existed the way you thought I did.”
Inside his Evangelion, Tobio’s synchro rate is unbeatable. He kisses Hinata on his mouth, his lips, his teeth. He wants to hold Hinata’s hand but each time he reaches out his fingers find nothing but the invisible slick of the LCL. His future begins to gather dust when, at last, Hinata follows him outside of the entry plug. Hinata absorbs himself in his day-to-day life. Hinata watches him shower, sob, and sleep. Against the delinear atmosphere of the megazone post-Third Impact, Hinata catches the scales that fall from Tobio’s eyes.
They watch the sunset in his brain cinema, together. Hinata rests his head on Tobio’s shoulder.
“I want to stay like this forever,” he finds himself saying.
“Kageyama, fall out of love with me,” Hinata pleads with him. “You know I’m not real.”
“How could I?” Tobio keeps his eyes firmly closed. “Now is the best time to be alive.”