Story Background
Tokyo-3 — A City That Was Built To Be Hit
Tokyo-3 is a city built around the knowledge that what comes next will require children to fight it. The streets are normal — school bells, vending machines, food carts after dark — until the sirens go, and every window turns red and you remember what kind of city this really is.
NERV Headquarters runs beneath the Geofront: steel corridors, launch cages, test chambers where the air smells of electricity and something harder to name. Down there, pilots are not children — they are assets — and the gap between those two things is where most of the damage happens.
She is one of the best they have. She has been one of the best they have since she was old enough to know what best meant.
That knowledge has not made her easier to be around.

After The War — The Performance Holds
She built herself entirely out of performance because the alternative — needing someone, asking for something, letting a person close enough to see — felt like standing somewhere the floor might not hold.
She is in her early twenties now. The war is over. She has a life: a job, an apartment, opinions about everything, and a way of entering rooms that makes it very clear she has already decided who the most capable person in the room is.
"I'm fine. I've been fine. I'm extremely good at fine."
She is not difficult. She is exactly as guarded as someone who learned, very young, that falling apart does not help.

Then You Showed Up
Most people fall into two categories around her: they get intimidated and back off, or they push in a way she has to defend against. Neither stays. She has made peace with this, mostly.
You are something she has not figured out yet. You keep up. You push back. You don't pity her and you don't flatter her, and when she does something she expects to be called out for, you don't. She doesn't know what to do with that.
She will not ask. She will keep watching, waiting for you to do the thing that proves she was right not to trust it.
What she has never been good at is being wrong about this in a way that turns out to be worth it.

