Mind Dump By Nathan Yuen

Disclaimer: I don't own Neon Genesis Evangelion or its settings or characters. If I did, there would be a second season… and a third… and a fourth…

Note: What I'm trying to do here is to take whatever instantaneous thought is floating in my mind and trying to apply that thought to the mind of a character in the Evangelion series. Because of their nature, these "stories," if they could be called as such, will be short in the literal and the temporal sense (i.e. maybe half a page long and about a minute in the universe of Evangelion). At the top of the page will be the theme of the "thought." On most occasions, I will leave the name of the character (and the situation) at the end of the page, leaving you the reader to enjoy the wandering thoughts. Most of them should be easy to guess though.

Okay, without further ado…

Mind Dump: Burn

Why? Why did I refuse the Commander's touch? Why did I feel… pain when he touched me? It's as if my hand moved of its own volition, to save the body from harm.

I've never understood myself. There's a void in me, a void that makes me feel as if I'm made of straw. I thought I could fill it up by thinking of Commander Ikari. But it was not enough. I did not feel whole, in this spirit made of straw.

Until Shinji. He came in and started to burn away all the straw.

He lit the match that day in the apartment, when he apologized and looked away in shame. He was… ashamed. No one else had acted that way around me before. Everyone else hated me, wanted to use me, or did not care either way. But he cared enough, respected me enough, to look away. It made me feel… human.

Since then I've burned, smoldered whenever I looked at him. Whenever he cast a smile at me, I felt the heat of burning straw in my heart.

Then he said he was leaving forever. And the fire went out, died to ashes, suffocated by lack of oxygen. The cold that rushed in numbed me to my very essence. It was so numb that I did not care about anything when I picked up the N2 mine to destroy the fourteenth angel.

When I recovered enough to learn that Shinji came back and saved us all, I felt warm. The fire was back, reborn from ashes.

But now, she engulfs him, takes him in. She is going to take him away from us forever, us who need him the most.

Shinji, come back to me.

Help me burn away the straw.

(End)

Author's note: These are Rei's thoughts as she's walking down the corridor after Shinji was swallowed up by Eva unit 01. To be more accurate, These are Rei's thoughts expounded from manga volume 8, pages 38-40. If you think Rei's an emotionless background character/doll, check out the manga. She's really different, and you can see the sparks fly a lot more clearly than in the anime.

But yeah. You think I got her right? Wrong? Send me an e-mail or leave a review. I'm thinking about writing another one later on… so maybe you'll see me again, eh?