Disclaimer: This is a work of fan fiction. The author does not own anything concerning Gainax's IP Neon Genesis Evangelion. The company gives the word and this comes down.
In the Dark, In the Night
Dark out tonight and it is all she knows.
No bloodied moon, no stars, only a black carpet of clouds blotting the sky. Nothing lies beyond the windowpane; the city lies dead, rotting. Rain aggregates and sheets down the glass in torrents, flooding the gutters. Quiet. All life and warmth stripped from these ruins with hands of fire. Indomitable wills shook this place, her soul; those hands broke them all.
Fire weighs down her thoughts as she lies upon the bed. Fire scourged away flesh and bone and left a husk wrapped in the placental tube. Every time she pictures the fire, something begins to itch in her skin and a cool, mercurial wash numbs her forehead. And in that moment, half-remembered voices like echoes in a cave whisper of secret lust and loneliness.
Rei doesn't know what it means. It's all sensations of pain, of herself, and yet, being wholly someone else. Are we not all the same, she wonders. She rolled away from the window and the soaked world without.
To be one.
"I am the Third," she whispers, as flat and listless as every time she uttered it in past days.
The soft glow and heat of the desklamp warms her, suffusing the dirty confines with an aged, orange glow. Pale, slim fingers dance in the light when she holds up her hand, watching shadows skitter 'cross her flesh. It's her hand, nothing more, but she can feel the echoes of something crawling under the skin, sending exploratory feelers through the muscle, veins, nerves, and metastasizing to the bone.
Little lances of pain wrench fingers into a fist. It isn't as bad as it was just a week ago, post-decanting, living only echoes of her former incarnation's pain. Transition never suited Rei. The sensations of previous deaths lingered on, anchored down deep in the subconscious. Even now, she could not suffer her neck being touched.
Rain pelted the window outside furiously, trying to break into the only sealed room left in the complex. Buildings one through six caved in on themselves after Unit 00's detonation. All the windows shattered in the buildings left after the shockwave. Exposure to the elements did the rest. The NERV settlement team had done her that small kindness of replacing the windows and dehumidifying the wreck. They even replaced the rotting mattress and bedding.
Much hasn't changed, even with ruination. That unsettled her the most. Her fingers slowly drug across the mattress, feeling that rough softness again. Another familiar thing made strange.
To be one with him.
The bed fascinated her, its pillow especially. It was just a lump of stitched cotton with a coverlet. Part of her knew the bottom right was most comfortable when she lay upon her side like this. With ridiculous care, she lowered her head to that spot and felt her entire body break out with gooseflesh. There hadn't been time to relax in the practiced ways.
The rain lulled her and reminded her of cracking glass.
Transition, the grey-haired man called it. Names were difficult again. She felt hollow.
A soul can travel from corpus to corpus with proper procedure and setting, but the journey, the memories, of the previous incarnation will be strong and displace the present with an eerie, twenty-four-seven déjà vu; for a little while, days, weeks, maybe even months. And all became a disorienting slide show and battle to recall the secret of the present. To assert discipline.
For the week old clone, existence was a bizarre out-of-body experience. Little things became readily apparent that would fall to the wayside soon enough: the musty smell of the mold above the refrigerator offended her; the coolness of her bedding and how it felt against her skin; the preternatural quiet of this dead apartment block even before its destruction; the way plastic feels as it gives way to inevitable pressure; the sound of breaking glass and the aching, glittery sound of each shard hitting the floor.
Transition, she recalled, is the best of times for change in human life. So too did she follow the spirit of the definition. The thought briefly turned her bloodless lips into a smile. All too briefly.
Elbowing up, Rei peered over the bed rail to stare at the broken pair of glasses lying in the shadows. The little shards of glass became small pools of glinting amber in a dark ocean. It would be swept up in the morning; it couldn't be allowed to sit there anymore.
At first, she believed it was change. Necessity dictated that her allegiances molded to fit what she wanted. A simple enough lie she told herself. There was no ruling whatever raged inside of her, Rei long since regarded her emotions as wild cards that did as they pleased and held court with them only on occasion. Her soul was not her soul and her body merely an interchangeable vessel.
Nothing of her was hers. The rain began to ebb outside, and she instantly regretted missing an attempt for peaceful slumber. The rains always did that for her. There was peace in its actions, its force. What she would give to float in the air like that, away from the world. Trade winds would carry her over the red seas.
Polite fiction, a little reminder tells her. What you are, what you grow into, is trapped by vasty fields of inaction. You float, rebounding off the hulls of people made of sterner stuff. Those you admire, in your own twisted little way.
Kicking her legs over the bed's edge, Rei sits up, feeling the chill creeping into the room. The hum of the refrigerator distracts; something to focus on. She remembers, feels sameness in this as well. There came a time, after the first transition ages ago, when a soft, lovely voice sang her to sleep. It stopped the confusion and the hate Rei felt. Eased the fever, stopped the screaming. It sang with a voice that reverberated at a primal level and its songs fed a hungry light deep inside of her. The reminder sang in the voice of Rei's true self, the soul, the will of the husk.
Rei's focus drops, staring off into the dull lamplight, and for the first time in years, she engages that will.
I am not inactive, she counters.
You have been all your life. Waiting. Hoping. For what? Even I am not clear upon that subject.
I am me.
You are so much less. You feel this when you float in water. You think yourself free enough to dream. In those reflective pools, you see no sins.
It is highly agreeable… I would like…freedom.
Yes. It is why those spectacles are broken, no?
Rei didn't answer and simply starred deeper into the lamplight, feeling her skin grown taught with goosebumps. Her fingers idly knuckled a slithering itch between her breasts. It felt as if it would dive into the esophagus.
What was there to say, with the truth so blatant? Her eyes shut.
There's nothing wrong with change. Heed your own counsel. Take what you wish to be one with. We both know what this is. He wept when you burned. Wept and gnashed his teeth before sealing himself under layers of steel and indifference.
"Ikari."
-DISSOLUTION-
He tried to meld you with the Other. He did. You are greater than the whole of your wildest expectations in freedom. We are within that water, that ocean. What you want is yours. He did this.
"The Commander." She felt something shift within the skin, suddenly, as if waking. Something in the gut. Looking down, she saw a hardened callus, brown as butcher's paper, with snail-like body resting there. A yellow eye opened on the inflamed head of the creature and glanced up at her.
Yes, the reminder spat.
"What…happened to Ikari?"
He is deciding.
"I see." Without even reaching for the chain, Rei turned off the lamp. Suddenly, her apartment peeled away into nothing. The cabinets, tile, appliances, her bed, all became nothing. And nothing begat nothing until all was black around her. Soft rains fall all around, sucking the heat out of her world, out of her pale flesh. It is nothing.
There is a light ahead, beaming down from some infinite precipice. Under it, a young man sits in a row of foldout chairs. All lined up on either side of him are empty chairs ad infinitum, vanishing off into the obfuscating drizzle.
"Ikari." Suddenly, she is there right beside him and there is not a sound in the universe other than their combined breathing. Slowly, his head pitches up, gazing upon her with clinical boredom. His face is weathered by something far more terrible than she can imagine. The transition was painless for her. For him, though…grim beyond what can ever be recalled. His fingers twitch in his lap, hitching as they did when he came to an impasse. That was good; he'd force his own hand soon. Maybe there would be time for a brief talk. Between you and me.
Rei felt troubled. For one who spoke to herself, her true self, this became inane. She thinks and speaks all at once, "What is wrong?"
His surprise, at least, seems genuine. "You…you died. It's all…it's all gone wrong."
Ah.
"I know. But I did not say goodbye." How could he be sad? She had saved him, and did not part with a goodbye, as far as recollection went. She was replaceable. Memory proved otherwise, she recalled his sadness. That papery sadness in which he folded into himself. She was not as she once was. There, a spark of hope guttered out. She hadn't recognized him in that first visit to the hospital after the self-destruct. It hurt him. That troubled her.
It had made him sad the first time, but now, after all this death…
"Are you…mad?"
He looked at her, through her, eyes clouding up and looking well beyond even this realm. It took time, the death of suns, for him to reply.
"No. No, I'm not, Ayanami."
She felt such a surge of relief; she frightened herself at the implications. Here was one who would not fear or despise her. "What do you want, Ikari?"
Her thighs suddenly flanked his waist; the world had shifted with a tide of white. All about them was white noise, and the whispers of billions of forgotten lives. He was warm, soft, and shuddering flesh. He stared up with implacable eyes. Looking away, he shrugged. Her hands cupped his cheeks, righting them, making him look at her. Contact. He didn't flinch. For that, she was grateful.
Do not pursue him, the reminder whispered.
You are not me. Be silent.
"I…" Silence screaming in the white, as profound as continental drift. She saw it now, the stain upon his soul. The severity of the scars in his eyes took her breath away. All of this did she see, but she couldn't feel moved. Not now. This was his time, but here she would steal some.
"Do you know what I desire, I—…Shinji?" Tendrils ghosted through her flesh and seized around her heart. That mocking phrase came bubbling up. One with another, not alone. Not to shout 'I' at the world. Something red settled in the dust of her thoughts. She sucked on her front teeth, then let the thought speak. "To see the shore with you. But I won't. We…we both know that, yes?"
He wouldn't meet her eyes. But she did smile at him, a barren twitch of thirty-some muscles. A sort of relief came over her, absolved of the one thing she still wished for in the dark of this place, this aggregate of Humanity. Never had she been so close to so many. She had seen the whole of the world before The End. People knew her face. And they always would.
"But what about you," he murmured, naked, lying flat as a board under her. There was a flicker in his eyes, an old spark.
"It does not matter, Shinji."
She hadn't removed her hands from his face. He broke things so easily. He'd never realize it. Even now, there were conclusions being drawn up in his mind. The entirety of concentration, the whole of humanity, was ebbing away from them. Shinji was taking shape. He expanded into something, instead of nothing.
The warmth of his body retreated, greedily sucked up by withdrawal. She gave him what she could, squeezing tighter, closer, as she leaned down just so.
"See the shore. Do not…forget, Shinji. Ikari. Shout to the world. That is my wish."
And in seconds, in decades, he was gone.
The world changed.
And she found herself in the apartment, sitting upon the bed.
Rain.
Dark out tonight and it is all she knows.
A/N: Yes, I am alive. Just been busy alternating with incredibly lazy and excruciating writer's block these past few months. Then this thing popped into my brain, provoking action and shattering my writer's block for the moment. Just came into my brain. The title is a wonderful, chilling line from Robert Wise's 1963 film The Haunting, an adaptation of Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
Well, not too much more to convey here, just felt like poking into one of the Rei's brains to explore Anno's quote, "Whatever else, she needs to be painted in as a bitterly unhappy young girl with little sense of presence." So, I wrote of that, her sense of self, my interpretation of soul-transfer, and the knowledge that she isn't exactly Rei Ayanami. She's a god's vessel.
I'd like to thank Mashadar for giving this a looksee once or twice. To her I say fu fu fu.
And yes, vasty.
Cheers.
P.S. Kadmon, I'm full of it, this is longer than 2000 words. Bah!