Chapter two of Rebuild of I, Rei

I descided, finally, that i was going to write this story how i had wanted to originally, my first shot at it of course missed the mark, at least in my opinion, and i didn't do all the things i'd wanted to do, and several times it disagreed with itself, at least ,that's what i thought.

Now that the customary run-on sentence is over, i will proceed.

Remember, reviews are like author fuel, they help me realize if it's worth continuing.

"Chief!" I heard a voice yell. I cracked my eyes open. My entire body felt like I'd been hit by a car. I felt a larger hand grab my own and haul me up, my eyes snapped open and I stood on my own.

"You good to go?" The soldier… no, Marine, who'd lifted me up looked at me with an appraising eye.

"Yeah" I answered, still dazed. I followed the Marine across the deck of the ship, it was listing slightly and I could hear explosions going off in the distance, "What the hell's going on?" I yelled ahead as the man ran in front of me.

He didn't answer for a moment then said "Huh, you must have hit your head harder than I thought. Somebody just torpedo'd the ship, we're waiting for evac from the Kennedy."

As I was about to answer him the entire ship lurched and I fell to the deck, I saw smoke rising from the bow.

And then I woke up.

I sat up in bed and took in a deep breath. 'What the hell… was that a dream or a memory?'

I looked cautiously around the room I was in, it was the same hospital room as before, at least, it was as near as I could tell. I was alone too, which would help keep me from having to explain my rather animated awakening.

Further inspection indicated that I was not, however, un-attended, two black suited men stood guard outside of my door, or, at least that's how many I could count through the windows. On the positive side, I was neither dead nor in jail, and I'd been given a hospital gown instead of the latex body suit I'd been wearing.

I sighed and sat up slightly in the bed, the pain was significantly less than it had been before. "Well, guess I'll just sit here and look at the exciting scenery…" I said to myself in heavily accented English.

Now that was weird, my mouth felt…strange forming those sounds, like it wasn't used to doing it, "How about some Japanese…"

That certainly felt more natural, odd, it would take some getting used to. 'of course, now that I think about it, I guess I've been thinking in Japanese too, it's like that exchange student in high school said, he has a hard time using German when he's in America, but once he goes home he starts thinking in German again, and it comes naturally.'

I hesitated for a second, 'So I can remember that, but not who I am… or, who I was really. Great.'

The door opened and one of the suits walked in, "The doctor has released you, we will escort you home… don't come like that." He hesitated when he said the last part. I blinked, and looked down to see my hospital gown was riding lower than was modest.

After he turned around and left, I pulled the garment back up and got out of bed. "Awesome; been awake for five minutes and I'm giving out free shows."

x

The door to 'my' apartment clicked shut, the suits had just left after escorting me home. Along the way they had told me that the man who had 'kidnapped' me had been put into isolation. 'At least they didn't kill him' I thought, guiltily.

I locked the door and turned back towards the rest of my home when the smell hit me. I looked around for only a moment before I realized that the source was myself, I smelled like a foot. Extended hospital stay without bathing will do that to you, I supposed.

I sighed and started to disrobe, dropping the skirt was easy enough, and the shirt was uneventful but upon getting to the bra, reaching across myself caused my ribs to shift more than they had in a while. The pain took my breath away, I nearly hit the floor before I caught myself, and, more delicately went about my task.

Finally, having put on my birthday suit successfully, I turned the shower on and waited. "So, I'm here, in Tokyo three, I have no idea what I'm going to do, and if I do any of it wrong, the world ends."

I sighed and stepped into the shower. "Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

There was no hot water. There was no hot water and the cold water was like ice cubes hitting my naked skin. Gritting my teeth, I took the quickest shower I'd ever taken, possibly the quickest shower in all of human history.

If not, it was at least in the top five.

Shivering like I'd just spent the last five minutes in a meat locker, I toweled off and dressed as quickly as my injured body would allow, which was surprisingly fast in light of the tremendous cold I was trying to escape.

Under-garments, shirt, socks… and bed. I crawled under the blanket, wrapped it around myself, and slowly drifted off to sleep.

"Chief, get up!" I heard the man scream, "we gotta get to the evac point, the forward magazine just went up, the ship's going down!"

I hesitated too long for him as he grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me up onto his shoulders in a fireman's carry. This guy was pretty strong, or else I was very light, I couldn't decide.

My vision drifted to my dangling left arm, the one he hadn't hauled me back up with, there was a faded patch, three chevrons and a caduceus, and then i looked farther down. 'Huh, compound fracture, that should probably hurt' I thought to myself as I watched the bone sticking through the skin half way up my forearm. My eyes kept drifting and I saw the bodies, some living, some dying, and some dead. I couldn't focus on any of them, and quite a few were in double. 'Concussion probably, explains the lack of pain reaction' I thought with a detached clinical part of my mind.

My eye cracked open, I could see half of my pillow and the wall at the far end of the room, a lock of blue hair intruded from the left side of my vision. 'That dream again… or memory…'

There was a cell phone on a card table set up next to my bed, I picked it up. The screen told me it was 6:15. Time to get dressed I supposed.

I crawled out of bed and shuffled across the sparsely furnished room when a mirror caught my eye. I stopped and looked at myself in it. I was short, slender, pale, and Asian. The blue hair was off-putting. "Still…" I said to myself, "I guess I could have done worse."

I was still cute, I supposed, perhaps not by purely conventional standards but my figure was, well, good and everything was in pretty much the right place otherwise.

I looked at my face more closely, eyes the color of blood stared back. I sighed, "Still kind of creepy, I'll have to get used to that."

X

For the better part of an hour, I had walked down the seemingly deserted road towards school, or, at least what some unknown part of my mind insisted was the direction of school. 'So, either this body has some cognitive leftovers from the real Rei, or I really am Rei Ayanami and I'm losing my damn mind. That's comforting.' I thought to myself.

"Two more kilometers up this road, and then turn right… I think." I said aloud to nobody in particular. "Kilometers, now I'm thinking in metric, awesome." I observed as I approached a crosswalk.

This road was busier, cars, busses, even the odd panel van, all rushing across the road I was walking down. There were other people waiting for the light to change, none of them particularly stood out, nor looked familiar.

I zoned out while I waited with the group of people. A sea of average; average faces, average height, average weight, average hair, average clothes. And then there was me, moderately shorter than the sea of salary men and women, pale with blue hair, red eyes.

And nobody took notice. Strange world that you can live in when people who stand out don't stand out, Rei must have stood at this corner a hundred times over. My clothes were average enough though at least, I supposed; I saw several other girls wearing the same uniform near the road, waiting to cross.

The light changed, a rush of people crossed the street, I got about 10 feet closer to the curb, and then the light changed back again. "Great." I muttered to myself in the accented English I'd slowly grown accustomed to.

Then I caught sight of movement, a lighter-brown haired boy wearing headphones and glasses was absent mindedly entering the road, the road that traffic was currently occupying. 'Surely he'll stop' I thought as I started moving towards him. "He's not going to stop" I said to myself as I started moving faster, pushing people out of the way.

There was a car coming, some kind of Toyota or Mazda, I couldn't really tell, and didn't really care. The driver was texting and there was no way she could see the teen currently entering the roadway. 'Some things never change' I noted with disgust as I pushed my way through the rest of the crowd.

Dropping my bag on the sidewalk I stepped off the curb and grabbed the boy and shoved him back onto the sidewalk. I turned to see how close the car was and immediately wished I hadn't, it had arrived.

Acting on pure instinct I jumped, straight up in the air, with everything I could muster and cleared the hood of the car. I did not, however, clear the entire car; the top of the windshield hit my feet and sent me tumbling through the air. In the moments I tumbled through the air above the car I was struck by the bitter irony of having been killed by a car, twice.

What felt like a small eternity later, but was in reality maybe a second, my shoes hit the pavement and I tumbled over on my back as a heavily built man grabbed me by the arm and hauled me both out of the street and onto my feet. 'That did not just fucking happen.'

I instantly recognized him as Section Two, his face was a mask of incredulity, and I couldn't blame him, but I had other things to worry about. I spotted the boy I'd pulled out of the road, he looked about my size and vaguely familiar.

I marched over to him, adrenaline still pumping through my veins and grabbed him by the shoulders, my fingers surely digging into his flesh in a painful way, and screamed at him, "What is wrong with you, you idiot! You could have been killed! You almost got me killed by trying to save your dumb ass!"

The boy blinked and pulled his head phones off his ears, "Ayanami?"

Then it hit me, the glasses, the hair, the face, the voice: Kensuke Aida, in the flesh.

He kept talking, "Ayanami, are you okay?" his voice conveyed concern.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down. "I just got hit by a car! Do you think I'm okay, Aida?" I hissed out through clenched teeth, my way of keeping my voice down. "You know what, never mind, just leave, go to class" I ground out as I stiffly marched back over to the agent who'd pulled me out of the road.

As soon as I got back over to the agent the pain hit me, my feet hurt, my legs hurt, my ass hurt, and my ribs hurt. 'I guess I did just get hit by a car… again… and that little outburst probably blew me cover to shit.' I thought to myself as I got the agent's attention, not that that would have been hard anyway, all things considered.

"We could have handled that you know" the agent mentioned to me as I walked next to him, he was leading me towards a car. "Although, I'm sure it wouldn't have been as… impressive as that. You dropped this" he said as he handed me by bag.

"It felt pretty impressive" I quipped as I took the bag, climbing into the car through the door he'd opened for me, "So, school then?"

X

"…and then she yelled at me, it happened!" Aida recounted to his tracksuit clad friend as I entered the classroom, how he'd gotten there first I was at a loss for.

"Bullshit, Ayanami don't talk to nobody, especially not yellin." The taller, who I assumed was Suzuhara, answered him.

I walked past them, silently, to my desk by the window and sat, reflecting on the conversation I'd had in the car with the agent who'd pulled me out of the road.

"Will this be in the report?" I'd asked him as he drove. The buildings passed by in silence as he considered my question, the series of one-way streets meant that we wouldn't be taking a direct course to the school after all, still, better than walking.

"Something tells me I shouldn't do that, actually." He replied after considering it, "Besides, it's not as if anybody would believe that you, of all people, screamed at somebody for being stupid."

"And the driver of the car?" I asked as we turned a corner.

"Other agent's are dealing with that. She's going to be riding the bus for a while." He answered with a slight grin.

I smiled slightly at that, at least she wasn't going to be making that mistake again. We pulled over onto the side of the road, the school was through my window. I opened my door and started to get out when I turned back to the man. "Thank you, Agent…" I trailed off.

"Shimata, and you're welcome Ayanami."

I sighed, at least my little outburst hadn't cost me yet due in no small part to pure unadulterated luck, and it was all for nothing at that, as the agent had as much as told me they had the situation under control.

I was stupid, and I'd have to work on that in the future… still, it wasn't as if I could let him get run down by a car, and I didn't know that Section Two was paying attention to him anyway.

But I should have, and if I'd recognized him sooner I would have. Class 2-A, the no-mothers class, the class full of potential evangelion pilots; of course they wouldn't let him get plowed by a car, even if they didn't know how important he might have been.

"Ayanami?" I heard, dragging me out of my thoughts, I turned to see Suzuhara looking at me. "Is it true?"

I tilted my head an almost infinitesimal amount to the side, questioningly.

"What Ken said, 'bout you pullin' him out of the road, gettin' hit by a car, and then bitchin' him out?" he elaborated.

I blinked at him, twice, and then slowly turned my head back to the window, staring out into the world. The world, my world, if not before, than surely now. 'If there is where I'm going to be, I'd like to at least live to turn fifteen…again.' I thought with an internal laugh. Not that I knew how old I'd been, who I was, who my parents were, or anything at all really.

All I knew was that there was a possibility that I'd been in the navy at one point, and might have been a medic, but even that could have just been a dream. 'Of course, I knew the proper dosage to dope myself in the hospital.'

I sighed as I looked at a blue car drive past the school. 'Which also begs the question; shouldn't there have been a camera or something that saw what really happened at the hospital? Had somebody covered for me, or should I expect some very difficult questions from a man in white gloves? Unless… that Agent Shimata… he seemed vaguely familiar, he may have been one of the agents looking for me in the hospital, and I'm almost positive he was one of the ones outside my door. Had he covered for me? Why would he?'

Regardless, I'd decided, it needed more investigation. How I'd go about that, however, I didn't yet know.

some googling or knowledge of naval rank insignia will help the detectives among you figure out what that patch meant.