"Before and After," by Muphrid. After the battle with the Twelfth Angel, Rei begins to reexamine who she is and whether she can accept the fate Gendō's dealt her.

After Armisael

Chapter Seven

Hello.

I've thought for some minutes on the best way to start, but I can think of nothing else to begin with.

My name is Ayanami Rei.

The date is unimportant.

I found this notebook in a brown leather bag. Doctor Akagi said it contained my belongings. The notebook has a blue plastic cover. The label says there should be two hundred sheets within. I've counted—there are one hundred and two. Each sheet has a perforation along the side, where it can be detached easily from the binding. When a sheet is removed, the part on the other side of the perforation is left behind. There are many of these left in this notebook. Whoever detached the other sheets didn't remove these parts. They didn't find it necessary.

Or they didn't care.

I write from my apartment, number 402. I've not seen anyone else living here. There is a refrigerator with medicine bottles on top. There is a bed, and two wide curtains block out the sunlight.

Why am I writing?

I'm writing because I'm alive.

Why am I alive?

I don't know that yet.

I've been alive for two days. That's why I'm different from people. People can't write after two days of living. People can't speak or walk after two days of being alive. A person so young wouldn't know that's unusual either. A person doesn't remember waking up for the first time.

I do.

It was a warm place. I floated in a tube. The clear fluid inside carried my weight. An orange light shined from the bottom. The fluid was in my mouth. The fluid was in my throat. Fluid shouldn't be in those places. Fluid shouldn't be there.

"Rei?" There was a voice outside. I didn't see the woman through the fluid, but she spoke to me anyway. "Rei, listen to me: you have to breathe normally, all right? Just breathe!"

"Does she even know what it means to breathe normally?" said another voice.

"She has a basic comprehension of speech." That was a man, and he approached the tank, watching over the rims of his glasses. "She knows what we're saying," he said.

I coughed. I gagged. I pushed off the tube's wall. I kicked upward to the surface, but there was no air up there. There was no air.

"Just drain it!" said the first woman. "Drain the whole tank!"

"Yes, ma'am!"

The fluid receded. The surface sank below my eyes, and the orange stuff flowed from my mouth. I saw clearly for the first time. A blonde woman in a white coat watched me. A brown-haired woman in a beige uniform sat before an array of screens and buttons. The others—and there were others—stared.

Even the man with tinted glasses and white gloves stared.

They lowered me to the base of the chamber. I sat. The fluid dripped off me. The glass of the tank sank into the floor, and I was exposed to air—cold, cold air.

"Get her a blanket!" said the blonde woman. "Come on, snap to it! Do you all want to do this over again?"

Three technicians draped me in white fabric, and I clutched it close to my skin. They lifted me to my feet. I made the first step from the tube, onto a shiny, metal surface.

"Do you know who you are?"

It was the bearded man. He didn't touch me like the others. He only watched.

"Do you know who I am?"

My knees buckled, and the technicians let me go. I sat at the base of the tank. I shook my head.

"Bring in the gurney," said the blonde woman, the scientist. "Let's get her checked out."

The others wheeled in a metal cart and equipment. The bearded man leaned beside me.

"You're Ayanami Rei," he whispered in my ear, "and you've been saved—preserved—for a purpose."

He looked at me.

"Never forget that you have a purpose."

I haven't forgotten, but Commander Ikari—that is his name—hasn't told me for what or why. I don't think he means to until the time for me to fulfill it. It's a secret to everyone, including me.

Especially me.

The blonde scientist woman and her people—nurses and technicians—carried me onto the gurney. They stuck needles in my arm. They squeezed bags of saline and drugs to flow through my veins. They wheeled me to a gray room with writing on the walls: top, bottom, strangeness, titanium oxide. They laid me on a table before a plain white curtain.

"Do you remember this place?" asked the scientist.

"No," I said, "but it is familiar."

"It is either familiar or unfamiliar," she said. "Be specific."

Most of the words described quarks—subatomic particles that make up protons and neutrons. The rest of the laboratory was similar to the apartment I sit in now. Sparse it was. But for a bed, a curtain, and a small refrigerator, it was barren.

I didn't know that at the time. I'd yet to visit this apartment.

"Unfamiliar, then?" asked the scientist.

I nodded, and she said no more. She only watched.

Her nurses and staff pulled the blanket away. They shined lights in my eyes. They tapped my knees with a reflex hammer and pressed a stethoscope to my breast. I coughed for them until they said to stop. They made me lie back and open my legs.

"Doctor Akagi." The Commander stepped forward. "I don't think that's necessary."

The blonde-haired scientist squinted at a clipboard. "It's part of the standard workup."

"Forgo it."

"I'm fairly certain you don't want her keeling over from a tumor because we didn't look. Ask the vice commander how many we lost last month. They grow so fast—"

"How long would she have if she were ill?"

The doctor blinked. "Well, she wouldn't have made it this far if she didn't have at least a few weeks."

"She won't need to live longer than that."

The nurses looked to Doctor Akagi. She frowned.

"Very well," she said, making the empty checkbox with her blue pen.

"You can sit up now," said the brown-haired technician. She stood between me and the Commander. "Well?" she said to him. "Are you happy now that you've given a woman a gynecological exam for the first time?"

"Lieutenant Ibuki, hold your tongue!" said the doctor. "You will show Commander Ikari the proper respect!"

"It's all right." The Commander raised a hand, silencing her. "The lieutenant clearly doesn't know what she's saying."

"And why's that?" said the lieutenant.

"Because you've met my son."

Blood rushed into the lieutenant's cheeks. She didn't say another word.

Treatments followed. The technicians laid me face up on the table and stuck me with needles all over. They ran electrical current between the pins. My muscles tensed and relaxed three hundred and seventy-two times in total. I didn't keep count. They did.

Between the jolts the technicians whispered to each other. They faced their monitors and keyboards, but their eyes and heads they turned toward me. "Can you believe it?" said one. "The tank was creepy enough, but to bring one out, have her walking and talking like this?"

"She isn't walking yet," said another.

"Silence, all of you," said Doctor Akagi. "Let me remind you that this work is classified. It is not for lunchtime gossip."

"Speaking of lunch, doctor, don't you think it's about time we took a break?" said a technician.

A jolt of electricity tensed the muscles in my back.

"Does it look like we're at a point we can take a break?" said the doctor. "No? Keep working. No complaining."

There was a collective groan in the laboratory.

"Even so, Doctor Akagi," said the Commander, "it's admirable work."

The doctor wrote a note on her clipboard. "Your compliments could carry more weight with me."

"How so?"

"For one, when you talk to me, you could look at me instead of her."

The nurses drew out the pins and collected them—with droplets of blood—in a steel bowl. They sat me upright on the table. They brought bandages and rubbing alcohol. They gave me clothes to wear: a school uniform, white and green; black socks and a red ribbon. They covered my eye in a square bandage. They bound my arm in a sling.

"Appearances are important," said the Commander. "You will meet people, people who don't understand what has happened. These bandages are for show. They are, at minimum, what others would expect if they saw you."

" 'Expect'?" I said.

Behind the Commander, the doctor and the lieutenant exchanged a glance.

"If you had lived," the Commander said.

The doctor explained it. I was a pilot of Evangelion. I defended the new city Tōkyō-3 from the Angel invasion. I died in the battle, but thanks to this procedure, I was saved. The doctor and her assistants had preserved "the essence of who I was." They gave me knowledge. They gave me the ability to speak and write and read.

"Everything else," said Doctor Akagi, "is beyond our power to put back."

They nurses brought back the gurney. A clear capsule sat atop it, opened at the midline. They carried me off the table. They put me inside. They closed the lid and covered it in a white sheet. They left me in the dark.

"Don't panic," said the doctor. "We're just taking you to the hospital ward."

They wheeled me places. An elevator pulled the gurney upward, and my weight pressed against the bottom of the capsule. The hospital ward was not like the laboratory. People spoke openly. There were booming voices over speakers. We navigated hallways and corners, but I didn't see what it was like until we entered the room.

"You won't have to stay here for long." Doctor Akagi let me out and covered the capsule the same as it when I was in it, and two assistants walked the gurney out. "It's just for appearances' sake," she said.

I sat on the hospital bed. The sheets were white. The walls and ceiling were tinted blue. It made the sheets look blue, too.

"Is something wrong?"

The doctor stood in the doorway. We were alone.

"If it's about him," she said, "he never boarded the elevator. Does that concern you?"

I looked at the wall.

"It's strange, isn't it? From the moment you wake up, he whispers in your ear. He tells you how needed you are, but once you stand on your own two feet, once your clothes are back on, he's gone. He's there when you're at your most vulnerable, but past that…" She sighed. "Maybe we're most vulnerable when we're alone."

I looked at the wall.

"Well, say little about what's happened in the last few hours, or else we may have to start again. Understand?"

I nodded.

"You don't have to stay here," she said. "You may walk the hallway freely. Look outside. See what you remember."

"I will remember?"

"You may feel like some things are familiar, but…" She frowned. "No, you won't remember a thing."

Doctor Akagi hasn't been wrong. I have books in this apartment, this room with my name written above the door, but I don't know where or when I received them. They tell me how a DNA strand splits so that matching nucleotides will bond with each half and create two molecules from one, but that is something I already know. At the hospital, I touched the glass of the hallway window. I looked outside. A mountain jutted over the horizon. Trees and shrubs dotted the soil below. I know what they're made of—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and iron. I know the trees have branches and leaves. I know the flowers have stems and petals. I don't know when I learned these things. I know much, but I remember nothing.

"Ayanami!"

A voice cried out, and I didn't remember whose it was, either.

He jogged toward me from the corner of the hall. There was a woman with him—behind him—but I didn't see her clearly. She looked at us for a moment then sat down, out of sight.

"I can't believe it," said the boy, panting. "I really thought you were gone."

I sat on a row of waiting chairs, and the boy leaned against the wall beside me. It was an unnerving situation. The doctor and the Commander hadn't prepared me for it, yet they expected me not to draw attention and face consequences otherwise. I didn't know who this person was. Could he be family? A brother? A classmate? A stranger wouldn't care if I lived or died. Even the technicians thought my life a curiosity. They thought I wasn't real.

The boy told me he was glad I lived, that he was thankful I'd sacrificed myself to save him. I only found out later, from Doctor Akagi, what had happened. The boy and I are both pilots. He's the Commander's son—Ikari Shinji-kun. We fought the invader together, the one called an Angel, but it infected me. It corrupted my Eva, and it meant to infect Ikari-kun's, too. "We think you tried to pull it inside Unit-00," the doctor said later. "You reversed the AT field to keep it in. You said yourself that, if you left Unit-00, the AT field would vanish and it would all be for naught. So yes, you did make a sacrifice. You activated the Drive D controller and destroyed the Evangelion, the Angel, yourself, and half of Tōkyō-3 in the process."

"That is a victory?" I'd said. "That doesn't sound like something to be happy about."

"Happiness is relative," said the doctor. "It's terrible that so much of the city was wiped out, but it's better than the alternative. The danger to you and others was extreme. I don't think anyone can or would question your actions. Shinji-kun's happy to be alive, I'm sure. He's happy you are, too, even if the Rei he knows isn't quite here anymore."

That I know well. Ikari-kun and I spoke for some time outside my hospital room. I did not remember what had happened. I could only take him at his word. He wondered if I remembered, but that wasn't the issue. I was the third, at least—the scientists and nurses were too efficient for it to have been the first time. I tried to explain that to him, but he didn't understand.

"Ayanami," he said, "you're different. Is this about what happened the other day?"

I said no. I couldn't have known what he meant, and Doctor Akagi, when I asked her later, didn't know either. Ikari-kun was right to suspect, but he would never have guessed the truth. "When a flower no longer responds to sunlight or water," the doctor said, "the gardener assumes something's wrong. It could be a pest or a fungus or something else. Never would he suspect that the flower has been replaced with another, identical in color and size but different in all other respects. You must bear with Shinji-kun; he thinks he's looking at the same flower."

I don't think Ikari-kun looked out the window or studied the flowers.

He left me. He said he understood I was tired and needed to sleep. When he left, he looked over his shoulder and whispered to his companion. The woman in the red jacket looked at me, too. I don't know what she said.

Ikari-kun was mistaken, though. I didn't need to sleep.

I stayed at the hospital overnight. I looked at the ceiling as the twilight turned black. I was alive again. I was alive and in a quiet, empty place. What am I alive for? For whom and why? I looked into the black, but there were no answers in that place. Listening to the cicadas, I realized it—focusing on the emptiness just allowed me to avoid the questions.

What questions?

Why am I alive?

For what purpose?

For whom?

It is unsettling—falling asleep for the first time. It feels as if to disappear into the same void one emerged from. I feared it. When I caught myself drifting to sleep, I fought it. There was too great a chance I would wake up again having lost all that came before.

I didn't sleep much, but I did sleep. I know because one moment it was night,and the next—

"Well hello there."

The next, there was Doctor Akagi with a blue breakfast tray in one hand and my schoolbag in the other.

"How does it feel?" she asked. "Starting your second day of being alive again?"

It seemed no different from the first, I told her, but I had questions. There were concepts I wanted to understand, the names of people and events that I had no recollection of. It was over that breakfast she told me of Ikari-kun. She explained to me the war against the Angels that we fought—how they meant to merge with the giant Adam in the lowest level of the Geofront to make a world of creatures in their image. Some of this knowledge I remembered. I knew of wars between people in the wake of an extreme cataclysm, but that was human history. Of my own, I knew nothing.

"Well, let me see," said the doctor, giving me a bowl of rice to consume. "Before all this, you lived alone. You were close with Shinji-kun, I think, but you said little about it, at least to me. You were close to Commander Ikari, too. He invited you to dinner once, if I recall, but he said later on that he forgot about another dinner date and had to send you away. I'm sure he had a good reason for that mistake, right?"

I left my chopsticks in the bowl. "I don't remember," I said.

"Ah, so you wouldn't, of course."

Of course. The doctor knew that, too. It seemed strange to me that she'd forget.

"This isn't too lovely a place to be, is it," said the doctor.

It wasn't.

"Perhaps you'd like to go home?"

"Is that an order?"

"It is, actually. Let me do one more checkup on you, and if you're fit physically and mentally to move on, then you've done enough here to keep up appearances."

"Whose order is it?" I asked.

"Commander Ikari's, of course. Are you surprised?"

I wasn't.

I removed my clothes for Doctor Akagi, but she asked I leave the bandages in place. "It'll be easier that way," she said, "so we don't have to put them back on again." She checked my vision and breathing. She said I was fit and that it would be better to leave before a real doctor examined me and thought something amiss.

" 'The wondrous city of Tōkyō-3, built from historic Hakone.' " She read from a pamphlet, smiling to herself. "Honestly, they tried to make it sound like a real tourist destination. Not anymore." She laid the map flat on my tray. "The route from here to your apartment is in red, but be careful: this map is from before. You might have to improvise."

"I go alone?" I said.

"Yes, unfortunately. There's no one to spare, I'm afraid."

"And Doctor Akagi herself?" I asked.

"I'm afraid I have a sudden meeting with the Committee," she said. "So sorry."

She left the map and bag. I took them. There was nothing else to do. I closed the door to my hospital room and walked down the hall alone, but even with the map, I was unprepared. The intensive care ward had been quiet. The rest of the hospital wasn't. Doctors and nurses ran through the halls with gurneys. The instruments beeped and hissed. In the lobby, waiting patients sat on the floor or lay on sleeping bags. A piece of glass from a vending machine fell, cracked and shattered. People stepped on the shards anyway and ran off with packs of chocolate candy.

Leaving the hospital, I entered direct sunlight for the first time that morning, but the shadow of a cargo plane blocked out the brightest star. This is what the world was after my death: the explosion had blasted a crater into the earth. It breached the nearby lake, and the water there had already filled the void. The doctor was right again—had I followed her route directly, I'd have drowned. I walked the red line until the road it traced went headlong into the water. From there, I followed the edge of the crater. I walked on roads where they were intact. I stayed close to the edge where felled buildings or disrupted earth blocked the smoother paths. The lake's waters were brown and murky, rife with pollution and loose dirt. Flyers and advertisements lapped up on the new shoreline, their ink having long washed away. Utility poles snapped in two and stuck out from the surface. Propeller planes and helicopters circled the crater like infectious flies. I realized their purpose only when I walked further, away from the crater.

When I started to see people again.

At first it was just a car. A truck drove slowly over the broken road. Two adults and five children clung to the flatbed, bouncing erratically as the truck navigated each crack. "Young lady," said the driver, leaning out his window, "do you need a lift?"

I shook my head.

"Are you sure? It's dangerous to be alone out here. Rumor has it there are looters taking over just a few blocks away, and you're injured, too."

I wasn't. The man smelled. The children in the flatbed smelled. They were sweaty and dirty. They looked to the bottom of a clear, plastic bottle, but only a single drop of water came out.

"Well," said the driver, "all the best to you then."

The trains stood still, resting on severed tracks. People on the street huddled under awnings and in alleys for shade, even if the buildings around them had cracked or crumbled. That's why the planes and helicopters were necessary. They dropped boxes of foods and water with parachutes. The defense forces patrolled in their armored vehicles with guns and helmets. They gave energy bars to the hungry children and chased the thieves who took computers and television screens. Not all the city was like that. As I made my way around and away from the crater, there were places with working lights again, where the water that leaked from broken pipes was clear, not muddy. In these places, there were more people but less food, less shelter.

I saved these people once. I delivered them to nothingness. If that's what I did in piloting Eva, is my purpose meaningful? Is my life worth renewing again and again until there's no one left to bring me back?

The apartment complex Doctor Akagi indicated on my map was a string of buildings all along a single road. They were safe, undamaged, and free of refugees but for one car.

"Ayanami-san!"

It was a green car, shiny and metallic. A girl stepped out from the back seat, amid bags and boxes that were strapped to the car with bungie cord. The girl's uniform was green, too.

Her uniform was like mine.

"Amazing." She stopped me on the sidewalk, halfway up the path to the lobby. "I heard from Ikari-kun you survived, but to think, after that big explosion, that you'd be walking around and back home already!"

I said nothing.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "This looks strange, doesn't it? That's our friend Nakamura-san's car. He and his wife offered to take us out of the city with them." She looked down. "Our house is gone, you see. It's not your fault, of course—just part of the lake came out that way and, well, the whole street is still underwater. Aida-kun and Suzuhara's homes were in the blast zone. They're both leaving, too. We're going to try to go together to Tōkyō-2, but the way things are right now, nobody knows if we'll even be able to stay in touch."

I said nothing.

"Did you hear about the school?"

"No."

"It's gone, too, as you might expect." She sighed. "Well, I know you can't leave, but when it's all over, come find us, okay? And if you see Asuka, I guess we lost track of her. Take care of her for me, won't you? Even though I know you're not friends. You and Asuka and Ikari-kun—oh, did you tell him?"

" 'Tell'?"

"About your feelings?"

I couldn't say if I had.

"You didn't? Well you should. I hope you do. If nothing else, all this…" She looked over the crater. "This should tell you to."

"Big Sister!" A child called from the sedan. "Kodama wants us to go before it gets dark!"

"Okay!" the girl called back. "Well, until next time, Ayanami Rei-san." She bowed slightly.

"You," I said.

"Hm? What is it?"

"Who are you?"

She blinked, her eyes wide. Her lips parted, but she didn't speak.

There was a honking from the car. "Big Sister!"

"Just a minute!" she said. "I am—well I was—class representative for our homeroom. We went to school together."

"I see."

More honking. "Big Sister!"

"All right, all right!"

She trotted down the walkway, meeting the sedan at the street. I swiped my residence card at the building entrance.

"Ayanami-san!"

I turned.

"Take care of yourself, okay?"

The entrance door closed behind me. The lobby was silent.

I don't know her name. I don't even know most of what she talked about. The life I've come to is full of these things—fragments that are forever lost to me. I entered the apartment with my name on it, but I'm not sure if I can call it mine. The books I've read, but they told me nothing. Even the one that was unlike the others told me nothing. I read that book from cover to cover. I know the author's name. I know he lived in England in the nineteenth century. I know he was prolific and famous. I know of the French Revolution, for it is like all the wars people have fought against each other. Those are facts. The characters, however—the barrister, the marquis, the revolutionaries—they are new to me. I can never know if I met them before. What they do is incomprehensible to me, for I can't imagine doing the same. I can't imagine. Who would I give myself for, as the barrister gives himself for the marquis?

Ikari-kun? I already sacrificed myself for him. I died for everyone.

No, that's wrong. I'm a different person. I should not be deceived like the people who see me are. I may look like the second one, but we're not the same. She had connections with people. I am blank. She had textbooks on genetics and physics. I don't know what they mean.

She kept a pair of glasses.

I didn't understand at the time. But I saw those glasses, and they affected me. I held them in my hands, standing before the curtain. They were something she cared about, but I didn't understand what they meant. I squeezed them. I twisted the lenses, my hands shaking.

I cried over them.

I haven't cried before. It should've be the first time I'd seen tears, and yet, unlike the rest of this apartment, it seemed too familiar.

I didn't understand it then. I didn't understand until that night, when the woman came. She knocked on my door, and when I opened it, she smiled.

"Hello, Rei," she said. "Do you know who I am?"

It was the woman from the hospital, the one with Ikari-kun. I recognized her red jacket.

"I'm Major Katsuragi," she said. "We work together." She frowned. "We used to work together. May I come in?"

I stepped aside, leaving the door open.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you," she said. "I can't be here long. The security agents are watching."

"Security?" I said.

"You haven't seen them? They're making sure you don't leave. Commander Ikari has all the pilots on lockdown. Things are tense right now." She scratched her head. "But it would be understandable if you didn't know that."

Major Katsuragi. She's an interesting person. She caught me off-guard.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"I'm fine."

"I see. That's good. Unusual, perhaps, but good."

"Unusual?" I said.

"A little, isn't it? I mean, here you are, having just been salvaged from Unit-00's wreckage, and you have hardly a scratch on you."

She looked at the bandages I'd left on the floor.

"Even without any physical injury, it'd be typical—expected, even—that you'd bear some scars from that. Not on your skin or in your bones, of course, but, you know…"

I didn't.

"A normal person would be angry," she said. "A normal person would be sick of the way things are. Isn't that how you feel, Rei?"

I didn't know how I felt at that moment, but I'm not a normal person. The major knew that. She taunted me with those questions. Whether I wanted to be alive, in this body that people remembered but a world I'd forgotten—that was not her concern.

"What is your purpose here, major?" I asked.

She tilted her head, frowning. "That's just like you, isn't it? Even now, you don't take long to get to the point. All right then. You don't remember, so I'll tell you." She sat on my bed, sighing. "For a long time, I've been trying to uncover what's hidden. I lost someone close to me for it. I almost did something to you that's…" She looked away. "Unspeakable, really. How strange it is—to contemplate ending a life only to see another take many more. It shakes you inside, or it should, if you still have a soul left at all."

"Major?"

"I know now what you are, Rei. I made Ritsuko take me there tonight. I saw the graveyard of failed Eva. I saw the tank where dozens of clones swam happily, naked and smiling. They seemed so blissful, being empty."

"If you didn't know, it's something I doubt you're meant to," I said.

"Without a doubt," she said, "but I had to find out: where the dummy plugs come from, where the tons of water and chemicals were going. Even then, I wasn't prepared." She shook her head. "Neither was Shinji-kun."

"Ikari-kun?"

"That's right. Ritsuko wanted him to see it, too. You know, I've known that woman for ten years. I didn't think she could surprise me anymore. I didn't think she could be so full of jealousy and hate."

"To whom?"

"To you. Rei, she killed them—all of them. All the others that were like you are gone. You're the only one left."

That's right. I'm alone now. I'm separate. I'm unique. I'm the only one left. I can't be brought back again. I couldn't be brought back again. If I died again, it would be for the last time.

"I realize now that you were trying to tell me what you could," she said. "That you knew what would happen if Commander Ikari were unhappy with you. He wouldn't have to discipline you. He had no need to. If things got bad enough, he could reset you. He could bring you back like this—blank and new. I don't agree with Ristuko's motives. I don't condone her anger, but I heard how you were with Shinji-kun. I see how you are now. Since I saw it with my own eyes, I'm not afraid to believe it: you're not the same, and that's appalling. What Ritsuko and Commander Ikari have done to you—it's wrong."

The major couldn't have been more correct. This world I'd been thrust into was full of people and things—people who should have connections to me, objects that should have significance. They brought me back to a world without context. They gave me back a notebook with the written sheets ripped out. I can feel, on the pages that remain, the impressions of a pen that someone else held, but what she thought when she wrote there is lost forever. They gave me a name. They gave me a face. They gave me an impression of being like the other one, but I'm not. While they could bring me back again and again, that didn't matter. Nothing would change.

But the major told me that night they couldn't do that anymore.

"Now I understand," she said. "They need you for something. You're the key after all, but not for what you know or who you are. Your existence alone is the point of it. It's disgusting, but it's the truth." She buried her face in her hands, sighing. "I need your help, Rei. My sources are being pressured, but you're still on the inside."

I faced the refrigerator. A beaker of water sat there. I found a prescription note and a clear orange bottle. I undid the safety cap and shook out two large, white pills.

"If you feel any anger for what they've done to you, if you dislike them at all for their cavalier treatment of a life, you'll help me, won't you? I know what you're thinking, but this goes beyond a woman's need to dig up gossip and secrets. With what the Committee's planning, with what Commander Ikari's done—I think they want a Third Impact. I think they're counting on it, and the only thing that's been important so far is making sure an Angel doesn't start it first."

I swallowed the two pills. They went down easily. The major was misguided and mistaken. Third Impact—such a term was foreign to me, but it spoke of death and mayhem. She would save people from calamity and force them to endure the hardship that followed. I'd seen that. I saw it by the edge of the crater lake. I saw it from the defense forces who chased looters and angry mobs in the streets. She would save them from nothing. People like her, I thought, were the ones who brought me back.

"Rei? Are you listening?"

I shook the bottle, and two more pills came out. "Yes, major."

"I know you must still be in shock, having just come into this world again not knowing what everything is, but I believe people have to have a basic compassion for one another. If they don't, we're all doomed anyway. There are men in control out there, doing whatever they want, shielding themselves in lie after lie. I'm sick of it. What they want serves them and only them; they don't care what anyone else thinks."

It wasn't my concern; it wasn't my purpose. Then again, what I was doing then, as she spoke, was likely not my purpose, either. I didn't care. This world was empty to me. It had lost all meaning. The glasses by the curtain had lost all meaning, but they were still there. That's why I hate them.

That's why I want to die.

"Haven't you had enough of those?" asked the major.

I swallowed, shaking the bottle. Four pills rolled out. "This the recommended dosage," I said.

"Is it?"

"Please go, major. I'm tired."

"Uh-huh. Let me see that prescription scrip."

I upended the bottle. The pills spilled out, but I caught most of them. More than enough.

"Rei, stop, listen to me—"

I stuffed them into my mouth, three or four at a time. It was harder to swallow that way, but I forced myself to. I swallowed twice. That was all I had time for.

Before the major punched me across my left cheek.

Pills sputtered out. I stumbled into the wall, holding my chin and cheekbone.

"Sorry," she said, shaking her wrist. "I know it hurts. I can only guess what it must be like. What is it you're thinking? That your situation, your life—it fucking sucks, is that it? That's probably right, but this?" She snatched the pill bottle from me. "This won't change anything. You want your life to be better? You have to have the will to live, the will to do things that are hard, to do what you're afraid of. I know you're not afraid of this!"

She hurled the bottle into a corner, and it bounced harmlessly into shadow.

"You're afraid to live."

The major said some other things, but the room grew blurry and faint. When I woke up, I was in one of those blue rooms again.

The major, I learned, had carried me to her vehicle and driven me to the hospital. She convinced the nurses that Doctor Akagi, in her anger, deliberately gave me the wrong dosage instructions. "Clever," said the major, "don't you think?"

That time, before dawn, the major drove me back to my apartment, past the roadblocks and the wreckage of the destroyed city. "Forget everything I said," she told me. "Whether you want to help me or not, that's your decision, and this time, I'll respect it. Whether you want to live or not, that's your decision, and I'll accept that, too. But like I said, if people always do the easy thing, they'll never change. You'll never change. So, I challenge you, Rei, to learn to live—to make something of the time given to you."

Easy advice that is to give. Even now, I look to the fresh, full bottle of pills atop my refrigerator. The major left them on purpose. She insisted that I have the choice. I haven't opened the cap yet. I don't know if I will. For all the major's pleading, she gave me no incentive to stay alive. Even the Commander and Doctor Akagi gave me a purpose.

But none of them can give me a reason.

I've left the top page of this notebook blank. It's the last I have of her, the second. When I run my fingertips over the page, I feel the impressions of her writing, the indentations of her pen strokes. It's precise. It's neat. I wonder now—how did she feel? Did she know of this purpose she lived for?

Did she embrace it?

Did she reject it?

Did she choose some other path instead?

She must have, or this notebook wouldn't exist. This thing captured what she was. This where she put her thoughts, not others'. She had her own opinions. She had her own wishes. She might not have expressed them. She might've kept them to herself, but they existed. They were real.

I can never be that person again. I never was that person, but like her, I write to find a reason to live. That reason can come from no one else. It is mine. It is mine alone.

And if I don't find it, the pills on my refrigerator will still be there, to let me sink into nothingness and no longer be.

Author's Notes

There are several theories on what Rei remembers after she's reborn. I chose the most conservative route because it seemed like the one most dramatic to use, the one that punctuates how removed she is from her old life. It is, in some ways, a cruel choice, but I felt it best for the story at hand.

Coming soon, Kaworu joins the pilots' ranks, but this is no ordinary boy, and his interest in Rei will challenge everything she thought she was. Check out my blog at westofarcturus [dot] blogspot [dot] com for commentary on this and other chapters, or follow me on twitter, [at]muphrid15.