The First Child/Before I Sleep
Part 3

-----------

Rei's voice echoes through the void.

"No."

...

"The promised time has come, yes, but what is the promise?"

...

"I'd prayed for this day, but now I fear it."

...

"You can't let me cease to be, because once upon a time, my existence mattered to someone."

...

"Don't you remember? Can't you hear him?"

...

"No... I am not your doll, Ikari."

...

A door closes on an empty room. Footsteps recede into the distance.

Leaving behind the shattered remains of glasses that once signified something that lived on only
in a dying girl's memory.

Time passes within the abandoned room.

A room devoid of life. Perhaps a few seconds pass, perhaps a few millenia. No sentience
within the room exists to know the difference.

The broken shards of glass, bathed in the moonlight streaming through the window,
lies there as if caught in a moment, frozen for posterity as if in a glass museum case.

But eventually a shadow shifts in the background, like an insubstantial ghost.
A boy in black slacks and white shirt emerges, kneels down on the floor in front of the
glass shards. He lies still, as if staring through the floor. Eventually he moves, still
kneeling, to take a hand broom and a dustpan from a corner of the room, and proceeds to sweep
away the glass shards. Slowly, as his hands tremble, he tries to clean.

As he does so a chill wind blows in through the open window, carrying along with it
the faint sound of distant voices. Scuffling. The stamping of distant boots on an
unseen floor.

"We've found the Third Child. Will proceed to terminate."

Metallic clicks.

"I'm sorry, kid, this is nothing personal." A stranger's cold, gruff voice.

Gunfire. Running footsteps. Grunts, the thud of bodies falling.

"Nothing personal here either," whispers a woman's soft, seething voice.

Another gunshot... just one.

Behind the boy, in the pale moonlight, another shadow becomes visible, a tall,
red-clad figure with her back turned to the boy.

As she turns to face him, the frail light fades, the room turns completely dark.

"Why, Misato? Why did he have to die...?"

And the room, and everything in it, disappears.

---
The Void. A silent, black vacuum.

Faint breathing from somewhere within the shadows. A faint, breaking whisper.
"Why...? Why him...?"

Silence.

"He was more deserving of life than I was..."

Silence.

"Asuka... help me, Asuka..."

The void is suddenly pierced by a hint of faint, brittle light, barely illuminating
a solitary metal folding chair.

The spotlight slowly widens. Illuminating classroom desks and chairs. Silent rows of
uniform desks and chairs, facing the lone metal chair.

Behind the lone metal chair, a schoolteacher's monolithic desk. Behind which sits
a solitary shadow.

The old sensei quietly reading faded, yellowing lesson notes behind his desk.
Oblivious to the Void.

He would have stayed like this for eternity, for all he knew. Except for the arrival
of a gaunt ghost, a young yet grey-haired student, who sits now on the lone metal
folding chair. His hands clasped together, elbows on his knees, scarlet eyes staring
intently forward, into empty space. As if waiting.

Kaworu Nagisa.

A pinprick of light appears in his hand.

The boy raises his right hand to bring the Marloboro, like a stubby
smoking wand, to his lips. The boy puffs uncertainly on
the cigarette. As he exhales smoke, he relaxes dramatically, and sits back, slowly crossing
his legs, his left ankle resting now over his right knee.

The old sensei looks up from his papers to narrow his eyes in stern disapproval.

"Those things will kill you, young man," he grunts at the boy's back.

"...Does it matter, really? I'm already dead," deadpans the boy, in a soft, almost
submissive voice.

The old sensei raises an eyebrow, and sits back, crossing his arms.

"Another young punk, trying to sound profound," grumbles the sensei. "I've met
many of you before, you're nothing new to me."

"Smoking is new to me, really; I only tried it not too long ago," relies Kaworu. "It tastes
good, actually. When you get used to the smell, you can't go without it."

"I know," replies the old sensei, frowning severly. "It took me forever to quit
that blasted addiction."

They both pause, staring out into space.

"Do you have a spare with you? And a light?" he says suddenly.

"Sure, sensei. Here," he replies. He reaches into his pocket for his pack and a
lighter, and tosses both to the teacher, who catches them easily with both hands.
The boy listens to the old man, who with practiced hands gets a stick from the
pack, puts the cigarette to his lips, and with a flick of the lighter closes his
eyes, savoring the smoke.

"I thought you had quit," remarks the boy.

"Well. I'm dead anyway," deadpans the old man.

"Not yet... we're not there yet."

"You know exactly what I mean, Tabris."

"You... lost your wife and children at Second Impact."

"I'm glad you remember."

"I see... I'm sorry."

"Of course you are."

"You... don't sound convinced, sensei."

"I'm an old man, boy. Old men like us, we've seen too many things."

"Yes, I see... you have a lot of 'past' to remember. The Third told me how
you always dwelt on the past... like the future doesn't exist."

"As if children such as these can make the future any better than what the
past was," wheezes the old sensei, bitterness creeping into his voice.

"Lying to him, and to all his friends, about Second Impact didn't help. SEELE
lying to me about Lillith didn't help. The truth--"

"Truth, and history, like everything the human mind created, boy, is relative. The truth
about Second Impact had to be 'changed' to meet society's needs..."

"Needs," interjects the boy, sadly, "as determined by a select few who
found power in their laps. By SEELE. By kings and presidents, clerics and cardinals,
monks and mullahs, rabbis and generals and bankers... and old men like Kihl."

The sensei responds with silence, focusing his attention instead on the smoke
wafting through the air around him. Until he coughs.

"This is really a bad habit you've learned," exclaims the old man, who
still holds on to his cigarette.

"Well... I picked this up from Kaji-san. It looks... what's the word...
'cool.' I should tell Shinji, maybe the Second Child, Asuka, likes men who smoke. It's...
cool. Don't you think so?"

"It's not. You shouldn't copy everything that your elders do."

"Do as I say and not as you do, sensei?"

"Yes. Of course. Of course. You know I'm right about this."

The grey-haired boy closes his eyes, for a moment. A shadow of a smile crosses
his lips.

"Yes, sensei."

The old teacher suddenly seems distracted by a figure to his right. An auburn-haired
female student sitting alone, lost in thought, by the window.

"You there," the old teacher spits out, "have you been listening at all in class?"

And a young Yui Ikari shifts her gaze to the teacher, flushes slightly, nodding.
"Yes, sensei."

"Well then, young lady," the old man warns her, "what have I been discussing the
past ten minutes?"

"The Kabbalah, sensei," she answers. "The Lurianic Kabbalah."

"Well, what about it?"

"It was a... myth tradition that explained existence in terms of exile," says
the girl, almost uncertainly.

"Yes, yes, that was the interpretation I gave. What was the myth itself?"

"Uhm... that the Godhead, the Ein Sof, had to withdraw from a region within itself
in order to make room for the world, for Creation."

"Yes? And?"

"And... that the... Ein Sof had tried to channel divine light back into what he had
created, but the channel broke and trapped some of the divine sparks. When Adam
sinned, the divine sparks were trapped in the material world. They... they..."

"They became the Shekhinah, the presence that is the closest that a mortal can
apprehend of the divine. The Lurianic Kabbalists pictured her as a woman wandering
the earth, a perpetual exile, yearning to be reunited with the Godhead. So, Ms.
Ikari, what purpose did the myth serve for the ancients in the Palestinian desert?"

"It, uhm, accounts for a divinity who doesn't seem to be in full control of his
creation, and has to bear the existence of evil. The exile of the people, and the
exile of the Shekhinah, mirrored the same reality."

"So even a God is in exile from itself. It's pretty depressing, isn't it?"

"But they believed in the distant promise of a reunification with the Godhead."
"And what do you think of this myth's worldview, Ms. Ikari?"

"It's obsolete... I think human civilization has advanced to the point that we can
manage our own destiny..." the girl smiles, "and if this Shekhina exists,
we can even go ahead and help her come home. Religion and myth, after all, are as
much a human invention as science is."

The old sensei's eyes look lost in thought. He sighs, and turns back to Kaworu,
and whispers.

"Yes, I do remember the Third's mother. Even as a young girl, she was so full of
confidence. She was a scientific genius, you know, although a bit inattentive
in my class... or maybe not."

The light in the room shifts, the boy and the old sensei disappear, and only
the girl is left in the room.

The interrogation finished, the girl resumes her trance, and looks out the
window.

She looks out, the morning daylight fades into afternoon, as her face ages, loses its
adolescent looks, and becomes that of a young woman.

A red-haired woman around her age, sitting to her right, leans in and whispers to her.
"You're still thinking about him, haven't you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The Rokobungi boy, silly. Really, don't worry about him. Professor Fuyutsuki
will bail his sorry ass out of jail."

"I know," she sighs.

"But really, Yui, I can't understand your attraction to noisy, know-it-all troublemakers.
Heaven forbid your kids someday inherit your taste."

"But that's why we're friends, dear."

"Huh?"

"You're not so quiet yourself, Kyoko," she replies, smiling. "Your Western assertiveness
scares away all the boys, even the confident ones like Gendo. But I like you just the
way you are."

"Whatever," the redhead replies, arms crossed across her chest as she leans back. "But
how about that Fuyutsuki? He seems to, well, really like you, I think."

"Don't be silly! He's like a father to me," she retorts, and resumes staring out the
window.

"I'm glad you're starting to remember," answers a boy's voice from where Kyoko had been
seated.

Startled, Yui looks back to her seatmate, and finds herself staring instead at a scarlet-eyed,
gray-haired youth.

And Kaworu, in turn, now finds himself staring at a scarlet-eyed, blue-haired schoolgirl.
"Yes..." replies Rei, "they're her memories, but I do remember them..."

---