Disclaimer I: As much as I wish I could own some part of Eva, it belongs to Anno-san and to Gainax. I make do with these dim shadows, replacing the true item with something I can control. Sort of like Gendo with Rei, no? Did you ever hear that life is like a metaphor?
Disclaimer II: I need to thank all those who have helped me on this venture, including my beta-readers, my correspondents, and especially all of you who constructively review my work.
Disclaimer: (I think this is the third….) Again, I find myself referring to EoE in the fic, so again I need to include a spoiler warning. My apologies to those who haven't been able to see it yet. Standard series spoilers also apply, and alliteration warnings as well.
The Sounds of Water in a Quiet Room
Ayanami Rei awoke with the sure and sudden knowledge that her arms and legs had fallen off.
For a moment she lay in bed, contemplating the ceiling. She frowned. Not again.
"Method," she whispered to herself. Ikari-shirei had told her once that she could take control of any adverse situation, either riding with it or turning it to her advantage, so long as she dealt with it in a controlled and methodical manner. Ever since the first incident two weeks ago, there had been an established procedure for this sort of occurrence.
Step one: locate missing mass. Rei closed her eyes briefly. Then she opened them and stared upwards with an expression of intense concentration. She could feel her ragged stumps beginning to unravel more quickly as her AT field externalized and she rose into the air.
A vortex of displaced air hissed around her, whipping the bedsheets into disarray. Frowning, Rei righted herself and looked around the room. The lower half of the bed was occupied by a rapidly decomposing mass of thick amber liquid and pale pink flesh that reeked of blood. Useless. One of her arms appeared to have fallen onto the floor and disintegrated. The other still lay on the sheets, now blown against the wall. It was mostly intact. It might still have a purpose; it is the only one left.
Rei III slept in the nude. She had never been taught otherwise. Now, the morning sunlight filtering in through the blinds shone on her body, suspended in the epicenter of a rotating cylinder of force. All around her was a mass of dust motes raised by the unnatural wind. As they flew, they caught the light and shone dully, giving the girl's torso a wanly illuminated aurora. Her air of bland calmness only added to the impression of her being some forgotten pagan idol or deity, come to reclaim her own from a dying world.
This image was reinforced as her wayward arm rose from the bed and flew to its shoulder-stump. Rei briefly focused her AT field, inverted, on the gap between limb and body and they fused together seamlessly. After taking a moment to flex shoulder, elbow, and fingers, Rei floated over to the box of bandages set against the wall.
Rei took one of the bloodstained linen strips and made a winding motion as if she were binding her missing arm. Instead of falling to the floor, it remained hovering in the air as if wrapped around a real limb. Rei constructed the shell of an arm, hand, and fingers, leaving a hole open in the palm. She similarly constructed a pair of hollow legs, leaving an opening in the upper thigh of each.
Although they had taken on the shapes of a young woman's arm and legs, the bandage-limbs remained empty and gray. Rei grimaced slightly and drifted into the kitchen. There, she used her good arm to open the refrigerator and remove a large pot full of cooked rice. She took out a thermos, which she shook gently and set to warm in a water bath on the stovetop.
Rei watched and waited impassively while the water heated. When the thermometer on the side of the bath read thirty-seven degrees Celsius, she turned off the heat and removed the thermos. She popped off the lid and poured the now-body-temperature blood it contained into the rice. Inaudibly humming the "Yan Can Cook" show theme, she stirred until the rice was evenly coated. She then spooned the rice into the hole left in the palm of the arm-prosthesis until the bandage was full. A brief but excruciatingly painful AT-field manipulation left her gasping on the floor, covered in sweat—but possessing two arms instead of one.
Still following procedure, Rei unwrapped the new limb and flexed each joint carefully, checking for defects. After finding it satisfactory, she repeated the process twice more to replace her missing legs. An hour and a half after waking up, Rei was once again whole. She made a mental note to ask one of her security squad to pick up another supply of rice, in preparation for the next incident.
Rei went to back to her bedroom and dressed. With her mouth drawn into a tight, colorless line, she counted out her medications. She swallowed them with a drink of water and checked the time. There was just enough left to eat breakfast and pack a small lunch before leaving the apartment—she spent the time reading.
While walking down the apartment stairs, Rei dialed Ikari Gendo's personal number on her cell phone. After a moment, she spoke.
"Good morning, Ikari-shirei. I am reporting as ordered. There was another incident last night. This time it was accompanied by a mild tingling sensation, which awakened me. Yes, it is all taken care of. Yes, I will require more blood this afternoon. I am following the planned daily schedule. Yes, I understand… ja ne."
After walking a few blocks toward the school in silence, Rei stopped on the street corner and turned. "Matsumori-san," she murmured.
A nondescript man in his late fifties materialized out of the sparse crowd and bowed minutely. "What is it, Ayanami-kun?" Normally, the security agents assigned to the Children remained discreetly in the background, avoiding all contact with their charges. However, in Rei's case, Ikari-shirei had given explicit instructions—the commander had commanded—that one agent be assigned as a general assistant and errand-runner, should she ever have need of such services.
"Matsumori-san, I would like another week's supply of cooked white rice, please," Rei said.
"You like rice, don't you, Ayanami-kun?" The agent smiled at her in a fatherly manner and wrote down her request on a notebook from his pocket.
"It is… a convenient foodstuff," Rei admitted. "After all, 'you are what you eat,' as it is said."
"That we are, Ayanami-kun. How has life been treating you?"
"I am well, thank you." Rei didn't blink. Her eyes did, however, indicate the tiniest of smiles.
Matsumori bowed again and pocketed the notebook. "Well, if you need anything else, you know how to get in touch with me. Mata." He smiled again, warmly, and faded into the background with a smoothness that would have made Kensuke swoon.
Rei proceeded calmly down the sidewalk until she reached the intersection where she normally turned right on her path to school. Today, however, she stopped in the middle of the street and stood for long minutes, staring at the ground.
No cars drove by. No pedestrians were on the sidewalk to stare. Rei stood motionless, looking at the ground… thirty feet below. She was at the edge of a huge, shallow crater that stretched for hundreds of meters in front of her.
The pit was blackened; full of twisted metal and shattered concrete. In some places, smoke still rose from flaming gas pipes whose supply had never been cut off. In others, the smooth metal of the Geofront's topmost armor plate showed through the rubble and dirt. The street had been sheared off along a sharp diagonal by some powerful blast—an explosion that had leveled too much of the city's aboveground infrastructure. This destruction was all that was left of Evangelion Unit 00.
"She might still have a purpose," whispered Rei III. "She is the only one left."
Rei turned and began to walk back into what was left of the fortress of mankind. Despite her programming, despite her show of surprised contemplation of the school's non-existence, there was only one book in her schoolbag. The Book. Some other her had written it: some philosophical Rei whose wrath had been subdued by human artifice and by the Commander's psychological tactics. It was garbage. It contained the guiding principles of Rei III's life.
-
Matsumori was under the impression, somewhere at the back of his preconscious, that his family had been samurai once. Not that he mentioned this belief to anybody, not that he was even aware of it. But when life troubled him—and life was nothing but trouble, these days—the goddess who haunted his dreams came to him and told him to be strong. "True warriors show no hesitation."
Like a true warrior, Matsumori touched bases with the other agents on his team, then headed to one of the three remaining supermarkets in the greater Tokyo-3 metropolitan area to get white rice. The wild stuff was healthier, in his opinion, but seemed to bring out a rash in the girl. That was unacceptable. Her flawless complexion reminded him of something vitally important, although he could never quite remember what. Had he studied psychology, he might have babbled to himself about archetypes and been happy with that. As it was, he knew that Rei meant more than just a job to him.
He wanted to talk about her with somebody. Specifically, he wanted to lie in bed next to a wife and talk about Rei as either their daughter or their household deity, although he didn't know that this was exactly what he desired.
His wife had died in the Second Impact. He had no children. He didn't talk much with his co-workers, especially the ones who resented his special treatment. Even when he talked to himself, it was an inaudible subvocalization that did not move his lips. Nobody could guess that he spent most of his time chatting with nobody or with the spirits of the dead.
"I think Ayanami-chan is changing," he breathed while standing in the monorail car. "She talks more than she used to. She also says 'ja' more often, and 'sayonara' less. She no longer sounds like she expects each conversation to be her last."
He nodded to himself imperceptibly. His professional eyes automatically searched the passengers boarding the car for signs of concealed weapons; his old man's mind followed its own course.
"It's strange," he mused. "I don't suppose I'll ever figure young people out. Ayanami-chan has acted as if her life didn't matter ever since I was assigned to her. She left her apartment door unlocked constantly. She spent all her time with the doctor, doing some sort of experiments in the Geofront. She didn't do anything with her classmates at school."
He frowned. Rei no longer had a school. Only two of her classmates remained in Tokyo-3. And one of them had been lost and then found again in a coma, while the other avoided pretty much everybody. He especially seemed to be avoiding Rei, for some reason. "I had such high hopes for that Ikari kid, too. They would have made such a cute little couple, and I've been wanting to see gr— I've been wanting to see young children again. I can't remember noticing a child under ten in several years, can you?"
Matsumori cocked his head as if listening, then: "Oh well. I suppose things will have to get better sooner or later, won't they?" He smiled, got off the train, and walked to the store with notepad in hand. Ironically enough, it was at that moment that programmers at the NERV center in Berlin began running preliminary tests on their MAGI system in preparation for the upcoming hack of the central site.
-
Rei had lied to her commander. Again. She most certainly did not perform her usual time-filling ritual, which consisted mostly of staring out of the classroom window or enduring various unpleasant procedures in Terminal Dogma. There was no more school. There were no more procedures. Akagi-sensei was in what passed, in NERV, for jail. Ikari was buried in an avalanche of study and the fine-tuning of his scenario. Rei felt vaguely sorry for him. He was taking even more medication than she was; it had something to do with Adam and human flesh coming into contact. Despite the lack of summons, though, her steps turned toward Terminal Dogma.
Rei was a swimmer by nature and by upbringing. She had been known in all her incarnations to swim or just float in pools when given the chance. She found it comforting. She was free, in the bowels of the Earth—in the Egg of Lillith—from surveillance. That, too, was comforting. She slipped naked into the lake of LCL and swam for a while. The blood of the Pale Giant was also comforting. After working up a pleasant level of fatigue, she closed her eyes and drifted.
The voices were there, as usual. Lillith whispered to the girl who floated in the LCL lake: blood is, after all, thicker than water. She whispered about the peace that comes from togetherness; about the stillness found after the end of the world. She was calling Rei home.
Rei did not listen to the Angel. It was a siren's call, leading only to destruction if obeyed without proper caution. It was but one of many, anyway. She could also hear Adam, his infant mind screaming for release from the prison of Earth, instinctively begging his brothers and sisters to rescue him. She could hear the answering calls of the other Angels as they awoke and heeded the summons. Ikari-shirei would need to move quickly in order to avoid the attack of the Elders. It was possible that he knew this, though. His face had become increasingly drawn and pale ever since Rei III's awakening.
In the power-charged stillness of the LCL lake, Rei could hear other, weaker voices as well. Half-philosophical, half-animal rumblings from Yui. Soryu Kyoko-san's disjointed rage at the world and specifically at Tabris' recent puppeteering of her body. The feral hunting-cries of the MP series Eva as they were put through their paces in labs scattered across the world. And below all other calls, like static over a radio or the soft whispering of silence itself, was the voice of humanity.
It hurt her physically to do so, but Rei listened to this most intently. There was something about it that she knew was important—if only she could tell what. What was it? What did this pathetic, crying voice mean? In the silence, Rei could hear the pain of the world. She did not know what it was. She did not know what to do about it. But ultimately, it was the only thing that mattered.
Ikari-shirei would be leaving his studies and work at sixteen hundred hours to run her tests as best he could with Maya's assistance. At 1530, Rei's internal time-sense woke her from her musings. She drifted over to the ladder, climbed out, and dressed. No need to towel off: her failing body drank in the excess LCL like a heart pulling in lifeblood. "Blood," she murmured to herself. "The scent of blood from the woman who does not bleed."
If the commander knew about her need for the fluid, though, he would cut off the last taste of freedom she had: her solitary apartment would be forbidden as too dangerous, her surveillance would be increased. That was unacceptable, no matter how good his intentions might be. Personal reasons.
Rei hefted the schoolbag, enjoying the weight of its secret cargo. She walked along passageways, rode up and down elevators, and found herself exactly on time at the lab where her blood and urine would be tested. Gendo glanced up with weary fondness as she closed the door behind her.
-
Matsumori slumped in the break room, trying to enjoy his coffee. He had delivered the rice to Rei's apartment—still unlocked, he had noted with vaguely worried disapproval—then come to the Geofront to rest before the evening sign-out. He was alone, listening to the repeatedly-broken-and-repaired coffee machine cough muddy brown water into its pot. A solitary man by the force of long habit, Matsumori took some time to realize that the mood bothering him was loneliness, and that the missing presence was Ryouji Kaji.
Ryouji-san was not a polite man. Word had it that he spoke in a familiar tone even to the Commander, poked fun at all and sundry, flirted shamelessly with the women. Ryouji-san was not noted for his tendency to bow, and when he greeted people at all it was with alarming casualness. Yet he had always nodded to Matsumori. Nothing overt—just enough to acknowledge respect for the elder agent.
And the man was missing. Supposedly, somebody in Intel Ops had identified him as the SEELE spy responsible for kidnapping the subcommander. Why SEELE would want to abduct their own Director of Geofront Operations was beyond Matsumori's comprehension, but the fact remained that Ryouji-san was no longer part of any staff, much less NERV's. Half against his will, Matsumori sank into a reverie and recalled the past.
It had been a very bad day. Asuka-kun, then a new arrival, had vanished from the agents' care for twelve hours. It later turned out that she had merely taken the day off on the town, but at the height of the crisis, entire squads of men and sections of the MAGI operating capacity had been requisitioned to find her. Word was that the Commander had been notified, and was severely displeased.
Rei's squad had been reduced to Matsumori and one other man, and the elder agent had found himself without any break time. Even stealing two minutes to use the restroom was an effort. The entire section was also laboring under the certain knowledge of a major departmental shake-up. Such a gigantic oversight would result in nothing less than a reorganization, perhaps even including layoffs—"occupational repositioning."
Finally, he had been relieved by the night shift. Matsumori had dropped into a chair in the break room. He had remained upright for a split second before falling forward and dropping his forehead onto the table in front of him. He had been on his feet for twelve hours straight without food and with only a few ounces of water to drink. Tensions in the section were high, aggravating the natural hostility the other agents held toward him because of his special status as Rei's gofer. He was vaguely aware of the others leaving the room. Nobody spoke, but he knew what they were thinking. Matsumori-san, they felt, was too old for the job.
He drifted for several minutes in and out of a light doze before noticing a solid, friendly presence next to him. It was Ryouji-san.
The Special Tasks operative had given his customary nod of deferential greeting before returning to his coffee. A cup of water and a plate of rice cakes were in front of Matsumori; he accepted them gratefully. The two drank in silence, sitting next to each other, staring into space. Finally, Ryouji-san spoke fourteen syllables in a voice almost too soft to hear.
"Sabishisa narau/ Matsukaze no koe. Shôhaku."
"Hatarakedo/ Hatarakedo nao waga kurashi raku ni narazari/ jitto te o miru," rejoined Matsumori. "Ishikawa Takuboku." Neither spoke again that night.
It took an effort of will for Matsumori to drag himself back to the present. He was once again alone in the break room in the small hours of the morning. This time, however, he had no friends to share a drink with. There was nobody alive who understood him.
Despite being satisfied, even happy, with his job, Matsumori felt deeply unfulfilled. He stood with a sigh and went home to chase a few hours of sleep.
Half a city away, under the watchful but impersonal guard of the night shift agents, Rei also slept.
Rei was not accustomed to remembering her dreams. When she did remember them, she ignored them until the images went away. But tonight, and every night thereafter until the end, she dreamed of the same scene. There was no escape. She was standing on a too-short pillar in the middle of a lake of fire. And everywhere she looked, the shore was filled with death.
—
Author's Notes: I didn't mean to write this.
I wrote "The Rustling of Leaves in a Quiet Room" as a stand-alone, an exercise in writing Rei. But I've had the opening line of this fic hanging in the back of my mind since I first saw EoE. It was just turning over again and again, and one day it sprang into existence as this story's first scene.
Matsumori was originally introduced as a minor supporting character. However, after a while I began to wonder about him. What drives him? Could his attitude toward Rei really be just a simple daughter-substitution? What will his part be in the drama of NGE? He was a completely different kind of challenge from the series characters: they are to be interpreted and explored, but he needed to be invented and given life. Here I must apologize to Rei fans. This is another "Quiet Room" fic, and Rei is the driving force behind the action, but this is not entirely her story.
There will be a chapter three. I know what's going to happen to each character. I know how to weave the strands together into a coherent whole. However, I'm not sure when I'll find the time to write it. Please accept my apologies.
Oh yeah… Shôhaku was the author of the first poem, roughly translated as "One learns to bear solitude/ from the voice of the wind in the pines." Ishikawa wrote the second: "I work/ and I work, but life is no easier./ Blankly I look at my hands."
-Worldmage