Author's Note: Another round of thanks to all who reviewed and/or emailed me about this fic. With the help of your suggestions and comments, I've been able to turn an overzealous attempt at a first-time fic into something with some real potential. And now to go exploit that potential.
--Omega
Narration: Having already read this three times, the viewer grows tired of it.
Thought: 'This is really getting boring. Should I mention it to him?'
Speech: "Hey, Omega, this had better be the last time you write this!"
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Dreaming of an Angel
Chapter Four
The sun poured through the small windows of her room. It was a beautiful day outside, despite the consistently average condition of her indoor prison. A small bird landed on the outer windowsill and stared in. At the sight of the room's only resident moving, it left.
She inhaled a deep breath of the stale air and sat up. Though a bit dizzy from the sudden change in alignment, she forced herself away from the bed and then out of it. Slipping into a hospital gown, she took a step toward the window and gazed out into the world she never knew. Rei had some catching up to do.
Shinji's room was dark. He noticed as soon as his mind left unconsciousness and relayed the message to open his eyes. A fraction of a second later, those eyes flew open again. He stared straight up at the ceiling, afraid, no, terrified of what he might see if he rolled over.
The sound of his door opening caused his already rigid body to tense even further. Since Misato wasn't on the ceiling Shinji didn't see her, but her voice quickly told him who it was.
"Good morning, Shinji! Did you sleep we—" Her voice broke. In a confused, accusational voice she asked him, "What's going on?"
If it was possible, Shinji's expression at that exact moment possessed even more shock and fear than before. Those amazingly wide eyes still hadn't left that one point on the ceiling, and he had no intention of letting them do so. 'What am I gonna do? How can I explain this? There is no explanation for this! I'm doomed!'
"I didn't know you wanted a roommate."
It was all he could do to keep from screaming. 'She's here! It was real! What the hell am I going to do!!?'
"Come on, Pen Pen, you have your own place to crash. Out you go, come on. A pile of clothes in the corner is no place for you. Oh, and Shinji? You should really get an extra blanket. It's freezing in here."
The door shut behind the two of them and Shinji was left alone to stare unblinking, unmoving, at the ceiling.
"I don't know why I'm doing this," Shinji said aloud. The streets were oddly deserted, even for this time of day. He passed across and through them largely without the company of other traffic. "She's going to think I'm insane. Or a freak, or something."
Looking down at the address scrawled onto a crumpled piece of paper, he couldn't help but notice how close it was to his own. Yet Rei's apartment building, regardless of the proximity to his own home, wasn't in the part of town held in the highest esteem. Most people avoided it altogether. Maybe she had planned it that way.
"You know, I don't have any reason to come here. No excuse. She's going to ask me why I came, I know she will. What am I going to say? 'To find out whether you also have surrealistic, romantic dreams about a relative stranger'? Yeah, that sounds good. No weirdness there."
His doubtful monologue was cut short by the tall shadow of her building. Shinji stopped to look up. "It's...really tall. Well, there goes my stealthy escape route."
Simultaneously discouraging himself and trudging ever forwards, he made his way into the shabbily furnished lobby. There was no one there; not a surprise, really. No one wanted to be. Shinji checked the address again. "Fourth floor." He tried the elevator buttons, but (another startling revelation) they didn't work. With a sidelong glance back at the square of light that was the front door, Shinji started to climb the stairs.
'What am I doing here? So I have a few odd dreams, that doesn't give me the right to just march up to her home and drop in. I wouldn't want it if she just dropped by my place,' he thought. 'Well...maybe. Still, have you even thought about what to say, what to do? I have so many questions, but no answers. Or maybe that's why I came. For answers. For the truth about what's been happening to me. But why would she know?'
Third floor and rising. The spiraling, squared staircase rose in such a way that every visitor had to pass through the end of each floor's hallway before going on up. As Shinji reached the main hall of the floor below Rei's, he stopped. He tried to will himself to go on, but to no avail. "...I...I can't do this..." His rubber legs refused to enter back into the upward-bound stairs and involuntarily began to heavily tread back down to the lobby, and then the street.
Her eyes watched Shinji as he left the building. She saw him plod through the streets. She watched his head lower in defeat. And she stared, taking in all of him she could, as he disappeared into the distance. The First Child's hand slid down from the cool glass of her apartment's windows and met the rough wooden panel at its base, where the sun's rays soaked into it.
'The sun is better for seeing than feeling,' she thought as that hand retreated from the sill. 'But I prefer night anyway. At night, I sleep. And in sleep, I dream. Does he know, I wonder? Or does he pass it off as just some trivial memory twisted by his subconscious? I suppose I would too, in his position. But if so, then why has he come to me? And yet he left me to remain alone...what drives him away? Perhaps his fear, fear of rejection. Or maybe it's far worse...the fear of acceptance.'
She would return to school tomorrow, and Rei knew that then she could pursue this further then. A thought struck her quite suddenly. 'How do I...talk to him? I don't really know how to act in a situation like that. That phrase sounds familiar...I've said it before. I don't know how to act in any situation. Am I such an outcast to have no means of conversation? I was trained by NERV to pilot, but no one ever taught me to live. Perhaps...perhaps he can teach me. Ikari seems to fit in, more than I do, anyway. I will...' She pondered the actions to begin tomorrow. '...I will ask him. We will talk. And I will live.'
Misato's apartment door slammed shut behind a very distraught pilot. Angry with himself for backing out yet somehow glad that he didn't have to face a situation like that, Shinji strode quickly (and loudly) through the front rooms and into his own. He fell into the bed and lay there, staring at that same ceiling.
'All that time for nothing,' he thought. 'What a waste. I hope no one saw me on my way out. A long walk through a bad part of town just to run away once I got there...how embarrassing. What if she saw me?' He tried to visualize where her apartment would have been within the building. 'Maybe. But probably not. That would have been far too convenient.'
'It was convenient,' thought Rei, 'how he showed up yesterday. Perhaps I can initiate a conversation around it.' She sat down in her desk at the window-side corner of the classroom and stared out into the sky. Most of the other students were already here; Suzuhara and Aida sat next to each other, ogling class representative Horaki; Horaki sat in front, writing up a report for their instructor; their instructor entered the class, telling Suzuhara and Aida to get back to their normal seats. Always the same. 'But not today.'
Pilot Ikari rushed through the doorway to take his seat. His face was red, and he was breathing hard. Apparently his morning routine was running a bit late. As he collapsed into his chair, Shinji let his head fall onto his desk, where it stayed for nearly a minute. Looking up at his teacher, he saw him began yet another lecture on "the financial ramifications of the Second Impact". 'Always the same.'
The teacher's monotonous voice droned on and on. Shinji laid his head back down onto his desk, racking his tired brain for something to relieve him of this boredom. 'I hate this. There's no reason for me to be here. I know all of this stuff already, and how it really happened. Just a bunch of lies...and he's been teaching them for weeks. Does he know? Of course not. He actually thinks he's telling us the truth. Heh, I should be teaching him.' He sighed as his thoughts turned elsewhere. 'I still can't decide whether or not she saw me.'
Shinji once again envisioned yesterday's events. He pictured the deserted lobby, the tall, winding stairs, his nervous breakdown at the third floor, and his subsequent escape. 'Let's see...her room would have been on my right going up, so on the way out... Ergh, why do I even care? So what if she saw me? It's not like she'd ever say anything.'
'Not out loud, at least.'
Shinji suddenly became very aware of a familiar presence around him. 'You...how are you doing this?'
'I am doing nothing. You are the one who reaches out for me.'
'How do you know all this? Why are you inside my head?'
'For the same reason you are inside mine. What reason that is, I do not know. But this is not the first time you have felt it.'
He mentally blushed, if such an action is possible, remembering the night before last. Deep down, he knew he had enjoyed it, the company, the closeness to her. Still, he wondered whether she felt the same.
'I do. It was...an enjoyable experience.'
So now she could read his mind. Shinji was embarrassed; with all the walls he had built up over the years, having someone suddenly breach them all without any chance to resist was unsettling.
'It's all right. I mean you no harm. I merely wish to understand you, and to have you understand me. Can you tell me why you did it? Why you came to my home?'
Finally finding the "words", Shinji responded in kind. 'I don't know. Maybe because I thought this might happen.'
'So you enjoy our meetings, then?'
'I...yes. Yes, I do.' A pause. 'And what about you?'
'They are unusual, and in some ways unwelcome.' They both felt Shinji's heart sink. 'But in many more ways, they are of greater value to me than anything I have ever felt in this world.'
Alone save for each other, they floated in the black void of their minds. Finally Shinji spoke again. 'How can you sense my thoughts?'
'It is easy, with practice. Try to read mine. Try to see into me, into what I keep out of view.'
She didn't need to ask twice. Shinji extended his own consciousness into hers, probing deep into her mind. Visions became clear to him, pictures frozen in time and seen through Rei's eyes. He saw the interior of Unit Zero, her apartment...and a blurred figure, reaching in through a bright square of light. The figure reached in to him, its hands still seething from the heat. He looked up and saw his own face.
Delving even deeper now, he saw a tube of orange liquid around him. A room of those tubes. There were others inside, but the glass was clouded; their identities remained anonymous. Deeper...he flinched at the pain of the reactivation test. Metal walls slammed into him from all sides, battering his body and leaving him broken. Deeper still, and a far more intense pain enveloped him. But it was not the searing agony of physical impact, but rather the frozen chill of utter isolation. Shinji pushed as far as he could go, sensing something near. Closer, closer...
He recoiled from the shock. His head jerked away, hitting some obscure student's books. Looking around, he saw an emptying classroom. Apparently the order of class had left, and with it his peers. Shinji stumbled out in a daze. Everything seemed like it was a dream now; was he even awake? But he must be, for the dream was over.
As Shinji walked home in his trance-like state, only one thing kept playing through his head. The thing he had found at Ayanami's core. Just that one little word, and the emotion that had coursed through them both when it was heard.
'Love...'
