Author's Note: Sorry this has taken so long to update – my computer died, then I'd been really busy with work, and well…the usual excuses, I suppose. Here's Chapter 4 anyway.
Largosan: This is totally just for you. I've been working on it for a while, but I've been so distracted I had almost thought I would never finish it. I hadn't gotten a review in so long that yours jolted me back to reality. Thank you!
The moon rose full and bright and its light streamed into her bedroom, drawing her from light sleep. Rei Ayanami sat up slowly in her bed, blinking her crimson eyes. She needn't wonder why she had awoken. She glanced up placidly at the moon, expressionless. It was time.
She was gone in a heartbeat, leaving the desolate apartment for the last time. Commander Ikari's glasses lay completely destroyed, small shards of glasses shattered across her bare dresser.
Rei made her way to NERV headquarters through the Geo-front. She could hear explosions raining down above her, and she knew immediately where they were from. SEELE had finally decided to destroy NERV. She smiled but sped her pace nonetheless. SEELE would need the Evangelions to finish Instrumentality, since she had dispensed with the Lance of Longinus. It mattered little to her. Her goals and SEELE's were not, after all, so different. SEELE wanted to cause Third Impact and unite all humanity to a single soul. She wanted to cause Third Impact to destroy the ambitions of a single man. The corners of her mouth twitched. Not so different.
NERV fell beneath SEELE's assault. The initial attempt to overtake the MAGI supercomputers a failure, SEELE had fallen back onto force. And it would work. SEELE would find what they were looking for, for now Third Impact was an inevitability. But it would be Rei Ayanami who would have the final word.
They will be unable to locate me, Rei thought idly, slipping into a deep pool of LCL, the blood of Lilith, hidden in the depths of NERV. SEELE will not find me before the Commander does. She took a deep breath of oxygen through the liquid, and allowed herself to relax for the first time in weeks. Her day of judgement was here. The Commander would ask her to bring him with her, to allow him to merge with her and bring him to the spirit of his wife Yui, where they would unite humanity into a single soul. And she, Rei, created in the image of Yui, would deny him, and go alone. The world would be destroyed, but that thought didn't bother her. The more she learned about herself, the more she felt the power of her AT field and the nature of Third Impact, the less worried for humanity she was. There is always a way to reverse such things. Which was why it was lucky that SEELE was going to use the Evangelions to cause Third Impact. She smiled openly. She would use the pilot of Unit 01, the son of Commander Ikari, to bring hope for the future.
Rei had watched him closely during his battle with the last Angel, Kaoru. She had seen the depth of his love, and the way he clung furiously to any type of life, if only to sustain his own self-hatred. She also knew that he, too, hated the Commander. Such was not uncommon knowledge. He would come with her on her judgement, and she as Lilith would join with Unit 01, with Shinji inside. And together they would mark the destruction or rebirth of the world. For if she had the power to destroy it, he would have the power to rebuild it. Without Gendo Ikari. If he could make his way back to his dead wife, let him stay there.
Here in the LCL Rei was able to let herself go, to spread her AT field and begin the process that would dissolve her physical self and allow her to merge with Lilith.
She arched her back as foreign sensations flooded into her consciousness. She could feel every life force in the complex, like little tiny pinpricks of light, heightened by the LCL. SEELE's assault was total: she felt hundreds of lives end in her semi-omnipresent state. A part of her was with them as they died, as though she alone were watching over them, granting them the serenity of companionship before death. She knew it was ironic, comforting the dead when she herself was to cause the death of every being on the planet in a matter of minutes. Perhaps, like SEELE wanted, they would gain the serenity of unity with all of humanity. Perhaps Shinji would bring them back to life if he so chose. She didn't really know.
Her strength sufficiently gathered for her task, Rei lifted herself from the pool, shaking out her soft blue hair gently. Without thinking, lost in the trance of comforting the dead, she suddenly found herself standing before a wall of glass. She looked up slowly to view the broken bodies of the beings that could hold her transient soul: the beings known as Rei Ayanami. Despite herself she recoiled slightly, taken aback. Kaoru had told her that Dr. Akagi had destroyed the clones, the basis of the Evangelion auto-pilot, the Dummy Plug. But it had never occurred to her that it would look like this. Hundreds of…her, really, lay broken and destroyed, floating throughout a giant tank that lined the walls. It struck her as total carnage; the LCL they floated in stained red with their blood. She closed her eyes, feeling violated, and realising fully for the first time that she was not completely human.
"Rei." It was the Commander. He had come for her. She opened her eyes slowly, and turned her head slightly to glare at him through narrowed ruby slits. "I knew I'd find you here," he said confidently, smiling the little cocksure smile that she had grown to hate. He walked closer to her and she turned fully to face him, her satisfaction at her imminent betrayal enough to dispense the vulnerability of her nudity. "The time has come. Let's go."
She turned to take a last glance at her clones as she followed him. A sudden twinge in the wide field of her mind told her that another of NERV's personnel had fallen to SEELE. Major Misato Katsuragi, the woman she knew she was supposed to know, but had never met, was dead. She felt a sudden sense of loss, as though her soul realised Misato's loss better than she did. She bent her head and stared at her bare feet as she walked, but still she walked on, following her Commander to his inevitable defeat.
"I've been waiting for you."
It was Ritsuko, sitting in wait along the edge of a pool of LCL that held Lilith, crucified in the bowels of NERV, Terminal Dogma. The Commander tore his eyes away from the figure of Lilith and turned to her, to see her leveling a handgun at his head. Seemingly subconsciously, Gendo moved in front of Rei, as though she may be Ritsuko's intended target. However, Rei felt no gratitude at the gesture, for she knew he was acting out of pure self-interest.
"I changed the MAGI's programming without telling you," Ritsuko was saying, holding the gun steady, her eyes filled with Gendo alone. "A loving daughter's final request."
Rei looked away, uninterested, and stared instead at the giant Lilith. With curiosity and satisfaction she noticed that as her own self slowly disintegrated, Lilith's body regenerated. She knew somewhere inside that Lilith was getting stronger. She was getting stronger. "Mother, let's end it together," Ritsuko was saying, her voice trembling slightly. Rei looked over sharply, selfishly worried that the doctor would steal her revenge and attempt to murder the Commander. Ritsuko slid a hand inside her labcoat pocket, but after a long pause, still nothing was happening. "It's not working! Why?" she cried, pulling an electronic device from her pocket. Red flashing light from a small screen illuminated her face, surprised and betrayed. "Casper betrayed me?! Mother, how could you choose your lover instead of me?"
"Ritsuko Akagi." It was Gendo this time, and Rei lifted her head to see that Gendo had produced a gun from within his jacket, pointing it levelly at Ritsuko. Rei felt nothing for her as Ritsuko's flat eyes fixed on Gendo, seeing nothing else, absorbed with the last sight of her lover. "I truly…" From where she stood behind him, Rei couldn't hear what he had said, and was not surprised to find she didn't care.
But Ritsuko smiled, wanly and with resignation. "Liar," she whispered, nearly imperceptibly.
She wasn't sorry for her; the doctor had hated her, after all. But that wouldn't stop Rei from being with her. She, too, had been betrayed, and deserved to know that retribution would come.
Rei turned away as the Commander pulled the trigger, but she was with Ritsuko too as she died. As the doctor dropped back into the pool of LCL surrounding Lilith, her eyes widened to see Rei's insubstantial figure before her. With her dying thoughts, Ritsuko realised that Gendo's doll would ultimately betray him.
Rei's mouth twitched in an unfamiliar smirk that soon slipped from her face as a pull inside her informed that a third acquaintance of her former self, Second Child Asuka Langley, was dead.
Gendo glanced up at the ceiling, sliding away his gun, straying a glance to Lilith. "Unit 01 has finally awoken."