Chapter 01: The Fate of Destruction
Rei looked, but she saw nothing. Wrong, she saw nothingness; darkness, without the light of hope. She felt the presence of others, but could not reach out to them, could not communicate. She heard a voice, distant and cold. Commander Ikari.
"This is your life, your truth. This is your wish, Rei."
"What do you mean?" She knew she should be confused, but she didn't feel it. She couldn't feel herself, not even in presence or in absence. She had no form, not even of mind; nothing existed except for the voice, and even that seemed removed, out of this world.
"Nothingness. That is the fabric of this truth, your truth. That is your wish. Or was it?" The voice chuckled, a wash of static and cacophony, frequencies that shouldn't be there. White noise fading into impresence.
'I wish to return to nothingness. But he won't let me.' She remembered, in the absence of memory, her words from what seemed like long ago. Even the form of her conciousness was fading. A concept came to her, a meme out of place. He let me. But she didn't want it. She didn't want her choice, her torrid wish. It seemed to be too late, as she felt herself fading, her form becoming transparent even in spirit.
Far in the darkest corner of her mind, a light came on.
Akagi-hakase(0). She knew this person. A shadow from her former self. It was not a thing she wished to be illuminated.
"A murder, and a suicide. Tried to squeeze the life from you, like a wet sponge. But you're back. Like me, there are always replacements"
She bit back the strange sensation in the back of her throat, like slimy cockroaches covered in capsacin struggling and fighting up her esophagus. She knew her form was back now, but this wasn't the way she wanted to be notified.
"Like mother, like daughter. These are the thoughts that occupied my mind, if one can describe it in those terms, in the time before the Instrumentality. But I now feel assured, since it can be applied to you as well."
"I have no mother." Rei's scarlet eyes brightened and pupils narrowed. A horrible realization, she did not know what it was to have one.
"You surprise me." Commander Ikari. But she was not happy to see him.
"You are not happy to see me? How sad. Is that the reason you betrayed me? Or was it something else?"
She suddenly felt small. As if her body was shrinking in the wrong order, her head lagging behind in the miniatuization. She looked up, and felt herself forming the words from a past life. "Baa-san."() Her vision blurred scarlet, and she felt icy fingers tightly enclosing her neck, but still the words came. "Baa-san, baa-san, baa-san." The commander spoke.
"You know yourself, who your mother is. Your soul, your body, they come from two mothers. And I am sure you have realized, I am now disgusted at the idea of my dear wife being one of them."
Feel lifted off the floor, toes curling, the taste of bile and decay in her mouth. She jumped out of herself, her prior-life form left inside-out inside her heart, but omnipresent in her mind. Lillith.
'We are the same. We are born of the same being, but we both take the form of the lillim to live among them.' Nagisa Kaoru. But he was wrong. Rei looked inside herself, the interiority of his mind inside hers. But he knew? He knew I was lillim. She corrected herself. No, not lillim, Ur-Lillim. The penultimate cursed being. I contain the soul and blood of Lillith herself.
'We are the same.' And he was Adam.
"Now, you see what you truly are. Next, you shall see who."
The commander's racous and maddening laughter filled her mind, the sounds visualizing, popping colours in her view of the darkness. Flowers. Pilot Ikari.
"This is the Shinji inside of you."
"Then, this must also be the Rei inside of you."
Ikari looked at her, his eyes beginning to distort. Water. Water fell from his eyes. Tears?
"Ikari-kun, why are you crying?" But she knew why, even before she asked.
She saw in his eyes, in the water in his eyes. Shining through the darkness, infintesimally small, an image. His memory.
'Why? Do you not have faith in your father's work?"
'Not a father like him.'
Impact.
"Why?" All the voices seemed to be asking at once, the voices of a world at loss without her presence and concience.
"I..."
"You don't have an answer?" The commander's face reminded her of something his mention could not.
"I am his tool. I am his instrument. I must retain loyalty."
All the voices in unison, again. White words on darkness. "Is that why?"
"Yes, that's why."
"Is that why?"
"I belive that is the truth."
"Is that why?"
"I think so... I don't know. The Commander, I was his. His animosity was mine. But Ikari-kun. He was a threat."
"A threat? What kind of dumb excuse is that? You're just a doll, aren't you?"
"I was his doll. Ikari was a threat to all my dollhood. He was the antithesis to my status-quo."
"So you slapped him?"
"Yes."
"So you slapped him?"
"It seemed like the best choice at the time."
A waterfall of purple hair. The smell of lavender. "Sometimes, people don't think. You can't say that it was a choice. Despite it all, you are emotional at the core."
A flash of orange-red. "Just like me."
"I felt threatened. He was... New. Different. He had the..."
"He had the capacity to make you feel." Eyes behind orange oval glasses jeered.
Eyes behind thick square lenses, a face in anguish, a face at peace. Pushing up the frames. "More than me."
"He was breaking the status quo! He wasn't supposed to be there! I was supposed to be a tool, even if that wasn't what I desired. If he was absent, I would have never had to realize that." The blue-haired porcelin maiden looked down and fragile, and cracked.
"You loved him?"
A propogation. The cracks lengthen.
"You loved him?"
A propogation. The cracks widen.
"You loved him?"
"Yes! I loved him! More than anything."
"More than you loved yourself?"
Shattered.
"Yes. I loved him. He made me feel, and he made me know the feeling. He is my alpha and omega(1). He is the one who let me in."
"Do you love yourself?"
"I am just a tool. An instrument, for that man. This is my time. I shouldn't be the one who's interrogated! I'm the cause."
"Could you love yourself?"
A shock of bright blue hair. A white plugsuit. "I am not worth loving."
"Could you love yourself?"
"I am simply that man's doll. I deserve nothing. Even if I wish to give my wholeness to another, I am bound by blood and duty to my master."
The commander, bathed in the red light of warning, raises his head and smirks. "Enough of this. I suppose you will need to be shown firsthand."
The commander's son, bathed in the light of morning...
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Author's notes:
There, first chapter done. I'll probably upload the second chapter at the same time, if nothing ties me up. Note that this beginning part takes place during the Instrumentality of Mankind, and consists of Rei being psychoanalized Hideaki Anno-style (which is to say, Rogerian-style (iirc)) by her inner self. The rest of the story (as far as I have planned) takes place in an alternate universe. This is similar to the alternate universe shown in episode 26 of the series (and there is some overlap), but one must remember, this is different because it is imagined by Rei. It's rather hard for me to come up with, since I am so much like Shinji, but I'm doing this as an escapade into Rei's personality for the purpose of a computer programming project I'm going to be trying (a simulation of Rei's personality, along with realtime animation of an interactive Rei).
NB: Numbers marked in parentheses mark notes. A () marks a translation.
Notes:
(0) -hakase is the Japanese honorific for "doctor" as in "researcher" (as far as I can tell... I'm picking this up from the Eva subs). Note that Akagi-hakase refers to Akagi Naoko-hakase (Akagi Ritsuko-hakase's mother). Not that it couldn't be figured out from context, of course...
(1) "alpha and omega" comes from the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, respectively. Colloquially, it's equivalent to "the beginning and the end". In Christianity, it is often a role relegated to Christ. As Eva is based upon Kaballistic and ancient Judaism (among other influences), this could be Rei implying that he was the "messiah" (a concept that I believe is supported by End of Evangelion). But she could also be saying that he was simply her savior, something accepted as fact. It could also mean that he is the beginning and end of her thoughts (or even, one may replace thoughts with anything intangible that makes sense). It's really up to the reader.
Translations:
Baa-san: A term of medium respect for an older woman. Usually used for aunts and grandmothers in Japan. Doctor Akagi was used to getting more respect because her work was well known (so much so that her daughter notes the oddity that Misato did not know the name when they first met), and she seems to care about her looks and take care of them as such (perhaps for Gendou?), so she is doubly insulted by the implication that she is both old and undeserving of respect. Hence, the usual transation as "Hag". But also note that in Shinji's alternate universe, Asuka calls Yui "Baa-sama", and Yui is not insulted. Such is the flexibility of the Japanese language.