Gendo opened his eyes, looking up at his ceiling in the dark bedroom. He had been dreaming. Before him had been a child made of sand, and it had kept being blown away. He couldn't remember how the child looked, or even if it had been a boy or a girl, but something about it was so important, so desperately important to him. He attempted to pack more sand onto the child, to keep it from disintegrating, but the action became more desperate, more futile. In no time at all, Gendo had been reduced to a blubbering mess, watching finally and fearfully as the last trace of the child was swept away and he was alone.

"What would that mean?" he whispered to the dark. Something Jungian, no doubt. He was tempted to ask Fuyutsuki about it, but he knew, as he lay under his sheets, that he never would. The dream had frightened him, and he wished to forget it. He sniffed, rolling over and feeling the emptiness of the room around him. He had found, day by day, he wanted more and more to sleep next to Yui. What surprised him most about this was the general lack of lust in the desire. There was lust, to be certain, but the need to be asleep next to a warm, living body, to know that when you woke up, there would be no solitude…it had become an obsession. Compelling and aching.

He was very lonely.

Gendo rubbed his eyes and checked his clock. 2:20 in the morning. He hadn't been sleeping very long, had he? He grumbled, and rolled out of his bed. He intended to drink himself back into sleep, and hopefully erase the last vestige of the dream. As he padded through the dark room in boxers and a t-shirt, he kept trying to place the child. Why was it so important? Why did it hurt so badly when it vanished? He snuffled as he paused next to his bureau, and picked up his S-DAT player. His brain was too full.

In the kitchen, he uncorked a bottle of American bourbon that he had gotten as a gift three days ago. A celebratory token, for successfully defending his dissertation. Oswald Spengler, the proto-metaphysical biologist: that had been a laugh. He smiled as he popped his earphones on, and poured a glass. The three-hundred page work had been twenty percent actual research, ten percent of networking (but such important networking), and the remainder was complete, utter crap. The nice thing about a topic like metaphysics was that, as long as one made one's argument obscure enough, one could do a marvelous job of sounding like one had an actual thesis to go on. In the end, he had confused his dissertation board so thoroughly, they had passed his work and granted him his doctorate simply to avoid having to deal with him again. The entire time, Fuyutsuki had been present, not to question but to observe. He had been visibly trying not to laugh.

Hitting the play button, he heard the light start of a jazz beat, snare and toms beating out a cool, staccato rhythm, driven by the light tapping of hi-hat cymbals. Creeping in, as though shy and uncertain, was a single, faint female vocalist. Then, at the moment he sat down and his eyes closed, strings joined her, a bass guitar, light keyboards. Cool minor notes, sad and poignant but soaring and lifting at the same time. The effect was entrancing, as her voice was still faint but so present, so insistent. He forgot about the bourbon for a moment, simply savoring the sound. It was an American duo, a man and woman with an ever shifting background of supporting musicians, a group that he had found by accident and had never been able to shake. They always seemed to poke themselves into his view, whenever he needed them. He slowly traced his finger on the table top, drawing shapes in time with the music. He paused to sip at the bourbon, and waited as the song slowly cascaded down into a soft, almost pleasing thump.

In the brief silence between the first song and the second one, there was a knock at his front door. He opened his eyes and glared. The timing had jarred him, and the sensation that someone was knocking on his door at nearly three in the morning unnerved him. He removed his headphones and took a knife from a drawer, and crossed the apartment. He hadn't seen his father in nearly a semester, and the timing seemed too…perfect. Having finished the dissertation, having completed his doctorate in a very record time….

He glanced into the peephole, and almost dropped the knife onto his barefoot. It was Yui. He opened the door, not bothering to hide the fact that he was in his boxers and holding a knife.

She blinked in surprise, but the expression faded. "Why, Gendo," she said. "It's like you were expecting me."

"Not at all," he said, rolling the knife smoothly in his hand and taking the blade safely into this palm. "It's 2:30 in the morning. Why are you here?"

"Because I had a hunch you would be awake," she said.

"Do you have cameras in my apartment? Keeping tabs on my activities?"

"Would it make you feel better if I said yes?"

"…Not really."

"Well, I don't, though the idea does sound nice." She rocked on her heels, smiling sweetly. "I had a feeling, believe it or not. That's all."

"A feeling?"

"Well, let's see…a year after meeting Fuyutsuki-sensei, you crank out a three-hundred page dissertation on the most dubious of topics, complete with research, and get a doctorate. I can't do that, and I'm pretty sure I'm a hell of a lot smarter than you."

"I imagine so, yes," Gendo admitted.

"I figured that, maybe, you were in a spiral."

"A spiral?"

"Yes. Heading down." She traced a looping circle towards the floor with a single finger. "After somehow pulling off a feat like that, I imagine depression, bewilderment, doubt…all those things you pushed down in order to…how did you do that, anyways?"

"Yui, what was I doing before we met?"

"An excellent point," she said, brushing past him and kicking her shoes off in the doorway. He grunted as he backed up: in his surprise, he had gripped the blade a tad too tightly and cut one of his fingers. "Of course, if it was all just a con, Fuyutsuki-sensei would have spotted it right at the start."

Gendo smirked. "I knew someone, came into a graduate program fresh from his degree. Determined to get his master's and his doctorate in two years. He did it in one and a half." He sucked at the bleeding finger as Yui turned on the light to his small living room and flopped down on the couch.

"I imagine he also worked a lot harder than you did," Yui said, draping an arm across her eyes.

"Yes," Gendo admitted. "To tell the truth, I think Fuyutsuki pretty much agreed a lot of it was fluff. He knew it would pass muster, though…if only for confusing anybody who read it." He closed the door and returned to the kitchen to wash his cut. "In the end, they probably felt embarrassed for not understanding portions of it."

"Do explain."

"There's a fine threshold in failing to understand something," Gendo said, "On the one hand, if you read something you don't understand because it's obviously mush, you're going to call a spade a spade. It's crap, and that's all there is to it. On the other hand, there is a spectrum that makes you wonder if your failure to comprehend is because the work itself is fine, it's just something wrong with you. At least one of those professors passed my work because they couldn't understand what had been written, but they were afraid that, somehow, I was smarter than them. They passed it because they didn't want to be called on not understanding it."

"That seems like a lot of work," Yui giggled. "Seriously, for that much effort, you could have done an actual and feasible thesis."

"It's not work to me," Gendo said. "I knew who was going to be on the dissertation committee. It was just a matter of…editing."

Yui sighed. "The mysteries of metaphysical biology are wasted on you. You should have gone to psychology. You have a natural talent for it."

"Except where you're concerned," he said, glancing down at his legs. He should really put some pants on. He ducked into his bedroom as Yui called after him.

"That's because I'm a mystery," she said. "I'm mysterious, and you can't figure me out."

"And you have my number, right?" he asked, grabbing some sweat pants out of a drawer.

"Oh, yes," she said. "I knew you'd be awake, didn't I? And drinking in the dark like some sad hikkimori."

"And yet we've just graduated you to boiling pasta, and still aren't ready to let you tackle tempura," he said.

"That was uncalled for," she pouted, as he came back into the apartment proper. "I get nervous around the oil."

"You recently observed and handled a sample of smallpox," he said flatly.

"Smallpox doesn't burn you," Yui snapped.

"Oh, no. Because it's known for being the the most gentle and playful of viral strains," Gendo retorted, dry as kindling. He poured a second glass of bourbon and handed it to her.

"How thoughtful," she said sweetly.

"I am glad to see you," he admitted. Green eyes glittered up at him. He smiled weakly, and headed back to grab his own drink when soft fingers gripped his hand. Gendo glanced down at her.

"You look spent," she said, concerned. "I was only half-joking when I said all that, earlier. I think you did work hard, in your own way. I'm worried you burned yourself out doing it."

"Hardly, and to be fair, it wasn't a very difficult topic. Oswald Spengler may have been an historiographer, but his characterization of nations as organisms parlays neatly in metaphysical theory and doctrine. I did abuse the connections a lot, but style makes up for a lot of the…loopholes." He smiled weakly. "It is what it is."

"Then why are you up? What has you feeling uneasy?" Yui studied his face for a second, then lowered her face shyly. "I mean, you do feel uneasy, right? I'm not just assuming?"

"I had a dream," Gendo said. "It left me in a weird state."

"A dream?" Yui sat up, interested. "Go get your drink and then tell me about it." Gendo did. He described the feeling, the child, the battle against the wind. The despair. The ache. He sat across from the couch as he spoke, perched on a small footrest. Yui sat cross-legged, every now and then taking a small sip from her bourbon. By the time Gendo had finished, he had emptied his glass, and hers was halfway down. Her eyes were a bit glassier than when she had come in, and when she spoke, the words were a little slower. Despite that, it was clear that Yui was still present and in the moment.

"Have you considered what the child might represent?" she asked. "Perhaps a part of yourself? An unconscious aspect that you're giving up, or are afraid that you're going to lose?"

"Maybe," he said, not sold on the theory. "It felt like I wouldn't ever be whole if I lost it, but…it didn't feel like me." He twisted his wrist slowly, watching a single bead of liquid sliding along the bottom of his glass.

"You of all people should know that it doesn't have to feel like you to represent an inner aspect," Yui said, flicking the tip of his nose as she spoke. It wasn't a painful action, but it made him sit up and pay attention to her. "In many ways, we are strangers to ourselves. Those things that linger in our subconscious, when we turn to face them, are just as strange to us as if we were meeting a new person for the first time."

"That's academic," he said. "Despite that, I still feel this was…external, I guess, would be the proper term. It felt like the child in question wasn't something internal, but that it was something outside of me. Something I was interacting with, from in to out."

"So what could it represent, in that sense?"

"The symbolism is beyond me. Dream interpretation is something that certainly exists within metaphysical biology, if simply for the fact that certain organisms dream, and those dreams have meaning and purpose. In the very least, they're critical to the processing and storing of acquired data. That being said, a lot of what does exist is strongly influenced by Jungian concepts of dreaming, which, while useful…it's…." He shrugged.

"Outdated and incomplete," Yui finished for him. "And you aren't a specialist in dream interpretation."

"God, no," Gendo sighed.

"So…what could it mean?"

For a moment, Gendo said nothing. He allowed the silence to linger, pondering the question. What could it mean? He had eliminated what he thought the child didn't mean, but that had eliminated a lot of logical prospects. He cocked an eyebrow…

Sometimes, a spade is a spade.

"It may be just that. A child."

"Ooh…a prophetic dream," Yui intoned. Gendo smirked.

"Hardly," he chided.

"No, wait, let me finish," Yui snapped.

"I didn't know you had started something," Gendo said. Yui flicked his nose again.

"I've been talking to Mei over in the physics department, and she's was telling me about this concept of time. That time itself is immutable, that what is going to happen is going to happen, and that happened in the past was what would have happened all along. Does that make sense?"

"That time is fixed, past and present."

"Exactly. All events that happen are going to happen: there's no branching paths, only one path, and that the concept of choice is inherently an illusion. The choice is only a choice because you don't know the outcome, but the outcome is already determined."

"Go on."

"If that's the case, then seeing the future is not as improbably as it would otherwise seem, because the future is unchanging. You're simply seeing events that will happen, regardless of whether you know or not. And if what's in front of us is going to happen…or, more to the point, has already happened and we're simply catching up, then we would be seeing pre-images of those events coming. We might not understand them, but they would be coming."

"I don't buy that," Gendo said. "That implies too much of a fixed nature on reality. The mathematics of causality are simply too diffuse to allow for a fixed path for every element in the system."

"I don't buy it either," Yui admitted. "And neither did Mei, but we had fun dissecting it. Imagine if we've already done this before…that simply the Universe would roll towards a Big Crunch, condense, start a new Big Bang…and we do it all over."

"That's depressing."

"A bit," Yui admitted. "As though we are locked in a cycle, right? Unchanging and unable to escape. Again, I don't buy it myself, either. I believe too much in my own ability to influence outcomes."

"Yui, the Observer," Gendo chided.

"I am Maxwell's demon!" she snapped, thrusting her hands in the air and spilling some bourbon on her hair. "I am the one who knocks!"

"You did, actually," Gendo noted. "On my door, in fact."

"It was meant to be!" she snapped. "I like this bourbon, I want so more bourbon."

"I do, too," Gendo said, standing up and slipping into the kitchen. He returned with the bottle, filling his glass and topping Yui's before resting the bottle carefully on the floor.

"Despite all of that," Yui said, still a little giddy but sipping at her drink carefully, "I think there is something feasible to be said for seeing images. Perhaps they aren't the kind of things that one can point at and say, 'This will happen, and it is meant to be,' but perhaps it's more along the lines of ideas or generalities. We have the notion of what's ahead of us."

"And a notion of how to change it?"

"Perhaps…or at least how to deal with it." Yui looked up, smiling brightly. Her cheeks were very red.

"You're drunk," Gendo said.

"I'm a lightweight!" she giggled happily. "But I'm still in control of my faculties. Beat that!"

"What if it was our child?"

She got very serious. "Why'd you go and spoil the mood?" she moped.

"I didn't mean to," Gendo said, feeling very morose all of a sudden. "It just occurred to me."

"Fears about being a father?"

"…I think, maybe."

"We haven't even slept in the same bed, and already you start worrying about that," Yui sighed. "You put too much stock in the past."

"The past shapes the future…anyone who says otherwise is deluded."

"You aren't your father."

"No, but I am me," Gendo countered.

"And you are fine the way you are," Yui said. She leaned over, and gave him a deep kiss. He tasted her breath, her warmth, all of her, and he almost dropped his glass. She pulled away, and rested her forehead against his. "I like the way you are."

"…You're too kind for your own good, sometimes," he said.

"And you're too much of a pill for your own good, sometimes," Yui retorted. She flopped back, and drained the glass. Gendo gaped at her as she did. She rested the glass on her knee in satisfaction, then made an awful expression and squirmed.

"That's why you sip it," he said as she coughed.

"Awful. Want more!" she insisted, thrusting the glass under his nose. So he poured another glass. Between the two of them, they finished the bottle, talking more about physics, and biology, the outcome of seemingly random coincidence and the nature of what was and was not.

Before long, Yui was slumped onto the couch, snoring lightly. Gendo watched her, for a time. He had watched her nap, from time to time. Usually in the student commons, little catnaps between lectures. This was her dead to the world, a full and honest sleep. Deep and vast, deep and mysterious. He studied the lines of her face, the almost child-like sense of vulnerability and wonder in such a slumber. He felt the goofy grin on his face, and knew that he himself was well past tipsy. That didn't change how much he loved to watch Yui. To look at her. To absorb each detail, file it away, hope that those thoughts never vanished with age.

He stood up…very slowly…and returned the empty bottle and glasses to the kitchen. He made his way back to the couch, and picked Yui up. She was very light, which was a good thing, because even then she threatened to tip him over. Instinctively, she turned towards him and snuggled into him. He carried her into his bed room, and tucked her in. As though she belonged there, she immediately dominated the pillows, throwing an arm over them and pressing into them with a gleeful sigh. Satisfied, Gendo meandered to his closet in a vaguely straight line, took an extra blanket, and worked his way back the couch. He slumped against it, the cushions still smelling strongly of Yui's clothing, her shampoo, her perfume. He drifted into a deep sleep, dreamless except for the sensation of Yui around him.

He didn't feel alone.