(Melancholia)

Before I knew it, it had become a usual occurrence for me to meet up with Ikari-kun on the streetcar.

I had not thought, at first, that I could get used to this, but in the end, I did.

It became commonplace, almost comfortable, something I might even look forward too a little bit.

Often we sat there across from each other in the all-suffusing orange light of sunrise while Ikari-kun recounted the latest bizarre adventure of Captain Katsuragi's pet bird.

It seems that he had grown especially fond of the Captain and her animal companion since that recent incident with some defense contractor's combat robot.

"You know, at first I was just kinda disappointed that she acts so different at home like she wasn't even trying. Like they just – threw me with the first person who volunteers so she can keep an eye on me and nothing else matters. But a while back, Kensuke said that, when someone lets themselves go like that in front of you, that means they think of you as family. Strange, huh, how that can work out…"

"Well, I wouldn't know about that."

"I guess so… I'd just thought… well, never mind."

He didn't talk that much, at school, or at NERV, but when he was with me, he did most of the talking. Probably because I was practically making him, having nothing much to tell.

He didn't seem to mind, but still, I'd think, from what little resources I had access to, that it is important for friendships to be reciprocal. To have an exchange going back and forth.

Most sources I'd seen described it in terms too vague for me to extrapolate much.

I most certainly recalled, however, that you were supposed to ask the other person questions about themselves. I recalled the figures in novels complaining about it, or even from the times I'd been stuck at NERV's sickbay where they often had a radio playing for the patients.

"He never asked me anything about myself!" as a dramatic complaint.

This morning, I thought that I might as well attempt it, so, once Ikari-kun was done with his penguin story, I decided to contribute the next topic of conversation.

I worried a little bit that this may again be 'too direct', but I could not really think of any other way to say it, and I saw no point in smoke and mirrors.

So, I raised up one hand that had been limply hanging down beside me and pointed at the electronic device that Ikari-kun was still holding in his lap, though he had pulled out the headphones the moment I arrived.

"Why are you always listening to that?"

That line of inquiry seemed to surprise him.

"You mean this player? Ah, that is…" there was a longer pause, a greater appearance of reluctance than seemed merited over a simple electronic device.

"...it used to belong to my father, kind of like those glasses you have. He threw it away when he no longer needed it…" The words dripped with the folded-up sharpness of some unsaid addition that was probably kept back as a courtesy to me.

"He left it behind at my teacher's place, so I took it. I guess it's the closest thing I get to a break from this terrible world."

"Terrible?"

"Well, obviously!" I was still not quite used to the way that he may swiftly swing to a state of agitation, a flood of emotion coloring both his voice and face – The Commander, Vice Commander, and Dr. Akagi were all rather more self-possessed.

"It's a terrible world where terrible people exist. A world where the only parent I have left never has any time for me, and only keeps me around because he needs me – which he might not, once that new EVA from Europe arrives, or if they get that autopilot thing figured out… I guess I thought that, if I listened to this thing, it's a little bit as if he were protecting me, but that's probably just self-delusion…"

That was dishearting to hear when I knew so well that the Commander was, in fact, taking on great risks to life and limb to create what he at least saw as a better world for all mankind including his son, and in that instant, I wanted very much to tell Ikari-kun of the sacrifices that his father was even now planning to undertake – how he meant to give his very flesh, his very soul, as soon as a certain sample would be delivered from Europe alongside EVA 02, but I could not.

I was not at liberty to say.

So all I could do was try and ask the right question that might lead him to realize this on his own:

"Have you ever tried to understand your father?"

"I am trying. I mean, that's a part of why I came… But even if I give him the benefit of the doubt, even if tomorrow morning we somehow reconciled and all was fine and dandy, this is still a world where EVAs and Angels exist. Where you have to do terrible things just to survive. A world where my friends and I keep getting hurt…

Sure, once in a while, some good thing might happen, but it always gets taken away in the end.

So that, even when good things happen, even when I'm happy, I still can't really be happy – it feels like taking on a debt. I keep wondering when I'm gonna have to pay… Like it's only a matter of time until something screws it all up if I don't end up doing it myself…

So yeah, this world hasn't done much to make me like it…. If I'm honest, if it wasn't for like, five particular people, I might just let the angels have it and burn it all the way down to the ground..."

Realizing the implications of what he had just said in the heat of passion, he leaned back in his seat and took a deep long breath.

"I'm a terrible person, aren't I?

I know that I'm not the only one who's suffering, but, sometimes it all just hurts so much that I just can't think of anything else. I'm not cool-headed like you."

I would never have thought to describe myself that way.

"...by that you mean… me?"

Ikari-kun seemed rather glad for the opportunity to leave the heavy topics behind:
"Yeah, totally! I've always thought that you have this tough, cool silent vibe about you! Kensuke thinks so, too. He says you're a lot more mature than most of our classmates."

This is getting wilder and wilder.

"You seem to put a lot of stock in Aida-kun's opinion."

"Well, I admit he might not really look it, but Kensuke's actually really wise when you get to know him. He gets people really well.

I can see how you could get a different impression, though, with how he's always on and about all this military stuff and the EVAs. At first, I thought he and Touji were kind of silly, with how they were always gushing about Misato-san doing stupid stuff, like when they sneaked out to watch the battle when the first EVA attacked. But now I'm starting to wonder if I'm not the one who's still a kid compared to them. I actually ran into Kensuke in the mountains, back when I tried to run away, and somehow, he knew just the right things to say…

And Touji, too. Sure, he might be a bit of a showoff and Kensuke and I are kind of trying to wean him off the macho talk for his own good, but he's a really solid, good guy, too. His father and grandfather have to work all the time to support the family, so, he's the one who usually goes to spend time with his little sister, who's been stuck in the hospital.

The first time I met him, he socked me right in the face, but, after that, he wouldn't be satisfied until he took one punch from me…"

So that's what happened.

"Why didn't you notify the school staff?"

"There would be no point. Besides, I had it coming. His sister actually got hurt during the first battle. If only I hadn't been so clumsy, maybe the EVA wouldn't have gone out of control…"

"The reactivation was the only thing that saved us. There was nothing you could have done. It's a miracle that you were able to activate it at all."

He mulled this over.

"I guess you're right. But still, I can't blame Touji for being mad. I'm an only child, so, it's not like I could understand. He didn't have to forgive me – but he did. He even said – that he wouldn't blame me if I left. He totally used to hate me – and now he doesn't. That's really precious, I think.

Like it shows that maybe it isn't completely hopeless if people hate you…"

He trailed off there, lost in thought.

"By the way, Ayanami, I've been wondering – Do you have a younger sister, too?"

"No, not younger."

From a certain angle, the first, defunct clone might perhaps be accounted as an older one.

"Why do you ask?"

"It's probably nothing, it's just… that I've sort of been having this feeling, like… could it be that we have met somewhere before? Like before I came to NERV?"

That inexplicable image of the little red girl at the gravesite invited itself into my mind.

"I do not know how that might be."

"...of course not. You're probably right."

...was this a lie?

I was just leaving out the parts that I couldn't explain to him, the ones that ought not be relevant. Everything I was actually saying was as truthful as it could possibly be – for how could I speak truth about something that I myself had not sorted out the meaning of?

It was not deception but simplification, translation even, a struggle to make comprehensible what probably could not be.

Yet I wasn't wholly unaware that some at least may account this a white lie, even if I would likely be believed if I claimed not to understand.

It would be self-delusion to think that the secrets in the bowels of Terminal Dogma would not catch up to me sooner rather than later. I'd known that from the first.

But from the moment that I had not contradicted his promise about a future that would never come, the space between us had become its own little compartment, a special third space governed by different rules and different premises.

A little box that I opened up when I met him in the mornings, and then closed back up when I entered back into the empty stillness of my apartment, where I existed alone, or took the elevator down to NERV, where everything I did was a function of my role as a tool to the instrumentality project.

Here in this streetcar drenched with sunrise, we were cocooned off in a little world of our own, and so far, the awareness of the inevitable had not penetrated there.

He'd addressed me as a lonely classmate and comrade in arms because that's what he'd been given reason to see, and I had not corrected him.

I didn't know how. There wasn't a way. I wasn't even sure how to do it. For the most part, I had just passively let myself slide into it, with few deliberate acts aside from deciding not to resist.

I could have claimed that I had no choice, that if anything had led him astray it would have been his own assumptions.

Yet I can't deny that I was interested. That I'd wondered, even just in the speculative, what it might be like if he, as a new, recently arrived person who knew little of either my reputation in our class nor the truth of my origins, looked at me with the fresh, unencumbered eyes of someone who just saw me as I existed, just seen by myself, without context, without the knowledge of my origins or evident dysfunction clouding his vision.

What it may be like to be seen by someone who had not labeled me to begin with.

Would my trite artificiality bleed through as obviously as it did in my physical appearance?

Or would such a person look at me in a different way, see something different, interpret me differently, than one who could refer to a ready-made explanation by way of my origins?

If I didn't tell him, was I hiding myself?

But, if I did tell him, would he be able to see me anymore?

Me, as an unlabeled existence, discerned only by his own observations?

Me, as the thinking, feeling thing inside here?

Many times I had felt as if I were all alone in this world, a single stream of unmoored, unattached thoughts, only distantly even connected to the vessel that ferried my mind through the day.

Everyone else was certain there, influencing my life with their wills, planning it out – but they were too far away, too different, too skewed in their view, and probably not at all interested in the puny, scrambled thoughts of a mere tool.

The Commander was the only one whose presence I could have said to have brushed even distantly.

Now, I was here, with Ikari-kun, and at least sometimes, something inside of him was clearly speaking to something inside of me, reflecting as a mirror what he was truly, actually receiving from me, as we subtly warp the shapes of each other's paths as through the forces of physics.

It was as if the veils were ripped away, and through it still came to me through this ten-foot wall of lead, a tangle of assumptions, interpretations, and self-serving interests on both our counts, I felt like there was truly someone somewhere out there, communicating, from the other end of a wide chasm-

And every time I did, I was all the more reminded of the great leagues of distance that remained between us, the walls that could never be erased.

When I was going about my day, I thought of him with warmth and interest, yet when I was in front of him, I could only think of all that was inevitable, all that I could not do, if it were asked of me, so that I was almost tempted to withdraw, to spare us both what was coming, to let go of what must be pointless – just a few scattered, trivial exchanges that didn't amount to much of substance if you lined them up like a string of pearls. And yet they held a warmth, just a tiny, fleeting matchstick in a world of freezing cold.

It was happiness and sadness all blending together into some tangled mixture that I could not make sense of.

I kept gazing at Ikari-kun's sunlit hands on his music player as the streetcar rattled on.

Ikari-kun would, of course, disappear as well on the eve of Third Impact, along with everything else. We would not just simply be parted, but rather, at least in his current form of existence, he would be washed away by the crimson tide to come.

For a conclusion so obvious, it had taken a surprising amount of time to occur to me, and longer yet to fully sink in.

Though, knowing how he viewed this world, I wondered if Ikari-kun might not in fact be glad of its passing.

I wondered what he might do, when the time came for me to collect his soul.

Would he welcome me, or would he turn away in horror?