2010-04-06 - The Third Seal

It is late. This means that Leo Stenbuck is unconscious.

He is not, however, unconscious in his bed; as part of a God-given quest not to recycle animation frames, Leo is passed out at his desk inside his room above the Shirogane, slumped over the keyboard, his head resting on his folded arms. He is not wearing a shirt, for some Godforsaken reason.

The computer monitor displays a suite of MS design tools; currently, a wireframe 3D model too unfinished to even be recognizable as a mobile weapon is currently featured prominently in a large, central window. Every once in awhile, the monitor automatically dims, and the change in light makes Leo groan and shift his position enough to hit a key and make the monitor light up again.

The rest of the room is in disarray, far more than it ever was when Ralla was around. The bed is unmade, and piles of dirty laundry litter the floor; currently, Leo's Haro is sprawled in a pile of dirty clothes in one corner of the room, apparently in Sleep mode.

In accordance with this new policy of developing new animation for all manner of exciting developments, Rei does not simply emerge from the shadows, whispering from afar. Well -- she does emerge from somewhere, but that's hardly important. The bizarre circumstances of her arrivals and departures stopped being anything new long ago. She never thought she'd be so good at forging A-LAWS shuttle logs and security footage, but there you go. What's bizarre this time is Rei's manner of dress.

Unlike her last visit, Rei has not opted to go the 'sexy' route, although she's wearing arguably the same amount of material. Somehow, she has gotten onto a shuttle, onto the Shirogane, through the hallways and corridors, and into Leo Stenbuck's quarters... while wearing little more than bandages and a teal A-LAWS hospital gown that doesn't tie as reliably as it should in the back. To be fair, though, she's wearing a lot of bandages. Her legs are wrapped in the to the point that only her feet, knees, and upper thighs are exposed. Her left arm follows that pattern, while the other has a heavy cast set around her forearm and hand, effectively rendering the appendage useless as anything but a bludgeon. Rei's gown makes it plain that there are plenty more bandages (and, uh, little else) underneath its surface. Finally, the coup de grace -- her right eye is covered, as is much of the right side of her face, bandages wrapping around her head and causing her shaggy hair to splay in unusual directions.

Rei doesn't awaken Leo. Not immediately. Surveying the room, the first thing she does -- is begin to clean up. She quietly makes the bed, and careful to avoid the pile with the haro, starts collecting the dirty clothes and depositing them into whatever hamper-like containers are available. Any debris of food or drink -- into the trash. She doesn't go so far as to vacuum, but Rei works quickly and meticulously.

So quickly that she doesn't even have time to ask herself why she's doing it. Of course, being unwell and sort of broken, she can't quite stop herself from accidentally banging her heel into the Haro while scooping up a pile of clothes near it.

When Rei bumps into the sleeping Haro, it tumbles off of the pile of laundry it has made its bed and bumps into the wall; a moment later, its eyes flicker as it exists sleep mode, and with a soft whirr it rights itself and turns to face Rei as she busily works at cleaning Leo Stenbuck's room for him. For several long seconds, it merely stares, occasionally flapping its ears as if in thought.

And then it begins to chant, "SAYLA'S HURT, SAYLA'S HURT! SAYLA'S HURT, SAYLA'S HURT!"

The Haro's shouting rouses Leo immediately. He starts awake, snapping into an upright position, his head whipping around the room in something vaguely resembling panic. "Whauh?" he blurts, obviously dazed from his sudden awakening. "Whuzgoin'on?"

He doesn't notice Rei immediately, even in the comparatively bright light cast across his quarters by his monitor; he reaches up to rub the sleep out of his eyes, and yawns, "Haro, what the hell...?"

In Leo Stenbuck's room is an injured, small, silent woman with one eye who happens to be carrying a large pile of laundry over to be stuffed into a hamper. Rei is given pause by the Haro's pronouncement, but it doesn't make any sense to her -- and therefore she ignores it, taking up the clothes that it had been resting upon and putting them away. By the time he's done rubbing his eyes, Leo Stenbuck's view is of this tiny one-eyed girl cramming his laundry into the bin.

Granted, the view is from behind, and with the way the hospital gown doesn't really like to close up at the back -- bandages and fading bruises aside, it's at least a somewhat familiar lunar view.

But then it's over when Rei turns around. She's picked up the floor, made his bed, put his shelves back in order, straightened up and tidied... the only place left untouched is the desk Leo was camped out at. Leo's newly, magically clean room is the scenery framing the injured Rei Ayanami, who stares at Leo from in front of the hamper that now fairly bulges with worn fabric.

Her one eye doesn't blink, and Rei's tone is as neutral as it ever was. "You need to take better care of yourself, Leo," Rei says.

One of her most endearing qualities has always been how oblivious she is to irony.

When Leo lowers his hands from his eyes and is greeted with a view of Rei's bare back, his eyes widen; it is, indeed, a view he's familiar with, even if he hasn't seen it in awhile. He's still gaping when Rei turns around, and he keeps on doing so when he sees the state she's in, his surprise punctuated by a sharp intake of breath.

After a few seconds of staring, he sweeps his gaze around his newly cleaned room, lifting his hands to cup over his nose and mouth. For some reason, the fact that she has - apparently - done his housework for him hits him just as hard (if not harder) than the fact that she's come in a hospital gown and a bunch of bandages... not to mention that she's come again at all.

Eventually, Leo turns his gaze back onto Rei. He stares at her appraisingly for several more seconds while he collects himself, and then slowly lowers his hands into his lap. It's true that her failure to grasp irony has always been adorable, but... well, he's not in much of a mood to appreciate it.

"What are you doing here?" he demands, any attempt at sharpness ruined by how quiet his voice is. "You should be in a hospital." Without waiting for a reason or an excuse, Leo moves to stand up; he only gets as far as tensing his legs before he loses whatever momentum he has and just sags backwards into his seat again.

"Sit down," the young man commands weakly, lifting his hands again, this time to rub at his eyes with the heels of his palms.

Rei walks over to the bed and sets herself down on the corner. Her own hands droop into her lap, her knees pressing together to prevent the view from being immodest. Earlier today, she was in a neck brace, and now, her posture is a bit stiff even for her, as if she hasn't worked all the kinks out of her spinal column yet. Still, she complies, but continues to stare at Leo with her dead expression.

"I came to talk to you," Rei Ayanami says. Her voice is quiet, hushed even by 'Rei' standards. She pauses to glance over at the Haro again, turning her long, thin neck slowly, as if it hurts to do so. But, like Rei, she never complains. She just endures. And then she turns back to look at Leo again.

"Gendo Ikari is happy with you, Leo," Rei says, speaking as if they were conversing during a service in church, as if she didn't want someone cutting in. "This is good. He trusts you enough that they have begun the next stage of their plans for you."

Rei pauses again, one of those hesitant breaks that suggests that she has more to say. Reading Rei's pauses is a fine art, and Leo is probably one of the few who could possibly claim to have any skill at it -- recognizing when she's collecting her thoughts, when she's seeking the right phrase, when she's just feeling slow and sad, when she doesn't want to say anything further at all. But right now, all of those things seem to apply. Rei then continues, regardless.

"Leo."

"How do you know that... what you feel... what you experience..." Rei pauses again. Her stare refuses to break away from Leo's eyes. "How do you know that they're real?"

Well, that's good news about Gendo, at least. Leo just doesn't know the man well enough to know for sure that he's pressing the right buttons; he's done his best, during the recent Angel attacks and the meeting with Huang Qin Shi, but he was worried that he was failing. After all, it seems he's failing at most things, lately.

Leo lowers his hands from his eyes, and into his lap yet again. They only stay there for a moment before he lifts his left hand and begins chewing on his thumbnail, a clear sign of how distressed Rei's presence has him. He matches her stare evenly - albeit with more blinking - but despite his experience in it, he isn't giving much thought to why she's paused.

He's distracted, and in more ways than one. He's worried about her - she may not be /his/ Rei, but she's still a... person, even if she isn't entirely human. She's obviously in bad condition... but they still sortied her, and he knows they'll do so again, throw her back into Unit-00X, despite how obviously bad for her the addition of a GN-T Drive is even when she's not already wounded.

And, of course, he's distracted by the combination of the view he was just treated to and the fact that she's sitting on his bed, looking vulnerable. Some part of him screams to go over and sit with her, but he stamps it out viciously, reminding himself over and over that she's not really Rei. It's... easy to forget, sometimes.

And that just makes him feel even worse.

Eventually, Rei asks her question; at first, it only makes him furrow his brow in confusion. It's not the sudden blow that most of her questions are, but it's obviously done /something/... and that something gets more and more obvious as he puts more and more thought into it.

How /does/ he know? Leo has never thought about this before; he's not a very philosophical man, outside of a few specific subsections of it. He's never been one to soliloquize on the nature of reality.

"I just... you just know," he says uncertainly, after almost ten seconds of increasingly agitated silence. "You wouldn't... they wouldn't happen if they weren't real."

Even as he says it, his mind adds a 'but.' But... nightmares aren't real, right? But he experiences those. And sometimes, when he dreams memories, they're just as lifelike as when they happened. Maybe even moreso, if that's possible.

But that's different, he tells himself. When he wakes up, he knows those are dreams. Something like this, this isn't a dream. He can tell... especially because she was cleaning his room. And now his room is clean. And he knows that's real because he can see it.

But he can see dreams, too. Who says this isn't a dream?

"Why?" Leo demands, hostility creeping into his voice.

If Rei Ayanami is thinking, then she doesn't broadcast it to the world. She never does. Her counsel is her own. She takes in every detail of Leo's turmoil -- she must, she can't be so inhuman as to not realize his distress -- but she doesn't /respond/ to it. She just stares and stares and seems to let him suffer. It's as if Rei doesn't even care. But why would she?

It's not like she's /his/ Rei.

When Leo asks that crucial question after his struggling answer, Rei sits, silent, still. Another uncomfortable silence settles over the room as the blue-haired girl seems to become part of the scenery. The scenery that isn't the same as it was when Leo went to sleep.

Finally, though, Rei again allows herself to speak: "Because it's important," the Japanese teenager says. Her posture is still but slightly flagging. She seems tired. It's not like her at all -- to seem tired, that is. She's not supposed to seem tired, or at least she's not supposed to show it. The last one never did. She was fine to go go go until she decided that it was time to sleep. This one -- this one, in her ragged state, she seems so much more human than Leo's Rei ever did. And that makes her all the more alien.

"You will face... There will be a lot that will be hard to understand, Leo," Rei says, again showing a rare, un-Rei-like moment of indecision as to her word choice. This is the second time. Was Rei ever this inarticulate? In the real world, that is? "You need to know what is real and you need to stay on that path. Otherwise you may become lost... and fail to find your way back. To do what you need to do, Leo, you need to be sure."

Rei settles into a silence there, and for once, it's a familiar thing. The way her throat tenses subtly, the minute motion of her lips in the process of closing her mouth, the tiny, tiny flare of her nostrils -- when a girl gives so little, the most microscopic indicators are everything. And Rei is done speaking.

When Rei finishes speaking - and Leo is certain that she's finished, this time, all her little tells are still the same - the young Captain just stares at her, his thumb still hovering near his mouth even if he's ceased to chew on it.

There are so many little ways the girl in front of him is different from Rei. But there's a lot of ways she's the same, too... aren't there? Or is he just imagining those? Does she act like this when she's not here?

And how does she /get/ here? After Tannanliel, he checked the Shirogane's security footage and shuttle logs from the first time she visited. She wasn't in any of them. But at least then she was in uniform.

But on Tannanliel, she was wearing what Excellen was, when they spoke earlier. But he hadn't seen that yet. So she had to have really been wearing it, right? Because he didn't imagine it, because he hadn't seen it yet, and then later Excellen was wearing it.

... Excellen /was/ wearing it, right?

And how did she get here like that? She might as well be naked. There's no way she could have escaped from a military hospital without being seen, hopped a shuttle, gotten past all the security, and, and then, and-

Leo forces himself to take a deep breath - even if it's a shaky one - and swings his eyes around the room again, as if to make sure it's really clean. Eventually, he turns his eyes back on to Rei, and speaks again.

"Find my way back from what?" he asks, uncertainly. "Are you... does this have anything to do with what you said last time? About... about seeing Rei again?"

Rei's answer is nothing special. "You'll know when you reach that point," she says. Evasive. Cryptic. Typical. "But you need to be ready for it. You need to be able to trust yourself." This is the same sort of stuff Rei's been rambling about through these clandestine little affairs. But despite this lack of substance, her answer is potentially more disturbing than the other things she's said. It's not from the way she speaks -- her voice stays soft and submissive in its vacant monotone.

What's disturbing about Rei's answer is that she looks away when she says it. Her head turns, very slightly, tilting her right side -- her bandaged, wounded side -- to face Leo. Her visible left eye casts its gaze downward. She couldn't look at Leo while she said that.

Why?

Rei's position doesn't change. She doesn't lift her head back up, or start staring at Leo again. She seems to have picked a point on the floor and is giving it her full visual attention. If she didn't seem like she was about to tip over, it'd be... well, a lot like the Rei that Leo remembers. All those trips in the Vic Viper where she never even looked out the windows, ignoring the beautiful view of space in favor of a corner of a control panel or a fold in Leo's sleeve or whatever else happened to be in her line of sight.

"Leo," Rei says, voice weaker, matching the frailty and fragility of her bandaged form.

"Is pain real?"

Leo is getting awfully sick of Rei's evasive tactics, and it shows in the irritation that flashes across his face when she looks away... and his immediate, sharp answer to her question. "I don't know," he snaps, raising his voice for the first time in all of Rei's visits. "I don't know any of this shit!"

He rises so suddenly out of his chair that it topples over, clattering loudly onto the floor; the noise reminds Leo that it's late and he shouldn't shout, so he drops his voice to a mere angry hiss when he continues, "Why do you keep doing this? How am I suppose to, to help you, when you won't even tell me anything straight?!"

"How do I even know you're telling me the truth?!" he demands, making broad, angry gestures with his arms as he does. "Why won't you just leave me alone?!"

After Leo's outburst, a long, uncomfortable silence fills the room. Rei simply has nothing to say in response, apparently. It's different from her usual silences, though. It's not a prelude to some profound, evasive soundbite. It's not anything other than bleak and empty.

Rei keeps her head turned away. Even though her bangs fall into her field of vision, arranged artlessly by her bandages, it's still plainly visible that Rei closes her eye and decides not to open it again. Her shoulders seem to sag. It's as if Leo's hiss were a weight being placed on ber back.

"If you do not wish to help me," Rei says, quietly, slowly, "then you are under no obligation to." Her monotone is different. It's slipping. If Rei's blankness was ever a mask, this is a moment where it seems to slip. There's a deep sadness under her tone. Leo has actually managed to hurt her feelings -- confirmation that, for better or for worse, she had some to begin with.

Another long pause, then Rei speaks again. "I need to prepare you for what Gendo plans to do with you, Leo. I don't... I'm... I'm not trying to hurt you..." Her voice slips into a whisper, as if she were desperate for Leo to believe her, but she doesn't know how to follow it up.

So Rei settles for brute, unflinching honesty, delivered in that same feeble, melancholy tone like it's all she can do to hold back tears. "I have to prepare you, Leo, because I'll be gone soon. My usefulness to Gendo will have ended. He had Zerogouki-X built... I was never the intended pilot for it, Leo. I'm the test pilot. The one they use to work out the... Leo. When I'm dead, Gendo is going to give Zerogouki to you."

Rei finally opens her eyes, and turns her head slowly, staring up at Leo, red eye wet. "You are the Fourth Child."

Leo Stenbuck has never been able to stay angry when faced with a crying girl. There are, of course, a very few exceptions... but this isn't one of them, even if Rei isn't technically crying. At least not yet.

As it becomes increasingly obvious that he's hurt Rei, his anger dissolves, and his shoulders sag with the sudden return of his almost constant exhaustion. He takes an uncertain step towards the girl, where she sits on his bed, but that's as far as he gets before he hesitates.

He has yet to overcome his hesitation when Rei speaks again, to tell him that she is not long for this world, and that when she's going, he'll be the pilot of Unit-00. There's a great many parts to the statement, and Leo's not sure which is the most surprising. He isn't even sure what to say first.

Eventually, he settles on, "I'm sorry for yelling at you." He takes another uncertain step towards Rei, and then a third, stopping in front of her and lowering himself into a squat in front of where she sits. He's silent for several more seconds before he confirms, "I do want to help you."

The Fourth Child, huh...? It isn't that Leo doesn't think he can do it. He thought that, once; when he first piloted Jehuty, he swore up and down to Elena Weinberg that he couldn't pilot the Orbital Frame, even though he had already done it, even though he was still doing it.

He was wrong. Over two years of active combat duty have taught him that, at least. In fact, more and more, it seems that fighting - that killing - is the /only/ thing he's good at it. But it's something he can do. Something he /has/ to do. Maybe, sometimes, something no one else can.

"What do you mean," Leo asks hoarsely, his gaze never flinching from Rei's. "'When you're dead?' What makes you think you're going to die?"

Rei stares into Leo's eyes, her own visible one still threatening to let slip a tear or two, but never quite making good on that promise. There's a tension in her neck when he asks that -- she swallows, and seems to shake slightly, as if it's harder and harder to stay sitting up. She doesn't quite slump forward, but she's not as rigid as she always is. Then, for the second time, Rei looks away in distress.

The Japanese girl's gaze settles on Leo's Haro, still over across the room. Leo's Haro -- she recognizes it. Even though it's had the dents smoothed out, a new coat of polish, even though it /works/ -- she knows exactly where that Haro used to sit. "You fixed it," Rei whispers, as if it hurts for her to speak. "People used to ask her why she never let anyone fix it. I remember these things, even though they're not mine. I remember what she used to say. She said she didn't need a robot friend, because she had you. It was enough that the Haro was hers. It didn't have to be functional. She bought it because she was ordered to fit in, once." Rei swallows again. "But it's not hers anymore. Now it's yours."

Rei turns her head back to face Leo. She looks as exhausted as he does. "Gendo Ikari is going to try and end the world, Leo. He's... I don't know if... I don't know what /she/ felt. I can remember... things she said, things she did. But /I/ know that what he wants to do is wrong. /I/ know that he can't be allowed to do it." Rei's sudden use of emphasis is jarring. It sounds out of place, as if she were suddenly speaking with a Bulgarian accent instead of a Japanese one. "I'm just a tool toward that end, though. I... can't... be what she became."

Rei closes her eye again for a long moment. Her voice is increasingly troubled. Speaking harder and harder, it sounds like. Rei's accent never used to be very prominent, but it seems that this was through conscious effort -- the more distressed she is, the more prominent that accent becomes. Her volume is that of an icy whisper -- with an open flame behind it, promising to melt it. "I don't want to survive this, Leo. I don't... I can't keep going. But my death will be the... the trigger. That's why I need you."

Rei suddenly drops her head, hunching forward and putting her face in her hands. One scrawny, pale appendage covers the left side of her face, hiding her eye from view. Her other hand, caked as it is in that enormous plaster cast, just kind of bonks into the thick layers of gauze and bandage covering her other eye -- if it hurts, she doesn't notice. But she can't bear to look up. Her breath is becoming ragged. Emotion is threatening to completely overtake Rei Ayanami. For maybe the first time ever, Leo is witness to it -- it's as unnatural as watching her burn alive.

"I need you to stop it all. I need you to make sure my death is meaningless."

When Rei moves her eyes to the Haro, currently huddling in the corner as if it was a frightened child whose parents were fighting, Leo tears his eyes away from the young woman's to look at it, too. It's one of the few things he has left of Rei, other than his memories; there's the handful of photos he has, the bandage even now tied around his head, and the Haro.

And that's it. Not even a grave... because, officially, she never died.

Rei's comments on the little spherical robot drudge up all sorts of memories for Leo; the comment about being ordered to fit in, especially, carries quite the parallel with his increasingly difficult struggle to humanize Soma Peries...

... which, in turn, reminds him of his now /former/ struggle to humanize Ralla Traln Triald, and the memory of /her/ serves only to make his night even worse than it already is.

A trend that is immediately continued by Rei's claim that Gendo is going to end the world.

Leo rocks his weight back onto his heels. It seems almost involuntary, as if he'd just been struck. End the world... there's no way he could manage that, is there? NERV isn't an entirely independent group, not by a long shot. Not even the Earth Federation can look the other way while he... what, exactly?

What the fuck is he even going to try to do? He has to be trying to do /something/, if Rei says he is. But Rei's told him a lot of things, since her first visit... and he has no way of knowing if any of them are true.

He doesn't even have any way, he realizes, to tell if she's really here.

Watching Rei become more and more upset as she explains how she's going to die - how she /wants/ to die - is just as upsetting at Leo's increasing uncertainty that the girl in front of him is even in front of him at all. He's not convinced either way, yet... and he's not sure that if he was, it would let him just ignore the fact that a girl is inching towards tears right in front of him.

The fact that the girl is identical to his dead girlfriend - even if such open emotion is extremely un-Rei-like - isn't even necessary to get to him; it just makes it infinitely worse.

Without even thinking, Leo reaches out to comfort Rei when she buries her face in her hands. He freezes in place with his hands only inches from the girl's body, as if they'd struck some sort of invisible field. The feeling from before - the terrible guilt at intimate contact with Rei's doppelganger - bubbles to the surface, and Leo wrestles briefly with his two conflicting urges until, after a few seconds, he makes up his mind...

... and rocks his weight back onto his heels again, leaning back away from Rei. He can't... he can't betray Rei like that, and he can't keep letting himself pretend, even if just for a moment, that this girl is her, and she's back, if only for a few moments. He shouldn't have ever done it.

But this still leaves him in an unfortunate position. If he comforts her, he feels guilty... but if he doesn't comfort her, he feels guilty, too. The conflicting emotions, the distress of seeing Rei so visibly upset, buries a knife into his heart, an agonizing feeling he's more and more used to with each passing day. He feels like he could burst into tears at any moment...

... but, as is entirely expected at this point, he doesn't. Because, as much as he wants to, he still can't; when he reaches up to wipe at his eyes, they're not even moist.

Leo stares for a few more seconds at the collapsing Rei before asking, quietly, "Why do you want to die so badly? Life is... it's sacred. You shouldn't just throw it away. And I'm sure you have a lot to live for..."

"I didn't say I wanted to die," Rei replies, quietly but firmly, her voice as fragile and breakable as a glass bauble -- and teetering on the edge of something, threatening to fall and smash into a thousand pieces, to go from a recognizable shape into an obliterated pile of shards -- to lose all sense of what it is -- of who she is.

"I don't want to die." Rei's voice is tiny, now. Her face stays in her hands. Whether or not she notices Leo's hesitation, his abortive attempt to touch her... it doesn't register. She stays concealed in her doubled-over shroud, face hidden, voice muffled somewhat by the way her lips press against the spot where her left hand meets her wrist, like an accidental kiss.

"But I don't want to live, either." Rei shudders when she says that, like it's difficult -- as well it should be. Rei never opens up like this -- well, opened up like this. Everything was a logical process. Everything was clearly stated with rules and boundaries and frontiers beyond. She never told Leo what she wanted. She just told him how things were, to her. But was all of that just an act? Was this what was hiding beneath? Or is this the new Rei, the fake Rei, the broken Rei that knows she could never replace his?

Is this the Rei that he's making up entirely? Is Leo just talking to a piece of his own psyche?

Did Leo just make Rei up to hurt himself?

"It's wrong that I exist. It's... wrong. I don't want to live or die. I just don't want to /be/." Rei still doesn't interrupt the way her face is hidden away, even though her words aren't always exceptionally clear, with how she lets her hands muffle her speech. Her shoulders twitch or sag every now and then, and she's breathing quickly. But that's it. No sobs. No tears, that can be seen. Just hiding her face while baring her soul -- Opposite Day.

"All I have to live for is her shadow."

Leo has no idea what to say to that, because he has no idea how to sympathize with it. Leo has been in awfully bad spots before - hell, he's in an awfully bad spot now - but he's never hurt so bad he wanted to die, and he's certainly never hurt so bad he wanted to stop existing. But that doesn't really matter, because any attempt he might possibly make to console Rei - without touching her - is blown away when she twists the knife.

All she has left to live for is her shadow.

Leo rocks his weight back even farther, so much so he loses his balance and collapses onto his ass with a heavy thunk. As if it were possible, he has even less of an idea of how to respond to /that/. After sitting in grim silence for several seconds, he decides to cope with the influx of negative emotions the way he always does.

He blames himself.

It's his fault that Rei died; she died because he couldn't protect her, because he couldn't stop Yazan. And now this girl - this girl who looks so much like Rei, and is so much like her in all the ways she isn't totally the opposite - is suffering. And that's his fault, too. He can't reassure her. He can't comfort her. He can't even just hold her.

And the worst part is, it doesn't really matter that he can't, because he probably can't help her. He'll do the best he can, but she's going to die, and there's probably nothing he can do about it. So what good would it really do for him to comfort her?

If, an insidious voice in the back of his mind whispers, she even exists at all.

"Please don't say that," Leo begs, his voice a mere whisper. Even if he knows he can't, he has to try to help her, somehow. "I can... let me try to help you. I can... whatever Gendo's going to do, I can stop him before he hurts you. I can..." He can what? What can he do?

He doesn't know.

'Please don't say that,' Leo Stenbuck begs. So Rei Ayanami complies, and says nothing.

That sense of uncertainty and dread hangs over the room for a long time. Probably not as long as it feels, but these things never are. Rei stays motionless, in her bandages in her gown, in her cast and her messy hair and her shoulder shakes, lost in some secret inner world, or possibly just refusing the one outside to the point of complete stasis. Rei finally lifts her head, though. Her face is once again that serene, bored mask. Her eye is a little wet, but not glistening like it was before.

It's as if Rei cut out a piece of herself and pressed on without it. But her words, whispered so quietly, as if no one else in the universe could be allowed to hear them -- her words say it all.

She stares at the young man gracelessly sitting on the floor. Her hands lower, and Rei slowly lifts herself to a standing position, with a shaky rise that suggests some degree of pain in her back and ribs. "Help me by doing this for me," Rei whispers. "Help me by making sure there's never another one like me. Help me by looking out for the people who will be hurt by what I'm doing. Help me by taking care of Zerogouki, Leo. She's alive. She has a soul. She'll help you when you need her. And she will be alone without me."

Rei stays there, standing over the man who loved a version of her once -- loves a version of her that's... out there, somewhere. "The only reward I can give is that you'll see her again. But you have to know what's real. You have to know that in your heart. If you don't, you'll be lost with her forever. And so will the world."

Another long pause. Rei stares down. Her voice is numb. She rejects the feelings she just displayed -- forces them back and out of her system, keeps them from marring her cryptic statements with inflection or emotion. But before she walks away, leaving again, out into the corridor and leaving Leo with his fractured life and his fracturing mind and all of the pain and problems and rage and guilt -- she says one last thing. "I'm scared, Leo."

"But you should be, too."

And then she's gone. It's as if she was never there.

Except for the room, changed in her wake, ordered and pristine.

Has... a soul? Unit-00 has a soul? It's... she has to be speaking metaphorically, right? But... Leo can't help but anthropomorphize his mobile suits - even ones that aren't Jehuty - but he doesn't think he'd ever say they had /souls./ Except for Jehuty, of course.

Rei's eventual reversion of demeanor - and the greatest of her few final revelations of the night - stuns Leo into silence, and as she says her final words he just sits, staring. He doesn't know what to say, and this time he can't even muster up some catch-all statement of false encouragement.

Even after Rei leaves, he doesn't move to stand up; he sits, staring at the wall, for almost fifteen minutes. His fears about whether the girl was real or not... they came and went while she was there, while she was in front of him, seeming as real as can be.

But now she's gone, and his mind is racing, picking apart the entire situation. Little things she said, things she did, oddities in her behavior, the impossibility of her getting here at all. He picks at them until the off-chance possibility that he might be losing his mind creeps closer and closer to certainty.

He needs to know what's real. She kept saying that; that it was the most important thing. What was she talking about? Something else, that his fears and her words are just a coincidence? Or was his subconscious trying to tell him what he was doing?

Rei should be happy about one thing; in part, her message got through. Leo /is/ scared.

Maybe that's why, after those fifteen minutes are up, he staggers to his feet and swings his gaze uncertainly around his room. This... is his room really like this? Clean, orderly, in the wake of a visit by a ghost? Or is it as dirty as it was when he went to sleep?

As early as hours later, he won't know why he did it... but now, it seems like a great idea. Not even a great idea; a /necessity./ Leo storms across his room to his hamper, digs his arms into the thing, and comes out with a huge pile of clothes...

... which he proceeds to throw haphazardly into piles around the room.

He sweeps things furiously off of shelves; a box of revolver ammunition opens when it hits the ground and spills rounds across the floor. He digs a few scraps of food trash and empty cans out of the garbage and deposits them back where they were, as best he can remember.

Only after everything is back the way it was - and worse - does he collapse into a sitting position on his bed, suddenly overwhelmed by panic, struggling to keep himself from hyperventilating. He hunches over, reaching up to clutch his head in his hands, staring at his feet, the image of his cluttered quarters etched into his mind.

This is right. This is the way things should be. This is the way things are.

Leo sits there, holding his head in his hands, awake but unmoving, for three hours, until his alarm goes off.