2010-06-05 - First Taste of Crucified Grace

A RELEVANT DATE

Really, who can say what's worse: if Rei (the third Rei) had turned out to be wrong, or a hallucination, or a ghost, or just a vengeful little mess of a clone; or that she seems to have been right. It hasn't been long now since that moment in the hallway of the Minerva -- a kiss and then she was gone. Slightly longer since that last meeting with Leo, where her flesh tore and all that remained afterward was a bit of blood and a folded paper crane in the shade of blue she knew Leo would like. Her gravestone: digital voice recordings on a Haro that once sat broken in the corner of a broken room.

But that's all the past now. This is the present, and what drives the present is a phone call. Leo's phone went off -- his special 3066 phone. The usual ringtone didn't happen. Instead, it was just a series of ominous beeps. No known sender, or at least none that phone was willing to attempt to decrypt. A gruff, curt voice on the other end; Gendo Ikari's.

"Come to Tokyo-03, Leo. I told you that you have a bright future ahead of you. It's time to start making that future happen."

No pause to allow for a response from the boy soldier. Just the click of a phone being hung up. Gendo Ikari is not the sort of man who would have entertained a conversation, anyway.

And this brings us to the Geofront, deep in its belly, where the corridors gleam and every room is as immaculate as Christ's conception, home to so many memories.

SOME TIME AGO

Rei Ayanami and Leo Stenbuck are seated in what amounts to a hospital room. Rei is wearing a paper gown; plugged into her arm is a tube that is feeding on her blood, the cord red with activity. Rei does not seem bothered by this; perhaps Doctor Akagi's allowance of Leo's presence has calmed her. Or perhaps she wouldn't have been bothered anyway. She /is/ Rei, after all.

"You can absolutely keep a hummingbird as a pet," Rei intones flatly, looking at Leo with her usual combination of incredulity and absolute apathy; this was early on, when it wasn't really obvious how much of either of those were genuine. "It's no different than a parrot, or a parakeet. They're all birds."

"You really can't," Leo says, getting animated, gesturing with his hands. "And I'm not saying I /agree/ with it, it's just that /bird law/ in the Earth Federation, it's not governed by reason!"

Rei is silent for sixteen seconds, approximately. "There's no such thing as 'bird law.'"

"Yes, there is!" Leo replies, getting up out of his chair to show how passionate he is.

"If I must, I'm going to acquire a hummingbird through NERV's Personal Animal Familiar Acquisitions Department to show you why you are wrong." Rei says this as if it were a totally rational thing to say; to her, it presumably is.

Leo sputters: "Hummingbirds -- /Hummingbirds are illegal tender/!"

NOW

Ritsuko Akagi is in that room, smoking, despite the 'No Smoking' sign posted near her head. She seems indifferent to Leo's presence, but not in the charming Rei sort of way -- in the sense that she really and truly feels like she has better things she could be doing. "Your suit's on the bed. Put it on and use the wrist control to pressurize it. And get a move on. We've got a lot to do today, and Takaya's already been a bust."

Leo knows it shouldn't, but Gendo's trademark curtness has left him a little anxious. In the half an hour it took him to get to get to the Geofront, the young man concocted no less than four scenarios in which Gendo had discovered his 'plan' - such as it is, as it involves too much winging it to truly be a plan at this point - and has him killed upon his arrival.

It's ridiculous, of course. He hasn't done anything that might tip his hand... and, indeed, he barely has a hand to tip. It's funny, Leo muses as Dr. Akagi urges him to put on his suit, how this stuff is way scarier than being in combat.

As he sets eyes on the suit, Leo's eyebrows raise in surprise. That's... "Unit-00's plugsuit," the young man says simply, more an observation than a question. So it's finally time, huh...?

After a moment of frowning contemplatively, Leo realizes that he's not actually supposed to know this is coming, and does his best to feign surprise. "I thought you had to be special to run one of those things," he says, shooting a sidelong glance at the Doctor. The confusion in his voice is a little wooden... but the anxiety, at least, is very real.

As he asks his question, Leo begins stripping off his A-LAWS uniform, under the assumption that putting on a plugsuit over it would be an awful idea. He doesn't bother asking the doctor to leave, or turn away. He doesn't work out an hour a day to /not/ expose himself to as many women as possible.

The very idea is just ridiculous.

Despite Leo's eagerness, Ritsuko seems to be more busy with her nails than with checking him out. "Underwear, too," is her only comment, delivered with the savor and gusto of someone who's just been presented with a plate of sand for dinner.

The comment -- 'Unit-00's plugsuit' -- doesn't even earn a response. Leo's other statement, though, causes the bottle-blonde scientist to tap her cigarette, snort smoke, and sigh. "And that's why we're conducting these tests, Leo," she notes with the sort of overbearing quality that one might expect to see in a university professor who's been downgraded to teaching kindergarteners how to use the Flintstones Phone without putting their eye out. "To see if you're special enough."

Doctor Akagi clearly does not harbor high hopes.

It's at that moment, halfway through dressing, that Gendo Ikari enters. His first move is to exchange a meaningful look with Ritsuko -- she straightens up as if galvanized by an electric current, stamps out her cigarette in an ashtray, and gets up out of her seat. "Commander Ikari," she says, because protocol is important.

Also important: the way that Gendo gives her the barest of nods and then turns his attention entirely toward Leo. Ritsuko glares daggers at the boy over Gendo's shoulder. If Gendo notices, he doesn't pay it any mind. Rei learned a lot from him, it seems.

"Leo, my boy," the leader of NERV and potential destroyer of the world says, once Leo is dressed. A hand claps on the teenager's shoulder. "It's good to see you."

Then, though, an uncomfortable lingering of the man's opaque stare -- Gendo gazes at the '00X' on Leo's chest as if it were changing shape. He quietly clears his throat, and then, hand still on Leo, turns to guide him toward the door. "Come along. We've got much work to do. Has Doctor Akagi briefed you on what the experience may be like?"

Leo sheds his uniform in what seems like it must be record time (but is, in fact, short of his record by almost a full second), shedding even his underwear without an iota of hesitation. Rather than just toss his clothes into a pile, he neatly folds each article. Maybe it's his military mindset shining through...

... but judging how he only starts folding after he's naked, and how his actual room is a mess, and how he keeps stealing glances back at Ritsuko as he folds, he's probably just trying to bait her into checking him out. He is, inevitably, disappointed.

She must like girls or something, Leo grouses silently to himself as he begins working his way into the plugsuit.

Somewhere, Maya Ibuki lets out a single, sudden sob, and does not know why.

Gendo enters before Leo can actually quite get decent, and contrary to his behavior with Ritsuko - where he might as well have done a handstand in front of her and shouted 'HEY LOOK' - he suddenly yelps and rushes to cover himself, turning away from the Commander. He mutters something under his breath about knocking as he finishes dressing, and only then turns back to face Gendo.

He doesn't bother responding to the greeting with anything but a simple nod... and, indeed, remains silent up until Gendo start leading him away and asks if he's been briefed. "Not... exactly, sir," he confesses. "Maybe you should give me the short version."

Gendo leads, with Leo at his side; Ritsuko follows, and doesn't seem especially happy about it. "The Evangelion operates through direct interaction with your nervous system. I'm sure Doctor Akagi would be happy to explain as much of how that works as you're cleared to know, later, if you like."

"I'd be delighted," Ritsuko says in such a chilly tone that Leo's ass may get frostbite.

"You'll see and feel strange things, probably unlike any other mobile suit experience you've had... but then, Evangelions are unlike any other mobile suit in existence." Is Gendo dropping a hint? Is he smugly waving the secret of these things right there in Leo's face, assuming the teenager has no clue what he's talking about? Or is he just a proud parent, so to speak, talking up his life's work? "It's important that you keep in mind that what you experience will feel very real to you."

Gendo doesn't follow that up by saying that it /isn't/, but.

SOME TIME AGO

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.

NOW

The trio cross catwalks and move through corridors until finally, after a short trek, they find themselves on a bridge between two platforms, suspended high inside a gigantic white-walled. Fixed inside its restraints, GN Evangelion Unit-00X stands at attention like a disused marionette, its joints locked in such rigidity that it stands more or less erect. The pathway leads to the control room set into the wall; Gendo releases Leo.

"Doctor Akagi and I will be monitoring your progress from there." Gendo gestures at some incoming techs, giving them a nod. "These men will help you into your plug." And then, without any words of reassurance or even closure, Gendo walks off, toward the control room. Ritsuko spends a second glaring, then follows.

Directly with his nervous system, huh...? Leo frowns thoughtfully as he's led through the Geofront. He knew there was /some/ kind of physical feedback, but he wasn't sure how it got there, exactly... it makes sense, though. He briefly considers chiming in that he has some experience in mental control systems, but...

Well, she - the third Rei, Leo corrects, his grimace deepening sa he calls her by name, even if only in his thoughts - seemed awfully convinced that they were going to give him the Evangelion. He doesn't think he'll have to pad his resume too much.

The sight of the Evangelion is an unsettling one, to say the least. Seeing the Evangelions in their hangars has always been unsettling for him, and this is the closest he's ever come to one. It's somehow eerier to see them standing still than to see them moving like they do.

Especially, he reminds himself, because there's a person in there. A soul.

Leo grunts an affirmative to Gendo and Dr. Akagi as they depart, and sort of switches onto autopilot as he's led towards the plug entry. There's a soul in Unit-00X. Rei's soul. But not his Rei, or... the third. A first Rei.

How did it get there? Did they kill her to make it? Was it ever really 'Rei's soul', or is it just another part of the Second Angel, of 'Adam?' Leo grinds his teeth together. He wishes he knew more. He doubts it'd change his plans... he just wants to know. Ignorance has never bugged him like this before. He wishes--

-- and then the plug door shuts behind him, jolting the young man out of his own head and off of autopilot. He glances around the plug for a moment to familiarize himself with it, and then carefully takes a seat and rests his hands on the controls.

Well. This isn't /that/ different, he thinks.

At least until the plug starts to fill with LCL, at which point - despite knowing from first-hand experience that the plug's filled with /something/ when it's operating - he has a miniature panic attack, and ends up taking a deep gulp of breath just before the liquid rises over his mouth and nose and holding it.

It's dark in there, but as the viscous amber liquid rises, controls come to light -- one in particular a luminescent black, red script in the middle of the field reading 'VOICE ONLY.' "Relax," Ritsuko chides, as if Leo were stupid to try and keep from drowning. "Let that breath go before you break a blood vessel. Breathe the LCL in. It'll allow us to directly oxygenate your body and maintain your vital signals."

Every time Rei Ayanami piloted this thing, her mental condition degraded that much further, from stuttering fractured thought loops to screaming hallucinations to muttered brain-dead chanting to complete collapse.

But it's funny, because it doesn't /feel/ like Leo Stenbuck's brain is dying.

"Just relax," Ritsuko says again. "We're going to get the baseline readings and then we're going to initiate preliminary synchronization. I'm going to walk you through how to control the suit while this happens." Ritsuko sounds like this is the most boring thing she could imagine doing, ever.

What she doesn't realize is that she's talking to the kid who got Jehuty up and running in seconds flat.

It takes Leo, stubborn as he is, several seconds to let out his breath, and he makes the mistake of trying to immediately and hurriedly take another one, as if there is somehow a period in between 'breathing LCL' and 'breathing air' where he is breathing /nothing/ and could die forever. He ends up swallowing a little bit of it, and spends the next several seconds coughing violently as Unit-00X finishes booting up.

As the coughing dies down, though, and Ritsuko explains to him that she's going to walk him through how to make robot go, Leo brushes her off with a nonattentive, "Yeah, okay." In truth, he didn't even process what she was saying, because even though this is a horrible alien monstrosity powered by the soul of a dead girl...

... well, it's still a shiny new toy.

Leo, forcing himself to take slow, even breaths, sets his hands on the Evangelion's controls and - still only technically listening to Ritsuko - decides he's going to see how this baby works by lifting the Evangelion's right arm.

And then he does.

In the control room, Gendo Ikari grunts. He and Leo have very similar grunts; but then, they also share the impulse to keep their feelings hidden away in the company of people they're not having sex with or trying to have sex with. Granted, Gendo also does this to people he has sex with -- that's why he's the one in charge and Leo's the one being stuck inside a corpse's throat.

"Wh-- how is he doing that?!" Ritsuko seethes, as if Leo lifting Unit-00X's arm is an affront to God and nature as well as a personal slap to her face. "His synch level is barely in the double digits -- he shouldn't even be able to turn that thing's head!"

Ritsuko does not bother to turn /off/ the intercom when she says these things.

Still, Unit-00X has its own distractions. As soon as Leo makes it move, the corners of his vision get a bit fuzzy. That could be a side effect of seeing the world through amber LCL hues, but it probably isn't. It's like a light-headedness that only arrives in his skull after traveling up the base of his spine.

There's a sound to it, too. It's a tiny noise, undulating, washing back and forth like an ocean-sounds record designed to help people sleep. It's only as vision continues to become more obscure that the sound becomes clearer, louder -- it's a voice. A human voice.

/Her/ voice.

"Leo."

Rei Ayanami, the ghost in the machine.

"Leo."

Ritsuko's seething goes unheeded; if Leo even heard it, there's no indication. He's way too busy with his new toy.

At least until he hears someone - someone very familiar, someone who is definitely /not/ on the other side of the intercom - say his voice.

Leo suddenly rocks backwards in his seat, reaching up to clutch at his head. The movement makes the long ends of his headband, floating languidly in the LCL, drift forwards past his head like linen horns. At least, however, he doesn't accidentally direct Unit-00X to do the same motion, and his sync ratio is surely too low for it to happen on accident.

At least for now.

Leo's first thought is, of course, that he merely hallucinated the voice. But... he thought that about number three, too, and that turned out to be a months-long mistake. She said he'd need to know what was real, didn't she? Well... hell, he's come this far already. What's the point in assuming?

Leo squeezes his eyes shut, and begins, voice barely a whisper, "Re-" He cuts himself off; they're not supposed to know he knows, and even if he's slowly coming to be okay with calling the third Rei by name, the thought of calling an Evangelion it still crosses his limit of weirdness.

So he stops, waits a beat, and then corrects, "Zerogouki?"

And then he opens his eyes.

This has two effects. One is that his sync ratio skyrockets as the tender ministrations of Ribbons Almark crank up the available bandwidth into and out of his brain.

The other is that shit starts to get a little weird, which is bound to happen when you're brain humping with an alien monster.

To say shit gets weird is a bit of an understatement; shit gets /very/ weird. It's a bit like going to sleep. The outside world -- the walls of the plug -- deform and blur and go dim and then dark. Leo Stenbuck is left alone in the darkness, somewhere between consciousness and whatever lies beyond, and around him there's this voice broadcasting out from nowhere -- nowhere, everywhere, here (wherever here is) it seems to be the same difference -- and it's Rei's voice, and she sounds so small, so small and so alone, and in anyone else that'd be a /bad/ thing but these things just make her sound like /Rei/.

"Leo."

When the light begins to come again, it's like an oncoming vehicle, like a bullet train rushing out of a tunnel, right for Leo, but in the last possible instant the light is /red/--

And then Leo's awake and aware again. But his body isn't his body. It's familiar, but reduced -- it's his body, but it's not. The scenery is familiar enough, though. The noise, certainly. He's home. Back home on Jupiter. At the dinner table. His parents are fighting again.

It's that one -- the One. The fight about who gets to keep him. The fight where neither /wants/ to keep him.

Dinner is cold.

Across the table, nothing has been laid out for the fourth participant. The one who shouldn't be here; the one who exists in a cruel deformation of Leo's memories. There was no fourth seat at the table. And there certainly wasn't Rei Ayanami sitting in it. It's unmistakable that this girl is her -- who else would have that blue hair, those red eyes, that vacant stare?

Except she looks like she's maybe ten years old, dressed for a day at school. She stares across the table at Leo, saying nothing.

Well, that just doesn't seem fair.

Leo's heart skips about eight beats as he gapes at the girl who is so obviously Rei. His first thought is, of course, that the events of the past six years have all been some sort of daydream, that he'd simply turned to imagining something else while his parents fought and it had - somehow - gotten away from him on an epic scale.

He dismisses the idea as soon as he can manage it. For one, he can't imagine that he'd somehow un-remember Rei in the process of fantasizing... and for two, he's pretty sure he's not clever enough to come up with all of the things that have happened to him.

So this really /is/ a hallucination, he decides... but that doesn't make it any less awful, once it really clicks what's going on. Slowly, he turns his gaze away from Rei to look first at his mother, who he hasn't seen in over five years - and indeed does not even know the fate of - and then at his father, who died during the Antilia Raid.

He stares at each for several seconds before he turns his eyes back onto Rei. He stares at her again, for several more seconds, his shoulders and voice trembling, before he demands, without bothering to lower his voice to avoid interrupting his parents, "Why?"

Leo's parents continue as if Leo didn't say anything -- or indeed as if the mysterious other child wasn't sitting at their table. They're following a script laid out in Leo's memories -- a one-act Pinter play of domestic cruelty imbued with the sense of authenticity and of overblown grandeur that can only come from childhood trauma.

Rei doesn't respond, at first. It's as if Leo hadn't spoken. But then, if anyone's wise to this sort of pattern by now, it's Leo. Rei-2 did this until he cracked the code; when Rei-3 did it, it was old hat. But this is the first one, and maybe where it came from, because it's the exact same as the other two -- the same subtle lift of her chin, the same microscopic shift in her gaze, the same way she silently draws a breath in when she's about to speak, as if trying to prepare to go underwater without alerting anyone to the fact. All rendered in the face of a girl who can't be older than ten.

"Why did you hurt us so much?"

The question is as flat and blunt as any other that's ever been asked by any other Rei. The little girl gets up from her seat and walks around the table -- true to memory, Leo's parents don't even miss a beat when some little blue-haired moppet is wandering around their home.

"You made everything confusing."

The question quite obviously takes Leo aback; his face contorts in confusion, and he shifts his weight backwards in his seat, too gently to really be a recoil but with enough force to, at least, be noticable.

His head swivels to follow the Littlest Rei as she dismounts the chair and walks around to stand next to him; occasionally, his gaze flits away to glance at one of his parents. He can't help himself, on that regard.

But the question - odd as it is - definitely grabs most of his attention. He focuses on it, tries to block out the sounds and memories of his parents. It is only marginally successful.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he insists, turning to face the blue-haired girl. It's... disconcerting, being this small again. Small and weak. It makes him feel helpless again. "I didn't hurt you. At least... I mean, I didn't... I wasn't /trying/ to hurt you..."

Rei looks so different and yet -- the same, really. Just... shrunken. Just about every aspect of Leo's Rei is there, minus the puberty. The sloppy pageboy haircut, like she can't be bothered to use a comb. The school uniform -- by her own admission, Rei didn't /own/ anything else when she met Leo. The stare that seems to go right /through/ Leo, or, rather, through one side of him and directly into his center, not emerging.

"If I'd never met you, I'd never have fallen in love with you. If I'd never fallen in love with you, I'd never have fought Yazan Gable to protect you. If I'd never fought Yazan Gable to protect you... I would have only had to die once."

Every word is delivered with the precision of a laser. There's an icy sharpness to her tone, one of those hidden patterns that it takes patience and experience to pick up on. It's an accusation. It's Rei blaming Leo.

The little girl turns away from him and starts to walk away, toward the front door of Leo's old place, reaching up and opening it. She looks over her shoulder at Leo for a moment. Her gaze is...

Rei always had that quality of seeming to be so much older than she actually was. That, at least, is not something that only came into being when she was able to make it to fourteen.

Then the door shuts after Rei when she departs, leaving Leo with the obvious choice.

This time, the rocking /is/ strong enough to rightfully be called a recoil. She's... angry at him? She's /angry/ at him because she fell in love with him? Because he- because-

The blame thrown at him by this tiny Rei stirs up a great many emotions in him, and it as much a surprise to Leo himself as it may be to others that one of the foremost among them is anger.

Leo can only gape, trying to sort through the rush of emotion, until Rei looks back at him from the doorway; that look, The Look, yanks him out of his daze, and he suddenly yelps, "Rei, wait!"

He's on his feet as the door closes, and he rushes to it, his parents forgotten, and throws it open about two seconds after Rei closes it, charging through the doorway posthaste.

Charging through the door may be a bit of a mistake in that it's a thoroughly jarring experience. That sense of disembodiedness returns for just long enough to acknowledge its existence, like a blink that goes on a half-second too long. Then, eyes open, and the world is different again. Leo is different again -- a little older, a little less helpless.

Or, he would be, if this weren't the Antilia Raid happening all around him.

Buildings crumble and burn and the streets' arteries clog with corpses. It's the worst possible place anyone could be, but it's only as painful to exist in as a dream -- that is, it's both much safer than the real thing, and so much more horrific.

Rei-1 stands in the midst of chaos and flame. She looks across the distance at Leo, like a siren toward some distant ship. She seems unaffected by being in the midst of Hell. Then again, if anyone would be...

"You made me care about things I shouldn't have."

SOME TIME AGO

Aboard the Giga Float, Leo Stenbuck is talking to Brough Grabbs, who has yet to learn how to put up with certain aspects of Leo's bullshit. They have acquired some apples.

"Do me a favor, Brough? Peel this apple for me, please?"

Brough Grabbs looks at Leo askance. "No. No, I'm not gonna peel an apple for you."

Leo makes an annoyed face. "But Rei always does it for me."

"Why does your girlfriend peel apples for you?" comes the incredulous response.

Leo sighs, as if this should be common knowledge. "She doesn't like for me to eat the apple with the skin on it. She said the skin is /loaded/ with... toxins."

Brough takes a second to think on this: "Okay, well, good news. Rei's not here."

Leo starts getting agitated: "I know she's not here, and that's why I need /you/ to do it for me!"

"Jesus, just eat it with the skin on!"

Leo is getting angry, now, waving the apple around: "I do not /like/ it with the skin on, Brough! I'm not /allowed/!"

NOW

A building collapses behind Rei, lurching and breaking. It comes perilously, dizzyingly close to claiming her as collateral damage. Her dress is ruffled by the sharp wind of the crashing debris. She doesn't even blink; but then, she never does.

"You couldn't even make up your mind," Rei continues, not being explicit as to what she's talking about, but probably being clear enough, considering. "You don't even know what you want."

The little girl that was once Rei and that is now an Evangelion is angry without sounding angry; hurt without sounding hurt; violently emotional without appearing to be anything remotely resembling such. The law of inverses dictates a Rei Tantrum: the more angry she is, the more withdrawn she gets. Right now she is somewhere on Jupiter, relative to Tokyo-03.

"All I thought about was you."

Leo's first hint at what's going on comes when he trips over a corpse, collapsing heavily onto one knee and skinning it even through his jeans. He skins his palm, too, when he throws out his hand to catch himself... and, at that point, notices the sleeve of his jacket. He was wearing that jacket when...

Leo lifts his eyes just in time to see a trio of Phantomas rocket by overhead, chased by a pink Orbital Frame; Neith. Leo's stomach rolls, and he lurches unsteadily to his feet and drops his gaze back to Rei.

Everything has changed... but she hasn't. She's still a little girl. What does that mean? Is she... is that what she looked like before she...

Did NERV kill a little girl to make a super robot?

Leo staggers across the corpse-laden street towards Rei, shielding his face against the heat radiating off of nearby burning buildings. "I know what I want," he insists, raising his voice more out of habit than out of necessity; the ongoing Raid is audible, but not /that/ loud... most of the time.

"I want you- I mean, her," he corrects, because whoa there, champ. "I want to be with, with her!"

Leo corrects himself and Rei corrects him right back. "She is me," the little girl surrounded by horror proclaims as neutrally as if she were reading off charges to open court. "We're all me. But I went away because of you."

Rei acts like nothing around her is happening. Flame brushes against her body, but it doesn't affecther in the slightest. She doesn't blanch from the heat -- nor does she burn, even though she probably should. Leo's dreams hold significant power over him; less so for the one who's not dreaming them.

"You just don't want to be alone." It's the conversational equivalent of taking out a .45 hand cannon, pressing it to the space between someone's nose and upper lip, and then firing about a thousand times, forever. That it comes from a preteen avatar of one's dead girlfriend certainly can't help.

"And now I'm alone in here."

Explosions detonating around the two prevent Rei from continuing her train of thought. She silences herself rather than try to speak over the sound of Jupiter being razed.

Blaow.

"That's not true," Leo cries, now truly shouting to be heard over the battle as it sweeps over them again. He finally reaches the little girl so cruelly disassembling him, and staggers onto one knee in front of her, still holding his arm up to fend off the light and heat. He stares at the girl for a moment, licks his lips anxiously, and repeats, more uncertainly, "T-that's not true!"

Obviously it isn't. ... right?

Leo takes a wheezing, uncertain breath - already, the smoke is getting to him - and continues, "And, and even if it was, so what?! No one wants to be alone! But I want- I want to, to not be alone with you! -- I mean, I want to-- aagh!"

Before he can work out what exactly he's trying to say, there's another shockwave of dust and heat as a Phantoma lands on a nearby burning bulding, crushing what remains of it to dust, and opens fire at something. "Rei, please!!" Leo screams, having gone far past simple shouting at this point. "You don't want to be alone either, right?!"

Rei reaches out and touches Leo's shoulder. Suddenly, everything goes dark again, and he's not alone. The grip on him tightens. Widens. Grows stronger and broader and rougher.

And when Leo's eyes are open, he's being manhandled by Yazan Gable in the Titans locker room.

The dream plays out like it did when it happened for real -- an unceremonious beatdown, and just like that, a stab wound right to the thigh, as sudden and as violent and as painful as it was when it happened the first time. It's only after Gable leaves that Leo regains control of himself, that the dream stops following the rigid script of memory.

And it's about then that it becomes obvious that ten-year-old Rei Ayanami is watching from the sidelines, as out of place in this locker room as she is in any other memory of Leo's. Rei walks forward to stand next to Leo while he bleeds.

"You couldn't even protect yourself from him," Rei notes quietly, more calmly than before -- more 'calmly' in that her calmness does not carry as strong or as dark an undercurrent. Now, she's simply making an observation.

"Being with me is being inside my coffin." Blood pools around Rei's shoes as it leaks from Leo's body. She doesn't care. "I could shut you out of it. You could go away. I told myself about the other girls. You could go away to them."

Oh, good, /this/ one.

For being a dream, Leo thinks dimly as Yazan smashes his nose against a locker, this feels awfully real. He squeals when Yazan stabs him, despite his best attempt to hold it in, and slinks down onto the floor until the man is gone and, suddenly, he's no longer an unwilling participant in a show.

When Rei steps up next to him, he weakly shifts to look up at her; it hurts too much to try to even sit up, so he doesn't even make the attempt. "I'm trying to- help you," he croaks. "I want to- to protect you. What these people did-" Leo's voice falters as he hisses in pain, and he takes a deep breath and shifts his weight more onto the elbow propping him up.

"What they did to you is- is wrong," Leo declares, grimacing as much in anger as in pain. "The... 'other girls'... s-she means more to me than- than them. You do, I mean. Ugh- I don't know," he groans suddenly, sliding off of his elbow and collapsing back to the ground.

It gets better.

Well, no, not really. Of course it doesn't.

Rei stands there over Leo, staring down at him like he was a science fair experiment, with that sense of uncanny detachment that she specializes in. If Lilith is the Ur-Rei, then this is something close, a first-generation bootleg unfettered by things like complicated human hormonal development. The world is a broader, more black-and-white place to children who have yet to come to understand adult life.

And all this child staring at Leo knows is what her younger sisters have told her.

"You're confusing," Rei re-affirms. "I don't understand you."

After that, it's one blink away from the worst of it. Opening one's eyes to find oneself in the deepest, darkest, most brutal memory one can find.

Leo's in his cockpit, now. The emergency lighting casts a disgusting pallor over the room. Rei-1 is next to him, her tiny body -- she was so frail and little, even at that age -- squeezed into available space. Across from her, a tiny video panel shows Rei Ayanami, an older Rei, /his/ Rei, caught up in battle with Yazan Gable.

"It's his fault, too," Rei-1 affirms quietly.

Oh, no.

No, no, no, no, no no no no nonononononono

Leo shrinks away from the video on the screen like it was Kaworu Nagisa in the shower, flattening himself against the rear of the cockpit seat. The inside of the Gabthley's escape capsule is cramped, but Leo's squeezing does a surprising amount to mitigate that.

"Not this one," Leo begs; Rei has to be controlling this, he assumes, she has to be the director of this little Leo Stenbuck's Greatest Hits montage. "Please, not this one. I don't- I can't- I can't watch it again."

"Please, please, turn it off," he pleads, but even as he does, even though he knows what's coming, he can't tear his eyes away from the tiny video window. "I know I failed, I know it's my fault, please, please just turn it /off/-"

Rei doesn't respond to Leo's pleading. If she does have control of this little show, then his begging does nothing to change the program. For once, though, Rei isn't staring at Leo, hovering over him like the Ghost of Girlfriends Past.

Rei's looking at the same spot Leo is. The spot where:

"I... Leo. I love you, Leo. I meant it when I said it. And I still do. Leo. Promise me, no matter what happens. Don't let me forget what I said. Don't let me forget what I /feel/. Promise me, promise me, Don't let me forget."

And then Rei Ayanami pops.

The younger / older Rei reaches out and touches Leo again, but this time, it's not the prelude to another aggressive change of scenery. It's a soft, polite gesture, her palm never quite comfortably resting. Her fingers stay tense. Rei's voice once again speaks in hidden codes, waveforms under the icy surface, sonic spectrograms.

"I failed. It's my fault, too."

Leo watches in horrified, wide-eyed silence as Rei repeats her last words and then pops like a gore-filled water balloo. Only when she has died - again - does he slump down in his seat as if suddenly exhausted, his head lolling forward, his eyes squeezing shut. He doesn't react, at least not physically, when Little Rei touches him.

"No," he whispers hoarsely. "I should have been able to protect you, and I couldn't. There's no... no excuse for that. I'm... I'm sorry." He pauses for several beats, and then continues, voice still weak, "I don't know what else I can say."

And after that, no one says much of anything. Certainly not Rei, whose hand stays in that awkward position as she maintains a stoic, thoughtful silence. This extended meditative pause is broken only when the first one to bear the name Rei Ayanami says:

"You still confuse me. But you meant everything to me. I told myself after to welcome you. That you would be kind to me."

Rei's hand lifts from Leo's shoulder. The miniature world of the Gabthley's cockpit is suddenly that much darker, a humid, wet sensation filling the air, sticking to the skin.

"I will do as you wish."

There's a sound like a rush of air and a feeling like a anchor digging into Leo's ribcage and pulling him out of himself skeleton-first. Only when his body no longer feels like it's moving at a billion feet per second does it become obvious that he's back in the cockpit of Unit-00X, control panels all around him, readouts surprisingly healthy.

Synchronization has completed as much as it's ever going to. The Evangelion isn't a mobile suit like Leo's other ones -- he's not manipulating controls to make mechanical parts move. He can feel the outside world in his own body -- the ground under the Eva's feet, the unnatural length and strength of its arms, the speed and power and grace and inhumanity.

And in the booth, Ritsuko Akagi seems absolutely disconsolate when she notes: "Within acceptable parameters, Commander Ikari... he can pilot it."

Gendo Ikari doesn't respond other than to stroke his beard and then exit the room without a word.

When he's back in Unit-00X's cockpit, Leo can do little but sit there, trembling slightly. That was... an ordeal, to say the least. Leo takes a few deep shuddering breaths as he forces himself to calm down, and it's almost a full minute until he places a shaking hand on the side of the plug and murmurs, quietly, "Thank you, Rei."

Leo squeezes his eyes shut again, and when he opens them a few moments later, they're no longer glowing. His sync ratio plummets accordingly.. but, for now, that's definitely for the best.

Only a few seconds after that, when he's taken a few more deep breaths, does he key his communications and ask, as casually as he can manage, "You guys are awfully quiet up there. Everything okay?"

It's important to play it cool.

There are things Ritsuko Akagi does not care for -- one of them, and probably foremost among them at this exact point in time, is 'sixteen-year-olds who your boss-slash-lover has a mysterious fixation on and who seem to violate everything you know about Evangelions, which you know everything about, with a synch test that causes them to go from "incompetent" to "frighteningly competent" to "incompetent" again.'

There are so many questions going through Ritsuko's head right now, but they're drowned out in a wave of spite toward Leo, as if he was personally making it his business to dick around with her. "Everything's fine," she replies coolly.

"Your readings are dwindling again," Ritsuko notes. "Your vitals are all over the place. We should probably hold off on combat training for now. I'm going to walk you through the ejection process. First..."

And elsewhere, Gendo Ikari broods.

And inside Unit-00X, all around Leo, Rei Ayanami accepts her commands without question, as she always did, back in the good old days.