Disclaimer and stuff: I do not own Neon Genesis Evangelion. Eva belongs to Gainax, ADV, and possibly a couple of other companies. Should they ask me, I will remove all trace of this story from existence.

This story takes place as an insight into a scene from the Evangelion manga, volume 8, when Shinji and Rei are down by the pool in the courtyard. It refers to several scenes that had happened previously, and the fic looks at each one from Shinji's POV. Hopefully I won't botch this too badly.

"Storm of Flower Petals"

or "Hanabira no Arashi"

The courtyard was a marvel, an enclosed palace of sorts. A reflecting pool that had paths on either side, a gazebo at the end that was surrounded by a smaller pool, and a collection of palm trees created an oasis in NERV's backyard. A place of rest, of relaxation, freedom from the stresses of life in such a perilous time and city, created for the people of NERV to come and let their troubles be forgotten for at least the briefest of moments.

I had been here before, but I had been alone then. This time, I found myself in the company of Rei Ayanami, the enigmatic First Child, pilot of Evangelion Unit 00. Some would call Ayanami an enigma, a mystery, a girl of no emotion. But I knew better, for I had seen her smile before, though only once. It had been a while ago, just after the attack of the Fifth Angel, Ramiel. After Unit 00 had almost been destroyed, I had opened the entry plug of the giant mecha and gotten her out. She had smiled then. But I had not seen her show that kind of emotion any other time.

Now, this enigmatic girl stood before me, in the beautiful courtyard, the fountains splashing softly, a few birds singing, and the sound of the palm leaves rustling gently in the slight breeze that had picked up. Rei, surprisingly, was the first to speak.

"This place is so pretty. I didn't know that this place was on the grounds."

This comment surprised me slightly. Rei had worked here far longer than I had, how could she not know that this place was here? "You've worked here so long and you didn't know?"

She stooped down and dipped her hand into one of the pools and splashed slightly. "I was… never told to come here."

An awkward silence descended upon us for a few moments. I didn't really know what I was supposed to say, so I merely watched Rei for a moment. She continued to sit by the pool, before turning to me once more.

"The first time we touched, I didn't feel anything."

This comment confused me even more than the first thing she had said. Rei was not one to be random, or say things without a good reason. "Wh…what?" I asked, stumbling over my words slightly in lieu of her seemingly out of place comment.

She replied simply, "Your hand."

I pulled my thoughts together for a moment. "The first time… that time?" I wondered out loud, and remembered back to when I first arrived here…

"If you're going to do it, do it now! If not, then LEAVE!" my father, Gendo's voice rang out from his spot on the bridge over looking the Eva cages. I stood there, completely numb from what I had just been told. He turned and said something into a monitor. Ritsuko cried out "Reconfigure Unit 01's system for Rei, then activate!"

After a few moments, a girl was wheeled in on a gurney. She was wearing a skintight outfit that looked rather like a swimsuit. Her right arm was in a bulky looking cast, and her right eye was covered with an eye patch. She looked like she was having trouble breathing. My father spoke once more. "Rei, our spare is unusable. You must pilot the Eva again."

The girl mustered up her strength. "Yes sir," she replied, and began to bring herself up. She winced in pain and began breathing laboriously. Before she could stand get off the stretcher, however, another energy blast from the Angel overhead hit the building we were in and shook the whole room, knocking the girl from her stretcher and knocking everyone to the floor. I ran to her as fast as I could and tried to help her up. She winced and moaned in pain. I felt something warm against my hand. Looking at my hand, I noticed it was covered in blood. HER blood. That was the final straw for me. Misato said something in the background, but I couldn't hear it over the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears. I looked up to where my father was.

"I'll do it. I'll pilot it."

That was the day I became an Eva pilot.

"I remember that day," I told her. "The day I came here. When you were hurt, and I caught you when the Angel attacked the Geofront."

Rei nodded in acknowledgement. She moved on. "The second time…" She paused here, as if straining to think of the right words. "… It felt a little queasy, I think."

At those words, I instantly remembered what she was talking about. I ran my hand over the back of my neck nervously. "Uh… yeah, about that. I'm sorry." I thought back to that day, just before the Fifth Angel attack…

I knew that I shouldn't have gone inside, but I did anyway. The door was unlocked, I was sent here with something to do, and I hadn't gotten an answer when I knocked. I opened the door and walked inside, slipping my shoes off outside the door before I came in.

Rei's apartment was absolutely filthy. I hated to make that kind of a statement about a home whose occupant I hardly knew, but the layers of dirt on the floor and the bloodstained bandages that littered the bed did not exactly pull me in the direction of a positive assessment. I looked around the apartment, not seeing anything that could be called decorum. But I did notice two things on Rei's nightstand. One was a beaker of water. The other was an old pair of thick-rimmed glasses, cracked and slightly warped looking. I walked to the nightstand and picked them up, examining them. They didn't look like a girl's glasses at all. "Are these Rei's?" I wondered out loud. It was about that time that I heard footsteps from behind me. I turned around, the glasses in my hand, to find Rei behind me. She had a towel thrown over her shoulders, but that was it. All I could do was stammer, I couldn't seem to form a sentence. Then she started walking towards me. She reached out and took the glasses from me. Then the unthinkable happened.

If it hadn't been for my right foot, none of the resulting fiasco would have happened. But being cornered, and in sock feet, I slipped, stumbling forward and having to catch Rei for support. Noticing that this was not quite the best thing to balance myself with, I reeled backwards, running into the nightstand and jarring myself forward again. This time it was enough so that I sent the two of us toppling to the floor, falling on top of Rei in the process.

For what seemed like an eternity, I couldn't move. Hell, I'm not even sure I breathed. I merely stared at Rei's eyes, just inches away from mine. There was nothing in those eyes, not even anger at what had just happened. That was what frightened me the most, was the evident lack of emotion.

She stared at me placidly. "Will you get off?" she asked in a perfectly level tone.

I flinched, looking to my left hand. It was only now that I noticed it had landed on Rei's right breast. I literally threw myself backwards, stumbling over the nightstand again. She stood and walked to the other side of the room. "Why are you here?" she asked in that same eerily calm voice.

I stammered a response as fast as I could, interrupted by my frequent stumbling over my words. "I… Ritsuko sent me… to deliver your…" I blanked. For a moment I couldn't remember what I had been sent here for. Then it hit me. "Your ID card! It's… it's been renewed… and they sent me to…" A door slamming interrupted my last statement. Rei had left. I sighed, and followed her out the door.

"I'm really sorry," I said after my reminiscing was over. "I shouldn't have come in without knocking, but the door was open and I just…"

Rei cut me off before I could go any farther. "It is in the past now, Ikari-kun. There is no sense worrying about it now." She let out a bit of a sigh, something I had never heard her do before, and it made me wonder why she did it. Before I could start trying to figure it out, she moved on. Apparently this stroll down memory lane had some kind of purpose, if Rei was going to talk to me this much. "The third time, I felt warm inside. I think it was the heat from your hand, through the plug suit."

I thought back once again. I shuddered to think how close the two of us, especially her, had come to dying that day…

The entry plug hatch hissed open, and before I could even think about what I was doing I found myself leaping to the ground and running to the smoldering remnants of Evangelion Unit 00. I found the manual eject on the side of the Eva, pushed it, and the entry plug hatch popped open and the massive white cylinder slid from its resting place inside the mecha's spine. I ran to the hatch, not even thinking about how hot the plug was until I touched it. I recoiled from the heat at first. Then I thought of Rei, and what might have happened to her. I held my breath and grabbed onto the handle, then began to force it open, letting a groan of exasperation escape my lips. Finally the door swung open and a burst of hot air escaped the inside of the entry plug. I leaned in the door and looked in the pilot's seat. Ayanami was inside, her head down. I couldn't tell if she was breathing. "Ayanami! Ayanami!" I screamed. She inhaled, and brought her head up to face me.

When her eyes opened, I couldn't help myself. I felt the tears flow from my eyes. "Thank God… you're alive…" Sobs wracked my body and I was unable to speak for a moment. Finally I managed to get out "Don't say 'goodbye' when you leave on a mission. It's too sad."

She leaned out of the seat and looked at me awkwardly. "Why are you crying? Are you sad?"

"No," I told her, speaking through blurred eyes and a choked up voice. "I'm just happy that you're alright."

She did not speak for a few moments. "I'm sorry, I just do not know what to do in situations like this."

I looked at her. "Why don't you try smiling?"

And she did. She smiled. The first time she had ever smiled, I found out later.

It was quite possibly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

"For some reason," Rei said, "I felt… warm when you smiled at me that time. I do not know why." She looked back down to the pool, seemingly in thought about what she was going to say next. "All those times, I felt something physical. But the fourth time, I was just happy. Happy that you were concerned for me. No one has ever been concerned for me before."

It took me a while, but I finally remembered the fourth time. It had been a while ago, right before the anniversary of Mom's death.

It still baffled me that Rei could live in such a dismal place. The apartment was unclean, the heating didn't seem to work (judging by the fact that it felt like a meat locker in there) and the sounds of construction could be heard from the single window of the dreary little room. What they were building, I wasn't sure. But that noise had been there last time, and it was there this time as well.

I looked into the kitchen, where Rei was looking around in the cabinets for tea, boiling a kettle of water on the small stove. She had invited me in after I had come to drop off her printouts from school. The activation test of Unit 00 had required her to miss school, and I was dropping off her assignments. So here I found myself, in Rei's apartment once again, though thankfully the situation was considerably more comfortable than last time. Probably the most surreal part of the whole situation was seeing Rei standing in a kitchen. That was enough to make my skin crawl slightly.

Finally, she retrieved a box of Earl Grey tea from one of the top shelves. She turned the box around and began reading the instructions on the back. "How many leaves do you use to make tea?" she asked. "I have tea here, but I have never made it before."

"It's okay, you don't have to…" I began. She turned around to me, a spoon in her hand, full of tealeaves.

"Is this too much?" she inquired casually. Once again, something creepy enough to make my skin crawl. And considering that the stack of leaves was about two inches tall, I was guessing that was too much. "Yeah, I think so."

She reached for the kettle on the stove, but the back of her hand brushed against the hot metal and she burned herself. "Oh!" she exclaimed.

I turned to look at her frantically. "What? What happened?"

"I just burnt myself a little."

I looked at her hand. The skin was red and rather inflamed, from the look of it. This might have been due to the fact that Rei had such pale skin, but I was too concerned to care at that point. "Just a little! Here, put some cold water on it!" I grabbed her wrist and held her hand under the faucet, letting the cold water run over it, soothing the burn.

I don't think that it sunk in for a while exactly how long I held her hand. When I finally noticed, I backed away slightly. "You just stay put," I told her gently. "I'll make the tea."

She looks at me with that rather confused look she had sometimes, like she didn't know how to react. "Thank you," she said.

That was, I believe, the first time she had ever used those words.

Rei turned from the pool of water to look at me. The look on her face told me that she had something she wanted to say, but she didn't quite know how to say it. She sighed again, this time sounding a little nervous. Which made me wonder, why could she possibly be nervous? I couldn't think of a reason. After a few moments of awkward silence, Rei spoke.

"Could I… hold your hand again?"

That statement caught me off guard, a lot. It went against ever notion I had ever conceived of Rei. It just didn't seem like her at all. But when I saw her face, I could tell that she was looking for something. I don't know what she was looking for; perhaps an indication that I had been lying, perhaps a sign of an emotion that I felt.

I nodded. "Alright."

She looked at me and smiled again. That same angelic smile from the aftermath of the battle against the Fifth. I reached out and took her hand. Her skin was soft, slightly cool. She stood next to me, and we held hands for a while. I glanced at her a few times, and noticed her smiling, her eyes closed, looking perfectly content. It made me smile, knowing that I had made her happy. I felt a breeze pick up, and the rose bushes in the corner of the garden rustled. A cloud of leaves blew forth from the bushes, and the petals danced around in the air for a while, before being blown away, dispersing in the wind. The sun was starting to set, casting hues of red and purple across the ground, the light reflecting in the pools in the garden.

I thought back on all that had happened in the past few minutes. All those memories, all those times when I had seen more of Rei Ayanami's heart than anyone else. And it made me wonder, what would tomorrow hold? Another memory, perhaps?

Only time will tell.

Author's Notes: Like I said in the disclaimer, the fic is based on a scene from the Evangelion manga, volume 8. I expanded upon some of the dialogue to make it more interesting. Hopefully I didn't botch any of the scenes too bad.

Thanks go out to my prereader, Scout. Thanks also go out to the newest addition to my prereading squad, That Other Guy. Thanks, dude.

Read and review! Flames will be read and laughed at, but constructive criticism is always welcome. Thanks!