Neon Genesis: Evangelion is not my property. I do not own it. I'm really quite bored of these silly introductions.




Pictures - Derek Zischke


The apartment building always bothered Shinji. It looked like it was deserted, with old newspapers piling up in front of doors, shards of glass littering the walkways from parties carried on into the small hours, random (and not-so-random) lines and curves of spraypaint over the walls. But it never did sound deserted, as there was always some voice yelling to another voice, and the steady drum of heavy machinery making the back-beat to the tune of an endless jackhammer. Odours of engine grease mixed in with a rain-wetted dank; destruction mingling with decay.

It also had always bothered Shinji that this was the residence of a fourteen year old girl.

In his hand he held a folder lined with a decent collection of homework papers, intended for said fourteen year old girl. Shinji had no idea why Rei missed the most school out of the three of them (and in fact, had little proof from either Nerv or Rei herself that she was doing something related to the Evas), and often he was called upon to take her work over to her apartment. He had deduced enough to figure that the whole thing was a put-on show, because Rei rarely turned in homework, their teacher rarely bothered to reprimand her, and she rarely showed any interest in her grades, or even the classes themselves. But still, the show must be performed, and here he was, lone actor in an empty (but not silent) theatre.

Mounting the final step of the long climb up several flights of stairs and rounding the corner to the hallway which was home to Rei's door, Shinji felt hesitancy creep up into his throat and sit there to torment him. The other reason why he disliked coming to this particular apartment block, especially while alone, was Rei herself. She had never met him at the door, not even when she was only lying on her bed. He had never embarrassed himself as he had the first time he had entered her apartment, and found Rei just finishing a shower, but he still remained concerned about her state of dress...or undress, as the case may have been.

Forcing hesitancy back down to where it resided when it wasn't making itself known, Shinji doubled up his fist and rapped on the door. It opened slightly, a few of the papers that were wedged in the mailbox dislodging and floating to the walkway in the swinging way the falling paper had. Shinji assumed that Rei wouldn't miss them. He further assumed, since he got no response from inside, that she was
(having another shower)
out. Opening the door the rest of the way, Shinji quickly slipped off his shoes and walked inside.

The interior hadn't changed much. Shinji had little experience in the way of girls his own age (in fact, of girls of any age), until he began sharing an apartment with Asuka, and although he found it impossible to imagine this room decorated with pictures of movie and music stars, he thought it should at least be decorated with something. The walls were too bare, the floor too barren, the whole apartment seeming...what, exactly? Not sterile, and not totally empty, although that was part of it. It was...

'Neglected. This place is neglected,' he said quietly to himself. In a way, it was like a microcosm of the whole apartment block, that had the signs that people lived there, but very rarely the people. It was eerie, when were surrounded by it, and often Shinji wondered how Rei managed to live in a place like this.

And often, he concluded that it was something that wouldn't really affect her.

The bed, unmade as it had been all the other times Shinji had seen it, was different. It was still unmade, but spread out upon it were several pieces of something white. At first they seemed like more discarded strips of bandage, but as he got closer, Shinji could see they were piece of paper. They were all laid out so that no one piece was greatly overlapping the other, which made sense to Shinji when he saw what was on them.

Here was a picture one of the courtyards of the middle school, etched in pencil. Another picture of the sun setting behind two skyscrapers. Another of the cityscape. There was one he could not place for a while, until he recognised from the large triangle shape in the background that it was the lake in the GeoFront. That gave him assurance that Rei had drawn these, and he was about to pick up one of the sketches to look for a mark or insignia of some kind, when he noticed a sketch that was different from the others.

A tree took up the central part of the page, its broad canopy spreading up and over into blankness at the top of the paper. The roots, dark hard strokes of a pencil, twisted and overlapped each other, fading out into the ground below. A building stood off to the side in lighter lines. Next to the building, the faint outlines of the players of a basketball game were frozen in mid-pass.

It was a picture of the school.

Sitting under the tree was a lone figure, leaning on one of the larger roots and looking up between the leaves at the sky. This figure was wearing a button-up shirt and long pants. He had dark hair. Shinji was looking at himself.

Normally, when a person is startled by a sudden movement or noise, their mind tends to make their subsequent reaction to it larger than it actually was, through some guilt as to acting so irrationally to such an event. This, however, was not the case when Rei Ayanami stepped inside, quietly, and shut her apartment door, loudly, causing Shinji to jar his hands violently, the piece of paper with his likeness on it slipping out of them. It floated to the bare space of floor behind Shinji in the swinging way that falling paper had, and as Shinji turned to pick it up, he found himself looking into the deep red eyes of Rei, and felt his face turning approximately the same colour.

'I...uh...,' Shinji began, the part of his brain responsible for language temporarily taking leave of his control. Rei's eyes, seeming infinitely large and unreadable, disappeared for a moment as she blinked, and then disappeared from Shinji's sight altogether as she turned her back to him, putting down the paper bag she had carried inside on the tiny bench in the apartment's tiny kitchen.

'Please be careful with that,' Rei remarked as she took her various items out of the paper bag and placed them into their tiny spots inside the tiny cupboards.

'Did you...did you draw these?' Shinji asked, putting the sketch of the tree - and himself - back onto the bed. He looked over to Rei, who was making herself stand a little taller to put away several packets of instant rice. One of the skills Shinji had become very adept at while living with Misato, alongside being discreet about underwear turning up in odd places and how not to trip over a sleeping penguin, was recognising a packet of instant rice at first glance. Rei, while still seeming to consider herself completely alone in her apartment, managed a plain, 'Yes,' to Shinji's question as she stood back up.

'They're very good,' Shinji said, after watching Rei pack away the rest of her food and trying to think of a response. This time Rei did acknowledge him, and her eyes fixed on the folder Shinji was holding, the one that had originally brought him here.

'Is that from school?' Rei asked, and for a second Shinji thought he had misheard her, as the folder in his hand was quite far from the forefront of his mind. Quickly re-registering the feel of cardboard under his fingertips, he held out the folder to Rei, and was halfway through stumbling through an awkward sentence about what was inside the folder when she took it from him. Shinji stood for a second, arm still outstretched, before he said, 'I guess I should be going now.'

He was about to pull the door to the apartment open, possibly letting more scraps of junk mail float to the ground in the swinging way that falling paper had, when he heard Rei say his name. He turned around to see her at her bed, his - well, now her, really - folder of work still in her hand. She picked up the pencil sketch of himself, the tree, and the school, and walked over to him. His eyes widened a little as Rei extended her hand to offer him the single piece of paper.

'I want you to have this,' she said, and after he had taken it and she had turned away and the apartment door was between them, he would think in the walkway, as he would at Misato's kitchen table, as he would in his bed that night, that he saw a slight blush of colour in the face of the pale girl that lived on her own.




Zischke In The Jar Productions (c), 2001-09-27
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'Do you suffer from long-term memory loss? I can't remember...'
-Chumbawamba