Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ Evangelion: Tribulations After ❯ Why are you Here? ( Chapter 6 )

"Guess Shinji-kun can't hold his liquor." Misato says, pulling the boy out of the bar and into the car.

"It's your fault. You gave him the fake ID so he could get the beer he drank." Asuka says, helping Misato with Shinji.

With those three, the mysterious boy and Rei were accompanying this Shinji-sponsored night on the town. Rei wore a nice red dress she had bought recently. In the past, she wouldn't have really cared what she wore, but she had developed some type of fashion want ever since the mysterious boy had locked her soul onto that body. Rei was smirking as she watched Asuka and Misato load an unconscious Shinji into the back of the car.

"It's the boy's fault, he was the one who produced it for me." Misato grunts.

"Look, we could all sit here playing the blame game and trying to find out who produced what fake ID, or we could just calmly get Shinji back to your apartment where he can sleep and think of dancing Evangelions." The boy suggests.

They all stared at him blankly.

"You really are strange, you know that?" Asuka states.

"Yes. It helps." The boy replies.

"Helps what?" Rei asks.

"Exactly." The boy responds.

Shortly after everyone got in the car and drove back to the apartment building that Shinji, Misato, Asuka, and Rei lived in, Asuka angrily paid Rei the 100-yen she had bet that Shinji would try to sleep with her after he got drunk.

"Well, one crisis ended. Another begins. You people are going to have some serious problems cleaning up after all your race has done in the past few days." The mysterious boy says.

"We can handle it." Asuka smugly says.

"It's a mystery how you people survived the ice age with that kind of self-righteous attitude…" the boy mumbles.

"Speaking of mysteries," Rei says. "We still have yet to uncover one mystery: how long are you going to keep your identity secret from us?"

The boy raises his head up and looks around. "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

"Excuse me?" Misato queries.

"That question baffles religious figures even today, but I know the answer. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? As many as wanted. How long am I going to keep my origins from you? As long as I want. You will learn. Patience is also a weapon when used correctly." The boy explains.

"Patience is an obstacle. I'm unbreakable to everything, including patience." Asuka states.

"Said the Titanic to the iceberg." The boy says.

"What?!" Asuka asks.

The ride from then on was pretty much silent, and the mysterious boy left the group's company and went down the street. Asuka, hidden in the shadows, and walking quiet as a ghost, followed in pursuit. She was intent on finding out where this boy came from, where he lived, and where he was going. The boy walked and walked, and Asuka eventually began to think it was hopeless as the boy just walked from one edge of Tokyo-3 to another, back and forth until he finally stopped in a park.

"You must be getting really tired, Asuka. I suggest you go home and sleep." The boy shouted out.

Asuka nearly fainted. She ran out from the clearing in front of the boy. "HOW DID YOU KNOW I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING YOU?!"

"You walk as loud as a marching band, and I can sense the rage and jealousy on the surface of your mind. You might as well put a sign on you that says, `I am a ninny.'" The boy explains.

"That's it! I'm sick and tired of you just pulling out these mysterious phrases of yours from thin air! I'm sick of you being all mysterious and not trusting us with who you are! You haven't been truly frank with us ever since we first met you, and it's about damned time you finally gave us some answers! I want you to tell me who you are!" Asuka demands.

The boy stares intently at her for about twenty seconds, and he narrows his eyes at her and turns away.

"Stupid kid." He mutters, but loud enough for Asuka to hear. "You don't know what you want. None of you do."

Asuka finally exploded with rage. She ran at the boy, intending to tackle him, but when she reaches a distance of one foot from him, she feels as if she has just smashed into a brick wall, and was suddenly flung back twelve feet and onto the ground. The boy is then suddenly sitting right on top of her, holding one hand to her throat.

"Do you have the slightest idea what my wildest imaginations could do to your body just by thinking about them?! You don't know terror, Asuka. You think you do, but you don't. You don't know who you are, you don't know what you want, you don't know why you're here, and you don't know where you're going! I can answer the question of who I am once you answer those four questions I put before you!" the boy shouts.

And with that, he vanished into thin air.

Rei stood in the blackness of everything, yet she seemed to be illuminated somehow. She knew this was some type of dream or vision, but she didn't understand what was truly happening around her. Whenever she shifted her view from one side to another, she saw different things. One was of Gendou Ikari opening the entry plug with his bare hands, another was of her detonating Unit 00, and the last was of seeing all the human beings be reverted to LCL in the Third Impact when it occurred in the dream SEELE had induced. Then, when she finally looked ahead of her, she saw the mysterious boy.

"Why am I here?" she asked him.

"You were never away. For the first time, your mind is quiet enough to hear me." He responded.

"Why are you here?" she asked him.

"We have always been here."

Rei woke up.

Asuka watched Shinji from just outside the door. She was beginning to feel tired, but wanted to get a look at Shinji sleeping on his bed before she slept.

<I wonder why I feel so happy seeing him like this. Maybe I'm just starting to like the little idiot. He's not that bad looking. And he really never did compliment himself when he was fighting the Angels. I wonder why I always gave him such a hard time. He was just trying to find some sense of self worth in that cute little head of his. Wait a second; did I just call it cute? Oh God. Oh sweet merciful God, no! I think I'm falling in love with him! Dear God, don't let it be so…> she thought.

Shinji suddenly lightly smiled in his sleep. Asuka smiled more, and then winced. <God hates me. I AM falling in love with him!>

The next morning, Shinji got up, but was not like usual. Despite his hangover, he was extremely pleased. When Misato came out and went through her usual procedure of the morning of drinking and suddenly snapping into total focus, Shinji did not criticize, in fact, he laughed.

"Man, that boy really did a number on you, Shinji." Misato points out.

"I feel the best I've ever felt in my entire life! The kid's a miracle worker! Either that or I still have some alcohol in my blood from last night." Shinji suggests.

"You remember everything from last night?"

"Not everything. After the third glass, it gets fuzzy."

"Then you don't remember singing "We are the Champions" with Asuka and Rei in the karaoke bar?"

"WHAT?!"

"Just kidding!"

"Whew."

"You passed out half-way through the song, the mysterious boy finished it for you."

Shinji hung his head down.

"It was fun! We should do it again sometime." Misato suggests.

"No, the hangover's starting to get to me." Shinji replies.

Asuka walks out from her room and sees Shinji. She holds back a blush and says, "Gotta go! Be back later!" Immediately afterwards she runs out the door, leaving a bewildered Shinji and Misato.

Asuka stood outside the door and thought for a moment. "I got to ask him out on a date. It's the only way this'll work. If he's a complete and total idiot, I'll know I don't want to do this anymore. Okay, I'll just walk back in and ask him to dinner. Right now. This moment. Immediately. I won't put it off. Yep, walk in right now and ask. Uh huh, this is going to help. Yep, I'm walking in. Even though I'm just standing right here, I'm walking in, and I'm gonna ask him. I am so pathetic."

Rei just stood inside of NERV HQ, watching the Reconstruction Team work on Unit 04. All she can think about is the dream she had before waking up in the middle of the night. She thinks about the clothes she's been buying, the redecorations she's been doing for her room. And then she thinks of the soul she has now. She collapses onto her knees, and she weeps.

"Oh God… Why do I feel this way? Why do I have no feeling of self-worth? Why do I feel guilt? What's happening to me?! Is it this soul? This soul now making every pump of my blood in my heart count? Why am I not feeling the happiness I desire?"

The emptiness around her had no answer to her questions. Rei held her head and screamed. After ten seconds of screaming, she felt a finger pressed against her lips, and she stopped screaming. She opened her eyes and saw the mysterious boy in civilian clothes in front of her. Rei didn't even realize that she had had tears coming down her face. The boy took one of the tears on the side of his index finger.

"Girls with such pretty faces weren't meant to cry, Ayanami." He says.

Rei jumped into his arms, still crying. She did not smile, they just held each other. Rei's tears flowed down onto the mysterious boy's white shirt, but the shirt absorbed and evaporated the tears as soon as they touched it.

"I thought… I thought this soul was supposed to make me happy with my life, supposed to let me take control. All it's bringing me is sorrow and regret!" Rei shouts.

"Regret? About what?"

"I don't know! I just feel intense guilt. It's eating away at my heart, what's happening to me?! Make it stop!"

"I can't."

"You have to! If you can stick this soul on me, you can take it off!"

"It would be like me asking Shinji to just pull his arm off with his other arm, I can't do it! Ayanami, I never said a soul is the best thing in the world! When someone has a soul, it means they're open to all emotions a human being can feel. Human beings don't just feel happiness; they have to deal with the sad parts, too. The regret and guilt you feel is for yourself."

"What?"

"You feel sorry for yourself after everything you did in the past. You killed many angels, and in a sense, their DNA is part of you because you were created by DNA from Ikari's mother and Lillith, who is the Zeroeth Angel."

The mysterious boy flinched when he said Zeroeth Angel, but he continued. "You have Angel DNA within you, so you feel like you've killed a part of yourself, some type of heritage. You feel like you've been used, like you're some kind of puppet for someone else's game, and that's true. SEELE used you from day one for their own purposes. In fact, the only one who truly appreciated and loved you from day one was Ikari's father!"

"But he used me too…"

"No, that was a dream. Your soul was hanging onto you by a thin thread, and deep down, it thought Gendou Ikari was using you, so it created the part of the dream where Gendou was planning to use you to initiate Third Impact on his terms. Gendou loves you even to this day."

"I'm a clone. Less than a clone, a freak. Why am I here?"

Rei stopped embracing the boy and fell once again onto the floor. She looked down on the floor, and then up at the boy. Much to her surprise, he was smiling. He then grinned with his teeth showing.

"Congratulations, Rei Ayanami! You've done it!" he exclaims.

"What?" she whispers.

"You've asked the question that proves you've fully joined with your soul, and that you've evolved from a state of being a clone to a full human being!"

"What question?"

"`Why am I here?' That question is basically the same question as `What is the meaning of life?'! Every human being asks why he or she exists! If you were just a soulless clone, you might cry a little because you're being used, but you wouldn't ask that question because you would already know the answer to it! You've proven your worthiness, and don't worry about the whole angel thing. Do you think they're dead?"

"Well, yes…"

"You can't kill an angel unless they're human, Ayanami. They're back in heaven, thinking how much you people failed the tests they gave to you."

"You mean…"

"Yes, you have worth, you killed no one, and you look downright sexy in that red dress you wore yesterday."

Rei smiled and jumped into the air. "Now come on, kid, I'm going to show you the way to this nice tanning salon I know…" the boy says, leading Rei out.

Asuka gulped deeply. She had been trying all day to ask Shinji out for dinner, but every time she came close, she stuttered and stammered and asked for something else, instead. Finally, she built up the courage to walk out to Shinji in the kitchen, who was sitting down at the table reading a newspaper.

"Hey, Shinji?" Asuka asks.

"Hey, Asuka, did you read the paper? Reconstruction on the city's almost halfway done. They say the school will be open again in about a week." Shinji states.

"That's great. Shinji, I'd like to… Um… Well, you see…"

"Friday, the fifteenth, dinner at that club down on forty-ninth?" Shinji asks, raising his eyes from the paper and up at a baffled Asuka.

"How did you-"

"When someone stutters like you do for a simple question, they're obviously trying to ask you out on a date."

"YOU KNEW THE WHOLE TIME!? WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY SOMETHING!?"

"It was funny watching you make yourself look like an idiot!"

Asuka slapped Shinji in the face, a feeling Shinji was getting used to. Asuka turned tail and walked out the front door. Five seconds later, she put her head in the door and said, "Yeah, Friday night is good. Tell Misato." She then left again. Shinji smiled.

To Be Continued…