Chapter 20

She remembered the dirty, checkered tiled floor and filthy bed but not much else.

The air was heavy, loaded with dust and the smell of decay as if nobody had been here in a long time. There was almost no light, only enough to see the faint outlines of worn-out, rusted medical equipment that did not seem to have been used in a long, long time.

Dead things, dead reminders of a life lost.

She didn't know how she'd come to end up here. All she remembered was pain, and voices and an awful feeling of fingers on her bare skin.

Rei Ayanami stood in the middle of the room, her ghostly white flesh almost glowing in the darkness. She was naked, but she didn't feel cold. She didn't feel anything, just dead.

There was something missing. She didn't know what it was, but something wasn't where it was supposed to be in her chest.

Like she had no heart.

Where was she? Why was this place so familiar?

She had never been here before, and yet she felt like she had always been here, always living in the dark, always naked.

A dream?

Memory?

As she approached the bed, the soft shuffling of her feet filled the room. The sheets were dingy; there were dried blood stains on the yellowing material. Her blood? Softly, she pressed her hand on the sheets. They were warm, pleasant to the touch. Was this her bed? Her past?

No, not hers-Rei Ayanami's.

"Rei, what are you doing?"

Rei turned to the sound of the familiar voice and found Doctor Ritsuko Akagi standing where she had been before, holding a flashlight. She couldn't see the woman's face, only a shock of her blonde hair and white lab coat. The harsh light hurt her eyes and so she looked away.

"How did you get here?" the Doctor repeated.

"I do not know," Rei said honestly. "It felt like I was walking in my sleep."

"I said you could take a break. That wasn't permission to wander off," the blond doctor said sternly. "This is a big place, it would incredibly easy to get lost forever if you don't know your way out, or nobody knows where you are."

Rei nodded her head slightly. "I am sorry to have worried you, Doctor Akagi."

Doctor Akagi turned around.

"I wasn't worried at all." She made a motion with her hand, a signal to Rei that she was supposed to follow. "Come on."

Rei followed her obediently, falling in step behind her as she led the way out of the darkened room and into a pitch-black hallway illuminated only by the flashlight and a bright doorway at the very end. The damp air clung to her as sweat, the gloom entered her pores like some kind of virus. Shapes appeared along the walls: doors, broken equipment, pipes, shards of glass, cardboard boxes, medical supplies.

The only sound was the clicking of Ritsuko's heels, the rustling of her coat, and Rei's quiet padding on the tiles.

"Familiar, isn't it?" Doctor Akagi said, keeping her gaze straight ahead. Rei could only see a flash of yellow hair along the silhouette of her head.

"What is this place, Doctor Akagi?" Rei asked, unable to hold her curiosity. "I have never been here before, and yet there is something ... I do not know what to call it."

"To you, this place means nothing," Doctor Akagi answered coolly. "This is where she grew up. This was her world for a long time."

Rei felt a sudden pang of sadness. "In the dark?" she said.

"We used to have lighting when it was still in use. Of course we wouldn't have raised her in the dark. That would have made for a very badly adjusted individual," she added. "But what do you care, you didn't grow up here. You came from a glass tube."

Rei didn't know what to feel—how to feel. Only that she felt something odd and empty once again on that familiar spot inside her chest.

"She grew up?"

Ritsuko Akagi stopped, but did not turn. Rei stopped too, and stood there, red eyes carefully examining the woman in front of her. The doctor didn't seem quite able to put her thoughts into words. Rei didn't mean to trouble her. Her question had not been intended to do that, but it seemed to have regardless.

"Rei," finally Doctor Akagi said, "for someone who is very intelligent you sure ask a lot of dumb questions."

A sudden cold draft of air touched her skin, making her shiver. "Do you hate me, Doctor Akagi?"

The doctor sighed, turning partially back towards Rei. It was impossible to see the expression on her face and Rei knew it was the same with her own face, which was good because she didn't know what expression to make.

"Hate is a strong word, Rei. It is meant to hurt. People don't seem to understand now. You shouldn't use it unless you mean it—and even if you do there are always other ways to say it without being so blunt." She paused. "That said, I don't hate who you are, I hate what you are. What you represent."

So this was what being hated felt like, Rei thought. It was such a familiar thing. Like she had lived with it for a long time.

Without knowing why she dropped her gaze to the floor.

"You know, I destroyed the Dummy System for the same reason," Doctor Akagi said bitterly. Her voice had a strange hardness to it. "Soulless things shouldn't hold the same value as human beings. You were no different than those things until you were born. Then everything changed and you became who you are."

"I am soulless?" In the dark, even Rei's soft whisper seemed carry on forever.

"No, weren't you paying attention?" Doctor Akagi admonished her. "I said everything changed for you. You have a soul. But Angels have souls—would you call them human?"

Rei did not offer an answer, though in her heart she already knew what it was supposed to be.

"Don't flatter yourself by pretending to be more than you were created as, Rei. Understanding is not your purpose. You may feel better, but in the end it will only lead you to misery." Doctor Akagi turned back, and resumed walking down the hallway behind the beam of light from her flashlight, her heels once again clicking ominously as she went. "Now, enough with the questions. To be honest, the answers have absolutely no relevance for you. We still have experiments to run."

Rei followed her quietly, every footstep feeling as heavy as her heart. This was her lot, she knew, the only reason for her existence. She had to fulfill her purpose or she would be discarded, and whether she liked it or not was irrelevant. Still, as she walked naked on the cold floor, she found that she did not want to go back.

She did not want to be hated anymore.