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Class 2-A, of Tokyo 3’s First Municipal Junior High 8th grade, was beginning the two-week nightmare of the baby unit . This wasn't particularly special; in fact the dear reader might recall a period similar. However, this was also the class harboring the First, Second, and Third child, and between manning the world-defending EVAs and trudging through their own grief-saturated personal lives, dealing with a school mandated screaming plastic baby was an annoying priority.
The babies were plastic. They weighed about ten pounds, with heads that rocked with every motion and awful little porcelain faces and a paint-peeling scream that went off randomly every three to six hours. To get it to stop screaming, they had to remove the cloth diaper and press a button on its hip. They also had to log, on a small chart, the hours in which they were ‘feeding’ it, but everyone bullshitted that part.
It was birth control, basically, though as Asuka put it smartly, “I don’t see any point in doing this. Like COME ON, earth’s population is already at an all time low! You’d think it’d be in their best interest to spread MORE misinformation, so they could pump out more soldiers,”
It was an unpleasant announcement, under the after-school sun, as the three walked in step to what constituted their home. Shinji rubbed the back of his neck, and watched the sparrows flit by. It was spring. They probably had families to feed, and bugs to snatch up in sharp beaks.
“I mean,” Asuka grimaced, her tone changing, “I guess it’s helpful to warn these kinds of things…in case someone had a child but didn’t want it. But, then, they do that anyway,”
Those words hung over the two of them. Shinji held the plastic dummy a bit closer, and Asuka continued, hers hanging from her limp hand by a firm grip on its leg, swinging it slightly. Cradling hers, Rei walked in that strip between the sidewalk and the road. She stepped over the gutter. Shinji startled, “Rei? Don’t do that!”
REI
Rei didn’t have opinions on things. But, in the vast cavern of emptiness, in the abyss of indifference and the sea of apathy, if she were to glean the tiniest, most microscopic molecule of a personal statement, she’d say: she did not like the baby.
Or, rather, the baby made her feel bad -- worse. There was a base level of badness that anyone, any person that wasn’t a person, was bound to feel, but this was a mark below even that. As soon as she was home, as soon as she robotically finished her homework and ate her pre-prepared food and changed it the first time, she sat up on her bed, and watched it from across the room with wary eyes.
It made her feel funny. Her stomach was in knots, and her head had begun to pound. She cupped it, rubbing her temples and shutting her eyes. Body check: am I sick? Am I feverish? Did I eat something out of the ordinary? No, no, and no. Like checking the maintenance of a machine, Rei felt the frustration of a mechanic. Something was wrong, and nothing felt right.
This, regrettably, wasn’t the first time she felt this way. She had a pang of it, earlier, when as they were cleaning the classroom, Shinji caught her wringing out a towel and admitted she looked like a mother . That was weird. The familiar way the water squeezed from it, suds under her fingernails, splashing the front of her baby blue uniform. And when he said that, her mind sharpened, and she was suddenly aware of the smell of soap, of the distant yet near constant ringing in her ears, of the ache of her wrist she’d broken two months ago. It pulled Rei Ayanami back into focus, and yet why did that make her feel so sick?
It happened again, earlier, months earlier. Last year, actually, when she was 13. That year had been unimpressive, a vague timeline of filed reports and journal entries detailing her latest injuries and what she ate those days, calories and blood tests. It was all numbers, but there was one instance where a red ballpoint pen went to paper, and something unusual happened.
Rei assumed it was internal bleeding, when she saw the blood. That made sense: her stomach cramped and tore and it felt like some piece of her had been dislodged. That also made sense: she just got out of training, just went to the restroom after getting out of her plugsuit. That’s something Ms. Misato had said that for girls it was best to urinate after getting out of that. Something about the fluid creating UTIs, the body’s natural cleaning system. She also said that it was best to do that after having sex -- for the same reasons. But the plugsuit and the LCL fluid were more equivalent to wearing the same wet bathing suit bottoms all day -- bad, but not sexual.
Blood. She staggered out the stall and, upon facing the rather distorted image in the mirror, wondered, Am I going to die now?
Internal bleeding was always bad. Yes. It was a practical death sentence. And she felt a pang -- or, not really felt , experienced -- as though her check-engine light had flared again. Teeth gritted, Rei unfolded and walked the rest of the way through the halls with her shoulders thrown back, like a good soldier. Even if she wanted to curl up and whimper, something told her she wasn’t allowed to. Rei didn’t curl up. Rei didn’t whimper.
But, when she arrived in Ritsuko’s office, where the head scientist was packing up for the day, clearing coffee mugs and leaving her lab coat over the back of her office chair, Rei couldn’t help but sense her heart squeeze again. Palpitations. Weird.
“Ms. Ritsuko,” she said, and the head scientist of NERV balked. She straightened, alarmed and frankly a little confused. Rei never spoke, not to her. A good soldier, a good soldier who for all intents and purposes had been sent home, didn’t suddenly appear standing in the office doorway, her face bloodless.
“Yes, what is it?” Her voice quickly stabilized, and with only a second to process her surprise, Ritsuko straightened. She smiled, strained, startled, and walked over to Rei. Her professionalism smelled of coffee and mechanical rot, iron and no-nonsense perfume. “Is something wrong?”
Rei felt her own heart give another spasm. The only words she could find, each one an unfamiliar and awkward sound: “Yes.” and “I’m bleeding.”
Ritsuko figured out the problem painfully easily, and when she did, she smiled wearily.
“What is it?” Rei asked, when she dry-swallowed the pill and took the weirdly wrapped little orange square.
“It’s just…Rei, I suppose I assumed, you were so scholarly you already knew about these biological processes. I’m…just thinking about what else we could have missed,”
She replied, flatly, “I know what reproductive biology is.”
Sitting in her office chair, watching with a scientist’s eye and a mother’s concern, Ritsuko filled in, “Did you assume it would not occur to you?”
Rei nodded, once. “Mhm.”
She figured out the nature of periods pretty quickly, though she was underweight and young and stressed, so hers only started every six or so months. And, still, when they did, it didn’t just hurt -- it felt weird. It felt, for a brief second, that some part of her body, of her lower organs in the area below the intestines and around where her navel was, wasn’t her own anymore.
They usually resulted in a lot of bizarre nightmares. That’s how it often was -- Rei only dreamed of memories, compartmentalizing and storing them away for future use, like any good machine. But, when those memories turned into visions of blood between her legs, of back breaking agony, that roused concern in her.
That funny feeling continued.
Eventually, Ritsuko told Misato about the situation that had transpired, and if Rei had any say in it, she would have felt annoyed and embarrassed she did; but Rei didn’t care. Misato, of course, laughed her head off at it. She laughed so hard in fact that she cried, and banged her fist against the desk, and held her stomach, and eventually Ritsuko had to slap her across the face to make her stop.
“I’m not laughing at the First Child, calm down! Calm down!” she breathed, still shaky, “Ritsuko, when I first had mine, I thought I was dying. Oh, my god, that poor girl,” she devolved, again, laughing harder, and Ritsuko shot an apologetic look over at Rei, who stood dripping in her plugsuit, in the entrance of the office, watching this with absolute indifference.
Misato gave Rei supplies. That’s what she called them. She probably did it mostly as a personal joke, which could explain why she was smiling when she set down the cardboard box on the floor of Rei’s apartment, having paid a surprise visit.
“This is a young lady’s survival kit, alright?” She said, and Rei stared at it. “Are you gonna open it?”
Which she did, cutting it with a single line and then taking the innards out one by one. There was no flash of delight, no sudden moment of gratitude. She just stared at the gifts. A heating pad, a packet of a useless painkiller, fresh underwear, a dark towel, and…
“I’m not instructed to eat this,” she picked up the bag of CACAO 70.
“Well, Commander Ikari can fight me on this. What sorta girl isn’t allowed chocolate?” she gave an emphatic eye roll, and Rei wondered if Misato was really so old.
“He has specific dietary regulations for me,”
“I have the authority to override those, anyway, and I’m using it now.” Misato dismissed with a flippant wave of her hand.
“So you’re instructing me to eat this?”
“Yes -- well -- not all at once. Just, keep it, and eat it when you want it, okay? And you’ll want it.” And she flashed a wink, and Rei heard her own thoughts retranslate those words: I probably never will.
“Okay,” she set the bag aside, and then, as if she finally remembered the words, “...Thank you.”
“Hey, no sweat! Look at the other things now!”
And she did, with the indifference of a routine inspector, turning over every item with cold observation. Misato seemed to expect her lack of graciousness, but still made up for it in her own way (‘Who's your favorite supervisor, Rei? Is it me? I brought you such a nice goodie bag!’).
“What,” Rei lifted the last two things, “are these?”
“Condoms. You know what they are, right?”
“...Yes.” Rei squinted, “But why?”
“Eh, well. They last a while,” Misato gave another loose shrug, before grinning, “You’re a cute girl. When I was your age, I was getting down to all sorts of naughty things,”
“Okay,”
“And having some of those onhand is a lifesaver. I mean -- okay -- I was a little older, but like I said, they don’t expire for at least three years,” and feeling the need to, she added, “I’ll buy you more at that time.”
“...Thanks,” Rei said, less thrilled about that than she was about the chocolate, which was already a low bar. She lifted the final thing, studying its white packaging, before popping it open and holding one up, “What’s this?”
It was a small white wand, with a tiny screen around the middle of it. It was pink, too, on one end, and holding it sent a sudden wave of vertigo through her. Rei grit her teeth, bearing the uncomfortable rush of it.
“A pregnancy test,” Misato said, and she had the dignity to sound a little ashamed. Perhaps the condoms had been a joke, or the build up of a joke. This? The punchline. Her face a little red, she added, “S-same reason as the condoms. You don’t need it until you need it!”
A beat passed. Rei continued to hold it.
“Uh, yeah. So you pee on it, and the little screen turns, one line for no, two lines for yes,”
Another beat, and Misato seemed to realize something was wrong.
“Hey, kid, put it down. It was just a stupid joke, I knew you wouldn’t need it. You’re a good girl, you wouldn’t do that stuff,”
Rei sat it down, looking up as though she had just come out of a daze. She had. That icky feeling in her stomach, the same feeling that recurred like a pang of a bad dream, circulated, and bringing a hand to her mouth, she muttered, “ Thanks .”
“We gotta look out for each other, alright?” Misato smiled, and Rei tried to impersonate it, but her face just wasn’t listening. When her supervisor left, Rei continued to stare at the laid out utilities, feeling awful and alive at the same time.
That isn’t right. She didn’t clean it up. As the months would progress, Rei would take less and less care of her room. She didn’t care about living in filth. She just didn’t care. Caring -- taking care of and being taken care of -- hurt. Crawling on top of her bed but still now allowing herself to curl up, she stared blankly at the opposite wall.
The feeling continued.
That was the feeling. It was easier to understand the specifics of what brought it about than trying to describe it, Rei supposed. In a word: bad. In two words: unsettlingly painful.
She remembered Shinji, calling her a mother in that soap-clouded classroom. She remembered the feeling of the little test in her hands, of Misato’s expectant smile. She remembered waking up, slick with sweat and gasping. And the more she remembered, the more her body felt it was separating from her. It wasn’t her own -- something happened to some part of her, be it her soul or the body she was currently living in, and now she was feeling the shockwaves of it.
The baby started to cry. It was a plastic baby, not the real thing. Its cry was one note, one singular piercing shriek that replayed every two seconds, seemingly endlessly. She wondered if they made a real baby cry to get that sound. It never failed to raise the hair on the back of her neck.
She supposed she had a maternal instinct, somewhere in her, as did Misato and as did Ritsuko. Their supercomputer -- the woman, the scientist, the mother -- perfectly represented the combat of the three assets. And that’s what Rei was, she decided: the girl, the soldier, the mother. But she wasn’t a mother, she’d never had a baby. You needed a baby to be a mother, didn’t you?
Maybe not. Misato was some form of a mother, Rei reflected. She looked after Shinji. Shinji was her baby, even if, like this awful screaming toy, he was often left in the corner and ignored.
Eventually, the shrieking stopped. Rei, then, stepped up, and walked over to it. Dried bandages and leftover boxes crinkled underfoot. She didn’t care about the mess. She was disgusting, but she wasn’t human, so it didn’t matter. Lifting up the plastic baby by its head, Rei wondered, Did I have a mother?
Did I?
She did not. Perhaps, she was her own mother. No one looked out for her, so she did herself. And staring around at this decrepit, horrible room, Rei thought, I’m not a very good one at that.
Some days later, when she was stuffing the little plastic creature into her locker, zipped into her white plugsuit, Commander Ikari approached her. She looked up, a little surprised to see him, but also relieved. In fact, she smiled, an odd and sudden gesture that made her wonder if she was truly so inhuman after all. He, the man deemed almost as inhuman as she, made her feel alive.
“Rei, what is that?” He asked slowly, taking her locker for her and opening it.
“A baby,” she replied, and her voice wavered with the tiniest glimmer of emotion. That’s what it was: a baby, awfully crammed and half hidden by her uniform, which had been thrown over its head. It wasn’t swaddled or held lovingly, “It’s a school project. It’s plastic.”
He already knew that. His eyes flickered behind his glasses, and she wondered if somewhere in the depths of his old spirit, if seeing it roused something in him. He cleared his throat, “The kind that screams, correct?”
“Yes,” she had, unfortunately, had to replace the batteries.
“Does it interfere with your sleep schedule?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
“Well,” he paused, puzzled. He was a man. He probably wouldn’t understand the bizarre complex she was dealing with, let alone the funny feeling that little creation caused. Speaking of, he gave her a funny feeling as well, as though something in her was rattling the bars of a metaphysical cage. “Do you want to keep it?”
Her blood icened, for reasons she wasn’t quite sure. “What do you mean?”
“I can order your teacher to nullify the assignment for you,” importantly, he continued. He wasn’t so scary, talking to her like this. She didn’t really understand why Shinji cowered in fear of him so often. Commander Ikari was just an older man, with his hands stuffed in his pockets, scruffy and tired and haggard.
“You can?”
“Sure.” And he held out his arms. Rei realized, it wasn’t a question: her sleep schedule (which would determine the survival of humanity) or some plastic doll she didn’t like.
“Okay,”
Rei pulled it out of the locker and handed it to him. He took it underarm, like one might carry a book, and with a squeak she saw its neck hinge bend.
“You have bigger priorities than being a mother right now,” he said, and with his free hand, placed it on her head. Ruffled her dry blue hair. She accepted it, and watched as he turned to leave, the plastic baby -- her plastic baby -- still hanging limply from under his arm.
All of a sudden, Rei felt worse. Her white plugsuit felt altogether too tight. Her throat closed and, leaned against the cold surface of her locker, she allowed an odd agony to rush over her. It felt almost as if the spirit that had possessed her, that little ghost that triggered the weird feeling in her gut, had been whisked away, leaving her weak and unsure.
But, it didn’t matter. Rei took two deep breaths and, then, leaned back. Her heart rate slowed. That -- that miraculous little lapse in character -- was just that. A phase, a quick flicker of something that wasn’t there anymore. After a long moment, she exhaled.
She would be fine.
ASUKA
Asuka hated the little fucking baby. She really, truly, fucking hated it. As soon as they wheeled out the assignment, she groaned and slammed her elbows into her desk. The Class President gave her a lecture, but Asuka didn’t fucking care.
So, she carried it home, swinging it in a way that would be sure to break and twist its little plastic legs. When they reached the elevator up to their apartment, she slammed its face into the buttons instead of just pressing them, like she was a yakuza and it owed her money. Shinji yelped as she did.
“H-hey--”
“What?” She turned. “You got something to say?”
Shinji just wilted, holding his own close to his chest. Seeing him, so pathetic and trembling and earnest towards a fucking doll, made her blood boil, and so she stormed over, grabbed its skull, and ripped it from his hands. She threw it, as hard as she could, into the floor of the elevator, and there it struck with a loud echoing CLANG.
“Asuka!” He protested.
“Go!” She replied, sneered, “Collect your precious little baby, before I chuck it down the elevator shaft,”
And he did, picking it off the floor with that plaintive expression that just made her want to puke.
Her own didn’t last the afternoon. When it started screaming, she picked it up again, and threw it to the floor, and then, with another seething hit of indecipherable rage, stood up and slammed her heel into its face. She didn’t stop until its head was entirely caved in, the plastic peeling away to reveal gray metal and screws and a hollow cavity.
Pen-Pen and Shinji stood by the door, silent witnesses to this infanticide.
Shinji, still holding his gently (as he’d paid attention in class, when the teacher ordered them to ‘cradle the head,’ to support the neck’), swallowed, “Asuka…”
“THIS,” she turned, snapped, “THIS is not my baby. It’s a mass produced piece of plastic from some bullshit lesson that’s not going to teach any of us a damn thing,” every phrase was punctuated by a deliberate kick to its tiny body, and with enough force she knocked it into the opposite wall. Its porcelain face cracked off, and yet the crying didn’t stop.
As though he couldn’t take the abuse any longer, Shinji rushed across the room and scooped it up before she could get to it again. He was now carrying two, and it was hard to decide what looked more pathetic: the mutilated plastic infant or his own sorry expression.
“You’d never understand,” she continued, without even a shred of remorse, “Have you ever been -- God. Nevermind,”
“Asuka?” He asked, as she turned to storm out of the bedroom.
“Asuka?”
“Forget it!” she yelled back, and she meant it. He didn’t see it, the glint of tears and the tremble in her shout. Shinji could never understand the depth of the unpleasantness of this GODDAMN assignment.
SHINJI
Misato came home late to see Shinji sitting on the couch, both of the plastic toys on his lap, his arms wrapped tightly around them.
“What are you doing?” She asked, amused and a little baffled, her hand already in the fridge looking for a beer. She was a bit too sober for this kind of lunacy, and by the serious look on his face (his wide eyes, his trembling lips, his furrowed brow), she knew she’d need at least three drinks before it made any sense.
“Protecting them,” he replied, with a tired sigh, “Asuka wants to kill them.”
“They’re plastic,” Misato wiped her mouth, “You can’t kill plastic.”
“Look what she did…I tried to tape it back on, but…I think we might have to pay for its repairs,” he pointed to one of the babies, the uglier one that had a definite crack across its face. That made her grimace a little.
“Well, she’ll pay for it,” Misato exhaled.
“She better,” he looked back down, seeming a bit more glum than usual.
“Uh…”
Perhaps that was how he felt, deep down: like some pointless, useless, replaceable piece of plastic, thrown to the side and discarded. Face caved in, if anyone even really cared. Perhaps that’s why he held the two so tightly, devoted in a way he’d never been, not even to that massive fucking robot he was forced to pilot.
“Wow, you’re even keeping the feeding log,” Misato stated, noticing the open journal beside him.
“That’s what the assignment is,”
“You know, there’s no way for the teachers to check it. You don’t have to do that,”
“Yes, but,” he exhaled, softly, “I’m supposed to.”
Another beat passed, and Misato finished her beer, tossing it towards the trashcan and missing completely. “Well, Shinji, you’re a good single mother. I’ll give you that.”
ALL
At the end of the two weeks, Shinji returned both of the plastic babies to his teacher. He explained, to the best of his ability, why one was missing a face, and Asuka denied all of it, lying easily and quickly. It devolved into an argument, but in the end, they both forked over twenty bucks and the tiresome issue resolved itself.
“Hey,” Asuka stated, to the class president, Hikari, “Why didn’t we see Rei turning hers in?”
“Oh, she did so earlier!”
“She did?”
“Yes, before school,” Hikari nodded to the report taped to the wall. Shinji puzzled it, before saying.
“Whoa. She had the highest score out of all of us.”
“Really?”
“Who knew,”
“I’m sure she’d be a great mother,” whispered Kensuke, and Shinji had to nod.
“I mean. Obviously, yeah,”
“She’d need a good husband, too,” that earned Toji a yank on the ear by an annoyed Hikari, and when their teacher spoke, they all hurried away from the published scores.
“I bet it’s only because she doesn’t have a life to deal with,” Asuka muttered, loud enough for the aforementioned girl to hear. But, Rei, who hadn’t moved from her seat, simply stared out the window, and felt a surge of that bizarre sensation again.
“Hey, good job,” Shinji said, kindly, approaching her after class.
And she only stared at him.