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She does not believe in God. At least, not in the way others do, with trembling hands and desperate prayers whispered into empty air. Her belief, if it deserves that name, exists like mathematics: cold, inevitable, indifferent. She does not believe in God. She believes around Him, the way water believes around a stone it has spent centuries wearing smooth.
Her disheveled apartment breathes with gray silence. A narrow bed beneath thin sheets. A single bulb overhead that flickers with exhaustion, casting restless shadows across bare walls. One shelf, sagging under the weight of its cargo. Beyond her window, Tokyo-3 sprawls in its perpetual convalescence, concrete and steel bent beneath the memory of Second Impact. The city grieves in frequencies too low for human ears, but she hears it anyway.
Inside, there is only the whisper of turning pages and the patient scratch of pen against paper.
She handles the weathered Torah with the same deliberate care she once used to pierce an Angel's AT Field. The Upanishads rest in her palms like surgical instruments - familiar, purposeful, precise. Her pen moves across the Qur'an's margins in thin crimson strokes, not with mockery but with the patience of an archaeologist brushing dust from ancient bones. The Vedas. The Gospels. Confucius and Krishna and Christ. She reads them all with the steady persistence of rising water, inevitable and thorough.
Each annotation is surgical in its brevity: Inconsistency. Circular reasoning. Metaphorical weakness. Projection. She moves through these cathedrals of human longing like a ghost studying the living, cataloguing their desperate reach toward something beyond themselves.
After all, there's not much else for her to do when she's not piloting or attending school.
When she finishes each volume, it joins the others beside her door. A neat stack growing like sedimentary layers of discarded faith. At knee-height, she gathers them with care and walks through NERV's sterile corridors to the Commander's office.
Gendo Ikari waits behind his fortress of a desk, hands steepled in their perpetual prayer to nothing. His glasses catch the light at angles that hide his eyes completely, a trick she's begun to think is intentional. He doesn't acknowledge her entrance, doesn't shift when she places the books before him with geometric precision.
The silence stretches. Finally, he lifts one volume - Aquinas's Summa Theologica - and opens it to pages veined with her blood red commentary. His expression doesn't change, but something almost imperceptible tightens around his eyes.
"These are old, Rei. Some would call them sacred."
"I corrected them." Her voice carries no apology, no defiance, only fact. "They contained errors."
"Contradictions," he murmurs, as if the word has weight. "Faith isn't logic, Rei. It doesn't require proof."
She meets his hidden gaze directly. "Then I am not faithful."
The pause that follows feels deliberate, measured like everything else about him.
"No," he agrees, and something almost like approval colors his tone. "You are not."
For just a moment, less than a heartbeat, his careful composure seems to crack. She catches something moving behind those reflective lenses, a flicker that might be memory or recognition or something more dangerous. She wonders if he's thinking of another child who once asked difficult questions, who colored outside the lines of acceptable faith with broken crayons and trembling hands.
Lately, thoughts of Shinji have been visiting her more frequently than she permits herself to examine.
She turns to leave.
"Do you believe they're wrong?" His voice stops her at the threshold. "That there is no God?"
She considers this. "I don't know."
"And do you believe you were made by God?"
The question hangs in the air like smoke. She tilts her head, genuinely thoughtful.
"I was made by NERV."
His exhale is barely audible. "Then no. You were not made by God."
The words settle into the room's corners with surgical finality. She nods once, acknowledgment, not agreement and leaves him alone with his reflection in the window.
That night, beneath her restless bulb, she opens another text. The pages whisper secrets in languages she's learned to parse but not to feel. Her eyes trace familiar patterns: humanity's endless attempts to explain itself to itself, to find meaning in the spaces between heartbeats.
A syllogism forms in her mind, inevitable as gravity:
If God made everything...
And she was not made by God...
Then what was she?
The logical conclusions unfold like origami in reverse. Either she exists outside of "everything" ...impossible by definition. Or the premise is false... God did not make everything. Or...
The third possibility slides into her consciousness like light through water. Not with fanfare or revelation, but with the quiet certainty of mathematical proof.
Or she is God.
The thought should disturb her. Should feel like blasphemy or madness or both. Instead, it settles into her awareness with perfect, terrible fit. She doesn't smile, she not sure if she knows how, but something in her chest loosens slightly, like a held breath finally released.
She doesn't discard the thought.
The school rooftop burns white-hot under an unforgiving sun. Her skin doesn't protest the heat - another small difference she's learned not to question. Below, Shinji sits alone on a weathered bench, picking at his lunch with the mechanical motions of someone eating from habit rather than hunger. Asuka is elsewhere, probably practicing her German curses on some unfortunate classmate. The other children have learned to give them all a wide berth.
She descends without sound, her shadow falling across him like an eclipse.
He startles, chopsticks scattering rice across his lap as he looks up. His eyes always too large, too exposed, widen with something between surprise and concern.
She stands there, backlit by the merciless sky, and asks the question that has been forming in her mind like a slow-growing crystal:
"Am I a god, Shinji?"
No irony in her voice. No jest or challenge. Just inquiry, pure as laboratory conditions.
He stares at her as if she's spoken in a language he almost remembers. His mouth opens and closes soundlessly, searching for words that keep slipping away.
"I... no? I mean... no. You're..." He struggles, then seems to find his footing. "You're Rei. You're my friend."
The smile he offers is small and uncertain, like a candle flame in wind. But it doesn't waver, doesn't collapse under the weight of her question. It's perhaps the most honest thing she's heard in months.
She studies him for a long moment. This boy who pilots miracles and carries the weight of humanity's survival in his hesitant hands. Then, without asking permission, she sits beside him.
They don't speak again. The wind moves through their hair with careful fingers. The sun continues its relentless arc overhead. Her question hangs between them like incense in an abandoned temple, unanswered but not forgotten.
But she thinks about it. She will continue thinking about it.
And someday, when the world has exhausted all its other possibilities, perhaps she will find the answer.
Or perhaps, more likely, she will create one.
Because that, she thinks, watching Shinji's profile as he stares out over the wounded city, might be what gods do.