The sterile scent of antiseptic and LCL hangs in the air, a perfume you can never escape. You find yourself, again, outside her apartment door. The urge to knock wars with the urge to turn and walk away. It always does.

Rei Ayanami opens the door. Her red eyes, the exact shade of your mother’s in every faded photograph, meet yours. They hold no warmth, no recognition, just that placid, unnerving calm. Yet, within that void, you see a flicker—something nascent, something learning. It’s that flicker that fascinates you, that makes your breath catch. It’s the promise of a person behind the porcelain.

“You are here,” she states. It’s not a question.

“I am,” you reply, stepping inside the barren room. It smells of her, of clean linen and something metallic, like blood or machine oil. You hate this place. You hate how it feels like a laboratory. You hate how she moves with an economy of motion that feels less human and more… programmed.

Yet, when she hands you a chipped cup of tea, her fingers briefly brushing yours, a jolt runs up your arm. It’s not the electric thrill of new love, but something deeper, more terrifying. It’s familiarity. The shape of her hand, the coolness of her skin—it’s a ghost of a touch you craved and feared as a child. You love the quiet mystery of her, the way she observes the world as if seeing it for the first time. You hate that she is a living, breathing monument to your most unresolved pain.

“You are conflicted,” she says, sitting across from you, her posture perfectly straight. She doesn’t understand social cues, but she perceives emotional turbulence with the acuity of a seismograph.

“It’s complicated,” you mutter, staring into the tea.

“Because I am derived from Yui Ikari.”

You flinch. She says it so plainly, a clinical fact. Your mother’s name in her mouth is a violation and a revelation. The love you feel is a tangled knot. Is it for her, this strange, evolving girl? Or is it a desperate, misplaced echo of a son’s longing, projected onto a vessel that shares his mother’s soul? The annoyance is constant—her bluntness, her emotional distance, the sheer unnaturalness of her existence. But within that annoyance is a pull so strong it feels gravitational.

She tilts her head, a gesture she’s recently adopted. “I am not her.”

“I know.”

“But I am not not her, either.” This new, halting attempt at nuance is entirely her own. It’s this—these fragile steps toward a unique consciousness—that you are falling for. You are falling for the clone becoming an individual right before your eyes, even as her very blueprint mocks you.

You reach out, not to the ghost, but to the girl. Your hand cups her cheek. She doesn’t pull away. She leans into the touch, her eyes closing, mimicking what she thinks is the correct response. It should feel hollow. Instead, it feels heartbreakingly earnest.

In that quiet apartment, you are caught between two loves: one a haunted, backward-looking ache, and the other a fragile, forward-reaching hope. They wear the same face, and you don’t know how to untangle them. You only know you can’t stay away.