Between Shinji Ikari and Rei Ayanami as romantic.
The world, fresh and unscarred, lay under the burgeoning twilight—a canvas repainted, a story retold—a peaceful hum replacing the wailing of sirens and the roars of titanic clashes. Shinji Ikari walked the streets of what was now called Neo Tokyo-3, the aftershocks of cataclysmic memories a faint, unsettling prickle in the back of his mind. Buildings ascended towards the sky, reflecting the light of a setting sun that dared to promise a tomorrow.
Elsewhere, Rei Ayanami wandered, her azure eyes reflecting not the metropolis around her, but the shadows of a history untethered from her conscious mind. Crowds flowed around her like rivers around a solitary isle, each person a story, a life reborn from the ashes of what was once an inevitable apocalypse.
The evening brought with it calm—a deceptive silence juxtaposed against the buried cacophony of screams and cries that had once defined their existences. As fate—or perhaps remnants of a lost design—would have it, the two found their steps converging in a small, inconspicuous park nestled in the shadow of monolithic structures.
Shinji took a seat on a weathered bench, his gaze lost in the dance of the leaves above him, each descent a whisper of a world long gone. Rei stopped a few paces away, her gaze inexplicably drawn to the lone figure. A feeling akin to nostalgia, yet not fully recalled, enveloped her, beckoning her to approach the stranger who inexplicably felt like the closest confidant.
Under the flicker of a lamplight, their eyes met, and a silent understanding passed between them—a recognition not of the other's face, but of the soul behind it. It was as if they were meeting for the first time and yet, they both carried an overwhelming sense of having shared a lifetime of experiences together, experiences that now seemed more dream than reality.
"Hello," Shinji spoke first, his voice neither expectant nor surprised. "It feels like I know you, but I... I can't remember from where or when."
Rei, often a repository for silence, found words to greet him. "I feel the same. It's like a song I used to know but can't recall the melody."
As the darkness grew closer, entwining with the dwindling light, they talked. Their conversation was not of known pasts, but of the present moment, and the hope of futures, yet neither could shake the sense that every word they exchanged was an echo of some forgotten dialogue, a reverberation from lives past.
And as the night claimed its realm, for the first time since the world started anew, they allowed themselves a sliver of belief, an admission that perhaps the world they'd lost held the key to understanding the mystery of their bond—a symphony of hearts now only faintly recalled, but never truly forgotten.