After seeing the postage stamp-sized quarters assigned to Kaworu (so they hadn't expected him to need them very long at all…), Misato had given in to Shinji's blue eyes and let Kaworu stay with them instead of just hauling Shinji out of there. Not in Asuka's empty room, but in Shinji's.
As much as she hated angels, better to keep your enemies close. Shinji was certainly keeping him very close. Misato knew all the signs of sex, and Shinji was washing his sheets so often nothing stayed in the dirty laundry for more than a day. She would have known exactly what was going on even if she didn't have hidden security cameras in her place, ones she'd taken control of as soon as she moved in.
Now that Ritsuko pointed it out, Misato could see it: Kaworu doted on Shinji. Shinji was overjoyed, but also gloating. Possessive. If Kaworu's eyes didn't turn back to Shinji, Shinji would make sure they did, she saw at dinner.
Not very healthy at all, and she wasn't sure to what degree she should care. What kind of fury would an angel scorned have? But if Shinji was a little over-controlling, that was all to the good, wasn't it? In this case?
The next night, though, Kaworu kept glancing towards the Geofront, worry in his eyes, and Misato went back to her room quickly after dinner, hoping that as soon as they were alone… bingo.
"It's worse tonight, isn't it?" Shinji asked, pulling the boy-that-wasn't down onto the couch to sit on him.
Kaworu nodded. "It's been getting worse."
"Don't listen to it," Shinji demanded, holding Kaworu's head in his hands so he couldn't look away from Shinji. "Just listen to me. You're mine, not his. Or hers. Or SEELE's."
"I'm trying." Kaworu smiled up at him, red eyes soft and grateful. "I didn't think I would have more than one or two nights to spend with you." He'd lived that first week like each day was his last, each day a precious blessing, a little more time to spend on this world, with Shinji. After he confessed to Shinji the call was dampened enough that he could almost begin to listen to Shinji when his love promised to protect him, promised that he'd make this last forever, let those words erode the decision to accept death he'd made so long ago, and yet… Kaworu knew that he should be saddened by the thought of dying, but when his death meant Shinji would live? When he'd had so much time to spend with Shinji, so much proof that his sacrifice would be worth it?
"I hate being grateful to my father," Shinji admitted, "but it's almost worth everything he put me through, so I can do this. You're just so strong though," Shinji said, biting his lip. "And I don't need to break into your heart."
"It's not your fault, Shinji. You've… thank you. You've given me so much." Kaworu embraced him. "I'm supposed to report tomorrow morning again, and if I keep staring towards the geofront? SEELE already suspects that I've already been called. The others couldn't fight it, but the Lilim might be able to, and since they…"
"It's not your fault," Shinji told him. "It's not your fault. None of us asked to be born. And you, if you weren't born, I couldn't have met you," he said, stroking silver hair.
"I wish I was born to meet you," the angel said. "Just to be yours."
"I'll weaken you as much as I can tonight," Shinji promised, starting to mouth Kaworu's neck.
"Ah, Shinji…" Kaworu gasped, losing his train of thought as Shinji sunk his teeth in. "Misato…"
"Hhn?" Shinji wondered, not really paying attention. What about Misato?
Kaworu's eyes looked directly at the camera, met hers through the lens the way she'd seen him see her through her binoculars. "We need to tell her."
"Don't even think about it!" Shinji ordered angrily. "She hates the angels because of Second Impact, what if she blames you for…" He quieted when Kaworu put a finger to his lips, looking a little shocked.
"I should tell her that myself," Kaworu said, and sighed. "I shouldn't have let her hear so much, but she already knows."
Hearing them? "Why didn't you warn me she was watching us?" Shinji was too shocked to get angry, yet.
"At first because I was distracted by the call, and then because… Because I don't know how much time I have left, and since the only survivor was here... Forgive me, Shinji." Kaworu looked at him pleadingly.
"If she tells them who you are, or takes you away from me…" Shinji wouldn't forgive either of them, and made it clear by kissing Kaworu viciously, making the angel groan.
It was when Shinji started to glow that Misato grabbed her gun and burst in. "What have you done to him?" Infected him, the way other angels had infiltrated Evas and systems?
Kaworu looked up her with unfocused eyes, trying to catch his breath, as Shinji glared at her protectively and stopped glowing. "It's an anti-AT field. My father made sure I would be so miserable so that I could generate one. It means I could trigger Third Impact, and it also means that I can damage AT fields. I've been hurting Kaworu because he asked me to, so he can't hear Adam and Lilith." But she should know better than to even try to threaten an angel, much less Shinji's Kaworu with that gun.
"A human could trigger Third Impact?" Even Kaji hadn't suspected that.
"Humans are the Eighteenth Angel," Shinji said bluntly, narrowed eyes telling her she had no right to hate Kaworu because he was an angel. "The Lilim. If Kaworu dies, all of us might start getting called to merge with Adam or Lilith, because we're next in line. We probably will be called, because there already have been people trying to make sure we merge with them, all this time, so the drive is there."
Misato wished she could say he had to be lying, but this? This was the missing piece. Humans and angels had almost identical DNA except for the type of matter. Evas were derived from angels, but they could contain human souls. They were the same. She was the same as the things that had killed her father.
Her gun shook and bile rose in her throat as she lowered it to point at the ground. "The Secret Dead Sea Scrolls… Prophecies are ridiculous, but genetic memory…" Humanity's fate. An instinctive drive. Unlike many mammals, humans didn't only crave sex when they were fertile or in the presence of someone fertile. Didn't need heat to drive them to mate. Those conspiracies already wanted Third Impact: what would happen when humanity was actually driven to obtain it? Driven the way the angels had been?
Bite the bullet, she told herself. "It's related to our… why we have sex? Is that why the birthrate has been so low for so long now?" Kaji suspected it.
Kaworu and Shinji looked at each other. "I don't know for certain," the angel told her, "but Lilith cannot supply humanity with many more new souls – what you call the AT field is the light of the soul – and some humans desire Third Impact in order to create a union between the black seed and the white, which they believe will make humans into gods. I, I am the first product of such a union."
"The white and black seeds?"
"Adam and Lilith," Kaworu explained. "I was created when…"
"Kaworu!" Shinji tried to stop him.
"Your birthday is the exact date of Second Impact." She kept her gun pointed at the floor, but it was an effort not to raise it.
The angel nodded, or was it more like bowing his head.
"But I've seen a video of what set it off, they injected Adam with human genetic material," Misato objected. "So why are you an ang-Because we are." The white seed and the black?
"A second seed should not have sprouted on this world," Kaworu told her. "The black and white seeds are incompatible: the black seeds create a duplicate of the Ancestors with all their flaws and their potential, and the white seeds create more powerful beings, some would say closer to the nature of the divine. There was division among the Ancestors as to which was superior, and the two breeds find each other distasteful. To be raped, implanted with seed of the black seed…" Kaworu winced. "Nothing could keep Adam from fighting back after a violation like that, not even a lance. So this world was nearly ruined, I was born and Adam was made weak enough that SEELE could make use of him instead of him ruining their plans."
"Ra-raped?" It was hard to force the word out. Rape an angel? Rape that white giant of light? But humans were humans, and if angels, even half-angels, were close enough for Kaworu to let Shinji mark him like that?
The angel bowed his head. "Yes. I have known how I was made and what I was made for since my form was still that of a child. My birth took your father away from you, and made so many more Lilim lose their loved ones. I decided long ago that I wouldn't destroy any more of this world."
"Since you were a child," Shinji corrected him, not letting Kaworu say what he'd planned to do. He couldn't stand to hear it again, to think of Kaworu offering himself to be killed, wanting to be destroyed like an enemy for the harm he'd already done? "And you didn't ask to be born!"
Her father died when Adam struck at its tormentors? Were the angels seeking vengeance too? Just like her?
Misato turned around and walked to the kitchen. She couldn't taste the beer until she was chugging her third. Until then it didn't taste like anything, not even American beer, which at least tasted like water.
When she turned back around Shinji had Kaworu pinned down again. From the way the angel's eyebrows were drawn together that glow hurt, but it was a pain he suffered gladly. A pain he was well on his way to associating with pleasure, judging from the way she couldn't see Shinji's hands, from the soothing murmuring sounds Shinji was making, trying to take Kaworu's mind off it.
Misato casually sat herself down in a chair to enjoy the show.
If she really had been expecting that failing to get a reaction out of her would make Shinji stop it or Kaworu stop Shinji, she would have been disappointed. The angel's eyes were closed, trying to block out all of the world except for Shinji, and Shinji had planned to spend the evening not just saving Kaworu's life for a little longer, but saving Kaworu's life by having sex, which was so much better than Eva piloting. Compared to that, explaining anything to Misato, or anyone for that matter, was a complete waste of time, and he was miffed at Kaworu for trying to get it done tonight, after Shinji had already gotten excited. Ignoring her was his passive-aggressive way of getting back at them both for this. It wasn't that Kaworu would care about being watched during sex, but he would care about being rude to Misato by ignoring her.
A handful of minutes more and Kaworu let out a soft cry, sounding utterly grateful and loving and needing and undone.
…Misato wanted a boyfriend who got off on making her orgasm, possessive power trip or no power trip. Or did Shinji like seeing the angel like this? Tired, pained, driven over the edge and still needing, wanting more? Helpless in his grasp? Weak, human? Misato knew how easily men got overstimulated, and exactly how much sex had they been having for shy little Shinji to get this confident with it?
She wondered how much beer it would take for her to try to put herself in Shinji's bed again.
This time, instead of unsuccessfully trying to hide her presence from Kaworu when he went to go stand on the beheaded angel statue several meters out in the red water to make his report to SEELE she was driving him in exchange for a report. In fact, he'd patched the holographic communicator through to her laptop.
"I said, and Shinji agrees, that I should declare my opposition to them today. If they attack now, I will still be of some use," he'd told her earlier, quiet and calm even though they were talking about SEELE sending the army to attack NERV, to stop Gendo and force Kaworu to merge with Lilith, giving them the exact form of Instrumentality and Complementation they desired. Infusing the bodies born from Lilith with the nobility and power of the soul of Adam.
"Instead of Shinji having to kill you to stop you from merging with Lilith."
Kaworu smiled at her. "Yes, but he thought of someone who might help."
"Someone?"
"It's not my secret to tell," he apologized.
Someone, someone… She was sure she should know who he meant, it should be obvious, but they had almost reached the shore so she was out of time to try to put her finger on it. For now. Also, she had a battle to plan.
"There isn't anyone watching who doesn't know what I am, or won't know soon, so... I'll be back in a moment, Major Katsuragi." After she stopped the car he darted out onto the water: here at the edge it was so shallow that Misato understood how she could have failed to realize that he was running on the surface of the water, not the sand and rubble right beneath it, from her vantage point up on the hill when she spied on him before.
What did he mean by 'who won't know soon?' Misato wondered that, getting out and leaning back against her car, but she supposed that even if they were about to go to war with SEELE, that wasn't any reason to be late.
She was closer, but watching him from the back instead of the side she could actually tell less about what was going on. For now she was watching him instead of the feed he was sending to her laptop – not via a technical means SEELE might notice, but by 'infecting' it. He was the last angel (but one), and they'd all learned from those who came before.
When the conversation was over, he jumped back to shore. "You should reassure the young man who was with you when you watched me before. I believe he's on the bridge staff?" Normally they would have introduced themselves to the Fifth Child, but since Misato had them investigating him they'd all been wary. "After you have put some distance between yourself and this place." The angel looked out across the sea. "It will start very soon."
And the rogue angel would be a target. "I'll get Shinji to his Eva," she promised him. "The safest place for Asuka is inside her Eva: she's already there, and we can hide it in this lake."
"That works perfectly," he told her with a smile, happy to be of help. Misato didn't know if she'd considered him smiling all the time to be more or less creepy before she figured out that he was making an effort to be happy, perhaps to enjoy life for the sake of those who couldn't, instead of resigning himself to quite reasonable misery the way Shinji had. It wasn't a lie, he wasn't smiling to cover up unhappiness, but it must take work to find things to be happy about in the face of death. It wasn't just SEELE that was convinced when he came here that Kaworu would go after Adam within one, two days at the most. "Once I begin, the forces they send here will be trying to destroy me: they won't start dredging the lake unless I've already been taken care of."
"You're staying here."
He nodded. "Yes. This is something I've chosen for myself. Shinji understands." The angel smiled, thinking of Shinji, and she knew he didn't expect to survive. "I don't want to leave this world worse off than it was when I came into it. I can't fix all of it, but…"
"What do you mean?" Misato asked him. "Are you talking about Second Impact?" He couldn't possibly change the planet's tilt or bring billions of people back to life… Could he?
He looked out over the sea. "Nagisa. SEELE approved it because with alternate kanji it can mean messenger, which is the meaning of the word angel. I chose it because it means 'seashore.' I can't affect all the land the tsunami reached, not without creating a tsunami myself," and that would kill people, "but LCL is what you call the primordial soup: it nourishes life when directed by an AT field, and we angels can shape it to our wills. I didn't think I would really be able to attempt this, but, with Shinji's help… It might exhaust me enough for the army to get through my AT field. I would rather die trying to help this world than trying to destroy it." He turned back to her, smiling, and she was suddenly struck by the fact that his eyes were the color of that barren water, and his hair was the color of bone, as though he was so ethereal because he was already dead. "And if I'm killed before I manage to transform all the seas, and the LCL kills everything all over again, well, at least I would have tried to atone for the sin of my creation."
"The… sea?"
"I want it to be blue again. Like Shinji's eyes. I want that to be my gift to him, I want him to come to this place, where we first met, and see the proof of my love."
"An angel… Undoing the destruction that was caused by humanity. You want them to murder you while you're helping us?" Maybe her feelings began to transform into anger then, at that too kind smile, wondering if this was to make himself look better or because he considered himself superior, but he shook his head.
"They will be granting my wish by protecting their future. Killing me while I am still myself, and if they can kill me, Shinji won't have to. Please, Misato. Please survive so you can tell these men that." That they hadn't done anything wrong by attacking him. "And please hurry. This place is too exposed, and it's on a direct path to NERV. They'll be here very soon after the order is given."
She nodded like the soldier she was. "I'll protect Shinji."
"Thank you," he told her with a smile that conveyed how happy he was to see her one last time, and went to crouch at the edge of the waters, running his fingers through the watery LCL (the seas turned to blood: a sign of the apocalypse), in a way that would have seemed idle if she didn't know what he was and what he intended.
The sudden roar of her engine or the screech of her tires on the pavement as she drifted through turns back to Tokyo-3 didn't make him jump: he just kept looking down on the blood on his hand, finally lifting his gaze to the horizon, the end of the lake and the ocean beyond it.
When he heard the rattle and rumble of tanks behind him, he nodded. Time to begin: NERV would be too busy to send Shinji here to attack him, not when he was needed closer to home.
Getting to his feet, he considered sitting on the statue again, the way he had when they first met, but then he paused. "Rei. I'm glad you came." That she'd made her own choice instead of serving Gendo.
"Will you really bring the whales back? I think… I am told that I am made of light and water, that this is the nature of all of me, but the waters are…" Perhaps if she saw herself reflected in the blue sea, the third thought, she might be able to see herself there. She thought she saw herself in Shinji's eyes, but there was too much of Shinji there for her to find herself.
"If I can manage it," he told her. "First, I need to restore the plankton, since they produce oxygen and are the base link of so many food chains. Then kelp. The more LCL I leave untransformed at the end of each step, the more likely that enough will be left over when I stop to undo all my work, if I lose control of myself without warning." He tilted his head to the side of a silent question.
"If you show me how you intend to do this, I will make sure that the seas do not die again," she promised him.
"Thank you," he said, reaching out his hands to her. "But please promise me one thing: that you won't shield me. If my AT field fails, that means my soul is faltering, guttering out. When that light dies, if I am still alive, Adam's soul will awaken inside me. Don't let him use my body to harm Shinji."
"I won't allow harm to come to Shinji. That was the most important thing to the second." Who was also her, so that was her wish as well even if she didn't quite understand it yet.
Kaworu's smile as he took her hands made her happy inside, because even though he was sad he was also grateful, and he trusted her to protect Shinji. "Thank you, Rei." He closed his eyes, and she felt him raise his AT field before she saw the glow, before he raised them up into the air and over the waters, wrapping the light of his soul around them both, to protect her even though she also desired Shinji.
He seeks to ensure Shinji's happiness after he is gone, Rei knew, and knew she had been that noble once, that she had died to save Shinji's life. She wanted to become that person again, she wanted to become Kaworu's equal, equally worthy of Shinji.
If she tamely went to obey Gendo, then she never would have been worthy, she knew as she felt his soul reach out to the LCL in the water, shaping it the way the other angels must have shaped themselves bodies. First making the LCL in this lake into something akin to a transmitter or signal booster, to allow him to reach LCL even on the other side of the planet. The water beneath them became blue and green, the surface blooming with many-colored lotuses, but even though they were more beautiful than the form any other angel had taken they were simply a part of Kaworu for now, not life that could survive on its own.
Later, later. If he held out that long. This lake would be beautiful. The sea would live again, and maybe humanity would begin to believe that they and their world could truly live again.
If he held out that long. If Shinji lived to see it.
It's really sad when trying to induce codependence is healthier than what was going on before.
Defining an anti-AT field as an AT field that breaks down other AT fields, then defining the AT field as the soul/will/self, it makes sense that it was so important for the pilots to develop negative self-worth for them to be used for Third Impact. It's interesting to come up with a scenario where a weapon/effect that is something that destroys individuality/destroys souls and is thus about as evil as things get is actually helpful. It's a bit like doing surgery with a chainsaw in terms of overall danger, but when the alternative is death and/or Third Impact? As Misato reflects, the Evas are abominations but without them humanity is SOL, so oh well. A ninety percent chance of death is better than a hundred percent chance.
Note that even if Shinji has the power to cause Third Impact with his Eva and a resonating diagram and/or Rei, he's not trying to breach Kaworu's ego barrier. He doesn't want Kaworu to cease to exist or no longer have any will of his own, he's just trying to limit that will. Which IRL is extremely toxic in relationships and you should get out of there if they try to cut off outside contact/separate you from your friends, but desperate times…
