Obligatory Disclaimer:

I am not Jim Butcher, or anyone else who owns the legal rights to the Dresden Files. If I were, I would be utterly terrified of the reaction once people found out I was writing this instead of the next book in the series.

I am also not Hideaki Anno, or anyone who owns the rights to Neon Genesis Evangelion. If I were, I would be spending my time sleeping on top of a pile of money with many beautiful women instead of writing crossover fanfiction.

Sometimes, I really wanted to just punch Gendo Ikari right in the face.

He could be a ruthless son of a bitch, but that part I could live with. It's unfortunate, but in an imperfect world sometimes you need a ruthless son of a bitch to get the job done. With the survival of the entire human race at stake, I could even accept and very reluctantly agree with some of the choices he made. I'm not a big believer in the idea that the ends completely justify the means, but there were a lot of things I was prepared to do before I'd let the Third Impact happen.

I'm pretty sure that's why Lash had cut down on her efforts to tempt me into taking up the coin that contained the rest of her essence. It's not that she had given up; it's just that we both knew she didn't need to tempt me anymore. If it came down to a choice between me taking up the damned (in a very literal sense of the word) coin or letting the Third Impact happen, I wouldn't hesitate to use the power Lash offered me. I'm a big believer in sticking by your principles, but sticking by them to the point of letting billions of people die is going too far.

So, I could understand Gendo Ikari doing some nasty things in order the save the world. Problem was, he didn't limit his bastard tendencies to just that area.

The nine-year old kid walking down the street to school looked way too miserable for a child his age. His head was bowed down, his shoulders were hunched, and his eyes never rose up from their fixed gaze on the sidewalk. A set of earphones plugged into an old SDAT player completed the image of miserable isolation. The Shinji Ikari I saw now was a far cry from the cheerful little kid I'd seen with his mother seven years ago.

I'd thought more than once about trying to get closer to the poor kid; everything about him screamed how miserably alone he was. Of course, there were a huge number of reasons that wouldn't work. Unfortunately, in this day and age a strange man, especially a foreigner like me, couldn't just walk up to a little boy and be his friend without lots of people getting the wrong idea. All those years of warning kids about 'stranger danger' had their side effects.

Plus, there was no telling how Gendo would react to me going out of my way to befriend his son. Sure, he might have tossed the kid aside shortly after Yui's death, but I knew he got regular reports on how Shinji was doing, and word would get back to him quickly if I approached the kid. Gendo was a hard man to read, but getting myself involved in his private family business probably wouldn't go over well.

On top of that, if I was honest with myself, there probably wasn't all that much I could really do for the kid. I suppose if everything worked out right I could've been his friend, but Shinji Ikari didn't need a friend, he needed a father. His father. That was where his real problem lay. He felt like his father had rejected him, and no amount of friendship or approval from anyone else could ever fill the gap that left in his heart. In time, the kid would probably learn to deal with it, people are good at learning to survive no matter how painful life is, but he'd always carry the scars.

Then again, I'm not sure how much of my desire to look out for Shinji was actually driven by genuine human decency, as opposed to just being a way of displacing my guilt over my part in what happened to his mother. It might have been Yui's decision to merge her soul with Unit 01, but if I'd said or done something differently she might not have made that choice.

At least the kid had decent guardians. He'd been bounced around between a bunch of different people over the years, but Gendo apparently cared enough to have someone do the research first and make sure he wasn't getting tossed into a bad home. Back when I was a kid I hadn't been that lucky; nothing serious until DuMorne, but I'd had a few foster parents who thought it was alright to smack me once or twice when they were drunk or just in a bad mood. At least Shinji didn't have problems like that.

So, in the end, I could only do a few little things for him. I checked up on the kid every once in a while, sent him a little birthday present every year that went along with the one Fuyutsuki bought for him and put Gendo's name on. I did little things that I hoped could help him out a bit. And I nursed my budding hatred for Gendo Ikari.

With the official transformation of the research group Gehirn into the paramilitary organization Nerv set to happen tomorrow, I was in Tokyo-3 to deal with my part in the massive amount of red tape that inevitably accumulates around any major government action. Turning Gehirn into Nerv was a lot more complicated that just changing the stationary.

I personally had an extra set of complications to work out, since my status in Gehirn didn't transfer very easily to Nerv. Gehirn hadn't been that large of an organization, and for the most part the hierarchy had been fairly informal. As a paramilitary organization, Nerv couldn't get away with that kind of loose attitude. Nerv needed to have a clear chain of command and strictly defined lines of responsibility, rather than the loose system that was acceptable in the Gehirn days.

That level of strict hierarchy was a problem for my role in the new organization. Unsurprisingly, my actual status as Gehirn's in-house wizard wasn't the sort of thing you could put on the official forms for the UN. Technically speaking, for the last seven years I had just been an ordinary civilian consultant under contract to Gehirn. Officially, a contracted civilian like me should have anywhere near the authority, access, or knowledge that I did. Gehirn had been able to get away with stretching the definition of civilian contractor to include me; Nerv couldn't.

Suffice to say, after a day's worth of navigating the bureaucratic maze that was the UN and brainstorming with Fuyutsuki, we had managed to hammer out something that should satisfy the requirements for the new organization. My official title was a long string of appropriately military jargon that could basically be summed up as "high-ranking guy with vaguely defined duties who reports directly to the Commander."

Nerv being a paramilitary organization, my title was also accompanied by an equivalent-rank of Major in the Nerv chain of command. I was still a civilian so I didn't actually hold military rank, but the equivalent-rank clarified my position in the hierarchy so that if I told a Lieutenant to do something the soldier would do it instead of my request causing a bunch of confusion as everyone tried to sort whether or not they actually had to listen to me.

Being a Major-equivalent put me below the Research Director and the Operations Director (both of whom would Lt. Colonels, though Akagi held equivalent rank like me), and obviously the Commander and Sub-Commander outranked me, but finding out I was officially fifth in the chain of command of the main branch of Nerv was a bit of a shock. Then again, if we were in a situation where Ikari, Fuyutsuki, Akagi, and Katsuragi were all unavailable, I would be the only person in Nerv available who would know about things like the fact that we had Lilith down in Terminal Dogma, so I suppose there is a certain kind of logic to it, and as far as I knew I had more actual combat experience than anyone other than Misato. I would say that the odds of me actually ever having to use that hypothetical authority or non-existent, but I've seen enough movies to know that if I actually say that there's no way I'll ever end up in command then I would just be jinxing myself, and it would definitely happen.

Technically speaking, I would actually be #4 in the chain of command for the next few years. While her won impressive record and recommendations from Ritsuko and myself had gotten Misato earmarked as the future Operations Director, Nerv wasn't actually going to need an Operations Department until we started combat operations against the Angels. For the next few years, Misato would be in Germany working on the training program for the future Evangelion pilots.

My new status at Nerv did add a few other complications. While I didn't have to move just yet, I did need to have a residence in Tokyo-3 for appearances' sake. Explaining that I could make the commute from Chicago to Tokyo-3 in about half an hour wouldn't really fly with all those pesky government agencies that don't believe in things like magic.

Any further musing I might have done on the changes in my status at Nerv were cut short when I noticed the only blond currently in Gehirn's employ approaching me intently. I offered her a polite greeting, while being vaguely annoyed by the fact that Ritsuko and were on a last-name basis. It's not that I really wanted to be friends with her or anything; it's just that since I was also on a last name basis with her mother, so it led to some annoyances when I had to clarify which Akagi I was referring to.

"Hello Mr. Dresden." Ritsuko's tone was terse and businesslike, but then most of the time I spoke with her she was either terse or bitingly sarcastic. "If you could come with me Mr. Dresden, there is something I would like to show you." Ritsuko was still a relative newcomer to Gehirn, and since she was working under her mother she no doubt felt like she was under even more pressure than usual to prove herself. Personally, I wondered if she might not have been happier working a different field; it was obvious that she felt a bit overshadowed by her famous and well-established mother, and she likely would have had an easier time making her own identity elsewhere. As it is, I'm pretty sure part of the reason she dyed her hair was to lessen the family resemblance between them. I know Molly has gone though a couple dozen bottle of hair dye in the process of figuring out her identity. At least Ritsuko stuck with blond instead of some of the crazy colors Molly's tried over the years, and never took an interest in piercings. The mental image of Ritsuko Akagi with pink hair and a nose ring was good for a few giggles.

"I will follow your lead, Fearless Leader." I suppose the younger Akagi and I did have a semi-decent working relationship, just because she had enough of a sarcastic streak that I didn't worry about indulging my inner smartass with her. Helping Misato snag her job at Nerv probably helped too, though from what I knew of the two women it seemed like they had a rather unlikely friendship. Well, it wouldn't be the first time two people with very different personalities somehow managed to get along with each other. At least she'd adjusted to the whole wizard thing reasonably well; of course, she probably knew about me from her mother before she started working at Nerv two years ago, so she'd had plenty of time.

A few minutes later the two of us arrived at the mostly completed command center at Central Dogma. There were still a lot of little things left to be done before the command center would up and ready, but all the basic framework had been completed, and moving in the equipment and getting everything else set up would only take a few months. Of course, the lighting was still less than ideal, and there was a lot of bare metal, but those were cosmetic details.

The thing that immediately caught my attention was the thick red stripe running along the floor and walls of the room in a rough semi-circle, which looked fresh enough that I suspected touching it would get my hands stained. "Do you see that line, Mister Dresden?"

"Kind of hard to miss." I quipped.

"You are not allowed to cross that line. Ever."

"Any particular reason? Is that where Nerv's 'No Harrys' club is going to meet and complain about me and my barbaric uncultured American ways?"

Ritsuko's lips gave a brief upward twitch before returning to a stonily serious expression. "If you cross that line, Mister Dresden, you will have come within thirty meters of the Magi supercomputers. The most advanced supercomputers on the planet, which will be responsible for running most of Nerv HQs essential functions. The supercomputers that my mother and I have spent the last seven years and billions of yen creating. That is why you may not cross this line."

"I have gotten pretty good at suppressing my magical energy, you know." I protested halfheartedly. The thing was, while she could have been a bit less brusque about it, I pretty much agreed with her overall point. It was the same reason I wouldn't get too close to other parts of Nerv-HQ, like the nuclear reactor that was going to power the entire facility; any glitches I could cause might have catastrophic consequences. Seven years of practicing and tweaking my tricks for suppressing the stray bits of magical energy that caused tech to die around me had gotten it to the point where as long as I kept a cool head and didn't actually sling any power around, I would almost never cause problems, but even a million-to-one chance of something going wrong was way too big of a risk to take when it came to the supercomputers running all of Nerv-HQ or anything with the word nuclear in it.

Still, the whole 'Harry Dresden Exclusion Zone' thing could have been worded a bit more diplomatically. "I've got it, Ritsuko. If I cross the line and get too close to Magi, you kill me."

"No, I'm not allowed to kill you while Commander Ikari still has a use for you." Ritsuko deadpanned. "So, if you cross that line without a very good reason, I'll castrate you." Ritsuko gave a nasty and asked all-too-sweetly "That won't interfere with your ability to perform your duties at Nerv, right?"

"Okay." I drew the word out a bit to cover my instinctive wince at the thought of anything happening to that part of my anatomy. "I think I'll just stay on this side of the line from now on, so we'll never have to find out if that will be a problem. I'm glad we had this talk." I heard a snigger in the back of my mind, and after confirming that Ritsuko wasn't the source of it, mentally commanded the fallen angel sharing my brain space to stop laughing at me. Unfortunately, that only seemed to encourage her.

I tell you, I get no respect at all.

Now that she was done delivering her ultimatum, a brief silence fell between Ritsuko and I, before the blond spoke up once more, this time keeping her tone a bit more friendly. "By the way, Misato's going to be in Tokyo-3 tonight; you're not the only one who needs to jump through a few bureaucratic hoops to deal with the changeover." Ritsuko paused for a few moments, and then added. "She and I were planning to go out for drinks later."

I was a bit surprised by the implicit invitation, though I suppose I shouldn't have been. After all, like many young people eager to prove themselves Ritsuko was a workaholic who almost never left the Geofront, so I probably was one of the few people in her rough age group that she actually associated with on a regular basis, and we did get along reasonably well. I had been planning to just head back to Chicago in a bit, but I didn't really have a pressing need to do so, and spending an evening with a pair of attractive twenty-somethings sounded reasonably appealing. Granted, even if they were interested it would probably be a bad idea to actually get romantically involved with either of them, and might even be against some of Nerv's rules, but there was nothing wrong with just a bit of harmless socializing, and I could live with 'look, but don't touch.' Keeping my attitude appropriately casual I remarked. "I've got one or two things to take care of here; if I finish up in time, I might join you two."

Ritsuko simply nodded, then glanced at me, taking appropriate care not to look me in the eyes. "By the way Mister Dresden, did the two of you really kill vampires in South America?" I recognized the tone Ritsuko had; it was the way a lot of people talked when they knew enough about the all things magical to accept that some parts of it existed, but hadn't quite adapted their worldview to encompass the existence of an entire supernatural world. Ritsuko could accept that I was a wizard, but she was still having a bit of trouble dealing with things like vampires.

"I killed the vampires; Misato just stood on the sidelines commenting on how awesome and manly I was the entire time." I dropped my voice to a stage whisper and added. "Don't say anything if she claims that she took down a vampire that was about five seconds away from eating me; I actually had the situation under control, but I don't want to hurt her pride too much. Besides, it would have been rude to kill all of the vampires by myself."

"How very generous of you." Ritsuko deadpanned.

The two of us parted ways, Ritsuko taking off for her meeting with her old friend, while headed down several levels within the half-finished headquarters to reach the area that had essentially become my domain. I actually didn't need much more than a large conference room, and even that was mostly just because of how much space Little Tokyo-3 took up. Aside from that all I really needed were a few shelves for supplies, a filing cabinet to keep my notes in, and the secure locker for the staff hair samples and a few of the more valuable or hazardous materials I worked with.

Most the space allocated for my use was actually just a buffer zone, so that I wouldn't fry any equipment when I had to make with the magic. Considering the sheer size of the massive underground Geofront complex, space was one thing we had plenty of. Of course, not all the space was going to waste; I did have a nice backup lab/workshop put together for when I would need to do my work here. That was one of the downsides of Tokyo-3; large basement apartments were a bit problematic when the city was suspended over a massive underground cavity.

Given the general techbane nature of my lair, and the fact that I had made it fairly clear that messing around with some of my magical equipment could have unpleasant consequences, it was pretty rare for anyone else aside from me to be there. So, I was a little surprised to find a nine-year-old girl standing in my lab, studying Little Tokyo-3 intently.

I'd heard about the young girl Gendo Ikari had apparently taken in, but I'd never actually had the chance to meet her before. I was reasonably certain that this child was in fact Rei Ayanami; the odds of there being more than one pale-skinned blue-haired red-eyed nine-year-old running around the Geofront were pretty low. Since Molly's hair had gone through just about every color of the rainbow, including a shade of blue pretty close to Rei's, I had enough experience to recognize that Rei's hair was probably naturally that color. After all, Molly had never bothered to dye her eyebrows. I wasn't as surprised by the girl's unusual appearance as most people were; being a wizard, naturally blue hair ranks pretty low on my weird -shitometer.

Rei simply regarded me levelly, a blank expression on her face, while I wrapped my mind around the fact that an unsupervised child had been running around a whole lot of delicate magical gear. Once the silence extended to the point of being awkward, I decided to deal with one thing at a time, and put on my best kid-friendly smile. "Well hello there Rei. You are Rei, aren't you?" The child gave a slight nod in response to my rhetorical question. "Well, I'm Harry Dresden; nice to meet you."

"Hello Mister Dresden." The girl answered softly, her face still devoid of any expression.

"So … what are you doing here by yourself?" A quick once-over confirmed that she had not inflicted any obvious damage on my lab, although considering how flat and generally lifeless she was acting, I couldn't really imagine her running around screaming and inflicting random destruction the way some little kids her age are wont to do.

"The Commander is occupied with other matters, and instructed me to familiarize myself with the layout of the Geofront." A couple seconds later, Rei added. "I am lost." The girl said this without a hint of the shame or embarrassment most children would show upon admitting this. "I was studying this model in the hopes that it would allow me to ascertain my current location."

Something about the girl was nagging on me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. A second later, the voice in my head provided the answer, and an illusionary Yui Ikari sprang into being right next to Rei. As soon as I saw the two of them side-by-side, I realized that aside from the hair and eye colors, and the obvious differences in age and size, the two of them were identical. They even had the same haircut.

Thanks Lash. She might be trying to tempt me into damnation, but having a fallen angel in your head can be handy when said Fallen has a photographic memory and makes the best illusions I've ever seen.

I live to serve, my host. Lash tried to sound humble, but there was just a bit too much snark in her tone to make it believable. She was getting to be more and more of a smartass over the years; I must be having a bad influence on her. At least I hadn't turned her into a pervert like Bob … yet.

Now I knew something was definitely off about the girl. On top of the odd hair and eye colors, which weren't necessarily a sign of anything spooky by themselves, there was the fact that she was a mini-Yui, and as I studied the girl I noted an air of subtle wrongness surrounding the girl. Almost everything about her, from her blank expression to the way she seemed to study whatever she looked at just a bit too intently, seemed just the slightest bit off.

I opened my Third Eye, and Saw Rei Ayanami. I wasn't expecting anything too extreme; if I had to guess, I would have said that Gendo had tried to clone his wife, or maybe artificially produce a child using stored genetic material, and it hadn't come out quite right. As often happens distressingly often when I assume something isn't dangerous, I was wrong. Fortunately, I guess curiosity takes a little bit longer to kill the wizard than it does the cat (not that's it has caused Mister any trouble).

Try to imagine you saw something so indescribably that you literally couldn't even begin to comprehend what it was. Imagine that when you looked at it you saw colors that shouldn't exist, arranged in impossible shapes. Everything about her was just so alien. So wrong.

And yet, at the same time, she was also a human child. She was a little hungry, and a bit nervous about the fact that she was lost and didn't know where her guardian was or how to get back to him.

I think it was duality of it that really got to me. The fact that Rei Ayanami was simultaneously an utterly inhuman abomination and a little child. It was trying to wrap my mind around that concept, the fact that she could simultaneously be both of these utterly contradictory things that really did it. It was like trying to make yourself accept that blue and orange were actually the same color. Her very existence and nature were an affront to my entire sense of reality.

It was a struggle to force my Sight closed, especially since I was being distracted by someone in the room screaming and gibbering incoherently at the top of their lungs. I eventually realized with a detached sort of surprise that it was me. However, I was eventually able to calm myself, close my sight, force myself not to think of what I had just Seen, and return my mind to the present.

I took several deep breaths as a I slowly enhanced my calm, and then opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was Rei, looking at me, her head cocked slightly to the side like a curious bird studying something that caught her interest.

And I remembered.

The next few hours are a bit fuzzy in my memory. If you've ever really tried not to think of something, then you know it's just impossible to do. That goes double for anything you see with the Sight, since for the rest of your life, you always remember it with absolute crystalline clarity. Even if I lived for centuries, as many powerful wizards did, I would always recall every detail of the horror of Seeing Rei as if it had happened just moments ago.

Still, while the memory could never be forgotten or blocked out, it could be endured. So I remembered. And I suffered. And I remembered again. With each repetition of the cycle, I moved forward. People are tough, and we know how to adapt in order to survive. While it was still a horrifying thing, the second time I remembered what I had Seen hurt less than the first, and the third time hurt even less than that. The memory would never stop being viscerally horrifying on a certain level, but I forced myself to learn how to live with that horror.

Like they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

When I finally began to recover from the shock of Seeing Rei, I wasn't quite sure where I was; I'd been expecting to wake up in a hospital bed, not the middle of a sunny field of flowers. A couple seconds later, I realized that if wasn't in a bed, than the soft, warm thing my head was resting on probably wasn't a pillow. That was confirmed a moment later, when my headrest shifted a bit, and a soft, feminine hand gently brushed over my forehead.

When I finally looked up, I saw the tall, athletic blond form Lash was fond of assuming whenever she presented herself to me. Since my head was currently resting on her lap I couldn't tell for sure, but I was reasonably sure she was also wearing her normal Greco-Roman style tunic. I knew she was quite capable of changing the image she presented to me at will, but for some reason she favored this particular form. Maybe it was a close approximation to her true form back when she had been an angel. Then again, given that her whole deal was to tempt me into darkness, maybe the form she used around me was some sort ideal woman who I was supposed to be find impossible to resist; it's not like she couldn't have pulled that out of my subconscious if she really wanted to.

"Feeling better now Harry?" Lash smiled down at me kindly.

"Yeah." The smart thing to do would have been to move; cuddling with a fallen angel was almost certainly a bad idea, not to mention the weird factor that came from all of this just being an illusion she was projecting inside my head. However, it was a very nice illusion. When you've just been through some nasty psychic trauma, there are few things that can top a beautiful woman's lap for offering comfort. So I didn't quite get around to objecting. "Thanks Lash."

"I live to serve, my host." There was more than a hint of sarcasm in her voice; like I said before, I'm a bad influence on her. Lash's expression shifted to one of concern. "By the way Harry, Ikari is waiting to speak to you, presumably about the … thing you Saw." Clearly, Lash was a bit put out by the experience; then again, she'd always seemed rather annoyed by anything related to the Angels, mostly because it was one of the few topics she knew absolutely nothing about, and she usually enjoyed lording her superior knowledge and experience over me. "Are you ready to face him?"

"No time like the present." I blinked, and suddenly instead of being in a flower-filled field with Lash, I was in an ordinary featureless white hospital room. Gendo Ikari set the book he had been reading aside, and turned to face me, placing his hands the armrests of his chair and folding his hands across the lower half of his face. It seemed to be his favorite pose for any serious discussion; maybe the man just has such a crappy poker face that the only way to keep people from reading him like an open book was to hide as much of his face as possible.

The smart thing to do probably would have been to play it cool. Maybe try to deny that I knew anything at all, or play it like I knew more than I actually did, and see if I could trick him into revealing enough facts for me to fill in the gaps. However, after spending a couple of hours putting myself through a psychic wringer, I wasn't in the mood to be diplomatic and play word games.

So instead I jumped out of bed, strode over to the man, grabbed two handfuls of his labcoat, yanked him right out of his chair, and slammed him against the wall. "What the hell have you done?" A quick check confirmed that my staff and blasting rod were in the corner of the room, and he'd left the rest of my magical gear on me. I guess that means he either hadn't been expecting the conversation to get violent, or was confident in his ability to talk me down.

Gendo certainly seemed perfectly calm despite the fact that I was kind of assaulting him at the moment; he wasn't trying to resist or break my grip; instead he just calmly looked me directly in the eyes. There was a hint of challenge in his face, a tightening of the jawline and hardening of his eyes. I didn't back down; to be honest, I wanted to soulgaze him, if for no other reason than to get past that shell of detached disinterest he constantly carried around himself, and figure how the hell he could do some of the things he did.

What I found was unexpected. Well, that's not entirely true; the first things I discovered about him were pretty much exactly what I had expected. Gendo Ikari was a cold and driven man. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he would let absolutely nothing get in his way, and do absolutely anything if it could help him accomplish his goals. If I threatened his goals he would order my death without a moment's hesitation; if I could help him, he would put all the resources of Nerv at my disposal.

It was what lay underneath the cold, driven man that surprised me. It was the small, hidden core of self-loathing that was so deeply buried that he probably didn't even know that it existed himself. He blamed himself for what happened to Yui; he should have found another way to make the Evangelion work, or barring that at least found a way to convince her not to sacrifice herself. He blamed himself for what happened to her.

Even more surprising was the subject of his son. At least now I understood why the man had been a bastard to his Shinji, and I suppose in a way it was oddly to his credit. Gendo Ikari knew he was a terrible father. That was why he had abandoned Shinji; not simply out of cruelty or callousness (though those were certainly factors in how and why he had made that decision) but also because the man genuinely believed that Shinji was better off without his father in his life.

It might have made me feel a bit sympathetic towards the bastard, if not for the fact that he was right. Gendo Ikari was a terrible father. After all, if it came down to it, Gendo wouldn't hesitate to use Shinji just like he would any other asset. That's what it meant to have no limits in the pursuit of his goals. Shinji was better off far away from the man, and as much as it hurt the kid to be tossed aside by his only remaining parent, Gendo actually trying to raise him would have made things infinitely worse. At least now, the kid might one day be able to have a normal life.

The soulgaze ended, and I released Gendo and took a half-step back as I recovered from the effects of it. For his part, Gendo simply adjusted his glasses, and then calmly declared. "Rei Ayanami's creation was necessary. The combination of Angel and Human DNA has provided us with invaluable insights, and her hybrid nature should allow her to be a superior Evangelion pilot."

"She's an abomination." I snapped at the man.

"Yes. Rei Ayanami is a necessary abomination, as are the Evangelions themselves. As I'm sure you understand now, I will create as many abominations as I must to accomplish Nerv's purpose." Gendo's eyes narrowed. "Don't try to pretend you wouldn't do the same. That you haven't done the same."

Next thing I knew, the knuckles on my right hand stung a bit, and Gendo had a rapidly forming bruise on his jaw and trickle of blood running down his lip. "Shut up. I'm nothing like you." The hell of it was, I knew that on some level he was right. I wasn't the cold-hearted bastard that Gendo Ikari was, but there were times when I'd gotten downright brutal with my enemies; I knew that I had the capacity to do terrible things if that was what it took to win the day. I'd killed, without mercy or hesitation. Even if I hadn't gone all the way into damnation yet, I'd made my little deal with the devil by working with Lash.

But I wasn't like Gendo. After all, I had compunctions; Gendo never stayed up at night worrying that he might have gone too far. Never worried that he had crossed the line. Never regretted the hard choices he made. I did. That was the difference between us. I had regrets.

Like Susan. I loved her; still did, really. What happened to her was my fault. When the Fellowship of St. Giles came hunting for Bianca, I helped them. After all, the Red Court was weak, shattered, and in disarray, and the chance to get rid of Bianca was too tempting to pass up. I didn't realize until too late that few things are more dangerous than a cornered beast. As far as I know, Susan's still alive, but I haven't seen her since the day she Chicago left with the Fellowship fourteen years ago.

Gendo Ikari didn't feel regret like that. The closest thing he had was how he felt about what happened to Yui, and even that was closer to toxic obsession of self-loathing than actual regret. Gendo slowly turned to face me once more, and readjusted his glasses, which had been knocked askew when I punched him. "Are you satisfied now?"

"Not nearly." I growled back at the bastard.

"But it won't effect your decision to work at Nerv." The calm assurance with which Gendo stated this was utterly infuriating.

"Yeah, stopping the Third Impact's important enough that I'll force myself to put with you." I leaned forward and gave the man a tight smile that carried not a hint of warmth. "But make no mistake, Gendo. We're not friends, we're not even comrades in arms, and once the last Angel goes down, you'll just be another monster on my list." He was pretty close to the top of the list too; right now I wanted to take Gendo down a lot more than I did the likes of Lara Raith or John Marcone.

"That's fine, Mister Dresden." Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure he meant it too. As long as I stuck around long enough to help him get the victory he was aiming for, he didn't really care if he wound up in prison or dead afterwards. "Now then, I believe you need a full briefing on Rei Ayanami." Some degree of shock must have shown on my face, because Gendo gave the barest hint of a smirk as he added. "Giving you a proper briefing will be far less painful for all of us than letting you find the truth on your own after smashing through anything that gets in your way."

Put in that light, I guess it did make sense to just tell me the facts instead. Of course, I wouldn't put it past the bastard to say he was telling me everything while hiding a few of the important little details. "If you'll follow me, Mister. Dresden…"

Author's Note: As indicated in the story, I'm going with Misato's rank in the Rebuild films rather than the TV series, mostly because Captain seems like kind of a low rank for the kind authority she wields while running battles that will decide the fate of the entire planet. Plus, everyone knows that Colonel is the most inherently badass military rank ever.

Also, I hadn't originally planned to include so much interaction between Harry and Ritsuko. In hindsight though, it does seem rather obvious that a smartass like Harry would get along well with the most sarcastic and snarky character in Evangelion.