Author's Note: I thought it was important that I get the truth of Ryū across in this chapter, and though I was expecting to go further with it, this is just too good of a stopping point. Please R I have so many concerns with this one. I kept asking myself, "Am I going too far down the rabbit hole?" And that other tedious question, "Am I going down it far enough," was also tossed around enough to make it a legitimate concern. So tell me how you all feel about it, and I'll get back in a flash.

Dateline: 2330 hours, 25.12.2017

Location: Penthouse 14-B, 1074 Anohana, Tokyo-3

I spiraled down an endless corridor that night as I slept, the familiar pleasure of once again laying my hands upon and playing the cello for the first time in over a year relegated to naught but a shadow of a memory. Nothing about the dream made any sort of sense… Snippets of conversations, shards of individual moments…all of these things ran together within the recesses of my mind, and sprinkled amidst the mixture were eldritch scenes I knew to be memories of what I had undergone during Instrumentality. And none of it made any…fucking…sense! It became painful and frustrating, these gaps in memory, individual moments like a debris field floating aimlessly in the space of my brain, missing the single, central component that had once forced the memory-dust to compact and form a cohesive, spherical whole.

Unwittingly, I woke screaming, cold sweat running in rivulets down my face. I clutched my temples, doubling over as the pain in my head assaulted me: I felt as if there were several dozen chisels being dug into my head at once, and it was only getting progressively worse from there on in, the pain intensifying and magnifying, but always coming in pangs, like a headache… No, not a headache; a migraine. A migraine so powerful that a few seconds later, a pang came that sent me to the floor with a cry, my vision blurring, darkening and then sharpening again, always fluctuating, never stable enough to give me anything to hold onto. I was a man at sea who had lost both his tiller and his bearings in the midst of a hurricane, lost and desperate, pained and just fighting now to survive…to stay alive with some semblance of sanity intact.

Crawling on autopilot, before I realized it I had moved out of my room and into the salon where Ryū sat, staring out of the window, gloves, turtleneck, pants, boots and coat all on him as he smoked a cigarette and watched the city of Tokyo-3 at night. Had I been in a different position, I would have noticed his glowing scarlet eyes which seemed to be bottomless, yawning pits, his unnatural pallor which far outstripped what he usually bore in terms of skin tone, and the absolute agelessness of his face, but as it stood, I could barely think coherently enough to remember my own name, let alone notice the differences in one with whom I had lived for two, almost three months. Somehow, I knew that I just…had to…reach him…

"Shinji!" he exclaimed, rushing over to me on the ground, crouched down and swiftly peeling his gloves off to reveal white, bony hands with long, sharp nails. He placed his hands onto my temples and cradled my head back to force me to look him in his scarlet eyes with their cat-like slits for pupils. "Shinji…you're in pain…almost as if…" A look of bitter comprehension dawned on him right then, and when next he looked to me, it was almost…apologetic? "Shinji, I know the memories hurt… Hell knows I do. I am sorry; I have done you a great disservice. But for what it is worth, I will tell you what is going on: your subconscious can no longer cope with the strain of what I have enforced upon it. It is now time to correct that egregious mistake." With that, he retracted his hands from my face, took mine away from my temples, and drove the first two fingers of each of his hands onto those same spots…hard.

I gasped reflexively; for suddenly, within the expanse of my mind, I felt Ryū's presence. Don't ask me how I knew it was his, because I don't know either. It just…was. Suddenly, the swirling images abated and resolved themselves as I was pulled back into my subconscious, and when everything else was gone, there I stood, just there, in the midst of an odd room…a circular chamber that was filled with exactly thirty-two doors. No, I didn't count them; it was just one of the things I knew, akin to the knowledge one has in the midst of a dream. It felt…empty, somehow; as if it was usually accustomed to hosting hundreds of occupants in its area. I looked about, resolving to try and find the way to progress, to learn what was in this strange little wonderland, this little trip down the rabbit-whole.

"Don't bother," came a voice from all around which made my semi-coherent thoughts freeze in place. "Out of all of these doors, there is only one that leads out; all the rest lead to…different avenues; madness, the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging, the Cage…the chamber of the Supernatural Anesthetist (which, believe me, is not a place you want to be headed)…the list goes on." The voice localized, now coming from directly behind me. "The only way I've ever found to get out of here is to ask help from Lilith."

"L…Lilith?" I asked, confused.

"Yes…Lilith. Lilywhite Lilith. A blind woman who knows a great deal about what lies beyond the Chamber. What pitfalls, what dangers…what wonders. Though I doubt that your sister has the ability to guide us now that she is out of the LCL Sea, and thus not part of the collective unconscious that allows her to access this world." I turned around, and lo and behold, there stood Ryū, cigarette held languidly in his hand as it always was, but behind him his shadow wriggled and writhed, always shifting upon the red carpet that covered the floor.

"Where am I?" I muttered. "Rather, where are we?"

"'Where are we?' An excellent question," he said. "Currently, we are in a place known only as the Chamber of 32 Doors, beyond which lies the Waiting Room and the Pool of the Lamia, and then onto the Colony of Slipper-men. But right now, Shinji, I'm not here to take you on a tour of the Underworld. I'm here to take you on a tour of memories, to help you cope with things that you never quite learned to deal with."

"Why?"

"Because of who you are, Shinji," he replied. "And because of who I am. Come; we have much to see." With that, he turned and walked up to a single door, throwing it open and beckoning me through. Nodding my acquiescence, I followed his instructions, and taking a deep breath, I took the plunge with him into the Abyss that lied beyond. And suddenly we were both falling; falling down an endless chasm. Ryū's arms wrapped around my waist, and as I looked up, I glimpsed scarlet wings of energy that seemed to emulate the skeletal structures of bat-wings, and our descent slowed to a stop, landing us upon a circular platform in the midst of the darkness, the platform edged by the image of a winged red dragon devouring its own tail. "The Ouroboros of the Dragon, the sigil of Clan Dracula," he muttered. "Interesting. We're getting close. It isn't far now."

"Wait, close to what? What isn't far?" I demanded, getting impatient. "I want answers."

"And so you shall have them, Shinji-kun," he replied, turning to me with a wry smile. "All in good time. As to where we're going, well…we're running for the border." Seeing my confused expression, he explained: "The border between you and me; a very tenuous and tenebrous line indeed. You'll see why in only a little while. Regardless, we should be moving… They're already waiting for our arrival."

I tried to hold in my questions about who was waiting, I really did, but I simply couldn't accept "you'll see" as an answer on this one. Too many questions had gone unanswered; questions that, if the feeling (of indeterminate origin) of indignation at being kept in the dark was any metric, needed to be answered. "Who is going to be waiting for us?" I asked, a measure of danger entering my tone that surprised even me–especially me, for some reason.

Ryū looked back at me, a bemused smirk upon his face, but the set of his eyes expressing approval. "Why, my dear Shinji-kun, haven't you guessed? We're going to meet the other versions of myself…" He trailed off and turned to face me, projecting the full force of his gaze at my mental representation of myself significantly. And then I was filled with a sort of existential trepidation at the anticipation of what his answer would be, meaning that there was little more that I dreaded more than him replying to my question. Finally, after a short but dramatic pause, he finished: "…And ADAM."

ADAM.

Why did that name sound so terrifyingly familiar?

Ryū snapped his fingers, and in the distance a pinprick of light resolved itself. Then it grew brighter. Then larger. Then both. I stifled the urge to gasp as I realized what was happening: it was moving towards us. Of course it's moving towards you, idiot, I thought. It's your head, after all!

"That it is," chuckled Ryū. "That it is."

I paled, then introduced my palm to my face as the answer came to me. We were inside my head; therefore, it should have been obvious that actively thinking anything would be as private as yelling it out loud at the top of my lungs…in public. "Right… Inside my head…"

"Mental exploration takes a while for anyone to get used to, Shinji," assured Ryū. "In fact, I have to admit that I'm rather impressed that you've done as well as you have so far. So do not berate yourself so; we travel into uncharted territory, you for your first time. How is it then unnatural or a failing of capacity to then become lost now and again?"

"I suppose you're right," I sighed.

He regarded me with an understanding, friendly smile. "Wipe the storm-cloud from your brow, Shinji. What we will have to do together… I shall not lie to you; it will be painful. But in the end, it shall be worth it: for this shall break your chains, and you shall thus be free."

I nodded mutely; I still had no idea of what he was talking about, but on some level, this resonated with a very basic, very hidden part of myself; thus satisfied that I wasn't walking into the rabbit-hole blind, I simply stood and waited for the opening at the end of the tunnel to reach us, and through the portal we passed, into a strange, unfamiliar room, with walls and floors of what looked like black granite, huge arched windows, an arched and arcaded ceiling high above, and at the back of the room was a large stone carving of a Western dragon, fearsome, realistic and beautiful; but upon more focused scrutiny, I saw that throughout it ran a system of shining silvery pipes, centered about the keyboard of a great, elegant pipe organ, nestled within the dragon's wide-open mouth, curving staircases on either side of the dragon and going up.

"It's…spectacular," I muttered, transfixed and dazed by the grandeur I saw all about me.

"I'm glad you like it," Ryū replied in a mocking tone, but with an underlying message of sincerity that told him that it was truly an act, and not even one he wished to conceal. "This is Ravenswood Manor…the boundary between me and you. They are here already; that is good. Shinji," he said. "In order for this to work, I need you to trust me. And to truly trust me, you must know me for what I am. In turn, I will do what I can to heal your wounds, for they run deep and savage, some festering, others with so much corrupted tissue about them that maggots travel from far and wide to partake of their bounty."

"Wha…what do you mean?" I asked, confused.

{He means that he is not what he appears to be}

I whipped my head about, searching…I knew that voice!

{Yep. Been a bit since we could talk like this, Shinji}

From the shadows of the room, the body I knew somehow to be the source of the voice emerged, and I gasped at its appearance. Walking up to stand before me was a mirror image of myself at fourteen, save for the inky-black hair atop his head…and the scarlet eyes with diamond-shaped pupils that were set into an all-too-familiar head. He was pale, thin, and looked a little sickly, but it was most undoubtedly based upon a representation of me.

{So good that we can finally meet face-to-face, Shinji-kun}

He extended a hand in greetings, a wide smile upon his face (though how I knew that it was a face far more accustomed to expressions of rage or feral grins was beyond my knowledge). Nervously, I took his hand in my own and shook it as firmly as I could manage. Then, he turned his gaze to Ryū, and his eyes narrowed.

{You bastard. You sealed me up in there…}

"It was for your own good as well as Shinji's wellbeing," Ryū deflected, seemingly casual save for a dark edge of murder upon his tone. "You nearly drove him to…well…let's just say that six grams of morphine is the antimatter to whatever leverage you might have had upon which to stand in judgement of me or my actions. So I would suggest, ADAM, that you should keep your complaints to yourself when it comes to precautions that must be taken to protect him from you."

The nigh-on clone of me…ADAM…reeled as if struck, shadows of crushing guilt entering into his eyes and making themselves visible to all who looked closely, as I did. Though, confusion reigned as a memory returned, like the word that had been on the tip of your tongue all day that you only just now remembered. "Wait, you…you can't be the ADAM! Kaworu was the host of the soul of ADAM, not me!" The end bit just slipped out, but as soon as I had realized my slip-up, some part of myself had accepted and verified the truth of it.

The Seed of Life snorted derisively. {They tried to leash my soul into the body of Kaworu Nagisa, saw that he had developed a Super Solenoid Organ, and thus summarily declared a success. Old fools, the lot of them. You have been my host since before you were born, Shinji; a product of the Contact Experiment your mother initiated to get my original body to revert to larval form. Imagine it: a body that was once a giant of light, relegated to a soulless husk. She didn't realize it until you were a toddler, Shinji–though how that woman got the thought in her head that she could come into physical contact with me, even through the intermediary of the Lance, and come out of the experience unchanged, is beyond me. When she realized that…well…that was when she climbed into the Test Type EVA and subsumed herself into the Unit, hoping that her husband would help manage my influence while she was gone; the influence her presence only helped intensify}

"Wait…so…" I interjected, trying to make sense of it all. "You're telling me that I've had the soul of the First Angel inside of me since before I was born?"

{Correct}

"Why do you think Ayanami handed control of Third Impact to you, Shinji?" Ryū interjected. "For the commencement of Third Impact, both Seeds of Life are needed, but ADAM more so; for in his original body, once awakened he could effect an Impact on his own. But with his soul inside you, he needed the body of Rei Ayanami to control the catastrophe, and thus it was necessary for her to act as a catalyst, seeing as ADAM had little to no agency whilst trapped within the body of a human. It is also why you were only handed control once you were inside your EVA, the only of the Evangelions that was synthesized from the genome of Lilith and not ADAM himself, as Unit-00 and Unit-02 were."

"Well then, what…what was Kaworu?"

{SEELE succeeded in synthesizing a body for my son, the Angel Tabris, from my genetic code. But that negated their already nonexistent ability to insert my soul into him; no two Angelic souls may occupy the same body at the same time. Even the Seventh Angel, Israfel, was only capable of an exceptional level of multitasking, splitting his partitioned consciousness into the governing will of two bodies}

"Your father knew of the part that ADAM would have to play, as told to him by your mother before her…self-sacrifice. It was knowledge that not even SEELE had, and instead of connecting the dots, your father, distraught with grief, thought to combine ADAM's biology with his own so that, using Ayanami, he could control Third Impact and direct it to bring Yui Ikari out of Unit-01," Ryū added, lighting up as he did so. He took a draw from the spectral cigarette, exhaled slowly, and then continued. "Of course, he had to give some measure of this knowledge up to SEELE, so as to legitimize the securing of the regressed larval-stage ADAM, and somehow their understanding was more warped and divergent from the truth than his own. Thus, they somehow got the idea in their heads that they could extract a soul from a soulless husk via the husk's biology and create a second Ayanami, regardless of the fact that Lilith and ADAM are as yin and yang: what works for one will necessarily not work for the other."

Before stammering out another question, I stopped, closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and asked: "So why are you telling me this here and now?"

"Because it is important for a few gaps to be filled before the floodgates are open. And besides, ADAM knows what's going to result from this, so in a penultimate act of apology, he elected to help guide us and to explain some things to you…some things that, in his estimation, deserved to be said," he responded, nonchalant. "And personally, I agree; far too many things about the events leading up to Third Impact are a mystery even to you, and, well…the status quo is about to change quite drastically, so it is a good idea to say whatever should have been said before one no longer has the chance. To tie up loose ends, as it were."

{And now, with that said and out of the way…time to proceed with the task at hand}

"Of course," responded Ryū, his tone unchanged save for the undercurrent of awareness that replaced his previous laconic affectation. "Shinji, if you're ready…" He lifted up his arm, pulling down his sleeve, and then lowering it to show me the scarlet dragon ouroboros that curled up, rested, on the flesh on the inside of his wrist. Then, he brought it up to his mouth and, peeling back his lips to reveal a set of sharp, interlocking teeth, spaced apart by a pair of long, narrow, razor-keen fangs and a corresponding set of shorter, wider, but no less deadly ones, and bit into the wrist, breaking the skin and exposing–with a pinched grimace of distaste–the wounded artery to my vision. Urged silently by an insistent prodding that I knew to be his doing, I obligingly lowered my head and secured my lips around the incision that yielded up blood swiftly, and drank it, stifling the urge to gag as the almost overpoweringly sour taste made its way down my throat, though unable to shake the disconcerting familiarity of its texture and flavor. Somewhere, far off, I felt a short stab of pain as his upper fangs slid needle-like into my jugular, whilst his lower fangs secured his jaw's awkward position somewhere in the neighborhood of my carotid. And it suddenly hit me, where I had tasted this before…

Night had fallen, and upon the surface of the table I had built–it was only fair after all, that a monster such as I should only possess a table crafted by a monster's hands, so as not to interfere with the lives of anyone else, and in so doing, poison them–rested the syringe. The syringe filled with six grams of morphine, twice the amount it would take to kill the most dependent morphine addict; yes, I had researched this in depth, and I knew that not even my troublesome aversion to dying would be defeated by this much of the painkiller. It was simply more than the human body was capable of surviving, no matter what the circumstances. I sat there, staring at it, my hands propped up on the table just as I had seen the Bastard's, so many times before the end.

It would be almost too easy; I had done what I could to minimize the negative impact my continued existence would have had upon the people I cared for–Misato, Tōji, Kensuke, Hikari, Rei, everyone at NERV, Asuka…

Asuka…

No. No, it wouldn't be too easy. It couldn't possibly be; she deserved to have her happy ending, and the cosmos was eager to see that she get it, especially if that meant sending me down into the nadir of the lowest pit of Hell that was reserved just for me.

I had to do this; I knew I did. No more running away. I had already made 99% sure that she might never stumble across me again, that I would never again have the opportunity to ruin her life that I knew I would always take… After all, I was a monster; isn't that what monsters do? Ruin the lives of everyone around them? Not this time; this time, I had one final duty to carry out: remove the 1% chance. Remove myself from the world, so that I might never interfere with her finding her happiness in this world ever again, might never interfere with her dream job, her friendships, her family life, her eventual husband…

Husband…

For some reason, that hurt most of all, was the most potent reason I wanted to shove my hand down my throat and rip my own heart from my chest, only to pound it into a liquefied pulp so that it would just stop hurting… She deserved to find her other half, her soul mate, the one who could take away her pain and give her no more, give her the happiness she deserved…the family…the children…

Yes; I was more certain than ever that I had to do this, that it had to be done. Resolute, I picked up the syringe, unsheathed the needle, and placed it against the outstanding blue artery in my forearm, ready to plunge it into the blood vessel and do at least one good thing for the world…for my friends…for her

"I'm sorry, Asuka," were my last words, and then I exerted that tiny little bit of pressure on the syringe to force the point of the needle into my flesh, ejecting the compound that would stop my heartbeat, and with it, the venomous effect my presence had upon those who deserved to hurt the least…like her. Darkness engulfed my mind, and I knew it was all over…

Shaking. Shouting. I felt this in the cold embrace, masculine and insistent. "Shinji! Fuck!" A crunch, a sound like a nail being driven through flesh and bone. "Dammit Shinji, don't you die on me!" How keenly those words reminded me of Misato. And my ungrateful ass couldn't even protect her from her death, just plunge her headfirst into this hellhole I'd created. The sour taste, burning my parched throat, knifed through my mind, and suddenly, as it cascaded throughout my stilled body, I felt my heart sputter into a single, painful, violent beat…

[No, Shinji! It's too soon for you to be going there!]

[Ryū?!]

[Were you expecting someone else?]

[Wha…I'm so lost! So confused! This…this isn't…I don't remember this!]

[Patience, Shinji. Memory lane is a two-way street, and we can't go into this headfirst. Follow me, and I'll show you what you need to see]

[What I need to see?]

[Tell me, Shinji; what was that?]

[…]

[(waiting)]

[…Asuka. I loved her too much to get in the way of her happiness…but…who is Asuka?]

[*sigh* Clearly, there is much more that you need to see before I give you the key to Pandora's Box. Come with me, Shinji: those wings on your back are just waiting to guide you; the future will soon set you free]

Faintly, I followed Ryū through a nebula of swirling, indescribable colors and shards of thoughts and dreams, trusting that though I had no idea where we were, he knew precisely where we were headed. Strangest of all, though, was that I did not feel as if I was being dragged, but actually following him of my own accord, and as I dimly perceived his dream-self floating through the delirium on those same red energy-wings, I felt phantom extensions upon my own back, like those I had seen that belonged to the Giant of Light in photos from the Katsuragi Expedition after going to…wait, when had I seen…

And suddenly, we were in a memory that didn't even faintly ring as one that could possibly be my own, and nor did the headache resurface. The dreamscape was an unfamiliar location, the leaves of the trees browning, the air carrying a sharp chill that told me it was autumn, making this memory either from before Second Impact or after Third, and somehow I got the unshakable impression that, despite the seeming impossibility of it (for in fact, I had never really been blind to the fact that Ryū was at most sixteen), the former was the correct answer. I remained silent, though, as I felt him walk up beside me, just as we watched a somewhat familiar sleek black sportscar slide sinuously into a parking spot, its driver-side wing door opening to reveal the golden-eyed version of Ryū that I was used to. The apparition stepped out of the cockpit and entered a sprawling concrete structure that looked like a school. Time sped up, and next to the black car, a yellow one parked, and out stepped a woman. True, I knew somewhere in the back of my head that she was only seventeen, but if you had seen her, you'd understand: she wasn't a girl; she was a woman.

Tall, with a method of movement that was unconsciously sensual and seductive, she was nevertheless regal in her bearing, pulling off the former perfectly and not falling into the sexual, as was all too often what happened to others who attempted the same. Her brown hair was long and luxurious, straight with slight curling, but undeniably voluminous and silky, her pale figure hourglass-shaped and generously endowed, her legs long but toned with lean muscle…but the eyes…her eyes were a pair of glacial shards of ice set into her beautiful but austere face, and those eyes looked so lonely and…sad…

When she entered the building, me being dragged along, unable to resist the path of memory, and saw him across the hall, time stood still, and silence so thick you could hear a pin drop descended upon the busy high-school hallway, his eyes meeting hers and both of them lost in a torrent of emotions and, unbeknownst to her, memories.

[Who is she?]

[Her name is Meg]

[(mentally frowns in confusion at tone)…is she…special to you?]

[The only woman I ever loved…the one who saved me from myself]

Then, caught in a swirling maelstrom, I spiraled with him down further into these memories of his, and suddenly we found ourselves in the familiar-but-different ballroom of Ravenswood Manor as a dreamlike version of Ryū walked into the room, paused, stricken in horror, at the threshold, and bolted towards a long, elegant, finely-dressed, broken form upon the stone floor, lying at a mess of unnatural angles amidst a pool of her own blood.

ELANTRIS! Elantris, speak to me! What happened?!

Olliver, my darling… Her voice sounded relieved…euphoric, even, that he was there, her weak hand reaching up to stroke his face. …I will always…love…you…

Silence.

Ryū's form, strangely clad in Western finery that looked like it belonged in a period film, collapsed upon hers, her body obviously now dead.

Then, his head rolled up, and he screamed.

It was familiar, that scream, almost unbearably so, and yet, I still couldn't place it…

His mouth opened wider, baring the strange, predatory fangs and sharp teeth to the gum before bolting down purposefully and sinking into her jugular, and drinking swiftly all of the blood left in her body, the blood on the ground somehow lifting up and spiraling into him to be absorbed into his form. When it and she were drained dry, he broke, his shoulders heaving with sobs of anguish so violent that it once again struck an undefinable cord of recollection within me. After what I knew was an hour of weeping, he stood, limp, whispering to himself over and over and over again: Mordred…Mordred…Mordred…Mordred…Mordred…Mordred…Mordred… His head rolled back like a ragdoll, his eyes ablaze with rage and emptiness, and he cried out to the heavens: "MORDRED!"

"…please let that be it…"

"Hmm?" asked the real Ryū.

"…can we see something else? Please?" I pleaded.

"What's wrong? Something bothering you?" he asked.

I nodded mutely.

"Well then, out with it!" he prodded. "What's bothering you?"

"I…I don't know. It just…" I rubbed my arms, trying to clear them of goose-bumps, and thus becoming aware of the fact that even though our dream-selves were separated, I still had the physical sensation of Ryū's strange fangs in my throat, his unbearably sour blood cascading down my throat. "It feels as though someone's stepping on my grave, alright?! As if…as if…"

"…As if someone took from you your reason for living," he supplied. "As if the only reason you could stand to see yourself in the mirror every morning, your other half, the only anchor you have to your sanity, to reality, was violated and then demolished?"

"Y…Yes," I replied, surprised. "How…how did you…"

"I know the feeling," he said elusively. "The night I lost Elantris was the night I stopped living…the last time my heart beat. All that was left was to find and destroy the one who had taken her from me, the rage, the hatred… As time went on, I became increasingly aware of a fact that I had always known: Elantris was my life, my heart, my companion. Without her, living on was a weight that even Atlas himself could not bear. All that remained was the hunt: I could die only after I had found and slaughtered her murderer…"

"Mordred…" I muttered.

"Precisely. You and I are more similar than you think, Shinji," he said enigmatically.

The scene shifted before I could ask what he meant, and suddenly we were standing in the middle of a wide, grassy field, the hills rolling with deep valleys and the sun shining high and white in the sky. Before us was a small village of thatch and stone, and the inhabitants milling about were clad in furs and skins that looked like they were from the days of prehistory.

"This is where I grew up," came the nostalgic explanation. "When I grew up as well…"

"Ryū," I ventured. "In the last memory, the woman, Elantris…she called you 'Olliver'." The name sounded strange on my tongue, but somehow I managed to pronounce it correctly. "Why? Is that your real name?"

"Names are cheap, Shinji," he replied. "They allow others to define us, and if we do that, suddenly we are beholden to their foolish expectations. But no, 'Olliver' was simply another pseudonym. Here, where I was a child, I was called 'Æbel'; a cruel name, to be sure, but strangely apropos. For in my mother tongue, 'Æbel' meant 'Second Son,' or, of course, in your language…"

"Shinji," I breathed. Then, realization hit me like a monorail, and I stared at the scene of the prehistoric village, unseeing.

"Yes, Shinji; you begin to understand," he said…but not from where he was, beside me; rather, it came from behind us, and as we both turned to gaze upon the figure that crested the hill at the head of a column of battle-scarred men, my jaw gaped as I gazed upon the familiar, but at the same time almost completely unrecognizable form of Ryū–though I suppose at that point he was still called Æbel–draped in skins and furs, his pupils dilated as a normal person's within his golden eyes as opposed to their permanently contracted state that I was used to. "In a very real sense, I am you."

And like gears clicking shut, it all came together.

Images flashed around us, faster than I could divert my attention to regard them; memories of a neglectful father, of a betraying brother, of a deal made with an entity of light at the behest of a mother who had been there and then gone, of the pain that came with apotheosis, the rage, the thirst for blood…the first gaze given to one to whom your soul belongs, of a bond that could not be broken…of a lost beyond feeling, the hatred, the rejection of all around, the self-hatred that became so much a part of both of us that we forgot that there was anything else in us but that vitriol…and the commonality of the one person who could–and in his case, did–make us feel like more, feel completed, feel…whole.

"H…How?" I choked out, still reeling from something that I ordinarily wouldn't believe, save that I had just witnessed the proof.

"How? Don't you remember?!" he exclaimed, a sardonic smirk upon his face. "Leliel."

Yes… The red-head (who I somehow knew was Asuka) taunting me, and I fell to it, charging at the shadow of the Eleventh Angel only to be absorbed into the Dirac Sea that was its body…

"And Third Impact?"
Opium dream…everyone searching for their personal euphoria…"

"You see, Shinji? I'm from one of those worlds, one of the parallels."

The flow of memories faded from my view, and we stood upon a beach, familiar for a reason that was just out of my grasp, gazing out over a red sea of the primordial soup of LCL. Upon the bank, a nude male figure was splayed, black hair long and familiar; and as the chest expanded rapidly with the flow of air, he got up on all fours and spent a few seconds hacking up the LCL and clearing his lungs, allowing himself to stand up once done and take a few tentative steps on the shore, and as he whipped his head about, I gasped in recognition: we were witnessing Ryū arising from the LCL Sea.

"In my world, to save everyone from annihilation, I assumed the power of a god in truth, sacrificing my immortality for the sake of those I loved…or so I thought. Instead, I was cast adrift on the eddies and flows of time, from timeline to timeline, until finally I landed here. So sorry about Keel Lorenz, though; I took the LCL that had once been his body to make my own, so even if he wished to come back, he can't," said Æbel in a tone that told me that he was most certainly not sorry.

"This…this makes no sense…"

"No, I didn't expect you to see that it did," he replied. "It is difficult for the greatest of all art critics to make an objective judgement upon a painting that he has never truly seen. As I have said, you and I are a lot alike, Shinji, though I daresay you had it a lot harder than me." He chuckled at this.

"Yeah," I responded. "No kidding."

"Though not for the reasons you might think," he continued. "For example, I had an easier time of it than you because firstly, I had a father who hated me."

That stopped me. I couldn't even answer; the fog of confusion was coming off of that question in far too thick a consistency to allow for coherent thought.

"Having a father who hates you, Shinji, is invariably easier than having one who loves you," he mused. "My father, Aadem, despised my very existence because I more closely resembled my uncle than him, coupled with the fact that I had my mother's eyes. He always thought of me as a doubly unpleasant reminder: first, that he hadn't been enough to keep my mother with him, and second, that he always held a sneaking suspicion that I was the product of an affair she had with his brother, who was, incidentally, the man who ended up raising me. And thus came my second stroke of luck that made my adolescence less painful than yours: though the village hated me, my uncle taught me to hone my intellect, and so when the Highlanders came through, I was the architect of my clan's survival. In contrast, your father loves you; he truly loves you. And so it becomes all the more painful when he does something that destroys you inside, because you cannot really hide behind a shield of 'he hates me' and use that to deflect whatever harm that might be done away from you, as I learned to do."

"My father…"

"Of course, that's where my good fortune ended; my one sibling, my brother Cæn, didn't take my newfound status as savior of our clan very well, and so when we were about to make peace, he betrayed us, and personally drove a hammer into the small of my back, paralyzing me from the waist down." As he relayed this, I felt the phantom blow, heard the ethereal cries of surprise and death, felt his physical pain…and his overwhelming rage. "I crawled–crawled–towards one of our holy sites, the City of the Dead, and there I saw my mother, offering me my 'destiny' with a being in a pillar of light. We…we struck a deal: my humanity for the ability to attain my revenge. I accepted…and took into myself the alien soul of the Dragon of Saint George, becoming the first Immortal…the first vampire." I looked to him sharply at this. A vampire? "Oh, yes: a vampire. The first, the oldest…and later, I became the Vampire King, Lord of the Elder Council, the God-killer, the Adversary of Heaven…but, as is the case with you, all the praise, success and power in the world meant nothing when compared to the regard of a single woman: she who was my wife; the Nubian Queen Lamia, host of the soul of Lilith. Without her, my drive for revenge would have turned to melancholy and, ultimately, to madness; but she was for so many centuries my reason for living, and when she was taken from me…" he trailed off. "…and when she was taken from me, all I wanted was to find and end her murderer so that I would not have to face the torment of an eternity alone.

"She came back to me," he added. "Reincarnated via the soul-bond we swore to each other, my own life serving as an anchor to bring her back into our world, a dhampir. In under six months, she once again gave me a reason to live, saved my life, regained her memories and became once again a succubus–or, alternatively, a vampiressa. And I left her to save her, to end up here, before you, Shinji Ikari, and I tell you this now that you should trust me enough to let me help you. You carry a heavy burden throughout your life, never once even suspecting that you are, in fact, the architect of your own prison. I wish to give you the key to the cage, and help you be with the one you love, if you will let me. Will you?"

"…yes," I decided. "Yes, I will."

A familiar smirk crept onto his features as I said that, and two words left his lips:

"Of course."