"Maya's work," was Ritsuko's instant assessment of the case. "I'd have to examine it to be sure, but most likely it identified you by your AT field." Saying AT field was so much more scientific than 'light of the soul.'

"How did they get that information? You haven't even managed that kind of precision yet," Misato asked.

Ritsuko shrugged. "Tabris, most likely. I haven't bothered to develop a lock like this since we're already aware that angels can hide their fields and make them hard to read. He could have imitated Shinji's field, and then no one here could open it but Shinji or possibly Rei." Although they weren't letting Rei anywhere near anything that originated from her big brother, just in case someone tried to prove that they were conspiring. "Now that I think about it," she realized, still turning over the case. "It's odd that other angels can change their shapes but Tabris needed to disguise himself. I wonder if he can't change out of that semi-human form? Rei hasn't managed to, but I've wondered if that's because she's afraid that she won't be able to change back. Still, you'd think that she'd want to be able to look more normal."

"Finding out if he has a weakness later," Misato said, because good thinking. "Information now."

"Ritsuko?" Shinji handed a piece of paper out to her, looking even more unhappy than he had recently. She'd walked right by him, assuming they'd called her here for the unique-looking case, since that was what they'd said over the phone.

Ritsuko stared at it. She hadn't really believed it could happen, somehow. They'd made it through so much, the young immortals, and even when Misato was no longer perfect, couldn't pilot, they were still… Ritsuko'd feared for her own life, and thought that Kaji was damn insane and going to get her killed often enough, but she'd gone along with the latest crazy scheme because it was Kaji and he'd get her out of wherever it was by the skin of his teeth or easy as pie. They'd come home okay. Maybe it was realizing that Tabris, the powerful abomination, the one who could mindrape them, the one they'd been far more afraid of than all the people with guns, actually had no desire whatsoever to kill Misato, or anyone for that matter. It became a game of almost-mock heroes and villains, where the real goal, the real means of keeping score, were how many UN troops or SEELE 'mooks' didn't die because they pulled out of the area when Misato was going to fight, or Kaji and Ritsuko managed to get some vital piece of intelligence somewhere in time. SEELE was shooting to kill, and there were plenty of bullets flying and bombs going off that didn't care who they hit, but…

Hindsight was anything but twenty-twenty. After having to send kids only a couple of years younger than they'd been back then out to fight, not knowing if they would come back alive or maimed or not, Ritsuko had started to feel nostalgia for the days when she was the one in danger, not the kids. The battles they'd gotten out of okay, in the end.

Now Kaji was dead.

"I am going to go through the Intelligence Division. Then I am going to the UN capital. If this is our op, I will find out who is responsible for this," Misato told them. "My guess is that Tabris will make sure his own house is clean first, but if he starts going after our intelligence people, we're in trouble." Because if Tabris was angry enough, and this looked far more furious than she'd ever seen him, he was an abomination. He could mindrape people. And he would pass information on to SEELE if it would save the lives of his people. They could lose every single infiltrator because of this. More and more information would be compromised the longer it took to find Kaji's killer.

Her husband's killer.

But first, she was going to go home and cry.

That bastard. Hadn't she told him that no one was allowed to kill him but her? He knew to tell her when he was in danger!

Wait a minute.

He did.

Misato considered the odds that this had blindsided Kaji and felt very glad all of a sudden that she'd been a romantic idiot and kept all of his letters instead of throwing them in the trash for the Intelligence Division or ritualistically burning them with his own cigarette lighter, which he'd sent with the second to last of the daily letters.

Wait.

At the time, it had seemed like he was just making exaggerated promises and a stupid reference to that old, "Addicted to Love," song, but Kaji? Quitting cold turkey? Her Kaji? He couldn't go two days without…

Yes, she realized. He'd known. He'd known that he was dying, he'd known the day and he had to know who. If he'd sent her one message, what else had he sent? "Shinji," she told him, "I'm going to need your help."

"This is bad," Shinji said, eyes wide.

"I know."

"This is really, really bad." He averted his eyes. "Misato, I can't read any more of this, I really can't." Not after studying music, even though it was Kaworu who was the singer, who loved to talk about the significance and effects of the lyrics and how beautiful songs could be.

His eyes, they burned.

"Suck it up, Shinji."

"Misato, seriously, I would rather climb into the Eva right now than read any more of this. I am a musician, I have actual training in how to write and analyze music. How to listen for bad rhythms and notes, and poetry is very similar to song." Every bit of horribleness was jumping right out at his trained mind. "You can tell that it's bad. I could write a thesis paper on how bad it is. Please, sis, just give me the ones that don't have poetry."

"It's not all bad," Misato said in her husband's defense, and furtively looked around before pulling a piece of paper from her dresser drawer, daring Shinji to comment.

He took one look at it and said, "That's because Kaworu wrote this. Or rewrote it." Because a lot of the feelings that were expressed here were very Kaji, and definitely not things Shinji wanted Kaworu to think about his sister, forget Tabris the abomination, even if he might not have a real form with tentacles.

"You're sure?" Misato asked, somewhere between disappointed and intrigued.

He nodded. "I'm sure. We had to do original compositions, and he always wrote lyrics for his." Shinji knew his partner's style.

"Love songs?" his sister asked next.

"Some, but also sunset, sunrise, joy," Of course, as a tribute to his favorite. "He never wrote anything unhappy unless it was a request." Or for Shinji. "He never liked how those turned out, he said he couldn't understand them properly."

"Couldn't really comprehend the pain of loneliness, of Lilim existence, the pain we endure every day unless we manage to fight it off, to forget it by reaching out to others and imagining we can touch their souls," Misato said, looking down at the poem. "Tabris," she said, by way of explanation. "He didn't understand how I could be so strong, after losing my father, being locked up alone for so long. Well, it was painful. It was horrible. I know I lost track of time, and I… I lost words. I could speak when I was found, but I lost words because I didn't want to be able to think about what had happened. What was happening to me." To be able to understand how painful the loneliness really was. "They didn't torture me or anything, they just didn't talk to me, didn't do anything but feed and bathe me. And that was enough. I did go mad, losing language and thought is a form of madness since it meant I couldn't function, I was practically an animal. But words, I could get back, when people talked to me again. I could have started hallucinating people to talk to until I completely lost touch with reality, like sensory deprivation victims.

"Because of what SEELE did to me, I know exactly what they're talking about," she told Shinji. "Life is pain. Our default state, being without other people, is a living hell. But, you know, I'm alive. I survived that pain. And people who have never experienced anything at all like that, people who knew that loneliness is torture and still did that to me, have no right to talk. I broke, Shinji. I did break, just like they wanted me to. Then I picked up the pieces, and now I have a home, a family. I pursued happiness, and I damn well caught it. Even though the pain of my soul is inevitable and I've also got my body trying to tell me that I'm miserable, I'm hanging in there. My husband is dead, and I'll cry, I'll cry a hell of a lot, then I'll pick myself up and I'll live. And you will too," she told her little brother. "You're still fighting. We're going to get through this because we aren't giving up, not like all those people who joined SEELE. Not like the angels. Tabris is the toughest there is, and he can't even understand what makes us fight for our future despite the pain. So somehow, someway, we aren't going to let him get to Lilith." Misato's eyes narrowed. "It's SEELE I'm really worried about, because they'll be coming for us next, and if Tabris scans half our intelligence and military before that happens, they'll know way too damn much." The UN had numbers, but knowledge was a power all its own.

Still, as long as there was life there was hope, there would be a light at the end of the tunnel, all those clichés. …Ah.

"It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness," Misato quoted, picking up the lighter and putting it in her breast pocket (Kaji would have wanted it that way), "and even better to light a flamethrower. Let's go borrow Ritsuko's hammer."

"He always thought he was James Bond and I was Q," Ritsuko said, most of her attention focused on typing away at the one computer in the secure room deep within the fortress connected to the outside world while Misato, Shinji and Rei each looked through a third of the decrypted files on the microdot, sorting them while they tried to figure out what was… Well, all of this was important. Gendo's semi-heretic fraction of SEELE was practically impossible to get intel on, but he couldn't keep out Tabris' own agent, not when he had the entire council's backing because they were about a hair's breath away from having him put up against the wall and shot. If it weren't for the Committee saying they still needed him until all the other angels were gone?

That wasn't all that was on here: Kaji had been researching SEELE doctrine for a long time, even longer than Misato and Ritsuko knew. Scans, documents, a log of notes and thoughts that was practically a diary: with all the image files, that made up most of the data on the microdot. Shinji asked for the files on his father and his experiments, Misato took the data on SEELE and the smaller sections, while Ritsuko asked Rei to look over the research on abominations/angels in case there was anything she would find helpful, and just in case he'd hidden something there.

"Gendo's the obvious suspect, but Tabris would at least try to use normal methods before he starts breaking into people's heads," Misato knew. "So if it was Gendo we might know in… two more days?"

"I do not believe Gendo Ikari is the only one with a motive to kill Mr. Kaji," Rei said, the light of the screen reflecting from red eyes.

"You mean besides the intelligence agencies of both main power blocs and all the nations?" Misato asked her.

"I found files pertaining to my creation as you requested, Aunt Misato, but the specifications were oddly exact. Genetic data related to Yui aside, Gendo wished to ensure that I met certain exact criteria in order to allow me to merge with Unit 01, as opposed to either of the progenitors," although Unit 01 was made from the carved-up body of Lilith, it contained none of the brain. "In a certain exact fashion. According to Kaji, it was labeled heretical by SEELE not because it did not match the Dead Sea Scrolls, but because it would not bring about proper complementation and would grant instrumentality to only one. That implies that there is more than one potential outcome of Third Impact, and the outcome can be determined by the nature and procedure of the merging."

"That's true, Rei," Ritsuko told her. "If an angel merged with Adam, humanity would be reduced to raw materials instead of having our minds absorbed."

"And the race of that angel would become the dominant race on the planet." She turned around to look at Ritsuko. "Tabris is not human, correct?"

Everyone looked at Shinji for some reason. He stared back: what were the experts looking at him for? But they kept waiting for something.

His immediate response was no, Tabris wasn't, but Kaworu was so kind, and, and humane, but, "People aren't like that. He's, he, he… he cares. He cares about other people. I can't say what all humans are like, I don't really know that many," being antisocial, "but everyone reacted differently to Kaworu than other people. People just knew that he cared, even about people he'd just met, so you could trust him. Even though it turned out that he was lying to everyone," both about being Kaworu Nagisa and by looking human. Yes: looking human was a lie. "He's not human. That's even SEELE doctrine, isn't it? He was born of the white seed, unlike the false successors born of the black seed. They say he's an idealized version of us, sort of, but he's not like us." Maybe that was why Shinji watched him disappear into the smoke and knew that this was not someone that could be replaced. "So maybe if he merged with Adam we'd be replaced by a version upgrade, but isn't he supposed to merge with Lilith?"

"I am not certain that makes a difference. Gendo Ikari did not believe so when he made these alterations to Yui Ikari's original plan: he believed that creating me using genetic information from Adam instead of Lilith to disguise his intent and the soul of Lilith would not alter his planned instrumentality. On the other hand, much more deviation would alter the outcome, while SEELE's backup plan in case in case Tabris fails bears almost no resemblance to a simple combination of Tabris and Adam. Instead it is centered around a Lilim and it requires a portion of Lilith's body containing a Lilim soul, and multiple Eva units, one containing the soul of Adam and all of them directed by the will of Lilim. The angel that combines with the soul and body of different progenitors is the Eighteenth, the Lilim. Instead of all merging into a single being, it is necessary to shatter the mind of the Lilim at the center of the diagram during the process in order to ensure that all humans continue to exist as fragments of the divine. This is a very elaborate procedure for a back-up plan, and it has been refined over centuries, incorporating many different mystic traditions."

"While insert Tab T into Slot L is very simple," Ritsuko raised her head: now she smelled a rat too. "Cults like complicated rituals, but… If the progenitor's body and soul are really moot, and combining Eva 01 with you would have made Yui a god and all humans just parts of her while she went out into space, then are they intending to make Tabris into the god instead of Yui? Have him create a new world of half-humans were there won't be any war or loneliness because they don't possess those flaws? Misato?"

"Tabris would not go along with that."

"Kaworu won't destroy everyone's souls. He wants to save the people that are alive: he thinks that Second Impact was a tragedy, I know he has to." Even if they'd never talked about it. "He wouldn't want to combine with Lilith if he knew what it really did."

"Would he rather die?" Ritsuko asked Misato again, looking at Shinji as well now.

"Yes," both of them agreed. Tabris, Kaworu was pure-hearted like that.

"What would happen if he found out the truth ahead of time?" Ritsuko asked now. "When he's the one most of SEELE's followers really believe in. What would happen if the true believers find out that SEELE intends to sacrifice their god in order to move Adam's soul into a vessel made from Adam's flesh, so there isn't the risk of instrumentality being granted to the Seventeenth instead of an Eighteenth because there were two different descendant type inputs?"

"That's it. That was what Gendo was holding over the Committee's heads. He clearly knew the truth, so they had to keep Tabris away from him: that was how he could do so much under their noses, even make Rei," Misato knew. She'd learned a lot from Kaji too. "All he would have had to do is set up a dead man switch, something to broadcast the information to the web if he died, and unless SEELE found it first then they couldn't kill him without having a revolution on their hands."

"It would be just like what Dad did," Shinji said, meaning Professor Fuyutsuki. "The Committee would be hunted again." By the people they'd controlled before. "Kaji was investigating Gendo, right? So the committee could arrest him, lock him up, tell him that if he didn't keep the information from getting out until Tabris was already dead they'd kill him?"

Ritsuko and Misato looked at each other doubtfully in the dimly lit lab. "Gendo Ikari's a slippery one," Misato said.

"A manipulative bastard," Ritsuko agreed, pushing her unbrushed or bound hair back and scowling at the thought of her mother. "Kaji never could get the better of him." And he'd gotten the better of Fuyutsuki, Misato, Ritsuko, all of the UN and SEELE often enough. Suckered Tabris out of position several times, too.

"Then, if there was a lot of confusion, wouldn't that delay things? Two more angels to go, even if they knew they had to kill Kaji," Shinji said, and swallowed. Asuka, Asuka was going to cry. Shinji couldn't, not now, or Misato would start. "They can't do anything before they're gone, right?"

"If they still exist, their souls have more power than those of Lilim. They could appear and hijack the instrumentality, causing them to become the gods and their race the owner of this world," Rei agreed. "I suspect that is why Gendo Ikari has of yet made no move to acquire me and force me to merge with Unit 01."

"Even after they're dead, it will take him some time to get here unnoticed, with the UN and SEELE watching for him," Misato thought, leaning back. "If he needs to come here personally, he'd have to leave in advance if he wants to get here soon after the last angel dies… And if Tabris thinks Gendo killed Kaji, then he would be hunting for Gendo as well… We'll have to ask Dad, but I bet that bastard's on his way, and SEELE lost track of him. What do you think, Shinji?"

"If, if it was me, and this was someone I cared about, I wouldn't take any chances." No. And Shinji was not Gendo. "He might have left when the last angel we fought died, if they're using that as a timetable." Third to last, before Tabris.

"They gave us some information on the angels when they handed over Adam," to let the UN wipe themselves out fighting the angels, not out of the goodness of their hearts, Misato knew. "SEELE would love to use Tabris against Gendo. Rits?"

"Let me see which you're looking at, Rei…" That file. Ritsuko transferred it onto her stick and then to the only networked computer and resumed typing. "I'll get this and the gist of the theory over to Maya. She'll have a way to get it to Tabris' attention without SEELE knowing what it is, and he can verify it better than we can." And scanning SEELE meant he wasn't scanning UN personnel. "What the… Kaaaaji!" Ritsuko growled as the cursor began to move on its own. "I haven't… And…" Tabris, and even if he'd made it past the Magi to identify this computer, he shouldn't know what they were talking about unless someone had broken in and installed a microphone into her rig, who else could have done that? Oh? "That's all? Just 'Please ask Misato and Shinji to please come to the Embassy with you?'" Maybe he wasn't listening in to the conversation, then.

"We'll have to drive over to Tokyo-2," but it should be worth it. "I'll put on the siren," Misato decided. "Shinji, get showered and changed. You look like something the cat dragged in. As for you two, you're just covered in cat hair," she told Rei and Ritsuko."Get changed."

"Are we going to a funeral?" Ritsuko asked. "Why are we dressing up for someone who's seen us covered in LCL, muck, sand…"

"That was before you adopted his little sister," Misato reminded her, "and before he met Shinji. We have to fake being adults now. Think about it: would you trust yourself with Rei?"

Ritsuko paused. "I think I've still got a little black dress that fits. Somewhere." She still had all her jewelry and so on, but there wasn't much point in dressing up for an internet not-girlfriend.