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.


It didn't take me long to find Donald Morgan after the battle with the Fourth Angel. The man did kind of stand out from the small army of Nerv technicians working on retrieving the depowered Unit 01 and the remains of the Fourth Angel, after all. Half a dozen of Nerv's Security and Intelligence goons were standing around in his general vicinity, though none of them had actually worked up the guts to confront Morgan yet. Can't say I blame them; Morgan might not be capable of smacking down an Angel, but disabling half a dozen ordinary mortals would be child's play for him. I gave a nod to the security guys and they moved off enough to let me talk to Morgan in private, though they still stayed close enough to move in if anything happened. Much to my annoyance the grizzled old warden didn't seem the slightest bit surprised to see me.

"Morgan, it's such an incredibly unpleasant surprise to see you again." After more than a month of almost exclusively speaking Japanese, even if it was all auto-translated by Lash instead of actually speaking the language myself, using English again felt a bit odd. "Shouldn't you be killing warlock kittens or something? Or is this about your man-crush on me again? I mean, I'm really flattered you would follow me all the way to Japan, but –"

"Dresden." At least now Morgan looked and sounded as annoyed as I felt. I've found a lot of ways to get on his nerves over the years, it's pretty much a hobby of mine by this point, and implying that he was gay for me always seemed to be a big winner. I guess it's lucky for me he's not a smartass, or he'd throw it right back in my face and ask why I kept wanting him to be interested in me that way. Or if he'd found out about that time I pretended to be gay in order to sneak into Thomas's apartment. Or the fact that it's been a very long time since I had sex with a woman. Or…

You know what; let's just drop this entire line of thought. Have I mentioned that I love boobs?

"So, why are you here, Morgan?"

"You move to Japan. A few weeks later, a giant monster shows up right around the area you moved to. I don't believe in coincidences."

How delightfully paranoid of him. Then again, I guess he was kind of right. "So, let me guess, I created or summoned some sort of massive terrifying eldritch abomination in an effort to destroy the entire White Council and you in particular, but now you've finally figured out my evil plan, and have come here to stop me?"

"Don't flatter yourself, Dresden." The warden sneered at me. "Creating or summoning a being like that is far beyond your power. Besides, the Japanese and UN forces wouldn't have been nearly so well-prepared to counterattack with conventional military and a giant robot if you'd randomly summoned up some sort of elder demon or Outsider."

"You never know, this is Japan after all. I mean, building giant robots is practically their national pastime, and Godzilla shows up just about every week, so it's no surprise they're prepared."

Morgan let out the annoyed grunt he usually offered whenever I started being a smartass. "In any case, just because you're not a mad dark wizard doesn't mean you're not exactly the sort of reckless fool who could find himself neck-deep in this. So … what's your angle in this, Dresden?"

"Sorry, can't tell you, it's classified information. Need-to-know basis and all, that, and you don't need to know, Morgan. It's actually against the law for you to know too much about this, so a legal zealot like you would probably have to chop off his own head if I actually told you anything."

"There will be an accounting for this, Dresden. Don't think you can hide behind mortal authorities and their laws. Your obligations to the White Council supersede any other concerns."

"Well, if the Council really wants to involve themselves, you can tell them that this whole situation is none of their damned business." Morgan lips drew back from his teeth, and the warden let out a low growl of rage. Before Morgan could launch his diatribe about how the Council's jurisdiction is whatever the Council says it is, I cut him off. "These creatures are not of supernatural origin, and the mortals are more than capable of engaging them with their own resources. Also, as you might have noticed while the monster was kicking your ass and laughing off your best shots, the Council can't really do much against these things anyway. Only the Evangelions are capable of engaging and destroying these monsters."

Technically speaking, I was probably stretching the truth a bit. I guess you could argue that the AT fields were a natural biological function of the Angels, but there were definitely some kind of mystical properties to the whole thing. Of course, the Council didn't need to know that, especially since that would encourage them to get involved. While trying to set the Merlin and Gendo against each other certainly had its appeals, getting the White Council involved would just add too many new elements to an already unstable situation.

Morgan didn't look the slightest bit impressed by my argument. "That creature was able to repel some of my best attack spells. How, exactly, did it manage that if it not supernatural, Dresden?"

"Some sort of electromagnetic tachyon deflector field or something. It stops normal attacks just as easily as it does any kind of magic." That one was an outright lie. I've been a craptastic liar for most of my life, but I've gotten a bit better at it over the years. Considering her reputation for being a highly skilled manipulator and consummate liar, it's hard not to wonder if the fact that I've gotten a bit better at both of those things over the years was due to Lash's influence. I tried to ignore the feminine chuckles echoing in the back of my mind.

"And this Evangelion has some countermeasure to this defensive field?" If Morgan caught my lie he gave no sign of it, and Morgan wasn't the kind of guy who'd just sit back and keep cool if he thought I was lying. If he wasn't screaming accusations and threats in my face, then he probably thought that I was telling the truth. Of course, Morgan had never been that good at sorting out truth from lies anyway; like a lot of fanatics, he tended to assume that anything which matched his worldview had to be true, and anything that conflicted with it had to be false.

"Yeah, the Evangelion can produce the same kind of field as these creatures, so it's the only thing that's capable of dealing with these things." Even though I was being deliberately vague, Gendo probably wouldn't be happy if he found out just how much I'd told Morgan about the AT field, since Nerv hated sharing information of any sort, but it's not like I've ever really cared whether Gendo approves of my actions or not.

Morgan gave a vague grunt of acknowledgement. "So Dresden, if all this is completely normal mortal affairs, why are you mixed up in it?"

"It pays the bills." I answered with a shrug. When it looked like I might be stuck with a pissed off Morgan if I didn't give him more than that, I decided to offer him another true but less than complete answer. "There's a lot of money and power tied up in this. I make sure they don't have the Vampire Courts, Faeries, Fomor, and every two-bit wackjob dark wizard trying to get a slice of the pie."

That got a vague scowl and a slight nod from Morgan. "I see." I guess Morgan couldn't find anything particularly objectionable about that; keeping the rest of the supernatural world from screwing the normal humans over too badly was one of the more respectable things a wizard could do with their time.

"Well, now that I've been a good boy and answered your questions, I think it's time I got to ask one of my own." Morgan frowned, but didn't tell me to piss off right away, so I figured asking was safe. "Why'd you blow your cover like that? Kinda hard to keep investigating what's going on here now that you can't stay under the radar anymore."

Morgan got that confused look on his face that usually shows up whenever he has to think about something more complicated than killing things that violate the Council's laws. "Those two children would likely have been crushed if I hadn't intervened, Dresden."

"Well, yeah, but…" I trailed off as I realized just how stupid my question really was. I was used to thinking of Morgan as nothing more than humongous asshole that fanatically enforced the Council's laws and took a fiendish delight in making my life a living hell. It is very satisfying to think that every person who's mean to you is really nothing more than a nasty, petty asshole who dislikes you for nasty, petty asshole reasons. Problem was, people are rarely neat little one-dimensional caricatures like that.

Much as I disliked him, Morgan was one of the good guys. Don't get me wrong, Morgan had made my life pretty unpleasant for several years, but it wasn't like he was just doing it for shits and giggles; he genuinely believed that I was just another bad guy who'd beaten the system and gotten away with murder. He'd even admitted he had been wrong about me, or at least as close as someone like him could ever come to making that kind of confession.

The guy had put saving innocent lives ahead of his mission, and faced down a monster that was completely out of his league without flinching. I could respect that; in fact, that was the sort of thing I probably would have done in his shoes. Hell's bells, if things had worked out differently, and I had been raised and trained by a proper responsible wizard instead of a crazy warlock we might have been able to get along; maybe we could even have been friends.

"Sorry." Saying that word to Morgan was about as much fun as chewing a bunch of broken glass. "Sometimes I forget that just because we hate each other's guts doesn't mean we're not both good guys."

Morgan glanced at me oddly for a moment, and then gave a slight nod and grunt. I was grateful he didn't feel the need to give any further response; that would have just made things difficult and awkward. If this were one of those happy stories, out new understanding of each other would have spawned a strong, lasting friendship. Sadly, that's not the way the real world works. I was who I was, he was who he was, and even if we'd gotten to the point where neither one of us thought the other was pure evil, we had way too much history for us to ever actually get along.

That became all too apparent a moment later, when Morgan's face scrunched up into a furious scowl. "Speaking of children, I see you neglected to mention a few things about the pilot, Dresden." I looked over my shoulder, and saw that the techs had finally hooked up a reserve power supply to Unit 01 and gotten Shinji out of the entry plug. The kid looked like hell, but I didn't see any actual injuries. "Child soldiers, Dresden?"

"I don't like it either, but only kids can pilot those things. Something to do with being born after the Second Impact." Morgan was still scowling. "It's not like we haven't exhausted every other possibility; we even tried hitting the thing with a N2 bomb before we sent the kid out. It was the only way."

Morgan's scowl softened a bit, but he still looked very unhappy. "That's always been your problem, Dresden." The warden gave a nasty smirk and added. "Well, one of your problems, you're also reckless and shortsighted. However, what's at issue now is while you're not evil, but when your back is up against the wall, you'll bend or even break the rules if that's what it takes to win."

"Oh shove it up your ass, Morgan. I know you've bent the rules too; hell's bells, you bent the rules more than once just to try and come after me."

For a second I wondered if I might be pushing the man a bit too far, but instead of snapping at me Morgan just went disturbingly calm. "I know my own past, Dresden, I don't need you to remind me of it. However, I never broke the Laws."

"Stars and stones, Morgan! That was a long time ago! And it was in self-defense!" Now I was the one who was pissed off; I do not like being reminded of what happened the day I killed Justin. "What the hell happened to the whole 'I don't think you're evil' thing?"

Morgan crossed his arms over his chest and met my anger with pure stoicism. "It doesn't matter if your actions justified, you still broke one of the Laws. Someday, when you find your back against the wall and your options running low, you might break the Laws again. And I'm sure if you did it would be for a very good and noble reason, and you'll truly believe that you're doing the right thing … but the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Dresden."

"Hell's bells Morgan, you almost sound like you're worried about me."

"I would take no pleasure if executing you if it became necessary, Dresden. See that it does not." Morgan glanced at the Security and Intelligence men, still remaining a respectful distance away from the two of us. "Do your mortal associates intend to detain me?"

"Nah, I'll clear it up."

"Good. I will give the Council the information you shared with me. I will also inform the regional Warden-commander that these attacks are, for the moment, a mortal concern."

"Right." Morgan and I swapped an awkward sort of grunt-nod goodbye. Sometimes, I really miss the days when we could just be as nasty as we pleased to each other instead of this mutual respect-but-dislike thing we had now. My life was a lot less complicated back when I just hated him.

*Break*

The post-battle briefing proved to be relatively … erm, brief. Not having the Bastard-in-Chief around probably contributed to that, since Fuyutsuki wasn't the type to waste time with power plays, internal politics, and subtly reminding us that he was in charge while Gendo was away. It probably also helped that Ritsuko and Misato also wanted to keep things short, since one of them had a relatively intact Angel corpse to analyze this time, and the other had a mildly mutinous pilot to deal with.

"So, Mr. Dresden, you believe we will not have any further problems with your fellow wizards?"

"Not for the moment, at least." I shrugged, and added. "Of course, just because they won't interfere doesn't mean they won't keep an eye on us, and the not interfering might change at some point if they dig up some of our secrets or decide we're not doing a good enough job. 'course, if that happens they're hardly going to be the only ones sticking their noses into our business."

Once that was dealt with, I wound up following Ritsuko and her research team over to the Fourth Angel's remains. With all the science people and their high-tech gear around I couldn't actually do much in the way of magical investigating, but I could at least gather some more samples to mess around with. At the very least, I would have more to work with than the bits of Angel-goo that was all that most-definitely-not-Sachiel had left behind.

With as busy as all the techs were, it took about half an hour before Maya finally got all the samples together for me. "Thanks Maya." Half a second after the words left my mouth I mentally whapped myself upside the head; among the various bits of culture shock I'd been introduced to during the move was the fact that being a first-name basis could be a big deal in Japan.

Which is why I was surprised when the fact that I'd used her first name got no reaction out of Maya. Instead, all I got was a distracted-sounding, "Oh, no problem Mr. Dresden," that came after about five seconds of awkward silence.

Being way too chivalrous for my own good, I decided to find out what was bugging her. "Something wrong?"

Maya gave a twitch of her head and seemed to regain her focus. "Oh, nothing serious. I was just wondering why Shinji suddenly went Leeroy Jenkins on us. I hadn't expected him to do something like that; he's normally such a nice, quiet boy." Before the conversation could continue, Ritsuko called out that she needed Maya's help with whatever she was working on, and Maya rushed off to go help her boss.

It took me a moment to figure out exactly what Maya had meant, but eventually I remembered hearing the whole Leeroy Jenkins thing before during the Arcanos games over at Billy's place. Apparently it was some kind of internet thing; all I knew was that people started shouting it whenever my barbarian got bored of listening to villains monologue and just started killing everything. I have to deal with enough clichéd villain monologues in my day job, I'm not going to listen to them during my fun time too.

I made a mental note to see about recruiting Maya if I ever got around to starting up an Arcanos game at Nerv. People need a few hobbies to keep themselves busy when we're not saving the world.

I had the samples from the Fourth Angel about halfway back to my Nerv lab when I heard the unmistakable sounds of someone beating the crap out of a vending machine. "Stupid piece of crap, give me the soda I paid for!" The sound of a foot slamming into the plastic side of a vending machine joined Misato's voice in echoing down the hallway.

Sure enough, Nerv's operations director was in the process of wailing on a soda machine like it was a redheaded stepchild. "Well gee, I didn't expect the Fifth Angel to show up this soon. Think you can hold Cokeiel off long enough for me to get up to the command center and scramble our defenses?"

"Oh, hello Harry." Misato glared at the vending machine. "I don't suppose you could magic a couple cokes out of this thing, could you? Actually, while you're at it, turn those cokes into beers too."

"Sorry, I haven't quite mastered the art of turning soda into beer yet." I took a seat on one of the benches. "So, I'm guessing your little talk with Shinji went perfectly well, and everything's fine now?"

Judging by the way Misato stiffened at Shinji's name, I figured I'd hit the mark, not that it had been all that hard to guess. "If you want me to talk about Shinji, I'm definitely going to need a beer."

"I've got a couple stashed away in my lab." Normally I was reluctant to share my stockpile of Mac's microbrew; I'd have to go all the way back to Chicago if I wanted more, and that would be a huge pain in the ass. However, Misato had clearly gone through a rough day, and she was a friend, so I guess I could spare one beer for her.

Once we got to my lab, I cleared off random debris covering one of my work tables, and offered Misato the chair before grabbing a suitable crate to serve as my own seat. That done, I went to the icebox stocked with actual ice, and pulled out two bottles of Mac's dark beer. I wordlessly handed one off to Misato, and set the other down in front of my own seat.

Mac probably would have been horrified when I handed a bottle of his dark brew to Misato, and she proceeded to chug it all down in about fifteen seconds. I know I was. Once the entire bottle of Mac's precious brew was gone, Misato let out a loud enough shout of appreciation that I'm glad my lab is in a relatively isolated part of the Geofront, or people might have gotten the wrong idea about what the two of us were up to.

Once she came down from her beergasm, I decided it was probably time to get down to business. "So, what happened with Shinji?"

The lingering smile Mac's beer had placed on Misato's face instantly transformed into a frown. "It didn't go well." Misato let out a frustrated growl. "He doesn't want to be a pilot."

"Well, you can't exactly blame him. A month ago, he was an ordinary kid going to school, and now all of a sudden we've stuck him into this crazy situation and expecting him to go out and fight life-and-death battles. If I was in the kid's shoes, I wouldn't want to be a pilot either."

"It's not that I don't understand why he doesn't want to be a pilot." Misato sighed and crossed her arms on the table before resting her chin on top of them. "But if he goes into combat with that kind of attitude, it's likely to get him and a whole lot of other people killed. Sometimes I really regret leaving the army; I know we're doing good work here, but it was a lot easier to stay professional and detached when I had a hundred trained adult soldiers under my command instead of a scared kid."

Misato sighed and shifted posture, resting her chin on her left hand while her right idly played with her empty beer bottle. "I suppose it's my own fault, really. After all, he's just a kid; I can't expect him to turn into a good little soldier overnight. Plus, I'm the one who designed most of out pilot training protocols, so if he's having trouble it's probably because I messed up somewhere. How can he be a good soldier when his commander dropped the ball?

"I guess it must have been because I based so much of our training program on my experiences with Asuka. She's … she's not perfect, but the one thing she's never had any problems with is persuading her to pilot the Eva. She's probably been spitting fire over the fact that she missed out on the chance to fight the first two Angels. I knew Shinji didn't have the right kind of attitude to really be a soldier, but I didn't think about changing our training program to deal with that."

"So we wound up training him how to fight in the Eva, but not why he should fight, or how to handle the stress of combat." I grimaced as some less than pleasant memories of my own past sprang to mind. "I had a similar problem back when I was a little older than Shinji. My first master was a dark wizard; he taught me a whole lot about how to use my power, and a lot of it was nasty. I wound up in pretty unhealthy place, until my second master spent a couple years teaching me the really important stuff; why I should use my power."

"Exactly. My training program wound up focusing so much on giving Shinji the skills he needed to survive that it's neglected getting him prepared psychologically. What a complete disaster."

"It's not that bad; we didn't have much time, and teaching the kid enough to stay alive in a fight was more important in the short term. A living Shinji with a bunch of psychological problems is still better off than a dead one who's got his head on straight. Besides, even if you spent all the training time on getting him mentally prepared for combat, there's only so much you can do to train someone to handle life-and-death combat."

"Yeah, there's no substitute for actually having people try to kill you. We probably shouldn't mention that to the Commander though; he might decide to have his security take pot-shots at Shinji to help toughen him up."

I let out a small snort of laughter; that did sound like the sort of unnecessarily traumatic asshole thing the Bastard would do to his son. Misato sighed again. "I guess there's nothing for it; we'll do what we can to help Shinji adapt, and hopefully he'll learn to deal with the pressure before it breaks him."

I scowled at how cold those words sounded. "Hell's bells, Misato. You're talking about a kid!"

For a minute I thought Misato might slap me, but after a moment the anger leaked out of her and left nothing but weary resignation behind. "I know. He's just a kid, and he shouldn't have to deal with all of this." Misato took a deep breath, and slowly let it out. "But he's going to have to learn to handle it; It's not right or fair, but that's how it is."

"I know. God forgive us all, but putting kids in those things is the only way to stop the Third Impact. But does Shinji have to be one of those pilots?"

Misato frowned down at the table for a while, and then slowly shook her head. "We still need him for now. Rei is still in no condition to pilot, Asuka is still in Germany, and we don't have a Fourth Child yet. All those things are subject to change, though. Once we get to the point where Nerv can survive without him … maybe it would be better to just let him go home, and forget about Eva."

"Probably. Of course, then we would have to put some other kid who doesn't deserve it any more than he does out there to replace him." I drained the rest of my beer, and was tempted to go get another one. "What the hell are we doing to these kids, Misato?"

"We're doing what we have to do to survive. It's not like we would be doing the kids a favor if we all decided to just lie down and the let the Angels kill us off."

"Yeah, I keep hearing that, from myself as much as anyone else. I know it's true … but I still don't think I'd ever be able to forgive myself if one of those kids dies before all this is over."

"Then we just need to make sure we don't let any of them die." Misato's voice was barely above a whisper. The tactical commander of Nerv slowly rose from her chair. "Thanks for the beer Harry, think I'm gonna go home now and have half a dozen more."

I let out a rueful chuckle "Guess the talk didn't help you feel any better then."

"The day I stop feeling bad about sending these kids into combat is the day I'll start worrying." Misato's shoulders slumped.

"I wonder how Fuyutsuki and Ritsuko handle it?" I didn't bother asking about Gendo; we both know he's far too much of an ice-cold bastard to worry about that kind of thing.

"I don't know about the Sub-Commander, but Rits … back in college, she smoked maybe three or four cigarettes a day. Now, she goes through two packs on a good day, worse if she's under stress. Of course, I'm not one to talk; I've been drinking more than usual lately." Misato took our empty beer bottles and chucked them in the garbage. "Maybe we'll get lucky, and all our unhealthy habits will end up killing us before the Angels get around to it."

Once Misato went back to her place to get hammered, I got down to my own work. I didn't expect to get much out of the Angel samples, and I wasn't in the mood for doing a lot of heavy analytical work in any case, so I went with something meticulous but simple, and updated Little Tokyo-3 instead.

Little Tokyo-3 was an incredibly useful tool, but keeping it up to date was a huge pain in the ass. A city is a constantly growing, changing and evolving thing, especially a city like Tokyo-3 that still had a lot of construction occurring on the outskirts. Nerv's resources did at least ensure that I was kept up to date on any changes to the city's geography without having to do all the legwork, but I still had to make all the changes to the model of the city by myself. I wasn't about to let someone else mess around with a complicated and delicate tool like Little Tokyo-3, especially since there was enough energy stored in it to do some nasty and potentially fatal things to me if anything went wrong.

The Angels weren't helping matters in the slightest. If the first two were anything to judge by, every single one of them was going to do their own little bit of urban redecorating when they attacked. After spending the better part of a couple of hours removing every single building that had been destroyed and updating the ones that had been damaged, I was getting pretty close to done. It wasn't exactly hard work, but since it was so incredibly detail-oriented it took pretty much all my concentration.

"Hello Mister. Dresden."

"Bwah!" Apparently Rei's knack for being quiet wasn't limited to simply not saying much, because until she spoke up from about five feet behind me I'd had no idea she was even in the room; she'd snuck up on me like some sort of blue-haired half-alien eyepatch-wearing ninja girl clone thing. "Rei … you're … well there you are."

Rei, as was her nature simply regarded me silently.

"I was just uh – bwah!" I made a suitably dramatic gesture with my staff. "You know, it's a wizard like battlecry – strikes fear into the hearts of…" Rei simply continued looking at me flatly as I continued to sound like a complete moron. "You know, it's not exactly a good idea to sneak up on a wizard when he's making with the juju."

Rei cocked her head a tiny bit to the side, then straightened it and slowly nodded. I might have a soft spot for the girl, but she can still weird me out occasionally. I would've felt a lot better if her facial expression had changed the slightest bit the entire time I had been making a fool out of myself.

"So … uh … what can I do for you?"

Rei wordlessly pulled out the trio of the dog-eared paperbacks I'd loaned her the last time I visited her before she got out of the hospital, and offered them to me.

"Oh, right." I took the books back from Rei, and stuffed each book into a different pocket of my duster; not only is it stylish and enchanted enough to protect me from armor-piercing bullets, it also has a lot of very big pockets. "Say, I've got plenty of books back at my apartment; want to come by and have a look at my bookshelf, see if anything catches your eye?"

Before Rei could answer my question, something very unexpected happened. Her stomach let out a loud, hungry growl.

She might be a freaky humanoid abomination, but she also a growing teenager, and teenagers are always hungry. "Wanna grab some food first? My treat."

Rei nodded, and after a moment added. "I do not eat meat."

"That's fine, it'll make ordering a lot easier."


"I'll take the double cheeseburger meal with fries and a coke, and a double veggie-burger meal with … hang on a second." I turned my attention away from the drive-thru. "Rei, do you want fries, or onion rings?"

The girl in question considered the matter for several seconds, before quietly answering. "I am sorry, but I am not familiar with either of those things."

Well, that wouldn't do at all. Gendo had done a lot of things wrong by the kid, but never giving her a chance to eat french fries or onions rings ranked … well if I'm honest it wasn't the worst thing he'd ever done to her, but it had to be in the top ten. I couldn't let this stand. "We'll get both. What do you want to drink?"

"Water will be sufficient."

I sighed, and decided that it was my duty to help expand her horizons. I turned back to the drive-thru and finished up the order. "With the veggie burger, I'll have medium fries, medium onion rings and a large chocolate milkshake. Oh yeah, give us a couple crowns too." The person on the other end of the drive-thru speaker offered an answer that was almost comprehensible; I was still suppressing my magic, so I'm pretty sure that wasn't my fault.

Once we'd gotten our food, I pulled out the pair of cheap cardboard crowns; unlike a certain Faerie godmother, Rei put hers on without a single word of complaint. I then spent the rest of the drive back to my apartment struggling against the urge to break down laughing; something about the combination of Rei's blandly serious expression and the ridiculous-looking cheap paper crown just cracked me up.

Once the two of us got to my apartment, I disabled the wards, and invited Rei in; I wasn't sure if her half-Angel nature would make an invitation necessary, but even if crossing my threshold was a non-issue Rei would probably just stand outside my door if I didn't let her know it was alright to come in. A quick "flickum bicus" lit the candles and gave us enough light to work with, and we carried our food over to my comfy couch and set it down on the table. Once I was seated, Mouse plodded out of my bedroom and came over to rest his head in my lap while I idly scratched his ears with the hand that wasn't full of burger.

I had planned to try for a bit of small talk while we ate, but obviously I had forgotten what a hungry teenager can be like around food. Rei's table manners were completely perfect, but she still never went more than a few seconds between swallowing and taking another bite of food, and all her food was gone before I was even halfway through my own burger.

Once she was done eating, Rei sat very politely on my couch, watching me eat. At first I thought she was just being her normal self, but then a thought struck me and I emptied out about half of my fries onto my burger wrapper, then nudged it in Rei's direction. "I don't think I can finish all of these, you want some?"

"I have had sufficient food." The girl answered.

"Alright, but if you want them you can have them." I couldn't help but smile when, after about fifteen seconds of polite hesitation, Rei started in on the fries I'd offered with her usual efficiency.

I still had a few bites of burger left when Rei spoke up. "Mister Dresden, may I ask you something?"

"Sure." I offered around a mouthful of burger, before washing it down with some coke. "By the way, I think you know me well enough to call me Harry by now." If Misato could be on a first name basis with Shinji, I could be on one with Rei.

Rei nodded, and then continued. "I do not understand why the Third Child refused to obey Lieutenant Colonel Katsuragi's order to withdraw."

I sat back and took a bit to think my answer over carefully; I was pretty sure what I said next could have a big effect on what she would think of Shinji. "Well, Rei, Shinji hasn't had very much training, so when he got put into a combat situation he wasn't fully prepared to deal with it."

"He was given an order. It is the duty of all pilots to obey their orders without question or hesitation." Rei rattled the statement off as if it had been drilled into her head a thousand times, probably because it had been. Gendo Ikari was that kind of guy who would train the girl who was supposed to be his ultimate pilot to be completely and unconditionally obedient.

However, as Morgan will explain at great length to anyone who asks, I've never been one for following the rules. "Look, Rei, obeying orders in a combat situation can be important, but if anyone ever tells you to do something that you think is wrong, or gives you an order that's really stupid, then you don't have to follow it, alright?"

"Even if it is an order from the Commander?"

"Especially if it's an order from him. He might be in charge of Nerv, and it might even be that we need someone ruthless like him who's willing to do whatever it takes to beat the Angels, but that doesn't change the fact that the man is a rat bastard."

Rei nodded, and then remained silent for a few seconds before she came up with her next question "What criteria should I use to determine which orders are morally questionable or stupid?"

"Um … well, if you're not sure, ask me first, but generally it's better to decide those kinds of things on your own." I shrugged and shifted around a bit on the couch. "That's what's really important; learning to figure out these kinds of things for yourself, knowing what's right and making the choice to do it. You get too used to doing what other people tell you to do, and it can get you into trouble."

"Would that not also mean that I should disobey any order from you if I felt it was objectionable?"

"Yes." If anyone else had asked that question I might have thought she was teasing me, but I had yet to confirm that Rei had a sense of humor. I made a mental note to work on that; given the fact that nobody could beat Rei's poker face, she could probably become the world's greatest smartass ever if I trained her right. Molly was pretty much a fully trained wizard now after all, so I needed a new apprentice, even if Rei would only be my apprentice in wiseassery.

"So, anything else you wanted to ask, grasshopper?"

Rei remained silent for a while, either because she was coming up with another question or because she wasn't quite sure what to make of her new nickname. Mouse, obviously satisfied with the amount of attention he'd gotten from me, moved over to Rei, and after a moment the girl cautiously started scratching his ears the exact same way I had been doing before. Rei shifted around on the couch a bit to find accommodate the large dog's desire for attention, and her new position exposed a little bit of silver chain running down her neckline, presumably some kind of necklace or something that had been hidden under her clothing before now. That caught me by surprise; Rei's generally not the type to wear any jewelry or really care about her appearance at all. I considered asking about it, but then Rei spoke up. "The reactivation test for Unit 00 will occur next week. Will you be present for the reactivation?"

That surprised me a bit; it sounded like she wanted me to be there, and I don't think she had ever just come out and told me she wanted something before, even indirectly. Of course, I had been planning to show up anyway, and considering how things went last time I wouldn't have been surprised if the Bastard or Ritsuko asked me to be there. "Yeah, I'll be there. You worried about getting back into Unit 00 after what happened last time?"

"No." And then the darndest thing happened.

Rei smiled.


If mental images aren't enough, there's a picture link in my profile of Rei wearing her crown. General consensus is that it is adorable.