A/N: Please, for the love of EVA, review. If you love this story, tell me. If you hate it, tell me. If you think my writing is too wordy or too verbose or too highfalutin or just right or good enough or ANYTHING, just tell me, ok? Reviews are what motivate non-for-profit authors (like myself) to write. In fact, I'll make it easy for you. Multiple-choice.

A. If this were a person, I'd marry it. Hell, I'd marry it even if it weren't!

B. It's pretty good.

C. It's like Shinji. Boring as hell.

D. Kill yourself. Now.

Choose one. All you have to type is the letter.

Misato yawned blearily as her systems hummed to full awareness, one limp hand flapping restlessly around in a habitual frenzy. As the whining torment of the alarm clock was silenced, she sighed contentedly into her pillow, sprawled out over her futon in the questing haze that accompanied first wakefulness. A battered beer can tottered from a disheveled cabinet and clinked against her head.

Should I wake up? Or go back to sleep?

Caught evenly between duty and temptation, she started as a glaring white-and-blue vidpanel popped into her line of sight. Kaji Ryouji's blank white eyes stared at her, his jawline strangely solemn. She yawned again, irritation growing in her like a vine. First that damn alarm clock, and then this? She hoped Kaji wasn't going to spout bull like "I know how much you love to wake up to my face" at – her eyes flicked over to her table chronographer – 4:33 AM. She moaned and dropped her face back into the pillow, eyes defiantly shut. The vidpanel was still there, of course, superimposed on her vision. Kaji opened his mouth as if to speak, hesitated, and then-

Here it comes.

"Misato."

Her head popped out of the morass that had occupied her futon, and she blinked. "Misato?" That was it? No cheesy comment or pick-up line? She thought she was worth more than that! She couldn't have been getting fat – cybernetic bodies had done away with that problem – but what if he was no longer interested? Relief shot through her like a high, then elation, then – was that disappointment. Gleefully she squelched it. And then another beer can came tumbling from the heavens, smiting her in reprimand. Thinking during the morning. Bad.

Kaji focused his impenetrable gaze on her. She realized that he looked serious, even more serious than the first time they had broken up. There were crow's feet splitting from his empty eyes, his hair was more rakishly splayed than usual, and his mouth was contorted into something that resembled a grimace. Uh-oh.

"Misato, there's been…a complication with the Children. The mission-

And there it came.

Father did not say that it would be so bright. But he was a man of few words.

Bleeding now, I had to see. One lunged away from me, crimson flow and living blue. Such a beautiful child, but she had yet to see the light. Tapping slashed crystal erupted now, splattering my side with silent shards. Another was coming now – he was an angry one. Even angrier than her, and far more terrible. He was a deception, a twist in the light of the soul. Two-in-one and broken dreams.

They planned on trapping me in this labyrinth of birth, fearing as they did the heavens' light. I knew fear too, fear that these wayward Children would succeed. But for them, I had to be brave. They were the future, you see? They were the light. Only through defeat do we ever learn. It is an experience, Father tells me, that they need more of.

And so I was born. But I could not grasp Day, for I was entombed here, a land of angular shadows wrapped in fluorescent shrouds. A ghost-land between All and None. I ripped through Mother's flesh, the craft of men, pylon-masks in an untrue reality. My claws bit and dug into the malleable darkness, spraying me with its detritus of no-light. Up, ever up, and then the light came, the true light, the day-light, and now I would make them See.

Asuka sprang back from the – she supposed she ought to call it Shamshael – thing and sent another urgent firing from her neurons into the cybernet. Shinji and Rei were already closing as rapidly as possible but another distress signal wouldn't hurt. Not when she had to deal with this monstrosity, alone. There was a time when she would have sneered at the Angel and challenged it with lone wolf ferocity. That was before the boiler room, and before Shinji had saved her, and she before hated him for it. (Not before she hated him, though.)

There was a thudding down the hall, distant, and it was euphony to Asuka. The glass next to her blew out and a murderous shadow fell through.

Shinji spun as he landed, bringing his arm-cannon to bear on the thing which Asuka had called Shamshael. It was a huge beast, vaguely bipedal, hunched-over and completely smooth. Four-fingered claws, over a meter in length, extended from its arms, and its entire surface – skin? – was livid orange but unruly, as if a tumescence throbbed right beneath it, injecting bursts of dapper red and molten yellow into the living montage. It had no neck. Instead, extending from its shoulders, and framed by an arch of pulsing flesh, was a single, lucidly transparent eye.

It pounced upon the ceiling and began a remorseless assault upon the architecture. Casually it ripped support beams out as if they were limbs from a body. Splinters, debris, and dust coated its passage in a ponderous fog.

God, that thing is ugly, Asuka shot at him. Who knew we'd be facing some freak whose body looks like a tie-dye job with tomato juice splattered over it?

Shinji shrugged. It is pretty weird. Wonder what it wants? Hey, have you seen Rei?

Asuka blasted him with a withering glare, then huffed and leapt into the crevasse left by the Angel's departure.

The sky was lachrymose with red. Like inkblots of crimson the light pooled across the vast expanse of Tokyo-3, catching the outlying spires in blooded hues, hesitant at first, dribbling and collecting in pinks that resembled washed-out flesh, then a surge, a torrent, an ocean of carnal red, harlot red, blood-red. The city was drenched in a forever of blood and the underworld capsized, washing its hands of that everywhere red and slithered back into its innumerable hovels. Daybreak had come to the blindest city in the world.

And Shamshael rejoiced. For now he would have the light to show them all his wonders.

A/N: Yeah, it's short and it sucks. Don't sue me, though - I don't own EVA or GiTS. All feedback is appreciated (constructive criticism the most).

On an utterly unrelated note, I updated my profile, if anyone cares/wants to see.