I was bad and wrote more of this. It's my own fault for watching Rebuild.

"Even on the world of the First Ancestors, life came from the sea," Tabris said through Shinji's music player so no one would hear it but him as the cat sat on the beach, tucking his tail around his body. No one else was here: who else would want to look at the red sea? Water that couldn't be swum in, poisoned water.

Shinji had still thought it would be blue somehow, from the movies of before Second Impact that were broadcasted over and over, the world clinging to a dead past where people congregated on the beaches, blue water reflecting a blue sky, teeming life on golden sands. A lost paradise.

The beaches Shinji knew were made of tumbled pebbles, the water green and brown with life, and he'd learned to swim in the blue water of the high school's swimming pool. So maybe he understood how much it bothered Tabris to see water that couldn't be swum in. "We could swim in it, right?" Maybe that would cheer him up?

"Not this close to Tokyo-3." Not when cats were supposed to hate water, and changing into the Terran-human form SEELE gave him when they might be watched?

"It's just LCL," Shinji reminded him. He was trying to remember to use the words NERV used for all this stuff: they were different from the terminology SEELE was teaching Kaworu Nagisa and he definitely didn't want his father to think he'd had contact with SEELE, since then SEELE would find out and they certainly knew they hadn't contacted Shinji at all. When the whole point was to keep him from realizing that he actually mattered. "So it can be reshaped?" LCL was also originally designed as an 'atmosphere' that every variant of humanity could survive in and breathe, according to Tabris. The carriers some of the more powerful Angels brought with them through the Sea of Dirac were filled with it for the convenience of scientists from many different planets. While it was hospitable to life with AT fields, the descendants of the ancestors, it was also designed to be sterile, so it couldn't be contaminated by the bacteria, fungi, prions and everything else of a hundred worlds. Angels could shape it into whatever they wanted and it would act as life support to anyone who knew to flare their AT field, but everything else?

When that N2 mine was set off, the blast and secondary blast of Adam and the othes breaking loose had disrupted the containment fields all the angels used to store LCL in a personal pocket dimension, where they could call it out to shape it into physical forms or the first seed bacteria for a new ecosystem. When all of that was dumped into the ocean, it started to disinfect it, converting all the algae and other organic matter into more LCL.

If it weren't for SEELE, Shinji might have wondered why no one had wondered why it was so much less toxic to humans than everything else. Since Kaworu knew they used LCL inside the Evas, he'd shown Shinji how to flare his personal mental AT field out to mark that the cells of his body were part of the physical embodiment of his mind. It wouldn't protect him from a gunshot, but since LCL was programmed to respond to that, even LCL that wasn't processed for the EVAs wouldn't start stripping off his skin.

"Yes, that's where the other angels are getting the matter for their bodies." Giant combat forms. The cat stood up again and delicately picked his way across the rubble, making sure there weren't any pools of LCL left on it even this late in the day and long after high tide. Shinji had shoes, but their companion was still nervous.

When they came here, when he saw the sea, Pen Pen had pulled back with a disapproving, "Wark." He must have been trained to avoid the water, even fear it, so that he wouldn't go diving in. Because it wasn't safe for penguins to follow their instincts anymore.

"We need to find somewhere they can't monitor," Shinji told Tabris. Again. It was boring to lie in bed in his room staring up at the ceiling, although he was lucky he'd practiced making sure not to talk aloud during these conversations. It was hard to find out what normal behavior was, when TV didn't show it and people didn't talk about it, but most of the adults who lived through Second Impact were some degree of shell-shocked, and their children…

So for Shinji to be active and upbeat, especially when that wasn't part of the Scenerio, would be much more unusual and suspicious than for him to lie there like a zombie. He still had to get out of the apartment before he got sick of being inactive, which was why he'd offered to take Pen Pen for a walk along with Tabby. It was a little embarrassing how grateful Misato had been: she never had the time.

"So he can swim?" Tabris could cover the other life form with his own AT field, if they found somewhere they could do it without questions being asked. He wouldn't want Misato to think Shinji was being careless with her pet.

"It's dangerous to let him think that water's safe, but someday it will be, right?" Angels were made for large-scale reshaping of ecosystems, and one of the many mad scrambles in the days after Second Impact had been to get genetic samples of everything. Since Tabris had hacked those databanks long ago, even though he wouldn't be able to put the ocean exactly back the way it had been, it wouldn't be hard to manage close enough that life could take it from there, once all the LCL had been converted into that life.

"I'm already keeping an eye on his tracking collar," Tabris said. After all, this was the companion of the woman who had taken Shinji into her home, and Lilim technology was still quite simple to beings with the processing power to handle entire planetary ecosystems. "If he decides to leave the apartment to swim, I'll make sure no harm comes to him."

Not when all of this was Tabris' fault for lowering his AT field when he detected the presence of other humans. For some reason, the Lilim's psychic abilities were almost entirely unused, and although he hadn't wanted them to see him as some sort of oracle, he had wanted them to be able to speak to him so Tabris would know if something came up that he should help them with. Since they made use of radio waves and other transmissions, he'd allowed those frequencies to get through his AT field.

It wasn't the blast from the N2 mine that had destroyed his focus, reabsorbing all but the most strongly reinforced Lance into his normal AT field and releasing the other angels, it was the EMP it sent out, the energy on the frequencies Tabris was no longer armored against. His mostly-dormant mind had diverted all resources to personal defense, as though he'd entered normal space into a supernova or some actual threat. Then, after he was shocked awake, trying to reestablish the spears and keep the others in stasis and unharmed while still very disoriented made him divert most of his AT shield away from his personal protection, at which point Adam had sucker-punched him hard enough to reduce his body to scattered protons, neutrons and electrons.

Leaving his remnant consciousness to wonder what the fuck (although the team of scientists that created him would have scolded him for speaking of the continuation of life in vain) had just happened until SEELE's clone developed enough that he could load himself into the new brain and start gathering data, only to realize that they'd already loaded Adam's dormant consciousness into the body and since Adam was buried deeper into it, the instant he did anything that woke Adam up?

So this was how humans with a gun pressed to the back of their heads felt. Or a sword of Damocles hanging over it.

He really did hope that his homeworld never did find out how poorly he was representing them. First he'd let most of a biosphere be destroyed, and then he'd let desperation put him in a position where he was unlikely to live long enough to fix it. He was just lucky they'd overengineered their first Seed of Life, or he wouldn't have survived all the mistakes he'd made even this long.

To die uselessly, leaving nothing to the future?

No, it would be a poor repayment for Shinji's company to waste this time on dark thoughts like that.

"Thanks," Shinji said, because if Pen Pen was anything like the dog one of the other kids at school had finally managed to badger her parents into allowing her? Her plan had involved borrowing Tabby at his most purry and least troublesome to get her parents to start to smile again and realize that a pet really could make things a bit brighter. Of course, she'd had to take care of the dog herself, but while he loved her family, he'd still loved the outdoors enough to become one hell of an escape artist. Ami, Shinji and the rest of their class had spent a lot of fun afternoons spreading out to find the dog, in the certain knowledge that there wasn't any actual pressure because he would come back around dinnertime, or come running up to them if they brought food. The dog's escape artist skills had allowed a lot of them to escape cram school, among other things.

Pen Pen and Tabby had started getting along as soon as Pen Pen was satisfied that Tabby wasn't going to try to steal any of his food. Shinji just hoped no one at NERV knew enough about pets to realize that Tabby's diet wasn't felinely possible. Cats were carnivores: if an ignorant owner tried to put them on a vegetarian diet, they'd die. Yet Tabris got nauseous at the idea of eating anything with a nervous system. Eating was an important part of social interaction for every group of planetbound humans, so angels still had to be able to eat plants for the sake of hospitality, but a lot of care had been taken over the generations to make sure that while they were still capable of violence, if need be, they weren't going to start blowing up things for fun. Compared to an AT field, so many things were fragile. Windows, walls, planets…

Asteroids were another matter entirely. One of his first training exercises had been helping another angel find water asteroids and bombard a likely-looking planet with them, along with another angel who was working on a planet in the same solar system. Aziraphael had taught him the elaborate scoring system developed over the eons to maximize ocean formation and metal accessibility. The game of Asteroids was an exception to the general rule of 'Hands Off My Planet,' along with shifting orbits, so if things had gone properly, all the angels attached to planets in the Sol System would have helped out with Mars.

A tug on Pen Pen's leash made both Shinji and Tabris wince. "How is your shoulder?" Tabris asked, padding closer to Shinji as though he could do anything to help. He couldn't, not when NERV closely monitored the health of its pilots.

"It's fine," Shinji said, although his hand went to the shirt over the elaborate dressing Ritsuko had encumbered him with, on the grounds that cat scratches were dangerous and was that creature really sanitary?

Shinji didn't blame Tabris: when that angel had crashed practically on top of them while they were waiting for Misato and Shinji had jumped back, it wasn't like Tabby had hands, so how else was he supposed to stay on Shinji's shoulder? It was reflex. If anything the sudden owfuckow of realizing twenty-one sharp claws had been jammed into him had helped clear his mind and hopefully look like less of an idiot, although in hindsight there had been a lot of lag between the injury and Misato pointing out that he was bleeding. He'd been a little distracted by the angel and the need to get in the car. It wasn't until things had calmed down enough that Misato could care about a little blood instead of the need to avoid being crushed that his own brain had bothered to notice that right, now that he was still alive, he was bleeding, huh, and owfuck.

Since Tabris was too well-behaved to shed anything he wasn't given for that purpose, there hadn't ever been any need to trim those claws. Which might be a good thing, because otherwise the cat might have gone flying and Misato wouldn't have let Shinji go grab an animal when his own life was in danger. It might have been a little difficult for a cat to survive at ground zero of both an angel and a lot of ordnance without using his AT field and being noticed by said angel, even if it was too little power for NERV's equivalent to detect. Then someone would have wondered why the angel had stopped its relentless advance towards the geofront and started stamping on the ground.

Although really, Shinji didn't think there was much of anything that could have kept him from acting like an idiot. For one thing, he hadn't asked Misato any questions because she worked for his father and there was something called security clearance on top of that.

Not to mention that he hadn't been sure what questions someone really would ask if they didn't know anything about angels, not when he'd known about AT fields, if not about the whole apocalypse thing, for what seemed like forever.

Then there was the proof that his dad was either absolutely insane or somehow knew about Tabris, which was an even more scary thought, because seriously, who put someone who supposedly didn't know what the fuck they were doing into something like that?

Quickly followed by the sensation of a crazy person clawing at his mind. While an angel was trying to kill him and he was trying to kill it. Oh, he'd experienced piloting an Eva before: the time difference even let him tag along during some of Kaworu's training sessions. The trouble was that it was hard to interface with the machine without seeming like he knew what he was doing while keeping the crazy lady from using the interface to ooze inside his head. He was used to letting Tabris in there, because that was how Tabris showed him the battles the angels had fought with each other. Not to mention how angel powers worked and felt, so Shinji would know what he was up against even if he couldn't actually use physical AT field abilities in the real world.

Tabris knocked, because there was such a thing as manners and the angelic AT field didn't cover the psychic bands, and Tabris didn't want to get fried by Shinji's the way a human fighting an angel without an AT field would get crushed by an angel in the real world.

So his first battle had been trying to keep a lot of plates in the air once and failing pretty epically. Shinji consoled himself with the thought that he really didn't have to worry about them suspecting he knew what he was doing when he tripped over his own two feet practically right away.

At least all of that had kept him from thinking about the most serious aspect of what was happening. Eva pilot training exercises, with whatever handicaps the two of them could dream up (although nothing had prepared him for the crazy lady) to make it harder were familiar. Worrying about his father was also familiar. The whole crazy-ghost thing had been panic-inducing.

It wasn't until afterwards that he'd really registered that oh yeah, someone had been trying to kill him. One of his best friend's kind, messed up and not all there.

But still a person. Shinji had just killed a person.

It still hadn't really sunk in, in all the pressure of getting a collar for Tabby so he wasn't confiscated and cleaning Misato's place because it smelled terrible and there was barely room to move around in without tripping over something and medical examinations and not knowing anyone here except Tabby and was Rei alright and what the hell.

Seriously.

If he didn't know that NERV and SEELE both wanted the world to be destroyed… Still, never attribute to malice what could adequately be explained by stupidity. He doubted his father really cared enough for putting him with Misato to be some sort of diabolical plot, especially when Misato really did seem to care, and even had a pet.

Yes, she was kind of crazy, but who didn't need therapy, after Second Impact?

Still, he might really have just lain there awake and stared at the ceiling all night if Tabris hadn't kept him company, purring him to sleep even though he also had to pay attention to SEELE wanting his reactions to what had just happened.

He hadn't said thanks to Tabris because he knew that Tabris would thank him for giving him something to think about besides those old men and the façade Tabris himself had to put on.

It was nice, Shinji knew, to know that he could make someone smile.

The second angel, though… it had been easier, to pilot the Eva and everything else, and that made it harder, because that left him free to think about what he was actually doing. It wasn't until he had to save those other boys, who were in danger because Shinji hadn't just done it, and he got the order to retreat that he realized that he couldn't retreat, not then. He had to kill the angel then, as selfish as it was of him to put the other two in danger in order to help him fight. He didn't want blood on his hands, no matter how much Tabris wanted him to value his own life, but it was easier when he had someone else to protect. Having them there had reminded him of that, cut through the haze of what the hell am I doing, I'm about to murder someone that isn't even in their right mind, with the reality that if he didn't get this done, if he ran away from this, people were going to die.

Tabris was the same way: they could take pain. Shinji's abandonment by his father: he knew what it felt like to be hurt. He didn't want to make anyone else feel that way. He refused to be like his father, and just hurt and use people so Mr. Ikari could be happy. He refused to lower himself to that level, become that kind of person.

Even though Tabris had tried to tell him that it was okay to be a little selfish, to value his own life, Tabby wasn't very convincing when he was the same way as Shinji. When so many people had died because Adam and Lilith were selfish and Tabris himself… He hadn't really screwed up. He just hadn't succeeded, and when failure meant people died?

But that was why Shinji had known that he had to kill the angel then, because if he let himself obey Misato, find an excuse not to kill even if it was such a good excuse even Misato agreed with it, then when would he work up the nerve again?

This was fucked up, that was what it was. All of it. He knew that Tabris was sad that Shinji finally understood what Tabris had known all along. This was insane. None of this should be this way, his father shouldn't have abandoned him and called him back just to use him, angels shouldn't be trying to exterminate a planet. It was like all that was good and holy had been turned on its head, like the world had started eating the wrong kind of mushrooms, the ones one of his classmates' father had ODed on, trying to get away from it all. How did you fix this? Where did you start, when it seemed like all of the world except for Shinji's little corner of it, the one he and his friends had carved out of the rubble of a broken world, was absolutely crackers?

Apparently, the way to start was with killing people. Killing people who had reason to be pissed off. This would be so much easier if he could tell himself that this was actually the angels' fault, the way Misato clearly did.

Shinji had never actually asked Tabris to kill SEELE, both because he knew Tabris wasn't capable of that and it would be cruel to ask him, and because even knowing his aunt and uncle, even before he came to NERV, it was clear that things were just… messed up. The world was, and then people got messed up, and messed up other people.

It might be their fault for not fighting it, not standing against the tide, but a lot of people felt the way SEELE did, would want that paradise if they knew it could be reached, so killing them with angel powers wouldn't actually do anything except screw up Tabris' head enough that Adam would wake up and kill everything.

So Shinji had to go along with all this bullshit, as much as he hated it, because the only alternative was to ignore it, try to turn his back on the world and go back to his mountains… Until all of it got turned into more of this goop.

Yeah, no.

Well, at least it wouldn't be hard to act like he was totally out of his depth or didn't understand anything of what was going on. He understood it, but that didn't mean it made any more sense, was any less insane.

He could tell it was bothering Tabris too by the way his music player skipped to Tabris' favorite song, the one he could listen to for hours but didn't play that often for Shinji after that time he'd played it so many times in a row that Shinji had gotten absolutely sick of it and refused to listen to it for almost an entire year.

Ode to Joy.

The joy found in life, the enjoyment of it all, the happiness that proved life was worth living, that the Ancestors and Angels' work to continue it was worth it. Was worth everything.

He just had to keep that in mind, he told himself, tugging on Pen Pen's leash. "Come on, Pen Pen. Let's see if they've got any real fish."

"Wark?" Was Pen Pen's shocked reaction to that word.

"Everybody kept giving me money." And warm clothing. And hugging him and Tabby goodbye until he thought he might need a crowbar. He'd had so many people tell him that even if his aunt and uncle were throwing him out, he could come stay with them that it had started to wear down his resolve to go to Tokyo-3 and finally face his father, finally start moving forward. It wasn't that he hadn't liked his life, but he knew that it was happy because Tabris had worked very hard to make it that way. But most people's lives, including Tabris' life as Kaworu Nagisa, weren't like that at all. So it would be selfish to want to stay.

Maybe he was more than a little selfish after all.

The post-Second Impact depopulation would help reduce starvation due to the loss of seafood as a resource, and of course modern agriculture means the world can grow more food than it needs even for the current population, so starvation due to lack of food wouldn't be an issue as long as someone made sure it got where it needed to go (likely how the UN rose to power), but if the oceans are basically barren? There would still be fish farms and such, but supply and demand dictates that fish would be so incredibly freaking expensive that businesses would fight to get the entire Pacific Northwest restored to a pristine state for the sake of the salmon.