At this point I think I've done enough of these that the original chapter title scheme has stopped being funny.
"I didn't know Kensuke knew anything about music," said Shinji, opening his bag of bento on the grass next to Hikari's, the two of them quickly conducting the usual round of trades.
"War movie soundtracks," Touji said, looking around. "Hey, where's your cat?"
The pilot shrugged. "Around. He's never been a house cat: sometimes I think being indoors so much bothers him. He didn't follow me to school, so he must be exploring."
"You sure that's safe? I guess it was where you're from, but this is the big city."
"I talked to animal control, and he knows about cars."
"I guess." They'd had this conversation before, but it still worried Touji a little. What was he supposed to tell his sister if the kitty was run over or stepped on by an angel or caught in the gears when a building went down or something? "Damn, though, guess I'll have to eat my own radishes." He didn't like them, but he wasn't going to waste food, not when things had been so tight for years after Second Impact.
"Kaworu's a vegetarian and so's Rei, so give 'em here," Shinji said, opening two boxes and taking Touji's to divide the offending food between the two of them.
"Rei's contributing now?" Hikari asked, a little surprised. Asuka was her friend and Shinji's fellow pilot, so the two of them would have brought lunches for her even if she hadn't insisted on pulling her weight by treating them to lunch on Sundays and giving Hikari entirely too much money for ingredients.
"After the last battle…" Shinji bit his lip and the others looked at each other. Shinji didn't want to talk about it and Rei didn't talk much, but they'd already guess that Rei had nearly died. "And I think we may be related. She looks a lot like my mother. We're not sure because Rei and my mother both had their backgrounds wiped for safety's sake, but that just makes it more likely, doesn't it?"
Touji and Hikari looked at each other again, then to where Kensuke was animatedly talking to Nagisa, who was nodding with what seemed like genuine interest instead of feeling put-upon. Kensuke had monopolized Nagisa since the beginning of lunch because moonbase that was host to the latest angel-fighting secret technology developments: Nagisa was lucky he'd somehow asked questions on topics which came up in Kensuke's excited half-questions half-telling-Kaworu-about-his-own-'hometown' that eventually led Kensuke to talk about something Nagisa was actually interested in hearing about. Then they looked back at Shinji.
"I don't know, man," Touji said finally. "Maybe if the two of you are cousins or something," if there was a resemblance, it was hard to see, "She's Nagisa's sister? The two of them look enough like each other to be twins." Fraternal, but since they were a girl and a boy that was obvious.
Shinji nodded. "They could be. They have the same birthday."
"He didn't know?" Touji asked, frowning. He could see Rei not even mentioning that she'd ever had a brother, but Kaworu seemed pretty normal – by comparison to Rei, anyway – so he'd have told Shinji right away even if they weren't allowed to meet before, right?
Shinji shook his head. "He's been up on the moon and training his entire life. He needs almost as many pills as Rei does because the isolation means his immune system isn't developed enough. Section Two came by in the middle of the night the first night he was here, woke Misato up carrying these boxes in, since they couldn't let him miss a dose right after coming down to earth and an EVA fight." Kaworu still had more drawers stuffed with pill bottles than with clothes. "Asuka asked if he had AIDS or something, because some of the medicines are the same." A lot of them were post-organ transplant medications, too.
Shinji had been shocked and worried: Kaworu hadn't told Shinji he might get sick why? Kaworu had assured him that there wasn't any real danger because of his AT field, and that was when Shinji had found out that Rei, on the other hand, did have to worry.
Although her cover story was organ transplants, after the EVA battles, the real problem both their bodies had was that neither NERV nor SEELE had exactly known what they were doing when they translated angel DNA into normal matter, earth-type biochemistry, then mixed those genes with enough Terran genes to get something that looked like this world's human. Both groups of scientists had given up on solving the pigment issue.
Then there was the problem of that mixed genome being inserted into Terran cells with Terran epigenetics. In the end, they actually had failed to produce anything viable. The compatibility problems involved in mixing Lilith's Noxian or Tabris' Tethyan DNA with Terran would have been more than enough to keep producing hybrids from being anything as simple as 'plug and play' even without the differences between angels and terrestrial humans.
Rei was only alive because what was left of Lilith had designed these genes and bodies in the first place, and buried memory knew how to operate them 'manually' and automatically with her AT field. Tabris had just analyzed the local biologic and learned how to do the same thing.
The EVAs were orders of magnitude easier to make because one of the things pure angel DNA was designed for was being easy to work with, since a planet's inhabitants usually discovered their angel when their technology had advanced to around that point anyway. It wasn't quite to the point of having a built-in-tutorial, but if a planet couldn't figure out how to make living spaceships first capable of lifting stuff into orbit for them and then settling more stars with a set of blueprints designed to be easy to read right in front of them, they probably needed to wait a few decades before making beings that powerful anyway, because while humanity had dozens of universes' worth of experience making angel biotech idiotproof, sometimes stuff still happened.
Like, oh, Shinji's own planet.
Still, while space was prettymuch space, planets had a lot of variety in their environments, so there were a lot of different adaptations to those environments. In all the history Kaworu had, no terrestrial species had moved onto someone else's planet, not in large numbers. Planets had things like weather that would erode domes and plants that would crack them open: if you were building habitats because your planet had gotten too old to support life, it was better to just build spaceships that could move on to the next star to begin with.
And if a planet became uninhabitable while its people weren't at that tech level yet…
As cool as it would be to be able to fly, Shinji didn't want to die. Instrumentality meant that everyone would become one, and that meant that there wouldn't be a Shinji anymore, or a Kaworu, or a Rei. Misato, Asuka: their memories would be in the whole, but they wouldn't be themselves anymore. Just like how if something made their sun go nova (and it could happen, if one of the angels had gone crazy enough) and the desire to live made everyone who still had their original instincts intact even with their AT fields shut start turning into angels, they wouldn't be themselves anymore.
Kaworu was, well, Kaworu. So Shinji hadn't really taken him seriously when he said that no, if Shinji got cool powers (well, cooler), he wouldn't be Shinji anymore. Kaworu was a pretty normal person, or so Shinji thought when Kaworu was the person Shinji knew best and all the adults Shinji knew were some degree of crazy.
The other angels were pretty inhuman, but they were definitely crazy, and even so had almost seemed within normal post-Second-Impact limits compared to the crazy lady in his Eva. They'd been trying to kill him but they hadn't been clawing at his mind, he hadn't actually felt that madness.
It was Rei, and the strange mix-up of angel feelings and lilim-type-human feelings inside her that made him realize how big the gap was. Psychologically, she wasn't quite one or the other, and with Yui and Lilith both trying to influence her (forget Gendo), her mind had been tugged in two incompatible directions all her life.
Tabris assessment was that she was not capable of a hyperspace scouting voyage, not one of any length, but she might be more suited to developing another world in this system, one whose species would have a grandparent-race to interact with from the beginning, than having lilim-human relationships.
"Is there anything we should watch out for?" Hikari asked him, worried for their new classmate. "Does he have any food allergies?"
Shinji shook his head. "The only thing he can't eat is meat, like Rei. And Misato showed me how to use antihistamine shots if he has a bad reaction to something. Asuka already knew how. Rei's been fine for years, so if they really are twins and have the same condition, he should be fine."
"So that's more evidence, isn't it? If they have to take the same stuff," Touji realized. "Huh," he said, looking at Kaworu. "Maybe pilot potential runs in families?" So Shinji got it from his mom, not his dad, and so had his cousins?
Hikari didn't quite sigh when Asuka intruded into Kaworu and Kensuke's conversation, loudly disagreeing with Kaworu on the merits of a German composer.
"Huh, she's pulling his pigtails now," Touji said. "Guess you've got some competition, Shinji."
"Pulling his…" That had been Tabris' assessment this whole time, but it made Shinji blink to hear it from someone who wasn't somewhere between Shinji's best friend and godfather and wasn't biased in Shinji's favor, thinking that of course the brilliant foreign genius would be willing to settle for an ordinary country boy like Shinji.
Since Kaworu hadn't been listening into their conversation, he thought Shinji's mental sending of what amounted to, "Wha?" was actually about the conversation Kaworu was having.
He told Shinji, "It's fascinating, isn't it?" So no wonder Asuka was so passionate in the defense of someone she hadn't studied, just heard a few pieces from. "I doubt any planet in all of human history has developed music to the extent you have. Oh, every species needs a method of communication that isn't psychic, because it's impossible to keep from sending one's emotions along with the words because the words and thoughts are made of those feelings about the universe and the other person, but because of this it's the best way to communicate emotions." Obviously. "Yet with that closed to you, your ancestors looked for other ways to make the person they tried to communicate with feel the emotion they were trying to get across, and developed this form of communication using the reactions of your brains to harmonizing frequencies. Using this to communicate so many things from transcendent joy to the madness and horror of indiscriminate death, to the rebirth of the world after winter or tragedy…"
Part of Shinji's patience with Kensuke's otakudom was that Kaworu was such, such an otaku, so Shinji was used to dealing with the enthusiasm of someone who thought music was the best thing ever and couldn't understand why anyone else wouldn't find equal joy in it once its wonders were explained to them.
Shinji liked music himself, and not just listening to it. He found playing instruments a wonderful way to think about things and Kaworu was right: it did sort of fill the hole left by not being able to talk to other people 'properly,' not being able to get his feelings across to his aunt and uncle and let them know that they weren't alone in their pain. They could hear things in the sound of his cello that he'd never managed to say to them in words. Still, to him it was beautiful, but there were lots of beautiful art forms. It also was only a fraction as good at communicating as actual psychic communication was, so in that department he saw it as some utterly inadequate, grasping at straws substitute instead of a miracle of human determination to overcome the odds and reclaim their birthright, reach out to each other to join together and build this world the way Tabris did.
Maybe Kensuke's passion about the tools of warfare and Tabris' love of music were the same thing, at root. Kensuke had grown up after Second Impact, during the wars over resources that had led to the UN's authority over the world. Weapons were what defended people, tools that could be used to save the world from angels and other evils. By preparing for war, by fighting they could have peace, and hopefully sanity.
While music, one of the things humanity used to fight its life sentence to solitary confinement inside their own skulls, showed Tabris that they were still fighting, still reaching out to each other despite all the fear. That the human spirit wasn't broken, that no matter times human hearts were they could pick them back up again, piece them together, and turn that pain into something beautiful.
Because of Evas, humanity would survive the angels.
Because of music, there was proof humanity could still move past what the angels did to them?
Did all of this boil down to the love of life, wanting this world to live, or was Shinji overthinking it? Or thinking too much like Kaworu, who was made to think in those terms. He might have hit on Kaworu's subconscious reasoning, but Kensuke's might just be that guns went boom and Misato kicked ass.