Re. the Moonkitten chapter: Actually, Tsukiyomi dislikes basically every single other Eva.

Evas 00 and 01 are jerks. Eva 01 wants to cause Third Impact, and did in the anime. Eva 02 got controlled by Kaworu in ep. 24 when Kaworu is his pilot. Eva 04 let an angel control it and use it to attack humanity. The Mass Production Evas let SEELE control them and use them to cause Third Impact.

And, most annoyingly of all, so far they have all gotten to do more fighting than him. Rebuild!Kaworu stopped Third Impact with a one-hit kill, and since then Gendo hasn't wanted to deploy SEELE's Eva or pilot. Instead, he's had Ritsuko and her people poking at it all the time to discover and copy the improvements, and he doesn't like that. Especially when bored.

So his reaction to the idea of getting to run around NERV beating up the other Evas is less, 'this is a fun game, huh guys?' and more gleefully punching the other Eva's faces in while trashing the place cause it sucks.

Kaworu is friendly and dislikes hurting people. Tsukiyomi is a very unhappy (new environment, not allowed outside much, stressed, etc.) toddler-stage war machine. Meaning that if he could get away with it, he'd totally start smashing things. Gleefully. Like Naoko/Unit 00 going berserk and trying to punch Gendo through the observation window, although she was more pissed off and Tsukiyomi would be more tantrum/pissed off. However, being able to communicate using telepathy instead of struggling with words decreases his stress level compared to a normal toddler, most of his life coaching is Kaworu, who does not encourage smashing things, and he knows that if he were to, for example, break apart his Eva cage to go for a walk he would be in so, so much damn trouble since his soul-father can totally kick his ass, war machine or not, and then time outs plus lectures.

So being given orders to beat people up, even Evas instead of Angels, would be very yes since he'd really like to beat something up, especially people he dislikes.

The apartment door opened quietly and Kaworu padded into the hallway, heading towards the balcony. "Oh?" he said when he reached the dining room that doubled as the apartment's common area. "You're up early, Misato."

"So are you," was her response. "Having trouble adjusting to the time change?"

He smiled especially brightly, even for him, in the way that she already recognized as, 'Oh, you want to talk about music?' "No, I found this wonderful place by the shore to do my practices."

"Your practices?"

He nodded. "I sing. I had to wait until one of the rooms with soundproofing was free on the moonbase to practice it and the violin, since the vocal exercises aren't all that interesting to listen to, but there's a broken statue of some kind of winged beast," the proportions were wrong for it to be a humanoid angel, "a little ways into the water at the shore of one of the crater lakes, facing out into the east, with mountains to the west. It's just a marvelous atmosphere."

She raised an eyebrow. "Dead angels, seas of blood… Isn't that a little morbid for you?" Taking a drink after that statement disguised the suspicion in it, or might have if he hadn't seen her watching him through binoculars along with Mr. Hyuga.

"Blood and dead angels both signify a defeated enemy. Then the new dawn, breaking over the world, bringing with it the promise of peace and a new era. The victory greater for the magnitude of the struggle, the night survived, the suffering endured to reach the new day." His hands tried to frame that vision before he remembered his audience. "Sorry," he said a little bashfully, "but it is very inspirational." A pity she'd left before he finished reporting to SEELE and moved on to the singing, but he knew she hadn't been able to hear him at that distance anyway.

"Are you planning on making a habit of going down there then?"

Hmm. "Well, I'd like to find somewhere inside the geofront, and somewhere in the city. There's just such a range of environments down here. It's a pity I can't visit mountains when an angel can attack at any time, and… I'm hoping to use this opportunity to connect with the emotions of the composers as much as I can, the world they were crafting music of and in. I'd like to try singing in a crowd, but apparently you need a license for that."

"You do?" To burst out singing in a plaza somewhere? "Are you talking about performing?"

"Touji said it was called busking, and apparently a hat is required. Shinji said he would look into that, since he'd like an audience, or for Rei to get a chance to perform for an audience." Most likely both.

"Oh," Misato said, enlightened. "Remember to ask for a cut of the take."

"Kensuke already reminded them, since he knows a site for soundtracks. I have very few actual hard copies of anything, because of the expense of shipping weight up to the moonbase." He blushed, because it really would have been a lot of trouble for them if he couldn't teleport. "Just for birthdays and when I did well in simulations and other tests. I think I'd like used copies, not just because they're cheaper but for the sake of knowing that someone else listened to and enjoyed the music. I'll probably be sent back to the base afterwards, but storage lockers aren't that expensive: if I leave the key with Shinji, he said I could ship things I find online to him and he'd put them in storage for me."

"That's very nice of him." Afterwards? That was a good attitude for a pilot. For anyone. She certainly hoped there would be an afterwards, but the angels were tough bastards and getting tougher. "I can count on you three not to let it interfere with piloting?" Although she was certain there was no way they'd be able to get Rei to go along with it if it did.

The pale teenager nodded: of course they wouldn't let it interfere, and yes, he was grateful for Shinji. More than Misato knew. "I can't come back here someday and see the mountains, Vienna and… there's so much else I want to see." He couldn't if Third Impact happened and it was all gone.

"Do you mind if I come along with you some morning?" Misato asked, back to the topic of his report followed by morning practice.

"Of course not." Especially since that would give him an excuse not to report, if he was there to report in the first place. He'd chosen somewhere nice to make the report and followed it with music to take his mind off it, but he definitely did want to do that again. "If you want to come out to the statue, though, it might be a good idea to wear waterproof boots. I'm going to ask Hikari and Suzuhara if they know where I can buy some." As Misato could see, his shoes and socks were still soaked: he'd carried them inside with him instead of leaving them in the foyer. "I was going to put these out to dry on the balcony." The shoes anyway, the socks could go in the wash.

"Well, don't let me stop you. We don't need you catching a cold," she said, gesturing at the sliding door, which he kept open as he took his socks out of the shoes and set them down.

Misato, unlike Kaji whose hacks had caught Tabris' attention years ago, shouldn't have any particular reason to mistrust SEELE. So why was she out there to watch his report, he wondered. Had Kaji started to share information with her? When she was deep in the belly of NERV, and most of what Tabris was fairly sure Kaji knew implicated the group that became NERV more than SEELE? It was Gendo Ikari who had left the Katsuragi Expedition the day before Second Impact: the members of SEELE there stayed and died along with the ones, like Misato's father, who were completely in the dark. Tabris had been asleep when it happened, so he didn't have any idea what the man had seen that gave him enough warning to get Misato to the closest thing to safety. Unless SEELE had wanted her to survive for some reason: they were too damnably good at guarding the contents of the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls. He still didn't have any idea where the hard copies were, they'd never been scanned into any computer he had access to (no computer at all, he was almost certain of that) and all the members of SEELE who were allowed to know their contents already knew them, and only referred to them obliquely in conference calls. There weren't any helpful, 'as you already know' discussions. They took their communications security seriously, and regarded conference calls as so much of a breach of it in the first place that they weren't even going to drop obvious code-phrases. He'd first heard the phrase 'Secret Dead Sea Scrolls' from a conversation between Fuyutsuki and Gendo: the Sub-Commander was a couple orders of magnitude less properly paranoid than the others involved, but he seemed to know only a little more about SEELE's plans than he'd managed to figure out on his own.

It wasn't that Tabris wasn't also concerned with what Gendo was up to, but Gendo didn't have his fingers in half as many pies (Touji's phrase, and it was a good metaphor: ruining things that should have been treats for others) as SEELE did. He had one specific goal he was driven to reach, and the rest of the world didn't matter to him as long as it didn't get in his way.

He'd also told what was probably about ninety percent of his plan to Rei, so that she would carry it out if something happened to him. No, Gendo would become truly dangerous in the endgame, once he started actively working to find ways to bring this to fruition, ways around whatever obstacles appeared. Kaworu was on his radar, of course. Gendo could certainly guess that he was SEELE's version of Rei, if finding out about Kaworu hadn't given him the inspiration to create Rei in the first place, and now Kaworu had become close to Rei via Shinji. So far, Kaworu had never spent time around Rei in the (human) flesh without Shinji also being there. He'd told her the reason why, so she didn't take it the wrong way, but it was to everyone's benefit if Shinji, carefully kept in the dark Shinji, was the link between them and otherwise Kaworu didn't show any particular interest in her. Other than musical skill.

The eagerness with which Shinji had jumped on the idea their classmates came up with that he and Rei were related (instead of just defaulting to an appearance closer to the First Ancestral Race, since neither NERV nor SEELE had managed to figure out how to get them to use Terran skin pigmentation) meant Gendo might worry that Shinji was pushing the two of them at each other, but since SEELE thought Tabris' priorities were purely an angel's, Gendo might as well. Why would Tabris want to encourage the competition? None of the angels were going to sabotage those whose turns came before or after them: on the contrary, combat data was being uploaded to those who came afterwards, so Rei would benefit from whatever Tabris experienced. Gendo might even be hoping that the longer he left Tabris alive, the more SEELE would tell him and the more intel Rei would be able to give him.

Gendo as well as SEELE must think that they had the option of killing the current host and then the souls of Lilith and Adam would transfer to the next clone, wiped of any inconvenient bits of knowledge or personality. Now that Rei was trained, that wouldn't happen to her.

For a moment it puzzled him why she didn't remember being Lilith-

Kaworu blinked, looking out at the early morning light shining over the buildings of Tokyo-3. What had he been thinking about? Ah well.

"Yen for your thoughts? You spaced out there for a moment," Misato told him.

"Not really anything in particular," he told her. "I think you're right, I just spaced out. Maybe I should get more sleep, but…"

"Is it impairing your performance?" she asked, with a hint of, 'I am your commanding officer,' sternness there.

"No, I am keeping track of that. Lack of sleep can impair judgment as badly as consumption… as reckless consumption of alcohol," he corrected himself, blushing at the can of beer in her hand. He really hadn't meant to cause offense, but should she be drinking that in the morning before work? Well, it wasn't his place to say. "I've been fine so far, haven't had any trouble adjusting my sync ratio and that was one of the first things to go when we tested my ability to pilot under adverse conditions, like sleep deprivation."

Oh? "Adjust your sync ratio?" she asked mildly.

He nodded.

"Adjust your sync ratio?" Asuka demanded, startling Kaworu.

When had she come into the main room? He really had spaced out. It was probably his fault for not doing two things at once at the moment, since he'd wanted to focus on his report to SEELE and then providing Misato with a reasonable explanation for being out there at that hour in the first place, forget turning around and looking right at her when he'd felt someone's attention focusing on him. He'd manifest the cat again after making it through this conversation, he decided, nodding for Asuka's benefit while looking why he was wondering what everyone was so fussed about.

Shinji's door opened and he walked out, rubbing his eyes.

"Adjust your sync ratio?" Asuka demanded again, louder, startling Shinji more awake.

"Why is everyone up this early?" he asked, mystified. So much for having the kitchen to himself while he tried to create.

"How can you just talk about adjusting your sync ratio like it's easy?"

"Like it's humanly possible, for that matter," Misato added, and Kaworu realized that was why she was suspicious of him.

"You can't?" Shinji asked Asuka, equally mystified. "I mean, it's hard for me to make myself raise it, and sometimes she gets grabby so it takes a minute to lower it, but…"

Asuka grabbed his shirt. "How can an idiot like you control your sync ratio?" she screamed in his face, making him wince.

"Stop yelling, it's too early!" he screamed back, right in her ear. When she removed her arms to cover her ears he said apologetically, "And I just do it, okay Asuka? You just open your mind to the Eva. Or not, because mine is crazy and I don't want her in my head." He shuddered. "Anyway, Asuka, you know I don't know what the hell I'm doing, so why are you asking me in the first place? Ask Kaworu, okay? I have breakfast and lunch to make."

Asuka had to admit he had a point, so she turned back to the moonboy. "The Evas are alive," he said simply. "Shouldn't you be cleared for this? I mean, you pilot them. And you're our operations commander," he said to Misato, clearly puzzled. "They haven't told you this? Really?"

"They're alive?" Misato actually put down her can of beer. Answers. Now.

Kaworu nodded, but still looked unusually serious. "It is classified. I don't know what you're cleared for, but you really should have been told about this. If no one gives you a briefing on it by the end of today… I really shouldn't interfere in NERV internal affairs, but I think… Yes, this is important enough for someone piloting an Eva and the person planning our operations to know for me to go over the commander's head. Misato, would you do me a favor and tell whoever you ask to brief you that if they don't explain to you what you need to know, I will be forced to inform my direct superior at SEELE that NERV's fighting effectiveness is being compromised?"

"Good thinking," she told the boy. But then, bureaucratic and scientific infighting would require a lot of diplomacy in tight quarters like the ones up there. "You have your responsibilities, after all." And if the team he was a part of wasn't allowed what it needed to be effective, that affected his responsibility to fight, and was something he should pass up his own chain of command.

Even if that bypassed Gendo Ikari and sent it through other channels to the Committee for Human instrumentality that oversaw NERV on the UN's behalf.

Gendo would still be pissed about it, so Misato would try to get it out of Ritsuko without getting him directly involved, but he was already unhappy with having a pilot who answered to SEELE and only answered to him through Misato on the ground here. Especially when that meant he had to keep Unit 00 in storage for the moment.

"I'll handle this," she told Asuka. "But you're right: this is something we should be angry about. Both-all three of us. You weren't informed either, were you Shinji?"

Already putting pots on to boil, he turned to stare at them. "Gendo? Tell me anything? I found out when I was in the Eva and there was a crazy lady in there with me, and I had to let her in to make her move. It was the crazy lady taking over that made it go berserk. I figured all of them were the same, since Rei's went berserk too and she was injured like that."

"Tsukiyomi is…" Kaworu paused, considering. "He's young, but he certainly isn't crazy. I know someone said that it was significant that he was 'new.' Perhaps the others went mad because of the isolation, before they had anyone to talk to?"

"Talk to?" Everyone stared at him: only Shinji's confusion was feigned. Not that Yui talked to him.

"Well, yes. He liked the trip down here, but he's disappointed there haven't been any battles since we arrived. I'm the one that named him Tsukiyomi."

"So he's alive enough to have preferences?" Misato asked.

"Of course. He's sentient. He's not old enough to be very… complex yet, and he can only read because of what's in his programming-"

"He can read?" Asuka asked next, startled again."Sentient and sapient?"

"Yes, sapient. Not very complex plans, mostly hoping that if he asks enough he can fight something again, but yes." Kaworu hesitated. "I really think I should stop answering your questions. I don't know exactly what you're cleared for, or why, and I'd rather not be removed from this household as my punishment for saying too much, to prevent more slips."

"That's fine, Kaworu," Shinji said firmly, and since he was the one holding breakfast and more than capable of dumping it into the lunchboxes and leaving everyone else to forage for themselves while he dragged Kaworu off to pick up curry buns (they could shower and change at NERV), everyone else shut up.