No one heard the jingling of the key in the lock, not even Kaworu, who was humming to himself while turning over one of the potato pancakes. The specific cookbook he'd opened was a German one Shinji bought when Asuka moved in. Since what wouldn't be served at dinner would be this household's contribution to Shinji's lunch potluck, Kaworu had tried to think of what the others might like as well.
It would have bothered Kaworu to know that the reason he, unlike Rei, wasn't focusing on the acquisition of more babies and creating a safe environment for them was because his instincts felt he already had. Raising Shinji while introducing him to the fields, woods, mountains and lakes by his home had made his subconscious feel that Earth actually was his planet despite Kaworu's efforts to resist the temptation to make it his.
Now Shinji was growing up. Rei, his sister, who had also let Kaworu adopt her already had children and was therefore 'of age.' Once a planetary human population had been evolved to fit the environment and was decently well-established, the only worry an angel had left was tracking them over time to make sure they continued to reproduce without any problems.
Fortunately that was a far more hands-off stage than the initial creation, so Tabris's instinctive desire for Shinji to find some nice people and begin ensuring the survival of the human race by making with the grandbabies would never manifest as nagging. Instead, an angel's job was to create an environment suitable for the production of grandbabies: one provided with adequate food supplies, for instance.
One not in immediate danger of global destruction, that was fairly important as well, since it was hard for people to raise children if they were dead.
Most people looking after teenagers would have been angry to find them fighting, especially a boy and a girl. The other reason why a girl and a boy might be rolling around together getting sweaty was even worse in some ways, because fighting could mean their guardian had to look after injured and cranky teens while the other one could mean having to look after a baby.
Since Misato was not most people, however, her response to finding Shinji and Asuka looking up at her with, 'oh crap, caught' expressions and trying to look too innocent and too mature respectively to have spent the afternoon yelling at each other and bumping into things was to put her hands on her hips and exclaim, "Finally!" She grinned down at them, looking approving and satisfied, before deciding that this called for a beer.
Shinji and Asuka stared at her, then looked at each other to ask, 'Do you get her? No? Well, I certainly don't.'
Meanwhile, Misato took in another deep breath, sniffed the air again and asked Kaworu, "Are those apple dumplings?" When the young man nodded, she asked the two other pilots, "No injuries that might impair performance?"
"Of course not!" Asuka responded, more than a little insulted. She'd had to go a little easy on Shinji in order to make sure of that, but at least that gave him a good excuse to be holding back a little too, even if he was still a wimp who shouldn't be on the battlefield if he couldn't stand hurting people. They were just lucky they were fighting angels instead of humans, or he'd hesitate even more and be completely useless. She'd been a little worried when her elbow hit his face a little too hard, but he should be fine aside from the black eye he'd have tomorrow. She had various bruises on her ass and the right side of her thigh – fighting on a hard floor without a mat would do that, even though neither of them had gotten to their feet in part to avoid getting damaged in a fall – but nothing she was going to whine about.
"Good, then I'll look you two over after dinner," Misato said, eyes back on the dumplings. She'd been to most of the world with the UN army, and just as France and Italy paired food and wine, Germany made good, solid beer food. She'd hoped that Asuka would like to cook, since she'd already lucked out with Shinji, who had apparently realized that keeping the person who decided when and how his life would be risked adequately supplied with nutrition would be good for, if not his career, his odds of getting out of this alive. Or maybe it was a bit of an ego thing: she thought she'd caught him smiling to himself when Ritsuko tasted the boxed lunch he'd brought her as a, 'Sorry for letting the Eva get damaged and making you work late repairing it,' present after Shinji defeated his first angel and suddenly turned into a barracuda.
"Dumplings? Apple dumplings?" Asuka asked
"I hope they turned out okay, this is my first time making them," Shinji's new roommate told her.
"They smell alright, but we'll see." They smelled good. Not too much like the ones Mama used to make.
Kaworu felt Shinji's flash of alarm over the prospect of being demoted in Asuka's mind from Slave Boy #1 to Slave Boy #2, but managed not to smile. Jealousy was certainly progress, though. Especially if it drove Shinji to further efforts. "I've heard that there are some people who need to understand each other through fighting, so I didn't think I should interfere."
"Exactly!" Misato agreed, pulling the table away from the wall, getting a chair and sitting down on it. "Asuka, you went to college early, so you constantly had to put up with people looking at you and seeing not just a woman but a little girl. In order to get recognized, being aggressive was a good tactic: it's so outside the little girl 'box' that it forced them to notice and reevaluate you. As for you, Shinji," she said, pointing at him, "You're too sweet. You try to go unnoticed, and you try not to make waves. I bet you snuck around the people who had you before like a little ninja: whenever they saw you you were such a good boy and they didn't have any idea what was going on in your head." She drank more beer while she put her next thoughts together. "Asuka: as long as people don't view you as worth fighting back against, they're not acknowledging you, are they? It means they think you're a little girl, that you're weak. Or that's what you think. So you kept trying to get Shinji to see that you were a threat, but," she continued, pointing at Shinji with her can next, "that's not how he operates, is it? If Special Ops ends up in a direct fight, they're doing it wrong. So, the clearer you made it that you were a threat to him staying here and his position as pilot, the harder he was trying to avoid and outflank you, not risk a direct confrontation. So," she said, kicking back, "what set this off?"
"He started saying some nonsense about going easy on me," Asuka said, glaring at Shinji.
Shinji looked embarrassed: he'd been trying to communicate, but had she really not heard what he'd been saying until he said something that provoked her? Did he really have to fight every time he wanted to communicate with Asuka?
Yet the fact remained that somehow, he kind of liked Asuka. He'd kind of had fun just now. So what did it say about him that he liked someone he not only could fight, but had to fight? "I've been trying to make friends with Asuka, and avoid arguing with her, but it just seemed like the more I avoided fighting the more I was annoying her, and I didn't want to do that." He blushed, looking to the side as he tried to think.
"Good, good." Misato nodded, then looked at both of them. "Unit cohesion. When the chips are down, it's important to know which way everyone else on the battlefield with you is going to jump. Asuka, did you review the report on Shinji's second battle?"
"He disobeyed a direct order," she said, crossing her arms.
"Yes, he did," Misato agreed, giving Shinji another look: they'd had words about that. "But in hindsight, Shinji, you did that because you knew it was your best shot at taking out the angel." Misato slammed her beer down on the table. "The most important thing is the will to fight, and the second most important thing is your unit!" she declared, standing up and leaning forward. "Asuka, this isn't about proving yourself! You've already proven yourself, or you wouldn't be here! Rei was raised for this, Shinji was the commander's backup, but you earned your slot. So quit complaining about how hard you had to work to earn it! You think Shinji had it easy? You're a trained and tested pilot who knows what she's doing, while his father just hauled him over here and threw him into an Eva without any idea what was happening because he had a naturally high sync rate and it would go berserk to protect him! Asuka, I need to be able to count on you to look after Shinji! He's a natural pilot, but he's not a natural fighter! Not like you! Of course you're not happy about someone without any training or killer instinct being a pilot: you think I am? But we can't let him go home because we need his ability.
"All that work that you did has paid off, or I damn well hope so, but because he didn't get the chance to do that work, he's nearly gotten slaughtered out there! You asked for this, you fought for this, Shinji didn't get the chance to.
"We need all of you pilots to work together to save the world, and Shinji can't be much help if he's dead because he didn't get any training and he barely knows what he's doing! Asuka, as his sempai, as his teammate, it is your responsibility to use your superior skill and training to keep him alive out there and encourage him to develop some of those skills. Saying that he isn't as good as you doesn't help: he knows that. What you haven't realized is what it means that he went out there anyway. He took that angel down with no training and with seconds on the clock because he had people there in the entry plug with him to protect. And that Asuka, is why you want Shinji out there as your backup. Because as long as your unit succeeds, you've achieved victory. You need to stop thinking 'me' and start thinking 'my people!' Did you go through officer training or not?" Misato roared with her best parade ground voice.
Asuka hung her head at that dressing-down, red hair falling in front of her face.
"Now, I'm having all of you attend the same school to increase the time you spend around each other so you can get to know each other: I'd have Rei move in here too if I could manage it. Not just for the sake of my learning all your strengths and weaknesses so I know what roles to assign you to, but so that you can develop some damn unit cohesion. Since the first conflicts where commanders were able to speak to units in the field, it's been clear that there is no substitute for the judgment of the people there on the ground. I can't experience what it's like to be an Eva pilot, and what that means is that I have absolutely no business micromanaging your tactics! Do you have any idea how unhappy it makes me to have to do something that I know I can't do an adequate job at, with your lives on the line and the fate of the world at stake?" Her hands slammed down on the table.
"I need all four of you to start thinking tactically. I need all four of you to start thinking about how you're going to provide backup for each other, and what roles all of you are best suited for. Right now, I'd like to assign Rei as sniper and spotter because she's had training in what to look for; Asuka as the one whose job it is to get in there and directly engage the angel while trying to stay alive so the rest of us can get a read on it and design a counter strategy; Shinji as mobile support and backup melee offense; and I'm not sure about the new pilot we've just had dropped on us. I don't know you well enough yet, Kaworu, and you four don't know each other well enough yet! Stop thinking that you can keep taking angels on one-on-one, Asuka! There are more coming, and they're learning from the ones that came before. They are going to come in with counters to whatever beat the last ones: they aren't human, but they are the most dangerous kind of enemy, one that thinks. So start thinking." Misato nodded, straightening back up and coming out from behind the table to pace in front of them. "We need multiple strategies, we need every resource and pilot we have if we're going to survive this and you need to be able to think and plan on your feet, which is impossible if you don't know the other factors." The other pilots, what they were capable of, how they thought and what situations they were best in.
So far, Shinji was Misato's pick for unit commander and tactician. His ability to analyze Asuka and his willingness to go outside his comfort zone for the good of the unit were both important, but he'd also been able to see that the strategy he'd been using all his short life was failing and attempt a new one. The way he'd ignored her order to retreat and instead attacked that angel when Touji and Kensuke were there? After living with him for this long, she was satisfied that it wasn't just that he didn't want to run away in front of an audience: he'd made the right call as the one in the field, and that was what Misato needed. Asuka had training and guts, but Shinji had good instincts and he already cared about his comrades. She'd need to make sure that he wouldn't be too hesitant to spend them, but he wouldn't be careless with them or charge ahead for his own glory like Asuka either.
At first, Misato had encouraged the developing rivalry between him and Asuka, hoping that would motivate them both to excel, but that had clearly backfired since Shinji was too mature a person to go for a rivalry, despite being a teenage boy. He already knew that when lives were at stake, his ego shouldn't be anywhere near the equation. Misato still needed to find a way to motivate him to be more aggressive. Kidnapping those two classmates and stuffing them in Shinji's entry plug every time to make sure he was aware that it wasn't just his own life on the line was an option, but she'd like to avoid that.
Moonboy had clearly been listening, his head tilted to the side, but it looked like it was half Greek to him. No, worse than that: speaking and reading ancient and modern Greek was on the list of stuff he knew how to do that she'd had him give her. Apparently someone decided to give him a real Classical education, unlike Rei who had read a lot of science texts but knew absolutely nothing about the humanities. Well, she'd heard SEELE was old-fashioned like that: the Renaissance and Enlightenment were the eras that had been all about human potential, despite how Romantic the idea of a soul seemed in this day and age, much less naming an organization dedicated to mapping the human genome, understanding physics and space travel, contemplating transhumanism and now assuring mankind's survival after the soul.
Still, it took people to excel: that drive had to come from within, so really, Misato understood why you would teach someone born and probably genetically engineered (there were whispers that SEELE used the Moonbase to get around national and UN laws on experimentation) to fight for the human race about the history and culture of humanity. What made it worth fighting for.
Still, being raised in a place like that? According to him there hadn't been any other children his own age around: he was more used to dealing with adults than even Asuka, although it looked like those adults had understood how important he was and hadn't talked down to him. If anything, what bothered Misato was that he was a little too serene: training him to keep control over his emotions, especially on the battlefield, was a good idea, but not when she was trying to figure out what he'd do or which way he'd jump under pressure. He'd also been trained for multiple combat roles and didn't have a clear preference the way Asuka did.
Aside from his sync ratio he hadn't displayed any too-unusual abilities yet, but even though the Committee for Human Instrumentality had basically turned into NERV's oversight board, their original purpose was transhumanism, hence the name. For humans to become more, to achieve their full potential, even godhood. Kaworu was just in too good shape for someone who had spent his entire life at a fraction of normal gravity. He'd adjusted too well and too quickly to Earth's gravity.
Earth was dying. Everyone knew it. Before Second Impact, the majority of the planet's oxygen came from the ocean's algae. Now the ocean was absolutely sterile: nothing could survive there. The Amazon Rainforest had been a low-level floodplain: a hell of a lot of it had been flooded, and when LCL sank into the soil?
So if SEELE wanted to bioengineer humans to survive on the moon and in space stations, to endure the amount of Gs Kaworu must have experienced during reentry, more power to them, from Misato's perspective. She wished it wasn't illegal, if anything, so that she could get actual capability specs on Nagisa. And Rei. She was sure both of them had been tested like anything, and now the real test had come.
What would bother her was if they'd used angel DNA to do it. She did not like the idea of people who might think like the enemy piloting Evas. She did not like it one bit. Misato knew there was something wrong about Rei the instant she saw her, although it had taken months to realize what Rei reminded her of, and now Kaworu. That same benevolent yet somewhat distant serenity, even if he was less distant, closer to Shinji.
But if that was as fake as that creature had been…
Well, keep friends close, enemies closer, and wild cards closest to your chest, Misato mused, giving her pilots, her children, her soldiers one last examining look. "Well, come on," she said, sitting down again. "Time to eat, drink and be merry."