Since I originally posted these out of order: This particular chapter takes place after the one where the Kaworu clones are introduced. The ones used for the psycho white Evas in the ending movies of the original series.
Misato has also had a lot of revelations about how unproperly unparanoid she was regarding her bosses, what really happened at Second Impact, the true purpose of the Evas, etc. Just because she's not actively trying to kill Kaworu doesn't mean she hasn't learned her lesson about being too trusting with the fate of the world at stake. Interestingly, Kaworu being so honest and transparent with her is not helping his case: most human people in those circumstances would try to paint themselves in a flattering light, hold back some information... Give people a look saying 'I can squash you with my mind' to get out of cleaning duty...
Kaji knocked on the door. "Misato?" No response. "I brought beer. From Germany. Limited microbrews." He lifted up the bag so it could be seen though the spyhole.
That made the door open. Misato was firmly convinced that no beer was as good as her beloved Yebisu, but she was a fair woman and willing to give all those other brands a chance to prove themselves. She'd told him a few weeks ago that after she accomplished her first mission in life and got revenge for her father, most likely her next mission would be to sample every beer in the world. "Find room for them in the fridge," she told him, sitting back down on the couch as Kaji picked his way through the kittens that swarmed around his shoes, examining the new person.
Ice? Put ice in beer? When that would melt and water down the beer? Blasphemy, in Misato's mind. She'd brought a fridge instead of using the standard issue in order to acquire a model that would let her set the temperature.
Once that was taken care of, Kaji asked her, "Mind if I sit down?"
"No one's stopping you." Misato was grinning, but he was always willing to take risks for the sake of his goals. She already had an impressive pile of beer cans next to her, but that was Misato for you.
"What's that in your hand? A laser pointer?"
"Right." She said, pointing it in the direction of four beaten-up old teddy bears that were arranged on the far wall. All the kittens crouched down, heads flicking back and forth between Misato and the bears. "You've heard of leash training?"
"Sure." Kaji's eyes widened. "Wait, is this-"
She flicked the pointer on. An instant later, one of the bears was covered in grey. Fluff went flying.
"Laser sight training," Misato confirmed. "At ease!" The kittens left the bear, although the one in the red collar had to have his tail tugged on by one of the others. "I needed a way to make it clear to them what they were allowed to tear apart and what they weren't, and then I thought, why stop there? So I'm developing a laser-guided kitten system."
"That's why you're the one that can order around the JSSDF," Kaji agreed as the kittens swarmed toward them, all but six of them jumping up onto Misato's lap. The others, perhaps more adventurous or wanting to take advantage of a better hands-to-kittens ratio, headed for Kaji's. "Training up some attack angels, huh?"
"Exactly," the dark-haired soldier said, grinning as she mussed up their fur. "That's what they were made for in the first place: dummy plugs. Why shouldn't I take advantage of my enemy's resources?" She looked down at them, "Who's the cutest plunder ever?" Oh yes they were!
The way the kittens licked their fur back into place after Mom was done petting them seemed as though they were preening. Kaji doubted the fact they looked smug was entirely due to them looking like cats.
"According to Kaworu," Misato said, "It would only work once, but it's good to have an ace in the hole."
"Once? Why's that?"
"They're young and don't have any practice with their powers, while the angels fought against Lilith's for a very long time. Even if I thought it was a good idea for Kaworu to give them all his combat data," and teach them how to cause a hell of a lot more damage, "Inexperience, enthusiasm and lack of an attention span will make them make mistakes. And the next angel will know what they're up against." She shook her head. "I didn't like that we had to send children to fight for us in the first place."
"But you'd do it."
"Of course." With a world at stake. "So, why are you here?"
"Can't I-" he started to say in a flirting tone, and then shut up when she gave him a look that said, 'drop the act if you ever want to see the inside of my bedroom again.' "Right." They still weren't dating or anything, and Misato would translate him just coming here to see her as him wasting his time, and with the fate of the world at stake? "I ran out of useful places to visit. Well, there are a few more, but if an inspector like me," especially one like him, serving three masters (four, in fact, since he followed his own conscience), "showed up there, they'd know that either they've got a leak very high up, or someone escaped. At that point, I'd have to dig a hole to hide in so deep I'd be of no use to anyone."
"What about Kaworu?"
"He can play their systems like a lute, even get past all the Magi except your three," and the reason why, human sacrifice, had somehow still surprised him despite everything he'd learned about Gendo Ikari, "but they keep a lot in their heads. And only in their heads. They wouldn't be teleconferencing the amount they do if a few of them weren't getting too old to travel. Their organization learned their communications security when they had to worry about being burnt at the stake. I don't think even Lorenz knows everything." Which said a lot, when they were talking about a man like him. For him to be willing to be kept in the dark about some things, by his own organization? That was fanaticism right there, Kaji knew. Still, "This is making me feel like an amateur." According to modern doctrine, complete access to the enemy's computer networks and communications should have made the whole thing easier than pie. SEELE wasn't modern, even though they used cutting-edge technology. They'd stuck with the old, laborious methods while everyone else went for what would make their lives easier. "The good news is that they're not training successors or passing on the council-only information. There's no single person who knows everything any council member does."
"Third Impact's coming, and they don't want a leak to let us stop it." Why plan for the future when the end of the world was nigh?
"They don't think it can be stopped: this is prophecy." Sent by Adam and the angels themselves. "But they don't want to risk failing any tests." He sighed and leaned back.
"Why don't you get us both some beer," Misato said, a little annoyed he hadn't already.
"Sounds good to me," he said, carefully dislodging the angels from his lap and heading for the kitchen, tossing her a cold one before he sat down again.
"So what have you got?" Anything useful?
"Well, we already know what order the angels are coming in, but so did they. I think they think they know everything Gendo Ikari's up to, which makes it almost certain that they don't. Kaworu asked me to check if any of them were suspicious of him, but even the ones that are worried he might consider turning on them think that he'd do it by causing Third Impact without including humanity in the Instrumentality, which would wipe us out instead of giving us the 'honor' of being included in the hive mind purified by the presence of Adam, or whatever. I would have thought that hobby of his might make them realize he admired at least some of us, but apparently music is a very angelic thing to like. 'Pure transcendent harmonies.'" Kaji laughed "Either they don't know half of what's in his collection or they didn't recognize it."
"He said that rock is a music of change, of hope for the future, and that three/four time represents a heartbeat, so it's also a music of life," Misato said. "He does play more classical than anything when it's his turn to use the CD player." The one Touji and Suzuhara brought Shinji as a, 'Thank you for saving us,' present. "But when rock's playing, he listens to it very intently. Like he has to interpret it." He still liked it, though, from those smiles.
There was something classical on in the background right now, in fact. Misato would have changed it to something with punch if this wasn't going to be a thoughtful day.
"He doesn't get my jokes unless he searches the net," Kaji said, leaning forward a little to rest his elbows on his knees.
Misato snorted, then swallowed the other half of her beer before replying, "Who does?"
"Ha ha, very funny," Kaji said wryly. "Left myself wide open for that one."
"You know it."
"They've blamed the Kaworu clones falling apart on Gendo implanting that thing into himself." Ugh. "Since they don't know about Tabris, they think all of them, including Kaworu, are basically vessels waiting for Adam. Spare bodies, so tampering with Adam's AT field could withdraw its protection from them. The same thing happening to Lilith's spares first might have been Gendo trying it out, or he might have figured out what happened and decided to make sure that if SEELE had the same idea to clone a progenitor that he did…" Kaji spread his hands.
"Putting them both at an equal disadvantage," Misato agreed that sounded plausible. "Anything else?"
"Nothing new: a lot of this is confirmation." He wasn't going to believe half the stuff he'd heard about SEELE without multiple sources to be sure he wasn't being fed bullshit. Well, now he had the multiple sources. "There's one way to get more intel, but Kaworu won't cooperate." He finally opened his own beer but didn't drink, instead staring down at it. "Looked at me like I had to be joking and it was in really bad taste, but then I think he guessed that I couldn't be expected to know any better, since we couldn't use the psychic stuff here without the angels screwing with us. He said that first, if they got a lucky shot in he'd be dead, and he couldn't take that chance, not now." Which hinted at the idea that there would be a later time when Kaworu would consider himself expendable, but Kaji wasn't going to say something like that, not yet. "Second, the only way to get everything without staying in there long enough to make it almost certain they'd get their act together and fight back would be to assimilate them, and then SEELE would have to change their codes." It would render a lot of their information worthless. "Third, he would be doing anything like that over his dead body." Now Kaji took a drink. He needed one. "Damn principles."
"If he didn't have them, we'd have to kill him." Because that would make it almost certain that this really was a plot of some sort, Misato knew.
"Exactly," Kaji agreed. "We can only provisionally trust him because all of his actions are in line with the principles he says he has." And it wasn't just that he said it, it was how hard it was for him to realize that it needed to be said, half the time. "If he was willing to tamper with people's minds, we wouldn't be able to trust our own judgment anymore. I wouldn't have access to this resource if it wasn't this way, but that doesn't make it any less annoying."
Then? Well, with humanity's survival on the line, they had to err on the side of caution, now didn't they? If they couldn't trust Tabris, and Misato couldn't come up with a way to kill him on her own, despite being the world expert on strategies to kill angels, then telling SEELE and Dr. Ikari might be the only way to have him stopped. After all, what if he was distorting their minds enough to make them imagine evidence to support the idea that Gendo and SEELE were the bad guys instead of him? He could be turning them against the defenders of humanity.
"If he hadn't put up with me trying to kill him, and if I didn't still remember hating him…" Misato's hand crushed her can, the sound of twisting aluminum jarring her out of her memories.
"He was talking as though I'd suggested something really perverted. Like he had to explain to me why child porno was wrong. He'd never even thought about how to explain this to somebody."
Misato raised an eyebrow. "He's not that mad at the clones for breaking into his mind looking for something."
"Well, they're not old enough to know any better, I guess. That's the attitude I got when I said that it would make things a lot easier if he could just grab that intel. Not to mention that escape's a little different from a fishing expedition." Kaji took another drink. "I wonder if he would have been willing to give them that intel, or there's something like that? Like privacy settings." So if the clones hadn't crossed any actual lines…
"Maybe." It sounded plausible to Misato. "Ask Shinji if you want to know about the psychic stuff."
"Yeah, Kaworu told me that too. Weird to think that it's supposed to be something we're better at." Kaji grimaced. "So much intel I can't act on, or give to anyone, without setting off every alarm they've got. Damn it. I might be more limited than when I was obviously blundering around in the dark, bruising my shins on the coffee table. Well, I can take some advantage of the fact they should still think I'm a ham-handed idiot who doesn't know how deep and how far this goes." Kaji got quite a shock when he saw the date they'd put him on their list of people to terminate if they stopped being useful.
"You know, it might actually be less annoying if he held humans in contempt the way the people who believe in angels do," Misato said, reaching over and shaking her can in front of his face. She was out of beer.
He threw his hands up in surrender. "I'm going, I'm going."
"I don't want anyone's pity, much less some angel's. It's been years now! You'd think he'd have the grace to stop being shocked by stuff all the time! Yes, the Iron Age came before the scientific method, and mostly before chemistry. Did he think we were using bronze until the Renaissance or whatever? Yeah, so we got all our technological development ass-backwards because we didn't have our Information Age before the Bronze Age, so we couldn't build on those insights and create a system or whatever. He's the freak here! I'm right, right? And glorified tractors shouldn't be allowed to be so cute when they're boggled! Jets, maybe," Misato allowed. "He's worse than Shinji!" She decided not to tell Kaji about the time she'd drunkenly decided to go to sleep in Shinji's bed because he looked so cute with that cat of his, like he'd be a teddy bear with a teddy bear.
"Well, in the grand scheme of things… I noticed that too," Kaji said, suddenly switching from a teasing tone to a serious one. "It's not normal to have insane angels breathing down your neck all the time while you're evolving, or I hope not. SEELE doctrine is that humanity is just too screwed up, and the only way we can make anything of ourselves or reach out to each other is through complementation. What happens if Kaworu starts agreeing with them? If he hasn't been looking into human thoughts all this time, and he says he hasn't, then the only human, Lilim, whatever that he's taken a good look at is Shinji, and he practically raised the kid after Yui died. I'm worried that if Tabris," Kaji switched to the other name deliberately: Kaworu was a friendly kid, a bit goofy and mostly harmless. Tabris was an ancient angel. "What if he takes a good look at some normal people? Or SEELE. Or Gendo, Gods help us all."
"That's it," Misato said, suddenly turning to look at him. "That's what was bugging me. He's nice. He feels responsible. He wants to help. He thinks that we're broken because we're not letting each other into our heads all the time, or whatever. According to Shinji, the psychic stuff still comes naturally to us and we should stop learning to bar the doors and hide from the scary monsters once the angels are gone," that was how she'd woken Tabris in the first place, stubborn curiosity overwhelming her instinctive fear of the angels and letting her reach out… "I'm betting it's like cell phones: it'll be too damn convenient not to spread. But we're suspicious of each other because we can't let each other close without getting hurt: that's how we are. So what if we start hiding inside our heads because we're afraid of each other, because it's too late for us to be normal? Sure, Rei thinks he'd have a lot more trouble killing than she does. But Rei can kill. What if we're dangerously insane and a threat to however many universes there are?" Kaworu didn't actually know. He only had the generation data from his ancestors and the ancestors of the angels they had met with. Who knew how far humanity had spread, with its branches separated by time, space, matter/antimatter and even universe. "Or what if using psychic abilities is hell for us, but we can't stop because we want it too much?" The hedgehog's dilemma. "Can't stop without another insane, imprisoned angel."
Kaji shook his head, leaning back on the couch again, a picture of laid-back ease even as he said, "And I thought the inside of my head was a scary place."
"I had my head in the sand all those years I was working for NERV. I was focused on the mission, on killing them all and saving the earth: I didn't want to see that Gendo was using Ritsuko up and…" This time, the can was crushed out of anger instead of as a 'subtle' signal to get her another beer.
"I'll get you another beer," Kaji said anyway. "I don't want to think about this sober."
"Now you're talking. I knew I must have kept you around for some reason," Misato said, getting up along with him and piling cans under one of her arms in a practiced pyramid. "Great minds think alike."
Then there's the contrast between Kaworu's extreme reluctance to kill, abuse his power or mess around with the world further and the other angels, which are quite direct when it comes to annoying things standing between them and Adam/Lilith.
Terrestrial humans need a lot of weaponry, smarts and training to come close to the damage an angel can do, so hopefully once they have access to the ability to cause that sort of property damage, they probably aren't going to start randomly launching nuclear missiles to see what happens. Probably. Since creation is harder than destruction, it's very easy for angels to wipe out worlds (as Eva shows). If the behavior of the Eva angels was normal, that species wouldn't last very long: evolution as well as scientists who don't want their world deleted so the angel can start over would both favor drastically curtailing the willingness of angels to do stuff like that. Unless, of course, the situation really was that drastic or their world was under threat before developing a terrestrial humanity that could and should defend itself. While I was thinking about what eventually became the plot of this fic, I considered the possibility that there were no Lilith-associated angels other than the 18th because the biosphere got damaged in the battle and the angel that would give rise to humanity, Lilim/Sophia went giant-Rei levels of psycho on them, but that would have affected the fossil record.
This is one of the psychological differences involved in the human/angel generational dimorphism. On the one hand, it's nice of Misato to see Kaworu as human. On the other, even though he is a different mode of the same species, it's a very different mode. If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, (proper) angels are tracing cometary orbits out past the Oort Cloud.
Anyway, everyone loving a character, especially one who acts oddly, just isn't realistic. Especially given how stressed, emotionally charged and messed up the Eva cast are. Even if Misato were to end up liking Kaworu eventually, right now it's her duty to her planet to figure out what the hell is really going on and trust no one.