Notes at end.
Sorry about the use of OCs. I really should use expies: I likely will when I rearrange this fic into a serious epic instead of adding to it as it comes to me. It's handy to have outside perspectives on some things, and it's nice to see proactive people in Eva. If anything, you could say SEELE wanted these people on the isolated base so they wouldn't influence others, as well as to break them down.
I'm mostly using this chapter to think about the implications and mechanics of what SEELE, the state of the earth and Eva piloting do to people. Also Shinji's childhood and the whole mental contamination thing, which is underused.
A private tropical island would have cost millions before Third Impact, but afterwards? It was very possible, Dr. Jun Itoh knew, that Adam's host body, the artificial angel, subject KWR, Kaworu Nagisa, the one who claimed to be the only angel not hostile to humanity, didn't own it. There wasn't any need to own it, not even under a false name. No one would want to live on the coast. Not when they'd have to look at the sterilized blood-red sea everyday. The fact there was actual life on such a low island, that it hadn't been sterilized by the tsunami of LCL, was either evidence that Kaworu had been telling the truth and angels were capable of helping nature instead of destroying it or that this was one of the areas where tropical flora and fauna had survived on their own by some miracle. Places like this were so protected that even countries where the death penalty was theoretically illegal would shoot trespassers and dump the bodies somewhere after capturing them, there'd been a big fuss about it on the news last year. Mangroves, orchids: to a world obsessed with nostalgia for the past, so many of the plants and animals in this place were valuable enough that a single poaching run could set all but the most extravagant criminals up for life.
After being stuck on a station with nothing but hydroponics, not even allowed to visit the surface for over a dozen years? He'd spent the first few days exploring the island, looking for a means of escape, before admitting to himself that was just an excuse.
He could hear birds here.
He could sit on the porch and not hear a single sound of machinery, silence except for the noises of the jungle and the crashing of the waves. After so long looking down at a dying world? Knowing he'd been tricked by SEELE into creating something that would help to finish it off instead of something to help it cling to life? His hands stained with blood just as his world was stained with LCL?
The first time a bird came to eat the crumbs of his breakfast he couldn't keep himself from breaking down. It was alive.
The contents of this mansion were puzzling indeed.
There were no music CDs, tapes, records or any other music storage format, but there were signs that they had been here at some point, some of them in climate-controlled cases. Dr. Itoh was the one who destroyed the first ones Kaworu brought back to the station. An angel, one of those who destroyed the old world, collecting antiques? Planning to keep products of the species it was made to kill because they were unworthy?
Like a damn vulture… He hadn't been able to keep himself from yielding to his fury, from smashing the relics defiled by those pale hands. It was afterwards that he'd realized that he'd just destroyed pieces of priceless human culture. Helped SEELE annihilate everything, just like he had by creating Kaworu and the other clones.
If Kaworu had left them here, Jun thought he really might have been provoked into destroying them.
What he had left here, though?
Science fiction made sense, for an alien who bothered to pay attention to human culture at all. A lot of the books were children's books, though. Were they here because Kaworu wanted to see what would be known or read by the child he'd appeared to be?
Books on flora and fauna might be interesting to a terraformer, but that didn't explain why it was only the books on Japan that had flowers, leaves and other samples pressed among their pages, and checkmarks, circles and clumsy drawings that were utterly unlike the angel boy's perfect penmanship.
In the front of a thin notebook sandwiched between a book on dinosaurs and a collection of pictures of the Amazon Rainforest published before Third Impact, in kanji perfect except for the wavering pressure of the crayon (a guided hand), he read, "Shinji Ikari's Summer Vacation Notebook," and underneath in blue pen and parentheses, "If found, please return to class 2A, Inaba Elementary School."
"What I did on my summer vacation was first Tabby and me and Aoko went fishing with Aoko's big brother and there were lots of teeny fish that looked like this. They kept eating my worms but that's ok because I don't like worms. Aoko's big brother caught most of the fishes and made potatoes and Aoko made a big fire and I cooked the fishes with plants. Aoko's big brother didn't believe me when I said one of the plants was hot and we laughed. Then we couldn't sing because he got drunk and fell asleep and Aoko put his bag on top of him and we pulled the boat upside down and on top of him too because he can't go home and it was too late to get on the bus. Aoko's big brother is really cool but don't worry Sensei, I won't run away to the big city like him. Aoko was worried because it was kind of dark so me and Tabby walked her home and she took the rest of the plants and some flowers she found so her mom would thinks she was out doing that. Please don't tell her mom, Sensei. And that was the first day of my summer vacation."
Shinji Ikari. Almost certainly as in Dr. Yui Ikari and NERV Commander Gendo Ikari.
"Then it was rainy so I wasn't allowed outside because my aunt is silly sometimes and thinks I will melt even though there isn't LCL in the rain ever and I read a comic about a boy and a cat because I wanted to read things with boys and cats to see if there were fun ideas. The boy is really cool because he can make things that do things. If I had a thing that turned things into other things, I want to be a panther since they can climb trees and they're cats like Tabby. Calvin uses a lot of big words and is a jerk, though. The cat is cool but not as cool as Tabby. I also made lunch and did cello practice until there were thunderstorms. Then we watched the thunderstorms. These are the colors I saw."
Had Kaworu stolen all of these? Was he observing all the pilots or just the Second Child, who also represented leverage on his father?
"Then it cleared up and Keita came over to do homework, but his mom called so my aunt watched us to make sure he really did his homework instead of going out in the wet so we both drew my aunt for that assignment. She made copies at her work but she also wants the originals back, sensei. Keita is really good at drawing and basketball and making things. After that we imagined a treehouse and my aunt thought it was homework and that's why it's glued in Keita's book, I hope you like it sensei cause it's really cool."
When he turned to the next page, it wasn't a pressed plant that almost escaped but a memo. A Marduk Institute internal communication. "Subject is extremely good at acting cheerful when under observation and likely has repressed memory of abandonment by Gendo Ikari as well as memory of Yui Ikari's death. Fortunately, aside from network of classmates and families he will be separated from in Tokyo-3, he derives most of his emotional support and companionship from the cat referred to 'Tabby.' Suggest liquidating it along with the Second Impact survivor's penguin at key juncture, leaving him to reach out to others and be rejected as pilot associate network destabilizes. Also spends large amount of time alone with nature: forced proximity to hostile others in a city for days without a refuge should turn that coping mechanism into an additional source of stress. Told Aoko's parents in order to continue pattern of adults never acting in ways beneficial to subject, keeping him from seeking advice or forming bonds with strangers outside our influence while in Tokyo-3, as unlikely as that is."
Even if it wasn't the angel who stole these in the first place, how had he acquired this from the Marduk Institute? Had they given it to him so that he would learn the weaknesses of the other pilots? Surely not: they'd e-mail scans, not ship unnecessary weight up to the Moonbase.
Still, this sounded like a concerted campaign to undermine another of the Children, carried out by the organization meant to select and monitor the future pilots. Was it just to ensure that the chosen child would be able to easily eliminate them? No, if they didn't find out the truth about the angel in their midst, it would be all too easy for Kaworu to succeed in delivering Adam's soul to Lilith's body as SEELE hoped. They didn't need anything this elaborate, and that was Dr. Itoh's analysis based only on what he'd reported of Kaworu's capabilities (or what Tabris let him see?) before he'd realized that this was not an anti-angel weapon he'd been tricked into designing for them. SEELE hadn't controlled the world for centuries by leaving anything to chance, true. Was this meant to suborn the other pilots, make them crave the form of Armageddon SEELE wanted, with all of humanity merged into a giant blob of protoplasm, a great mass of slime, all individuality stripped away from them?
Yes: make them alone, make them vulnerable, then introduce SEELE's holy child into their midst. What Dr. Itoh saw as Kaworu being condescending towards a lesser race, most on the Moonbase saw as either innocent kindness from a child born and bred for the sake of humanity's defense or the benevolence of a true angel. It was easy for Kaworu to enchant all the pilgrims who traveled to the station to grovel before him and the new staff members who didn't know the truth. Even with a monster's red eyes, even with skin and hair the color of death.
Dr. Itoh knew more about the AT field than all but the members of SEELE itself, he was certain of it. He had to know what it truly was in order to engineer a weapon using it. Then they'd revealed the other side of it, that humans also had one they used to defend their individuality. Told him to make sure Kaworu learned to get past it. Not to penetrate that field, no: that would damage the souls inside and SEELE wanted to make sure all of humanity was absorbed into that abomination of LCL.
The other way in was seduction. To make a human want to lower their barriers. Want to let the angel into their minds. As the mass absorbed more and more people, it would know more and more about the remaining humans and could wear the faces of their loved ones to convince them to let it in. The EVA pilots were the only ones capable of fighting angels: wouldn't SEELE want to make certain that even with physical AT fields, they couldn't hold out against mental absorption? Make them so desperate for love, kindness or even the help good people gave each other that they'd hand themselves over to the growing mass?
It made sense to load the mind Adam would awaken within with this data, with the weaknesses of the pilots.
He knew that if Kaworu intended to absorb him, it would be all too easy. When he'd done so much else for his lost family?
White light flared behind him. "Come to the beach," Kaworu's voice said, and he vanished again almost before Dr. Itoh managed to turn around and see him, even in a young body.
The rare sense of urgency in that tone, and even more so the evident discomfort in Kaworu's face made him obey. What could make the angel look worried, look sick in the physical sense instead of sickened by one of humanity's excesses?
When he got there, Kaworu was shaping a human form out of the ocean's LCL. Not all at once, but he'd add detail, look thoughtful and wince, then add more detail, as though downloading this information was painful. "Reach out to-Grab him," Kaworu said, correcting himself. "When I'm done. Reinforce field-hope it's instinct, he learned fast…" Then the angel's glow intensified as though his body was entirely a solid AT field, and he reached his hand right into that mannequin's flesh as though he was reaching to grab out its heart.
Or implant one: something that looked like a human-sized core flowed down the light that was Kaworu's arm, and then it was as though the angel was flung back, not just physically away from the body but through a dark portal and into another dimension.
That was when Dr. Itoh finally recognized Dr. Steve Bannon, the chief designer of Unit 06, Kaworu's Eva. He stood there for a long moment, eyes unfocused, and when his head did turn towards Jun, his eyes still didn't focus, even though it was clear that Steve was trying to see him. Just not with his human eyes, not in a human way. When that didn't work, Dr. Itoh saw him reach out clumsily, even though he wasn't sure with what, since Bannon's arms didn't move, or how Dr. Itoh perceived this happening at all before something was pawing at his mind, like a blind man trying to find the lightswitch.
Somehow, either the very state of being panicked hit that mental feeler away or… Anyway, something happened, and Itoh saw the physicist blink. Was whatever he'd been turned into startled by the concept that someone wouldn't want to be absorbed?
Grab him? Was the angel out of its damn mind? Like hell he was going to be a test run for some kind of chain reaction, absorbing people and then throwing them out again to have them absorb others, Dr. Itoh thought as someone appeared several meters out from the shore right above the ocean, falling down into it an instant later.
Dr. Itoh blinked, because why would… What the hell was going on?
A dark-haired head surfaced much closer to shore. "Sorry, but pin him down!" a boy's voice called, obviously conflicted between habitual politeness and actually giving orders before diving under again and darting towards the coast, finally staggering up the beach, trying to avoid having the wave crests hit his legs in a way that seemed clumsy until Dr. Itoh remembered that no one this boy's age could possibly know how to deal with the impact of waves. He remembered going to the ocean: once you were out far enough to duck under the crest you were safe, or where it was shallow enough that all the wave really did was wash around your ankles, but when you were in a shallow area and a three-foot wave that still had some force behind it came at you, there was a trick to it. And if this beach had an undertow? "Pin him down, Kaworu thought he'd probably think he could fly… Nevermind," the young man said when he finally ran up to Dr. Bannon and did something that felt like hitting him over the head with a blackjack.
Dr. Itoh winced as Dr. Bannon fell, even though the young man caught him and made sure he didn't hit the sand too hard, then stood back, looking like a repair tech who didn't like what they were seeing. "If this is contamination, I guess Asuka's going to be happy, because my sync ratio is never getting as high as hers," he said, then shook his head. "I don't know, I might have to make them remerge at least a little so they can swap the things that ended up in the wrong person. If he's this bad, no wonder Kaworu didn't let me get a good look at him."
"What's going on?"
"Oh?" the young man asked, almost jumping a little. "Sorry, I'm Shinji Ikari. Kaworu said SEELE called him back up, since they know he can teleport, because they've known for a few months that the person who built Kaworu's Eva figured out that Kaworu was… more angel that SEELE told him, I guess? Anyway, SEELE knew he knew that SEELE was actually evil. So now that the Eva's been checked out by NERV and they're sure they don't need this guy to maintain it, they wanted Kaworu to absorb him so that they could find out what traps he put in the Eva and disarm them. Kaworu's pretty sure he found all of them already, but he couldn't tell them that. So since they thought he absorbed you, they wanted him to absorb…" Shinji looked down at the man again. "Dr. Steve Bannon. And answer their questions, so it would have been pretty suspicious if he disappeared with him and then came back. All he could do was drop him here as soon as they let him go back down to Earth."
"Shinji Ikari?" No. "You're working with the angel?"
Shinji blinked at him. Then he looked very pointedly unhappy. "He said he rescued someone, not that he rescued the person who threw him out an airlock when you thought he was just a kid…" Dammit, Kaworu. Although Shinji clearly thought he was too damn nice instead of damn annoying. "Kaworu is my friend; yes, I know he's an angel; and someone who conducted human experimentation like that isn't going to convince me that he's the bad guy."
How did he know that? "…You're…"
Shinji rolled his eyes. "I'm not an angel. Everyone has an AT field: Kaworu showed me how to use mine. I can't do telekinetic stuff the way angels can, but I can do a lot more psychic stuff than he can. So he called me to see if I could patch this guy up, since even though it looks like most people here have a reflex to curl up and try to pull in their shields even when the other guy's already inside them," which was absolutely useless. "Curling up like that meant he didn't just pull himself in, he pulled a lot of Kaworu's mental stuff, feelings, how to move your arm, that kind of thing, into him. I think that's what NERV means by contamination, although Ritsuko said it was classified when I asked." Looking over Steve with a sigh, Shinji explained that, "Absorbing some of Kaworu's knowledge meant he got some of the information on mental defense, and then he started actively reaching for more of it, it looks like. That meant he got even more contaminated, but I don't think he managed to hurt Kaworu too badly before Kaworu pushed him out." Thank goodness.
Shinji was also very thankful that this guy's desire to have his mind un-raped had overpowered his desire to kill the angel. Kaworu wouldn't have been able to force him out if he didn't want to go, and if Dr. Bannon had actually managed to find out how vulnerable Kaworu was and where, instead of just thrashing around and throwing the angel's systems into chaos while he was trying to get him out of there without making SEELE suspicious?
If he'd been in Kaworu's mind, then he could have seen for himself that Kaworu wasn't a bad guy, Shinji thought, so if he'd killed Kaworu just because he was an angel, Shinji would never have forgiven him.
It didn't occur to Shinji that to most people, angels were genocidal abominations, so even if Dr. Bannon hadn't just experienced being turned into goop and absorbed, which would make anyone marginally sane who wasn't being mind-controlled panic and fight for their lives, the idea of looking for hints the angel SEELE had just stated in his hearing was working for them to end the world wasn't actually evil wouldn't have occurred to him. It didn't help that in Shinji's own experience most scientists were bastards (his parents, for example), so he was prejudiced not just in Kaworu's favor but against Dr. Bannon. Dr. Itoh, too, especially after what Shinji read from him.
Shinji didn't mindscan people, but since he'd been using that sense anyway he had looked at the doctor, and since his hatred of angels and the fact he'd been tricked into making Kaworu were things he was focused on and he didn't have to hide them here, they'd been on the equivalent of his public profile. The fact he essentially wanted the world to know that he had tried to kill the angel, even though he hadn't known that was what SEELE's custom modded weapon was at the time, was not calculated to endear him to Shinji, who already wanted to kick Gendo's ass for what his old man did to his little sister. Another genetically designed weapon holding a carrier admin's soul.
Dr. Bannon might have grasped at Kaworu's knowledge of mental warfare theory, but Kaworu had managed to keep most of it out of his reach while Shinji had actual training. Since Bannon had opened himself up in order to protect an attack instead of keeping the outside of his soul solid, it was very simple for Shinji to slide in past the attack and use one of the knockout techniques he'd learned. This one was harmless enough that on most worlds, people with insomnia used it on themselves to make their minds stop racing and parents used it sparingly on kids who just would not go the fuck to sleep. The knowledge that if they tried too hard to avoid bedtime, they wouldn't have a choice in the matter forced kids to learn tricks like pretending to go to sleep and then reading under the covers with a flashlight like good little children who understood that their parents needed some private time.
Shinji dropped down comfortably to sit cross-legged on the sand: he hadn't actually done this before, and he was worried if he'd be able to do a good enough job on Kaworu, but he felt pretty comfortable doing this. After all, even if he screwed up, he was screwing up on the guy who made Kaworu's Eva look demonic, and then he'd brought this on himself. Kaworu would have tried to ask him to hold still if it weren't for the fact Kaworu could sense that would just make the guy thrash around more. Looking at his logs, Bannon hadn't done more than repeatedly kick Kaworu in the shin and mix around the edges of both their filing systems, but angels as well as humans had redundant storage for memories, so Kaworu shouldn't have lost anything important.
Honestly, the more he looked at what exactly happened then, the more pitiful it was. An angel who let a planetary human who wanted them dead inside their mind should have been a dead angel. While he wanted to sigh with relief after seeing how useless this guy was, it did kind of worry Shinji, because this was easy stuff. Heck, the kittens could have done several times more damage than this, and they didn't have mental AT fields, they'd be purely screwing around with the filing system like they'd shredded Misato's paperwork. On command. Before she did it, so that she didn't have to.
Dr. Bannon wasn't completely ignorant, and if he was representative of Earth's humans? Then they were trained to do exactly the wrong thing if hit with a mental attack. They'd actually have to unlearn a heck of a lot of bad habits, not just learn actual attacks.
Shinji looked at Dr. Itoh thoughtfully before deciding that no, he wasn't going to use him as a guinea pig to see if taking out one of Earth's humans was usually just like taking candy from a baby. Maybe by copying Tabris' mental defenses instead of human mental defenses, which didn't entirely consist of confusion, misdirection and data shuffling, Bannon had actually weakened himself, since thinking he knew what to do kept him from desperately reaching for something, anything and finding the good stuff?
One of the reasons that knockout method was mostly used on children or people who weren't fighting back was that it was really easy to block. But Terran humans had only learned how to harden their fields: loosening them in order to 'move' so that they could block would be painfully counter-intuitive.
Even so, Shinji was glad Tabris had asked Shinji to help instead of trying to do this himself, not to mention teleporting Shinji in a good distance away, over LCL, instead of teleporting him in right there and being present where a strike could hit him.
Tabris brought him here because he trusted Shinji to undo the harm Tabris had done, even in the process of saving someone's life, instead of getting annoyed at these guys and just knocking them both out and waiting for Tabris to give up on Shinji changing his mind and come pick him up. Shinji wasn't normally a very confrontational person, since confronting his aunt and uncle just got their attention, which made his life more annoying regardless of the outcome of the fight. The efficient way to get things done was just do them, and ignore the opinions that didn't really matter. Still, maybe he should learn how to be confrontational, because he kind of wanted to be right now but he wasn't sure how to avoid sounding either like a pathetic loser who would end up apologizing and backing down or some kind of close-minded Neanderthal who wouldn't listen to reason, let alone speak it, and he wanted them to listen to him about Kaworu.
Well, it would help them listen if Shinji got the ears fully online. "Yeah, Kaworu was right about him trying to fly: movement programming's totally overwritten. I'm amazed he could even stand up."
Shinji was talking like an expert, someone who knew what he was doing, so the resemblance to a scientist that signaled 'bad guy' to Shinji actually gave him more credibility to Dr. Itoh, not less.
"That's why Kaworu told you to grab him," Shinji continued. "Angels handle travel in this dimension, as opposed to hyperspace, by moving relative to physical matter. If he'd reached down with his mental AT field to find a surface composed of mental objects and pushed on that? Since our branch of humanity mostly doesn't know anything about our psychic abilities, hitting hundreds of thousands of people like that would probably have been read as an attack, and odds are that enough of them would have lashed out for someone to hit him with something fatal, even though we're tougher than angels are. But, if he read you as the one imprisoning him instead of gravity, that's another set of protocols. Angels have an aversion to trying to push the minds of planetary humans around the way we tend to have an aversion to sticking our hand in an open flame." Unless you had some trick up your sleeve, you were going to get burned. "Next time Kaworu tells you to do something, do it. If you hadn't picked a fight with this Dr. Bannon, he would be dead by now."
"Picked a fight with him?"
Shinji looked embarrassed. "I wouldn't call it a fight, exactly." That was just really pathetic. Like they were just waving their hands in the air and if they actually hit each other, it would be a complete accident and a shock to both of them. "Look, if you work for SEELE, you know how they call us Lilim? Because we're the children of Lilith. There are lots of other worlds out there, with humans that are the children of other angels. Our planet is messed up. Really messed up. Humans are a psychic species: we can use words to communicate, but it's the same thing as being able to use letters on a page to communicate. Most people on earth talk instead of writing, because it's easier. You only send someone a letter if you want it to take awhile to get there: well, they use words if they want to keep things at a distance instead of talking mind-to-mind, because it's a clumsy way to communicate. Dr. Bannon copied a lot of Tabris' programming trying to figure out how to get out of there – instead of just waiting – so he didn't remember Earth is like the one planet where it isn't actually incredibly rude to greet someone without psychic contact. It's the equivalent of saying 'I intend to attack you so soon I'm not even going to bother to pretend otherwise,' so trying to contact another carrier with radio waves wouldn't have been a very good thing…"
In fact, it would be calculated to add to the impression that Terran humans were screwed up in the 'mad dog' sort of way. Even if angels were reluctant to eliminate biospheres, a lot of carriers in populated galaxies contained planetary human envoys who didn't have those instincts and could send a message home for someone to get them their shotgun, or rather armada.
"You've been to other planets?" Dr. Itoh asked, curiosity overpowering suspicion for a moment.
"No. Long-distance hyperspace trips require a carrier or two angels, and Tabris is the only one who didn't go crazy. Well, there's Lilith, but we're not sure about Lilith and the sea wouldn't have turned into LCL if the planet was stabilized, whatever that means, so if Lilith is destroyed or leaves we're in trouble."
"He's refused to explain that to you?"
"No, it's just really technical, like how angels travel through hyperspace, and Kaworu isn't entirely sure how it works either. It's something planetary humans do instinctively at a certain point in their development, the way angels can travel through hyperspace even if they don't have any idea how to explain what they're doing to someone else."
Shinji looked disappointed. "It would be nice if we could do it, but it can't happen as long as everyone's sealed in like this. It involves what SEELE calls the Room of Gauf: it's possible the replacement source of new souls is… like in physics, where wave crests can add up. The light of the soul isn't just a territory absolutely controlled by your will, it's something that radiates. So enough lights could catalyze the birth of new lights, but there's a point at which that starts happening, and it should have happened way before the start of the bronze age. If I wanted to be fair, SEELE's right about a couple things: we shouldn't be closed off the way we are and there really is a problem with the supply of souls. Normally souls reincarnate on the planet they're first born on, but the angels have been making most of them go looking for another planet." One where the communication system worked, dammit, and trying to connect to others wasn't an exercise in frustration.
It wasn't possible to just delete things out of a human mind without bypassing a lot of safety features and doing more work than Shinji wanted to, so he was looking for unscrambled copies of the important stuff Bannon'd overwritten with the angel versions. He left the fragments of Kaworu's personal memory where they were: none of it was anything Kaworu considered private, although Kaworu wasn't a very private person to begin with. Shinji wasn't as serious about it as Rei was about her desire for more Shinjis, but if a scientist somehow picked up some of Kaworu's ethics, especially when it came to the use of power, that could only be a good thing.
Anyway, Dr. Bannon had partially scrambled his own memory and he was perfectly capable of cleaning it up himself as soon as he was willing to listen to Shinji and take a couple lessons. It wasn't life-threatening, so Shinji wasn't obligated to clean up a mess that wasn't his or Kaworu's fault in the first place. He was sure Dr. Bannon wouldn't want anyone else mucking around in his mind more than necessary either, so after Shinji gave Dr. Bannon a copy of Shinji's activity log, at least the parts of it that contained what he'd done to Bannon's mind, he did the equivalent of giving the guy a kick to get him to boot up and withdrew from his mind. "There, that's good enough," he said, nodding as Dr. Bannon jerked awake.
"Wha, where… Where is this?" Was it really…
Shinji looked up. "Kaworu's island. Actually, I'm not sure exactly where it is. It's day, so I guess we're in the Pacific?"
"This is, this is earth." Gravity. Fifteen pounds per square inch of air pressure, the weight of all that atmosphere pressing down on him. In standard units, that was one… no, that was water pressure. What was the pressure like on top of the sea? Well, he could go find out… No, he couldn't, Tethys was further out of range than the human brain was really set up to conceptualize. "Or am I just in a dream or instrumentality? This doesn't seem like my own personal paradise. There aren't enough dancing girls or witch-hunters burning SEELE at the stake. Or did that so-called angel send me to hell?" For his rebellion, his sabotage, his secret heresy?
The boy sighed. "Kaworu doesn't mind it in songs, but I don't like people using Western religious imagery. They think they're being clever and they don't realize the same thing's been said a lot of times." Another reason Shinji didn't watch the sanitized news reports on the Eva battles.
"Who are… The Second Child," Steve said, levering himself up. "Shinji…" Not Shinji Ikari, or Shinji-kun. Certainly not Shinji-chan, not for a child that had already endured so much and been forced to grow old too quickly because of it. Shinji was Shinji.
And those weren't his memories or feelings, he wasn't the one who saw this soul-light frequency and filed it instantly under not just friendly, but family. Only one deliberate step removed from life-of-my-shaping, life born from the planet that would become his body, the Garden of Eden grown by a Seed of Life.
That made the part of him forced to learn biology in order to make an Eva muse that since angels were parthenogenic, from a classification standpoint they were all technically female. The part of him that had kept him alive on the Moonbase, the suspicious part he'd thought had kept SEELE from realizing he'd discovered the truth, was classifying Shinji not as a friendly but as someone who was the angel's protégé and could kick his ass in more ways than one.
He'd stayed in better shape than Dr. Itoh, but he wasn't used to earth's gravity anymore and the inhuman memories he'd stolen were classifying Shinji's AT field as that of a policeman or doctor: he wasn't primarily a killer, that would have been obvious, but he was trained and wouldn't hesitate to put Steve under either because he was making trouble or for his own good.
Wait, Dr. Itoh? "So you're here, and they said he ate you too." Moonbase was a closed bottle: someone just disappearing didn't go unnoticed, especially when they were so closely tied to the reason Moonbase existed in the first place. How little fuss there was had proven he'd been silenced by SEELE.
"No, just brought me here, rearranged my face and dipped my clothes in the ocean. Of course, all of this could be a dream, and we're just being held under until it's time for true complementation."
"You look the same, just younger." Skinnier, a lot skinnier. Standing up and not actually looking exhausted. If it wouldn't involve an angel, Dr. Bannon would have wondered where he could sign up for some of that.
Dr. Itoh felt his nose: the bump was more pronounced than it was this morning. "…He made me look like myself again so that you'd recognize me." Believe him when he said he was Dr. Itoh.
Shinji sighed: Kaworu was really too considerate, when he knew what the considerate thing to do was. "I could ask if you wanted anything, like news, but not if you're not even going to thank Kaworu for putting himself in danger to save your life."
Steve stared at him. "He ate my soul."
"Yes. And otherwise you would have been pushed out an airlock or something. Which isn't actually a very quick way to die," Shinji added, looking at Dr. Itoh, who had hoped the panic of dying for lack of breath would provide motivation to summon an AT field. "And that's after you tried to make his Eva eat his soul. Not the way mine did my mother's, but the way Asuka's ate her mother's, so both halves of what was left would be too broken to be of any use to SEELE." The more Shinji thought about it, the more they reminded him of Gendo and the more he wanted them to be left here to rot. "There's something I figured out after my father abandoned me: sympathy isn't something anyone 'deserves,' or gets just for existing. No one's obligated to care about anyone else: even parents might not care about their own children. Everyone suffered after Second Impact, and they get into these fights about who suffered more as though winning is a good thing, when all that does is make the other people whose sympathy they want care about them less, because they're as good as shouting, 'I don't care about what happened to you, I want to force you to pay attention to me.' If you want your pain to be cared about, you have to care about other people's. You can't tell me my friend risking his life to save you doesn't matter and then turn around and expect me to care about you almost losing your own life. You can't have it both ways unless you're willing to give it both ways."
Dr. Bannon stared at him, then laughed weakly. "In other words, grow the fuck up."
"No, I definitely wouldn't put it that way," Shinji said, shaking his head. "More grown-ups are that way than kids."
"It takes time for someone to shove their head that far up their ass?" the doctor wondered now.
"Well, all the members of SEELE are pretty old, aren't they?" Shinji pointed out. "There's a saying that you shouldn't trust anyone over thirty, and I haven't met an exception yet." Kaworu didn't count.
I've seen a lot of people saying that Kaworu's goal in the anime was to break Shinji's heart. In the episode, Kaworu talks about Shinji's 'heart of glass,' how he admires Shinji not just for piloting a giant robot to save the world, but because of Shinji's ability to pick himself up, reforge his heart and go on even after being broken.
Rudyard Kipling's, 'The Hymn of Breaking Strain,' is a great poem that sums this up well: "that we, in spite of being broken, because of being broken, may rise and build anew, stand up and build anew!" Which Shinji does after Third Impact.
So Kaworu is therefore the one person in the series who wouldn't hatch a plan centered around psychologically breaking Shinji , because Kaworu believes this would be absolutely fucking useless. 'Yeah, why don't I sacrifice my life just to shoot a bullet at someone who's immune to them. That's a brilliant idea.' Not. If Kaworu was out to destroy Shinji, obviously he wouldn't pursue a course of action that he knows is doomed to fail, he'd instead look for a method with some chance of actual success. Like, you know, going looking for Adam and causing Third Impact in a way that would destroy Shinji's soul instead of absorbing it. QED, Kaworu was not out to destroy Shinji.
I really wish people paid more attention to the dialogue in the episode instead of being distracted by the shiny. It reminds me of Maroni in The Dark Knight saying, 'What makes you think I want to hear you talk?' since even some people who like Kaworu & can describe every detail of how he's physically affectionate towards Shinji were pretty clearly looking at the handsome young man instead of listening to a word he was saying, except when it came to those three words. I can imagine fangirls going, 'Aww, you love him, so it's meaningful. Now shut up and get naked.'