"So, what have I missed?" Jun asked.

"More dead angels down on the surface. The public thinks it was the attacking angel, but we saw that NERV's pilots nearly set off Second Impact themselves, although the First Child was involved and the smart money is on her being something like Tabris," Dr. Steve Bannon looked at Dr. Itoh for confirmation, since he was the one who'd worked on the 'artificial angel' project.

"SEELE seems to think so, from some of the discussions about Kaworu." Specimen KWR, Dr. Itoh's contribution to the war against the angels. The Fifth Child and the First were almost certainly both hosts. "They think she's Lilith's host body, the way he's Adam's."

Steve paled at that. "Seriously? How did that happen?"

Jun shrugged. "This is from after the point when they stopped telling me things I didn't need to know. I did take over the project from someone else, who was working on creating clones with Adam's genetic material: I gather he was removed for incompetence." 'Removed' was moonbase slang for 'removed from the area with oxygen,' or gotten rid of permanently in some other fashion, among those who knew the truth. Euphemisms didn't get you hauled in front of security and threatened: SEELE wanted the staff members who weren't in the know to stay oblivious. Dr. Itoh had been spared since the young angel requested it, but if he'd tried to warn others SEELE's tolerance of him would have run out fast. "Did you…"

"I didn't run into it, no." The thing that caused Second Impact, and he'd been that close to it? "I picked up a lot from him, though, enough to know that if I had woken it up, that would be bad. I'm not sure of the details, but he must have been keeping me away from the thing. If it wakes up, Tabris is convinced he's screwed. He's worried enough about it that I picked up the fear of it without picking up that it was in their with me. I guess it's dangerous no matter where it is." It had been on Antarctica, about as far away from people as you could get and still be on earth's surface, and it had still killed billions when it went off.

"That must be unpleasant. Having thoughts and feelings in your head that aren't yours." Unpleasant was an understatement. Shinji had gotten Dr. Bannon mostly straightened out, but he hadn't erased any of the extra data the doctor had picked up. In theory, they should want more information on the angels, but Jun Itoh still felt lucky that hadn't happened to him. The thought of it made his skin crawl, and SEELE wanted to do that to everyone?

Steve just raised an eyebrow, leaning on the counter. Seriously? Of course it wasn't damn pleasant. That was stating the obvious, and not enough of an understatement to be funny. It just came across as inane, and he was never in the mood for inanity. "The angel's down on the surface piloting the Eva I built. I tried to program it to kill him if he was too much of an angel, but that obviously didn't work." Shinji had clearly found out, and the trap would be dismantled if it hadn't already. It was possible Kaworu'd managed to hide his true thoughts from the Eva well enough to avoid triggering it. It was a machine, half-biological or not… Except it wasn't a machine, stolen knowledge informed him. Not anymore than angels were, at any rate, and angels were humans were… "Panspermia." The distribution of life throughout the universe.

"You didn't already know that?" Jun wondered, pouring the excess water off the mac and cheese he'd made for the sake of having something hot and quick. "Sorry, I should know how good they were at making everyone keep their knowledge to themselves, even in a confined space like that. I didn't know you knew SEELE was working to unleash their custom angel on the world and bring about Third Impact."

"I wasn't sure-No, I was sure, I just didn't want to believe I was suckered in that far. That the world was." That the organization he'd supported because they were working to continue the human race against such odds was really working to end it because they didn't think it was good enough (Tabris' knowledge again). "The Evas are just like your project: they're doomsday devices. More angels, just under human control, meaning SEELE's control. Or NERV's, but they want Third Impact too. The only technology we have to fight the angels and prevent Third Impact was engineered from the ground up to bite us in the ass and kill us all later. I don't know if it even is possible to make a safe Eva." But they needed something to fight the angels. "You're out of touch here?"

"No radio, no nothing, and I'm a geneticist, not an engineer."

"Lack of radio can probably be fixed, if you don't mind sacrificing a few appliances." Once again, Steve looked thoughtfully around the kitchen. "I knew he could teleport down to the surface, but when did he set all this up? And how? He probably bought the house, but where did he get the money? At least Shinji coming here because Tabris said so answers the question of why an angel bothered."

"This place may have been intended as a safehouse for humans from the beginning." Jun thought so too. "At first I thought he was stalking the boy, since there are a lot of books and other things from Shinji Ikari's childhood. If anything, it's like what my wife and I used to keep of our children's things as they grew up." The amount of the books that were related to nature or some form of science just made the resemblance clearer, sharper, more cutting. "How could they have gotten so close in a few scattered visits to earth that only started long after Shinji was past that age?" It had to be mental tampering, or… Sometimes the more innocent explanation was the more worrisome one.

"…One of the angels had two bodies," Steve said. "He could have been in two places at once the entire time." While Dr. Itoh was trying to keep him confined to limit the damage. While SEELE was monitoring him. "He's been on earth for years, doing who knows what?" Dammit.

"Did you pick up anything that might let us figure that out?"

"No. He doesn't think he's evil, but few do. Even SEELE clearly thinks they're the ones doing the best thing for the human race." Given his interrogation, the contempt they had for people like him and Dr. Itoh who turned against SEELE upon finding out that they were betraying humanity. "I worried him while I was there," he said with a bit of pride. "He was worried about me. Not just about what could happen to me, but what damage I could do. If Shinji could knock me out like that? I wonder if there's a way to go past an angel's AT field with psychic powers? Knock them out, hope their AT field goes down and you could finish them off. Wouldn't need an Eva then."

"If you trust those powers. You were absorbed by Tabris and who knows what he's done to Shinji. He's had years to meddle with him." When angels could encroach on and alter living organisms and computer systems? "They could be as much of a trap as the Evas are. As the program to engineer a pilot who could match and counter angel abilities was."

"Damn. Well, I guess it pays to be in charge of the effort to stop yourself." Not that most of humanity knew they needed to worry about SEELE or the Committee for Human Instrumentality. Oh, they didn't have the approval of a hundred percent of the population, but that was because of their stance on genetic engineering and transhumanism, not because the people suspected they wanted to wipe out humanity with its individuality instead of improving upon it and allowing it to survive. "Use material cloned from Adam to make Evas, they tell me, a design for mass production and oh, by the way, there's something called a dummy plug system we'd like to get working, using not-quite-braindead human bodies. Humanoid."

"You objected on moral grounds and one of them told you that the clones weren't really human, and you figured out that meant the pilot wasn't either?" Jun guessed.

"That, and the shortcuts I could take on the model under construction up there for Kaworu. That and his test results. Genetically engineered yes, and that would explain a lot of I didn't have access to the data that showed that angels had something that mapped to human genes amazingly well." Just in different types of matter. "If I wasn't working with Adam's flesh and computers to begin with. Setting up all the links there, the artificial nervous system and connections to the pilot gave me justification for doing all the analysis I wanted."

"That was your mistake," Jun said. "Just because they let you run the data doesn't mean they didn't notice that you were running it, and they know what it means. Once you had all of that in front of your face, they'd know it had to be obvious to you. So when you didn't say anything, when your productivity didn't even drop, that meant you had a clever plan. I just blew up when I figured it out. It was the assimilation that did it: they wanted to bring people up to the station for my so-called creation to practice on. I swallowed a lot of stuff before that, because it would be useful to have those powers on our side, and I assumed they knew what they were doing-No, they do know what they're doing. I assumed they were doing what they said they were doing. Absorbing humans, though, wasn't relevant to fighting angels at all. So I finally asked what the hell they were thinking, and once I was looking at the possibility that SEELE wasn't on the up and up… Hell, I wish they had been trying to take over the world. I knew that wasn't it right off, though. With the Eva tech and everything I saw and worked on myself, there isn't a conventional army with a prayer of stopping them. They wouldn't have needed to go so far, take so many 'risks' with Third Impact and angels if that was all it was. Letting your conquest get destroyed defeats the purpose."

"Oh? Right. At least if they were planning to rule the world, they'd have to keep it from being blown up or absorbed by an angel first." Steve gave him a thoughtful look, grey eyebrow raised. "How much have you had to drink?"

"There isn't any alcohol here. Not drinkable, anyway." Just what was in the first-aid kit. The young-looking Dr. Itoh sighed. "I've probably given myself mild heatstroke again, though. Why?"

"You sound a little muddled. Heatstroke?"

"It's hot outside here. Out in the jungle, it's like standing in a sauna." So many trees, all that transpiration. "It's alive, alive," Jun said with only a hint of irony to show he knew what he was quoting.

"Sounds like a real change from hydroponics and office plants." From white plastic walls surrounded by poisonous moon dust. Steve heard they made the pilot take a shower when he came back in until he learned to use his AT field to keep himself from actually coming in contact with the ground out there, or letting any of it settle on his skin. He knew the angel could survive vacuum: Kaworu had come out to watch them work on the Eva often enough. It had come in handy a few times, since the angel didn't have a bulky spacesuit enveloping him to worry about and had grown up in that gravity, so he could move fast when the situation called for it.

This would be a lot easier if Steve knew what Kaworu had really been feeling the time he'd darted forward to push one of the construction engineers out of the way of a falling arm. Lesser gravity or no lesser gravity, Evas were huge and that was a big damn piece of metal and muscle. Steve had picked up what Kaworu supposedly felt while the doctor was absorbed, but he wasn't going to trust that. Who felt guilt and understanding when they were supposedly doing this to save someone and that person was damn pissed-off and ungrateful? No one was going to feel only benevolent worry, with traces of actual fear both for themselves and the other person if the observers realized something was up, with the equivalent of a pissed-off snake hidden under their clothing, crawling around and looking for somewhere to do some real damage. There should have been revulsion, the anger Shinji clearly felt at the doctor for hurting someone who was just trying to help and the urge to just smash the damn thing.

Then again, didn't angels produce (or become?) planetary biospheres, the way Earth was born from Lilith? Weren't planets supposed to have humans climbing all over them, damaging the planet before they learned any better? Was Kaworu, Tabris' efforts to keep him out of important areas like a father repeatedly grabbing the baby back from taking a header off the countertop when it crawled over trying to peer at the edge? Or a guardian angel trying to get the proto-homonids to understand that no matter how interesting the gooey sticky stuff was or what could be made with it, the tar pits were dangerous. Kind of a combination of 'Aww, it's already developing curiosity!' and 'Oh dear, be careful!' instead of normal annoyance. Forget the basic desire for self-preservation and the aggression that should be prompted by someone trying to fucking kill it. At least Tabris either hadn't felt or hadn't let Steve feel that his efforts to kill the damn thing were fumbling, insignificant and thus cute.

Provided the angel really was an enemy, it was pleasing to imagine it trying to smile like it was utterly unconcerned while reporting to SEELE while hiding that there was a small animal running around under its clothing biting and clawing at it, even though Steve hadn't managed to get at any vulnerable areas.

If it wasn't an enemy, that really had been a dick move. Especially because if he had managed to get the angel to show discomfort or that it was distracted, it would be his fault if SEELE figured out something was up because of this. It wasn't like he'd managed to hide his own efforts to stop the cabal: what if he'd screwed up Kaworu's deception?

He could still feel that the kid who'd patched him up was pissed off at him, although most of it was a general level of pissed off at… what? Anything? Everything? Scientists? Older men? People who were supposed to help him and his friends and instead screwed them over?

Steve could tell that when Shinj said he didn't trust anyone over thirty, he hadn't been joking despite the smile. There was a lot of hatred and anger in that kid, held back but there and looking for a target. Which begged the question of why the angel hadn't done anything about it, if he really was the kid's father figure.

Then again, the impression he'd gotten of the angel… Those emotions were buried even deeper, otherwise he would have gotten angry at Steve, wouldn't he? To be pissed off at someone being a pain in the ass was human, and angels were related to humans, anyway. Still, if Kaworu hadn't felt his own anger, not even with an enemy trying to kill him and one of the Council members right in front of him, would he have recognized Shinji's?

He'd still patched Steve up, so he was a pretty nice kid, but that just meant he was too nice to let that anger out to play very often. It wasn't good to keep things dammed up like that: if Dr. Bannon hadn't had the Eva to work on, traps to set and hide, something productive to do with that anger?

Well, the well-leashed desire to destroy was a good trait in an Eva pilot, he supposed, especially when he could see what Jun was talking about through the windows over the kitchen counters.

Green.

After so long looking down at the Earth and seeing red, seeing a wounded, bleeding, dying planet, to see green like this? To hear birds and need to put on mosquito repellant before heading outdoors in the evenings (Jun had already warned him)?

It wasn't dead.

Holy shit, it wasn't dead. After so long up there, trapped in that bottle, the only place inhabited by humans on an otherwise dead planetoid and only a few screw-ups or a little sabotage because someone had gone insane (or wanted to stop SEELE?) away from dying, to see living things that could manage without human help just fine? To hear noise that wasn't made by people or machinery?

He was actually trying not to think about it. Not to stare too long at the jasmine that was flowing over the balcony's railings, because it felt like hysteria. Like a nervous breakdown. It was such a relief that if he let himself believe this was real, he might let go of the control he'd used to fight off despair for years, might let the emotions he was holding back get loose, and then he didn't know what he'd do. Oh, shake, cry, maybe scream or punch a hole in something, but it was trying to pick up the pieces afterwards that worried him.

Still being alive himself was a plus, but while there was life there was hope. There was hope, holy hell there was hope for this battered old world yet, the one people'd said was only a few more mistakes away from destruction decades before Second Impact sterilized about eighty percent of it.

He felt the air pressing down on him – fifteen pounds per square inch, he still remembered the Imperial measurements – but it was the force rising up inside him that almost worried him more, because now it wasn't just a matter of fighting for revenge or to try to keep the angels from getting their hands on what was left of the planet.

Was that what he'd built the Eva for? Really? Not to defend the survivors, but because if humanity was doomed to die out, then he wasn't going to let anyone else have the planet? Had it really just been a massive 'Fuck you' to Adam, the angels and SEELE, a scorched earth or rather flooded red Earth policy? That if humanity was going down, all of them were doing down with his people, and screw the future because it was already fucked beyond repair?

But what if it wasn't? What if this world really could be repaired? "Do you think he did this? This is a flat island, the LCL should have seeped into the water table already, there's no way a garden like this should be just a few meters from the water's edge."

Because angel powers could be replicated: that was the entire point of the Evas. Aside from Ritsuko Akagi and a couple other deceased women, he was the world's expert on Eva development and here with him was the man who had (supposedly) developed SEELE's tame angel. The one they'd told the staff who were still loyal to humanity was a human with a few extras that would let him defend the Earth.

If they really could create artificial angels, or rather humans with angel abilities? If they could replicate this?

"I can't think of any other explanation," Dr. Itoh finally admitted, and Steve felt a little better when he saw the hint of fear in those black eyes.

Not fear of the angel or fear of losing: fear that they'd screwed up.

Wasted years.

Forget Eva 05, forget Kaworu: there were more Evas and angels where they came from. The two of them had thought they were contributing to the defense of their world, but what about afterwards?

What if instead of either becoming bitter and downtrodden or scheming a way to destroy one angel and one threat to the world, they could have been saving it? What if they'd overlooked… No, they had overlooked it. It had been right in front of them the entire time.

Eva technology, angel technology? "He turned LCL into a body for me: what else could he do with it? Turn it into a jungle like this one? Turn it into…" Steve shook his head, because there were just so many possibilities, chief among them getting rid of the LCL. Even if their first prototype could only do that much, just getting rid of that damn stuff would allow life to reclaim the oceans and the barren ground, the way islands became green again after burned by volcanoes. "Fuck," he said finally, putting his slow old head in his hands.

Forget SEELE, forget the idea that instrumentality was the only choice they had unless they wanted to just lie down and die either with the bang of Third Impact or the whimper of slow starvation.

They could rebuild this world. They had the technology, it had been right in front of them the entire time and they'd been too focused on SEELE to see that!

Or was that what SEELE had counted on? Used their anger, hatred and despair to blind them to the real possibilities that lay before them, the real hope they should have been using their talents to create?

"Damn. Old. Bastards," Steve cursed, and Dr. Itoh (the older of the two, although he looked younger now), bit back the fatherly instinct to tell the other man to watch his language, even though he'd also let his standards slip when it came to that. What point was there in setting a good example when there weren't any real children around them and there wouldn't be much of a next generation anyway? There'd only been single men and women up there, who didn't have much tethering them to earth. Who were willing to leave everything behind to work on research too classified (every nation on earth would kill for Eva military tech) for them to be allowed down to the surface anytime soon, if ever.

They'd already said goodbye to the world, already mourned its loss: was that why they'd given it up for dead so easily?

SEELE and NERV were recruiting all the best minds: of course they were, when they were supposedly Earth's best defense and best hope for the future. The people they hadn't recruited didn't know the truth about the angels, didn't know that abilities like Kaworu's existed and could be replicated.

Right now, the two of them were the only two people who knew the truth and weren't under the control of the groups that wanted Third Impact. They weren't just any two people, either: Dr. Itoh had been hand-picked to take over the pilot and dummy plug clone angel production and Dr. Bannon had created Eva 06 and the Eva Series. If anyone on earth or off it could do this, it was them.

But they needed teams, needed a lab, needed samples… "We need to get in contact with him. Is he watching you somehow?" Dr. Bannon asked, almost hoping the angel was because that meant they could explain what they'd realized and hopefully it would negotiate.

He'd wanted it to be an enemy, something he could kill, when there was no hope. Now?

"I don't think so. I had to find where the food and medicine stockpiles were hidden on my own." Not that it had been that hard.

"Well, you said it didn't want you to contact the outside world, so if I put a transmitter together, hopefully it would wonder what we're trying to tell the outside instead of jamming the signal without listening to it," Steve said, already making plans, already thinking about how to accomplish this.

Who wouldn't want to save the world?

Who wouldn't want to believe that it could be saved?

Oh, right. SEELE, and NERV. Not to mention that an angel Dr. Itoh experimented on and he tried to give a lobotomy didn't have much reason to trust them with more DNA samples or whatever it knew about its powers.

He could see Shinji giving him a level stare already, because the teenager had psychic warfare capability and a giant robot, so Steve had to be very, very stupid if he thought he was getting another chance to kill Kaworu or Jun was going to get more clones to experiment on.

Still, it was worth a try. They had to try. There actually was something at stake.

The world, their world, was still here. Had been here all along.

Waiting.

Okay, hands up everyone who's heard of the Legacy of Kain series. Do check it out, since the writing and acting are awesome, ok?

In the first game, Kain is given a choice: it seems fairly simple, sacrifice himself to save the world or conquer a world that is slowly dying and will eventually become a wasteland if he doesn't sacrifice himself now. "Let's call it a two-sided coin." However, it turns out that the game is rigged. If he dies, the world is also screwed, thanks to an ancient genocidal war, an eldritch abomination, the local magitech/laws of physics and a lot of other stuff. By taking the selfish option, he bought himself time to try to find an actual solution, an actual way to save Nosgoth. "Suppose you throw a coin enough times. Suppose, one day, it lands on its edge." This kicks off a saga of time travel and gambit pileups, with Kain trying to create a timeline in which the world isn't destroyed, other people trying to make sure the world (or at least its current inhabitants...) stays doomed and Raziel doesn't even know what he wants, especially once he realizes that he was doomed to painfully mutate into a monster either way, so Kain's betrayal was just the option that gave him a fighting chance of not ending up in eternal hellish madness. Of course... Well, long epic story.

Radiant Historia also has the concept of a world that is dying, with the survivors fighting over the fertile land that's left and time being bought via sacrifice. However, do enough sidequests, and it turns out there may be a magitech solution to the real problem. There's a line of biomagitech research that offers the first actual hope there's been since all this began, since there are timelines stemming from it where the world doesn't end.

If you go into a fight thinking you're going to lose, you're probably going to lose. However, since angels can create new worlds, and angels are basically human, and humanity's already figured out how to make Evas, they really shouldn't need Third Impact to give people godlike powers. The technology is clearly there, they just need to be allowed to apply and improve on it without interference from conspiracies.