Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The glow of the computer monitor bathed Shinji’s room in cold light. The curtains were drawn shut even though the evening sun still bled faintly outside, painting the world in orange and pink. Shinji lay on his bed, sprawled flat on his back, SDAT player clutched loosely in one hand. The little device clicked, the tape reversing with its mechanical whirr before restarting the same track again.

Music poured into his ears, a muffled wall he used to drown out everything else.

At sixteen, Shinji Ikari was supposed to be the savior of the human race. He was the boy who had climbed into an Evangelion and survived the war against the Angels, who stood in front of reporters and world leaders, bowing his head as they showered him with words he couldn’t fully absorb. National hero. Humanity’s symbol. Their miracle child.

But lying there in his small room, with his heart pounding in rhythm to the static buzz of the SDAT, he felt like nothing at all.

Two years had passed since the war. Two years since the nightmare that was the Angels ended. To the world, this was humanity’s “happily ever after.” Cities rebuilt, nations stabilizing, Tokyo-3 transformed into a sprawling metropolis brighter and fuller than anything Shinji remembered. SEELE, the shadowy puppeteers behind everything, were gone—wiped out in Misato’s coup. Lilith had been sealed, and anything that could spark another Impact was contained.

To Shinji, it was supposed to be over. The fight, the fear, the pressure—it should’ve ended.

He was glad for so many things. That Misato had survived, somehow carrying the weight of the world without crumbling. That Asuka was happy again, her laughter real and unforced, her temper loud but no longer hiding fractures underneath. That Rei, finally freed, had found a strange sort of humanity and grew into it with each passing day. Even Ritsuko smiled more often, her hands still busy but her eyes lighter.

Misato had taken her place at the helm of NERV, officially promoted to Commander. She’d laughed bitterly when she first put on the uniform, saying she wasn’t built for the stiff suits and power games, but she did it anyway. And when the dust had settled, when SEELE’s corpses were cold and the Angels were nothing but memory, she did something Shinji never expected. She adopted him. She adopted Asuka. Made it official, on paper and everything. Family.

On New Year’s, after too many glasses of sake, Misato had ruffled his hair and told him he could finally just be a kid. That he didn’t have to save the world anymore. Shinji remembered how her eyes had watered, how she looked at him with the same fondness she used to reserve for Kaji.

He’d grown, too—shot up in height so fast that Asuka shuddered every time she realized she had to crane her neck to yell at him now. It embarrassed him, the way her comments about his long legs or deeper voice made him self-conscious. Misato got emotional sometimes, saying he reminded her of Kaji, and Shinji never knew what to do with that.

And yet…

Even with all this—when everyone else seemed whole, happy, moving forward—he felt hollow.

Toji had healed, Kensuke had become more excitable than ever with the rebuilt Tokyo-3, Hikari was thriving in school. His friends all had lives they could look forward to. And Shinji? He smiled when he was supposed to, waved when people expected it, sat in conferences as Misato’s “hero” show pony while politicians clapped him on the back. He’d met foreign leaders, bowed in front of cameras, endured endless gratitude and fanfare. They thanked him like he was their miracle.

But when he was alone, when the room was quiet and the SDAT looped for the thousandth time, he realized the truth.

This “happily ever after” was for them. Not him.

He’d heard whispers before the war ended—seventeen Angels. He remembered counting, desperate to know how many more would come, how many more battles would break him. fourteen had fallen. The two seeds now an ancient relic to be forgotten. Sixteen he could put a face to. And yet, Misato had once let slip a seventeenth.

When he asked her, months ago, she brushed it off with a half-smile and too much poetry, calling humanity the seventeenth Angel. A joke wrapped in philosophy. Shinji had laughed nervously, but the question never left him.

If that were true, then why did he feel so incomplete?

Why did it feel like something was still missing?

Why—when Asuka smiled, when Rei softened, when Misato held them both like they were hers—did Shinji still feel like he didn’t belong in the ending he’d fought for?

He pressed the SDAT harder against his ear, letting the static swallow him whole.

Why wasn’t he happy too?

It wasn’t as though he lacked people around him. Misato checked in, hovering at the door with her brisk smile that she tried to soften for his sake. Asuka was never far away, loud and brilliant, still basking in the attention she knew she deserved. Rei—what remained of her—lived in quiet dignity, her presence like a ghost Shinji could never quite hold. They were all there, orbiting him like satellites. Yet inside, he felt a hollowness so deep it rattled.

He turned his head to the side, staring at the wall plastered with commendations and certificates. His birthday last year hadn’t been balloons or candles, not even a quiet meal at home. It had been a press event, a massive conference hall filled with clicking shutters and blinding flashes. Shinji had stood there awkwardly in his too-formal suit, sweating under the heat of stage lights as questions fired from every angle. His english still slightly broken.

“How does it feel to be the boy who saved the world?”
“Do you see yourself as a soldier, or as a symbol?”
“Do you have a message for the children of tomorrow?”

His answers had stumbled out half-formed, nervous, uncertain. He thought he was failing. But the next day, headlines praised him even more. The humble hero. The awkward savior of mankind. They adored his hesitation, mistook his fear for charm.

Asuka, on the other hand, had been incandescent. She’d leaned into the microphones, flashing her teeth and her confidence, her voice sharp and cutting. She teased Shinji for flinching under the noise, for his awkward stammers, but when he’d caught her eye later she’d smirked—not cruelly, but like she was telling him, don’t worry, you’re fine.

He remembered smiling back, weak and tired, but it had carried him through.

Now, at sixteen, the memory was ash.

The world still called his name, sang it, adored it. But when the music in his headphones was gone and he sat in silence, Shinji felt more alone than he had ever been in his life.

The SDAT clicked again. Track 25. He let it play.

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying to shove away the sting of tears before they could fall. He didn’t even know who they’d fall for. For the faces he saved? For the ones he couldn’t? For the Angels who had died by his hands, who might have had names and reasons he’d never know? 

His throat locked. He ripped the headphones off and sat up, gasping like he’d been underwater. His reflection in the darkened monitor stared back at him, pale and tired, with eyes too much like his mother’s.

Hero of humanity. Child of no one.

The silence of the room pressed in, heavier than any Angel he’d ever faced.

Shinji sat up slowly, his elbows digging into his knees, the SDAT still clutched in one limp hand. The music had long stopped, the player clicking uselessly at the end of the tape, but he didn’t bother rewinding. The silence in the room felt heavier than the static hiss ever could.

Running away. The thought pressed at the edges of his mind like a stubborn bruise. He’d run before—away from his Eva, away from Misato, away from every responsibility that made him feel like a hollow shell with a pulse. But now it was different. Running didn’t mean vanishing for a day, waiting for them to call him back to the cage. This time, he thought about disappearing entirely. Out of Tokyo-3. Out of their reach.

Would Misato notice? Maybe when she opened the fridge and realized she didn’t have anyone to nag about chores. Would Asuka? Only when she needed someone to measure herself against, someone to tease. Kaji was gone, his quiet steadiness with him. Rei… Rei wouldn’t come looking. Nobody would—not until they needed him again. Until they needed the puppet in the plug suit, their little show pony to trot out for the cameras, the symbol who saved them all.

He let out a bitter laugh, low and cracked. Some happy ending. This was supposed to be peace, wasn’t it? The war was over. Humanity had survived. He’d lived to sixteen when he never thought he’d see fifteen. The world adored him, worshipped him even. And yet, sitting here, in this room with his walls suffocatingly close, Shinji felt more purposeless than ever.

He rubbed his face hard with his palms, dragging his skin until it stung. In his Eva, at least, he had meaning. Fourteen years old, still awkward, still scared, but every time the alarm sounded and the ground split open beneath Tokyo-3, he climbed into that cockpit. He fought. He bled. He screamed. And in those moments, in the sync of metal and flesh, he knew why he was there. He was saving people. He mattered.

But outside of it? The boy who couldn’t answer a simple question at a press conference without stammering? The boy who couldn’t stand the weight of people’s eyes on him? He felt alien, wrong, like a piece that didn’t fit into the puzzle anymore.

He curled into himself, forehead pressed against his knees, voice breaking into a whisper. “What do I do... mother...?”

The words slipped out before he could stop them. A plea to the air, to the ghost of Yui Ikari, to the mother he barely remembered but carried like a phantom ache in his chest. “Tell me what to do... Please.”

No answer came, of course. Just the quiet tick of the wall clock and the hum of the power lines outside.

Tears welled anyway, hot against his lashes. What made it worse—worse than the silence, worse than the emptiness—was the gnawing sense that something was missing. Not just loneliness. Not just exhaustion. But something fundamental, a piece of himself carved out and gone.

Sixteen Angels. He had faced them all, stared down death again and again. Somewhere in that long list of battles, he was sure—so sure—there was supposed to be something else. Something that would’ve made it all mean more. That would’ve made him whole. But it never came. And now, two years later, he couldn’t stop wondering if he’d missed it. If he’d failed to find the one thing that was supposed to give him a reason to keep going.

Instead, he felt hollow. A boy stitched together from duty and fear, missing a piece of himself that didn’t even exist.

Shinji laughed again, a broken sound, and pressed his sleeve against his eyes. “Pathetic,” he muttered. “So pathetic. Of course I’d be like this.”

And it fit. How in character of him—Shinji Ikari, the boy who saved the world, and couldn’t even save himself.

The night pressed heavy around him as Shinji slid the apartment door shut behind him, careful not to let the latch click too loudly. He adjusted the plain mask over his face and tugged the glasses further up the bridge of his nose, his reflection in the hallway mirror little more than a blur of shadows.

The penthouse was too big, too quiet. Every corner felt hollow, echoing with the weight of everything it represented. A gift, they’d called it—reward for his service, for Asuka’s, for Misato’s sacrifices. A shining symbol of gratitude from the people who cheered his name. He remembered standing in the foyer the first time, staring at the marble floors and the floor-to-ceiling windows, wondering if this was what it felt like to step into someone else’s life.

It had been surreal, laughable even. From counting coins in his childhood room to opening bank accounts he’d never be able to empty in a lifetime. From eating instant ramen with trembling hands to dinners served on plates that cost more than he’d once had in savings. He had gone from nothing to everything, and somehow, it still felt like less.

He stepped carefully past Misato’s room, the faint sound of her uneven breathing drifting through the cracked door. She’d been drunk again, a heavy, sour smell lingering in the air when he passed earlier. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to see her slumped over the table with empty bottles scattered like fallen soldiers.

Asuka’s room was quieter, but the glow of her TV bled faintly under the doorframe. She’d been devouring some new series lately, sneering at every plot twist but glued to it all the same. He pictured her sprawled out, half-asleep with the remote still clutched in her hand, and a pang of guilt tugged at his chest. He didn’t want to wake her. He didn’t want her sharp questions or sharp laughter right now.

He kept moving.

The stairwell yawned before him, dimly lit, the metal railing cool under his palm. He chose the steps instead of the elevator. The elevator was too bright, too exposed, too unreliable. The rhythmic slap of his sneakers echoed in the stairwell as he descended, each floor falling away behind him like discarded skins.

Out on the street, the city was different. Quieter than he remembered from his years in the thick of it, but still alive in its own way. Tokyo-3 had been rebuilt, polished and gleaming, but in the shadows between neon signs and streetlamps, Shinji blended in. To most, he wasn’t the boy who saved humanity. He was just another teenager with his hood up, hands in his pockets, wandering the streets long after curfew.

It felt almost freeing. To be nothing. To not matter.

He cut through alleys, past the shuttered convenience stores, past the soft thrum of distant trains. Nobody stopped him. Nobody looked at him twice. He could almost pretend he wasn’t Shinji Ikari at all.

The lake was quiet when he arrived, its red shoreline lapping gently at the sand. The faint crimson glow of the water painted everything in muted tones, as though the world itself had been soaked in blood. It was beautiful and wrong all at once, the kind of sight that left his stomach twisting with nostalgia and dread.

And there, lying upon the surface of the water like a sleeping giant, was Eva Unit-01.

His Eva. His mother. Or the shell that had taken her soul and left him with questions she would never answer.

The water rippled softly around her form, the massive frame gleaming faintly in the moonlight. She looked both alien and familiar, both terrifying and comforting. To the world, she was a weapon. To Shinji, she was something more—a vessel that had once cradled him, that had once been the only place he felt he belonged.

His breath hitched as he stepped closer to the shore, his shoes sinking slightly into the damp sand. He pulled his mask down, his glasses fogging in the night air.

“mother...” he whispered, his voice barely carrying over the waves.

The Eva did not move. But in the stillness, in the weight of her presence, Shinji swore he felt something. A hum in his chest. A tether tugging at his ribs.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore,” he admitted, his voice breaking. “The war’s over. Everyone’s happy. Everyone’s… normal again. And I…” He swallowed hard, the words catching in his throat. “I don’t feel like a hero. I don’t feel like anything.”

The wind brushed across the lake, sending a ripple across the Eva’s body. Shinji closed his eyes, the sound of the waves filling the silence his mother left behind.

For the first time in weeks, the loneliness cracked. He wasn’t sure if it was hope, or despair, or simply exhaustion. But staring at Unit-01, he felt less like he was talking to a machine and more like he was speaking into the chest of someone who had always been listening.

“Please,” he whispered. “Tell me what to do.”

But the water only lapped at the shore, red and endless, and the giant stayed silent.

He didn’t care about any of it anymore.

They didn’t need him. Not Misato with her endless bottles, not Toji with his circle of friends at school who laughed too loudly now, not Asuka who basked in praise that never seemed to stop. Not even his own father—especially not his father. Gendo Ikari hadn’t so much as looked at him in two years.

So why keep pretending? Why stay?

“Fuck it,” Shinji muttered, his voice raw and trembling. His hands shook as he shoved his bank card into the ATM outside the corner shop. The machine beeped, the screen lit up, and he withdrew every yen it would allow him in one go. The thick wad of bills stuffed into his pocket felt unreal. Heavy. Liberating.

He ducked his head as he walked, glasses fogging slightly under the cool air. The mask covered the rest of his face, but no one would have noticed him anyway. Tokyo-3 was too busy humming with its late-night neon to pay attention to one scrawny sixteen-year-old. He could have been anyone. Maybe that was the point.

No trains. Too obvious. Too many cameras. NERV would track him before he even left the station.

But buses? Buses were forgotten things, still clinging to routes the world had outgrown. Nobody would think to look for him there.

He reached the stop just as the clock above the post office struck 11:10. His chest eased when he saw the schedule taped to the board: Last Departure—11:30 PM. A perfect chance. His chance.

He bought the ticket from the kiosk with shaking fingers, tucking the slip of paper deep into his pocket like it was salvation itself. Then he sat on the metal bench, his leg bouncing uncontrollably as he counted the minutes.

Twenty left.

Twenty minutes until he left Tokyo-3 behind.

Twenty minutes until he could vanish into the night and bury himself in the old streets of his mother’s hometown, where the air smelled like earth instead of blood and machines.

He pictured it clearly: a cheap, nameless apartment, mornings spent in silence, afternoons blending into the blur of nobody noticing him. A quiet life. A life where nobody asked him to fight, nobody shoved microphones in his face, nobody called him a hero when all he’d ever been was afraid.

The neon lights buzzed faintly overhead, and Shinji clutched his bag tighter to his chest. His heart thudded loud and uneven, but beneath the fear there was something else, something sharper.

For the first time in years, he felt like he was about to choose something for himself.

The headlights cut through the dark as the bus lumbered up to the stop. Its brakes screeched, the doors swinging open with a metallic groan. Shinji stood, legs stiff and trembling, and held his breath as he climbed aboard.

The driver barely glanced at him, just punched the ticket and waved him through. That was it. No one calling his name, no one reaching to pull him back, no alarms blaring. Just the hiss of the doors closing and the rumble of the engine as the bus pulled away from the curb.

Shinji slid into a seat by the window and pressed his forehead against the cool glass. The city rolled past in streaks of neon and shadow. Tokyo-3—his prison, his stage, his battlefield—slipped behind him one block at a time.

For a moment, his heart raced with panic. What if they notice? What if Misato wakes up, what if Asuka finds my room empty, what if NERV sends someone to track me down? His hands tightened on his bag, knuckles white. But the bus kept moving, slow and steady, carrying him farther and farther away.

He let out a shaky breath. Maybe—just maybe—they wouldn’t notice. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Maybe not ever.

His eyes drifted shut as the hum of the engine carried him back through the past two years.

—

He remembered the first time a girl had asked him out. She had cornered him after school, cheeks flushed, voice soft. For a moment, Shinji thought maybe he wasn’t so invisible. Maybe someone saw him as more than a pilot, more than a puppet. He had walked her home, listening more than he spoke, thinking maybe he’d finally found something normal.

The next day, he overheard her laughing with her friends. “I actually got the Ikari Shinji to walk me home!” she boasted. “Can you believe it?”

Shinji had turned away before they could see the way his face fell.

—

He remembered Toji, once his closest friend, slapping him on the back after the final battle, grinning through tears. “You did it, man. We’re still alive because of you.” For a while, Shinji thought they’d stay close. But life moved on, and Toji moved with it—friends, sports, classes. Shinji kept his distance, telling himself Toji deserved to be free of the shadow of the Evas. But the truth was, he couldn’t stand being near him. Couldn’t stand the reminder of everything they’d lost.

And so the calls grew fewer, the visits shorter, until they barely spoke at all... or... well... More like Shinji didn't bother when Toji tried. 

—

He remembered Asuka. Always loud, always burning bright, basking in the attention like it was her birthright. She teased him for shrinking under the cameras, for his stammers and nervous half-smiles. Sometimes he caught her watching him when she thought he wasn’t looking, something unreadable flickering in her eyes. But she never said it out loud. And Shinji never asked.

—

And Misato… she had tried. God, she had tried. For a while, she’d cooked meals, pushed him to laugh, carried him through the dark with her stubborn optimism. But the war ended, Kaji never came back, and she turned to bottles to fill the silence. She was still there, still smiling, still keeping the household together—but Shinji could see the cracks. And he didn’t want to be another weight dragging her down.

—

He opened his eyes again, the city giving way to highways and empty stretches of land. Tokyo-3 shimmered faintly in the distance, its towers catching the moonlight one last time before the hills swallowed it whole.

Shinji pressed his palm flat against the glass, his reflection staring back at him—blurred, pale, just a boy on a bus in the middle of the night. Not a hero. Not a pilot. Not anyone’s savior.

For the first time in years, he felt the faintest flicker of control.

He closed his eyes again, letting the hum of the road lull him forward, carrying him away from the city that had demanded everything from him, and given nothing back.

The bus rocked gently beneath him, the hum of the engine a low lullaby that threaded through the quiet night. Shinji leaned his temple against the glass, the cool surface grounding him, his SDAT player still clutched loosely in one palm. The cassette whirred softly, not playing now—just waiting, just as patient as he was.

Outside, the world blurred past in streaks of shadow and silver. The moon hung low, its pale light washing the hills and flat stretches of road in a ghostly glow. Even in the dark, Shinji found himself staring, eyes wide, drinking in details he hadn’t noticed in years. The ripple of tall grass bending in the wind. The silhouettes of trees clumped together like watchful sentries. The occasional glint of water where a river cut its way through the earth.

Tokyo-3 was a maze of concrete and steel, a place of alarms and machines. Here—just minutes outside its limits—it felt like another world. A world that hadn’t been touched by Eva, by Angels, by blood. Shinji felt something unclench in his chest, something that had been wound tight since he was twelve.

His lips curved into a small, almost unrecognizable smile. So this is freedom…

He let the SDAT player rest on his lap, thumb brushing against its familiar dents and scratches. It had been his one constant, his lifeline through battles, through endless nights alone. Now it sat quiet, as though it, too, was resting—content to let him listen to the world instead of drowning it out.

The scenery shifted again, the bus turning along a curve, the headlights sweeping over rows of farmland. Wooden fences, weathered and uneven, marked off fields that stretched into the dark. He could almost picture the people who lived there, asleep in their beds, untouched by the weight of what he had carried. They didn’t know his name. They didn’t need him.

And for once, he found comfort in that.

Shinji turned his head and glanced down the aisle. There were only three other passengers scattered across the dim interior.

An older man, slouched in his seat near the back, cap pulled low over his face, snoring softly. His hands were still clasped around a small bag of groceries, knuckles wrinkled and worn from years of labor.

A young woman sat two rows ahead, her head leaned against the glass much like his own. A paperback novel rested open in her lap, though her eyelids had already slipped closed. The pages stirred faintly with each breath she took, the book forgotten in the peace of sleep.

Near the middle, a boy about his age—or maybe a year younger—sat with earbuds in, his head bobbing slightly to music only he could hear. He tapped the rhythm out against his thigh, lost in his own little world.

Shinji stared at them longer than he probably should have, drinking in their ordinariness, their humanity. None of them were looking at him. None of them knew he was the boy who saved the world. To them, he was just another passenger—just another sixteen-year-old with tired eyes and a worn bag on his lap.

It was nice.

So, so nice.

He turned back to the window, his reflection faint against the rolling landscape. The bus rocked, the steady vibration beneath him lulling his body into relaxation. His hand slipped from the SDAT, the player resting safely between his arm and the seat. His eyelids grew heavy, the scenery blurring further until it was little more than soft smears of moonlight and dark.

For the first time in years, Shinji Ikari let himself drift to sleep without fear of being called, without dread of alarms, without the suffocating knowledge that the world depended on him.

The night had been gentle. Too gentle.

Shinji stirred in his half-sleep as the bus hummed along the lonely road. His head lolled against the cool glass, lulled by the sway of the engine. Then, without warning—

The world jerked. The bus swerved hard, tires screaming against the pavement. Shinji shot upright, heart slamming into his throat. The headlights whipped wildly across the dark road, then—impact.

CRASH.

The entire vehicle tilted, metal groaning, glass shattering. Shinji’s shoulder slammed against the window as gravity flipped sideways. He heard someone scream—the driver? the kid with the earbuds?—before the whole bus bucked into the trees with a terrible howl of twisting steel.

Then stillness. Smoke. The sound of broken glass pinging softly as it settled.

Shinji coughed, lungs burning, every breath thin and ragged. His head spun, the smell of scorched rubber sharp in his nose. He dragged himself forward, crawling across the tilted aisle on trembling arms. Pain prickled across his skin, stinging cuts from glass, the bruises already swelling along his ribs and arms. Nothing fatal. Not compared to what he’d endured in Eva. Not even close.

“Mother...Misato… Asuka… Rei...” His voice cracked, useless. They weren’t here. He was alone. Again.

He pulled himself through the cracked window, stumbling out onto the dirt and grass, his palms raw. The cool night air hit him like a shock, and he doubled over, gasping, half-laughing. He was alive. Alive.

But what the hell just happened?

Shinji turned back, eyes darting. No other headlights, no other vehicle mangled against the bus. The road itself was empty, silent except for the hiss of the ruined engine. It was a dead stretch of highway, miles from anywhere.

He pressed his hands to his knees, trying to think. Come on, Shinji—think, think—!

And then it came.

A sound.

Low at first, then swelling. A howl. Long and guttural, like an owl’s call dragged deep through the throat of something too big, too wrong. It rolled through the woods behind him, vibrating in his chest, crawling under his skin.

Shinji froze. His breath puffed out in quick, shallow bursts.

No. No no no.

Every memory of late nights curled on the couch with Misato and Rei came crashing back—horror marathons where he’d sat stiff and terrified under the blankets while Misato laughed at the gore and Rei blinked placidly at the screen. Rule number one: you don’t check the noise. You don’t split off. You run.

His legs twitched, ready to bolt. He knew what to do. He knew every trope. This was the part where the dumb character crept into the woods, whispering, “Is anyone there?” before something tore them apart.

And yet.

Shinji’s heart pounded against his ribs, but something else prickled at the back of his skull—curiosity.

He’d fought Angels. He’d faced nightmares on a scale no human was meant to endure. He had been the one shoved into an Eva and told to fight for humanity. Compared to that, what was this? A bear? A wolf? A trick of his already fried nerves?

How bad could it be?

His lips twitched into a bitter, shaky smile. “Is this how white people die in horror movies?” he muttered, voice too loud in the emptiness. “Because they just… had to see for themselves?”

The woods loomed, dark and endless, the howl still echoing faintly through the trees.

Shinji took one hesitant step forward. Then another.

Fear and curiosity twisted tight inside him, impossible to tell apart.

The forest swallowed him whole.

Shinji’s sneakers crunched over the uneven ground, dirt loosening under his steps, grass bent and dragged flat in strange patterns. Branches creaked overhead, twisted into unnatural shapes that blocked out what little moonlight managed to bleed through. The deeper he went, the more wrong it felt—the air too still, too heavy, as if the whole forest was holding its breath.

He noticed the scars in the landscape almost immediately. Trees had been snapped like twigs, their splintered bodies leaning awkwardly against their neighbors. Others had toppled completely, roots jutting upward like skeletal claws. Dirt was scraped raw in long streaks, grooves carved deep into the earth as if something massive had dragged itself along the ground.

His pulse quickened. He slowed, each step cautious now, the silence pressing tighter around him.

And then—

There it was.

At first, he thought his eyes were tricking him. The thing stood in the clearing, its form shifting against the fractured trees, illuminated in faint, otherworldly light. His breath hitched hard, his body locking in place.

A beast. No… not a beast. An Angel.

Feathers blanketed its entire form, soft yet alien, each one gleaming faintly in the dark. Beneath the plumage, its body resembled a human infant grotesquely stretched—its torso too long, its neck elongated, its arms and legs thin and disproportionate.

Rows of eyes lined its neck, each one a bright, burning red, all blinking in uneven rhythm. Its face was hidden behind a mask that seemed fused to its skin, the pits where its eyes should have been nothing but endless darkness.

Tiny wings fluttered on either side of its head like twitching ears, but its main wings—god, they dwarfed its entire body. Enormous, unfurled, larger than life, each one shifting with the faintest rustle, catching the dim light like oil on water.

And circling it, hovering lazily as though gravity held no sway, were rings. Perfect, gleaming, ethereal. One floated above its head like a crown, others encircled its arms. When one brushed too close to a snapped branch, the wood hissed and burned away. Another slipped straight through a fallen tree trunk, leaving it untouched, phasing like the ring itself wasn’t bound to reality at all.

It was human, but not human. Birdlike, but not an animal. Angel, yet… something else entirely. Its head tilted, slow, deliberate, an owl’s mannerism trapped in a childlike frame.

Shinji’s breath came shallow, ragged, his heart hammering against his ribs. He should have been terrified. Every cell in his body screamed to run, to hide, to do something. He had faced Angels before—giants that tore cities apart, horrors that ripped flesh from steel. He knew what they were capable of.

But his feet wouldn’t move.

Instead, he stared.

Because it wasn’t just monstrous. It was… beautiful.

The sweep of its wings, the gleam of its rings, the way the forest seemed to bend around its presence—it pulled him in, rooted him where he stood. The rows of crimson eyes blinked in uneven rhythm, and instead of dread, Shinji felt his chest swell with something strange, something he couldn’t name.

Hypnotized.

He realized his mouth was slightly open, his fingers trembling at his sides as if they longed to reach out.

“How…” he whispered, breath fogging faintly in the air. “How can something so terrifying be… so beautiful?”

The Angel’s mask tilted, as if it had heard him.

As if it understood.

The creature shifted.

At first Shinji thought it might strike—its feathers flaring out, its massive wings twitching with sudden movement. His breath caught in his throat, body tensing for impact. But the Angel didn’t attack. Instead, it hunched lower, the motion deliberate, careful.

Its height was staggering—even curled inward, it loomed over him like a tower of bone and shadow, close to ten feet of raw, alien presence. Up close, its proportions were even stranger, the long neck bending with birdlike precision, the mask-locked face lowering until the abyss of its pits almost aligned with Shinji’s own wide eyes. The rings circling its body hummed faintly, shifting just out of reach, their glow scattering across the broken trees like fractured moonlight.

Shinji froze where he stood, his sneakers half-sunk in the churned earth. Yet when the Angel leaned closer, when rows of crimson eyes blinked down its elongated neck one after the other in an almost curious cascade, he didn’t feel hunted.

He felt… seen.

The great hands unfurled, fingers long and clawlike, but they moved slow, trembling, as though afraid to break him. A feathered knuckle brushed the dirt beside Shinji’s shoe, tentative, testing. The earth shifted under the touch, but Shinji remained untouched.

His chest constricted. He should’ve run. He knew he should’ve run. Every survival instinct screamed go. But something in him—something deep, buried, aching—told him to stay. To reach back.

His hand rose before he realized it, shaking as it hovered just above the creature’s feathers. He expected heat, a burn from the rings, some rejection. But the Angel stilled, almost holding its breath, the twitching of its tiny head-wings pausing in anticipation.

The connection didn’t quite happen—the space between them crackled with tension—but Shinji felt it. A warmth, faint and pulsing, radiating from the feathers to his skin. Tender. Patient.

His throat tightened.

Why… why does it feel like I’ve known you?

The thought wasn’t spoken aloud, but it sat heavy in his mind. A familiarity he couldn’t explain. Like a word on the tip of his tongue, a memory just out of reach.

He searched the creature’s mask, the abyssal pits, the endless eyes lining its neck. Something about them was wrong, alien. And yet—they stirred something old inside him.

Déjà vu.

“Have we…” Shinji’s whisper cracked. He swallowed hard, tears threatening at the corners of his eyes. “Have we met before?”

The Angel shifted again—not with violence, but with almost excitement. Its massive wings spread slightly, feathers rustling as if in answer. The rows of red eyes blinked rapidly in sequence, a rhythm like laughter without sound. Its mask tilted, nearly brushing Shinji’s hair, the rings pulsing faintly brighter for just a moment.

Shinji’s heart pounded painfully in his chest. His body trembled, but it wasn’t from fear. It was from recognition. From the terrifying, beautiful possibility that he wasn’t imagining it.

That maybe… just maybe… they had.

The forest was ruined around them—snapped trunks, dirt scraped raw, grass bent flat in sweeping arcs. But in that broken clearing, it didn’t feel dangerous anymore. Not with the Angel crouched low, massive frame folding into itself like it was trying to make itself small for him.

Shinji let his fingers hover again, closer this time. The creature’s feathers shifted like breath beneath his hand, soft, faintly warm. He brushed them lightly, just enough to feel. They weren’t coarse like a bird’s, not slick like an animal’s—closer to silk, delicate and impossibly clean.

The Angel shuddered at the touch. Not a violent movement, not the quiver of a predator, but something closer to delight. Its tiny winglets twitched on either side of its head, rows of crimson eyes blinking rapidly down its elongated neck as though trying to follow his hand.

Shinji’s lips parted in a soundless laugh. “You… like that?”

The mask tilted, the abyssal pits where eyes should have been fixing on him. Its massive arms shifted, hands lowering into the dirt palms-first, bracing itself, as though trying to steady its excitement. It leaned closer, nearly bowing, feathers brushing the ground like an offering.

Shinji swallowed hard, nerves buzzing, but the warmth in his chest drowned out the fear. Carefully, slowly, he pressed his palm flat to the creature’s feathers. The heat of it spread into his skin, into his bones, until his whole arm tingled.

The Angel quivered again. Its huge wings folded inward, wrapping slightly around Shinji in a half-curtain, like it was shielding him from the cold air. For something so massive, the gesture felt impossibly gentle.

Shinji’s heart clenched. He should have been terrified. But instead, his throat ached with something else entirely—relief. A connection he hadn’t felt in years, maybe ever.

“You’re…” He choked on the word, then tried again. “You’re not what they said you were.”

The Angel tilted its head at him again, slow, owl-like.

Shinji’s eyes blurred. He let his hand fall, but the Angel followed it down, pressing closer, lowering until its mask almost touched the dirt by his shoes. Its long arms folded inward now, like a child curling in on itself.

It was so tender. So trusting.

Shinji lowered himself too, knees sinking into the dirt, until he was face-to-mask with it. For a long moment, neither of them moved, just staring. His reflection warped faintly in the dark pits where its eyes should have been.

“Why do I feel like I know you?” Shinji whispered, voice trembling but earnest. “Like… we’ve met before... Like I’ve been waiting for you all this time...”

The Angel’s feathers rustled softly, its enormous frame trembling once more—not from fear, but from something like joy. Its wings curled tighter, wrapping him fully now, a cocoon of pale feathers and faintly glowing rings.

Shinji didn’t resist. For once, he let himself lean into it. The warmth of the feathers cradled him, the low hum of the Angel’s breath—or heartbeat, or something deeper—soothing the frantic edge of his thoughts.

For the first time since the war had ended, Shinji Ikari didn’t feel like a weapon. Didn’t feel like a symbol. Didn’t feel alone.

He felt… whole.

And as the Angel’s countless eyes blinked softly, in sync this time, Shinji smiled—a small, fragile smile, but real.

“…thank you.”

The Angel only trembled again, wings curling tighter, like it understood. Like it had been waiting for him too.

The night cracked open with noise.

At first it was faint—a shuffle, like boots dragging through undergrowth. Then came the unmistakable snap of branches, the heavy crunch of someone pushing through the ruined forest. A voice rang out, muffled but close enough to spike Shinji’s pulse.

“Hello?! Anyone out here?!”

Then beams of light cut through the trees, white and blinding against the darkness. Flashlights. Searchers.

Shinji flinched, heart hammering. But before he could react, the creature moved.

It scooped him up without hesitation, enormous hands folding around him like he was nothing more than a toy. Shinji barely had time to gasp before the world became a blur. The Angel surged forward, and the ground vanished beneath them. Wind tore at his hair and clothes, his ears filled with the roar of movement faster than his body could comprehend.

And then—silence.

Shinji blinked, breath ragged, realizing they were somewhere else entirely. The forest clearing was gone. The bus wreckage, the lights, the shouting—gone. They were in another part of the woods, darker, deeper, miles away from anyone else.

Only the Angel remained, hunched over him protectively, wings fanned wide like a shield.

Shinji’s chest heaved. He looked up, saw those endless pits for eyes, the glowing rings, the trembling feathers, and reality slammed into him.

This wasn’t some strange animal. This wasn’t some wandering beast. This was an Angel.

An Angel.

His stomach twisted violently. His hands clutched at the feathers holding him, trembling so hard he thought his teeth might rattle out of his skull.

“No… no, no, no, no!” His voice cracked, hoarse. “That’s impossible! There were sixteen! Sixteen! They’re gone—they’re all gone!”

The Angel only blinked, head tilting in that same slow, owl-like rhythm.

“Seventeenth?” Shinji whispered, his throat raw. His mind burned with the memory of Misato, late-night words she’d said when she thought he wasn’t listening. The delay of an Angel saved billions… He thought it was an expression, some twisted joke from NERV’s archives. But now—now it made horrible sense.

This was what she’d meant.

“There… there was another one?” Shinji’s voice rose into a near scream, panic bursting through him. “A seventeenth? All this time—?! Why didn’t they—why didn’t anyone—?!”

He thrashed in the Angel’s hold, twisting against its impossible strength. “LET ME GO!” His voice cracked, high and desperate, echoing through the silent forest. “Let me go, let me go!”

The Angel didn’t move. Its grip remained steady—not crushing, not violent, but firm, unyielding. Its feathers trembled, its rows of eyes blinking in uneven panic as though it understood his terror but couldn’t release him.

Shinji’s chest heaved as he screamed again, tears burning hot in his eyes. “I’m not supposed to—YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO EXIST!”

The Angel lowered its mask-like face closer, tilting, trembling, almost… pleading.

But Shinji could only see the truth: another Angel. Another enemy. Another nightmare come back to life, dragging him into a war he thought he’d finally escaped.

The Angel’s grip did not loosen.

Shinji kicked and shoved against the feathers holding him, his fists pounding at the creature’s chest. Every strike landed with the strength of desperation, each blow more frantic than the last. “LET ME GO!” he shouted again, voice breaking. His throat ached from screaming, his ribs burning from the bruises of the crash.

But the Angel didn’t retaliate. It didn’t even flinch.

Instead, it trembled. Its massive frame hunched tighter, shoulders quivering, wings curling around Shinji as though trying to shield him from a world he couldn’t see. The rows of crimson eyes blinked rapidly, chaotically, scrambling up and down its elongated neck like a broken signal. Its mask tilted lower, closer, the bottomless pits straining toward him in almost desperate mimicry of… pleading.

Pleading.

Shinji froze, fists suspended mid-swing. His breath came ragged, his chest heaving, but the sheer desperation radiating from the Angel tugged something deep inside him. He’d seen monsters rage. He’d seen them tear cities apart. This wasn’t that.

This was… begging.

The wings shifted, folding even tighter, feathers brushing lightly against Shinji’s arms as if the creature was afraid he’d vanish. A sound rumbled from deep in its chest—not the roar of a predator, but something low and broken, vibrating like a child’s sob.

Shinji’s eyes burned. His hands fell limp against the creature’s chest.

Anger rushed through him anyway, hot and sharp, because suddenly it all made sense. Or maybe it didn’t—but it felt like it did.

He hadn’t been purposeless all this time because the war was over. He hadn’t been empty because peace was too big for him. He’d been empty because he’d only been ninety-nine percent of the way there. His soul had been clawing for something it couldn’t name, and now here it was—feathers, rings, bottomless pits for eyes.

A Seventeenth.

His purpose hadn’t ended at sixteen.

“Was it you?” Shinji’s voice cracked, his fists clenching again—not to strike, but to shake against the feathers. “Is this why I felt like nothing? Like everything I did wasn’t enough? Because you were still out there—waiting?!”

The Angel’s head jerked, eyes blinking in uneven sequence, but it didn’t pull away. It only hunched lower, lowering its mask to almost brush against Shinji’s forehead. The rows of eyes blinked again, slow now, steady, like it was listening.

“I gave them everything,” Shinji hissed, tears spilling hot down his cheeks. “I bled, I screamed, I saved them. And still—still it wasn’t enough. Not for me. Not for anyone!” His voice broke into a sob, a bitter laugh tangled in it. “Was this it? My purpose wasn’t finished because you were still here?!”

The Angel trembled again, its wings quivering. It pressed closer, lowering its massive frame until Shinji’s body was enveloped in feathers, cocooned in impossible warmth.

And despite his fury, despite his grief, Shinji felt something else rise in his chest—something he couldn’t name. Not peace, not yet. But not emptiness either.

He was trembling, sobbing, his fists pounding weakly against the feathers as his voice cracked into the night.

“Answer me!”

But the Angel only held him tighter, as if the act of not letting go was its answer.

The Angel didn’t answer—couldn’t—but the way it held him changed. The crushing panic in Shinji’s chest met a wall of warmth and steadiness. Those huge hands shifted, not restraining so much as supporting, like someone lifting a kid out of a flood and refusing to drop him. Its wings curled tighter, feathers brushing his cheeks in shivery passes, and that odd, low hum in its chest settled into a steadier rhythm, almost like it was syncing to his breathing on purpose.

His fists slowed. The last punch landed against downy feathers and just… stayed there. He was panting hard, tears slicking his face, but the Angel’s pleading made it weirdly hard to keep screaming. Every tiny movement it made read as, Please don’t be mad. Please don’t leave. The rows of eyes along its neck blinked out of sync, then tried to line up, like a kid fixing a messy drawing to show it mattered.

“God,” Shinji rasped, fingers uncurling. “What are you?”

It lowered him. Carefully. Like he might break. His shoes found dirt. Its hands hovered inches away, palms open, waiting to catch him if his knees gave out. When he didn’t collapse, the Angel hunched even lower, bringing its mask level with his face. Those bottomless pits where eyes should be were so close he could see his own warped reflection in them.

He scrubbed at his cheeks with his sleeve and dragged a shaky breath in. Anger still fizzed under his skin—hot, directionless—but it had nowhere to go. He was alive. It hadn’t hurt him. It had moved him out of danger like he weighed nothing. Somewhere far back in the trees, voices and flashlights combed the wreck site, too distant to touch them here.

Shinji’s brain, still trying to find purchase, grabbed at the wrong thing. “There were only sixteen,” he muttered, half to himself. “I killed most of them- if not all of them!. I—” He broke off, tasting metal. “Why do you exist?”

The Angel’s head tilted—owl-like, curious. No threat in it. If anything, confusion.

Shinji blew out a breath and yanked his gaze away, because thinking about the count made his chest feel like it would split. His eyes fell to the churned dirt near his feet… and a familiar rectangle half-buried there.

He crouched and dug the object free. His SDAT.

He stared at it, blinking rain that wasn’t there out of his eyes. He’d dropped it in the crash. He hadn’t even realized. The casing was scuffed, a little dirt in the buttons, but intact.

When he looked up, the Angel had folded even smaller, tiny head-wings twitching, as if waiting for a reaction.

“You… got this?” Shinji asked, voice small.

The Angel didn’t nod—didn’t know how—but the rings around its arms pulsed once, a soft, bright flicker, and the rows of crimson eyes blinked down in a neat, proud cascade. Like, See? I did good.

His laugh came out strangled. “Yeah. You did.”

For a moment they just stood there, the ruined forest holding its breath around them. Shinji thumbed the SDAT’s dented corner, swallowed, and then—slowly—held his free hand out again. Not quite touching. Offering.

The Angel leaned in so carefully it was ridiculous for something that big. The mask stopped a hair from his palm. Shinji hesitated, then closed the distance, setting his hand against the smooth, weirdly warm surface. The rings gave a quiet, electric buzz that tingled along his skin. The feathers at the edges fluffed, almost like a cat pressing into a scratch.

“Sorry,” he whispered, surprising himself. “For yelling. I just—” He let his shoulders drop. “I don’t know who I am without all of that behind me. And if you’re… part of it… it makes me angry. And scared.” His mouth twisted. “Mostly scared.”

The Angel’s breath—if that was what it was—ghosted over his wrist, a feather-soft heat. Those many eyes blinked again, slower this time, syncing like a heartbeat finally finding rhythm. It understood at least one thing: he was upset. Be gentle.

Somewhere between panic and weird comfort, a stray thought bubbled up: the stories he’d read as a kid. Knights and trials. Names that stuck with him for reasons he couldn’t explain. The word slipped out before he could stop it.

“......Kaworu…” he murmured.

The Angel jolted, just a little. The rings flared bright enough to pop afterimages in his vision. Its winglets fluttered, frantic with… delight? Every eye along its neck blinked in a rapid circle, a pattern that felt like a rush of yes, yes, yes.

Shinji blinked back, heat creeping into his face. “Uh. That’s… not your name. I don’t know why I said—” He cut himself off because the Angel had dipped its head lower, almost bowing, the mask pressing gently into his palm like it was accepting a coronation.

“Huh-? wait- uh... Okay,” he said, breath hitching. “Kaworu- It’s… nice to meet you…”

It made that quiet, low sound again—no voice, just vibration—and eased in closer until his chest was brushing feathers. The huge wings lifted, then settled around him in a partial fold, not trapping so much as offering warmth.

He didn’t refuse it.

They stayed like that, cocooned under giant wings in the wrecked woods, while sirens ghosted faintly somewhere far away. The ridiculous part was how normal it started to feel. Shinji’s brain ran through the checklist of things he should be doing—calling for help, hiking back to the road, yelling at the universe—but his body decided to breathe instead. In. Out. In. Out. Matching that low hum without trying.

When the tremor in his hands finally ebbed, he pulled back a little. Kaworu’s wings loosened right away, careful as if any sudden move would shatter the moment. Shinji kept one hand in feathers and looked past the Angel’s shoulder at the mess of broken trees, the gouged dirt, the black ribbon of road just visible through gaps in the trunks.

“I should go,” he said, and his voice didn’t crack this time. “They’ll be looking. People might be hurt.”

Kaworu’s rings dimmed to a soft glow. The eyes blinked in a pattern he didn’t know the meaning of yet, but it felt like worry.

“I’ll be okay.” He tried to smile. It felt wobbly and real. “I’ve done worse hikes.”

The Angel shifted, then, with the hesitant energy of a kid who wants to help but doesn’t know how. It reached one long arm into its own wings, plucked up something with two fingers, and offered it like a treasure.

A large feather. The corner charred, but legible. He barked out a tiny laugh. “Proof I didn’t dream this?”

Kaworu held very still until Shinji took it, claws retracting enough that they didn’t scratch skin. Then, with visible effort, the Angel pulled back another step, making space, wings unfurling but not fanning—the giant equivalent of I’ll let you pass first.

Shinji tucked the feather into his pocket and, on impulse, took off his scarf. It was cheap, knit in a fuzzy navy that Misato had shoved at him last winter with a gentle motherly smile that didn’t quite suit her yet. He looped it once around his own neck, then reached up and looped it once (awkwardly) around Kaworu’s. It looked ridiculous—too small, obviously—but the Angel went motionless like he’d received a medal.

“For… when it’s cold,” Shinji said, ears burning even though it wasn’t that clever. “So you’d remember… Me too...”

Every eye along Kaworu’s neck closed, then opened again in a wave that rolled downward and back up, like the biggest, strangest, most grateful blink in history. The rings hummed, warm and light against Shinji’s knuckles.

He stepped back. The forest felt less like a nightmare and more like a secret now. He realized he was smiling, not because anything had been fixed, not because he’d figured out who he was—but because, for one weird, impossible hour, he hadn’t felt alone.

“Can I… see you again?” he asked. “Tomorrow? Here?”

Kaworu’s head-tilt was immediate. The winglets fluttered; the rings gave that pleased little flare. He didn’t nod. He didn’t need to.

“Okay.” Shinji wiped his face with the edge of his sleeve, squared his shoulders toward the glimpse of road through the trees, and took a step. Then another. He glanced back once more.

The Angel had lowered back into that protective hunch, scarf comically small, wings half-spread to hide him from the line of sight of the highway. Those infinite pits watched him go. Not a hunter’s stare. Not a god’s. Just… a boy’s, trying not to mess up the first good thing he’d ever been handed.

Shinji pushed through the last tangle of brush and found the ditch running beside the asphalt. A rescue truck rumbled by a hundred meters ahead, lights sweeping over toppled saplings. He raised an arm, yelled until his throat hurt, and a paramedic’s flashlight snapped his way.

“You there! Are you hurt?”

“I’m okay!” Shinji called back, the lie halfway true. “There are others back by the bus!”

Hands guided him up. Questions flew. Someone draped a blanket over his shoulders and tried to steer him toward a stretcher. He let them, head buzzing, heart loud. The world shoved itself back in, messy and human, and he let it, because that was what you did.

But as they checked his pupils and dabbed at the cuts on his forearms, Shinji’s fingers found the enlarged feather in his jacket. He rubbed the silky feather between his fingertips, grounding himself in its scratchy edge. In his other pocket, the SDAT sat solid and familiar.

He glanced over his shoulder one last time. The tree line looked like any other—shadows and branches and nothing at all. He couldn’t see the ruin, or the rings, or the scarf looped around a neck higher than any human should reach.

Still, he felt watched. Not in a bad way. In the someone’s glad you’re okay way.

Ninety-nine percent had hurt like hell. Maybe this was the missing one.

“Tomorrow,” he whispered to himself, so quiet the medic didn’t hear. “Same place.”

The night didn’t answer. It didn’t have to. He already knew.

Chapter Text

The smell of burnt toast and stale beer clung to the air like smoke.

Misato’s voice rattled the walls, sharp and raw. “What the hell were you THINKING, Shinji?!” She slammed a mug down on the table harder than she meant to, spilling coffee across her hand. She hissed at the sting, clutching her temples with the other hand. Her head throbbed with every syllable she spoke, the punishment for last night’s bottles catching up fast.

Her body ached like it always did after drinking too much—bones heavy, stomach sour, the kind of pain that made standing feel like a battle. But even through the fog, the words kept pouring out.

“You vanish in the middle of the night—no note, no message, NOTHING—and I get a call from emergency services saying you were on a bus that nearly killed you!” Her voice cracked into a growl. “Do you know what it’s like to pick up the phone at three a.m. and hear your name next to ‘accident’?! I thought—I thought—” She broke off, pressing her fingers to her forehead, fighting back the spinning in her skull.

Across the table, Asuka sat stiffly with a bowl of cereal, spoon clinking against the rim. She wasn’t touching it much, just stirring. Her eyes flicked between Misato and Shinji, her mouth set in a line. She looked like she wanted to say something but decided against it, shrinking a little into her chair, trying to disappear into her own business.

Shinji, though… Shinji was different.

He sat there, shoulders hunched like usual, but there was something off in his expression. Not guilt. Not the old slump of shame Misato had grown used to hammering against. He looked almost… pleased. Too pleased. His lips tugged upward, faint but there, and his eyes kept drifting toward the window where sunlight bled through the blinds.

“Shinji,” Misato snapped, dragging his name across her tongue like a whip. “You don’t look sorry at all. You think this is funny? You think running off in the middle of the night, scaring me half to death, is some kind of game?”

He blinked at her, startled by the heat in her tone, then ducked his head. “I’m fine,” he mumbled, too quiet for the fury in her veins. “Nothing happened.”

“NOTHING—?” Misato’s voice cracked, and she slammed both hands on the table. The vibration rattled Asuka’s bowl. “You could’ve died! Again! Do you get that, Shinji? After everything we’ve been through, after everything I’ve done to keep you alive, you still—” Her words broke, breath heaving, and she collapsed back into her chair, clutching at her pounding head.

Silence filled the kitchen.

Asuka stirred her cereal again, awkwardly, her eyes sliding toward Shinji’s faint smile. She frowned but said nothing, shoveling one spoonful into her mouth as if chewing loudly enough could make the tension go away.

Shinji, though… Shinji’s thoughts weren’t in the room. They weren’t in Misato’s pounding voice or Asuka’s uncomfortable silence. They were still in the forest, in the feathers and warmth, in the thousand red eyes that had blinked just for him.

Kaworu.

The name hummed in his chest like a secret melody. The memory of that massive frame curling low to shield him, the way those impossible rings pulsed when he whispered the name—it tugged a smile out of him despite everything.

He’d see him again. Tonight, maybe.

He couldn’t wait.

Misato dragged a hand down her face, groaning, half in pain, half in defeat. “You’re going to be the death of me, kid.” She reached for her mug, swallowed coffee like it might patch the hole inside her chest.

Shinji barely heard her. His eyes drifted back toward the window, sunlight glinting, the day already too slow.

The scrape of Misato’s chair legs against the tile broke the silence. She pushed herself up with a groan, one hand still pressed to her forehead, the other clutching her half-empty mug. Her hair was a mess, dark strands falling into her face, and she didn’t bother fixing it.

“I can’t do this right now,” she muttered, voice rough. “I need to shower, clear my head before I puke on both of you.” She pointed weakly toward Shinji. “Don’t. Move. From. This. Apartment. Got it?”

Shinji didn’t answer—just gave a small nod without looking at her. Misato exhaled through her teeth, shuffled toward the hall, and disappeared into the bathroom. The sound of running water followed a moment later.

The kitchen fell quiet again, only the faint crunch of cereal breaking through.

Then Asuka’s spoon clinked down into her bowl. She leaned over, sharp as ever, and pinched Shinji’s arm hard.

He yelped, jerking back. “Ow! What was that for?!”

“For being an idiot, obviously,” Asuka snapped, glaring at him. “Sneaking out in the middle of the night? Do you have a death wish or are you just naturally brainless?”

Shinji rubbed his arm, scowling faintly. “I said I was fine…”

“Fine?” Asuka’s voice pitched higher. “You almost got yourself killed, stupid! What would’ve happened if Misato hadn’t gotten that call? We’d just find your body on the morning news?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it. Words caught in his throat.

Asuka groaned and leaned back, crossing her arms. “Unbelievable. You’re supposed to be smarter than this, but no—you’re just the same dumb Shinji, spacing out while the rest of us clean up after you.”

Her glare softened, just a little, when she saw his far-off look. He wasn’t even listening anymore. His eyes weren’t here—they were miles away, staring through the window like the glass opened into another world.

Asuka clicked her tongue. “Hey. I’m talking to you.”

Shinji didn’t flinch. Didn’t even blink.

He was somewhere else entirely—back in the woods, feathers brushing against his cheek, warmth pressed around him, eyes blinking in uneven rhythm as if they belonged to something that shouldn’t exist but did. Kaworu. His secret.

A new friend.

And an Angel.

The contradiction chewed at him. What was he supposed to do with that? Hide it until someone inevitably discovered it? Keep sneaking out, visiting under the cover of night until Misato—or worse, NERV—caught him? Or should he kill it now, before it became something worse? Before it became exactly what it was always meant to be: humanity’s enemy.

His stomach twisted. He couldn’t imagine raising a hand against it. Not after the way it had trembled, the way it had pressed close like it was scared to be left alone. Not after it had looked at him like… like it had always been waiting.

“Idiot,” Asuka muttered again, glaring down at her soggy cereal as if it had personally wronged her.

Shinji’s lips curved into the faintest smile, barely there.

He didn’t answer her. He just kept staring out the window, lost in daydreams and secrets, unsure of what he was supposed to do next. But deep down, he already knew: tonight, when the world went quiet again, he’d go back.

Back to Kaworu.

_______

The school day dragged like molasses, but to Shinji it may as well have been a blur.

He sat at his desk, pencil in hand, but most of his notes were just meaningless scratches, words and numbers that his brain didn’t bother catching. He kept staring out the window instead, watching the sunlight creep across the yard, marking time by the shifting angle of the shadows.

Teachers droned. Pages turned. Chalk scraped against blackboards. None of it stuck.

Every so often, someone nudged him—Kensuke whispering something about new gear he wanted to show off after class, a girl from the back row asking if she could borrow a pencil, even Toji tossing a balled-up scrap of paper onto his desk. Shinji barely blinked at them, offering short, vague replies, and then went right back to staring into space.

At lunch, Asuka jabbed him in the side with her chopsticks. “What’s with you today? You’ve got that dumb puppy look again. You in love or something?”

Shinji jolted, nearly dropping his food. His face flushed, but he shook his head quickly. “N-no! Nothing like that!”

Asuka rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Just don’t come crying to me when you trip over your own feet.” She went back to her meal, muttering about idiots under her breath.

Rei glanced at him once across the cafeteria. Her gaze lingered, unreadable as always, but she said nothing.

Shinji let out a small breath of relief and went back to poking at his tray, his mind already drifting again.

He couldn’t help it. Every time his thoughts wandered, they went back to the forest, to the warmth of feathers, to rows of crimson eyes blinking like they were trying to match his heartbeat. To that low, humming sound that had filled the air when he whispered the name Kaworu.

It wasn’t fear that clung to him. It was anticipation.

By the final bell, his legs were restless, his hands twitching with the urge to move faster. He packed his things in silence, ignoring the chatter around him, and slipped out into the sunlit streets of Tokyo-3.

He didn’t care if Asuka trailed after him with questions, or if Misato noticed him spacing out again at dinner. The thought of the evening ahead—the chance to see Kaworu again—was enough to carry him through the hours with a lightness he hadn’t felt in years.

Shinji Ikari, the boy who once dreaded tomorrow, was finally excited for something.

And that was that.

The walk home passed in a haze.

Shinji moved through the familiar streets of Tokyo-3 like he was drifting in a dream. Normally, he’d shuffle along with his bag slung loosely over one shoulder, staring at the cracks in the sidewalk or the shoes of the people passing by. Today, though, his head stayed high. The city’s late-afternoon hum surrounded him—bikes rattling over crosswalks, the chatter of students freed from school, the rumble of a train sliding into the distance—but none of it really touched him.

All he could feel was the pull of nightfall. The waiting. The promise of returning to the woods.

When he reached the apartment, Misato was already sprawled on the couch with a can cracked open, sunglasses perched on her nose like she was shielding herself from both the light and responsibility. She waved vaguely at him without looking up from the TV.

“Homework first, Shinji. And no more late-night adventures or I’ll chain you to the couch.” Her voice was scratchy, half-sarcastic, half-serious.

“Right,” he murmured, slipping past her before she could notice the strange tightness in his smile.

Asuka was in her room, blasting music Shinji could faintly hear through the door. Her singing was off-key but confident. He almost smiled at the sound before shutting himself away in his own room.

He dropped his bag by the bed and sat at his desk, opening a notebook. His pencil hovered above the page for all of ten seconds before he gave up and pressed his chin into his palm. Equations and kanji blurred into nothing. He doodled a circle instead—then another, smaller inside it. The shape of a ring.

He snapped the notebook closed and leaned back with a sigh. His foot tapped against the floor, restless.

Dinner came and went—instant curry with Misato yawning through the meal and Asuka berating him for eating so slowly. Shinji nodded where he had to, but the minutes bled together, each one stretching unbearably.

Finally, the sun dropped low. The sky bruised purple, then deepened into black. Misato retired to her room, muttering about an early morning briefing. Asuka disappeared into hers, shutting the door with a slam.

Shinji waited until the apartment was quiet. His heart thudded so loud in his chest he worried it might give him away. He grabbed his jacket, slipped his SDAT into his pocket, and crept out the door with the same careful steps as the night before.

The streets were emptier this time, washed in the dull glow of streetlamps. The walk to the edge of town stretched long and silent, his breath visible in the cooling air. Each step brought back the memory of the forest’s stillness, the press of feathers, the way the Angel—Kaworu—had folded itself down as though trying to meet him halfway.

Excitement tingled through him, sharp and nervous. A secret thrumming in his chest.

By the time he reached the tree line, the world was hushed. The red lake shimmered faintly in the distance. He tightened his grip on his jacket collar and stepped into the woods, the shadows closing around him like familiar arms.

His pace quickened.

“Kaworu…” he whispered, as though the name itself might summon him.

The trees opened into a familiar clearing. The wreckage from last night was faintly visible even here—splintered trunks, dragged soil, branches bent low like they had been brushed aside by something impossibly large. Shinji slowed, heart pounding against his ribs, and then he felt it.

That presence.

The same warmth that had coiled around him before, invisible but undeniable, like standing close to a fire and knowing the heat belonged to something alive. His chest tightened, and then the air shifted.

Kaworu emerged from the dark between the trees, wings folded close, feathers rustling in the stillness. Even hunched over, his form dwarfed the clearing, elongated limbs bending at odd but graceful angles. Rows of crimson eyes blinked down his neck, catching the faint moonlight, and the rings floating around his arms gave off a low, quiet hum.

Shinji froze for half a heartbeat. He had thought last night was some trick of exhaustion, some dream his body had made up after too much panic and too little oxygen. But here Kaworu was, impossibly real.

“Kaworu,” Shinji said again, louder this time, and he surprised himself with the steadiness of his voice.

The Angel reacted instantly. His huge frame shivered with what looked almost like excitement. The tiny winglets on either side of his head fluttered rapidly, like a bird startled into joy. The enormous wings shifted, spreading just slightly before curling back in again, as though he was remembering to be careful.

He lowered himself, bending that long neck until the mask-like face was level with Shinji’s. The bottomless pits where his eyes should have been reflected the boy’s pale face, warped but clear, and Shinji felt his throat tighten.

Without thinking, he reached out a hand.

Kaworu leaned into it.

The feathers under Shinji’s palm were softer than anything he had ever touched, silken yet warm, each one vibrating faintly with life. The Angel shivered again, a low rumble rising from his chest—a sound that wasn’t words but carried all the meaning Shinji needed. Gratitude. Relief. Affection.

“You remembered,” Shinji whispered, smiling despite himself. “You waited.”

Kaworu’s wings quivered, curling forward like a half-hug, cautious, tentative. Shinji stepped closer until the feathers brushed his shoulders, surrounding him in warmth. He didn’t flinch. Instead, he let himself sink into it, resting his forehead against the Angel’s chest.

For a long while, they simply stayed like that. Shinji breathing slow and steady, Kaworu vibrating faintly with that low, wordless hum. The forest was silent, the world outside forgotten.

Shinji’s hand trailed along the feathers, tracing patterns as if memorizing them. “I don’t know what to do with you,” he admitted softly, his voice muffled against Kaworu’s chest. “You’re supposed to be my enemy. You’re supposed to be… dead. But you’re here, and you’re—” His throat tightened. “—you’re the first thing that’s made me feel like I’m not completely alone.”

Kaworu responded by lowering his head further, pressing the mask gently against Shinji’s hair. The rows of red eyes blinked in a slow, steady cascade, like a heartbeat made visible.

Shinji closed his eyes, letting the warmth sink into him.

After a while, he pulled back, just enough to look up. “Do you… like music?” He pulled the SDAT out of his pocket, the tape deck dented and scuffed from last night but still intact. He held it up for the Angel to see, the faint glow of the rings casting reflections on its surface.

Kaworu tilted his head, the winglets twitching. He didn’t understand, not fully, but he leaned closer, curious.

Shinji fumbled with the buttons until the quiet hum of track 25 began to play. He held one of the earbuds out toward Kaworu, hesitating. “…Here. Try.”

It was ridiculous. Of course Kaworu couldn’t fit an earbud. But the Angel leaned in anyway, pressing one of the tiny winglets close. Shinji slipped the bud against it, and to his amazement, Kaworu stilled. Every one of his eyes blinked in rapid rhythm, then slowed, syncing with the steady, simple notes.

Shinji smiled, tears pricking at his eyes again. “You like it.”

The hum from Kaworu’s chest deepened, soft and steady, resonating with the music. It was clumsy, imperfect, but it was harmony.

They sat together in the clearing, Shinji curled against feathers, Kaworu bowed low to meet him, listening to music from a broken SDAT player like it was something holy.

Shinji talked, halting at first, then faster. About school. About Misato’s yelling, about Asuka’s jabs. About how empty it all felt, how he couldn’t stand the cameras, how the praise from strangers felt like paper covering a hole. Kaworu didn’t answer with words—he couldn’t—but his wings shifted whenever Shinji’s voice cracked, brushing against his shoulders in quiet reassurance. His eyes blinked slow and steady, an unspoken I’m listening.

The hours slipped by unnoticed. Moonlight filtered through the broken canopy, casting silver across the Angel’s feathers. Shinji’s head grew heavy, his words softer. He rested against Kaworu’s chest again, listening to the hum and the music blending together until it was impossible to tell which was which.

He smiled faintly, eyes half-lidded. “You’re… my secret,” he murmured. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but… I want to see you again. Always.”

Kaworu’s wings folded around him fully now, a cocoon of warmth and light, careful not to trap but to cradle. His many eyes blinked in perfect unison, a silent promise.

For the first time in years, Shinji drifted into sleep not with dread, not with the weight of the world on his shoulders, but with the simple comfort of being held.

When dawn broke, the forest shimmered with light. Birds stirred in the branches, leaves trembled with morning wind. But in the clearing, surrounded by feathers and warmth, Shinji felt safe.

It was ridiculous. Impossible. Dangerous.

And yet, it was the happiest he’d been since the war ended.

He didn’t know what the future would bring. He didn’t know how long he could keep this hidden. But for now, for this one fragile morning, Shinji allowed himself to believe in the impossible: that an Angel could be his friend.

And that maybe—just maybe—he wasn’t meant to be alone.

______

The nights blurred together.

Every evening after Misato disappeared into her room with another can of beer and Asuka lost herself in whatever show she was obsessed with, Shinji slipped quietly out the door. Jacket, SDAT in his pocket, careful steps down the stairwell. The streets at night were hushed, familiar, his heart thumping with anticipation the closer he drew to the tree line.

And there, always waiting, was Kaworu.

The Angel hunched low in the clearing, eyes blinking eagerly when Shinji appeared, wings shifting with excitement like a bird greeting dawn. Shinji would sink into those feathers, music whispering between them, his voice spilling stories and secrets he couldn’t tell anyone else. Sometimes he laughed, sometimes he cried, sometimes he just sat in silence while Kaworu’s warmth wrapped around him.

By the time he trudged home, the sky was paling.

Breakfasts became clumsy, Shinji blinking blearily at his plate, yawning into his miso soup. He dropped chopsticks more than once, apologized softly, and picked them up again. Misato tried not to snap at him—she saw the dark smudges under his eyes, the sluggish way he chewed. Asuka, on the other hand, smirked knowingly every time he nodded off at the table.

School was worse. He’d doze through half his classes, chin propped in his hand, pencil slipping from his fingers. Teachers scolded, classmates whispered, but Shinji barely noticed. Every bell was just a countdown to nightfall.

Dinner became an afterthought. Misato would sigh when his seat was empty again, reheating curry or stirring instant noodles for two instead of three. She asked questions when he was home, casual at first.

“You’re going out a lot lately, Shinji. Where do you go?”
“Just walking.”
“At midnight? Every night?”
“…It helps me think.”

His answers were vague, his smile too thin. Misato let them slide, but her gut twisted. She’d seen Shinji like this before—withdrawn, hiding—but now there was something else in him too. Something lighter. Something secret.

One night, when Shinji’s door shut quietly behind him and the faint echo of his footsteps vanished down the stairs, Misato turned to Asuka, who was sprawled on the couch with her arms crossed.

“Asuka,” she started, hesitating. “Has Shinji… said anything to you?”

Asuka raised an eyebrow. “About what?”

“You know.” Misato rubbed the back of her neck, suddenly awkward. “The sneaking out. The spacey look on his face all day. It’s like he’s… hiding something. Or someone.”

Asuka blinked, then barked out a laugh. “You think dull-boy has a secret lover?”

Misato flushed but didn’t back down. “It would explain a lot. The late nights, the way he skips dinner, the dreamy looks. I mean, he’s sixteen. It’s not impossible.”

Asuka snorted, shaking her head. “Unbelievable. You think anyone would fall for him? He can’t even talk to a cashier without stuttering.”

But as the words left her mouth, she frowned. Because she had noticed, too. Shinji’s odd little smiles, the way he brushed off her teasing, how his eyes seemed fixed on something far beyond the walls of their home.

Asuka huffed, grabbing the remote. “Whatever. If he’s sneaking off to see someone, good for him. Maybe they’ll knock some spine into him.”

Misato sighed, sinking deeper into the couch. “I just wish he’d tell me. Tell someone.”

In the silence that followed, Asuka glanced toward the window where the city lights flickered. Shinji was out there, somewhere, tangled up in secrets. Whether it was a girl, a boy, or something else entirely, she couldn’t say.

But Shinji—slipping through the trees, greeted by feathers and rings and a hundred blinking eyes—didn’t care what they thought. Night after night, he returned to Kaworu, the one place where he felt whole.

__________

Misato slumped into her chair, the leather sighing under the weight of another sleepless night. Her office was clean enough to pass inspection, but dull in the way only a commander’s room could be—gray walls, too many files stacked on her desk, and a single cold cup of coffee that had long since gone bitter. She rubbed at her temple, staring at nothing.

She was Commander Katsuragi now. The most powerful woman in the world, technically. Gendo Ikari had vanished into the shadows, SEELE had been crushed under her heel, and NERV stood tall because she’d made it happen. The coup had been bloody and fast, Shinji and Asuka holding the front while she pulled the strings behind the curtain. Ritsuko’s brilliance, Kaji’s sacrifice, her own ruthless gamble—it had all led to this chair. This victory. This new world.

But the paranoia never left.

The door hissed open, and Ritsuko walked in, crisp as ever, a file tucked under one arm. “I’ve finalized the arrangements for the U.S. trip. The technical directors are expecting you—” She stopped, eyes narrowing as she took in Misato’s slouched posture. “What’s wrong now?”

“Oh, don’t even start,” Misato groaned, throwing her head back. “It’s Shinji. It’s always Shinji. That kid is driving me insane!”

Ritsuko set the file down carefully, already bracing herself.

“I mean, he sneaks out every damn night! Every night!” Misato’s voice rose, hands gesturing wildly. “I get these emergency calls saying he was caught in some bus accident or wandering the city like a stray cat, and then he comes home all bright-eyed like nothing happened. He skips meals, he sleeps through school, he’s grinning at nothing like he’s got some giant secret! What the hell am I supposed to do with that?!”

“Misato—”

“No, listen to me!” Misato jabbed a finger at the desk for emphasis. “I’m the Commander of NERV. I’ve stared down Angels, I’ve faced off with SEELE, I orchestrated a goddamn coup! And yet, the one thing I can’t handle is my sixteen-year-old son acting like he’s in some—some stupid teenage drama! I ask him what he’s doing, he says, ‘just walking.’ Walking? At midnight? Every night? What is he, some kind of marathon monk?!”

Ritsuko exhaled through her nose, muttering, “So you think he’s seeing someone.”

“Exactly!” Misato slammed her palm against the desk. “He’s got that look—you know the look! He’s dazed, he’s distracted, he’s doodling in his notebooks. It’s either a secret lover or he’s joined a cult, and honestly, at this point I don’t know which one scares me more! And Asuka—don’t get me started on Asuka! She just smirks and calls him an idiot like that explains everything. What if he’s out there meeting some girl? Or some boy? Or worse—what if he’s doing both and lying to me about it?!”

Ritsuko pinched the bridge of her nose. “Misato—”

“And I can’t even yell at him the way I want to because then I look like the terrible parent, the nagging drunk who can’t let her kid live! I’ve adopted these two, Ritsuko, I’m supposed to be their guardian, their rock, their safe place. And what do I get? Silence. Smiles at the window. Skipping dinner for who-knows-what in the middle of the night!” She slumped forward, banging her forehead against the desk with a dull thunk. “Kaji, this wasn’t supposed to be my life…”

Ritsuko crossed her arms, expression caught somewhere between sympathy and exasperation.

“I’m telling you, Ritsu,” Misato groaned into the desk. “I toppled SEELE, I killed those old bastards, I saved humanity. And now I’m losing a war to a teenager sneaking out past curfew. It’s pathetic!”

Her voice cracked, somewhere between laughter and despair, as she sat up again, hair mussed, eyes bloodshot.

“And worst of all?” she whispered. “I think he’s happy about it.”

Ritsuko arched an eyebrow, the faintest smirk tugging at her lips as Misato flailed her arms in frustration. “You know,” she drawled, “all this sneaking out, keeping secrets, spacing out at school… it’s reminding me of someone else I used to know.”

Misato blinked at her, mid-rant. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Oh, come on,” Ritsuko said, folding her arms, her smirk sharpening. “Sixteen-year-old Misato Katsuragi? Ringing any bells? Sneaking out of her father’s compound in the middle of the night, slipping into bars with a fake ID, skipping school because she was hungover, running off with boys on motorcycles—”

“Hey! That was different!” Misato shot up in her chair, pointing at her like she’d been stabbed. “That was— that was me coping! The world was a mess, and I was— I was—” She faltered, flushing as Ritsuko’s smirk deepened. “Okay, fine, I might’ve had a phase, but that’s not the point!”

Ritsuko leaned against the desk, utterly unbothered. “No, the point is you see Shinji sneaking out and immediately assume he’s repeating your greatest hits. Lovers in the night, big secrets, drama. Sounds a lot like self-projection to me.”

Misato groaned, dragging both hands down her face. “God, don’t say it like that. I’m supposed to be the adult here. The Commander of NERV. And yet—yet all I can think about is Shinji pulling the exact same crap I used to and ending up in just as much trouble.”

Ritsuko tilted her head, feigning innocence. “And you’d know trouble best.”

“Ritsu!” Misato barked, half a laugh, half an indignant cry.

Ritsuko just chuckled softly, gathering up her file again. “Relax. He’s a teenager, Misato. If he’s sneaking out, odds are he’s not plotting the end of the world. You of all people should know it’s probably just hormones and bad decisions.”

Misato slumped back into her chair, glaring at the ceiling. “God help me if that’s true.”

“Or,” Ritsuko added with a sly glance, “maybe God help Shinji—if he’s anything like you.”

Misato groaned again, but her lips twitched like she was fighting a smile. “Don’t remind me.”

Ritsuko softened, letting the teasing edge slip from her voice. She set the file aside and leaned against Misato’s desk, arms folded but gaze steady. “Hey,” she said, more gently this time. “You’re not a bad parent for worrying. You’ve been through hell, and you don’t want Shinji to walk into it blind. That’s not paranoia, that’s instinct.”

Misato exhaled through her nose, slumping further into her chair. “My gut’s been screaming at me for days now, Ritsu. Every time he leaves, every time he spaces out at the table, it’s the same feeling I got before an Angel hit. The same feeling before SEELE pulled something shady. And when my gut screams? I’m always right.”

Ritsuko tilted her head, studying her. “If it bothers you that much, I could… look into it. Quietly. He doesn’t have to know. A few taps into the surveillance grid, maybe assign someone to tail him—”

“Absolutely not!” Misato shot upright so fast her chair squeaked against the floor. “No way. Not happening.”

Ritsuko blinked at her, surprised by the sharpness.

“I am not spying on Shinji,” Misato said, voice firm, her eyes blazing with something that was half fury, half fierce protectiveness. “I’m not turning into Gendo. I won’t—I won’t put trackers on him, or bug his room, or dig through his private life like he’s some lab rat. I refuse to even entertain the idea.”

Ritsuko lifted her hands in surrender. “Alright, alright. No spying. I was just offering.”

Misato sagged back into her chair, pressing her fingers against her temples. “I don’t need cameras to tell me something’s wrong. I know. He’s hiding something, and it’s not just some secret crush or dumb teenage stunt. This is bigger. I can feel it. And if my gut’s right…” She trailed off, staring at the ceiling like it might answer her. “…then it’s trouble.”

Ritsuko watched her for a long moment, then said quietly, “And when has your gut ever been wrong?”

Misato let out a bitter laugh, running a hand through her tangled hair. “Exactly.”

The room went quiet again, save for the faint hum of the overhead lights. Misato closed her eyes, the weight of both Commander and guardian heavy on her shoulders, and prayed she wasn’t about to find out just how right she really was.

The silence in the office stretched, broken only by the faint whir of the air vent and the muffled footsteps of staff moving down the hall outside. Misato leaned back in her chair, arms crossed tightly over her chest, as if she could physically hold back the storm in her gut.

Ritsuko didn’t move at first. She simply stood at the desk, watching Misato with that sharp, analytical stare she always wore—half scientist, half friend. Finally, she sighed and pulled one of the guest chairs closer, sitting down across from her.

“You know,” Ritsuko said, voice softer now, “for someone who toppled SEELE and runs the most powerful paramilitary organization in the world, you’re awfully rattled by one teenager sneaking out.”

Misato laughed bitterly, rubbing her eyes. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? I can stare down an Angel, outmaneuver corrupt old men playing god, pull the trigger on people who needed to be put down… but Shinji?” She shook her head, hair falling into her face. “He scares me more than any of them, because I can’t control him. I can’t predict him. And if he screws up, I can’t just… fix it.”

Ritsuko leaned back, thoughtful. “You’re not supposed to control him. He’s your Son, not your soldier.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Misato snapped, then winced, guilt flashing across her face. She let her hands fall limp onto the desk. “God, listen to me. I sound like my father. I don’t want to be that. But Shinji’s all I’ve got left of Kaji. And Asuka, too. If I lose them, then what the hell was all of this for?”

Her voice cracked on the last words, and she swiveled her chair around, staring at the wide, blank wall where her reflection dimly shone.

Ritsuko’s lips pressed into a line, but she didn’t argue. Instead, she said, “Then what will you do? If you won’t spy, and you won’t confront him directly, how do you plan on keeping him safe?”

Misato drummed her fingers against the desk, restless. “I’ll wait. Watch. Shinji slips, always has. When he’s scared, when he’s hiding something, he leaves breadcrumbs without even realizing. And when he does…” She clenched her jaw. “I’ll be there to stop it before it explodes in our faces.”

Ritsuko gave a small, humorless chuckle. “That’s not a plan. That’s a prayer.”

“Maybe so.” Misato grabbed her cold coffee, grimacing as she forced down a swallow anyway. “But it’s all I’ve got. And like I said—when my gut screams trouble, I’m right.”

Ritsuko studied her a moment longer, then leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “Then let me give you this: when the time comes, when Shinji’s secret finally crawls out into the light, you’d better be ready to choose. Commander Katsuragi… or Shinji’s mother. Because you won’t get to be both.”

Misato’s breath hitched. The words sliced sharper than Ritsuko probably meant them to, because she knew they were true. She had been balancing those two titles, Commander and guardian, for two years now. And she was already failing at one.

Her gaze dropped to the photo on her desk—a rare candid shot of her with Asuka and Shinji, both awkwardly squinting at the camera while Misato grinned like a fool between them. She reached out and touched the glass, her chest tight.

“I just hope,” Misato whispered, almost to herself, “when it comes down to it… I’ll make the right choice.”

The weight of her words hung heavy, and for once, Ritsuko didn’t have a sharp reply. She only sat back in her chair, quiet, letting the truth settle between them like smoke.

__________

The clearing was quiet except for the cicadas and the faint rustle of Kaworu’s feathers. Shinji sat cross-legged in the grass, his notebook already open on his lap, pencil tapping nervously against the paper. He had so many questions, his head felt like it was going to burst if he didn’t start letting them out.

“Okay, okay,” Shinji muttered, more to himself than to Kaworu. He glanced up at the Angel, still towering and hunched in that strange, owl-like way, rows of eyes blinking down his neck. “But you’ll… you’ll answer me honestly, right? Just… yes or no. That’s all.”

Kaworu tilted his head, feathers rippling faintly, then gave the slightest dip of his mask—an unmistakable nod.

Shinji exhaled, clutching his pencil tighter. “Were you… in cahoots with the other Angels? The ones we fought?”

A firm shake of the head. No.

“Then… did you know about them? Talk to them, maybe?”

A pause. Then a slow, careful nod. Yes.

Shinji’s shoulders tightened. His pencil scratched across the paper, jotting the answers down as if he were a detective with a fragile lead. “So then… why now? Why only show up now?”

Kaworu’s wings twitched, then his mask dipped, slowly, deliberately—another nod.

“So you waited,” Shinji murmured. “Waited for… me?” His voice cracked at the end, but Kaworu didn’t move to correct him, didn’t tilt his head in disagreement. The silence was answer enough.

Shinji bit his lip, gaze dropping to the notebook. He scribbled furiously. Then, after a shaky breath: “Can you even talk? Like, actually talk, like me?”

Kaworu’s head tilted again, feathers whispering together. Then, finally, he shook his head. No.

“Right… right,” Shinji mumbled. “Then how old are you? I mean, do Angels even have an age?”

Kaworu crouched low, feathers brushing against the ground, and extended one impossibly long finger. Slowly, carefully, he traced numbers into the dirt.

1 … 7.

Shinji blinked, staring at the marks, and then his eyes went wide. “Seventeen?” He repeated it out loud, as if the number itself was too human, too impossible, to belong to the being in front of him. “Wait… I’m— I’m sixteen. You’re only a year older than me?”

Kaworu tilted his head again, the faintest rumble humming in his chest, something like amusement.

Shinji’s mouth hung open for a beat longer before he snapped his notebook shut and leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “Hold on—hold on. If you can write numbers, then maybe—just maybe—you can learn letters, too! I can teach you! Yeah, we could—” He scrambled for his pencil, flipping to a blank page, his entire face lighting up with sudden, frantic energy. “I mean, unless… do you already know how? Can you write words?”

He looked up, pencil frozen in his hand.

Kaworu paused, then gave the slowest, most deliberate shake of his head. No.

Shinji’s grin cracked wide across his face, brighter than Kaworu had ever seen it. “Then I’ll teach you,” he said, voice bubbling with excitement he didn’t try to hide. “I’ll teach you everything.”

The late afternoon sun draped the clearing in gold, shadows stretching long across the grass. The cicadas hummed lazily in the background, a chorus that had become part of the rhythm of Shinji’s visits. He sat with his back against a tree, legs folded, his SDAT player balanced on one knee. The tiny machine hummed steadily, the familiar click… whirr… of the tape spinning.

Beside him, Kaworu crouched low, his massive frame folding awkwardly into something almost companionable. His feathers rustled faintly whenever the wind stirred, and the rows of crimson eyes down his neck blinked in a slow, unhurried rhythm. His mask tilted toward Shinji, close enough that the pale light caught on its smooth surface, making it seem almost human.

They shared the earphones—one tucked into Shinji’s ear, the other resting against the curve of Kaworu’s mask. It was ridiculous, Shinji thought, that something as small as an earbud could bridge the endless gulf between human and Angel, but here they were.

“You like it?” Shinji asked softly, his voice a little embarrassed as he fiddled with the SDAT’s buttons. “It’s… just something I listen to when I don’t want to think. Helps me feel like the world isn’t so loud all the time.”

Kaworu didn’t nod exactly—his movements were too deliberate, too otherworldly—but he leaned in, mask tilting closer, feathers brushing against Shinji’s sleeve. The gesture was answer enough.

Shinji exhaled, a small, lopsided smile tugging at his lips. “I, um… I used to play music too. Not just listen.” He hesitated, as though saying it out loud might jinx it. “The cello.”

The cicadas buzzed on. Kaworu blinked, all the rows of crimson eyes moving in unison, fixed on him. Shinji flushed under the weight of it.

“I mean, I wasn’t great or anything,” Shinji rushed on, fingers curling against his knees. “I practiced a lot when I was younger. I even played in school once. But it’s heavy, and… well, I don’t really play much anymore.” His gaze dropped to the dirt, tracing circles with his pencil eraser. “…Still, I’ve been thinking about it again. Picking it up. Playing more.”

Kaworu tilted his head, mask reflecting the dim orange light. His feathers rustled faintly, like a question.

Shinji laughed nervously. “If I didn’t have to lug it all the way out here, I’d—” He stopped, shook his head, and looked up again. “I’d play for you. Definitely. Maybe one day, I’ll figure it out. Bring it, I mean. And you’ll hear what I sound like when it’s not just… tapes and static.”

Kaworu’s chest rumbled faintly, a low hum that seemed to reverberate in the air around them. It wasn’t words, not exactly, but Shinji understood it all the same. Approval. Agreement. An odd sort of happiness.

“You’d like it, I think,” Shinji went on, braver now that Kaworu hadn’t recoiled or blinked away. “It’s… slower than this. Deeper. You can feel the sound, not just hear it. Like it’s in your chest. That’s what I like about it.”

He hesitated, then leaned his head back against the bark, closing his eyes. For a few minutes, they just sat there in silence, listening to the tape play on, letting the music fill the space between them. The cicadas faded, the world softened, and Shinji let himself forget everything else—the weight of expectation, the ache of loneliness, the constant hum of being needed but never wanted.

When he opened his eyes again, Kaworu was still there. Still close. Still watching him with that calm, unblinking attention that should’ve been unnerving but wasn’t.

Shinji chuckled quietly. “I guess it’s silly, huh? Wanting to play something like that for… well, for someone like you. You probably don’t even need music. You’re… bigger than that. Beyond it.”

Kaworu shifted then, leaning closer until his mask brushed lightly against Shinji’s shoulder. The feathers along his arm trailed faintly against Shinji’s sleeve, almost like a nudge.

Shinji froze, then smiled, soft and a little shy. “…But maybe not beyond it.”

He let the tape keep spinning, the soft melody wrapping around them like a blanket. And as the sun dipped lower, painting the clearing in deepening shades of orange and purple, Shinji found himself thinking that maybe—just maybe—he could really do it. Bring the cello here. Play until his fingers ached, until Kaworu understood what it meant to him.

For now, though, this was enough. Sharing a pair of cheap earphones, listening to the same song, letting the silence between tracks feel like a secret only they could hold.

And though he didn’t say it out loud, Shinji thought: Yeah. One day.

The sky unscrolled by degrees—indigo to oxblood to a weathered velvet—until the first apertures in the firmament presented themselves like pinpricks through gauze. Cicadas made their mechanical prayer. Shinji coaxed the SDAT to resume its small, stubborn orbit. One earbud found the boy’s ear; the other he pressed to the curve of the Angel’s mask, where sound was not strictly sound but still arrived, transmuted by contact into measurable vibration and then into something usefully akin to music.

Kaworu accommodated the arrangement with the patience of a stone that has decided to be riverbed. Feathers settled. Rings circled at a courteous distance, their perihelions widening so as not to scorch. The many eyes along his neck blinked in a tidal sequence—an anfractuous call-and-response—before quieting into a slower cadence that matched, with almost comic fidelity, the rhythm of Shinji’s breathing.

The piece on the tape contained a skeleton of melody wrapped in a low, insistently human pulse. Within the Angel’s apprehension, this was not merely “song” but an anthropology of pressure: the Lilin proclivity to project interior turbulence into the air, then call it meaning. He found the habit compelling in the way a map is compelling: inaccurate, yes, but devoutly so. The melody’s small climb and fall traced the boy’s pulse with an accuracy that outperformed coincidence. A minor coruscation touched the feathers at the joint nearest Shinji’s shoulder; the feathers answered with a minute shiver, an acknowledgment.

Above them, constellations assembled with bureaucratic confidence, pretending their scattered points had always been destined to connect. Kaworu knew better; the shapes were an old Lilin palimpsest plastered across an indifferent geometry. Yet he noted—without irony, because irony is a frail technology—that the boy’s eyes had earlier lifted and softened when he named them. Cassiopeia, Deneb, Altair: crude nets thrown at infinity. If Shinji believed the nets could hold, perhaps that belief alone constituted a workable physics.

Wind moved; leaves spoke their sibilant language; the SDAT ticked forward. Shinji’s shoulder leaned—incremental, then inevitable—until it was resting against the contour of feather and bone. Kaworu adjusted the angle of his frame without ceremony, redistributing weight and warmth so the contact could persist without fatigue. There was a time when proximity had meant hazard; when a touch would have seared or phased; when his field’s border was a guillotine. Not now. The border thinned and curved obediently around the boy, like glass slumped in a kiln to meet the cup it must become.

He tracked the boy’s micro-motions with the attention of a tide to moon: the flutter at the throat, the half-swallow of a yawn suppressed out of habit, the brief hyperaesthesia when the wind cooled sweat at the nape, and then—more interesting— the visible argument between vigilance and sleep. Shinji’s lashes grew heavier. The earbud wire tugged as the boy’s head tipped, then resettled. The SDAT’s tape breathed a little hiss where it had been spliced and repaired; Shinji’s mouth made a small, unimportant sound in reply. The Angel’s hum—an underfrequency that lived where language could not—drifted into alignment with these human noises until alignment became sympathy.

He had learned, quickly, that the Lilin body was a theater of thresholds. There existed a precise pressure at which a hand resting on a forearm ceased to be warning and became comfort; a duration after which silence ceased to be a threat and became shelter; an interval of gaze that if held a fraction too long asserted dominion but, if released just sooner, offered invitation. He kept to these thresholds with the same thoroughness he once applied to orbitals and apocalypses. One wing sloped outward, arcing like a temporary architecture until it made a cove. Shinji, presented with cove, did what water always does. He filled it.

Sleep approached like weather. The boy resisted—because that is the Lilin tradition: resisting the inevitable until it can be renamed as choice—then allowed it. His head found a hollow beneath the Angel’s clavicular ridge as though the body had been designed for such lodging. Warm breath feathered the down. The SDAT continued its captive constellation of clicks; the tape wheel revolved with sacerdotal stubbornness.

Observation, even when saturated by tenderness, remained observation. Kaworu catalogued without cruelty: the weight of the boy (compared to the imagined weight he had once simulated when calculating whether his rings could lift him without harm), the heat gradient where skin met feather, the exact tenor of the soft snore that manifested when Shinji’s mouth fell open a little. This inventory-making was not distance. It was devotion’s method when vocabulary had to be borrowed from physics.

The stars elaborated themselves. A satellite scrolled past, self-important and transient. For an interval the Angel attended to the sky’s deeper arithmetic: parallax; the long, inaudible conversation between distance and time; faint architectures of dust describing a history of fire. The universe offered its usual sermon on mortality and scale. He accepted the sermon as one accepts weather reports: true, unhelpful.

Attention returned to the local. Here was the boy. Here were the soft catastrophic proofs of him. Here, beneath the earbud’s tinned orchestra, a smaller orchestra: valves, fluids, currents. The Lilin speak of “being held” as if it were a discrete posture; to the Angel it presented as a field phenomenon: two boundaries consenting to a mutual softening. His own field—ancient, absolute, once tasked with preventing all trespass—had acquired a custom topology around a single human: a siphon, a saddle, an embrace.

If romance existed, it likely lived in the interval where annihilation might have happened and did not. It lived here, then: in the decision to be permeable; in the elective lowering of a wall that entire species had evolved to keep raised. The Angel understood that such permeability entailed hazard. Hazard was acceptable. Hazard was preferable to the prior condition: endless singularity, endless assignment. Purpose without choice is a machine; he would rather break and be rebuilt than iterate at infinity.

Shinji’s hand, in sleep, sought. It found a seam of primary feather and—in a gesture of astonishing, blasphemous mundanity—pinched and rubbed it, the way a child might worry a blanket’s edge. The Angel adjusted the quill’s resistance microscopically so that the habit could proceed without waking either participant. The many eyes along his neck closed in a traveling wave, extinguishing like lanterns on a procession route. The rings around his arms slowed and dimmed to ember-thin aureoles; one passed through a root and then, remembering the new etiquette, held position above the soil.

The music turned to something slower, almost anatomical. Shinji’s ear twitched. A small sound—contentment? sorrow remembered and set aside?—escaped him and dissolved. The boy smelled of heat and soap and the small, metallic sharpness of old fear evaporating; it was an index of survival, and the Angel, who had catalogued the atmospherics of cathedrals and blast furnaces, added this scent to the archive carefully, ceremonially.

There existed an old instruction that ran through him like a fossilized riverbed: descend, precipitate, complete the teleology of ending. The instruction still glimmered under the new silt of choices. It would, on certain nights, attempt to assert itself—a reflex, a ghost. When it rose now, floated by some gravitational memory, it encountered facts: a shoulder against him; a hand sleeping inside his feathers; a tape wheel lisping its endless corridor of song. The instruction folded. Not erased—transmuted. A fate is a line; love is a surface; surfaces curve lines.

He considered the earlier interrogatory session—Shinji with notebook and pencil like a scholar of storms, issuing yes-or-no inquiries to pin an impossible creature to the page. There had been delight then, and terror: delight because the boy wanted to know him; terror because being known is a kind of dismantling. That the boy wished to dismantle him only into parts that could be loved was not guaranteed; it was observed. He marked the observation as one marks a safe path through a minefield: with great, grateful precision.

The stars brightened, or perhaps the pupils along his neck dilated; it amounted to the same. The clearing cooled. The Angel lowered the entire scaffold of himself by a fraction so that Shinji’s chin would not rest at an angle that would punish his neck later. He did not possess the musculature of sighing, but something homologous to it traveled through him, a systolic release of charge.

It could be said—by those predisposed to metaphors—that the heavens approved, sending down their diffident shine as benediction. He did not require cosmic consent. The only sanction necessary lay asleep against him, sweating the day’s small despairs into the down and trusting, with the extravagant negligence of the exhausted, that he would be here when consciousness returned.

A meteor cut a minor theorem across the dark and vanished. The SDAT clicked; the tape reached its end; a soft clack announced the reversal. Shinji stirred, the brief grimace of a dream negotiating a border, then settled. The Angel tilted the mask infinitesimally, aligning the dormant earbud more comfortably against the surface where “ear” would be if anatomy obeyed narrative.

There would be consequences—there are always consequences when borders are edited. But consequence, tonight, was an academic word. The practical vocabulary was smaller, kinder: stay; hold; wait; listen. He executed these with the unshowy thoroughness of monastic craft. One feather at a time, he made a shelter. One heartbeat at a time, he matched a cadence. The night performed its enormous theater and was politely ignored.

When the wind rose, he enlarged the wing-cove. When dew settled, he adjusted field-temperature by a degree. When an insect, fascinated by the faint aureole of a ring, approached too near, the ring shifted elsewhere, uninterested in theater that might wake the boy. If divinity once required spectacle, it did not tonight. The miracle sufficed: a creature built for ending had elected to be furniture for a sleeping child.

On a different axis, farther than stars and nearer than breath, something like a promise gathered mass. It had no syntax yet, only a contour: if the boy asked for sky, he would provide sky; if the boy asked for silence, he would be silence; if the boy asked to be told again that he was not nothing, he would repeat it as long as repetition required. This was not worship, and not duty, and not the old mandate with a new mask. It was the simplest available articulation of will.

The tape wheel turned. The world expanded and contracted on its invisible lungs. Dawn remained a rumor. The Angel remained a harbor. The boy slept, and the stars, having nothing better to do, continued being stars.

.

.

.

…

The sky unscrolled by degrees—indigo to oxblood to a weathered velvet—until the first apertures in the firmament presented themselves like pinpricks through gauze. Cicadas made their mechanical prayer. Shinji coaxed the SDAT to resume its small, stubborn orbit. One earbud found the boy’s ear; the other he pressed to the curve of the Angel’s mask, where sound was not strictly sound but still arrived, transmuted by contact into measurable vibration and then into something usefully akin to music.

Kaworu accommodated the arrangement with the patience of a stone that has decided to be riverbed. Feathers settled. Rings circled at a courteous distance, their perihelions widening so as not to scorch. The many eyes along his neck blinked in a tidal sequence—an anfractuous call-and-response—before quieting into a slower cadence that matched, with almost comic fidelity, the rhythm of Shinji’s breathing.

The piece on the tape contained a skeleton of melody wrapped in a low, insistently human pulse. Within the Angel’s apprehension, this was not merely “song” but an anthropology of pressure: the Lilin proclivity to project interior turbulence into the air, then call it meaning. He found the habit compelling in the way a map is compelling: inaccurate, yes, but devoutly so. The melody’s small climb and fall traced the boy’s pulse with an accuracy that outperformed coincidence. A minor coruscation touched the feathers at the joint nearest Shinji’s shoulder; the feathers answered with a minute shiver, an acknowledgment.

Above them, constellations assembled with bureaucratic confidence, pretending their scattered points had always been destined to connect. Kaworu knew better; the shapes were an old Lilin palimpsest plastered across an indifferent geometry. Yet he noted—without irony, because irony is a frail technology—that the boy’s eyes had earlier lifted and softened when he named them. Cassiopeia, Deneb, Altair: crude nets thrown at infinity. If Shinji believed the nets could hold, perhaps that belief alone constituted a workable physics.

Wind moved; leaves spoke their sibilant language; the SDAT ticked forward. Shinji’s shoulder leaned—incremental, then inevitable—until it was resting against the contour of feather and bone. Kaworu adjusted the angle of his frame without ceremony, redistributing weight and warmth so the contact could persist without fatigue. There was a time when proximity had meant hazard; when a touch would have seared or phased; when his field’s border was a guillotine. Not now. The border thinned and curved obediently around the boy, like glass slumped in a kiln to meet the cup it must become.

He tracked the boy’s micro-motions with the attention of a tide to moon: the flutter at the throat, the half-swallow of a yawn suppressed out of habit, the brief hyperaesthesia when the wind cooled sweat at the nape, and then—more interesting— the visible argument between vigilance and sleep. Shinji’s lashes grew heavier. The earbud wire tugged as the boy’s head tipped, then resettled. The SDAT’s tape breathed a little hiss where it had been spliced and repaired; Shinji’s mouth made a small, unimportant sound in reply. The Angel’s hum—an underfrequency that lived where language could not—drifted into alignment with these human noises until alignment became sympathy.

He had learned, quickly, that the Lilin body was a theater of thresholds. There existed a precise pressure at which a hand resting on a forearm ceased to be warning and became comfort; a duration after which silence ceased to be a threat and became shelter; an interval of gaze that if held a fraction too long asserted dominion but, if released just sooner, offered invitation. He kept to these thresholds with the same thoroughness he once applied to orbitals and apocalypses. One wing sloped outward, arcing like a temporary architecture until it made a cove. Shinji, presented with cove, did what water always does. He filled it.

Sleep approached like weather. The boy resisted—because that is the Lilin tradition: resisting the inevitable until it can be renamed as choice—then allowed it. His head found a hollow beneath the Angel’s clavicular ridge as though the body had been designed for such lodging. Warm breath feathered the down. The SDAT continued its captive constellation of clicks; the tape wheel revolved with sacerdotal stubbornness.

Observation, even when saturated by tenderness, remained observation. Kaworu catalogued without cruelty: the weight of the boy (compared to the imagined weight he had once simulated when calculating whether his rings could lift him without harm), the heat gradient where skin met feather, the exact tenor of the soft snore that manifested when Shinji’s mouth fell open a little. This inventory-making was not distance. It was devotion’s method when vocabulary had to be borrowed from physics.

The stars elaborated themselves. A satellite scrolled past, self-important and transient. For an interval the Angel attended to the sky’s deeper arithmetic: parallax; the long, inaudible conversation between distance and time; faint architectures of dust describing a history of fire. The universe offered its usual sermon on mortality and scale. He accepted the sermon as one accepts weather reports: true, unhelpful.

Attention returned to the local. Here was the boy. Here were the soft catastrophic proofs of him. Here, beneath the earbud’s tinned orchestra, a smaller orchestra: valves, fluids, currents. The Lilin speak of “being held” as if it were a discrete posture; to the Angel it presented as a field phenomenon: two boundaries consenting to a mutual softening. His own field—ancient, absolute, once tasked with preventing all trespass—had acquired a custom topology around a single human: a siphon, a saddle, an embrace.

If romance existed, it likely lived in the interval where annihilation might have happened and did not. It lived here, then: in the decision to be permeable; in the elective lowering of a wall that entire species had evolved to keep raised. The Angel understood that such permeability entailed hazard. Hazard was acceptable. Hazard was preferable to the prior condition: endless singularity, endless assignment. Purpose without choice is a machine; he would rather break and be rebuilt than iterate at infinity.

Shinji’s hand, in sleep, sought. It found a seam of primary feather and—in a gesture of astonishing, blasphemous mundanity—pinched and rubbed it, the way a child might worry a blanket’s edge. The Angel adjusted the quill’s resistance microscopically so that the habit could proceed without waking either participant. The many eyes along his neck closed in a traveling wave, extinguishing like lanterns on a procession route. The rings around his arms slowed and dimmed to ember-thin aureoles; one passed through a root and then, remembering the new etiquette, held position above the soil.

The music turned to something slower, almost anatomical. Shinji’s ear twitched. A small sound—contentment? sorrow remembered and set aside?—escaped him and dissolved. The boy smelled of heat and soap and the small, metallic sharpness of old fear evaporating; it was an index of survival, and the Angel, who had catalogued the atmospherics of cathedrals and blast furnaces, added this scent to the archive carefully, ceremonially.

There existed an old instruction that ran through him like a fossilized riverbed: descend, precipitate, complete the teleology of ending. The instruction still glimmered under the new silt of choices. It would, on certain nights, attempt to assert itself—a reflex, a ghost. When it rose now, floated by some gravitational memory, it encountered facts: a shoulder against him; a hand sleeping inside his feathers; a tape wheel lisping its endless corridor of song. The instruction folded. Not erased—transmuted. A fate is a line; love is a surface; surfaces curve lines.

He considered the earlier interrogatory session—Shinji with notebook and pencil like a scholar of storms, issuing yes-or-no inquiries to pin an impossible creature to the page. There had been delight then, and terror: delight because the boy wanted to know him; terror because being known is a kind of dismantling. That the boy wished to dismantle him only into parts that could be loved was not guaranteed; it was observed. He marked the observation as one marks a safe path through a minefield: with great, grateful precision.

The stars brightened, or perhaps the pupils along his neck dilated; it amounted to the same. The clearing cooled. The Angel lowered the entire scaffold of himself by a fraction so that Shinji’s chin would not rest at an angle that would punish his neck later. He did not possess the musculature of sighing, but something homologous to it traveled through him, a systolic release of charge.

It could be said—by those predisposed to metaphors—that the heavens approved, sending down their diffident shine as benediction. He did not require cosmic consent. The only sanction necessary lay asleep against him, sweating the day’s small despairs into the down and trusting, with the extravagant negligence of the exhausted, that he would be here when consciousness returned.

A meteor cut a minor theorem across the dark and vanished. The SDAT clicked; the tape reached its end; a soft clack announced the reversal. Shinji stirred, the brief grimace of a dream negotiating a border, then settled. The Angel tilted the mask infinitesimally, aligning the dormant earbud more comfortably against the surface where “ear” would be if anatomy obeyed narrative.

There would be consequences—there are always consequences when borders are edited. But consequence, tonight, was an academic word. The practical vocabulary was smaller, kinder: stay; hold; wait; listen. He executed these with the unshowy thoroughness of monastic craft. One feather at a time, he made a shelter. One heartbeat at a time, he matched a cadence. The night performed its enormous theater and was politely ignored.

When the wind rose, he enlarged the wing-cove. When dew settled, he adjusted field-temperature by a degree. When an insect, fascinated by the faint aureole of a ring, approached too near, the ring shifted elsewhere, uninterested in theater that might wake the boy. If divinity once required spectacle, it did not tonight. The miracle sufficed: a creature built for ending had elected to be furniture for a sleeping child.

On a different axis, farther than stars and nearer than breath, something like a promise gathered mass. It had no syntax yet, only a contour: if the boy asked for sky, he would provide sky; if the boy asked for silence, he would be silence; if the boy asked to be told again that he was not nothing, he would repeat it as long as repetition required. This was not worship, and not duty, and not the old mandate with a new mask. It was the simplest available articulation of will.

The tape wheel turned. The world expanded and contracted on its invisible lungs. Dawn remained a rumor. The Angel remained a harbor. The boy slept, and the stars, having nothing better to do, continued being stars.

Shinji’s heart was already a mess in his chest, pounding like it wanted to claw its way out. He threw his free hand toward Kaworu’s wings in wild exasperation.

“With that size—” Shinji’s voice cracked, high and panicked, “we’d definitely get caught! People will look up and go, ‘Oh look! An oversized ANGEL hovering above Tokyo-3!’” His laugh came out nervous and shrill, his words tumbling faster and louder with each syllable. “Doesn’t that remind you all of a little something from—oh, I don’t know—TWO YEARS AGO?! You know, when EVERYONE ALMOST DIED?!”

His voice bounced through the clearing, desperate and sharp, but Kaworu didn’t flinch. Didn’t so much as twitch. His mask tilted slightly downward, rows of crimson eyes blinking in a ripple down his neck. And then—

It happened.

The air shimmered, faint at first, like heat rising from asphalt. The grass bent, the sound of cicadas wavered. Shinji’s stomach dropped as he recognized it instantly: an Angel’s AT Field.

“Kaworu—what—what are you—” Shinji’s words strangled off as Kaworu’s arm tugged him in closer. His body pressed against feathers, warmth seeping through his clothes, the Angel’s steady hum vibrating into his ribs. He tried to yank free, but Kaworu’s grip was unyielding—firm without being cruel, like a restraint made of inevitability.

“W-wait, wait, wait—what are you doing?!” Shinji yelped, his sneakers skidding against dirt as Kaworu pulled him along. The AT Field shimmered stronger now, wrapping around them like a dome.

And then Kaworu stepped forward. Onto the road.

Shinji’s eyes went wide, his breath hitched in his throat. “No, no, no, don’t you dare—”

A car rounded the bend, its headlights glaring even in daylight. Shinji’s whole body seized. They’ll see us, they’ll scream, they’ll—

The car roared past.

No brakes. No screech of tires. Not even a honk. It just—drove on. The driver’s face remained calm, eyes fixed ahead, as if the two figures—one massive and winged, the other flailing like a caught fish—weren’t even there.

Shinji blinked. His mouth fell open. “…What?”

Another car followed, slower, its engine humming. Shinji braced, squeezing his eyes shut. But the car glided by with the same indifference, the driver not so much as glancing their way.

Shinji’s breath hitched, his body trembling as the realization punched through his panic. He turned his head upward, craning to look at Kaworu. “…Are we… invisible?”

The Angel said nothing, but the steady, endless blink of eyes down his neck was answer enough. Kaworu’s wings shifted, feathers catching the morning sun, his arm tightening around Shinji’s torso in one smooth motion.

“W-wait—” Shinji started, but he didn’t get to finish.

The other arm came around him, wrapping him in a cage of warmth and feathers, holding him as if he were something breakable, precious.

And then Kaworu’s wings spread wide, beating once—just once.

The ground fell away.

Shinji’s stomach flipped violently, his lungs failing him in an instant. The clearing dropped into nothing, trees shrinking below like toys in a child’s sandbox. Wind slammed against his face, tugging his hair in every direction, his screams breaking loose raw and terrified.

“KAWORU! NO—NO, PUT ME DOWN! PUT ME DOWN RIGHT NOW!” Shinji thrashed wildly, legs kicking, arms clawing at feathers that wouldn’t yield. “THIS ISN’T FUNNY, I’M GOING TO DIE—”

But Kaworu held him tighter, steady, the AT Field cocooning them as they rose higher and higher. His hum deepened, vibrating against Shinji’s chest, as if to say: You are safe. Trust me.

Shinji didn’t hear it that way. All he heard was his own panicked screaming echoing across the sky, bouncing off the rooftops of Tokyo-3 as an oversized Angel carried him into the heavens like a shrieking, unwilling passenger.

The wind was deafening.

The first beat of Kaworu’s massive wings had been enough to knock Shinji’s breath out of him, the rush of air so powerful it tore through the treetops, scattering leaves into a cyclone behind them. Now, as they cut higher and higher into the sky, every beat drummed like thunder, each downstroke shoving a gale so strong Shinji’s screams were swallowed before they could reach his own ears. His words broke against the wall of wind, reduced to nothing more than muffled, panicked noises.

Kaworu’s arms stayed locked around him, feathered and warm, holding him steady even as the world spun into a blur beneath them. Shinji realized quickly that shouting was pointless, so he forced himself to lift an arm and point—down toward the roads, the cluster of buildings that stretched toward the horizon.

Kaworu tilted his head slightly, his mask catching the morning light, and adjusted his course. He moved with uncanny smoothness, each wingbeat powerful but controlled, steering them through the air like he’d done this countless times before.

Shinji’s stomach flipped again as the familiar skyline came into view—the gleaming towers, the packed neighborhoods, the unmistakable stretch of his campus on the far side of Tokyo-3.

His eyes went wide.

Kaworu hadn’t hesitated. He hadn’t slowed to examine the rooftops or checked for landmarks. He had flown straight for the school, confident, direct. As if he had always known exactly where it was.

Shinji’s pulse spiked. Wait. Wait, wait, wait—how?

He pointed again, a frantic gesture toward the school’s main courtyard, and Kaworu’s wings adjusted seamlessly, angling them downward. The Angel’s crimson eyes blinked calmly, as though the rush of wind, the height, the city sprawled beneath them was nothing at all.

Shinji’s thoughts raced. He knows. He’s been here. He’s seen it before.

A chill prickled up his spine despite the heat of Kaworu’s hold. Has he… been watching me?

The question lodged in his chest like a stone, his breath hitching as the school grew larger beneath them. Kaworu’s grip stayed steady, protective, as if Shinji’s panic was invisible to him. But Shinji couldn’t stop the thought from spiraling: Kaworu wasn’t just taking him to school. He already knew the way.

And that meant this wasn’t Kaworu’s first time looking down on his world. It wasn’t his first time looking at him.

Shinji’s legs still felt shaky when his sneakers finally hit solid ground. His lungs burned, his ears rang from the roar of wind, and his heart hadn’t slowed once since Kaworu had lifted him into the sky. He staggered a step forward, almost ready to whirl on the Angel with a thousand questions—How did you know where my school was? Have you been here before? Have you been watching me?—but the shrill chime of the second bell tore through the courtyard.

Shinji froze, stomach plummeting.

Shit. I’m late. I’m so late.

His panic shifted from celestial horror to mundane dread. Late meant lectures. Late meant paperwork. Late meant calls home. With his record—skipped classes, half-finished assignments, nodding off in lectures—Misato was definitely going to get a message about this. He rubbed his face hard with both hands. This trip was so risky. So, so stupid.

When class finally ended, Shinji didn’t even try to sneak inside. He wandered to the courtyard instead, finding a bench tucked under a swath of shade. The wood was warm from the sun, and he collapsed onto it with a long, miserable sigh.

“I’m going to die…” he muttered, slumping forward. His hair stuck slightly to his forehead, sweat not yet dried from the flight.

He blinked to the side, instinctively searching for Kaworu. Nothing. Just empty air. His heart skipped—had he left? Disappeared again?

Shinji’s hand lifted before he could stop it, groping gently through the space beside him. His fingers brushed against something soft, something that resisted only slightly before yielding like a cushion. Feathers. Warm, downy feathers. Shinji’s shoulders relaxed all at once, and he breathed a shaky sigh of relief.

“…Thanks,” he murmured, low enough that no one else in the courtyard could hear. “Really. I’d be dead without you.”

The feathers shifted faintly, a ripple of acknowledgment. Kaworu bent low, lowering his massive frame until he was hunched in an attempt to meet Shinji’s level. Even so, it didn’t quite work. Shinji still had to tilt his chin upward, neck craning ever so slightly, just to catch those bottomless eyes staring at him.

It was ridiculous. He’d grown from a pathetic 4’9 to a decent 5’6—maybe 5’8 if he really stretched his spine and measured on a generous day—and still, next to Kaworu, he felt like a kid again. Small. Breakable.

He let out another sigh, dragging a hand down his face. “You… you should probably stay hidden like this. People will think I’ve lost my mind if they catch me… I don’t know… pawing at nothing like some lunatic.”

The feathers quivered faintly, brushing against his shoulder in what could only be described as gentle amusement.

Shinji leaned back against the bench, the shade overhead cool against his skin. His stomach twisted with nerves, but at least for now, with Kaworu here—even invisible—he felt less like the world was about to collapse on him.

“Who are you talking to?”

The voice slid in calm and familiar, like a door opening onto quiet light. Shinji flinched so hard he nearly fell off the bench. He twisted around with a laugh that sounded way too high and way too fake.

“Oh—uh—no one,” he blurted, ears burning.

Rei stood a few steps away, beaming sunlight off the pale ribbon in her hair. Her face was its usual stillness, but her eyes were soft in the way he’d learned meant she was actually listening. She blinked once, slow, like she was accepting his answer in good faith.

“I see,” she said.

He scooted over automatically. She sat beside him without hesitation, knees aligned with his, bag settling between her feet. Her hair startled him for a second—it fell past her shoulders now, silky and straight, tucked behind one ear. Not the neat bob he still remembered from the early days.

He knew why. The memory flashed up so vivid he could taste miso in the air—late night in the kitchen, Rei standing at the sink, hair damp and pinned back with one of Mis— (don’t go there) —one of the spare clips, Asuka rifling in a cupboard and saying, out of nowhere and in that rare not-mean voice, “You’d look prettier with it longer.” Rei had gone very still, glanced at Shinji like she wasn’t sure if pretty was safe to want, and then nodded. Two months later she started skipping the trims. It had just kept growing. These days, Rei tried not to be proper all the time. She smiled more. She asked for things, sometimes, if Asuka nudged her first. And Shinji—God, he meant it—he loved her like a sister.

Rei’s shoulder bumped his. Not hard. Deliberate. She was more affectionate than people gave her credit for. She brushed her fingers over his sleeve like she was smoothing a crease that wasn’t there, then tucked her hands into her lap. “You look tired, Shinji,” she said, tilting her head a fraction. “And red.”

He coughed into his fist. “I… ran.” He left the rest unsaid. Flew.

She nodded once, as if that answered everything. “I lost track of time,” she offered after a beat, serene and matter-of-fact. “I missed the bell. It did not feel right to interrupt the lesson, so I did not go.”

“Right,” he said, smiling before he could stop himself. That was so her. If being five minutes late meant stepping in front of thirty people, she’d choose sitting outside and waiting for the hour to end. It wasn’t fear. It was… consideration, overclocked.

Silence settled, the shade cool, the courtyard noise a far-off hum. Shinji became hyper-aware of the empty air to his left. Not empty. Soft. Warm. He didn’t dare look. When he shifted a little, his fingers brushed fluff, and the faintest pressure answered, like a hand squeezing back. He kept his eyes straight ahead, ignoring the way his heart tried to sprint in opposite directions.

Rei leaned forward enough to peek around at his face. “Have you eaten?” she asked.

He opened his mouth to lie and then shrugged. “Not really.”

She didn’t sigh, but her mouth turned, tiny and decisive. From her bag she produced a small cloth bundle and unfolded it in her lap. Two onigiri, a neatly halved apple, something that looked like tamagoyaki cut into careful rectangles. She held one triangle out to him.

“I made too much,” she said, which was the nicest lie he’d heard all week.

“Thanks,” he said, suddenly stupidly close to crying. He took the onigiri and tried to eat without shaking. Salt and seaweed. Simple and perfect. Rei watched his hands like she was making sure he didn’t drop it.

The SDAT in his pocket felt heavy. He thought of them—the three of them—two years of NERV pretending hard enough that a “normal life” might stick. The trip to the States in October where they’d carved pumpkins with plastic hotel knives and Rei had chosen a cat face because the triangles were “nice geometry.” The winter in Germany, standing outside a bakery with breath ghosting into the air while Asuka yelled in fast German and then, softer, tugged Rei’s scarf higher because she didn’t know how to wrap it properly. The way they’d fallen asleep on couches and buses and plane seats, heads on each other’s shoulders because it turned out families could be assembled that way too—by proximity and patience and the stubborn fact of showing up.

Rei finished her half of the apple and, with the seriousness of a surgeon, pulled a packet of tissues from her pocket. She dabbed gently at the corner of his mouth. “Rice,” she said, as if she were narrating a rare astronomical event.

Shinji laughed, embarrassed and warm all at once. “Thanks,” he murmured, softer.

She let the tissue go, but her hand didn’t leave. She turned his wrist a little, checking for scrapes he hadn’t noticed. When she found none, she still kept his hand, holding it openly on the bench between them. She did that now—touch without apology, simple and sure. It made something quiet in his chest unfold.

“I haven’t seen you in the courtyard in the morning,” she said after a moment. “Not for a while.”

“Yeah,” he said, staring at their hands because it was easier than thinking about the air to his left. “Been a mess.”

“You are not a mess,” she replied, as if she were correcting an equation.

“Grades disagree,” he said, half joking.

“Grades do not know you,” she said. “I do.”

His throat went tight. He swallowed it down and nodded, because anything else might tip him into actually crying.

She shifted closer, shoulder to shoulder. He felt the invisible cushion of feathers press in and subtly adjust, accommodating her without revealing itself. A ridiculous image flashed into his brain—two hands cuddling him from either side—and he had to cough to strangle down a laugh. Rei turned her head a little, curious.

“Allergy,” he lied. “Trees.”

She hummed, unconvinced but willing to let him have it.

For a few minutes they just sat like that, sharing the shade and the quiet and the rest of the apple. Rei braided and unbraided the edge of her napkin with absent concentration. Shinji tried to control his face, keep his breathing even, because he could feel the faintest flutter of down when his chest hitched and the worry in that softness would ruin him if he let it.

“Will you come after lunch?” Rei asked finally. “To class.”

“I’ll try,” he said, which was true and not enough and all he had.

She tilted her head, considering. “Trying is acceptable,” she decided.

He snorted. “Thanks for the pass.”

Her mouth almost smiled. She reached up and smoothed his collar, then found a leaf in his hair and plucked it free. Her fingers lingered an extra heartbeat on his temple. “You slept outside,” she observed.

“Kind of,” he said.

“It was good sleep,” she added, like she could see it written there. “You look… rested.”

“I… yeah.” He couldn’t help the small smile. “Best in a long time.”

She seemed pleased by that in her quiet way. She folded the cloth carefully, tucked everything back into her bag, then sat for a moment longer with her hand still around his. When the second-period bell rang, she didn’t move right away. The courtyard emptied a little more. A breeze slid through the leaves.

Rei’s gaze lifted to the light through the branches. “The shade here is nice,” she said, which, for her, was almost extravagant praise.

“It is,” he said. “We should… come here more.”

“Yes,” she said, like a plan had been set.

She finally stood, bag strap over her shoulder. She didn’t let go of his hand until the last possible second. When she did, she squeezed, slow and deliberate, eyes on his.

“Goodbye,” she said, and then, after a breath, softer, “I love you.”

He blinked. It wasn’t the first time; it still hit the same way every time—a gentle, precise arrow right through the center. He nodded, smile pulling wide and helpless. “Love you too.”

She seemed to file that away like a precious receipt. Then—because she was Rei and because she’d decided affection was an action—she leaned down and touched her forehead lightly to his, a small, careful press. When she straightened, there was a ghost of a smile at the edge of her mouth.

“I will see you,” she said. “Soon.”

“Soon,” he echoed.

She turned and walked back toward the building, steps unhurried, hair catching a bit of sun that found its way through the leaves. He watched until she disappeared around the corner.

The courtyard fell quieter. He exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and leaned back against the bench. The space at his left folded warmer, feathers settling. He didn’t look. He didn’t need to.

“Yeah,” he whispered under his breath, throat thick. “She’s the best.”

A faint brush answered at his shoulder—an agreement, or a promise, he couldn’t tell. He closed his eyes for a second and let himself have it: the bench, the shade, the ghost of an apple’s sweetness, the steady warmth at his side, and the kind of love that didn’t ask him to be anything but himself.

The courtyard buzzed with movement again once the final bell rang, the flow of uniforms spilling out of the hallways and down the steps. Shinji shifted on the bench, gathering his bag and tightening the straps like they could hold him together. He felt the soft brush of feathers against his shoulder again, subtle, a reminder that Kaworu was still there, hidden in plain sight.

He stood and glanced to the side, lips parting with the instinct to say thank you, see you later, please don’t disappear again. But the words caught in his throat. Someone would hear, someone would look, and he’d have no way to explain why he was talking to empty space.

Instead, he lifted his hand just enough for a discreet little wave, half-hidden by his bag. “Bye,” he mouthed, almost soundless.

For one reckless second, his body wanted to lean in, to close the space and bury himself in that warmth the way he had last night. A hug. Just one. But the thought of how it would look—a boy clinging to air—froze him solid. His chest ached, but he forced himself to turn away.

He jogged across the courtyard, weaving between students, calling out to Toji and Kensuke when he spotted them lingering near the gate. Toji clapped him on the shoulder with his usual easy grin, Kensuke launched into a half-formed story about something ridiculous a teacher had said, and Shinji let himself get pulled back into the current of normal life, or at least the illusion of it.

Behind him, where the shade pooled deeper under the trees, the air shimmered faintly.

Kaworu remained, hunched slightly in his smaller form, crimson eyes following Shinji’s retreat until he vanished into the crowd. The feathers along his arms rustled once, like a breath, and then stilled.

He did not move. He only watched.

________

The mountain air was cooler than in the city, crisp and carrying the faint scent of pine and damp soil. Shinji’s shoes crunched over uneven ground as he followed the narrow trail upward, the weight of his school bag pressing into his shoulders. He hadn’t left a note on the counter this morning, hadn’t even bothered with an excuse. Misato and Asuka would assume he was sulking, or at the library, or doing something equally Shinji-like. The truth was much simpler: he wanted quiet. And Kaworu. He didn't find Kaworu after school ended- so he took the initiative to walk back to their usual spot.

The clearing appeared after a sharp bend in the trail, sunlight cutting through the trees. Kaworu was already there, perched low between two ridges where the forest opened up. In daylight, he looked… different. The feathers, usually muted under moonlight, caught the sun in flashes of white and silver, almost blinding at first glance. The rings shimmered faintly, their glow dulled in the brightness but still impossible to ignore. Rows of red eyes blinked slowly down his neck, following Shinji’s approach with the same kind of half-alert attention a cat might give a familiar person.

Shinji didn’t run. He was past that stage now. Instead, he walked into the clearing with the sort of ease that only came after repetition, after nights of the same routine. He gave Kaworu the faintest nod, like greeting a neighbor, and chose a spot under a broad tree with roots that stuck out in uneven ridges.

The bag thudded down, and Shinji sat cross-legged, pulling out a stack of notebooks and half-finished worksheets. Math, literature, science—assignments that had stacked up while he’d been sleeping through lectures and sneaking out at night. He smoothed one out on his knee, clicking a mechanical pencil into place.

Kaworu shifted, feathers rustling. His massive frame hunched down, and he lowered himself until his mask-like face was angled toward Shinji’s pile of papers. The long fingers flexed idly against the dirt, claws dragging shallow grooves. The many eyes blinked in uneven rhythm, studying the mess of symbols and characters.

“This isn’t for you,” Shinji muttered, already scribbling in the margin of a math problem. His handwriting was tight, rushed. “I’ve been… falling behind. If I don’t get at least some of this done, Misato’ll corner me about my grades again.”

Kaworu didn’t move, but one of the rings tilted lazily in the air, sliding closer before drifting back. The slow, restless blinking of his eyes gave away his mood—curiosity laced with boredom.

Shinji exhaled through his nose, erasing a mistake. “Yeah, I know. It’s boring. Welcome to being human.”

For a while, the clearing stayed quiet. The only sounds were the scrape of pencil on paper, the occasional sigh when Shinji hit a problem he couldn’t remember how to solve, and the faint, restless flutter of Kaworu’s feathers. Every so often, Shinji glanced up and found the Angel’s head tilted, the winglets twitching like he was trying to understand the point of all this.

Shinji shook his head and muttered, “Don’t give me that look. Just because you don’t have to take tests doesn’t mean you get to judge me.”

Kaworu’s chest gave a low vibration—not a sound, exactly, but something close. His wings flexed once, scattering sunlight through the clearing like shards of glass, before settling again.

Despite the distraction, Shinji bent back over his work. The strange thing was, he felt more focused here than he had at his desk back home. Maybe it was the quiet. Maybe it was the sense that Kaworu, even with his strange, watchful stillness, was grounding him somehow.

By the time he finished the first assignment, his fingers smudged with graphite, he leaned back against the tree trunk and let the pencil drop. “One down,” he muttered, closing his eyes for a moment.

When he opened them again, Kaworu was still there, crouched low, watching. Rows of crimson eyes blinked at him in a slow, deliberate cascade.

Shinji met that gaze for longer than he meant to. “You really don’t get this, do you?” he asked quietly. “Why I’m doing it. Why I have to.”

The Angel tilted his head again, feathers rustling softly, like a shrug.

Shinji huffed, shaking his head. “Yeah. Figures.”

And yet, he didn’t feel mocked. If anything, it felt like Kaworu’s curiosity was genuine. Shinji stretched his legs out and pulled another sheet from the pile, muttering under his breath. “Alright. Let’s try another one.”

The hours slipped by in the clearing, the forest alive with the sound of wind through the trees and the scratch of Shinji’s pencil against paper. He muttered to himself every so often, erasing with quick, annoyed strokes, only to scribble again, hunched over his homework like he was trying to wring sense from it by sheer stubbornness.

Kaworu sat close, folded into his usual hunch, watching. His rows of eyes followed every line Shinji wrote, blinking at odd intervals. Sometimes he would tilt his head, sometimes flutter his winglets, but mostly he just stared in a way that would have been unsettling if Shinji hadn’t grown used to it.

When Shinji finally leaned back with a groan, stretching his arms above his head, Kaworu startled him with a sudden clap.

Shinji blinked. “Did you just—?”

The Angel clapped again, long claws coming together with a sharp sound, like the awkward echo of applause. His wings twitched, feathers rustling, and all those crimson eyes blinked in a cascade.

Shinji’s face heated. “You’re… praising me?”

The Angel clapped once more, slower this time, as if confirming.

Despite himself, Shinji laughed under his breath. “You’re so weird…” He rubbed the back of his neck but found he didn’t hate it. In fact, it felt good—better than hearing a teacher mark the assignment, better than Misato’s absent-minded “good job.” Kaworu’s approval, as strange as it was, felt… genuine.

“Alright,” Shinji muttered, flipping to another worksheet. “Fractions this time.” He pointed at the page, pencil tapping the problem. “See this? You take the numerator here, divide it by this denominator—like splitting a whole into pieces.” He frowned when Kaworu’s many eyes blinked out of rhythm, confused. “You don’t get it?”

The Angel tilted his head, the winglets twitching again.

Shinji sighed. “I guess it’s hard to explain without—”

Before he could finish, Kaworu reached out, his enormous hand surprisingly delicate as he pinched Shinji’s spare pen between two clawed fingers. The paper crinkled as he dragged it closer, crimson eyes fixing on the far side of the worksheet where the “extra credit” problems were listed.

Shinji blinked. “Wait—those aren’t—” He cut himself off when Kaworu began writing.

The pen moved clumsily at first, wobbling against the page, but the numbers he traced were shockingly precise. He didn’t go for the simple fractions Shinji had been trying to explain—he skipped straight to the advanced problem Shinji had been avoiding all week. A near-academic level equation, shoved onto the sheet not as a requirement, but as a cruel teacher’s test of who was aiming for extra marks.

Shinji’s stomach twisted. He’d stared at that equation for days, chewing on his pencil, praying the teacher wouldn’t notice if he left it blank. He hadn’t even tried.

And now—

Kaworu’s claws scraped softly as he wrote. The rows of eyes blinked one after another as he balanced the fractions, adjusted the formula, and dropped the solution into place with a final, decisive tap of the pen.

Shinji’s jaw went slack.

“You… you solved it.” He grabbed the paper, staring at the neat string of numbers. It was correct. Not just correct—it was elegant, precise, the kind of solution his teacher would’ve underlined three times in red ink.

Kaworu set the pen down and tilted his head again, waiting. His massive frame trembled slightly, feathers fluffing, all those crimson eyes blinking in sync like they were holding their breath.

He was waiting. For something.

Shinji swallowed, throat dry. “You… wanted me to praise you.”

The Angel leaned closer, mask lowering until it nearly touched Shinji’s cheek. The silent hum in his chest deepened, expectant.

Shinji laughed, a nervous, incredulous sound. “You’re… unbelievable.” He shook his head, smiling despite himself. “Good job, Kaworu.”

The rings around the Angel’s arms pulsed with a soft glow, and for the first time since Shinji had met him, all those crimson eyes blinked in perfect, harmonious rhythm—satisfied.

Shinji sat there, staring at the page like it might start glowing in his hands. The numbers were too clean, too effortless. He had wrestled with that same equation until his brain gave up, and now Kaworu had solved it in the span of a minute, like it was nothing.

He looked up. Kaworu was still leaning close, waiting. The faint hum in his chest vibrated in the air, the glow from the rings fading back to their usual low shimmer. Those endless crimson eyes blinked, all focused on Shinji, demanding something.

Shinji pinched the bridge of his nose, suppressing the weirdest urge to laugh. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you? You’re not just showing off, you… actually want me to say it again.”

The Angel tilted his head, mask pressing into Shinji’s space just slightly. His winglets fluttered like nervous ticks.

Shinji exhaled through his nose and gave in. “Fine. You’re smart, Kaworu. Smarter than me.” His lips twitched. “Happy now?”

The feathers around Kaworu’s shoulders puffed up in a soft ripple, and the hum in his chest shifted to something lower, steadier. Shinji swore it was satisfaction.

Shaking his head, Shinji leaned back against the tree trunk, pencil still dangling in his hand. “I don’t get you. You’re supposed to be this… terrifying thing, right? A monster. But you’re sitting here doing my math homework just so I’ll pat you on the head.”

Kaworu’s mask tilted again, slow, deliberate.

Shinji huffed. “Well, you’re not getting head pats.”

The Angel didn’t react at first—then one enormous clawed finger tapped the edge of Shinji’s worksheet, insistent.

“Oh my god,” Shinji muttered, covering his face with both hands. “You are worse than Asuka.”

Kaworu shifted closer, so close Shinji could feel the warmth of his feathers through his jacket. One of the rings drifted lazily between them, humming faintly as it phased through a root before circling back into place. Kaworu’s many eyes blinked at him again, a steady rhythm now, calm and almost… smug.

Shinji peeked through his fingers. “…You’re impossible.”

Still, when he looked back at the equation, at the neat, perfect solution, something inside him eased. For once, he didn’t feel like he was drowning under expectations he could never meet. Kaworu had picked up the problem he couldn’t solve and carried it like it was nothing—and then sat there, waiting for praise like some oversized, feathered child.

It was ridiculous. And kind of wonderful.

Shinji let his hands fall and muttered, “Thanks. Really.”

Kaworu gave another one of those strange vibrations, soft and steady, and folded his massive wings a little tighter around them both, as if to say he wasn’t going anywhere.

Shinji bent back over the rest of his work, pencil scratching across the paper. And this time, when he worked through the problems, it didn’t feel so heavy. Every time he finished a sheet, Kaworu clapped his claws together, the sound sharp but strangely encouraging, and Shinji couldn’t stop the small smile tugging at his lips.

Shinji hunched over the worksheet until the words swam in front of his eyes. English grammar drills, essay fragments, red pen corrections echoing in his head—it was too much. He dropped the pencil with a clatter and let out a groan, slumping forward until his forehead pressed to the page.

“Enough,” he muttered. He shoved his bag over the papers so they wouldn’t scatter and stood, stretching his stiff shoulders. His gaze caught on the clearing—the sweep of grass, the way the sun caught on Kaworu’s feathers, the quiet openness of the place—and something in him loosened.

Without thinking, he broke into a jog. The grass swayed beneath his steps, the mountain air cool in his lungs. For a few heartbeats he forgot homework, forgot expectations, forgot Misato’s lectures. He just ran, laughing under his breath at the sheer absurdity of it.

Behind him came the heavy, deliberate sound of movement. Kaworu followed, each step sinking deeper into the earth, his massive wings half-furled. He didn’t run—he didn’t need to—but he matched Shinji’s path, each motion careful, curious, like he was mimicking the game without fully knowing its rules.

Shinji glanced back, hair sticking to his forehead with sweat. “You’re too slow!” he called, his voice breaking into laughter.

Kaworu tilted his head, then quickened, strides longer and smoother, closing the gap easily. Shinji yelped and picked up speed, darting around the clearing, boots pounding against the ground. He laughed harder than he had in years, until his stomach ached and his chest burned.

When he tripped—on a root, on nothing—Kaworu’s wings swept forward in an instant, catching him before he hit the dirt. Shinji clutched feathers, breathless, and laughed again. “You’re cheating!”

The Angel tilted his head, mask lowering, eyes blinking in uneven rhythm as though puzzled by the accusation.

“Never mind,” Shinji said, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. His heart thudded so hard it almost hurt, but not in the bad way. He hadn’t felt joy like this in so long it was foreign, intoxicating. He leaned against Kaworu’s feathers, chest still heaving, and whispered, “This is nice. Really nice.”

Kaworu responded with a low vibration, feathers rustling as he curled his wings around them both, pulling Shinji into his warmth. It was absurdly tender. Shinji pressed his cheek to the feathers, smiling without thinking.

For a while, there was nothing but laughter lingering in the air, the sun warm on his face, the steady hum of Kaworu’s chest.

But then, slowly, the quiet shifted.

Shinji’s breath evened out, his smile faded. The warmth around him should have been enough. It was enough. And yet—something hollow stirred beneath his ribs. The joy that had burned so brightly moments before left only an echo, like laughter fading down an empty hallway.

His fingers curled tighter into the feathers, as if clinging could keep the feeling from slipping away. But already, the weight of reality crept back in. Misato’s suspicion. Asuka’s smirks. School. The cameras. His own constant reminder that nothing good lasted long.

The joy hollowed out into something aching.

Shinji pressed his eyes shut, hiding it, even though Kaworu couldn’t speak to call him out. He whispered into the feathers, voice thin: “Why does it never last?”

Kaworu’s eyes blinked slowly, rows cascading in a rhythm like a heartbeat, and his wings only tightened their hold.

Shinji wanted to believe that was enough. But the hollow in his chest kept whispering otherwise.

The clearing was quiet except for the faint hum of cicadas and the sound of Shinji’s breath, still uneven from running. Kaworu crouched near him, wings folded close, feathers gleaming in the sun like a wall of silver. Shinji sat with his back against the tree, homework abandoned under his bag, knees pulled up to his chest. His hands were clenched tight, fingers digging into the fabric of his pants.

He had been laughing moments ago—really laughing, the kind that hurt your stomach and made your chest light—but now the silence pressed down on him, and all the things he’d been burying began to spill out.

“I hate this,” Shinji whispered, voice raw. “I hate all of it.”

Kaworu tilted his head, one of his ringlets drifting lazily in the air. His rows of crimson eyes blinked, watching.

Shinji dragged a hand through his hair, tugging hard at the strands as if he could root the words out. “The Evas… I can’t even look at them without feeling sick. They made me pilot one when I was fourteen. Fourteen. I didn’t know anything—I was just a kid. I didn’t even want to do it, but they forced me in. And I did it, because if I didn’t, people would’ve died. And then people still died anyway.”

His throat tightened, but he didn’t stop. The words tumbled, faster, angrier.

“They called me a hero. A savior. Humanity’s knight.” He spat the last words like poison, shaking his head violently. “Like that meant anything. Like that title was supposed to fix all the nights I went home shaking, all the times I thought I was going to die in that thing. Who comes up with that corny shit, anyway? Some politician sitting behind a desk, deciding it’s easier to brand me than to ask if I was okay.”

Kaworu shifted closer, lowering his mask-like face until the shadow of it fell across Shinji’s. The faint hum in his chest vibrated the air, steady, grounding.

Shinji pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes, trembling. “And then after… after the fighting stopped, it didn’t matter anymore. Everyone praised me, celebrated me, but no one actually saw me. Not Misato, not Asuka, not Toji. I was just a—what? A trophy? A reminder of everything they lost? People stare at me on the streets like I’m not even human. Like I’m just… that boy. Their savior. Their knight. But I don’t feel like any of those things. I just feel empty.”

His voice cracked.

“My father,” he rasped. The word clung like ash in his mouth. “God, I want to hate him. I should hate him. He abandoned me, threw me away, and then dragged me back just to use me. I watched him choose Eva over me again and again. He never even looked at me like I was his son. Not once.”

Shinji’s breath hitched, and he curled tighter against his knees. “But I can’t hate him. No matter how much I tell myself I do… I can’t. And that makes me hate myself.”

He let his head fall against his arms, voice muffled. “And my mother… she’s not even gone. She’s there, in Unit-01. I know her soul is inside it. Every time I piloted, I felt her. I know she’s in there, and yet she might as well be dead, because I can’t talk to her, I can’t ask her why she left me, I can’t ask if she’s proud of me or if she even… if she even cares.”

His hands shook violently.

“I’ve spent my whole life like this. Alone. Drowning in people’s expectations, or their indifference. Trying to keep breathing because if I stop, everyone will tell me I’m selfish. And I am selfish, because I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to live like this either. I don’t know how.”

The silence pressed heavy around them. The sun shifted overhead, casting the clearing in warm light, but Shinji felt only cold inside.

He lifted his head slightly, tears streaking his face. Kaworu hadn’t moved, hadn’t flinched. The Angel’s wings had shifted closer without Shinji noticing, cocooning him in shadow and light, feathers brushing his shoulders.

Shinji sniffled, his voice small. “…But you.”

The word hung there, fragile.

Shinji blinked hard, his throat closing. “You’ve only been here for—what? Days? Weeks? I don’t even know. But in that time… I’ve felt more whole than I have in years. You listen to me. You stay. You don’t look at me like I’m a tool, or a savior, or some idiot kid. You just… look at me.”

Kaworu’s many eyes blinked in slow rhythm, steady as a heartbeat.

Shinji let out a shaky laugh, tears spilling fresh. “I don’t get it. I don’t get you. You’re supposed to be the enemy. You’re supposed to be terrifying. But you’ve brought me more comfort than anyone else ever has. You make me feel like I matter, like I’m not just this broken thing everyone’s stuck with.”

His chest hurt, his voice breaking on the next words. “I love you, Kaworu.”

The admission shocked him even as he said it. His face burned, but he didn’t take it back. He couldn’t. The truth spilled too easily now.

“I love you,” he repeated, firmer, desperate. His hands fisted in Kaworu’s feathers. “I don’t even care if it’s stupid, or wrong, or dangerous. I love you. You’ve given me more in these short nights than my father, my teachers, my friends—than anyone.”

Kaworu leaned closer, pressing his mask gently against Shinji’s hair, the hum in his chest deepening, surrounding them.

Shinji closed his eyes, trembling. “God, I wish you could say it back. I wish I could hear you say it just once. Do you even know what that would do to me? How badly I want that?” His voice cracked again, hoarse and pleading. “The things I’d do, Kaworu… the things I’d give up, just to hear you say you love me too.”

The words echoed into the clearing, carried by the mountain air. Shinji’s breathing slowed, his tears soaking into the feathers he clung to.

Kaworu didn’t speak. He couldn’t. But the way his wings wrapped fully around Shinji, the way his many eyes blinked in perfect harmony, the way that low hum resonated against Shinji’s chest—it was an answer all the same.

And Shinji, broken and hollow and desperate for something real, let himself believe it.

Shinji stayed there, pressed against Kaworu’s feathers, until his sobs dulled into shaky breaths. His throat burned raw, his eyes felt swollen, but the silence around him didn’t feel suffocating the way it usually did. Kaworu’s warmth filled the empty spaces, wings curled so protectively around him that it was almost hard to remember this was an Angel—an enemy, a monster, something humanity should fear.

He lifted his head slightly, his face blotchy and streaked with tears, and looked up into that mask. The bottomless pits stared back, unblinking. The rows of red eyes blinked down Kaworu’s neck, steady, almost soothing in their rhythm.

Shinji gave a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “I must look pathetic right now.”

Kaworu tilted his head, feathers rustling. The mask came lower, brushing against Shinji’s hair again, and Shinji exhaled like it was a touch he’d been waiting for.

“I really meant it,” Shinji whispered, fingers curling tight into the feathers. “All of it. I hate this world. I hate what it did to me. But you—you make me feel like I can breathe again. You make me feel like I’m not just… useless.” His voice cracked, small and wounded. “And if that’s love, then fine. I love you. Even if it’s stupid.”

Kaworu shifted closer, wings pulling tighter, the hum in his chest deepening. It rattled through Shinji’s bones like a second heartbeat, low and endless.

Shinji closed his eyes. He could almost pretend that sound was words, that the warmth around him was an answer. He wanted so badly to hear it spoken back, but even without it, he could feel it. Maybe that was enough.

“I don’t know how long this will last,” Shinji admitted, voice trembling. “Misato will find out eventually. Asuka will figure something out. And when they do…” His stomach knotted. “They’ll try to take you from me. Or worse. And I—I don’t know what I’ll do then. I don’t know if I could survive losing you.”

Kaworu’s many eyes blinked all at once, every single one fixed on him, as if saying: I’m not leaving.

Shinji’s chest ached, but for the first time in years it wasn’t empty. It was full—overwhelmingly so. With fear, yes, but also with something warm and impossible.

He buried his face into Kaworu’s feathers again, holding on as if his life depended on it. “Please,” he whispered, broken but sincere. “Please don’t ever let me be alone again.”

The forest was silent around them, but Kaworu’s embrace tightened, and his hum vibrated deeper, like a vow.

For the first time since the war ended, Shinji felt like he wasn’t drowning. He felt like someone had finally pulled him up for air.