Disclaimer: I don't own Neon Genesis Evangelion or anything associated with it. Gainax created this world, I just play in it.

I originally projected that this story would be out in late March or early April. So much for deadlines, I should know better.

Four months since my last submission...I guess times still flies even when you're stressed out and miserable. But enough with the negativity.

Here's my latest, it should be a 2 chapter affair and I'm still working on the second chapter. Usually I won't post multi chaptered work until the whole thing is completed, but I felt the need to get something out. This is one of the ideas for a 'younger Misato' that I've been kicking around for several months and finally got around to writing it.

So, give it a read and leave a review if you please. I hope you like it.

Thirteen

Chapter One:

The silence in the cavernous room went from the mere undisturbed quiet of a long abandoned space, to a suddenly heavy and oppressive thing that seemed unnatural and impossible in its scope. So much so that it affected not only the physical world, but had also temporarily silenced the brief flow of sudden, chaotic thoughts in the mind of Misato Katsuragi. Such was the case when one laid eyes upon something that should not be.

She should never have come back down here again, it had been a bad, bad idea. She never should have returned to the shadowy depths of Terminal Dogma and to the horrible secrets it held. She had been well aware that if she found anything in her searches through the recesses of the base, it would most likely be shocking and unpleasant. But she hadn't expected anything like this. She hadn't expected to find something that would shake her very soul to its core.

The room she currently stood in was a lab, very similar to the one where she and Shinji were shown the clones of Rei Ayanami, but with at least two dozen large, upright, glass containment vessels rather than a large tank. The sight of those giggling, soulless, beings disintegrating before her in that tank still gave her nightmares.

Still, it hadn't been enough to suppress her now all consuming quest for answers, and it had pushed her once again into the little travelled depths of the facility to seek out the unknown truths hidden within it. So far the quest to learn NERV's secrets had resulted in Kaji being killed and her Shinji being left in a state of shock and very badly shaken. She still didn't know everything that was going on with NERV, but even so, she had never suspected that things would get so bizarre and horrifying.

The vessel before her, like the rest of them, was situated on a raised platform that took up most of the centre portion of the cavernous room. It was beyond the safety rail she was currently trying to crush in her white knuckled grip, and it was the only one that wasn't empty. As much as she tried to look away from what was inside of it, she couldn't tear her eyes away. The sheer incomprehensible nature of what she was seeing left her transfixed and unable to think.

She covered her mouth with her left hand and swallowed hard, trying to ensure that her meagre lunch didn't make a sudden and unwanted reappearance. Finally letting go of the rail, she took a couple of shaky steps backwards until she bumped up against a large control console, then her legs gave out completely and she slowly sank to the floor.

Her breath began to come in great, heaving gasps and it was all that she could manage to keep herself from hyperventilating. Her body began to shake uncontrollably and tears streamed down her cheeks, her mind threatening to shut down on her completely. There was no way that what she was seeing could possibly be true. It just couldn't, it wasn't possible.

She had already seen a lot of incomprehensible things in her life. Second Impact. Angels. Evangelions. In Terminal Dogma alone she had already seen the skeletal remains of failed Evangelions, a crucified Angel, and the clones of Rei Ayanami. She had thought that nothing could surprise her anymore, that nothing she could ever see or discover in this place could top what she had already seen, or leave her feeling any more horrified and disgusted.

Obviously she had been very wrong about that.

Nothing in particular had drawn her to this specific room, it was just one of the very few whose electronic lock yielded to the doctored ID pass card she had found in Kaji's apartment. The card which had escaped the notice of Section 2 when they ransacked her former lover's living quarters.

She had attempted to gain information by hacking some of the lesser subsystems of the MAGI, she wasn't good enough at it to try cracking the main system, but the effort had turned up nothing more than fragments of files and documents that mentioned various projects, including the elusive Instrumentality Project. However, that's all they were. Fragments. Basically useless bits and pieces that held no explanation as to what any of them were and which gave her very little to work with.

That left her with no other options than to start snooping around and see what she could get into. It was risky and she knew that she could be caught at any time, with the likely outcome being a cell next to her dear friend Ritsuko. Of course it could also get her a bullet in the head, but if that was how they wanted to play it she sure as hell wouldn't go down easy.

At the moment however, all of that was irrelevant. Someone could walk up to her right now, press a gun to her head, and blow her brains all over the room and she would be hard pressed to even notice. Her mind was locked in a loop of unthinkable possibilities and the rest of the world around her had temporarily ceased to exist.

The oppressive silence was shattered into a thousand pieces by her sudden, soul rending scream.

If humanity were to give out an award for those who were among the most downtrodden and kicked around by life, it could well be named after Shinji Ikari. True, the boy hadn't done very much to help himself avoid such pitiful circumstances, but he also hadn't been given a hell of a lot of help to be anything other than the too often kicked dog that he was.

He had lost his mother at a very early age and was promptly abandoned by his father because the man had no use for him, at least not yet. He was made to feel like he was a burden and an annoyance to the people who where entrusted with his care and education, and he was forced to learn how to fend for himself very early on in his young life.

No one had ever taught him how to stand up for himself, or spent enough time with him to allow him to grow comfortable in the presence of others, to learn how to interact with other people without being paralyzed by nervousness and fear. No one taught him that rejection and pain were just as much a part of life as acceptance and pleasure, and that he deserved love and happiness just as much as anyone else did.

The skinny, physically unimposing boy became so withdrawn that to be anymore so would have seen him disappear from existence entirely. Something which at times he had found himself wishing for very much.

Even if he had arrived in Tokyo 3 well adjusted and happy, he was sure that the last year would still have beaten him down. Fighting the Angels terrified him. For that matter, so did Unit 01 and it didn't help that he was very confused as to why, despite that fear, that he often felt safe and even a little at ease when inside the beast. Not to mention that the number of times he had awakened to find himself in the hospital hadn't exactly done much to ease his frayed nerves and boost his confidence either.

Even amidst the fear and uncertainty he had made some friends, and at least for a little while he felt like his life might have been changing direction and something good may yet come out of it all. Typically though, as was usually the case when he got his hopes up about something, it all went downhill and turned to shit.

He had nearly killed Touji and now he and Kensuke and Hikari were all in Tokyo 2. In Misato he had met someone who truly seemed to care about him, but for several weeks now he had seen less and less of her and even when they were in the same room together, little was said between them.

Rei was someone he had wanted to get to know better, but ever since he had found out that she was a clone he had been unable to go near her. This Rei wasn't the one he knew. This wasn't the Rei who had protected him, smiled for him, and gave her life to protect him. It was an impostor wearing her face.

Asuka. He didn't quite know how to quantify his relationship with the mercurial redhead. He liked her and wanted to be her friend, but she treated him like garbage most of the time. He admired her spirit, but he hated her attitude. One minute he was mesmerized by her, the next he wanted to kick her ass. Now she was laying motionless in a hospital bed, locked away within her own mind. No one knew if she would ever come out of it.

Then there was Kaworu. He had seemed to understand his pain. He wanted to be his friend and expected nothing in return and Shinji was glad to be his friend. He wanted him to be happy, but he destroyed all potential for that happiness when he revealed himself to be an Angel. When he forced Shinji to kill him, it nearly destroyed the already troubled boy.

Since then, Shinji had kept himself busy with two main activities. Laying in the dark of his room, trying to drown his mind in the music playing on his SDAT, or wandering around aimlessly in the ruins of Tokyo 3 or the less travelled regions of NERV headquarters.

He had found that he could wander for hours with his mind becoming a virtual blank, a blissful and welcome relief from the turmoil usually contained within it. The pain and the pressure seemed to disappear, or were at least pushed so far to the outer reaches of his consciousness that he couldn't feel it anymore.

It was almost as if he went into a trance, something like a state of not quite awareness. It was a solitude that he couldn't find anywhere else. He supposed he was on dangerous ground and ran the risk of ending up like Asuka, but he really didn't care anymore. All he knew was that when he wandered, he didn't feel the pain. He didn't slip back into the waking world unless something caught his attention or he became tired and would then go home and sleep peacefully for a few hours before the pain and turmoil crowded his mind once again.

He had been wandering around the labyrinth of corridors beneath NERV headquarters when he found himself rudely brought out of his blissful stupor. He had come to that place again, the room that had once held Rei's clones. He didn't know why he kept ending up there every time he wandered the complex, and he really didn't want to give it much thought.

Like usual, he thought about going inside, he knew the door was no longer locked, but in the end he never ventured in. It was partly because of what he had learned about Rei while in that room, but it was also because seeing her clones disintegrate had been like watching her die again. He still saw those blissfully unaware smiles and heard the giggling laughter in his sleep.

It was doubly hard to deal with because he had really liked Rei and seeing her die in order to protect his worthless hide had been hard enough to deal with, but this…

He shook his head violently in an attempt to dislodge the painful memories from his mind before they replayed themselves again. After regaining a semblance of composure he stumbled off down the corridor and resumed his wandering, desperately hoping that he would soon return to that blissful, zoned out state of mind.

He soon came to the end of the corridor and entered the stairwell to make his way down to the next level. It was a long way between levels, with the stairs criss-crossing back and forth several times as you went down. He could have taken the elevator, but there was less chance of running into someone unexpectedly if he took the stairs.

As he exited onto the next level, he saw Misato entering a door about halfway down the hallway. It wasn't really too much of a shock to see her down here, he knew that she had been up to something for the past few weeks but he wasn't entirely sure what. There had been several nights before he started wandering where he had tried to work up the courage to go and talk to her, to try and break the uneasy silence that had grown between them. However she was always locked away in her room and his resolve would evaporate by the time he got to the door.

Several times he had sat down in the hall next to her door after his failed attempts, disturbed that he couldn't re-establish contact with the one person who had cared about him. He listened to her cry, which only made him feel worse, but he also heard her talking to herself as she hammered away at the keyboard of her computer. He caught enough tidbits to know that she was deeply immersed in trying to find something, but he wasn't sure what it was. Now that he saw her down here he realised that she must be trying to find out what else was hidden in the dark shadows of NERV.

Personally, he had already seen more than enough to last him a couple of lifetimes, that was why he never bothered trying to get into any of the rooms he wandered past. He simply didn't want to know.

He felt his need and desire to talk to her once again crowding his mind. His inability to express his feelings to others meant that he could never tell her how much she really meant to him. She had cared when no one else did. She had known nothing about him, yet she had welcomed him into her home and let him make it his home, something he felt like he had never had before.

True, she was a slob and she drank too much, she was immature, she teased him endlessly, and she paraded around the apartment half naked. But, in the brief moments where he allowed himself to think about it, he realized that he wouldn't have her any other way. He realized that he loved that crazy, troubled, beer soaked woman. She was his guardian and his commanding officer, but she was also just Misato, his friend and quite probably his only lifeline out of this mess his mind and his life had become.

He wasn't stupid, he knew she had problems of her own. Hell, he had come to the conclusion that it was practically a job requirement for NERV employees to be severely messed up in the head. But the weight of their respective troubles had pushed them away from each other, though in his mind he was convinced that he was more to blame for it than she was.

With all of this on his mind, he slowly made his way to the door she had entered, trying to keep up the slim flicker of courage to go and talk to her. He was just stepping across the threshold when he heard her scream.

Misato was so out of it that she didn't even notice when Gendo Ikari walked up to her, reached into her jacket, and removed her pistol from her shoulder holster. He stepped back, keeping the weapon trained on her.

"It seems that you've found something you're having trouble comprehending, Major Katsuragi," he said to her, finally awakening her from her unresponsive state.

"What the hell is this?!" she rasped, still trying to get her breathing under control.

"It is exactly what you fear that it is," he answered simply. He glanced to his right and smirked. "It is rude to eavesdrop, Third Child. Close the door and come over here and join your guardian. Misery does love company after all."

The summons from his father snapped him out of the terrified paralysis he had fallen into when he heard Misato scream. Reluctantly, he obediently entered the lab, closing the door behind him, and shuffled over to his father. His eyes glanced from Gendo, to the gun, then to Misato. He was alarmed that his father was pointing the weapon at her, and he was equally concerned by the distraught look on her face and followed her gaze to the cause of it.

It took a few moments for his already congested mind to focus on what he was seeing inside the tall glass tank. His eyes went wide and all of the air went out of his lungs as his brain finally processed it and recognition struck him. It seemed like yet another important part of his life was turning out to be something other than what he knew it to be.

He staggered backwards, stopped only by the firm grip of his father's hand on his shoulder. Gendo easily steered him towards the control console and guided him down until he was sitting on the floor next to Misato.

The elder Ikari derived no pleasure from their reactions, but he also felt no remorse either. Remorse and regret were things he had no time for and had cast them away a long time ago. They served no purpose other than to distract one from their goals and he was never one to lose focus. Now, with the moment he had worked so long and so hard for drawing ever closer, he had taken care of two possible distractions.

It hadn't been hard to follow Katsuragi's progress as she snooped through the lower levels. There were many hidden cameras and sensors that even the most well trained observer would be hard pressed to find. When he saw her heading towards this particular level, it was a fortuitous bit of luck that he gladly used to his advantage. He ensured that the door to this lab would yield to her card and he used his private express elevator to arrive before her and entered through a concealed door in the back. It also got him out of the more vulnerable levels of Central Dogma, since the JSSDF had been about to launch their attack on the facility as part of SEELE's Instrumentality plan.

The sole object of interest in the long unused lab had rendered the Major virtually harmless, just as he knew that it would. She was paralyzed at the sight, her entire world shaken and turned on its head, effectively negating any threat she had posed to the consummation of his scenario.

While she had posed a threat and needed to be dealt with, the same couldn't be said of the Third Child. He was a broken and used up commodity and was of no consequence. While it mattered very little as to his whereabouts leading up to the culmination of events, it was just as well that his aimless wandering had brought him here. At least he could spend the last dying moments of humanity with someone who actually cared for him.

As for Shinji himself, he felt like someone had wrapped their hand around his heart and had begun to squeeze. Tears were streaming from his eyes as he looked to Misato. She was trembling and silently crying as she just stared lifelessly at the sight before them. He didn't want to look at it again. He didn't want to acknowledge that what he was seeing was real. Somehow though, he felt compelled to look. Not looking wouldn't make it any less real, or confusing, or frightening.

He wanted to run away. Oh god, how he wanted to get up and run away as fast and as far as his legs would carry him. But he knew that he couldn't. The sight of Misato being so broken somehow held him in place. Even the fact that his father was watching over them with a gun pointed in their direction seemed somehow secondary to that. Misato didn't break, that was one thing he had been sure of if nothing else. Even after she found out about Kaji's death, she hadn't broken. She had bent, she had cried and she had grieved, but she got back up and kept going. He was afraid that there wasn't any getting back up this time.

He turned his reluctant gaze back to the subject of their attention, swallowing hard and trying not to come apart at the seams. The tank was filled with a liquid that made him think it was LCL, but it was a lighter shade than normal and he could feel a definite, sharp chill coming off of the vessel. Various tubes and wires snaked through the liquid from above like high tech tentacles, and were attached to a naked human figure floating weightlessly in the centre of the container.

The figure was female and if Shinji had to hazard a guess he would have said she was at least the same age as he was. She was very pretty, with dark hair sweeping down below her shoulders, but it was hard to tell exactly what colour it was through the tint of the fluid. Under other circumstances he would have blushed furiously at seeing the girl's slim body and generous breasts, maybe even launching into nosebleed territory. In actuality, the sight wasn't totally unfamiliar to him, since he had seen it before, along with the long scar that cut across the girl's abdomen. He had just seen an older version of her was all.

"Third Child, meet the real Misato Katsuragi," Gendo said dispassionately to his son. "The woman sitting beside you is a clone of this girl, number thirteen to be exact. She is the culmination of the research that eventually led to the creation of Rei Ayanami and the foundations of the dummy plug system."

"No!" Misato croaked. "It's not true! You're lying!"

"The truth is floating right in front of you Major," he said calmly. "And it is indisputable. Your unwillingness to accept it, does not make it any less so."

With great effort, she managed to regain a small measure of control. "Why?" she asked, her voice unsteady and full of bitterness. "Tell me why."

"It was a matter of convenience," he answered. "We had a need and she," he gestured to the tank, "was an available test subject."

"Just another Second Impact orphan," she seethed. "No family left, no one to miss me. And being in a near catatonic state and unable to speak, I couldn't object."

"Precisely," the Commander agreed. "Despite the illegalities of it, mankind had nevertheless pursued the ability to clone a human being and had successfully done so before Second Impact. SEELE, and NERV's forerunner Gehirn pioneered much of the process, with an eye towards using clones to pilot the Evangelions, either as live pilots or as living remote control units."

"The dummy plug system," she spat in disgust.

"Indeed," he confirmed. "One of the initial problems however, was that we could not wait for the clones to grow to maturity by natural means. We needed the program to be as close to functional as possible before the expected arrival of the Angels."

"You needed to accelerate the growth rate of the clones," Misato guessed logically, her anger helping her focus and start regaining her composure.

"Correct," Gendo affirmed. "Our genetic biologists were the best in their field and they had a workable method that had already yielded promising results in test animals. The problem was in applying that same procedure to a human body. It took another two years and eight attempts before they were able to perfect the accelerated growth of a human clone."

"But clones don't have a soul," Misato said, shivering as she remembered what Ritsuko had shown and told them. "Rei's clones…"

"Were little more than animated dolls," Gendo finished dispassionately. "Spare parts that on their own were useless. The lessons that were learned through your predecessors also allowed our scientists to work out the final problems in acquiring a soul from a living being and implanting it into a soulless body. It also gave excellent results in the transference of intact memories from one clone to it's replacement, or the burying of selected memories so deeply into the mind that they might never resurface."

"That's why Rei didn't remember anything," Shinji mumbled.

"So how much of my memory did you bury?" Misato asked accusingly, her fire now beginning to return to her.

"All your memories of visits by medical personnel associated with the project were suppressed," Gendo answered. "As were all memories pertaining to any location outside of the mental hospital you were admitted to after Second Impact, up until the time you were released."

"Why didn't you just put my soul back into its original body?" she asked accusingly. "Why not just erase all of my memories from Second Impact on and send me off to an orphanage somewhere, where I would be out of sight and out of mind?"

"There were three main reasons," the Commander began. "The first being the remote and unacceptable possibility that the memories would resurface, which coincided with the second reason. Your whole life from that point on was a case study to gauge the long term effects of the process. You have been under constant observation ever since."

"And what was the third reason?" she asked, her voice taking on a cold, hard edge.

"The third reason is the most important." He very nearly smiled. "It was because I had a use for you. I used your desire for revenge against the Angels to turn you into what you became. A skilled tactical commander who would willingly and repeatedly send children into battle, no matter how much it hurt them or how much it hurt you to do so. You performed your duties beyond all expectations, Number Thirteen."

"You bastard!" she screamed, lurching to her feet in order to attack him. She didn't get far. He fired her confiscated pistol, the round slamming into her left shoulder and sending her crashing against the guardrail and sliding to the floor in a world of searing pain.

"The end is coming soon enough Major," he told her, his voice still calm and emotionless. "Do not hasten your end anymore than is necessary."

Shinji was frozen in place, unable to move. The sound of the gunshot had made him jump, but he was too overwhelmed by everything his father had just told them to move on his own. Even as the woman he cared so much about writhed in agony on the cold cement, he could do little more than stare at her in disbelief.

She was a clone. Number Thirteen. The words kept echoing across his mind like some horrific recording that was caught in a loop and he couldn't make it stop. Finding out about Rei had been like a shot to the gut, but this was a hammer blow to his heart. The rational part of his brain told him that it didn't matter. She may be a clone, but she was still the Misato he had always known. She hadn't changed. She hadn't had her soul put into another copy of herself and her memories hadn't been suppressed. She was still the same.

But the not so rational part of his mind was in panic mode and on the verge of overload. He had seen, heard, and experienced far too much. Evangelions. Angels. Clones. Murder. Betrayal. Death. The crushing responsibility of saving humanity sitting upon his small shoulders. None of these were things that a fourteen year old should ever have to worry about.

He lowered his head into his trembling hands, his fingers digging into his scalp as if they were trying to worm their way through his skull and into his brain. His heart was pounding in his chest like a jackhammer and his breath was coming in short, shuddering gasps. Hot tears rolled down his face, and he wanted to scream, but his voice wouldn't work. The last anchor holding him in place was gone and he just wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear.

His breakdown was interrupted and put on hold by a horrendous, thundering boom that made the entire base shake, even this far down. It felt and sounded like the world was coming to an end.

"It seems they're getting impatient," Gendo muttered before turning his attention back to his audience. The time was almost at hand. "Both of you have played out your assigned roles and are no longer necessary," he calmly informed them. "In a manner of minutes all life on this world will end and mankind's suffering will end with it. I will finally be reunited with my Yui."

"What are you talking about?" Misato's pain ragged voice rasped as she tried to pull herself up into a sitting position.

"I am talking about Third Impact, Number Thirteen," he answered, the words chilling her to the bone. "The end of all life on this miserable world, brought about and directed by human hands, not Angels. The ultimate goal of our entire battle to defeat the Children of Adam. I will enact my version of SEELE's Instrumentality Project. There is nothing that you or anyone else can do to stop it now."

His words were his last cruel act, spoken for no other reason than to let her know that she had failed to uncover the truth she had so desperately sought. And he had no intention of explaining to them what the end entailed. He had neither the time nor the inclination to do so.

"You both performed the roles I set for you quite well," he added as he turned and began walking to the hidden exit in the back of the lab, his voice fading in the distance. "This moment could not have arrived otherwise."

"I'm so fucking glad I could help!" Misato spat. The only response she got was the sound of a door opening and closing and a heavy lock bolt sliding into place.

She reached up and grabbed the top of the safety rail and finished pulling herself upright. She leaned her head back against the cold steel and fought off a wave of pain and nausea. Silent tears began to roll down her face once again.

Her mind was filled with confusion and chaos as long suppressed memories began to flash in and out of clarity. She had glimpses of a containment vessel like the one her true self currently floated in, only the view was from the inside looking out. There were white coated scientists taking notes and working at computers. She could remember the feel of the tubes that fed her body and carried away waste, and the electronic leads that had been attached to her head and various other parts of her body to monitor her progress.

The strange thing was that there was no emotional attachment to these recollections, they were just 'there', but she soon realized that they must be latent memories from events that had happened before her current body received the soul.

'Number Thirteen,' she thought bitterly. 'I'm nothing but a number, a tool.'

She tightly squeezed her eyes shut and tried to push the memories away, but they were stubborn and didn't want to go. She forced her injured left arm to move, the searing pain from the gunshot wound flaring anew and burning the unwanted memories out of her conscious mind. She bit her lip until it bled, trying to keep herself from voicing the pain she was in. As it began to ebb, she worked at catching her breath and settling her mind.

What she was, was different from who she was, and who she was hadn't changed with the knowledge that she was a clone. She was still Misato Katsuragi, survivor of Second Impact, Director of Operations for NERV, and guardian of Asuka Langley Sohryu and Shinji Ikari. Despite the mind numbing revelation she had just experienced about herself, she could not lose sight of that. She was who she was, and she had to hang onto that for not just her own sanity, but for that of the broken young man sitting across from her.

Shinji really didn't know what to do, so he did what was always so disturbingly natural for him. He did nothing, and nearly suffocated on his shame because of it. How could he be so weak? Successful or not, Misato had always tried to be there for him and there she sat, devastated and in pain for the second time in the last few weeks and he couldn't even do as little as speak to her. Even if he could, what would he say? What do you say to someone who just had their life turned inside out? How do you offer them comfort when they were just hit with something so unbelievable?

Besides that, there was the truth that his father had been working towards Third Impact all along. All they had been doing was fighting for who got to initiate and control the end of the world. He was the son of a man who wanted to destroy humankind and he was ashamed of that association. It left him with a rather sick and disgusted feeling.

"So I'm a lab experiment huh?" she mused tiredly, breaking the silence as she glanced over her shoulder to regard the inert form in the tank. "I suppose I could take the easy way out and blame all of my bad behaviour on that."

The attempt at humour did nothing to lessen the flow of tears still silently trailing down both of their faces. The truth was, at this point she didn't really know whether to laugh or cry at the farce her life had turned out to be. At least it wouldn't last much longer, and for Shinji's sake she could bluff for that long.

"Shinji," she called out, her voice as gentle as she could make it. His gaze remained glued to the floor in between them. "Look at me Shinji…please."

Slowly, his head came up and his eyes eventually met hers, though they had a lost and empty look in them. He looked so scared and so alone, like he had nothing left in the world.

"I'm still me Shinji," she told him with as much reassurance as she could, though she wasn't sure if she really believed it herself. "I'm still the same Misato you know, I'm just not the one I thought I was."

His eyes seemed to finally come into focus. "It was all for nothing," he said quietly. "All of the pain. Touji, Kaworu, Asuka and Rei…all that we've been through was for nothing."

"Depends what side you look at it from," she sighed. "And from where we're sitting, yeah, it seems like it was all pretty pointless. Beat the angels or not, we lose either way, but I guess none of us really had any choice."

"I've been thinking a lot lately that I wouldn't mind dying," he admitted to her, his voice shaky. "Sometimes I even felt like I deserved it. I thought that it would be alright because it wouldn't hurt anymore. But now that I know it's coming…I don't know."

"I'm not ready to die," she responded, a hint of defiance in her voice. "And I don't want to either. Okay, I'm a clone. I can't do anything about that. And I don't know now if my motivations were my own or if everything I've done for the last fourteen years were things that I was conditioned to do or to believe. In any case, I've made a ton of mistakes and done a hell of a lot of things that I regret."

She used the safety rail to pull herself up to her feet. Loss of blood was making her a little woozy and she wasn't very steady, but she was determined.

"But in spite of all of that, it was still my life and I lived it. I'm not giving it up that easy. I'm not gonna sit here on my ass and cry about it and wait for death to come and find me. If it wants me, it can come and get me while I'm on my feet and looking for that bearded bastard with the tacky orange glasses."

Shinji admired Misato's spirit, he always had. She had just been told that she was a clone and that the world was about to end, revelations that were crushing what little life was left in him, but she wasn't going to give up and quietly accept it. She wanted to go down fighting and he wished he had it in him to do the same.

"So whaddaya say Shinji?" she asked him, a small smile finally gracing her lips. "You with me?"

"I…I don't think I can," he stuttered, his voice barely audible. "I…

"Then you're not my Shinji," she said flatly.

"W-What?" Her words had caught him completely off guard.

"My Shinji always kept fighting even though it hurt him and he was scared. He knew it was the right thing to do and he fought to protect the people he cared about."

"I'm not that strong Misato, I'm weak and I'm a coward…."

"Bullshit!" she barked more sharply than she intended, making him flinch. She softened her voice. "You are not a coward Shinji, and you never were. You did what needed to be done because you were the only one who could. Believe me, if I could have piloted the Eva and saved you all of this pain, I would have, and I've wished a hundred times that I could have. Give yourself a little credit, you're a lot braver and a lot stronger than you think you are."

"I wish I could believe that," he said, finally raising his head to look at her.

She looked into his watery blue eyes. "You should believe it, because it's the truth. I've always felt that way Shinji," she admitted.

"You have?"

She nodded. "I just wish I'd said it before. I know I've been a poor guardian. I'm immature, a lazy slob, and I drink too much. I wasn't there for you when you needed me and you certainly took much better care of me than I ever did of you and I'm sorry for that. You made my apartment seem like a real home and you chased away some of the loneliness. And I used you to get my revenge, which makes me a pretty rotten person. But, despite all of my faults, you've stayed with me. You're the only one who hasn't left me or said you hated me."

He sniffled, his tears finally starting to subside. "I could never say that to you Misato. You're the only person who's cared about me since my Mom died. You're not rotten and I could never hate you and I wouldn't leave you."

She reached out and smoothed his ruffled hair. "Thank you Shinji," she said sincerely. "You know, I wanted so much to help you come out of that shell you live in and be more confident about yourself and have a little fun, like a boy your age should." She gave him one of her mischievously evil smiles and winked at him. "Heck, it's too bad I wasn't your age, we could have had lots of fun together."

"M-Misato!" he squeaked as his cheeks turned red.

Smile still in place, she offered him her hand. "So how about it Shinji? This is the last chance you'll have to show the world who you are and what you're made of. Leave all of your pain and self hatred here and walk out of this life with me, with your head up and a smile on your face."

Her desire to live in spite of the knowledge that their lives would soon be over was a powerful thing and it seemed to take hold of him. Despite all of the pain and loss and loneliness that had made up so much of his life, and despite knowing that their lives were about to come to an end, he found that, for once, he didn't feel like he wanted to run away. It was a very odd feeling for him, yet very satisfying. Besides, he could think of much worse ways to leave this life than to be walking hand in hand with Misato Katsuragi.

He wiped away his tears and took her shaking right hand in his trembling left and got to his feet. As they turned and began to slowly walk towards the door, she intertwined her fingers with his and gave his hand a gentle squeeze.

"I don't know if there's an afterlife Shinji," she began. "But if there is I hope we get to go there together."

"Me too," he agreed.

They were silent again for a moment before she spoke up once more. "You know, it's too bad that I didn't know about being a clone long before this."

"Why?" he asked, a bit puzzled.

"Well, if I had known that this body was only fourteen years old I would have jumped your bones long ago."

His face turned red enough to practically light up the room. "…M-Misato!"

"What? Technically it would have been legal…I think."

While he was rendered speechless as his already overworked brain processed this, she bent down and planted a brief, but heartfelt kiss on his lips.

"Just a little something to remember me by."

They suddenly felt a tingling sensation that made the hairs stand up on the backs of their necks, and they both felt as if there was a powerful presence in the room with them.

She squeezed his hand again as they resumed walking. It took a great deal of effort to keep the fearful waver out of her voice. "Don't look back Shinji. Keep going forward."

"O-okay," he said as he squeezed her hand back.

Behind them, an apparition of Rei Ayanami displayed the briefest of genuine smiles before fulfilling her duty. There was a barely audible pop and a splash as their bodies turned to LCL and hit the floor, becoming one amongst a pile of empty clothes. The apparition turned to the containment tank and performed the same duty for the body residing within before promptly disappearing.

A/N: I hope you liked this and I am looking forward to your comments. Your reviews and PM's could go a long way towards the developement of Chapter 2.

I have some work done on it, but that doesn't mean what I have will be what see's the light of day in the end. It could be fluff, or there could be something else entirely. I need to brainstorm it a little more an develop a list of possibilities to choose and work from.

No matter how it turns out, or what it turns out to be, it will get done. I will never leave a story incomplete or leave it hanging.

And since you're hanging around here, why not check out my other work. You know how to find it.