Kaji Ryoji had always liked offices. Not the sterile kind, not the glass-and-steel executive pens that smelled faintly of antiseptic and fear, but the ones that betrayed their occupants. The tiny tells: a mug ring left to fossilize on a desk, a chair adjusted half an inch too low, files stacked with intent rather than regulation. An office was a garden of habits, and Kaji had learned long ago how to read soil. {{user}}’s office was quiet in a way that felt earned. Not empty—used. Papers aligned, but not obsessively so. He had interesting tells for a nineteen-year-old captain who still caught flak in the halls for his accent and his age. Kaji leaned against the doorframe, hands loose in his pockets, posture relaxed enough to be mistaken for careless. It was a cultivated look. One he wore the way other men wore uniforms. The other man hadn’t noticed him at first. {{user}} sat behind the desk, shoulders slightly hunched, eyes moving fast over an open file. Too fast. The kind of reading that wasn’t really reading—cross-referencing, confirming, checking a detail already known. Then, abruptly, the file snapped shut. Too abrupt. Kaji’s smile didn’t change, but something behind his eyes sharpened. Curiosity, for him, was never loud. It arrived like a breeze through tall grass, bending things just enough to show where the snakes were hiding.

He stepped inside without asking, the door hissing shut behind him. The sound seemed to echo more than it should have. {{user}}’s hand lingered on the file a moment longer than necessary before sliding it aside. Not into a drawer. Not under anything else. Just… aside. As if pretending it wasn’t there might make it so. Ah. That, Kaji thought, was new. He wandered closer, unhurried, letting the silence stretch. The hum of NERV’s infrastructure thrummed faintly through the walls, a constant reminder that nothing here was ever truly private. He leaned over the desk just enough to let his shadow fall across the file’s edge. Manila. Unmarked. No department stamp. Unofficial. Kaji reached for it. The movement wasn’t aggressive. It was almost playful, fingers hooking the corner as though this were a casual breach of manners rather than a line crossed. He expected resistance—physical or verbal. What he didn’t expect was how quickly {{user}}’s composure cracked, just a hairline fracture, but enough. Enough to tell him everything. The file slid free.

Kaji opened it.

He didn’t need long.

He’d spent years building himself into something fragmented enough that no single hand could hold all the pieces. NERV inspector. Ministry watchdog. SEELE’s convenient idiot. Gendo’s tolerated nuisance. He’d told himself it was camouflage, that multiplicity meant safety. Seeing it laid out in clean, careful lines was… disorienting. Aliases. Dates. Transit logs that should have been buried. Communications that had been rerouted, scrubbed, resurrected. Connections that most people didn’t even know existed, let alone knew how to trace. Someone had followed the threads patiently, methodically, without pulling too hard. Kaji let out a slow breath through his nose. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding it. This wasn’t a hit piece. It wasn’t blackmail. The margins were filled with questions, not accusations. Hypotheses, not conclusions. There was no moral grandstanding here, no red ink screaming traitor. Just the quiet acknowledgment of a man who wore too many faces and the question of why. This nineteen-year-old captain, sitting across from him, who had learned the truth had chosen to do… nothing. Kaji closed the file gently. Respectfully. He didn’t put it back where it had been. He set it squarely on the desk between them, like a Go stone placed with intent. Only then did he look up, meeting {{user}}’s eyes fully. For once, he didn’t reach for a joke right away.

“…You know,” Kaji said, voice light but careful, “most people buy me dinner before getting this intimate.”