Creation began on 05-20-13
Creation ended on 06-14-13
Neon Genesis Evangelion
An Unwanted Child
A/N: A child unwanted is a child without any hope. But when people say such things to children themselves, who knows what will go through their minds as they are shattered.
"AAAAAAAHHH!" A woman screamed, just as other people on the sidewalks took notice of the scene that had just occurred.
A boy, no older than four or five years, lying on the ground in a growing puddle of blood; he'd been struck by a car.
"Someone call the doctor!" A man yelled to the people, as the driver panicked over what happened.
"I didn't see him," she confessed; it was true that she hadn't seen him, for he had just appeared out of nowhere, and she unintentionally struck him with her car.
The boy, with dark hair and brownish-black eyes, coughed out some blood that pooled in his mouth and uttered, "Are you happy now? Are you…happy…now?"
He then passed out before paramedics arrived.
-x-
"…Are you two his parents?" A doctor asked a man and a woman.
"No," the woman answered. "We're his aunt and uncle. How is he?"
"I'm sorry," the doctor confessed. "He didn't make it."
-x-
They listed the cause of death as another auto-related incident, leaving the victim with internal bleeding, broken ribs, a broken left arm and right leg. The driver wasn't charged with anything, as the boy's guardians considered what happened as an accident, and a small funeral was held. Not much was said, for no one really knew the boy, and only one fact was ever shared between the people that showed up to watch him be buried six feet under: He was Shinji Ikari, the only son and child of Yui and Gendo Ikari, and was not looked upon with bright smiles. And when the day ended, a freshly-filled grave with a tombstone marked 'Shinji Ikari Two-Thousand-One-Two-Thousand-Five' was left abandoned, without even a single rose to decorate it or symbolize any affection for a child whose life had been ended.
-x-
"Are you happy now?" The boy's voice echoed in the woman's mind, as she cleared out the little room that used to be Shinji's. "Are you happy now?"
Kana Ikari, the elder sister of Yui Ikari, couldn't be any happier to not answer that question the boy died asking. In her mind, the people to blame for the misfortune she had been burdened with were her sister and brother-in-law. She had her own life to contend with, with her own son and husband, not wanting any additional weight on her heart. But then her sister died in a science accident…and Gendo dumped his son on their doorstep, leaving before they could tell him that they didn't want anything to do with the boy. Yes, in her mind, they were to blame, for bringing him here and thinking that they, she and her family, would take care of their kid.
Cleaning up the room was a simple task, as all Shinji had was just his cloths and two stuffed animals, all of which was to be disposed of now.
At least he's back with the gods now, she thought, sealing the large box up. Back where he belongs.
-x-
SMASH! Gendo, once he found out, in the summer of Twenty-Fifteen, that his son had died ten years ago in an auto-related incident, threw a fit and trashed his computer. Ten years in a week from now that would mark the anniversary of his death, as he had received the information of his death when he requested the whereabouts of the supposed-to-be Third Child of NERV. He wasn't prepared for this at all, as Rei Ayanami was in no condition to pilot Unit-01 after the incident with Unit-00's activation test resulted in serious injuries.
How could this have happened?! He wondered. How?!
Outside his office, the Sub-Commander of NERV, Kozo Fuyutsuki, having looked at a copy of the report of the Third Child's death, wondered why there was no mention of said death beforehand as he walked away down the hall.
"Are you happy now?" He read what was listed as Shinji's last words before he succumbed to death. Why would he ask a question like that? And to whom was he asking it to?
Also, the head of the Evangelion project, Ritsuko Akagi, hearing about the boy's death because his file was accessed through the MAGI and spreading like wildfire throughout NERV HQ, wondered the same thing herself. She had been building up the data necessary for the Third Child to pilot the Eva, but once she found out that he had been dead for a decade, she put the in-progress data away, as it was now useless if the person it was meant for was gone.
Why was there no word of his death right after he died? She wondered, as, surely, all relatives of the boy would've been notified.
-x-
RING-RING-RING! The phone in the kitchen rung and a fourteen-year-old boy picked up.
"Ikari residence, Aki speaking," said the boy to whoever was calling.
"Is there a Kana or Ryuhou Ikari there?" A man questioned the boy. "This is Gendo Ikari."
The boy tensed up before calling out to his mother.
"Mom! That man is calling us!" He yelled out, and his mother came in from outside in the garden.
"Hello?" Kana uttered out. "We don't want to talk about him. Don't call this number, anymore."
She hung up and instructed Aki not to answer the phone for the rest of the day before she went back out into the garden to finish planting new flowers.
-x-
Gendo hung up his phone and knew something was amiss. He had left his son with them a few weeks after Yui was killed in the Unit-01 Contact Experiment, and his wife's sister just up and said that her family didn't want to talk about how Shinji died.
"Hey, now, wait a minute, Gendo…" He recalled Ryuhou saying before he drove off back to Tokyo-3.
All he ever asked of them was to look after his son, and when word of his death reached him, he tries to find out what really happened, and his wife's sister hangs up on him and tells him to never call them again, not wanting to discuss Shinji Ikari. To him, this meant that they knew something and they didn't want to talk about it with him.
-x-
"…He called here?" Ryuhou questioned his wife.
"He wanted to know about why he wasn't informed about his son's death," Kana explained.
"I thought we put the incident behind us. The town's put it behind them."
"We did, Ryuhou. Gendo didn't."
Ryuhou finished drinking the rest of his beer can and dumped it into the recycling bin. He hated the fact that Gendo believed he could just ask them to look after his son and drive off before they could give him their answer of refusal. They didn't want anything to do with his son and made it very clear to Shinji himself that he wasn't welcome in their home.
"I don't want him here," he remembered telling his wife how he felt about his nephew.
"I don't want him here, either," she confessed. "I always knew my sister was trouble, but her family are greater trouble. Who does her husband think he is, thinking he can just dump his kid on our doorstep and expect us to take care of him? We're better off without him in our lives. I wish he would just leave."
In one way or another, husband and wife viewed Shinji's death as a blessing, since it relieved them of him. And Shinji wasn't somebody they were going to miss at all. Even when people came to pay respects for their loss, they treated it not as a loss at all. And if given a do-over, they wouldn't hesitate to cast him aside a second time.
"Are you happy now?" They recalled his last words.
In a great sense, they were happy. They were happy to be rid of him.
-x-
"…So, now what, Ikari?" Kozo asked Gendo, the day before the Third Angel was scheduled to arrive and make itself known to the world.
"We'll have to use Rei until we can find a replacement pilot," he answered, though looking at the scattered papers of the report on his son's death. "It seems like a suicide rather than a car accident."
"Hmm?" Kozo responded, wondering why Gendo was going over the report on his son's death. "I suppose they wouldn't talk about it?"
"That's not your concern."
-x-
Ring-ring-ring! Ryuhou awoke to the sound of the phone ringing, and answered it.
"Hello?" He went.
"I want to know what happened to Shinji the day he died," he recognized Gendo's voice anywhere, and was immediately enraged by a question like that.
"I don't want to talk about it," he told him, and then hung up, returning back to sleep.
Ring-ring-ring! The phone rung again, forcing him to answer.
"Yes?"
"I demand an explanation for what caused his death," he heard Gendo tell him.
"We've put him behind us, Gendo," Ryuhou told him. "If you wanna blame somebody, blame yourself. You landed him with us and left before we could tell you that we didn't want him. Don't call us again."
He hung up again and returned to sleep.
"Was that him again?" Kana asked in her sleep.
"Un-huh."
"Idiot."
"Yep."
Ring-ring-ring! The phone rung again, and an angry Ryuhou picked up.
"I just told you not to call us again!" He yelled through the receiver.
"Are you happy now?" A little boy's voice responded to him. "Are you…happy now?"
It sounded just like Shinji the day he died, and then the call disconnected.
"Oh, God," he gasped.
-x-
The arrival of the Third Angel wasn't deterred one bit. Military might was no match against the power of a creature that possessed the glory of immortality and adaptation. Explosions were more like beanbags against its body, but the wrath of an object that seemed to burn with the might of the sun itself caused considerable injury to every inch of it that it even had to grow a new face to cope with the injury it received to its original one that was pushed aside. It punished all that opposed it from reaching its destination with pain and death. Nothing was going to stop it from reaching its goal. Absolutely nothing was going to stop it.
-x-
"…Are you ready, Rei?" Misato asked the albino girl in the cockpit of Unit-01.
Although injured, Rei responded, "Yes."
A second afterward, she saw something within the plug with her: A little boy, no older than four or five years, looking like he'd been dealt a fatal hand in his life; his dark hair glistened with blood and two of his limbs were mangled. And then, he was gone. She didn't give any indication of it, whatsoever, but the sight of the boy had left her feeling disturbed.
"Launch!" Misato ordered in Central Dogma, and the purple behemoth was shot up to defend the city that was Tokyo-3 from the Angel.
-x-
The damage to the city was, while extreme, very minor. Only a few dozen buildings were totaled and the loss of life was below two-hundred. The defeat of the Third Angel was never expected to be without consequences, and one of the consequences that was dealt to NERV was the safety of the First Child, who received greater injuries than she had from the Unit-00 incident. A broken arm and leg, two broken ribs, severe eye trauma, and internal bleeding to her liver and spleen.
"…This is awful," went Misato to Ritsuko, as they were observing the destruction to the city from above in a VTOL aircraft.
"It'll be about three months before reconstruction can begin," the faux-blond informed her.
Back at NERV HQ, Gendo, after finishing a meeting with his superiors that funded the paramilitary agency he controlled, attempted to call his in-laws again from his office, only to find that the number to their house had been changed. He was convinced that the death of the boy was suicide, but wanted to know what had instigated the choice for him to take his own life. His plan once the Angels were dealt with involved his son as a pawn in his scenario, but now that plan had to be altered because of this revelation of death. All he could suspect is that his in-laws had something to do with it.
"You landed him with us and left before we could tell you that we didn't want him," Ryuhou's words echoed in his mind.
"We don't want to talk about him," Yui's sister had told him before hanging up on him.
Yui and Kana had never been close sisters to begin with, so Kana had a natural disgust with her and wanted nothing to do with her once she left home, and that included her side of their family. When their mother passed away, Kana was left with a larger inheritance from her than Yui was, which, in itself, helped to show that their mother favored her more than Yui…mostly because Kana had two different careers as a botanist and a chef for some lower-class restaurant…and wasn't so obsessed with trying to change the world, while Yui became a scientist specializing in genetic engineering, which their mother perceived as trying to play God. Gendo could've suspected that Kana forced Shinji to kill himself, but he had no proof of this at all, or maybe Ryuhou had a hand in it, but he couldn't prove that, either. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, he knew they were responsible for the suicide and put the boy's demise behind them in favor of their own son.
-x-
"…Hmm?" Aki piped up, noticing a set of dirty footprints outside his family's house when he came outside. "Mom?"
Kana showed up behind him and saw the prints.
"Was there anybody here earlier?" He asked his mother.
"No," she answered him, looking up from the prints and up ahead to the sidewalk. "Oh!"
For a brief moment, like an illusion or phantom, she saw a little boy that bore an uncanny resemblance to the deceased Shinji, standing on the gate, looking at them (or her), blood pouring from the sides of his mouth and his broken arm raising up to give a wave. Then, he was gone, and Kana realized that the footprints were the size of a child's. She quickly took her son back inside and closed the door.
-x-
The people at NERV HQ were stunned by the sight in front of them! It was like some sort of joke or a prank! There was dirt and reddish-black streaks and stains on the floor, walls and ceiling of nearly every hallway, restroom, office and medical suite. Some of the dirt was in the shape of footprints while the red streaks and stains were in the form of large words that had been smeared, seemingly by hand. "Are you happy now?" was what was written all over the place.
"Who the Hell did this?" Misato questioned, touching the writing on the walls, and discovering that it was written in blood. "I think I'm gonna be sick."
The cleanup was extensive, as was the tracing of who the blood belonged to and why it was written everywhere. But the orders to deal with it came from Gendo, who found his office, despite the fact that the door was locked from the inside, had the most dirt and blood in it than the rest of the base, with bloody hand prints on the windows in addition to the footprints and writing. Security cameras were looked at, but nothing was shown to have written or left anything unusual.
"What do you think, Maya?" Makoto asked his fellow Bridge Bunny. "A ghost, maybe?"
"Yeah, right," she responded. "That's insane."
"Well, how else do you explain the prints and bloody writing?"
"Maybe somebody playing a joke on everyone."
"The videotapes were looked at, and nobody saw anything that left all that mess," said Shigeru to them.
Meanwhile, Ritsuko had just gotten the results from the tests on the blood and was puzzled (and frightened) by what she had discovered, and rushed over to Commander Ikari's office.
"…So, how is Rei?" Fuyutsuki asked Gendo, trying to forget about the dirty prints and bloody messages that were left around his office as if they were left by a child that either didn't know any better or had thrown a tantrum.
"She'll be able to work again in forty days, by that time, the Second Child will have arrived along with Unit-02, and we'll have found the Fourth Child," Gendo informed him, his voice as hollow as it always had been.
The door to his office opened up and Ritsuko came in, tight-lipped and tense about something.
"The results came in," she told them, "and they don't add up."
"What do you mean?" Kozo asked her.
"The blood was traced to one person, but this is what doesn't add up: This blood shouldn't exist anywhere because the owner can't produce any more." She explained, and set the folder down on Gendo's desk. "It was traced to Shinji Ikari."
The only photograph of the dead boy right in front of them, with a saddened face, caused more questions than those that had answers for them. While Gendo and Ritsuko, more or less, viewed everything with logic, Kozo, due to his years of being around people that lived their lives through comics and movies, accepted that there could've been one explanation that couldn't be explained through science. He believed that there were forces beyond the rational and logical.
"We'll need to find out what is going on," Gendo told them, though he meant that getting the details of his son's death from the last people he was with.
Kozo decided to be a little sarcastic and uttered, "We might as well be chasing a ghost."
Ritsuko had never known Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki to be sarcastic and wondered if he was being serious about the ghost part. There was no such thing as ghosts.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!" They heard a scream outside.
-x-
People were starting to talk outside their house. Something about dirty hand and footprints on the sidewalks and bloody messages on cars and building windows. This was making Kana and Ryuhou Ikari edgy about what they experienced separately. Now, they were saying things about a kid appearing and disappearing in places and actually leaving these messes and messages around the town.
"…Hearing from several residents," said a news reporter, "the police have been able to sketch a detailed photograph of this so-called phantom child leaving dirt and blood behind."
The television then showed a picture of the child in question, and Aki, who was watching the news, went wide-eyed! The child looked exactly like Shinji, after he died.
"Mom!" He called out to his mother, and she and Ryuhou came into the living room and saw the sketch. "Tell me that's not who I think it is."
CRASH! Kana had dropped her mug of tea and shook from fear.
"So far, every message left has all been the same one: 'Are you happy now?'. Police suspect that these messages are being directed at somebody, but it's anyone's guess on who these messages are being directed toward." The reporter continued.
Ryuhou turned off the TV and sat on the sofa.
"He's… He's haunting us, isn't he?" Aki asked his parents.
"It can't be him," Kana expressed. "I saw him die that day. We were there when it happened."
"We were there the day he got buried, too," Ryuhou added.
"He's haunting us," Aki said it straight. "He's haunting us because of what we did to him to make him do what he did to himself, and now he wants revenge on us for forgetting about him."
The three were silent for the rest of the afternoon. None of them were able to ascertain why who they believed was Shinji's ghost had come back from beyond the grave and started leaving these messages all over the town and seemed set on possibly harming them. The only person that could even tell them why…was the very person whose heart stopped beating over ten years ago.
-x-
"…That's him! That's him!" Maya Ibuki gasped, having seen an apparition of Shinji Ikari leaving another bloody message on the walls, and confirmed his existence on a picture of him as a child. "But he looked different: He looked like some sort of zombie or revenant. He waved at me before jumping up and disappearing, like a slow-motion movie stunt."
The message, like the last ones, was "Are you happy now?", which was confusing to the whole of NERV HQ. They didn't know what it meant.
"Did he say anything before disappearing?" Ritsuko asked her.
"Nothing," she answered. "He didn't look like he was in a talkative mood at all."
"Okay, I'm convinced that we're dealing with a ghost," said Makoto to Shigeru.
"A ghost that has an agenda…or a ghost that's malevolent?" He asked him.
"Whichever one makes more sense."
It made no sense to even consider putting the base on lock-down, as a ghost wasn't bound by mortal limitations like people were, so Gendo made no attempt to even try such. Not even when he left his office over an hour ago to monitor Unit-01's repairs, and returned to his office to find the same message written in blood on the windows again.
"I have no time to waste on a child," he muttered.
SLAM! The door behind him suddenly slammed shut, and a cold breeze crept into the office, forcing Gendo to zip up his jacket to retain heat. The windows became foggy and the emotionless man saw something that wasn't logical. A hand print forming on the glass beneath the writing…and them a smearing as it moved along the writing.
Gendo could see his own breath as the air became colder, just as the hand that was smearing the glass became visible to him, along with the owner.
"Are you happy now?" The disembodied voice of the dead child asked him, looking at him while his feet were a few inches above the floor. "Are you happy now?"
Gendo, demonstrating the first actual degree of emotion ever since he abandoned his son, which was the emotion of fear, ran to his door and tried to open it, only to discover it wouldn't budge from where it closed, and the locking system wasn't even on. He turned to face the dead boy, seeing that he was now standing on the ceiling, upside-down, looking at him.
"Are you happy now?" He asked him again, like a broken tune. "Are you?"
Then, Shinji's ghost disappeared from off the ceiling…and reappeared on wall on the right side of the office, standing sideways now, with blood dripping from his neck onto the floor.
Gendo still tried to open the door, worried if the boy was going to attempt to approach him. His fears were answered as the ghost then walked along the wall, his expression unchanged and the blood trailing behind him and now showing on the wall beneath his shoes.
"Aah… Aaaahh!" Gendo screamed, now reduced to slamming on the door. "Somebody out there! Help! Help! Open the door!"
Shinji raised his left arm, the bone jutting out from beneath the skin, having gotten with touching distance of Gendo, and almost touched him had his father not jump away from the door and into the middle of the room.
"Get away from me!" He told the ghost, brandishing a gun now.
"Are you?" Shinji continued, appearing now on the floor in front of him. "Are you?"
BANG! Gendo fired at him and tried to scare him away, but was terrified to see that the bullet hole right next to the boy's right leg hadn't made him so much as flinch.
"Are you happy now?" Shinji asked again, his voice sounding heavier and full of malice. "Are you?!"
The air became so cold that ice was forming on the windows and desk. It was even forming on Gendo's jacket, too.
BANG, BANG, BANG! He fired three more times, this time at the boy, but he might as well have been shooting the floor or wall because they passed right through him, not even leaving bullet holes.
Shinji levitated off the floor and floated toward him, causing Gendo to back up against the desk.
"Are you happy now?!" He asked again, yelling at his father. "Are you happy now?!"
Click! The door opened and a security guard came in.
"Commander Ikari, sir?" He asked Gendo, who was left by himself the very instant the door opened, and his office, all save for the bloody messages and melted ice on his desk, was untouched.
Gendo set his gun down and took a moment to regain his composure, but found that to be difficult due to the sight of the bullet holes on the floor and wall, proof that he hadn't hallucinated in the few minutes that involved the ghost of his dead son. It would be a long half-hour before he made an attempt to speak again.
-x-
The next day, Kana awoke to see that her dead nephew had made his presence known in her home: Shinji had left his bloody messages on the walls and his dirty prints on the carpet and ceiling. She and her husband knew this was getting out of hand now. It was like the more they tried to ignore the fact that a dead child they didn't want in their lives when he was alive, the bigger this ghost's attempts to get their attention became.
"Ryuhou," she sighed and spoke to her husband, who came out of the bedroom behind her and saw the large mess.
"Yes, dear?" He responded.
"I think we should talk to Gendo," she expressed.
"For once…I'm willing to put up speaking with him if it means ending this."
The door to their son's room opened and Aki stepped out, his pajamas covered in dirt and blood.
"He came to me in a dream and I saw him get run over, just like he did years ago," he told them. "And then he pushed me into his grave, asking if dying makes people happy. He even went so far as to wonder if my death will make you two happy for not answering his question before he died."
Kana and Ryuhou were left fearing for their son's safety now. It seemed as though the ghost was making a major threat to them for what they did to him before he made the choice that ended him.
"Okay, we really need to talk with Gendo," Ryuhou expressed, wanting to prevent something awful from happening to his son.
-x-
Gendo's meeting with the Instrumentality Committee was an unexpected waste of time for him. Especially since they found out about NERV's visiting ghost child. They were concerned over the possibility of this ghost affecting their scenario or possibly much worse. But Gendo told them that he had high doubts that this ghost was even aware or interested in the scenario, as children had short attention spans, and that this ghost was, from his point of view, only interested in him. It was only after the meeting was over that he received a call from his in-laws.
"…You said you wanted to know what happened to Shinji before his death," he heard Ryuhou tell him, "so we'll talk about it. Set the time and place."
"The cemetery outside of Tokyo-3, tomorrow at three," he told his in-law.
"We'll be there."
With that taken care of, Gendo was to ponder what this ghost boy was after, what he wanted, whatever his agenda was…if he even had an agenda beyond what he was doing to them. While he doubted the ghost was interested in the scenarios he and SEELE possessed, he wasn't so sure if the boy's motive for showing up involved homicide, as he hadn't killed anyone just yet. But he was certain that the ghost had decided to make an attempt on his life after trying to shoot at him. It would be over twelve hours before the next day arrived, which involved Gendo placing a bouquet of flowers on his wife's empty grave…for the sake of appearances.
"I'm starting to think you cursed us with bad luck the day you left your kid with us against our will," he heard Ryuhou say to him, as he and his family arrived at the grave.
Gendo looked at him, his wife, Kana, and their son, Aki, who kept his face turned away from looking at him (possibly because he'd heard about him to the point that he didn't like the look of him).
"Has he been leaving his messages at your place, as well?" He asked them.
"Only outside," Kana explained. "His face has shown up more than once on the news, he shows up every now and then outside the house. He even visited my son in a dream and is probably set on killing him later on."
"Just what happened to him? Before he died."
"He lived every day knowing that we didn't want him around," Ryuhou stated. "Then one day, while Kana and Aki were out with him, he threw himself in the path of an oncoming car and got run over."
"We wanted him gone," Kana told him, "and he left the only way he knew how to."
"So, basically, you persuaded him to commit suicide," Gendo uttered.
"Hey, we didn't persuade him to do what he did," Ryuhou corrected him. "We said we wanted him gone, not dead. And do you really think we would kill him like that? I wouldn't waste my time even trying to."
"All I asked you to do was watch him," Gendo told them, "and you can't even do that."
"Hey, it wasn't our fault!" Kana yelled. "We didn't want him! You forced him on us the day you showed up and dumped him! And now his ghost has shown up and leaves dirty footprints everywhere and bloody messages that are like a broken tune, like he's asking us the same question over and over until he gets an answer! If there's anyone to blame for this situation, past and present, it's you for forcing him on us ten years ago!"
"You should've left him with people that would take him in," went Aki to Gendo. "But then again, who would want him? There were rumors where you were accused of murdering your own wife, and some of those rumors included you doing so right in front of him. And then, there's your public history, which contributes to many people's unwillingness to do things for you. There were dozens of other people that wouldn't take in Shinji, mainly because he was your son."
Suddenly, the air became chilly and the parched, lifeless soil around became like mud.
"Oh, great," Ryuhou reacted to this change in the weather. "Here we go again."
Yui's meaningless grave marker turned into solid ice before fragmenting into pieces…and the hand that appeared behind it made itself known to the four.
"Aaahh!" Kana gasped, seeing her nephew's ghost up close, and he looked exactly as he did the day he was run over.
Shinji, looking at each of them, quietly bled over the dirt as he floated up and set his feet on a different grave marker that had been next to his mother's.
"Are you happy now?" He asked them, with tears of blood running from the sides of his eyes. "Are you…happy now?"
"What is this all about, Shinji?" Ryuhou asked the ghost. "You keep asking the same question, but don't expand on the question. What are you asking?"
Shinji looked at him with a glare, which made the family man back away; Shinji had never glared at people before in his life. He frowned at one point a month after his aunt and uncle had been forced to take him in, and that was at the cousin talking about his father possibly killing his mother…and he was struck for rebelling by his aunt, who made it no point to express her dislike of him.
"You wanted me gone," he then expressed, no longer speaking his broken tune, but no longer sounding like a little boy hurt and abandoned by the world. "You wanted me to go away…and I went away. Does my leaving…make you happy?"
His voice was cold and full of hatred; he was projecting all of his pent-up anger at the four people in front of him.
"After he (he pointed to Gendo with his broken arm) abandoned me, you made every day a living Hell for me. You made me feel like I was a waste of space, that I was less than, that I had no value in life. You even said I wouldn't be missed if anything happened to me. You all but yelled in my face for me to leave and never come back. So, I ask you…are you happy now? Because I know I'm not happy! I have never been happy! I haven't been happy since the day I felt I had no choice but to leave this world that has done nothing but put me down every day! And you drove me to do what I did! You drove me to run out in the street and let that car hit me! I was in great pain, and yet all I could ask was did I make you happy for finally leaving! Well?! Are you happy?! Are you?!"
Gendo couldn't believe this! The very boy he had abandoned, that he made plans to use later when he turned fourteen, had gone and got himself murdered thinking it would make his relatives happy…and he had only come back to haunt them because he never got an answer from them.
The cold air made Kana shiver, while Aki turned away from his dead cousin, and all Ryuhou could do was stare at the dead boy. But Gendo, who was the initial cause for all of this, actually tried to walk away from them, believing he was now wasting his time once he got the truth and cause of the death.
GRIP! His feet became locked in place, and he found that he had sunk to his ankles in the mud, which then hardened into rock.
"Nobody's leaving until I get my answer," Shinji told him, having now bled enough blood to fill a small children's pool, and directed that message toward all four of them.
The sky turned dark and it started raining, but it wasn't water that was falling to the ground. It was blood. Blood was pouring from the sky!
Gendo tried to free himself from his immobility, but he was stuck real good.
"If we answer you," went Kana, "will you stop?"
Shinji looked at her…and nodded that he would; all he was here for was an answer to his question that has left him a restless ghost of a child the world had forgotten.
Kana sighed, inhaled and uttered, "Yes, Shinji. You leaving made me very happy. But I never desired for you to kill yourself. I just wanted you gone, not dead. I'm sorry that you misunderstood what I meant by that."
The blood rain, which had been heavy, became a light shower now.
"It doesn't matter if it was understood or misunderstood," he told her. "Dead means gone, and gone is gone, regardless of the how."
"How do you get rid of an unwanted child?" Ryuhou asked. "Especially when no one else wants him? Do you kill him? That would be easy, but it would also be wrong. Do you dump him on someone else's doorstep like his father did him? Whose doorstep do you dump an unwanted child on…when nobody will take him, knowing who his parents are?"
Shinji's ghost looked at him like he had called him out for who he was, simply because of who he was related to.
"I'm sorry, Shinji, that you were unwanted," he apologized to him.
"Unwanted," there was a hint of sorrow in his voice now. "That's all I ever was…and all that I'll ever be…to anyone."
Then, the ghost boy faded away…and the remaining shower of blood went with him. The sun shone once more and Gendo's legs were set free from the ground. A ghost out for closure had left a ghost with a heart left broken, abandoned by all.
-x-
"…We're done now, Gendo," Kana told the disgraceful man that her sister married, as she and her family got on the train.
"We're not done here," he countered; now that he knew the truth about his son's death, he needed someone to pilot Unit-01 whenever Rei couldn't.
"Back off, Gendo," Ryuhou uttered; as sorry as he was to Shinji's saddened soul for being an unwanted child, he still wanted nothing to do with Gendo. "We're done, we found out what brought his ghost back and got the problem resolved, and we're going home."
They left the would-be megalomaniac and departed back to home. It was an awful day with a revelation of heartache and pain. Their reunion with their dead relative had left the husband and wife feeling somewhat bitter while their son was left wondering what could've been if his cousin had been wanted or never dumped on his family's doorstep. Sadly, life for some was simply unfair, and Shinji had been dealt one of the worst hands that any person, especially a young person, could ever get handed. His only real crime wasn't killing himself to please people that didn't want him…but simply being the son two scientists that put their work before him.
"…I don't think he'd ever forgive us for what drove him to kill himself," said Kana, sounding saddened.
"Of course, he wouldn't," Ryuhou expressed. "We heard him, loud and clear."
Looking out the window, Aki saw the once-beautiful countryside outside of Tokyo-3, unable to see any beauty near a city that was too technological, unlike back home where it was just ordinary. Gazing down at the water of a massive Lake Ashi, he wondered if his cousin would, eventually, get reborn into a better family now that he had his answer of whether or not his death made his relatives happy. It was strange that the three didn't feel as happy this year than they were the years that came after Shinji's suicide, and they worried over how something as awful as being haunted by a ghost would affect them later on in the future. In his mind, while they were happy Shinji was gone, they weren't happy that they had became one of the driving forces that made him take his own life.
-x-
Days went by, followed by weeks…and then a whole month. NERV returned to its subtle routine of monitoring the damaged city and the lands of Japan for the whereabouts of the Angels, maintaining the Evas and running tests on the children chosen to pilot them. And in his office, Gendo was left to his solitude after another meeting with the Instrumentality Committee; he'd been instructed after his encounter with the ghost of his dead son to report to them every week to be informed of any supernatural activities at NERV that weren't instigated by the living. And in Central Dogma, Ritsuko Akagi was wondering how Gendo's scenario would play itself out now that she and Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki knew what had really killed the Third Child all those years ago.
Abandonment, she thought, numbering the factors that led to the boy's suicide. Verbal abuse, constant neglect, self-doubt of value, loneliness… Any young child could go crazy from all of that, and it did worse than that to a boy like him. It killed him. He saw the world as a place of pain and hatred, all directed at him, and not a single person gave him so much as a kind word.
Up in his own office, Kozo Fuyutsuki, having an epiphany after discovering how bad the truth behind the suicide had really been, had finished writing his signature on his resignation forms. He had joined NERV's predecessor organization after being threatened with death by the Ikaris' erstwhile superiors that funded their research if he went public with the proof he found that the devastation that ruined the world called Second Impact was not a natural catastrophe, but was now disgusted with how one family treated one of their own, driving him to take his own life…just to make them happy.
He never even did anything wrong, he thought, walking out of his office and heading toward the elevators leading out of the building. Ikari, what were you thinking when you did what you did?
-x-
Even after all these years, it was still a miserable grave, made so by the fact that its resident was a miserable boy. And Shinji's ghost, as mangled in death as he was in life, stood before his own grave and fell onto the grass in front of his tombstone.
Unwanted…to everyone…and unloved by everyone, he thought, disappearing into the ground, back into his grave, back to wherever he ended up after letting that car hit him.
Unlike what people of generations past described, the afterlife wasn't as simple as one could think. While such places as Heaven and Hell existed, their perceptions in the eyes of those that died were often shifted or misunderstood. As Heaven could be described as a beautiful place, like a field of flowers surrounding a magnificent castle, or a lush valley with a grand waterfall, Hell could be the very lives people lead in life, excluding other people, or a large, empty room with a window and no door. For Shinji, who didn't know what either were, his Hell was that of a vast ocean of a reddish-orange substance with a reddish-black sky. Here, he sat above the calm surface of the ocean, as he had when he arrived, unable to move on…and unable to accept that he had no one that actually loved him. Only one thing ever made sense to him in his death, and that was that every choice a person made affected the choices made by other people, and his choice to kill himself was made simple and clear for him when his aunt claimed she wouldn't miss him.
Unwanted…to everyone…and unloved by everyone, his mind repeated, as he lost consciousness as he fell onto his back, drifting off into a slumber that barely counted as a reprieve from pain.
It was here that he was alone. He was always alone…and would always be alone.
-x-
Alarms went off like crazy as the newest Angel made itself known, approaching Tokyo-3 from the water like the previous one had. Military might, just like last time, proved useless against it.
"Synchronizing Rei to Unit-01," one of the NERV technicians announced, as the First Child was placed into the purple Evangelion, just the red-haired Second Child and her fiery Unit-02 were sent into battle.
"Unit-01 is not responding!" Maya gasped.
Within the purple Eva, the albino Rei Ayanami, having recovered from her injuries, couldn't feel the synchronization between herself and the Eva. It was as though a wall was in between them, but it wasn't like rejection.
"Is it rejecting the pilot?" Gendo asked.
"We can't tell," Shigeru answered. "It's just not responding."
Inside Unit-01's core, its resident soul had been aware of what had become of her son and what had caused him to do what he did to himself. She wanted to blame herself for leaving him behind and traumatizing his young mind, but she'd only be blaming half the people directly responsible for his death. Both she and her husband were directly responsible for Shinji's death, and it was a bad idea to leave their son with her sister if they themselves never got along after a falling out between them when they were much younger. If she had known this would've happened, she would've… She could've done something other than what she did when he was little.
Her last image of Shinji was of a little toddler, barely three years old, watching her from out a viewing window as she went into the unfinished Eva, unaware of why it was being built and how it was made. This pleasant image contrasted with the horrid image of her son's ghost, over a year older, two broken limbs and bleeding everywhere as he had a look of sadness mixed with anger. It was like how the unfinished Eva's horrible appearance contrasted with its completed design, and she had wanted was a brighter future for Shinji. Instead, she helped to give him Hell.
-x-
Gendo saw the images of his son, both and dead, on the monitors around him as he tried to get Unit-01 to work with Rei. He knew why it wouldn't function: Who Yui did what she did for was gone for good, so there was no reason to go on. The very goal was dead now.
-x-
"…I read in the papers that Tokyo-3 got maimed a few days ago," Kana heard one of her gossiping neighbors as she was grocery shopping. "A lot more people transferred out, saying that it was unsafe to live in such an unstable place."
She, too, had read the news that the city had been crippled, though it never stated how. It was part of the reason she hated places that were more about technology than culture or nature: They were unpredictable and the scientists thought they could control what they had created, only to have it all backfire and explode in their faces. At least the gossip about Shinji's ghost had ended once he left them alone in the cemetery.
"…Those poor kids that were dug up from the rubble," the gossipers continued, and Kana left.
-x-
The Fourth Angel had been slain, but the cost was greater than that of the Third Angel. While the Second Child and Unit-02 had managed to defeat it on their own, a greater portion of the city had been reduced to being a thing of the past, along with a loss of life being less than five-hundred, including children from the neighborhoods with lots of them running around. A quarter of the city's shelters had been destroyed and several people were found buried alive under debris.
"…The damage to the city is almost at the Hayflick Limit," went Maya to her fellow Bridge Bunnies, overlooking the damages. "It'll be a long while before anything can be rebuilt."
"Not to mention many of the people remaining are set to leave," Makoto Hyuga added in. "It probably won't be long before the whole place is abandoned."
"Ugh!" Shigeru shuddered, and the other two saw why: Someone hadn't examined the rubble thoroughly enough, seeing a pair of arms half-buried beneath rubble.
One of the pair seemed to belong to a woman, but the second pair were those of a little boy's, victims of fate, casualties of war.
"I'd rather be facing paperwork than to stumble upon dead bodies," Maya uttered, covering her mouth to keep from gagging.
At NERV, in his office, Gendo was left to ponder what to do now that Unit-01 wouldn't serve its purpose to defeat the Angels. His own wife had left him after discovering that their son had died, shutting herself up within the Eva's core and Fuyutsuki had abandoned their cause. His best guess was that his sensei had lost faith in the Evas and even more faith in people after finding out how cruel people could be to those that needed what they weren't given. While he wouldn't admit to anyone, he only cast his son aside because he needed him as a complete, psychotic wreck for Unit-01, plagued by loneliness and self-doubt, figuring that his wife's relatives would handle him. But instead, their dislike of the boy, their dislike of he himself and Yui, had, along with his abandonment of him, drove Shinji to get run over. He needed his son as a pilot and pawn to achieve his goals, but that could never happen now with him dead, and he wasn't much of a believer on suicide victims coming back from the dead like regular people, minus the supernatural powers they exhibit.
-x-
"…Hey, Misato," went the Second Child, Asuka Langley Soryu, to the strategist captain of NERV, "I need to ask you something."
Further down the hall, the purple-haired woman turned to face the thirteen-year-old girl and responded, "And what might your question be?"
"Before I got here, I did a background check on this Third Child, but his whole record's nonexistent. Just who is this Shinji Ikari and why isn't he here?"
Misato couldn't blame her curiosity, even if it was just that she felt like someone was competing against her for being the best at whatever. But the Third Child, no, Shinji Ikari was a subject that much of NERV was uncomfortable speaking about because of the story of his life up to his death was traumatic.
"He's dead, Asuka," she explained to her. "He's been dead for a long time."
Asuka was now confused.
"How long are we talking about?" She asked.
"He died almost ten years ago, when he was little. He killed himself in an auto-related incident."
"What? Why would he… What would make him do something like that?"
"Not 'what', Asuka, but 'who'. He was abandoned by his father shortly after the death of his mother, and left with an aunt, uncle and cousin. But it turns out that they got landed with him against their will."
"You mean, they didn't want him?"
"Yeah, and they made it very clear to Shinji…so almost a year after he was left with them, he killed himself by running into open traffic. I doubt he knew anything about NERV or the Evas or the Angels. How could he? He was only four or five years old by the time he died, and being told that his relatives didn't want him…it must've drove him mad with heartache."
Asuka, having not even seen a picture of the dead boy, not even a photo of his ghost, could almost imagine him getting run over, with a hopeless expression on his face. She wanted to view him as competition in piloting the Eva, but after learning that he had known nothing about anything NERV-related, that he was abandoned by his father, unwanted by his other relatives, all she could really do was pity him for his childhood ending with a slap in the face by the Grim Reaper himself, taking him before his time.
"How do you live with yourself, telling a kid that they're unwanted, unloved?" She questioned.
"I have no idea," Misato responded. "Even though a lot of people died in the previous attacks, I can tell that most of them are bothered more by a kid that took his own life just to please his aunt and uncle than the recently deceased. Especially since NERV was visited several times by his restless ghost."
"A ghost?"
"Yeah. He left blood and dirt everywhere, messages to his father, wanting to know if he was happy he was gone. And it shattered him to know that his absence made his aunt and uncle happy, even though they didn't want him to kill himself. They just wanted him gone."
"How does the commander sleep at night, abandoning his son?"
If the truth could be revealed that Gendo simply never gave a damn about his son, most people would be enraged that he discarded Shinji like trash. Sadly, that truth would remain hidden away, like nearly every other truth, every other secret, even any other secrets that followed a dead boy to the afterlife.
-x-
His eternal damnation was unchanging. The scenery of the red, ocean-like environment a quiet misery. As Shinji looked ahead of himself where he laid, all that caught his limited imagination were the memories he had of watching other children his age that had what he didn't have: Family, friends, a home and future of smiles. The sounds of children laughing contrasted with his crying, the sight of families playing contrasted with him being left alone, without even a book to read, and it all made him angry inside. He admired the other kids for having what he didn't. He envied them, wanting to be wanted, wanting to be loved.
He blinked, and his imagination ended just like that; even in death, there was no happiness for him. There was no hope, whatsoever, for an unwanted child. A child unwanted…was truly a child without any shred of hope.
End
A/N: Well, here it is. Something new and probably with an unused plot and theme. It's rage-driven, heart-aching, heart-breaking and very sad. How would you live with yourself if you told a kid that they were unloved, unwanted and wanted them gone? Read and review, please, and tell me what you think.