Creation began on 08-12-13

Creation ended on 08-14-13

Neon Genesis Evangelion

A Maddening Cause: The Drive

A/N: Nobody is innocent, not even the innocent. Everyone is guilty, including the guilty.

It was allover the news back in the year Two-Thousand-Six. Nobody was any wiser than they aren't today. All it took was words of contempt, a few bruises, uncaring voices…along with a woman's admittance of what led to her end. Only a trail of blood and shame could tell of what transpired in a simple house with a relative that seemed to lose all sense of sense.

"…The board's still refusing to allow him to be paroled," said a man to a woman dressed in a red with a matching jacket, leading her down a hall with a multitude of door. "Honestly, I don't blame them. He hasn't been right ever since he was brought in. More than half the time, the staff can't even tell if he's there because he's so quiet. He's like a ghost: Silent in every sense of the word."

"And you have no idea of what caused this all to happen?" The woman asked, looking over the small folder that held what was written on the person she was tasked with picking up, seeing very little that was helpful; she did wonder, though, how much on guard she should be when she meets him.

"Only a rumor that he was the target of intense hatred toward his parents by his other relatives that his father dumped him on. Some gossipers once said that the boy's aunt had expressed that if anything happened to him, like getting sick and dying, she wouldn't miss him at all. Then… I don't know, he just…snapped."

"He just snapped?"

"Here we are," the man announced, stopping in front of one door that read "Room II-78J" with the occupant's name written underneath. "You're not going to like what's in there. It's something out of a nightmare of sorts."

As he opened the door, the woman then suspected the reason why the orderly needed short-chained hand and leg-cuffs with him every time he came to this room; the man had stated that this patient was their only extremist case because of how detached he seemed. Within the room, the woman was in awe at what was inside the small space. There had to be over a thousand drawings taped to the walls and ceiling of the room, all depicting either scenes of happiness…and scenes of discord. Many depicted flowers, mountains, lakes and people gathered together, with several corresponding pictures of what could've been their dark opposites, with bloodshed, dismemberment, decapitation, disembowelment, rivers of blood and the like. And at a small desk, seemingly ignorant of their presence, was the person they were here to get, working on what had to be another drawing…using crayons.

His hair was messy, his exposed skin was dirty and his clothes, which should've been a sparse-white, were dusty-gray. It was like the boy was without any measure of caring about anything other than what he was doing at the moment.

"That's him?" The woman asked the orderly. "He's Shinji Ikari?"

"Yeah," the orderly answered back. "He just turned fourteen last week, but for him, and everyone else around here, it's nothing of any concern. Another year of life is another year of awaiting greater retribution for sins committed in the past."

The orderly approached the detached boy while the woman looked to her right to examine a drawing depicting a woman looking like she was getting stabbed to death.

"Oh, my God," she shuddered, raising her hand to touch the drawing, something the orderly, who was putting the restraints on Shinji, noticed with great fear.

"Hey, hey! Don't touch those!" He shouted at her. "Don't ever touch any of those!"

"What?!" She defended, looking at them, and saw that Shinji's hair was so overgrown that it covered his eyes, which she wasn't sure he could see her through the strands.

"He doesn't like it when people touch his drawings. Look, I've been keeping an eye on him ever since he was brought in, and I know from past experience that there are things you simply cannot do around him or even ask him about."

The woman stared at the boy that gave no indication of being aware of her presence, and didn't know whether or not to be afraid of him…or very, very afraid of him. If half of what was written in his file was accurate, then Shinji Ikari was an extreme flight risk to anybody after what he did years ago.

-x-

"There is absolutely no way we can permit him to be transferred out of this facility, even if your organization requests him turned over," said the head of the institute to the woman that came to pick up Shinji Ikari.

"If NERV didn't require him, I wouldn't have come here under orders to get him," the woman expressed. "How long has he been here?"

"Ever since Two-Thousand-Seven…after his trial," revealed a woman that was on the board of parole officials handling the boy's case.

"You mean to say that he's been here, in your institute, for nearly nine years?"

Shinji was sitting down in a chair several feet away from the table of the board officials, watched carefully by two armed guards. With Shinji, they had to take precautions when moving him around or keeping him in check.

"If your organization takes him in, he's no longer our concern," the head of the board warned the woman. "If NERV takes him, that makes him your problem. We wash our hands of him."

Then Shinji slowly raised his head up, looking at the board and the woman under his messy hair. They couldn't see his eyes, otherwise there would've been greater degrees of woe from each of them.

"NERV will assume full responsibility for any of his faults," the woman told them.

"You'd best hope you can handle him," they all told her back.

-x-

"…Now, I'm sure as some of you are more than aware, Shinji Ikari's being transferred out of the Japan Institute of Insanity to the NERV facility in Tokyo-3 here," said Kozo Fuyutsuki to several members of the staff at NERV HQ. "Now, back in Two-Thousand-Six, Shinji was arrested for the death and mutilation of at least eight people, each one murdered in a grim fashion. However, despite having eight counts of first-degree murder on his record, he was convicted of only three of the murders."

"Why is that?" One of the technicians, Maya Ibuki, questioned.

"Because the three he murdered last were his aunt, uncle and cousin," explained her co-worker, Makoto Hyuga. "And, according to the gossip that occurred before the deaths became public knowledge, they were the cause of him resorting to murder at such a young age."

"And I thought my family was weird," expressed Shigeru Aoba. "Sub-Commander, if he's been incarcerated in the institute ever since the day he was found guilty of murder, why have him brought here if he doesn't even know what's going on? He has no training, whatsoever. There's even a likely possibility that he might not be cooperative."

"The order came from Commander Ikari," Fuyutsuki answered him.

"What bothers me about his kid," went Ritsuko Akagi to them all, "is that he hasn't spoken a word ever since that night he did them in, so says his record."

"Probably his way of coping with what he did," suggested Shigeru. "Are we really that desperate to defeat the Angels that we resort to letting out a killer?"

"We're already facing bad press," said Maya. "Some of the people have considered themselves to be people of change, but not with this boy. They all had the same opinion: Shinji Ikari needed to spend the rest of his life locked away where he couldn't hurt anybody."

-x-

Bad press was right. The moment Shinji was being transferred out of the institute, the majority of Tokyo-3's population, mostly families that were concerned with their children's safety, were uncomfortable with a killer living among them. They were holding picket signs with words to show that they viewed Shinji Ikari as a psychopath. There were even people angry enough to gang up on the car transporting him into the city the moment they found out he was in it.

"IKARI KILLER CHILD!" The angry mob chanted, rattling the car with the boy inside.

But Shinji ignored their raised voices, which were no different from running water to him. In the abyss of his mind, where he spent most of his years ever since he was incarcerated, he was lost within a labyrinth of a city without people…and his only company…was another boy that looked just like him, except he had his face exposed and wore broken restraints with his dirty clothes, standing in front of a younger Shinji with a sad expression. It was also here, in the isolation of his mind, where he could utter as many words as he wanted to and not be looked down for anything he said, even if it was only a question or just an opinion.

"That man lives here, doesn't he?" The younger Shinji asked the older one that looked detached from the world.

"He does," the older one answered.

"You…will make him regret abandoning me…won't you?"

"He will be punished for his sins, along with any that stand in the way of closure and justice."

"You're a cold person," the younger Shinji expressed, crouched on the ground in front of his older self.

"In a cold world, a person must be just as cold in order to survive," the older boy responded. "At least…until all the people that have caused you heartache and grief are dealt with. Only then…can the end of this miserable life end with the feeling of warmth."

The younger Shinji sighed in agreement with his older self and expressed, "Do whatever you have to, but leave the innocent be."

"Shinji, nobody is innocent, not even the innocent."

"You know what I mean."

"Of course I do. I'm just testing your sense of reason. You're the light to my darkness."

SMASH! Shinji, broken from his internal conversation, didn't even react to the glass behind his head being shattered.

"You brought a killer child into our city!" A woman cried out. "How could you do this?! Are you nuts?! Are you an organization of crazies?!"

There was no answer for such questions that NERV was willing to give the public, which only made the people more outraged against the organization's possession of a sociopathic child convicted on three counts of murder in the first degree…and he murdered at least eight people. They felt there should've been justice served for the other five lives he took, not just those of his relatives that he decided to send to the next world.

-x-

Slowly walking into the large, dark chamber, Shinji, even if his hair wasn't obscuring his vision, couldn't make out much of anything in front of him. His cuffs made of metal without chains itched his wrists as he was made to stop in front of a desk.

"It's been a long time," he heard a man's voice say to him, and his fists tightened as he raised his head up to get a better look at the man that was, as far as he was concerned, the last person on his vendetta list. "You look like you haven't had a bath in years."

His fingernails, which were unkempt, dug into his palms and pierced the flesh, spilling his blood out. He didn't need to show his face to let his anger be known; the tightened fists were evident enough to the sub-commander behind his father.

"He…doesn't seem very talkative," said Fuyutsuki, wondering how unstable the boy might've been after spending less than a decade in the loony bin.

It was just a half-truth; in his mind, Shinji was just talkative to himself in his isolation.

"He's not making this easy for me," the older Shinji told his younger self.

"Don't make it subtle, then," the younger boy responded. "You're my hall of clarity. Make yourself heard by him by being clear."

"How do I do that? You're the one with the power of speech. I'm just the one that moves the arms and legs. You're the will of the mind, and I'm the will of the body…that carries out the resulting cause."

"He never listened to anything I had to say. Nobody did, so I have nothing to say."

"Not vocally."

"Not vocally."

"Actions speak louder than any words ever could?"

"Who listens to a child's voice, anymore?"

"You mean, who would listen to you?"

"Silence has been my unwanted blessing, speech a forsaken curse, and isolation a cruelty forced upon me by those that viewed me as a burden, not a person."

"So…what must I do, in order to be clear?"

"Just do…what you do."

"With the greatest of displeasure."

Outside the maze of his mind, Shinji continued to glare at his father beneath his messy hair, now dripping blood on the floor from his fists.

"…Are you even listening to a word I've been saying to you?" Gendo, who had been running his mouth to the boy, questioned, as he hadn't spoken a single word as a response to him about working for NERV on an important goal. "Answer."

But Shinji remained silent; to others, it was suggested that spending the length of time he spent incarcerated had left him no different from a mute. Of course, Gendo had taken a look at his son's file, but it was just a look; he had lost interest in the boy long ago, so much of any understanding on his psyche was up to discussion. He never even attended the trial or resulting sentencing to the institute, but found it odd that, while never speaking, Shinji wasted his time by drawing one picture after another, provided he had the materials, which seemed to be a necessity, as he did nothing else. He even once heard of a rumor that he reacted with hostility to any that so much as touched his drawings, which didn't make any sense.

SMACK!

"Aaaahh!" The guard on Shinji's left was knocked down by him.

"Hey!" The guard on his right moved in to detain him, but Shinji head-butted him in his jaw, knocking him down. "Aaaaurgh!"

Shinji stood atop the first guard and set his right foot down on his crotch.

"Aaaaurgh!" The guard screamed in agony. "Get this lunatic off me!"

As the other guard got up, Shinji reacted faster and grabbed him by his neck, choking him.

"Gaaaah! Gaaaagh!" He choked on the air the boy was squeezing out of him.

WHACK! Shinji had failed to notice several more guards having entered the room and one struck him with a baton on his back. He fell to the ground and passed out. The guards dragged him out of the office while Fuyutsuki was left wondering how the boy could pull off what he just did when he looked like he had been reduced to a pathetic shell.

"Are you sure it was a good idea to bring him here, Ikari?" He asked Gendo. "He seems to lack any degree of understanding you."

"He may need to be monitored more thoroughly," Gendo responded.

-x-

"That kid nearly killed one of the guards and stomped another's testicles into the next world," gossiped one of the technicians to the others.

"The commander was trying to persuade him to work as a pilot for the Eva, but the boy didn't speak up," revealed another technician. "Instead, he tried to choke one of the guards. I heard he's getting an MRI to see what his brain's supposed to be like."

"Thirty yen says he's got nothing in that skull of his."

"Sixty yen says he's not even human."

As the gossiping and betting went on, Ritsuko was initiating the MRI on the unconscious Ikari boy…and was shocked at the resulting scans.

"What…in God's name?" She questioned, never expecting something like this to be possible.

"My God," gasped her protegee, Maya, amazed and terrified at the same time.

It wasn't until Gendo and Fuyutsuki were informed that more gossiping was spread, but it was both commanders of NERV that were startled by the analysis conducted upon the boy's head.

"Are you sure the scanner was functioning normally?" Fuyutsuki asked her.

"I've double-checked twice and rechecked," the faux-blond expressed. "The scans were all the same. The boy's brain…is the size of a golf ball."

"How can he function with a brain that small?"

"My theory? His reduced brain only seems to be able to perform simple functions, such as walking and breathing. However, I did further investigation in his neurological scans and his abnormal brain might be the least of whatever problems we might have with him."

"Elaborate," Gendo told her.

"Further scans of his brain indicate that he might be subject to a personality disorder…along with an electrolyte instability, indicating insomnia." Ritsuko explained further.

"You mean to say that he hasn't been sleeping much?" Fuyutsuki questioned.

"None of these factors are something that could've happened in one or two years. His eyes were blood-shot. I'm talking totally red. This had to been going on longer than a year or two. Possibly ever since he was locked away…and nobody knew."

"Didn't the staff at the institute ever examined him regularly?" Fuyutsuki questioned, wondering how an institute like the one Shinji resided in could disregard such crucial needs.

"Apparently not. No medication, no surgeries, no therapy, not even conversations. They locked him away and that was that."

"But they still let him draw those pictures of his," went Gendo, wondering about that factor.

"Yeah, that's what he did. It was really all he ever did while there. All he did was draw, draw, draw. Probably how he deals with what can be viewed as an eternity. If it's all accurate, he might not be of any use to the Evangelion program." Ritsuko shared her belief; she honestly didn't view Shinji as a dumb person, but rather a numb person because of the constant isolation. "We could try brainwashing him, but with the way his brain functions, and the size of its contents, we risk causing greater damage that could limit his body functions."

Gendo felt he was at a loss here. He didn't mind his son being a case of insanity or sociopathy, but a case of deformity was another problem. If anything, the constant drawing habit could've indicated Shinji still possessed the limited mentality of a toddler, but the possibility of a personality disorder was something to be considered. He might have to consider locking his son away in another institute, as he had to consider that he was on no use to NERV…or any organization for that matter, except perhaps a research group that studied special cases and then did away with them.

Suddenly, alarms were going off and Ritsuko's phone rung, prompting an answer from the faux-blond.

"Yes?" She went, but then went wide-eyed. "What do you mean? I thought he was sedated!"

She hung up and told the commanders that they now had a problem on their hands.

-x-

Nobody had expected this to happen, and nobody really wanted to believe it. Without any warning, Shinji Ikari had escaped from the room he was being examined in and single-handedly killed seven guards. The rest of NERV was put of yellow alert, though a few feared it would reach red alert. The reason for such a fear was what was written on the wall in the room the guards were murdered in.

"Either he was on steroids or he had a massive adrenaline rush," said Misato, as she examined the corpses. "These guys were either stomped to death, asphyxiated, or had their necks snapped by him."

"We got bigger problems," one of the other guards that was elsewhere when the escape took place revealed. "Their guns and ammunition are gone."

"He's armed himself," Misato lamented heavily. "Any idea of what that means on the wall?"

On the wall, written in blood, was a series of words that suggested that Shinji, even with a tiny brain, wasn't dumb enough to be unable to leave a message. It read, "Father, you have lived at the peak for long enough. You are going to realize your idiocy soon enough, and then wonder how you thought you could live your life on your own terms, and leave me the way you did with those that gave me the drive to do what I did to get locked away. What you did to me back when I was little, I will do to you, in a harsher fashion, in ten days' time. If you think you're safe from me…you are wrong…and soon to be nothing more than a memory in the abyss of agony. Any that get in my way will know the same fate."

"I'd call it a death threat, Captain Katsuragi," one of the technicians expressed. "One meant for Commander Ikari. It's his kid that did this all."

"And he's willing to murder anyone else he has to in order to get to his old man," another technician expressed his woes.

"No," Misato corrected. "The message says that any that get in his way will know the same fate he intends for his father. It's a personal vendetta, plain and simple. Shinji Ikari doesn't have it out for everyone. He just wants his old man out of the picture…and is willing to murder those that try to stop him from achieving that goal."

The question of the boy's questionable intelligence was explored further by his recent actions in escaping. He had murdered a female technician and relieved her of her security card to escape from the facility and killed another technician for his shirt and belt. Along the way, he had shot out any cameras that were visible, but the people that were fortunate to see him on the monitor were surprised to see that he knew how to handle a firearm, despite having never used one before.

"Okay, we gotta notify the police and warn the people," said Misato. "Our priority is finding the Third Child and containing him."

NERV had been prepared to deal with the threat posed by the Angels, but they had been unprepared to deal with a sociopath that now had a murder sheet of seventeen victims and a willingness to murder more in order to get to his father in the time he had revealed he was going to use in order to do so. The boy was driven to accomplish his goal and end his vendetta, and he was determined to not let anybody stand between him and his objective.

-x-

The city was quiet tonight. And lonely. Shinji liked it that way; there was no one he had to hurt that got in his way. With a makeshift sack of guns and ammo, he had some firepower to last him a while…and he had made himself heard without the power of speech.

As he walked down the empty streets, he stopped and turned to gaze at the reflective glass windows on his left, seeing, in the lonely darkness, his current state. When you looked past the blood that was splattered upon his clothes, all you could see…was a filthy teen that had never known the pleasure of personal hygiene or just a hot bath or shower, with a messy head of matted hair that was like a mop unused in years. Beneath the dirt and blood, Shinji saw nothing that could be viewed as a person. He had been locked away in a cold, dark place with only the freedom of drawing as his luxury; he'd known no other form of pleasure. And looking past the glass, he saw that the building in front of him was a convenience store full of necessities…and anger boiled within him.

He raised his right fist and shattered the glass in front of him. He shattered it all away until it was safe for him to enter the store. Life had been cruel to him, so he was going to indulge along the path of retribution and suffering.

To be continued…

A/N: I know there have been several cases of Shinji being portrayed as different from his anime and manga counterparts, but what if he were pushed over the edge in his early childhood and did things that marked him as a lost cause? Also, what if he were engage in conversations with himself that nobody was aware of, where he spoke with another as a result of repressed guilt or pain, and this other person was able to carry out the tasks that he couldn't do personally? Please, look at this chapter and give a response. I want to see where this will lead, knowing it will be extreme.