So this is my first work of fiction opened for the consumption of others. I know it won't be perfect and I welcome constructive criticism, so please read/review. Universal disclaimer applies (see profile). If you own any of the properties mentioned, hey I mean I will take it down but I would give an arm and a leg to talk with you, really, would be awesome.

While this is nominally an NGE story other properties will be crossing over, but listing them would give things away so I won't be doing so. There will be at least one anime, a book series, 1 American TV character, and a religious mythology. The title probably gives away the mythology, but by chapter 2 a troper could probably guess the book series. The anime will not come in for a while and given how dark this may come off as at first, it may surprise you.

I have a very detailed outline for this going forward with several segments already written, just not necessarily from start to finish. I hope this means, given interest, I can maintain a regular update schedule through what you might call the first season. That would be through the end of the canon series.

Edit: 11/3/14 So nobody pointed it out but I feel like an idiot. I described Misato going to the rear of her car to open the trunk. I had forgotten her vehicle of choice was rear engined.

Chapter 1

On September 13th, 2000, the course of human history was changed.

The event that became known as second impact melted the Antarctic ice fields in an instant, violently raising sea levels and contaminating the oceans with the debris of millions of human lives. Impact and the wars that followed were the single most destructive event in human history. Within the span of a year, over 6 billion had become 3 billion, and that was by generous estimates.

For developing nations this was a setback measured in decades, but for many of the industrial giants of the world it was as if a century had not passed. Lack of readily available clean water and food shortages do horrible things to people. In such a world, liberals did not last long.

Order was brought to chaos at the end of a gun. Military states backed by the United Nations now rule the mass of humanity. Strict rationing of resources and population controls keep humanity surviving, but not thriving. The population is kept placated with petty entertainments and warned from aspiration by threat of force.

On June 6th, 2001, Shinji Ikari has the misfortune of being born. Or so were his thoughts on the matter. He remembered only the briefest moments of a wonderful loving mother. He tried not to though, because it only reminded him of the many vivid memories of his cruel and frigid father. After Gendo Ikari left when he was 8 years old, Shinji thought he was saved. But then it became a pattern of hope, rejection, and neglect as he was moved from foster home to foster home. There were many orphans after impact and with the restrictions on having children, many families were eager to take them in. However the quantity of children also meant it was far too easy to become lost in the tide and there was little oversight of the homes in those days.

Shinji was small for his age, a product of poor nutrition and even worse living conditions. His white shirt and grey slacks hid the many scars covering his body, and below the skin he had broken more bones than he could remember. There had always been the best medical care, and everything healed straight, but those visits to the hospital were the highlight of his short, sad life. He really did not mind hospitals, they were always clean and the doctors and nurses were the only people he remembered, after his mother died, to genuinely care. For all the complaints about the food, Shinji enjoyed it because it was always there and nobody was beating him to take his.

He thought maybe he could be a doctor, or maybe even a nurse. He wanted to help people to feel the comfort he did. His teachers and guardians laughed at him and called him too stupid to be a doctor and said he must really like boys if he wanted to be a nurse. He did not get it until that other boy cornered him in the bathroom when he was 12. He had told Shinji he was so girly, cooking and sewing, he was going to treat him like a girl.

Shinji had read somewhere that the strong will do as they will, and the weak will suffer, as they must. Shinji Ikari understood very clearly that he was the weak, and to accept the actions of the strong was his place in life. In this way Shinji was the model citizen in the post impact world. No matter what those stronger than him would do, he would accept it and not push back or even entertain thoughts of rebellion.

On September 10th, 2014, he had received a note by courier, not in the mail. He had not received anything addressed to him before and had taken several minutes to examine the envelope. He saw it was from:

Ikari Gendo, Commander

NERV Japan HQ

Tokyo-3, Hakone

Opening the envelope he found a single piece of folded paper, an instant photo, and a train ticket. On the paper was printed a single word:

Come.

The train ticket was dated for 3 days thus, on the 13th. The photo made Shinji blush and drop the entire package. He quickly gathered it back up and took it to show his guardians. Well except the picture. They would probably find some way to blame him for that.

Back on the train, Shinji took the ear buds from his head as he felt the brakes engage and the train began to slow. He was not sure if he had spent the entire trip alone, having let his mind wander, but there had been nobody else on the train when he got on and there was nobody he could see now.

Several minutes later, Shinji stood on the platform as the train pulled away. He had with him all his worldly possessions, consisting of 5 sets of clothing plus the white shirt and black slacks he wore, toiletries, 1 pair of white tennis shoes, a small collection of school supplies and notebooks, and his SDAT player. In his hand he holds the picture that came along with the letter and his ticket. The woman in it was gorgeous, Shinji wondered if she was a model or an actress, or something. Knowing his father he would not be surprised if this was either a cruel joke or trying to get compliance through baser instincts.

Shinji Ikari hears a car approaching. To Shinji, cars are cars. Some are big, some are small, some are quiet and some are loud. This one nearing the station is loud, small, and blue.

To a connoisseur of the tawdry diversions in life like Misato Katsuragi, this was not merely a car. This was a 1984 Renault Alpine. Surely the finest thing to come out of France since some off wine gave the world champagne; this was the rare GT package, in which the already impressive V6 was bored out for a few hundred extra cubic centimeters. The entire series was hand built piece by piece. It was neither the fastest car made at the time, nor the most powerful of vehicles to survive second impact, but that was not what mattered. Like all things French, being the best at a thing was not the point. It was perfectly French in that it was the perfection of an ideal in the here and now. It was the experience that mattered. Like a night out when one spends far too much money (preferably someone else's), consumes far too much food and drink, and stumbles into bed (again, preferably someone else's) shortly before the sun rises, the end result was abysmal, but the experience leading up to it was what mattered.

The blue sports car pulled to a stop as Shinji stepped off the final stair leading from the station platform to the sidewalk. The engine shuts down, the far driver door opens, and out steps the woman in the picture. She is wearing a high necked black dress under a red jacket and a matching beret. Shinji notices she is wearing leather driving gloves as she pulls off her oversized sunglasses, only because he has never seen anybody wear gloves to drive before.

"Well hello there handsome." She says

Shinji Ikari's first reaction is to look around to see to whom she is speaking to before dumbly pointing at himself and asking:

"uh, me?"

She giggles and folds her sunglasses, hanging them in the collar of her dress.

"You must be Shinji Ikari, I'm Captain Misato Katsuragi of NERV, but you can all me Misato. Is that all you brought?" Shinji nods, his mouth still kind of dangling open in shock at this woman is even speaking to him. As she steps around the front car, Shinji mind is drawn away from her long legs and the sound her heels make as they touch the ground by the fact that she is using a metal key to open hood. As she opened it he realized the trunk was up front in this car. The car looked so new, he thought, why didn't it have a remote?

"Your file said you played the cello, did you opt to have it shipped instead of hauling it on the train?"

"N-no Ma'am, I actually stopped playing a couple years ago. I had to start working and between that and everything else, I just didn't… you know… time and all that.." he said, trailing off as he stepped towards the rear of the car to put his things in the trunk.

"Please Shinji, call me Misato." She said as she took his two small bags and set them in the crowded boot before closing the hatch. Shinji only caught a glimpse of the other contents but besides all the trash and plastic bottles he swore he saw a gun too. The big two handed ones like the police carry. "Wait, couple of years… you had to start working when your were 12? I thought you were with a foster family, did they make you work?"

"Y-yeah, just to help cover taking care of me, y'know? It wasn't anything hard, that family had a restaurant and I would help take orders or clean up. I even got to learn how to cook so it wasn't so bad." Shinji stepped around to the passenger door, which Misato had to reach over from the inside to unlock.

"Oh you cook? " She says as she starts the car and immediately turns down the blaring stereo.

"Yeah, just a little of this and that, its nothing special." He replies as she shifts the car into gear and rolls out of the empty station lot. Several minutes of silence followed, during which Captain Katsuragi considers a 12 year old working to support a family that received a NERV stipend bigger than her salary to house him.

"So Shinji…" The captain said, trying to break this silence that was barreling towards becoming awkward. "… Are you excited to see what your father does at NERV?"

Shinji jolts a little when she speaks, his mind having wandered again.

"Um, I guess. NERV is like a science organization of the UN, right?"

"Not really, no. I can make sure you get the big presentation when we get there, but in short…" Leaving the surface streets and joining the motorway, Misato accelerates, pressing a surprised Shinji into his seat.

"NERV operates as an independent organization, nominally under the UN, but really they just pay our bills. It holds several patents for technology created after second impact, but NERV was truly created for one purpose…" Misato pauses as she drops the clutch pedal and shifts up, Shinji's heartbeat rising with the sound of the engine.

"…To defend humanity from the threat of the angels… Pretty cool right?" Misato turned to look at the boy. His face seemed more confused than impressed.

"The what?"

"You don't know about the angels?" She screams before turning back to the road and swerving around a piece of debris that just fell to the road.

"What was that?! I don't know, I don't watch TV or anything!"

"Yeah well you are about to get a really good look at one!"

As they round a bend, something comes into view. It dwarfs the hills that surround this part of the country. The vibration of the engine had masked the noise and tremors but Shinji could now feel the earth shake with each step of the giant. The car shook on its suspension as VTOLS zoomed overhead at low altitude and loose their weapons at the beast. Dozens of missiles slam into the beast followed by their warheads detonating in a flash of light and thunder of noise.

Shinji feels the shockwaves hit the car and echo through his bones. Even at this distance the world goes silent as his ears are overwhelmed. He hopes that it is over now, hope that it is short lived as the dust settles and the green giant is stands unfazed and it looks like even unmarked. The thing is vaguely human shaped with long gangly limbs and bony plates on its shoulders. Instead of a head or any kind of face, a great bone colored mask of a placid human face with closed eyes adorns its chest. Below the mask, a great red jewel was held in bony claws.

As his hearing returns, he can hear the captain's phone ringing. She takes it from her jacket and flips it open to answer. For some reason, in all the chaos, Shinji notices it is a fairly advanced model, only about the size of a back of cigarettes. It is black with the NERV logo printed across both sides in red.

"THEY'RE GOING TO WHAT?! Shit!" Misato slams on the breaks, jerking Shinji forward in his seat. A moment later she is dragging him out of the car and into a roadside ditch. Before he can ask what is going on, light and thunder again consume the world.

Shinji thought he had lost consciousness until he realized he was actually still under Misato. More specifically, he slowly came to the conclusion that his face was under her chest. Her ample, heaving, chest he observed. It was at this point that Shinji Ikari did in fact pass out.

Shinji did not know how much time had passed when a very dirty Misato Katsuragi shook him awake. Before his vision had settled he was hauled to his feet and led back across the road to what he supposed was the captain's car, though it no longer quite resembled what it had been. He slumped down against the passenger door as she failed to start the mangled car and opens the hood to see what might be done.

"Wha-what was that?"

"The Strategic Self-Defense Force set off an N2 mine. YES!" Misato exclaims, pumping her fist in the air as the engine finally turns over.

"So that means it is over, right?" Shinji shakily rose as he spoke, leaning on the crumpled skin of the car for support. Misato looks at him in reply and points to the horizon in the direction of the blast. Shinji turns and sees the beast still there, in one piece, kneeling beneath a dome of yellow light.

"No, Shinji…" Misato opens her door and gets in, Shinji following. Though hidden beneath her sunglasses, Misato's expression matches Shinji: the look of weariness when all fear has been exhausted in an instant. Misato knows that at this moment there is nothing she can possibly due to stop the angel from killing her if it so chose. So she concentrates on the task at hand, transporting the boy.

Shinji just has no context to even put this in. The fear he felt in the last few minutes feels like more emotion than he has ever felt before in his life. He has no energy for further reaction right now; he hadn't time to process it yet.