Creation began on 05-04-13

Creation ended on 06-05-13

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Hell is reserved for the Greatest of Cruelty

A/N: A side-story to My Special Keeper involving Yui and her ancestress, Mai Mikamura, the Blood Mistress of Hemo Channeling, and Gendo.

The first thing she realized upon waking up from what felt like a long slumber was that she was in a dark place with a burning light above her head. The ground was wet, along with her clothes, there was a foul stench in the air, and there was a breathing noise that wasn't hers. Someone was nearby.

"You took long enough to awaken," a female voice uttered from within the shadows in front of her, just as she saw a woman partially obscured by the darkness. "I didn't expect to meet the latest member of my family that could be considered an equal to myself."

What is she talking about? Yui wondered, rising to her feet, seeing more clearly now…and disgusted by the fact that she'd been laying in bloody water.

"Yui Ikari," the woman continued. "Yui Ikari… Yui Kyoubou… Whichever way you put it, you're my second-born son's great-granddaughter…and a grave disappointment in the eyes of those you've harmed…just like me."

Great-Grandfather Kyoji? Yui thought, as the woman said that he was her son. That man is over a century old and doesn't even look like he's in his nineties.

As the fire above her illuminated everything hidden from her, she got a better look at the woman claiming to be Kyoji's mother: A lovely-looking woman in her early-forties, shoulder-length ebony hair with a single streak of gray on the upper left side, with eyes that were as dark as the deep, blue sea at night. She was also dressed in a red and black yukata, tied at her waist with a blue obi. The woman was quite the term some people referred beautiful women as 'bombshells', but there was something off about her face; it was like she wore a mask of love and virtue, but beneath her lovely exterior was someone that had no shred of love or toleration for others, as if she had a superiority complex or something else altogether serious.

"Who…who are you?" She asked her.

"Mai," the woman answered her. "Mai Mikamura. I was also known as by another name that made me rather infamous. The Blood Mistress."

"What is this place?"

"This…is where all souls of disarray end up after their mortal lives are ended. How do I say this to a woman that caused greater pain than me, myself and I had done in my life? Um, your sins and transgressions laid the groundwork for you to…push up waterlilies, end up in permanent slumber, become seafood for the sharks. Yui, my descendant, you're dead…and in Hell. H-E-L-L, Hell, where the demons and damned reside."

Yui recalled the memory of how she ended up here now: She had caused great pain to Anne-Marie, disgraced their parents, robbed her sister of her child, abandoned her own, even manipulating Gendo, all for the sake of undoing her crimes and achieving forgiveness for the horrors she had a hand in unleashing on Earth in the Second Impact. Now, all she had was an eternity of damnation to look forward to as penance for her sins.

"You should count your slim blessings," Mai told her. "Hell's a lot worse than what people think it is. There are multiple levels to it, and each one is reserved for different people belonging to different categories of sinners. We belong to the Penance Level for the Greatest of Cruelty, reserved only for those that have done many wrongs and never did anything right to be absolved of them, used their relationships to their twisted advantages, taken innocent lives or poisoned them, and exploited their gifts and made other people despise them for what was their faults. The masters don't make time for our kind of troublemakers, Yui, so we have to put up with our sins coming back to haunt us all the time."

"What do you mean?" Yui asked her.

"We have lied, cheated and murdered lives that we cannot give back," she explained further. "Kill one life, you're just a murderer…but kill many thousands or millions, you're a legend in your own right. Sometimes, we lie, cheat and kill of our own judgment, and other times in the service of liars, cheaters and killers that want more than what they bargain for…and leave very little for those in need. To mask our shame, our arrogance or dark desires, we pretend to be separate, to have our own reasons for doing what we do to others that don't deserve the pain we inflict upon them, something that makes up for the horrors we've unleashed. But because of the cruelty we committed against the innocent, the horrors of our crimes are a part of us and the ones that lived after our deaths…and even in death, our crimes are still held against us. They take a life of their own, become our personal demons to remind us of the hate and agony we deserve…and they never go away."

Grasp! Yui felt something grab her on her left shoulder and she backed away from whatever it was.

"Aaah!" She gasped at the sight in front of her now: It was a little boy, probably nine years old, who reminded her of her great-grandfather if he were a child in front of her, covered in bloody gashes and with bloodshot eyes.

"Hell, my great-great-granddaughter, is like a giant prison; everyone's got their own cell full of shame and punishment," Mai explained further. "This…is my personal Hell, and that dead boy in front of you is a demon manifestation of my firstborn, Mushi, here to haunt and tease me. I killed him, and his future was cut down to the very roots. Your Hell…is further down the river of blood and sin. I was tasked with introducing you to your damnation here, just as I introduced Gendo, who left about an hour before you arrived. If you hurry, you might catch up with him before he enters his Hell where he won't be reachable for a long time."

Yui was then pointed down a path toward a beach-like setting with countless gondolas that looked ancient, burnt and ready to crumble into piles of debris. Each one was occupied by a humanoid that reminded her of the Evas, waiting around for their passengers that have sinned. One of them turned to face her, looking similar to Evangelion Unit-01, right down to the purple armor, long horn and gnashing teeth, and it pointed to her.

"It's about time you showed up," it told her, sounding like her legal father, Masamune Ikari, but colder and more detached, almost like Gendo had been. "Get in."

She climbed into the gondola and sat down as the gondolier ferried her across the long river of blood. It was as quiet as a cemetery, and the gondolier demon gave no indication that Yui was even present, simply rowing the boat down to its destination.

"So," it spoke up, "what'd you get condemned for?"

"I hurt my family," she answered in a simple response, because that's exactly what she did.

"Big sisters that treat their little sisters like they're less than, firstborn daughters that dishonor their parents with their behavior toward other people, first-time mothers that leave their children behind to suffer and claim that they're going to get along fine without them…are some of the most unforgivable souls that deserve whatever hate they get from the ones harmed by their existence," the demon told her. "It's a real pity for most humans that do what they do to others. One man's quote, spawning many variations of its originality, is a source of great truth: 'Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it'. What does it take for you to learn that what you do to others isn't always in their best interests…but purely for yourself? You have committed unforgivable acts to those that never did you any wrong…and they have abandoned you to your doom, knowing that you are capable of anything…but incapable of atonement. They…will go to great lengths to keep from mirroring any of what you've done…and bury the hurt they've been forced to carry because of you. Do you not hear their hearts, Yui? Do you not hear…their futures?"

Yui did hear something beyond the water they were surrounded by; she could hear small voices, familiar voices, owned by those that she would never see again without hurting them in one way or another, even if she didn't mean to. Though, for some reason, their voices seemed different, as though time had changed them.

"I don't let my position as a veterinarian isolate me from the people I love," a voice like Anne-Marie's was heard, indicating to Yui that, at some point in the future, her sister had achieved her goal of becoming an animal doctor, taking back her dream that had been stolen from her. "I went through childbirth twice, bore a daughter and a son, both I love equally, and would never abandon for any reason. I want my family to know that I want them to be able to speak to me about whatever's bothering them, to never feel like they're less than in my eyes. I had a bad childhood because of my sister, but I've escaped from her shadow…because I'm noting like what she was. My nephew's the only good thing she ever did, even if all she did was have him."

"There was no way I was going to traverse down that path they took," she heard a voice similar to Shinji's, only older and full of achievement. "They made choices that affected people that found out about what they were doing and were unable to act because they were threatened by them. What kinda parents do such things and claim that they're trying to help people? You can call yourself a savior to the scattered souls and say you'll return to them the joy that was taken by tragedy…but the truth is that you're nothing more than a second-rate profiteer in it for your own benefit. I would trade away a degree in biology or a career in politicians…for a degree in culinary arts and the love of a woman that fell in love with me when she was six years old any day for the rest of my life. I would give away the chance of knowing more about my parents for the comfortable life I have with my cousins, aunts and uncles, my grandmother…and my Rumi…for eternity. They're my happy place, my home, my Heaven."

Yui looked at the bloody water outside the gondola, seeing her shaded reflection, and unable to see any shred of hope that might've been there. She knew she had failed in life, causing great pain that could only end with her death, and so she killed herself…and took Gendo to Hell with her, not only because she now saw him as the monster he'd been reduced to being for over a decade after she merged with the Eva…but because they were both failures in life. She wouldn't admit it, even to herself, but she couldn't bring herself to caring about Anne-Marie, instead fascinating herself with her ability to communicate with animals and trying to discover a way to gain acceptance for her skills and knowledge elsewhere, and then there was her inability (or rather, her unwillingness) to be apologetic to her sister or show true concern for her when she was harmed by the Second Impact. As a scientist, she was viewed as being fearless in the pursuit of new, scientific discoveries…but as an elder sibling, a woman, a mother and a person, she was to be frowned upon and turned away. In the end, she was going to live on within the Eva as a testament of mankind's existence for any other race of sentient beings in the unwritten future…abandoning everything and everyone in the past, but had this original design undone…by a little girl that would've probably killed her the instant she made an attempt to approach her son, and she was never sure of what she was going to do if given the chance to approach Shinji.

"There's no hope here, is there?" She asked the demon.

"You're asking the wrong demon," it told her in return. "If it does exist around here, it's elsewhere, beyond this river. Hell…is merely a place of sin, regret, shame, retribution and torment. Oh, look, it's the gondola carrying the guy that showed up to be taken to his personal Hell before you showed up."

Yui looked up ahead, seeing another gondola, and Gendo, who was chained to the gondolier demon's legs to keep him from trying to get away.

"Your mate?" Her gondolier asked her.

"My match," she responded.

"What you see in him, I don't even want to know."

She sighed and returned to her silence; her eternity had only just begun.

-x-

"…Yui!" Gendo's last words to her before being dragged away to his cell by his gondolier demon echoed in her mind as she was being led into her cell by her demon.

"You stink like she does," the demon told her.

"What?" She questioned.

"The Blood Mistress, Mai Mikamura," it explained. "You two must be related by blood, because that's the only reason you could smell so awful down here."

"I think she's my great-grandfather's mother from over a century ago."

"Which would make you her great-great-granddaughter. Interesting, for before she was killed by her second-born son before she could kill the Unity Channeler that would lead him down the path of honor and purity, she was a Hydro Master and a Hemo Master. You don't have the gift of channeling any element in your being."

"I guess it's something that's a rarity in my family."

"Oh, no, it's not a rarity. Not a genetic rarity, that is. It's a power bestowed upon a chosen few. There's nothing about it that's based on heredity. You find out through a special ritual upon turning six. You're to select four toys from among countless toys, and depending on which element they correspond to is the element you're landed with. But judging from your lack of knowledge on the history of channeling, you were never informed or confirmed to possess such power, and whatever potential you might've had for elemental channeling is long gone."

The demon then left her alone and sealed the stone door shut, leaving her in the dungeon-like chamber with very little light. She sat down on the ground and allowed herself to suffer the indignity of living in eternal damnation.

"Hello, Yui," she looked behind her and saw Akira, dressed in a black yukata with a red obi around the waist, holding a naginata with a serrated blade, looking like she was extremely angry with her.

"Mrs. Rokubungi?" She gasped, and then noticed that her eyes were red, not the sea-green color she saw her with prior to falling into unconsciousness when Lilith attempted to absorb all the souls on Earth. "What are you…"

"This is Hell, Yui," she cut her off. "This…is your Hell, and here…all of your shame, all of your deepest fears…take on a life of their own, including the people you have pissed over for your own, selfish goals. There's an old saying, 'Live by the sword, die by the sword'. You used violence, in one form or another, on others to have your way, only to lose yourself to violence…and in addition, you lost others to the violence you used. This cruelty has been within you since before you even met Gendo Mu, my former adopted son and the only black sheep of my family. Your brand of science spelled only two words: 'Manipulation' and 'abandonment', and you persisted in them. You're a sociopath, Yui, incapable of real love, unwilling to admit your faults, even when you know you've harmed people."

"Like how you hurt me," Yui turned around and saw Shinji, dressed in a kimono of the same black and red as Akira was, wielding a kusarigama, a sickle with a metal ball and chain attached at its end, and he looked at enraged as her sister had been the last time they saw each other at the hospital.

"And me," turning to the eastern side of her cell, Yui saw Anne-Marie, dressed in a yukata like Akira's, wielding her dual swords that dripped with blood on the blades, and Anne-Marie looked like she was in a state of injury because Yui saw blood pouring down her exposed legs and bare feet onto the ground.

She made an attempt to back away from her, but Yui's right hand made contact with something that felt like a squishy sac or wet, plastic bag.

"You know what you did to hurt me in ways that you cannot understand, Yui," Anne-Marie told her, and Yui saw what her hand had connected with. "You stole from me my right to bear life!"

It was a baby, deformed and covered in blood! Yui was terrified beyond her worst nightmares! And then, the dead fetus raised one of its deformed arms up and grabbed her by her left leg.

"Aaaahh!" She gasped, backing away from it.

"Women like you give mothers a bad name, Yui," she turned to the western side of the chamber and saw Pema, her legal and biological fathers, Masamune and Tai, respectively, Kyoko Zeppelin Soryu, whom she had met a few times during the creation of the first Evas from the salvaged pieces of Adam and the body of Lilith, and, to her surprise, Rumi herself had also accompanied them, all of them dressed in black, wielding weapons associated with the martial arts, ranging from bows and arrows, swords to axes, and looking at her with anger so great that it was insatiable.

"Grrrr!" Something over her head growled, and she looked up, seeing her former vessel, Evangelion Unit-01, demonic in the fact that it had very little armor covering it, revealing much of the bloody muscles and nerves surrounding the pseudo-organic and cybernetic bones and attachments in the time it was being designed, with its eyes burning white like fire.

"Eva is a curse," Akira uttered.

"And you are a disgrace," went her fathers right after.

"You are a liar," Kyoji added in, raising an arrow in his bow right at her head, but not firing it yet.

"A cheater," added Pema, raising her bow and arrow at Yui, too.

"Murderer," said Anne-Marie.

She could've run, but there was no point in trying; she was already dead and in Hell, so escape was impossible, no matter what she did. This was her damnation, and she couldn't avoid it. Her shame manifested into the people she manipulated, harmed, infuriated and abandoned, her worst fears of how they would exact vengeance upon her already in their minds, and the insanity of the reality of there being no end to the madness that she sentenced herself to.

"Show her the pain that she has forced each of you to endure," Unit-01 uttered out, sounding just like her, but with the greatest hint of sadism in its tone, and they all charged at her.

Yui didn't even scream, for any good it might've done her.

-x-

"…Urgh!" Gendo groaned, having been kicked flying backwards onto the walls of his cell, sliding down to the smoldering ground. "Aaaaurgh!"

For a long time, he tried to deny the fact that he had died, that his own wife killed them both, and that he was in a place that served as his personal Hell, complete with the fears and nightmares that he kept at bay when he was alive. One such fear was Akira, despite her unwillingness to cross the line between a person of moral conscious and a cold-blooded killer, crossing the line he was willing to cross every time, and using her power over the four elements to inflict pain upon him.

"You dishonor us all, Gendo Mu," she told him, brandishing her staff as two streams of fire shot out from beneath her legs. "You disgrace me, disgrace my family, and the price for such shame is to be beaten until all the resistance in your soul has been expelled from you!"

"Yeah, Akira," he looked up and saw Shinji, or, rather, what passed for Shinji; he looked like a desecrated corpse, dried up, wrinkled and everything. "Show him no mercy."

"Teach the black sheep the repercussions of all that he did," he heard and saw Rumi, holding onto the corpse Shinji's left hand. "He thought he could get away with hurting us. He lived by the hand that causes pain and death, and died by the hand that causes pain and death."

"She means you made the choice to hurt us, and signed your death warrant in the end. You made your bed and you're sleeping forever in it." Akira explained, and then shot a stream of fire from her staff and burned what was left of his face!

"Aaaaaaaurgh!" He screamed, for all the good it didn't do him; he was in the one place where pain was a constant sensation, and one he was condemned with.

But then, he had a theory on his predicament: Since he was in Hell, and he was a Pyro Channeler, he could try to fight back back against his adopted mother with the flames she used on him.

"Nice try, Gendo, but your theory is full of false hope," he looked up and saw Miaka, dressed in an all-red hakama with a black sash around her arms. "Channeling is something you have in life, not in death, and we all know how terrible you were in the art of Pyro Channeling."

"Yeah," went her daughter, Taeko, dressed like her and floating alongside her on the left. "You really suck, bad man!"

THRUST! He soon felt a blade penetrating his abdomen and out his back and looked back down, seeing the only daughter of the non-channeler that humiliated him in a defeat that he felt was unfair.

"You tried to get us killed!" Mayo shouted at him, driving her sword deeper into his stomach. "You don't deserve your life!"

His perception was soon rendered murky by the presence of all the Rokubungi family, including members he had never seen in his life, there had to have been almost one-hundred of these martial artists, masters of the elements or more (when he took into consideration that Akira's biological family dated back to before the Eighteenth Century, over one-thousand years or more because some of the members, he now accepted, had lived over four-hundred years in their own lives.

"Mayo's right," went a man that demonstrated greater control over fire that matched Akira's and was something Gendo would never amount to, looking at said man. "You don't deserve your life. Not even an afterlife. You're incapable of loving others beyond your pathetic wife. You're a fool."

"A failure," a woman, a bit older than Shinobu, added in.

"Cretin," three teen girls finished. "Let's make his suffering legendary for the masters here."

"One of Gendo against many of us? The odds are unfair for him," said Akira, who then sprouted horns on her forehead, "but this is Hell. There is no such thing as 'fair'. Get him!"

They charged toward him, and he screamed his lungs out, but in his cell, any cries he gave out fell on the ears of the deaf.

-x-

"…Urgh!" Mai groaned, feeling her neck about to break for the umpteenth time, as the demonic manifestation of her dead son, Mushi, channeled her body's internal fluids.

In the end, all three were doomed to eternity in their personal Hells, subjected to their worst fears, their failures, and cursed to repeat them until all sense of sanity had faded from their minds. This was their fate…and the fate of many who came to Hell after death.

End

A/N: Hooray! I completed this on my birthday! Well, read and review, please! Peace out!