Creation began on 05-30-15
Creation ended on 12-31-15
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Different from You: Moving on
A/N: Now that Gendo's out of the picture, maybe Shinji and Shado can get on with their lives.
Shinji had been grateful to not require crutches to maintain his mobility and so long as he stayed off his leg for most of each day until he healed completely, he would be fine.
Unfortunately, due to Gendo's unwanted visit and attempt on her father's life (as far as she was convinced, the man after her father), Shado rarely kept Shinji out of her sight, except for whenever she slept or went to the bathroom.
It's been two days now, thought Shinji, laying down on his futon in his room, trying to stay off his leg for the remainder of the day. He must be gone by now, or something else happened to him.
He heard the flushing of the bathroom toilet and sighed at how Shado would return to his room and sit beside his futon to play watchdog on him.
Shado, dressed in shorts and a green shirt, returned to his room and sat beside his futon and resumed reading a comic book about a girl band achieving fame in the music business.
"How are you feeling?" She then asked her father, looking over at him.
"For the fifteenth time, Shado, I'm fine," he told her, unable to hide his small smile. "It's just a minor injury, nothing I won't recover from in a few more days."
Shado looked at his left leg…and poked it once.
"Aaaurgh!" Shinji gasped, wishing his daughter hadn't done that. "Was that truly necessary, Shado?"
She then responded, "You're not Superman, Daddy. You stay in bed tomorrow."
"Shado, I can't stay in bed tomorrow. I have to go down tomorrow and pick up our laundry that the police concluded wasn't evidence and then…" Shinji tried to express, but Shado looked at him and placed her left hand below the bandaged portion of his leg, right near his foot. "Okay, you win, Shado."
She removed her hand from his leg and returned to her comic.
All the while, the rain continued to pour outside onto the streets.
-x-
"…So long as it continues to rain over the city, nobody will notice the Angel until the weather clears up," Ritsuko informed Commander Fuyutsuki, still wondering how they were going to deal with the Angel in the Big Apple.
"What about the NERV branches in the States?" He asked her.
"Neither the Nevada or Massachusetts branch have any Evas functional to deal with the Angel."
"And after Ikari was discovered to have been in New York and his alleged harassment of his son and granddaughter, the rest of NERV is under scrutiny for any further misbehavior. What about the Dummy System? Has that been progressed to completion?"
"It's still unable to sync with Units-00 and 01. It demonstrated some acceptability with Unit-02, but the other Evas and their potential compatibility with it is a problem."
After telling her to continue her work on trying to get the two Evas to work in tandem with the Dummy System, Fuyutsuki dismissed her. Ever since he was placed in charge of the agency two days ago, he felt like he was under pressure to get results that would enable the Evas to defeat the next Angel instead of those creatures that defeated the last Angel.
-x-
"…He's wearing them," the female detective said to her partner, as Shinji watched the televised series that revolved around New York's sexual crimes.
"Nice shoes," the male detective said to the perpetrator they were looking for at the beginning of the episode, and the episode ended.
It was only eight months ago that he started to look at these dramatized versions of the police that protected and served the people of the Big Apple, but Shinji found the Law & Order franchise, particularly the original series and the Special Victims Unit series to be more powerful than the other versions. More so, he was trying to move on from his sordid experience in Japan that he never wanted to relive again, whether or not he was the victim or the perpetrator. It was his introduction into the the franchise that became his form of immersion therapy in the hopes to recover completely from his rape…by immersing himself into the series that showed people what the police did when they got the evidence and statements to go after the bad guys and get justice for the victims who would have to go through recovery methods he didn't have in order to move on with their lives.
The next episode that came on showed the leading female role chasing after a man on a cold day.
"What's your name?" She asked the criminal after she received aid to apprehend him.
"Screw you," the man told her.
"Screw You, you're under arrest for attempted rape until we can nail you for the other eleven," the woman responded.
-x-
As Ritsuko continued to work on the Dummy System, she couldn't stop thinking about the Third Child and his bastard daughter. The fact that Commander Fuyutsuki deemed them off-limits only made her deduce that they were more valuable to the Evangelion program than they could've been elsewhere with some other agency. But the way things had transpired, because of the little girl's fear of them and the young father's devotion to said daughter's safety from anyone that would harm her (rather impressive, given who his own father was) was something she didn't see in most families these days.
Or at least the families in Japan.
"Ugh!" She heard Misato sputter after taking a sip of coffee that had been left out more than two hours ago. "Rits, I'm starting to think you've lost your respect for this type of beverage."
"It's nothing that special these days, Misato," the faux-blond told her.
"So says the woman that's a workaholic."
"I still believe that we might've gotten somewhere against the Angels if the Third Child and his daughter were to pilot the Evas."
"Maybe, but then again, maybe not. The Third Child's not someone that is willing to view the world as endangered just because he's told or threatened to live the way others want him to, and his kid's more afraid of us than she could ever be of the Angels, and I don't blame her for being afraid."
"So, you think that Ikari was wrong for trying to convince his son and granddaughter to join NERV?"
"Rits, the guy sent Section Two agents after them like they had gone AWOL, and brought them here against their will when the boy told us he'd only do it once last year. Shinji had to either incapacitate or even kill several of our personnel when he came to and got loose, looking for his daughter. I would say that his actions in protecting and rescuing his child is similar to the wrath of a woman scorned, except that his wrath was much worse than I believed it ever could be."
"So, we're simply to forget about them, even though the boy was able to move the Eva on his first try?"
"If we're ordered to leave them alone, then we're to leave them alone."
-x-
The rain didn't let up over the Big Apple, and the nightly and cloudy tones concealed the Angel that was just over the city. It could've shone its light over the people on the streets, in their vehicles or within their homes, read their minds, invaded their most private thoughts and even drive most of them mad, but something, some sort of instinct, told it to remain at bay and wait for an opportunity to come around for it.
As the Angel continued to remain hidden by the weather, Shinji had just put a blanket on Shado, who had fallen asleep in front of the TV again after watching only an hour of The Phantom.
Maybe I should consider getting her a tablet with several movies from off the Internet, he thought, laying back on the other side of his bed (since Shado was out cold on the other end. Apple is becoming quite the success around the planet. There's hardly a soul in the city I've seen without an Apple device. Those iPods, iPhones, iPads. A pity that their watches aren't selling as well as their other products.
He turned the film off and turned in earlier than he had intended to.
"Hmm…hmm-hmm," he heard Shado humming in her sleep, and then looked her scattered comics on the floor.
What are you dreaming about, Shado? He wondered, laying down and gazing up at the ceiling.
As he drifted off, the dragon and phoenix tattoo on his back disappeared again.
-x-
"…Even though it may be a necessity to have them near, I'm against it completely," went Fuyutsuki to Unit-01, speaking to the soul of Yui Ikari within it. "I went to see your relatives, and they were…relieved of their absence. Shinji and his daughter are probably better off away from Japan…and everything that causes them problems they shouldn't have. At least in the States, they're free from the conflict against the Angels and the difficulties NERV has with them. And Shinji…he's do anything he had to in order to protect his child from others that so much as look at her with some intention to cause them harm. We're not even sure how it happened, but Gendo has suffered from massive trauma to his brain and nervous system. He's been…pushed to the edge of his very sanity, over its boundaries, lost in a labyrinth."
Suddenly, the alarms went off and Fuyutsuki heard scuffling footsteps.
"Commander Fuyutsuki," went Ritsuko as she arrived in the Eva cages, "the Angel in New York!"
"Yes?" He questioned.
"It's…being dealt with right now in lunar orbit."
"Excuse me?"
-x-
Nobody ever saw the dragon rising out of the Hudson and into the air, lifted up by a large, blue bird with arms beneath its massive wings. And nobody ever saw them go up high into the sky.
The Angel noticed them, and followed them into space.
The Dragon and the Phoenix were now so high, they were above the mesosphere. The Phoenix then began to change; it went from looking like a living creature that looked as though it had been sculpted from blue flames…into a metallic, armored version of said creature. It's wings were smaller, but their refined design made them sleeker along with the rest of its body.
"Aiieeee!" It shrieked, now sounding metallic.
"Rrrraaugh!" The Dragon roared, and its chest emblem blinked several times…before it came off of it, revealing a hollow cavity.
Then, the Phoenix, as if by an act of God himself, came apart into many pieces! They surrounded the Dragon as its own body collapsed into itself, with the sides of its body closing together, forming a new chest area, while the arms and wings of the Phoenix attached to where the sides and back of the Dragon. The legs of the Dragon fused with the legs of the Phoenix, forming armored boots while the Phoenix's head merged with the Dragon's head, forming a human-like face wrapped in thick armor. Whatever remained of the two that weren't merged into one being was fused together into a staff-like weapon that incorporated the Phoenix's tail and body remains with the Dragon's tail.
They had somehow merged into one being, intent of taking the Angel out.
-x-
"No way," went Hyuga in Central Dogma.
"They fused together?" Maya questioned.
On the monitors, the new creature had now flown towards the Angel, which tried to defend itself with a ray of light that was clearly more than just light. It was causing burn marks to form on the fusion's body. But the fused creature wasn't deterred at all. It wasn't going to let an attack so critical stop it from ending the threat the Angel represented.
It then thrust its weapon…and pierced the Angel in its core, just under a pair of limbs that resembled small wings. The Angel then faded away, leaving only the core, which atomized into nothingness.
"The Angel's blue pattern has disappeared," Maya uttered.
Ritsuko, Misato and Fuyutsuki were fascinated and left to wonder how they could ever hope to face such a being. If they could at all.
On the screens, the fused creature split apart, returning to the form of the mechanical dinosaur and blue, bird-like creature, which just disappeared from sight.
-x-
Shinji awoke and found that his daughter was nowhere to be found in his room.
"Shado?" He called out to her.
She appeared from out in the hallway, her footed pajamas half-opened and revealing her undershirt.
"Yes, Daddy?" She asked him.
He exhaled a breath of relief and expressed that he was glad to see her.
"I was just on my way to the bathroom," she told him.
"Oh. Oh, sorry. You go do that." He told her, and then slowly got out of bed himself. Get a grip, Shinji. You'll burn yourself out worrying about her with every waking moment. You gotta move on.
To be continued…
A/N: And here's the last chapter of the year. Until next year, everyone.