Creation began on 03-02-20

Creation ended on 03-03-20

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Extinguished Torches

A/N: When all that remain of the Ikari family are its worst members, does a name like that deserve to be remembered? When two lives are forced to end prematurely due to spite from the other members of the family, did they ever truly matter to anyone?

Shinji Ikari, the only son of Yui and Gendo Ikari, the father of Shado Ikari, pronounced dead due to suffering from severe burns and multi-organ failure…and yet no funeral was in the works for him by anyone from his family. Not his father, whom he hadn't been in contact with for ten years since his mother passed, not his aunt or uncle, anyone.

Shado Ikari, originally named Fuyona Ikari, the bastard daughter of Shinji Ikari and Hama Tendo, the granddaughter of Yui and Gendo Ikari, pronounced dead as a result of a suicide jump a few days after she was sent to be with her grandfather after her father was hospitalized for his burns received from saving his daughter from a house fire. The claim that the grandfather could look after her while her father recovered was proven to be just a falsehood due to the man not knowing how to take care of any child. And despite both father and daughter dying just a day apart from each other, no plan of a burial was in motion for the girl, either. Not even plans to cremate them.

Gendo, the estranged father and cold-hearted grandfather of the two, just made the order to acquisition the remains of both young children to use for NERV's genetics research, something that appalled most of the personnel for his choice instead of doing something to honor the fact that he just lost his son and granddaughter.

Smash! A loud noise came from within his office, getting the attention of Misato, Fuyutsuki and Ritsuko, the former two who wanted to question Gendo's decision.

They opened the door and entered to find Gendo had been slammed against the wall on the right side opposite of the windows by a…a woman dressed in a black and green, scaly, armor-like bodysuit, sporting red lines extending from the arms and legs to a spot of her torso, oversized gauntlets and thigh-high boots. Her face was rather angular and pale, with a pageboy hairstyle and an expression of contempt.

"I really didn't want to believe what they told me about what you did," they heard her say, and Fuyutsuki reeled back from the sight of her. "I was hoping there would be at least one version of you that was different…but I guess even one prayer of you to be a kind person is literally asking for too much from anyone that listens."

"Yui?" Fuyutsuki questioned, and she turned to face him. "Yui Ikari?"

"Yes…and no," she answered him. "My time here is brief, so I'll just tell you what I'm here to do. This man that failed them…can no longer be trusted to do the right thing and honor them, so I'm taking them away from this place for good."

"Call security," Gendo ordered them. "Stop her! She can't have their remains!"

He was somewhat bloody and from the looks of things, his left arm was broken; if he'd been beaten, this woman had apparently done a small number on him.

"You're here for remains of the Third Child and his illegitimate daughter?" Ritsuko questioned her. "I'm afraid they're property of NERV's genetics division."

"They were people once, just a young boy and a little girl…and deserve to be treated as such, regardless of what you say. They don't deserve to be poked and prodded and dissected like they're nothing more than lab rats. If this is how you truly treat your own, then you don't deserve them any more than he does."

"They were signed over to NERV for study. It's the law."

"I say to Hell with your laws. I'm taking their remains from here."

The woman, Yui Ikari, walked over to them, her hands extended into claws, threatening to harm them if they stood in her way.

Fuyutsuki simply stepped out of her way and realized what was going to happen. He had to suspect that, somewhere down the long, someone was going to be upset with Gendo's choice to put his child and grandchild to something worse than he had done already…and act in defense of what needed to happen.

"Now, hold on a minute," Ritsuko tried to stand up to her, but Yui grabbed her and threw her aside to the floor.

"I used to think what we were doing was a noble thing," she uttered as she walked out of the office, "that we were making a difference for everyone. But if we can't even be humane to our own, what right do we have to call ourselves human? What right do we have to live…when we condemn our own to suffer in ways that are unforgivable? We have none at all."

-x-

With the men in white coats down on the ground, nursing their cuts on their arms and legs, a young, pale-skinned man with the barest resemblance to Shinji Ikari looked down at the deceased girl that was his daughter, cleaned up and prepped for experimentation. He was dressed in traditional Japanese attire (a dark hakama) with a metal gauntlet covering his right hand, sporting two submachine guns and a shotgun scabbard on his back and a kama in his left hand.

"I can hear what remains of your soul crying out to your father," he spoke as he picked up a discarded sheet and clothed the girl with it. "You don't deserve this. Neither of you deserve this. We're supposed to honor our dead with humanity by burying them so that they can return to the bosom of the Earth, or cremate them to spread their ashes to the winds or into the water someplace far from where they died. But if that man that drove you to take your own life to be with your father cannot honor his family…then he doesn't deserve what he cast aside at all."

He picked up the girl's body and carried her outside the room.

Just next door, a larger man, with a prosthetic left arm under a blue shawl, carried out a larger body wrapped in a sheet. He, too, had a resemblance to the young man that had died.

"Taken before their time," he uttered to the pale one. "It's not fair."

"Death is never fair," the pale one uttered. "But Death didn't do this to them. People whose hearts rot with cruelty drove these two the realm beyond mortality. They're the only ones to blame for this act of spite towards two souls that struggled to belong in a world that shunned them just for existing. Whatever fate awaits the ones that remain…is the fate they themselves chose to be dealt with."

-x-

"…They all said the same thing," a security guard told Gendo in the infirmary, "a woman in armor with two men and a little girl came and took the Third Child and his daughter's remains and then they disappeared from the base."

"Find them," he ordered the guard.

"We're looking, but there's no sign of them ever leaving the Geo-Front. Nobody's seen or heard of these four, two of whom say looked you're the Third Child, except one was older and the other looked like he needed more sunlight."

"Why would anyone want their remains?" Ritsuko, who was also present, questioned.

"Why else?" Fuyutsuki uttered. "To bury them, to cremate them, or whatever they felt was necessary to do them justice and honor them."

Gendo was handed four pictures of the foul culprits and had to admit to himself that the two men did possess some resemblance to his son while the girl was someone he'd never seen before, but was clearly older than his granddaughter by at least two or three years. The woman, on the other hand, looked exactly like Yui, his wife, but was…not the one he knew.

"You don't deserve your son or granddaughter," she had told him when she appeared in his office. "You abandoned your son, drove his daughter, your only grandchild, to kill herself when you told her that the only person to have ever loved her unconditionally was gone. If you care very little for your family, then you don't deserve to honor their memory. You have only disgraced their memory by condemning their remains to an inhuman series of cruelty."

"Do we have their DNA?" He asked Ritsuko.

"All we managed to get before they were taken were hair and skin samples," she answered.

-x-

It was a rather grassy field with few trees and flowers, spring-like weather, nothing like the humid, summer weather that was associated with Japan, and remote, someplace where they could be left alone because nobody would ever come to disturb such a place. There stood two lone gravestones, made of marble instead of black stone or metal, etched with the names, DOBs and DODs of the people that were buried…and in front of them were the four people that liberated them from that awful place, there to pay their respects, even though they didn't know them at all.

"Thank you for doing this, Death," Yui addressed the pale version of Shinji.

"There is no better way to show respect for the dead than to bury them into the Earth," he responded, "to return them to the world."

The little girl, no longer sporting a golden, scaly-armored bodysuit, now dressed in a blue yukata with a black sash wrapped around the waist, placed two bouquets of flowers in front of the graves as a peace offering to their souls.

"I pray that you two will find each other in the next life," she uttered to the graves.

What brought these four different people from different lifetimes, different worlds, completely different fates that defied an original fate that was as cold and twisted as the fate that nearly befell this father and his daughter were it not for the crueler fate that befell them that was their way out of the cold life they were forced to put up with…did not matter as much as this moment did to them. They each either had to escape predetermined events that weren't worth fighting against…or protect someone else from such predetermined events that weren't worth fighting against on their behalf. They and several others had to do what others never thought to do, but there would always be others, those who were less fortunate or completely deprived of such opportunities to change the course of their destiny…that would find a way to escape that was just as unlikely…even if it was frowned upon to take what some would call the easy way out. But there was nothing easy about dying or taking your own life to escape a living version of Hell…and there never would be.

Two lives, two insignificant souls in a labyrinth of the flesh, blood and bone…were just gone now. And nothing, nothing of human means or divinity…would undo the fate they were dealt to free them from their mortal suffering. Their torches extinguished before they could even burn brightly to illuminate the darkness and frighten away the monsters that lived among them. And there was nobody that could reignite their torches…or would be asked to carry them through the darkness that was just beyond the last breath.

"Death," the girl spoke to the pale Shinji, "can you see their souls beyond us all?"

The pale, young man looked up to the blue sky and answered, "I can see their souls."

"What has become of them?" The older Shinji with the prosthetic arm asked.

"They are separated by pain inflicted upon them by those of blood ties that were as cruel as criminals that care not for the harm they inflict upon the innocent. The son that became the father wonders where his little princess is in the great beyond that is eternity. And the girl… She's with someone similar to her father…but is full of a pain so deep that there may be no saving him like there is hope in saving the girl."

"Save the girl's soul, save his soul," Yui stated. "How do you save one's soul…and give up on trying to save another's when there's even just a small chance of doing so?"

"Whatever it takes to save them," the little girl spoke. "Whatever it takes to save them."

Even in the abyss of time…may their souls burn with renewal…

A/N: If anyone can guess which incarnations of which characters were used in this chapter, they will get praise for figuring it out. Just look at the previous stories that were completed or are still being worked on. Anyway, what did you think of this chapter? I didn't think that Gendo would be a stickler for any measure of humanity represented in the acts we commit to honor our dead; they who don't respect their fallen will themselves fall farther than they can imagine. Who these days would do what he did and do so with a cold heart?