Creation began on 11-01-20

Creation ended on 08-19-21

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Never Understanding

A/N: Throughout what has happened…and what has yet to happen, there's only one other person in existence that's wondering why nobody else seems to accept what can be over what was.

As she hid in another lifetime that was not her own, she knew they were looking for her. Worse was that they were either looking for her…or him, who was also looking for her. And yet none of them seemed to be able to see the reason why this needed to happen. Even as she walked down the hospital hall and looked down at various people in need for their injuries due to a major traffic accident, she had to wonder just who would be looking for her first: Them…or him?

Them, being the various men and women that were from different lifetimes as a result of the Third Impact, or beyond that, before that day even occurred, resulting in a fractured universe…or rather, a multiverse, comprised of alternate universes, each one different from the previous one, either existing all at the same time or at the end of one universe or the beginning of another. There had been times, small times, where she was certain that she had just narrowly avoided being caught by one of them, a young man that resembled her son, only paler and having met his end a long time ago and now serving under a deity that belonged to whatever lifetime he was from. She had heard of a rumor of how some people, child molesters, were slaughtered by a teen that was whiter than a bed sheet with dark eyes and a small blade that could cut through metal, flesh and bone like a knife through butter, leaving bloody messages for the police to find, taking credit for their inability to bring justice or vengeance for the innocent or dead victims left behind by the people he killed.

Why can't they understand? She wondered as she examined a little boy with a cracked sternum. Why can't they just accept what can be and make him see that everything that happened was necessary to save everyone? In the end, people were saved from the end.

"…I found you," she heard a little girl's voice and turned around and saw a six-year-old girl with a look of disappointment on her face. "You can run all you want, lady, but you can never hide from us. It's either you face the consequences of your involvement…or face retribution because you chose to leave him."

Yui Ikari, probably the smartest person in the whole of existence, turned away from the girl, but found her path blocked by a man that clearly had fewer good days with his body being a record of unpleasant memories, particularly his prosthetic left arm…and the fact that he was carrying a sword on his back.

"You're only making things difficult for yourself," he told her. "It's best to cooperate with us rather than face him."

"You two don't even belong here," she responded.

"Neither do you," they countered.

She walked away from them, walking through the crowd of people. There seemed to be a dozen or so of them, these men and women (she used "women" loosely when it seemed that two of them were just little girls, one of whom was the one that she had just walked away from), people that seemed associated with him or herself in one way or another. All she really understood about them was that there were two groups out looking for her; one that seemed to be after her for the sake of saving themselves…and the other group that had something more personal on their minds, like a vendetta, but all she ever glimpsed of either of them was the sense of impending dread. And throughout all of it, only one name ever came to mind regarding the two sides: Shinji Ikari.

She couldn't even recall the last time she ever saw him. At least without his rage against her. After everything ended, he should've been able to move on and seek out happiness in the future she had paved for him to take, but he didn't seem to see it that way. To him, everything was an unbearable pain he wanted to end, and in his mind, it could only end in one way: With her death.

Why can't they just understand that this is the way things need to be? She wondered as she ran into a stairway and went down a flight of steps. I did everything I could to ensure a brighter future for everyone. Why can't they see it that way?

But she didn't know any of these people…and she had no intention of getting to know them, either. She had to get away from all of them.

"You can run all of you want, lady," she heard a voice that sounded colder than her son's…but in a hollow-like sense, like he was less than present, and she saw a person that resembled Shinji, but his skin was paler, his hair was somewhat-ragged, and he was dressed in traditional Japanese clothing adorned with a shotgun bandolier and scabbard (Yui wasn't sure if he had any other weapons), and his eyes seemed like black holes, devoid of light. "You can't outrun the ghosts of your past…and you have dozens chasing after you."

She ran past him and out onto the streets. She had to get away. If these people were looking for her, then it was a matter of time before the other group was after her.

"You can't escape me forever, Mother!" Her son's enraged voice echoed in her head. "I'll find you! I'll make you pay!"

Why can't he understand? She continued to question herself. Why won't they understand?

-x-

"…Where'd she go?" The little girl asked the two men as they made it outside, seeing a crowd of people.

"She ran," the pale-skinned Shinji stated. "She always runs, never staying in one place for too long. Even if we track her to where she lives, she won't be the same woman we were looking for. She'll have abandoned this existence, as well."

"I hate that she does this," the adult Shinji with the prosthetic arm and sword stated. "We're trying to save the people we hold most dear to ourselves from a calamity that she put in motion, and she just runs whenever she's found. What is she so afraid of?"

"The consequences," the pale-skinned Shinji answered him. "The fact that she runs implies that she is aware of the fate she will be dealt for her role in this agonizing situation she helped to create. To run is to deny her involvement…and forget that she has a debt to pay to the people she helped to harm."

"I don't know exactly how you're able to speak the way you do," the little girl admitted, "but you make more sense, regardless. But we won't actually kill her when we find her; we would've done so the instant we found her, no matter who was present when we did. The other side, they'd find her and bring her to him…just so that he can do away with her himself."

"To kill who you blame for the suffering you have experienced is to give your suffering an identity. Once you give a personification of a perceived form of degradation, of brutality, of a usual or basic evil a face, you hand yourself an adversary…and you give others that have suffered, one way or another, the like-minded, a target."

"It seems like Yui Ikari, in most cases, is the adversary because she has caused the initial degree of pain towards him," the adult Shinji expressed, "towards all of us, one way or another. The only difference between each of us and the original is that we were able to get past that agony."

-x-

"…She was here," said a little boy that had a pool of blood forming under his feet to a teenage boy as they appeared atop a building rooftop, looking down at the people below.

"That bitch," the teen uttered. "I thought we had her."

"She can't keep this up. Sooner or later, she's going to run out of places to run to. Even a multiverse has limitations regarding hiding places."

"Tell that to these wannabe heroes that are looking for her, too. I still hear those despicable voices in my head whenever one of those people from my past come near me, always promising what they deny each time. Even in the silence, I can't shut them up. I want them to stop, and I must believe that handing her over to him will end it all."

"Then let's keep looking for her."

And then, they were gone.

-x-

In all honesty, Yui simply didn't understand what was wrong with the people after her, including her son. Now hiding in a forest in a lifetime where the people didn't embrace science and technology, instead communing with nature, the woman tried to comprehend where she went wrong with Shinji.

"No matter what you try to say to persuade any of us to look the other way," she recalled a version of Shinji saying to her, dressed in dark robes like some sort of mage or something, holding a large staff, "you can't wrap yourself up in the cloak of victimhood…because you're not a victim. You're not even a martyr or a savior. You're a villainess! You're the end-bringer! You helped unleash Hell on Earth and you turned your own son into a scapegoat for everything that went wrong with your intentions, and now he's looking for payback!"

Why can't he accept why I did this all for him? She wondered as she sat in front of a roaring fire. Why can't he embrace the bright future for all of humanity?

"You left him alone, lady," a little girl holding a stuffed bear had told her once. "Nobody deserves to be left alone by anyone that has some sort of connection to them. But you chose to leave him. You can say that you didn't all you want to, but in his mind, in his heart, he saw you leave. He saw you die. And all you do is…watch him from the safety of the darkness as he had to go through the rest of his life in misery. You and his father made him that way. You made him miserable. Some people call me a bastard…but that's what people like you are, people that are cruel by doing what they choose to do. You're the bastard, lady. You."

Yui had been getting flak from people either affiliated with her son or were, in perverse degrees, related to her son. It seemed like none of them really understood why she did any of them. She gave the people a future. She gave Shinji a future. Why couldn't they see it that way?

"Are you truly that blind to your son's suffering?" A female voice uttered to her on the other side of the fire, and she looked at…herself, dressed in a strange suit of armor that conformed to her body and had a scaly, reptilian aesthetic to its design. "You know, for a woman that chose the path of the scientist before she chose the path of the mother, you have a very pathetic perception of which side of you takes precedence over the other."

"Who…who are you?" She asked her.

"I'm you…and I'm not you," the other Yui responded. "In a way, I'm just someone Shinji made to fill the void you left in his life, a being with a body and mind, but with only bits of the soul. I'm half the woman that represents the mother he needed in his life, but the other half of the woman that represents the scientist is the part of me I can do without making decisions that conflict with my maternal feelings toward Shinji."

"You're only…half a woman?"

"Half a woman who's a mother. What are you? Are you a mother? Are you a scientist? Or are you just a woman?"

"I'm all three."

"But which one or two of these aspects take precedence over the other aspects? The woman would be the foundation, but are you predominantly the mother…or the scientist?"

"I told you, I'm all three. I'm a woman, a mother and a scientist."

"But one or two of these must take precedence over the rest. You must be one or the other if not all three. So…which is it? Are you the mother…or the scientist?"

"Must I really be one or the other?"

"In this case, yes. When it comes to priorities, women…and other people, for that matter, have to decide who and what they are in terms of what is that they do. When I was…you…I was a woman, a scientist and a mother, but when we committed more of ourselves to the Evangelion than to our son…or that man, we created an instability that tore Shinji's life apart, and he's been trying to put the pieces back together ever since. When he decided that he needed to have his mother back at any cost, he performed an…an unexpected ceremony of sorts…and managed to pull the maternal part of the woman he understood to be his mother back from the abyss she plunged into of her own volition back into his life. I am merely his mother, without the scientist. I still feel this emptiness in my heart that probably belongs to the part of me that is the scientist…and I'd rather not have that part of me returned. Every time I think about that day, I am reminded of how I made Shinji suffer, how I put a blind ambition before my own child…and I could no longer believe that what I initially believed to be a bright future for all of mankind to be the right thing to do."

"But it was the right thing to do," Yui told her. "We were going to save everyone."

"Except that's not how I can see it. I saw the world you left behind for your son…and it's not a paradise as you probably wanted to believe. But you probably already knew that when you left him alone the way you did. There are no trees growing. There are no birds singing. There are no children running around and laughing. The ocean is as red as blood. The soil is as parched and decayed as what you would find in a dark desert. Those behemoths that you let put holes in his hands lay scattered across the place like mockeries of what befell Christ himself. That's no paradise, not even a place where an oasis could be made. It's just a new form of Hell. It is Hell."

"That's not true. Anyplace can be like Heaven so long as you have the will to live."

"That's just your belief…and not everyone embraces it as you claim to. You call anyplace like Heaven if one has the will to live…but what happens when will…becomes synonymous with suffering, with betrayal and abandonment? What happens when…those taken by an unforgiving agenda…have no will to return to life…or simply can't return to life? What, then?"

Yui wanted to say that none of this was possible, that people would return if one was patient, but she got the impression that her doppelgänger, this half of a woman that was only the mother and not the scientist…had an opinion that would contradict her claim. Just like these other people that came looking for her, either for themselves or for…him. None of them seemed to really get what was happening or what could happen if they just followed her beliefs.

"Why do you think he's after you so much and only has a negative viewpoint of everything?" The other Yui asked her.

"He's not giving life a chance," she responded her belief. "He's not even trying to."

"Or it's likely that he has…and can't embrace your beliefs, anymore. He can't believe in the people he wanted to protect if they're no longer part of his life, a life that wasn't so much of a life as it was a…nightmare he just wanted to wake up from. But you wouldn't know anything about nightmares, would you? You don't know the difference between a nightmare…and a living Hell. To you, they're not real, just another factor you try to make sense of like a puzzle. Except you can't view everything that way, Yui. You can't factor in what will happen against what could happen. You can't factor in what someone believes in against what they don't believe in. And you can't factor that Shinji will remain as he is against how he could turn out when left alone by practically everyone he thought he could stand to be around. Namely the two people that failed him above all others."

"Failed him? But…I didn't fail him!"

"Yes, you did. You did it by leaving him. You did it by taking advantage of his lack of understanding. You used him, deceived him, and then you abandoned him to serve as an eternal testament of human existence. You think too far ahead in the future and only half a step in the past and present."

"You don't know that."

"I know enough to know that nobody's really going to give a damn about us when we're gone. You put so much stock in people's future as a whole and very little individually; you didn't plan ahead for an actual future that you could be proud of for your son."

"You're wrong. I did."

"Then enlighten me. What did you hope Shinji would do when he grew up? When he really grew up? And I don't mean when he turned fourteen years of age and ended up as your pawn in an agenda to change the world. I mean the things that we take for granted every day of our lives. The things that we don't really consider we may want until much later in life."

Yui opened her mouth to speak the first thing she had intended to say about Shinji…but nothing came out. It wasn't that she had nothing to say about it…but rather, she didn't put in the time to consider what her son might do in the future. What would Shinji want to do with his life? What would he want to be when he grew up? Where would he want to be and who would he want to be with when he met someone new?

"I… Shinji… He'd…" She tried to speak again, but she had been stumped.

"Yeah, I thought as much before I came looking for you," her doppelgänger expressed. "In a universe that was fractured into many, with many possibilities, we don't really know what your son had desired in his life beyond what he no longer had, what you took from him that agonizing day. Did he want to be a doctor? Did he want to be a race car driver? Did he have a childhood friend or crush? Did he wish to explore some other country? You see, we don't know what really goes on in his head, so we can't assume that your son has any other plans beyond what he wants to do when he finds you and fulfills his need for justice for his shortcomings or inflicted slights by other people because he felt he made the wrong choice of believing in someone that was absent for most of his life."

"But I wasn't absent! I was always there! I was always watching him!"

"You liar!" They both turned away from each other and towards a little girl dressed in gold armor with a design similar to the doppelgänger Yui's bodysuit, but invoking somewhat of a samurai aspect to it. "You know perfectly well that you weren't there for him! Your absence caused him nothing but grief! Every day, every month, every year was one where he had to go through with the understanding that his mother was not there! You weren't with him on his birthdays! You weren't with him on your birthdays! You weren't even with him on Mother's Day! You were just…gone! You were just a stranger to him that he wanted involved in his life when his father chose to cast him aside until he became of use to him in a goal just as depraved as your own! And the worst part?! The worst part is that neither of you, the people that were supposed to put him before yourselves when you became the primary people in his life…ever deserved him! You…you don't deserve him at all!"

"And who are you to tell me this?" Yui questioned her.

"I'm the same person that looked another version of yourself in the eye and threatened to do worse than you can possibly imagine any child doing with a sword to an adult that made the wrong choices in her life if she dared to approach her so after all she did to hurt other people, and I'll do the same to you if I have to."

Yui didn't like this, being threatened by a little girl. And worse was the feeling that these people that came looking for her had other beliefs that went against her own.

"As you can see," her doppelgänger uttered, "Little Rumi here has her opinion about you that's just as valid as my own or anyone else's that are looking for you."

"And does everyone looking for me have the same opinion towards me?"

"They're as different as we're all different…and we all have people we want to protect from the fallout of your actions, whether they're a different incarnation of the boy we either love or loathe…or it's other people that we hold most dear and would give anything to be with. Me? I love my son, being his mother, to the point that I would choose never to go back to being that woman that left him to play false god in a fossilized time capsule. Rumi here, she loves her Shinji to the point that she would and has threatened to harm you if you so much as hurt him a second time. There are other versions of Shinji looking for you, as well, some of whom you've already met, and they have their reasons for wanting to find you."

-x-

In his solitude, Shinji, closing his eyes for the first time in what felt like a long time, drifting off into a slumber that he had been denied for such a long time, tilted his head back in his throne of bones and twisted metal. In his darkness, there was nothing and no one to bother him. There was no Yui Ikari, no Gendo Ikari, no Evangelion, no Angels, not even those faces he was losing touch of as time went on in this agonizing journey across this multiverse, seeing through the eyes of all these different men that weren't himself. A young man, about his age, with freckles and a camera in his hands, appeared before him, but he turned to dust as he looked away from him; he couldn't even remember his name or who he was to himself.

If I could stay like this, he thought, it would be like what I truly desire above all else. The sweet release from all the suffering I want to end. It would be better to be this way, to drift away from it all. To drift…to let go of everything…and never know more than that one thing that promises the only absolute truth.

Hanging in a large cage beside his throne, a woman so much like the one he was after, but without any of the ties and arrogance as the one he was after, watched him as it looked like he was asleep for the first time in a long time.

When he's asleep, he looks like he's more than asleep, this incarnation of Yui thought. He looks like he's been released, set free, cut lose from his bindings.

"If you find this woman you're after," she had asked him once upon a time when they first met, discovering that she was just a single woman with no family or desires to be a scientist, "will you let me go?"

"If I find her…you'll have my permission to leave," he had responded, making it clear that she was his prisoner, and only because she looked like the woman that had hurt him, no more, no less. "If I find her…there will be no further reason to keep you here."

She was merely his distraction, his metaphorical punching bag to remind himself of why he hated her so much.

"Aaaaurgh!" She heard him scream as he came to, panting from what had to be another fright.

And then…she saw him crouch on his throne, agonizing over whatever it was that had tortured him in his subconscious.

"I don't remember any of them, anymore," she heard him say. "Who were they? Why did they leave me behind? Why did I get left alone? Why?"

She pitied him, really. It seemed like every time he drifted off to sleep, it was only for less than two minutes…and every time he awoke, he just seemed to deteriorate further, getting more and more worse, both mentally…and physically. He still looked young, but his hair had turned white and his face wrinkled and worn, his eyes red from insomnia; if anyone said he looked like he needed a vacation, they wouldn't be far from the truth. She hoped that they would find this version of herself that hurt him really soon.

I don't want to be here for when the worst happens, she thought.

-x-

Running. Always running. That's all she really did when she didn't want to be found by any of them. But there was only so many places that you could run to.

Before the fire died, Yui just got up and left her maternal doppelgänger and the little girl in armor and fled deeper into the forest. The next thing she knew, she wasn't in the forest, anymore. Now, she was in another city, driving a car, trying to forget about her encounter with these people that just couldn't see past what had happened to what could be. They just couldn't get that everything happened as intended to, that this was all for the bright future of all humanity.

Well, almost everything. She wasn't inside the Eva like she was supposed to be…and her son wasn't happy in any state of existence. She needed to make him see, make them all see, that good things would come to those that had the will to live.

"Except you can't force people to believe in that pitiful claim," she recalled the girl say to her. "To force them to follow your belief is to force your will upon others and deprive them of theirs. If you do something like that, then…you might as well just take their whole lives from them and call them your own like a vicarious parasite. Nobody should have to live like that if they don't feel up to your expectations…or anyone else's, for that matter."

"You make me feel exhausted from having to hear about your nonexistent expectations of people to follow your beliefs, lady," the pale-skinned Shinji had once told her, "like I should move on to better days without someone like you riding me all the time because I can't stand you."

"I don't know who said and where they said it, but I'm going to tell you this belief that is a harsh truth to all that make a choice to go down that path," her doppelgänger told her, "but if you have no intention, whatsoever, or are not fully committed to taking care of that child, then you shouldn't get involved any further. You'll only end up hurting him more than you already have."

"Hurt me?!" She recalled Shinji once yelling to her during another chance encounter between them. "You don't want to hurt me?! Look at me! LOOK AT ME! You already have! You already have hurt me, Mother! And now, I'm going to hurt you! Do you hear me?! I'm going to hurt you!"

She shuddered at the thought and stopped the car. She reached into her purse and pulled out a picture of Shinji; in this lifetime, like the other ones she had wandered in and out of, her son had a plain and solemn expression, clearly someone with no dreams or ambitions. Worse was the date on the back of the picture: "If I ever see you again, I'll do right by you this time."

He's dead in this one, too, she realized as this woman's memories of the death of her son played in her head; she woke up one day, almost a year ago, seeing him off on a field trip with his class, and then receiving a call three hours later to hear of a traffic accident that claimed the lives of eighteen of the people on the bus her son was on along with forty-three other people. His death devastated her.

As of late, it seemed as though every time she found herself in a different version of herself, it was always those who had either lost their son, or husband…or both…and she was forced to go on. There was never an alternate life where the three of them were…devoid of the tragedies or agendas that had been put in motion long ago. She couldn't understand it at all.

"I have seen many possibilities over my life," she recalled a dark creature associated with another version of Shinji saying to another version of herself at one point, "but no matter how much I tried to see so, I never, not once, even in the face of unforgiving adversity, saw a possible outcome where you two were together in the end. It was always as though such an outcome was decided long before I ever met you two. But outcomes like that only exist when the people involved in them make them so."

Meaning there's no other lifetime where the three of us are together because we choose not to be together? She wondered, looking at the urban road in front of her. We can't be together because we can't see ourselves together like we were before?

-x-

Shinji opened his eyes again, hearing that woman's despicable voice in his head. Oh, how he really hated his mother to the point where he wanted to shut her up for good. He couldn't sleep for more than two minutes at any given time without the bits and pieces of his past coming up to the surface of his psyche to haunt him over his degenerating ability to recall anyone from before the downfall of all of human existence. Simply wringing her neck and snuffing the life out of her wouldn't be sufficient enough after what he has gone through. He needed to send her to the farthest reaches of oblivion, beyond any hope of coming back.

I can't take it, anymore, he chanted in his mind, longing for something more soothing to his soul than everything else could ever hope to be. I just want it to end.

Always running away…

A/N: We can only run for so long and hide for so long, but we're running out of places to run and hide. And Yui is bound for a crisis of retribution if she doesn't own up to her faults, and the other alternate and original characters seen in this story, such as Evaflowne Shinji, A New Cause/Shinji/Death, Rumi Rokubungi, Shado Ikari, the homunculus Yui Ikari, etc. are a constant force that want to make her face the consequences because they have everything to lose. Please, do read and review. Peace!