The Last Chapter that Seldon ever wrote of The Children's Crusade. Let us mourn his passing.

Anyway. Enjoy his last chapter, before moving onto mine.

-Dorian

**********

This will be the last one for a moment of time. I'm working on yet another one-shot story to post out. But this one will be romantic! I swear to God and all high Heaven, it will be romantic! And not a darkfic either! Yes by God! I am not doing a darkfic for once in my life....well, I think it isn't a darkfic.

Maybe.

And wish me luck all: cause in 6 days, yours truly will be moving in at the Hill Hall in fair Athens, GA to begin his illustrious road to a Chemistry Degree at the University of Georgia.

Tremble in fear World! I am almost upon thee!

And one little more side note....TCC HAS REACHED 200+ REVIEWS! *Celebrates* And the time is fast coming upon us for the year-long anniversary of this story. I'll be sure to put in a little side note up here when it is. Ja mata!

Sel.

The Seldon Planner Presents:

An Etherworlds Production

The Children's Crusade: Oceans of Darkness

~~~~"Chapter Two: Memories, Part I"~~~~

I've wondered at the ignorance of my country at the horrors that have been wrought across its lands. Marveled at the sheer unknowledgeable populous that knew nothing about the massive battles, the great armies that had slaughtered one another barely thirty miles away from their porches.

But then, when I see how long their attention lasts on my words of history, when I see how few and sparse their library of books are; I cease to wonder. But later that night, I weep for the six hundred thousand men who died fighting our war. Because there are so few who weep for them anymore.

-Seldon

~~~~

"What do the Scrolls say about the Fourteenth?"

Gendo flicked an eye over to where Kouzo was slowly whittling down a thick twist of hardened salami, the one thing that not even the doctors, with all their "recommended" dietary schedules and endless storehouses of pills for this ache and that sore, could keep from him. The attention soon returned to the halted scrolling of the green text that floated ethereally above the floor. A low, menacing growl burned in his throat, threatening to escape and show the slow and subtle tension that had been quickly building up for the past hour and a half of reading and mystic foretelling.

That's what the whole of the Scrolls were for anyway, for one man to sit down and try to pry free the secrets that they vaguely hinted at. But today was the first day that Gendo really felt the strain and tension of that exercise of mind. Today...

"The Scrolls say that the Fourteenth will come immediately following the Thirteenth's death."

"You don't seem convinced by it, why?"

Gendo waved his hand dissmissively, gesturing broadly at the text. "The Scrolls have said this same line again and again. They said it about the Fourth, and three weeks passed before the Angel showed."

"So you don't think that it will differ from any of the other Angels?" Kouzo popped in a thin slice of salami and chewed thoughtfully.

"No..."

Kouzo stopped chewing and slid the food to his cheek, "That certainly sounded re-assuring to me."

Gendo slightly shook his head and turned his chair to watch the last rays of sunlight fade. Reflected sunlight from the surface, yes--but the effect was still the same. "The wording is slightly different, but then so are the others. But I would prefer a definite date and time that we could set for ourselves. Otherwise, we may be caught blind."

Kouzo quickly swallowed his food. "The problems?"

Gendo nodded, "With the destruction of our Matsushiro facility and the damages incurred by the surrounding countryside we've lost close to a third of our observation posts."

"So...we're blind."

Kouzo carved off another thin wafer of hard salami, the red and slightly spicy meat coming off his hands and fingers with a greasy feel to it. He had a packet of crackers in his pockets, but he would save that for later when he had something to drink. Gendo silently watched the dim light fading away from the domed Geofront, not bothering to answer what Kouzo himself had already said. A dozen minutes passed before he turned around again to the hanging text.

"They released the Third Child from the hospital. Tomorrow I will order him brought here to stand hearing. You will be present."

Kouzo looked at the careful poise Gendo had sculpted his thin, wiry body into. That hunched, leaning look that gave him a most sinister expression when you viewed him from the front. The almost casual way that his hands and fingers clasped together to shield any prying eyes from his face; the eerie reflections of his glasses as those cruel, methodical eyes peered at you. Kouzo did not envy the position that Shinji would soon occupy; did not envy having to submit and bow down before those eyes.

'If indeed he will bow...'

The memory of what Shinji nearly did certainly was fresh enough, and the whole of it raised doubt that the boy would continue to go along like he had. Kouzo could not be sure anymore, not after he saw the boy's shaded eyes in that fashion. Not after hearing Shinji so very calmly tell the whole of NERV that he would destroy them just to kill his father. "Just to kill that abomination," as the boy had put it; all the while staring with those cold, calculating, and soulless eyes.

'He has his mother's eyes, but his father shines through them as well.'

"The Sixth Child is also being released, have Section 2 place a watch over him."

"I thought the hospital report said he needed to stay for at least a month for psych therapy?" Kouzo was wary, instantly wondering if Ikari had ordered the pilot's release, even in such a distant state that the boy was reported to be in. One line of the report stated that the doctor ordered the Section 2 guard outside to come in and point his weapon at the boy's face. The report concluded by stating that Kensuke Aida finished his battery of tests, not even recognizing that a pistol was less than four centimeters from his eye. He was dead to the world. 'And they are releasing him?' Kouzo just couldn't understand.

Gendo hummed an answer, then spoke. "Akagi cleared him. She just delivered the reports and then gave me her reasons. She believes that if we returned him to his father his condition would improve. I found no reason to deny her."

'Because you need him to pilot, and if the doctors know you have another available pilot for Unit 01 they would never allow Kensuke Aida out of the ward. Would they? But what are you going to do about Shinji? Why call him here?' It couldn't be because of his reticence for piloting the Evangelion. Nor would Ikari jeopardize his tentative position, what with one pilot a vegetable and the other locked behind a security ward. 'He knows that Aida might prove more than unuseful if placed back into the Evangelion, but he also knows that to trust his son with Unit 01 again may prove to be his demise. He'd never risk his plan. Never...so, what is his game?'

As Kouzo watched, his old and slowing mind struggling to find all the nebulous twists and turns of Gendo's seemingly self-depreciating plan, the man himself was reading over the passage that told him of the next Angel. He read it and frowned, then read it again, and again, and again, and again until--he smiled.

***

As the door closed behind him, Shinji finally realized that he could not do it anymore. He just could not do it. The door, re-enforced with tempered steel that brought it's full weight up to nearly a quarter of a ton and made movable only by the specially designed hydraulic hinges, crashed shut with a dull, rumbling boom. Leaving the room in an ocean of darkness.

Shinji snuffed deeply the air, holding it in his tight chest for as long as he could bear it, then released it with a whooshing cough that ended in a throat burning hack. He groped along the stainless steel walls until his hands found the first of two steel-link chains that supported the thin, hard metal sheet that was to serve as a cot in this prison of metal walls. They jingled a bit as his hands trembled violently with a short, spastic jerk.

'The drug is wearing off.'

His legs were jumping together as he wearily slumped onto the cool sheet of unupholstered metal. NERV did not feel that their prisoners should have any comfort. But it was okay, after all: Shinji was used to it. He had even smirked a bit before the man in a neatly pressed black suit shoved him into the yawning cavern of shadow, feeling almost like he was returning home as his feet stamped clumsily in a near-futile attempt to regain their setting and assert balance. Even that feeling was something familiar, a fleeting remembrance of a time that wasn't but a few months gone.

His cell even smelled the same.

'That Creature certainly has a sense of humor, dry and diseased as it is.' Shinji leaned back against the slick wall, with its dimly illuminescent NERV logo hanging like a headman's ax over his head. The crescent of words that shaped along the bottom, 'God's in His Heaven, all's right in the World,' certainly lent credence to that depressing imagery.

'What will the Creature do to me now? After I have refused his commands? What will he do?' the darkness gave him no answers, only bleak memories. Memories of that time not so long ago, not even a half year past, memories when he did not know the things that he did now. Remembrances of a time when he knew nothing about NERV, the Angels, the Evangelion. A time when his father, that Creature, was but a simple loathing that lurked in the recesses of his mind; when he never knew a person as sloppy and energetic as Misato Katsuragi, a fired and hot-tempered a person that had aroused in him a feeling that he still wasn't quite sure about as Asuka Langley Sohryu, a quite and morose-inspiring person that seemed as frail as dew and harder than adamantium as Rei Ayanami.

Life was so much simpler then. So much easier, easier for him to ignore. Back then he could lose himself in the massive complexities of the past history, of a time that by nature was simpler but no less complex than the times of his own life. How he envied those of the past, how much he longed to do nothing more than rush off towards the untamed wilds of the mountains and live out such a life as he had read.

That letter from his father, that bloodthirsty Creature that had demanded the blood of his friend to be sacrificed to him with his own hands; that letter had shattered all of that--that innocence. And now what he was left with, was the terrible burden that he bore now.

He was not living in the Crusades of the past century. He was living the Crusade of this century.

He was living his own Children's Crusade.

The trembling started along his thighs now, gently covering the much softer trembles of his body as he shook with choked-off sobs. His hands, cuffed thrice over, quickly came up to ease the fall of his head as it dropped with the unbearable weight of grief.

'He killed him...Touji is dead...Touji is dead...'

And so, these walls became a testament once again to the character and person that was Shinji Ikari. They listened to him cry in the darkness, they stolidly waited as he shouted out at the cruel injustices that were the too-oft realities of life, patiently watched as he curled up on his thin cot to drift off into a troubled and shaking sleep bourne out of exhaustion rather than desire. They listened, and they remembered-- remembered that time not to long ago in the feeling of age, when Shinji Ikari had found himself within their austere grasp once before.

***

The day had been hot. Very hot.

And from the very beginning, Shinji knew that something was--not wrong, but rather unusual. Like everyone in the city, or maybe the Universe, had all been invited to a party and he had been left out. Uninformed. After wandering aimlessly for an hour, Shinji reached the place that this Ms. Katsuragi had instructed him to find. He found it more out of blind luck than actual knowledgeable guesses really, or maybe--fate had placed him there. Put him right there so that he could see the beginning of his Crusade. To let him see what horrors would spawn later sorrow.

The picture was suggestive, and Shinji would be a liar to say that he hadn't felt some lusty stirrings when confronted by the curvaceous lines of the long-haired beauty that had asked him to be at this corner at that time, in this place of hell that he would later call his home.

Somebody, somewhere was mocking him at that thought surely. Laughing at the notion of calling Tokyo-3, that place that attracted so much suffering, death, and pain a home. But fate is not a kind teller of futures, what it gave you got; and be damned if you lived for it.

But that he would realize later, and for now his thoughts were only on the impatience and gradually building sense of loneliness that came from the absent streets with their churriping cicadas. He pulled the picture out and mulled over the words that rivaled the picture with its suggestiveness. That stirring was still there as he looked past the words towards the buxom woman leaning over on a sun-drenched, sandy beach. That stirring was easily controlled and tamped down though. He had felt such urges before, but never acted on them. In time, they were so weak that he almost never felt it anymore. His interests were placed elsewhere, on what he deemed more useful things such as literature and music.

After all, none of the others had shown interests in him. None even knew he existed, more than likely.

It was better that way.

Then he went to the phone by the curb, dialing the number written near the edge. The call cost him only a small amount of his meager cash, but it was still an extravagant expense if he were to stay for a few days. He had only enough to get perhaps a dozen cheap meals; not enough for even the dirtiest, most run-down hovel of a hotel room.

The phone rang for what seemed a listless moment of eternity. That flat toning buzz of the other receiver sounding just as listless and weary as his own soul. Finally, Shinji grew tired of it all and just hung the phone up.

"Useless, wasting money," Shinji glanced around, taking in the stark landscape of precise, cubed-off buildings that rose ponderously into the air. Feeling the pure emptiness of it all. "Maybe I should find a shelter..." Shinji had seen the warnings, had heard the declarations from a distance; but what it all meant was beyond him. At first he felt like trying to find a shelter, as the warnings had advised, but soon the impracticality of that weighed the thought down. He couldn't reach what he didn't know where to find; and no helpful portents directed him towards one of these advocated shelters.

So looking around, judging the whole useless situation before him, Shinji was introduced to his enemy. A sudden ground rumbling shockwave rocketed through the city, the impact popping his ears and making him gasp out in pain as wires whipped and whispered through the thick, hot air and the aluminum gratings of the store behind rattled and shook like madmen were beating on the opposing side.

Quickly he recovered, easing open his eyes to stare in horrified wonder at the advancing giant.

That innocence turned to dread as that giant, the Third Angel, reached up ever so easily with his arm to destroy one of the aircraft that encircled it with their feeble weapons of man. Rockets tore down the street beside him, scorching him painfully with the hot, hard afterwash from their jets. Only to explode uselessly against the unseen barrier, the AT Field.

Then came the startling screeches of rubber on pavement, and the much welcomed blue Renault Alpine with the motherly Misato Katsuragi arrived. She seemed like a goddess, coming to take him from this uncertain madness as she opened the door to speak a cheery, "Get in!" followed immediately by a: "Am I real late?" Shinji didn't really care, this city was insane as he saw it. Silent and still one moment, then exploding with rockets, jets, and strange monstrous giants. To him, this Misato Katsuragi seemed to be the light of Heaven in the depths of the deepest, darkest pit of Hell.

How only if he had known, had he known what Misato would take him to; what his life, his existence would eventually be corrupted into--he would have rather stayed in that hell and gladly die under the foot of that giant.

But Fate was not in the habit of telling truths. And nor would it tell the secrets that it had held so closely guarded for fourteen years today either.