Adyen—Before you go saying things like that, show me where I once used the word assassin. Did I? No. I even used the phrase Professional Killing. In short: 'Dachi doesn't even consider that killing someone for someone else might be assassination. And besides:

Jonathan Shim—Not that I see anything morally wrong with the use of fag as an insult… what the fuck am I talking about? If you've got a problem with homosexual people, take them elsewhere.

A/N: Hmm… while FF.N is saying that I have seventy-two reviews… only sixty-eight of them are actually showing up. Garners a WTF? Nor did I get review alerts for them, so… yeah. Apologies and whatnot. "Take me out, to the black, tell them I ain't comin' back, I don't care, I'm still free, you can't take the sky from me…" Opening song from Firefly. "Point of Interest: offering to shoot us might not work as well as an incentive as you might think." Mal. I wonder if this "Shan Yu" was a real person… "Ah, the pitter patter of tiny feet in huge combat boots…" Mal. "I am a large, semi-muscular man!" Wash

Ocean Red

Chapter 13: To The Black

A Neon Genesis Evangelion Fanfiction

By CrimsonNoble

No one noticed when the pale man stepped off the monorail. To them, he was just one more faceless person in a faceless crowd. Each, of course, was unique in their own way.

Every snowflake is unique. But no one bothers to notice the individual snowflake when it's among uncounted others.

He cut his way through the crowd, standing below most of them by half a head. His neatly pressed suit draped from his form loosely, in much the same way that they might on a child dressed up in his father's clothes. A dark blue hat topped his grey locks, slightly too large for him, and it persisted in falling over his eyes, forcing him to push it back up. Surrounded as he was, he felt as though the only way anyone in the crowd was moving was toward him, though he knew that was wrong, that both directions had more or less equal traffic, he couldn't shake the idea.

He gazed blurrily out of dark eyes, clutching his briefcase in both hands.

For all appearances, he was just one more lost and alone soul.

To two individuals in the city, however, he meant everything. And the instant he stepped off of the train, something was set into motion. An insidious idea planted itself in the back of his mind as he considered the sprawling representation of human triumph over nature.

His head tilted as the mechanical feminine sounding Japanese PA system rang loudly in the crowded terminal. "Please note that visitors should retrieve their belongings from the Third belt."

A thin smile quirked his lips as he observed that nothing had been added about the radiation hot zone shortly outside of the east border. It was, admittedly, something fairly difficult to miss. News was blaming it on Heavy Chem. Industries, though he shouldn't have expected anything else, an organization such as NERV didn't exactly survive by letting the news run wild.

The man continued out of the station, a breeze catching his jacket, blowing it back momentarily to reveal the end of something metallic reaching out of the leg of his slightly wrinkled pants.

His feet would lead him toward his "children's" apartment.

--

Shinji bowed to the man before him. Tendo was something of a traditionalist, a tendency that pissed the boy off to no end. It had nearly taken him a week to meet him after faking curiosity in Mayumi's beliefs, implying that he was opposed to his job.

Oh yes, he wanted to keep people from coming after him, but there was more to it than that. He had a reputation to keep after all.

Nodachi didn't just kill you. He killed your family first.

It was highly clichéd, as the Ancient One had told him. Repeatedly. Nevertheless, it scared the shit out of people. Because whoever he was targeting, they died last. They had to attend the funerals of everyone they held dear. They had to watch as everyone around them fell. All the while aware that no one would want them committing suicide, so they would keep living.

He liked to keep a countdown going, with every member of the target's family he killed, he'd write a number on the wall with their tongue as his writing instrument, which he would later pin to the wall along with a finger or two. It had to have a ritualistic feel, because that was how he liked to work. Besides, ritualistic killings, oddly enough, made people think of religious tendencies, which in turn implied a zealot-like devotion. And that seemed to scare people more than most other things.

And scared people screamed more.

He knelt, feigning interest in the philosophy the traditionalist was spewing.

After a good few hours of the man's lecture, 'Dachi had gone from a somewhat painless death to vivisecting the man, starting with his eyes. Ten minutes later, he'd reconsidered and decided to go with removing the eyes last so he could see the fear as each tool was brought to bear.

When he finally escaped, half an hour later than he had intended to, he had decided that he would kill the man's wife first and take a bath in her blood before torturing the man to death. He was that irritatingly self-righteous.

His feet lead him back toward his apartment.

--

Shuriken rhythmically tapped her pen against her desk, gazing idly at the paper. What was she supposed to be doing again? Something with the schematic PDA Nodachi had thrown at her, she thought. He'd marked some entrances, in violently red X's, and circled something that looked like a ventilation shaft on the roof of whatever the hell the thing was. Perhaps she was to design a way for him to reach the roof? She hadn't been bothering with wondering; mostly she'd been drawing random doodles on it.

She glanced at the clock, made a mental calculation that took several minutes, and stood. The PDA disappeared into her pocket, and she tossed the pen up. It hit the ceiling solidly, point first, and stuck. A rumbling purr rose from her throat, drawing several slightly more than awkward stares.

She giggled in response, tilting her head and widening her eyes. A smile of the sort that turns people into insulin dependants slipped onto her lips in a practiced fashion, before she tilted to spin away and wandered off; stumbling wildly as she did so, imitating a drunk she had once seen. She did, however, refrain from puking on someone. As amusing as it would have been, she didn't particularly feel like explaining that to someone at the moment.

She fingered the cuffs of her sleeves as she exited the cafe, making sure that the loops of her strangle-wire were still readily accessible, as they had a tendency to slip if they went unmaintained. They had, naturally, slipped. She would repair them later, perhaps install a ring on each, though that was an idea she had refrained from carrying out before, as the entire purpose of the wires were to remain undetected. They didn't show up on anything less than a totally intrusive investigation, Infra Red, X-Ray, hell, they wouldn't show up on a CAT scan.

Which was why she loved them. She could walk into an airport, get on a plane, and then kill both pilots and take over an airplane. Provided she wasn't shot down, she could then crash it into the center of a random city. A terrorist in training, she called herself.

Of course, she could do so without the wires, but that was irrelevant. It might even be more fun without them.

Idly she wondered when she would be able to retrieve the rest of her stuff, knowing that it would be her that would be forced to finish importing the rest of the pair's armories.

Not that Nodachi had an excuse. He was just a lazy asshole. There was a difference. Somewhere. She just wasn't entirely sure where. After all, she didn't want to be saddled with the gear-retrieval either.

But, damn she wanted her gearsuit back. She flexed her fingers in a controlled movement, perfected through extensive practice. Had she been in her 'suit, it would have triggered the extension of the artificial claws.

She'd never understood the reasoning behind that idea, she had her own damn claws, why the hell did she need fake ones? In his typical fashion, the Ancient One had merely given her a look that said both, "You don't need to understand," and, "You wouldn't understand even if I explained it, so why don't you just shut up and obey orders?"

She didn't pay attention to where she was going. Her feet knew the way back to the apartment, and they took her there.

--

Nodachi's right foot hit the first step of the stairs of his apartment at approximately the same time that the pale man folded himself into a sitting position on the chair and opened his case.

He was rounding the first landing as the professional in his apartment finished assembling the parts to the device on his lap. Approximately six stairs later, Shuriken entered the building, her loose pants dragging beneath her heels as she did so. Somewhere in the back of her head she noted that He was going to berate her for not wearing a belt.

'Dachi was at the third floor as the bleached fingers stroked the smooth item lovingly, and reached back for the second ingredient. Shuri' was closing in on him, four steps closer than she had been when she had started ascending the stairs.

He was midway between the fourth and fifth floor when the dark-clothed man moved the item into position, aiming carefully. The girl absentmindedly twined her fingers into the loops of her wires as she continued closing on her 'brother'.

By the time the boy reached the door to the apartment, his 'sister' was next to him, and had they not been forced to stop by the door, she would have been ahead of him. Inside, the grey-haired man pointed the item at the door, holding it close to his ear.

He waited until the door had opened enough that he could see through it, and launched the glistening object.

The shining metal pierced Shinji's school uniform like it was tissue paper, ramming itself halfway through his left bicep, injecting a small portion of the contents before he ripped it out.

Nodachi stumbled backward, hitting the railing as he stared at the hypodermic syringe in his hand, just less than three quarters empty now, though it looked as though it had held something transparent, something that probably came from a purple bottle.

Shuriken stepped into the apartment, ignoring her 'brother', and walking toward the seated man, who was now in a position mimicking that of Buddha's famed lotus. He smiled almost benignly at her approach, extending a hand for her to take.

A hissed snarl from outside the door reminded everyone that 'Dachi was still alive and awake. And enraged. He knew exactly what had hit him, and he loathed it. He had been on it before, and it had been absolute hell getting off it. The stinging in his back dimmed as the drug took effect, and his control slipped just a fraction more.

Above, the pale girl lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling with her hands folded across her chest, shivered as she felt the perverted AT-Field expand rampantly.

Shuriken gently placed her hand in the whitewashed hand of the red-eyed man. Her lips drew into an ice blue smile of contentment, and her hand tightened ever so slightly on the man's. He squeezed back carefully in response.

The fifteen year old darted forward, his shriek echoing in much the same way that echolocation does not. He was clearly not thinking lucidly, else he would never have attempted to assault the man on his bed. Even if he had been armed with firepower approximately equal to that of a full tank division.

And unarmed… Perhaps he knew, somewhere in the more survival-oriented part of his brain, that being armed and attacking would bring greater punishment. For, even though a number of them adorned his person, he drew not even a knife.

Of course, it was far more likely that his thought functions had gone far beyond considering the use of weapons.

The poorly-dressed man's second hand came up, pressed gently against the side of his errant pupil's head, and accepted the energy of the charge, before redirecting it.

Into the wall.

Nodachi's skull bored its way through the wall, through the stud behind the wall, and into the net of wiring beyond that. His flesh tore as one of the steel reinforcement bars scraped a jagged, broken edge down his face, beginning a scant half centimeter to the right of his eye, and continuing down to a centimeter above the line of his jaw in a crude mimicry of the line his tears had taken when he had been abandoned at the train station by his father.

He shoved himself away from the wall, the morphine dulling his senses so he felt nothing as the shattered bar dragged its path in reverse. Cautiously he poked at it, trying to identify the sensation of something missing from himself. His hand came away bloody, and he flicked it to clear the highly viscous crimson liquid.

The small man seated on the bed tenderly pushed Shuriken away before standing, his contented smile half genuine, and half the result of twelve cc of morphium. Slowly he slid into a fighting stance he had learned long ago, designed for combat against an armed foe.

Shinji rushed him, landing a solid left palm heel to the man's chest as the first parry missed, coming out far too soon. His next strike, aiming upward to hit underneath the man's pectoral muscle on the same side of his body as his heart, missed as the man slid aside, catching the arm, as it stayed extended for a fraction of a second too long, around the wrist, placing his other hand on the boy's shoulder blade, and pulled in a deceptively short motion.

There was a squelching crack as 'Dachi's shoulder was torn from its socket.

The boy collapsed face first into the tile floor, and remained that way.

For good measure, the older man kicked the boy in the head to make sure he was unconscious. Only then did he sit down, placing his left foot on his right thigh, and his right foot on his left thigh.

Shuriken moved to attend, kneeling down in a more formal fashion, and waiting to offer what assistance she could.

And, with a calmness brought on by the large dose of morphium, the Ancient One began to tend his son's wounds. Later he would be absolutely enraged, more by the hole in the wall than the wounds, though he would be irritated by the bandage one of his prodigies would have to wear until the would closed. It wouldn't scar, he would make sure of that. But he would leave the wound to shame his student until it healed, as a reminder: I am god, and you are merely my disciple. Remember your place.

But for now, he would care for the injuries of his pack. And that would make it all the more painful when his rage did come out.

And, across the smooth skin covering the taught muscle at the small of his back, the tattoo read: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.

Above, the red eyed girl let the unrealized tension flow out of her as the perverted AT-Field flickered and died. She would report this to the commander.

Though she didn't know why she would hide the circumstances from him. There was no logical reason for her to do so.

And other than that, the MAGI would have told him of another Absolute Terror Field. Therefore, there was no real need to tell him.

--

"Hallo Misato!"

Misato's cheerfulness could not be denied, but then it wasn't something she particularly wanted to deny. "Hello Asuka," she responded, being careful to pronounce the girl's name exactly right. She'd seen what happened to the poor man who was the last one to ever mispronounce it.

The girl bounced. This seemed to somehow have both a rejuvenating effect on the woman, and terrify her immensely. Asuka, being who she was, failed to notice this, and continued bouncing toward Misato.

Quickly, she multiplied into several hundred bouncing figures, moving in waves. Which, naturally slowly surrounded the Kat-lady.

The faces slowly melted away, the hair falling out to reveal a face that haunted her nightmares.

The woman collapsed inelegantly, curling up into a fetal position as she started to whimper. The no-longer bouncing Asuka Langley Sohryu blinked several times as the purple-haired woman collapsed into a sobbing mess in the parking lot.

Her foot rapped against the ground repeatedly as she flicked her hair over her shoulder and crossed her arms. "Well, Gott damn… now where am I going to get a ride?"

END CHAPTER

And whatnot. This took a while. Whee…

Burn. Flame. Praise. Take out the F stamp and nail your monitor with it. I DARE YOU!