Creation began on 03-14-18

Creation ended on 03-15-18

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Held in my arms, but ripped from my life

A/N: Fusei often reflects back upon the moment when she went through the biggest change of her life and the negative repercussions that befell her.

Fourth of June, Two-Thousand-One

It was Two-Thosand-One, the first year of the Twenty-First Century, and Tokyo had been unable to enjoy much of it like the rest of the world should have been able to. The wards were in shambles, some of the buildings either completely destroyed or damaged to the point of uninhabitable, and the people that were living there or just visiting at the time of the devastation were either dead, injured or helping to alleviate some measure of pain and suffering experienced by others.

I'd listen to the words he'd say, but in his voice, I heard decay, thought the fourteen-year-old Fusei Hitode as she laid on the small cot alongside other women in her condition, staring up at the ceiling instead of at her broken leg or the world around her, reflecting upon the lyrics of an American song she heard back in Nineteen-Nighty-Nine that seemed to fit with her current mood. The sweetest price you'll have to pay…the day the whole world went away…

She knew it wasn't anyone's fault that the world was going a bad period of unrest, but it didn't stop her from feeling like a casualty of a sudden war alongside many others that didn't choose to get involved. And then she grimaced a little bit, instantly reminded of how it wasn't just her that occupying the cot, looking away from the ceiling and at her swollen belly…and feeling a tinge of happiness and hope that at least someone in her family would be ignorant of what was going on and would one day see a world being rebuilt where people could laugh and smile.

"Hey, Fusei," she heard a male voice say to her, and she turned to her right and saw her boyfriend and the father of her unborn child, Genshi-teki Katagiri, using a pair of crutches while being aided a little by his brother and her childhood friend, Tetsuo. "How are you so far?"

"So long as I don't move my leg or nothing touches it, I'm good," she answered him. "What about you? You shouldn't be walking."

"He needed to see you," said Tetsuo to her. "The doctors gave him some morphine and told him he could still walk so long as it was short distances."

"What about you? Your arm?"

Tetsuo looked down at his left arm, wrapped in small bandages, and stated the worst was behind him since his two bones would heal with time.

"If he's lucky, they should be able to save his ruptured abdomen in another day or two."

"Genshi-teki?" Fusei asked, concerned for her lover.

"Please," he pleaded to her as he slowly sat down in the chair beside her cot, "don't worry about me. I can endure this agony. I will endure this agony. How is he doing (he places his left hand on her belly)?"

"Shinji just reminded me that life endures," she told them.

"Well, he's probably being optimistic," Tetsuo suggested to the parents-to-be. "You two tend to focus more on the good than the bad."

"Aaah!" They looked over at a woman who was twelve years older than Fusei, clutching onto her swollen belly. "Aaahh!"

Fusei recognized the emotion in her howls of pain; it was the feeling of agony that came whenever a mother-to-be was due to deliver.

"Uh, maybe I should go get your mother and make sure that the doctors supply you with an epidural, Fusei," said Tetsuo to the young couple as he turned to walk away; he had seen the movies and as much as he loved his future sister-in-law, he really didn't want to see any births in real life at the moment.

"Uh, yeah," she agreed with him; she couldn't keep from feeling the pain of childbirth, but she could at least alleviate some of it so that it didn't feel like she was dying or something.

"Just tell me one thing, Fusei," Genshi-teki uttered to her, holding her right hand. "Do you ever regret that I got you pregnant?"

Even just a thought that lasted two seconds was enough to make the young girl say, "No. Why would I regret this? I love you and our baby. There should never be any regret."

"I guess I have the jitters."

"You're not the only one. I…I really want to be a good mother for Shinji."

"Oh, you'll be a great mother."

"Thank you."

-x-

Sixth of June, Two-Thousand-One

She was the only one that hadn't gone into labor yet, and she only just started her recovery from having metal pins inserted into her left leg to keep the bones set as they healed back together. As she slept as peacefully as she could while the other new mothers were caring for their sons and daughters, Fusei grimaced softly as she felt Shinji kick every now and then. It was sometime after midnight and approaching dawn when the young girl felt a hard kick from her unborn child in what felt like her bladder. She knew it wasn't his fault, but sometimes, just sometimes, she wished the baby was a little more considerate towards the fact that she couldn't go to the bathroom with her leg on the mend…and that it was taking her every ounce of effort to hold her bowels close.

Thump. Fusei felt Shinji kick her again, and this time it felt like it was followed by a loose feeling of her bladder; she suspected as she woke up from her slumber that her baby kicked her so hard that he caused her to lose control.

You gotta be kidding me, Shinji, she thought as she opened her eyes to the blank ceiling ceiling. "Ohh…"

"Are you okay, Fusei?" She heard her mother's voice say to her as the elder woman came into view on her left side.

"No, I was just kicked so hard that I peed myself."

Her mother checked under the blanket and then looked back at her.

"Fusei, dear, you didn't pee," she revealed to her. "Your water just broke."

"What?" The girl asked, now feeling like her belly's innards were tightening up. "Aah!"

"You're in labor, Fusei."

"But I don't have my epidural. I want my epidural, please."

It wasn't until an hour later that Fusei was having a difficult time with her contractions due to being unable to move her left leg, which her sister had to hold so that she didn't move it. Her boyfriend had his left hand crushed by her as she was feeling the need to push…and they both felt like the epidural was either wearing off or Fusei didn't get enough injected into her veins.

"Aaaurgh, can I push now? I want to push, please! This hurts!" She cried, gripping the right side of her cot.

The doctor checked her cervix again and announced that the baby was starting to crown.

"Okay, Fusei, get ready," she told her.

I've been ready! Her mind yelled.

"Okay, push!"

"Aaugh! Urgh!" Fusei groaned, feeling like something inhumanly large was being passed through her. "Urgh!"

"I see the head! Keep going, Fusei!" The doctor encouraged, though the girl was starting to feel like she was being split in half at the bottom as something was sliding slowly out of her.

"Ooourgh!" She groaned louder before falling back, exhausted.

It felt like a long time had passed before anyone said anything to her. She was totally wiped out of her energy, like she had run ten miles, ten times, or had been drawn and quartered, four times. There was no definite way to describe her childbirth experience.

"Fusei," she heard Genshi-teki's voice, almost like a whisper instead of the full volume it usually was all the time. "Fusei, you did it."

"Huh?" She responded, her mind scattered because of her exhaustion. "What?"

"You did it," she heard her sister say. "You had the baby. Shinji's here. You're a mother now."

"Shinji's…Shinji's here?"

"Yes," her mother told her, holding a small form swaddled in a white blanket. "Here he is."

She never really saw him outside of the sonogram she and Genshi-teki had gotten to make sure that he was developing properly and without any complications. This was her first time meeting Shinji in person…and he was tiny, about the size of a basketball, a little wrinkled and annoyed, crying as the cold and drafty air made contact with his soft skin and wispy strands of dark hair…and the most precious little boy she had ever met. Tears fell from her eyes as she held him for the first time, just happy to meet him.

"Hey, there, Shinji," she greeted him.

-x-

It had only been two days after the birth, but Fusei still had her habit of sleeping through loud noises, but there was at least one noise that her ears were registering to her subconscious so that she did awaken whenever necessary: Her wailing baby boy. Just five minutes after he was held by his mother and father for the first time…and just like four hours after his birth, Shinji had his facial expression scrunched up to indicate that he was hungry again, so Fusei got up and picked him up out of the bassinet and held him against her chest as she pulled out her left breast.

"Here you go, little guy," she told him, still tired, but was willing to endure sleep deprivation to do right by Shinji.

"Fusei?" She heard Genshi-teki's voice, and turned around to look over at a cot five cots away across the large room and saw him struggling to get up.

She quickly got up and carried Shinji over to his father.

"Hey, you shouldn't try to get up now. They're gonna finally fix your insides tomorrow." She reminded him, using her right hand to calmly push him back down onto his pillow. "You need to rest up for your surgery."

"Either I've gotten weaker because of my ruptured abdominal cavity…or your newfound motherhood has made you stronger," he confessed to her.

"No," she assured him. "We're still the same pair we've always been. We just have someone to take care of now."

"Yeah, we do. I never let you let me forget. I love you both very much."

-x-

Ripped away

Crying. Fusei heard Shinji crying again, but something was different about the way he was doing so this time. It was like…a feeling in her heart was telling her that he was in danger or something…and she needed to wake up, to be there for him. Opening her eyes, her vision blurred as she struggled slowly to get up. As her vision corrected a little, she saw an obscured shadow.

No. It was two shadows…and one of them had Shinji in their grasp, receding into the distance away from her. Something…or someone…was taking her baby away.

"No…" She uttered, but it was so low, it wasn't heard by anyone around her. "Stop… Don't take him away from me…"

Crash! A noise from across the room was made, and Fusei saw that a man had fallen from his cot and onto the floor.

"Help!" It was Genshi-teki that cried. "My son! Someone took my son!"

By the time any security or medical personnel came, eight minutes had passed…and nobody found or even bothered to look for anyone with a baby that wasn't there. And the second worst thing to befall the two families that were upset about the kidnapping was the personal loss of Genshi-teki; because of his attempt to get up and stop the snatching of their child, his ruptured innards were exasperated further, causing severe internal bleeding he couldn't be saved from.

Genshi-teki…died in Fusei's arms, wondering why anyone would want to just take Shinji from them.

"I saw someone walking away with a baby in their arms," Tetsuo had reported to the police; he had been on his way back to see the three after departing the bathroom when he saw a pair of people walking out of the room like they had done something wrong to someone else and we're trying to get away. "One was a woman, probably in her twenties, with pageboy hair. The other was an older man, probably in his thirties, not a friendly face."

Even if the police were able to find the people that were responsible, there was no guarantee that Shinji would likely be with them. There were too many factors, too many reasons for why, and not enough answers to the question being asked. And finding someone, even in a damaged world like today, could take years, especially when it's a newborn.

Fusei and the others were basically being given the sour version of the possibility that Shinji was going to be listed as a missing person for a long time. It wrought the teenage mother with woe over her son's fate. She lost her father, her grandfather, her boyfriend and now she lost her son.

"Fusei," Tetsuo told her, swearing to her a promise that day, "we have to do whatever we can to find Shinji. For as long as it takes. We find him and bring him home."

-x-

Present Day Promise Kept

With her achieving her dream of being an expert in computers and taking on her boyfriend's desire to be a doctor (though the route she took was directed towards young people, children) and his brother, her best friend taking the path of a genetic analyst with the revelation of being able to find people through the use of DNA, Fusei, well into her thirtieth year of life, had gone through year after year after year ever since that horrid and unforgivable day, rebuilding her life and trying to find her son, already in his fourteenth year of life, trying to hold onto the hope that Shinji was alive. There were times where she wanted to stop, to give up hope, to just crawl into some hole somewhere and wait for the end of her life, but her mother, sister, Tetsuo and friends kept pushing her to never give up on what she wanted most out of her life. If she gave up, the people that wronged her and Genshi-teki would win…and Shinji would never know who his real family was. Ever.

And here she was, following another possible lead that could lead to finding Shinji. Tetsuo had done further genetic research and rechecked previous cases of missing or adopted Japanese children going back over ten years and found that none of the male children had the same blood type as Fusei, who would have the primary source of DNA in any child that she bore, meaning that this new lead he found for her, a boy by the name of Shinji Ikari, was another possibility. All she needed to do was get a sample of his DNA, either his blood or saliva, and Tetsuo could compare it with hers for a mitochondrial match. The precautionary reason for checking the DNA was also to confirm the accuracy of identifying blood types because of a three-year-old discovery that revealed the falsifying of several people over the years which led to several near-deaths due to misidentified blood types during transfusions.

Tetsuo has been going dozens of files of young men under various names and DOBs ever since he graduated from college, she thought, looking at the file and wanting to truly believe that this Shinji Ikari was her son. If this search pans out, then it has to mean that the Ikaris were the ones that took him away from us. And if so, the question becomes why. Why did they take him? We don't even know these people, and it's like they hate us. There were several other newborn children there that day, and they could've taken any of them, too, but instead, they chose our son, Genshi-teki. Was it a crime of passion? A crime of desperation? I mean, were they trying to gather random children to sell on the black market? Tetsuo has already exhausted the list of deceased children and made many checks to ensure that none of them were him. Kami, this must be the eighteenth time I've gone crazy over possible scenarios that stress me out. Calm down, Fusei. Nothing has been proven yet. You have to meet this boy…and just hope for the best that your prayers will be answered by gods. And this feeling in my heart…it tells me that he's still alive out there somewhere.

Her last good memory of Shinji was when she, Genshi-teki and he were just sitting on her cot while her sister took a picture of them on her cell phone. Sometimes, it still felt like only the day before when she went into labor and gave birth and started breastfeeding him. She didn't have anything planned out with Genshi-teki over their future with Shinji; they just wanted to wait until after he was born to get married and then just be a family wherever they could and go on with their lives. Maybe she was fourteen years too late to be a mother to her kid, but maybe she could still be involved in his life in some way.

She owed it to her and Genshi-teki's families to be a part of his future, regardless of the kind of person he had become over the years.

"Please, let us find him," she uttered to herself as she got into her Prius and started the trek to Tokyo-3 where this Shinji Ikari was reported to be living.

To be continued…

A/N: Well, now we have the past to a degree from the point of view of those wronged by the Ikaris. All that's needed now is to reshape the future.