Creation began on 07-16-22

Creation ended on 07-21-22

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Hope from the Future: Let their Reign Begin

Due to the fact that Japan was one of the places that took most of a colossal beating because of Second Impact, its grounds seemed to be the place where the Titans and MUTOs were converging. However, when a second look was taken by observers, it was the island of Hokkaido that became the place to be, likely due to the fact that, unlike most of the archipelago, it had endured and survived the devastation with the most population that were able to rebuild and carry on. The second people there saw the creature that was a familiar face from their past of the previous century, they didn't know whether to run and scream or to give praise. But when they saw more creatures, they were starting to get the impression that the former was what they needed to do over the latter.

Godzilla, having dealt with the last known threat to the planet, endowed with greater clarity due to Mothra's sacrifice, could now feel the suffering of the world around himself and what needed to be done to mend its wounds. The humans responsible for the ravages of the lands and oceans would answer for their crimes, but the rest had to be disregarded due to their ignorance of those that made a conscious decision to dabble in forces beyond themselves. Until those responsible were all dealt with, this was an important issue that needed to be dealt with first.

-x-

"What do you think they're doing?" Hana asked Kenji as the carrier docked ten meters away from the island where the monsters were gathering, just mere feet away from the arriving Manda, which ignored its personnel.

"I'm not sure," Kenji replied; whatever reason these creatures chose to converge on Hokkaido, all he could do was hope that it was a benevolent one.

Away from them, his sister and cousin, Mima and Suki, were wondering the same thing. All the three knew was that just a couple of hours ago, they received word from their grandfather's guardian that Godzilla had returned to Tokyo-3…and murdered their great-grandfather, Gendo, as though he had been a threat. While it didn't really bother them to know of this, it was still a curious thing to wonder why, of all the people that do exist in the world, did Gendo have to become such a target of a living god. What did Gendo do to incite a god's fury?

Whatever he did, thought Suki as she held her baby bump whilst looking at how the sea dragon Titan crawled across the shore to meet with the other Titans, it was probably something he brought upon himself. Even if the primary reason for his death wasn't his neglecting of Grandfather, it had to be very bad. So bad that even a god couldn't overlook it.

Seconds later, Gorosaurus emerged from the ocean and followed behind Manda, and then a much larger creature that didn't look like it belonged to any line in the animal kingdom.

"What sort of monster is that?!" Aki, who was present when the creature appeared, asked, pointing to it.

Based on a few features, it was a four-legged beast with a pair of tusks or horns…and a type of rock or mountain on its back…with glossy-looking eyes.

"Uh, it's, uh…Titanus Methuselah," Hana revealed to the girl. "Methuselah, after the man believed to have lived for almost one-thousand years."

"Is it…good or bad?"

"Monarch lists it as a protector, so it's a good monster."

"Oh…that's good."

-x-

"…So, they're all converging here on the island," said Ritsuko as she only had access to a laptop after the MAGI was damaged by Godzilla when he killed Gendo. "Why is still unknown."

"Maybe it's a meeting," suggested Kaji, "or a battle royale."

"They already got rid of the monsters that were a threat to the world," Asuka stated, "so why would they want to fight again?"

In a café for access to its WiFi, the small group could only wonder why these massive beasts were gathering on Hokkaido.

-x-

Godzilla turned and saw a creature he hadn't seen before in the past. It was as big as he, but had large tusks and almost resembled Kong. Looking further back and around, he saw at least two other creatures; one resembled a Kumonga mixed with an Ebirah, and the other resembled an Anguirus, only more…mountainous.

Slam! Rodan landed before Godzilla as Gorosaurus, Manda and Anguirus arrived.

"Iiiiee!" They heard Mothra Leo as he escorted Kong.

"Rrraagh!" Rodan shrieked at Godzilla; even from a distance, they had all either seen or felt the power that emanated from Godzilla when he defeated King Ghidorah, making him a force they either couldn't match and exceed…or shouldn't try to challenge.

"Grr!" Godzilla growls, demanding an explanation to his claim.

Then…Rodan lowered his head to Godzilla, recognizing him as the master of all of them.

Godzilla turned to face the other creatures, and, with the sole exception of Kong, they bowed to him, showing respect and acceptance of his authority.

Kong, despite his own designation as a ruler on Skull Island, refused to bow, but did respect Godzilla, as he was the one that defeated Ghidorah. They were both alphas in their respective food chains, but only one of them could be the master of all. And that current master was Godzilla…for now, at least.

Godzilla, with his position as the King of the Monsters re-solidified, accepted his mantle without question. This world was theirs, but with humans involved, they would have to find ways to deal with their presence like before. They were here first…and if they were fortunate enough to survive into another millennium, they would be here long after humans were gone. But the world had been maimed by years of unspeakable ravages…and they would need to restore it in order to ensure their own future.

-x-

"…Kenji, are you seeing this?" Mima asked her brother as he and Serizawa were stunned by the would-be rise of the new king.

"It looks like the Titans are capable of a pack mentality," he stated.

"What does that mean?" Hana questioned.

"Animals that live in groups, like lions, wolves, whales or gorillas, all respond to a member of their kind that is the one in charge. The alpha. They do the bidding of the one in charge."

"But…it doesn't look like Kong is submitting to Godzilla at all."

"They're likely rival alphas; they're both apex predators, so neither can submit to the other," said Serizawa. "However, Gojira is the ancient alpha predator, the top of the primordial ecosystem."

"Which means he's the one in charge."

Seconds later, the Titans split up, each one going their separate way.

"They're leaving now," Kenji told his sister and cousin.

"That's it?" Mima and Suki asked him.

"Seems like it."

"What does it mean?" Suki questioned.

"Long live Godzilla's reign?"

"If that was meant to be a joke," said Mima to him, "it wasn't funny."

"It wasn't meant to be a joke. In a world of ancient creatures returned, it's on all of us to find ways to live with them…because they're not going anywhere any time soon."

-x-

Even though his information was limited after the MAGI was damaged by Godzilla killing Gendo, Kaji didn't have much difficulty with walking around NERV HQ; it was mostly abandoned due to the order to retreat when Godzilla returned and killed Gendo, and Misato didn't give an order return. This enabled him to get back in undetected.

Or so he thought.

"Mind telling me what brought you back here?" He stopped in the hall and turned to see Misato; he hadn't even heard her footsteps.

"Ikari's office," he confessed. "Since he's no longer around, I figured he'd probably have something of value locked up in there."

"Personal or political?"

"Both."

"Lead the way."

Since Fuyutsuki wasn't back and she was still in charge until he returned, assuming that NERV would not be disbanded because of the Titans and Godzilla's murder of Gendo, not that many people would care for that, going into Gendo's office to see what he kept in there didn't seem like anything that could jeopardize their jobs or freedom any more than the revelation of there being monsters in the world. The Geo-Front was exposed, Shinji was gone, the MAGI was crippled, Gendo was killed, Unit-01 useless without its core, Unit-02 damaged and who knew what else there was that probably went wrong in the paramilitary agency. As they reached Gendo's office and pulled the doors open, Kaji asked Misato what her thoughts were about the future of NERV.

"More than likely, we'll either be disbanded or repurposed," she told him as they pulled the doors open. "Either way is fine for me if it means no more Angels to fight or Evas to build and face them with."

"Yeah, it would be nice if the Angels did stop attacking," he agreed with her on that. "Say NERV gets shut down, what will you do with the rest of your life?"

"Probably see if I can join Monarch."

"Why?"

"One of Shinji's journals had a section that spoke about his personal interests in the Hollow Earth theory written by one of the people from Monarch that went to Skull Island. While it had been discredited by the scientific community, Shinji asked the guy what he thought about it. I guess Shinji thought it was possible that such a theory was true, how there were underground locations that could be accessed from the surface and that they could have been used by the Titans to survive extinction events and adapt over the years."

"The Hollow Earth? Did Shinji ever try to see if such a place could be found?" Kaji questioned as they looked around Gendo's desk.

"No," she answered, looking through one of the drawers. "He did write down how Monarch had attempted to send a team to investigate what they believed to be a passageway into the Hollow Earth, but all he wrote was what he had been told by Monarch at the time. Some kind of gravitational inversion or something that killed the team."

"Ouch," Kaji expressed; he wasn't an expert on gravity, but he got the feeling that anything unexpected that involved the invisible force was likely to be hurtful.

"Yeah, and during that time, Monarch couldn't risk the Eva, even if it could withstand the gravity phenomenon. There were still giant monsters that could attack and people that needed to be protected from them."

Misato then found an old picture of a young woman that bore a resemblance to Shinji, but half the photo on its lower right had been ripped away, indicating that there was something in the photo that someone wanted removed. If she had to take an educated guess, based solely on the size of the photo and the ripped portion, she suspected that near this woman had once been a little boy that bore a resemblance to his mother…and that his father ripped him out of the photo in an attempt to erase his existence.

"I never wondered why Shinji had relatives that were either dead or distant towards him," she told Kaji as she showed him the photo. "Even after he got displaced in the nineteen-fifties, I didn't stop to question why his parents were the way they were towards him. His mother was a scientist he tried to persuade not to do something that would scar her son, only to laugh at him and shatter his hope of changing his past self's fate, and his father was a cold and arrogant man that wouldn't even give him the time of day if there was no threat to the world. The only good thing they ever did was have him, only to lose him to the past where he found his own future, even when it came at a different cost to him."

"People are complicated," Kaji explained. "Nobody is perfect."

"Well, I'm not asking that people be perfect. I would ask that they at least be morally responsible for everything they do. If they walk out on someone, they should at least answer to why. But Shinji, he… He never got any closure to what his parents did to him. He just…had to live with the fact that his parents were people he would never know about. Nowhere in his journals or videos were anything about what he found about them as people; no mention of what their hobbies were, what their favorite colors were, what kind of books they reads that didn't relate to science or history, not even how they first met, things like that. And when he became a parent, he had to do everything he understood as the complete opposite of what his parents had done…and actually did a good job of it, right to his final day."

Kaji couldn't deny that truth; after seeing those photos of Shinji's family over the years, it was a miracle that he was able to have a happy life at all, the very opposite of what his childhood had been after his parents left. No smile was forced, no handshake or hug was faked, no kiss devoid of any sense of longing. Even when faced with monsters that the previous century had witnessed with little memory of due to Second Impact, Shinji had a life that was like an adventure filled with excitement and love, even if it was with people that he may have not been related to that he could belong to.

"The universe is cruel to most people," he uttered, looking down at the floor…and seeing an indentation that shouldn't have been there. "What's that?"

"What's what?" Misato questioned, and Kaji rolled the chair out of their way.

"He kept a floor safe in his office?"

He tapped on the small door on the floor and it gave a hollow response. Feeling around, he found a recessed handle and pulled up, opening the hatch, revealing a panel with an electronic lock, complete with a battery backup.

"Son of a bitch," he groaned. "I don't suppose you know any possible passwords he was likely to use, do you?"

"No," she responded, looking down at it. "It's a six-number password, though. Try dates."

Kaji entered the date of Second Impact, but was denied. Then he tried the date of NERV's establishment…followed by the date of the Third Angel attack…but nothing worked.

"Do you know his date of birth?"

"He was not a social person."

"It's not like he used Shinji's birthdate. I mean, he never made any attempt to get to know him, and he didn't even try to know any of his kids or grandkids. He just chose to focus on his own problems and left anything family-related in the past."

Misato had Kaji enter Shinji's birthdate just to be sure…and the panel turned green.

"Oh," Kaji sighs; he didn't expect the password to be Shinji's birthdate at all, considering that Gendo kept him at a distance all the time.

Opening the safe, they found a stack of papers.

"What is it?" Misato asks him.

"Some documents," he answers. "Information about some people from the United Nations, financial data, and what looks like some dirty laundry relating to GEHIRN."

"Why would he keep these instead of discarding them, burning them or shredding them?"

"Probably his insurance policy in case something went wrong with NERV. Either way, something did go wrong for him, and instead of trying to accept it, he tried to control the situation. But it really is true about Mother Nature; you can't control her, no matter what you do."

"The eternal arrogance of mankind."

But what Kaji didn't say to Misato was that some of these papers were what he was looking for that regarded this group of people known as SEELE, supposedly behind the strings in the United Nations and other organizations in the world. With this evidence, they could be brought down and exposed to the public. Not that it would've mattered when the public had to be made aware of something just as important, which was the rise of monsters and their hold on the world. Still, he had to try and expose SEELE, to make sure the people responsible for causing Second Impact were brought to justice and sent away for as long as possible.

"You know what Shinji believed about monsters after joining Monarch?" Misato asked him.

"No, tell me," he replied.

"That every story he ever heard about something, every legend and myth, no matter the country and culture, were all misrepresented recordings of ancient people's encounters with creatures like Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra or Kong. Dragons, sea serpents, phoenixes, angels and demons, protectors and destroyers. When he saw a member of Godzilla's species attacking Tokyo in Nineteen-Fifty-Four, he saw a destroyer that was believed to be the result of people's arrogance in creating nuclear weapons to decimate entire cities, summoned to take revenge upon the masses, and when he saw a picture of another Godzilla, the one we saw fighting King Ghidorah and the monsters that threatened the world, he saw a creature that was a protector…and he believed it to be a god. He didn't regret killing the one in Tokyo in order to save the people…but he did believe that there were others out there, but that this one, the greatest of them all…was one that he could never face. Ever."

"You mean, he had a crisis of conscience?"

"No. He was just one of several that believed creatures like Godzilla to be viewed as gods, and therefore people had no right to question their place in the world where it's people of today that question many things only to make decisions that don't end up being the best for everyone."

"Gods and monsters."

"Yeah."

They left Gendo's office with the documents…and the photo of Yui Ikari. Since the husband and father was dead and had only himself to blame for his arrogance, he didn't need them any longer.

-x-

With reports of Mothra Leo returning Kong back to Skull Island and Rodan flying towards a volcanic site near Fiji, the storms that started when King Ghidorah went bio-electrical dissipating with its demise and many of the other creatures leaving Japan, Fuyutsuki saw an opportunity to find a flight that would escort him back to Tokyo-3.

"Leaving now?" Mariko asked him as she found him in the hallway of the hospital.

"Not yet," he explained. "The flight I scheduled won't be ready for another five hours."

"Oh… Well, the doctors looked at Rikka's brain again and said her Alzheimer's showing signs of regression. It's… Even if it's only temporarily…it looks like Rikka's mind, her memories…won't be going away any time soon."

"That's good," Fuyutsuki praised. "I'm happy for you. Really."

"Thank you."

While none of these Ikaris were affected in any way by the loss of Gendo like they had been with the loss of Shinji and their other friends and relatives, it was a small miracle that at least one of them, still alive, wasn't suffering as much from a disease that attacked at their brains and caused them to lose bits and pieces of their recollection. Maybe it had something to do with Shinji's connection to Monarch, or because Monarch had access to technology and resources NERV didn't have or know about, such as whatever was found on this Skull Island where Kong lived. Whatever the case, it was a small blessing to be able to treat Alzheimer's and potentially cure it for good.

"Mariko?" They heard Fuma speak as he came by with Rikka in a wheelchair. "I just got a call from Suki. Everyone is on their way here."

"Family," said Rikka. "I am…looking forward to seeing everyone."

-x-

"Squawk!" Pen-Pen yapped as he ran over to the returning Misato and Asuka in the apartment; every time the building shook, he got worried to the point that instead of hiding in his refrigerator, he hid in his owner's room.

"Hey, Pen-Pen," Misato greeted him, setting down the photo of Yui on the table.

Asuka had seen it and had to question the obviousness of why Gendo would rip out the section of it that had Shinji as a small child from it, despite the obvious answer being that he was trying to erase whatever connection he had to his own son. Maybe it was poetic and tragic justice that the same boy that saved people from one member of the race of incarnate gods…had his absentee father taken out by another member of the same race as a form of penance. Or maybe it was just because Gendo was someone that fouled up so much that a creature like Godzilla would take offense to him and remove him from the face of the Earth, just to make sure he wouldn't continue to foul up.

"So…what are you going to do with that photo?" She asked Misato as she sat down in the living room after grabbing a bottle of water from the refrigerator.

"Give it to the Ikaris and let them decide what to do with it," she answers the redhead. "It's not like Shinji's father needs it, anymore."

"Yeah."

"You know what's ironic? When we first met him, Shinji was a fourteen-year-old nobody we knew next to nothing about, whose own father seemed to detest him for no reason, and then he disappears because of an Angel that had a shadow-like body that led to another dimension and ended up sending him over fifty years into the past, and where he lived until he died last year due to his old age after failing to save his past self from something his mother was going to do to scar him…and his legacy ended up being this family that was better than what he had before he ended up in the past."

"Yeah. He went from being a nobody…to being somebody that had some influence on the future…and still does in a way."

Asuka then reached over on the sofa and picked up an aged photograph of Shinji back when was in Tokyo, in front of the National Diet Building. She wished the picture had color in it because of how sad it seemed when in black and white.

"It's really stupid, though," she uttered, "that people name streets or parks or bird sanctuaries after fallen politicians or presidents, when it's people like Shinji that do things like helping people without any desire for fame and recognition…and people should know who he was."

"The people whose lives were touched by him do know who he was…and they'll make sure others know who he was, too."

-x-

Deep in the ocean, in his lair, the King of the Monsters laid atop a temple-like structure, basking in the heat and radiation that sustained him. The world was out of balance and would need to be worked on, and he was among the many that would ensure that there was balance restored to the place they called home. In front of him, he saw a small human, an echo of a person that had faced two lesser members of his race. He didn't know this boy…but was aware of his spirit, similar to the people of the past that gave praise to him and others across the planet.

The boy knelt before the mighty beast and uttered his last words.

"Sayonara…King of the Monsters," he went…and disappeared.

He could also feel's Mothra's presence lingering around him within his lair…and felt her telling him that the boy had been among the special few that might've fought against some of them…but only to protect the people from the ones that sought to harm them. While he didn't think much about individual humans, he did feel that this one had been special in at least one way: He didn't bolster any measure of arrogance, instead being humble in what he had gained up to his final days.

"Grr…" He growled as he continued to absorb the radiation around himself.

The reign of the Titans…had begun in earnest.

To be continued…

A/N: What do you think? There will probably be two more chapters before this story concludes. The last scene was something I felt that could've happened due to there being no other way to address the issue that is life after death, that a spirit could appear to show respect to someone for just a brief moment. Until the next chapter, stay active, healthy and creative.