Creation began on 05-21-16
Creation ended on 05-26-16
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Different from You: Mental Beatings
The Fourth Angel had finally arrived. Unfortunately, it had arrived ahead of their schedule, leaving NERV at a disadvantage.
Shinji was dispatched in Unit-01, instructed to deal with the Angel, but his response to the orders weren't carried out the way Misato had intended him to do so. The Pallet Rifle didn't cause the Angel any damage, and it counterattacked with these energy whips.
"Dammit, Shinji," Misato shouted in Central Dogma over the intercom. "Retreat! Retreat!"
-x-
Shinji, knocked to the ground in Unit-01, looked up at the Angel and saw not the monster it was…but the man he hated for abandoning him years ago…and the woman that raped him years ago.
"Gaaaaurgh!" He yelled, and made Unit-01 dash towards the Angel.
Before it could retaliate, it was slammed into and smashed into a hillside!
BASH! BASH! Unit-01 was punching the Angel in its core!
-x-
"What the Hell?" Misato gasped, seeing the Eva grab at the Angel's whips, tearing them away from the body so that it could resume bashing the core that began to crack under the blows.
"He needs to stop," Ritsuko informed Misato. "His synchronization's going too high."
"Shinji, stop!" Misato ordered, but Shinji just kept bashing away at the Angel. "Shinji, I order you to stop! Stop!"
CRACK! The Angel's core cracked and fell to pieces, causing the creature to perform a death rattle before laying around like a dead animal.
When it gave no indication that it was alive, Shinji calmed; he didn't see his father or his rapist in front of him, just a strange creature he had stopped before it did something to hurt his daughter. He buried his face in his palms as he panted.
Dammit, he thought.
-x-
Sitting in a chair outside the locker room her father was in, Shado, who didn't see the fight between the red squid and purple behemoth her father had been inside, wondered if he was alright.
Misato came by and asked her, "Is he still in there?"
Shado didn't answer her, neither a verbal response or a shake of her head.
The woman decided to go into the locker room and see if he was in there, and to her luck, he was in there, putting on his coat.
"You disobeyed a direct order given to you by your superior officer," she informed.
"I was ordered to fight the Angel," he responded, his voice sounding ragged. "I fought the Angel."
"Next time, you're expected to follow orders, Shinji."
"Not every order can be followed."
"Are you even listening to me?"
He closed the locker and looked at her, and she almost had to step back; she had never seen him looking so irritated before.
"What does it matter?" He asked her. "I stopped the Angel. I kept Shado out of harm's way. That's all that matters to me. Anyone else is a secondary concern…or at the very bottom of my list of concerns."
Before she could even express that that attitude of his would get them all killed (or even himself killed), he walked past her and out into the hall. She followed him and saw him leave with his daughter on his back.
"Daddy, are you okay?" Shado had asked him.
"I'll be alright, sweetie," he responded to her.
Misato was now worried that NERV had entrusted the fate of the human race to the wrong person.
-x-
"…Before he got back up, his synchronization raised to ninety-seven percent," Maya Ibuki informed Ritsuko, Misato and Fuyutsuki of what had transpired in the last battle, showing them the Third Child's recorded graphs. "Then, it went over one-hundred-twenty while he was beating the Angel. It didn't stop rising until he was done pounding on the core. Then, it dropped back to the seventies. It gets worse."
"How could it get worse?" Misato asked her.
"His blood pressure and brainwaves were becoming unstable, almost bordering on emotional instability, similar to what happened with the First Child several months ago."
"Emotional instability? With Shinji?" Misato questioned.
"It wouldn't be illogical," went Ritsuko. "It was similar with the initial Angel attack. He was more disturbed than usual. When the Angel self-destructed, we had to disconnect his nerve connections before he passed out."
"There's something else, too," Maya showed them a holographic display. "The visual equipment inside the plug was affected by his synchronization…and this was what he saw in place of the Angel."
The display showed Commander Ikari…and a woman that had been identified as Shinji's rapist.
"His synchronization rose up because he saw these two?" Fuyutsuki questioned.
"That's a possibility," Ritsuko expressed. "It would seem that out of everyone he's ever seen, he has a lot of unchecked rage towards his father and his rapist."
-x-
She never made him angry or anything. Shado always managed to quell his rage that always seemed to be triggered by anyone that tried to tell him how to do things. Ever since the police just showed up at his aunt and uncle's and informed him of his fatherhood caused by his rapist, he was the only one that wanted anything to do with Shado because he fell in love with her right then and there. So she was his anchor, she kept him tethered to his sanity every time he felt like he had a mental beating weighing him down.
"Ha-ha-ha!" Shado laughed as her father pushed her on the swing at the park. "Higher, Daddy!"
"Heh-heh," he chuckled, and obliged her request.
-x-
"…If anything, his daughter seems to keep him from going off the deep end," went Misato, observing the young father and his daughter at the playground.
"He practically lives for her," said Fuyutsuki; any parent with a loss for life dedicate themselves to their children as a way of coping with their remaining years or as a sign of redemption by making sure that they had a future where they could be happy, even if they weren't.
They were monitoring the scene in Central Dogma.
"He beats an Angel to death with an Eva's bare hands," expressed Maya, "but still finds time to spend the rest of the day with his daughter."
"We should consider retesting him in the plug," said Ritsuko, wanting to test the boy again to see if his synchronization was not a fluke or error.
"Maybe not for a few days," went Fuyutsuki.
"Yeah, he wasn't a very talkative person when I tried to question him about the way he fought the Angel," Misato added, agreeing with the Sub-Commander. "I doubt that he'd comply at the moment."
Across the chamber, several of the other technicians were still reeling in from the Third Child's actions against the Angel and his apparent rage. Despite the use of the rifle, it looked like the boy seemed to get the job done faster by using his natural weapons: His fists.
"He rarely seems to embrace violence," went Maya. "How can someone that does what he does for his kid be capable of violence? I mean, violent hands can't hold children."
Misato wanted to disagree with the Bridge Bunny, but the sight of Shinji removing his daughter from the swing so that they could go to the jungle gym kept her silent; throughout the relocation, the young parent never tried to use force to relocate his daughter from one part of the playground to another.
"He could displace his rage," Ritsuko suggested, "redirecting it elsewhere to refrain from being abusive towards others."
"He seemed to redirect his rage towards me when I questioned him," Misato stated. "I didn't want to imagine what he'd be most likely to do to me if he he put his hands on me."
-x-
"…The Fourth Angel arrived ahead of time, Ikari," said SEELE 01 to Gendo during the new meeting. "And the only Eva dispatched against it was Unit-01, which defeated the Angel by beating its core to a fractured pulp."
"This was an unexpected situation," Gendo explained. "However, the situation was handled and the Angel was defeated."
"It's not the Angel we're concerned about," said SEELE 06 to Gendo. "It's the, seemingly, unpredictability of the Angels and the unreliability of the pilot."
"Who beats an Angel with their fists?" SEELE 10 asked.
Gendo explained that the pilot reacted under desperation and was under pressure. It was a lie, but he didn't really know what made the Third Child act the way he did against the Angel. From the recorded footage of the attack and the information of the raised synchronization ratio of the pilot, he began to wonder if it was even safe for him to be anywhere near Tokyo-3 during any of these attacks. He needed to make plans to excuse himself from the base and city in order to further the Human Instrumentality Project that SEELE stressed him about.
To be continued…
A/N: What do you think? Shinji makes the NERV personnel fearful just because he punches an Angel to death?