Shinji Ikari One Shot
A Matter Of Faith
Shinji Ikari was a man of faith. But his was not a casual faith, drawn on only in times of trouble. Shinji's faith was deep and in everything he did.
He knew some people would find it silly, to have faith like his in times like these. He found it silly himself sometimes, but for his mother having died when he was just a toddler, and his father dumping him off with his teacher, he was fairly normal. He had friends, mostly his game group, and he did well in school.
He did so well because his faith demanded nothing less.
He played well, honestly and honorably, because his faith demanded it.
He woke every morning before dawn and exercised, running several miles and doing a hundred push-ups, sit-ups, and squats each. When he got home he would wake his teacher and make breakfast before seeing to his body. Once he had finished his shower, while the hot steam still filled the bathroom, he would say his prayers. He demanded nothing less of himself.
His excellent grades made his teachers tell him he could pick any university in the nation. Shinji told them all the same thing.
"I want to serve humanity, a life of learning can wait."
How did he plan to serve, they would ask. Would he go abroad, do human rights work, perhaps dedicate himself to helping the poorest?
"I'm going to be a soldier!" He would tell them, much to their shock.
Shinji had been disappointed when he was twelve and realized he would never go to the stars to make the way for humanity branching out from this little world. So he decided once he was finished with school, he would join the military. Even a decade and a half after impact, most of the world was still racked by war.
He would bring peace to the children of man, because his soul demanded no less.
It had all started with little things. A few words before the roll of the dice, hands across his chest and a silent prayer for good fortune, that sort of thing.
Lots of big things, like change the world big, start with little things.
Shinji was stepping through the door, home from school, pulling his SDAT earbuds out as he crossed the threshold, when his teacher told him he had a letter. Shinji set his tape player aside and went to find a letter opener. He liked the old device, outdated as it was. Old was good, old works.
The letter was from his father, their first contact since last year. They had met up at his mother's memorial, but had exchanged no words. Apparently the old man was out of practice, since the letter said only "come" and nothing else. Enclosed was a train ticket and a picture of quite attractive woman with a rather crude note emphasizing her bust.
"Hey Sensei! Can I get off from school on UN orders?"
It had been quite a day since he left peaceful Sendai on the train. As soon as he had arrived, they had began running from the monster. Shinji never got a clear look at it through the hills and the attacking VTOLs. The N2 mine had thrown so much dust in the air he hadn't been able to see much at all.
Seeing his father had been a surprise, but Shinji had his chance to shock when he was told he was to pilot this machine in defense of humanity.
"Yes Sir!" He had shouted, smartly saluting and snapping his heels together. The effect was ruined somewhat by the dull thud of his sneakers coming together.
Now he sat in the cockpit as the orange goo rushed in. He had been assured it was perfectly safe and told to just breath it.
"Captain Katsuragi, can I ask a question?"
"As long as it is quick."
"What is the angel, I mean, where does something like that come from and how come we never saw it before?"
"We believe the angels are a kind of extraterrestrial weapon. The leading theory is that they are here to wipe out life on earth to make way for whatever is sending them."
"Its an… alien?"
"Yeah, that's what I said."
Shinji quickly pulled open the top buttons of his shirt and fished his necklace out from under his t-shirt. He grabbed the small icon that hung from the chain around his neck and began to speak.
On the bridge, Misato was watching the feed from within the plug.
"Whats he saying? I can't hear, raise the pick-up."
A tech raised the volume and as they listened to him speak, there was a giggle from Dr. Ristuko Akagi. His mumbling was still indistinct, but from the white knuckle grip on the thin chain around his neck with both hands, it didn't matter.
"Is he praying?" Misato asked to nobody in particular.
"So it would appear. Not an unexpected reaction, but there was nothing in his file about being religious at all. He doesn't go to church or anything. Spends all his free time playing games." The blond doctor said, flipping through a sheaf of papers on her console.
In the plug, Shinji had his eyes screwed shut and both hands clenched around the symbol of his faith, his lips moving near silently through practiced words.
Though I walk through darkness, I know no fear
For I wear the mantle of faith, and the armor of contempt
I am the tip of his spear, as he is the strength of my arm
I am the armor about his mailed fist, as he is the crushing blow
Like a storm I will come upon his enemies
By blade and gun I will vanquish the xeno
By holy fire I will purge the heretic and the witch
I will cut out the taint of chaos wherever I find it
Shinji felt the lurch of the catapult, the g-force pressing him into the couch. He clenched his teeth and let go of the Aquila around his neck, grabbing the control yokes. The evangelion came to a screeching halt, sparks flying from the rails as brakes stopped the machine from being thrown into the sky. For the first time Shinji saw the whole of the angel, and what he saw turned the light of his faith into a wildfire.
It was a disgusting parody of the sacred shape of man. It was ungainly and clumsy as it shuffled through the streets, dragging its feet and shattering buildings as it brushed by. Its green flesh barely covered its bones and eye sockets of the exposed skull were filled only with inky darkness. Sacks of yellow fat hung from it and a single twisted horn spiraled out from its skull.
"I will destroy you, xenos filth!" Shinji screamed as the evangelion took its first step away from the support of the lift. Shinji felt like he was doing a million things at once, it was mentally exhausting just to make the machine move. This must be what a princeps feels like, the thought.
"For I am his angel of death!" He said as he made the machine straighten up and raise its hands in fists. "And I will know no fear!"
With lurching steps, the evangelion charged and threw a haymaker with its right arm, grazing the roof tops as it swung. The titanic armored fist connected with the jaw, shattered the rictus grin to splinters. Shinji felt the sudden recoil as the punch stopped dead still within the jaw, stuck in an organic cement of tissue and bone fragment that started to close around the evangelions hand.
Shinji struggled to free the eva, but the angel held fast and grabbed the evangelion's right arm with its own left hand. Shinji gasped in pain as he felt dozens of ragged bone needles pierced through the eva's arm, then screamed as the angel snapped the bones with a squeeze of its clawed fist.
His blood ran cold as he felt the rot enter the evangelion, enter his body. He could see it twisting and bulging on the machine's arm, felt it writhing beneath his own skin. It was obvious what this thing was, a daemon of Nurgle, a great unclean one. It would infect him, consume his machine. There was no point fighting something like this, it had already won. How did you fight something like this?
Faith
Shinji growled and purged the heretical thoughts from his mind. Chaos was cunning but it was weak before the emperor's might, and his faith was the emperor's will made real.
"BACK, DAEMON!" Shinji shouted. With his words came golden light across the evangelion's body and the daemon was thrown down. The monster fell to the street, its claws digging through towers of steel and glass and finding no purchase.
Its right arm a shredded, useless, sack of tissue, Shinji made the evangelion take a step back.
"Hello! Can anybody hear me?"
"Shinji, this is captain Katsuragi, we can hear you. Shinji I know you are probably in a lot of pain right now, but you can't retreat."
"I would never retreat Captain, not with his eyes upon me. If I attack this daemon with bare hands again it will only infect the machine further. I need a weapon, a sword, a gun, anything!"
Lt. Makoto held his hand over her headset's microphone. "Ma'am, I can have the magorax to the armory building on his left in three-point-five, just give the order."
"What do we have for guns?"
"Does he even have firearms training?"
"Point. Send it… Shinji, the building on your left is going to open up in a few seconds, there will be a sword for you inside."
Three and a half seconds later, the daemon was getting up as Shinji grabbed the sword in a reverse grip with the evangelion's left hand. The sheath came along with it and as Shinji swung, it was blunt force trauma to the monster's neck instead of the cut he had wanted.
"Shinji, my name is Lt. Makoto. You need to disengage the lock to draw the sword."
Shinji pulled the sheathed sword away as he took another step back before the daemon could grab hold.
"And how exactly am I to do that?!"
"Okay, on the left control yoke…"
Shinji yelled and stabbed the weapon into the daemon's chest, driving it back to the ground with the sheath lodged within its torso. He let the beast's flesh get hold before moving to a proper grip on the sword and pulling as hard as he could, shearing the lock between weapon and sheath as he drew the sword.
"Or you could do that… that works too."
Shinji thrust the tip of the blade into the belly of the daemon then pushed the hilt up against the lodged sheath. Using the sheath as a guide in place of having a second hand to guide the swing, he pushed the blade through the daemon's body in one long stroke, cleaving it in two from its belly and through its skull.
The evangelion stumbled to catch itself after the over extended swing, leaving Shinji looking at the hopefully dead daemon of Nurgle. It was not moving, but he expected something else. For it to go back into the warp or something.
"Oh well… Um…" Shinji considered the right words then crossed his left hand over his chest. His right was not moving. "In his name, I banish thee from this world."
And then everything went very bright, then very dark.
"What the hell was that?!"
"The angel exploded!"
"Any sign of it, is there any blue pattern?"
"No Ma'am, no blue pattern remaining. The third angel has been defeated. Maybe that was like a suicide attack or a kind of miniature of impact?"
"Whatever, leave it to the nerds to figure out."
"Hey!"
"Condition of the evangelion and the pilot?"
"Unit one has sustained surface damage, but nothing beyond the primary armor layer, outside the right arm. Explosive bolts have isolated damaged tissue in that section. Pilot's vitals are stable, but unhealthy."
"Get the pilot out of there."
When Shinji awoke beneath an unfamiliar ceiling, he had the distinct feeling something was missing.
"Oh good, you are awake." Shinji recognized the voice of Captain Katsuragi. "Now before you look down…"
"You cut off my arm didn't you?"
"No! no no… well I mean I didn't cut off your arm, that was Rits here…"
Dr. Akagi sighed and elbowed her friend, and she would be using that term lightly at this moment.
"Shinji, you shouldn't be able to feel its absence, but yes, we were forced to amputate most of your right arm."
Shinji nodded and slowly looked down at the depression in the sheet where his arm just… ended. He reached over with his left hand and pulled the sheet down to look at the bandage wrapped stump. It looked like they had cut about halfway down the humerus, so right between his shoulder and the missing elbow.
"I am sure you have a lot of questions." Dr. Akagi said, sitting down on the bed next to the boy, on the left side of his feet. "And I will answer all of them for you. I want you to know it was my decision and it was not something I took lightly."
Shinji nodded, biting his lip. The muscles in his cheeks were twitching and it was clear to both women he was doing his best not to cry.
"I… I think I know why."
"Okay Shinji, why don't you tell us what you think and I can fill in the gaps for you." Dr. Akagi said.
"When it… the daemon I mean…"
"Actually we call them angels. I mean yeah it sure as hell seems more like somethin…"
"That beast was a greater daemon of the plague god, I know what I fought." Shinji said, his eyes hard as he glared at the captain. "When it grabbed the machine's arm, it infected its flesh with something. When I, you called it synching right? When I sync with the machine what happens to it happens to me, right?"
"That is very observant Shinji. Yes, when a pilot has synced with the evangelion, it is possible to experience sympathetic pain, even injuries. The… thing you fought did transmit a pathogen into the tissues that make up the evangelions musculature. We are still working out exactly how, but you suffered the same effects. We aren't sure if it was psychosomatic and your body created the injuries to match what happened to the eva, or if the pathogen somehow transmitted through the LCL as a medium."
Shinji nodded and she continued.
"Now with the evangelion, we were able to isolate, remove, and replace the arm, but of course, that's not something we can do with you. When you were removed from the plug, there was already necrosis, that is tissue death, around your wrist. In the twenty minutes it took to get you here, it had already spread over your hand and to your elbow. We cut where we did to prevent any chance of infected tissue remaining in your body."
Shinji nodded again and stared at the space where his right arm was not.
"Do you have any questions?" Ritsuko asked.
"Can I still pilot, you know, and make both arms move?"
"I will be honest, we don't know. This is the first case of this kind of thing we have seen. I know I would be very interested in helping you try, but I do believe it is possible. It is up to you if you even wish to continue or not. We very much want you to of course, but at this point we can't force you to try."
"And the machine has been repaired?" Shinji asked. He was still staring at the stump.
"Yes. Well repairs are underway, but its just speed of labor at this point."
Shinji reached up to his chest with his remaining arm with searching fingers. He looked down when he felt nothing. "Um, do you have my…"
"Oh!" Misato said, and dug into her jacket pocket. "I wanted to make sure it didn't get lost or anything. Docs had to cut your shirt off to get at your arm."
Misato stepped over on the right side of his bed and held out his brass colored double eagle. Shinji took it from her and held it in his fist, over his chest. He looked at the stump again and shut his eyes. The doctor and the captain watched him mouth a few words, and then he was still for a long time.
He turned his head to face them before he opened his eyes.
"If my arm was the price to defend humanity, then…" Shinji pushed himself up with his elbow, the icon still clenched in his fist. It hurt to move and he winced in pain before he could look at them again. There were tears in his eyes, but there was also fire.
"Then I give it gladly."
He only held himself up for a few seconds before he fell forwards. It was Ritsuko's arms that caught him and wrapped around his shoulders. In a moment of compassion that shocked Misato, she soothed the boy, gently stroking his head and back as he began to cry into her shoulder.
When he had calmed down a time later and could hold himself, he spoke again.
"C-can I make one request?"
"Of course."
"W-would it be possible, perhaps, to have a prosthetic?"
"For the boy who saved the world, I think we can figure something out."
"Thank you doctor."
Shinji slept in the hospital that night. He wouldn't be going home for a while, and there was still the matter of where home was. His father had been clear he had no interest in taking the boy in.
Ritsuko had checked on him first thing when she got in, then saw to her own work. It was during that morning work session, between smoke breaks three and four, that Misato burst into her office, holding a stapled sheaf of papers and periodically giggling.
"Rits, Rits, Rits, you gotta see this!"
Dr. Akagi looked up from her paperwork, lipstick stained pen dangling from her mouth and her glasses fallen halfway down her nose.
"And what treasure have you dug up, Misa?"
"So I wanted to look up what Shinji was praying to, cause it didn't sound Christian, or Buddhist or Shinto or anything. Turns out he is a freakin' otaku! Its from a war game." Misato tossed the papers on the doctor's desk. She began flipping through them. It appeared to be background material for a science fiction setting.
"Interesting…" Ritsuko said as she flipped past a picture in the style of an orthodox icon, depicting a man in golden armor wielding a flaming sword.
"So he is a total geek, right?"
Ritsuko looked up from another page of text. She had been quite interested in the small picture in the side bar. This one in a realistic style, it depicted a man in a fascist style military uniform with a prosthetic arm. The arm looked as much a weapon as the massive gun in his other hand or the sword on his hip. The look on the subject's face was one of grim determination. The look on Dr. Akagi's face was one of annoyance.
"So he has an odd faith and a hobby. What's so wrong with that?"
"Uh, cause its from a game. And its not, you know, real?"
Ritsuko pushed her glasses back up her nose and sat up in her chair. "And what are you comparing it to?"
"whaddya mean?"
"When you say it isn't real, what do you mean?" Dr. Akagi asked.
"Well its not a real religion, its just made up for a game. Its more of a parody of religion and cults of personality really."
"Yes but lets assume he really believes it. How is his faith not real?"
"Because what he believes in isn't real. What are you getting at Ritsuko?"
"Misato, you know where I stand on religion. You can all go talk to your special version of your big invisible friend in the sky. So telling me his god isn't real because another one is doesn't cut it."
"You can't be serious."
"Well I am and I'm not. I'm not saying his beliefs are true. But I fail to see the sacred line between beliefs based on, and lets be honest here, very watered down versions of books written by a bunch of starving madmen in the desert a few thousand years ago, which demands denying oneself any number of variants of anything fun and…"
Ritsuko flipped through a few pages.
"Books written by some rather witty men from… oh that's unfortunate, from Britain… Anyway, the point is, if this is what he bases his values on, he believes in defending the human race, no matter what. I will be honest Misa, I think if I am going to ask someone to risk life and limb to defend the planet, I think I would rather have a follower of…"
Ritsuko flipped another page and adjusted her glasses.
"The God-Emperor of Mankind, than someone who believes in whatever desert death cult mumbo jumbo." Dr. Akagi said, flapping her hand in the air through the last bit. She was looking back down at the papers Misato had brought.
"Not cool, Akagi."
"Excuse me?"
"Death cult mumbo jumbo? That offensive."
"Oh, I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over that noise. I think its that pot over there calling my kettle something or other. Do you hear that?"
Misato had left unhappy. Ritsuko had thanked her as she walked out the door. The information she had brought, written as if it was a current publication for citizens of this 'Imperium of Man', was both fascinating and frankly quite amusing. She prided herself on the breadth of her reading, and the many in-jokes and references were actually quite skillful. She could easily understand how an adolescent boy with weak father figures would find something of value in it.
It got creepy when she got to the information on the forces of chaos, some magical faction, kind of a mash-up of various versions of hell to her reckoning. While it certainly wasn't obese looking, the angel did bear a striking resemblance to certain creatures of this god of sickness and such, Nurgle.
Ritsuko turned back to the picture of the officer with the bionic arm, then searched through the piles of binders for that report she had ordered on potential prosthetics for the boy. They had made quite some headway in neurological interfaces thanks to the eva project. As she looked at the blue prints and the picture of the, lets see what did they call him, ah, the commissar, an idea began to form. She grabbed a piece of paper from her printer tray and began to sketch.
Hmmm, yeah he would probably like something like that. She would check in on him at lunch and show him.
End
So this is my take, and my tribute, on the whole NGE/40K thing. Shinji & Warhammer 40,000 by Charles Bhpen and Thousand Shinji by Academia Nut are two stories that really got me back into reading for pleasure. That was something I had lost touch with the busy life of a family man. They also inspired me to write, thus why I tend to stick to Eva stuff. (I am working on branching out to other fandoms and original work.)
What I didn't like in those was, in both, Shinji is in this god-like role. Shinji40K he is a would be god-emperor, Thousand Shinji similar thing on the chaos side of the coin. But the best fiction set in the 40k universe has always been that stuff where you have one person or a group, doing incredible things, but as just tiny specks in the massive imperium. Even the inquisitor centered novels, these are people working cases that affect billions, if not trillions of people, and they are just one tiny corner of one faction in the galaxy.
With these one shots, I think of the characters with names like the warrior, the vampire, the pilot, etc. This one I think of as The Fanatic. He is never going to be the god emperor, he is not invincible or anything. He is just a faithful, determined, and yes very-abled, servant in own view. He dreamed of being a space marine, but he was happy with settling for what he saw as equivalent to a guardsmen, because he would still be making a difference. Now he pilots a titan, and to him it is all the same. He is fighting to defend humanity and holy terra.
If this continued, I would see Shinji taking on a role similar to an inquisitor outside the eva. The angels would indeed be the threat of chaos made real, and all that entails. The extreme measures of the inquisition would be necessary because of the very really danger of the witch, the mutant, and the xeno. Then things really get weird when the emperor starts granting miracles.
Oh and, appro of nothing, this Shinji is homosexual. Not camp, just attracted to the same gender, that's all. His biggest moment of angst would be a scene in which he has a bolter to Kaworu's head. Kaworu is telling him, very calmly, to pull the trigger, because he never wants to hurt Shinji. It would be the one time his armor of contempt cracked, the one time he truly questioned his faith. I honestly am not sure whether he would pull the trigger or find another way. Make him swear to serve humanity, call him a daemonhost or something.