Creation began on 07-22-22

Creation ended on 06-02-23

Neon Genesis Evangelion

The Broken and the Unbreakable: Adaptation

What made a dream a pleasant one? What made a nightmare scary? For Shinji, these were the unanswered questions that plagued him in his sleep. As far as he could recall, every dream he ever had was one of horrors, with either people trying to kill him, throw him down a dark hole, sic monsters on him, or worse, which was to isolate him from everyone, locked up in a cold, dark place, cut off from people that wanted nothing to do with him, regardless of who he was. And now, here he was, wandering through a labyrinth of metal and glass, trying to find a way out.

"…You're annoying," he heard voices throughout the labyrinth, men and women, voices full of spite towards him.

"…You're useless…"

"…Why are you still here?"

"…Don't look at me!"

"…Why'd they have him if they didn't want him?"

"…Why can't you just go away?"

"…Someone just take him away from here…"

"…He has no friends…"

"…His father was a lunatic. I don't know how he could live with that knowledge…"

"…I heard his mother was killed right in front of him. That kind of trauma stays with you…"

But try as he might, he couldn't escape their words of contempt towards him, and they didn't even know him. They didn't know the real him.

"Are you lost, too?" He stopped and saw a little girl that bore a resemblance to himself a little, holding a teddy bear, dressed in a dark skort and green shirt. "Are you trying to find the way out, too, mister?"

"Who…who are you?" He asked her.

"I don't know, anymore," she replied. "I've been stuck in here for a long time. I don't remember my name. I was with someone, but we were separated some time ago. I keep hearing this awful man's voice in my head, telling me that I'm a horrible person, that I hurt everyone around me."

"Somehow, I doubt that. I think this man that tells you that is just an awful person himself."

"If you were to touch me, you wouldn't believe that."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Whenever people touch me sometimes, they get hurt…or worse."

Shinji lowered to his knees to meet her gaze and offered her his right hand.

"You're hurt?" She asked him, noticing his bandages.

"I fought someone that used these whips made of fire," he told her.

"Whips? Are they like…belts?"

"In a way."

"I don't like belts."

"You've been hurt by a belt before?"

"Yes."

"What did you do that was wrong to get hurt by a belt?"

"Living."

Shinji sat down in front of her and crossed his legs.

"Some people are just cruel if they choose to hurt anyone that has done nothing wrong to deserve pain," he told her. "I hurt someone that hurt me a while ago…and didn't really enjoy having to do so. That person…was my father, and he was the only person in my life…that deserved to be hurt. I didn't want to hurt him before…but he was a terrible person."

"What did he do to hurt you?" The girl asked him.

"He abandoned me."

"Abandon? What does that mean?"

"He left me with people that I didn't know…and didn't keep in touch with me for years…except on the day my mother passed away…and refused to talk to me."

"That's awful."

"Yes, it is. It's part of why he had to pay for what he did to me."

"But you… You don't seem happy."

"I've never really been happy."

"That's awful, too."

"Yeah, it is."

"It hurts when good people get hurt by bad people. Why do bad people hurt good people all the time? Why are good people hurt when bad people know it's wrong?"

"Why does anyone do anything?"

"I don't know the answer to that question."

"I don't know the answer, either. Any question has many answers…and for every answer, there's more questions."

-x-

"One-One-Nine," went an operator over the phone line, "what's your emergency?"

"Yeah, there's this big guy blowing things up with a bazooka!" A woman screamed. "He just showed up and… Aaaaah!"

The operator heard an explosion on the other end of the line.

"Ma'am?"

"He just tried to blow me up!" The caller yelled. "He's… Oh, jeez."

"Aaaaaurgh!" Some more screaming could be heard.

"Please, send someone down here! This man is out of control!"

-x-

"…What are we looking at here?" Misato asks as she is being shown footage of a strange man on the streets, brandishing a large bazooka.

"Apparently," went Ritsuko in response, "this is the Fifth Angel."

"What did you say?!"

The Angel, assuming the form of another human, was probably six feet and eleven inches, had a grayish-blue skin told, a bulky, muscular build, and bronze-colored eyes with blond hair. He was dressed in dark blue pants with a dark shirt and his wrists adorned with dark straps.

"Where is he?!" They heard him yell as he fired what looked like spheres of electrical energy from his bazooka at the next unfortunate target, which ended up being an ambulance trying to drive away with some injured occupants, reducing it to smithereens. "Where is the Unbreakable?! I will not stop until I kill him!"

"Where is this happening?" Misato asks Shigeru.

"Tokyo-2," he answers. "This was three hours ago. Our best guess is that he'll be in Tokyo-3 in under an hour. He's left a large body count of two-hundred-seventeen."

"He killed all those people…and he's looking for the Third Child…just to kill him?" Hyuga questions. "This is messed up."

"The way these Angels tell it now," Misato states, "getting rid of Shinji and anyone like him is what will give them our world without any other obstacles in their way. We're basically putting our future on this one person."

"Where is he now?" Fuyutsuki asks.

"Still in his room."

-x-

"…So…you're called an…an Unbreakable?" The girl asks Shinji as they walk down the halls of the labyrinth. "What does that mean?"

"I guess the best way to describe that is… I'm a reluctant hero out to save the world," he suggests as a definition to his status as an Unbreakable.

"What can you do?"

"I'm stronger than I look and…I can't be hurt by most people."

As they turned a corner, the girl asks, "You face bad guys?"

"Kind of. They've come looking for me."

"You…don't like to fight?"

"No. I don't, really. But I don't really have a choice in the matter."

"But…there's always a choice."

"Maybe, but not for me right now. I did something wrong to someone I detested…and now I have to do something for the time being to avoid being locked away for the rest of my life."

Finding a stairway leading up towards darkness, the girl looks up to Shinji and responds, "So…you have to do what other people tell you because if you don't, they will lock you in a box with no door or light?"

"More or less."

"The person you hurt because they hurt you… Your father?"

"Yeah."

Walking up the steps, the little girl stopped to look at him.

"But…you only hurt him because he hurt you…and you wanted him to stop," she tells him. "How can that be wrong if he was the one that hurt you?"

"Because in the end, I ended his life. We were two people that had no future where we could understand one another. He was never going to accept me as I was…as I am…and…not once in my entire life was he ever sympathetic towards me. Not once."

"Simple…simp… He hurt you…and he never said 'sorry'?"

"Yeah."

"My daddy once said that if someone hurts you and they don't say they're sorry for it, then they don't deserve to be accepted by you."

"Your daddy sounds like a smart guy."

"He's smarter than I am, but everyone around him is smarter than he is…but he's the one I love the most."

"Then he's a very lucky man to have you in his life."

"Thank you."

Suddenly, they could see light up ahead and the girl could see someone standing in front of them.

"I think that's him," she tells Shinji. "I think that's Daddy."

"He must've been waiting for you all this time…or looking for you," he responds. "You should go to him now. He'll look after you."

The little girl then hugged him on his left leg.

"I don't care what people say about you," she says, "you're a good person. Anyone that says you're not is wrong. I hope you get to be free someday."

"I… Thank you," he praises her as she walks further up to the steps to the obscured figure, who reaches out with their left hand.

"Shinji…Shinji…" A voice calling out to him from behind on the steps. "Wake up, Shinji. Wake up. Wake up, Shinji."

And then…he fell into the darkness around him. He opened his eyes and saw the Katsuragi woman looking down at him while a man was aiming a rifle at his head.

Sighing, he utters, "I hope you have a reasonable explanation for waking me up and having someone pointing a gun at my face."

"A man with a bazooka is heading here," she tells him. "It's the Fifth Angel. We need you ready to face him."

Sighing again, Shinji nodded his head in compliance.

"Could you have him stop pointing that gun at me?" He asks. "I know better than most what's at stake if I tried anything to anyone here."

"Safety procedure," she responds.

"Yeah? Well, your procedure stinks."

-x-

BLAST! The Fifth Angel had arrived in Tokyo-3 and sent seven cars into the air, reduced to smoldering slabs of metal and glass as people were forced to flee from him.

"Police!" He heard men in uniforms yell at him as they stood behind some black and white vehicles. "Cease and desist!"

"Halt!"

"Drop your weapon or we'll shoot!"

But he wasn't intimidated by them and fired his bazooka at them.

"Foolish Lilin," he told them as he took aim and fired again. "Only an Unbreakable stands any chance against me, and none of you are Unbreakables!"

He fires again and again, sending them running away or reducing them to smoldering pieces.

"Bring out your only savior…and I'll destroy them, too!"

Bang! A gunshot was heard and the Angel staggered backwards a little, sporting a red spot on his right temple.

He looked at where the shot came from and saw a cop had taken aim and took a chance at him.

"Bad choice," he tells the cop, and then fires his bazooka at him.

"Aaaaurgh!" The cop screams as he's blown to bits.

"Die," the Angel declared, firing seven more times at the streets and buildings. "All of you Lilin, just burn away and die!"

-x-

"…So, that's all we know about this Angel," Misato informs Shinji as he's being escorted to the surface to face the humanized Angel. "He's armed with a bazooka and is looking for you."

"A bazooka that doesn't need to be reloaded with ammunition," Shinji responds as they were in the elevator. "Any suggestions?"

"Yeah, break his neck," went the guard armed with the machine gun; Misato's questionable protection against Shinji in case he tried to act out.

"Right," he sighs, and then the elevator stopped, having reached the surface level.

He opened and closed his hands, still feeling the discomfort of what he went through with the previous Angel.

"Getting cold feet?" Misato asks him, and he frowns.

"I bet you'd love that," he retorts; he was still on the mend, but he refused to be locked up or executed because some were afraid of him for killing his father in cold blood.

Even with the explosive choker on his neck, it didn't change Misato's perception of him in the slightest degree. In her eyes, he was less than a person. Probably no different from the Angels that assumed human form now and had their sights on him in order to take over the world, which made her perception of him even more unlikely to change.

"Unlike some, I don't have the luxury of getting cold feet."

The doors opened and Misato led him out of the lobby of a building, onto the streets of the city, just in time to see an explosion down the street from where they were.

"He's down there waiting for you," she tells him, and then lets him walk down the street towards the guy that wanted to kill him.

"What are the chances that this Angel takes him out?" The guard asks her.

"I don't even want to know," she responds.

To be continued…

A/N: Overdue like many things, but will progress as time passes. And, yeah, Shinji is still being shunned for his murder of Gendo, but that will soon come to an end. If people made life-altering choices that included killing someone that was so rotten to you that you couldn't forgive their transgressions, how long would it take to forgive or overlook their actions and move on when they're trying to save your life and win their freedom?