Creation began on 10-17-15
Creation ended on 03-15-16
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Vengeance of the Seven: Zero Ego
A/N: It's been a long time since I gotten back to this story.
They were surprised to see these two. All of NERV was on edge when they came in. They looked so much like the vegetative Third Child, but the young man seemed different, personality-wise, from the boy that hated piloting the Eva.
"How is this possible?" Misato wondered, watching the young man that claimed to be affiliated with Shinji through the glass mirror of the interrogation room.
"Their DNA tests came back," went Ritsuko, who had taken the man and woman's blood to confirm their identities, and found herself wishing she hadn't. "They're both Shinji Ikari, but that's impossible. He's completely comatose."
"Clones, perhaps?" Misato suggested.
"No, clones have slightly-altered DNA. These two are genetically identical to him, down to the last strand of their DNA. This is beyond anything we've ever seen before."
The young man that was Shinji…and wasn't Shinji, looked at the mirror in front of him, knowing that he was being watched outside, and uttered, "Unless there's a creature that you call an Angel attacking because of some blight that select members of the human race committed less than two decades ago, I would like to get started in a conversation about what is going to happen. While we're still alive, that is. I understand why some people believe youth is wasted on the young, but I feel that my time, and that of Shinji's, is being wasted by the likes of you, people that are either too smart for their own good…or too ignorant of who's truly responsible for the damnation that we're heading towards unless we turn away."
Ritsuko and Misato looked at him and wondered what was really going on.
-x-
"…So, will you consider piloting the Eva once more, Mr. Suzuhara?" Fuyutsuki, on orders from Gendo, asked the resurrected Fourth Child, who had recovered more in the time spent in the Geo-Front.
"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't go through that again," Toji answered him. "Believe it or not, Shinji told me not to do it again."
"He told you not to? When was this?"
"I don't know when this was, but I know it was he that told me. He's felt nothing but shame and guilt after I was unnecessarily killed in the Unit-03 incident, but now that I'm back, he doesn't have that weight on his heart. But that doesn't mean that something worse than that day could happen if I got back inside an Eva, so I must decline on the offer."
-x-
"…Did you beat up the Fifth Child, Shinji Ikari?" A man asked the younger man that resembled Shinji in the room.
"The Fifth Child? Oh, you mean that gray-haired boy with the red eyes and a lack of respect towards the weakest creatures," he responded. "No, it wasn't me. One of my brothers beat him up. You see, he was about to kill a kitten as a so-called mercy, and my brother and one of my two sisters intervened and saved the kitten's life. She took a liking to the kitten. While I admit that my brother may have gone too far on the boy, I do feel that he got exactly what he deserved for trying to kill a defenseless animal."
Outside the room, Misato and Ritsuko had observed this interrogation and the faux-blond woman uttered, "I don't recall Shinji being this… Well, not like this."
"What about the other one?" Misato asked. "The girl that looks like him?"
"She seems to lack any motivation in engaging in extended conversation or anything that requires effort to be thrown in. To her, anything NERV does, including just walking around, is too much effort for her to do."
"…I wouldn't get back into the Eva," the young man resembling Shinji expressed in his interrogation. "Not even if you raised a gun to my face. It's unnecessary, and a waste. It killed Toji when that bastard decided his life was to be forfeit in order to defeat the Angel that possessed Unit-03. The Eva is meant to protect mankind? Don't make me laugh. Eva is nothing more than a harbinger of pain and death, and you rely on it, deluding yourselves into thinking it's worth the hardships you've gone through in order to deal with the Angels, God's messengers. You people pervert creation and play at being God when you're closer to the Devil this way."
"This is insubordination coming from you, Third Child," the man interrogating him expressed.
"And what is truly insubordination, hmm? I refuse to follow orders, and you say I'm out of line? I speak my mind, and you call me treasonous? I hate to sound foul, but for one tasked with interrogating me, you are pretty naive. But call it what you will. I am simply stating what few people will…and what I couldn't before. None of us could until we needed to be more than the sum of our lives. There's only so much you can do and be with a sum."
-x-
"…I'm tired, I'm cranky, and I just want to take a nap," the female Shinji expressed to the other guy interrogating her, but found interrogating her to be a waste of time because she lacked any motivation to speak or do anything. "Interrogation is too much effort. Talking is too much effort. Even sitting at this table is too much effort!"
"Is everything you do too much effort?" The man asked her.
"What can I say? I'm the weakest of my siblings. I represent the part of us that has potential, but no will to use it. I have the capacity to do anything, but I have no mandate, no agenda within me, to do anything at all."
-x-
"He looks so much like him, Major Katsuragi," went Rei to Misato, viewing the Shinji look-alike in the room. "But there is something different with him."
"Yes, there is," she agreed with her. "It's like he has more of an ego, but it's not like anyone else's."
"What is that mark on his neck?"
Misato then took notice of what Rei had just questioned; initially, she hadn't seen the mark on his neck, but now saw it as clear as day. It looked as though he had been branded.
"My pride!" They then heard him shout out. "I know you're out there looking at my neck! It's a symbol of my pride! Pride as a person! Pride as an individual! Pride, and nothing more!"
-x-
Gendo was confused as to why there were these two teens that had a genetic relation to the Third Child, resemble the boy, but behave differently from. He didn't imagine Shinji with either an ego of air around him or as a girl that was so lazy to lack any interest in anything around her.
"What is going on here?" He demanded.
-x-
After being given his discharge papers, Toji was permitted to leave the base. He would at least be able to see his sister again, who had been discharged from the hospital to go home after the so-called cover story of her brother's death; NERV needed to come up with an elaborate cover up for why Toji was alive when he should be dead. But none of that really mattered to him, as he just wanted to go home and get away from any further involvement with NERV.
To be continued…
A/N: Here's the third chapter.