Creation began on 02-20-18
Creation ended on 02-22-19
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Infinity Redemption: I need you
A/N: After checking the poll related to the story a few times, I've decided that this story will be part of my Different from You series. Get ready for the continuation.
Stepping out of the cosmic-like portal that had opened for him, Shinji Ikari had stepped out onto the ruins of Tokyo. He wasn't feeling as cheerful as he had initially been when he thought of using the newfound power he was gifted to see his mother, but he had reason to be feeling this way. If there was truly such a place as Heaven, it wasn't where she was at, and it wasn't Hell, but it might as well have been Hell. It was Limbo, a purgatory realm that she herself had condemned her soul to. And the worst thing of it…was that she did it deliberately, knowing full well that it would be the worst thing she would ever do.
She let herself get killed on purpose all those years ago, he thought, finding a large piece of debris to sit on. She believed she was doing the right thing by doing so…but…it wasn't right at all, what she did.
"Nothing our families did to us was right, Shinji," he recalled the only friend he ever had tell him last year when they both experienced the worst feeling they would never forgive their families for inflicting upon. "I can't stay at that house any longer. I can't…I can't bear to be reminded of what was done to me, to us. Forgive me, Shinji, but I need to get out of this place and be elsewhere. Will you come with me?"
What pained him most about that request…was that, as much as he wanted to go, to leave his aunt and uncle's house, to get away from the hurt he had been feeling, he hadn't been strong enough to accept the offer that was being given to him at that time. He had been a coward because he stayed in a place where there was nothing there for him…and nobody that would matter as much as those that had left or were taken away by other forces.
Rumiko, he thought as the tears he had been fighting back for so long finally spilled out of his eyes. "I should've left with you! I should've run away with you after they took our kids from us, Rumiko! I'm sorry!"
He understood that now, how he made a mistake by letting his friend go alone, but now…now, he had a chance to try and make it right. With his mother's pendant, the Space Stone, he could go anywhere he wanted and be wherever he wanted. He could go to wherever Rumiko was and talk to her about his lack of a plan he was already thinking of.
"Please, be alive, Rumiko," he begged as his pendant glowed again.
-x-
"…After what he went through, I doubt he'll want to be found just to pilot it again," Misato told Ritsuko over the phone as she was bathing, "even if he did agree to whatever living arrangements we made for him, it's not like he'd be able to have a life."
"But we don't have any other pilots able to move the Evas right now," Ritsuko reminded. "Until the Angels are defeated, we need him and those like him that are capable of piloting the Evas here, no matter what."
"Even if doing so hurts them?"
"What other choice do we have?"
-x-
Gendo didn't lose any composure over the disappearance of the Third Child. He had every confidence that he would return to pilot the Eva when he realized that he had nowhere else to go in the world, and when he did return, he could implement more to his scenario and achieve his goal. All that he needed to do was bide his time for the boy to return from wherever it was he ran off to, and then everything else would fall into place. And as he stood in front of Unit-01 in the cage, he knew that everything would go according to the scenario he had laid out since the aftermath of his wife's failed experiment…and nothing else would matter.
-x-
It was a dump, and there was no denying it for him. Standing in front of a four-story building in the process of outright decay, ready to crumble at any moment and become nothing but an old memory in a poorly-developed neighborhood full of garbage, including people with no degree of hope.
Shinji couldn't fault his pendant for bringing him here to this unknown location somewhere on the planet; all he thought of was going to wherever Rumiko was, and he was taken to where she was living.
"Hey, kid," he looked at a man sitting by a garbage can, as filthy as the rags he sat on, "can you spare a dollar?"
"I would if I had any, sir," he responded. "Sorry."
"What brings you here?"
"I'm trying to find a friend."
"Hope you find them."
"Thank you."
"Is that them?"
Shinji noticed the guy pointing down the street and he saw a young woman walking towards them. She had long, dark brown hair, had a pale complexion like Shinji did, and wore a yellow dress that barely covered her legs. But it was her gray eyes that caught his attention; they were full of despair and heartache.
"Rumiko," he called out to her. "Rumiko Gaidoku?"
The girl stopped walking and looked at the boy that addressed her…and gasped as she recalled his face from a year ago.
"Shinji?" She asked. "Shinji Ikari?"
"Yes," he answered her, and she ran over and hugged him.
"What are you doing here?" She asked him.
"I needed to see you," he explained to her.
She led him into the building and to her apartment…where, after she closed and locked the door, she wedged a chair under the knob.
"I…live in a rotten neighborhood," she told him. "The guy you met by the garbage bin is the only nice one around. Never tries to do anything beyond asking for a simple dollar. The landlord's a slumlord and the water's always warm instead of hot."
"What do you do?" He asked her, standing against a small dresser.
"Nothing you'd like me for doing."
"You mean…you…have to let others…mistreat you?"
"I'm not proud of what I've done, either, but I can't go back to that house, to that woman. She took my son away and gave him to an orphanage, told those people I was incompetent to care for him when she's the one that made me have him after my father and brother raped me. She only wanted to hurt me after Toya responded more to me than he did her."
"I know. I haven't forgotten that day. I can't ever forget it. You lost Toya…and I lost Shado, the only family I had that I ever gave a damn about and was really mine. We never even signed anything, so we still have our parental rights, even when we were still too young in the eyes of those adults. That's part of the reason I wanted to see you after all this time, Rumiko. A while ago, I… I had to go to Tokyo-3 to see my father…and nothing good came about it. It turns out he only wanted me to work for him at his agency. I left the next day, but I was in between a rock and hard place: I couldn't deal with my old man and I couldn't go back to my aunt and uncle's; no matter which choice I made, there was no place for me to go. And then my mother's pendant started glowing…and I wasn't in that city no more. I was…everywhere and nowhere."
Rumiko then noticed how his Taoist pendant hanging from his neck started glowing, as if to prove he was telling the truth.
"If you could go anywhere you wanted, and not just in the world, but the universe itself, where would you want to go? Where would you want to be?"
"Where would you want to go, Shinji?" She asked him.
"Wherever I had people that mattered to me," he answered her. "I can go anywhere I want because of this stone…but the freedom to go anywhere within the universe…doesn't cure loneliness and heartache. I came to see you…because I want to know if you'd be interested in getting our kids back."
Rumiko gasped at the very thought of seeing Toya again. He might've been either her father or brother's child, but that didn't change the fact that she loved him as her son, not the two men she stopped calling family after realizing that she was nothing more than an outlet for them. Even after her mother gave her lip over not wanting to know the father's identity, Rumiko still felt a little peace from not knowing; she never needed to see Toya as anything else except her son, not her…little brother or nephew, just her child. And now, this opportunity was being presented by her childhood friend to reclaim her son. Did she dare to take it…or turn it away?
"Are we doing this legally or illegally, Shinji?" She asked him.
"Is it really kidnapping if they were taken from us because a bunch of adults decided they were better off away from us, even after they cried and said they wanted to stay with us?" He asked her, implying that trying to do things the legal way wouldn't work for either of them, even if they tried to do things properly.
"Are there any places where people wouldn't think to come after us if we went down this route?"
"How far away is beyond Earth?"
"When they were taken, they were likely taken to the same place. I tried looking it up shortly after I left that house, just to try and send a letter to Toya…and there's nothing about it that's remotely pleasant. Since when does the government treat orphanages like prisons and children like inmates? Our children are probably getting the third degree by everyone there?"
"I still remember giving Shado the custom-made teddy bear I had made for her…the day before last year."
"Ursa Guardian, her first toy that wasn't a hand-me-down. She fell in love with that bear just as much as she loved you."
"Shall we go see them?"
Rumiko was about to agree with him when she looked down at herself.
"Maybe I should change out of this first," she told him; she didn't want to look like some party favor when she met her son after a year apart from him.
"Yeah," he agreed with her. "I'll be honest, though, I barely recognize you dressed like that."
"I know. Whenever I dress up like this…I don't know who I am when I look in the mirror. I always tell myself that this isn't who I am, that I'm not some… That I'm not that kind of woman my mother would always try to make me out as out of spite."
"You're not that kind of woman. You did only what you had to in order to survive. You don't have to, anymore. I mean, you…don't have to live that way, anymore."
A tear escaped Rumiko's left eye when Shinji told her that.
"Shinji?" She asked him.
"Yes, Rumiko," he responded.
"Was there any other reason you came here to see me?"
"Yeah, there was."
"What was it, please?"
Shinji sighed and held out his left hand to her.
"Is it too late to say that I want you, my only friend, back in my life?" He asked her.
She took his hand and uttered, "I need you, too, Shinji."
-x-
"…How did we miss this in his file?" Ritsuko asked Maya as they were reviewing the Third Child's profile in Central Dogma.
"It was sealed, Dr. Akagi," she explained, feeling sympathy for the boy after going over the darkest aspect of his background. "This may change our view on having him pilot the Eva."
"We still need to find him. It is imperative that we do."
The sealed portion of Shinji's file revealed that nearly five years ago, the boy had been kidnapped by three sisters that attempted to hold him for ransom for almost three weeks, and by the time the police did find him, he had already been raped by the youngest sister…who later had his child in prison before dying. The child had been a girl and, despite her maternal relatives being either dead or in prison, was placed in the care of her paternal relatives, namely Shinji, who seemed content with the girl being with him. Unfortunately, the aunt and uncle, after only three-and-a-half years, up and decide that Shinji, despite his struggles at simply doing right by the girl and the girl herself never seeming to want anything to do with the other three relatives on her father's side, was unfit to care for the girl and was costing him his education, which he'd been neglecting just to be with her, and gave her to an orphanage against Shinji's wishes, causing the lack of any positive relationship between the young father and his guardians to be irrecoverably strained.
"Honestly, I don't believe this kid will pilot, no matter what happens," went Hyuga to Maya and Shigeru, having also reviewed the sealed file. "This isn't something one simply forgets…or forgives, even after a year. This kind of hurt builds over time."
"You think he'd reconsider if we got him his daughter back?" Shigeru asked them.
"I doubt his father would permit it," Maya expressed. "I mean, he must've known about his granddaughter…and did nothing about her being taken away."
Ritsuko, of course, understood that even if Gendo knew about the girl, he would've gone to extreme lengths just to keep Shinji separated from her if it meant severing his bonds with others he might've been close to.
When it came to Gendo's lack of a relationship with his son, the best way to ensure his cooperation was to keep him from having any friends.
Looking at the photo of the illegitimate girl, Ritsuko couldn't help but see a resemblance to the girl's father, who himself had a slight resemblance to his mother, wondering if Gendo's reason for wanting Shinji to be by himself had anything to with any recollection to his wife, which seemed to be only a coincidence.
The girl certainly looks like Daddy's little girl, she thought.
To be continued…
A/N: Here's the second chapter of the story that is now a part of the Different from You series. I expect the next chapter to deal with Shado and Toya's year separated from their single parents and how difficult they find having to adjust to life around people that simply don't make them smile or laugh…or where any degree of happiness is frowned upon, even such as the happy moments felt from holding a teddy bear. See you in the world of tomorrow. Peace.
