Creation began on 09-26-20

Creation ended on 10-06-20

Neon Genesis Evangelion

My Hero, Shinji Ikari: Moral Fortitude

The door to the disused room slid open and Shinji stuck his head out to look around his new surroundings. There was nobody present in the halls, which were a sterile-white color, reminding him of the halls of NERV HQ, and he stepped out of the room, his upper body covered in a torn lab coat. As far as he could surmise, there were no cameras anywhere, but he was only taking a risk by walking around the place, so there could've been hidden cameras that he didn't know about.

"You can't do this to people!" He heard the voice of a girl from his deceased counterpart's memories. "You can't hide people from the world or treat them like some experiment!"

"I will do whatever I have to in order to keep people like you in line," he heard his father say in response to her reaction.

He sounds colder than ever before, he thought as he turned a corner, seeing small device mounted on the wall on his right. A fire alarm? If those work around here, the fear of a fire burning out of control somewhere in here would likely make the people freak out and get out. But if I'm wrong, I just have to find another way to find them.

He walked over to the device and pulled the lever down, causing the lights to shift from white to red as an alarm went off.

Oh, shoot, he realized; this was the first time he ever pulled a fire alarm in his life, so he didn't expect it to be this loud.

-x-

The noise from whatever was wrong inside this place woke Shado up from her light slumber, and she heard strange sounds outside her cell. They sounded like…footsteps, as if someone was running around.

"What's going on?" She wondered, seeing that her cell was bathed in red light.

-x-

"…We're not detecting any releases in the extinguisher system, sir," a man told Gendo, who was annoyed by the disruption of his work. "It looks like an alarm was pulled."

"Where was it triggered?" He demanded to know.

"Sub-level ten," another man answered, "right near one of the decommissioned labs."

"A decommissioned lab, you say?"

On that level alone, there were ten different labs that had been shutdown. One of them, in particular, had been abandoned due to a mishap there that was listed as a technical accident, but was, in truth, a coverup to something Gendo had done to ensure he had no hindrances to his goal.

Suddenly, another alarm went off, and Gendo demanded an explanation to why.

"A rudimentary fire, sir," they told him.

"Where?"

"Decommissioned Sub-Lab-16."

"Send a containment crew down there, immediately."

Gendo didn't want to consider the possibility of a mistake he made a while back, but it was starting to seem like that.

-x-

He walked down some stairs to another level and down its hall, seeing a half-open door. Curiosity got the better of Shinji, and he went over to it, opening it and shedding light on some large prison cells, each one occupied by a woman!

"What's going on here?" He questioned, and a woman with bleach-blond hair rose up from the floor and raised her left hand up.

"Please," she uttered, "don't hurt us again."

Her voice reminded him of Ritsuko Akagi, and as he walked closer to take in her features, Shinji saw that she looked exactly like the woman he met at NERV, excluding a jagged scar running down the right side of her face, over her eye.

He looked at the wall beside him on the right and found a set of keys hanging from a hook.

"Who locked you in here?" He asked her.

"Gendo Rokubungi-Ikari," another woman, older, with dark auburn hair, revealed, looking at him from within a different cell. "Shinji Ikari?"

"Yes."

"But…he killed you over two months ago. We discovered that anything or anyone organic and in possession of a conscious mind that gets torn apart by his Quirk has to be put back together within five minutes of being atomized, otherwise the damage done to them is irreversible. You were dismembered down to your last molecule by your father. In essence, you were murdered by him. I saw him do it. He tore you apart and left you scattered around the lab he threw you in. In his mind, you were all that stood in his way."

Shinji opened the cells and responded, "Does everyone here have a Quirk that is considered unnatural or useless?"

The other two women bore an uncanny resemblance to Maya Ibuki from NERV. They were probably, most likely, twins, but one of them was scarred on their whole mouth. The other woman had a left hand that appeared skinned and rotten.

"My sister and I can see into the past of whoever we touch," the one with the damaged arm explained. "We aimed to be heroes of information."

"What about you two?" Shinji asked the Ritsuko look-alike.

"We don't have Quirks," said the dark auburn woman to him. "We're just researchers that turned against him because he was abusing your daughter. So, he threw us in here."

"Do you know where he's keeping Shado?"

"Most likely the floor beneath this one," the Ritsuko look-alike revealed.

"Hey!" They heard a man's voice yell, and Shinji saw a security guard running towards him.

"Run!" He told the women, and picked up a broken piece of rebar. "Run as fast as you can!"

But instead of running away from the guard, Shinji ran towards him; even if he ran the opposite way, the guard could've caught one of the women and put her back in he cages again, so he needed to stall for more time, as much as he could give them. Gripping the rebar, he aimed at the guard's waist.

"Aaaurgh!" The guard screamed, feeling the rebar pierce through his shirt and flesh, and he fell to his knees.

"Urgh!" Shinji grunted, bringing his left hand down on his shoulder, knocking him out.

Then, he checked him for a gun and took it and its ammunition; he didn't want to cross the line unless he had no other choice, but Shinji had made a promise to his counterpart to rescue his daughter and friends from his father. He also took the guard's can of Mace, just in case lethal force was unnecessary.

"What about you?" The Maya Ibuki twins asked him.

"I'm not leaving without my daughter," he told them.

-x-

"…Was that who I think it was?" Another guard questioned Gendo, as they had watched from the other guard's bodycam the footage of the attacker. "Wasn't he missing, presumed dead? How the Hell is he here?"

Gendo was wondering the same thing. His Quirk had made it so that his son was no longer a hindrance in his plans for that illegitimate brat of his, reducing him to nothing but a memory. And yet, here he was, alive once again.

"One way or another, Father," he had warned him before being atomized, "I'll protect my daughter from you, even if it means my soul is forfeit."

"What about you?" One of the captive women asked the boy that freed them.

"I'm not leaving without my daughter," he told them.

Gendo left out the room and proceeded to walk towards the room where the girl was held; as long as he had her in its possession, he could still achieve his goal. And he wasn't going to let anyone, not even his dead son, get in his way.

Nobody understands, he thought as he entered an elevator. They will understand, even if it means they have to die to do so.

-x-

Shinji ran down the stairs to the next level and found the whole place to be just as much like NERV as the previous level.

"Search for a door that says 'Containment GD-54'," the alternate Ritsuko Akagi told Shinji as he ran through the empty halls, looking for the door. "Your father always kept her isolated from you and everyone else by keeping her as close to six feet under as he could."

"Any clue as to why he would do that?" He had asked her.

"Yeah, because he hates her for killing his wife, your mother. But as long as her Quirk serves a purpose to him, he won't let her out of his possession for as long as she lives. That's how he treats everyone he sees a use for; if they possess something he wants, he'll go through whatever measures he has to in order to possess them, even if it means burying them so deep that their own ghosts can't find them."

Yeah, well, I'm one ghost he's going to regret not burying, he thought as he ran past doors that weren't the one he was looking for. "Shado? Shado?"

-x-

"…Shado…" The girl heard her name being called from outside by a voice she hadn't heard in a long time now, and she crawled towards the door in front of her. "Shado?"

She slowly banged her hands against the door.

"Daddy?" She called out, but her voice was weakened. "I'm in here!"

If anything, she must've sounded like a mute child; nobody could hear, let alone understand, her.

"Daddy, I'm in here," she cried.

She heard a scuffling of footsteps, looked down at the light slipping through underneath the door, saw a dark figure blocking the light.

"Shado?" She heard his voice again. "Are you in here?"

"Daddy," she uttered, still unable to raise her voice any higher than she could right now.

"Get back from the door."

She obeyed and backed away, covered her eyes and waited for her hero.

BANG! A loud noise struck the door, and she looked to see that a small hole had been made.

Then it slowly slid open, just enough for two hands to grab the side of it and pull it the rest of the way, revealing a young man much older than the little girl, but was much younger than the man that was hurting them, with softer features of hair and eyes. He was a sight of such greatness that the girl felt like it had been too long since she last saw him. It might as well have been an eternity, because she hadn't seen him for a long time. But here he was, in front of her, exactly as he had always appeared to her, not as someone to fear, but as someone she cherished dearly.

"You came back for me," she expressed, tears falling out of her eyes.

He slowly nodded his head up and down as he lowered to meet her gaze.

"I'm sorry I took so long," he told her, and she hugged him as tight as her arms could.

"Grandfather hurts me every day."

"He will never hurt you again."

Ding! They both heard an elevator signal that it was on the level they were on, and heard it slide open to either allow a passenger to enter or exit.

"He's here," Shado gasped, afraid of who was coming. "He's here."

-x-

Gendo exited the elevator and walked down the hall and turned a corner, seeing the two people that were the only ones down on this level, and it infuriated him.

"I hope you two weren't planning on leaving," he told them, removing his gloves. "That would be very bad for you."

The mere sight of his son, alive and whole, with his bastard daughter, was enough to make Gendo want to spit up at whatever happiness they felt for being together. Once he had dealt with him, he would find out how he was able to come back to life after being ripped apart to so many pieces that scientists wouldn't be able to tell his eyes from his fingernails. Anyone that tried to stand in his way would pay the price for their arrogance.

"You've been hurting us all for long enough," the boy told him, picking up the girl. "We're leaving, and there's nothing you can do to make us stay."

"That's where you're wrong. Even if you were able to leave, the whole world thinks you're dead. You have nothing out there. You are nothing out there. And that child is nothing more than a biohazard that needs to be treated without any mercy. She has killed before and will kill again."

Watching as the girl hugged her father's chest, Gendo saw his son frown at him.

"I've heard nothing but contempt from you ever since you showed up down here," Shinji told him. "What happened to Mother was an accident, one that you can't accept as an accident, and one you covered up with a lie. We could've told the police what really happened that day, but you chose not to, all because you had a twisted idea pop in your head and wanted to capitalize on it, regardless of who it harmed in the process."

"Neither of you are leaving this place," he told his son. "Put the girl down and surrender."

"I can't do that. I won't do that. She needs me to be her hero."

That word. That…that awful designation and status symbol that he had grown to resent so much over the years. It made Gendo hate anything and anyone that chose it so much and denied him of it. He thought back to how much he wanted to be a hero, only to be told that he would never be one because of his issues, and if he couldn't be one, he would make sure that nobody else could.

"You're not a hero," he told them. "Nobody gets to be a hero! Nobody!"

He flexed his fingers and caused the walls around him to fracture as he approached them.

To be continued…

A/N: What did you think of this chapter?