A New Cause Chapter 27: Harvest the Secret, an evangelion fanfic

Creation began on 02-19-16

Creation ended on 04-25-16

Neon Genesis Evangelion

A New Cause: Harvest the Secret

A/N: The first chapter of the New Year.

Commander Chansu awoke, having no recollection of ever falling asleep, and holding onto the back of his head, where he felt a slight bruise.

"Ow…" He groaned. "What hit me?"

As his vision came into focus, he took notice of something on his desk that wasn't there before: An arrow, primitive in its design, but sturdy enough to be dangerous if fired. There was a character drawing on the large arrowhead. One of the Japanese characters that translated into "Life".

"Great," he uttered in irritation, picking the arrow up. "I don't believe this."

He had to make sure, and pulled open the top drawer of the desk where he kept the item that had to still be there…and found it empty.

If he was really here, he was the one that took it, he thought.

-x-

The sunlight felt good on his facial skin and neck as he stood on the roof of the Asagi house. It was nearing the afternoon hours, so he soaked up as much sunlight as he could for the sake of feeling its rays before the Restorative Horseman of Death did anything else.

"I wonder what he's thinking about?" Mordecai said to Mana as they saw him on their roof.

Still dressed in her sleep attire, Mana yawned and answered, "Probably wondering why Japan is called the Land of the Rising Sun."

Death turned to face the two and leapt off the roof, landing on the ground in front of them.

"I could probably bask in the sunlight for a year, and my skin wouldn't change a shade," he told them, "and I'm not even a zombie."

"Zombies always change in appearance," went Mordecai, "but you…you may only be able to change in wardrobe and skills rather alter your identity. But there's nothing wrong with a pale face…just as there's nothing wrong with a pale horse."

Death was clearly affected by the man's choice of words, for he cracked a small smile.

"I've yet to fully grasp the total sum of my position as Death," he told the man.

-x-

"We can escape from here at any time you choose, Gaia," she heard the Poison Master whisper to her as she turned on her cot.

"We wait until he returns," she whispered back to him. "You disappeared for a while. Where did you go around here?"

"I had to retrieve something of necessity from the hands of mortality. In their vulnerable hands, it would be a weapon of untold mayhem…but in your hands or those of another deity…it would be kept safe from misuse…or cast away to the abyss of time…as some believe it should've been long ago."

Gaia buried her face in her arms as she muttered under her breath, "Maybe this time, we'll do what should've been done to escape this loop."

-x-

"…Hair samples, skin samples, blood samples," said Nama, checking off the list of samples on a chart board as the reanimated Shinji Ikari was being harvested of his DNA. "That's nearly everything that could aid in the Dummy System's research. Next is the bone marrow and spinal fluid extractions."

Unfortunately, he couldn't shake off the fact that, even strapped, gagged and drugged to reduce his potential resistance to being poked and prodded, Shinji was looking at him with hatred, as if he wanted to kill him…simply for doing as he was instructed to do.

"Um, your brother was being cooperative," he tried to suggest to the boy, "the least you could do is follow his example."

Rattle! Shinji tried his hardest, but he couldn't break free of his shackles on the gurney.

"Okay, talking to you is pointless," Nama accepted. He probably doesn't even think he can take the time to talk.

In the other room next door, Yui had finished extracting her eldest son's infant blood for the Dummy System and turned him over so that his bone marrow and spinal fluid could be extracted. One of the things that left her questioning whether or not anything she did remotely caused him any degree of pain was the fact that, as an infant, he should've been crying out in response to anything that registered as pain. But the baby boy didn't react to anything; it was as though he were still a corpse, and corpses never responded to anything done to them.

"Curiosity isn't a sin, but it does get people into trouble when they decide to poke their nose into places that are best left alone," she recalled the ghost of her eldest son say.

As she held up a new syringe to extract his spinal fluid, she started hesitating from sticking the needle into Mako's back.

Come on, Yui, she thought, wanting to get this over with. You've done this before. Just stick the syringe in and extract the fluid.

She held the syringe over the small of his back, but still didn't stick the needle into the flesh.

"I believe that form of hesitation's an aspect of something called maternal instincts," she turned around and saw the phantom of Shinji's younger self, who hadn't been seen since that last encounter with Death at NERV HQ, speaking up after a long time. "Except his soul's not there, so what should matter if you drive the needle in him or not? It's not like he could scream in pain. He's just a resuscitated sack of meat with a face with no soul to occupy it, same as the younger twin."

"It's for the greater good," she expressed, but still hesitated from driving the needle in. "This…this is something that has to be done."

Driving Force was quiet for a phantom whenever he made a move, and approached the woman and the infant, looking at said infant with an emotionless stare.

"You keep deluding yourself into believing that pile of bull," he told Yui. "But it's only yours to believe, and not everyone will follow that belief."

"And what about you? What do you believe in?"

"Now, why would I tell you anything about whatever it is I believe in? There's still the belief that nobody's innocent and everyone is guilty. But, being that I am nothing more than a shadow, an echo of a soul that no longer dwells in flesh, it's not truly my belief, but the departed soul's belief. Still, it's a firm belief…since you're not innocent, not with your guilty acts."

Yui then took a new breath and stuck the needle into the infant's back.

"You should probably pray that he doesn't find you down here," the phantom boy told her. "You think a stab to the waist was painful? Heh, he'll make you beg for a quick death over an agonizing, prolonged form of torment."

Then, she was left alone with the infant.

-x-

"Hey, boys?" Death watched the primary woman of the film say to several soldiers that had killed a woman that looked just like her. "Is that any way to treat a lady?"

"I don't understand this thing with what you call cloning," he then told Mana, who sat beside him in front of the television.

"Yeah, films like this don't exactly go into the fundamentals or moralities surrounding cloning," she agreed. "It's just used in this film as a way to better the action and show how the science around it can be used for beneficial purposes…or for wrongful purposes. It's films like The 6th Day that help to show cloning in a more helpful and teaching manner."

Death then decided something, while out of his manner of being educated by this mortal girl he had saved, was probably a preferred objective over continuing the current film.

"Show me this science-fiction film that teaches cloning while displaying it as an action-based adventure," he requested of her.

Mana then stopped the film and searched on the television's link to the Internet for The 6th Day film to show the horseman.

"If it's not on sites like Hulu or Netflix, we're likely to have it on VHS in our storage bins," she told him, and managed to find the film on Hulu. "Here we are."

"Thank you," Death praised her.

As the film started, the horseman was again mesmerized by the imagery used to detail the opening credits of the film.

"What is this message they used?" He asked her, as his ability to read things was still below that of an educated individual's.

"It's a shorted piece from the Bible, speaking of how people as a whole were created by the almighty one known as God," she explained, "how he created people in his own image and how the evening and morning were referred to as the sixth day."

"Six days…out of seven days?" He questioned.

"Yes."

Death decided to try and read what was displayed on the screen, able to grasp at least three, large words: Human cloning banned.

"So this all started…because scientists cloned a sheep?" He asked her.

"That's right," she answered.

"Something tells me this film will be very interesting."

-x-

"…It's just creepy, him looking at you like that," Yui heard the other scientists say about Shinji, who still retained a negative expression on his face. "I just hope the Dummy System gets better from this instead of getting worse."

Still strapped to a gurney, the woman sighed at how symbolic it seemed for her younger son. To have been declared a danger to everyone, and instead of being executed, he was tied down. Even after dying and being, subsequently, brought back in a scientific sense, nobody could take any chances with him not under any degree of control. And so she went over to a nearby table and picked up a syringe, filling it full of a sedative.

"You know the flesh is weak," she stopped and turned back to face Shinji, who spoke up after a while. "You know that it seeks release…but you won't let it die. You…will never let it die…even when you know it has to."

Even when she should've known what he was talking about every time he said it, Yui couldn't bring herself to accept any of it.

"The flesh of it desires release from the agony in which it finds itself confined to," Shinji uttered to her. "All you are doing…is prolonging its suffering that has already been paid for with the final breath."

As she approached him carefully with the syringe, Yui had to ask him something that was probably beyond the both of them.

"You can understand us, can't you?" She questioned. "Even when medicated and restrained. You understand everything that we say around you, about you."

Shinji frowned at her.

"In the absence of that which makes the flesh live, the flesh is forced to rely on the scraps of what no longer resides," he told her. "Yes, I can understand you. I can understand everything that transpires around me, the flesh that seeks release above all else."

"And you keep referring to yourself as the flesh, don't you?"

"That's all that I am. I am nothing but flesh."

"Reanimated flesh. Why not refer to yourself by your name?"

"Because he is no longer of flesh. When he passed, he took the sense of identity with him. The identity of the flesh is his alone. What is flesh without identity? What is a face without a name? What is a body…that desires not the life that was forced into it…but the gratification that comes with the end of the life that was lost to it?"

That's when Yui decided to inject him in his left arm, to silence him. Everything that he said made more sense to her now than it didn't earlier, and she couldn't accept any of that. It was a line in her beliefs that she wouldn't allow to be crossed. Not by anyone or for any reason.

"This is something we can work around," she told him as he started to lose consciousness.

-x-

Death suddenly felt a measure of unease in his left arm and raised it up in front of him, closing and opening his hand, flexing the fingers.

"Uh, Death?" Mana asked him, noticing his unease. "Are you okay?"

But as soon as the unease was felt, it disappeared from him, and his arm felt exactly as it always did before, and he set it down.

"It's nothing," he told her, and returned his attention to the film.

"A clone has no rights," the male scientist told the main character after revealing to him the existence of an underground cloning facility that went against the laws against human cloning. "A clone can't own anything."

"Are you able to comprehend most of the plot now, Death?" Mana asked him.

"Just about," he responded. "In the future of this film's world, it's legal to clone animals to replace deceased pets and remedy the shortage of edible meat, but it's illegal to clone humans because the brain is too complex to work with without cloning an entire body, and it perverts natural existence and brings into question the nature of a clone's thoughts and emotions. Is a clone no different from the person it replaces? Does it truly have a soul? Is literally replacing someone on the verge of death with an artificial replica truly humane, even when you know it's not really the person you have lost?"

"Right," she agreed with him, satisfied by his basic understanding of the film's messages and how it sparks curiosity, questions and answers.

"But this here, where the man that runs the facility that clones people's pets," he spoke up, "his willingness to go after the wife and daughter… I would kill him myself, even if he's not an actual person but a clone himself, trying to keep his secret from becoming known."

"Yet, he makes good points to a bunch of people that are split between the laws that prevent human cloning from being legalized. Some would want it in order to keep from feeling a sense of emptiness in their lives if they lost someone they loved. Others, like Adam Gibson, feel that cloning is not something that society should embrace and accept the reality of life."

"What is this the scientist has discovered?" He asked her, pointing out that the man that helps the villain of the film had discovered something that related to his wife's death earlier in the film.

"He has discovered that his wife's clone had a defect embedded in her DNA," she explained to the horseman. "The bad guy clone did this to ensure that he could never be betrayed by anyone that he clones. These defects, like cancer, give the cloned people shorter lifespans. Her defect gave her clone a lifespan of five years. Clones without defects in their DNA in the film are guaranteed to have a full life and likely die of natural causes, such as old age."

"Or unnatural causes, such as murder," he reminded her.

"Yes, that, too."

"Sometimes, I think you should be considered a teacher to my brother, Ms. Asagi," went Mako, floating above them, reminding the two that Death's brother was quietly watching the film and was with them.

"I can't believe I forgot he was with us," Mana told Death.

-x-

"…How are things with the Third Angel?" Misato asked Hyuga, trying to maintain a sense of stability in the Geo-Front.

"Same as always, Captain Katsuragi," he responded, showing her the visual readings of the Angel in the city. "It just stands there, doing nothing."

"Any signs of the Horseman of Death?"

"Nothing. But he's not the only horseman. There's this guy from the last time they were here."

On a separate screen, War's image showed up, reminding Misato that there were four of them, not just the one that looked like Shinji.

"Where's this one?" She asked.

"He's just outside the city. He's not really trying to do anything other than what appears to be keeping watch over the Angel from a distance."

"In other words, he's playing the role of a babysitter."

"We don't try anything to the Angel…"

"Except when Death came back here, it had nothing to do with the Angel's protection from any of us. He came back because of Unit-03…because of some association with the Fourth Child."

"The guy hates our guts, hates the Evas, but it looks like when it comes to the girl, he'll hold his tongue on us."

"But why Unit-03? Why does that particular Eva get his attention?"

-x-

Standing in front of Unit-03, now deprived of its core, which had been inserted into Unit-01, Asuka frowned at why such an irritable Evangelion such as the purple seemed to gain more recognition over the black one or her own Unit-02. Her suspension from piloting hadn't been lifted yet, and she feared her abilities would've diminished if she hadn't done what her lifetime had been spent preparing her for. She needed to prove her worth, to show the world that she was the best.

"It's not like they need anyone else for this when they see that I'm all that's necessary," she told the defunct behemoth. "And they made a mistake when they selected that little bitch. Oh, just because she found a means to hurt the dead Third Child, they think she's all that. It hasn't done anything to solidify her status as anything other than an excuse."

She then left the black Eva in the cage. But had to look at the Test-Type Eva, Unit-01, which many of the people were wondering would actually work with the Unit-03 core. Physically, the purple Eva didn't look all that intimidating to her, even with its horn.

"Not as frightening to you, isn't it?" She heard someone say to her, and turned to face the commander.

"I wouldn't call it frightening at all," she told him.

Chansu sighed and admitted that he always felt this particular Eva wasn't really worth salvaging, but even he has to obey his orders from the people that fund NERV.

"And why put Unit-03's core inside it?" Asuka asked him. "It's not like that girl is gonna come back and pilot it."

"Orders came from my superiors," Chansu told her. "Of course, if Ms. Asagi did come back for some reason, I would hope it's a reason she can live with."

"I gotta be honest, but you seem terrible at this job."

"Noted. But I'm probably the best one for this job. The only one that's willing to clean up the previous guy's mess because he was too irresponsible to do it himself."

"And how do you clean up someone else's mess?"

"By trying to preserve as much of the order and limit the discord…and being willing to consider all options in dealing with a situation."

Asuka was about to question his morals, but decided not to. She just wanted for the Fourth Child to never return to NERV and get in her way, and left the cages.

"Those Angels need to be dealt with, sooner or later," she told Chansu as she walked away. "Along with the horsemen!"

Chansu looked at her departing form and sighed at how right she was…but not for the reasons she had.

-x-

"…Well, that was truly a good film that dealt with some really interesting themes about cloning," Death told Mana as The 6th Day ended.

"Sometimes, films like that end up teaching through fiction more than through science," she responded, and then Death got up off his bottom and stretched his limbs. "Cartoons, too."

"If you could only know…what we really are," the horseman uttered, which surprised Mana. "What we really are."

"Death…you looked at a music video of Steven Universe?" She asked him.

"I looked, I clicked, I listened…and some lyrics stuck to me," he explained.

"That song actually made me want to sing a variation that was directed towards you and the other horsemen based on the shorter version."

As Mako floated down onto the table, Death tilted his head to the right.

"Well…you are one of the Four Horsemen," she clarified.

"What are the lyrics?" He asked; he actually wanted to hear the song.

-x-

Before Tokyo-3

Slash! War swung his sword against the tall blades of grass around him.

"Doesn't this seem like a complete waste of our purgatory time?!" He yelled at Famine, who was laying on the moss-covered rocks nearby.

"I've rechecked my Angel-designated locations," Famine told him, looking up at the sunny sky. "There wasn't a single mortal that wasn't supposed to be there. You could try rechecking your Angel-designated locations in case there are mortals there."

War sighed and re-sheathed his sword.

"I got a better idea," he told the boy in rags. "I'm heading to Tokyo-3 to keep watch over the Angel of Water. I may not be able to actually harm any mortal souls in that place, but I can make sure that the Angel is kept safe in case they might want to try something."

"Be careful while you're there."

-x-

"Hmm?" Gaia got up from her prison cot and looked up at the ceiling away from the ventilation shaft. "Oh, dear."

She could feel the presence of War outside the Geo-Front, but he hadn't taken a single step into the city above it. If he was here, he was likely doing Death's duty.

-x-

"…That was very impressive, Ms. Asagi," Death praised Mana's song. "I don't believe the Restorative has any measure of songs associated with the Four Horsemen. Props to you."

"Thank you," Mana responded, "and…it's okay if you called me by my first name, you know."

"I'll address you as such…when I bring your mother home…and I'm going to go do that now."

Mako was surprised to hear his brother say that. They had just recovered from getting away from NERV…and now Death wanted to go back to that place that dealt him agony.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again," Death stated, feeling invigorated right now.

"Are you sure?" Mana asked him.

"Have faith, Ms. Asagi," he told her. "It's something that not many lost souls actually believe in. It's about time I did."

He walked towards the front door, turned back to face the young lady, and gave her an assuring nod that he would return.

-x-

"Why not refer to yourself by your name?" Yui thought of her conversation with the body of Shinji Ikari when it was made known that he was capable of understanding everyone around him.

And he longs for death to claim him a second time, she realized, but was unwilling to permit such a thing to happen. So long as his remains are alive once more, he needs to be preserved as an available source of genetic material for the Dummy System. So long as both he and Mako's bodies are alive, the Dummy System has an available source of genetic material.

In front of her was a new tank filled with preserving fluids and an obscured form of mass that was being worked on within it. Harvested from the bone marrow and spinal fluid of her eldest son, Yui was involved in another aspect of the Dummy System that SEELE needed to ensure that they had a more efficient supply of pilots capable of meeting their needs.

Maybe, with further research, I can harvest the secret of restoring the soul to the body, she thought.

To be continued…

A/N: Your dark shadow actually thought I had stopped updating this story, but that's not true. Every story is important to work on. It's just a matter of finding the motivation and inspiration to keep it going. And now we know some of what has transpired into the unwritten future. What do you think?