Creation began on 09-13-21

Creation ended on 08-21-23

Neon Genesis Evangelion

A New Cause: The Purpose of an Avenging Angel

A/N: Innocence and guilt are two sides of a coin that is not even currency. The side that represents one's fate…is the side they act upon.

Mana awoke to the new day that felt like the sun had yet to rise upon the city and walked down the stairs of her home to the kitchen where her parents and grandfather were.

"Good morning," she greets them as she sits at the table.

"Morning, Mana," her father replies as he pours her a cup of orange juice. "I'm not sure if you should look at the paper today."

"Hmm? Why?"

"Our friendly-yet-unfriendly Grim Reaper made another impression upon the criminal element," her grandfather tells her, and then hands over the newspaper that came in this morning.

Mana looked at the article that took precedence over much of everything else printed and saw a picture of a deceased man.

"'Organized crime figure Sōsuke Hitama committed suicide last night in Osaka-2. Caught jumping from the balcony of his heavily guarded penthouse apartment after screaming something about an avenging angel that walks among us. Sōsuke Hitama was out on bail while awaiting trial for eight charges of sexual assault and attempted murder'," she read. "Well, I'm not really going to lose sleep over a bad guy that saved the justice system from having to deal with him."

"I'm surprised that Death didn't finish him off," Himeko states as she pours herself another cup of coffee. "It would seem that the criminal had a crisis of conscience that overtook him?"

"Or he realized that ending his own life would prevent Death from taking his knowledge and exploiting it for his own purposes," Mana tells her. "Anyone not killed by Death would be depriving him of any valuable information relating to the criminal element. Access to financial records, names and addresses of people connected to the criminal underworld, even other victims. Death wouldn't have access to any of that if a criminal took their own life to avoid him. But doing so would just make Death have to take a different route to obtain adequate information in other ways."

"And because he can go to Hell and back again, he could get the information from the suicide criminals, anyway, right?" Mordecai asks his daughter.

"Sort of. He would have to torture the condemned until they break."

"Still, it makes you wonder what he was screaming about Death before he jumped," Miroku says as he slices a piece of his egg off to eat. "I can understand that he hates the criminals that the law can't or won't touch because of one issue or another, but what truly makes him an avenging angel? What truly makes him a seeker of vengeance?"

"It might not be so much vengeance as it is a form of justice, Grandfather," Mana tells him. "Yes, he is a spirit of vengeance, but it's vengeance for the people wronged by others. The abused children, the battered spouses, the neglected, exploited, even the scapegoated. The victims that can't stand up or even speak for themselves, he acts as their voice, their enforcer. At first, he didn't consider himself a vengeful ghost or anything of the sort, but as time passed for him, he began to become more comfortable with his position as the Horseman of Death for the Restorative…and now sees the difference between what makes what one does as either good, evil…or necessary. His actions against the bad people of the world, in places where the other horsemen don't have authority or where he doesn't have to sneak around, come from his deeper understanding and disgust towards the darker side of human behavior. The world needs someone like Death, the Endgame out there, willing and able to go to extremes, to cross the line…to make sure the truly evil, the truly irredeemable…are dealt with. If he let even one criminal go free, to terrorize another innocent soul, he would experience something we would all experience if we did the opposite of something we had intended to do."

"You mean, regret?" Himeko asks.

"That's right."

"Regret. It's something we can all relate to," Mordecai says; he, too, had his share of regrets from his past, such as not being home when Himeko was killed.

"But we're able to move past it," went Mana to her father. "And sooner or later, the bad guys get their comeuppance. Whether it's through Death, the honest police, self-defense by a victim or victims, or even being overwhelmed by a number of people that decide to get revenge on their own, the bad guys get their comeuppance in the end."

Mana looked out the kitchen window and still saw grayish-blue sky. It must've been too early for the sun to come up yet.

"So…an avenging angel is someone that obtains vengeance for those that can't obtain it for themselves," Miroku says, "and is able to do so at all costs, including to the point of risking personal harm to oneself to avenge the innocent?"

"More or less," the granddaughter states.

"Death is quite the vigilante, then. He can do the things that no cop can do. He can endure things that people can't when he makes a choice others don't consider making."

Soon enough, the sunlight shone through the windows and Mana smiled as the morning truly began today.

"Death isn't some vigilante, though, Grandfather," she tells Miroku. "He's…one of the heavenly guardians that walk among us mortals, a lethal predator of the guilty as well as a brutal protector of the innocent. A man that understands what is required of him to walk between the land of the living and the realm of the dead. He's the Restorative Horseman of Death."

-x-

Somewhere in the world, watching from the shadows, a Japanese teenage boy dressed for a funeral, armed with guns and bullets, holding a kama in his right hand which sported a metal gauntlet with the word Death engraved on it, observed as a man in a suit walked up to a door in the alleyway guarded by a doorman who looked like he had seen better days due to his facial scarring. The teen was paler than the avenge person of light skin tone, as though he had never been exposed to the sunlight and was raised in the darkness, his ebony hair glossy and shaggy in some areas, and his eyes darker than the night, as though he could see into one's soul and know all of their sins. As the guy in the suit was let into the building by the doorman, the teen sighs as he now knew what needed to be done.

Forgive me, lords of Heaven, thought Death as his twin brother, a ghostly infant wrapped in a red blanket appeared beside, floating four feet above ground, for I will sin yet again to protect and avenge the innocent.

You have their forgiveness, brother, Mako, the ghost infant, told Death. Deal in retribution to those that have strayed from the path of righteousness…and condemn them for their sins.

With that, Death raised his kama up and stepped towards the doorman, letting him see what came his way.

"You?!" He gasped, recognizing him from the media, and quickly reached for his gun; if he was who the news stated he was, then, even though the gun was useless against him, it was better than using his bare hands.

Slice! His hands fell from their wrists and he looked at the teenager that was now less than a foot in front of him, his kama at the ready, dripping with blood; Death had cut his hands off.

"Any last words?" Death asks him, his voice distorted to make himself sound more menacing.

"Who are you?" The doorman responds.

"I am…the whispers in the darkness. I am the pale guardian of the innocent. The blade that glistens with the blood of the guilty and condemned. There are those that will say I shed innocent blood in a one-man crusade of sorts. You are far from innocent if you serve the guilty and corrupt. But they'll say you were innocent…until nothing else matters. However, what they'll say…will matter very little to me…because I know who's guilty and who's innocent. Unless you want to go to Hell now, I suggest that you go to the nearest hospital and seek aid for your severed hands that I picked up for you and put in a bag of ice tied to your left hip."

The doorman looked to his left side and saw that his hands had been placed in a bag of ice and tied to it.

"Death will come for you, but not right now," Death tells him. "In due time…unless you atone. Go now…while you still have breath in your lungs."

He whimpered as he fled, fortunate that his wrists weren't bleeding because Death had somehow cauterized them. If he was lucky, it was possible that maybe a doctor could reattach his hands.

Death approached the door…and kicked it open, smelling the scent of sin and decay.

"As much as I detest that smell," he utters as he walks into the building, "I love that smell."

To be continued…

A/N: This is just one of many chapters that were overdue. To those of you that miss this story, I hope to resume progress as soon as possible. Of my Evangelion characters, Shinji Ikari/Death, the Endgame is among my favorites due to his position as the Grim Reaper. Until next time.