Creation began on 08-24-18

Creation ended on 02-19-19

Neon Genesis Evangelion

All the Starfish are closer

A/N: The epilogue.

"Shinji, did you clean your room?" Fusei asked her son as he sat down at the table for dinner that night.

"Yes, Mother," he answered with a smile.

"Shinji always cleans up his room before I finish cleaning mine," a younger girl with blue bangs in front of her dark, waist-length hair expressed; she was probably around eight or nine years old.

"That's because your cousin's older and not as clumsy, Yugana," said Shinko-Kinomi to her daughter as she set the bowls on the table.

It had been almost fifteen years since the paramilitary agency NERV was disbanded and the United Nations restructured after select individual members were apprehended to go along with the recovery of the world. In that time, Shinji had lived a relatively-happier life with the Hitodes since his rebirth; he still retained his memories of his previous life, but didn't think much of it because he was, by all intents and purposes, a fourteen-year-old boy without any sense of pain.

Fusei's sister, Shinko-Kinomi, had ended marrying the guy she was seeing that worked part-time at the library in town five years after Shinji was born and had a daughter with him that she named Yaguna. While she didn't see her husband as much as she used to two years ago, Shinko-Kinomi still managed to make their relationship work since the elder sister was pregnant again.

"It seems like your father will be home tonight, Yaguna," Shinko-Kinomi told her daughter.

"Really?" The little girl asked her mother.

The sound of a door opening and closing was heard and a male voice came after.

"I'm home, everyone," he announced.

"We're about to eat," they responded, and saw a man in gray slacks and a blue shirt, his hair salt and pepper and his eyes green.

He came over and sat next to Shinko-Kinomi and Yaguna.

-x-

"…I still can't believe we all agreed to see this movie again," a thirty-year-old Kensuke Aida said to Toji and Hikari as they sat in the theater with old friends and relations.

"We rarely get to see each other these days," Hikari reminded him. "Plus, this will be the last time Toji and I will be able to see a theater film for a while."

Shinji, hanging with his friends in the theater, turned to face the older woman and asked, "Is it a boy or girl?"

Hikari, hands on her swollen belly, responded, "Both, Shinji. We're having twins."

"That's nice."

As the movie began, the silence crept in, and Shinji, despite the large gap between himself and his friends, was happy for them as they had moved on with their lives.

Toji and Hikari had gotten married right after they had graduated from high school and settled into their professions as a basketball player and a kindergarten teacher and had just started their family life five months ago.

Kensuke had joined a medical research company called Medical Angel and recently joined a small project there to develop living skin formulas for people with prosthetic limbs. Two years ago, he ended up in a romantic relationship with a bookworm of a woman named Mari Kagayaki, who rarely talks about her personal life because of Second Impact, but Kensuke was optimistic about getting to know her (something Shinji got the feeling that her past was somewhat traumatic and the woman was still trying to escape it).

And Asuka, unlike her past as an Evangelion pilot, had transitioned over to a career as a seamstress, something far removed from what she used to do. Although Shinji suspected that she was doing something else with her time that was just as much to her liking, but he wouldn't poke his nose into her privacy."

"How have you been, Shinji?" He recalled Misato asking him when he saw her last month.

"Life's been good to me, Misato," he told her. "How about…you and Kaji?"

"His job as a PI causes me some undue stress. Sometimes, I think he should've just taken a job at Medical Angel, less stress for me."

Of course, Misato only said that because she was pregnant for the second time when he saw her. Three years after Shinji was reborn, Misato and Kaji had finally gotten married and a year later, they had a daughter named Kasumi. Now, they were getting ready for a boy.

While he did have a few friends his age, Shinji still enjoyed the company of his older friends, every minute he could, even though they had lives of their own, probably something that would follow him to the ends of time. But…Shinji couldn't change this part of how he felt around old friends, even if he wanted to…and he didn't. He just went with it for what it was worth.

"Hey, baka," he heard Asuka say to him; of course, that designation she had was just her form of endearment and not disgust, "could you pass the popcorn, please?"

"Sure," he responded and gave her to bucket of popcorn.

-x-

"…I figured I'd fine you here…Rei Ayanami," went Ritsuko Akagi to the woman sitting against a small tree in the park in what was proudly declared a reclaimed Tokyo after several operations over the last decade to reclaim the coastal lands and produce artificial island landmasses when the planet returned to its original axis.

The woman, resembling Yui Ikari to a sight degree, but was actually Rei Ayanami, had managed to extend her shortened lifespan through periodic monthly injections of modified LCL, allowing her to see more of the world after putting her affairs in orders. It was only after the former albino's brief trip to Mt. Everest did Ritsuko even hear of Rei returning to Japan, but she didn't return to the former NERV facility for more injections. This meant Ritsuko, despite her working relationship with the former Evangelion pilot that was just getting adjusted to living, had to go find her, and here she was in the gentrified park.

"Rei?" She spoke again, but the woman didn't respond.

She reached down and checked her neck for a pulse…and sighed over the discovery that she was dead…and had likely died a few hours ago.

"At least you got to enjoy your life while you still could," Ritsuko uttered to the dead woman, noticing a small smile on her face. "I wonder what your last thought was about."

-x-

"Welcome home, Shinji," went Katsura to her grandson as he took his shoes off and slipped into his slippers. "How was your day out there?"

"It was okay," he answered her. "My friends and I just went to see that new movie everyone was talking about."

"You mean that superhero one that came out last week?"

"No, it was the romance one from a week earlier, with the long-distance relationships."

"How was it?"

"Honestly… The couples that were portrayed weren't as believable as I originally believed. There were moments where they each wanted to call it quits and move on, but they couldn't walk away from their respective love interests. I think we were better off watching the superhero film instead, that or an old Godzilla film."

"So, I take it the romance film would be a waste of time for me to go see, Shinji?" They heard Fusei ask as she stepped out of the living room, holding her tablet with a digital romance novel.

"It's only my opinion, Mother," he stated. "I just couldn't believe in the couples that were involved. The ending wasn't that bad, but there was no solidity in the structure."

"You were more into Godzilla than anything else."

"I was also into the earlier incarnations of Gundam."

"You two and your preferences," Katsura expressed to the two.

"Hey!" Fusei and Shinji reacted at the same time, mildly offended by that remark.

"You two can rarely dislike the same thing, let alone agree on what is good about one thing and what is awful on another."

"Shin Godzilla made Godzilla look terrible while Legendary Pictures gave him his royalties back," mother and son both expressed one of their shared beliefs.

"Okay, we all can agree on that," Katsura responded.

"The Crow, still one of the greatest films ever made," Shinji told her.

"Yeah, that one, too," Fusei added.

-x-

There was no point in telling Yui that Rei was now dead as Ritsuko stood before the woman's grave, just as there was no need to tell Gendo, as he was killed in prison four years ago when a riot took place…and several of the inmates, men in former positions of power that were ruined because of him and his wife, jumped him. She wasn't even sure why she decided to have the girl buried instead of cremated; part of her reasoning was probably because she felt the former pilot of Unit-00 deserved to be remembered in some form or another.

"Good luck on the other side, Rei Ayanami," she told the grave marker.

-x-

The thing about old memories for Shinji that sometimes kept him up at night…was that some the ones that snuck up on him during his sleep were the ones he wanted to forget completely. Just two hours ago, he awoke from a nightmare where he saw Unit-01 and Lilith chase after him on a lonely highway at night, similar to the ones he had fifteen years ago. The only difference between then and now was that in his recent dreams, they were further away from him and kept falling down…and he was riding his bike as fast as he could to get away from them as he saw his house, a place they couldn't get in.

Fifteen years, he thought as he looked out his window at the bluish-gray sky. Sometimes, I think the hardest part about remembering my life as a fourteen-year-old…is remembering the previous past that was full of hurt.

Sighing, he decided to get up since sleep wasn't going to come back to him. He came out of his room and walked down to the kitchen, where he saw his mother sitting at the table with a cup of tea in her hands.

"Couldn't sleep, either?" She asked him, seeing him standing there in front of her.

"Woke up two hours ago," he explained. "I still get ridiculous nightmares."

"Same here, Shinji, and they're the same each time."

"I thought you still got those dreams of being with Father."

"I do…heh…just not as much as I used to. And I still keep track of them. I've had one-thousand-seventeen of them and counting."

"Somehow, I don't think I could keep track of that many dreams if I were the one having them."

"Maybe when you meet the one for you, you'll be keeping track of memories of your happy moments in the form of dreams, perhaps."

"Well, I don't know much about meeting the one for me, but…I did sort of meet someone while leaving the theater…and she was actually happy to see me there."

"Oh, really, Shinji, is that right? What was she like?"

"She's about a year older than I am, probably two-three inches taller than I am, with waist-length, dark brown hair, grey eyes and…a pleasant smile. You know, a…a nice girl."

"Sounds like a little crush you have," Fusei expressed her opinion. "Did you manage to catch her name before you parted ways at the theater?"

"Yeah," he answered her. "Rumiko Gaidoku."

"Well, here's to hoping that one day, you two end up being good friends."

"Yeah…I'd like that."

-x-

"…So…Shinji was a boy you once looked after when he was a baby?" Kasumi asked Misato, trying to wrap her head around the relationship her mother had with this teenager she knew from long ago.

"No, it was fifteen years ago," Misato explained to her daughter again, "when he was the same age he is today. When we were in Tokyo-3, everyone I worked with thought we knew who his parents were, only to find out that five giant monsters after he arrived to the city, a woman showed up to work at my old workplace, and it turned out that she was his mother the whole time. It was quite a shocker when I found out."

"But…if his mother was looking for him, then why was he with other people?"

"You see, dearest, he was…taken from his mother when he a baby."

"You mean Shinji was adopted?"

"No, not adopted. Fusei, his mother, never had any intention on giving him up to somebody she didn't know. You know about kidnapping, right?"

"Yeah, Daddy says that's when people take children that aren't theirs… So, Shinji was kidnapped when he was a baby. That's awful."

"Yeah, and it was by the people we had thought were his parents. But in the end, the truth came out, and Shinji was returned to his mother while the people that kidnapped him were taken to jail where they couldn't do it again."

"But…you said that Shinji got hurt while he was leaving, right? And he was…fourteen. So, shouldn't he be…as old as you and Daddy are?"

"Well, yes…but at the same time, no, sweetie. The day everyone was leaving work, Shinji had to…go further away than the rest of us did when he got hurt. For him, time came to a stop and he to take a long break from everything until the summer of Twenty-Sixteen."

"Oh, you mean like a fairy godmother or godfather turned him back into a baby so he could be with his mother again, like in a funny fairytale."

Misato found that analogy to be creepy, but somewhat within the realm of acceptability. In a fairytale sense, Shinji had been turned back into a baby and reborn to Fusei, who was de-aged back to her early-teens when she had gotten pregnant with Shinji, making it seem similar to a fairytale with a positive twist over a negative one. While this made the mother, chronologically, over forty and her son almost thirty, it wasn't in any other way of thinking a form of immortality. Even Misato had to laugh at the thought of these two outliving everyone else on the planet when it was undesired over just wanting to be together.

"What was Shinji like when you met him, Mommy?" Kasumi asked Misato.

"He was…not what I was expecting in a teenager," she explained to her. "He hadn't been informed of the situation he was going to be helping us resolve, and he seemed to have no interest in women at the time like boys his age do."

"You mean, he didn't look at you when you wore your favorite dress and fall head over heels for you? That would've been too easy."

"Yeah, too easy, even for me. He was also deprived of any love from people as he grew up, leaving him, in a way, socially inept, not comfortable around others. Even as time went by, he didn't make that much progress, not with what he was doing half the time for the world. It was only after he saw Fusei did he…feel like he could actually enjoy life."

"And Fusei, what was she like when you met her?"

"She seemed unlike anyone I had ever met at NERV. She was a computer expert with a degree in medicine, and she was skilled in coding. There was an autopilot system that had been intended to replace the children so they could return to their lives, and she gave it a conscience when it came to fighting and being unwilling to endanger people. After that, things got a little bad as they were getting better, but in the end…things got better."

"But some people still got hurt, right?"

"Yeah. Maya Ibuki was injured, but she recovered after NERV was shut down. A few people died, but less than what we had expected after Fusei joined us."

"And what was that story based off the situation of your previous job?"

"Your father called it 'Bloodless Ties, Orphan of Hurt'. The 'bloodless ties' aspect comes from the fact that Shinji wasn't related to the people he lived with that he was led to believe he was. The 'orphan of hurt' aspect stems to the delusion that, because Shinji wasn't related to the people we all thought he was before we met Fusei, Shinji was no different from a child without parents…and would have to live with a degree of pain."

"But he doesn't have to, anymore, does he?"

"No," she answers, looking over at a picture taken by Fusei back before NERV's shutdown. "No, he doesn't."

It was a photo of Shinji, Fusei, Misato, Asuka, Pen-Pen, Kaji and Ritsuko (both had to be dragged in by Asuka and Misato, respectively, in front of a wall with the NERV logo that became partially obscured by the people in front of it.

"You're happy for Shinji, aren't you?"

"I am."

They heard the door to their apartment open and close and a male voice uttering, "I'm home, lovely ladies."

"We're in the living room," the mother and daughter responded to the husband and father.

"Has Haruo been behaving himself?" Kaji asked them as he walked into the room.

"All he really does is sleep in Mommy's tummy," Kasumi stated obviously, pointing to her mother's melon-sized melon. "We have to wait another month before we can meet him."

Misato just chuckled as she placed her hands upon her belly.

Well, Shinji, she thought, the one thing we both love is also the one thing that's complicated.

By "complicated", Misato meant "family"; she loved hers dearly, but there were times where the antics they committed made her want to sleep.

-x-

In his room, looking at his old photos, Shinji chuckled as he felt the peace of his life envelop his heart.

"Happy days," he told himself, writing in his diary about his day. "All the starfish are closer."

Beside his left hand was one such photo of Shinji and Fusei that was taken when he was three, with big smiles on their faces.

Fin

A/N: Well, we're finally at the end of the journey here. To those of you that stuck by until the end, I thank you. Whatever you wish to ask me about what might've happened to the other characters of this story, I'm available for talking through the private messenger. If any of you think I should include Fusei in a future story, feel free to ask me about her. See you later.