The Boy-Who-Lived and the Boy-Who-Broke (original ending)

Author Note:

Back when I got the idea for The Boy-Who-Lived and the Boy Who Broke, I thought on doing it with just the encounter of Harry and Shinji in the ghostly King's Cross Station, and then doing a time slip to the epilogue, leaving the intervening years and how Harry won the Second Blood War as vague as possible. However, as I was writing, I had so much fun writing Sirius, and the Goblins, that I decided to continue the story, fleshing up Harry's plans and development.

Eventually, reintroducing Shinji and other NGE characters to the story meant that my original ending became moot.

But, I still like this epilogue, and I want to share it.

There is no need to rehash the beginning of the tale, just check the first two chapters of The Boy-Who-Lived and the Boy Who Broke, and then continue here. (Chapter six is optional)

Hogwarts, 1997, Before the Yule Break

The last few years had been quiet. No more Voldemort, no more Death Eaters. Shinji hadn't appeared again during Halloween. Harry hoped his friend was happy, wherever he was...

Even Dumbledore mostly kept a professional distance these days. Harry simply dedicated himself to study, practice, and basically, enjoying his time at Hogwarts and at the Pottery.

Harry walked back to the Gryffindor common room, his thoughts centered in some hot chocolate and the trip he and Sirius had planned. Two weeks in Black Island to shake off the cold of winter in Scotland; and after that, two weeks in France with his girlfriend and her parents. Therefore, he was completely unprepared for his past to intrude in such an understated way.

A Fourth Year Ravenclaw, Muggleborn, was chatting happily with a friend, about a strange cartoon he had seen during his holidays.

Their talk would have been dismissed by Harry, hadn't the Ravenclaw dropped a name that made Harry's neck hairs rise in alert.

"I tell you, man, that Shinji Ikari sure has it baaaaad. He lives with two beautiful females, and all he does is complain about how nobody likes him!"

Harry turned around so fast, he almost dropped the books he had In his hand. He grabbed the Ravenclaw by the shoulder, "Sorry to intrude, did you say, 'Shinji Ikari'?

Surprised, the Fourth Year and his friend looked at Harry. They knew him, of course, he was well respected by everybody, even the Slytherins. "Uh... yeah... it's a character in a muggle cartoon..."

"Which one?"

"Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's quite good, for a show about giant robots fighting giant monsters. But the real thing about it is that the lead characters have big problems. They are not all bad people, but they are all damaged, and make very bad choices."

Harry repeated the name to make sure he wouldn't forget it. "Thanks! I'll check it out, sounds interesting."

The kid smiled. "Sure, I caught it the other day on the telly, and got hooked. I think you can buy the series in VHS or Laserdisc."

Harry nodded hurriedly, "Thanks! I'll buy them in London!"

Harry ran to the Owlery. Once there, he hurriedly wrote a letter to Sirius.

"Dear Padfoot:

I have a lot to tell you, and I'd like to speak with you as soon as possible. Don't be alarmed, everything is okay. I have some matters to attend in muggle London and it would be easier for me to crash there for a couple of days.

Could you ask Dobby and Kreacher to ready my mother's flat? The one near the Leaky Cauldron? Dobby knows where it is. I don't want to distract them if they are doing priority work. Yeah, I know, I can call them in emergencies, but this is not actually an emergency, I just have to check something and think on some stuff. They can work on it when they want.

Thanks.

Your handsomest godson,

Harry. "

As soon as he arrived to Diagon Alley, Harry stopped at Gringotts, and exchanged galleons for pounds. Once outside, he bought a VCR and the complete set of Neon Genesis Evangelion tapes. The drawing style on the covers was peculiar, but the features were very recognizable. There was no doubt in Harry's mind, this was the same Shinji Ikari he had met after dying from basilisk poison.

He spent two days at the flat, watching Shinji Ikari's life and trials. He shared his triumphs and tragedies. He facepalmed at his obliviousness for other people's own feelings, raged with him when Toji Suzuhara almost died, and cried when Rei Ayanami sacrificed her life. He raged at Commander Ikari's callousness and SEELE's hipocrisy and evil. Asuka simply was a mystery to him until her backstory was revealed, then she went from obnoxiously self-centered to a tragic figure in his mind.

The two days Harry spent there were a new emotional rollercoaster, only comparable to the one he had felt years before, in that deserted King's Cross Station, listening about his past and future from Shinji Ikari himself.

Harry swallowed a lump in his throat. His friend has suffered so much, and still had jumped at the chance to help him.

Reverently, Harry ejected the last tape. "But... everybody lives... what could have happened to break him so badly..?" He asked aloud, not expecting an answer.

He was about to put the tape back into its box, when he noticed the coupon inside. He filled it, included the proofs of purchase, and mailed it. A few weeks later, after he and his in-laws had returned from France, he received the last tape, End of Evangelion.

The cover illustration showed a grotesque scene, Asuka and Shinji alone in what seemed to be a beach, while a colossal replica of Rei Ayanami's head almost looked at them. The mood the image showed was strangely unsettling.

As he watched, Harry almost wished he hadn't sent for it. More than once he was very close to ejecting the tape and opening the bottle of fire whisky Sirius kept in the flat, in case it was needed. Several times, Harry paused the tape, and breathed deeply for a couple of minutes, then, he continued.

He wept freely for his friend, no one deserved such a fate.

Harry finally understood why Shinji's had broken down all those years ago, and why his own naive forgiveness had lifted such a weight from his friend.

The young wizard stored reverently the tapes in a chest, and the next years, he dedicated himself to learn everything he could about the NGE world. If only to honor the memory of Shinji. He learned to speak, read and write Japanese, mostly to watch and understand the series in its original language, not depending on the translators perspective. He also learned enough German to realize Asuka's German lines in Japanese were mostly gibberish nonsense.

Of course, Magical Britain considered him an eccentric. There were a couple of articles in The Prophet, insinuating that Harry Potter was considering leaving Magical Britain to move to Japan or Germany! A single reminder to the editor put those especulación to rest. Being the owner had its privileges. Harry rarely exerted that power anymore, as Cuffe has mostly learned to publish more truthful articles, but Harry couldn't really dope-slap the man when the article clearly stated it was merely especulation. Still, his mailbox was full for a couple of weeks, half of the letters begging him to reconsider and staying in Britain; while the other half practically called him a traitor to the country, his parents and everything good and proper. He simply forwarded the worst letters to his solicitor, and let the man to have some fun scaring the living daylights out of some very idiotic wizards and witches.

Every Halloween, Harry visited his parent's graves in the morning, and spent the night sequestered himself in his mother's flat, watching the episodes and the movie. When the tapes worn down, he replaced them with DVD's, and later, with BluRays. And still later, with Datacrysts and Q-Projs. After that, the series lapsed into public domain, due to being mostly forgotten by the lawyers, and he simply transferred it to each new successive data storage medium.

Not even his kids would ever learn what he did that day, they thought he held a vigil for his parents. Hermione, Sirius, and Dobby were the only ones he ever told. And they took that secret to their graves.

The Pottery (new Potter Manor), December the 31st, 2015; 6:24 P.M.

Harry Potter stood in the tastefully furnished library. Close by, his wife and his godfather sat on well cushioned chairs. For several years, Harry had spent New Years Eve alone, in meditation, but had never told anybody the meaning of that particular date.

"Dobby," he said softly, "please lock the door and throw your best privacy spells at this room."

"Dobby makes sure nobody be listening to Great Master Harry Potter's words!" The excitable elf snapped his fingers several times. Sound and color dulled a bit, while two wizards and one witch layered their own spells along with Dobby's magic. The magic done, Dobby looked at Harry adoringly, and at his Master's nod, he sat on a third chair.

Harry pulled the Potter pensive from its hiding place, and extracted a silvery thread from his right temple.

"I have kept a secret from you, and I ask you forgive me for that. I think now is the time to tell you that secret. Let me tell you a story with two beginnings." He dropped the silvery stuff into the magic bowl-like artifact. "The first beginning of the story was back in 2000, when a world almost died."

He proceded to tell them an abridged versión of the events of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Of course, Hermione knew what he was talking about. "Honestly, Harry, that sounds like a Japanese cartoon!"

"It is, honey. But it is more than that." He leaned back against the heavy oak desk, almost sitting on it. "The story also begins the day I died."

"What? Pup, what are you talking about?"

"Back in our Second Year, Lucius Malfoy's plotting resulted in Salazar Slytherin's basilisk being loose at Hogwarts."

At hearing this, Dobby looked ashamed for a moment, then he straightened up, with a determined gesture set in his face. "Bad Master wanted to harm Great Master and his friends." He said, with an anger in his voice and posture that nobody would have believed possible in the house-elf.

Hermione paled, she had been close to dying then. "You mean..?" She gulped.

"Yeah, the basilisk did kill me. For a while at least. But I couldn't die then, not before facing Voldemort. When I died, I awoke in what seemed a copy of King's Cross station. And there, I met a young man. One who had died too, but was too afraid to go to his final reckoning. His name was Shinji Ikari." He paused.

Hermione's brow furrowed. "Must have been a hallucination, maybe you subconsciously dreamed about the series while you were unconscious."

Patiently, Harry looked at her and shook his head, "Hermione, that was in 1993, Neon Genesis Evangelion was released in Japan in 1995. There is no way I could have hallucinated that."

She opened her mouth to argue, but closed it immediately. Harry continued. "I didn't even knew there was a cartoon until the end of our Seventh Year. Anyway, it turned out that for Shinji Ikari, I was a fictitious character in a series of books."

Sirius perked, having worked out Harry's secret. "He had read the books! No wonder you told me I wouldn't believe you!"

Hermione grabbed Harry's hand. "How could that be, you being a character for him, and he being a character for you, even if you didn't know that then?"

"I don't know. I don't know how come we spoke in 1993 if he had died, at the earliest, in 2015. What I know is that the Shinji Ikari I met was completely broken. Still, he found a way to help me. He told me what he remembered of the books. He knew of my life before Hogwarts, that was what convinced me to listen. He knew me better than anybody, and he warned me of so many dangers and plots, and revealed so many secrets my head spun. When I went back to the Dursleys that summer, I spent several days thinking hard, on how I could use the knowledge he shared with me. What to do to ensure lives wouldn't be lost, that Voldemort couldn't return, to clear Sirius, to rid Magical Britain from the endemic corruption that dominated it. I took a lot of notes and Dobby destroyed them so no one could use them."

"Making a messy was good work to clean later! Dobby be thankful to Great Master Harry Potter for that messy!"

Harry smiled at his friend.

"So, in a way, after I died, I was playing with a marked deck." He shrugged. "Yes, Hermione. I cheated!" He laughed heartily at her confused expression.

"I don't care." She finally said. "We are alive. Together. But... just how bad would things have gone?"

"Terribly bad." He sighed. "I'll share that with you. Today. Today is a meaningful day for me. Tomorrow will be the day Shinji Ikari's world died. I will mourn for him and his world. I hope you'll find in your hearts some pity for a friend I only knew for what seemed a few hours, yet saved my life and my soul."

Hermione and Sirius nodded, moved by Harry's deep sadness.

"The memory in the pensive is of my talk with Shinji. I'll wait for you to see it. I have seen it several times, when I needed to be sure of something. But only when it was absolutely necessary. I haven't seen it since I watched the series. It hurts too much to know what he went through and being unable to help him."

Later, when they emerged from the pensieve, Sirius walked rigidly to the hidden bar, and poured himself a shot of fire-whiskey. Hermione crushed Harry's ribs in a desperate hug, sobbing uncontrollably.

Autor Note:

There is still another part of the story.