Angel

Did You Forget About Fate?

The district was utterly destroyed.

Yui should have been hearing the deafening rush of the helicopter's propeller blades, but all she couldn't hear a thing. Just a ringing numbness that threatened to crush her very soul.
The pilot took the broken scientist and her husband down to ground level. She could vaguely hear Gendo and the pilot yelling at each other over the sounds of the flying vehicle. Something about the building still being unstable or something.

But she didn't care.
She had to find them. She had to find Shinji.

As soon as they were close enough to the ground, Yui jumped out, closely followed by a rarely-seen, utterly panicked Gendo.

"YUI! DON'T GO NEAR, IT'S TOO DANGEROUS!"

But she couldn't hear him. She couldn't hear anything anymore.
Only the sounds of a soul-destroying numbness.

*

"S-shin...ji..."

It was dark. Cold. And he was sure he was inhaling more dust than air by now.

"Shin...ji..."

Who was that? Who kept calling his name?

"Shinji... p-please... I need you to... wake up..." He felt something grab his hand. It was warm, but seemed to be getting colder and colder.

"Shinji..." He definitely knew that voice. His head was ringing. But there could have been a full-scale orchestra deafening his ability to think and he'd recognize that voice anywhere.

"Please... save me..."

His eyes shot open, only to be met by darkness. Only a sliver of light trickled through a tiny gap in the debris of what had been Mana's living room. Turning to his side, he saw whatever had been holding his hand had indeed been Mana.

Bloodied, bruised, but well and truly alive.

They were trapped under the table. Mana's mother had thrown them both under the table the second the earthquake sirens started going off, and the terrifying shaking had started. Grabbing her blood-drenched hand, he squeezed it tightly.

"It's okay Mana... we're gonna be *cough* ...be okay..." She nodded, providing a little sound in agreement. They were going to make it.
Trying to sit up was an incredible effort, but somehow he made it into a sitting position, and tried looking around him. He sorely wished he hadn't.

From their position under the table, he could see blood trickling over the side. Along with a hand poking over the edge. Trembling in utter fright, Shinji gently crawled out from under the table, stood up, and looked back.
No six-year-old should have had to have seen it. Not many adults would have had the stomach to look at something like that.
But Shinji Ikari saw the unmistakable sight of Natsuru Kirishima lying on the table, skewered by what looked like a fallen girder from the destroyed ceiling, straight through the torso. By some miracle, it hadn't penetrated through the table. They had been saved, but...

"ahh...uuhh..." He could feel his mind, his sanity evaporating. He wanted to cry, he wanted to scream, he was so close to losing his mind...

"S-shinji... is... everything... alright?"

She couldn't know. She can't know. She can't see this.

"E-everything's o-o-o-okay... Mana..." His voice was cracking, he was on the knife's edge of retaining his senses.

"That's... good..." Mana looked up at the clearly shaken boy.

"Where's Mama?"

The terror had upgraded to an apocalyptic version of panic. He could feel the crescendo of extreme stress building on top of what was already an uncontainable meltdown.