Max And His Eva - Blog Posts

F1 x Neon Genesis Evangelion au

Max.

Story post to my previous drawing.

"Cut the signal! Shut it down!" Voices overlapped in his comms, frantic and useless.

His hands trembled against the controls. He wasn’t piloting anymore. He was inside something alive, something hungry, something that had always been waiting for an excuse to take over.

Max’s hands gripped the controls, fingers slick with sweat, blood pounding in his temples.

The Angel before him was relentless, its form twisting and shifting with eerie fluidity. Every strike was a surge of primal energy—a force that Max couldn’t seem to contain, no matter how hard he pushed Unit 33 to retaliate. His EVA was battered, bruised, the armor cracked and peeling away in places. But still, it stood. Still, it fought.

Another wave of energy hit, sending Max reeling inside the cockpit. He gritted his teeth, his body jolted violently as his EVA staggered backward, but it didn’t fall.

He couldn’t fall.

He had been fighting this Angel for what felt like days. The city around him had become little more than a memory—broken fragments of steel and stone scattered across the battlefield. But he was still there, still standing.

But he didn’t know how much longer he could hold on.

His vitals were spiking. The monitors flashed with warnings, but Max barely registered them. His breath came in ragged gasps, the LCL in his lungs thickening with each inhale. Every movement sent fresh waves of pain through his body, the kind that echoed deep into his bones, but it didn’t matter. He had to keep going. He had to fight.

There was no room for weakness.

He wanted to retreat—just for a moment, to assess the damage, to regroup, to think. He wanted to find a way to make sense of it all. But every time the thought crossed his mind, his heart raced. His chest tightened. Because if he stopped, if he gave in, lives would be lost.

People were counting on him.

He was their perfect pilot.

A perfect pilot didn’t retreat.

A perfect pilot didn’t allow failure.

Not when there was a city to protect. Not when people needed him. Not when NERV was watching, waiting for him to perform—to succeed.

Max’s heart hammered in his chest. His breath came out in short, sharp bursts. Every muscle in his body screamed for rest, for release, but he refused to listen. His hands trembled, but they didn’t leave the controls.

NERV had no patience for weakness. They never had.

They didn’t care if he was hurt. They didn’t care if he was dying.

As long as he was standing, as long as he was able to fight, he had no choice but to keep going.

No one else should do this. No one else could do this.

He couldn’t stop.

With a deep, shaky breath, Max drove Unit 33 forward again, the EVA’s claws scraping against the cracked asphalt. The Angel was already charging toward him, its limbs twisting and shifting, ready to strike once more.

His pulse raced. His sync rate spiked dangerously. The cockpit shook violently as the Angel’s tendrils slammed into his EVA, throwing him back again. Max’s vision blurred as he fought to maintain control, his hands gripping the controls so tight his fingers went numb.

Pain flooded his chest. Pain shot through his head.

But he couldn’t stop.

He couldn’t give up.

“Max! Your vitals—!” The voice crackled over the comms, but it was distant, muffled, like someone shouting from far away.

It didn’t matter.

Max’s jaw clenched, his breath harsh and uneven. The world around him felt like it was spinning, the edges of his vision darkening, but he pushed it all down. He could still fight. As long as he could move, as long as he had breath in his lungs, he could keep fighting.

He had to.

He was their perfect pilot. The one who never stopped. The one who never failed.

Even as his body screamed for rest, even as his mind teetered on the edge of exhaustion, he kept going. Because the world demanded it.

Because they expected it.

A flicker at the edges of his vision. The sync rate display spiked.

85%... 90%... 94%...

He growled, shaking his head. "Not now. Not yet."

A second strike. The Angel’s attack tore into Unit 33’s plating, exposing the writhing mass of muscle beneath. Pain surged through him—not real, but real enough. His nerves lit up as if he had been struck himself. The sync rate climbed again.

97%... 99%...

"Max! Keep control!" The voice—his comms officer? His strategist? He couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter.

The anger came in a wave. A deep, all-consuming heat. The walls of the entry plug pulsed around him, the LCL thickening, as if alive. The heartbeat of the EVA—his heartbeat—pounded in his ears.

100%.

Then, silence.

It felt like hours had passed.

Unit 33 twitched. Its jaw cracked open wider than it should. A low, inhuman snarl vibrated through the battlefield.

The EVA moved—and Max wasn’t the one moving it.

With a deafening roar, Unit 33 launched itself forward, faster than before, limbs contorting, armor splitting as its organic form expanded. It tore into the Angel like a rabid animal, ripping through its core with bloodied claws. The once-monolithic creature writhed and screeched, but Unit 33 didn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop.

Max gasped, trying to override the controls. Nothing responded. The EVA thrashed wildly, breaking the Angel apart piece by piece, ignoring the fact that it had already won. The thing was dead. And yet, Unit 33 was still moving, still destroying, still devouring.

"Cut the signal! Shut it down!" Voices overlapped in his comms, frantic and useless.

His hands trembled against the controls. He wasn’t piloting anymore. He was inside something alive, something hungry, something that had always been waiting for an excuse to take over.

The last thing he heard before everything went black was the sound of his own laughter—low, broken, and not entirely his own.

—

The cockpit disappeared.

The battlefield disappeared.

Everything disappeared.

—

Max floated.

Drifting in a vast, endless sea of nothingness, weightless. lost in a space without shape, without form.

It was as though the air itself had melted away. There was nothing. No edges, no boundaries. Just an infinite softness wrapping around him, enfolding him like a cocoon of silence. He couldn’t name it—the color, the sensation. It wasn’t light, but neither was it dark. It was... something. The absence of something. Or everything.

Every time he tried to name it, the thought slipped away, like sand through his fingers.

A slow breath.

The emptiness felt warm in his chest. It wasn’t his breath. It wasn’t his body. But the air still moved. It still filled him, and in that slow rise and fall, he felt something.

He knew this place.

A sense of relief bloomed, quiet and deep. It was as though something heavy had been taken from him, something unspoken, something he had never let himself acknowledge. A breath that he hadn’t known he was holding.

He Knew. Unit 33 was tearing apart the Angel—or worse, something else.

He could hear it. NERV was screaming through comms, trying to reach him.

But he didn’t care.

Because this was the only place where he could be vulnerable.

No battle. No expectations. No weight crushing down on his shoulders, forcing him to be perfect. Here, he didn’t have to hold up the façade of strength, didn’t have to wear the armor he’d built around himself.

Here, there was nothing.

And in that nothingness, it was waiting for him.

A figure stood above him. Watching. Protecting.

It had no metal, no restraints, no plating to hide behind. It bared its true form—muscle and sinew, raw and unshaped, not human, but something close. Its eyes, deep and endless, held something he couldn’t name. It reached for him, but did not touch him. It didn’t need to.

Its presence was vast, too large to understand, and yet its outline was etched into his mind as if it had always been there. It didn’t move, but he felt it, hovering above him like a shadow without a form. Or maybe it was light—he couldn’t tell. All he knew was that it was watching.

A strange pulse—faint but unmistakable—washed over him, and the space around him seemed to shift, as if the very nothingness breathed with him.

He felt held.

It was holding him.

Keeping him safe.

It was not a grip, not an embrace. It was a knowing, an understanding that didn’t need words or touch. It existed between the silence, in the place where nothing could reach him.

And for a moment, he allowed himself to float in it.

Weightless.

There were no edges. No time. The concept of moments felt like waves, but they never broke. He drifted, and yet he didn’t move. And somewhere beneath it all, he could feel it—the thing that had always been there.

He didn’t know if it was his.

He didn’t know if it was him.

But it was with him.

His fingers twitched. His body, for the first time in so long, felt light.

His eyelids grew heavy.

He let them close.

His mind felt detached, his thoughts soft like ripples in water, fading before they could take shape. There was no rush. No urgency. Only the slow, quiet rhythm of something waiting.

The figure above him remained, and in its presence, he didn’t feel the need to understand. He only existed—floating, breathing, and being held by something that wasn’t quite light, and wasn’t quite shadow.

A moment, perhaps. Or maybe, no moment at all.

It didn’t matter.

He let go.

Let it take over.

And for the first time in a long time, Max rested.

New Evangelion au update

Max (and his Eva)

There’s a story post coming to that very soon.