"Pages From Akihiko's Journal"
Disclaimer: All characters from Persona 3 © Atlus. Original characters, including but not limited to Setsuna Rossi, Father Rossi, Father Brigham, and Kazuo Amada are mine.
April 4, 2009 -- "My Birthday"
It's my birthday today. Eighteen years in this world. Mitsuru gave me this journal as a present. I use the word "journal" because "diary" is too girly. Mitsuru also gave me a nice pen – one of those really fancy pens you buy at a specialty store. I feel guilty using such a beautiful pen, but if you saw this journal – perfect red leather cover, high-quality vellum paper – you'd understand why I'm using it.
No one's ever going to read this, so why am I justifying using this pen?
I've never kept a journal before. That kind of thing was more Miki's bag.
I still think about Miki. My sister. She was older than me by about two years. She died nine and a half years ago.
And she's also the reason my life is the way it is, with boxing and SEES. It begins and ends with Miki. How we lost our parents. The orphanage. How we met Shinji Aragaki, though he was known as Shinjiro Saga back then. Our adoption. Our run-in with Setsuna Rossi. The mysterious man in black who killed Miki and set my house on fire to cover it up. Me getting booted to boarding school. Mitsuru approaching me in junior high with an Evoker. And now, high school, with one scared new recruit (Yukari Takeba) and a new 'potential possibility' arriving in three days.
This is actually pretty relaxing. It might make a good activity to wind down before going to bed.
Anyway, back to Miki. She loved stories. She was obsessed with them. And she loved retelling stories, giving them her own twists. Her dream was to compile a big book of stories. Shinji always liked the stories of clever rogues, like Robin Hood. His favorite characters in mythology were Prometheus and Odysseus. I preferred the more heroic characters, like St. George.
My name is Akihiko Sanada, and this is my story.
