They never tell you that.
After the first minute, through cloudy eyes and into the next countless, endless days - or what must be - and beyond. After all of that, all of that waiting, there's something to hold onto. Previously, all Chidori could call it was pain; all it could be was that void-rending claw taking what little remains for itself.
Whatever separated her from life took that too. That foolish impulse squirming with fear over a little blood won far too easily, and what was she now? Now all that's left is something new to grapple with in the infinity of waiting, watching: hope.
A little red is all it had ever been when dainty wrists bled, blanching her cheeks and staining her cuffs and books. It had never, ever mattered in those previous few years. Sometimes Chidori had gone hours before realizing that anything had happened at all and Medea's possessive warnings cleaned themselves in silence. It was those same claws that were normality - pain.
"What had made him different?"
It was a question she never let escape her lips back then, before any of this, but the question looped endlessly in life.
What made him so very different?
At first, exploration was interesting enough. Boundless white wrapped around her, occasional landmarks like a bench nestled in a busy street corner, thoroughfare bustling by without noticing anyone that might be sitting there. Sooner than she could sit and ponder where it was, the crowd melted into an evaporating horizon that seeped into the sky.
"The sky?" Chidori spoke aloud. Her own voice felt weak and distant. Lips dry, she snorted a short breath. That's all the laugh she could muster.
There wasn't anything here. No warmth, no color, just passionless white and a bench sinking into nothingness underneath her dress. And just like that, everything accelerated around that corner - gates. Heavy, metal gates before her were suddenly blazing hot with something. It wasn't the pain of living, or even the sharp exhalation that comes when something unseen slices soft skin. It burns the white blank space surroundings until all that's left is a staircase of black soot, those two heavy gates, white-hot coals built into a slender, unassuming form with another hiding behind. Those two heavy encumbering gates ahead, all that stands out against the molten black covering what was white nothing are those two.
Those two and that unreal feeling that surged through Chidori before everything left her, that anger for those two forms and the desperate love for the wounded boy beside her. This was hatred.
But Medea was not alone, and in fact that familiar sensation like a chain strangling her thoughts was lifted and instead something new was there. The terrified ferocity like a wounded, cornered animal was no more. In its place something calming, almost weird. It was strength, awkward and unsure of the new burden but powerful. Only this time Chidori was not overwhelmed by the presence. A warm blanket draped around her and despite her dress it was only relaxing, and she sank into it just as something spoke out to her.
Woah.
The intense fury welling up blasts the figures ahead of her, forcing the smaller one back again. Medea's remnant, lingering soul softens inside.
"Woah," she tries the word on.
It's funny.
Forms become easier in the White. She likes how simple that name is, unassuming but proper with a capital-W. It feels stronger, more real that way.
And it coalesces like a line drawing around her, sketches of form and figure like that corner bench tightening up until harsh black outlines leave solid impressions in the White. The people stay dull, in the distance. Chidori focuses on carving out something here with all of the time slipping past her to build a better vantage point to watch.
She doesn't know when she begins seeing through him, feeling through him, but that bond of blood means Chidori gets first-person sights on everything he does. Tuning out the mundane gets easy after a while, that becomes the time to shape her surroundings. Medea may be gone in whole form, but power wells from her with each passing day as Trismegistus grows and shares what happens in the White - what she's writing with her mind - with Junpei.
"Yukari," Chidori says to herself when he passes by his friends in school. "Mitsuru... Minato."
She can't be sure, but something is different in his gaze towards them. A feeling that never existed before in her mind almost like a faux-nostalgia for something that never could have happened to her sinks in. Nothing is interesting about these people anymore. And when he sits down to eat, a growling stomach she doesn't have is satisfied with water and half-hearted chewing.
He sleeps longer than normal, a time frame she doesn't really know but feels.
Chidori watches his friends care for him, try to, and these people that had never been more than captors or enemies mean the world to her. What could be said of her world. As of now, it was just that bench, sharply contrasting the dull crowd and featureless buildings pockmarking the expanse behind her. It was this bizarre awareness of what was happening to him and she sometimes could not tear herself away.
"Fuuka," she whispers to herself, knwoing that Junpei is fighting something over this one. It burns away quickly.
"Hey Junpei, we should go out and... oh, I don't know, watch that stupid- um, that movie you wanted to see," Yukari says, catching both Junpei and Chidori off-guard.
He doesn't answer. A long, uncomfortable silence ensues.
He shivers briefly.
Finally, Yukari breaks. "You know, it's been..."
"Nah," he interrupts her.
The bubbling fear and deep sorrow in Junpei boils over as he walks away from Yukari. Chidori's eyes water at the very sound of his strength breaking. She longs to hold him in her arms, let him curl into a ball and cry as long as he needs to just as long he knew she was here.
Something different is there, though. That girl. It's nothing like what she feels for Junpei, of course. It is, though, appreciation. That's when Chidori decides she loves this Yukari girl.
And it does not stop with her, this Minato and his quiet resolve and even the outwardly sullen Akihiko's misguided attempt to get Junpei into better shape; Mitsuru tuts loudly but the air between them has a faint trace of understanding, as if that sound was enough. The soft fur in his lap when he tries to study - how diligent - is comforting and the odd-looking girl with less tonal variance than Chidori even asks if he has been sleeping. A young boy, Ken, wants Junpei to teach him how to shave the nonexistent stubble they both have.
Though he does not respond often, a heaviness and anger subsides a little with every inquiry, worry, and shoulder to cry on. Junpei says nothing about her, doesn't respond to the most forward questions, but something is subtly changing every time his friends yearn to help him.
For that, Chidori loves all of them.
They find the sketchbook and all alone Chidori's can't help but go a little red.
He finds the sketchbook and what feels to be her heart skips a beat.
He opens the book and for just a second she is completely shut out. Separation is sudden and Chidori nearly jumps from her seat at the bench, now crisp and well-formed among leaves of grass sprouting from the unkempt corner. In this eternity within another she returns to the blinding pain again, and Chidori wants to reach out.
"It's okay," she says as loud as she can muster. Chidori's voice is weak, barely above a whisper. "I swear, it's okay!"
Junpei stares at the portrait of himself as a strong figure in her private sketchbook.
"It's okay!" she is louder now, drowning out what his friends are saying. Now is not their time.
He runs a finger down the paper, marking his portrait's face down to the collar of his uniform undershirt.
"I love you, Junpei!" she screams into the void, at him, hoping he will hear.
The white hot of Medea's wound builds within, strengthening her own voice. He can't keep living like this, and perhaps this is all he needed to know what she felt for him in those last moments. She had told him point blank, but even Chidori knew how dense he was, is, and would be, most likely forever.
And she swears he hears her, because he tenses up and wipes his eyes.
"Thank you," she whispers to no one.
And when they seal away that which Chidori and those two had been chasing, or rather his friend does, triumph is the only word.
The loss of his memory, though, she is not prepared for at all. Nothing changes within, but the power of Trismegistus no longer keeps her company, only the power to create around her remains. And as the month passes, as Junpei reawakens those memories, one rises to the top with the recollection of the rooftop meeting. One person rises above the rest. Even as he realizes Minato sleeps on and on, tears welling in his eyes, something keeps his back straight and his mind at least somewhat clear.
The thought swarms her being. She knew how he felt before she could reciprocate, but that odd feeling is worth it. Chidori wills a field of flowers into existence just outside the burgeoning village around her.
The first woman he is with yields a broken building, the bench smashed, and tears to her eyes.
Betrayal is the only word, but Chidori has given herself a new task with this post-existence. She wishes him to be happy, of course. So, why then, can't he experience this? Furthermore, when it is over, Junpei cries. And for a long, long time Chidori cannot for her life figure out why. Even with their connection, and her own tears staining the image, she doesn't understand how something that had been physically pleasing for him and almost cathartic could result in these tears.
But he keeps going, and his partner eventually leaves him alone.
Chidori hates this one.
Not because she slept with Junpei, though the thought is sickening in its own right, but because she left him. Couldn't she tell that Junpei was bleeding his feelings?
And that's when Chidori realizes that his thoughts have been focused so strongly again on one person. Whenever it happened, that surge of warmth and happiness flooded her like nothing else at all. It was like the return of the Persona, or how Medea had merged into something more.
"I'm sorry... man, aw man why do I keep..." he sighs loudly, wiping his eyes. Junpei smacks his forehead with the knuckles of one hand and sobs softly again.
"Stop it," Chidori chides him for hitting himself, even lightly. Even playfully, or in this moment of aggravation.
"Man, why can't I stop thinking about you?" He asks nobody, looking up at the ceiling of his tiny apartment. After a moment, another sigh, "Either of you."
Chidori had gotten used to sharing this mourning with Minato, it was okay considering what he had done for everyone.
That feeling of wanting to eject herself into whatever was the "real" world and hold him tight returns, so she cries with him. Hopefully he could feel that, know that she wants to be there with him more than this for once. No matter what he might do after, she is resolute in his happiness at the cost of all else. So Chidori weeps gently with him until the friends she cherishes just as much as he does join in and Chidori cannot match their fervor, but the loss of someone so close to Junpei burns inside of both of them.
It is unfair seeing it end this way, but it does.
After so long waiting, Chidori kept battering back the black pit of worry over Minato. She took up rebuilding what she had broken in her rage before and after the short repairs kept expanding on her own little city in the White. Much of it reflected what she could remember of the life she had before, but what she hopes one day will be for more than just her. Chidori had not known what to think of a concept like the afterlife before, or what she would even be when all that suffering ended, but now that she was here, trying to mend the pain that Junpei built and drained over time, none of the metaphysical seemed to matter.
It eventually feels real enough to her, again, when Junpei's projection to her fades.
She doesn't even realize for a while. Chidori's silent watch and protection often meant ignoring private moments between Junpei and other people to save her own sanity, Junpei and himself to never impose herself in that time, or any number of mundane habits. It is her own habit. The streets take shape and in front of her, a newcomer's figure comes into focus.
With her awareness snapping into overdrive, the sound of tires screeching fill the White.
They seem to haunt her forever, interrupting her watch when she should be able to use whatever is left of the fabric of her being within him to stop it, but she can't do it.
The horrible rubber howling grinds on forever in her mind while the new figure takes shape.
His pretend peach fuzz stubble is the same. His awful little facial hair is barely in any thicker than what she remembers. That hat is at just that right angle to make him look like such an idiot, but the surprise on his face melts any of that annoyance away for good. Everything around her stops. For a moment, Chidori can feel his blood on her hands and on her dress again, the outrage of grief in that one touch overtaking her again. His fashion habits have gotten better post-uniform, minus the hat, but she isn't even looking at him anymore.
She just hears that gunshot, those screaming brakes.
"Chidori?"
And his voice.
The White is soft again, her pain receding in an instant.
He is near her, and his hands take hers, so warm. He is so warm to the touch and Chidori can't help herself from breaking that stern grimace in his presence. She's been here for as long as she could in his presence, surrounding him and watching, loving and caring for the people and friends he'd left behind, forgotten, or simply drifted from over his life. He was in his forties, single and with a dry spell longer than Junpei cared to share with people. His life ends in a street late at night after a movie.
His life ends there, but the White doesn't.
"Chidori?" he repeats, and he's so close her bottom lip quivers faintly. "I-I... y'know, it's gonna sound real stupid-"
"I won't be surprised," she interjects.
His grin starts on one side of his mouth and splits wildly. "I could tell you were still here, watching over me."
"I did not mean to look all the time." Chidori glances away from him as she speaks, "But I..."
"How long... where are we? Is this some sorta, uh, extra-dimensional thingy or whatever?" Junpei scans the nothingness around him and catches her wild cornucopia of drawing. "Oh, wait a freakin' minute..."
"Junpei, I have been waiting so long just to see you again and I-"
"Don't need to say anything, Chidori!" His excitement is palpable and Chidori could almost smile at the ease it builds in him. "You know I, uh... Well, it's pretty obvious that I love you."
"Yes. And yes, I do. I need you to know how much I love you as well, Junpei," she says. "I need you to-"
Even in the White, where only her feelings for Junpei had ever been realized and never a physicality between them; even here, where the only thing keeping her company is fake scenery and the drive to keep him under her care (and her failure to do that) and, even then, in that... what could compare to a kiss?
His lips were soft, only forceful enough to get his point across. Chidori stands stock still with his lips against hers in a kiss, and the scratchiness of his face glides below her bottom lip.
She is stoic when she returns the kiss, harder, and Junpei breaks first, tears in his eyes.
He had interrupted her so rudely, but whatever annoyance melts into him in another kiss. Before anything escalates, Chidori breaks away and cracks a tiny smile. Junpei's eyes widen at the small gesture.
"But first, you gotta explain to me what the heck is going on around here. I just sorta blinked and now we're in this freaky place?" he says through a chuckle. The reality of his death never seems to occur to Junpei, just another step. "Dude, I'm gonna need some help. Because this is so messed up."
"Messed up," she tries on the syllables and tuts to herself. "Yes, exactly."