Before I begin…

WARNING: Language!

WARNING: True Ending spoilers!

WARNING: AU!

WARNING: I do not own Persona! (I only wish I was cool enough to think of something like that on my own…)

Something Wicked

Storm clouds were gathering over Inaba, and the morning's fog was clinging on with a stubbornness that was rarely seen in the area, but Sadako Seta could care less. The threat of rain and the lingering fog had driven everyone else away from the riverbank, so she could finally have a moment's peace. With the same methodical care that she would use for editing one of her own business reports, she engaged the plastic locks on the stroller wheels, pulled down the top to ward off any errant rain drops and checked, for the third time, to be absolutely positive her son was asleep, before stripping off her shoes with a sigh of relief and almost skipping, barefoot, to the end of the dock to sit down and dangle her feet into the water. He'll be perfectly safe right there. This is probably the safest, most boring town in Japan. And this way, I can at least pretend I'm alone.

Everyone had told her that this week off would be good for her mental health. That being able to spend some time in the country with her son would be good for her. Instead, it had been a week of physical and emotional torture rapidly approaching the torment she had gone through for the first weeks of little Souji's existence, back when he couldn't sleep more than three hours and had to be fed and changed every fifteen seconds. Nearly a year later, she had gotten used to leaving the daytime care of her child to a nanny, and had relished in only having to change the cadging little monster two or three times a day, and only having to change his diaper perhaps once. (At least her husband was progressive enough to take his turns changing the diaper. Or, rather, the threat of her cooking was enough to browbeat him into helping out.) However, back 'home' with her family, she was expected to do everything herself, with only minimal help from her idiot little brother. If anyone had told me how much pointless toil a baby would be, I would have had a hysterectomy. At least my husband doesn't want any more. If he asks me for another child, I might have to poison him.

Logically, she did not hate her son. She knew that the crying, the occasional regurgitated blurbs of formula, and the filthy diapers were not things that he did to her with the intent of driving her to madness. Nor was he responsible for the way everyone in town would point and gossip about everything from her disastrous first marriage, to the fact that her son had only been born six months into her second marriage, or the fact that she was working ten hour workdays in an office while she had an infant she could be cooing over instead. And he wasn't nearly old enough to be carrying tales of disinterest and neglect to her eagle-eyed, vindictive little shrew of a mother. That was Ryoutaro, and she was going to get him good the next time Chisato-chan came over for dinner.

But baby Souji couldn't talk back, and that made it so tempting to just heap the blame on his tiny shoulders.

Tempting, but wrong. She reminded herself. Let this be a lesson to you that you're not in your teens anymore, and that you do, occasionally, need sleep rather than caffeine. If you hadn't fainted in the middle of a meeting, this never would have happened. You could still be back in the city, at the job you love, instead of banished to Nowheresville with strict doctor's orders not to do anything but stare at the walls and feed the baby.

Well, that hadn't been quite what the doctor had said, but between her mother's scathing lectures and the pointed glances and whispers of the people who had once been her neighbors, classmates, and acquaintances... well, that had ended up being all she had done. All week. That, and walk anywhere she thought she could avoid people, which was mentally disorienting. Normally, she loved being around people, but the constant negative attention was enough to really wear her down, and if she couldn't convince the doctor and her boss that she was running at a hundred and ten percent, they might send her back for another week of this. Thank you, whatever god or gods are out there, that today is Saturday. I don't think I can take much more of this.

And then, as if to mock her, the sky opened up and it started to vomit rain. "I lied… I hate you all," she muttered as she stood up, not even bothering to try and shake off the water off her feet as she pulled her socks and sneakers back on. She was going to be completely drenched by the time she got home, so it wouldn't do any good anyway. Well, I can at least be thankful that I sprang for the waterproof stroller. If I run, Souji shouldn't get too wet before I can make it home.

Except when she looked up from her shoes at the spot where she'd parked it, the stroller was gone.

For a moment, she could only stare at the spot where she knew it had been and stare mutely, mouth probably hanging open like some idiot on an anime, because the stroller was not there, and she hadn't been watching it, but things like this never happened in Inaba, and-

And you're panicking. Calm down. Did you really park the stroller right there? It's humid enough that there's still fog around, maybe you just don't see it yet.

After about five minutes and a pretty thorough grid of the area around the remnants of the bridge, it was getting harder and harder not to panic. Not only that, but the fog wasn't going anywhere, and if the stroller was still out in the air Souji should be getting at least a little wet by now. Which should make him wake up. And cry. And even in this downpour, wouldn't she hear that?

"Do. Not. Panic," she said to herself, out loud. "Let's think about this logically. It was pretty foggy today. Maybe foggy enough that someone could have seen the stroller, but not seen me? If I had been on a walk, and seen an abandoned stroller, what would I have done?" Besides calling out to try and find the mother, which some baby-snatching psycho wouldn't have bothered with-no. "Positive, happy thoughts Sadako. You can't afford to think like that, or you might faint. Again. Which would be bad." On autopilot, her feet carried her up the slick wet stone steps to the main road, where she looked around to see nothing, nothing, some pavilion where people might have a picnic… hey… It's hard to tell in the fog and the rain, but it looks like someone's over there. Worth checking out, anyway. Maybe they at least saw something…

Trying to blank her mind with memories of graphs and charts of quarterly earnings, Sadako set off for the pavilion at something of a panicked sprint. Hence, even in the fog, it came into focus pretty quickly. The tables. The single woman, her white umbrella lying, still open, on the concrete slab. The way her dark gray hair and snow-white raincoat fluttered despite there being no breeze. The navy-blue, compact little stroller…

The stroller… that BITCH!

"HEY! Get your filthy little hands off my son!" she roared as her heart rate quadrupled. The other woman jerked around in surprise, and the baby boy in her arms squirmed, one fist wrapped around a handful of wavy gray hair, the other clinging to a brittle looking, delicate finger.

"Oh! Is this your child, ma'am?" The young woman asked politely. Although… looking at her from the front, 'she' seems to be lacking… certain basic requirements for being a woman… The person before her, now that she could see her properly, was very wiry, almost too thin to be real. If she had hips or a bust, they were so miniscule as to be nonexistent, but her frame and her face seemed… wrong, for a man. 'Her' voice had an awkward pitch to it that made it impossible to stick a gender to, and even though Sadako's instincts were telling her female… it wasn't possible for her mind to be entirely certain, one way or another. Which was almost as creepy as the fact that this genderless freak was still holding her Souji, like he belonged to her!

"Yes!" Sadako snarled after the brief pause, deciding to run roughshod over her own uneasiness. "And I would very much like Souji back!"

"Oh, is that your name?" the stranger asked. "Well, welcome to Inaba, Souji-kun," she cooed at the child, wiggling the finger Souji was holding as if to shake his hand. Her boy whimpered, as if he was about to cry, but tears became giggles as the other woman tickled his ribs. "He really is something special. I thought the stroller was abandoned, so I moved it up here so he wouldn't get rained on while I tried to figure out what to do next. I must have missed you in the fog. You need to be careful about that, if you're planning on staying here, it can get pretty dangerous in Inaba on foggy days. Are you planning on staying here?" The woman asked, and she was still cuddling Souji like her own goddamned child. "Or are you just vacationing at the Amagi Inn?"

"Ahem."

"What? It was just a… oh. Of course. I apologize," the stranger sighed, handing the baby back to Sadako. Which ended up being more of an ordeal than it should have been, as Souji (the traitorous little bastard) refused to let go of the she-thing's hair, and actually had the gall to start crying. "You might want to stay here until the rain slacks off a bit. It can't be good for his health."

"Don't tell me how to raise my child! I could have you arrested for kidnapping!" Sadako snapped, succeeding in earning a glare from the stranger, and redoubled bawling from Souji.

"Funny, I think I'd have an easier time getting you held on charges for neglect," the stranger countered, managing to be heard quite easily over Souji's cries without having to resort to shouting. "Leaving a child that young, alone outside? What were you thinking?" The she-thing's eyes seemed to sear Sadako's skin, and the heat of her anger almost made them appear red. "You're not in the city anymore, true, but just because Inaba isn't a big place doesn't mean that there's magically no crime here. Anything could have happened to him while you were off doing… whatever it was you were doing. Alone. In the middle of the fog." Contempt dripped off those last sentences so toxically that Sadako didn't even notice her son had stopped crying.

"I was sitting on the edge of the old bridge, soaking my tired feet in the water," she responded defensively. "Where you could have found me… if you'd bothered to look."

"So terribly sorry," the she-thing replied in almost exactly the same poisonously sweet tone. "It just didn't occur to me that anyone could possibly be that stupid, to sit out alone by the water when no one could see if you fell in."

Sadako's eyes narrowed. "Was that a threat?"

The she-thing smiled. It was not a nice smile. "Do you want it to be?" In fact, it was a downright terrifying smile… and dear, sweet god, her eyes really were red.

Contacts. She's wearing contacts. Why she's wearing red colored contacts in Inaba, where no one forgets about anything ever…? And…

"…how'd you get the stroller back up the hill?"

The gray-haired woman blinked at the conversational one-eighty. "I beg your pardon?"

"How did you get the stroller up here? It's not easy to get something like that up stairs with one hand, and if you do it with the baby inside, he'll wake up and either squeal or cry. And the hill's slope is too steep to push that thing up without tripping. I only got that thing down without breaking mine or Souji's necks by taking him out, kicking it down the stairs, and putting him back in again. I wasn't thinking about how I was going to get it back up again… I'm just lucky it tipped over and killed its own momentum before it hit the water. So. How did you get that thing up here without making enough noise for me to hear, exactly?"

The woman's smile managed to become more terrifying. It became… calculating. "You notice a lot more than most people around here do, Sadako Dojima-san." Sadako felt the color drain from her face. It might be her maiden name, but this stranger knew her name. "So I'll tell you how. With a little magic." The woman was advancing and Sadako was retreating, retreating until her back hit one of the support beams for the pavilion.

"You're crazy," Sadako whispered, feeling like nothing so much as a cornered rabbit as she helplessly clutched her child to her breast.

"It never ceases to amaze me how the mortal mind manages to find excuses for the things it does not wish to accept," the woman sighed, her tone one of weary amusement. "I suppose I should thank you for livening up what was promising to be a boring afternoon, but… well, I doubt you'll remember this conversation in a few hours." The woman suddenly seized Sadako's head with both hands, forcing her to look into those horrible red eyes. "In fact, I think you're going to have one of your little fainting spells in a few seconds, and when you wake up this will all be a horrible nightmare. Isn't that the way mortals like to remember these things?"

"B-Bitch," Sadako managed to splutter as the world started to spin.

"You're extremely lucky I'm on a schedule and your son has caught my interest, human worm," the creature snarled as, once more, it took Souji from her suddenly noodlelike arms as the dark sky angled away and her face met the ground. "Now, it's been a few centuries… or maybe millennia… since I had any children of my own. Let me see if I can remember any good songs to pass the time until your mother comes back to herself, hmm? Ah yes… I think there was one…"

When Sadako woke, hours later, she was alone, stretched out on a wooden bench. And thank god for that, she sighed as she sat up, careful not to jostle the dozing Souji in her arms. I shudder to think of what the ever-dreadful neighbors would say if they'd known I'd fallen asleep out in the open alone with my son. She took a despairing look at the scenery and then added, In the rain, no less. It's really pouring out there… And her back was really, really killing her. She needed a nice, soft, real bed. And aspirin. Did I fall asleep because I'm getting sick? I certainly hope not! I'm leaving Inaba tomorrow if I have to walk to Yasoinaba station nude over hot coals! Which meant getting home, hopefully before dark and before her mother got back from her afternoon shopping/gossip outing with friends.

But how am I going to get home? Sure, the stroller's waterproof, but the shade only comes down three-quarters of the way. He'll still get wet. And cry. And probably catch a cold, and then I really WILL catch hell. I guess I'm really stuck here until the rain lets up… and with my luck, it'll probably be dark by then…

Just then, her roving gaze turned up a single white umbrella, left sitting open on the ground right next to the stroller. Huh? I don't remember bringing that. Did someone see me passed out and leave it for me to be nice? If that's the case, I wish they'd been nice enough to wake me up! She scanned around, furtively, looking for an owner. Finding none, she laid Souji down in the stroller (still not waking him up, by some miracle) and started pushing the stroller with one hand, holding the umbrella over the opening in the stroller's canopy with the other. The walk home took twice as long, but left her feeling pleased enough with her own ingenuity to forget any lingering traces of nightmares that she may have had while napping on that park bench.

When Sadako Seta woke the next morning, both she and her son were running fevers. After losing the entire next week to recovering from her nasty head cold, she vowed never to vacation in Inaba again, and was often heard to mutter "Country air is good for you, my cute little heart-shaped ass," whenever someone suggested some time with her relatives would do her some good.

In fact, aside from three brief visits (for her brother's wedding, the birth of his first child, and his wife's funeral, respectively), she never returned to Inaba again, and would not set a toe outside the Amagi Inn (where she always stayed in lieu of a relative's home) if it was rainy, foggy, or even mostly overcast.

As for Souji Seta, well… that's a completely different story.

AN: In case you were wondering… why yes, that was Izanami. And yes, she did just give Souji the power to enter TV's. As a baby. May Izanami singing Souji lullabies be an image to haunt you in your nightmares.

Unfortunately, I have no plans to write a second chapter or a sequel to this, as I am already working on a P4 story with mild to moderate P3 crossover elements (yes, more than just visiting Tatsumi Port Island. You'll have to wait to see.) It's mostly in the planning stages right now, as I'm trying to figure out where the ripples will bounce to, so to speak. And I need to research Japanese mythology, too. So it'll be a very big project and eat a lot of time. So, if you like this idea, feel free to steal it. As a matter of fact, please do. I'd really love to see where a capable writer could take this crazy little idea of mine, and if you let me know what you're doing, I'll drop you a review.