Atlus has me in their pocket - I own copies of the games, they own the rest. These "After the End" stories stand on their own, but they interconnect. I write them for my wife (and she's a die-hard Fuuka supporter!) - thanks also to user Emmychao for moral support.
[X. Fortune] You're Gonna Carry That Weight
(Be Your True Self)
The funeral was large, and well-attended.
As Naoto Shirogane stood and watched the formalities and rituals, a pendulum swung in her heart, between bearing the grief stoically, and crumpling like a wet sack. The one thing in her favor was that stoicism was her default position, and so as long as the pendulum kept swinging, she was going to make it through the day.
Her friends stood all together to one side, almost lost in the crowd of dignitaries, officials, and celebrities who owed her grandfather one debt or another. The Shirogane Detective Agency was, if not exactly beloved, definitely respected across Japan, and so there were any number of people in attendance at this public funeral who were solely looking for the photo op. That gave her plenty of places to look, rather than at the four people who had traveled a variety of distances to reunite on her behalf; to look at them too long would still the pendulum entirely.
Kanji, for his part, remained quietly behind her, looking sick. Grampa had required more than one audience with Kanji Tatsumi before he saw the boy's virtues (though to his credit, and Souji Seta's, Kanji acquitted himself fairly in each interview, all things considered), but once he had, he'd been very welcoming, and in his office had been a Tatsumi custom doll, a small bear with a blue jacket and cap. Kanji had wisely decided to stay out of Naoto's way—for now, at least, with other people around—and contented himself to the best of his abilities by assisting her in small tasks that suddenly required strength that she didn't have. She'd never have figured there would be a situation in which she'd be glad for him to open a door for her.
When things finally broke up, her four friends approached, and Naoto took a deep breath. Apparently they had reached a consensus on their own, and a compromise had been made; Chie and Yukiko would pay their separate respects and then leave her be, and Souji and Rise would follow them to the textile shop for the evening.
Yosuke had given her a heartfelt apology over the phone—he had been opening a store in America, of all places, and couldn't get away—and nobody had seen Teddie, whom they all assumed must be with Yosuke overseas. As much as she cared for them both, and she really did, some part of her thought that it was for the best.
Rise Kujikawa was Naoto's best friend, a fact that on some days still surprised her, but she could be exhausting to deal with, and Naoto wasn't sure that, under the circumstances, she could handle being mothered. But Rise and her husband had apparently planned on this, and Rise took Kanji into his storehouse to look at fabric, or talk, or something; it was Souji who gently sat Naoto down at the kitchen table upstairs and began busying himself at the stove, solving problems in his usual way—with food.
As always, the protest that Naoto was building collapsed when the plate was in front of her, and she ate in silence while her senpai watched. When her stomach began to fill, some sense of equilibrium came back, and she figured she could hold on long enough to weather at least the visit. So long as she didn't think about what the following days would contain—an accounting of her grandfather's study, a review of his caselog, a question of succession in ownership of the Agency...
"I have a mystery for you to solve."
She looked up, and Souji's eyes were as always calm and seemingly untroubled.
"Rise has been acting peculiar lately." Souji crossed his arms and leaned forward on the kitchen table. "She closes internet windows when I enter the room, and sometimes she goes out and even Inoue-san doesn't know where she..."
Naoto winced, and her hand ran through her hair. Only then did she realize that her cap had fallen off some time after she had gotten home. "She's pregnant."
He blinked once, then leaned back and slowly nodded. "Ah. That makes sense."
The way that he would delay slightly before he spoke. Everyone was used to it by now, but in the beginning it used to make Naoto wonder. She had always respected Souji Seta as being someone who thought before he spoke, and chose his words carefully, but sometimes the delay was just slightly off, slightly alien. She had often wondered if he had some disorder on the autism spectrum—and yet, he was so good socially, certainly no Asperger's Syndrome could explain his behavior, his ease in leadership. Finally seeing his shifting inventory of Personas had suggested at a sort of explanation, but then, he claimed to no longer carry any Persona at all within his mind.
Naoto mopped up the last of her plate with a scrap of bread, and only then realized that she had devoured the whole plate. "You seem unsurprised for someone who did not know."
"I suppose some part of me suspected." Souji collected her plate. "Nanako will be very excited, I think."
Naoto looked down. "I suppose when the news becomes public, I will have to endure Rise's insistence that I follow suit." What a terrifying thought.
"I wouldn't worry about that." His voice called out over the running faucet of the kitchen sink. "She'll be more interested in bragging." Pause. "Have you and Kanji ever discussed...?"
It was somewhere in the midst of being embarrassed at his question that Naoto realized how well he'd distracted her from her pain.
Soon, though, Souji was collecting Rise and bidding them good night, and as she crawled into bed with Kanji she finally allowed herself the vulnerability, and the sword-thrust of grief that slid right back between her ribs when her armor came down. He didn't say anything, just lay one hand on her hip and the other on the top of her head, and when she'd exhausted it all she fell into a deep sleep.
And that was all fine, acceptable. Not even she could blame herself for giving in, not with her Grampa's presence being the sole pillar holding up what had been the collapsing ceiling of Naoto Shirogane's soul for most of her childhood and teenage years. But she got her catharsis, of a sort; and the next day she was up, if not at her usual dawn, certainly before the morning was wasted, and she planned to re-assume her life, with the new challenges ahead filed carefully into a balanced schedule.
Which was a solid plan, until her cat began to talk to her.
Fuuka Yamagishi's most well-kept secret: she hadn't had a decent night's sleep in years.
It started in her first year in Gekkoukan; sporadic, then, and unexplained, but so strong when it came on that she would convulse right out of bed in a seizure. The dreams would not cease when she woke, instead carrying on in the shadows of her bedroom.
Long red curls fell over her face as she thrashed against her restraints.
"Now, now, Rosebud..." The old man's gentle hands on her face. "I want this to be over as much as you do. Just stay calm, and..." A jolting pain from the back of her head to the fore, and her head lolled. "Ut! You see..." He clucked his tongue, and she could hear the gloves snap against his wrists. "You mustn't resist—this was your idea, after all, you made a very big girl decision."
Something dark and heavy whispered from behind and inside her... the world outside her head began to burn bright white...
Fuuka couldn't, didn't even bother trying to explain the dreams to her parents. She was given MRI's and other tests, and nothing seemed wrong with her, and so her parents chalked it up to anxiety. Fuuka had always been such a frail and trembling girl (and yet still always so disobedient! Very embarrassing), and this sort of thing had to be expected.
She didn't have a lot of friends when she was a first year, and anyone that she was friendly with, well, what would she say? "Rosebud?" Sounded more like she'd fallen asleep watching old American movies.
And then, in second year, the incident. Fuuka was locked in the school gymnasium, a nasty prank that became something else entirely. When midnight came and the walls began to shift, Fuuka had no choice but to believe that she was losing her sanity. The dreams must have been but a precursor to this, walls that bled out all over the floor, the spare few windows showing a view that kept rising, and rising, and rising... Yes, she had to have gone crazy, but when she heard the growling sounds around corners and down long corridors, she still kept her distance, and trusted in the voice buried deep in her heart that told her which ways to go.
The boys rescued her then, and all three of them had looked oh-so-dashing (yes, she had to admit to herself, even Junpei) with their swords and their scars and their rumpled school uniforms. But none more so than him, with his dangling headphones that seemed to dance when he would spin in place, cutting a limb free from one of what they all called "Shadows." His eyes were almost always hidden behind his hair, but the cord in his jaw that would flex when another creature came after them awakened something in Fuuka that she had only read about, heard others discuss.
And then she was up on Akihiko's back in a fireman's carry, and then they were downstairs, and then those two giants were smacking the others around and off the walls even as Fuuka finally understood whose voice had been calling her, and whose eyes had been rending her nights in twain.
As she pressed the gun that Akihiko had handed her as a good luck charm, it was Lucia who assured her that everything would be all right. And when the glass shattered, and her eyes opened, it was Lucia who shielded her from the danger. It was warm inside Lucia, like the womb, and everything in that moment was a comfort, until she heard the screaming voice of one of the others, and turned.
All thorns, topped in red. "Rosebud." The most popular girl—woman—in school, and it was only now that she was seeing her, hearing her. Through Lucia's eyes, she watched Mitsuru Kirijo and knew that this was the one she'd been dreaming about for so long.
Naoto had been sitting in her Grampa's study, trying to make sense of the files. It was then that the voice whispered, "Check the accounting logs."
Naoto, like other Persona users, had gotten used to hearing voices. And so at first, she acted without thinking, pulling the ledgers out of a drawer. But the voice was not Yamato-Takeru, and so her eyes darted around the room, searching every corner for intruders. But there were none to be found, just the black cat curled up on an old chair. Kanji was meeting with a sales rep at the textile shop who was deathly allergic, and so he had convinced her that bringing Gouto to the estate would not be an inconvenience. And the cat had seemed to perk up a bit upon arriving in his old home. But...
That chair, Gouto's perch, was the chair where Naoto would sit and read, or ask her Grampa questions about the cases he was undertaking. It almost felt haunted, now.
The cat looked at her quizzically. She shook her head and scanned the ledgers.
When she saw the strange listings, her head jerked back in shock, and the cat was already up on the desk, almost as if he was reading along with her.
How—why-had her grandfather spent so much money on internet auctions? And what were these auctions for?
"You should follow the money. That's what detectives do, isn't it? It's been a little while for me, I must admit."
Naoto looked at Gouto in horror. The cat cocked its head.
"What?" He stretched long across the desk. "Not the strangest thing you've ever seen, is it?"
She shook her head slowly. "Stress. Grandpa's death." She placed a hand to her forehead, checking for a fever. "Kanji was right."
"Sure, that's a possible explanation." Gouto padded closer to her, and she had to force herself not to reel back. "Or maybe, it's that you've been chosen."
"Chosen..." Naoto's knuckles were white. Stay calm. If she was hallucinating, then agitation would make things worse. And if she wasn't, then she needed to be prepared to battle Shadows. Could she reach her cell phone without alarming the cat, call Kanji to get reinforcements from the Investigation Team?
"Don't stress out about it too much." Gouto almost looked as though he was smiling. "You're halfway there—you've already got a trademark hat."
When Fuuka was brought to the dorms, she thought that the dreams would ease up. Understanding Lucia, what she was, how they were linked; that should have calmed her down. Instead, proximity made things worse.
Most of the others, she skimmed the edges of them so rarely that she could almost ignore them. Yukari, Junpei, Akihiko, their nightmares, when they came, would raise her temperature but the fever wouldn't come. It was Mitsuru who was dangerous, because her Persona had a power similar to her own. While apparently it wasn't as strong as hers, the synchronization left her enveloped in Mitsuru's memories and fears in a way that left her gasping for air. And so when Yukari, who had barely spoken to her before, tried to enter her into a conspiracy against Mitsuru, Fuuka had agreed to search for information on the mysterious explosion—because she, herself, wanted to know what caused the dreams.
But with experience, control grew stronger, waves crested, and she was able to find her sense of self once again. She was able to be a person again, and she found that the people around her had become friends almost without her realizing it. Some of them even felt more like family than the parents who had always been so hard on her.
And then Shinjiro came, and it was almost too much for her.
He was tall, dark, and handsome; he was self-consciously cool, and he was a little scary in that way that, as a woman, you didn't actually mind so much in the right dosage levels. He intimidated her at first, but then she'd come home with Aigis one evening to find him pretending to sleep with a cooking magazine over his face, and all of a sudden she wanted to get to know him better—it didn't even mean anything, not the way that Yukari sometimes teased her, it was just that now she understood that there was a whole person inside that shell, and she wondered what he was like.
Until the first time that, as she'd learn in retrospect, he was near the end of a suppressive dosage. That night, she almost died. Castor tore through Shinjiro's brain like a wild animal, and everything was blood, fire, and exploding concrete.
He was so small, and staring right at Shinjiro with a level of hate that went right past his fear, even with the blood and the flames all around—who was this kid? With a look like the devil himself...
And then Shinji saw the hand flop limply where it emerged from a pile of strewn bricks. His hand grabbed his chest, to see if his heart was still beating, and it came back covered in red tar. He grabbed at his own hair, smearing blood across his face, and even with the open wound running from his neck to his breast, he knew that it wasn't all his.
He fell to his knees. Somewhere a million miles away, Aki was calling his name, but he couldn't seem to make a sound.
She wouldn't understand until much later the sad truth of the dream, or for that matter how physically close to death he was that night, with his Persona out of control. She just shut herself into her own closet in the dark, held her hands over her ears, and curled up on the floor.
It wouldn't be the last time that it happened, either. Sometimes just looking at Shinjiro afterwards would make her physically nauseous. But the longer he spent around SEES, the more he seemed to take care of himself, and so (as they later understood) the more careful he was with his drug use. It wasn't until early October when they'd both reached an equilibrium where Fuuka could dare to try to speak to him. And that night, when Mitsuru asked her to get him for the full moon briefing, they did speak, ever so briefly.
And then it was over.
The numbness clouded her mind in the weeks to follow—Minato had to sit her down twice, she was having so much time calling out enemy weaknesses—and what followed after that was even worse, guilt, because part of her was glad to be free of the horrors that Shinjiro would unknowingly visit upon her in the dead of night.
And then Mitsuru's Persona ascended, and it seemed that the last vestiges of its detecting ability vanished, and Fuuka was completely clear. But by then, of course, the world was coming to an end.
Gouto directed her to an old steamer trunk slid away in a crawlspace in the attic, long hidden behind cartons of Naoto's childhood clothes and a broken and soiled kotatsu that should have been thrown out years (decades?) before.
Inside was an ancient high school uniform that could only have been her grandfather's. Beneath that, though, was a false floor that Naoto pegged to in a second and pried back; she discovered a sword that looked as clean as the day that it was forged, a case holding a single revolver not so different from Naoto's custom model, and a photograph.
The youngest man in the picture had to be her grandfather at age twenty or so, smiling but with stern eyes in his uniform (shouldn't he be too old for it?), and with the other man's arm around his shoulder and the woman giving him "bunny ears" behind his head. The two strangers were dressed period-appropriate for a few years into the Taisho period, but what made Naoto frown was the black cat who was in her grandfather's arms. The cat looked identical to Gouto, even if the photograph had to be taken something like a century earlier.
A century. Her grandfather had always joked about being over a hundred years old, hadn't he?
The cat was beside her. "We don't have time to reminisce. I wish that we did. But you can only understand me because you've been called upon."
"Just... just give me a minute." Naoto sat back and looked at the photograph in her lap.
"He was a great man. The greatest of all of them, every one that I've looked after." The cat rubbed against her arm. "Your parents were great people, too. Detectives that amazed everyone who met them. But they didn't have what your grandfather had, and what you had. They were Shiroganes, and they were worthy of the name. But they were not Kuzunohas."
"And what," asked Naoto, a little more bitterly than she had intended, "was my brother?"
If Gouto was shocked at the question, he didn't show it. "That... is an excellent question."
The only dreams that she never even skimmed the surface of were, of course, Minato's. Instead, there was almost an absence there, like a missing tooth.
Naoto had been searching for secret passageways and hidden panels in the Shirogane estate since she was old enough to walk. At one point, Grampa and Yakushiji had started installing them in places that she'd already checked, just to try to trip her up. Of course, there were a few places that not even she was allowed to search, like Grandpa's desk; she started searching them now, and found lots of little rewards that would have excited her under any other circumstances. Unfortunately, nothing was relevant to her investigation, and so she had to try a different tactic—searching the few places in the Estate that she had never had any desire to go near, that until recently she had been actively repulsed by.
Which is how she found herself elbow deep in the underwear drawer of her late grandmother, with a talking cat looking over her shoulder from atop the dresser.
She and her grandmother had never really gotten on. Well, that was perhaps unfair. She just hadn't understood or accepted Naoto's desire to be a man in all but body, a desire that her grandfather had not entirely encouraged, per se, but had accepted quickly in that easily-adaptable way of his (Kanji had perhaps been the thing that had taken him longer to adjust to than any other) and supported as best as he was able. Grandma, however, had tried to break Naoto of the "phase" right up until her death, something that Naoto wished that she could now reconcile with the late old woman. How happy she would have been, to see Naoto married! That she hadn't had to give up the things that made Naoto who she was might have been the victory that would have led them to compromise and reconciliation. But it was too late for far too many things.
Naoto found her own undergarments to be a necessary evil of her body. She'd thought this had been because of who she was, but apparently, as Rise never got tired of explaining to her, most women hated their undergarments. When she was younger, and further in denial, any form of women's clothing tended to anger her on at least some level, and so this drawer had been one of the few places in the Estate that not even blunt, insensitive fake-boy Naoto would dig through for clues. And so she wasn't so surprised to find the latch that released a compartment.
Inside was a long cardboard tube. She unrolled its contents on her grandparent's bed. It was a series of blueprints, annotated by her grandfather in his personal shorthand, the same scrawl that she'd found on the remit that had led her to the existence of a brother that she didn't remember. The blueprints were of a battle suit, and specifically a set of computer hardware designed to operate in concert with the suit's life support systems. It was a bit like a space suit. "Demountable Next Integrated Capability Armor." The Sentai-like helmet, with built-in HUD, reminded Naoto uneasily of the laboratory that her own Shadow had built around herself in the TV world.
Extra attention had been paid to a computer system built into the wrist, which was wired into the visor. "Communication Player," said one note, and her grandfather had written "SOFTWARE?" in big capital letters. There were other terms as well, like "Harmonizer" and "Terminal System," with no attending information.
"Do you understand this?" She asked the cat.
"No," Gouto replied, and placed a paw over a doodle that her grandfather had left in one corner of a long cylinder. "But I recognize that."
"And I recognize that." She pointed to the company logos printed in the bottom right corner of the blueprint. The design was a product of a joint effort from the Kirijo and Nanjo Groups.
Two years after the world didn't end, she began sensing others again.
They were farther away, but they also weren't dreams. It was more like she was seeing things that were happening from far off. It would come in fits and starts. Juno's hum would fill her ears even as she was falling asleep, and she'd get a glimpse of something.
At first, they were brief. The first time, she got a stabbing sensation in her eye and the image of a strip club (she had to assume! She'd certainly never been to one!), and then it was gone.
Some of the later ones, though, were longer, more detailed.
Yosuke and Chie ran forward, dodging laser gun fire.
Naoto's Shadow was, appropriately, smarter than many of the Shadows that they had faced in the past. While earlier Shadows had focused their attention on one person, usually someone they had a connection with—Yukiko's Shadow had wailed on Chie with fire spells over and over—Naoto's Shadow had assessed their threat levels and reacted accordingly. Teddie was already unconscious over in one corner, and the smell of burnt and smoldering fur was beginning to haunt the entire laboratory. Yukiko was slumped over him, their heaviest hitter—and their only other capable healer—covered in a thin layer of frost.
Even without the threat-assessing powers of Rise's Shadow, he—no, she—seemed to know all of their weaknesses, and was firing them off in between bursts from the TV props in her hands as she zipped around the lab like Astro Boy. Consoles exploded, and the strange surgical apparatus had begun to melt from the heat. She—no, it—had already made its speeches and its threats, and now it was carrying out its directive—to perform "operations" on whomever got close enough.
Souji was guarding Rise, who was the Shadow's next target—it was trying to disable their ability to communicate and match its scanning abilities with their own. Kanji was standing in front of both of them, bearing the brunt of the fire with his shield, a piece of armored lead and steel once used in radiation testing that Daidara had hammered together with fangs and claws from felled Shadows. He was shouting up at the Naoto-like thing in the air, but the two-faced cyborg didn't appear to be listening, and his words had degenerated into something like gibberish at this point, as roaring winds rocked him back another foot, into Souji's swing radius.
It was now or never. Chie dove forward and into a somersault, and when her legs came around Yosuke jumped and landed right on her feet, which then kicked up—and then Yosuke had his arms wrapped around the Shadow's neck.
The child-sized cyborg dipped sharply under Yosuke's weight, but its jetpack was too powerful, and soon they were both rocketing back upwards. Naoto's Shadow spun sharply, trying to shake him free, but Yosuke bit into his own lip and held even as his stomach flip-flopped under the sudden G-forces. He stabbed his kunai deep into the Shadow's shoulders, and the sparks nearly burnt his hands through, but the extra leverage gave him room to get a knee up into the Shadow's back. He wrenched hard, and they fell backwards, the jet propulsion launching them upside down towards the opposite wall.
Chie was waiting, bouncing from foot to foot, all coiled energy, and when they both approached she spun, snapping one leg straight—Yosuke barely had time to pull his own head back as Chie's shin connected with the cyborg's head, and the Shadow spun wildly off to one corner, crashing hard into the wall.
It should have been enough, but of course the personal Shadows were always the strongest, and this one didn't even bother to right themselves, firing its laser weapons at them from its place hips-over-head in the corner. They'd gotten the thing away from Rise, however, which gave Kanji and Souji room to move. Souji's hands glowed and he levitated just slightly as a rush of power entered the room, and it seemed as though all the air rushed towards Kanji, who almost seemed to get bigger as he bolted forward, one arm coursing through with electricity.
He closed the gap and punched straight through the shadow's chest, surges firing and overloading the Shadow's mechanical parts. Naoto's Shadow coughed smoke, and its eyes burst. He picked it up by the neck with his free hand, and the fist in its chest yanked sideways, tearing the whole creature in half. By the time it had hit the ground, the familiar swirling energy had enveloped the Shadow and Kanji both, and when the others got closer, the scared little child in the labcoat was lying on the ground, crying. And if maybe Kanji's eyes were just a little red, too, nobody had the strength to take much note of it.
Fuuka sometimes felt like someone was calling to her, asking her to bear witness.
Occasionally, she'd think the name Himiko but she'd forget that it had happened when she woke.
When it got late, Naoto gathered up the ledgers, the case files, the blueprints, and anything that looked relevant. Yakushiji had arranged for a car to take her home, and she wanted to work at her own desk. And the weight of her grandfather's secrets was starting to get oppressive.
The cat had warned her that Kanji would not hear his voice, and he didn't seem to notice anything out of the norm when she returned, just laid out a meal for her and kissed her forehead, mumbled something about shipping rates. She tried to nod encouragingly to him, but he saw that she was barely paying attention and waved her off. Naoto didn't know if he thought it was casework or Grampa's death, but was relieved to be rid of him for just a few more hours. He'd be there when she came to bed, and that was all she wanted for the moment.
She sat back on the small couch in her study, then turned and laid sideways across it as though she were in a therapy session. Since Kanji had let her be, she'd been discussing the situation with her cat, trying not to think about how quickly she was growing to rely upon his voice.
"Kirijo is your adversary, sure. Can't very well argue with that one." Gouto reached out with one paw and began to claw at the couch. "But 'adversary' and 'enemy' are two different things."
Naoto glared at the cat who was tearing up Kanji's precious re-upholstery work. "Has there been some sign that I could trust her that I have let slip by me?"
"Oh, no. No no no. I wouldn't trust her for a second, if I were you. That's common sense." He didn't stop attacking the couch—indeed, he was working at it rhythmically with both paws now. "Mm, that's good. No... you're a smart girl, Naoto, so you know this already—sometimes why someone does something can be just as important as what they do."
Naoto could not help thinking of Taro Namatame, which made her wince and look away.
Gouto purred. "Yes, yes, I know all about that. He wasn't evil, was he? Stupid, dangerous, but not evil, yes?" Naoto shook her head. "Here's the part that you don't yet understand, which your grandfather did. There are sides, in this universe, that are bigger than you, or I for that matter, can wrap our brains around. There's a bigger Law than man's law, and that Law isn't always right. If it was, then your friend would have done Izanami's bidding without complaint. Adachi followed the Law, which is to say the law of that goddess, and people were murdered. Namatame tried to go against the Law, and his behavior caused Chaos. It was your friend, Seta, who followed the middle path. But nobody would question, given the particulars, whether or not he did the right thing."
Naoto tugged at the brim of her hat. "I find your concepts of morality harder to swallow than I did the idea of Izanami's existence in the first place."
"More things in heaven and earth, Shirogane." The cat curled around her legs. "Do you know why your grandfather took so long to accept your husband?"
She blinked. "Well... speaking without bias, he is 'rough around the edges,' but..."
"Don't be thick. Give the old man some credit." Gouto hissed. "Johei saw that he was a good man within the first ten minutes."
This, to Naoto, might be the most unsettling thing of the many unsettling things revealed in the last few days. "Then why?"
"Because he knew Kanji Tatsumi's own paternal great-grandfather, Naoto. And it took a while to believe that Goro Tatsumi had produced something worthy of his own grandchild." The cat shook his head. "He was being a stubborn old coot. Goro was a drunken, smelly gambler, a cheap thug. But he also wasn't Kanji. Don't lock yourself into one way of thinking. It can get you killed." He flicked his tail. "Or worse."
"Fuuka-san, who is the male in the photograph?" The severed head, lacking skin, did not show emotion, but the voice (she noted proudly) had the right mixture of curiosity and caution. "Is this person a family member, friend, or mate?"
Fuuka, blushing, tapped at the keyboard in her lap. "Don't say 'mate.' Human relationships are subtle, we have lots of words in that category for different things." She glanced at the picture. "His name was Minato. He... passed away, some years ago." She looked back to the head. "He was a friend, that's all."
The head could not blink. "I am sorry for your loss, Fuuka-san." And there was a programmed response if ever she'd heard one. The head did not feel grief or sorrow, only knew that it had made a social error. She sighed.
The artificial intelligence laboratory at the Kirijo Foundation was the world's most advanced facility bequeathed to a single person. Mitsuru basically threw money at her, had done so ever since she expressed her desire to to fix the mistakes that the last attempt at artificial life had birthed—and to replicate the one great success. Traveling with Aigis and her "sister" for all that time in the Abyss of Time had turned a curiosity into a full-fledged passion in Fuuka, one that she hoped would one day benefit the world the way that Aigis had benefited the lives of everyone who had resided within the dorm.
That Aigis had been one of the few residents whose dreams did not intrude on Fuuka's own was only a tangent to that idea.
She picked up the picture and held it up so that the prototype could better see it. "He was a very brave man, who died saving the entire world."
"Comparing that data with historical record suggests that your statement is hyperbole based on emotional attachment." The prototype did not have access to Kirijo records, at Fuuka's insistence. She smiled softly and ran her hand over the picture.
Everyone had their own "special attachment" to Minato. Yukari and Aigis, of course, had the greatest claims over him, but the rest all had their own stories. For Fuuka, it had been the darkroom. She'd suggested him for entry to the photography club, but he'd just showed up one day on his own, eager to participate. One evening in the makeshift development lab that they'd set up in the upstairs washroom, he'd confided in her that sometimes he, too, preferred the distance from others that a telephoto lens provided.
Unlike her own shots of friends and people in groups (groups that she wished she could join), or Keisuke's artful compositions, Minato's pictures had been stark. Empty rooms, condemned buildings—spaces that had suffered loss of life. It was as if there were presences filling in those empty spaces that only he could see. It wasn't until Ryoji, that they'd understood what he'd been trying to convey to them, and to himself. He'd spent so much time helping each of them come to terms with themselves—Fuuka remembered nights in the kitchen with Minato, laughing, with Shinjiro lurking just outside muttering what had probably been helpful hints under his breath—when he'd been in so much pain, trying to understand himself.
And none of them had really tried, had they? They'd offered him token support when he'd been forced to make the choice—whether to sacrifice Ryoji for the world's blissful ignorance—but they'd never dug into his secrets, his pain, the way that he'd dug into theirs.
Maybe, then, this project of hers was also penance. Fuuka powered down the prototype robot head and began searching through its grief subroutines. Maybe what she was trying to do was help somebody find themselves now, because she hadn't when somebody needed her most.
Or maybe, she thought just a little bitterly, it was because she was becoming an old maid hidden away in a big white room many levels underground, hidden away in Mitsuru Kirijo's expense reports.
Naoto had a pleasant, if guarded, breakfast with Kanji in the morning, and then had set off down the street with Gouto at her heels. If he had wondered why the cat was now following her everywhere, he didn't ask.
She knew that on some level, she was likely failing badly as a wife. Certainly no part of their relationship had ever been traditional (and as kind as Kanji's mother was, she had been known to make that point clear from time to time), but his patience must certainly have a limit. Her cases often took her away from home for long stretches, and as open as she now attempted to be with him, there were parts of her life that he had never really been part of.
And now she had a much larger one. The secret of the Four Families of the Kuzunohas had been imparted to her so quickly and so definitively that she'd so far had little time to ponder its ramifications. Whether Kanji Tatsumi would be allowed to learn that same secret was apparently out of her control. The Yatagarasu apparently made such decisions and imparted them to their disciples like gospel—which they essentially were. Naoto had not even tried to tell her husband, and she wondered if that was her own decision or the will of something stronger than herself—an idea that she did not like.
But this secret could lead her closer to understanding her grandfather, and to finding her long-lost brother, and so she had agreed to play along for now. So far, the compromises that she'd made had been small. There would still be time to turn back (maybe). And yet... the time would have to come when she'd finally stop being a partner in a relationship only when it was convenient for her.
Just down the street from the textile shop was a small shrine. It dominated the slowly rebuilding shopping district of Inaba, and had been the first thing to turn around from its economic disaster. Much of the shrine was now plated in gold, a disturbing image even if she did not know the reason for the shrine's sudden upturn in condition.
When she entered the shrine, a small pack of young foxes surrounded her, yipping playfully. She looked down at Gouto, who did not seem bothered in the slightest. He flicked his tail in the direction of the shrine's offering box, before which stood an older, strangely-majestic animal in a pink bib. The older fox regarded the two of them with its good eye.
"Inari has looked over the shrines of the Yatagarasu for centuries." Gouto stretched into something that, from a cat, could be considered a bow. Naoto looked at the familiar fox for a long moment before bowing as well, somewhat more reluctantly. The fox and Naoto had never been close, even in the days when it had assisted the Investigation Team in the battle against Izanami's pawns. What she remembered when she thought of the fox was neither a patron deity nor a trusted ally, but instead a thug who demanded expensive tribute for the slightest favor. What the fox had seen in her, she couldn't imagine.
Gouto approached Inari, still talking. "That you found yourself in alliance with Inari in the past was no accident. But as you were not yet a Kuzunoha, Inari chose instead to communicate with the member of your team that she respected most. I wouldn't bother taking offense. She's... capricious." Inari's ears flicked and she offered a slight growl. "Don't get mad at me because I'm right." His tail beckoned Naoto closer. "I liked you better, old girl, when you spoke through statues."
"What am I supposed to do?" Naoto was growing tired of talking animals already.
"Ring the bell." He looked up at the old, frayed rope above the offering box. She took it in hand and looked it over. "And steady yourself. It's always hard on the stomach the first time."
"I don't understand." She clanged the bell once, and then... the world turned inside out. Not since her first trip through the television, dumped roughly into another world by Taro Namatame, had her insides revolted so violently at a shift in atmosphere. She almost fell to her knees as the setting shifted from Inaba to a grand, dark hall.
"Steady, Raidou Kuzunoha the XV." Gouto's voice had grown deeper, steadier, more formal. She looked around, but the cat was gone from sight. "Your training begins today."
Fuuka Yamagishi didn't see the others nearly enough anymore.
Despite working in the same building, Mitsuru was a phantom, always busy. She'd make time if asked, but it always felt as if Fuuka was intruding on too much, and so she rarely did. The others, it seemed, were similar, and Mitsuru rarely made first contact. There was always a stuffy looking man in glasses lurking around her these days, who spoke politely but without a lot of warmth. Yukari, for her part, was slowly becoming the same way. She seemed to withdraw more every time they spoke.
And of course Aigis was missing, now, and nobody knew where she had gone. Fuuka sometimes prayed that in her research, in growing to understand what made androids like her, she might somehow figure out where Aigis had gone. But no answer seemed forthcoming.
Which left the boys. The men, now. Junpei was trying his hardest to keep everyone together, always paying social visits to everyone and inviting them to the home he was building with Chidori. And that was always fun—Junpei had matured in all the right ways, but he also had changed less than the others had in all the right ways as well. Sometimes he even got Akihiko to come by, or Ken, who was growing up so quickly that it made Fuuka feel elderly.
But the group was growing apart. She supposed it was inevitable, but she wasn't sure where it left her.
The only one who'd stayed as close as she'd hoped was Natsuki, who met her once a week for coffee or lunch somewhere in the city. Natsuki was long-used to Fuuka and her quirks, and she always knew how to steer the conversation to places where Fuuka was comfortable. Things on television, maybe, or their shared desire to be better at cooking. Natsuki had also taken it upon herself to work on Fuuka's surface—that is, she was pulling her by her ears into a new wardrobe, and make-up to counter her natural unhealthy pallor (which probably came, she sometimes mused, from lack of sleep). She kept Fuuka anchored in the real world, and she thanked God often that Natsuki was still in her life.
Then, one night, Fuuka skimmed someone's dream again. But what scared her this time, was that she did not know this person—but was convinced that this person, this girl, was as familiar as family.
She woke up sweating and clutching her hair like the old days, and she sat up and took deep breaths, scared to know that the dream was already slipping from her memory. Only a name remained, a name that she felt that she should know as well as her own.
But "Hamuko" didn't mean anything to her, and that left an ache in her chest.
Naoto Shirogane, the fifteenth Kuzunoha in the line of Raidou, was ready to pass out at her desk when her phone rang.
She picked it up upside down first, and quickly righted it as she kicked her desk drawer closed. Inside the drawer was a belt that carried several thin tubes, similar to the ones in her grandfather's doodle on the DEMONICA blueprints. The world was a whole lot stranger and scarier than it was twelve hours earlier, and even more so than twenty-four hours before that; and this was a life that had faced the goddess of Izanami upon the slope leading to the underworld.
The phone call was from a contact that she had gotten in touch with what felt like a lifetime ago. It was regarding the scholarship records of a "Keisuke Hiraga" - as planned, her contact had been able to trace the results of a photography contest to learn what other entrants that year had been students at Gekkoukan High School.
Her contact listed names until he got to one that she recognized as residing in the same dorm building as Mitsuru Kirijo, Akihiko Sanada, and Yukari Takeba. Even better, her contact had been able to send digital copies of the photos that this student had taken to her e-mail. As Naoto reviewed the entered photographs of one "Fuuka Yamagishi," she found one girl in many of the pictures, and was able to compare them to the student records that she already had on file.
When she had Natsuki Moriyama's name, finding her current information was child's play. Kirijo had done an admirable job of hiding Yamagishi away, but she hadn't done the same for what appeared to be Yamagishi's best friend. She'd go to Moriyama and put the pressure on her, and if she was lucky, they were still in contact. Then Yamagishi would be within her reach.
Fuuka Yamagishi appeared, in pictures, to be a sickly and timid girl. With any luck, it would be an easier route than Takeba had been.
Gouto was napping on the couch. She cricked her neck, stood from her desk, and went to find Kanji. He'd been working late in the shop all evening. Perhaps she could tempt him away from that work, and remind herself that the other half of her life still existed.
"No, the name doesn't ring a bell at all." Mitsuru's eyes narrowed at Fuuka, who winced. "Why? What is this about?"
"It's nothing. Forget I mentioned it." She backed out of Mitsuru's office quickly. Mitsuru had been honest—Fuuka was sure of it—but for some reason, she didn't think that she should explain.
She felt like a great black shape was descending on her—on all of them—from above. She clutched at her arms and headed back to the lab, where she felt safest. She'd vowed that she'd do anything to protect her friends. But what had she done, since they'd left the Abyss? And how could she protect a friend that she wasn't sure that she had?
The placard outside Power Records was advertising Risette's new CD single, "Dream of Butterfly." This explained why Paulownia Mall was a riot waiting to happen. There was a line backed up all the way across and into the doors of Club Escapade, and there were clusters of people sitting on the stairs to the mostly-unused second level, chattering about the pop idol's new hit.
Gouto peeked his head out from within Naoto's jacket. "Wow! And this is your friend, right?"
"Yes, and she's inadvertently given me an advantage." Naoto stuffed the cat's head back down and buttoned her jacket up to her neck. Fuuka Yamagishi was just exiting a beauty products store with a large paper sack. Time to pursue. The mall's overhead speakers could only just barely be heard over the din of the crowds.
Gouto had been able to sense, when they'd entered the mall, what Fuuka's Persona could do. He'd insisted that they could still surprise her. Naoto wasn't so sure.
...My life'll turn out
To move on like that
Just give me something that proves you're not fooling
Just give me (just give me)
You gotta tell me your love came all over me...
Fuuka kept almost-swerving, and then dodging behind groups of people in Risette t-shirts. Right. There, that was it... "I thought she couldn't detect us," Naoto hissed, and looked away when Yamagishi turned in her direction.
"She can't," replied Gouto, whose meows were muffled within the jacket. "What I am and what you are should cancel each other out."
"Cancel each other out as in, 'normal,' or as in, 'absence?'" Naoto pulled her hat down lower and slid between two overweight fanboys dressed as policemen with paper keys taped to their chests. They only knew the image as a character in one of Rise's music videos, but Naoto recognized them as Shadows from the phantom bathhouse.
Fuuka, looking indecisive, doubled back. Naoto cursed and looped around some Gekkoukan students and ducked low behind the claw machine outside of the local arcade.
...My life'll turn out
To be so cruel
Just give me something that proves you're not fooling
If this is so real (if this is so real)
So just tell me your love came all over me...
She had no exits on that side of the mall, and so Naoto was able to slowly close in towards her. But when she broke into a run, it was clear that Yamagishi was full aware that she was under surveillance. Naoto jogged forward to close the gap, and broke left through the line of waiting shoppers. With the exit by the club blocked off, Yamagishi had no choice but to turn around and head down the rear hallway below the karaoke joint on the second floor. It was a blind alley with no exit; Naoto pressed forward and caught up right when Fuuka hit the rear wall with nowhere to go.
...When the stars're smiling at moon
Wonder how they look in your eyes
If I could ever tell you that
Wouldn't I feel so weak
Pray in the heart
When the moon's reaching stars you won't leave me again
If I could ever tell you that
You wouldn't leave me...
She dropped the shopping bag and turned.
"So somebody was following me!" Fuuka took a step forward and put her hands on her hips. "What do you want from me?"
Naoto held up her hands, to show that she wasn't dangerous. "My name is Naoto Shirogane. I am a private detective. I only wish to ask you some questions."
Her hand went to her mouth. "You're that boy who was harassing Yukari-chan!"
"I was not harassing her. She just would not cooperate with my investigation." Naoto kept her voice low and as calming as she could manage. "It appears that your employer considers me to be a threat. Perhaps you could inform me why that is."
"I don't know anything... I..." Fuuka's head tilted. "Wait. I know you."
A chill went down Naoto's back. "You and I have never met."
The other woman's eyes widened. "You're not a boy at all, are you?" She stepped back again, hitting the wall. "I saw the... it was a laboratory. You were... part machine. Like Aigis. Or... like a Shadow..."
This Naoto wasn't prepared for. "I... you 'saw' my... Wait. You have a misconception..."
In her jacket, Gouto hissed. "We can't do this here." He was right. The alley was not very long or deep; people would see them, and things could be misconstrued in an ugly way. Naoto in her jacket and cap looked like a mugger in an old manga, which was usually useful, but now?
Fuuka reached out, as if she was going to touch Naoto's face. "Are you... Himiko? No-Hamuko?"
Naoto shook her head slowly. "I don't know who that is."
Fuuka didn't look like she did, either. Her eyes kept squinting, as if trying to read something far away. "She's... is she Minato's... sister?"
"Sister?" Naoto's knees felt weak. "What are you..."
There was screaming from out in the main area of the mall. Both of them turned in unison.
In the Kuzunoha training hall, Naoto had seen demons.
This had been hard to reconcile with her beliefs at first, even with the knowledge of Izanami. But she had been forced to adapt, and to remind herself that Grampa had stood in this hall before her, and had given a good accounting of himself.
What had been even harder, was realizing that she recognized these demons, each in turn, as facets of Souji Seta. Sides of himself that he had called upon as Personas in battle. It had raised questions that had no answers, not even from Gouto or the voices of the training hall.
If all people carried such demons within themselves, then Gouto's claims of "alignment" carried more weight. Because which demons you chose to face out to the world could mean all the difference to how you answered the questions of the world. And it meant examining once again the two Personas that she herself had used in the past. One of whom, it appeared, had been in demon form a great adversary to her grandfather.
When the people of Paulownia Mall began crying that "the end of the world" had come, it was something that Naoto, with her new perspective on the world, could not treat lightly. And so she stepped out of the alley, with Fuuka at her heels.
The news was about something happening in America. Televisions in some of the stores were broadcasting live feeds, word was filtering in from people on the streets. At some point, an unspoken decision was made between Fuuka and Naoto to learn what was going on together, and they found their way to a location showing such a live feed. It was then that they saw a floating woman atop an inverted pyramid; something that they both clearly recognized, from different experiences, as an Idol Shadow. It was floating down an American street in broad daylight, incinerating things in its path with magic.
"My God." Fuuka went to cover her eyes, and then stopped, taking it all in. Slowly her hands formed into fists. "We have to do something."
"I don't know about 'we,' Naoto, but she's right about one thing." Gouto was watching the feed as well, his head sticking out of her jacket. "Someone has to do something. And you can bet that the Yatagarasu is going to put you on the case."
It seemed to Naoto, often, that her life had been out of her control for years. Sometimes, like facing her own Shadow, it hadn't been pleasant, but had been better overall. Sometimes, like with Kanji, it had been wonderful. Other times, like everything about the Kirijo case and now the truth about her whole family, it was as if the world was grinding her behind its gears. And now, there she was again.
What would someone of "law" or "chaos" do? In the end, it didn't matter any more than what the Yatagarasu would want her to do. There was only one thing she, Naoto, could do, and if that meant she had no choice, well, that would have to not matter, either.
"I've felt so often like my life was stolen from me." She glanced over to see Fuuka watching the screen and talking, though whether to herself or to Naoto she couldn't say. "I've lived everyone else's lives, and I decided that it was okay, if it meant that I could protect them." She wiped at her eyes. "But... it's always been my life, hasn't it?" She smiled a little. "I didn't even know that I was living it. We have to go help them. I have to. For myself, too."
Naoto nodded. "We're going to need a plan."