Disclaimer: Persona characters and settings belong to Atlus. This is a work of fanfiction, shared without profit or intent of copyright infringement.
SPOILERS alert: the worst ending, the true ending, dungeons and max social links for Kanji and Naoto, previous installments in the Persona series, and probably other random spoilers that I'm forgetting to mention now.
The dark that crept from the corners of the dining room seemed to soften, as it approached the glow of the fireplace. Softened by the deep red velvet of the armchairs, the deep red textured wallpaper, and matte varnished dark wood furniture and floor. Softened to something more like a mother's embrace after a nightmare, than a sinister enemy. Through the right lenses, firelight and shadows alike would not be softened by the fog that filled the room-- but that was the limit of its range. Even wearing Teddy's glasses, Naoto could see how the sky loomed beyond the frosty windows, like a mold growth: white fog, pocked by fuzzy black spots that were Shadows.
April afternoons just weren't the same, anymore.
Kanji gulped down pyramids of tiny sandwiches, slabs of cake, banded cliffs of plain biscuits and black caviar and pate— all the while seeming to breathe but barely, and wasting not a moment to set anything down on his own plate. He washed it all down again with a cup of now-lukewarm tea.
One square of buttered bread lay on Naoto's plate, and it had been lying there for almost half an hour. Her tea had cooled by now as well, but she brought it up to ripple the surface with her breath, and set the cup back down on its saucer with a dull tap. "Feel better?"
"No—" The syllable came out like a growl. Kanji gulped and tried again. "I'm just warm and toasty here when it's hella cold outside, and full up now when I've been starving for days, but no, I don't feel better."
Naoto cast her gaze down for a moment. For the next, she jerked up and reached for the teapot, mumbling, "You should take care to be adequately hydrated as well as nourished," as she poured him another cup.
Kanji toyed with his last sandwich, waiting until she sat back down. "You want something?"
Naoto gave a slow, disdainful blink. "You left us. You just up and left, and Rise advised us to give you space to grieve, but-- then-- we couldn't find you! After all we've been through—!"
Kanji rose, toppling his chair behind him. "We ain't ever been through that! You ain't ever been through… getting trash-talked by the first person you thought ever believed in you, failing to save them! Nanako-chan went better'n my mom—"
"That was your mother's shadow. That's what the fog does, it brings out the worst in people, it creates an intemperate body of everything they rightly refuse to admit." Memories. A child's fearful whimper for her Big Bro, a grown man's wide bloodshot eyes and pleas to make it all stop… Naoto dismissed them with a frown, focused on reciting her next point. "What your mother chose to do as a lucid, whole person, that shows that she loved you. You should remember her that way, not as she was under the influence of such an illness. Kanji…"
He paced the room, twisting his fingers in his hair, saying, "I had to bash her skull in. The things she-- it-- said. The things sh-- it was going to do, I had to. But she was still in there, I know it! Her eyes, Naoto! She didn't want to die!"
"Kanji, it's imperative that... I need you to get it together, I have something important to... Right now, listen to me, damn it!" She stood, slamming both her palms on the table.
Kanji righted his chair and sank back down. Naoto turned away from him before she allowed herself to wince, massaging her wrists as she ambled up to the world map tacked up on the wall. "My grandfather has arranged for me to leave Inaba."
"With the quarantine? Good for you."
"If you're implying that I pulled strings to have the quarantine lifted for me, I didn't." Naoto glared at him. "It was my-- my grandfather who... attempted this, but, the most he could manage was to pinpoint a section of the town's border with slightly lax security. He's strongly suggested that I break through it and come back home."
"How 'laxed?" Kanji leaned forward. "How many can we smuggle over?"
Naoto shook her head. "That was not what I had in mind."
She pointed out clusters of push-pins on the map. "According to my sources, these red pins show the where else this particular fog phenomena have occurred. Sri Lanka. New Zealand. Cuba. Manhattan. Ireland. Madagascar. Citizens suffered the effects in the space of a few weeks, whereas residents of Inaba had a little more than three months to begin feeling them. From these locations…" she hovered a splayed palm over the sprawls of orange and yellow push-pins, "… it spread."
Kanji swore. "So there is no safe place."
"There are many regions of the world yet untouched by the fog, indeed, even a few parts of Japan, but there is no guarantee that they shall remain so. This fog doesn't move with the wind, or really any other meteorological influence that would determine the formation and movement of normal fog." Naoto shifted her weight, leaned one hand on her hip, and continued. "From what I've seen, Persona-users have an innate resistance to the more grievous effects. There may be no safe places, but there may be safe people."
"If everyone else turns into shadows, though? Might be safer to be not safe." He lowered his voice, "Less painful."
Naoto sighed. "Of course it's our duty, as people with an innate immunity, to keep others from succumbing to the fog. Without our leader or Teddy, with the stakes and scope getting higher and wider, I believe we have been doing… quite well—"
Kanji snorted.
"—under the circumstances."
"You know what I was doing really well? I'll get back to it. Thanks for the biscuits, and all that damn depressing news." He rose again, shrugged his jacket on, and left the room.
Naoto strode after him, her voice resonating through the empty mansion. "Avoiding your friends? Living out on the street, waiting to freeze to death, or for Shadows to expunge you? In this town, that's hardly a unique accomplishment." She overtook him, blocked his path. "I was about to tell you how the circumstances have changed. Would you not work that to its best advantage?"
"Outta my way."
"You're better than that, Kanji, you know you can do so much more--"
"…hell are you talking about?" He raged, "It's too late! I don't care!"
She set her jaw, unflinching. "We could see Souji again."
Their noises had lured a few Shadows to press against the windows and claw off the frost or scuttle the tips of their fingers under the door. These were gross concepts of fingers, sticky against whatever they touched-- and with an undetectable sigh somehow coming off their pores that gave an aura of dread. The thick fog made them tamer, however, and in Kanji's revelatory silence, their attentions waned and retreated.
"Souji?" Kanji shook his head, trying to shake off hope. "No. Come on."
She pursed her lips, thinking of what else to say to convince him. "Do you remember that Yosuke left before the quarantine, because his family was to manage a new Junes branch overseas? I was surprised to find out the specifics, that he'd settled in a town quite close to the Shirogane estates in the Pennines. Still, such a small promise of a continued investigation could not tempt me, when our collective efforts seemed far more urgently needed here. Then, Souji--"
"-- is moving there, too?"
"Indeed. I don't believe in fate, but this… the scales have tipped, now; I must go." Naoto hesitated. "But I shouldn't, alone. It was a close scrape, just trawling this area for you. My sources reported Shadows migrating ahead of the fog's movement, becoming more aggressive. Heads of state and civilians alike, being driven by fear... riots, massacres, quite an increase in violent cult activity--"
"Why didn't you ask the others?"
"They're the first ones I asked. They refused."
Perhaps she had begun wrong. Chie had yelled a lot, and called her a coward for abandoning them. It was an insult, she continued, to bring them all down to her level as a deserter-- as if it wasn't enough to be brought down to murderers. At that, Naoto had retaliated with all the vicious honesty that comes over people who are angry, honesty that usually ought to be denied and covered up later.
Rise tried to get between them, to calm them both down. In the joint vituperations that it earned her, however, she could only turn away to bawl like a child. When they had all been shouted and cried out, Yukiko cast her gaze downwards sadly, and whispered that she was sorry, but she would never leave. That had settled it.
They had walked away, the three of them, shoulder to shoulder. Like girls commonly do, they'd made it clear to Naoto that whether she actually left or not, they would never speak with her again.
Naoto shrugged. "This is their home."
"Home," Kanji repeated. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to hit something. This small town, full of small minds and their wounding habits, was somebody else's home. Meanwhile, his dad, his mom, his best friend-- everyone who could have made it merely bearable, seemed to keep leaving him. The void they left, only filling with monsters. "They can't leave their home. Damn, I wish I had that problem. I wish."
Naoto gave a curt nod. "We should pack lightly, and leave as soon as we can. How long will you need to get your strength back?"
"Ready for anything, any time," he mumbled, with the bruise-gray bags under his eyes, and his low blood sugar tilting him a few almost imperceptible degrees off-balance.
"Mm. I should take that time to brief you more thoroughly on the dangers, plans, backup plans..." She moved past him, back towards the dining room. "I've laid out a couple of futons, in my grandfather's study and the room annexed. We do have guest bedrooms, but if the Shadows become aggressive enough and break in, the study is more defensible..."
"Sounds good," said Kanji, fumbling his hand in his jacket pocket. At last he unfolded his glasses, slipped them on, and followed her.