Persona 4: There is a Therapist

The train rattled. I stared at the passing scenery as it blurred past cities, thundered through tunnels, and finally passed lazily through farmland. It wasn't a steam train or anything, it wasn't particularly peaceful, but the staccato rhythm of the metal against my head slowly lulled me to sleep...

And I found myself in a vast room, like a cathedral. "Welcome, Takeru." A booming voice, and a divine light came from on high – it lit the man who spoke; a judge, straight out of some sitcom. "You have taken your time in coming here."

I nodded anxiously, holding a huge sheaf of papers to my chest. "Um, yes, quite a bit, only it took me a while to get it all together-"

"Silence." From his blank expression, the judge's voice should have been mild. It was anything but. "You will hand them to me."

I gulped, trying not to let my sweat ruin my essay. "Yeah, cool, um, how do I get up there?" The distance was great; between the judge and myself laid a thousand miles. The judge sighed and raised a lazy hand, and my graduate essay was ripped from my hands, and floated towards him. "Um, sir, not to be rude, but please be careful with that, it took a long time-"

This time the judge didn't even speak – his eyes did it for him. But he wasn't meeting my eyes; a little lower? I looked down. I was naked. "Oh my god." I made myself some degree of decent, pressed myself against the bench in front of me and tried my best not to scream. "W-will this have anything to do with how I'm scored, sir?!"

The judge read the papers in an instant, and sat back with a sigh. "Well. Takeru Hasegawa, you have failed your parents, yourself, and ultimately, your final exam." He ran a hand through his hair, his face like stone. "If you are bound for Yaso-Inaba station, please depart now."

"I'm sorry?" I said, confused. The judge's lips didn't move, but the words came again, more insistent. Something hit me in the shoulder, and I woke with a snort.

"Sorry." It was some high school kid with a heavy looking bag, staring down at me. His eyes were cold, grey, and uncaring. "Didn't mean to hit you. With the bag, I mean."

As always, my brain ran through a million different responses. "Of course you didn't, why would you want to hit me, a complete stranger?!" "Uh, no problem." "It's all good man, it happens to everyone." "I'm not naked am I?" By the time I'd settled on "No problem", the kid had already moved on.

I stared out the window, watched the kid leave. "Yaso-Inaba station, final departure." The intercom buzzed. I leapt from my seat, grabbed my bags, and staggered out of the door just before it closed, shoving an old lady in the process. I mumbled an apology, but the doors were already closed, and so I could only watch her glare at me until the train finally sped towards the sunset.

Dropping my bags at my feet, I took a deep breath of that country air. "So, this is it!" I said, smiling. The sun was soon to set, and it didn't seem like such a bad start to the first day of my practice.

I majored in psychology at the sort of college that Tokyo University wouldn't even give the time of day. Contrary to my dream, I somehow managed to pass my final with a high enough score to be worth mentioning, and didn't even have to get naked in the process. I laughed at my own joke, and nobody else was in the station so it was okay.

Nobody, eh? I looked around, but all was silent – April was too early for cicadas, and only a few birds were still hanging around looking for scraps. I reached into my pocket, unfolded the note from my dad. "Your practice will be just off the Samegawa Flood Plain. You will know it when you see it."

Nice and cryptic, just like dad. I gathered my bags, took a look at the map, and began my first journey as a real adult. The silence was deafening as I walked along the side of the road, no sidewalk in sight. The sunset went from a pale pink to a heavy orange, and the April coolness was losing against the effort of carrying my load.

By the time I made it to the flood plain, night had already fallen. "No streetlights? None?!" I grumbled to myself, cursing my sweat soaked clothes. I was bent double from the effort of carrying my bags, and the air was thick with humidity. A flash of lightning in the distance. Thunder followed.

In that flash of lightning, I saw nothing. Not the kind of nothing that brings relief, or the nothing that terrifies you, but the nothing that simply means you're in the middle of nowhere. "I followed the road! Damn you, damn you!" But the road was nowhere in sight. There weren't even any trees in that flash of vision, just a huge, empty nothing with me smack dab in the middle.

"Ah, so that's how it is." My voice was calm, and cool as the rain that started to fall. "Well, that's life, haha. Just keep your head down and keep trucking, yeah? It won't be so hot in the rain, and, well, the practice is bound to be just around the corner!" My legs wouldn't move. They hurt a lot, and so did my back. I let my bags down for a second, just to catch my breath.

Hell, but it really was a storm. I looked up at the lightning, and the rain, and took a seat. It wasn't so bad; if I put one bag like this and the other like this, and got a flask out of my backpack like so, it wasn't even that uncomfortable! The bags could block most of the rain landing on my head, and the flask could make the rest of it not even matter. The whiskey inside was warm and welcome.

Minutes passed, and hours followed slowly behind. "Fuckin' oooohhhhh, Tokyo University, big shots on campus. Ain't got my big shots. You couldn't ever handle my big shots, you prissy diiiiiicks!" I drank the whiskey in the flask too quickly, so I opened up one of the bags and got the whole bottle.

Now the storm was in high gear, all crashing thunder and pounding rain, and I sat there in my makeshift luggage lean-to having the time of my life. "Yeah, yeah! Go to Takeru University, maybe you'll learn how not to be so fuckin' stupid! Hah! Pricks!" That's where my memory ended – but not the drinking, apparently.

The next morning was one of the worst I ever had. Half-buried in loose, wet soil and my own bags, I opened one eye. I closed it and whimpered. "Ugh, no..." is what I tried to say, but my mouth was so dry it came out as a wordless moan.

"Woah!" A high pitched voice, probably a girl. I groaned. No, please, don't get excited and shout- "Oh my god, Yukiko, it's a person!" Ohhh... A shadow passed in front of me, and out of reflex I opened my eyes – yep, a girl. A girl in green, staring at me like she found some kind of alien. "Wow, cool!" She shouted – again – and grabbed the almost empty bottle of liquor. "Yukiko, it's booze!"

Shit. "No, you... mine, that's mine..." To my credit, half my motivation was to get the booze away from the high schooler. The other half, of course, was that it was my booze. I lurched towards her, she jumped back, and the sun hit me full force again. I tried to roar, grunted instead, and fell back onto my bags.

"Chie, that's not yours! We can't drink it anyway, we're not old enough!" This voice was a shout too, but it was far off and it didn't make me want to die half as much. "C'mon, we've got class!"

The girl – Chie, apparently – inspected the bottle closely, turning it over and watching the booze slide from top to bottom and back again, before finally dumping it in my lap. "Well, um, she's right, so – see ya, old guy!"

"Wait!" For the first time, my voice actually worked. "Where is it? Hasegawa Clinic..." Chie turned, grinning awkwardly. She raised her arm, pointed her finger, and I followed it to – a building, maybe five hundred feet behind my drinking spot, just past the field and across the road.

It wasn't a huge house, but not small either. Above the door hung a plaque with HASEGAWA CLINIC drawn in beautiful calligraphy. A few seconds passed. "Thank you." I muttered, and Chie ran to her friend, and presumably they went to school but I was a little too depressed to pay attention at the time.

Getting up was an ordeal, and shaking off the mud and soil even more so, but eventually I managed to hoist my sodden bags onto my shoulders. "Here we go." The end of my first journey was in sight, a new start awaited me, all I had to do was take that first step-!

In the five hundred feet between where I slept and my new home, I fell three times.

Author's Note: I was writing a book and doing a chapter a day, but making things up entirely whole cloth was really exhausting and led to me floundering for tens of thousands of words at a time, so I've decided to try and write something like this for Persona 4, a game that I loved a whole lot as a kid.

I'm probably going to get a few things wrong here and there since it's been a few years since I last played, but when I did play it I think I finished it about six or seven times. I might start another playthrough here, just cause it's a fun game and I only ever played through The Golden once.

Full disclosure, I'm not really planning on having Takeru enter the TV world or anything, or at least not early on. It's not that I think that would be boring, exactly, it's just that since I'm writing from the perspective of an adult character, I think it would cheapen the cast's struggle if they had an adult come in and kick ass for them.

This fic will kinda deal with mature themes, but no explicit sex or anything raunchy like that. There'll be plenty of weird shit, almost all of which will come from my own personal experience, (haha thats why there's no sex, owned nerd) but I don't intend on getting into any serious issues.

If you liked these first two chapters, look forward to more. I won't really be editing except for proofreading, and a lot of it will just be little one-shot stories. They're fun to write, and good practice. Anyways, it's a double feature this time because didn't let me upload this one yesterday, so please enjoy.