moog: A drabble requested of me by selseiras (ariel). Takes place just after the end of the game. The back story I don't go into is that Souji's train crashed and left him in a coma; so this can be considered something like an alt. universe wherein Arena never occurs. Also in this universe I am making the assumption that Teddie is inherently connected to Souji/Yu. Anyway, I'm kind of terrible with characters like Yosuke so I probably wandered over into the realm of over-dramatic, but oh weeelllll. Not quite shippy, but I guess it can be read that way if shippers so choose (hell, I ship 'em most of the time, albeit not quite seriously).

Soundtrack: "Serenade" (from Homestuck)

Disclaimer: Persona 4 is no mine.

You have learned that you can't hold on to anything.

This lesson has been branded onto you, laid thickly over the deepest, most secret parts of you, over and over and over again. Somewhere inside you are shattered, but you haven't examined yourself too closely for fear of cutting yourself on one of the shards.

You say you are okay. It is your mantra, but the truth doesn't change. No matter how you choose to cope with it, it doesn't go away.

Saki is gone.

A girl you liked, maybe even loved—not that you can say for sure what love feels like—gone forever, vanished from the world, and she's not the only one. People disappear every day, every single moment, leaving nothing behind but memories, which are comforting, but never enough.

You think of this, and of her, often. But not by choice. That's just the way your mind works, no matter what tricks you try to play on it. That's the way it's always been.

Sometimes you pick at the scar she left, in that unconscious way that people scratch an itch. Sometimes you pick at it and the shock comes back, the loss of her, that numbing chill, the sharp, blinding flash behind your eyes that leaves your temples throbbing. The worst is the way your gut sinks and twists, as if trying to slide out of you. Sometimes the scar bleeds, but only in pinpricks—never enough to hurt you, only to remind you that you still have something left beneath the surface.

You can handle that.

After all, you have Jiraiya—and Teddie, and Chie, Yukiko and Kanji and Risette. You have Naoto, you have Nanako. So much to love, even more to protect. You tell yourself this, over and over and over.

On top of all that, you have him—your partner, your pillar, your best friend.

Well, had.

You sort of hate him now.

He should not have left you. Maybe it's selfish of you to say so. After all, you're sure he missed his parents, though he never spoke of them. You're sure he had a life in the city he wanted to get back to, even if he didn't say so (after all, you did once, too). Yet when he stepped on that train and out of your line of sight, that sinking, twisting feeling of once ago came back like a sucker punch to the gut. For an instant you despised him—how dare he show up out of the blue, share in the darkest parts of you, and then leave like it meant nothing? (That was unfair, you knew—he promised he'd be back. He promised he'd call, if not every day, then at least every week. You wanted that to be enough, but you felt sure that it wasn't). You despised his city-friends, too, the ones he'd had, the new one's he'd make. You despised them for what they knew and would know of him, for what you did not know. You despised them because they were not you.

It was selfish and it sickened you, but for all that you weren't sorry. You weren't sorry, because by then you had learned that being sorry for how you felt didn't change the fact that you felt it.

The feeling didn't last long, anyhow. As quickly as it had come, your hatred fled and all you wanted, more than anything, was for him to be happy. Sure it was cheesy, but it was the most honest you'd ever been with yourself, and you thought that maybe if you'd had a brother, this was the kind of love you'd feel.

That was then, and you know better now. Love is fire, not only because it is warm; it is fire because it burns.

The room is small and sterile and white, and you feel you are choking. The empty drone of the heart monitor is taunting, as insistent as a Shadow, and there are no words left. There are no defenses, nothing to hide behind and nothing to fight against. Yet all the same, you do fight. You've had to accept a lot of things, but not this. You refuse to—you cannot—accept this.

You came here with so much rage, with so many accusations to fling in his face. You meant to grab him by the shoulders and shake him awake, to shout at him and to punch him until he ached as badly as you did, until he opened his eyes. The moment you arrived everyone looked at you with shoulders tight and jaws clenched, like they knew you would go off, like they expected it even, and that pissed you off even more (he would have laughed, to see you so enraged; you know he would have laughed). But the moment you saw him, lying there like a broken promise, there was nothing left; only flashes and white hot fear. Suddenly you felt tired, so, so tired, and resentful too—towards him, towards the others, towards yourself.

The ground beneath you trembles.

You try to articulate to him how betrayed you feel (far in the back of your mind you are ashamed of feeling ashamed at a time like this for baring your heart in front of so many people), but all you manage is a strangled laugh.

Nanako squeezes your hand, and you realize it's not the room that's trembling. It's you. And the faces whirling round and round are still, while your head spins relentlessly and your vision swims.

You're pale, says Yukiko, or maybe Chie.

Get him a chair, says Kanji, or Dojima.

You miss the chair, but Naoto, small thing that she is, catches your arm and eases you into the seat. Nanako brings you water, and you pick at your scar. You pick and you pick and you pick.

No matter how deep into yourself you go, you do not wake up, and neither does he. That is the cruelty of a lucid nightmare. You know this better than anyone, except for maybe him.

( He's shared his nightmares with you, his lucid terrors, being trapped alone someplace small and cold, knowing he's asleep and being unable to wake. He trembled when he told you, though you weren't meant to see it. You weren't meant to feel the coldness of his skin, but his hand brushed against yours as you walked. Maybe as a rule you were generally tactless, but at that moment you'd kept your silence. It was something in his eyes that stilled you, something bright and all-consuming that you have never been able to shake. The memory is more potent than ever, pinned to the front of your mind. That withering loneliness—you wonder if he feels that way now. The thought of it makes you sick.

You'd join him if you could, but this isn't the TV World. He's not lost in any dungeon you can find your way into. There's no monster you can protect him from with a Persona. It is one of the few times he needs you, and you can do nothing. )

You promised yourself you would never feel powerless again, yet here you are, more powerless than ever before.

For now you wear this powerlessness, this hatred, like a suit of armor. While the girls and Kanji cry, while Dojima scowls and Naoto crosses her arms so tightly you briefly wonder if they'll snap, you sit in your chair and stare at his empty shell, listening to the computerized rhythm of his heart. It is the most beautiful and the most wretched sound you have ever heard. It is the song of his life, the last thing he will ever communicate to anyone. It is his serenade.

Its sudden ending leaves a hollow echo in your chest. You can't stop laughing, even though you have never felt so cold.

You cannot hold on to anything. This you have learned fully, intimately.

Saki is gone, and the scar is barely visible (but then again, you've made it a point to never look at it directly).

He is gone, too. Slipped away, without ever waking.

It is a gaping wound, but one that doesn't bleed for all the ice that stops it up.

(Teddie is gone as well; was never, you later realized, at the hospital to begin with, though youreally try hard not to think about that.)

You are still partly under the impression that this is all a dream, that your resentment at his leaving Inaba carried over into a harsh nightmare, but you have never dreamed of ordinary day-to-day monotony like this.

The demands of the teachers do not change. The demands of Junes's customers do not change. The world does not stop and fall apart, as you had always suspected it would with the loss of your partner. In sleepy Inaba, it does not even rain. Life is as it was. You have lost what's most important to you (as have Chie and Naoto, Kanji and Yukiko and Risette; you can't forget about them), yet nothing around you changes.

Your old man insisted you take a few days off, but in the dead silence of your bedroom, you missed Ted's rambunctiousness. At least while you are working, his absence is a distant feeling, one held at arm's length. You are able to treat it as though he's gone to buy some ice-pops and will return at any moment. There is no other way you can touch his disappearance and still survive.

You consider going into the TV to search for him, but somehow you know that he won't be found. There is no pain or panic in your realization, only exhaustion, and resignation. It is not like you to give up like this, and your partner would have chided you for having so little faith—but this wasn't a matter of will, or even of believing hard enough. You know Ted is gone, and that is why you can't stand to think of it. Not directly. Not now. Bit by bit. One loss is enough.

For now you tread softly, sweeping up the glass, glimpsing your thousand thousand reflections from the corner of your eye and not meeting the gaze of a single one. Eventually, you'll have to scoop them up with your bare hands. Eventually, you'll have to gather them to your chest and try to reassemble the pieces, to make some sense of the altered image you'll surely see there. Eventually, you will have to let your wound bleed and clot and scar. Right now, though, a scar is not intimate enough. Right now, you don't have the energy it takes to let go of anything else.

For as long as you are able, you will hold on to him, and hold on tightly. You will grip the nightmare with all your strength, to be near him, to feel what he must have felt, trapped alone in his own mind. In this, at least, you will try to understand him.

His memory will fade, as all things fade, but not now, not now.

They become a mantra for you, those words. You murmur them as you bike to school in the mornings, repeat them in your head as you drum your pencil against your desk, repeat them, even, while grinning at customers like you're not lost and alone and gasping for air.

You repeat them in the dark, your eyes wide open and your heart drumming its own steady serenade in the crushing stillness of the night.

"Not now. Not now. Not just yet."

~FIN~