Hello everybody! This is a new submission, obviously, to this site. I'm right now trying to lower myself from the Persona 4 high in that I played nonstop to read the very captivating story. It's a very great game with a great story line to it. It even pose a few moral questions to it like what is the dark side of myself and what I truly fear the most. It really makes you think sometimes, and that's what I like about games like this.

Now this part is just me ranting, but I have to get it off of my chest. America rated it as an M game, but I think it's really more of a high T game. I mean, the only signs of M are an abundance of curse words from a certain main character, a few phrases made from a certain "newborn" that sounds a lot like older teenage lingo trying miserably to pick up a girl, and Shadow versions of the characters who represent the hidden feelings of their hosts and magnify them by a hundred. By a show of hands, how many of you think that this particular Persona game, along with Persona 3 since those are the only ones I've played as of now, is more of a high T rated game...?

But in all seriousness, I was inspired by this when watching a particular hospital scene in the game. I won't say what it is for those of you who haven't played the game before, but it was at the point just before your choices dictated which ending you'll see. For those of you who know what I'm talking about, good for you.

I know that scene is completely different from what I got here, but it ended up making me cry like a baby. In essence, this scene was born from said sadness and tears. That and I figured it fit this character whom I'm writing about pretty well, at least for the first part of the game.

Just as a warning, this story will be between somewhat to a lot OOC. I'll keep certain aspects and details the same since I can't see them as anything else, but the character portrayal might be a bit different. Just a little warning for you all who don't like sort of AU stories and are purists.

But yeah, that's enough of me ranting on about stuff you're probably not interested in. Before you're done reading, please leave a review telling me how you feel I did. They are always very helpful and I take the constructive criticism with a grain of salt.

And as a final note, this is a one-shot. However, I might expand on it if my mind can make it work. I would also like all of your opinion on whether or not I should continue it. Until the next update on any of my other stories and maybe even possibly on this everybody!


Chapter 1: Thoughts of a High School Loner

For me, going to school is like a punishment, a sentence that I never deserved and forced to serve until the day I graduate. It's a place where I go to constantly be reminded of what I don't have by the sight of others being happy.

Yeah, I hate school just about as much as the average high school teenage student does. All the work we're bombarded with by our teachers with the expectations of getting them done by the next day at the least; the expectations that both teachers and parents hold on us so great that it could easily suffocate someone; it was just typical school that induced typical stress on your everyday, typical high school student. Honestly, it isn't like we're going to die if we fail, but it wouldn't be in the best of interest to do so for anybody.

However, it's not for these typical reasons that I hate going to school. I can make due with having to stress over every piece of homework shoved under my nose with the thought of being done by tomorrow. I could survive the sometimes overwhelming strain that expectations from everybody brought about whether purposefully or not. Hell, I could even make it through an entire day of classes without falling asleep if my life depended on it, which it kind of did a couple of times due to threats from my teachers of detention. But that's not what I want to talk about right now.

What really made it feel like punishment for me was what most students tended to look forward to the most. That was hanging out with friends and joking around with them with playful teasing, being able to help each other without having to feel awkward asking for it. Yes; I am a high school loner of the Yasogami High School in the sleepy countryside town called Yasoinaba, or Inaba for short. This was the punishment I feel that I have to live through every time I go to school.

To be a loner either means that you do not want to have the company of people around you or you just don't have anybody who you could be blessed enough to call a friend and hang around with. That's how I tend to define that term, at least. For me, the latter of the two implies more to me. Apparently, I have some kind of aura surrounding me that keeps people away from me unless there was something really important people want to ask me about. That, however, rarely happens.

Then again, it was not as if this was completely due to the fact that I'm inept at making friends, although that probably did play some small part to where I am now. What probably played a large factor in all this was the kind of life my parents have that ties in directly with their jobs.

I was born into a successful family who had the unfortunate luck of working for a company that constantly relocated their employees under the pretense of further extending and bettering their business. That, in turn, means that I get transported from place to place; but at least all of them are thankfully within the region of Japan and not overseas where there'd most likely be a language barrier. These constant changes forced me to enroll in lots of different schools, all of them different in how they ran and when they taught certain things. Luckily, I haven't fallen behind in my studies, but this current school that I've been in for a couple of months is going to be my sixth transfer since elementary school.

Hopefully, Yasogami High is going to be my last transfer. After all, I'm less than two years away from being a legal adult, and I'm not going to be moving with my parents again if they were relocated again after that. It's not like I hate my parents for having to constantly move around the country or anything like that. I completely understand that their jobs might perform moves that were less than favorable with them. That didn't mean that I was going to be happy with it, however.

But because of all these relocations, I…started to have problems making friends when middle school came around. I used to be a pretty easy kid to connect with before then, but the moves, three at the time, that I went through started to get to me. I became more distant in that I didn't want to get attached to people I didn't know when I was going to leave behind all because of my parents. At the same time, middle school tended to become that certain point of time where teens spent more time with their already made friends than they did making new ones. So it was practically an emotional double whammy for me.

Another reason why I tend to have a hard time making friends is because of the fact that I'm probably one of the many other students in Yasogami High who are "in the closet," so to speak. For those of you who don't know what it means, let me spell it out for you. I'm gay. I don't like to flaunt it around, and I have no intention of doing so anytime soon.

I had a bad experience with this during my final year of elementary school. I tried to confide to someone I thought to have been my best friend that I was gay. Needless to say, that plan badly backfired, and I soon found myself dunked in a thankfully clean and empty garbage can waiting for someone to help me out. At least I moved away again a couple of days after, so I didn't have to worry about my "friend" blabbing to the school that I was gay and having to live it down. Talk about being lucky in the unluckiest of situations…

Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that I have a hard time making friends because of all this. I keep to myself for two specific reasons. I don't know when I'll be moving again, and I don't want people to discover that I'm gay and have the whole elementary school scene replay itself with ten times more intensity than just being dunked into a trashcan. That and I also kind of fell out of practice with the most likely easy process when middle school came around. The only people I could probably even consider to be my friends are my parents being that they know a lot about me.

With that said, it doesn't mean that they know I'm gay, and I intend for it to stay that way. My dad, who had found himself as the General Manager of the shopping megastore called Junes here in Inaba, keeps going on about how he wants me to take over the business with a wife who would support me and grant him healthy grandchildren. My mom's not so much on the business side in that she doesn't want me to keep being moved here and there, but she would still like to have grandchildren to call her own. How could I break it to them that their only child isn't likely to be having kids in the near future save an artificial insemination procedure with a willing woman? Then again, I wouldn't really mind the idea since I do want to have kids, but I'll be caught dead if I start out as a single parent.

But that's beside the point. Being that my parents are really the only people who care about me, I can't tell them that I like guys. They're both quite homophobic. I only stumbled upon this when they said that one of their coworkers was gay and having an open relationship with another. Needless to say, I don't want to get kicked out of my house anytime soon in a strange town with nowhere to go.

…Boy, I sure took a big tangent from what I was originally talking about, huh? Then again, I guess that tends to happen when I voice my thoughts like this. At least nobody, not even my parents, can hear what I'm saying.

It's pretty much late in the night right now, and I have to go to school tomorrow. That's another boring weekend spent at home doing homework and strumming away on my guitar down the drain. Not like I'm not used to it or anything like that…

Heh, I say I'm used to it, yet I'm starting to tear up right now. Embarrassing, isn't it… Why can't I have a normal teenage life with a stable life and friends? Why am I a loner…?

At least I can say one thing about all this. I just need to keep on believing that everything's going to be alright when the next day comes. Now if only it would come soon, because waiting for the next day is getting more painful every passing day. I never thought that I'd actually think or something like this…, but I'm starting to wonder if allowing myself to disappear will make everything better…?

I'll cross that bridge if it ever comes to it. For now, I, Yosuke Hanamura, am going to keep on going while trying to keep my head held high, even if it's really for show more than anything else.


Well, now you know that I was putting this story under Yosuke's point of view. I just could really see this scene unfolding in my head as if it really happened. Yeah, he's pretty energetic and stuff, but I figured he could have had another side of him that he was not afraid of per se. It'd be more like a part of himself that he could somewhat handle rather than what his Shadow said about him in his game that he feared.

To be perfectly honest with you all, most of the details about the friends closely relate to how it was for me during my middle and high school years. Yeah, I added the gay part to make the story more interesting, but everything else pretty much ties closely to what I went through being a loner during middle and high school. And for the record, I would never think about suicide. I have too much in my life to look forward to for such a sad thought to enter my own imaginative head. That detail was only meant to help soup up this story even more. Only the friend part relates to me in any way possible. I guess that's why it was easy for me to write this down as an AU scenario because it's related to me.

I'll tell you all this now. Being a loner as in having nobody to call as a friend, or at least the feeling you can't because of the awkwardness you feel, isn't an easy thing to be going through. It's like you only have yourself to rely upon, and it's just hard to get out of the loner status when you already have a hard time making friends. It's not easy, but I guess I'm one of the lucky guys who managed to get around that.

I ran top miles in my P.E class, so I got some respect for that. I beat a well-known football coach in a fifty yard dash in an attempt to cut our weekly mile run in half, and that meant more respect. And I climbed a rope, the ones that just dangle in the middle of the gym room, using only my hands. Take note that I'm not muscular in anyway whatsoever and pretty skinny, so everybody was surprised I could do that.

Anyway I'm starting to get way off topic here. As I said in the first note, this is a one-shot currently. However, I'm thinking of making this into a multi-chapter thing depending on how well received it is with all of you. So please don't forget to leave reviews telling me how you thought of it and if you would like to see more on this. Until the next update to any of my stories or maybe even this one everybody!