Title: The Monsters at the End of the World
Rating: mildly NSFW (gore)
Wordcount: 8656
Summary: As the world turns obliviously toward its end, Aigis is the only one who remembers. She's also the only one hallucinating a dead Ryoji.
Note: Let's put sad icing on the sad cake of the bad ending and garnish with Persona 2 sad sprinkles.
Glass shatters at the edge of Aigis's hearing. Koromaru whines; no one else seems to have heard. In three milliseconds, she determines that her sensors are functioning normally, the trajectory of the sound, the shortest path across the lounge to the stairs, and that there is no time to explain anything. Orgia Mode activates before she has completed a single stride.
Fear slows the world and speeds her through it. At the end of the hall, the door shatters against her fist. But she is too late. She knows that she is too late even before she sees Ryoji's body through the cloud of splinters and the blood that has sprayed everywhere. His dimming eyes lock with hers before losing focus.
Minato turns, lowering the Evoker from his temple, but his red-spattered face is still in profile to her when he collapses.
Time shudders and inhales. Ryoji's corpse vanishes; his blood evaporates. The broken door reassembles itself, displacing her hand. When sound returns to the world, it is without voices or anxious barking.
She cries out his name. She has been crying out for some time.
The door opens, and Minato stands behind it in his pajamas, squinting sleepily. His face is clean. "What is it?" he asks, as if she is malfunctioning in the most tiresome way possible.
When she only stares at him, wide-eyed and lost, he closes the door.
They don't know each other anymore. They don't even know themselves. Aigis's halting attempts to interact with them go nowhere and spark no recognition. Every time they see her, they seem confused, as if she slips from their minds each time they lose sight of her.
She finds Koromaru living at the shrine, and while he is pleased to let her scratch behind his ears, he regards her as a stranger. When she tries to explain, because her synaptic circuits feel as if they will burn out if she does not, he gives her a comforting nuzzle and no indication that he understands any of it. Dogs, even very intelligent ones, do not entertain hypotheticals.
When night falls, she keeps a vigil outside the school. The clock strikes twelve, and it remains a school, just as the moon remains white. She has no idea what to do.
As she stares at the dark windows, methodically querying her every relevant memory, a voice beside her says, "I'm so sorry."
Aigis leaps away from it and automatically enters combat mode. Before she has a chance to question her reaction, she finds herself questioning her senses.
Ryoji cannot be standing before her, soaked in his own blood. Yet he absorbs and reflects light, blocks her view of what is behind him, and fills her olfactory sensors with gore. Her fingers level at him, pointlessly poised to fire. "What are you doing here?"
"I have no idea. Maybe you're hallucinating me." He shrugs. "In any case, I really am sorry. You have a human mind, so I didn't think it would matter that you don't have a human brain."
He just keeps talking, as if she can't see the severed ends of his carotid artery through the gash in his throat. After a few seconds, her stare seems to make him self-conscious, and he tugs his bloodied scarf up over the wound.
Still she stares, unable to reconcile him with reality. If she were a dog, the past would be swept away to accommodate the present; if she were human, she would reshape her memories and perceptions until they fit together. Since she is neither, she struggles.
"You can't be real," she says slowly.
"I know. The world couldn't exist in this state if I were."
A glitch she can understand; for the first time in her existence, an incomprehensible flaw in her systems is the least alarming option. She is probably a glitch herself now, a weapon created to operate in a hidden time that never existed.
Warily, she lowers her arm. "Although my acquisition of memories is similar to a human being's, my memories reside in my data banks and do not degrade with time. I can recall every piece of information as clearly as when I first obtained it."
"That must be the problem." He frowns thoughtfully. "Maybe I am sort of real, then, if I'm burned into your memory."
Maybe this is what she deserves for sealing him into an innocent child so many years ago. "He had no intention of killing you," she says, without half the anger she intends. Anger is still new and strange, and it's difficult to direct strong emotions at what must be a processing error. "We had all agreed."
"I changed his mind. I won't apologize for that." Ryoji looks away from her, up toward the moon. His eyes are unsettlingly bright with what might be tears. "As glad as I am that they won't suffer now, it pains me that I haven't spared you the same. If there's any way to erase—"
She turns abruptly and walks away. His voice carries after her much longer than she wishes it could, but at last she loses him under the rumble of car engines.
Attending school is pointless, but it allows her to be close to the rest of what used to be SEES. When they are together in a classroom, they can't shut their doors or avoid crossing her path. During class, she twists her head just far enough to the right to stare intently at Minato, as if she might transmit her memories to him. He glances at her once, blankly, and adjusts his headphones under his hair.
She smells blood half a second before Ryoji says, "Isn't he beautiful? Though I guess it's vain of me to say that."
The other students give no indication that they've noticed a corpse in their midst. His shadow falls only over Aigis's arm; her desk receives uninterrupted light. His voice is at a frequency well within the range of human hearing, but no one else seems to register it. From the way his leg intersects with the corner of her desk, she assumes that the space he appears to occupy is open to all mass except, perhaps, hers.
When she refuses to respond, he asks, "Am I bothering you? I just thought that you must be terribly lonely, existing like this. I know I am."
"I do not feel sorry for you," she replies sharply.
Mr. Ono pauses his lecture to frown at her, but his expression smooths away before he says anything. The other students' gazes focus on her for only a moment before drifting away, as if they found nothing to latch on. Tales of the Sengoku Era resume.
In her peripheral vision, she watches Ryoji squat to her eye level. "I don't want you to feel sorry for me. I want to find a way to help you."
"Your help is unwanted."
This time Mr. Ono concentrates on her long enough to ask if she'd rather stand out in the hallway than listen respectfully. She melts from his attention and returns to watching Minato, who is slumping into a nap. She can faintly hear the music leaking from his headphones.
The worst part, she thinks, is that not all of her anger can stick to Ryoji. Betrayal embitters her grief.
Ryoji shifts closer. His blood-soaked scarf sags, giving Aigis an unwanted view of the tattered flesh fluttering with each breath he shouldn't be taking. His smile is almost contented. "Look, he's not afraid. When he sleeps tonight, he can dream of a beautiful future. Would you really want to rob him of that and give him nothing in return but despair?"
Aigis excuses herself to the hallway. Class goes on without her.
Ryoji waits for her every morning when she wakes, but he never follows when she turns her back on him and walks away. She comes to think of him as a gauntlet she must run to escape the crushing darkness of her dreams.
He always opens with "Good morning," as if she might one day concede that he contributes anything pleasant to the start of her day. As a followup, he might apologize again, or ask her how she feels, or confess that his understanding of machines is limited to Minato's vague impressions of how computers work, or tentatively suggest something involving magnets. The last is the only one that riles her into responding; she feels the need to defend the honor of her solid state drives.
By mid-January, she no longer gives him the chance to say more than two words.
At first her days are spent lurking, usually in the school or the dorm. Occasionally she follows one of her friends through the city. She has no need to engage her stealth protocols, as no one notices her for long, and she would doubt her own solidness if she didn't leave footprints in the sparse dusting of snow. She brings food and blankets to the shrine for Koromaru; each time he greets her as a stranger. Sometimes she sees Ken there as well, but he never notices her, and she can never bring herself to intrude upon his prayers.
She stops going to school first. She leaves the dorm soon after, when she realizes that the pain in her chest resonates most strongly when her friends stare through her. It doesn't matter where she sleeps; she feels no discomfort from the cold, and the only danger left for her is the steady forward creep of time. With aimless steps, she memorizes the city. Pedestrians flow around her as if she is a problem they don't want to have.
The moon waxes and wanes without incident. The world is a hollow egg that no one else realizes will never hatch. When February arrives with no more meaning than another page torn from a calendar, Aigis wanders the streets restlessly until she comes to the Moonlight Bridge. Cars rush by, paying her no mind. The gibbous moon undulates upon the water.
The scent of blood mingles with the exhaust fumes. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Ryoji join her at the edge of the bridge, leaning forward on his folded arms. His elbows clip through the railing where he can't quite keep them aligned with the physical world. "If you had your way," he says conversationally, "everyone would be dead now."
Something in her chest twitches, as if her Papillon Heart has been scratched. "Is this the original date of the Fall?"
"It was a few hours ago, yeah. You're up late."
She digs her fingers into the railing, spalling the stone. "Why do you persist in talking to me?"
"Because you're suffering senselessly. What good is it doing for you to be miserable? There must be some way—"
She cuts him off like a sword: "It doesn't matter if you find a way for me to give up my memories. I will never choose to."
He frowns at her. "I wish you would."
"What you wish is irrelevant."
His sigh rolls through his entire body. "Well, it's your choice," he replies, petulantly, "so I'll respect it."
She narrows her eyes at him. "You had no respect for our choice. You took it away from us."
"It was his choice. He was the only one who could make it." Inexplicably, he bats his eyelashes at her. "Maybe if I'd spent some time inside you... Never mind, that went over a lot better in my head."
After a puzzled moment, she asks, "Would Yukari-san hit you for saying that?"
"Probably."
She slaps him and is mildly surprised that she can. His body is cool and solid; his blood feels wet but leaves no residue on her hand.
When he regains his balance, he's mostly through the railing. He steps back onto the bridge before saying, "Sorry. I was just trying to lighten the mood."
She turns back to the water. "If you respect my decision, why are you still talking to me?"
"I won't try to change your mind again, I promise. But please tell me you aren't determined to suffer alone."
Her reactionary answer tangles in the knot of feelings that she still struggles to comprehend. He is lonely too, she thinks, and she finds that empathy operates independently of pity and forgiveness. The alternative is January looping smaller and tighter as the world spirals to its end.
"Are you capable of being quiet?" she asks, even though she knows that the answer will be "not for very long."
Aigis didn't realize how much she missed conversations until she went a month without any that didn't taper off awkwardly or reboot halfway through when the other party kept too loose a grasp on her presence. Ryoji frustrates her almost hourly, but he also remembers from minute to minute and day to day. He finds beauty in the black-and-white world of winter and lends a gash of color to it. Some days, she thinks that Koromaru is on the verge of smelling him.
It is strange to look at him sometimes; when he smiles at the snowflakes falling through him, her memory superimposes the inchoate form of Death. It is stranger when he brushes her arm and she remembers how he effortlessly tore her apart, then cried about it.
A week into February, the Fall still has not occurred, and she still has not determined any action that can be taken against it. When she tries the dorm again, her friends ask one another who she is, and she has already memorized the conversations through which they circle around to determining her status as a dormmate. They never remember her name.
"All you're doing is tormenting yourself," Ryoji points out. "Isn't there anything else you'd rather do with the time you have left?"
"I would rather create more time," she replies. Sometimes she frustrates him, too. "How much longer do we have?"
"Why do you want to know? So you can dread it more with each passing day? I'm going to spare you that, at least, whether you like it or not."
With no other leads, she begins visiting every Kirijo lab she knows the coordinates of. Some of them are no longer labs at all; the rest have nothing to do with Shadows. Still she explores them, half-noticed, and combs through petabytes of data. Ryoji follows and does a poor job of pretending that he isn't humoring her.
"I can tell you more about Nyx and the Fall than ten thousand books," he tells her as she runs another series of database queries. He has trouble grasping the scale of digitized information. "It doesn't matter. Knowing more about the inevitable doesn't make it any less inevitable."
Coming up empty, she moves on to the next database. "The Kirijo Group caused this. If my memories remain intact, their systems might still hold information from the incident ten years ago. We cannot be certain that there is no way to prevent the Fall until we have acquired all relevant data."
"But—"
She turns away from the terminal to give him a pointed look. "We cannot be certain."
He sighs, conceding nothing. "Say, do you think Fuuka-san has files on her laptop that she doesn't understand?"
Information about local building codes marches up the screen. Aigis attempts to retain none of it. "If she does, she hasn't said anything about it. I see very little of her, however. Outside of school, she seldom leaves her room."
"She's very kind. She cried for me, as if I deserved anyone's pity."
As Aigis scrolls through more results, she watches him out of the corner of her eye. He has been failing to physically interact with a small pile of office supplies and now appears to be trying to align the tip of a pen with his death-wound. She hopes he doesn't intend this to be for her entertainment.
She has almost given up when she comes across a strange cluster of deleted data, much of it already overwritten. Little is salvageable, but what is arrests her attention: database entries for victims of the disaster ten years ago, listing both their official and actual causes of death.
None of it is useful, but she copies it into her memory regardless. Near the end, she discovers something that, if not useful, is at least startling.
She turns from the screen to Ryoji, who has settled in on the floor, pretending to lean against the wall. "Did you know that he had a twin sister?"
He nods. "He used to wake up crying about her. I was very curious about it. Of course, this was before I had the capacity to be anything but curious."
Blunt force trauma, according to the file, with burns sustained mercifully postmortem. Officially, a car swerved into the side of the bridge; in truth, a car was seized as a shield and then hurled as a projectile. At the time, she thought nothing of collateral damage, and of course neither did he. They are neither of them human, and they were both born pitiless and single-minded.
"We killed her," Aigis says, unnecessarily.
"His parents, too. I know." Ryoji tips his head back and lets his rent throat gape wide. "We've been terrible for him, haven't we? I'm glad he's getting to live a little while without us."
By mid-February, Aigis has exhausted Kirijo's systems and come away with nothing to avert the Fall. She goes back to school because the building might still have some tenuous connection to Tartarus, and also to keep herself from retreating into the habits of January. Ryoji, her shadow, tags along.
"When I thought I was human, I was really looking forward to Valentine's Day," he tells her as they wait at the monorail station. "What about you?"
She looks at him askance. "I never thought that I was human."
"Don't be like that. C'mon, which boys were you planning to give chocolate to?"
"I wasn't." Flustered, she stares down the length of the track and wills the train to arrive faster. "Why would I?"
"Not even giri-choco? How cold!"
She's more frustrated than curious, but at least he can't ask questions while he's busy answering. "I don't understand. No one ever explained Valentine's Day to me."
He does, at great length, for most of the monorail ride. It sounds like a holiday based on elusive social subtleties. Aigis can't imagine simplifying her emotions into a box of chocolates and leaving the recipient to puzzle them out, only to find the challenge returned a month later.
"At least give some to Junpei-kun, okay?" Ryoji says when it becomes apparent that she wants nothing to do with any of it. "I don't want him to feel lonely."
Stopping to buy some makes her ten minutes late, but this earns her only a half-hearted reprimand that peters out by the time she reaches her seat. Minato doesn't even glance at her.
The other students have boxes and bags and variously giddy and apprehensive demeanors. No one is paying attention to Ms. Toriumi, so it probably doesn't matter that her lecture has devolved into complaining that Valentine's Day isn't actually until tomorrow, and isn't everyone supposed to ignore the holiday in the workplace when it falls on a Sunday?
During lunch, Aigis catches Junpei in the hall and presses the box of chocolates into his hands. His face lights up as it hasn't since November. "Wow, really? I mean, a stud like me's rollin' in chocolate, but I'm really gonna cherish these, 'cuz you're..."
He looks away, brow furrowed, and scratches the back of his neck. After giving the chocolates a look of bemused delight, he squints at her as if she is an optical illusion. She walks away before he can say anything else.
"Thank you," Ryoji says. "You just made his week."
"Do we still have a week?"
"I wish you'd stop asking about that." He drifts halfway into the classroom. From the angle at which the back of his head pokes through the door, he must be looking at Minato's seat. "You gave all of that chocolate to Junpei, right? There's no one you want to give any to?"
She remembers the hand warm against hers as her damaged systems failed, the soft smile absolving her of her ruthlessness, the nod that she didn't realize was concealing doubts, the blood-spattered profile in the dark. She can imagine no chocolate bittersweet enough.
The school roof is not the Observatory, but it evokes memories of the first time her heart prevailed. At the time, she did not understand the significance of her defiance, nor the greater significance of her never considering whether it was proper for a machine to override its instructions. It is not true, in retrospect, that she has always understood the motives for her own actions. In retrospect, she chose to live long before she realized it.
If she were less entangled by emotions, Aigis might be able to detach herself sufficiently to ask what would have happened if she had obeyed Ikutsuki's directives. As it is, she doesn't want to know. She too often allows herself to become lost in the Dark Hour that never fell at the end of January.
"The view is breathtaking, isn't it?" Ryoji stands beside her, and unlike her, he is paying attention to the way the sun glints from fixed metal and flowing water. "I know it's cold, but it's a shame no one's up here confessing their love today."
February is half over, tumbling irreversibly toward spring. It is unlikely to snow again.
"Today is Sunday," Aigis points out.
"Exactly. It's more romantic if you have to sneak in."
Sometimes she wishes he wouldn't try to cheer her up. At least he appears to take the hint when she doesn't reply, and they spend a while gazing out over the city in silence. She tries not to consider what it will look like after the stillness of the Fall descends.
At length, Ryoji asks, "So did you come up here to confess something? Or were you hoping I would?"
"Neither."
They are quiet again. The world below is distantly alive, its organic parts hidden in gleaming vehicles and tall buildings. This time Aigis is the one to break the silence: "When I returned from the lab, the night before New Year's Eve, I pleaded with everyone to kill you."
"Really?" This is the first time she's seen Ryoji look surprised since he awoke to his identity; she takes some small satisfaction in the wideness of his eyes. "What changed your mind?"
"They all did. They taught me that my purpose could change and that could I choose a new one for myself, and so I chose to live. We chose to live."
He nods. It would be asking too much, she supposes, for him to look guilty for the one thing she wants him to regret.
"How did you change his mind?" she asks.
"I just told him the truth, again. I think the choice became starker once he was alone with it. Why suffer so much for the sake of something as fragile as memory?" Ryoji's fingertips trace idly over the ruin of his throat. "In the end, he made the choice that would be impossible to regret."
The betrayal sits inside her like a magnet, drawing all other emotions to it with such force that they shatter. Everything she feels about Minato is a mess of shards. She would give him chocolate studded with glass and grieve when he bled.
After a long silence, she asks, "How did he kill you?"
Ryoji raises his eyebrows and works a finger into the gash in his throat.
"I will be more precise. Which Persona did he summon?"
"You know, my Valentine's Day fantasies were a lot less morbid than this." Just when she has determined that this is Ryoji's way of refusing to answer, he says, "Thanatos. That's how I knew I hadn't really changed his mind, just tipped him over. He came prepared." His finger strokes the edge of the wound. "It didn't hurt much, if you're wondering. That sword is very sharp." He pauses again. "In that moment, I was the happiest I've ever been."
She wonders how it would feel to shiver. Letting her gaze slide away from his throat, she says, "The night that I returned from the lab, when everyone told me that I could 'live' alongside them and determine my own purpose... that is when I understood what it means to experience happiness."
Unexpectedly, he takes her hand and sets it against the intact side of his throat. The flesh is cold; she detects no heartbeat. His scarf clings wetly to the back of her hand. His expression suggests that he is trying to tell her something, but she can't understand.
When she pulls her hand back, he smiles sadly and says, "I wish I could make you happy."
February ends on a full moon, and Aigis's panic waxes in time with it. She has found nothing—not in the Kijiro labs, not in the school, not in the dorm. For two months, she has been a pebble hoping to change the course of a river. There is no logic to her efforts and no foundation for her hope.
On the twenty-eighth, she brings a bag of dried meat to the shrine and offers it to Koromaru. As always, he regards her warily for a moment before warming up to her. He takes the meat from her hands with careful nips, unaware that he would be the one in pain if he bit her.
Her distress has no scent, but he seems to understand it. When she wraps her arms around him to feel him warm and rhythmic with life, he snuggles and licks her face. His breath smells so heavily of beef that it reminds her faintly of Akihiko's. Touch is comforting, though she has difficult pinpointing when it became comforting for her.
Ryoji's shadow falls over her, and only her; the reddening light passes through him to reach Koromaru. He extends his hand down to her and says, "The sunset is especially beautiful today. We should enjoy it."
Her Papillon Heart twitches as if caught in a spiderweb. "Does that mean—"
"It means the sunset is especially beautiful today. Please don't read anything else into it."
How can she not? She curls her fingers in Koromaru's fur as she thinks herself in tactical circles, weighing his determination not to tell against the chance that he is hiding the truth in plain sight, the odds of reverse psychology against the possibility that they have both been worn down. She considers ignoring his hand but feels petty for it. As she lets him help her up, Koromaru trots in circles around her feet.
The best view is at the top of the jungle gym, so she climbs up to where Ryoji drifts to approximate sitting on the top bars. Koromaru settles in beneath her and indicates that he would be happy to eat any more meat that she might happen to drop.
Whatever else Ryoji might be, he isn't a liar; the sunset is indeed beautiful, rich with reds and golds that have significance beyond stimulus for her visual sensors. From its first conscious thoughts, humanity has imbued the sun with meaning. It unsettles her to imagine the sun dyeing the sky of an indifferent world.
Ryoji is suspiciously quiet. "How will it happen?" she asks.
He glances sideways at her before returning his gaze to the horizon. "Well, it'll be orange, and then sort of purple, and then the stars—"
"Are you mocking me?"
"Of course not. I was just hoping you'd let me get away with not spoiling the mood for once." The look that he lets linger on the sunset is almost a pout, but his expression is earnestly gentle when he faces her. "It'll be quick, I promise. Without the Dark Hour, without me, there's no ceremony. You probably won't even notice."
"I don't want it to be quick," she replies firmly. "I want to prevent it."
He shakes his head, catching the ragged flesh of his wound in the threads of his scarf. "This was all set into motion by immensely powerful cosmic forces, long before the dawn of human civilization. Trying to stop the Fall is like trying to kill gravity."
She sets her shoulders stubbornly, body language that she learned from Mitsuru. "But the Fall is occurring now because of human actions. If it was possible to hasten the coming of the Fall, it must be also possible to delay it."
"It was, remember? That's why we're having this conversation now." Ryoji's legs swing back and forth, passing through the bars. "Look, isn't it your purpose to live? No one gets to do that indefinitely. This desperation that drives you can end only in despair."
Her shoulders stiffen further. "My purpose can change. More and more, I believe that my purpose is to change."
He gives her a look she can't decipher before asking, incongruously, "Did you know that you've started to tremble when you're upset?"
"What does that mean?"
"You tell me." He pauses to drag out a breath. "It won't happen today."
Aigis is flooded with relief so intense that the excess turns to anger. A soft clatter rises where her trembling limbs touch the bars. "Then why were you leading me to conclude that it would? Why were you toying with me?"
"I wasn't. Do you see why I wanted to spare you this?"
Below, Koromaru senses her distress and whines. She bends down to reassure him, but he refuses to believe her when she insists that she's all right. At last, in desperation, she throws a leftover piece of meat all the way to the far fence and watches him take off after it. By the time he devours it, he will have forgotten about her.
When she looks back up, Ryoji is crying. He has turned away and hunched his shoulders, shaking with the effort of suppressing sobs. Uncertainly, she sets her hand on his back, and he stops trying to hide his face in his scarf.
"I'm sorry that you're here," she says.
His next breath is loud and shaky, halfway between a sob and a laugh. "I'm sorry that you're here, too. I hope we both mean that in the same way."
Nodding, she lets her hand fall. "Please don't think that I have forgiven you for persuading him to kill you."
"I wouldn't ask you to. Please don't think I've apologized for it, either."
As the world turns over into March, pale green buds begin to appear. Each day, the sun spends longer above the horizon and lends a little more warmth to the air. This is her first experience of spring.
Ryoji is never more than a half a meter from her side. When she investigates unfamiliar scents, she must filter out the abattoir smell that has become her olfactory baseline. She commits every sensory input of a young plum blossom to memory, as if it dearly matters.
Aigis tries to take some small satisfaction in graduation day, as if her friends have struck some unwitting blow against the Fall by finishing the school year. She watches Mitsuru stand on stage like the discarded chrysalis of who she should be; she watches Akihiko arrive almost at the end of the ceremony, no doubt after lingering again at Shinjiro's grave. She listens to the second-years casually dismissing their futures.
There is no satisfaction to be taken here, after all.
"Let's follow them," Ryoji says, as Minato falls into step behind Junpei and Yukari. "I did karaoke with Junpei-kun a few times. It's fun."
It's still difficult not to hear his suggestions as attempts to distract her from the moment of the Fall. But the Fall still has not come, and by now she is almost inured to the little jolts of suspicion. She has long since run out of practical ideas for finding a way to deflect Nyx; either people-watching and animal-feeding and stargazing will somehow give her the spark of inspiration she needs, or she will fail. The Fall will not be mitigated if it comes while she is fruitlessly querying data that she already knows to be useless.
"I have never participated in karaoke," she replies as she begins to walk. Her gaze sticks to Minato, whose hair tangles in the cool breeze. "Am I correct that it involves singing?"
"Yeah, they take the voices out of songs so that you can put them back in. The place at Paulownia Mall even rates you on how much you sound like the original. Oh, and there's a little plastic tambourine."
Four meters ahead, Junpei says something that doesn't make sense, and Yukari shoves him. His protestations of innocence make them both laugh. Minato says nothing, but his head turns just far enough to the side for Aigis to glimpse his small, close-lipped smile.
"I've never sung before," Aigis says.
She has managed to surprise Ryoji again. "You lived with him for all that time, and you never started singing along with that home shopping show he can't get enough of? You know, 'Here comes Tanakaaa, over the airwaves to youuuu...'"
He loops through the jingle twice before she hesitantly joins in. Precisely pitching her voice presents little challenge, but she can feel something lacking. When she recalls what others have said to her about music, she hits variations on the word "feel," over and over. She consciously lets precision slip and emotions bleed through, most of them inappropriate to the content of the lyrics.
Minato glances over his shoulder at her, but his gaze slips away like water through a clenched fist.
By the time they arrive at the mall, she has learned how to harmonize. She falls silent as she slips into the room in Mandragora, which is so small that she could easily become a burr lodged at the edge of everyone's attention. Ryoji falls to humming, weaving together strains of jingles and theme songs and melodies that overflow from Minato's headphones.
Junpei orders four drinks and seems confused when he is able to distribute only three of them. With a shrug, he hooks two straws into mouth. Yukari selects a song, then passes the device to Minato. The kaleidoscopic colors of an upbeat music video fill the screen. When Junpei answers his phone, Yukari elbows and scolds him, then in the same breath begins to sing.
They are, Aigis supposes, happy.
Minato glances up for the first time as Yukari raises the microphone for the second verse. It picks up the sound of her breath, but no song follows; she collapses, with Minato and Junpei following so quickly that their faces don't even register surprise. Soft thuds overlap throughout the bar, each one like a physical blow to Aigis's chest.
The music plays on, emptily, under her cries.
Her hand has scarcely touched Minato's shoulder before his body softens like ice cream in an onsen, and she is left clutching his empty jacket as darkness pools on the floor. Her world shrinks to this moment. For the first time, she wants to forget. She wants no meaning to attach to loss.
Ryoji pulls her back against him. His cold chest heaves with sobs. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. You shouldn't be seeing this. Just close your eyes, please..."
The darkness begins to congeal. Within seconds, the bar will be overrun with Shadows. If she powers down now, she will never power on again. Her shoulder is sticky with blood and tears.
Awkwardly, balancing against Ryoji's weight, she rises. The Shadow's form is still unsettled when she opens fire. Furniture splinters. By the time she stops, the Shadow has been shredded to nothing, and the puddles of empty clothing are riddled with bullet holes. Her feet clatter against the wooden floor as she runs for the exit.
"Why are you prolonging this?" Ryoji's voice breaks on each breath. "What could you possibly hope to accomplish?"
A shattered door piecing itself back together. Forcing her fear inside-out, she guns down a newborn Shadow blocking her access to the rest of the mall. "I will not give up."
The mall is overrun. The floor is an oozing mass of Shadows, bearing clothes and shoes like flotsam. The rising cacophony is all the more horrific for its lack of human screams.
Aigis processes the scene in half a second, which is all the time she has before the flood surges toward her. Orgia Mode would be a countdown to suicide; instead she summons Athena to clear a path down the stairs. After so long, summoning her Persona feels almost unfamiliar.
As she charges down the path that is already beginning to close up, Ryoji shouts over the din, "It this because you were made for combat? Will it comfort you to die fighting?"
It would be easier to maneuver without him on her back, but he's still clinging and crying, doesn't weigh much, and isn't attempting to sabotage her. She doesn't have the heart to fling him away. "This is my choice," she replies, and he falls silent.
At the base of the stairs, a blue light catches her eye. The shape of a door glows at the end of the alley. It was not there before. Her decision is instantaneous; she spins on her foot as she lands and blasts her way toward it.
Shadows swarm at her back. If she is wrong, if this is nothing, she will be unable to fight her way back through them.
"Where are you going?" Ryoji asks, but he doesn't leave her time to answer before adding, "Wait, can you see it?"
"I can see a door." Something reaches through him to grasp her shoulder. If she slows, she will be overrun, so she sets Athena on it and focuses on the Shadows in front of her. "Where does it lead?"
"You shouldn't be able to see it. He was the only one who... I don't... None of this is right." Ryoji is clearly too distressed to be helpful. "It shouldn't be happening this way."
The door lacks any visible hinge or latch, but it swings inward as Aigis reaches for it. Without hesitation, she dives into the light.
Her sensory inputs are overwhelmed; even gravity pulls from impossible directions. The only grounding input is the smell of Ryoji's blood. All at once the light fades and the world is still and silent, and she finds herself standing in a room covered in blue, with a massive bronze gate filling one wall. Nearby stands a dial with regular markings but no numbers. Its single hand is frozen at three hundred fifty-nine degrees.
The Shadows have not followed. Aigis disengages combat mode.
"He used to come here," Ryoji says. He sounds somewhat calmer as he slides from her back. "This is supposed to be an elevator, I think. It was always rising before."
Through the gate Aigis can see grooved metal walls and a slit of light near the ceiling. If this room is indeed an impractically large elevator car, it would appear to have come to an unplanned stop. "Why did he come here?"
"Oh, various reasons. Mostly he fiddled around with cards and ran errands for an entity that looked like a beautiful woman. It was all very strange." Ryoji sits down on a plush blue chair, the more comfortable-looking of the two available seats, and he genuinely does appear to be sitting; when he twists to watch Aigis over the back of the chair, he leaves bloodstains on the upholstery. Before she can remark on this, he adds, "When I say 'beautiful,' I mean absolutely stunning, by the way. Much better-looking than the other one."
Sometimes it's impossible to tell whether he attempts levity for her comfort or his own. "Do you mean that there were two others here? Where are they?"
He shrugs. "She used to go out with him sometimes, so I don't think there was anything stopping either of them from packing up and leaving whenever they felt like it. And if he really was the only one able to enter this place, well..." With a sigh, Ryoji folds his arms behind his head. "Funny thing, I met her before he did. She found me in one of his dreams and gave me a contract for him to sign. And after that, she never talked to me again."
Aigis frowns. "What were the contents of the contract?"
"Just something about accepting full responsibility for his actions. You know, the usual stuff." His brow furrows. "Actually, is that the usual stuff?"
Neither her programmers nor her teachers taught her anything about legal matters. She shrugs, and Ryoji tips his face toward the ceiling with a pensive, troubled expression.
Returning to her exploration of the room, Aigis peeks under one of the heavy blue cloths draped over a tall, rectangular form. Beneath is a door, though she can see no way to open it, nor anywhere for it to lead. A squatter draped form proves to be a giant mirror, and a smaller one is an easel holding a blank canvas. The large shape on the side of the room opposite the gate is a dusty piano. She has no idea what to make of any of it.
The gate is solid and lacks any visible latches or hinges. Frustrated, she makes her way back to the chair, and Ryoji scoots over to make space for her. The large mirror reflects her alone.
The quiet presses in. She is glad that he feigns breathing to keep the silence from becoming absolute.
Eventually she says, "I never signed anything."
He nods. "Your intent was clear, though, which I assume is what matters. It isn't as if I gave him a literal piece of paper."
Speculation sits less well with her than empirical evidence. "For now, we should focus on our current situation. If this elevator used to move, there must be a way to resume its motion. We can't go back the way we came."
"No," he says quietly, "I suppose not."
In her peripheral vision, there is unexpected movement on the mirror's surface. Her initial impression is that the mirror has suddenly begun to reflect Ryoji, but the details immediately disprove this: the reflection has Minato's hair, only longer and tied back, and wears a white mask. In an instant Aigis is on her feet, fingers poised to fire at it.
Unlike Ryoji, the impossible reflection moves the visible portion of its mouth, and a man's voice carries into the room with a slight delay: "Welcome to the rift between unconsciousness and consciousness."
It is ridiculous to threaten a reflection, but Aigis maintains her stance. "Explain. What are you?"
"This never happened before," Ryoji interjects, eyes narrow.
The reflection appears not to have noticed him, though it leans forward as he does. "I am the one who called you here, and I am pleased that you accepted my invitation. Your circumstances are unique."
The lack of synchronization between mouth and words would be less unsettling if it weren't so subtle. Nearly right is somehow worse than clearly wrong. Aigis readies Athena at the forefront of her mind and says, "You failed to answer my question."
"I am Philemon, a dweller of this rift." Still this is not an answer, but it is clearly not the reflection's intent to provide a useful one. "Now that this timeline is dead, I may interfere more directly with it."
To hear the obvious spoken aloud is painful. Before Aigis trusts herself to speak again, Ryoji asks, "Are you responsible for this? For her suffering?" Again he is ignored.
"I invited you here," Philemon continues, "to give you the chance to create a new world, at a price."
Aigis cannot imagine what she has left to offer as payment. "What do you mean?"
"This world is beyond saving and has been for some time. What I can offer is the chance to alter a single point in the past and give rise to a new timeline."
His words are a jolt to her Papillon Heart even before she has processed their sounds. It is New Year's Eve, and the lounge is quiet. They are anxious but unafraid, their hearts united in hope and purpose. The silence is broken by a creaking door, followed by two sets of footsteps.
Ryoji's hand grasps at her arm, and Philemon's does the same to her reflection's. "I can practically hear what you're thinking, and please, don't. You don't understand—"
She interrupts him to ask, "Is December 31, 2009 within your parameters?"
The visible half of Philemon's mouth curves downward. "That night's events cannot be usefully altered. The human mind is complex and unpredictable, as well you know, and I cannot take control of his will. Is there any single external factor that you are certain would change his mind?"
There can be no knowing precisely what happened inside his head. Aigis is quiet for a moment, cleaning up the remains of one dashed hope to make room for another. "What events can be usefully altered?" she asks, and Ryoji's grip on her arm eases.
"Those of the first Dark Hour, on November 23, 1999. Everything before has already been agreed upon."
His phrasing twists inside her.
"Then there's no point," Ryoji says. "The fate of any world in which I exist has already been sealed. Tell him to do better."
"This is all that I can offer," Philemon adds, and Aigis wonders whether he might be aware of Ryoji, after all, but declining to acknowledge him. She follows the pull of Ryoji's hand and sits back down heavily, disarming herself.
She has no idea what to do.
In silence, she racks her memories. At length Ryoji says, "If his parents survive, Minato might never return to Port Island. My pieces wouldn't be reunited for as long as he lived. He'd have the chance to lead a normal life, and the Fall might be delayed for decades."
Aigis shakes her head. "That is not a solution. Upon his eventual death, you would be released to bring about the Fall."
"You're not still trying to prevent the Fall, are you? It's impossible. I'm just trying to create a kinder fate for him. Isn't it your highest priority to protect him, too?"
"My purpose is to change."
In the mirror, Philemon sits beside her reflection and watches her with inhuman patience.
It is late autumn, which means nothing to her. Her visual processors adapt quickly to the unnatural green glow of the moon. There is an enemy she must defeat; nothing else matters. The trouble is that there can be only two outcomes: Death is either sealed away or free to hunt and consume its stray parts, and there is only one suitable vessel in which to seal it. She cannot be made strong enough to destroy that which cannot be destroyed.
Yet Philemon clearly knows that something can be changed and is waiting for her to discover it. The combatants are fixed. The Dark Hour cannot be unmade. There are frozen automobiles, transmogrified civilians, a bridge, a boy, and a burning car full of corpses. Aigis finds herself trembling.
"He had a sister," she says slowly.
Philemon gives her the thin edge of a smile. "Do you understand? The best chance of a different choice is to appoint a different chooser."
"No." Ryoji grabs both her hands, and now he too is trembling. "Don't you understand that it won't do any good? One way or another, it will come down to the same choice, and you're hoping she'll choose the one that dooms you all to crushing despair. Do you not understand how cruel that is?" By the end he is crying so hard that his words are difficult to understand.
She raises her hand, and his with it, to wipe his cheek. "We had hope," she reminds him. "We will have hope again."
"Your hope is a towel in the ocean. Nyx wouldn't even notice it." His hand slips out of hers. When she pats his shoulder, he lets out a sob. "I'm so sorry. You're comforting me and I—I shouldn't even..." He breathes deeply, tattered throat shivering, as if to calm himself. "I wasn't made to love. It makes me unreasonable."
To give up one world in which Minato is dead, for another in which he dies even younger—Aigis forbids herself to consider the issue from this perspective. It does not matter what she feels, how intricately sorrow and anger are cross-wired inside her. There is a vast world beyond him. She too has become unreasonable, despite the best efforts of her creators.
"I cannot do nothing," she says. "If there is a chance, however slight, I must take it." She keeps her hand on his shoulder as she addresses Philemon: "Is his life the price you spoke of?"
The mask renders his eyes unreadable. "The price of a new world is necessarily the memories of the old."
There is nothing funny about it, but Aigis feels the urge to laugh. In the end, he made the choice that would be impossible to regret. Then she laughs regardless, because she has never laughed before.
"Don't you realize what that means?" Ryoji's voice is sharp. "Maybe you've already made this choice a thousand times. You'd have no way of knowing." He glowers at Philemon, who gazes back impassively.
Perhaps he is right, and she carries the ghosts of dead worlds inside her like fog breathed on a glass circuit board. She falls silent and turns the possibility over in her mind before replying, "The alternative is unacceptable."
Ryoji slumps, eyes low. When he speaks, the edge is gone from his tone. "I wish you could accept that this was the least of all possible evils for everyone but you."
"And also for you?"
"I don't count." He breathes deeply again, then faces her with a wet and crooked smile. "I won't try to change your mind again. Regrettable as it may be, this is your decision to make."
She remembers the heat of Minato's hand, her only solace against her first experience of fear. In the three-point-eight seconds before her systems fully shut down, she prioritized this tactile input above the chill of the air and the hardness of the bridge beneath her. At the time, she did not understand why.
Ryoji's hand is cold, as is hers, but touch is comforting. "I wish I could make you hopeful," she says.
"You'll make me forget not to be. Isn't that the same kindness I wished for you?"
She must not focus on her memories of awakening with a dormant heart, certain and ignorant of her purpose. It will not truly be she who awakens, after all, no more than the dead will be returning to life. There is nothing to be gained by delay, nothing else unsaid worth saying.
She sets her hand gently on Ryoji's throat and watches his eyes close. When she turns to Philemon, she finds his eyes open and pitiless. "I accept."
The odds of victory are less than one thousandth of one percent.
Aigis cycles through her library of combat tactics, discarding each as insufficient. Her opponent cannot be defeated. She cannot fulfill her purpose. Without hesitation she recalibrates to determine the least sub-optimal failure.
Restricting herself to defensive maneuvers, she scans the area for a suitable container. The corpses will not suffice, nor will the coffins, neither whole nor splintered. Outside one of the crushed vehicles is a small human female. Her injuries are minor.
She will do.