I ain't got nothin' - Atlus is the banker. "After the end" stories operate at various levels of standalone, but all intertwine. Thanks to user Emmychao for being a sounding board. I write these for my wife, even when the stories are sometimes about SMT games she hasn't yet played. Next time, honey!

[V. Hierophant] The Fuse and The Wick

(Three Bikes, Three Hearts, Three Memories)

There was shouting from the Chief's office, and possibly thrown things, and everyone could guess who else was in there. Everyone kept glancing at Officer Satonaka, who shifted uncomfortably, and went to wait by the door for her partner to emerge. They made this part seem like so much fun in those movies.

When he finally emerged, head bowed low, she wondered if facing a Shadow would be enough for a guy like him.

She fell into step behind him. "How about food?"

The police chief watched as Officers Satonaka and Sanada walked away, framed by the closing door. He'd assigned them together on purpose, but even he was a little surprised how quickly they'd taken to each other, even if neither of them were quite aware of it. Now, what did that remind him of?

He settled back in his chair, and looked at the single photograph on his desk. It was of his beloved younger brother, who was also an officer in the Tokyo police department. It had been taken upon his graduation from the academy—he was holding his cap and beaming into the flash. He looked, in that photograph, like he had his whole life figured out.

It was for that smile that police chief Katsuya Suou had given up everything.

There was a cop bar down the street, where Katsuya would go sometimes at the end of his shift. Most of the officers there answered to him, and so they'd give him polite nods or raised glasses. The man who sat in the far, dark corner that Katsuya always came to see, though, he always snorted like Tatsuya was a private joke that only he understood.

Officer Kurosawa had a pair of shots lined up for them already, as he always did. Katsuya slumped into the booth and downed it without looking.

"Hard day at the office?" Kurosawa always sneered when he asked the question. They had come up through the academy together, years earlier, and he knew better than anyone that to Katsuya, getting bumped over to a desk was essentially a punishment.

"Don't start. It's your protégé that I'm always dealing with, you know."

Kurosawa chuckled, waved the bartender to bring over two more. "I thought you'd settled that."

"I put him in check, that's all. Kid's like a wolf on a tether."

"You only say that because he reminds you of you." Kurosawa studied his empty shotglass. "You both like to bite off more than blah, blah, blah..."

"Right." As if the older officer hadn't been dealing the kid weapons under the table for a year. "I forgot how you always keep your nose clean."

Kurosawa shrugged. "Seems like it all worked out. How's Tatsuya? Heard he's making waves."

Katsuya rolled his eyes. "My brother's running out of places in his house to hide all the commendations. Kid's going to get himself killed one of these days."

"I suppose..." He accepted the glasses handed over by the bartender, "...That it would probably make things easier for you, hmm?"

Katsuya removed his dark glasses and glared at his friend. "That isn't remotely funny."

"I didn't say it was."

Sometimes, Katsuya would pick up the phone, and he would dial, and he'd get the newspaper office's receptionist on the line before he would hang up. He'd pad around his tiny apartment in his boxers, feeling sorry for himself, and then try again.

He knew he shouldn't—he always managed to hang up before it was too late—but sometimes, he just wanted to hear her voice again.

It was, no doubt, for her benefit that he'd taken Sanada under his wing, and then done the same for his rookie partner. That he'd renewed ties with his old drinking buddy. For Maya Amano, the only thing better than flowers would be information, and they were both sitting on opposite ends of the story of the century.

For all the good it was doing him, since calling Maya, trying to reach out to the person he loved, would be sentencing his brother to a living Hell.

He could hear her telling him to "Think positive." But that was easier said than done.

He'd take his heavy dosages of antihistamines, and let his cat jump into his lap, curl up and purr. He'd look at his phone, and make a different call, instead. His other great secret.

"I understand your frustration, Katsuya, I do." Maki Sonomura rubbed at her eyes and looked at the clock. The chief of police had a tendency to call her at frightful hours. She sat up in bed, her husband stirring slightly before resuming his snoring. "But you can't keep calling like this. Maya's a smart woman. If you're making all of these calls, she's going to figure out who you are, and I can't imagine she'll be thrilled."

He grumbled something on the other end of the line, and she eased her way out of the bedroom, cradling the phone under her ear as she grabbed her robe.

"I know, I know..." She sighed. "Maya had to make a very difficult choice—you both did—but it's for Tatsuya's benefit, and more than that, the repercussions of..." She winced as he replied with something cutting. "No, I'm not accusing you of not taking it seriously." She filled a glass with water from the kitchen sink. "Katsuya, hold on a moment, please."

She held the phone away from her head and slowly gulped the water. She woke up with dry throat often; sinus problems, too, tended to plague her. Compared to how it had been, there was no question which she'd prefer. But the persistent, lingering reminders of a life spent bed-ridden could hardly put her at ease, either. Especially when her sleep was so often interrupted by a patient whom she helped for free. Becoming a psychiatrist had, on the one hand, eased her mind considerably—every person that she helped made up just that little bit for what she'd nearly done—but on the other had left her at the beck and call of a half-dozen neurotic and crumbling Persona users.

"Okay," she said finally, placing the glass on the counter, "Katsuya, honestly, this needs to stop. You know this as well as I do. Now, I'm here to help you work through things, but I can't be just a voice that you call upon to commiserate with after you do what you want. That's not healthy for either of us."

Her patient mumbled something.

Maki settled into a chair in the living room and let him mumble as much as he wanted to. She tried to blink away sleep. Yukino still called her often, as well, both distraught at losing touch with Maya, as Katsuya was, but also slowly coming to terms with no longer having access to her Persona, a devastating loss that Maki wasn't entirely sure how to help her with. Some of the others, too, from time to time, and for various reasons.

And those were only the non-paying clients. She had a full docket most days, now: just recently, a singer had been referred to her by that charity group, the Kirijo Foundation; apparently "Haru" had been trapped in the Tokyo Lockdown incident, and she was a handful on her own.

There was a rustling behind her, and she turned to see moonlight glinting off of a single earring. Her husband had woken up. She offered him a weak smile, and he waved sleepily before staggering off towards the bathroom.

Katsuya seemed to have worn himself out. She offered him some reassurance, and finally hung up the phone with a sigh. Sometimes, she thought, Katsuya's problem would be the one that she could not help. How did you tell someone to stay away from the one he loved, when she almost surely loved him back?

Once a week, Katsuya and his younger brother met for lunch at a restaurant not that far from the station. It was the rare place that met his high standards—while he didn't get to cook for others as often as he'd maybe prefer, and seemed to do so even less the longer it had been since the battle with Nyarlathotep, he still couldn't eat at a place that didn't serve food that he couldn't make himself, or better.

Not that Tatsuya seemed to notice. He wolfed down food quickly as he talked excitedly about his current case load, or intrigues in his branch of the force. Katsuya would nod, fingers twitching for a cigarette (had he always smoked, or had losing her started that?), and wonder if he was starting to resent his younger brother, the one he'd doted on for all his life. Wonder if he was even beginning to hate him.

Katsuya and Kurosawa were leaning over their usual table, perusing reports of incidents that might be Persona-related. They had, in particular, a lot of questions about the Kirijo Foundation, around which Katsuya's old "friend" Kei Nanjou had been seen a great deal of late. Nanjou's company was merging with Kirijo's; Kurosawa had known the Kirijo Group back when they were big-league firestarters, and neither of them were comfortable with the development.

"Have they called you up?" Katsuya looked at his friend.

"My wife and I, both." Kurosawa didn't talk about his wife much. She ran a small antique shop, and supposedly she used to wear a labcoat. Beyond that, Katsuya hadn't asked. They were friends from wayback, but not that kind of friends, where you tried to get to know each other. You were usually too busy jumping in front of bullets for each other, instead.

Or maybe Katsuya was just that self-involved. Of course, Kurosawa was kind of an asshole, anyway.

"And what do you think?"

"I almost slammed the door in their faces. They put my wife through Hell the first time." He sniffed, and then picked up his pint glass. "Were you downtown for the big Lockdown?"

"Couldn't get near it."

"Probably for the best." He held up his glass as if he were toasting, and then downed half of it.

Katsuya leaned back, and tried to frame everything he knew in a big enough picture, but no matter how big he made it, he couldn't contain it all.

"Chief?" Satonaka sat down across the desk from him, and played with her hat. He just looked at her. "What do you know about Officer Sanada?"

He frowned. "Is he bothering you?" As if he didn't know.

"No, not exactly..." She blushed. Oh, good Lord. "He's just real tight-lipped, and I though, maybe..."

Some part of him wanted to give her a treacly speech about not 'denying her heart,' while another part wanted to shout her out of the office. Instead, he sighed.

"He grew up in Iwatodai. Tatsumi Port Island. You ever been there?"

"Yeah, actually." She blinked. "Huh."

"Maybe you can chat about the old neighborhood or something."

"Thanks, Chief." She slapped her hat on and headed out of the office.

"Hey, Satonaka."

"Yes, sir?" She turned.

"Nothing. Never mind." He picked up some paperwork, and she shut the door. Tatsuya smiled at him from the photograph.

He went down to one of the firing ranges, where Tatsuya was lining up a shot against a paper silhouette. He waited for his brother to take his shots, and then approached as he was pulling off the giant headphones. "Hey."

"Oh! Hey." Tatsuya hit the switch to bring the silhouette up to the firing line. He had a nice tight cluster around the bullseye. "What are you doing here?"

"I was wondering if I could get your help with a case."

"Oh?" Tatsuya blinked in surprise. "You never ask me for help."

"Yeah, I know." He took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. "Maybe that's... I could use some fresh ears."

"Shoot." Tatsuya looked at the bullseye. "Or, you know, whatever."

Katsuya replaced his glasses and pulled the silhouette from its clips. "There's one for the fridge."

"Knock it off." He slugged his older brother in the shoulder. "What did you need?"

"Well." He curled the paper into a tube. "There's a business under suspicion of being a front. They're smarter than the average perp, though... Their books are clean, they've got powerful friends..."

"Like, an organized crime thing?"

"Organized is a word, that's for sure." He slapped the tube against his palm. "We keep probing all the angles of this thing, and we're coming up short. It's too risky to put someone on the inside. We might be entirely wrong about them, as it is, but they're damned suspicious no matter what they're doing."

"Well..." Tatsuya stuck his hands in his pockets. "Who's the weakest link in the chain that you know of? Is there someone that can be pressed under a pretense?"

Katsuya frowned. That was the question, wasn't it? He'd been living his life for years as though Tatsuya was the weak link, the one that fold them all under. But really, it was him that was the weak link. Sometimes, he barely recognized himself anymore.

Tatsuya was still thinking it over. "You could claim it was mistaken charges after the fact. Just sweat them out, like on a drug charge or something, and see if they leak anything to follow upwards. If you don't make it about the big business, they can't be sure you're on them."

"It's not a bad play." He nodded. Except that Kirijo kept her people off of the streets. But Katsuya didn't want to tell his brother any more, lest he start exploring it on his own. And he couldn't be sure what it would take to set him off. "Hey, I'll buy you a coffee."

"Sure." He gathered his things. "I brought the bike, though. I shouldn't go too far."

The bike. Katsuya almost took a step back. "No, that's... fine..."

He had to talk to Kurosawa. Maybe there was a way to get someone on the inside.

"You think the bikes are an angle?"

"You said that Kirijo was a motorcycle enthusiast."

"Well, sure." Kurosawa scratched at his face. "But you'll never get her on a violation. She's the cleanest driver in Japan."

"And second place would go to Kei Nanjou." Katsuya nodded. "But the two of them have to be riding them together. We both figure they're thick as thieves. They couldn't resist that. It's a way in."

Love was always leverage. Katsuya understood it better than most.

It was a good plan, until Tatsuya volunteered to be the cyclist.

He appeared outside the bar one evening without warning, with his helmet under his arm and an all-too-proud grin on his face, a dead-on match for the photo on Katsuya's desk.

"How did you..."

"C'mon, everyone knows you guys are working on something here all the time. I asked around, found out what people had overheard, and made some connections. You think Kirijo's fishy, I'm here to help. Off the record and all." Tatsuya tossed him the helmet. "Unless you think you can match me on a bike."

"I don't want..."

Kurosawa cut him off. "It makes sense. We need someone who can keep up with them."

And when Tatsuya met Kei Nanjou? Which of them would recognize the other first? Or if he learned more than he should about Personas? What if he remembered Maya? There had to be a better way.

But if Tatsuya was locked out, he'd keep snooping. He'd take the case himself, and he wouldn't know to keep the knowledge away from Akihiko Sanada.

"They're not gonna kill him, Suou." Kurosawa shook his head. "I don't know how far I trust them on their own, but I trusted them that far, before. This is about information."

Information for Maya. The one who stood between Katsuya and his brother, holding them apart. And if they were up to trouble, and Katsuya didn't dig it up? He thought about Kei Nanjou. The man had helped them out, but he'd been an arrogant little prick about it, and he'd held things back. He hadn't trusted him then, and like Kurosawa, he wasn't sure how far that extended. Not to endangering Tatsuya, but...

"I've already figured out where they go to race." Tatsuya crossed his arms. "Are we doing this or not?"

Katsuya couldn't figure out a way to call it off without giving the game away.

It was a small village, a few train trips away from the city. They arranged to get Tatsuya and his bike there.

They played it like it was an organized crime angle. They put a wire on Tatsuya, and he and Kurosawa sat in a car and listened in as Tatsuya tooled around the village on his motorcycle like he had nowhere to be. It wasn't long before Kirijo and Nanjou were passing him by, and then the game was on.

The first step was to impress. Tatsuya roared past them on his own bike, did a quick donut in a nearby plaza, and then flew past in the other direction. That annoyed them, without a doubt. When Tatsuya made his next pass, he tossed them a wave. Nanjou, who still had a big blue number one on his jacket, wasn't going to take the insult without showing up the young upstart. And apparently Mitsuru Kirijo was tickled at the idea of a race, because in short order the three of them were tearing up the empty roadway.

Katsuya was looking at himself in the rear view mirror. Sweat was beading on his brow. This was a stupid way to end the world. He thought about his brother out there, and realized what an angsty little child he had been. What would she think of him, as he was now? It was only now that he was remembering why he'd sacrificed so much for Tatsuya. He remembered a burning shrine, and how many times he'd nearly lost his brother... including due to his own personality.

As if he could hear Katsuya's thoughts, his brother spoke over the wire. "Hey, I think it's working. Looks like you worried for nothing, Katsuya." His voice was a whisper underneath the growl of the motorcycle engine. "Let's think positive, huh?"

Katsuya's blood went cold. The bikes kept racing.

A gun tapped on the car window.

Kurosawa and Katsuya placed their hands on the hood of the car as they were frisked. From inside the car, the radio crackled with Tatsuya's tinny voice. "Hey, they peeled off. Do you think they were tipped?"

A red-headed woman with an ugly-looking rifle watched the two cops as she reported in. Then she looked at Katsuya. "My name is Captain Misaki Izuna. And you boys are way out of your jurisdiction."

"SDF?" Katsuya grunted as one of her men finished checking him. Her uniform looked like Self Defense Force, but the logos were sanded off, like an off-brand model.

"Sure, let's go with that." She offered a weak smile and motioned for them to stand with her rifle.

"Kirijo's operatives," mumbled Kurosawa.

"I've been asked not to detain you for too long, but I do have a message from Kei Nanjou." She shouldered her weapon. "He said, and I quote, 'Don't be so stupid, Katsuya. Next time, just ask.' End quote. Bad boys."

The other goons were already climbing back into their jeep. Katsuya kicked the dirt. "She must pay pretty well."

"Let me refer back to my employer's message, here." She shook her head. "Don't be so stupid. You have no idea what they're trying to do. They saved a lot of lives in the Tokyo Lockdown, and elsewhere. You'd be better off signing up."

"And who holds them accountable?" Kurosawa spit. "I helped Kirijo the first time around. Her father would be ashamed at her presumption."

"I'll tell her you said so." She climbed into the jeep. "Have a pleasant ride home, gentlemen. Don't forget to claim your partner." The jeep drove off.

Katsuya looked at Kurosawa. "Well, now what?"

"I'm calling to apologize." Katsuya diced onions and threw them into the pot. "I've been a damned fool, and you've had to put up with it."

"It's not all as bad as you make it out to be." Maki's voice was calm and assured on the other end. "Are you repairing things with your brother, then?"

"He's dozing on my couch right now, with a cat on top of his head." He rummaged through one of the cabinets for the small set of western spices he'd bought. "Lucky bastard doesn't have to dope himself up twelve ways just to pet the thing."

She chuckled. "I know that I don't have to tell you this, but one epiphany doesn't make the feelings go away. You'll find that as you go on, you'll feel that way again, and you shouldn't hesitate to call me."

"Yeah." He sipped at the sauce. "Thanks." He clicked the phone off, and threw a wooden spoon at Tatsuya's rear end, which was jutting upward.

"Eh? Whuzzat?"

"Dinner's ready. Clean yourself up, and quit embarrassing me."

The three of them met in the bar, and Tatsuya slid in next to his brother. Katsuya cracked his knuckles and watched as Kurosawa laid out three shots.

"So."

Kurosawa closed his eyes. "I was half-convinced that you were going to give this up."

"No, I think I have a better idea." He glanced at his brother, and then back to his friend. "I think we need to widen the circle."

Officers Satonaka and Sanada entered his office and sat down. "You wanted something, chief?"

He looked at Sanada, weighing his decision. The picture of Tatsuya offered and encouraging smile. Finally, he leaned forward and entwined his fingers.

"Let's talk."