After Minato lost consciousness in the ending of the original P3, probably becoming much like one of the brain-dead Lost, I don't think his friends or relatives would have kept him on life-support for a number of years. I've read up a bit on Japanese medical practices regarding brain-dead patients (those with no hope of recovering their consciousness and whose bodies can only survive on permanent life-support) and because they take a slightly different view of death (for whatever reasons, you can ascribe much of it to Buddhist / Shinto practices), it is less likely for Japanese families to preserve the lives of the brain-dead. That is not to say it does not happen, of course, and Minato is the messiah that saved the world from destruction, and Mitsuru does have the wealth to keep Minato on life-support, so maybe Minato's body was preserved. But I didn't choose for that to happen in my fan fiction. So here are Yukari's memories of Minato's formal passage into the next world.
I also decided not to do the visions of all the other cast members like Fuuka, Mitsuru, and Akihiko, though I had initially planned for them. But the concept of these visions was already done in FES: The Answer, so I didn't want to spend too much time on it. I'll probably give a few details of what each of these people saw as they tumbled down towards the second Shadow that Fuuka sensed in Matsue, but that stuff comes later.
Next chapter will be titled: Minato's Story!
-OrpheusT
PERSONA 3: INHERITANCE
CHAPTER 4: The Final Death
Yukari slumped against a wall inside the Nagasaki Shrine. She tried to suppress the shaking of her shoulders. Slowly she reached for the top of a nearby bench and slowly she started pulling herself upright. But the spasm of her fingers betrayed her half-way through. She fell down and hit her face on the floor. With one ear to the floor she could hear the priest's sutra rumbling through the wooden planks. Yukari covered her ears. She felt a terrible compulsion to plunge her hands deep into the hollow of her ears, to gouge out the nerves of her eyes. But the weakness of her hands frustrated her.
"I will not watch this again," Yukari said brokenly. "I refuse to go through this charade!" She thought of night and the dead vacuum of space and tried to empty her mind. But despite all her efforts she could not slow the coming of the nightmare.
She remembered standing at the head of a line inside the Nagasaki Shrine. At the priest's signal she wetted a cotton ball in a basin of water. Then she came forth slowly, one somber step after another until she stood before the still body. She dabbed the moist cotton against its lips once, twice. After that she proceeded to the far end of the chamber. Looking back she saw the line massing forward, hands indiscriminately reaching for the cotton balls, tediously separating them from one another. One of the hands belonged to a sickly young man. His nose twitched at the strong smell of incense. He sneezed in his hands and wiped them on his pants. Picking up a piece of wet cotton he walked to the body. Yukari watched him spitefully from the corners of her eyes. Dirty despicable hands. How dare they touch his body? She thought of a hundred different ways to kill the offender. She pierced his body with arrow and sword. She shot his head from the front, the sides, and the back. She amputated his limbs and let him bleed to death. She castrated him and let him bleed to death. She tied weights to his feet and cast him into the Sea of Japan. Yukari started running out of ideas. The ceremony was almost over.
Yukari remembered washing the naked body. The skin was cold and pale, especially around the shoulders, the buttocks and the heels. These parts had lain closest to the dry ice packed at the bottom of the coffin. At the time she had lifted the corpse into the temple bath. The body was lighter than she had expected. It did not yet smell of rot but rather of a mild and fragrant sweetness. She filled the bath with lukewarm water and rubbed the soap down the smooth length of his limbs. Then she rinsed and dried him off with a towel. Dressing him in a white shirt and a black suit, she carried him back to the coffin. The priest took him away. After that Yukari didn't know what to do next. She went to the women's washroom and turned on the tap of a sink. Then she looked at her hands. They still carried the scent of soap and an undefined sweetness. Yukari started to put her hands under the sink and hesitated. Studying her hands more closely she could see flakes of dead skin clinging to the nubs of her fingers. Yukari took a deep breath and washed her hands thoroughly.
The next day went by like a blur. The priest chanted another set of sutras that morning. Then he gave the body a Buddhist name. Yukari could not understand the meaning of the name's characters. Mitsuru said it was taken from an ancient Japanese script. But all Yukari knew was that the body could no longer be called Minato and then she began to despair. After the ceremony the guests paid their final respects and left. Yukari placed a bouquet of pink gerberas on the body. She waited for the coffin to be nailed shut. Then the priest dragged the coffin into the back of a truck. Yukari got in with Mitsuru and Aigis and the priest drove them to the crematorium. In a small room painted white they watched the body slide into the furnace. Nothing told them the body was being burnt but a single light switched on, a sullen orange light. But Yukari could imagine the inside of the furnace, a resurging flame that incinerated everything in its sight, that once carried her hopes and her dreams and burned so brightly she thought it could never be doused. Yet before she knew it he had vanished before her eyes and even now she could not fully believe it.
One hour and twenty minutes later an employee of the crematorium stopped by and turned off the furnace. He offered his condolences to the party and told them to please wait fifteen minutes for the machine to cool down before checking the ashes. Yukari and Mitsuru went to the shop at the front of the crematorium. They looked up and down the aisles for an appropriate urn. Mitsuru ended up choosing one. Then they walked back to the furnace room. Yukari slid the furnace open and took a pair of chopsticks in her hand. Aigis stood behind her and Mitsuru waited by the far end of the room with the urn. Yukari sifted through the ashes for the prominent bones. The priest standing by her side told her to pick up the bones of the feet first. She took one of the charred bones between her chopsticks and passed it to Aigis. Mitsuru told Aigis to pass the bone to her. Dropping the bone in the urn, Mitsuru clicked her chopsticks and told Yukari to hurry up…
The images flooded Yukari's mind. She kept remembering more and more of what she had desperately tried to forget these past three years. Her throat strained tight and her mouth gaped open like a silent scream passed through, never ending and never relenting. Her eyes flew open and she lowered her hands from her ears. She recognized the scene of the repeating nightmare. She was back at the funeral rite listening to the final sutra. The priest would soon give Minato a new name and never again would he rise from the dead.
Yukari got up on her feet. She walked up the aisle to the front of the shrine where the priest raised his hands benevolently. As she passed by a murmur gathered behind her like a wave and gained impetus with her every step. When the priest ended his sutra, Yukari seized one of his bony hands lifted in benediction. The priest could not decipher her face's expression. He asked her, "What's the matter?" Yukari broke the priest's wrist with a quick easy snap. "No more," she said. "Never more." Then the priest howled in pain and the audience howled in outrage and the space collapsed around them howling like a whore raped over and over.
And then she was alone. It was as if hers was the only existence that had ever graced the universe. Her heart beat furiously against her chest and she wondered if that was the first sound she had ever heard. She felt on the verge of running away, poised like a deer in flight after the first gunshot. Then from the deep a voice issued forth that named her Yukari. It was not the kind of controlling voice telling her how to feel, but instead something like the trickling of a stream over the rocky terrain and she knew it could be trusted. For the first time in three years Yukari laughed freely. The nightmare was finally over.
