Persona: His Sapphire Eyes – Chapter Nine
Woken Revelation
Hey there guys! Remember when I said that this would be the last chapter? Well it turns out, I was lying! The next chapter will DEFINITELY be the last chapter, so get ready for the hints that will be revealed to you! I must tell you now that this chapter will end the story, and I'm sorry to say, this will be a short one! Let's GT-R-DONE!
The morning rays of the golden sun finally poked out from the early horizon as it called its silent flares out towards the world. The curtains were drawn open to pour the orange and yellow colours into the room, opening Yukari's eyelids and letting her eyes see the fresh new day.
Her face lit up as her thoughts were cast back to the night before, thinking of that perfect kiss that brought her and Minato into her room for a romantic night. She looked towards the side of the bed that Minato was sleeping on, trying to use her arm to find his body.
After a short while of searching with her arm, her eyes widened to find that he wasn't laying next to her, but standing next to the bed, facing his body towards Yukari's room door which was surprisingly wide open.
He was already dressed and he was stood with hands in his pockets. His head was lowered with eyes closed, showing his expression of sadness and despair, grimacing at certain times as he took a couple of glances back at Yukari.
Yukari sat up, throwing the bed covers off of her, noticing that she was still dressed as well. She knew that she still kept her clothes on from last night. She looked up at Minato and started to feel uneasy about why he was behaving in this way.
"Minato?" Yukari called him with a worried tone. "Are you okay?" Upon being asked, Minato's head was lowered even more and only gave a little nod as a reply. A long silence was left hanging in the air before Minato spoke an unexpected question.
"Do you hear them, Yukari?" Minato asked her, still fixating his eyes on the open door. "Hear who?" She replied, confused as to what he was talking about. His head was lifted. "Do you hear everyone? Can you hear them calling for you?" He kept asking the question, darkening his voice.
"No. Why? Are they calling to say that it's breakfast?" Yukari asked him back, looking at the clock that sat on her bedside table. After a short pause, it seemed that Minato ignored the question. "Come here, Yukari." Minato said to her, sounding as if he was commanding her to.
She immediately stood up and walked beside him, not saying another word. She looked towards the door where Minato was looking, wondering why he was doing this in worry. She looked at him, hoping that he'll look at her. But his head didn't budge, still fixing his eyes on the door. Reluctantly, she looked outside the door.
"Listen closely..." Minato told Yukari. She swept the hair away from her ears and began to listen. A heavy silence filled the room as she did this.
Eventually, a gentle but vague noise was heard from outside the door. "Wait..." Yukari began. "I can hear something." The noise grew louder and louder with every passing second, turning mumbles into whispers.
Yukari walked towards the open door and poked her head out of the porch, looking around the area and trying to find where the voices were coming from, but to no avail. This made Yukari feel more worried about the situation. The whispers then grew into voices that then started to call out her name multiple times.
She backed away from the door, hearing the voices get louder and louder. The voices were familiar and they were getting louder still. Yukari knew that the voices were everyone's voices, calling out to her in pleads, begs and demands.
"Yukari, please wake up!" one voice shouted out. "It's been too long, wake up!" shouted another. Many voices were calling out and repeating themselves to her, causing Yukari's head to pound and ache greatly.
Both hands were on her head, holding the pain that was throbbing in her temple over and over with the voices bashing around in her mind. She started moaning and groaning in agony as the headache started to grow and grow. Eventually, she collapsed to her knees, still holding her head.
Minato quickly knelt down to her and lifted her head up to his with one of his hands. The other was laid on her shoulder. "Minato...help...me. Why...is this happening?" Yukari pleaded to Minato, starting to form a tear in one eye.
"Yukari, all will be explained once you are out of here. I promise you...the pain will go once you open your eyes!" Minato shouted over the voices in Yukari's head. He wrapped his arms around her waist and she threw hers around his, scared about what might happen. "'Open my eyes'? What do you mean? What do THEY mean when they tell me to wake up?" She asked him, looking deeply into his eyes.
He looked at her, as if she knows the answer to those questions. She saw this and turned her expression into sadness. "...No. You mean..." Yukari stammered. "You mean...I've been...dreaming?" She shouted, starting to run tears down her cheeks. Minato cupped her face into his hands, and she laid her hands on his for comfort, trying to hold back the voices thrashing around in her skull.
"Yukari...you are right. But this is no ordinary dream. We both dreamt this." Minato began, already making Yukari slightly confused. "...the bond that we shared so greatly with each other is still there. Our bond forged this dream." Minato sounded just as upset as Yukari was. "I'm still trapped inside this Seal, but the only thing keeping me going is you. You are the reason why I've developed this strength to protect the world." Minato told Yukari with all of his heart. "I love you."
"I know that's right...the fact that you're really gone..." Yukari sobbed over the loud voices. "I just don't want to believe it! I want to respect the decision that you made...but I still wish that you were here...with me!" She finished, sobbing and weeping into his chest. "I feel lost without you..."
Suddenly, the loud racket of the calling voices started to subside slowly, washing away into the tears that Yukari shed for the regained memories of Minato's death. After a long while of comfort from Minato's ghostly body, she composed herself and looked back into his sapphire eyes once more, before hugging him for the last time.
As the silence was brought back into the room, Yukari began to speak again. "It's funny..." She began. "Have you ever had that dream when you see something happen, but you weren't there to begin with?" Minato grinned weakly and nodded slightly to her answer. She continued. "That happened to me...when I saw you being knocked unconscious by Takaya and Jin. And then I found you, thinking that I never knew how it happened...it's weird how the mind works." Somehow, the surprising conversational chat made Yukari feel slightly better, but the tears just kept flowing.
"That just shows how much I need you, Yukari." Minato said to her gently. Yukari broke away slightly from the hug to look at him. "Huh? What do you mean?" She demanded an answer.
"I have my regrets..." Minato said quietly to her face.
Yukari was very confused by those words, but yet felt as if they were important.
Though, it wasn't long before Yukari's eyelids started to droop over her eyes exhaustingly. Her head fell into Minato's ghostly chest and finally felt as if she gliding through empty air. "Minato..." She called his name for a final time.
Her eyes opened into a squint, to see where she was. She looked all around, only to find a whole area covered in black. There was literally nothing around her, but light air that carried her body.
Her room was nowhere to be found, nor a light and sadly, not even Minato. Only an endless abyss of nothingness remained.
After a long while of gliding aimlessly in a heavy silence, a small light was found at the end. She floated towards it, watching it get bigger and bigger as she closed in on it. As the light became brighter, her squinted eyes were closed again as she passed thought it with warmth returning to her body.
"Yukari? Yukari!" A familiar voice called out to her, feeling a firm hand shake her shoulder back and forth. Yukari heard her name being called a couple more times before slowly forcing her weary eyes open to a bright light-bulb that hung from the ceiling above her.
She looked at her surroundings and immediately found everyone gathered around her with relieved looks staring at her. The bed she was laying on stood in a completely different room than where she was in her dream. This reminded her of where she really was. Tatsumi Hall.
"Oh Yukari! Thank goodness!" Fuuka shouted in joy. "Wow...Rise and shine, Yuka-tan! You had us all worried..." Junpei carried on with a relieved tone. "Yukari-san...we thought you weren't going to wake up..." Aigis said as she sat on Yukari's pillow. "Welcome back sleepyhead!" Ken joked with a sigh. Even Koromaru was yapping gladly, knowing that she finally woke up.
Yukari looked at everyone and could only reply to their words with tears that ran down her face, trying not to sniffle. Mitsuru saw this and put a gentle arm around her shoulder. "Yukari...is something wrong?" She asked, trying to get a look into Yukari's eyes. She couldn't get one glance as Yukari covered her wet, puffy eyes with the palms of her hands.
Mitsuru could hear the sniffling and the sobbing starting to choke Yukari, and wrapped her other arm around her, letting her head sink into her shoulder, crying her eyes out quietly.
Koromaru whimpered as he heard her sobs, and everyone tried to comfort her the best they could. They tried rubbing her back with their hands gently, they tried telling jokes both bad and good, and they tried reminding her of good thoughts and memories, but nothing could calm her down by even a little.
"Everyone, I'll take it from here..." Mitsuru quietly said to everyone. "...I'll calm her down." They all nodded to Mitsuru's order and left the room, closing the door behind them.
"Yukari...do you want to talk about it? Was it a nightmare?" Mitsuru asked the weak Yukari with concern in her tone. "I-It...was-wasn't a...nightm-mare..." Yukari stuttered and stammered, trying to fight her words through her choked throat.
Like a child in its mother's arms, Yukari continued to sob into Mitsuru's shoulder whilst she'd comfort her in her friendly arms, rocking her from side to side slowly. After a long while of weeping, Yukari finally calmed down and tried to catch her breath and managed to hold back her remaining tears.
She slowly told Mitsuru everything that happened in her dream, including the things that Minato said to her, saying that her strong bond with him forged the dream and that his soul called her from the Great Seal.
"You dreamt of him..." Mitsuru said as she looked down. "Waking up from it must've been a hard thing for you..." Yukari looked down as the tears that dampened the bed covers.
"It felt so real...it felt like he was still alive. But I had to wake back up, just to carrying on knowing that he's gone..." Yukari croaked, reminiscing the times that she shared with Minato in depression. "I really want to respect his decision but...he meant so much to me...no, he still means something to me..." Yukari's tears were close to flowing again, but Mitsuru used her thumbs to wipe them away from her eyelids.
"We all miss him, Yukari..." Mitsuru began. "But all we can do now is to keep thinking to ourselves that he wants us to be happy...he may have made that decision to protect us, but he may have also done it to tell us that everything is all right now. He wants us to be happy..." Mitsuru's words slightly calmed Yukari down a bit.
She gave a little nod of the head and looked away from Mitsuru, collapsing her body onto the soft pillow. Mitsuru looked at the watch that was wrapped tightly around her wrist and stood up from the bed, walking towards the door.
"I'll be going now. Keep thinking of happy thoughts for me, okay? Say a prayer for him if you need to." Mitsuru said with a concerned voice. She opened the door and walked slowly out through the porch, closing it softly behind her.
Yukari was left laying on her bed with half of her face sunk into the pillow. She remembered the last words that Minato said to her in the dream, replaying it through her head as a slight confusion shot into her mind. "I have my regrets..."
"Regrets? What is he regretting?" Yukari asked herself as her only thoughts of Minato brought back the tears.
For the rest of the day, she stayed in her bed, watching the television as the news was presenting the past breaking news. It was the only channel that was viewable on her screen.
"And now back to our main headline." said a woman who sat next to a male anchorman at the desk. "Thank you." He said as he tidied his papers in front of him.
"Just over three weeks ago, a local Gekkoukan High-Schooler sadly passed away of unknown causes on Graduation Day. This student was known as Minato Arisato." Yukari's head shot up from her pillow as she heard his name being called out from the television screen.
"From paramedics to doctors, the staff of Tatsumi Memorial Hospital worked tireless hours to diagnose the true cause of this unfortunate death. Sadly, the diagnosis resulted in a failure, and the death of Minato Arisato still remains a mystery..."
As Yukari listened to the report, it only angered her more, knowing that the hospital couldn't find anything wrong with Minato whatsoever.
"They worked 'tireless' hours to find nothing? The doctors are so blind! Even we know how he died...why can't they see that!?" Yukari shouted to the TV as she violently threw her cushion at the screen in anger and devastation.
She quickly grabbed the remote and hit the power button, slamming it down onto the floor to cause a small thud. She covered her face with the palms of her hands and let out a sharp and painful cry, sinking her face back into the mattress.
All she could do now was to shed her tears into the bed sheets quietly. She felt lost with everything.
With the feelings of nothingness blackening her heart with a devastated disposition, she continued to cry her eyes out until she cried herself to sleep, drifting herself away from the trauma that still tortures her.
Before she closed her eyes, the same thoughts kept revolving around her mind.
Minato, and the thought that the next morning will be no different.
Her dreams would always start with his sapphire eyes.
And that's the end of the story! But don't worry though, there is still ONE MORE CHAPTER TO GO! I've also got a poll up and running on my profile now, so please vote! Also, so you can get to the poll easily, I've changed my name from The-Darkened-Heart to The-True-Insomnia, keep that in mind! CYA!
