Disclaimer: I do not own Persona 3—or any version of the Persona series, really. I just own this rather shameless piece of work.
Other Notes: Apologies for this taking longer than expected. We're at a rather heavy part of the story, though, so I tried to be careful when writing it. Still, thank you for your patience—my health hasn't been the best either, which also contributed to my poor writing schedule. And no matter how much I appreciate you all, taking care of that, both physical and mental, was rather more important than strictly adhering to an updating schedule. After all, I can't keep writing if I'm not fully there, y'know?
That said, to Animefan1337, from your review on whether Minato and Tamamo's relationship is romantic or platonic… good question. I like genfics and while I like reading about romances, I'm not exactly good at writing them, so my first instinct would be to say platonic. But my living soundboard says that he can see them as being romantic. He says they have that "childhood friend" dynamic—they're so close that it can honestly go either way. Of course, Tamamo lives in Minato's mind so that gives a rather odd spin on things…
Symbiosis
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ramen was, apparently, what the gruff senior had in mind.
Minato blinked, staring up at the shop sign of Hagakure momentarily before hastily following Shinjiro inside. He noticed that the older boy made a beeline straight to a corner of the counter, slipping onto the seat with such familiarity that it was obvious he frequented the place. Which fit, he supposed. The other teen was always wearing that pea coat of his no matter the weather (it was the middle of summer, humid as hell, and yet there it was), so the fact that he would often go for a warm and filling bowl of ramen didn't seem so farfetched.
Feeling almost timid, Minato slipped into the seat next to his.
The moment he was settled, Shinjiro said, "Order."
Not even bothering to question it, Minato thought back to what he remembered of the menu before deciding, "One special. Please."
"Make that two," Shinjiro added, voice barely dropping to a more respectful tone as he addressed the owner.
"Coming right up," the man replied pleasantly before bustling away with a hum.
As soon as the man had turned around, the two teenagers lapsed into silence. Minato shifted numerous times, feeling awkward, but Shinjiro was apparently unaffected, leaning back in his stool with his hands shoved in the pockets of his coat. In an effort to keep still, Minato focused all of his attention on the counter in front of him, staring at the pattern left in the varnished wood, tracing it out with his eyes as it flowed from one corner to another.
How many times would he be able to do something like this before the end? Idling around, waiting for an order of food to be completed? Sitting in a restaurant, looking as though he still had all the time in the world?
It seemed so insignificant. It seemed silly—stupid, even—to worry about. And yet, he did.
In hindsight, he probably should have asked Tamamo about the estimated date of the Fall to get a better picture of how much time they all had left. How much time he had left. But given that each month saw at least one new Arcana Shadow, it couldn't be very far off. By the end of the year, maybe.
"I don't want to die."
Something inside him twisted, ugly and dark and despairing, and he took deep breath through his nose to try and keep from panicking.
It had been his decision to know what information Tamamo had stored in her mind from another life, he tried to remind himself. Everything she told him, it was because he had asked her to. It wasn't her fault that what she said was so upsetting, no matter how much the wounded parts of his mind insidiously tried to blame her for this pain and paranoia.
Again, in hindsight, as much as it chafed at him to not be able to hear her, it was probably best that he had blocked her.
"You gonna eat or what?" a low voice asked.
Minato was startled back to reality, where a bowl of ramen sat, steaming, in front of him. Another bowl was placed before Shinjiro beside him. "Ah, yeah. Sorry—I mean, uh, thanks?"
Shinjiro snorted and reached for a pair of chopsticks as Minato did the same, though the senior was much smoother in movement than his awkward fumbling. As the two settled into their meals, Minato found himself side-eyeing the older boy, feeling very much out of depth.
It was rather rude to judge others by how they look, but this—whatever this was—was not something he expected from the rough-looking upperclassman. Whether their brief run-in at the hospital or in the alleyway by the station, Minato saw the older boy as someone who kept away from others at all costs. That he would intentionally call out to Minato and more or less drag him someplace to eat, even after their accidental run-in on the street, seemed very out of character.
…Then again, Tamamo had told him about something similar, hadn't she? He couldn't remember her exact wording, but he could recall what she meant. That Shinjiro Aragaki was tough, undeniably, but that there was something else buried beneath that delinquent-esque layer.
Minato paused in the midst of calling up everything Tamamo had told him about the senior student, a familiar feeling sinking in his stomach. But unlike the past few days, it was focused on something else rather than his woes.
"Self-destruction," he recalled Tamamo saying.
Because Shinjiro sought to right what he'd done, even if it meant his death.
"Um," said Minato before he could stop himself.
The upperclassman didn't stop eating, but he gave an answering grunt to indicate that he had heard. It was only after several moments of silence that he looked up from his bowl, lowering the hand holding his chopsticks. "What?"
A small part of Minato told him to dismiss it and just keep eating until he could pay the senior back and leave. He ignored it, pulse fluttering with nerves. "This is going to sound weird, but… I've been thinking about this a lot recently and I was just wondering… what would you do if you thought you would die soon?"
There was a glint of something in Shinjiro's gray eyes that Minato couldn't identify, and he forced himself to keep very still when said eyes narrowed into a scrutinizing glare. Then, the moment passed and Shinjiro returned to eating and Minato started breathing again. "You guys doing that badly or something?"
"No…" Minato said slowly, feeling lost as he faced his own bowl, stirring the noodles around. "It was just a thought, I guess."
His ears burned with embarrassment at saying something so dramatic. Were his senses and instincts so skewed now that things could just blurt out like that? If so, he would have to be extremely careful around the rest of SEES…
"If you ask me," Shinjiro spoke up suddenly, making Minato jump minutely, "I'd just keep going my own damn way. My life, my actions." He gave a rough, almost careless shrug of his shoulders. It contrasted jarringly with the rather morbid tone behind his words. "If it's gonna happen anyway, then I want it to be on my terms."
That was, Minato thought privately, a pretty badass way of thinking. If maybe a bit reckless.
Shinjiro continued, seemingly unaware of how Minato hung from his every word, "If I'm gonna die, then I want to make sure that the things I did up to that moment were things that I could be proud of."
And had Minato not known the connections between him and the Ken Amada Predicament, if he hadn't known exactly what reasons fueled those words, he would have thought the older boy a natural hero. Or maybe he still was, if tainted by a dark past.
Regardless, it gave him a new perspective. The thought of dying still scared the hell out of him, but if he were to look at it with Shinjiro's words in mind…
"Thank you, Senpai," Minato said quietly, head bowed over his bowl.
"Yeah, sure," Shinjiro grunted, as if their conversation had been something bland, like Minato asking homework advice and not a depressing topic like death. "You're too goddamn young to worry about that sort of stuff. Now hurry up and eat."
Minato did so, half listening as the upperclassman muttered about poor habits that sprouted up in dorm life and how they'd all better not be on some weird diet like "that protein shit". He didn't know quite what the senior was talking about, but the way he was acting like a particularly brusque mother hen even under his breath made Minato smile.
I think I hate you a little bit, Minato thought as he made his way back to the dorm. The mental block was still up between him and his Other, so he took that time to vent. It's irrational, but I do.
She had kept many secrets from him while he was growing up, which was annoying to be sure. Even after she revealed that she knew much more about his life from her past one, she still kept quiet about many things, only explaining them when they became of immediate relevance.
A more bitter side resented this fact, muttering that she could have acted more quickly. Could have told him to prepare him or allow him to avoid the situation entirely. He also wondered what would have happened if he hadn't asked for her to tell him—if he had backed down or otherwise decided to not hear what she had to say. Would she have just figuratively stood by as he went to his supposedly predetermined death?
But then, as he turned the thoughts around and around in his head, barely registering as he arrived at the dorm building and signed in, he realized how unfair that was.
After all, by some trick of fate, Tamamo existed only in his mind. Or soul. Whichever. She had only so many actions available to her in the first place. Even if she had dumped all the information she knew on him as soon as it was possible, without the context of the events at hand all it would have done was confuse him. And if she had told him to stay away from Gekkoukan, from Port Island and Iwatodai, who was to say he would have listened? He went with her suggestions more often than not, but back then, before he had known of the true dangers of the Dark Hour, would he have taken the threat to his life seriously? All it had taken was him taking a step back into Iwatodai to wake up the Arcana Shadows thanks to a certain other presence in his head. One step and a few days was all it took for him to encounter the first of them and get dragged into the entire mess.
Slipping quietly into his room, he was struck with a thought.
Knowing everything he knew now, he could admit that a part of him resented her, justified or unjustified as the thoughts were.
But for Tamamo, who had known all of it from the beginning…
From the moment she woke up, she had been trapped in his mind, torn from one life and displaced in the next without so much as a "by your leave". She had known who he was, what his fate was, and had been powerless to do anything.
She had lived every day of his life knowing, believing, that he would probably not make it past seventeen, if that. And that she would likely be bound to him the entire way. His Other had never stated at what exact age she had died, but her little storytelling night to both Pharos and him allowed him to estimate her at early-to-mid-twenties. For her to die young once and then die young again, without even a proper body to live in the second time around…
How much do you hate me? he wondered. And once more he was grateful for the mental block because a large part of him feared her answer. It wasn't his fault that she was stuck with him, he knew, but just as he couldn't help but feel embittered about her role in his life, it wasn't unlikely that she felt the same way about his role in hers.
She was his doomsayer.
He was her prison.
Feeling sick at the thought, he turned in early, throwing the covers over his head and pretending, for a moment, that it was only fatigue and that his life wasn't so screwed up.
The last day of summer classes came and went. Minato had taken diligent notes, quiet but significantly less distracted than the previous days. It wasn't even that he felt numb anymore. He didn't know how to describe it. It felt like he was indifferent, somehow, though that word didn't seem to fit either.
Unofficially, he had determined that he was just "a mess".
Still, his friends had seemed relieved at his better mood. The air around Yukari and Junpei had lightened considerably as they spoke during break that day. Kazushi had come around to say hi as well, though he warned Minato to get some sleep and keep up his strength for kendo before Yuko dragged him off, harping at him for something or another.
Students celebrated the end of summer classes and returning to their vacation—Junpei being of the most vocal amongst them—and they more or less quietly returned to whatever routines they had established before.
Which left Minato staring at the calendar in his room the very next morning, realizing rather belatedly that the dorm was strangely empty even for a summer day because the summer festival was going on at the Naganaki Shrine.
Padding over to his bed, he picked up his phone and flipped it open. Sure enough, there were several missed calls and a number of texts asking him if he would be going to the festival that day. Or, as Junpei's read, dude wake up and get your festival on.
Minato flipped his phone shut without replying, peering up speculatively at his calendar again.
Then, his imaginary Tamamo voice (and wow, he really did have kind of a problem, didn't he?) told him not to hole himself up because being alone when he felt like crap like that would only make him loathe himself more.
With a quiet sigh, he went to obey her—his—suggestion and went to change and drag himself to the shrine.
There was a liveliness and cheer in the air that left Minato feeling much like an alien, standing at the top of the steps to the shrine and peering down the long aisle of various food, merchandise, and game stalls. Families and friends drifted this way and that, their voices mingling into a pleasant background hum. Some of the more festive attendees were dressed in summertime yukata, their bright colors standing out amidst the almost neutral tones of others' everyday wear.
If he had felt like being particularly dramatic or brooding, he would have said that he felt cold even as he walked forward into the throngs of people. But he didn't because… well. He didn't.
Instead, he found himself preemptively focusing inward at the pain when he found himself thinking, I might never see a summer festival again.
But before he could do something stupid—like break down in the middle of the festival or throw up on someone's shoes—a voice called out to him.
His head snapped up immediately, battle-honed senses flaring up only to sputter to a halt when he realized who had called him. Who was approaching him.
"Maiko-chan," he greeted, clearing his throat when his voice came out hoarse. He tried to smile and hoped it passed as at least a mediocre attempt. "You look very pretty."
The little brunette beamed, twirling as much as her yukata allowed. Her hair was done in its usual style, but he noted the bright-colored clips that decorated it that day. "Thank you!"
"Are you here with your parents?"
Maiko nodded, turning back briefly to indicate a man slowly approaching them. Minato only vaguely remembered his features from when he helped both him and his (soon to be ex) wife locate their daughter. "My dad took me since Mom's at work."
A more honest attempt at a smile tugged at his lips. Minato didn't fight it, genuinely glad for the girl to spend time with either of her parents. "That's good. Don't eat too much or you'll get a stomachache."
She puffed out her cheeks at him in an overblown pout. "I won't!"
"If you're sure…"
"Honest!"
Maiko's father neared and, catching the tail-end of their conversation, chuckled as he seemed to deduce what was being said. "Ah, Arisato-kun, right? Thank you again for looking after our—er, Maiko-chan."
He shrugged, hands automatically going to his pockets. "It's nothing. Have a good day, sir. Maiko-chan."
"See you!" Maiko waved as her father took her hand and led her away.
Minato held up his own hand to wave back, letting it linger even as she turned away before eventually dropping it with a sigh. He watched Maiko's retreating back until even she disappeared in the crowds of people, wondering (always wondering now) what she would be like in the future. If he was gone.
When he was gone.
He had done his best to help her, floundering with his nonexistent social skills to comfort her when she cried over the stress of her divorcing parents. His awkward attempts to help her sometimes seemed to work, sometimes made it worse, especially since Tamamo wasn't particularly helpful in that regard. Whenever he had asked her what to do, she had only asked him what he thought he should do. It was frustrating and humbling in equal measures, trying to learn on the go how to deal with this strong yet fragile little girl, afraid that any action or word of his would affect her badly. Terrified that what he said to her now would have some consequence on her life later that he would be responsible for—however directly or indirectly. And that he—
Wait.
Wait.
In what felt like an eternity ago, Tamamo had told Pharos and him the tale of her past life, however vague the details were. And after, Pharos had made a quip about the story being never-ending.
"If humans really do never stop growing, from one life to the next, then it never ends," the child-like form of Death had said.
Minato could recall that easily enough because it had seemed to resonate with even him at the time. He had thought Pharos had only meant it in the way that Tamamo had reincarnated. "One life to the next" had seemed like an obvious clue. He'd thought it suited her well, just as it was. Her story, continued on from her past life in some other world and into his, if only in his head.
But Tamamo. Tamamo had added to that. "'From one life to the next'… and to all the people connected to them."
The story didn't end, but not because she had managed to reincarnate herself. Or, rather, not only because of that.
It wasn't about a continuation of life, he realized. Not in the sense he had believed it to be.
It was about legacy.
When Tamamo told them about her past life, she took care to mention all of the important people to her. Her family. Her closest friends. The people that had made an impact on her and taught her lessons on how to be. How to live. In this life, Tamamo lived in his head, but she had passed on bits of her knowledge and wisdom to him. To help him grow and learn and hopefully thrive. He was, in some ways, her legacy. Her story had yet to end, but even if it someday did (forcing away the spike of fear at the thought), he would continue it simply by living on what she had done for him and taught him.
And if… when he died, the people he got to know, got to meet and perhaps even change in some way, would carry on for him as well.
Like Maiko. Like Hidetoshi. Like Chihiro. Or Junpei. Or Yukari. Or Fuuka.
It was a tale that kept on spinning.
A part of him still wanted to shriek at the idea—he wanted to live, too!—but he couldn't help but think that the revelation that Tamamo and Pharos had come to so many nights ago was amazing. And cruel. And beautiful. And full of hope.
Because it was human nature to reach out and touch other lives. The world would keep spinning without them all either way, so it was up to them to continue and leave behind their own legacies. So that they could keep spinning along with it.
Minato was struck with a thought. Shinjiro, for all his brusqueness, had had the right idea. Regardless of what the outcome was, it was better to do things that he would be proud to call his accomplishments later on than spend his time fretting about the details. Come what may. Whatever will be will be. And so forth.
He was still selfish, though. He wanted to live.
But.
If the worst came to pass… If there was no other option and no alternative could be found… he felt as though he could be a little more accepting of that fate. Somewhat.
Turning on his heel, Minato left the festival, speeding back to the dorm.
He was nervous about how this encounter would go after that last disastrous meeting, but he had to do it. He felt as though he were going stir-crazy inside his own skin the longer he blocked contact with his Other, and with his recent revelations, he felt that he could talk with her now that he'd taken time to cool down. Felt that he could talk to her without self-destructing.
He could.
He would.
With a deep breath, he situated himself in the solitude of his dorm room—and lifted the block.
EXTRA
Useless, Tamamo thought dully as Minato tried not to flinch away from his aunt and uncle's widespread arms and smiling faces. She was so useless.
"It's okay," she said as soothingly as she could muster. "I'm here, Minato. I'll get you away from them."
It had been just over a week since they'd overheard his latest caretakers talking in hushed voices, unaware of the little boy still awake and hiding behind a corner. He had woken up thirsty and so got up to get a glass of water when he'd heard his aunt and uncle whispering. Heeding Tamamo's suggestion to sneak quietly to the corner, he had situated himself neatly to overhear as much as he could.
He hadn't understood what they were talking about, but the absolute fury that built up in his Other told him that it was nothing good. He quietly obeyed when she told him to return to his room and didn't question it when she told him to lock the door. Then, in the privacy afforded to them by his dark room, she'd told him, in words that he could understand, what his relatives had been talking about.
He had cried until morning light, and she alternated between soothing him and ranting in equal measure.
Now, with his birthday just around the corner and truth brought to light, Minato desperately wished to be anywhere but there. Tamamo agreed wholeheartedly with him, trying to think of how to get him out of there when the couple seemed so intent to keep him—or rather, whatever part of his inheritance they wanted that came with him.
It was only as the greedy bitch of an aunt started giggling over him about how big a party they were going to throw him, bigger than any party he'd ever had before, that she realized what he could do.
"Your birthday party," she told him firmly that night when he asked her what they were going to do. She didn't blame him for being scared. They'd been staying with this couple for longer than usual, due to their insistence on keeping him near and ingratiating themselves to him as well as Minato's own reluctance to leave at first, surrounded by what he'd deemed as true familial love for the first time in ages. The rest of the family thought he was happy and if his caretakers had no problem with it, then he could stay there. "They invited your grandfather—remember him? We'll bring it to his attention."
Old Man Shirogane (and something about that name was familiar in a fuzzy way that she couldn't quite pin down) was a no-nonsense type from what little Tamamo saw of him. Mostly during the funeral and the aftermath afterwards. He worked in some part of law enforcement, or something, and had a keen eye for many details from what she could construe about him. But he was fair. If he determined that something wasn't right about Minato living with this aunt and uncle, he would do something about it.
Minato shakily agreed and they settled back to wait out the days until the party. Tamamo coached him on what to do and say, advising him on how not to act too little or too much, but just enough to garner the right response.
She had gone through one lifetime as the youngest daughter in one family. She wasn't a master puppeteer by any means, but if she wanted to be a manipulative bitch, she could be. They didn't come out often, but she still had her claws.
On the day of the party, she told Minato to play with his cousins for a while before eventually making his way to his grandfather while everyone else was distracted with something or another. He tugged at a loose fabric of the older man's clothing and, once he had his attention, Minato began the questions she had carefully given him, along with the childish and simple reasons behind them when he was asked why this and why that.
And then she sat back as Old Man Shirogane's eyes darkened even as he patted Minato on the head, ushering him off to play with the other kids outside for a while.
Maybe not completely useless, she amended as Minato watched as his maternal grandfather approached his aunt and uncle, pulling them none-too-gently to the side and talking with them, their faces a strange mix of pale and flushed with indignation. Then, she nudged Minato to pay attention to the game.
(Minato would be moved out before the week was finished, placed with his aunt Sayuri who fretted over him from his stay with "those vile people". Never mind that one of them was her cousin.)
(Later on, Tamamo would watch some of Minato's more sneaky dealings and wonder if maybe he picked up more from her than she'd first thought. Natsuki was certainly still a little leery of him, even though she didn't seem to remember exactly why.)
(Poor Natsuki.)
