[Summary: Nanako spends a peaceful Sunday with her aunt and her cousin. And then there's Monday.]

[7/10: Sunday]

After that very relaxing afternoon in the bathhouse, Nanako reluctantly decided it was time to get back to studying. She had to kick it into high gear; they only had another week before exams. And after spending so much time with her friends over the last few days—who, beloved though they were, were also infinitely distracting—there was someone outside the group who needed her attention.

"Sou-chan~" she trilled. "How was daycare yesterday? Did Yuuta-kun get to see your umbrella?"

Souji, seated at the tea table and ready for a morning of Sunday children's television, nodded. "He wants one, too!"

"He should ask his mom—" She frowned in mid-thought. She hadn't met Yuuta's stepmom last week because the boy had suddenly dashed ahead when they'd reached the street he lived on. Nanako hadn't been expecting it, and before she knew it, the boy was out of sight. Impulsive kid.

Souji handed her a gummi from the bag, as if he understood. Heck, maybe he did, if Yuuta complained at school. A family more dysfunctional than the Setas? Was it possible?

Right before Loveline started, Nanako's phone buzzed. It was probably Chie complaining about studying or something. Today's a family day, Nanako thought, looking across at Souji with a warm smile.

It was, in fact, going to be a real family day. Aunt Seta was home with them, doing some paperwork at the kitchen table. "It's about to start!" Nanako called to her. The woman had declared this morning that she was going to watch television with them. It had been quite a surprise to hear that at breakfast.

"Oh!" The woman briskly stood up and took her seat at the sofa. "What is this show about, anyway?" she asked after settling down.

"It's Magical Detective Loveline, Auntie. The title kind of tells you everything, hehe."

As the show started, Nanako sang the theme song, and she poked Souji until he was singing along with her. No need to be embarrassed! We're all family here!

Nanako held out the bag of gummis to her aunt and she daintily took one. Then she made sure Souji had one, too, and turned her attention to the show. In this episode, Loveline lost a locket that belonged to her grandfather and was trying to find out who might have taken it.

Halfway through the show, Nanako's phone went off again. She was more popular than Aunt Seta today! She checked the name. It was Yosuke. Heh, he was probably wondering how their time in the bathhouse yesterday had changed their friendship. Totally hasn't, Yosuke. She turned off her phone after that. Her friends really should know better than to interrupt during Loveline and Featherman.

"Is it Chie-san?" Souji asked her softly. "Are we going to train today?"

"Nah, we trained yesterday," Nanako told him. "I'm sorry we left you behind! We'll do it with you next Sunday, how's that?"

"Okay..."

"Train?" Aunt Seta asked.

"Exercise," Nanako explained. "My friend is on the track team. We jog down the flood plain and do jumping jacks and stuff. Souji-kun should get out of the house more on weekends, so I've been bringing him with us."

"That's so nice of you," Aunt Seta said. "Souji, have you thanked her?"

Souji blushed and looked down. "Y-yes, Mama..."

"Darling boy," his mother murmured.

The show returned from commercial, so they went back to watching. It turned out the locket had been knocked under a dresser by the cat. Kind of an anticlimactic end, but it had been cute to see Loveline's powers didn't always work.

During the break before Featherman started, Nanako informed her family that she'd finally joined a school club.

"'Finally'?" Aunt Seta noted. "Was there some debate over it?"

"Y-yeah," Nanako admitted. "I didn't really want to join one. But I thought it might keep me out of trouble, heh heh, so I joined the basketball club. I only went to a meeting once so far, but it was pretty fun. Do you like sports, Sou-chan?" When he looked uncertain, she told him he could be honest.

"N-not when there's a lot of shouting," he murmured.

"Why don't we play outside a little after the show?" she suggested. "I promise I won't shout."

"I thought you had studying to do," Aunt Seta pointed out, not unkindly but with purpose.

Nanako scowled because she was right. "Yeah, yeah, after Featherman..."

With that looming in her future, the episode of Featherman seemed shorter than normal. After some debate, she decided to focus on geography. It wasn't a difficult subject, in her opinion, but it was something she never really bothered to study. She thought she ought to make the attempt. Mr. Yamada taught it and she didn't really like him—he was always making creepy comments about how cute Yukiko was—but that wasn't an excuse to slack off on the subject.

About an hour later, right as Nanako was starting to get really restless, Aunt Seta came to the tea table and set a large shoebox at its edge. Nanako moved her notebooks out of the way and looked at the box curiously.

"I thought you might like to see this, Nanako-chan," Aunt Seta said. "If you can take a break."

"What is it?"

Aunt Seta's playful smile resembled Igor's. She opened the box and withdrew some photographs. She handed one to Nanako and another to Souji.

Nanako inspected the picture. A group of boys were in it, wearing only their underwear. Her eyes immediately scanned the array: mostly briefs, but one boy was wearing swim trunks and another boxers. The boys were playing in a riverbed that didn't have very much water in it. One particular bare-chested boy stood out because Nanako recognized that face. He had dark hair, and, despite the distinct lack of 5 o'clock shadow, already sported a rather rugged look. He had his arm about another boy's shoulder and was giving the camera a peace sign.

"Wow, my dad was hot!" Nanako exclaimed. And he wasn't the one wearing boxers, thank god.

Oh shit, she'd said that out loud! As she covered her mouth and racked her brain on how to salvage that comment and not appear as a creep to her dad's only sister, Aunt Seta said, "He was quite the charmer, yes. There were a number of girls after him during those years."

"And boys, too?" Nanako asked, again without input from her brain.

"He was in a sports club," the woman conceded, her smile not wavering. "Your mentioning it earlier reminded me to show you these pictures."

Nanako traded pictures with Souji and discovered her father had been on the soccer team. This was a picture of him in his sports uniform, foot resting on a soccer ball. His hair was damp with sweat and his shorts covered in mud. It must have been taken after practice. Nanako could almost smell the musk—

She bit her lip and put the picture down. These were really not good thoughts to have!

"He looks nice," Souji commented.

"Nice?" Nanako squeaked. "Oh, you mean friendly?"

Souji nodded.

"He can be," she said, "but he's totally my dad. You know how it is!" A moment later she slapped her hand over her mouth again. 'You know how it is'? Dammit, how insensitive was she? "Err, I mean, umm, he's stern with me," she finished lamely.

"Yeah," Souji said. He sounded solemn, but thankfully undamaged by her thoughtless words.

"I wish Tokyo wasn't so far away," Nanako murmured. Another adult in Souji's life would be grand. "Then you could meet him." Though Souji probably had met him, at the funeral...

"It can't be helped." Aunt Seta sighed, and Nanako realized she probably missed her brother, too.

Nanako scanned for a way to change the subject. "W-wait a second," she said, picking up the picture again. "Is that a Yasogami uniform? Dad went to Yasogami!?"

"Did you think he was from Tokyo?" Aunt Seta teased. "He is a country boy at heart."

"How did I not know this!?" Nanako asked herself in wonder. "My mom's not from here, though, I know that. How did they meet, anyway...?" Her mom had married young, that's all she knew.

Aunt Seta shook her head. "I don't believe Ryotaro has ever told me. Knowing your mother, it must be a very interesting tale."

Nanako couldn't agree more. She'd have to ask!

"I do see both of them in you, Nanako-chan," Aunt Seta went on.

"Y-yeah?" Nanako felt embarrassed.

Aunt Seta didn't explain, instead offering to look for other pictures. "I'm sure I have plenty more. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to photographs. I know I have a set you'll really like."

"Y-yeah?" Nanako repeated. "Please do!"

Aunt Seta smiled and said she'd find them and show her later. As the woman took the photos back and placed them in the box, Nanako felt it before she heard it. The time stop! Temperance. She was so stunned by the fact she'd established a link with her aunt that she didn't do anything.

That night, at around ten, Nanako turned her phone back on to find several voice mails waiting for her. Well, it was too late to worry about them now, and besides, she had a more immediate goal.

She called her dad. He should be free at this hour. He might be in bed, but knowing him, he was probably up and going over a case file or something. Or maybe he'd be out drinking with his fellow officers. But it was a Sunday night, so probably not.

"Nanako?" Dojima's gravelly voice answered. "Hey, honey. Everything all right over there?"

"Daaaaaad!" she squealed, excited over just his voice. "Auntie said you were totally a heartthrob when you were a kid, and she showed me pictures and everything."

"Nanako."

She ignored the warning tone in his voice. "Now I totally see why Mom kicked her boyfriend to the curb for you!"

"...Is there a point to this call?"

"Dad, Dad! I was just wondering, Dad... There was this picture of you and another cute boy in middle school. You were in the river with your schoolmates, playing in the water, I guess."

"Oh?" He sounded somewhat more interested now. "We were probably looking for whetstones."

"Yeah! So that boy next to you in the picture, do you remember him? He, well, he looked normal I guess, he had light hair and his eyes were maybe brown, hard to tell in the picture, and you had your arm around him."

"Hmm... It was probably Takeshi. I wonder what he's doing right now."

"Daaaaaaaad."

"What?"

"You ever kiss him?"

Even without the dead silence on the line, she knew she'd gone too far. She just couldn't help it. That picture had been too cute.

Finally her father answered. "Stay out of trouble, honey."

He hung up on her.

She blushed into the phone. His reaction...! He hadn't denied it!

Did... did her sexuality run in the family? It was a relief to think that.

Because maybe... maybe her dad understood her. She thought back to the Locker Room Incident and his reaction. He had such a poker face, but... even while he'd lectured her, she'd sensed something from him then, something she hadn't the skill to identify at the time.

Had it been empathy?

Her phone buzzed with a text message. She read the sender's name and growled to herself. Dad, always tattling on her to her mother! Really...!

The text read:

He did, but don't tell him I said that!

Xoxo love you much, honey!

She stared at it until the phone went idle from lack of input.

[7/11: Monday]

It was a cloudy day. The forecast had said it would rain tomorrow, but you could never trust the forecast—although Inaba's always seemed surprisingly accurate—so Nanako made sure Souji brought his umbrella to school with him today just in case.

"Loveline~" she sang at him, and he smiled back. She asked him about his favorite story in the manga so far, and they discussed it all the way to the intersection. They lingered there for a few minutes to keep chatting. He even turned the question on her. "We haven't seen it yet, Sou-chan! But so far I just love it when she takes that puppy home."

He nodded in agreement. And then he mentioned that Takeyoshi-kun had a puppy.

She eyed him shrewdly. "I think it's about time I meet this Takeyoshi-kun, Sou-chan. Maybe after my exams we can go swimming, huh?"

"I'd like that," he admitted. She hugged him one last time and then shooed him off to school.

She continued to hum the Loveline theme song to herself while walking to school because she had it stuck in her head. She didn't stop even when she came across other students—at least until she heard them talking. Eavesdropping was another skill she'd learned from Dad, heh heh. Well, actually it was just hard not to overhear conversation when everyone was going in the same direction.

The boys were two underclassmen. She didn't know their names. They both had dark hair, although one had longer hair than the other, and wore the Yasogami uniforms without any obvious personal flair.

"Figured they'd cancel class today," the short-haired boy observed.

"Are you nuts?" his friend scoffed. "A school in Japan, canceling class?"

"Hey, I can dream, can't I?" the first replied.

She raised her eyebrow. Yeah, right!

At the shoe lockers, the students at school seemed chattier than normal, but Nanako attributed it to her imagination. It was the start of the week, after all, and with exams coming up, everyone was under pressure. A lot of people were complaining about how much they'd studied so far. Someone said they couldn't study at all yesterday, and she wondered if he'd spent the day with his family, too.

After going to the bathroom one last time before school started, she got behind her desk and checked the clock. There was still a little bit of time before class. Chie wasn't even here yet, and neither was Yosuke. Let's see, she had math after homeroom today. She decided to take that notebook out and review what they'd learned last week.

It was difficult to study, though, because the students around her were talking so loudly! She glared at them to absolutely no effect. So wrapped into their excited conversation, they didn't acknowledge her at all. With a sigh she re-wrote an algebra problem in her notebook and tried to solve it without looking at the solution.

She'd manage to get it half-finished when she noticed Yosuke rushing into the classroom. She checked the clock again—yeah, he was totally almost late for class! He nearly tripped over the desk at the front of the row in his haste to get to his desk.

But instead of sitting, he stopped in front of Nanako's desk and panted to catch his breath. "Nanako! I swear to you I checked and there was nothing there!"

She frowned at him. "What are you talking about? Sit down, homeroom's about to start! And where the heck is Chie?"

"The Midnight Channel!" Yosuke said. He didn't take his seat and continued waving his arms at her. "No one was on it! It doesn't make any sense. I promise you I've been diligent about checking it every time it rains!"

She nodded. "I know. I checked it on Saturday night, too, and it was completely blank. But why are you so worried about it? No one's on it, that's a good thing!"

Yosuke's mouth opened and closed and his eyes widened. "Uh... N-Nanako," he said cautiously. "You didn't get any of our messages?"

"Duh, it was a family day yesterday," Nanako told him. "I don't normally answer the phone on Sundays, do I?"

"And you didn't watch the news? There was another murder victim. Apparently he was killed the same way as the other two!"

"So it really is a serial murder now," she mused to herself. "Wait a minute! If the victim wasn't on the Midnight Channel, then what happened? He wasn't put in the TV World, was he? Sit down, anyway, before Mr. Morooka comes in and bitches at you."

Yosuke flinched, his face paling. "Uh, uh, Nanako. The victim... w-was King Moron... They found his body just outside the shopping district on an apartment's rooftop—"

Time didn't freeze, but it might as well have. His words weren't being processed at all.

Wait, what?

Mr. Morooka... dead?

He was dead?

Their homeroom teacher?

Dead?

What?

How could Mr. Morooka be dead?

Yosuke continued to talk about the state of the body, but it was going in one ear and out the other.

The Midnight Channel.

Mr. Morooka hadn't been on it.

She really had checked it herself Saturday night.

But he was dead?

It... it couldn't be.

Now Chie was here, too, telling her how they'd spoken with Teddie yesterday, and...

A middle-aged woman with a very low-cut skirt came into the classroom. She stood in Morooka's place at the front desk, soiling it with her presence. "Goooood mornin'," she said with a seductive lilt. "I'm Noriko Kashiwagi, your new class teacher starting today. You all probably know already, but Mr. Morooka has passed away..."

Nanako grabbed her school bag and began to run towards the door, bile rising in her throat.

"Where do you think you're going, little girl?" Kashiwagi said, but Nanako rushed on out of there, ignoring everyone in her path. She ran down the stairs, past the shoe lockers, out of the school, down the road, past the flood plain, no clear goal in her mind until she was absolutely out of breath.

By the time she stopped, she was at the shopping district. Izaya wasn't there at the gas station. It was possibly too sunny for him.

A sunny day. Where the fuck did all the clouds go?

The blue door by the bookstore gleamed at her mockingly in the sunlight, its key heavy in her hand. She didn't recall taking it out of her school bag, but there it was, the stoic black and white mask insignia perhaps mirroring her own expression.

She entered the Velvet Room for the first time in months.

Igor was there in the usual spot behind the table, and so was Margaret. To his credit, Igor was... he wasn't smiling.

"You...!" she shouted as the limousine's engine revved up. The sound faded into silence. In her mood, Nanako wasn't even aware that the sourceless singing that normally filled the room was absent today.

Her body trembled. "Why didn't you tell me!?"

Neither resident spoke, but the two were observing her carefully. Margaret's hand was clutched in a tight fist over the Persona Compendium in her lap.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Nanako shouted again. "You're supposed to know these things! Isn't it your job? You're supposed to be helping me!"

"We cannot foresee the future," Margaret began, but Nanako cut her off.

"Bullshit! Igor was telling me all about my future when I wasn't even in this damned town. What the hell, Margaret, Igor! Mr. Morooka is dead. He was my social link. He can't die! Why!? Why did he die? You... You could have warned me! I... I'm supposed to protect everyone, isn't that right? So why didn't you do your damned jobs and...!"

"Our job," Margaret answered coldly, "is not something you can understand. It is not to directly interfere with the workings of your world. This is but one truth you'll have to accept—"

"I don't give a damn about the truth!" Nanako interrupted, slamming her fist repeatedly down on Igor's table.

The engine revved again, and the fog rolling outside the windows began to stream by at a much faster rate. Wherever it was going, the vehicle was speeding up.

"How dare you lecture me about this shit when my social link died?! You're happy to call me and say how important they are and then one dies and I'm not given any warnings! Not one! Not a damn card!"

"The cultivation of social links is important mostly if you bothered to utilize our services," Margaret replied.

"...You did not just say that," Nanako said quietly.

"But they will also bring you closer to the truth," Margaret went on. "The purpose of your journey is the truth, is it not?"

"Oh, you're bringing it back to the truth, huh?" Nanako growled. "I'm supposed to find the damned truth, but as soon as I get close to it, one of my mentors dies. Maybe... maybe the truth isn't worth shit!"

The limousine began to careen wildly, and Nanako fell to her knees, unable to keep her feet as it turned sharply. Margaret's face, usually so smug, was suddenly full of some emotion that Nanako had trouble identifying. "Master!" Margaret cried.

Nanako directed a venomous gaze on Igor, daring him to speak up.

The vehicle hit a bump in the road, and Nanako was slammed into the brandy cabinet. She tried to grab a bottle and smash it against the floor in her wrath, but gravity pressed down on her and she couldn't move, as if the car had braked to a screeching halt.

"Enough."

Igor spoke, his voice so quiet that it was barely audible.

"There are rules, dear guest," he said, and there was sadness in his voice. "And we are bound by them, as are you. We are your allies, and we will help you, but we cannot break the rules. I share in your sadness, but I must remind you that you alone are responsible for your actions."

She stared at him.

There was a flash of light from the windows, distracting her. The fog outside had dissipated completely. Another movement caught her eye. Margaret was looking from window to window in utter shock.

After a long moment, though, the woman composed herself. "If..." Margaret hesitated very briefly, running her nails through her hair. "If you break the contract, we will be unable to aid you in the remainder of your journey." She held her lower lip in her teeth for a moment. "This is not advisable."

"You're wrong," Nanako said, looking the woman dead in the eye. "Not this. This wasn't my action. I might have been responsible if I knew something and did nothing, but I didn't. But if it's so important that I abide by this bullshit contract, then let me say this... whatever led to my social link dying wasn't my responsibility, but what comes after sure will be."

She paused. "You won't need cards to know that."

Her eyes closed, and as the room faded from existence, she heard Igor's voice calling out to her. "Dearest guest," he said, "Death is not the end for a social link."

When her fists unclenched out there on the central shopping district's street, Nanako found that her nails had dug so deep into her palms that they were almost bleeding.

She didn't feel any pain.

She didn't feel much of anything, to be perfectly clear. The anger had been returned to the back burner, replaced by... what? She didn't even have the coherence of thought to figure it out.

She stared at the blue door for a long while. She wasn't thinking of Igor's words, or Margaret's. She wasn't thinking much of anything, and nothing specific prompted her to begin walking down the street.

The crime scene was supposed to be near the central shopping district, but that fact wasn't even in her mind until she turned down a street at random to find a police barricade set up in the distance.

A part of her idly wondered if Adachi-san was there, throwing up. Throwing up at the sight of...

Throwing up like she wanted to do. The pressure rising in her body made her feel like she might burst at any moment.

On some level she knew investigating the crime scene was important, but that level was far, far removed from her current state.

She found herself at the overlook that stood over the town. She stared over it without seeing for an indefinite time. She didn't notice when a bird hopped along the guard rail almost within her reach, nor when a police siren sounded out in the distance, nor when a large drop of rain landed on her head. The rain was only teasing, a few drops more and it stopped, although the sky promised more: the heavy clouds were moving across it like a choppy sea.

Eventually, though, the chronic buzzing of her phone—since it was on silent and could only buzz—in her school bag began to irritate her.

Working on automatic, she opened the bag and made to turn the phone off, but the voice messages indicator flashed at her. With a pronounced scowl, she input the code for them to play.

'Hey, Nanako, umm, it's me, Chie, uhh, did you hear the news? Someone was murdered last night, same way as the others. Should we meet up? Call me back.'

The automated mail box's robotic voice informed her of the call time: yesterday morning.

'Okay, Nanako we've got more info. I talked to Yosuke and he says the victim was K-King Moron! I can't believe it... Anyway, we're at the food court and we're gonna go talk to Teddie now, so if you can't reach us, well, you know where we are.'

Nanako sniffled, because she'd thought yesterday had been such a good day.

'Nanako! Yosuke here. Uh, we talked to Teddie and he said no one was thrown in there at all. It doesn't make any sense! I guess he was killed on our side. Umm, I guess we'll talk about it tomorrow. Man, I wonder who our new homeroom teacher will be... It's crazy, isn't it? I bet they can't—'

A peal of thunder in the distance interrupted his next words, and then the message was over. There were more messages, but she was now staring into the soupy sky. The weather was as confused as she was. It didn't know what it was doing. The sun kept poking through the black clouds to shine brightly at her.

The phone buzzed in her hand, the sudden sensation almost causing her to drop it.

This time, the caller was her mother.

With tears of frustration streaming down her face, she hurled her phone over the cliff.

Then she leaned back against the nearest tree and slid down against the bark until she was on the ground, hugging her knees.

She spent the entire night out there at the overlook, completely unaware of the passage of time around her.

Withdrawn into herself, she didn't feel the coldness of the steady rain or notice how thoroughly soaked she was from it. She didn't hear the threatening rumble of thunder in the distance.

She was only pulled back to reality when she heard the desperate cry of her name.

"Nanako!?"

Nanako whimpered against the tree behind her. She didn't want to deal with people, not now, no...

The cry repeated, and she buried her face in her arms and hoped Saki would go away.

"Oh my god..."

She bit her lip, knowing she must've been spotted. A sudden hand on her arm made her flinch away, but it gripped her and held her in place.

"Nanako?" Saki whispered. "Look at me, please."

She didn't want to.

"Please."

She sighed and lifted her head, greeted by Saki's worried face.

Saki wrapped her arm around Nanako, ignoring how filthy and soaked she was from the rain, and tried angling her umbrella over the both of them. She pulled Nanako close to her body.

Nanako tried to form words, but then shook her head.

Saki squeezed. "I think I know," she said. "You thought you had everything figured out, but then some shit happened. Is that right?"

Nanako broke down and wept against Saki's chest.

[AN: Saki's words here are a callback to her first social link event with Nanako back in chapter 8.

I hope the tragedy came as a surprise, even if you were expecting it, due to the dichotomy between the two days.

So Aunt Seta is a social link now (similar to the original Temperance, when you think about it), but... what about the Hierophant?

We toyed with the idea of killing off Ms. Kashiwagi instead, but Nanako wouldn't really be affected by that, would she?

A comment for our reviewer:
Dusk Clark: My coauthor says, 'Yes.' I say that it is if you want it to be, heh heh.

Next Chapter: The Afterglow

Good things come to an end.]