By the time they made it to Landmark Tower, night was already falling. This made the visit to the observation deck a little more disappointing than Naoto had hoped, but seeing the city lit up was pleasant in its own way. Souji appeared to be experiencing less enjoyment.
"You go ahead," he kept saying, each time Rise tried to drag him away from the elevator and toward the edge of the deck.
"Dude, we came up here for your birthday." Yosuke shook his head. "You said it was a good idea!"
As Rise tugged him closer to the glass, explaining how great the view was, Souji leaned further back. He'd turned alarmingly pale.
Naoto couldn't comprehend why anyone would suffer a fear of heights. She'd adored them since childhood, when she'd often climbed the trees on her grandfather's estate. Being high up gave her a perspective often lacking in daily life: a sense of her position in the world, an understanding of how insignificant some things truly were. (It might, she acknowledged, also be a form of overcompensation.)
A few metres away, Yosuke was standing in front of the glass and indicating something to Teddie; from what Naoto could see, he was pointing at the Cosmoworld theme park and its giant ferris wheel. Chie and Yukiko were debating whether they'd be able to see Mount Fuji from here, Chie insisting that she'd climb it one day and trying to persuade Yukiko to tag along. Kanji stood alone, peering intently down at the city.
Naoto walked over to him. "The view is excellent."
Kanji blinked down at her, startled. "Oh. Yeah." He looked back at the glass. "S'really different to Inaba. Kinda blows my mind."
Casework demanded frequent travel. Naoto had journeyed across Japan and Yokohama was just another city. It had never really occurred to her that some of her friends had lived their entire lives in a single small town. But thinking about it, hadn't they been equally impressed with Port Island?
"I suppose," she said, for want of anything better.
Something in Kanji's expression shifted, but she couldn't place it. "You've seen all this sorta stuff before, right?"
"Yes."
In a way, she envied him. When it came to home and travel, Naoto had more in common with Souji: skipping from place to place, rarely having the opportunity to settle. Unlike him she had the benefit of her grandfather's estate, but her recent visit there was the first time she'd been back in two years. Her stay in Inaba was one of the longest she'd spent in a single location – as substantiated by the enormous collection of possessions she'd somehow accumulated in her small apartment.
Throwing things out remained a challenge. Discarding Inaba would be harder still.
She glanced up at Kanji, who kept his gaze on the city lights below.
"Guess you'll head outta Inaba," he said. "Now that school's over an' all."
Naoto raised a hand to her cap unthinkingly, her fingers gripping the brim. "Perhaps."
Examining her relationship with Kanji was less a slippery slope, more a sheer drop.
Naoto knew herself to be extremely intelligent. She absorbed information like a sponge then found reasons and means and places to put it to use, the correct pegs in the correct holes. The problem was that she'd never been able to understand herself. She could recognize base emotions - anger, frustration, sadness, fear - but why those emotions occurred remained a mystery, as did anything more sophisticated. This included her situation with Kanji. She'd long realized he was attached to her – how could she not? – and that by now she felt...something, in return. But pausing to consider this would mean identifying the something, then having to respond to it – and she knew too well that her emotional reactions were fundamentally different to those of others. How did one even begin to respond to such a situation? And once started, where would the process stop? Thus Naoto had done her best to never recognize either of their feelings, to never categorize their relationship the way she did with the rest of the team, to never think about any of it.
Over the past year, this had proved increasingly unsuccessful. There'd been no sudden switch, at least not that she recalled. More a crawl of realization, at first, a gradual tilting of the world to some strange and unsettling new angle – but once the tipping point had been reached, there was no return. Naoto had tried to map the trajectory of events in her mind, this is where it all started, here is where it will go. A mathematical explanation, a vector equation. Numerical. But with no idea of the origin or even the function's plane, there was no possibility of prediction. All she could do now was watch it shoot or spiral in whichever high-speed direction it chose, and attempt to deal with the consequences.
She thought she'd improved since she first arrived in Inaba, that she'd learned to relate to others and relinquish control. That in a sense she'd finally become socialized, a decade later than she should have. But there were still deficits. Ways in which her emotional responses were lacking, or inappropriate, or simply tin-eared. The only way to compensate for this was rigid self-restraint, and two years on Naoto's personality still demanded that she remain in control of all aspects of her life. The loss of that was a terrifying prospect – but no worse than the creeping, sinking sense that she might be missing out on something vital.
...Perhaps taking the first step forward was to take control.
"I'm gonna throw up," Kanji mumbled.
"Not on your new jacket," Naoto said.
"C'mon, Kanji-kun, that coaster was awesome!" Chie made a rotating motion with her hands. "The cars were spinning!"
He leaned sideways against the wall, head pressed against the brick. "Yeah, I know."
Yosuke looked equally pale. "I think my stomach fell out. Someone go search for it."
"I did tell you to stay down here," Souji said. He'd remained perched with his arm around Rise on a bench opposite the ride. If he wasn't Souji, his smugness would have been highly irritating; as it was, Naoto only mildly wanted to strap him in the coaster and send it on its way.
Rise pouted. "I wanted to try it too. Hey, Kanji-kun, wanna go up there a second time with me?"
"Ooh, ooh, Teddie too!" Ted said, hopping up and down. Kanji responded with an unhappy groaning noise and mumbled something about throwing up again.
From Naoto's perspective, the coaster had been enjoyable. Specifically, it had been reasonably fast, which satisfied her only real requirement of a carnival ride. The movement of the cars had been startling at first, but easy to predict after the first few rotations. Unfortunately, Kanji had distracted her by screwing his eyes shut and gripping the safety bar until his knuckles turned white. They'd shared a car with Yosuke and Teddie, the latter of who had proved more distracting still by trying to climb out mid-ride.
"Do you need to sit down?" she asked Kanji.
He stared down at her as if surprised, then slightly shook his head. "Nah. I'm good. But…if it's okay, I don't wanna go on anything fast for a bit."
"You guys are all wusses," Chie complained. "Let's ride the Cosmo wheel, then."
Souji blanched. "Let's not."
"C'mon, Souji-senpai." Rise grabbed his arm and hauled him up. "You don't wanna miss out on everything, right?"
Unlike the tower, the Cosmo ferris wheel looked far more impressive at night. The spokes were lit up in blue and green, the clock in the center glowed bright yellow, and a few minutes after they arrived a rainbow of light flashed across the entire wheel. It was a pity the ride itself was relatively slow, but at least three members of the group seemed grateful, Souji in particular. He remained standing firmly in the center of the capsule, again refusing Rise's attempts to urge him to look through the glass.
"I heard this ride is bear-y romantic," Ted said, fluttering his eyelashes at Yukiko. Souji smiled at Rise, then slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her close. Yosuke kept staring firmly out of the capsule at the city below.
This time, Kanji was hunched over on the capsule's small bench, with his elbows resting on his knees. Naoto glanced first at him, then at Souji, still holding Rise at his side.
When he'd still lived in Inaba, before the Wild Card had fallen dormant and they'd all grown a few years older, Souji had been perfect. Beautiful, for want of a better word. Naoto had been close friends with him, or as close as anyone got to Souji. Falling in love with him had seemed like a logical next step: one crucial point on the path to a valid conclusion. Except it had never happened. Naoto had adjusted herself to the idea, dreading and expecting it in equal measure, and yet her feelings had never quite caught up.
Kanji was far from perfect. He wasn't even particularly handsome. But he was, Naoto thought, beautiful too.
She sat down beside him, watching him stare down at the capsule floor. "You don't wish to admire the view?" she asked.
"Did that earlier. Don't really want to look at the city anymore."
"Why?"
A long pause. "No reason."
Naoto eyed him carefully. "Really?"
He hesitated, then let out a heavy breath. "You like it better than Inaba, right?"
"I don't like it better. My work simply requires that I travel." She shifted against the bench. "Souji-senpai and Yukiko-senpai left too."
Kanji looked like he wanted to say something to that. Naoto wished he would.
"Yeah," he eventually mumbled. "They did."
"So." She swallowed. "I fail to see the issue."
He shrugged. "Maybe there ain't one."
What did that mean, Naoto wondered. She tended to read too much into everything - when you struggled to understand, you sought evidence where you could - but did it mean he'd decided to move on? She was astonished that he hadn't already, having witnessed her flaws first-hand; disbelief had been one of several reasons she'd disregarded his feelings for so long. There had been others, of course: her self-recognized inability to process emotions correctly, her issues with gender identity, her unwillingness to compromise herself. All of which she'd never been able to express to anyone, including Kanji. The only other choice, or so she'd thought at the time, had been to deny his attentions completely. Yet even knowing all that – even being painfully aware of her defects, of what he must have gone through in part because of them, of her utter selfishness - she didn't want him to move on.
Take control. But how?
Naoto opened her mouth to speak - then closed it again, uncertain of what to say. She stood from the bench, gave him a quick nod instead, and stepped toward the glass.