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Minatodai Dorm, 2nd Floor

Morning

Midori grumbled as she fought with her glasses. They just refused to stay on her face, and every time she thought she had them fixed on her nose, they just slid off again.

She didn't think they were damaged, but she couldn't focus on them to be sure. Quietly cursing, she saw out of the corner of her eye a white blob she recognized as Aigis. Turning and putting on her best "I'm not blind. Honest" look, she called down the hall. "Aigis?"

"Hello, Midori. How was your night?" The robot wasn't fooled, knowing full well how badly off Midori could be without her corrective lenses. She also knew that bringing it to the attention of the blue-haired girl, especially in the morning (and compounded by her current state of mind in relation to them being trapped) would be a bad idea.

Groaning, Midori worked her way down the hall, centring herself carefully. "I think I rolled over and squished my glasses a bit. They won't stay on." She offered the metal and glass to Aigis, who examined them, glad for the distraction.

"Yes, you did." She bent the offending part back into place, noting that in doing so, there would be structural weakness. "You should be more careful." Aigis didn't need to remind Midori that her spare pair of glasses were outside the dorm, in the limbo of whatever it was that was outside their walls, and the abyss.

"Thanks." Midori put on the repaired part of her, and looked around. "Um,why are you standing here?" Her question was punctuated by the gesture at the door to Minato's empty room.

"I had a feeling..." Aigis failed to find the words, but forged on ahead. "His door is closed. Locked by the same force that prevents us from leaving."

"What?" Midori pushed past Aigis and tried the door for herself, but to no avail. "What? That can't be right. You told anyone yet?"

"No. Not yet. I only discovered this myself today."

"Great. And here I was counting off the people left to have a piece of their history revealed. Now this gets dropped into our list of problems."

"Yourself. Fuuka. Chidori. Koromaru. Metis. Myself." Aigis made the list promptly. "Although I cannot predict which will come next."

Midori ignored that in favour of the door. If her will could have changed the fabric of reality, she was certain it would have opened for her, but such was not to be. "You tell Mitsuru about this. She'll want to know. I'm going to Paulowina and get some breakfast, then meet everyone back here for today's foray."

Aigis nodded her agreement, following her younger associate downstairs, and into the waiting day.

The Abyss of Time

Daytime

Aigis gathered Chidori, Ken, and Akihiko to her, for no other reason than they were ones she had not fought together with as a whole. With Fuuka trailing them, they entered into the next door, one whose name she couldn't quite make out.

It was odd. She should have been able to, but by the time the thought crossed her mind, she had crossed the threshold. The others came in after her and they all took in their surroundings. "Quite... blasé," Chidroi noted, stealing a French word from Mitsuru in the process.

They descended, dealing with the occasional Shadows they came across when Ken finally spoke his mind. "How did your talk with Midori go, yesterday?"

Chidori huffed, flipping her axe in her hand to distract her. "I don't know why you all thought that I would be the one to calm her down. She is her own person."

"It wasn't my idea," Akihko shook his head. And you two seem to spend a lot of time around each other."

"No," the correction was sharp and swift, "she spends time around me. It is not a mutual decision, I assure you."

"That still doesn't answer my question," Ken said, annoyed at the evasion.

Sighing, Chidori rolled over what was said and left unsaid on the day before. "She is like the water in that regard, always in motion. I am sure there is some line of poetry that describes it, but being bottled up like this is not good for her."

"I thought so," Akihiko agreed with a thoughtful expression. "Thank you for trying, though."

Chidori didn't bother to reply, instead readying her Evoker as another Shadow approached.

Once more, they all stood before the final door at the bottom of this particular Abyss. The ones who had blazed the trail were all recovering from their ordeal, Yukari and Mitsuru tending to their wounds in their own ways.

Oddly, it was Metis that seemed most eager to open the door that led into the past. She gazed restlessly at the gilded edifice, as though trying to divine what secrets lay beyond it.

"Things are getting worse," Aigis commented flatly. "The Shadows and the Guardians are becoming much stronger than I predicted."

"More training then," Akihiko offered in support. "We do what we did with the first door, send everybody through in rotation through the first section in oder to bring them up to scale."

"Great. More fighting." Yukari complained bitterly, earning her an annoyed glance form Mitsuru.

Midori, for her part, was sitting off to one side, Koromaru in her lap. She avoided fidgeting by petting and grooming the dog. "When was the last time you got your hair cut?" She asked as she tried to roll down an itinerant lock of hair.

Koromaru simply gave her a piteous look of total innocence, his red eyes refusing to provide proof that he was somehow lacking in personal grooming. Midori sighed. "No, my scissors won't work for you. They're for human hair." Not to mention they were in a trunk outside the dorm, and thus outside her ability to get.

Maybe there was something to her being a little less calm than she put on.

"Everyone ready?" Mitsuru finally asked, still the perfect image if unflappable-ness that Midori just couldn't quite understand. With no dissension, they gathered themselves up and headed into the door.

Tartarus

They saw them emerge from Tartarus, Jin and Takaya. Junpei moved to cover Chidori, while Akihiko broke ranks to advance on them. "You sons of bitches! You won't escape this time!"

Takaya ignored the outburst to sigh. "Oh, Chidori. How you've been poisoned by them."

Junpei snarled right back. "What the hell does that mean, you pale freak?"

"A freak? Oh, how right you are, yet how wrong. Are we not special? Chosen even? Yes... we are the chosen of this world." Takaya ignored the insult as he lectured Junpei.

"Whatever." Junpei reached back to put a hand on Chidori's shoulder. "I won't let you hurt her. Nothing matters as much as that."

Takaya laughed, raised his gun, and shot Junpei down.

The silence in the wake of the singular gunshot was deafening. The followup was even louder. "NOOOOOOOOOO!" "Junpei!" "Iori!"

Chidori responded with a far more quiet "Junpei?" She reached out to touch his face. "Junpei?" A touch and she could feel through Medea his heat and his life leaving him. She could not see his eyes and wanted to see more. She pulled him up and cradled him against her bosom, closed her eyes and invoked Medea.

For a moment, all was still. Even Takaya seemed perplexed by what was going on. A shimmering light grew from the Pesona, Medea rising above the two on the ground, then draping itself over them.

An eternity rested in that moment as Midori found that her legs had failed her, and that she was now on her knees. Akihiko was leaning forward to reach Junpei. Minato had his Evoker in his hand, moving towards his head. Yukari had dropped her bow. Mitsuru was drawing her sword. Aigis stood unmoving, as though she wasn't sure what to do, or was simply waiting for the right moment.

Then Junpei moved. One hand reached up and caressed Chidori's cheek. "No. Don't." He said this as she leaned down over him, her tears falling onto his face. They shared a private moment, a private word, a private world. Then he pulled her close and kissed her on the lips.

The scene went dark, and everyone turned to the real Chidori.

She fell to her knees, crying at her memories. Fuuka was closest, and draped one arm over her, the gentle sobbing proving that no matter what, some wounds remained open. Held in death's grip in her hand was the cap that Junpei wore that fateful night, and currently resting on his head.

Midori furrowed her brow. Something was wrong here. Something was missing from her understanding, and so she said as much. "What's wrong with this?"

"What do you mean?" Mitsuru diverted her attention away from Chidori to see Midori looking very confused.

"The hat," the young girl articulated, "the hat...?"

Everyone not consoling Chidori turned to face the scene. It was Aigis who made the connection first. "The hat remained when he vanished." She turned to face Metis. "Why did he vanish?"

"I have no answer, Sister. This was not in my memories." Metis' answer was effectively bored.

"His hat remained, but he went away." Midori reached the next step of logic, forcing herself to reach for the answers that were in front of her.

"He vanished because he wasn't here?" Ken offered, his own expression thoughtful.

"Then where did he go? And why did his hat of all things remain?"

"He went here." Midori concluded, not bothered one bit by the sheer impossibility of it. Stranger things were acceptable to her standards. "He's not there because he went here."

"What makes you say that?" Fuuka asked, thinking over what she implied and proposed in the same breath.

"We can take things from the Mall, right? Why can't we take things from the rest of these moments?"

"DON'T YOU DARE!" Chidori's scream ripped into the conversation that went on around her head. The rest of them were stilled by the force of the declaration. "DON'T YOU DARE, YOU BITCH!" Chidori roughly threw off Fuuka's arm, and lunged at Midori, whose only response was to stand still and stare Chidori in the eyes, the intense rage and grief meeting nothing but calm acceptance and forgiveness.

No one moved to separate them.

"Don't you dare..." Midori stepped up, and held Chidori as well as she could. "Don't take him from me again." The words were punctuated by tears.

Yukari took the initiative and walked over to the still scene. Hesitantly, she reached out and held a shaking hand above the still Junpei. Slowly, she lowered her hand, and touched the hat, snapping back in case something went wrong.

But nothing did. It was just normal felt. She touched it again, and there was no reaction, no response. "We have to try," she said.

"What?" Aigis asked, confused. Then she caught up to what was being suggested. "We cannot. He has been shot."

"We can heal him," Mitsuru pondered. "We have access to our Personas. We are not caught in the moment. We can plan this out. We only leave this moment when we choose to and no later."

"He has been shot," Aigis repeated. "None of us has the skills to remove the bullet. Even Metis and myself do not have the training required."

Thinking this over, Mitsuru reviewed her options. There was only one candidate. "Komaki can."

Of everyone who reacted to the statement with disbelief, none was more vocal that Midori's herself. "WHAT!?" Even Chidori pulled herself out of her grief long enough to see that the blue-haired girl was not taking this command properly. "I'm not a doctor!"

"No, but you are the only one here with the presence and the experience to do so," Mitsuru recognized the thin line she was running across, and the absolute need to support the girl if this endeavour was to succeed. She remembered vividly how the younger girl had ordered her around when she was wounded on the Moonlight Bridge, and the careful measures she had taken. She knew beneath that flighty and underdeveloped exterior was a person of conviction and skill – skill that she needed now if they were to take this chance and succeed.

"How would we do this? We don't have a surgery..." Fuuka asked at the tense energy around her spun itself amidst them. "And Junpei..."

"We've already done this," Yukari barked out. "Remember? He vanished when we thought he died. What if he didn't disappear, but we took him out of that night and into now?" It was a foolish line of logic, but it was one that held a grain of truth to it, one they found their own reasons for believing in.

"I'll need a knife, some tweezers used to fix Aigis, someone to hold Junpei down, Frosty and a lot of healing magic." Midori felt her stomach drop completely away as an idea popped into her head. It was just the germ of a plan, one that seemed impossible, even to her and her sensibilities. Her hands began to shake. "We hold him down, I cut open the wound a bit more to use the tweezers to remove the bullet, then someone heals him."

Everything about this screamed at her that she was wrong. Mari-sensei had been adamant that there were some injuries that you didn't treat, but she didn't have access to Yukari, Aihiko, Ken, Mitsuru and any healing that Aigis may have had. That changed so much, opened up so many impossibilities.

It was simple. Impossibly so. But Chidori's death-grip on her refused to let up, and she simply could not let her down. She had invested too much into being the red-haired girl's friend to simply surrender to the inevitable. And Yukari's point rang true. Junpei vanished, with only his hat remaining. He hadn't mysteriously gone away through some quirk of the Dark Hour. He had been stolen by them from the future, utilizing this opportunity, this place where the past was real in order to save him.

"But how?" Ken asked, worried. "How can we get him? I thought we can't interact with the past?"

"We can in the Mall," Aigis countered. "We can make this situation different." She paused, understanding the weight of the word. "We must make this different."

"We won't have a lot of time when we get back to the Dorm. We need a firm plan." Mitsuru announced, the wheels in her head spinning hard at the possibilities and implications. It galled her to act on incomplete information, yet the desire was there.

Desire...?

That was it. The desire. It was the wants of the people trapped in the Dormitory, the Abyss that was giving this place form and function. Everything encountered so far was a defining moment in their existence, the start of something that all lead to being here and now. The discovery of her Persona, recruiting Akihiko, Amada's abandonment... More than that, the desire to have supplies and a way out linked the Abyss to the Paulowina Mall, before the slow downward spiral that started with Shinji's death had begun. Aigis' desire to understand what had happened to her forged a link to the Velvet Room.

It was all a measure of Desire. What did people want? Some wanted to recognize what had happened, to make a break with the past. Theirs was the most intense. Naturally, she would be first, as all the sins of the Dark Hour came down to her power emerging first, as she had said so long ago. She had longer to reflect on it, and from there...

It was their desires that kept them here. And Chidori's was right in front of them. Junpei was all of theirs. There was no nobility in his death. It was a sudden and violent thing, and yet he sacrificed himself for her.

Who were they to leave that debt unrepaid?

"AMADA! Go to the Mall and get all the medical supplies you can from the pharmacy. Steal them if you have to, it makes no difference. Akihiko, go upstairs and get the bottle I showed you out of my desk. Midori will need it. Yamagishi, get whatever Midori needs from Aigis' room. Aigis, Metis, you will need to move Iori to the kitchen as fast and as safely as you can. We'll need the clean surfaces. Yukari, go with them, use Io to keep Iori alive. Yoshino, go with them. Komaki, why do you need Black Frost?" She poured every last once of authority into her tone, for if this place was representative of their desires, then she knew beyond a doubt that hers was the greatest force present.

"Heat to treat the wound, cold to keep him safe." Midori responded almost reflexively, caught under the burning gaze of Mitsuru, a flash of memory of Mari-sensei heating a scalpel, and using the last of the ice on the same patient.

"I will provide whatever cold you need." Mitsuru looked around, measuring the commands that everyone had been given, save for Koromaru, whom she knew would take proper initiative. "Do it!"

Aigis surged toward Junpei, a confused Metis following a moment later. Midori started to pry herself out of Chidori's grip, trying very hard not to think about what Mitsuru was asking of her. The consequences of failure were too horrible to comprehend, the result of success equally impossible to predict. She didn't know what she was doing, but she still had to try. In her minds eye, she could see the actions she would have to take, but every time she brought herself to the cusp of it, everything went blank.

Mitsuru took Midori by the shoulders and guided her out of the past and back into the Abyss, following the rest as they all ran to their assigned tasks; a hustle of action given form and a goal. Now the nominal leader just had to hope that she had made the right decision.

Minatodai Dorm

1st Floor, Kitchen

Junpei's breathing was ragged, his skin clammy and cold. Akihiko recognized the symptoms of shock and quickly made to warm him up before Chidori took the lead on that. With his still-bleeding chest, she took his head in her lap and leaned over him, pouring into him enough heat and warmth to keep him alive without risking her own stable life. Helios was the sun, and she kept that image firmly in mind as she worked.

Aigis and Metis held down Junpei by his arms and legs, leaving little room for Midori to straddle his chest. Fuuka had produced some implements from the kitchen and Aigis' workbench, and Mitsuru broke the seal on the bottle of alcohol with no fanfare. Ken and Koromaru stood by, watching with worry and dread at Mitsuru doused the improvised surgical implements with the liquid to sanitize them in the only manner available to her. Yukari stood to one side, Evoker in hand, ready to lend healing when called upon.

Mitsuru handed the cleaned instruments to Midori, and gently told her to begin.

The next few minutes were, to her memory, a haze of cutting, searching, healing, blood, sweat, panic and just not thinking too hard about what she was doing, lest she realize just how stupid of a chance she was taking. At some point, she manifested Frosty to help her, another set of claws to hold something or another while Mitsuru kept the area around the wound cold to reduce the bleeding.

And then it was done.

To one side, two broken halves of the lead bullet lay in a bowl of alcohol and blood. Junpei was breathing, but still unconscious as Yukari, Mitsuru and Ken all took turns applying magic to the wound. Chidori was breathing in perfect synchronization with the man on the floor, so engrossed was she in keeping him alive that all other factors were dismissed.

Looking down at her hands, she saw that they were red with blood, the lack of gloves a distant concern to her mind as she started to realize what she had done. A cup was pressed into her hands and she drank the clear liquid in one gulp before choking on the sheer foulness of the remains of the bottle that Mitsuru apparently had hidden away.

She stumbled a little bit as she stood up, pulled away by Mitsuru, who led her out into the main room. Holding Midori's shaking hands, she set her junior down on the couch. "You did well. I think Iori will pull through."

Midori didn't say anything as exhaustion caught up with her, and she fell asleep.