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: Avatar NIX: That was indeed a reference to P4. I am yet another amongst many that believe Minato and Naoto have some form of familial connection—or should. In Symbiosis's universe, they're first cousins. Actually, in Chapter 14, the grandfather Minato mentions he went to live with is Old Man Shirogane and the cousin who prevented the "supply closet incident" was Naoto herself.

Also, Tamamo has no idea that Minato's cousin Naoto is that Naoto. As mentioned before, she's only played up to Rise's dungeon and largely ignored Persona 4 info to avoid spoiling herself in case she took it back up again. Combined with memory degradation over time, she barely remembers anything about P4.

And to everyone, sorry, this is another slow chapter. But things should hopefully start picking up again next chapter as our (not quite) intrepid hero climbs over this mental hurdle and gets back in the swing of things.

Symbiosis

Chapter Thirty

It was quiet.

And Minato only realized that quietness because he had lifted the mental block between him and his Other—and she wasn't saying a word.

Tamamo? he called hesitantly. Then, when she still did not answer, he got worried. Tamamo?

When the silence continued, Minato entered his mindscape for the first time in days (had it really only been days? It felt much longer than that) in order to search for her only to stumble to a stop.

That wasn't there before, he thought, dumbfounded, as he stared at the new additions to his mindscape. It was still dark, with a starry sky lit up all above him, but what caught his eye were the trees. A great number of them stood ahead of him, quiet and steady like they had always been there even though he knew for a fact that they had not been. They looked like pine trees, though the needles seemed to be some ethereal mix of blue and green, though that might have been due to the perpetual night sky that loomed over them.

Approaching them slowly, Minato peered up and all about the trees, noting with some surprise that the ground, usually blank and dark as the rest of the mindscape, was now almost picturesque in imitating the ground of forested earth. Then, with some hesitation, he lifted a hand and placed it on the trunk of the tree nearest to him.

He jumped when his mindscape hummed, retracting his arm as the materialized forest seemed to breathe. But when nothing lashed out at him, he carefully placed his hand back on the trunk, bracing himself for the thrum of power. It echoed and he felt himself smile in wonder and disbelief.

Whatever this was, it had not been created by Tamamo. He wasn't sure how he knew since she had been the only one to ever really do anything in his mind, but it was true. This budding forest, which was still growing if his instincts were correct, was a direct product of his mind. Something had happened in those few days that he ignored his little mental world and its inhabitants, and this was the result.

"Tamamo!" he called, anxious. Something about the forest's appearance unsettled him, but at the same time he felt safe. Like it was meant to be there. Had always belonged there. He had no idea how to take it. "Tamamo, where are you?"

He made his way in the general direction that he remembered what he came to consider "her corner", which had also housed her little Velvet Room lounge. The trees, though numerous, seemed to part for him as he passed.

"Tamamo!" he called again. Before he could get very far, a familiar voice stopped him.

"It's you," said the voice, airy and young.

Minato whirled around, instinctively taking a step back when he met Pharos's bright blue eyes. He stopped, forcing himself to still even though he never looked away from that unnerving gaze.

"Pharos," he greeted as calmly as he could muster.

Death. He was standing before Death. Incomplete and amnesiac, maybe, but still a mass of the Shadows that went bump in the night.

Unaware of his innermost thoughts, Pharos smiled. "It's been a while. She's been waiting for you."

Minato eyed him suspiciously. "You know where Tamamo is?"

The boy in the striped pajamas dipped his head in a nod. "You were away for a while and didn't seem to be talking, so I kept her company while she slept."

Guilt and fear hit Minato in equal measures. Alone. He'd left his Other alone and in the mercies of Death's company, however incomplete he still was.

…Wait, "slept"?

"She's been sleeping?" he asked, hesitantly. That didn't sound quite right. Tamamo had never seemed to sleep, even after she apparently rediscovered her inner world and the way to return to it. That last conversation with her had been the first he'd ever heard of her being able to sleep let alone dream again.

"Yes," Pharos replied blithely. "She hasn't woken up since you left that time, actually."

A cold weight dropped in Minato's stomach and a creaking groan made him look up to find the half-finished forest shuddering, the trees shaking and swaying in an imaginary wind. Forcing himself to calm until the trees settled, Minato looked squarely at Pharos, putting away his fear of Death (and death) for now. "Take me to her."

"All of this started appearing a few days ago," Pharos explained as they walked through the underbrush, "it was quite interesting to watch."

"Was it dangerous?" Minato asked as he lifted a hand to push away a low-hanging branch only to startle when it moved on its own and out of his way. He eyed it warily when it waited patiently for him to pass before resettling. "They move… Did they try to hurt you guys?"

He hadn't exactly been having the most charitable thoughts towards either of them, after all. If the trees had done something in reaction to that and hurt Tamamo while he was unaware…

Pharos shook his head, idly swaying on his feet until Minato was moving forward again. "No, but they're awfully protective. They try to cover her a lot and don't like letting go. I wasn't sure when she would wake up, but I don't think she'd like being covered like that so I tried to keep them away." He gave a small hum, looking thoughtful. "Actually, it's been a while since I went to find you once I felt you were back. They might've tried to reclaim her again. But it should be fine now that you're here. This way."

Minato followed diligently, ignoring that "should" was not a definite assurance. Still, this was his mind (well, his and technically Tamamo's, but she always insisted it was just his) so he had to have some confidence that he could take control of any situation that could occur.

Regardless, he let Pharos continue to lead until they arrived at a clearing with what appeared to be a shallow lake. Minato fixated on the water, which was deep blue in color and nearly glowing against the starlit forest floor. Was this what had become of Tamamo's corner?

"They did get to her," Pharos commented, sounding intrigued. He peered up at Minato, smiling. "You really are quite a protective person, aren't you?"

Minato said nothing, for he was too focused on what Pharos had pointed out. In the middle of the shallow pool was a small island, and on that island was what looked to be a veritable nest of branches. Mildly disturbed, Minato made his way across the lake until he reached the island, pulling parts of the nest away until he could clearly see his Other sleeping, cradled amidst the leaves.

He tugged at the nest and found that it was much sturdier than it looked. Frowning, he considered the structure, its connection to his mind, and Pharos's words just moments before.

Letting his hands fall away, he took a step back. Then, eyes on Tamamo through the opening he'd managed to create, he ordered, "Let her go."

And the nest opened, unwinding and gently depositing his Other onto the grassy floor of the small island (which he noted now was also Velvet Room blue in color) before him. She didn't move as the branches left her, deep asleep.

Minato kneeled and hesitantly reached out only to stop short just before his hand could so much as brush her shoulder. He pulled back, just watching her breathe, scared of what could happen. If he tried, and she woke up, what would he say to her now that he was before her? He hadn't exactly gone in with a plan. Just a thought that he could maybe understand the reason he had to die even though he didn't entirely agree with it. Greater good or no.

Conversely, if he tried, and she didn't wake up…

He barely noticed when Pharos sat beside him. He did, however, jump when the boy reached out and poked Tamamo's forehead with a pale finger, hand shooting out too late to stop him.

"He's back," Pharos said, apparently uncaring that his wrist had been snatched by Minato. "You should wake up now."

Tamamo didn't respond, continuing to sleep. Pharos turned, bright blue eyes looking up expectantly at Minato as if to say, "See? This is your job. Don't be a coward now. You've fought pieces of me and survived, for pity's sake, what's so scary about waking up the girl who's lived in your head all your life?"

Well. Okay. Probably not that much, but it got the message across.

Sighing, Minato reached out again and managed to place his hand on Tamamo's shoulder, shaking it gently. "Tamamo, wake up. I'm… I'm here."

It didn't take much more than that, evidently, because her eyes fluttered open not a second later—all disconcerting blue and red—before locking onto his.

Before he even knew what was happening, he was knocked back, something squeezing around his ribs as he narrowly avoided falling back into the water. Dazed from the impact, he looked down to find that Tamamo had evidently tackled him and was now clinging to his torso. She was also babbling something that he couldn't quite understand until he managed to push himself up some and refocus.

What he heard just about broke his heart.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she chanted, voice thick. "I know you asked, but I shouldn't have… I should've… I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…!"

"Tamamo," he said, but her voice bulldozed through his.

"It's always been at the back of my mind, why I'm here. I know it sounds like an excuse, but I never bothered to really try to change things because I always felt as if they were set in stone. Or something," she rambled, a note of desperation in her voice as she tried to get the words out. Minato wondered if this was what he had stopped her from saying right before he left. "But when you looked at me like that… I just… I felt so ugly and useless. I know it won't make up for anything, but I swear, I'll do everything I can to help you. I won't let you die. I refuse to. I told Pharos that your survival is my priority so I will definitely keep my word from now on. I won't—"

"Tamamo," he said again, sitting up fully and placing his hands on her shoulders.

Her voice stopped abruptly from where she was ranting into his chest (and he was struck again by how very small she was now) and she looked up, trepidation in her bicolored eyes.

He took a breath. "I'm not going to say it's okay. Because it isn't. Not really. Everything you told me… really shook me up. To be honest, it still scares the hell out of me and I can't help but hate you for telling me now and not helping me try to avoid it earlier." Shit. Dammit! Too far! Back up! "So yeah, it's not completely okay and I'm pretty sure I'm still on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Or still in one. I can't really tell."

The look on Tamamo's face told him that it would have been kinder to just shoot her in the heart right then. She pulled away and sat limply in front of him, looking like a marionette with its strings cut out.

"Sorry," he bit out. "That isn't what I… I mean, I've had a lot on my mind since you told me, and that came up a lot and—wait, no, that's not…" He sighed before eventually going with, "I didn't mean to say that. As you can probably see, I'm a bit of an emotional wreck right now."

After a long moment, Tamamo shook her head, hurt fading into something tired and subdued. "No."

Minato blinked at her, incredulous. "Huh?"

"You are an emotional wreck right now. The fact that you said even half of that proves it," Tamamo said, bluntly agreeing with his description. "But you have a reason to be. Even if you say something with emotions running high, there's still a grain of truth in it." There was a bitter undertone to her words just then, but he had no time to dwell on it when she continued, "It's fine."

He doubted that she was as unaffected as her carefully schooled expression indicated, having seen the hurt that had been on her face just moments before, but he didn't push it. Things were still too raw to poke at when he still had other things to say.

Sighing again, he mulled over what he wanted to say, trying to string the words together in a coherent sentence. "Everything that you told me… it was because I said I wanted to know. Maybe you could've said something sooner… but I might not have listened anyway. I don't know. I've had some time to think it over, but I still… I don't know." He gave a wry smile. "What's done is done. This is the path we're on, so we'll just have to abide by Igor's contract as best we can and take responsibility for the choices we made."

When Tamamo didn't answer, he looked to her. Whether she'd heard him or not, he didn't know, for her attention was fixed on their surroundings, eyebrows furrowed.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

Her eyes flicked back to him for a moment before slipping back to the trees surrounding the clearing, swooping downwards to the shallow pool of glowing water before lifting back up again to the canopy. When she spoke, it was in such a carefully measured manner that it put him on edge, "How long has it been?"

Minato blinked. "What do you mean?"

"The last thing I remember," his Other began slowly, "was talking to you in my mind. You left and I followed you. And then we were here." If he hadn't seen the way she seemed to close off her own inner world in order to suppress herself, Minato would have mistaken her blank expression for calm. "All of this… wasn't here before. And from the way you were talking… you said that you've had time to go over this. Longer than the few seconds it seemed for me to wake up again. So how…?"

She didn't seem willing to finish the question again.

As gently as he could even with his mind and pulse racing at the implications, Minato counted the days that had gone by (which were surprisingly few for how long they'd felt) and answered, just as slowly, "It's been five days." When he saw her still, he felt he should elaborate and so continued, "Summer classes ended yesterday. There were four days after our, er, talk. Today's the day of the summer festival held at Naganaki Shrine."

"Five days…" Tamamo mumbled. She let out a shaky breath and she blinked hard several times in quick succession. "Five days, huh? W—wow. That's…" She let out a laugh that sounded as forced as it looked. "Shorter than I thought! Thank goodness. I mean, I've heard of losing time as you got older but that puts a whole new spin on things, ha…"

"I blocked you," Minato said, ignoring her attempt at cheer. Guilt stirred in his stomach, warring viciously with self-justification. "I'm sorry. I didn't think… I didn't know you would lose time like that."

"I didn't know either," Tamamo admitted, wilting. "The times you practiced blocking me before were nothing like… that. But I guess if you willed it hard enough…" She shrugged. "This is your mind, after all. In a battle of wills, you'll probably overpower me any day if you really tried."

He didn't know what to say to that, so he only repeated, "I'm sorry."

She gave him a brittle smile at that, lifting a hand to gently pat his head. "It's okay. You needed that time to think. And I'm glad you got to determine things on your own like that." She gestured at their surroundings, a wan smile on her face. "This forest must represent that."

"You know what this is?" Minato asked, curious and desperate for a change in subject that didn't involve them pitying themselves any further. "I didn't do anything in my mindscape while I was thinking. Today's the first day I've been back since then and it was just here. Pharos…" He looked around before noticing belatedly that the child Death had disappeared. "Well, he said that he got to see it 'grow'."

Tamamo nodded. "It's like my inner world, which is basically my mindscape. I don't know the meaning of it exactly, but I think the ocean and tree that you saw there represent that I've 'found' myself. My way of life and whatnot. The fact that this forest is in yours must mean that you're maturing."

"It's still growing," he said, feeling that it had to be said. He still didn't know how he knew, but he did.

"Then you probably are, too," she replied easily.

She sounded much better than before. Her voice was surer and her smile steady as opposed to fragile. Minato didn't doubt that she was still shaken, but some form of returning to normalcy appeared to give her the footing she needed.

"So? Wanna fill me in about what I've missed these past few days?" she prodded. "Other than the fact that you're growing the Forbidden Forest in your head, I mean."

He snorted at the reference—secretly hoping that that wasn't actually the case because acromantulas sounded horrifying—and, taking a little time to recall everything that happened, obliged.

Five days, Minato had told her. Five days had passed (well, four and some fraction of a day, but she was never really good at math) since their "talk" even though it barely felt like a second to her. It was a frightening thought. And no matter how hard she tried to focus solely on what Minato was telling her about his days since she told him just about everything, her mind kept going back to that little fact.

Five days lost, added to the years she'd been asleep for his first years of life. Five days during which Minato struggled through what was basically a BSOD, trying to keep himself from drowning in the information she'd dropped on his head. Without her, because her help—or lack thereof—had gotten him into that mess in the first place.

It was her failing, Tamamo knew.

In the moment she saw him start to crumble in her inner world, flinching away from her when she had tried to reach out to him, she realized how badly she had dealt with the situation. She tried to think of all the justifications she had given while Minato was growing up, but they all came back to her, mocking and hollow.

It was a consequence of living in his mind, it seemed. Tamamo lived with Minato, witnessed his life as it went on, but she was still detached in some way. It was morbidly like playing a video game; she watched as events rolled by in his life, could influence them in some ways, but ultimately she was an outsider. She had allowed Minato to keep going along his allotted path in life with a mind to possibly change things, but like the hypocrite she was, she stood by and let canon happen anyways.

And he suffered for it, even more so when she told him of the future she'd seen and the implications that she had done nothing to prevent it. Had actively encouraged it.

It was a wonder that he didn't keep her sealed up forever, to be honest. If it had been her, she would have thrown her into some abyss of her mindscape and never let her out. And her mindscape had an ocean. She probably would have just stuck this metaphorical Other Her there and cackled over the fact that she had actually dumped a body into the sea.

But Minato was good. A much better person than her. If she hadn't seen him nearly sneer at bullies and manipulate certain situations to his favor with almost callous disregard, she would have thought that he didn't have a spiteful bone in his body.

Which was actually kind of a relief, knowing that he wasn't some perfect saint. But she digressed.

"Wow," Tamamo said simply when Minato finished talking, ending his tale with a note about his meeting with little Maiko at the festival and the revelation he'd come up with shortly after. She'd only been vaguely listening, but years of being with him and having his thoughts as her sole company had her easily attuned to what he said and didn't say. Five days was not enough to erase that, at least. "…I didn't think Shinjiro would be the type to just go out and do that."

"Really?" Minato looked doubtful. "You're the one who said he had hidden depths and all."

"I don't think I said exactly that," she replied blandly, though she knew she had probably implied it. Or maybe she had said it outright. She couldn't remember. "I guess I just thought he was more the type to hover worriedly in the background."

"I think he does." There was a small shrug. "But when I ran into him, he said I looked like death warmed over. So maybe he just felt like he couldn't leave it alone."

A smile tugged at her lips. "Maybe." Then, shaking her head, she said, "Still, it really is good that you got this time to think things over for yourself. It sounds like you reached a conclusion you can be somewhat peaceful with, too."

It wasn't settled, though. Not by a long shot, if she had any say in the matter.

Minato had determined that there was an outcome that he could agree with, somewhat, on the chance that the events to come would end in his death.

Having been faced with how truly despicable she was, however, Tamamo could firmly say that she would do whatever she could to ensure that he was able to live far beyond that fated graduation day. She would need a lot of help, but she had his arsenal of Personas to badger and was considered a guest of the Velvet Room by proxy. That, joined with her burgeoning not-quite human powers… in short, she felt she had a good chance of finding some sort of alternative.

Once she sent Minato off back to reality with firm reassurance that she was fine and that they could continue talking later, after he took a day to just relax and hang out with his friends at the festival, Tamamo stood in the middle of her little island, frowning.

"Pharos," she called after a moment of deliberation. And even though she had been expecting it, it still took a bit of willpower to not jump when the boy materialized at her side.

"Yes?" he asked, placid expression innocent. His eyes were as unnervingly blue as they'd always been, just as they always held that much more awareness each time she saw him. He regained more of his memories every full moon, but his interactions with her and Minato gave him pieces of humanity at a (hopefully) faster pace. He didn't show it overtly, still overwhelmingly otherworldly, but it was in the little things. The Pharos of several months ago would not have given her and Minato the semblance of privacy to catch up, for instance.

She eyed him thoughtfully, trying to spot the mask of Ryoji Mochizuki that he would possibly later don after the defeat of the Arcana Hanged Man. But then she stowed her observations away for now, focusing instead on the more pressing matter and resolving that she would get back to it later. "Would you happen to know where the door to the Velvet Room is?"

It had led to nowhere the first time she tried opening it, but something told her it would be different this time around.

And if it wasn't… well, she was overdue a chat with Orpheus anyway.