Aigis thought she had gotten over death after Makoto.

She did not realise how wrong she was.

For several years after the Dark Hour ended in 2010, she enjoyed her life with the Shadow Operatives, working together with Mitsuru and the rest to solve supernatural cases around Japan, and sometimes even overseas. Aigis could not ask for more. After all, it was a rare chance to work with so many people that she had closely bonded with over the years. They even expanded their task force, welcoming new people into the Shadow Operatives, and to Aigis, everything was perfect.

That fantasy shattered soon enough, though.


The first death Aigis experienced was Koromaru's.

He had just returned from a mission with Ken in tow, walking slowly like the old dog he was, but still with a strength in each of his steps. When Ken collapsed in Mitsuru's office couch from exhaustion, Koromaru joined his master on his lap, and growled in contentment when Aigis petted him without waking Ken up. After a couple of minutes though, the growls stopped, but it was when he stopped breathing that Aigis realized Koromaru had just passed away in his sleep.

Ken was inconsolable for two weeks ("He was right there on my lap, and I didn't notice anything until Aigis told me!"), but eventually picked himself up. Koromaru was buried next to Makoto and Shinjiro, his collar Evoker buried with him. Ken kept the little wing ornaments as a memoir, displayed on his work desk in the Shadow Operatives office.

Akihiko died around twenty years into his marriage with Mitsuru.

He was head of a police raid group to take down a drug cartel that was circulating similar drugs that Shinjiro had taken when he was alive, causing a breakout of Shadow-related incidents. At some point during the raid, a Persona belonging to a lackey had gone out of control, incinerating the whole forest and triggering the carefully-set traps the police had planted beforehand. Akihiko had been an unfortunate victim, caught up in the shrapnel of a bomb near him. He spent several days in the hospital while the Kirijo doctors tried to save him, but in the end, it was not enough. Mitsuru, Aigis and Junpei were all by his side when he took his last breaths, until the monitor beeped out a flat line.

Mitsuru mourned, but did not let it affect her work. She put on that queenly mask she was so well known for, and kept the Kirijo Group running as if her husband was still around. Still, Aigis could hear sobs in her room late into the night, when all the other workers had left for the evening. She knew better than to interrupt Mitsuru during those moments, but always left something out in the doorway, whether it was a blanket, or a cup of her favourite tea.

Mitsuru herself only outlived Akihiko by fifteen years.

"Overwork," the doctors said, and Aigis could clearly see it. There were heavy eyebags under Mitsuru's eyes, only covered up by her thick layers of makeup, and her skin was gaunt with stress. By then, she had cleaned up most of the remnants left by her grandfather's research, and the Kirijo Group was expanding overseas rapidly. Yet, even with all the extra work piled up on her desk, Mitsuru had refused to hire anymore help apart from Aigis and Kikuno as full timers, only allowing Sakura Futaba and Fuuka to occasionally help out and organize the massive amounts of data that she received everyday, since their main jobs were elsewhere. When Aigis asked about the reason, she simply said that she "did not trust anyone else."

It was a sad reality, because the Kirijo Group still had enemies in the world.

At this point, Aigis realized that she might be the only person to witness Makoto coming back, out of their original team as S.E.E.S. If he came back, that is. She did not know where Elizabeth was, or what she was doing after all.

The company was handed down to Mitsuru and Akihiko's son, according to her will. It took some time and coaching, but Mitsuru had prepared him well to take over the company. Slowly, he ironed out the kinks in his management, and kept the Kirijo Group running.

Aigis found herself as the head of the Shadow Operatives as the most senior member, but at least that transition was smooth, plus probably permanent for a long time. It did not feel the same without Mitsuru though, and even the experienced reserve members – the Investigation Team and the Phantom Thieves (that they finally managed to find, after several months of playing cat-and-mouse with them) agreed.

The next two deaths happened so quickly, Aigis hardly had time to process them.

Yukari had been down with a minor cold that somehow blew up to the point that she was hospitalized on a very short notice. When Aigis visited her, she had looked fine. After ten minutes of talking, doctors were rushing into her room to try and figure out why all of her vitals were dropping.

Aigis did not even have time to say goodbye before Yukari flatlined.

Then, Aigis did not even get to witness the next death.

The next month, while Aigis was numbly working off the pain in her heart through paperwork, she received a call from Junpei's wife Chidori, informing her that he had passed away in his sleep. It had taken a moment for Aigis to process Chidori's words, then it was only through locking down on her limbs that Aigis was barely able to keep a grip on her phone. Mechanically, she consoled Chidori over the phone, just like how she would console family members of deceased Shadow Operatives, then helped her arrange his funeral.

From then on, Aigis drowned herself in work.

Even after seventy years, she still clearly remembered the scene on the Gekkoukan High school rooftop, with his head on her lap, her caressing his hair, and promising him that she would protect him forever. If that meant not thinking about death, even when it was clearly affecting her, just so that his burden as the Seal would be lessened slightly, then she would not give herself time to think about it.

Labrys became concerned about the amount of work Aigis was doing as her second-in-command (and was that odd, two robots leading the most secretive branch of the Japanese police force), but Aigis waved her off, thanking her for her concern.

She later poured out all her bottled-up feelings to Labrys, when she finally stopped piling work on herself and having her machinery replaced four times in six months due to overheating. Her sister lent a listening ear, and that was enough for Aigis to calm down and re-evaluate her rather unhealthy habits of coping, as much as it was unhealthy for a robot. It was just like how she handled Makoto's death all over again.

Death was inevitable after all, but it should not be thoughtlessly rejected.

Ken died in a car accident.

The hurtful thing was, he had just came out of a reunion with Aigis, old bones creaking as he shuffled back to his home. Aigis had barely turned her back to him before she heard an alarming screech of tires on asphalt, and the next thing she was aware of was screaming. She pushed herself through the crowd, not wanting to believe what her robotic senses were telling her, but the truth could not be denied. At some point, someone had called an ambulance. Ken was pronounced dead on the spot.

Aigis attended his funeral along with Labrys. Hardly anyone remembered Ken at the Shadow Operatives office anymore, considering that he had retired for quite some years, and those who did were still rookies when Ken was around, so they hardly got to know him as his rank was so much higher than the others. The same stabbing grief raked at Aigis, but this time, she maintained work as usual, and was not overworking herself again. Regular talking, or rather, venting, sessions with Labrys helped, combined with her reminding Aigis that there were still new people to bond with. She still had her bouts of busying herself to forget about how almost everyone close to her had passed away, but somehow, someone in the office would always remind Aigis to take a break, robot or not.

It was no good to hold onto past ties, denying the fact that they were gone, physically at the very least.

Fuuka was the last to go, perhaps owing to the fact that she never really battled at the front lines, so she never was in much danger unlike everyone else.

Aigis never quite knew what possessed Fuuka to call her and ask for a visit half an hour before she died, closing her eyes as if she was just going to take a nap. Perhaps it was Juno, informing herself that her time was up. But that was the exact situation Aigis found herself in: watching someone slowly taking their last breaths on a sunny porch, having just made small talk for the last fifteen minutes, as if Fuuka wanted to create one last pleasant memory for her to take to the afterlife. Honestly, Aigis did not mind.

When everyone had left after Fuuka's funeral, Aigis stayed back, her eyes gazing over the freshly-dug grave. Then, she cried for the first time since the day Makoto died, oily tears flowing uncontrollably out of her eye sockets.

"Please rest well, everyone. I promise I will live, for your sakes."

She wiped her tears, and turned her back. She has years to sort out her grief.


More than two hundred years later, Aigis was still active in the field.

The Kirijo conglomerate had gone through numerous shifts in size but was eventually unable to keep operating in the scale they had before. At that point, Public Security decided to step in, officially making the Shadow Operatives a part of the police force, though they were still as secretive as before. The heads had the shock of their lives when Aigis introduced herself as the head of the Operatives, even more so when she revealed herself as a robot. One of them passed out on the spot, unable to process the fact that a robot had been leading one of the most efficient squads of the police force for the past two hundred years. Nevertheless, she somehow managed to hammer out a decent working relationship, even if she had to compromise by having to report to someone else after every mission, that "someone else" changed way too often for her liking, and the vast majority of them treated her like a robot, expecting her to follow all orders as programmed. Unfortunately for them, Aigis was way past that stage.

Both Aigis and Labrys had their parts upgraded over the years, while they were still part of the Kirijo company, and afterwards as part of the government. Weapons were updated, machinery was replaced. It culminated in some very realistic-looking skin covers for their metallic bodies so that it was easier for them to blend in as a human, even if science had developed to the point that humanoid robots were widely accepted as part of daily life. There was still no way for scientists to duplicate the level of human emotions that the anti-Shadow weapons had though, partially because they did not know how to create a Plume of Dusk or where to find them after the Kirijo Group dissolved, and partially because there was no way Aigis was going to let herself or her sister become an experiment for possibly amoral scientists and engineers to operate on, no matter how they phrased it. When the government threatened to forcibly deconstruct Aigis and Labrys to find out how they can reverse-engineer the technology used, Aigis turned it right back at them by threatening to dissolve the Shadow Operatives, and her friends – the new Persona users that she had found and sheltered over the years, rallied behind her. The government was not idiotic enough to risk losing the only branch of police who could deal with the supernatural world – that, surprisingly, was growing in frequency, so they eventually relented.

Yes, Shadows still existed after two hundred years, coming through different dimensions and realities. They were still a threat to humanity, though no incident had quite ballooned to the likes of the Dark Hour and Nyx. At one point though, they started receiving reports of Shadows manifesting in the real world, raising alarms in Aigis's head about the Fall.

However, no such thing happened. The strange new Shadows were regularly exterminated, and life went on. Eventually, they cropped up so much that it just became part of a daily patrol routine for them.

Even then, Aigis knew. She knew she was not infallible, that she would either retire, run out of power, or be destroyed at some point.

That was exactly what happened, after an unfortunate encounter with a god in a Shadow filled verse. One wrong jump, and she found her chassis torn open by a long, clawed hand, her Papillon Heart exposed.

The next, it was crushed.

Before her sensors stopped, the last thing Aigis remembered was Labrys desperately calling for her name, the other Persona users trying to run to her aid. There were no outward expressions on Aigis's vacant face, but deep down, she was satisfied.

"Have I lived well enough, Makoto…?"

There was no funeral for Aigis, just her parts being recycled for scrap. Still, in the Shadow Operatives office, one small plaque was erected, right below the names of the original S.E.E.S. members.

"In memory of Aigis, the most humane of us."


A/N: Well hello there, everyone! Welcome to my first real attempt at writing fanfiction!

Just to be clear on what the format is, I plan on this series being a string of connected one-shots, following a loose storyline of Aigis in Soul Society. I literally have no idea what it is going to be like other than the setting and perhaps some specific scenes, so do bear with me. That said, the next update is probably coming around mid-May or early June, because I am currently in the midst of finals (what am I even thinking, writing fanfiction at this time?!). After that, well…I have no set schedule. Maybe I will, if anyone can come up with a solid storyline for me.

Constructive feedback is extremely welcome, especially on characterization and writing style. I would love to improve in the future, especially because I actually draw more comics than write stories.