Author's Note: My apologies for the mid-day chapter reupload. There is some kind of glitch going on with the statistics and the reviews, I thought deleting and reuploading the chapter would fix it, but it didn't. I'm just going to wait and hope FFN resolves it.
Thank you for your patience.
Sunday, May 24, 2009, 1:45PM
Iwatodai Dormitory, Makoto's Room
Three soft knocks on his door roused Makoto's attention. He sent a message to Maya and got up from his desk. When he opened his door, he found Yukari, dressed in a pink tank top and blue pants.
"Hey." Yukari said.
"Yo." He responded. "What's up?" She handed him a slip of paper. As he took it, he realized it was a coupon that said Buy 1 get 1 combo 50% off at your local Wild Duck Burger! In tiny text it said that it expired sometime in June. The actual date was so smudged it was nigh-indecipherable.
She put her hands behind her back and leaned forward. "I still owe you a meal for rummaging through your files. Plus we can celebrate finishing midterms. Kill two birds with one stone, right?"
"Hell yeah." He handed her back the coupon. "Let me just log off and I'll be downstairs in a sec."
"I'm just saying," Yukari protested as they left they arrived at the strip mall, "burgers are totally a kind of sandwich."
Makoto shook his head. "I respect your opinion, Takeba-san, but I must firmly disagree. They are at most, distant cousins."
She frowned. "Oh, now you're playing the formality game, I see how it is." Before she could continue, her phone started to ring. "Sorry, one sec." She flipped it open and flinched upon seeing the name.
The seconds rolled by as her phone continued to buzz, and she stood there frozen. "Are you...going to take that?" Makoto asked.
"Huh?" She turned to him, eyes wide. "R-Right. Hold on." She walked a few feet away and accepted the call.
Makoto yawned and stretched as he waited for Yukari to finish her call. It was a nice and warm day, perfect some light exercise, a burger, and good vibes all around.
"That's not funny!" She yelled, startling him. "What's wrong with you!? Do you ever think about anyone but yourself!? Haven't you thought about how I would feel!? About how dad would!?" A few seconds later she yelled back into the phone. "OK, fine! Do whatever you want, I don't care." She shut her phone and shoved it in her bag.
Makoto warily walked over to her. Her shoulders were tensed, fists tightly balled up and legs trembling. "Are you OK? Do you need a minute?"
"I'm fine." She said, looking to be on the verge of tears. "You...can probably tell who that was."
"I can assume." He said.
She bit her lip. "Can we...go talk somewhere else?"
"Of course."
They found a bench to sit on, and Makoto waited for her to compose herself. He couldn't tell if she was more angry than sad, or sad than angry.
"My mom...after dad died, she became an absolute wreck." Yukari started slowly. "Everyone blamed dad for the accident, so we moved around a lot after that. I hated always having to pack up my life just because she decided to run away again. When I was applying to middle school, we were still living up north in Himeji, and she wanted to move back to Kyoto again. I decided, 'I'm going back to Iwatodai City and I'm staying, I don't care if she comes or not.' And she didn't, and I've been just fine since." Yukari said.
Yukari tapped her shoes against the ground, her thumbs were constantly circling each other, and her eyes kept darting around the place.
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "I...don't care what she does with her life. She has her life and I have mine. She wasn't there to be a mother for me, and I don't need her to be anymore. I'm basically an adult now. I'm fine living on my own." She scoffed." All this time she jumps from one man to another, then all of a sudden she calls me out of the blue, telling me she's cleaned up and wants to reconnect and found the right guy and wants to remarry. She had to audacity to ask for my blessing." She whispered out, voice laced with venom.
Makoto remained silent. He let the minutes pass by as he carefully considered what would be the right thing to say.
"It's just..." Yukari eventually mumbled out. "Stupid. It's all stupid. She's stupid, I'm stupid for taking her call."
Makoto took a deep breath and spoke. "You said to you that she wants to reconnect, right?" She nodded. "Does that mean she's in Iwatodai right now or...?"
Yukari shook her head. "No, she's still living in Kawasaki. She said wanted to come to me and for us to talk in person." She scoffed. "As if."
Makoto opened his mouth, but at the last moment stopped. He could feel the words dying on his lips.
She turned to him, eyes peering at him like a hawk. "You look like you want say something." She said.
Makoto looked in her eyes, smoldering with exhaustion and anger. "It's not my place to say this..." he rubbed the back of his head. "It's nothing."
"Please." She moved closer to him. "Tell me. I...I want to hear it."
Makoto sighed and braced himself. "You know, there's a lot I'll never be able to say to my mom." She flinched and looked away. "And I'm sure there's a lot you've wanted to say to your dad since then. I know I do."
Her face burned red. "OK, geez, I got your point." She mumbled out.
He sighed and scratched his head. "I'm not saying you should just accept your mom remarrying. I'm not saying you should forgive her for being a bad parent, or even let her back into your life. I honestly don't know how I'd feel if I was in your place, I really don't. It's just...what if that's the last thing you ever get to say to her? If that conversation right now is the last one you ever had."
Even turned away from him, he could see Yukari's face still burned a bright red.
"Sorry." He mumbled out. "That was inappropriate, I shouldn't have said anything."
"...no." She mumbled out. "You're right. I...I miss my dad." She whispered, on the verge of tears. "There's so much I wanted, want to tell him. I hate mom so much, but I...I don't her to die. I don't want to never be able talk to her again. I just wish she wasn't such a..." She shook her head. "I'm sorry, here I am complaining about my mom when you lost yours."
"You have a right to feel the way that you do." Makoto said softly. "It's just...I don't want you to have any regrets with her. If she is serious about patching things up...it's worth at least considering? Maybe?" He said weakly.
Yukari balled up her fists. "I-I can't promise anything...but...I'll try and think about it."
Makoto nodded.
"I'm sorry." She said. "I'm not hungry anymore. Can we do this another day?"
"You got it."
She got up and sighed deeply. "I gotta be honest...that call ruined my day, but," she turned to him, eyes calmer, softer, "I feel better talking to you about it. It's like a weight lifted off my shoulder. Thank you."
He smiled. "Thank you too." She tilted her head. "For talking to me about it. You're my friend, I don't want you to be in pain or make you feel like you have to shoulder everything on your own."
"Friend..." She mumbled out. Slowly, she began to smile. "Yeah, you're right, thanks."
Monday, May 25, 2009, 12:45PM
Gekkoukan High School
"Damn it." Kotone muttered under her breath.
As everyone in 2-F crowded around the exam results, Kotone knew that the worst possible scenario had happened. Makoto had scored higher than her.
Scratch that, he had scored at the top of their class. She had scored a comparatively meager 5th place.
Nine days ago she made a bet with Makoto over who would score higher on the midterms. What lay on the line was their wallets, as feeding a whole nine people was something she could afford, with all of the money she had scrounged up from beating up Shadows, but would prefer to not have to do.
As she made her way back to class, through the crowd of students she spotted a familiar head of blue hair, staring right at her. And as he turned away, he flashed the most arrogant smile she had ever seen, ruining any hopes she had about him forgetting the bet.
"Hmmph!" Kotone puffed out her cheeks.
"But just as the tarot has positive manifestations, it too can have negative manifestations." Mr. Edogawa pointed to the drawings on the black board. "The inverted Fool isn't an innocent spirit so much as he is a reckless madman, the inverted Magician lacks focus and thus squanders his great potential, and the inverted High Priestess, or Popess in some decks, hides away things rather than discusses them. Both the inverted Empress and Emperor can represent the worst of feminine and masculine urges, but don't necessarily always." He pointed to the drawings of a man and a woman in the corner. "Just as the inverted Empress can represent infertility, literal or creative, so too can she represent insecurity and disharmony. The inverted Emperor can represent father issues, but also a lack of control and discipline within oneself."
Makoto's eyes, up until this point half-glazed as they always were in these particular lectures, slowly came into focus as he completely tuned out the teacher's lesson. He began hastily writing in his notebook.
Magician I: "unfocused" literal, dizzy, disoriented, Aragaki&Sanada
Popess II: "hidden" metaphorical?, train shield w/Kotone&others
Empress III: " insecurity, disharmony" literal, Yukari&Kirijo
Emperor IV: " lack of control and discipline" literal
Makoto gripped his pencil tightly, and slowly finished writing in his notebook
me, Orpheus, also Yukari and Kirijo
"Alright," the teacher scanned his eyes across the room, "let's see...Makoto-kun."
Makoto jumped in his seat and proceeded to hastily stand up. "Yes sir?"
"Can you name some of the hanged men that have been represented on the titular tarot over the years?"
A long few seconds passed before Makoto sighed and said, "no clue," and sat back down.
A score of giggles and chuckles erupted as Mr. Edogawa rolled his eyes. "Don't think just because you scored the best in the class you can now afford to goof off. Pay attention or I will curse you. Some of the answers I would have accepted were Judas Iscariot, for certain Christian versions of the deck, Odin, in some decks that emphasis the willingness aspect, or the common traitor, on the oldest Italian decks. For you see-"
"The Tarot is responsible?" Mitsuru raised an eyebrow. "What exactly do you mean?"
Once Makoto arrived at the dorm, far later than he usually did, backpack full of books and hands full of hastily stapled together pages, he asked her to gather all the members of SEES together in the meeting room. He stood tall, shoulders tall and wide, eyes burning with a quiet, but unshakable, confidence. He looked nothing like the oft-blasé youth Mitsuru had come to think of him as.
"The four Shadows we've fought on the full moon these last two months, they're stronger, bigger, and have much more esoteric powers than the Tartarus Shadows we fought." Makoto said. "And all of them had these numbered engravings on them." They all looked at the photocopied notes he had given them at the start of the meeting. "It's not the most scientific observation, but I believe it roughly fits."
When Mitsuru's eyes got to his writings on the Empress and Emperor, she instinctively looked at the other end of the table. Her eyes met with Yukari's. Both flinched and looked away.
"I don't know if it'll be of any use, I don't know if this is just a coincidence and I'm reading too deep into things, or if it's something more than that, but...it can't hurt to be prepared. If we know what the Shadows can do to us, or at least have a vague idea, we have a better chance at fighting them." Makoto sat down.
"High-air-o-fant." Junpei read. "That's the next tarot you think we'll be fighting?"
"We fought one in April, and three this month." Akihiko put his paper back on the table. "If Makoto's ideas are right, it might just be Hierophant, but it might also might be him, Lovers, and/or Chariot. Maybe even more."
"Tarot deck usually have 22 Major Arcana." Fuuka said. "Does that mean we'll have to eventually fight 22 Shadows?"
Makoto shrugged. "I'm not sure. Like I said, it's just an idea...but one I feel pretty confident about."
"I mean," Yukari shifted in her seat, "I don't have any better ideas, so we might as well consider Makoto-kun's. At least until the next encounter."
"June 8 is the next full moon." Shinjiro said. "So that's two weeks to prepare, and if the kid's right we might be fighting Hierophant and God knows how many more of them."
Mitsuru's eye wandered over to Kotone. "Shiomi?" The brown-haired girl jumped in her seat. "You look like you want to say something."
Once everyone's eyes were on her, she sputtered. "What-huh-right-yeah." She coughed into her hand and composed herself. "It's more of an...observation?" She braced herself and asked. "Why...now? If these Shadows are connected in some way, why did they show up..." her voice lowered a pitch, "like, right after Makoto joined the dorm?"
"I..." Makoto trailed off, and looked away. "I um..." The confidence he exuded dissipating like the morning dew as he sunk into his seat. "I don't know."
Kotone cringed, but just as she was about to say something Junpei spoke up. "Maybe it's like a uhhhhh," he snapped his fingers, "what's the saying? A critic's mask of somethin'? You know what I mean right?"
Yukari sighed. "Do you mean 'critical mass' of something, Junpei?"
"Yeah! That's it!" He smiled. "Maybe it's like a critical mass of Persona-users. Makoto's like, what, the sixth Persona-user SEES got?"
"Seventh," Mitsuru corrected, "but the Chairman is rarely here with us, so...functionally yes, he was the sixth."
"Yeah, once we got enough Persona-users in one place, all the wack-ass Shadows take notice and show up to...I dunno, eat our brains or whatever Shadows eat'?" He shrugged.
"Our psyche," she corrected again, "but yes, I suppose that is a logical reason. If Personas are the antibodies to Shadows, then in turn Shadows would eventually grow hostile to a large gathering of Personas. A veritable beacon of opposition."
Junpei grinned, and Makoto stared off in the distance, the confidence that had been brimming early extinguished.
Approximately three-eighths of a second after Kotone spoke, she felt nothing but immediate regret. All she could think to herself was, oh shit, oh hell what did I just say, why did I say that, what the fuck is wrong with me, I just accused Makoto of being the reason these Shadows showed up, I'm such an idiot, Makoto's going to hate me, I'm such an asshole, shit, shit, shit!
Thus, after Mitsuru had dispersed everyone from the fourth floor, Kotone sat on the stairs, lying in wait, hoping to catch Makoto before the night was over and apologize to him in private. But even as most of the team left, and as the seconds turned to minutes, two people remained in the room.
Makoto and Mitsuru-senpai sure have been in there for a while...
Kotone gulped and very slowly stood up. She walked with the utmost care to not give away her position. Tippy toeing to the door, left slightly ajar by Junpei, she leaned up against the wall and tried to listen in.
"For what it's worth, I am sorry." Mitsuru said. "I...understand I can be pushy, and I understand why would were angered by it. When I do something like this, it's not because I want to punish you, it because I think it's the best thing for you to do."
"I'm sorry too. And I not saying you had bad intentions or anything," Makoto said, "I just..." he shrugged, "it's not my thing. I don't care about school clubs, I don't care about track team. I just didn't want to do it is all. Being forced into it really ticked me off."
She crossed her arms. "Do you intend to drop out?"
"I've considered it, I'm not going to lie...but I also hate quitting stuff I've started. I do want to give it a bit of a try before throwing in the towel."
She sighed. "Alright, that's fair I suppose. I suppose I can't ask you to do anything more than that."
"Thank you senpai."
Mitsuru chuckled. "Actually, you should told off on thanking me until I give you this." Kotone heard her walk over somewhere and back. "Here you are. Congratulations for getting top marks. I expected you'd get in the top ten or top five, but not number one."
"Oh. Thank you." Makoto said. Kotone inched closer to the door, trying to see what the gift was. She peaked in and saw Makoto holding a large silver, and rather opulent looking, incense burner. "It's beautiful."
"I know it's a bit of an old fashioned gift, but the smell helps me relax after a long day. I...admit I wasn't sure what to get you," she fidgeted, "I'm actually not very good at getting gifts. I usually just get Akihiko and Shinjiro money, or take them out to eat. They always tease me about my lack of creativity."
Makoto smiled. And he laughed. A genuine, sincere smile and laugh from the blue-haired boy. "Nah, it's fine. I like. It's very practical and very chic. Dare I say it's avant-garde?"
"Oui." She handed him something else. "I recommend the chamomile one the most. It's my favorite smell. Just be sure to ventilate your room often if you use this. I wouldn't want the fire alarm to go off. Not after last time..."
Makoto laughed again and nodded. "Got it senpai."
Kotone bit her lip and quietly left for her room.