Chapter Text
December 17th, 2020
“It’s probably nothing,” Yosuke said, when they were lounging on the sofa together one evening after dinner. “Stress or something like that. It’s not the first time it’s happened.”
“…Hmm?” Souji looked up briefly from the pile of half-marked term papers in his lap. “First time what’s happened?”
Yosuke didn’t respond for a long moment; the notes he was picking out on his guitar were building and climbing, and he seemed to want to finish that thought before getting around to the one he had just voiced. “Mmm,” he finally mumbled. “I dunno. Mostly it’s just static, but sometimes it’s kind of like I can hear…” A sour note sounded beneath his fingers, and he winced, narrowing his eyes as he stared hard at the fretboard and tried again until he got it right. “…Y’know what, never mind. It’s stupid.”
“Now you have to tell me,” said Souji, absently scribbling a note in the margin of one of his students’ papers.
“It’s nothing. Forget I said anything.”
Souji usually liked nights like this, when they could spend time together even though there was work to be done. Yosuke was content to sit and play in relative silence, and Souji had grown used to grading tests and papers to the sounds of improvised music, the squeak of calloused fingertips as they slid between frets. It was relaxing. Tonight, however, the scales and chords being played were more minor than major, more melancholy than soothing, and it was making him feel even more depressed that he had to work all night than usual. “Can’t forget it,” he said, by way of prodding the other man into discussion. “My memory’s too good for that.”
There was a sigh, short and vaguely irritated, and accompanied by the jarring noise of open strings being strummed rather abruptly. Yosuke silenced the cacophony a second later with his palm. “Fine,” he grumbled. “But it’s stupid, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“All right…” Yosuke began tuning the low E, probably to give his hands something to do while he talked, and took a deep breath. “Lately I feel like something’s wrong with me. Like, I feel paranoid almost, like someone’s watching me all the time. And… sometimes I think I can hear Susano-O.” He frowned. Moved on to the A and tuned that to match. “Does that make sense? You’ve got like a billion other yous in there, so you must know what I’m talking about…”
“Kind of,” said Souji, putting his pen down at last. “They’ve never really talked in words, but I think I understand.”
“So they don’t – y’know… say things?”
Souji shook his head. “No. But sometimes they – react to things, I guess. Some of them really seem to like you, some of them are drawn toward Nanako-chan. Things like that. It’s something I feel, not hear.”
Yosuke snorted. “Gee, thanks. Glad to know there’s a few tiny parts of you that like me.”
Souji resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Yosuke had never quite grown out of his self-deprecating streak, however cloaked in humour it may be, but he sensed that right now was not the appropriate time to call him on it. “They’re all me, so they all like you. Some of them are just… louder about it than others.”
He smiled a little and continued tuning, by ear, the way Souji liked it: two strings at a time, two discordant sounds gradually becoming one perfect note. After he was done, his hands stilled entirely, and Souji glanced up when he noticed that the room was silent once again, only to find Yosuke staring at the far wall pensively, his brows drawn close together. It was unsettling, to see him so disturbed by something when he was normally good at brushing off his worries. Souji reached out and grasped his hand, pulled it away from the instrument and toward himself, and lightly kissed his fingers. The strings they’d been pressing down on lent them a sharp smell of copper, as always, a smell his brain had long ago learned to associate with him.
“So…” Yosuke asked quietly, “what about the other other you?”
Souji paused, Yosuke’s hand still pressed against his lips.
“I don’t hear that either,” he said. “Do you?”
“No,” said Yosuke, too quickly, with a shake of his head and a smile that was all deflection and no authenticity as he drew his hand back. “I don’t.”
Souji didn’t manage to press the issue. At precisely that moment, Nanako emerged from her room holding the cordless phone in one hand and extending it toward Yosuke.
“Yosuke-nii,” she announced, “it’s your dad.”
“Great,” he scowled, propping his guitar against the couch’s armrest. “I should really just make a recording and get it over with. Yeah, Dad, still gay for Souji. Can we at least pretend to be adults about it? No? Okay. Looking forward to another awkward day at work with you tomorrow.”
Souji offered him a shrug and a sympathetic little half-smile. The eventual disclosure of their relationship to Yosuke’s family had turned into a long-standing feud between them. The Hanamuras had so far avoided making a mess of things – nothing so dramatic as disowning their son or trying to interfere with their lives in any way – but their distaste was palpable, and Yosuke’s relationship with them had become severely strained. As luck would have it, they appeared to be the only people in Inaba who didn’t like Souji, apparently convinced that he had single-handedly lured their son into a sordid, sinful life of monogamy and child-rearing. Souji liked to think that someday they’d thank him for getting him that far.
As Yosuke stood up and Nanako passed him the phone, Souji asked her, “I didn’t hear the phone ring. Were you talking to someone on the other line?”
“Her mystery boyfriend, I bet,” said Yosuke, already disappearing around the corner into the kitchen with the phone pressed to his ear.
“Yosuke-nii!” she whined in protest.
“I want to meet him,” said Souji sternly, and he was satisfied to see that his tone had made her redden and stutter.
“C-come on, big bro, I’m seventeen—“
“He’s twenty-two. I want to meet him.”
“Fine,” she sighed, rolling her eyes exaggeratedly for effect. “He’s planning a trip out here after New Year’s. Can you wait that long?”
“A city boy? Well now I really don’t trust him.”
“Big bro!”
“Would you give it a rest?!” The angry outburst from the kitchen startled them both. When it was clear that Yosuke wasn't yelling at them, they glanced at each other nervously.
“Yosuke-nii’s still fighting with his parents?” Nanako asked after a moment.
“Sort of,” said Souji. “It’s complicated. Don’t worry, he can handle it. He’ll probably be in a bad mood when he hangs up though, so just hope he doesn’t switch over to the other line to give your friend a piece of his mind when he’s done.”
“Big bro!”
Souji smiled warmly to let her know that he wasn’t entirely serious. Just partially serious. Dojima would never rest easy if he knew he wasn’t looking out for her in exactly the same frustratingly well-intentioned way he would himself, after all.
January 8, 2021
Souji tumbled out of the television and into the foggy backlot, all but completely seized by a terror that had been building on itself under its own momentum ever since he left home. While he’d been waiting for Nanako’s boyfriend to arrive for his pre-arranged instillation of the fear of God, Yosuke’s father had called to demand why his son had decided not to show up for work today. He’d had a terse reply all prepared – there was an unpleasant undertone to the conversation that this was somehow all his fault – but then he’d glanced at the clock, and then at the dark streets outside their kitchen window, and realized that Yosuke was several hours late in getting home.
One call to his cell phone had yielded an out of service area response, and that was the only hint he’d needed about where to begin his search. Now, as he slid on his old glasses and saw clearly through the fog of the other world, he wished he could have been wrong just this once.
A body lay amongst the chalk outlines on the floor, a heap of sprawled limbs splayed in a shallow pool of its own blood. Souji’s hand found his mouth. He recognized at once the shock of red-brown hair and the clothes he’d worn to work that morning and the thin outline of a back he’d traced his fingers down more times than he could recall…
Daisoujou reached Yosuke before he did, appearing in response to his horror rather than to any verbal or mental command. He knew what to do before Souji could even think of it – healing light washed over him, around him, but when it and the Persona had both faded, nothing had changed.
The body was heavier than Yosuke ever was in life. Gravity seemed to work twice as hard to keep him rooted to the floor instead of allowing him to be lifted into Souji’s arms, pulled his limbs down in a sick imitation of a ragdoll as Souji clung to him, cradling his head close to his chest and tucking his face down into his hair. His hand roamed quickly to locate the wound that could no longer be closed, and he made a thick, choked noise as found it in his side, deep and wide and leaking blood – not pouring, anymore, not like it would with a pulse behind it. He wanted to scream, shut his eyes tight and opened his mouth to do so, but his throat was constricted, tarred thickly with despair, and nothing came out.
They hadn’t had enough time together yet. They hadn’t done enough, hadn’t wasted enough days doing nothing at all, hadn’t fought enough or made up enough and when was the last time he’d said he loved him? What happened to forever, what happened to their promise? Their promise that—
Souji looked up, through wet and cloudy and stinging eyes, and stared at those limp, lifeless hands.
Yosuke wasn’t wearing his ring.
Inside him, his Personas began to swirl around anxiously. But it wasn’t Daisoujou this time; it was Mada and Pyro Jack and Surt and the other Magicians. And even more alarmingly, it was Izanagi, murmuring a wordless warning in his ear that something wasn’t right. All of them were restless, highly on edge, but not despairing. He was bitterly sick with himself, finding their lack of concern a disgusting betrayal of his grief – they were him, his anguish was theirs as much as it was his own, so why didn’t they care that the man they loved was dead…?
He kept Mada closest to the forefront of his mind these days, the one he and Yosuke had created together, the one that always seemed the most pleased whenever he was nearby, but that didn’t stop him from being startled when the Persona materialized beside him. He felt a faint urging from his other self, to look, to really see – and then he was sure something was wrong. Izanagi knew it and Mada knew it, and that meant he knew it as well.
What he didn’t know was how he knew it, exactly, or how he knew what to do next. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and looked at the corpse cradled protectively in the ring of his arms, and then hesitantly touched its cold, pale face with a bloodied and unsteady hand. Yosuke looked different, an insubstantial imitation of his former self, and it was so, so painful to even look at him, never mind to touch those familiar features like this… His fingers traced cracked lips and high cheekbones and soft skin, and then moved to the glasses and slid them down off his nose. With his thumb, he slowly, gingerly moved a single eyelid, just a fraction of an inch—
Just far enough to catch a glimpse of the glassy yellow iris underneath.
He recoiled. The body tumbled out of his arms as he scrambled backward, rolled brokenly onto the bloodstained linoleum and lay there, rejected. All of his grief churned and curdled inside him, turned sickening and sour, and Souji had to swallow repeatedly to keep the bile from rising any higher in his throat.
“What the hell is this…?” he panted. Mada gnashed the teeth of his monstrous mouth, and said nothing as he turned around and raised one of his multiple arms in a pointed gesture.
Souji looked to where he was pointing, to the stack of televisions that functioned as the gateway between this world and his own. There was blood on the glass of the bottommost one, smeared handprints and other indistinct shapes, like some kind of grotesque finger painting. With a sick jolt, he realized what it meant: someone on this side had been trying desperately to get out.
Mada moved off to one side of the backlot, tugging on Souji’s mind as he went, urging him to follow. He stood up, legs still shaking beneath him, but worry was already pushing aside his fit of grief as he understood the truth. Yosuke was alive. He was alive and probably injured and trapped in here, unable to cross over to their world without his— without…
“Take me to him,” said Souji, setting off at a stumbling run. Mada disappeared from sight, taking up residence in Souji’s mind once again, but that was all right. He knew where to go, and that meant Souji knew where to go just as well.
He ran without thinking to the twisted shopping district. For a moment, Souji thought that he was going to end up in the Konishi liquor store again, but as soon as the idea occurred to him, he knew that wasn’t right. He slowed and came to a stop in the middle of the ruined street underneath the black-and-red nightmare sky, and then turned, casting his gaze up and down the lines of broken and shuttered-up buildings. His eyes finally alighted on the barber shop next to Tatsumi Textiles, and Mada thrummed inside him.
He went round the back and climbed the stairs to his own apartment. His hand came away bloody when he touched the door handle, and his suspicions were confirmed: for better or worse, Yosuke was there, or at least had been there. It was a start, he thought, and he stepped inside.
Their home was exactly like it was back in the real world, except mired in a darkness so deep his eyes couldn’t penetrate it, even when he paused for a minute to let them adjust. When he came back late from work some nights, either Yosuke or Nanako would always leave a light on for him, but in this world, the light switch by his hand did nothing when he flicked it on. But he’d lived there for four years now – he didn’t need light to know his way around, to avoid tripping over the first step up into the kitchen, to not crash into the table as he crept forward into silence and darkness, listening hard for signs that he was not alone.
“Yosuke,” he called out, when he was sure he couldn’t hear the telltale noises of shadows nearby. “It’s me. Are you here?”
A sudden sound from their bedroom made him jump, a chaotic, ear-splitting din of mismatched musical notes that ran through him like nails on chalkboard. He bolted toward the noise and hissed “Pyro Jack!” before he reached the door, wincing from the sudden bright light as his pumpkin-headed Persona appeared, swinging his lantern. Souji threw open the door and let Pyro Jack float in ahead of him, casting the room in the unearthly lantern glow, and held his breath.
Yosuke didn’t react to being discovered. He sat shaking in the far corner of the room, clutching his guitar and plucking at it tunelessly – worse than tunelessly, Souji had never heard such an awful noise – and gave no indication that he realized he was no longer alone.
“Yosuke!” Souji hurried across the room and knelt before him. His face was drawn, pale; the shadows of his features waxed and waned with the swaying of the lantern light as Pyro Jack bobbed above their heads, and it was so eerie, Yosuke looked so unlike himself, that Souji had to dismiss his Persona and let the room be plunged into darkness once more. But the darkness didn’t help. He could still see the image burned onto his retinas, could hear the hitches and snags in Yosuke’s uneven breathing, could smell…
Copper. So strong he could practically taste it, stronger than he ever remembered it being on Yosuke’s fingertips. He leaned in across the guitar and wrapped his arms around him, and one of his hands rested against ominously sticky, matted clumps of hair when he did. “Are you hurt?” he asked urgently.
A slow, rattling breath was drawn, and then released just as slowly, and Yosuke made a faint noise in the affirmative. God – how long had he been here today, trapped and bleeding and alone in a way he hadn’t been since before they’d even met? What would have happened if he hadn't realized where he'd disappeared to as quickly as he did? Souji didn’t let go as Daisoujou reappeared and attempted to heal him again, and this time when the cool, calming light had come and gone, Yosuke’s trembling had eased somewhat.
“S-Souji…”
“It’s all right,” he soothed him, still oddly high on the sheer relief of finding him alive after what he'd seen in the entrance hall. “I’m here to take you home.”
“D-don’t want… wish you’d n-never…”
Souji eased the instrument away, though Yosuke fought him futilely as he did – it was his object of comfort, even if it was only a copy in this world, even if it seemed for some reason that Souji didn't understand that he could no longer make it work. “I wouldn’t leave you here,” he assured him gently, and then because he remembered now why it was so important to say so, added, “I love you…”
“W-wish you… d-didn’t…”
“Don’t say that…”
“W-wish you’d… n-never told me…”
Souji pulled back, stung, as his Personas began to act up again. He’s confused. Disoriented. He doesn’t mean it. Get him out of here. How long can a person last without—
“Your Shadow,” Souji whispered. “Yosuke, did you… did you kill your Shadow?”
Yosuke laughed into Souji’s shoulder, a halting, crazed sort of bursting cackle. “I don’t hear him anymore…” he choked out after the fit had passed, and Souji didn’t need his Personas to tell him that everything had just gone from bad to worse.
Getting Yosuke out of the other world had been the easy part, Souji was dismayed to discover. By the time he managed to get him home, he could no longer speak or stand under his own power, and instead slumped heavily on Souji’s shoulder and mumbled incoherently for no discernable reason. It was unsettlingly like the worst days of December, back during their year together in high school, when Inaba had been full of people made ill by the mysterious fog. He kept talking all the way home, desperately trying to keep Yosuke awake and alert, but it seemed that with each step he became increasingly more delirious, and completely incapable of comprehending anything that was said.
Souji had sometimes wondered, back when he’d still thought maybe he didn’t have a Shadow, what it would be like to have one and lose it. Surely it couldn’t be all that bad, he’d concluded: he got along just fine. As he all but carried him up the stairs to their apartment, he found himself wishing he was still naïve enough to believe that, so that he could believe Yosuke was going to be just fine, too.
Nanako was there when they arrived home, and so was her boyfriend, a tall, gangly young man with ridiculous flyaway hair. They never got as far as introductions. She helped him get Yosuke into bed while the boy watched them, clearly alarmed – the two of them were covered in blood by now, and Yosuke wouldn’t stop making those weird noises -- and then she ushered him away from the scene as quickly as she could.
Yosuke didn’t sleep all night. Before sunrise, Souji and Nanako were in the waiting room of Inaba Municipal Hospital, holding each other and not speaking.