Chapter Text
9/ 27/ 2008 • Sa, Night
The pointers on his watch read 11h23 p.m. but he suspected it to be at least 5 minutes short of the actual time. This wouldn’t do, but there was no way to be sure, so he committed himself to be extra vigilant nearing the Dark Hour's arrival.
Angrily he shut the watch’s cover and stuffed it in his jeans' pocket, clasping its chain to his belt. Not long ago Castor’s grumbling but coherent nonsense had woken him up from a small nap and made it impossible for him to slip in a few minutes of sleep before midnight. Like many a times before, Shinjiro conjectured over how, throughout his life of dubious amount of resources and free time, did he manage to personify his soul into a purple prose demon.
Tales of woe from the inconsiderate traveler.
It was probably Kirijo’s influence - it certainly wasn’t Akihiko’s - or maybe it wasn’t a question of whether he grew like so, but rather of Castor having chosen him because it had related to his fundamentally inborn worship of both violence and sappy poetry. Him, all jagged edges and taut strings of fate, ready to snap.
In the middle of his path was a group of four loudly arguing where to next take the party, streets empty except for their echoes as they verbally fought over which bar to debauch in, which nightclub to dance, which cherry to pop.
Shinjiro groaned. “Stop it,” he faintly told Castor, already predicting his own sway of emotions as its hands slowly closed around his throat. It was fine. He’d been over this. The whole world got to live free while he dragged his feet, heavy with a chain and a Persona attached. Such were the order of things. He needed to chill.
When the wind picked up Shinjiro brought up his hands to his exposed arms. His only jacket had been stolen at the last shelter and he hadn’t bothered to get a new one since, assuming he’d be alright until October reared its ugly head because his body was built like a furnace and so his slim wallet had the odds of holding out for a few days longer. Another gust of wind forced his hand to grasp his beanie and in raising his head up to keep it from falling he groaned again.
Shinjiro hated the night sky. He hated the stars, the moon, the night and everything it brought. He hated the world, the universe. There wasn't much out there to love.
He'd learned to keep his head low and his stance arched in hopes of gaining fame as a thug by mere happenstance of the archetype, secretly glad that the looks coupled with the rumors made him especially unapproachable. He looked down as he walked and tried not to raise a fuss of the details as to why, even if Castor never forgot – his Persona would periodically remind him that his heart was too soft for hate and that he was doing himself a disservice by hiding away from his pains as if they’d never existed.
It hurt. Shinjiro lowered his head and continued walking, pretending that the pain didn’t bore his heart fresh cavities. His neck wasn’t apt to rise above the muddled ground yet, even if it threatened to engulf him whole when he didn’t care to so much as breathe properly, and every time he tried he felt as if all the waste in the world clamored for a spot in his lungs.
Castor roared inside his head at his thoughts in the only way it knew how to laugh. It sounded like a stampede, a million horses' hooves thundering along his muscles and bones, reminding him of who he was and what part he took in his own mess. It hurt more than it should when Castor’s fingers simply twitched from their familiar spot on top of Shinjiro’s shoulders, inching ever so slightly towards his neck because-
I am thou, thou art I.
“Shut up.” He got it, he understood, he saw in-between the lines, read the fine print – Castor was him and he was Castor, and Castor wanted him dead.
At this rate he’d never survive the Dark Hour. Or maybe, at this rate, others wouldn’t survive it instead.
The group must have heard him, shifty glances and hushed conversations focused on him as he walked by. Shinjiro had half a mind to keep it to himself and continue his aimless path, not barter for another brawl when he sure as shit hadn’t healed from the last one, but even if his heart was soft and his soul torn and his head continuously told him that he was a waste of a human being with no redeeming qualities who should just die die die-- he couldn’t. So he stopped, turned around and stood there, blood scorching in his veins.
They were four. Probably older than him, probably looking for the kind of stress relief they surely wouldn’t find with him. “You think you’re hot shit?” Said the one with bleached blond hair, taking a step forward with his fist raised and a mean glint to his eyes. “Wan’ a piece of this?” The streets were wide and without a soul in sight. The light of the street lamp above cast a perfect yellow ring on the pavement.
Castor grinned.
Shinjiro tugged his beanie further down his head. It was nighttime in September and he was out and about with a black t-shirt and a pair of jeans, yet his fingers shook with something other than cold and his neck was surprisingly humid. The adrenaline was setting in.
The blonde guy approached him slowly, questioningly, and Shinjiro swung the first blow- two steps forward and a left hook without precision and yet he still didnt expect the guy to dodge with a side step, further enraging the blonde that now raised both fists.
One of the others approached from the left, another from the right, and the fourth one he didn’t see coming as much as he felt it – the impact of a fist on his face left him stunned for a moment, made him stumble to the side with his arm loosely raised in what Akihiko would’ve undoubtedly called a ‘sorry excuse of a block’. Shinjiro was vaguely aware that his beanie had fallen to the ground, but was preoccupied mostly with how to keep said ground from spinning too fast, though the other guy promptly exclaimed what the rest of them were thinking:
“What the- he’s just a kid?”
Castor narrowed its glare.
The world became less fuzzy when Shinjiro’s fist collided with the thug’s mouth. He ducked away from a blow from his right and proudly took another in the chest, body barely hunching. In one swift motion he grabbed the fist that struck him, twisted it into an unnatural position and while his opponent screamed he shoved him against the closest of the bunch.
Castor roared.
This wasn’t going to be a fun night.
-
The stars looked down on him, a mix of disappointment and weird exultance in their shine, as if humming both their worry and approval. Left the last man standing Shinjiro defiantly looked at the sky, too deep in adrenaline to either feel his bruised body or the ever present pull of dark thoughts as he grinned at nowhere in particular.
‘See that, Aki?’
But the feeling didn’t last long. It lasted, in fact, as long as it took him to blink, to focus: two groaning bodies by his feet, one on his knees and another limp against the nearest wall, hair moussed against his forehead, nose caked in blood. The dissipating adrenaline made every blink morph the guy’s face into a rounder shape, younger. He could be his age for all he knew, probably younger, and as one of his mates gingerly shook his shoulder Shinjiro saw with growing horror how there was no response.
The urge to vomit had him turn away before doubling over himself and hurling last night’s meager dinner on the floor. The taste of bile revolted him, left him pale and unsteady more so than the lack of a proper meal ever did, but he heaved until there was nothing left, until the gag reflex was accompanied by gusts of desperate air and his knuckles turned white by the grip of his fingers on the front of his shirt, on top of where his heart should've been, hoping vainly to grow a new set of lungs.
From the corner of his eye he saw the shadow of a motherless boy kneeling down, the weight of a new reality too much to bear on his small shoulders as he realized that life would never be the same before he blinked the dark spots away, and the boy was gone.
But Castor had no eyelids. It didn’t care for nightmares hiding in street corners or pathetic excuses that blinked away reality, because it saw the clearest of truths of the road in which it galloped over and it knew that the pavement was the result of blood and dirt sifted so thoroughly that it muddied its journey and slowed its movements - and Castor was furious that it no longer had the freedom to ride wherever it wanted to.
(I am thou, thou art I.)
So it didn’t come as a surprise when Shinjiro felt the pull of darkness by its hands, felt his neck constrict and tighten until it couldn’t close in no more, gargled whatever noises came out of his mouth and, as he often allowed, closed his eyes to the inevitable.
Castor never finished the job. Sometimes it seemed close, trotted alongside the edge too many times for him to not see just how much of a miracle it was that a year of this shit had passed by and he hadn’t fallen over that particular cliff just yet. It wanted to – oh, it wanted to – but there was always something holding him back.
By the time Shinjiro woke up the Dark Hour had already crawled into motion. Belatedly, he took in the greyish walls and white beds and glared over his headache and over the drip-dripping noise of blood running down the curtains by concluding that sometime, in between this and that, he'd been taken to a hospital.
Outside the bounds of Iwatodai the Dark Hour didn’t breathe the same presence, but as days blended into months its area of effect had grown to defy these expectations – it festered like a decease, a literal miasma, growing thicker here and there and making it harder to see on the spots where the moon didn’t shine. At times he’d hear inaudible voices whispering sweet nothings into his ear and despite their consistency he’d long chalked it up to paranoia.
Shinjiro often wondered if the Dark Hour had any edges, any determinable limitations. Did it ever end? Was the whole world like this? He pried his memories in search of Mitsuru, whose conversations he often recalled when trying to piece together the scattered puzzle of available information (he’d never tell her that - he’d never get the chance to, anyway).
Through the window of the hospital Shinjiro saw Castor had physically manifested to look towards the stars in silent conversation.
Shinjiro picked up his things and left, and as he walked his Persona aligned itself behind him, hands already hovering over its favorite spot before dropping without fanfare. Shinjiro kept walking and credited its inaction to the immediate need to move through his exhaustion as he focused on the throbbing of his wounds and the motions of his legs and eventually, when the Dark Hour reached its end, he pulled out his mechanical watch from his pocket and prepared it to run for another 24 hours. The watch clicked into place with the seconds ticking steadily, gifting Shinjiro enough repose to continue walking.
-
9/ 28/ 2008 • Su, Morning
On the next morning he grabbed a newspaper that had been unceremoniously thrown next to a garbage can and sighed when the title on the third page read “Four Injured in Downtown Brawl”. By the corner the date was inked black with a thin letter font, the cheap paper smudged by the previous fingers that held it. He already knew, of course, but reading it doubled the pain in his chest.
It was time to return to Iwatodai. He’d considered this before, just hadn't expected the day to have come so fast.
-
9/ 30/ 2008 • T, Afternoon
From beyond the train windows Iwatodai city appeared to have remained the same type of nonsense he’d once gotten used to. It was dumb to think that his departure would've changed things in some way, or that there would be fanfare with his return. Shinjiro left a different person than the one he came back as but the world remained the same.
Castor snarled, an unpleasant sound that sent chills down Shinjiro's spine as it focused on something he coudln't see but nevertheless squinted his eyes by reflex. There, on the stars faintly shining beyond the warm colors of the setting sky he felt the pull of something familiar, the distinct presence of grey eyes pinning him into place, homing in on his location.
“No,” he whispered to no one, thanking whatever deity existed that the train was near empty as he felt a storm come his way. In one second Castor seized him by the neck with its monumental strength. “I’m not here to see him,” he tried as Castor tightened its grip, ghostly head hovering somewhere along Shinji’s line of sight and red irises shaking with wants and needs he didn’t want to indulge in.
He leaned against the closed doors of the train and slid down, a building pressure behind his eyes and ears. His breath came out ragged and then barely perceptible as Castor’s grip tightened more and more, blocking blood from running to his head. His heartbeat quickened while his feet kicked out at nothing.
Castor’s growl was bloodcurdling. It was hard to believe they were the one and the same.
Then, beyond the dots that colored his vision black he saw a mop of bright red hair approach him. A woman was staring at him, intently so, apparently passive towards this maniac struggling with himself in a six o’clock train on a week day. The train rumbling beneath him kept him focused for long enough to feel the brush of cloth against his skin before her fingers pried his mouth open, shoving something inside. The jolt he felt came accompanied with sensory overload – the air had a taste and it tasted like he always thought trains would, like sweat and dust and menthol gum; the porcelain looking woman smelled of raspberry glycerin soap; somewhere close by there was a window open and he could just feel the salt of the sea’s waves crash behind his nose-!
He could breathe.
The numbness slowly settled in after that. Whatever floodgates opened were abruptly shut and trapped beneath a slab of concrete, itself hidden behind the worn, fuzzy drape of a curtain that he was sure matched the ones from his old orphange's common room. Castor was behind that slab, angry in its confinement, but though he could feel his hoof vibrating against the enclosure he could no longer feel the pain of its existence.
There was a lump in his throat that he quickly swallowed, tasting the leftovers of a powdery pill that left a chemical trail on his tongue. The woman sighed, the finely detailed white dress following her movement, her sharp, unimpressed eyes betraying only the most distant ounce of worry. Kneeling beside him, hidden between seats, dressed up in her best cosplay and looking at a homeless kid in the eye, she finally addressed him: “You’re a Persona user.”
It was a statement.
“How did you get it?” That was a question.
He was on the verge of mouthing a slew of obscenities when she ordered him to be quiet, reminding him that this was real life, not a fever dream, and that people would definitely be within reason to carry him to a mental asylum for acting cuckoo outside happy hours. This still didn’t stop him from losing his mind as Castor, despite being angry, threateningly so, continued to leave his throat intact. He palmed the skin around his neck, feeling the indents of Castor’s fingers, wondering why hadn't his brain popped off like a cork on a champagne bottle. “What did you do?” He asked, voice raspy.
“You should hide that,” she pointed out, though immediately seemed to regret it as she got up and looked away, a hand gripping her arm. He got up with her. “People will ask questions.”
“I have a lot of questions.”
She stabbed him with a glare. “And if you want more of those pills then you’ll ask none of them.”
The authoritative tone on this small specimen of a human being was not pleasing in the slightest. After a year of roaming around, minding his own business, he’d be remiss to see himself lectured by a Mitsuru in the making, red hair and all. “I don’t give a shit.” She'd recognized him as a Persona user and 'healed' him with a snap of her fingers – did she have a Persona? Did Aki know about this? Did Mitsuru!? He couldn’t feel Polydeuces’ eyes anymore, as if his forcibly imposed medicine did more than just hide his Persona from himself.
Up from the speakers the mechanical voice announced their arrival at Iwatodai Station.
The girl humphed, displeased with his rude behavior. She grabbed his collar and pulled until they were mere inches apart before slipping an orange pill bottle against his palm. She wore platform shoes, he noted, and as it was the top of her head barely reached his chin. “I’ll find you when you decide to give a shit.” Before he had time to interject, she shoved past him and left.
-
10/ 1/ 2008 • W, ?
Those pills were both the best and the worst thing he’d ever gotten his hands on. They were easily the best fix he’d ever attempted, but as a downside he’d sometimes blink and magically teleport to a different place. He also slept a lot. God knows where.
Having already taken an ungodly amount of pills he didn’t feel like caring about repercussions. Not this time. Not when Castor was off to the middle of nowhere and he slept through time and space in pure bliss, neither hungry nor thirsty, merely breathing. Taking free drugs from strangers felt in tune to the type of person he was...used to be? It was hard to distinguish the timelines sometimes. Whatever. Each second without them was a second too long. Agonizing. Literal, heartbreaking, pain.
But even though Castor was a far gone memory he still felt like death.
Damn, he was falling asleep again. In a blink he was at the park bench, hunched over himself and coughing his lungs out, but in another blink he was in a dark alley. He blinked a few more times and then woke up with a startle, shielding his face with his arms. Of course there was no one there, just the sliver of a nightmare he already forgot.
Good pills.
-
10/ 2/ 2008 • Th, ?
“She was a nurse,” he repeated over and over again. “She was a nurse, she was a nurse, she was a nurse-”
And he took her life, just like that. She probably saved a lot of lives, definitely more than she did while dead. Or maybe there were hospitals for dead souls. Would they accept his?
He looked at the pill bottle and felt a shockwave punch his body to his knees before doubling over and hurling his stomach out.
-
10/ 3/ 2008 • F, ?
He didn’t know where he was but he still kept track of the days, hyper aware of the time but not the place. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t even aware of who he was.
But he was aware of the date. There was no amount of pills that could shake the date away. It brought a different kind of forced lucidity, like the universe wasn’t letting him truly escape.
He shook his head. It was just a miserable a day as any other.
The pill bottle was almost empty.
When was the last time he ate?
…did it matter?
It hurt to think.
He blinked.
-
“I never had the potential,” he admitted to no one, gathering side eye glances from passersby who’d only see in him another punk with a drug addiction, hardly able to maintain his own weight. “I never… I shouldn’t have…”
-
10/ 4/ 2008 • Sa, Morning
He was at the cemetery.
Figures he’d go there. The sap. All of him cheap philosophy and violence and abandoned friends. ‘Fuck..’
He blinked.
He was still at the cemetery. Still in Iwatodai too, said the sign at the entrance. It read…wait, it took him some time to read. It definitely had Iwatodai in the name. ‘Shite name’ he thought. ‘Cool story bro, who gives a shit’, he answered himself.
Not two steps forward and he stumbled to his knees and then onto his back. His stomach growled at the excessive movement and tried in vain to wretch the pills that he’d taken minutes ago. He gulped them down.
The pill bottle was three pills away from empty.
He blinked.
There was shadow against his face and a small breeze against his nose and Aki was laying by his side, hands on his stomach, looking directly into the sun. It was close to noon.
“But there’s a shadow right there,” the Akihiko said in a voice he couldn’t hear.
“You should be in school” he told the Akihiko.
Something beside him fidgeted, shifted in place, and a voice that definitely wasn’t Aki’s startled his eyes open. There was no Aki (he guessed there never was), but in his place was a boy of brown hair and doe, brown eyes, kneeling beside him and blocking the sun. “I should be…” he murmured. “But that’s not important at the moment. Are you alright?” Shinjiro wanted to move but groaned as his body hurt from starvation. "Here,” the boy said as it handed him a carton of apple juice. “Please drink. It has sugar – I’ve read that sugar is important when you’re feeling debilitated.”
Shinjiro sat up, slowly. His head was a whirlwind of many things, not one of them sane, and the ringing in his ears traced black vignettes around his sight. He convinced himself that he was doing the kid a favor by taking the juice and sipping it dry with one gulp, but though his throat seemed pleased his stomach felt grimy and foul and threatened him again with a violent twist of its walls. A groan escaped his mouth and the boy turned to dig into his schoolbag for something else.
“Eat this.” It was a sandwich wrapped in plastic along with a chocolate bar. “You’ll feel better.” When Shinjiro took too long to take the items the kid forced them onto his hands.
The longer he sat the better his vision became. The black dots dispersed and the static, though still there, lingered to the side, making way for his brain to further unravel the weight of the moment. His beanie was lying on the ground behind him but instead of putting it on he guiltily opted to shield his eyes with his hand, convincing himself that it was due to the sun. “Thanks,” he said, voice raspy and unpleasant, like chipping paint.
Ken Amada nodded. “I didn’t contact emergency services. I don’t possess a phone, but I can request one from a local store!” He seemed hesitant. “Would you wish me to..?” He felt older than he looked – the way he carried himself, the way he worried - but the way he spoke seemed odd, like his little dictionary of a brain was purposely searching for the more complicated words to replace the simpler ones.
After a moment he answered “No.”
A small smile lightened Ken’s face. “It’s ok. I don’t particularly enjoy hospitals either. The smell irks me. It might be the disinfectant.”
Shinjiro’s eyes were glossy behind his hand and he didn’t know what to make of it. The drugs in his system left him weirdly apathetic and insensitive to a lot, like the rubble that dug into his open palm on the floor or the way his clothes bunched up and tangled around his waist, but the more he sat there the more his lucidity grew to encompass the macabre situation he was in.
A boy and his mother’s murderer sat side by side at the gates of a cemetery. There was no punchline.
“Aw crap” Ken said, jumping to his feet. Something in the distance had caught his eye.
After a quick glance Shinjiro weakly signaled for Ken’s attention and pointed a thumb behind him. “At the back, furthest corner on the right. There’s a hole in the wall. Easy to climb up.”
Though surprised Ken took a step back, turning around just to murmur a quick “Thank you” before lightly bowing and disappearing behind him.
Meanwhile, Shinjiro got up to unsteady feet and counted the seconds until something happened, putting on his beanie in the meantime. He was not the least surprised when an adult in a formal suit ran directly to him to ask if he’d seen a kid in a school uniform pass by before eyeing him up and down upon his refusal to answer. He eyed him some more after Shinjiro finally told him that he hadn’t seen no damn kid before the man spoke again. “You’re Shinjiro Aragaki, yes?”
A scowl twisted his face. “You tell anything to Miss Kirijo and I'll be sure to break your coffin open at night.”
When the man spoke next his voice cracked a little. “Miss Kirijo said there was a chance I’d run into you today, so she ordered me to give you this.” He rummaged inside his coat pocket, took out a flip phone and passed it onto Shinjiro with an open palm. Shinjiro, for his part, took the phone with a shaky hand and admired it for a moment, reflecting on how much it could’ve cost. If his memory was still intact (which he doubted, but still) Mitsuru had a penchant for the expensive, having never experienced life in any other fashion. He chuckled.
With what remained of his strength he smashed the phone on the ground and stepped on it for good measure.
The man in the suit looked down, his expression unreadable behind his dark sunglasses. He then sighed and reached out to the pocket on the opposite side, taking out another flip phone – this one evidently more expensive than the last. “She informed me that there was a chance this would happen as well.”
Shinjiro rubbed his temples. There was no headache to subside, but he still felt the imaginary tingle of annoyance that oh so commonly used to send him to his room at an earlier time, whenever Mitsuru involved him in some extravagancy he wasn’t used to. This whole ordeal was quite in the realm of those extravagant possibilities. It made him groan.
Still, he took the phone. There was that part in him that still liked owning stuff now strongly telling him to not be the kind of person that wasted good things, especially not twice in a row. If he broke this phone, would he take out another? Fuck, whatever.
The man seemed pleased enough, eventually leaving when enough seconds had ticked by for it to start being awkward, but it wouldn't be until later that night, when the drugs allowed more breathing room for normalcy, that he flipped through the contact list of the phone consisting of not one, not two, but three different phone numbers, one for each SEES member. Mitsuru took but a second to answer his call – he didn’t get to hear the end of the first ring when she replaced it with her stern voice. “You took initiative.” She seemed more pleased than surprised.
Something twitched in his forehead. “What, you didn’t expect me to?”
She had the nerve to let out a small, dry laugh, as if sarcasm was her middle name, but Shinjiro was blighted by his pathetically empathetic heart and understood the subtext behind the voice (the fine print, if you will). When Kirijo had let out a shaky breath she was glad that he was safe while also uncharacteristically nervous on how to react to his quips, reminiscent of a past that still lingered. “...I deduce you’ve met Amada Ken and his guardian.”
“That his guardian?”
“One of them, yes.”
He rubbed his eyes. “Where are you?”
He could practically hear her gears turning from the other side of the phone. “At the dorm.”
“Where?”
She sighed. “Akihiko is not present at the moment.”
“So…” he fidgeted “…how’s he doin’?”
“Who? Akihiko? Or Amada Ken?”
He deserved that painful twist of his heart. “Both.”
There was a pause. “I feel as though I should forge a narrative in which Akihiko was left severely hurt by your disappearance, but my standards are above any ‘guilt-tripping’. Instead, I will relay to you that in your absence he has become more of himself than usual, driven to make you portray yourself the same way he paints you.” A ghost of a smile haunted his lips as she spoke. “If there is a position to be taken here, rest assured that I am on par with his desire. Though I’d be far more agreeable to set up a date between the two of you if both of you restrained your methods of…dispute.”
“You were always the funniest one of our group, Mitsuru.”
“Hmm.” Her tone had a bit of mirth to it, despite its sharp edges. “As for Amada Ken, he’s in good hands.”
“The kid skipped school today, you know?”
“I’m aware. Understand that, in the end, I can’t control how he lives his life, the same way I can’t control how you dictate yours. No matter how much I want to.”
“See that’s funny, because I know you had your suits poking their heads for me all the time.”
Mitsuru breathed the word ‘…suits?’ before realizing what he meant. “I apologize for my decision in regards to that. I…acted impulsively. I shouldn’t have meddled with your decision. For that...I'm sorry.”
He scratched the back of his neck. Mitsuru had a funny way of demonstrating affection and though it was high time she learned how to properly convey what she felt, that was a can of worms he wasn’t good enough to be in charge of. “Have you been eating well?”
If possible, he heard her smile. “I take it that you plan on disposing this mobile phone once this conversation reaches its finale?”
He hummed. “Haven’t decided where to throw it yet.”
“I see.” A pause. “Don’t mistake my lack of an aggressive pursuit as a sign that I am less invested in your well-being. That being said, I expect to hear from you if you ever feel the need. You know where to find me.”
“Yeah… Thanks.”
Another pause. “I’m happy to know you’re well.”
Another twist to the heart. He wasn’t so sure about that. “Same.”
-
10/ 4/ 2008 • Sa, Dark Hour
The withdrawal was driving him up the wall with itches and painful headaches – one of his hands clamped on the other to keep it from fishing out the rest of the pills and his feet kept ambling around Port Island just so his body could keep working instead of falling over like putty. Getting a hang of how he used to live before the inhuman peace brought by the pills wasn’t something he ever thought he’d be doing and certainly something he wouldn’t allow to happen anytime soon. Who’d thought that he’d be struggling just so that he could exist as he used to merely a week ago? But he had to try. Something about the conversation with Ken and the one with Mitsuru left him feeling oddly guilty.
He stumbled his way through the dark with the same type of effort it took Atlas to raise the entire sky. The pain he felt was immeasurable and Castor was relentless, hammering against the inside his skull with the might of the cosmos, screaming to be freed, and Shinjiro was just as obtuse with his half-assed, frenzied responses and meek attempts at conversation with himself which, of all people, he should've know to be futile.
He was a madman roaming the Dark Hour, expecting his screams to eventually fill the void and call out someone, anyone (something, anything!), to just put him out of his misery. His Persona wasn’t letting up. His sanity was trickling away fast. He stopped for just a moment, leaned down to catch a breather and immediately Castor materialized in front of him and clasped its hands around his airways, pulling him up to its eye level while speaking from inside his head.
Seize the boat you are a stowaway on.
He grabbed and pulled at Castor's massive fingers but the fight was lost in him quickly and his Persona only seemed to tighten its grip at such dismissal. Breathing was becoming a chore.
Seize it.
The same way he seized that Shadow a year ago? Or was it years before, the same way he seized the opportunity to join SEES and forced an uncontrollable Persona out of his brain? FUCK what was he supposed to fucking seize – was it years before that, then!? When he saw Aki scream his throat out at the crackling fire to please let Miki go please there’s no one else no one else please please-
You live in the past. In the past you are immortal.
“Shut up.”
Pain reminds you that you are human.
“I know.”
To be human is to die.
“I didn’t forget.”
But you deny.
He clawed at Castor’s hands but ended up squeezing his own neck instead. “And you didn’t!?” His voice was raspy and inconsistent. “You and Polydeuces? You fucking – my life is my own and I’ll do what I fucking want with it!” This was absurd – he was screaming at himself. “I’ll decide my own fate. Me, by my own terms!”
His body was flung into the air before crashing against a coffin. As a testament to Castor’s strength Shinjiro felt the ground rumble beneath him and was fairly sure that his ribcage was cracked.
You decide by laying still. To live is to act, not to breathe.
“Who gives a shit about what I don’t do?!”
You.
He coughed into his closed fists. “You’re full of shit you know that? Cryptic one liners and tall fucking stance, up there on your high horse.” Slowly, he got up to his feet. “What do you want from me!?” But, of course, it was outside Castor’s area of influence to nudge Shinjiro with actual meaningful words. It got him so angry, so mind-numbingly furious. What was the world to expect of Shinjiro Aragaki, hard-ass seventeen year old barely in the making and already with a murder tucked right under his belt. With a strength that didn’t feel his, he ran towards Castor with a raised fist, only to again be grabbed by the neck and slammed against the ground.
To blame is to be inactive.
He tasted lead on the back of his throat that made it difficult to breathe, but the invisible blood that he knew to already coat his palms made it difficult to care; and Castor gripped harder. It may have been a product of blood loss that he saw the Persona’s small pupils tremble with unsaid words, felt its fingers shake with something other than rage.
Out there, by himself, there was a boy inside a coffin waiting to wake up from his nightmare of dead mothers and empty houses only to realize that life itself was a nightmare, and it had Shinjiro’s name on the director’s seat.
Castor’s grip increased tenfold.
Warriors learn, they do not forget. Forgetting is but shallow relief.
Out there, Ken Amada lived every day without the comfort of the parent Shinjiro stole from him. Every day, no, every second Shinjiro felt the pain of a phantom limb he never had, the actual understanding that he took someone else’s life, someone that would be living and breathing if it weren’t for him, cooking meals for her child and grasping his small hands in between hers whenever Ken needed reassurance. He choked. He took a life that wasn’t his. He’d never forget.
Castor’s grip loosened, then tightened again as Shinjiro grabbed the pill bottle from his pocket.
He’d never forget, but that didn’t mean he was about to hate himself less for it. It didn’t mean he had to move on. He had to carry the burden.
For the first time in what seemed like forever Shinjiro looked at the sky and took a deep breath, and then popped a pill into his mouth.
The usual high he got turned against himself and he was assaulted with a primordial pain from every nerve in his body. He was hyper aware of everything around him, but mostly of himself – of the itch of every internal wound, the sound of every torn muscle, the taste of rust and the scent of iron that pervaded his whole body. It was like he was burning, or something worse, excruciating, like his nails and teeth were being pulled, though mortal words could describe. He wanted to die, but he needed to live. To just live, to just breathe, because at least that he had been allowed in his early years. And then it passed.
Coward.
The toxic green tint of the moon soon came to pass and its light was replaced by the faint hum of the electrical post right beside him. Slowly, he got up.
(10/ 5/ 2008 • Su, Early Hours)
It was nothing short of a miracle, he thought, that his body was still intact, even after all it’s been through. With his large hands he cupped the entirety of his wrist and dryly laughed at how easily he could snap it in two if he wanted to, with his pointer and thumb easily overlapping over each other. He was hurting all over, and if he cared enough to raise his sweater he’d see the extent of his bruises, of his fights with himself.
“Shinji!”
He got whiplash from turning around too fast. With little to nothing in his stomach the motion left him dizzy so it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. By the second to third blink the first thing he saw was the blur of a gloved fist erupting against his face and he knew immediately whom it was he was dealing with.
His ass fell on the ground. “What the hell Aki!”
Akihiko had no time to quarrel about with pleasantries of the conversational variety. Riled up after months of being apart, he took Shinji by the front of his turtleneck and pulled him to his feet. He wound up his arm for another punch, but stopped himself short once he noticed Shinjiro wasn’t about to move. His face was contorted, confused and angry and relieved all at the same time. Beneath the surface of his skin the thunder clouds raged and exploded before starting a de-stressing process of their own, parting away just enough to stop creating static.
Polydeuces felt pleased, but soon its pleasure turned to confusion when it couldn’t locate Castor in all of its splendor. Aki was confused as to what to do, feeling the pull of a million questions but not knowing where to start. His fist slowly dropped, then raised again, then dropped for good. His shoulders were shaking and Shinjiro stood still, heart pounding, unsure of what to do. If he didn’t know any better he’d think Akihiko would openly start crying, something he’d swore off on doing ever since that fateful day, but instead Aki leaned his forehead towards Shinji’s shoulder and stayed like so for a quiet moment. Eventually, Shinjiro raised a shaky arm of his own, and reassuringly patted Aki's back.
“You came back,” Aki’s voice was hoarse.
Unwilling to savor the moment any longer, Shinjiro pushed him away. “I’m not coming back.”
The air turned heavy and sour. Akihiko blinked slowly – it was a testament to their friendship just how well Shinjiro understood what was going on inside his head before he got to put it to words; things like ‘what do you mean’ and ‘how do you mean it’. He’d ask if that entailed not returning to SEES or school or even to the dorm or, even still, if that meant his time in Iwatodai itself was limited, something Shinjiro himself wouldn’t be able to answer. “You-” Whatever he’d wanted to ask got lost in translation as Akihiko grabbed Shinji by the collar again. “You know how much I worried about you all this time? Do you even care?”
Shinjiro wrenched Akihiko’s hand away, but got punched in the mouth for his troubles. He’d received another one if he hadn’t jerked to the right and another still if he hadn’t thrown his arms up in a block. But Akihiko was anything but unprepared and when Shinji’s forearms blocked his jab he came swinging with a hook from the right that left him stunned for a second or two.
He shook it off. Inside Shinjiro lived a type of fire that he couldn’t name, a throb that called him to anger and violence, traits of his that burned so hot he felt the made up barriers that separated him from Castor melt into nothing. He didn’t know where Castor ended and where he began, but he did know that Aki was good at calling them forth. He didn’t know if fighting prowess came a close second, but when Akihiko recovered from his own swing and wound up to launch another, Shinjiro struck first with a shattering right hook. For one glorious moment he felt foul pride at his advantageously long arms, but then Akihiko stumbled backwards and gripped his head. Down his nose streaked a drop of red that he was quick to wipe away and Shinjiro was reminded of why they were having this fight in the first place.
He took a look at his open palm and had a vision of his life flashing before his eyes up until that exact moment and all he saw were the reflections of him as a boy, a child, a teenager, all looking down at their own hands in different points in time. He closed it.
‘To live is not to breathe, but to act’, he thought. For an entire second Castor, from far, far away (beneath the concrete beneath the drapes), stopped its thrashing. It was expectant, waiting to see where this train of thought would leave him…but he’d be disappointed again. Shinjiro Aragaki, again, disappointed himself.
What a joke. If acting meant hurting Akihiko then he’d rather just breathe.
Ken’s mother was still dead and Ken himself would always spend his days running away from people in suits who wouldn’t know how to give a comforting hug if he needed one, because he would never be the kind of kid to ask for it in the first place. His comfort was in the cemetery, on a school day, hoping to be congratulated by a ghost on how strong he was for having lasted so long without crying. No one would reprimand him for helping a junkie off of the ground when it was dangerous to do so, and no one would teach him the appropriate scenarios in which to use big words like ‘debilitated’ and ‘particularly’.
Shinjiro’s body was bruised and hurting but Akihiko was strong and healthy so, if anything, the common denominator of bad things in his life was entirely the existence of a childhood friend that fought to remain alive despite not really wanting to, despite not deserving to. Aki would eventually learn to live without him and Mitsuru would be there to diligently pick up the pieces because Mitsuru too would learn to live and let go, so she wouldn’t have to stay up all night with her phone in hand hoping he’d call at an unsightly hour for a pack of ice and a trip to the hospital.
He let his open palm fall to his side.
Castor was under too many layers to see.
He pushed Aki away and walked past him. For his part, Akihiko seemed to be allowing him.
“I won’t give up on you Shinji,” he said, but let him go all the same.
Shinjiro cleaned the trickle of blood off of his chin and took out his pocket watch, turned it to run close to another 24 hours and walked away with it in hand, hearing the familiar clicks of its gears as time was reset for another day.