InsaneJournal

Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	character: minato, fandom: persona 3, genre: gen, length: fic

Fugue (Persona 3, Minato)
I debated whether or not to post this one to kinkfest, and ultimately decided against it, because this fic isn't really what the prompter asked for. Not so much songs defining Minato's life here as -- well, Minato's own fragmented sense of self defining his life.

He is such a creepy little fucker. CREEPY LITTLE FUCKER. But I like writing him.

Fugue. Persona 3, Minato and assorted others. PG-13 for some whacked-out imagery and Minato being wrong in the head, ~2600 words. No significant spoilers.
He remembers things by association, primarily.


He lies in bed one night as the Dark Hour steals over his room and renders the moonlight a sickly green—no Tartarus tonight, no studying, just the promise of a pillow and scratchy sheets and sleep, the sleep that keeps eluding him—and realizes he can’t recall his parents’ faces.

He has impressions. Nebulous, fleeting, the faint scent of sandalwood and stubble scratching against his cheek, but they’re real, or he thinks they are. He remembers voices in his ear, murmuring him to sleep, one high and soft, one low and rich. Their faces, though, their names—and he can’t recall those either, even when he tries to match up Arisato with what he remembers about them, it’s an inexact match at best. It could fit, but the outlines of the characters in his mind are so vague that nearly anything could.

The Dark Hour might be causing this, this uncertainty. Things shift now: the corridors of Tartarus, the positions of the Shadows slithering over the floor, the bloodstains on the walls. Even the green light filtering through his window is like that, shifting, ebbing and darkening as something ticks forward. Not time, exactly, but some kind of counter. Ticking towards the end, ticking towards zero.

His teeth ache when the world resets itself, like he’s been chewing on tinfoil. The moonlight sharpens; hazy clouds fade and reveal dots of light behind where they used to be, stars and streetlights.

His memories stay diffuse.

***

He remembers things by association, primarily.

Junpei, talking about videogames from his childhood: “I wanted a Playstation more than anything. Seriously, more than anything, man. I told my old man he could sell my bike—hell, he could’ve stopped buying me food for a month and I’d’ve been okay with it, as long as I got that Playstation.” Junpei props his feet up on the end table, pulls the bill of his cap over his eyes. “But he didn’t. The old man wasn’t really good at saving, you know? He blew too much of his salary on booze and shit like that.” He shrugs: casual, unperturbed, in the present. That’s the mask Junpei wears, the persona he assumes. “Hey, Minato, did you ever want something that bad?”

A small fist clenched around his mother’s skirt, pulling, pleading…

“Yes,” he says. “A little sister.”

“A sister?” Junpei echoes. I talk about a Playstation and you talk about a little sister? You’re such a freak, dude.”

Was that the right answer?

He throws a pillow at Junpei’s head and knocks his cap off in the process. Junpei shouts “Hey!” and the laughter he’s trying to hold back garbles his indignation. Junpei punches his arm, he responds in kind, and it continues like that until Junpei’s laughing too hard to keep swinging. He laughs, too, it isn’t hard to make himself do that, the Jack Brothers reside in Junpei’s arcana and bringing them forward—finding the right tickle in the back of his skull and nudging it into position at the front of his mind—gets easier and easier each time he does it.

When he aligns himself with someone like that, everything falls into place: the right things to say, the right set of memories.

Kazushi, grabbing his shoes out of his locker: “The first time I can remember going to the hospital—I think I was seven, almost eight. There was a tree in the center of the park down the street from the apartment complex where I grew up, this thick old tree with knotted branches and big broad leaves. One day when my mom wasn’t looking, I ran off and started to climb it. It was going pretty well until one of the branches snapped under me, it must’ve been rotted through or something. I tumbled out of the tree and I heard this snap. Turned out I broke my leg.”

Bright lights and bleached walls, beeps and rattling carts and antiseptic smells burning his nostrils. Something stale and flat underneath it, stale and flat and sour like—

“I slammed my finger in a car door when I was six,” he says. “I think I had to get stitches.”

Kazushi winces in sympathy; something in the air between them thickens, solidifies, though Kazushi doesn’t react to it. He wonders if he’s the only one to perceive it.

There’s a deeper truth behind that one—the Pale Rider following in the Chariot’s wake, the hem of his robes unsullied by muddy wheel ruts, wheels, car, crushed metal and bloodied glass—but it isn’t appropriate, or at the very least isn’t fitting, so he discards it for now, pushes the image back.

After the conversation, when he tries to think back on the memory-behind-the-memory (the truer one?), he finds nothing, only echoes of what he told Kazushi, and nothing of what he didn’t say. When he searches for memories on his own, not in response to what other people are asking for but for himself, he finds vacancies, hollow corridors, fleeting snippets of sound that can be strung together into almost anything.

***

“You’ve been here barely three months and I swear the entire school knows who you are,” Junpei is saying. “It’s weird.”

Do they really? he wonders. What do they know?

The thought remains unvoiced.

***

“I find that the best way to get things done,” Mitsuru tells them—all of them, one evening in the dorm when there’s no expedition to Tartarus planned and no exams coming up in the immediate future, “is to have a goal, and to plan out the steps you need to take to achieve that goal. That way, you know what types of activities you need to put on your schedule and in what order you need to do them. Make sure that the things you do now will help you towards getting what you want in the future, or it’ll end up hurting you.”

“But what if we want to have fun?” Junpei grumbles under his breath. Yukari glares at him, curls her fists primly in her lap.

Mitsuru blinks as though she’s never heard it phrased like that before, then clears her throat. “Because wasting time now limits the opportunities available to you in the future,” she says. “Junpei, where do you want to be in five years?”

“How should I know? That’s five years from now.”

I have six-year goals, he remembers saying to Kenji, and it was true when he said it. Does he still? Can he still remember that progression: university, a prestigious internship, work, marriage, management?

It’s a generic template, he knows that, the basic outline of the life everyone’s supposed to want. It’s bland, impersonal, says nothing about him. A form letter, a pat response on an exam, the answer to an equation.

How does he make it his?

He knows what to say to Mitsuru when she asks: “I’ve thought about going to Kobe University to study physics. Theoretical physics, I think, especially after what the Dark Hour’s showing us about time. Doesn’t the Kirijo Group offer scholarships for that?”

“Kissass,” Junpei says, but Fuuka nods and Yukari beams and Mitsuru says, “I’m sure the corporation would be more than willing to negotiate something like that, especially with your excellent academic record.”

“You memorized the student handbook in two nights?” Hidetoshi asks him the next day as they pore over the attendance lists for last week; Hidetoshi circles one name, Nakamura Seiji, in red, underlines the times of his tardiness twice, and writes Absent from class during suspected time of vandalism in short sharp strokes. “I’m impressed. Have you thought about a career in law?”

“I have,” he says. “A few times.”

Hidetoshi nods once, twice, the tip of his pen hooked under his chin. “You have the right kind of mind for it.”

Later he’s shopping with Yuko, one of her hands tucked in his and the other clutching the designer bag he bought her (“How did you know?” she asked, her cheeks bright and flushed, and he imagined the metallic glint of Valkyrie’s shield and said, “Silver suits you very well”). She leans on his arm, enough for her skin to warm his, and he tells her, “Those kids really look up to you.”

Yuko’s pulse quickens under his fingertips. He’s always been aware of that, aware of the movement of breath and blood around the body. “Do you really think so?”

“I do.”

“I think—I think one of the reasons they looked up to me was because you were there,” she says. “People really like you, Minato-kun…kids especially.”

“Well,” he says, “I’ve thought about becoming a teacher.”

“I’m kind of glad to hear that,” she says; he wraps his arm around her shoulder and keeps it there until the two of them reach the entrance to her dorm.

“You’ve got a real future in entertainment, kid,” Tanaka confides in him the following day. His breath reeks of mouthwash and decomposing starches, sugar gone to rot, the sickly-sweet scent of Incubus. “That or politics, but they’re the same thing, aren’t they? Ha.”

I’m good at peddling lies, he thinks, which comes out as, “People don’t want politicians who lie well.”

And when he’s with them, he sees how viable each option is, how each person nudges him towards a different path and some of them complement each other and some of them don’t, but somehow the contradictions cohere because they’re all inside of him. Part of him. Part of how he understands whatever it is that he understands.

And the disparate parts unite to form, this picture of the whole reveals…what?

***

Easy, easy, easy.

It isn’t that he doesn’t work—he does—but the work itself passes in a fog, in the blink of an eye, one day becomes the next in the same way one song becomes another when he flips through his mp3s and the moon waxes and wanes in the space of a measure. One two three new, one two three, crescent, one two three gibbous, one two three full. The times he spends alone are as indistinct as his parents’ real names—he could be doing almost anything in them. He knows he’s studied because he scores well on his exams, at the top of his class, even; he knows he’s practiced kendo because he remembers how to block, parry, thrust in after-school matches (though he suspects that Tartarus has something to do with that, too); he knows he’s slept because he keeps his eyes open in class the next day, even during Ono-sensei’s lectures on the samurai.

Was it like this at his old school?

He can’t remember. If someone asked him about it he might be able to, but there aren’t any answers to the questions he asks himself.

Easy—ink splattering his fingertips as his pen flies across the paper, leaving a glistening row of characters behind. Easy to call on Sarasvati’s skill at writing, channel Forneus’s rhetorical capabilities. Easy—then, at least, easy in this context—to match names to dates, subjects to verbs, supports to arguments.

(“It’s because you have a plan,” Mitsuru would say.)

Easy—the clatter and clack of shinai, step forward, chop overhand, strike with Titan’s strength, Cuchulainn’s agility. His hand is a vessel for what lives inside him, or what lives inside him are vessels for his hand, his will. His zori slips forward, slides into place.

(“It’s because you’ve practiced,” Yukari would say.)

Easy—pressing open seams and adjusting hems and mix-and-matching colors and filling up the canvas with broad bright shapes and whittling them down into smaller forms. Easy to switch off his mp3 player and sing back whatever it was that he was listening to, he doesn’t even need the security of a private booth to do it. Easy to tally numbers and calculate related rates and budget his time, easy to pluck the people who need him most from the crowd, the ones who want his company, the ones who want some part of himself, and figuring out what the right part to offer them is, that’s sometimes harder, but once he notices the patterns…easy.

(“It’s because you’re cheating,” Junpei would say.)

***

Because there are patterns, and once he moves in time with them, he harmonizes, complements what they’re doing.

“Th-thank you for believing me.” Chihiro’s fists curl around his uniform and crumple the fabric. Wet spots soak through the front; she’s crying. “I feel like—I feel like I can feel good about myself when you’re here…”

He doesn’t say anything, just holds her until she stops shaking.

Easy.

***

In Tartarus, the Shadows don’t care who he is.

The melody breaks down, the rhythms alter. one two move at half-speed, don’t startle the Shadows or alert them to your presence three four draw and strike while they’re looking away, catch them off-balance, attack first five six Evoker out and finger tightening on the trigger and Fuuka giving instructions in his head seven eight Lachesis whirls from the wound in his head and sends windbursts spinning towards the mayas, buffeting them back and forth before they have a chance to retaliate, stripping bits of them away and flecking the air and walls with black dots. one two Yukari wipes their injuries away three four round the corner, search for the staircase, climb until you can’t any more five six don’t think about where the Shadows’ hordes come from or why they’re always framed by bloodstains, just take what you find, what you’re given, what you’ve won seven eight mount the stairs before the Shadows see you.

He wonders if there is a top. Wasn’t Tartarus a bottomless pit? So this is that, but inverted.

He hears faint beats echoing through the halls: footsteps, the clock at the foot of the tower, his heart. Time has stopped, but he’s moving. He feels as much.

He lives through every second he passes in Tartarus. No gaps, no blurs, no hazes. The Shadows are amorphous but his memories of them aren’t.

Electricity jolts through his back and sends him sprawling over his shoelaces. Inside him, Lachesis recoils and shrieks; his muscles contract-release contract-release and he twitches on the floor, fingers knotted and numb, his Evoker tumbles, falls—

“Here,” Akihiko shouts, presses the Evoker between his seizing fingers. Polydeuces springs forward from him, spreads its hands, bathes him in green light and soothes away the aches, washes away the pain. The Evoker is solid in his hand again; he puts the muzzle to his temple and pulls. The new eruption of light from Polydeuces’s fists casts a sickly pallor over the Shadows, draining some of the ink from them—Laksmi sweeps Lachesis aside and encases the Shadows in thick ice—he darts forward with Akihiko and Aigis and Yukari and shatters the Shadows, they break and splinter like glass when they’re frozen. Ice saps their strength, makes them brittle, or it does with this kind.

Again: there are patterns. Shifting, subtle, but there. Improvisation within guidelines, and some kind of pecking order among them that he still doesn’t fully understand.

Where do the Shadows go when the Dark Hour ends? Do they vanish, or are they absorbed into other things, into the pockets of darkness from which they sprung so many years ago?

He never knows how to answer the questions he asks himself.

***

Another Dark Hour: between one day and the next, between life and death, and he spends it between wakefulness and sleep, between what was and what will be.

He isn’t supposed to know the second one. He isn’t sure he knows the first.

***
fugue (fyoog)
n.
1. Music An imitative polyphonic composition in which a theme or themes are stated successively in all of the voices of the contrapuntal structure.
2. Psychiatry A pathological amnesiac condition during which one is apparently conscious of one's actions but has no recollection of them after returning to a normal state. This condition, usually resulting from severe mental stress, may persist for as long as several months.


And now to tackle...um. Everything else on my to-do list.
...at least I have a lot of time backstage to work on all that stuff?