[align=center][size=8pt]「 memories of light in a starless sky ／ persona 3, a character study 」
[div style="width:250px;text-align:justify;font-size:9.5px;margin-top:10px;color:#000;line-height:95%"]([font=georgia]TRIGGER WARNINGS for mentions of blood, descriptions of violence, heavy themes—typical Persona 3 things—you know, the game where you summon your powers by simulating death by means of repeatedly shooting yourself in the face with a gun—evoker. I'll dress this post up. Later.)
There were white orchids in a pot on the veranda of the big house.
Mitsuru remembers her mother tending them in the mornings, while a smaller version of herself sat quietly on one of the garden chairs and watched her change the potting bark, spread the fertilizer, plant ice cubes in the pot for water. She remembers wondering if her mother had a green thumb because she'd been named Hanae, for flowers, remembers being told once that although Mitsuru was the first and most precious of all her treasures, the white orchids were the second.
❝
Aren't they hard to take care of?❞ she remembers asking, more than once. Far more than just once, but each time her mother only smiled and said that caring for things was always hard work.
Mitsuru also remembers how the aphids got in one summer, tiny slow-moving creatures with squishy, translucent bodies that made her skin crawl. She saw the leaves yellowing, the stems bending as though under a great weight, weak and wilted, and ran up to her parents' room in tears, sure that this was going to be the first time she'd ever see something die. Hanae's answer was to take her by the hand and lead her back out onto the veranda, where together they picked up the pot and carried it tenderly inside.
Mitsuru watched her mother nurse the plant back to health over the next days, helped her pick the insects off by hand and wipe down the leaves with a cloth dampened with water and rubbing alcohol. Talked to it, even. Prayed a little. She was probably only around five or six years old then, and already wondering if she was too soft for this world.
❝
There are many ways to be strong,❞ Hanae said to small Mitsuru, cradling the blooms in her hands, tracing the delicate fan-shapes of the petals with her fingertips. ❝
It takes a special kind of strength, you know, to be nurturing. To help something live.❞
Mitsuru rarely returns to the big house nowadays, and when she does it's only ever for a few hours at a time, as a guest or a visitor rather than a girl coming home. Her memories of her time there are all pastel-colored like this, watery and blurred around the edges as though the paint has started to run. She thinks it's only fitting, given that she knows it primarily as her mother's house, and she knows her mother to be soft, without angles, her long hair curling delicately, her arms warm and white and sweet. She remembers those arms outstretched, Hanae seated at the dressing table or the piano or by the tall French windows in the living room, and the way she'd bend low over her most precious things—the flower pot and her daughter, murmuring endearments Mitsuru finds she can no longer retrieve.
In the beginning, it's only her.
The direct effect of her awakening to her powers is spending fewer nights in the big house and more in the company labs. There are long interviews—she has to tell the story of that first encounter close to a hundred times,
I don't know how I did it, I thought Father was going to die—and adrenaline shots pumping fire into her veins. There are hours of strength training and swordplay and virtual reality combat simulation—imaginary labyrinths, and imaginary monsters.
It'll be another few years, she's told, before she enters Tartarus again. They want her to be prepared when she does, and the word
when is an iron bar falling across her shoulders, as certain as death.
❝
I saw you die,❞ she tells her father, as she steps down from the simulator after one of the first test runs. All the unsightly little human impulses are still there—she feels them, the urge to cry, to run at him, to sink to her knees on the floor, curl her arms around herself and dig her nails into her flesh—but already she's started to fight. ❝
And I heard Penthesilea singing.❞
❝
I will not die, Mitsuru.❞ There's a spark in his one good eye that looks like pain.
❝
You won't,❞ she agrees. ❝
I'll protect you.❞
Her father stays in the labs too whenever she's there, though she never sees him sleeping. When she wakes in the middle of the night to the blips of the machines that are supposed to read into her dreams, sketching out the shapes her brainwaves make on a long sheet of paper that never ends, he's always reading in the armchair on the far side of the room. Or standing by the window, contemplating the moon, the twisted, spiked shape of Tartarus in the distance.
Sometimes he turns his head and looks at her, and a shadow falls over his face. In these moments Mitsuru wonders if she looks as small as she feels, nested in this bed amid a tangle of wires, electrodes clinging to her forehead and chest and arms. If he were a different father, and she a different daughter, she knows he'd probably scoop her up and embrace her, wires be damned.
Her father is made of stone, and she of steel. Neither of them get much by way of rest, but he never goes home without her. Some part of Mitsuru, some small part buried deep, is glad, but even on the earliest days of testing she knows better than to ever say this aloud.
The fruit of the first year—of her sacrifice, the doctors assure her, and the words hiss out into the air and wrap around Mitsuru, constricting—is a strange, cold contraption in the shape of a gun, called an Evoker. They lock her in the training room with it and tell her over the PA system that she's to shoot herself. They say this with all the gentleness in the world.
Mitsuru-chan, we want you to put the muzzle to your head and pull the trigger.
She wants to retch.
Don't worry, dear. It's not real.
All of this is real. Her palms are slick with sweat, and she almost drops the gun—Evoker—
gun, but her father's eyes are on her on the other side of the thrice-reinforced glass observation window. When she finally pulls the trigger, Penthesilea sings.
The first year becomes two, three, four more, and Mitsuru learns not to hesitate, even if her hands shake and the beating of her heart accelerates to bursting. There's an intimacy to the icy press of the metal against her temple, curious and somehow perverse; stranger still is the truth that this is the only touch she'll know for a long time.
She starts to wake each night a minute or two before the Dark Hour, and her nightmares cease to be nightmares, become patterns, become stimuli. Eventually she loses the pain-impulse in her skin in the particular places where the needles slide beneath it.
The Kirijo net is so wide it's near-impossible for someone with the Potential not to blip on its radar. By the time she finally meets them in person, Mitsuru's known them on paper for months, the two boys from the destroyed orphanage on the opposite side of the city from the big house. The company databases have logged names, birthdays, addresses of foster homes, their academic records at Gekkoukan Junior High. Mitsuru summons the information up on her computer screen with a few measured clicks and studies it, wondering as she does so if it'll tell her how to live with them, or how to fight alongside them.
The three of them move into the dorm halfway through their final year of middle school, and of course she soon discovers that it doesn't. The boys are cut from the same cloth; she sees it from the way they stand—arms tense, shoulders squared. Their eyes sketch her out warily as soon as she comes through the door, making the long searchlight-sweep up and down. Mitsuru pulls her spine straight in response, lifts her chin.
They stand facing each other awkwardly in the lounge as Ikutsuki introduces them to one another, the gentlest of smiles settled on his face like he doesn't feel the frost in the air.
❝
Look at you,❞ he remarks, almost fond. ❝
What a trio of little soldiers.❞
That's what they are, Mitsuru thinks. Soldiers. For all the tension that suffuses their initial meeting, it's possible they even recognize that in each other here, now—steel in the eyes, in the bones of the hands.
❝
Aragaki,❞ she says, by way of greeting. ❝
Sanada.❞
❝
Kirijo,❞ Sanada replies, quiet and unsmiling, a gravelly roughness around the edges of his words. Aragaki doesn't—answer, merely inclines his head and looks down into her eyes.
They'll learn each other later. All their tomorrows start here.
They're difficult in battle. This is one of the first things she discovers, but she's almost thankful for the chance to mitigate it early. It speaks of more than his stellar boxing career that Sanada is wound tight as a wire—always circling and shifting his weight from foot to foot, always outrunning them, Polydeuces' lightning crackling in the places where he steps. Aragaki is quieter and more cautious, more likely to hang back by her side, but ultimately no less volatile; sometimes he'll stop and double over without warning like the breath's been ripped from him. Mitsuru's heard him mumble, ❝Quit it, Castor,❞ more than once when this happens.
They're even harder to live with, for more reasons even than one would generally expect of two boys suddenly thrust under the same roof with no one to look after them but a girl the same age. They make good grades at school—Aragaki's are only a few notches below Mitsuru's own, nearly enough to bump him up into the honor roll with her—but too often Sanada returns from boxing matches with aching ribs and a scattering of bruises along his jawline, and Aragaki goes on too many long walks at night, returning in the wee hours after they've gone to sleep. He never tells Mitsuru where he disappears to. Even Sanada insists he doesn't know.
❝
Didn't you grow up together?❞ Mitsuru asks. She's seen them converse without speaking so many times, just glances and quick, curt nods. This is a language she hasn't learned how to speak just yet.
Sanada only shrugs, offhand, like it doesn't matter. ❝
So?❞
❝
Don't worry, Mitsuru,❞ he adds, softening, when she doesn't budge. They've lived together a month and this is the first time he's used her name. She doesn't know how, or why, but it soon becomes a habit.
It's another month before she learns that Aragaki spends these nights buying groceries at the 24-hour supermarket two streets away, and that he cooks until 3 AM. She always assumed that the intricately constructed lunchboxes that appeared on the dining table every morning, ready to be picked up and taken to school, were her staff's work. When she finds him in the kitchen one night completely by accident, he won't let her thank him, only roughly shoves the glass of water he assumes she came down for into her hand and turns back to chopping onions.
It's yet another month before Mitsuru stops calling her car to pick her up in the mornings, choosing—bizarre as the idea may seem—to walk to school with them instead. She's prepared for the whispers and the stares, heads turning as they pass like it's impossible to reconcile the sight of the Kirijo daughter coming through the high school gates on foot, flanked by two tall boys with grave, fierce eyes and their fists clenched by their sides. Their shadows fall on either side of her, but when she draws her shoulders up and stares straight ahead she'd like to think it's hard to tell who's protecting whom.
Sometimes the larger Shadows, the stronger ones, escape Tartarus and make their way into the city. There is no observable pattern to this behavior that they've unearthed. There is no known cause.
Eventually, she's sure she'll forget what the Shadow they were pursuing looked like, on this one October night that breaks everything. She'll forget its special capabilities, its weaknesses, the steady blip and hum of Penthesilea feeding the information directly into her brain. A year from now, maybe less than that, she won't be able to tell the story of the battle, how precisely they cornered and defeated it, or where they were—only that it was in one of the midtown residential districts, in front of a small house with a plaque on the gate that read
Amada.
What happens after, though, she'll remember. She'll have dreams about it until she dies.
The woman stands framed by the gate of her house—brown hair, Mitsuru notes, long skirt—and the sight of her, alive and awake at the height of the Dark Hour, is by itself enough to horrify. But then Aragaki seizes up and convulses, the tremors ripping through his body from head to toe to the sound of glass breaking.
She and Sanada are fast, pelting toward Aragaki at a run from two directions, but Castor is faster, colossal, translucent hands lifting the woman—Amada-san, Mitsuru thinks—in the air. He grips her by the throat and hurls her downward, her body shattering against the pavement not a half-second before Mitsuru reaches Aragaki and her shoulder slams into his chest. They tumble to the ground and suddenly she's screaming fit to wake the dead—is that really her voice—slapping his face and ordering him in a fit of near-hysterics to come back, to come back this instant, and distantly she can hear the echo of Sanada's voice calling
Shinji,
Shinji,
Shinji, as though from a thousand miles away.
They practically have to carry Aragaki home that night, his arms across their shoulders, stumbling and broken. When they lay him down on his bed he's half-conscious and in the throes of a nightmare—he jerks and spasms, and they have to sit with him for another hour, Sanada's hand on his chest forcing his body flat against the mattress, before he finally lies still.
Mitsuru's dreams that night are full of the sound of splintering bone, of blood flowering across the pavement on a street she'll never visit again. When she wakes the next morning, Aragaki's room is empty and the blood and bruises bloom across Sanada's knuckles instead, the living room wall covered in dark brown blotches where he's taken his fists to the concrete.
He doesn't answer when she calls him—first the last name, then the given name, as if the illusion of some greater intimacy will wake him up and fill the empty dorm—but neither does he resist when she reaches out and takes him by the arm, guiding him toward the kitchen sink. He stares straight ahead, unseeing, like she doesn't exist at all.
Mitsuru turns the knob and holds his wrists down; the water streams cold and clear and sharp over both their hands.
At first the juniors are little more than names on the official S.E.E.S. biodata file. Takeba Yukari. Arisato Minato. Iori Junpei. Yamagishi Fuuka. In turn, Io, Orpheus, Hermes, Lucia.
Everything is simple on paper, and so much messier in practice. Mitsuru knows this in theory, and she's good at thinking on her feet, preparing for eventualities. They fare well enough in Tartarus, especially with Yamagishi's support abilities and Arisato's quiet direction—with each week that passes, the Shadows fall faster, and they climb steadily, up and up toward the moon.
To her shame, she finds she's less adept at dealing with the specific brand of chaos that accompanies a nearly fully occupied dormitory. Battles are nothing compared to the small metropolis of instant ramen bowls steadily being built on the kitchen counter, the hum of Arisato's music issuing quietly from under the door of his room and following her everywhere. Some days Takeba will mislay something—a book, a notepad—and nearly tear the dorm apart looking for it, only to find it wedged between the couch cushions, or under the dining table. Once Mitsuru finds Iori's boxer shorts dangling from the second floor banister; she picks them up with the edge of her practice rapier, and dumps them in the communal laundry basket without comment.
Mostly they subsist on takeout or convenience store fare. None of them know how to cook, though occasionally Yamagishi tries—and honestly, Mitsuru thinks, it's a miracle they haven't died of starvation. Or blown up the dorm, come to that.
It feels strange to admit to herself that, on the other side of these things, her smiles come easier nowadays. Akihiko, too, for all that when he talks to them he seems utterly unable to understand Iori's punchlines, or what Yamagishi and Takeba mean when they whisper about a boy in Class B being ❝a total dreamboat❞. In these moments he shoots a look like a distress signal across the room at her, the same look he gives her in the face of a particularly grueling lab report or an English essay with a frighteningly high word count, and Mitsuru glances away and hides her laughter behind her hand.
❝
We're supposed to be saving the world,❞ he remarks one evening as he stands at the kitchen sink with a spatula in one hand, scraping the remains of Yamagishi's latest dinner attempt from the bottom of their last serviceable pot. ❝
Why does it feel like daycare?❞
Iori is telling a ghost story in the living room behind them, but they can only half-hear him from where they are, the theatrical rise and fall of his voice drowned out most of the time by the girls, who shriek loud enough to break the windows at every other sentence.
❝
We needed them, I think,❞ Mitsuru says, and it has to do with more than power. She can tell from the way Akihiko's eyes find hers across the dining table that he knows what she means.
There's an empty room on the second floor that they don't talk about, but Mitsuru's eyes linger on the locked door on her way up the stairs. She's seen Akihiko standing in front of it, some nights.
Mitsuru goes to see Shinjiro on occasion, but not for the same reasons Akihiko does. She knows he'll always refuse when they ask him to come back. Shinjiro's never believed in safe places, and he's so hard-headed it would probably be easier to order the rain to fall upward than to convince him otherwise. There's no point in telling him that he's cared for, and missed, and needed, regardless of the truth of all of these things.
Today it's raining, and they're talking in the alley behind Port Island station. He doesn't seem to have an umbrella, so she insists that they share hers, and for all his grumbling he takes it from her so he can hold it comfortably above both their heads. They stand awkwardly under its shade, and if Mitsuru notices the far sleeve of his coat going dark with water because he's angled it slightly toward her, she decides to do him a favor and refrain from nagging further.
These conversations always proceed in the same vein. He tells her what he thinks she wants to hear—that he's lying low and taking his medicine, even if he never says where he gets it, or where he stays these days, or who he spends his time with. In turn, she tells him what they're eating at the dorm, enduring his withering glares as she recounts the number of short-order meals and bowls of instant ramen and convenience-store onigiri Akihiko in particular has consumed in the past month. At all junctures he makes it a point to refuse anything she might think to offer him, whether it's confidential trips to the doctor, or a directive to some partner pharmaceutical to start work on improving the available Persona-suppressants. As if it would be so easy to tweak the chemical composition of this or that particular drug, and just like that stop it from eating away at his organs, and maybe cure his crippling guilt besides.
❝
Aren't you already up to your ears in responsibilities?❞ Shinjiro asks her, wryly. ❝
You don't have to nursemaid me, you know.❞
But what if you're dying? she wants to say. Instead, ❝
What can I do, then?❞
He starts to answer, but it's alarming how quickly that hoarse, scoffing laugh turns into a coughing fit these days, and how the coughs are fiercer, more ragged, shaking his entire body back and forth. He brings his sleeve to his mouth, and she clasps her hands tightly in front of her to keep from patting him on the back—he'd hate to be touched, she knows.
❝
Don't tell Aki,❞ he says, when his breath comes back.
❝
He deserves to hear it from you, anyway.❞
Shinjiro shrugs. ❝
Maybe.❞
Akihiko would come running, they both know—Akihiko would fight and plead and threaten and maybe even cry, and he'd never give it a rest, not ever. As well try to convince the rain to fall upwards. That's precisely why Shinjiro won't talk to Akihiko, not about this, though Mitsuru also finds herself wondering what it means that he's still willing to talk to her, even just this little bit.
❝
Go home, Mitsuru.❞ When Akihiko calls her by her first name it's like a second breath, so familiar it's nearly involuntary. Shinjiro's voice, meanwhile, always rasps a little over the syllables, as though something about the word hurts him, or he's not sure he's even allowed to say it. ❝
It's getting dark.❞
She walks him to the flower shop at the foot of the station steps, so he can take shelter under the awning until the rain lets up. ❝
Take care of yourself.❞
❝
Yes, ma'am,❞ he says. His eyes are narrowed, his shoulders drawn protectively up toward his ears, his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, but Mitsuru thinks as she walks away that she sees his lips twist, some small thing that passes for a smile behind the high collar.
Halfway to where her car is parked on the street corner, kind of on impulse, she turns and waves. Silhouetted against the flickering fluorescent lights of the store window, he lifts a hand.
She'd like to think that, after seventeen years of schooling in the art, she's mastered how to do her duty, regardless of how it feels. Most days her personal feelings about the affairs of her (admittedly quite bizarre) everyday life seem so irrelevant she scarcely thinks of them at all.
Still, if there's one item on Mitsuru's long list of things that need accomplishing that she'll allow herself to drag her feet a little over, that she'll admit to feeling just a little put out by, it's the obligatory quarterly dinner with her fiancé, no question. On these days she's whisked off to the salon after school to have her hair straightened and her makeup done, and after that bundled into an outfit pre-selected by the family stylist—always a dress, she notes, always made of some light unthreatening fabric, in pale shades of lilac and sky blue and buttery yellow she privately feels would look better on a cake. Then she's chauffeured across town to this or that hotel, handed out of the car by a faceless, solicitous valet, and escorted to the in-house restaurant, toward a seat at the chef's table across from a man she still calls by his last name, even if they've been engaged to be wed since she entered high school.
This, too, is her duty, and it frustrates her sometimes that two hours of sitting and talking about the weather and delicate, measured eating can leave her feeling utterly spent. So spent, in fact, that she needs to actively fight against the temptation to lean against the door of the dorm after closing it behind her.
❝
Your hair looks dead,❞ Akihiko says, from the couch.
She feels her face relax, the knots in her shoulders unraveling where she's hiked them up aggressively high. ❝
I was assured I looked beautiful. Multiple times, in fact.❞
❝
Maybe.❞ He grins and turns his face back toward the history textbook that lies open on his lap in a halfhearted attempt to hide it from her. ❝
But this guy's your fiancé, and I'm—even if you'd rather die than admit it—your friend. Between the two of us, who do you think is going to tell you the truth?❞
Maybe not
die, she thinks, but Mitsuru's always felt uneasy about the word ❝friend❞. In French,
ami, which has its roots in the Latin word for love. She thinks it might be because she hasn't known many people in her short life to whom it might apply, though she's had upperclassmen and underclassmen and classmates and teammates and acquaintances in spades. Her comrades in S.E.E.S. have confounded this issue of classification somewhat over the past months, with all the little, sometimes accidental intimacies brought about by shared living space and a good few near-death experiences, but still the word doesn't sit well—it's too much, too close, but also somehow insufficient.
She knows what to do with Akihiko least of all. She doesn't know what else to call him, so she settles for his name, and takes the speculation in stride when people inevitably notice he's the only one she ever addresses this way.
❝
What are you still doing down here?❞
❝
Studying,❞ he says, without looking up. ❝
French Revolution.❞
❝
It's Sunday tomorrow.❞ She knows he'd rather study in his room, where he can pace and sprawl and mumble dates and names aloud, bungle the pronunciations of foreign words without fear of embarrassment. She also knows that he almost never studies on Saturday nights, not unless they have finals coming up, and then only when she pushes him.
❝
So?❞ It sounds like a challenge, with a sidelong look to match:
What's your point? ❝
How's the old man?❞
❝
Don't be rude.❞ She crosses the room and sits down on the couch, with barely a thought to the fact that she comes down so close beside him their knees nearly touch. ❝
Though his hair seems to be greying somewhat since I saw him last.❞
It isn't a joke—she's bad at those, and this is merely an observation—but Akihiko laughs then into the pages of his textbook, the sound resonating all through the empty lounge.
When Koromaru arrives at the dorm with a clean bill of health from the best veterinarian for miles around, it's a little like the world turns on its head. It's actually not just the sheer peculiarity of his existence—it's hard enough to imagine human beings capable of harnessing the power within their own hearts, let alone a dog—but also the effect he has on the rest of the team. The underclassmen in particular are so enamored of him, such that Mitsuru contemplates establishing an official rotation for who's going to feed and exercise and groom him on any given day. Iori and Takeba argue endlessly about it, Yamagishi and Amada fuss and fret over him like he's a newborn. She's also caught Arisato, who's usually as impassive as a block of marble, stepping out the front door in the evenings with Koromaru at his heels, the pinched line of his mouth curved sideward into the closest thing to a smile she's ever seen.
Even Akihiko takes a shine to him, in his way—she's lost count of the times she's had to scold him for slipping Koromaru table scraps—and Shinjiro's unexpected return a month or so later is made more surprising by the fact that he seems to establish himself straightaway as the dog's main caretaker, in ways that extend beyond feeding schedules and a Spartan walking regimen.
For her own part, Mitsuru tends to excuse herself from this rotation, not because she isn't fond of Koromaru (she is, because he's brave and loyal and easy to love) or because she doesn't welcome his surprise entrance into all of their lives (she does, as evidenced by her signature on all his veterinary bills). It's that she doesn't know what to do with him, for the same reasons that she never kept pets as a child, for all that her parents suggested that maybe a dog would make the big house a little less lonely. For the same reasons that she never touched the white orchids, either, when her mother wasn't around.
If the flower can't tell you what it needs, she remembers her small self asking, watching Hanae's fingers cradle the white petals,
how do you know?
Ten years later and she finds she wants to ask Shinjiro the same thing. She hears him talking to Koromaru sometimes, on nights like this when the others are studying or out at the mall and it's just the three of them in the lounge, and she's pretending to be too deeply engrossed in her reading to listen. Sometimes she thinks he knows what the dog is thinking, even before Aegis translates every bark and whimper into human words for their collective benefit.
❝
He wants you to pet him,❞ Shinjiro says, as if he knows what she's thinking, and the unspoken question has somehow reached him across space and time and a different life.
That catches her off guard. Her glance snaps upward, away from her book and toward their two pairs of eyes, Shinjiro in the armchair, Koromaru on the floor. ❝
How do you know?❞
❝
He's only been staring at you for an hour.❞ Did he just roll his eyes at her? ❝
C'mere.❞
It sounds like an order, and that fact alone is startling enough to push her into compliance. Before she quite realizes it she's already closed her book and set it down on the table, and then she's taking a step forward, hand half-extended, hesitating. It's not nearly enough for Shinjiro, who sighs and lets out a little ❝tch❞ of impatience before he grabs her wrist and pushes her hand down against Koromaru's head. His fur is smooth under her fingertips, and warm, and it's surprisingly difficult to ignore the fluttering that starts up in the pit of her stomach when he lets out a soft whine and cranes his neck a little to meet her hand, butting against the palm.
From that first point of contact, oddly enough, it's like she already knows what to do, as if there's a kind of instinct switching on that tells her to bend. She sinks down to her knees on the carpet—she wouldn't be caught dead doing this, she knows, if the others were here—down to Koromaru's eye level, and lifts her other hand to scratch lightly behind the ears, around the head, under the chin.
❝
There, see,❞ Shinjiro says over her shoulder. ❝
He's not made of glass, you know.❞
October comes and finds Mitsuru's knees bruising where they've come down hard against the pavement, and Shinjiro's blood is red, so red where it's soaking into the hem of her skirt and the legs of Akihiko's pants.
His eyes are shut, and he's breathing but it's all wrong—whistling, watery. Polydeuces' hulking shape eclipses some of the sickly green glow of the moon as Akihiko casts healing spell after healing spell,
Diarama running seamless into
Goddammit under his breath, over and over, half a growl and half a prayer. She can feel Penthesilea buzzing under her skin, straining at the bit, sending her mind spiraling from one action plan to the next, each more ridiculous than the last. Should she match her own diaramas to Akihiko's, or simply put Shinjiro's heart on ice until the Dark Hour ends and the world comes back to life?
Shinjiro's head moves against Akihiko's knees. He coughs; Mitsuru feels the rattling in her own ribcage and bile rises in the back of her throat. He's bleeding from the mouth now, a small stream at the corner of his lips—how can there be so much blood, Mitsuru wonders, in the human body? So much blood, the hot iron smell of it filling her nose and making her head spin.
His eyes open. He starts talking, but she finds he's saying things none of them want to hear, strangely final things to Amada about anger, about how he needs to live and what he can do with all that time. He's saying ❝
Aki, take care of him.❞ For half a second something wild shadows Akihiko's face—the eyes go wide, the mouth tight, and she's scared that he's going to scream—but then he lets out a long shuddering breath and drops his shoulders and all he says back is ❝
I will.❞
Mitsuru's own hands are outstretched, hovering, coming to rest uselessly against the front of Shinjiro's coat. He hates being touched, she knows, but maybe if she pushes down hard enough she can trap the warmth that she still feels there, cover it with her palms and cage it in still-living flesh.
❝
Hey, quit it,❞ Shinjiro says, but at the same time he touches her, one long hand across both of hers, presses them down against his chest almost with a violence. ❝
You too, Aki. Don't gimme those eyes.❞
Neither of them know how to answer—right now they barely even know how to breathe, holding theirs for every one of Shinjiro's.
❝
Don't cry,❞ he says. ❝
This is how it should be.❞
Then he closes his eyes, and breathes a few times more—more softly this time, but still all wrong—and if not for the green light all around them, and the blood, they might all have believed he's just fallen asleep in Akihiko's lap.
Yamagishi cries, Amada screams. Mitsuru pulls her hands back and finds them sticky, dark with blood, stained a color she doesn't have a name for.
Akihiko holds one of those hands in his for all of the long walk home, hooking his fingers through hers and squeezing. He's cold, even through his glove, and his mouth is set in such a rigid line it looks like his entire face has petrified to stone.
He doesn't show up for Shinjiro's impromptu memorial the next morning. It's just as well, she thinks; she knows he'd hate it, because the principal says all the wrong words.
Troubled.
Potential.
Cries for help.
Nobody knows anything. A few rows ahead, she sees Iori bristling, shifting in his seat between Takeba and Arisato, and she can tell they're all thinking it too.
Nobody knows anything.
Mitsuru thinks she'd give up her chance at the valedictory address to stand at the podium today instead, snap the entire student body to silent attention. She could talk for an hour. She could talk forever about how alive Shinjiro is in her memories—the tall, sad boy with big hands and a foul mouth, who seemed to know how to speak the language of dogs, and watched the early cooking shows every single morning with a diligence to rival the most anal-retentive of housewives. How he made the best beef stroganoff she's ever tasted, bar none, and how, if she could, she'd decorate their kitchen at the dorm with a Michelin star.
October becomes November, and on the night her father dies, Akihiko comes to her room.
He comes unannounced, uninvited, and in another life she'd be stunned by the audacity of it, because she's never allowed another person into her room before, not in the three years she's lived in this dorm. But in this life it feels too much like her soul has unanchored itself from her body; she's adrift outside the world, looking in, watching herself. She's read about experiences like this, about how severe physical trauma or near-death situations can induce them, and she wonders if maybe she saw things all wrong—maybe the bullet went into her own gut instead of her father's, and it was her blood and not his that she saw spreading slow across the floor. (So much blood, she thinks, in the human body.)
Except it didn't, and it wasn't—Kirijo Takeharu is dead, and his daughter is watching herself and wondering at how small she looks where she lies curled up on her side in a bloodstained school uniform, how ridiculously large the four-poster bed with its sweet-scented brocade canopy. The moonlight that filters through the gaps in her curtains is pale, not the green of the Dark Hour, but the room it lights is so still she can almost believe the world hasn't moved forward, that she's still suspended in some hidden pocket of time that isn't even supposed to exist.
In this strange frozen version of the world the only thing that moves is Akihiko, padding nearly soundless up the stairs toward her room, turning the doorknob and sending the door whispering across the carpeted floor, stepping past the threshold, closing it behind him.
❝
Mitsuru,❞ he says. He comes down on one knee by her bedside and there's something about the motion that's almost comical, similar to something out of a fairytale, some story about a knight and his lady. ❝
Hey.❞
Stop, she wants to tell him, only her spirit has no voice where it floats above their heads.
Stop calling. We are all dead.
❝
Mitsuru,❞ he says again, and his voice is thousands of miles away and right up against her ear all at once, low and sandy and tired, but soft around the syllables of her name, impossibly soft.
He doesn't seem deterred by the fact that she doesn't answer, or by the fact that he meets no resistance at all when he reaches out and touches her—gloved fingers against her hair, stroking downwards, tracking slow, meandering lines down her back like he's counting the bones there.
Mitsuru's always hated fairytales because in almost all of them the princess stays in her tower until a man comes along and changes everything—slays the dragon, heals all her brokenness, drops the happy ending in her lap. There's something somehow reassuring about the realization that this is not that; Akihiko is here with her and his presence changes nothing. He's barely a man, only a boy with black gloves covering his hands and a cracking, raspy voice, and the only thing they're certain of is how small they both are in this moment.
She knows he's warm, for all the intervening layers between her skin and his, and she's almost glad.
❝
Do you want me to go?❞ he asks.
It's a simple question with a simple answer. She shakes her head no; he rises and lies down beside her, hands behind his head, close enough to touch.
The next time Mitsuru visits the big house, she finds Hanae in the parlor, pruning the orchids.
❝
I had to bring them inside, you know, to keep them out of the cold.❞ There are fine lines crisscrossing their way across the backs of Hanae's hands now, but they're still as smooth as they've ever been, and move with the same slow sureness Mitsuru remembers from watching her tend the flowers on the veranda so many years ago. ❝
I'm hoping they'll bloom again in three or four months' time.❞
Mitsuru notes the crows' feet that appear at the corners of Hanae's eyes when she smiles, and wonders at how little her mother's face has changed otherwise, for all their time apart. ❝
You look very beautiful.❞
❝
You don't look well.❞
Mitsuru wonders what Hanae sees when she takes in the image of her pale daughter, the black dress and satin gloves, hollows in her eyes and cheeks where the warmth has leaked out of them. She stands half a head taller than her mother now, but with every second they spend sitting together in this room she imagines that she's shrinking, and that by the end of this conversation she'll stand only knee-high.
❝
How are you still so strong?❞ Or, to put the question another way,
How is that even possible? These days Mitsuru wakes in a haze of pain so great and terrible it exhausts her. There are no adequate adjectives for it, no metaphors in any language, just two holes carved out in her gut, and two words:
Shinjiro,
Father.
There's still the question of the inheritance, and the Shadows, and Tartarus, all two hundred some-odd floors of it spiking upward, stabbing at the moon. There's a man she's supposed to marry, a company to run. All of these things are her duty. She doesn't understand how it's possible to know that for a certainty and yet not see the way to go. Still she stands and walks and breathes, but without knowing how.
❝
Your father was the love of my life, you know,❞ Hanae says, gently, as if Mitsuru's six years old again and in tears about everything from aphids to the first frost in the garden. ❝
Still, today I have you, and I have this house. You can bear anything as long as you don't run out of things to love.❞
❝
What should I do?❞ For a minute she doesn't even recognize the sound of her own voice, brittle and almost shrill, like the words are made of glass.
❝
Go home, my dear. Go home and be with someone.❞
The rest, her mother assures her, will take care of itself. She doesn't understand right away how it will change anything, but it's so much easier to follow orders than to give up on her studious avoidance of the word
love—to admit that it exists for her at all in a particular place, in an unexpectedly long list of names, in two eyes and two gloved hands and a heartbeat.
The car ride back to the dorm—the road home, she thinks, and it's so much easier to say the words silently to herself when she's alone—feels long, and slow. When she goes up the front steps and pushes open the door, it feels like the earth of a hundred nations falling away from under her feet.
❝
Where have you been?❞
She wonders if she's allowed this to keep these moments for herself, slipped sideways behind battles and board meetings and visits to the funeral parlor. She wants to ask someone—anyone—if it's permissible for things to stand still here, just for now; here in the lounge at the dorm, Akihiko sprawled on the couch with the remote in hand.
❝
I've been waiting all day.❞ He smiles a little as he says it, even, and it seems to light up the room.
There's a different kind of strength too, perhaps, involved in finding soft places to settle. Whatever it is, it brings her down next to him with no consideration at all for space. They sit so close her hair spills downward across his chest and their knees bump one against the other, and his arm around the back of the sofa follows the slight inward curve of her shoulders, close enough to touch.
Maybe, on the other side of all her duties, rest is a thing that also needs accomplishing—these wordless hours with him are, most days, all the rest she knows.
❝
Could you put the cooking channel on?❞ she says.
