A Persona 4 one shot
Words: 4k+
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/44544748
( An elucidation of my headcanon personality for the protagonist. Some knowledge of Japanese creation myths is required to understand this. Spoilers for the true end. Content warnings include deranged behaviour and gore/rot imagery. )
The most wondrous thing about a rainy day, he thinks, is the way it makes everyone all about fold up tight within themselves and shut the hell right up. He can wander through the centre of town as slowly as he desires and he won't run into anyone, except perhaps the fox, and the quiet is a blessing he's half-sure he himself would murder for on most other days.
He can take his time, savour the atmosphere. For: it is November, late November, and the world is ending. It has nothing to do with Nanako or Nametame or murder, or anything like that; it is simply something he can feel, like a great dark yawning pressure pushing down against his shoulders, or the barest brush of wind snaking softly through his hair. He's surprised the others haven't noticed it, not yet. It's as easy as breathing, to inhale and taste the tang of fog that floats across the air. Even on a day like today, with rain fresh all about to drown out every other sense, it's still there. Curious, truly. He can catch a smile curling up his lips already in stark anticipation of whatever is to come. And so: he walks, wets his toes in countless puddles, and dreams of a dying future that is just a bit too fuzzy around all of its edges to be truly seen.
He cradles his umbrella close against his shoulder, like a guard against rain and conversation both, and lets his eyes unfocus as he gazes through the clear plastic made blurry by rain and the warmth he breathes. He's been up and down the street three times now, from one end to another, and in all his meandering, the only other person he's yet seen is the attendant at the gas station, lounging against the side of the building just out of reach from wayward drops of rain. She waves to him each time he passes, an easy toss of the wrist. The exact details of her expression are lost to incoherency, but he thinks that she is grinning. He finds it inexplicably infuriating.
On his fourth circuit, the gesture that greets him at the bottom of the hill is not a wave of greetings, but an inward curl that speaks of beckoning, and it makes him pause. He frowns. He hasn't spoken with her since that day he first arrived, many months ago; she offered him a job, he thinks. Clearly an offer in which he never was much interested.
But perhaps this is yet another of those heart-bonds Margaret is forever droning on about whenever he deigns to pay the Velvet Room a visit. He hasn't forged a new one since Naoto, after all. And so, so, in spite of better judgement, his feet find their grudging way around puddles and across the road. She rises to greet him and stretches forth a hand in lieu of words, so that he has to fight actively against his disgust at being here.
Instead, he puts on his very best smile, sweet as sickness and wide as the sky. "Hello," he says, polite caution measured right down to the smallest grain. "Did you want something?"
She's still smirking at him, as easy as she was before. There's something about it that is deeply unsettling. But she does not say anything; merely pushes her outstretched hand towards him, insistent. He looks at it, and feels something tighten into an angry knot within his chest.
"Haven't we already met before?" he asks. He can't help the tiny gust of annoyance that bursts like an undercurrent through his words.
Her smile does not lessen. "More times than you know," she states, like there isn't anything out of place or cryptic about that at all; "but that's no reason to be rude. C'mon, now."
He stares at her, hard. His smile has slipped to neutral and his eyes have glazed over to chilly sleet that betrays nothing of this nameless storm he feels brewing in his head. Her words are making him angry, and he does not know why; that alone is enough to be unnerving. Unconsciously, painfully, the hand hanging loose by his side balls itself up into a violent fist.
If she has any feel for his displeasure, it does not show; there is nothing of his disquiet reflected in her at all. Instead she looks at him, looks at him, looks. "No, really," she says. Her voice is disgustingly pleasant. "I insist."
His fingers flare apart, their knotted grasp bursting. Hesitantly, hesitantly, he reaches out. Her palm meets his solidly, easily, and the pressure of her hand about his is as natural as anything, neither too loose nor too tight. Her skin is very cold and wet to the touch, he thinks, even though he would have said for sure that she had kept herself safely out of the fall of the rain, and it makes a shiver run through him, all through him, from the inadvertent curl of his toes to a splattering of stars across the darkness of his brain.
He feels dizzy. How odd. Her hand pumps his once, twice, and she leans into it with a laugh, friendly and warm. "Was that so bad? Hey, anyway, I was just wondering if you ever thought more about that part-time job offer? We could really use the help!"
It's so absurdly normal, so utterly bland, that he could laugh right back at the irony of it. He shakes his head to clear the dazzling in his mind all away, and fights against frowning. A heart-bond, in this? How foolish. He doesn't even know why he bothered.
"No, thanks," he murmurs, and deftly extricates his hand. "I've already found something else."
More useful than you, that's for sure, he thinks with disgust, and with no further words than those, sharp as the changing of the winds, he turns and walks right away. He feels furious, in a cut-off twisted way that has no possible outlet, and so he keeps on going, away and away back towards the peaceful quiet of an empty home.
Behind him the lady stands with her hand yet outstretched in greeting, looking at his retreating back with a grin still sitting easy on her lips, and not a bone in her body offended by the coldness of his affront. It is almost as if she anticipated such a response, as her eyes drift down to the puddles in the pavement and she murmurs the rest of the rehearsed exchange to herself without skipping a beat of it: "Well, you come back now if you change your mind and need it. We won't turn you down."
(she raises up her hand and kisses her palm, as dry as can be, and chuckles to herself, expectantly)
Walking in the rain so long, he thinks, was perhaps not the smartest thing he's done this past week.
He makes it home in record time, spurred by the lashing gale of snarling fury, but even before he makes it in through the front door, he finds his rage subsiding as if subsumed by some other wretched thing. It starts in his core as a dull burn and spreads through his limbs, splashes across his cheeks, and weighs him all down into bitterest lethargy.
A cold of some sort, definitely. He takes stock of his status with frigid and astute certainty, and reacts accordingly with all the grace of a well-oiled machine clicking all its cogs. It will not do to be taken with illness, no; such things deaden his senses and dull his brain into a fog so thick it would give all the others instinctive chills, and these are both wretched calamities that cannot be afforded. And so: he medicates, he downs enough water to drown a small army, and he lays himself down in his futon no later than at once. His head hits the pillow and his eyes snap shut as if magnetised, and he does not have even time enough to inhale before he finds himself asleep.
In slumber, he dreams. It is immediate, violent, like plunging from warm air to freezing water and having the whole of his body burst to life with adrenaline. His thoughts rip from him in an outward spiral and he is there, standing fast and ready in a place he thinks he knows, he surely knows, even through a heavy blue fog that feels laughably like a metaphor for too many things he already understands far too well.
This is no dream -- more a memory than anything else. He curls up his fist, feels the bite of his nails against his palm, and knows unquestioningly that this all must be very, very real.
It wisps away before him, and he observes it, languidly. There is red at his feet, all tiny bricks that lock together perfectly into intricate and geometric patterns. There is blue infinity above him, not like a sky but like a cave so vast that the roof cannot be seen, feeling cramped up and open wide all at once. There is water all around, known only in the gentle distant swishing of waves kissing up against an unknowable shore.
There is emptiness. There is emptiness. There is emptiness. But for all of these appearances, all this mist as thick as lies, he is certain beyond all possibility that he is not here alone. His heart clicks, its compass sings, and distance maps itself against the dark of his eyelids when closed.
So, he walks. He steps with feet that move ahead of him, sure of every pace and finding an invisible path that he somehow instinctively knows is there. He crosses over bridges and under tunnels and up hills and through door after door after door, rising steady as a storm through this labyrinth of cold fog. He can't see the walls around him, but it does not seem to matter; he hasn't run into anything, yet.
After some time of wandering lost not-lost with his eyes closed shut because having them open doesn't help one whit, (such a pity one does not wear their glasses to bed, he idly thinks) he stumbles, quite suddenly, free of mist altogether. It does not open, but ends, and he breaks through a wall immaterial into a space where the air is so sharp and clean it hurts his lungs a bit when next he breathes, and the ground is so clear he can define the edges of every brick in its matrix, and.
And standing in the middle of it all, clothed in loose white simple robes that shimmer and billow minutely across the floor, with long grey hair that hangs limp to her shoulders as if wet with rain, hands clasped at her chest in a rapture of prayer, he finds her. Her is a word of many meanings, here and now, and they are all things that burst formless in his mind and cannot be put into words, cannot be defined, cannot be understood, cannot be expressed--
She looks at him. Her eyes are dark like rubies, dark like blood, and for the first time in his life, he is matched with a gaze as deep and impenetrable as his own. It does not make him feel small, but equal. I know you, he thinks, as he begins again to walk slowly forward. I know you as well as I know myself.
He goes to her, on feet as steady as the earth, and kneels so that his toes are just short of the hem of her clothes. He can see her legs through the fabric, just barely, an outline as faint as a shape seen distantly through falling snow, and something about the sight repulses him. And so he lets his gaze rise up to her face, like a welcome, at last.
"Greetings, Izanami," he says, a low quiet rumble of thunder that vibrates in his chest. (His voice is not his own.)
"My love," she whispers back. "Izanagi."
She reaches out to him, with skin white as ice and fingers that are long and delicate and very, very beautiful. Her touch is soft. He feels her bones like ghosts against his cheek; sees her flesh all warm and solid, but knows what is truly there. He kisses her palm, her wrist, and tastes of rain. Easy, easy, he breathes back hot lightning into her hands, and the insult is more bitter by far than any mist or storm she births will ever be.
Her eyes turn to fire, fast and bright, and he could laugh with all the heart he does not have to see it. What irony, he thinks, that there is anything of flame left within her at all.
(there is fog about them now, spiralling in from all the edges. Still faint, but ever growing. He notices this, and does not feel afraid)
She pulls him up, and he lets her, so that they are standing again face to face. They have not done this for a time that feels long enough to outpace eternity, and they both wear different faces and different bodies from ever before. It is nauseating.
He is achingly aware of the exact length of his every bone (and how wrong they all are, to the one) and the discomfort of seeing all her differences, from the hollows at her cheeks to the ripple of her knuckles through paper-thin skin. She is taller than he is, but only barely. He could rise up on the tips of his toes to kiss her just as easily as he could reach out to strangle her back down into death. He's not sure which he'd rather, truly. Perhaps a bit of both.
But he settles instead on simple speech; lets the words flow through him, born as they are from a nameless heart that is not his own. "A bit much for a reunion," he says. "You know how I hate to visit."
"That is not the meaning of this." Her reply is smooth, immaculate. Utterly unruffled. "It has been some time, and I wished to speak with you. That is all."
The burning in her eyes has faded, now, from a wild fury to the gathering dark of brewing clouds. Not a storm, no -- never a storm from her again -- but something disquieted, unsettled. It makes her lovely, he thinks, as he reaches out to press the tips of two fingers against the curving bone of her cheek, so that her eyelashes flutter at his skin whenever she blinks.
Unerring, unbothered, she continues as if his hand is not poised to strike out her eye at a moment's breath: "This game will be ending soon. It seems you know that better than anyone, even when you walk among the living." A pause, thoughtful; her head falls slowly right and down, so that his touch smears across her face, towards her ear.
(she looks so serene he could complete the picture by tearing her skin right open here, to feel the explosion of blood in his palm and how beautiful that deep contrast would look against her ash and white)
"A pity we didn't get to see each other much. This flesh fits you far too well for that."
And he laughs to hear it, he does, an unbidden cacophony that bursts forth sharp and knocks his head back, puts a delighted spark into his eyes. "You holed yourself up in hell this time. I don't know what else you were expecting."
"Nothing," she spits. Her distaste springs immediate and vulgar. "I do not expect much from you anymore. Foolishness is a mortal's sin, and it sits heavy with you these days. I do not imagine you will make it far enough to face me, let alone best the challenges set for you from the start."
A pause. "...No. I do not so much as wish to match you in conflict again. It is... an improvement, this way."
Her eyes are clear now, hard and cold. He has angered her, he notes, from the contradiction to the emotion curling her hands into claws regardless, and that makes him very happy. So he pushes his fingers in a bit, to feel his nails bite against skin. She does not wince, and he cherishes that, drinks it up. "You are harsh today," he says. One thousand against one thousand five hundred, he thinks, like an answer to the question he does not need to ask.
"Of course. It is natural. I took you for my husband, once." She murmurs. Her voice is ocean deep, slow as drifting tides, and her gaze sits heavy upon him. "Truly, a mistake."
She turns from him, turns from him, turns from him, leaves his fingers lost in the air, and raises her hands palm-up towards the sky of fog that billows blue above them. "Yet here we are again. Yomotsu Hirasaka."
(an ending, they think, in glorious unison. Neither says it aloud)
Her head twists on an inhuman snap; their eyes lock together. "You left me here to rot once long ago," she hisses. "I hope you do not intend to do the same this time."
It is the final piece of the puzzle, of course. The reason she called him here through dreams and woke the lightning in his blood and turned him all to divinity for a night. He could cry another moon, just for this. He could fall in love with her all over again.
He smiles at her. It is as beautiful as their beloved Amaterasu and just as brilliant, near enough to burn right through the curling tendrils of deepening fog that widen the distance between them. "Of course not," he says. His voice is sincere like sunbeams, just as high and just as clear. It rings him 'round with halos, gilds his limbs in limning light, and for the first time since his coming, he truly does look like some sort of god.
(yes, his heart whispers in blackest darkness, as rank as the maggots that once consumed her whole: lie alone with all the dead)
She does not believe him, and he knows this. One thousand for one thousand five hundred, he thinks. There will never be trust between them again. But instead: he steps forward smooth and slow so that he is standing right close behind her, and can smell the touch of rain that lingers in the curling waves of her hair. He lays a hand against her hip and reaches out to catch her wrist with the other. She fits close against him like this, posed as if for a dance, and the extra height she has on him makes it so that his face locks very neatly into the curve of her neck.
He breathes, in and out, and does not smile into her skin, just as she does nothing at all in turn. This is a moment they have not shared since the turning of time began, and so he cherishes it, fastidiously. As is proper, he shuts his eyes; and with them closed to drown out all the alluring workings of her illusions, it is easy enough to feel how her flesh is rotting against his lips, and to inhale the wretchedness of it so deeply he could vomit out his heart. He digs the tips of his fingers in, minutely, to feel how muscle disintegrates and gives way and peels apart. There is no blood, and she does not gasp, and her arm is well and whole again when he chances a glance, but as with all other delusions that give this place its shape, he knows what is real.
He could do many things, here: he could speak, he could lie, he could sing to her of the beauty found in burning bones and writhing maggots, he could eat her all up and savour every sour rank morsel that is left of her. She would be very soft against his tongue, decomposing into dust as she is. She would not let him go through with any of it, he thinks, with her power unbounded by the limits of a mortal body and a will as proud as hers, but it is always nice to dream.
The reward for his composure is a sweetness more sickening than the stench of her rot: she relaxes. Her spine bends to his chest in a gentle curve, and her cheek presses back to rest against the top of his head, and her free hand falls to cover his where it presses to her hip.
(it is nothing less than a victory bright as triumph, the acceptance and regret lingering hesitant in her touch)
It holds for a count of sixteen heartbeats (four fours, surely, to properly send him off) and then her head snaps forward and back to break the moment, so that their skulls knock together and he loses his vision in a black thick swirling of fog. "Goodbye," she says. Measured and minced, as he staggers back and clutches his hands into his hair, snarling inadvertently with rage enough to blot out the sun. "I will not see you again."
True to her word, she does not look back at him. Her arms flair like fireworks scattering in the breeze and in a plunge that robs him of all breath, the fog subsumes him in a mighty roaring rush up from behind. He bursts from sleep with a gasp that jerks him up from the chest and splays him to the air like a beast carved open in a bloody spread-eagle, lungs cut clean for all to see. All stops, defiant of gravity, before he falls back down to his futon in a loose-limbed sprawl. He feels dazed, disoriented. He doesn't know where he is.
There is a thunderstorm raging in his brain, all lightning and thunder and rain pounding through him, running out in a cold sweat from his crown to his toes. His blood feels confused and thick and full in his veins, like a sludge that does not belong.
He breathes, labouriously. Time settles, and his heart does too, so that his flesh no longer feels a size too small.
He breathes, more easily. A blink, a blink, a moment, and the flash of headlights from a car zipping by down the street, and he finds his bearings. This is his room, here in Inaba; there is the clock on the wall. He was sick, he thinks. He went to bed early. That is why he is here.
He breathes, relaxing into the hollows of his body filled up with jumbled bones. Looks up, and finds that it is only midnight. His fever is gone, but he feels very tired, very sleepy, very still. His limbs are like mounds of iron sprawling from his torso, too large to be human and too large to be his. To move feels out of joint, like his tendons are not wired up correctly, but that is probably only the weight of lethargy lingering upon him, and there is no cause for concern. Business as usual. Back to bed. And so, he shuts his eyes once more.
He does not remember what it is that woke him, but it can't be anything of importance; Nanako is in the hospital after all, and Dojima too, so there isn't anything here to which he should pay any mind. Nothing, nothing. He rolls slowly onto him stomach, presses his face back into the pillow, and lightly, dreamlessly, slides back down into slumber.
It is clear in Inaba yet, so the fog within the TV is thicker than anything, like the underbrush of a jungle fit to strangle all life from everything that enters. Her most dearly detested is in Inaba, so Izanami stands and robes herself up in sheets and sheets of fluffy condensation, to feel the tiny pinpricks of water droplets against her false-flesh that is not there, both for love (of the rain) and hate (of him) to wash her rotting skin all smooth and clean. Her hands are flawless in their even motions, but her heart trembles with every beat, and time cannot go fast enough in this warped distorted hell, truly.