(no subject)
Fandom: Persona 4
Rating: G
Characters: Souji Seta, Yosuke Hanamura, Tohru Adachi, Taro Namatame
Warnings: For the kink meme again. Spoilers. The prompt goes along with an image, so an image is under the cut (from here, on pixiv.)
Pivot
(character studies)
select: H E R O _ /roots
Izanami chooses him because he is bright, and beautiful, and filled with endless potential. She wonders if he’ll ruin himself, and she lets him dangle from her string until he rips himself off of them, defiant and courageous and free.
---
Souji is accustomed to moving, and he is used to change. Raised on a notion of consistency that only extends until the next transfer, he knows that uprooting is an excruciatingly painful process no matter how weathered and wise the tree. Sometimes, it is just easier to take one’s roots with you, holding them high enough above the ground so that they do not (cannot) burrow beneath the surface of the earth and fool itself into thinking that maybe it’s there to stay. Sometimes, he forgets.
He steps off the train in the middle of April, and meets his rough-around-the-edges but well-meaning uncle, who is somewhat awkward when initiating conversation, but the heart is all there. Dojima’s daughter hides behind her father’s knees. She is young and innocent and knows all the right things to say at all the right times. One day, Souji will not be able to help but love her, because it is impossible not to when a child like that so wholeheartedly loves you, and he will come to understand her father, too, growing into adulthood gracefully enough to comprehend that it is not always easy to live.
He goes to school the next day, and is distantly polite to everyone he meets. Despite their curiosity, he doesn’t ask many questions, because questions mean answers mean understanding, and that is a process that requires too much concern, which makes his hands clumsy, until some of those roots slip between the cracks of his fingers, digging into the ground until it becomes impossible to pull all of it out when the time comes, and inevitably, he leaves a little bit behind.
Even while knowing this, he does it anyway - for a boy, who wants to be a hero, for a tomboy, who wants to blossom, for a blossom, who wants to fly. Taking the opportunity of his lowered guard, they wrap their own roots around his heart, and claim little parts of him for their collective own, to share, to love, to follow. Unexpectedly, more follow, and soon it’s impossible not to let everything down - Souji needs those hands to hold a weapon, to enter the other world, to save a life. At the end of the year, he finds himself firmly rooted into the Inaba soil, coiled around their roots, and their stories, some running deeper than others, but all impossible to pull.
He doesn’t try. “I’ll come back,” he promises, putting a hand on Yosuke’s shoulder, smiling gently at Rise’s tears, hoping Teddie won’t really jump him in the middle of the station, because it sure looks like wants to. It’s not a lie - no matter how far he wanders, Souji inevitably returns home.
select: V I L L A I N _ /scrap_wood
Izanami chooses him because he is pitiful, bitter and ugly. She knows she can use him, but he wants to break everything else in this broken world so badly that he does it of his own volition, until he crashes down on the ruins he created and realizes that Hey, Pinocchio, what were you thinking? You’re only made out of wood and nails.
---
Adachi hates Inaba because he chooses to hate it, decides it, even before stepping a foot in it. It is not what he wanted, not what he planned, not on the itinerary when he mapped out his life at an age where he didn’t know anything, but thought he knew everything. Unlike Souji, he doesn’t take well to change, but he can adapt to it, for the definitions of ‘adapt’ that are like chemical reactions - violent and explosive, until everything it becomes is a completely different element than everything it could’ve been, if he had just learned that falling down just means standing back up, and not sniping at everyone else’s ankles, hoping they’ll trip.
He steps into the office a few weeks before everything begins, and meets his loud, eternally unhappy, and constantly condescending superior, who, just like Adachi, wishes he didn’t have a partner, but since he does, wishes he weren’t such an incompetent fool. He and Adachi are more alike than either of them care to acknowledge. One day, they will become, to each other, the closest thing either can call a friend, a confidant, a partner, but not all friendships last forever.
He meets a news program announcer, who is a refugee, and a high schooler, who can’t find sanctuary, and everything is downhill from there. They are innocent, and maybe somewhere in his mind, he knows it, but Adachi sees the world with stained lenses, and he pins crimes into their faces that are less sins than prejudices. Pushing them is easy, and he revels in the feeling like a child relishes being a secret-keeper, except he doesn’t realize now like he will later that secrets are hard to keep alone. They weigh heavily (and marionette strings are only so strong.)
In the end, Adachi knows he is wrong, but that is meaningless - all along, he has known he was wrong, for notions of ‘wrong’ that were flawed to begin with. The acknowledgement means nothing; it is insignificant. What matters is that Souji refuses to let him die in the middle of his madness, and drags him back into the middle of a department store instead. What matters is, while lying on the cold tiles and leaking blood into the cracks, he hears the distant blaring of the ambulance Dojima sent for him and something inside hurts.
(Oh, Pinocchio, maybe you’re a real boy after all.)
select: F R I E N D _ /(extra)ordinary
Izanami doesn’t choose him, but he probably wishes she had, if he knew anything about the choosing at all. She doesn’t meet him until he comes to defy her, standing beside the very one that revolted, and curls her lip back over her white teeth, malicious and hateful.
---
Yosuke doesn’t dislike Inaba, but he dislikes the fact that in Inaba, he is plain, even to simple country people. Like every boy who has yet to become a man, Yosuke wishes that out of a million, he could be that one who was special, unique, and destined for great and legendary things. He isn’t; even with murder and intrigue thrown into the mix, Yosuke is still just a boy, still growing, and still filled with dreams that may or may not come true, but he is special (just not the kind of special that cures cancer, or pioneers space, or even gets the girl.)
He doesn’t meet Souji until April, and when he does, meets him in a rather embarrassing and humiliating fashion that does not exactly speak volumes about the strength of his character. The class fawns over Souji on the first day, because he is new, because he is from the city, and because he has a quiet air of charisma around him that draws people without meaning to. Yosuke likes him, because Souji is good and capable and kind, but it’s not enough.
He wants a persona like Souji, and he gets one. He wants to solve a mystery, like Souji, and he does, but Yosuke always wants more (from Saki, who didn’t have enough love to offer it to others, from Inaba, which doesn’t have enough life to embellish his). It is not that he isn’t important; it is just that he hasn’t come to realize it. Just like it is impossible to say the exact point at which a child becomes an adult, Yosuke doesn’t know until he already is.
The realization hits him like a slow, crashing wave, leaving the sand beneath his feet unstable, making for uneasy footing. (That’s okay; that’s like growing up, too.) It feels like sundown, like fall seeping into winter, with his breath condensing in the air and the scarf around his neck scratching the skin, pulling a broken creaking bike up a suburban hill, bag heavy with books and the dread of approaching exams, with Souji staring at the sky, softly admitting, “You’re special to me.”
Yosuke doesn’t cry when Souji leaves at the end of the year, but his eyes sting, and he blinks twice as fast. He can’t lose to Kanji in terms of macho, of all people, and he’s almost surprised to find that he finds it as difficult as he does. In the grand of scheme of things, Yosuke Hanamura will not go down in history for anything much. He will not change the axis of the Earth, he isn’t destined for anything grander than saving a sleepy town from disappearing off the face of the earth, and for changing Souji Seta’s world.
It’s enough.
select: V I C T I M _ /nobody
Izanami chooses him almost out of pity, because he has nothing left, and nowhere to go. She watches him decay, a man of circumstance, one of those hopeless cases, and becomes more and more convinced that the human race is tenfold more merciless than she could ever be.
---
Scandal, divorce, and wife aside, Namatame honestly loved Mayumi Yamano. To him, Inaba is a place of mixed hopes and disappointments, canceling out each other until there’s nothing left. He had thought he could run away here, like she had, and they could be together, away from the misunderstanding, senselessly critical public eye, but this place took her away from him, strung her body up on a roof like a rag doll until he grew sick to his stomach at the sight of it on the television, and then he wept, putting his hand on the television, and then his hand went through.
Like a drowning man, Namatame grabs at every lifeline (perceived or genuine) he is given, because quite literally, he has nothing left to lose. He brings packages to houses, asks people to sign, pulling his cap down over his eyes, but they wouldn’t recognize him anyway, not with his eyes sunken into his head and bags growing heavy over his cheeks. He pushes teenagers into the television, imagining that he will have done one right thing for once, ever since that whole debacle with the affair, and he smiles to himself, mentally sending messages to heaven that he finally did it, and no matter what he thinks, he is always wrong.
Life is sometimes more unfair to certain people more than others.
He tries to make people understand, but beaten down and unable to mend, Namatame can no longer deliver speeches with the same eloquence and passion as he did when he was a politician. He no longer has the trust in himself, let alone the people’s trust in him, to fuel his words. All he has is a dying ambition and weakening desperation. When he stutters out his reasons (they make sense in his head), they don’t hear and accuse him of murder (how ludicrous), diagnose him with disorders that fill up an entire sheet of paper.
Souji Seta looks at him, into his eyes, partial to the truth, and understands. His friends are arguing amongst themselves around Namatame’s bed, but even so, the boy is calm and grounded. His expression shifts, almost unperceivable, brow knitting together and drawing up into his forehead. For a moment, he stares down at Namatame from his bedside and looks unbelievably sad, and Namatame can’t say it, can’t string the words together well enough, but he thinks, like he thinks to Mayumi, Did you hear me? Did you get it? I only wanted to help.
Souji speaks, and though his voice is not the loudest, everyone hears. “It isn’t Namatame,” he says, decisively, and the look of sorrow turns into determination. “It wasn’t him.”
Namatame leans back on the hospital bed, and closes his eyes.
G A M E _ O V E R _
Rating: G
Characters: Souji Seta, Yosuke Hanamura, Tohru Adachi, Taro Namatame
Warnings: For the kink meme again. Spoilers. The prompt goes along with an image, so an image is under the cut (from here, on pixiv.)
Pivot
(character studies)
select: H E R O _ /roots
Izanami chooses him because he is bright, and beautiful, and filled with endless potential. She wonders if he’ll ruin himself, and she lets him dangle from her string until he rips himself off of them, defiant and courageous and free.
---
Souji is accustomed to moving, and he is used to change. Raised on a notion of consistency that only extends until the next transfer, he knows that uprooting is an excruciatingly painful process no matter how weathered and wise the tree. Sometimes, it is just easier to take one’s roots with you, holding them high enough above the ground so that they do not (cannot) burrow beneath the surface of the earth and fool itself into thinking that maybe it’s there to stay. Sometimes, he forgets.
He steps off the train in the middle of April, and meets his rough-around-the-edges but well-meaning uncle, who is somewhat awkward when initiating conversation, but the heart is all there. Dojima’s daughter hides behind her father’s knees. She is young and innocent and knows all the right things to say at all the right times. One day, Souji will not be able to help but love her, because it is impossible not to when a child like that so wholeheartedly loves you, and he will come to understand her father, too, growing into adulthood gracefully enough to comprehend that it is not always easy to live.
He goes to school the next day, and is distantly polite to everyone he meets. Despite their curiosity, he doesn’t ask many questions, because questions mean answers mean understanding, and that is a process that requires too much concern, which makes his hands clumsy, until some of those roots slip between the cracks of his fingers, digging into the ground until it becomes impossible to pull all of it out when the time comes, and inevitably, he leaves a little bit behind.
Even while knowing this, he does it anyway - for a boy, who wants to be a hero, for a tomboy, who wants to blossom, for a blossom, who wants to fly. Taking the opportunity of his lowered guard, they wrap their own roots around his heart, and claim little parts of him for their collective own, to share, to love, to follow. Unexpectedly, more follow, and soon it’s impossible not to let everything down - Souji needs those hands to hold a weapon, to enter the other world, to save a life. At the end of the year, he finds himself firmly rooted into the Inaba soil, coiled around their roots, and their stories, some running deeper than others, but all impossible to pull.
He doesn’t try. “I’ll come back,” he promises, putting a hand on Yosuke’s shoulder, smiling gently at Rise’s tears, hoping Teddie won’t really jump him in the middle of the station, because it sure looks like wants to. It’s not a lie - no matter how far he wanders, Souji inevitably returns home.
select: V I L L A I N _ /scrap_wood
Izanami chooses him because he is pitiful, bitter and ugly. She knows she can use him, but he wants to break everything else in this broken world so badly that he does it of his own volition, until he crashes down on the ruins he created and realizes that Hey, Pinocchio, what were you thinking? You’re only made out of wood and nails.
---
Adachi hates Inaba because he chooses to hate it, decides it, even before stepping a foot in it. It is not what he wanted, not what he planned, not on the itinerary when he mapped out his life at an age where he didn’t know anything, but thought he knew everything. Unlike Souji, he doesn’t take well to change, but he can adapt to it, for the definitions of ‘adapt’ that are like chemical reactions - violent and explosive, until everything it becomes is a completely different element than everything it could’ve been, if he had just learned that falling down just means standing back up, and not sniping at everyone else’s ankles, hoping they’ll trip.
He steps into the office a few weeks before everything begins, and meets his loud, eternally unhappy, and constantly condescending superior, who, just like Adachi, wishes he didn’t have a partner, but since he does, wishes he weren’t such an incompetent fool. He and Adachi are more alike than either of them care to acknowledge. One day, they will become, to each other, the closest thing either can call a friend, a confidant, a partner, but not all friendships last forever.
He meets a news program announcer, who is a refugee, and a high schooler, who can’t find sanctuary, and everything is downhill from there. They are innocent, and maybe somewhere in his mind, he knows it, but Adachi sees the world with stained lenses, and he pins crimes into their faces that are less sins than prejudices. Pushing them is easy, and he revels in the feeling like a child relishes being a secret-keeper, except he doesn’t realize now like he will later that secrets are hard to keep alone. They weigh heavily (and marionette strings are only so strong.)
In the end, Adachi knows he is wrong, but that is meaningless - all along, he has known he was wrong, for notions of ‘wrong’ that were flawed to begin with. The acknowledgement means nothing; it is insignificant. What matters is that Souji refuses to let him die in the middle of his madness, and drags him back into the middle of a department store instead. What matters is, while lying on the cold tiles and leaking blood into the cracks, he hears the distant blaring of the ambulance Dojima sent for him and something inside hurts.
(Oh, Pinocchio, maybe you’re a real boy after all.)
select: F R I E N D _ /(extra)ordinary
Izanami doesn’t choose him, but he probably wishes she had, if he knew anything about the choosing at all. She doesn’t meet him until he comes to defy her, standing beside the very one that revolted, and curls her lip back over her white teeth, malicious and hateful.
---
Yosuke doesn’t dislike Inaba, but he dislikes the fact that in Inaba, he is plain, even to simple country people. Like every boy who has yet to become a man, Yosuke wishes that out of a million, he could be that one who was special, unique, and destined for great and legendary things. He isn’t; even with murder and intrigue thrown into the mix, Yosuke is still just a boy, still growing, and still filled with dreams that may or may not come true, but he is special (just not the kind of special that cures cancer, or pioneers space, or even gets the girl.)
He doesn’t meet Souji until April, and when he does, meets him in a rather embarrassing and humiliating fashion that does not exactly speak volumes about the strength of his character. The class fawns over Souji on the first day, because he is new, because he is from the city, and because he has a quiet air of charisma around him that draws people without meaning to. Yosuke likes him, because Souji is good and capable and kind, but it’s not enough.
He wants a persona like Souji, and he gets one. He wants to solve a mystery, like Souji, and he does, but Yosuke always wants more (from Saki, who didn’t have enough love to offer it to others, from Inaba, which doesn’t have enough life to embellish his). It is not that he isn’t important; it is just that he hasn’t come to realize it. Just like it is impossible to say the exact point at which a child becomes an adult, Yosuke doesn’t know until he already is.
The realization hits him like a slow, crashing wave, leaving the sand beneath his feet unstable, making for uneasy footing. (That’s okay; that’s like growing up, too.) It feels like sundown, like fall seeping into winter, with his breath condensing in the air and the scarf around his neck scratching the skin, pulling a broken creaking bike up a suburban hill, bag heavy with books and the dread of approaching exams, with Souji staring at the sky, softly admitting, “You’re special to me.”
Yosuke doesn’t cry when Souji leaves at the end of the year, but his eyes sting, and he blinks twice as fast. He can’t lose to Kanji in terms of macho, of all people, and he’s almost surprised to find that he finds it as difficult as he does. In the grand of scheme of things, Yosuke Hanamura will not go down in history for anything much. He will not change the axis of the Earth, he isn’t destined for anything grander than saving a sleepy town from disappearing off the face of the earth, and for changing Souji Seta’s world.
It’s enough.
select: V I C T I M _ /nobody
Izanami chooses him almost out of pity, because he has nothing left, and nowhere to go. She watches him decay, a man of circumstance, one of those hopeless cases, and becomes more and more convinced that the human race is tenfold more merciless than she could ever be.
---
Scandal, divorce, and wife aside, Namatame honestly loved Mayumi Yamano. To him, Inaba is a place of mixed hopes and disappointments, canceling out each other until there’s nothing left. He had thought he could run away here, like she had, and they could be together, away from the misunderstanding, senselessly critical public eye, but this place took her away from him, strung her body up on a roof like a rag doll until he grew sick to his stomach at the sight of it on the television, and then he wept, putting his hand on the television, and then his hand went through.
Like a drowning man, Namatame grabs at every lifeline (perceived or genuine) he is given, because quite literally, he has nothing left to lose. He brings packages to houses, asks people to sign, pulling his cap down over his eyes, but they wouldn’t recognize him anyway, not with his eyes sunken into his head and bags growing heavy over his cheeks. He pushes teenagers into the television, imagining that he will have done one right thing for once, ever since that whole debacle with the affair, and he smiles to himself, mentally sending messages to heaven that he finally did it, and no matter what he thinks, he is always wrong.
Life is sometimes more unfair to certain people more than others.
He tries to make people understand, but beaten down and unable to mend, Namatame can no longer deliver speeches with the same eloquence and passion as he did when he was a politician. He no longer has the trust in himself, let alone the people’s trust in him, to fuel his words. All he has is a dying ambition and weakening desperation. When he stutters out his reasons (they make sense in his head), they don’t hear and accuse him of murder (how ludicrous), diagnose him with disorders that fill up an entire sheet of paper.
Souji Seta looks at him, into his eyes, partial to the truth, and understands. His friends are arguing amongst themselves around Namatame’s bed, but even so, the boy is calm and grounded. His expression shifts, almost unperceivable, brow knitting together and drawing up into his forehead. For a moment, he stares down at Namatame from his bedside and looks unbelievably sad, and Namatame can’t say it, can’t string the words together well enough, but he thinks, like he thinks to Mayumi, Did you hear me? Did you get it? I only wanted to help.
Souji speaks, and though his voice is not the loudest, everyone hears. “It isn’t Namatame,” he says, decisively, and the look of sorrow turns into determination. “It wasn’t him.”
Namatame leans back on the hospital bed, and closes his eyes.
G A M E _ O V E R _