(Untitled)

[badbadbathhouse]

Oh gracious, I turn a blind eye for just a sexond and the second post fills up! Darlings, sweetpeas, do please forgive my tardiness. I bring you now our third installment of the fantasticousity, and would indeed love to, ah, beg your pardon in being so late about it.

SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI: PERSONA 4 KINK MEME
PART THREE

In this scintillating post

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Interlude 19 [1a] - Naoto

[anonymous]

A brief introduction - these interludes, a collaboration between anon and anon, are a portion of a larger fanfic (which will render both anons slightly less anon) with framing scenes and a few extra bits added. We post this here in hopes that they might be found suitable as a fill, and for everyone's enjoyment.

***

2012

"It's... good to see you again, Shirogane." Detective Dojima looked uncomfortable, but his words were genuine. He was perched on the edge of his chair, one hand resting on an old and beaten file folder that looked as if it had gone to Hell and back several times over. "Can I get you something to drink? Some coffee, or..."

"Thank you, Dojima-san, but that won't be necessary. I simply came by as a favor to Souji-senpai." She smiled, glancing around the small house - it was still oddly familiar, despite the fact that Souji had been gone in body for nearly two months. "And please... call me Naoto, if you would. I'm no longer involved with police consulting, after all, and your nephew and I were quite close."

"...right. Sorry." He shrugged. "So what's the favor?"

"He asked me to check in on you and Nanako-chan." Another smile, broader than the last one. It was technically true, even if it omitted several rather important details. "Is she -"

"In bed. She's been a bit rebellious ever since Souji left." He laughed, relaxing slightly, but his hand refused to move away from the file folder. That was exactly what Naoto had expected, based upon Souji's observations on his uncle, and it was the real reason she had come to the Dojima household far later than she would normally have been out. But her surface remained calm, passive, and simply friendly, nodding politely as Dojima explained the difficulties he had been having with his daughter.

Halfway through the story, Dojima's phone rang, and Naoto closed her eyes in silent thanks. Dojima missed it, momentarily distracted. "Sorry, let me just get this..."

"Of course."

"Dojima speaking." His eyes widened, and he all but jumped from his chair. "You're kidding. No, I - look, calm down and get in touch with the closest patrol car. I'm on my way right now." He clicked the phone shut, glanced at Naoto and growled. "Look, there's an emergency at the station. I need to get there quickly - can you keep an eye on Nanako?"

"Certainly," replied Naoto, nodding as the smile vanished from her face. "I'll call my grandfather to let him know I'll be remaining here for the time being."

"Thanks. If she wakes up, just... don't tell her I'm at work. I'll call soon." And the detective spun on his heel and darted out the front door, at which point Naoto sighed in relief. He had forgotten his folder.

She had very carefully observed the route that Detective Dojima took from his home to work, and estimated no more than fifteen minutes until he was at the station and realized that it was a false alarm. While she disliked impeding the police force, her friendship with some of the junior patrol officers had come in handy, and she needed the distraction if she were to have any opportunity to examine Dojima's legendary dossier. Souji had told her about it, about how he had been compiling endless numbers of newspaper clippings and fragmentary leads following his wife's death.

The same death that showed up nowhere in the police records. A death with no trail leading backward. A death that ended a life only recorded officially as that of Mrs. Ryotaro Dojima.

Naoto leaned over the table, grabbed the folder and flung it open. There was no time for copying information in a disciplined fashion, only time to take out her camera and take what few photographs she could and commit the rest to memory. She began turning pages over with alarming speed, reading as fast as possible, slowing as she came across a handful of articles in English, then stopping entirely when she came to one in German.

Interlude 19 [1b] - Naoto

[anonymous]

One of the first tricks she had learned from her grandfather was taking in information without trying to process it, to store a memory of what was written to be called back at a later time. That was what she had been doing, internalizing the words and saving them for later. But her lack of understanding of the German article forced her out of the trance, and she began to scan the other articles on the page with increasing fixation.

"Two Hikers Find Dead Cardinal In Own Backpacks."

"Bank Clocks Run Backwards."

"Raining Baseball Hats in Seoul."

If she had been inclined to think less of Detective Dojima, Naoto would have entertained the thought that the articles were the scavenging of a deranged mind or an elaborate practical joke. But she dealt in logic. She shook her head, continued photographing, continued flipping through. There was time to analyze the why once she had absorbed as much of the what as possible.

Still, when Dojima called ten minutes later to say that he was returning home, Naoto closed the folder and slid it back to its place with a sense of relief.

---

Two hours later, Naoto was sitting at her computer in an old t-shirt, her knees to her chest and her brow furrowed. Had anyone walked in and seen her, she would have looked for all the world like a teenage girl confused by some trivial thing online, but she found herself starting to seriously question the sanity of Souji's uncle.

The newspaper clippings - and she had managed to reconstruct some three-quarters of what was in there, making it highly unlikely that she had missed something of vast relevance - were not limited to Japan. Nor were they confined to America, or even to languages that Naoto could immediately recognize. Nor, for that matter, did they seem to directly relate to the day of Chisato Dojima's death. Half of them seemed to be far older than even Souji himself, dating back to the same cluster of dates in 1991. The whole mess made no sense.

Souji had asked her to look into what had happened to his aunt, and all she could find was a woman that didn't exist. And now she went looking for his uncle's information about her, and that didn't exist either.

Indeed, she was starting to wonder how solid his uncle's sanity was. He had been carrying around an entire folder full of nothing but erratic human interest stories that sounded to be one reliable eyewitness away from the tabloid market. The idea that there was any sort of connection between the nonsense therein and the passing of Chisato Dojima was purely ridiculous.

Still...

Naoto squinted. There was a connection, she knew it. While she gave very little credence to groundless intuition, working as a detective built a certain sense of interconnection, a picture of how tied together everything was. And she had the sense this was just such an occurence, that if she just peered a little bit closer - or if she could step outside of her place a bit more - if she just had the right perspective, everything would fit together perfectly.

The irony, as she sat there thinking and wishing, was that the only person with the necessary perspective to explain everything was Chisato herself.