P4: Aeon Social Link
Finally de-anoning from the Bathhouse and posting this on my journal, because I am damn proud of it.
Title: Aeon Social Link
Fandom: Persona 4
Characters: Souji Seta, Izanami
Words: 5109
Rating: R for sexy bits late in the game, spoiler warning
Summary of fic: Social Link Go
[Initiation]
There’s a new girl in school, and she looks like him.
Souji listens to Yosuke pratter on about bands and concerts by the shoe rack and sees her looking at the flyers on the bulletin board. Her short gray hair, the way she stands with one hip cocked, the way she holds a small package with both hands against her stomach.
“She’s hot, isn’t she?” Yosuke’s smile slithers up the side of his face. “You gonna ask her out?”
“Hm? Oh, no.” He picks up his umbrella. “Do you know her name?”
“Nah, I think she’s a senior though, maybe? Way out of my league.”
“Chisato.” They both turn. The girl’s at Souji’s elbow, looking at him with curiously scarlet eyes and a small smile playing up her lips. She’s pale, slender, and within an inch of his height. “You’re the transfer student, Souji Seta. Would you like to get a cup of coffee?” They weren’t questions.
“Sure.”
“Let’s go then.” Souji opens his umbrella and they walk out while Yosuke wolf-whistles behind them.
She orders a cup of tea but doesn’t drink it, and doesn’t speak while he sips his. Her hair curls at the ends and falls across her face, her uniform without adornments, her eyes unblinkingly locked onto his. He sets the cup down.
“Are you happy, here in Inaba?”
Souji pauses before he says yes. Chisato rises and offers him a hand. “Perhaps, next week, we can do this again. I apologize for the lack of conversation today.”
He shakes her hand. “No apologies.” She walks away, apparently not minding the rain, and Souji hears a familiar voice in his head begin I am thou and thou art I . . .
[Rank One]
Chisato finds him after school, walking home alone because Yosuke has a work shift and Chie and Yukiko have girl time together. She’s drenched from head to food but smiling, a little, asking him if he’d like to go into town for the day.
“I don’t see you outside of school,” Souji says.
“I keep to myself. Busy, with work.”
“School work?”
“And other kinds,” she finishes playfully, eyes narrowing, challenging. Souji knows he’s seen her eyes on somebody else before. “Do you have other kinds of work?”
“Part-time, at the hospital.”
“Is that all?” She lets the question hang between them. “I love it when it rains. Do you?”
“Not really,” Souji answers, thinking of the Midnight Channel. “It sets my teeth on edge.”
“I love what the rain brings in. I never know what to expect after it happens - sun, or clouds, or fog.” She steps over a puddle and looks at him, sopping bangs reaching down to he tip of her nose. “How about fog? Do you like fog?”
“No.”
She still smiles.
[Rank Two]
Chie makes kissing noises and Yosuke huffs angrily about having plans broken off when Souji goes to find Chisato and ask her out for lunch. Bento box in hand, he heads over to the senior classrooms only to catch her climbing the stairs to the roof ahead of him. Maybe gliding up the stairs - she barely raises her feet or bends her knees. Knowing how uncomfortable it is to sit in a wet uniform, Souji follows her up and outside.
“There’s a story I heard, the other day,” she tells him, picking through the bento. “A sad story.”
“Sometimes sad stories are the best.” He picks up salmon chunks with his fingers.
“A woman died, and her husband, a famed detective, spent all his life tracking down her killer. He used every means available, both legal and not, and eventually came to a witch and asked her to bring his wife back from the dead, so he could ask his wife who killed her. So the witch brought her back to life, and the man set out to catch her killer, even though he had his beloved back with him.” She picks through the ginger slices, setting them on her tongue before swallowing them. “In the end, justice was more important than his love, and he died alone.”
Souji’s reminded of his uncle.
“But when I first heard that story, I wondered, what the wife’s reaction was. If she was sad or angry at what happened to her.”
“Either would be justified. But perhaps she left, and became happy somewhere else.”
“I doubt that happened.”
“If she chose to be happy,” he says, putting the lid back on the box, “she could be.”
Chisato’s eyes flash as he stands. “So choice is stronger than natural impulse?”
Souji shrugs. “I think so. I have class - do you?” She shrugs too, and he leaves her sitting on the air ducts on the roof.
[Rank Three]
“You mentioned last time,” Chisato tells him when she follows Souji to Nanako’s school, “that you believe that a choice is stronger than an impulse.”
“I did,” says Souji, trying to walk fast enough to cover her with his umbrella. She dances out of reach, splashing him when she steps into puddles on purpose.
“I’ve thought about that since you said it, and I’ve decided that you’re wrong.” He raises an eyebrow. “Choice cannot be stronger when it does not exist. There is only the battle between impulses.”
“How’d you decide that?”
“Think about death. Most people would not choose to die, but they do. That is an impulse. Now here,” she says, stopping in her tracks, “is a fork in the road. Which path are we to walk down?”
“The left.”
“Why?”
“Because I chose to pick up my cousin today.”
“Because you have to pick up your cousin today.”
Souji turns and looks at her. He’s not sure if he’s ever seen her when her hair wasn’t flattened to her head from rainwater.
“I could have gone home.”
“Your desire to appease your uncle is stronger than your desire to be you alone. Desire is an impulse, like death.”
“Yet how I go about those things is my choice. I could chose not to pick up Nanako but chose to make dinner for the three of us - don’t those satisfy those impulses?”
“They do. But intrinsically you are aware that picking her up will appease him more than making dinner, for you have seen those actions repeated and rewarded. The choices that you make are the result of trained impulses.”
“Then why do people live?”
“What do you mean?”
Souji catches up with her, standing next to her with the both of them underneath his umbrella. Her breath is freezing against his neck.
“If the impulse is to death, then what stops me from throwing myself in the river?”
“Because humans have a stronger impulse to survive.”
“Then why do they die?” Her brow furrows. “If the stronger impulse is to survive, then why is there suicide, and if death is stronger, then why am I alive right now?” He smiles softly but unfriendly. “We all die, but most people at least choose when they go.”
“Because their desire to end pain overcomes the survival drive.” Her eyes have a strange look about them, lips pursed. “Perhaps you should go collect your cousin.” She walks beside him in complete silence, her steps so light and presence so nonexistent that Souji feels alone.
[Rank Four]
“You’ve been spending a lot of time with that senior girl lately,” accuses Yosuke, a twinge of jealousy in his voice.
“I have,” Souji says, giving him a look and hoping he would end the conversation there. Instead, he leans over the top of his desk and stares with his eyes unblinkingly focused. “She’s . . . interesting.”
“Aren’t you dating Ai? Isn’t she jealous - she seems like she’d get jealous. And violent.”
“I explained to her it’s not romantic.” He stands when the bell rings. “Come by at six and we’ll work on the project.” Yosuke groans and smacks his head on the desktop.
Outside and by the balcony Chisato stands, her elbows on the railing and a puddle under her feet from all the rainwater dripping off. She makes the smallest of turns when he walks up next to him, the smallest of frowns on her face.
“What stops you from jumping from this ledge?”
“I don’t want to.” He’s not even fazed, just amused that he isn’t surprised. “I’m only seventeen, I have family and friends who love me, and I enjoy my life. I gain nothing by dying, and I wouldn’t die from just two stories.” Her smile increases.
“What if I were to jump?”
“You’d break your arm at best.”
“From the roof?”
He leans his elbows on the ledge as well. “You haven’t given me a reason why you’d want to. I’d ask why.”
“What if I said I jumped because of you?”
He takes his elbows back. “Have I done something?”
“And if you did?”
Souji can see himself in her eyes all the time, his entire face reflected in her red gaze. Splintered and bent, yes, but the whole of him is there. Chisato rarely blinks or turns her head, and it seems like she wants him to see himself.
“Did I?”
“I’d like to be alone today,” she says after a long pause, when most of the students had gone down to the shoe lockers or home. “But I’m not angry.”
“If you want to talk, just find me.”
Chisato never answers.
[Rank Five]
The next time it pours outside, Souji can’t find Chisato anywhere. She isn’t in school or anywhere near the riverbed, and he realizes that he’s never seen her anywhere else. He doesn’t even know her family name or address. Frowning, he walks from school, deciding whither or not he wants to go into the television and rip some Shadows to pieces.
But halfway to Junes, he sees her sitting at the bus stop, hands and ankles crossed and a package in her lap.
“Hello,” he tells her, standing at the street corner. She doesn’t look at him. Her red eyes are red-rimmed. “Are you alright?” She doesn’t even twitch. Souji decides to approach her, slipping his hand in his pocket. “What’s your full name?”
“Chisato Dojima.” She lifts her head up just a bit to look at him. “Do you believe that?”
“No,” he says, an edge to his voice. “Why did you say that?”
“To get a rise from you,” and lips twist. “Did I?”
“Yeah.” But his tone makes her smile fall away.
“I’ve been thinking about choice and impulse again.” He sits down on the bench but far away from her. “So let me pose a query to you. Love. Is that a choice or impulse?”
“A drive,” Souji says.
“Can one choose who to fall in love with?”
“Some can.”
“Why do women fall in love with abusers, and men with cheaters?”
“Some can’t choose.”
“Its yes or no.”
“Not always,” he says. “I know a man enamored with a woman who despised him.” The picture of Yosuke in a tight black suit, standing over Saki’s gravestone, came and went. “And another woman who married a man she didn’t love, but who could provide her with a good life.” Eri’s smile appears and quickly fades. “Love is both a choice and impulse, and you can make yourself fall in love or out of love.”
“Can you now?” Souji nods. “Now how is that? Two people deeply in love can decide to stop? Vows taken can be broken because they decide not to honor them?”
“Sometimes,” he says though he’s worried of what her response would be.
“Something must happen to cause the break. Another love. Death.” Her eyes glaze over. “Fear.”
“Sometimes,” he says hesitantly.
“Imagine a man and wife deeply in love. He promises her the world. She stands beside him until . . . something happens. She’s disfigured.” She touches her cheek, lets her fingers slide down it, and puts her hand back in her lap. “But he doesn’t know it until he sees her. He flees from her, and they never speak again.”
The rain patters against his umbrella.
“What ended the love? An internal decision or the external factor?”
“People are complex,” Souji says, “and I don’t know.”
“Why not?” she accuses.
They sit until the bus comes, and Chisato demands he take it away.
[You had a dream, and became closer to . . .]
Souji wears a long dark coat, and the woman across from him is all in white. She extends a hand, unfolding one finger at a time from her palm. She says something but he can’t hear it, not a word.
The flesh begins to drip off of her fingers, leaving only bone behind. She offers it as muscle deteriorates, turns gray and picks itself apart, falling to their feet as ash. She offers it.
Souji tries to raise his fingers to take hers, but is paralyzed in place.
[Rank Six]
They had lunch on the roof and after school Chisato asks him if he would walk away with her. They circle around neighborhoods, watching small children in yellow raincoats splash about.
“Are you feeling better?”
“Perhaps,” she says. “I apologize for being depressing.” She’s insincere but Souji accepts the apology. “Tell me though, do you love me?”
“We’re friends,” he maneuvers around.
“Do you choose not to love me?”
“No.”
“It is an intrinsic decision then.”
“It’s complicated,” he finally says and Chisato smiles at that.
“That boy you’re friends with, with the orange hair.”
“It’s brown,” he defends.
“He loved Saki Konishi because he chose to, would you say?”
He stops. “How do you know that?”
“I saw them,” he doesn’t believe that and the tension mounts in his muscles. “Would you say he chose to fall in love with that girl?”
“I never said that love is always a choice. I’m saying some choose, some don’t - not everything is an impulse, not everything is a choice, it depends on the person.”
She looks at him, tilting her head so her bangs fall across her face. “Are you angry with me?”
“I can only speak for myself in any situation.”
“Are you always so honorable?” Chisato’s smirking and it’s a cold expression on her face, makes her face look like a skull. “Can’t disgrace someone, anybody?”
“The only thoughts I know are my own for certain, and if you want honesty, that’s all I can give.”
“Who do you love?”
“My cousin.”
“Why?”
“She’s family.”
“So that’s a natural impulse.”
“In her case, yes.”
“Who do you love romantically?”
“That’s private.”
“Fine then. Do you choose to love them?”
“It happened.”
“Another natural impulse then.”
Souji sighs. “So because of my example, everyone is the same?”
“You made . . .” she catches herself, and waves one hand about her. “You are like every human.”
“Everyone is different. Who do you love romantically?” Chisato doesn’t answer. “Did you choose to?”
Her voice is deathly still. “I can’t help not to.”
“How did you start to?”
“There was nobody else.”
“Did he hurt you?”
Her eyes flash and voice grows cold. “You should understand. Please, go away.”
“Did I?”
“You should know.”
“I don’t.”
“Please go away now.”
[Rank Seven]
“You don’t go to this school.”
They’re by the riverbed again, underneath a tree for shelter, watching the Samegawa swallow whole each raindrop. She holds her knees up to her chest, long arms wrapped around them, a package separating her chest from her thighs. Souji’s beside her but feels no warmth.
“Do you accuse me?”
“No.” He bites his tongue flat to keep it from getting tied. “It doesn’t mean anything, so you don’t have to answer, but I wanted to ask.”
“You are a skilled detective.” It sounds but isn’t sarcastic. “I never answered. I saw your aunt’s name on a gravestone. It suited my purpose.”
“How did you know she was my aunt?”
“Does that matter?”
“Just wanted to know.” But she doesn’t answer.
They sit still on the banks for hours, one against the other but without the warmth. Souji lifts his arm and slides it around her shoulder, fingers cupping her bony, pointy shoulder.
Chisato leans her head against his rounder shoulder.
“Why did you do that?” she whispers in his ear.
“I wanted to.”
When it becomes dark and the Samegawa still and black, Chisato stands, does not look back at him, and walks down the road alone. Souji looks after her, wondering, strangely, if he already knew her real name.
[Rank Eight]
Nobody in town knew her, by name or by appearance. Yosuke only knew her from around and seemed surprised when the rest of the team didn’t recognize her. Strangely, though, Adachi’s eyes lit up when Souji described her to him.
“I think she stands at the corner near the liquor store,” he said, scratching the back of his neck, “jus’ sort of watching things.”
Wryly, Souji wonders if she’s a hallucination or a ghost, because that girl doesn’t live in Inaba.
However, Chisato waits for him at the lockers and tells him, “Follow me.” Souji obliges, not even remembering his umbrella till the evening passes. They walk into the woods behind school grounds, her leading, cutting a long white shadow against the trees and dirt. Never speaking, never questioning, and never answering, Souji follows her.
She stops when they reach train tracks, with a view of the mountains just visible through the rain and clouds.
“You’ve never been to the mountains here,” she informs him, “but there’s a legend about them. Deep beneath the mountain is a pathway to hell, and deep within hell was imprisoned a woman. She died in childbirth and was waiting, many, many years, for her husband to come for her. She decayed, rotted, as the dead are likely to do. But she never stopped loving him. She had no idea how not to love him.”
Souji waits. She combs the hair from her face with three fingers.
“One day, he came back. It was dark and couldn’t see her. He called her name and she stepped into the light - and he saw the rot on her skin, her hands, her face.” Her fingers lingered on her cheek and slid down to her chin. “And he fled.”
“I’ve heard this story before,” and she ignores him.
“She was furious. He abandoned her. He abandoned her. She decided that, in the end . . . instinctual horror and the natural fear of death overpowered the love he said was intrinsic to his being. Because otherwise, he would have chosen to abandon her, it would have been a consciously taken act of malice.”
“Ah,” says Souji at the end of it.
“So will you try and tell me there is choice in the world?”
“Yes.”
There’s murder in her eyes when she sets them upon him.
“You can’t assume that there is no choice because of this. There can be both choices and impulses, and actions can be either.”
“Its yes or no, Souji.”
“There’re maybes too.”
“No,” she enunciates, full of ice, “there’s not.”
Her shoulders are thin and pointy under his fingers, breakable and thin. Her lips are gray, lifeless, freezing against his lips and sending shivers of cold - and, strangely, familiarity - down the whole of his spine. He doesn’t see her face while they kiss, but when he opens his eyes, hers are wide, face cast into long shadows.
“I wanted to,” he tells her, “and something inside me told me to.”
She doesn’t blush like Ai, or smile or wrap her arms around his shoulders too. Souji doesn’t expect her to. He knows, in fact, what she’ll do before she does it - she takes him by the hands, slowly, and takes them from her shoulders. She never breaks eye contact. He sees himself, with soaked sheep-dog hair and bangs across his face, in her eyes. They might as well be identical.
“So you remember?”
“No,” he answers without a moment’s pause, “but do I need to?”
She lets his hands go, turns around, and walks across the train tracks towards the mountain.
[Rank Nine]
Chisato stands outside Dojima’s house, hands folded properly in front of her and hip cocked to the side. She doesn’t even wait for him to say hello, marching straight up to him and breathing puffs of white clouds into his face.
“What makes you empty inside?”
“Failing,” he answers immediately, “and having someone die because of it.”
“What makes you despair?”
“Being powerless.”
“What do you hope for, Souji?”
“Staying here,” he says, looking up at the dull gray sky, raindrops making him flinch, “in Inaba, forever.”
“Because of me?”
“You are a reason, but not the only one.” The rain hurts when he hits his skin so he looks at her instead.
“How did you reach those decisions?”
“So I can decide now?”
“Maybe. You haven’t done a very good job at proving it to me.” Souji smiles though. “I want to do something. Come with me.” Her clumped gray hair sways as she walks.
They go to Junes. She opens the employee entrance, though without a key or lock-pick set, and their footsteps echo loudly up the concrete stairs to the roof. Nobody would work maintenance on the roof on a Saturday, in the rain, so all Souji feels is confusion when she shuts the door beside him and begins to take off her socks and loafers.
“It’ll be easier to move when you aren’t in wet socks or holding an umbrella.” He discards both, peeling off his sneakers with the toes of each foot. Chisato stands in front of him and intertwines her fingers in his right hand, guiding his left hand to the small of her back.
“Why’re we here?”
“It’s the tallest building in town, that is not the mountaintop.” She’s so close to him and he can barely feel her heartbeat or chest move, but feels every tiny shiver that rocks her body. “Lead.”
In his last high school, they had a ballroom dancing class on culture day, and the rain on the air conditioner units almost sounds like music. Souji counts to three in his head over and over again as he spins her around in small circles for the imitation of a waltz. She’s hesitant, not stumbling but slow as he drags her along, dead weight in his arms, until she starts moving with him in time.
“What do you remember?”
“There’s a woman in white,” Souji says without thinking, too focused on the dance steps, “and sometimes, she’s made of mist and fog. But she’s dead, and every time I see her, she falls apart in front of me.”
“Are you afraid?”
“A little. I miss her, because I knew her, as if she were myself. Except when I see her, I’m not myself.” He pauses, sweeping her across the rooftop. Water trails up after them and concrete cuts into his feet. “I’m another me.”
“What do you do to her?”
“She always offers me a hand, and I want to take it. So, so badly.” A crack appears in his voice.
“Do you?”
“No.”
“What stops you?” There’s urgency to her words. She tries to make him dance faster but he keeps the movement slow and steady.
“I’m looking at a shadow of the woman I loved. She isn’t there anymore, and I miss her, I want her, I need to see her, but in front of me is just another something that happens to have her face. So I stare at it, and I don’t know what to do, at all. And eventually,” he dips her down so quickly the air leaves both their lungs, “I walk away.”
“Now I lead.”
She holds him tighter than he did her, digging her fingernails into the back of his hands, and pulls him in sharp turns, hard and sporadic changes in pace and footwork. The rain picks in strength, drumming down faster, hitting him harder. She twists and turns him at the merest twitch of her fingers. The bottoms of his feet get torn up fast, and badly.
“The boy I was in love with left me when I needed a companion the most.” Each word escapes her mouth in a hard articulate gust. “I missed him, and was angry with him, for a very, very long time, but recently, I have found people in whom I see him. Or rather,” she jerks him towards her. His arm almost leaves its socket. “I see in people what he made me feel. Emptiness.” She thrusts him to the right. “Despair.” And yanks him back to the left as she slides opposite. “Hope.” And bends him backwards til his head nearly touches the ground. She bears down at him, her hands the only thing that keep him from smacking his skull on concrete, her eyes unseen, his legs shaking.
“I’m sorry.”
Those words hang out in the air.
The rain splatters all around them.
[Rank Ten]
“I want to see your room.”
Nanako’s been in the hospital for weeks now and they won’t clear Dojima for release. The house, though empty, fills with warmth as Souji shows Chisato inside.
“Here,” she says. In her hands is the package he’s sometimes seen her carrying. “I want you to have this now.” He opens it, ripping off the coarse string. Inside is a string of prayer beads, each one polished white as bone and cold as marble. Each one hooked to the next with carved gold, ended with red and golden silken tassels, and a magatama made of something silvery he’s sure he’ll never seen in any other jewelry in the world. Four characters are engraved upon it.
“This is your real name, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Neither is sure who began it.
Each of her kisses is cold, dry, each time catching his lip and biting it just before he pulls back for breath. He fumbles with his jacket and shirt; she slides her top away and flicks the bra off when it lands on the back of her foot. She thrusts him against the wall, on top of him, clawing at his back, and deeply. He grips her arms, trying to hold them back, but faltering. She wants blood.
He pins her first against his futon, kissing her down her neck and up her jawbone. She doesn’t exhale softly but instead stiffens, the muscles of her neck bulging. She works his pants off him, and he leaves her skirt on. Just as he enters her, she slams back at him, and Souji’s head hits the base of his desk chair. Stars explode in his eyes, and she utters a blood-curdling yowl.
Each time he comes, it makes static dance across her skin and fire blaze in her red eyes, her teeth gnash and muscles tighten. She throws her weight against him, pushing him up against the wall. He wraps his legs around her waist and tries to push her back onto the floor. She bites him, and he breaths out deeply.
Once, lying flat on his back and gulping shallow breaths, she pins his arms down her knees. Her face looks upside down upon him, this time her hair mattered with sweat. Her eyes are wide. Her fingertips shock his skin, and grip around his throat, squeezing as tight as they possible could.
“How does that feel?”
Souji knows she won’t go through with it. He barks out hard, short breaths, taken them in even quicker, when she inevitably lets go. He wraps his arms around her forearms and chest, the cold flesh of her breasts making him go cold, and just holds her under his table. Deeply, he inhales the smell of her hair. It’s rainwater and ash.
The clock ticks away and they go again, her on top, slashing at his arms and chest. She goes stiff, her eyes widening and body tightening when the orgasm takes hers, and collapses down upon him. Her uniform’s skirt feels like silk, strangely, against his thighs.
His head tilts back when she moves hers towards his neck. He thinks, perhaps, she’s going to bite him, and she does in fact. It pinches, but there’s hardly anything left in him to feel pain with. Halfway through, she leaves it as a kiss, wet with saliva and tears.
His fingers try to slide into hers, but just as Souji drifts away they fall flat to the ground.
He feels, as he shuts his eyes, that nothing new was done tonight. That once upon a time this was routine.
“What is your true desire,” she breaths into his ear, quiet but curious, looking deep into his eyes and smirking. He sees something else behind hers, something not right or even human, but something that does not paralyze him tonight.
“Truth,” he exhales.
“Then question everything. Do not,” she says, squeezing him, “stop looking.”
They sleep, each curved to the shape of the others’ body, with her back against his sofa’s front and bony arms wrapped tight around his chest and neck. He intertwines his fingers into hers, breathing deep her ashy smell and smiling at it, having missed it.
She leaves in the morning, without a kiss or acknowledgement (for none was needed), and Souji finds her again in March. It’s new, unlike their past. Their eyes meet then, above a misty pool in another world, and she asks him some more questions with complicated answers. They talk, together in their own world of memories, and Yosuke and the rest of the team looks on, confused.
“Will you fight for your beliefs?” she tells him. Her gray hair, though dry, still hangs in clumps between her eyes. “After everything?”
His throat is tight and heart is heavy, and it takes everything he has to answer against his feelings, “Yes.”
[Reversed]
Chisato stands on the roof, only on days when its empty and a tempest storms outside. He tries to apologize to her, shouting over the gale and the torrents, but she just looks at him. She’s not angry, she’s not even hurt. Resigned, weary, aged, her face skeletal and ill, but red eyes brighter than before.
“You confirmed for me,” she says in her normal pitch, which he somehow hears, “a deep fear.”
“What?”
“There is choice,” she tells him, standing very far away from him, her fingers locked in the grating of the fence, “and that it was an act of malice.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was good to meet you, Souji Seta,” she tells him, wind crossing hair across both of their faces, “but I wish I had not. Leave now, please.”
.
Title: Aeon Social Link
Fandom: Persona 4
Characters: Souji Seta, Izanami
Words: 5109
Rating: R for sexy bits late in the game, spoiler warning
Summary of fic: Social Link Go
[Initiation]
There’s a new girl in school, and she looks like him.
Souji listens to Yosuke pratter on about bands and concerts by the shoe rack and sees her looking at the flyers on the bulletin board. Her short gray hair, the way she stands with one hip cocked, the way she holds a small package with both hands against her stomach.
“She’s hot, isn’t she?” Yosuke’s smile slithers up the side of his face. “You gonna ask her out?”
“Hm? Oh, no.” He picks up his umbrella. “Do you know her name?”
“Nah, I think she’s a senior though, maybe? Way out of my league.”
“Chisato.” They both turn. The girl’s at Souji’s elbow, looking at him with curiously scarlet eyes and a small smile playing up her lips. She’s pale, slender, and within an inch of his height. “You’re the transfer student, Souji Seta. Would you like to get a cup of coffee?” They weren’t questions.
“Sure.”
“Let’s go then.” Souji opens his umbrella and they walk out while Yosuke wolf-whistles behind them.
She orders a cup of tea but doesn’t drink it, and doesn’t speak while he sips his. Her hair curls at the ends and falls across her face, her uniform without adornments, her eyes unblinkingly locked onto his. He sets the cup down.
“Are you happy, here in Inaba?”
Souji pauses before he says yes. Chisato rises and offers him a hand. “Perhaps, next week, we can do this again. I apologize for the lack of conversation today.”
He shakes her hand. “No apologies.” She walks away, apparently not minding the rain, and Souji hears a familiar voice in his head begin I am thou and thou art I . . .
[Rank One]
Chisato finds him after school, walking home alone because Yosuke has a work shift and Chie and Yukiko have girl time together. She’s drenched from head to food but smiling, a little, asking him if he’d like to go into town for the day.
“I don’t see you outside of school,” Souji says.
“I keep to myself. Busy, with work.”
“School work?”
“And other kinds,” she finishes playfully, eyes narrowing, challenging. Souji knows he’s seen her eyes on somebody else before. “Do you have other kinds of work?”
“Part-time, at the hospital.”
“Is that all?” She lets the question hang between them. “I love it when it rains. Do you?”
“Not really,” Souji answers, thinking of the Midnight Channel. “It sets my teeth on edge.”
“I love what the rain brings in. I never know what to expect after it happens - sun, or clouds, or fog.” She steps over a puddle and looks at him, sopping bangs reaching down to he tip of her nose. “How about fog? Do you like fog?”
“No.”
She still smiles.
[Rank Two]
Chie makes kissing noises and Yosuke huffs angrily about having plans broken off when Souji goes to find Chisato and ask her out for lunch. Bento box in hand, he heads over to the senior classrooms only to catch her climbing the stairs to the roof ahead of him. Maybe gliding up the stairs - she barely raises her feet or bends her knees. Knowing how uncomfortable it is to sit in a wet uniform, Souji follows her up and outside.
“There’s a story I heard, the other day,” she tells him, picking through the bento. “A sad story.”
“Sometimes sad stories are the best.” He picks up salmon chunks with his fingers.
“A woman died, and her husband, a famed detective, spent all his life tracking down her killer. He used every means available, both legal and not, and eventually came to a witch and asked her to bring his wife back from the dead, so he could ask his wife who killed her. So the witch brought her back to life, and the man set out to catch her killer, even though he had his beloved back with him.” She picks through the ginger slices, setting them on her tongue before swallowing them. “In the end, justice was more important than his love, and he died alone.”
Souji’s reminded of his uncle.
“But when I first heard that story, I wondered, what the wife’s reaction was. If she was sad or angry at what happened to her.”
“Either would be justified. But perhaps she left, and became happy somewhere else.”
“I doubt that happened.”
“If she chose to be happy,” he says, putting the lid back on the box, “she could be.”
Chisato’s eyes flash as he stands. “So choice is stronger than natural impulse?”
Souji shrugs. “I think so. I have class - do you?” She shrugs too, and he leaves her sitting on the air ducts on the roof.
[Rank Three]
“You mentioned last time,” Chisato tells him when she follows Souji to Nanako’s school, “that you believe that a choice is stronger than an impulse.”
“I did,” says Souji, trying to walk fast enough to cover her with his umbrella. She dances out of reach, splashing him when she steps into puddles on purpose.
“I’ve thought about that since you said it, and I’ve decided that you’re wrong.” He raises an eyebrow. “Choice cannot be stronger when it does not exist. There is only the battle between impulses.”
“How’d you decide that?”
“Think about death. Most people would not choose to die, but they do. That is an impulse. Now here,” she says, stopping in her tracks, “is a fork in the road. Which path are we to walk down?”
“The left.”
“Why?”
“Because I chose to pick up my cousin today.”
“Because you have to pick up your cousin today.”
Souji turns and looks at her. He’s not sure if he’s ever seen her when her hair wasn’t flattened to her head from rainwater.
“I could have gone home.”
“Your desire to appease your uncle is stronger than your desire to be you alone. Desire is an impulse, like death.”
“Yet how I go about those things is my choice. I could chose not to pick up Nanako but chose to make dinner for the three of us - don’t those satisfy those impulses?”
“They do. But intrinsically you are aware that picking her up will appease him more than making dinner, for you have seen those actions repeated and rewarded. The choices that you make are the result of trained impulses.”
“Then why do people live?”
“What do you mean?”
Souji catches up with her, standing next to her with the both of them underneath his umbrella. Her breath is freezing against his neck.
“If the impulse is to death, then what stops me from throwing myself in the river?”
“Because humans have a stronger impulse to survive.”
“Then why do they die?” Her brow furrows. “If the stronger impulse is to survive, then why is there suicide, and if death is stronger, then why am I alive right now?” He smiles softly but unfriendly. “We all die, but most people at least choose when they go.”
“Because their desire to end pain overcomes the survival drive.” Her eyes have a strange look about them, lips pursed. “Perhaps you should go collect your cousin.” She walks beside him in complete silence, her steps so light and presence so nonexistent that Souji feels alone.
[Rank Four]
“You’ve been spending a lot of time with that senior girl lately,” accuses Yosuke, a twinge of jealousy in his voice.
“I have,” Souji says, giving him a look and hoping he would end the conversation there. Instead, he leans over the top of his desk and stares with his eyes unblinkingly focused. “She’s . . . interesting.”
“Aren’t you dating Ai? Isn’t she jealous - she seems like she’d get jealous. And violent.”
“I explained to her it’s not romantic.” He stands when the bell rings. “Come by at six and we’ll work on the project.” Yosuke groans and smacks his head on the desktop.
Outside and by the balcony Chisato stands, her elbows on the railing and a puddle under her feet from all the rainwater dripping off. She makes the smallest of turns when he walks up next to him, the smallest of frowns on her face.
“What stops you from jumping from this ledge?”
“I don’t want to.” He’s not even fazed, just amused that he isn’t surprised. “I’m only seventeen, I have family and friends who love me, and I enjoy my life. I gain nothing by dying, and I wouldn’t die from just two stories.” Her smile increases.
“What if I were to jump?”
“You’d break your arm at best.”
“From the roof?”
He leans his elbows on the ledge as well. “You haven’t given me a reason why you’d want to. I’d ask why.”
“What if I said I jumped because of you?”
He takes his elbows back. “Have I done something?”
“And if you did?”
Souji can see himself in her eyes all the time, his entire face reflected in her red gaze. Splintered and bent, yes, but the whole of him is there. Chisato rarely blinks or turns her head, and it seems like she wants him to see himself.
“Did I?”
“I’d like to be alone today,” she says after a long pause, when most of the students had gone down to the shoe lockers or home. “But I’m not angry.”
“If you want to talk, just find me.”
Chisato never answers.
[Rank Five]
The next time it pours outside, Souji can’t find Chisato anywhere. She isn’t in school or anywhere near the riverbed, and he realizes that he’s never seen her anywhere else. He doesn’t even know her family name or address. Frowning, he walks from school, deciding whither or not he wants to go into the television and rip some Shadows to pieces.
But halfway to Junes, he sees her sitting at the bus stop, hands and ankles crossed and a package in her lap.
“Hello,” he tells her, standing at the street corner. She doesn’t look at him. Her red eyes are red-rimmed. “Are you alright?” She doesn’t even twitch. Souji decides to approach her, slipping his hand in his pocket. “What’s your full name?”
“Chisato Dojima.” She lifts her head up just a bit to look at him. “Do you believe that?”
“No,” he says, an edge to his voice. “Why did you say that?”
“To get a rise from you,” and lips twist. “Did I?”
“Yeah.” But his tone makes her smile fall away.
“I’ve been thinking about choice and impulse again.” He sits down on the bench but far away from her. “So let me pose a query to you. Love. Is that a choice or impulse?”
“A drive,” Souji says.
“Can one choose who to fall in love with?”
“Some can.”
“Why do women fall in love with abusers, and men with cheaters?”
“Some can’t choose.”
“Its yes or no.”
“Not always,” he says. “I know a man enamored with a woman who despised him.” The picture of Yosuke in a tight black suit, standing over Saki’s gravestone, came and went. “And another woman who married a man she didn’t love, but who could provide her with a good life.” Eri’s smile appears and quickly fades. “Love is both a choice and impulse, and you can make yourself fall in love or out of love.”
“Can you now?” Souji nods. “Now how is that? Two people deeply in love can decide to stop? Vows taken can be broken because they decide not to honor them?”
“Sometimes,” he says though he’s worried of what her response would be.
“Something must happen to cause the break. Another love. Death.” Her eyes glaze over. “Fear.”
“Sometimes,” he says hesitantly.
“Imagine a man and wife deeply in love. He promises her the world. She stands beside him until . . . something happens. She’s disfigured.” She touches her cheek, lets her fingers slide down it, and puts her hand back in her lap. “But he doesn’t know it until he sees her. He flees from her, and they never speak again.”
The rain patters against his umbrella.
“What ended the love? An internal decision or the external factor?”
“People are complex,” Souji says, “and I don’t know.”
“Why not?” she accuses.
They sit until the bus comes, and Chisato demands he take it away.
[You had a dream, and became closer to . . .]
Souji wears a long dark coat, and the woman across from him is all in white. She extends a hand, unfolding one finger at a time from her palm. She says something but he can’t hear it, not a word.
The flesh begins to drip off of her fingers, leaving only bone behind. She offers it as muscle deteriorates, turns gray and picks itself apart, falling to their feet as ash. She offers it.
Souji tries to raise his fingers to take hers, but is paralyzed in place.
[Rank Six]
They had lunch on the roof and after school Chisato asks him if he would walk away with her. They circle around neighborhoods, watching small children in yellow raincoats splash about.
“Are you feeling better?”
“Perhaps,” she says. “I apologize for being depressing.” She’s insincere but Souji accepts the apology. “Tell me though, do you love me?”
“We’re friends,” he maneuvers around.
“Do you choose not to love me?”
“No.”
“It is an intrinsic decision then.”
“It’s complicated,” he finally says and Chisato smiles at that.
“That boy you’re friends with, with the orange hair.”
“It’s brown,” he defends.
“He loved Saki Konishi because he chose to, would you say?”
He stops. “How do you know that?”
“I saw them,” he doesn’t believe that and the tension mounts in his muscles. “Would you say he chose to fall in love with that girl?”
“I never said that love is always a choice. I’m saying some choose, some don’t - not everything is an impulse, not everything is a choice, it depends on the person.”
She looks at him, tilting her head so her bangs fall across her face. “Are you angry with me?”
“I can only speak for myself in any situation.”
“Are you always so honorable?” Chisato’s smirking and it’s a cold expression on her face, makes her face look like a skull. “Can’t disgrace someone, anybody?”
“The only thoughts I know are my own for certain, and if you want honesty, that’s all I can give.”
“Who do you love?”
“My cousin.”
“Why?”
“She’s family.”
“So that’s a natural impulse.”
“In her case, yes.”
“Who do you love romantically?”
“That’s private.”
“Fine then. Do you choose to love them?”
“It happened.”
“Another natural impulse then.”
Souji sighs. “So because of my example, everyone is the same?”
“You made . . .” she catches herself, and waves one hand about her. “You are like every human.”
“Everyone is different. Who do you love romantically?” Chisato doesn’t answer. “Did you choose to?”
Her voice is deathly still. “I can’t help not to.”
“How did you start to?”
“There was nobody else.”
“Did he hurt you?”
Her eyes flash and voice grows cold. “You should understand. Please, go away.”
“Did I?”
“You should know.”
“I don’t.”
“Please go away now.”
[Rank Seven]
“You don’t go to this school.”
They’re by the riverbed again, underneath a tree for shelter, watching the Samegawa swallow whole each raindrop. She holds her knees up to her chest, long arms wrapped around them, a package separating her chest from her thighs. Souji’s beside her but feels no warmth.
“Do you accuse me?”
“No.” He bites his tongue flat to keep it from getting tied. “It doesn’t mean anything, so you don’t have to answer, but I wanted to ask.”
“You are a skilled detective.” It sounds but isn’t sarcastic. “I never answered. I saw your aunt’s name on a gravestone. It suited my purpose.”
“How did you know she was my aunt?”
“Does that matter?”
“Just wanted to know.” But she doesn’t answer.
They sit still on the banks for hours, one against the other but without the warmth. Souji lifts his arm and slides it around her shoulder, fingers cupping her bony, pointy shoulder.
Chisato leans her head against his rounder shoulder.
“Why did you do that?” she whispers in his ear.
“I wanted to.”
When it becomes dark and the Samegawa still and black, Chisato stands, does not look back at him, and walks down the road alone. Souji looks after her, wondering, strangely, if he already knew her real name.
[Rank Eight]
Nobody in town knew her, by name or by appearance. Yosuke only knew her from around and seemed surprised when the rest of the team didn’t recognize her. Strangely, though, Adachi’s eyes lit up when Souji described her to him.
“I think she stands at the corner near the liquor store,” he said, scratching the back of his neck, “jus’ sort of watching things.”
Wryly, Souji wonders if she’s a hallucination or a ghost, because that girl doesn’t live in Inaba.
However, Chisato waits for him at the lockers and tells him, “Follow me.” Souji obliges, not even remembering his umbrella till the evening passes. They walk into the woods behind school grounds, her leading, cutting a long white shadow against the trees and dirt. Never speaking, never questioning, and never answering, Souji follows her.
She stops when they reach train tracks, with a view of the mountains just visible through the rain and clouds.
“You’ve never been to the mountains here,” she informs him, “but there’s a legend about them. Deep beneath the mountain is a pathway to hell, and deep within hell was imprisoned a woman. She died in childbirth and was waiting, many, many years, for her husband to come for her. She decayed, rotted, as the dead are likely to do. But she never stopped loving him. She had no idea how not to love him.”
Souji waits. She combs the hair from her face with three fingers.
“One day, he came back. It was dark and couldn’t see her. He called her name and she stepped into the light - and he saw the rot on her skin, her hands, her face.” Her fingers lingered on her cheek and slid down to her chin. “And he fled.”
“I’ve heard this story before,” and she ignores him.
“She was furious. He abandoned her. He abandoned her. She decided that, in the end . . . instinctual horror and the natural fear of death overpowered the love he said was intrinsic to his being. Because otherwise, he would have chosen to abandon her, it would have been a consciously taken act of malice.”
“Ah,” says Souji at the end of it.
“So will you try and tell me there is choice in the world?”
“Yes.”
There’s murder in her eyes when she sets them upon him.
“You can’t assume that there is no choice because of this. There can be both choices and impulses, and actions can be either.”
“Its yes or no, Souji.”
“There’re maybes too.”
“No,” she enunciates, full of ice, “there’s not.”
Her shoulders are thin and pointy under his fingers, breakable and thin. Her lips are gray, lifeless, freezing against his lips and sending shivers of cold - and, strangely, familiarity - down the whole of his spine. He doesn’t see her face while they kiss, but when he opens his eyes, hers are wide, face cast into long shadows.
“I wanted to,” he tells her, “and something inside me told me to.”
She doesn’t blush like Ai, or smile or wrap her arms around his shoulders too. Souji doesn’t expect her to. He knows, in fact, what she’ll do before she does it - she takes him by the hands, slowly, and takes them from her shoulders. She never breaks eye contact. He sees himself, with soaked sheep-dog hair and bangs across his face, in her eyes. They might as well be identical.
“So you remember?”
“No,” he answers without a moment’s pause, “but do I need to?”
She lets his hands go, turns around, and walks across the train tracks towards the mountain.
[Rank Nine]
Chisato stands outside Dojima’s house, hands folded properly in front of her and hip cocked to the side. She doesn’t even wait for him to say hello, marching straight up to him and breathing puffs of white clouds into his face.
“What makes you empty inside?”
“Failing,” he answers immediately, “and having someone die because of it.”
“What makes you despair?”
“Being powerless.”
“What do you hope for, Souji?”
“Staying here,” he says, looking up at the dull gray sky, raindrops making him flinch, “in Inaba, forever.”
“Because of me?”
“You are a reason, but not the only one.” The rain hurts when he hits his skin so he looks at her instead.
“How did you reach those decisions?”
“So I can decide now?”
“Maybe. You haven’t done a very good job at proving it to me.” Souji smiles though. “I want to do something. Come with me.” Her clumped gray hair sways as she walks.
They go to Junes. She opens the employee entrance, though without a key or lock-pick set, and their footsteps echo loudly up the concrete stairs to the roof. Nobody would work maintenance on the roof on a Saturday, in the rain, so all Souji feels is confusion when she shuts the door beside him and begins to take off her socks and loafers.
“It’ll be easier to move when you aren’t in wet socks or holding an umbrella.” He discards both, peeling off his sneakers with the toes of each foot. Chisato stands in front of him and intertwines her fingers in his right hand, guiding his left hand to the small of her back.
“Why’re we here?”
“It’s the tallest building in town, that is not the mountaintop.” She’s so close to him and he can barely feel her heartbeat or chest move, but feels every tiny shiver that rocks her body. “Lead.”
In his last high school, they had a ballroom dancing class on culture day, and the rain on the air conditioner units almost sounds like music. Souji counts to three in his head over and over again as he spins her around in small circles for the imitation of a waltz. She’s hesitant, not stumbling but slow as he drags her along, dead weight in his arms, until she starts moving with him in time.
“What do you remember?”
“There’s a woman in white,” Souji says without thinking, too focused on the dance steps, “and sometimes, she’s made of mist and fog. But she’s dead, and every time I see her, she falls apart in front of me.”
“Are you afraid?”
“A little. I miss her, because I knew her, as if she were myself. Except when I see her, I’m not myself.” He pauses, sweeping her across the rooftop. Water trails up after them and concrete cuts into his feet. “I’m another me.”
“What do you do to her?”
“She always offers me a hand, and I want to take it. So, so badly.” A crack appears in his voice.
“Do you?”
“No.”
“What stops you?” There’s urgency to her words. She tries to make him dance faster but he keeps the movement slow and steady.
“I’m looking at a shadow of the woman I loved. She isn’t there anymore, and I miss her, I want her, I need to see her, but in front of me is just another something that happens to have her face. So I stare at it, and I don’t know what to do, at all. And eventually,” he dips her down so quickly the air leaves both their lungs, “I walk away.”
“Now I lead.”
She holds him tighter than he did her, digging her fingernails into the back of his hands, and pulls him in sharp turns, hard and sporadic changes in pace and footwork. The rain picks in strength, drumming down faster, hitting him harder. She twists and turns him at the merest twitch of her fingers. The bottoms of his feet get torn up fast, and badly.
“The boy I was in love with left me when I needed a companion the most.” Each word escapes her mouth in a hard articulate gust. “I missed him, and was angry with him, for a very, very long time, but recently, I have found people in whom I see him. Or rather,” she jerks him towards her. His arm almost leaves its socket. “I see in people what he made me feel. Emptiness.” She thrusts him to the right. “Despair.” And yanks him back to the left as she slides opposite. “Hope.” And bends him backwards til his head nearly touches the ground. She bears down at him, her hands the only thing that keep him from smacking his skull on concrete, her eyes unseen, his legs shaking.
“I’m sorry.”
Those words hang out in the air.
The rain splatters all around them.
[Rank Ten]
“I want to see your room.”
Nanako’s been in the hospital for weeks now and they won’t clear Dojima for release. The house, though empty, fills with warmth as Souji shows Chisato inside.
“Here,” she says. In her hands is the package he’s sometimes seen her carrying. “I want you to have this now.” He opens it, ripping off the coarse string. Inside is a string of prayer beads, each one polished white as bone and cold as marble. Each one hooked to the next with carved gold, ended with red and golden silken tassels, and a magatama made of something silvery he’s sure he’ll never seen in any other jewelry in the world. Four characters are engraved upon it.
“This is your real name, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Neither is sure who began it.
Each of her kisses is cold, dry, each time catching his lip and biting it just before he pulls back for breath. He fumbles with his jacket and shirt; she slides her top away and flicks the bra off when it lands on the back of her foot. She thrusts him against the wall, on top of him, clawing at his back, and deeply. He grips her arms, trying to hold them back, but faltering. She wants blood.
He pins her first against his futon, kissing her down her neck and up her jawbone. She doesn’t exhale softly but instead stiffens, the muscles of her neck bulging. She works his pants off him, and he leaves her skirt on. Just as he enters her, she slams back at him, and Souji’s head hits the base of his desk chair. Stars explode in his eyes, and she utters a blood-curdling yowl.
Each time he comes, it makes static dance across her skin and fire blaze in her red eyes, her teeth gnash and muscles tighten. She throws her weight against him, pushing him up against the wall. He wraps his legs around her waist and tries to push her back onto the floor. She bites him, and he breaths out deeply.
Once, lying flat on his back and gulping shallow breaths, she pins his arms down her knees. Her face looks upside down upon him, this time her hair mattered with sweat. Her eyes are wide. Her fingertips shock his skin, and grip around his throat, squeezing as tight as they possible could.
“How does that feel?”
Souji knows she won’t go through with it. He barks out hard, short breaths, taken them in even quicker, when she inevitably lets go. He wraps his arms around her forearms and chest, the cold flesh of her breasts making him go cold, and just holds her under his table. Deeply, he inhales the smell of her hair. It’s rainwater and ash.
The clock ticks away and they go again, her on top, slashing at his arms and chest. She goes stiff, her eyes widening and body tightening when the orgasm takes hers, and collapses down upon him. Her uniform’s skirt feels like silk, strangely, against his thighs.
His head tilts back when she moves hers towards his neck. He thinks, perhaps, she’s going to bite him, and she does in fact. It pinches, but there’s hardly anything left in him to feel pain with. Halfway through, she leaves it as a kiss, wet with saliva and tears.
His fingers try to slide into hers, but just as Souji drifts away they fall flat to the ground.
He feels, as he shuts his eyes, that nothing new was done tonight. That once upon a time this was routine.
“What is your true desire,” she breaths into his ear, quiet but curious, looking deep into his eyes and smirking. He sees something else behind hers, something not right or even human, but something that does not paralyze him tonight.
“Truth,” he exhales.
“Then question everything. Do not,” she says, squeezing him, “stop looking.”
They sleep, each curved to the shape of the others’ body, with her back against his sofa’s front and bony arms wrapped tight around his chest and neck. He intertwines his fingers into hers, breathing deep her ashy smell and smiling at it, having missed it.
She leaves in the morning, without a kiss or acknowledgement (for none was needed), and Souji finds her again in March. It’s new, unlike their past. Their eyes meet then, above a misty pool in another world, and she asks him some more questions with complicated answers. They talk, together in their own world of memories, and Yosuke and the rest of the team looks on, confused.
“Will you fight for your beliefs?” she tells him. Her gray hair, though dry, still hangs in clumps between her eyes. “After everything?”
His throat is tight and heart is heavy, and it takes everything he has to answer against his feelings, “Yes.”
[Reversed]
Chisato stands on the roof, only on days when its empty and a tempest storms outside. He tries to apologize to her, shouting over the gale and the torrents, but she just looks at him. She’s not angry, she’s not even hurt. Resigned, weary, aged, her face skeletal and ill, but red eyes brighter than before.
“You confirmed for me,” she says in her normal pitch, which he somehow hears, “a deep fear.”
“What?”
“There is choice,” she tells him, standing very far away from him, her fingers locked in the grating of the fence, “and that it was an act of malice.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was good to meet you, Souji Seta,” she tells him, wind crossing hair across both of their faces, “but I wish I had not. Leave now, please.”
.