the other side of the glass

[justforthegun]

STATUS: OPEN
CHARACTERS: justforthegun (Tohru Adachi, Persona 4) & ~*YOU*~
LOCATION: A prison.
SUMMARY: You are not visiting Adachi. Adachi is visiting you.
WARNINGS: Persona 4 spoilers.
NOTES: Adachi is visiting your character, who is in prison. Why are they in prison? Falsely accused or not, should be more interesting than the other way around.

Comments

[foolreversed]

At first, Adachi kept his eyes down. He really didn't care who it was on the other side of the glass and he didn't even have to look to make a good guess. Only a tiny handful (if he was lucky) of people would bother to visit him, most of those people being involved in the case, so it really wasn't that hard to figure out. Regardless of who they were though, the question wasn't could he look into their eyes but rather, did he even want to.

The answer was, quite simply, no. No, he didn't. No matter who they were.

But that changes when he hears the other's voice. He has to look up then. Because that voice is his own.

At first all he does is blankly stare back at the glass, wondering for a split second if it transformed into a mirror when he wasn't looking. But soon enough he realizes how foolish that idea is; not only are their positions different and not mirrored at all but his "reflection" is not wearing the same uniform he is either. The clothes aren't even the same kind he wore before his arrest. But he does recognize them. He remembers someone who used to wear them quite well.

He almost laughs. Either he's still sleeping or his eyes are playing tricks on him. A dream or a hallucination of a man who lost everything, one of the two. While a laugh never leaves his lips, they do curl into a weary smile. ...If you could even call it that.

Dream or illusion, he could play along with the cruel whims of his own mind for a while.

"Do you even need to ask?"

[justforthegun]

"No," Adachi lets a laugh slip. "Guess I just love to hear the sound of my own voice."

How many times has he done this? With each familiar stroke he remembers, vaguely, the pride of first learning to carve his name into the world. That was when he, like his name, was fresh and new. Clean, sharp, clear. Before everydayalways filled his place on the wall, packed the dirt in and wore down the edges until he could hardly tell he'd ever been there at all.

Now his pen traces the design, but it's a word said too often; it stops making sense to him. Tohru Adachi. Tohru Adachi. His body remembers; his fingers and tongue have no problem with it. What's gone missing is the why.

But he doesn't think the man before him knows, either. After all, he is him. He was him, before he was caught, and now he is him, because he is caught. The man before him knows with the certainty that comes with struggling the futility of knowing the truth. Was the glass between them the thinnest point between two alternate realities? Or a mirror, warped along the inside of their skull?

The man before him knows it doesn't matter. The truth doesn't matter, because the truth is never on their side. He can tell this realization has sunk into the other; he is sure even future scientists and psychologists will be able to read it in their remains. Each fruitless twitch of muscle fiber has etched the years into their bones: the many nights of grinding teeth and clenched fists and brains and guts and hearts and lungs clawing against caging skulls and ribs to go... where?

Nowhere. Anywhere.

And they'd succeeded. Thrown the last of their empty frustrations out into the fog. Now they were two shells listening to each other's hollow echoes, the reflection of the tired blood rushing in their ears.

The truth doesn't matter. What matters is what's written in the papers, what shows up on the screen. Tohru Adachi. It didn't make sense, but his body remembers. His fingers and tongue understand the warmth of reflection (or delusion), so he trusts them; he has nothing left to trust.

He presses his hand against the screen, but instead of static pulling all his hairs on end, instead of his fingers sinking easily deeply dangerously in, there's nothing but flat cold hard glass.

But he keeps it there as his smile slips away, face suddenly very sincere. He does not lie to himself; he never had a Shadow.

I THINK I JUST BEAT DOJIMA FOR SLOWEST TAGGER AWARD

[foolreversed]

Everything drops as soon as he sees that hand on the glass. His smile. His face. Every single remaining trace of his masks. All that's left is an exhausted, empty man who's really lost everything for good this time, even the things he never realized he still had.

He stares at that hand, so close but unattainable. He can't hold it, can't so much as touch it. The glass between them is like the "4th wall" that used to separate them. Only this time instead of disappearing to let them become aware and interact with each other, it simply... Thinned and became translucent. Letting them see, hear and talk to one another but nothing more. That hand is a tease. A cruel one.

But it's better than nothing.

Raising his own hand he presses it back against the other's on the screen, but of course he only feels the cool, hard glass. Not long after he slumps forward, pressing his forehead against the screen as well. He doesn't say anything, just sighs. Heavily.

[justforthegun]

He watches the masks on the other's face crack, slip off, shatter silently by their ankles, and knows that his had done the same, those many months ago. There is no change in his expression now because change has already come to him. His face was not a mask when he walked in here today. It was the weathered, exposed remains that he, at times, twisted back into the shape of old masks out of necessity or habit or nostalgia. But it was not the same. He needed no more proof that the glass between them was not a mirror.

So he does not sink to press his own forehead against the glass- not yet. He watches himself sink and he wonders if this is how he looked then, too. He thought he would feel something different, if he were to look back. He thought he would laugh, but he does not. He thought he would cry, but he does not. He does nothing but watch, because what he feels now is something beyond the capacity of his body to convey.

His thumb twitches. He wants to change the channel. But the image before him doesn't blip out of existence. That's right. This was a Midnight Channel. It would broadcast whether he wanted it to or not. But he didn't have a Shadow. He had nothing to say to himself.

Then, was this his soulmate?

It is not his forehead he presses against the other's, then- it is his lips. But the glass is cold, and for the moment of darkness when he lets his eyes close he is transported back to his apartment, back before Inaba, when he kissed the screen on silly whims. But there is no static here, prickling above the warmed glass- only the chill of reality. His lips do not warm. The glass does not warm. The truth is cold and hard as always.

He lowers his forehead then- not to match it to the other's, but so that their eyes can be level. He wants to read something there. He doesn't bother speaking, because the how, the who what where when why is unimportant. Only the "you are me, and I am you"- and that was something he never needed to say.