[Persona 4] The Story of How Souji Got a Really Great Rack, Pt. 3
I bet you all thought this was dead, didn't you? Well, so did I. XD
Title: The Story of How Souji Got a Really Great Rack
Fandom: Persona 4
Parts: 3/? ( 1, 2, 3)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Possible Souji/Yosuke
Contains: humor/crack, genderswap
The Story of How Souji Got a Really Great Rack
Ryoutarou Dojima considered himself to be a down-to-earth and fairly open-minded person. It came with being a cop, and especially with being a cop in a small-town region, where people wanted him to interview their pet cats as eye-witnesses, the elderly were consistently ready to blame misdemeanors on angry mountain gods, and half the population's housewives thrived on gossip like roses in sunlight. For that matter, so did their husbands, but they preferred to think of themselves as superior to tittering in hushed whispers and generally presented it as sharing valuable, unbiased information.
That being what it was, Dojima had to be ready to accept quite a number of outlandish behaviors, and, since his nephew had kindly introduced him to television sets that harbored interdimensional nightmares and monster-summoning murderers, to take a lot of evidence at face value, too.
So when he opened the door to his nephew wearing said evidence encased in a bobbin lace vest and baby-blue flower top, he did the down-to-earth, sensible thing: He grabbed the door frame for support.
In a way, he knew what was coming long before anyone in the group could get their mouth to move. He'd seen Souji patiently sit through round after round of Nanako's pretty-princess-dress-me-up fancies, and the incident he had thankfully not been present for at last year's school festival had stayed a secret only as long as the average Inaba secret-keeping stamina lasted (about five seconds). However, the congregation of embarrassed faces on his doorstep immediately told Dojima that whatever had happened was much, much worse than a bunch of bored teenagers stuck in hickville trying to find ways to make their summer vacation interesting.
"Um. We can explain, sir. Well, kinda. Maybe. Just a little?" Hanamura bit his lip, glancing towards Souji with a vague mixture of guilt, despair, and the hope that Souji would somehow transform back into his regular self before he would have to try his hand at an actual explanation.
Dojima thought it wisest to usher them all into the living room, if only so he could find a chair to sit down.
"It was an accident," the Kujikawa girl added helpfully, though Dojima noted she sounded considerably less miserable about the entire thing than her face let on.
"With sensei-tional results!"
There was the muffled sound of somebody's foot hitting a painful place.
With a long-suffering sigh, Shirogane pinched the bridge of her nose. "What they mean is, we unfortunately have no lead on what caused the change, or how to reverse it."
Hanamura grimaced. "Yes, because someone had to go shopping instead."
"Hey, it was necessary. Sempai needed those bras."
Dojima thought the faint, tortured wheeze that escaped his throat was a rather efficient, if undignified way of keeping the conversation from dissolving into aimless bickering.
"Are you all right?"
Souji had stepped forward to peer at him with concern, and it really wasn't helping that he still mostly looked and sounded like Souji, and also appeared to be taking the transformation frighteningly well. Dojima felt he would be coping a lot better if he were the one forced to console Souji instead, in some semblance of normal family dynamics and the reaction a normal teenage boy could be expected to have upon coming home as a teenage girl. Not that 'normal' had ever applied to anything surrounding Souji, but he felt Souji could have tried to be at least a little inconsolable for his sake.
"I... yes." Dojima shook his head, and just decided to follow police protocol. Ask questions, make notes, take stock of the situation. Even if the situation was situated on his nephew. "So this... change. This change is due to...?"
He still couldn't quite bring himself to say "TV" without feeling thoroughly insane.
Souji nodded. "We're pretty sure, yes. I mean, we weren't really doing anything out of the ordinary-" Except slaying untold horrors and converting their remains into pocket money for a day trip to Okina, but that, Dojima reminded himself, was the new 'ordinary'. "-so this came a bit out of the blue."
"But... you're not hurt?"
"No. No, I'm fine. Just... like that." A handwave, as if Souji were gesturing at a set of particularly average curtains.
"Good. That's good." Dojima swallowed, sitting up a little straighter. Police protocol really was helping. "So... I take it this is... thorough?"
"Um."
To his surprise, Souji colored a little, while Hanamura and Tatsumi readily took over Dojima's breathing problems.
"Um, yes. Afraid so." Souji was looking almost contrite now, as if the alternative were any better.
Dojima nodded in the most neutral way possible. Under different circumstances, he would have ordered a visit to the hospital and not taken no for an answer, but he had the feeling they wouldn't even be able to get through the first part of, "Well, my nephew had to enter a parallel universe where magic dictated he must be a girl," without getting one or both of them committed to a mental institution. Plus, if the bear proved anything, it was that modern science seemed to be quite useless against anything to do with TVs.
He truly ought to be handling this better. By some twist of nature, Souji might have turned out to be the most mature teenager on the planet, but that still didn't absolve Dojima of parental duties, and one of the primary parental duties was overprotective fussing. He might not be good at fussing, but he was good at being overprotective, and Souji, whether he admitted it or not, needed looking after. And someone to tell him to stop downplaying his problems. And someone who could do things his little gang couldn't do, such as anything other than a whispered council on what to do if Souji couldn't change back, and whether or not Hanamura's ruling that this was a terrible catastrophe should indeed be considered the opinion of all.
Clearing his throat, Dojima pushed himself up. "Alright. That's quite enough. You all get home. Souji needs to rest."
"I'm fine, really."
"And I don't care, really," Dojima cut in, and was slightly disturbed to have his words countered by the girl version of the "thank you for yelling at me" smile. "Just. Go. Lie down. I won't have you taking this lightly. We'll decide what to do later."
He turned and shuffled towards the kitchen, trying to decide on food appropriate to bring to a person who probably just had his entire body chemistry turned on its head. It felt a bit too incompetent to just take the Souji-brand egg-drop soup from the fridge, so he settled for hunting through the cabinets for some medicinal tea.
At the very least, it provided sufficient distraction from the fact that a few of the parting well-wishes sounded quite insincere, or that someone was currently getting kicked in a painful place again for attempted hugging. Eventually, the front door opened and closed a couple of times, leaving behind the rustling of a mildly alarming number of store-brand plastic bags.
"I've got it, I really do."
"Forget it. Your uncle's right, you should be resting."
Still rifling through the kitchen drawers, Dojima nodded to himself, satisfied that for all the unreliable elements in Souji's circle of friends, there seemed to be some who still had their head on their shoulders.
"I never knew you could be such a gentleman."
"Shut up, Seta. Shut up with your face. Ow."
"...the staircase is this way."
"Um. Right. I knew that. I'll just get these to your room."
In retrospect, Dojima would blame his response delay on the fact that he finally found Nanako's flu tea tucked into the towel drawer, most likely courtesy of Nanako who couldn't stand to drink it. He liked to believe that it was the tea, and not his utterly overtaxed mind still trying to come to grips with what had just transpired, which somehow caused him to miss the significance of Hanamura's voice disappearing up the stairs, and of the second set of feet belonging to Souji, and also the fact that Hanamura was quite male, while Souji was currently not.
By the time it hit him, however, Hanamura had already whizzed back down the stairs and out the door with just a squeaky-voiced goodbye, leaving Dojima to cope with the realization that he'd been up there for a full five minutes, and that he really ought to start policing who had unsupervised access to Souji's room.
-TBC-
------
A/N: Yep. It came back. Guess I owe it to this. Next up, The Suffering of Young Yosuke. Also, bikinis. In the meantime, C&C is welcome.
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Title: The Story of How Souji Got a Really Great Rack
Fandom: Persona 4
Parts: 3/? ( 1, 2, 3)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Possible Souji/Yosuke
Contains: humor/crack, genderswap
The Story of How Souji Got a Really Great Rack
Ryoutarou Dojima considered himself to be a down-to-earth and fairly open-minded person. It came with being a cop, and especially with being a cop in a small-town region, where people wanted him to interview their pet cats as eye-witnesses, the elderly were consistently ready to blame misdemeanors on angry mountain gods, and half the population's housewives thrived on gossip like roses in sunlight. For that matter, so did their husbands, but they preferred to think of themselves as superior to tittering in hushed whispers and generally presented it as sharing valuable, unbiased information.
That being what it was, Dojima had to be ready to accept quite a number of outlandish behaviors, and, since his nephew had kindly introduced him to television sets that harbored interdimensional nightmares and monster-summoning murderers, to take a lot of evidence at face value, too.
So when he opened the door to his nephew wearing said evidence encased in a bobbin lace vest and baby-blue flower top, he did the down-to-earth, sensible thing: He grabbed the door frame for support.
In a way, he knew what was coming long before anyone in the group could get their mouth to move. He'd seen Souji patiently sit through round after round of Nanako's pretty-princess-dress-me-up fancies, and the incident he had thankfully not been present for at last year's school festival had stayed a secret only as long as the average Inaba secret-keeping stamina lasted (about five seconds). However, the congregation of embarrassed faces on his doorstep immediately told Dojima that whatever had happened was much, much worse than a bunch of bored teenagers stuck in hickville trying to find ways to make their summer vacation interesting.
"Um. We can explain, sir. Well, kinda. Maybe. Just a little?" Hanamura bit his lip, glancing towards Souji with a vague mixture of guilt, despair, and the hope that Souji would somehow transform back into his regular self before he would have to try his hand at an actual explanation.
Dojima thought it wisest to usher them all into the living room, if only so he could find a chair to sit down.
"It was an accident," the Kujikawa girl added helpfully, though Dojima noted she sounded considerably less miserable about the entire thing than her face let on.
"With sensei-tional results!"
There was the muffled sound of somebody's foot hitting a painful place.
With a long-suffering sigh, Shirogane pinched the bridge of her nose. "What they mean is, we unfortunately have no lead on what caused the change, or how to reverse it."
Hanamura grimaced. "Yes, because someone had to go shopping instead."
"Hey, it was necessary. Sempai needed those bras."
Dojima thought the faint, tortured wheeze that escaped his throat was a rather efficient, if undignified way of keeping the conversation from dissolving into aimless bickering.
"Are you all right?"
Souji had stepped forward to peer at him with concern, and it really wasn't helping that he still mostly looked and sounded like Souji, and also appeared to be taking the transformation frighteningly well. Dojima felt he would be coping a lot better if he were the one forced to console Souji instead, in some semblance of normal family dynamics and the reaction a normal teenage boy could be expected to have upon coming home as a teenage girl. Not that 'normal' had ever applied to anything surrounding Souji, but he felt Souji could have tried to be at least a little inconsolable for his sake.
"I... yes." Dojima shook his head, and just decided to follow police protocol. Ask questions, make notes, take stock of the situation. Even if the situation was situated on his nephew. "So this... change. This change is due to...?"
He still couldn't quite bring himself to say "TV" without feeling thoroughly insane.
Souji nodded. "We're pretty sure, yes. I mean, we weren't really doing anything out of the ordinary-" Except slaying untold horrors and converting their remains into pocket money for a day trip to Okina, but that, Dojima reminded himself, was the new 'ordinary'. "-so this came a bit out of the blue."
"But... you're not hurt?"
"No. No, I'm fine. Just... like that." A handwave, as if Souji were gesturing at a set of particularly average curtains.
"Good. That's good." Dojima swallowed, sitting up a little straighter. Police protocol really was helping. "So... I take it this is... thorough?"
"Um."
To his surprise, Souji colored a little, while Hanamura and Tatsumi readily took over Dojima's breathing problems.
"Um, yes. Afraid so." Souji was looking almost contrite now, as if the alternative were any better.
Dojima nodded in the most neutral way possible. Under different circumstances, he would have ordered a visit to the hospital and not taken no for an answer, but he had the feeling they wouldn't even be able to get through the first part of, "Well, my nephew had to enter a parallel universe where magic dictated he must be a girl," without getting one or both of them committed to a mental institution. Plus, if the bear proved anything, it was that modern science seemed to be quite useless against anything to do with TVs.
He truly ought to be handling this better. By some twist of nature, Souji might have turned out to be the most mature teenager on the planet, but that still didn't absolve Dojima of parental duties, and one of the primary parental duties was overprotective fussing. He might not be good at fussing, but he was good at being overprotective, and Souji, whether he admitted it or not, needed looking after. And someone to tell him to stop downplaying his problems. And someone who could do things his little gang couldn't do, such as anything other than a whispered council on what to do if Souji couldn't change back, and whether or not Hanamura's ruling that this was a terrible catastrophe should indeed be considered the opinion of all.
Clearing his throat, Dojima pushed himself up. "Alright. That's quite enough. You all get home. Souji needs to rest."
"I'm fine, really."
"And I don't care, really," Dojima cut in, and was slightly disturbed to have his words countered by the girl version of the "thank you for yelling at me" smile. "Just. Go. Lie down. I won't have you taking this lightly. We'll decide what to do later."
He turned and shuffled towards the kitchen, trying to decide on food appropriate to bring to a person who probably just had his entire body chemistry turned on its head. It felt a bit too incompetent to just take the Souji-brand egg-drop soup from the fridge, so he settled for hunting through the cabinets for some medicinal tea.
At the very least, it provided sufficient distraction from the fact that a few of the parting well-wishes sounded quite insincere, or that someone was currently getting kicked in a painful place again for attempted hugging. Eventually, the front door opened and closed a couple of times, leaving behind the rustling of a mildly alarming number of store-brand plastic bags.
"I've got it, I really do."
"Forget it. Your uncle's right, you should be resting."
Still rifling through the kitchen drawers, Dojima nodded to himself, satisfied that for all the unreliable elements in Souji's circle of friends, there seemed to be some who still had their head on their shoulders.
"I never knew you could be such a gentleman."
"Shut up, Seta. Shut up with your face. Ow."
"...the staircase is this way."
"Um. Right. I knew that. I'll just get these to your room."
In retrospect, Dojima would blame his response delay on the fact that he finally found Nanako's flu tea tucked into the towel drawer, most likely courtesy of Nanako who couldn't stand to drink it. He liked to believe that it was the tea, and not his utterly overtaxed mind still trying to come to grips with what had just transpired, which somehow caused him to miss the significance of Hanamura's voice disappearing up the stairs, and of the second set of feet belonging to Souji, and also the fact that Hanamura was quite male, while Souji was currently not.
By the time it hit him, however, Hanamura had already whizzed back down the stairs and out the door with just a squeaky-voiced goodbye, leaving Dojima to cope with the realization that he'd been up there for a full five minutes, and that he really ought to start policing who had unsupervised access to Souji's room.
-TBC-
------
A/N: Yep. It came back. Guess I owe it to this. Next up, The Suffering of Young Yosuke. Also, bikinis. In the meantime, C&C is welcome.
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