How Do You Solve a Problem Like Minato? (Persona 3, Junpei, Cast)
I don't even know.
I wrote this today in like one sitting, because apparently I am productive when it is better for me to be working on things that are, you know, school.
Thus, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Minato? Persona 3, Junpei and the rest of the cast. 3440 words, PG at most. Set right before the August full moon, so minor spoilers for who's in your party by that point.
In which Junpei wonders why the world seems to revolve around Minato Arisato. (Yep, metahumor.)
The evening’s quiet for once, and everyone in SEES just kind of flops around in the living room (except Mitsuru-sempai; she’s too dignified to flop), sprawled out across the overstuffed couched and chairs, sweltering in the thick August heat and leaving streaks and puddles of sweat behind whenever they shift around. Junpei drapes himself across the air conditioner-Mitsuru stopped him from fiddling around with the thermostat and lowering the temperature in the dorms, so this is the best he can do to stay cool: get as close as possible to the window-mounted unit when it starts blasting cold air and stick his head right up against the vents to stop his face from melting off. Yukari flips through the channels and sinks deeper into the couch cushions every time she mashes the remote, and Akihiko stands in a corner off to the side doing wrist exercises, his bangs plastered up against his forehead. Fuuka’s got her laptop out and he can hear the fan in that thing working overtime; she shifts it off her lap and picks up a glass filled with more ice than water, presses it between her palms. Aigis scratches Koro-chan behind the ears, and Koromaru’s tongue flops right out of his mouth and stays there when he starts panting. Mitsuru spreads the newspaper open in her lap, pulls her hair back away from the nape of her neck, takes out a red pen, and starts circling stuff. Minato’s out tonight, off getting dinner with the kendo team, so no Tartarus. He’s sweating so much that his katana would probably slip right out of his hands if he tried to swing it. He wonders if Minato has that problem, especially since he’s practicing right when the heat’s the worst.
He wonders a lot of things about Minato.
“Hey, guys.” Junpei swings his feet off the table.
Mitsuru looks up from the newspaper. “What is it, Iori?”
“Is it just me,” he asks, “or is there something-well, weird about Minato?”
“You’re just jealous,” Yukari mutters loud enough for him to hear, tugging her skirt down further over her thighs.
“Am not.” Well, maybe a little. Okay, maybe more than a little. But still. “Seriously, though. Is there anything the guy can’t do?”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Iori.” Mitsuru frowns and brushes a damp strand of hair out of her eyes. “He’s certainly skilled, but-”
“No, no, see, he’s more than skilled,” Junpei cuts in. “Okay. Think about it. He’s at the top of the class-”
“Yeah, because he studies.” Yukari turns up the volume on the TV; someone starts confessing their love for someone else, big romantic music swells in the background, and he really wants to yank the remote out of her hands.
“I study.”
“When Mitsuru-sempai makes you,” she says.
“I study other times, too.” He barrels on before Yukari can ask him about what other times. “Besides, fighting Shadows is more important than doing homework.” Saving the world beats out passing history, man. Come on. Memorizing the Tokugawa shoguns or smacking Shadows around with a spiked bat. That’s not even a choice. (He misses that bat. Where did Minato get it anyway? Hell, where does Minato get half of the weird stuff he carries around?)
“When the Shadow threat is eliminated, we’ll have to resume our normal lives,” Mitsuru says. “If we don’t stay on top of our studies, we won’t have that option available to us.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.” She only tells him that like every day. Mitsuru Kirijo Motivational Speech number seventy-five: School Is the Only Path to the Future. Seriously, she acts like more of a robot than Aigis does sometimes. “But you’ve never wondered why Minato knows the answer to absolutely everything in class?”
“It’s a good thing he does,” Yukari says, dragging herself out of the cushions a little, “because you’d be in trouble if he didn’t tell you the answers to half the questions Ms. Toriumi asks you.”
Mitsuru frowns. Great. Thanks a lot, Yuka-tan.
“Okay, okay.” Junpei holds up his hands. “So he’s smart. Fine. Cool. He’s a genius or something. But he’s a genius and a good athlete?”
Akihiko wipes his face off with the towel draped around his neck. “He was on the kendo team back at his old school,” he says. “He was pretty good. He never made captain, but his school made it to the championships a few times.”
“I bet he can’t beat Mamoru Hayase, though,” Yukari says.
“Jubei Yagyu couldn’t beat Mamoru Hayase. Not the point. It’s not just the kendo. Fuuka, you said he paints?”
Fuuka ducks her head behind her laptop, her cheeks flushing.
“Fuuka?”
“Oh,” she says from behind the screen. “He joined the art club in June. I think he’s quite good…” She picks up an ice cube from her glass and pops it in her mouth, sucks on it either to cool her throat down or to keep from talking anymore or maybe both.
“Man, how does he fit in all those extracurriculars? It’s not normal,” Junpei says.
“At least he has some,” Yukari points out.
“Takeba’s right,” Mitsuru says. Time for Mitsuru Kirijo Motivational Speech number fifty-three: It’s Important to Get The Most out Of Your High School Career and Look Like a Well-Rounded Student on Your University Applications. “Universities aren’t interested in your academic prowess alone. They want to see that you’ve been an active participant in your school’s community.”
“Have you thought about kendo club?” Akihiko asks. “That would help you improve your form.”
Actually, he did think about checking kendo club out, but then he’d be in there with Minato and Minato sees him fall on his ass enough in Tartarus, and in kendo club Yukari can’t exactly cast Re Patra on him to get him back up on his feet.
“Or baseball.” Yukari snickers. “Because you always step forward on the wrong foot when you swing your sword.”
He grinds his fist into his palm. “Hey, I still hit the Shadows, Miss Please-Hit-Oops-I-Missed-Hey-Junpei-Get-That-Arrow-For-Me.”
“Calm down, you two,” Akihiko says.
“Totally calm.”
“We’re fine. Junpei’s just an idiot.”
Akihiko’s lips twitch. Dammit, not sempai, too.
“Anyway.” Junpei clears his throat; it’s gone all parched and cracked from the heat. “So Minato paints. He’s a regular-” He realizes he doesn’t know what Minato’s paintings look like. “…whoever.”
“Um, I can’t really think of any artists his style resembles,” Fuuka says to her knees. “He uses a lot of rich dark tones, though. Deep reds and purples and forest greens. He likes painting landscapes.”
“Landscapes? No shit. Like trees and mountains and stuff?”
“Not quite,” Fuuka says. “He doesn’t paint places I’ve ever seen before.” A flush creeps up her neck. She tugs at the collar of her sweater-she must be hot under that, smothered by the wool so close to her skin. She pulls up her wilting socks and Junpei gets a good look at her skirt. At her skirt, not up it. He’s not that bad. And besides, he doesn’t want to make Fuuka run off and lock herself in her room or anything, which she’d probably do if he did try to see up her skirt. “Have you worn that skirt before?” he asks. It’s light blue, with black fabric bunched around the bottom in a way that reminds him of Juno’s skirt. Thing.
Her cheeks turn pink again. “Oh. No, it’s new. Minato-kun made it for me.”
“Wait. Wait. Hold on.” Junpei peels himself away from the air conditioner. “He sews, too?”
“Yeah, he’s in the home economics club with that transfer student,” Yukari says.
“I’ve let him use my sewing machine before,” Mitsuru says.
“Wait, you sew?” And where does she keep her machine, anyway? He hasn’t seen it around, so she must keep it in her room. Minato’s been in her room? Minato’s been in her room and hasn’t told him about it? Minato’s managed to penetrate the, like, most inner of inner sanctuaries and he hasn’t said anything about it? What the hell’s wrong with that guy? “And you let him in your room?”
She smiles. “I keep my machine in the basement. And I have to mend my clothes when they tear, don’t I? I can’t rely on someone else to do it for me, not while I’m living here.”
Akihiko smiles and says something like “That’s Mitsuru for you” softly, pretty much just to himself.
“I guess. I just thought you, you know, bought new ones when the old ones wore out or something.” He scratches the sweat-soaked hairs at the back of his neck. It’s not like she couldn’t afford to do that.
“That wouldn’t be fiscally responsible.” Yeah. Robot. He’s never even heard Aigis say “fiscally responsible” before. Okay, maybe she’s not a robot, it’s probably just that she’s a genius and almost as perfect as Minato is, but she’s a babe and a half so she gets a pass from him on that one.
Junpei holds up his hand and ticks off his fingers. “He’s smart. He’s a good athlete. He paints. He sews. He’s on the student council. Freaking everyone knows who he is and he hasn’t even been at Gekkoukan a whole year. Every time you turn around, he’s always talking to some new girl.”
“Sometimes boys can talk to girls without hitting on them,” Yukari says. “The ones who aren’t cretins, at least.”
“No, but I swear these girls are seriously falling all over him.”
Yukari snorts. “How would you know?”
“Well, it seems like it,” he retorts. “Am I wrong?”
“You aren’t.” Mitsuru crosses over to the window and pulls the curtains shut, blocks out the last dying rays of sunlight. The room maybe gets a degree colder, if that. “He has quite the following. Fushimi’s quite taken with him.”
“Fushimi? Chihiro Fushimi? The treasurer? I thought she was afraid of guys!” He should know. He’s tried to talk to her before, but she’s scampered away each time. Shame, too; she’s pretty cute. “Why isn’t she afraid of him?”
“You can’t really be afraid of Minato,” Fuuka says, and the way she smiles, the way the corners of her lips just kind of move up and her cheeks get warm again…
“Fuuka, no way. You too?”
“I-” She stands up, her arms straight at her side, her hands clenched. “I think I need to study. And-and we won’t be going to Tartarus tonight, so you don’t really need me down here. Excuse me,” she half-whispers, bowing.
“No, wait,” Junpei tries to tell her, but she’s already unplugged her laptop and started to walk towards the stairs fast, hugging her computer close to her chest.
“You should have left her alone, Junpei,” Akihiko says quietly, and he’d rather have Yukari yelling at him, because at least Yukari always yells at him, so it’s not really a personal thing anymore.
“I gotta go.” He doesn’t have to run too fast to catch up with Fuuka-climbing all those stairs in Tartarus has made his legs stronger than ever. “Are you all right?” he asks her.
“I’m fine.” She smiles up at him, her eyes pink around the corners. “Really, I’ll be okay. Thank you for asking. I do need to study, though.”
“Look,” he begins, “I didn’t mean-”
“It’s fine.” She presses her lips together, looks down. When she looks back up she’s trying to smile again. “Please don’t worry about it. I don’t want you to be upset.”
“Well, I don’t want you to be upset, either.”
“I’m not. I do, um, I should study, though.”
“Sure thing. Come back down when you’re done. I mean, even Mitsuru’s taking a break for a while, you know? You can, too.”
She heads up the steps, and he heads back into the living room. Aigis kneels next to Koro-chan now; Koromaru barks and he swears he hears something clicking in Aigis’s head when she not-quite-barks back at him.
“You have a robot talking to a dog over there and you think Minato’s weird?” Yukari crosses her arms. “And move away from the air conditioner, you’re blocking off the vents.”
“I’m on the other side of the room now. Chill.” He grins. “Get it?”
Akihiko groans. “That was bad.”
“Then come up with a better one.”
“Puns aren’t my thing.” He starts moving his wrists around in circles, keeps them limber and loose. The bandage over his eyebrow’s unsticking itself a little, slipping loose from all the sweat.
“It’s not that Minato’s weird-okay, I guess he is in some ways, but hell, The Dark Hour makes everything kind of weird-it’s that, well, is there anything he can’t do?” Junpei runs his hands through his hair, knocks his cap askew a little. His hair’s so damp it stays spiked up when he musses it. “And everyone likes him, I swear. I mean, don’t you think Ms. Toriumi has a crush on him?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Yukari says.
“That’s highly unprofessional,” Mitsuru says.
“Well, she always calls on him in class.”
“So she thinks he’s a good student,” Akihiko says. “That doesn’t mean she has a crush on him.”
He sighs. New tactic. “I bet he plays with orphaned kids and helps old people cross the street, too.”
“He spends time with that little girl who’s always at the Nagasaki Shrine,” Yukari says. “I think it’s sweet.”
“I’ve run into him outside the bookstore at the Iwatodai strip mall,” Akihiko says. “I think he runs errands for the old couple who runs it.”
“Dammit, I didn’t need you guys to find examples.” He groans. “Fine. One more thing. A Persona’s supposed to be an expression or an extension of your soul or something, right?”
“Essentially, yes,” Mitsuru says.
“So you have one Persona. I have one Persona. The robot has one Persona. The dog has one Persona. Everyone has one Persona. Except him. I swear I see him calling up a new one every time we go into Tartarus. He’s got to have at least thirty of them. How does he have the room? I mean, how does that even work? Where does he get them? Does he have thirty souls or something?”
“There’s still much we don’t know about Persona,” Mitsuru says. “He’s an anomaly from what we’ve seen, yes, but there might be others like him.”
“But there aren’t. At least, nobody I’ve seen.” He looks around the room-at Mitsuru wiping a bead of sweat from her temple, at Yukari shifting around on the couch, at Akihiko picking up Fuuka’s abandoned water glass. “How about you guys?”
“Just because we haven’t seen anyone else like him doesn’t mean other people like him don’t exist,” Yukari says. “I don’t know, maybe he understands how Persona work better than we do.”
“Yeah, well, if he does, he never says anything about it,” Junpei says.
“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?” Yukari says coolly, brushing her bangs out of her eyes and looking at Mitsuru. Ouch.
“Calm down, Yukari.” The way Akihiko says it’s almost like a command, low and insistent, and Junpei feels his back straightening. “We’re all hot and tired tonight. I think we should try to sleep.”
He and Mitsuru end up heading up the steps together; Yukari grabs her shoes when they’ve left. “I’m going to the karaoke,” she says. “I’ll be back.”
Junpei looks over at Aigis. “Well, do you think there’s something weird about Minato?”
“I have sworn always to remain at his side,” Aigis says, each word spaced the same as the one before it. “His ‘weirdness’ is irrelevant.”
“Right.” He flops back on the couch. “See, this is what I mean. The guy even has a pet robot.”
***
Junpei knocks on the door to Minato’s room a few hours later. He hears music filtering through the door, Yumi Kawamura or someone like that. Minato told him who she was once. He knows he should sleep but his sheets keep clinging to his skin because it’s all slick and there’s no sounds outside to lull him to sleep, not even a breeze stirring the leaves on the trees.
“Come in,” Minato says.
He pushes the door open. Minato’s down to his boxers and a t-shirt; the fan on his desk blows sweet, sweet air right into Junpei’s face. He’s got his computer screen on, but it doesn’t look like he’s studying. There’s a map of a city pulled up on his computer, one with blinking lights and flashing arrows and a few menus stacked on top of each other at the bottom and a chatbox in the upper right hand corner.
“Is that an MMO?” he asks.
Minato nods. “Innocent Sin. It’s the one you gave me.”
“Right.” He tips his head towards the ceiling. He’d forgotten. He’d kind of ditched that one for World of Warcraft, anyway; he remembers that grinding in Innocent Sin was a pain in the ass because mobs pretty much always respawned at the worst possible times. “So you like it?”
“It’s fun,” Minato says. “I’ve met interesting people on the server.”
“Yeah, Innocent Sin’s full of the really weird pretentious nutjobs who think they’re telling the world’s greatest epic story or something like that,” Junpei says. “Or did you mean interesting in a good way?”
He taps his pencil against his chin. “Interesting in a good way.”
Junpei sits down on Minato’s bed, and since Minato doesn’t say anything about it, he guesses it’s okay. Minato doesn’t have much in his room, just a bookshelf-looks like he’s alphabetized all the titles-and a painting tacked to the back wall. Junpei stares at it for a while, at the bruised reds and purples swirling together around a shadowed coffin, murky green and almost sunken into the canvas. A crumbling white flower rests on top of it, shedding wilted petals. He’d hate to have to look at that day in and day out. There are better things to stare at than coffins. Seriously. Maybe he should get Minato a poster for his birthday or something. When is Minato’s birthday? “Is that yours? The painting, I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you make it? Do it. Whatever you call it when you paint something.”
“That?” He tilts his head to look at it. “I finished it about a month ago. I’ve been painting variations on it for a while, though.”
“Kind of creepy.”
Minato’s smile is small, secretive, like he’s letting you in on something. “I guess it is, isn’t it?”
“Freak,” he says, but he doesn’t mean it in a bad way. Mostly.
“Was there something you wanted to talk about?” Minato asks.
“Huh? Oh.” Well, he can’t exactly ask Minato why-well, everything. Why he can do everything he can. Why he’s smart and popular and brave and tough and Junpei isn’t. Why after they wipe the last Shadows out, Minato will go to university and graduate with honors and change the whole wide fucking world and Junpei will be lucky if he gets to be a manager at a fast-food restaurant or something because without Hermes, what does he have? “I dunno. I guess the heat’s getting to me. Making me restless, you know?”
Minato waits, doesn’t say anything, just props his chin on the heel of his palm and looks Junpei straight on. Minato doesn’t really talk all that much, if Junpei thinks about it. Maybe that’s why everyone listens when he does, because they think he has something to say, because they think he’s taken the time to pick his words out as carefully as he selects his Personas.
“What’re you going to do?” he asks. “When the battle’s over?”
Minato leans back and studies the ceiling. “I have ideas,” he says. “But the world’s changing. I don’t know if they’ll still be good ideas by the time this is over.”
Figures he’d bust out with some deep shit. Junpei takes off his cap for a second, wipes his forehead with the brim. “So I guess you don’t know everything, huh?”
“No,” he says. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Hey, as long as you keep saving my ass in Toriumi’s class, we’re cool,” Junpei says. The vents groan, sputter out a few weak gusts of cold air. He sticks his hands over the vents, watches the sweat run down his palms. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
Minato drops his pencil on his desk with a little clack. “It’s only going to get worse from here.”
“Yeah.”
The vents give one final choked gasp, then fall silent.
I wrote this today in like one sitting, because apparently I am productive when it is better for me to be working on things that are, you know, school.
Thus, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Minato? Persona 3, Junpei and the rest of the cast. 3440 words, PG at most. Set right before the August full moon, so minor spoilers for who's in your party by that point.
In which Junpei wonders why the world seems to revolve around Minato Arisato. (Yep, metahumor.)
The evening’s quiet for once, and everyone in SEES just kind of flops around in the living room (except Mitsuru-sempai; she’s too dignified to flop), sprawled out across the overstuffed couched and chairs, sweltering in the thick August heat and leaving streaks and puddles of sweat behind whenever they shift around. Junpei drapes himself across the air conditioner-Mitsuru stopped him from fiddling around with the thermostat and lowering the temperature in the dorms, so this is the best he can do to stay cool: get as close as possible to the window-mounted unit when it starts blasting cold air and stick his head right up against the vents to stop his face from melting off. Yukari flips through the channels and sinks deeper into the couch cushions every time she mashes the remote, and Akihiko stands in a corner off to the side doing wrist exercises, his bangs plastered up against his forehead. Fuuka’s got her laptop out and he can hear the fan in that thing working overtime; she shifts it off her lap and picks up a glass filled with more ice than water, presses it between her palms. Aigis scratches Koro-chan behind the ears, and Koromaru’s tongue flops right out of his mouth and stays there when he starts panting. Mitsuru spreads the newspaper open in her lap, pulls her hair back away from the nape of her neck, takes out a red pen, and starts circling stuff. Minato’s out tonight, off getting dinner with the kendo team, so no Tartarus. He’s sweating so much that his katana would probably slip right out of his hands if he tried to swing it. He wonders if Minato has that problem, especially since he’s practicing right when the heat’s the worst.
He wonders a lot of things about Minato.
“Hey, guys.” Junpei swings his feet off the table.
Mitsuru looks up from the newspaper. “What is it, Iori?”
“Is it just me,” he asks, “or is there something-well, weird about Minato?”
“You’re just jealous,” Yukari mutters loud enough for him to hear, tugging her skirt down further over her thighs.
“Am not.” Well, maybe a little. Okay, maybe more than a little. But still. “Seriously, though. Is there anything the guy can’t do?”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Iori.” Mitsuru frowns and brushes a damp strand of hair out of her eyes. “He’s certainly skilled, but-”
“No, no, see, he’s more than skilled,” Junpei cuts in. “Okay. Think about it. He’s at the top of the class-”
“Yeah, because he studies.” Yukari turns up the volume on the TV; someone starts confessing their love for someone else, big romantic music swells in the background, and he really wants to yank the remote out of her hands.
“I study.”
“When Mitsuru-sempai makes you,” she says.
“I study other times, too.” He barrels on before Yukari can ask him about what other times. “Besides, fighting Shadows is more important than doing homework.” Saving the world beats out passing history, man. Come on. Memorizing the Tokugawa shoguns or smacking Shadows around with a spiked bat. That’s not even a choice. (He misses that bat. Where did Minato get it anyway? Hell, where does Minato get half of the weird stuff he carries around?)
“When the Shadow threat is eliminated, we’ll have to resume our normal lives,” Mitsuru says. “If we don’t stay on top of our studies, we won’t have that option available to us.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.” She only tells him that like every day. Mitsuru Kirijo Motivational Speech number seventy-five: School Is the Only Path to the Future. Seriously, she acts like more of a robot than Aigis does sometimes. “But you’ve never wondered why Minato knows the answer to absolutely everything in class?”
“It’s a good thing he does,” Yukari says, dragging herself out of the cushions a little, “because you’d be in trouble if he didn’t tell you the answers to half the questions Ms. Toriumi asks you.”
Mitsuru frowns. Great. Thanks a lot, Yuka-tan.
“Okay, okay.” Junpei holds up his hands. “So he’s smart. Fine. Cool. He’s a genius or something. But he’s a genius and a good athlete?”
Akihiko wipes his face off with the towel draped around his neck. “He was on the kendo team back at his old school,” he says. “He was pretty good. He never made captain, but his school made it to the championships a few times.”
“I bet he can’t beat Mamoru Hayase, though,” Yukari says.
“Jubei Yagyu couldn’t beat Mamoru Hayase. Not the point. It’s not just the kendo. Fuuka, you said he paints?”
Fuuka ducks her head behind her laptop, her cheeks flushing.
“Fuuka?”
“Oh,” she says from behind the screen. “He joined the art club in June. I think he’s quite good…” She picks up an ice cube from her glass and pops it in her mouth, sucks on it either to cool her throat down or to keep from talking anymore or maybe both.
“Man, how does he fit in all those extracurriculars? It’s not normal,” Junpei says.
“At least he has some,” Yukari points out.
“Takeba’s right,” Mitsuru says. Time for Mitsuru Kirijo Motivational Speech number fifty-three: It’s Important to Get The Most out Of Your High School Career and Look Like a Well-Rounded Student on Your University Applications. “Universities aren’t interested in your academic prowess alone. They want to see that you’ve been an active participant in your school’s community.”
“Have you thought about kendo club?” Akihiko asks. “That would help you improve your form.”
Actually, he did think about checking kendo club out, but then he’d be in there with Minato and Minato sees him fall on his ass enough in Tartarus, and in kendo club Yukari can’t exactly cast Re Patra on him to get him back up on his feet.
“Or baseball.” Yukari snickers. “Because you always step forward on the wrong foot when you swing your sword.”
He grinds his fist into his palm. “Hey, I still hit the Shadows, Miss Please-Hit-Oops-I-Missed-Hey-Junpei-Get-That-Arrow-For-Me.”
“Calm down, you two,” Akihiko says.
“Totally calm.”
“We’re fine. Junpei’s just an idiot.”
Akihiko’s lips twitch. Dammit, not sempai, too.
“Anyway.” Junpei clears his throat; it’s gone all parched and cracked from the heat. “So Minato paints. He’s a regular-” He realizes he doesn’t know what Minato’s paintings look like. “…whoever.”
“Um, I can’t really think of any artists his style resembles,” Fuuka says to her knees. “He uses a lot of rich dark tones, though. Deep reds and purples and forest greens. He likes painting landscapes.”
“Landscapes? No shit. Like trees and mountains and stuff?”
“Not quite,” Fuuka says. “He doesn’t paint places I’ve ever seen before.” A flush creeps up her neck. She tugs at the collar of her sweater-she must be hot under that, smothered by the wool so close to her skin. She pulls up her wilting socks and Junpei gets a good look at her skirt. At her skirt, not up it. He’s not that bad. And besides, he doesn’t want to make Fuuka run off and lock herself in her room or anything, which she’d probably do if he did try to see up her skirt. “Have you worn that skirt before?” he asks. It’s light blue, with black fabric bunched around the bottom in a way that reminds him of Juno’s skirt. Thing.
Her cheeks turn pink again. “Oh. No, it’s new. Minato-kun made it for me.”
“Wait. Wait. Hold on.” Junpei peels himself away from the air conditioner. “He sews, too?”
“Yeah, he’s in the home economics club with that transfer student,” Yukari says.
“I’ve let him use my sewing machine before,” Mitsuru says.
“Wait, you sew?” And where does she keep her machine, anyway? He hasn’t seen it around, so she must keep it in her room. Minato’s been in her room? Minato’s been in her room and hasn’t told him about it? Minato’s managed to penetrate the, like, most inner of inner sanctuaries and he hasn’t said anything about it? What the hell’s wrong with that guy? “And you let him in your room?”
She smiles. “I keep my machine in the basement. And I have to mend my clothes when they tear, don’t I? I can’t rely on someone else to do it for me, not while I’m living here.”
Akihiko smiles and says something like “That’s Mitsuru for you” softly, pretty much just to himself.
“I guess. I just thought you, you know, bought new ones when the old ones wore out or something.” He scratches the sweat-soaked hairs at the back of his neck. It’s not like she couldn’t afford to do that.
“That wouldn’t be fiscally responsible.” Yeah. Robot. He’s never even heard Aigis say “fiscally responsible” before. Okay, maybe she’s not a robot, it’s probably just that she’s a genius and almost as perfect as Minato is, but she’s a babe and a half so she gets a pass from him on that one.
Junpei holds up his hand and ticks off his fingers. “He’s smart. He’s a good athlete. He paints. He sews. He’s on the student council. Freaking everyone knows who he is and he hasn’t even been at Gekkoukan a whole year. Every time you turn around, he’s always talking to some new girl.”
“Sometimes boys can talk to girls without hitting on them,” Yukari says. “The ones who aren’t cretins, at least.”
“No, but I swear these girls are seriously falling all over him.”
Yukari snorts. “How would you know?”
“Well, it seems like it,” he retorts. “Am I wrong?”
“You aren’t.” Mitsuru crosses over to the window and pulls the curtains shut, blocks out the last dying rays of sunlight. The room maybe gets a degree colder, if that. “He has quite the following. Fushimi’s quite taken with him.”
“Fushimi? Chihiro Fushimi? The treasurer? I thought she was afraid of guys!” He should know. He’s tried to talk to her before, but she’s scampered away each time. Shame, too; she’s pretty cute. “Why isn’t she afraid of him?”
“You can’t really be afraid of Minato,” Fuuka says, and the way she smiles, the way the corners of her lips just kind of move up and her cheeks get warm again…
“Fuuka, no way. You too?”
“I-” She stands up, her arms straight at her side, her hands clenched. “I think I need to study. And-and we won’t be going to Tartarus tonight, so you don’t really need me down here. Excuse me,” she half-whispers, bowing.
“No, wait,” Junpei tries to tell her, but she’s already unplugged her laptop and started to walk towards the stairs fast, hugging her computer close to her chest.
“You should have left her alone, Junpei,” Akihiko says quietly, and he’d rather have Yukari yelling at him, because at least Yukari always yells at him, so it’s not really a personal thing anymore.
“I gotta go.” He doesn’t have to run too fast to catch up with Fuuka-climbing all those stairs in Tartarus has made his legs stronger than ever. “Are you all right?” he asks her.
“I’m fine.” She smiles up at him, her eyes pink around the corners. “Really, I’ll be okay. Thank you for asking. I do need to study, though.”
“Look,” he begins, “I didn’t mean-”
“It’s fine.” She presses her lips together, looks down. When she looks back up she’s trying to smile again. “Please don’t worry about it. I don’t want you to be upset.”
“Well, I don’t want you to be upset, either.”
“I’m not. I do, um, I should study, though.”
“Sure thing. Come back down when you’re done. I mean, even Mitsuru’s taking a break for a while, you know? You can, too.”
She heads up the steps, and he heads back into the living room. Aigis kneels next to Koro-chan now; Koromaru barks and he swears he hears something clicking in Aigis’s head when she not-quite-barks back at him.
“You have a robot talking to a dog over there and you think Minato’s weird?” Yukari crosses her arms. “And move away from the air conditioner, you’re blocking off the vents.”
“I’m on the other side of the room now. Chill.” He grins. “Get it?”
Akihiko groans. “That was bad.”
“Then come up with a better one.”
“Puns aren’t my thing.” He starts moving his wrists around in circles, keeps them limber and loose. The bandage over his eyebrow’s unsticking itself a little, slipping loose from all the sweat.
“It’s not that Minato’s weird-okay, I guess he is in some ways, but hell, The Dark Hour makes everything kind of weird-it’s that, well, is there anything he can’t do?” Junpei runs his hands through his hair, knocks his cap askew a little. His hair’s so damp it stays spiked up when he musses it. “And everyone likes him, I swear. I mean, don’t you think Ms. Toriumi has a crush on him?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Yukari says.
“That’s highly unprofessional,” Mitsuru says.
“Well, she always calls on him in class.”
“So she thinks he’s a good student,” Akihiko says. “That doesn’t mean she has a crush on him.”
He sighs. New tactic. “I bet he plays with orphaned kids and helps old people cross the street, too.”
“He spends time with that little girl who’s always at the Nagasaki Shrine,” Yukari says. “I think it’s sweet.”
“I’ve run into him outside the bookstore at the Iwatodai strip mall,” Akihiko says. “I think he runs errands for the old couple who runs it.”
“Dammit, I didn’t need you guys to find examples.” He groans. “Fine. One more thing. A Persona’s supposed to be an expression or an extension of your soul or something, right?”
“Essentially, yes,” Mitsuru says.
“So you have one Persona. I have one Persona. The robot has one Persona. The dog has one Persona. Everyone has one Persona. Except him. I swear I see him calling up a new one every time we go into Tartarus. He’s got to have at least thirty of them. How does he have the room? I mean, how does that even work? Where does he get them? Does he have thirty souls or something?”
“There’s still much we don’t know about Persona,” Mitsuru says. “He’s an anomaly from what we’ve seen, yes, but there might be others like him.”
“But there aren’t. At least, nobody I’ve seen.” He looks around the room-at Mitsuru wiping a bead of sweat from her temple, at Yukari shifting around on the couch, at Akihiko picking up Fuuka’s abandoned water glass. “How about you guys?”
“Just because we haven’t seen anyone else like him doesn’t mean other people like him don’t exist,” Yukari says. “I don’t know, maybe he understands how Persona work better than we do.”
“Yeah, well, if he does, he never says anything about it,” Junpei says.
“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?” Yukari says coolly, brushing her bangs out of her eyes and looking at Mitsuru. Ouch.
“Calm down, Yukari.” The way Akihiko says it’s almost like a command, low and insistent, and Junpei feels his back straightening. “We’re all hot and tired tonight. I think we should try to sleep.”
He and Mitsuru end up heading up the steps together; Yukari grabs her shoes when they’ve left. “I’m going to the karaoke,” she says. “I’ll be back.”
Junpei looks over at Aigis. “Well, do you think there’s something weird about Minato?”
“I have sworn always to remain at his side,” Aigis says, each word spaced the same as the one before it. “His ‘weirdness’ is irrelevant.”
“Right.” He flops back on the couch. “See, this is what I mean. The guy even has a pet robot.”
***
Junpei knocks on the door to Minato’s room a few hours later. He hears music filtering through the door, Yumi Kawamura or someone like that. Minato told him who she was once. He knows he should sleep but his sheets keep clinging to his skin because it’s all slick and there’s no sounds outside to lull him to sleep, not even a breeze stirring the leaves on the trees.
“Come in,” Minato says.
He pushes the door open. Minato’s down to his boxers and a t-shirt; the fan on his desk blows sweet, sweet air right into Junpei’s face. He’s got his computer screen on, but it doesn’t look like he’s studying. There’s a map of a city pulled up on his computer, one with blinking lights and flashing arrows and a few menus stacked on top of each other at the bottom and a chatbox in the upper right hand corner.
“Is that an MMO?” he asks.
Minato nods. “Innocent Sin. It’s the one you gave me.”
“Right.” He tips his head towards the ceiling. He’d forgotten. He’d kind of ditched that one for World of Warcraft, anyway; he remembers that grinding in Innocent Sin was a pain in the ass because mobs pretty much always respawned at the worst possible times. “So you like it?”
“It’s fun,” Minato says. “I’ve met interesting people on the server.”
“Yeah, Innocent Sin’s full of the really weird pretentious nutjobs who think they’re telling the world’s greatest epic story or something like that,” Junpei says. “Or did you mean interesting in a good way?”
He taps his pencil against his chin. “Interesting in a good way.”
Junpei sits down on Minato’s bed, and since Minato doesn’t say anything about it, he guesses it’s okay. Minato doesn’t have much in his room, just a bookshelf-looks like he’s alphabetized all the titles-and a painting tacked to the back wall. Junpei stares at it for a while, at the bruised reds and purples swirling together around a shadowed coffin, murky green and almost sunken into the canvas. A crumbling white flower rests on top of it, shedding wilted petals. He’d hate to have to look at that day in and day out. There are better things to stare at than coffins. Seriously. Maybe he should get Minato a poster for his birthday or something. When is Minato’s birthday? “Is that yours? The painting, I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you make it? Do it. Whatever you call it when you paint something.”
“That?” He tilts his head to look at it. “I finished it about a month ago. I’ve been painting variations on it for a while, though.”
“Kind of creepy.”
Minato’s smile is small, secretive, like he’s letting you in on something. “I guess it is, isn’t it?”
“Freak,” he says, but he doesn’t mean it in a bad way. Mostly.
“Was there something you wanted to talk about?” Minato asks.
“Huh? Oh.” Well, he can’t exactly ask Minato why-well, everything. Why he can do everything he can. Why he’s smart and popular and brave and tough and Junpei isn’t. Why after they wipe the last Shadows out, Minato will go to university and graduate with honors and change the whole wide fucking world and Junpei will be lucky if he gets to be a manager at a fast-food restaurant or something because without Hermes, what does he have? “I dunno. I guess the heat’s getting to me. Making me restless, you know?”
Minato waits, doesn’t say anything, just props his chin on the heel of his palm and looks Junpei straight on. Minato doesn’t really talk all that much, if Junpei thinks about it. Maybe that’s why everyone listens when he does, because they think he has something to say, because they think he’s taken the time to pick his words out as carefully as he selects his Personas.
“What’re you going to do?” he asks. “When the battle’s over?”
Minato leans back and studies the ceiling. “I have ideas,” he says. “But the world’s changing. I don’t know if they’ll still be good ideas by the time this is over.”
Figures he’d bust out with some deep shit. Junpei takes off his cap for a second, wipes his forehead with the brim. “So I guess you don’t know everything, huh?”
“No,” he says. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Hey, as long as you keep saving my ass in Toriumi’s class, we’re cool,” Junpei says. The vents groan, sputter out a few weak gusts of cold air. He sticks his hands over the vents, watches the sweat run down his palms. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
Minato drops his pencil on his desk with a little clack. “It’s only going to get worse from here.”
“Yeah.”
The vents give one final choked gasp, then fall silent.