Sea of the Unconscious Part 7

[madimpossibledreamer]

I don't care what you say, past!me, that choice music for the floor is a little creepy given we've got kid yosuke in this one.  I'm changing it.

Main Points:
Persona 4 Sea of the Unconscious
Summary: Yosuke was not part of the original investigation team. In fact, he wasn't even part of their world. He was a huge fanboy. And then he fell into Inaba, and his life changed forever...
Really old, so not perfectly written, and it was during my FONTS EXIST phase. Slightly inspired by Chisotahn's Ten Steps fic. The entire concept is a little chuuni/Gary Stu. I don't think it would be bad with some tweaking, but that's tweaking i don't really want to do, so we've got this instead.
Word Count: 574
Rating: teen

          "I think you'll be particularly interested in the items on this particular floor," the Junes Yosuke told them conversationally.  It was empty.  Literally pretty empty.  There were mounds of sand, a strangely grey-colored sand, but no shelves, no products, very little indication, in fact, that this was still Junes.
          And someone else crying.
          Souji sighed and began climbing the dunes, searching for the source, summoning Izanagi to help him with the treacherous footing.
          Eventually he spotted a little kid, probably about Nanako's age, bawling his eyes out, rubbing at his eyes with tiny little fists.  The fur-lined jacket seemed a little much, considering the fact that they appeared to be in the middle of a desert.  That, or someone had just dumped a bunch of sand in the middle of the Junes floor and the air conditioning had gone out.  Anything was probably possible in the TV World.
          He realized Chie had seen the child, too, because he heard her gasp behind him.
          With help from Izanagi, he was running toward the child, who turned to him with sad yellow eyes and a trembling lip.  On every other Shadow of a person he'd ever seen the yellow was kind of creepy.  It was sort of cute on a child, though there were probably situations where it would have been creepy.  He pulled the child into his arms.  It was still a Shadow that if it got really mad could probably kill them all, but...Yosuke had been adorable as a child.  Like Nanako.  He'd always had a soft spot for children anyway.
          "Don't cry," Chie stated awkwardly, smiling at him and trying to get him to smile back too.
          "Can' 'elp it," he finally managed, hiccupping.
          "Seriously, kid, stop being a wuss," Kanji added, just as awkward, more from the fact that he wanted to hug the kid Yosuke as Souji was doing but also didn't want to seem weak.  Souji had no such qualms, running his hands through the longer hair, down the small arms, as it had calmed Nanako before.  It seemed to be helping now.
          "Everything I touch always turns into dust.  I think I'm cursed," he added, looking at his feet, embarrassed, brow furrowed.  "They always tell me that I should have known better.  That I'm always being stupid.  I am being stupid, aren't I?"  He looked up at the group, honestly waiting for an answer, and Yukiko let slip an 'aww' before recovering her composure.
          "Don't be silly.  Who tells you that?" Chie asked gently, crouching so she was on the level of the child Yosuke now sitting on Souji's lap.
          He elaborated in only the way a child could.  "Everyone."
          "Well, I sure as hell don't say that!" Kanji yelled, and Yosuke giggled.
          "Come help us, Yosuke-chan!" Teddie added, bouncing up and hugging the kid.
          "What if I mess up?" he asked, lip beginning to tremble again.
          "We believe in you, Yosuke-chan!  And even if you do, it's not the end of the world!  You learn from it, you grow and mature and we'll help you do that, okay?"  Even Chie was charmed by the young one.
          "Okay," he said simply, hopping off Souji's knee before another thought occurred to him.  He turned back and planted a small kiss on the leader's cheek, the kind that Nanako had given him just a few months back.  He took the grey-haired teenager's hand and began pulling him, determined, toward a corner.