Diverging Paths
Nov. 17th, 2022 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madimpossibledreamerMain Points:
Persona 4 Past Will Tell AU (protag swap + Average AU)
Second person, Souji POV
Chapter Summary: It used to be easy to be a hero. It's not anymore.
Word Count: 1065
Rating: Teen
pre-yosuke/souji
At least, you think that, until the first day you remember doesn’t go the way you remember it at all. There’s a girl at the station you don’t remember meeting before, and this isn’t the lazy Yosuke you first met. He’s oozing the sheer determination he does when you go into the TV, when you talk about finding the killer, and he doesn’t run into the light pole or get kicked by Chie. Yosuke’s the one to save you from Morooka—a now-living Morooka—and his lecture, not Chie. He doesn’t invite you to a tour of the town, and neither does Chie, and Chie is buying him a beef bowl rather than the other way around. She doesn’t even complain about it. It briefly has you wondering if they’re dating suddenly, but while there’s a closeness between them that had been entirely absent before, it’s not that of boyfriend and girlfriend. They’re both exhausted, like everyone is the day after training in the TV. Saki-senpai is already missing, according to one student whispering during a lull in the lecture, and last night you watched a news report saying Yamano-san and some police officer named Taguchi-san had already died.
You want to run to Yosuke, exclaim “I have a bunch of Personas, and I’m a great help during the fight; let me help, Partner!”. But if they’ve already gone in the TV, saying such things would only make you look suspicious. In fact, it probably already has, considering the weird looks he and Chie shot you when you’d merely dared to ask about the Seven Mysteries. You don’t dare ask directly about the rumor of the Midnight Channel.
You try putting your hand in the TV. That works, although you quickly put it out, remembering Teddie biting your hand early on. If he does that again and tells Yosuke and Chie, and then if they see your hand is wounded, that’d be suspicious.
You want to check if you can summon your Personas, out here. But you can’t, obviously, because that’s not how any of this works. Personas can’t be summoned in the real world. At least, you think you can’t. Maybe you should have tried, when everything started going wrong, after Nanako—you’re not thinking about that, other than how you’re not going to fail her again.
But the fog was strong, out here, back before you fell asleep and woke up on the train. No dream of the Velvet Room, though, and you don’t get quite what that means. Maybe you should’ve seen if the glasses worked. Maybe you should’ve tried to summon your Personas.
But there’s…an emptiness, when you think about it. It’s not like they talked to you, but there was…a feeling they’d convey. That you weren’t alone. That they were there for you. That’s all gone now. You suspect they are too, and you want to go in and test it out and find out for sure, afraid to know the answer, but you can’t bring yourself to do it. You’re not sure what to do if the former (and maybe present? time travel is still something you’re getting used to thinking about) Inaba Investigation Team find you or how you’d explain yourself. You desperately need not to screw it up, because you’re not the enemy and you couldn’t bear it if any of them looked at you like you are.
You’d been used to being alone, back before all this. You should be better about it. You’re not. If anything, it feels worse than it had, because it’d been so long, before, you hadn’t been aware of what you were missing. It’s really lonely now. You end up cooking a lot, which at least Nanako and Dojima-san appreciate.
It can’t have been Namatame. That has to be where you went wrong, why you’re living this all again. Why the fog started taking over. You’re back here, like this is all a game and you’d reloaded your save, but this is far from a game. People died last time. People have already died again this time. You can’t afford to screw around. You consider telling your uncle, but it’s clear someone had been watching you, and from what Namatame said, he considered throwing people into the TV World to be ‘saving’ them.
But the mysterious stranger, the one who sent the letters, said ‘do not save anymore’. So they’d clearly known the truth. Might’ve even have known about Namatame, too.
Then there’s also the issue of how everyone had been getting the power. Namatame was like you. He hadn’t faced his Shadow. You’re not sure about the letter writer. For all you know, he or she doesn’t even have the power, or hasn’t gone in, just like Namatame.
Just watched Namatame shove someone in, figured unlike Namatame that portals to other dimensions are probably rarely friendly, and is just sitting back, entertained, watching the chaos unfold.
Then again, that would also tally with Chie’s guess that the murderer is a pervert getting off on it, which would mean he probably at least had the power to enter TVs even if he maybe didn’t enter one himself. So they might not be different people after all. It’s just a possibility, and unfortunately, at the moment, you don’t have enough answers.
The oddest part is knowing these people better than they know you. The most painful part is feeling you’re close, but you have to watch yourself or you’ll make a mistake. Another one, possibly. Chie and Yosuke had looked at you funny, and you have the odd feeling that you gave yourself away, which is weird, because they don’t actually know you, so they shouldn’t know that. You have the feeling you should try to warn them with what you know, but how much? The order people get thrown in? How not to warn them? How much do you try to change events, and thus deviate from what you know and thus make things more unpredictable and possibly more dangerous?
You’ll sleep on it, you decide. Perhaps you’ll find answers in the morning.
Persona 4 Past Will Tell AU (protag swap + Average AU)
Second person, Souji POV
Chapter Summary: It used to be easy to be a hero. It's not anymore.
Word Count: 1065
Rating: Teen
pre-yosuke/souji
Oddly, the time travel is the easiest part to come to terms with. After you spend days making friends to unlock parts of your soul that you then fuse together in a limosine reached by a door inside the TV, you’d like to think you’re hard to faze.
At least, you think that, until the first day you remember doesn’t go the way you remember it at all. There’s a girl at the station you don’t remember meeting before, and this isn’t the lazy Yosuke you first met. He’s oozing the sheer determination he does when you go into the TV, when you talk about finding the killer, and he doesn’t run into the light pole or get kicked by Chie. Yosuke’s the one to save you from Morooka—a now-living Morooka—and his lecture, not Chie. He doesn’t invite you to a tour of the town, and neither does Chie, and Chie is buying him a beef bowl rather than the other way around. She doesn’t even complain about it. It briefly has you wondering if they’re dating suddenly, but while there’s a closeness between them that had been entirely absent before, it’s not that of boyfriend and girlfriend. They’re both exhausted, like everyone is the day after training in the TV. Saki-senpai is already missing, according to one student whispering during a lull in the lecture, and last night you watched a news report saying Yamano-san and some police officer named Taguchi-san had already died.
You want to run to Yosuke, exclaim “I have a bunch of Personas, and I’m a great help during the fight; let me help, Partner!”. But if they’ve already gone in the TV, saying such things would only make you look suspicious. In fact, it probably already has, considering the weird looks he and Chie shot you when you’d merely dared to ask about the Seven Mysteries. You don’t dare ask directly about the rumor of the Midnight Channel.
You try putting your hand in the TV. That works, although you quickly put it out, remembering Teddie biting your hand early on. If he does that again and tells Yosuke and Chie, and then if they see your hand is wounded, that’d be suspicious.
You want to check if you can summon your Personas, out here. But you can’t, obviously, because that’s not how any of this works. Personas can’t be summoned in the real world. At least, you think you can’t. Maybe you should have tried, when everything started going wrong, after Nanako—you’re not thinking about that, other than how you’re not going to fail her again.
But the fog was strong, out here, back before you fell asleep and woke up on the train. No dream of the Velvet Room, though, and you don’t get quite what that means. Maybe you should’ve seen if the glasses worked. Maybe you should’ve tried to summon your Personas.
But there’s…an emptiness, when you think about it. It’s not like they talked to you, but there was…a feeling they’d convey. That you weren’t alone. That they were there for you. That’s all gone now. You suspect they are too, and you want to go in and test it out and find out for sure, afraid to know the answer, but you can’t bring yourself to do it. You’re not sure what to do if the former (and maybe present? time travel is still something you’re getting used to thinking about) Inaba Investigation Team find you or how you’d explain yourself. You desperately need not to screw it up, because you’re not the enemy and you couldn’t bear it if any of them looked at you like you are.
You’d been used to being alone, back before all this. You should be better about it. You’re not. If anything, it feels worse than it had, because it’d been so long, before, you hadn’t been aware of what you were missing. It’s really lonely now. You end up cooking a lot, which at least Nanako and Dojima-san appreciate.
It can’t have been Namatame. That has to be where you went wrong, why you’re living this all again. Why the fog started taking over. You’re back here, like this is all a game and you’d reloaded your save, but this is far from a game. People died last time. People have already died again this time. You can’t afford to screw around. You consider telling your uncle, but it’s clear someone had been watching you, and from what Namatame said, he considered throwing people into the TV World to be ‘saving’ them.
But the mysterious stranger, the one who sent the letters, said ‘do not save anymore’. So they’d clearly known the truth. Might’ve even have known about Namatame, too.
Then there’s also the issue of how everyone had been getting the power. Namatame was like you. He hadn’t faced his Shadow. You’re not sure about the letter writer. For all you know, he or she doesn’t even have the power, or hasn’t gone in, just like Namatame.
Just watched Namatame shove someone in, figured unlike Namatame that portals to other dimensions are probably rarely friendly, and is just sitting back, entertained, watching the chaos unfold.
Then again, that would also tally with Chie’s guess that the murderer is a pervert getting off on it, which would mean he probably at least had the power to enter TVs even if he maybe didn’t enter one himself. So they might not be different people after all. It’s just a possibility, and unfortunately, at the moment, you don’t have enough answers.
The oddest part is knowing these people better than they know you. The most painful part is feeling you’re close, but you have to watch yourself or you’ll make a mistake. Another one, possibly. Chie and Yosuke had looked at you funny, and you have the odd feeling that you gave yourself away, which is weird, because they don’t actually know you, so they shouldn’t know that. You have the feeling you should try to warn them with what you know, but how much? The order people get thrown in? How not to warn them? How much do you try to change events, and thus deviate from what you know and thus make things more unpredictable and possibly more dangerous?
You’ll sleep on it, you decide. Perhaps you’ll find answers in the morning.
