Always Just Behind

[madimpossibledreamer]

The song wasn’t actually due to the lotus. I was listening to the song separately and then went ‘wait there are parallels to Asura/Taisha in this storyline my heart ow’, after which I cranked this out at a point I definitely should have been sleeping.  And named the series.  Also some steins;gate parallels.
Contains the tradition of graduating high school seniors giving the second-to-top button of their gakuran (school uniform) to the one closest to their heart.
~Dreamer~
PS: posted "early" because tomorrow's going to be a pain.
 

Main Points:
Persona 2/Persona 4 crossover (Broken Hero)
Chapter Summary: Neither Jun nor Tatsuya ever truly moved on.
Word Count: 2362
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Tatsuya/Jun
Warning: This is the one where the kids realize Tatsuya and Jun used to date, so some mild homophobia from Yosuke (he gets over himself, but this isn't that one), depression, suicidal thought patterns.  Viewer discretion advised & seek help if you need it.

 

         “Why the park?” Amagi-chan asks innocently as they enter, and Jun would have shrugged, answered that they were just visiting the places in Sumaru that were important to them both, when his breath catches in his throat.
         He doesn’t start crying at this. He can’t. He’s already shed far too many tears over this already. But he knows this moment, has replayed it a thousand times, and the fact that it’s captured so perfectly, himself still far too handsome in the kimono as he stares desperately, frozen tears on icy cheeks, the devastation that must have been present in Tatsuya’s heart depicted on his face. The statue of Jun’s hand is outstretched, begging, pleading, and he knows without having to look precisely what is inside.
         He does, he realizes after a moment, stop moving, and Amagi-chan has turned to him, question and concern in her face. The others have slowed down, and he’s vaguely amused to see Satonaka-chan start to dance on the balls of her feet as if preparing for an enemy and Seta-kun’s hand move to his katana, though he makes no move to unsheathe it, despite the fact that they have yet to be attacked near these statues, only a few ambushes here and there more unnerving by their absence than presence.
         Teddie-kun rushes forward, on the other hand, without heed for the emotional landmine before him. “Why are you so upset about a lost button?” he asks innocently, actually expecting an answer, and the children gasp, instantly grasping the meaning of the gesture without the need for the statues’ narration.
         “Teddie, read the room!” Hanamura-kun scolds quickly, steadying Jun with a hand on his elbow—a gesture both endearing and amusing, or it would be if he didn’t actually feel a little off balance. He’d hesitated to touch, to act beyond that initial admonishment, but he’d overpowered that reluctance, an act Jun appreciates. “Do you need to sit down?” he asks.
         Jun takes a deep breath and shakes his head. “It’s not as if this doesn’t live in my heart, for obvious reasons.” He’d meant that as a reassurance, but if anything the children look even more devastated than he feels.
         He walks forward, taking courage from the fact that he’s not alone, to touch his own shoulder, trying to impart any ounce of reassurance he can to his younger self in a useless gesture. For this isn’t actually himself in the past, just a crystallized memory, cold and hollow but full of meaning to them both. He’d thought Sevens had been harsh, but in a way, this is worse, because he expects something similar enough to reality. It’s not as if there’s much to overthink, after all, not much more that Tatsuya’s quickly becoming more and more apparent self-hatred can elaborate upon. Why lie, show the worst interpretations, when the truth will break him just as easily?
         “why?” It’s plaintive, desperate, practically the cry of a drowning man, and Jun winces. He remembers that just as well as Tatsuya does, apparently, because it’s the one thing he still can’t understand, even after all these years. Tatsuya had never been able to give a satisfactory answer, though at the time Jun suspected—and still does—that to give anywhere near the answer Jun would have suspected his love would have to voice the secrets he keeps closest to his heart, to this day, secrets and burdens he was unwilling to share.  The ones unwillingly on display now.
         He’s nervous to touch the other statue, nervous to finally get the answer he sought, and the worst of it is that this cannot be Tatsuya’s deepest pains, because this isn’t the end of the dungeon. They haven’t found Tatsuya’s shadow that taunted and teased in equal measure. And yet he can’t hesitate, not now, not when it’s clear his dragon is suffering and has been for so long and might just die if he is too slow because of a little thing like feelings. With a snarl at his own weakness, he puts a hand on Tatsuya’s shoulder, foregoing the urge to throttle the impossible, infuriating man.
         “Was it cruel?” Tatsuya’s statue muses, sounding cold and distant, and for a moment, Jun’s hand slips before he forces himself to put his hand back, because this is clearly not the end of it. “I don’t regret giving you back Maya-nee or the rest, but forcing you to remember me…what a price to pay, to avoid This Side. Was it selfish? Would it have been better to just follow your lead, to forget everyone? Would that have actually kept this fragile world safe?”
         The rage drains, replaced with pure bewilderment. The things Tacchi is talking about feel familiar, as familiar as the back of his own hand, and yet Jun has never heard them, has no idea what Tatsuya’s even talking about.
         He closes his eyes, thinking, and it’s clear the children are doing the same, since they’re not bombarding him with questions—or perhaps they’re concerned Hanamura-kun would scold them as well. The experience of being a manager’s son has clearly given him the ability to lecture when the occasion calls for it.
         The question is not whether whatever Tatsu-chan remembers happened. They had fought creatures of rumor, after all, to the point Eikichi-kun was the only one still surprised by anything that happened. They’d all come to expect the unexpected.
         The prices had been everyone forgetting each other, or whatever Tatsuya had done that no one remembers. Jun’s immediate reaction is that he would never agree to such a thing, that he doesn’t want to lose whatever he has left of the man he loves. If Tatsuya hadn’t, he would have, he’d say. Thinking back, though, it’s entirely possible he would have, as a teenager.
         He still believes in the power of the stars, of destiny and the red string of fate, and if their memories had been erased at the time, he would have said that they’d still all meet, that it was inevitable.
         Tatsuya hadn’t been willing to go along with it, yet another fact that doesn’t surprise Jun for an instant. For appearing a loner and not talking to them, Tatsu-chan still holds his relationships, what few he has, right next to his heart. But there’s another part of him that isn’t willing to take that chance, the chance that someone he loves would die if he didn’t go along with whatever plan—
         Of course, Jun gasps, not sure why he hadn’t seen it before. Only one point stood out, in their fight. Why none of them had questioned further? When Miss Ideal had appeared, ready to stab Maya, and then just…disappeared in a Nova Kaiser. None of them had even bothered to ask what had happened to her, only being sure that he hadn’t killed her, or Nyarlathotep would have gloated at the fulfillment of the prophecy by the hands of humans, no less, and anyway it wasn’t Tatsuya’s style, and for some reason that was enough for them. No one named Maya had died, the Oracle of Maia had gone unfulfilled, and Nyarlathotep had failed. Tatsuya had been so prepared, as if he’d known it was going to happen, and yet none of them had bothered to question their good luck, the speed with which their leader had reacted.
         Forgetting each other might have had something to do with undoing the Oracle of Maia, the conditions that allowed it to happen, creating another world that Tatsuya called ‘This Side’.
         And then, somehow, Tatsuya made some sort of bargain that had allowed him to rewrite events, allowing him to change what had happened without the need for any of them to forget each other, without losing the friendships they had made. The details here are hazy, though Jun suspects they won’t stay that way, not when they’re traveling this dungeon, a reflection of the way Tatsu-chan sees the world he’d made as a fragile one—for if he could undo events, what ensured they remained set in stone? He’d trusted this outcome more than the choice to forget, or perhaps he didn’t think they should have to suffer in such a way—but, notably, didn’t include himself.
         The Tatsuya they’d known, loved, fought beside, was not the same one that had secured that victory doubtless with blood, sweat, and tears, and none of them had even bothered to even look hard enough, to see. True, it had been clear that something had happened from the way he was acting, but it hadn’t made sense, they’d known that and should have come up with some way to support rather than interrogate him. None of them, not even Jun, had bothered to look more than surface-deep, and what pains Jun’s heart is that his dragon sees that as a fault with himself, when, rather, it’s that they all failed him. For the second time, and just as deeply.
         And yet, he hadn’t changed, not particularly. As broken as he was, the fundamentals remained the same, so while it all seemed inexplicable, when Jun started with the thinking about what externally could have prompted such actions, rather than what had changed internally, following the train of logic and his own intimate knowledge of the way Tatsuya thinks was enough to get here. Maya-nee had, after all, jokingly called them doppelgangers. If anyone could know Tatsu-chan’s heart so intimately, it would be him, which the dragon probably saw as an edge ready to draw blood. One single mistake would have been enough for Jun to work it out, as he is now.
         If Tatsuya could have erased his own existence, or at least their memories of him, if there wasn’t the slightest chance that removing himself would cause this world he’d built to shatter and melt, he would have done so already. He made this world, but doesn’t feel as if he deserves to live in it.
         He’d tried. Until graduation, he’d tried to keep up the pretense, tried to act as he had, but Jun had been too observant, asked too many questions but never the right ones, and then when it came to his confession, a desperate last attempt to keep the man he loved by his side even as he felt him slip away, Tatsuya had apparently made his choice.
         “I can’t give you what you want—what you need,” he’d explained at the time, awkward and clearly in pain even if he was putting on a brave face. “I can’t be the man you deserve.” Painfully true, if not for the reasons Jun had thought at the time, and not an insurmountable obstacle as Tatsuya had clearly thought. And then, gently, ever-so-gently, like stabbing Jun’s heart slowly, he’d pressed the button back into Jun’s hand, closing his fingers over it and reluctantly letting his own hand fall before he’d left.
         Lisa-chan, to Jun’s surprise, did not make a move. Well, he knew she wasn’t callous, but both of them had been in love with Tatsu-chan so long that neither one of them remembered what it was like not being in love with him. She had been furious on his behalf and offered to challenge Tatsuya to a duel, to which he’d laughed and declined.
         They’d both grown closer, after that. While Tatsuya only drifted, lost and alienated from everyone. He loved Sumaru in his own way, the city in his very bones, and yet he barely stayed there. Did it make it easier to remain at arm’s length from them? Or was it in some way some misguided attempt at punishment for imaginary sins? His dragon was, after all, very good at self-martyrdom. And the only thing he’d change, of all this, was not to imagine himself a better future, imagine that his life was capable of any happiness. No, he’d only wish Jun not remember him, so he would no longer be chained to the past, despite the fact that such is Tatsuya’s fate.
         What’s left, in the ashes of revelation after revelation, is sorrow, pain, but also determination. This dungeon, this Fragile World—that’s not some exaggeration, some warped version of Tatsu-chan’s mindset. This is a diorama, aside from the encroaching Shadows they’ve had to fight. This just took how Tatsuya sees the entire world and placed it in stark view, the way the dragon sees the world given life. He hasn’t been suffering in this place for mere hours, distorted by the way time works in this place. Tatsu-chan has been suffering in this place for more than ten years.
         He glances up. The statues have shattered long ago, while he was thinking.
         Hanamura-kun’s eyes question if he is all right, but he doesn’t voice the words. Still a little self-reflection left, Jun gathers. Instead, it’s Seta-kun. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but…” But any secrets kept could literally end up killing them all. Jun’s aware.
         But how to frame it in a simple way? They’re already aware of the basics. “In the end, apparently, we had three choices,” he summarizes. “To lose our memories of each other and our dear friendships. To let the world end. Or a third choice Tatsuya made without our knowledge, a road of sacrifice and suffering to create a world ideal for the rest of us.”
         Hanamura-kun speaks up, finally, voice slightly apologetic and challenging. “And if saving him destroys the world?”
         “We won’t let it,” Jun replies firmly, and the words would be empty if they hadn’t already prevented the end of the world once.
         Hanamura-kun holds his gaze for a moment more before nodding firmly. Satonaka-chan finally relaxes, smiling at him. “Yeah! We’ll kick his Shadow’s butt!”
         It’s clear Seta-kun knows it won’t necessarily be that easy, but he nods, too, Amagi-chan readies her fan, and even Teddie-kun looks a little more cheerful.
         Satonaka-chan is the one to carefully hand him the next flower—and Jun nearly laughs at the sight. A lotus flower. He cradles it in his hands. “‘Far from the one he loves’. Still so dramatic, Tatsu-chan. I see some things don’t change.”
         Even Hanamura-kun smiles a little at that.