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~*2*~
Zen supposes the festival is “creepy”. He doesn’t exactly have very many things to compare it to, but by the force of sheer logical conclusion, the Yasoinaba Culture Festival is at the very least, “unnerving”.
It exists in a place outside of time, with gateways to bleak worlds infested with dangerous monsters. Their fellow students scarcely bat an eyelash at this, and they fail to react in any substantial way to discussion outside of the festival. He knows this, because he’s tried.
The other students will only clear out their ears and laugh about not understanding the question, assuming they even deign to acknowledge one was asked at all. He may not have any memories, but Zen knows something isn’t right, and arrives at the singular result.
It is indeed “creepy”.
Rei doesn’t seem to mind. She contents herself with endless food that the school acquires from God knows where, wandering around, entertaining herself with games as she coaxes him into participating alongside her. He always does, because she asks, and he does not find it “fun” to refuse her a request.
It is also not as if he has anything better to do.
Wonderland, that place is called. He’s wanted to explore it, but Rei finds it unpleasant, using the same word that he favors in regards to describing the festival.
It is “creepy”, to her.
He agrees, it’s just…
He knows there is something waiting for them at the end of the labyrinth. The bottom. But Rei is frightened of shadows in more ways than one, and even Zen must acknowledge the danger—the two of them alone would be tantamount to suicide.
Time is unimportant, but it passes, and Zen is so keenly aware.
~*5*~
Rei says she is unwell, and Zen sits out the next expedition into the Evil Spirit Club for her sake. It is not a progress trip so much as it is a run for supplies and menial tasks, so Minato takes only a few with him, and leaves the rest behind.
The girls couldn’t be more relieved.
“Oh, thank God,” Yukari breathes out, one hand folded over her chest. “I swear, if Minato-kun had asked me to go with him just now…”
She trails off, and Zen fills in the silence with suggestions of her actions. I would have killed him. I would have cried. I would have run screaming into the festival.
But he says nothing, and Chie is quick to respond.
“I know, right?! That place is just…it’s really giving me the heebie-jeebies, you know? I can’t believe Yu-kun had us battling those creepy dolls…”
“Heebie-jeebies’? What kind of food is that?” Rei chimes in, stars shining bright in her eyes.
Yukari sighs deeply and Chie lets out a weak chuckle before explaining, “It’s not food, Rei-chan. I just mean it was seriously freaking me out. Oh, but how about you? Didn’t you say you were feeling sick?”
“Maybe it’s all that junk food,” Yukari quips, but there’s concern in her eyes, turning them gentle.
Zen waits for a reply as well, and Rei is slow to respond.
“O-Oh um, yeah, I’m doing much better now! I guess the labyrinth was just giving me the ‘heebie-jeebies’ too?” Her words trip over themselves but they satisfy Chie and Yukari, who feel much the same way, and they don’t contest her.
Zen watches her until Rei can’t bear the weight of his gaze, and she turns away.
“I know you’re afraid, Rei,” he says to her softly, sometime later when the other team has returned and everyone is off fusing new Personas in the Velvet Room. “But we have to keep going. It…It is for the best.”
She smiles at him then, but the words that leave her are a miserable whisper of, “Is it really?”
And Zen does not give her what she wants, for once.
“Yes,” he says, and she sighs.
~*4*~
The leader of SEES is a quiet young man who makes sport of slaying gods.
Or at least, this is the impression Zen has of him.
SEES is a club, but they perform like a military unit. Zen rarely finds himself left out of battle and it is just as well, because there’s something gratifying about the way this group functions. He is quite fond of it. They have orders, plans, tactics lined out for every occasion; and as far as Zen can tell, a vocal command is scarcely required in order for these maneuvers to come into play.
What’s more, Minato is ruthless. Shadows fall before the cleaving strikes of his blade, but he never blinks.
There is a tension simmering beneath this group, however. Rei can sense it, and she’s told him.
Zen can already tell.
“Don’t you trust each other?” he asks, and his tone is mild.
Minato’s answering smile is wry, and his gaze follows Junpei across the room. “I do,” he replies, and leaves it at that.
But Yukari’s fingers twist tightly around her bow when Mitsuru takes command, and Shinjiro rarely stays anywhere alone with Akihiko and Ken. Aigis spends the nights with one eye on Minato and another on someplace far away, and Zen goes to her, too.
“…Is everything all right?”
She is not human, but Zen swears at that moment he would never have known.
“I…am uncertain,” she admits with something like fear in her eyes, and Zen can’t help but agree.
Koromaru stands guard, and is silent.
SEES survives the night, and he thinks the word fits them.
Survivors.
~*1*~
The day they discover Rei has magic, it is the same day that Zen knows something is wrong.
He is good with time. It’s something of a game that they play, at first, because Rei is fascinated by his ability to keep track of even minuscule details. He knows of the passing of the hours down to the second, and Rei creates activities to entertain the two of them based solely on this fact.
Time passes, but this school fails to change at all. Rei counts down the final moments of the New Year with him, but Zen knows that nothing has really changed.
Time passes, but it does not pass. It exists only as humans can record it, but the physical, unrelenting pull of time itself does not occur here.
But it seems death will still come. Humans cannot escape it.
The labyrinth—Wonderland. They make a mistake. They wander into it with a sense of equal trepidation and excitement; Rei will deny it, but she knows their stolen memories have something to do with these mazes as well.
They enter one, but it proves to be too much.
He is injured. Rather severely, at that. The Shadows are arriving in swarms and the FOEs are drawn by the noise. Should the card soldiers arrive, Zen knows he will not survive, not if he wishes to keep Rei alive at the very least.
He sends her away. Tells her to escape, and he will hold them back. Zen knows he can do that much, and with their map, Rei will find her own way out.
But she doesn’t run.
“Z-Zen! I can’t just leave you!” She’s grabbing at his arm but Zen shrugs her off, readies his crossbows one more time, and hisses that she has no choice. His eyes are forward at the time, but he knows she is crying. “N-No…I…I don’t want to be left alone again…! Zen, I want to protect you too…!”
And then the golden warmth of her magic envelops him, and his physical health is restored, at least, enough to run.
They barely make it out of Wonderland alive, and though sometime later Zen will want to try it again, to take it slower instead of their curious stroll through the place, at the present he is relieved simply to be alive.
That Rei is alive, that is, perhaps, most important.
“Zen! Zen, did you see what I did?!” Rei’s staring at her hands as if she’s unable to recognize herself, and Zen leans against the wall in exhaustion. “I-I didn’t know I had magic! I thought only you had magic! Oh, but this means I can help you now if you get hurt and stuff!”
“Are we going back in there?” he asks, tone mild as always, and Rei freezes in the middle of a victorious hop.
“B-Back in? Why would we do that? Zen, y-you…you almost…”
He watches her, and she’s furiously wolfing down a corndog with one hand, whilst the other fiddles knots into her hair.
Zen gives her what she wants. “It’s all right. We won’t be going back in, not anytime soon, at least.” He inclines his head. “Thank you, Rei. I would not have made it back here without you.”
Her answering smile is radiant, the crumbs that he leaves over his cape as a result of her embrace, much less so. Zen places a palm on her head and looks to the ceiling.
He felt it. The strain on his soul’s power when she cast that charm, even as it saved his life. The spell is familiar but he will not be the one to name it.
A short interval later, he will ask her about the shared power of their souls, on how they both draw from the same source. And she will get shy.
“M-Maybe we’re, um, soul-mates?” She kicks the ground demurely, and she will not meet his eyes. “Since we’re always together all the time, maybe that’s why we share magic and stuff! That’d make sense, right?”
Zen will not argue with her, because he finds the idea more pleasant than he lets on.
It is preferable to what he suspects, but wishes to deny, and perhaps they are not so different in that regard.
~*3*~
The “Investigation Team”, they call themselves, and Zen supposes they are in need of investigators.
Their leader is a young man as well, but he does not hold back his words, does not stay silent where Minato would. Yu unites and charges his group with the warmth and energy expected of one that possesses his charisma—his team is less organized, but they make up for their lack of structure with an overabundance of enthusiasm.
It’s tiring, but Rei likes them, and Zen finds them charming in their own way.
Teddie will try to “score” with the girls (Zen wonders if perhaps it is the Investigation Team playing games instead) and he will recoil once Yukiko shoots him down with minimal effort. Rise will cling to her favorite senpai and Naoto will try to understand Kanji’s sudden shyness around her—something that escapes Zen’s understanding as well. Chie and Yosuke will banter and argue, flitting on the fine line between annoyance and affection.
Affection. Yes, that is it, Zen decides.
There is a deep affection in these “investigators” for one another, matched only by their drive to find the truth.
“Your memories,” Zen overhears Yu saying to Rei, one day. “We’ll find them, I know we will.”
“Oh, th-that’d be really cool! I hope so!” Rei replies, and Zen thinks a part of her is lying.
~*6*~
The Velvet Room and all of its mysterious attendants have spread throughout the school.
Zen feels some strange kinship with them, and his reasons are simple.
Many of them are golden-eyed, powerful, but have trouble understanding conversational topics—about as much as he does. Marie keeps to her poems until the Investigation Team comes in, and then she tends to dominate much of Yu’s attention until Margaret intervenes, wherein she will help the others fuse their Sub-Personas instead. Zen learns Marie is not very honest with herself either, but finds it more “amusing” rather than worrying. Not like with Rei.
Margaret has an air of undeniable command. For all of her grace and strength, she declines the opportunity for battles (mostly), preferring to keep things organized; and the worst of her siblings’ antics in check. Zen watches her try to bolster the faltering confidence of Theodore in the wake of one of Elizabeth’s more vexing conversations, and his heart goes out to him.
They are quite lively, these siblings and the girl that they look after, and Zen senses the bond between them all.
“What are you thinking about, Zen?” Rei asks, mouth full of takoyaki and eyes stretched wide. He looks into her luminous green gaze, and he sighs.
“…I was pondering about…bonds. The feelings that unite them.” He sweeps an arm out, indicates the two happily conversing groups of Persona-users, and he wonders what twist of fate brought them here across the stretch of spacetime.
“Zeeen,” Rei begins, tugging at his collar playfully; the gesture has her standing on tiptoes. “It’s not just the bonds that connect them! We’re a part of their group too! Yu-kun and Minato-kun told me so!”
Before he can reply, Yosuke calls out to him.
“Yo! What are you two standing over there for?”
“Yeah, come on, we’ve got a Shadow to defeat!” Akihiko adds, cracking his fists.
A small squabble breaks out after Shinji dryly comments that they hadn’t even bought new gear yet, and Rei takes Zen’s hand, leading him over to them.
“We can trust them,” she says softly, and he nods.
~*?*~
She deserves so much more than what he can give her.
The purpose of her life, the meaning behind it? He has no answer for her. But he must come up with one soon.
The ticking of the clock does not stop, but for Zen, the tolling of the clock tower means nothing anymore—just a bad feeling.
Rei smiles at him and speaks for the first time, and he wants to be good, to become the “good” that she calls him, sees him as.
The spider spins its web, and Zen denies it, and denies it, until it’s clogged up the mechanisms of the clock and the worn gears can spin no further.
Yet still, it comes for them.
~*7*~
Her hand is warm in his, and the air is comprised of golden light.
“I’m going down the rabbit-hole, Zen,” she says, tone bright and humorous and filled with hope.
They survived.
“Don’t be afraid, Rei. I’m with you.”
But even he doesn’t know what lies “beyond” for her. He will exist, and they will forget, but Rei goes someplace he has never been.
“I’m not scared anymore.”
She smiles, and she’s found her truth.
Death is nothing to be afraid of.
Zen smiles too, and they are gone.