Chapter Text
Yosuke’s head buzzes - a comforting, familiar presence now, always there in the back of his mind. It’s been louder lately, requiring more attention - more effort to make it stop, to ignore it enough to function like normal. It’s almost like Jiraiya is trying to force himself to be heard. The Investigation Team hasn’t gone into the TV world in awhile, sure, but they hadn’t had to. Yosuke had just been ignoring it. His head aches with a dull, intermittent throb, but he just squeezes his eyes shut and pretended he was fine.
Everyone was having lunch on the roof. Chie and Yukiko are sitting close together, bodies tilted inwards towards each other, giggling about something in loud, happy voices. Kanji is sitting next to Yu, staring longingly at Naoto. She is, as always, oblivious to his attentions, eating her lunch in dainty, efficient bites.
Yosuke’s eyes slide over all his friends until they land on Yu, who is smiling, small and quiet, and meets his eyes. Yosuke blinks, the buzzing so loud now he can hardly hear anything outside his own head. Yu’s hands are folded elegantly in his lap and he’s still staring at Yosuke, something in his expression suddenly - surprisingly - unguarded. Rise, next to him, bumps his shoulder gently with hers, trying to get his attention. His face snaps back to a smooth blankness and he turns to Rise, who immediately launches into conversation.
The buzzing grows louder and louder, a tight knot of pain between his eyes. Yosuke rubs his forehead, nausea curling through his gut, his throat dry, and the constant buzzing louder and louder, his eyes swimming with hot, electric feeling.
There is a snap, and a cold wind he feels rush through him. And then the buzzing is gone.
Everything is quiet. Everything is so quiet. He hears the world through something, muffled, like he’s surrounded on all sides by some surreal curtain. Has the world always been this bright? This painful?
His face goes slack with distress for a moment, unable to process what is happening to him.
Jiraiya is gone. Jiraiya is gone.
He can’t stop himself from letting it stop on his face, from crumpling up, scrunching up tight in pain, teeth clenched so hard he can feel it all the way up to his ears.
Chie notices first. She stares at him. It’s as derisive as ever, but there’s concern coloring her expression. “Hey… Yosuke-kun? Are you okay? You look like…” She wrinkles her nose up and he brows furrow. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“I, uh…” Everyone’s attention turns to him. He scrambles to his feet, fighting off a sudden flash of near-panic. “Uh, I’m fine,” he says, even if everything inside him was screaming wrong, wrong, wrong. “Just. Ugh, I feel sick all of a sudden.” He wraps an arm around his midriff, feigning an onset of pain. He winces and says “I better go. I’ll talk to you guys later!” And he runs for the stairs, leaving his friends staring after him.
It isn’t hard to get out of school for the rest of the day, and even if he didn’t think he’s sick, exactly, he certainly isn’t up to dealing with class and pretending he’s fine for the rest of the day. He snaps his headphones over his ears the first moment he can, turning the music up much louder than he would normally. Because there is a difference between silence and… Silence, between the absence of noise and this vast, lonely emptiness inside him. He couldn’t hear, he couldn’t feel, he couldn’t…
Jiraiya is gone.
He walks home by way of the floodplain Everything is still too bright, every person he sees like a miniature sun, burning him, rays flickering against his skin if he passes too close. He can’t remember ever feeling so raw, so vulnerable, like he’s been turned inside out, the smooth, soft interior of him suddenly exposed to the harshness of the sun and the air. He shivers, but he isn’t cold.
No one is home when he arrives at his house, and that is a comfort, however small. He barely ate lunch, too concerned with what happened, but he’s still so nauseated he’s not sure he can handle any food. Being alone is hardly better than being around others, though, his world still with a terrible silence.
Yosuke gets a glass of water and drinks it down in two big swallows. He goes into his bedroom and turns on his television. He sits down in the chair at his desk and puts his headphones back on over his ears. He turns on his music and lets it play, but keeps the volume low. He doesn’t really want to listen, just to hear something, anything, a cushion of sound around him. He curls up as best he can and stares at the wall until he falls asleep.
(*)
He wakes up a few hours later to a tap on his shoulder. He jolts in surprise and falls out of the chair, landing in an ungraceful pile on his floor.
“Yosuke,” he hears, and he takes his headphones off his ears, pulling them down around his neck. His mother stands there staring down at him, her lips pressed thin and her hands on her hips. “Yosuke,” she says again, “what are you doing?” He gets to his feet, flushing red. “Why do you have those headphones of yours on if you were watching television? Not that you were doing that, since obviously you fell asleep. In a chair.”
“Sorry,” he says. He shuffles his feet and doesn’t look her in the eye. “I wasn’t feeling very well today.”
She shuts the TV off and her expression softens. “Would you like something to eat? Your father just got home.”
“Oh. Okay. That sounds good.”
His mother nods and leaves him alone in his room. Yosuke just stands there in indecision. He knows he has to leave eventually - he’s not even really sure why he doesn’t want to. He still feels empty, everything is still too quiet, but he has a feeling that here, in his own space, it will be easier to handle.
Maybe it’s just a temporary thing. He hadn’t even known he could have a persona in the first place, so it’s almost silly to wonder why it’s -. He thinks circles around the word ‘gone’.
He shares an uneventful meal with his parents. His father complains about work, asks him almost absent-mindedly how his studies are going. Yosuke gives the vaguest answer he can get away with and neither of his parents press the subject. He’s starting to feel unsteady again, too sensitive like he’d been on the walk from the school. He excuses himself with a short apology, saying he still doesn’t feel well. It’s not even really a lie.
The queasiness starts to subside a bit once he’s alone, but he still feels weak. This vulnerability is an unsettling new experience. He’s been lonely before, depressed, but never so… exposed. Was his persona keeping all those feelings at bay, or can he never feel normal without it now that he’s had it? Yosuke doesn’t know and with how currently shitty he feels it’s not a question he particularly wants to contemplate.
There’s no manual for this, no precedent that he knows of. It might be something that just happens sometimes - Yosuke doesn’t know. He scrubs a hand through his hair and thinks about calling Yu. If anyone could help, he probably could. But something holds him back - he doesn’t want to be the only one who lost his persona, doesn’t want to have to admit that somehow he fucked this up, too.
Especially not to Yu, who… His head starts pounding, harder, like something is trying to punch its way out. Thinking about Yu is not a good idea.
He turns off his light and crawls under his blanket. It’s too uncomfortable to sleep in headphones so he turns on his music loud enough to hear it and sets the headphones beside him, by his shoulder. Maybe he’ll be able to hear Jiraiya in the morning. Maybe when he wakes up everything will be fine. Maybe the silence will be gone and he won’t feel so empty, so alone, so insignificant and small and unprepared. Maybe -.
When he wakes up his music is no longer playing and the only thing he can hear is his own heartbeat, dull and sluggish and heavy in his ears.
The morning passes for Yosuke in a blur of suppressed panic. He’s going to go to school, because even though he still feels awful, the thought of being home alone all day, with nothing to occupy him, nothing to distract him from the gnawing wrongness in his head, is enough to mitigate the fears he has about school. At least there he’ll have Yu.
His fingers tremble around the buttons of his uniform and as soon as he is dressed he picks up his phone.
“Hello?”
“Hey partner,” he says, trying to sound normal - maybe happy, though Yu will probably be able to see through that. “Sorry to bother you so early…”
“It’s fine. Is everything all right, Yosuke?”
“Can you hear Izanagi?” he asks, blurting it out without thinking. “Uh. Or not hear him, I guess, but feel him? You can tell he’s still there? Or that any of your personas is there?”
Yu hmms like he’s seriously considering the question. “Yes,” he says, deliberately. “I can.”
“Because…” Yosuke chews on his bottom lip and switches his phone from one ear to the other. “I can’t feel Jiraiya. He’s… I think he might be gone, I’m not sure. He’s not around, not like normal, not where I can feel him.”
“Oh.” Yu sounds worried and it makes Yosuke’s stomach drop. “Did something happen?”
“I don’t know!” Yosuke tugs at his hair, trying to stave off his steadily rising panic. “Shit, dude, I have no idea what’s going on.”
“Just calm down, Yosuke, it’ll be okay.” Yu’s voice, as always, works to settle him. He takes a deep breath audible over the phone and Yosuke mimics it. “When did this happen?”
“Yesterday,” he says. He swallows, adjusts his grip on the phone, fingers so tight they were sore. “I wasn’t… I wasn’t sick yesterday. I just felt this snap, and suddenly Jiraiya had just disappeared. I feel weird. Hollow. Like I’m…” He swallows again and forces himself to keep going. “Like I’m not complete anymore.”
“Yosuke…”
It’s sympathy he hears in Yu’s voice, not pity, but that doesn’t make it much easier to handle. His insides still twist up and his mouth feels dry.
“You don’t need to worry,” he says, too fast. “I’m fine, all right? I’m fine.” He exhales, repeating it to himself. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. “But I want… I think we should go into the TV world, just to check. Just to be sure. You know, that nothing’s wrong?”
“Of course,” Yu says. “How about after school today? I think I can get out of club meeting without a problem.”
“Sounds good, partner. See you in class, okay?”
“Okay, Yosuke. Bye.”