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As Sensei sleeps soundly in his room down the hall, Yusuke’s mind drifts back to the painting of him in that museum.
It’s all so surreal. To think those arrogant strangers had a means of seeing what he couldn’t despite living there.
But that isn’t true, is it? Despite only awakening to his Persona today, Goemon’s weight in the back of his mind is comforting, like an old friend, reminding him that he did know, he just turned a blind eye, and took it out on the others when they tried to warn him.
Still, the painting of him, of all the pupils, lining the halls of that museum, somehow that’s more haunting than anything else he’s seen today.
Yusuke had never given much thought to how Sensei thought of them. At the worst, he assumed Madarame didn’t remember everyone who’d passed through the atelier and everyone he’d stolen from. He must not give them much thought, because how could he remember the faces and names of every single pupil and not care about them or what happened to them?
Yusuke remembered, he remembered all of them. His heart aches for the day this place had even one other person for him to talk to when it was truly alive. But seeing their faces perfectly preserved in Madarme’s heart, proudly displayed in fact?
What is Yusuke to make of it? That Madarame remembers everyone who suffered under him and is happy about it? There’s no ounce of shame or introspection? He can remember the faces of students who screamed and cried and demanded he give their work back, who now look completely different because they’re reduced to begging for scraps at the train station, some of whom are dead, and what? Nothing?
Yusuke feels haunted every time he closes his eyes and thinks of all those students lining the halls of the museum, his own face frozen in an eerie smile that doesn’t match how he’s face in a long time.
The idea that Sensei could remember all of them and feel nothing is the most chilling thing about that place. Moreso than hearing the words from Sensei’s own Shadow.
Then there’s the other fact that Yusuke doesn’t want to consider. Ann had briefly described seeing her own cognitive self in the heart of the last person they’d confronted, and her shadow had been a person.
A caricature of her, sure, but someone capable of moving under her own power.
To Sensei, Yusuke and the others were, what? Objects? His creations? Surely Sensei understood that Yusuke was a person, right? That he had feelings and fears and cried and got hungry. He’d raised Yusuke after all, how do you raise someone you don’t think of as a person?
And worse, it makes Yusuke feel stupid for daring to think of him as a father. Because that was it, wasn’t it? Sensei raised him from childhood, and none of it mattered. Yusuke wasn’t any different from any of the hundreds of other pupils.
And to Yusuke’s shame, the fact that he isn’t special to his foster father hurts more than anything else.