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There's something wrong with Tatsuya.
I mean, anyone could tell you that, Baofu mutters under his breath when Maya confides in him. He's blunt, but not wrong; every time she sees Tatsuya, he's throwing himself into a fight, shoulders tense and eyes haunted beyond anything an eighteen-year-old should be. But, she tries to explain, it's something else. Just a feeling she's had since they had defeated the mechanical beasts Sudou left behind on the Nichirinmaru.
It had been just after that fight that Tatsuya had snapped at her, gripping his arm tight and shouting at her with wild eyes. Then, just as suddenly, he went silent with a sharp jerk, as if she had slapped him, before bolting for the exit.
“I’m sorry, Amano-kun,” Katsuya had said at her side, staring into the distance after his brother. “He’s not like that. Please forgive him.”
And, somehow, Maya knew. Yes, of course Tatsuya wasn't like that—wasn't short-tempered or snappish, but careful and considerate, and she knew it the way you shouldn't know a near stranger.
But, as usual, there was nothing they could do. Tatsuya was faster, stronger, and—somehow—more experienced than all of them. Even if they had time to chase after him, he knew how to hide and not be found. Even if, heading deep into the Undersea Ruins, Maya knew something was wrong, there was no way for her to find the problem, let alone fix it.
When they fight against Kandori, Maya is distracted by Tatsuya in the corner of her eye, locked in battle with Chizuru. She notices it, the lag to his steps, the pillars of flame smaller than they were in his fight with Sudou—but battle isn’t a place to get distracted, and her attention is ripped away in the next second.
She remains distracted, even when they manage to escape to the submarine, focused on their race to escape the falling rubble. She’s kept far away from the controls, which gives her plenty of time to stare out the small, round windows, heart in her throat as debris crashes down around them.
Tatsuya manages to fly under the radar until they finally resurface back at a port in Narumi. He’s the first to climb up the hatch, and by the time Maya follows he’s already halfway down an alleyway.
“Tatsuya!” Katsuya shouts, his clear, authoritative voice cutting through the night. “What exactly are you hiding?! Can’t you tell us by now?!”
Tatsuya hesitates, swaying on his feet. He doesn’t turn to them as he croaks out a small “Please don’t get involved with me.”
Maya hears rather than sees Baofu lighting a cigarette, her focus fully on Tatsuya. “You know your brother’s saving money from his paycheck for you, kid?”
That grabs the team’s attention. Katsuya flusters, asking how on Earth he got that information, and Ulala gleefully informs him that it was payback for his own little info-gathering stunt. Maya turns to see Tatsuya’s reaction, but he hasn’t turned around or otherwise moved an inch.
“Tatsuya-kun?” Maya asks hesitantly.
Tatsuya suddenly takes a stumbling step forward—less like he’s walking, and more like he’s catching his weight before he falls. Alarmed, Maya runs to his side.
“I’m not…” the words come out slurred, stoking her fear further when she sees his eyes are shut tight, face pale in the moonlight. “I’m not your…”
Tatsuya gives no warning, so Maya’s not sure how she instinctively knows to put her arms out—but in the next second, he collapses forward right into her. She lets out a little oof as she tries to balance the sudden full weight of Tatsuya, who’s even taller than his older brother.
There’s a flurry of commotion behind her—Katsuya’s voice loudest of all, and he’s by his brother’s side in a second—but she’s too focused on the boy in her arms to hear a word they’re saying.
The first thing she notices is the heat. It rolls off his skin like Apollo’s fire spells, burning steadily against her even through her clothes. She struggles to shift his weight in her arms, wanting to check his forehead, but Katsuya is easing him to the ground, so she switches to helping him with that before doing anything else.
“Tatsuya?! Tatsuya!” Katsuya’s voice is still as authoritative as ever, but she can hear the shrill panic behind the words. “Amano-kun, can you try a healing spell on him?! He might be hurt!”
Maya can’t do any healing unless there’s a wound right in front of her—the spell doesn’t find the injuries for her, unfortunately—so she frantically scans his body, trying to find evidence of any damage.
“His right arm.” She startles, turning to find Baofu standing right behind her, face drawn and tense. “There’s a rip in the clothing.”
Maya turns Tatsuya a bit, and sure enough, there’s a tear in his motorcycle leathers. She tries to move the fabric out of the way to get a closer look, but half-dried blood keeps it stubbornly stuck to his skin.
When she moves to the zipper at the front of his outfit, Tatsuya stirs. He groans, batting her hand away weakly.
“Tatsuya-kun,” Maya starts, serious and steady as she can manage, “You’re injured. I need to take your top off to see the wound.”
“No,” he mumbles, eyes screwed shut. “Don’t look.”
“Tatsuya,” Katsuya hisses, long-suffering. “Is now really the time for the macho act?! You just passed out in front of all of us! For the love of God, let us help you!”
“Come on, kid,” Ulala urges gently. “Ma–ya’s a good healer. She’ll get you fixed up.”
“I know,” Tatsuya whispers. Maya tries to remember if she's ever healed him before. “It’s not…I’m fine, I just…got dizzy…”
He tries to push himself into a sitting position, but his good arm wobbles visibly, and as soon as he’s halfway vertical he lists right into Maya’s side.
“Just dizzy,” he repeats faintly.
With a silent apology, Maya takes his moment of weakness to yank down the front zipper of his top. Katsuya immediately eases his injured arm out of its sleeve, ignoring Tatsuya’s low noise of protest.
She doesn’t notice right away, because she’s still busy pulling the fabric away to get a clear look at the injury. It’s not until she realizes everyone has gone dead silent that she looks up, and sees Katsuya staring down at his little brother’s wrist with a face pale as a ghost’s.
“Jesus,” Baofu mutters behind her.
Heart in her throat, afraid to look, she peers over Tatsuya’s body at his right arm, and sees—
A tattoo.
Well, Katsuya does seem like the type of person to go nuclear over a tattoo, is her first thought—before she senses the resonance.
Her Persona recoils, snarling in a way wholly unlike itself, and her own body jolts like ice water just poured down her spine. The mark is pitch-black in a way tattoo ink could never be, but more than that it breathes, not visibly or audibly but in the way all demons and Personas do, staticky and heavy right against her own soul.
A brand. The word pops into her head, and there’s none more fitting. Tatsuya has been branded like cattle by—something, something stronger and awful, not just malevolent or evil but simply wrong in the way a limb bent at a bad angle is.
“Don’t look,” Tatsuya repeats, voice trembling. “Please.”
Nobody reacts to his plea, all too focused on calming their Personas or themselves. Still, with a gasp, Maya remembers why they’re here in the first place, and pulls her eyes away from the brand to look at the wound itself.
Although looking away felt like it took physical effort, there’s an immediate relief once she’s no longer staring at the mark, like a sudden absence of intense pressure. It sharpens her focus as she tentatively brushes the edge of the wound.
Tatsuya gasps in a small breath, trying to jerk his arm away, but Katsuya is firmly holding his shoulder, probably more out of self-comfort than anything else. It’s a nasty gash, and not a very recent one. The wound has had time to partially heal, but the skin around it is tight and red-hot.
“...Your Persona can’t heal,” Katsuya breathes, coming to the realization with a hoarse voice. “Then…this whole time, how have you…”
Tatsuya doesn’t respond, so Maya moves to the more pressing topic. “It’s infected. I…I don’t know if I can heal it like—”
“What?!” Katsuya's quiet despair evaporates in an instant, and he's right back to incredulous panic. “What do you mean you don’t know —”
Baofu raises his voice to interrupt. “Your healing just knits together wounds, doesn't it? You’re worried it’ll trap the infection beneath the skin.”
“We always heal as soon as we get hurt, I’ve never tried with an infected wound before,” Maya frets. “I don’t want to risk making it worse.”
“Our Personas are magic!" Ulala argues. “Can’t they figure something like that out?!”
“When we get shot we pull the bullet out before healing, right?” Baofu’s voice is smooth and rational amongst the clamor. “It’s the same idea. But maybe we can treat it like we treat poison?”
There’s a hush as everyone mentally scrolls through their shared “stock” of Personas—it feels almost like flipping through a phonebook, clustered shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone else. With a tinge of dread, they all separately come to the same conclusion. Ulala is the one to break the news.
“...None of them know Posumudi.”
Usually, they take trips to the Velvet Room together. This time, though, they just send Ulala; they need Baofu to unlock the door to his lair, they need Katsuya to carry Tatsuya, and they need Maya in case any emergency healing is needed. They part ways, Ulala promising to summon a good Persona and hurry right back.
“Almost there, Tatsuya,” Katsuya says for the sixth time as they descend the metal staircase to Baofu’s room. “You can lay down in a minute.”
Tatsuya’s responses to these check-ins had gotten increasingly monosyllabic, but this time he doesn’t respond at all. Katsuya hastily picks up the pace and rolls him down onto the nearest couch the second he gets.
"Tatsuya, we're here." Katsuya is out of breath, but no less urgent. "Can you tell me how you're feeling?"
"Fine," Tatsuya breathes out, an automatic response if there ever was one. His eyes stay closed, brow furrowed in obvious pain.
"An infection bad enough to give you a high fever and knock you unconscious," Baofu begins, in that same casual voice he uses when contacting demons. "It's not something that happens in a couple hours. How old is that cut, kid?"
"...Didn't have time," Tatsuya mumbles, nonsensically. "It was...the lab and the TV station, they were right after the other, I didn't have a chance to..."
"But that was days ago," Katsuya says helplessly, as if that means anything in the face of Tatsuya's recent recklessness. He seems to immediately realize this, and sinks his face into his hands.
"Alright." Baofu pauses, taking a drag of his cigarette. "How about the last time you slept?"
Maya startles at the unexpected question, and takes another look at Tatsuya. He has dark circles under his eyes, but he always has ever since she met him—
Is that right?
—at Sevens, after facing Joker.
"Can't," is all Tatsuya says, small. His hand brushes up against his right wrist, where the mark is.
"Right. And the other elephant in the room." Baofu leans over and grinds the cigarette into the ashtray on his desk. "What's that mark on your arm?"
Tatsuya recoils, drawing up against the couch armrest and angling his body to turn the brand away from them. He swallows and looks away, silent.
Baofu waits for a few seconds before relenting. "Is it causing any immediate, mortal danger to you?"
"...No."
"Then we can ignore it for now."
Katsuya looks like he's about to protest, but the way Tatsuya's whole body relaxes into the couch gives him pause.
"Only thing we can solve right now," Baofu continues, sitting at his desk and swiveling to face his monitors, "is the sleep issue. Get some rest 'til Serizawa gets back, kid."
So no pestering him with questions, Suou, goes unsaid, but Maya can hear the point loud and clear. Katsuya has been tearing himself up about what his little brother's role is in all this, but Tatsuya's not going to be able to rest and heal if they try to get answers now.
Maya watches as Tatsuya tries to settle down, not unlike a street dog's first night in the shelter. His posture is tense, and his eyes flit from person to exit to person, as though they're all strangers and not friends of his older brother.
It feels so alien in a way she can't begin to explain. Why shouldn't he look at her like a stranger, when they've barely ever spoken? And yet her Persona cries, and that ever-present deja-vu only strengthens. It's only us, Tatsuya-kun, she wants to say.
But who is us to this young boy with the saddest eyes she's ever seen?
She stays silent, and lets him rest.
He's too hot.
Tatsuya blinks awake, unsure of when he fell asleep, clothes sticking uncomfortably to his skin. He swipes a hand across his forehead, struggling to draw himself up into a sitting position. His hair sticks to his neck, trapped under his collar, the few loose strands sticking to the couch and making static buzz under his already too-tight skin.
Too hot. Too close, too much. A small noise of simple discomfort leaves him as he gets himself upright only to meet a wave of vertigo. His eyes slide open as he tries to place where he is.
There's no natural light, only the sickly glow of monitors reflecting off steel to illuminate the room. The low, dull humming of computers only makes everything feel worse. He just needs the sweat off him, or the clothes, or the static on this stupid couch.
He tries to swing his legs over the edge of the makeshift bed so he can stand, but finds them inexplicably pinned. He furrows his eyebrows, trying to figure out what's trapping him—there's no blankets, no pillows, so what—
Singularity.
His own voice rings out too-loud in the room.
"Ah," Tatsuya chokes out, the only sound he can make as the terror fills his lungs. He only has a moment before he feels the hands all over him.
Paradox, my toy...
No, Tatsuya thinks, jerking back against the armrest, but it's already too late. The hands sprout out from under him at first, crawling out from every spot on the cushions until there's no more space and they must spawn from inside of him next.
He tries to close his eyes, tries to breathe, but it only makes him realize he can't hear the monitors humming or feel the fabric under his hands, just His voice and His hands and His laugh as he is torn open.
"N-nn," he grits out, voice pulled back to the very base of his throat, unable to even scream or swear revenge or beg for help—
They wouldn't come.
Hands, different ones, on his cheeks. Tatsuya's eyes snap open, and his own face grins at him, eyes ichor yellow.
"Everybody's forgotten," He says, faux gentleness in His mocking tone. "Oh, Singularity, there's not one person who can save you."
No, Tatsuya tries to say, as His hand reaches slowly, slowly down, and he can feel His hands, not the dark ones pinning him down but those of flesh-and-blood, wrapping around his right wrist, NO, he thinks, twitches, thrashing pathetically inch-by-inch in His hold.
"Fall to me," Nyarlathotep breathes, and he
"TATSUYA!"
In one instant, the hands all vanish, and Tatsuya lurches forward with a strangled, awful cry. He scrabbles at the front of his chest, then his arm, trying to rid himself of His phantom touch. He keeps his eyes squeezed shut, not wanting to see if another brand has been placed on him, or what face He will choose to wear next—
"Tatsuya-kun, hey, hey. It's alright, it's just us."
—and his resolve instantly breaks, eyes snapping open at her voice.
"Maya-nee," he croaks, automatically reaching out before he can think better of it.
She meets him, hand grabbing his, strong and cool against his skin. "...Yeah, I...I'm right here, Tatsuya-kun. You're alright."
He sinks back in relief, panting from exertion. It's only then that he notices his older brother next to Maya—he must have been the one who first called out to him.
"Tatsuya," he begins, using the voice he takes when Tatsuya is in deep shit, "I-I need some kind of report, here. Are you awake? Can you understand us? What was that?"
The harsh tone doesn't hide the fact that Katsuya is scared, and it only unsettles Tatsuya further. His head feels scrambled, unable to remember where he is or how he got there, and it's still so stiflingly hot.
"...Maya-nee," he repeats without thought. Because her hands are cold, and she always knows what to do, and because his his heart is still beating so fast.
There's a pause. Tatsuya's eyes slip back shut as he tries to steady his breathing.
"...Are you referring to Amano-kun?" Katsuya ventures, sounding even more unsettled.
"Katsuya, I think he's just confused." Maya's voice is low, as if it's not meant for him to hear. "It looked like a bad nightmare."
"It looked like a seizure, is what," his brother snaps, almost a yell in comparison. "You and Serizawa-kun healed him, shouldn't he be alright?!"
Through the fuzziness, Katsuya's words snag. Tatsuya furrows his eyebrows. Serizawa-kun...Amano-kun...?
Oh.
He can almost hear His laughter as he realizes.
This isn't his Maya-nee.
He flinches away, violent enough to draw a startled noise out of the two adults, as the panic that had barely started waning doubles back with a vengeance.
What if hearing that name triggers her memories? What if it's familiar to her, what if she thinks about why it's familiar to her? What if that's all the foothold He needs to whisper to her and brand her with His hand, too?
He doesn't know what else to do. "Get away from me," he snarls, squeezing himself as far back as the cushions let him. His heart pounds rabbit-quick against his ribs. "Just—just leave me the hell alone!"
The room is small, and there's nowhere to really go—they have no reason to listen to him. Inexplicably, Maya pulls away anyway. She murmurs something to Katsuya, but Tatsuya doesn't catch it, so wrapped up in his own panic.
Once it's clear that Maya isn't having any sudden resurgence of memory, the all-consuming fear begins to fade, and shame steadily takes its place. Maya shouldn't have had to see him like that, to say nothing of how embarrassing Katsuya being there is. If they weren't buying his each desperate attempt to seem like he had everything under control without their help, then they sure won't now, after they saw him wake up in a panic like that.
It reminds him of when he was very little, in the weeks following Sudou's attack on the shrine. Just like this, he'd wake up in a screaming panic, making his parents—or, more often than not, Katsuya—come and soothe him. The fact that this Katsuya has never seen anything of the sort is just another reminder that this isn't his world.
They're never going to leave him be, he realizes, despair welling within him. Despite all his efforts, spreading himself as thin as possible while still trying to be a strong enough shield, it's not enough to protect them.
His only chance is to bargain with them, plead with them—if he gives them the information they want, they'll stay out of this, keep Maya far far away from Him, keep living the lives they should've had. One last Hail Mary for the sinner.
The mark He left on his skin burns, and somewhere, someone uses Tatsuya's voice and laughs.