Chapter Text
Makoto isn’t sure when the memories of his original life first started to trickle into his mind.
He’s sure they weren’t there from the start. Of course, people only really start remembering more than scattered snippets of their youth around the age at which they enter elementary school, but from what he can tell, he acted nothing different to what any kid his age would. Quiet, as befits his personality, but not overly wise or weary or anything like that.
But he can also remember times where, while the memories he’d come to regain weren’t having a significant impact by any means, they were definitely there. Moments where he’d get a distinct sense of deja vu, or times when he’d see something for the first time, yet still feel like he recognized it. Like the time he first played an MMORPG; it wasn’t Innocent Sin Online, considering he now lives in an entirely different universe to that which he originated from, but it was close enough to feel familiar, despite never having played anything like it before in this life.
He’d probably tried an MMORPG younger than most kids would have, he realizes. Maybe that was influenced by the memories? He’s not sure. He wasn’t even ten years old yet, so it’s not like he played it much at the time.
But it was around that point that he was starting to realize there was something unusual about his mind. He didn’t mention it to anyone, though. He was naturally one to keep to himself, and while his parents in this world loved him a lot, he wasn’t sure if they’d understand, considering at the time he barely understood what was going on, himself. And given that, telling anyone else was out of the question.
In hindsight, staying mum about it was probably the opposite of the lessons he’d learned throughout his year at Gekkoukan. But vivid dreams of what he now recognizes as moments from his past, meaning in an entirely different universe to the one he now lives in, are understandably hard to explain.
His second childhood was nice, though. At this point it was difficult to remember his original parents, considering they’d died when he was only six years old, but it was easy to say that his new parents were way better than getting passed around from orphanage to orphanage. They were kind, worked hard to take care of him, spent lots of time with him, but also taught pre-memories-him right from wrong and up from down.
Now that he thinks about it, it was probable that his unstable childhood contributed to his current personality… or, at least, what it was before S.E.E.S. If it was anyone else, it was probable that his upbringing in Eridu would have resulted in him being more open and upbeat, but he assumes that the inevitability of his memories returning had set the core tenets of his personality in stone, at least until they fully returned.
But still. It was nice. He didn’t feel the need to have any extra thoughts on the matter.
Being enrolled in Helios Academy was also nice. He didn’t have many close friends, but he had classmates he worked well with in school and hung out with after school, which is way more than could be said about what he was doing at that age in his previous life. He’s not talked to them in nearly a decade - doesn’t even have the contact info for most of them - but it was a semblance of a social life. He’d made so many connections in Gekkoukan that he doesn’t think he’d be able to survive without at least a couple of them, now.
School came easy to him. Knowing what he now knows, it’s obvious that the subconscious memories were helping greatly. It was as easy as seeing all of the material for the second time, which he supposes now that it kind of was. Now that he’s grown past the age at which he originally passed away, he doesn’t have that advantage anymore, and he kinda misses it.
The rest of Eridu was also nice. Well, except for the Hollow-shaped elephant in the room. (Which might just be a half-sphere.) It wasn’t very different to Tatsumi Port Island; it had the same amenities, same luxuries, same societal issues. To be fair, it was significantly more multicultural, which makes sense considering that Tatsumi Port Island was just Japanese. Meanwhile Eridu was the entirety of human civilization that decades before he was born had been reduced to one single megacity, thanks to the post-apocalyptic dark wall that had eaten up most of the planet. And half of the moon, apparently.
History was one of the few subjects he had to properly study for. That knowledge won’t be leaving his head for decades.
---
The real return of his memories was when he first summoned his Persona again.
It was a normal day like any other. He got out from school, loitered around in the after-school section for a couple hours with his friends who were either staying in the dormitories or also waiting, got picked up by his parents, then walked to the subway station.
But on the way there, sirens started blaring.
His parents immediately knew what that meant. Even he, perpetually tired and still learning the rules of this world at the time, knew what that meant. They didn’t have to wait for the warning system to blare the fateful words to start playing on repeat:
“WARNING! Dangerous ether expansion! Evacuate immediately!”
Immediately, Makoto’s dad snatched him up, and they began to run. His mom pulled out her phone, trying to look up the news and figure out where the Hollow was, keeping pace with his dad who, understandably considering he had a ten-year-old in his arms, wasn’t running as fast as he otherwise could.
As soon as she got to the site she was looking for, she paled. “It’s Hollow Zero! It’s coming right here!”
As if on cue, the warning system finally began to give details. “WARNING! Rapid expansion of Hollow Zero! Citizens in the Pluto and Minerva Quarters must evacuate immediately!”
Running wouldn’t be enough. Immediately, his parents started looking around for any mode of transport which could take them away faster. In hindsight, their instinct that the subway or buses would be unmanageable proved to be an incredibly salient decision. They’d end up getting completely packed, and the tunnels would be rendered unusable within only a couple of hours.
Fortunately, Eridu’s bike and scooter sharing system was up to snuff. People were already grabbing them as fast as they could, understandably, so they dashed over as fast as they could.
But electric scooters could only go so fast, and Hollow Zero moved faster. Quickly, as Makoto got on his dad’s scooter and the three of them began zooming away, he could look back to see its daunting form in the distance, growing by the second. And they still had half of the inner ring to cross.
As the minutes passed and they kept heading southward, it became plainly obvious that they weren’t gonna make it without going into a hollow for at least some amount of time. But if they could move as far away before getting sucked in as possible, they could delay the onset of Ether poisoning for as long as possible, and reduce the amount of time they’d need to get lucky not to encounter anything dangerous in the hollow.
The memories blurred from there, which Makoto attributes to the time in between then and actually getting caught up to by the Hollow to be… not all that interesting, to his younger mind. Sure, nowadays he’d consider every nook and cranny of New Eridu to be worth exploring, but they weren’t exactly exploring, but rather just straight-up beelining. And none of the streets were all that familiar to his younger self, who usually took the subway to school.
But he did remember the streets quickly getting incredibly busy, though the amount that traffic was slowed was impressively little. After all, everyone was headed in the same direction and everyone ran the red lights; the only impediments on the streets themselves were cars turning onto the street. Similarly, while the sidewalks got crowded it was similarly easy to weave past pedestrians running away as fast as they could, considering the (small, but manageable) real estate on the road at their disposal.
But despite the pace they were able to move at, the hollow just kept coming closer, every time he now remembers looking back.
It was ominous. A ten-year-old usually has a grasp on the concept of mortality, but someone that young shouldn’t have to grapple with their own. But all he could think at the time was, is this it?
---
Entering a hollow feels… strange.
There’s definitely a moment where you can feel that you’ve gone from not being in it, to being in it. That was the first thing he’d noticed when he entered… or, well, was forcibly entered into, a hollow for the first time.
It’s not a great feeling. Probably because of the whole “Ether corruption” thing.
The rush became a race against time. Inevitably, one of the people in the crowd would succumb to the hollow, and then it would turn into a dash for survival when they turned into an ethereal. That is, if one didn’t find them before that happened.
Practically, though, it didn’t change the calculus. Except for the fact that the electric scooters stopped working thanks to the hollow, so now Makoto’s parents had to return to running, his dad once again scooping him up in the process.
Again, it was a blur. He was in quite a shaky position, after all. But he could distinctly remember the sky being hazier than before, the air being wavier like a thin layer of warm smoke. People screaming and scattering all over the place behind his frantically running parents. He can’t remember anything they said at the time, but he imagines they were getting quite tired at this point.
Unfortunately, it was quite clearly a fruitless endeavour from the start. They were barely halfway to the center of the city when the first glimpse of an Ethereal in the distance came into young Makoto’s view.
He distinctly remembers burying his face into his dad’s shoulder. As the screams grew louder, and more horrifying sounds started to be heard, his parents just kept running.
Minutes upon minutes this went on. It felt like an eternity.
He wasn’t sure how long it took until the running suddenly became a futile effort.
Screaming was all over, and it was hard to make anything out, even though logically a person succumbing to Ether poisoning would be quite loud. The transformation itself, however, was unmissable.
Makoto, at that moment, had dared to turn his head.
He was greeted with the sight of an eight-foot-tall, black and green behemoth. It now stood between his family and the edge of the hollow.
Somehow, despite everything that had already happened, it had gotten even more hopeless.
At this point, he couldn’t remember what had happened. The screaming got louder, the shaking of the earth around him got far worse, and it likely hadn’t taken long for the Ethereal to start chasing people down. It’s likely that it had torn those it had caught, limb from limb. Now, Makoto’s glad he doesn’t remember it.
His memories only return to him at the point where he was on the ground, dazed and bleeding. Gunshots were ringing out in the air; it seemed that the Eridu Defense Force had arrived. Not that it had done much good for him; his head had clearly taken a good knock, his left arm was pretty badly scraped, and his ankle hurt pretty badly. Had he been thrown by the Ethereal, or something in its wake?
The screams were lesser at that point, at least. Most people had either run further away or been knocked unconscious (or worse), so all that was left at that point was the sounds of gunfire and destruction.
But what Makoto does remember clearly is his eyes coming into focus to see his parents also having fallen down with him. His father was unconscious, his mother desperately trying to haul him over to where little Makoto was.
And… there was a pistol lying next to him.
Makoto’s not sure how that had gotten there. He assumes that the EDF had only just reached their location; hopefully, there hadn’t been enough time for a soldier to go down and/or lose their weapon. There was a chance someone fleeing the scene had dropped it, considering the amount of commotion, but not many people carried guns in Eridu.
Either way, it was his for the taking. Of course, at this point Makoto had absolutely no idea how to use a gun, but it was the best shot he was gonna get of surviving. Even his younger, headache-addled self could tell that.
So he picked it up.
It’s finally happening, huh?
Makoto had startled at the first sound of that voice. Anyone would, at finding an intruder in their own head. He had nearly dropped the pistol out of surprise.
Perhaps such a terrible circumstance was needed, to finally jog your memory.
His eyes were then drawn back to the pistol. His hands shook as he held it; it was a small thing, but he innately recognized the capability even such a small weapon held for untold destruction. He’d never touched something so violent before.
I wish you wouldn’t have experienced this so early, but… it is what it is. Lives are in the balance, now.
His head pounded even more than before. Memories were flooding in, too quickly to properly parse, so he had mostly ignored them. But a couple floated to the top right away. The ones about how best to use this weapon.
You know what to do.
Later, he would be told that he had fought with blue flames and a magical, robotic presence at his side. He’d apparently manifested a sword, cast terrifying powers, and driven the Ethereal back. The property destruction that he’d left behind was great, so he was lucky that the land he stood on at the time would never be used by society again. The soldiers who’d rescued him once he’d become too tired to maintain Orpheus’s form in the real world would tiptoe around the topic; they’d seemed… scared of him, and what they’d seen from him on the battlefield.
He’d later manage to reunite with his parents, who, too, were frankly terrified of his new power. But they loved him just as much nonetheless, so he couldn’t be too peeved about it.
It would be the first of many, he’d known at that point.
But that was later. Here, in the depths of what would soon become known as part of Hollow Zero, for the first time in this world, Makoto Yuki brought the pistol up to the side of his head.
He pulled the trigger.
“PERSONA!”