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Mementos

After Crow gave her the warning Sumire thought it best to stop by central street and get medicine and supplies just in case she needed to leave. She still doubted that a Shadow of Goro would be as hostile as Crow told her, if he was anything like her own Goro the hostility would just be a lot of posturing right?

...Right?

She steps into Mementos donned in her black mask attire, and starts to realize that she has no navigation skills to really find a shadow. She brushes a black glove on her black skirt, listening to high heels click off the track and keeping her sword gripped tightly in her hand. "Here shadow shadow!" She calls. That has to be better than nothing maybe.

"Actually on second thought that's a little patronizing, isn't it? I wanna talk to you about the other me...if you're even there-" not that she didn't think that he was she just really didn't expect him to appear before her if he was as standoffish as Crow told her he was.

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A warm wind blows past her, deeper into the tunnels. That's nothing new; Mementos is like that.

Except the wind... reverses itself. Just for a moment. That's odd.

The wind changing directions definitely was not something that Mementos usually did. She looks in the direction the wind turned. It was something that a ghost would do more so than a Shadow, but she couldn't rule the possibility out.

"Gor- um Sparrow, right? Am I just reading into this?" Maybe she shouldn't have had that confidence when she talked to Crow.

Yeah, there's nothing much to see—until you spot two hellish yellow eyes, glowing like candles in the depths of a tunnel.

"Fucking Sparrow? Did you come down here just to annoy me, Yoshizawa-san?"

She notices that all she can see are his glowing yellow eyes. Well she was told that he was kind of pissy all the time so he probably didn't just show up around on purpose and chose to lurk.

Though she is surprised that he's mad about being called Sparrow. Crow had said that was what they called him, wasn't it? "What do you want to be called then?" She wasn't really looking to make him angry and he wasn't attacking her yet.

"Why would I want you to call me anything?"

He hasn't approached her, but nor has he raised his voice. It sounds as if he's standing right next to her.

"Why would I want to help you? What am I, an idiot?" After all, you don't help people who drive you mad just by existing.

She pauses. She's pretty sure she knows what's going on here by the specific temper tantrum he's throwing right now.

"I guess you wouldn't, assuming you actually know who I am," she points out to him. "I'm not the Sumire that's cognitively altered, if that's what you think." Best clear that up right now if that is the misgiving that he had. Also to prove she didn't do anything to him because she wasn't that Sumire.

"Obviously. Your outfit is different."

He does come closer now, but not in any sort of conventional way. Instead, he blinks out of sight, appearing in... well, shadow, a little further down the tunnel.

"You aren't Midnight. And, again, you aren't Violet. You've just come down here to put me to your use. Like a farm animal."

Edited 2024-01-05 17:58 (UTC)

"Is that what you think?" He hasn't been hostile but so far he has been a massive dick. Did Sumire end up with the only kind Goro in the entire multiverse?

"I want to get her out of her cognitive alterations, and I was told that you knew more about that than anyone." She wasn't gonna make him do anything he didn't want to. Of course if he wanted to fight with her she wasn't opposed to that either.

She already killed one Shadow of someone he cared about. "I won't be mad at you if you decide not to help me though."

"I don't care if you're mad at me or not! I hope you fucking die!"

But he doesn't attack, though his form, shadowed or not, momentarily loses its outline as his eyes flare bright.

"You should kill her, you know. Before she can find him."

Alright then. "You've got to be the Loki Persona..." She mutters under her breath to herself. Since he seemed to only be angry no matter what she told him.

Sumire thinks about that. Killing her other self. "Is there a reason I should do that? And a reason that you haven't done it? And who do you mean? Your other half?" Those all seemed to be reasonable questions...she hoped.

"Is there anything I can do to not piss you off?" May as well ask since she was trying to get on his good side.

"Just leave!"

He bellows it through the mindspace between them. It could have been right in her ear.

"All of you wanting to use me. Deceive me, manipulate me. I was stupid. I won't let you hurt me again! I'll kill you first!"

But he still makes no move to attack.

The Shadow keeps going on and on about killing her and wanting her to die. "Do it then." Prove to her that you aren't just posturing as terrible to lick your wounds, Goro."Because right now it just seems like you're lashing out at me to hide your pain."

Of course it did help that she knew her own Goro and she knew she was like that too. Just because she grew numb to it didn't mean that her Persona wasn't awakened out of pain that looks a hell of a lot like this Shadow's. She starts to think that he hasn't killed the other one not because he can't but rather that he won't. He probably is just as afraid of being alone as he is of being used.

Though she's hit the nail right on the head, it doesn't exactly placate the Shadow. It shrieks like something terrible, like a moth in a candle flame might scream, and, losing its form and ballooning outwards, it dives at her.

It looks like nothing human, just a gaping maw with nothing inside, ravenous for anything it can take, with its uncertain exterior pressed against the wall of the tunnel; it dwarfs her. Its power is tremendous, enough to shake the world.

Yet before it can quite reach her, the thing vanishes altogether. All that remains is his voice, speaking from nowhere.

"I'm not Loki. You have such a shallow understanding of what it is to be a Shadow."

Edited 2024-01-05 18:45 (UTC)

She's rather calm as the Shadow takes its inhuman form and rapidly approaches her. Only gripping the edge of her mask to rip it off if it does attack. Instead it vanishes again which is exactly what she thought. He won't do it.

"My Goro told me that Personas and Shadows are the same thing though." She hums. "And the other me told me that you were a Persona before you got separated from Sparrow." She assumes he won't take offense to her calling his counterpart by name.

She won't rub it in that he didn't attack her, but she does have to ask again. "If you aren't able to attack the other me for whatever reason, is that why you think I should kill her?" If it was a mercy she wasn't opposed to it but she wasn't going to do his dirty work for him either.

The Shadow, of course, takes offence. "Midnight wants to liberate Sparrow, the imbecile, from his little prison. I, on the other hand, would rather like him to remain there.

"And since I was here first, I'd say what I want should take priority."

It's an odd answer to her talk of shadows and Personas, but it is an answer.

Edited 2024-01-05 19:04 (UTC)

"Who's trying to use who in that case?" She points out. He just wanted Sumire to kill her other self because he thinks he wants to keep his other self blind forever.

"I don't think either of them deserve to have their entire personalities overridden and you think that what you want is the only thing that matters in this situation?" What a huge baby honestly. He isn't proving to her that he isn't Loki. "If you're fine with letting other people be used how is that any better than your Kurusu or Maruki?"

Bad move. It's only the fact she said Kurusu, rather than Amamiya, that keeps her from getting a level 99 carnivorous maggot-thing right in the face.

As it is, his scream is agonised. It shakes the tunnel around her, even though he can't be seen. Something unbearable; some heartbreak beyond endurance. Something that channels all his power, hate and grief into a single shriek of "No!"

Edited 2024-01-05 19:25 (UTC)

Shit, his meltdown is going to flatten them both if he isn't fucking careful. "Stop shaking the tunnel you'll flatten us both!" She won't apologize for what she said given that it's the truth no matter what the Shadow thinks. However, pushing on that is not what she wants to do right now when his recklessness would kill him which is something she was sure he'd like to avoid.

It doesn't help. If anything, the scream gets louder; the awfulness of it becomes more overwhelming.

It stops eventually, but he doesn't speak. That guy. That guy. He can't bear to think about him. He'll do anything to make it stop. Anything.

She lets out a slight sigh of relief when the screaming does stop. So his Kurusu used him and betrayed him. It makes her wonder what the Shadow's counterpart is like.

It kind of...pissed her off. Bad enough that she hates his Kurusu more by association. "He left you. He doesn't even care what happened to the real you." Yeah she's really mad about that. "Look I don't want to hurt you, or abandon you. I just want to help. I mean it." And she thinks restoring Sparrow and Midnight is what he called the other her was the best way to go about that. "I'm sorry that nobody's cared about you." She does feel sympathy that nobody in his life seemed to worry about him.

Was that...normal for the other Goros?

There's a hint of a hunched figure in the depths of the tunnel, though no trace of the luminous glare that should go with it. Maybe he's facing away from her.

His voice is still right in her ear. "Sshit. It would have been so much better if he left. I expected that. I deserved that." And now, finally, he touches on what she wanted to know.

"He couldn't bear to leave me! Couldn't bear me to be dead, so fucking weak! So he made a puppet of me, just like Yoshizawa-san. And just like Midnight. To walk, and talk, and smile, and say pretty, pleasant things. A doll."

The thing starts to laugh, cracked and broken. "It's all... it's so funny. After everything I did, you know. Don't you think so?"

Edited 2024-01-06 11:46 (UTC)

"If funny is the way you want to describe that...but it is weak of him." Playing with Goro's life like that just because he couldn't bear to see him dead was despicable honestly.

If his Kurusu knows how to fix this she may just beat the answer out of him. "Is that why you don't want to help your other self? You're worried that you'll just be alone again?" He doesn't like Kurusu's name so she won't say it, but he's probably downright terrified that he won't love Goro again if he's whole. If he's himself.

She knows how that feels so badly she's already killed someone over it.

Her words mollify him. Maybe he liked her agreeing with him.

"I don't want that thing alive." It's not even angry, the way a landslide isn't angry. "Every moment he lives and breathes is a travesty. And me, me too.

"I paid for what I did, for what little that was worth, stupid as it was. There's nothing left for me here, and nothing in the hell that shitstain has made of the world."

"I don't know if it's right to kill either one of you here though. I just don't want it to have consequences in your world." She couldn't kill him even if she wanted to though. Even if it isn't her Goro she doesn't think that she could bear being the one to kill him.

"I want to make you whole and if you want to go off and die in your own reality that's your choice. I just think your other half and you deserve to die as yourself if that's what you want." Sparrow deserves to be himself, even if that ends in tragedy at least it's his choice and not living at Maruki or Kurusu's behest as something he isn't.

But again, she loses him; his scream pitches up. "I won't be part of that thing! I won't accept it! I won't go near it!"

Strange, that he should be so very reluctant. As if there's a cause.

Hm. "But why not?" She asks him. Dying clearly isn't an option for him since she isn't going to kill him, so why wouldn't he want to be with Sparrow again? Surely that has to be better than either of them existing as they are.

There's a long, long moment when the shadow speaks again, it almost sounds... afraid?

"The thing inside him. The thing that replaced me. I won't go near it! I'll never let that happen to me again!"

"What replaced you?" She feels like she has an idea but she wants to confirm it. Maybe if she could rid Sparrow of what it was she could help them both.

"It..." It's possible she's never heard a Shadow stutter before.

"You were half-right. Part of me was Loki. Part of me was Robin Hood. But not a big part. Most of me arrived when... when it happened.

"I remember being anchored to Goro, part and parcel. You couldn't remove me and still have him, because I was him." For some reason, this again elicits one of those high-pitched, broken laughs. "The shelter in the storm.

"But Maruki managed it, of course. What was tearing a Persona from its root, next to reshaping reality itself? I found myself in Mementos, alone, but so much more than I had been. Because everything that had been Goro Akechi came to me. Or as good as."

While he hasn't answered her question, he's said a lot. Enough, perhaps, for her to figure it out.

"And if it wasn't everything it was everything Maruki can't control." That seems the obvious enough explanation. Which does imply to her that just about everything left of Sparrow is Maruki in one way or another.

"I know how that feels..." It was why she wanted to return Sparrow and Midnight to who they were before. "And I don't want anyone else to feel that way," she pauses, not sure if this would make him upset or not. "Is it okay if I hug you? It's okay if not."

The figure in the tunnel turns. Yellow eyes flare in the darkness. "I'll shatter every bone you have, and whatever that leaves of your mind, if you come a centimetre closer."

"Alright that's a no then," she's not one bit afraid of his empty threat. Again, if he was gonna kill her he could have and would have done so already. "So is there a way to remove the parts of Maruki controlling Sparrow?" There had to be a way to do so if there was a way to rip the Personas from him too. She just wanted to be sure that the Shadow didn't know.

"Don't you get it?" Scorn drips from his words, tired though he is. "It was back in our world, if you can call it that, that Maruki controlled us. He... he used me as the conduit."

That moment he'd seen the cables approach, had known their intent, had lashed out with all his power, with all the rage he had left to him, and it had done... nothing.

"But Maruki isn't here, Yoshizawa-san. He doesn't control this place. He doesn't control Sparrow." The laughter threatens to overtake him again.

"No, Sparrow controls himself. Such a well-trained little toy, don't you think? Perhaps it will help you understand, to know I have to stand down here and watch it. Feel it. It's poison."

"So that's it? There's nothing at all to be done and you just roll over and give up?" The Goro that she knows wouldn't ever do that. "Ask whoever comes along to put you both out of your misery? I can't do that," she may be a killer but she can't have Goro's blood on her hands.

"If there's anything at all that can be done I want to know. I can't watch you and Midnight live like this and do nothing about it." She does feel for him but she can't just watch him pity himself without at least trying to help her fix it. There has to be some way to get him and Sparrow back together and to fix the other her too. She won't accept anything less.

"I'm already dead! What about that is complicated? He dragged me from my grave to act as a bribe! That's where I should be. That's where I belong. It's what I chose, for all the good choosing has ever done me."

The Shadow drops back against the tunnel wall. "So what will you choose, Yoshizawa-san? You have a choice too, you know. You can respect the one I made, the last thing I did as Goro Akechi. Or you can be..."

He breaks off. The sound that comes from him is almost like a sob.

"I... I can't kill you. Even if I wanted to. Even if it was the right thing to do. If I fix this and you go off and get yourself killed then that's your choice, but I can't have your blood on my hands." She's a coward too for that, she supposes. At least she'd rather him be himself.

"So you can tell me what to do to Sparrow to make you whole or I can leave you here alone," two impossible decisions but she needs to know how to fix this without killing either one of them.

Silence stretches between them, broken only by the thud of his head dropping against the tunnel wall.

"I'll never be that," he says, painfully weary. And then he shimmers, and blurs, vanishing from her sight.

Well she got somewhere. Not everything she wants to know and he definitely didn't tell her everything that he knows, so she'd probably come back at some point. "I'll leave you be for now then, but I am coming back," she tells him. She can't just leave him here knowing it's one of the few things that Goro Akechi hates more than anything. Being alone.

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Mementos

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