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sixpossumsinatrenchcoat · 12 days

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la mort en rose [ch 3/6]

A Ryoji Mochizuki study. You can start from chapter one here.

“Aigis,” Thanatos says calmly. “I don’t want to fight.” “I do.” “I don’t want to hurt anyone!” “I’m not anyone,” Aigis says coldly, then pauses to run the query again. “You won’t hurt me.” “I kind of think I will, though.” She expels a puff of trapped steam. “If you’re so concerned for my condition, you could allow me to subdue you without resisting.” “And then you’d let me go?” “No.” “See, that’s the problem,” Death says sadly. “It’d be different if you could really do it. But you can’t, so…” “Allow me to disagree,” she suggests, and opens fire.

Chapter 3: Memento Mori

A few minutes before midnight on November 25th, Minato blinks awake to a familiar sight: a spindly figure staring down at him. Bare feet, blue eyes. Unearthly pale and inhumanly still. Through the fog of sleep, Minato manages a bleary smile.

Then he remembers that Pharos is gone.

This isn’t Pharos.

Slowly, almost soundless, he slides his hand toward his bedside table. But before he can reach his evoker, the figure speaks.

“Minato-kun,” it whispers; and at last, it moves, raking tangled black hair back from a familiar face.

“Wh… Ryoji?” But why would he… and how would he… “How did you get here?”

Ryoji flaps a hand vaguely, like maybe even he doesn’t know. “S-Sorry. Sorry, I’m sorry, I just—I had to see you, I had to. I feel like I’m running out of time, like we’re running out of time, I can feel it slipping through my fingers, like… like something horrible’s going to happen. Can’t you feel it?” he pleads, suddenly desperate. “It’s so quiet, it’s too quiet, it’s—the horrible stillness as the surf pulls away from the shore, the beach all naked and exposed, the whole ocean holding its breath, and then—” He has to stop to gasp for breath.

Minato pushes up on his elbows. He’s still not sure if he’s awake. “What are you… What? Everything’s fine.”

“You can’t feel it?” Ryoji asks miserably. “No. No. I know that you can. A change in the wind, a cold front, a barometric shift like your ears are going to pop, except instead of your ears it’s everything. Everything is going to change. We’re going to lose everything.”

“Nn…no?” Minato yawns. “No, what? Come on. What?”

Ryoji laughs. It is not a happy sound. “Minato-kun. Have you ever known, really known, that you’re in danger? You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, but you know, you know it’s coming?”

“Anxiety disorder,” Minato mumbles.

Ryoji snorts a laugh. “Aw. Mina-kun. You’re so kind.”

“Not really…”

“But you are! You really are! You’re so good at picking the right answer! But sometimes there are only wrong answers. Sometimes mercy is cruelty and, and cruelty is kindness.” Ryoji spreads his hands wide, baring all his white teeth in a wild grin. “If you can’t save them, will you spare them?”

Okay, Minato is officially awake. “Ryoji. What are you talking about.”

“I don’t know!!” Ryoji giggles. “There’s—haha!! There’s so much I don’t know! It’s like the whole of my mind is the dark under the bed, the monster in the closet, only I can’t exorcize it by looking, because! It’s! It isn’t real until I look!!! A-And once I’ve looked, I can’t un-look. You don’t want me to look, do you, Minato-kun? That wouldn’t be kind.”

“I…” Minato trails off. He’s good at killing Shadows, taking exams. Right and wrong answers and, ideally, a navigator to tell him which ones are which. He isn’t good at… whatever this is.

“It’s okay!!!” Ryoji rushes to reassure him. His time-signature’s shifted along with his tone, minor chords to crashing, discordant majors. “It’s okay!!!! You don’t have to have the right answer!!! I don’t want you to change at all!! I’m just—I’m so glad to have known you!!! I feel so lucky!!!”

“…”

“The monster in the closet…” Ryoji chuckles. “It’s like something from a scary movie. Isn’t it? What is it that Sadako said… ‘Seven days?’”

Minato’s skin prickles.

“That was kind of her, wasn't it?” Ryoji says thoughtfully. “To warn you before she unmakes you. B-But, but! Do you know! I think that might be even crueler! If you know what’s coming but you can’t fight it, can’t prevent it… wouldn’t it be better not to know?”

“I—” Minato remembers to breathe. “—never watched The Ring.”

“But you saw the commercials! They terrified you!”

…Yeah. That’s true. Not that Minato's ever told anyone. He has a reputation to uphold. But it wasn’t Sadako’s sodden broken body that scared him, or that stupid VHS. It was the warning. Seven days. That’s how long you have. You can say your goodbyes, make your peace… just keep it short. There’s only one week left.

“Minato-kun?”

Minato shakes himself off. “Look. Do you need to sleep here?”

“In your bed?” Ryoji asks hopefully.

“On the ground.”

“Haha! I know, I know. But it’s alright, Minato-kun. I don’t need anything from you. You’ve already done more than enough.”

Minato glowers. “I—” haven’t done anything. I’ve known you three weeks. What do you even mean? But he doesn’t get the chance to find the words. Ryoji’s already slung one leg over the sill.

“Rest well, my dearest,” Ryoji says, from halfway out the window. “I think you’re going to need it.”

* *

* * *

* *

Mochizuki Ryoji is a threat.

The Anti-Shadow Suppression Weapon AIGIS cannot explain how she knows this. Many humans cannot explain how they know what they know, because human memories are made of meat and light. Their long-term storage systems are highly insufficient and, as such, force them to draw conclusions based on the memory of the memory of data.

Associations, affiliations; pareidolia steered by emotion and allegiance. These things are beneath Aigis. Or, at least, they should be.

They are not.

Aigis knows—knows, without doubt—that Mochizuki Ryoji is a threat. When he draws near, her Anti-Shadow firmware fizzles and sparks. She can sense, with a sensory cortex more specialized than any bio-neural network, the way the air warps around him. The way sunlight seems to flinch.

Yet she cannot explain it. Cannot prove it. Of all the maddening, illogical lessons she’s learned from her time among humans, this is far-and-above the worst. To know what, but not why? To know why, but not how? To identify a threat mathematically, objectively, without any margin of error, and fail to produce any evidence? Aigis cannot imagine a worse fate. (Though, to be fair, ‘imagination’ is not one of her core functions.)

In order to manufacture an artificial Persona-wielder, Aigis was gifted with knowledge of the entirety of written human history. Those annals included the story of Cassandra, a fictional navigator whose RAM had desynchronized from linear chronology. Due to the parasympathetic mirror-neural response embedded in her Papillon Heart, Aigis can relate to this fictional human.

In the stories, the prophet Cassandra devotes herself to the man she loves. Then the both of them are murdered by Clytamnestra, who loved him first. Cassandra knew what was coming, and chose not to act.

This was a miscalculation. A more competent soldier would eliminate the threat on sight.

* * *

In the weeks since Aigis seized her autonomy back from the Chairman, the humans have taught her a great deal about how to be a person. Personhood chiefly involves the consistent exercise of agency and intent. Aigis has integrated these values into her routine operation. She does not simply default to her programming. She ruminates. She deliberates. She considers her motives.

Which is why, at 00:00 02 DEC 2006 (JST), Aigis is so surprised to find herself on the Moonlight Bridge. None of her operators—no, her friends—have requested her presence here. And there’s little to learn about the human condition with all proximal humans locked in coffins.

Her surprise only lasts a moment before she sees the threat, and the pattern comes into focus.

It feels like running antivirus software. Like there’d been a bug in her code—impeding her visual cortex, scrambling her RAM—and now that it’s been repaired, she can finally see clearly. She can see all the data, and her place in it. And she can see him. It. The thing that calls itself Mochizuki Ryoji.

“You are a threat,” she tells it, dizzied by the relief of understanding. “You are called Death.”

The monster doesn’t even look surprised. Its eyes don’t widen. Its pupils don’t dilate. There’s no flash of recognition, resignation. In the time it takes Aigis to load her firearm, the puppet named Ryoji is gone. There is only Death.

“Aigis,” Thanatos says. The corners of its mouth turn up into another lying smile, but its eyes are dark. “I don’t want to fight you.”

The energy building in her firearm crackles. “I do.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone!”

“I’m not anyone,” Aigis says coldly, then pauses to run the query again. “You won’t hurt me.”

“I kind of think I will, though.”

She expels a puff of trapped steam. “If you’re so concerned for my condition, you could allow me to subdue you without resisting.”

“And then you’d let me go?”

“No.”

“See, that’s the problem,” Death says sadly. “It’d be different if you could really do it. But you can’t, so…”

“Allow me to disagree,” she suggests, and opens fire.

* * *

The damage report is incapacitating. Power-capacitors offline. Ignition triggers unresponsive. Circumnavigation cauterized completely.

The heap of smoking rubble that is Aigis glares up at humanity’s doom. “If you were truly capable of human emotion, you would not have inflicted so much damage to my chassis.”

“No,” Thanatos says sadly, “you’re wrong, I think. That might be the most human thing about me: I still want to live. So I couldn’t let you break this vessel. I’m not sure if I could make another.”

She tries to nod, but the joint casings in her spinal tract have fused. “You mean to destroy me.”

“Only eventually! Not for ages. A month or two, at least.”

“Why stay your hand now?”

“Because he loves you,” Thanatos sighs. “And I suppose I love him, too, as much as something like me can. Anyway, I already told you, I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just wanted you to stop shooting me.”

“Then you miscalculated.” Aigis flips on Orgia Mode, overrides the emergency shutdown. She overclocks her shattered propulsion engine point-blank in Death’s face.

The guttering glow of her HUD illuminates his sympathetic smile for only a moment before the lights go out.

You can read the rest of chapter three here: ao3.org/works/58634896/chapters/150195979 Or start from chapter one here: ao3.org/works/58634896/chapters/149399371

#ryoji mochizuki #ryomina #aigis #persona 3 #minato arisato #SEES ryoji #persona 3 spoilers #p3 spoilers

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