Chapter Text
February 21st, Sunday, 20XX.
The first time you killed someone, there was no blood.
Tanabe Kichirou was – had been a middle aged businessman, selling away the livelihoods of others to prosper his own demands for cash. Naturally, he’d risen to the top of society, full of overconfidence and affluence. He showed this affluence through sharp business suits, taking care of his grey, slicked back hair and ignoring the pleas of his underpaid workers begging for a raise after hours of torturous work.
Yellowed eyes rolled into the back of his head as a bullet pierced directly through skin and skull, brilliant pain exploding through his expression before he slumped back into the blood red tendrils of the Mementos floor, shattering into pieces like bits of broken glass. He didn’t look like much of a businessman now, you thought absently, watching carefully for signs of life. When he didn’t move, you breathed a sigh of relief.
Even as his body disintegrated into drops of black dust, it didn’t feel quite real, like something you had been watching through fuzzy TV static. In a detached, humourless sort of way, you were glad there was no blood or gore. You wondered if that was selfish, when you had just shot someone.
Now that there was no danger, no imminent threat, the adrenaline flow steadily stopped and the tunnel vision stopped and you realised it all too clearly – even if it was just a mirage, you had actually shot someone. You looked down at your shaking hands and finally, the walls of your emotions that you had to desperately tried to repress came crashing down. The TV static returned, buzzing and electric and alive in your veins as you realised the consequences of what you had just done.
He’d had a family; You’d searched it on your phone in a desperate attempt to sway yourself from the irrational thought of doing something stupid. A daughter, young and bright, no older than eight (you had seen the picture of her dressed in some private school uniform - she had the same shade of brown eyes as her father) and a wife, thin and tall. They’d looked so happy in the social media pictures, smiling with the mirth of a family knit tightly together.
Then you remembered his victims. People living in tiny cramped apartments and working twelve hour shifts for barely enough income, impoverished by a man who knew not their names or struggles. You’d spoken to one of his victims on a whim, dangling by the last threads of your sanity and hoping that the rumours hadn’t lived up to the internet’s web of lies.
The woman you’d approached under the guise of searching for employment shot you the most hallowed look you’d ever seen, gently gripping your hands as she begged you to reconsider. “Don’t work there – they’ll lower your pay and increase your hours.”
You collapsed to the floor, bruised knees flickering in pain at the sudden drop as you desperately scrambled to pry your mask away. Although it served well to obscure your identity by covering the entirety of your face, you couldn’t breathe. It lay discarded on the floor as you sucked in air, stale and the best thing you’d tasted all week. Taking another breath, then another, then it was all too much air and you were spiralling again – head spinning with vertigo. Why wouldn’t the world stop spinning?
Tears sprang to your eyes, saltwater that stung the bleeding cut on your cheek. The pain served as a reminder that you were still in fact injured as you lightly pressed on the wound – blood came away on the material of your gloves, sticky and coagulating. You briefly wondered if you would have been able to pull the trigger if this strange, otherworldly version of Tanabe bled the same way you did.
The app placed on your phone - the Metaverse Navigator, if the shaky lettering was to be believed - had appeared on your phone a few weeks ago, dragging you into a hellish, abandoned underbelly of the subway. Despite your best attempts to delete it and brush the incident off as a stress-induced hallucination, the occult symbol had more persistence than you did patience.
Awakening a Persona, ripping away the very flesh that bound your face together, fighting those apparitions that had beaten you within an inch of your life – all of it had been real. In spite of all the warning signs, you returned, more out of insatiable curiosity than anything else.
Over the coming days, you deduced a number of things, enough to know the basic composition of how things worked in this upside-down world; you organised those thoughts into a mental list. If people did reprehensible things, they would create their own portion of space in Mementos, festering in a corner of the hellish maze. You could track them with the Metaverse Navigator if you knew their name.
It wasn’t real. That was what you told yourself, trudging home. It had just been an impulsive thought, fuelled by rage and spite at another arduous day. No one had actually gotten hurt.
The guilt had eaten at your bones the whole night, restlessly awake as you lay before the blue-purple light that shone through your curtains. Sleep clung to your lashes, but no matter how much you braved the darkness of closing your eyes, there was nothing but the visions – what had you been thinking?
Certainly, you were angry. Angry that no one listened when workers spoke up against their abject working conditions. Angry that no matter how much yen businessmen made, there lay no respite for the people that paved their fortunes and inlaid their mansions with gold.
You’d snapped, something bending and finally breaking under the weight, sending you careening over the edge of that fine line you walked between emotions. Hadn’t something like this been mentioned offhandedly in one of those psychological textbooks you’d perused? Displacement – the mind’s substitution for when one goal was unattainable.
So… you’d shot him.
Logically speaking, it wasn’t the right thing to do. You could have brushed it off, just another layer of injustice in the system, another corrupt man who would eventually be his own downfall.
But you’d rationalised it to yourself; when you’d beaten the strange creatures there, no one had gotten hurt, right? It was just… a slip of the gun. Taking out some anger on a punching bag.
You discovered something more the next morning. After wiping dirt, grime and blood out of your wounds, putting your clothes in to wash and collapsing into the soft surface of your couch, you flicked the TV on, looking for mindless entertainment to scroll through.
Entirely by chance, you had flicked to the news, the bright red flash of breaking news had you leaning closer, interested.
You skimmed the headlines.
One caught your attention as you jolted awake; the strange accidents that seemed entirely too coincidental. There hadn’t been one in almost two weeks, although the time periods between each one were randomly intervalled. It was a passing interest of yours, to try and solve crimes – you considered it some sort of morbid practice. A good detective would keep their eyes to the sky.
As the camera zeroed on the news reporter, she began detailing the finer aspects. A man had been found dead at his estate, passing of a heart attack despite never having any previous issues with his health. Police were investigating the case, but the probable cause of death seemed natural.
Just as you were about to change the channel, an interview played. You dropped the remote.
Wearing tear tracks down her face, she was a mess as she shakily answered interview questions. You recognised her – the same woman who had been in the photos you’d scrolled through of Tanabe’s social media, only days prior.
The first thing you could think of was to reach for your phone. In a blind panic, you retrieved the item between two cushions, inputting the password. The internet was slow to load as you desperately tapped at it, somehow hoping that it would load faster with your persistence. Bar by bar, the website loaded and you scrambled through the written news article related to the broadcast, desperately seeking out a name.
When you found it, your heart dropped, shattering to pieces on the wooden floor, splintering like pieces of old, rotted wood. There was no way. It had to be a coincidence; you couldn’t have actually killed someone, right?
Desperately, you refreshed the page, praying for an update, a perpetrator of some kind.
Nothing.
Your phone fell between your pillows, but you were much too preoccupied with what you had done. That strange static buildup in your mind returned once more and your tongue felt useless against your throat, dry as you swallowed, desperate as you clawed at anything for a sense of stability.
Moving your legs was useless – they remained firmly locked in place, useless muscles twitching with emotion as fear paralysed you. Now there was a new piece of evidence on the table, a bloodied note scribed into the table in the forefront of your mind – if you hurt someone in Mementos, they would die in the real world.
What were you supposed to do? You had just killed someone. Should you turn yourself in? Would anyone believe you?
No, no they wouldn’t. You would be shipped off and labelled as insane, rumours would spread.
Then again… didn’t he deserve it?
It wasn’t a nice train of thought, but one you had nonetheless. Before you could sever it away, banish the thought entirely from your mind and brush it off, it coiled around you, entrapping the shattered remnants of the pulsating organ that once served as your heart.
Think about it, the voice argued, laden with charisma, you’re just wiping another one of those heartless millionaires off the planet. He exploited so many people, ruined their lives. Isn’t that justice?
Justice – you yearned for it so bad, it ached. There wasn’t a single thing you could do as an individual, just another number and statistic in the datastream where nobody cared. Even if you reported things to the police, it would fly under their radars if it padded their pockets.
If you had gone by normal means, you know what would have happened. It was just another piece of paperwork to be shredded, ignored in favour of a crime more palpable by the public.
Crime was always like that, journalists pushing stories that would quell the worries of the general public, hiding away the truly corrupt in a wicked canopy of shadows. They wanted something that was marketable.
Maybe… maybe you had done the right thing.