Chapter Text
Minako’s dad is a monster.
Not literally. Probably. Maybe. She’s not quite willing to rule it out- there’s always been something not quite human in his eyes. He might be a literal monster. She’s open to the possibility.
That isn’t what she means, though.
Her dad is a monster in the way the child abusers and serial killers are monsters. And dirty cops, which is what he is.
She’s not sure what she’s going to do about it. She’d been willing to shut her eyes at night and pretending nothing was wrong with him back when her mother and brother were still alive, but not anymore.
She doesn’t know why she’s still alive either. It’s probably because she’s useful to him: another a shield to protect him from suspicion. It couldn’t be him, he’s a cop. It couldn’t be him, he’s Minako-chan’s dad. It couldn’t be him, not Adachi-san, he’s just so harmless.
It is him, though, and Minako is the only one left alive who knows.
She shows up at Tatsumi Port Island with nothing but a sad backstory, a note guiding her to her new dorm, and whatever she could fit into her suitcase. Adachi wouldn’t let her take a second suitcase, because he apparently needed four suitcases to pack up his non-existent personal effects to take with him to his new job in Inaba.
He’s still mad at her for getting him kicked out of town. The only reason she’s still alive is because he couldn’t prove it was her, and because having a cute daughter is always a good way to draw off suspicion.
She couldn’t believe her luck when he’d told her he was sending her off to some dorm off on some island city. He probably thought it was a punishment- that’s the kind of person he was. After everything, he probably still thought she wanted to be around him.
She feels a little guilty for being so happy, because he’s probably just going to go do the same exact thing in a new town. But there’s nothing she can do about that from this far away. That’s why he sent her here, after all. She wonders idly if he planned to just abandon her in this city. If he was done with her now. If he really thinks he is, well, then he has another thing coming.
Adachi might be done with her, but she’s not done with him.
The dorm is weird, and its inhabitants are pretty obvious about whatever secret they’re holding, but she’s grateful for it nonetheless.
Her room is small and poorly heated, but it’s hers. She immediately sets about decorating it, putting up a calendar and throwing a gaggle of stuffed animals on the bedspread.
She ties up her hair tight and puts in her brother’s pins, and starts living again.
She likes Yukari, secrets aside, and Junpei is sweet if clueless. Without the drawback of her popularity helping out Adachi, she’s free to make friends and get involved at school.
She can’t say she has any close friends yet, but she’s certainly not lacking for company.
Life is good, all in all. Sometimes she imagines she can see her brother out of the corner of her eye, or that she can hear her mother calling her. She’s learned, though. She never turns her head to check anymore.
Things were going good, which of course meant that something was about to happen. It happens early in her stay, with Yukari banging on her door and screaming that they need to move. She follows her, through a confusing a conversation with Mitsuru, through Akihiko’s injury, through to the roof.
There’s… something up there. Yukari calls it a shadow, but that’s not what it looks like. It looks like a void.
Yukari pulls out a gun and presses it to her head, but she gets hit before she can pull the trigger. The gun falls, sliding over to Minako’s foot. She reaches down to grab it, to- well she hasn’t thought that far ahead.
She could shoot the monster, she supposes, but it doesn’t look like the kind of thing that would be hurt by a bullet. Yukari had pressed it to her head, hadn’t she? She wasn’t sure what good it would do, but she mimicked Yukari anyway.
It feels right, the gun pressed against her temple, which should worry her.
She takes a deep breath and pulls the trigger.
Her mother dies when she’s eight.
Such a tragedy, everyone in town says.
She was a whore, her dad says.
You’re the one who killed her, her brother says.
I miss mom, she says.
Shut up, her dad says.
You’re the one who killed her, her brother yells.
Minato doesn’t come home that night, or any night after that.
She wakes up in the hospital, with Adachi sitting in the seat next to her bed.
She shut her eyes immediately.
This isn’t where she wants to be. She wants to be on that rooftop, back in that moment where the sheer power of Orpheus had almost knocked her over. Being inside and outside of herself at the same time, something more than the sum of her parts.
“She told me about you, y’know.” Apparently she hadn’t been quick enough to fool Adachi.
“Who?” She says.
She can’t decide whether or not to open her eyes. Leaving them closed gives Adachi an advantage she’s really not comfortable with him having, but she also really doesn’t want to look at him. She settles for peering out from behind her lashes.
“The wife.”
“Who?”
“God. I’d forgotten how stupid you are.” He snaps. “Keep up. The wife.”
She isn’t hurt by the comment. Adachi isn’t quite as clever as he thinks he is either.
“I can’t quite figure out why she’d want to give power like that to a brat like you though.”
“She didn’t.” She says. “It was…. Someone else.”
She’s not really sure, actually, where the power came from. She guesses that contract she’d signed had something to do with it, but there was no way to really know. Had the others also signed a contract with Igor?
It was typically, really. Adachi tainted anything she’d ever wanted. Her family, her friends. Her power.
“Hmph. That’d make sense. My power isn’t like yours, anyway. I’m on a whole different level from you.”
She hopes so, really. The thought of having anything more tying her to Adachi is disquieting.
“Don’t you have lives to destroy?” She says instead.
He stares her down, considering. She can hear her Yukari and Junpei chatting in the hallway. He wouldn’t try to kill her with them right outside. And he’s in a good mood, meaning he’s having fun doing whatever he’s doing in Inaba. He wouldn’t want to jeopardize that.
There’s that guilt, again.
And, worst of all, she knows he still wants her for something.
“Yeah,” he laughs, high and fake and meaningless, “I guess I do.”
Minako tends to think she’s a good person. She’s not cruel, and she’s not a killer.
But sometimes, when she thinks about her father… she wishes.
She finds out the reason for his mirth two days after she leaves the hospital. She’s on her way to Tartarus with the others, chatting aimlessly with Yukari, when she stops short. Mayumi Amano’s face is plastered on the screen, along with a big bold title: MURDERS IN INABA.
It’s moving along earlier than usual, then. Not his normal way either- he usually liked to play with them, to make them think and say this and that, until they bored him. And then, he’d make a suggestion, just a comment here or there, until they decided the world was better off without them. He got a reputation for it too: Adachi-san, always trying to help the helpless.
Well, he’d had one until she’d gone and ruined it. The thought still brings a smile to her face.
Corpses hanging off antennas didn’t really sound like Adachi, but the immediate death of a successful woman after she crossed paths with him? That gave it dead away.
“Uh… Minako?” Yukari says. “You okay over there?”
“Yeah, Minako-chan, do you not want to go to Tartarus anymore? Are you scared? Because if you are, I can always-“
She stops listening then. She is scared, but not of Tartarus. No, it’s something much more deadly that worries her.
Tartarus is cold, and dark, and brutal. She loves it.
It leaves her gasping for breath, her muscles burning pleasantly. She and Junpei and Yukari have become a stellar team, shifting to accommodate each other’s weakness and strengths immediately. They’d all been surprised, to realize she could draw more than one persona, but then they’d decided to make her the field leader, so it’d all gone well.
She starts hanging out with Yukari and Junpei after class, and they become close rather quickly. Yukari confides in her about her father and her mother, laughing about how both of them were missing a parent. Between the two of them, Yukari laughs, they have one whole family.
Maybe, Minako thinks, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
She and Junpei also get along well, despite his jealousy. She understands his complaints about his deadbeat dad, chiming in with her own memories, watered down and censored, but her own nonetheless.
“Really?” He says when he finds out. “You just seemed so well adjusted.”
I watched him wash my brother’s blood off his hands, she thinks. Out loud, she just laughs and drags him to another corner of the arcade, where she proceeds to destroy him at every single game.
The only person she doesn’t like is Ikutsuki. It doesn’t have anything to do with him, to be fair. Only, he laughs like Adachi at the same shitty jokes and, like Adachi, he likes to hide behind her back when the going gets tough.
It’s probably nothing. She can’t exactly go around killing everyone who reminded her of her father.
The next one to die is Saki Konishi, some school girl her age. She wonders if he tried to fuck her like everyone else he killed, and then shuts down that train of thought before she does something rash. It happens on a full moon, and she’s lucky it does. The rage makes her faster, stronger. It saves Yukari and Junpei more than once.
In her idle moments, she considers telling Mitsuru what she knows. The older girl is cold, sure, but she has a strong sense of justice, and S.E.E.S. was meant to do more than just climb up a tower. But she remembers the way Mitsuru talks about her father, clearly yearning for his approval, and she never does.
Akihiko is the next one to join them, and she’s glad for it.
He’s strong, fast, smart, and… really good looking, which is always a plus.
In Tartarus, he’s priceless. He can handle all the shadows with ease, and he spares her from having to cover lightning attacks. He can heal himself too, which eases the weight on Yukari’s back.
He’s fun to hang around with, even though his fangirls definitely make it a struggle to reach him after school. A little weird, maybe, but she’s more than happy to train with him after school.
She needs to get stronger, and not just for Tartarus. Eventually, he starts talking to her about his family and his childhood. Growing up alone, trying to protect his sister, only to have her die anyway. He wouldn’t appreciate her crying for him, so she waits until she’s alone to do that. After she’s done crying, she thinks for one brief moment that she’d rather have lived his life than hers, and hates herself for it.
After they save Fuuka, Mitsuru decides to join the field team.
Minako half expected to have to give up control, to be expected to follow her orders now. She dreads the moment when Mitsuru finally says that she’s in charge now, thanks for the service but Minako isn’t really needed anymore. Something ugly inside of her rears its head every time she thinks of it, and to be honest the bitter voice in her head sounds a lot like her father. Mitsuru hasn’t brought it up yet, even seems to be reluctant to go into Tartarus. She hangs back in fights, always dutiful but not quite enthusiastic. Anyone else, Minako would’ve asked if they were okay or told them to put their back into it, but Mitsuru is in charge of her, not the other way around. It’s almost frightening, knowing that Mitsuru, for all her hesitation and poorly concealed anxiety, is able to match any of them.
The other problem with Mitsuru joining is that not everyone can go every night anymore. And, apart from Mitsuru, everyone does want to go. They’d tried to take a team of five, but it had been a disaster, with people constantly bumping into each other and Minako losing track of who was doing what.
The upside is that now she has Fuuka, whose skill and sheer power constantly amazes them all. Fuuka is made of softness and care, and Minako feels calmer every time she’s in her presence.
It’s hard, sometimes, but it’s the closest Minako has come to family in a long time.
They meet Aigis at Yakushima.
She’s a little weird, but being an android is as good a defense as any for a little oddness, and one of Minako’s closest friends is a knife-wielding dog.
She likes Aigis. Loves her, even, because Aigis is made of hard edges and impenetrable armor but she’s powered by earnestness and conviction. She’s not sure Aigis would appreciate the sentiment. She isn’t even sure if Aigis would understand the sentiment. Aigis has told her a few dozen times now, usually in the mornings after she’s snuck into Minako’s room, that Minako is her number one priority. That’s probably as close as Aigis comes to love.
Minako loves Aigis, but it’d be a lie to say Aigis is her number one priority. Her number one priority is Adachi, as always. One day she’s going to find him, and stop him, and then-
She never quite gets that far.
She gets sick almost immediately after they get the new members of the team. A pity, because she really wanted to get to know them.
Surprisingly, it’s Shinjiro who spends the most time taking care of her, followed closely by Mitsuru.
The others visit, or try to, but Shinjiro and Mitsuru, using some sort of upperclassmen mind meld, manage to stop all attempts to access her until she gets better. Junpei and Yukari try to tag team the door, with Junpei making a commotion in an attempt to draw them out and Yukari running to try to get in. It almost works, but Mitsuru is quick enough to catch them, and Yukari is granted the dubious honor of being the first girl to suffer at the hand of Mitsuru’s executions.
Akihiko gets the closest, opting for the window instead of the door, but Shinjiro gives him one unimpressed look and casually shuts the window before Akihiko can swing all the way in.
Fuuka, as is her way, doesn’t pull any stunts. Instead, she sends Minako a cute text telling her to get better quickly.
It’s heartwarming, but her sickness is worrying. On the third day of her fever, Mitsuru goes through her files and finds Adachi’s number.
“Don’t worry, Arisato.” She says in what is clearly meant to be a comforting voice. “I’m going to call your father.”
“Please don’t.” Minako grits out.
“You’re really sick, Arisato. He should know.”
“He should go throw himself off a cliff.” She coughs. “Or three.”
Mitsuru frowns severely, her fine features contorted by disapproval.
“I understand that you’re uncomfortable Arisato, but that’s no reason to be cruel.”
“Arisato.” She snaps. “That’s my name. Not Adachi. Arisato.”
“You’re delirious, you’re barely making sense. I’m sorry, but it’s not really up to me. Dorm policy is very strict.” Mitsuru says, already flipping open her phone.
Minako groans and flops over to make a halfhearted attempt to smother herself in her pillows. Somewhere past her pillows and blankets she can hear Mitsuru quietly explaining the situation over the phone. She turns towards her just as Mitsuru finishes.
She can’t quite hear what Adachi says to her, but Mitsuru’s rapidly paling face worries her. Mitsuru says nothing, just listens to whatever bullshit Adachi is spouting, and clenches her fist. Finally, when she’s had enough, Mitsuru shuts the phone with a neat flip of her wrist.
“What’d he say?” Minako croaks out, already trying to figure out how she’s going to go about damage control.
“Just some nonsense.” Mitsuru says. “No need to worry about him. We’ll take care of you, Arisato.”
Minako tries to stare her down, but eventually fatigue wins, and she drifts off to sleep as Mitsuru strokes her hair.
What Adachi said to Mitsuru was this: “Ah, that’s so sweet of her friends to be worried about her. You know, I love Mina-chan to bits, but sometimes she just gets so desperate for friendship that she resorts to things like this. It gets you attention, after all. Munchausen’s, I think it’s called. I’m so sorry she bothered you with this, please don’t worry about it, she’s been this way since her mom-"
He says other things, too, no doubt in that same friendly voice, but Mitsuru doesn’t hear any of them.
Mitsuru isn’t quite under Minako’s spell the way the others are. She likes the girl well enough, but she doesn’t lack for flaws. Minako is brash, reckless, and obstinate, but she has never been anything less than genuine.
She doesn’t know the story, isn’t close to Minako like Junpei and Yukari are. She’d known Minako wasn’t close to her father, but hadn’t know the details. She certainly isn’t close enough to ask for them now, but she finds herself not caring.
A man like that, she finds herself thinking, we’d all be better off forgetting about.