are you still my answer

[trainerlyra]

title: are you still my answer by trainerlyra
fandom: persona 3 (portable)
pairing: aragaki shinjiro/arisato minako (female protag)
word count: 12,562 for this chapter (chapter 1)
notes: happy october 4th :)

read here!

Snippet:

As usual, Shinjiro woke up with only Koromaru in the house. This wasn’t anything he was not used to — he’d been waking up alone in bed for many, many years. There was honestly only one night since he’d left the dorms for the first time in middle school that he could remember where he hadn’t, but it wasn’t good to dwell.

Despite telling himself that, his thoughts drifted to Minako anyway.

It had been years since that day on the rooftop. He’d stumbled all the way up, out of breath and limbs on fire, to spend those final precious moments with her. Shinjiro wasn’t sure how he’d known. Maybe it was their connection. Maybe it was something much simpler — maybe he’d heard her talk about it while he was in his own coma, and something in his body refused to let her go without getting to say goodbye.

Koromaru whined from the other room, and he knew it was almost time to get up. It wasn’t easy to wake up to a world where she wasn’t there, and he suspected Koromaru had chosen him to stay with because of that. She’d told him, once, that Koromaru had asked to live with her after the battles were over. Even if she couldn’t keep her promise, Shinjiro hoped that he was a good replacement.

Still, he missed her. That was the honest truth. A girl he’d known for all of a few months, who’d he’d fallen in love with over the course of talks and mundane activities, who he was ripped away from and then was ripped away from him.

Thankfully, nobody who had known her judged him for it. All of SEES had kept their mementos of her. Without fail, every year on March 5th, they would meet up for something, anything, to remind them of the person who they had to leave behind.

Fate was cruel. Shinjiro had known that for too long. Minako had not deserved her fate, but she accepted it all with a smile on her face. She was the only one who could do it, and she’d valued the longevity of everyone she loved far more than her own life. A martyr of the highest degree.

It would be a heroic feat if it didn’t hurt so damn much.