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Abandoned Draft: Persona 4 - some ambitious souyo thing
This was last touched November 28, 2014. I really don't remember much about what it was supposed to be. I think it was supposed to be about Yosuke trying too hard to fit in with some guys who are actually jerks while the people he loved in his high school years drift away from him, and feeling lost in his own identity because of it.
I wrote 1700 words of it and ultimately gave up because it was too hard for me to write party-loving frat bros. Looking back on it, I agree with that judgment. But it's also interesting to me, because it was my one attempt at writing a kind of person that I understand the least.
---
[ph yosuke]: Hey
[ph yosuke]: Guess ur in class? Me 2
[ph yosuke]: Ur prolly paying attention tho lol.
[ph yosuke]: Ok I'll catch u l8r partner
Yosuke flipped his phone shut in the old windowless classroom, his eyes lingering on the phone with the hope that it would light up with a new message, even after he had acted as if he'd given up on one. None came.
He sighed and let his face rest against his notebook as the professor went on and on in his old creaky voice about his weird obsession with Yasunari Kawabata. Chie didn't text him much. He expected that—Chie wasn't much of a texter. He tried to phone her now and then, but they got up early at the police academy and sleeping in was the best part of college. Texting Yukiko was going too far out of the way, like making a statement about something, and it wasn't like anything had happened. He just wanted someone to chat with to make 20th Century Literature go by faster.
It should've been Yu. It always should've been Yu.
Yu was busy studying International Politics at Waseda University, his second choice after he was turned down by Tokyo U and obviously tried hard to be graceful about his disappointment at only attending the seventh best college in the nation in front of Yosuke, whose scores hadn't even left him a foothold in the entire city of Tokyo.
Knowing Yu, he was busy being the #1 student while secretly saving the world again. Which probably didn't leave a lot of time for entertaining Yosuke in the middle of class. Yu hadn't always texted as much as Yosuke would've wanted him to during their last year of high school, but between his friends in Inaba and the messages they got in throughout the day, it was almost enough.
All he ever got from Yu these days were two lines at three AM to the tune of,
[ph yu]: Hey.
[ph yu]: Sorry I missed you. Phone ran out of batteries and I didn't get back to my room until now.
[ph yosuke]: U need a new phone, dude.
... and then silence again until some unknown tomorrow.
It made him miss the days when he was important enough to Yu to be worth a couple of afternoons. He knew right after thinking it that it was unfair, for a lot of reasons that he didn't care to go over in his head yet again, but that was how he really felt. He let himself wallow in it since experience taught him that denying it was bad for him.
It was in the midst of said wallowing that the guy sitting next to him cracked a wide, gaping yawn. Trying to look nonchalant, Yosuke lifted his face up from his notebook, feeling like he'd been caught in his moment of self-pity.
“Should've skipped,” the guy muttered to him.
Yosuke's first impression was that the guy looked too stylish to be sitting here in this chalk-coated lecture hall. He had one of those super-layered haircuts with sweeping bangs and carefully placed wild tufts in the back that only seemed to work with actors and anime characters. And him, apparently. His face wasn't too bad, either, if Yosuke was going to be honest with himself—not horse-shaped like his, and well put together in a way that screamed that women died for him on a daily basis.
Despite feeling a twinge of envy, Yosuke whispered back, “There's a girls' badminton game today too.”
[more stuff went here to constitute their first meeting, presumably. dude's name is Shouzou.]
----
They picked up Yosuke in a beat up Toyota, a merely functional car whose driver and owner, Shouzou's childhood friend Yuudai, also believed in enjoying their youth while it lasted but didn't have the budget to transcend his family hand-me-down. Although, given his deadpan disposition, Yosuke couldn't have imagined him driving a sexier car anyway.
Admittedly, he felt kind of lame being alone in the backseat while Shouzou rode shotgun, but there were three of them so he tried not to take it personally. Yosuke figured that since they didn't all have motorcycles, cramming into the car seemed like the less solitary option, and besides, cold hard experience taught him that the motorcycle honestly didn't get girls to talk to him. So tonight he chose to ride with the guys, even if it wasn't in style.
“So,” Yosuke said to start some conversation, “what's Okina Club Tarot like?”
“No clue,” said Shouzou. “They just opened up last month.”
“They're occult themed,” Yuudai volunteered in his terse bass voice. “Velvet drapes, incense.”
“Occult?” Shouzou quipped before Yosuke had even realized that Yuudai was done talking. “Are you taking us to some kind of goth place?”
Yuudai let out a scoffing voiceless half-laugh. “No. They're very casual.”
“Good. I'm not into goth girls.” Shouzou made himself comfortable with his feet up on the dashboard. “No offense, Yuudai.”
Yuudai shot Shouzou an annoyed look and Yosuke couldn't help but interject, “Yuudai's into goth girls?”
The two of them exchanged glances. With embarrassment touching at his expression, Yuudai kept driving silently while Shouzou burst into laughter and said, “Dude. Long story. But anyway”—changing the subject just like that—“have you gone clubbing before?”
“Yeah, actually,” Yosuke said, plenty relieved to know exactly what to say, and trying to keep his voice casual while saying it. “I went to Club Escapade once with Risette.”
“Risette?” Shouzou repeated incredulously. “The idol?”
“Yeah!” And then Yosuke abruptly ran out of things to say, because as cool as it sounded when put like that—I went clubbing with Risette—what actually transpired was a night of humiliation astride his best friend's shoulders.
Fortunately, Shouzou spared him having to come up with anything else. “No way. You're fucking with us.”
“You know how Risette took a break in her hometown of Inaba for a year?”
“Dude, and you met her? Lucky bastard! What was she like?”
“Dangerous,” Yosuke said without really thinking about it, which sent Shouzou into a bout of amused laughter.
“You've gotta watch out for idols, dude,” Shouzou said. “Once you get past the cute exterior they're some fucking crazy women.” The first image that came to Yosuke's mind was Rise's appearance on the Midnight Channel, slender arm curved around a pole, legs spread wide; the second was Rise in Kanzeon's embrace, standing boldly in the middle of a battlefield of swords and bolts of thunder to send them her energy so they could finish the fight. Shouzou continued, “That's why she went back, right? Did she flip her shit or what?”
The first acceptable answer that came to Yosuke's head, and therefore left his mouth, was “Uh, she made a lot of tofu. Shit-tons of tofu. Tofu like mental.” Shouzou cracked up, which instilled in Yosuke a feeling of both relief and guilt.
“Yuudai, isn't that just like the one girl, from second year.”
“Inarizushi-chan?”
“Yes! God, she was so weird.” Shouzou turned back to Yosuke and explained, “So, in high school there was this weird girl who had a crush on me. I kept trying to tell her I wasn't interested, but she brought me lunch like, every day. And it was always inarizushi, with just plain rice inside. It's like it was the only thing she could make. Of course, I got sick of inarizushi in like three days. So then I was like. Look. I don't have any feelings for you and I'm sick of inarizushi.” He paused a bit to catch his breath, as if setting the stage. “So the next day. She comes up to me with this giant plus-sized bento of inarizushi and she's says, 'I don't care what you think of me, please take this.' I'm like fuck. What do I even do with this? And I know what you're thinking dude, I could've just went with it for awhile, enjoyed myself. But you don't get it, this girl was creepy, I wanted her to just go away. So next thing I know, Yuudai says, 'If you don't want that, I'll eat it.' So I give it to him, and he starts eating it calmly right by the lockers while inarizushi-chan has this complete meltdown. She's screaming about how it was supposed to show her undying love for me, he's munching and just watching with a completely straight face. And when they're both done—at exactly the same time, he finishes the last one and she's done screaming—he says, 'It was pretty average,' and hands the box back to her.” Yosuke couldn't help but start laughing, and Shouzou twisted further around and leaned hard against the back of the chair as he said, “Dude. But the best part. Dude, the best part is when she turned up the next day. With a bento of inarizushi for Yuudai.”
“It was pretty average,” Yuudai said, completely deadpan. Yosuke had run out of breath but he was still laughing. And he decided he liked Yuudai.
When he could finally breathe, Yosuke said, “So—so wait, what did you do after that?”
“I ate it.”
Shouzou and Yosuke both burst back into hysterical laughter. Yosuke didn't ruin the moment by asking again.
---
Okina Club Tarot: Here before him, backlit in blue and purple lights, supported by the beat of European dance music and the scent of musky incense, was a veritable buffet of city girls with gorgeous glossy hair, cute noses, dark eyes. Past the crowded dance floor, a lovely group of them sat at the bar with half-full glasses, occasionally glancing around the room like lionesses either ready to fawn over a lion or devour a man alive.
Yosuke felt closer to a fleshy piece of meat right then, but since he was with his bros he was determined not to back down. He looked to Shouzou for a plan, who was looking at Yuudai, who looked back at them.
Feeling the need to kill the silence, Yosuke brought a grin to his face and said, “Let's go!” The other two, at least, didn't protest as they followed him into the fray of eyes that collectively turned to inspect them.
[I sincerely don't remember much about what was supposed to happen except that Yuudai is privately gay for Shouzou or something and they're in some sense a weird foil for Yosuke and his gay long-distance blue balls for Yu.]
I wrote 1700 words of it and ultimately gave up because it was too hard for me to write party-loving frat bros. Looking back on it, I agree with that judgment. But it's also interesting to me, because it was my one attempt at writing a kind of person that I understand the least.
---
[ph yosuke]: Hey
[ph yosuke]: Guess ur in class? Me 2
[ph yosuke]: Ur prolly paying attention tho lol.
[ph yosuke]: Ok I'll catch u l8r partner
Yosuke flipped his phone shut in the old windowless classroom, his eyes lingering on the phone with the hope that it would light up with a new message, even after he had acted as if he'd given up on one. None came.
He sighed and let his face rest against his notebook as the professor went on and on in his old creaky voice about his weird obsession with Yasunari Kawabata. Chie didn't text him much. He expected that—Chie wasn't much of a texter. He tried to phone her now and then, but they got up early at the police academy and sleeping in was the best part of college. Texting Yukiko was going too far out of the way, like making a statement about something, and it wasn't like anything had happened. He just wanted someone to chat with to make 20th Century Literature go by faster.
It should've been Yu. It always should've been Yu.
Yu was busy studying International Politics at Waseda University, his second choice after he was turned down by Tokyo U and obviously tried hard to be graceful about his disappointment at only attending the seventh best college in the nation in front of Yosuke, whose scores hadn't even left him a foothold in the entire city of Tokyo.
Knowing Yu, he was busy being the #1 student while secretly saving the world again. Which probably didn't leave a lot of time for entertaining Yosuke in the middle of class. Yu hadn't always texted as much as Yosuke would've wanted him to during their last year of high school, but between his friends in Inaba and the messages they got in throughout the day, it was almost enough.
All he ever got from Yu these days were two lines at three AM to the tune of,
[ph yu]: Hey.
[ph yu]: Sorry I missed you. Phone ran out of batteries and I didn't get back to my room until now.
[ph yosuke]: U need a new phone, dude.
... and then silence again until some unknown tomorrow.
It made him miss the days when he was important enough to Yu to be worth a couple of afternoons. He knew right after thinking it that it was unfair, for a lot of reasons that he didn't care to go over in his head yet again, but that was how he really felt. He let himself wallow in it since experience taught him that denying it was bad for him.
It was in the midst of said wallowing that the guy sitting next to him cracked a wide, gaping yawn. Trying to look nonchalant, Yosuke lifted his face up from his notebook, feeling like he'd been caught in his moment of self-pity.
“Should've skipped,” the guy muttered to him.
Yosuke's first impression was that the guy looked too stylish to be sitting here in this chalk-coated lecture hall. He had one of those super-layered haircuts with sweeping bangs and carefully placed wild tufts in the back that only seemed to work with actors and anime characters. And him, apparently. His face wasn't too bad, either, if Yosuke was going to be honest with himself—not horse-shaped like his, and well put together in a way that screamed that women died for him on a daily basis.
Despite feeling a twinge of envy, Yosuke whispered back, “There's a girls' badminton game today too.”
[more stuff went here to constitute their first meeting, presumably. dude's name is Shouzou.]
----
They picked up Yosuke in a beat up Toyota, a merely functional car whose driver and owner, Shouzou's childhood friend Yuudai, also believed in enjoying their youth while it lasted but didn't have the budget to transcend his family hand-me-down. Although, given his deadpan disposition, Yosuke couldn't have imagined him driving a sexier car anyway.
Admittedly, he felt kind of lame being alone in the backseat while Shouzou rode shotgun, but there were three of them so he tried not to take it personally. Yosuke figured that since they didn't all have motorcycles, cramming into the car seemed like the less solitary option, and besides, cold hard experience taught him that the motorcycle honestly didn't get girls to talk to him. So tonight he chose to ride with the guys, even if it wasn't in style.
“So,” Yosuke said to start some conversation, “what's Okina Club Tarot like?”
“No clue,” said Shouzou. “They just opened up last month.”
“They're occult themed,” Yuudai volunteered in his terse bass voice. “Velvet drapes, incense.”
“Occult?” Shouzou quipped before Yosuke had even realized that Yuudai was done talking. “Are you taking us to some kind of goth place?”
Yuudai let out a scoffing voiceless half-laugh. “No. They're very casual.”
“Good. I'm not into goth girls.” Shouzou made himself comfortable with his feet up on the dashboard. “No offense, Yuudai.”
Yuudai shot Shouzou an annoyed look and Yosuke couldn't help but interject, “Yuudai's into goth girls?”
The two of them exchanged glances. With embarrassment touching at his expression, Yuudai kept driving silently while Shouzou burst into laughter and said, “Dude. Long story. But anyway”—changing the subject just like that—“have you gone clubbing before?”
“Yeah, actually,” Yosuke said, plenty relieved to know exactly what to say, and trying to keep his voice casual while saying it. “I went to Club Escapade once with Risette.”
“Risette?” Shouzou repeated incredulously. “The idol?”
“Yeah!” And then Yosuke abruptly ran out of things to say, because as cool as it sounded when put like that—I went clubbing with Risette—what actually transpired was a night of humiliation astride his best friend's shoulders.
Fortunately, Shouzou spared him having to come up with anything else. “No way. You're fucking with us.”
“You know how Risette took a break in her hometown of Inaba for a year?”
“Dude, and you met her? Lucky bastard! What was she like?”
“Dangerous,” Yosuke said without really thinking about it, which sent Shouzou into a bout of amused laughter.
“You've gotta watch out for idols, dude,” Shouzou said. “Once you get past the cute exterior they're some fucking crazy women.” The first image that came to Yosuke's mind was Rise's appearance on the Midnight Channel, slender arm curved around a pole, legs spread wide; the second was Rise in Kanzeon's embrace, standing boldly in the middle of a battlefield of swords and bolts of thunder to send them her energy so they could finish the fight. Shouzou continued, “That's why she went back, right? Did she flip her shit or what?”
The first acceptable answer that came to Yosuke's head, and therefore left his mouth, was “Uh, she made a lot of tofu. Shit-tons of tofu. Tofu like mental.” Shouzou cracked up, which instilled in Yosuke a feeling of both relief and guilt.
“Yuudai, isn't that just like the one girl, from second year.”
“Inarizushi-chan?”
“Yes! God, she was so weird.” Shouzou turned back to Yosuke and explained, “So, in high school there was this weird girl who had a crush on me. I kept trying to tell her I wasn't interested, but she brought me lunch like, every day. And it was always inarizushi, with just plain rice inside. It's like it was the only thing she could make. Of course, I got sick of inarizushi in like three days. So then I was like. Look. I don't have any feelings for you and I'm sick of inarizushi.” He paused a bit to catch his breath, as if setting the stage. “So the next day. She comes up to me with this giant plus-sized bento of inarizushi and she's says, 'I don't care what you think of me, please take this.' I'm like fuck. What do I even do with this? And I know what you're thinking dude, I could've just went with it for awhile, enjoyed myself. But you don't get it, this girl was creepy, I wanted her to just go away. So next thing I know, Yuudai says, 'If you don't want that, I'll eat it.' So I give it to him, and he starts eating it calmly right by the lockers while inarizushi-chan has this complete meltdown. She's screaming about how it was supposed to show her undying love for me, he's munching and just watching with a completely straight face. And when they're both done—at exactly the same time, he finishes the last one and she's done screaming—he says, 'It was pretty average,' and hands the box back to her.” Yosuke couldn't help but start laughing, and Shouzou twisted further around and leaned hard against the back of the chair as he said, “Dude. But the best part. Dude, the best part is when she turned up the next day. With a bento of inarizushi for Yuudai.”
“It was pretty average,” Yuudai said, completely deadpan. Yosuke had run out of breath but he was still laughing. And he decided he liked Yuudai.
When he could finally breathe, Yosuke said, “So—so wait, what did you do after that?”
“I ate it.”
Shouzou and Yosuke both burst back into hysterical laughter. Yosuke didn't ruin the moment by asking again.
---
Okina Club Tarot: Here before him, backlit in blue and purple lights, supported by the beat of European dance music and the scent of musky incense, was a veritable buffet of city girls with gorgeous glossy hair, cute noses, dark eyes. Past the crowded dance floor, a lovely group of them sat at the bar with half-full glasses, occasionally glancing around the room like lionesses either ready to fawn over a lion or devour a man alive.
Yosuke felt closer to a fleshy piece of meat right then, but since he was with his bros he was determined not to back down. He looked to Shouzou for a plan, who was looking at Yuudai, who looked back at them.
Feeling the need to kill the silence, Yosuke brought a grin to his face and said, “Let's go!” The other two, at least, didn't protest as they followed him into the fray of eyes that collectively turned to inspect them.
[I sincerely don't remember much about what was supposed to happen except that Yuudai is privately gay for Shouzou or something and they're in some sense a weird foil for Yosuke and his gay long-distance blue balls for Yu.]