Work Text:
11/29 Sunday, Daytime
The batting cages are in the shit part of Iwatodai. The part where the streets get tangled and the buildings sprout too close together, lines of laundry strung up between the houses and too many strays and the kind of rank stink only poverty and addiction can raise. It's the kind of area that reminds Junpei of his own crappy stomping grounds on Port Island, and maybe that's why he's not too bothered by any of it as they wind through the streets, following the scribbled directions on the back of a convenience store receipt.
Junpei hadn’t even known the cages existed until he saw that tiny ad in the paper while waiting for the train. It’s a little hole in the wall type of joint, stuck back in a strip mall up a narrow flight of stairs from a discount shop. The stairwell spits out into a dingy hallway, lined with faded magazine racks and crusty gachapons probably at least half as old as he is. A window at the end of the hall is open, and the middle-aged attendant inside is smoking a cigarette and reading a tabloid when they approach.
Junpei has to drop his chain wallet up on the counter to get his attention. “Two for an hour.”
The man’s eyes flick up from his magazine, taking a long second to help himself to a drag and stare at them. Behind Junpei, he can feel the moment Kotone flashes the attendant one of her killer grins, and it gets the guy in order. Junpei pays for the both of them, and they’re buzzed through the next door over.
It’s an outdoor setup, netting stretched out and boxing in the space behind the strip mall. Junpei can see an apartment building on the other side of the far net, the flickers of shapes beyond sun-bleached blinds. The November air is cold but the afternoon sun is bright and the three lanes are furnished with machines and bats and Junpei guesses he can’t really expect more given the circumstances.
Throwing their stuff down, Kotone follows him over as he goes and grabs a bat from the supply rack. Junpei swings his around, getting a feel. It’s been a while since he’s held one, but turns out running around at all hours fighting Shadows and dealing with sketchy criminal organizations doesn’t leave a guy with a ton of free time.
He swings hard at the air, hard as he can. A baseball bat’s not so different from a sword anymore as it is, gets him going the same way. He’s not gonna think about what that means, because he’s not the brightest crayon in the box but he knows that’s probably not a great thing to be thinking.
Kotone’s still messing around at the rack, and when Junpei glances over Kotone’s got her bat in both hands, trying to adjust her grip around either end with shoulders square and feet spread. She’s holding the damn thing like it’s her naginata.
“C’mon now. That ain’t how you do it.” He goes over and snatches the bat out of her hands, shaking in lieu of shaking her. “What are you even doing? Who taught you this?”
Kotone turns her bright eyes on him, sparkling with a wicked kind of delight. “I’ve never seen a baseball bat before in my entire life.”
Junpei isn't sure if it's fondness or an oncoming heart attack that's got his chest feeling like it's dissolving from the inside. Regardless, it is horrible. He’s got to do something about this.
“I wanna call bullshit, but with your oblivious self, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” He sighs, thumping her lightly on the head with the bat. “C’mon dummy, hold it like this.”
Kotone snorts as he gets behind her but relinquishes her limbs to him. She gives him no shortage of lip as he wrangles her, and it’s almost weird now, how comfortable he is touching her, grabbing her elbow, twisting her waist. There’s nothing behind it, and hasn’t been for a while, so maybe that’s the weirdest part.
When she’s suitably situated, Junpei steps back to appreciate his handiwork. She smiles pleasantly at him, testing her new stance by taking a swing at Junpei he only barely avoids by the ingrained instinct of a hundred Shadows trying the same before.
He shoots her a glare as she readjusts, innocent as can be. Rubbing a hand up the back of his head, Junpei points at the ball machine on the other side of the cage. “Alright, now I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but obviously you hit the ball when it comes at you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You hit it with the bat.”
"Got it."
"You hit the ball with the bat."
“Sure, sure. I got this.”
She gives him a thumbs up and what more does he want from her? Junpei goes over to his lane, taking up his own bat and stance.
At the end of the cage the ball machine groans to life, gurgling a baseball in its throat for a long moment. Junpei squints at it, hands twitching, impatient. Shit, the cage he used growing up on Tatsumi Port Island wasn’t state of the art or nothing but it never took this long to get a damn-
The first ball rockets out and cracks against his bat like a gunshot. For a second it feels like it's blown a hole through his vision, and Junpei’s grip falters, remembering the sound a body makes hitting concrete. The next swing veers off, his hands suddenly slick. It’s a nubber, ball spiraling into the ground. His ears are ringing for some reason.
He only clips the next ball and then he’s doubling over, sweat already racing down his neck, choking a tight breath from his seizing lungs. The next ball’s spat his way and he whiffs it like an idiot. What the hell. What the hell.
A crack to his left draws his eyes over to Kotone on the other side of the cage. Her brow is furrowed, eyes focused, knees bent and elbows up just like Junpei showed her, and she throws her whole body into the swing when the next ball crosses her. It lofts off into a far corner and then she’s back in position, ready for the next one.
Junpei’s never taken a girl to the batting cages before- shit, he’d never even seen a girl go to one either. He’d always assumed a girl would’ve been nervous having stuff flying at her, scared of getting hurt or hit by the ball. Leave it to their fearless leader to prove him wrong again. That’s the look she gives Shadows, stubborn and unafraid when she’s about to crit one into next week.
Junpei lets the next ball rush by him, and the next one too. He rolls his shoulders, takes a deep breath. To his left another crack rings out, the ball bouncing over to his lane. She’s got no control and he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get hit himself.
He readjusts his cap, wiping sweat from his eyes, and raises his bat again. He can’t be outdone at one of the only damn things he’s good at. One of the only things he has left.
The machine lurches and the next ball meets Junpei’s swing and knocks off high into the air. There’s another ball right behind it, and then another. Junpei just reacts, lets his instincts rule his body. There’s nothing in his head except the clunk of the machine and the whistling wind in his ears.
His world narrows down to the oncoming ball.
He swings.
He swings.
He swings.
Distantly, a buzzer goes off, breaking Junpei from his focus. Through the sweat running down his face he looks up at the clock. Their time’s up.
Kotone sighs, dropping her bat and stretching out her arms. Junpei is still breathing hard, and it takes several moments before he can force his fingers off the bat, one by one.
“Whew. Man, I got really into that.” Junpei says, trying to play off the crack in his voice as a cough. “Nothing compared to fightin’ Shadows though, haha.”
Kotone turns to look at him, that assessing gaze she gets when he knows she’s reading someone like a book. Today it’s him, it’s Junpei , she’s reading like a book and it doesn’t upset him at all like it used to.
“You want something to drink?”
They sink down against the concrete outer wall when Kotone returns with their drinks. She hands him a Mad Bull and he realizes he didn’t tell her which one he wanted but she remembered his favorite anyway.
They sit and drink in silence, catching their breath. Kotone checks her phone and when Junpei peeks he sees her breeze through several text messages, replying to the ones that have built up over the day. She’s in high demand as ever. Junpei doesn’t bother checking his even for the sake of it. He doesn’t expect anything to be there, and even then he doesn’t particularly feel like talking to anyone right now. There’s no pressure or point in faking it in front of her anyways.
"You make it look so easy," She says after a bit, snapping her phone shut. He looks at her and she waves her sports drink around in her hand. "You know, swinging your sword around."
"Huh. I guess I never really thought about it." Junpei chuckles, wiping the cooling sweat from his face with his sleeve.
"I didn’t realize it at first, but you use your sword like a baseball bat. And you do this weird, like, pose when you hit a Shadow like a home run."
Kotone sticks one hand up in the air and the other one straight out to the side, poorly mimicking either Junpei or a some sort of cactus. Against everything within and without him, Junpei snorts.
“It’s a victory pose! Don’t you know that sort of thing’s real popular in America? Like, once a guy even jumped on a horse after a World Series game to celebrate.” He waves her off. “You just don’t get it.”
“Well, I don’t know how well a horse would fare in Tartarus. And I’m not sure how much Koro-chan would appreciate you hopping on his back, so-”
Junpei swipes his leg out and kicks over her drink. The cap is on, but it succeeds in rolling it out of reach, and the annoyed scoff it gets from her is its own kind of reward.
He grins smugly as Kotone gets up to chase her bottle, taking another half-hearted shot at her legs when she comes and sits back down. She gripes at him, putting her bag between them as a barrier to deter future kicks. Junpei just raises his eyebrows and grins some more.
Several moments and sips from her drink later, Kotone asks him, "How are you feeling?"
He’s surprised it’s taken her this long to ask. But then again, it's been a few days since she last checked. The others seem to ask all the time, whenever they see him, but she's been giving him space.
Junpei shrugs, downing his Mad Bull. “You know.”
He doesn’t elaborate. Kotone, brilliant transcendent genius she is, picks up what he’s putting down.
“Yeah. I figured.” She recaps her bottle. “Still. I was worried about you.”
Junpei sinks down into a slouch. “No reason to. I’m not gonna do anything crazy, or something. I even went to most of Career Experience, thank you very much.”
Kotone stares at the floor, visibly uneasy. Pale knees covered in fresh scratches stick out from under her skirt, and whether they’re from volleyball, fighting Shadows, or something else entirely, Junpei has no clue. He’s barely seen her over the last week. He’s barely seen anyone.
She takes a deep breath. “You know, I’m shaken up from it all too. I’m sad about Chidori, but I also almost lost another friend. Junpei,” Kotone says his name suddenly and when he turns her expression is raw, like all her courage and skin has been scraped off. “I don’t know what I would have done if you died.”
It’s like a cold bucket of water. Someone has ripped Junpei’s shirt off, pantsed him, dumped a whole sports cooler over his head and then kicked him in the bay for good measure. He's been such an asshole .
It's a realization in two parts. The first, that he's an asshole, moping around not giving a shit about what anyone else was feeling or going through. And the second, that they would have mourned him. They would have missed him.
He thinks about last night, where they were all gathered around the dining room table waiting for him to come down. The looks on their faces when they saw the sketchbook, when Junpei stood up and apologized and took Kotone’s hand, the worried looks on their faces becoming tearful smiles for him. Chidori had been trying to show him that, he’s sure. That people thought of him, that people cared about Junpei, despite everything about him.
Her sketchbook, filled with the pictures she drew of him, sits like a cinder block in his skull. Like a dead weight at the center of his soul. He spent all of last night flipping through its pages, the sketchbook he bought her returned to him full of his own face. His hands were shaking so bad, he was terrified of accidentally touching any of her sketches and ruining them. If he destroyed one by being a sentimental idiot he’d never forgive himself. There’ll never be any more, after all.
It scared him a little, how he felt looking at himself over and over again, aching to trace the lines she drew like it was any substitute for Chidori herself. She poured herself into this sketchbook, poured her own life into Junpei’s shot-up, sad sack of a body. He owes it to her to be better. To be stronger, able to protect the things he cares about for real rather than just waving around a sword and acting the hero.
But is he strong enough?
Without realizing it, Junpei’s hand has risen to his chest. The wound is gone, but he still knows where the bullet entered his ribs. Feels it, sometimes. He wasn’t dead long, doesn’t remember jack shit about it, but he imagines that this is what it felt like. Heavy. Stuck. Everything and then nothing, all at once.
After all, staying the same preserves her too. If he doesn't change, she doesn't change, her memory upheld in the way he breathes and thinks and moves through the world, because she can't be gone if he's the same person as he was when she left. She can't be gone and she can't be changed and she can't be forgotten if he doesn't let her.
Beside him, Kotone hums, taking Junpei back from his thoughts.
"It’s weird, but when you said you were going out, I didn't expect you to come here."
Junpei blinks. "Oh yeah?"
Kotone plays with the little frayed pink strap on her phone. "I thought you'd be going to see her."
"Nah. Not yet." He sighs and shakes his head. Yeah, definitely not strong enough yet. “Is that why you asked to come along?”
“I just didn’t want to leave you alone.”
She shrugs and says this like it’s the easiest thing in the world. He crushes his Mad Bull can so he can cover the shaking in his hands.
Pulling the trigger on an Evoker had been nerve-wracking at first. Junpei had never seen a gun in real life before, let alone put one to his head, but he learned pretty quickly to get used to the feeling, to relish in the shot even. There was a moment after pulling the trigger when his mind would white out completely, nothing in and nothing out as reality shattered like glass, and when Junpei came back in he was powerful, energy surging through him and combustion in his veins. He could do anything.
When Junpei decided to come here today, he had been wanting to feel like that. Wanting that white noise, that violence, to blank out and come back to himself in the end lifted and free. To feel like himself again.
Kotone tilts her head up against the wall, looks up at the fading sun. "This was fun though. I'm glad we came."
"Hey, Kotomin."
He feels her gaze when it comes back to him, warmer than it has any right to be.
"I know Chidori wouldn't want me to be sad, but I still am." His knuckles are going white, clutching the can. "I just," He takes a deep breath. Puts the can down, though the damage is done, and his fingers are already aching. "I don't want to waste the life she gave up for me. But I also don't want to go so far and change so much I become someone who doesn't need her. I don't want to forget her."
Kotone is quiet for a long minute, fingering her phone strap again. It’s only now Junpei recognizes it as the one that used to be on Yukari’s phone. What else has he been missing?
"I don't think that'll happen." She says finally. "She wanted to save you. She made that choice on her own. It’s hard to forget something like that. Besides, you’ve already changed, Junpei. None of us are the same people we were at the beginning of this year.” She adds quietly.
Junpei recalls meeting Kotone back in April. All he’d thought about her at the time was that she was hot. A little messy. A little distant. Now-
“Changing comes with life. And you don't owe her anything other than that, you know.” Kotone continues, shrugging again. “She wanted you to live. That's all you can do."
Now he has nothing but faith in her.
Junpei sighs, putting his head between his knees. "My head's all messed up still. I don't know if I can stop feeling guilty just yet."
Kotone reaches over to pat him lightly on the cap. She doesn't have to say anything. He knows that she's had her fair share of survivor's guilt at this point. She just gets him.
"Next round can be on me, then. If you like." She offers, hand lingering for a moment on his shoulder before pulling away.
Sunset streaks the sky in slashes of yellow and red, dousing their sneakers orange where they stick out from the shade of the building. Trismegistus dons those colors too, fierce as Medea’s flame, something he never knew he had within him until some asshole came and blew a hole through Junpei’s life as he knew it. He’ll get that son of a bitch Takaya if it’s the last thing he does, and he’ll give Chidori a front row seat to it. Kotone promised him that.
Chidori, who is with him always in Trismegistus. And Kotone, who is with him now. He’s so glad she’s here with him right now.
“Well, you know, it’s just as I say,” He claps his hands against his knees and stands up. “ ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going!’ “
Kotone follows suit with an eye roll. “You have literally never said that before.”
“Maybe it’s gonna be my new thing! It’s gonna catch on before you know it, and then everyone’s gonna know what a cool, tough guy Iori Junpei is.”
“I already think you’re pretty cool, Junpei.”
Kotone looks back at him over her shoulder and flashes one of those bewitching smiles of hers. Junpei knows in that moment he would do anything for her, and she just keeps proving the same is true for him. With her abilities it's only a matter of time till they’ve kicked every ass that needs kicking in this whole damn city.
They might be okay yet.