They all like to watch, to be fair

Silence reigned in the restroom after long after Minako's shadow had vanished. The leader of SEES was perched on the bathroom sink in an undisturbed corner of the shattered facility. Her knees were drawn up close to her body her head was propped up with her hands. Her thoughts were a jumble of feelings, questions and memories from two divergent lives and she had long since given up on attempting to sort through them all. For the first time in three days the fact that she was attending high school wearing nothing but her shoes, knee high white socks and a collar tied up with her school ribbon around her neck was not her most pressing concern. Her shadow had managed to expose far more than her body during their last encounter, stating plainly for the first time that the ordeal she currently endured was part of some strange pact with the entity called Temptation specifically intended to prevent to prevent the Fall from ever taking place. In other words, the shadow had found a way to stop Nyx from destroying the world without the need for Minako to sacrifice herself.

Minako noted with a tiny sense of chagrin that the worries she was wrestling with were old and familiar anxieties that had haunted her for the past year, the very same ones she tried diligently to push away each day by filling her time with schoolwork, relationships and late night adventures in Paulonia Mall. The more recent feelings of intense humiliation and shame at being naked in public and **** to live out every perverted fantasy she had ever had at the behest of her darker side had occupied every ounce of her attention for the past two days. In retrospect, the whole sordid, embarrassing ordeal had been a desperately needed vacation from the dread of facing down the impending confrontation with **** itself. In a twisted sort of way she was actually grateful to her shadow. And the idea that her other self was anything other than the sadistic, bitchy monster that was gleefully tormenting her and her friends in the name of serving Temptation and the unknown puppetmaster whose agenda that entity served…that fact was absolutely infuriating!

“She beat me again.” Minako muttered to no one.

The shadow was an echo of the true self. It was as intelligent as the conscious mind it was born from, but bound up in all the desires and thoughts the real self rejected. The shadow of Minako Arisato was a decadent, manipulative, controlling little hedonist that reveled in domination and enslavement just as much as Minako herself valued forming and deepening her bonds and relationships. She had subjected every woman in SEES to a game of seduction and humiliation that one by one left them all naked and **** to possession whenever their darker selves willed it. The idea that there was any altruism in all of this, that what Minako was being put through was a humiliating kind of mercy? Or worse, that in the end she might have to admit that her shadow was right? It was unbearable.

“Uhhh…knock knock! Minako-tan, you in there?” the familiar voice of Junpei drifted into the room, interrupting her reverie.

Minako sighed to herself. “Hey Junpei. Sorry, lost track of time…”

As she hopped off her perch the tall boy with the ghost of a goatee on his chin sauntered into the room, his shoes crunching on the scattered debris as he approached. Minako already expected the look he would give her, the involuntary little smirk that curled his lips and the dilation of his eyes as he caught sight of her naked body, followed by that intense stare that seemed to go on and on before he reluctantly lifted his gaze to look her at her face to face. She expected it, but she found herself blushing all the same. Minako meekly covered herself, trying desperately to pretend she still had some tiny sliver of dignity left to cling to after the numerous humiliations she had gone through.

“Junpei! Don’t you know this is a girl’s restroom! You aren’t allowed in here!” Minako said, hoping her feigned outrage would cover up her surprise and mortification at being naked in front of her fully clothed male friend.

“Eh. I figured if you needed the toilet one of these stalls would hide you just fine. And anything else you'd normally be worried about me seeing...well...” Junpei grinned.

Minako stuck her tongue out at him. “Didn’t you promise to be nice and NOT gawk at us?”

“Yeah, and you remember what happened after that! Yuka-tan pretty much immediately shoved herself right in my face and made sure I got an eye full! Pretty sure trying to avoid looking at you is an open invitation for you shadow to humiliate you even more.”

“That…” Minako stammered. “That’s a good point, actually.”

“Exactly. So whoa is me! Guess poor Junpei will have **** but to take a good long look at all you while your naked. Don't worry, Minako-tan. It'll be tough, but somehow I'll endure it for your sake! No need to thank me.” Junpei said with a vast grin.

“Jerk…” Minako muttered, glancing to the side and blushing with her whole body.

“So uhhh, my jackassery aside...you okay? You seem a little…how do I put this? You seem bothered and distracted, and not in the 'I'm going to school naked' kind of way. Everything all right?” Junpei asked, adjusting his cap.

“…I had to do some thinking.” Minako said, her eyes downcast.

“You uhhh…you wanna talk about it? Know its been awhile, but offer still stands. You need anything your old pal Junpei is here to help!” Junpei said with a twinkle in his eye.

“Talk…heh. I was never very good at talking…” Minako muttered to herself.

“Oh yeah, because the rest of us are all super great at communicating!” Junpei smirked.

“That’s not what I mean. I’ve never been good at it. Not about the important stuff. Listening was always easy. Cheering people on and encouraging them to grow. That was always easy to do. I enjoy doing that. When it comes to solving my own problems I’ve always been better at doing something than talking about it.” Minako said, looking sidelong at her reflection in a cracked restroom mirror. “And for the problems I couldn't change? I was always better at ignoring those.”

Junpei shrugged. “We all do that sometimes, Minako-tan.”

“But I need to do better, don’t I?” Minako said, biting her lip. “It’d be easier to just keep my secrets. It’d make fighting Temptation simpler, at least. We could all just go to Inaba and go through with Margaret’s mysterious little plot to fix all this and then go right back to the old timeline like nothing happened. None of you would have to be any wiser…”

Junpei gave her a quixical look.

“Sorry. I’m being cryptic again." Minako mumbled. "I realized something important about my shadow and why this was all happening. And…I need to tell everyone. Tonight, before we go to Tartarus. This could change the entire mission. We have to decide if there even IS a mission anymore. And...I can't make that decision alone. It wouldn't be fair to all of you. It wouldn't be fair to me. ”

Junpei gave her a serious look. “You don’t gotta **** yourself. We all trust you. If it’d be better-“

“Yeah. I trust all of you too. I should start acting like it. And I’m so tired of keeping secrets from everyone. Some people even seem to think I’ve been taking on too many burdens lately.” Minako said, glaring at her reflection.

“Well…yeah. None of us are gonna argue with you on that score. You do too much. You're a great leader, but you always end up pushing yourself way too hard for everybody else's sake.” Junpei said.

“Yeah. I get that. Hey. Do you remember that night on Shirakawa Boulevard?” Minako asked suddenly.

“What? The love hotel? Sure. Hard to forget.” Junpei said sardonically.

“Oh yeah. Yukari and I had our first kiss that night, you know.” Minako smiled. “Also the first time I saw her naked. Also the first time she saw me that way. Might…might also be the first time the idea entered my head that seeing a girl naked and embarrassed was something I really really liked seeing.”

“Seeing? Or being?” Junpei asked with a smirk.

“….maybe both…” Minako said, blushing. “Probably both….umm…like you said, hard to forget that night. Anyway, you asked me a question that night I've been thinking about lately.”

“Did I? Been awhile.” Junpei shrugged.

“Yep. ‘What’re you trying so hard for?’ was the exact phrase.” Minako said, mimicking an irate Junpei.

“Oh. Right. I was caught up in my own bullshit back then. Sorry for being so…you know.” Junpei grimaced.

“That’s fine. None of us really knew each other all that well back then. It just occurred to me recently that I never answered the question.” Minako said, a whistful look in her eyes.

“Oh. I mean, not like that’s important anymore.” Junpei said.

“Of course it is.” Minako said softly. “We all had to find our reasons for why we were fighting. And I never answered the question. The other Minako in that other timeline, the person I would be right now if Temptation hadn’t stepped in? She never answered it either.”

Not even at the end of it all.

“Okay, fair enough…so…what’s your answer, then?”

“You.” Minako said, closing her eyes and placing a hand over her heart, over the place minutes earlier she had wounded herself with a phantom bullet. “You. Yukari. Mitsuru. Fuuka. Aegis. Akihiko. Ken. Everyone I've met in this town. Everyone who is with me now, and everyone who I lost somewhere on the way. All of you gave me the best year of my life. You gave me an answer to a question I’ve been asking for ten years. There are so many things that I wish could have been different. I wish all of us had met without ever having to know about a Persona, or Tartarus, or Temptation. I wish someone else could do all the things we can do. I wish we didn't have to fight these battles alone. I wish…I wish someone else could make the decisions I have to make. But when it comes to actually making those decisions? I never had a single regret about the choices I made or why I made them. I stand by everything I did this past year. And if the time ever comes to make those decisions again, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the same path. Not in this new world Temptation has created for us. And not in the one we left behind.”

Junpei crossed his arms, his face a mask of concern.

“You might not understand this. I’ll explain it all in more detail tonight. But all of you? The reason I’m this strong, the reason I can do all the things I’ve been able to do? That’s all of you. That’s your strength inside me. In Tartarus and in the real world. Ten years ago my world was ripped out from under my feet. You gave me a place to stand. You gave me a reason to love when everything I loved was taken away. And I do love all of you. I love you all so much it hurts sometimes. Seeing you all living your lives, cheering you on when you face down your demons, seeing you grow into better people? That’s where I find joy. That’s where I face my demons. That’s where I find my strength. You all became my reason for living when I thought all my reasons were gone.”

Junpei smiled. It was a touching admission. And Junpei dealt with such feelings as he always did. He ruined the mood.

“So what I’m hearing is…you like to watch?” He said with a smirk.

Minako drew her lips into a line. For a moment she just stared blankly at his obnoxiously grinning face. Then with a sigh she moved right past him en route to the sink and the mirrors, trying her best to emulate the cold shoulder she and the other girls had given him the day after they had discovered him hiding in the bathhouse.

“Idiot.” she muttered, borrowing Yukari's tone of exasperation that inevitably peppered every conversation she had with Junpei.

Junpei kept smirking at her. “Thanks for telling me all thought, Minako-tan. It was good to hear.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Minako said, waving the statement away with her hand. “Thanks for being the one to listen. It was nice being the one to unload for a change. But you're still an idiot!”

“And yet I'm not hearing 'no'!” Junpei proclaimed. practically singing as he made the observation.

“J-just cause like that kind of stuff doesn't...!” Minako paused, blushing furiously. “I mean, that's not even what I meant! That wasn't the point at all!!”

Junpei had a smile that went on for days. It was infuriating. Her confession, heartfelt as it was, had threatened to leave her more melancholy than she felt before. It was absolutely vital that Junpei Iori was never know how easily he could turn her mood around with a stupid joke and a lewd expression. Minako therefore made a point to keep her back to him, hiding from his stupid happy face and shit eating grin. There was no way she would give him the satisfaction of seeing her smile!

Minako took a moment to splash some water on her face. As she did so, bent over the water fountain, she heard a suspicious ‘click’ coming from Junpei's direction. Eyes widening in realization, Minako spun around just in time for Junpei to snap another picture on his camera phone, this one capturing her full frontal nudity and the humiliated look of dismay on her face. She quickly covered herself, glowering at him and shyly backing away from the camera.

“Jerk!! I take it all back! You suck! You suck so much! Pervert! Idiot!” Minako shrieked.

“Oh? Then why are you smiling?” Junpei asked, looking incredibly pleased with himself.

“I’m not!” Minako squeeled, even as she felt her lips involuntarily curve upward even as a deep red blush spread over her naked body.

“Pretty sure you are…” Junpei said, snapping another picture as Minako shrieked.

“I hate you!” She moaned.

“Man, I keep forgetting how this ‘Eden Syndrome’ thing your shadow is putting you under works. Not only do you have to be naked, but your shadow forces you to stay super embarrassed about it too, right? You can’t ever get used to being naked, in other words. Basically every pic…” Junpei said, snapping another picture for emphasis as she writhed in humilation. “...feels like the very first one anyone ever took of you in your birthday suit. Better yet, you still feel the shame of every other time people saw you naked. So every shot is just a little more humiliating than the last one!”

“Yes! Right! S-s- s-stop!!” Minako squeeked, utterly overwhelmed from the feeling of being photographed naked and haunted with the knowledge that so many more people had already seen her and photographed her doing all sorts of lewd things that day. “Put that phone away or...or...I-I’ll tell Chidori!!”

That was a bluff, pure and simple. Minako and the rest of SEES had been heartbroken seeing Junpei shut down as he did when they believed Chidori had been lost. And seeing his elation after her inexplicable resurrection and apparent amnesia was like looking at the face of the Sun. All of them were in full agreement that the dorky boy and the gothic lolita artist made an incredible couple and were privately rooting for the relationship to succeed. Minako certainly had no desire to be the cause of any rift between the two. Threatening to tell on Junpei was a paper tiger born out of a **** need to relieve her embarrassment and to keep his notoriously perverted nature in check during what was already an intensely humiliating and arousing experience. She had no plans to follow through on the threat, but Junpei didn't need to know that!

Unfortunately his reaction was not at all what she had hoped for. Junpei smiled at her, then casually typed a few commands on his phone. The device made a terrifying beeping sound, one Minako was dreadfully certain she recognized.

“Did…did you just send those pictures to someone???” She demanded, mortified beyond belief.

Junpei smiled, typed another command, then held the phone up to his cheek. Minako stared, humiliated and confused yet morbidly curious about what he was doing.

“Hey babe.” Junpei said with a smile, giving Minako a devilish grin as he spoke. “You get those pics I sent? Oh yeah, she was super embarrassed. Wish you could have seen the reaction. Looked like she might explode any second. Oh hell yeah, seeing her getting embarrassed and turned on at the same time is amazing. So, are those what you were looking for? Can you use them for your sketches? Well, yeah, obviously I’ll send more! Just think of me as your personal paparazzi agent, documenting the humiliation of SEES throughout the day! Oh, yeah, her curves are amazing. But she has got nothing on Mitsuru-senpai. I can’t wait to show you! Awww, babe, don’t say that. You have an amazing body! I like messing with them as much as anybody but you know I like seeing you most of all, right? Oh? OHH? That’s fair! Hahaha! Sure. If big boobs and asses is girls is what turns you on, I’ll be happy to show them off. Just as long as its okay that you stay my number one.”

Minako’s jaw dropped. There was no way this was what it looked like.

“Anyway, babe, Minako wanted to talk to you. I think she wants to tattle on me! I know, what a narc, right? I figured you'd like to explain things to her.” Junpei said before holding the phone out for Minako.

Minako stared in stunned silence. Slowly, carefully, she reached for the phone while hiding herself as much as possible. Cheeks burning, she raised the phone to her lips.

“H-hello?” She said in a tiny voice.

“Ah. Minako-san. Hello!” Chidori said, her voice heavy with laughter.

“Chidori-san….?” Minako said in disbelief. “What…what’s going on?”

“It sounds like you’ve been having a rather hard time the last few days. Being **** to be naked in public…playing with yourself while being filmed…even having sex in front of an audience! I can’t even imagine how humiliating it must be for you!” Chidori said, her voice sounded overjoyed rather than sympathetic.

“He TOLD you?” Minako yelped.

“Of course he did. You know Junpei can’t keep any secrets from me.” Chidori said, the smile evident in her voice. "Oh, sometimes he tries, but you know he's quite terrible at it."

“But…but he can’t do that!” Minako said. “Umm…ummm…Chidori-san, don’t be mad at him, okay? It isn’t his fault and he’s tried hard not to be a pervert. If you need to be mad at someone, please be mad at me, okay?”

“Minako-chan. Relax. I’m thrilled by this situation.” Chidori whispered.

“….you what?” Minako said in disbelief.

“I’ve been worried about him. All those cute SEES girls all around him, and he has to wait until he can make it to my apartment to get any relief. He has a very dirty mind, you know. It must be **** for him. This is probably a huge stress relief!” She said smugly.

“He told you…and you…” Minako trailed off. “A-aren’t you jealous?”

“Oh, I’ve been quite jealous of all of you for a long time. But Junpei has said, and has backed up his words with ‘action’, that he finds me more attractive than all of you by far. And even if that wasn’t true, you know he’s a good, loyal boy at heart, pervert or not. He won’t do anything with any of you. Not without permission, at least.” Chidori said the last part with a hungry note in her voice.

“….That’s…that’s…that’s not fair!” Minako wailed.

She received a full minute of Chidori cackling over the phone. “Oh, I see. You were hoping to be saved from his perverted mind by using me as a shield? You didn’t think I’d encourage him, did you?”

“Well…” Minako said with a blush. “Goddammit. Are there any women in this town who are STRAIGHT?”

“At this point I very much doubt it.” Chidori said in all seriousness. “Blame it on the Dark Hour. When your darkest thoughts come out to play every night and intermingle with the whole city your preferences tend to get a little muddled.”

“…..” Minako sat stunned.

“Oh, I suppose you didn’t realize. Yes. I remember. A little. Junpei has avoided some of my questions. I know what happened to me is a painful subject, and there are undoubtedly parts I’m better off not knowing about my personal experiences. But SEES and Tartarus? Oh yes. As I mentioned, Junpei isn’t good at keeping secrets around me. And he does love having someone to tell his adventures to. I remember a few details from my dreams. I know more from Junpei. Enough to know you all tried to help me and that I was ungrateful. I am sorry for that, even if I don’t recall much of that time.” Chidori said.

“That’s…” Minako paused. “I’m…glad. I had mixed feelings about keeping you in the dark.”

“Thank you. But let’s not get too far off topic. My point here is that I am as much a pervert as dear Junpei there. I’ve always had a love for the human form. I study it every day while I sketch, naturally. But I’m also Junpei’s soul mate. Very literally, I used my life **** to save his life. Part of me, what you call my Persona, merged with his soul. Unfortunately for you, I suspect my own perversions have been amplified by his own thoughts. And I wasn’t exactly a pure hearted innocent soul before all this happened. I’m afraid I’m only going to encourage him to make your school lives as humiliating as his dirty little mind can manage. Right now I’m busy making a new portrait with the naked photos he sends me of all of you. I’m looking forward to creating a tribute to your humiliation!”

“….” Minako pouted. “That’s not fair!”

“You said that. But I thought you were concerned this might hurt our relationship. Aren’t you relieved that we can enjoy your humiliation as a couple and ogle you all together? Unlike Junpei, I’ve realized I vastly prefer women with curvier bodies than my own. And what luck that all of you outmatch me in that area! Its going to be so fun seeing you all naked!”

Minako was seriously starting to rethink how ‘cute’ she considered the couple to be.

“Anyway, I’ll be here enjoying your pictures while I sketch. Or while I touch myself. Its going to be a long day. Feel free to think about me getting off on your suffering the next time something humiliating happens!” Chidori said cheerfully.

“….W…Will you…Will you send me a copy of the pictures at least?” Minako choked out, feeling embarrassed and aroused and very aware of her nakedness.

“Oh sweetie. Of course we will. You’ll be a good girl and send us back your reaction to seeing yourself like this, won’t you?” Chidori asked.

“…yes.” Minako admitted, mortified that she meant it.

“Then I’ll let you go. Get to class. I don’t want Junpei to miss any lessons. And you certainly don’t want to miss being naked in front of your homeroom.” Chidori said.

The phone went dead. Minako dumbly handed the phone back to Junpei. What the hell just happened?

“Your girlfriend is a bigger pervert than you are.” Minako declared.

“I know! Isn’t she great?” Junpei asked.

“I’m going to class now…” Minako said, blushing intensely. “Aegis will have to find her own way back, I guess. And I want to give Yukari her space.”

“Sounds good. Oh, and Minako?” Junpei asked.

“What?” Minako said in exasperation.

“Say cheese.” Junpei smirked.

“Junpei…you put that camera away…you are not going to…Junpei, I said put it down. Don’t you dare…” Minako demanded, to no avail.

A moment later a embarrassed, naked Minako was fleeing down the hallway, squeaking her protests as Junpei Iori pursued, camera in hand, snapping one picture after another, her humiliation rising with every click of the phone.