#deck of 52

Chapter 3: A Lesson in Forgiveness

Pairing: Haru Okumura/Makoto Niijima

Contains descriptions of violence

Makoto enjoyed being on the roof.

It was peaceful, a place she could get away during the long days without anyone observing. The fresh air, the flowerbeds Haru had worked lovingly on; the entire atmosphere of the place helped to calm her nerves.

It was also, of course, the only place on the property she could smoke a cigarette without getting caught.

She didn’t like that she smoked. Someone convinced her it helped with stress, so she opted to try a few. After realizing they didn’t work, she tried to quit, but the addiction had set in very snugly. Her sister was eternally stressed over work, so she let herself suffer.

Sae didn’t need to see her go through the withdrawal. She could wait a little bit longer to quit. Her sister was more important.

She was pulled out of her thoughts by the squeal of the door, and her head whipped over to see her lovely fluffy-haired girlfriend.

“Hey, Mako-chan. How are you feeling?” Haru asked lovingly.

Makoto sighed. “Not fantastic, all things considered. How about you?”

“Probably better, but I’m not here for me. I’m here for you. Do you... wanna talk about what happened?” Makoto exhaled a plume of smoke, and dropped the cigarette in her makeshift ashtray.

Chapter 2: Slumber Party

Pairing: Sumire Yoshizawa/Futaba Sakura

Contains spoilers for P5R

“How long do you think it’ll take?”

“Unfortunately, it will take four hours.”

“ FOUR HOURS ??”

“... Yeah. And most of that will be sitting around because it will be factory resetting itself over and over again.”

“Fantastic.”

Futaba loved repair and modding work. She liked taking apart electronics and putting them back together, fixing their bugs and reworking them to do other things. She had a small but growing collection of modded GameBoys that she’d installed backlights in, and a few custom made cartridges for the SNES that could read ROMs. She’d done bug fixes for Android and Apple phones alike, done commission work for homebrew mods on various gaming consoles, and one time whipped up a functional NES emulator.

This would not be like her other repairs or mods though. Due to the nature of the glitchiness, all she could do was remove all the data from the phone and back it up on her personal computer before factory resetting it a few times, hoping for the best. She didn’t have a gimmick or app to solve this, no coding or fixing. It was a firmware error.