Fanfic / Start Again

The fight against the Holy Grail ends with the Phantom Thieves' defeat, and all of them fading away. They then awake before becoming the Phantom Thieves, and have a chance to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.

The problem? They each get their memories at different points in time.

Start Again is a Persona 5 Peggy Sue Series Fic by Scedasticity, having each of the Phantom Thieves trying to fix the future on their own without any way of knowing if all of their comrades remember. This leads to several cases of What If? that turn several important things on their heads. It will, of course, contain spoilers for the main game.

There are currently six entries, along with a timeline/character primer:

• The Count of Monte Cristo: After losing to the Holy Grail and fading away in Shibuya, Haru wakes up at the beginning of the school year — of her first year of high school. It's not ideal, but she'll do what she has to. As soon as she figures out what that is.
• Escher: Futaba has a weird sense of deja vu, until she doesn't.
• Echoes in the Void: Goro fails to take control of his destiny, but maybe that's okay.
• Valor and Discretion: There are times to keep secrets and times to share secrets and times to create bigger secrets, and Ryuji just hopes he's identifying them correctly.
• medjed: can hack ur brain: February-March with a newly merged team: an overview. Focuses on both Haru's and Futaba's teams coming together before the events of Valor and Discretion.
• Collateral: Makoto has a lot to catch up on in a hurry. The concussion IS NOT HELPING.
• Start Again Timeline: A timeline to help make sense of the series of events and know who's part of the new team.

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Start Again contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents:
  • Several cases present in canon carry over, including the Magarios and Kunikazu Okumura. Both of these examples are targets for changes of heart by the new Phantom Thieves, with Haru in particular working with Makoto and Akechi to not only make Kunikazu Okumura a better person much earlier, but also to stop him from joining the Conspiracy and getting wrapped up with Shido.
  • Hifumi's mother is willing to do anything to make Hifumi famous. When Hifumi tries to protest this, her mother slaps her, causing Hifumi to run away from home.
• Achievements in Ignorance
  • Downplayed example in The Count of Monte Cristo, where Haru blackmails Akechi into taking her into the Metaverse to get the Nav and stop him from killing Wakaba by threatening to reveal that he's Shido's bastard son. It's later revealed that at the time Haru approached Akechi, he was planning to approach Shido and demonstrate his powers, only to deem it too risky thanks to Haru knowing his secret. This means Haru prevented the Conspiracy from gaining their most dangerous asset and prevented the mental shutdowns and politically-motivated breakdowns from her timeline.
  • Yusuke, to deal with the stress of being (apparently) alone remembering the future and being stuck under Madarame's thumb, paints a self-portrait of himself as a cognition. Turns out the painting functions as a portal to its counterpart in Madarame's Palace.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Hifumi Togo, Wakaba Isshiki, Shiho Suzui, and Yuuki Mishima awaken to Personas in this timeline when they didn't in canon.
  • Akechi's Wild Card abilities are not left stunted as they were in the original timeline, and he learns how to acquire other Personas like Joker did. He also obtains Medusa, which enables Akechi to induce fear in his targets rather than madness.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Haru, big time. In the original game, she suffered from Late Character Syndrome. Here, she is the first character whose perspective we see, and she immediately makes a huge impact by blackmailing Akechi for the Meta-Nav, which has the unintended but major effect of preventing him from joining Shido's conspiracy and convincing him to genuinely work with the Phantom Thieves instead.
• Adaptational Heroism: Goro Akechi, thanks to Haru's attempts to blackmail him, decides not to reveal his powers to Shido and instead starts working with Haru and Makoto. He's still very much an Anti-Hero and a clear-cut example of Reformed, but Not Tamed, but he never becomes the murderous Black Mask and is overall a much better person than he was in the original timeline (best exemplified by how he grows to genuinely care for Haru and Makoto and appreciate them as teammates.)
• Adaptational Intelligence: Ryuji displays this in his story. He is still somewhat brash in nature (and fully aware of it), but when he discovers that he is thrust back into the past in November (before starting Shujin) without the other members of the Phantom Thieves to support or even contact, he starts thinking and planning things out more carefully, and also tries to be as discreet as possible so that he can try and save Shiho and Ann from Kamoshida while minimizing negative attention to himself. Ryuji's mother compliments him on his maturity with regards to how he's approaching the problem of Kamoshida, and Futaba is shocked that Ryuji has known since November and managed to avoid telling anyone else. Something that the story lampshades early on:
  Ryuji knew he had the reputation of being the least discreet Phantom Thief. And yeah, he'd sort of outed them to Makoto before she joined. And maybe made everyone else nervous a couple other times. And he did come charging in and ask Ann if she remembered right in front of Shiho. And the rest of 3-C.
  
  But once it was clear she didn't remember…
  
  Well. It was easy to keep a secret when you didn't have anyone to talk about it with.
• Adaptational Name Change: Futaba's last name remains "Isshiki" due to Wakaba being Spared by the Adaptation.
• Agents Dating: In medjed: can hack ur brain, Wakaba makes a conspicuously public romantic gesture towards Sojiro. Futaba concludes they're fake dating to throw the conspiracy off and asks her teammates how she's supposed to react to help sell the act.
• Arranged Marriage: When he sees Haru is making unauthorized trips, her father tries to rein her in by having her engaged to a vice-president in his company, who is only marrying her to improve his standing. Goro is able to end the engagement by finding the man's Shadow and giving him a rage fugue during a dinner with Kunikazu.
• Ascended Extra: Hifumi, Shiho, Mishima, and Wakaba all become Phantom Thieves.
• Bad Powers, Good People: Akechi falls under this trope (albeit as an example of Reformed, but Not Tamed) in this timeline, specifically with regards to his Hate Plague abilities. Makoto and Haru are both understandably uncomfortable with his ability to cause "rage fugues." However, they also acknowledge that the rage fugues can be very useful in a battle if utilized wisely by setting enemy combatants against each other, and they have utilized that tactic in important battles. He later gains access to "fear fugues" which causes his targets to experience intense terror.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • When running away from her Evil Uncle, Futaba runs into Yusuke, who uses his phone to take them into the Metaverse for safety.
  • The end of Valor and Discretion has the combined forces of Haru's and Futaba's teams arriving to help Ryuji's group against Principal Kobayakawa's Shadow.
• Boarding School of Horrors: Jikken Academy. They encourage students to spy on each other in the dorms, confiscating items they deem 'unfit' for the students to have, including money- with a student even losing his only keepsake of his dead sister because they thought it was improper for boys to own ribbons. Outside of that, Akechi is punished by having him run laps around the track in his bare feet, which bleed so badly it soaks through his socks. The principal's Palace has the school represented as a laboratory with the students being vicious beasts (at-risk teens with "sub-optimal" or "undesirable" backgrounds) that the lab (school) uses vivisection and all sorts of ghastly surgery (abuse) to transform them into horrific, but controllable chimeras ("productive members of society").
• Call-Back:
  • Yusuke painting a portal to the Metaverse is very similar to how the Demon Painter painted a door to the Velvet Room.
  • Wakaba's Shadow says that the technology to breach her Palace through the Metaverse came from some declassified documents from an incident 20 years ago.
• The Cameo: In the SIU Director's palace is a freak show containing various individuals. Among them are an "idealistic fool who doesn't know when to give up"^note Toranosuke Yoshida, "mannish girl detective"^note Naoto Shirogane, and "uppity rich bitch"^note Mitsuru Kirijo.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • Haru definitely didn't expect that approaching Akechi at the start of their first year would lead to Akechi never joining Shido in the first place.
  • In an effort to deal with Kaneshiro, Akechi starts hitting him with repeated 'fear fugues' to make him panic in front of his men. It has the unexpected effect of making Kaneshiro paranoid enough to try attacking Haru's place to get at the Nijima sisters. Thankfully, the confrontation ends with Kaneshiro's arrest.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: Yusuke blurts out that Hifumi's mother has been fixing her matches to Hifumi's face. When she confronts him about it later, he compounds his error by rambling about whether it is happening or will happen.
• Dramatic Irony: The later installments are full of this, as each new Thief wonders if anyone else remembers. In addition, each of the non-Haru-group Phantom Thieves that remember the future initially think that Akechi is still working for the conspiracy, unaware that he never joined thanks to Haru's actions in The Count of Monte Cristo. This is cleared up when the Thieves actually meet up.
• Dungeon Bypass: The door from the first Path of Mementos to the second Path is blocked, as Haru's group doesn't have public notoriety yet. Akechi has been able to to get to the second Path regardless by running on the railway tracks, much to Makoto and Haru's shock.
• Extreme Doormat: A side effect of Kunikazu Okumura's change of heart is that he overcompensates to make up for what he used to be; no indication if he'll return to normal.
• Frame-Up: The Conspiracy tries to make Wakaba's death look like an overdose of drugs taken from the stress of both her research and raising Futaba.
• The Freakshow: The SIU Director's Palace has one that describes how he really thinks about the individuals in his life, whether co-workers like Sae or conspirators like Shido. Interestingly, the cognitions in the Freak Show look exactly like they do in real life, with the only "freak" quality being the biased descriptions the director makes.
• Future Me Scares Me: Thanks to Haru approaching Akechi and therefore preventing him from ever joining Shido, Akechi never becomes a murderer and is a far better person as a result. He sees the version of him from the original timeline as evil and psychotic.
• The Ghost: Morgana is believed to have remembered the future since before January 2014, since he's the only plausible one to have written the note that warned Futaba about Wakaba's potential murder. However, he has yet to appear in the series so far.
• Heel–Face Turn: Akechi is a subversion. He never turns from heel to face because Haru never gives him the opportunity to become a heel and then makes it smarter for him to become a face.
• Highly-Visible Ninja: Hifumi's Phantom Thief outfit is based on a stage ninja.
• Historical Domain Character:
  • Hifumi's Persona is Hangaku Gozen, a onna-musha warrior who played a major role in the Kennin Rebellion.
  • Wakaba has Hypatia, an ancient Egyptian philosopher, for their Persona.
  • Shiho's Persona, La Maupin, is based on Julie d'Aubigny, a French opera singer from the seventeenth century.
• I'm Standing Right Here: Goro and Makoto discuss on the chat why Haru knows so much about the Metaverse, and why she is going through so much trouble to take her father's heart, despite his corruption and trying to force her into an arranged marriage, with Goro suggesting that her concern for him is from lifelong conditioning. Haru then responds that they're discussing this on their Phantom Thief chat, meaning she can read the entire conversation.
• Insistent Terminology: Goro prefers "rage fugue" over "psychotic breakdown" to describe Loki's ability against Shadows. Makoto admits that it's more fitting because "psychotic" is a clinical term and doesn't match up with the observed behavior of the victims.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Most of the SIU Director's cognitions of his acquaintances are extremely dismissive and cruel, but his judgement of Shido's character as a man who claims to champion law and order but is actually a criminal is spot-on, if hypocritical.
• Lesser of Two Evils: Madarame. His neglect and plagiarism of Yusuke and his other students is unquestionably cruel and unfair, but compared to the other problems the Phantom Thieves have to deal with, which include a renegade Metaverse assassin, a violent sexual predator, a mob boss, the sociopathic leader of a Government Conspiracy, and Hifumi's mother, whose toxic behavior is rapidly escalating due to Yusuke's accidental actions causing changes in the timeline, his cruelty is at least stable and predictable, and Yusuke's own actions have butterflied away the worst of the damage. Therefore, dealing with him is fairly low on the Phantom Thieves' to-do list.
• Named by the Adaptation: The SIU Director is given the surname Uchiyama.
• Necessary Fail: As much as Haru loathes the idea, she has to let Kamoshida's Palace remain standing, since it's the earliest known location where Akira and Ryuji meet Morgana, and it might be the only place where Ryuji, Ann, and Akira can regain their Personas and/or memories. All she can do is set up a few rumors about Kamoshida's true disgusting nature and try to dissuade her yearmates from volleyball.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The Conspiracy trying to use Ryuji and Yuuki as guinea pigs for their Mementos experiment not only restores Ann's (who, along with Shiho, tagged along to the boys' "internship interview") memories of the future but also leads to Shiho and Yuuki awakening their Personas.
• Not Me This Time: Early into their team-up, Makoto accuses Akechi of inflicting a rage fugue on a man who drove his car through a window. However, Akechi denies it, and Haru mentions drugs were found in the man's system.
• Party Scattering: A variant. The Phantom Thieves are sent back to the past in Tokyo (with the exception of Akira, who would be in his home town), but they regain their memories of the future at different moments in the past.
• Pet the Dog: Akechi's attitude towards Jikken Academy. Even before he starts to warm up thanks to Haru and Makoto, he is genuinely dedicated to improving the frankly atrocious conditions in the school and the lives of his classmates (who he doesn't even like personally), and the favors he calls from them revolve around helping him in the Jikken palace. Even after Haru arranges things to get Akechi transferred to Shujin, with Jikken no longer affecting him personally, he is still committed to solving the problems in the academy out of principle.
• Point of Divergence: Several:
  • Haru uses Goro to acquire the MetaNav app and convinces him to work with her and Makoto in exchange for information. Not only does she steal her father's heart when his twisted desires were starting (keeping him from joining the Conspiracy), but she also stops Goro from joining the Conspiracy as well, deciding their assistance was better.
  • Thanks to Haru's suggestion, Akechi learns how to gain more Personas.
  • Futaba is warned about the threat towards her mother by a note from Morgana (and her own half-memories) and bugs Wakaba's phone just in case. Without Goro, the Conspiracy tries to kill Wakaba through the real world and frame it as an overdose, only for Futaba to overhear the confrontation and tell Sojiro, who rushes to Wakaba and gets her into the hospital in time. This ultimately results in Wakaba surviving, and joining the Thieves as Archive.
  • Without either Goro's powers or Wakaba's cognitive psience research, the Conspiracy attempts to learn to use Mementos by tossing teenagers into the other world, with Shujin Academy as one of their sources. This directly leads to Shiho and Mishima gaining their own Personas, and the complicit Principal Kobayakawa undergoing a change of heart. In addition, without a mental shutdown-inducing assassin, the Conspiracy has to use more mundane methods of dealing with their targets. It's mentioned in passing that a politician who originally died of a mental shutdown was instead killed in a 'car accident'.
  • The Thieves setting Sae on the path to investigate corruption in her workplace leads to Makoto being attacked by Kaneshiro. The Thieves' response to that ends in Kaneshiro getting arrested over a year early.
  • Hifumi actually standing up to her mother (repeatedly) leads to the woman going from a Mementos denizen to a Palace ruler.
• Properly Paranoid: After finding a warning letter to her mother that her continued research will lead to her death, Futaba bugs Wakaba's phone to keep an eye on her. It comes in handy when the conspiracy sends their men to try and kill Wakaba with an overdose, which Futaba overhears and calls Sojiro to rescue her, allowing Wakaba to be brought to a hospital and saving her life, although Wakaba does end up in a coma for a while.
• Public Domain Character:
  • All of Akechi's original Personas fit the bill so far. Defarge is based on Madame Defarge, one of the principle antagonists of A Tale of Two Cities while Medea and Medusa are both figures from Classical Mythology.
  • Mishima's Persona is Eulenspiegel, a Karmic Trickster from German folklore.
• Reformed, but Not Tamed: While Haru is able to get Akechi on their side, stopping him from joining the Conspiracy and becoming an assassin, he still finds rage fugues the best solution to most of his problems. He also despises Shido just as much as ever, but given how much of an asshat Shido is nobody can blame him.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Psychotic Breakdowns still occur all over Tokyo, which Haru chalks up to Akechi performing them for Shido like before. However, unbeknownst to Haru, her interference actually prevented Akechi from ever approaching his father, so the breakdowns are really the result of Akechi inflicting 'rage fugues' on whoever happens to piss him off.
• Sarcastic Confession: After Yusuke comes to in the past, his fellow pupils ask him why he's acting so weird. Yusuke responds by telling the truth in a sarcastic manner: one senpai left, another was hit by a train, Madarame was arrested, a golden cup conquered Tokyo, and he's not sure if that was a dream or if he's dreaming now as the cup kills him.
• Saying Too Much: At Kosei's cultural festival, Yusuke meets Hifumi and recognizes her as a future classmate and confidant of Akira's. He then spots Ann past her and ends up distractedly mentioning Hifumi's mother's rigging games and idol aspirations before leaving, which Hifumi wouldn't have learned about until a year later. His teammates later poke fun at him for this tendency.
  prometheus_unbound changed Fox's name to SelfPortraitAsAnInformationLeak
• Secret-Keeper:
  • Sojiro knows about the Metaverse and about Futaba's and Wakaba's exploits in the Metaverse, though he isn't happy about it.
  • Kiyomi and Hitoshi, Yusuke's fellow students under Madarame, both know he and Hifumi are Phantom Thieves, thanks to being there when they went into and out of the Metaverse through Yusuke's self-portrait.
  • Kana, Futaba's friend, is eventually told everything following her parents' change of heart.
• Shared Dream: It slowly becomes clear that several members of the time-displaced Thieves (and Akechi) have been sharing dreams with Akira, who currently only remembers the future when he's asleep.
• Serial Escalation: Tokyo doesn't just have 7 palaces like in the game, as anyone with a distorted desire that can impact a location can form one. Goro and Makoto estimate that every high school has at least one palace connected to it, due to the stress it brings for both students and teachers.
• Simultaneous Arcs: The events of Collateral take place during Valor and Discretion, explaining why Makoto and Haru weren't at school while Ryuji and his team worked to deal with the Conspiracy and Kobayakawa's Palace.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Thanks to Haru recruiting Akechi and stopping him from joining Shido's conspiracy, she is able to work alongside Makoto and Akechi to change Kunikazu Okumura's heart much earlier than in the original timeline, causing Shido's conspiracy to lose interest in him. This, combined with the fact that Akechi hasn't joined Shido and become the Black Mask, ensures that Kunikazu stays alive and has his morality restored.
  • Wakaba doesn't die thanks to the Conspiracy lacking Akechi and the bug Futaba placed on her mother's phone letting her hear their goon poisoning her. Wakaba ends up in a coma between a mix of the drugs and her Shadow locking her up in her Palace, though Futaba and her team are able to save her. She even gets her own Persona out of it.
• Start My Own: A benevolent example, as the scattered Phantom Thieves are unsure if their teammates currently remember the future and thus have to start their own team to deal with their individual crises. Haru, Futaba and Yusuke, and Ryuji and Ann each start their own groups before coming together.
• Taking You with Me: Haru sets up an informational dead man switch with Makoto early on so that if Akechi betrays her, she'll have allegations leaked that he's Shido's bastard son and it will be bye-bye Akechi. It's then deconstructed when Haru nearly gets herself killed in Kamoshida's Palace, forcing Akechi to come rescue her because the dead man switch does not necessarily require Akechi to actually be involved with Haru's death.
• Talking in Your Dreams: The Phantom Thieves that remember the original timeline (and Akechi) will often speak to Akira while dreaming.
• Technology Marches On: In-Universe and Inverted. In the old timeline, Yusuke only got a smartphone thanks to his art senpai Hitoshi buying him one as a gift for getting into Kosei. In Escher, which takes place while he is in middle school, Yusuke still has a flip phone that cannot run apps. After falling into the Metaverse through his self-portrait, the Meta-Nav instead shows up as a speed dial entry, which takes him to Madarame's palace if he's at the atelier or Mementos elsewhere.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Actually averted with Akechi and the members of the original Phantom Thieves (Haru, Futaba, Yusuke, Makoto) who remember the old timeline. While there is some occasional abrasiveness, it has nothing to do with Akechi's actions from the original timeline, and they are mostly able to cooperate and coordinate with each other without problems. Futaba outright states that she doesn't hold Future Evil Akechi's actions against the new timeline Goro, and Goro himself regards "Future Evil Akechi" with contempt and considers him a psycho.
• Token Adult: Wakaba after awakening from her coma and obtaining her Persona.
• Uncanny Valley: Madarame finds Yusuke's self-portrait of himself (which he based off his cognitive self from Madarame's Palace) as a painting deeply unsettling due to its resemblance to how he himself sees Yusuke as a means of profit. He even refuses to plagiarize it and tells Yusuke that it's personal to the latter and he should keep it hidden in his room.
• Unwitting Test Subject: The Conspiracy has been drugging high school students and sending them into the Metaverse. Of course, one of their potential subjects ends up being Ryuji.
• Wham Line:
  • COMC chapter 4:
    GA: Well
    GA: No
    GA: Shido won't arrange a transfer
    The 'typing' indicator appeared and disappeared several times.
    GA: He has no reason to, since I don't actually work for him.
  • From the final chapter of Escher, when Futaba is having a dream of Akira:
    Futaba: Yeah, and I bet you're just overflowing with honesty—
    Akira: Well, no, but I never remember a thing about the future after I wake up. Even the dreams are just bits and pieces.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Akechi's default solution to any problem is "rage fugue". The Thieves' default solution to any problem is a change of heart.

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