It would have occurred in the first scene of Chapter 58 ("Dance of Fools"), right after Chie wakes up and finds her phone...
The faceplate blinked at her with an alert of a new text message, and no less than four new voice messages, which made her swallow thickly. Avoiding Yousuke was one thing; that was for his own good. But ignoring him was a different matter entirely, one that didn't sit well with her...and that she knew she wouldn't be able to do for long, if at all.
She missed him too much for that.
So she flipped open her phone and dialed for her voicemail, preparing herself for a tirade of furious and hateful epithets.
Yousuke was more than capable of verbally cutting her to the quick; she'd had enough arguments with him in her day to know that much. But as she listened to the start of the first message – time-stamped at seven forty-four, not long after she would have run out of the apartment – she found that she couldn't hear any of the venom in his voice that she had been expecting. Rather, he sounded flustered, and confused, and decidedly very scared:
“Chie, I'm sorry,” he said, his voice quiet and only half-enunciating, as though the words were being swallowed by his throat. “I know I'm an idiot. And whatever it is that I did, I'm sorry. Please, just...come back. Come back, and we can talk about this. Please.” He gave a low breath, injured by a sudden sniff. “Call me back, okay?”
She pressed her lips together, feeling a low, burning shame heat her cheeks. But her Persona's words echoed in her inner ear (Continuing, hard), and she knew that if he was going to be free, then she was going to have to be strong. So she deleted this message and went on to the next, which had come in an hour later, at nearly nine o'clock. He sounded much less lost, now, his tone clipped and more decisive:
“This is ridiculous...! I can't just sit around here waiting for you anymore.” She heard the scraping sound of something moving against the mouthpiece, as if he were shifting the phone from one ear to the other. And below that, the echoey sound of his steps on metal stairs. “Listen, I'm gonna get my bike. If you get this message, please, call me right back. And if you get home before I do, don't-don't leave! All right? Chie? ...Fuck.”
She could hear the brewing anger and frustration in his voice now, and it wasn't a message she wanted to listen to again, so she deleted that one, too.
The third message was marked as incoming another hour later – at ten twenty-one – and if she'd thought he was starting to brew in the last message, he was positively boiling in this one:
“Gah-! Dammit! How fucking hard is it for you to answer your fucking phone?! I've been riding around this stupid town for the last hour-and-a-half looking for your sorry ass!” He growled then, sharply, like a verbal swing at her guts. “I swear, you'd better be lying in a ditch somewhere-!”
Chie hit the DELETE button nearly before he'd finished speaking, at the same time biting down on her bottom lip. There was the anger she'd been expecting, in spades. Not that she didn't deserve it (she did), but hearing him actually say those words with such fury made her flinch. She considered just getting rid of the last of the messages, too, except she automatically pressed the NEXT button, and it started up before she could stop it.
This fourth one was time-stamped not two minutes after the previous, but where she was ready for another denunciation, she found his tone now to be markedly different – frightened, distressed, regretful – and it made her pause:
“I'm sorry. I'm sorry; I didn't mean that. Chie, I'm so sorry...!” He gave a muffled and sucking breath into the phone, and she could almost hear the anxious, terrified spit bubbling over his lips. “Look, if-if you don't want to talk to me, that's...that's fine. But at least let me know where you are? Please? I just want to know that you're okay. I don't want this to be....” Another break, and another breath, while he seemed to swallow that left-unspoken thought. “I just want you to be okay,” he muttered again, and she had to close her eyes as she actually heard his voice crack. “Please be okay. Just...please...let me know you're okay.” He paused then, the rambling utterances of frustration and sadness coming to a stop with a long and audible breath in her ear, something like a sigh. And as his voice trailed off and was replaced by a deafening and deadening electronic click, she cupped her hand over her mouth, as her tears started afresh.
Damn it, why was he doing this? Why didn't he just let her go? Why did he have to make this so much harder for both of them by fighting against her like this, when he'd already seen, already felt, what she'd done?
Why couldn't he see that he was better off without her?
She wiped at her eyes with the back of her free hand, just as her phone buzzed again in the other. She looked down at it, blinking through her tears as she focused on the display. She had thought that these new text messages would be from Yousuke, too...but they weren't. They were from Yukiko.
I really liked the progression of emotion for Yousuke's character, here, which I considered realistic, given the situation. And I liked Chie's reactions a lot, too. I spent a big chunk of effort and time trying to make those messages come out just right for the scene....
The problem was that it presented a very different Yousuke than the one who appears in the later scene, and I needed for him to be take-charge and determined and desperate in that moment when he comes to her door. He needed to confront her as an equal (almost as a dominant), refusing to accept any of her excuses; the Yousuke that leaves the messages on her phone didn't convey that properly, in the end.
This was an example of a moment that took me a long time to write to the point where I was happy with it...only to edit it out because it didn't match what was going on in the rest of the chapter. Unfortunately, that happens a lot with stories that are as long as "1 More Chance!" has turned out to be. I've had this baby plotted to the end nearly since the beginning, and I know where I'm going, but sometimes it's the little moments that make us stumble.
For those of you still waiting for Chapter 60 at this time, maybe this will help give a little bit of insight into why it's taking so long. (There were about a half-dozen moments like the one above that I wrote, rewrote, and then ended up editing out from the final version. Those might still pop up elsewhere, though, so I think I'll leave them out of the dump for now.)
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