A/N: Older fic. Second in a series exploring character-element relationships. (The first, 'Thermodynamics', is in chapter 2 of 'Short Circuits' and focuses on Yukiko. Chie will be the focus of part three.)
Many thanks to Rayless Night for her suggestions and corrections :)
At age five years (and six months and thirteen days), her parents die in a car crash in Paris.
Naoto is in Japan at the time, at her grandfather's estate, and Yakushiji attempts to soften the blow; tells her that her mother and father are no longer here and yet will always be with her. Naoto remembers Yakushiji holding her hand at the funeral and decides he should know better. Something either is or isn't, can only be true or false - and this means her parents are gone.
When Naoto tells him this, he stays quiet for a long time.
At age eight years (and two months and two days), she finds the gadgets her father sent her in a box under her bed. Some of them don't work. They can be fixed, Naoto decides, and she asks Yakushiji for a book on electronics. After some work, she not only repairs them but improves on the old designs. The badge now functions as a camera, the telescope pen as a flashlight.
Electronics are important because they make sense, more than anything else she's ever encountered. More than the children at school. Naoto doesn't understand why they laugh at her when she's tried her best to be their friend.
But people are untidy and not worth understanding. They try to be too many things at once, and Naoto wishes they were like her circuits: binary, zeros and ones.
At age eleven years (and one month, ten days and seventeen hours) Naoto officially assists her grandfather with her first murder case. There are things he won't allow her to see - an irrational choice, since deductions cannot be made without evidence - but she is thrilled to help, to be useful and show people all the things she knows.
Her grandfather's role is to track down a man who killed another man, and with the assistance of the police, the search is soon concluded. The culprit says it was in self-defense, that the other man had a knife. Given that one man is dead and the other is not, Naoto doesn't see the relevance.
Is this man a murderer, she asks her grandfather before the trial she isn't allowed to attend.
He pauses, his face hard as stone. It is difficult to know.
This is nonsensical. There is one meaning of right and one meaning of wrong, and Naoto doesn't understand how anyone could claim otherwise when the difference is so obvious. It isn't idealism, no matter what her grandfather says. It's logic.
By age thirteen years (and three months, fourteen days, eight hours and twenty-seven minutes), the world is a neat and regimented structure of black and white lines. On this side is one thing, on that side is another. In this manner, all things are diametrically opposed. Light and dark, weak and strong. Girl and boy.
Girls are weak: light. Boys are strong: dark. Naoto chooses the only sensible option.
The Shirogane name is in demand and by now Naoto conducts his own cases. The solutions are frequently trivial, an observation he presents to the police officers. They simply need to pay more attention - to understand right and wrong, true and false. They do not appear to appreciate this information.
Naoto concludes that adults lack the most basic and most vital of traits: strength of conviction. Time and again he has to insist that yes, he is right, that no other theory is logical. He does not make mistakes. Again, the police do not welcome his explanations and complaints are made.
There are always shades of grey, Naoto, his grandfather tells him on a rare visit home.
The cases are solved nonetheless, so the complaints are meaningless.
At age sixteen years (and five months and it sets his teeth on edge that he can't be certain how many days), Naoto looks up at his own face, eyes glowing yellow, and thinks this doesn't make sense.
In retrospect, it's all downhill from there.
At age sixteen years (and five months and ten days but counting them no longer helps), Naoto concludes that the fault lies with her.
She contradicted herself. She isn't a boy (even though she is) yet insisted otherwise. Something either is, or isn't. If that one fact changes, so does everything.
Kujikawa comes to see her the day after the team pull her out of the television, perhaps under the assumption that Naoto is lonely. She isn't (even though she is).
Sukuna-Hikona's unusual, Kujikawa tells her with a smile. No elemental strengths, no weaknesses. Just light and dark.
Naoto thinks, at least that makes sense.
At age sixteen years (and six months, approximately), Naoto decides her new colleagues are even more contradictory than the adults.
Yukiko is graceful and feminine yet fights with fire. Chie, a girl, has more strength than anyone else on the team. Yosuke's clumsy and tactless but genuinely wants the best for his friends. Rise is two people at the same time, perhaps many more. Teddie is human and not. Kanji, pierced and tattooed, likes to sew dolls for his mother's store. Souji is so many things at once, shifting and amorphous, it makes Naoto's head ache.
That's just how people are, he says, then grins. Even you, Naoto.
At age sixteen years (and she's stopped counting the rest), Sukuna-Hikona buzzes inside her head, calls bright bursts of light and swirling clouds of darkness - but he also tells her, not everything is this way.
Naoto - girl and boy, adult and child, perfect and flawed - might just believe him.
The black and white lines she spent years constructing blur into monochrome, and this new, confusing, ambiguous world unsettles her. It doesn't make sense, no matter what logic she applies or which shapes she tries to twist it into. But perhaps it doesn't need to. Perhaps it isn't even just shades of grey.
The team sits at the table at Junes; chatting and laughing, squabbling and teasing, discordant and harmonious, all at once. Naoto watches them quietly, searching for colors.