Multichapter Persona 4 fanfic retelling the events of Persona 4 from the alternating perspectives of Kanji Tatsumi and Naoto Shirogane. It is very, very, very long, and moves into slow burn Kanji/Naoto over time. I wrote many fics preceding this one, but they have all been lost to time. To the best of my knowledge, I started writing this in the spring/summer of 2012, and a very large portion of this was written during the final year of my university undergraduate degree. Due to mental health concerns, I took an approved reduced courseload during the regular year, and ended up with very long (3-4 hour) breaks between classes where I remained on campus for lack of anything better to do. Originally, the first few Kanji chapters up to him joining the team were to be a small standalone fic, with a few assorted one shots (Chapter 81-82 were originally a one shot, for example). Then I said well, why don't I just rewrite the whole thing. The whole damn game. That was the devil talking, by the way.
Even at the very beginning, this fic was written with pen and paper: almost exclusively with an Apple Green Lamy Safari 2012 LE in fine, on Clairefontaine notebooks, with Private Reserve Sherwood Green Fast-Dry ink. The ink and the paper are both dogshit and I don't recommend them to anyone. I still have the pen, though the early handwritten drafts were destroyed. But I digress.
I had played Persona 4 some time earlier, and it made a huge impact on me, especially my favourite characters, Kanji and Naoto. At the time I was struggling with some gender and sexuality issues, and these two resonated with me as a result. So, over these very long breaks, I wrote very large quantities of fic. I never planned to share it. It was entirely to keep myself from losing my mind. Which it succeeded in, admirably. I graduated with honours, albeit late.
And then I failed to find gainful employment in my field of genetics. For a year I worked sporadic shit jobs (I was fired from Staples for being "unfriendly", memorably), lifted weights until I became a tank as means to chase away the demons, and wrote copious amounts of Picking up the Pieces. Then I went back to school in 2014: technical college this time, for a laboratory technician diploma. I wrote a little in my first year, became atrociously blocked by Nanako's kidnapping and Heaven, and then dropped the fic entirely. I graduated again, wennt to work, struggled with employment due to COVID, eventually found a job that I've been at ever since, and successfully addressed my mental health issues. In 2023, I started talking about Picking up the Piecs with a friend, who very strongly encouraged me to just post it.
So I did, and as I fired the immense amount of backlog onto Archive of Our Own, I rewrote the last couple chapters, and then started writing new material entirely. I burnt out early 2024, worked on several other fics (most notably Sulphur and Starlight, which I maintain is the best thing I've written to date), then returned to the fic again in 2026. I dearly hope to finish the fic before it's old enough to vote.
Picking up the Pieces is wildly inconsistent in quality due to my varying levels of confidence and experience writing (2012-14 era chapters were not excessively edited before posting, I only tidied up some grammar then fired them onto Ao3), my evolving writing process and personal standards, and more. However, I still stand by all of it. I used the earlier portions of this fic to work through sexuality issues (via Kanji), gender identity issues (via Naoto), and a load of internalized misogyny etc (via both), and the latter portions when I became happier and more stable in life are purely for the love of writing and the characters.
I mentioned that this fic was never intended to be posted. This was a self-confidence thing, but also because then and now, the Persona 4 fandom has been incredibly virulent towards... well, pretty much any interpretation of Naoto, because you could not take any stance without angering someone somewhere. There were also a number of witch-hunts against writers in the fandom, one of which in particular bothered me very badly. It should be instantly evident to anyone reading my fic that my stance on Naoto is that she is nonbinary and grappling with internalized misogyny. I have no qualms with trans masculine Naoto interpretations but it's just not my take (though I think, if I wanted to, I could do a fair enough job of writing a trans Naoto now). So far, I've encountered none of the toxicity the fandom is known for to my face or in my orbit. I very much hope it stays that way.
All the chapter titles are songs, something I carried on to all future works. Though I changed some of the titles after my hiatuses, the majority of them make for something of a journey through my music taste over the years. I'll probably discuss them chapter by chapter (along with mentioning what some of the original ones were), and why I chose them, reasons which could range from the lyrics, to pure vibes, to "I was listening to this album a whole hell of a lot at the time" (Battle Beast's debut album Steel might as well be the soundtrack to Naoto's dungeon, for one).