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She imagined her grief contained within the teapot. She carefully measured its volume in the water she filled it with, the heat of it as it warmed from cold to scalding, the anxious waiting as it steeped into her bones, and finally the careful delicate decanting from the larger vessel to the small dainty teacup, beautiful and perfectly poised, before she could smash it to the ground and watch it splatter, everywhere, messy. Grief had a funny way like that.
Haru wasn’t sure she… missed her father. Goodness knows he had been quite awful lately, distant and unloving. And after what she witnessed in his Palace, seeing the depths of his heart and the shameless way he viewed her, an obedient little robot willing to sacrifice her life for him, she had to admit to herself, it’s hard to miss that person. But a lifetime of memories couldn’t be erased in one horrible night, in weeks of lonely despair. He was, for better or worse, still her father. His legacy weighed heavy on her shoulders.
She did not miss the person he had become. But the shape of his loss cut holes into the fabric of her life, an ugly skein between her pointed needles. She could knit the rupture shut, close it off, pretend like it never existed and tie it off in a little bow, or she could stare into it, challenge it, acknowledge the loss and hollow feeling, sharpen her mind against it like a whetstone to an ax. Like how she turned her hurt and betrayal into strength to bring Milady into her true power. But something about the deceased pulled the empathy from people, at least from Haru. It seemed so hollow to stay angry at someone who would never feel it.
So her anger instead tried to latch onto the Phantom Thieves. For days, she did not speak to them, letting herself boil that grief into rage instead, distantly aware this pattern fell into an old and tired trope but it felt good regardless.
He would get better, they had said. He would change, they had said. And now he was gone, unchanged. Forever remembered as the horrible villain whose burden Haru now had to bear. It felt so… unfair. And she knew it was unfair to even feel that unfairness, and the spiraling contradictions of her own emotions left her staring into that cup of tea until steam turned to air and heat to cold, and in the end her rage could find nothing at all to keep it fed.
She didn’t ask to be a Phantom Thief. Had no interest in changing the hearts of others. Perhaps she was selfish, wanting to use her power to help her own father and no one else. But his death left a hole that demanded to be filled with justice and she had the power to do… something. She had to do something.
So she stayed. She knit together the jagged edges of her life with gossamer spider silk and straightened her spine and pinned her smile on and only allowed it all to fall apart under hail of gunfire and the swing of wood and metal. As long as she could find out who did this, she told herself. As long as she could fill that hole in her life with a name, a face, a body, then maybe things would make sense again.
Haru didn’t think much of Akechi, at first. The last few weeks had been a whirlwind of cheap fake smiles and hand-over-fist offers of sympathy colored by manipulative intent. Akechi was no different, the way he never looked at you unless he thought he could get something out of you. But then Ren let them in on the secret. They all heard the damning words spoken from his own mouth. How casually Akechi planned to take a life. Ren's life.
The deduction was not hard to make. Akechi must have been the culprit behind the mental shutdowns, the deaths. Again, she tried to muster the hatred she thought she’d find upon the discovery of her father’s murderer, waited for the pieces to fall into place, for their plan and for vengeance to right what had been turned upside down. But they never did. And she waited, and waited, patiently following Ren and Futaba and Mona’s plan to usurp him, find out who he was working for. Maybe that, that would do it, finding out the true mastermind, because Akechi’s murders weren’t Akechi, not really, he was just the blade wielded in the dark, and maybe learning the meaning behind Kunikazu Okumura’s death, the orchestrator of the whole thing, surely that would mean something. Akechi was nothing, no one, he didn’t kill out of passion or hatred or even enjoyment, he killed because someone else told him to and he didn’t feel anything at all, just like Haru.
Then Akechi was gone, and Haru felt something again. Something she loathed but could not name.
She couldn’t figure out anything meaningful to say in those last moments. Couldn’t step forward to take vengeance for her father, or even to ask why. For himself, Akechi seemed only interested in besting Ren, in taking them all down, too wrapped up in his own schemes and complexes to do anything but attack like a rabid beast. She could have written it off as the last frantic actions of a madman, a deranged killer who held no value for human life. Perhaps she could have lived with that. But at the last moment, he sacrificed himself for all of them, so they could take down Masayoshi Shido… his father.
No matter how long Haru stewed on that knowledge, she couldn’t make sense of it. The man who murdered her father did so in a plot against his own father, then sacrificed himself so they could defeat his father instead. It made her head ache. And ever since the Phantom Thieves entered her life, she had no chance to pick through her thoughts, prune the weeds, cultivate any satisfactory answer to her present circumstances because her life had been reduced to crisis after crisis. Being sold off, arranging a funeral, taking over a company, infiltrating a Palace, thwarting an assassination, yet another Palace, then saving the entire country itself - all while studying and taking exams and preparing for college, like a normal, real life was ever a possibility for her. By the time they dug into the pits of Mementos, Haru wondered if she’d truly become the robot of her father’s cognition, winding herself up to smile and speak softly and follow Ren’s orders and never question anything anymore.
When she felt herself dying in the Shibuya crossing, forgotten and disappearing, the last cognizant thought in her mind was - finally. I can rest.
In the end, not even death brought relief. Soon enough they were back, pulled back to reality, fighting for a world Haru still could never understand. Was this the will of the god of control? Was that why she felt so lost? Was that his will?
They beat him back, like they always did. They saved the world, again. And Haru drifted, smiled, visited her friends, until reality crystalized into a bright fragmented diamond and her father returned to her. Warm, kind, loving, supportive, everything Haru wanted. She was happy, she was happy… she knew what she wanted, he would support her, everything was… perfect.
Until that shattered, too.
And that was that. Her father was dead, and Akechi was alive. All the emotions she thought she’d feel had burned through, leaving nothing but empty despair in its wake. Haru had gotten quite adept at just going along with things by now, dumb and agreeable and polite, but after they had their sights set on a new target with yet another deadline to meet, she surprised herself when she caught Akechi’s elbow at the end of their meeting, just outside Leblanc.
Akechi stared at her like she was a thorn that had caught the hem of his sleeve and asked, “What is it.”
“Uhh.” She scrambled to make sense of her own actions, trying to find her thoughts and the will she left behind long ago in another reality. “Akechi-san, can you wait a moment?”
A scowl dug between his impassive eyebrows. “I already am. Make it quick.”
Why had she stopped him? What did she want with him? “I would… like a word with you.” He stood unmoved. He filled the air between them with buzzing silence and it grated on her nerves and - ah. At last, a burr to stick on to, heat pouring into her frozen steel heart. “Would you care to meet me in Mementos? Right now?”
Something twitched in his expression, too fast to catch. A quirk of the lips maybe, a slight widening of the eyes maybe, but quick as she could blink his face was a bland mask again. “Sure.”
And just like that, they were off, sharing a deeply uncomfortable train ride to Shibuya, a less uncomfortable slip from reality into the hellish dreamscape that was the collective subconscious, and there they were. Haru and Akechi, wearing his Black Mask finery.
And then he aimed his jagged red sword at her heart, and she nearly leapt out of her bloomers.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” And he sounded so bland, so bored, when the last time she really saw this outfit he was screaming at them, wild-eyed and under his own psychosis, it’s almost more shocking than the lazy way she was currently being threatened. “You wanted to fight me in some kind of pathetic attempt to get your revenge?”
Was that what she wanted? She still wasn’t sure. She almost wished she had a Palace for herself that she could visit, take a peek into her subconscious to get any hint about what was going on inside her own head, but it would probably be just as empty and desolate a wasteland as…
Akechi didn’t make a move to attack her, nor did she reach for her own weapon. They stood there, facing off against her each other, until he finally sighed and headed down the tunnel. Haru followed.
They fought their way through some low-level Shadows with ease, not saying a word outside of barked orders and terse acknowledgements. Akechi seemed to have some kind of latent ability to navigate, either from experience or more hidden Persona abilities, she couldn't say. It felt far too comfortable to just continue to follow him, and no matter how much she reminded herself that this is the one, he killed Father, she couldn't find a way to break free of her numbness. Even her usual catharsis of Shadow slaying didn't seem to be helping.
A few floors down, they encountered a Succubus. Normally a Shadow either of them could fell with a single hit, but this one took them by surprise, managing to get off a Marin Karin before Haru cleaved it in two.
Only after the monster dissolved into black ichor did Haru notice that the attack had actually taken hold on Akechi, and he snarled before rushing her with nothing but his claws.
Yelping, Haru just managed to dodge his swipe but he moved like a wild animal, lunging again, and she kept desperately back pedaling, holding up her ax defensively hoping to fend him off, because she couldn't... she couldn't attack him.
Could she?
He's brainwashed. She'd seen it before, it happened sometimes. Confusing friend with foe, attacking their friends… then they'd get over it, have a good laugh about it, patch each other up and it's fine. It didn't usually last long. All she had to do was wait for Akechi to come to his senses…
Wait. Brainwash. She was so busy ducking and weaving, and no one was giving orders, so it took her a bit longer to realize, but…
A rush of clarity. Bright razor-sharp edge of certainty, cutting through the silk that had turned her brain to cobwebs, through the noise, the weeds, clean and pointed as the jagged edge of porcelain. No more waiting. No more dallying. She ripped off her mask and called forth the psychic power held within her psyche.
Too far gone to even to dodge, it only took one strike to knock him completely down. And he stayed down, down, down.
Still. Quiet.
Panting. She didn’t think she had exerted herself at all but she gulped down air like she had run a marathon, heart thudding so loud in her ears it drowned out the usual creaks and moans of Mementos.
Akechi did not move.
She wondered if maybe she had killed him, and if she had, she wondered how she felt about that. Underneath the surface layer of vague disappointment that she would have accidentally lost them a powerful ally, she felt… good. Strangely satisfied. Not viciously victorious or horrified, not enlightened or repulsed. She felt complete.
If Akechi could be killed by a single Psiodyne, though, he likely would never have gotten this far to begin with, and eventually, he roused on his own, jerking awake with the shock of someone who never expected to wake up alive again.
“Hello, Crow,” she greeted from behind the thermos of coffee she had snagged before leaving Leblanc.
He stared at her warily, glanced about the empty tunnels, and pulled himself into a cross-legged sitting position. They waited in pitched silence before he spoke, low and shockingly calm. “Did it feel good?”
She wanted to pretend like she didn’t know what he meant. But they’re likely past the point of facade. Here, behind their masks, they can be themselves. “Yes, it did.”
“Out of your system?”
She took a sip of coffee and thought about it. “For now.”
“Fair enough.” He craned his neck, stretching it to the left, right. Eventually, they both stood, knowing if they lingered too long, it would attract the attention of monsters too powerful for either of them to take. As they began their silent ascent, Haru assumed they were done speaking. But at the very top, Akechi stopped.
“If you ever want to try again,” he started, words slow and strained, like it pained him to pull his voice from his throat, “I only ask that you wait until after Maruki.”
“Of course,” she answered automatically, but tilted her head to the side. “The mission comes first.”
“Good.” And with that, they returned to reality.
Haru could have asked him more questions. He might have even answered some. But what lingered in her mind, the one thing that fit into the empty spaces left in her life, was the image of Akechi, still and cold on the floor, and everything made just a little more sense.