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Bang! Bang! The distinct sounds of two separate gunshots repeatedly ring inside of Akira’s head.
He’s in Leblanc’s attic, surrounded by the Phantom Thieves, some of his closest friends in the world, but something’s wrong. Someone’s missing.
There is silence in his absence. That, and a black leather glove grasped tightly in Akira’s right hand. No one knows what to make of this. It was a victory, and he was an enemy, so why…?
But he was a victim, like them. That was it. The only difference between him and them was that they’d been lucky enough to be saved on time.
As reliable as ever, Ryuji is the one to break the silence. Akira can tell that he’s angry, but for once the blond has abandoned openly expressing his emotions for lightening the mood. He supposed there was a first for everything, and this was certainly a fitting time to do so.
The Phantom Thieves lounge around eating curry and playing video games well into the night. Even though Akira himself doesn’t say anything, it is no longer silent, and for a while the distractions help, if only for a little bit.
Then they start to leave for the night.
First Haru with her strict curfew, then Makoto who emphasizes the fact that they all have school the next day. Next goes Ann, then Yusuke, Ryuji, and finally Futaba who slinks away to her own home a couple blocks away.
And it is silent again.
Morgana had gone to sleep long ago, but when Akira slides below the bedsheets he stirs just enough to give the teenager a concerned glance. It lifts the heaviness in Akira’s chest just a fraction.
Denial:
He can’t sleep that night– won’t . He stares at the dark wooden ceiling with a mind racing of thoughts telling him not to think– if you don’t remember it, it didn’t happen . He ignores the glove clasped in his hand. Each second, each eternity slips by until the first light of day begins to peek in through the window.
He doesn’t move an inch as his alarm goes off. He doesn’t move and inch as Morgana stirs awake and sends him another concerned look. He doesn’t move an inch as Sojiro walks up the stairs to the attic to shake him out of bed.
But Sojiro doesn’t shake him out of bed. Instead, he takes one look at Akira and shakes his head. A few minutes later he’s back with a hot plate of curry.
“Take care of yourself, kid,” he says before leaving.
The second day passes by uneventfully. Akira does his best to ignore the phone buzzing beside him. The glove is in his pocket now. Futaba comes to check on him and talks to him about some video game for a while, but eventually she’s gone once again.
Anger:
On the third day without sleep, Akira punches a hole through the wall.
He doesn’t know why, exactly. Maybe it was a way of getting back at the world for being so cruel, not unlike how he would change distorted hearts as Joker. Maybe he blames himself instead, and is doing it as some sort of lame punishment. Maybe there is no reason for doing it at all.
Sojiro glances at the damaged wall before he pulls Akira downstairs with him, immediately flipping the shop’s sign to ‘Closed.’
They sit opposite each other in one of the booths.
Bargaining:
“Look, kid. You have to tell me what’s wrong.”
Akira stays silent. He doesn’t want to speak, doesn’t know what will happen once he does.
Sojiro sighs, “Hey, I’m going to be honest here and say that you’re kind of scaring me. You look like shit, you haven’t left your room in days, and Futaba seems really anxious and keeps asking about you. I… I hate to see you like this, and I just want to know what’s gotten you like this, because I want to help you.”
More silence passes. Then, Akira takes a deep breath through his nose and opens his mouth.
“He- someone is gone,” they are the first words he’s spoken since leaving the Palace. He clenches his fists and desperately tries to fight off the knot forming at the back of his throat. He waits for the miserable feeling to recede before he speaks again, “and it– it’s all my fault.”
The knot grows bigger when he sees the softness in Sojiro’s eyes, “Hey, don’t say that. It’s not.”
“Y-yes, it is.”
“Okay, how is it your fault, then?”
“I could’ve done so many things differently,” the tears are flowing freely now, “t-there were so many s-signs. I should’ve n-noticed,” he can’t stop the hiccups that have come on now, too, “I thought I knew him, a-and I was the one who w-was closest to him, s-so I should’ve know, I-I should’ve done something differently, a-and m-maybe he’d still b-be here.”
“If you say it’s your fault, then it can be your fault,” Sojiro says, “But you don’t need to keep beating yourself up over it. You still need to take care of yourself, and your friends are worried about you.”
“Yes, but–”
“No ‘buts.’ Just… try to rest up, and maybe go to school tomorrow? You might not want to, but being around other people might help.”
Sojiro gives Akira a box of tissues alongside the biggest plate of curry he’s ever seen. He sends Akira to sleep with a sympathetic pat on the shoulder before leaving.
Depression:
Akira finally lets himself cry that night.
It’s loud and ugly and before he knows it he’s run out of tissues. But he can’t stop– won’t, because every time he does he’s just reminded of the fact that he’s gone and no one knows and the cruel reality or knowing that no one will care . In the grand scheme of consciousness, a single soul being snuffed out, even that of a celebrity, is nothing. A star blinks out of existence, and the world keeps moving as if it was never there in the first place.
He doesn’t know when he falls asleep.
He simply blinks and he hears the familiar sound of water dripping and chains clinking.
“Up, Inmate!” Caroline slams her baton against the cell.
“There is someone we would like for you to meet,” Justine says with cold eyes.
And then it happens.
From out of the shadows steps a boy clad in blue. He is around Akira’s age.
Akira gapes; he knows this boy, should know this boy, but the person in front of him looks like a complete stranger.
Brown hair has turned to white, red eyes now a piercing yellow, but the most uncanny change of all was the fake, too-pleasant expression that had been replaced with one of genuine gentleness as the boy looked upon Akira with innocent confusion.
“Hello?” The boy says, and Akira feels like throwing up because it’s all so right and yet so wrong. This isn’t happening, this can’t be happening, it’s all impossible and this is some sick, horrible joke that his brain is playing on him and–
“I am your new warden here,” the boy continued on without any acknowledgment of Akira’s obvious distress, “I’m meant to help you reach ‘rehabilitation’ in any way that I can, though I admit I’m not quite sure I know how to do that, exactly.”
“Get away from me,” Akira says.
Three pairs of yellow eyes stare at him. No one moves. No one says anything.
“What the fuck is going on,” he says to no one in particular. Akira backs up against the wall of his jail cell and curls down onto the ground, hugging his knees, “Just get me out of here.” He doesn’t want to be ‘rehabilitated’ if it meant having all his wounds being painfully reopened and shown off like it was some sort of cruel game.
No matter how much he would have liked it, Akira does not wake up or move on to a peaceful sleep. Instead, he stays there in the silent jail cell as irregular drip, drip, drip of the water slowly drives him insane.
“I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re going through,” he says, and Akira hates the way in which he brings a gloved hand up to his chin while he thinks, as if the ghost of his not-renemy not-rival not-friend was cruelly taunting him, “but I think my purpose is to aid you through it.”
Akira takes a deep breath before looking up. The twin wardens must have left, because the only person standing in front of his cell is the Velvet Room’s new attendant.
“Ake–” no, he couldn’t bring himself to call him that, “Do you know who I am?”
A curious smile is shot his way, “I know that you are the inmate of this place. Is that enough?”
No, it isn’t, “Do you know who you are?”
A pause this time, “...No, I do not. I only arrived here a couple days ago, and I have not even been given a name yet.”
A couple days ago–? Isn’t that when…
Akira thinks he knows what is going on, and he hates everything about it.
“Crow,” Akira blurts out.
“Excuse me?”
“Your name is Crow now,” he responds. He can’t– won’t bring himself to call this stranger by the name of a dead man, but this would be good enough.
Surprisingly, the boy only nods, “Okay, Crow it is.”
Speaking seems to come more naturally after that, “Crow, do you remember anything?” Do you know who I am?”
The boy– Crow– frowns, “Unfortunately, I do not. When I woke up I knew nothing. The other wardens and the master of this place seemed very… angry, and confused that I was here. I’m not quite sure I’m supposed to be here at all. But then they told me of the inmate I would need to aid in the rehabilitation of. Though,” Crow appraises Akira’s appearance closely, “there is a sort of… familiarity to you that I have not felt before. Have we perhaps met before? Is that why you reacted that way earlier?”
This was Akira’s opportunity to tell him. Everything they’d gone through in the past months together, from how they met at the TV station to how he’d blackmailed his way into the Phantom Thieves all the way to the events of the engine room, this was Akira’s opportunity to tell him all of it, and maybe by doing so he would get a second chance at fixing his now-biggest regret.
He is abruptly taken out of his thoughts when Caroline seemingly reappears out of nowhere to bang on the cell bars again, “Inmate!” she barks, and Akira is taken aback by the intense look in her eye. It’s a warning.
“We will be sending you back soon,” Justine says calmly, though she has the same expression as her sister does.
“Oh… A shame,” Crow says, and it appears that he’s forgotten all about the conversation they’d been having only seconds earlier, “it appears that this is goodbye for now, Inmate?”
He can’t bear to hear that voice call him an inmate like that, “Akira,” he breathes out– if he can’t restore everything back to the way it was, he has to at least gain that one thing back, “A-and Crow. I’ll be back to talk to you, I promise.”
“I quite enjoy this game,” Crow tells Akira one day as they’re playing chess.
“Yeah, I thought you would,” Akira has been visiting the Velvet Room every day for the past two weeks, and every time he’s brought along something different that he and Ake– Crow had once enjoyed, quickly finding that this new version of the once-detective finds joy in all the same things he always has. Although Akira can’t bring along something as large as a pool table or a TV, per se, he’s still found plenty of smaller things that he could carry around– a cup of Leblanc coffee here, some of Futaba’s Featherman figures (that he definitely had not stolen) there, and today he happened to bring along a chess set.
Crow was a natural. Although he’d started off needing to be carefully taught the rules, now after only a few games he was easily beating Akira. Akira knows he should have seen this coming, given what Crow’s skill level once was, but it still came as a surprise. It was almost as if it were muscle memory to him.
Crow seemed to think this too, “I know this is a strange thing to say, but I feel as if I’ve played this before.”
“...Yeah,” Akira responds smartly.
“It’s the same with a lot of things you’ve been bringing here, actually,” the Velvet Room attendant continues, “Like even though it’s all completely unfamiliar to me, I get this strange feeling of joy whenever you bring something new, but this joy does not feel like my own. It feels older than I am, like those feelings are a soul that has been around for a long time and I am simply the one trying to snuff it out and take its place.”
Oh, how he is so close and yet so far from the truth. Akira doesn’t know what to say to that, so he simply says nothing.
“Crow,” Akira says the day before the Phantom Thieves are set to fight Masayoshi Shido’s shadow.
“Yes, Akira?” Yellow eyes stare back at him cluelessly.
“I’m doing it. Tomorrow.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Your final wish. I’m fulfilling it,” Akira is not speaking to Crow but to the person he once was. He hopes this message reaches him, wherever he is.
Akira turns and leaves the Velvet Room.
He returns to his normal clothes. There is a glove in his pocket.
They are about to fight the Holy Grail when Lavenza appears in front of him.
“Trickster,” she says, “You are aware that after you defeat the Holy Grail the Metaverse will disappear, too? Naturally, that includes the Velvet Room as well.”
Akira knows what she is implying. They share a look.
Lavenza nods in affirmation, guiding him towards the Velvet Room doors, “There is someone who would like to speak with you one last time.”
Acceptance:
“Akira,” he says. They’re standing closer to each other than ever before– the bars that had once closed off the jail cell are gone now, after all.
“Goro,” Akira says back.
“Ah, so that was my name,” he responds, “It’s nice; I wonder if I liked my name back then, too. I wonder if my mother picked it with love.”
“I’m sure she did.”
He smiles wistfully, “I’m going to disappear soon.”
“...I know.”
“The ‘real me’ was gone long ago.”
“I know that, too.”
“I am an entity that was never meant to exist. But despite that, I was created out of your own will, and the one of the ‘real me’ as well. I had a purpose in a world that wasn’t built for me. This purpose is one that you– we made ourselves. Together. And I don’t regret that.”
“I don’t regret that, either.”
There are no more words left to say, but one more action left undone. Akira, no longer a prisoner, and no longer in a prisoner’s clothes, reaches into the pocket of his coat and takes out a black leather glove, throwing it at the boy standing in front of him.
The boy catches it, and he smiles.