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When Maruki left, the seeds of tension he’d sown in his wake grew into an overwhelming, monstrous shadow. If Akira had closed his eyes at the precise moment the cafe’s bells jingled behind him, he might’ve seen pincer-like, dripping fangs and curled, yellowing claws silhouetted against Leblanc’s furthermost wall—the sort of thing kids dreamt up to scare them into behaving for authority figures rather than the creatures the Thieves tore apart effortlessly in the Metaverse.
In a more contemplative moment, maybe Akira could appreciate his subconscious mind equating this feeling between him and Akechi to a demon that was impossible to make sense of, especially now that they were on the precipice of adulthood. His imagination had spent many of his adolescent years cowing every day in the face of cold, hard truths and a reality that refused to catch him when he fell. The incident with Shido had been the first in a long sequence of dominoes all the way down to rock bottom; awakening to Arsene had been his lifeline, and after that, the other Thieves had been there to help Akira pick up the pieces of his life, whether they knew it or not. Now, however, in his visualization of happier times—something Maruki had told him to work on in their first session, ironically enough—the hungrily-colored-in trees on his parents’ fridge no longer boasted a rainbow of leaves. The sun in the background no longer smiled. All that was left were the crayons whose broken backs were too weak to sustain the power of childhood naïveté and the callouses that years of unbridled enthusiasm had left behind.
Akechi had seen the figurative ‘man behind the curtain’ for years now: corruption, addiction, greed, despair…death. It was these things that had broken Maruki, and when Akira looked at the boy standing across from him, a wary scowl twisting the pretty features of his face, he knew at that moment that the very same things were in the process of breaking him, too.
‘Deft handling of his unfortunate circumstances’? What a fucking joke. For once—well, twice if he felt like holding him accountable in the slightest—Akechi had been wrong.
“Don’t,” Akechi bit out warningly. “I’m not an idiot.”
Akira bristled. He could feel Akechi trying to sniff out a weakness, no better than Maruki in his tactics whenever he deemed it necessary.
“Don’t what? Ask you if you knew?” he shot back. Akechi’s face turned stony. He regarded Akira like he was an enemy for the first time in weeks, and something about the way he carried himself—arms crossed defensively, his gaze trained somewhere near Akira’s eyes rather than making direct contact—felt unbearably cold. Akira vacillated between sadness and anger as he pressed him further, his voice pitching higher with the gradual loss of his composure. “Or maybe I should ask you how long you knew?”
“If I’ve known and how long I’ve known are both completely irrelevant,” Akechi interjected, cutting off the next inevitable string of emotionally-charged questioning. He took a step forward, arms still crossed, and fixed Akira with a glare that could freeze over even the hottest circles of hell. “What actually matters is what you plan to do.”
A dry, humorless bark of laughter punched its way through Akira’s chest, and for the first time since the night he’d been charged with assault, he felt like he was truly losing his tether. After the dust had settled back then, what had come next had been a messy divorce from his own feelings and desires: He’d listened to his parents' harsh directives wordlessly; he’d moved to Tokyo without asking a single soul for help; he’d masked over everything that made him a complicated and nuanced human being to preserve his inner peace, and he only deigned to emerge from his shell the day Ryuji had unwittingly dragged him toward their shared destiny. What the hell was he supposed to do now, staring at the face of the only person he’d ever really loved? What reason, what higher purpose was there to be found in letting him go?
A small voice that sounded suspiciously like Lavenza’s niggled at the back of his mind—as if he already knew the answer to his own question—and he suffocated it without a moment’s hesitation, blinking back tears. Akechi hadn’t so much as breathed in the meantime, a fire smoldering in his dark eyes. He was waiting, but for what, Akira wasn’t sure; he had a vague concept of what Akechi might want and the sort of ideology that played into it, but the only reason he could even guess that much was because of Akechi’s silence during Maruki's confession and their uncanny level of synergy.
”…What do you want me to do?” he asked quietly. “Don’t put this on me right now. I can’t think straight.” He wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve, not caring how gross it looked. “You probably won’t like my answer.”
Akechi’s nostrils flared and his jaw tightened. “What do I want?” he repeated incredulously. “I want a reality where I’m allowed to exist exactly as I am, not one where my circumstances are smoothed over to cater to and please you.”
His answer was barbed in a way that was engineered to pierce Akira as deeply as possible. “Oh, would you stop being petty for just one second and consider the actual weight of your life? Please?” Akira implored him, sounding far too caustic for it to come across as wholly genuine. He couldn’t take this. He couldn’t understand how Akechi had been able to reconcile all of this so quickly, as if his life didn’t matter, as if they’d never even—
Akechi took another challenging, pointed step forward, letting his hands fall to his sides. At some point, he’d balled them into fists. “A bullshit life meant to satisfy you,” he seethed, “is not my own. Remove yourself from this ridiculous savior complex you use to cope and whatever guilt you’ve been harboring over my death, and think—really, truly think about what you’d be condemning the entire world to.”
Akira allowed himself to collapse into one of the booths, and Akechi leaned over the table in front of him, enveloping Akira’s body in shadow as the soft lights from above the counter ringed his head and shoulders in gold. Like a halo, Akira thought, feeling a single tear run down the length of his cheek. Akechi didn’t react to it in the slightest as he continued, “Every one of your comrades would coast through their lives, blissfully unaware that you tampered with them for your own idiotic, selfish gain,” he hissed. “And do you honestly think either of us would be spared in that? The moment I strayed too far from Maruki’s perception of what you want—” He softened a bit and shook his head, breaking eye contact. The bitter laugh that underscored his next words was the most emotion Akira had seen from him all night, and it threatened to unmake him. “I would just be a puppet to yet another self-righteous asshole, hell-bent on controlling me until I outlived my usefulness—if you could even call this living.”
Akira remembered Shido’s cognitive version of Akechi saying something eerily similar back in the engine room, and the ensuing wave of revulsion he experienced was so strong that he wanted to throw up. He wasn’t even sure who he was the most angry at anymore, and to fan the flames of his misery even further, he asked, his voice quivering, “Do you mean Maruki?” Akechi’s gaze flicked down to meet his, unreadable. “Or me?”
There was a pregnant, merciless pause. The clock hidden behind the counter ticked away loudly, reminding Akira that every second spent under Akechi’s scrutiny was another second closer to never feeling this particular brand of hot knives and harsh love under his skin again; even the warmth of blood rushing toward Akira’s extremities was preferable to nothing at all.
”I suppose that depends on your answer,” Akechi finally said with all the subtlety of a bull, his voice soft and unnervingly quiet, “doesn’t it, Joker?”
Akira combed his fingers through his hair with a great degree of difficulty, scissoring apart a handful of knots. It was a habit born and bred from childhood anxiety—and a bit of an ugly one, at that—but Akechi paid it no mind, his back as taut as a bowstring. Finally, Akira murmured, “We can say no, if that’s really…” He caught Akechi’s line of sight as he glanced up, and the ruthlessness in the latter’s expression made his heart shatter in slow motion. “If that’s really what you want, I mean—no doubt in your mind, no second-guessing... I just don’t want to fight you anymore, especially if your time is limited.”
Akechi mulled over his response for a moment. “Good,” he said after a long stretch of silence, leaning in further and lowering his voice. “Let me make you a promise of my own, then: If, for any reason, you go back on your word tomorrow—if you even try to—” He grabbed Akira’s chin before he ever stood a chance of dodging him, and the leather against Akira’s jaw did little to cool the rapidly-forming bruises beneath Akechi’s fingertips as they dug into it. “I’ll kill you on the spot, this past month be damned.”
There was a certain degree of intimacy behind his words, and Akira shuddered. They’d never had the chance to kiss outside the context of an errant charm spell a week prior, which had gone completely and utterly forgotten in the pandemonium that followed; they’d never had the opportunity to discuss anything that wasn’t battle strategy since mid-November, and as Akira mourned the loss of Akechi’s touch, painful as it might’ve been, he couldn’t help but feel cheated out of a million and a half things the world had promised him when he took up the mantle of a hero.
When Akechi made to leave, Akira found his voice again.
“Why do I keep losing you…?” he asked no one, staring at Akechi with puffy, red-rimmed eyes. The cloying sentimentality rolled right off the other boy’s back, and when he turned to face him, his expression was pitiless.
“And that’s exactly it, isn’t it Joker?”
Akira took a deep breath, steeling himself for whatever scathing remark Akechi had loaded in the chamber of his pistol—the same one that had been poised between his eyes every day since the interrogation room, maybe even before that. Foolishly, naïvely, Akira thought there was nothing Akechi could say or do to him at this point that would devastate him further, but it turned out he was wrong:
“You never had me.”