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“Thump!”
The barrel of the gun in Akechi´s hand was still smoking when the body of the guard hit the ground.
For a long moment, Akira took his time to be terrified.
Sae had just left the room, phone in hand, just like they had planned.
They? Who were they, exactly?
He didn´t know. Probably all of his friends, just like Sae had suspected from the beginning and whom he hadn´t admitted conspiring with. He didn´t know anything about the plan either, only that there was one and that it probably involved that phone.
He didn´t know because Niijima Sae didn´t, either.
Akechi´s steps echoed as he gloated about Akira´s apparent inability to tell that the fake detective wasn´t very trustworthy. The interrogation room reeked of the guard´s blood, even though it had smelled strongly of disinfectant shortly before.
Akechi Goro levelled the gun at Kurusu Akira´s head and smiled.
“It was nice knowing you”, he told him, “but I´m afraid this is the last stop.”
Akechi´s eyes were cold but Akira could almost taste the regret he tried to hide behind the façade he had expertly pasted on.
But while Niijima Sae hadn´t had much of an opinion on what kind of person the leader of the Phantom Thieves was, after meeting a beaten and bloodied high schooler, she had thought he was vulnerable and afraid, taking it all with admirable silence.
This had not been her cognition of him when she had walked out the door with vital evidence in hand though.
The impression she had left him with instead had been of a calculating and strong young man, who wouldn´t take anyone´s shit, though he would still stay quiet throughout, waiting for an opportunity. Even if he was beaten up and not allowed to fight back.
She didn´t know about how much the drugs had affected him, even if her guess could have come close, to her it had looked like he had been able to shake them off a lot better than had actually been the case. She didn´t know about his cracked thigh, the boot to the stomach.
She believed he was able to work through excruciating pain.
So that is what he did. Or her cognition of him anyways.
Akechi yelled in surprise when his would-be-victim shot up from his seat seconds before he could close his finger around the trigger and promptly kicked him in the face.
“Give it up.”, the fake told his fake Teammate, keeping it short, as Sae thought he was not a man of many words. (Though she would be wrong. The original could talk with other people for hours on end and not get tired of it.)
Akechi glowered at him from behind his hand, trying to stop the blood flowing from his nose from staining the ground, leaving even more evidence of his presence in the interrogation room he had already killed someone in.
“And why, pray tell, should I? You forget I have the advantage here”, he seethed, trying to aim his gun again.
But as everyone on a reasonable investigation team would have assumed, the leader of the Phantom Thieves was no pushover. He threw himself into a roll on the ground and swiped at Akechi´s legs. The fake detective fell, the gun clattering against the metal table.
Akira took the gun. He dodged Akechi´s desperate grasp for it, removed the magazine, like Sae had seen her father do at the police shooting range and threw the rest into the other boy´s face. There was an ugly cracking noise and more blood was flowing down Akechi´s chin. He had given up on preventing it from dripping everywhere.
“So this is how you want to play? How arrogant”, he sneered at him. “You will regret throwing away your chance to kill me.”
“I don´t believe in killing senselessly.”, Akira said, with conviction. Sae had really wanted to believe that the boy she had forced all this information out of hadn´t been lying to her and shared her strong sense of justice and believe in doing what was right, even if she herself was of the opinion that the right thing should be done within the confines of the law.
Akechi took a step back and laughed. “That doesn´t sound like you at all, Mr.Leader! That sounds like a cheap line from a comic book hero. I didn´t take you for the type!”, he yelled, rushing at Akira and trying to wrestle him to the ground.
They both fell, struggling with each other, Akira hitting his head against the cold doorframe, Akechi´s hands on his throat.
+++
There were subtle differences in the structure of his face and the colour of his hair was off. If he were anyone else he would have attributed it to the strange lighting of the interrogation room. Goro didn´t know why he was having second thoughts. He had come here to kill him, not toy with him. But he hadn´t expected that much resistance either, after all. Joker knew when to quit. It was one of his strengths. And he believed in doing what was necessary, morals or no.
Goro tightened his hands around Joker´s throat.
The Phantom Thief he knew would have not removed the magazine from the gun. No matter what impression he made on the normal layperson, he had no clue about real guns. He had never even held one.
Goro knew he had read up on firearms so that he could better portray using real ones in the Metaverse. But no matter how real they looked, all guns that the Phantom Thieves used had been fakes. They usually didn´t have any magazine to remove, so they couldn´t mime reloading, which was why, once they were out of bullets, they had to return to the real world for them to “refill their ammo”.
If the Thieves themselves had had a better understanding of manipulating their own perception, they should have been able to convince themselves that they had “infinite bullets”, but not even Goro had managed this level of self-delusion yet.
Which was why he knew that Joker, had it been him, would have reflexively taken aim at Goro´s torso, where the chance of a critical hit was low, but damage guaranteed.
“Who are you?”, he voiced, angry at himself for not noticing sooner. This was not the leader of the Phantom Thieves.
The impostor shook off his now loose grip, staying silent. Joker would have mocked him for not going through with it.
“I am Kurusu Akira, member of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. Why would I be anyone else?” The other was so close Goro could see the stale brown color of his eyes.
Kurusu Akira´s eyes were grey. He knew the poor lighting in the room made them seem almost black and people would have maybe assumed they were brown instead, if they hadn´t seen much of him in more natural light.
Goro wanted to throw a punch in anger but the second he lifted his fist, the impostor cracked their skulls together painfully. He felt the skin on his forehead split and slowly bleed into his eyes. The other´s fringe was matted to his forehead as well, though he didn´t appear to bleed as much.
Slowly creeping backwards, Goro felt for the gun that he knew was somewhere behind him on the floor. The fake Akira tried to get up, but his knee had been twisted in the struggle.
Goro moved quickly.
He snatched the magazine from where his opponent had left it on the table, clicking it into place with one practised motion.
He aimed, not at the head this time, the fake Akira trying to charge at him in alarm, determination clear on his face.
Goro pulled the trigger.
+++
There was a lot of blood leaking out of the bullet wound in his side. Akira could feel his vision slip and he startled when he felt Akechi grab him by the front of his shirt.
“I´ll not ask again. Who are you?”, he asked, eyeing him with disdain. Akira snorted.
“Why would I be anyone else?”, he answered. Sae wasn´t very philosophical by nature, so this question could be deemed irrelevant. Right now, he was the real Akira. He only knew with certainty that he was a fake because the real one had told Sae about the possibility of there being cognitive versions of people the palace owner knew before she had left.
Akechi might not be thinking of the possibility that they were in the Metaverse yet. Good. He didn´t know why but it had to have been part of the plan, otherwise he wouldn´t be here. But what was he supposed to do?
What would Makoto have wanted him to do?
He had lost too much blood already. If he didn´t die soon, Akechi would start wondering, distracted as he was right now. Sae seemed to think of people as a lot more durable than they actually were. Maybe it was her fault Makoto liked those kinds of movies so much.
The thought would have been sobering, if he had been the real Akira.
“You know, Akechi, you betraying the team like that was kind of predictable”, Akira rasped out. “After all, you have always been so fake it hurt to watch.” Both Sae and the real Akira´s opinion of Akechi hadn´t been great.
Riling him up like this really shouldn´t have worked, but it did, surprisingly. Maybe he cared about their ragtag group of outcasts more than he liked to admit. He still seemed to be fine with killing them, so him showing emotions concerning them didn´t say much about his character.
Akechi´s eyes had gone impossibly wide, turning redder in anger by the second.
“You, of all people, dare to talk to me about being fake”, he yelled, “when all your friends think you are such a good person and care so much and help them so much when all you ever do is tell them what they want to hear?”
“I can´t fault you for thinking that”, Akira admitted, playing by what Sae thought she could read between the lines of Akira´s recounts of their adventures, “ but I would never betray their trust, no matter what.”
Akira felt his consciousness slipping. Soon he wouldn´t be able to answer Akechi´s questions. But, and he felt a ferocious sense of pride in that, he would leave him with questions and a ton of regret.
Niijima Sae didn´t have that high of an opinion of Kurusu Akira.
And maybe this was a wake-up call that would push Akechi one step further into coming to terms with himself and the people around him. And help him come to the realisation that he did want to be part of something good, something bigger than himself and the greed of the man standing in the shadows behind him.
Akira knew that no matter what, Makoto´s plans would always be flawless and she would have counted on Akechi being able to kill a cognition of their leader, thought up by her sister. So he would follow her plan to the letter.
Sae´s cognition of Akira died with a smirk on his face, taunting the fake detective and giving him a memory the sight of which would haunt him for the next few weeks and make him question everything he thought he knew. And maybe even setting him on a path that would spare him of his eventual demise.