Chapter Text
“Ice cream, really?” Akechi asked as Kurusu thrust a cone in his hand.
“It’s the day before we steal Sae’s heart,” Kurusu said. “We’ve got to celebrate our near victory.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to celebrate after we succeed?”
Kurusu shrugged and began to lick his ice cream. “Usually we do something more extravagant.”
“I see.” Akechi stared at his ice cream, but he found he wasn’t very hungry.
“And besides, you’re leaving the team after this.” Kurusu lowered his cone and stared at the sky. “Do you think… we’ll be able to do something like this again?”
Akechi almost didn’t respond. Any positive answer would be a lie.
Instead, he smiled and said, “Of course.”
Kurusu’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Of course,” he echoed softly.
Part 1: My Ghostly Shadow
Akechi never gave the afterlife much thought.
When his mother died, the few people that bothered to attend the funeral gave him half-hearted platitudes. Phrases such as “she’s in a better place now” or “she’s watching over you” did little to comfort a child already bitter toward the world. It didn’t matter if she was happier where she was. She was the one who abandoned him, who decided that he wasn’t worth fighting the harsh battle of life.
Akechi didn’t have much time to dwell on it as he was moved from foster home to foster home. He was more concerned with himself, with fighting tooth and nail to escape his dooming situation.
When Akechi killed for the first time, he allowed himself to wonder about death. He wondered if he had sentenced someone to heaven, hell, or nonexistence. He wondered what words were exchanged between those who grieved for the person he killed.
After that brief moment of weakness, he pushed all such thoughts aside. The endless debate of immortal souls didn’t matter. He had a plan, and he could not be distracted by such thoughts. All that mattered was the people he killed were out of Shido’s way, furthering Shido’s trust in Akechi, bringing Akechi ever closer to enacting his revenge.
In all truth, as Shido’s cognition of himself leveled his gun toward Akechi’s head, Akechi expected that to be the end. One bullet and his existence would cease entirely. If not that, he expected to end up in some form of hell as punishment for his very long list of sins.
Then, when he woke up in Maruki’s dystopian utopia of a reality, Akechi refused to think about what would happen to him after Akira put things to rights. He’d vastly preferred nonexistence over another one of manipulation and lies, but he was lying to himself when he thought he was not afraid of what came after.
Akechi’s face pressed against the windows of the Morgana Helicopter Monstrosity. He could barely see Akira leap back into the wreckage of Maruki’s palace to have a fist fight of all things. He wondered what the hell was wrong with his rival as the walls of the palace crumbled around them and Morgana’s helicopter choppers beat against the air–
Silence enveloped Akechi like a suffocating blanket.
Akechi lay completely still. His face was still uncomfortably pressed against a hard surface, but it wasn’t a window. The surface was much smaller, and the sharp edges of it were surely creating red marks on his cheek. Akechi could barely breath the hot, suffocating air, and Akechi realized that the silence wasn’t a blanket at all. There was actually a blanket draped over his head, soft and heavy and covering his entire body.
In the silence, a clocked ticked in the steady rhythm of counting the seconds.
Tic, tic, tic, tic…
Impatience suddenly seized Akechi. He would not allow death to be silent, still, or suffocating, not if he had any say in it.
Akechi’s arms felt light and ungainly as he grabbed for the edge of the blanket. When he finally brought his fingers around the fabric, his grasp felt much weaker, not to mention smaller, than he expected. He yanked the blanket off of himself and sat up.
He blinked as his eyes adjusted to the darkness in his surroundings. A familiar painting of a beach sat on the wall across from him. His chest tightened
It seemed Hell decided to take the shape of one of his old foster bedrooms.
Akechi tried his hardest to breathe.
Assess the situation. It would do no good to panic, especially if his old guardians were sleeping in the room adjacent to his. Waking them up would only cause more difficulties than what was worth.
Akechi inhaled sharply. The hard surface his face had previously been planted against was a textbook. Akechi picked it up. It was heavier than he expected, but he focused on its contents. Some of the printed text was in Latin letters, and Akechi could make out simple English words and phrases.
Akechi recalled spending sleepless nights studying underneath the covers of his bed, not wanting to be found out by his guardians. They didn’t take kindly to their sleep being disturbed by Akechi’s mumbling or the bright light of his flashlight coming from the other side of the door. And while Akechi made sure to complete all of his homework immediately after classes were done, he took the time to study extra whenever he had the chance.
I have to prove those bastards wrong. He would think to himself, even at the young age of eleven. I’ll show them all what I can become.
Akechi was always obsessive when it came to his goals. He was determined to reach the top of his class, even if he sacrificed the notion of making friends or having any other hobbies. Friends and hobbies were useless if he ended up in the gutter.
His studies, of course, had paid off, but he could already imagine Kurusu’s incessant prattling about the importance of bonds and other similar crap.
“What’s the point of achievements if you don’t have anyone to share them with?” Kurusu asked once on one of those lonely nights at the jazz club. He wore a confused expression, as though he truly had no idea what hid behind Akechi’s motives.
Akechi was deeply preoccupied, seeing as he was going to disappear from existence in a few days, but he didn’t think mentioning that would do Kurusu or himself any good. He also didn’t mention that once Akechi knew he could get revenge on Shido, his own life was of little consequence to him.
Akechi returned his attention to the textbook, closing it as silently as possible. While doing so, Akechi realized why his entire body felt smaller and entirely too weak.
He was smaller. His hands were free of any scars and blemishes, and they were admittedly thinner as well. His fingers were notably smaller, and as Akechi stretched his arms out, he couldn’t reach nearly as far as he was used to.
It made sense. Hell took the form of his old foster home. Hell apparently made him take the form of his ten-year-old self, who had lived in it.
Typical. Hell took him back to one of the worst times of his life, barely a year after his mother had died. In hindsight, of course, Shido was far worse than some neglectful and verbally abusive swine; his foster parents had never encouraged him to murder innocents. But back then, when Akechi was ten and motherless, this was yet another taste of how vile and disappointing the world could be.
Breathe, damnit.
A flashlight rested against Akechi’s legs, and Akechi recognized it as the one he used to study with. Akechi picked it up and pressed the button awkwardly with his smaller hands. No light emerged from the bulb. It must have run out of batteries. That, at least, explained why Akechi had been asleep when he woke up. Akechi wasn’t prepared to steal batteries in the middle of the night, not at the risk of being discovered. His younger self probably thought it best to attempt to read the words on the page in the darkness and ended up falling asleep instead.
Not that he thought he had actually time traveled. Although anything was possible after everything Akechi had seen and experienced, it was far more likely that something else was at play. Perhaps Akechi really was in the afterlife. Or, perhaps, he was in some version of the metaverse, which took advantage of his deepest fears and insecurities.
If that were the case, Akechi best look for some sort of weapon to use against the shadows. Although Akechi could still feel his personas’ power, tucked beneath the far recesses of his mind, he wasn’t sure how much stamina this younger body had.
Akechi slid out of bed, and he struggled to gain his balance as his feet landed on the floor. His legs were certainly much weaker than he was accustomed, which was to be expected. Fortunately, this wasn’t technically his first time being in an altogether new body. He’d been turned into a mouse plenty of times while running around in palaces.
Admittedly, this wasn’t remotely the same thing, but it was enough for Akechi to grit his teeth and take a few experimental steps. He careened forward, and he grabbed the bed before he fell flat on his face.
He glanced at the clock sitting on his nightstand. It was still ticking away as the minute hand got closer and closer to reaching midnight. That gave Akechi plenty of time to rehearse and prepare for the next morning, as long as he was quiet about it. With any luck, nobody would notice anything was off at all about him.
Akechi still glanced around the room for any weapons, just in case this was a trick of the metaverse. Unfortunately, at this point in his life, Akechi hadn’t quite reached the point of carrying a knife illegally on his person, and he certainly didn’t have any toys that could function as weapons in the cognitive world. The best he could hope to do was throw his textbook at any shadows that tried to attack him, which, while an amusing thought, wouldn’t be all that effective.
Akechi grabbed the dysfunctional flashlight. It felt good to have something in his hands, even if that something was used for neither stabbing or shooting things.
For now, Akechi would just practice walking and–
The sudden silence was deafening.
Obviously, it hadn’t been loud before. As a matter of fact, the only sounds in the room had been Akechi’s scrambling and the ticking of the clock. It hadn’t been overly difficult to tune out said ticking, but it was easily the loudest noise in the room.
Now, it was gone.
It was probably paranoia that caused Akechi to react so strongly to the absence of a ticking sound, but he spun around toward the clock anyway. It didn’t explode, although Akechi wasn’t sure he expected it to in the first place. The seconds hand merely stayed perfectly on top of the hour hand, which was centered on top of the twelve. The minute hand indicated that it was a few minutes past twelve.
The clock broke suddenly. That was it.
Akechi cursed himself for his own skittishness, and he turned away from the thing. He was ready to continue his own plans of walking practice, but a flash of green emerging from the window caught his eye.
Akechi looked out the window, and he nearly let out an exclamation of surprise.
The sky was green.
That at least confirmed his theory about being in the metaverse. Or hell. Certainly not the real world. Akechi walked up to his window, stumbling a few times, and he took a better look at what was happening in the city outside.
In addition to the green sky, the city seemed to be filled to the brink with coffins. Either hell liked to hammer home the fact that Akechi was dead, or the ruler of whoever’s palace he was in considered everyone else in the world dead to them.
Akechi felt an uncomfortable nagging sensation. Was he in his own palace?
No. He still had his personas. Persona users couldn’t have palaces. Maruki was an exception, not the rule. Besides, Akechi frequently checked his metanav to see if he had a palace that could be exploited by either Shido or the Phantom Thieves. No such palace had ever existed.
So, he was in some other deprived soul’s heart. Probably one with some sort of childhood trauma, if Akechi being his childhood self had any indication. This warranted far more investigation, and Akechi couldn’t exactly proceed if he stayed huddled away in his bedroom.
It was a palace. His foster parents were likely not even in the apartment complex.
In spite of that possibility, Akechi crept out of his bedroom as quietly as he could manage. He wasn’t as stealthy as he would like, but his past experience infiltrating palaces did not fail him. He hated himself for being afraid of two adults who ultimately held no true power over him–Akechi had the power to kill them at any time–but habits that used to protect him were hard to kill even eight years later.
But, if all of the people out on the street were coffins…
Curiosity overwhelmed Akechi’s anxiety, and Akechi crept up to his foster parent’s bedroom door. He wrapped his fingers carefully around the cold doorknob and slowly twisted it. Cracking the door open slightly with a terrifyingly loud creak, Akechi peered inside the room.
Two coffins sat on top of the queen-sized bed, and Akechi’s hand dropped to his side immediately. That was one thing Akechi needn’t worry about.
Without another thought to stealth, Akechi ran to the kitchen and grabbed a large knife. It would have to do as a weapon against shadows. After looking back outside the living room window, Akechi hadn’t spotted any shadowy figures, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
Carefully handling his new weapon–Akechi did not need to accidentally cut himself due to his newfound clumsiness–Akechi hurried down the stairs of his apartment. Although in the past he might have just gone ahead and leapt out the window, Akechi did not trust this body to obey the metaverse’s incorrect conception of how physics worked. If it turned out he wasn’t already in the afterlife, he was not going to die by misjudging his own abilities. That would be pathetic.
Akechi exited the apartment building and hid behind a nearby trashcan. He looked to his right and left for any enemies. None came. The streets were emptier than Akechi had ever seen them, and the deathly quiet was unsettling.
Even though there wasn’t a shadow in sight, Akechi still used stealth as he progressed through the city. It was better to be safe than sorry. Akechi was in no state to be engaging in combat on his own, even with Hereward.
Besides, if this was a palace-- and it almost certainly was-- there logically had to be a center in which the ruler’s treasure resided. It was only a question of where. During most of his conquests through palaces, it was unnecessary to make it all the way to the treasure. He’d get deep enough through the palace security that the ruler’s shadow would come to investigate, and Akechi would kill the shadow without a second thought.
Sometimes, however, Akechi was pressed to draw out the ruler in more creative ways. In those cases, the easiest solution was always to head in the direction of the ruler’s treasure. The ruler would almost always rush to defend it.
In palaces such as Niijima-san's, it was easy to ascertain that the treasure would be at the top of the building. In other palaces, Akechi would speculate the location of the treasure based on both the whispers of the shadows and the ruler’s own goals. In Okumura’s palace, it took no time at all to discover that Okumura would be fighting the Phantom Thieves where his new ship was being launched.
In this new palace, Akechi was at a distinct disadvantage. He did not know the ruler of this palace. By extension, Akechi did not know the ruler’s distorted desires. To make matters even more difficult, there was seemingly no center building that would serve as a stronghold for the treasure. Even Kaneshiro’s palace, which was technically the entirety of Shibuya, had its own floating bank.
Akechi glanced at the skies, but only the murky green crescent moon floated above him.
Very well. Akechi would just have to engage old-fashioned reasoning. He was a detective, and while many of his “deductions” had been mere deception, he wasn’t incapable of logic.
Based on the scope of the palace, it was safe to assume that the ruler’s desires were extremely distorted. Akechi had already explored multiple city blocks, and the shadows and coffins were all the same. As Akechi wandered around more, it seemed that the distortion had no intention of fading away, as it would with most palaces.
Akechi hated to think it, but this sizable distortion was almost at the same scale as Shido’s sunken Japan.
Focus. The distortion seemed to center around some sort of death motif. Where citizens should be, coffins stood instead. The sky was green, and a few puddles near the curb were a blood red color.
Perhaps they think themself a vampire, Akechi thought derisively.
To organize his thoughts, Akechi tried to bring the possible keywords that the metanav would designate to this palace. The entire city was likely the location… Iwatodai, if Akechi recalled correctly. As for the distortion… tomb? Graveyard might be more fitting, or perhaps even hell?
Akechi wished he could be absolutely certain that he wasn’t in his own palace. His desires were certainly warped enough to require one. And from his appearance to his current location, he was in his own personal form of hell.
Akechi once again dismissed the thought.
After perhaps another twenty minutes of sneaking around and trying to find more clues, Akechi finally found what he was looking for.
It was distant and somewhat difficult to make out, but there was definitely a towering structure on the horizon. The building seemed alarmingly massive, but Akechi didn’t allow himself to be too perturbed. At any rate, that was the place to go to get more answers. The shadows had likely all congregated there. It was certainly far away, but Akechi had been conserving his strength. While his weak legs were getting sore, he was sure he could manage at least as long as it took to find a safe room–
The city burst alive with a fit of noise. Cars honked and engines roared, and Akechi flinched at the sudden appearance of people where coffins once stood. The sky returned to its original black, the moon once again pearly white.
Akechi froze in place, trying to understand what had just happened. Had he accidentally exited the palace? But he hadn’t even moved. Was it possible he hadn’t been in a palace at all? But everything that just occurred reeked of the metaverse.
Akechi stood to his full height, refusing to be caught crouching behind a garbage can. His full height was still at least a full head shorter than the rest of the adults that wandered past him, which was proof that Akechi still was in the body of his ten-year-old self. His age hadn’t been an effect of the metaverse.
This certainly left Akechi with fewer possibilities. This was the most bizarre afterlife Akechi had ever heard of, or he had time traveled. If Akechi had time traveled, he reserved the right to be royally pissed at whatever deity had decided to continue making Akechi’s life an utter shit show.
Regardless, Akechi should operate assuming the worst case scenario. That is, Akechi really had time traveled to when he was ten years old, and he no longer had the emancipation he had so deeply valued in past years. It was one of the only things Shido had done that Akechi had genuinely appreciated, even if his freedom had come with chains.
Akechi reached into his pocket to pull out his phone before he realized he had no such device. No watch sat around his wrist either, which meant Akechi had no way of knowing what time it was. The sky was still significantly dark. Akechi could assume it was deep into the night, which gave him time to relocate his apartment building and return to his bedroom hopefully undetected.
Akechi would have better luck sneaking around shadows.
Although it was years since Akechi had even lived in this city, he still remembered enough from his past, as well as from his walk just now, to get back to the apartment building. After climbing the stairs, he found the front door wide open from when he left earlier.
Clearly, the metaverse affected the real world in this case. It was deeply unsettling, but it didn’t seem that any burglars had taken advantage of the opening.
Akechi carefully crept inside, closing the door behind him as carefully as possible. He would have to return the knife to the kitchen as well, lest his guardians notice that it was missing. Akechi was already an illegitimate child. He didn’t need ‘dangerous delinquent’ added to that description.
Akechi’s footsteps were much louder than he would prefer, but these floorboards always had an over tendency to creak. Grimacing at the noise, Akechi entered the kitchen and placed the knife back into the knife block.
Muffled swearing and heavy footsteps echoed from down the hall. Akechi stiffened, but his chances of making it back to his bedroom before he was discovered were impossible now. Instead of wasting precious time, Akechi immediately began wracking his mind for a decent excuse as to why he was wandering the apartment in the middle of the night.
Akechi began walking toward his bedroom as calmly as possible. He had barely taken two steps out of the kitchen before his foster father, Fukui Katsuro, intercepted him.
His short black hair was matted around his pale face, which was pulled into a tight scowl. For what he lacked in bulkiness, he made up for in height, and he easily towered over the still rather short Akechi.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. His eyes darted over to the kitchen behind Akechi. “You brat, you were stealing, weren’t you?”
Years of working with Shido and his associates allowed Akechi to stay calm. He forced an innocent expression on his face as he said, “I was doing nothing of the sort, Fukui-san. I was merely using the restroom.”
Fukui narrowed his eyes. “You really expect me to believe such a crappy lie? I know how brats like you are, acting all innocent and sad when you really want to strip us of everything we own…”
Akechi tuned out the rest of his speech, trying to look appropriately ashamed for his “misbehavior.” Eventually, Fukui would begin telling Akechi that he had made so much racket that his wife, Yui, had woken up. Then, he’d tell Akechi that if he had found time to sneak food from the kitchen in the middle of the night; he wouldn’t need breakfast the following morning.
In the past, Akechi would zone out thinking of all the ways he would one day make vile adults suffer for mistreating him. They mostly involved gaining a position of power and creating laws that would prevent evil people from taking care of children ever again.
Akechi had been more idealistic back then. This time, he tried to remember where the grocery store on the way to school was. He could grab some free samples for breakfast, assuming he left early enough in the morning.
God, he was beginning to sound like Kitagawa.
Speaking of school, did Akechi remember where it was? He recalled having to take the metro to get there, but he wasn’t sure if he remembered the way. He couldn’t exactly pull up the gps on his phone either, seeing as he didn’t have one.
Why did he have to get sent back here of all places? Akechi had escaped the horrors of the foster system, and now he would have to go through it all over again? At this rate, Akechi would end up going back to Shido just to get out–
Akechi jolted back to reality at the sound of Fukui’s hand smacking against the wall. “Are you even listening to me, you little–”
“I think,” Akechi interrupted, his frustration causing him to forget himself, “that if you’re so concerned about Yui-san’s insomnia, you shouldn’t shout at me so loudly.”
The slap wasn’t unexpected. Akechi stumbled backwards at the force of it, narrowly avoiding collapsing backwards onto the floor. He grabbed the nearby chair as an anchor point, catching his breath as he tried to stay calm.
Fukui was just a man. A pathetic, disgusting whelp of a man who hurt children because that was where he found the most power. Akechi could kill him in an instant. He wouldn’t even need the metaverse.
“Don’t talk back to me!” Fukui shouted. “You’re lucky we’re kind enough to even take you in! Brats like you should learn to be grateful for what you’re given, but if you think you’re too good for us, I suppose you won’t need dinner tomorrow either…”
Akechi would be collecting some free samples on his way back from school as well, it seemed.
Akechi was chewed out for approximately fifteen more minutes before Fukui sentenced him back to his room.
“If I hear another peep out of you, there will be hell to pay.”
Akechi didn’t bother studying. He trusted himself to know basic elementary school material, and, fortunately, at this time, he was already at the top of his class. There would be no risk of Akechi arousing suspicion at suddenly knowing everything.
Instead, he crawled into bed and stared at the clock sitting on his night stand. His cheek still stung slightly–for such a skinny man, Fukui was certainly strong–but Akechi managed to ignore the pain well enough. It was the emotional trauma that was trying to crawl its way back out of Akechi’s chest.
He couldn’t go through this again. He refused to go through this again.
But if this really was reality, if he really was trapped in the past, Akechi had few options. He still had many years until he could emancipate, and Akechi wasn’t willing to wait that long.
Death was always an option, but it clearly didn’t stick as well as it was supposed to.
Besides, Akechi wasn’t sure he liked it all that much the first time. Akechi would save that as a last resort.
What was his life coming to? Akechi sighed as he watched the second hand on his clock tick mechanically onward. He should just try to get as much sleep as possible. Hopefully, it would be as nightmare free as possible.
Wait a moment… hadn’t his clock broken? Hadn’t it been stuck on a minute past midnight? Admittedly, that was in the metaverse, but Akechi would have assumed that the clock, like the front door, had carried over into the real world as well.
Apparently not. The clock happily displayed that it was fifteen ‘til two, as though it didn’t realize how much confusion it was giving Akechi.
Akechi rolled over and closed his eyes. He would worry about clocks and palaces and time travel later. For now, he wanted to fall asleep and pretend that his life hadn’t gotten insurmountably worse.
A piano melody floated around the corners of Akechi’s consciousness. It was followed by someone singing, and Akechi’s entire soul swelled up with the music.
He opened his eyes.
He wasn’t lying in bed. Instead, he was sitting straight up in a chair. Another chair sat next to his, but it was empty. A round table covered with a violet tablecloth stood in front of him. Behind that table sat the strangest looking man Akechi had ever seen. His was clearly ancient, but his nose was shaped like a crow’s beak. His round eyes stared at Akechi piercingly, and Akechi returned the gaze.
“Welcome to the Velvet Room, my child,” the man said in a strange, high-pitched voice.
The Velvet Room seemed to be a giant elevator, but it was the fanciest elevator Akechi had ever seen. For one, a large mechanical clock sat on the back wall, golden gears clicking against each other as they turned. Violet-blue velvet curtains seemed to hang from every wall, and the floor of the elevator itself was a rich blue color.
Akechi had no idea what the Velvet Room was, apart from the place he was currently sitting, but anyone could tell that it had connections to the metaverse. It could even have the answers as to what the hell he was going on with Akechi’s life.
It was also clear that whoever these people were, they were very powerful.
“Thank you for welcoming me,” Akechi said as pleasantly as possible. “I’m honored. But, if I may ask some questions. Who are you? What is this place?”
“I am Igor. These are my attendants, Theodore and Elizabeth.” Igor gestured to the two figures standing on both sides of him. Their blonde hair matched their yellow eyes, and their blue attire mimicked those of old elevator operators. Their skin was the same light beige tone as Igor’s, and the only true difference Akechi could discern between them was their difference in gender. “However, Theodore will personally be attending to you.”
“It will be a pleasure working with you,” Theodore said. In spite of his overly polite tone, he actually sounded genuine. There was no fakeness in the way he smiled, although Akechi did not miss a certain sharpness in Theodore’s golden eyes. “I look forward to assisting my master in your growth.”
“Are you shadows?” Akechi asked unthinkingly. “Pardon me for asking.”
“We are neither shadow nor human,” Igor said. “This place resides between dream and reality, mind over matter. The sea of humanity’s subconscious surrounds us here. Please, do not feel the need to hide your true face. I can see through any mask you may put on.”
That was certainly cryptic, but there was no way in hell Akechi was going to show his true colors to Igor, no matter what he said. Regardless, this place was definitely connected to the metaverse.
“What exactly is it that you do here?” Akechi asked, glancing around at his curtained surroundings. He couldn’t imagine that these beings just sat around all day, but there were no tools or furniture that indicated they did anything at all.
“This is a place where I assist guests in creating new personas,” Igor explained. “I fuse personas to create more powerful assets to aid a guest on their journey.”
“Fuse personas?” Akechi’s polite tone lost some of its softer edges in his shock. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Personas are merely manifestations of humanity’s subconscious.” Igor gestured around himself. “Each person has their own persona, unique to themselves. Consider it a mask used to face life’s hardships. The sea of souls houses many broader such beings, less unique than an individual persona. These creatures are what you know as shadows. However, those with the power of the wildcard are able to take these shadows and turn them into personas of your own.”
“That was Joker’s power,” Akechi said. Names had power, and in a place like the Velvet Room, Akechi didn’t want to risk using Akira’s proper name. Besides, Akechi didn’t yet know if Igor’s intentions were as benevolent as he made them sound. “Did you create, or fuse, personas for him?”
Igor shook his head. “You speak of a time that has not yet come to pass. But your friend did, or should I say will, possess the power of the wildcard.”
“You know what’s happened to me, then,” Akechi said, seizing onto this thread and refusing to let go.
“I’m afraid I do not know for certain what has brought you here. My attendants and I merely exist to help those along their separate journeys. That is what I have summoned you here for.”
As if Akechi was going to trust that for a moment.
Akira hadn’t given all the details of what happened after Akechi’s death, but in his vague summary of the world nearly ending, he did briefly mention that someone he trusted to help him turned out to be the god of control. Could Igor be this entity? Or was it someone else entirely?
“If you’re their master–” Akechi gestured to Theodore and Elizabeth “--does that mean you have a master as well?”
Igor nodded, his smile not waning. “I am the servant of Philemon, the manifestation of all that is good in humanity.”
Well, that gave Akechi a good measure on how much he could trust this Philemon, then. Humanity was about as good as coffee was sweet, and Akechi could trust this Philemon, as well as Igor, as far as he could throw them.
On the other hand, if Akechi wanted to figure out what brought him back to this time, it might behoove him to try to get closer to Igor and his attendants. Stronger personas certainly couldn’t hurt, especially if Akechi was to be expected to clear out such a large palace on his own.
“What would be the terms of me becoming a guest here?” Akechi asked.
“This is a room that only those bound by a contract may enter,” Igor said. “You have already signed the contract, although you don’t know it.”
Akechi frowned. He signed many contracts in his lifetime.
“What were the contract’s contents?” Akechi asked.
“You agreed to accept the full consequences of your actions, however those consequences might unfold.”
Akechi would have remembered signing such a ridiculous contract. He definitely had done nothing of the sort.
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” Akechi said. “I haven’t signed any such contract.”
“Not all contracts are made with pen and paper,” Igor said. “Those are just symbols, humanity’s proof that such a contract has been made. True contracts are signed within humanity’s hearts.”
Akechi nearly scoffed. “You mean to say that I signed a contract on my heart saying I would accept full responsibility for my actions?”
“You have resolved to let your life be your own, and that you will face the hardships that come with it.” Igor tilted his head. “Is that not the resolution you made to your friend?”
Akechi grit his teeth. Obviously, he hadn’t wanted to accept Maruki’s reality. That life was built on lies and manipulation. Akechi would have control over his own choices, even if that meant his own death.
Which was exactly what Igor just said. Maybe Akechi had mentally signed an unwritten contract.
The concept was still ridiculous, but according to Igor, the deed was already done.
“Were there any other terms of this contract?” Akechi asked, hating to think what he had inadvertently gotten himself into.
Igor raised his hand, and a clipboard appeared out of thin air. Igor placed it on the table in front of Akechi. Akechi stared incredulously at its one paragraph. Underneath it, Akechi’s signature sat on a dotted line.
“You worry about fine print, but I assure you, we hold you under no obligation than what is written on this page.”
There was no way this was real. There had to be some kind of trick. “You grant me the power of wielding an arsenal of personas, as long as I ‘accept the consequences of my actions’?”
“Our services are ultimately for your own benefit,” Igor said. “You may choose to use or deny them as you wish, but we will never require you to take action against your will. Your choices are yours and yours alone.”
“So it seems,” Akechi muttered, staring at the word consequences. If Igor could be believed, they took free will quite seriously. Seriously enough that they weren’t going to intervene if someone chose to do something stupid or dangerous. If all of their guests were like Akechi, then there was a good reason for that.
“I’m sure you have many more questions,” Igor said. “And I understand your mistrust. However, I hope, in time, we can come to have an excellent partnership.”
“I’d hardly call it a partnership if you're helping me and I’m doing nothing in return,” Akechi said.
“On the contrary.” Igor clasped his hands together. “It’s always a joy to work with each and every one of my guests. They always find new ways to surprise me.”