Missing Persons

by vivalisse (clothonono)

Summary:

On the morning of February 4th, most of a decade ago, Akechi wakes with a start, stares blindly up at the tiles of the ceiling without registering what he’s looking at, and says out loud, “Well, that’s embarrassing.”

On the morning of February 4th, most of a decade ago, Akechi wakes with a start, stares blindly up at the tiles of the ceiling without registering what he’s looking at, and says out loud, “Well, that’s embarrassing.”

He takes a moment to run through his doubled memories and make sure he’s got everything in order. It’s not so difficult. After all, one set of memories is totally bland after the brief, adrenaline-blurred, competition-blurred mess of you had to make surviving this another challenge, you piece of shit, you asshole. Dragging his bleeding-to-death carcass out of his father’s disgusting Palace just in time to swap that death for the headache of a lifetime—Metaverse wounds don’t persist but the exhaustion, oh the exhaustion does—just conscious enough to push himself to the finish line. Don’t go back to the apartment. Bag with cash and a change of clothes, stashed in a locker in Shibuya station. Phone tossed in a public trashcan. Go. Get out. Live.

Shido’s conspiracy is big. A lot of people have a lot to lose. Even if the Phantom Thieves pull off their change of heart, Akechi knows too many secrets. There’s a dozen powerful men who certainly have contingency plans and that’s just the ones he can think of through the headache. Not counting Shido himself—Shido himself—

Akechi gets out. Out of Tokyo. It ought to be out of Japan. If he’d ever really planned to survive he would have had a passport ready, plane tickets; and it’s realizing that he doesn’t which makes him realize he never really planned to survive. Some part of him knew the path he was on. Yeah, of course Shido was always going to have you killed, Ace Detective. What are you, stupid?

Apparently.

But after that first stubborn flight—to a shelter, of all places, somewhere his mother took him once, somewhere they remember him kindly, somewhere he knows he can’t stay—he collapses. He doesn’t mean to be there more than a couple of days. Instead it’s been nearly two months. They’ve got him on the chore chart. The rest of Akechi’s memories of January and December—the real January and December—are mostly physical labor. He’s been stacking wood, he’s been lugging heavy crates of donated food from the delivery van to the kitchen. He’s been making himself useful. There aren’t a lot of healthy young people here.

He remembers time passing in an unending numb haze. It’s as if the world has filled with fog. Does he want the fog to lift: no, he doesn’t, because what’s underneath it is worse. Every so often he uncovers a piece of what he’s actually feeling and it’s always hell.

I wish I’d done a single meaningful thing with my worthless life, after Shido confesses his crimes on television.

I wish I wasn’t completely useless to him, to all of them, as the sky rains blood.

The leader of the Phantom Thieves is reported to have turned himself in to assist with the prosecution of Shido’s crimes. Ren Amamiya is in prison again, for Akechi’s crimes again. It ought to be me. I wish it was me. Ren’s in prison all through January, and meanwhile Akechi’s doing chores and being effusively thanked by the nice old lady who keeps this place. Sweeping, sweeping. I wish I was slaughtering some fucking Shadows right now. Kitchen duty, where he’s restricted to washing up only. I wish we could have actually worked together. Would he mind doing some weeding? I wish I was dead, Akechi thinks mildly as he’s putting away the gardening tools. It’s the first real feeling that doesn’t actually feel terrible. After all, everything else he wants is completely impossible, but he probably could be dead. It wouldn’t be that hard. He’s not scared of pain.

I wish I was dead, he thinks again, washing his hands, eating a meal, sitting quietly with a book in the early evening. I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead, I wish—

Thank you, Doctor Maruki. Welcome to the new reality, where all your dreams can come true at the low, low cost of a few weeks of miserable memories. Akechi’s second set of recollections from the last two months is crystalline, exquisite, full of life and motion and violence. Full of meaning. Full of use. Working with Ren, really with him, a new deal between them based on actual honesty—oh, hilarious, it’s even better than that—based on being the only two honest people in the universe. Slaughtering Shadows side by side. Saving the fucking world with the Phantom Thieves. Akechi even nobly turned himself in, to rescue Ren from imprisonment and nail Shido to the wall. He got to make the little speech he thought about, the one about paying debts, which probably barely made sense to Ren or to Sae Nijima at the time.

And he got to be dead.

No future. No debts left to pay. No afterwards to face.

Talk about a relief.

It all happened. Akechi has no doubts about that. The numbing fog has lifted off him; two months of a life too good to be true have woken up his heart. He can feel Hereward there, his other self, his new self. On the rare occasions he’d been able to prod Ren into talking about his infinite variety of Personas, the half-hearted explanations had never satisfied. You execute them how? What does that even mean? How does that fuse anything?

Take what you were and drag it kicking and screaming to destruction. Lay the separate parts of your being side by side and slaughter them without mercy. Make something new from the broken remains of your dead selves. Something better. Something stronger.

Akechi is one whole and entire person for the first time since his long-ago Awakening, and he didn’t get that from weeding.

So now… what, he slinks back into Ren’s life and says, funny story? He gets a new phone and texts the Phantom Thieves, apologies to all for the melodrama, turns out my heart’s wish was to be the tragic hero of events instead of a shameful footnote? Is he supposed to call Sae Nijima, too little too late I know but would it be helpful for anyone or anything if I submit to the system we both know is unspeakably corrupt and go to prison until someone powerful gets around to eliminating me?

He cannot bring himself to do any of those. Akechi is not, won’t be, can’t be himself unless he gets to hang on to the last remaining scraps of his pride. And that’s embarrassing too, of course. Having this much self-knowledge feels like being naked all the time. There isn’t a good reason to stay away. There isn’t a good reason to guard himself, hide himself, deny himself the things he actually wants—the connection.The humanity. There isn’t a reason, except that Akechi will live his life on his own terms or not at all, and with Hereward’s strength and courage bracing his reforged heart, not at all no longer feels like a remotely attractive option.

On his own terms, then. That’s how he’ll reappear in Ren’s life, if the chance ever comes. He thinks about it sometimes. With no vengeance left to plan for, it’s nice to have a daydream.

On his own terms.

Of course it doesn’t happen like that.

 

Akechi tries not to mark the time too carefully, but one morning he glances at his phone calendar and realizes it’s been eight years.

Eight years. It rounds up, not down: basically a decade. He’s getting past the time when you can really claim to be in your mid-twenties. He never finished high school and university was out of the question. He doesn’t have a steady job. On paper, he barely exists.

But Akechi is doing fine, because less than a year after the Metaverse supposedly disappeared forever—yes, really, we mean it this time—he was back in that other world, back to the only thing that ever really mattered, stalking the hidden spaces between the ideal and the real, hunting. You don’t need an app to get into that place. You don’t need a system, instructions, rules and regulations. It belongs to humanity, after all. Akechi has his own theories about who governs the hidden world and why, and what it is that makes them keep tapping literal children on the shoulder, offering them all the power in the universe, trust us, it’ll be fun.

Anyway. The key is reflections. See the self that’s not yourself. Mirrors, windows, TV screens. Your phone camera will do it. A puddle on a still day, which is how Akechi figured it out at the shelter. He left a few days later. Since then he’s been…

Well.

He doesn’t work for the people who call themselves the good guys, the adults patrolling the otherworld trying to do something with it, all of them survivors of previous iterations of the game. But sometimes they pass information to him, and sometimes—after verifying—he acts on it. Once in a while he gets coffee with Naoto Shirogane, whom he nearly killed the first time they spotted each other on the other side. He doesn’t trust Shirogane, but he feels a measure of respect for him.

He doesn’t trust any organization trying to use cognitive psience for a cause, no matter how noble they think their cause is. He doesn’t trust anyone. He barely even trusts himself. He knows what drives him and most of it is foul. But the thought of walking away from the other world—from Hereward, and everything Akechi did to earn him, and everything Hereward can do to shield and avenge and punish—is unbearable.

“It’s interesting,” remarks Shirogane when they meet in an anonymous, unfamiliar café in Osaka later that month. Akechi has a mediocre coffee to finish and then he’ll go. He already took the latest sheaf of papers—disappearance case, a miserable housewife, a suicide which Shirogane doesn’t think is a suicide, a smug surviving husband living on the life insurance payout. If the woman is still in one piece, then she’s in the other world, buried alive in what Shirogane describes as an unusually unpleasant psychic emanation of abuse and cruelty and despair. If she’s not… well, Akechi learned from the Phantom Thieves long ago how you beat a real-world confession out of someone’s Shadow.

Shirogane says, “Yes, it’s interesting. You’re obviously not looking for atonement.”

“Atonement is impossible,” Akechi says. “Nothing I do now will undo my past. I won’t waste time wishing otherwise.”

“But I would describe what you’re doing as similar in intention, all the same. A balancing of the scales.” Shirogane takes a delicate sip of his coffee. “You aim to save lives. That’s obvious. Your work would be more effective with the support of a team.”

This again. “I work alone,” Akechi says. “I always work alone.”

“I see my own efforts in that world in the light of an ongoing investigation,” says Shirogane. “I have learned a great deal, but there’s always more to know. Still, based on everything I have managed to discover about you, I feel fairly certain that you possess, or should possess, the power of the wild card. To use,” he coughs, “a certain party’s terminology.”

“And this wild card is…?”

“Infinite variety,” says Shirogane. “Infinite possibility. I’m not proposing teamwork out of sentimental enthusiasm for the concept. I’ve seen this power in action before. You could be stronger.”

He means Ren’s power. Akechi recognizes it at once. This claim about what Akechi himself might be isn’t necessarily a sincere belief of Shirogane’s. He’s perfectly capable of a confident lie in search of a reaction, any reaction: do you understand what I’m talking about? But Akechi keeps his gaze steady and cool. In the course of working with these people he doesn’t trust, he has taken care to sow the seeds of confusion over the events of eight years ago. Phantom Thieves, what Phantom Thieves? The heart of the trouble in Tokyo back then was Goro Akechi. Oh, the sky rained blood? Did it really, though?

All he says is, “No.”

“You wouldn’t have to work with the people I suggest,” Shirogane says. “Bring in your own allies.”

“No.”

Shirogane shrugs. “I can’t insist. Be careful with that one,” nodding at the papers he handed over a moment ago. “I’m not altogether happy leaving it to you alone. But we’re spread thin, and you’ve always been competent in the past. Would you like another card?”

For what must be the twentieth time, Akechi accepts the ritual gift of Shirogane’s business card. He gains nothing by being rude, after all.

 

If this latest victim is alive then she doesn’t have long. Most likely, she’s not alive. Akechi heads out to the small country town named in the mission briefing, does his own legwork, confirms Shirogane’s intel. Breaks into the husband’s house and leaves—ha—a calling card. There’s a big mirror on the back of the closet in the couple’s bedroom. Akechi glances back at the piece of plain white cardstock lying on the pillow, and then he turns and walks straight into his own reflection. Through the looking glass.

Shirogane wasn’t wrong. This personal hell is a particularly disgusting one. Akechi won’t be sorry if he ends up having to beat the guy’s Shadow most of the way to death. It stinks of shit and gore in here. It’s trite, as well, all black leather and clusters of draped chains, bleeding female figures hung up in cages over buckets of refuse while they sob pathetically, a human soul defined almost entirely by the aesthetics of cheap pornography. Nearly all the Shadows are variations on the theme of giant weeping cock. It takes a lot to make Akechi feel dirty—the melodramatic child he used to be would say something like, because my soul is already more stained than any of you could begin to imagine—but after ten minutes he’s deeply looking forward to getting out of here and having a long, long shower.

Find the woman, or find her body. Deal with the Shadow in charge. Get out. Wash. A tough job—the giant weeping cocks are tough fights—but nothing he hasn’t done before. Nothing he hasn’t done a hundred times, over and over. It’s never going to be enough to undo a single one of his own crimes, but sometimes it’s enough to make a difference to someone. Sometimes there’s a person who’s still alive to be saved. Akechi’s scales will never be balanced; all that means is he can never stop.

And as a small miracle, this victim is alive. Just. She’s an ageing housewife unconscious and naked in a cage, hidden behind a maze of traps and riddles.

Akechi’s relief is tempered by his distaste for complications. A living victim is a hostage to this world. His best bet is probably to sling her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and make a run for it along the stinking halls he’s mostly cleared of Shadows, but—it’s an absurd consideration, she’s probably fifty and he’s gay, but he doesn’t like it all the same. Her piece of shit husband has already robbed her of every shred of dignity. Now Akechi needs to manhandle her out of here and he doesn’t have any fucking clothes to give her. It didn’t occur to him to grab a robe out of the woman’s closet before he came looking.

He obviously isn’t going to go back and get one, that’s a ridiculous waste of time. But the split-second he spends annoyed with himself for even thinking about it—that’s a split-second too long.

It’s funny, in the bad way, how little the real world and its cognitive mirror have to do with one another sometimes. Piddling smalltime monsters should have piddling smalltime Shadows. This would-be wife-murderer is nobody. Even his get-rich-quick scheme is obvious and pathetic. Maybe it’s being nobody, a lifelong inferiority complex, that has swollen his otherworld counterpart up into such a monstrous emanation of power-obsessed sex-obsessed shit-and-gore-and-cages-obsessed slime.

Akechi gets slammed by a gigantic physical attack from behind and eats shit. Helmet shattered, spinning away in two pieces, and he’s face down in the don’t-think-about-it-too-hard layer of muck that carpets this vile cognitive world. His ears are ringing and a giant heap of Shadow-sewage is already trying to smother him. The hollow voice of the Shadow rings around its hidden kingdom. Mine mine mine mine gonna kill you bitch gonna kill you this time—

The victim wakes up. Akechi hears her pleading in a cracked, miserable voice: I’m sorry it’s my fault hit me instead—the echo of thirty years of unhappiness. A heavy weight to bear. It’s a heavy weight that’s cracked at least two of Akechi’s ribs and is probably going to asphyxiate him. He can’t move. He can’t breathe. What a pathetic way to go.

“Dominion!”

The sizzling silver blast of a bless attack slices cleanly through the gigantic Shadow. Its separate halves go wobbling and toppling in opposite directions and then—of course—start to ooze back together. Akechi rolls over in the seriously-don’t-think-about-it muck, scrubs the worst of it off his face with his sleeve, and drags in a couple of heaving breaths—oh yes, those are cracked ribs, wonderful. Deal with it later. Get up. The fight isn’t over.

He’s trying to persuade himself that Shirogane sent last-minute backup, and he already knows that isn’t true. He only glimpsed the lithe figure moving with absurd wild grace through the darkness overhead. A glimpse, a silhouette, the flick of a coat, the flash of a smile: it’s enough. Akechi would know him anywhere. Akechi still sees him in his dreams.

Joker’s got his grappling hook. The dangling bunches of chains in here must look like a handwritten invitation to him. Zip, zip, zip around the Shadow, silver light blazing as he fires off each spell. Akechi draws his sword but doesn’t have time to actually do anything with it. The Shadow is already imploding, collapsing into the shape of a sagging ordinary man with greying hair, someone you wouldn’t look twice at on the train. “It’s not fair,” Akechi can hear it whining. “She’s more use this way, and after all, she’s my wife...”

Oh, Akechi would like to kill this one, actually.

He doesn’t. He never will. But he can think about it.

Joker murmurs something to the Shadow, which slumps and nods and disappears. Then he turns around and looks at Akechi. “Hey,” he says, and lifts his hand and throws—

Akechi catches it automatically. An energy bar. One of the expensive kind. Eating it probably will deal with the ribs, which will turn out to be only imaginary-cracked once they’re out of here anyway, but will hurt like hell till then. Joker nods at him. Walks past him. Swings off his coat with an unnecessarily showy swirl and wraps it around the woman they’re here to rescue, then gathers her up in his strong arms—his strong, bare, gymnast-muscular arms—like a princess. This fifty-year-old housewife is not a Persona user, so she’ll remember this—Akechi knows—like a terrible, vital dream. A tall, dark and handsome stranger pulled her out of her husband’s emotional hell and told her—

“You don’t deserve this,” Joker says to the victim. “You never did. Be free.”

It’s typical that when Ren says this kind of thing he somehow sounds impressive and sincere, instead of unspeakably pompous. Akechi bites back a scoff. He hasn’t said a single word yet. There isn’t really anything good to say when your high school rival whom you haven’t spoken to in eight years turns up out of nowhere to save your life from a random asshole’s Shadow in the flashiest way imaginable. Akechi still has slime in his hair. There is simply no elegant recovery from this one.

On his own terms, that old fantasy. It’s too late for that. Truthfully, it’s been too late for a long time.

He takes a couple of bites of the energy bar. Yes, that deals with the worst of his injuries. “Let’s go,” he says. And then, because he’s an adult and not a shamefully self-centred and melodramatic eighteen-year-old, he adds, “Thank you for your help.”

They don’t really talk on the way back to the mirror-entrance to this mirror-world. Joker’s never been one to waste words in the middle of a mission. This vile place is beginning to shake apart without its ruler, and the lesser Shadows have already fled, but Akechi’s pretty good at estimating how fast one of these will fall apart, and he’s not worried. They make it back to the mirror with time to spare.

Back in a middle-aged couple’s sad little bedroom, Ren Amamiya emerges from the glass behind Akechi like he does it every day. Maybe he does. He’s wearing a very ugly plaid shirt and jeans so threadbare they might actually be the same ones he had in high school. He sets the unconscious victim carefully down on her own bed and covers her gently with the blankets. Her clothes have reappeared, at least—a house dress and an apron, probably what she had on when she got thrust out of reality. Maybe she was cooking dinner.

It’s late evening. The white card Akechi left on the pillow is gone, and so are a lot of men’s clothes from the closet. It looks like Mr. Life Insurance Fraud has left the building: good. They check the coast is clear and then the two of them depart from the scene the same way Akechi got in, through the unlocked back door. “What are you doing after this?” says Ren as they turn round the corner of the street and become two ordinary young men just walking through town in the early evening, wandering in the general direction of the train station.

“Surveillance,” Akechi says. It sits in the air bald and unfriendly for a moment. Akechi can do better than that. “I like to confirm for myself that the change of heart has gone through. Especially in a case like this, with a survivor. Occasionally a target takes it into his head to apologize to his victim in person, which I’m sure you’ll agree is the last thing this woman needs. I’ll stay in town until I get word he’s turned himself in to the police.”

“Until you get word,” Ren repeats, with the very slightest inflection of doubt.

“Hmm.” So Ren wasn’t sent by Shirogane, because he clearly doesn’t know about Shirogane. “If I may—I’m surprised to see you here alone.”

A shrug.

But Akechi is surprised. Not a single fellow Phantom Thief? Not even the cat? Of course, Ren can shape himself for any situation, any threat—infinite variety, that was what Shirogane said in the café last week—but… it’s dangerous, that world. One careless mistake, one enemy not seen soon enough, and that’s the end. Ren shouldn’t be running around there by himself. It’s a stupid way to behave.

He doesn’t say any of that aloud because he doesn’t want to invite the natural counterpoint. Akechi would be dead in a lonely corner of a stranger’s pornographic hell right now if Ren hadn’t shown up. Instead he reaches into the pocket of his winter coat and there’s the business card. Sheer coincidence that Akechi hasn’t thrown it out already. The discreet corporate logo in the corner—Kirijo Group—raises Ren’s eyebrows, but not with recognition. He really hasn’t heard of these people.

“Call that number,” Akechi advises him. “I imagine you’ll be interested.”

The card goes into the back pocket of Ren’s jeans, casually. “That’s who you work for?”

“I don’t work for anyone.” There’s the train station, and there’s the station hotel. “Good night, Amamiya. It’s been a pleasure.” Oh, that was eighteen-year-old Akechi, that final sentence, that just barely good-mannered grab for the last word. Akechi knows himself well and it’s still embarrassing. Part of him wants to win this meeting, as if an eight-years-later encounter with an acquaintance who was once important to you is something you can win.

Acquaintance is the only word for what Akechi and Ren are. Akechi is always honest with himself; it’s not pleasant but it’s the only way to live. So he can tell himself, honestly: what else could you be but acquaintances? Rival was macho adolescent grandstanding. Ex would be genuinely delusional. One-time terrible teenage crush is true, sad, and not worth dwelling on. And the time for friend was eight years ago, when Akechi woke up still alive, knowing that all he had to do was swallow his pride and call Ren’s phone, and couldn’t bring himself to try.

Akechi can’t point to a specific time when he realized that just by waiting, by leaving Ren to mourn, by valuing his pride more than whatever bond they had, he’d already done something unforgivable. It only dawned on him slowly. On his own terms became it’s already too late so smoothly and subtly that by the time he acknowledged it, he’d accepted the outcome long ago.

“Hey,” says Ren as Akechi’s turning away.

Akechi lets it stop him where he is. Ren surely deserves that much from him. And anything he says now will be no more than Akechi deserves. The scales have never balanced, will never balance. Akechi knows it says nothing good about him that despite all the things in his past which he ought to be ashamed of, Ren Amamiya is the only one he actually feels guilty about. His shame for his crimes, his cruelties, the damage he inflicted on the world—that’s emotionless, intellectual, a simple analysis of the facts. But what he feels about Ren is a wound in the gut. “Yes?”

“If you’re not doing anything else right now,” Ren says, “want to go back to my hotel room and have sex?”

Akechi’s mouth opens.

Akechi’s mouth closes again.

Akechi counts to four in his head while Ren looks at him. Ren isn’t wearing glasses, but his gaze is somehow as opaque as ever. He seems calm. Perhaps he propositions old acquaintances outside hotels in the middle of nowhere every day.

At last, Akechi says, “Excuse me?” He’s really quite proud of himself for managing that instead of a ferocious bark of what?!

Ren shrugs. “Only if you want to.”

“I want a shower,” says Akechi. Cognitive muck in your hair doesn’t linger, but the disgusting memory certainly does.

“You can do that first.”

As if that’s the only problem. “You really are—”

No adjective comes to mind. Akechi has no idea what Ren is. Someone who likes sex and doesn’t care much about who his partner is? A person Akechi used to be would find a way to judge him for that and gloat about it. So he’s a slut. But adult Akechi holds himself very still and lets the thought slide away. No. Maybe this is a play, a move, an opening gambit in a game Ren hasn’t bothered to explain—no, that thought leads to rivals, leads to perhaps we still, and is somehow more painful than the thought of Ren just being enthusiastic about fucking strangers.

Or near-strangers. Acquaintances.

Ren’s still watching him. He doesn’t seem terribly worked up about this. Whatever Akechi says in answer to this absurd proposition will, apparently, be fine. And it’s a chance meeting. A coincidence. Akechi thinks it’s fairly likely that after this he’ll never see Ren again.

Maybe he owes this to a self he used to be, to a long-ago terrible teenage crush. Maybe after this he’ll be able to tell the memory of eighteen-year-old Akechi: we fucked in the end and it was nothing special. And after that, the what-ifs will trouble him less.

Yes, that’s probably why he says, “What a compliment. Well, why not.”

 

Ren has a room in the same hotel. Coincidence on coincidence. Did he have his own investigation going into that smalltime otherworld criminal? Does he have his own setup, allies, a system, a team? Akechi doesn’t ask. He uses Ren’s shower and then he very politely suggests that Ren should shower as well. Ren doesn’t take it the wrong way, or any way, as far as Akechi can tell. He just nods.

Akechi busies himself with his phone, seated at the narrow desk in the corner. He monitors certain channels. He pays attention to particular websites. Funnily enough, the urban legend of the Phantom Thieves never entirely went away. There are places on the internet where you can still find desperate people begging someone, anyone to help. Akechi doesn’t deal in random acts of vigilante justice. He doesn’t aspire to be a hero. But when you know the signs, it’s not so hard to spot when the otherworld is already involved—at which point Akechi’s decision to involve himself becomes not an arrogant imposition from on high, but simple fair play. An ordinary person has no chance in that world. Hereward evens the odds.

When he hears the bathroom door, he emails his latest set of notes to himself and looks up.

Ren is only wearing a towel around his hips. His hair is wet. He’s—

—well, he’s not a schoolboy any longer.

Akechi looks at him. He can feel certain memories getting overwritten, updated, and he thinks perhaps he hates it. It was easy not to want seventeen-year-old Ren anymore. A high schooler is a child and looks like a child, so really the idea is repulsive. Akechi could still just about imagine kissing that Ren, though only by imagining himself back into his eighteen-year-old body, his eighteen-year-old sense of self, Loki and Robin Hood blazing with competing flames in his heart, Ren unbearable and brilliant and self-righteous and infuriating and beautiful—

Yes, he could still imagine that kiss, sometimes. But the lurid, vicious, more-than-slightly-deranged sex hunger of his very deprived teenage self… it faded. Time took it away. Akechi got some experience, enough to let him realize with embarrassment just how implausible some of his pornographic daydreams had been. He got over it. He grew up.

So how dare Ren be standing there aged, what, twenty-five, lean and muscular still but with his shoulders filled out, his jaw stronger and shadowed with stubble? There’s a trail of hair down from his navel, disappearing tantalizingly beneath the loosely wrapped towel. His arms are incredible, the arms of a man who’s been doing fifty pull-ups a day since high school. His hair is wet and dishevelled and dripping onto his shoulders. He still has long, long legs. His mouth curls up in a self-satisfied grin and he leans against the doorframe with his hip cocked. “So.”

There’s no need to be coy about this. They both know what they’re here for. “Is there anything in particular you’d like to do?” Akechi asks. “I don’t have casual sexual encounters very often. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m out of practice.”

The grin gets sharper. “Managing my expectations?”

Akechi gives him a narrow look. “Communicating like an adult.”

“Oh, okay. Got it.” And—it’s been so long, Akechi forgot how it felt, watching Ren effortlessly drop one face and put on another. How could he ever forget? It used to make him crazy. The sharp, challenging grin vanishes like it never existed and Ren is perfectly earnest, perfectly natural, when he says, “I’d really like to blow you, then.” And as if Akechi needs persuading, he adds, “I’m good at it.”

“Of course you are,” Akechi says, and the vicious eighteen-year-old who apparently still lives in his head adds, unprompted, you filthy slut. Teenage Akechi would be losing his mind right now. Teenage Akechi, if by some insane chance he found himself in this situation, would already be on his feet trying to get his hands around Ren’s throat and his mouth on Ren’s infuriating mouth. Akechi shoves the uncomfortable desk chair around and says, “I’m not opposed.”

Ren smiles. Not the grin—a different smile. A very small one. “Cool.”

And he drops the towel, and he comes and stands naked between Akechi’s legs, and then he gets on his knees. His clever hands are quick with the button and zip of Akechi’s slacks, careful and proficient pulling Akechi’s dick out of his underwear. He probably does this all the time. And then Ren looks up—beautiful eyes, long lashes, mouth already wet because he just licked his lips—and says, “You can pull my hair if you want.”

Akechi nods. He can’t get enough air to speak.

Ren seems pleased. He gets his hand around Akechi’s dick and gives it a few firm, easy strokes, enough to get him the rest of the way hard. Then he puts his mouth to work. His hot, wet, eager mouth.

Ren wasn’t lying. He’s good at this. Like something from one of the more plausible long-ago daydreams—plausible anatomically, that is, not practically—right now it’s all Akechi can think of. Joker sucks your cock and he can’t hide how much he loves it. Joker’s such a perfect cocksucker he should do that and nothing else for the rest of his life. Joker takes you right down his throat and moans because he wants it so much, he wants you so bad, he’d be begging if you didn’t have his mouth stuffed full—

Akechi strokes Ren’s hair back from his face. He pretends it’s working up to the hair-pulling Ren asked for and not just that he wants to see him, to see that it’s real. Then he does pull, because Ren asked, and because the feeling of Ren’s curls tangled around his fingers is too good not to.

Ren moans around him. Akechi is nearly undone. He grips Ren’s hair tighter and then forces himself to let go. In the course of establishing to his own satisfaction that sex was easy to get and not actually that interesting, he did learn some basic courtesies. He brushes his fingers across Ren’s forehead and tries not to overreact to the way Ren leans into the touch. Ren obviously just likes this, likes giving head, likes being touched. It’s not long before Akechi tells him, “I’m close.”

Ren pulls off, which is a little disappointing, but you don’t ask a person you barely know to swallow unless he already seems open to the idea. But then Ren coughs a little, smiles up at him from where he’s down on his knees between Akechi’s spread thighs—that small smile again, unfamiliar—and says in a voice that is all low and rough like he’s just been enthusiastically sucking Akechi’s cock, “Sorry, got carried away. I meant to say, want to fuck me as well?”

Shit. What is Ren? “I—”

Just for a moment, the Joker grin. So Ren still loves winning. “That’s a yes, right?”

“That depends,” Akechi says, and is proud of how level his voice is. “Do you have condoms?”

 

It’s normal. It’s a normal sexual encounter. Sex is a normal thing to do. It’s true that Akechi hasn’t done this in a while but he knows how these things go. And Ren is—filthy—a charming, enthusiastic, very good-looking partner. Lucky Akechi. Lucky whoever else Ren’s been fucking, plenty of them presumably, or maybe not so many, maybe there’s just been boyfriends, one or two, lovers and that’s why Ren is so—is so—

Akechi doesn’t need to think about this. It’s none of his business. Ren is, thankfully, not especially talkative. Responsive, but in sounds, not words. Akechi fucks him face down on his hotel bed and Ren makes it clear that he likes it very much. They don’t kiss. Ren doesn’t initiate and Akechi holds back, feeling obscurely that it’s too intimate, too much, which is a moderately absurd thing to think about a man when you’re already inside him—but after all if Ren wanted to then he would just—

Akechi presses his forehead to the exquisite stretch of skin between the wings of Ren’s shoulderblades and screws him as well as he knows how, which he flatters himself is fairly well. Even if he is out of the habit of this. Ren feels so good. He even smells good. He gasps like it hurts when he comes, with Akechi’s hand on him and Akechi’s dick inside him.

Afterwards, he says, “Stay, if you like.”

“No, thank you,” says Akechi.

“Not a cuddler?”

Akechi’s polite smile doesn’t feel fake but it does feel like it might break his jaw. “Not really. Take care, Ren.”

If Ren says, Can I have your number, Akechi will tell him no.

But Ren doesn’t say anything of the kind.

 

Shirogane keeps odd hours. His email confirming Mr. Life Insurance Fraud’s confession comes in at three in the morning. Akechi is awake for no particular reason, certainly not thinking about Ren Amamiya, Joker, asleep in the bed they had sex in, just two floors down from his own hotel room. Well, a confession is good. The victim is safe, is free. That means there’s no reason for Akechi to linger. He has another lead to follow and an impossible quest to fulfil. He checks out as soon as the front desk is open and he’s on the first train out of town, early enough that he gets a table without difficulty. He flips his laptop open.

The train is already moving when Ren sits down opposite him and pushes a cup of uninspiring to-go coffee across the table. “Where to?”

Akechi closes his laptop. “You know,” he says, “stalking your one-night stand is usually considered discourteous.”

“I’m not stalking you,” Ren says. “I’m just coming with you.”

“Why?”

“How about,” says Ren, “because you don’t have any bless spells.”

“So you’ve decided to bless me with your company?”

“Something like that.”

“Ren,” says Akechi.

Ren just looks at him, opaque, in no way pointing out that he saved Akechi’s life yesterday. He doesn’t need to.

Akechi closes his eyes.

“I work alone,” he says. “I don’t want anything to do with your merry cavalcade of followers. Not even the cat.”

When he opens his eyes again, Ren is looking right at him. He nods.

“I choose my own targets. I’m not interested in discussing the whys. I won’t be diverted into vigilante justice, or whatever it is you think you’re doing. You’re not my leader.”

Ren nods.

“If what you want is to be a hero in that world,” says Akechi, “you’d be better off calling the number on the card I gave you.”

“You trust them?”

“No.”

“Then no. Anyway, that’s not what I want.”

What do you want. Akechi doesn’t ask. He doesn’t want to know.

“So, where to?” asks Ren again.

“Sapporo,” says Akechi.

Ren says, “Cool.”

 

Ren follows Akechi through his next six jobs and makes himself more than moderately useful. Some juvenile remnant of a person Akechi used to be wanted him to be rusty. Akechi himself is very good these days—better by far than he was eight years ago, better than any other Persona-user he’s ever encountered on the other side—and he’s not so enlightened by adulthood as all that. Appearances have always been important to him; pride has always been important to him. There’s a part of him that does still want to beat Joker. At the very least, it would be nice if he could make up for the sordid embarrassment of that initial rescue.

But if Akechi’s improved since they were both teenagers, well, Joker has too. Akechi doesn’t ask—makes a point of not asking—but he’s soon certain that Ren figured out the mirror trick almost as quickly as he did, and has been running riot in the otherworld ever since. Doing what? That’s less clear. He hasn’t been playing the Phantom Thief, because if he had, Akechi would know. Akechi is the closest thing to a phantom thief of hearts out there in the world these days.

Well, Joker is useful. He can cover a lot of elemental weaknesses. He’s faster than ever with his wicked assassin’s dagger. And he’s having fun—that’s obvious.

Akechi is having fun too. He hates it a little. He’s spent so long pursuing this lonely quest of non-atonement, the worthless excuse for justice which is all he can ever do for the dead. He’d almost forgotten what it felt like to love the other world. To be brilliant, to blaze, to know himself magnificent. But he sees it again, through Joker’s eyes: he sees it in Joker, who is wild and spectacular, and he feels Joker’s sly smile and Joker’s fathomless eyes and knows that Joker is seeing a parallel triumph in him. God, they’re good. They’re so, so good at this.

And they fuck every night.

Akechi can’t pinpoint where it goes from a casual suggestion to a casual assumption. Definitely Ren was still asking, without much apparent interest in the answer, during the Sapporo job. Three weeks later and halfway across the country, they’re no longer bothering to book separate hotel rooms. Akechi doesn’t care what kind of look a small-town hotel clerk gives him. He and Ren get good at fucking, too. Ren loves to give head. Akechi doesn’t particularly but he loves the little choking noises Ren makes when Akechi goes down on him. To begin with it’s always Akechi screwing Ren as the main event, but Akechi insists on trying it the other way once and likes it a lot more than he expects to based on previous experience. After that they switch it up regularly. Ren likes to kiss when he fucks. Very sweet. Maybe he got that from one of the theoretical lovers whom Akechi never, ever thinks about.

Akechi hasn’t kept tabs on him. He doesn’t need to know what Ren was doing all that time. It’s not his business. They’re old acquaintances, nothing more. Yes, he knows that Ren got into Todai, which isn’t remotely surprising if you know that Ren somehow maintained the highest grades in his year at a college prep high school at the same time as masterminding an occult criminal enterprise and working six different part-time jobs. Except it is surprising, of course. Someone must have pulled some strings with the administration for a student with such a chequered past to be accepted. Ren’s Dietman friend, maybe. Akechi doesn’t care.

Perhaps Ren had a nice university boyfriend.

He takes Ren along to his next meeting with Shirogane. This one is in a café perched on a hilltop above a windy seaside town. Shirogane looks at Ren with narrow, intelligent interest. “Ah. Your associate.”

“Joker,” says Akechi, and—he can’t resist it—“Naoto Shirogane, the Detective Prince. The original.”

“The former,” says Shirogane. “It’s not a useful persona for me, these days. Joker, hmm?”

Ren inclines his head.

“Did you know, some people theorize that the Joker in a pack of cards descends from the Fool in the traditional Tarot?”

“Huh,” says Ren. “Nope.”

 

“Shirogane is a better detective than I ever was,” Akechi tells Ren after that meeting and the latest exchange—another file, another suggested target, another pointless business card. “He’ll know your real name by this time tomorrow, so if you have anything to hide, now’s the time to hide it. He certainly knows far more about me than I would really prefer.”

Ren half-shrugs. He’s leaning on a fencepost outside a house with a neat little vegetable garden. The sea is sighing behind him, dark under a grey February sky. “I’m not interesting,” he says.

That’s an opening. Aren’t you? So what have you been doing all this time? How did you find me? What do you want? Why are you here?

Akechi doesn’t take it. He flips through the file Shirogane handed him instead. “Tokyo,” he says.

“Mmm,” says Ren.

“I assume you’ll be joining me.”

“Maybe I’ll take a break.”

Akechi has no right to be startled. Ren appeared out of nowhere and can disappear whenever he wants. They aren’t friends. They aren’t anything. “Of course,” he says, “I know you have other things to do in Tokyo.”

“Sure,” Ren says. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

They still haven’t exchanged phone numbers.

 

So Akechi goes home.

Home, what a joke. But Tokyo is home. The city you came from means something whether you like it or not. Familiarity rises up and wraps around Akechi like an old winter coat. He’s under attack by subway announcements, street crossing signs, the silhouettes of buildings. He doesn’t like it. He usually stays away from Tokyo.

But Shirogane’s intel is good, as usual, and there’s work to be done. It’s slower and harder and grimmer work than usual, partly because of the nature of the job—multiple targets, a series of escalating distortions, and Akechi never likes the ones with children—and partly because he got too used to having backup. He’s not stupid, he doesn’t make mistakes, he never goes into that world without a good supply of elemental bombs. He can handle things alone. He doesn’t need Ren. He never needed Ren.

But Ren’s not there, and Akechi’s not a child wallowing in self-deception. He can admit to himself: he wants Ren. He misses Ren. Six jobs—six weeks—and already the world is dimmer without him, the victories tarnished and hollow, the hotel room afterwards bitterly empty. It turns out you get used to sex every night. You get used to the world being spectacular again. You get used to not being alone.

Anyway. It’s nearly March. Eight years later and Akechi still knows when Ren’s birthday is. He can’t even remember when exactly he found it out, or what reason he told himself he had for knowing. He’d glutted himself on finding out about Ren, once. He’d studied up on the details of Ren’s life and his history like there was going to be a test later. He still knows Ren’s birthday, Ren’s exact height, Ren’s blood type, Ren’s favorite flowers. All the things a teenage detective needs to know about his most hated rival. Just in case.

Akechi sometimes looks back on the boy he used to be and just barely restrains a physical cringe.

He’s not planning to do anything, or to say anything, or even to make his presence known. He’s not really planning anything at all when he gets on the train to Yongen-Jaya. But it’s Ren’s birthday, and Akechi wants a glimpse of him. He’ll walk down the alleyway past Leblanc, he’ll glance through the cloudy glass of the door, and the Phantom Thieves—the former Phantom Thieves—will be gathered around their leader, their friend, laughing and chatting and eating and celebrating. On the occasions when Akechi has imagined Ren, over the long years since their connection ended, that was always the picture in his mind. Of course they’re all together. Ren loves his team.

Akechi’s deduction is absolutely right. It’s Ren’s birthday so they’re all there. Takamaki’s bright head is visble over the back of a booth. That’s Kitagawa leaning against the wall. Akechi slows without meaning to. There’s a piece of him that still thinks in codenames. Panther—Fox—he can’t see Skull but he can hear him in there somewhere—Noir and Queen together—there’s Violet, perched on a stool—Oracle straightens up from whatever she was doing behind the counter—Mona in defiance of all food service regulations is on the counter—

Ren’s not there. Akechi counts them again to be sure. And because he’s lingering after all, despite himself, he notices the other thing that’s off: Ann’s head is tilted down, Haru and Makoto’s closeness looks like they’re comforting each other, Yusuke is staring glumly into the middle distance. Futaba is slumped. Sumire’s body language is positively pathetic. And Ryuji is being loud, yes, but what he said was an emphatic This sucks!

And Ren’s still not there. He’s really not there. Akechi stares into Leblanc, lost.

He stares for too long.

Inside the café, a head lifts, blue eyes widen, and Morgana’s little pink cat mouth opens wide. “Akechi!”

There isn’t a good reason to run away. These people are seven twentysomething strangers plus one magical talking cat. Former acquaintances. Ren’s friends, not his. Nothing that matters. Nothing to be afraid of.

Akechi flees like all the Shadows in the world are on his heels.

He hears the door slam open and the bell jangling desperately behind him. Multiple voices are yelling his name down the street. Akechi panicked, he dashed the wrong way, and now they’re between him and the fastest route to the station. He risks a glance back and—over a short distance no human being can outrun a cat, so Morgana is practically on top of him already, paws barely touching the brick as he gallops along the wall over Akechi’s head. No way to shake him, and that means the others aren’t going to be fooled by a feint and get drawn off along the wrong alleyway. And fuck, fuck, fuck, Ryuji Sakamoto is a serious athlete and his best events are all middle distance, a long hard run with a good sprint at the end. Akechi grits his teeth and takes a hard turn down the next corner, nice and sharp, something that Skull’s bad leg won’t like doing in a hurry even after years of physical therapy.

“Whoa! Hey!” Ryuji yells somewhere behind him. Akechi’s bought himself a few more seconds, but he doesn’t know the street layout that well around here. Where’s the station? He doesn’t have a plan. He never had a plan.

It’s the same kind of shock as realizing I should have had plane tickets all those years ago.

No, you didn’t arrange an exit route, because you were always going to let Ren catch you. That was the plan. You came here to see him, surrounded by friends, on his birthday, because you were finally prepared to acknowledge what he is to you. You were going to let him catch you at it and reel you back in, his smile like a hook in your flesh. You were going to endure the surprise and amazement of the Phantom Thieves, you were going to give up your pride, you were going to admit you missed him and wanted to be close to him, you didn’t even care about the humiliation of his obvious indifference, you were going to give in.

But Ren wasn’t there.

Akechi stumbles. “Guys!” cries Morgana above his head.

Ryuji dashes past him and then skids to a halt, turning, obviously not quite sure what to do next. Akechi grits his teeth and prepares to bull on through. “Whoa, whoa,” says Ryuji, “what the hell, hold on!” and he spreads his hands out, palms flat, flailing like he’s trying to wave down an aircraft.

Ryuji can’t stop Akechi. What he can do is go wide-eyed at whatever’s happening behind him. Akechi isn’t stupid and he knows the Phantom Thieves’ capabilities, so he turns just in time to dodge what should have been a very effective tackle by the only actual martial artist on the team. Makoto pivots neatly and comes up on his other side and now here come the rest of them, roughly in order of athleticism. Sumire’s not out of breath and Yusuke recovers fast. Ann puts her hands on her knees and bends over, panting. Futaba is very red-faced and looks upset; Morgana jumps down from the nearest fence and perches on her shoulders.

Akechi is backed up against the wall of this alleyway. He looks around the clustered semicircle and identifies the gap between Sumire and Ann. Last chance. Better than nothing. Unless these people have changed dramatically since the time when he knew them, they probably will hesitate to collectively assault him on the street in broad daylight.

Sumire’s a gymnast, not a brute fighter, and she’s no match for Akechi’s weight and determination as he shoulderchecks her out of the way. And she’s a gymnast, so he knows she’ll fall well and won’t be hurt; he’s half-aware of her bouncing easily back up to her feet behind him as he points himself, finally, at the far end of the alleyway and the familiar steps down to Yongen-Jaya station—

—where Haru Okumura is waiting in a pale pink coat, hands folded neatly together, totally implacable.

“It is you, isn’t it? We’d like to speak with you, Akechi-san,” she says. “If you don’t mind.”

Akechi stops.

Behind him, Ann wails, “Akechi!” and then for some reason she runs up and flings her arms around his neck.

“We haven’t spoken in eight years,” Akechi says, genuinely confused. Ann is clinging. He’s forced to turn around just to peel her off without being unduly violent about it. “And we never had this kind of relationship.”

Ann sniffles and wipes her eyes. “Haha, same old Akechi!” she says. “Oh my god, you’re alive.”

“So Ren was right,” says Yusuke. “Ren was right after all.”

Akechi asks the only question that matters. “Where is Ren? Isn’t this charming little gathering his birthday celebration?”

The Phantom Thieves all look at each other.

 

They take him back to Leblanc. Akechi feels like he’s being marched into a prison cell. Yusuke takes up a stance by the door where it will be almost impossible to get past him in a hurry. Ryuji and Ann lean over the back of the booth Akechi is chivvied into, and Makoto and Haru are sitting opposite. Morgana is on the table. Sumire gives Akechi a totally unjustified sympathetic look from the stool she’s perched on. Futaba puts herself behind the counter and watches him narrowly. She also pours him a cup of coffee for some reason, and it gets handed from Thief to Thief until it ends up warm and unwelcome in Akechi’s hands. Akechi sips it. It’s very bad.

“Well, what a nice reunion this is,” he lies. “What was it, exactly, that you all wanted to discuss with me?” He’s asking Makoto, who next to Ren was always the brains of the operation. Her jaw tightens, and she says nothing. Akechi’s starting to get frustrated by everyone's strange behaviour. “And where is Ren?”

“We were hoping you’d know, man!” says Ryuji.

“Akechi,” says Makoto, “the last time any of us heard from Ren was over a year ago.”

Akechi finds he’s sitting very still. He looks at Makoto. He looks at the others, one by one.

They’re not lying.

“He called to wish me luck before Worlds,” says Sumire.

Futaba adds bitterly, “Burner phone, no way to trace it.”

Akechi, very carefully, adjusts his gloves. “And before that?”

“Before that he’d been missing for more than three years,” says Makoto. “The last time any of us saw him was just after he graduated from university.”

“He vanished,” says Ryuji. “We thought that bastard was dead.” The look on his face is at odds with the words. He might say bastard but he looks like he’s about to cry. Akechi jerks his gaze away. He’s not interested in Ryuji’s feelings. In any of these people’s feelings. They’re former acquaintances. They aren’t his friends. They aren’t important—

Something stirs in his heart. It whispers: weren’t you done with lying to yourself?

Makoto is talking again, brittle. “We’ve hit dead end after dead end. Ren was—Ren is—very good at covering his tracks. We think he’s alive. We don’t know where he is, or what he’s doing. Morgana believes he found a way back into that other world, which I’m sure you appreciate means he could be facing considerable danger. If nothing else we’d just like to know that he’s okay—”

Her voice cracks. She stops talking.

Haru puts her hand over Makoto’s on the booth table. She’s the one who finishes laying it out. “We’d like to enlist your help, Akechi-san. When I look back, I believe there were some ways in which you always understood Ren better than any of us. And even if that wasn’t the case, the Phantom Thieves right now need a detective.”

Her gaze is a lead slug fired at close range. She doesn’t say, you owe me, murderer. She doesn’t say, you owe us everything worthwhile about you, everything you are.

She says, “Please.”

 

Of course Akechi was never going to refuse.

Besides, it’s easy. This is familiar: oh please, Akechi-kun, won’t you solve this unsolvable case? And Akechi’s a cheat so he already knows the answer, there’s no deduction involved at all when he does his thinking pose and gives the gathered sycophants a little smile and says, well, once you eliminate the impossible…

“Ren is fine,” he says. “Or he was when I saw him last week.”

His announcement causes two things: first a silence, then a sensation. Morgana screeches. Ryuji is saying what the hell! over and over in different tones of voice. Ann and Sumire have both started crying, one in noisy sobs and the other in stifled little gulps. Makoto looks dangerously close to tears as well. Futaba slumps slowly downwards and then disappears entirely behind the counter. Yusuke appears to be talking impassionedly to himself.

Only Haru is calm. All of them as adults have grown into dangerous people, people to be taken seriously: that’s true of any Persona-user, Akechi has learned. But Haru Okumura, with the lifelong gifts of wealth and power added to deep self-knowledge, is a very dangerous person. She doesn’t get distracted by the commotion. “Could you tell us more, please?” she says. “Where did you see him? What was he doing?”

“We know what he’s been doing!” yelps Morgana. “Where’s the map, someone get the map—”

“I’ve got the map,” says Futaba’s voice from the floor behind the counter, and her hand in fingerless gloves comes up over the top and pokes a roll of print-outs across the counter into Sumire’s hands. Sumire passes it to Yusuke who passes it to Ann who passes it to Makoto. It’s been years; how are the Thieves still like this? Aren’t people supposed to grow apart? To grow up? To move on?

Makoto unrolls the scrappy printed maps and then starts laying them in order, overlapping in places, slowly creating a map of Japan out of multiple A4 sheets. It’s all marked with scarlet crosses and scribbles and annotations and fluttering post-it notes with dates. “Look, this is nearly two months ago,” says Morgana, stalking across the mess on small black paws, “he was in Sapporo, this has got to be him. Before that—”

Akechi can see embarrassment bearing down on him like a huge pink blast of psychic energy. He doesn’t want to discuss this—with anyone, but least of all with them. But he has to. The dates on the map go back years. Some of them are circled, with hyperlinks written on them in pen and Futaba’s scrawl underneath complaining about handwritten hyperlinks. Akechi recognises the websites. Of course he does: he checks them all the time.

“None of these were Ren,” he says.

Morgana, yowling an explanation that Akechi wasn’t listening to, stops and looks insulted. “Weren’t you paying attention? This is phantom thievery! Calling cards and changes of heart! There’s no other explanation, it’s got to be him, I know he’s been in the Metaverse somehow!”

“He has,” Akechi says. Ren’s as good as he is. Ren’s not rusty. “And he was in Sapporo.” It was fucking freezing, Hokkaido in January. Ren complained lazily every time Akechi got out of the bed. Get back here and warm me up. “But none of these incidents are Ren’s work.”

“You don’t know that!”

“Yes, I do.”

It comes out too harsh. They all look at him, waiting for his explanation, ready to judge. They’ve been thorough. They’ve got nearly everything, except the most recent handful of jobs; no doubt they’ll pick those up too as the consequences of Akechi’s actions trickle through the system.

“It’s true, you’ve been tracking a phantom thief’s activities. But not Joker’s,” he says. Rip off the bandaid; it’ll hurt less. “All of this is me.”

“It’s—what?”

“Did you not consider, cat,” says Akechi, losing patience, “that there was one other person who knew your little group’s methods?”

“But,” says Morgana, “you—you were dead!” Akechi can only ignore that piece of stupidity. “And why would you be—”

Here comes the embarrassment attack. The quickest on the uptake among the Thieves—Makoto, Futaba, Ann for some reason—are already looking at him with new consideration. “No reason,” says Akechi without the slightest hope of deceiving any of them. “It was something to do.”

“I see,” says Haru softly. “Well, then.”

 

Akechi can distract them, thank fuck, with more of what they really care about. He’s seen Ren. Ren looks fine. He appears to be eating enough and not living under a bridge. He has money—enough for hotel rooms, anyway, he always pays for his half. Akechi doesn’t tell them that. He does tell them that it looks like Ren is living cash-only, with fistfuls of stained notes like the ones dropped by Shadows in the other world. As far as Akechi knows, he doesn’t have a job. And no, Akechi doesn’t know where he actually lives. No, Akechi can’t give them Ren’s phone number. For the first time he lets himself actually think about it and then he tells them all, I’m fairly certain he doesn’t have a phone.

Akechi tells them it’s been just under two months since they had a chance meeting in the other world and that he has no clue where Ren was, or even that he’d pulled a disappearing act, before that encounter. He tells them Ren seems normal, fine, like he’s having fun when he fights. He’s forced to outline his own activities in order to explain the way he and Ren have been working together on Akechi’s otherworld jobs. He doggedly skips over anything that might hint at what else they’ve been doing all that time. Ren’s casual sexual encounters are not his friends’ business. Akechi’s sex life is even less the Phantom Thieves’ business.

“But how do we get him to come home,” says Ann, when they’ve all run out of questions.

“Maybe you don’t,” says Akechi. He knows it’s brutal but he’s not going to lie. “Maybe he doesn’t want to.”

Yusuke’s deep voice has an odd gravity when he answers, “I find that hard to believe.”

Akechi finds it hard to believe too. When Akechi let himself imagine Ren—rarely, very rarely, and he’d almost trained himself out of it altogether—it was always with his friends. His team. Ren wandering, wasting his life, wasting his brains and talent and enormous potential, always pointlessly alone… that doesn’t make sense. That’s Akechi’s life: his doom, his fate, his lonely well-earned punishment.

“What we need,” says Makoto, “is a plan. And whatever plan we make,” she looks at Akechi, “you’re in the middle of it. That’s clear.”

He is? Akechi was hoping to flee into the night after he escapes this terrible birthday party. He owes them everything; it’s a miserable feeling. “What role do you have in mind for me, exactly?”

“Well, obviously,” announces Morgana, leaping up to the back of the booth seat so he can yowl it right by Akechi’s ear, “you’ve got to be the bait!”

 

By the time Akechi leaves Tokyo again he is in four different Phantom Thief groupchats. Some other things happened over the three weeks he was there, but the four groupchats seem to summarize the agony and indignity nicely. They dragged out the reason he was in town—and by ‘dragged’ Akechi means ‘Sumire asked nicely, once, and he folded like a cheap card table’—and then wouldn’t be put off, they wanted to help. They wanted to support his work in that other world.

(“It’s not about you, bro,” said Ryuji. “This is just helping people, right? It’s what we do!”)

So Akechi taught them the mirror trick, and after that he spent three weeks taking down Shadows with a team again. A team without a leader—so they made him be the leader. They chose him without any apparent discussion or difficulty. As if it was obvious to all of them that Akechi could take Ren’s place, just like that. Which he can, he did, it required a mental adjustment but the Phantom Thieves—even out of practice—are a lot more effective than a pocketful of elemental bombs. Akechi isn’t so arrogant or so stupid that he’ll refuse them face to face in favor of cherishing his own pride. Not any more.

Anyway, that’s groupchat one.

The team insisted on socializing. Groupchat two.

A single afternoon’s discussion about the newest Featherman series got the participants universally banned from mentioning it in the second groupchat. Futaba set up groupchat three apparently just so she could continue to share her opinions. She specifically tags Akechi to respond if he mutes the chat for too long. Ryuji and Sumire are also there for no apparent reason, since neither of them ever adds anything but emoji reactions. Futaba’s a graduate student, shouldn’t she be too busy for this sort of inanity? (Akechi’s a murderer; shouldn’t she despise him too much ever to speak to him agan?)

Groupchat four is the last: Akechi, Makoto, and Haru. Haru created that one, two days before Akechi left. She tends to type for a long time before sending anything. Akechi has come to dread the three little dots.

(Haru says: I’ve put a lot of effort into discovering and compensating my father’s victims, so far as compensation is ever really possible. I don’t feel responsible for his crimes, but I do feel responsible for what I choose to do with the wealth and power I inherited from him. Would any of the information I’ve uncovered be useful to you?

The answer is yes, of course it’s yes. They all see Akechi with his unbalanced scales. They all know; they understand. If self-knowledge is like being naked all the time, friendship is the same permanent nakedness and you’re also covered in slime. It’s totally unbearable. Akechi was right to stay away. He will never be able to stay away again.)

Akechi leaves Tokyo in early April, as the cherry trees bloom. He’s done good work, worthwhile work. He’s saved some lives and paid a little more of his bottomless debt to the world. Now he has a lead on a mission taking him to a small town in the mountains, a pocket buzzing with phone notifications, a meeting set up with Shirogane next week, and not the slightest hint of Ren.

In Tokyo, for the first time in eight years, Akechi was almost too busy to miss him.

 

Akechi did point out that he had no way of contacting Ren, no leads on his location, no actual ability to find him. The Phantom Thieves did not seem concerned about this hole in their plan. Just focus on being bait! ordered Morgana, and Makoto gave Akechi a serious look and said, The most important thing is to talk to him.

You can’t talk to someone who’s not there. You can’t talk to a phantom, a ghost. And no one explained what Akechi was supposed to say.

There’s a sharp breeze blowing through the town in the mountains where Akechi is due to meet Shirogane. When he arrives at the touristy tea-shop he almost misses them. He was looking for one man alone, Shirogane’s slender silhouette with his face half-hidden by his turned-up collar. Instead there’s two of them, the remains of a breakfast spread on the table between them suggesting they’ve been there a while, and both of them talking and laughing. Akechi sees Ren’s smile flash, his fingers flutter as he waves away a comment, a compliment—Shirogane’s eyes narrowed with amusement—fuck this, fuck this. He’s not jealous, he has no right to be jealous. He’s an adult and he’s normal about things. He doesn’t own Ren, so Ren can flirt with any Detective Prince he likes; after all, Ren enjoys sex and doesn’t care much about who his partner is, obviously, does he—

“I’m sorry I can’t convince you,” says Shirogane, with a small smile playing around his lips as he stands up. “Ah, Akechi, good morning. I’ll take my leave. Joker.” A little nod. Akechi hates him, hates his guts, in a way which is so familiar it’s frightening. He grew up. He’s not like that anymore. He’s not like anything much anymore, outside of his self-imposed mission.

But then Shirogane’s gone and it’s just Ren at the table looking up at him. “Hi,” he says. “How was Tokyo?”

Akechi could drop the bomb right there: I found out you’ve spent the last four years breaking all your precious friends’ hearts. What a cruel thing to do, Joker! Turns out you’re not such a great hero after all!

He takes a seat.

“Fine,” he says. “Did he give you any intel?”

 

Akechi took care not to expect anything. It’s been three weeks. That’s a long time, isn’t it? And it’s not like they’re lovers. It’s not like they’re anything. Akechi didn’t even know about—whatever it is Ren’s doing, the vanishing act, the ongoing nervous breakdown maybe. Ren doesn’t seem particularly broken.

The plan is stupid. He’s not a therapist. He’s not a friend. He’s not anything. Acquaintance. Occasional associate. Colleague, at a stretch. And they’ve fucked a few times. That’s it, that’s all there is, Akechi doesn’t know this Ren. This Ren doesn’t know him either. How could he? What is there to know?

They don’t sleep together that night. Akechi takes it as a portent. See, look, there’s nothing, this won’t work. But the next night Ren leans into his space and curls his fingers around Akechi’s shoulder as he murmurs a suggestion, so that’s a different portent, perhaps. Akechi won’t say no. Akechi still remembers the way his insides ached when he realised in Tokyo that he had no plan except go back to him and there was nothing to go back to.

What is he doing, what is he doing? Why did he let the Phantom Thieves persuade him to try to do anything?

So Akechi spends four days doing the travel and the legwork for their next otherworld mission and screwing Ren every night and stewing miserably.

Then he pulls himself together. He’s an adult. If teenage Akechi could handle Ren’s double meanings and opacities and flirtations when the stakes were literally life and death, Akechi right now can find an effective way to lead into so why aren’t you talking to your friends?

Pillow talk, maybe. That seems like a plausible moment for an ambush: vulnerable, reasonably intimate, the suggestion of trust and safety. Ren after sex likes to sprawl into all available space, languid and appallingly gorgeous. Akechi tends not to actually fall asleep beside him, unless there’s really no other space in the hotel room. If he has no choice but to stay beside Ren, he turns his back, sleeps facing away. Ren politely doesn’t touch. He’s a cuddler and Akechi’s not. They sorted that out early on.

So Akechi knows Ren’s pleased when he doesn’t twist away immediately this time. He stays, and lets himself look at Ren, naked, all flushed and dreamy and delicious. His eyes are closed, his profile is exquisite. Little hard-to-read smile on his lips. How to begin? A question? A compliment? A confession?

“Take a picture,” says Ren without opening his eyes, “if you like.”

“Don’t tempt me.” The temptation is real. Akechi could capture this Ren. He could have him forever, pixels on his phone, exquisitely post-coital, Akechi’s to keep.

Low chuckle. “What are you thinking about?”

“Tell me something,” Akechi says.

Not lightly enough for pillow talk. Ren’s eyes open and his gaze flicks to the side. He doesn’t move otherwise. You’d have to know his body well to see the tension that catches hold of him, runs through his fingers, his calves, the lovely arch of his throat.

But Akechi does know Ren’s body well, now. He has that much. And he sees that tension—but more than that, he feels it. He feels his own response running through him as if his body and Ren’s body are one and the same. It’s a thrum, a hunger, a sudden taut excitement. They had sex already and Akechi’s flesh is satisfied. But his mind is not, can’t be, could never get enough of picking Ren apart. There’s something to uncover here, if he asks the right question. There’s a challenge. There’s a weakness.

The game is afoot.

Akechi thinks: you abandoned your team and disappeared, I still don’t know how you found me, I don’t know where you’ve been and I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but I know you’re hiding something from me. I see you, Joker.

There’s a hint somewhere, a loose thread, something. Sooner or later, there’s always a way to the truth. Akechi thinks carefully, watching Ren watch him, watching the flicker in the depths of those bottomless eyes like a shadow moving underwater. He thinks: Shirogane made Ren some kind of offer when they had breakfast together last week.

Then something that he would once have called detective’s intuition slams several different conversations together into a shape that doesn’t answer any questions but does give the answer an outline. An offer for Ren, almost certainly the same offer that Shirogane has repeatedly made to Akechi. It’s not about sentimental enthusiasm for teamwork; choose your own allies, you could be stronger. Joker, the Fool. The power Shirogane recognises, the power he calls the wild card.

Ren’s waiting. Akechi gets one question before the deceptions and opacities kick in. So many of the rules of their game were always unspoken.

“I’ve always wondered,” he says, “how exactly do you keep track of all those Personas? Is there an organizing principle? A system?”

Ren’s eyebrows go up. Not the question he expected. That’s good. Unexpected questions get unprepared answers. Time to push.

“Unless I’m overstepping,” says Akechi sweetly. “It’s not really any of my business, I know."

That gets him a frown. “No, it is,” says Ren. “You… if anyone gets to know, it’s you. It’s nothing special, though."

Akechi makes his eyes go wide with interest, a trick from long ago. “Please, go on.”

So Ren opens his mouth and comes out with the stupidest load of nonsense Akechi has ever heard.

He stares. He splutters. “What do you mean, it’s the Tarot?”

 

They end up getting dressed again—Ren in his underwear, Akechi in pajamas—because Akechi is not having this whole thing out naked. Ren is irritatingly vague until Akechi gets a notebook and makes him go through it step by step, pinning every step down on the page as they go. “So the most powerful Personas are associated with the god you killed back then—wait, can you still summon them?”

“Yeah?” Ren seems to think this is a weird question. “Of course. And the Fool arcana isn’t just the strong ones. High Pixie is Fool.”

“Why?”

Ren shrugs. Then he looks guilty somehow and says, “I think because… Igor back then, the cup guy, he was super strong, and I could always sort of tell? High Pixie’s pretty weak.”

That doesn’t explain it at all. “And then these are the Phantom Thieves,” says Akechi, running down the list, “Magician, Chariot, Lovers, Priestess, Emperor, Empress, Hermit, Faith—Faith? That’s not a traditional card.” He has the list up on his phone.

“Guess I ran out of those.”

“What’s the distinction between Priestess and Empress?” Ren rattled off lists of Personas earlier, he seems to hold all of them effortlessly in his head this way. “If you encounter and recruit a Shadow with a humanoid female form, how do you decide—”

“I don’t pick which one goes where. I just know,” says Ren. He seems to be genuinely thinking about it. “Empress is bitier, maybe.”

“What about the rest of these cards? You said you ran out, who—”

Ren starts reciting names. Akechi knows them all. He knows them the same way he knows Ren’s birthday and his blood type: because eight years ago he spent several months of his life compulsively learning everything there was to know about Ren Amamiya, and he has never been able to forget any of it. Teenage Akechi once imagined that knowing enough would explain Ren. That explaining him would make the madness stop. “Are all of these people you met in Tokyo back then?”

“Well, yeah,” says Ren, as if there’s nothing strange about this.

“No one since?”

Ren says nothing for a moment, as if it’s never occurred to him before that this is odd. “No.”

“And do you still have contact with all these confidants?”

“Not really,” says Ren, which is a pretty good technically-the-truth answer when Akechi knows for a fact that he’s not in contact with the Phantom Thieves.

“Who else?” he demands. “Sae Nijima? That asshole Maruki? Me?”

“Yeah?” says Ren. “All of those.” And at Akechi’s look. “What? I knew all of you.”

“Sae Nijima interrogated you in a prison cell,” says Akechi.

“That’s a relationship,” says Ren. “Judgement.”

“Maruki manipulated your therapy sessions for Metaverse knowledge and used it to try to make himself God.”

“I guess technically that’s all true,” says Ren. “But… also a relationship. Councillor.”

“I tried to kill you!”

Ren smirks, flutters his eyelashes, turns his gaze flirtatiously away. “Such a shame we never went all the way.”

“You—”

“What?” says Ren, and then puts on his serious face. “Okay. Sorry. Still funny—to me, okay, to me. Anyway… it was a relationship. A bond.”

“Are you going to tell me my card?”

Ren’s quiet for a moment. Akechi watches the serious face slip away, replaced by the emptiness—the true neutrality—which is Ren thinking about something. At last he says, “Justice.”

 

Justice.

What comical irony. What nonsense. Is that really how Ren saw Akechi back then?

He shouldn’t dwell on it, but he does. It nags at him. Their next target is a nasty old domestic tyrant whose small cruelties and endless manipulations drag down everyone around her—siblings, children, grandchildren. Her other world is thick with clinging grey mist, impossible to pin down or combat, full of inchoate Shadows that are barely visible until they leap at you brandishing daggers made of porcelain. It’s a gruelling job. Even Joker isn’t having as much fun as usual.

Akechi usually finds Joker’s silences more than acceptable—who wants a chatty associate?— but the swirling mists keep trying to separate them. As long as Joker’s talking, Akechi knows where he is. As long as Akechi’s talking, Joker can figure out where he is. So he talks. Their conversations were always about seventy-thirty in Akechi’s favor. Nothing’s changed. It might be eighty-twenty now. Akechi, by nature, is the chatty one. He’d somehow forgotten that about himself. It’s been a long time since he had anyone to talk to.

He finds himself on the subject of justice before long. Of course he does: it’s been on his mind. Night after night, Joker already asleep on one bed and Akechi unable to doze off on the other: don’t you understand what I was? It’s hurt, the thing he’s feeling. Hurt on behalf of that long-ago eighteen-year-old, who always thought—always hoped—that Ren was the one person who did understand.

“Show me one of these Personas you associate with me,” he demands.

In this mist he doesn’t even have the glimmer of Joker’s microexpressions to help him gauge the reaction. But in the next fight, Joker sticks to bless spells. Akechi doesn’t presume to tell him to switch it up and think tactically—he’s not Joker’s leader any more than Joker is his—but it’s annoying and it slows them down. “What did you think?” Joker says afterwards.

“I think they were weak to ice, so—” Akechi gets it. “Ah. That’s one of your regulars. Dominion, isn’t it? Show me again.”

A little pause. It’s not always straightforward manifesting your Persona outside combat. Akechi’s about to tell Joker to forget it, leave it till the next fight—but then Dominion appears, rising up behind Joker’s shoulder. It—he?—she?—neither?—is a glimmering winged shape. The grey mist of their target’s diffuse cruelty and misery apparently doesn’t like getting too close to it: the longer Dominion stands there, the clearer and brighter it appears, until Joker is little more than a shadow outlined in front of a blaze of silvery light. The apparition’s hands are full: a great book, a pair of balanced scales. Its hair and robes coil in an invisible breeze. It looks bright. It looks clean. It turns its distant gaze down to Akechi and the faint smile on its lips is neither affection nor pity: just a perfect, merciless understanding.

“Is that—” Akechi can’t keep going. “Enough. Send it away.”

The shadowy man-shape of Joker shrugs and then the shining giant is gone. There’s just Joker: but a Persona is another self. Joker’s eyes are that terrible being’s eyes. Akechi says, “Is that really what I am to you?”

A very faint lift of Joker’s brows is enough to purge any resemblance to the angel. “No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“I mean no. That’s not what you are to me,” Joker says. He seems to find something funny. “That’s what I am. Because of you.”

Never tell me that again, some part of Akechi wants to say. Never make me see it, never make me think about it.

“I want to see all of them,” he says.

Joker laughs. “That’s a lot of bless attacks.”

“Is there a reason the Personas you associate with me target Hereward’s only combat weakness?”

That wins him a silent, speaking look and the curl of Joker’s grin.

 

By the time they finish the mission Akechi has been subjected to the entire array of angels: armored, robed, winged and metallic, blazing with silver and fire. Archangel, Principality, Power, calls Joker. Throne. Melchizedek. Uriel. Justice, to Joker, means bless attacks and punishing physical force. It means distant faces with shining eyes. It means, Akechi can’t help noticing, a series of perfect male bodies. The angels of the Justice arcana have broad shoulders, perfect biceps, powerful thighs. They all seem to exist somewhere on the spectrum between beauty and dread. There’s one that Joker only summons once—Metatron!—a monster, gigantic even for a Persona, cold and dreadful and shining. “That one is powerful,” Akechi says afterwards, instead of you terrify me. “Why don’t you use it more?”

Joker clearly struggles with the question. “Metatron? He’s sad,” he says, and then grimaces. “No. He’s not sad. I’m sad afterwards. He doesn’t feel anything much.”

But his gaze cuts away, so that doesn’t seem to be the answer either. Joker clearly thinks Akechi is entitled to the truth here, which is an interesting piece of the puzzle of Ren’s psychology, or would be if Akechi could make himself think about any of that right now.

“He feels it,” Joker says finally. “He doesn’t let it change anything.”

“Feels what?”

Joker shrugs. “Everything.”

Akechi has no answer.

It’s probably to exorcise the sunspot afterimage of Metatron that Joker cries Angel! in their next fight. Not just male bodies, then. Akechi snorts with laughter. “Is that really what you are for me, Joker?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t like it,” Joker says, and the toss of his head to shake his hair back from his face is exactly the Angel’s motion of blind abandon as she lifts her arms to cast another spell.

 

They finish the mission. Joker talks low and sweet to their target’s Shadow and nearly brings her round, but one verbal misstep makes her balloon into a monstrous serpent instead. Joker’s jaw tightens for a second as the battle begins: it’s the closest he ever gets to showing frustration. Akechi isn’t bothered. He can count on his fingers the number of times in eight years that he managed to negotiate a nonviolent resolution to one of these otherworld adventures. Talking Shadows into better behavior simply isn’t his strength. He’d rather fight. And the serpent doesn’t like lightning, so out comes Thor behind Joker’s shoulder. Akechi tells himself he’s glad. No more beautiful and dreadful angels. No need to think right now about the shining eyes, the merciless comprehension, and that’s what I am, because of you.

It’s a good, fast, invigorating fight. They win it well, and the victory is the best kind, satisfying without exhaustion. It gets Akechi’s blood up; his insides are sparkling with energy and violence. Normally this is when he’d go looking for more trouble. Where there’s people there are Shadows, and where there are Shadows there are monsters. Akechi knows himself and he knows that he and Hereward could slice through demon after demon today. One glance at Joker is enough to confirm he’s up for it; he shifts his weight from foot to foot, flexes his hands in red gloves, catches Akechi’s eye and grins. Akechi opens his mouth to say let’s go and then for no reason at all changes his mind. “Hotel.”

Joker’s eyes go very slightly wider. His tongue darts out and wets his lower lip. “Okay.”

Hotel. Lobby, corridor, elevator. The spark of violence is still driving Akechi from the inside. Joker in the real world has folded himself back down into Ren, colorless and unreadable. Akechi takes hold of his wrist in the elevator and doesn’t let it go as he hustles Ren down the hall. Ren could say something like cool it or easy or everything all right? but he doesn’t. He lets Akechi shove him through the door of their room and then force him up against the wall right by the doorway into the tiny bathroom. Akechi still has a hold of his wrist. He puts his other hand on Ren’s jaw and pushes his head up and back so he can get his mouth on the tender skin of his throat. Ren’s body is a puzzle to solve, a secret to uncover, an endless sequence of challenges, but Akechi isn’t thinking about that. He’s only thinking about what he wants to do, which is kiss, kiss, so soft and sweet, right into the tender hollows under Ren’s jaw, until he lets out a little whimper—kiss, kiss, and then bite.

It's not courteous. Akechi has tried so hard to be courteous, to be reasonable, to be an adult about this. He’s communicated his preferences and made careful mental notes about Ren’s. He’s been polite and generous and good-humored and surely a match for any charming university boyfriend. He hasn’t even tried to learn the names of the strangers who touched Ren when Akechi couldn’t, let alone hunted them down to punish them for their presumption. He worked hard, he got better, he grew up. He’s not a child anymore. He’s not a monster anymore. He’s—

—a liar, a liar, all the way through, and he always has been, and he always will be.

He wants Ren so badly it burns.

He wants to hurt him. He wants to kill him. He wants to get his hands around Ren’s throat and his mouth on Ren’s infuriating mouth. Instead for now he has Ren caught between Akechi’s grip on his wrist and his hand on his jaw, a perfect capture that lets Akechi get his face right up to the pulse fluttering frantically in Ren’s throat. Ren is still whimpering as Akechi bites him, soft, soft, hard, soft again. Akechi lets Ren go for long enough to drag his t-shirt off over his head and then pushes him shirtless back against the wall and kisses his mouth. It’s not even a good kiss. They’ve kissed better than this, nicer, sweeter, more attentive. Ren likes to kiss when he’s topping and it’s always perfectly lovely, of course. This kiss is sloppy, aggressive, rude. It’s a collision. It’s a punishment. And Ren gasps and grabs a fistful of Akechi’s hair with the hand that Akechi hasn’t got pinned by the wrist and kisses back, and suddenly it’s a battle.

That fierce kiss is a distraction tactic, which Akechi clocks a second too late as Ren shoves him backwards against the opposite wall of the hotel room and twists his arm. Now it’s Akechi who’s pinned under him, still gripping his wrist but with no leverage at all. He won’t accept it. A second later they’re grappling in earnest. Who’s against the wall: you are, no, you are, someone’s ankle hooked gets behind someone’s calf and now they’re on the floor, who’s on top, fuck you, fuck you: and the vicious, sloppy, magnificent kiss barely breaks the whole time. Finally Akechi lets Ren think he’s won, goes relaxed and yielding under him and feels Joker’s triumph-grin curling against his mouth. Three beats, four, the kiss sweetening for a second as if the battle is over; then Akechi rises up underneath Ren, heaves him up and over and flat on his back on the bed that takes up most of the room, because Ren might be tall and lean with arms as perfectly sculped as an avenging angel—but by the measure of sheer brute strength, raw violence, he’s never been as strong as Akechi. Down he goes with a thump. Akechi’s weight has him pinned across the thighs and shoulders. Akechi’s turn to grin at him, and he knows it’s an ugly grin. Oh dear, Joker, did you think you were the only person here who could pull off a trick?

He doesn’t say it out loud because they’re kissing again. Akechi is fumbling with his belt at the same time—intentionally fumbling, because he’s waiting, and sure enough Ren waits till he seems distracted and then tries to roll over and wriggle away from under him. “Oh no,” breathes Akechi, the first thing either of them has said since they got into the hotel room, and he drags Ren back towards him by the hair and slaps him across the face.

Ren’s eyes go wide. It wasn’t a hard slap, but his cheek is blushing pink in the shape of Akechi’s palm. Akechi didn’t think before he did it. He didn’t plan that at all. He has a moment of sickened horror at himself—that this is what he is, that this is what he wants, no matter how hard he tries he’s still the monster who looked at the most extraordinary person in the world, newly discovered, and could only dream of destroying him.

Ren closes his eyes with what Akechi has learned is an intentional flutter of his lashes, turns his head to the side, and kisses Akechi’s hand.

Of course. He can always play any part.

“You don’t have to,” Akechi says.

“Don’t pretend you don’t like it,” says Ren.

All right. All right. Akechi breathes in. Violence still glows inside him, just barely leashed despite all his years of work to be better. All right, they’re doing this.

He slaps Ren again.

Not hard. And Ren only cries out and arches under him. He’s so beautiful he ought to die for it. Akechi does actually have to fumble to get his belt out of the loops of his slacks, but it’s because he’s doing it one-handed, the other hand pinning Ren’s wrists. Ren could fight him off. Ren’s strong and cunning and dangerous and every time they’ve seriously tested themselves against each other, Ren has won. Which means when he doesn’t fight, it’s a choice. Ren’s choosing this. He’s letting this happen.

Akechi hates him for that as well.

His nice leather belt—one of his few luxuries, he can’t bear to be badly dressed—goes round Ren’s wrists. Ren’s got his lower lip caught between his teeth. His eyes are shut. Akechi thinks of that’s what I am, for you. He thinks of Ren tossing his head in the gesture that precisely matches the glimmering half-naked angel at his shoulder. Ren’s caught. Akechi can afford to take his weight off him for a moment. There’s a black wool scarf in his suitcase.

Ren’s eyes open again to watch Akechi digging for it. He’s shirtless on the hotel bed with his wrists bound above his head. He says nothing. Akechi sees his strong arms flex and knows he’s testing the belt. But then Akechi comes back to him, shows him the scarf silently, and takes his non-answer as an answer. He folds the black wool carefully and knots it around Ren’s face, covering his eyes.

Maybe a blindfold is a kind of mask. Ren reacts as if it is. All his body language changes. Joker’s mask brings out wildness and rebellion, but the blindfold seems to do the opposite; while Akechi watches Ren sighs, relaxes, and surrenders. All his long limbs are loose and easy; there’s the glimmer of a smile on his lips. It’s outrageous. It can’t possibly be real. It’s perfect.

What happens next feels like a dream, one of those long-ago pornographic adolescent daydreams perhaps. Does Akechi really drag the rest of Ren’s clothes off him, unresisting; does he truly kneel over Ren’s face and force his cock into Ren’s willing mouth, does he get to pull Ren’s hair and fuck his face and come on his tongue and hear him groan as if being used this way is everything he wants? Does he hold Ren’s hips down and suck him off in turn, feeling feral about it, digging his nails into the meat of Ren’s ass? He doesn’t let Ren come yet, he’s not that kind, he takes his time enjoying Ren’s shudders and frantic rocking up into Akechi’s mouth. He knows he’ll get it up again before long. They don’t often go two rounds in one night but this is different, this is monstrous, and this is probably the only time Akechi can let himself get away with this.

Ren says something as Akechi’s fingering him open, wet and messy, smearing lube everywhere. His voice is so breathy Akechi can’t understand him. “What?”

Ren gasps once, twice. “No condom.”

It stuns Akechi a little. Then—“Filthy,” he tells Ren. Ren’s face is red and his mouth is open and the blindfold is damp where it covers his eyes. Akechi can’t help it, he kisses him, two fingers still in his ass. “You’re so dirty,” he says. He can hear the awe in his own voice. Maybe the blindfold is working both ways. You can be a different self when there’s a mask between you and reality. Ren kisses back frantically, and Akechi can taste himself in Ren’s mouth.

Akechi fucks him. No condom. He puts his hands on Ren’s throat. Ren has fully cried through the wool scarf now. He’s so desperate to come, he thrashes and whines and even actually talks—not begging, not Ren, never begging; no, he curses at Akechi and calls him names, and his arms flex and pull against the belt around his wrists. He’s unspeakable. He’s exquisite. Akechi would like to ruin him for anyone else. He’s been ruined by Ren for a long time. He’s talking, he’s been talking for a while, though for sanity’s sake he’s trying not to listen too closely to himself: but he tells Ren he’s lovely and he tells him he’s a slut, he tells Ren he’s a perfect cocksucker and a gorgeous fuck and that he ought to die like this, just like this. He tells Ren no one else should ever touch him, he shouldn’t even touch himself, he should come for Akechi and only for Akechi, that’s right, show me how much you want it, show me you love this, show me—and in a moment of completely deranged inspiration he pulls Ren’s hair and bites his ear and croons now be an angel for me, you know how, good girl.

Ren comes with a beautiful, agonized cry. Akechi doesn’t last long after that.

Then it’s over.

Akechi pulls out, trying not to think too hard about the mess. He rolls off Ren and stares at the white-painted hotel ceiling. There’s a discolored patch in one corner. Sweat is drying on his skin. He feels cold.

After a little while, Ren slips his hands out of the belt still looped around his wrists, pulls the wool scarf off his face, then gets up and goes to the bathroom. Akechi should probably have dealt with the belt and the blindfold for him. That would have been more polite.

The minutes go by.

Ren comes back. Lies down on the bed. Leaves a gap between them, because Akechi’s not a cuddler, as he told Ren the first time. Something buzzes somewhere. Ren doesn’t own a phone so it must be Akechi’s, but he doesn’t get up to look for it. It’s a shame he’s not the sort of person who passes out after sex. Unconsciousness would be a gift right now. Instead he’s terribly awake. He’s aware of Ren looking at him, his head turned sideways on the pillow. Akechi keeps looking at the ceiling. Tries to close his eyes, but immediately opens them again.

Ren makes a thoughtful noise.

“What,” says Akechi.

“Just wondering.”

If Akechi looks at him, will there be red marks on his wrists from the belt? A handprint on his face from being slapped, twice? He has to stop thinking about this. “Wondering what.”

“Well, you know.” Akechi won’t look, must not look. Ren says, “Was it everything you dreamed it would be? You’ve been trying to shoot your hot load in me since high school, right?”

Akechi hears himself make an appalled noise, a kind of creaking groan which resolves somehow into a bark of horrified, helpless laughter. “Joker.”

“That’s what they call me,” says Ren, sounding smug, and Akechi doesn’t actually have a choice about looking at him then. Ren is lying on his belly, at ease. His head is pillowed comfortably on his arms. His grin makes his mouth long and mean. He says, “What about it?”

“How on earth can you find that funny,” says Akechi.

“I mean,” says Ren. “How can you not?”

There’s no handprints on his face. They weren’t hard slaps, after all. Akechi should be relieved, and he is. The thread of disappointment can be disregarded: shameful, unsurprising. After all, he knows himself. Ren is fine.

And Akechi likes him. He likes Ren so much. Isn’t that strange? In the face of everything else Ren is and has been to him, liking him should be inconsequential—but it’s not. It’s easy to get worked up about Ren’s beauty and talent and courage and grace. How much more insidious this feeling is—the amusement, the startled laughter. The affection. “Show me your wrists,” he says.

Ren raises his brows without lifting his head, and shifts so Akechi can see the marks. Faintly red, nothing serious. He’s fine. “And your neck,” Akechi says, because he had his hands around Ren’s throat for some of that. Now the tilt of Ren’s eyebrows is decidedly sarcastic, but he rolls over a little. No marks. Wait—one. The outline of Akechi’s teeth in the soft skin under Ren’s jaw, already starting to purple. Akechi nearly reaches out to touch it.

“You can,” Ren says, low.

“Strangulation is a key indicator of intimate partner abuse, the kind likely to escalate to serious violence,” says Akechi instead. “It’s one of the most significant warning signs. Don’t let anyone do that to you.”

Ren frowns at him.

Akechi rolls his eyes. “This is important information, Ren. Yes, I’m aware I’m spoiling your afterglow.”

“Hey,” says Ren. “Are you okay?”

“Obviously I’m okay—”

But Ren’s sitting up. Ren’s looking at him with his terrible look of understanding, which Akechi can’t bear. “Stop,” he says, but doesn’t actually do anything to try to stop Ren, or to get away, as Ren crosses the invisible barrier they set up months ago and puts his arms around Akechi’s bare shoulders and his face in the crook of Akechi’s neck. “This isn’t necessary,” he says. Ren is holding onto him. Ren is very warm.

“I like to cuddle,” says Ren. “You hit me so nicely, you can do this part too.”

“I barely tapped you,” says Akechi, instead of I can’t.

“Mmm,” says Ren, sounding satisfied. “I know.”

Akechi very carefully puts his arms around Ren. It feels awkward. He puts his face down into the sweaty mess of Ren’s hair. They should both shower. Ren goes heavy and lumpish in his arms and tugs him down so they’re both lying flat. The arm Akechi has underneath him goes numb almost at once. And what are you supposed to do with your legs when you cuddle? Akechi investigated sex, got some experience, dismissed the whole thing as basically uninteresting. He never did this.

It’s confusing. It’s uncomfortable. It’s very boring, which Akechi only realizes slowly. Ren seems happy. All Akechi’s muscles have become floppier and less useful than usual. And time appears to have gone away. When did they stumble back to the hotel room? Was it mid-afternoon? Evening? It’s dim outside their one narrow window, and then the next time Akechi looks it’s dark, and a street lamp has come on somewhere further down the road.

Ren’s eyes are closed, but he’s not asleep. Akechi confirms this for himself by scratching idly at Ren’s scalp, which makes Ren produce an involuntary mmm of pleasure. “Get off my arm,” Akechi says. He doesn’t mean to whisper it, but that’s how the words come out. Ren shifts his weight. His eyes open a little. They watch each other.

“You’re thinking about something,” says Ren.

About Naoto Shirogane, actually, though only by casual association. “Good girl, is it?” Akechi says.

“Mmm. Sometimes,” Ren says. “But… you know. As a mask.”

“Interesting. Should I demand your Archangel in bed next time?”

Ren snorts. “Better not. I don’t think he knows what sex is.”

 

Akechi doesn’t actually fall asleep in Ren’s arms. He’s probably physically incapable of doing so—just the idea makes him tense up. But the barrier has been breached, and when they pull away from each other to sleep, the bed doesn’t feel as irrevocably halved as usual. Ren puts his hand out and leaves it casually on the pillow, and after a while Akechi lets his hand lie beside it. It’s sweet. It’s nice. Ren can be so kind.

Akechi slips into unconsciousness still thinking about that.

He’s awake before dawn, ravenous. Turns out you shouldn’t skip meals for sex, even really good sex! Ren seems to have woken up with the same idea and is digging in his big duffle bag for the snacks he always keeps stocked. Something is buzzing again. Akechi reaches blindly for the bedside table and discovers that his phone is decidedly not there. Ugh. He’s sitting up in the hotel bed and blearily trying to think past how hungry he is when Ren hands him three cereal bars and a can of Dr Salt. “Your pants are over there,” he says. “I’ll get it.”

Ren, naked in the morning, bringing him food. This was also a long-ago fantasy, one of the more painfully sentimental ones, the daydreams Akechi was most ashamed of at the time. Three slightly squashed cereal bars and a carbonated drink in a hotel room is not exactly the delicious home-cooked meal of his teenage dreams, but he’ll take it. He’s starving, anyway. And the view of Ren bending over to rescue Akechi’s phone from the pocket of yesterday’s slacks is also pretty good.

Ren stands up with the phone. Pauses for an instant as he looks at it. Akechi’s mouth is full of cereal bar but his brain hooks onto the moment, the split-second freeze, that was a tell. What did Ren just see?

The answer is obvious even before Ren hands the phone over. He saw a lock screen full of notifications from the Phantom Thieves and their four different group chats. He saw the friends he left behind, the people whose hearts he broke, all the connection and humanity he threw away for some insane reason. Akechi looks down at his phone—looks like Oracle has been awake all night as usual—and then looks back up at Ren, who has slammed the mask of neutrality back on as if it isn’t already much too late. Game over. Akechi has him.

“Ren,” he says, “why aren’t you talking to your friends?”

Ren is very still. After a pause—slightly too long—he shrugs.

“You’ve told me that your power comes from your connections with others,” Akechi says. “It’s not as if you can end these relationships. Your Personas remain a part of you even if the person you associate with them is dead. They’ll be with you forever. What on earth is the point of doing this to yourself? You can’t persuade me you don’t miss the Phantom Thieves; even you’re not that good a liar, so I won’t believe you. Shall I tell you how much they miss you? I was at Leblanc on your birthday and all of them were there. I told your friends I’d seen you alive and unharmed. Do you want to know how many of them cried?”

Ren’s expression tightens. “What were you doing at Leblanc on my birthday?” he counters.

Nice try! That move might have worked on eight-years-ago Akechi, but Akechi’s a grown-up and he knows himself so Ren isn’t going to trip him up with such basic emotional strikes! “Looking for you, of course,” he says, turning it back on Ren, who flinches. “And you weren’t there. Why not? What are you doing here? Do you get a kick out of hurting the people who love you?” Ren has an actual expression on his face now so Akechi is winning. He presses his advantage. “Ren, when are you going to go home?”

Ren says, “Did they make you the leader?”

“—what?”

“You did the mission with them, didn’t you?” Ren says.

Akechi stares up at him. He should have got out of the bed. He should have put them on the same level before he started this.

“It was the only thing I could think of,” says Ren.

Akechi says, “What are you talking about?”

“I tried the other way,” says Ren. “I pursued my studies.” He says ‘studies’ like he’s talking about a crime. “I finished high school top of my year and then I did everything—academic prizes and sports and work experience, law, politics, I was a debating champion, did you know that? I made it look good. I got approached by modeling agencies.” He laughs, a weird, high, unfamiliar laugh. “And I told them I had to focus on my education! I did all of it, I had to, I couldn’t do nothing. I couldn’t just wait. And then it didn’t matter because you still weren’t there.”

This is literally the most words Akechi has ever heard Ren say at once. He looks absolutely furious. “Is this string of boasts supposed to impress me? When it’s nothing I didn’t already do in high school—”

“I know!” Ren shouts at him. He’s the most naked Akechi has ever seen him, and the fact that he’s not wearing clothes is only incidental. “I fucking know! But you weren’t there so I did it, because I’m you and you’re me, asshole, and I knew I wasn’t dead so if I was you—if I was you—”

He gasps for breath.

“…then I would be you,” Akechi finishes for him. “You thought if you turned yourself into me, then that would somehow force me to be alive in order to be you—Ren, that’s not how reality works, that’s not how logic works. Whether I was dead or alive after everything that happened had nothing to do with you. That’s insane.”

Ren just looks at him. After a moment, he shrugs.

“And you still haven’t explained why you—” Akechi’s brain catches up. “—ah. You disappeared.”

“Yeah,” says Ren. “I did that.”

Because Akechi disappeared. Because he already tried being the perfect young man Akechi once thought he was going to be, the successful college student with a bright future, a person no one could look down on, and it didn’t make a difference. Ren should have given up, forgotten about it, moved on and grown up and got over it all and had the lovely life he deserved—but he didn’t. Even then, years later, Ren was still looking at the levers of fate and throwing his whole weight against the ones he thought he could move.

He disappeared. Maybe he dropped his phone into a trash can at Shibuya station and got on the first train he saw. Maybe he lay awake at nights afterwards wondering why the hell he didn’t have a better plan. But he turned his back on connection and humanity. He left his friends heartbroken, wondering if he was alive or dead. He wandered alone, slipping in and out of the other world, wasting his brains and his talent and his future on a question without an answer.

And meanwhile Akechi found that despite everything he did have a reason to keep existing. Akechi found ways to defend the innocent and punish the cruel, to tip the scales of justice just a little way back towards where they ought to be. Akechi left calling cards on targets' pillows and beat confessions out of the Shadows of evil, exploitative assholes who would otherwise have kept on getting away with everything. Akechi’s the closest thing in the world to a phantom thief of hearts, and when he found himself back in Tokyo and surrounded by Ren’s team, they slotted him into the empty place of leader as if he’d always belonged there—

“Mmm,” says Ren. “So it worked, right? So that’s fine.”

“Are you out of your mind,” says Akechi. “What kind of lunatic would—this is the real world and that’s not how logic or causality or anything works, Ren! You didn’t argue me back into existence by throwing your own life away, that doesn’t make any sense. It was the worst kind of wishful thinking to even hope it would work. You’d have to be crazy to try it. You hadn’t seen me in years, you didn’t need me anymore, and what kind of adult spends years obsessing over an acquaintance, someone you knew for six months in high school—"

“You’re not an acquaintance,” says Ren. “You’re my rival.”

He says it with terrible flat intensity. He’s naked among the mess of their bags and discarded clothes all over the hotel room floor, and the pre-dawn light coming through the narrow window makes his eyes seem to glow. Their silver color is almost the angelic blaze of Metatron. The purpling mark of Akechi’s teeth is hidden somewhere under his jaw. You terrify me, Akechi thinks, staring at him. Akechi is still tangled in the blankets of the bed they shared last night. Akechi is remembering, for the first time in years, that ‘rival’ was always Ren’s word for the two of them.

“You’d have to be crazy,” he says again. His voice comes out embarrassingly weak. “You’d have to be crazy about me.”

Ren just looks at him. Akechi, after a moment, hears what he’s said. Ren doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t look ashamed.

And if Akechi was a different person, maybe this is the moment when he’d say I never got over you either. I always felt the same way. You know that, because I’m you and you’re me. Something like that. Nice and dramatic. Now come here and kiss me, you fool.

But Akechi’s not that person. He knows himself better than that; he can’t leave the rest of the puzzle unsolved. So he keeps thinking, still following the unravelling thread of Ren’s madness. Ren tried being the prince and that didn’t work. Then he made himself a ghost, and maybe it did. But there’s four years of disppearance to account for and an obvious omission. Akechi’s prince and ghost and one other thing, something he’s going to be for the rest of his life no matter what he does. You can’t be an ex-killer the way Ren’s an ex-barista. Once you’re a murderer, you stay a murderer forever.

Akechi gets out of bed, finally, and he stalks closer. They’re on the same level now. They’re both naked. Ren watches him coming like one of them is a predator and the other is prey. Akechi reaches out and catches hold of Ren’s jaw. Ren’s got a little bit of stubble coming in. He needs to shave. It would be so easy to give in and kiss him. There’s some part of Akechi clamoring for it. He doesn’t.

He says it softly, seriously. “Ren… have you been killing people?”

Ren only tilts his head to the side. The motion presses his face against Akechi’s palm, a casual not-quite-coincidence. Just as soft, just as serious, he answers: “What would you do if I said yes?”

Akechi closes his eyes.

“I’d hunt you down,” he says. “Wherever you were. I’d find you, I’d catch you, I’d put an end to it. I’d show you no mercy and I’d never stop. You could never run far enough. You would never escape me.”

Ren breathes out raggedly. The rough curve of his cheek is hot under Akechi’s palm. “Promise?”

Akechi opens his eyes and meets Ren’s dreadful silver stare. Ren can play any part. Ren is capable of anything. How strange, that knowing himself so well means knowing Ren Amamiya better too: because there was a time when Akechi was furiously, miserably sure that Ren was better than him, and now he’s just as sure Ren’s not.

“I promise you,” he says. “I’ll never let you go.”

Little smile. There’s no real and fake about any of Ren’s smiles; they’re all him. This one is sweeter than the Joker smirk. “Cool,” he says. “Guess I’d better go and kill a guy.”

Akechi tightens his grip on Ren’s jaw, digs his nails in under Ren’s ear. “Joker.”

Ren says, “Ow.” He also sways closer to Akechi. Akechi is suddenly aware all over again that he’s naked, they’re both naked, the room still stinks of sex from last night. This is disgusting. They should shower. Or they should go right back to bed, foul and sweaty as they are, that would be fine too. Fucking—Ren thinks he’s so clever, he’s doing this on purpose, he heard kiss me you fool unspoken and now he wants Akechi to give in and say it. Akechi uses his hand on Joker’s jaw to shove him away hard instead.

“Do you really understand what you’re letting yourself in for?” he demands. “I’m not normal, Joker. I didn’t grow up and get over myself and turn into a nice young man you could call your lover or your boyfriend. I’m homeless, I live on take-out and vending machine snacks, I have no reliable income. There’s nothing in my life but violence and an endless series of self-imposed Shadow hunts, because I’m nothing but a supernatural vigilante with delusions of grandeur. I may have survived adolescence but I sincerely doubt I’ll see old age. On top of that I’ve been insane about you since I was eighteen, and I don’t mean the romantic kind of insane. In case last night wasn’t clear enough, let me say it in words. I want to hurt you. I will hurt you—” Ren’s expression has changed subtly “—stop getting turned on, you piece of shit, I’m trying to have a serious conversation right now.”

“Like... a relationship conversation?” says Ren, edging closer again like he doesn’t understand what personal space is.

“For fuck’s sake, Ren,” says Akechi.

Ren kisses him. Akechi kisses back. Ren kisses so sweet and hot. He’s smiling into it. His arms loop up around Akechi’s shoulders like they belong there. Akechi wants to hunt down and slaughter everyone else he’s ever touched. When they break apart, Ren says, “Can I call you Goro?”

“No one calls me Goro,” says Akechi. “I haven’t used that name in years.”

“Can I?”

“Yes,” says Akechi. “I suppose. If you want. Do you understand yet?”

“Yeah,” Ren says. “I think so. Do you think I’m normal?”

Objectively, no. Akechi scowls at him. “Get therapy.”

“I tried that once,” Ren says. “It went kind of weird.”

“Get better therapy.”

“I will if you will.”

Akechi read a book about self-improvement at one point and that’s all he really feels he has time for. Ren keeps smiling  that terrible sweet smile at him. They stopped kissing but they’re still holding each other. It’s shower or sex. They could have sex in the shower, possibly. Or—

“There’s a mirror in the bathroom,” says Ren, before Akechi even finishes the thought, because on some fundamental level they’re the same person. “We could cross over. You know you owe me another round.”

“Are you proposing that we fuck or that we fight?”

Now the Joker grin. “I’m easy.”

It could be so good. For a little while, Akechi thinks. Surely one day Ren will come to his senses. Just because he hasn’t in the last eight years doesn’t mean he never will. But until then—they fight so well, they fuck so well, they challenge one another as no one else does, they know one another as no one else could. Is he supposed to pretend he doesn’t want this? Would a good person find a way not to want this? Akechi wants Ren all the time. He always has. He never stopped.

“One condition,” he says. “On all of it. This deal, whatever you think you’re doing.”

“Yeah?”

“Come back to Tokyo with me.”

Hard for Ren to hide the flinch when Akechi’s got him trapped in his arms. “I have to, don’t I?”

“You do,” says Akechi. “You know you do.”

 

If Akechi had actively set out to inveigle himself into the Phantom Thieves’ good graces, he could not have done it better than this: a breezy May morning, wind ruffling the surface of the lake in Inokashira Park, and Ren sitting on a park bench looking—if you know him—just the tiniest bit nervous. Akechi is leaning casually on the back of the bench. It’s only partly so he can grab Ren by the scruff of the neck if he tries to make a last minute break for it. The park has escape routes in all directions; Akechi picked it on purpose. When you feel sure you can run, it’s easier not to.

Seven cheerful twentysomethings and one magical talking cat. Despite all his tension beforehand, Ren lights up when he sees them coming. Then the team are all together and Ren is being embraced and hair-scruffed and shouted at and embraced again and aggressively scented by Morgana, and his smile just keeps getting wider. Look, Akechi’s done a good thing. Look how happy Ren is now. Look how happy his friends are. Futaba is the first one to start crying and she’s clearly furious about it. She gives Ren a little punch in the arm and then he holds her for a long time. Then Makoto gets her turn at a tight hug, then Yusuke, Haru, Sumire, all of them—and meanwhile Akechi keeps leaning on the bench to stop his hands curling into fists. There’s possessive and then there’s absurd. Ren has a stable of Personas for every one of these people. Ren’s infinite possibility could never belong to Akechi alone.

He's so caught up trying to be a reasonable and normal adult about his—about Ren—that he’s not guarding himself. That’s how he gets taken by surprise with a stranglehold embrace around his neck, again.

“You did it!” cries Ann. “I knew you could do it!”

“It was nothing,” Akechi says. “Get off.”

Ann lets go, thank fuck. Then they watch Ren getting put in a headlock by Ryuji, both of them apparently at peace with behaving like middle schoolers despite being fifteen years too old for it. Maybe Ren will stay in Tokyo. He ought to. Akechi should encourage it. He doesn’t want to.

Ann says, “Cute! So are you two all official now?”

Akechi nearly chokes. “How—”

Morgana leaps up onto the bench and says, “Lady Ann’s emotional intelligence is second to none!”

“Oh, not really,” says Ann. “It was always kind of obvious.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I suppose you weren’t there,” says Ann. “But Ren was such a mess after everything, you know. I mean—he doesn’t let much show, it can be kind of hard to know how to be supportive for him! But I think he was really sad.”

“He was so sad,” agrees Morgana. “It was horrible. You should be ashamed of yourself!”

Akechi is being scolded in the park by a fashion model and a talking cat. This is so unbelievably embarrassing. The worst part is that it’s working. “He was supposed to get over it,” he finds himself saying. “He was supposed to grow up and be happy and move on.”

“Well… maybe if you hadn’t made the whole thing into a big weird challenge?” Ann says. “You could have had a dramatic high school romance and then broken up later the normal way. But I don’t think he’ll ever get over it now!” She gives him a funny look. “You mean that wasn’t on purpose?”

“I bet it was on purpose,” says Morgana darkly.

“This is none of your business,” says Akechi, a last-ditch defence. “Either of you.”

“Well, you guys are both my friends, you know,” says Ann. “I’m really glad you’re okay. And hey, congratulations!”

“Please stop.”

“Who’s that?” Morgana says suddenly.

Silence has fallen across the happy crowd of friends reunited. Ren has gone still, straightening up, turning towards the threat or surprise or challenge. Everyone else turns to look the same way.

Naoto Shirogane, with his hands in the pockets of his big coat, is walking across the park towards them. The wind of a breezy May morning is blowing in his dark hair. “Good morning, everyone,” he says when he reaches them. “I’m looking for the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. As a matter of fact, I’ve been looking for some time.”

There’s a long moment when no one says anything.

Then Ren speaks. For a moment Akechi thinks he made good on his threat of public intimacy and said Goro. But then his brain catches up with his ears. No, that’s not what just came out of Joker’s mouth. What Joker actually said was a familiar command, and a plea for help, and a mark of trust. What Joker said was, “Crow.”

There’s something Ren let slip, on that long night when he talked Akechi through the absurd house of cards that is his soul. Ren said: sometimes, when you drag your past self kicking and screaming to execution, that’s not the end. You can break yourself down to make something new, yes. You can endure all horrors for the sake of transformation. And then, on top of that, you can call your old self back. Like it’s nothing. Like you never died at all.

Out of all the people Akechi’s been…

Well, it’s not a surprise. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Of course Ren can summon that one.

So it’s Crow who steps forward. It’s Crow who lets Joker slip into the shadow behind his right shoulder. And it’s Crow, eight years older, eight years wiser and sharper and stronger and meaner, who gives Shirogane a polite little smirk. “Well, Detective, you’ve found us,” he says. “What can the Phantom Thieves do for you?”

Notes:

Fic soundtrack: Angels of the Silences

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