Chapter Text
It starts like this...
She is on her bed, trying to sleep yet she cannot.
It is one of those nights.
She thinks, 'Maybe, tonight will be different'.
Maybe she won’t dream of ghosts, dead friends and former partners. People who are dead due to the justifications of a deluded sociopath and a terribly flawed governing system.
The memory of an old man who called her “Ojou-chan”, like she was someone important to him, makes her insides squirm with false pain.
Her eyes feel wet.
Sometimes, Akane believes in the law, in the people, but on nights like these, where one case strays far beyond the lines of injustice with Sybil, she wonders otherwise. And on these nights, she sees the one ghost she’d rather not see. The man who had killed her friend.
Makishima Shougo.
Also known as Akane’s bane of existence. To have solved that godforsaken case, she needed to understand Makishima to his depths, for though she was like Makishima in many ways, she wasn’t his other half. Not like Kougami, the one who was simply another side of the same coin. No, to catch Makishima, to understand all that he'd planned to do, Akane had invested in becoming Makishima Shogo, and by doing that, has drawn a part of him to be tied with her forever, until her death.
She wonders, if even then, he'll be with her wherever souls go after death.
With Kagari, she retains him as the essence of a ghost, with bittersweet memories that suffocate her. And on the days she visits his apartment, she’d wake with tears in her eyes, along with the lack of an appetite; she thinks those days are some of the worst since he died.
Those are the days where she chokes on her own bile and remembers that Kagari is dead.
Remembering Kougami is painful, because she misses him, like he was a missing limb, and it feels like he’s gone. But her gut just knows he’s still out there, still fighting for justice, or whatever skewered version of it he'd retained due to Sybil’s influence and tyranny.
She’d never ever once thought of people as sheep, but it’s the part of her that knows Makishima so well that understands why he had done all that he did. She begins to think like him due to that understanding. When she watches how scared people are of crime, to become criminals, sees the things they would do to make sure they’re psycho-pass doesn’t cloud up, the things she never had to do because like Makishima, she wasn’t scared of herself. But unlike Makishima, was not aware of the flaws in the system until far too late. Makishima had been trying to make a point to her, and he’d succeeded. He had wanted to see humans as they really were, and enjoyed the chaos that had come with it.
"The splendor of their souls" or so he loved to say.
And she wonders at times, if they’ve really lost that due to Sybil or due to the constant wars and lack of stable governments. She’s read 1984, and thinks that even without Sybil, Makishima was right, in some sort of way, this was all to control the people. This was all to limit individuals and create a functioning society that turned people into subservient sheep.
When her eyes flutters open, he’s already there, sitting on the side of the bed, and she can see the fake charming smile on his lips. The one he'd worn in many of his other personas.
“Did you miss me Akane?”
She responds immediately.
“Not really.”
“That’s what you always say, one would think you weren’t fond of me.” He chides her almost gently.
“What makes you say that? The fact that you killed my friend and colleagues, or the fact that you wanted to poison the water supply and kill most of the population, or maybe even the insane amounts of murders you’ve caused throughout the past months?”
“Ooh, maybe all three? But let’s be honest, I think...it’s the first one that really bothers you. The fact that you couldn’t kill me, because some part of you refused to believe that Sybil would fail, but of course, Sybil never fails to disappoint, does it Detective Tsunemori? To the point where you watched me kill your friend and Sybil did nothing.”
His words this time, are less intended to hurt but they’re meant to dig sharply into her faults, so that she never forgets why Makishima really killed Yuki.
Because Akane couldn't pull the trigger. She couldn't take justice into her own hands nor defy her own moral code. Because before Makishima had come by, she might as well have been one of the sheep.
It makes her wonder though who she doesn’t forgive more, Makishima for committing the crime, or herself for failing to pull the trigger and believing in Sybil.
Some days she thinks it’s her fault. Other days, she’s sure it’s Makishima to an extent, but most days she realizes that it is the flaw of a system that never really wanted to punish the guilty. It was a system that wanted to protect itself by killing people's aspirations.
He leans in, amber eyes twinkling with delight, and whispers to her softly, like he’s telling her a secret.
“The truth hurts, doesn’t it Akane?”
“Yeah, it does.”
As she runs her fingers through her hair, he’s already leaned back, and had began to get up, and for a moment, Akane is reminded that despite how much she loathed Makishima, she had never wanted him dead. Even though some part of her thinks that he wanted to die, because he was far too lonely in such a constricting world.
And as he stands, looking tall and handsome, Akane wonders if he’d been a wonderful professor or even a combat trainer in another world where technology did not limit them and tame them.
She wonders if Ginoza-san would have been happy with a world where his dad wasn’t a latent criminal, and his mother never re-married.
So many possibilities gone, because of Sybil.
She wants to scream but instead does nothing.
Sybil takes care of them as if it was a mother, but instead of nurturing her child, it locks the child away in a tower with no door and no windows, who then wonders why the child goes mad, and then, punishes the child for becoming the very thing she’d created.
“You know, if you’re not sheep, you're the wolf, but people, like you and me Tsunemori-san, we’ve become the shepherds. We are aware that there is more to life than eating, sleeping, living, and dying. Is it not sad?” he asks, his fingers grazing the nape of her neck.
Her breath hitches, and she feels goosebumps rise all over her chest. A tears strolls across her cheek, and Akane wonders, who would cry for the shepherd?
Kougami she thinks, is a wolf, bred and leashed until they set him loose so he tore his collar as they broke his pack, and reversed him to the very nature of what Kougami and all these people are in their core...animals. Give a man a rule, then engrave unto his mind for years, and then take away the rule, and you break the man.
The smile on his lips is sardonic as he plays with her hair.
“No one cries for the lone shepherd Akane. Aren’t you sad?”
She closes her eyes shut, and doesn’t answer.
Yes, I am very sad, she thinks, as her lips form the words.
“No, I'm not”.
And Akane wishes for once, she could stop lying to herself and closes her eyes shut.