personavelvetroomdr | whisper that the past is gone eternally

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whisper that the past is gone eternally

It's the Shibuya Crossing. The big, famous one, with all the crowds and the traffic and the 109 building overlooking it all.

And that's the thing.

The 109 building.

Paying no mind to the sea of empty cognitions around him, a Goro Akechi stands in the center of the crosswalk, staring up at the number-faced building with a frown. If you were looking for any Goro Akechi in particular, however, this one almost transparently isn't him. Twenty-one years of age and dressed like the masculine line of a Victorian goth brand was thrown over his head like a bucket of cold water, this Akechi stares at one of the most familiar landmarks of Tokyo like it's a river in a desert and he hasn't quite decided if he wants to take a drink.

He's back.

(Or, at the very least, he's no longer where he was. Her Shibuya was a 109 as well. And there was that strange room...)

"If the Shibuya Game has gone down the shitter again," he says, seemingly addressing nobody, or possibly the phone he's pulled from his pocket to glare at, "I am going to go after the Composer myself."

He lifts his phone. (It's the same phone he's always had. The only thing that hasn't changed, for anyone with a keen enough eye for detail. There's a new vinyl sticker on the back, a stylized skull in red at an angle, but it's the same phone as ever.) Snaps a picture. No change in the photo. Closes that, opens a different app, snaps again. His frown intensifies.

(It is, by now, a good thing that the cognitions are just filler that will continue to idle in whatever routine they're running, because otherwise he would surely have been hit by a car, right? But the crowd continues to wander around him, heedlessly.)

Finally, he lowers his phone, sends the photo to someone on his contacts, and apparently gives up, shoving it back into his pocket. The cognitions resume the flow of normal traffic, clearing the crossing so that cars can pass through, as he goes over to Hachiko to lean up against the side of the statue.

"I didn't miss the not having any idea what's going on," he tells the dog, firmly firmly and with a hint of melancholy. "Oh, if only a real person would show up with the answers right about now. Why, I'd even consider buying them a coffee for the trouble."

Despite nominally being addressed to the bronze canine, the way he lifts the volume of his voice makes it clear that it's addressed to you, onlooker, whoever you are.

[[OOC: I don't actually care what format you use i just always write introspective-y starters in prose. tldr twewy au post-canon post-death akechi]

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[A lot of tension in there, but no intent.

Akechi visibly relaxes, setting the mug carefully on the counter. He doesn't trust himself to pour just yet.]

It'd be a lie to say that I'm not envious of your world. Just for that.

[How many dark paths would he have not walked, if not for that?

He tells himself that there's no point dwelling on it. That he's not the one who can turn back time. It doesn't stop the hungering ache.]

If you get the chance to meet her, be sure to treat her well.

[Because a version of his mother that survived... All it takes is a moment of weakness. He knows that. He's seen Players play it out too many times to not.

So, that's a version of his mother who never had that moment.

With that, Akechi seems all too happy to close the subject.]

In any case, I never really learned to cook. I didn't have occasion or time to do so in life, and my partner now is one of those people who plans meals for far more people than he actually has to feed to fill his need to coordinate something, so I never have to worry about going hungry.

[ No way. Talking to the Sakuras is bad enough. Ren doesn't want to even think about meeting Akechi's mother. What would he even say? Sorry I killed your son, I really liked him?

It occurs to him to wonder whether Akechi needs to eat, what with being dead and all. But he doesn't want to think about that. Instead what he says is: ] Your partner, huh? Congrats.

Ah - not that kind of partner.

[Despite the rumors that surround them among the Shinjuku Reapers. Shinjuku isn't a partners Game. They don't get it.]

More like police-force partner. The sort where we have absolute trust in each other even if he's always muttering about how he liked me better when I couldn't lie and I'm always rolling my eyes and telling him that smiling is a thing he's allowed to do.

[There's definite fondness, sure. But none of the hot-flash of romance or lust.]

Uh-huh. Sounds like an old married couple to me.

[ He always figured Akechi had a side to him like the one that briefly peeked out a minute ago, so he isn't too troubled by it. Hard to put him on edge when he's already there. He smiles over the counter, though, as if everything is chill. ]

You couldn't lie for a while?

You should see our seniors, then.

[Alright, his hands are steady. He grabs a second mug and starts making up the cups, keeping his hands in full view the entire time. Even if he's no longer actively Scanning Ren's thoughts, that layer of paranoia leaves a taste in the back of his mouth that would ruin the coffee if it didn't equally taste like old memories.]

Let me run a hypothetical by you - if you died, and had the chance to win a second chance, but the cost of entry was the thing you valued most in the world, would you do it?

[ Obviously. He values his freedom more than anything, all the more since he doesn't really have it. But if he died, he'd go back a slave rather than not go back at all.

...or at least he thought so until recently. Now that he's truly faced with that choice, he's started to wonder. ]

Not if the so-called second chance was being a shinigami, dude. No offense.

Well, it was second prize. Winners got to go back no strings attached.

[In the end, despite everything with Shinjuku, this probably wound up being the better option for him... But it's precisely because that's not true of everyone that he's here like this now.]

[ It's hard to imagine Ren's Akechi coming second place in anything. But Ren doesn't say so, and he definitely doesn't put into words his new, tentative thoughts about the path he should take when he gets home. ]

Then yeah, I'd do it. [ He smiles crookedly. ] Are you saying you value lying more than anything? Very Akechi of you.

[ With his preoccupation with his image, and his fear of what would happen if people really knew him. They're alike in that way, Ren and his Akechi, except that Ren is right, while Akechi is an idiot for it. He's surrounded by people who love him. ]

Oh, it was awful, I wouldn't lie about that.

[Ha. He can joke about it now, but there's a little too much edge in it to be anything but honest sentiment underneath.]

But that's part of the point. It forced me to change - and what's the point of sending someone back to life if they're just going to repeat the same mistakes? It takes a lot of power to bring someone back; I can't blame the creators of the Game for wanting to be sure that that second chance goes to people who will do something worthwhile with it.

[That's how he's made sense of it for himself. He doesn't need to understand whatever nonsense there is about the power of soul or whatever is going on behind the scenes, the cosmological perpetual-motion machine that is the Reaper's Game and how it refines souls. Bringing people back to life is expensive, so second chances should go to those who aren't going to fuck them up.

And he would have absolutely fucked his up if he'd been brought back to life without that experience. So he gets it.]

[ Ren listens with a distant look in his eye. It forced me to change - and what's the point of sending someone back to life if they're just going to repeat the same mistakes? Mistakes like killing a lot of people, probably. So would he just go back, tell Shido to fuck off because he'd changed or whatever, and then die again? Or get sent to a lab, maybe. Or the noose, or a prison cell when they weren't using him as an attack dog, or a windowless room for carbon copies of Murota to file in and out of day after day.

He keeps fucking thinking about that situation, that inevitability. At that rate, maybe it would be better to just be dead.

Anyway. Whatever happens, he's not going to be selected as likely to do something worthwhile with a second chance, so this conversation at least is hypothetical. ]

It's a game? Isn't that kind of... fucked up?

That's a common first reaction. I'm not in a position to judge; my baseline hasn't been normal since my mother died, and Shido certainly didn't help.

[His perspective on 'fucked up' is skewed. That's part of the reason he makes a good Reaper. It's hard to bother him in that regard.]

We call it the Reaper's Game because we have to call it something, and a game is closer than most of the other options. It's a game; it's a test; it's a cognitive secondary reality on par with the Metaverse. My partner once called it an anvil. You can choose your metaphor.

[ He hates thinking about any Akechi being made to bend and warp that way. Even Ren can still see when something's twisted, usually. At least he thinks he can. ...But maybe everyone thinks that. Hm. ]

Can I be real with you?

[He lifts his eyebrows faintly, and finally, finally I remember to have him fill the coffee mugs.]

Go right on ahead. If you cross a line, I'll tell you where to shove it.

You describe it like a charity or a rehab center, with the. [ He gestures vaguely. ] Making people change and wanting them to do something worthwhile. But it sounds like you're just fucking with desperate people, Akechi. Some people would do anything to come back to life. And that makes them easy marks, doesn't it?

Oh, I won't deny that. I was that desperate person, remember? And my Game was more of a fucked up disaster than most.

[He shrugs, and takes a drink out of his coffee.]

It's not all glamour and happy endings. Most people don't make it to the end. Plenty don't even make it close. They'll shoot each other to take rivals out of the running, cheat in any way they can think of, and sometimes in the end it's all for nothing.

And I won't even pretend it's fair, because it isn't. Even when the Game is winnable, it isn't fair.

But I'd Play the Game a thousand times more than do what I did for Shido another day.

[ He hums thoughtfully, hands wrapped around his mug. It doesn't sound that different than what he does for Shido, to be honest. One prison or another; one desperate, clawing fight for a vanishing chance at freedom, or another. You even shoot people, apparently. And you're no doubt acting in service of some greater power's agenda.

He sips his coffee and takes a moment to savor the taste. Maybe it's different for Akechis. ]

You mentioned Shido before. No one's actually told me what the deal was there. I only know the broad strokes.

[ Murderer for Shido, opposition to the Phantom Thieves. A lot of Akechis are Ren, basically. But the circumstances that led them there are a mystery. ]

Well, start with the most basic gross "man abandons woman he got pregnant" story. I don't know if my mother was in the industry at that point, or wound up there because of what happened, but I grew up more than in than out of the red light district in Shinjuku.

Then she killed herself, and I was sent to foster care.

[He stops there to take a too-long drink of his coffee, because he needs to regulate.]

I came across information about Shido and manifested my Metaverse powers about the same time, so I ingratiated myself with him by doing his dirty work. In exchange for me being his teenage hired gun, he helped me set myself up as a miracle detective for the media. It's easy when you can get a confession out of a suspect's Shadow on the other side - you just have to narrow the pool enough that you're not running around Mementos doing a needle-in-a-haystack bit.

My plan was to build him out and take him down at the height. Looking back, I was an idiot, but hindsight and the wisdom of age and all.

[He'll pause there, to gauge reactions, and also because, as flippant as he is about how that plan fell apart on him, he needs a moment to figure out how to talk about it falling apart.]

[ Ren doesn't seem perturbed or repulsed as he listens so much as he just seems kind of sad. He doesn't know much about his own Akechi's mother, but he knows enough to be aware that his Akechi narrowly avoided a similar fate. Except for how Shido already had Ren to do his Metaverse killing, of course. (And he definitely knows all about information-gathering in the Metaverse, but that's a whole other conversation...) ]

So it was a revenge thing. [ Akechi with his furious, implacable sense of justice. What would that look like if it got twisted? If anyone would walk willingly the jaws of Shido's Conspiracy to chase his justice, it would be Akechi. ]

The revenge thing, you could even say. The only thing that mattered.

If I hadn't already failed when I died, I'm sure that would have been my Entry Fee.

[He can imagine it all too clearly. Modified memory Entry Fees weren't uncommon, after all. His partner had one.]

My first target was Wakaba Isshiki, which I imagine you could have guessed, if our worlds run in parallel. From there, it was mostly Shido's enemies or loose ends he wanted cleaned up - Okumura, for example, though that was later. Then the Phantom Thieves appeared, things get complicated, and eventually Shido told me to clear the board.

I figured that getting rid of their leader would be easiest. They'd be scattered and unable to pose a threat after that, considering their reputation with the general public had already been tanked by pinning Okumura's death on them.

[He drinks again, giving Ren a moment to brace himself if he needs it, to prepare for the statement of the implication he's made.]

[ Ren has gone as silent and still as stone. His eyes fix on Akechi's face, unblinking. ]

[He can almost feel it. The weight of can't you guess how this ends? is somehow even stronger than when it was when dealing with the actual time traveller.]

I set it up to catch them in Sae's Palace. I caught him. Had him exactly where I wanted him.

I shot him.

[A slight pause, and his expression softens, just a hair.]

Or I thought I did. They got one over on me - I shot Sae Nijima's cognition of him, while the real one was spirited away. At the time, it filled me with a fury I hadn't known since I found out Shido's identity in the first place, but looking back, I'm almost proud of them.

After that, we both invaded Shido's Palace separately, they caught up to me, we fought, and then Shido's cognition of me left us all between a rock and a hard place. I locked them out and cleared the last obstacle.

[Which is a roundabout way of saying...]

If it had been only one of the cognition of myself or the collapsing Palace, I would probably would have survived. But not both.

[ Ren's expression doesn't change at all for a long moment. He doesn't think, doesn't really feel, just lets Akechi's words settle inside him.

When he finally speaks, his voice is strangely flat. ] They faked you out in Sae's Palace, and with their leader alive, they targeted Shido for their next change of heart. Is what you're saying.

[ There was a lot of other stuff Akechi said too, all of it less important than this. ]

[There are a lot of ways he could answer that question (if you're willing to dignify the flat series of statements with that title. He doesn't choose any of the ones a normal person would expect.]

You shot him, didn't you?

[The truth is also a weapon.]

That's why you reacted that way when I said I was dead, earlier.

[It's not an answer, directly. But it's also not not an answer.]

[ ...and the unblinking distance in Ren's face splinters. His eyes widen with shock, then with fury, and he actually starts to snarl, reaching not for the knife in his pocket but for the bigger, meaner one sheathed behind his back.

Then he remembers who he's talking to, and he forces his hand back down. But he can't make himself stop fucking... fucking vibrating, like he's a gong and Akechi hit him with a giant mallet. ]

No, I didn't fucking shoot him. You're projecting.

[ His voice cracks halfway through. Maybe he hasn't shot Akechi, but he's thought about it so much that he sees it when he closes his eyes all the same. He hasn't shot Akechi, but if he'd been brought here two weeks later, his answer would be different. And even now, if he can't figure something out in time, if he doesn't make up his mind—

He hasn't shot Akechi yet. That's all. ]

You've thought about it, at the very least.

[A slow, deliberate setting down of his coffee mug, in such a way that the click of the ceramic on the bar seems amplified.]

I was a detective, remember? I sat in on enough police interrogations to know how people react when you hit them directly in the guilt.

[The ones still capable of feeling guilt, anyway.

It's reassuring, really, that whatever else this Ren has been through, he's still one of those people.]

But yes. Joker lived - though not without his share of bruises and drugging, and they went after Shido, as he deserved.

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cw sexual slavery mention, vague suicidality

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cw: all of Akechi's bullshit

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