Chapter Text
Fate.
It’s a ridiculous concept, unable to be proven or even tested, incapable of being perceived, settling itself on an endless wheel of circular reasoning. It is too friendly with reason, but scorns objectivity the way a pathogen might resist a vaccine. It’s impossible to debate.
Yet, human beings cling to it like dust clings to itself when it’s scared of the wind. Meaninglessly, because it brings them meaning. There is meaning everywhere, in fact. One obtains it when one is desperate enough to seek it. Anything can be a ritual, a superstition, a fixed belief that builds a beautiful, vibrant community out of lies. There could be a reasoning behind why one was born. There could be a purpose.
There’s a spiderweb on the bathroom ceiling light.
Akechi squeezes his eyes shut. The muscles in his temples protest in turn. An equal, opposite reaction.
Lying down horizontally may help with his physical pain, but the clear-headedness is always a double-edged sword. He can feel every pinprick of cold bathroom tiles on his neck, see every microscopic movement the spider makes. It’s still there, dangling on its thread without fear for its life, like it knows it would hurt too much to stand up straight and kill it.
He wishes he were asleep. He wishes he could close his eyes without seeing Akira’s face. He wishes for a lot of things — some would say too many, others would say too few.
When he was five years old, he learned to swim for the first time.
He’d been a strange, inhuman child even back then. Other children would play in the pool — do somersaults in the water, run around pretending to be mermaids, race to the other side splashing around like a dog. Akechi did not talk to people his age, instead he sat and imagined he was somewhere else. In that respect, not much has changed.
The truth is, he was fascinated by the water, but also terrified of it.
It might have seemed like a contradiction to anyone else, but to him it made perfect sense. Being underwater was a strange, wonderful experience. He felt weightless, like the world had stopped existing for everyone else except for him. Yet he couldn’t breathe, and that scared him. The sight of the water was enough to make him vividly imagine drowning, his vision going dark, ears popping, heartbeat flapping like a hummingbird’s wings. When he thought about it too much, he started crying.
Children his age thought his reaction was silly, but were still too young to understand the great social benefits of cruelty towards the lowest of the low. Older children — those were the real danger. Cute enough to be seen as harmless, but intelligent enough to know how great a tool it is to have a common enemy.
To sum it up, he wasn’t as vigilant as he should have been, and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The kid that pushed him in the water probably doesn’t even remember having done that. They’d run away soon after, giggling with their friends about something else, the incident all but forgotten. If they do still remember it at twenty-two years old, it’s probably as a wholesome, bonding moment between childhood friends. Remember when we pushed the weird kid into the pool? That was a lot of fun. Everyone was laughing.
It’s barely even a functional childhood sob story. He didn’t even come close to drowning. In fact, a few moments after he plunged into the water, he was immediately fished out by some adult, unceremoniously dumped in time-out, then sternly told he would be banned from the pool until his ‘irresponsible’ mother could buy him floaties with all the money she didn’t have.
She came to pick him up, held him when he cried over the mean kids who pushed him, and the next day, she took him to the shallows and taught him how to swim.
So next time it happens, you can bounce right back up.
Five-year-old him had been content to wipe his tears and nod, secure in his belief that his mom would protect him from the mean kids. Eighteen-year-old him, had he remembered the episode, would have dismissed it as childhood naivety, boasted about his ruthless climb to the top of the social hierarchy, then inevitably ended up demeaning those who were born friendly and nice. Oh, the simple creatures, too stupid to see the invisible pyramid that ruled over every one of their relationships. As if his face wasn’t turning green with envy.
Twenty-year-old him… Twenty-year-old him is lying supine on the floor of an empty bathroom in an empty house, and he can’t stop repeating his mother’s words. Next time it happens, she said.
Next time,
as if she believed he was fated to be an outcast.
Was that simply her commiserating with her son over their shared low place in society? Was it a fatalistic statement of hopelessness? Was it an expression of love, or a verbal continuation to the endless cycle of suffering? If he could ask her what she meant, would he ever be satisfied with the answer?
He can’t remember if there was a ‘next time’. He can’t remember most of his childhood. At least not the parts that matter.
The ceiling light’s already seared a mark on his retinas twice over from how long he’s been staring at it — but despite all his pretensions, it does nothing to cover up the face he still sees every time he tries to sleep. There’s just a halo shining behind it now.
He can’t bring himself to monologue about the shining example of symbolism found in the mundane. He doesn’t want to connect this to anything. Not to ancient religious texts, not to history’s great thinkers, not to psychological phenomena. The face reminds him of nothing but itself.
He misses it.
It’s truly impossible to notice how empty one’s life has been until one feels the space being filled, even if just for a brief moment. Like living alongside a human ribcage without knowing what it is, dusting it every day as you get home, polishing the sternum as if it knows you’re taking care of it, as if you’ll arrive one day and see it has finally turned to gold, a precious artifact to be sold for all it’s worth — then having that inevitable moment of realization, that unbearable feeling that everyone knew but you, everyone knew there’s supposed to be a heart here, there’s supposed to be lungs. You don’t know what those things are. You were never taught.
They’re all laughing behind your back. You can do nothing except pretend it was your plan all along.
But it wasn’t. It wasn’t his plan, none of it was his plan. Someone went behind his back and watered all his flower pots, until they were strong enough to stay alive when the winter came. He was expecting those flowers to die, but then he had to adjust his expectations, deal with the unforeseen circumstances, think about what he was doing for more than the few seconds it takes to fire a gun.
Sometimes, certain things are avoided for a good reason. Akechi avoids Kurusu because Kurusu ruined his life.
He’s long given up on ever being able to convince his therapist of any of this — but no authority figure has ever successfully managed to stand between him and the truth. The simple, observable fact is, some people make him volatile, emotional, unpredictable, bring back scenes from the past that he’d rather leave behind. No matter how much drivel she feeds him about moving forward, she’ll never understand that with that kind of person, forward is backward.
He tilts his head to the side, shuddering through a wave of nausea.
She was overjoyed when he told her of his friendship with Sumire. Of course she was — she knows Sumire is at least tangentially a Phantom Thief, which clearly fuels her obsession with ‘reuniting’ him with the group.
What she doesn’t understand, however many times he tries to explain, is that Sumire is different. She doesn’t bring out any of his darkest impulses. She’s witty, yes, surprisingly so, but she doesn’t make him want to tear her face off in annoyance. There is no black hole of obsession that draws him to her, no sweet lead fumes that make his head swim and his body shudder with heart palpitations.
As for competitiveness, there is no universe in which he would ever have a rivalry with Sumire. He teaches, she learns, and they’re both satisfied with that. This dynamic gives him the slightest edge over her, which is precisely what makes her safe.
This isn’t to say he feels superior to her. She’s more than proven her intelligence and hidden talents, many of which far exceed his. He’s consistently underestimated her, while she’s consistently blown his expectations out of the water — it would be foolish to view her as anything less than an equal.
But there’s equals, and there’s… 'You and Akira’s thing’, as Morgana put it. The cat was more correct than Akechi cares to admit.
It’s too painful to think about directly. Like an infected insect bite that can only be scratched at an angle, or a solar eclipse you need special glasses to view.
Maruki, that repugnant asshole, once asked him about Kurusu with all the subtlety of a punch to the nose. He can only presume it was some last-ditch effort to appeal to the humanity in him — of course the therapist would be convinced that inducing enough emotional turbulence in a teenager would override their moral principles. As he’s learned since then, Maruki is a bad therapist even by the system’s own standards. There are several psychiatric terms to describe people like Akechi, but one thing most of them agree on is that this kind of gambit would never work on someone whose attachment to other people has always been flimsy at best and apocalyptically destructive at worst.
Sometimes he wonders what Maruki even expected him to say. Was he hoping to catch a confession on record? Was he that eager to teach him that friendship is magic? Did he want him to look at the camera and sing a mournful ballad about a love that can never be?
As if he’d ever give up his values for an emotion as frivolous as infatuation.
He’s been infatuated before, of course. As much as someone like him can experience human emotions, that is — his are the artificial green of a glass bottle, theirs are the natural color of lush chlorophyll. Nevertheless, he’s not a stranger to what is essentially just a subset of obsession, an emotion he’s very familiar with. As a matter of fact, he has an inconvenient tendency to become infatuated with people whom he envies.
It’s unfathomable to him, at times, the way this emotion seems to steer teenagers’ lives. Other times, he can almost see their angle — certainly, if he didn’t have the anger and the envy and the self-loathing, obsession would probably be his main driving force. Though, once again, any minimally positive emotion he is capable of feeling is nothing but a pale, sickly imitation of the real thing. Best sought elsewhere.
His joy is muted, stained, like mixing pure black paint into the shadows in a canvas. His comfort is everyone else’s discomfort, even when he desperately wishes it wasn’t. His elation is limited to conflict, the only thing that makes his heart race like a kid in an amusement park. Everything else is dull in comparison. His satisfaction is in proving his superiority over others, and even then it’s brittle, crumbling, bitter cotton candy that lasts two seconds in his mouth. His love…
His love is ghostly, flickering like a candle, vengeful like a pyre. It’s unpleasant. It’s hard to swallow, but spitting it out feels natural, the body’s instinctive way of protecting itself from whatever poisonous thing found its way inside its throat. It’s like selling someone a broken clock that he can’t or won’t fix, and expecting them to be content with the fact that he's right twice a day. It’s a remnant of a happier time that he always hoped would die, but instead it strapped him to a chair and forced him to watch it become this.
He’s ashamed of the things he’s done in the name of love for his mother.
God, this thought spiral cannot possibly get any worse, can it.
A manic laugh bubbles up in his chest, making the tips of his fingers twitch from their place on the tiled floor. No, perhaps I spoke too soon — should I start planning my suicide again? They do say third time’s the charm.
The way his vision looks right now, all criss-crossed by strands of hair, it reminds him of an abstract painting.
He tries getting up, but is immediately stopped by a stab of pain all across his upper back. For once, his physical body seems to be in agreement with his mind, both of them uttering the same cry for help. Existence is unbearable. Let us go.
Akechi is disgusted at himself for daring to think about how disgusting he is. If he truly found himself morally repugnant, he’d be doing more to pay reparations to his victims. Instead, he is lying on the bathroom floor, experiencing emotional agony because his actions make him an unlovable person. It’s like a black hole — everything always comes back to himself.
The familiar rage taps on his shoulder, goading him to stoke its fire, but its visit is short-lived. It often is, these days. He doesn’t attribute this to therapy or personal growth, but rather to the fact that anger burns energy, which has been in short supply in his physical body ever since it took several inconvenient bullets to the torso and lower back.
He sighs. Everything is a double-edged sword.
It’s most likely not a coincidence that the only two people that have ever shown him genuine, caring compassion are almost pathologically unable to think about themselves. Anyone with an ounce of self-preservation, or an inkling of how little time they have on this planet, does not and will not approach the true Akechi Goro. He can acknowledge it now — it’s deeper than a savior complex, or a desire to replace one’s dead sister. It seems baked into the very fabric of their personalities, with roots so deep-seated that plucking them out would topple the entire structure.
Parasite and host — it’s a deeply flawed dynamic, one he can punch several holes through just by considering it for a few seconds. It’s also, most likely, the best he’s ever going to get.
He’s caught between the sword and the wall.
Self-isolation has a real probability of making him sink so deeply into loneliness, he’ll forget why he even took his second chance at living in the first place. Furthermore, there’s no logical reason to refuse an offer of friendship once he’s ruled out all possible ulterior motives.
However, by letting Sumire enter his life, he has not merely opened Pandora’s box, but also smashed the lid and swallowed the key.
Rationally speaking, he knew it was only a matter of time until Akira found out he was alive, the instant he crossed paths with Sumire outside the physiotherapy clinic. Knowing and knowing, as he’s found out, are two different things. He knew Sumire was trying to be his friend from the start, but he only knew it when she dropped everything at 8AM, sprinting in crutches, pushing herself to her physical limits just to make sure he was alright. Similarly, he knew Morgana must’ve been aware of the so-called ‘thing’, but he only knew it when he had to cycle through all stages of grief while listening to a cat rant about possibly the most humiliating situation Akechi has ever experienced.
He closes his eyes, feeling several weeks’ exhaustion piling onto him in a few seconds, like a curtain of falling sand. Human connection, as it turns out, is much harder to navigate when he doesn’t have the comforting reminder of his impending death to hang onto like a lifeline.
It shouldn’t be as surprising as it is when he immediately feels the pull of sleep tugging at his eyelids.
Well, he thinks. Here's to hoping I never wake up.
-
Akira’s late again.
“I’m closing up for the night,” Sojiro says in his usual gruff tone, but his face betrays a hint of worry. “Just watch out for him, will you?”
“Of course.”
Sumire tugs at a hair strand, crutches forgotten in a corner as she sits in her usual booth. She texted her dad that she’ll probably be sleeping over at Leblanc today, but it’s looking more and more like that won’t be the case.
At least he’s stopped sending her those awful embarrassing texts about using protection, the ones that make her have to take away five minutes of her day to explain to him what asexuality is. Sumire loves her dad, but she is glad he finally got this through his thick skull — she’s pretty sure that if she had to explain herself one more time, she’d melt into a puddle on the floor.
Time to message Futaba, then. Sibling telepathy might be made-up, but whatever those two have could convince someone it’s real. Nibbling on a carrot stick to calm her nerves — she’s going rabbit mode, is what Akira and Futaba always say — she searches for the contact on her phone.
Just as she’s about to hit the send button, her phone lights up with a call from Futaba. That’s odd. Futaba never calls if she can help it — phone calls make her too nervous.
“Hi?” Her greeting comes off kind of confused. Oh, well. It’s Futaba, I can be as awkward as I want.
“Yo, Sumi.” Futaba’s tone is oddly businesslike, as if she’s playing one of those strategy games that make her convinced she’s an unrecognized genius. “Do you have a minute?”
“Uh, yeah… I was just about to text you to ask where Akira is.” She chuckles, but Futaba’s end of the line stays silent.
“…About that.” Futaba’s voice sounds echo-y, like she’s moved away from the screen to hide her head in her hands. Normal phone call behavior for her. “We may have a Featherman Seeker season 6 on our hands.”
“What?” Sumire struggles to remember which Featherman series that is — she didn’t even know any of them had six whole seasons.
Futaba coughs. “The pigeon has left the coop.”
“Okay, is this one of those ARG things?” Sumire leans back in the seat cushion, smiling fondly. “Because if it is, you could’ve just texted me—”
“The pigeon,” Futaba cuts in. “Grey. You know the one. You remember.” She sounds a little strained, but mostly keeps her business tone. Sumire squints her eyes, vaguely recalling the conversation they had a few days ago.
Then it hits her. Oh, boy. This can’t be good.
“…The one Akira has a crush on?”
“Why,” Futaba scream-whispers, “do you always have to introduce him like that.”
“My memory’s terrible.” She shrugs.
“Dammit, Sumi—yes. Yes, it’s the same one. Much more importantly…”
“—He’s your Akechi stand-in,” she finishes. Her grip on the phone slackens.
Shit. This definitely isn’t good.
She fetches one of Akira’s rainbow-colored fidget toys from the drawer and starts fiddling with it — if she doesn’t do something with her hands, she’s going to start thinking about The Situation, and if she starts thinking about The Situation, then stuff is really going to get out of hand, because she’s basically the load-bearing piece holding the whole Jenga tower together.
What exactly is the Jenga tower representing in the metaphor? She has no idea, because she’s great at not thinking about things. Another point for Sumire. High-five.
“Yes.” More coughing. “Um. So, uh. The pigeon was spotted. At the convenience store.”
“Oh.” Sumire grimaces, recalling Akechi’s shell-shocked stare when he came back from the conbini, the way he sounded quieter than she’d ever heard him. That guy just can’t catch a break, can he. “Um, I mean, I knew that already. Akechi told me—”
“The pigeon told you.”
Futaba’s tone says ‘play along or else’. She holds in a tiny chuckle.
“The pigeon told me.” Sumire frowns. “Wait—hang on, wouldn’t this make way more sense if you called him ‘the crow’?”
“There’s no crow in Featherman, Sumi. That’s like, basic lore.” Futaba lets out a hmpf. “You should be grateful I’m not calling him Murder Twink.”
“Right.” She almost laughs, imagining Akechi’s reaction to hearing that, before she remembers he’s probably having a mental breakdown as they speak. “Um, anyways… I was there. He kind of kicked me out of the house…"
“I’m going to make that pigeon into fried chicken,” Futaba hisses into the phone mic.
“…Cut him some slack, ‘Taba. He said please.”
An exaggerated gasp. “Impossible. Fake news. Pics or it didn’t happen.”
“No—I’m serious. He was pretty upset. Not angry upset, just…” Sad, if anything. “I think he felt bad about kicking me out.”
She’s giving Akechi his space right now, because he clearly needs it. At least, that’s what she’s doing in theory. In practice, she knows that guy and his fifty-seven mental illnesses — it might look to him like she abandoned him in a time of crisis, even though he literally told her to get out of his house.
There’s the familiar itch to apologize, but Sumire notices it’s less all-consuming than usual. I guess if I apologized, he’d say it’s his problem to deal with, not mine.
She wonders if he’s right.
“Not bad enough to say sorry,” Futaba grumbles through the speaker. Sumire feels a smile tug at her lips.
“Bad enough to say ‘please’, though.”
Futaba’s answering scoff is friendly enough to calm her nerves. “Whatever.”
“So… what do we do about it?” Sumire asks quietly, the brief humor in their exchange already fading. “I don’t think I’m banned from his house exactly, but he doesn’t want me there right now, and I don’t know any other way I could help…”
“Help? You want to help—uh, hang on...” There’s that sound Futaba always makes when she’s caught off guard and needs a moment to think.
After hearing her mumble something about too many stupid phone calls in one day, Sumire decides it’s probably a smart idea to wait for her friend to speak up again.
“You think I called you because I wanted to help Ake—the pigeon?” Futaba finally says.
“Yeah? I mean, um…” Sumire abruptly remembers that Futaba isn’t exactly Akechi’s number one fan, to put it mildly. “Okay, well,” she says. “I guess not help help, but you did start the call talking about the pigeon this and the pigeon that…”
”Yeah, that was code for—Ugh, don’t you know what happens in Featherman Seeker season six?”
Futaba lets out a long sigh at her answering silence. Sumire feels her cheeks turn red.
“Um…” she tries. “The big heist?”
“That’s season five.” Sumire can practically see Futaba rolling her eyes. “Come on, Sumi. You know this one—it was basically all we talked about for weeks.”
She wracks her brain for the plotline that Futaba’s referencing, combing through all of her Featherman-related memories. Can’t be the alien guy, that one was at the beginning… The other guy was later on, but still before the heist, I think?
Could it be the—
Sumire almost drops her phone.
“Akira got kidnapped?”
Shit. She lost her composure a bit there — she didn’t mean for that panic to show in her voice. It’s fine, she reminds herself. Everything’s going to be fine. Remember the Jenga tower.
“Finally!” Futaba all but yells. “I was starting to think you’d never get it.”
“Is he—” Sumire swallows her dread. “Is he going to be alright? Do you know who—”
“Wait. Wait wait wait—he didn’t get kidnapped,” Futaba stammers, and Sumire swears she can feel her heart do a somersault of relief. “I was referencing that arc, but not—not like, all of it.”
“Oh thank god,” she mumbles, suddenly feeling light-headed. “You really scared me there…”
Futaba chooses this brilliant moment to finish her sentence.
“Yup,” she says. “He’s just missing.”
Sumire’s pretty sure she’s about to have a panic attack.
She stares around the empty attic, like she’s hoping Akira will miraculously appear at the top of the stairs. But there’s nothing. No grin, no shy-yet-cheerful wave, no mindless conversation about work and school and video games and how’s your practice been going. Not that there’d been much of that lately either, what with her injury and all.
(Deep down, if she’s being honest with herself, she’s been unsure about professional gymnastics ever since she visited Kasumi’s grave.
When was it? April 10th?
That’s almost two months ago. An awfully long time for something she thought was just a manifestation of her grief. Not that she had any therapist she could ask — but she was getting back in the groove of things, or at least she thought she was, before her stupid carelessness had to come and ruin everything—)
Sumire shoves that train of thought deep down, then tosses it in the same thought-box where she keeps ‘should I go back to therapy’ and ‘did I really want to die back then’ and ‘what the hell happened on the day before Maruki’s deadline’. After congratulating herself on how good she is at compartmentalizing, she tunes back into the phone call.
“Sojiro said he was at Leblanc earlier, but he left with a backpack or something?” Futaba’s saying. “And I don’t know if it was on purpose, but he also left his phone there. Mona went to school with me today, so he doesn’t know where Akira is, either…”
Her head swims again.
“Wait—I’m at Leblanc.” Sumire can’t mask the stupid hurt that seeps into her voice when she hears Futaba’s words. “We were supposed to meet up.”
“Yeah, well, um.” She coughs. “The convenience store thing happened, and then I guess he kinda flipped out, but you know, in the Akira way—”
“But how’d that even…?” Sumire trails off when she realizes she interrupted her friend mid-sentence. Her free hand finds its way to the tips of her hair. “…How’d Akira even make sure it was the real him?”
Sumire knows she had her doubts. She’d had to rely on the fact that she saw the entire fake reality collapse in front of her eyes, just to keep her fears at bay. That, and Akechi acting as standoffish as he did back in that January.
There’s a brief, quiet pause on Futaba's end.
“Uh… so I may have kinda helped him hack into some security cameras so he could check.”
“…What?”
There’s no emotion in Sumire’s voice. Nothing but pale, cold numbness.
“Yeah, I figured he wouldn’t do anything stupid if I warned him first, but, well, I guess this is… the pigeon we’re talking about.” She laughs nervously.
“Futaba. He didn’t want anyone to know.”
Stupid — this is so stupid. She’s supposed to be better than this. She’s not supposed to be mad that Futaba opened the floodgates and Akira disappeared on her and Akechi kicked her out of his house. They’re all complex people, with their own thoughts, and needs, and feelings, and…
God, she’s so tired.
Even now, all she can say in protest is what Akechi wanted. The words I’m your best friend, so why didn’t you ask me first are lodged in her throat, terrified of coming out and sounding like a total hypocrite. After all, didn’t she do the same thing? Did Futaba even have a good reason to trust her? Sure, she said it was fine, but—
Fuck. She was so, so close to solving this impossible puzzle of being friends with someone who everyone else thinks is dead.
It was such a difficult, careful balancing act, arriving in the nick of time just so Morgana wouldn’t freak out, making sure Futaba didn’t hate her, keeping the secret tightly knit just so Akechi could have some kind of a choice for the first time in his life.
But she should’ve known it doesn’t work that way. Akechi knows it better than anyone — that life doesn’t give people a choice before throwing things at them. It didn’t give her a choice.
“I mean...” There’s a pause. “It had to happen sometime, didn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Sumire says. “I guess it did.”
Then she hangs up.
There's barely enough space on the hardwood floor for her to lie down comfortably. She blinks away reflexive tears, which are definitely from her dust allergy, and not from feeling like her head is about to explode into confetti.
Okay, she admits to herself, her head wedged in between Akira's plant and his overdecorated shelves. Breaking the problem into tinier pieces isn't working.
But what else is she supposed to do? Her dad didn't teach her any other tricks for calming herself down, plus it's not like she's ever had a helpful school counselor. And Kasumi—
Kasumi was an honest person, who didn't keep up elaborate lies by omission that always ended up with her getting in trouble. She was the one who spoke up at family dinners as a kid, who knew which foods were Sumire's favorites, and which ones she only ate to be polite. Even as they got older, as Kasumi got her own life and left Sumire behind, she still knew. She didn't say anything, not even when Sumire lied to her face. But she knew.
She knew about all the times Sumire pretended to have a cold, just so she wouldn't have to listen to Kasumi's friends rave about how great and wonderful she was — so she wouldn't have to sit through another "sorry, I mean, both of you were amazing, it's just". How in ninth grade, she said she forgot to apply for her usual locker next to her sister's, when really she was just tired of looking at all those years-old photos of the two of them, smiling ear to ear, lost in the bliss of gymnastics. Because Kasumi's locker had long since been filled with new photos of her friends, and she'd rather quit the race than get left behind.
How did she ever think she could handle having so many friends at once? No, scratch that — how did she ever think she could handle not being part of a matched set? She can't even let go enough to have her own damn birthday party. For two years now, it's been just her, her dad, and the same framed photograph of Kasumi, smiling wide, a sixteen-year-old girl with life in her eyes and the world at her fingertips.
Sumire's eighteen, now. Two years older. The image of her sister stays frozen.
She has an actual social life, full of people like Futaba, who never knew Kasumi as anything but a part of her messed-up backstory. Akira loves her for herself, not for having ninety-percent of Kasumi's face and thirty-percent of her personality. Sumire's world is bright, constantly in motion. She will be in college soon. Kasumi never got past her first year of high school.
There is just no way around it — she only really started living once Kasumi died. Nothing could ever sugarcoat the truth, and she knows it, so the thought just spins circles in her head.
Is that why I can't let go?
Sumire sighs, but it comes out as a sneeze instead. She must have inhaled all the dust particles on the floor of Leblanc's attic.
The feeling brings back another wave of nostalgia. It was always her volunteering to sleep on the floor, whenever Kasumi hosted a sleepover — joining her bed next to her sister's, so everyone would have more space to play, then curling up in her pink sleeping bag. It was only natural that she offered — they were Kasumi's friends first, after all. She was just a lucky tag-along.
Phantom Thief sleepovers were legendary, or so everyone said, but she only ever made it to one of them. She remembers Haru's mostly empty mansion, and how full it seemed as they all gathered to celebrate Akira getting out of juvie. Haru had never been allowed at a sleepover before, so they made sure to run through every game they possibly could, right up until she fell asleep way too early (according to Futaba, who spent most of the night curled up in the far corner of the room with her Nintendo DS).
Sumire did have fun, but as usual, she spent most of it playing catch-up on all the Thief in-jokes and secret handshakes. After that, with her gymnastics training, plus Haru's business meetings, plus Makoto's cram school, it was a nightmare to coordinate their schedules enough to have a part-two. Besides, she always felt like an intruder in that huge house. Futaba and her DS would definitely agree.
It occurs to her, then, that the closest she's been to having a sleepover of her own was Akechi accidentally falling alseep on his threadbare couch, with Sumire still in his apartment.
Before she knows it, she's burst into a manic fit of giggles — soon turning into an allergic cough that she tries and fails to muffle with the back of her arm. There are tears in her eyes, actual tears, and she doesn't even know how long they've been there. Is she laughing? Crying? Are the dust mites getting their revenge?
Her fingers press the call button before she can order then not to move.
"Hey," she says, as soon as the telltale click of static reaches her ears. "Let's have a sleepover."