Chapter Text
The halls of Mementos echoed faintly with the sounds of frustration. A high school boy in a dashing outfit had been battling with a lock on a treasure chest for the past fifteen minutes. He’d tried time and time again to line the pins up, but it just wasn’t happening.
“Joker, this is taking forever,” A bleach-blond boy echoed Joker’s own thoughts as he leaned out of the car window.
“I noticed,” Joker replied curtly, losing the pins once again.
“Can’t we just, I don’t know, break it open?” The bleach-blond boy whined.
“Such force would likely only end up damaging whatever was inside,” the other boy in the vehicle replied, polishing a katana.
“Fox is right, Skull. You can’t just brute force everything,” the childish voice with mature words came from the car itself.
“Fiiiiine.”
“Maybe we should continue exploring this floor and come back for it later,” the brunette behind the wheel chimed in. She saw him flinch, having lost his progress once more and continued with a slightly guilty expression. “We should be fine as long as we don’t head down an escalator.”
“No, I’m getting there, I just need a little more time,” Joker reassured, flashing her a grin to allveiate her guilt. In truth he wasn’t quite sure he believed his own words. Given he was the leader, no one persisted, and they passed another few moments in silence.
“Hey, did anyone hear that just now?” A blonde girl with pigtails leaned forward from the back seat, her eyes were flitting around nervously.
The others in the car looked at her in confusion.
“Hear what?” Skull asked, giving her a sideways glance.
“That noise." she whined impatiently. "Just a second ago.”
The driver looked at the blonde girl with a puzzled expression, then shook her head, “I didn’t hear anything.”
The blonde girl turned to the boy with the katana, seeking support. “Fox, what about you?”
The boy with the katana mirrored the driver’s motion. “I can’t say that I did.”
The blonde girl huffed. “Okay, I’m not crazy, I just heard it. Mona?” She looked down at the floor of the car.
“Sorry Panther,” the cat-faced vehicle replied sympathetically, “I only heard wind and Skull’s obnoxious voice. But whatever it is, you don’t need to worry. We should be strong enough to handle any shadows we come across here.”
“Even if we couldn’t,” Joker added, still fiddling with the lock, “Queen’s a pretty good driver, we’ll out run anything we can’t fight.”
“Thank you, Joker.” The driver smiled in reserved gratitude.
Joker got all but the last two pins in line, “Okay, I think I-”
“There it is again!” Panther suddenly cried out, breaking his concentration and losing his progress.
“Wait… nope… never mind,” Joker sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Okay, that time I heard it,” Skull confirmed, suddenly upright and tense in his seat.
“Me too,” Mona agreed.
“See, I told you I’m not crazy,” Panther grumbled.
“It’s as Mona said though,” Fox replied, still lax, “no matter how intimidating the sound, anything we find here is likely weaker than us.”
“I’m not so sure.” Queen’s hands tensed a little on the steering wheel. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Finally Joker heard the noise. Chains. Rattling chains. It was short, but the sound carried an eerie gravity to it. It vibrated through the skin and bones, right to the soul. The way it echoed through the tunnels didn’t seem to fade in power. A kind of dread began to creep into his mind.
Clearly everyone else was feeling it to. “Joker, I think we should leave the chest,” Queen called from the window, more than a little urgently.
Joker put his lockpick away, giving one last disdainful look at the box. “Yeah, you’re right.” He turned around. “Let’s head to…”
It had a long black cloak and a pistol aimed at them. He jerked his head to Queen, catching her eye. “MOVE!”
With the reflexes of a cheetah, Queen’s foot hit the pedal. Mona’s wheels squealed in the second it took to catch friction with the ground. The car headed one way, Joker headed the other. He’d just started to lunge forward when the shot came.
It missed them, but the shockwave from it simply passing by sent both him and the car flying. The bullet struck the chest, completely disintegrating it and whatever was inside.
By some miracle, Mona land on his tires. Joker wasn’t so lucky. He was sent skipping twice across the ground, only stopped when he hit the wall. As he scrambled back to his feet, he saw their attacker drift across the ground until it was between him and the rest of his team. A burlap sack was tied over its head and a single hole showed its eye, shifting its gaze from him to them and back again. Joker looked past it to Queen and Skull, sitting in the front.
“RUN! NOW!”
After a split second of shock, Skull shook his head vigorously, shouting a protest. Queen on the other hand, looked him solemnly in the eye and nodded. Joker took out his pistol and fired off two shots at the thing. It wasn’t much of a surprise when it didn’t flinch. It clearly directed its attention at him though, which was plenty. With that, Queen gunned Mona’s engines, made a sharp turn, and sped down the track. Skull’s cry of shock echoed back. The shadow heard the movement and looked back, raising one of its pistols. Joker fired on it until he emptied his magazine, bringing its eye back to him.
“That’s right, come and get me,” Joker muttered before turning on his heels and sprint away as fast as he could. The chains began rattling again as it gave chase. The first corner he found, Joker rounded, and not a moment too soon. The shock wave of a bullet nearly missing him was still enough to throw him forward several dozen feet. The inadvertent head start turned out to be an advantage.
Soon as he was back to his feet, he rounded another corner and hid in the darkness, pressing himself against the wall and staying as still as humanly possible with his level of exhaustion. His chest heaved from the combination of terror and physical exertion, but he did his best to quiet his breathing.
“Where did you come from?” Joker muttered to himself after a moment. It was nothing like the other shadows. This thing had a definite form, it wasn’t a twisted mass with arms and legs. It was closer to the monstrous forms of the palaces' rulers. But Kamoshida, Madarame, and Kaneshiro, they didn’t stack up even close to this thing. The cold, deathly chill that polluted the air around it, it was a feeling unlike anything he’d ever felt.
Now he was stuck here, on foot, with it moving around. He hoped Queen was smart enough to keep the others from trying to find him. If they ran into that thing, it was over, even with all of them together. She, Fox, and Mona were fine, but Panther and Skull were no doubt worried sick.
It was faster than him and it had a ranged attack that would kill him in one. He was going to have to move smart, but that was only going to draw to this out. There was a reason they drove in Mementos.
“Hello there.” A young voice came from behind him.
Joker whipped around and drew his pistol.
The young boy didn’t flinch. He just smiled. He stood just over half Joker’s height, dressed liked he was fresh out of Igor’s prison. His skin was eerily pale, like he was sick, and he wasn’t wearing and socks or shoes. The kid cocked his head curiously. “Are you lost?”
“Uhhhh,” Joker lowered his gun and stared for a moment.
“Are you?” He asked again, patiently.
“Yeah, kinda,” Joker replied warily, deciding not to put the gun away. Nothing about this child even whispered “normal”. “Listen, kid, you need to get out of here; there was one heck of a monster floating around nearby.”
“You mean the Reaper?” The boy replied knowingly.
Joker stopped and pursed his lips. Yep. Definitely not normal.
“I saw it attack you before. It was a good idea to run from it.”
“Felt like the only idea at the time,” Joker crouched down to the boy’s level. “The Reaper, huh? You seem to know what’s up. Mind sharing?”
The boy only shook his head. “I’m afraid knowing any more than you do now wouldn’t help much. It would also take quite a while, likely more than enough time for it to find us. All you need to know is that it’s far too powerful for you to stand a chance right now.”
“Lucky me, fighting wasn’t the plan,” he cast a nervous look over his shoulder, half expecting it to already be there. “How do I get around it?”
“You can’t here, it’s too fast. That car was your only chance.”
Joker heaved a sigh, but then had a thought. “What do you mean, ‘here’?”
The boy’s smile widened just a little, satisfied that he’d caught on. “In this part of Mementos, it moves faster to traverse the tunnels.”
“So, there’s a part of Mementos where it doesn’t do that?”
In response, the boy turned around and began to walk away. “Follow me.”
Joker turned back for just a moment, debating whether to go with the evil he knew or the one he didn’t. In the end it was the choice between possible death, and certain death. The boy was just disappearing around a corner when he started to follow him.
“Hey, wait up!” He ran to join the kid. But when he turned the corner, he didn’t see him.
He also didn’t see the familiar dank, dark tunnels of Mementos.
“What the hell…” Joker trailed off, looking around. He backed up a few steps to try and take it all in.
But his back quickly touched a wall. It took Joker by surprise and he yelped, spinning around and staring at it. He couldn’t go back.
“Are you kidding me?” He shook his head, smiling to himself at the absurdity of it.
A gurgling growl from deeper in the twisted school ensured him that no, they were not kidding him.
Whoever “they” were.
Once more finding himself a prisoner (seemed to be an ongoing theme lately), Joker turned around to look at his new surroundings. It was very obviously a school, much more well-funded than his. But it was… wrong. Everything had green tinge to it. Blood seemed to leak out of the walls and pool on the floor. His vision even felt a bit messed up by this place; every once in a while, part of his view would distort just slightly.
Nothing about this place felt good and that feeling was only heightened when he realized he was wearing his school uniform.
“What the-!” He looked at his hands in disbelief, not only was he stuck in Mementos with something called “the Reaper” on the loose, but now he didn’t have his thief stuff. But that also meant that while he was here…
“I’m not a threat,” he muttered. What did that mean? What was this place? Who was the kid? What was the Reaper? And most importantly, why was he here?
He didn’t know what to make of any of it. But there was nowhere to go but forward. With a sigh and a shrug, Joker started down the hall.