Archive of Our Own

"I only want what's best for you," Maruki had told him, standing behind Sumire as she spasms and screams, limbs violently jerking as her mind is replaced with that of her sister's, filled with nothing but fear and grief and sorrow.

"I only want what's best," as he tears all of Akira's friends away from him, rips them to pieces and glues back the parts that he deems acceptable. As he treats the world like a collage, mishmash pieces and one-note personalities.

He only wants what's best.

"This is what humanity wishes," Yaldaboath had boomed, towering over Tokyo and Japan and the world with arms outstretched. "It is what is best."

"It's what's best for you, Akira," his mother had told him sternly three days before she and Dad had shipped him off to the other side of the country. The memory comes with a red, stinging cheek, the sound of palm striking skin still echoing in his mind.

Akira had killed Yaldaboath, destroyed it without even a skip in his heartbeat, shot it in the head with all of humanity behind him.

He had left his parents, started a new home, carved his name and legacy into the attic of LeBlanc, created a family that loved him just as ferociously as he did them.

Maruki, however, is a different case.

"I hope you understand," he tells Akira, holding a red black white postcard in his hands, dangling the lives of all of Earth on strings right in front of him. "I only want what's best for you."

Morgana is leaning on Akira at his side, and though Akira knows it's a cat barely a whopping 8 pounds sitting next to him, he can't help but remember the man sitting at the counter, relaxing on the couch, laughing with Akira's friends. Can't help but be reminded of the human Morgana was, just for a week.

Akechi is as imposing as ever, standing over the booth table with his arms crossed and chin held high, remarkably cool and composed for a corpse.

There is a dead man standing next to Akira, one who Akira has risked life and limb for, time and time again, and Maruki has the gall to talk about what's best for him.

"Get out," Akira tells the counter. "Leave and go fuck yourself, Doc."

When Maruki's heart pangs, Akira can feel it himself, feel the squeeze in his own soul, but he refuses to lift his gaze off the grains of the wood of the table until he hears the bell chime goodbye, rage like waves crashing in his skull.

Akira is no stranger to fury.

It was inherent to him long before he was in handcuffs, something that was part of him back when he still had gaps from losing teeth, that showed him how to punch the right way, how to kick and flail and scream and bite to fight for himself.

He considers it more of a guardian and guiding force than either of his parents, something that coats and covers and consumes him whole with this ugly, gnawing hunger that can only be sated with bruised and bloody, sore and aching knuckles, split lips and dislocated shoulders, scrapes and scars and sweat and tears. It's only satisfied when Akira's fingers are knotted in his classmate's hair, forcing them to bow and apologise to whoever, whatever they've wronged or hurt. It's how he gets that kick, that calm, watching bullies sob and say their sorries to a kicked dog or little kid with spilled ice cream or a classmate just a second too slow to defend themself.

It's anger that threw him out to Tokyo and led him by the hand into Kamoshida's Palace, that pointed him to friends and allies and helped him weigh every decision he's ever made. It's what kissed away bitter tears as he lies alone in his bed made of milk cartons and stares up at the ceiling with holes in his heart, it's what grew up with him and notched lines against doorframes to show him how much he's grown, taught him how to cook and to clean and kick and scream.

Akira is all too aware of how empty he is without his anger.

So he sits and stews and dwells on it, chews on it and lets it settle right down at the bottom of his heart, curl in his stomach and pump through his veins.

Morgana is gone, when ire subsides and Akira remembers himself. It's just him and his would-be murderer in his restaurant-turned-home.

Akechi is lecturing him, like always. He thinks he knows best, always was a touch too pretentious even before he made himself insane.

So Akira stands up and lets him talk, lets the words go from one ear out the other-- it's funny. He used to always listen to what Akechi had to say. Even if he was a bit of an egomaniac, he always had a good interpretation of things, had the ability to say it how he saw it and still knew how to look objectively. It was something Akira admired, the little conversations where Akechi would make things a little bit cleaner, clearer, crisper, the remarks that brought Akira back to his feet.

He feels no such admiration right now.

"--really so spineless that you'd fold over some bullshit, trivial threat on my life?" Akechi is asking him.

"You're not trivial, Akechi," Akira says, far away in his own head, without his say-so or a single thought about it. He's on autopilot, meandering through as he thinks and thinks and thinks about nothing on repeat.

"You're a fool," Akechi snarls back.

Akira is overtaken with his rage again, feels it wrap around him like a warm blanket, fingers, head numb. It's a few seconds of Akechi spitting his soliloquy before Akira puts enough effort into deciphering--

"This is what's best," Akechi spits like venom towards Akira's feet. "You'd listen to me if you knew what was good for you."

Akira's world turns red, his ears filling with a shrill scream like ringing bells.

The next thing he hears is the crack of knuckles against jaw.

Akechi is on the floor. Akira's fist pulses with aftershocks of the impact.

"You don't know shit about me," Akira hisses down at Akechi holding his face in one gloved hand, pushing himself up with one elbow, splayed like carpet on the wooden boards of LeBlanc.

Akechi stares up at Akira.

"How long?"

Akira is asking Akechi's chest, can't even fucking bear to look him in the eyes without being overcome with every word for anger in the goddamn dictionary.

"How long have you known?"

A pause.

"...I've had my suspicions since the day I woke up."

Over a month.

Over a fucking month he thought he was dead, thought he was another pretty little piece of this disgusting world and--

"You didn't think to tell me?"

Akira's voice breaks.

He has been this angry before.

He has been this angry before a lot of times. Face pressed against a cop car, screaming his innocence as his hands are pinched together by metal. Standing in front of a court of grey beards and wrinkled faces who don't even look at him as they ruin his life. Packing everything he owns into one suitcase to be shipped off across Japan for nothing. Standing being held back by literal actual monsters as he watches someone get beat within an inch of his life. Face pressed against a window as he watches a little body fall fall falling off the roof of the school building.

Needles entering the crook of his elbow and kicks delivered to his skull. Watching a boy barely a year older than himself self-destruct under the weight of a conspiracy. A gun to the temple of the man who destroyed him. Staring God in the face as he learns he was nothing but a game piece for something far greater than himself. Watching that God insult his friends, his family, his home, along the rest of the wretched world.

Akira is familiar with this rage. He has been for a while.

Akechi does not offer him an answer.

He is intimate enough with the feeling to know the words he's biting back aren't true, knows he wants to say things in the moment he far from means. So he grits his teeth and holds back insults and screams that aren't fair, aren't right.

Somehow, a, "You. Are the most arrogant person I've ever met," slips out between his lips. Then, "How can you stand spitting those stupid, petty insults at Maruki when you're doing the exact fucking thing he did to me? You think you know what's best for me? You don't even have the balls to tell me what you're doing, what you are! You're a filthy fucking coward, Akechi. Don't pretend like you've done anything for anyone's best interests other than your own. You never have, and you sure as hell aren't starting now."

Akira steps past him and wrenches the door open, the cheerful bell chiming happy a million miles away from his ears.

He's standing out in Shibuya Crossing when he remembers himself.

The snow is curling around him like tiny little whirlpools, dancing and spinning without a care in the world.

He is surrounded by puppets on strings. His head is up towards the sky-- there's no air pollution in Maruki's world, so the stars are out and proud like they are back home, way out in the boonies. He never thought he'd miss the open sky on a clear night, but thoughts of both Maruki and home leave sour tastes in his mouth.

Everything. Everything is wrong.

If he thinks hard enough, he can remember gunshots, sirens blaring in his ears as flood doors close over a half-corpse standing his ground against a fake and a dozen monsters. A promise, to take down the man that ruined both their lives. A glove Akira keeps at the bottom of his bag.

A fucking month.

Perhaps anyone in the real world would have thought him strange-- a boy cackling up to the night sky choking on thousands of emotions that he can't name, too bitter and burned to cry, not anymore-- but Maruki's world isn't filled with people. So they simply walk past him like he doesn't exist, too caught up in two steps above euphoria to pay any attention to the guy laughing at nothing in the middle of the street.

He stands there for maybe 10 minutes, or maybe 3 hours. However long it takes for his legs to ache, his cheeks to hurt from guffawing at nothing, his fingers to freeze in the cold.

He doesn't have a phone on him or a bag or money, so after he's done laughing he shoves his hands in his pockets and trudges back on home.

LeBlanc's lights are still on-- it must be close to midnight now, every light in Yongen-Jaya peacefully clicked off, so LeBlanc glows a soft warm light that cuts through the darkness.

There's something funny about time. Someone like Akira can do nothing but sit and steam in his rage when left to his own devices; everything gives way eventually to anger, like coal forming diamonds or bones to proper fossils. Time will only let him boil and fester until he's nothing more than snarling, bleeding teeth, a beast that is hungry and wanting and mad.

But, ever so often, recently, it does something else. Drains the pot, leaves him to dry. He's nothing without anger to keep him busy. Hollow.

So he feels nothing as he pulls the door to LeBlanc open and enters. There is only a cold, numb feeling not just from freezing temperatures, but something deep deep inside himself, when he looks around the empty restaurant.

Akechi is nowhere to be seen.

Akira cannot bring himself to care.

So he turns off all the lights and picks up his phone still on the table, untouched, and meanders up to bed.

Morgana is awake, waiting for him, presumably, but doesn't say a word to Akira as he throws himself into bed, just curls up on his stomach with nary a goodnight.

Akira dreams.

"Say you're sorry, Kurusu," his teacher says.

He's in third grade. Both his knees are scraped from falling on concrete and climbing up trees and wandering in places he's not supposed to. There's a crack in his glasses and blood on his cheek, he's caked in dirt and dust and sitting in the nurse's office, petulant and indignant.

"No," he tells his ratty sneakers. It's before his parents decide his lisp is too ugly to bear and throw him into speech therapy, so he still likes talking, and he says every word weird.

"Kurusu!"

There's a kid on the seat next to him whose name could be anything. His face is bruised, bloody. He holds a tooth in one hand as the nurse silently patches up the scratches and cuts on his arms and legs.

"I wasn't the one killing the ants," Akira spits.

Akira understands at age 8 the concept of disproportionate retribution-- this is not the first time he will get this lecture. The teacher tells him the consequences for stomping on a colony of ants don't include a fistfight in the entrance the forest they haven't bothered to fence off from the playground. Akira tells her that it's not his fault the other kid fought back after the first punch-- he was content to leave it there. No, he was content to tell his fellow student of his wrongdoing so he could go back to looking for big beetles to play with him during recess. It was his classmate who escalated the situation by calling him weird and dumb.

Furthermore, Akira states in his voice not yet trained in the art of clear speech, and far too heated to care, he was not the cause of most of the other boy's wounds, that was from the log Akira pushed him into when he got punched back. The only thing he can take credit for is the bruises on the face, and the kid's tooth was already very loose so Akira did not completely punch the tooth out of his mouth, he simply aided it.

The nurse and Akira have had a tacit agreement not to bother each other-- Akira is there so often he's aware she has a habit of smoking in her office, and he keeps silent due to the fact that she is probably the nicest person on staff, barring one or two lunch ladies, though she isn't quite privy to his part of the bargain. So she doesn't mention the fact that Akira's classmate, in fact, lost two teeth, neither of which were nearly as loose as Akira is making them out to seem.

The teacher just sighs, because they are nearing the end of summer and she is already keenly aware that Akira is a lost cause, and tells him that she'll be speaking with his parents in the near future.

Akira catches the same kid, with one tooth beginning to grow in and replacing one of the ones Akira knocked out, throwing stones at a bird's nest not two weeks later.

He has no argument or defence later on with his exasperated teacher nor the wailing child next to him. He only tells them that the ants could be considered a warning-- he was not at fault that the kid couldn't listen to what he was told.

Something about the memory of watching a classmate grind his heel into an anthill, chuck rocks at a nest of baby birds that can't even fly, reignites a rage within him.

Akira has been this angry before. It's a thought that drums through him as he wakes and goes about his day, as he dons Joker's mask and costume and name and begins the climb to take the world back from the hands of a man who never learned how to lose, when he makes eye contact with Crow standing off to the side as usual. He's been this angry before.

Perhaps, he considers, staring Maruki in the face as he grows and grows and suffers and suffers until he is the size of a God that is begging for mercy, he hasn't ever stopped.

He's been this angry before-- he's not sure if he's ever not been.

He watches something overtake his guidance counsellor with slime and gold and size and power until Maruki is something he's not. He's all height and width, features and appendages huge to the point of grotesque, too much to see at once, reaching, probing hands and exposed shiny-white teeth and glittering, false gold-- a filthy, nauseating assault to the senses.

He wonders, briefly, how an ant feels when it gets crushed.

Joker lets his teammates hold the God's arm still so he can climb up to his-- its forehead and press a toy gun to his temple and snarl, vision red and ears ringing.

"Please," it booms with the voice of someone he once trusted. "I just want everyone to be happy!"

"Don't you understand?" Joker sneers. "I only want what's best for you."

His trigger finger twitches.

Adam Kadmon falls.