Chapter Text
“I can’t believe you’re leavin’ us,” Ryuji mumbles, all petulance, scuffing at the floor with his sneaker. “We only just got you back, and now you’re, like, sailin’ off into the sunset…”
“He’s been back for over a year, dumbass,” Futaba tells him, with an admirable amount of scorn for someone who’s spent the whole morning looking completely downtrodden. “And it’s only for six months! And then he’ll be back for good, right?”
“Right,” Akira says as she turns to him, fondness curving his mouth into a smile. The day he travels to Osaka has dawned unnaturally cold for an early Tokyo autumn, and as they stand on the train platform he braces his jacket around himself a little tighter.
“Are you sure you’ve got everything you need?” Makoto asks worriedly, eyeing the duffel bag heaved over his shoulder. “I know it’s only six months, but still…”
“You should’ve seen what this guy brought with him to Tokyo the first time,” Morgana chirps, piping up as he pokes his head out of Akira’s bag. “Did you know he has more pairs of the same glasses than he does pants?”
“That’s not true,” Akira says, as Yusuke opines, “Minimalism is a noble lens through which to view the human experience… You are a man after my own heart, Akira.”
“I’m not sure being eternally broke and being a minimalist are the same thing,” Ann muses.
As the conversation devolves into an attack on Yusuke’s spending habits, Akira watches them silently, the same fond smile playing on his lips. Of course he’s known he’ll miss them, over the coming six months, but only in this moment does it sink in how strange his life will be without this familiar backdrop of affection-laced banter. Out of the corner of his eye he becomes aware of Haru watching him, a quiet smile on her face. “Are you nervous?” she asks, and he has to take a moment to think about it.
“No?” he says, sounding vaguely unsure, and then laughs. “No, not really, just a little… you know.” He makes a vague gesture, and she giggles.
“I understand,” she says, expression kind. He isn’t nervous, but there’s a natural amount of… uncertainty, he supposes, that comes with packing up your life (or, a duffel bag’s worth of your life) and moving somewhere new. Sailing away, as Ryuji put it, even if it’s just for a few months.
“Ah,” Makoto says, over the din of the others’ bickering. They all stop to follow her gaze as the Nozomi shinkansen comes soaring round the corner.
“Nooo,” Futaba moans, seizing Akira’s arm and hiding her face in his shoulder, as if the train won’t exist if she can’t see it. “It’s too soon! Go back!”
“He’ll be back before you know it, Futaba-san,” Sumire says, gently prying at her grip. Futaba detaches herself from Akira and throws herself around Sumire instead, faux-crying into the crook of her neck.
“I’m leaving too, you know!” Morgana interjects haughtily. “A little display of emotion on my part would be nice, too!”
“Are you ready?” Ann asks him (“Don’t ignore me!” Morgana yowls in the background). She steps back and surveys him, expression half-proud, half-sad, as if Akira is a child off to his first day of school.
“I think so,” Akira says. Ryuji slings an arm around his shoulder and makes a very strange expression. “I’m gonna miss you, bro.”
“Why do you look so weird?”
“I’m trying to look supportive, man! Reassurin’ and shit!”
“You look constipated,” Futaba sniffs, removing her head from Sumire’s shoulder.
“Listen, you -”
“Have you got your ticket?” Makoto interjects, a little too loudly. “Do you know where your seat is?”
“I do,” Akira says, grinning at her worried hovering. “Don’t worry about me.”
“We’ll text you all the time,” Ann says, and points an accusatory finger in his face. “You better update us! No, “sorry, I was asleep” all the time!”
“I do like to sleep,” Akira says, then a laugh splits his face as she glares at him over a pout. “No, I’ll keep you posted, I promise,” he insists, gently tugging her in for a hug with one arm.
“Group hug!” Futaba yells, throwing her arms around Akira’s chest as the others follow suit (“Ow, Yusuke, that’s my foot!” “Ann, your hair is tickling my nose…”). The thought of how they must look - a ragtag crowd, smushed together on the Tokyo station platform - warms Akira’s heart, and he closes his eyes, leaning into the warmth a little longer.
Eventually, their side of the platform becomes all but drained of people, with everyone having slowly trickled into the train carriages. Akira slowly emerges from their huddle, reflexively raising one hand to fiddle with his fringe.
“Time to go, huh,” Morgana says. Akira nods, shooting his friends a final grin before he turns to face the train.
“Contact us as soon as you arrive in Osaka,” Yusuke tells him.
“Send pics!” Futaba demands.
Akira laughs an airy acknowledgement, stepping onto the carriage and turning to look at them over his shoulder. “I’ll be back soon,” he promises, eyes lingering for a few more seconds on their wobbling smiles before he turns away, the train door sliding shut behind him.
He’s only been to Osaka once before - many, many summers ago, and the memory is blurry and distant - but the past few years spent navigating the labyrinth of the Tokyo rail system have bestowed a valuable set of skills upon him. The unfamiliar skyline slides past him as he sits on the Osaka loop line, knees jostling gently with a quiet anticipation. Akira is idly studying the ads plastered around the train carriage when his phone vibrates urgently in his pocket.
[ Ann: are you there yet!! ]
Before he can even begin to type a response:
[ Futaba: no he’s still a few stops away
i think?
signals kinda sketchy ]
[ Akira: I thought you said you’d stopped GPS tracking my phone ]
[ Futaba: yeah i lied
have to keep an eye on you while youre out there in the wilderness of kansai
its a dangerous place ]
[ Ryuji: r u tracking our phones too?? ]
[ Futaba: no ryuji i don’t care where you go ]
[ Sumire: How are you doing, senpai? Did your transfers go alright? ]
Akira pauses to crack a smile at Sumire’s unwavering politeness, even after years have passed.
[ Akira: yeah, it was actually pretty simple
Better than my first day at Shujin when I spent a small lifetime trying to find the Ginza line ]
[ Haru: Getting lost in Shibuya station is like a rite of passage for everyone who comes to Tokyo! ]
[ Yusuke: I once spent half an entire day searching for the Hachiko exit
It was a most enlightening experience. ]
[ Ryuji: bro didn’t you grow up here???? ]
“We will shortly be arriving at Tsuruhashi Station,” a voice announces, disturbing Akira from his half-typed reply. “Tsuruhashi Station.”
“This is it, right? Come on, get up, get up!”
“Shh,” Akira mutters at Morgana, gently shoving his head back into his bag.
The apartment which he’ll be living in for the next six months is - well, it’s better than the attic. Not that he actually minded living in Leblanc, but at least this place has its own shower. Morgana leaps from his bag and promptly begins making himself at home, prowling over to inspect the modest furniture his new room has been blessed with. Akira flops down on his still-unfurled futon and snaps a lazy photo of Morgana sniffing at the thin layer of dust on the desk, sending it to the group chat with the caption ‘home sweet home i guess’.
His phone promptly begins to buzz with notifications, but Akira lets his arm fall to his side, the other coming up to cover his eyes. The journey here wasn’t particularly gruelling, or long - beyond the thin curtains of his room’s window he can see the sun still hanging radiant in the sky - but Akira suddenly finds himself overcome with exhaustion. He almost feels like he could fall asleep here, and it’s so easy to let his eyes flutter shut -
“Hey!” Morgana leaps onto his stomach and Akira lets out a sharp, pained exhale. “What’re you getting all cozy for? Let’s go look around!”
“I’m tired,” Akira tells him, sounding vaguely winded.
“Come on! We’re gonna be living here for half a year, let’s go check it out!”
“By that logic, we’ve got plenty of time to go sightseeing,” he says, but he’s already begrudgingly getting to his feet. “Don’t I even get to unpack?”
Morgana levels him with a withering look. Akira is constantly impressed by how he manages to make a feline face be so expressive. “Don’t pretend you weren’t going to just leave your luggage abandoned on the floor all night anyway.”
Akira shrugs on his jacket in lieu of responding.
The area around his apartment is nice, a series of pleasant tree-lined streets, autumn’s amber colours beginning to permeate the scenery. He scopes out the nearest convenience store and tosses a couple hundred yen on a bottle of soda, and - unable to resist Morgana’s doleful gaze - a pack of sushi.
“This place is pretty decent,, huh,” Morgana remarks, although Akira thinks the cheerfulness to his tone is 90% due to the tuna he just inhaled.
“It’s not bad,” Akira agrees, taking a swig of his drink. They’ve wandered their way into a park where Akira rests back on a bench, watching the sunlight filter through the swaying trees overhead.
“I think I prefer Tokyo, though,” Morgana says, and Akira makes a noncommittal sound in response. His hand drifts to gently scratch between Morgana’s ears as his gaze skims the Osaka skyline. The sounds of the city roll past in the distance - countless people milling in and out of their everyday lives, each of them following a path Akira will never know, and a thought flowers hopelessly, desperately in his heart: are you here?
The thing is - ostensibly, Akira has moved on.
There is an odd solace in the cruelty of the seasons’ advance; he had left Tokyo as the winter ended, and as he watched the cherry blossoms bloom from the safe monotony of his hometown, so too had something taken root in his own heart - a sharp, quiet dawning, a realisation: ah, things are moving forward.
The days folded into each other and Akira had gone with them, let himself be rolled from one month to the next. Summer came in and he found himself pulled back to Tokyo, a tide at the mercy of the moon. His friends’ smiles had been lunar bright as he emerged back into his only real home, having followed his summons (in the form of a group chat delicately titled PHANTOM THIEVES BEACH REUNION BONANZA ☀️🌊🏖🎉 no lobsters inari 🚫🦞🚫) all the way to the sun-kissed sands of Miura.
“We’ve missed you terribly,” Haru had told him. It’d only been a couple of months, and of course he’d seen all of them over video calls and photographs, but her hair had seemed inexplicably so much longer to him then, its gentle waves cast into a beautiful amber glow by the slow sinking of the sun. In the background, he could hear Futaba saying, “okay, look - no buying any sea life! No buying, no - capturing, no adopting!”
“I fail to understand why you are so staunchly against me saving such elegant creatures from the fate of livestock.”
“‘Cause when your stupid lobsters died last year you moped about it for, like, three weeks!”
Yusuke sniffed. “Ah, the cruel brevity of our time together… I suppose, as the cherry blossoms of spring are all the more beautiful for their transience, so too was the culmination of our fate…”
“Okay, Murasaki Shikibu,” Futaba had said, her voice an audible eyeroll, as Ryuji chimed in, “Ain’t lobsters meant to be, like, immortal?”
Akira’s heart had swollen with love. “I missed you all too,” he said to Haru, smile so wide and genuine he could’ve burst, the fatigue of the last few lonely months washing away in their presence. Ann punctuated the end of the day with a casual, “let’s go to Okinawa next year,” and this statement wrapped around him like a blanket. Next year. It was that nebulous, beautiful promise that had carried him through his final year of school, through graduation, through the final journey back to Tokyo.
And now he is here - away again, but for only a brief stretch of time, and on the other side of it the concrete promise of returning to the warm place of belonging he had carved for himself. His future beginning to form, its shape vibrating with potential. The world no longer needing to be saved. Nothing is missing.
Except: some nights. Most nights. Not every night, but a lot of nights - when he begins to drift off into the comfort of sleep - his mind squeezes around one last coherent thought. Always the same. Akira keeps the glove in his bag, no matter where he goes, never allows himself to forget the one tangible piece of evidence he has left that someone was here, and they existed. Could exist still, against all odds.
Because a wish can be a memory, and a memory can be a wish.
“Takoyaki, takoyaki,” Mona whispers at him, insistently, as though Akira’s managed to forget in the last three minutes.
“I know,” Akira insists. “We’ll get there, I promise.” It’s his last day of freedom before he has to go and be a human being tomorrow, and he is - mostly at Morgana’s insistence - spending it navigating the throngs of people crowding Dotonbori.
“You’ve had takoyaki plenty of times,” he mutters as he slips down a side alley. “What’s the big deal?”
“It’s Osaka,” Morgana says haughtily. “You can’t put Osaka takoyaki on the same level as the rest of it!”
Akira thinks he’s talking with a lot of confidence for someone who’s never even had it before, but he keeps that thought to himself. He thumbs through the map on his phone, gracefully dodging a gaggle of tourists as he does so. “Is this the right way?” he mumbles to himself, idly.
“My takoyaki!”
Mercifully, he finds the takoyaki place in a few minutes, and after he purchases it they stand in a quiet side street a couple blocks away, Akira leaning against the wall as Morgana paces excitedly around his feet. “You better enjoy this, for what it cost,” Akira warns him before biting into his own share. The insides flood his mouth with a blistering heat. “ Ow, fuck -”
“Idiot,” Morgana says reproachfully, and promptly does the same thing.
It’s as Akira’s scouting out a nearby convenience store, desperate for something to help soothe his scalded tongue, that Morgana comes to a verdict. “I have to say,” he begins ceremoniously, “that tasted the same as every other takoyaki I’ve ever had.”
“You are kidding me,” Akira says, as he approaches the sliding doors of the Lawson. “I burnt my tongue for you.”
“That was nothing to do with me! It’s not my fault you never learned any self restraint!”
Akira had a witty retort ready, possibly, at some point. But the doors slide open seconds before he makes it to them, and all the words on his tongue, in his brain, die. The entire world fizzles out of existence and then restarts again instantaneously. Akira is reborn on the corner of an Osaka street in autumn and the first thing he ever sees is Goro Akechi, emerging from a Lawson convenience store, eyes widening in slow motion as his gaze comes up to meet Akira’s.
Somewhere far, far away, the cashier calls, “Thank you very much!”
“Ah,” Akechi says. “God fucking damn it.”