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The fact is that it starts with a throwaway comment at the end of the world. Or, from another perspective, the beginning of another. Akira can’t pretend to understand how time moves forward in a dream-reality, how it even all works when he thinks about the sheer amount of processing power it must take to smooth over every chink and inconsistency in ensuring one man’s happiness is that of another man’s. At any rate, what Akechi also says over the phone on the eighth of January is this: this world’s like something out of a Ghibli movie.
Akira thinks about this. Really thinks about this. Considers in his mind’s eye the rolling idylls and colorblock curiosities of his childhood favorites, then goes right out to the nearest Lawson’s for tickets. He gets a pair dated for this very afternoon. Exploiting the hell out of Maruki’s reality for miracles like this is the only satisfaction he gets out of it. One of the defining principles of the real universe, after all, is that nobody gets to visit the Ghibli museum on a ‘whim’.
He calls Akechi up immediately.
“You ever actually seen a Ghibli movie, Akechi?”
There’s a long pause on the other end of the receiver before Akechi lets out a long, existential sigh. “Maybe. Long ago. Right, hanging up now.”
“From what I can tell, the Ghibli museum’s an absolutely Instagrammable location.”
“You know I stopped updating my social media profiles months ago. And they don’t allow photography in the building, Kurusu.”
“Oh. Shit.” He’s genuinely disappointed.
“Does this have anything to do with our investigation?”
True, they’re not pretend-buddies anymore, but Akechi isn’t the only one with a say in this and Akira figures Akechi at least owes him this, if he never takes him to account for all the rest. It’s only fair, not that he’s not himself secretly thrilled by the idea of ‘resuming pleasantries’. And it isn’t as if Akira has anyone to go with. He can’t bear to stake claim on his friends when they’re making up for lost time with people returned from the dead.
It’s a funny feeling whenever he thinks of them, their smiles. Fluttery and hollow all at once in his chest.
“You’re meeting me there once you’re done,” Akira says after another such moment, knowing that Maruki aside, the ex-Detective Prince can’t have much else to do in a world without crime and cabal. “The museum’s twenty minutes on foot from Kichijoji. See you there.”
***
He’s there, of course, waiting in a crisp mid-January winter and right on time, as if not a second should be wasted and they should just get this over and done with.
His attire’s similar to what he wore on the second day of the year, clean-cut with a streak of color that suggests a certain precision in fashion consciousness. For someone who claims to have no need for the Prince persona, he’s very well put together, Akira can’t help but note, especially when relative to his own simple blacks and blues and the longer tail of his jacket that only winks a hint of Joker.
It’s good to get to focus on Akechi and a few of his favorite things. It keeps the rest of the world, or what it has become, from his mind.
“That’s Totoro,” he says carelessly by way of introduction, and sure enough a sculpture of the beloved long-eared mascot is taking up a sentinel’s post at the ticket counter. Akechi’s face is already showing signs of abject regret.
“If you’re going to be condescending I might just murder you again.”
“Ah. What’s a ray gun going to do to me?” He frowns. “Wait, they let you walk with all your things returned to you?”
“No. Guns don’t exist in this reality.” And Akechi rolls his eyes as if they’re talking about the latest unfortunate choice of model on a teen zine.
They enter. Akira’s only too conscious of Akechi’s nearness, their not speaking, the aimlessness of this entire endeavor without a heist to perform or an investigation to pursue. It’s been months since they were at… ‘leisure’.
The quiet’s fine by him, at least. He isn’t up for much talking anyway, not these days, especially, when he’s been feeling like an alien in a sea of smiles. Is this what Akechi has had to feel all this while?
“You don’t look impressed,” he remarks eventually, after ten to fifteen or so minutes of wandering about.
And it’s clear the museum, unlike a Palace, wasn’t built to hide; isn’t for looking, but for finding. It’s an oddity of a museum, indeed, the gardens unmarked, the interiors devoid of signs and directions. Each corner turned, every corridor traversed is a surprise, the rooms furnished in cobblestoned quaintness and covered with myriad drawings, paintings. Some are of characters old and familiar to Akira. Others simply delight the eyes, if not the imagination.
“I suppose there’s a fanciful sort of charm to this place,” Akechi says, arms folded, glancing at clusters of families trawling the place and then, very deliberately, not looking back again.
Family upon family, hands tucked into each others’ as they ascend the winding stairways, their laughter ringing through the halls. Akira wants to think they have more authentic reasons for happiness in a house built specifically for dreams.
(Haru, the smallness of her hand slipped gently into the much larger one of President Okumura’s. Futaba, arm-in-arm with Sojiro and Wakaba on either side, marching down a crowded street like she owns it, or already owns everything she could ever hold or want.)
“At least it’s realer, here,” he says quietly.
“Perhaps,” Akechi says after a moment, his face expressionless. “For you.”
It’s another beat or so before Akira realizes fully what Akechi is saying. Or isn’t saying, rather. By then they’ve been ushered into a dark theatre for a fifteen-minute short that features Totoro’s Mei and her stubby, well-fed limbs tumbling in giggles over grasses or window sills into the soft landings only cat-buses can provide. Onscreen, kawaii monster and kid whoosh across an idyllic night sky alongside other relatives, Cheshire smiles upon smiles upon smiles, Mei’s blissful innocence the brightest of them all. Akechi, who has never had much of a childhood, rises to his feet and leaves before the film is done.
***
“I’m sorry,” Akira says as he catches up. He almost reaches out to grab Akechi’s arm. Almost. “I should’ve anticipated the kind of effect this place has on you.”
“Really.” Akechi’s voice is as devoid of emotion as it can be, a note pressed too low on the keyboard. “It wasn’t deliberate? Are you really just this polite to everyone?”
“You’re most certainly not just anyone,” Akira finds himself returning.
Of course, it’s a stupid comeback Akechi refuses to acknowledge. “It’s not real, any of it,” Akechi says instead, looking about them, at the warm painted walls and the spiral stairways trundling like decorated worms between floors, with a new and undisguised disdain.
“The movies aren’t all that way,” Akira explains, shifting his glasses up his nose. Why this urge to prove it? What does he even want Akechi to learn? He ticks off lists in his head: Spirited Away. Princess Mononoke. Howl’s Moving Castle. Nausicaa , the one that sort of started it all . “ The characters develop. They work for their happiness. There’s loss, too,” he adds, thinking of deaths in a forest, so many of them, of red-smeared fur, beheadings, blood spilling thickly across the screen.
“What I’m referring to is how they appeal to people’s naive desire to believe in the inherent goodness of human nature.”
Not a surprising sentiment from Akechi Goro at all, no.
“True. I can’t bring a single consistent antagonist from the movies to mind. But that applies to real life, too,” Akira adds, meaningfully.
“Like I said. We’re working together, for now."
“And, barring a few exceptions, no one dies in a Ghibli movie, because no one deserves to.”
It’s hitting too close, isn’t it. But can Akechi resist a debate, sort of, like old times? “You can't even have a conceivable discussion of justice in a world without Shadows. Metaphorical or literal, though I suspect that dichotomy falls apart for Persona users.”
“What's the harm in a little escapism?” And Akechi looks strangely, suddenly incredulous at this, as if Akira’s implying a betrayal of their cause. “Fellini said that cinema uses the language of dreams. A movie obeys its own logic of time, and every single object has its own meaning.”
He hasn’t quoted from The Craft of Cinema before. He never found an audience. Never expected to find one, an equal where books and coffee were concerned, until the Detective Prince walked into his life.
He’s missed this.
“Unlike a dream, going to the movies means being a willing participant in illusion, though one must wonder at which point one loses choice.” Akechi almost sounds angry. “When the lights go off? When the show comes on? When the cat turns into a fucking bus so movie-goers can empty their pockets on figurines of it at the merchandise store later?”
Because they’ve now turned into the museum’s shop, which is predictably milling with people of all shapes and sizes, each one identical only in their apparent preferences for stuffed collectibles and wearable forest-spirit ears and snow globes. An enthusiasm from which Akira is not exempt.
He trawls his fingers through a tinkling mob of keychains. Thinks of the green, breezy pastures from a quiet youth before the TV, the animated path of wind. Says, very carefully, “Isn't there value in a vision of perfection, however momentary, if it sustains one through the years that come?”
Akechi isn’t even pretending to be examining something else now.
“What's perfection to one can be very different from another. I don't have to tell you this. You've seen Palaces.”
“And for better or worse,” Akira continues, as if he hasn’t heard him, as if the fucking Leader of the Phantom Thieves doesn’t know all too well what distortion looks like, “it’s that vision which sticks. Doesn’t matter if we can’t trust it to be anything more than an impossibility, Gray Pigeon.”
Akechi doesn’t say anything. Bingo, Akira thinks. There was a spark in Akechi’s childhood, somewhere, a hero’s dream, however brief. Obvious in his choice of weapons.
“You’re really buying that,” Akechi says at last, glaring in the general direction of Akira’s hands, then up at the speakers blaring out PONYO, PONYO, PONYO, SAKANA NO KO! Akira pops the third fluffy sootball into his basket.
“Yeah.”
***
They’re seated in the Straw Hat cafe now, where the mild winter sun tessellates the woody interior generously through skylights. The room is filled with a cookie-and-coffee smell, distinctly different from the muskier scent of Leblanc that Akira finds himself suddenly missing. It’s not home anymore with Wakaba and Morgana there, like that.
But why can’t it be?
Akechi’s sipping at his coffee with an irritable air, turned away from the curious gazes of guests and families streaming in and out, some making repeated visits to ascertain that it’s truly the Detective Prince that’s sitting in the same room, breathing the same air. Even if his celebrity status oddly has something of a dated air, just like that of the Phantom Thieves, which accounts for their tentativeness. In the meantime, Akira is inspecting his many, many purchases.
One for everyone, not that he expects gifts to achieve anything.
“Have you considered whether, hypothetically speaking, purchases you make in the dream world don’t get carried over to reality?”
Akira has a sense that Akechi is doing his best to look busy in a conversation. Well, then. “That depends on whether Maruki’s power divides two physical realities, one of which he’s actualised from our cognitions, or two cognitive realities.” He’s given this a lot more thought than it looks. Too much of it; it’s been keeping him up. “Besides, we’ve always carried over things from the Metaverse.”
“Conceded, but powers like these don’t just distort space, real or cognitive,” Akechi says smoothly. “Time’s been affected, too. Your experience of linear time. Maruki’s actualisations remove or add items and events which occupy a space in time. ”
“No loss for me, anyway. They were all on discount. Thank God.” Akechi snorts, rather loudly. “Think we’ll forget any of this happened, though? It seems a standard narrative trope. The There-and-Back-Again, in Spirited Away and all of Miyazaki’s dream flights.”
“I did notice Miyazaki’s fondness for planes.”
“You didn’t answer my previous question.”
Does he want to forget any of this — the conversations, the coffee, Akechi or Crow by his side, his violent glee vaulting into the unreachable ceilings of Maruki’s abode? What has Akira got to gain or lose with the return of the real? And what does it mean if it matters little, either way?
Would he wish forgetting on any of his teammates when they’ve tasted a bliss that has never existed for him?
“It’s probably best to forget,” Akechi says, so startlingly quiet and cold that he is almost inaudible over the upsurge of noise from a family in the corner. Akira stares at him, leans forward with a new urgency.
“For what it’s worth, you were here. You were here with me, Akechi.”
He’s never had to plead with Akechi, or anyone — not even in the police station, he didn’t — but it certainly sounds like he’s doing that now. Akechi Goro is full of secrets and the idea that his rival, his almost-friend, almost-murderer , wants none of this to mean anything at all in a world in which he now means nothing, scares him like hell. Akechi’s face is folded into a perfect mask, though, his gaze now fixed on the loudest chatter in the room as if that has all of his attention. What is Akira even expecting?
“...That man over there, the one electing to don a beanie shaped like your insipid gray cryptid , seems to be an actualisation.”
Akechi the detective, in pursuit of objective truth to escape from emotional ones. It's such a trope, Akira realises dejectedly. “And how can you tell?”
Akechi shrugs and returns to his coffee, but it’s clear to Akira within moments when he begins focusing on the man and his family. They’re wearing the same looks of contented oblivion as everyone else, but the parents of this classic nuclear quartet appear to be concentrating most of their joy on the older son, a young adult whose otherwise polished appearance doesn’t go well with the Totoro headgear that has Akechi’s stamp of disapproval. It’s evident in the way they are turned towards each other, their chuckling and familial grousing locked in a veritable Bermuda’s Triangle, while the considerably younger son sits off to the side and casts in their direction a smile both forlorn and bewildered. A smile that doesn’t know why it’s there; one not entirely of its own volition, perhaps. Maruki’s project certainly needs its hotfixes.
Akira finds himself rising to his feet.
“What?” Akechi says.
“Ice cream,” is all Akira offers for an explanation, and then he is off to the counter (a miracle of queueless-ness) for a cone topped with a vanilla swirl of geometrical perfection. He suspects that were he to turn it over, he’d find in his hands an edible stalactite, but he’s not about to potentially disappoint a child who already has his gaze fixed on him as he approaches.
(“I can't tell you enough how you nearly killed your mother here when you showed up for New Year’s Day on our doorstep. She knocked over a few plants as she fainted!)
(“And I would’ve gone out with a smile. I always knew you’d be back, no matter how long it took. I always said London didn’t agree with you, and I was right…”)
“Here,” Akira says to the younger brother, handing him the cone like a knight with a rose to his lady, half-kneeling, half-bending. The kid’s smile turned on him is empty, but the surprise that rises in his eyes isn’t.
The parents barely even glance at their kid’s acceptance of an offering from a stranger.
It’s Akira’s turn to feel as if the room is too crowded. The voices heighten in volume, their enthusiasm sucking the warmth right out of his chest and leaving only a cold longing there that he and this boy alone shares. Wordlessly he returns to Akechi, whom he’d like to think understands, having finished his cup right on cue. Akira picks up his bags and they head out into the late afternoon, the breeze picking up around their ears.
***
It’s cold out, but somewhere along these short winding paths and around the curious sculptures dotted around, the sun manages to tail them. Maruki’s doing? Is it even safe to twist a person’s cognition about the weather? Akira doesn’t know. Either way, he’s grateful for the safe space this quiet allows him to fold into, here on a bench in the middle of a Miyazaki-commissioned garden.
Miyazaki made the films and scenes that understand him. The serenity between riot and activity, the throwback to a simpler time. Even when nothing was ever quite so back then. Akira remembers the shouting and throwing of things, between his parents and their freeloading siblings and between his aunties and uncles and their children in a house too tiny for everyone. Remembers making himself very small, very still and very silent, not necessarily to avoid trouble to himself in a mob of a house but to become only what is needed of him as a son: his invisibility.
Whatever it takes.
Later on he learns to become friend, babysitter, prefect, boyfriend, scholar… whatever is needed, whatever it takes. The yin to yang or yang to yin. The silent mirror that reflects back to a person what they are. The world must be in balance, in harmony like a Ghibli film, and he is merely in service of the big picture.
Akira doesn’t realise he’s closed his eyes until Akechi’s voice says, “Well, this was nice . I'll be going now.”
He’s actually making to rise. Akira glances over at him.
“Funny, isn't it. That we're the only two left out of this world.” A world that’s made clear the irrelevance of both a hitman and its own servant.
“Indeed. The irony of ‘we’.”
“No, no, not at all.” Akira straightens. “I don't think it's ironic. I think it's apt.”
“Oh, of course.” Akechi’s annoyance is back, a low thrum in the quiet. “Because we share uncanny similarities. Because deep down we're made of the same matter, is that it? Because I could've been you or you could've been me if our paths hadn't diverged so tragically . I thought you'd know better by now than to believe the Prince's bullshit.”
“It wasn't all lies, Akechi.”
The Thieves haven’t seen Crow as he has, Morgana or Futaba and all the rest of them. This is the closest the both of them have come to talking about November, Akira realises, and instinctively he reaches for the glove in his jacket. Keeps his hand there.
Neither of them have talked about this either.
“Are you actually, genuinely, comparing yourself to me?” Akechi is saying.
“You don't have to make a trophy of your monstrosity, you know.”
That smile Akechi’s wearing. “Unlike yours, mine isn’t imagined.”
“I think you can let us be the judge of this,” Akira says, and then the family from before passes and his attention is drawn by the youngest, savoring the last of his cone in sticky slurps, drawing the ends of the wafer up into turrets like a castle. Akira draws his hand out of his pocket to wave at him. It’s a few moments before then kid waves back, and for some reason this has the parents’ attention this time. Their curious gazes rove over the pair of them before settling on Akechi, who is pointedly looking away.
(“We should stop staring.”)
(“Is that… wait, I could’ve sworn —”)
They pass out of earshot in a small circle of tugs and chuckles, and the moments pass in silence again. Akira breathes in and out, the air passing through clean and crisp against his frayed nerves.
“From one lonely soul to another,” he says quietly, pointedly, “thank you. I was calling in a favour today that you needn’t have answered, but you did.”
“So even a person like you has voids that need filling.”
Now Akechi’s voice is as clinical as the dental cavity he sounds like he’s describing. Cold settles in like a vice around Akira’s gut. “You think that’s what you are?”
Akech isn’t looking at him, although Akira’s watching, very intently, the way Akechi’s jaw tightened against the rest of his too-smooth face. “It’s hard to see, isn’t it?” he says. “When you’ve been the one filling them. I’ve watched you with your friends, you know. The things you say, the way you talk — you’ve a different mask for each person, and to tell the truth... that was enviable too. You seemed possessed of everything and nothing at once.”
There’s another beat before he adds, “I thought it looked… freeing.”
Akira lets out a bitter chuckle. Of course he would. It isn’t the first time Akechi has said something to this effect; it’s even odder that it’s happening now, surrounded as they are by fawning parents and giggling kids in the distance and the statue of one towering, benevolent, fictional android from Laputa: Castle in the Sky. If there’re no chains on his heart it’s because he’s distanced himself. Made of himself the ‘nothing’ that Akechi’s named, staked his entire self-concept on that.
Akechi has done exactly the opposite of this.
“Now you know.” His voice is too low, too light. “I could very well be the one who’s wrong about… all of this. And I don’t have the right, do I, to take it from them.”
A moment of incredulous silence follows before Akechi snaps, “Isn’t there a single choice you can make for yourself ?”
The realization is dead weight: no. No, it’s always been about others. Add to that the sudden anger in Akechi’s voice… what is it about? His weakness, or something else? What is Akechi reading into him more incisively than anyone else has — that he’s incapable of the ‘very personal’ because his unconscious harbors few desires?
Should being a literal Buddha — who has wielded Satanael and downed a god and more besides — feel this heavy?
Akira spins around on the long bench and flops with an exhale onto his back. A cavalier movement he doesn’t feel. He can just barely see Akechi’s face over the top of his knees.
“I... just keep wondering why I’m exempted from all this.” He doesn’t know if it was his unconscious who pushed back against dreams, or whether he’s simply… unsuitable.
“I find it hard to believe the cause of that resembles in any way mine.” Akechi’s mouth is set into a grim line. He stands. “You’ve been unnaturally pensive for a person who never had trouble deciding before. We’re seeing Maruki again tomorrow. Don’t back out on me.”
On me . It’s personal.
“Goro,” Akira says carefully, figuring he’s earned his first name over the course of the afternoon. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Lots of things.” He’s already walking. “What, you think I’ve reformed? Could say the same of you, by the way.”
“I just told you more than I’ve ever told anyone,” and it’s sad, pathetic in its truth, like the way he calls after Akechi’s departing back.
A while later he springs up and jogs to keep in step with his reluctant companion. They head silently down the stairs, through the short winding paths, back to the front of the museum. The first snow of the day begins, a streak of white pelting his nose as gently as regret.
***
“For the record,” Akira says as they step out of the museum grounds proper, “my sole purpose in bringing you here was to convert you into a Ghibli fan.”
He's watching the sky, the snow spiraling out of gray and landing on the small huddles gathered outside the Totoro-guarded ticket house after an afternoon of whimsy, on Akechi Goro’s coat, scarf, mouth. He’s thinking about a lot of things, of existence, of insignificance, of the hollow in his heart he didn’t know was there until Goro called it out for what it was, and this is the shit that comes out of his mouth to diffuse the mess that’s roiling about inside his head.
Goro isn’t just a filler. At all.
Goro says, “We’ll agree to disagree, Kurusu. I’ve never been a man of faith.” He hesitates before adding grudgingly, “But I suppose, like the Sayuri , Ghibli offers a glimpse of grace. A very stubborn one, which I can respect.”
And Akira smiles at the memory. Of the elsewhere Goro’s gaze goes on evenings at Leblanc, the softness in it that seeps into their conversations after. “You did like that painting.”
“Where is it now?”
“In the Ueno art museum. I was just there today.” As a witness to the sheer pride in Yusuke’s gaze sliding into uncertainty in a sea of bright faces. It pains him to think about. He adds, “People were marveling at third century pottery like they contained scrolls of enlightenment. Makes you wonder what the curators wished for.”
“What do you think happens if we smash up museums in Maruki’s reality, Kurusu?”
Goro is actually looking at him. Smirking. Considering it: toying with the variables to find out the disruptions they make in a closed system like Maruki’s. Being an actual social miscreant, too, as opposed to only running rogue in the Metaverse, because what are the stakes anymore.
Together.
“I’d back you up,” Akira says, and is utterly sincere, as he glances over at the Totoro’s benign bulk in the distance and back to the remnants of museum-goers scattered around in fresh snow, their murmurs spinning occasionally into shrieks of childish joy. A toddler skids across wet ground, falls flat on his nose, and picks himself up again in absurd glee. Yes, Akira’s properly tired of it all by now; the slapped-on gladness in a place like this is profane and heartbreaking and they can’t get in .
Goro smooths the sleeve back over the watch on his wrist and makes to continue walking, as if Akira hasn’t relished the restless seconds between his offer and his reply:
“We should be getting a good rest. To prepare for—“
“O-Oh! Look! We didn’t miss our chance after all! It’s Akechi-kun himself, right where we wanted him!”
“Akechi Goro! Could we, uh, maybe take a picture with you?”
It’s the family from before, again, come tumbling out of the exit gates right there and then. The happiness in them is spilling over so much, apparently, that the only recourse is to afflict the lauded Detective Prince with it in a selfie to commemorate yet another perfect day in a perfect world. Akira winces at the look on Goro’s face, at the way the older son’s arm drapes familiarly across his shoulders to pull him in, at the general hubbub that ensues from people breaking out of reverie enough to notice who’s here.
Except the younger son is standing forlornly off to the side. He isn’t in the photograph.
He’s always just a space his family doesn’t need.
Akira is about to walk over when Goro beats him to it, all calm vitriol, right to their father’s face: “Your older kid’s not an only child, you know. You might’ve considered how much smaller the size of your heart relative to the size of your dick was before you stuck it in your wife again.”
And then there’s dead silence and stricken faces all around, frozen in incomprehension, expressions flitting between simple and slapped like commercials across a screen. For a moment Maruki’s dream world is still.
Then the first smile ticks again, as though nothing has happened. Then the next. The world rearranges itself, elastic, back into a loopy happy ending.
A movie without villains.
Akira lets out the breath he’s been holding.
(“Thanks for the photograph, Akechi-kun! We’re such a fan!”)
Very carefully and deliberately, Goro brushes off their touches down the length of his coat before stalking off. “That wasn’t nearly satisfying enough,” is what is audible from him as Akira trails him, saddled as he is with ten paperbags and a lump of a laugh in his throat.
***
Goro is scowling — seething — all the way through the speckled baldness that is Inokashira Park in January and back to Kichijoji Station, back and arms drawn stiff as his usual briefcase swings carelessly against his knees. “Still think this world’s like a Ghibli movie?” Akira calls, coming up from behind.
“It’s worse,” Goro barks back, then stops. Akira doesn’t even blink when Kichijoji’s colors, washed out by the thickening snow, morph into the grotesque bodily interiors of Mementos.
Rest, huh.
“If you’re going to take your feelings out on more than just Area 1,” he says, smiling in the new belly-heat as he tosses it over, “at least we’ve the Mona bus with us.”
“What are you—” Crow, catching on reflex, opens his palm only to find a striped, many-legged ball of synthetic fur scrunched within his claws. “...oh, fuck you, Joker.”
Goro’s voice is light this time, light as a punch to the gut. It fills Akira up. Fills him out , so that for the time being, as he follows after into the intestinal dark, he is substantial again, not just a lone phantom in a dreaming city. Almost as if, like Chihiro in the bathhouse of the gods, he’s more alive in another realm than anywhere else.