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Akechi has his hand on the door handle when Akira speaks.
‘Accompany me somewhere tonight,’ he says.
Akechi turns around. Akira is standing right where Akechi left him, next to the counter of Leblanc with the lights turned down low. His grey eyes are soft in the warm café lighting, the glasses in front of them doing nothing to obscure how he’s looking directly at Akechi, watching and waiting patiently for an answer. Akechi is struck at times, outside of the Metaverse, by how ordinary Akira looks. Another pretty face in the sea of people in Tokyo. Akechi would never have guessed he was the reckless and debonair leader of the Phantom Thieves, vigilante heroes who have accomplished things most adults and many organisations could not.
Akechi raises an eyebrow. ‘Do I get the choice?’ He asks, unimpressed.
Akira’s voice had been soft, but steely underneath. But Akechi watches something flicker across Akira’s face, usually as placid and as inscrutable as a mirror—his expression ripples once, too quickly, before smoothing out again. Whatever it was lingers behind Akira’s grey eyes, making them burn brighter with a keener sort of intensity.
‘You’ll always have a choice, Goro,’ Akira says, quietly.
Ah. Akechi remembers Maruki from not even an hour ago, and thinks he probably could have chosen better words. Regardless, he won’t apologise.
He should say no. They have their fight with the gods-be-damned quack of a doctor tomorrow, they should be resting and conserving their strength for the battle because who knows what Maruki has hidden up his sleeve—but Akechi looks again at Akira across from him, and thinks that even though he’s cruel, he’s not that cruel. Or maybe, he’s been cruel enough. Akira’s one wish in this utopia had apparently, despite everything Akechi has done, been to see him alive and well, and if nothing else Akechi doesn’t want to leave this world with debts or regrets. One night out is all Akira is asking. Surely Akechi can give that much.
‘Fine,’ Akechi says, curtly, opening the door to Leblanc and stepping out decisively. The night is endlessly dark outside.
Akechi gives Akira a backwards glance.
‘Where are we going?’
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Akira takes him to church.
Akechi glances around him dubiously, wrinkling his nose even as he delicately steps inside. Of all the places he’d thought Akira would want them to go, this place hadn’t even remotely crossed his mind.
‘If you’re looking to get me to repent for my sins before I’m officially gone by tomorrow, I think you should know that I don’t believe in god,’ he says, dryly. At this hour, they’re the only ones around. ‘Though, perhaps now isn’t the best time to be saying that to you, since we’re already here.’
Akira frowns at him, once, before striding down the aisle to the front of the church, where the confessional booth is. Startled, Akechi follows him.
‘Hold on, you can’t possibly be serious—’
Akechi’s ready for a fight—he has never once begged for forgiveness for his past actions, and he isn’t going to do it now, not to some bullshit martyr-idol constructed by the masses to give them false reassurances (he can’t even believe Akira is religious)—but Akira holds up one hand to stop Akechi in his tracks. He’s speaking quietly to the priest stationed outside the listening side of the confessional booth.
The priest’s brow is creasing. ‘I don’t know,’ he murmurs, his eyes darting from side to side as Akira stands in front of him and Akechi stands glowering to the side, ‘it’s not technically allowed– I’m incredibly grateful that you’ve helped out the church several times, Akira-kun, but–’
Good god. Akira manages to find time in his schedule to run favours for even the church. Four months ago Akechi would have found this fact grating, even downright infuriating, but right now Akechi can only think, exasperated, of course. Akira Kurusu and his bleeding little heart. Always looking to find the good in people.
Akechi wrestles the desire to be mean back under control, just as Akira says, ‘please.’
Akechi blinks at that. From where he is, Akira’s back is hunched, his shoulders looking stooped and weary as he all but begs a priest for—for what? Use of a worn-down confessional booth for ten insignificant minutes? What is Akira looking to do here, and why did he bring Akechi along?
Akechi has never heard Akira sound like that before. The priest’s eyes are wide with surprise as they flick to look at him from over Akira’s shoulder, before returning to Akira. Akechi finds himself wishing, with a sudden and surprising intensity, that he could see the expression on Akira’s face right now—even as his entire body recoils at the thought, flinching away from the idea like maggots from the light.
After a long moment, the priest gets up from his position in the booth. ‘Alright,’ he murmurs. ‘Take as long as you need, Akira-kun.’
Akira inclines his head in gratitude. His eyes get shaded by his glasses. ‘Thank you very much.’
The priest kindly makes a dismissive hand-waving gesture. With a final hesitant look between Akira and Akechi, the priest brushes past the both of them to head towards the entrance.
Akira turns to Akechi. Akechi barely has time to protest before he finds himself pushed into the left confessional booth, the door closing on him with a firm click. The action would’ve plunged him into complete darkness if not for the moonlight filtering through the church’s stained glass window, streaming silvery-blue light over his lap via a small square of glass cut into the wooden wall on his right. Faintly, Akechi can make out the sound of the confessional door on the other side opening, the rustle of somebody settling in.
‘Akira.’ Akechi lets the irritation creep into his voice. ‘You have ten seconds to explain what it is you’re planning, or I’m going to get up and leave this pla—’
‘I’m going to talk,’ Akira says. Akechi falls silent. ‘I’m going to talk, and I’m going to say things I have never told anyone before, and you can either choose to listen to me or you can leave the booth. The choice is up to you.’
Fury is venomous and bitter at the back of Akechi’s throat. ‘You all but shoved me in here,’ he snarls. ‘What do you expect me to do, be your therapist?’ Look at how well that turned out the last time , Akechi almost says but bites back.
‘The door is unlocked.’
Akechi tests the handle; indeed it is. The door can only be locked from the inside, though, so that’s kind of a moot point. ‘If you really wanted to give me a choice, you would’ve told me what you were doing while we were outside in the first place.’
‘Goro.’ Akira sounds so tired. ‘I can’t– This isn’t– Please.’
That pleading tone of voice again. Somehow every ugly writhing emotion in Akechi dies at the sound of it. Pressing his lips together, Akechi sits back in his seat, keeping silent as a prompt for Akira to continue. At the very least—if it comes down to it, he can always leave.
There’s a brief pause from the other side of the wall, before Akira starts talking.
‘I think it was really shitty of you to not tell me the truth, first of all,’ he says.
Akechi can’t help the scoff that comes out of his mouth at that; it’s instinctive, the way he feels the need to rise to Akira’s level at every turn. ‘Are we going to have this discussion again?’ He asks. ‘I told you: it was a trivial matter. It wasn’t worth getting you distracted over, not when we had Maruki to defeat and your friends plus Yoshizawa to save.’
‘Maybe. But you didn’t have the right to decide that for me.’ Akira’s voice is low.
Akechi clenches and unclenches his jaw. Considers, for a very real moment, the possibility of kicking the door open and leaving Akira alone in the booth to confess the grievances that he’s already gone through with Akechi once before, even if Akechi might’ve deserved the hit Akira just swung at him. ‘It’s my fucking life. Excuse me if I didn’t think it necessary to report every detail of my existence to you.’
‘Goro.’ Akira sounds audibly frustrated. ‘I had to hear about the fact that you’re dead from Maruki. Does it not—’ Akira’s voice breaks off as he struggles for words, ‘—does it not register to you how fucked up that is? We’re friends, Goro. ...I thought you would at least trust me a little, after everything.’
The laugh Akechi lets out on accident is sardonic and mean. ‘What? You must be kidding.’
‘What part of this makes you think I am?’
That answer sobers Akechi up. He glares incredulously at the wooden wall beside him, imagining he could make Akira feel the weight of his disbelief through it from sheer willpower alone. ‘Akira. The fact that you can think to trust me at all, after everything, is insanity.’
Akira is quiet, for a moment. ‘I know,’ he says at last. ‘But I still do.’
The wall separating Akechi from Akira suddenly feels like too much and too little distance, all at once. The world narrows into the little confession booth, Akira on one side, Akechi on the other, the space between the two of them seeming to swell and shrink dizzyingly within the same motion. Akechi reaches up almost unconsciously to touch the wall next to him, leather rubbing against smooth wood where his fingertips curl into themselves; in the next moment, Akechi is snatching his hand back as though he’d been burned.
Akechi swallows, cradling his left hand with his right. ‘Then you’re insane.’ His voice is hoarse.
There’s a sound like a huff of air. Laughter. Akira Kurusu is laughing. ‘Maybe. I don’t think so.’ He pauses. ‘Do you believe me?’
Akechi wants to say no. Might’ve believed it too, if this had been November and Akira had said this while staring down the barrel end of a gun. A last-ditch attempt to plead for his life, Akechi would’ve reasoned. Absurd fondness based on memories made with a Detective Prince that hadn’t been real. But it’s February and Akechi has been brought back to life because Akira wished for it hard enough, and the fact that he’s been brought back the way he is now, instead of some vapid-eyed version of his detective persona, means—
Well. It means something.
Akechi’s voice is quiet when he says, ‘I believe that it counts for something.’
And the smile is audible in Akira’s voice when he says, ‘good.’
There follows a long silence. Akechi breathes in deep, and leans back to thunk his head against the wall. On the other side, he imagines Akira doing much the same, the two of them twin mirrors of each other. In the dark of the confessional booth, things feel a little more removed, a little less real—like this, Akira feels almost like a faceless entity, someone Akechi can confide in without worry about the repercussions.
Akechi squashes that urge within himself as quickly as it comes. There’s no use dwelling on futile things, he reminds himself. He’ll be dead this time tomorrow.
‘Goro.’
‘Hm?’ Akechi says. His eyes are closed.
‘There’s also something else I want to say.’
‘What.’
‘I love you.’
Akechi snaps his eyes open and sits bolt upright. Frantically, he jerks his head to the side, intent on looking Akira in the eyes and demanding what the hell is going on—only to be met with the view of the wall next to him. ‘What?’
Akira patiently repeats it again. As if Akechi didn’t hear him perfectly the first time round. Akechi stares, dumbfounded, for a few seconds—before he begins to feel that familiar rage work its way through his veins.
‘Are you fucking stupid?’ He asks through gritted teeth.
A pause. ‘Not exactly the reaction I was expecting,’ Akira says.
Akechi looks down at his hands, concentrates on the way the moonlight stripes blueish over the black leather of his gloves. He thinks he might want to hit something. ‘You don’t love me,’ Akechi says, precisely.
‘Don’t tell me how I feel.’ Akira’s defensive now. Hurt, even. The distance between them that had begun to feel like a comfort, like nothing at all, might as well now be miles and miles and miles.
An ugly sound rips its way out of Akechi’s throat. ‘Then what I’m supposed to do? Believe you? Believe that you love your murderer, the person who put a gun to your head and pulled the trigger?’
‘You didn’t murder me.’
‘Don’t argue technicalities with me, Akira. The point is that I planned to, and I followed through. The fact that it was your fucking cognition that took the blow doesn’t change the intent.’
‘...It changes how I received it, though.’ Akira says.
Akechi could scream. He scrapes his hands uselessly at the walls, as though he could scratch his way through to Akira, grab him by the shoulders and shake him to make him see sense. ‘Is this some sort of ploy?’ Akechi asks, instead. ‘If this is your form of pity, some twisted idea of giving me a final send-off before I disappear tomorrow, save your breath. I don’t want your scraps.’
‘Fuck you.’ Akira sounds genuinely angry now. ‘I’m sitting here laying my heart at your feet, the very least you could do is take it seriously instead of demeaning it like that.’ When Akechi doesn’t say anything to that, he adds, ‘I mean what I said, Goro. I lov—’
‘Don’t say it again!’ Akechi shouts, and slams a fist against the wall.
The silence that follows this is deafening. Breathing hard and leaning his head against the wall, Akechi tries to get a grip on his bearings. Belatedly, he notices that he’s shaking. That’s strange. He’s usually so much better than this.
He could leave. Akira said he could. He should. The door is right there, the exit within reach. You’ll always have a choice. He isn’t one to care for useless sentimentality. But it’s a cold February night, the last night of his life, and at least with the wooden confessional booth wall between the two of them Akechi won’t have to look Akira—selfless, unbearable Akira—in the eyes when he says things like that out loud.
‘Goro?’ There’s a tentative tapping sound, right above where Akechi’s hand, still loosely curled into a fist, is. A thud, like Akira had thumped his head forward onto the wood, sounds after. Akechi shuts his eyes.
From behind closed eyelids, Akira sounds painfully closer when he says, earnestly, ‘I’m not looking for an answer, telling you this. I just wanted you to know.’
‘What use does that do?’ Akechi asks. ‘Are you looking to change my mind? Is that what this is? If that’s the case, I’m sorry to tell you, but no amount of love could convince me to stay in this reality where I’m just a puppet.’
Akechi can hear Akira’s sharp intake of breath. ‘...That’s not what this is, I promise,’ Akira says. ‘I know where you stand on this matter. It’s—’ Another deep breath. ‘It’s where I stand too.’
Akechi opens his eyes, and tilts his head up so that his forehead is resting against the cool wood. ‘Good,’ he says.
For a moment Akechi simply listens to the sound of Akira breathing. The faint sound of the scratch of nails against wood, like nails on a coffin, the rustle and shuffling of fabric on the other end. Akechi tilts his head to the side, watches himself flex his fingers and hears the leather of his own gloves creak when he does so. So much for dying without regrets, Akechi thinks. So much for cruelty.
‘Why did you choose to tell me now?’ Akechi asks, at last, when Akira doesn’t say anything. His voice is taut, angry. Vulnerable. He’s slid more than halfway off his seat, by this point; Akechi sinks to his knees onto the floor instead, uncurls his hand to press it palm-side up onto the wood. Imagines Akira doing the same, on the other side, the wall between the two of them impossible to breach. ‘Why didn’t you say all of this earlier, or never said anything at all?’
Akira laughs.
‘I was always planning on telling you eventually,’ he says. ‘Maybe that’s selfish of me. But I thought I could tell you after everything was finally over. When there were no more gods, no fate or higher power or bigger forces in our way, telling us what to do.
‘I don’t know,’ Akira says. And he sounds at a loss, young and hurt and ordinary, ‘I thought I had all the time left in the world to say it.’
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