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He’s nothing. A small-minded boy from a small-minded town who came here and happened to get lucky. Happened to stumble into your world and somehow make enough people believe in him that he could get this far.
He’s ruined everything.
(He’s everything.)
If you die for someone, do you have to tell them that you love them?
After you take your last breath, you wake up gasping in the grass by the Diet Building. Snow is falling from the sky and frost is starting to form beneath you. You stand, shivering.
You don’t know how it is you survived, but you have to find him.
He’s not far. He’s talking to Sae, and you realize you know why he’s there, all of his friends gone. She’s going to ask him to help her close this case. It’s always him—running first, reckless, into every trap you’ve laid, every mess you’ve made. And somehow always—he comes out of it with that smirk on his face.
This time you step in.
You brush off his shock that you’ve survived, because the look on his face—you don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve for him to be glad you’re alive. He’s your rival, your nemesis—you would’ve killed him if you could have.
(Would you? Could you have? You saved him. He never stopped trying to take you back.)
They let you go on New Year’s Day, your crimes wiped away like a chalkboard erased.
It doesn’t take long to become obvious why.
There’s no visible distortion in the world you’ve woken up to, but to you, it feels so wrong it’s paper-thin. You’ve learned through years of cruelty and disregard to see through veneers of kindness, of happiness to the intentions and the miseries of human beings. You’ve seen their hearts. You’ve held their inner selves at point-blank range and fired.
You know what the truth looks like. It’s not this.
A Palace, maybe, like Sae’s, almost a perfect reflection of reality—but you’ve never seen one like this, one that stretches on across along every train line, one with no weaknesses.
One where everything works out and everyone on the streets, in the news, everywhere you go is happy.
You want to know what this means before you see him again. You want to have some kind of plan.
But there’s no Shido now, no endgame to work towards. You never wrote the story past this point. And you’re so tired.
You might as well get coffee, you think as your body takes you to that place, his place, and then—
The cat is a person. Wakaba Isshiki is alive.
And he’s the only other person who knows.
You’re surprised there’s a place for you at all in a world like this. Sure, there are others it brought back. (It’s not just your victims. You looked into that.) But they all returned to facilitate someone’s joy, or to take away their pain. But you—you’ve always been alone. Who would even care if you were gone—
You used to wonder, as you watched him from a distance, which girl was his girl. You would’ve chosen Haru: the money, the power. And she barely has a spine without him—it would’ve been so easy to grasp. But Makoto would’ve been more fun, more of a challenge. Her subtle mind and her ambitions—the closest you can imagine to enjoying the experience. But that’s not the way he thinks and you know it. Ann, then, soft-hearted like he is—and classically gorgeous, the most obvious catch. But then he’s never been as obvious as you thought he would be. And almost everything he’s done, he’s done for someone else. So would it be Kasumi—or really Sumire—who always wanted him the most? Or Futaba, who he saved, who needs him? The options spin in your head, and you know that’s not exactly the extent: there were others he helped, others who helped him.
And then you meet him to talk in his dusty attic bedroom and in pride of place on his shelf is a fake bowl of ramen next to a large can of chocolate protein powder, of all things. Before you sit down to talk you scrutinize this, send him an evaluating look. He’s quiet, as usual, until you push him. “What’s so important about this?”
“Ryuji gave it to me.”
You snort. “You let that idiot decorate your room?”
Akira never looks condescending, exactly, even when he speaks so flatly you know he thinks you’ve lost it. He just stares. (You hate it. It’s perfect.) “They were gifts.”
You realize, again, that you’re circling around the part of him you’ll never understand. The reason why he always beats you.
It’s not like him to keep speaking without a prompt, but you must go quiet for too long. “He was my first friend here,” he adds, a little more insistent. “And…”
And then he stops elaborating, but there’s a flush to his cheeks, and he turns to look at his desk.
And you think: if things had been different, but maybe not by the miles you thought. Maybe by inches.
If you had met him first.
You know you’re dead, so you must be an echo. Some kind of cognitive composite. Maybe that’s why you can’t hate him: because part of you is tied up in his memory. (Or maybe you never did.)
You think you are yourself, but the edges are hazy. Is it the facade you’ve shed or the fact that you don’t actually exist?
(The cognition of someone other than the Palace ruler is not that person. It doesn’t matter if you hurt them. You learned this by accident, you remember, you didn’t mean to—)
A bruise is still a bruise. And you can still bleed. You feel pain, and you can reason, you remember, and you dream—
—in your dreams you see him but it’s a blur, an image underwater, of a man imprisoned in a cell in a vast blue room.
You’ve watched it before, the way he can shift between Personas like he’s trying on different jackets. None of them seem an exact fit, but he still looks good doing it, still can take down most enemies harder, faster than you can.
Faster than he used to. He beat Shido, while you were gone. He tells you he took down a god, the one that put both of you up to all of this.
You try not to scream while you guide him, urge him on.
For the first time, you hear him negotiate with a Shadow. You saw this from afar before, but—when you worked with him, he never stopped to do this. (He never let you all the way in.) This boy, this random attic-dwelling no one from nowhere who set off a bomb in the middle of your life, has become so silver-tongued that he can convince even the monsters from the aether of people’s minds to fight on his side. (He convinced you, after all.) He knows just what to say to relate to any of them.
(The way he knew just what to say to every one of his teammates—a bandage here, a grim smile there, a pat on the back. The way he convinced all of them, bruised and bloodied and exhausted, to carry on just one floor further, for just an hour more, so he could take down those Palaces before anyone else in the real world got hurt.)
He learned this, you know, because he listens. You watched his team, you learned their weaknesses, but for him—it was always hard to tell why, what made him special or different. But you get it now—how much strength was in so much of his silence. Because he hears everything. And it gives him all of the information he needs to act. To lead them.
You navigate for him, give him tips, remind him what needs to be done—and he just looks back at you with that damn smirk, pulls up his gloves, and…does it. But you get the sense that maybe he didn’t need to hear it from you first.
He just knows you need to say it, and that’s so much worse.
He invites you to the jazz club, and it feels—circular.
“The last time I tried to spend time with you, you tried to kill me,” he says casually, unaffected. He slides you a drink across the table.
“Well, then, you were an idiot,” you counter, sitting down.
He smirks. “I knew what you were up to. And I won that fight. And the one after.”
“My, my, aren’t you cocky tonight.” Your voice is a knife in a silk sheath. You can’t help it—you want so badly to hate him.
He shrugs. “I had help getting as good as I have. And I had help figuring you out.”
You sip your drink, but it sours in your mouth. Modest doesn’t suit him. “So you’ve ‘figured me out’ now?”
“No.” And now his gaze feels like a stab wound. “But now we can help each other.”
“What makes you think I need—”
“Akechi?”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
You glare murderously at this, ready a response, but—
—he pulls a glove out of his pocket. Your glove. He drops it on the table.
“You helped us. You’re helping me now. So I’ve got your back from now on.”
You crumple the glove in your fist. He can’t. You won’t let him. No one ever has—
But he just rolls his eyes at the obvious turmoil that must cross your face. “Just shut up. The band’s starting.”
The band starts, and you shut up, and he turns towards the singer. His shoulders relax. He likes this place—your place.
When the set breaks, you slide the glove back towards him, say quietly, “It’s not over yet.”
And he just smirks that annoying smirk of his, pockets it again. “I’ll think of it as a gift.”
You think of it later that night, alone. Your glove on that shelf. Or maybe something else—a real gift. Not some frivolous trinket to remember you by, but to remember this.
A record player, maybe, and something to listen to, something calm and warm that’d fill the cold, dusty corners of his room. Something—
—nothing like you.
His team comes back and you feel yourself shuffled out, more often than not. The worst part of it? You don’t even blame him: it’s smart. He uses the tools that are best for the situation, and you have to admit, the stupid blond musclehead always at his side is almost universally effective. (He hits like a truck: you know from begrudging experience.) Futaba navigates, shouting encouragement, and Makoto advises, and he tells everyone where and how to hit. And you know this, you remember being among them before, but now you are yourself, and the practiced dance is not something to dissect.
It simply is. And you’re not really a part of it. (You exchange a look from the sidelines with Sumire. You know she must also sense it. And yet—when she steps in—she’s nothing but eager to prove herself to him. Her senpai. So it doesn’t matter that this is all around her and—)
(—and you’ve always been alone. Who would even care if you were gone—)
But when the enemies ahead glow with a divine light, he urges you behind the others—
I’ve got your back from now on
—and you go. You take orders.
You know why you came back.
He talks to Maruki, and he doesn’t know the stakes. How could he? He doesn’t know that you died. (How could he not know? You died. He heard the shot, the silence.) You told him you didn’t.
(“Your signal was gone,” Futaba corners you with this on the train tracks in Mementos, for the umpteenth time, while he’s negotiating with a strange child with what looks like a cracked egg on his head. “How did you—”
“I didn’t,” you finally relent.
Her eyes shoot to Akira immediately. “Does he—”
“No.”
“So then I’ll—”
“Don’t.”
“You killed my mom,” she says, matter of fact. You’re surprised that this is the first time she’s brought it up.
So you hum softly. “I did.”
She gives you a long, evaluating look. “He thinks you could’ve been good. That’s why you’re here. So I won’t tell him.”
It’s a line of reasoning you can’t follow. “Why?”
“Because you should. And because Akira’s usually right.”)
You didn’t, so it takes until Maruki holds it over his head. His eyebrows raise, and he asks you about it.
All of this and he hasn’t realized: there was only ever one person who ever wanted you here. Only one person who could’ve possibly been happy that you continue to exist.
And you can’t let him live like this.
He does what you ask. And they follow. Of course they do.
If a bumbling psychologist can create a whole other world with the force of his consciousness, then there must be other realities. Better ones. And in one of them, you’re the one who runs in to back him up. You’re the one who met him first.
He’s not in the helicopter when you mutter to yourself, “I’m sorry.”
Why couldn’t you just accept my reality?
—he grins, pouring your coffee, and your hands touch as you take the cup;
—you’re playing a game of shogi in his attic and he cocks an eyebrow, laughs;
—he tells you it’s not too late, over and over and over again;
If you die for someone, do you have to tell them that you love them?