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i.
The cards are spread before you, each one of them aglow. Reflected in your eyes is that familiar blue, the blue of crushed velvet and the blue of an ocean both vast and bottomless.
You are adrift, but by choice. You are adrift, and it is power.
This world is a starving one, eager to glibly cut the meat from your bones and deliver it to the eager masses, part and parcel.
They mean well but they are hungry. They mean well but they are wolves, driven by their instincts.
There is no blame in you. Animals aren't capable of being more than exactly what they are.
ii.
When they bay at your door for the blood of your kindness, you let them in.
They might be wolves but you are a hunter, armed to the teeth with a smile.
iii.
All it takes is a bashful kind of look to disarm them, full of encouragement. All it takes is the careful disassociation between you and Yu, all twenty three of them. A few insinuations and they fill in the blanks themselves, a feedback loop built off your desire to collect their puppet strings, to loop them tight around your fingers, laying dormant.
Until you need them.
On this well-meaning path to their redemption, they are eager to exsanguinate you. To take and take until there's nothing left of you and Yu. The expectation is set: give up all of your compassion until the well of it runs dry.
If only they'd known: your well was empty from start. Their ledger runs red and you will be paid.
All in good time.
You are patient, after all.
iv.
They're not masks, though, is the thing. Masks would mean covering up the core of yourself and painting on something new, a doll's face for a show if all the world's a stage.
That isn't what you do, though. That isn't the empire you built. Every one of them gets a piece like they wanted, dissembling the pieces of a modular home. Marie gets the heart and Yosuke your arms, Kanji your hands, Adachi your teeth. All of you is stripped away by what they want, so what's left?
v.
(In both worlds, power thrums in your veins, awakened and crackling. You reach into it and can't find the bottom. You look into the abyss and it's already looking back into you, wide-eyed and waiting.)
vi.
It's not as if you control what they do, that would be boring: the pieces would become inconsequential. It means so much more that the creatures have herded themselves into pens through nothing but their own free will and a little bit of nudging. They act and inquire, hungry for your every word, eager to know your opinions and thoughts and artificial dreams.
The threads tied around your fingers sometimes pull as they divert from the course, but you let them. Reeling them in smarter, not stronger, is the key.
They think their trajectory is one borne of their own designs and desires, and it couldn't be anything further from the truth. But they think it. Close enough.
vii.
Twenty three links forged, but one of them is different. They're cataloged in the rolodex of your mind but something sits off, a book out of line on the shelf, color bleeding out from the lines. Just a little. Just enough for you to tell, and down the rabbit hole you go, the nothing in you swelling to life in search of another like you.
Twenty two malleable hearts and one doesn't budge. His eyes are just like yours: shining but empty. His words are just like yours: kindness but calculated, but he gets an A for presentation. Inside your head, the wheels begin to turn and his card glitters brighter.
The Jester, huh? You want to peel back the skin and flay, to pull apart his lungs to see if there's just a gap there like you've got.
(Behind the card, in the corner of your eye too swiftly moving to catch, it turns into something much more familiar.)
viii.
Weeks pass and within their span he notices you noticing him. Despite the bashful ducks of his head and the too-easy grins, Adachi watches you with a quiet intensity that even Dojima notices. From upstairs, you can hear the quiet discussions: suspicion, keep an eye on, Junes.
The both of you know that's not why he's looking. Compassion isn't the well Adachi is seeking to tap, and that's just fine.
What do you call a game of cat and mouse when the victim thinks that they're the perpetrator of the crime?
ix.
I was wondering, you know, he says, throwing that lazy, lidded-eye look your way over the last cup of sake. He's sprawled on Dojima's couch like a cat in the sun despite the moon outside, as if he owns it. As if he's entitled to. When you were going to catch on.
You drift closer but his card doesn't flip. You lean over him and calloused fingers slide up the curvature of your wrist, caressing it as if it were a blade. There's plenty of time, you think, as the wolf sinks his teeth into the pliant skin of your neck. Adachi lingers around the edges of the right (wrong) side of vicious, the kind that's kept muzzled in polite company, even now.
You can fix that.
x.
Your fingers curl into his hair and pull him up up up. Slip the tie from his neck and discard it. Slip the belt from his waist and use it, looping it around your neck and handing him the reins.
It's a noose he'll use in any way but the divine, too cowardly to use it in the only way that'd save his skin from damnation.
The scales tip in your favor even as your vision whites.
xi.
You learn the writing of his skin and the song of his bones, but nothing will change the fact that zero multiplied by zero is, and always will be, zero. He pushes the line further and further with you, half to see if you have any and half to reassure himself that he doesn't. Red paints your skin and trickles down his chin, sticky and reviled. You navigate the space between your body and his without obligations: there is no possession, just a professional curiosity.
Together you and Adachi are an ouroboros, two of a kind and starving.
No wonder he doesn't see it coming.
xii.
When the letter comes, it's no surprise at all. The sloppiness means the distraction has been working, and isn't that a shame.
You burn it and he thinks he's won, but he's always been nearsighted, hasn't he? Given a power almost too immense to behold and he uses it on something as petty as an orchestrated game of death, for popcorn entertainment instead of something worthwhile.
Where Adachi looks for the easiest answers, you look to the heavens and all of what it holds.
xiii.
Upon the zenith of his defeat, when he looks the most defeated and ruined, you find yourself the most fond. Cradling his face in your hands, you press one last empty kiss to his upturned face, wearing the first true smile on your face in a year's time.
xiv.
Izanami is, admittedly, the greatest surprise of them all.
Before you is something primordial and divine, immense and rotting and wonderful. Your heart pounds in time to the rattling of her carpal bones. This was never planned but the rest of it is, your emergency measures going into effect. You don't even have to pull on the strings and your links fall into line as needed, each one of them disappearing in lieu of you. And when it's your turn, the rest take their turns feeding back into you, twofold from what you invested.
It means you are reborn. It means you contain more than the sum of gifted parts; Izanagi-no-Okami materializes and is shaped anew, raising his weapon as you unobscure your eyes.
She screams and it means nothing.This is what you had divided yourself up for, when you had first dipped your toes into that expansive sea of potential and realized what it was. The power of the gods at your fingertips, now powered by bonds unbreakable. The proof of it rings true in her defeat, setting both you and Inaba free.
xv.
On the train, you read, eyes scanning over the pages without truly understanding. Your mind is elsewhere, in a strange, shadow-filled world no longer full of fog. The power is yours to keep, irrevocable. Turning the page, you smile again, making nonsensical notes in the margin with your red pen, looking to anyone else like your average high school student.
Adachi had been so short-sighted, content with ruining his toys rather than allowing them to flourish in ways that would benefit him.
You will make no such mistake.