Chapter Text
17 NOV | FRI | EVENING
“This must be some kind of mistake. No, no—listen to me. Yes, I’m en route as we speak. What I don’t understand is why I wasn’t notified. I am his lawyer. Yes, I am his lawyer. My name should have come up on the paperwork when they ran his prints.”
It’s raining.
“You’re not understanding me. What are you saying? His parents have no say in this, he was eighteen three months ago. Listen to me. He is my client and no one is to see him until I’ve arrived on site. Yes, I’m—how far is it?—I’m fifteen minutes out.”
Faster. I need to get there faster.
“...Tch. Of course he isn’t cooperating with you, my client has experience being unjustly accused. He knows better than to speak to detectives. I want the visitation logs the moment I enter the building. Do you understand? I’ll be giving them hell for this one.”
She hangs up.
It is the same police station.
Breathe, Sae. Breathe. He needs you to be calm. He needs your support. He needs to know you have this under control. That this isn’t another game of mastermind. That it isn’t his responsibility to pull all of the strings.
The taxi pulls to the curb and she extends her umbrella first, stepping out onto the pavement, collecting her briefcase, and quickly crossing the plaza to enter the building.
What is their agenda? Who are they? Why him?
“What the hell are these charges? Complicit in underground dealings? Resisting arrest? Bullshit.” So much for staying calm. “You have six different men on eight occasions all harassing my client? I want all of their profiles printed out and in my hand now. No one is to speak to him without my say-so.”
The authority she had once carried in this building shines through. Office workers swirl to serve at her beck and call—it sickens her to think that it hasn’t been all that long since she treated them like greedy insects, below her. It hasn’t been that long since her change of heart.
Only a year.
Her name is on his paperwork. The clerk that passes her the packet fails to remove the sticky note that reads in bold Sharpie: Do not call Niijima Sae until our allotted time is up.
It has been forty-eight hours since his arrest.
She receives a coffee that tastes like moldy cardboard.
It is 11:23 p.m., Friday, 17 November, 2017.
Kurusu Akira was arrested at 10:52 p.m., Wednesday, 15 November, 2017, on the streets in Shibuya, on alleged suspicion of criminal misconduct. Kurusu-kun appeared to be alone. Kurusu-kun has neglected to respond to all attempts at negotiation or interrogation. Kurusu-kun does not respond to small talk. All attempts to build rapport have been met with silence, though Kurusu-kun is non-combative and does not appear to display contempt. Note: Kurusu-kun has refused meals and coffee. He appears to accept bottled water.
The charges are fraudulent, and lazy. It won’t take even an hour to clear them. The notes go into no further detail on the matter—Sae opens her notebook and writes down every name on the report, every charge, and she photocopies each document before returning the originals. She takes the sticky note. She deposits everything into an empty manila folder and asks to be escorted to the holding cell where her client is being kept.
Niijima Sae approaches a solid door, takes a deep breath, and knocks before stepping in.
It’s almost too much.
He’s pale. Pallid. He is not in a school uniform. There is an unopened water bottle beside him. Both of his wrists and his right cheek are a matching angry purple. His glasses are intact; she can’t see his eyes through the lenses, but she knows he is not looking at her. She knows how it feels when his eyes land on her, and she knows, perhaps she is the only one who knows, how he looks when he is not present.
Sae finds herself scanning the floor. Nothing. She examines his hands. Unblemished, except for the chafing from the cuffs, and it seems the only bruise on his face is from laying him over the hood of a car, or onto concrete pavement. Still it is too cruel, but she can’t help uttering a voiceless Thank god.
She knows already he has not moved.
They gave him one water bottle, and each assumed that someone else has been replacing it.
She knows he isn’t okay.
“Kurusu-kun,” she begins, securing the door shut behind her and stepping into the room. She picks up the steel chair on the opposite side of the table and rotates it to sit adjacent to him, instead. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear about any of this until—thirty minutes ago. Are you alright?”
No response. He doesn’t even turn his head.
Sae takes a slow breath in, and releases it just so. She reaches for the bottle of water—there is a nearly imperceptible twitch. A flinch. An intake of breath. Fear. She stops, her hand hovering in the air halfway to the bottle.
Will he react? Will he lash out? Is it safe? Does that even matter?
She slowly, gingerly, takes the bottle in hand to open the cap.
She sets her fingertips on the back of his hand and only then does she realize how badly he’s shaking. How afraid he is.
He’s just a boy. He’s only ever been—just a boy. How could they see him as anything else? How can they stand to do this to him?
“I need you to drink this, alright?” It takes guiding his hand to the bottle before he seems to acknowledge the cue. “Have your parents called you? ...no, I’m sorry. You can’t answer right now, can you?”
Makoto has spoken about him relentlessly. For a time she had even harbored affections for him—briefly, though the details are fuzzy—she admires and respects him, yes. She swears by his resolute strength. By his skilled leadership, by his ability to weave every aspect of their plans together flawlessly, to maintain control even in the most bleak of scenarios.
When Sae asked after him, sometime during the Thieves’ infiltration of Shido Masayoshi’s Palace, Makoto had reflected that he rarely speaks.
It hadn’t come as a surprise back then. Despite the long interrogation where much of the silence was filled by his testimony, even sedated he maintained a clear and succinct narrative—Sae recalls thinking that despite the drugs, despite the way he shook, despite that his eyes were dull and unfocused, she had felt the weight of his presence. As though the very sky blanketed itself upon the room, holding its breath, waiting for him to rise and take it back upon his shoulders.
He is so scared.
Sae remembers comforting Makoto when their father passed away. She remembers cradling Makoto in her lap, or sitting in her bedroom waiting for her to fall asleep. Nurturing her through her grief at how unfair it all was. She remembers how terrifying it was, to have to take on the whole world in order to protect her sister. That she had never permitted herself to feel it, all for the sake of maintaining a strong front, a shield for Makoto.
A long breath in. She digs into herself (he is so good at that, isn’t he?, at forcing one to confront the deepest parts of themselves, everything they think they have long burned or boxed away?), she digs until she finds all of her hurt and her petrified love, her trepidation and her determination to cover and protect and mend the wounded.
It isn’t so hard to find—he has already helped her find it once before, when he succumbed at last to his exhaustion, to his injuries, to the sedatives addling his mind, when he slumped against her before they even made it out of the building, this building, dammit, and she found herself overcome with the urgent desperation to get him to safety. To push his hair back from his clammy forehead. To promise him everything would be okay, even when she didn’t have a damn clue whether they’d make it out alive.
Sae exhales.
“Akira,” she prompts him, her tone lilting into that sweet maternal concern she had met him with during their escape, in the taxi, dragging him into LeBlanc, heaving him from the floorboards and up the stairs into the attic. “You have your phone, don’t you? May I see your phone? You keep it in your right pocket, don’t you?”
Is he even here? Where is he? It’s November. Is he back in that room? Where is he?
“I need to text Futaba-kun, right? That was part of the plan?”
...
A faint, absent nod, more like a tremor than anything else. It’s hardly anything. It’s nothing at all, really, to anyone other than her—but to her it is a response, however slight, and he reaches into his pocket to present her with his phone.
“Thank you,” Sae whispers. Thank god. “I’m going to step out of the room now, Akira. I’ll text Futaba-kun. You’re safe. We’ll leave together, alright?”
Another nod. He still hasn’t looked at her. He’s still shaking. She’s begun to shake, too, though not from fear—anger, it has always been anger. She does not know yet the direction it points in, only that she is angry, she has never been so angry on behalf of anyone else.
Last year there was no room for anger—only urgency, the realization that if she did not step in to save him then he was going to be killed. The realization that despite everything, she was his backup plan, his failsafe. He was forced to trust her, like it or not, and damn it all to hell she was not going to be yet another name on the long list of adults who let him down.
“Please keep drinking from that bottle of water while I’m gone, alright? I’ll take you home to LeBlanc. We’ll ask Sakura-san to make some curry, get something in your stomach.”
Hope that helps you feel better. Hope that brings you back. You would hate for the others to see you like this, wouldn’t you? Their proud, unerring leader... Isn’t that too much to put on his shoulders? Makoto, what do I do? What have we done? What is this terrible duty you’ve burdened him with?
Sae exits the room and positions herself in front of the door, stationary, unyielding, and her glare burns holes in anyone daring to walk by. She has a right to be furious, they must be thinking, that she was kept in the dark over her client’s arrest. They cannot know how much this boy means to her; they cannot know that he is the reason for everything, he is the reason she has a life.
I will not let them steal that from you. I will not let them ruin you. I will do everything—everything—to protect you.
His phone is off, and dead. There is an outlet panel in the floor—Sae pulls her charger from her briefcase and plants herself in a chair directly in front of the door, turning the phone on, waiting for it to catch up.
Dozens of messages come in all at once. The pure red interface strains her eyes horrendously even in the harsh fluorescent light overhead—it suits him though, doesn’t it?—hundreds of missed calls, too. No voicemails.
Before Sae can scroll through his contacts to look for Sojiro, the phone begins to ring.
Futaba, reads the caller ID.
Sae picks up.
“Holy shit! Akira! Are you okay? Everyone’s worried sick about you, it’s been days, Mona said you never met back up with him, you haven’t been picking up your calls so I set a program to automatically call you every minute, I just thought maybe then it could, could catch you the moment you turned your phone back on—where are you? Are you okay? What’s going on?”
She sounds on the verge of tears.
“Futaba-kun?” Sae answers, resting her free hand over her chest, reminding herself to breathe. Reminding herself that she needs to be strong—these are children—someone needs to take care of them. “This is Niijima Sae.”
“...What’s going on?”
Frigid, instantly. That scrunched-up, scrawny, anxious little girl—how she’s grown, how incredible she’s become. Is that because of him, too?
“You have his phone bugged, don’t you? You’re tracing it as we speak.” The silence says enough. “I’m at the police station. They arrested him on false charges, two days ago. I just got the call less than an hour ago. I’m getting him out. I’m taking him home. Will you trust me with him, Futaba-kun, just one more time?”
“...”
Furious typing over the receiver, a loudly clacking mechanical keyboard, the muffled sound of heavy and forcibly controlled breaths, and muttering, and meowing (“I know,” Sae barely catches, “I know she did, but ... casino ... decoy plan ... exactly a year?”, and she squeezes her eyes shut, harnesses enough control to keep her heart from breaking).
“Do what you have to do,” Futaba answers softly. “Akira trusted you to save his life, so I’ll trust you to get him home. I’ll reach out to everyone. Dad and Morgana and I will meet you at LeBlanc. Got it? LeBlanc. Nowhere else.”
“Thank you. Give me an hour,” Sae promises. “I’ll get him out of here. Futaba-kun, one more thing—...” A long pause. She shakes her head. “Never mind. I’ll explain everything when we get there.”
“Sure. ... See ya.”
Futaba hangs up before Sae even lifts the phone from her ear. Brushing at her face furiously, Sae collects herself, reapplies her lipstick, fixes her bangs, and then reopens Akira’s contacts list to look for his parents’ numbers. Nothing under o-... but is that any surprise?—there, under ‘kaasan,’ probably better to call his mother than his father, right? Sae taps the call bubble and waits.
“...Hello? Akira? It’s late, dear... Have they released you yet?”
“I’m sorry to have woken you this late.” Sae speaks coldly, bordering on impolite—no mother should be peacefully sleeping while her son is in police custody—she knew? She knew, and she didn’t call anyone? She didn’t even visit him? “My name is Niijima Sae. I’m your son’s lawyer.”
“Oh, right, you’re that prosecutor...” An audible yawn. “The one who called Akira as a witness last year, right? In that case you built against Shido Masayoshi? I remember you.”
“Correct. I now practice as a defense attorney. Your son is one of my clients. Kurusu-san, when were you made aware of Akira-kun’s arrest?” Sae crosses her legs, opens her laptop, and busies herself filing a dispute against each charge.
“Hmm, yesterday morning?”
“May I ask why you didn’t think to notify me,” she presses, “nor to reach out to Sakura Sojiro, nor to come visit him?”
“Well, I didn’t know he had a lawyer. He’s been off probation since March, still would be if he’d stayed out of trouble—Sakura-san has my utmost appreciation and respect for looking after my son last year, but tell me, why should I involve him in a private family matter?” Sae clenches a fist. “Akira is an adult now. He’s capable of taking care of himself. I thought if he needed anything he would call. Besides...”
The woman trails off. Sae presses: “Besides, what?”
There is a crackle, light laughter through the receiver—laughter! “This is, what, the third time he’s been arrested? Innocent or not, that boy has caused quite the stir in our home lives. We can’t go anywhere in town without people looking at us like we’ve raised a murderer.”
That boy is your son, she wants to say. That boy has it so much worse than you do, forced to hold his head high and walk no matter how the world looks at him. No matter that everyone he’s ever met mistakes him for a criminal, all due to the sins of another. That boy is your son, and each time he has needed you, you’ve let him down.
“I see,” is all she says, instead.
“Then, you’re having him acquitted, right? You’ll send him home?”
Sae grits her teeth. “The charges are fraudulent, Kurusu-san. Akira-kun is innocent. There is no need for a trial. I’ll ensure he is released tonight.”
“Tonight? The trains stop running at midnight, Niijima-san was it?, I hope he has enough for a taxi.”
Hopeless. “Get some rest, Kurusu-san. I’ll have him call you the moment we get a chance.” Like hell I will. “Goodnight.”
Sae hangs up without waiting for a response.
It’s disgusting. It fills her with that same sickening rage that has always run alongside her envy, this time tinged with an unfamiliar selfless fury that leaves a bitter aftertaste in the back of her throat.
Akira is not so different from her.
She knows this for a number of reasons. The first and most obvious of which being that he has earned Makoto’s respect and admiration, via a method not so dissimilar to Sae—presenting himself as reliable, relentless, as someone without any weak points, someone who makes every effort to disguise the work gone into even the most difficult of tasks.
“He was in rough shape,” Sae remembers confessing to Makoto. “I’ve thought about checking up on him, but I don’t want to overstep.”
“He’s already over it,” Makoto had assured her. “Akira is as tough as it comes—he’s completely focused on the Shido infiltration.”
That level of brutality isn’t something you just get over, she had wanted to say. You can’t just sleep it off. Does he have someone helping him through the withdrawal symptoms? Is he keeping off of his leg?
—But Makoto knows him better, she had reasoned with herself then. There’s no reason for him to place any more trust in me than he already has. If he needs help, surely he can rely on his team, or on Sakura-san.
The next time she saw him, he appeared unscathed. His eyes were sharp. Focused. She remembered through his upright posture that he is exceptionally tall, and holds himself well. But she couldn’t help thinking that he looked...tired.
Sae also learned, during the interrogation, that Akira has a matter-of-fact approach to any conflicts that may personally affect him. That he is an inherently selfless person—devout in keeping the identities of his collaborators a secret despite staring down the death penalty, omitting any details that did not serve in his longer game to earn her trust. She learned that he had patiently tolerated the scorn he received from his peers as well as the staff at Shujin High—that he rose to fight Kamoshida not in order to save himself, but for Sakamoto’s sake, for Takamaki’s sake, for Suzui’s sake, for Mishima’s sake. For the sake of the student body that trod over him at every turn. And so the theme continued with the Thieves’ other targets, barring the setup with Okumura—leading up to Sae herself.
She had assumed at first that this selflessness was a projection on his part, a means to present his story as one of heroism, to paint him in a favorable enough light that she would believe him. A bias skewed by his personal sense of justice.
No, that was only ever her envy. That she had begun the way he did—but, somewhere along the line she fell askew. Where once she had wanted to tear down the corrupt system and rebuild something better in its place, she had fallen victim to it—she had become a part of it, playing directly into its hands, never realizing that the game had been rigged from the start.
Where she naïvely placed her trust in her own ability and fell right into the trap set before her, Akira had seen all along the injustice of those in power.
What other options were there for him? Greed buys greed buys greed, the wealthy and corrupt buy politicians and scientists and doctors and police. The system had failed him, so the only way to reshape it was from the outside.
He wouldn’t be Akira if he had gone down her path—just as she wouldn’t be who she is, had she taken his route instead.
Still, it is this precarious relativity between them that lends her toward a simple understanding: that he is hurting, that he thinks he cannot afford to display this hurt to anyone around him—and that he is angry. He must be angry, because the just and the courageous do not pull their strength from nothing. He must be angry, because he has been betrayed over and over and over, because for so long—what did his efforts come to?
In the end, it seems the system refuses to spit him out no matter how hard he fights against it.
Is it all hopeless?
Sae calls to follow up on her disputes the moment they’ve all submitted. Aggressive. Aggressive gets the job done.
I can’t think that way. Not when I’m his only hope.
It is 11:47 p.m. when she hangs up, and 11:53 when they hand her his bag and the key to unshackle him. When she insists to them that she will show the both of them out, no need for an escort, and she returns to find that he has emptied the water bottle, thank god.
“Akira-kun.” Sae enters the room and crouches to release him, setting the key aside and extending her hand to him. “It’s time to go. I’ve cleared everything up—it was all fraudulent, so this will be struck from your record. Can you walk? Do you need to stretch first? It’s a long drive to LeBlanc. Do you need to stop at the restroom first?”
Too many questions, she realizes. He takes her hand, though, even if he doesn’t answer, and rises to his feet. But something... Something isn’t...
This isn’t him.
“Nonverbal?” she asks. Waits for a response, and receives nothing. “How about this, Akira-kun—can you nod yes or no? I’ll ask you yes or no questions?”
Nothing.
“Can you hear me, Akira-kun?”
She’s beginning to feel sick, worry and anxiety twisting together into knots in her stomach. Breathe, breathe, breathe. Get him out of here first. She braces a hand at the small of his back to walk him from the room, and he curls his hand into a fist on the back of her jacket. Umbrella and briefcase and his bag all clutched in one hand, she walks him to the restroom and waits, watches him allow the door to fall shut behind him mechanically, as though on autopilot.
Just once more, Sae picks up Akira’s phone and dials Sojiro.
11:59 p.m.
“We’re leaving now,” she tells him. “But, Sojiro, we need to talk.”