Chapter Text
“Conditions have not been met.”
He threw his phone at the wall. It was a childish overreaction, and he went to go pick it up again. But he didn’t regret it.
Here is what he did regret. In September, when he found his own name at the top of the Phansite rankings, he’d been entertained enough to check the Meta Navigator and see if it was there. It was, in hindsight, an arrogant move. But arrogance had gotten him that far, so he did it. Then his phone responded.
“Target acquired.”
He didn’t move for five minutes. Then he turned off his light, and went to bed, and didn’t sleep.
He found Akira Kurusu on the subway platform the next morning and joked about it. He was baiting him. He was constantly baiting him, and Kurusu was constantly failing to take the bait. He got on the train without even showing a glimmer of interest, and Akechi wanted to punch him.
At school the next day, he fell asleep during class, and got sent to the nurse’s office to take a nap, and then to the faculty office to have a talk with his homeroom teacher about whether or not his job was going to start affecting his schoolwork again, and how they were honestly just concerned for his health, and Akechi wanted to punch him too.
He went to work, and he worked mindlessly until he couldn’t think at all. By the time he got home, he had made up his mind not to worry about it. So what if he had a Palace? He also had more important things to worry about. He had a plan to put in motion. He had people to kill, and he had long since made peace with casualties in his line of work. It was for his goal. It was for the greater good. And anyone who had a Palace to kill them in wasn’t doing much for society in the first place.
If that was true, why did he have one?
The next afternoon, less than 48 hours after he’d found out he had a Palace, he tried to get in.
“Akechi Goro… Tokyo. Prison.”
“Conditions have not been met.”
He tried again. “Akechi Goro. Apartment building in Kita City. Lair.”
“Conditions have not been met.”
“Akechi Goro. The justice building. A trap.”
“Conditions have not been met.”
He must have tried at least ten more times before giving up. But he didn’t give up for long.
For the next week, he tried at least once a day. He tried sticking with Tokyo as a base and varying the distortion. He tried committing to a distortion and varying its base. He tried for five minutes on some days, and an hour on others. When he didn’t get in, he kept trying every day for the next week, his guesses getting less likely and more random each day. When he still didn’t get in, he tried to convince himself, again, that it didn’t matter. He tried to focus on the plan, and he only opened up his phone and tried new keywords every three or four days instead of every evening. In early October, he realized that he hadn’t been keeping track of what he’d been trying, so he started a spreadsheet on his laptop. A few days later, he decided he was being ridiculous and deleted it, and a few hours later, he started a new one. He spent three nights he wasn’t proud of with the spreadsheet, his phone, and a print thesaurus, and when he couldn’t stand it any more, he set the thesaurus on fire in his trash can.
He started throwing his phone at the wall.
Makoto Niijima invited him to the Shujin school festival. He rehearsed his lines, and he recited them perfectly. He stayed calm. The takoyaki incident was… embarrassing, considering he’d come to intimidate them, but perhaps it worked in his favor to look a bit bumbling. He left feeling confident that they’d agree to his demands, and the plan would work.
What he didn’t feel was confident that the plan was the right one.
It wasn’t guilt. He enjoyed Kurusu’s company in some ways, and he might even miss him when he was gone, but that didn’t add up to guilt. Guilt was a stranger in a foreign country, was something he’d packed away years ago and forgotten about. Guilt was the enemy of necessity. No, this was simple doubt, which at first he’d managed to ignore, and then had merely managed to manage, and now had him surrounded.
It was inevitable. If he had a Palace, his cognition was distorted. If he couldn’t figure out his keywords to get some sense of how, he couldn’t trust himself. He couldn’t trust his plans. He couldn’t move. He had been very sure for a very long time, and now, he couldn’t move.