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Sojiro Sakura wakes up on April 9th.
This would not be remarkable, except he remembered going to bed the night before, and it had been March 20th. March 20th, spent with Futaba curled up at his side until he needed to get some sleep. The both of them dealing with the recent absence in their family. Akira gone back to his parents.
He doesn’t even notice the date. Not until he’s opening up LeBlanc.
April 9th. 2016.
Almost a whole year in the past.
The day Akira was meant to arrive for the first time.
Sojiro sighs. Stares at the calendar on the wall, knowing he keeps it up to date. Knowing everything those kids of his were involved with. He checks his phone, just in case. No dice. Though there is a reminder there, reading Kurusu Akira arrives today. Stated so simply. A minor note, as if nothing but an unremarkable troublemaker to keep in line is moving in. As if that kid hadn't changed the world, and Sojiro's own life, twice over.
Well. At least he can count on Akira showing up. Maybe he doesn’t need to worry about anything being different leading up to this. Maybe this is all some fancy dream.
The sign is never flipped to open.
The text comes after he’s gotten most of the trash cleared out, while he’s dusting. Geez, there’s a lot of dust. How did the kid clean this place up so much so quickly?
Futaba: What are you doing?
He runs a hand down his face, thinking. In the end, he goes with, “I mentioned that I was taking in that delinquent, yeah? He’s coming in later. Figured I’d clean the place up for him.” There’s no point in typing it. He knows his girl. His heart sinks at the thought of her being like how she used to, locked in that room until Akira came along, but… He’ll do what he can for her. He’ll help her however he can, and help Akira for real this ti–
Futaba: I think… I might try coming to help.
He drops his phone.
“What?” A moment later he’s scrambling to grab his only way to see her words from the floor.
Futaba: I have the audio and cameras on my phone.
Futaba: I’m out of my room.
Futaba: I’m outside. I’m
Before he can try to figure out what's going on, what to ask, the bell at the door rings, followed by a slam.
He’s down the stairs as fast as his old-man bones can carry, and there she is. Curled up in a booth, facing away from the windows. Shaking slightly, but there.
No walls separating them.
Sojiro moves to sit by her, careful not to touch, but then she’s throwing her arms around him, burying her face against his side.
Well. Naturally he puts an arm around her and holds her tight. Even after the shaking subsides.
“Sorry. I– I thought it’d be easier.” The words are slightly muffled.
“Futaba no it’s– It’s okay, you just surprised me is all. What are you…?” He doesn’t know how to ask this. Luckily, she knows.
“I want to help,” she repeats from her text, determination in her voice far more familiar to his own past than what should be hers. “I want to help you clean Akira’s room.”
“... I mentioned his name to you?”
That actually gets her to nudge him with her elbow, squinting up at him. “No. Or, well, if you did before now I don’t remember. But you’re cleaning his room, which means you must remember, because you didn’t do that before.”
Sojiro opens his mouth. Closes it. Repeats.
Oh.
“You remember? It’s not just me. Are you–?”
Sojiro feels some tension drain from her. “I– I think I still have the…. Palace. Or something. It’s still here. I don’t have the app yet, I can’t check. It's definitely a lower-level quest now, though.”
He doesn’t know all that much about the metaverse, but he knows enough to make sense of that. Despite the distortion still having a hold, Futaba had managed to come to the cafe by herself.
(Just as strong as her mother.)
“Well, I’m sure once the others know about your situation, they’ll be more than eager to help.” Even if she had the app, he doesn’t think she should be going in alone.
Thankfully, she nods. “Yeah, you’re right. I just have to hold on.”
He hums, looking her over. “Did you eat before you came rushing all this way?” She waits a second too long to respond, and he chuckles. “Well, let me make some food before we get to work on that attic, yeah?”
The cafe isn't open.
Akira stares at the door. Stares at the closed sign on the door. This is his 30th time doing this routine, and never, not once has that sign said closed.
What the fuck.
He tries the handle anyway. He doesn’t want to trudge to the house and disturb Futaba (he wants nothing more than to see Futaba). Nothing he did in loop 29 should have changed things. He’d been tired. So tired of trying something new. So it had all played out perfectly, with no deviations. He hadn’t even shared the little detail of the time loops he’s stuck in. He was too powerful, he knew too much, but he also knew how to keep it hidden. Everyone’s sympathy was a comfort, but sometimes he didn’t want it.
Morgana knew. Morgana didn’t make him tell the others, but he saw those nightmares.
(Akira’s slipping. He knows he’s slipping. Becoming less human each year, becoming stronger. The grooves where he’s dug his nails into his sanity can only hold him so long, fingernails cracked and chipping, grip-strength failing. He doesn’t know how much more he can take. How much longer he can handle losing everyone year and year again. How much longer until he loses himself.)
The bell chimes above his head as he looks around. Did Sojiro not lock the door when he left?
His thoughts are derailed when he sees the man himself stepping down the stairs, covered in dust. “Thought I’d heard the door. I was getting your room ready for ya while I waited.”
What the fuck.
Static buzzes in his throat. He can’t get his tongue to work, his mouth to open, words to form. Can’t take his eyes off of Sojiro. A deviation this big has never happened so soon. Not once in all his years. Deviations have always, always happened due to his own interference.
With his silence, Sojiro has to keep speaking. “Well, I’m Sojiro Sakura, I’ll be looking after you this year. Akira, right?”
He nods. Sojiro squints at him. Before he can say more, there are footsteps above them. Akira’s hand goes to his bag, reaching for a weapon on instinct.
“Come say hello,” Sojiro calls. Seconds later a very familiar face pokes her way into his view, standing on the stairs by her dad.
“Futaba Sakura, hi!” She waves, and he can see the way she shakes. The way fear runs through her even still.
But she is standing in LeBlanc, greeting someone she should. Not. Know.
There’s a crash as his bag hits the floor, and pain jars his body as he collapses into a barstool.
There’s no way. There’s no way.
“You okay there, kid?”
He has to take a moment. Stare at the counter missing the scrapes accrued last year. Futaba is hiding behind Sojiro now, still peeking at him.
“You…” Akira swallows. Looks back up at them both. “You remember?”
Sojiro’s eyebrows furrow. Futaba, though, frowns. Squints at him. He can see the thoughts running through her head.
Seconds later, she’s at his side, arms wrapped around him. She leans in close, and whispers, “How many?”
Something in him shudders, but he doesn’t let it break. He hugs her back, and rests his forehead against hers. Low, so that Sojiro can’t hear, he replies, “Counting now? Thirty.”
Akira feels her flinch as she processes that, and he can tell, just by looking at her, that the tomb is still there. Still beckoning her back. They need to get to work. Sometimes knowing doesn’t root out the distortion. “Give me a week to grab Morgana, Ryuji, and Ann, and we’ll help you out, alright?”
“Told her you would,” Sojiro says, and Akira blinks. He’s on the other side of the counter now, starting a cup. “You alright, kid? Know what’s going on?”
Futaba sits down, but scoots her chair close enough that he can still wrap an arm around her.
“It…” He pauses, needing to form his words. Akira taps his fingers twice on the counter, a sign they both still know (they know, they know, it’s April 9th and they know). “If I… Die. Or if I make it to when I leave. I wake up on the train again today. Nobody has ever remembered with me.” A huff escapes him. “I usually mention it. Last time was one of the few I didn’t. It’s complicated, but… The reasons involve The Velvet Room, and what happens on Christmas Eve.”
“When you die?” Sojiro’s hands shake, and he has to set down the kettle. Out of habit, Akira uses his free hand to lift it and keep the pour-over brewing. Steady, even one-handed. Decades of practice showing. He started retaining muscle-memory in the real world ages ago.
“Wasn’t great at first. Hasn’t happened in a while, I promise.”
“That’s not the point.” He sighs, running a hand down his face. “I swear, you’re going to send me to an early grave, kid.”
Akira can’t help but laugh, finishing his brew. He exchanges a look with Sojiro just to be sure, before taking a sip. Blue Mountain. A classic. “At least I won’t have to pretend to be new to this,” he lifts the cup.
“All that time,” Sojiro huffs, “all that time, as if you weren’t already a master at it. Why go through all that again?”
“You’re a good mentor. I like it when you teach me, and I don’t want to miss our time together.”
As Sojiro ruffles his hair, as Futaba leans against his chest, Akira feels warm.
In the end, Futaba drags him back to her bedroom, letting Sojiro open the cafe for a bit. It’s still a mess, but he can worry about cleaning it later. For now…
“Let me know if it’s too much, okay?” Akira says, laying right down on top of her.
She squeaks (adorably), but it only takes a moment for her to relax. “I’m all good, you’re my key item! That means this is a-okay!” He laughs, and inhales deep. The scent of body odor and sweat and junk food is a bit overwhelming, but it’s also familiar, in a way he always misses at the start. “Besides,” she continues, “you owe me so many explanations! Tutorial level amounts of explanations!”
Akira laughs, just a little. Anything to not cry. “Like I said, I do usually tell everyone about the time loops. I just…” He can feel the tremors running through him, and clearly Futaba can too, because she wraps her arms around him. “I’m so tired, Futaba. I can’t not do anything, because the world probably keeps going after I’m pulled back. I have no idea if I still exist beyond March 20th! I can’t risk leaving everyone to suffer, but I’ve tried so much, and it never fucking ends.”
She holds him tight, and gives a direction. “You said it has to do with the Grail?”
He nods. “I… Have a claim to it, after we defeat Yaldabaoth. Doubly-so after we win against Maruki. But… I don’t want it.” Akira sighs. “It’s a game of tug-of-war between it trying to shape me to better hold it, and me trying to escape, I think.”
And there are so many possibilities that run through his head thinking about that, looking at Futaba in his arms.
She seems to catch his train of thought, eyebrows furrowed as she thinks. “Lavenza and Igor mentioned something when we saw them in the Velvet Room. It didn’t make sense at the time, cryptic NPC guide speech, but they told you to share the load. That your bonds…”
“... Could handle the weight of the Grail.”
Standing in that room again, it had felt like them playing with their words after saving them all from disappearing in Shibuya. Yaldabaoth would always merge the Cognitive World with reality, and try to erase them all. The Velvet Room would always deign to snatch them from that crossroads and save them before it truly set in.
It had felt almost like a taunt, after choosing not to tell his friends of the way he knew this script. That his bonds could bear the weight of knowing his predicament.
(A piece of him, a piece inside him, tells Akira that these two and Morgana will be the only ones remembering with him truly.)
(A piece inside him tells Akira that this is not a linear process. It’s not even necessary to loop back in on itself.)
(Akira can feel the fractures, can sense that there are other lines where the ones remembering with him first are different.)
(But this one is the one he will have, the one he will remember.)
(Selfishly, he’s glad he’s the one who gets Futaba and Sojiro.)
He gives her a kiss, chaste and sweet and short, and laughs when she flushes and has to take several seconds just to make a noise that isn’t the whistle of a teapot.
“Akira!!!”
“What? We’ve been dating for months, I can’t kiss my girlfriend?”
“Not! When! We’re! Handling! Important! Conversations!” And not when she’s still handling the weight of what lurks in her mind, surely, but it was worth it.
She pouts up at him, and something in him softens, something clicks.
Akira isn’t alone.
Futaba knows that there’s a lot they haven’t covered yet.
For one, the fact that Akira never told her about the time loops! Not once last year.
She’d be angrier about it if the number he’d given her hadn’t been thirty. She’d be angrier if he hadn’t said that he usually does. She’d be angrier if the parameters for a reset weren’t make it to the end or his death.
(He had always seemed so tired. She knew about the nightmares, of course. When he woke up with a scream her mics could pick up. When she watched as he cried against Morgana, too quiet for her to hear.)
(But he always smiled for her, always reassured that it wasn’t anything to worry about. My dreams are about what could’ve gone wrong, he admitted freely, uncaring that he knew she watched. Happy she did, in fact.)
(How many of those could’ve gone wrongs are wrongs he’d seen play out before?)
Which brings her to point two they need to cover:
Akira has lived this life twenty-nine times. With that knowledge now, with the understanding that he was aiming to stick to a script, she can see the discrepancies. A forced smile here, a rote line there, an unsurprised expression when everything goes wrong. Moments where he’d genuinely be having fun, and yet sometimes she’d look over and there’d be a haze in his eyes.
Akira is doing much, much worse than he’d ever let on. She knows her own signs, and she can map patterns to learn his. She was already in the process of figuring out his tells, this just makes it easier, this just gives her the root of the problems.
Topic three:
The weight of the Grail.
She doesn’t know the details of how his Wild Card thing works, only that it ties him to the Velvet Room. Sometimes he would call people his Confidants, a title which always seemed to carry weight. Weight like the bond between the two of them, even if the natures of each bond were different.
If his bonds could handle the weight of the Grail, instead of it being confined only to himself, it stands to reason that she will carry some of that weight as well.
The longer she rests here, the more the tomb of her mind seems to ease. Futaba knows who she is, and she knows the truth now. At the time, she had found it interesting that the calling card she received named her sin Wrath and not Sloth, but knowing what Akira knew of her, it makes sense.
Futaba Sakura has fallen victim to the great sin of Wrath, turned against herself. The world has sought to rob you of your righteous anger, and instead create a narrative where self-loathing is the only hatred that can be allowed. Your distorted desires have entombed you, but the Phantom Thieves will crack open the lid to the sarcophagus, and in the light of the truth, you will be able to determine your own path forward.
There is an anger in her, not at Akira’s secrecy, but that this has been done to him at all. Rage that he has been alone except for the two of the Velvet Room in his memories.
If the universe wants to play games with Akira’s life, it shouldn’t have kept her out of the loop this long. She has half a mind to figure out how to tear this whole thing down for what its done to him.
“Alright. What can I expect from this?”
He lifts his head off of her chest enough to raise a single eyebrow at her.
Ah, he may have been dissociating instead of following her trains of thought. “Tug-of-war, but now there’s two more hands on your side. If I’m remembering because of the shared weight, then the Grail is going to try to change me, too.”
Oh, he’s frowning like he doesn’t like that idea, which means she frowns back, because if it’s been hurting him in more ways, she is going to figure out how to uninstall it from the universe.
“... You called it quality of life upgrades at one point. Or, well, a different you. My bag is like a bag of holding. I can see the Metaverse from the real world. I don’t… actually need the app. I can alter things, from creating shortcuts to slight shifts in cognition.”
Not as bad as she feared, though she does recognize some potential angst of the Am I really even human anymore? trope variety. But she’s in information gathering mode, she has to know what they’re working with.
“Okay, yes or no, whichever feels more right to your instincts: do you think the timelines you leave behind still have you in them?”
“Yes.” Then he pauses, stumbles. “I don’t know for sure, it just…is the assumption I’ve tried to operate on.”
“Then for now, I can theorycraft on the same.”
Akira laughs, small but joyful, and she wonders just how new this is to him. Her fingerprints are already all over his words, from the way he names the changes that have been made to him, to the readiness he had in responding to her, as if they’d done this a hundred times before.
Well, at most it could only have been 28. 27? The first timeline probably didn’t count either.
“You’re forgetting the amount of times we’ve definitely plotted and schemed together, and researched things far above our grade-level as a team,” he says, and he didn’t name reading thoughts! “I can’t read your thoughts, just your face, and I’ve known you for decades.”
Awful. Horrible. She shoves him off of her and face-first into a pillow instead. “You have such an unfair advantage! Stop that!”
“Stop knowing you? Never.” It’s muffled by the pillow, but still clear enough to understand, and if she could see his face she knows he’d have that stupid smirk!
There’s a knock on the door then, and she jumps as Sojiro opens it.
He takes one look at the both of them and sighs. “Please don’t kill each other in the house.”
“He started it!” she says, but lets him up anyway.
Akira just laughs and sits up, wrapping an arm around her. All it takes is one glance from him and she knows he’s refraining from saying so the cafe is fine then?
And for that, she elbows him in the side.
Sojiro laughs at their antics, though, and that makes her pause. Makes her smile. When she’d woken up, all alone instead of curled up with him, she thought the worst. She’d seen the time, the date, and thought the past year had been a lie, a hallucination, that she was all alone and that she was still going to die in this room.
But then he’d started cleaning the attic, and she knew.
This is her dad. This is her family. Together and happy, despite all they know they’ll have to face in the coming year.
“Come on, kids,” he says, “you two scurried off before I could make sure Akira got a meal.”
She watches Akira open his mouth, pause, and close it with a nod.
Oh she is going to have to ask what he was doing eating before making his way to Leblanc.
As they follow Sojiro, he leans against her and whispers, “Sorry, it involves making acquaintances with a little crow.”
Ugh. They’re not talking about him, not during her first day experiencing the time loop.
“We can talk about your terrible taste later. It’s curry and Featherman time now.”
In the end, all three of them sit together on the couch, and she has the ultimate power (the remote control). Akira is sandwiched in the middle, and has probably seen these a dozen times, but the smile on his face is real, and there’s no distance in his eyes tonight.