Work Text:
Honestly, Sojiro hadn’t looked too deep into Akira’s lack of a date for Valentine’s Day. Was it a bit surprising? Yeah, honestly, kind of. As much as Sojiro teased him, he always seemed to hit it off with everyone around him, even the ladies. Sojiro was an adult, which meant that he ended up spending a lot of time as a wise, passive observer off to the side of the kid’s whole friend group. Which also meant that he’d picked up on a lot of things that the kids probably hadn’t. One of those things mainly being the way that Akira’s female friends looked at him when they thought he wasn’t looking— or especially when he was.
He’d even attempted to make a couple insinuations about it throughout the year, but with Akira’s typical undecipherable expression, it was difficult to tell if Akira was deliberately deflecting about it or simply didn’t pick up on it at all. Either way, Sojiro sort of got the feeling that Akira just wasn’t all that interested in that stuff.
Which was kind of weird. When Sojiro was his age, it was basically all he thought about, so Akira was really the opposite of how he was back then. And the opposite of most teenage boys, honestly. He was responsible, well-rounded, and kind. Nothing at all like Sojiro had been expecting originally. Actually, he feels guilty thinking this, because Ryuji’s such a nice kid, but he supposes that the delinquent he’d envisioned in his mind before Akira moved in was pretty much just like Ryuji. He thinks it’s nice that the Ryuji kid ended up having a buddy like Akira— Sojiro would have benefited from having a friend like that as a buffer when he was a teenager.
Anyways, not having to deal with a teenager running around with girls all year made things easier on Sojiro’s part, so who was he to complain? He didn’t have to worry about dealing with Akira sneaking around with a girl, or, god forbid, finding him creeping on Futaba. So he wasn’t in a position to complain. But he was definitely in one to tease.
At least Akira acted as a weird sort of buffer between Ryuji’s pity party until Yusuke came along. Sojiro did his best to make the day special and fun for the boys anyways, even if neither Akira nor Yusuke seemed to care the same way Ryuji did. They went out to dinner, even brought the cat along. Then they parted ways with Yusuke and Ryuji at the train station, saying their goodbyes. All in all, everything seemed well.
The ringing of Leblanc’s doorway bell signalled their arrival to Futaba, her head shooting in their direction at the sound. She’s sitting hunched over at the counter at her laptop, making Sojiro internally cringe. It doesn’t matter how many times he tells her to take better care of her posture, though, he’s accepted the fact that she’s not going to listen to him about it.
“Hi guys. Did you have fun getting sushi without me?” she accuses, rightfully so.
“Sorry, Futaba. Ended up having a bit of a ‘guys with no game’ only night. I’ll remember to invite you next time,” he jokes.
She huffs. “Whatever. Did you at least bring me any leftovers back?”
The cat who ate all the leftovers meows something Sojiro can’t understand, to which Futaba sighs in response. “It was worth a try. I already ate dinner, anyway.”
The cat meows back at her, jumping out of Akira’s bag and striding upstairs. Akira blinks, “Well, goodnight. Thanks again, Sojiro.”
And then he’s following after the cat, and it’s just Sojiro and Futaba.
“We should be heading home too, I guess,” he suggests. He’s a bit confused, though. “What’re you doing waiting around in here, anyways?”
“There was no curry in our fridge. I had to scavenge,” Futaba explains. But then, her demeanor changes. Her expression is one of nervousness, taking Sojiro by surprise, and she hesitates before speaking again. “And I sort of wanted to check on Akira?”
“What, you feel sorry that he went the entire year without managing to get a date?” He tries to lighten her up, but somehow, her face scrunches in that way that always hurts his heart even further. “Hey, the kid’s okay, alright?”
Something doesn’t make sense to him about Futaba’s sudden investment in Akira’s love life, or her seriousness about it. He feels like he’s missing something. Maybe she’s worried about something other than his relationship status. “Is there a reason he shouldn’t be okay?”
Futaba’s eyes widen, and she looks down at her lap, now refusing eye contact. “No, I don’t know. I mean, I just wanted to see after everything.”
Sojiro exhales and puts a hand on his hip, thinking. He crosses to sit at the booth across from her stool. The energy in the room is different now, the way it always is when the kids are talking about Phantom Thief business; like something big happened just beyond his view, and no matter how trustable he makes himself, he’s just not a person they can go to for support about it. He doesn’t even know half of the stuff they get up to in the Metaverse, so he knows he’ll never be helpful in that department. But he hates feeling like these kids are suffering in ways beyond him.
“Want to tell me about ‘everything’?” He offers.
She hums uncertainly. “I dunno… it’s not really mine to tell, and Akira—I don’t know, it’s kind of a lot.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything, but I’m not going to be upset if you do, you know? And maybe I’ll be able to give you some old geezer wisdom.” That does crack a smile out of her, and she seems to consider it genuinely.
She apparently decides that he’s worthy of being in on the secrets, blowing air like a deflating balloon. “Okay, so, um. Um. Do you remember Akechi?”
He tries not to let the way he tenses show. It’s not that he hates the kid, or even has a distaste for him really, but anything regarding Akechi has typically been pretty serious. So he braces himself. “Yeah, I remember. What about him?”
“Well, um. A lot happened recently, and it’s a lot of stuff that's really hard to explain, I don’t know how to start.” She fumbles with the ends of her hoodie strings between her fingers.
“That’s okay, take your time,” he says in what he hopes is a soothing tone, and it seems to calm her. She thinks it over for a minute before continuing.
“We were fighting with Akechi. But do you remember how Akira spent a lot of time with him? A lot more than the rest of us?” He does remember that. He distinctly remembers that he’d actually pushed them to hang out a few times, in the bathhouse or after hours at the cafe, because, well. Akechi had always seemed lonely to him. Since it wasn’t relevant to Sojiro, he’d never cared about Akechi’s public status or fame. He’d just seen a teenager who enjoyed a good cup of coffee. And a teenager who clearly didn’t have many friends his age, if any. But he’d seemed to take a liking to Akira, like most people. So Sojiro welcomed him.
“Well, you know he, uh, disappeared around when he took down Shido? But, he actually came back after that whole thing on Christmas eve.”
Sojiro’s eyebrows furrow in confusion. “I don’t remember seeing him. Did you have another fight?”
Futaba shakes her head. “No, we weren’t fighting. We actually teamed up, and you actually did— um…”
She trails off, confusing Sojiro a little, but continuing on before he can ask her to elaborate. “I don’t know everything, I only really even figured it out so early on because it’s hard to hide things because of my bugs and nosiness and tech and stuff, and I don’t even know how much of it the rest of the team picked up on. But I think everyone ended up sort of knowing something , at least, after he came back.”
She chews her lip, looking unsure of how to go on. He tries to smooth his body language into something reassuring and open. “Knew what?”
Futaba’s head dips slightly. “He and Akira were… really close. And they were, uh, interested in each other?”
The gears in Sojiro’s head are not computing this at all. She’s being vague, and he’s doing his best to put it together, but he can barely handle one kid who speaks in few words, and Akira’s taken that slot up already. “Interested in each other? What do you mean by that?”
“Sojiro, they were… I don’t know. It’s not like— they weren’t together,” she specifies as she meets his gaze, still talking around it— but the wording makes Sojiro inhale sharply. “They were… involved, though. Romantically? I guess? Well, I know that for sure, actually.”
The gears in Sojiro’s head have clicked and subsequently frozen over.
This is a surprise for a number of reasons, and a swell of different emotions that Sojiro doesn’t know how to even begin unpacking accompany it… He didn’t even know Akira liked boys. Sojiro’s been silent for too long, he knows, trying to get his thoughts in order, but he has to say something.
“The kid and Akechi were… I, um. Didn’t know that.” Probably not that. Okay, fine. But there's still something else itching at him here. “Wait, then where is he?”
Futaba catches him off-guard by visibly wincing. She prefaces, “Sojiro. A lot happened after Akechi rejoined us, and I think I should explain the rest of it some other time, okay?”
He nods carefully. If so much has supposedly happened in the past few months, how come he didn’t know about any of it?
“But after the final battle,” she swallows hard, “Akechi disappeared again. For real this time, because…
“We think he’s dead.”
Sojiro physically feels his heart abruptly drop to the very bottom of his stomach. “What?”
Futaba looks down again, despondent. “Yeah.”
Is that real? God, that’s awful. He leans against the table to his side, dragging a hand down his face for a few moments. He wishes he knew more, wishes he had just been there. but he can’t focus on that right now. “That’s really terrible, Futaba. I’m sorry.”
It makes Sojiro feel kind of sick. That, somehow, so many things he supposedly didn’t know anything about were occurring right under his roof, right under his nose. But the news of Akechi’s death struck a particularly painful chord inside of him.
Here was the thing; there was a lot about Akechi that he didn’t know. He felt a lot of things towards and around the kid— pity, sorrow, dread. But he’d never, ever felt resentful, at least not truly.
Before he’d been told straight that Wakaba had truly been murdered, he’d never felt angry. Instead, he’d carried this gaping feeling of helplessness . Grief with no direction or outlet. The death of Wakaba had been sudden, and for a long time, it had felt like a puzzle that had been ostensibly solved, but never felt right. Maybe a few of the pieces had been shoved into the wrong holes in an attempt to make it work, or they had just been printed wrong. But despite the mysteries, it was seemingly solved. He couldn’t complain that it came with lack of explanation or reason, really, because it did. Or, he’d thought so, at least.
When Futaba had told him that she had been conclusively murdered, though, taken away from them on purpose— well, then he’d gotten angry. He’d shoved his doubt over her death deep down for years , telling himself that it was just over, that he just had to grieve and move on. Ironically, all he’d actually been doing was running away from his grief. Making excuses. Either way, he told himself he had to accept it. Told himself that acceptance was the correct way to grieve. He had to be okay with the cards that he’d been dealt, because he didn’t get a choice.
So when he was told that Wakaba had been killed, it was like the excuses he had been surrounding himself with to cope with his pain just melted away, revealing themselves for what they really were. The powerlessness that he had preached as acceptance transformed into rebellion, and a will to move forward— for real this time.
Maybe in the back of his mind for that, he’d begun to form this image. A blurry image of what he imagined her killer to look and act like. And he supposes that he did direct resentment at that image. That image twisted and turned, becoming an amalgamation of the one sole person who was directly responsible for all of their woes. Replacing it with Akechi had shattered that resentment instantly.
First off, Akechi was not the callous villain that Sojiro had conjured up in the back of his mind when he thought of Wakaba’s killer. His willingness to kill and cause suffering, all hidden behind his outer persona of politeness, was off-putting, but not for the reason that might come to mind first. Where someone else might have interpreted evilness from his cold cruelty, his immorality, and his lies, Sojiro only saw him even more rawly as a kid. A kid who had been failed by the world in vast, numerous ways to have reached that point.
But furthermore, it destroyed this naive picture he hadn’t even realized he’d been crafting in the back of his mind, where there was one person to blame, one person at fault who had the hands of a killer. No, that wasn’t true at all. Because the cold, hard truth was this; if the kid hadn’t pulled the trigger, someone else would’ve. There were a nearly impossible number of people who were responsible in an impossible number of different ways, the gun was systemic and the bullet was, from at least one view, another victim. Maybe to discover that it was not all so black and white, that it was infinitely more complex than that, wouldn’t have been so comforting to someone else, but to Sojiro it brought him peace. He still had a lot of varied feelings about Akechi, but overall, Sojiro had made a lot of peace with him in his heart, and he was wishing the same for him in return one day. If he’d returned to the cafe one day, after making up with the rest of the group, Sojiro would have welcomed him.
He sure as hell hadn’t wanted the kid to die.
Futaba puts a hand over her mouth, muffling her next words like she’s unsure of speaking them. “But I don’t know if you understand, Sojiro.”
He's kind of taken aback, not really knowing what she’s getting at. “What do you mean?”
She removes her hand, getting a bit riled up now. “I know I said they weren’t really even dating, but they were really serious.”
He quirks an eyebrow, unsure what she’s insinuating. “What are you trying to say?”
“I know you must be thinking… that it’s like, a high school crush or something. Not serious and whatever. But it wasn’t like that,” she stresses, looking him dead in the eye. “Sojiro, they really meant a lot to each other.”
Now his shock has faded to make way for genuine consideration. It didn’t make sense to him at first, but he supposes she’s actually kind of right on point. Maybe it’s an adult thing, but in his mind, high school relationships are short lasting. They’re simple, fun, and then they’re over. Kids’ll get together and then breakup in less than a month, and it’s not like they can’t be sad about it or care, but it’s just an insignificant blip in their life, right? That’s his preconception, he guesses. So he tries to really hear what she’s saying here, to really think about it.
Akira is far from a typical high school boy, because typically, high school boys don’t have feelings for boys who have tried to kill them. Sojiro thinks that would be the dealbreaker for any kid— any person at all, for that matter. But not Akira. Akira, who he’d considered either allergic or immune to high school-typical romance, who has never been interested in it at all. But he was interested in Akechi.
And Sojiro wasn’t there when they fought each other, or fought together, or any of that, alright? But he was there when Akira served Akechi coffee. He was there as they began their game of chess, in the moments before walking out the cafe door, in that one split second before turning his back. Their expressions were guarded and longing, and Sojiro wasn’t there, didn’t even know— so he can’t truly understand what they were longing for. But he understands what that’s like, and so he sincerely considers that, very simply, love transposes age groups.
That’s what Futaba’s talking around, right? And whether that’s because she doesn’t believe it was, or more likely because Akechi didn’t live long enough for their guards to drop, for that feeling to bloom, that’s what she’s saying to him. They were really serious, they really meant a lot to each other.
He takes a deep breath. “Okay. I get it.”
“You do?” Futaba relaxes.
“I do.” He nods earnestly. Futaba goes quiet at the reassurance, but she begins to fidget with her hoodie strings, expression darkening like she’s trying to figure out how to say the words. Sojiro waits patiently.
“I didn’t even really like him. I mean, he got more tolerable towards the end, but he was only there because we needed him. I couldn’t accept it. I’ll never be able to forgive him for—” She chokes, hands tightening into fists around the strings of her hoodie. Her expression softens somewhat. “So I didn’t like him much. But even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have blamed Akira because he did. Because he wasn’t all bad, especially at the end, and I can admit that. Maybe he wasn’t always good, but he wasn’t all bad. And even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have said he was all bad for Akira.
“So someone has to talk to him, and I’m probably not the number one player for this one, right Sojiro? But Akira liked him. He really liked him, so someone has to…” she speaks softly into the cafe’s night air, still slightly cool from the passing winter. Sojiro understands.
If anything, he’s proud of Futaba. He wishes, not for the first time, that he could have been there when these things were happening, instead of hearing about them through word of mouth in the aftermath. His kid shouldn’t have had to carry this burden all by herself— but when he hears her speak about Akechi, he’s momentarily struck by just how grown she is. Again, not for the first time. But it takes great maturity to think about the situation from a view like that. She hasn’t made the same peace with Akechi that he has, but he doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. She’s allowed to feel her own way about things. If anything, he’s proud. Proud that she’s been raised to love people instead of hate them, and proud that she’s grown into such a caring person.
But he’s here now, and she doesn’t have to carry this all by herself anymore. He stands up, joints clicking when he does, and crosses over to give her a fond pat on the head. “I’m really proud of you, Futaba.”
She splutters, glowing, but he just retracts his hand and continues. “And it’s not on you to handle this, okay? It’s a lot. I’ll check on him for you.”
She gapes. “Wh– really?”
“Yeah, really.” Sojiro nods. “I’m gonna go and send the cat down here, and then you two will get on home for the night.”
She looks slightly unsure. “And you’ll make sure he’s okay? And tell me how he is?”
“Yeah, of course,” he says. That seems to convince her. She nods, and before he can give it a second thought, he’s trudging up the attic steps.
Akira is sitting on the edge of the mattress towards the head of the bed beside the cat, with his elbows on his knees when Sojiro makes it up the last step, expression hidden behind frizzy locks of hair and black glasses. He straightens as Sojiro comes into view.
His expression is as unreadable as ever. If Sojiro didn’t know any better, he would’ve considered him totally typical, entirely unaffected. And he didn’t know any better before, when he made a big deal about Valentine’s day and relationships— but wracking his brain and replaying each interaction with him from the day, searching for some sort of indication that the boy was in any way affected by the death, he feels as though he knows no better than he did before.
“I need to talk to the kid,” Sojiro tells the cat, trying not to sound too serious but knowing that the sentence alone carries too much weight to offset. “Futaba’s downstairs waiting for you.”
He’s definitely still not over the novelty of a magical cat who can speak, but he does his best not to sound too awkward addressing him directly. Morgana’s furry face twists in perplexion, but with only a little hesitance, he hops to the floor, stalking past Sojiro and down the steps to meet Futaba.
Akira blinks at him— the closest he gets to surprise, the most expression Sojiro’s seen on his face all day— and so he crosses over, taking his seat at the edge of the bed. They sit at opposite corners of the bed, just the distance away to perfectly accentuate the way Sojiro feels both too close and too far at the same time, considering his words carefully. He looks to Akira, clearing his throat.
“I spoke to Futaba. She told me about you and Akechi.” Akira looks away. But other than that, he does not tense up, or shift in any way whatsoever. Though he doesn’t seem like he’s going to provide a reply, he is the same brand of calm and composed that he has always been in any interaction. Even so, Sojiro can sense an air of tension coloring the stillness, poised in wait for his next words. Although that’s probably him, not the kid. But Sojiro never knows with him.
He’s threading through different ways he can continue even without any reply to let him know what’s going on in Akira’s head, what direction to take this, when Akira startles him by actually speaking up.
“How do you feel about that?”
It’s casual in tone, delivered coolly, but Sojiro’s been learning to detach Akira’s mild words from his tone of voice. He feels that the words aren’t casual so much as they are careful— he realizes that Akira is tentatively testing the waters with Sojiro, just as he is with Akira. The silliness of them walking on eggshells around each other for no reason at all makes him scoff abruptly. There’s only enough room in a conversation for one of them to be vague and ambiguous, and again, Akira’s long since claimed that role for himself.
He looks away from Akira and straight into the banister in an attempt to make Akira more comfortable by making himself less obtrusive. “It’s far from about what I feel about it, Akira. I don’t— I don’t disapprove, if that’s what you're asking. It doesn’t upset me. That’s not what it’s about, though.”
He knows how he needs to continue, but it feels so far away from him. He breathes in the familiar dust of the attic, the buzz of the lightbulbs on the ceiling, and Akira’s ever patient silence. Closing his eyes, he tries to bring himself back, once again, to what it was like.
Wakaba made him whole. Where he faltered in passion and determined optimism about the world around him, she never had a shortage of either, right around the corner to melt his prickly self. When she needed someone pragmatic and down to earth to keep her from working herself to death, there he was, taking care of her in the late night. He had never felt as seen as he had when she saw him, and he knows it was the same for her.
He’d fallen in love with Wakaba in more ways than could be quantified or defined, in many ways that were reciprocated, and some that were not. But that never really mattered to him— Wakaba was his best, most beloved friend. She was his other half, his life partner. She made him whole, and he never even realized it until she was gone, and he was in pieces.
“I know grief like the back of my hand. I’ve lived with it and I’ve learned from it, every day that goes by without Wakaba. I’ve learned how isolating it can be.” He reaches for that empty, helpless thing that he used to live with every day, feeling and remembering it. He feels the lonely shell of what he used to be when she was no longer around. It’s like setting his fingers upon an aged wound that’s finally scarred over, lightly trailing the pads of his fingertips over the tissue. The memory of turmoil doesn’t sap his energy anymore— if anything, it’s the opposite. He feels a rush of empathy for Akira.
“I’ll be honest, I’ve got no clue what’s going on in your head. I’ve got no idea if I'm even pissing you off right now. So you don’t have to say anything that you don’t want to say to me— maybe you’re talking to one of your other friends about it already,” he says, knowing that if Futaba’s right, which is extremely likely, he’s not. But he offers him the out anyway. “So you don’t have to, but I don’t want you to feel alone. You can talk to me.”
And then he’s done, leaving the ball in Akira’s court, taking a deep breath. He may not know what’s going on inside Akira’s head, but some things are universal to the heart.
Akira’s resounding silence doesn’t surprise him, but he doesn’t get up to leave. He knows this isn’t Akira pushing him away, but Akira wordlessly telling him to stay. If he had nothing he wanted to say to Sojiro, he would’ve said so, and he at least knows that.
In the moments of silence that pass, Sojiro patiently gazes right ahead, totally content to give Akira as much time as he needs. In his peripheral vision, he watches Akira reach up to lightly pull and twist frizzy strands of hair between his fingertips. He doesn’t turn to gawk at the anxious— dull, unhurried enough that it’s nearly unremarkable, but unmistakably anxious— fidgeting, allowing Akira all the space he needs to think. Sojiro does enough rambling around him, anyway. And he does not startle when Akira utters, low and slow:
“The worst part was that it was so quiet.”
Sojiro hums, acknowledging, quietly urging him to continue. Akira’s hand jerks, pulling on his hair hard, and Sojiro finally turns to look at him.
“Maybe I’m wrong to say it, but the first time that he… disappeared. It felt right.” Sojiro scans his face, just short of its resting neutrality in the smallest microexpressions. He can finally see how it cracks, in the crinkle of his eyes as they pointedly look straight ahead. “It was so Akechi. Out with a bang, literally. It’s what he wanted.
“But the second time was different. So draining— maybe because it was sudden… No.” He shakes his head, eyes fluttering shut. “That’s not why. The first time was sudden. But back then, we were dealing with Shido. We just had to march on. There was no time to think about it. Now, though… There’s nothing else left. And all I can do is think about it.
“About how quiet it was,” he exhales shakily, “because there was no life ending danger. Just a choice, but it was never really a choice. Because both of us knew that doing that was never actually an option. Not a choice, but a declaration. No bang, just a whisper.”
Sojiro remembers the suddenness of Wakaba’s death very clearly. How she was beside him one day, and in a morgue the next. A fundamental pillar of his life one day, and nonexistent the next. But even though the suddenness colored it the most, it wouldn’t be right to say that there was no preamble whatsoever.
I think I might die.
And he’d pushed that out of his mind under believing the guise of a suicide for so long, because, Akira is right. Sometimes, the quiet is worse than the suddenness.
Sojiro is far from an affectionate person. Everyone— from his customers to those closest to him— knew this well. So it’s with strange, unfamiliar surety that he scoots over, reaches out, and squeezes his shoulder affectionately. Akira stills, his hands pausing their fiddling. Then they drop to his lap, and his entire form just sags.
Sojiro’s heart clenches so hard it hurts. Tentatively, he wraps an arm around Akira’s shoulders in a sort of mock hug, not physically pulling him in or forcing him to reciprocate. Akira doesn’t hug him back, so much as he mutedly falls into his embrace.
Sojiro is properly holding him now, allowing his arm to drop from Akira’s shoulders to his back, drawing his free hand to his shoulder. Akira’s head rests limply on his shoulder, breathing unsteadily. After a few long beats, he confesses:
“I think that, deep down, I knew the whole time,” he murmurs somberly. “I knew it was temporary. And he was my wish.”
Like this, Sojiro can tactually feel what Akira meant when he described the loss of Akechi as draining. In the way Akira sinks into his hold and begins to shake, finally cracking, Sojiro’s own years of exhausted grief are reflected back at him. After the loss of Wakaba, after his pillar of strength being shot out from beneath him, he never thought he would have the energy to stand up on his own two feet again, to take back control of his life. But because of Akira— his incessant meddling and unrelenting earnestness— he was able to overcome and rise above it, restrengthened.
Strength that he is putting back to use, in an ironic turn of events, in holding up Akira. In response to Akira’s confession, Sojiro pulls him closer, gently rubbing comforting circles into his back. It’s the last time Akira speaks, breaking down delicately in wordless trembling.
Of Akira, Sojiro’s always seen a tenacious, unshakeable boy, entirely capable of hoisting the world up onto his shoulders. Now, though, he sees a teenager who has literally carried the world. How stupid and irresponsible he’s been, to ever doubt that Akira could be affected, have emotions, just because of how strong he is? In this moment, Sojiro vows to never overlook him again. He’s always wanted all of them to rely on him— he is the adult, after all.
So, he vows to do his best to finally make himself reliable. He holds Akira for a long time after the shaking has ceased.
Futaba is quiet when she apprehensively approaches him, after he arrives back at the house late that night. “Is he okay?”
Somewhere far off into the night, across the distant streets of Yongen-Jaya, a crow caws under the candescent moonlight. Sojiro smiles sincerely. “He will be.”