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God, Ren thinks, as the adrenaline in his blood recedes and leaves behind a droll soreness, Akechi would be so disappointed .
The source of that disappointment kneels before him, wailing like a brat. Masayoshi Shido’s limbs droop like their ligaments were cut, and those stupid fucking orange shades lay shattered in the corner of the legislator’s room-turned-arena. The rest of the thieves stand behind their leader, all silent. Oracle, curled up in Promethus, is silently crying. Ren can sense that. Noir has taken to silently chopping at the faux-marble columns like a lumberjack, occasionally grunting with repressed rage.
Ren pulls out his gun, heavy and freshly loaded, and points it between Shido’s eyes.
Case closed,
he thinks.
So this is how your injustice ends
.
“Joker, are you really-”
A second’s hesitation is all it takes to turn him away from vengeance, though the act of pulling the gun away from the bastard’s head is maddening enough that he empties the clip into the ceiling, roaring with Akechi’s rage and his own grief, though the rest of his thieves still don’t understand, still cannot understand.
“If he were here,” the leader’s voice is nothing more than a growl, robbed of emotion and of any righteousness, “I’d let him pull the trigger.”
The rest of the thieves say nothing. Perhaps Fox understands, knows the longing of Orpheus looking back in spite of it all. The artist’s eyes are watering, but his jaw is tight, a mirror of Ren’s.
Skull claps Joker on the shoulder, gently guides him to holster his firearm, and takes point over the kneeling shadow.
“You’d better get going,” he says, with the tiniest modicum of sympathy. “Get right before one of us decides to pop you like a thug.”
And the owner of the palace, stripped of pride, listens. They all leer at the space left behind when he fades away.
Joker doesn’t have to say a word. They all begin walking back towards the palace’s exit, robbed of purpose, too exhausted to even revel in their achievement.
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That doesn’t last long. Shido, the bastard, tries one last time to kill them. Fortune barely saves them all, and Ryuji emerges from the Metaverse just seconds after the rest of them have begun to sense his absence. Before the girls can wail on him for those agonizing seconds of fear, Ren embraces him in the tightest hug he can manage. He doesn’t spare a thought to the outside world. The leader of the Thieves, a dead man turned Lazarus thanks only to luck and another’s misfortune, is weeping openly.
“Yeah, man.” Ryuji says, amongst the quietest he’s ever been. He awkwardly pats his best friend on the shoulder. “I know. I know.”
They don’t get to relish in relief for long.
“J-Joker?!” Futaba shrieks, and rushes to Haru. Through teary eyes he notices the two girls walking away, nearly jogging. There’s a corpse on the ground, snarling like a rabid dog, covered in blood. Almond-brown hair is matted into thick knots, formal clothing torn to shreds. Fingers claw at the concrete .
The corpse looks up, and Joker’s dark gaze meets a crimson one, darker than any of the blood around them.
“Piece of shit… Is it done?”
Just moments ago a unit, the Thieves are fragmented: Haru and Futaba have disappeared into the evening crowds. Morgana is puffed up into a cat twice his size. Makoto looks conflicted between chasing after them and stomping Goro’s head in. Ryuji and Ann gaze at one another, bodies stiff, ready to catch Ren if he should fall. They both look equally as ready to finish the job. It doesn’t look like it would take much.
Only Yusuke is smiling.
He’s not sure exactly how things progress. Some part of Ren recedes backwards, that sobbing weakness. It leaves behind the shadow of a leader.
“Fox, Skull, help me pick him up. Panther, support his head. Don’t let his neck move any more than it has to.”
The cat speaks up: “Joker, surely we’re not-”
“We are.” He says, leaving no space for argument. “We don’t leave a thief behind. Nijima, take my phone. You know Takemi Tae, give her a call. Let’s get him to an alleyway. The less he has to move, the better.”
The back-alley doctor seems perfectly at home in the dingy space between a restaurant and a lawyer’s office, humming harmonizing with the roar of an AC unit a decade past its prime.
“What in the world have you gotten up to, guinea pig? Next thing I know, I’m going to be patching up a yakuza’s gunshot wounds.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time you’ve done that, Plague-senpai.” Ren finds the space to joke only because it’s the only thing keeping him from a total breakdown. He’s already punched the bricks hard enough to peel the skin off of one of his knuckles. Assured that the Black Mask was in decent hands, the rest of his thieves have left – sans, as expected, Fox.
“How moving. Of course, the Hippocratic Oath necessitates doing no harm, and yet that also means helping those that do the most. I can see a number of artistic parallels, such that-”
“You…” Akechi growls, mouth half-full of blood. He has to spit red onto his chin to enunciate properly. “Shut it before I…”
Yusuke doesn’t seem offended at all. He just leans back against the wall like a samurai in the opening of some old anime.
“Guinea pig, I want you to hit his knee with the pommel of your knife.”
“I don’t have-”
Takemi’s glare pulls the denial away. Ren does as she asks. Akechi nearly kicks him in the groin in response. Both Takemi and Ren grin at the response.
“We’re looking at a couple of pints of blood missing, though not enough to necessitate a transfusion. It would make it easier, but… I’m assuming that hospitals are once again out of the question. I haven’t seen this one before. A new stray?”
“F-Fuck. You.”
“Mouthy, this one. I like him. Your little gaggle seems a bit too sanitized without him.”
“I can give blood.” Ren is still locked on the quantity of blood lost, certain that it’s more than a couple of pints. “We’re the same blood type.”
“Ah!” Yusuke gasps, “as fated rivals should be.”
Ren had grown to hate those early days of his friendship with Akechi, when the older boy had been so fucking annoyingly polite, when he’d had to try so hard to bring that fire and brimstone to the surface, when the light only shone through in little cracks of the facade. That banal conversation, though, had done a lot. No one thought that Ren listened as intently as he did, a detective himself.
“You don’t… You don’t know that. It’s-”
“B Negative.” Ren answers for him. “It’s in my dossier of you-”
Akechi gags on a mouthful of blood, turns his head against Takemi’s instruction, and spits it out. One of his molars is missing, and a clot now blooms between two pearly teeth.
“Kill me over it later.” Ren tells him, and half means it.
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Goro spends the coming hours near the Velvet Room, a place between conscious and sub-conscious. He says words that mean nothing to faceless people, listens to words that fail to register as speech. All he feels is pain. Then, the weightlessness of being carried by four hands. Lips press against his forehead, soft like his mother’s. For a moment, he thinks he’s died.
His eyes open. And Amamiya fucking Ren is looking at him with those pathetic, sappy, sacrificial eyes. The same ones he’d had just seconds before getting his brains splattered onto an interrogation room wall.
Akechi wants nothing more than to strangle him. His body will not move. There is an IV in his hand, a heart-monitor gripping his trigger finger. Decorum necessitates that he play the role he needs to. There’s a doctor perched behind Ren, in a stool, flicking the stick of a lollipop between her lips like it’s an unsmoked cigarette.
“Goodness, am I in the hospital? The strangest thing happened. I was walking to a meeting at the SIU Building, and suddenly I was being pulled into an alleyway. Something hit the back of my head. Did anyone identify the perpetrator?”
“Drop the shit, kid.” The blue-haired doctor is grinning at him.
Akechi relaxes muscles he didn’t even know were still tense. They’re all stiff. “Oh,” he hisses, “Thank God.”
Ren, that bastard, is smiling like an idiot.
“He’s done.” The leader of the Thieves tells him. “We changed his heart.”
“And you didn’t put a bullet in his head. Wonderful. Just what I wanted, another simpering idiot with a guilt complex.”
“I could have killed him.” Ren says, devoid of emotion, and for a moment Goro finds his own simmering rage behind those black, black eyes. My gun was pressed against his forehead. All my finger had to do was squeeze.”
“But you failed to do that, Joker.” Goro knows the kindness he’s been shown; the kept promise, every last debt paid with interest. He can’t handle that, can’t handle any of this. All he knows to do is bite like the rabid dog he is. Loki purrs in his ear, whispers a never ending stream of kill kill bleed kill gouge bite tear rip tear kill kill. “Deep down, you’re too afraid to do what needs to be done.”
“Killing him,” Joker bites back. Whether he realizes he’s mirroring his rival’s strychnine-saccharine tone isn’t clear. “Wasn’t my decision.”
“No, of course it wasn’t, because your friends are such bleeding hearts that-”
“I would have blown his brains all over that fucking building if I’d had just a split second of privacy.”
“I’m going to see myself out-” The doctor, he recognizes briefly as one of Ren’s collaborators, hurries off, grants them a moment of privacy. The whole time, Joker is staring back at him, expression so full of hate he looks ready to cry blood. Goro is almost proud of him.
“I would have kept our promise,” he continues. “Not the one that the rest of the thieves made to you. Our promise.”
This sentimental fool still has the glove in his jacket pocket.
Goro wants to kill him even more, now. He can’t help it, though, because he’s grinning like the manic thing he is, baring his teeth at Joker, bloody mouth on full display.
“Now,” Joker asks, voice so low Akechi has to shut his eyes to hear. “What happened in there?”
It’s all blurry, but Akechi’s used to that. Call of Chaos does not give one space for regret, for rumination after the fact. He can piece enough together.
“I shot that fucking double in the head.”
“There were…”
“Two shots, I’m aware. Just under my eye. Good thing I was already in Hell. There was nowhere for me to go.”
Ren now has enough space to admire his rival’s wiry musculature. In his desperate attempts to occupy his trembling hands with something, Takemi had told him to hold his shirt taut while she cut it the rest of the way off. He’s shrugged off the thin sheet that covered his chest. His arms, freshly wiped down, still ooze blood.
He’s shredded all the way down, a mimic of his truer Persona. Loki’s stripes – angry scars and freshly opened wounds – coat his arms in uneven brushstrokes that would give Yusuke a migraine. His chest, meanwhile, is dotted with patches of scar tissue. He’d been shot too many times for comfort, had washed them away with a couple of somas Ren had snuck into his bag November 18th..
“I suppose I feel like I deserve them.” Akechi says, robbed of all vitriol. “I also wouldn’t put it past him to have yet another contingency. It should have been me.”
That last masks falls, and he looks like a child again, all fear and uncertainty. Ren doesn’t dare touch him, despite the innate desire to comfort. Goro’s lip quivers.
“Are these just fluids?”
“Just fluids. You missed the blood transfusion?”
Goro doesn’t remember that, and that pisses him off. He knows that – but he’s far too tired to show that. The venom in his stomach burns up his throat like bile. His gums are swollen.
“Takemi thinks you hit your mouth on the concrete. When you left the Palace.”
“Hmph.” Akechi thinks about spitting at his rival, but swallows the iron and bitterness. “Bastard.”
One last ignobility from his father.
“So what now?” He asks, tracing the bloodied edges of his teeth his with tongue. “The all-forgiving Phantom Thieves wipe away my sins, welcome me back into the fold, after the slightest of tongue-lashings?”
And Ren laughs, warm and invigorating like the coffee he brews. The scent of it is on him even now, cutting through the antiseptic tang. “Oh, definitely not. Haru would like to kill you with her battleaxe.”
“You know I wouldn’t make it easy.”
“We all know that, Crow.” Akechi feels a jolt in the back of his brain. It’s the first time since his betrayal that Joker has used his codename. Somehow, in spite of what he knows to be true, it’s an open door back. “She’d be a good warmup before our rematch.”
It’s so… Akechi cackles until his chest seizes.
Ren never stopped understanding him, he thinks. Perhaps he’s starting to agree with the Black Mask’s methods over his own team’s.
“Well,” he purrs, “I suppose we’ll have to arrange that. I’d loathe an audience… but I’ll make an exception for you.”
“Someone has to samarecarm the both of you.”
“Hmph. As if I’d ever…”
“No,” Joker says, quietly, “No one but me.”