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Life is not a miracle, believed Akechi, it is a choice. Each breath, while made unconsciously, is used for infinitely possible choices.
Akechi chooses, on January 2nd, to watch the snow fall from the sky. Likely something for a simpler man to enjoy. He walks through Tokyo like a bird overhead; not truly seeing, just passing through. Everyone is smiling, laughing with each other. Their voices are full of easy joy. Akechi only hears his own voice in his ears.
Perhaps he had been the one indulging in the fantasy, then, even before this began. The conversations he’d shared with Amamiya, the casual banter with the Thieves - he knew it was all fake, but he can hear the soaring of his heart as it had been then in the voices all around him. He can hear the hollow silence in his skull as he fell each night and rose every morning of those days when he opens the door to Cafe Leblanc and says: “You know, don’t you?”
~*~
While Amamiya works whatever bullshit with his friends, Akechi pushes certain limits of his own.
Crime still exists, certainly, though he watches names in his files disappear as the criminals do. Maruki claims to wish to erase all pain, but whose joy must he sacrifice to gift to another? Akechi starts listing, and he senses a cycle. What goes around, comes around, he supposes. The ‘justice’ that Maruki seems to believe in is karma.
He has one final hypothesis to test.
The day after the newly bound Phantom Thieves rescue Yoshizawa, Akechi takes a walk. He walks and walks and walks, his footsteps leave prints in the snow and his breaths leave condensation in the air. He trails himself further and further away, until he is alone once more in the world, with just himself and his own remnants. The open sea feels freezing even from this far, but Akechi’s skin is numb.
He opens his attache and removes the gun. He places the end of the barrel to his temple and fires.
~*~
He wakes in his bed.
His head is just as hollow as it was before.
~*~
Life has always been a choice. Goro Akechi’s karma is that very choice stolen away from him.
Each day or so, he traverses the Palace with the Thieves. When he leaves, the aches of battle do not subside.
When he wakes after the explosion of a bullet in his ear, the pain has vanished.
“Just the brainless sentimentality I’d expect from you,” he scoffs at Amamiya, who stands patiently at his side in Kichijoji.
“You’re the one here waiting,” the boy replies.
“I certainly underestimated your ego if you think my only reason for ever being here was for you.”
A tilt of his head, a shine of his glasses, “Well, you’re here. Why don’t we do something?”
“What we should be doing is preparing to confront Maruki.”
“Always so single-minded,” chuckles Amamiya, “I’m not acting any differently now than if we were in our real reality either, you know.”
“I do.”
A hum, “Let’s play darts today.”
“Oh really.”
“Why wouldn’t we? Wouldn’t you want to, if we were back?”
Emotions are not something Akechi can choose. He resents that. There’s a hundred things he could say, a lie, a half-truth, a diversion. But he can’t help the sensation in his chest when he remembers, when he feels his life flash before his eyes every night and lets it all go when he fires–
“Akechi?”
The words that leave his mouth, “I should be dead.”
The silence that follows. Amamiya’s shoulder against his own.
“I know.”
Akechi’s head whirls, “Amamiya.”
A huff, “It’s okay, by the way,” Amamiya has the audacity to smile, “that you don’t call me by my first name. The only time you did was then,” Akechi’s throat feels raw in passing, almost like the appearance of a phantom, “the choice you made. I understand. I forgive you.”
“You can’t,” says Akechi, lacking any emotions that he might’ve thought he had, or maybe with all of them at once.
“I do,” because Amamiya isn’t anyone if not someone who only achieves the impossible. “And I might not, tomorrow. Or the next day. Or ever again. But I do, today. I forgive you. And I’m happy you’re alive. That, I always will be.”
I’m dead, Akechi thinks. I’m dead and I’m only standing here now as your own personal fucking accessory, he wants to scream. I’m dead and I still can’t see my mother even though every night I’m going out the same way she did. What he says, “Let’s do billiards instead.”
Ren smiles, and Akechi’s heart soars as it always does.
~*~
The infiltration proceeds as planned, and the route is secured. But every morning, Akechi feels like Maruki is repeatedly spitting in his face. He must know, he must. By this time, Akechi knows his life is no longer his own, just a karmic reward for a simple country boy who accidentally showed a man with a god complex the powers of a said god.
And there’s a question, now, on the tip of his tongue. Instead of wondering if he wants the answer, he ends each night with more lead in his brain.
He gets it without asking on February 2nd. Akechi tastes gunmetal and smoke on his tongue, and Ren stares a hole through his head.
~*~
In the blinding light of morning, of the end of the world, Goro Akechi dies again. He hears Hereward cry out and go silent in one breath. Yet his heart still beats.
He’s felt this before.
With sharpened claw, he reaches out, just a bit further than before. This is the Metaverse, after all, if only its ashes. When he falls during a battle, he rises again at its end, if only with a single ounce of strength. He is still able to choose.
He chooses to stand.
On March 20th, on a train platform departing from Shibuya station to everywhere, to nowhere, Akechi meets Ren Amamiya’s eye once more.
And with the weight of it all in his shoes, the heaviness of 12 bullets in his skull, he asks, “Do you forgive me today?”
Ren crumbles, just slightly, and Akechi holds him just as tightly in his arms as he always did in his heart. “No, goddamnit,” Ren sobs, his tears soaking Akechi’s neck and collar. “I don’t.”
“Alright then,” Akechi rests a hand on Ren’s back. “I’ll ask again tomorrow.”
“Ask me,” Ren insists, “Ask me every day. I want to hear you ask me every day.”
“I will.”
“Ask me in an hour. In five minutes.”
A sigh, “How tedious.”
“I won’t forgive you,” Ren chokes out, “Every day. Promise me I’ll hear your voice every day.”
Akechi remembers to breathe. “Of course, Ren.”
When Ren boards his train, and Morgana eventually pops out to give him a sour look, he finally allows himself to smile. He drifts further and further from Tokyo, and as it becomes a mere speck on the horizon his phone rings. He picks up without hesitation.
“Do you forgive me now?”
Ren can’t help it anymore, and laughs.