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Damn it.
Damn it, damn it—
He was so close, they were so close—he had seen Akechi swaying towards them, the phantom touch of his hand sliding into his own for one shining moment where Akira believed something might go right for once. That Akechi would choose them, him—
And now a dead-eyed puppet wearing Akechi's face had a gun trained on Akechi's head, a horde of Shadows arcing through the room and poised to strike.
Akechi was slipping through his fingers, phantom touch turned to wisps of sand impossible to hold.
Akechi raised his gun, muzzle trained on Akira's forehead. Their eyes met. Akira saw the glint in that wine-red gaze, and he knew.
Akira lunged forward as Akechi whirled, as bullets fired, as alarms blared.
He wasn't fast enough to get past the final barrier Akechi raised between them.
Akira slammed into the bulkhead door, rebounding from the force. He stumbled, hissing as every ache clinging within his skin vividly reminded him that three brutal fights in a row and slamming into solid metal had consequences to his abused body. His leg burned the worst, where bruises went bone-deep and slowed him down. Too slow—
"Let's make a deal, okay? You won't say no, will you?" Akechi asked, tinny through the thick (unbreachable—) metal. Akira barely heard him over the roar of blood in his ears. "Change Shido's heart, in my stead."
No, please. You should be there. It's your fight.
He couldn't breathe. His heart hammered against his ribs, barbed and violent.
I can't lose him, please, not him.
"You promised!" Akira shoved against the metal, forehead grinding into the unforgiving shutters, willing the door to yield, bend, give him back. "I still have your glove."
"You…" Akechi trailed off, laughing roughly. "Sorry, Joker. You'll just have to add that to the list of my many lies."
He really was resigned to dying here. To going out in one last comet flare of violence, biting and snapping because Akechi never rolled over easy and wouldn't start now, in a hopeless battle. To save them.
"Don't do this." Akira's voice cracked. His hands curled to fists against the door, as he fractured.
Tears were worthless, his mother said. An embarrassment, his father preached. Akira did not cry. Not when he broke his arm in middle school from a rough fall in gymnastics. Not when he was falsely accused, not when his parents and everyone he knew forsook him for grime beneath their heel, not when he was isolated in Tokyo without a single friendly face. Not when his world was nothing but four concrete walls and needles and pain and violence and a mantra to keep his damn mouth shut because he would never let those fuckers hear him beg mercy—
Akira did not cry.
He bit his lip, vision blurring, and tasted salt.
Akechi was mere feet away, all his brilliance and beauty and star-bright rage right there, behind cold metal, and if Akira didn't do something now the nova of all Akechi was would be gone.
None of his Personas could get through the door. They didn't have the strength. He didn't have the strength.
He refused to leave Akechi here to fucking die in the bowels of his asshole father's ship. He'd give anything. He'd beg, he'd pray, he'd switch places with him, he didn't care, just please, someone—
A presence rose within his mind, overwhelming and cataclysmic. Pressure built behind his eyes. Threatened to crack his skull in two.
"I have the strength you seek, voleur de coeurs, but your heart is not yet prepared to hold me." The voice resounded through his head, each word a drilling spike to his skull. It was almost Arsene, with the same rich cadence and velvet promise. But where Arsene was fire and fury, this one was smoke and tempered steel. Like Arsene, distilled and refined to the truest core.
Agony pulsed from his temples and lanced down his spine, thorns lodging between every column. Fire seared through his veins, charring into his fingertips. He choked on smoke and ash in his lungs.
Akira dropped in time with the gunshots he didn't hear over the sound of his own screaming. His knees cracked against the ground.
He remembered this sensation.
This was so much worse than Arsene.
(He didn't hear the panicked shouts, the footsteps rushing towards him, Oracle's aborted cry: "Wait, don't touch him—" Didn't feel a glancing touch or hear the yelp of pain when a friend burned through their gloves trying to help him.)
"Would you risk forfeiting your life to break fate's will over your knee? All to save your beloved betrayer from a death claimed deserved?"
He doesn't deserve this, Akira snarled back, burning, burning, burning. The pounding of his head pitched towards crescendo, so acute he was blind with it. Fuck that and fuck fate if all it wants is his blood on the wall. Crush my heart if you have to. Just get through that door. Let me reach him.
The voice hummed, pleased, approving. "Very well. Your resolve and utmost loyalty has forged a new path before you, one to walk with your beloved at your side. Now steal back what fate dare take from you. Call upon my name, and we'll rend fate apart!"
Something, hot and wet, dripped down his face and stained his gloves as he reached for his mask. Blood coated his tongue, yet all he tasted was ash.
"Do try to not allow me kill you, chere voleur."
"RAOUL!"
Tearing Raoul forth from his heart was, he knew, the closest he had ever come to death. The pressure in his skull rubberband-snapped backwards, spearing through brain matter and down his throat, into his chest. His heart stopped, his lungs convulsed, and he stayed conscious through the mortal fucking agony of it all by sheer, vehement, white-knuckled will.
He had not survived worse than this—all previous close calls were frivolous in comparison—he shouldn't survive ripping something much too big, too great, from his soul and channeling it through his body. And yet.
He wouldn't die here. Akechi wouldn't die here.
When his heart jolted back into beat, it came back on fire.
He heaved for breath, smelling smoke like incense, tasting blood and salt and ash. He staggered to his feet, blinking black stars from his vision. The vignette around the edges refused to abate. That was fine; he could see enough.
Like Raoul, wicked sharp heels and black-gold mechanical wings cleaving through the bulkhead door, wreathed in blue flames and shrouded in twisting smoke.
He couldn't quite hear anything over the din of his own stuttering pulse and a pervasive ringing in his ears. Blood poured down his face in worrying amounts, and when he tried to wipe away the nosebleed, his glove came away soaked after the first pass, and his head fucking hurt, but he was. Fine.
He was getting on the other side of that damn door.
A golden-blade heel sheared through the last layer of metal. Akira ducked through the opening, tripping in his haste and catching himself on ragged metal. Raoul remained a steady presence at his back. Smoke curled around him, spreading through the room.
There, framed by his dark-vignette vision, just a few steps ahead; Akechi lay in a pool of his own blood, unmoving.
He dove for him, abused knees electric with old and fresh pain as he crashed to the ground beside his too-still form. He pressed a hand to Akechi's chest, holding his own breath.
He prepared himself for the lack of a drumming heart, prepared himself to summon Norn and slam Samarecarm spells into Akechi's body one after another until either his heart started beating or the overexertion killed Akira. Whichever came first.
Akechi was breathing, shallowly. Stubbornly clinging to life, even when he'd given up on it.
Akira sobbed, new tears adding to the mess of his face. Always so contradictory, his rival.
(He didn't think about the rest of the room: the dead puppet, shot between the eyes, the scattering of dissolving Shadows, the dangerous, agitated horde still left standing.)
(Raoul loomed above his little thief and dear beloved-killer-chosen, grinning at the Shadows and daring them to step forth with a curl of his claws. The hellfire trapped in his eyes sparked with vicious promise. His heels gleamed in the light of blue flames not yet banked, wings shining in the crimson alarm lights and casting long, daunting shadows up the height of the torn bulkhead door.
The Shadows hesitated.)
Akira gently, tenderly, lifted Akechi and cradled him to his chest, holding him fiercely with one hand around his back and the other steadying his head. He pressed his pounding temple into down-soft hair, vanilla and gunpowder overriding the scents of iron and incense, trying and failing to bridle the desire to never let him go again.
"…Joker?"
It was hardly a whisper, rendered weak and frail and everything Akechi wasn't.
Akira looked across the room, at the Shadows edging towards them, at the blood on their claws, the bullet casings at their feet. Rage, vibrant and hot and protective, blistered to life in his already-burning heart. He pulled Akechi impossibly closer. "I've got you."
Pistons and leather shifted above them. Raoul's wings flared, smoke dancing and curling into a phantom curtain.
He wanted to eviscerate them all—shred and disembowel with curses, turn the remnants to ash with flames, grind the puppet's body down to the atom—for what they'd done to Akechi. But his body warned otherwise, a bone-deep weariness that ached (beyond all the other hurts and agonies ravaging his body) permeating every nerve. Now wasn't the time for violence, much less vengeance. And with Raoul, they didn't need to fight. They didn't need to run, either.
The curtain fell across the Shadows, heavy and dark. Some fell immediately, dropping to the ground as the sleep affliction took them. Others railed against its weight, hissing and snarling. They all succumbed, in the end, Raoul's Phantom Show striking with all the force of Hypnos' hand.
He closed his eyes as the last threat collapsed, nuzzling into Akechi's hair, and finally dismissed Raoul.
His mask settled over his face, and Raoul within his mind and heart, still overwhelming, but less so, now that he'd cracked himself in half and violently carved out a space between viscera and sinew for him to dwell.
The migraine and relentless nosebleed seemed to be staying regardless of whether Raoul manifested or not.
He was in the process of figuring out how to stand, carry Akechi, and not pass out on the way out of the ship when someone crouched down next to him, their knees lightly thudding against the metal.
He pried an eye open in time to watch the green cast of healing magic rain over both of them. Its power was weak, drained as his team was, and didn't do much at all for him. (It wouldn't, the consequences of awakening to a Persona far beyond his caliber were bound to be outside the limits of healing spells.) Akechi breathed a little easier against him, though, and that's what counted.
It was Ryuji crouched beside him, looking pale and waxen, brows knitted gravely. The expression didn't suit him.
Akira's eyes slipped shut as Ryuji wavered into melting colors and kaleidoscope shapes. "Just…need a minute." His words were slurring. "…I'll get up and we can…" He sucked in a breath, vertigo threatening to knock him over. He clung to Akechi, clung to consciousness. "Sorry."
"Dude, you've done more than enough. We'll take it from here."
He frowned, because that wasn't—
"We're gonna get you and Akechi out of here and to that scary doctor of yours. Just rest, man." Ryuji's hand settled on his upper back. "You did it. We're all safe."
Akira's body gave way under the gentle support. Still clinging to the star-bright boy who tried to kill him twice and die for him once, the star-bright boy who held Akira's heart in his hands and didn't understand how loved he was—with all the irrational, relentless emotion Akira had to offer—everything went black.
"You're a fucking idiot."
The scathing critique was belied by how softly it was whispered and the fingers massaging in gentle circles along the back of his head with an assuredness that spoke of experience.
"Worth it," Akira mumbled, voice a slurring wobble.
His eyes were closed, but he could picture Akechi's scowl. He smiled weakly imagining it and pushed his face further into the exceptionally high-thread count pillow beneath him in a backwards attempt to relieve the pressure jack-hammering through his skull.
Honestly, he was considering asking Haru to take her axe to his head. It would probably hurt less.
Getting here, in Akechi's bed with Akechi sitting beside him and Akechi's fingers in his hair, was… blurry.
He vaguely remembered waking up and immediately regretting it as bright lights seared through his eyelids and turned a lamentable pain into all-consuming torture. Remembered blessedly-cool cloth being laid over his abused eyes, Takemi's voice in his ear saying things like: "One instruction, guinea pig. I gave you one instruction: take it easy while your body healed. Not even three weeks later you're dragged in here, blood soaked all the way down your shirt and half-way to being a damn cadaver on my table—" and "multiple hemorrhages" and "bet your head feels like a pressure cooker, doesn't it?"
Time fluctuated after that, and then there was a cacophony of half-shushed voices that weren't hushed enough to spare his pressure-cooker skull, and he groaned… something that made them quiet down.
He remembered Akechi's voice (—Akechi was okay, Akechi was safe. He reached him in time, Akira realized with a knot heavy in his throat—), quiet but no less venomous for it, refusing to stay in a "damned back-alley hospital" and "The dingy little attic, are you insane? Are you daft enough to think that travesty of a bed would do me any favors, much less him? Absolutely not." (He was so prissy and high maintenance. Gods, Akira loved him.)
Then there was something about Akechi's apartment, he thought, and a burst of too-loud discontent that had him groaning again, and Akechi continued, "If I still wanted him dead, I wouldn't do it while he's this pathetic. It'd be a waste of my time."
Ryuji, bless him, had risen (much too loudly) to his defense, "Don't call him pathetic! He's like this because he nearly died to save you!"
To which Akira whined pathetically. There was a smack and a hissed 'shush' and more quiet arguing that blurred to empty static in his ears.
There were flashes of a pill being urged into his mouth, of a car ride, of being dead weight against someone's side, and coming back into some form of cognizance thanks to Takemi's definitely-illegally-strong medication just in time to hear Akechi whisper-shrieking to 'get the fuck out of his house.'
And now they were here: two bottles of unlabeled, high-grade painkillers on the bedside table with their names on it and a strict dosage schedule Akira would absolutely be abusing to get through the rest of the Palace later.
Akira still felt he was missing some pieces between 'going to Akechi's apartment' and 'Akechi massaging his head in a blatantly sweet gesture', but thinking too hard about it nailed stakes through his temples, so he was rolling with it (and definitely not complaining.)
"'Worth it,'" Akechi mocked, voice still a whisper. "Do you understand you'll feel like this, without reprieve, for a month—if you're lucky—or longer? Why—" He stopped himself, hissing out a breath. "Didn't your Persona warn you?"
Month-long migraine from hell seemed like a steal in return for both of them alive, together. "Mm," Akira shrugged the shoulder he wasn't laying on. Talking aggravated the hell migraine, and dredging up words was a Herculean task, but Akechi deserved what answers he could give. "Raoul said… might die. Didn't care."
"You were that content to throw your life away?"
"Needed to reach you."
Akechi's breath shuddered. The hand in his hair stilled, but didn't pull away.
The silence sat heavy, weighted with Akechi's measured breaths, the click of his throat as he swallowed. "I'm not— You shouldn't— Why would you—" He'd never heard Akechi fumble for words before. There was another pause, another swallow that sounded like it hurt, and Akechi whispered, voice so uncertain, "Why…?"
I'm not letting you off your promise so easily.
I didn't know how selfish I could be until I met you.
There's very little I wouldn't do for you.
I don't want to live in a world that doesn't have you in it.
Because I love you.
The thoughts crowded his already-splitting head and flooded his throat, unable to pass his tongue cottoning to the roof of his mouth.
He braved peeling his eyes open, wincing as even the faint city lights through the curtains skewered into his retinas.
His vision was slow to focus, but once the colors coalesced into distinct shapes—rich comforter he couldn't place the color of in the dark, Akechi leaning back against the headboard, one knee drawn towards his chest, hip near Akira's head, his fingers clenched bone-white into the fabric of his pants—Akira reached out and caught Akechi's hand in his own to drag closer.
He rolled his eyes up to meet Akechi's (and holy shit did such a basic action fucking hurt—)
Akechi watched him, the planes of his face shadowed, half-lit only by the streetlights outside. Wounded, with bruises under his eyes and mottling his jaw, scrapes slashing through constellations of freckles across the bridge of his nose and over his cheekbone. Bandages wrapped around his neck, disappearing beneath the collar of his long-sleeved shirt to protect hidden injuries. Alive, emotions like solar flares in wine eyes—distress, confusion, concern, and a thousand others Akira couldn't discern in the sparking afterimage. Brow pinched, mouth twisted, even as he let Akira hold onto and tug at his hand. His warmth radiated against Akira's hand, his scalp, where Akechi's leg nearly brushed against him.
He was radiant in the dark, without his masks, with candid, bare honesty on his face. Devastatingly beautiful, for all he looked like hell grinded him between its teeth and spat him back out.
Akira held Akechi's gaze and pressed a kiss to the heel of his ungloved palm.
Akechi's breath hitched, his eyes flaring wide as saucers. His fingers twitched against Akira's cheek.
Akira smiled, lips still pressed to warm skin. His eyes slipped closed, unable to bear the faint light any longer, no matter how he wanted to see what emotions flitted across Akechi's face or burned in his eyes.
He hoped he got the message across—he didn't have much else in him at the moment.
The mattress dipped as Akechi shifted, his hands moving to cradle Akira's head between his palms, and oh, that was nice—maybe Akechi could stay just like that and keep his skull from splitting in half and leaking brain matter all over the expensive pillows like it wanted to.
When Akechi spoke, his voice was much closer, exhalations feather-soft across his face. Akira might have jumped if he'd had the energy for it. "You're incorrigible. You have every reason to hate me and instead you pull shit like this. Ripping yourself open to reach beyond your limits, uncaring that your brain was hemorrhaging and your heart physically burning within your chest. You have a whole city of people who adore you, a life brimming with their love ahead of you, and you were ready to throw it all away on the chance you could have me instead. " A thumb brushed the tender skin beneath his eye. "You want me terribly, don't you?"
Akira slid his hand over Akechi's, pressing it firmer against his cheek. Mumbled an assenting noise.
Akechi laughed lowly, disbelieving and edging on manic. "Senseless. You're not supposed to want your own murderer. Anyone else would have let me die behind that door, regardless of sentiment or crippling savior complex." Both his thumbs swept across Akira's face now, exploring the arch of his cheekbones and the span of his lashes. Akira hummed softly under the attention. "But not you."
The sheets rustled, a quiet shush of fabric against fabric.
Something soft and warm pressed against his forehead. Breath displaced his hair.
Akira's sluggish mind sifted through the sensations for far too long before realizing Akechi was kissing his forehead.
The sigh Akira let out was a shaky, pitchy thing. If only moving his head was an option right now, he'd lean into the touch and indulge, insolently seek out more affection like a spoiled cat.
Lips still a fluttering touch against his skin, Akechi whispered, "Fine then, Akira. You can have me. And I'm going to ruin you, burrow under your skin and behind your ribs to stain you irrevocably until this is a choice you can never take back. Until you can never stop wanting me."
Akechi touched him so gently, almost reverently, as he promised the sweetest violence.
Akira smiled.
He'd hold him to that promise, too.
(Later, when it was almost time to beat the shit out of Shido's Shadow—and, after that, God—Akira would pop painkillers like candy while Goro watched him with disgust and called him a 'fucking idiot' once more.
His idiot, Akira would correct and watch fondly as Goro rolled his eyes.
Goro would grab him by the high collar of his coat, drag him in for a searing kiss and leave him breathless as the other Thieves hollered behind them.
Akira would walk the path he forged in blood and fire and loyalty, Goro at his side, Raoul laughing inside his head.)
(And, even later:
"Loki was your Raoul, wasn't he?"
"Excuse me?"
"They feel the same. Overwhelming, brimming with this… unfettered potential. You Awoke to him too early, didn't you?"
"…Keep your outlandish theories to yourself.")