Chapter Text
Leblanc Slate
Justice v. Vengeance
He had come around to his new real. The reality he was living in wasn’t the one he knew. He was living a life that never should have been his, the life of the person he held the most loathing, contempt, and envy for out of every last misbegotten fool on the planet. The… friends he had made, from the cat, to the meathead, the bimbo, the airhead… Ugh. He still wasn’t sure how they’d interpreted his disdain for kindness. For kinship. It wasn’t some accomplishment to find that Kamoshida freak repugnant. Or if it was, the human race was destined for failure. It wasn’t impressive to want to tear down one more lying bastard like Madarame, rich off of the work of others, and the sweet lies he told—far too much like that monster to be allowed to continue on his way.
Justice? Meaningless. Mercy? Worthless. Heroism? Don’t make him laugh.
Revenge was sweeter than Justice by far. Both could only be enforced by the strong, but Revenge was something you took for yourself, not something you gave away, and hoped that the rest of the powerful of society allowed to proceed. Mercy… why not kill? Why allow your enemy the chance to kill you again? It was irrational, something that should have been culled from the population as an evolutionary dead end. And playing the Hero? What did the Hero get? Heroes were nothing but wage-slaves, answerable to every last dullard on the street, paid in scraps of appreciation and kindness, and browbeaten for the slightest shortcoming. Villains paid their own wage, and had the luxury of anonymity.
Something his associates didn’t understand. Unfortunately, they had made themselves too valuable to simply discard. Barely.
The only reason he hadn’t simply killed them, Kamoshida and Madarame both—as he had every Palace-holder and self-destructing Shadow he was aimed at by that bastard in his last life—was that the others wouldn’t have stood for it. They didn’t have the guts for murder. Unfortunately, he couldn’t simply kill their targets and banish the petulant, buzzing flies that gathered around him at every opportunity. Because for some reason, some inexplicable twist of fate… He didn’t have Loki anymore. Without his Persona‘s power—his true Persona’s power— he couldn’t subvert the Shadows by force, couldn’t bull his way through the palaces with a growing army of enslaved emotions and thoughts at his beck and call. Without the strength of the God of Lies, he couldn’t obliterate whatever stood in his way.
Damn it, he didn’t even have Robin Hood! No, instead…
Fantomas . He’d done some research—unlike Joker’s Persona, Arsene, he didn’t even have the decency to be based on someone from a piece of decent literature. Fantomas was from a serial , and in the nineteen hundreds, that was hardly more reputable than a self-published webcomic.
Ah, but that brought him back. Back to reality. Fantomas was… pathetic, really, but growing stronger—much as he imagined Arsene had grown into something formidable, rather than beginning that way like Loki had. But Arsene was, of course, Joker’s. Was, as in Akechi no longer knew if that was the case.
Because Joker had just walked into Leblanc, with an empty, false, careless smile, an excuse about evading his fans, and trying to engage him in polite chit-chat. It made the change real. The subversion of reality, the alteration of everything he knew. It brought back the questions of psychosis again. The internal debates of what, precisely, happened to one who was murdered in the Metaverse. How dying inside the mind of another affected your own psyche.
The only moment more Earth-shattering to him had been that first day. Waking up to a LINE message, haphazardly constructed and inexpertly spaced in a way that screamed the auto-correct of the messager’s phone had been as busy as it was ineffectual. From his mother. He froze, then. Something he wouldn’t do here. Then she called, worried he hadn’t gotten her message, insistent that he couldn’t miss his first day, and he had mumbled out some response, playing it off as tired, using years of experience at lying and pretending and acting, years of experience predicated on her death to fool the woman he prized over everything else in the world.
Her voice, her soft concern, the stern, playful way she told him ‘No sweetie, you can’t just pull the covers over your head!’ After he hung up, he cried, and he couldn’t do that today, because if he was living the life of Joker, attending Shujin in honor of his accomplishments as a junior detective, looked down on for needing a scholarship by all of the preppy little idiots, if he was assembling and leading the Phantom Thieves from disaster to disaster, that meant that Joker … was working for Shido. That… Bastard.
Destroy Joker’s limp attempts to gather information on him and the Phantom Thieves first. Worry about… about how real this all is, if he’ll ever get to see his mother again for real, in person, and not just through a screen… later. He could wait, for his breakdown. He was good at that.
“Nice to meet you,” Akechi said formally, affixing the face he’d long since discarded when around his subordinates that thought themselves equals. Even if they weren’t friends, weren’t anything more than colleagues at best , they at the very least didn’t mind him dropping the role of soft, smiling dullard for his true feelings. “My name is Goro Akechi. I’d say please take care of me…” He chuckled, insincerely, and gestured at the apron he wore. “But that wouldn’t make much sense at the moment. Do you have your order ready, or would you like to take a few minutes? I’d definitely recommend the curry, and it pairs well with…”
The chatter continued on, inane. Empty. A worthless waste of both of their time, to the point where Akechi was wondering if the smiling, somewhat daft expressions on Joker’s face truly were representative of an empty head, rather than a cunning ruse.
Then the other boy slipped.
“How do you manage it all by yourself?” Joker asked, bemused. The coffee in front of him was shoddily brewed, but the idiot didn’t seem to notice, or if he had he didn’t think it important enough to break character. The Boss would be mad at him for not treating a customer to his best effort, but he was out at the moment, looking after the daughter he thought Akechi didn’t know about.
Really, even if he hadn’t had the knowledge from before this… reset. He was a detective , in another life, and he made time to help Ms. Nijima even in this life—inroads with the prosecutor’s office could spare him a lot of trouble, if things turned against him—Sakura knew this. Why he thought his secrets remained secrets were a mystery, to Akechi. Not everyone was a silently trusting, vapid fool.
“What do you mean?” Akechi asked, head bobbing to the side with a small, polite smile on his features.
“All of the extracurriculars?” He asked. “You intern with the prosecutor’s office, you work here part time, you keep your grades up, you’re joining the track team… is there anything you don’t do? Wearing so many hats, inhabiting so many Personas…”
The subtle emphasis, the fishing joke. Either an attempt to startle a response out of Akechi, or a joke to hold over the unsuspecting other. Joker had gotten careless, and sloppy, and it was all the proof that Akechi needed.
He would watch his back, on his next foray into the Metaverse. He needed to cut Shido’s dog out from under him quickly. The longer he had a suitable agent within the Metaverse, the more dangerous things got for Akechi and the rest of the Phantom Thieves.
Knife, gun, or… ugh. Words?
His attempts to negotiate with any but the simplest of Personas to share their power with him had been laughable, thus far. He hoped that the others of his team wouldn’t demand that they try negotiations first. The rational part of him had already discarded that distant hope though—they were too softhearted to kill a threat until they knew that there was no other way.
Worst case… he could always try a repeat performance. Joker would have no idea that Akechi and his subordinates knew. They could lay a trap for him before the other boy ever started. Turn things around on him, as Joker had on him in that other life.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Akechi responded. “I’ve only ever been myself. Though sometimes I wish I could live a different life… I’m pretty happy with the one I have right now.”
Ugh. Such sweet words were liable to rot his teeth. He wished that Sojiro allowed him to drink coffee on the job—he needed to wash the taste out of his mouth before he couldn’t forget it.
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