Chapter Text
Morgana is heavier at night.
Not when he’s in Akira’s bag, nor when he’s climbing on the Phantom Thieves’ shoulders or butting his head against their legs. Just at night, when it’s just him and Akira and the noises outside the window—cats digging through trash, dogs barking, a man shouting at his girlfriend that she’s “just so shallow!” and a slamming door.
The first time Akira notices, he doesn’t draw the connection. It’s their first night together, after all. He isn’t used to sharing his bed with anyone, let alone a strange not-cat. Akira squirms and It’s not until Morgana leaves the Phantom Thieves over his fight with Ryuji several months later that Akira really considers the difference.
Although Morgana had been heavy in his sleep, his absence is even heavier.
Later, when they find out the truth of Morgana’s existence—about how he’s a vessel for all of humanity’s hopes and dreams, a living beacon of optimism in the face of crushing misery and indolence—Akira Gets It.
After all, hope is a heavy thing. It can sit, thick and viscous, in the back of someone’s throat. It threatens to consume, to cloy, because if the thing that you hope for doesn’t happen, it’s going to hurt so much more. Isn’t it better to simply not get your hopes up?
But without hope, existence is so much heavier. The will to continue, to improve, gets swept away and all you’re left with is crushing doubt…and loss. No wonder Yaldabaoth deemed it necessary to remove Morgana’s memories and lock him away: hope was the natural cure for indolence.
So, yeah. It makes sense that Morgana is heavier at night, when there is nothing else to distract from one’s hopes and dreams and he lets his guard down in rest.
Whether this is one of his special abilities—like how he transforms from a cat to a car—or just a weird trick of physics, Akira isn’t sure. He just knows that he’ll do his best to protect this flame of hope, even if he is basically just a cat now.
Not that him being a cat has ever detracted from Morgana’s skills and knowledge as a phantom thief. For having paws instead hands, he’s weirdly dexterous, and the versatility of becoming different forms of transportation is incredible and useful. Nobody else can do what Morgana does.
And yeah, he might be a little bit of a control freak sometimes. He likes things to be done a certain way, is quick to anger when things aren’t going according to his carefully plotted plans, and he can be annoyingly insistent and impatient. Hope is often like that, too.
But most of all, Morgana is the glue that sticks them all together. He is the reason they started exploring the Metaverse in depth, the one who taught them how to navigate its depths. And through this, Akira found connections with so many people and learned so much. Morgana was the only reason they could progress as far as they had when they were trying to save Yusuke, had been the only one who could get close enough to Futaba in the beginning, and the reason they got to meet Haru, too.
Throughout all the ups and downs of the Phantom Thieves, hope has ever been the connection between all of them—the core of the will of rebellion they all felt—and Morgana represented that connection. They just weren’t complete without him.
So yeah.
The weight of humanity’s hopes and dreams could be incredibly heavy. But Akira—and the rest—were all too happy to help shoulder that weight for their Magician.