Work Text:
If someone asked him to describe his life in as little use of words as possible, he would say miserable.
He had been miserable from the moment he was born into the world with a mother who stared at him with a mixture of love and hate, death dancing on the tips of her fingers whenever she tucked a piece of hair behind his ear. He had been miserable when he had seen men come into their home, his mother pressing money into his hands to keep himself company for the night.
He almost always ended up on a corner near the apartment, sleeping on the harsh sidewalk until his mother came back to get him, bruises covering her body as she promised to make him pancakes; she never did make them in the end.
He was miserable when she died, when he found her in the bathtub with a note that simply said sorry and he wondered what she was apologizing for: Having him or for being alive at all. He was miserable when foster parents took him in and took him back, returning him again and again as if he was a pair of clothes that never fit right.
He was always never right for them.
He was miserable when the Velvet Room opened up to him, Igor sitting at his table and offering him the power to change fates. He was miserable when he stood in front of Shido, revenge and anger boiling in his chest because he couldn’t find anything productive to do with it. He was miserable, scored and hell-bent on ruining the world that had once treated him so poorly, reaping souls as if he were Death itself.
He can still remember how sick he was after his first murder, how it felt like the blood would never come off.
He didn’t care if Japan burned down with Shido, if it ripped into two and sank into the ocean. All that mattered to him was getting revenge, for finding his own justice in a world that had never given him any.
So when he pushes Okumura, a person who objectively hates every fiber of his being, out of the way of a shadow’s attack, he questions what his justice had been about.
What was justice if it led to people dying, to hands covered in blood and bodies laying at his feet? What was justice if one became numb to murder itself, seeing it as a tool rather than an awful thing? What was justice if he was the one who decided the truth, if he was the one who had the last say in it?
The answer, the voices in his head provided, was that his justice was for nothing.
His justice wouldn’t have fixed anything. In fact, it wouldn’t have changed anything at all. He still would have been the abandoned child, unloved and unwanted by those in the world who dared to look at him. Shido dying wouldn’t have righted the wrongs of the adults that hurt him, that turned him into a soulless monster.
If humans had hearts, then what did that make him?
He wonders if his mother still regrets bringing him into the world, if she would look at him with disgust and hatred. If she looked at him, would she see the baby boy that she birthed or the monster that has Shido’s blood in his veins? Would she murder him in the same way that she killed herself? Would she shove his head into the water, fingers wrapped around his neck as she attempted to purge the evil out of him?
Would she even want to touch him at all?
He wonders if this is what the foster families saw when they looked at him, if they saw the evil in him before anyone else did. Were they trying to protect themselves or were they trying to protect him? Did they actually want him or did they want him for sport, a trophy on display for society?
Did Akira actually love him or did Akira just see him as a good fuck?
Did Akira see him the same way those men saw his mother when she brought them back home, pulling them into bedrooms so that she could keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs? Did Akira want anything from him or was this just another game he had been playing?
Was there anyone who was actually dumb enough to want him?
A voice calls out to him, a hand touching his shoulder. He swings wildly, mind hazy with thoughts and feelings.
Was he just another toy, another tool to be used for someone else’s pleasure? Was he just a pawn in a game of chess, his fate left up to gods who thought that his suffering was endlessly funny? Did Igor look at him and see a jester, a fool to play the part of entertaining the king? Did Igor look at him the way one would look at a stage play, a smile and crossed lips that spoke every word that was left unsaid?
Was he nothing but a joke?
“Akechi!”
Hands pull fingers away from his body, blood dripping down his neck as the color runs down the length of his claws. Joker kneels in front of him, brows furrowed as the rest of the Thieves stand behind him. They all stare at him, but he averts his eyes to the ground. He doesn’t want to see the smiles on their faces, the joy that comes from watching someone they hate be so broken.
If he had bothered to look, he would have seen the concern, the mild worry that is aimed in his direction.
He shoves off Joker’s hands, pushing himself up off the ground. He ignores the shaking in his legs, the urge to wrap his arms around him like a hug to walk further into Mementos. If he’s lucky, maybe a reaper will find him and kill him, ending the life-long misery.
Or maybe, Maruki’s reality will fall apart early and he’ll go back to what he should have always been: A corpse.
“Akechi, wait!”
He bites down on his lips, drawing more blood to run down his chin. It collects in his helmet, a pool of all of his sins and he wonders how much effort it will take for him to dig his claws into his neck and rip out every vein.
He wonders, then, if his mother would finally love him.
“It’s too dangerous to go on your own.”
He whips around, anger and vile and snark and bitterness and every other thing he hates about himself to glare at Joker. “Why do you even care?! I thought you would have been happy to see me gone!”
Joker stops in his tracks, eyes conveying something like heartbreak. “Crow, what–”
“Don’t play dumb with me! I know you can see how your little teammates look at me!” He points a clawed finger at them, spit flying from his lips. “You think I don’t know that they hate me?! That they want me gone as much as this stupid world does?!”
His vision blurs and he shakes his head, teeth grinding to let the pain overwhelm the need for emotions. “Why keep me around?! Is it for entertainment?! To watch your little toy fall apart?! To feel better about yourselves?!”
“Crow, you’re with us because we need you. We need all the manpower we can get and you’re a valuable member to the team.” Joker steps forward, hands held up as if he was at gunpoint. “You aren’t a joke to us. We aren’t using you for entertainment. We aren’t keeping you around so that we can feel better about who we are.”
“Liar!” He snarls, hackles raised. “You’re lying to me!”
His eyes make the mistake of drifting over to Okumura and Sakura, staring at him with looks that he can’t fully understand. He can feel the blood of their parents on his hands, on his body, dripping down his face. He can remember the devastation he caused them, the happy endings he ruined for them.
At the very least , the voice in his head whispers mockingly, they had parents who loved them .
It’s that very thing, that one line that separates him from them, that gets him to run around and dash into the depths of Mementos. It feels like a sprint, like running away from something that is trying to kill you. It puts a burn in his legs, thighs aching as he goes and goes until he stops at a train platform, falling to his knees as his lungs beg for breath.
He undoes the latches on his helmet, tossing it to the far corner as he grips a hand around his throat.
He can’t think, he can’t breathe, he can’t feel. All he knows is the deep pain of grief and the knowledge that everything he worked for was wasted, burned to ashes because he just wanted a justice that was never given to him, a fate controlled by his own hands. He curls into himself, a scream ripping from his lips.
He doesn’t care if it attracts a shadow; maybe if he’s lucky, it’ll kill him before he has to keep feeling things.
He feels the wash of a curing spell over him before he can comprehend it, his mind clearer than it has been in the past few minutes. It dawns on him what it was and he feels embarrassment color his cheeks at the same time that he hears someone walk up from behind him, slow and careful.
“Akechi-kun?”
On second thought, maybe he would like to go back to waiting for a train to run him over.
Okumura’s mask isn’t on her face when she comes into his view. Instead, it’s held between her hands, down towards her chest as if she’s preparing to put it back on. He looks away from her, wiping the snot off his face.
“What?” He finally says, firmly ignoring the wetness in his voice. “Did you want a prize for curing me?”
Okumura, to his surprise, does not attempt to rise to his bait. She stays silent, sitting down next to him with her legs tucked under her. Even in her Thief outfit, she still manages to exude grace. She hands him a bottle of juice, some type of fruit that he doesn’t bother looking at before he rips the cap open and downs half of it like a man in the desert.
“When I heard that it was you who killed my father, I hated you.” She says softly and all of the juice threatens to come back up. “I wanted nothing more than to have my father love me again, to have the man that I once knew as a child. I had hoped that the change of heart would have done that, but you took away the chance of me ever finding out.”
She looks over at him, her eyes drilling holes into him. “I wanted to hurt you when I saw you. I thought that you deserved every awful thing that ever happened to you in your life. I once, horribly, thought that Shido must have done a favor by taking your mother away from you like you took my father away from me.”
He swallows against the bile in his throat, the thick lump of things that he never wants to mention.
“Every time I look at you, I see my father’s murderer. But…” She trails off, her voice leaving behind a faint echo. “I also see another victim just like us, hurt by adults that were supposed to guide us. Despite how awful you are, you never deserved what happened to you. I’m sorry that life treated you so badly.”
He doesn’t know why her apology for his shitty life makes him start crying again. It sounds so effortlessly honest, a genuine apology for how his life ended up, for how he ended up. He can’t remember the last time someone apologized to him for his life, for the things that happened to him.
He can only remember his mother apologizing for bringing men back home, the words muted against his heart because he knew that she was just going to do it again.
Okumura, shockingly, reaches over to hesitantly grab his knee. It’s a show of comfort, a sign that she doesn’t hate him as much as he thinks she does. There’s no friendship between them, no mutual bond that connects them together, but he’s okay with that.
It’s more than enough punishment.
Eventually, he forces himself to stop crying like the pathetic thing he is and rises to his feet. He looks behind him, seeing the other Thieves standing near the escalators. He looks at Futaba who looks away from him, her own complicated feelings in her eyes. He looks at Akira, the sickening expression of love and worry that makes his skin crawl.
He looks back at Haru, her fingers carefully putting the mask back on her face before she, too, rises to her feet and heads back towards the others.
Faintly, he wonders why they haven’t left him here to die.