Chapter Text
Akira wakes up to the dulcet tones of Orange Caramel’s hit meme song, Catallena, and gropes blindly through the covers to stop the alarm at the last, “Ah!” sound effect.
Morgana promptly kicks Akira in the jaw and stretches, waking up. “Morning, Joker!”
Akira sprawls back out on the blankets, seeing stars. He says nothing, thinking over all the choices he could say. All of them are mean, like…
> “Go fuck yourself, Mona.”
> “You dumb cat.”
> “I’m going to flea bomb you.”
Morgana licks himself from at the bottom of the bed, unaware that Akira is contemplating committing a murder and getting himself in prison for real this time. “You always take forever to get up! Come on, Sojiro’s gonna yell at you if you’re late to class.”
Akira rolls out of bed, falling onto the floor with a dramatic thump. He sprawls out dramatically, holding a hand over his heart. “I’m dead,” he tells Morgana.
Morgana hops off the bed, landing on Akira’s stomach with all the weight of a cat that’s been overfed on expensive sushi from Ginza and Sojiro’s cooking. “Be a man already.”
Akira hates him.
***
Akira sits down across from Sojiro, who stands behind the counter watching him with the most unimpressed expression known to man. “Morning, Boss!”
“Hey. What’s with all that racket? You’ll scare away the customers.” Sojiro places down a bowl of sushi for Morgana, who inspects it with disdain because it’s not golden-flecked like the shit from Ginza. He places down a bowl of plain rice for Akira, which is largely unappealing and probably a punishment for something he didn’t do. Wash the dishes maybe?
“The cafe’s empty,” Akira says, staring down at the bowl of rice. There’s not even enough water in it and the rice is sticking together in clumps. He relates to them emotionally.
“Not for long,” he grumbles, flipping the sign to open. No one comes in. It’s 8:00AM.
Akira would respond with something that’d get him in trouble, but then his phone cheerily starts making a noise like when the fighter loses in Punch Ouch. His phone screams, “Ouch! Ouch! Ou-”
Sojiro looks like he wants to kill him.
Akira checks his phone with such speed that his Proficiency might have gone up by a point for the valiant effort to save his ass from eviction. The dumpster outside didn’t look so charming to him when he had a cushy attic and the dust bunnies finally knew him by name.
Gororo is typing…
Gororo: Akira, are we going into the palace today? We haven’t made much progress.
Akira leaves him on read and eats his shitty, clumpy rice in contemplative silence. My life sucks, he realizes.
Morgana leans over his shoulder, glancing at the message. “Aren’t you going to respond, Akira?” he nags, like a micromanaging feline prick.
“No,” Akira informs Morgana, ignoring the way Sojiro looks at him like he’s crazy to stuff three spoonfuls of disgusting rice into his mouth. He feels like a chipmunk. “‘M storin’ dis for later,” he tells Sojiro, grabs his bag even as Morgana’s frantically hopping into it, and sprints out the door before Sojiro finally kills him.
***
“What is a constitutional monarchy?” Mr. Ushimaru drones on. The class is silent. “Tch. If no one answers, I’ll have to pick one of you to tell me.”
Akira’s resting his head on his arms, staring at the back of Ann’s head. Her hair is so full of volume, he thinks. Why’s mine just all frizz? He imagines himself with her hair. It’s not a pretty picture. No, I’ll take Yusuke’s maybe. He has nice hair. What dye does he use? I mean, I’ve seen his baby picture… painting. Whatever. He’s a natural brunet.
Morgana watches him from inside his bag with squinty blue eyes, full of judgement. He turns his gaze to Ann, who Akira is still staring at, and suddenly looks betrayed. “Why are you staring wistfully at Lady Ann?” he whispers, the meow echoing in the room.
Students turn and stare at Akira.
Akira blinks at them and offers, “...Meow?”
Chalk comes soaring at Akira’s head out of nowhere, offering him no mercy.
***
Akira sits at a table in Cafe Leblanc, flicking his straw wrapper at Ryuji and hitting him in the forehead dead center. “So… now that we’re all here…” He has no idea what else to say, wondering if he could assign Makoto as leader since she’s the only competent member of the team.
“Man, what the hell?!” Ryuji pauses, eyes wide. He turns to Akira and loudly whispers, “I ain’t Akechi. Aim left next time.”
Goro sits primly in his seat, sipping his tea. He locks eyes with Akira, clearly able to hear every word of the conversation.
Akira aims left with Ryuji’s wrapper and it hits Goro in the forehead dead center. “We’re going into Mementos,” he informs the group, deciding that he should pretend to be responsible. “Last time we were in there, someone-” He pauses, hesitant to actually say it. “Well, someone-”
All eyes turn to Haru, who looks back guiltily.
“-tripped, clumsily fell face-first into a slot machine, and alerted the shadows to our presence,” Goro finishes for Akira, taking another long sip of his tea. He savors it, but everyone knows what he’s really savoring is Haru wilting like one of her plants during the winter.
Ryuji looks like he’s going to pummel him.
Akira claps his hands together with a pasted-on smile, feeling like he’s kinning with Ms. Kawakami. “And I am broke! So we’re going into Mementos, and we’re going to pretend to be a real team while we do it! Anyone not okay with that?”
Yusuke goes to raise his hand, but Futaba smashes her bony little elbow into his ribs and he lowers his hand with a pained noise. “I just thought, perhaps, we could-”
“No.” Futaba adjusts her glasses. “We aren’t posing like my Featherman R figurines first so you can make art of it. Alright, losers, let’s get to kicking some shadow butt.”
***
So… Mementos is broken.
“Dude, what the capital H-E-L-L!” Ryuji screams, sounding staticky from Futaba’s giant UFO struggling to handle the sheer volume.
“Thank you for the spelling lesson, Skull,” Goro says, clearly unimpressed. He’s looking around the area of Mementos they have ended up in curiously. “Joker, what do you think of this situation?”
Akira looks at Goro, then off into the distance, then back to Goro. He runs over the many choices running through his head.
> “I think we should make out.”
> “Aliens did it! I knew it all along! The aliens are behind Mementos, and if I’d wore that tin foil hat we’d never be in this situation to begin with!”
> “Does this outfit make me look fat? Be honest.”
He chooses none of them to save his head from being lobbed off by a stupid toy weapon. “I think we should be careful. Who knows what caused this to happen? Mementos has always been a mystery.”
“Calm down, Skull,” Makoto says, sounding vaguely murderous. “Or I’ll make you calm down. It appears we’ve been separated from each other. I can assume Crow and Joker are together. I have found myself stuck with,” she sighs, “Skull,” and she frowns. “That leaves us with Panther, Mona, Oracle, Fox, and Noir’s locations unknown.”
“I’m with Mona and Fox,” Haru pipes in. “Fox is trying to paint me.”
“And I’ve got Oracle! She’s… um… typing?” Ann sounds like she would really like to know what Futaba is doing, which is understandable considering the girl is angrily inside her UFO and possibly breathing fire even though that’s Carmen’s thing.
“I’m trying to figure this out, if you’d like to know!” Futaba sounds agitated. “I can see all of you, but I can’t find any paths that lead us to each other because they always change. Our best bet might be to all try to meet up with Mona, Fox, and Noir.”
Akira tries his hardest to listen to Futaba, but his attention is caught by the pulsating red tendrils crawling across the ceiling of the space he’s in with Goro. They seem to be getting closer. “Hold me. I’m scared,” he tells Goro, not scared. He’s a bit fascinated, actually, and is reaching out to try to touch one.
Goro doesn’t seem scared either. If anything, he looks vexed. “Don’t touch anything. You aren’t five.”
Akira is tempted to touch it and stick his tongue out at Goro. “Okay,” he relents, pulling his hand back. “If Skull was here, he’d let me touch the red things…”
They’d be incredibly easy to touch, considering how close they are now. Like, even with his hand back by his side. He wonders if he should be worried.
“Dude, you know it!” Ryuji says, followed by what sounds like Makoto’s weapon smashing into a wall. “...Man,” he lowers his voice as if his faux-whisper will save her from hearing it, “Makoto’s real pissed about being stuck with me. She’s attacking this wall with gustard.”
“Gustard?” Makoto asks, clearly exasperated.
“Oh, like that feeling you get when you’re eating really good cheesecake!” Ann laughs.
“Gusto,” Futaba says through gritted teeth. “He means gusto. I want to go home right now, Joker.”
The tendrils are closing in on them, wrapping around Akira’s wrist and ankle. He’s awkwardly stuck mid-fall. “This sucks,” he tells Goro.
Goro, who is equally stuck in the position of catching him with a tendril wrapped around his entire torso, looks like he could kill him right now and say fuck it to his plan. “My hands are free,” he says, like a bloodthirsty murderer would say to the victim he’s going to strangle.
Akira’s running through the options of what to say again, glancing down at the red tendril. It seems to be glowing and he thinks that is a bad sign. Probably. Maybe. Who knows?
> “Caress my face. Gently.”
> “My teeth are free. I’m going to gnaw my way out of these binds and carry you to freedom on my back!”
> “I kind of have to pee.”
“I can’t feel my fingers,” he says instead, trying to flex them.
Goro looks down to Akira’s glove-covered hand. “Your fingers are rather purple,” he says, disinterestedly playing along with the melodrama. Then he seems to remember the actual role he’s meant to be playing. “We need to do something! Oracle, can you help somehow?”
“I’m trying! My persona’s getting completely covered! I can barely keep up communi-” Her voice cuts out abruptly, as do the voices of the others on the team.
“Fuck,” Akira says, summing up the situation. Then he looks at Goro. “I think this thing is draining me of my will to live. I’m going to pass out now.” He stares at the tendrils as they glow even brighter before fainting into Goro’s arms, vision fading out to black.
***
Akira wakes up, expecting to see his own corpse mirroring him. He sees Morgana laying on his chest, fast-asleep, and hears, “Ah!” from his phone. He stares at the alarm, confused by the dream he just had. It was very elaborate. Why did I ask Goro to hold me? The most pressing question of the entire affair weighs heavily on his mind.
Morgana interrupts his ponderings with a loving kick to the jaw. “Morning, Joker!”
Akira screams and flails, falling off the bed. He watches Morgana, traitor not-a-cat that he is, leap away and land on the chair next to the bed. “10 out of 10,” he says weakly. “You’re gonna win the Olympics.”
Morgana licks himself from his seat on the chair. “I am the best Phantom Thief,” he boasts, before turning on him like the total turncat he is. “You always take forever to get up! Come on, Sojiro’s gonna yell at you if you’re late to class. Get off the floor already.”
Akira tries to crawl under his bed, which is a very tough thing to do since it’s low to the ground. “I’m escaping you. You’re saying the things from my dream, and you’re being very mean.”
Morgana hops down from the chair to walk up to him. “Be a man already and face Sojiro. He’s still mad about what you did.”
“What did I do?” Akira asks, suddenly remembering his clumpy rice meal.
Morgana looks at him incredulously. “You poured rice in the coffee machine instead of beans when you were in a rush.”
Akira thinks this over. He has no memory of it, but it does seem like something he’d do. “I’m a bad, bad boy, Morgana.” He sprawls out on his back like a starfish. “And I think you should kill me just to get one villain out of the way.”
“I said be a man!” Morgana delivers a spinning kick to Akira’s ribs, leaving the human wheezing for breath on the floor. “I’m getting Sojiro’s delicious morning sushi. Face your punishment already.” He sprints off down the stairs.
Akira stares blankly at his disappearing fuzzy form, trying to remember where he put his glasses. He pats his face. “Oh. On me.” He hears his phone screaming, “Ouch!” but ignores it to stare at the ceiling. My life really, really sucks.