"Do you want to finish him off? It's your call…" Morgana asked with his trademarked smirk, breaking our tense silence that had choked us as Carmen conjured orbs of flame. He was definitely the only one smiling here. Carmen held up her arms, one at each side, while she and Ann stared in disgust at the now quivering Kamoshida.
"N-no, wait! Please! Forgive me!" The shadow shouted out, holding his arm out in front of him, turning his face away and tightly shutting his eyes in fear. He couldn't look any more different from the arrogant 'King' who had locked me and Ryuji up in a cell, or ordered Ann's execution. Ryuji and I stayed quiet, looking back and forth between the two. Even though it was us two who had discovered this place, it was really Ann's fight from the start. We had no right to interfere here.
"SHUT UP!" Ann howled, Carmen hurling a fireball towards Kamoshida, which whizzed just past his head. Kamoshida let out a pathetic squeal and collapsed onto the ground, still clutching his damn crown. "Don't you get it? All your students… Shiho… did you ever stop when they begged you!?" Carmen launched another bolt of flame, this time landing right in front of Kamoshida. Some of the flames bounced off the floor and reached his body, singing his ridiculous robes and eliciting a cry of pain from the shadow.
"Ugh… y-you're right!" he whimpered. He opened his eyes and looked up mournfully at Ann, before getting back up onto his knees and looking down at the crown in his hands. "I'm… I'm sorry…" he choked out, and then tossed the crown towards us. I reached out and caught it without a word; I didn't think it was possible, but Morgana's smile grew even wider. Glad to see one of us has got what they wanted so far. "You win… I lose… You can end this now…"
Those fatal words. I wonder where I would be now had this one moment gone differently, had we not taken Ann with us, and decided what to do with him ourselves.
"Morgana…" Ann spoke through clenched teeth, "If I… get rid of him here… the real one won't be able to confess his crimes?" Even while addressing Morgana, Ann's vengeful eyes never left the shadow. She clenched her fist, hard enough that we could hear her leather gloves straining in her grip, as Morgana shifted his gaze to her.
"Kill the shadow, you kill the mind," he informed her with a calm tone and countenance as if he was talking about the weather. "Kill the mind, and… you won't have to deal with him anymore," he finished, never dropping that cheerful look on his face.
Ann shut her eyes on hearing this, groaning under the immense weight of the decision she was facing. Nevertheless, it was hers to make, no matter what I thought, I dared not impose it on her.
"… Aren't you going to-?"
"Shut up! SHUT UPPPPPP!" Ann roared, raising up her SMG and opening fire at the wall behind Kamoshida to his left. Still running through the magazine, the gun trailed to the right, threatening to shred into him before it finally clicked and stopped just in time. Ann hurled the gun to the ground and marched forward until she was towering over him. "You are going to go back to the real Kamoshida, and you are going to make him confess! NOW!" she screamed before raising her leg up high before Kamoshida's pathetic face and slamming her boot into it. "Do you hear me!?" Ann barked as she slammed Kamoshida into the floor.
"Y-yes, yes!" Kamoshida screamed beneath her foot. Ann gave the former 'King' beneath her one more twist of her boot before stepping off, swiftly turning and marching off toward the door to the throne room without another word.
Ryuji and I looked back and forth at each other, Kamoshida, and Ann, before Ryuji turned to her. "Ann! Wait! Don't go off by yourself!" he called out as he ran off to catch up with her. I watched as he followed her out of the room and around the corner, out of sight, leaving me and Morgana alone with the shadow.
I shifted my gaze to the mysterious cat. He was looking right back at me. "What are you going to do, Joker?" He looked quite curious, his cartoonish head tilted to the side, ears twitching continually, "Do you think everything will really fix itself if this man turns himself in? If you and Ryuji get expelled anyway, this'll all have been for nothing." His gaze darted between each of my eyes, like he was trying to read my face.
I turned once again to Kamoshida. Tears were streaming down his face as he sobbed some nonsense about losing. He cried out "What am I supposed to do...?"
Were Ann's instructions not clear enough!? I thought to myself. Morgana's question seemed to echo all around me. What a waste this would have been if we got expelled, if I got sent back to the 'Correctional Facility', for what? because we had shown mercy to this guy? Once I finished having these thoughts, I realised that my arm was stretched out in front of me, holding a gun.
"That's right," spoke a voice in my head, a voice I had not heard since my first time in Kamoshida's palace. "You have made it this far, using my power, and the power of your new comrades. But now only you can finish the job." It told me, as I watched Kamoshida weeping behind the sights of my weapon. He was right. Morgana was right. This was right, the right thing to do, I told myself, flicking the safety off with my thumb and wrapping my finger tightly around the trigger. "Such is the nature of power. The only power you can always rely on is your own. Your parents, the law, and now your friends have disappointed you. Won't you take action yourself, Shizuo?"
Suddenly, I regained myself. My grip around the gun relaxed, threatening to drop it entirely. Those words… I had heard them before. Of course, I thought to myself, what would he do? The one who had opened my eyes to the emptiness of my life. The one who told me that what I did that night, that night that got me arrested, took me from my family, my friends and everything I knew, was the right thing to do. 'Whatever you decided to do, was the right thing to do for yourself, Shizuo.' His voice came to life in my mind, not like how my persona's did. No, it came from a warm place in my heart. The answer was clear, and it hit me with an unbearable pang of guilt that I had not seen it before. He would do the same thing he did for me. He would respect Ann's decision.
"Own up to everything you've done, and face the consequences." I said to Kamoshida. "It's the only thing you can do." I couldn't help but smile as I shamelessly copied the words once handed down to me. I lowered my gun. Kamoshida raised his head one last time, and our eyes met. His expression was still sad, but less intensely so than before, as though my answer had calmed him. He gave one silent nod, and began to lose colour, slowly becoming transparent, and fading away before my eyes.
"Hmph, since when were you a man for words, Joker?" Morgana asked mockingly as he turned his back to me and trotted off to the door.
"Not my own," was my only response. I had yet to start walking out myself when I was shaken nearly off my feet; a loud rumble echoed all around the huge room.
"We better get going, Joker. Looks like this place is ready to crumble," Morgana casually informed me, himself barely picking up speed.
"Crumble!?" I shouted back as I sprinted after him, almost falling with every tremor.
"Yeah, well, we kinda severed the connection between this place and the psyche when we sent the shadow back to its host," Morgana shouted while we sprinted out the door and made our way for the spiral stairway down the nearest tower, "so there's nothing really keeping this palace in one piece anymore." As if to illustrate his point, a huge chunk of ceiling plummeted in front of us, and nearly flattened us into the floor. "Yeah, we better hurry," the party navigator concluded.
"Welcome back to the Velvet Room." Igor's usual automatic greeting.
"It seems like you had quite the ordeal today, but now you have finally triumphed against your foe. Please take this opportunity to rest your weary mind and heart." And Lavenza's usual kind concern.
Yes, I am definitely back in the Velvet Room. As if the endless aisles of towering book cases permeated by blue fog weren't already a dead giveaway. "Good idea," I answered back to Lavenza with an awkward smile. It wasn't the first time I'd gone to bed to find myself sitting at this desk before a wicked grinning Gollum-like man and his polite little assistant, but I hadn't been here enough yet to be completely comfortable with them, even after all the help they'd been until then.
"You can indeed rest now, rest assured that the shadow of Suguru Kamoshida has in fact rejoined its host," Igor informed me.
"So Kamoshida will confess? He'll do what we told the shadow to do?"
"That I cannot tell. I cannot interpret or interfere with the decisions of mortals in the mortal realm. That is not what we have brought you here for this night." I shouldn't have expected much more information from him. Igor wasn't in the habit of giving straight answers or useful advice.
"I'm afraid we have not brought you in merely to congratulate you either, dear guest." At least I could always rely on Lavenza to be more concise. "We wished to ask you your thoughts on the outcome of your trial." They had something they wanted to ask me? This was new.
"What do you mean?"
"Ann Takamaki's decision to send the shadow back to the psyche, or more importantly, your decision to allow that. Are you happy with it?" So that was what they wanted. They both looked at me as I thought about it myself, Igor with his usual intense bloodshot-eyes-wide-open stare and broad menacing grin, and Lavenza with a calm professionally neutral expression that really didn't suit such a young girl. The truth, however, was that I still was not sure how I should have felt about it myself.
"If he really does confess and gets punished, and Ryuji and I don't get expelled, then we will have gotten everything we wanted," I eventually responded.
"That was not at all the question we asked," Igor scolded playfully. "Allow me to word it differently: if you were the only one who knew about the Metaverse, and Kamoshida's fate were left to be decided solely by you, what would you have done?"
If it were only me, huh? I wouldn't have known what Ann wanted: I only would have known what he'd done to her. It would have been up to me to decide what punishment that scum deserved, and make sure he received it. I would have had to 'take action' myself, right?
"I would have killed him."
Afterword: Hello dear reader, first of all, thank you very much for reading through to the end of this short story of mine.
I'd like to use these notes now to talk a bit about what I've written here and what I intend to do with it in the future.
To start, I want to explain why I called this a 'short story'. This has been a vague idea in my head for quite a while and I figured that writing it out and putting it up online would help me decide if I should actually follow through with it or just forget about it. It's not a fully fleshed out story, I'm afraid. If I do decide to make it one, there will no doubt have to be changes made to this first draft of the first chapter. As such, any and all criticisms and suggestions made by you are more than welcome. As it is now, this is without a doubt a 'below average fanfic,' maybe even just 'some shitty one-shot.'
Next, Joker's name. This is the first piece I've ever written on Persona 5, and I've never read another Persona 5 piece before, so I don't know what the conventional name, if any, there is for the Persona 5 protagonist/Joker, but if it's anything like Persona 3, then I suppose it would be the manga name, Akira Kurusu. There's nothing wrong with that name, but I decided I would make use of the old anime trope of giving a character a name whose meaning reflects their role/personality in the story. Joker's first name, Shizuo (静男) means literally 'Quiet Man', or 'Calm Man.' I'll leave it to the readers to decide the significance of this name (though I know it's not hard to figure out).
Speaking of not hard to figure out, perhaps the two things that stood out the most to you reading this were Shizuo's character, and the Velvet Room. More than anything else, I sincerely hope I managed to make Shizuo feel like a genuine person, and not come across as "edgy." If the thought ever occurred to you, whilst you read this, that this was someone trying to make Persona 5 more edgy, then I have completely failed. I just want the protagonist of the great story of Persona 5 to have a bit more going on in his head, to have opinions of his own that don't necessarily match with everyone else around him for optimal confidant ranks. Similarly, Lavenza has not replaced Justine and Caroline just for shock-value or anything of the sort. Again, I'll leave it up to the readers to decide what is going with that, and again I won't pretend it is hard to figure out. I just hope it's interesting enough for people who already know the story of Persona 5 to think "Oh, I wonder how that would play out."
If you've now read through the story and that whole rant, then thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I hope you can give me your full honest opinion in a review as well, be it kind, curt, or completely unimpressed.