A constant thudding sounded out from the umbrella above him. His brown boots disturbed the blemishes on the black asphalt, splashing the occasional puddle. People, adults of all ages and careers sped past him, heels clacking and loafers patting towards shelter. The neon signs that tried to lure him into their brothels and bars illuminated the entire district, like a halo of color in a world of despairing gray people.
Looking around Tokyo's den of sin and depravity while rain poured down above and around him, Akira slowly blinked, his lashes brushing against the lens of his glasses.
They were fogged up from the light condensation in the air, rendering the harsh lights in his vision into a soft glow. There was something akin to peace now, with no advertisers shouting for him to visit their bars, women in revealing outfits trying to seduce him for his wallet, or even police officers coming to interrogate him. The smell of cigarettes, piss, and vomit were masked by the cool rain, the earth trying to wash away the virus that was humankind.
Shinjuku was quiet and he wanted everything but quiet right now.
Continuing on his way, he shouldered his leather bag, making sure the objects inside were completely hidden and unscathed. He could almost smell his blood wafting out...
Earlier
Nodding to Ohya, Akira left the dark pink of Crossroads and into the multi colored streets of Shinjuku.
He had been able to strike another deal, this time with the shady reporter who gave him his last target's name. He had even gained a new member, the student president Niijima Makoto. It was almost disorienting to see her be so cold with them to now being teammates with her. He wanted to tell her how foolish she was for trusting the very people she tried to interrogate. To allow them to watch her back in the other realm when two weeks ago, she knew of them only as the troublemakers.
To willingly walk into their profession without knowing the truth about her new leader.
He tightened his grip on his bag, his nails biting into his palm. No, there was no other truth. She knew all that she needed to know, and he had another member to look after in battle. There was nothing he was hiding, nothing he was concealing from the very people he was suppose to trust. He was a phantom thief, fighting alongside them.
'My name is Kurusu Akira. I'm 16 years old. My parents are named Kurusu Hideaki and Kurusu Suzume. I like videogames and I dislike sweet things...' He repeated to himself in his head, over and over again.
In his chest, he could feel something stir. One of his new Personas, Isis, heard him and sent an unwavering pulse of reassurance.
He hated it.
Hated how his selves trusted him, hated how his team trusted him, hated how people who didn't know his name or his face trusted him. Why? Why did they trust him? When he couldn't even trust the words coming out of his mouth or the words he repeated in his own mind?
Stopping in the middle of Shinjuku, Akira forced himself to let out the breath that he had unknowingly kept in. Taking another deep breath, he relaxed his shoulders, ignoring how people walked passed him to get to their destinations.
Fluttering his eyes open, he looked up at the myriad of colors that were reflected off his glasses, trying to distract himself from the darkness that was his head. Looking around the busy district, a blue light attracted his gaze and he turned his head to the right.
And found a molten gold eye staring right back at him.
Time stood still; People stopped mid-walk, their foot still in the air. Chatter immediately ceased, almost deafening him with the silence it left in its wake. Even the sound of fluorescent lighting in the billboards and signs around him halted.
His gaze slid from left to right, from the people who were frozen, to the pigeons that were in mid flight, stuck in the air, and finally back to the one eye he was truly coming to despise with what little emotion he could even feel these days.
Caroline stared back at him with a sneer on her otherwise cherubic face, swinging her legs back and forth on top of the barred gate that led to his nightmares. "Coming, inmate?" She spat at him, narrowing her one eye.
Akira only nodded, dragging his feet over to where she had situated herself. He side stepped several adults who obstructed his path as if they were lawn ornaments, mere decorations whose existences mattered little to none.
Walking up to the gate, he waited with a detached feeling in his chest, almost calm even. The gate swung open, releasing a quick gust of cold and dead air in his face. Before he realized it, a foot was planted firmly in his back and he was sent careening straight into the portal to the inbetween.
Blue light enveloped his surroundings and he fell through for what seemed like eons, the sharp black chains rattling silently around him. He couldn't even hear the blood in his ears, he didn't know if he was breathing in this realm, he knew nothing and felt nothing.
Finding himself on his wooden cot within a second too quick for him to comprehend, Akira clenched his eyes shut as he waited out the vertigo he had grown used to. Taking a deep breath to chase away the nausea that began to boil in the pit of his stomach, he forced himself to get up and walk over to the gates of his cell where warm light shone from the middle of the prison hall.
A wide grin greeted him as it always did, the shadows dancing on his inhuman face and highlighting every wrong stretch of muscle. "Trickster." Igor greeted him. "You have grown exponentially. I would like to reward you for your efforts, as a way to help you with your current obstacle in the Palace of Sloth."
Akira only nodded with a blank face, refusing to say a word. What was the point of arguing? What was the point of anything? He was only their puppet; theirs to bend and break.
Igor only grinned wider at his silence and gestured to the twin wardens before sitting back in his leather chair. Justine stepped up with her usual clipboard where he could already see several names in what had been blank spaces before. "Inmate," She greeted monotonously with a cooler facade compared to her sister's. "You should feel honored that our Master would bestow this to you. It will not only help you grow stronger, but your team as well." She held out her hand. "A Persona, if you will."
He stared down at her small palm, covered with a skin tight black glove. If he compared it to his own, hers would be twice as small, or even smaller than that. How was it that something so small could be one of the instigators of his retched present?
Letting out an unnoticeable sigh, he held out his hand and summoned a mask, letting her take it. Caroline slammed her foot down onto the stone floor and with a rumble, the next method of his insanity appeared. Bathed in the blue light of this other realm, the barbaric wooden structure groaned ominously once it settled in its place, the sound sending a shiver down his spine.
The gallows.
Justine threw his mask into the air and with a wisp of golden light, Isis appeared with a beauteous smile on her face. She looked at her owner with completely trusting eyes, unaware of what her fate was to be. Akira felt something inside him hurt at just how much she trusted him and how he was about to destroy that trust in a matter of seconds.
Please, no more. It couldn't be worse than last time when Arsene ate his charred corpse, and how the taste of his own flesh lingered in his mouth for days to the point where he forced himself to eat curry and coffee without pause to scald the nerves on his tongue. He could still remember the smell, the salivating smell of his burnt skin, his cooked flesh, the copper tang. It couldn't be worse.
He was wrong.
Isis frowned when she noticed the twins approach her, burlap fabric already in their hands, and she took a step back toward the edge of the round hall. Raising a hand, she found that she couldn't use her powers at all inside the Velvet Room, and turned around to silently beg the one person she trusted to save her. He would, right? She was a part of him, a new part of him as well that had only just settled into a gap in his being.
It was her new home, even if that home was desolate with bones jutting out into a cairn of thrones. Her other counterparts had come and gone aside from the red one who sat silently at the highest throne of all. She had not even had time to introduce herself to him, but her owner would save her, welcome her back into his soul so that she could. She was a part of him. I am thou and thou art I.
Right?
Caroline frowned at the Persona's behavior. "C'mon! Fulfill your duty!" She shouted, holding one hand out. An unknown force began to drag the priestess back and she panicked, gripping onto the steel bars of his cell. She begged him, eyes full of fear, hand stretched out into his cell to reach out for him.
Her fingertips were close enough to brush against his nose, allowing him to scent the dry sand of her skin, and Akira watched with a shattered heart as Justine threw the fabric on top of her.
Time slowed as her red skin paled into a milky white, her cerulean eyes trading for a terrified gray, her golden headdress melting into black curls, her form morphing into a male's. Akira begged his owner to take him back, to save him from the cruel fate of their handlers, and Akira could only stare with wide eyes at the true terror his mirror image exuded with every ounce of his being.
As the fabric began to wrap around the boy, the fear in those gray irises gave way to heart wrenching betrayal, followed by the cold dead of resignation. He knew he was being sacrificed, that his form as Isis wasn't enough. He would never be enough.
The rough fabric pulled him back away from the bars of the cell, enveloping his outstretched hand last, and covered his body from head to toe. It was then kicked onto the coarse wood of the platform where Caroline roped it in place with the sharp square shaped chain that dangled from the top of the structure. Making sure it was securely wrapped around where the neck would be, the little warden walked off the gallows and kicked the lever beside it.
With a bang, the platform gave way and the body bag fell. A resounding crack echoed in the halls of the prison once the chain was pulled taut, followed by an almost silent gurgle. Akira felt the vertebrae in his neck dislocate, pulled apart from one another, separating the nerves in his brain from the rest of his body. It was a quick death.
Once the deed was done, the gallows disappeared and the body bag of his dead self fell onto the stone floor with a smack. He stared at it with wide eyes, wondering what was going to happen. Wasn't it over? Wasn't it enough that he had to continue witnessing himself die over and over again? Wasn't it enough that Isis had been the first Persona to actually beg him, to cry out to him for help? Wasn't it enough-
The bag moved.
Akira held his breath, watching as it began to wiggle. Was Isis still alive? Did he somehow survive?
Something pushed at the fabric prison around it, but he couldn't tell what kind of limb it was. As he continued to watch with bated breath, dread and horror began to creep into his soul when he realized that the shape had stopped being human. He had no idea what was inside that bag anymore, but he knew it wasn't Isis or himself.
With a rip, it tore out of its confinements, taking a raspy breath through its orifice. Its peachy pink flesh bubbled like liquid, as if it hadn't finished deciding what form it should be, and the blood vessels that crossed outside of its skin was strung around it. With an inhuman shriek, as if it was in a constant state of agony, it began contorting again.
With each malformation, bones cracked, muscles tightened until it snapped, and it deformed into itself. What was around six feet of pure monstrosity became disfigured cubes, lying innocently on the floor.
With a calmness that betrayed the true horror that happened right before her, Justine walked up to the cubes and picked them up in her hands, not minding the blood and fluids that began to coat her gloves. Turning around from the viscous mess in the prison, she walked up to his cell and held them out to him. "Consume these and they will teach you a new skill." She informed him coolly. "Any of your companions may also use these items."
Acid burned the back of his throat as he smelled the putrid stench from what was once his flesh, and he hesitantly accepted his boon with shaking hands. Looking down at them, he realized just how red his meat was, how stark white his bones were, how his blood vessels that wrapped around them like gift wrapping stood out entrancingly in blue and red. The smell was of rot; sickeningly sweet that made his mouth involuntarily water.
Without even blinking, he found himself back in Shinjuku, still staring at the carnage in his hands. Time resumed as if nothing happened, as if he hadn't just witnessed himself becoming a monster and then into these. People walked past him without a glance, somehow not seeing the sinew that covered his hands.
Within a few seconds, Akira felt a drop of water land on top of his head, followed by more. In an instant, it began to rain, as if the earth was trying to wipe his sins from existing on this plane. Footsteps hurried around him to quickly find shelter, and he mechanically moved to place his flesh cubes into his bag before taking out his umbrella.
Without looking at the inhuman warden who took a seat on top of the gate once more, he forced himself to move. To go.
Keep going.
Don't look back.
Don't cry.
"So, these will help us learn a new skill?" Panther asked from her seat in the Safe Room. She held up one of the cubes he created the other day, peering at it curiously without any signs of discomfort.
Joker nodded, his tongue feeling like lead in his mouth as he watched each of his teammates pick up a square of his flesh and bone from the table.
Fox hummed thoughtfully, leaning against the sandstone wall of the Palace. "Who knew a card was all it took to learn a highly coveted skill?"
His eyes locked onto what was clearly to him an abomination of his disfigured body. So they saw a card..? But he knew what he was seeing, what he was smelling, what he tasted-
Queen eyed the item in her hand. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try." And without pause, placed the item between her lips. The card glowed before entering her soul, teaching her Diarama. The others watched in awe as she glowed briefly from her new skill and without ado, used their own cards.
Joker watched with wide eyes as they placed cubes of his wrangled flesh into their mouths, blood and pus oozing from the corners of their lips. He saw what they couldn't see, a layer of reality that none but he and his puppeteers could peer into. Nothing was sacred. Nothing was truth or lie.
Only the macabre of flesh and rot.
Without realizing, he had begun chuckling under his breath. He continued to watch as his teammates consumed bits and pieces of him, swallowing the raw meat and crunching down on the chalky texture of his bones.
He truly was despicable.
Inhuman.