(a/n: due to my busy schedule, updates will be on pause during AX. more info to follow shortly.)
Cop and Robber
RANK 13, STAGE 3
"Beginning navigation," said a mechanical voice.
The air shimmered.
Leblanc's attic became bright with sunlight. Colored paint appeared over the walls, pictures hung from nowhere, furniture morphed into cozier shapes.
It was a boy's bedroom, something long lived-in that had gained countless artifacts over the years. There were old textbooks on the shelf, a soccer ball, tapes from a childhood piano recital, a few spattered collages of finger paint. The next shelf held thicker and taller textbooks, a three-panel science fair project on tectonic plates and the natural disasters caused by their movement, small photos of a middle school soccer team gathered around a silver trophy.
Makoto turned her attention to the walls. They were deep blue, adorned with countless objects: a diploma, bladed weapons on display, a poster on psychology, a plush cat. She could see pencil marks etched into the white doorframe, a homemade height-per-year chart that shone with charm and nostalgic affection.
She came to a stretch of the wall plastered with calling cards. Each bore a different message, a different name. Seven years' worth of mental infiltrations, all condensed on five square feet of blue wall.
And next to the calling cards were four photos. The photos were in artisan wooden frames and fixed on a special shelf, underlit, as if they were on display at a museum.
The first was an older man dressed in a pale pink shirt, hunched over a cup of coffee.
The second was a preteen boy with shaggy hair, three-quarters dark and one-quarter silver. He was wearing a black-and-white Letterman jacket, baggy khaki striped shorts, and an impish grin.
At the next photo, Makoto gasped.
Mishima Yuuki stared straight at her with a friendly smile, hands in his pockets.
Uncertain, she moved on to the last photo.
She reeled.
It was her, Niijima Makoto, standing in the street in the same A-line dress and thin belt that she'd worn on their date to the diner. Her short chestnut hair was waving in a gentle breeze, flowing over the braid that twined around the top of her head. She was beaming. Everything about her looked warm and gentle and comfortable.
Makoto let her fingers trail over the edge of photo for a second. She felt winded.
"This... is your Palace?" she whispered.
Behind her, Kurusu Akira straightened, his hand once more healthy and whole. "Yes," he said, monotone.
"Is it... a place you used to live?"
If he had been normal, his mouth would have twisted ruefully. Instead, his face stayed blank. "It's the kind of place I wish I'd lived. Most of the memories here never happened."
It wasn't demented, twisted, psychotic. "I don't understand."
"The thing is," said Kurusu Akira quietly, "distorted emotions don't necessarily need to be evil. They just need to be a discrepancy from reality. The reality that you know deep down in your unconscious, at least. A Palace is basically, in its essence, cognitive dissonance."
"That sounds easy for anyone to have a Palace," Makoto said. Her voice was gentle.
She felt his eyes on the back of her head. "The discrepancy needs to be really, really strong."
There was something tragic about that statement.
Makoto's fingers drifted to the first two pictures. Who were they? A father, a brother? She squinted. The backdrop of the man's photo were familiar shelves and familiar countertops. She immediately pegged it as Leblanc. Perhaps he was the previous owner, Akira's guardian, Sakura Sojiro. What had happened to him?
"It's a good thing that you made me come to the Metaverse, Officer," came Akira's soft voice.
Alarm bells sounded in her mind. She turned.
Akira stood upright, arms spread to his sides. Fire wreathed around his shoulders and licked down to his hands, dancing with burning intensity. Sparks blitzed into the surrounding furniture, but there were no resulting scorch marks, no fires.
Akira smiled with a hint of madness. "Now I can kill you."
.
.
.
Gorou stirred awake.
He was blindfolded. He could feel the cloth pressing against his eyes, enforcing darkness.
But his body was, for the most part, free. His wrists were tied snugly behind him, but his legs and arms were no longer bound to a chair.
He seemed to be lying on some kind of starchy mattress. A thick cotton blanket had been pulled to his shoulders, like he was just an ordinary boy tucked into an ordinary bed.
Gorou sat up and tried to push the blindfold up with his knees. Something pulled at his cheekbones and forehead.
He paused.
The cloth blindfold had been duct taped to his face.
Gorou sighed, choosing to feel for his surroundings with his bound hands. He was surprised that his hands touched nothing before the knobby, whitewashed wall. No storage crates, no barrels, no bottles.
Had he been moved?
The smell was no longer woody and fragrant like a cellar of wine and coffee. The smell was musty, bland, an unused basement. Gorou kept rummaging, hoping to find something that could remove his bonds. The wall broke into empty space. When he explored with his foot, he found a staircase.
Technically, he probably shouldn't leave the cellar. His captor seemed somewhat temperamental, and grand escapes were nearly impossible to make while blind.
But there were mysteries to be solved.
And this blindfold was really rather obnoxious.
Gorou took a deep breath and started up the staircase.
.
.
.
Makoto had no magic, and she had nowhere to run. She had a pistol, but she was fairly certain that Akira would disintegrate it—and maybe her—the moment she reached for it.
All she had were words.
"You could have killed me a long time ago," she said quietly. "You could have killed me in the attic of Leblanc. You could have killed me when I shot you. You could killed me five minutes ago instead of letting me walk around this room."
The fire arced around Akira. "Don't tempt me."
"Why haven't you?" Makoto continued. She kept her voice gentle. "Why aren't you?"
"I'm just deliberating on my best options." Akira touched his mask, and suddenly, the fire turned to crackling lightning. She could feel the static in the air. "There's a lot of ways to inflict injury. What to choose, what to choose."
He didn't sound excited about it. He was trying, but failing, his voice flattening where it should've risen in glee.
"I would deserve it," whispered Makoto. "Four gunshots of pain."
"Your little body couldn't take it." A harsh wind flushed her into the wall. She crumpled to the ground, ears ringing. "Have you studied what a bullet does to a human body? How it punctures the skin, rips apart tissue and bone, crushes everything in its path? Do you know how it feels? Shattering bone sends fragments, tiny little knives, all through the inside of your body, and those knives cut at your nerves, and your nerves send blinding fire to your brain until you can't register anything but agony."
Her gun ripped from her holster. She felt the icy press of metal against her calf.
"Maybe I should show you how it feels. To get shot, shot again, and you have to heal it, you have to heal it or you'll die, but the pain doesn't go away, the nightmares don't go away."
He dug the gun painfully into her calf. Terror blitzed up her veins, chasing away her thoughts.
"When you close your eyes and dream, someone comes to you with a warm smile and a kiss, and then you feel metal press into you and they leave your stomach full of holes until the acid eats your body alive. Someone comes to you with a beautiful laugh and stabs you in the chest, over and over, and you can't lift a finger because you can't bring yourself to hurt them, not even when they're killing you."
His voice finally started to rise. Emotion was bleeding back into him, cracking him.
"Someone whispers I won't hurt you, I will never hurt you and they cut you open with a knife through the back and you know you can't trust them, you can never trust them again—!"
He threw the gun at the wall with all the force of his arm, cracking his framed diploma and sending it crashing to the floor. Makoto's eyes were blurry with tears. Guilt and fear twisted in the pit of her stomach, slamming her with nausea.
Akira drew back his leg. She curled, bracing herself for the kick.
His leg shook in midair.
He stomped it down, screaming in frustration.
"Akira," Makoto whispered.
She couldn't apologize.
She couldn't say "I'm sorry."
It was patronizing to think that two words could ease any of his pain.
"I should kill you! I should!" A blade of light blasted the side of the room. "It'd finally be over, all of this damned, miserable life—!"
She didn't know what to do.
She lay there, speechless.
Akira suddenly stopped and curled against the wall. He looked very small and ragged.
A moment passed.
Makoto breathed.
Akira was still.
"Diarahan," he whispered.
Makoto felt a cooling sensation all over her body, like mint applied to her skin. The soreness and splinters in her body eased away. She sighed instinctively, the relief immediate.
He'd healed her.
"Go," Akira murmured.
She lay there, unwilling.
The door swung open with a creak. A boy walked in, oversized sneakers scrunching the carpet.
Makoto recognized him. He'd been in the second photo, raggedy hair and black-and-white Letterman jacket. His bright Metaverse-yellow eyes surveyed Akira as he jumped on the bed.
"Up and at 'em, Joker," he said.
"Go away, Morgana," Akira mumbled into his knees.
Morgana.
Morgana?
In his cognition... Akira saw his cat as a human?
Human-Cognition-Morgana stood up and nudged him with a foot. "Come on, Joker. Get up."
Akira didn't move.
Cognition Morgana's gaze swiveled to Makoto. She pushed herself onto her knees, not knowing what to expect.
"Hot damn," said Cognition Morgana. "The things he does for you."
"How can I help him?" Tears, stuffed up for too long in her eyes, poured over cheeks and down her chin. "I don't have a right to ask, but please. How can I—or if not me—anyone else help him? How... how?"
"You can't," said Cognition Morgana flatly. "This whole mess happened because you tried to help him in the first place."
"I had to," Makoto cried. "He was locked up in his room, he was—"
"Do you know why he was locked up in his room?"
Makoto's voice faltered.
"Black Mask's video," said Cognition Morgana. His voice was matter-of-fact, but it still cut into Makoto. "He came to fight Black Mask because he was scared for you. Which led to him taking Gorou. Which led to a very, very problematic conversation. Which led to a crash. Hence the self-imposed solitary confinement."
"But his Palace..."
"Also your fault." Cognition Morgana kept looking, his yellow eyes piercing into her soul. "We got a bunch of unwelcome eyes on Leblanc because you went missing, and your card had transactions from Leblanc, and your squad wanted to find you. We needed another way to get in and out without being noticed."
That was a blow.
"You... you didn't have to go to such extreme measures..."
"Then he'd be caught for Phantom Thievery and sentenced to prison for life. Or, let's be real, capital punishment isn't out of the question." Cognition Morgana crossed his legs. She had the feeling that he'd be preening if he was still a cat. "Not a good place for Joker to be. Love is a liability in this field."
Makoto was speechless.
"You're still a liability, by the way," said Cognition Morgana. "More stuff can still be your fault. If you arrest him. If you report him. If you bring the police here and get the whole department killed. Odds aren't looking great for you."
"Ignore that for now," managed Makoto, "and save him. You're... his best friend, aren't you?"
Cognition Morgana shrugged. "Who knows? In this form, I'm something like a punk little brother."
"He loves you."
"He loves you, too."
Makoto swallowed. That was a hit that made her unexpectedly sore. "I can't leave. Not before I've made things right."
Cognition Morgana eyed her warily. "You're going to have to. The psyche doesn't enjoy intruders. It prefers to flush them out."
"Soldiers? Guards like Munakawa's Palace?"
"Usually, yes. But in this case, only kind of."
A soft wind brushed through the door and skimmed over the nape of Makoto's neck. She stiffened. It felt cold, deadly, and very, very angry with her.
Cognition Morgana grinned. "Imagine the cognition's entire security system condensed into one person."
Ten thousand guards, all in one.
Ten thousand otherworldly monsters, all in one.
Ten thousand powers, all in one.
Cognition Morgana's grin widened. "That's Shadow Joker."