The first time that Akira witnesses a mental shutdown, he's not even the cause. In this timeline, it's Shiho, tears spilling over her ivory mask as she pushes the barrel of her revolver against the forehead of Kamoshida's shadow. His golden eyes are wet and dilated in terror as the heavy pressure forces his head back. The sharp click of the safety's removal echoes in the cavernous throne room, sucked into total silence. Kamoshida's gilded treasure is cold and forgotten in Joker's grip, the entire room's attention riveted toward Angel.
"You took everything from me," Angel whispers to the fallen king, the shell of a man who thought of others as mere playthings. Joker sees Panther put her hands over her mouth, hiding behind the shock of her pink gloves, distraught but unwilling to intervene. Whatever her own, extensive, trauma with Kamoshida, Shiho needed to have this final confrontation. The rest stand with bated breath.
"Please." Kamoshida's voice is reedy and pathetic with desperation. "Please, I'm sorry, Suzui, don't, please, I'll do anything-"
"You're worthless," Angel spits. "You're worthless and you're evil and you're better off dead!" In the span of a single blink, Angel pulls the trigger and her gun fires in a grisly spurt of blood. She staggers back with the momentum of the recoil as Kamoshida's lifeless body keels over and hits the ground hard. The shadow hadn't exploded into a flurry of thick, sulfuric ash, like when they had destroyed the trio of disgusting cognitions that Kamoshida had built in their image. The death of Kamoshida's shadow is instead frighteningly realistic, the gorey hole punched through his head staining the crimson carpet with gray brain matter. His blank yellow eyes stare out at them, unseeing.
"Shiho!" Panther rushes forward, catching Shiho in her arms and holding her close. Angel's elegant wings drape over Ann, swan-like. "Oh my god, are you okay?"
"Ann?" Angel blinks up at her, dazed. "What-" she squeezes her eyes shut, shaking her head, "what happened? Kamoshida? Did I-?"
The floor rumbles violently underneath their feet, and it's only due to Joker sprinting to catch them that the two girls don't lose their balance and crash onto the ground. Bouncing anxiously, Mona cries out, "The Palace is coming down! Talk later, go go go now!"
"WHAT?" Panther shrieks, even as Joker grabs her hand and yanks her forward. He trusts her to keep a tight hold on Angel, still unsteady on her feet. A chunk of stone ceiling falls onto where they'd stood just moments before, crushing the plush scarlet carpet underneath its weight. Kamoshida's bloody corpse is cut off from their view, buried under the rubble.
"Run!" Joker yells, tearing off after Mona. Panther and Angel follow close behind, scrambling to escape with the Palace's destruction on their heels. With no Ryuji to trip on his bad leg, the four of them manage to skid to the entrance with time to spare. Joker's hands shake as he activates the MetaNav, the copious amount of practice that he's had running through these exact castle hallways doing nothing to change the rabbiting pace of his heart beating in his ears. The warp to the real world can barely begin quickly enough, and they return to the alleyway at the gates of Shujin with heaving chests.
Finally safe from Kamoshida's Palace, Shiho starts coughing in rough, violent bursts. By the time Akira finally thinks to help her, the hacking has devolving into ugly sobs, heavy in the humid afternoon air. Fat tears stream down Shiho's face, and she covers her mouth with one hand in an attempt to muffle herself. Ann swoops in, pushing past Akira to gather her best friend in her arms. Shiho clings onto her, desperate.
Akira and Morgana exchange nervous looks. Morgana leaps gracefully onto his shoulder, and it's only by Akira unsubtly knocking his head against Morgana's sleek body that he gets the hint to stop gaping at the two girls. Akira twists the strap of the fake Olympic medal in tight rings around his wrist until the scratchy fabric digs red, angry grooves into his skin, averting his eyes from the sight of Shiho falling apart and Ann's frantic attempt to put them both back together.
He's seen the aftermath of mental shutdowns, sure, the pitch black tar spilling from rolled back eyes, heard the ear-splitting screams torn from the victim's throat from the agony of their mind shredding itself from the inside out. Their faces go slack as the body convulses, the last morbid act of an animate vessel without a soul. The moment between the shutdown's effects and the victim's death is breath-catching in its horror, frozen in memory.
But no matter how repulsive the experience, Akira can't find it in him to condemn Shiho's actions. He has no desire to witness Ann's mercy in the form of Kamoshida hopelessly prostrating himself in front of the Shujin student body. He had begged for death, then.
Kamoshida had seemed so much worse in this loop, and the realization wells bitter and shameful behind Akira's teeth. Perhaps it was because Akira had neatly inserted himself amongst Shiho and Ann, maneuvering himself into a tight triumvirate in a matter of days by appealing to their bleeding hearts - carefully placing himself in just the right situations to come to their aid, deconstructing his terrible reputation by making them witness the vicious looks that Kamoshida casts in his direction, and acknowledging Ann and Shiho as humans rather than the objectified dolls that the others thought of them as. Watching the trauma that Kamoshida so easily caused hit Akira so much harder when he was allowed to watch the direct aftermath of his actions.
Akira had recruited Shiho, first. Jeanne d'Arc had burst out of her with an awe-inspiring passion, her ice-blue rapier and shield held ready as Shiho channeled her immense powers. Her bless attacks rivaled Ann's in sheer magical skill. It was no surprise that Akira reaped what he sowed, then. She was the embodiment of the Strength arcana indeed.
Shiho had convinced him to let Ann join them the day after. There was no real progress made to defeat Kamoshida's shadow, but their hopeful enthusiasm overcame the worst of Akira's worries. So, he got sloppy. He messed up, because as strong as they all were in the Metaverse, it was depressingly easy to forget just how powerless they were in reality. He could do nothing to stop Kamoshida from forcing himself upon Shiho, but he could convince her not to leap to her death as she tried to in so many timelines before, violated and consumed by her own twisted emotions.
All he had to do was ask, "Do you want to hurt him back? I can show you how."
(Was it selfish of him to move the timeline of the change of heart forward in this loop? Being subject to Kamoshida's leers, the gravel, hair-raising purr of "Well, aren't you pretty for a boy?" gave Akira a wretched sense of urgency that he'd never experienced before.)
Much later, at the school assembly of this time, Kamoshida collapses on stage. The way that he smashes to the ground, a white-eyed marionette severed from its strings, is eerily reminiscent of the death of his shadow, minus the gaping bullet wound carved through his forehead. At Akira's side, Shiho falls to her knees as the school erupts into panic. He and Ann manage to pull her from the pandemonium into a calm, private classroom so that she could have her own, if much less literal, mental breakdown.
Even after so many loops that he's spent slogging through the same cursed year, Akira has never felt quite as useless as he does now.
Yuuki joins them next. He had approached Akira the week after the disastrous school assembly, determination in his eyes even as his slight frame wracked with anxious tremors, and told Akira that he knew exactly what had happened, and that Akira, Ann, and Shiho had some part in Kamoshida's horrific end. "I-I-I," he pauses, taking a shuddering breath and balling his fists, "I don't condone you killing him, but I'm not - I'm not angry you did." He swallows, staring down at his shoes. "That makes me a horrible person, doesn't it?" he whispers.
Akira moves to put a reassuring hand on Yuuki's shoulder. He stops when Yuuki flinches away from the touch, and Akira steps back just as quickly. "Of course it doesn't, Mishima," Akira says instead. "You're not responsible for what Kamoshida did to you or what happened to him. All that matters now is that he's gone, right?"
Mishima nods, squeezing his eyes shut, before looking back up to meet Akira's gaze. "Then, I just wanted to say that I support you guys. What you all did was right, I think. Tell the others I said that, okay?" His throat bobs. "And tell Suzui I'm sorry," he adds anxiously. "I didn't - I didn't want to hurt her. I didn't mean to."
Akira knows that Mishima was a victim in all of this too, but he's seen for himself the monstrous consequences of Mishima following Kamoshida's orders, terrified of what might befall him if he refused. Even now, Akira never touches Shiho, because however close they may be as friends, he is still a man and it was her right to never fully trust any of them ever again. Healing is a hard fought road, non-linear and endless, and Shiho has only just begun.
Akira can't speak for her.
"Tell her yourself," Akira says.
Mishima's stuttering but heart-felt apology to Shiho comes alongside his creation of the Phantom Aficionado Website. It's just as helpful to the Phantom Thieves as it's always been, and a few weeks later, with Shiho's blessing, Akira finally asks him, "Do you want to see how we do it?"
It comes on the heels of months of preparation, secret trips to the Metaverse to interrogate the many, many shadows created from the various career criminals that make up the yakuza. Akira digs into his years upon years of experience in negotiating, of twisting monsters and gods and demons to fit his will. He doesn't need to destroy these shadows, or change their hearts, or anything else nearly as messy. All he does is talk to them, directly communicating to the subconscious of the underground's most powerful personnel in the hopes that it will translate into their decisions in reality.
Kaneshiro may have his lackeys, but Joker has power over them too, whispering in their ears until they follow his orders just as easily. It helps that he isn't forcing them to change their behavior in the real world too drastically. They're already dragging helpless students into their schemes, so all it takes is a few well-placed suggestions to direct their attention to a more productive target. Mishima is already suffering from a bit of a god complex while being just weak enough to immediately cave under the considerable threats and distortion of organized crime - it just makes sense for him to get wrapped up in the nefarious underworld, a perfect victim to fall into the yakuza's pudgy hands.
It doesn't take long to convince Mishima to follow them into Kaneshiro's Palace, to offer himself up as the gateway into shadow Kaneshiro's floating bank. Akira tries to ignore the swoop of guilt whenever he sees how much Mishima shakes in the meantime, drunk with terror at his situation and convinced of his own impending downfall. Mishima always would have wanted a persona, no matter the circumstances, Akira knows. The exact scenario that he gets it should be nothing more than semantics.
The new addition of Yuuki's electric attacks to their team's arsenal is almost as satisfying as the open relief and wonder on Gravity's face behind his starry cobalt mask at the first time that he summons the great warrior Achilles.
Shiho is their wildcard, much more so than Akira feels that he had ever fit the title. The Phantom Thieves' reputation had been in shambles since they had first been connected to Kamoshida's death in April, and it was way too early to say whether or not they could resurrect it enough to stand against Shido and his Conspiracy. They could not have another fatality on their record, especially so early on.
"Stand down, Angel," Joker commands through gritted teeth, the scarlet leather of his gloves creaking as his fists clench, stepping in between her gun and Kaneshiro's defeated, sniveling shadow. She meets his gaze, defiant, the custom revolver not moving from its position even if the barrel was now aimed squarely at Joker's chest. Her snowy white wings are flared wide behind her, blocking his view of the others. For one frozen moment, it's just the two of them alone, dark against light.
"You heard him!" She's trembling with a thinly veiled fury. There's mutiny in her eyes, and Joker can barely stop himself from recoiling at her tangible rage. "He was manipulating kids to do his dirty work. He doesn't even see us as human! Who g-gives him - who gave him the right?"
Joker loosens his frame, palms forward and nonthreatening as he mentally tags out Rangda for Abaddon to absorb the damage rather than risk hurting her back if she decides to pull the trigger. He says, tone measured, "If Kaneshiro dies, it'll create a power vacuum within the yakuza. Someone else will fill it, and they'll just take control of his operations, and then no one gets any justice! He needs to confess, and he cannot do that if you kill him."
Angel purses her lips, throat bobbing uncertainly underneath delicate silver lace. Her wings begin to lower in a slow, gentle movement, releasing the two of them from their impromptu arena. Her gaze slides over to Panther's shocked face and then even further to Gravity's horrified expression. Her hand quakes, the gun unsteady in her grip. Finally, she lets it fall to her side, and Akira breathes a sigh of relief. "Okay," Shiho says, face unreadable even as her voice wavers with anger. "Okay," she repeats. She brings her free hand to her face and traces the edge of her mask, dipped low on her cheekbones. She takes a shaky breath in a weak attempt to ground herself. "Can we please just go, then? I don't want to see this monster's face ever again."
Joker inclines his head as she turns away, and after that it's a crazed race to escape Kaneshiro's crumbling palace.
Akira had tried to get an entirely different set of Phantom Thieves. Fundamentally, the team itself could be the main reason for their continued failing against Yaldabaoth. He aches whenever he sees Ryuji trudging alone around the grounds of Shujin with a scowl, nothing more than a thug with a ruined future in the eyes of their overly-judgmental peers, or Makoto ostracizing herself from other students, acting every part the image of a friendless robot that she had once been mercilessly accused of being. Akira can't risk allowing himself to get close to either of them, terrified at the possibility of becoming swayed into bringing them into the Phantom Thieves' welcoming fold.
The team isn't as different as he'd hoped - it was impossible to get Shiho without also gaining Ann, and there was no way to shake off Yusuke when Morgana had picked the lock to Madarame's painting storage room. As always, Futaba blackmailed her way in and then stayed after they succeeded in changing her heart. They couldn't infiltrate Okumura's Palace without Haru herself, eager to prove herself and put an end to her father's horrific operations.
Akira has been through enough iterations of this year to know all of Makoto's strategies and quirks, the way that her mind whizzed ten steps ahead of anyone else's. After being witness to her workings so many times, he can reach the same conclusions long before she does, running circles around her when solving puzzles. However, their need for a strategist and another persona user overpowers any possible arrogant urge to claim the sole responsibility of planning their heists.
He needs a trusted second-in-command, anyway.
Akira has already set the groundwork to build a connection with Hifumi, built over countless trips to a gentle, candle-lit church in Kanda. The smiles that she reserves for him are small but dazzling as they whisper about dragons and knights and royalty to each other over a familiar Shoji board. Akira doesn't bother to pretend to be a total novice this time around, but their difference in skill level is still painfully obvious. They're not quite dates, exactly, when they take sparse trips to the bookstore when the chapel feels too claustrophobic to contain their grandiose conversations or make escapades into the warm atmosphere of an expensive restaurant rather than listen to the sound of cold rainfall splatter against stained-glass, but the way that Hifumi seems to glow under the attention makes Akira's heart swoop all the same.
It pains Akira to have to wait as long as he does to bring Hifumi into the Metaverse. He had to wait, after all, until her mother's shadow ceased to simply exist within the deep bowels of Mementos to become the ruler of a mockery of the Roman Pantheon instead. It takes longer to prod at Mitsuyo Togo's ego than expected, but it inevitably falls to the encroaching presence of a few well-placed rumors about the behavior of her daughter, a handful of anonymous comments submitted to popular tabloids, and the stream of forged emails sent straight to her greedy inbox. The more Akira puts Mitsuyo on the defense, the more she constricts around Hifumi and the creation of her perfect image. Mitsuyo's distortion slowly come into being in the form of forcing Hifumi into a tighter schedule, more interviews, more brand-deals, an increasing onslaught of uncomfortable media appearances that make Hifumi withdraw more into herself the longer it goes on.
Something whispers within Akira of the dangers of taking advantage of someone as reserved as Hifumi Togo, the idol known as being impossibly aloof because she gives out trust as if it's something precious, a rare gem to be treasured rather than run the risk of being shattered. It makes his stomach churn whenever she confides secrets to him that she would never dare tell the rest of the world. The priest continues to give them disapproving glances whenever their voices happen to raise above the constant murmur of heart-felt prayers, but his gaze always softens when he notices Hifumi's playful laughter. Akira's able to draw it out of her less and less as time goes on, and every time it comes is a relief. Hifumi would never expect him to be the cause of her mother's overbearing attitude, and he welcomes the way that she takes refuge in his presence instead. It's the only way that he knows how to give back - Akira is well-aware that he's the one who is causing her steep decline in mental wellbeing, no matter how much he knows that it will help her in the long run.
He drops more hints than he needs to for Hifumi to figure out his true identity, and then it's only a matter of time until he's able to whisk her to her mother's palace. It's cathartic to finally let her into his world, months of heinous work going into this one sacrifice, but the sick guilt refuses to leave him even as he watches Hifumi talk back to the cruel shadow of Mitsuyo Togo, wreathed in white robes and desperate to raise her daughter onto a pedestal in the same movement as tearing her down. The Phantom Thieves wait in a silent anticipation as an ornate crimson and gold mask materializes over the entire left side of Hifumi's face. She rips it away from her with a scream and a graphic spray of blood, but there is no pain in her voice when she calls for the power of the legendary warrior Tomoe.
Later, Hifumi wrings her hands together, standing in front of the Phantom Thieves in her new rebel's outfit. Joker can see his own reflection in the intricate design of her mask, warped grotesquely by the delicate grooves in the metal. As much as it covers her face, it leaves just enough bare to see her furrowed brows and downturned lips, a recognizable self-loathing. "I just play Shoji," she confesses, the loose fabric of her silk sleeves wrinkling in her fists as she clutches at them like lifelines, "and apparently I was never truly skilled at that." Her emerald eyes are conflicted when they meet his, searching and forlorn. "How could I possibly be a Phantom Thief like all of you?"
"It doesn't matter what your mother says," Joker reassures her, the perfect leader, partner, friend. "This is what you make of it. The Metaverse is yours, not hers. She can't control you here." He puts a grounding hand on her shoulder, the red of his gloves matching perfectly with the fiery shade of her armor. "You're one of us, now. We can be yours too, if you'll let us."
Hifumi looks away from him, thoughtful. At this angle, he can only see her mask, the imperial patterns hiding her emotions. Eventually, she says, "I wish to change my mother's heart first."
"Absolutely," Joker says with a grin.
As reserved as she was in the real world, within the Metaverse Hifumi was both a literal and a metaphorical powerhouse. Her nuclear attacks - a rare, awe-inspiring magic in of itself - compliment her sharp-sightedness on the battlefield. She notices weaknesses and conjures strategies that Akira - nor Makoto, from all of the timelines that she had been a fellow Phantom Thief - could never dream of creating. She and Akira compliment each other, communicating with looks rather than words, the product of a tight bond formed over a Shoji board in the quiet ambiance of a church.
Hifumi's ears turn red whenever Ann coos at them for holding hands after their outings finally become actual dates, but she refuses to shy away, giggling and happy in a way that Akira's never seen her. It makes an impossible warmth bloom in his chest, reveling in the way that his true mission stutters from his mind every time that he makes her blush, deft fingers carding through her silky hair and cradling her head as he brings her face to meet his.
(Even after all of this time, Akira barely knows anything about tarot. Tangible bonds to his soul are too intimate to require anything as simple as a label, no matter what the residents of the Velvet Room might think.)
(It doesn't matter that Akira never bothered to learn about the meanings of arcanas. He knows a Star when he sees one.)
Hifumi names herself Queen - sharing a private, giddy smile with Akira when she chooses it, "Just like in Shoji, do you remember?" - but he can barely register her over the horrified roaring in his ears. All he can hear is the shadow of Yaldabaoth laughing in delighted, cruel peals, reveling in his failure and gleeful to pronounce that, "Trickster, you have always been destined to fall to me. There was never another way. There will never be another way."
Unlike so many loops before, Akechi does not blackmail his way into the Phantom Thieves so much as he simply falls into it, eyes open and scheming all the way. It's Hifumi who ropes Akechi into their team in a rapid series of events that Akira didn't have time to become privy too, much less make any moves to stop.
Akira hadn't even known they were friends.
It makes sense, looking back. They're both teen idols, even if they achieved their fame in different ways, and are intimately familiar with being thrust into the harsh, unforgiving spotlight just to be treated by the public as emotionless icons rather than human beings. Akira even found old tabloids speculating about dating rumors a few years back, although those reports had fizzled out when they'd been met with denials and no substance. Hifumi and Akechi had probably met at a television station while both waiting to be interviewed and bonded over shared intelligence or something, and then kept in sporadic contact as kindred spirits. It doesn't really matter how it happened, but the fact is that it did and has created an unwelcome obstacle that Akira now has to figure out how to overcome.
As the year repeats, dealing with Akechi has become a constant hassle. Akira has been prepared for his betrayal ever since the first time around, but Akechi is still as stubbornly tenacious as ever, determined to not be ignored no matter what Akira does to try and avoid him. Akechi is a constantly overhanging storm cloud at Leblanc, inching closer to Akira's secret identity over every barbed mug of coffee. It's difficult not to be pulled into the offered chess games or tempted to another round of biting jabs, but Akira forces himself to remain conscious of Akechi's status as a mass murderer. No amount of banter can hide the gruesome crimes that Akira knows that Akechi is capable of, but every attempt to push him away only results in Akechi coming back stronger.
Akira isn't sure what Hifumi did to make Akechi realize that she had access to the Metaverse. Hifumi's too sharp to let something like that slip so carelessly, so Akechi must have deduced it from her and Akira's proximity and used her as the perfect opening to weasel into their group. Or, rather, he'd presented it as being the other way around - letting Hifumi discover that he had the MetaNav on his phone and dutifully report it back to Akira. It forces Joker's hand in front of the rest of the Phantom Thieves - either he must approach Akechi to gain another possible ally in the Metaverse, or stay further away without explanation and risk alienating himself from the rest of the group.
So, Crow joins the Phantom Thieves, and his addition surprisingly isn't horrible. Joker refuses to let his guard down around Akechi, and his reluctance must show to the others, but Crow melds into their dynamic easily enough. He cedes to the rest of the team even as he flaunts Robin Hood's prowess - although it is genuinely funny to see the look of shock wiped onto his face the first time he witnesses Shiho single-handily demolish a group of shadows with a bless spell that far outclasses anything in his own arsenal - and it doesn't take long for the rest of the Phantom Thieves to claim him as their own.
It's not bad, actually, having Crow on their team, because that means Joker can monitor his actions in a way that he was never able to do before. Haru's father survives because Black Mask cannot act freely when Crow is fighting alongside her instead, and the mental shutdowns reported on the news slowly begin to taper away as the public opinion of the Phantom Thieves optimistically rises. Akechi is still a murderer, but right now he's also their friend who is slowly but surely separating himself from Shido as he stops acting as the Conspiracy's primary enforcer.
Kamoshida was the only mental shutdown that the Phantom Thieves were ever responsible for. They toast their victories to each other at Haru's private reservation at Destinyland, all adorned in childish merchandise as they watch Okumura apologize to the world at his own hastily called press conference. Akira laces his fingers through Hifumi's, heaving a sigh of relief when the conference ends peacefully and the cameras wink out. Her smile is star-bright, and Akira wants to laugh, giddy and surrounded by the warm spirits of his friends.
They haven't fought Yaldabaoth yet, but this new team that he's created are more than strong enough to. He's gone to extreme measures to mold them that way, after all. They may not be Ryuji or Makoto, but he's determined to reach their final, hard-fought victory with them at his side.
Two months later, Akechi murders Queen.
The light in his eyes is manic as he plunges a bloodied hand into her chest, his razor claws shredding the life out of her with little remorse. It's nothing but a ghastly show to him, showcasing his immense true power in a single act of cold-hearted violence. It didn't even matter that Akechi had known Hifumi, not just Queen, that they had been such close companions in the real world. She had advocated for him to join the Phantom Thieves wholeheartedly, staking her own position on the team in an attempt to help him earn their trust. And then he killed her anyway.
Joker doesn't stop Angel from attacking Akechi in revenge, driven solely by the gut punch of betrayal as she beats him into gorey pulps, shrieking with rage. Gravity isn't far behind her, a protective hurricane, desperate to rectify his past mistakes in any way that he knew how. It's Joker who deals the final blow, his gun and personas forgotten because nothing is truly personal enough to encapsulate the boiling fury that floods his entire being as he descends upon Crow, mind blanking into something as scarlet as Tomoe's brilliant sword.
Akechi is killed in the hold of his father's ship, defeated at the hands of the very same people that he'd pretended to love. His grin is animalistic as he goes, fanged teeth glinting and red eyes bright with insanity. He'd stared at Akira through the shattered remains of his black mask the entire time, as Hifumi had bled out and the rest of the Phantom Thieves enacted their vengeance. Akechi had never truly cared about his father. He only ever wanted to be seen, and to him, Akira had been the first person to ever truly do so.
Akira had been so, so close to finally winning, to ending this tortuous cycle of a single year repeating for eternity, and when it had mattered most, he had led his own team to their destruction. The self-loathing is all-consuming, finding a bitter home in his bones and taking root in the empty crevices of his body. The cascading failure is a choke-hold, a puppeteer's string fashioned into Yaldabaoth's golden noose.
Instead of changing Shido's heart, Akira puts a bullet in his own brain and forces a restart.