He feels like his thoughts have been wandering. It takes a force of will to drag them back to the present (?), but when he does, blinking back to himself in Kichijoji, he can't really remember where his thoughts had been wandering to. He slowed to a halt in the middle of the promenade, people passing on either side of him.

If they recognized him, none of them showed any signs of it.

The hair on the back of Akechi's neck stood on end.

February. It was February, was it not?

And he

was supposed

to be dead.

A man knocked shoulders with him, scowled, and kept moving.

So, evidently not dead. Akechi started moving again, if only to get out of the middle of the foot traffic.

It was February, and he had been dead since December. But clearly he wasn't. He felt a knee-jerk flash of outrage, because Akira had promised him

but

no.

That didn't seem right.

He already knew Akira hadn't taken Maruki's deal. He could remember entering the palace. Fighting first Azathoth and then Adam Kadmon. He could remember that ridiculous fucking helicopter and Joker's usual theatrical heroics.

And now he was in Kichijoji, and the more he tried to remember how in the fuck he had gotten there, the more his head felt like it was going to split itself into pieces. He let one shoulder lean against the nearest wall, his temple thumping against the bricks. He grabbed at the other side of his head with one hand, nails digging into his scalp even through his gloves.

People were looking at him. Not like he was a current celebrity. Not like he was a celebrity who had gone missing for weeks. Not like a celebrity who had been reported dead and suddenly turned back up. Not with any sort of recognition, but more like they were assuming he was strung out. He huffed out a breath of incredulous laughter. The foot traffic gave him a wide berth.

"Akechi-kun?"

Oh.

Akechi looked up at the familiar voice as Muhen reached the top of the stairs. He was staring at Akechi, startled but most definitely aware of who Akechi was.

Muhen's mouth was moving. Presumably, words were coming out of it. But as his skull's efforts to fracture carried on and his ears began ringing—louder and louder—Akechi couldn't actually tell what those words were supposed to be. He pressed his temple more firmly against the brick wall, nails digging harder into the other side of his scalp. Maybe he could just bash his head against the wall and be done with it.

Maybe Muhen could see where Akechi's thoughts were going. Maybe he was just concerned about Akechi's failure to say anything. Either way, no skull-bashing could take place, as Muhen caught him by his elbow and then bodily dragged him down the stairs and into the jazz club.

Akechi sort of assumed the music would make his head hurt worse, but honestly, his ears were ringing so loudly he couldn't hear it. Not exactly a relief, but at least it was something.

Oh. And he was fairly sure his vision was going.

Jazz Jin had always been a bit dim , but he was positive the grey fuzz was not part of the ambiance.

Muhen towed him through the staff-only door behind the bar and parked him on a couch in the staff lounge. Dimly, Akechi tolerated the manhandling as Muhen grabbed his chin to get a look at him.

His vision had gone double, crisscrossing like the walls in Mementos sometimes did.

His head felt like it was trying to implode, and really, if he was supposed to be dead then at least let this be it.

Something clicked, like a single shard of glass being neatly snapped in two. And finally, two concurrent timelines managed to squeeze themselves into the same space in Akechi's head. All at once, the pain vanished so quickly it seemed to rock the world on its axis. His vision swayed, and stabilized, and merged. He blinked.

Saliva pooled in his mouth. He swallowed.

"...Muhen," he managed, voice about as unstable as his life expectancy.

Without any fanfare, a wastebasket was shoved into his hands and a hand grabbed the back of his neck and shoved toward it, just in time for the minimal contents of Akechi's stomach to rapidly evacuate into the bin. A hand rubbed his back as he retched for a few more moments, and it was probably supposed to be a comforting gesture, but mostly the world sort of felt like pins and needles.

Eventually, it was safe to set the wastebasket down. Muhen handed Akechi a water bottle and waited until he spat the first mouthful into the bin before asking, "Where in the hell have you been, kid?"

Akechi was quiet for a moment. It was probably a long moment, but fuck, he was tired, and getting words to line up in his head was like trying to throw darts while he was shitfaced; it wasn't working well and someone would probably get hurt if he tried too long.

"I'm not sure how I got here," Akechi offered eventually, since it didn't require much thought to say—it was, after all, true—but also didn't make him sound insane. Best if Muhen simply assumed he'd been kidnapped and drugged to the gills and beyond.

"Should we call-?"

"No police," Akechi interrupted sharply.

Muhen was silent for a moment before he heaved a reluctant sigh. "I don't have time to argue with you, and I figure you know better than me when cops are needed. I've got a bar to run."

Akechi expected that to be that, but apparently there had not been enough manhandling that day. Muhen grabbed his shoulder and bodily shoved him down onto the couch, grumbling, "At least sleep it off. You look like shit, kid."

Akechi planned to argue. He had places to be, after all, even if he didn't know where those places were just then. But then he blinked, and when his eyes opened again, the staff lounge was dark, the wastebasket no longer smelled, and the clock on the wall said six hours had passed. One of his arms was hanging off the couch and he had a crick in his neck. It cracked like bubble wrap when he rolled it as he sat up.

His phone was in his coat's inner pocket, but of course the battery was dead. Thankfully, getting to his feet seemed to prove that he was right as rain, and it only took a few minutes of pawing through the employees' bags to find a compatible charger and plug his phone in. What they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

And finally, as his phone came back to life, he could look into what the hell was going on. It didn't actually take that long. Looking into Shido brought to light that the leader of the Phantom Thieves had stepped forward to testify and been locked away, and beyond what happened with Shido and Akira, the rest of the workings of the world didn't concern Akechi over much just then.

'But why?' was still on the table.

Parallel worlds?

No, that was absurd.

Either way, if the others were actually working on roughly the same timeline as Akechi, he doubted that they would sit idly by while their leader was locked away. They would be doing whatever they could to help. And while Akechi had no intention of reaching out to any of them, he nevertheless had his own ways to help.

Reluctantly, Muhen let Akechi leave that night after Jazz Jin closed, after cajoling him into eating a sandwich, realizing he was fucking starving, and then eating two more sandwiches. Once he was satisfied that Akechi wasn't going to starve in the night, he let Akechi leave.

Akechi's apartment was still in his name.

Curious.

Granted, he supposed Shido wouldn't have known he was dead, simply gone, and his newly acquired conscience would have compelled him to keep paying for the apartment on the off chance Akechi ever turned back up.

Part of him rankled at the charity. But, well, gift horses and so on and so forth. It wasn't as if he would be spending much time there for the next few days. He had shit he needed to do.

Threatening people in the real world was slower and messier. He had to make sure he budgeted his time accordingly.

The people he threatened still knew him, in a sense. Looked at him and recognized him as Shido's gun, and gawked at the fact he was aiming himself at them.

Three days later, a folder was slid under the door of one Sae Nijima, with all of the information Akechi had been able to squeeze out of people but that nevertheless wouldn't require his presence in a courtroom. No one new was dead, so he counted it as a win.

And then ... time passed. Seconds and minutes and hours and days.

Akechi googled himself more than he would ever admit to, though the results never changed much. Old interviews. Old articles. Defunct fan forums. Nothing new; not even a tacky tabloid 'where is he now?'

By all appearances, the world had moved on before his corpse had even gotten cold.

Typical.

Muhen checked on him. Actually hassled Akechi if he didn't think to check in. It should have been annoying. but Akechi could never manage much more than a long-suffering sigh as he assured Muhen that yes, he was still alive, just as he had been a day ago. He supposed he could acknowledge his own track record.

He got ... bored. The word didn't quite seem right, but it was close, nonetheless. Within the first two days, he was already itching for something to do, like he might eventually peel his own skin off to escape the restlessness. No more Metaverse. No more conspiracy. No more Detective Prince. His social life had always been a masquerade anyway, and they likely wouldn't be able to pick him out of a crowd anymore. His one friend (?) was still in prison, regardless of the efforts to rectify that detail; bureaucracy took time, after all.

Left to nothing but himself and his thoughts, it felt like he was pacing an endless cage.

He rearranged his apartment four times before eventually throwing a tantrum going off on a tirade at Muhen during one of the Nagging Sessions. Perhaps not his best moment, admittedly.

Muhen taught him how to make the cocktail of the day. He knew barely a tenth of everything that was going on in the hidden crevices of the world, but he could give Akechi something to keep his hands busy and his thoughts elsewhere, sometimes.

(Granted, he had to start with the virgin version. "No sense in wasting good alcohol, kid.")

Akechi wrote sometimes, in a leatherbound, unruled book that fell out of his desk after the third time he moved it. A diary, even if he wasn't going to actually call it that. Sometimes the quickest way to get his thoughts to stop hounding him was to vomit them out.

It always started fairly coherent. Today I did this, I did that, I planned this, and also I think I might chew my own arm off but that won't really help me to get away from the problem. The words were always cramped on the page by the end.

(He remembered Joker, sprawled on his stomach on a bench in a safe room, his arms hanging off the front. One arm propped him up to keep him on the bench and simultaneously held his journal open. The other hand held his pen.

"You look ridiculous," Crow informed him pleasantly.

"Yeah, it happens," Joker replied.

Personally, Akechi preferred to just sit on his couch when he wrote.)

On February 13th, Akira was released.

For all the coverage it received, Akechi's name never came up. Perhaps Shido, too, had forgotten his involvement. Perhaps he had decided not to make Akechi's life any worse. He sort of hoped for the former; the latter made his teeth itch worse than the apartment.

Akechi had learned how to make four cocktails well enough that Muhen felt like selling the results to customers wouldn't summon a health inspector, he had filled in half the pages of his journal, and he had rearranged his furniture again.

And ... he waited, before going to see Akira. To let him readjust. No sense in suffocating him. Or at least that seemed a decent enough reason.

(There were stakes when he still had time. There were no stakes in loving him at the end of his life.)

It was March 1st. Akechi was ... fairly sure he was employed at the jazz club. He and Muhen never really discussed it formally.

It filled the time, and he preferred the club to his apartment.

He had filled all the pages of his journal and shoved it as deep into a desk drawer as he could, and Muhen had tossed a new one at him the next evening. Cheaper and much tackier—from a convenience store, probably—but paper was paper, and some part of Akechi preferred it to the leather one.

It was March 1st, and in the middle of the evening, Muhen wondered, "Wasn't that kid who was in the news a couple weeks back a friend of yours? Could've sworn you showed up here with him a few times."

"Something like that," Akechi answered cautiously. "Why?"

Muhen arched an eyebrow at him. Akechi stared back steadily, the picture of bemused innocence. Muhen rolled his eyes and tsked, and something about it rankled.

And after somehow losing an argument that hadn't even had any words, it was March 1st, getting late in the evening, and Akechi was in Yongen-Jaya.

He loitered around a corner until he saw Sakura-san leave before he approached. He paused outside the door, staring inside. It looked just like he remembered it. Obviously. It hadn't been that long.

He steeled himself and got his shoes to unstick themselves from the front step. The bell over the door jingled as he entered.

"Forget something, Boss?" Akira asked, facing the sink, up to his elbows in dishwater. He glanced over his shoulder and froze. There was a muted thump as whatever he was holding under the water slipped from his hands to settle on the bottom of the sink again.

Both of them were quiet as they stared at each other. Even the television seemed to muffle itself out of respect. And then, carefully, Morgana hopped down from his barstool and scampered back up the stairs, and the spell was broken.

"...Honey, I'm home," Akechi offered. His voice felt like sandpaper.

Akira laughed damply. Like a wind-up toy jolting back into motion, he peeled himself away from the sink and turned the rest of the way around. "You're back awfully late." He scrubbed his hands dry on his apron and pulled it off, and Akechi should probably have said something.

And then Akira was in front of him and dragging him into a hug, tight enough Akechi thought his ribs might crack. He buried his face against the side of Akechi's neck and his hands fisted in the back of Akechi's coat.

Akechi stood rigidly, hands hovering just out to his sides for a moment. At Akira's muffled, "Hug me back, you jackass," he released a breath he hadn't realized he was holding and did as he was told, his shoulders dropping and his arms curling around Akira's middle.

They stood in silence for only a few minutes after that, before Akira shifted, still partially buried against Akechi's neck but with his head angled such that he was at least audible as he asked, "How are you here?"

"Here I was, hoping you would have an answer to that," Akechi answered plainly. "As far as I'm aware, Maruki's reality was undone and I simply appeared at Jazz Jin."

"Maybe you weren't actually dead?" Akira suggested slowly. "You could have just been-"

"Akira." Akechi pried him back to arm's length. He caught one of Akira's hands and pressed it to his stomach, to make a point. "I was shot here. You saw that one happen." He dragged Akira's hand upward, to his ribs. "And then here, after the bulkhead closed." He released Akira's hand. "And then I laid there and hoped I bled out before a Cerberus dragged me away."

Akira swallowed. "...Did you?" he asked.

'Only mostly,' Akechi did not actually say. "And then it was Christmas Eve in Shibuya. The evidence would suggest I died."

Akira's fingers curled distractedly in the front of Akechi's coat, the gears in his head almost visibly turning. Finally, carefully, he said, "I might have an idea."

Akechi's eyebrows rose, his expression turning expectant. "Do tell."

"So, I guess Morgana also disappeared after Maruki's palace collapsed," Akira said. Akechi darted a glance toward the stairs and open his mouth to reply, only for Akira to flatten a hand over his mouth. "Don't interrupt. Honestly, who taught you how manners work?"

"Mostly Loki," Akechi answered, muffled, and then stuck his tongue out. Akira yanked his hand back to scrub it against his pants. "Carry on."

And Akira explained the conversation with Lavenza and Igor, of everything reverting to how it should have been. Akechi hadn't been alive to testify in Akira's place, so he hadn't. Morgana was never meant to exist in the real world, technically, so he didn't. Except that he did, because evidently the sentimental glurge that glued the group together had brought the cat back.

"Your friends don't like me," Akechi pointed out before Akira could say something truly vomit-inducing. "I doubt they would be particularly inclined to waste their pixie dust on me."

Akira heaved a sigh, followed by a gently exasperated, "Goro." And he was looking at Akechi like he still couldn't quite believe how stupid the ex-detective was, and perhaps Akechi should have been offended. And he was, a little bit, but mostly he just felt an unsettling pool of fondness in his gut.

"What have I done now?"

"You're gonna hate what I'm about to say, but you were just as stuck in Shido's web as everyone else," Akira pointed out, heedless of Akechi's scowl, "and we couldn't help you, because we had never tried to before it all erupted like a volcano." Finally, his voice got unbearably soft and gentle as he said, "I wasn't the only one who wished things had gone differently."

Akechi swallowed. Akira kept talking.

"Even if they didn't know the whole situation, it wouldn't have taken pixie dust."

They lapsed into silence for a moment, as Akechi tried to decide if it made sense. Not really. He had given them good reason to hate him, and yet there he was with no other answers on the table.

"Do you think…" Akira trailed off.

"...Yes?" Akechi prompted after the silence lingered a few seconds too long.

"Do you think anything would have changed if we had just tried to talk to you in November?"

"How should I know?" Akechi scoffed. "I may very well have done something drastic, and you didn't want to show your hand."

Distractedly, Akira hummed in agreement, but he looked as if his thoughts were still several months behind.

Akechi snapped his fingers twice in Akira's face, startling him back to the moment. "Back to the present, please. I didn't come tonight to watch you fret about shit that's already happened."

Dryly, Akira wondered, "So why did you?"

Akechi reached up, cupped Akira's face with both hands, and kissed him.

Miraculously, they didn't even bash their noses together.