pancakeboy | ic inbox [ota]

Please don't start in about pleasure. I've heard as much about that this week as I can take.

[There's something of a delay, before his second message. The idea of the Metaverse going away makes him feel hollow, like the thing that makes him himself would vanish—even assuming he was alive at that time.]

I can't go all out with him. We can't ever be fairly tested. It's annoying as hell.

Your interpretation there, not mine.[Hah. Is a little innuendo enough to scare him that much? It's not even an uncommon saying.]

Isn't that the thing? It's a power level thing, or a "how is it fair he can cover all my weaknesses" thing. I get it, you know. The first is easy, really, just give it time. Second is harder. But I'm sure you can if you really want to and put your mind to it. If you do, you'd be able to beat me to it.

[He's not scared. Not. Probably. It's just been so unending this week, and ultimately, so isolating. Like he even cares if he's isolated, for fuck's sake.

There are other questions, though. He thinks of that little talk they had in the Dojima garden, about arcanas.]

How many Personas do you have?

Two. Why, want to see?

[Hey, at least he's not saying "you show me yours and I'll show you mine."]

[Small mercies. But he's going to ask a big question, here.]

Which two? Did you always have two?

[He could just be asking about Kurusu's awakening, because of the way his own differed from Crow's. But he's not.]

Edited 2023-10-15 20:57 (UTC)

Started with just the one. Got the other one a while later.

[There's a pause. Because- does he really want to say that second name? Then again, it's all going to come out sooner or later. But.]

Let's see. By the point you're at... my Akechi knew about Arsène.

Interesting. You're the second I've spoken to who got their Personas at different times. [And it's annoying as hell.

Arsène, though. He remembers him from Madarame's Palace. As to whether Kurusu once had more than the two, either he never did, or he won't tell Akechi.]

That was your first Persona, right? You'll forgive me if I say you don't seem the type to have an inner Phantom Thief?

You don't say.

[He stares at that last bit for a good long minute or so. Ha. Haha.]

Yup. Funny, that. I fitted in really well. It was fun.

[When he ignored and blocked out what'd happen after the end, sure.]

[Yeah, he stares at that reply, too. "Fun". It did seem like fun—or like it might have been, if he'd got further than the elevator, if he'd gone into Sae's Palace more than once. Now he'll probably never know.]

I don't know about fun. I got to impress them the once. That was fun, I suppose. You did the whole Palace?

All the way in and all the way out. Also, just the once? That's criminal.

I hope it was a little more than once. But in the Metaverse itself, when they knew it was me? Only the once.

[Part of him doesn't want to ask.]

What was it like? Were they as intolerable? The whole time? [Oh, right, Crow doesn't know too much about cognitive beings, does he?... fuck you, Takamaki.]

Damn.

[He... sighs. He knows how it was for him. He can also remember how it was before... and how the others were.]

Can't say the others didn't have their moments. I'm sure I didn't make things easy for them either, since I wasn't exactly used to working in a team at first.

[Akechi had apparently made things bearable on both sides; he can't make that kind of promise, that this one's Ren will do the same when he isn't in the kind of position they were in.]

And you had other things to worry about, I'm sure.

[He'd had it all planned. Keep them on track; keep them from noticing anything too incriminating. Learn whatever he could, any way he could; glean the secrets they were given for the asking. But there had been a reason for that, hadn't there?—a history that Kurusu appears to have turned inside-out?...]

What were you going to do at the end? I know you didn't plan to indulge yourself with my counterpart all along. [Or, who knows, perhaps he did.] What was the big finish?

Edited 2023-10-16 00:24 (UTC)

That's one way of putting it.

[He sees the rest, and- freezes, staring at his phone screen with a bit of a lost expression.]

I don't know what you mean by 'indulge' but I'm pretty sure the plan was the same. Other than that Big finish?[Then he realises. Obvious. Of course.]

I don't know. I didn't have a plan of my own, really. I told you before, how it would've been a meaningless way to go. Pretty pathetic, huh?

You did say that. But that can't have *been it*. So you got out alive and so did he. Against surprising odds, by all accounts. But you believed you *had* to do it.

[Kill Ren, that is. Because he had orders.]

How did you see your future? Did you truly think your death was inevitable? Did you think you *deserved* it?

Death? Don't make me laugh. Most of the past few years has just been about surviving. Because I refused to die when I could have. It's all academic now, because I'm out the other side. But I don't think Freedom was a pipe dream. At that time, "my future" wasn't really mine. So you could say I didn't really have one.

[It's an odd thing, thinking about how he'd been back then. Sometimes he's the same person and the Phantom Thief is the stranger in his memories he's looking at from the outside, and sometimes that mindset is the stranger. It doesn't help that putting himself back into it for too long is like touching cognitive sludge.]

[Damn it. People keep insisting to him that life is worth living; that he has a future, somehow. It makes him suspect, again, that most people can't truly admit what's necessary—or ever face reality. But what does he know about facing reality?]

So you kept going because you were afraid to die. Or because you wouldn't give him the satisfaction. That much I understand. Now you're embedded with them? You see your future there? Once you retrieve your Akechi from wherever he is, I take it. [Detention, probably; Kurusu doesn't talk about him like he's gone forever.]

You think most kids wouldn't be if you set them against some Shadows? Awakening makes you feel all-powerful until you're reminded there's something way stronger that can just squish you. He helped me remember who I was before all of that. Sure it isn't perfect, but even if I'm still figuring out where I'm going, at least I know I'll be able to get there now.

[He thinks back to the kid he was when he first awakened—alive with hate, secure in his own self-righteousness, astonished by the new knowledge he didn't have to be good any more.]

It worried me when I was fifteen. But a lot has passed beneath that bridge since.

[A lot of dead and broken bodies, mainly, along with more of him than he wants to admit.]

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