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entrancelogs2017-09-02 07:33 pm
intrusivethot) wrote in entrancelogs2017-09-02 07:33 pm
[open] and your friends are gone, and your friends won't come
Who: Akira Kurusu & you!
Where: Damon's bar
When: Saturday, September 2nd
Rating: PG
Summary: (blanket spoilers for Persona 5 as always)
Bonds to others are where true strength lies. Until those bonds are abruptly and unceremoniously severed, anyway.
The Story:
Goodbyes are difficult. That's why Akira's rarely given them; too bittersweet to acknowledge a friendship let lie fallow, too awkward to reconnect and make assurances that they'll stay in contact. For Akira's sake, the stigma of becoming a parolee at sixteen saved him one kind of heartache at being put on a train to Tokyo at the expense of another, more bearable heartache. The kind that means you don't have to see the disappointment and distrust replace schoolyard camaraderie. A stranger's hatred is somehow tolerable in comparison.
The circumstances are different now, of course. There was no indication that over the course of a few weeks, he'd lose friends at random. First, Morgana not coming back to sleep on him, then Yusuke's uncharacteristic stand up at the art gallery - then he'd really known something was off. Ann was almost not a surprise at all after that, but a blade quickly removed to let the wound flow freely, pain to come once the adrenaline faded.
Akira didn't so much allow himself to think of it as much as it seeped into his actions, moodily avoiding Ryuji or throwing himself at the Danger Room when all he needed was an outlet for the bubbling rage at the unfairness, when he needed, above all things, to drive himself into numbness, into exhaustion in the absence of the ability to journey into Mementos alone. (Sorry, Mona.)
It isn't fair. It isn't fair.
He can't spend another night inside his room, taking whatever the closets unscrupulously give an underage teenager that asks. He's too bruised for the Danger Room, still nursing a busted lip from a training bot that got a lucky swing in. Distraction is at hand, guiding him to a bar he'd never been in nor has any business being inside on a Saturday.
Akira spends a while watching the drinking games other of-age patrons are engaging in, unconsciously half smiling with the hoots and hollers when someone was forced to take a shot. The clamor ensures that maybe, just maybe his sticky fingers can get to work on grabbing a bottle of his own and surreptitiously pour it into a pilfered glass. If no one catches a teenager grabbing a beer, anyway.
Eventually keeping his thief skills sharp loses its luster (or he stops being quite so capable of it) and Akira slouches openly at the bar, a haze of misery shrouding a nearby drink until his elbow sends it spilling across the bar, Akira staring at it after, stricken.
"Oh - damn, sorry. No, sit down, let me clean it up -"
[ closed to Goro Akechi ]
Akira being a mess sort of aligns with the messy company he keeps. Had Akechi told him that he works here? Since that zombie event the detective prince had been damned good at not being in the same place at the same time as Akira, with a few...notable exceptions...
Not that Akira thought of it often. Or at all.
Just catching a glimpse of him behind the bar sends odd prickles across his skin, a volcanic heat searing his gut that he blindly attributes to annoyance that the detective hunting him down in his world is here while many of his friends are not. Anger has always been a clarifying force for him, so he has to try and understand why Akira still has a murderer instead of his closest friends, robbing Akira of the one thing that distracts him from his loss of purpose, separated from the Phantom Thieves' mission.
Tries. And fails, as honesty breaks through the hard shell of the anger that he mostly feels he's playacting by now. Empathy is a hell of a thing.
He doesn't really know why he instead gives a half wave when Akechi's eyes glance past him, a faint smile in place. Hi there.
Where: Damon's bar
When: Saturday, September 2nd
Rating: PG
Summary: (blanket spoilers for Persona 5 as always)
Bonds to others are where true strength lies. Until those bonds are abruptly and unceremoniously severed, anyway.
The Story:
Goodbyes are difficult. That's why Akira's rarely given them; too bittersweet to acknowledge a friendship let lie fallow, too awkward to reconnect and make assurances that they'll stay in contact. For Akira's sake, the stigma of becoming a parolee at sixteen saved him one kind of heartache at being put on a train to Tokyo at the expense of another, more bearable heartache. The kind that means you don't have to see the disappointment and distrust replace schoolyard camaraderie. A stranger's hatred is somehow tolerable in comparison.
The circumstances are different now, of course. There was no indication that over the course of a few weeks, he'd lose friends at random. First, Morgana not coming back to sleep on him, then Yusuke's uncharacteristic stand up at the art gallery - then he'd really known something was off. Ann was almost not a surprise at all after that, but a blade quickly removed to let the wound flow freely, pain to come once the adrenaline faded.
Akira didn't so much allow himself to think of it as much as it seeped into his actions, moodily avoiding Ryuji or throwing himself at the Danger Room when all he needed was an outlet for the bubbling rage at the unfairness, when he needed, above all things, to drive himself into numbness, into exhaustion in the absence of the ability to journey into Mementos alone. (Sorry, Mona.)
It isn't fair. It isn't fair.
He can't spend another night inside his room, taking whatever the closets unscrupulously give an underage teenager that asks. He's too bruised for the Danger Room, still nursing a busted lip from a training bot that got a lucky swing in. Distraction is at hand, guiding him to a bar he'd never been in nor has any business being inside on a Saturday.
Akira spends a while watching the drinking games other of-age patrons are engaging in, unconsciously half smiling with the hoots and hollers when someone was forced to take a shot. The clamor ensures that maybe, just maybe his sticky fingers can get to work on grabbing a bottle of his own and surreptitiously pour it into a pilfered glass. If no one catches a teenager grabbing a beer, anyway.
Eventually keeping his thief skills sharp loses its luster (or he stops being quite so capable of it) and Akira slouches openly at the bar, a haze of misery shrouding a nearby drink until his elbow sends it spilling across the bar, Akira staring at it after, stricken.
"Oh - damn, sorry. No, sit down, let me clean it up -"
[ closed to Goro Akechi ]
Akira being a mess sort of aligns with the messy company he keeps. Had Akechi told him that he works here? Since that zombie event the detective prince had been damned good at not being in the same place at the same time as Akira, with a few...notable exceptions...
Not that Akira thought of it often. Or at all.
Just catching a glimpse of him behind the bar sends odd prickles across his skin, a volcanic heat searing his gut that he blindly attributes to annoyance that the detective hunting him down in his world is here while many of his friends are not. Anger has always been a clarifying force for him, so he has to try and understand why Akira still has a murderer instead of his closest friends, robbing Akira of the one thing that distracts him from his loss of purpose, separated from the Phantom Thieves' mission.
Tries. And fails, as honesty breaks through the hard shell of the anger that he mostly feels he's playacting by now. Empathy is a hell of a thing.
He doesn't really know why he instead gives a half wave when Akechi's eyes glance past him, a faint smile in place. Hi there.
doki doki~
By the time he gets back he doesn't really have the strength to go through it all. He's been through it with Akechi and he might have had a few but Akira's got his wits about him, frayed as they are.
It's nothing Ryuji's done, of course. He'd needed someone to talk to with some distance, to help forget that half of the Thieves' founding member were now gone and no amount of Joker's legendary guile could fix it. And that fucking sucks. Akira's half convinced that he's going to walk into their shared rooms and find nothing waiting for him - no one to miss him until he's eventually erased too.
Damn. This is messing him up. It's hard not to take it as an accusation seeing as how Akira's pulled an extended disappearing act.
"Checking out Akechi's job at the bar. Didn't think you were waiting up for me."
Oh, he's been missing longer than that? Weird.
<3
They can't just do that--what if something happens, and that's the one time the rest of them aren't around to...? To help, to be there. To... something.
Ugh.
He hates the atmosphere of uncertainty Wonderland's created, that one moment any of them could be laughing over breakfast only to turn a corner and be gone, but he hates the feeling that uncertainty creates in him even more. He's become his own mother, wanting to keep tabs and helicopter parent.
"Akechi?"
But Ryuji has faith in his friendships above all else, and when he hears Akechi and bar together, he leans forward with a new alertness, automatically assuming Akira means he'd been there for work. He probably hadn't thought to say he'd be out so long because he'd gotten busy with whatever it was. Makes sense. Keeping tabs on that guy is practically a full-time job.
"He up to somethin'?" He's all ears. Recon might be good to keep their head in the game.
o3o
Yeah. Akira can be reminded of these things, but can he feel them just now beneath a haze of loneliness, confused feelings, and pilfered half-full beer.
He jerks, maybe shaking his head. "Wh- no. Akechi's -" Something. He has no idea what Akechi is except human and incredibly warm to the touch. "Okay."
Akira rubs his face with the heel of his palm, scraping away the patina of insomnia that's plagued him these past few days/ Maybe longer, and he hadn't noticed. He understands Ryuji searching for something to act upon, some... point of focus but beyond surviving in this place it just doesn't exist. He flumphs down onto the couch next to Ryuji, their legs pressed together.
"I don't know what I'm doing anymore, Ryuj."
no subject
It's a question that can wait for another time. Now that he has a moment to get a good look at the other boy, he backseats the rest of his thought in favor of mounting concern. Akira looks... rough, to put it politely. He sits up straighter, following the other's weary progress across the room with the furrow pulling tighter between his brows.
It's only when Akira flops into the seat beside him that he catches a whiff of what Akira had meant by bar. "Have you been drinking?" he asks in surprise, nose wrinkling at the pungent aroma of beer clinging to his breath and clothes.
Going to a bar to play amateur sleuth--that's nothing new for them. But going to a bar to drink the actual drinks?
no subject
"Mmyeah. Not a lot. Some." He'd never get away with it at home, but here there is a lawlessness that we delinquents cannot distinguish themselves from, no society to oppose. It is unjust that they're here and their friends are slowing becoming Not and they can do nothing about it...
Akira may or may not mumble some of that at Ryuji, staring down between his knobbly knees.
"S'not fair. I miss them."
no subject
The mumble sets a mood somewhere between a tired drunk and that of a despairing philosophizer, and Ryuji turns to sit sideways, the better to see Akira. The more he sees, the more he frowns. Akira looks raw and worn-out in a way he hasn't seen since the winter when it felt as though the entire world's displeasure had turned on the Thieves with the force of a magnifying glass pointed at an ant.
"You mean to say that's where you've been all this time?" In the bar, getting shit-faced? Akira is just full of surprises. Sometimes to a worrying degree.
A beat to consider what to say to that admission, then Ryuji hesitantly ventures the thought on his mind: "Why didn't you call me? I wasn't busy. I would've gone with you." Maybe not to help himself to the liquid buffet, but he could've gone.
A double standard in a sense, deciding against texting Akira while acting like he'd been expecting one in return, but he's also not the one who keeps taking off without a word. Needing space has typically come with a negative value attached in Ryuji's experience; he doesn't like it, not with Akira of all people.