#ryuake

"Don't you want to get revenge on him? The things he did to you, and your mother... Don't you want to make him pay?"

Ryuji forced himself to look up and meet Akechi's gaze. It was steady and almost too calm, and something about it made the hair on the back of his neck prickle.

"If I do that, I'm... I'm just like him, ain't I?" Ryuji shook his head and clenched his jaw to release some of the tension curdling inside him. "Sometimes it's hard though. Goin' into the Metaverse, I hafta be rough and hurt people. Well, they aren't really people, I guess, but you know what I mean." He exhaled long and low. "But knowing that we're doing it for a good cause kinda helps me get it out. We're helping people and changing society for the better.

"And when Ann says stuff like, she doesn't know if we're doin' the right thing and she doesn't know if we're really helping people, I..." Ryuji faltered and then scrubbed a hand over his face before resting it back on the table. He had to force his fingers to stop trembling. "Eff, man, I don't know why I'm telling you this." He laughed joylessly.

"Tell me." Akechi's eyes were steady on his, and Ryuji didn't even like the guy but something about him made him want to spill his damn guts on the table, made him want to see Akechi spill his own dark secrets.

Ryuji picked at the napkin under his glass again. The edges were shredded by now. "I feel like... if all this time, we weren't the good guys... how am I better than him, y'know? Using violence to get what I want." His voice broke on the last word, and suddenly Akechi's hand was covering the back of his, stilling his anxious movements. His cool, slender fingers curved over the back of Ryuji's knuckles, and it didn't feel good to be holding Akechi's hand--felt really effing weird, wrong, and if Futaba was spying on Leblanc right now he was going to ask Ann to explode him into pure flame--but something about it made his thoughts stop racing.

"Would you believe me if I said 'I understand?'" Akechi said. His voice sounded oddly detached.

"Yeah?"