#stargirl.exe

i don't know, i think about it a lot. they just feel so real, in a way that an explicitly canon relationship wouldn't be able to. there's something so awful about being akira and having to go home at the end of the day knowing that the person you care about is probably dead.

the one you care for more than anything else, to the point where your core wish, the thing you want more than anything else, is some variation of "i want him to be alive and well," or "i want him to be happy" (underlying connotation of "with me.") the way i interpreted it — he could have wished for anything else, but that's his deepest desire. to see akechi happy, and free to be his true self.

and your choices are —

1: risk losing him, risk him dying a second time and knowing that you did nothing because that was his wish. he wanted to die. he would rather be dead than controlled once again.

(tangent here: i do sincerely believe that akechi's motivation there was a double-edged sword? is that how you use that phrase. i don't think so. double-sided coin maybe. two sides of the some coin.

anyways i think he had two reasons there — first and most obviously, he's fucking tired of being a puppet. of being a bargaining chip in some massive cosmic hellscape. it's happened several times at this point — shido, yaldaboath, and now maruki all using him as their pawns. he doesn't care if he dies, as long as he isn't under maruki's control.

secondly — his entire motivation for working himself to the literal bones (apple a day, anyone?) was for his revenge plot. television, keeping up appearances, school, assassinations, was all to get closer to shido so he could kill him once and for all.

but if he turned all that rage and fire inward, and burnt himself into a boy obsessed with revenge, what does he have left to live for? what sort of stable person would turn themselves psychotic in a last-ditch effort to stop the phantom thieves from keeping him from his literal lifelong goal of being the one to end shido?

anyways, that was a whole lot of talk to say i think he's suicidal. and needs to have a long, long, long talk with a trauma therapist.)

or 2: betray him, betray his most fundamental ideal and the thing he's been fighting against since he was a frightened little teenage boy offering his persona to shido as a way of getting his revenge the only way he could think of. and cling to the knowledge that he's going to hate you, for as long as he can think on his own, but he'll be alive.

where one is deeply jealous of the other for always being better, being more than they could. the good old -- hatred isn't that far off from powerful earthshaking love, you know. it's comforting to know there's someone out there who wants a grave for you. -- or even just being friends! but there's that undercurrent of not being good enough.