whoever dies last wins

“I think the part of the ring we’re in is probably the commercial district—which explains all the shops and supplies here!”

Joker hums in agreement: “It’s massive, but if we really put boots to ground, I think we can cover more…” He trails off, something pings in the back of his brain. His head snaps up as he furrows his brow, something shimmers to his left making his breath catch.

“Whoa! A safe room!”

Something in him unwinds—he’s half disappointed, but this still feels like progress after two weeks of rotted buildings and endless rowing.

Just in time it seems, like a mourning shroud, a sheet of rain blankets the winding canals. The effect is immediate, dots dance in the thief's vision, cotton pillowing his habitually sharp senses.

Joker hastens the boat's glide to the lone pier before it gets bad enough for his grip on the oar to weaken. His boots land, heavy, against the waterlogged wood of the half-submerged pier, Mona keeps up with him despite needing to all but scamper to keep up with his longer stride.

Before them is a marble rotunda, almost aggressively Roman in its presentation. The rain is sheeting now, a picturesque waterfall rolling down the ornate ledges and pillars holding the structure upright, further obscuring what may lie on the other side.

It’s almost pristine, compared to the rot weaved in everywhere else.

After a short pause, Joker crosses the threshold, muscles heavy, soaked through and chilled to the bone. Yet, to his surprise… the first thing he registers is the music.

The smooth tenor saxophone is nostalgic enough to suffocate him, he brushes his hair back away from his forehead, slicking his messy unkempt curls away from his mask.

His pupils may as well be pinpricks, with how hard he focuses in on the deceptively innocent record, spinning away on an antique gramophone that’s at least a hundred years out of date. He takes off his gloves and wrings them of excess moisture to hide how badly his hands are shaking.

Joker hadn’t realize the depths of the palace’s deafening silence until he is abruptly devoid of it.

Water streams down the opening he and Mona entered from, creating the illusion of a doorway. Then, for a moment reality wavers. Joker blinks, seeing what looks to be a records room for a split second, with wall to wall shelves, endless manila folders, hundreds of color coded labels.

When he blinks again, between the skip of a needle on a record and Mona hopping on one of the benches the space settles—remembering what shape it ought to be. Curious. A part of Joker ponders if his rival’s unredacted court records exist somewhere in that place—he’ll have to probe Sae about it when he gets the chance.

(Granted, Futaba could probably snag them in a heartbeat, but the inherent selfishness of that impulse, makes Akira want to crawl himself into a hole.)

Beside him, Mona happily bobs his head to the tune, the rhythmic notes of blues a welcome way to break up the palace's eerie, whistling winds. Joker only sighs and leans his back against a pillar, complicated gaze focused on the blurred shapes of the ruins just obscured through the cascading water. A bit of his vitality comes back.

“So, what’s the plan?”

Joker’s mouth twists to the side, “Well, I think we can probably rule out that flood gate as being a block in the real world…”

“Huh? What makes you say that, Joker?”

He lifts a shoulder, “Lavenza said Akechi’s physical body is in here somewhere. So, there’s no avenue to change his cognition further; that means most of the puzzles here are meant to be solved.”

“Oh, I see now! Come to think of it… Doesn’t this place kind of give off the vibe that it wants to waste our time?”

Blink.

“‘Waste our time?’”

“Yeah, two weeks and we’ve only found a safe room, a less experienced thief would’ve probably given up by now. Not us, though, obviously,” Mona glances up at him, practically shining, “we’re professionals!”

Joker’s lips twitch with affection, “That thing you’re getting at… so, you think this district we’re stuck in probably a defense mechanism. A time sink to deter thieves.”

“Exactly! Akechi’s a prickly guy, so it makes sense his palace would craft a buffer, kinda like a moat around a castle.”

“I think this is beyond prickly, and we haven’t even run into any enemies yet.”

Joker trails off grimly, this palace represents a worst case scenario. It is his rival at the end of the world, corned like an injured tiger, covered in wounds, bearing blood-stained fangs to all unfortunate enough to wander in too close.

You put him here. He did all this for you instead of running like he should have from the start.

“... I hope the rain stops soon,” Mona admits after a short silence, ears drooping as the saxophone reaches its bridge, there’s a distinct hint of blues in the quartet, a morose nostalgia that Joker can’t seem to shake. The bass. The saxophone. The piano. Even the rumbling of the drums.

Akira remembers how important music was to Akechi, it’s only fitting it would color his psyche in a place that’s 'safe', a space meant to bring the relief and comfort he never received in life, even to the visitors his psyche so loathed.

Contradictory in every way, just like Akechi himself.

(Stop that—he's still alive, you can still salvage this, you can fix this.)