#I thiiiiink this technically qualifies as fic?

[c-is-for-circinate]

Some thoughts on the very final boss battle of Persona 5

It’s in those very last moments--that final instant, that flash that is as still and infinite as eternity, when all the voices of every soul below reach up to them and their final battle against the God--that Akira knows himself to be a slave.

He’s a rebel.  He’s fighting god himself, has struggled his way through hell and up to heaven for it.  He is here to champion the cause of free will for every single soul on Earth, and he has no choice in the matter.  He never did.

This is what he’s good at, where he excels: fitting perfectly into whatever situation comes upon him.  He’s the Trickster, the man of a thousand masks.  He can wear any face he likes, and in return, he always wears the face he needs.  It’s a bargain of sorts.  Akira knows a lot about bargains by now.  He has known a lot about rules for his entire life.

Once upon a time, that was a quiet life in a small town where he kept to the middle of his class and hid his face behind glasses and obeyed every rule.  Nobody up here with him would believe it, but he was just like everybody else.  He would have willingly given over rule of his life to somebody else.  He did, every single day--his parents, his teachers, the will of society as a whole.  He would have let Yaldabaoth rule over him without hesitation.

He did.  That’s the secret that isn’t a secret at all, only he doesn’t think any one of his friends have realized it.  They all stepped into the life of a Phantom Thief, one by one, to rebel against whatever force was holding them back.  Akira stepped into it because that was the door open in front of him.  Because he was chosen.  Because it was fate.

He spent a long time in that cell in Yaldabaoth’s Velvet Room.  He’s been playing his role for a very long time.

It was a rigged game, Lavenza said.  So why play a game at all?

There are rules.  Yaldabaoth always meant to take the world, but he’s bound by rules.  He’s created by the collective will of the entire world, to be the incarnation of rules, and that means he has to follow them, too.  That’s how the story goes: two opposing sides.  Order and chaos.  Bless and Curse.  The God, and the Trickster.

That’s what it means, to be the Trickster.  It’s a role.  The story requires it.  Every story needs an antagonist.  Every fate demands an opponent.

It’s been a long, slow, arduous path up to the top of this summit right now, but there is no other path he could have walked.  None.  He chose the ‘how’, sometimes--picked their days to storm into palaces, certainly, but whether or not they stormed in at all?  No.  It was never a choice.  The door was open in front of him, and he walked through.  From the very first moment--he could have stumbled along the way, but there was never any other place he could have ended up besides right here.

He could have turned right instead of left and fallen off a cliff at Akechi’s hands.  He could have taken the false Igor’s deal, maybe, and left the world enslaved.  Supposedly.  He could have left the woman to Shido’s attentions and turned the other way all the way back at the beginning, a year ago almost to the day.  That might have been the only real choice in all of this, the step that started him down this path, except there was no choice at all.  It was a foregone conclusion as soon as he set foot on the street that night.

He knows about bonds, now.  He can feel every single unbreakable chain that he’s forged this year, tying him to his fate.  He’d never understood, back at the beginning, the chains tying Arsene’s arms to his--which of them was the puppet, the prisoner, and which of them was supposed to be the will?  Even back then, all the way back at the beginning, he was bound--to himself, if nothing else.  To his own code.  To his own justice.  He could not have turned the other way on that first night any more than he can turn around and leave the battle in front of him right now.

He’s the Trickster, after all.  Yaldabaoth created him as such, and gave him to the world, because the collective will of humanity demanded a rebel.  The collective will of humanity demands freedom and hope and revolution every bit as much as it demands order.  He can feel it this very instant.  He can feel it right now, the light and the power from every person in Tokyo, in Japan, on Earth who believes in this moment in the Phantom Thieves.  

The Trickster is every bit as much a creation and a slave to the will and desires of humankind as Yaldabaoth is himself.  He thinks, fleetingly, of online polls and Kunikazu Okumura.  He thinks about choices.

He could surrender right now and let Yaldabaoth kill him, destroy his friends, enslave the world.  Akira Kurusu is a human being with a human’s free will.  He can choose.  He can give in--

He told me to go to his place.  You know what that means.

Whenever I acted out of line, I was made to sit calmly in that corner.

I’m just a burden to her.

This place is my tomb.

I think it’d be useless.

He can give in to Yaldabaoth.  Or he can give in to the rising, rushing tide of hope and determination that demands he win here.  Surrender or surrender.  Submit to a god, or submit himself to the rules of becoming one.

Shall we make a deal?  The ring of his own thoughts echo in his own head, through all the bits of him that Yaldabaoth never quite managed to execute.  He’s been killing bits of himself since the very first week he stepped into the Velvet Room, murdering himself by inches in exchange for power, a few more steps down this path that chose him.  But some bonds can’t be broken.  Arsene hasn’t quite left him yet.

A deal.  One last deal, with his own self.  One more vow.

Maybe it’s possible for humans to go through life unbound by rules and bonds and the will of society.  He’s here to defend that possibility.  It doesn’t exist for him, but.

He can choose which bonds to forge into unbreakable steel.  He can pick which side he surrenders to.

It’s not in him to break a promise.  One last promise, then.  Arsene flares up inside him for the first time in almost a year, behind his mask.

He’ll take the power.  He’ll be the Trickster, the Joker.  He will be Satanael, the Rebel, the Devil Himself.  He won’t falter.  He won’t fall.

And when this is all done, he’ll just be human, that’s all.  This will be done.  No path, no story, no more fate, just the wide World spread out full in front of him.  He’ll have his own freedom, then.

He raises his gun and gives in to fate just one more time.