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The first time it happens is in Kamoshida's Palace, so early into their time as Phantom Thieves that they're not even calling themselves that yet. It's just three of them in the Palace at that point. Just Ryuji and Akira and Morgana, and then of course there's the Shadow that opens its mouth and comes out with a babble of sounds so horrible and unpronounceable it makes Ryuji want to cover his ears and run away.
They're not words, they can't possibly be words, even if it does sort of look like the Shadow is trying to say something. It sags low to the ground because of the injuries they've given it in the fight, babbling away and looking up at them pleadingly.
They're not words, but something in the sound of it crawls inside Ryuji's skull anyway, the broad meaning of it pounding itself into his head whether he wants it to or not.
(MercyNegotiationPleadingPleaseNoMore)
The sounds the Shadow is making are absolutely the worst thing Ryuji has ever heard in his life, right up until Akira opens his mouth and responds in the exact same way. Hearing those sounds coming from something as weird as a Shadow is bad enough, but hearing Akira somehow replicating them is ten thousand times worse.
(UnityUnderstandingNotAloneBeMyMask)
Ryuji exchanges a look with Morgana, half hoping that the cat will have some kind of explanation for this the way he does for everything else they run into in the Palace. But Morgana just returns Ryuji's look of extreme confusion with one of his own, which isn't helpful at all but does at least make Ryuji feel a little bit better. It would have been way worse to be the only one completely freaked out by this.
When the Shadow finishes its... conversation with Akira and vanishes in a flurry of sparks right into his mask, Ryuji doesn't even have any confusion left to spare for that new surprise. So Akira can recruit Shadows, that's fine, that's cool, but he is spewing monster nightmare words out of his mouth that seems like a bigger problem.
Akira turns around and sees the looks the other two are giving him. "What's wrong?" he asks, his voice normal again.
It takes almost half an hour to convince Akira, who apparently hadn't heard anything weird about his own voice or the Shadow's, that the whole conversation had taken place in some kind of horrifying Shadow language and not in regular Japanese. He has no idea, apparently, how he'd learned what Ryuji dubs Shadow Talk, but he slips right back into it with the next Shadow he decides to recruit, and with every one after that.
He doesn't even have the grace to look apologetic for it.
-//-
It wouldn't be so bad, in Ann's opinion, if Akira only slipped into Shadow Talk while they're in Palaces, when he's negotiating with Shadows. At least then there would be a point to it, because that's the only way they have of getting items and money and new Personas for Akira out of them. She can accept that it is necessary and helpful and they would not be doing as well without that.
But it's not just in Palaces, and when Ann realizes their math teacher has spotted Akira nodding off in the desk behind hers, she braces herself for what's about to follow. Sure enough, the chalk flies past her and hits Akira smack in the forehead, knocks him awake, and sends a flurry of horrible nightmare syllables tumbling out of his mouth from the sheer surprise.
(WokenSuddenSurpriseStartle)
The language of Shadows sounds sharp and strange in the mundane banality of the classroom. Ann schools her expression, and does her best to project an air of nope, nothing's wrong, nothing to see here, there's definitely no one speaking in horrible eldritch tongues, why would you even say that?
Luckily, even half-asleep, Akira has the sense to say it quietly, and because most of the rest of the class is now laughing, no one other than Ann really hears what he says. The unfortunate classmate sitting next to Akira kind of gives him some side eye, mouth half open like he's not quite sure what he's just heard.
Akira blinks a couple times, then gives him a bland smile that's enough to makes him shudder and turn away.
"If we can all focus on the lesson, please," their teacher announces in a bored tone, and the lesson resumes.
"Sorry," Akira mumbles to Ann, quietly enough for only her to hear, when finally no one is looking at them anymore.
"Not your fault," Ann whispers, half turning her head back toward him so he can hear.
He shrugs, only a slight movement in Ann's peripheral vision, and then Ann hears the faint noise of Morgana shifting around in his desk. "I should have noticed you were nodding off," the cat whispers.
Akira shakes his head and turns his face away, not looking either of them in the eye as he says, "It's fine. I'm fine. Honestly."
Maybe he is, but it's going to take Ann a while longer to stop shuddering whenever she hears him break into Shadow Talk. It's the way it corkscrews into her head that gets her, the way the meaning of it imprints itself onto her brain. She doesn't hear the nuance of it, not the way Akira says that he does. He's tried to explain it before, how the Shadow Talk sounds to him like normal words, just with... layers of meaning behind it that don't come through in normal Japanese.
But to Ann, all she gets are the broad strokes, the basic meaning and big emotions behind it.
And the horrible sound of it, which she hears loud and clear.
-//-
The first time Yusuke hears Akira's Shadow Talk, during a negotiation with one of the Shadows in Madarame's museum Palace, he jumps at least six inches, makes a noise of startled horror, and looks around at where no one else is reacting with any kind of surprise. Akira pauses in his... conversation with the Shadow, looking back over his shoulder at Yusuke, and the other Thieves look suddenly sheepish.
"Yeah," Morgana says, wincing a little. "We... probably should have warned you about the Shadow Talk."
"He does that," Ann agrees. "Sorry, Fox."
"And this is... fine and normal?" Yusuke asks. It certainly does not sound fine and normal. It sounds like Akira is either having a seizure or being posessed.
Akira half turns back to them and starts to say something, but the Shadow growls at him--
(ImpatienceIrritationAttendToMeNotToThem)
--and Akira kind of rolls his eyes and mutters something. It doesn't exactly sound like words, but carries a meaning anyway, of--
(HangOnAnnoyanceWaitOneSecond )
Yusuke immediately turns to the other three.
"He can talk to Shadows and recruit them into being his Personas," Morgana explains.
"There's this... kinda-language thing," Ryuji says, rubbing the back of his head and making a face. "I dunno, it's just this weird thing Joker knows how to do."
"It's actually not that bad in here," Ann says.
Yusuke can feel an expression of polite disbelief etching itself across his face, half hidden by his mask, and Ann laughs.
"I know," she says. "I know, It sounds really bad, but it's actually a lot worse if you ever hear it in the real world."
This is not the ringing endorsement Yusuke had been hoping for.
"And you probably will hear it in the real world," Ryuji adds. "Since he does it all the time when he's not paying attention."
There's a flash of light from the Shadow, and after a brief pause to adjust his mask, Akira turns to join the conversation. He's making a face and says, "It's not seriously that weird, is it?"
"It is extremely weird," Yusuke says. "How can you not hear that it's weird?"
Akira just shrugs. "I can barely tell the difference when I'm speaking it," he says. "It just sounds--normal. If I concentrate I can force myself to switch in and out, but usually it's just something that happens."
"Why, though?" Yusuke asks.
"I have no idea," Akira says, with so much feeling that Yusuke has to crack a smile. "Anyway, I don't think it sounds as creepy as everyone keeps saying."
"It is," Ann tells him.
"It super is," Ryuji adds, as Yusuke nods in emphatic support.
"I guess," Akira says, still sounding unconvinced. "But at least it's a useful kind of weird. Anyway, should we keep going? Mona, you were saying earlier we still have a long way to go to get to the Treasure, right?"
"What? Oh, right! Yeah, I think we still have a lot of the Palace left to get through..."
The conversation moves on to the Treasure and how far they still need to go before they get to it. Yusuke joins in hesitantly a first, still a little unnerved by the... negotiations he'd just witnessed. He keeps expecting to hear more of that Shadow Talk every time Akira opens his mouth, and it takes him some time to relax the way Ryuji, Ann, and Morgana already have. But, over time, he does get used to it. He learns not to listen too hard to the way Akira sounds when he talks to Shadows, and then later, how to joke about Akira's Shadow Talk with the rest of the Thieves. Akira's weird habit of talking to Shadows in a language that sounds like it should be unpronounceable becomes just another odd aspect of their trips into the Palace, no stranger than summoning Personas or searching for Treasures.
By the time Makoto joins the team in June and jumps half out of her skin the first time Akira breaks into Shadow Talk, Yusuke is the one apologizing for not thinking to warn her ahead of time.
"You get used to it," he tells the extremely skeptical Makoto. "It's just the way he is."
Akira grins and says... something. Yusuke gets the impression of--
(JokingFriendshipPleaseDontThinkImWeird)
--before everyone protests at once, and both the Shadow Talk and Japanese dissolve into laughter.
-//-
It bothers Akira, sometimes, that ever since his first trip into the Metaverse he's had this... thing in his head that he doesn't understand and can't control. A knowledge he's never learned, just... woken up with one day. He doesn't know how he learned to talk to Shadows, doesn't know why he's the only one that can understand their language.
The whole thing is convenient, sure. If he only had one Persona, they'd be making much slower progress through the Palaces. They'd have fewer options, less opportunity to take advantage of Shadows' weaknesses, less chance at surviving a fight with a Palace ruler. But it marks him out as different in a way that just--sneaks up on him sometimes.
As spring slips into summer, and they clear one Palace after another, Akira gradually comes to recognize when his words slip sideways out of Japanese and into Shadow Talk, into something that isn't even really words. It's feelings, and things deeper than feelings, truths and beliefs that are sometimes hard to explain to himself.
In some ways, Shadow Talk is easier than words, and in some ways it's harder. There's no hiding in Shadow Talk, no misunderstandings, and it's very hard to lie. It's just exactly what he's thinking and feeling, translated into something that unfortunately happens to sound like some kind of horrible monster language to most people.
To him and the Shadows, though, it's completely and unambiguously understandable. It's why recruiting them works at all. Because they talk to him, and he talks back, and sometimes what they say to each other sounds the same. It's not just a matter of convincing the Shadows to listen to him--it's them recognizing something in him that's the same as them.
But Shadows aren't very good conversationalists, and Akira doesn't hear anyone else human (or human-ish, anyway) use the language until one day in the Velvet Room. He's standing by the bars of his cell, tense and trying not to show it as the twins go through the disturbing motions of executing and fusing his Personas. No matter how many times he sees it, he never gets used to the way it looks (or feels) to have his Personas sacrificed and merged and turned into something new. He watches, unblinking but not quite sure what he's looking out for, until--this time--something goes wrong.
There's a sharp, sudden noise, and one of the guillotines jams halfway down, resting just barely above the cloaked neck of the squirming Persona below. Akira jolts forward, abandoning all attempts at acting unconcerned. That's his Persona, that's a part of him. "What--" he starts, but Caroline turns to glare at him, and he falls silent.
He watches, though, tense and concerned, as Justine crouches in front of the Shadow, putting her hand on cloth covering its feebly squirming body. (Patience) she says to it quietly, and although Akira should be too far away to hear her whispered words, he hears them anyway, as if listening through the Persona that is still, after all, a part of him. (Patience, comfort, all will be over soon)
And then Caroline produces a chainsaw from somewhere, and finishes the job that the guillotine had started.
Akira never exactly asks either of them about Shadow Talk, because the twins are mercurial and hard to get a straight answer out of even in the best of circumstances. But after that, their conversations in the Velvet Room take place in Shadow Talk as often as they do in Japanese. It's a turning point for Akira, who starts to see them as friends as much as wardens. They open up to him a little bit more as well, talking to him more often, challenging him to fuse and train more Personas and show them to the two of them.
He never once hears Igor slip from Japanese, though, no matter how normal it gets to talk to the twins in Shadow Talk.
Sometimes, he wonders if that means the old man is hiding something.
-//-
The thing about Shadow Talk is that Morgana absolutely hates it. He hates it, and not just for the reasons that the rest of the Phantom Thieves do. Sure, it's weird and hard to listen to, and it definitely still startles him, even months later, when Akira will all of a sudden switch from perfectly normal Japanese into something that can only be called a language because there's no better word for it.
But Morgana is with Akira almost twenty four hours a day, hanging out in his desk during class, or snoozing in Leblanc while Akira trudges through his homework or helps the Boss out with the cafe. He's sort of gotten used to hearing it by now, especially when Akira is tired or upset or distracted. And, since so much of their lives as Phantom Thieves involve running around in the metaverse where one wrong move could get them all killed by Shadows, Akira is tired or upset or distracted a lot.
If Morgana was going to freak out every time he heard Shadow Talk, he'd barely have time to do anything else.
So, no. The reason he hates Shadow Talk isn't because of Akira. He knows that his roommate can't help himself, and it's useful in the metaverse and not actually hurting anyone in the real world, so... yeah. It's fine.
But at night, when Morgana curls up on the bed with Akira and drifts off to sleep, that's when he has the dreams. Nightmares, really. They have to be nightmares, Morgana has convinced himself, because regular dreams don't feel so horribly real. And memories--
Well, they can't be memories, because that would mean that he's remembering that he was born from Shadows, and that's not true. He's human.
In the nightmares, the language Morgana always hears is Shadow Talk, and he can understand it perfectly. And not just in the general sense he gets from Akira, with the meaning sort of it stamping itself across his mind. This sounds like--well, like a real language. It sounds the way Akira says it sounds to him. In his nightmares, Morgana can understand every word he hears perfectly.
(Find the Trickster, guide him, show him what he needs to know)
But it's definitely only nightmares, it definitely could not possibly be a memory, and Morgana refuses to consider the possibility that it might be anything more than that. It's probably just Akira talking in his sleep, so that scraps of Akira's dreams filter into Morgana's nightmares. That's all it is. Right?
He tries not to think about the fact that he's never actually heard Akira talking in his sleep, or about how it sometimes feels like, if he just tried a little harder, he could understand Shadow Talk while he's awake, too. Because Akira's the only actual person that can speak that language, and everything else that speaks it is a Shadow.
And Morgana. Is. Human.
-//-
Makoto is definitely a little freaked out by Shadow Talk, there's no point in pretending she isn't, but she approaches it the same way she does everything else she doesn't understand.
She studies it.
She listens when Akira negotiates with Shadows, even if sometimes she thinks she'd rather cover her ears and go running in the opposite direction. She uses her phone to record him when he speaks it in the real world (since the only app that works in Palaces is the metanav), and plays it back when she's at home, on the all too frequent nights when Sae stays late at work. She takes notes on what each phrase or sentence means, cobbling together a notation system that can account for all the strange sounds and syllables that just don't exist in Japanese.
The other Thieves are confused by the way she throws herself into studying Shadow Talk, and even Akira gives her a why would you even want to look when she first brings it up to him.
"I mean," he says. "Everyone says it's--you know."
"Super weird?" Ryuji volunteers.
The team is gathered around one of tables in Leblanc, studying for the exams that are about to start for everyone except Yusuke and Morgana. They have the place to themselves since, as seems to be the norm for this time of day, the place is empty of customers. Even Sojiro is gone for the moment, stepping out to pick something up for the cafe and leaving Akira temporarily in charge on the off chance that anyone actually comes looking for coffee.
So it's just the Phantom Thieves today, hunched over their books and (supposedly) studying. Ryuji has a manga volume open behind his textbook, as if she wouldn't notice, and Ann is flicking idly through something on her phone that looks suspiciously like a shopping website.
Yusuke is sketching out a draft of something on his sketchpad, but since he's already done with his exams and has assured Makoto that it's for an assignment, this actually leaves him as the only one currently focused on schoolwork.
Makoto had been trying to study, she really had been, and Akira at least has his math notes out in front of him, but he's obviously having some issues wrapping his head around the assignment. After ten or fifteen minutes of visibly struggling with the same problem, he had thrown down his pencil and let lose with a stream of Shadow Talk--
(FrustrationMathIsStupidIDontGetThis)
--that had sparked off their current conversation.
"It doesn't matter if sounds weird," Makoto tells Ryuji, as the rest of the Thieves--minus Yusuke, still absorbed in his sketching--abandon all studying efforts in the face of this more interesting distraction. "It's still a language, and that means there must be rules for it to follow. I'm interested in finding out what they are."
"I guess," Akira says. "But I couldn't teach it to anyone, I don't think. I don't really know anything about how it works myself."
"Which is even more of a reason to study it," Makoto tells him.
"Does this mean we're going to have to listen to both of you speaking it?" Ryuji asks.
"Probably not for a while," Makoto tells him. "If ever." She... is not sure that she would actually want to speak in Shadow Talk. Akira has never complained that it hurts in any way when he uses it, but it's hard to imagine how he can manage some of those syllables without damaging his vocal chords. "I'd just like to understand how it works a little bit better."
"Well I don't have a problem with it," Akira tells her. "If you actually want to know more about it, then sure, why not?"
"Because it's creepy," Ryuji says, again, under his breath.
"Thank you, Akira," Makoto says, giving Ryuji a sideways stink eye. "We can start after exams are over, when we all have a little more free time."
"Exams," Ryuji mutters, scathingly.
"Yes," Makoto says, eyeing his manga. "That's what we all came here for, remember?" Then she hesitates, thinking of the flash of absolute incomprehension that had come across with Akira's earlier outburst. She might not be fluent in Shadow Talk, but she'd heard his frustration loud and clear. "Did you want some help with your math notes, Akira?"
"Please," he says, and the conversation shifts back toward safer subjects.
And then a few weeks after that talk, Futaba joins the team. She's already at least partly familiar with Akira's Shadow Talk, thanks most likely to the bugs she's learned about the Phantom Thieves from. She spends a few days watching Makoto's efforts more or less in silence, and then one night Makoto gets an email from her at two in the morning with a meticulously organized database of all the information Makoto has collected so far.
They work on the project together for a while. Futaba turns out to be the kind of person that puts absolutely all of her effort into a project when it catches her attention, and Makoto of course isn't going to let herself be outdone, and they start to make slow, gradual progress. Shadow Talk is a hard language to learn, because almost nothing about it seems to be consistent. The same word in Japanese could be translated a dozen or more different ways depending on the feeling and intention behind it, and this is frustrating to keep track of and almost impossible to understand.
But they do learn some things, cobbling together a word or two at a time, never enough to really satisfy Makoto's curiosity about the language, but... it's something, at least.
Makoto's only interest, really, is in figuring out how the language works. She's not really interested in learning to speak it, and she doesn't realize that Futaba's been trying until one day, when the three of them are in Leblanc--Makoto coming back with Akira after an awkwardly faked double date with her friend Eiko, and Futaba having been roped into helping Sojiro with cleanup behind the counter. The three of them are talking about nothing in particular when Futaba reaches for a stack of dishes, misses, and knocks the whole thing to the floor. Makoto winces at the sound, and Futaba lets loose with a sudden, heartfelt fit of--
(FuckFuckShitDamnitFuck)
--cursing, in Shadow Talk.
Because of the ongoing echo of the crashing plates, Makoto and Akira are the only ones close enough to hear the outburst, and for a second both of them just stare at Futaba in surprise. Then Akira doubles over laughing, and Makoto demands to know why is that the word you decided to learn to say.
"Because you always start with curse words first when you learn another language," Futaba tells Makoto, as if this is common sense. "And Akira, stop laughing."
"Your accent is terrible," he informs her.
"Akira!"
He does not stop laughing, though, at least not until Sojiro comes over to ask for an explanation for his broken dishes, and to send Akira off for a broom.
-//-
Akechi enjoys his time with the Phantom Thieves.
He does, really. After two years with the entire metaverse to do with as he pleases, it is a genuinely enjoyable challenge to deceive, infiltrate, and destroy the Thieves. He puts up a pretense, lies through his teeth, and tricks them into thinking that--for this Palace at least--they are on the same side. Akechi can't remember if fighting Shadows had ever been fun for him before, but it is now. Akechi calls to Robin Hood, he follows the Phantom Thieves through the Palace and in their battle plans, he plays nice and bides his time, and then...
And then Akira stops a fight to have a conversation with one of the Shadows, and Akechi hears a language he never thought he'd hear coming out of the mouth of another human being. It's the language the Shadows speak, the one that Akechi himself knows, without knowing how he knows it.
Akechi has never exactly trusted the language that he soon learns that the Phantom Thieves call Shadow Talk. He has a certain intrinsic understanding of how to speak it, yes, but not with the same easy fluency that passes between Akira and the Shadow. For Akechi, its clumsy and slow and takes some mental effort, and he has honestly never been motivated to make much of an effort to improve.
He doesn't need to hear what the Shadows say to him. And he doesn't enjoy the honesty that Shadow Talk demands when he speaks it. His whole life is lies, and there is no room to hide within the emotion-and-truth driven language of the Shadows.
Akechi stays quiet during Akira's first Shadow negotiation, and then during every one that happens after. Morgana gives him a brief explanation of what Akira's trying to do and how he recruits new Personas, and then after that Akechi is mostly ignored while Makoto tries to study her way into understanding the language, or while Ann and Futaba tease Akira over it, or Ryuji keeps up his running commentary of yeah okay but it's creepy. He's fine with this. He hadn't expected this complication during his infiltration of the Phantom Thieves, and he doesn't know what he'd have said if anyone asked for his opinion on the Shadow Talk issue.
Luckily, it never comes up during the Palace infiltration. They get all the way to the Treasure at the end of Sae's Palace, all the way to the point where Akechi starts to make arrangements for the the police action that will lead to the arrest of the Phantom Thieves' leader.
They meet up the day before they plan to steal Sae's Treasure so they can talk about the calling card and then, through a miscalculation on Akechi's part, he ends up alone with Akira after everyone else has split up to do other things.
"So I guess this is it," Akira says, once the two of them are alone in Akira's attic bedroom. He's moving slowly around the room, cleaning up after the team meeting as he continues, "One more day and then you get what you want. The Phantom Thieves split up."
"You agreed to the deal," Akechi points out mildly.
"You didn't give me much of a choice," Akira answers.
He pauses in his cleanup, and they face each other across the mostly empty space of the attic. There's something unexpectedly serious about Akira's expression, and it occurs to Akechi suddenly that maybe he should have wondered why the rest of the group were in such a hurry to leave. Normally, it's the other way around, and they're all still lingering when Akechi walks out first.
"I'm getting the feeling there's something you wanted to talk to me about," Akechi says. "Is that why none of the rest of your friends are here right now?"
A nod. Akira says (careful, expectant, I asked them to give us some time to talk).
And Akechi asks (WaryIsThisATrapTalkAboutWhat) before he's even realized that they're not using Japanese anymore. The words just come, naturally responding to Akira in the same language he'd used to ask the question.
Akira nods. (satisfied, confirmation, you never reacted the way everyone else does) he says. (You were never afraid)
"Well," Akechi says. Intentionally. Purposefully. In Japanese. "Now you know that I speak it too." It's too late to try and pretend that he hasn't said... what he's just said, in the way he's just said it, but he's still wary of how much he might accidentally give away through Shadow Talk.
That, and it sort of gives him a headache.
Akira nods. He doesn't seem particularly motivated to continue the conversation, so Akechi asks, "What now? I assume you wanted to confirm that for a reason."
(indifferent, unplanned, nothing really) Akira tells him, and Akechi wonders if he's sticking to Shadow Talk on purpose to make Akechi uncomfortable, or if it's just easier for him to stay in that language that he's started. (curious, just wanted to know before we go after the Treasure tomorrow)
Akechi feels tricked, he feels vulnerable, and both of those things make him feel angry. "I was starting to wonder why I never heard you use it in the real world," he says. "Everyone else was always talking about how often they have to put up with it and I never heard it from you unless you were trying to recruit a Shadow into a Persona. And can you not--" He stops, reigns in the sudden burst of anger that's leaking into his words. "Can you not talk like that?"
Akira shrugs, and switches obligingly back to Japanese. The easy transition only annoys Akechi more, for some reason. "I'm less careful about it when I'm around the rest of the team," Akira explains. "Because they know already and I trust them, but with other people..." He trails off with a one shouldered shrug. "I try and stay on guard all the time. I've never even slipped up around Sojiro, and he's right downstairs all the time."
Akechi does not miss the implication that this means Akira does not trust him. Considering his plans, though, he can't even muster up the energy to pretend to be offended.
"Anyway," Akira says. "That's honestly all I wanted to know. If you want to hang around you can, but--"
"No," Akechi says. "I'll see you with the others at the Palace tomorrow."
He leaves, still feeling outraged and off balance.
The next day, when the Phantom Thieves enter Sae's Palace and make a beeline straight for the Palace ruler without stopping for any fights with smaller Shadows, without any possible Shadow Talk negotiations, Akechi is extremely grateful to avoid hearing it again.
-//-
Futaba isn't particularly worried by Akira's bad habit of slipping into terrible sounding Shadow Talk. Not anymore, anyway. When she first started spying on them during their meetings at Leblanc, and heard those impossible syllables come crackling through her headphones, she'd freaked out completely and almost given up on them then and there.
On the day he comes stumbling back into the cafe with Sae, beaten and bloody and obviously just barely hanging on to consciousness, Futaba wants nothing more than to hear him open his mouth and say something that sounds like it should be making his tongue twist up into a pretzel. "Are you okay?" she demands.
It seems like it takes him an actual age just to focus on her. Futaba can feel her hands curling up into fists, and all she can think is how dare they, how dare they take him away from us and hurt him like this?
Akira's answer is slow in coming, and in the end he only manages an unconvincing "...fine."
She doesn't believe him. She'd trust him with her life, she's done exactly that a hundred times in the metaverse, but she doesn't trust him to tell her the truth about how hurt he is. She's vaguely aware of Sae giving Sojiro an explanation of what had happened to Akira while he was in custody (Futaba hears drugs and that explains a lot, really). But she keeps her eyes and her attention fixed on her friend. "Akira," she says. "Joker. Are you okay?"
His answer takes even longer to make it out of his mouth this time, but when it finally comes, Futaba is genuinely relieved to hear the Shadow Talk, because at least she knows he's not lying to her when he says--
(TiredHurtHurtHurtEverythingHurtsHelp)
--and the impression she gets of exhaustion and pain isn't what she wants to hear but she can work with it. "It's going to get better," she promises him.
The two adults stop talking abruptly, and Futaba realizes vaguely that this must be the first time Sojiro has ever heard Shadow Talk. On the other hand, Sae's expression of wary confusion instead of outright shock and fear tells Futaba that she must have heard this before. It kind of makes sense. Akira slips into it more often when he's not at his best, and if the cops were actually drugging him while he was with them, that would definitely count as being 'not at his best.'
"I was... going to mention that, actually," Sae says, sounding slightly hesitant. "I think some of the drugs that they put into his system may have... well..."
"No," Futaba assures her. "This is normal. He's fine."
(OwOwOwOw)
"Not fine, I mean, but the speaking in cursèd eldritch tongues part is normal."
Sojiro rubs both hands over his face and gives the kind of heartfelt sigh that only the guardian of two of the Phantom Thieves can manage. "This," he repeats, in a tone of deep disbelief. "This is normal."
"Well," Futaba says. "He tries not to do it around other people. Only, maybe we can talk about this later?"
Sojiro hesitates, then nods. He very obviously has more questions, but Akira at this point is starting to sag, and he obviously needs to be taken care of first. "Alright, alright," he says. "Let's get him upstairs."
The rest of the day is... an experience. Akira drifts in and out of a painful looking half-sleep, rarely conscious enough enough to offer up more than a word or two in answer to their questions about what he'd been through during his interrogation. On the other hand, since the few sentences that he does manage are all in Shadow Talk, they still give a pretty thorough idea of the important parts.
He can't manage a single word, it seems, without pouring some part of his pain and confusion into it. In Japanese, he might have been able to cover up how he's feeling, but Shadow Talk carries more meaning in everything that he says. There's pain layered behind every word, and by the end of the day Futaba knows almost nothing about the facts of how his interrogation had gone, but she knows in explicit detail how afraid, and how hurt, he had been.
Futaba stays with him and Morgana in Leblanc that night, stubbornly refusing to go home when Sojiro points out that it's getting late. Instead she brings her laptop up to the couch in the attic, and manages to do absolutely nothing productive in between watching Akira sleep and worrying about basically everything until she finally nods off a little after midnight.
She wakes up to find Akira sitting up in bed, trying to maneuver himself into a standing position without putting pressure on his injuries or waking Morgana.
"Do you need any help?" Futaba whispers, rubbing her face and yawning. He still looks not so great, and when he says--
(FineThanksDontWantToSleep)
--she figures he's still not quite back up to par yet.
"Do you want to talk, then?" she asks, and he is at least feeling better enough that he gives her a raised eyebrows do you seriously want me to talk right now look.
"I'd rather hear you speaking Shadow Talk for the rest of the year than still be locked up," Futaba says. "Make whatever nightmare noises you want, I don't even care right now."
He laughs, an almost surprisingly normal sound compared to everything else that's come out of his mouth so far today. Morgana half stirs in his sleep, purring loudly, and Futaba lets herself smile. "You... are going to get better," she says. "Right?"
It's probably selfish of her to be asking him to comfort her, when he'd had to sit through an interrogation and a beating and everything else. When he might be dead right now, if the plan with Akechi hadn't worked out exactly right.
But he looks at her, and in the quiet dark of Leblanc's attic, with the ever-present smell of coffee and curry drifting up from downstairs, the only brother she's ever known her name, says--
(FutabaOracleLittleSister)
--and it doesn't sound like her name, it sounds like something an eldritch abomination from the depths of a nightmare. But she recognizes it, somehow. She recognizes that this jumble of syllables is her name, in Shadow Talk, that it's everything Akira is feeling and thinking about her. And it's soft, somehow. Softer than Shadow Talk should be able to sound, and everything in the way Akira says it tells Futaba that he cares about her.
"I'm listening," she tells him. He kind of smiles, a little lopsided because he's obviously still in pain, and--
(HomeNowEverythingsGoingToBeOkayIPromise)
--and she believes him.
It takes another day or so before whatever they'd given Akira after his arrest to be fully purged from his system, for Dr. Takemi to announce he can start on pain meds without them mixing badly with the interrogation drugs, and for Akira to be alert enough to go back to (mostly) speaking Japanese.
-//-
Haru has never met anyone, other than the Shadows and Akira, who can really speak Shadow Talk. Futaba can curse quite fluently in it by this point, and Makoto has picked up a few words as well. Akechi, apparently, could speak it as well--Akira had told the rest of them after he'd died in Shido's Palace, as they'd all sat together in their hideout, trying to process a death that they weren't quite sure they should be mourning.
But, among all its other surprises, Christmas Eve brings them to a place called the Velvet Room, where a girl named Lavenza and a long-nosed man called Igor speak exclusively in Shadow Talk. And later, when they face a false god in a distorted temple over the twisted wrongness of a Tokyo full of bones and blood, that false god speaks to them in that language as well.
By the time Haru had joined the Phantom Thieves, Akira had more or less stopped trying to hide it when he slipped out of Japanese around them. She's heard quite a lot of it from him by now, she's gotten used to it. But even with all that, the way this so-called god of control speaks it sends a shudder all the way through her.
Shadow Talk always sounds a little bit terrible. It always sounds like something that human beings should not be able to pronounce or comprehend. Compared to this monster, though, Akira's way of speaking Shadow Talk sounds positively comforting.
He shouts out to the false god now, setting himself stubbornly against the insurmountability of the foe in front of them, and announcing to anyone that will listen that the Phantom Thieves are not ready to give in.
Once, the sound of his declaration that--
(AngerRejectionRebellionNeverGiveInToSomethingLikeYou)
--would have made every single one of the Phantom Thieves cringe. Haru can remember her first time hearing it, in her father's Palace, what seems like a hundred lifetimes ago now. Makoto had remembered to warn her ahead of time, so Haru had thought she'd be ready. Instead, she'd been startled and a little bit afraid, and had watched through wide and nervous eyes until the negotiation ended.
But now? After months fighting with each other as a team, after everything the Phantom Thieves have survived together, all Haru can hear in those unnatural syllables is Akira. She hears his bravery and his stubbornness, and she reaches deep inside herself, past the fear and exhaustion that this whole situation has ground into her, and finds her own determination.
She lifts her face, refuses to bow, and continues to fight as the battle rages on.
(GiveUpGiveInSubmitToMe)
--the false god says, and Akira shouts back--
(NeverWillNotAndWeRefusePERSONA)
--and something bursts from him, larger than any Persona Haru has ever seen. Still, as he stands there with his face bare and his mask in his hand, long Thieves coat flapping in the wind, and something as large as the enemy they've come here to fight standing at his back, there's no doubting that a Persona is exactly what it is.
(Persona)
--Akira says again, more quietly this time, but no less insistently.
And the false god falls.
The last echoes of its dying screams linger in the air around them for several seconds too long. But then those too fade. The Thieves look around at each other, and Ann asks, hesitantly, "Is it over?"
Akira takes a deep breath.
(SatisfactionPrideWeDidItGuysWeDidIt)
--and the rest of them break immediately into shouts of celebration because it's over.
-//-
Akira's last day in Tokyo is something he's going to remember for a long time. The swirl of emotions--of happiness at getting to see his friends all together, one last time, of sadness because he's going home--is intense. He's not ready for this. He's not ready to say goodbye to his friends and Leblanc and Tokyo as a whole.
At least there's Morgana, returning unexpectedly and announcing that he's going to follow Akira home when he leaves the city. It's going to raise some questions with his parents, Akira's pretty sure, but there's absolutely no way he's letting them turn Morgana away.
"I'm not sure you're going to like it much back home," Akira tells the cat as he packs his things from Leblanc's attic.
"That's fine," Morgana says. He's lying on one of the storage shelves, tail swishing back and forth as he watches Akira work.
"It's not at all like Tokyo," Akira says. "You're going to be unbelievably bored."
"With you around?" Morgana says. "Doubt it."
Akira pauses for a second in his packing, feeling a smile working its way up his face. (Wistful, homecoming, I missed being here) he says. (And I missed you guys)
Morgana narrows his eyes like he's annoyed, but his tone is more joking than irritated. "Well, I guess you still have that, even though the metaverse is gone now."
Akira shrugs and then nods. He hadn't been entirely sure whether he'd still be able to speak in Shadow Talk after everything that happened on Christmas Eve, but it had never gone away. Maybe it's more a part of him now than it is anything else. Maybe it had always been a part of him, the way Arsene, or his other Persona, are a part of him.
Maybe it doesn't really matter much. What matters is that he can still speak in Shadow Talk, not that it's going to do him much good now, with no Persona to negotiate with, and none of the Phantom Thieves around to put up with him for it.
"Well," Morgana allows. "I guess it would be pretty weird at this point if you just lost it."
"Mmm," Akira agrees (teasing, fondness, I wouldn't be able to freak you guys out anymore)
"Hey," Morgana says, ears going flat. "You don't have to do go around speaking it just for fun."
"Yes I do," Akira assures him, and they bicker about that for a while, until Sojiro shouts up from downstairs that his friends have arrived.
And he's going home tomorrow. He's not going to see them again for a while.
Akira takes the stairs two at a time and there they all are at the bottom, waiting for him. There's an instant uproar and Akira finds himself suddenly at the center of a mass of Phantom Thieves, being welcomed back with all the enthusiasm he expects from them. Someone--it sounds like Ryuji--is crying, and Akira can feel himself tearing up too.
(my friends, my team, my family, my home, I missed you guys so much)
And Futaba must have been practicing Shadow Talk enough to get past the I've only bothered learning it so I can cuss phase, because she comes right back with (missed you, crying, you giant dork we love you)
Makoto tells him afterward that she and Futaba had worked for days to make sure they had the translation right, that it had been Yusuke's idea originally, that they'd all agreed that there was no better way to tell him how happy they were to have him back than to say it in Shadow Talk. Every one of them had been terrified to hear this language from him, once. Here they are now, figuring out how to speak it.
Futaba's accent is still terrible. Her pronunciation could really use some work. But Akira hears the truth loud and clear behind her words. And he knows, right then and there, that as long as he's with these people, he's home.
When you've found the group that will put up with you giving them nightmares by speaking in tongues, you've pretty much found your family.