This is an unpublished snippet of something I'm working on where Akechi and Ryuji are enemies to coworkers to friends to a secret third thing. They're both extremely hung up over somebody else who needs no introduction so they have toxic gay sex about it. Not in this section though sorry
I was gonna post this for "WIP Wednesday" (as they say) hwowver I fucking. Forgot. So.
"And… Joker. How is he."
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He stood apart from him, carefully flattening his collar. He watched the blond out of the corner of his eye.
Sakamoto stiffened up, arms crossed.
"...He's fine," he grumbled. "No thanks to you."
Goro hmphed. "I'm sure he's quite happy being looked after by his harem of pretty girls."
"Nah, he, uh." He scratched the back of his head. "He's engaged. To a man."
The world dropped out from under his feet.
"Oh." His voice was sandpaper rough. "What. Is he…?"
Sakamoto's eyes were fixed elsewhere. "Not anybody from back then. He's nice. He runs, like, a charity or some shit. So. He's really good. For Akira. Has been really good for him. He's happy."
Every word was another shot to the fragile ego he had spent the last six years maintaining. He swallowed around the massive lump in his throat. He would not be undone by Akira all these years later. He would not let it happen.
"How wonderful." He hissed. His head was pounding.
A note of sarcasm returned to his voice. "Maybe you would know this if you had actually, like, talked to him at all. Since 2017."
"Well, it seems like he did perfectly fine without me."
"Yeah."
He brushed a strand behind his ear, and could feel his temple burning through the glove. His throat hurt from how dry it felt.
"Excuse me."
"Wha—we're not done talking!"
"Later." A hand caught on his wrist, and for a moment he felt his heart fall into his stomach until he realized what had happened.
He shook it off harshly. "Later, Sakamoto. I'll still fucking be here tomorrow, if you're so obsessed."
He shot a glare in his general direction, and power-walked to where he knew the nearest watercooler to be.
It was in another room, putting another wall between him and Sakamoto. The door shut behind him and a bubble of quiet came with it, tenuous and trembling.
like i know it's not actually canon but also like it is absolutely canon that akechi seduced joker on purpose like specifically taking him to date spots the fucking "that's the same strategy used in romance, wouldn't you agree?" like his crazy ass HIS CRAZY ASS me when i notice a boy likes me and i get so gleeful because it makes my awesome nefarious schemes that much easier except i grow to hate him because he has everything i've ever wanted is everything i've ever wanted to be but better except i also really fucking like him and he's the only person i can stand for more than five minutes which makes me hate him more makes me NEED to hate him more and my super cool murder fantasies are now full of gay shit but i still always shoot him and that's lowkey part of it and im a broken fucking person and he has to die and of course i didn't beat him and i wish we'd met a few years earlier and SCENE
Genuinely like I think the ambiguously romantic atmosphere is on purpose but I think he's also kind of bad at it. He barely goes to school, he spends all his time pandering to adults (at both his jobs), you fucking knowww he doesn't know how to interact with his peers, and tied up with his general fakeness, makes it so that it's not as effective up close as it is when he's just a boy on the TV people can moon over. And I think joker sees right through it but it still works. Bc number one thing about joker he loves his freaks. Joker like anybody gonna form a social link with this outcast/off-putting stranger and doesn't wait for an answer.
So he's like yes alright I've succeeded at seducing him with my normal charming teenager facade. So long as he never gets too close and finds out I'm a disgusting freak we're good. And in the third semester he goes pretty hard on that and he's abrasive and petty and loud for the most part, though he does have times where they get along, and he doesn't understand why at the end of it all joker would hesitate because the boy he liked doesn't exist. I need to keep yelling at him so that he realizes I'm off-putting and strange and not worth worrying about. Not realizing he was literally attracted to the strange and off-putting part of him the entire fucking time WHOOPS
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