Chapter Text
Crow strode through the collective unconscious casually, unafraid of any shadows that might deign to attack. Joker matched his stride easily, flipping his dagger as well in an impressive show of confidence and ability. Not that Crow would ever tell Joker that. He was a professional after all.
They moved in comfortable silence, the years of doing this exact same thing meaning they didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with anything other than their echoing footsteps.
The collective unconscious rippled around them, one second a pitch black field filled with glitching and shifting things, another looking like the inside of a brain, the next a train station, another tick of the clock the top of a cloud, and a moment later the uncanny inside of a school. It settled after a few more disorienting moments of switching visuals, settling into the hazy everythingness of before. Crow and Joker didn’t even pause, too accustomed to the morphic state of what once was Mementos, the TV world, and Tartarus to waste a few seconds being disoriented.
“Here we are.” Joker’s voice split the heavy silence, or the closest thing to silence you could get in the collective unconscious, which whispered cut-off thoughts seemingly straight into your mind sometimes.
“Indeed.” Crow answered. “I’ve been feeling the pull for a while now.” In front of them, in a space clear from all the various items and concepts that clutter the collective unconscious, is what looks to be a glowing rectangle.
“It almost looks like a screen.” Joker comments as he makes his way into the ‘room’.
“Wait- Joker-!” Crow snaps, instinctively following after him. “Don’t just barge in without-” Crow doesn’t get to finish because immediately the pulling force intensifies, taking the two off guard and throwing them into the glowing screen, which is now revealed to be a portal of some kind.
~*~
“Ugh-!” Crow groans from his place face down on the ground. As he quickly stands up, he takes in the cognitive world they find themselves in.
“Creepy.” Joker comments as he draws next to Crow, the two falling into a defensive position.
Crow snorts, he can’t disagree with that. They’re in a bright world, where everything has a face and a plastered-on smile, like one of those borderline-horror kids shows. Everything from the smiling people-sized flowers to the caricature houses are made of cardboard, like this is all a fucked-up play that went too far.
The only un-flat things in this world are the ground, the sky, them, and the shadows making their way towards them.
Crow breaks out into a manic smile. “Joker, get ready for a bloodbath!” He laughs, baring his teeth at the prey approaching them.
Joker snorts out an exasperated laugh, rolling his eyes, but his smile is a touch too affectionate to be anything truly irritated. Crow has settled down his unhingedness in recent years, but a fight with a shadow never fails to bring out a little bit of the bloodthirst. Joker, in all his masochistic glory, has always loved these moments where he’s reminded his partner can be fucking ruthless at times.
They fall into battle cleanly, their moves practiced and flowing together cleanly. Unlike the weak shadows from the untethered collective unconsciousness, though, these shadows don’t fall in a few turns, and actually hit hard enough to need to dodge. Joker even had to fall back and heal Crow after he mistakenly let the 5 shadows hit him thinking each would only do puny damage.
“These shadows aren’t god-less.” Crow murmurs to Joker as he heals him. “This pocket must have a god around, these shadows are too powerful to not be.”
Joker furrows his brows. “We’re sure these shadows just haven’t been left alone too long and grew stronger without a god?” He questions. A fair explanation, but something doesn’t add up with it.
“What about the pull then?” Crow shouts to his partner as he dodges an attack.
Crow pulls out his model gun and tries to counter-attack, but the gun fails to fire, as if it were an actual model gun. Crow frowns at it, then haphazardly throws the gun itself at the shadow, hitting a critical point and dissolving the shadow into, well, shadow.
“Hah! Fuck you too!” Crow barks out at the puddles of black that the offending shadow now has become. For good luck, he flips the puddles off with both hands before launching himself at another shadow.
“Strong-ass shadows as well as the pull we felt leading persona-users to this pocket!” Crow picks back up as he tore into the shadow with a combination of his gauntlets and serrated sword. “Doesn’t sound like just normal strong shadows to me! Stop playing devil’s advocate! It’s not cute!” Crow shouts over to Joker, who’s actually keeping a distance between himself and his foe. Crow untangles himself from the shadow.
“Don’t lie!” Joker shouts back, “You do find it cute!” Crow only replies with a growl. “Ok, ok, fine.” Joker surrenders after a few moments. “You’re right, I was wrong, I’m a fool, we need to get back to work.” Joker finds a lull in battle to roll his eyes in Crow’s direction.
Crow smirks. Another win for Akechi Goro. “Damn right!” He crows, then does as Joker says and gets back to work.
They fight back to back, not taking long to finish the remaining shadows off. They stand, panting, still back to back, and weapons still raised afterwards. Then they relax and step away from their defensive position.
“No way back.” Crow starts, but footsteps break off what he was going to say.
He jumps into action, scanning the surroundings and ascertaining that the footsteps are made by persona-users, not shadows. He makes eye contact with Joker and silently communicates this information to him.
“ Persona-users. ” Crow transmits to Joker.
Joker’s wary face breaks out into a relieved one. “ Great! Maybe they’ll know what’s going on huh? Let's give them a chance. ”
Crow frowns, but nods. It leaves a bad taste in his mouth to immediately reveal themselves to these unknown people and he wants to retort that Joker is too willing to trust people, but over the years he’s learned to leave some battles alone. Only some of them though.
…Also, Crow’s… Willing. To admit that sometimes, only sometimes , Joker has been right, and trusting people was the right idea. He will admit that revealing themselves to Kirijo was probably one of the better decisions he made.
So Crow doesn’t conceal himself. He just… walks to the side. Because he wanted to lean against the wall. Yeah.
Joker watches him do this, a carefully blank look on his face so that Crow doesn’t snap at him for ‘judging him’. Crow knows Joker would never judge him, not on this, but still.
Joker drops whatever stare he has on Crow as they hear the footsteps come closer, and the chatter of multiple people talking at once and laughing. The voices… Sound young, which is concerning.
Not as concerning as for who exactly walks into the clearing though.