A/N

I'm so sorry this hasn't been updating like, at all. And I'm sorry that it won't be updating any faster from here on out. I don't like making excuses but the truth is that I've actually been swamped in paperwork. I'm going to Japan for study abroad in like, two days, and right afterwards I'm going to a proper university. This isn't an excuse, though, since I've written other stuff. All I can really say is that I've not been focused in writing at all lately because I've had so much to do. I'm really sorry this is taking so long and your patience as a reader is something I'm very grateful for.

That said, let's get this show back on the road.

"I'm a shapeshifter at Poe's masquerade, hiding both face and mind. All free for you to draw—I'm a shapeshifter, what else should I be? Please don't take off my mask, revealing darkness."

Akechi blew on his hands in vain, rubbing them together. On the outside banister of the apartments sat a paper cup of cheap coffee. It had already burnt his tongue with its acidic, bitter taste. He could only blame himself for recognizing the disgusting flavor. If he had not accumulated himself to the expertly blended coffees of LeBlanc then the boy supposed he wouldn't be able to tell the difference. A year ago he wouldn't have taken any notice of the flavor at all and just downed the cup out of practicality.

Now it sat at his side in the earliest hours of sunrise, gathering snow and growing ice cold.

A small flurry had kicked up in the night and Lavenza had greeted him in the morning with a set of winter clothing. He hadn't bothered to ask her where she got the scarf and the thick jacket. At this point Akechi had already grown wearily accustomed to that the blonde girl would never truly answer a question directly unless he happened to be in dire straights. And a small patch of January snow certainly wasn't anything that he could call the most dangerous to ever happen to him.

He sighed; his breath wisped around him playfully then dissipated. Though he was becoming used to the behavior of the Velvet Room denizens, it was still ceaselessly frustrating to deal with their vagaries. Particularly now that they expected results out of him. Yet they themselves didn't even seem to comprehend that which they opposed…

How stupid.

"You can't think such things, you know."

Akechi eyed up the light haired girl as she swiftly placed her hot chocolate, now half empty, aside his now frozen coffee. Not to his surprise, she hadn't bothered to change her clothing in the least. He didn't care to look at her long, though, directing his gaze out over the poverty stricken skyline. If he squinted he could almost see past it to the nicer districts. And if he kept doing such pointless nonsense, Akechi reasoned, perhaps the little girl aside him would stop fixing him with those vivid yellow eyes that seemed to tear into his soul.

Finally he looked back at her from the corner of his eyes. "What do you even believe that I'm thinking, anyways?"

"You're thinking 'this is stupid, this is confusing, why are we wasting our time on something we don't understand', right?" Lavenza mocked the ex-detective, her voice dropping a few octaves to mimic the brunette's. Akechi's just rolled his eyes in response. "You aren't being particularly on your guard today. Is something on your mind?"

"…Concern, I guess." Akechi hunched over onto the banister, burying his elbows in the layer of snow that had gathered up from the light fall.

"Worried about this mission?"

"Goodness me. How'd you guess."

"If it makes you feel any better, which knowing you it probably won't…" Lavenza reached up to the banister, standing on her tiptoes, to pull herself up to his eye level with the now snickering boy. "…I'm worried about it too. I mean, how do you track what is supposedly always moving, and has no motive to direct it? It's very unlike what I've ever seen before."

Akechi had to resist rolling his eyes again. "But?"

"But if teenagers can summon the dark one to fight a living God, then I think we can probably handle whatever this is."

The boy had to hold back genuine laughter at that one. A small snort managed to escape anyways. The sheer honesty in Lavenza was near staggering. Her comparison was so ridiculous yet so apt. In comparison to what had happened in the last year, all the mundane squabbles and concerns of man seemed very inconsequential and meaningless. Even, he realized bitterly, his own pitiful obsessions. What was the suffering of a damaged child in the face of a manipulative God meaning to destroy all of man? Nothing. Nothing but a weak point to exploit so that the bigger picture could be obscured and hopefully snuffed out.

It was just Masayoshi Shido on a cosmic level.

And he'd fallen for it.

All of the sudden, Akechi felt more angry than anything else.

He felt as if he was drowning in his own mediocrity, his own stupidity, his own bad choices….and then there was a hand. There was a small, simple hand of a child covering his own as they looked over the snow. Lavenza's hand did not grip tightly at his own nor did her fingers attempt to lace with his own. They simply were, sitting atop his own, radiating with the sheer warmth of a living creature aside him.

Like a bonfire in a field of snow, the irritation melted away into a defeated slump.

You can't change the past, Akechi.

He was glad, at least, it could go unsaid.

"So where exactly are we supposed to start with this?" He finally said, ignoring the child's gloved hand over his uncomfortably bare one. "I don't have the Nav anymore. I don't even have my phone anymore. So I don't really have any way to detect the presence of whatever this…this 'travelling Palace' is. Much less try to enter it."

"I can feel it." Lavenza replied simply. "As for entering it…well, I'm working on fixing something up that could help us with that."

"Didn't the Nav just come to me because of what was going on with Mementos and the Yaldabaoth incident?" Akechi wondered. Lavenza paused, eyes fixed on a man behind them who walked by with a confused expression on his face. Carefully, with his free hand, Akechi's fingers splayed across the back of her head to pull her away from her target. "Calm down. It's just one of the people who live here. Don't give them the death glare. It makes us look even more suspicious."

"You speak from experience?"

"Just a bit. Could you answer my question?"

Lavenza sighed. "Yes, of course. The Nav did come to you become of times of great peril, though likely not because it intended to assist in preventing said peril. Yaldabaoth created and sent versions of the program to both your phone and the phone of Kurusu Akira to set his plans in motion. Neither Igor nor I have any idea how the application fundamentally ran because by the time we were back together, it was not necessary to fight those who opposed us. At that point it had deleted itself. Mementos ceasing existence, I believe, may have been the reason for the demise of the Nav. Honestly, even if it was still on a phone, I'm not sure if it could even do anything now."

"So like an out of date program without a system update."

"Basically, yes."

"For fuck's sake." Akechi ran a hand through his loose hair. This was becoming increasingly frustrating. He wasn't like Lavenza's last disciple—he had the patience to wade through garbage, but lacked the temperament to not be constantly frustrated by it. Waiting around like this made him feel a sick feeling in his stomach like he had forgotten to do something and it just might get him killed. It made him think too much. "…So what do we do now?"

"We wait." Lavenza replied simply. "And we prepare. We are already in the vicinity of this energy. I can feel it; it floats over Paris ready to strike at any time. If you can have a little patience then I should have a method of moving between there and here soon enough."

"What if we don't have TIME to wait?"

"We will."

"And how do YOU know?" The bile of rage was beginning to creep up Akechi's throat; this girl that had seemed so comforting was beginning to seem more and more infuriating.

She was very hard to dislike but more often than not, he found himself thinking that she was not particularly easy to like either. Perhaps it was the way she seemed to always talk like she knew better than him, or perhaps it was the fact that she could just end up being another noose around his neck. Perhaps it was the way she turned like every movement she made was intentional, or how her striking golden eyes bore into him with an intensity that seemed to reach everything that he had worked so hard to hide. That he could no longer hide from her.

All he could do is watch, on guard like a half crazed animal, as she gazed at him.

"I know because we would not be here otherwise. This is fate, whether you like it or not. It was fate that misfortune met you with Yaldabaoth—it will be fate that you find your own fortune." She said carefully. "I can feel it. It is here. But I cannot pinpoint it yet. So all we can do is wait and see what it has to offer us."

Silence overtook the pair as they stared over snowy Paris, over the gray and lifeless apartments. Everything in Akechi urged him to just go inside; he was cold and his coffee was cold and his fingers were starting to freeze. Yet it somehow felt like losing to step away from the stone banister before the child aside him. He wouldn't be surprised if Lavenza could tell this, especially with the slight smile that tinged her lips despite the situation they had been placed in.

She was so calm yet oddly positive in the face of disaster. This small girl who sometimes couldn't even pass for an actual human being somehow had the ability to act more maturely about their situation than him, a teenager on the brink of adulthood. Such things as naivety didn't faze her. She seemed content with her current lot in life, even if she couldn't understand it, and could somehow just trust that they were being led the right direction.

It irritated him. Mostly because he couldn't help the niggling feeling that a mere child had taken a more mature approach to her life than he had or ever would.

Before he could say anything, though, a loud shout rose from down the hall.

Both he and Lavenza exchanged glances as the door furthest down from their was thrown open, a young boy pushed bodily outside into the cold. His hair was untrimmed and wild, tamed only by a ragged cap, with his face caked with dirt and his clothes torn and aged. He fell backwards to catch himself against the banister, the large book in his hands slipping to fall over the rail; with a gasp, the child, clambered atop the railing to watch as it tumbled down to bury in a snowdrift.

"I said NO, Hugo! Go away! I'll make you sick, I swear I will!" A shrill screech pierced the air; with one hand resting under his cheek, watching the scene play out before him, Akechi realized he recognized the voice. Tilting forward he could see small white knuckles clutching against the doorframe. The girl with the pallid composure and blue bow was standing in the doorway with a fierce grimace on her face. The same girl with dark circles under her eyes, and the same girl who had without a second though charged into their apartment yesterday.

"Nadine—" The boy at the railing tried, but he didn't get very far.

"Just GO AWAY, Hugo!" She yelled, thrusting her arm to point down the arm. "Go get your stupid book and don't come back! I don't need anyone but grandma, anyways! You…you're just a PAIN!"

Silence reigned over the hallway; with a start, both children realized they were being watched by the pair aside the railing. Quietly the dirty young child gathered himself up to back down the hall, turning on his heel to run away from them. Nadine watched with narrowed eyes until he disappeared into the creaking elevator shaft, the numbers above flashing down to the ground floor. Then she looked over to the onlookers; angry eyes seemed to morph into tired and sad ones.

Lavenza was quiet and Akechi wasn't sure what to say. He rather WISHED the Attendant would say something, to break this uncomfortable silence of staring back at forth with an upset child. He wasn't good with children. He never had been. He could show them what they wanted to see but they were frustrating beyond belief. Their intents could never be gauged and their responses could never be predicted. After all, the little girl he looked at now was certainly now the cheerful girl that had forced her way into Akechi's living room the day prior. The girl who had looked sickly but upbeat and curious yesterday today only looked….ill.

Nadine's mouth hung open for a moment, as if trying to grasp at words, then she promptly slammed the door shut.

Leaving the Attendant and Akechi to stare wide-eyed and wordlessly.

"…What in the hell was THAT about?" Akechi asked incredulously. Lavenza didn't answer; rather, he brows furrowed and her hands grasped tightly together in contemplation. Her golden eyes focused down on the square below at the speck of a child dusting snow off of his novel and turning to retreat. She knew that the ex-detective could not see it so there was not much point in trying to direct his attention to it, but the boy wore an expression of helplessness and desperation when he looked down at the cover.

It was the face of someone who was dealing with a difficult person.

No, she thought as her eyes focused back on the now locked door that Nadine had hidden herself behind. Not just a difficult person. A person who had become difficult enough that their heart had begun to warp. Possibly into something far darker than anyone around them could even begin to realize—a descent into a consciousness that had begun to see reality and themselves through a corrupted lens.

Lavenza closed her eyes. It couldn't be checked yet.

But it could be explored.

"I think we should speak with that boy, as soon as possible."