[It's a hazy daydream that Akechi's words pull him out of, not even fully remembered. He blinks tv studio lights out of his eyes and rolls his head towards Akechi.

Beside him. Breathing. Old enough to drink, against every odd that's ever been stacked against him.

Akira's chest aches with it.]

It begs the question of how much of a cognitive world this is, or how little we may know of the laws of the Metaverse. I wonder which one it is.

[Without even a speck of hesitation around someone that could easily kill him, he reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind Akechi's ear, hand dropping away nonchalantly. When Akira speaks, his voice is just as even as it was before.]

Your face isn't quite the same as it was when you were eighteen. [It's not that Akechi is unrecognizable. It's simply that even now, a year out, his face is burned into his brain. Every one of his moments before death makes its rounds through his dreams.] Not a big change, but enough of one that I can see. You've aged while you were here. Did you experience growth because there's more of reality here than we'd like to think, or is it your cognition making it so?

[It's a question to answer a question, the same as is often their way. Akira doesn't like his own question very much, nor its implications, but it's one that he asks all the same.]