Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

For the eighteenth night in a row, Goro watches the ceiling fan spin. Around and around, around and around, chasing itself and never getting anywhere. For the eighteenth night in a row, Goro takes a sip of a drink he hates, stolen from a man he loathes. For the eighteenth night in a row, Goro lights a cigarette and breathes deep. 

The smoke mingles with the peat-laced residue on his tongue, making his mouth taste like a bonfire. Some nights, he imagines a spark finds the alcohol and blows his head off. A spatter of brain matter and overpriced liquor painting his bare walls, a ring of flowering viscera from the epicenter of his headless, smoking corpse.

He exhales the smoke out of his nose, watches it tangle in the fan’s loop and dissipate. He pours another drink. His watch beeps at the top of the hour. Another hour closer to the final day, and the final performance with his newfound troupe. The truth is that this is the worst part of his day, and has been for a while. Here, in the quiet, in the stillness, alone.

Acting is acting is acting; there’s no space to think about anything else. 

Wake up, interviews, wake up, check the group chat, wake up, fight alongside them, wake up, sleep through an interview, wake up, he hasn’t invited you anywhere this month, wake up, and you feel so very empty, wake up, scratch names off the website, so blow your own head off, wake up, or sit in that attic and wonder why he won’t look at you, wake up, it’s good you hate him, wake up, because he definitely hates you.

But alone, it’s like time slows to watch him back as it slips through his fingers. The burned-low cigarette singes them. He tosses it into the ashtray and watches the embers die. Why should tonight be any different? Because it’s the last? No, the meditation is always the same. He closes his eyes and visualizes November 19th. He has to. He’s imagined this day so many times that it’s routine and ordinary and boring now. 

Get up, dress exactly the same as always, down to the cuff-links and smile. Check the group chat. Meet at the arranged time. Relay the signal. Enter her Palace. Watch Joker and be watched back. Confront Sae-san’s Shadow. Maybe she’d be better off with a stolen heart. Offer aid. Relay the signal. Watch Joker fall, and not be watched back ever again.

Knock, knock, knock.

Goro’s eyes snap open toward his front door. Did he imagine it? It’s just gone past eleven. It’s nearly the nineteenth. Drinking probably wasn’t the best idea.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

He didn’t imagine it. Standing, he redoes his top button and fixes his tie. Ash falls from his chest to the floor as he checks his phone. There are no new messages, so there’s only one thing this could be. Last minute instructions, too sensitive to be delivered over the phone. It’s a last minute disaster, set to make the 19th not routine, not ordinary, not boring. He walks toward the door and peers through the peephole, expecting suits and lapel pins. Instead, there’s a dark turtleneck sweater, two-day dirty jeans, and a pair of fake glasses. 

Somehow, Akira’s eyes are already fixed on his. “We need to talk,” he says to the door.

Goro’s heart speeds up, blood draining from his extremities, mouth drying, a sheen of sweat pricking the back of his neck. How did he find him? How did he get up here, past the doorman and the cameras and the… Goro swallows, his tongue like a wad of cotton. Akira’s a thief. Don’t overreact. This can still be controlled. It has to be controlled.

Slowly, he drags back the five deadbolts, then unlocks the door. There Goro stands, one hand on the handle, the other trembling with the flood of adrenaline, trying to be ready for this, whatever this is. What the fuck is he doing here?

Goro opens the door and wedges himself in the gap. “This is a surprise.” His voice is shaking. He coughs it out. “Not a particularly pleasant one, either. I don’t believe I told you where I live.”

“Yeah, she’s very sorry—can I come in?” Akira asks. He’s standing here as though he belongs, looking like he’s just come back from something with friends. Perhaps karaoke. Akira tilts his head, wiping his hands on his jeans. Yakiniku too—Goro can smell the fat and taste the smiles—a last hurrah of comrades that of course he wasn’t invited to.

His hand tightens on the handle, unseen. “You being here is dangerous enough, or did you forget we’re on different sides?” The plan says I kill you. “What do you want, and why couldn’t it be said over the phone?” The routine says you can’t be having second thoughts.

“I want to come in,” Akira insists, again. There’s no bag on his shoulder, so no cat. “I’m not talking to you from a gilded hallway like your bellboy.”

Casting a look back into his bleak condo, Goro feels scalded. There’s an open bottle of stolen whisky beside the ashtray on the coffee table. The smell of cheap cigarettes hangs in the air. There’s barely any furniture. The door to his bedroom is wide open. Eighteen identical, grease-stained takeout bags are tossed onto the kitchen island, overflowing onto the never-sat-in bar stools. Goro exhales hard through his nose. 

He should refuse.

“Okay,” he replies, leaving the door how it is and striding toward the kitchen. Blood is pounding behind his eyes as he hastily arms himself with a small, sharp knife. His eyes flick back to see if Akira’s watching him.

He isn’t. He’s standing at the now closed door, counting the deadbolts. Goro uses this moment to try and stuff the takeout bags into his overflowing trash can. Slowly, Akira takes a step into his space. Goro feels stone cold sober as he watches him—more than sober, actually—hyper-aware, like he’s on a stimulant.

Akira still hasn’t said a word.

“I installed those after the summer,” Goro says suddenly. “The deadbolts. I was getting quite a few threats, if you remember.”

The trespasser and reason for the threats just pauses, looks at him, then nods. 

Goro forces himself to close the distance, left wrist covering his knife-stuffed pocket. Akira is now standing by the tall, potted plant Goro keeps near the windows, fingers rubbing the plastic leaves and frowning. 

He got that in October, after being in Akira’s attic, and no, he doesn’t really know why. It just seemed like something people did. Have plants. Furniture. The Phantom Thief leader’s eyes slide to the coffee table. 

He still doesn’t say anything about anything. 

Goro loathes him.

“Why are you here?” he roughly demands. Akira glances up again. The smoothing-over is automatic as it flows from Goro’s lips, “Are you alright? This is a risk we can ill-afford at such a juncture.”

Akira looks away. “Can I sit down?”

Goro thinks about punching him. The tiny knife feels heavy in his pocket. “Of course,” he says instead, picking up the desk chair that was here when he moved in. It’s cheap and uncomfortable. He places it across from the armchair. “Please, sit,” he says, taking the shit chair for himself, like a good host.

Slowly, Akira does. He looks around, then to the whisky bottle and the stubs of cigarettes, then back up at Goro. “Right,” he says finally, fingertips tapping on his knees.

“So?” Goro begins, leaning forward, crossing one leg over the other. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your unannounced visit?”

“I’ve really enjoyed working with you,” Akira says, taking a deep, unsteady breath. “Getting to know you, seeing you as a teammate. I was hoping—”

Goro cuts him off. “We made a deal.” 

And Akira ignores him. “—we could keep the deal going.”

The cheap gyoza Goro ate earlier feels like it’s trying to burn through his esophagus, soaked in smoky alcohol. “The deal was that the Phantom Thieves cease their activities, which includes you.” A muscle in his leg tries to cramp as he holds himself up, steadfast and rigid. “This partnership was made for one purpose, and it’s almost through. Shouldn’t you be relieved?”

It’s a betrayal. Akira Kurusu, the almighty Joker, is here to beg for his life. He’s not supposed to beg for his life. He’s supposed to be above such things. Supposed to take it with effortless resilience and infuriating conviction. He knew the terms when he agreed, but now Goro has to watch the man he hates, beg the impossible of him—and he must say no—No, I have to kill you.

“Relieved?” Akira holds his gaze. “No. Our job—my job—isn't done.”

Goro uncrosses his legs, inching forward in his seat. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough? You’re about to bring down the entire case against you, reveal the corruption in the government, the police and SIU—”

“Yeah, and I’ve still got one more heist in me,” Akira replies breezily, leaning backwards. The nervousness from earlier is evaporating, boiling off him and leaving Joker in his place. “You’d be interested.”

Goro laughs while fighting the urge to vomit. This shouldn’t be happening. He shouldn’t be having to hear this. “Vigilantes never want to stop, Akira. But—”

“We have another target. Both of us do.”

“You have another target,” Goro’s lips mimic Akira’s. His blood feels heavy as it pumps through his veins. A feverish heat clings to his neck and runs down his spine in rivulets. “Since when? Whom?”

Akira doesn’t look happy, or smug, or ashamed. No, he just sighs.

“Don’t play coy. Who? The SIU director?” Goro rambles desperately. It can’t be him, he’s about to be dead, a ticking time bomb in his head that he himself just put there. The list of possible targets is endless. There are too many fucked up people in this corpse of a city. “Who?”

“You know who,” he replies. His eyes are bright, searching, acidic, and branding. Trying to peel skin and snap back ribs and tear muscle until he can see the innards. Goro does know, even as Akira’s lips spell the name, “Masayoshi Shido.”

He didn’t come here to beg for his life. No, he came here for something grander. The last trophy to fill out the great Joker’s glittering array of accolades. Something digs its claws into the electrical circuits of his body and makes him laugh.

And laugh, and laugh. He rests the heel of his shoe on the edge of the coffee table, leaning back in his shitty desk chair.

“I know, Goro. More than you think, actually.”

“Who knows you’re here?”

“Nobody.”

Of course. Failure is never on Joker’s mind.

“Please, let me help y—”

Goro kicks and launches the fucking table at his head. It collides with a crack. Shimmering amber liquid cartwheels through the air, spraying over the tiles. Akira topples out of the chair to the ground. He came here, he asked for this. There’s no other choice. The thought thuds through the blood and muscles in his hand, clutching onto drawn steel.

Akira rolls to his feet, blinking, palm pressed to his temple. His eyes are no longer shielded by the fake glasses, now sharp and angry. “Will you just stop?” He glances over his shoulder, checking his surroundings. “And fucking listen to me?”

“I’m sick of listening to you,” Goro snarls, advancing.

Their leader is backpedaling, cut, bleeding, and unarmed. He’s headed for the kitchen. Goro hops the chair, his father’s whisky now soaking into the nice rug that came with the condo. It’s slick under his shoes. The smell of smoke thickens.

His rival backs behind the island, trying to keep something between them. It’s funny. All that careful planning, all the scheming and misdirection, and this is how it ends. “You know you’re already dead, right? This is all just a day early,” Goro tells him, circling.

Akira yanks a carving knife from the drawer. It’s large and unwieldy and very sharp. “Knew that one too, but thanks for showing me where the knives were.”

Goro laughs, back-teeth grinding. He grabs an island stool by the leg. “Will you just shut the fuck up already?” He slings it as hard as he can at Akira’s head, who flattens himself back against the counter just in time to dodge. It cracks the cupboards behind him.

Each ragged breath he sucks in feeds him. Raw and vital. There are no Personas here to get in the way. No revivals, no Robin Hood, no limits and no fucking teammates. Each of them is just muscle, blood, and bone holding steel. Goro draws himself up and rakes the whisky-stained bangs out of his face. His hands are already sticky. 

“What do you think happens once he’s prime minister?” Akira asks again. He’s always asking questions, always probing and reaching out. Firing coffee-and-concern stained glances across the counter, small hopeful smiles in bathhouses, all of them designed to effortlessly rip his past out of him. It was always so fucking effortless for Joker; interrogation, fighting, friends, laughter, belief, as easy as breathing.

“I don’t care!” Goro screams, backing up to the door, not taking his eyes off Akira’s. “What made you think I give a single shit what he does?” He slams each deadbolt home, one to five. “No, Joker. I couldn’t care less, and you’re not going to live long enough to find out.”

Akira rolls his shoulders and steps out from behind the island, looking taller and darker. His eyes flash, then there’s steel flying at Goro’s chest. He throws himself aside, and the carving knife thunks into the heavy wood behind him. Splinters pepper his skin.

“Oops. I missed,” Akira says happily as Goro rises back to his feet. “You know, with everything you told me, I never pegged you for a brain-dead daddy’s boy.”

Goro lunges at him. He wants to dig his fingertips into his spine, tear out each disc while he’s still alive. He wants to hear him scream. Akira kicks out to receive him, using the island to support his weight. It feels like a lead pipe just hit him in the chest. Goro grabs his ankle and pulls it close, tying it up under his arm as he stabs the knife up into his calf.

Akira roars in pain, then punches Goro in the face. It fucking hurts. His eyes water and ears pop. Goro twists the knife in one fist, then fires the other at his nose. Akira’s angular bones split the skin on his knuckles. There’s no leather to dull the sensation. It feels as good as he always imagined. He wants to do it again, and again, and again.

Laughter rings in his ears. Akira’s laughter, the fire in his blood. Suddenly Goro’s view tilts, then his back slams hard into the floor. There’s not enough time to think. Akira’s fist snaps his head back as he tries to rise. Goro tastes iron. Pain swims through him. Akira used both legs to grip and his weight to drag them both to the ground. 

Goro gropes and strains, trying to find the knife still stuck in his rival’s muscles, but Akira’s silhouette blots out the light. His pupils are blown, afire and hungry. He’s seen it in Mementos, only for beautiful seconds at a time, before a teammate rids him of it. The next strike cracks against his cheekbones and slams Goro’s head back against the tile. The colors of the world run, leaking out of their shapes. Blood is collecting on the back of his tongue.

“Ask me to stop, Goro,” Akira croons.

Goro spits blood in his face.

Akira’s right hand fires down like a gunshot. Goro sways his head to the left. Akira’s fist snaps past and cracks off the tile, hard. He screams out in pain. Goro tangles their arms and yanks him down, smashing their heads together as hard as he can. The apartment vibrates. Bile burns the back of his throat. Akira’s legs go slack around his waist, finally letting Goro throw him off and roll away. Gasping for air, muscles screaming as blood oozes down into his eyes, he desperately looks for his enemy.

His enemy is on one knee already. Already rising, faster than him, even with a knife in his leg. With a tug and a grunt of pain, Akira pulls it out of his calf, wipes his own blood on his jeans, then grips it tight. “Good one.” He hisses as he pushes himself to his feet, putting no weight on his left leg. If Goro can get a hold of it, he’ll jam fingers in that wound and pull. “He knows who you are, you fucking idiot,” Akira rasps between gulps of air. “Probably always has. If I’m not gonna live to see him as prime minister, you won’t live to see the new year.”

A cold feeling slithers through the cuts on Goro’s face and brow, pooling behind his eyes. His stomach sinks as he stares at his bloodied leader, at his face, into his eyes. They’re so painfully honest.

“I’m gonna kill you,” Goro snarls, blood and saliva flying from his lips. “I promise.”

“Then I’m gonna haunt you.” Akira grins, showing his red-stained fangs. “I promise.”

They circle each other. He’s going to have to bury Akira somewhere nobody ever finds him. Burn him, maybe. Burn the whole apartment. Is he right? Does Shido know? God, how can he know?

“And what if I’m right?” Akira says, twirling the bloody knife between his fingers, shooting questions like rifle rounds. “What then?”

Goro laughs. It’s ragged and long and it hurts, but he just can’t stop, spreading his arms and hoping the next one hits him in the heart. “For so many years, I’ve worked at this one thing.” He tosses his blazer off and starts undoing his tie. “This one thing is all that matters! Not my life, not yours, not anyone else’s!” He can still see her sometimes. At night. When the drug hits, he slips beneath the waves. Sometimes she smiles. Mostly, she looks sad. The tie slides out from under his collar. “I have to make him pay.” 

“That’s it! Some fucking truth, finally!” Akira’s eyes are so very bright, and strong, and clear, and hopeful. “And I’ll help you, we’ll do it together, find something mor—”

That word again. Together. You’re not enough. You were born a mistake, so you’ll die making them. “Shut up, shut up, just shut up!” Goro screams. The tie pulls tight around his left forearm, the ends secured in his clenched fist. The white stripes blotch with red. Akira spins the knife forward, eager to welcome him. They lock eyes. Goro lunges.

Feinting a slice, Akira tries to step back, to reposition. But his left leg trembles as he moves, then buckles. He fights to stand anyway. Goro hits him in the stomach as hard as he can. Still, Akira doesn’t fall. Instead, he slams his forehead against Goro’s. 

Something cracks. Stars burst in his sight. His head feels like a medicine ball. Blinded and reeling, Goro drives all his weight forwards and sends them crashing hard against the windows. Tokyo’s lights stretch out into darkness. The glass rattles.

Akira ties his arms with Goro’s, slipping the knifepoint over his guard. Goro knees him in the ribs. The glass rattles dangerously again, but the pointed steel creeps closer to his eye. Akira roars, face painted in someone’s blood, mixed with sweat and whisky, all close enough to taste. Goro can’t hold him, can’t stop him. His strength is unreal. Goro’s arm trembles, slowly bending to Akira’s will. Fire burns in his rival’s eyes, red and gold cut against the silhouette of every demon he welcomed into his soul. It’s hypnotizing. Terrifying. Beautiful.

Suddenly, Akira flicks the knife around his thumb like a pen. It slices across Goro’s cheekbone. The skin splits and painless blood streams free. The knife slips from Akira’s fingertips and clatters as it lands. Goro wraps his leg around the back of Akira’s weak left and pivots with every bit of strength he has left to lift him. Together, they slam to the ground, Goro on top, between his legs. 

“Goro,” Akira croaks, palms reaching up.

Goro rises and chops a left hook across his face. Akira slumps back flat. He hits him again, and again. By the fifth hit, Goro realizes he’s unconscious. Akira lays there, silent and bleeding on his condo’s floor. The seconds tick by like hours, the sixth strike frozen in mid-flight. Goro’s heart feels like it’s trying to beat itself to death. It’s cold and hot, thudding quicker than it ever has in his life. Shaking, Goro unclenches his fists. The tie slips free, stained red and dark, unraveling, coiling on Akira’s chest.

Something takes over.

He reaches out and checks Akira’s pulse and breathing. Both are still there. Next, he rolls him onto his side and opens his mouth, then grabs both wrists and starts looping the bloody tie around them, around and around. His hands are trembling. “F-fuck, fucking, just… just fucking work!” he shouts at them. It takes four minutes longer than it ever has before. Tying this one knot. Tying Akira Kurusu’s hands together. 

Akira coughs, fingers twitching just under Goro’s. As he finishes, he notices blood is still dripping from his face onto his once-white shirt. Moments later, pain sears into his brain. From everywhere. His face, arms, legs, chest, back, skull, hands and heart. He curls into a ball beside Akira, trembling in agony as panic and fear move in.

He has to call it in. He’s got to call it in. Things can keep going like nothing happened. His plan, his goal, his one thing, it can still work! He can still make him pay. All it takes is one more phone call, one more death, one more—

Goro unspools, moving without thought. He searches Akira’s jacket and finds a wallet with way too much money in it, maybe three-hundred thousand yen in total. In the clear insert slip is a student ID, and tucked behind it is a folded photograph of a sight Goro’s never seen. A small town by the ocean, houses raised high on cliffs, supported by beams that lift them from the stone.

Akira never told him about his hometown, not really. Always in loops and riddles in passing, always in the rear-view mirror, always concluded and resigned. But here it is, kept closer to heart than he wants to let on.

He carefully slips everything back into the wallet, but as he goes to put it back, he catches Akira staring up at him. His face is already swelling, bruising badly. Goro broke his nose. Akira broke his in kind. The sharp lines of his jaw and cheekbones are blotched red with blood and inflammation, and Goro probably looks no better. Akira’s grey eyes blink lazily, pupils drifting, trying to fix on his face.

Goro swallows, then keeps searching his pockets. No weapons, no medicine… no fucking phone. He really came here with no fucking phone. No open line to the hacker hellion like he expected, no reinforcements coming, no weapons to defend himself, nothing. Clad only in hope, conviction, and his dirty fucking jeans. It pisses him off.

“What…” Akira mumbles, then grimaces, spitting a wad of bloody saliva across the tiles. “Goro?”

He can’t talk. Something has all his words tight in its fist, and it’s still squeezing.

What next, what next, what next, what next, huh? His brain takes Akira’s words and snaps at his body like a snarling rottweiler, like if he hesitates he’s going to lose fingers, limbs, his future. He sags down onto the backs of his knees, head pounding like a drum, the bleeding no longer painless. A plan. He needs a new plan. Do you? Do you need a new plan? What next?

He doesn’t want to make a new plan. He wants to fall into the mundane embrace of the old, the routine of killing his rival in a blacksite beneath Tokyo, comforted that Akira’s death was quick and clean, that he hadn’t had to be tortured for long, that he hadn’t had to live for long knowing his hope betrayed him, that in the end, Goro won.

And here Akira lays, on the floor, bleeding and tortured, his hope betraying him.

And Goro feels like he lost.

He reaches out and drags his discarded blazer over, pressing the sleeve into his cut cheek, hard. It stings. Check the captive, his brain commands, some internal timer ticking over.

Akira’s eyes look sharper already. “Fuck,” he groans from the floor, jaw clenching. His leg doesn’t look good. “You’re hurt,” he breathes, confused; trying to push himself upright. He fails. “What happened? My hands?”

Goro’s running out of time. His heart aches. He quickly fishes his phone from the inside of his blazer, wiping bloody hands on his thighs before he uses it. Akira’s keenly watching him now. Awake already. “Oh. I forgot. That was nice,” he says emptily, face falling, hope draining. “Go ahead, call him.” Now disgust is painting itself onto his bloodstained face in bold strokes. “Maybe he’ll give you a kiss on the neck before he slits it. Is that what you’d like?”

The fist around his vocal chords moves down to his stomach. Goro retches. Everything tastes like blood and smoke and bile and death. He clamps one hand around his mouth, the other trembling with phone in hand, call button blinking invitingly.

WHAT NEXT WHAT NEXT WHAT NEXT WHAT NEXT—

“I can’t believe this is what you are,” Akira spits at him, cold hate spilling into his normally warm voice. “After everything, here you are, crying on your fucking floor, too scared to choose!” He laughs again, enraged. “After everything I saw in you, everything I admired, everything I hoped for! Was any of it real?”

Akira’s getting up again.

Goro’s fingernails are digging into his own face. It hurts. Everything hurts. Everything always has. He jolts to his feet in a panic, thumb still over the call button. Just one press and it’s all over. Nine muscles could move it and let him relax.

Akira stares icily at the ground, at their mingled blood, at the wreckage around. “Fine,” he growls. Rage is fueling him still. Lucky him. “At least I fucking tried.” He looks at him. With so much rage in them, his storm-cloud eyes look almost black. Goro’s stomach wrings itself tight again. “What about you, Goro? Do you believe in anything?”

He smothers another retch behind his hand, staring into their leader’s eyes.

Admired?

A flare goes off in Goro’s chest, burning, burning, burning. He kicks Akira in the stomach, then shoves him back down with the sole of his boot. The phone goes back into his pocket. 

“Don’t move,” he hears himself say.

The drum beat of questions still continues rolling in his head, a background rhythm that chases his steps. In the bathroom, he opens the medicine cabinet and rakes all of his makeup out with one arm. Glass bottles crack and spill down the porcelain. The back panel pops off to reveal the wall behind. Goro hooks his bloody nails into a gap in the plaster and pries the fake wall away. Inside; a vial that’s got just about a dose left, a small bag of emergency cash, and a container of sealed syringes. He takes all of them, then runs the tap.

Smeared blood and spilt makeup swirl in the water, colors fusing, blood and fiery gold like Akira’s soul, rust and dark shades of depravity like his own. One floats atop the other for a little while, but the drain is the inevitable winner in the end. He dries his hands on a towel much too soft for someone like him and turns back.

Akira’s getting up again.

Goro throws what he’s carrying onto the island and grabs him from behind, wrapping his left arm under his chin, flexing and pressing hard against both arteries. Akira struggles. Goro trembles, picking out a detail halfway across the room and staring at it, dead-eyed.

“Goro,” Akira forces out, weakening. “I still…”

If he’d lived here longer, maybe he’d repaint the walls. Change things. Do something. 

He stares at the walls until Akira goes soft underneath him. 

Goro relaxes his arm. 

The beating of his heavy heart tells him the world is still moving.

Change things. Do something.

Goro lowers him carefully to the ground and checks his pulse and breathing once more. 

He’s got maybe two or three minutes before he wakes up again. Goro hastily rips open a syringe and draws what’s left of the anesthetic, rolling up one of Akira’s sleeves. The thick fabric kept the blood from reaching his skin, mostly. Goro hisses, struggling to find the right vein. He doesn’t normally use this one, it’s too easily spotted, and he has to wear specific designer shirts in the summer. A contract he signed, he can’t remember which. Eventually the vein bulges up between his thumb and index finger, and the metal punctures in. Slowly, Goro presses down until the syringe is empty.

A shaky exhale escapes him, and he carefully pulls the needle out. A stripe of blood runs down Akira’s pale skin. Goro stares at it. It glimmers under the light, like jewels or pomegranate juice, and for an instant, he wants nothing more than to drag his tongue along its path. To taste him.

He swallows, throat dry like sandpaper. The pain drags him back inside his own body, but he barely fits right now. He puts Akira back in the recovery position, using his rolled-up blazer to prop his head up. His left jean leg is stained with blood, knife wound still slowly bleeding. Goro’s lucky he didn’t hit an artery. Lucky? He’s got to fix that. Fix? More things to collect from the bathroom, but one thing at a time.

Retrieving his phone, Goro swipes right through the contacts. Akira’s name goes by. It’s not a long list. It’s just gone past eleven p.m. as he hits the call button. The line clicks after five rings.

A formal yet polite man asks, “Good evening sir, do you have a reference ID?”

His medicine-ball-like head throbs as he tries to recall his password.

“Forty-five degrees to midnight.”

The line clicks as he’s transferred.

“Your order?” A smooth female voice asks next.

Automatically, his lips long to say, ‘A pharmacist, a nightcap.’

“I’d like a taxi for two,” he says instead.

A pen scrapes. “Very well. Will you be needing a hotel reservation?”

“No, thank you,” he replies. “Only a private booth for tonight. Somewhere local, low-key.”

“Management is reminding all customers that all passengers must be in a fit state for travel. Damages or cleaning will incur extra fees,” she recites effortlessly.

“Yes,” he replies stiffly. 

“Very good, sir.” It sounds like she’s smiling down the line. “Your driver will further discuss your private booth and fees when he arrives in thirty minutes.”

A dial tone swallows his reply.

*

Rain hammers on the sheet metal overhead. Goro stares at the man he tied to a chair and drags a soft cloth over sharp steel, polishing. Akira’s still out, or pretending very well. The dose should be wearing off now. Goro sighs and flicks the knife closed. He would feel safer with a gun. In fact, it would be perfect if he’d been given a gun. Which is probably why he was never given one. He can see the suspicion and anger, glowering from behind orange tinted lenses.

Of course he’d never give you a fucking gun. You could decide to walk in one day and put a hole through his head.

Goro jolts up and starts pacing, the salt-stained air permeating his every breath. Thirty minutes was never going to be enough time to clean both himself, Akira, and the condo. Though on the bright side, they left enough DNA behind to create clones if they ever needed them. He laughs wearily at the stupid thought, the strain permeating it, voice like an elastic band that’s about to snap.

A tiredness has crept into him, the same one he gets on the sleepless nights. But he’s got none left to numb himself out with. He shot the last of it into Akira’s arm.

Then their extraction—if you could even call it that—took every yen he’d ever stashed away. Yakuza really did have a special ability for smelling money and weakness, and he probably reeked of both. He scowls at the ground, then back up at Akira. 

Akira, Akira, Akira. The fool who believed. The fool who tried to ruin everything.

The fool coughs. Goro stills, the rain softens, and Akira’s head rises. The starkness of his eyes has faded, no longer silver or gold or afire, just… grey. He tries to swallow, but fails and settles for slowly blinking. 

Crouching down, Goro scans his features. Akira’s pupils lock onto him. His lips are dry and cracking, skin chalky. He’s dehydrated, which stands to reason. Akira’s breaths quicken as he tries to blink away the post-anesthetic fog.

Goro stands slowly and turns away. He knows Akira’s gaze follows him. He feels it on his back, getting hotter every moment. He opens the bag he brought and retrieves a water bottle.

Akira’s arms tug at his restraints as he approaches and twists the cap off.

He offers it to his lips. “Drink.”

Akira hesitates. Goro crouches down again, just to meet his eyes. After a few moments, Akira’s lips part and allow him to tilt the bottle back, water trickling into his mouth. They stay like this for a little while. Neither speak. Eventually, Akira turns his lips away. 

Cold is probably the closest to how Goro feels right now. He sets aside the bottle and waits. Akira takes the time to look around, then tests his restraints again.

“Now—” Goro begins.

“Did you… fucking… drug me?” Akira interrupts, normally rich voice worn poor. He coughs.

“Yes,” Goro replies, rising up. “Trust me, it’s far better than what you would get in the SIU’s care.”

“Only you would think that matters,” his captive snaps back. “Both would be entirely because of you.”

Goro leans back on his heels. “I suppose you’re right.”

Akira’s eyebrows climb. “Wow,” he coughs again and swallows roughly. “Refreshing.”

“What is?”

“Honesty.”

Goro feels like he’s thawing already, more stray thoughts firing the longer he looks at Akira. Goro could always see through the fake glasses, but without them, he’s…

No. Start strangling it. 

His fingers twitch in agreement, and Akira’s eyes stay on him. It’s not the pleasant interest he often felt under the dim lights of Leblanc, with coffee and spice fogging the air. No, it’s what he hates the most.

"I fucking hate that look in your eyes."

"What look?" 

"Pity,” he seethes, “and belief.” Goro shakes his head. "That from where you sit, you can still change something. Belief that I ever needed your help in the first place. All of it! The sheer audacity of your arrogance. It’s going to get you and everyone you love killed.” His hateful voice echoes around the warehouse, then drains away with the rain. “Surely,” he says quietly, imploringly. “Surely, you knew how this would go."

Akira, tied to a chair, bleeding and beaten, simply lets his head drop back as he stares upward. “I'm not dead yet, so…”

Harder, something in him demands. The ice is cracking.

“Who else knows about him? About me?” Goro asks, jaw tight. “And how?”

Akira doesn’t blink, doesn’t even look at him, still fixated on the sky of interlocked metal sheets overhead. “Why? Will knowing change anything for you? Or are you just trying to plug leaks like a good little soldier?” 

Dread feels angular in his throat. “Answer my fucking question or die, Akira.”

That gets him to look at Goro. “Or die?” Akira spits on the floor in defiance. “You’d have already done it if you were going to.”

Kill him, prove him wrong, do it, do it now, now, now, now—

Goro stays very still.

Akira continues, “Thought so. How about you answer mine first, then. Why haven’t you handed me over to daddy? Isn’t that what he wants?”

Goro slaps him, hard. It’s automatic, thoughtless, expected, dull. Akira’s lips encourage him silently, curving into a smirk, still waiting for an answer. Goro has one, but he won’t surrender it, gaze fixed on Akira’s cheek as it tinges pink in the shape of his hand.

A thrum of something hot and prideful rolls through him. Beneath the leather, he flexes his right hand over and over, cracking the fresh scabs open again, chasing more feeling, more sensation. In his skull, every possibility ricochets off every outcome, synapses bursting into fireworks, light trailing in too many directions.

Akira won’t stop doing… whatever the hell he’s doing. Sitting. Smiling. Imploring. Bleeding. Why won’t he play by the rules? There’s a way this is supposed to go.

“What are we doing here, Goro?” Akira shifts back, now speaking softly. As though he hasn’t just been hit in the face, like he hasn’t been goading, or beaten and stabbed and abducted, like this isn’t a battle of wills, isn’t shifting, mask after mask, question after question. Goro’s wrist twitches, the blade freeing itself. Parry, riposte, parry—

Goro holds the knifepoint under the Phantom Thief leader’s chin. “Answer me.” The steel in his uncovered eyes is growing brighter by the second, flooding with color and will. Goro can practically see Joker shuffling the deck, drawing another card, again and again and again.

“All I have to do is push this fucking knife in and call him.”

Akira looks disgusted. “Coward.”

“I’ve killed before, Akira.” 

“In reality? Or just in dreamland?”

Every thread is slipping from his grasp. The knife digs deeper. A pinprick of blood wells up and runs down the blade. “Do you want to be the first? Is that it?” he hisses.

“Not if I can help it,” Akira retorts quickly. “And I know you don’t want to do it either.”

Goro leans in, close enough to bite. “Like you understand what I want,” he taunts. “I am ready to kill you. I was trying to kill you. That’s why I won.”

“That right?”

Akira suddenly leans forward to meet him, lips red and cut and blotched with bruises and oh-so-close—

Teethteethteethteethteethteethteethteeth

Goro yanks away.

Akira’s expression remains flat. “Yeah,” he says. “You’re a coward.”

“And what would you know about cowardice?” Goro snarls, spittle flying from his lips. “About me? You’re just a pack of sanctimonious children, all licking each other’s wounds!” He hates him, hates them, hates everything, but Goro hates Shido most of all. His north star, gleaming red on the horizon, the one thing that would never leave him. “What could consoling yourselves over your failures teach you about me?”

Akira, tied to a goddamn chair, still manages to emit pity like radiation. “I know what you told me. I know about you, because I listened when you spoke, Goro. Just like them. I saw your face when you talked about your moth—”

Goro kicks Akira’s chair to the ground. Dust stings his eyes. He looms large, driving close. He’s not afraid. “You don’t know anything! I will have my revenge on Masayoshi Shido—and nothing, not you or anyone else—will get in my way!”

Akira isn’t saying anything. Isn’t arguing with him. Isn’t fighting him. Unspent rage flares along Goro’s muscles. He stabs the knife into the boards beside Akira's head with a crack.

Goro starts pacing again. He can’t stay this close. He can taste Akira’s air. He wants to kill him. He wants to tear into his chest and eat the words out of his lungs. The very ground under his feet is eroding, every foothold worn smooth as he slides down into the warm, welcoming embrace of the hate he’s carried so very far.

“That man deserves every moment of suffering I can give him,” Goro shouts. “No, more! And you think you understand?” He says, voice twisted with mockery. “Do you? What it’s like to be that powerless for so long? To watch your mother eaten alive by shame, to know it’s your very existence that burdens her so? To return home one day—”

“Goro—”

“—And find her, cold and bloody? Her fucking arms—” He chokes. He can always see it. Will always see it. Her hands, pale and lifeless. But he needs to see it, too. At night, when he looks down at his own, they look so similar. Goro’s strangled voice forces itself out of his throat. “Slit from wrist to elbow, Akira. I can’t imagine the pain.”

Akira’s eyes screw shut as he struggles against his restraints, the chair jostling across the floor, jaw locked up tight. He still doesn’t understand.

“No note,” he laughs. It tastes like bile. “No final words.” Then make him understand. “Just a mission, a wish, the one thing I was put on this warped, sick planet for. Her gift to me!”

Akira is crying and shaking his head, even as he keeps struggling.

“Years, Akira. Years of powerless hatred. You—” His body tries to make him cry, too. He gorges on the hate instead, in wide, greedy bites. “You have… no right. No right to talk to me about knowing.” Hate runs from the corners of his lips, sticky and warm and familiar. The endless foster families, the endless rejection; and in the background, a rot festering. Like a cancer in his heart, spreading down his veins, burrowing into bone marrow.

“But one day,” he breathes, shuddering at the memory. “Something gave me a chance. Floating atop the ocean, a place so twisted I could smell it in the air. Something grinning under my teeth, behind my gums, matching my heartbeat, growing stronger every second; the power I needed to finally fulfill her wish! It ripped its way out of my head, drenched in my blood, and laughed. I laughed too. I finally had a plan!” He spreads his arms up reverently, singing Loki’s adulation. 

The strips holding the cut on his cheekbone closed pull deliciously taut. “I would offer this power to Shido, I would bow and scrape at his every word, make myself useful, indispensable, the core of his entire world!” Goro cackles, raking his hair back into shape with shaking fingers. 

“And then, once he achieved his so-called dream, grasped his bloody fingers around the zenith of power, I would tell him. I would tell him I was his bastard child. I would tell him my mother’s name.” Goro turns back to Akira, whose tears have burned clear pathways into his cheeks. “I would make him as powerless as she was. As I was! I would have him live in that hell for as long as I could. Every day, without reprieve.” He crouches and yanks a fistful of Akira’s hair up, staring down. Akira gazes back at him with sad eyes and doesn’t flinch away. “I wouldn’t even allow him my mother’s escape.”

He leans down, whispering into Akira’s ear. “It was all just a few weeks away. A few more deaths away. I even pleaded for your friends’ lives, you know? He wouldn’t listen, but I tried.” A manic giggle escapes from somewhere, empty and sour. He leans back. “And you want to steal it from me, thief? At the end? My mother’s gift? My mission?” He feels like he felt earlier tonight. Actually, he feels worse. There’s no one to fight now, no violence to drown the emptiness, the longing for something else. “Do you still think you know, Akira?”

Akira closes his eyes and shakes his head no. Seconds pass. Then, he opens them again. They’re still sad, not afraid, not angry, not disgusted. Goro doesn’t understand him, and he probably never will. Better that way.

“I’m happy you told me,” Akira says, voice even and steady, even with Goro still gripping his hair. “Really. Do whatever you need to after, but just let me talk first.” 

His hand relaxes, almost in spite of himself, his intent, his thoughts.

Akira breathes relief, then continues, “And I’m not judging you. I haven’t lived your life, but if I had—” He stops himself, leaving only a pause that Goro longs to hear filled. If you had, then what? 

The man’s eyes are fixed downward. He’s doing it again. Not doing what he’s supposed to. Akira’s a mutation, scrambling DNA, tearing electrons from their orbits and unraveling the universe, wherever he goes. Radiation was apt. Goro feels like he’s drifting away on a cloud of it.

But Akira doesn’t fill the pause, doesn’t answer the unspoken then what. Instead, he changes the topic. “I thought I had you figured out the day we first met. You made a mistake.” He looks almost guilty. “It wasn’t really fair, but my life felt unlucky enough already—maybe it was karma or something—anyway,” he presses on, rambling. Goro feels like he’s frozen in place, watching from somewhere else than through his own eyes.

“But then you kept appearing in Leblanc, and calling me, asking me to places you liked and talking to me. I kept seeing glimpses, and somewhere along the line—”

“Glimpses of what?” Whatever is controlling Goro’s body asks. He simply watches on, like it’s a stageplay.

“Of you. The real you,” Akira replies. A small smile curves his lips upward at the edges as he glances away. When he looks back at Goro, it’s gone. He feels himself being sucked down, back into his body, no matter how much he doesn’t want to be. Akira continues, “You could never have won, Goro. Not the way you wanted to, not as you are. Don’t you get it?”

“What?” Goro demands, glowering, the leather creaking under his clenched fists. “Because I’m not as strong as you? Because I don’t have a group of sycophants to have a failed societal rebellion with?—”

“God, it’s no wonder you could never see me as a person. So fucking obvious now. He’s your gravity, the thing that keeps everything in order.”

“—Or is it because Shido knows who I am? Has known who I am since the start? Are you still sticking to that bullshit? You haven’t proven anything to me. I beat you, I’m stronger, I will win!”

“But even your hate works for him!” Akira snaps, summoning something immutable, even from down on the ground. “It never mattered, Goro. It’s how you could be the same, and yet so different.”

“What the fuck are you saying now?” Goro asks, cruelly letting Akira’s head thud free against the boards. “The same as what?”

“I've been in his Palace too,” he quickly replies, pushing himself up on an elbow.

Goro goes very still, then breathes out hard, stands and steps away. “A lie. You would be dead.”

Akira scoffs at his back. “Do you ever get tired of being wrong?”

He furiously wheels back around, a snarl on his lips and venom on his tongue—

“It’s an ark, for his worshipers only,” Akira says, correctly, honestly.

—And he swallows it back down.

And Akira just continues asking his questions. “So, what do you think he expects of you for a place aboard?”

“As if it matters,” Goro snaps. “He’s a warped piece of shit.”

It’s like x-rays are firing from Akira’s grey eyes. “You still don’t—” He freezes, looking deeper, closer, through the skin. “You haven’t seen it, have you?”

“Seen what?”

“His cognition of you.”

Goro’s mouth feels like saw-blades and tastes like ash. “You think you’re so fucking clever—”

Akira laughs, the melody twisted with anger. “Did you even manage ten minutes inside his head before you ran away?”

There’s something undeniable in Akira’s words. Things he felt months ago, standing in the halls of that place again. He did it often when temptation took him, made him ponder a sudden off-piste excursion into chaos, fantasizing about what might happen if he suddenly stopped playing along. He remembers a feeling, growing and growing, like he was being watched.

Doubt stabs him in the back. Goro’s legs begin to move of their own accord, pacing, pacing, pacing. 

“What does this have to do with anything!? You’re just buying time, buying breaths with your endless bullshit. I told you the truth, and yet you—”

Joker takes Akira’s place, for a single, terrifying instant. The chair scrapes as he drags himself toward Goro in a show of utter defiance, of strength, even now. 

“You can’t keep ignoring it, Goro.”

Goro steps back.

Akira returns in a blink. “It's shamelessly devoted to him and his cause.”

“Shut up,” Goro desperately snarls.

“Just as skilled, just as eager to please.”

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

“Stop.”

“It calls him ‘The Captain.’ It does whatever he asks—”

“Please, just… stop!”

“—and it loves him, Goro. It loves him so much, it’ll even die for him.”

Goro fires his boot at Akira’s head.

And Akira catches it.

The knife Goro stabbed into the wood glints back at him, now clasped in Akira’s palm, beneath his boot. Goro’s breaths are coming thin and fast, skull feeling like it’s in a vice. He missed it. He’s missed so much. Missed Akira inching toward the knife to cut himself free, missed Akira and the Thieves sneaking into Shido’s Palace, missed what he was helping Shido create every day. His skin crawls, the shame becoming a living layer under his skin, scuttling and writhing like insects. He wants to burn them all out.

Maybe this was how his mother felt.

Akira’s eyes promise he won’t go down a second time. He waits for Goro’s next move. Irises a fire-tinged storm, a barely held back maelstrom of resolve. They promise him so many things he wishes he could trust. Deep within them, beneath the crackling storm-clouds and the rain-haze of hope, that same fire still burns. An unholy marriage, a never-ending chain reaction of supernatural power and personal will. It’s what drives him, what’s made him come this far, what made him knock on Goro’s door in the middle of the night, made him live through this torture as he fought to make him see.

Goro would kill to make it his own.

A sudden urge rips through his brain. An urge to make Akira use that power, that will for baser, ravenous ends. An urge to make Akira fucking cry and moan and dig his fangs into him, to bite and kiss and fuck him till he loves only him, to tear chunks off each other and sew them back, to let the feral, fiery beast he knows is inside rip through that composed skin and singe him with his touch.

His boot slips from Akira’s grip and he stumbles backward.

“Goro…” Akira says, rising, offering his hand already.

The pity is sickening, like aerosolized thallium blown in his face. His heart racing as the toxin mingles into his blood, so eager to pump it around and just kill him quicker.

“Don’t—don’t come near me,” Goro manages to force out between gasps.

Akira stays exactly where he is, hand falling away, pushing himself to his feet.

Love, hate; it didn’t matter. That’s what Akira meant. It never mattered. He was always playing along exactly as Shido wanted. There was no connection there, no matter which one Goro longed for, it all looked the same to his father. Just notes to be played. He knew it was true.

Just a tool to be used and discarded, a toy soldier to wind up and let go. All his pain, his hate, his promises to his mother’s memory—everything that composed him, all the power he thought he gained—it abandoned him the moment he walked into that man’s grip. Abandoned, left to move automatically to the rhythm played.

It was just a game to Shido. A rigged game. Goro never mattered. His mother never mattered. Shido never cared one way or the other. He was nothing. Shame or adoration? Shido felt neither. Love or hate? Shido didn’t care. Just two sides of the same offered coin. As the coin, his father could spend him. Nothing more.

Goro collapses back against the edge of the table, hand trembling, clasped against his mouth. This time, his body lets tears go. But then he’s pulled forwards and up. Something has wrapped itself around his shoulders. It smells of coffee and feels warm. 

Akira has not done what he’s supposed to, what he told him to do, what he expected him to do. He’s hugging him. It’s not tight, but Goro doesn't dare breathe. The blackbird’s nest of hair is pressed against his shoulder.

“I care about you,” Akira says easily. Goro can’t see his face. “You, Goro. Enough to risk that same you killing me.”

Goro’s arms are frozen behind him, paralyzed. He’s too afraid to hold him back, and too weak and wounded to push him away. But the more he touches Akira, the more he’ll stain him, and the worst part is that he wants to. It was bubbling up earlier, and now there’s nothing holding the current back. He wants to finally claim something for himself, to make him his, to stain him and make him do things he could never do alone. To show him new paths, new rushes, to brand himself on him. Desire is surging into him, chased by hunger, driven from somewhere he doesn’t understand.

He finally finds the strength to push Akira off and walk away. Goro’s hands flexing at his sides, breath racing. It feels like he just snorted cocaine. Ravenous hunger, drive, euphoria, panic, all thrumming through every part of him, heart thudding in his ribs.

“Are you okay?” Akira asks quietly from behind him, clearly embarrassed.

It’s almost identical, the twitchy feeling, like he’s full of too much energy. It’s the only part of that night he remembers well. It was offered, and he didn’t feel like refusing was a good idea. But the mania, the euphoria, it stuck with him. Guess it was just lucky he didn’t know the codeword, or he would’ve asked the Yakuza to get him some.

“Fuck!” he shouts, body shivering as he stands there.

Fantasies are rolling through him like waves, unbidden. Of returning to the Phantom Thieves with their leader, Goro’s teeth-marks on his neck, his talons digging into his waist. You’ll never get him back. He’s mine now.

The waves crash against his shore, turning to foam and spray, draining back into the sea of him. Akira, Akira, Akira, whose will drove him to this, whose opposition didn’t stop him from caring, with his clear-bright eyes and razor-sharp mind, unbowed and unbroken. Goro will never understand him. He wishes he could.

But he’d ruin him.

“When?” Goro forces through. “How?”

“When did I start caring?” Akira asks, amusement tinging his tones. “Hard to say, but at the bath—”

“When did you find out about Shido?” Goro asks again, quickly. “How?”

“Oh.” Akira sounds crestfallen.

“I believe you,” Goro yells angrily at the sheet-metal, unable to look at him. He lets out a shaky breath. Rain drips through a loose panel above him, slowly eroding holes into the boards below. “I believe you,” he repeats, softer.

Goro could never stand Shido’s Palace for long. It had made him feel sick, like he was a virus and the place itself was an antibody, trying to kill him with fever. All-seeing eyes, two hands gripping the world, a panopticon with an escaped prisoner. Sweat dripping down his back, a headache that would carry for two days, and a queasy paranoia impregnated under his skin. His only joy was that Shido would share the last two with him.

Looking back, he’d always wondered what Shido could do to stop him tearing through his head. Maybe the feeling of being watched was always the key. Nothing else in there paid any attention to him at all. So, what was watching him was a puppet-cognition of himself. One he’d created through his constant subservience, his constant feigned respect and adoration, his abilities, his willingness to learn, to be trained, all of it. 

It was the most humiliating outcome he could think of, and Akira knew.

Akira hasn’t acknowledged his response. Goro cautiously glances over his shoulder at him. He’s just examining his bandaged up calf muscle with this stupid, satisfied smile on his messed up face, like he’s just won something.

“What is it like?” He asks, slowly. Akira looks up. “My cognition.” 

The smile evaporates. “I want to kill it with my bare hands.” Joker’s baritone shakes the air. Tingles shiver down Goro’s spine. Akira breathes out shakily and laughs. “Sorry, I guess that’s not an answer. It’s hard to say.” 

The excitement mixes with fear. How alike are they? Would Akira know which he was killing? He tries to bury the line of questioning. “Alright,” he says, blandly.

Akira pauses, then says, “October. I went looking for keywords. His name was the really hard part, I had to call in a ton of favors.” He sighs, wearily.

Goro casts his mind back. Even a month ago feels so hazy right now, like trying to grip a reflection in rippling lake-water. Shadows of events swim, just beneath the surface, out of reach. Constant requests are all he recalls. A dizzying blur of arson, psychotic breaks, mergers, a never-ending run on sentence of money, blood, and fire. Okumura’s head bursting was the full stop.

“Yes. I expect it was,” Goro says slowly. He longs to keep asking questions. “A non-answer, then a half-answer to a different question. I suppose you’re wising up on how much information you offer.”

Akira just hums. “Sorry. It’s easier to just show you that thing.”

There’s so much hope in his voice. Goro scoffs.

“C’mon,” Akira teases as he limps a step closer. “If you say yes, I’ll promise to let you kill it yourself.”

“We have to survive the next few days first,” Goro replies, now forced to consider reality outside of this old warehouse on Tokyo’s outer-docks. “But perhaps.”

Akira smirks, eyes lidding in the way that’s had his stomach flipping for nearly half a year. But the realization earlier flips with it too, landing with a heavy thud. Goro turns away. “Sit down,” he instructs. “You’ll tear the stitches.” 

There’s a new—no, old—feeling rolling around in his skull. Guilt. The words, ‘I’m sorry’ seem pointless and empty. Farcical, even. He wasn’t sorry ten minutes ago. He didn’t regret stabbing him when he did. In fact, it was thrilling, and necessary. No, better not to say anything.

“Good idea,” Akira agrees, wincing. “Promise not to tie me up again?”

Goro leaves him in suspense. Now that he’s started to think of the outside, a flood of new things to deal with are pouring in. Wearily, he picks up the ex-prisoner’s chair and drops it beside him, then perches himself back on the table. The deep aches and throbbing pains are quickly coming back to his attention too. Akira gave as good as he got, minus the stabbing.

Wearily, he massages his face. He's so very, very tired. Akira’s cut will definitely scar. A dull ache echoes in his stomach at the thought, vague and unfocused. He rushes to find another topic, the only topic, really.

“So, after the election…”

“That’s what it said,” Akira replies as he sits. “The cognition, I mean. But you know Shido better than I do.”

Yes, he does. Paranoid. Calculating. Intolerant of loose ends and insecurity. Shido would cut off his right arm if it twitched in a way he didn’t approve of, and that’s what Goro shaped himself into. Shido’s right arm, ready to be sliced off and replaced. Bowing and scraping at his every fucking request for years. Even when the Okumura ghoul was running him ragged, he never complained, was never late, and never failed. Some recent odd moments of Shido’s made more sense now: the random suspicion, the outlandish accusations. Akira was combing through his skull.

But Shido had seemed so happy with him anyway, so satisfied, he was so sure he had him under control.

Little did you know, it was the opposite, all along.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Goro says, shaking himself out of his reverie. “And I’m out of money.”

“I’m not,” Akira says happily, patting the pocket where his wallet is.

He can’t quite summon the same cheer. Using Akira’s money now feels shameful. He would prefer to steal a real taxi than pay for one with his cash. The more he thinks, the more ashamed he feels. Everything he ever did was pointless. Ten hours ago, he would’ve known that gaining Shido power was a means to an end. That it would all come crashing down soon, and that everything was worth it.

Now, he only knows he would’ve never seen the bullet coming. Hell, maybe the plan was for the Thieves to do it for him. It sounds like something Shido would plan. Maybe his cognition would finish him off. A chill rolls over him.

It’s difficult to not be scared of what he’ll know ten hours from now.

“Akira?” he asks. 

The rain falls like sheets above them, constant but light.

“Mm?”

“What were you saying earlier? When you started—” He doesn’t really know why he’s asking. It’s not like it matters. “Never mind.”

“Earlier?” Akira pursues.

“We’ve killed enough time. We need to—”

“Then make time, killer.”

Goro feels his eyes bulging as he stares.

“What?” Akira smirks, then plasters faux-concern across his face. “You spent your entire life on the clock. Give us five minutes.”

“Fuck off—”

He rolls his eyes. “But you just told me to sit here.”

“You’re infuriating.”

“Yeah,” Akira says with a wry grin. “So, the bathhouse?”

“But—what—” Goro’s hands rose up into the air, possessed by annoyance and surprise, like they were physically trying to get a grip on the start of his sentence. “Why bother getting me to ask if you knew anyway?”

“Obviously because I wanted to hear you ask?”

Goro silently wishes he could snap him out of existence for a few minutes.

To that end, he decides to simply say nothing else, fold his arms and stare hard at the back wall. Old fishing equipment hangs there, nets eaten alive by moths and damp, ancient rods warped and stained with rust.

“Alright, fine,” Akira starts with a melodramatic sigh, and despite trying to only focus on things twenty meters away, Goro still tracks his movements in his periphery alone. “By the end of July I was…” Akira pauses, again. 

Goro fights the urge to turn his way, but he can see him smiling. Stupidly. 

Akira continues, “More happy than worried to see you in Leblanc.”

Well, the coffee was exceptional, and nobody would come looking for him there. It had a fascinating barista with fake glasses who knew Nietzsche, and also vociferously hated every word he ever wrote. They shared their thoughts and perspectives, which often became sharing increasingly frenetic debates between cups of coffee as the sun sank away. All that time, Goro felt he had the upper hand in already knowing the nature of the most important of Akira’s cat-like lives. 

Now he knows they were sharing that, too.

Akira is picking at a nail absentmindedly as he talks. “After Miel et Crêpes with Kasumi, I knew there was something interesting about you. Something more you weren’t showing.”

“Well, obviously. But you already knew that by then,” Goro interrupts, catching Akira frowning in his direction. Wrong answer.

But really, ‘interesting’? That’s the word he chooses? Oh yes, Goro remembers how interesting it was trying to incite an argument between Akira and a bright, bubbly and kind girl who was obviously smitten with him. How interesting it was trying to maneuver the conversation toward the Phantom Thieves’ morality when it kept wriggling away to gymnastics and other nonsense. It was, in fact, the best way he could’ve spent that afternoon. Watching her steal glances at him when he wasn’t looking, watching her cheeks tinge pink when he laughed off Goro’s points—all so very interesting.

Goro thinks the most interesting thing was the gnawing, unexplained feeling in his guts the entire time.

Akira’s been watching him closely, he can feel his eyes on the side of his head. “Yeah, that’s the look,” he comments airily. “I think Ryuji got sick of me constantly talking about it.” 

In this instance, Goro agreed with Sakamoto. They shared opinions surprisingly often, actually—despite the fact that Sakamoto had also spent as much time as possible in the casino antagonizing him.

“Heh, anyway… Jazz Jin felt like when I got a taste of it for real. I liked it,” Akira continues. The timbre of his voice leans against Goro’s will until he topples and decides to really look. Akira’s eyes are lidded, dark and direct.

Goro feels a little warm, embarrassed at the memory of everything he said that night. I live alone. I don’t cook for myself. I come to a jazz club when I need to think. I’ve never brought anyone else here.

Akira should really stop talking.

Of course, he doesn’t. “But the bathhouse was when I decided to do something about it. About you, about everything,” Akira says, with a note of fondness Goro can’t deny he heard. The note fills the space, pushing back the chill of the rain. “Yeah.” He sighs. “Late August, maybe? Anyway—” 

“September third,” Goro corrects him.

A Saturday, weeks after he became a pariah for the second time. The clear sky glowed as he entered the subway and cracked open as he left. Summer’s dying showers, catching him one last time. Rain draped itself across Tokyo like a silver curtain, one he had to part to reach Leblanc. Nightmares kept him awake the night before. The past branding itself upon him anew, searing old memories clear again. He remembers the look Leblanc’s owner gave him and his soaked shirt.

“Right, yeah. It rained, didn’t it?” Akira replies breezily. “Yeah,” he repeats again, then chuckles. “Then Sojiro...” Akira’s smile has turned rueful. It stays, even as his eyes flick back up to catch Goro’s watching.

He remembers Leblanc’s owner suggesting they visit the bathhouse, remembers Akira stumbling at that very moment in the kitchen, remembers convincing himself he was accepting just to spite Akira’s shyness. 

The snapshots of back then keep coming, like drops of water running down Akira’s chest as the seared-fresh past poured out of Goro’s mouth, eager to be free in the hot steam between them. He remembers the longing he’d felt, for however long, to have a normal life like this. Where he could stare at an undeniably attractive man and not have to think about how he’d have to kill him. Where he could share his past with someone he trusts and feel peaceful. Where he wouldn’t have to think about appearances, about tomorrow, about the end.

“Mm,” Goro manages. It’s barely anything, but it’s all he can do, tumbling end over end in his own head. Such hopes, such normality, it feels as far away as ever. No, he’s never had a normal life, and won’t get a normal death, either.

“Do you remember what you said to me that night?” Akira asks, a twang of his hometown accent slipping through as his voice shifts down, wavering on a tightrope only he can see.

Parts of Goro’s mind leap forth to try and distract him, eager thoughts to place the accent and region amid the one of how badly he wants to hear it more often. He dryly scoffs, eyes flicking away and back, away and back. “In excruciating detail,” Goro replies dismissively.

Akira simply shakes his head. No frown this time. “Wrong part.”

Goro frowns instead. “What ‘part’ could be more important than my past? Especially in the light of…” He pauses, gesturing to the warehouse. “All of this.”

“You called me, after.” The man wets his cut lower lip. “You said—”

It returns in a flash, before Akira can finish.

‘It’s nice to spend the day as Goro Akechi for once, rather than the Detective Prince.’

“That?” Goro can’t keep the incredulity out of his voice. 

Akira lightly shrugs.

Tired musings down a telephone, his mind stuck ruminating on things it shouldn’t be, sitting in the very same room they fought in not four hours ago? A phone call, probably somewhere between the third cigarette and the first shot of anesthetic? That’s what did it?

“I don’t understand you,” Goro says quietly, tongue gone numb under his teeth.

“No?” Akira asks. “We’ll get there.”

No. He very much doubts he ever will. What is Akira getting out of this? What is his goal? They stare at each other. The rain’s stopped. How long have they been sitting here, talking? It feels like hours.

“So,” Akira breaks the silence. “What now?”

Maybe they’ll get back to it later.

Goro breathes slowly out through his nose, then looks away. His thoughts stretch out again. Yes. What now?

“Survival, I suppose,” he says disinterestedly. He feels directionless for the first time in years. It’s not pleasant, so he fixes it as soon as possible. “I’m going to kill him, Akira,” he proclaims.

“But—”

“Yes, I know what you’d have me do,” Goro replies coldly. “Warp his mind, make him regret everything he ever did, make him confess. All of it, unearned, empty, pointless.”

“But it could clear your name,” Akira urges. “Everything he did—”

“Everything we did,” Goro corrects. “And I appreciate the offer, but I’m not interested.”

“As if to make my point,” Akira’s voice is flat and dangerous. Goro’s starting to realize that happens when he’s afraid. “Traumatized victims always think about things so logically.”

The word victim hits him like a bullet.

“Let me be crystal clear,” Goro says sharply as he stands, then turns and stares Akira down, coat trailing in his wake. “I chose to seek Shido out. I chose to commit assassinations in his name.” He takes a step closer. Akira is staring back up at him, eyes as hard as glass. “I chose to, because I sought revenge. The type of revenge I wanted, I needed. Those deaths, that blood on my hands? I didn’t care if it got me what I desired. Do you understand me?”

Akira’s jaw tightens.

“A victim?” Goro repeats, narrowing his eyes. “Is that all you see when you look at me? At all I’ve done?”

Launching to his feet, Akira shakes his head.

Can he even feel his leg?

“You and your absolutist bullshit,” Akira seethes. Apparently not enough to stop. “I see you. I told you this, over and over. But I guess black and white are the only colors you see. Maybe a shitty beige if we’re lucky?”

Goro clicks his tongue. “Stick to the point for once. What’s the alternative? Accept your sanctimonious pity?—” 

“Sanctimonious, right,” Akira mutters under his breath, shaking his head.

“—Hold hands, make nice and let that man claim ownership of my every decision? Every choice I ever made? Let him become someone he’s not, gain a conscience he’s never had, regret things he’d never regret—”

“Yeah, because that’s what he deserves. To suffer under it,” Akira retorts sharply.

Goro laughs. “That’s suffering to you?”

“More deflections. I know you know what guilt feels like,” Akira pleads, staring right through him, to his core, where she still resides. “Maybe think about that, or hell—go talk to the other monsters we’ve ruined—see how they like living with what makes them who they are, missing!”

“Akira.” Goro’s voice is still, but his chest is swooping cold. “If you use her as a cudgel on me ever again, I’m going to break your fucking neck,” he promises.

“Sorry!” Akira says quickly, angrily, exasperatedly. But it drains out of him quickly, with a breath that shakes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just—”

“Wanted to manipulate me into doing something you want, using my mother’s death.”

“No!” Akira looks appalled. “I’m trying to help you see it’s not black and white. You don’t have to go down with his fucking ship, he can still spend the rest of his life suffering! You don’t have to accept his manipulation as your life.”

“And we’re back here,” Goro says with a sigh. “Try not to evade this time. Did that make me find his name and office? Did it make me break in and wait through the night? I could’ve killed him right then and there that morning. But I didn’t! Did he manipulate me into that, too?”

Akira throws his head back in frustration, growl-laughing at the ceiling like he’s about to explode. “You were just a kid—”

“How about I turn this on you?” Goro interrupts, turning his words into a knife. “Everything the Phantom Thieves have ever done, I’ll call them a delusional series of meaningless acts, all driven by the trauma they’ve been through. Would you like that? They had no choice in it, no agency, no real purpose or goal—they’re just victims lashing out.”

Goro watches Akira’s fists ball.

“Not enough? Shall I go one further? I read the case file, Akira. Even the redacted parts. I know he was the person you assaulted.” His fingertips trembled tight around the papers, jealousy and fascination and arousal, all warred inside him. The names; Akira KURUSU. Masayoshi SHIDO. He couldn’t look away. “Every decision you made after, to reveal a predator and protect your friends, to expose a fraud and leech, to expunge a parasite preying on the entire city’s most vulnerable, to cleanse—” His voice cracks, thinking of her. 

A girl. No, her name.

“Futaba, being crushed under the guilt of someone else’s choices!” He leans in close. “Okumura, Sae, all of them! Sorry, you had no choice, Akira. You didn’t choose them, Masayoshi Shido did, when he got you arrested.” Goro smiles pitifully. “I feel so sorry for you. Isn’t it good he saved those people through you?”

Akira punches him, hard enough to make his ears ring. Goro shoves him back down into the chair. His leg makes it easy.

“Exactly! Fuck him!” Goro roars. “Own what you chose, right or wrong.” He steps back, panting and working his jaw. It aches from Akira’s rage. “Maybe we are victims, Akira. But we still chose our paths.”

“You’re right,” Akira breathes, posture slackening, fight evaporating. “I do, we do, so why shouldn’t you? Isn’t fair for me to ask for,” His voice breaks on the last word, and doesn’t recover. “I just want…” 

Goro can’t believe what he’s seeing. Akira’s shoulders, shaking. The sight demands he ask, “What? What do you want?”

“You,” Akira says, voice shattering, undeniably tear-stained. But he won’t look up. Won’t let Goro see. “You, and for you to have a chance at life. A real life! Something better, something beyond him! With me, without me, whatever you want!”

The breath catches in Goro’s throat, like a blade or a spike or a noose, tightening.

“I’m so tired,” Akira says down at the ground. “Tired of fighting, tired of trying. Tired of doing ‘right’ by this world that doesn’t care. I just wanted one thing. One thing out of everything that’s happened! Is that selfish of me? Am I being a child, throwing a tantrum? Is wanting one thing so fucking bad?” he yells.

But your friends. Your connections. Your power. You can look back at what you did and have something meaningful to show for it, even now. You have so much, and I have so little to give you.

Goro can’t make the words come out of his mouth, all of them locked behind something he can’t understand.

But you want …. Me? Me? Me? Me? Me? Me? Me?—

“What about my friends’ lives? Their names?” Akira angrily rubs at his eyes, pushing budding tears away. “Your life, your name? All of it, just the collateral damage of responsibility? Am I supposed to just accept that with a smile?”

“You—”

“Chose this, I know!” Akira shouts. “Fine! Maybe it’s just, maybe it’s right! Maybe the only thing this shit universe can provide for people like us is perfect causality. Maybe we can only hope for better, for what we want and not just what we deserve, somewhere else.” He drives the heels of his palms into his eyes.

The words still won’t fucking move. Like a scratch on a CD, his brain skips over it every time. His brain refuses to send the signals.

Him? 

Skip. 

A life? 

Skip. 

Better? 

Rewind.

“You know what else?” Akira’s voice slips into a cold rumble, the inner storm, now on the horizon, approaching. “I don’t give a shit what happens to that fucking subhuman. I care about what happens to you and my friends and my cat and fucking Sojiro. So kill him, yeah? Fuck the consequences, if that’s all that matters to you! Fuck wanting better!” His voice cracks and falters, now barely a whisper. “If you need to own it all, then take it. Take it all. The responsibility, the death, the giving up. Take it.”

Goro finally strangles it out of his throat and into the air, “You want… me?” 

Akira looks up. His eyes are wet with tears, capillaries stark lines, staining steel with rust too much like his own, pained but resolute and honest. He can almost see himself in them. 

The silence holds, and holds, and holds. Goro feels like his chest is cracked open, organs pumping and beating and writhing out in the night air for Akira to see.

At that moment, he hears heavy boots. Running. Moving toward the warehouse. Puddles are splashing as they move closer. Whoever it is, they’re coming to end this, whatever it is. This talk. This heart to heart. This revealing of innards. This autopsy.

Akira hears them now too.

“Who—” Akira rasps. “Is this you?”

His ribs are snapping shut around his heart, the skin sewing itself back up. “No. Kneel.”

“What?”

He’s straining his senses, counting steps, the weight of footfalls, the soft rattle of polymer under rain. 

No time.

“Four of them, kevlar and guns. Kneel, and put your hands behind your back. Now,” he commands.

Akira takes one look at the door, then back at Goro. He yanks the knife out of his pocket and tucks it into his boot.

The footsteps just stopped outside the door.

“Akira, I—” Goro hisses desperately, panic gripping tight.

His once-captive and once-leader kneels. “We’ll get through this. Believe,” he says.

They're probably about to be killed, no matter how much he believes. The threat calculations didn’t take long. He reasoned he'd have at least a day before they sold his info onto Shido. This is his fault for expecting Yakuza to have any scruples. The mistake that’ll kill them both. He looks back at Akira, and Akira looks right back at him. 

If he stays down, or runs when the fighting starts, he can probably make it to the street. If he can get a taxi, get far enough away before they realize... It’s not much of a hope, but it’s better than nothing.

If he had time, he’d call the Thieves, call Futaba. Call anyone. Warn them. But there was no time, and he cut all the support lines anyway. He braces his shoulder against the door. 

Still, Goro can at least give Akira some hope, however small. 

Much more than he’ll get himself.

He won’t be leaving this warehouse at all.

Perfect causality.

Goro breathes deep.

The handle turns, slow and soundless, testing for locks or traps. He’s got to break their little flowchart breach before it starts.

“I understand there's been a miscommunication," he says loudly. The handle immediately springs back up. "I’m Goro Akechi, I have the leader of the Phantom Thieves in captivity, ready to hand over to the SIU for interrogation.”

No answer. 

“He came to me, seeking to appeal to my..." He glances Akira's way. "Better nature. It seems my façade was entirely successful. However, it ended in an altercation. It seemed smart to leave the location as quickly as possible, and await pickup elsewhere.”

“Then why didn't you just call this in?” A male voice demands from outside. Gruff. Late twenties or early thirties. Slightly on the heavier side.

They start shuffling around outside. Polymer scrapes on leather. The door handle moves again. Fucking criminal scum couldn’t have given him a goddamn lock on the door? Excuses, excuses, think, think.

“My phone was damaged in the fight. I didn’t have much time, and I had to placate neighbors and staff immediately. It seemed the smartest move at the time.” He swallows his shame. “Perhaps I was mistaken. I apologize.”

“Well, kiddo. We all make ‘em,” the man replies, an unseen sneer curdling his words. “It’s good I’m here to clean up.” A pause. “So, the thief. Is he out?”

“Not sure. Dazed, at any rate,” Goro hesitates, then decides to add, “He’s not moving anywhere quickly regardless. Stab wound to the calf, among countless other injuries.”

Akira looks at him in utter confusion. For Goro, the reasoning is simple enough. Threat reduction.

“Huh,” the man laughs. “Maybe I can bring him in after all.” A fist lightly knocks against the other side of the metal. “So, why’re you still blocking the door, Goro-chan?”

Goro promises to kill him if it’s the last thing he does on this earth. He’ll make him a surrogate for his father. Tear out his throat and stab out his eyes, leave him gurgling and begging.

“Call it… professional suspicion,” he says slowly, struggling to swallow the still-wriggling fantasy whole. “I do hope we’re both still on the same side.”

Pairs of boots scrape backward through puddles. “I sure hope so, Goro-chan. Are you armed?” 

“No,” Goro admits. “I had him drugged when I brought him here. No need.”

“Alright, then let’s pack him up already, I’m getting fucking soaked out here.”

Taking one last look back at Akira, Goro slowly puts a finger to his lips and mimes closing his eyes. Akira gives him a long stare, gleaming with silver hope. ‘I trust you,’ he mouths, then closes his eyes.

Baton pass.

Goro positions himself behind where the door will swing toward. “It’s open,” he says, stepping back. A shoulder instantly collides with the metal. It swings toward him, flashlight beams scanning across the threshold. He snatches the handle in one gloved hand and holds it tight. 

Water splashes as they start to move. The beams of light sweep right, then left, seeking targets. They linger on Akira’s kneeling form, slumped back against his ankles. Then the men swing in, slides rattling as they do. Guns already drawn. The lights clear the right side, then switch and scan his side too. 

Fuck. He miscounted. Five. There’s five of them. 

Plan B. 

Goro nudges the door shut behind them, letting go. 

Just before the tactical lights blind him, he gets a glimpse of their weapons. Handguns with high-capacity magazines, all black and boxy. Austrian. The lights are fastened to the under-barrel, suppressors extending outward. Goro raises his hand to shield his eyes. “Mind getting your gun out of my damn face?” he snaps, summoning what little authority he may still have.

“Hah! Sorry, Goro-chan. Just a precaution. We don’t know the extent of his abilities, afterall,” the man he spoke to says, now safely nestled behind a firearm. Slowly, the lights slide down his face to his knees. Blinking the spots away, Goro takes stock of the situation as quickly as he can.

Two of them are closing toward Akira, guns raised. Akira stays very still. The suppressors don’t surprise him. They are still in Tokyo; it's only courtesy. The three other Suits stand in a half-circle around Goro, guns at low-ready. 

“Appreciate it,” Goro says, jaw tight and heart thudding, trying his best to don the now-shredded mask of the naive high-school detective. “I thought it was only you. An entire squad is quite the surprise.”

The large, suited man snorts. “Yeah, well, better to keep the element of surprise, yeah?”

The man’s hair is dark brown, clipped relatively short, with a widow’s peak already starting to erode his youth. At least Goro was right about a few things; he’s slightly overweight. A sliver of fat is pressed over the collar of his shirt. It bulges as he breathes. Further down, under his too-tight blazer, a kevlar vest stands black against the white cotton. This man is built strong under the fat, but he’s slow and probably tires quickly. Too many smoke breaks and too few cardio days.

Goro really should quit.

Well, you’re about to. Suddenly.

“Quite true,” he agrees with a vapid laugh. “At least, I’m certainly surprised. What’s the next step, then?”

The big guy instantly fires a side-glance to his colleagues. They aren’t saying anything. “Well, make sure he ain’t about to die on the transport. Package him up nice, bring him in. He’s going in the hole till someone figures out who they’re sending to interrogate him.”

Goro feels a cold chill run fingertips down his neck and spine. It was supposed to be him. The plan’s already changed.

“You need a medic, kid?” The seam-filling suit says with a chuckle, slotting his gun away in a shoulder holster under his left arm. Goro has to concentrate to not smile at the sight of an opportunity. “You’re a mess. He must’ve put up a hell of a fight.”

“Yes, he did,” Goro says, the first truthful words in this exchange. “I gave as good as I got.”

“Goddamn, he’s out,” One of them shouts over from beside Akira, holstering his weapon. A man on the younger side. Maybe twenty-two to twenty-four. Undisciplined and relaxed. Maybe he doesn’t know what they’re doing, who they’re working for—but it doesn’t matter. “Can see why you didn’t bother cuffing him. You really messed him up, Akechi-kun.”

“Shut up, Akiyama!” The big suit in front of him shouts. His eyes don’t move from Goro, even for a moment. A bead of sweat or rainwater rolls down his temple and drips from his developing jowls. The other two still have their guns at low ready. He takes a step towards Goro and offers his right hand to shake. “Anyway, good job, Goro-chan. We’ll get you sent to another apartment to rest up while yours is, uh… cleaned.”

This is it. The jaws, closing around his neck. 

In some other reality, some other universe or timeline, he shakes that man’s hand honestly and is dragged into a grapple. One of the other men presses a gun to the side of his head and turns his world off with a lead switch. The ejected shell casing rolls into a pool of blood, brain and skull.

Akira is taken to a blacksite and tortured to death.

A death certificate from the coroner Shido bought years ago arrives and says he killed himself after failing to escape custody. He’ll probably even say that Akira killed Goro during his escape, why not? Stir up the hate.

Goro Akechi joins the long list of ‘honorable’ law enforcement, callously killed in the line of duty. Fans weep and mourn him.

The Thieves are hunted down, one by one, and suffer accidents. No matter where they hide or how far they go. Goro tried to convince him days ago to ‘let them live in fear’—and was rebuffed. Shido does not tolerate loose ends, and now Goro’s the one that most looks like a lit fuse. He probably always did. The rage-filled eyes of a bloodstained seven year old, staring up at his father, life burning away, sparking and wild.

“Thank you,” Goro says numbly, eyes flicking to the other two, then back down to the offered hand. “I am very tired.”

In this reality, in this universe, in this timeline, he’s going to kill at least three before he takes that rest. He’ll give Akira time to escape.

Maybe the Thieves can shrive Shido’s soul clean and let him vomit up his misdeeds during a press conference. Maybe the world will get to see the man Masayoshi Shido is, and always was. Maybe they’ll even care. 

Maybe Goro’s story comes out after, linked to the killings of so many people. People will disown him, decry and loathe him. His merchandise will be burned or discarded. Corporate apologies will be issued. Posters cursed with his face will fade on the sides of forgotten buildings. The name Goro Akechi might become synonymous with traitor, like Benedict, Brutus, and Judas before him.

Maybe years later, someone will re-read his story in a different light and feel a vague sense of sympathy. Then they’ll close the book and go back to their world.

Goro hopes Akira will be doing well.

He hopes.

He believes.

With his last smile on Earth, Goro grabs Big Suit’s right hand with his left and twists as hard as he can. The small bones in his wrist crack. He screams in pain.

Time trips, falls and slows to nothing. Color drains. 

To his left, shock freezes Big Suit’s closest two allies where they stand. Goro drags the screaming man towards him, and—using every ounce of strength he still has left—pivots until his large frame blocks the guns that’re now rising to kill him. He releases Big Suit’s fractured hand, then moves up and cinches his arm up around the man’s neck, pulling him into a shielding embrace.

Next, two muffled thuds echo out, the suppressors eating the fire and sound as best they can. Suit One and Two have opened fire. Goro’s hand is already in Big Suit’s shoulder holster. Two nine millimeter bullets slam into the back of his shield’s soft vest and his back bows from the force. Ten meters back, around Akira, Suit Three and Akiyama have started to react, turning, guns rising.

Time crawls back onto its scraped knees. The world moves quicker.

Goro wraps his gloved fingers around the gun’s grip. It’s cold and slick with rain. He pulls it from the holster. The closest two suits are splitting, back and left, right and forwards, seeking angles. Their lights try to blind him as he stares over his big shield’s shoulder. Goro pendulums his gun arm under the big man’s left. The pistol is heavy as he aims at the center of the closest light. He pulls the trigger twice. Propellant ignites. The gun jumps happily in his hand, spray fizzing off the polymer. Acrid smoke bites the air. He needs to keep count. One light crashes to the ground.

Suit One, dead.

Time gets to its feet.

Color seeps back in from Akira, the dye to his monochrome world, flattening himself down against the boards as Suit Three and Akiyama dive for cover.

The Big Suit he’s embracing clamps his left arm down against Goro’s, pushing his aim off target. His right anchors around Goro’s lower back. Next, he starts to lift and turn, trying to move Goro toward the three remaining guns. 

Goro bites into the man’s neck as hard as he can. His screams deafen him. Sweet-tinged metallic heat runs down his lips and drips thick from his chin. The man’s grip goes limp. Goro tears his head back until a chunk of skin and blood vessels dangle, wet between his teeth. He did promise.

Inherited momentum stumbles Goro as his shield starts to buckle. Big Suit’s knees are folding under him as he goes limp, clutching at his torn neck and still screaming. Goro falls forwards with him. Two lights track him. Something hot hits him in the left shoulder. He crashes into the ground hard, rolling closer to his fallen shield as bullets turn the old wooden boards to splinters around him. 

The colors pop now, bright and agonizing and beautiful. Time takes its first step, then another, pulling sound with it, then—

“He’s hit!” Suit Two shouts, voice trembling with adrenaline.

Goro tucks his legs up and rolls the still screaming man onto his side, huddling beneath him.

“Stop shooting! You’re gonna hit Matsuda!” Akiyama shouts.

Suit Two doesn’t listen.

Matsuda finally shuts up, thanks to the friendly lead that’s splattered the rest of his face over the floor. Gore peppers Goro’s slacks. Three more rounds thunk wetly into the corpse’s extremities. Return fire, return fire, return fire. Goro twists—a lance of molten pain stabbing through his left side as he does so—and props his right arm over what remains of Big Suit Matsuda, peeking over. The pistol coughs in his hand again. Suit Two doesn’t have the cover of a large corpse. 

But Goro misses. Akira rolled away to the edge now, fading into the darkest corners. Suit Two keeps strafing to the left, firing as he goes. The scent of blood and propellant soak the air. A bullet shreds some of Matsuda’s large thigh, inches from Goro’s head. Shoot back! Goro’s muzzle chases him, spitting round after round until one catches the man in the groin. He spins and topples to the ground, cursing at the top of his lungs.

A light shines from his right. Suit One is getting up, unsteady, shakily pointing a gun at him. He’s supposed to be dead. Kevlar. Limbs or headshots. Goro rolls away from his corpse-shield, his shoulder crunching against the ground like wet glass. Blood rolls down his arm. 

Two rounds land where he was seconds ago. Goro snaps both hands up onto the grip and fires from his back. Suit One’s head snaps upward, then he totters drunkenly a step and collapses, gurgling and twitching.

Goro’s lost count thanks to One’s brief resurrection. Matsuda’s dead. Suit One’s brains are gurgling out of his mouth. Akira’s getting up again. Akiyama is nearby, distracted by the sight of the thief, rising. Suit Three is reloading. Suit Two is still alive and cursing, trying to stand but collapsing against shelves. He’s literally pissing blood. 

Two out of three, nearly at his goal. One more kill to go.

Goro looks at Akira. Akira looks at him.

Get out, you idiot. Run! Leave me!

Somehow, Goro pushes himself onto one knee. His body feels like it’s about to fall apart. His shoulder is… well, the blood is streaming off his left wrist now. But he needs to kill three of them before he dies. Three. That's all his duty, now. Matsuda’s stolen handgun coughs and drills Suit Two twice in the back. The fucking vest keeps him breathing, keeps Goro from his goal.

“Just die already!” Goro yells, voice thick with rage and Matsuda’s blood. The pistol feels hot through the leather as it spits fire and lead once more. Two’s head splits, blooming into a flower of bone and brain that hits the ground like a soaked rag.

Three!

He did it.

He killed three of five.

Goro twists and falls prone in the same move. Bullets shred the air overhead, like scissors slicing through paper. Fired by who, he can’t tell, but it no longer matters. All breath is driven from him, and his shoulder might’ve dislocated now. More muffled thuds. It feels like they’re everywhere. Bullets tear through the boards around him as he manages to lift his right arm and fire thoughtlessly at the only gunlight he can still see, again and again and again and again, until—

Click, click, click, click, click.

He’s done, but there’s no light anymore. Not even Akira’s. Faded into the night. Goro’s arm drops to the ground, the empty, warm pistol rattling free against the ground.

“Four out of five,” he says, then dryly laughs. Well, he tried his best. Better than he expected.

Something better?

Goro sinks down, bleeding arm draped over one knee, and looks for who will be his killer. He spots him, illuminated by the bouncing light of the other’s guns, but without one of his own. No gun light. He turned it off. Smart. That’s how he lost him.

The fifth man, the survivor, Akiyama, takes two steps closer, breathing hard. Goro wonders if he’ll see the bullet coming down the barrel before it cuts to black. He takes a final, deep breath.

“Win, Akira,” he utters fondly to the bloodstained air. 

He hopes Akira hears, somehow.

Goro hopes, even though he knows he’s already gone. 

Goro believes he can win. 

He’s never believed in anyone before. It’s nice.

The rain-drenched world feels warm beneath his knees. 

Acceptance is nice, too. It’s numbing the pain from his shoulder.

He finally saved someone. Even if it’s the last thing he’ll do.

A black shape materializes by Akiyama. Goro frowns, then slowly blinks, trying to focus. The bore of his pistol swings off Goro. It’s being gripped by a hand, wrestled off center. Akiyama’s face contorts in surprise and anger. 

Goro’s point of color, of light, is fighting for the gun.

Akira has his hand on the gun.

Akira is struggling to stand.

Akira is screaming.

Akira is still here. 

Akira is still here. 

AKIRA IS STILL HERE. 

Goro grits his teeth and starts getting to his feet. His body does not agree this is possible right now, but he stands anyway. Akira’s leg is bleeding too, and that’s not stopping him. Goro staggers towards the grappling pair as quickly as he can, every movement sending a ripple of dulled sensation through him. Akira’s screaming is drowning out everything else, like the volume of the world is being lowered. Two meters. Akiyama knees Akira in the stomach. Akira howls and buckles, grip slackening. Goro’s body feels cold. He has to help. Help, and get five out of five. Become exemplary. Become special. One meter. 

Save someone. Save the one who matters.

Akira falls to one knee. 

Half a meter.

Goro reaches out.

The gun twists towards Akira’s head.

Akira looks back at Goro. His lips mouth something.

Akiyama pulls the trigger.

Goro’s moving but not getting any closer. It’s like the world itself won’t let him. He can feel Akira under his fingertips, but isn’t touching him. Feel his warmth and his belief, so much belief. Feel himself pushing Akira aside, out of the line of fire, but his world doesn’t reflect his feeling or his belief. It never did. 

A dry metallic noise sounds from above them. Akiyama’s handgun jammed. The world really did turn for Akira.

Those silver eyes flash, the boot-knife drawn and thrust into Akiyama’s stomach in one movement. Goro can’t tell who’s screaming. The world slowly lets him move that last half-meter, inch by inch. Akira tears the knife down through the man’s groin. Goro grabs Akiyama’s gun, pulling it under his control as Akira pushes upon the knife, bowling the survivor down as the knife slips free.

Goro races to twist the firearm around, then aims—but doesn’t fire. He doesn’t want to. He wants to watch. Akira grows wings before him, large and feathered, darkness brushed with silver, as he raises the knife.

Arsène, made manifest.

The knife comes down. 

Again. Again. Again. Akira is silent. Goro can see his face, eyes filled with death, fury distorting his features. It’s warping the soft, handsome lines into devilish, twisting desire, streaked with blood. Goro watches. The knife comes down again. Akiyama gurgles and splutters under him. The knife comes down again. Akiyama falls silent. Red spatter trails through the air like Kasumi’s ribbons. Goro watches. Akira’s wings beat the rhythm of murder. The knife catches and sticks in Akiyama’s throat. 

Akira’s hands slip on the bloody grip and he falls forward against Akiyama’s soaked chest.

Goro blinks and Arsène is gone. Now, there’s just Akira. Still breathing, Akira. Wreathed in blood, Akira. The wingless assailant pushes himself upright on the bleeding body, then turns. Goro stares right back, then falls to his knees.

“Are you okay?” Akira asks, in a voice Goro’s never heard before. It’s distant and thin, fragile and ephemeral.

Goro’s throat aches too, like he’s been screaming. Maybe he has. Hard to tell. “I’ve been shot,” he replies, dumbly.

“Oh,” Akira says slowly, turning back to the corpse under him. His eyes go wide. Despite everything, Goro knows what’s about to happen. Akira is now no longer his opposite. He’s joined him in the dark.

Akira slides off the corpse. His eyes are shattered wide windows of fear, fixated on what he’s done. They spill over. His tears burn clear through the mixed blood and muck. Akira’s head shakes in denial, slipping on pooling blood as he pushes himself away on slick hands and knees. His back thuds into the nearby wall.

Goro tears the hole in his coat wider, looking for the wound in his shoulder. It’s a small circle, about the size of a cigar burn. Hand shaking, he slides his right hand around to the back side. The world vibrates with the pain. There’s an exit wound, a touch wider and gorier than the entry. Through and through.

“Akira,” he rasps, throat like sandpaper. “My bag…”

The man is still staring at his first kill, but slowly turns to look at him. He looks so sad.

“Please,” Goro says again. “I can’t do it alone.”

Akira’s face crumples. “I know,” he says. In the next moment, Goro sees something take over. Shutters slide down the broken windows of Akira’s eyes. He’s on his feet and limping over in the next breath. “I’m here, Goro. I’m here. What… what do I do?”

“Bag,” Goro says again, grimacing, ass sinking down onto his heels. “Bandages and… a tourniquet, I think,” he coughs, pointing back to the desk at the front. Akira nods and stands, somehow still moving. Maybe he’s gone past the pain. Wind brushes over his face, and Akira suddenly winces somewhere behind him. Not past it.

Goro wanted to save him, needed to save him. But, ever the rebel, Akira saved himself.