Chapter Text
Are we dating?
The question rings in Akira’s head about as often as the chimes of the old-fashioned cash register at the latest pretentious patisserie Akechi’s invited him to. Goro Akechi himself sits across from him, taking what must be hundreds of pictures of a fancy French cake with a name Akira can’t pronounce or remember. It looks sort of like a strawberry-flavored roll cake, but the layering is wavier and more complicated, with a drizzle of red syrup brighter than blood. There’s a lack of natural lighting thanks to the clouds outside, which means the pictures have to be coming out looking kind of creepy.
Akira has been picking away at his own baked good of choice (and the first thing on the patisserie menu he recognized): macaron set. He’d ordered it cooly, like he came to places like this all the time, but in his attempt to put in an order before Akechi he’d neglected to read the flavors that came with it. The purple one that he’d assumed was taro turned out to be something floral, and the green one he thought would be melon had a nutty flavor. Whatever they were, each one had been fucking delicious, and upon the first bite Akira had resolved to make Akechi take him here again. It should be easy enough—since they’d started hanging out, Akechi seemed ready to bring him along just about anywhere, which more and more begged the question: Are we dating?
Akira leans forward, cupping his chin in his hand. “What do you do when you get hot food?”
“Hm?” Akechi looks up from his photography, a sharpness in his eyes flickering away so quickly that Akira almost misses it. It’s something he’s begun to seek out, wait for during their conversations. He wishes he could bottle and crystalize it, watch how it catches the light under a lamp.
Are we dating?
“Do you take less pictures before you eat it?” Akira asks. “Or do you let it get cold for the sake of the post?”
Akechi lets out a gentle coo of a laugh, like a trained pigeon. “Eating food that’s left its serving temperature defeats the whole purpose of consumption,” he answers, like some kind of android. Akechi puts away his phone. Fucking finally. “I take less pictures.”
Akira feels his face slip into a smile. “Any hit to your engagement?”
“Hm?” Akechi says, in the exact same cadence as before.
“The engagement on the post. Does it suffer when you can’t choose from 200 pictures?”
Another coo. “Of course not. The numbers are relatively consistent.”
“Then why all the effort?”
“I’m still getting used to being accompanied by someone,” Akechi says, settling the cloth napkin onto his lap. Are we dating? “I’ve had to angle the camera away from the macaron crumbs on your plate.”
Akira wishes he could say it only pisses him off when Akechi lets his petty show, but he’s beginning to think it may be what he likes most about him. Akira finishes his last macaron and, mouth still full, says, “Should I have licked it clean?”
There’s another knife-edge flash in Akechi’s eyes just before they soften. “You’re joking.” He picks up his fork.
“Am I?”
Akechi brings the utensil smoothly through the layers of the cake, staining even more of it blood-red with syrup. The rain may have let up by now, but the lighting still isn’t doing its creepiness any favors. “You must be, else it would be only fitting for me to leave you with the check.”
“I yield,” Akira says. Are we dating?
Akechi takes a bite, red painting his mouth only briefly. He purses his lips to lick them without letting his tongue show, and waits until he’s swallowed to speak again. “You look as if you have something to say.”
Are we fucking dating? “Not really.”
“Is that so? You’re not wondering why I invited you out?”
“You’ve fallen for me.”
Akechi’s eyebrows raise only slightly before his winning smile and pleasant laugh make their return appearance. Damn. “I’m glad you still feel friendly enough to tease me. In truth, I haven’t seen you much lately and I was beginning to worry that you might be distancing yourself from me, alongside the rest of society. My popularity has been in sharp decline ever since the Phantom Thieves triumphed over Medjed.”
“So I hear,” Akira says, rubbing the back of his neck as he deliberates if he feels bad about it or not. He’s surprised to find that he kind of does. “Don’t let it get to you.”
“I appreciate your concern, but I won’t surrender so easily,” he says, smile unchanged. “I still plan to catch the Phantom Thieves—even if the public is no longer on my side. I’m quite used to being a pariah, after all.”
Akira waits. This is usually the point of conversation at which Akechi starts to divulge unnecessarily personal information, but this time he quietly returns to his cake.
“Been up to anything interesting?” Akira prompts.
“Not particularly.”
Akira presses a few more specific subjects, trying to get something useful out of Akechi as he finishes the dessert, but aside from learning that Akechi’s Physics class has started their astrophysics curriculum and that he finds the yawning nothingness of the cosmos “profoundly comforting”—wow—Akira comes up short for what might be the first time since they’ve met. Nothing more about the motivations behind these suspiciously date-like outings, and nothing about Akechi that he wouldn’t already find on a wiki page or fan blog. He’s a locked safe in a tweed jacket all over again, and he’s even kept his goddamn gloves on. They must have those little fingerprint pads to work a touch screen, and an inner lining so he never needs to feel the warmth of another human being.
Akira has no choice but to concede that if the online hate mail is what’s closed Akechi off, then yes—he does feel bad about it.
“Well,” Akechi says after sipping the last of his coffee. “Thank you for a pleasant afternoon, as usual. I hope to see you again soon.” He folds and places his napkin back on the table—completely unused and unnecessary—and stands from his chair.
Akira moves to stop him. “Hey, we haven’t pai—”
“It’s taken care of,” he says. “My treat, as usual.” With that, he turns and walks to the exit, not looking back as he retrieves his umbrella and leaves the patisserie.
Are we dating?
—————
After some deliberation—though less than usual after Kurusu’s earlier negging—Goro eventually selects a photo near the end of the camera roll, applies the most flattering filter to make up for the lack of natural lighting, and carefully crafts a caption describing the flavor notes of the vanilla raspberry petit gâteaux roll cake. He hadn’t tried it before, but after Kurusu had ordered so quickly, he’d had no choice but to pick something at random to match him. Goro concludes the caption with a brief accolade that the patisserie remains one of his favorites, adds a comfortable quantity of relevant hashtags, then posts the image. His popularity may be in decline, but he can’t allow the algorithms to send him into total irrelevance prematurely.
He checks his messages, but sees nothing more from Kurusu—not even a message thanking him for the food. It doesn’t matter. Continuing to meet like this is an easy way to ingratiate the leader of the Phantom Thieves to himself so that he’ll be close enough to drive the knife in when the time comes.
And yet, his usual clarity of stratagem has been faltering lately. Inviting Kurusu to the patisserie on a slightly rainy day to avoid getting interrupted was one thing, but Jazz Jin had been another. It was one of the few places Goro frequented independent of any ulterior motive of keeping up appearances or looking stylish—the club was his secret den, a place he didn’t even post about on social media, and he’d allowed his mark inside like a fox inviting a mouse over for supper and not eating it.
These days when Goro imagines his teeth around Kurusu’s neck, he smells like coffee instead of fear.
Goro sets his phone on “Do Not Disturb”, smothers all thoughts of Akira Kurusu, and pulls out some case file materials. He studies them for an hour—or about until he slips and lets his thoughts land on his latest job in the Metaverse and has to do breathing exercises in front of the mirror until time compresses, then levels.
Goro gives up on reading and checks his post. As anticipated, it has quite a few vacuous comments already.
Looks good!
I’ve had their roll cake too! Definitely the best in Tokyo.
omg YUM!! I’ll have to go there on my next day off…
He scrolls through them, liking each one or sometimes replying with a quip of his own to make the commenter feel properly acknowledged and important, right until his thumb freezes on a comment from 20 minutes ago.
who’s the lucky guy you’re with? 👀👀 a… date??
He breathes in for four seconds, out for four seconds. The comment doesn’t have any reactions on it yet, and while it seems to be a typical fan (denoted by the “meitantei” in the username) he doesn’t recognize the account. Goro quickly takes another look at the picture he posted, and spots it: Kurusu’s elbow and a bit of his T-shirt, blurred in the background of the shot. Fuck.
Fuck fuck.
Kurusu just had to be leaning forward, he just had to get his technicolor macaron crumbs all over the opposite side of the table, marring its aesthetic neutrality. Kurusu had clearly never eaten macarons before, either—his face had stilled when he’d taken a bite of the first one, like the texture or taste had been a surprise to him. Goro had almost laughed at him outright.
He brushes away the memory and opens his message history with Kurusu.
—————
Akira gets a text from Akechi in the middle of a murder mystery movie with Morgana. Before he can even pause it, he gets another.
Melon Ganimard:
I need to speak with you immediately.
We’ve been compromised.
“Something wrong, Joker?” Morgana asks.
“Maybe.” Akira reads the messages again, trying to guess their context. They’re pretty dramatic, especially for Akechi. Akira types, What’s this about? but as he taps Send, yet another message comes through.
Melon Ganimard:
I’m on my way to have a word with you alone.
Akira waits to see if he starts typing again, heart rate rising fast enough to be felt in his throat, but Akechi leaves him on read.
We’ve been compromised. What the fuck does that mean? What is there between them to compromise? Akechi’s not involved with the Phantom Thieves, and even if he was (Akira would be lying if he said he hadn’t pictured the dark, dangerous outfit Akechi must have somewhere inside his heart) he still feels leagues away from even leaving a scuff on the detective prince’s polished leather facade because he still doesn’t fucking know if they’re dating or not.
Akira runs a hand through his hair. He’s acting like an idiot. What if the jazz club and all the rest hadn’t been dates, but rather some targeted effort to wring information out of him while he was distracted trying to figure out if they were dates? The patisserie could have held the last clue Akechi needed to figure out that they were the Phantom Thieves. He could be coming to Leblanc to arrest him right now.
On the other hand, Akechi had started to respond to some comments on his food photo just a little while ago. Had someone seen him online and sent him a threat? He’d been speaking out against the Phantom Thieves on TV a lot, even in the face of their new popularity surge—maybe a rabid Phantom fan or even that mystery Metaverse user had come around, wanting to shut him up and now he needed somewhere to lay low.
Akira’s quiet for long enough that Morgana peeks at the messages from the chair beside him.
“What?!” the cat exclaims as he reads them. “Did something happen when you guys were out together today?” He swivels to Akira, tail floofing. “What if his phone was tapped? What if he sold you out?”
“If he did, he wouldn’t warn me,” Akira mutters. Unless…
…No. He wouldn’t warn him. Akira sends a final followup “?” message before pressing play on the DVD again. Fuck it. If Akechi’s already on his way, then Akira at least deserves to know who the killer is. Morgana tries to get his attention again, but soon gives up.
Akira stares at the screen for a while, then frowns and rewinds back to the start of the scene because he didn’t hear anything the characters were saying. He should change out of his pajamas.
It’s not long—it’s so, so long—before they both hear rapping on the café door.
“Get out,” he tells Morgana.
“What?”
“He said he wants to talk alone,” Akira says, right before unceremoniously scooping him up like a little sack of coffee beans, opening the bedroom window, shoving his squirming, protesting cat outside onto the sill, and slamming the window shut.
“Joker!” Morgana hisses from the other side of the translucent glass, no doubt powerlessly pawing at it with his adorable white kitty socks. The streets are damp but the rain’s stopped, so he’ll be fine. “What if it’s a trap?”
The knocking from downstairs resumes, with greater fervor.
“If it is, then you won’t get caught in it.”
Akira wheels away from the window, pads down the stairs, and goes to unlock the door before the knocking can rattle the wood enough to break it.
“Akechi,” he says, combing a hand through his hair as the detective all but storms inside the darkened café. He’s more dressed down than Akira had previously thought possible: a grey leather jacket over a dark, hooded shirt that he’s actually wearing the hood of. Akira is glad he decided to put on a jacket and some proper pants before Akechi got here, but if he needs to abscond into the night (for reasons still unexplained), he’ll have to do it barefoot.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes. Were you followed?” Akira says because he feels like he should contribute something to this inscrutable exchange.
“No,” Akechi hovers near his usual seat at the counter, then says, “May we speak elsewhere? Upstairs, perhaps?” His voice remains pristine as bone china, but Akira thinks he can still hear the hairline fractures. If Akechi’s getting ready to slap some cuffs on him, he at least hasn’t reached for his pocket yet. Plus, if he’s planning to cuff him, it’s unlikely he’ll do it upstairs, seeing as how it’d be a pain to have to escort him back down the staircase with them on.
Akira looks up the staircase. Morgana might still be yowling on the windowsill, but he better keep his mouth shut.
Akira’s eyes slide back to Akechi. He’d been able to understand Morgana’s speech way back at the TV station, hadn’t he?
Did that mean Akechi had already been in the Metaverse, like Haru?
Had he already found out they were the Phantom Thieves?
And instead of arresting him, did he want to join?
“Sure.” Akira leads the way up to his room, feeling cheated that he hadn’t had the foresight to put away his laundry before he got Goro Akechi to come to his bedroom for the first time.
“This is where you live?” Akechi says as he surveys the attic room, tone bleached clean of judgement—yet still undeniably stained. “It’s…”
Akira can’t hold back any longer. “What did you come all this way for?”
Akechi faces him, no doubt relieved he didn’t have to come up with an adjective for his bedroom. “This,” he says, presenting his phone screen to Akira as if it were evidence in a trial. Akira expects to see the Metaverse app, an accusation brandished in his face—
—but it’s Akechi’s fucking Instapic post, with a single comment highlighted.
who’s the lucky guy you’re with? 👀👀 a… date??
“We can’t be seen together like this again,” Akechi says severely once Akira looks back up at him.
“…It’s one comment,” Akira says, hoping they still don’t know each other well enough for Akechi to be able to pick up on the glee threatening to break through his schooled, neutral expression. He comes so close to smiling that he has to bite the inside of his cheek, because the user that had made the comment was a fake account that he'd set up. Akira had figured Akechi would react to the bait in one of three ways:
- Reply with a soft, jovial denial. Inconclusive, but it likely wasn’t a date.
- Ignore or delete it outright. Also inconclusive, but it likely was a date.
- Discretely affirm it with a subtle like. It WAS a date.
Akira had never expected Akechi to make up a fourth option: take the train (potentially even a car) all the way over here after dark to shove the matter in his face like he was asking Akira to take responsibility for robbing him of his virtue.
“What’s the big deal?” Akira asks as his mind reels with, Was it a date was it a date are we fucking dating Goro Akechi
“The big deal, Kurusu,” Akechi snaps, pocketing his phone, “is that if the press picks up on this, I’ll have a media sh—a media quagmire on my hands.” Did he almost say shitstorm did he almost say shitstorm
Akira thinks he’s stumbled upon a new kind of emotion—something beyond happiness or joy that only heavenly beings get to experience. He barely manages to return to reality when he reminds himself that if he keeps this up, he might get Akechi to curse in front of him—for if he almost said “shitstorm”, then he can say “shitstorm”; he does say “shitstorm”.
Once he gets his feet back on the ground, Akira tries to remember if he’d read anything on the wiki page about Akechi being gay. It’s clearly obvious, but whether or not the press ever confirmed it is another story. There definitely hadn’t been anything about him having a boyfriend, at least. Maybe Akechi dating anyone was page-worthy news. Detective Prince Gives Up Phantom Thief Pursuit… to Find Love?!
Akechi takes his silence as something else. “It’s not that I’m not—well. It’s not that,” he adds almost…tenderly? while Akira’s brain stumbles over itself trying to fill in that goddamn blank. It’s not that I’m not gay? Interested? Attracted? What?
Transcendence hits him again, this time in the form of an idea.
Akira slides his hands into pockets in a smooth, casual motion. “I’ll make it up to you,” he says. “We’ll go to a neutral location. Take another picture. You’ll be able to clarify that we’re just friends.” Akira’s eyes bore holes into Akechi’s from behind his glasses, watching for the tiniest twitch of disappointment.
He catches it. Akechi’s eyes flick minutely away and then back again.
“Maybe I’m helping you with research. Schoolwork,” Akira goes on. “Maybe you’re starting a charitable outreach program for Shujin delinquents.”
“No…” Akechi says, letting the end of the word trail off gently to try and smooth over the fact that it almost collided with the end of delinquents. “…The research angle will work fine. Where did you have in mind?”
Akira nearly frowns. He’d unraveled Akechi enough to get him over here, and he doesn’t plan to lose his advantage now. “The planetarium. They remodeled this season. We could—”
“Are you done?” comes a voice from outside, and Akechi glances at the window. For as much as Morgana shit-talks Ryuji for having a big mouth, he sure has his own moments. “What happened? Can I come back in?”
Akira turns back around. “I’ll reserve us tickets,” he says, loudly enough for Morgana to realize he should shut up. Akechi is still eyeing the window, but Akira shifts in front of him to reclaim his attention. “What day would be good?”
“Saturday after class,” Akechi says absently.
“I’ll see you then.” Akira moves towards the stairs.
“Are your neighbors ever a cause for concern?” Akechi asks, trailing behind him.
“Not really,” he replies. “The neighbor kid is kind of loud, but they’re not close enough to have heard us,” he adds as he descends the stairwell, praying Akechi will buy it.
“I see.”
The two of them commence a delightfully awkward goodbye in the dark, empty café as Akira revels in the full and shameful return of Akechi’s lucidity. The slightly dazed look on his face makes it clear he had no exit strategy for this confrontation, which means this has to be the first time he’s done something like this. Akira thinks it’s maybe the most flattering thing that’s ever happened to him.
“I’ll see you Saturday,” Akechi says. “I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me, late as it is.” As if he had dropped by with pastries after dinner instead of barging in at… Akira glances at the wall clock. 10:30-something P.M.
“It’s no problem,” Akira says as he opens the door to let Akechi back into the night from whence he came.
The detective looks back, just once, to say, “Good night.”
If he’d said anything else, Akira isn’t sure what he might have done. If Akechi had said he’d known about the Phantom Thieves all along and asked to join, Akira would have let him. If he’d asked Akira to run away with him, he might have followed without shoes.
—————
Goro makes a sharp turn as soon as he’s outside to loop around the building, looking for the child he’d heard from the attic room asking to come back home, but finds no one. They must have been let back inside by whatever neglectful parent had put them out after dark. After a moment, he hears the muffled voice of the child again, now from somewhere inside. They had made it back in, then.
Goro raises his eyes to the window of the café’s upper floor—Kurusu’s bedroom—and watches the silhouette of his cat disappear as the light flicks off. With the bedroom—he calls that place a bedroom—light out, the emptiness of the night unfurls itself around him, allowing for the full force of embarrassment and shame to descend upon him so powerfully he almost makes himself sick.
What the fuck was he thinking?
Coming here alone and in the dark—if they’d been discovered, it would have been an even bigger shitstorm than a stupid fucking Instapic photo. Detective Prince Gives Up Phantom Thieves Pursuit… to Find Love?! It would be nothing short of mortifyingly ruinous.
Goro rips off his hood. What had he hoped to accomplish with this stunt? It wasn’t as if the time was right to dispose of Kurusu—not when the Phantom Thieves were being primed to take responsibility for the mental shutdowns.
As he makes his heavy walk back to the station, hearing Kurusu’s voice saying “Just friends” over and over, he remembers the other thing he’d hoped for.
Goro would enter the darkened café, Kurusu locking the door behind them. Once he was sure it was just the two of them—so alone that if anything happened to Kurusu no one would find his body until morning—Goro would confront him about the comment. Then, Kurusu would look at it in his level way and say,
“So what if it was a date?”
It’s at that point that both their characterizations begin to diverge and deteriorate into cognitions that Goro would never admit to, not even under the threat of death.
On the train home, Kurusu sends him a link to one of the planetarium’s exhibits on the big bang. Alongside various other cosmology installations and a stargazing theater, Goro is forced to concede that it fits the pretense of a research outing perfectly, especially with the astrophysics material being covered in his Physics class this month. He’d brought that up to Kurusu, after all.
They would take notes on the machinations of the universe, learn that they’re just as cruel as he’s always known, sit together in the stargazing theater at a sensible distance, take a picture, and then Goro would send his unnecessary thoughts into distant orbit where they belong.
He hadn’t wanted—doesn’t want—anything more. He doesn’t want anything more. Not even in the dark.