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Shido Masayoshi is kneeling on the floor of his office with his hands clutched in front of him. “How could I have done that?” he’s whispering, and though he looks up to Goro, his eyes are unseeing. Tears flow down his reddened, puffy face in an endless stream, dripping onto his shirt, dirtying his suit. “How could I have done that to you?”
Seated at Shido’s desk, his nails digging into the leather armrest, Goro only stares. He doesn’t keep any photos of his mother, but if he did, he might throw one down now, just to watch Shido thrash and burn at the sight.
Still, Goro always finishes what he’s started, and the change of heart is only one half of his revenge. There’s a popular late night host waiting just a short drive across the city, and Shido has plenty more to say.
“Why don’t you get going now, sir?” Goro asks, smiling with teeth. “The people are waiting to hear from their new Prime Minister.”
At his feet, Shido cries out, clutching his head. The weight of a human heart is heavy, indeed.
It’s even more pathetic a sight than Goro had anticipated: almost unsatisfyingly so. His whole life, everything he’s worked for — and it’s all led to this. Only this.
Only this.
Only—
—
Goro blinks, eyes straining against the brightness of the television screen in the dark. Somewhere behind him, a voice calls. “I’m home!”
For a moment, Goro only looks around, childishly confused. It’s nighttime now; there are no curtains on their singular window, and even though the city lights should be everywhere, the world outside is pitch black. There’s a bandaid on his knee and a school bag to his right. His finished homework peeks out, spilling just-barely onto the floor: multiplication, kanji, a leaf to bring to science tomorrow. He’s seven, and his stomach is growling at the smell of fried food drifting from somewhere behind him.
This apartment is only two rooms including the bathroom, so all Goro has to do is turn to see the source of the noise near the door. Still, for a moment, he hesitates. His heart thumps, almost painfully loud.
His mother’s voice is familiar: tired, aching, and so lovely it hurts. “Goro?”
The room swims in its darkness, lights turned off, smoke seeped into the walls. The stars flicker, and the smell of hot oil coats his tongue, dripping into his throat: the croquettes his mom used to pick up from the stand down the road right after she got paid, the only thing open in the early morning hours when she got out—
It isn’t right. She shouldn’t be here yet — not if Goro is awake, not if his favorite cartoon is on. The television blares but no sound comes out; only the bass-boomed vibrations remain, shaking the floor, creeping through his bloodstream. It’s not right.
“Sweetie?” something asks, pushing its hand through his hair. His dead mother’s perfume chokes him, ripe-rotten and sickly sweet. The television starts flickering in strange, unfamiliar colors. “What’s wrong?”
Ahead, the picture flicks; the channel changes. Goro screws his eyes shut instinctively, blocking contact between him and whatever thing is watching—
—
And opens. There’s a body pressed into his side, and a laugh echoing round and round the room. He’s on Ren’s bed, in his dusty little attic, and Futaba is jerking her bony elbow into and away from his guts as she kicks ass at some racing game, squinting through her glasses to see, tongue sticking out of her mouth.
“Take that!” she shouts. Goro is too busy gawking at the proximity of her to even pay attention to what she’s done, though it’s impossible to ignore the way Yusuke falls to his knees, dropping his controller in anguish.
On Goro’s other side, someone is laughing. He turns to find Ren, seated at his dingy workbench with an arm slung over the back of his chair. When he catches Goro looking, he grins — a brief, subtle thing.
Goro stares: at him, at their surroundings. A row of little figurines and stuffed animals line the top of the work bench, beyond Ren’s head. A wind chime dances by the window, and even this late into the morning, Ren’s pillow is rumpled, like he’d just woken up. Ryuji is sitting on the floor, Yusuke having just joined him; Ann and Makoto’s voices coast from downstairs. Haru is on the small couch by the wall, drinking tea and smiling, Morgana asleep at her side.
When Goro speaks, his voice is unusually weak, like it’s been ages since he last used it. “What day is it?”
Most of the group ignores him — or they just keep going, as though he hadn’t spoken at all. Only Ren acknowledges his question, inclining his head in Goro’s direction. “November 5th,” he says, and then, quieter, “We still have time.”
Time — to do Sae’s Palace, to spend together, before Ren goes into that interrogation room and Goro follows him in, a gun at his disposal and blood on his hands—
Ren blinks at him behind his glasses; his gray eyes are glassy and too light, blood vessels bursting into branches, reaching into his sclera. He looks but he doesn’t see him, doesn’t connect, not like he usually does; Goro stares but there’s no spark. He gets nothing. He sees Ren handcuffed, Ren covered in bruises, Ren with blood streaming down his face, a bullet in his brain—
To their left, the game makes a series of loud noises, and Ryuji whoops. Futaba cries out, leaning despondent on Goro’s shoulder.
“I’ll get you next time,” she swears.
Ren’s eyes are glassy, and Goro sees himself in them: sees them all, the whole room, the whole world, reflected forward and back in a permanent feedback loop. He blinks, and Ren blinks, and that picture swims and blurs and pushes itself back together, again and again and again.
—
Ren is laughing, head thrown back, clutching his bleeding side. “I’ll get you next time,” he says, red in his teeth. His Joker mask is lying on the ground beside him, cracked down the middle.
Goro can feel Loki’s satisfaction and Robin Hood’s affection seeping into the flavor of his smile. “You’d better,” he agrees, reaching down to help him up, metal claws digging into Ren’s wrist. “You wouldn’t be much help as an accomplice if you couldn’t give it as good as you get.”
Before Goro can even consider it, Ren is digging some restorative out of his bottomless pockets and shoving it into his mouth. There’s a melancholy cast to his expression, as there always is when Goro brings up this particular deal of theirs. The wound at his side stitches itself back together, blood seeping out of his vest and toward the source as though it could wind itself back in time.
An accomplice. Ren had all his little friends, all those people who loved him, and he’d chosen Goro anyway: saved his own hide and followed him down, peeled off his kid gloves, been with him for real. They’re only a few short missions from the end, when Goro finally gets Shido where he wants him, begging and groveling and sniveling and—
How could I have done that? Shido had asked. Goro’s eyes screw shut; his stomach flips.
“Crow?” Ren asks, hand on his shoulder. There’s concern on his mostly-neutral face, of course there is; Ren always was a bleeding heart. It’s what got him into this mess in the first place: his inability to leave anyone behind.
And yet he’d left his friends behind. He’d chosen this: this place with nowhere to go. He’s not a hero anymore.
He isn’t Ren.
“This isn’t right,” Goro mutters, shaking the hand off him. Under his helm, his hair falls into his eyes, blinding him. “Hold on. This isn’t right at all.”
Mementos glows red all around them, its pulsing the only reprieve from the dark. Cloaked in shadow, Ren is hardly recognizable. “What isn’t right?”
A horrible feeling sinks through him. That ghoulish subway rumbles above and below and all around him, and, clutching his throat, Goro chokes—
—
He chokes. There’s blood in his mouth, and his body burns and begs and breaks down with pain. His feet drag on the floor and there’s a hand around his waist, and someone is speaking into his ear, quiet and familiar, only barely shaking: “Stay with me, Crow. Stay awake. Stay with me.”
Ren, he wants to say, but his mouth won’t open, and he can’t form the words. It’s Ren. Goro had locked him out of that room, put a bulkhead between them, taken a bullet to the chest — but still, it’s Ren, here and back for him, wasting time dragging his worthless body along to somewhere it doesn’t even want to go.
That’s so like him. His self-destructive compassion, his ideals, his heroism, his sentimentality—
The pain is all-consuming; then, suddenly, it isn’t. He’s cold but he doesn’t have the strength to shiver. Ren is talking and everyone is talking, a chorus of voices who — unlike Goro — belong in this scene. He’s just an extra: edited in, pasted at the tail end. Even scraped off the floor, this story isn’t meant for him. He’s going to die in the arms of the only boy he’s ever loved, and he doesn’t even deserve that.
He doesn’t belong here. He coughs, blood on his lips, a beautiful kind of nobility in the flutter of his lashes. It doesn’t suit him. He isn’t supposed to die here.
He isn’t supposed to die.
The pain burns away all at once, leaving him gasping. At his side, Ren is too tall, the familiar bones and bends of his lithe body replaced right under his nose.
“You’re a tricky one,” someone mutters sympathetically, and it’s Ren’s voice, but the intonation is all wrong, “aren’t you, Akechi-kun?”
Goro looks up, vision hazy through the pain, freely given and freely taken away—
—
He hisses through his teeth when the cotton makes contact with his skinned knees, alcohol stinging and grit pushed in and away in equal measure. It was a nasty fall but Goro hardly felt it until now, and he’s had worse anyway; he wasn’t even going to bandage it. He’d just wear pants tomorrow, he thought, and no one would even see his knees.
But Ren had insisted, and for all his complaints, Goro is helpless in the face of Ren’s requests. He would never admit it, of course; how embarrassing, to be beholden to a child, a full year younger than Goro. His mom says they’re practically the same age anyway, but she’s old; she doesn’t understand. These things are life or death for elementary schoolers.
As though hearing his name in his thoughts, Ren looks up, chewing his cheek. His glasses slide down his nose, and his hold on the tweezers is clumsy, cotton waving unsteady in midair. “Okay?”
He’s such a worrier. No one at school knows that about him, because he’s so quiet and weird, and people don’t give weird people a chance. But Goro is weird too, and he knows everything about Ren.
They’re best friends, after all.
“Yeah,” Goro says, extending his leg slightly closer to Ren, so that the toe of his sneaker just brushes Ren’s thigh. “We’re okay.”
Later, once Ren is satisfied with the state of Goro’s knee, they go weed old Mrs. Kato’s yard for pocket change. She used to be the science teacher at their school; Ren is too young to remember, but Goro does. He had to bring a leaf to class once to color over, tracing the midrib and venation in contrasting colors. Ren listens with rapt attention, arms wrapped around Goro’s shoulders, standing on the pegs of his bike, the wind in his hair.
Then they make their way into the small cluster of shops in the center of town to patronize the lone vending machine outside the laundromat. Goro gets a can of coffee because he saw an actor drinking one in a movie once; it’s bitter, and his nose wrinkles against his will at the first taste. Ren gets melon soda.
There’s nothing much to do, and Goro’s mom will be expecting him home for dinner in a couple hours anyway. Ren can no doubt come along, but still, that doesn’t give them much time to play. Still, they bike down to the Yamada’s farm, mindful to avoid the pothole that led to disaster last time, and lay out among the eggplant and okra.
The sun is summer-bright today, burning red through Goro’s closed eyelids. Break will end soon, and they’ll have to go back to school — separated by classes, forced to spend time with people who aren’t each other. But for now, they have this: the hot sun above them and the cool soil below, the rustling of leaves and call of birds in his ears, the bittersweet taste of something new on his tongue.
When Ren’s fingers twine with his, Goro doesn’t jump even a little.
Ren’s voice is quiet. “Do you think we’ll always be together?”
Of course, Goro says. Wants to say. Starts to say.
The wind blows; the leaves rustle. The birds call — the same call as before, like a sound bit played on repeat. The hot sun; the cool soil. The wind blows. The birds call.
Goro sits up. Of course, he wants to say; he can feel the words written for him. It’s all on script. He’s reading his lines.
The birds call. Ren’s hand tightens in his.
“Goro?” he asks — chewing his cheek, glasses sliding down his nose. There’s someone reflected in his eyes, but it isn’t Goro, and it isn’t Ren. “You okay?”
Goro lunges for him.
—
When he comes to, there’s something wrapped around every centimeter of his body, writhing and reaching and disgusting, keeping him upright and suspended. It feels almost like how a snake looks, but isn’t quite organic enough — there’s no muscle, only a mechanical crawl of movement, just tight enough to keep him still.
Goro would know: he struggles. Viciously.
The sound of steps, and a body stops in front of him. Goro can’t see around the mass keeping him prisoner, but he has a stomach-turning, blood-curling idea of who it is anyway.
“How did you wake up again?” the voice says — puzzled, and so sympathetic, as always. “You really are a special case, Akechi-kun.”
It’s difficult to get his jaw open, but he manages; even when he gets his teeth around one of the terrible appendages, it doesn’t flinch at all. It tastes how it feels: greasy and metallic, like blood and rust and motor oil.
He can’t form words like this, but he screams anyway. His fury echoes through the room, as if to reaffirm how empty his surroundings are. As if to tell him it’s meaningless, that no one is coming to save him.
But Goro doesn’t need saving; he never has. He screams again, directing all of his panic and rage at the man in front of him.
“This will be easier if you stop struggling,” says said man with a kicked-puppy sigh. “This is for your own good, you know. For both of you.”
The words only make him angrier. Even as his consciousness leaves him, he’s still struggling. Both of them, he’d said. Both of them. Him and—
—
A hand is in his hair. Goro snatches the offender by the wrist, snapped back to consciousness in an instant.
But even before he has the chance to look, the shape of the wrist is familiar: its width relative to Goro’s hand, the exact way the bone juts out knobby and delicate on the side.
“Ren?” he croaks, opening his eyes.
Lo and behold, Ren is standing above him. His chin is covered with that bright blue scarf he’s been wearing all winter, the lines of his body hidden in his coat. Leblanc’s warm lighting hits the back of his head, throwing golds and yellows into his hair. Behind his glasses, his eyes are wide and surprised.
Then, his expression eases: smooth and stoic. Normal. “Hey. You’re awake.”
The echo of a voice rings through his head like an ache: How did you wake up again? Goro squeezes his eyes shut, chasing it, but it leads him nowhere.
So he opens them again, glancing around. That’s right; they were having a meeting in Leblanc. Goro must have nodded off in the back booth, listening to the others’ inane rambling. None of it matters to him, anyway — not now, not when he’s most likely dead. His eyes are on the prize; none of it means anything except—
“Earth to Akechi,” Ren is saying, waving his hand in front of his face. There’s that almost-smile quirk to his lips, uneven and barely there. His fingers are slightly curled. “Still tired?”
Except — something. Goro can’t put his finger on it. It bothers him, lingering sticky even as Ren takes a playful tug of his hair.
Goro hisses, batting Ren’s hand away. Ren laughs, easier and brighter than usual. Goro’s scalp tingles where Ren had tugged; he isn’t so quick to touch him, usually. He doesn’t know if he’s ever touched his hair before tonight, except for that one time at the café, when they’d both had an excuse for the proximity.
Narrowing his eyes, Goro leans his elbows on the table. A coffee sits in front of him, only half-emptied, and he picks it up automatically though it must be long-cold. “You’re in a good mood.”
Ren only shrugs, flopping down across from him. The toe of his shoe bumps Goro’s before both of them pull away. “One of us has to be.”
In spite of the words, there’s a melancholy to Ren: a weight to his countenance, a dark cast to his expression. He sprawls in the booth like a lazy cat, body posture loose and open, but his eyes are unseeing, lined with dark circles.
It soothes something in Goro. He doesn’t know what he would have done if Ren was as lost in this ridiculous world as everyone else. Now that Goro’s existence or lack thereof is up for debate, Ren is the one thing left that still consistently makes sense.
It’s late; that much is obvious. Cold, too — Leblanc must not have much by way of insulation. Ren’s ridiculous attic is chilly enough in the daytime but he’s sure it’s downright freezing now, space heater or no space heater. Idly, Goro wonders if people can catch colds in this reality.
It’s an uncomfortable train of thought: either Ren getting sick, or Ren not being able to get sick. Goro takes a sip of his coffee to give his mouth something to do and is disgusted to find it still warm, at his perfect and preferred temperature.
“I’m surprised you aren’t shooing me out,” he says then, for some reason. His cup hits the saucer with a click, but Ren doesn’t flinch; his eyes slide to him slow and even. “Everyone else has cleared out already, yes? Or are you without plans tonight?”
Even he doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean. Ren seems equally surprised, blinking at him as he chews it over.
“Morgana will be back eventually,” he says after a pause.
It’s a non-answer. Typical. “And what does the industrious Joker get up to on his nights off?”
Goro has, of course, done his own legwork on this topic months ago. Ren does inane tasks at all times, constantly. He works part-time, fishes, eats competitively, hires maids. Sees movies with his friends, and walks around afterwards, nodding along to whatever they have to say about it. He hasn’t surveilled him at all since the advent of this crapsack world, but he would bet it’s much the same. Ren has never been capable of sitting still.
Ren shrugs — another non-answer. “A boy needs some secrets,” he says, deadpan, and then, “You can stay and find out, if you want.”
A second ticks by, then two; the ambiguous invitation hangs in empty air. Goro’s mouth is dry, and the aftertaste of coffee lingering on his tongue doesn’t suit his palette: too milky and over-sweet, easy to swallow and hard to bear.
The whole time, Ren stares at him. His eyes are glassy, and the whole world seems absorbed into them, reflecting onto Goro like a mirror. He’s at once too much and too little to hold onto: shiny and incorporeal, popping like soap bubbles when Goro presses too hard.
Then, Ren blinks, and his expression shifts easy again. His face colors with something as he leans back into the booth, though Goro can’t tell if it’s disappointment or good-natured ribbing.
His voice is even. Casual. “You should still be able to make the last train.”
Automatically, Goro’s eyes flick to his watch; it’s later than he thought. He swallows his off-center surprise, voice rough from getting it down. “You don’t think the trains run all night now?”
Ren hums. “Depends. Are we prioritizing the conductors and subway workers, or the people getting home?”
His dead eyes are starting to spark. Goro can see the same vivacity in him he’d seen the first day they met: a stranger arguing ethics behind the flimsiest excuse for a disguise, both knowing the conversation had higher stakes than they cared to admit.
Goro likes him most like this: active, focused, willing to engage. He leans forward on instinct. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” he drawls, unconvincingly bored. “There is no world where every individual can be happy. What if one person’s wish is antithetical to another’s? If someone’s happiness relies on another’s unhappiness?”
Ren’s fingers spread over the table, as though grounding himself in its chill. “It creates a world of concessions,” he mumbles quietly, looking somewhere beyond Goro’s head. “Almost-perfects.”
That’s the problem, Goro supposes, with this particular debate: they’re on the same side. Neither of them is willing to play devil’s advocate here.
“Fundamentally flawed,” Goro agrees, staring at himself in his coffee. The surface ripples with every movement, splitting and scattering his reflection. “There’s no such thing as absolute perfection, not where humans are involved. Perfect happiness of the whole cannot be achieved without sufficient happiness of the individual. Happiness of the individual cannot be consistently achieved without upsetting the social order, or settling personal grievances, or asking too much. In other words, it is in direct conflict with the happiness of the whole.”
Goro wonders, for a moment, what his own ideal world might look like, had he been successfully ensnared. Perfect revenge, perhaps; justice for his mother. Satiation for his lifetime of dissatisfaction, hungry for something he never knew how to identify outside of the fact that he didn’t have it. The others had their worlds constructed around more recent or ignorable events: a preventable outcome, an inconvenient truth. A relationship that could have been good; a life that should have been. But Goro isn’t like that. His lot in life has never been anything but rotten.
Still, it’s his lot. It’s one of the only things that is. Like it or not, whether he lives or dies — this is the path he chose. He isn’t letting it go so easily.
It’s been too long since Ren said anything. Goro clears his throat, looking over Ren’s shoulder to the door. “Hence, the entire premise is flawed. Even one person’s happiness is complicated enough. All of society? Impossible.”
Outside, it’s almost unreasonably dark; Goro can’t see a trace of the ever-present city glow. He’s certain there are lights outside, even in this alley: signs, streetlights, vending machines. But it’s pitch black through the glass, as though nothing outside this room exists at all.
Ren still hasn’t said anything. Goro’s unease is prickling into irritation, bottled up and shaken with nowhere to go. “Talk about a god complex. That man—”
That man. That man keeping them here, the one who—
His head throbs; his eyes sting. He shuts them automatically, bending in on himself, nails digging into the soft leather of his gloves as he curls his fingers around his knee.
When he opens them again, Ren is watching him.
“And what about the perfect happiness of the individual?” Ren asks quietly. His eyes are bright in the dark: more silver than gray, flashing metallic. His words are jarringly off-kilter. “What if someone just refuses to be happy?”
No one refuses to be happy, Goro wants to grit. Happiness isn’t something you opt into; that isn’t how the world works. Things are infinitely more complicated and unfair than that. Ren should know.
Instead, he goes along with the hypothetical, digging his claws from his gloves.
“If the puppeteer in question is a raving lunatic with an ego visible from space, utterly convinced he could find everyone’s happiness and unwilling to give up on even this belligerent individual,” Goro says dispassionately, “then I suppose he would need to trick them. Buy time, or wear them down.”
Ren’s head cocks to the side. He looks skeptical. “And that would guarantee their happiness?”
Goro snorts. “Of course not,” he says, staring down at his perfect cup of coffee. “But it might keep them complacent. The whole cannot be maintained without the individual. If someone’s wish cannot be granted — say, an antithetical one, such as destruction of the idealized reality — then it can only be faked. Neutered.”
“Then you’re saying it’s doomed. That person could never have their wish fulfilled.”
The tone of Ren’s voice is — strange. Somber, in a way he isn’t prone to. The peaks and valleys of his intonation, the precise speed of his words — none of it is correct. It’s his mouth, his teeth, his voice box, but the words are alien. They don’t roll off his tongue right.
When Goro looks up, he finds Ren’s appearance to be just as disconcerting: a frown that doesn’t belong there, and pity that doesn’t suit him.
The wrongness of it jolts through Goro like an electric shock: warm coffee, dark windows, and Ren. Maybe that’s what makes Goro’s temper flare into a sudden rage. His teeth grind, aching to bite, like an animal backed into a corner.
His voice, comparatively, is calm. “No. They can’t.”
Goro stands so quickly that his thigh jabs into the edge of the table. Still, his overly sweet, perfectly hot coffee doesn’t spill.
“I think I’ll check on that last train after all,” he says, and turns for the door without looking back.
Ren’s voice calls after him, somber and righteous.
“I want you to be happy, Akechi-kun,” something says.
Goro ignores it; it isn’t right. He ignores it. It isn’t right.
The door opens; the bell chimes. The world outside is pitch black, darker than dark.
Goro ignores it. He takes a step.
He falls.
—
Since Goro missed the last train, he ends up here again: in Ren’s apartment, Ryuji in the room down the hall. Goro’s more booze than blood, and for all he’ll regret it in the morning, it stretches him out warm and lazy now, arms spread wide across Ren’s futon while Ren scrounges his closet for extra blankets.
“It’s not even that chilly tonight,” Goro calls out, louder than he means and just as goading. “Scared you’ll catch a cold?”
The corner of Ren’s mouth quirks up. “You steal the blankets.”
He does. “I don’t.”
Finally, Ren manages to uncover his summer blanket, thin and sad and not worth the effort he put in to find it. “Mhm,” he hums. “Every time.”
In his gooey, drunk state, staring at the alcohol-flush coloring the back of Ren’s neck, Goro isn’t even embarrassed enough to be annoyed. Maybe he would have been, years ago — but he’s settled into his skin now, so much as someone like him can be.
Things are different than before. The Metaverse is gone, for one. Ren misses it like a part of his own body, Goro knows; Goro doesn’t know how to feel himself. For so long, the Metaverse was a means to an end, a crutch, a source of power and helplessness in equal measure. Though the lack is strange, an emptiness he can’t fill — it’s freeing, in a way. Losing that world.
They’ve already survived the worst; all they’ve left to do now is live.
There’s worth to this: autumn air, rain on the windows, an exam or three on the horizon. It’s the weekend tomorrow; maybe Ren will have breakfast made by the time Goro ambles out of bed, pretending to resist joining Ren and Ryuji at the rickety kitchen table. Maybe Ren will sleep in, and Goro will have an excuse to be near him an extra hour or so, counting his lashes before his restlessness forces him to his feet.
Tonight, Ren yawns, laying out the thinner blanket strictly on his side, as though to protect it from Goro’s reaching hands. Goro is stripped down to his undershirt and boxers, but Ren lives here; he’s characteristically covered, loose shirt and warm pants twisting as he crawls into bed. His futon is suspiciously big enough for two but only by cramming in close; when Ren flops down on his back, his shoulder hits Goro’s. His quilt is already reflecting Goro’s body heat, and Ren hums contently as he settles.
His glasses aren’t on. It makes sense, Goro thinks — he’s going to bed. He takes them off before bed every day, he’s sure. He’s slept over before, he knows he has — but he can’t remember seeing Ren take them off. He can’t remember ever seeing him take them off.
His head hurts; immediately, he winces, twisting his face away in the same breath that Ren turns to look. He blinks, and the pain disappears, taking the thought with it.
Goro thrashes in his sleep, mumbles or shouts, clings like a koala. On worse nights, he wakes to Ren pinning him down by the wrist, throat hoarse from words he can’t remember; on better ones, he wakes lying on Ren like a paper weight, face tucked into his hair or shoulder or neck.
Ren is as quiet in his sleep as he is awake, and painfully cold — like a corpse. He doesn’t move. He barely breathes. Goro can see him there when he closes his eyes: lying still on his milk crate bed in his freezing attic, head pillowed on his arm, never waking no matter how Goro shakes him—
Someone is shaking him by the shoulder. “Akechi?” Ren asks, wide-eyed and awake. He isn’t wearing his glasses. His skin is overly smooth where his shirt slips down his shoulder, pore-less and porcelain. “You okay?”
He isn’t wearing his glasses, and his eyes are wide and bright. Too shiny, irises too big, and not quite alive — like taxidermy. Like something else, wearing Ren’s skin.
There used to be a mole on that shoulder. There should be. There isn’t.
It blinks at him, pretty and toothless, waiting patiently for him to say his line. “Akechi?”
Goro’s body won’t move; his throat is hoarse. No matter how he screams, no sound comes out.
—
In his dream, Goro is a hero: the kind in comic books, with a secret identity and a league of friends, weathering world-ending powers and interpersonal dilemmas and bad public relations all at once. In his dream, everyone knows him and no one knows him. He has a mask and cape and a lightsaber. When he tumbles, he brings everyone down with him. When he reaches out, someone helps him to his feet.
In his dream, Goro is just a normal boy. He has a normal family, and a normal school life. He studies for university entrance exams, because he’ll live long enough for that to matter. He plans a graduation trip with his best friend.
He’s holding someone’s hand, taking him home to meet his mother over dinner. He’s holding someone’s hand, guiding him up a hill to his mother’s grave. He’s holding someone’s hand, and he doesn’t have a mother, and it doesn’t matter — not now, not when the only boy he’s ever loved is leaning up to kiss him.
Ren’s mouth presses to his, and his lips are chapped from the dry winter air. His bright blue scarf brushes Goro’s chin, scratchier than it looks. Standing on the curb, eyes half-lidded, Goro can see Ren’s face crease with an emotion he doesn’t want to name; their breath is visible in the air, highlighting the space between them every time they part for breath. Goro should wave him off; he’s meant for death anyway; he’s sure he had waved him off—
In the interrogation room, Ren’s eyes are bright and clear. “Don’t do it,” he says simply, like that’s enough when Goro has a gun between his eyes. He’s active, focused, alive. “There’s another way.”
Goro shoots him anyway, and leaves before the blood can get on his shoes. He shoots him anyway, and cradles him in his arms, tracing the hole in his skull with tender, reaching fingers. He doesn’t shoot him. He takes the other way.
Each scene is the same: enter and perform. Exit stage left.
It’s a long way to fall. On every step, Goro rights himself. On every step, someone is there to push him further down, down, down.
—
When he finally lands, someone’s hand is in his hair. Goro snatches the offender by the wrist, awake before he even had a chance to get used to being asleep: thumbing along the knobby jut of bone, feeling out the width relative to his hand.
“Ren,” he croaks, opening his eyes.
Lo and behold, Ren is standing above him. His chin is covered with that bright blue scarf he’s been wearing all winter, the lines of his body hidden in his coat. Leblanc’s warm lighting hits the back of his head, throwing golds and yellows into his hair. Behind his glasses, his eyes are wide and surprised.
Then, his expression eases: smooth and stoic. Normal — again. “Hey. You’re awake.”
He’s in the back booth of Leblanc again — again, because he’s sat here before, during any one of their various meetings to take down this reality. Everyone else is gone, and it’s just him and Ren. Outside the windows, the city is pitch black; it feels, if only for a moment, like they’re the only two people in the world. Just him, and—
Ren is still standing, staring down at Goro’s hand around his wrist, as though he could see himself reflected in the leather of his gloves. His brow is furrowed, lowered and scrunched, a barely-there line appearing between his eyes. His fake, plastic-rimmed glasses slip down his nose.
Before he can even stop to think about it, Goro is reaching to push them up. The lenses butt the tips of Ren’s long lashes, and he flinches out of thought, staring at Goro like he has two heads.
Pretending that was an intentional attempt to rile him and not a bizarre automatic reaction, Goro leans his chin in his hand and raises an eyebrow. “Earth to Ren.”
This Ren is just right, he thinks: hair choppy and dulled with cheap shampoo, a smudge on his lens and a light in his eye. His lips are slightly chapped, pink-red and bitten. Even now, he drags one between his teeth, eyes fixed somewhere over Goro’s shoulder.
It’s a strange thought, Goro realizes immediately. This Ren, like there are multiple, like there are Rens that are wrong—
Ren’s voice pulls him from his thoughts, echoing like a gunshot in an empty room.
“Akechi,” he starts slowly, like he’s sounding out the name in his mouth for the first time, “what day is it?”
It’s an unreasonable amount of gravity for such an inane question. Goro nearly rolls his eyes. “Do you not own a calendar?” he asks. “It’s—”
The date slips away the moment he tries to cup it in his hand. He scrambles to catch it, jolting. His fingers fumble for his phone. It’s—
The screen flashes, then goes black. The pressure in the room drops; Goro’s ears pop.
January, he thinks, staring at his reflection. We haven’t made it through the Palace yet, so it must be sometime in January—
A garden, and blinding light; a familiar man, the power of god in his mouth. Ren on his knees, aching and bleeding, companions downed, and no matter how Goro struggles, he can’t reach him. There’s something wrapped all around Goro’s body, writhing and reaching and disgusting; something mechanical in his teeth: snakeskin and metal, blood and rust and motor oil. Something somewhere pins him down. His throat is hoarse from screams he can’t remember.
His head throbs; his eyes sting. He shuts them automatically, bending in on himself, nails digging into the soft leather of his gloves as he curls his fingers around his knee.
When he opens them again, Ren is watching him.
“Akechi?” he asks, hand reaching out.
Goro lunges for him.
Ren’s tailbone hits the floor first; his head cracks into the corner of a chair leg. He’s putting up a fight before his expression has caught up: one hand in Goro’s lapel, the other in his hair, wrenching him back instinctively as Goro’s teeth snap. Ren makes to knee him in the groin but Goro gets his own knee down on his thigh before he can, taking great gasps in through his teeth, hunched and feral.
Quick as a whip, Goro gets both trailing arms of Ren’s scratchy scarf and pulls. It isn’t enough to do any damage, not yet, but Ren drops both handholds immediately to shoot to his neck anyway, protecting his windpipe from potential strangulation on pure animal instinct.
Goro’s voice is rough, like he’s the one being choked. “Are you him?”
If it isn’t Ren, it knows how to be needlessly difficult like him. “Who?”
Immediately, Goro pulls the scarf tighter in a silent threat. “You know who,” he snarls, and his fear is settling back down into a bright, tangible anger, easier to direct and easier to hold onto. “Ren.”
That furrow reappears between its eyes, if only for a moment. “I— Yes?”
Another pull. A reactionary gasp for breath. Ren’s voice is thin and incredulous, edging out whatever calm it might usually carry — though the snark remains, even on something else’s lips. “Is this a trick question?”
He looks up then, alive and wild-eyed. His glasses are sliding down his nose.
It isn’t right, but it is. He is. Goro’s head throbs like someone took a knife to it, and his eyes squeeze shut for a split second.
That second is all it takes for Goro to end up on his back. He still has hold of the scarf but he’s lost ground, and he’s baring his teeth, raising his knees, fighting to get the upper hand—
A hand wraps around his wrist. “Should I,” the thing in front of him asks, haltingly unsure, an extra rambling off-script, “not be Ren?”
Goro’s laugh feels like sand in his throat. “You’re asking me?”
The thing lets up, lets go, leans back. It looks around, lost and confused, Ren’s eyes shining behind its glasses. Sitting on its knees on Leblanc’s floor, lights throwing yellows and golds into its hair — it’s familiar. More familiar than Goro thinks he’s seen in a long, long time.
Scrambling to his feet, wrist throbbing, Goro studies it — him? It. The thing with Ren’s face that might be Ren, but that he can’t call Ren, because he doesn’t know, and that kind of thing matters. There’s power in a name — even more so in a place like this, where cognition is built into every blade of grass. To call it real is to make it real.
Now that he’s noticed, Goro can’t stop being aware of it: he’s falling. Not his current self, seated on the floor of Leblanc, his wrist and the back of his skull aching — but some other part of him, somewhere. He’s being held, contained; he’s being pushed and dropped. No matter what, he’s not on his feet.
He’s asleep, he realizes — and kept that way intentionally, his dreams and wishes and desires built around him like a prison. It’s a pit with no bottom, and he doesn’t know where he is, or how long he’s been here. But at least, he thinks, looking at the figure in front of him, he knows who he is.
It’s a mark of how terrible this world is, for that to feel like a blessing.
“Are you awake?” Goro asks.
Not-Ren turns to blink at him. “Another trick question?” he asks with an uneasy smile, though his voice is weak, and his hands fiddle aimlessly in front of him.
Some feeling races through Goro: sympathy, sadness, pity. He beats them all down, face perfectly neutral. “No,” he says plainly. “There’s no trick.”
It’s just a feeling; Goro doesn’t know enough to understand it yet. He’s right on the verge of a breakthrough, but there’s a block in the way, a plethora of information locked on the other side of the bulkhead. His fingers itch to run to it and his legs ache to escape — but he already knows, as sure as anything, that if he walked out that door now, he’d just fall all over again.
He clears his throat. “I have the feeling, actually, that it’s rather important.”
At this, Not-Ren falls silent, thinking. That furrow appears between his brow again; Goro can’t remember if he’d ever seen it before all of this. He can’t remember where the line is between ‘before’ and ‘this’ at all.
This world is made of cognition. Goro remembers something — a fight, and Ren, injured and on his knees; Goro is trapped here now, so they lost. They must have lost, and terribly too; Goro would never give in willingly.
Since he woke up in this world, Goro has been operating under the assumption that he’s already dead. It’s easier that way: he’s dead, and it doesn’t matter. He’s going to do what he needs to do, and then he’s going to disappear. If all he exists as is someone else’s cognition of him, then he doesn’t want to exist at all.
But here he is: an individual with an antithetical wish. Locked in a box in pursuit of perfect happiness.
You don’t build convincing environments for dolls. You don’t put out sets and figures. You just change the doll. The backstory can be rewritten, the joints replaced. It isn’t alive, so it doesn’t matter. The only substance it has is what you give. There would be no need for any of this if he were just a cognition.
It’s just like him, he thinks wryly, to be so disturbed by the thought that, after everything, he’s alive.
Not-Ren picks his nails the same way Ren does. His lip goes back between his teeth. There are dark circles under his eyes.
Ren was hurt bad in that fight, and this world is made of cognition. Somewhere, at some point, Goro can remember him: lying in bed, as still as death, unable to wake no matter how Goro shakes him. The working model Goro had in his head — that he was only alive because Ren willed him so — suddenly flips on its head, and he considers it consciously for the first time:
What if Ren is dead?
This is for your own good, you know, someone had told him, at some point. For both of you.
Goro’s stomach flips. His vision blurs. Already, he can feel himself slipping, one push from falling down, down, down.
“I don’t think,” Not-Ren says, snapping Goro back, “he’s awake.”
The words give him something to hone in on. “Awake,” he croaks immediately. “So, can you feel him somehow? Is he… asleep, or—”
“I don’t know,” Not-Ren interrupts in a way that real Ren wouldn’t. His face is falling slacker, eyes taking on a certain glassy sheen; he looks less like Ren by the minute. “I just — I don’t feel…”
A pause. He blinks, and his eyes darken once more into Ren’s storm cloud gray. “I don’t feel him.”
That isn’t a definitive one way or the other; he doesn’t even know if this means it has no connection to Ren at all, or that it does, and there’s just nothing on the other end. Either way, Goro knows, rationally, that this shouldn’t change anything; he should assume the worst, just as he has been. A superposition of states, but he can predict the outcome: Ren is dead. Ren is dead. Ren is—
The world swims in an automatic response to his emotions, forcing him out to greener pastures — but this is Goro’s fucked up cognitive dream prison. He holds on, and the pressure subsides, ebbing and flowing like a wave on the shore.
“I’ll find him,” he says, out of breath, stepping around the kneeling figure toward the door.
There’s an obvious obstacle: Goro doesn’t understand what’s going on. He’s asleep, sure, and his cognition is being manipulated; his subconscious may or may not have some connection to Ren, though not in any way he can control. The bulkhead door is closed; the information is blocked off. The more he reaches for specifics, the farther away they go. The telltale shrill ring of a Palace master’s attention shakes silent through the air, and Goro doesn’t have anything to show for it. No matter how he reaches, he can’t even remember the man’s name.
Some detective he is.
Still, it isn’t like he’s just going to sit here wringing his hands. No one is coming to save him, but he doesn’t need saving. He never has.
He has to find Ren. He’s alive, Goro decides, plan building up around that assumption. Ren is alive, and if neither of them is able to wake on their own, they’ll need the other to do it.
Goro has always been the more proactive of the two. It’s his turn first.
It takes ages to reach the door, as though even the short length of Leblanc is unwilling to let him go. Through the glass panes, the world is pitch black and darker than dark.
There are no doubts to be had, no other option. The figure kneeling on the floor isn’t even Ren — just a pale imitation, a puppet dreamed up by Goro’s mind and memories that can be controlled by their egomaniac puppeteer at any moment. Goro can feel its lack of humanity hammered home further with every step he takes, the changes in its body seared into his eyes for him to watch without looking: it stops breathing. Its eyes stop focusing. The slow pick, pick, pick of nail to cuticle stops. It isn’t human. It’s a part of Goro, and therefore, free game to be excised the moment it becomes inconvenient. He knows, and it knows, too.
Still—
“Is there anything you want to say before I go?” he asks the boy kneeling on the floor. His voice is stilted and odd — not against his will, but against his better judgment. “Any final regrets or grievances to air?”
Before it’s too late, goes unsaid. The figure hears it anyway. It’s a part of his own head, after all.
When it turns to face him, only its head moves, swiveling unnaturally far on unmoving shoulders. Its eyes are taxidermy-glass. “What was it you said?” he says in Ren’s quiet voice, lined sardonic and bitter in a way that could only be Goro. “I refuse to accept a reality stuck under someone’s control for the rest of my days.” A pause. “Just go.”
Goro doesn’t turn or hesitate; still, the final step to the door seems to take ages. Perhaps because of that, his voice is so low it’s barely there. “Thank you.”
Ren’s laugh rings through the air like a bell. “Maybe you should try going up instead this time, Detective.”
Goro turns on his heel — but the figure is gone. For the first time in a long time, he’s completely alone.
The world outside is darker than dark. Goro ignores it, crossing the length of Leblanc once more to take the stairs to Ren’s attic instead.
—
The stairs are wooden and creaky, leading to Ren’s room. The stairs connect the hallway outside his classroom to the roof, echoing with footsteps and chatter. The stairs smell of subway and city. He’s climbing the fire escape outside his mom’s apartment, the ones they used to steal out to in the middle of the night when she needed a smoke; they creak and complain, red-painted metal underfoot peeling its skin in great flakes. He’s climbing the glass staircase in the final Palace’s twisted eden, the artificial smell of ripe-rotten apples choking him.
Something is wrapped around him, holding him in place, and desperate hands ache to push him down. His memory freezes and blurs, and the bulkhead door stays locked shut.
Goro climbs up and up and up.
The stairs are wooden and creaky. When Goro breaches the attic, it’s baking in the heat, sun streaming in through the wide windows.
A body lies motionless on the milk crate bed.
The telltale shrill ring of a Palace master’s attention shakes silent through the air. Wind forces its way through the room, blustering and brutish; it pushes Goro’s hair into his eyes and his scarf into his face.
But the room remains untouched. Pristine. A perfect little bird cage for a beloved little pet.
You don’t want to do this, a voice says.
Goro’s mouth won’t open, but he figures that if the bastard can reach him even here, deep in his own cognition, then he can hear his thoughts, too. Fuck off.
The body is motionless and familiar: head pillowed on his arm, turned away. His hair flicks up in waves and cowlicks, dulled with cheap shampoo. When Goro gets near enough, he can see a mole where his shirt slips down his shoulder.
His chest moves, slight and barely there — alive. He’s alive. Goro exhales, breathing in time with him on instinct.
He manages to force his mouth open, but when he speaks, nothing comes out. When he grabs Ren by the shoulder, he can see himself in this same room what feels like ages ago: shaking him with single-minded focus, determined to wake him, one unexpected shove from falling down.
Just let him rest, the voice pleads. He deserves it, doesn’t he?
Deserves it — deserves this. Ren deserves this. Goro’s blood boils.
He can feel the words written for him, the script laid out: the hesitation, the doubt, the agreement that this is all for the best after all. Someone is sitting there on the edge of their seat in the audience, waiting for him to read his lines.
This artificial paradise is a hell coated in sugar, twisted cloying all around him; the taste of blood and motor oil and ripe-rotten apples crawls up his throat and chokes him. It combines with every taste he’s ever known: hot croquettes and city air, secondhand smoke and milky coffee, easy to swallow and hard to bear.
A world of concessions. Almost-perfects. Fundamentally flawed.
The world shakes and swims around him, aching to push him down and force him out.
But this is Goro’s fucked up cognitive dream prison. He holds fast. When the wind kicks up again, yanking not at the room but at Goro, blowing him back toward the stairs — he buckles down instead, knee to the mattress.
Shaking Ren didn’t work before; it isn’t likely to change now. Instead, Goro flips Ren onto his back, taking in his half-open eyes, the pores on his skin, the pink-red color of his slightly chapped lips.
Akechi-kun, the voice is saying, frantically now — and there’s rage there, too, open and roiling. He’s not half as saintly as he pretends. Don’t you see? I just want you — both of you — to be safe and happy. Is that so wrong?
They already promised they would return to their reality. It’s unlikely Goro can make it out by himself, not if this is what meets him on the precipice — but even if it were possible, that promise goes unfulfilled if Goro went alone.
Goro’s fingers are holding fast and white-knuckled under the bulkhead. The way out leaks like venom from his teeth, sickly-sweet, its skin waxy on his tongue: a forbidden fruit, caught and carried. He already has the key. He just needs to share it.
The world is silent; the warmth is sucked from the room. The voice is somber and righteous. It’s not too late to turn back. I can still grant your wish.
The whole cannot be maintained without the individual. Even, it seems, an individual like him, with an antithetical wish.
But he refuses to accept this reality.
Ripe-rotten apple under his tongue, Goro cups Ren’s cheek.
His voice is uncooperative, and shaking Ren awake didn’t work. But there’s more than one way to communicate.
When Goro presses his lips to Ren’s, the boy beneath him is cold and painfully still, like a corpse. Goro is no fairy tale prince, though; he opens his mouth, letting that forbidden fruit-sweetness pass from his mouth to Ren’s.
Wake up, he’s thinking — desperate, exhausted, digging into Ren’s shoulder hard enough to bruise, cupping his cheek like he’s made of glass. His lips move in a silent prayer, over and over. Wake up. Wake up. You need to wake up.
There’s something holding him still, squeezing him by the throat, tightening menacingly until his ribs creak. There are a million reaching hands springing from every dream he’s ever had, aching to drag him down.
The bulkhead door slides open. The voice — Maruki — shouts, rage forcing him wordless and dull.
Below him, Ren’s frozen body takes a loud, gasping breath.
—
When he comes to, there’s something wrapped around every centimeter of his body, writhing and reaching and disgusting, keeping him upright and suspended. The mechanical crawl is slow but unyielding, just tight enough to keep him still.
Then something slashes through, impossibly sharp.
Goro falls.
His eyes sting at the first attempt to take in his surroundings, even through the red-tinted visor. Still, it’s impossible to miss: Maruki’s Palace, a blinding white glow all around him, and more importantly, even brighter than all of that—
Ren stands there like a paragon of roguishness, adjusting his red gloves with a casual flick. His voice is creaky with disuse, but his eyes are alive and alert under his mask, sparking a friction fire when they meet Goro’s. “Hey, Crow. How’s it hanging?”
If Goro weren’t still calibrating, he would strangle him for the pun. As is, it takes everything he has to keep his voice even. “You’re late.”
The others are here too, he realizes belatedly: woken for the second time, though no doubt with less trouble than it took for Goro or Ren. Sumire and Ryuji are quick to come close, checking him over; Haru lingers at Ren’s side, and Futaba is practically ducked behind him, checking for enemies in her frog-like goggles. The others are tucked into the shadows, barely visible.
Images linger behind Goro’s eyelids: dreams where they were his friends, too. Where this was his team. Where Ren would smile easier and laugh louder and touch him in front of his teammates, and they wouldn’t look at Goro like he already had the knife prepared to stab him in the back.
But those weren’t the worlds they chose.
Every scene is the same. He can monologue, fall in love, swing his sword around — but it gets him the same place in the end. There’s only one spotlight. Come or go, he’s doing it alone.
Ren grins, vibrant and alive and unscripted, eyes flickering like lightning in a cloudy sky. “Sorry,” he says. “I slept in.”
Ryuji groans; Futaba snickers; Sumire laughs politely. Goro stares, as if he could pin this Ren — his Ren — down with his eyes alone.
Then he shuts them, hand to his forehead. Goro is more or less sure he isn’t dead by now, and judging by Ren’s expression, he knows it — but they still have a tyrant to topple before the day is done. Again.
“Okay,” he sighs, like relief isn’t kicking him in the teeth. “Take two.”
Ryuji shoves a candy bar in Goro’s mouth to fix his aching ribs. Sumire bounces like a bunny at his side, explaining recent events. Yusuke pats him on the shoulder when he makes it into active party, somehow both soft enough to be awkward and hard enough to hurt.
Ren jumps at his signal, climbing up Adam Kadmon with a flick of his grappling hook and a bloodthirsty grin.
The world dissolves, ripe-rotten dreams and all — and then that’s it. That’s the end.
Exit stage left.