Work Text:
When Goro woke up, he was confused.
There were various reasons why: a) he was dead, or, supposed to be with Maruki’s Reality gone, b) he was sprawled atop of a thick tarp used to protect construction materials from the elements, something hard and uncomfortable underneath it sending his back muscles into spasms, and c) it was the middle of the night and his phone was vibrating angrily in his coat pocket.
Coat pocket?
His limbs felt stiff and uncooperative, like he spent too long in one position, fingers fumbling to withdraw his phone. Text messages, a whole backlog of them from December dated after his death, now racing to catch up to the current date innocently blinking at the top right corner of his phone: June 2017.
They were all from Akira.
His brain felt like it was working through sludge, as he slowly sat up and closed the notification box. Pieces of information rattled in his brain: he died in December but it was now the following June, Maruki’s Reality was over, Akira sent his messages all while he was meant to be dead, and Goro was sitting in the middle of a random construction area, on top of a pile of tarp-covered lumber, blinking at his phone like it was some strange, alien object he’d never seen before.
It took him a bit to link these facts together into something coherent.
“I’m… alive,” he said dumbly, “What.”
Impossible.
But.
Okay then.
He brought up his search bar - somehow his phone still had internet connectivity, he wasn’t complaining - and clumsily tapped in his own name. He should check if he was dead or MIA legally, or what the public had decided his fate-
‘AKECHI GORO: THE TRAGIC PAST BEHIND THE SMILING MASK’
‘SHIDO MASAYOSHI’S BASTARD CHILD REVEALED: AKECHI GORO, ACCOMPLICE OF HIS CRIMES OR BRAINWASHED VICTIM?’
‘MASAYOSHI’S CONFESSION: EMBEZZLEMENT, DRUG-DEALING, POLITICAL ASSASSINATION, CONSPIRACY, AND CHILD ABUSE. WHAT HASN’T THIS MAN DONE?’
‘AKECHI GORO’S ACTIONS UNDER MASAYOSHI SHIDO RAISES QUESTIONS ON COERCION’
‘AKECHI GORO: MISSING SINCE DECEMBER. MASAYOSHI SHIDO QUESTIONED ON SUSPICION OF HIS MURDER’
Goro felt sick.
Headlines and articles and blog posts: Shido’s confession and subsequent public trial had exposed every rotten thing the man had done, including the shit Goro had done. There were theories and questions on what happened to Goro himself (“I bet that sick bastard killed him and buried his corpse somewhere”, “probably gone into witness protection”, “ran away”) , and with the assumption that he was dead, the media had dived deep into his personal life, gobbling up every detail Shido’s guilt compelled him to confess and pasted it all across the internet to garner clicks via pity.
His mother’s suicide. His journey through foster care. Allegations of abuse and neglect from various carers. Shido’s eventual contact. The orders. The phone call transcripts. The office recordings (because of course Shido recorded everyone he ever had a conversation with in his fucking office). The coercion and arm-twisting and barely subtle threats of ‘stay useful’. Everything.
Everything.
For a brief, horrified moment, Goro wanted to crawl back into Maruki’s Reality and never leave.
He went back to Akira’s less threatening text messages instead, his mind racing so fast he wasn’t thinking at all. He could hear his loud, unsteady breathing, stomach spasming with the urge to hurl at his fucking life becoming a spectacle for everyone to pick and pry at, but he didn’t think about it. Not right now. Later. Later.
06/06
Akira: i forgot to show you the picture of my hometown.
Akira: [boringvillelol.jpg]
Akira: been about two months already since i came back but i still haven’t felt settled
Akira: i think im bored or smth
Akira: tokyo always had SOMETHING going on
Akira: also i miss the jazz club
Akira: when you come back we should totally go there for our date.
Akira: still haven’t forgotten our promise haha
All the texts were like that.
A hiccup between March and April (Akira: looks who’s free from jail! | Akira: [selfiemugshot.jpg]) where Akira had been briefly detained to testify against Shido, but after that, rambling texts, like Goro was still alive and listening, selfies, pictures, photos, everything, a sharp, intimate view into Akira’s life after Goro, showing that he was still keeping an empty spot there, ready to be stepped in once Goro came back.
He didn’t know how to process any of this.
So he lied back down on the tarp covered lumber, focusing on breathing, just breathing, staring at the scaffolding and incomplete walls around him instead. He felt dizzy and sick, and he didn’t know if it was from shock or the sheer impossibility of being alive.
What the fuck.
An hour later Goro felt a bit more mentally prepared to deal with this nightmare he was now in, even if the dizzy spell hadn’t really left him.
He unsteadily sat up, looked at his phone, girded his loins, and ruthlessly researched himself, Shido, and the public trial that had smeared his joke of a life for all of the internet to consume.
Shido was in jail, his execution date pending (good), and Goro was legally declared dead after Shido, upon being told that his illegitimate son was missing, gave a very bizarre confession about how he must have killed him ‘on the other side’, despite being unable to explain how because Metaverse. Goro didn’t dare read more into it, not wanting to be exposed to Shido’s snivelling guilt over something he should have cared about eighteen years ago.
But the most important thing was: Goro was dead according to the Japanese government.
That both restricted him and gave him freedom. He wasn’t bound to Akechi Goro, so that meant he could happily skip free of any awkward convictions or jail time, but it also meant he was a nobody, legally. No money, no home, no prospects, no fucking clue what to do next, since all of his underground contacts were through Shido, and it wasn’t as if he could lend his services as a hitman anymore since his main method of killing was gone.
Also… he really didn’t want to do that anymore.
Akechi Goro had finally achieved the freedom he had wanted but he had lost everything in the process.
Well, he thought as his phone buzzed in his hand, heralding another text from Akira, not everything.
07/06
Akira: so
Akira: i wake up in mid of night as i do
Akira: and i see
Akira: all my messages are now read?
Akira: akechi
Akira: im guessing its phone being weird or after a while theyre auto read or
Akira: ok im being stupid
Akira: but in case im not
Akira: and a miracle has happened or
Akira: youve stopped ignoring me whatevr
Akira: you
Akira: you there?
Goro just breathed for a moment.
He saw the ‘Akira is typing’ bubble after five minutes had elapsed, and before he even thought about it, tapped at the keyboard. The bubble vanished the instant he had, and Goro stopped, his heart feeling like it was going to slam through his sternum, killing him instantly, hands shaking, but he- shit.
Shit.
In Maruki’s Reality, Goro had learned to be more impulsive, to just recklessly move ahead without getting caught up in stupid shit anymore. It was liberating in the way launching yourself out of a helicopter without a parachute was, in that you know you’re about to reach the ground but you’ll probably die in the process. Maybe. Fuck, what was his brain even saying.
Goro started typing again.
I’m here.
Goro waited.
Akira: fuck
Akira: fuckfc how?
Akira: where are you?
Akira: i’ll call futaba to trace you dont think i wont
Goro counted three deep breaths before he answered. He had hit that sweet spot where thinking wasn’t a necessary thing anymore, his emotions just sitting somewhere in the dark, not touching him, distant, a separate entity from himself. His brain muddled about in that static noise for a bit before hauling up pre-programmed responses to basic questions.
I don’t know.
Akira: you don’t know???
Akira: how are you even alive?
I don’t know.
Akira: r u ok??
Akira: im just
Akira: fuck
Akira: akechi???
I don’t know.
Akira: ok im freaking out at ur responses
Akira: im just
Akira: one sec i need
Akira: im calling you
Goro almost dropped his phone when it began vibrating furiously in his hand, the screen flashing AKIRA. His first instinct was to hit decline, but a last minute change of heart - or his violently shaking hand - had him hit accept instead.
“...Akechi?” Akira’s voice was quiet, barely audible over the crackling of a low-signal phone call.
He should hang up.
He didn’t, “Kurusu.”
“Oh my god,” Akira made an indescribable noise, “What the fuck?”
Yeah. Mood.
“How are you…” Akira trailed off, “It’s- It’s June. It’s June, Akechi!”
“I’m aware.”
“Where’ve you been?” Ah, he could hear anger starting to wind up in Akira’s voice now. Thinking, ‘were you ignoring me?’ or ‘did you run away despite promising not to’ or; “Why didn’t you- I thought- you were dead after the false reality bullshit!”
“I woke up,” Goro said, his tone sounding distant and out of it even to him, “Just now.”
“...what?”
“I woke up.”
“Yeah, I heard- I, Akechi? Are you really okay?”
No, he wasn’t. He felt sick again.
“No.”
“Shit, okay, it’s fine. I, how- what do you mean by ‘woke up’? Where are you right now? I can, I’m not in Tokyo but I have money, I can… I can catch a late train, I think-”
Goro heard his own breathing uneven again as Akira rambled, his brain fizzling into overdrive as the consequences of his unthinking, impulsive urge to respond to Akira started to drip through. He needed to hang up. This was- he shouldn’t have answered. Shouldn’t have looked at the messages.
He couldn’t- have Akira materialising here, asking him questions he had no answer to, crowding him - he won’t let him go, and Goro needed- just. Space. To think. Except maybe not in a random construction lot - and without being picked up by the police for being a dead man walking. He wanted to crawl back into the comfortable space that he had been in Maruki’s world, or even as Shido’s dog, just something familiar with established rules and a script to act by. This was too open and wild and bewildering for him.
(but no that was the coward’s way out and goro wanted freedom not trapped in the comforting familiarity of drowning in quicksand. this was freedom in all its ugly glory and he needed to get a fucking grip- )
He put the phone down, pressed the screen flat against his thigh. Akira’s words filtered out in a clumsy mishmash of sound his brain just refused to parse. Is this what it was like, having a mental shutdown? He felt like he was having a mental shutdown, just, parts of his brain lurching to a standing halt, refusing to process, frozen, senses greying out like he was descending to somewhere distant and away-
“-chi! Akechi!”
Goro automatically lifted the phone and said, “Yes.”
“Fuck, stop freezing me out,” Akira had a tone Goro never heard from him before- something strained and trembling, “Can you, just, answer me?”
“...I don’t have any answers,” Goro finally said, somehow managing to marshall his thoughts into something other than ‘i’m in the middle of an epic meltdown right now please hold’ , “My last memory is from the third of February this year. Maruki’s Reality.”
“Shit.”
“I woke up… here,” Goro looked about, grimacing when the abrupt movement of his head made his vision smear dizzyingly, “A construction lot.”
“The stadium?”
“I don’t know,” Goro’s head was starting to pound, too much stress, but there was a worrying floaty feeling accompanying it, like the oxygen was suddenly too thin. He blinked through it, carefully sliding off the lumber pile and onto firm, gravelly ground. His legs instantly crumpled, sending him onto his knees with a barely bitten off yelp.
“What was that? Akechi?”
“I’m fine,” he snarled, gritting his teeth against the flare of agony spearing through every joint in his body, like that one single movement had been far beyond its limit. He couldn’t even stay on his knees. He slowly sank back down on the floor, his breathing uneven.
Shit shit shit.
“Just- hard, to stay awake,” he forced out, the dark spots swirling insistently in his vision. Maybe not just stress. His heart was doing that frantic smashing feeling against his sternum, like squeezing blood around his body was the hardest thing it ever had to do.
“Stay awake?” Akira sounded frustrated and scared at once. Must be driving him insane, knowing there was a situation happening far out of his control. For some reason Goro found this funny, “Akechi, are you hurt?!”
“Don’t know,” he admitted, and dropped his phone.
Akira shouted something, but Goro didn’t have the energy to try anything. Fuck, maybe he was going to die anyways. Would be his luck, getting hauled back into the world of the living several months late, only to keel over dead within the first hour. False hope, dangling in front of his nose once more. Yanked out of reach. Again.
Goro’s world faded out.
He woke up to the sensation of being carried.
Someone was gripping him under his arms, another person his legs, though whoever was holding his legs seemed to be struggling with the weight, strained, puffed out breaths briefly drowned out by a creak of hinges and the jingle of a bell-
leblanc?
“So… heavy!” Futaba’s voice trickled through his semi-awake consciousness, “Can we just drop him on the floor?”
“I’m not leaving him on the floor, Futaba,” Sojiro’s voice, considerably less strained than his daughter’s, “He can take Akira’s old bed while we figure something out.”
“Ugh!”
Goro faded in and out, like every time his mind tried to snatch at consciousness it just darted away from him again. Two breaths and he was being set down. Another three breaths and he felt someone checking his pulse and a new person talking over him.
“Don’t really make a habit of doing house calls on dead people. You’re lucky I was in a good mood,” the unfamiliar- or was it? Something about it was- “Should really take him to the hospital if he starts getting worse. His vitals are a mess.”
“Do you know what’s wrong with him? How he’s…” Sojiro’s voice trailed off.
“It’s probably linked to whatever my old guinea pig was involved in,” the other voice sighed, “When he wakes up, make sure he doesn’t rip out the IV in a panic. I shouldn’t really be setting this up outside of the clinic-”
Another five breaths, and Goro opened his eyes to a bright strip of sunlight beaming him right across the face.
It was agony.
The dull, sort of distant ache when he woke up the first time had gained a ferocity that made his muscles twitch helplessly, his blurry gaze sliding from the ceiling to a familiar work-desk, a sofa, an ancient television with an equally ancient DVD player. Akira’s room above Leblanc.
He let that sink in for a long, wobbly moment.
An IV stand was set up next to his (akira’s) bed, the clear bag half-empty, with its winding tube going into the back of his hand. He vaguely remembered someone talking about it - and it was a testament to how out of it he was that his first knee jerk response wasn’t to rip it out. He just stared blankly at it, like an idiot.
Then he sat up.
An unexpected ordeal, he was panting by the time he managed it, the thin sheet pooling in his lap. He didn’t have a shirt on and his chest-
Bright pink scars, like they were so very recently healed, puckering his skin. One against his sternum (too slow on his first shot, his doppelganger hit him centre of mass-) and two peppering his left side (toppled from the first hit, on the floor as the doppelganger put two more in him, just to make sure) and he pressed his fingers against them and felt a phantom spike of pain, taste of blood lingering on his tongue.
What the fuck.
These should have killed him.
Did.
They did kill him.
He was breathing, though. Alive.
He could feel his lungs contract and expand, his heart thumping somewhere in the base of his throat, and the tingling, aching feel of his trembling fingers pressing hard against the scars. He was alive, with all the terrifying consequences that it entailed, and he didn’t know how to react.
Goro didn’t know how long he stayed like that, blankly staring into space as he processed this simple fact. He only snapped out of it when he heard the someone coming up the stairs, their steps light and near silent - except Leblanc was creaky and old and every other step squeaked like a trodden on mouse.
He should pretend to be asleep. It’d be easier. Instead Goro waited, unable to pinpoint his own mental state as Akira crept into the room - and paused when he realised Goro was awake.
They stared at each other for a long, tense moment.
“Akechi…” Akira whispered. He was holding a bowl in one hand and a glass of water in the other.
“Kurusu,” he returned, his voice scratchy and hoarse. It sounded ugly.
“I… I’ve got water,” Akira said, snapping out of his daze and walking towards him. His expression was strange, full of amazed wonder, as he held out the glass, “I’d give you painkillers too but, um, Takemi’s drugged you up, and she said not to give you anything.”
Perhaps that explained Goro’s scattered, yet curiously mellow mood. He could feel panic under the surface, bubbling and spitting like a caldera on the brink of eruption, but it was smothered beneath that cottony feeling of exhaustion. Maybe he was still in shock about the whole thing. He just - couldn’t process, right now.
“It’s fine,” Goro said, and he took the glass. His grip felt clumsy, and Akira had to gently support the bottom of it as he took a few refreshing sips. It was a miracle he didn’t spill it over himself.
“Takemi said you were… pretty out of it,” Akira continued after taking the water back and putting it, and the bowl, on the nearby shelf, “We thought we’d have to take you to the hospital and-”
“Why.”
“What?”
“Why didn’t you?” Goro elaborated, “The hospital.”
Akira didn’t look at him. He was chewing his bottom lip, frowning intently at the blank space on his wall where the Rise poster had been. It was then that Goro realised how empty the room was. Unlived in. It was obvious no one had been here for a long while.
“I was… scared I wouldn’t get a chance to see you,” Akira confessed quietly, “People think you’re dead, Akechi. You’d get, I dunno, taken into police custody and…”
Vanished, probably. Remnants of Shido’s Conspiracy existed, Goro was sure, and he wasn’t optimistic about his survival chances if he was tossed out into the wild without any support. His stomach twisted as he recalled all those headlines about himself - he’d become the centre of a media circus, picked apart and preyed upon by those reporters, thrown into jail to rot alongside his piece of shit father.
But what else was there to do? He couldn’t hide in Leblanc’s attic for the rest of his life.
“...” Goro’s gaze shifted, “I thought you weren’t in Tokyo anymore.”
“I got the first train I could get,” Akira said grimly, “After Futaba pinpointed your phone’s geolocation and Boss picked you up.”
Such loyalty he inspired in others. Goro was amazed Futaba and Sojiro would willingly rescue him out in the wilderness, considering the hand he had in Wakaba’s death. Or perhaps it was a sign of their better character, that they were willing to put such things aside instead of leaving Goro to, rightfully, freeze to death in the middle of an abandoned construction lot.
Silence draped over them as final as a funeral shroud. Goro watched Akira from beneath his eyelashes. It was hard to stay awake.
“We’re gonna figure this out,” Akira said firmly, “I don’t know how you’re here-”
“I’m not meant to be,” Goro said quietly.
Akira leaned over him and tightly gripped his shoulders. His hands were warm, his fingers digging in so hard he was able to feel the bite of fingernails. It was a desperate grip, matching the bright, desperate glint in his grey eyes. Akira looked more like he did when Maruki had issued his ultimatum, that crazed, selfish desire to burn the world if it meant Goro would stay.
He couldn’t match that look. The intensity of it frightened him - that someone would care for and want him that much, that they would contemplate breaking his wings and locking him in a gilded cage for the rest of his life. Akira had contemplated it, had been tempted, and, more shamefully, Goro would have let him do it.
He clenched his jaw.
“I’m not,” he snarled, before Akira could speak, “I-I died. I died, I remember- dying-”
(centre of mass, two more, JUST TO MAKE SURE-)
“Akechi.”
“Look at me!” Goro cried, shoving Akira back so he could point at his chest, to the vivid scars that were obviously fucking fatal, “These killed me! Look at them-!”
“Akechi!” Akira caught his hands, and Goro belatedly realised he was clawing at the scars, red welts crisscrossing the raised skin, beading red, and he could almost imagine the scars splitting open, spurting bright red blood between his trembling fingers, unable to make it- “Stop- stop, don’t hurt yourself, okay? It’s okay, it’s okay…”
Goro was struggling to breathe, an awful, gutting pain lancing right through his ribcage. He could remember it, in a vivid flash of bile and blood in his mouth. There were no stark details that leapt out, just, the pervasive, overwhelming suffocation of imminent death, of choking on blood and feeling lungs struggle to expand and spasm, gurgling on his dying breaths. He remembered it!
He hadn’t remembered in Maruki’s Palace.
Had those memories… had Maruki suppressed them, back then?
“Shhh, shhh, it’s okay…”
Goro was shaking, his breaths leaving him as gasping, heaving gulps of air. Akira was sitting on the bed next to him, still clutching his violently trembling hands tight, like he was afraid he’d start clawing at himself again. He wanted to. He didn’t trust- this. He didn’t trust it at all. He shouldn’t be here.
“You’re not dead…” Akira whispered to him, softly, gently, like Goro was glass ready to shatter apart from one wrong word, “You’re not dead. You’re here. Alive.”
“I shouldn’t- be…” Goro rasped.
“But you are.”
Goro couldn’t meet Akira’s fierce gaze, all but goading him to continue in denial. He stared at their clasped hands instead. The IV leading out of the back of his hand had a small kink in it, Akira’s palm pressing over where the needle slid into skin.
“I don’t care how you’re alive,” Akira continued, his grip loosening its deathgrip on Goro’s hands, “You just are, now, so we need to figure out what to do.”
Goro exhaled roughly.
“But… I think that can be left for another time,” Akira said kindly, a hint of his old teasing in his voice, “I mean, you’re kinda drugged up and shocked, which isn’t good for making plans.”
“Fuck you,” Goro whispered, and he hated how his voice wobbled over every syllable.
“Yeah, yeah, fuck me, I’m so terrible, telling the truth,” Akira drawled, and gave his hands one last squeeze before letting go, “I’m not leaving you behind this time, Goro. I don’t want to keep looking over my shoulder and hope you’re still following me somewhere out of sight.”
Akira should have left him behind. Goro was cursed, freakish, a backstabbing traitor who consistently bit the hand that fed him. Any sane person would have abandoned him long ago. Everyone else had.
“This time, I’m with you until the end,” Akira said, gazing at him with that intense, possessive look again, the one from Maruki’s reality. This time, Goro couldn’t look away from it, near hypnotised from the sheer ferocity of it. Yes, Akira was with him, whether Goro wanted him to be or not.
It clicked, then, how Goro’s existence came to be, despite his death. In the last moments of Maruki’s palace collapsing, where desires and desperation ran white hot like the core of a newborn star, still maintaining influence on reality depending on another’s cognition…
Had Akira revived him? Had he wished so fervently, so desperately, that he...
“Get some rest,” Akira said, drawing Goro out of his numbed realisation, “Okay?”
“Okay,” Goro replied faintly, watching Akira with new, wary eyes.
Akira smiled gently at him, tired and relieved and so happy - on first glance, he didn’t look like someone who had single-handedly warped reality itself, from the sheer force of his own desires. Had wasted such a ground-shattering wish on someone broken and cursed like Goro.
you terrify me, he thought but did not say.
Instead he watched Akira leave - reluctantly, glancing over his shoulder at him even as he descended the stairs - unsure on how to feel about someone wanting him so much, they distorted reality itself.