Chapter Text
Goro sets Ren down on the ground before he returns to scowling at his phone, leaning against the wall in a corner of the Shibuya subway station. His phone is shitty even at the best of times, a first generation smartphone probably closer to being fifth-hand than anything else, but he unfortunately needs it for school, and it’s not like the people at his current place of residence would bother to shell out any money for a new one. He’s been doing what he can to scrounge up enough money for another one, but he’s still several thousand yen from having enough to get one that would at least work half of the time, even with Ren’s… contributions. At least if he wants to be somewhat sure it isn’t stolen. It makes this fucking glitchy screen more than a little annoying.
Ren meows up at him, and the touch of paws to his leg keeps him from hurling the phone at a group of tourists passing by. It doesn’t stop him from hissing expletives as he presses the power button rapidly in an attempt to unfreeze the screen. To the tune of a particularly loud fragment of conversation in English, something finally happens: the speakers struggle to let out a burst of static as the screen is overtaken by some sort of black and red logo.
Goro’s blood runs cold. A virus. His goddamned garbage phone has somehow picked up a fucking virus. The sound around him distorts and slows down, ultimately being drowned out entirely by the ringing in his ears as he forces himself to breathe through the wave of nausea that hits him out of nowhere while he tries to process what that means.
It’s not the end of the world, he tells himself, trying to stop his hands from shaking. It’ll make group projects even more of a pain than they already are, and he’ll lose access to his possibilities of doing research outside of the library, but he can manage that. He’ll just need to- He needs to-
Ren. He needs Ren.
The massive beast of fur would usually be winding his way through Goro’s legs at this point, screaming up at him to pay attention to him instead of whatever caused him to panic, and it’s the worry about why he isn’t that finally has Goro snapping his eyes away from his phone to search for the cat instead.
Ren isn’t immediately by his legs, so Goro looks up to see if he’s run off into the crowd for some reason. It happens every now and then, when Ren grows tired of waiting for his attention, but he stays close, and he always comes back. The problem is: there is no crowd for Ren to have disappeared into. There are no other people around him at all.
When Goro looks up, instead of seeing the rush of people that is Shibuya station in the afternoon, he’s left to stare out into the darkness of a tunnel. A stale wind howls in his ears as it blows by, ruffling the strands of his hair. The walls of the tunnel are lined with thick cords of some kind, pulsing with red light. The way they cross and branch off from each other make them look like the veins of something huge, and while he struggles to make sense of what his eyes are seeing he looks back down onto the ground and finds himself standing on a train track.
What the fuck, he thinks frantically. Is he hallucinating? Or dreaming? The possibility that he fainted in the middle of Shibuya station makes him wince. It’s strange though, usually there would be plenty of signs that he was in danger of passing out, and Ren always made sure to prevent it, be that by stealing another rice ball from the closest 777 or bullying him into taking a nap.
The thought of his cat reminds him of said cat’s lack of presence and has him looking around again. Even if this is reality, there is no guarantee that Ren ended up wherever he is with Goro, but he still calls out, tentatively, “Ren?”
The name echoes weirdly in the tunnel, somehow both louder and more muffled than Goro expected. When the sound dies down without answer, Goro calls out again, louder. A moment later movement behind him has him whirling around, his hand automatically going to the slit in the lining of his jacket where he hides his folding knife. He stops short of drawing it, but that’s only because what he sees makes him stop in general.
A black, vaguely humanoid mass with what looks like masks of white porcelain scattered over its would-be shoulders shambles around on the tracks in front of him. The form of it is hard to pick out in the darkness surrounding it, but Goro can tell that it’s coming closer by the way that the bobbing turquoise lights in the eyeholes of the largest mask are slowly getting bigger.
Goro starts to back away, hoping that it won’t notice him, but maybe he would have been better off staying still, because as he moves the figure turns more deliberately towards him and picks up speed. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem friendly.
One of Goro’s heels catches on a plank in the tracks when he makes the next mistake of deciding to turn around and run, and it sends him sprawling onto his side on the ground with a gasp. Before he can get up, the figure melts into the ground in front of him.
The masks disappear into a swirling mass of red and black, which divides in half to form two different creatures. One of them looks like a brown-haired woman dressed in a short, blue dress with matching thigh high socks, who floats in the air on delicate looking fairy wings. The other is a jack-o-lantern in a witches’ hat and cape, holding a lantern. That one floats without the use of wings, as far as Goro can see.
“What’s this, what’s this?” the fairy says brightly as it flutters toward him, and Goro turns fully onto his back to scramble away without letting the two of them out of his sight.
“A hee-human in the tunnels, ho!” the jack-o-lantern answers, bouncing in the air. Both of their voices have a tinny echo to them, like they’re speaking through some sort of distorting filter.
“Humans aren’t supposed to be wandering around,” the fairy sing-songs as she circles above him, face framed by her hands. Goro stops and tightens his fist around his knife as he tracks her movement with wide eyes. He’s lucky he didn’t drop it when he put his arms out to try to block his fall as best as he could.
“What are you?” he demands, though his voice comes out as more of a squeak than a threat.
“Hee-how rude, ho!” the jack-o-lantern exclaims as the fairy draws back and puts her hands on her hips with an exaggerated pout.
“Maybe the human needs a lesson in how to respect it’s elders,” she says and points at him, barely giving Goro the time to throw himself to the side on instinct when the the hair on his neck rises from a build-up of static electricity. He narrowly avoids the lightning that slams into the ground where he was lying just a second ago, and as his brain tries to catch up to his body he’s left staring at the fairy, blinking the spots away from his vision. He’s too busy trying to make sense of the fact that he was almost hit by lightning that he doesn’t realise that the jack-o-lantern is winding up for its own attack until there’s a ball of flames coming straight at him. This time he doesn’t have the time to do more than throw up his arms and turn away in a desperate hope that the flames won’t incinerate him on impact, but the flames never touch him.
When Goro peeks back out from behind his arms, he finds himself staring at the back of another humanoid figure, curled into a defensive position. With the swipe of one of its arms the flames disperse, and the figure straightens out. With its other hand it pulls a handgun seemingly from nowhere, and with two well-aimed shots the fairy falls apart into dust with a screech. The newcomer barely pauses to watch it, leaping forwards to swipe at the jack-o-lantern with its free hand to send it spinning. The jack-o-lantern lets out a disoriented “Hee-ho-o-o-o!” as it spins, while the humanoid backflips away and snaps its fingers, summoning a pillar of black and red matching the scenery around them out of the ground to envelop the bouncing pumpkin monster. It too falls apart, and Goro is left gaping as his saviour whirls around to face him.
“Goro!” it says, and Goro almost startles at the deep voice, which lacks the distortion that the voices of the fairy and jack-o-lantern had. That doesn’t mean it’s human though, as the black, fluffy tail swishing behind it attests to. “I found you!”
The creature sounds relieved as it steps towards him, but Goro finally collects his brain from the floor and scrambles to his feet, flipping open his knife to hold it out between them and shouts, “Stay back!”
The creature pauses, and the clawed hands that had been reaching out towards Goro fall to its side as it tilts it head to peer at him with pale yellow eyes. Goro takes the moment to really look at it.
If it weren’t for the tail and the matching ears sticking out of the messy dark hair on top of its head, it would look just like a human, if a strangely dressed one. It’s taller than Goro – not that that is a difficult feat when Goro is still in the middle of his first growth spurt, and the creature looks like it would be in its twenties if it were human. Its clothes make it look like some sort of cosplayer, or an idol; a cropped jacket of crimson leather over a dark grey vest with red lacing and seams running down the length of it, form fitted onto a muscular chest. A white cravat is tied around its neck, and black, tight pants tuck into knee-high boots of the same colour of the jacket with sharp-looking heels of polished metal. Golden accents and accessories finish the look, and in its cravat sits a golden pin with the kanji for lotus carved into it.
“Goro,” it says after a moment, carefully. Its words are accompanied by the distant sound of chains, “We need to go, this place is dangerous.”
“Who are you? No, what are you? How do you know my name?” Goro demands, and the creature frowns, one hand coming up to rub at its neck as it seems to think for a moment.
“I guess I should be proud of you for not trusting strangers but…” the creature mutters before huffing, “Look, I’ll answer all your questions as soon as we’re somewhere safe, but I’m… Ren. I’m your cat. Except I’m not really a cat. Um. Surprise?”
Goro stares at it for a beat before declaring, “You’re insane.”
It’s eyes narrow as it says, “Remember three months ago when Feather Eagle had that shirtless scene and the next day you ran to the library to print-“
“Shut up!” Goro says, his face burning, and before he knows it he’s right in front of the creature with his hand over its mouth. It blinks at him, eyes filled with amusement, before it easily grabs his arm and moves it away to show off its fanged grin. In its other hand it holds up Goro’s knife, which Goro didn’t even notice being taken from him, before it flips it shut and stashes it into a pocket in its pants.
“If there is one thing you have to learn, mon petit prince, it’s how to spot when you’re being baited,” the creature – Ren? – says, before it bends down to scoop Goro into its arms and takes off at a run.
Goro yelps and immediately starts to struggle, but Ren just holds him tighter to his chest and says, “I’ll explain once we’re somewhere safe, don’t worry.”
As if Goro’s just going to trust something like that.
“Let me go!” he yells and starts trying to wrench one of his arms free to aim a punch at his kidnapper’s head, but before he manages he spots a figure over Ren’s shoulder and freezes. Surrounded by an aura of red light and floating chains, a large, scarecrow-like being in a tattered coat floats some distance away and as it raises one arm towards them, Goro realizes that there are shotguns in each of its hands.
Ren dodges to the side at the same time as it fires one of them, and then around a corner as the entity readies the other one. Goro sees the sparks as the lead from that shot ricochets off the tracks that they just left.
“What is that thing?” Goro asks in a strangled voice, completely forgetting that he’s not supposed to trust whoever this not-human claiming to be his cat is.
“The Reaper,” is the answer that he gets, which explains nothing, but the tense tone does cement it as dangerous. Goro can already see the glow of it coming around the corner again. Ren turns onto another path before it fully comes into view though, and then he suddenly shifts his hold on Goro with a “Hold on.”
Goro throws his suddenly free arms around Ren’s neck on instinct and feels one of Ren’s hands come up to cradle the back of his head as he turns them around. Goro stiffens as he sees the steel wall that Ren is just flinging himself at, shoulder first. Goro barely has the time to open his mouth to scream before they ram into it and the wall swings open on shrieking hinges to reveal itself to instead be a giant, double door.
Ren stumbles from the impact, and in the moment before he manages to find his balance again, Goro fears that they’ll go sprawling onto the ground. When they don’t, Goro lets out the breath he was holding and looks back where they came from.
“It’s coming,” Goro warns when he sees the Reaper round the corner again. Ren doesn’t answer, but two steps of regaining momentum later he jumps up onto the subway platform that comes up to their side – much higher than Goro would have thought possible – just as the Reaper shoots at them again. When they land, Goro realizes that the Reaper has drawn to a stop on the other side of the door, and for a moment Goro nonsensically thinks that it’ll leave them alone as it simply floats there.
In the next moment, Goro sees the flash of a gun firing right at them, and then there’s a swooping feeling in his stomach as Ren takes another leap and they go falling, and Goro can’t see anything anymore.
For a moment, they hang suspended in darkness, Goro’s heart beating rabbit-quick. The sound of their combined panting – Goro from terror and Ren from exertion – is loud in his ears, and that and the fact that he can still feel Ren’s body close against his own is the only thing that keeps him from outright panic. Goro inhales deeply to calm himself down, but the breath is jolted out of him painfully when Ren’s feet hit the ground with force.
This time, Ren doesn’t catch himself when he stumbles, and as they go sprawling onto the floor he twists around enough for Goro to land on top of him instead of the other way around. Goro catches himself with his hands on either side of Ren’s head, which bounces slightly on the floor without the cushioning of Goro’s arms.
Goro stares down at him as Ren blinks his eyes open with a hiss. His yellow eyes look almost golden up close, and they’re framed by thick eyelashes that flutter with every blink. The pupils are slitted just like a cat’s and when they catch the light in just the right way it reflects back.
“Ren…?” Goro whispers in awe as he stares down at his cat turned not-quite-human. He’s not even sure why he’s accepted that this is Ren – but that pin looks an awful lot like the engraved tag he splurged on years ago to attach to the collar he stole that one time the salesclerk at a pet store told him that he should get out so as not to disturb their real customers.
“That’s me,” Ren replies, markedly unenthused, and raises one of his hands to rub at the back of his head. His other arm is still hooked around Goro’s waist, and when Ren raises his head slightly Goro can feel his own hair move as it comes into contact with Ren’s skin.
Abruptly Goro pushes himself onto his knees, face burning, and swivels his head around to see if the Reaper had followed them. He’s decidedly not thinking about how pretty his cat is in human form. “Should we- Keep moving?”
Ren raises himself slightly on his elbows and glances around before shaking his head lazily, “No, we’re safe here.”
It takes a moment for Goro to trust him and relax, but then he takes another look around them. They’re on another platform, this one between two tracks that terminate at the other end of it. Behind them is a set of escalators leading upwards, and on the other end is a stone wall, gleaming with red lines forming a symmetrical pattern. It looks to be a dead end, unless they get back down onto the tracks to head back in the direction they came from.
“Say, little princeling,” Ren starts in an amused tone, drawing Goro’s attention back to him. The look in his eyes is the same as the one Goro’s seen in the cat’s right before he does something Goro specifically told him not to. “Would you mind letting me up?”
With a start, Goro realizes that he’s still sitting on Ren’s thighs, and he scrambles to stand. Mortified, he puts several steps between them as Ren chuckles. Ren leisurely gets to his feet and stretches, before sighing, “Well, I suppose this is as good a place as any for introductions.”
He turns to face Goro fully and spreads his arms as he says in a pompous voice, “Welcome, Goro Akechi, to Mementos: the collective unconscious.” He places a hand to his heart and bows, continuing, “My name is Ren, and I will be your guide for the upcoming game.”
Goro narrows his eyes at him, “What game?”
“I… can’t tell you. I want to! Trust me, there are so many things I want to tell you Goro,” a pained look flashes through Ren’s eyes, “but I am already interfering by being here. I will teach you about the metaverse and stay by your side, but aside from that any decisions you make have to be uninformed.”
Goro gives him a doubtful look as questions race through his head. It sounds completely insane, but if he takes it at face-value… There is so much he wants to ask, so much about what just happened he needs to know, but it’s the queasy feeling in his stomach at the thought that he apparently wasn’t supposed to have Ren that decides the first one. “Have you always been Ren?”
Ren gives him another amused look, that soon melts into fondness. “I suppose that depends on how you look at it. I had a life before I was your cat, but the cat was always me, yes.”
Goro’s eyes widen. More than the embarrassment of anyone actually knowing the things he’s told Ren over the years it’s the thought of Ren must having a life before him that bothers him. What sort of life would he have lived to make attaching himself to Goro a better option? Or, worse – what sort of game was this, that Ren would give it up to help him? Ren, who has been the sole source of pure happiness in Goro’s life since his mother’s death.
Goro clenches his fists and stands as tall as he can as he says, “Tell me everything about this place.”
Ren grins, wild and approving, and Goro does his best to match him. Whatever this game throws at him, he’ll be ready for it. He’ll make sure Ren’s choice was worth it. For Ren’s sake, he’s going to win.
Ren, Goro decides, is a much better teacher than those of any school Goro has gone to. His explanations are easy to understand, even if the subject of them is confusing, and he doesn’t get angry when Goro asks questions. That doesn’t mean he answers all of them – some he says he’s not allowed to, like if Goro is the only one who has access to the Metaverse (Goro takes that as a ‘no’ and resolves to be on his guard); some he says will be easier to explain with the ability to demonstrate; and some he simply doesn’t know the answer to.
The fact that his supposed guide doesn’t know everything about the place they’re in is worrisome, but at no point does he feel like Ren is lying to him.
“So basically…” Goro says as he stares up at the glowing red pattern of the wall in front of him, “There will be a door here if I become famous?”
“Or infamous,” Ren grins, showing off his sharp canines. “Make it to the front page and I’ll bet you could breeze through several of them. They don’t even have to know your real name or what you look like, as long as they know you by something specific. So Feather Eagle could make it through by that association and still have people not know his real name or what he looks like.”
Ren winks when Goro glares up at him, but before he can answer Ren’s ear twitches and he whirls around and into a protective stance, pushing Goro behind him with a growl. The sudden movement makes Goro stumble, and combined with how the growl has his hackles raising, the glare he aims past Ren’s shoulder as he rights himself is instinctual. However, when he sees what – or rather who – Ren is reacting to, the glare melts into hesitation. There is a woman standing on the other end of the platform – a woman that Goro recognizes.
”Fuyui-san?” he wonders out loud and takes a step forwards, but Ren holds him back with an outstretched arm.
“That’s not Fuyui,” he says in a low voice, glancing back at Goro, “It’s her shadow – her true self twisted by corrupted desires.”
Goro opens his mouth with a frown to ask what that means but the woman cuts him off with a scoff, “Fuyui-san, this, Fuyui-san, that. Can’t you brats see that I’m busy?”
Goro is taken aback by the annoyance in her voice. Out of all the supervisors at Goro’s orphanage, Fuyui Hiroko has been the one Goro has disliked the least. To say that she’s his favourite would be an overstatement, since she takes the top spot by simply not despising every child she lays her eyes on. That doesn’t mean she’s kind, but at least she makes an effort to treat Goro and the other kids with some amount of patience and respect.
“Stay behind me, Goro,” Ren cautions, and Goro’s attention snaps back to him, indignant.
“I can fight,” he argues, because it’s clear that that’s what Ren is gearing up for by the focus in his narrowed eyes and the way the tip of his tail flicks back and forth. He’s ready to spring into action, just like when he’s watching the end of a pilfered shoelace waiting for the moment when Goro pulls it away.
Goro’s words break that focus for a moment, making Ren turn his head to him with a fond smile, “I know you can. But this isn’t a schoolyard scuffle or one of the other kids trying to take your stuff. She won’t hesitate to kill you once she transforms, and without the protection of a persona she could do so with even the weakest spell.”
Goro glares at him, but before he can argue further or ask what the hell a ‘persona’ is, Fuyui cuts him off again.
“Goro…?” she says, squinting at him, and then she sneers. “Don’t tell me the little suck-up has come to ask about scholarships again? How many times do I have to tell you I haven’t heard anything back before you get that no decent school will ever accept a bastard of a whore like you, no matter how good your grades are or how much dick you suck? Why won’t you just give up already? Or better yet, take your mommy’s advice: no one would miss another piece of gutter trash like you.”
The words hit him like a sucker punch. Fuyui-san was the only person who listened to him when he talked about wanting to go to university, to become someone his mother could be proud of. This attitude is completely unexpected to him, and he’s gotten good at spotting when people were masking their disdain and pity towards him. If this is her true self like Ren said, does that mean she had been mocking him silently as she did? Had every encouraging word she said been a lie?
“How dare you talk about her like that? Did you even send in those applications?” he wonders out loud, the sound of his own voice strange and far away. There’s a numbness spreading through his body, a headache building behind his eyes. He’d thought she was different, that he could trust her.
Ren’s eyes widen and he looks between Goro and the shadow quickly, expression torn, but Goro doesn’t have the patience to wonder about the strangeness of the reaction. He looks back at Fuyui’s shadow when she laughs, cruelly. “Why should I waste what little time I have on something so pointless?”
Goro’s hands clench hard enough to draw blood from his palms and his teeth grind together as his headache intensifies. Goro sneers, ready to tell her just why – but as he opens his mouth, Ren cuts off both him and the whispers building in the back of his mind.
“It’s not pointless.”
The quiet authority in Ren’s voice draws Goro’s attention like a magnet. Ren doesn’t look at him as he places a hand on Goro’s shoulder and squeezes. Goro is too stunned by the steely expression on his face to bristle at the silent order to stay put as Ren stalks forward, tail swishing behind him like a hero’s cape.
Fuyui’s shadow sputters, also caught off guard by the interruption. “W-who are you to-“
“You have a family, don’t you, Fuyui-san? A mother who calls you every week to check in and a father who sends you money when you ask for it?”
“You leave my family alone, you freak!” Fuyui’s shadow straightens her back, face contorting in anger and fear. Her hands form fists in preparation for a fight, answering to the clear threat in Ren’s words despite the calm and considering tone of them. It has Goro’s heart speeding up, wide eyes fixed on Ren’s back.
“Isn’t it nice to have that sort of support?” Ren continues as if she hadn’t said anything, and the dark undertone sends a shiver of apprehension through Goro. He knows Ren is defending him, but it’s still unsettling. “I bet they didn’t complain when they had to send in your high school applications. And yet here you are, being paid to be that support for kids who desperately need it, and you say it’s pointless? Wasn’t it pointless for them to do the same for you, then?”
“I was worth it! I have a respectable future ahead of me!” is the shadow’s retort, to which Ren simply tilts his head to the side curiously as he stops a few metres away from her.
“Do you?”
With an enraged cry, Fuyui’s form starts to bulge as she throws herself at Ren. It looks like huge blisters form under her skin in rapid succession, and then they all split apart at once with a sickening squelch. As Ren dodges to the side, the shadow takes its new form of a humanoid figure with pitch-black skin and white hair styled into two cones on its head. The only clothing it wears is a mantle, which is green on the inside and has a black and yellow pattern on the outside.
“I am nothing like these ungrateful kids! Of course no one wants them when they just keep whining about everything,” it screeches as it whirls around to face Ren again, and crystals start forming in the air above it. With an angry swipe of her arm, she sends them hurtling towards Ren, who backflips to avoid them with a curse. The crystals shoot up into stalagmites where they hit the ground, shattering into tiny pieces moments after, leaving behind patches of glittering white on the floor.
Ren retaliates with a snap of his fingers, and a pillar of black and red reaches out of the ground under the shadow, but it doesn’t even flinch as the unnatural light wraps around it. There are already new chunks of crystals forming around it, and Ren has to dodge again as they come flying towards him. This time he lunges at the shadow after dodging, and swipes at it with his claws as he passes by. The shadow lets out a pained hiss which turns into an enraged cry as Ren catches himself on the floor with his hands and twists into a spin-kick, metal at his heel glinting as it connects.
“Stay still you idiot cat!” it yells, recovering quickly from Ren’s hits, and aims a dive-kick of its own at Ren’s chest before he has gotten steady on his feet again. The impact resounds with a crack as it sends Ren flying back towards Goro, and Goro hears him cough wetly as he skids to a halt, one arm down towards the floor for balance and the other clutching his torso. He draws his gun out of thin air as he tries to straighten up and fires off several shots in succession, but only a couple of them hit, the others going wide.
The shadow recovers quickly and grins, wide and menacing, as new crystals form around it. The sight chills Goro to the bone, freezing him to the spot while the crystals take aim at Ren again. Goro watches in horror as Ren tries to dodge to the side again only to stagger with a wheeze of pain as twisting his torso pulls on his injuries, and Goro screams.
“REN!”
Even at this distance, Goro can feel the cold radiating from the crystals – the blocks of ice – as they strike true, and his headache returns tenfold as he’s forced to watch it engulf his only friend in the world, the only one who had ever tried to comfort him after his mother’s death.
When the ice disperses it leaves Ren behind, stuck in the middle of a motion meant to take him out of its range. White frost clings to his body, and Goro can see the mist his breath forms as it leaves him in strained bursts.
He’s still breathing, Goro thinks frantically as the pain in his head spikes. He clutches his head in one hand as his vision swims and weakly reaches the other out for Ren, taking a stumbling step towards him.
“No, no, Ren!” he moans, throat raw, as the shadow draws closer, cackling with glee. It raises one hand towards the crystals of ice already reforming around it.
“I’ll put you down and dump your body in a river like I should have done years ago, and then I’ll do the same with that waste of resources that keeps dragging you around!”
At the words, Goro feels like everything just stops. He sees them in front of him: Ren, unable to run; the shadow, ready to strike the final blow. The pain in his head is joined by an unbearable pressure, like something is trying to claw itself out of him. A voice rings out in his head, garbled and distorted:
Are you simply going to stand there and do nothing?
He can’t speak through the agony, can’t force the words through his clenched teeth, but when he shakes his head stiffly a wave of force flows out of him in all directions, powerful enough that he can almost see the air rippling in its wake. It blows apart the ice that the shadow is summoning and sends cracks through that covering Ren. The shadow turns towards him at a glacial pace, and Goro realizes that it is not one voice speaking to him, but two, layered on top of each other in a way that should make them unintelligible, yet Goro knows each word they say as if by heart.
| Will you let her keep spouting this | Will you be the reason for his death as |
|---|
| disrespectful nonsense about | well? Will he be the next victim of |
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| that which is yours? | the curse that is loving you? |
|---|
One voice is haughty and regal, the other vicious and hissing, but the answer to both of their questions is a resounding, “NO!”
Goro’s snarl is punctuated with another wave of force, and time moves ever so much faster as the shadow lowers its arm and turns to shield itself. The pressure and pain in Goro’s head coalesce onto his face, and he scrambles to grip onto it, this manifestation of agony. He has to get it off, has to let free whatever is crawling its way out of him, get it off get is off gET IT–
Then speak my name and
| let loose the arrows | rain down the fires |
|---|
of Justice!
–OFF!
Goro rips the mask off his face with a howl, and he can’t be sure which name he says first, or if he says them at the same time, or if he even says them at all, but they burst out from him just the same. Loki and Robin Hood, both of them at once, and time catches up to him as they take aim. Robin Hood with arrows of light, and Loki with a sword of fire.
The shadow shrieks as they strike true, and Goro leaps from between them, his own sword in hand and dark fabric billowing around him as he slices through the air to take the shadow down–
And then his arm is stopped, with the blade mere centimetres from the neck of the shadow, which is once again wearing Fuyui’s face, now twisted in terror as she kneels before him. Goro tugs harshly on his arm and turns his head to Ren with a snarl, but Ren doesn’t even flinch. His hold is firm but gentle, his claws not even cutting through the thick fabric now covering Goro’s arms.
“This is your choice to make, Goro, but let it be an informed one,” he says, eyes serious as they meet Goro’s. “If you kill her shadow, she will die in the real world as well.”
She’d deserve it, Goro thinks viciously, turning his head to stare down at the shadow on the other end of his sword with cold eyes. Slowly, Ren lets go of his arm and steps away. His gaze is heavy like the feathered cloak that has settled around Goro’s shoulders. Within the cape Goro can see the glint of golden buttons on a dark, 1800’s military-style jacket, and the hand holding his sword is now clad in black leather. The sword itself is a lightly curved sabre with a simple hilt and an edge that glows purple like a laser sword.
While his concentration is broken by marvelling over his new outfit, Fuyui’s shadow makes a move to crawl backwards away from him. Goro catches the motion out of the corner of his eye and fixes her with his glare again, pushing the edge of his sword closer to her neck.
“Don’t move,” he barks, and she freezes in place. He looks at the face of the one person (aside from Ren, he supposes) he had thought gave a shit about how his life would turn out, and he remembers the words that had come out of her mouth now, and with them the looks that she had thrown at Ren when she thought Goro hadn’t seen. The looks that Goro had written off as paranoia because he had thought that he could trust her.
He has to take a breath to stop his voice from shaking, whether from rage or despair at another betrayal, as he asks without taking his eyes off of her, “I could kill her?”
“Yes,” Ren says, and maybe Goro is imagining the beat of hesitation that preceded it, because his voice is completely neutral. “No one would even know it was you.”
Fuyui’s already wide eyes somehow widen even more, almost bulging out of her head as she starts to plead, “No! Please, please Goro, don’t do this-“
“Shut up!” he yells, and she cuts off with a whimper when the sword comes even closer, forcing her lower to the ground.
Goro takes another rough breath. It’s tempting.
Fuyui’s shadow isn’t wearing make-up. Goro has stared at her face long enough now that he’s noticed. She doesn’t wear all that much anyway, but without it her eyes look smaller, even though they’re wide with fear. She looks smaller. Goro’s been catching up to her in height, but like this, height doesn’t even matter. She’s smaller than him because he’s the one in control for once. He’s the one who will decide if she lives or dies. He has the power.
It’s a heady feeling. Goro remembers an episode of Featherman from before his mother had died, one of the older series – he can’t remember which one at the moment, he’ll have to look it up – where Feather Black had been corrupted by an Aberrant artifact. As a kid, he hadn’t been able to understand how Feather Black could have ever been tempted by the promise of power that the artifact whispered to him, but here, standing over his very own artifact, Goro thinks about making the same choice.
Goro licks his lips. In the end, Feather Black had been made to see the mistake he had made with the help of his friends. Behind Goro, Ren is silent.
“What would happen if I didn’t?”
Ren doesn’t answer immediately. When he does, it’s with a regretful sigh, “I don’t know. Odds are that it will affect her, since we are essentially messing with her subconscious, but I know she won’t remember anything directly. I can make a guess that leaving her like this would make her feel at least a little of the fear that her shadow is experiencing, but for how long it would last or how strongly it would bleed through I couldn’t tell you.”
“So, what? Either I kill her, or I let her go like nothing happened?” Goro can’t do that. He can’t just return to the orphanage and pretend like nothing happened, like he hadn’t seen the contempt she had for him, for his mother, for Ren. But… Murder?
Not very fitting for a Hero of Justice.
Goro almost snorts out loud. He wasn’t exactly hero material though, was he? And anyway, there were plenty of heroic figures through both history and literature that weren’t exactly saints. Goro’s pretty sure even Robin Hood killed a few people.
She almost took our Ren from us,
Loki reminds him. If Goro hadn’t had Loki and Robin Hood to call out to, if they hadn’t spoken to him when they did, Ren would be dead by now. There’s no use in deluding himself about it – what use would a paltry little pocketknife have been in that fight?
Goro’s hand tightens on the hilt of his blade. Fuyui would have killed him, laughing all the while, and then she would have killed Goro, too. If he hadn’t come here, hadn’t found out her true feelings, would she have killed Ren in the real world anyway? She had obviously thought about it.
Would Goro have woken up one day to find Ren gone? Would he have found traces of black fur and red blood somewhere and figured out what had happened? Would he have been able to find out who did it? Would he have been able to do anything about it if he did?
“Those aren’t your only options, Goro,” Ren says, and Loki follows it up with,
She deserves to suffer.
Goro nods, eyes trained on the repulsive sight of the shadow in front of him, even as he feels Robin Hood gearing up for a protest.
You cannot punish someone for something which they did not do!
But Goro is already raising his hand to the mask on his face, growling, “Loki, Call of Chaos.”
Fuyui’s eyes widen, and panic overtakes her as she’s enveloped in tendrils of red, “No, no! You can’t, PLEASE-“
Her pleas cut off with a scream and she slumps down on the floor, writhing and clutching at her head in pain. Satisfaction curls in Goro’s gut, but it dims at the carefully blank look he can see on Ren’s face as he steps up next him, putting a hand on Goro’s shoulder.
“We should go,” Ren says, voice flat, barely glancing at Goro before he turns around to stride away towards the escalators.
Goro has long ago decided not to care about what the adults think of him, decided to meet every scornful or pitying look with defiance, but Ren’s attitude feels an awful lot like disappointment, and that hurts. It’s stupid – he barely even knows Ren, had no reason to believe he was anything other than a devoted pet before today – and the discomfort of it annoys him.
“You’re the one who said I had other options!” he argues as he trots after Ren, though it comes out more like a whine.
“I think Loki and I have different ideas of what those options were,” Ren fires back immediately, a growl punctuating the words. Then, he stops and drags a hand through his hair with a deep sigh. “I’m sorry, Goro, I’m not… mad at you.”
The hesitation is telling. Goro doesn’t say anything as he stops next to Ren and glares up at him. Ren’s hand moves from his head to rub at the back of his neck as he casts a troubled look back at Fuyui’s shadow.
She’s still screaming. Goro refuses to feel bad about it.
She got what was coming for her.
“We should find the entrance. The Reaper should have moved on by now,” Ren says and starts walking again, at a slower pace to let Goro keep up easily. Goro almost wants to drag his feet just for that, but the memory of the rifle-wielding monster keeps him from it. Besides, it would be incredibly childish of him to do something like that, just to be contrary. He settles for crossing his arms and scowling at the ground as they walk instead. (And yes, he’s scowling, not pouting or sulking like some child.)
Ren doesn’t say anything else as they get on the escalator heading upwards, and Goro will be damned if he’ll beg for attention from anyone. He refuses to uncross his arms to grip the handrail as they ascend, even though the thought of passing through the nothing between floors again has his hands tightening on his biceps. He supresses a flinch when Ren reaches out to touch his shoulder, and though he keeps the pressure light it’s still aggravating – especially with how comforting it is to have that point of contact as they move into the darkness.
When they get off at the platform above, Ren gets down on the tracks before Goro and offers a hand to help him down. Goro – of course – ignores it, opting to hop down on his own and walks up to the huge steel doors sealing it off from the rest of the tunnels.
The doors swing open with just a push, and Goro quickly re-crosses his arms and walks off in a random direction at the crossroads that they reveal.
“Goro…” he hears Ren sigh behind him, sounding not quite like all the other adults who keep saying they’ll take care of him when they find out just how much of a bother it is to do so – but close enough. He catches up easily and has no trouble lengthening his stride when Goro speeds up as a response.
Running away would be quite undignified, little Hero.
Goro huffs. Robin Hood is right, unfortunately. He just wishes he was taller, so that Ren would have to work to keep pace with him.
“…Did Loki tell you what that skill would do?” Ren asks at length, and Goro feels a spark of victory at having made him cave first.
“Yes.” Ren’s silence after Goro answers is sceptical, and Goro wills himself not to flush. It’s not a lie after all, though he adds reluctantly, “He said she would suffer. She deserves it.”
Goro hears the rush of air as Ren takes a deep breath, and then suddenly he’s stopped in his tracks as Ren steps in front of him, putting his hands on Goro’s shoulders. He bends down to seek eye contact as he says, “Goro, I said I would stay with you, and I mean that. There is nothing in this world that would make me abandon you.”
The unexpected earnesty of his words does more to make him feel guilty than any of the screaming and berating he’s been met with before. It catches him off-guard and sneaks past the automatic response to dig his heels in. He still doesn’t think he was wrong, but… Maybe he should have asked Ren to explain himself instead of just storming off.
Aside from the guilt, the words pull on two other emotions inside of him. First, hope – a hope that Ren isn’t lying to him, that Ren is his, forever – which he tries to squash, because he’s just found out how foolish he is for trusting that anyone could care about him.
The other is fear. Goro doesn’t really know Ren yet, but he’s never seemed upset with him for punching a classmate when they deserve it, or stealing money from someone who looks to have a lot of it – he’s even helped Goro with both. That means that whatever Loki did to Fuyui’s shadow was worse than that, in some way.
You decided to punish her for thoughts she had never acted on.
“Your choices are yours to make, and I won’t judge you for them. I just want you to know all of your options before you make them,” Ren continues softly, and Goro shakes off Robin Hood’s reprimand. He still squirms under Ren’s gaze though.
“…What would you have told me to do?”
Ren smiles at Goro’s sullen response, and he straightens up to push Goro into walking next to him again, at a more comfortable pace. He sounds a little guilty himself as he says, “I wouldn’t have told you to do anything. But my suggestion would have been to just… talk to her. We could have tried to use her fear to our advantage, try for a temporary change of heart. A beaten shadow is suggestible, and fear is a powerful motivator.”
“A temporary change of heart?” Goro frowns at the phrase, and then at the casual way that Ren suggests basically threatening someone into compliance. “What do you mean ‘suggestible’?”
“A change of heart is…” Ren pauses, tilting his head to one side and rubbing at his neck with a grimace, “…complicated. It’s a way of influencing a person’s shadow that takes a lot of preparation. If you’re interested I can tell you how it’s done, but some parts are easier to explain if I have something to demonstrate with. But the idea of it is to force someone to realize how their actions hurt others and make them stop.
“You don’t need the change of heart to influence someone in that way though. The change of heart makes it permanent, but just defeating someone’s shadow puts them in a state where they’ll listen to you. Fuyui-san was terrified of you because she knew her life was in your hands. Simplified, the change of heart replaces that fear with a wish for penance, and if left alone the shadow will decide on its own how that’s best achieved, but either way the person can be influenced.”
“So I could make anyone do whatever I wanted them to?” Goro asks, head spinning with half-formed ideas, some of which make the feeling which is Loki inside of him swirl with morbid excitement, and some of which make Robin Hood recoil in dismay.
“Well, it’s honestly just a theory,” Ren says with a shrug and an awkward half-smile, “Like I said before, I don’t actually know to what extent it would affect her.”
Goro huffs, annoyed that Ren had gotten mad over a theory that he hadn’t even explained properly. Still, it is an interesting line of thought. He wouldn’t be averse to testing it, if they came back here – which he’s both apprehensive and excited at the thought of.
No shadows bother them as they walk. Ren leads him between patches of shadow in the tunnel, where they can wait unseen as any of the ones with the masks bumble by. Strangely, Ren seems to blend in even better with the scenery than Goro even though, logically, his bright crimson jacket and boots should be much easier to spot than Goro’s black cloak.
After a while, they reach another of the steel-wall doors, and when Ren pushes them open to reveal another platform behind them Goro’s first thought is that they’ve gone in a circle, but then he sees that the escalators head up instead of down. This time, Goro accepts Ren’s assistance in getting onto the platform, stepping into his cupped hands for a boost that lets him crawl onto it. Ren follows him, swinging himself up onto the platform with an ease that has Goro envious of his long legs and strength. The grin he sends Goro’s way is mischievous and carefree, and Goro grasps at any distraction from the way it makes his insides squirm.
The smear of blood on Ren’s chin and minute shiver wracking through his body are as good as anything else.
“Are you okay?” Goro asks, and when Ren only blinks in question he continues, “You’re shaking.”
A small but genuine smile blooms onto Ren’s face, “I’ll admit I’m a little cold. A consequence of being frozen, it’ll go away when we leave.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Goro bites out, glaring through the way his heart skips at that smile, and Ren laughs.
“Alright, I’ll admit my continued health was in question for a moment there, but thanks to you I’ll live to see another day. My very own knight in shining armour.” Goro’s face heats up at the words, even though he’s half-convinced that Ren is making fun of him. It is, after all, something his mother would say to him on her good days, when she had enough energy to play with him. Still, Goro doesn’t let up on his glare, and after a moment Ren relents, “The injuries will go away as well. We’ll talk about getting our hands on some healing items if you want to return later.”
Goro isn’t entirely happy with that answer because it still means that Ren is in pain, but he has another question gnawing at him – Loki didn’t actually tell him what Call of Chaos would do. Just before they reach the escalator, Goro stops to ask Ren about it.
Ren pauses with his foot hovering above the moving band. He turns around to look at Goro, leaning on the space between the two escalators and pushing his hands into the pockets of his pants. He watches Goro for a second, face blank but gaze heavy, before he says, “Call of Chaos is a skill unique to Loki. In battle, it drives the target into a frenzy, giving it a bonus to attack power at the cost of defence. Outside of battle… I suppose you could say that it pushes a shadow and its real-life counterpart together, tearing down the barrier between the two for a while. It makes people more likely to act on the impulses they would generally try to repress.”
A heavy feeling settles into Goro’s chest as he remembers what the shadow had said, and he’s quiet as Ren straightens up again and motions for Goro to follow him up the escalators. On the next floor, they pass through a row of ticket gates into a small, generic-looking subway station. It’s the entrance, Ren explains, and he shows Goro how to use the virus app to exit the Metaverse.
Goro nearly collapses into a pile on the floor as a wave of exhaustion hits him when they return to the real world. He forces himself to keep standing and stumbles into a corner where he can sink down with his back against the wall, and out of the way of most prying eyes instead of in the middle of Shibuya station.
For a moment he feels like he’s lost his mind, like he’s just had vivid hallucination in the middle of a sea of people. Then Ren, back in his cat form, pushes his cheek against Goro’s knee with a comforting purr and says, “It’s okay, you’re just tired. Awakening to a persona does that to you, I can only imagine that awakening to two makes it worse.”
It’s surreal to hear that deep voice coming from such a small, fluffy creature, and Goro’s eyes dart around to see if anyone notices the weirdness of it.
“Don’t worry, you’re the only one who hears me. The others just hear normal cat sounds, remember?” Ren says, and Goro nods weakly.
“I think I need a minute,” he says, and Ren settles down beside him on the grimy tiles.
“Take as long as you need.”
Goro runs his hand over Ren’s back as he looks out at the people filling the station and thinks. It’s late – late enough that the people in charge at the orphanage would be furious with him if they bothered to care where he was. It’s a good thing if he wants to avoid Fuyui, she’ll likely have headed back to her home by this time. The orphanage is just her workplace, after all.
He’ll just have to hope that whatever impulses she has as a result of Call of Chaos doesn’t involve staying late to wait for him, and that the effects don’t last for long.
It takes him another ten minutes to gather the strength to get off the floor. Ren stays right by his side the whole way back.
Goro doesn’t see Fuyui – the real one – until late the next day. Her low-heeled shoes shine like they’ve been scrubbed recently. It’s the first time Goro’s seen her having done so, and it doesn’t match how the rest of her appearance is more dishevelled than usual. When her eyes land on Ren, her face drains of colour and she turns away, striding back down the corridor and quickly disappearing behind a corner.
It’s the last time Goro ever sees her – she resigns the day after that. Goro knows better than to hope that her replacement will be an improvement.
On the third day, Goro takes a shortcut down one of the alleys by the orphanage, Ren by his side as usual. The stench of garbage is worse than it has been recently. Spring is verging on summer, and the heat of the last few days has reflected that. He’ll have to dig out his summer uniform soon, and hope that it still fits him – he doubts he’ll get the money to buy a new one this year.
The alley is quieter than usual as well. It’s one of the places where the local strays hang out, but not a single one comes out of the woodworks to either greet or challenge Ren for stepping into their territory like they usually do. Goro doesn’t think much of it, until he spots a dark patch on the asphalt.
The light in the alley is dim: the stain could just be runoff from a bag of trash that’s been ripped in the wake of hungry cats, and maybe Goro would have been able to write it off as such if he’d turned around there and then, instead of letting his gaze wander further up the alley.
Just a few steps further down the path lies the first body. If it hadn’t been for the unnatural stillness, it could just have been sleeping, but it’s not. It’s the true source of the increase of the pungent odour of the alley. The brown fur is matted, stained even darker by the pool of dried blood beneath it. One of the legs is bent at an impossible angle, and part of the head is caved in, as if it’s been crushed under the heel of a shoe.
There’s another a little further up the alley. Its head is twisted the wrong way, white fur seeped with blood at its chest. A third lies in a heap right by the wall.
It takes a while for Ren to get him out of there, and he spends the night in his shitty bed staring up at the ceiling, thinking about how the backyard of the orphanage doesn’t have any patch of dirt big enough.