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In rhyme lies a constant; a small drum clapping endlessly in the background, a rift following through the air. All things exist in the same scope as each other, therefore, all things are forced to co-exist. A world designed around itself – even that which is considered a breakthrough is still an imitation of something else, then something else imitates it, if only to destroy each other.
And so, the creationist telling of trust follows through. God invented trust to test man, everything is invented with the desired intention of trust. Car bodies trust their wheels to hold them steady, and laptop bases trust their desks in the same light. Trains trust the rails they glide along to hold them steady, and God trusts man to hold his resolve, even in the face of wicked temptation, coated in glossy red. Bright, glossy red. Apples, headphones, converse sneakers, inner rims of fashion-forward glasses, blood, apples again.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Akira’s gaze shifts to where Goro stands a couple of meek meters away on the last evening train to listen to his proposition. “How these advertisers seek to trick us into believing their message.”
“Is it?” he says, with a feigned tone of disinterest. Perhaps this was just an attempt to throw Goro off, to try and shave a blunt edge off that sharp kitchen knife. A quick curveball to shake the tracks holding his steamrolling feet to the ground, ghosting delicately over the metal ones beneath them both.
As always, Goro only smiles, then looks curiously to the poster again. The corners of it had frayed in the rush of morning, afternoon, and night commuters, and the colours had only slightly begun to dull, but the message was still clear. Another cult beckoning people into the plush comfort of ignorant belief – ignorant trust – maybe the world was ending, or salvation awaits after death, or the truth is hiding in the small print of a thousand different multimillion company logos.
He reads the bold title again. ‘Hault!” it cries, in italicised capital letters.
“I’m rather fond of these kitschy posters myself,” Goro speaks quietly. He raises a gloved hand before them both, black in leather, to run it along the soft paper edges garnished with crude drawings of the damned. “They’re eye-catching, no?”
He could imagine they were both thinking of a hypothetical Yusuke’s disgust at such a statement. They were, for all intents and purposes, ridiculously ugly.
“It’s too much for me.” Obviously. “Why would they be so plain about their beliefs on a poster like this?” And it was a fair question, Goro wonders in response. Cults, renowned for their dark secrets and nervous shadows shouldn’t be this clear about their immoral standings. Rare for a cult to advertise itself on its peculiarities, he continued. But he was thinking too hard about this.
“You’re thinking too hard about this, Kurusu-kun,” he quipped, charming as ever, though he lacked the energy to add a quirky twinge to his voice or raise the corners of his lips, so he settles in doing neither. Instead he opts to stare at the poster, as if it was about to wiggle its way off the train window. “This isn’t a recruitment poster, is it? It merely offers the concept of change to the unthinking passer-by.”
Now he’s baiting Akira, and they both know this clearly enough. What else reflected change but the ghostly Phantom Thieves. Horrific monsters in the dark changing the world, deciding who deserves salvation and who deserves to be damned. But these aren’t single cogs spinning wildly out of place; Goro was baiting himself too.
He strokes the side of the poster again, pointing a long finger to the dancing politician at the bottom, and the guillotine next to him. “Reminiscent, aren’t they? Forcing you to remember a time, not in living history, but of turbulence and fear. A reminder of an age without laws and protocols, and the haywire of political paperwork.” He steals a glance of the side of Akira’s profile, just to make sure he’s looking at the right thing. He’s not. “Your average commuter doesn’t need to see the whole message, their attention can just be caught for a second with these, and then they take the idea of chaos with them to work. No recruiting, instead… should we use the word, ‘awakening,’ here?” Goro laughs at the end of that one for sure. It’s a little too long-winded for him to not try to dissuade any serious undertones.
Then the poster disappears anyway as the doors retract into their shells, and suddenly they’re at Yongenjaya.
“It’s interesting,” Akira smiles, stepping between the carriage and the platform as Goro does the same. “You’re right.”
Of course I am.
The walk from the station to LeBlanc was always nicer at night. Cities seem to rely on the strange way their arms open themselves to those who wander after light, though perhaps Goro was romanticising it a little too much. He knew how dreary Toyko was in the rain, how sad it looked in the fog. He was tired of looking up and seeing murky clouds hanging over the polluted LED lights, wishing away his childhood dreams of being a knight, a saviour, a hero, and grew to replace those gracious outfits with black salary men suits, his sword turning into a steel case instead. Like every other one, too, sent home after accidently working a second shift, and then a consecutive third one.
He wondered if, given the change, they’d work forever. He knew he would. Sort of already does – wakes up at witching hours thinking about the wrong things.
Akira, not so much. They’d knowingly shared enough public spaces for Goro to see that he studies, but not enough for anyone hoping to make real, institutional change. Rather, he gives up quickly, favouring his phone with his endless texts, or twisting metal garden wires around themselves until he’s decided they’re ready for battle. That stupid cat seemed to be a fan of his little handicrafts in particular, waving his tail in the open air above Akira’s bag when he managed to fit one piece of shrapnel into another.
And this whole thing was obviously something far more fun than Goro was allowing himself to imagine it really was, but he was capable of the art of three-dimensional thought too. He could see Akira having fun with his classroom craft projects while also unknowingly ruining Goro’s life in the same breath. The more he thought about it, the easier he realised this must’ve been – an occurrence too common for him to have left slip for so long.
Akira leads him into the open door of LeBlanc in his leisure, pointing out a few other things he thinks of being noteworthy, telling Goro all about how different Toyko is to his home town. The lamp-posts covered in political stickers of radical support and the way their neighbours close the blinds at night, all so different and new. “But I guess you have to around here,” he shrugs, and Goro pays it no mind. Less onlookers means less rumours – less of these obnoxious ‘Detective Prince caught doing charity!’ headlines for him to worry about. It’s a good thing. He could do with less spam in his inbox about helping turn young convicts around. Idiots like that, ones who got caught, weren’t worth much more than a fleeting moment of his time.
So it’s a wonder why he’s still following Akira to his carer’s stupid little café, but Goro considers it a non-issue. In a really distorted way, maybe he could call Akira a friend, or a faux imitation of one – Akira probably wasn’t too fond of him, and Goro wasn’t about to trick himself into liking someone he was trying to kill.
No, that would be really, plainly stupid.
But LeBlanc was warm all the same. The end of September was crisp and solemn, hands together in forgiveness for the cooler months topping and tailing the drawn out years, and Sojiro always knew how to remedy that away. Or Wakaba did at least, and he danced around in her shadow.
“—And I’m still learning, so my coffee won’t be as good as the old man’s,” Akira continued, because apparently he’d started talking.
Goro laughed. “You could be on the brink of losing one of your most valued customers, so be careful.”
Akira raised his eyebrow, though it was hard to see under that vicious mop of hair.
“Let’s say a reporter asks me where I find myself late at night,” Goro leans forward on the bar, lacing his fingers together. “They ask where Akechi Goro ruminates about the unstoppable crime rate of the city, and finishes all his last-minute assignments, A good barista would want me to say his place, you know. More customers tends to mean a bigger bone for the underdog.”
Akira smiles downwards, quietly, as though Goro wasn’t really supposed to see it. He briefly wonders what that meant, before he gives up on humouring Akira’s multifaceted personality and wringing it for all it had left. “Keep this between us, but I like the way it is now.” Double meaning? “Sojiro wouldn’t want all those customers here anyway, he’s not that great when people get snappy with him.”
What the hell does now mean?
He watches Akira pour the black coffee. He knew that Goro had been drinking his coffee black recently, as a change of pace. It wasn’t much of a reward for his sweet tooth, but that’s not why he was drinking coffee anyway. And if he appeased that part of himself, and came to LeBlanc to drink a sweet coffee and stare at the person he found himself dedicating a year towards killing, the whole thing would be a little too contrapuntal for his liking.
So, instead, he has to drink his bitter, bitter coffee out of the warm cup Akira had just hand-cleaned. And think about how horrible it felt that this was all so personal somehow. He envisioned the way his stomach much be twisting in disgust at the very idea of this, his fingers wrapped around the cup tightly, like the ghosts of Akira’s hands on it would shift themselves over his own instead. It was disgusting. How much he wanted to just reach over and—
Who knows. He realises as quickly as the thought began that it was better to let that fizzle out and die, too.
“And this blend is…” he asks, eyes as warm as he could muster them to be.
And Akira remains useless, smiling, pouring the leftovers into his own cup – another one in the long line of cups he washed, and of phantom hands. “My secret,” he grins. And Goro can’t be bothered to push it any further than that, because it only invites playfulness and banter, which he thinks he’s had enough of for one evening. The hypothetical hand he keeps outstretched for Akira’s friendship feels the same as it always has, like nothing’s changed.
Maybe.
Change is difficult to track though. Evolution happens so slowly and these things aren’t worth the energy it would take to monitor their agonising growth. And a part of him could recognise that he was wrong in thinking this, too. That if he turns a blind eye to things like this, he’s not really playing up the role of the detective prince, and if he plays dumb Akira will start to really think he is dumb, and then the circles and charts of who’s pretending to be innocent and who’s pretending to be a genius just grow more and more complicated, two idiots dancing to a song they’ve never heard before.
And it was nice to play dumb, too. Goro could feel like an average teenage boy messing with the feelings of the people he, too, likes, because in these alternative universes the outside is only nicer, and the inside is still complicated.
It was nice to left Akira brush his hand with his own a little too hard, too suspiciously for him to pass it off as the result of a full morning train, or a bump on the road. It was nice to let Akira stare too long at Goro’s profile, sincerely lost in the idea that Goro is too busy discussing cult posters or the design of bullet trains or deaf space and somehow misses all these obvious cues, steps over this puppy crush because he is an unfeeling, killing machine.
So he plays into it, just a little. Smiling too long, too sincerely. Letting Akira touch the small of his back when he pretends to not know which station they’re getting off at. Humouring the repeated knowledge he’s accumulated from Sojiro’s teachings, hearing all this useless trivia with a few new comments peppered in.
It was too rewarding. The apple was too sweet and that fucking honey that seemed to drip from Akira’s eyes was too inviting to not lean into, just to get a closer look. And it killed him. Right as he shot that hypothetical bullet through his hypothetical head, it killed him still.