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There’s a slight tickle in Goro’s throat the moment he’s vocally opposed on television - he’s enamoured. If it were anyone else, he’d have to bite down his seething anger - because what do they know about justice? - but there’s something about the way this dark-haired boy counters his statements with all the confidence of someone who doesn’t care about how he’s perceived by the public. All he can think of is that he’s so intriguing; Goro wants to know more about him, to sink his teeth right into the thick of it all and drink the marrow straight from his bones, building up the strength of opposition he’s never had. He’s always worked in the shadows, cool and calculating, the long-game the only victory that matters, but right now, it’s like he can see another side - another way he could have been, were he not in too deep already.
Although their conversation once the cameras are off is short, it gives Goro a lot to think about. Now that he knows the boy’s name - Akira Kurusu - he can research him using police records; a little unorthodox, but it’s nothing compared to his moonlight life. It’s strange that he finds a prior criminal record - Akira doesn’t seem like the type of person to commit an assault, and Goro knows firsthand how twisted the justice system can be. If he claimed innocence in his trial, then Goro is, for some reason, inclined to believe him.
But now there’s the matter of the Phantom Thieves, and he can’t get sidetracked from his ultimate goal of taking down his father at the apex of his power, simply because a pretty boy looked at him and listened to him talk about Hegel. Who even does that? Goro feels stupid for bringing it up in the first place, but he’s never had the firsthand life experience of merely talking with people his own age, and it seemed like it wasn’t too much of a conversational deterrent to Akira.
He’d like to talk with him again, if only to press him for more discussion that could help his investigation.
That night, sleep comes a little easier than usual. He still has nightmares, but they’re punctuated by some heroic phantasm with wild curly hair and a smirk that can shoot daggers into his heart, and he wakes up sweating, breathing heavily in the early light of 5am.
There are a few spots of blood on his pillow, but he pays them no mind. Perhaps one of his old wounds reopened during the night - it’s hardly news to him that his body has been through far more these past few years than he’d ever let on to the public eye.
However, when he walks into the bathroom, he sees that the origin of the bleeding is his mouth - just a slight trickle coming from the corner of his frown, seeping down his skin, half-dried into some viscous, sticky substance that he has to scrape off with his nails. It looks all too much like some delicately pathetic vampirism, and he wonders if maybe his sins are beginning to show on his face. Isn’t there a book about that? Ah, if he is not as lucky as Dorian Gray, if this is the beginning of his physical decline to match the inky, sweeping iniquity of his soul, well… wouldn’t that be something poetic indeed.
Making a mental note to get a doctor’s appointment at some point in the next, say, few months, he cleans himself up and checks that he has enough bullets in his gun for a trip through Mementos, and one more in case something goes terribly wrong and he has no way out.
Something has been going terribly wrong for a while now. He’s on the tightrope.
The next time he sees Akira, he’s at a train station. Wanting to shake him up a little to see if he releases any information, he mentions how strange Akira’s group of friends are, all somehow connected to the changes of heart enacted by the Phantom Thieves. Still, he’s hardly one to talk - how can he comment on the abnormalities of a friendship group when he has no baseline to compare such a concept against? But Akira is calm as ever, impossible to read, and Goro wants to push him up against a wall and jam his gun under his pretty face, just to see if his eyes will show him anything he can hold onto.
His throat begins to hurt again, and he excuses himself from the conversation, aching to look over his shoulder and see if Akira is watching him go. He just about makes it to the train station bathroom - not exactly the best place to throw up, but it’ll have to do - before he’s on his knees facing the toilet bowl, coughing until he tastes blood at the back of his mouth.
And then, held up by its own lightness and the thin layer of bile glistening against the water in the toilet bowl, there’s a single petal.
He reaches in and plucks it out, turning it over and over in his hands, hoping that a presence as poisonous as his own will cause it to immediately wilt. But it stays alive, so weightless that he feels like he’s touching nothing at all, until the sheer anger in his chest boils up and he closes his fist around the petal, throwing it back into the toilet and flushing it all the way down.
When he emerges, the dark circles around his eyes are more prominent than ever, and he just wants to go home and cry himself into a pathetic sleep.
Instead, he pushes himself further into Mementos. Requests from Shido have been building up on him, and he can’t afford to slack off; just because he’s sick doesn’t mean that he can fall behind, because then he won’t be useful, and Shido will drop him to the ground before Goro can ever ruin his life on his mother’s behalf. Revenge is supposed to be hard.
He tells himself this as he traverses through Mementos, contorting his face into something disgusting whenever he shoots down a shadow. His target today is some bank boss who’s been getting too loose with money, making him into a liability that needs to be dealt with before he leads a paper trail right back to Shido’s campaign; it’s not long before he finds the shadow, pulling his gun and watching it transform.
It should be easy. He hates to think it, but he’s done this countless times before.
This time, however, there’s a spasm in his chest as he doubles over and coughs violently, spewing blood and petals across the floor; they mingle into something thick and red, catching him so far off guard that he’s almost thankful when the shadow lands a hard kick against his ribs. He feels something crack inside him, causing only a flurry of more petals, and he can barely move, his hands sticking fast into the ground to try and steady him.
If this is some sort of divine punishment, then it can only get worse from here. He deserves all this pain and more.
Goro just about manages to grip his gun and fire a shot at the shadow; it reels backwards and he pushes through his own searing pain to finish it off. Quiet hush seeps through the cracks in Mementos, and he doesn’t even have time to leave the Metaverse before he falls on his back and sees stars, consciousness leaving him.
A minute later, he wakes up again, violent and harsh as the feeling of choking overtakes him again, spluttering and hacking up full flowers, now - he never imagined that the disease could progress so quickly, but he supposes that a lifetime of repressed emotion isn’t exactly working wonders for the purple hyacinths in his lungs.
Eventually, he gathers enough strength to leave the Metaverse. Back in his apartment, the bed feels too firm - he wants something cloud-like, something to take him away forever so that he doesn’t have to deal with the pain of being in love.
Over time, his self-destructive tendencies cause him to keep the flowers that he throws up. His apartment becomes filled with white tendrils of ivy, striped carnations that remind him of the terrifying pattern written across Loki’s skin, marigolds that bloom in the fresh water he puts them in. It’s all just a constant reminder that he’s running on borrowed time - the idea of Akira returning his love is laughable, so he’ll have to shoot for the goal of taking down Shido before he succumbs to the illness.
So why, then, does he keep coming back to Leblanc? It burns in his chest whenever Akira smiles at him, but masochistically he always returns, always ducking away to the bathroom to throw up flowers and leaving in some pathetic haste.
He’s already sat down with his coffee by the time Akira arrives. And it tumbles out of his mouth, fresh and aching - “Welcome home.”
“Honey, I’m home,” Akira responds, that familiar flirtatious smirk written right across his face. Goro only just makes it to the bathroom before he’s exhuming the contents of his corpse across the floor, not even managing to get the flowers in the bowl this time. He has to scrape them off the floor with his hands.
He leaves without another word, making a doctor’s appointment that night.
Knowing that he’ll have to present himself on stage at Shujin’s school festival, as well as enact his plan to join the Phantom Thieves and, well, do what he’s known since the beginning he has to do, fills him with anxiety as he lies on the bed in the doctor’s office. All his symptoms line up with a classic case of Hanahaki Disease, and the x-ray confirms that his lungs are indeed full of a nauseating cacophony of flowers.
“At this stage of the disease, you’ll have to have surgery,” the doctor tells him, “which will remove the flowers in your lungs, as well as removing all feelings for the object of your affection. However, it means that you’ll lose all memory of them, too. They could be the only person in the room, begging you to kiss them, and they’d still feel like a stranger to you.”
“I don’t want it,” Goro says, immediately. There’s no way he can lose his memory of Akira - not when he’s such an integral part of this stage of the plan to take down Shido. Even if it costs him his life, he can’t forget everything that he’s spent months building up to, and that’s the only reason for it.
No, absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he can’t go back to living without love.
He ends up leaving the doctor’s office with a small bottle of pills that will help with the nausea and coughing, at least. The side effects are that they’ll make him feel almost high, numbed completely to even the feelings of breathing - almost weightless. It’s apparently very easy to get addicted to, but Goro doesn’t mind; he suspects he won’t live long enough to reap the consequences of just another bad coping mechanism on top of his already painful life.
In the bathroom at Shujin Academy, he takes two of the pills half an hour before he’s due to appear on stage. Perhaps it’s a reckless decision, but he has to trust that he’s good enough at putting on a public mask to not let on that he’s struggling through the haze of disease and drugs, and besides - it’s a lot easier than explaining himself if he coughs up a bloodstained aconitum in front of a crowd.
The only thing that matters here, anyway, only begins once he’s in a backroom, confronting the Phantom Thieves with irrefutable evidence of their identities. And he wants to strike a deal, blackmail dripping ripe from his tongue; this isn’t love, this shouldn’t be love.
But god damn it, it’s the only way he knows how to love.
Mementos has taught him that he can’t take the pills in the Metaverse - not only do they not work as well, they make him more susceptible to surprise attacks by shadows that he should normally be able to defeat without breaking a sweat. As they all enter Sae’s palace, Goro - no, Crow - has to trust that he’ll be able to disguise his symptoms long enough to find a safe room and throw up without the pitying eyes of the man he’s supposed to be in love with.
It’s not enough.
They’re in the middle of a high-stakes poker game when he finds his eyes resting on Joker, taking in, like gulps of fresh air, the way his hair falls wild against his chin, how his mask only accentuates the most intense eyes, his impenetrable fortress of a poker-face. Shit. He can’t tear himself away quick enough, before he’s doubling down onto his knees and hacking up petals in full view of everyone; all he can do is squeeze his eyes shut and taste blood like he deserves it. Somewhere in the aching agony of the final stages of the disease, there’s a hand on his back - Queen’s, he thinks - but all he can do is cough and cough and cough until he collapses fully.
Sae puts the game on hold with a sigh. He vaguely feels arms around him, carrying him to a safe room, and when he manages to keep his eyes open for long enough to see what’s going on, he recoils at the fact that it’s Joker who’s carrying him. And Crow cannot read his expression at all.
“Hanahaki Disease,” Fox says, “a beautifully tragic form of art.”
“It’s not art.” Crow coughs out. He’s lying on the floor, whilst Joker sits next to him, just staring at him.
“This is that thing where flowers grow in your lungs when you’re in love with someone who doesn’t love you back, right?” Skull says.
“Who is it?” Panther asks. “We could help set you up.”
“Don’t pity me,” Crow tells her.
“It’s Joker, isn’t it?” Queen says.
“What?” Crow spits back.
“I apologise for the abruptness, but you coughed up a lot of flowers just moments after you couldn’t take your eyes off him. It’s not a hard deduction to make.”
“Guys, could we have a moment alone?” Joker says.
“Of course,” Fox replies, “we’ll wait outside and remain on guard for any shadows that attack.”
Once it’s just the two of them, Crow pushes himself up, despite the pain, until he’s sitting with his back against the wall.
“How long?” Joker asks.
“Since June. Pathetic, really.”
“It’s not. If I’m honest, I feel the same way. I just don’t have a garden in my lungs to show it.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Crow coughs up another petal into his hands, shivering.
“I’m not.”
“Let’s just go. We have a heart to steal, and it’s not mine.”
Sadly, Joker looks at him and extends his hand to help him up; Crow doesn’t take it. He pushes his back against the wall and stands up by himself, rejoining the group but walking a little behind them.
He can still catch snippets of a whispered conversation between Joker and Queen that he’s evidently not supposed to hear.
“I thought the disease went away once the love was requited?” Joker asks.
“It’s supposed to. But only if the victim believes that their love is returned. Maybe he thinks you’re just lying to try and save him.”
“Damn him for thinking he doesn’t deserve to be loved.”
Crow wants to spit at them and tell them that he doesn’t, because even now he’s got a plan in action to drag a police squad into the Metaverse and have Joker arrested, and then he’s going to walk into the interrogation room himself and hold a gun to his head and hope that blowing his brains out will shatter all the love in his own heart, and then maybe he’ll live long enough for all of his dirty betrayal to be worth it.
Once they’ve defeated Sae’s shadow, he’s on autopilot. He hears the panic in his teammates’ voices once they realise that they’re surrounded, and he knows in that moment that he doesn’t deserve to call them teammates anymore - he’s Judas, and Joker’s life is forfeit for a goal that he never had a part in beyond being a good enough scapegoat.
So why the hell is Goro - not Crow, not anymore - still in love with him?
Everything that happens after that feels a little too much like destiny. He almost overdoses on the pills before he double-checks that he has the silencer in his pocket; walking down the hallway to the underground interrogation room feels like walking on air, but it’s not light or dreamlike - it’s the same feeling as an imaginary fall just moments before he drifts off to sleep. Like he’s in limbo.
He crosses paths with Sae, but no words are exchanged. Truthfully, he’s just biting back the bile in his throat, knowing what he’s about to do and how much it will kill him inside to do it.
Stealing the gun is easy.
Killing the policeman is easy.
Pointing the barrel at Akira, bloody and bruised, is where things get hard.
“I don’t want to do this,” Goro says.
Akira stares at him. He looks exhausted, in pain, and Goro wants nothing more than to pick him up in his arms and carry him home, bandage up his wounds, kiss him goodnight and make sure - even at the cost of his own safety - that nothing bad ever happens to him again. God damn it, being in love is so hard; for years he’s been focused on nothing but revenge, and now his hand is shaking and he can’t pull the trigger and he’s coughing again and he’s on the floor and it hurts so much it hurts hurts hurts to be in love.
The gun drops from his hand and he writhes about on the floor, finding it harder and harder to breathe with each passing moment. His hands claw at his throat as he coughs up roses this time, thorns and all - he feels them cutting into his cheeks before he can spit them out, and he’s too overwhelmed by suffocation that he can’t talk. He wants to tell Akira that he never wanted to kill him, that he’s dying because of that, but all he can choke out is a strangled gasp.
And then his body gives up a little, just enough that he can’t move willingly any more. He still convulses with the pain and fullness in his throat, but his eyes fixate on Akira, wishing that he could just understand what he’s thinking. The dream has never seemed so far away, now.
It eventually comes to pass that his oxygen-starved brain gives one last hurrah, flooding his body with a feeling of finality and warmth. He’s unsure whether he’s hallucinating or not - the product of a death-flood of serotonin - but he could swear that Akira is next to him, holding his head in his lap, brushing his hair out of his face, telling him that it’s okay, he knows, he forgives him, he can let go now.
Goro can let go now.
And he does.