Archive of Our Own

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

~ Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

Even in dreams, where the mind wanders forever in Maruki’s Garden of Eden, there are interludes. At times the body stirs to a thinner slit of glow, to morning faint around the edges of curtains and sills like the line between one horizon and another. Here the light pressed against his eyelids is forgiving, a hushed reminder of the prospect of trains and classrooms that can wait just a little longer. The alarm hasn’t gone off. There’s still time.

And time is still. 

Kurusu Akira turns on his side in the attic at Leblanc, the phone dead under his armpit, but this time instead of sinking down (down) into warm gold and grass  he is jerked upward, parted from his sheets by a force tight on his t-shirt, the whiplash as his head falls back enough to knock the haze out of him in one breath —

Don’t expect to walk out of here in one piece. 

He hangs there, against will, against the shock of so much darkness, so much shouting into his ears from fuck knows who. Someone is shaking him, growing rougher by the moment. He makes no protest, not even against the slap that comes; the way out is close. All he needs is a few moments more — already the garden dances on the insides of his vision, cajoling and insistent, only to be met with the equal and opposite force of the barrel of a gun slammed into the center of his brow. 

Now that wakes him. 

The voice hisses, “You really are attic trash.” A voice his mind sees, his skin knows, before his gaze does, a voice shaped darkly around this cold metal on his skin like a —

“Kiss,” Akira tries to deadpan, though it comes out as a rasp. “No kiss to wake me? Real charming, Prince.”

Because even before the rest of his memories catch up with him he knows with a shivering certainty that he’s staring, eyes wide like screams, into the face of one Akechi Goro, whose expression is so harsh as to be alien. As it was before. Or perhaps it’s the way the pre-dawn makes shape and shadow of half-things. In any case it is not entirely the one he remembers. 

And time picks up again. 

Goro (it can only be Goro) says, the heat of his body close over his, “You’re in no state for stupid jokes -” 

“You started it -”

“We’re getting out of here. There isn’t much time.” 

Suddenly there’s scrambling and pulling. Akira can’t tell who’s doing what or why he should expect strength enough to push the gun away from him and to dig his hands into Goro’s jacket at the same time. His body can’t decide which life to be. The part of him that stings from Goro’s blows twists out from his grasp, hurls itself off the bed, manages a few scoots forward on floor so choked with dust it makes him shudder. 

He’s been put to sleep for… how long, exactly? 

He coughs into the room, feeling a phantom boot against his ear, the rain of blows from invisible hulking figures. Don’t expect to walk out of here. Don’t expect to… The Garden of his dreams was eternal day, soft and warm as a palm. Now everything is too dark. From behind a weapon is slid back into a coat before footsteps near, and a hand takes him firmly by the shoulder, and Akira’s long-suppressed terror catches up with him, unwinds into a thrashing on the floor. 

“What did Maruki do to you,” the man who is Goro says. Holding him down. Holding him. 

Maruki protected me, Akira thinks, his mouth full of tears and snot and overgrown hair. He’s left Eden behind. No more sweet oblivion against the intrusion of the interrogation room. No nothing against what enchanted sleep has staved off on his behalf for what must have been years. But here is the front of Goro's shirt that he smears with his tears, his breaths, here he is, shaking just as hard through their death-grip on each other at the base of the wall.

“Alright, alright.” Goro’s words come in a long exhale, softer and closer than Akira ever thought possible. “Maybe we can wait a little while.” 

***

There are so many questions he has, though each one calls from underwater. Every thought is slippery. Through it all the one sharpness seems to be Goro, if only because he is here, real and solid beside him. But then again Goro has always been this, the snag in the pattern that his mind hooks itself on. Is it any wonder that he is the easiest of all the memories that are beginning to return? 

At some point Akira manages to pull himself away, even to rise to his feet. Now that the shock is over, now that he’s breathing again. 

“You can walk?” Goro says blandly, watching him. 

And through the soup of his brain that’s whispering temptations of sleep, of silence, even now, Akira pulls a smirk. “You think this is real life?” 

He knows what all this is, even with his eyes still searching the rafters for Eden’s golden light and the other half of his head struggling to break out of the interrogation room. Knows it precisely because he has been gone long enough to tell the difference. The only reason his body, left alone for so long, isn’t an emaciated half-corpse by now is because Maruki’s powers have tended to him as he would a patient, cared enough to feed him from the fruit trees of a new world ruled by his brand of compassionate logic. 

Why hasn’t Maruki simply killed him, he wonders. They all wondered that at some point, didn’t they, back then (back when?). Him and his thieves (no, not his, not anymore). The names return slowly, each with a pang: Ryuji, Ann, Futaba, Yusuke, Haru, Sumire, Morgana... 

Akechi. Goro, rather. “Let’s get you out, then,” the man himself says after a grim pause. “Grab your phone.” 

Somehow they make it down the stairs as a gangly tangle of limbs, shoulder jammed into chest where it should’ve been support, ankle hooked with ankle meeting wall and step. Akira stumbles twice as his legs become a universe of pins that threaten to buckle into the back of Goro’s knees. “Shadows congregate around anomalies — you, and your being awake, in other words.” Goro is explaining things in barely contained impatience. “They were already on my tail when I made my way here. So we need to keep moving.” 

“You realise I understand exactly none of that.” Akira’s still leaning into Goro, feeling a thickness rise in his throat. “I… what happened. The last thing I remember after we missed the deadline was me talking to Maruki-sensei, in his office.” In prison attire. He must already have been asleep, then. “‘Sweet dreams’, he said...”

And Akira gave in, didn’t he? 

“What happened,” says Goro bitterly, his grip on Akira tightening, “is the world you more or less asked for.” 

So why did you wake me, is the question Akira most wants to ask but it turns his tongue to sludge. I didn’t ask to be woken. 

Didn’t ask for… this. At the bottom of the stairs an empty Leblanc becomes visible in gentle silhouettes, the outlines of its seats and counter holding its breath in wait for the beginning of the day. Any moment now, he thinks, and realises with a great lump in his throat that he is bracing himself for the tinkle of the bell that signals Sojiro’s arrival. Was that not just yesterday? 

“Sakura Sojiro will be here anytime, and you’re not supposed to be here like this.” It's as if Goro's read Akira's mind. He’s still keeping his hand on Akira’s back even though he is standing all by himself now. “You’re variable x in a rigidly closed and policed system that isn’t too forgiving on distortions. Maruki will correct every glitch in his absurd narrative. If you value Sakura’s safety, you’ll keep from destabilizing his cognition by letting him see you.”

Akira laughs in bewilderment. “I really don't understand. And I need a bath.” 

“You look like shit,” Goro agrees.

Akira laughs still more, bent almost double from the weight of it, at the sight of his reflection in the Leblanc bathroom when he bangs it open.  Apparently it hasn’t received the cobwebs treatment the way the attic has, while his own appearance can only be described as… edenic. Funny. But in spite of the way his lips curve he doesn’t feel even a tinge of the Trickster he’s supposed to be, sees no one else in the face that stares back at him in the mirror. 

“About earlier.” Goro’s still lingering behind, face turned away. “It was the only way to get you to focus.” 

“Yeah.” Akira wonders how much more of a mess he is that it takes the horror of his not-murder to wake him up, notwithstanding the rest of the trauma. “It worked. Could I… be alone for a moment?” 

***

He washes his hands. He washes the roughness of his face. He pulls the weighty clump of his hair into a tail clipped at the nape of his neck. He stands over the bidet and waits for nothing.

This is how the body works, this is what routine is, and neither feel like his. 

This is how time works in the unreal real, then, or the real unreal. Time is told by the shifting of shadows across a table striped by rays. By the little chirps and vibrations against his elbow as his phone is restored to life at the counter, although he is content merely to watch the face of its screen fill up with notifications from a ticking world. By the chimes of bicycles passing, voices rising in greeting from just beyond the door before fading again, from the occasional percussion of footsteps striding or tapping in and out of earshot.

But what is told may lie.

A glass of water sits beside him. Some crackers. Goro put them there but he hasn’t touched any of them, even with a voice scratched dry from disuse, and Goro hasn’t asked. 

At least he can make out with clarity now the shape of the coffee makers, the surfaces of the coffee jars stacked in their proper places on the shelves, the bulk of the fridge and behind it, even, the identity of those dark and domestic shapes in the pantry. The smell is so familiar that the ache in him threatens once more to spill over, but he owes it to Goro to hold it back.

“Bet you missed my coffee,” he says at last, breaking a silence that has lasted for god knows how long. Of course, of the million things he wants to ask, he says this. Perhaps he really doesn’t want to know anything at all, after all. 

From a few seats away Goro straightens, sliding an insistently buzzing phone back into his pocket.

“Not at all,” he returns, so easily that it must be otherwise, or else something else is there. “You forget that Maruki’s basically made a vending machine of reality. And now if you’re done feeling sorry for yourself, we really should go.”

Goro’s right about the self-pity, he supposes. Which means Akira has half a mind to resist, petty as it is, since Goro and the whole fucking cognitive melting pot know by now: the cold stone of shame that sits in his gut and turns every thought into a thing to run away from. He wants to say he didn’t ask to be released from the spell; he wants to remind him of his obsolescence. Once upon a time he was the leader of the Phantom Thieves, and then he failed them, failed to reach Maruki’s Treasure; now he’s just Rip Van Winkle. And maybe neither version of him exists anymore in the libraries of the collective mind. 

And yet there’s another part of him that’s slowly coming to, that he could never quite repress before, the cause of all his old troubles: curiosity. 

He does want to see this world and what Maruki has made of it, false as it is, irrevocably merged with Mementos as it is. He does want to see Goro. Properly. 

With effort he pushes himself from the seat and follows Goro out into the open. While Akechi locks the cafe (Akira doesn’t ask how he got the key), he shivers and blinks into the new day all around him: a brightness that doesn’t just pulse with a Garden’s sameness, like a womb. This is a breathing, moving set of color, and his eyes and ears can’t follow them enough, the bird from one pole to another, the flutter of a leaf from a neighbor’s potted plant, the train’s gray dragging across his glimpse. And here, below his feet, Loki’s unmistakable black-and-white pattern, a cellophane overlay observable only in mid-squint round the threshold of the cafe and up its walls. 

Akira’s gaze trails the length of it up to a hovering Hereward, an opaque cloud against a Yongen-jaya morning at the end of summer.

“You learn to improvise in this world,” Goro explains as he begins walking, and Hereward vanishes while the patterns follow. “Maruki was never the only person with power in Mementos. We devised what you might call wards against Shadow interference, to make temporary safe rooms for ourselves.”

“We.” 

And Akira just stands there, arms crossed against the chill, the pain in him lifting into a sudden relief that hurts just as much. 

“So Maruki’s got tentacles and you’ve got… zebra crossings. You know, Ann,” he nearly weeps again to pronounce his friend’s name aloud, “she always said —“

“I told her leopard prints are passé.”

Finally he stops and turns, looking unimpressed at the distance between himself and the characteristic slouch of a dizzy, unshorn Akira, an Akira wordless and about to crumple before the entire holiness of creation that has granted Akechi Goro with bickering friends, all of them presumably aware and awake and well. Akira’s friends, although he doesn’t deserve them anymore. Under the sun it’s clearer now, the build Goro’s grown elegantly into, a frame different from what he remembers back and front — still lean, but longer and topped off with a careless sprig of a ponytail. 

“What...? You’re not thinking some bullshit like this reality suits me, are you? Spare our new god the details, please.” Goro rolls his eyes upwards as if Maruki’s smiling down at them in bespectacled sageliness. 

He might very well be, honestly.

“God,” Akira says, reminiscing in the grin of a broken man, “might grant my request to give you better dungeon gear. I liked the claws and spikes but not so much those diagonals.” 

“Touche. You play Sleeping Beauty for three years and suddenly you’re the purveyor of hard truths? If you’re going to stare so hard at my ass, you might as well keep up.” 

“I mean.” He’s still smarting at the sudden goddamned beauty of everything. Does he still love the World? Is he permitted to? “I haven’t seen it for three years.”

“How did you live before?” Goro is very, very, dry. 

There’s something here, again. Something curious in this back-and-forth of theirs, clipped though it has been; Goro’s familiarity can’t be earned so rapidly in the course of years. Actual or otherwise. 

Even if they did kiss once, it could have been a lifetime ago, near the end of Maruki’s Palace. In Eden.

“So.” Akira ignores the crack in his voice as they resume walking, turning another corner of the backstreets. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know where they’re going; he hadn’t known for a long time, had he. “I deserve a re-introduction, don’t I? Tell me about yourself, Akechi Goro.”

“It’s mostly just Crow, these days.” Goro flicks a palm-sized device out of his pocket and presses it for a returning beep from a parked vehicle tucked neatly into the side of a street. A simple gray Toyota, sleek outlines, nothing that hollers for attention to itself either, but Akira gapes at it. “We’re at war with Maruki’s reality.”

“Didn’t think war would look so ordinary,” Akira remarks, gesturing about them and Goro just shrugs his shoulders and flips a finger to the sky.

They get in. 

***

After a moment Akira says the obvious, with a bit of a pout to it: “I guess you got your license.” 

Stupid. Of course the world has moved on without him. Even if it’s all false.

And as they begin the drive, the window blurs and drags more of it from his gaze like a trippy horror scene, the flesh of things pulled from the bones of things in colorful slow-motion. No chirps, no neighborhood banter, only the chemical smell of air-conditioner and the music that comes on as if from very far away. It’s a song he remembers, though he struggles to bring the band to mind, their beats and crashes hitting spots in his mind that don’t come alive. 

He turns away from the view to watch instead the way Goro’s gloved hands rest on the steering wheel as the car maneuvers nimbly out of the tiny compound, sliding onto the main road. As assuredly as his old prince’s demeanor, Akira thinks. All the while, though, there is noise from Goro’s phone, rattling against the door. 

“Aren’t you going to take that?” 

Goro sighs very loudly. Lifts a hand from the wheel to stick a bud in his ear and make a perfect sharp turn at the same time. Akira has to admire the elegance of it. Then a woman’s familiar voice enters the fray, yelling through Goro’s right side; Goro is swearing while he slams on the brakes and snatches the voice out of his ear and tosses everything, phone and all, into the backseat.  

“That was…” Akira swallows. “Makoto.”

Goro huffs as the car picks up speed again, coasting smoothly along the borders of Tokyo buildings.

“Was it about me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Akira, you’re not the only thing we disagree on.”

“I'm glad. I’m so glad.” Akira slides down further in his seat. “All of you… are okay. In a sense. Please tell me that.”

There’s a long pause until they come to a traffic intersection, and then Goro says, “You didn’t think they made it without you? And that having awakened they wouldn’t make you their priority? Well.” The lights flick green; they’re off again. “Now you’ve learned what it’s like to be rescued.”

“I did, before.” Akira’s remembering the interrogation room again, and he closes his eyes against it and it’s worse. 

“Did that count?”

“I… suppose.”

He’s recalling their entire plan, a devil’s scheme hinged on probabilities to save him from the clutches of the very man sitting beside him now, in November of a certain year in a certain age from a certain life. A life that feels like it belongs to someone else, now, even if the beatings it bore that evening revisited him each day after in nightmares. 

“Goro.” Is this a plea? He hates himself for his weakness. He has a sudden urge to thud his head against the window. “I’m — I’m not Joker anymore. I can’t talk to them.” 

The space where Arsène sits, in the middle of his chest, is silent. 

“That won’t be a concern,” Goro responds levelly. “I’m taking you to my apartment. It's safest. You’ll be under observation for a while; I’ll need to see how much of an impact your awakening is having on this reality.”

“Could you explain that, please.”

Goro complies, turning down the volume on yet another cheery old track on the radio. “Maruki’s world is defined by stability — stagnation, I should say. It reproduces convenience and positive outcomes in a tight feedback loop. Ripple effects are a problem for Maruki, so any small deviation — a stray memory, a careless thought of harm, a moment of sadness, a lack — is readily picked up on and corrected. Or fulfilled. Full awareness is rare and more dangerous, so Shadows show up when that happens to take more drastic measures.” He pauses, his gaze as ever on the road. “We’ve all more or less been on the run for… a while.”

“In other words…” Akira takes a deep breath. “This world’s basically a Palace at a 100% security level.” 

“Exactly.” Goro sounds almost approving. 

“‘A while’, you said?” How long? He wants to know numbers, precise measurements. Anything that can take form as a sharper outline.

“Could be months. Calendar time is meaningless.” Goro says this in a careless air, but Akira hears the weariness in his voice.

“What sort of… drastic measures?” 

Now Goro glances over at him. “Maruki’s been really quite merciful to you.”

Akira looks out the window again. Tokyo is coming to life, the roads filling with more cars than before, the pavements streaked with more and more denizens striding towards work or school with a noticeable spryness in their step. People like balloons, many-hued yet empty: how many are lobotomised husks of their old selves? Cognitions? Harmless actualisations? A thought occurs to him then. “You said… my awakening might be screwing with Maruki’s system. Not just my presence. You mean, I’m alive or presumed dead in this reality? I have, or had, an existence?”

This time Goro’s voice is even dryer than before. “Your friends were experiencing a fundamental lack in their existences, after a while. It was you. So there arrived a cognition of you that lived among us for a time.”

Akira finds, quite suddenly, that his face is wet for the second time this morning. 

He covers his eyes with a hand, leans his neck against the headrest. He’d always wondered if he was there to fill the voids in their lives, that his importance to them lasted as long as it did for the permanence of their pain. And as it turns out, they’re stronger than him, after all. 

They've also always loved him.

The song that comes on, fittingly, is another popular one from a Shujin summer. Its bops flit after the scraps of his memories like sparrows, filling him with a nostalgia that is almost unbearable. Goro side-eyes Akira without comment, then raises the volume of the track as it spirals towards its end and the deejay announces its fourth position on Japan’s lists for the week. 

At length, Akira asks, thickly, “How are these still chart-topping tracks?” 

“It’s a roulette every month among the same three hundred hits since city pop. Gold never gets old, and all that.”

Then there is a brief interlude of news by an anchor whose excitement is an autotuned breathiness. The headlines are all of donations, thanksgiving parties, successes at competitions and concerts and ventures. Akira doesn’t even need more than a minute or two of these before it gets grating. It’s a wonder Goro’s keeping the radio on, or maybe it’s part of Akira’s induction into this reality.

Or maybe Goro’s being vindictive. He wouldn’t put it past even this older, more assured version of him.

“I’m assuming that the reason why Sojiro can’t see me is because he shouldn’t see two of me?” 

Goro says quietly, “There aren’t two of you anymore.”

“Oh.” 

Oh. 

They’re traveling through the central parts of Tokyo now, the buildings growing in height and color, silhouettes of steel huddling together in the distance as they draw steadily closer. Their surroundings have begun to fill with bubble-words, glowing commercials, movement both digital and real; but Akira isn’t watching them, is staring at Goro as he continues, “Sakura is living with the impression that we’re on holiday.” 

We. Both of them…? 

“That’s the official word to everyone who knows us, since our absences give us greater leave to fight him,” Goro continues. “And Maruki cares enough about stability that it works in our favor. He’s not fucking with this cognition for now, so we’re not technically supposed to be recognised in Yongen-Jaya. Or Tokyo. More importantly, there’s no telling what could happen if people interacted with you.”

“Ah. Both you and Maruki are trying to avoid, uh, what was that term? Collateral damage.” It’s still a lot to absorb at once. “So Sojiro thinks we’re…”

“For context.” Goro’s clearly reluctant to explain this bit. “We’re friends at the same university, all of us, according to Maruki. We met almost every day for the last thousand days. It’s all very stupid and saccharine.”

You don’t mind it as much as you think you do, Akira thinks. But now they’re here, stopping for a few minutes at the center of the world, the world that’s smiling at Shibuya’s scramble crossing. Akira observes it as an audience at a silent movie, watches lives stream over the crosswalks in myriads of shades and ornaments, people holding hands or phones or briefcases in an oblivion so complete it is, frankly, something to envy.  Everything about Akira still feels too heavy, his head, his torso, the fullness in his throat and behind his eyes that still threaten to drag him into collapse.   

It was here, too, that the MetaNav froze the world for him on that very first day. 

His phone is in his pocket. He doesn’t touch it, doesn’t unlock it to check. 

The traffic lights snap to green and the crossing disperses,  but the cars don’t move. “What’s the hold-up?” Goro mutters from beside him, and is the first to slam the car horn. 

About them other cars start up, slow and reluctant at first until they become a badly-tuned goose choir. Goro winds down the windows to peer out and the world bursts in on Akira, too much too soon. The noise makes his head throb. He leans out too, wincing, to see a woman standing stricken right in the middle of the crosswalks, a haunted stare directed into the distance at something that isn’t quite there. At least, nothing that Akira can discern from where he is from three or so car lengths away. But even then there’s a wrongness to this that prickles across his skin: here is a clockwork universe that’s met a bump in the tracks. 

Then the woman falls to her knees. The honks stop. Silence hangs for a single long moment before doors flip open, hitting others in their frenzy, people climbing out of their cars to spectate with a curious sympathy an emotion so old it has become alien: distress.

“Fuck,” Goro hisses. “Of all the times and places to come aware—”

People start moving in on the woman through a jammed-up five-way intersection. In the distance, sirens wail. 

“We have to move. This is bad. Shadows.” Goro at least remembers to grab his phone before bolting out of the vehicle, screams at Akira who’s still dazedly staring at everything. “MOVE, you idiot!” 

Akira finds himself forcibly dragged out of the car, his elbow and knees scraping asphalt for a couple of seconds. He’s actually shouting in return, the protest drawn out of him by some old instinct he hasn’t realised still exists: 

“What’s going to happen to her?”

“Happiness.” Goro’s seething into his face, hauling him to his feet by the front of his shirt like before. “There’s nothing you can help with. You’re a liability!”

I’m a joke, Akira thinks numbly as Goro drags him by his arm through the growing tendrils of onlookers. A joke. He’s staggering more than he’s running, grasping at things as if they’re about to slide out of reach. As both of them pound their way through the tangle he has a strange sense that he’s losing himself again, pulled deeper into the ground with each weighty step. Dimly, gasping for air, he registers faint black-and-white lines trailing alongside them as they disappear into another part of the city. 

***

Somehow, before the rest of Akira gives out, they find someone’s briefly forgotten bicycle, left leaning against the side of a shop. 

It even has a pillion seat. “How convenient,” Akira remarks. 

And they’re off. 

“This world is — a — wishing well,” Goro reminds him through gritted teeth as he pumps, and Akira is so close to his back, his warmth, his little ponytail that swings against his mouth from time to time. He holds him carefully, breathes in his nearness as finally the streets grow smaller, shorter, quieter. 

Akira isn’t sure how much time passes as they bump and careen through Tokyo’s residential districts. He’s only too aware of the screaming soreness that has developed in unnameable parts of his body, his body that was folded into a delicate flower on a bed for three whole years (or more, or less). Of the throb in his elbow whose bleeding, at least, has finally caked into a red coin-shaped patch. Of the coolness of autumnal breeze, seeping into old bones and making him shiver. Signs and names of places whiz by them, too quickly for him to re-learn them. He’s still as lost as ever. 

Goro’s apartment block is a homey set of soil-colored cells, overrun by gardening and sandwiched between two taller, shinier buildings. Akira nearly tumbles from the bicycle when they finally arrive, and Goro makes a noise of annoyance as he catches Akira. Again. He barely gives the stolen bicycle a backwards glance as he lifts Akira up by the armpits and drags them both towards the elevator landing, not without some furtive looks about to check that no one is following them. And Akira is beginning to feel shame — a boy’s shame, the kind that creeps up scarlet at getting caught reading a lewd magazine under the covers. His physical dependence on Goro has a pleasing advantage, to be sure, but it’s becoming quite ridiculous. 

“Sorry,” he finds himself mumbling on repeat, which Goro also ignores on repeat. 

The feeling doesn’t quite leave him as the elevator takes them upwards, although it takes on a different hue. In spite of himself his pulse quickens. This is where Akechi Goro stays. This is what he leaves each morning and returns to in the evening, these are the walls that encase him from four angles three hundred and sixty-five days a year. This place that knows a mystery that Akira has been wondering about since their first meeting. 

As they exit and move towards his apartment it’s clear which one it is. At a whisper from Goro a filmy version of Hereward’s chest markings forms itself on the door at the end of the empty corridor. The apartment’s ‘warded’, then. 

“Has it been possible at all,” Akira abruptly asks, “to differentiate between a shadow, a cognition and a real person in a merged reality?”

“I’ve killed a few neighbors,” Goro says simply.

Of course. Akira thinks about this a little before saying, “And me.”

“Not you.”

Abruptly, he lets go of Akira, who drops like a loose bag of bones as Goro strides forward to unlock the door. A door that Akira notices has at least three different locks on it.  

“Twice now.” Akira’s rubbing the back of his neck and smiling up, somehow, at Goro’s back. “Thank you,” he adds in a quieter voice. For all that he’s done. For being the only one to see him this vulnerable since the start of his too-long adolescence.

“Get in quickly before we're seen,” is all Goro says.

***

This is what Goro does upon Akira’s arrival at his apartment: he changes out, takes a shower, orders take-out, and scrolls through his phone in baleful silence from an all-seeing corner of the apartment. 

This is what Akira does: he takes a shower, shaves his face, takes a pair of scissors to his hair, rifles through Goro’s drawers for clothes that fit (most still do), applies antiseptic cream to his cuts, boils water, wipes off the dust on Goro’s picture frames (there are lots of photographs if little else, of smiling people and of a woman with his eyes), wipes down the small TV screen, tidies an already immaculate work desk (that earns a him a vicious bark or two), stands at the window. Putters around the sparse two-room apartment as best as he can with unadjusted limbs, helping himself to answers on Goro’s existence. 

Always with Goro pretending not to watch him, but otherwise making no protest. No move to help, no shallow attempt at hospitality. 

Then again, Goro isn’t here to play host. 

He suspects Goro’s letting him for the same reason he’s keeping himself moving and busy: he is fighting sleep. Fighting the whisper of Eden that strengthens every time he so much as looks at the apartment’s single couch or its queen-sized bed. The cognition of bedrest, Lavenza once said of Shujin’s nurse’s office, or something to that effect. 

The queen-sized bed, though. 

There are other clues: the second toothbrush stowed in a corner of the bathroom cabinet, the coffee machine, the jars of coffee beans with dust coating their lids, the pots and pans and knives he wouldn’t have expected from a man whose fridge is lined up with instant meals from Triple 7. The carefully folded blue and black shades he’s found in Goro’s wardrobe, too. 

He’s certain by the time the takeout arrives at their door, a simple affair of steaming ramen, which Goro nudges across the table at him without a word. Akira pries his gaze from the revelation of Goro’s ungloved fingers and stares down at the bowl, feeling nothing. 

“What?” 

“I’m not hungry. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, I just… I suppose not all of me is entirely back yet. I can drink water and pee, though,” he adds, “so I think that’s progress.”

“Suit yourself.” Goro just picks up his chopsticks and eats from his own, as neatly and decisively as a hamster.

Akira attempts the ramen broth. It’s Ichiran. Good stuff, and they both know it, and Goro’s doing this for him instead of a heated-up combination of preservatives. But it’s all water and ash on his tongue. He shakes his head. 

“I’m sorry. I’ll help you to store it for dinner, if you like.” He rises to do exactly this.

He can’t tell him, after all, that in dreams he was naked and eating the fruit of paradise right from Maruki’s palm. At least, it’s what it felt like. 

When Goro’s done he cleans up after him. Then pulls up one of the two apartment’s two chairs to his corner, where Goro is putting up an intense show of preoccupation with his laptop, and just comes right out with it. “You were close with him. The other me.”

Goro shuts the lid of his laptop, his face impassive. 

“Not in the way you think. It wasn’t entirely me who was close with him.”

“What does that mean?”

“I wasn’t always aware. Maruki had me under his thumb for a significant period of time.” Goro’s pointedly looking at anywhere but Akira’s face. He adds, in a bitter sort of pride, “Of course, my coming to was inevitable.”

“Because your unconscious keeps rejecting any form of protracted happiness, doesn’t it?”

There’s a beat in which Goro collects himself before he responds. “As it turns out, my unconscious is made of sterner stuff than yours.”

“0-1,” Akira says ironically, brushing the jab aside. “Nice, we’re competing again. So. Did you… know immediately that it wasn’t me?”

“No.”

“How did you find out?”

Goro lets out a grim exhale. “Everything was too easy.”

“If it’s not a chess game, it’s not compelling. Is it?”

“Playing mental chess is the only way to be sure of yourself in a simulation, by the way.”

“And are you sure?”

“No.”

Akira glances around at the apartment, once again, at its crisp lines and its sheer lack of indulgences; the set of Featherman figurines on the bookshelf and its array of book titles the only color in the room. Many of the photographs on the wall are in black and white. Why? Is it a reminder of the irretrievable, as opposed to the illusory?

“Your… mother. She’s… in this reality?” 

The seconds tick by before Goro says, “Yes. But it’s not her.”

Akira stares at Goro’s face, with eyes more lined and tired than the younger self he knew, a half-scowl now locked permanently into his jaw. It lends his features a new edge. This is no longer a face as familiar with pretense. “Is it worth it?” he asks gently. “Living like that, still looking over your shoulder all the time.”

“It’s better than losing.”

It’s always been difficult between the both of them. Getting to the heart of the matter. Saying it. And Akira’s falling back on old methods even now, in a voice lighter than before: “I suppose you found out about me because my cognitive double lost where I never would have.” 

“On the contrary.” Goro seems to straighten at this. “He was by all accounts — and I mean all, considering Metaverse big data and the combination of cognitions he relied on for his creation — you. But Maruki couldn’t resist putting on some finishing touches to make you a perfect version of yourself, as it were.” Against all odds, his mouth curves into something of a smirk. “I had a hunch when you quoted Sartre, whom I never recalled you reading.”

“I'm sorry, what? I would’ve been a defect to you because of a missing book in my mental library? 

“Maruki’s a rather one-dimensional fanfiction author, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll take that to mean I still have what it takes. Glad to hear Maruki didn’t spoil you or anything.” He returns the smirk, because it’s easier, it’s almost like old times. “Although you would have enjoyed correcting me.”

“Do you know, I did correct your double, regardless.”

“Oh? What did I do, said Sartre could suck it?”

Goro gives him a withering look.

“Sartre has a line on existential anguish, that we’re, in his words, ‘condemned to be free’. Which means we have complete responsibility for every success and tragedy we engineer by sheer choice. Conscious or not. ” And Akira is actually smiling, enjoying this, the lecturing tone that’s two parts impatience and one part excitement whenever the detective prince goes into philosopher mode; at least this hasn’t changed. “So — he was a little too keen on emphasizing the pathos of the ‘condemned’ bit. I started getting the sense that I was becoming manipulated by a propaganda mouthpiece wearing your face.”

“Maruki’s not inaccurate. I’ve never liked that word, ‘condemned’.”

“As you’ve reminded me time and again.”

Goro’s tone is careless enough that Akira knows it’s nothing like the throwaway remark he wants it to be. So many years, Akira realises, and Goro still can’t fully believe it. 

“So you also deduced that ‘I’ — inverted commas — was fake because you thought I wouldn’t be able to forgive you for all that you did.” His voice is heavy. “Do we really have to go through that again?”

And now Goro is looking at him. “I only thought you shouldn’t be able to forget all of it. I was terribly disappointed.”

“You’re not the only one disappointed in me.” The words are out before he can stop himself. He’s imposed on Goro enough; he doesn’t need his self-pity to do the same. After a moment, he clears his throat and adds, “I’m still thankful to Maruki in some ways. That you’re alive.”

Goro just assumes a look of boredom at this admission. 

“I don’t know what’s keeping me here.” The emphasis is careful and unmissable. “It could simply be his Messiah complex at work. He might have seen me as a shining trophy in his cabinet of successes. Or I might be bait. For you. If you ever woke up properly all on your own.”

“I doubt it. I haven’t told you, but...” Akira curls each finger in on itself as if his hands have anything in them to read. “When I was sleeping, Maruki put my mind in Eden.” 

Eden: the last tier they couldn’t complete before the deadline, the garden that slowed them down so badly en route to the Treasure. Eden, Maruki’s botanical lab in which wills are broken. Now Akira can’t meet Goro’s gaze when it’s finally keen on him. 

“The whole point of Maruki is he hides things in plain sight,” Goro says at length. “He removed the attic from our cognitions, so for a very long time none of us suspected your body might simply have been in Leblanc all this while. Sojiro said he’d boarded it up… We did go once to Eden after to see if you might be there, but it was as impossible to find our way through as you remember it.” He pauses, then opens his laptop again to return properly to it. A dismissal. A reproval.

“I take it you enjoyed the experience.” 

Akira thinks of Eden, of the eternity spent plumbing its green alleys and entrances that open into other warm, leafy worlds, afternoons and afternoons of mild sun and sweet dew and most of all — a calm, wordless quiet without lack and imperfection, no gap he needs to fill. No help needed, no him. The world at peace with itself at last. 

“I did want to stay,” he whispers, knowing himself for the traitor he probably is. His susceptibility is more proof than ever that the Thieves’ failure was his fault. He turns and stares into sunlight that doesn’t sting his eyes, and when he finally shifts his gaze, there’re only dancing flares on the inside of his eyelids, like a veil against Goro’s typing from very far away. 

***

The hours pass on that first day. 

Akira has spent many of these watching, in intervals between conversations and cleaning and half-hearted interactions with the TV, the sky and its colors turning. Each time he looks up to find it changed, he finds himself surprised all over again. When night slips into the apartment, Akira begins flipping every light switch in the apartment. By nine o’clock he’s taken up permanent residence by the brightest lamp as if to warm his hands by a winter’s fire. 

“What?” He sounds petulant even to himself as Goro nears, giving Akira’s curled form a last once-over. 

“I’m going to bed,” he announces.

“This early?” Not that he feels the difference — all of time is already too heavy. 

“You should get some rest yourself. Eventually.”

Akira gives a laugh as Goro turns away and into his bedroom, the room with a queen-sized bed that his slimness only takes half of. “I think I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime.”

The door shuts but doesn’t click. 

Akira watches it for a long while, expectancy dipping into an odd hollowness, torn between knocking on an ajar door and keeping his hands to himself. But he isn’t about to begrudge Goro his privacy, even if it's not that late. Even if there’s so much unsaid and undone between them that all of it is curling into a knot in his belly. After all, Goro’s vigilance needs a break. From the number of lights Akira has to keep on to feel safe, too. 

More hours tick by. The back of his eyes is now setting up a low buzz, and his head feels as if it’s an emptied bottle turned over and lowered into quicksand. But he ploughs on, through Goro’s bookshelf and his Sartre collection this time. In Being and Nothingness he starts at finding his own handwriting tucked into a corner of the title page. 

Akira reads the message dated for a year ago. Over and over. 

Suddenly the apartment is too small for all that he’s feeling, and he goes to the front door, undoes the lock on that one, and pushes it open to greet the fullness of a cold night breeze against his face. 

If his cognitive self was composed of every cognition of him that existed in Mementos, who’s to say ‘he’ wasn’t ‘him’? What if any version of him now is the equivalent of a former incarnation in an eternal recurrence? Is there really anything in him, unknowable to everyone including himself, that defines him? Who’s to say this version of him is any better, any closer to what Goro’s tried so hard to protect and reject today? 

What if the ‘real’ him is nothing like what Goro and the rest loved and saved him for? 

Perhaps he’s only good for dreaming. Perhaps he really shouldn’t have been brought back. “Say, Arsène,” Akira says to the air through jittery teeth, “who the hell am I supposed to be?” 

No answer. Of course, he can’t expect Arsène to have the patience for such a half-arsed question. 

In the dimness Hereward’s markings over the threshold form patterns of red down the length of his arm. He holds it out and something in him trembles as if it’s stroked him along the skin. 

***

When he steps back into the apartment Goro is lingering in the doorway of the kitchen, ostensibly for a drink, since he’s not-watching Akira with a glass in hand. Akira isn’t surprised. Not by the possibility that Goro isn’t capable of sleep with the real Akira newly arrived in his home, or that he’s actually just been keeping tabs on the pretext of rest all this while. Or both. Probably both. 

“Same old bicycle outside?” Akira says casually to Goro as he enters and lounges against the wall.

“Same old,” Goro returns in the same manner as he tosses the glass in the sink. As if nothing’s up, nothing hovers, taut, in the space between them. “Nothing's ever worn out. Praise be to Maruki.” 

He makes to move past Akira but doesn’t make it. 

Akira catches him by the wrist and pulls him in, his mouth awkwardly finding Goro’s then pressing wetly against it in all his eager newness and longing. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this or what he needs to prove, but this, this is real. This human heat, the hands and fingers fumbling and tightening against his hair, shirt, a smell of musk and laundry at once so light and immediate he wants to sink his teeth into the warmth of everything. For a long, heady moment Goro is kissing him back, then he pulls away, holding Akira back by his shoulder so he can’t lean in. 

He’s breathing as hard as Akira is. “I don’t want him to see any of this,” he hisses. 

Who, Maruki? In spite of himself Akira huffs a bewildered laugh.  "That’s the problem? Isn’t this place warded?” 

Goro’s thumb is rough against Akira’s collarbone before he wrenches his hand back. “Everything around us is technically part of the Metaverse. Every thought, every —” Akira watches him bite down on the word. “...It gets out there eventually. Gets to him. ”

“Then is there a difference either way? What’s the harm?” Too late, isn’t it, and fuck if he cares — whatever they shared in a span of seconds, it’s filling the dry well of his senses so strongly that all of Mementos might as well be drowned in it. He needs — 

“I dislike the very idea that the bespectacled megalomaniac I have to thank for my afterlife is jerking off mentally to some fantasy of a star-crossed union.”

Wait. “It’s not a fantasy.” Doesn’t Goro feel the same? Hasn’t he been waiting for this since...? 

“Forget it, Akira. Get the bathroom. Do whatever the fuck you want in it, I don’t care. Don’t use me just because I made the mistake of fucking your cognition.” 

Fucking? He almost stupid-grins at that; he’s heard Goro curse before, of course, multiple times in a January snow that sometimes feels like yesterday and at other times, part of another person’s life. But the word shouldn’t sound this raw in such a context. This… angry. “Your feelings were real. And now I’m here. I’m really here,” he whispers, as Goro flinches very visibly at that and swipes Akira’s hand when it reaches for his. 

“Stop dreaming!” 

“I’m not.” Not anymore — isn’t that the point? 

“You’re not the one who’s lived for three years as a figment stuck in someone’s sick fancy,” Goro says in a low, warning voice. “You’re not the one who’s questioned and second-guessed every conscious thought and impulse because your mind’s been turned inside-out and nothing, nothing that’s visible, isn’t a product of it.” 

“Three years,” Akira echoes hollowly. 

Just how many of those three years has a cognitive copy of Kurusu Akira been a part of? How much of him was stitched in place by what people dreamed of him? How much of him was Goro’s, how long did they live in bliss before it all fell like a palace of cards? Does it feel worse than hell for Goro to see Akira now? Akira can’t fight it, the regret that now crashes down on him so strongly he could weep. But he’s not the only one broken by paradise. 

“I lost three more years of you, god damn it...”

Goro’s voice is very cold. “Oh, how forgetful of me. You didn’t have time to grieve for your murderer while you were busy getting wasted on dreams for almost half a decade.”

“You didn’t murder me and it wasn’t half a—”

“Akira. The fact is, I don’t even know you. You’re just a kid who woke up in an adult's body after years of playing Alice in Wonderland.”

Now that hurts. That hurts so fucking much. 

“Didn’t you say time was irrelevant before?” Akira shifts into his old slouch, hands in flappy bedtime pockets, a challenge. “What if this is the only reality we have left? If it is, then every single moment you resist happiness you’re wasting your damn time.”

“You don’t get to talk to me about time. My will is more important to me than anything else in this world. And you want me to give it up for an illusion?”

“It’s not an illusion if it’s permanent.”

Goro’s face is twisted into a sneer. “Maruki really did a number on you while you were sleeping, huh.”

“Is that why I’m under house arrest?” Akira says, very quietly. 

“Yes,” Goro hisses. “I’d put a bullet through your head again if I knew you were really just Maruki’s pawn, after all. And we can never be sure about that, can we? Your physical form doesn’t count for much, in the end, if you can be actualised at a snap of a finger. Maybe you’re not real. Maybe I’m not, maybe we’re all just cognitions who’ve performed this for the tenth time. I pointed a gun at you today. Again. So what? I still say, this is all I know of me.”

And Akira, Akira’s heart is really breaking. This still, after so long. If dreams can’t save, why can’t time? 

“It’s you getting yourself stuck in a loop, Goro. For the last time, you don’t want to kill me. You never wanted to. You need to stop letting yourself think you could if it came down to it.” Goro might as well be aiming to shoot, the way he’s looking at him. “ You got me — my body — whichever it is, whatever distinction that means anymore, out of Leblanc. That counts for something. Sometimes the choice is that simple. That honest.”

“Honesty’s a bullshit concept when nothing is real. You know what the irony is, Akira? This world suits my abilities perfectly . More than the old one ever did. Because bonds don't count for shit if Maruki’s imposed them on you. Because kindness can kill, this time.” Without warning, Goro’s cold smile blinks into being. “You don’t deserve someone who’s never going to trust himself, much less you.”

Deserve? Again? “Did you even listen ? You care so much about your precious will that you won’t even trust it? Does that even make sense?”

“Alright, Akira, you want honesty? I’ll give you honesty. I watched —"

He’s shouting. 

“— your blood run to nothing in this very room, on this very floor, and I am sick to death of seeing it.” 

This time he has to shove an advancing Akira into the wall. Akira’s dazed for a moment, staring wildly up at all of Goro’s pain so close, just a breath away. He could inhale it, take all of it into himself… and Goro recoils. Sags against the sink.

“Goro, I’m sorry. I —”

“You were right about the permanence. It’s not just the mind; the body knows. The body remembers. I didn’t just kill a bunch of people and your friends’ parents; I killed you twice. That’s just never going to change whether I’m punished or pitied or god forbid, 'forgiven', alright?” Goro’s fingers are tight on his scalp. “I killed you and it was you, at least to me, and it fucked me up. It fucked me up real badly. Is that what you want to hear to convince me that breaking the cycle’s not what I want?”

Akira’s mouth is dry. 

He knows too well, of course, the way the body bears the scars of a room, a fist, the cuts of words and silence long after the eyes close upon them. 

“Is that what  you want to hear so you can tell me I did the wrong thing by waking you up?”

“You didn’t.” And all at once Akira realises the truth of it, the same moment it’s spoken aloud. Like a spell or a summoning: somewhere, in the middle of his chest, Arsène flickers to life. “I’ll choose you. Whichever reality we’ve got. As you chose me, right?” 

The room’s suddenly silent for a long moment, both feeling the heaviness of fact between them. It’s a sickening set of paradoxes: if the cognition was little different from the real, then Goro has destroyed a being who loved him in return. The converse only implies yet another eternity of uncertainty. And it’s Akira whose failure is responsible for the impossibility of Goro’s happiness; but if he had succeeded, Goro might not have had a second chance at it at all. 

It’s indeed as Sartre has said: we are condemned to be free. 

All of it’s too complicated, and so of course Akira does the simplest thing he can do. He’s the one that crosses the room. Wrestles uselessly against Goro so that they collide against the tap, just to drape his arms around his shaking frame, but he needs it just as much as he does. 

“I know I can’t just… replace him, or anything, but for once — live in the present.” With me.

“Easy for you to say,” Goro manages raggedly, “you slept like a fucking baby.” 

“It’s the only sort of living that damned place ever taught me,” Akira mumbles into the crook of his neck, unsure of whose tears he tastes there. At least, for a while, Goro has stopped pushing him away. 

***

In the morning, long after he’s put Goro to bed, Akira finally feels the first pangs of hunger.

The sensation grounds him after hours of feeling transcendent from fatigue. He’s conditioned himself to wakefulness by now, but it’s made his head a bubble of fishmouthing thoughts, and the rest of him feels adrift. Gray as it is, morning offers relief, and as he throws open the windows to let it in, it’s impossible to deny a thin thread of adrenaline. He’s been alive for more than twenty-four hours now. Even if he feels quite the opposite from new. 

Akira presses two fingers to the growl of his stomach, pushes them in. At least he’s human again.

A while or so later the kitchen fills with the smells of coffee and other domestic edibles from scraps Akira has dredged up from the fridge. It is a simple scene in a humble setting, made unusual only by long black wings cresting towards the ceiling, brushing it each time their red-clad owner turns his head to follow Akira’s movements with a faceless curiosity. All other impossibilities considered (staying over at a dead crush’s apartment is one of them), having a conversation with one’s Persona over breakfast prep really isn’t the most bizarre thing to come out of a porous reality. 

“Much better than the fruits of the ‘spirit’, I take it,” Arsène is saying, watching Akira sip experimentally from the coffee he’s built from muscle memory alone. “You know, I was waiting for you to come around. Eden is too dull a place for the likes of us."  

“You’d best brace yourself, then. The Treasure’s still in there, I’m the only one who knows the way around, and I’m going to need your help.” He sets the coffee down, frowning a little; it isn’t exactly the way he remembered it. 

“That might be quite the interesting challenge, hm? Searching for clues in perfection ad nauseam. You’ll need a sharp eye in the sameness.”

“You think that’s what happened with Goro?” Akira muses in a low tone. “He got sick of perfection, or would have, eventually?”

“It wouldn’t have been sustainable,” Arsène agrees. “So you can stop wondering if it was better he’d never found out.”

Akira’s hands still over the cups. 

“You don’t belong in rest.” Entirely matter-of-fact. “He doesn’t belong in happiness.”

“That’s what he thinks,” Akira corrects him. Himself. 

“See? You’ve learned.” 

Akira has a very strange sense that Arsène is smirking. 

For now, though, Goro’s still refusing closeness. Understandably. And Akira, Akira doesn’t know how much of a self he has left to give, or how much of it even now is only a copy of what he was and wants to be. Goro’s right: he’s too new, and the years count for something. Most of all, Akira doesn’t know if he’ll ever match up to the life his cognition led with Goro, in a way that goes beyond personal inadequacy. What can one promise to a person who has tasted the fruit of paradise and found it bitter? 

“Give him time.”

“That’s the thing, isn’t it? He has a hell lot more of it now.” 

There’s no deadline on his existence now, either, and still Goro won’t pretend their mission is anything less than urgent. Speak of the devil: he’s even up early for no good reason Akira can think of, now, striding with purpose into the kitchen. Arsène bows himself out, his trademark red and black lines receding smoothly from the walls. Gloves replaced, phone in hand, Goro studies them before turning a hard gaze on Akira and the painful domesticity of the scene. 

It must be like stepping back in time. Akira watches emotion pass across Goro’s face before it assumes its guarded form. 

Morning, honey, Akira wants to say, but it’s too cruel, it’s unfair...

“I’ll be taking you to the Den,” is what Goro says flatly after a moment, almost a knee-jerk reaction to Akira’s unvoiced greeting. “Nothing's attempted an ambush or changed much over a day, so it looks like you’ve passed the test. They've been informed that you’ll be on your way.” 

Akira blinks. 

“Who?” Not that he doesn't have an idea.

Goro’s even more business-like than he was yesterday. Predictably. He’s even checking his watch. “I can’t risk saying more about it here, but the gist of it is, your Thieves’ collective wills and desires punched a hole in Maruki’s reality. It’s become a space for dream refugees, essentially.” 

“You can do that, huh.” In spite of what Goro’s implied about his own absence there, Akira is gratified. And proud. So proud, though he has no right to be. “I’ve so much to learn.”

“Too fucking much.” 

“You’re passing me on to them, aren’t you. Don’t I get a choice about staying with you?”

“I told you, neither you and I can be anywhere for a sustained period of time. It’s not safe for you or any of us." Somehow, Akira has a feeling Goro’s using that emphasis because he knows he’ll like it. And it’s certainly more persuasive, even if the intent is to put distance between them both. “Nobody blames you,” Goro adds grudgingly, and the World-shaped hole in Akira’s heart grows a little smaller. 

“I know.” Of course. “Aren't you going to need a car again?” 

“I’ll just steal another one.” Goro gives an easy shrug of the shoulder: just everyday Akechi. 

“Will I see you there?”

He smiles thinly. The expression is unreadable. “That’s not a place I can enter. That’s all I will say, Akira.”

Akira thinks he’s beginning to have an idea. If the Thieves have truly managed this, if they’ve forced a space outside of Maruki’s world, then wherever this is there’s a chance Goro can’t exist in it. Can’t age, or kill, or love, or change; all the miracles of living Goro embodies now in an older, wearier, more practiced form. But where there’s a present, there’s a silver lining — and hell if he’ll let Goro keep him away for long. Akira fights down his own dread, moves towards Goro and clasps long arms around his waist from behind, murmurs coffee-breath into his ear. 

They fit so well, after all.

“Please, Akira.” Akira feels Goro’s sigh through his spine. “Didn’t we agree —”

“A little while,” Akira lies, and holds on to a realness that, in all its pain and joy, warms more than the Garden ever can. “Just a while more.”