Archive of Our Own

I was much too far out all my life   
And not waving but drowning.

~ Stevie Smith

I. [STRENGTH]

Goro first saw the blue butterfly at his mother’s single-day memorial service, threading spirals through a silence so clinical it bled white. 

The thing was, he didn’t understand any of it. Mama’s painted face sat in the long box while another was pasted in a frame and he couldn’t reconcile any of that with her animated singing in the bathroom just the day before. Were they really the same person, the body they told him was beside him, and the woman that now apparently existed only in his memories? He could only muster a vague sense that Mama had simply gone missing again, as she had done a few times before, and all this waiting and shuffling and sitting here was simply a new way they’d come up with for him to pass the time. 

The butterfly was noticed because of the way it stood out against the spareness of the room that admitted only a flower or two, in pinks as pale as Mama’s mouth, and because there simply was nothing else for him to observe. They came in from time to time, asked him to sit at a table for food; he ate, was told to return, and this was followed by more hours of nothing at all. The only ceremony was stillness.

When he finally got up to follow the butterfly out the room, and down the corridor, one of them found him and steered him round again. To wait, they said, in case people came to visit, uncles or aunties or neighbors and so on. 

“But no one’s come,” he said, but they put him back anyway. 

No one had dropped by, except the butterfly which had been realer than the quiet that went on, and on, and on, around him. 

That very evening he was compelled to watch behind a screen as they put the box on wheels and rolled it into what looked like an oven and, later, had him pick a few rough, white, cracky bits from an urn. He watched them scatter the rest at the neighboring park. In the night he shared a room with ten other children whose whispers crowded in on him and stoppered his tears. Out of the corner of his vision, a butterfly alighted on a shelf to watch, then winked away like a promise. 

***

In the flurry of weeks that followed, death was something Goro experienced less as loss than as a forced transfer between one universe and another. There was no time or space for grief when his gaze was filled continuously with faces and voices: young or pinched or old, appraising, screaming, brief. People were shuttled in and out of the home all the time. Some had to be dragged. Goro kept himself out of the bullies’ way and tried to make himself smaller, even more invisible, rolled into a conch that collected sound without returning any. 

But when the butterfly showed up again he followed it as one hungry for fate, and not looking where he went ended up stumbling against Satoshi’s bed. He returned to his own shaking in bruises and  spots of blood. 

The places where he had been kicked throbbed so hard that a long time passed before he could get to sleep. Or dream.

The dream opened into a great sea about him, him in a boat so slim it was barely wider than the sum of his arms. It bobbed like a knot in the throat, every watery lick knocking it this way and that.  The waves extended everywhere, as far as the eye could see. There was a flimsy roof over his head and he sat smack in the middle of a blue rug lining the base of the boat, smoother and softer than any fabric he’d ever felt in Mama’s old flat or that of the couches in her lounge. 

Goro trailed his fingers across it wonderingly. But he understood enough of dreams to question neither the setting nor the blue butterfly that flitted through the salty air and became a girl with long, light hair. She sat across from him in an old-timey dress that wore the same vivid blue. Her eyes were gold and staring, and very large. 

There was a bit of silence. Then the girl spoke, solemn as a bell: 

“It was my curiosity about you that led to your being beaten. You have my apologies, Akechi Goro.”

No one had ever apologized to him except when compelled to, by the adults, so he found this rather amusing. 

“What would I do with your apologies?” Over the months he had acquired a matter-of-factness that made him trusted by adults but a target of infernal dislike among the children. “It was my choice to follow you, anyway.”

“Fair enough.” She wore a smile that looked more like a line. “You will have something better; very soon you will be bequeathed with my assistance.”

“Thank you.” He was habitually polite; it got him his way, and out of things. Then a wryness stole into his voice, “But how might you be able to help me? You led me into trouble.”

“Trouble never leaves the likes of a Trickster, if my master has read you right. And sometimes a Trickster may go looking for it. In either case, you will have need of me.”

For some reason she looked very satisfied with herself.

Goro didn’t know what a Trickster was, or that he could be one; what he did know was how much he wanted to leave, to fly from the grasp of the orphanage and everyone in it. “Could you teach me to turn into a butterfly?”

“You can be that, and much more. The world itself can turn at your bidding if your will is great enough. In fact,” and she gestured around them both, her arm turning an arc against the clear blue of the sky, “you might begin with this one.”

Goro looked about him, taken by how the peeling paint of the wood set a strange contrast against  the rich blue of the rug. It was a waste to place such a fine thing in the bottom of a raggedy boat, soaking up saltwater and sea clutter. He rapped his knuckles against the low walls; they produced a brittle sound. 

“It will be your inheritance,” she added.

“My… inheritance?”

He liked the sound of that, small as this boat was. It was more than he would ever have and he’d never thought he could have any such thing. An inheritance seemed the stuff of soap operas, quarreled over by people wearing more clothes and layers on them than he was used to seeing. 

“I cannot reveal too much. All will become clear in time...” The girl hesitated for a moment. Then she leaned in, as if someone else listened in. “In a way, I am as new as you are. You are my first assignment.”

Assignment: a heavy word for homework. Goro frowned. “Why would you want to write about me?”

“So you understand,” she said, looking surprised but pleased. “Our objective is to observe and guide humans towards the rehabilitation of the world. And you are a very special subject for the pages of my purpose.”

Big, adult words. By a pint-sized girl for a pint-sized him. Something in him warmed to it all, even if he didn’t understand anything. “You’re a writer?”

“A librarian, to be exact.”

He saw then the book at her side, so large he thought it might be more substantial than Satoshi’s pointed head, possibly enough to kill him with. Now that was a nice thought. Meanwhile the breeze picked up, bringing with it a distant cry of gulls. Or crows? 

That didn’t make sense, but none of this did, anyway. 

“Return and live your life, Trickster,” the girl said, after a moment, as his mouth opened to protest but no sound came out. Anything, anything was better than waking! But he could not stop hers from moving, “I have no doubt that we will meet again and that you have more to show me then.”

Then the sound of waves receded, and everything else with it, and when he jerked awake there was only his own heart pounding under the covers to listen to.

***

It was nearly a year later before Goro saw the butterfly girl again. By then he had been moved to another foster home which operated on a different set of laws. Privacy, for one, could be earned by wrongdoing: it took the form of a night locked within a tiny storeroom to breathe in the fumes of old shoes, with cardboard boxes for pillows and the floor for a bed. 

And tonight, Goro had won it by apparently coming very close to murder.

He hadn’t even touched the other boy’s face, much less reduce it to a pulpy mess — not that he hadn’t considered that outcome in lurid detail. The blue butterfly had flown into his face from out of nowhere just as he was about to pull him in by the collar, very close, to seethe blackmail into his ears. 

He knew what it had looked like, knew it was too late as he batted the butterfly out of his eyes and the boy ran off, screaming. By that time Goro had already understood justice enough to not plead his case. It was the fosterer’s own son’s word against his own, and a smashed up ray gun was no evidence for any justifiable motive. 

Goro sat now in the musky darkness, propped up against a huddle of old vacuum cleaners, listening to his fosterers’ panicked voices as they dialed up this number and that. The remains of his ray gun lay in his hands. His thumb moved across them like they were a rosary. At some point he fell asleep and in his dream was adrift again. 

He found himself below deck in the middle of a larger vessel than the one from before. Its walls now ran in ornate blue along the sides and up to join a ceiling from which a single light hung. The windows were large and open so that he could smell the sea, pungent on his nostrils, and they showed that he was coasting through the same long sea as before. A considerable distance away, in the shadows, stood what looked like a weighty desk with an unoccupied seat, much too large for the girl who had placed herself between him and them. 

Goro said, “You shouldn’t have gotten in the way. I wasn’t going to beat him up. I know the rules.”

“Indeed. And there was no need to tell you that there are other ways to deal with rules in an unjust game.” She stepped forward, looking him up and down appraisingly. “You have grown, Akechi Goro. Taller, too.”

“What’s so special about you? Why can’t you grow?”

There was that smile again. “The place in which I exist cannot be accessed by every human, and yet here I reside. It follows, then, that I am not as you are.”

“But I’m here,” Goro pointed out.

“You’re special.”

“How? You didn’t tell me that. What is this place? What do you want me to do?”

Anger still ran red in his chest. It fueled expectancy. It seemed right to him, then, that there could be more for him outside the confines of this cot and this flat and the rest of this sickening system that carted children against their will and stomped on their hearts. 

“This place is not ready,” the girl answered, with an air of very decided patience. “When it is, you’ll find out what it is you were meant to do.”

“I want to know now.”

Goro took a step forward, and the girl blanched.

“Stop right there. You should not come in any further.”

“I can.” Another step.

“Don’t, or you’ll regret it!”

He readied himself as the girl threw up an arm— as he plunged forward, there came a dim glimpse of a strange appendage in the form seated in the chair. An impossibly long nose? But before he could make out any more of it there was a great flash that shook the room all about him and flung him right onto his back and out — 

…and back into reality. 

Goro opened his eyes, his entire body shuddering. 

And somehow, the girl was still there, a silhouette of blackness with her hand outstretched. It slowly withdrew. 

“ I told you not to do that, you thick-headed fool!”

Goro glanced at the slit below the door. It was unlit. They’d all gone to bed, at least. He stood up, wincing as if he’d been stuck with pins in every pore, and snapped on the single light bulb in the room. Now the pair of them were as close as they had had to be on that pitiful boat from the long-ago dream.

“So. You can be human here.” 

“Not for long.” The girl’s chin was raised imperiously. 

“How did you do that?” Goro was almost grinning. His pulse ran with an eagerness he hadn’t felt in ages and he couldn’t distinguish it from the pain.  “What are you, really?”

“Part of me will be your strength. Strength far greater than this.” Now she arranged her skirts and folded herself into a dainty seat before him, reaching to take the pieces of his ray gun into her lap. “The time will come when you are ready. You must not be impatient.”

“And then I can do what you did?”

“If you grow strong enough.” 

“I will. What must I do?” 

“Observe the world around you. Be part of it. Listen to its sorrows and joy.”

Goro couldn’t help the huff that broke out of him then. 

“Are you ever going to tell me anything useful? What’s your name?” If she was determined to sit down with him in here until daybreak, she might as well tell him. 

“Lavenza.”

“Lavenza,” he repeated, studying her. An enigmatic name, appropriate for someone who wasn’t quite human or of this world. It was becoming obvious from the way in which her golden eyes studied his quarters for the night. 

“How will you train in a room like this? You have hardly any space to stretch and the devices you use break at the touch of a finger.”

Goro smiled thinly. “The ray gun is a toy.”

“A toy.” She tilted her head to the side. “I have heard of those. They are replicas of the real and have no power without the imagination.”

“So what?”

“Will something this flimsy really be useful to you?”

That was quite enough of that. 

He plucked up the parts from her and sat as far from her as he could with so many old objects prodding into his back, his fingers working as if on instinct to assemble the pieces again. The grip and barrel snapped in alright, but the rest of it was crushed or twisted and could no longer quite click into place. 

“It’s mine,” he snapped at her. “It was all I had left, all I was allowed to keep, and then that son of a bitch smashed it.” 

Because his mother’s ashes didn’t count. She was, and then she wasn’t, and an urn of hip bits and knuckle bones didn’t change that fact. And now the ray gun she’d bought for him, that she had loved watching him run about with as he spouted TV bravado and vows of eternal protection, was just as gone. 

Lavenza was watching him. 

“Interesting,” she said quietly. “How humans form attachment to the physical and imbue it with a significance much larger than an object itself. Truly, they are capable of such wonders and dangers in the Metaverse.” The smile she wore, suddenly, looked like a real one this time. “Will you tell me the story of this?”

“You’re a librarian, so you should know all the stories,” Goro pointed out, petulant. 

“I’m a librarian, so it is all I can do to collect the stories when they come to me.”

There was something wistful in her gaze, then, something that lent it a humanness instead of the pools that typically gazed right through him to somewhere he could not see. 

“You mean, you don’t know about Featherman?” He was in fact mildly offended. 

“There are many winged villains and heroes in my compendium,” and she tapped the great book at her side, “but I am certain yours will be different.”

Goro couldn’t imagine the type and variety of stories Lavenza had in that dictionary-like tome. The few books he’d ever owned, they’d read over and over together, him and Mama, wringing every last word dry because they could not afford more. So he’d grown recognizing that the written word was yet another privilege denied to the likes of his two-person family, as if they had to be punished for being that way. That, along with an equally strong sense of spite to claim this prize for himself. Literacy was currency, one which Lavenza and her powers apparently wielded a good deal of, and for that reason she was beginning to look like someone worth striking a bargain with. 

“If I do, will you actually tell me more about your world? Instead of saying things by halves that I don’t get.”

“As much as I am able.”

Well, then. “It’s a deal.”

This time, Lavenza’s features shone in a manner that was properly childlike. 

As before, everything had the quality of a dream, and it didn’t surprise him at all when his lengthy recounts of the Rangers’ battles put her slowly and surely to a most peaceful sleep. What did surprise him, in the end, was the warmth in his chest as he told the story of heroes he knew by heart. The same warmth watched the tiny curve of her lips dissipate into a blue tinkle with the rest of her, spiraling up and away into a realm invisible to the human gaze. 

He continued feeling this way into the next morning, and the next, as if they had shaken hands on an incredible secret. For the first time in his life he felt he had gained an ally in a war against forces he couldn’t yet name.  

***

But time passed, and a boy grew. 

Once upon a time, Mama had been around to tell Goro stories, although they were typically about  some neighbor or someone Mama knew from her job or an old villain from a brief and vivid past. They were never finished; she always cut her recounts off once she finally remembered Goro was there, hanging onto every word, every sordid detail he did not understand. She told very little of Goro himself, as if they were not sunlit, the long days she spent feeding and dressing and caring for a child she had not asked for. Sometimes Goro had seen, in her gaze on him, only empty pools of his reflected self, spaces he was not large enough to fill. 

Until Goro met Lavenza, and after that worked hard enough to beat the grades game, he had never actually processed how different the stories of textbook family life were from the happy, if meager, existence he and his mother had led. Stories, in the end, were balms for the rich and lies for the lonely. Until he saw Masayoshi Shido on TV for the first time, the father Mama named had been little more than a recurring villain he could blame as a superstition. Now all of the bitterness he had been harboring for his entire small life found a focal point and sharpened to an edge. 

Once upon a time, Goro could have believed in all stories, and by the end he believed only in one. 

***

In the Yamada’s living room, kinder but no less cold than other foster homes from before, Goro lifted his hand over the harried, inattentive chatter of his new fosterers and folded it into a gun. Made of Shido’s stupid shiny head a point-blank target. Held it there for a full few minutes until the screen leapt to a fruity commercial. 

It was the most important moment he’d experienced in his life thus far... or so it’d seemed to him then. In fighting to the top to become Azabu Elementary’s favorite boy, and securing his position among the Yamadas as someone they hated less than they did themselves, he hadn’t thought about Lavenza and their deal in a long time. 

So he didn’t expect to meet her that very night.

“There you are, Trickster!” She almost sounded cross. “We haven’t seen each other in a while.”

It was even stranger to see that, where Goro thought he’d outgrown a girl from a dream, the usual room had outgrown him. This was no ferry or boat, now, but a blue carpeted space within what seemed to be a fort out at sea, the walls so imposing they admitted only a painting’s worth of sea-view.  

“Almost there,” the long-nosed man at the seat at the desk — he saw all of this clearly now — said in a nasal snicker. 

“Almost? How much longer do I have to wait?”

“Only those who have made a contract can become a proper guest of this room.”

“A guest? Isn’t this room mine?”

“It will be,” the man said, while Lavenza’s eyes grew steadily wider as they gazed in Goro’s direction. 

“Right. My inheritance.” Had he wished so hard for something like this from mere figments? Masayoshi Shido had left him only ashes; what could he expect of anyone? “When will that be? When both of you die? From what I sense, that’s going to be a long time away by natural causes.”

“Trickster, ” Lavenza said warningly. “You will not talk like this to my master.”

Goro laughed. “Your master,” he said derisively. 

“What is existence but a cycle of connected service?” the man in the chair said. “Our goals are alike; we serve humanity.”

“You serve me?” 

“Your understanding of the world is limited, Trickster. But these are not the best words for the start of an acquaintance.” The man’s grin grew wider. “I am pleased to make yours. My name is Igor.” 

“Igor. Alright, so you’re the boss. So what’s in it for me?”

Lavenza’s eyes flashed. “Did I not say —“

“What’s stopping you? I’m tired of this sense of mystery you’re putting on. If something was meant for me, why aren’t you preparing me for it? Why haven’t you given it?” He could feel himself gaining momentum. “What are you waiting for? I’m ready. I’ve been ready since the day I was born, and I’ve already done so much to change myself.”

A low chuckle moved in Igor’s throat and came out through his ridiculous nose. “Gifts come to the deserving. Power is learned, not wrenched by force and foolhardy words.”

“You have grown, Trickster,” Lavenza added fiercely. “Your bearing and appearance have changed. Even your voice and the way you speak. But your heart is building walls! It is not ready for a world much larger than what you see it as.”

What was that even supposed to mean? “I do know how large it is,” he said quietly. “I’m trying to beat it.” 

“You think like a child.”  

It was designed to cut and oh, he felt it. “You think like a thing,” he retaliated, biting out the words, satisfied to see her flinch. For a moment she couldn’t speak. 

“You do not know the world as we do, from where we are,” she said at length. “It is of great possibility and beauty. It is not without hope of saving.”

“Oh? Then tell me about this world, since you understand it so well. Tell me why some people lead good lives and others don’t. Why some have happiness while others don’t. Why some have mothers, and —“

His voice hitched on his own words.

There was another long silence. 

When Lavenza spoke again, her voice was clear, but she had never worn so somber an expression. “This compendium is full of stories of beings, even humans like yourself, with so many different answers to that question. You must find your own.”

“I can, but would you like it,” Goro said, too lightly. “Would it be the right one for you?”

He turned, stalking out of the room and back into his bed, unable to sleep again for the sense of betrayal that dogged him. What use were their platitudes if they couldn’t give him something real for once, something stronger than ashes and words? 

***

The next time Goro saw the pair of them, he’d gone to bed hungry after multiple all-nighters over papers no one his age could’ve needed to read. It’d burned, all those hours he pondered and worked, at the back of his eyes and along shoulders while the cold pit of his stomach deepened. But even this was chosen. He knew how to sharpen exhaustion into hyperawareness, how to wield sleep itself. When he closed his eyes, his mind locked onto an old memory of a blue room and gripped so hard his dream could not but obey.  

Lucid, he wandered the length of his unconscious and focused on finding the right door. And  walked right in and watched as good old Lavenza in the middle of the room jumped a foot high. Then rounded on him. It was almost funny, if he had been in any mood to be amused; he was now at least three heads taller. 

“Trickster! How did you — we didn’t —!”

“Should you be so bewildered?” Igor, in the usual chair, wore a wrenching grin stretched like a Cheshire cat’s. “Our Trickster has always had a strong spiritual sensitivity, and most of all the will to summon it.” To Goro, he said, “You have something to ask. Ask.”

Goro smoothed down his  sleeves, surveying the room with a honed calmness. The furniture was the same as it had been, giving off a sense of quiet, dated ostentation, but unlike last time there was hardly any light in this place left save for the chandelier. The walls had become stone and eaten up all of the sky and sea, and only a single barred window at the top of the north side opened onto what looked like sunset. 

A locked inmate’s cell stood behind him. Goro took some time to consider this addition. Decided it didn’t matter. 

“I’m here to prove either your falsity or your duplicity,” he said at length, turning back to them. 

Lavenza’s voice came like a lash. “How dare you, Trickster!”

“My younger self believed, somehow, in you and your promises. If you’re just a combination of my latent thoughts and desires, you‘ve nothing to offer me.” His smile was cold. He’d done his readings, examined the literature on dreams as it’d evolved through time, and now he was ready for an ultimatum. “If you truly are capable of actual vision, however… grant me the resources to bring Shido down.”

“You cannot let this consume you.”

“I don’t care what it is — a clue, a connection, anything that puts me in his way. I don’t care how long it takes. But if you can’t do this one thing, then you’re only the pitiful gods I made in my weakness. And I’ll tear down this place myself.”

“Such pride! How do you even expect to do that as you are?” There was a hint of a gloat in Lavenza’s voice, but Goro held her gaze coolly. “Apologise instantly!”

“Unnecessary, Lavenza,” Igor said, and his deep chuckle moved through the chamber like a tremor. “My, my. What a boy of chaos we have on our hands. Such anger may be what the world needs, and yet it is a gamble. We must decide whether or not to make it.”

Goro’s world stilled for a second before Lavenza said firmly, “Absolutely not.”

“And what is your answer at the end of this vigil? Do you deem him suitable?”

She drew a breath. 

And there it was, in that tentative space between a yes and a no. There it was. There had indeed been a test, something that had needed him to be deserving and prove himself worthy of. His chosenness was not his birthright; nothing of this world and the other had ever been. 

Lavenza hesitated, and in that moment Goro knew he had failed. So much for fate. And destiny. Stories. 

“So. So, so. Being your golden child. It was all conditional, in the end, was it?” Lavenza was looking at him in alarm, as if she could see the horrible throbbing beginning against the insides of his skull. “But I don’t need you. I don’t need him. I’ve never needed anyone, and I don’t intend to start now!” 

“Don’t be mistaken!” Lavenza threw a desperate look at Igor before turning back to Goro. “We have no intention of —“

“Shut — up !”

He didn’t recognise the voice that tore out of him, or the voice from within that stretched him out in a long cackle, Boy of chaos, on my whim I come to your call… and as if in echo the last window on the north wall slammed shut. Its finality rang like a shudder. The darkness that  now seeped into the sparse shapes and lines of the room was not so much seen as felt. For a moment everything held its breath. 

Then his face tore, ran wild with blood, and power burst from him through slashes of black and white. 

Dimly, through his screams, he heard them:

“He has found his Persona? In this place? Against us?”

“Rebellion is how some find their way. This is a path of his very own making… but he cannot walk it alone.”

But that was bullshit, he wasn’t walking it alone, not anymore, Goro realised, as the clothes on him shifted into dark lines, and his entire body shouted in sheer glee, back arched into the darkness of the prison; he had… 

Loki. God of chaos. God of fire.

Shapeshifter.

Two skins and ten faces. 

Trickster.

Featherman.

It was not so much an invocation as a baptism, his body pulled under in an agony like flames before he rose to his feet again, pulsing, ready, reborn. And when his vision cleared there Lavenza stood with her grimoire open in one hand, a feathered pen in the other. As she closed it and looked upon him she tentatively smiled. 

“Loki.” A greeting. 

“Is this it,” Goro managed through a hissing grin, as Loki unfurled like heat through his ribs in an answering growl. “Not bad. Not half bad at all.”

“You can challenge us or you can allow us to teach you. But as one who ‘rules over power’, I suspect one will lead to the other.”

She held out her hand. She looked proud, even.

“Welcome to the —“

And then everything exploded. 

***

Whatever force it was flung him backwards like a rag and he hit the perimeter wetly. He thought for a moment his insides must have smushed themselves on the walls, but then he realized that the walls themselves, shaking as they were, were no longer of stone. They were slick with soil and waste and an old, pungent iron smell that lodged itself all the way up his throat. He couldn’t shout or blink away the horror that unfolded before his gaze: the Room was a room and then it wasn’t, only a hell of red with sweeping arches of bone as beams and pillars, and then suddenly it was all blue again, and then red, and then both, and — 

“What have you done, Trickster? ”

It was Lavenza, Lavenza as he had never heard before, her voice having risen into a shriek so large it ought to shatter her little doll’s form. But it was nothing against a deep godlike voice he’d never heard before, swelling and pressing in about the three of them like rocks over earth. The floor shook, rattling the table and chair. 

Goro could only watch even as Loki pushed and pounded in his chest, this nightmare to top all nightmares, nothing that could conceivably be plucked from the demons of his own mind. For what cell in him could have dreamed of Igor hanging in the air, pinned to the ceiling by some great and invisible hand. The twigs of Igor’s limbs were limp at his side while his grin was pulled upwards and sideways across his skin and eyes and ears into a bloodless, gaping gash. When he spoke, he sounded like a rapidly deflating balloon. 

“It wasn’t him, Lavenza… our Room has been compromised.” 

“Who is doing this, Master? Master!”

And then the top of Igor’s head shrank to a pin. The rest of him followed with a zipping sound. Lavenza cried out as Igor was pinched out of existence — only to reappear in the chair the next moment. Abruptly, the room settled. Into the immaculate blue-on-stone of before, as if nothing at all had happened, but red still bled at the edges of his vision...

The larger disembodied voice from before rearranged itself into syllables that rumbled from Igor’s mouth:

“Very convenient that you made this room a prison for my use when you did.”

He was looking right at Goro. 

“Release Igor at once, imposter!” Lavenza raised a hand, gathering the beginnings of whatever power Goro had been knocked flat by all those years ago. ““Or regret in pain your foul machinations —“

Something unseen struck her. Blue flecks leapt from a space where her left cheek once was. Goro choked on his horror as the old voice pushed deeper:

“As I was saying to you, Akechi Goro... It seems a pity to simply let you go when you have done me such service. How shall I thank you?”

“You will not touch the Trickster!”

She had been there and suddenly she was here, a flicker between the table and him, arms flung out wide as if she could actually shield him with those short girl-arms of hers, and then — then, she was no more, no, she was two, with a long golden blade thrust bloodlessly between her eyes. The slice moved down clean as a god’s hand through a sea. In a long, sluggish motion her left side fell from her right.

Two staring halves thudded at his feet. 

The shudders in Goro broke loose. He screamed and screamed and Loki burst from him with a flaming blade.

“You will fight a god as a child? I grow even more pleased with the pieces Igor put in place for me,”  Igor-who-wasn’t, said, sidestepping Loki’s swipe with an amusement as thick as hell. “This game cannot bore. And you might just win, regardless.” 

“Lavenza,” he cried, “Lavenza, Lavenza, she didn’t deserve that—” 

The blade gathered strength and thrust again, but ran into air.

“Neither did you deserve anything that happened to you. You always wanted to determine your own fate. And now, with her removed you can.” 

And, like shadow over sun, something moved over his gaze and pushed against his mind, blacking it out, tipping the rest of him into the wall and out over the other side. 

Goro came to on his own bed in his tiny apartment with his face ravaged by tears and his heart pounding fit to burst. He had only a vague memory of red for explanation, and the more distinct sense that something had been ripped from him forever. 

Loki, at least, was there. 

II. [X]

The loss he awoke to thereafter was so keen and sharp in its newness that sometimes he had to smooth his palm over his heart as if it ached there. For the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was, although he figured it probably had something to do with the app that showed up mysteriously on his phone at around the same time, and the striped devil that rolled about inside of him. Some penchant for stories and metaphor gave him a proficiency with the app that he spent an afternoon decoding, obsessing over combinations of hated names and nouns; it was how he eventually discovered the library of tragedies that was Mementos. 

Mementos bled the same red of his dreams. 

So he pushed through the depths with Loki, reveling in kill counts that rolled higher each time. Some old and insistent memory told him, observe, listen. And he did. Wandered its many floors and chambers in a wondering horror for hours, finding not the answer to what he had lost but the Shadows of people behind each pulsating doorway. They said things to him about their lives, things that made his insides twist and give the same answering cries. 

Made him drink. All of it. A son only half of me.

Couldn’t hold a pen so she put my hand in the kettle. 

Sensei bent me over and —

His tears drew Shadows. At one point Robin Hood spun out of him to fire arrays in a perfect radius around them, protecting where Loki had rebelled. And for a few glorious moments his heart burned with an anger that could move the world, right it if he so wished... but how was true empathy to happen in such a place without eating him up with it? Without its own kiss and kiss-back in the form of, say, a talking cat, or a pair of strange-speaking mentors, or a growing ensemble of sidekicks who asked after your day and treated you to crepes? Goro was all alone. The hollow in him where Loki simmered in impatience became a Call he knew no one would return. Nothingness being the point. 

By the time he went to Shido he was too ready.

***

Small things, inconsequential on their own but piled with each other as golden strands to a haystack, could tip a balance precariously maintained. Or knock down the odds stacked against an eventuality. 

A gun in any plot was bound to be fired; the real question was who had put it there.

In a few possible futures, perhaps he could’ve been saved. If he’d chosen to stay home instead of letting his mother stay in the bathroom alone. If he had stood in the streets and called upon collective conscience to do something, anything, to help her because she wasn’t picking up any of his payphone calls. If he hadn’t been moved from home to home. If a god hadn’t interfered. If there were no gods. If he’d met Joker two years earlier. If he hadn’t loved Joker. If he’d been Joker. 

If he’d been anybody else.

And so it happened that a boy became the villain of his own story and died. 

***

What stories had he recited to himself his whole life, what roles had he wished to play, which lines did he know by heart enough to pull the trigger so that he could spend eternity bathing in the warm applause of his own blood? Everything hurt, here, between the rubbles of a Palace and the dark subterranean of people’s hearts. Goro wondered if his mother had gone this way, lying on her back in the shower stall while vomit swam under her armpits and warm water cascaded about her hair. Like mother, like son. This was his inheritance.

He closed his eyes, he thought, for the last time. 

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life… 

~ Derek Walcott, “Love after Love”

III. [STRENGTH, MAGICIAN]

“Welcome to the Velvet Room. Or should I say, welcome back?”

Somehow, that was a voice he knew. It took Goro’s gaze longer than the rest of his senses to catch up to speed. It was dim in here, though a light — a familiar one — shone through a narrow set of bars some feet away from him. He lay on a mattress so thin he thought he might have been at the third foster home, or was it the second, all over again; his pillow, rough under his cheek, was mottled and stank. Goro shifted and sat up in the cot, considering the particular shape of its covers and creases, and had the very strange sense that this thing which passed for a bed had very recently been occupied by another. Beside him stood a washbasin, the water droplets on its rim evidence of the fact that it just been used, and a mere step away, beyond the unlocked door, was a round room awash with blue. 

Yes, he’d seen this all before. Never entered this way, through someone else’s cell, though. 

Goro got up, pulling his mask off his head and marveling at his unblemished torso, the absence of bullet hole. 

Another voice, a girl’s one this time, one which made him start and stride out to stare. “I never got to say it before, but this is your room indeed, Akechi Goro.”

Lavenza — for that was what her name was, he remembered now — stood there in the flesh. It was all coming back to him — the two halves of her face falling into the carpet, the eyes round and glassy and locked on him as they leaked blue. For so long she had been hidden from his memory; now she was here, whole as he somehow was, standing beside her goblin-faced master the god of the desk as if nothing had happened before. 

For a moment Goro’s heart rose in a wild hope — perhaps nothing had? 

But he wasn’t one to delude himself. Especially since it was clear, from the wistful way in which the Librarian’s gaze moved across his clothes and the all-too-fitting backdrop of a prison facility, that all the terrible things expected of him had happened. 

The place had grown since his last visit. Since years ago.

Goro stood there, arms hanging limply off him, a very figure of resignation. Death had been his final choice, but apparently fate had other plans, not that they were clear when it came to Igor. Good old Igor creaked his knuckles and folded his hands and said, in a way that made Goro want to punch his nose into his face once and for all, “You understood it long before we were due to reveal it to you: this is a place that exists between dreams and reality, between consciousness and unconsciousness.”

“And between life and death, apparently.” It was the only reason his dying self could be here, wasn’t it? “Listen. I’m done. I made my choice. I don’t have to go back into the real world and don’t want to.”

Lavenza said, “The real world…” And glanced worriedly back at Igor. Something passed between them; she nodded, then turned back to Goro. “The real world is in a state of ruin. Your friends are out there battling the false god, Yaldabaoth, who set Shido’s conspiracy in motion to gain control of the wills and minds of humanity.”

Wonderful. Above one manipulator was another. When did it ever end? What was there for pinpricks like himself? 

“You… have met him. We three have.” 

“How could I forget,” he spat. It was an ironic statement directed as much at himself as at Lavenza. 

“He kept us from you. Took your memory of us from you. Imprisoned Igor and set himself up in his place to lead a Trickster of his own choosing…”

“Ah, yes,” Goro said softly, realising all at once. Everything, everything now made such perfect sense. “He was here, wasn’t he? The prolific Kurusu Akira.” 

Igor folded his hands. “There have been tales of such cosmic irony, but few so tragic as what your respective wills have led you both into.” 

“One more tragedy for the Compendium,” Goro said ironically, and glanced over at Lavenza, whose lips were pressed into a thin line. 

“You were two sides of the same coin, in the end,” Igor went on. “Yaldabaoth, seizing Fate, played you both a rigged game and set you up as pawns against each other.”

The contrarian in Goro thought, maybe he did need Fate as much as he hated it, after all. If Fate existed, then it had afforded him a chance at the ultimate rebellion. It had even facilitated the illogical and impossible: his developing a most inconvenient crush on the very person who was given everything that had been taken from him. He could have been a nice fuck you , in short. 

There was nothing flattering about the way he’d gone down in the engine room, though. 

“And yet he’s the one who won,” Goro said, after a moment, feeling his heart twist in his chest. “He’s your Trickster now. He earned it. Deserved it, didn’t he, whatever you had to give him. Played by your rules, your standards.”

“That last one is a simplistic assumption, one you are especially capable of in bitterness. A Trickster cannot help but be a surprise.”

“Saved you,” Goro continued. And that had unlocked his return to this place, two years too late. Didn’t he have the right to be bitter?

“There is a long story for that,” Lavenza began.

“Kept the deal better than I ever could have, didn’t he, Lavenza.”  As if he hadn’t heard her. 

“He is indeed an excellent Trickster.” Lavenza’s voice held firm. “As you might have been.”

But he wasn’t. The fact was he’d lost the role, whether by chance or fate or his own weakness or theirs. Goro was beset by an urge to laugh, and laugh, and laugh. Laugh the entire prison down, as if he was a Samson bound to a pillar. That was an old story. Didn’t he deserve that? 

Instead he said, “So tell me more about these... guest privileges. Since I’m not going to have them for much longer. What did Akira get to do in here?” Apart from pissing in a cell. 

“This is a place, as you came close to recognizing, that facilitates the empowerment of the soul. The Trickster forged and fused Personas here for his fight to better society.”

“From the inside out. Small writ large,” Lavenza added. “It has ever been our way as master and attendant of the Velvet Room. We have some time; follow me.”

There was nothing for it but to do so, was there. Goro surveyed the rest of the place, the many, many cells about him that hadn’t been there before, the chambers that appeared in the black of a corridor beyond. It was a structure as full and forbidding as a fortress. And in the room beyond stood an array of formidable guillotines reaching to the ceiling in the same blue paint, the glow along their blades as sharp as downtown lights he would never see again. 

She showed him how they worked, summoning an Inugami into one and a Silky  into another and he watched impassively as the blade crashed down on their writhing bodies, a callous mechanism that heeded nothing but its own falling. The Matador that erupted from the pages glowered and clacked down at the both of them through its skull’s visage before tap-dancing into invisibility. Lavenza’s pages gave a brief spurt of blue sparks.

And now, now he did laugh.  

“Of course. Of course!” He was almost bent with the force of it, the pain of it, the whole struggle against the equal impulse to howl at the universe. “Oh, I should’ve known. I should’ve known that behind that flashy animal parade of Persona after Persona after Persona after fucking Persona was a pair of shit-talking figments. Of course!” 

Lavenza said nothing. Goro caught his breath, drew himself together again. He understood this place at last. 

“All of this was supposed to be mine, wasn’t it?” ‘Mine.’ What a strange word that was, now. 

“This is how your justice always ends.”

Yes. Didn’t it just. With blades or guns, point-blank shots to the head in the Metaverse or in the real. He was only eighteen and an executioner and knew how it felt, black wetness in curls under his fingers. “You saw that too, didn’t you.”

She nodded, looking rueful. “Yes, from my memories as Justine and Caroline. The false god made two of me when he cut me in half, as you might remember. And with everything forgotten, I ended up serving him for a term.”

“Sounds familiar,” Goro, lapdog of Shido-san, couldn’t help saying. “Only I never forgot.”

Lavenza’s face looked as if he’d struck her. Then she closed her mouth and came very close and looked up at him, her eyes gleaming with a fresh sorrow he’d never seen in them before. 

“I’m sorry.” The words seemed to have been held back for too long; her voice shook on them. “I’m sorry for everything that happened to you.”

“Don’t talk as if you failed me. Who do you assume you are to me?” Had Igor and Lavenza really meant to be foster parents of a kind, to a potentially prodigal son whose path could have been redirected by them? Or was he being presumptuous again to think that? He inhaled deeply against the phantom pain in his chest, let it go again. “I wasn’t meant for anyone, or anything. In a way, I’m grateful.”

In a way, that made him... free. Pathetic and diminutive as that freedom was. And he really wouldn’t rather have anyone else other than Akira take his fate anyway. This, at least, was an insult he could bear.

“You may not feel this way, but I for one find your return welcome.”

“I’m a cathartic little footnote in your collection, aren’t I,” Goro said quietly, unable to stop himself. “That’s why you’re cataloguing humans and their stories. To delude yourself into thinking you feel something grand and noble when you play with our lives —“

He heard the kick before it came, a sharp whoosh through the air before the blow against the side of his head so that he yelped and lost his balance and landed ungainly on his rear, staring up at a girl one-third his size and ten times his age. 

“Are you done?”

Goro realised that her golden eyes were over-bright with something that looked very much like tears he dreaded. He knew he wasn’t supposed to look away.

“I was not created to care, Goro. Not the way humans do. And you have so little time left!”

In another life, perhaps, if what they had had not been so rudely interrupted by a false god, he might have known how to reach out to hold another hand. A small one, that of a child, just as he was, really. He might have needed it just as much. Now he only watched in silence as she collected herself and smoothed down her skirt and said, with a regret so strong it softened the rest of him: 

“If things had turned out differently…”

Goro tucked his feet under him into a seat. They were almost level like this, he, the boy who followed the butterfly, and she...

“There’s no point in thinking about it like that. I might have gone down the same path anyway, and you’d be powerless  to stop me.”

“I could’ve been with you, at least. All those nights and days… To be all alone in two universes. It was never fair to you.”

For a few precious evenings spent at the Penguin Sniper and the jazz club, he hadn’t been so, but that was all over now. “It’s just the way things are.”

“Goro...”

Not ‘Trickster’, just who he was. For all that he’d fought to determine and deserve, all he had ever really wanted was to be loved for something as simple and meaningless as his own name. 

He asked, “Would you really have been with me? If I decided to kill the world?”

“Choosing to be with you does not mean I cannot try to change your mind.” She brushed at the last bit of wetness around her eyes and smiled at him. “There are many stories of people who have burned and remade the world. Who is to say?”

“You’ve changed too, Lavenza,” Goro said after a moment. 

“If there is anything I have learned from all this, it is that fate is capricious, and a human is a garden of forking paths. And so I must evolve.”  She straightened fully and was once again the solemn, composed attendant of the room, without a hair out of place, though there was something sharper in her gaze. “I will choose to protect my two Fools. And you are still here. Will you allow me to see where your story ends?”

“It’s ended.” 

Goro pushed to his feet with finality. He would harbor no illusions here. His body was a wasteland now, bait for Shadows in the land of the unconscious, and any moment now the last thread of his life would snap. Whatever final reprieve this was, he was content with it. 

It was more than he could have asked for. 

“If he comes back here before I go, Lavenza, I don’t want to see him.” Her stare followed him, round and wet with understanding. “It was enough for me. That promise... was enough for me.”

Later he meandered slowly through every corridor of his prison, tracing fingers through faults in the wall as if Akira’s had been in them, learning the echoey paths and the cold crunch of his steps as surely as a journey through his own heart. He came to every cell and found the locks stolidly in place, giving away only under the force of rust-scraped fingers. At intervals he pressed his ear to the walls and strained his entire being to hear the sea beating softly on the other side. Then he returned to the cell where Akira had lain in, curling up and breathing in the sheets as if his rival was here, wound just as tightly around him. And he fell asleep. 

***

At some point, he awoke. 

***

And awoke, again. 

IV. [FOOL]

The city lights that had been dancing about them winked out of existence, along with the great dome that housed the tree and pinnacle of Maruki’s ambition. Goro hurtled through space, a nothingness as bright as the sterilized walls and floors of Maruki’s dream, into what he thought would be an oblivion stalled by the too-short span of a little over a month. 

It was enough. It had to be enough. In a January he shouldn’t have had he had met Kurusu Akira again, spoke with him again, and they’d spent long hours in bars with jazz scuttling about their ears, in a mutual quiet too easy for words they couldn’t speak. He’d fought beside him and his friends again, too. As himself. Saved the world, probably, in a manner of speaking, but that was practical and necessary and anyway a by-product of his own will. Wasn’t it? 

All enough?

He fell, and fell, and then he hit an all-too-familiar bed of expensive carpet as if an alien ship had beamed him in from out of nowhere. Goro groaned. Wasn’t Fate through with him by now? 

“Hereward, hm?” came Lavenza’s voice from a distance, nearer and nearer still until it stopped beside him. “I am glad, Goro. You have put together the two halves of yourself.”

Goro glared up at her face. She almost looked cheeky. “What’s the use of it, now?”

“You have done more than you realise —“

“I didn’t do it for anyone.“

“...Even for yourself.” She folded her arms and added, testily, “And you have a few others on you. Why didn’t you use them? Why didn’t you show them to me?”

For most of the last month (his last month) he had been too preoccupied with Akira’s presence, and the impending negation of his own, that the potential displeasure of an attendant hadn’t seemed like much to bother with. Clearly she’d harbored some expectation of him, his company in the Velvet Room probably, and he’d given only the briefest of thoughts to it. Even as a very new Jack-o-Lantern clanked about within his ribs while a Kelpie stomped and brayed. (Was it like this all the time for Joker, feeling like a zoo?)

Goro considered the expression on Lavenza’s face and realised, after a long moment, that he was feeling a little guilty. It was a rather new feeling. 

“Did you want to be used this way? As an encyclopedia?” he said, in an easy manner he hadn’t adopted in a long time.  “Pity.  Was thinking of bringing you flowers, you know, in a vase. You’re just about the correct height for it.” 

Registering that seemed to take her a few moments. Then she inhaled deeply and announced, in a stately manner, “Goro, you... are an asshole.”

He almost chuckled. “Young girls shouldn’t say that sort of thing.”

She huffed. “You are the child intent on playing hide-and-seek with the Trickster.”

Goro turned surly instantly. “What are you talking about?”

“The reason you have not come here is because you wish to avoid the Trickster’s knowledge of your having been here. Is this embarrassment? Or a misplaced magnanimity?”

Goro’s jaw tightened. All those times they’d trooped past the gates to the Velvet  Room in Maruki’s lobby, or at the head of that alley in Kichijoji, and he’d pretended he hadn’t noticed her round eyes staring in his direction. 

At length he said quietly, “He’ll get his hopes up if he sees me in dreams like this. It’s a small thing. My life. I don’t want to make a big deal of it.” He shrugged. Why saddle another with hope and more grief he didn’t deserve? They hadn’t said goodbye, and more besides — so what? “I don’t want him to.”

“Indeed,” she mused, “your rehabilitation is still incomplete.”

Rehabilitation? 

It was a word for a strategy, a programme, something teachers and wardens (what was the difference) put on reports and stamped with meaningless signatures so that they could be smug about it. He hadn’t even known Igor and Lavenza were considering such an idea. The association was easy to make, to be sure, considering what this place looked like. But Goro was someone who had believed in and executed his own brand of justice without hope for any kind of absolution. Besides, some people simply didn’t deserve a second stab at life and all that term encompassed. Himself included. 

“What’s the point of rehabilitation for a dead person? Where the hell would I even go?”

“Have you not realised the nature of this place, Akechi Goro? You have yet to free yourself. Something still binds you here.”

He said nothing. He knew what it was — who he was, rather. 

“The Trickster is in detention once more, Goro.”

“What ?”

“Your friends work tirelessly to release him. They are rallying support from many quarters of your city.” Her features creased. “How unfortunate it is that he has broken from a prison in a false reality into a prison of the real. How curious that he is in a physical one, and you, a metaphorical one.” 

“Is that supposed to comfort me?” he demanded.

“I am merely reminding you of how strangely your fates are intertwined. Even now.”

“God damn it,” Goro swore. “I owe him one and I can’t do shit about it except land him in more trouble.”

“Fate is indeed still unfair,” she commented uselessly. 

“I should be there. Not here. Stuck in this nice, oh-so-calming blue stasis I don’t deserve!”

“Do you deserve more?” Lavenza said quietly. 

“No. I deserve worse.”

Silence hung between them. She looked so saddened then that he was on the verge of taking it back. Apologizing, even. What was happening to him?  

“Even now, you do not wish for your own existence,” she murmured, her gaze once again reading depths in him he was certain he could not possess. Then, decisively, she snapped open her grimoire. The feather on her pen fluttered as it jabbed in his direction. “Well, for now our task at hand must involve registering your two, ah, cute new Personas, I believe. What about a story or two over tea later? I shall tell you of Hereward.”

“A last one for the road?” Might as well indulge her, because what was there left to do with what little time he had left. “Why the hell not.”

***

Lavenza was changing. For one, she looked as if she was enjoying telling her stories, instead of making mechanical recitations of pages he’d never been allowed to see. In fact, she chattered more and more like a girl-next-door as they carried on, each time. And without day or life to wake him they could’ve spent multiple forevers conversing and wandering through the prison. 

He’d stopped questioning much by this point. Purgatory or afterlife, this was a whole lot pleasanter than what he’d taught himself to expect.

“Do you have any other regrets?” she asked at one point. 

“Can I regret anything? I couldn’t choose half my life, and the other half I did choose was the result of that. Am I supposed to regret my entire existence?” He had, very much, he still did some days or was it nights, whatever passed for measurement here. “Don’t look at me like that. I know the answer.”

“You no longer do. You are well on your way to rehabilitation.” He rolled his eyes at the word — as if he didn’t deserve this prison, as if rehabilitation was fair to everyone he’d hurt . “But there is one last regret you will have if you persist in being a stubborn ass.”

Goro sighed. “We’ve been through this, Lavenza.”

“You must see the Trickster before he leaves this room for the last time, or —“

“Or what? You’ll Megidolaon me again?” He’d been in battles enough to know that a fraction of that was what she’d landed on him all those years ago, during their second meeting. “That was hardly a tickle.”

“I held back for you, you little squint of a boy. Do you really think you could beat me in a fight?”

Goro’s mouth stretched in a wide smirk. “I’ve got nothing better to do,” he shrugged, as if this was child’s play,  and then her spell was upon him. 

Once again, he couldn’t tell how long they clashed for. He was serving time as Akira was and in both cases nothing told them whether it had been hours or days or even years — least of all Igor the antique himself, whose expression remained perpetually in its curious mix of taunt and formality. As if the globe stood still on its axis and nations did not erupt and people did not make demons or idiots of themselves. Between sparring and conversation some activity happened at the desk, the old telephone leaping on occasion while pens scratched illegibly across parchment older than history itself. Evidently messages circulated in some extraplanar system involving the Velvet Room’s guardians, but it was all beyond what Goro could perceive or experience.

As long as he was here, his world was contained here. 

Igor was hardly around these days. Overseeing another quest now that Joker’s was ended, perhaps. 

Boredom seeped in, or was it tiredness, or something else, slowly, like saltwater into pools in rocks. Whatever it was, it itched dreadfully. Sometimes Goro took to sweeping out the cell floors as if he dusted off the lids over his own feelings. 

***

And then the day came when he heard, from cells away, the footfall of someone else in the place. And he knew then that it was the end of his waiting. 

No, he wordlessly told Lavenza, who had materialized beside him in a flurry. 

“Yes,” she responded, looking excited and wistful all at once. “He has been released. He is ready to resume his journey as one who has overcome the world.”

Goro was surprised to find that his chest did not clench with that old, bitter ache. 

“But he is not entirely free. Not yet. The rest depends on you.” 

There was a moment during which she hesitated before reaching for his hands, and he did not pull away. Her fingers were soft and small against his; he could not remember anyone other than his mother holding him in this way. 

“We each have something for the Trickster only we can give. These form his inheritance. And with yours, you set both of you free.”

He stared at her, the understanding in him stemming from a place beyond words. Of course. There were gifts to be given, always, on the last day. Something to be left behind. Even a memory could be larger than a legacy. 

Awkwardly, unsure of all the feelings rising in his throat, Goro said, “I… have nothing for you, Lavenza.” 

For all that Lavenza had already given him. 

For a moment she looked blank. Then her mouth curved into the smirk he sometimes saw during battle.

“Have you learned nothing? We are not bound by such rules of exchange. But to be very honest, I envy you humans, your petty insecurities and your little joys. Hm.” Lavenza tilted her head. “Does that make me more human?”

This time he did laugh. “I suppose, if you think you’re going to miss me. It’s not a compliment to you.”

She smiled then, a perfectly human smile that showed dimples he was positive hadn’t been there before. “I do love you, Akechi Goro,” she said clearly, and he felt breathless, light, like an unlocked cell. “There, I said it. You have given without knowing it, and Akira’s and mine are yours to claim. Do not doubt it or think it undeserved. You are no longer alone.”

What was more precious, in the end — to be given a person, or to earn him? Even as he’d built his advancement on praise and merit, it had always rung hollow. In the end, he’d always desired a happiness that was his birthright. And could he now claim it, at the end of all things? Of all the possibilities his fate could have taken, of all the hatred he’d bore against Shido and his ilk, and his bitterness about that boy who wore destiny as gracefully and naturally as a second skin… it had been unimaginable, the idea that he could be loved at the close of his existence. That he was capable of giving or returning it at all, much less permitted to do so. 

“That’s enough for me,” Goro said, and this time he meant it. Even with so short a time to enjoy the rest of it.

“Shall we meet the Trickster together?”

They stepped out of the cell. 

The Velvet Room spread across the circular center of the prison as it always did, but brighter than before, touched by some skylight of sorts that had opened from above. The walls were lined with cells that no longer hung creaking doors on unoiled hinges. Instead, they formed simple and unassuming gaps through which a gentle breeze blew. This, in its entirety, was a toothless, harmless structure. And in the middle of it all stood the Trickster, Kurusu Akira himself, waiting with his hands in his pockets as always. 

Goro and Lavenza moved forward. One step, then another.

“This was all yours,” Akira said to Goro as they neared, his beautiful features twitching and crumbling against tears. “I always had a hunch. No. I always knew it.” 

Knew him. 

“Yeah.” Something in him loosened and spiraled away. They stood before each other for a long moment before pulling the other in, gripping for all it was worth. “Thief,” Goro murmured against his ear, his hair, a light musk of morning shampoo, bloodless. “You thief. You fucking thief.” 

“And now,” Lavenza said some minutes later, with a little clearing of her throat, “you have the World, Tricksters.” 

Goro watched without resentment as Akira’s hands glowed with Lavenza’s gift. Then it was his turn. He took Akira’s hand, pressed the jail key into it, and together they walked towards the prison gates. The Velvet Room began dissipating around them in little flits of blue, taking wing about their heads; before it vanished completely a single butterfly alighted and lingered on the edge of his nose.  An expanse opened around him, cool and salt-like on his tongue, and he heard the sound of birds calling and circling in the infinite distance.