Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

On the second Saturday of April, 2014, Goro leaves his apartment in the morning and goes straight to the Diet Building.

Entering the Metaverse is unpleasant no matter how much he does it.  In the weeks since initiating his plan, he’s practiced almost every day — worked himself ragged, sweating and sore, battling strange monsters in a world that shouldn’t exist.

It doesn’t exist — not for anyone else, at least.  But at 15 years old, Goro is already certain that he’s a special case.  The world has something planned for him, one way or another.

Huddled in an alley, tucked behind a dumpster where no one should be able to see him, Goro taps the mysterious red eye on his phone.  “Nakamura Fujiko,” he whispers.  “The Diet Building.  Circus.”

The familiar burn of acid and sulfur stings the back of his throat.  Then the dizziness strikes, weakening his knees and making his head spin, and everything unimportant fades away into the background.

The music is the first thing to greet him before he’s even opened his eyes: a shrill and shrieking carnival march that seems to repeat endlessly at the highest volume human ears can stand.  Great striped tents are placed overlapping with one another or nonsensically stacked on top, creating toppling towers of billowing canvas and nylon.  The whole of it looks like it’s eating itself alive.

It feels eerie and wrong.  Goro takes comfort in the familiar white outfit he finds himself in and the blade heavy in his hand.  “Robin Hood?” he asks the empty air, reaching inside himself.

Yes, my liege, Robin Hood says.  I’m at your service.

Loki doesn’t pitch in, but Goro can feel him there, too, just out of reach.  And so, equipped with the most valuable weapons he’s ever had, he turns to enter the Palace.

And he’s prepared this time, too; he’s ready.  He has a full pack of snacks and several energy drinks of varying quality, and he’s fully determined to make some progress today.  Nothing, and he means nothing, is going to get in his way.

Except that standing right there in front of the overgrown, grotesque circus tent, there’s a boy.

This isn’t a Shadow.  Goro has seen Shadows, fought Shadows, encountered cognitive versions of people that burst into Shadows.  But this boy — small, thin, maybe a couple years younger than him, with a round, girlish face and stupid fish eyes — is no Shadow.  He’s in an ill-fitting costume with a too-big jacket falling in heaps around his shoulders, but he has the unmistakable tangible weight of the real world, and the power of wielding a Persona burning on the tips of his fingers.  He’s real.

Blood rushes in Goro’s ears until it’s the only thing he can focus on.  Even when the strange boy opens his mouth to say something, he doesn’t hear it.

Instead, he lets out a rough, bitten-off battle cry and swings his blade.

The boy is nimble, though — nimbler than Goro was when he was his age.  He flips backwards, landing with one red glove pressed neatly to the ground.  “Wait,” he’s saying, but he isn’t crying, isn’t panicking, isn’t begging for his life.  His expression is remarkably even.  “I’m not your enemy — ”

Even when Robin Hood shoots a blast of magic toward him, the boy escapes unscathed.  Goro bares his teeth.  “Shut up,” he growls.  “I don’t care.”

Certainly, since awakening to his powers, Goro has wondered.  It reminds him of the way people talk about aliens: the world is so large and so unknown that to call yourself the only one seems both self-aggrandizing and impossibly lonely.  Goro has only just discovered the Metaverse; no matter how quickly he’s learning, and no matter how loath he is to admit it, he doesn’t know everything yet.

And he’s had the vague sense ever since, too, waking up in the middle of the night with his eyes stinging and head pounding, swirling chains and tendrils of blue escaping his consciousness the moment he regained it — that there’s someone else, opposite him.  That they could ruin him, if Goro isn’t careful or smart or vicious enough.

And now here he is — facing off with a wisp of a boy in a too-big jacket, caught at a disadvantage because he let his guard down.  Stupid.

The boy is disgustingly hard to pin down; he gets hurt less by Goro’s blade and more by vaulting himself into things as he dodges.  By the time Goro scores a single hit on him, singeing through jacket and shoulder alike with a hissing slice of his blade, they’re both out of breath.

But the boy doesn’t even flinch.  Instead of whimpering or crying for mercy, he just grins like a maniac and says, “Satanael.”

For a moment, nothing happens; everything slows like it’s floating in molasses.  Goro’s limbs feel heavy; moving becomes more strenuous, like air resistance is pushing him back.  And the boy is just as still as he has been, when he isn’t flipping through the air like a mad trapeze artist — head tilted, gaze locked, watching him.

Everything happens at once.  There’s the acid-burn of the Metaverse; then a blue fire rips through the air between them.  A figure wrenches into being — large, impossibly so.  It waves its hand lazily, and then —

Goro doesn’t realize he’s on the ground until he opens his eyes to the swirling red Metaverse sky.  His body aches, his ears are ringing, and no matter how he reaches, neither Robin Hood nor Loki are able or willing to answer.

He lost.

The boy comes nearer, crouching at his side.  Goro flinches away until the back of his pounding head smacks concrete again.  He struggles, willing his body to move, to run, to jump this kid and strangle him until not even his ridiculously overpowered Persona can save him — but he can’t.  No matter how he struggles, clawing the ground until his fingers bleed, he can’t fight at all.

His eyes fly open, trying to identify the boy even through his swimming vision.  Could it be someone he knows, someone who followed him here — or worse, could Goro have been tricked all along?  Could he be one of Shido’s people?

But through his mask, under his bangs, the boy is just a boy: young, unfamiliar, and remarkably blank-faced.  His mop of black hair and what’s exposed of his expression are unremarkable.  If Goro didn't know any better, he might think the barely-there pull of his mouth looks something like regret.

When the boy digs into his pocket, Goro stares him down, unwilling to dutifully close his eyes even in the face of a knife or bullet — but he only pulls out a bandaid and artlessly sticks it across the Goro’s forehead, above his mask where his ruffled bangs don’t cover.  Goro goes cross-eyed trying to look, utterly flabbergasted, as a bit of health rushes back into him.

Is this some new type of psychological warfare?  Is this a test?  Is he trying to get him back to his feet so they can fight again, and then take him down a second time as some sick form of torture?

Another dig in the pocket, and another bandaid — on Goro’s exposed jaw, this time.  The pain lessens enough for him to speak.  “What the fuck are you doing.”

The boy pulls out the entire box.  “I said I wasn’t your enemy,” he says morosely, smoothing an adhesive first on his own exposed neck near his injured shoulder, then on Goro’s chin.

Goro thinks suddenly of the sad alley cats by his apartment, aggressively sulking at any passerby that refuses to stop and pet them.  He immediately feels the urge to strangle himself for making the comparison — but for better or worse, he just doesn’t have the energy.

“Could have fooled me,” Goro hisses, spread like a starfish on the concrete.

Quietly fuming, Goro expects a fight — but all he gets is more bandaids.  In the corner of his eye, the boy doesn’t even look angry; it’s like the taunt passed right over him, like water, like it didn't mean anything at all.

“What do you want then?” Goro probes when his first taunt falls flat, gaining some small satisfaction when the other boy fumbles the box in his hands.  Bingo.  Nothing comes for free, not even basic human kindness — especially not kindness prefaced by a duel in the Metaverse.

Other than the manic smile that had marred his face just before summoning his stupidly huge Persona, the boy has been remarkably hard to read.  Goro studies him more intently than he would admit as he stews over his answer, clocking the way his body stills and his hands fidget discreetly in his lap.  His expression is blank, but under that he looks — a little lost, maybe, like he isn’t really sure what he’s here for, either.

Goro would never admit it under pain of death, but he has a split second — staring at this wide-eyed rumpled kid, a good several centimeters shorter than him and all but swallowed by his coat — where he wants to help him.  Maybe he just awakened to his Persona, and he doesn’t know where he is, or what’s happening, or why his body hurts so badly.  Maybe he’s feeling the same things that Goro felt.

But then those thoughts shut down with a fresh bleed of anger.  If that is the case, which it may not be — but if it is, then that means this boy just awakened, and hasn’t had the months of practice, and even inexperienced and exhausted, he’d managed to beat Goro.

That possibility is unacceptable; it’s impossible.  It makes Goro’s heart race, secret and furious, in his chest.

"I want to help you,” the boy finally settles on saying, voice as even as anything, face giving nothing away — but Goro sees a vulnerability in the way his body is held too still and his hands fidget.

This is really starting to piss him off.

A mean, thin smile pulls like a snarl across Goro’s face.  “As much as I appreciate it, I don’t know what would make you think I need help from a scrawny little kid like you.”

The boy’s head cocks to the side.  He glances down at Goro’s prone form, then back at his face, wordless.

The brittle pleasant mask cracks.  “Fuck off.”

Pushing up his mask like eyeglasses, the boy says, “I didn't say anything.”

There’s a stilted moment of silence.  Goro looks up at the boy suspiciously; that suspicion shifts to alarm as he watches him sway once, then twice.  Then he collapses like wet cardboard into a heap on the concrete, right beside Goro.  The boy is already out like a light, ashen and pale, closed eyes lined in dark lashes.

Like this, there’s only a few inches between their faces, and recognition kicks in Goro’s chest.  Upside down and half-obscured, the boy almost looks familiar — like a faded photograph, or a mirror when you squint the image blurry.

Really, Goro should kill him here and now.  Another Persona user isn’t going to mean anything good for him; at best, he’ll be a neutral entity, and their paths will inevitably cross again.  In the worst case, Shido will find him too, and Goro will have direct competition.  That could ruin everything.

Cautiously, Goro pokes the boy’s cheek; it bounces back, smooth and soft.  His finger comes away wet with blood, leaking out under his mask from a fresh awakening.  A new wave of rage sparks in Goro, and like instinct, he reaches for his saber.

He said he wanted to help you, my liege, Robin Hood objects quietly.

Goro steadfastly ignores him.  He should kill the boy now, while he’s passed out and weak and vulnerable.  This world is brand-new to him, and still, Goro sees in him the capacity to beat him at everything.  That’s exhilarating; it can’t be allowed.  Goro is cautious and smart and vicious; more importantly, he has a destiny.  This kid isn’t going to change that.

He should kill him now — but he doesn’t.  Instead, he downs an energy drink, stuffs the rest of the boy’s bandaids in his pockets, and heads into the Palace, leaving the crumpled figure in black behind.

The carnival tents are thick and impossibly heavy, and no matter how he tries, Goro can’t lift them high enough to slither under.  His sword doesn’t make a dent either, rejecting the blade with a metallic clang.  Frustrated, he stalks around the concrete, looking for an opening or something to fight.

Eventually, he finds one: up a flagpole, through a scaffold, then across a trapeze, there’s a narrow slit in the ceiling of one of the tents.  He peers inside, but it’s only darkness; he listens hard, but the music drowns out any possibly useful sound.  Heart thumping, he yanks his belt off and drops it through the gap; the buckle hits the ground with a clack, loud enough to cut through the cacophony.  When no other sound indicates enemies running to investigate, Goro steels his resolve and drops through.

The thick nylon yanks his hair into tangles on his way down, but he gets his belt back without incident and moves on.  The music is, blissfully, quieter in this tent; Goro clings tight to walls, running past the Shadows he can avoid and throwing himself at the ones he can’t.  Goro is young but he’s getting strong fast, training his body and mind until his stamina with both his sword and magic are nothing to sneeze at.  Still, he’s only one person, and the Shadows are endless.  His stolen box of bandaids will only get him so far.

Bitterly, he thinks of the boy outside.  Goro had struggled with blood, sweat, and tears to get a decent handle on his power and Persona; he can’t even access Loki most of the time.  In the beginning, he would faint, leave himself gasping, knock himself out for entire days, just for the most simple magic.  Even now, he has to rely on running away more often than not.  And that boy had just — done it.  Even having fainted, he’d summoned a Persona beyond Goro’s imaginings, performed a devastating attack, and managed to stay on his feet a remarkably long time after.  Goro is so jealous he could kill him.  He desperately wants to know who he is.

He could be useful, Robin Hood suggests lowly as Goro leans gasping against a wall, catching his breath while the Shadow chasing him ducks down the wrong bend.  His power is considerable.  If you aren’t planning on killing him, it would be worth having him on your side.

“I’ll kill him,” Goro swears — but it lacks the conviction he’d held in the thick of battle, staring down that boy through their masks like they knew each other.  That leniency frustrates him; it confuses him.  He crushes the empty energy drink in his hand before pushing off from the wall, can cutting into his white gloves and staining them unsightly.

In the whirling musical tumble of the tent’s impossible rooms, Loki’s silence feels even more judgmental than usual.  Vengefully, Goro grinds his heel into a Shadow’s face and thinks that if Loki didn't want to show his face since his awakening, he shouldn’t have come at all.

There’s no knowing how big this Palace is.  Goro understands the essentials of it: that this is someone’s heart, and he needs to dig in deeper to find their Shadow.  Prey doesn’t tend to come waltzing out to greet the hunter, after all.

But where exactly these overlapping tents lead him, he isn’t sure.  He sneaks; he sprints; he climbs and zip-lines and tightrope-walks under the watchful, intrusive eye of a thousand clicking cameras.  But even by the time his supplies start running low and every muscle in his body screams for a break, he can’t be certain where exactly in the Palace he is.

Worse, he can’t shake the feeling he’s being followed.  Surely if the Palace ruler knew where he was, she would have tried harder to eliminate him by now; still, that feeling follows him, someone’s eyes stuck like an itch on his back.

It doesn’t come to a head until Goro gets really and truly stuck.  Holding on to a swaying bit of scaffolding, he peers up at a tent held impossibly high in the air by an impossibly large bundle of balloons.  Unless Robin has a secret ability to fly that he hasn’t unveiled yet, he might need another plan.

If he squints just right, he thinks he can maybe make out the blurry figure of someone through a gap in the canvas.  If he could throw his saber at just the right moment, with an insane amount of force, maybe he could kill her from here — but he would only have one shot, and Goro has never been especially lucky.  Maybe if he had a gun —

“Having some trouble?” a voice asks directly behind him.

And embarrassingly, Goro shrieks, hand clapping over his ear and face flushing.  Whirling around, he finds that godforsaken boy from earlier squatting casually just behind him, so close that their noses brush.

“You,” Goro snarls, leaping forward to strangle him.

A smile tugs the other boy’s face as he bounds backwards effortlessly.  There’s no sign of the exhaustion from earlier; by comparison, Goro is aching and spent.  Still, his panicked fury fuels him: he should have killed him, shouldn’t have just left him there; he’s an unpredictable variable and of course he’s come here to ruin everything; Goro is so stupid to think there’s any chance that anyone would help him for no reason at all —

They tumble off the scaffolding.  The boy makes to infuriatingly backflip away again but Goro gets his hands around his neck first; even when he gets a kick to the gut for it, he holds on tight.  They twist through the air like acrobats, and the boy’s smile doesn’t falter a second — it only grows wider, wilder, all competitive and ecstatic and electric like the only place he wants to be is here.

It’s a little eerie, after seeing how stony and expressionless he can be outside of a fight — but Goro is in no place to judge.  He doubts his teachers and classmates and the people in charge of his scholarship would even recognize him like this, gnashing his teeth in his fury as he follows the boy all the way down.

They don’t stick the landing.  The enclosed stage they fall into has gymnastics mats stacked conveniently high; they’re still hard enough that Goro loses his breath when the boy flips them midair and shoves him into the ground first.  But even when another body lands elbow-first into his, he at least doesn’t break anything.

There’s a moment of peace while they both catch their breath.  The boy is kneeling over Goro like this, forehead on the mat near his neck.  He’s so close that Goro can feel his breath tickle his ear; his unruly hair is pushed into Goro’s face until he has no choice but to breathe him in.  He smells — pleasant.  Not really like anything in particular, but pleasant nonetheless.

Not that it matters anyway, since Goro is going to murder him.  He shoves him away, back on his feet in an instant; the tip of his blade slides under the boy’s chin, so that he has to raise his head to not get nicked.  “Why are you here?”

Seemingly unbothered by the threat, the boy settles back on his knees and grins.  “I want to help you.”

Goro gapes at him.  “Are you dense?”

The boy shrugs.

Gnashing his teeth, Goro shoves a hand under his bangs to push against his burgeoning headache.  “How did you even track me this far?”

“Track you?” the boy asks, raised eyebrows barely visible under his hair.

“Yes,” Goro grits, “track me.  Follow me.  I doubt you made it this far with no direction.”

“But I had direction,” he says, and pulls something out of his pocket too fast for Goro to stop him.

And Goro pauses, dumbstruck and staring like a buffoon, because the thing in his hand — it’s a map.  A trifold paper map like you might see at any event, with “The Lady’s Circus” printed across the front in eccentric red letters.

“Give me that,” he says, snatching and pouring over it.  Sure enough, when he investigates, there is in fact a map on the inside.  There are even some scratchy handmade notes, circling this area or that, jotting down clues to this or that puzzle.  Goro knows them well, because he’d had to solve the same ones.

The helpful “you are here” symbol is positioned over a ticket counter, a short stretch away from where Goro had first come in.  In his attempt to ration energy and items, he hadn’t bothered going back that way.  He can’t believe he missed it.

The map doesn’t include all of it, but before Goro can ask, a second matching paper is pushed under his nose.  Between the two of them, the whole circus is outlined and color-coded.

“I did follow you at about the halfway point, when I caught up,” the boy says evenly.  There’s zero audible indication that he’s gloating, which somehow only makes the situation more humiliating.

He has a tactical mind, my liege, Robin Hood points out hopefully.  Farther away, Loki's cackle zings nuclear and echoing in Goro’s head.

Goro’s blood boils.

He knows too much.  Either he has an advantage, a leg up over Goro, some secret fountain of knowledge, or — worse, much worse — he’s just that good.  So good that someone as pathetic and useless as Goro can’t even fathom it.  Everything that Goro has had to wrestle, struggle with, crawl through the mud for — it comes as easy as breathing to this stupid little boy.

His natural talent is phenomenal.  Something in Goro screams at him to either kill or absorb him, that they can’t both exist in the same world without consuming each other.

Before he can raise his sword to the other boy’s neck again and shut him up for good, the entire sunken stage they’re set in lights up.

“My, my,” an unfamiliar voice says, fizzling and electronic at the edges from the microphone clipped to her lapel.  “Have a couple of lost kittens stumbled into my show?”

Goro has seen his fair share of Shadows before, has walked beside faceless figures or snarling beasts or yellow-eyed visions of the scum of the earth.  He watched the Shadow of his last foster father choking on blood, the blade in his gut nailing him to the filthy ground.

Nakamura Fujiko’s Shadow isn’t like that at all.  Goro has seen her on newspapers and television screens all over the city: the rising star of the Liberal Democratic Party, drawing in moderate voters with her inventive economic reform and staunch conservatives with her traditionalist social views.  She carries the set image of an elegant middle-aged woman of class, and all the aesthetics that go along with it.

Here, her shadow smiles grotesquely wide, movements jittery and unnatural.  Her respectable skirt suit has been traded for an over-the-top ringleader’s get up: striped trousers, a glittery vest, a scarlet tailcoat.  Her bowtie shines unnaturally in the stage lighting; her top hat looks uncomfortably like flesh.

She’s larger than life — inhuman, unrecognizable, revolting.  Goro has to swallow down bile just looking at her.

In the corner of his vision, the other boy only looks vaguely interested.  His body language is more alert than it had been, turned to face her, but his expression is still blank.

“I’m sorry, kitties,” Shadow Nakamura continues, tilting her head to the side, “but we don’t take in strays.  There’s enough mouths to feed around here as is, and this is a show, not a charity.”

Goro didn’t realize Palace Masters could move around so much; in more ways than one, they really are very different from the Shadows in Mementos.  That’s his mistake.  Readying his sword, he eyes the difference between the two of them; if he took a running leap from the tower of mats they’re on, he wouldn’t be but a few meters from her; if he was fast enough, then maybe —

Shadow Nakamura sighs, “If you don’t play along, it won’t make for a very good show.”  Then she winks at the crowd, like they’re sharing a secret.  “But maybe there’s another way you can entertain the audience.”

Two huge cages descend from nowhere in a great clamor of chains.  When the dust settles, Goro sees a monstrously-sized, drooling lion through the bars of each.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Shadow Nakamura begins, voice bright and booming just like in her campaign speeches, “may I present a teaser to whet your appetite while we prepare the main course?”

“Hey!” Goro starts, making to run toward her.  When one of the lions snarls, he pauses, watching cautiously as the doors of both cages start to slide slowly open.

At the same time, a swing descends from somewhere.  Nakamura climbs on just before it starts its ascension above the stage, posing and pointing emphatically as she continues riling the crowd.  “The two lost kittens intruding on our show, versus my beloved pets!”

The cage opens all the way.  At once, two sets of giant paws step out into the stadium with a resounding thud.

“I hope you enjoy this special appetizer!  It’s on the house!”

The crowd laughs and jeers and chitters.  Cameras flash.  The lions burst into Shadows like fireworks.

Goro has never seen this type of Shadow before: a blue-ish, bipedal cat, with a large snarl and an admittedly cool cape.  A power radiates from it that sets his teeth on edge — and worse, there’s four of them.

“Stay back,” he hisses to the boy at his side.  “Your Persona is useless if you faint the moment you use it.  You’ll just get in my way.”

He’s always been alone; that isn’t going to change now.

But, to his mixed irritation and relief, when he vaults himself off the mats, he finds the boy following a half-second behind.

The boy shows off a dagger, glinting brilliantly under the stage lights.  “Who said I need my Persona?” he says around a smile too wide for his face, eyes bright and focused on the enemies before them.  And then, before Goro can retort, he’s bounding forward.

There’s no apparent pattern or sense to the way he hacks and slashes, and if Goro weren’t paying attention, he might think the boy didn’t know what he was doing at all.  But he never gets hurt — agile as anything, he leaps out of the way with a feline grace before darting in for another hit.  By comparison, Goro feels like a statue, still and solid and unwavering, hitting harder and less frequently, coming out each time a little worse for wear.

The next time Goro looks over, the boy is landing a particularly good hit.  One of the Shadows goes down, momentarily stunned.  The other appears to still be at full capacity.

Goro gets a bad feeling, taking up a defensive position and closing the distance.  The strange boy doesn’t even seem to notice him, though; he only grins wider and reaches for his mask.

“Bicorn,” he shouts, “Garu!”

A wind attack rips through the air and into the mostly healthy Shadow.  It shrieks and flits into nothing in an instant — the boy must have been exploiting a weakness.  How could he have known about that weakness?

Goro’s teeth grit.  He throws himself at his own pair of Shadows even harder than before, digging his saber into the neck of one and kicking the other so hard his knee aches.

“Makouha,” he spits, and Robin Hood takes care of the rest.

Against everything Goro ever expected about himself, it feels — good, to fight with someone by his side.  The other boy is distracting; he’s unpredictable; he’s infuriatingly talented.  Goro wants to be even more talented, and he pushes himself harder and harder to come out on top.  His body aches and sweat drips down his neck, and he’s never felt better in his life.

When he delivers the finishing blow, the strange boy joins him; they move so fast they’re invisible, and every glance of that smiling face makes something inside Goro glow red-hot like a fire poker.

Then, just as fast, it’s over.  The Shadows disappear, and the roar of the crowd dies and fades into nothing.  The stage lights flick off in successive waves.

Just like before, the other boy rocks and sways.  He doesn’t faint, but he does topple in a heap, lying on the ground in an echo of how Goro had laid when they’d first fought.

He’d never admit it, but Goro is pretty tired, too.  Ignoring the protests of his screaming legs, he squats down beside the boy to look at him more closely.

The boy’s mask is shorter than Goro’s: black and white, painted and carved in mischievous edges.  Like all the other components of this outfit, it’s sharp in the corners.  Between the collar of his oversized coat and the high neck of his vest, hardly any part of him is visible.  His gloves are a bright, vibrant red.

By comparison, his features are soft.  On closer examination, he might be closer to Goro’s age than he’d initially thought — a late bloomer, maybe — but his face is still full and sloped with youth.  Under his disorderly wreck of a haircut, his gray eyes are wide and deceptively innocent.

Gray eyes which are staring back at him.  Goro stills, reaching for the good-boy guise lying dormant within himself.

“Hi there,” he says, voice still gritty and not at all charming after the tough fight, “I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

When he extends a hand, he halfway expects to be left hanging.  But the boy takes it without hesitation, pulling Goro closer as he yanks himself into sitting.

“Maybe we did,” he agrees with some distant joke in his eye that Goro doesn’t understand.

The smiling daredevil from earlier is gone again, leaving only this stoic, mild ghost in its place.  Goro watches him thoughtfully; maybe they have more in common than he’s willing to admit.

Playing nice is annoying.  It’s demeaning.  He doesn’t like to do it, and there’s hardly a point in this situation, anyway.

But Goro is practicing patience, and he should hedge his bets.  He’s no stranger to humiliation.  If circumstances change, he can always kill him later anyway.

“The Bicorn was new,” Goro starts in his smalltalk voice, like he isn’t actually curious at all.  “I’ve seen them around the Palace.  Does that mean you can use multiple Personas?”

The boy looks straight through him, eerily still.  “You can too, right?”

Somewhere inside Goro, Loki laughs, Looks like he’s got you all figured out, joy at Goro’s expense zipping through his blood and into his clenching fists like lightning.  Goro doesn’t miss the way the comment digs at him — while Goro technically has more than one Persona, whether or not he can actually use both is another matter entirely.

Loki had been an overwhelming presence when Goro awakened — so much so that Robin Hood had, by comparison, felt like a joyride or an afterthought.  But where Robin Hood is there whenever Goro reaches, where he is as natural and easy and simple as breathing, calling Loki elusive would be an understatement.  His judgment weighs Goro down every moment of the day, but he refuses to pull his own weight; he’s always just — watching.

Please, Loki says, sternly indulgent like he’s talking to a child, you can’t handle me yet, kiddo.  Find your resolve first; then we’ll talk.

Goro takes a deep breath discreetly through his nose.

“You seem to know a lot about me,” he finally says with a friendly, close-eyed smile.  “I admit, I feel I’m at something of a disadvantage.”

But the boy doesn’t take the opportunity to either apologize or rub it in.  He only stands there, eyes darting over Goro’s face with an urgency that doesn’t come through his relaxed body posture.

This is quickly becoming tedious and awkward.  Goro hates the tedious and awkward.

“We should go,” he says, eyes sliding away to scan the stadium around them.  “The Palace ruler could be back at any moment.”

Quick as anything, the boy snatches one of the stolen maps from Goro’s pocket.  “There’s a Safe Room not far from here.  Follow me.”

No matter how nice Goro’s trying to play, a snarky comment very nearly escapes him at the slight.  But then the boy is gone, leaving him with no real choice but to follow.

Perhaps he was just trying to help, Robin Hood suggests.

Goro rolls his eyes so hard he knows Robin Hood can feel it in whatever part of his viscera he’s buried himself into.  ‘Just trying to help’ — whose side are you on?

Still, despite his reluctance, it is nice to talk in the Safe Room.  Obviously, Goro could have gotten here just as quickly and easily himself, but some concessions need to be made for negotiations.  Goro will give this stupid little kid this small victory, then strike him where it hurts later.  He’s going to wring him for every ounce of knowledge and power he can, then leave him out to dry.

“Can I call you Crow?” the boy asks suddenly, interrupting Goro’s plotting.

“What?” Goro asks dumbly.  Crow?  Why?  “Why?”

The strange boy shrugs, hopping up to sit on the table in the center of the room.  The distortion flickers for a moment, revealing what looks like a Diet building conference room, beige and lifeless.  “Using real names in Palaces can be dangerous, right?  In case it seeps into their… cognitions, or something.”  He waves his hand vaguely in front of his face.  “Your mask has a beak.  Crow fits.”

The explanation makes an infuriating amount of sense.  Goro has never really considered the power of names in Palaces before; he’d never considered there being anyone around to call him anything.  It’s really fucking eerie that this supposedly inexperienced boy has already thought this through.

Crow.  It’s not the worst possible nickname, especially from this brat.  Goro stares at him, looking for any amount of mocking or insincerity; the boy blinks back at him without a scrap of malevolence.

Goro smiles lifelessly.  “Sure, that’s fine.  What about you?”

“What do you think I should be called?”

“You want me to choose?”

The boy shrugs again, but his eyes are too bright and laser-focused under his mask to be truly casual.  “It’s only fair.”

Fairness is a strange concept to apply here.  Still, Goro can play along.  Thoughtfully, he studies the boy: unpredictable, mercurial, adaptable.  There’s a mischievous tinge to him underneath his harlequin’s mask, but still, he keeps his cards close to his chest.

“Joker,” he suggests before he’s even consciously willing his mouth to form the word.  It settles in the air like a scar, certain and right and achingly familiar.

And the boy just — freezes.  His eyes widen; his shoulders lock; his body leans nearer, as if unconsciously.  For a moment, Goro is certain he must hate it, and defensiveness makes his hackles rise.

Then the boy relaxes, all at once.  “Alright,” he says like nothing happened, “Joker it is.”

That defensiveness hasn’t completely faded away.  “Please,” Goro says with a thin smile, “don’t spare my feelings if you don’t like it.  Perhaps aliases are simply too important to leave up to someone else after all.”

Joker ignores the dig.  “It’s a perfect fit,” he says, tilting closer with a smile in his eyes.  “Don’t you think so, Crow?”

Just like that, he’s all blasé and insincere again.  Goro really can’t get a handle on him at all.

“It does suit you,” he huffs, leaning his hip against the table.

When Joker’s smile spreads from his eyes to his mouth, Goro can’t help but feel like he lost.

“We should talk about the Palace,” Goro says, abruptly pivoting away from that particular thought.  “You said you wanted to help me.  What did you mean by that?”

Joker eyes him a moment, eyes glinting silver.  “What do you know about Palaces?”

Goro is offended.  He doesn’t actually know very much at all, either, which only makes it worse.  “What do you know?”

“This and that,” Joker says, dropping his gaze to watch his own boots sway when he kicks.  “That place you were staring at, hoisted in the air — I bet that’s where you need to go.”

“Obviously,” Goro says sweetly, even though it wasn’t obvious, and he’d been questioning himself over it not an hour ago.  “Locating it is child’s play; it’s accessing it that’s the problem.”

Joker nods solemnly.  “The balloons are pretty impressive, aren’t they?”

They are — like something Goro would have seen in a kid’s show a lifetime ago.  Really, this whole Palace is just as whimsical as it is deadly; if he were someone else, maybe he could have fun skulking through the halls here, instead of just running and fighting for his life.

That someone else continues like he was never expecting an answer in the first place.  “I’m sure the Treasure must be there, for it to be so well-protected.”

Goro blinks.  “Treasure?”

“Right,” Joker says with an emphatic nod, “her Treasure.  The root of her distorted desires.”

Suddenly, Goro has a lot less conviction in this suspiciously-helpful child-prodigy theory he had going for Joker.  Goro isn’t aiming for desires.  He’s going to kill her.

“Right,” he echoes flatly.  Maybe he should get rid of him after all.

“What good will killing her do?” Joker asks, like a creepy little mind reader.  “Too many deaths too close together only means more trouble later.  Wouldn’t it be better for her to leave the political scene of her own free will?”

Goro feels like he’s watching a late-night infomercial sales pitch.  The plastic smile comes back on.  “Maybe you should go into politics.  This is quite the speech.”

“That’s the plan.  Vote Joker for Prime Minister, 2014.”

His straight-faced delivery leaves something to be desired.  Goro sighs, pressing his hand to his forehead in anticipation of a headache.  “What does this… treasure have to do with any of this?”

“If you seize the root of her distorted desires, her cognition will change.  She won’t want to exploit or manipulate people anymore.  She’ll change.”

“How sweet,” Goro deadpans.

Joker shrugs.  “Nothing kills a political career like sincerity.”  A pause.  “And criminal confessions.  Given what we’ve seen here, she has a lot to own up to.”

Goro actually hasn’t seen anything of the sort while he’s been here; maybe the Shadows chasing him down hallways have kept him too busy.  Not that he’ll admit that, of course.  “Where did you get this information?”

“A friend,” Joker says.

Alarm bursts sour under his tongue.  “Another Persona user?”

Joker shrugs, like it doesn’t matter.  Goro represses the urge to strangle him.

It’s no secret that Joker is frustrating and unreliable.  However, if there’s at least one more other than him, killing him now without any leads to follow up on won’t exactly do Goro any good.  And besides that, he’s been going into the Metaverse blind, and suffering for it; if there’s a more efficient way to go about things, and a source of more information about this world, then the only real tactical choice is to take it.

There’s no guarantee that Joker is telling the truth; even if he is, it doesn’t mean Goro can trust him.

Still, Goro puts out his hand.

“Let’s form a temporary alliance, then,” Goro says with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.  “First, we’ll steal the Treasure in order to verify your information.”

Joker tilts his head to the side.  “Do I get something out of this?”

“The pleasure of my company,” Goro grits through his teeth, waving his waiting hand toward him again.

When Joker only stares expressionlessly, Goro sighs.  “What do you want?”

Nothing comes for free; Goro already knew that.  He knew, so there’s no reason to be disappointed like a child.  If anything, it’s reassuring that Joker is after something, because it makes all of his actions make more sense.

“The pleasure of your company,” Joker says with that same straight-faced delivery, “in Mementos.  Let’s go together.”

Of course he knows about Mementos, too.  Nothing surprises him anymore.  “Fine.  Now, how do we get to the Treasure?”

Joker leans his chin in his hand with a carefree grin.  “That’s the tricky part.”

They hash out a tentative plan.  Goro isn’t pleased, and he makes sure Joker knows it; they go back and forth over and over.  To Goro’s mixed irritation and delight, Joker gives it as good as he gets; they’re matched in conversation, and every time Goro thinks he’s managed to pull ahead, Joker surprises him again.

Goro must have lost his mind, to be staking his entire life on information from a mysterious boy whose name he doesn’t even know.  But there’s security in the deal, and given how adamantly Joker had followed him into this Palace in the first place, Goro thinks he must really need the help.  If Joker had only been looking to kill him, he would have done so right when he beat him.

It’s a strange feeling — being needed, for anything.  Goro isn’t certain he’s ever felt it before.

Maybe he’s coming down with something.  There’s an uncomfortably stuffy feeling in his chest.

“I’m not giving you my phone number,” Goro says shortly as he gets ready to leave.  “I’m sure you understand.  This isn’t a friendship; we’re using each other.”

If Joker is bothered at all by the distance, it doesn’t show.  From the corner of his eye, Goro watches him kick his feet, still seated on the table.  The eerie, battle-wise grin is back, and privately, Goro lets himself acknowledge his own disappointment.

“Sure, you can use me, Crow,” Joker grins, but there’s something sticky and unfamiliar there, like an old wound picked open.  “We both want something; we’ll use each other.”

Something about the words settles wrong, weighing Goro down like he’d eaten something funny.  But he just nods, smiles transparently, and says, “I’m glad we have an understanding.  I’ll be leaving first, then.”

Joker’s eyes dig like nails into his back as he makes his way out of the Safe Room and into the real world.  There’s the dizziness, the sulfuric zing, and then Goro is back in his normal clothes, hair in place and injuries healed so that only the soreness remains.

He’s so exhausted by the time he makes it home that it takes everything he has to not collapse in the entryway.  The bloodthirsty assassin and picture-perfect prince facades fall away in an instant, leaving behind only aching, insignificant Goro.

When he changes clothes, Joker’s leftover bandaids tumble out onto the floor.  He stares at them blearily.

Goro has always been alone; that isn’t going to change now.

It’s already too late.

He shoves the bandaids back into his pockets.  That night, he dreams in swirling chains and flickering tendrils of blue.

Chapter Text

In children’s stories and arcade games, impossibly large bundles of balloons like the ones holding up Nakamura’s Treasure room would naturally be shot down via slingshot or the well-timed throw of a bomb.  In the real world, things aren’t that simple.

Acquiring a wire tap is easy.  Acquiring a wire tap that is completely impossible to trace is less easy.  After that, using the Metaverse to sneak into Nakamura’s office unnoticed is child’s play.  Goro wishes he had been the one to think of it. 

“This Palace is fixated on the media,” Joker had said in the Safe Room yesterday, flat and bored like the conclusion was easy to come to.  “She offers people up on display, but she herself never performs.  She’s untouchable.  To reach her Treasure, we just need to make her feel like that invulnerability doesn’t apply anymore.”

Like many things Joker says, it makes an infuriating amount of sense, and requires an impossible leap of faith.  Kneeling under Nakamura’s desk, taping the wire tap somewhere she’s sure to find it, Goro does his best to keep the other boy out of his mind.

When he slips back through the Metaverse and to the outside of the Diet Building, Joker is already waiting for him.  The sharp edges of his mask reflect the red sky, but the light doesn’t reach his eyes: they train on Goro like two black marbles, reflecting him larger and larger as he comes closer.

“You’re early,” Joker says with a friendly tinge to his voice that must be put on.

So are you , Goro thinks.  “C’mon,” he says instead, jerking his head toward the Palace.  “There’s no time to waste.”

The balloons are still intact the first time they check, so they kill time farming nearby Shadows for items.  Joker quietly demonstrates the way he sneaks around, and Goro quietly copies him until he has it down just as well.  He’s grateful and bitter and confused.  He’s going to pay him back for this.

Pay him back how, my liege? Robin Hood asks, concerned.

Loki pitches in this time, too.  You sound like a child.

Goro, who is decidedly not a child at the ripe old age of 15, ignores them.  His next ambush on an unsuspecting Shadow is especially vicious and sweet.

The longer Goro thinks about Joker, the less it makes sense.  He knows too much: the terminology, the mechanics, the general ways to get around.  He darts from hiding place to hiding place like he’s capable of melting into darkness itself.  His ability in battle is uncanny.  He doesn’t seem like a beginner; if anything, though it pains Goro to admit it, Joker seems infinitely more comfortable and capable in the Metaverse than Goro himself is, even if his raw physical ability doesn’t match it yet.

But Goro knows what he saw; he knows what the trickle of blood under Joker’s mask meant.  He just doesn’t know how .

Goro exhales harsh through his nose, watching Joker from the corner of his eye.  They met only yesterday, and already their hurried agreement is seeming more and more dangerous.  He needs to be careful; he needs more information.  All of his needs and wants are swirled together in a messy tangle that he doesn’t know how to unpick.

Still, the job comes first.  He’ll deal with the other consequences after that.

It's not like he expected the deal with Shido to be easy.  Goro has been planning this since childhood, when he sat alone with his mother's ashes and realized no one was going to help him of their own volition.  He did all the things he was supposed to: he was a good boy, a good student, a good foster son.  For all that got him.

He didn't expect Shido to be easy, not after all he watched his mother struggle through with him.  Even as a mid-ranked politician, largely unknown and unremarkable — a wealthy man is a wealthy man.  Goro has been intimately familiar with exactly what that means his entire life.

Still, he approached him.  Still, he took someone down pro-bono in Mementos, just to get through to him — to convince him of the truth, no matter how impossible.  He isn't naive enough to have expected Shido to be impressed , and Goro knows from experience how little hard work means to men like this.  Even so, the Metaverse is his greatest boon, his secret weapon; it would be an impossible gift for Shido to refuse, once he realized its value.

But Shido had only given him five minutes of his time and another name: someone infinitely more frightening, and infinitely more politically advantageous to get rid of.  The Liberal Democratic party needs a rising star to keep up with new voters; no one said that star had to be Nakamura.

A little test for you , Shido had said before shooing him out of his office like a stray dog.

So Goro will fetch.  He needs to do this job flawlessly; it's the last step before he can worm himself securely under Shido's skin.

He's going to make him depend on him, need him, beg him for help, then sit back and watch him fall.

Joker, naturally, doesn't know any of this.  Propelling himself off a Shadow with a kick to its face, he pulls out a toy gun: a small, discreet, surprisingly practical-looking pistol.

"Where did you get that?" Goro asks once the tent is clear of enemies.  "Toy or not, I didn't think anyone would sell something that realistic to a child.”

Joker is the same as yesterday: all smiles in battle, then weirdly flat out of it.  His gaze is a little too watchful when he thinks Goro isn’t looking, like he’s just as much a threat as the monsters around them.

"You think it's realistic?" he asks, pulling the toy out to look at again.

Certainly, under the circus's bright stage lights, it's easy to tell that the gun is a fake: it's too shiny, and the plastic has a few rough edges where it must have pulled away from the mold wrong.  The trigger pulls, but as far as Goro can tell, that's the only moving part.  And it's too small — obviously made for a child’s hand.

Still, Goro is playing nice.  He digs his heels in.  "Don't you?"

Joker shrugs, characteristically slippery.  Goro's teeth ache to grind under his smarmy smile.

“How embarrassing," he says, "I suppose my own inexperience may be showing.  By all means, feel free to enlighten me."

When Joker looks up to meet his eye, there's such warm, amused affection there that Goro's breath catches in his throat.  He doesn’t look fooled or won over by the words, nor incensed by the barb; he looks like Goro’s never seen anyone look before.  Not at him.

Not for the first time, Goro thinks something must be wrong with him: his heart is beating too hard in his chest.

Joker's mouth opens; there's words waiting in his mouth —

But then a great crash interrupts them: a boom so loud it rattles his teeth, accompanied by the ground shaking like it's seconds from falling apart.  Instinctively, Goro crouches low, grabbing Joker's forearm to yank him down beside him.  His eyes scan above for any falling objects, like he'd seen someone do in a movie once; the wobbling canvas of the circus tent waves back at him, nonthreatening and unconcerned.

Just as quickly, it ends.  The ground stops shaking; the noise skids to a halt.  It couldn't have been longer than a couple seconds.

Goro's hand clenches around Joker's arm; then he yanks away like the touch burns him.  An emotion, thick and uncomfortable, wrenches in his throat like a sickness.  He suppresses the urge to retch.

"I suppose that's our cue," he says with a forced smile.  Standing, he brushes imaginary dust off himself and looks around.  "Shall we?"

A moment later and Joker follows him up wordlessly, expression blank and posture unbothered.

Neither of them say a word as they circle back toward the Treasure.

There's no need to climb the precarious scaffolding again; the previously-unreachable tent is sitting defenseless in the center of the same sunken stage where they'd fought those Cait Sith the day before.  Its balloons lay discarded under and around it, a sad physical manifestation of Nakamura’s deflated ego.  Goro stomps on one on his way in.

When he rounds the corner, he expects to find Shadow Nakamura — but she isn't there.  He expects to see the Treasure — a pile of cash, maybe, or something equally mundane — but that isn't there, either.  There's only a ball of light, fuzzy around the corners, bobbing in the air like fishing tackle.

Joker hangs back near the entrance.  Goro suppresses the urge to swipe his hand through it and stares, too, hip cocked to the side and hand under his chin like a television detective.

“I assume we can’t just take it as is,” he says when Joker doesn’t offer any explanation on his own.  If he’s trying to be a know-it-all, he’s doing a horrible job of it.  “Should I expect a secret switch?  Alarms?  Lasers and pressure plates?”

The corner of Joker’s mouth quirks up.  “That would be interesting, wouldn’t it?”

In Joker-speak, that’s a no.  Goro rolls his eyes when he isn’t looking.

This time, Joker laughs before slinking right over to the light.  His red hand claws through it and comes out empty.  “It won’t materialize unless she thinks it’s in danger.”

Goro cocks an eyebrow.  “Doesn’t she?  The balloons are down.  She’s sent some minions after us already.”

Joker shakes his head.  “Not her.  The real Nakamura Fujiko.”

The real Nakamura.  Goro frowns, eyes settling somewhere far away while he thinks.

Certainly, the Metaverse works in strange and mysterious ways; the balloons were proof enough of that.  It’s not a huge jump to think of politicians as performers and ringleaders, but to think that a sense of security, an invincible shield against the media, could take the form of a silly bundle of plastic-wrapped helium — it’s absurd.

This whole world is absurd; there’s no point in getting lost in it.  The ticking clock of Goro’s destiny isn’t going to wait for him to catch up.

So the Treasure needs to materialize.  So she needs to feel threatened for it to do so — to sharpen the lens on the specific source of her distorted desires, perhaps.

Goro can work with that.

“I suppose that’s it for the day, then,” Goro says without explanation.

“Yep,” Joker says with a pop.  “Infiltration route secured.  Good job, partner.”

He holds his hand up for a high-five.  Goro’s eyes flick toward it briefly before he turns the other way.

“Shall we?” he asks sunnily, then leaves without waiting for an answer.

They take their time leaving the Palace.  Joker may be annoying and cryptic, and his very existence as another Persona user may drive Goro crazy, but really, he isn’t all bad company.  At least he’s quiet, which is more than Goro can say about the sniveling drivel that populates most of the world.  Still, Goro isn’t interested in working with him forever; even if their goals happened to align, it’s too much of a risk.

A long time ago, Goro had dreamed of standing tall at the vanguard of a group of freedom fighters.  His whole life, he’s wanted to belong to something.

But he never did, and the kid who believed in that is dead and gone now.  In the wake of that, there’s only Goro to pick up the pieces, and he refuses to doubt himself when he’s only just finished burying what he used to be.

I can appreciate the melodrama, but is now the time to feel bad for yourself? Loki mocks, watching Goro watch Joker barter with another Persona: a Pixie this time, wringing her hands from her knocked-down position.  You’re already falling behind, kid.  Figure it out or move on.

Loki has been very chatty today, but his helpfulness or lack thereof clearly hasn’t made the same overnight change.  Although, watching the Pixie flash across Joker’s mask like a wave — Goro can reluctantly admit he has a point.

Joker manages to restrain himself from doing anything else world-shaking as they finish making their way out of the Palace.  The two of them go back and forth, debating the best way to put Nakamura on edge — Goro suggests a threatening letter, which Joker vetoes, saying it’s too easy to dismiss as a prank.  Joker suggests a phone call, but Goro points out that they would never even make it to her personal line.

“We could go more public,” Goro muses, standing at Joker’s back to watch him pick the lock on a bright, gaudy chest.  Maybe he should pick up the skill as well, and give Joker a run for his money.  “Something overt and ostentatious.  Hard to ignore.”

There’s a moment where Joker doesn’t reply, his tongue caught focused between his lips.  “Like what — pasting flyers up?  Vandalizing her office?”

Goro scoffs.  “How tasteless.  I expected more from you.”  Joker’s fingers roll this way, then that; their angle changes just so, the pick tilting incrementally with it.  Goro watches with rapt attention.  “With her fear of the media, a publication seems like a good option, but without the right connections — ”

He could ask Shido for help; he might agree, if Goro explained the situation.  But then Shido would know more about the mechanics of the Metaverse, and then Goro would lose .

The lock opens with a click, Joker’s voice just a breath behind.  “I might know a journalist.”

“You might? ”

Joker hums noncommittally as he opens the chest, practically jumping in to pull out a teflon vest.  He considers it a second before shucking his coat and strapping it on.

It’s so big on him that it’s comical; he looks seconds from tipping over.  Goro stifles a laugh in his hand.

“Can you even walk in that thing?” he asks giddily.

Valiantly, Joker tries.  His usual catlike agility is gone; instead, he lumbers like a bear freshly awoken from hibernation.

This time, Goro really does laugh: an abrupt cackle that bursts from his throat and around the empty tent.  It’s a horrible, unfiltered sound, fully unflattering and mocking and ugly.

But Joker doesn’t even have the decency to be offended; he’s just watching Goro again, wide-eyed and intent, with that same overwhelming pressure that could crush them both.

For once, Goro doesn’t know what to say; words fall flat in his mouth.

Joker spares him the struggle, though, dropping his eyes to watch his own red hands undo the vest’s many clasps.  “Think it would fit you?”

It does, actually; though he isn’t that much bigger than Joker, the vest seems to mold itself to him like he was meant to wear it.  When he pulls his overlayer on top, it doesn’t even look any different.  And unlike with Joker, it doesn’t weigh him down or encumber his movement at all.

Naturally, Goro makes a few comments about it, but Joker doesn’t rise to the bait.  He seems deep in thought, distant and flippant and unreachable the whole rest of their journey.

It isn’t until they leave the striped circus tents behind, standing under the open red sky, that Joker finally opens his mouth for more than an absentminded hum.  “I need time to figure out that reporter.  Let’s do Mementos first.”

The disdainful wave that had shooed Goro from Shido’s office flashes in his mind.  “How much time?”

“I’m not sure,” Joker admits with none of the uncertainty or apology that comes with an admittance.  “How much time do we have?”

We , he says, not you .  Goro feels a snarl yank at his lip.  “Not nearly enough to play around.”

“Mementos isn’t playing around,” Joker says, infuriatingly calm, as he leans against the wall outside the Diet building.  “It’s my condition for working together.  Two days of Palace and one afternoon of Mementos doesn’t seem like a bad deal to me.”

Goro narrows his eyes.  “Just one afternoon?”

Joker shrugs.  “For now.”  In contrast to the relaxed lines of his posture, his eyes are sharp.  “Planning on going back on your side of the deal, Crow?”

If the challenge is a trap meant to incite him, he falls right in.  “Of course not,” Goro says with a knife-tipped smile.  “When should we meet?”

Truth be told, Goro isn’t up for it today; even if he could manage time to run home, take a nap, and run back out, he has an unfortunate amount of homework waiting for him.  This job is the most important thing by far at the moment, and not only because the apartment Shido had conditionally given him is the only way he can afford to live in Tokyo by himself — but his grades and scholarship are almost as important.  Classes are starting tomorrow, and Goro isn’t as ahead on coursework as he had wanted to be.

He has so much reading to do.  His eyes are beginning to ache just thinking about it.

But his pride is being questioned, and Goro will stay up reading all night if he needs to, beauty-sleep be damned.

Joker shrugs, unaware or uncaring of the fire he’s lit.  “I don’t know.  I have school tomorrow.”

Obviously , Goro wants to say.  “What a coincidence,” he says instead.  “I do as well.”

Through his mask, Joker’s eyes seem to sparkle.  Goro’s temper beats a heavy tempo in his chest.

Then Joker pushes off the wall, clearly getting ready to leave, and without thinking, Goro grabs him by the shoulder.  Joker looks at him wide-eyed, but Goro has no answers; he’s just as surprised.  After an awkward pause, he tightens his hold and pushes Joker backward until he thumps into the wall — so that it looks like intimidation and not vulnerability, no matter what it feels like.

“We still need to decide when to meet,” Goro blurts.

Joker makes no move to shake off his hand, but he stares so hard at it that Goro yanks away by instinct anyway.  Unrestricted, Joker peels from the wall like paper in a smooth roll, forcing Goro to step back so that they don’t get too close.

“Don’t worry,” Joker says cryptically.  "I’ll find you.”

Then he walks away, waving without even a glance.  Goro watches his back as he fizzles out of the Metaverse.

It’s hard to focus on schoolwork that night; no matter what Joker may say, Goro is, in fact, worried.  He stews over his history reading due weeks from now and tries not to feel like he’s lost hold of a major asset.

Perhaps he meant it when he said he could find you , Robin Hood suggests hopefully.

Goro rolls the sharp tip of his pencil around and around until the lead breaks.  Unless he knows who I really am, that’s impossible.

Loki chimes in, low and smooth.  Then perhaps he knows who you are.

His sleep is fitful that night.  Then the night is over and gone, and it’s his first day of high school.

Goro has great plans for this day.  There’s the entrance ceremony, obviously, and making nice with his peers, and sucking up to his teachers.  Goro has his uniform ironed and his hair perfectly styled; he smiles when he’s supposed to.  By all respects, everything is going well.

He’s in the middle of a group of girls right after the final bell, enduring their fawning and nosiness, when a waving hand catches his eye.  Down the hall is a faculty member on the board that doles out money like candy to talented, disadvantaged students, standing with her hand on a boy’s shoulder.

Looking at the other student, slumped and unremarkable, Goro gets a bad feeling.  Immediately, he forces a few niceties and breaks free of the horde.

Slumped and unremarkable.  A shock of black hair, falling in a mess all around him.  A small frame and young face.  A uniform jacket that’s too big for him — the uniform of this school.  The same uniform Goro himself is wearing.

Goro is about to have a conniption.

“Akechi-kun,” the faculty member says in a quiet but cheerful voice, seemingly oblivious to the way Goro’s smile has frozen and set on his face, “I wanted to introduce you to your kohai, Amamiya Ren-kun.  He’s in the same, ah — program as you, though a year below.  Since it’s both of your first years at this school, you should look out for each other.”

At any other time, the condescension and derision in the way she said ‘program’ would surely irritate Goro enough to grab full hold of his attention.  At the moment, he has bigger things on his mind.

Nothing about Joker makes any sense: his powers, his knowledge, his uncanny ability to get under Goro’s skin.  Goro can stand that in the Metaverse, a world away, where magic and monsters and the literal masks between them make it a little bit less real.  He can compartmentalize it, put it off, tell himself he’ll think about it later.

But this is his school , where he isn’t Crow, and has nothing to do with Crow, and isn’t supposed to know anything beyond what an amazingly smart and talented high school boy should know.  These sides of Goro were never supposed to meet.  Joker isn’t allowed to intrude on him here.

Not a meter away, Joker — no, Ren — is characteristically expressionless.  His eyes are even harder to reach through the thick glasses clogging up his face than through his mask.  His head bobs in a little nod, but he doesn’t say anything aloud.

Goro is going to make him pay for this.

“Akechi-kun?” the faculty member asks worriedly.

Just like that, Goro snaps out of it.  “Amamiya-kun, was it?” he asks, wheeling his smile back into something socially acceptable.  “I apologize for staring; I only thought you looked… familiar.”

The teacher looks pleasantly surprised.  “Oh?  Have you already met?”

Ren pushes his glasses up his nose, just the same way he does his mask.  “Something like that.”

They chat for a few minutes — or, Goro and the teacher chat, while Ren stands there like a paper doll.  By the time she leaves the two of them blissfully, painfully alone, Goro is exhausted.

The sunny facade is cracking fast; Goro needs to make his escape.  “What a lovely day.  I hear the gardens at our prestigious institution are in full bloom this time of year; would you care to walk there with me?”

Either Ren has the sense of a doornail or the self-preservation instincts of one.  “Okay.”

There’s still so much distance to go before they can be outside and alone.  Goro makes an executive decision and turns sharply down the hall, walking faster than could be comfortable for Ren to keep up with.  “Are you a middle school third year?  What are you doing all the way here?”

The junior high school, while connected, is still largely a different building.  It’s strange to see him.

But Joker is nothing if not bold.  “I got lost.”

Goro’s jaw aches with the urge to dig his teeth into something.  His voice is strained.  “I… see.”

For a few minutes, Goro’s footsteps are the only sounds in the empty hallway; even here, Ren is annoyingly, effortlessly stealthy.

Then they reach their destination: a small storage closet in a secluded corner of the school.  Goro had noted it earlier, during his completely normal survey and memorization of the entire building map that every well-adjusted teen does.

Just as planned, the door is unlocked.  Remorselessly, Goro shoves Ren inside.

Even when Ren’s back hits the shelf against the wall, he doesn’t make a sound.  The cleaning supplies rattle ominously, though nothing falls.  Goro steps in right behind him; the space is smaller than he’d anticipated, so that as the door closes, he has to lean so close they’re nearly touching.

This is such a classic television bullying tactic that Goro is almost embarrassed to be using it.  Still, no place in this school is suitable for this conversation, and Goro sure as hell isn’t bringing Ren home with him.

The shelf is still rattling.  Goro puts his hand on it, half to steady it and half to support his weight.  And Ren is so close — a breath away, really.  In the absence of light, his eyes are completely invisible through their thick glass shield, even at this distance.

Goro feels his hair stand on end; the back of his neck burns with what must be an enraged flush.

The words burst unwilling out of him.  “Why is this jacket also too big for you?”

A pause.  Ren swallows, and Goro watches the movement from beginning to end.  Then:

“I’m going to have a growth spurt soon,” he says, all flat and confident like this is complete and undeniable fact.

Goro doesn’t know what he was expecting.  He doesn’t know why that was the first question out of his mouth to begin with.

“Why are you here?” he hisses instead.  “Are you following me?”

Ren’s expressionless face is an impenetrable fortress.  “I go to school here.”

The panic that Goro has been studiously swallowing down crests into a wave so strong he’s nearly pulled over.  Ren is Joker, and Joker knows Crow, and Crow was talking about killing a woman — a politician , with his magic powers — not 24 hours ago.  Goro feels like an idiot for thinking the most threat Joker posed to him was as a business rival; this could ruin him.  This could ruin everything.

Goro planned to live and die with this secret.  No one was ever supposed to know.

The thick plastic bridge of Ren’s glasses slides slightly down until the tops of his eyes are visible.  His pupils are huge in the dark, abyssal and reflective; Goro sees his own distraught face there, distorted and pulled at strange angles.

It’s easier to be angry.  He reaches for anger instead until the wave wanes and falls.

He leans back, crossing his arms over his chest.  “What’s your goal here?”

There’s a moment of hesitation before Ren answers.  “It’s like I said,” he shrugs. “I want to help you.”

“That’s sweet,” Goro sneers, “but I want the truth.”

Nothing comes for free.  Goro doesn’t know what Ren’s agenda is or who sent him, but clearly, he sought Goro out.  He needs him for something.  There’s some hidden barb on this particular stem, and just because Goro has already agreed to grab it doesn’t mean he can’t take a closer look.

It’s hard to make out in the dark, but Ren doesn’t look anxious or angry or put out.  Even so, the easy confidence of Joker seems drained out of him: he’s all desaturated and lifeless, standing shock-still like a photo of a boy.  His lips part like he’s going to speak; they close again.  At his sides, his hands curl, picking absently at cuticles.

When he finally deigns to use it, Ren’s voice is low and grave, with a conviction that even Goro can’t doubt.  “There’s someone I want to save.”

How cliche; Goro suppresses the urge to roll his eyes.  Still, it settles something in him to hear it aloud.  “I don’t see how I can help with that.”

Ren doesn’t disagree or explain himself.  He just shrugs again, head ducked down.  Backed to the shelves in a tiny storage closet with his nerdy glasses and ill-fitting uniform, he really looks like the very picture of a bullying victim.

Goro still has so many questions.  Who does he want to save?  From what?  Why?  Is Goro special just because he’s another Persona user, and if so, how had Ren found him in the first place?  Could anyone find him?  Are either of them truly safe?

He wants to know if Ren had come to this school for him, or if that’s ridiculously paranoid and self-important, and it is just some sort of freak coincidence.  He wants to know if Ren also believes in fate.  He wants to know a lot about him.

But mostly, it’s getting hot in here, and Goro wants to get out of this closet.  “Alright,” he sighs, reaching behind him for the doorknob.  “I suppose that’s enough for now.”

He turns the knob.  Tries to.  Does it a few more times, stubbornly insistent.

The knob doesn’t move.

The crash of something breaking into tiny pieces sounds in Goro’s mind.  He’s pretty sure it’s what’s left of his dignity.

Naturally, Ren is of no help at all.  “Sometimes these doors auto-lock.”

“Thank you,” Goro hisses, twisting to try to see behind him, “for that very timely and useful information.”

This closet is too small; Goro can’t turn without pressing his entire back to Ren, which is something he is wholly unwilling to do.  Even turned as much as he is, he’s uncomfortably aware of how close they are.  It’s heating up fast in here, and the knob is becoming slippery with sweat both from the temperature and Goro’s own nerves.  And he can’t even see the damn thing in the dark.

The sound of Ren rooting in his bag has Goro turning away, if only to tell him to quiet down so he can focus.

Ren twirls a familiar lockpick in his hand.  “May I?”

Unfortunately, to get to the lock, Ren has to crouch down right in front of Goro — even more uncomfortably close than before.  This is the most mortifying thing Goro has ever experienced in his life.  He fights the urge to cover his face with his gross, sweaty hands.

Goro always looks like an idiot in front of Ren; he isn’t even sure why.  Some ally he is.

A sharp click is the only warning Goro gets before the door opens behind him and he goes stumbling out, arms wheeling comically as he fights to stay on his feet.  When he finally rights himself in the middle of the thankfully empty hallway, Ren is still kneeling there in the open closet with his lockpick held aloft.

He grins mischievously, more Joker than Ren.  “Got it.”

This alliance is a headache and a half.  Goro feels damp and flushed, hot and cold, his hair out of order and his uniform rumpled.

My liege , Robin Hood pipes up, surprised, are you smiling?

Just like that, the smile drops.  Goro smooths the front of his uniform down, discreetly breaking eye contact in the process.  He swears he can still feel the crushing weight of Ren’s gaze, but the next time he looks up, the other boy is similarly distracted, checking his phone with his default unreadable expression.

“Wait here,” Goro mutters before squirreling away to the nearest bathroom.  The image that greets him in the mirror is mortifying: pink-faced and not at all composed.  He washes his hands, fixes his hair, and races back down the hall.

Ren is probably already gone.  They hadn’t agreed to meet today, anyway.  Goro had just shoved him in a closet.

But he turns the corner, and Ren is there, messy hair and stupid glasses and all.  His phone is still in his hand, but the display is dark; he’s just staring down at his shoes with an absent look in his eye.

The echo of a dream flashes through Goro’s mind suddenly — blue lights and heavy chains and a voice that makes him shiver.  Then it’s gone, leaving only a gap in memory in its place.

“Are we going to Mementos today or not?” Goro asks in a low voice once he’s close enough, brisk like he himself isn’t the one who’d left Ren waiting.

Snapping out of his apparent stupor, Ren doesn’t call him out for it — though the corners of his eyes curl in a way that spreads a flush up Goro’s neck anyway.

The same faculty member who had ‘introduced’ them waves as Goro is fetching his bike on the way out.  Goro waves back, the picture of a benevolent upperclassman.

The swirling, dank chaos of Mementos is strangely soothing after a long day of being very buttoned up.  Like this, Goro and Ren go from their matching uniforms to opposites once more: white and black, gold and silver, only red tying them together.

It does ruin the image somewhat when Goro pulls out his bike.

“You’ll be in the way on my handlebars,” Goro says out of the gate.

Ren nods.  “Okay.  Then I’ll peddle.”

“With me on the handlebars?  Don’t be ridiculous; this is my bike.  And anyway, I’m taller than you.”

“One of us has to.  You don’t have any pegs.”

Indignantly, Goro peeks at the back wheels; normal, flat hubs stare back, with no place for him to stand on, literally or figuratively.

“I’m peddling,” he says firmly, looking over the bike still.  “You can just… get on the seat and try not to move around too much.”

When Ren looks unconvinced, Goro smiles at him.  “Unless you’d rather just run alongside me and try to keep up?”

Obediently, Ren gets on the bike.

It’s hard to get used to at first.  Peddling for two people’s body weight is much harder than for one, and each stroke burns more than usual without the support of the seat.  Additionally, Ren is just like a dead weight behind him, messing up his turns and momentum.

Ren must be holding onto the underside of the seat or something, because his arms aren’t around Goro.  Not that Goro would be alright with that necessarily, but — he had just expected it, when he suggested this.

He better not fall.  Then they’d both wipe out.

It takes a few floors before they see the first evidence of a person’s Shadow self, the walls swirling into a veiny, red vortex.  Ren charges in with no second thought, but skids to a halt the moment the Shadow inside comes into view.

Goro doesn’t recognize this man, slumped forward like a lifeless puppet.  He’s muscular and abnormally tall, but his casual workout clothes and close-cropped black hair are nothing remarkable.

“Kamoshida,” Ren mutters, all puffed up like a startled cat.  There’s wariness painted into every line of his body.  Goro’s curiosity sharpens into an ache.

Still, apparently-Kamoshida’s Shadow doesn’t move.  His eyes stare blankly forward at his feet; not even his chest moves to breathe.

It’s creepy.  Goro has never looked at a Shadow this long without attacking, so he can’t even be sure if it’s normal.

“Are we stealing his Treasure, too?” Goro asks, leaning down to whisper so the Shadow doesn’t hear him.  It’s supposed to be a mocking thing, but the derision doesn’t quite come through right.

Ren still hasn’t moved.

Goro’s eyes narrow.  He studies Ren a little closer, noting his clenched fists and frozen face.  His eyes slide to the Shadow like the flick of a blade.

Clearly, Ren knows this man.  Goro doesn’t know how — if he’s shocked to see someone he’d previously held in high standing, or if the lack of emotion painted on his face spells something else entirely.  He doesn’t know enough about Ren to tell.

Goro has already killed a man in Mementos for wronging him before.  He’ll help Ren do it too, if he asks.

If Ren doesn’t say anything soon, he might just do it anyway.

“Joker?” he asks carefully.

When Ren shakes his head, it seems to shake off the spell he’d been under as well.  “Yeah,” he says with conviction and a barely-there creak, “let’s take his heart.”

Goro takes that to be literal.  The fight that follows is grueling: Kamoshida melts into a pile of rotting sludge that’s just as rough on the nose as the eyes.  He hits hard and whines harder, prattling on and on about being used and old and jealous of the bright young athletes he trains at the fancy gym he works at because they’re taking his place, what’s rightfully his , and he should be allowed to take out some frustration on them during practice in the meantime, and they’re never even that hurt — 

One of his attacks hits Ren hard in the center of his chest, pushing him backwards.  He’s been pale and distracted the whole fight, and Goro can’t stop thinking about the pained noise he made, his obviously-trained physical ability, and the fact that he recognizes this man who gets his rocks off on hurting kids.

Things go a little blurry for a few minutes.  The next thing Goro knows, Loki’s laugh has its claws in his throat, and the slime under his heel is melting back into something humanoid.

He lifts his sword, intending to spear the bastard straight through his chest.  Because Goro knows men like this, and they don’t just stop.

Ren grabs him by the wrist and yanks him off.  Goro turns to berate him — but the expression on his face gives him pause.

Shadow Kamoshida rolls onto his knees, and Ren watches him with dark eyes.  He looks seconds away from pushing Goro aside and killing Kamoshida himself.

But he doesn’t.  He stands there and listens to Kamoshida give some bullshit speech about how wrong he was, and even when the Shadow bursts into light, he doesn’t move.  His breath is uneven; his expression is set.  His hold on Goro’s wrist is painfully tight.

It takes Goro longer than he would admit to shake him off.  Ren doesn’t even comment — just shakes his head again and darts forward to snatch the item floating in the air.

It’s obvious just looking at him that he doesn’t want to talk about it.  Goro met Ren only three days ago, but he understands him better at this moment than anyone else in his life.

“You seemed surprised to see him,” he says anyway the moment he opens his mouth.  Ren looks up to face him, but Goro turns away before they can meet eyes, pretending to inspect the exit back to the rest of Mementos.  “In my experience, you’ll find a lot of familiar faces down here.  It may be presumptuous to say, but I believe over time you come to expect it, which lessens the disappointment somewhat.”

It takes a moment for Ren to answer.  “I don’t want to expect it.”

Goro frowns, prickly and defensive.  “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know; it’s fine.  Kamoshida — he’s an awful guy.  I don’t feel bad for him.”

“But you are disappointed.”

Ren’s nod is a jerky, abrupt thing.  He’s fiddling with his gloves again: the spot where palm meets wrist, and the empty space folds the fabric baggy.  Goro impatiently watches him think, face all but hidden by the combination of his mask and the angle.

It might be the most off-center he’s ever seen him — but contrary to expectation, there’s nothing fun about it.

“I just realized that I don’t think I’ll get to see a couple friends of mine,” Ren says eventually in a slow, reluctant drag.  “That’s all.”

“Ah,” Goro replies, unsure of what to say.  The wording is obviously and intentionally ambiguous, and the thought of Ren with friends sends something unpleasant up his spine — jealousy, maybe.  Goro has always been too busy for friends.  “The person you want to save?”

Ren flashes him a wry smile, like they’re sharing an inside joke.  “No,” he says, “not that one.”

In the aftermath, Ren is all rash vivacity, and Goro drowns in it willingly.  They crash into Shadows with abandon, occasionally retreating to the sidelines to eat something or slap a bandaid on.  There’s seemingly limitless space in Ren’s pockets, and his assortment of items is strange: they pick through an entire plastic-wrapped tray of fruit; they down tiny cans of something with placenta in the name that Goro mostly tries not to think about.  He’s so worn down by all the oddities that surround Ren and his magic pockets that he doesn’t even question what exactly moist protein is when it’s pushed into his hand.

The whole time, Ren stays on high alert, head cocked like he’s listening for something.  Goro mostly just watches him.

Really, the mask doesn’t hide much; if anything, Ren is more hidden under his glasses.  Neither of them could be doing that good a job, though, since Goro had been able to identify him on sight at school — like he already knew, like something clicked back into place.

Still, Ren is sufficiently hidden in his disguise.  He’s covered to the neck, the shape of his body indistinguishable under his coat; except for his flashy gloves, the very colors seem keen to blend into darkness.  He moves differently, speaks differently, smiles differently.  The same remarks flow from his mouth, but with different effect.

Goro doesn’t know how to feel about it.  Certainly, the princely attire he shrouds himself with in the Metaverse isn’t a representation of his true self; he knows better than to think so highly of himself.  Still, he’s been shifting his public image to align with it more and more: he can’t be the hero he wanted to be when he was a child, because his goal comes first, and heroes don’t do the things he’s prepared to do.  But he can at least play the part.

The adults in his life prefer him when he behaves — when he does well in school, listens to orders, smiles and agrees and doesn’t cause a fuss.  Goro couldn’t care less about them, but he knows his place, and he’ll kneel and grovel if it will get him the privileges he wants.  It’s easy to deal with the humiliation so long as he keeps his eyes focused on the distance, where his actions meet the horizon line.

It’s a twisted version of a childish fantasy, a betrayal of his own ideal self, evident in the increasing worry and disapproval from Robin Hood.  Goro doesn’t know what that means, for even an aspect of yourself to be so reluctant to follow you.  It feels that allying with Ren is the only action of his that Robin Hood has encouraged in months.

I just worry, my liege , Robin objects quietly.  Goro feels him in his skull, in the retinas of his eyes, just as zeroed in on Ren as Goro himself is.

Loki is there, too, like a buzz in his vertebra, vibrating up into his grinding teeth.  His focus is, naturally, in the same direction as well.  Don’t overthink it, kiddo.

Some unfamiliar sound — sharp and clattering — distracts Goro before he can think up a response.  In a flash, Ren is shoving the last slice of loquat in his mouth and flipping dramatically to his feet.

He offers a hand to Goro: red-clad and open.  It’s Joker’s glove, and Ren’s fingers under it; he’s reaching for Goro without even knowing who he is or what he’s done.

“Ready to ride?” Ren asks, urgency cut with the mischievous tinge to his eye.  Goro waits to feel the defensiveness, the familiar fury at the very implication of a challenge — but all he gets for his trouble is the familiar pound of his own heart, lost somewhere under his jacket and gifted vest.

Don’t overthink it , Loki said.  Are you smiling? Robin Hood said.

“Crow?” Joker asks.

Something in his chest is creaking under the strain — but still, he takes the hand offered.

His bike thunks hard against every step as they run to the next level of Mementos.  Ren doesn’t explain what’s chasing them or why he’d known about it in the first place; instead, he laughs breathily, head tilted back until the light scattered around them paints his eyes a bright, disorienting red.

He’s always one step ahead.  Goro doesn’t hesitate to give chase, following him all the way down, down, down.

Chapter Text

When Kichijoji yields no results, Goro takes to wandering Shibuya in search of adequate replica firearms instead.  He’s not desperate enough yet to make the journey to Akihabara or ask Ren where he got his, and the concept of buying a toy gun on the internet like a child with an allowance is too humiliating to even consider.

He is , however, desperate enough to waste an embarrassing amount of time hunched over an arcade claw machine until its weak little fingers dig into the deceptively slippery box he’d been eyeing.  He emerges victorious, several hundred yen poorer and one sci-fi ray gun richer.

The package makes his school bag bulge in an unfortunate way.  Goro is still struggling to tetris-shuffle it in when he steps out to the street and spots a familiar face.

Or, at least — the back of a familiar frizzy head.  But like their first meeting out of costume, it would be impossible for Goro to glance the small, hunched figure across the street and take it as anyone but Ren.

It’s easy to avoid Ren at school; they don’t even take classes in the same building.  Goro is an expert at dodging friendly classmates, and there’s no reason he can’t do the same with his partners in crime.  And Ren isn’t exactly pushy, either: outside of the Metaverse, he has all the boldness of a dormouse.

All that is to say that this is the first time Goro is seeing Ren since they parted ways in Mementos last week.

Normally, Goro might just ignore him, or smile and wave if pressed.  Ren only needs to be as different from other acquaintances as Goro wants him to be, and Goro doesn’t want him to be at all.

But today, neither greeting Ren nor ignoring him entirely are appetizing options, because Ren isn’t alone.

Goro doesn’t recognize the woman standing across from him: young and dark-haired, her crimson lipstick at odds with the decidedly sloppy way she’s chosen to dress herself.  Straightening the cuffs on his shirt, Goro supposes there’s no accounting for taste.

Instantly, something about the scene bothers him.  Maybe it’s the fact that the unfamiliar woman has a strained look on her face, like she’s at the end of her rope; maybe it’s the way Ren is so still that Goro can’t even see him breathing.  Maybe it’s just that he can’t see Ren’s face from here — as though his expression has ever helped Goro parse the situation before.

Either way, Goro is irked; he’s bugged; he can’t leave it be.  He ducks his head down and follows the flow of foot traffic, veering off to the closest alley.  Then, he presses himself to the wall and listens.

“Look,” the woman is saying, “I don’t mean anything by this, but — you’re not exactly who I expected when I replied to that email.  How about I buy you a little snack and we call it even, yeah?”  She sighs her disappointment, tapping a nail against her arm.  “I mean, we’re talking some real bigwigs here.  You can’t be serious.”

Only a sliver of Ren’s expression is visible from this angle, but Goro is pretty sure just from the sound of his voice that he’s as blank as ever.  “I wouldn’t have contacted you if I wasn’t, Ohya-san.”

Ohya waves a dismissive hand.  “Why does a kid like you even know the word ‘informant’, anyway?  Aren’t you, like, ten?”

The beginning of a shocked laugh escapes Goro’s mouth before he can help it.  Immediately, he ducks farther into the alley, but not before he sees Ohya whip around in his general direction.

There’s a heavy, suspicious pause.  Goro is holding his breath, cursing his carelessness, when Ren speaks up.

Unlike Ohya, Ren doesn’t seem to have moved.  “Want to go get that snack you mentioned?”

“You’re bright,” Ohya says, pulling her sunglasses down from her forehead as she glances around, “I’ll give you that.”  Then, without even discussing a destination, they peel from the wall and make down the street at a pace just faster than normal.

This interaction is too strange and incriminating for Goro to let it go.  Naturally, he follows them.

The odd pair keep walking until the dense throng of people evens out into something more breathable.  There, Ohya leads them to a café.  Goro skirts in behind them, tucking himself into the back behind a large and conspicuous potted plant while Ren’s soft voice orders a black coffee.

Against all odds, Ren leads the way in finding a table.  To Goro’s mixed relief and frustration, he faces the other way, so that even when Goro peers around his camouflage, he once again can’t make out his expression.

“Okay,” Ohya says when she comes back from paying, flopping into her seat gracelessly, “that was weird.  You’re not being stalked or anything, right?  No lovestruck girls from school?”

Goro can’t see, but he has the distinct sense that Ren smiles.  “Maybe you were hearing things.”

“No way.”

“Maybe it was a coincidence.”

“No such thing,” she sighs, leaning her elbow on the table.  “Not with this job.”

An employee comes by with their drinks.  Through the sun-eaten holes in the leaves, Goro watches Ohya watch Ren like a hawk.

“Not that I believe you could do anything,” she says eventually, “but even if I did, I can’t use a kid like you.  It’s just bad practice.”

Ren takes his sweet time setting his cup down.  “No one needs to know.”

He must have bartered a Metaverse-related favor.  Goro hopes it isn’t another change of heart; Nakamura on her own has been a headache and a half.

Ohya’s grip on her own drink is ironclad.  “I’ll know!  Think of my journalistic integrity!”

This time, Ren doesn’t say anything.  Goro watches Ohya watch Ren once again, wondering if he’ll ever understand what the other boy is thinking.

Since Ohya had mentioned journalistic integrity, and since Ren is clearly trying to reach some sort of agreement with her — does that mean she is the reporter Ren said he knew?  But that doesn’t make any sense: context clues make it seem like this is the first time they’re meeting.  Maybe that first connection had fallen through, and Ren is making a new one?  But why her?

Apparently Ohya is on a similar page.  “Why me?  How did you find me, anyway?”

“You and your partner have been making headlines,” Ren says mildly, one finger tracing the rim of his mug.

Practiced and removed from the situation, Goro recognizes this as a classic Amamiya Ren slitherer-outer maneuver: a factually true statement tangentially related that makes it feel like he answered the question, even though he didn’t.

Across the table from Ren, Ohya looks mollified, if not entirely convinced.  “It’s impressive for such a young kid to be reading the news.”

Ren hits her with the classic Amamiya Ren slitherer-outer maneuver number two: in the face of the almost-question, his lips stay sealed firmly shut.

There’s a tense moment when neither says anything.  Ohya’s eyes dart all around Ren’s expression with such determination that, for a moment, Goro is certain she’ll find something there after all.

Instead, she sighs and looks away.  “Well, whatever,” she mumbles, “it’s not like this is for real, anyway.”

Perceiving it as a jab at their abilities, Goro feels his hackles instinctively rise.  Naturally, this woman knows neither the mechanics or the other person hiding within earshot, but even so — they’re a capable team, and Goro is certain that if Ren really believed this would help them in their goal, they could do it.  It couldn’t be any more real to them.

But there’s no similar gap in Ren’s composure at all; the comment slides right off him like he couldn’t care less.  All he does is take a leisurely sip of his coffee.

On the other side of the room, Goro watches the barely-there sliver of Ren’s face and sits in his confusing emotions all by himself.

It was only because his own abilities were in question too, obviously.  This Ohya woman doesn’t know him, but that’s no excuse.  Goro was only offended because of the lack of faith in his individual person.  It has nothing to do with teamwork; it has nothing to do with Ren.

And however Ren feels about it — about them — doesn’t matter to him anyway.  Ohya insulted them, and Ren doesn’t care, and Goro doesn’t care that he doesn’t care.

Robin Hood doesn’t say anything, but Goro can feel him anxiously hovering like a migraine behind his eye.

“Sorry, Kayo,” Ohya mutters under her breath, pulling Goro from his thoughts.  She’s watching Ren with a crease in her brow.  “We must be more in over our heads than I thought.”

“Then let me help,” Ren says simply, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

Goro can’t help but think of some of the first words Ren had ever said to him: I want to help you .  At the time, he had thought it was a trick, or a strange, ill-thought ploy — but apparently he pulls this all the time.  Goro had just been one in a crowd of people convinced to give Ren his hand.

A sour feeling yanks through him with such force it leaves him nauseous.  Discreetly, he leaves the table and stalks outside.

Whatever conversation the two of them have can’t be too in depth, because they’re walking out minutes later.  When they don’t immediately go their separate ways, Goro trails them again, ears straining to listen in through the crowd’s mindless chatter.

They don’t talk about anything else of import, though.  Ohya asks some questions about Ren’s life — his school, his family, his hobby of approaching strange adults.  Ren dodges all of them with characteristic ease, except to point out that he’s 14 and not 10.

Maybe it’s his building headache.  Maybe he’s just already in a bad mood.  But something about the seemingly innocuous conversation grates on Goro.

“I wonder who was tailing us earlier,” Ohya sighs, glancing over her shoulder.  Immediately, Goro ducks his head down and feels her eyes slide right over him.  “You’re not worried?”

Just then, they turn a corner.  Goro looks up — and finds Ren’s gaze locked solely on him for a single, electrifying moment before the other boy looks away.

“Nope,” Ren says as he slips out of eyeshot, mouth quirked with a quiet sort of mischief, “I’m not worried at all.”

Goro stops so abruptly that he causes a mild foot-traffic incident.  He knew , he thinks while someone’s face collides with his shoulder — and can’t stop thinking it, scuttling to his apartment cowed and red-eared with a storm brewing in his chest.  He knew .

Much as he tries to shove the whole experience out of his mind, Goro is still brooding on his way to school the next day — so much so that when Ren appears on the platform beside him, it takes him a moment to notice.

He isn’t quite beside him, though.  The same distance Ren keeps between them in the Metaverse seems to persist here, too.  Ren doesn’t even bother to greet him; he just stands silently a short distance away, like Goro isn’t worth the effort it takes to say hello.

It’s a far cry from how he’d been the last day they’d spent together, warm and reckless and so brilliant it hurt to look at him for too long — but then, that’s how everyone is.  People treat you well when you need them; when they don’t, they throw you away.  If Ren isn’t dragging him through Mementos or showing off in Nakamura’s Palace, he has no reason to speak to him at all.

It feels like losing to acknowledge him first.  Goro keeps his eyes trained straight on the oncoming train, even as the sea of faceless people swallows Ren from his peripheral.

Still, despite his best intentions, there is some part of Goro expecting him to reach out first — to pursue him onto the train, start a conversation, follow him all the way to school like a baby duck.  But Goro doesn’t see a hint of him all morning, and it frustrates him.

You think about that boy a lot , Loki says, interrupting Goro’s daily lunch-period skulk.

Goro only narrowly keeps his smile up as he returns the wave of a classmate.  Shut it.

Robin Hood ignores this instruction and joins in, too.  Perhaps he is also waiting for you to reach out, my liege.

The experience of finding a secluded and not-humiliating spot to himself to scarf down his convenience store lunch is hard enough as is without the peanut gallery jeering at him.  Goro steadfastly ignores them both, climbing the stairs and shouldering the rooftop door open.

It’s a bright day today.  Even in the midst of the rainy season, the clouds have parted; without its cover, the sun is blinding.  Goro squeezes his eyes shut instinctively, free hand blindly blocking the worst of the light.

When he opens them again, he finds Ren there, watching him.

Sitting on the ground with his back to the fence, Ren could be a statue but for the way his bangs blow in the wind.  They meet eyes, and the wronged energy rolling off Robin Hood shifts suddenly into excitement, like a dog seeing its favorite toy.

That dog represents an aspect of you , kiddo , Loki drawls over Robin Hood’s wounded complaints — but still in the midst of an eye contact stand-off, Goro barely hears them.

The sky is so big and blue.  By comparison, with his black hair and pale skin and washed-out beige blazer, Ren looks out of place — superimposed and barely there, like he could disappear any moment.

Goro takes a step forward as if by instinct.

“I was under the impression that the roof was off limits,” Goro says as he makes his way over.  He tells himself that this isn't caving , really; if anything, it would be cowardly to turn around and leave now.  This is the mature, proactive thing to do. 

Ren smiles with his eyes.  “Didn't stop you, did it?”

There aren't any chairs or even ledges to perch on.  Goro supposes the building of his image matters less here, where no one can see him but Ren, and settles down right there on the ground.  The fence's coils catch in his hair, and the metal is cold, but it has a comfortable, firm spring to it when he leans back.

He glances at Ren from the corner of his eye.  “I do hope I haven’t ruined your secret hideout.”

"Not at all," Ren says — and he does actually smile this time, but it's a tired thing.  “It’s not a real hideout with just one.”

They haven’t known each other long, but it’s impossible for Goro not to notice when Ren gets like this: strange and secret, lonely and delicate, with a sort of dense, larger-than-life gravity to him so powerful it could eat him alive.  Several nonsensical impulses rush through Goro all at once: the urge to hug him, to comfort him, to reach inside Ren and snuff that loneliness out.

Instead, he holds his tongue and unpacks his lunch, if only to give himself something to do.

So many kids at this fancy stupid school have the most beautiful lunches Goro has ever seen.  He can only suffer hearing them complain about their mothers' cooking so many times when it's wrapped up in artful multi-tiered wooden boxes and smells absolutely to die for.

To his relief, Ren only has a deflated bread bun, clutched tight in his fist like his greatest treasure.  Sometimes, despite all his mysteries and infuriating qualities, Ren feels like the only thing in this entire world that makes sense.

“Have you had any luck with that reporter?” Goro says, instead of, I saw you out with her yesterday .

Ren raises his eyebrows at him.  “Sort of,” he says, instead of, I know you did .  “We have to do a favor for her first.”

“Oh?”

“Mhm,” Ren says, peeling back the plastic on his bread.  “Want to go take care of it today?”

His eyes glance surreptitiously around them, as if looking at some imaginary cameras.  Goro is begrudgingly impressed by his caution and forethought.

He snaps apart his disposable chopsticks with flourish.  “Let me check my schedule.  Maybe I can fit you in.”

Ren’s nod doesn’t quite manage to hide his smile.  “I’ll wait for you at the gate.”

For the rest of the school day, Goro fantasizes about leaving Ren to wait for him for hours, only for him to never even show.  But Nakamura’s Palace is the most important thing in his life right now, so when the final bell rings, he dutifully makes his way to the front gate.

“Did I leave you waiting long?” he asks politely as he approaches, like he hadn’t watched Ren’s arrival minutes ago from an upstairs window.  “Apologies; I got held up by some classmates.”

Just then, in a burst of serendipity, said classmates pass by, giggling and waving.  Goro smiles and waves back — until he realizes they’re looking at Ren, too.  His smile shutters and falls; what does that mean?  Are they interested in Ren?  Do they think he’s cute — cuter than Goro?  Or is it strange, to see the two of them together?

Ren is only just looking up from his phone, apparently having missed the whole exchange.  “It’s okay.  I just got here.”

In spite of the rocky start, though, Goro is reluctantly and unfortunately looking forward to this.  Mementos is a great place to train and an even better place to blow off steam, but even he can admit that it’s dangerous; it’s not that he needs Ren to be there, but this is his end of the bargain, and for at least as long as Ren is of use to him, he has to honor that.  If he had a little bit more fun last time than he expected, no one needs to know.

Except it’s different than last time right away, because an unfamiliar boy is waiting at Mementos’s entrance.

Immediately, Goro bristles; his arm shoots out to block Ren, in case the airhead is about to blindly stumble into a trap.  His mind whirs, flashing back to his first meeting with Ren, wondering if the two of them have been found by yet another Persona user, if it’s safe, if they should regroup until they have more information.

But once Goro’s eyes catch up with his brain, he realizes: this boy is different.  He’s young, for one thing — elementary-aged at best.  Plus, his eyes are wrong — not a human color, not Ren’s pewter-gray, but yellow, like —

“A Shadow?” he hisses, ducking slightly to reach Ren’s ear.

Ren, predictably, says nothing, though it does nothing to save him from the recognition that flickers across the Shadow’s face.  “Hi mister.  Did you get smaller?”

It seems sometimes like everyone is poking fun at Ren’s small stature — even children.  If it weren’t for the tension in the air, Goro might laugh at the way Ren’s shoulders stiffen.

His posture settles back down unnaturally fast.  “Hi Jose.  Maybe you got bigger.”

Jose doesn’t laugh, though.  “I don’t think so.”  Tilting his head to the side, he asks, “Do you still have your stamps?”

Digging into his jacket’s massive pockets, Ren pulls out strange star-marked papers by the fistful.  Instead of explaining the situation to Goro, his alleged partner, he barely spares him a glance as he leans down toward Jose.  “I actually have a request,” he says before whispering something so low that not even Goro can hear it.  He makes out something about the safe areas, but that’s it.

For how few words he seems to have under that mop of his, Ren really makes a marked effort to speak to absolutely everyone.  Goro stares at the back of Ren’s head with furious intensity, burning this feeling into his memory to dredge up every time he starts to delude himself into believing that Ren favors him in any way.

When they leave Jose and his world-shaking hammer behind, Goro is still thinking about it.  “Who was that?” he demands quietly as he sets up his bike.  “Why was he here?”

“That’s Jose,” Ren says, not looking up.  “He lives here.”

Here in Mementos, where no one, much less a child, should stay.  “Is he human?”

Ren shrugs.

Goro’s smile pulls his lip in an uncomfortable way.  “You seem remarkably unconcerned.”

“Jose is fine.  He puts up a good fight.”

“You’ve fought him?”

This time, Ren gets out of answering by ducking behind Goro’s field of view, finally settling on the seat.  Goro starts to turn around, to continue questioning him — but then the bike tilts off-kilter, and Ren’s hands are squeezing Goro’s waist hard enough to hurt.  Goro loses track of what he was going to say.

A second later, Ren lets go.  A second after that, Goro starts peddling.

The stagnant air of Mementos is stuffy in spite of the chill.  Goro finds himself wishing it had any of the overworld’s wind, if only to cool his red cheeks.

They find Ohya’s target a few levels down.  He’s an average-looking man, just another typical suit; the form he bursts into, too, is typical and unremarkable.  Still, Goro can’t shake the feeling he’s seen him somewhere before.

Ren always looks so confident in battle, with none of the harried panting and puzzling that Goro himself is so often prone to.  It’s like he already knows exactly what attack to pick and tactic to use, exactly how to get the Shadows down and make them stay that way.  And Goro resents it; really, he does.  He swears he does; he thinks he does.

When Ren lowers the defense of their target, Goro’s shots rip great, painful holes through its incorporeal body.  It goes down, Ren grins, and then the both of them are coming down on the Shadow in a flurry of attacks, perfectly in sync.

It’s so hard not to like this.  Goro is struggling to hold onto his reasons to not like it in the first place.

Everyone leaves, one way or another.  Everyone either gets tired of you or of themselves or of their lot in life, and they’ll throw anyone away if it means escaping that.  Goro would know; he’s been thrown away by everyone he’s ever known.  He wasn’t good enough to reel in his foster parents; his father never wanted him to begin with.  And his mother —

Goro’s jaw tightens as he watches Ren swipe the glowing treasure from midair.  This isn’t about his mother.  This isn’t about anyone.  This doesn’t have to mean anything at all.

Ren turns around with a twinkle in his eye, dangling their prize from his red-covered fingers.  “He dropped this weird fruit.  Want to try it?”

Two weeks, and already, no one without legal obligation has ever stuck around this long before.  Some desperate, electric panic zips up Goro’s veins, warning him to either let go now or dig his claws in so tight that Ren will never be able to leave.

This acquaintanceship is making a fool of him — all the more reason to just cut ties.

Who are you? Goro wants to ask.  What do you want from me?  Would you still stay, even if you got it?

“You first,” he says instead.

The fruit breaks apart like jelly in Ren’s hands, both too soft and too firm to be appetizing.  It shines in an unnatural, unfamiliar way.  When Goro puts it in his mouth, it doesn't taste like anything until he bites down; then, a syrupy sweetness breaks across his tongue, thick as candy coating.

He makes a face at the same time Ren does, the two of them turned to each other squatting like little kids sharing secrets on the playground.

Goro would never admit it, but Ren recovers first.  “Not a fan of sweets?” he asks, leaning toward Goro with his elbows on his knees.

Neither of them had gotten very hurt in this fight, but the minuscule amount of health rushing back through Goro’s body is appreciated anyway.  He licks the blissfully-tasteless traces of fruit from his lips before replying, flat and sarcastic.  “What makes you think that?”

Ren smiles, all knowing and satisfied.  Goro blurts the question before he can help it.  “Do you?”

The words seem to hit Ren with a very physical weight; he rocks back on his heels, uncharacteristically unsteady for a flash of a moment.  “Sure.”

One eyebrow twitches up.  “It’s a yes or no question.”

“Sure isn’t yes?”

Curiosity twists sharply into temper.  Goro turns to say something mean — and finds Ren’s face closer than he thought it was.  Entirely too close.

He stands abruptly, pretending to peer down Mementos’s winding paths, voice short.  “You tell me.”

Some part of him is embarrassed by his own childishness.  Then irritation flickers across Ren’s face, vivid enough to rival his own, and Goro is immediately vindicated.  This is a silly thing to be so evasive about, and either Ren’s a poser who thinks it’s cool to have no personality, or he has some serious issues of his own.  Goro really chose the worst possible person to partner with.

Ren licks the leftover juice from the strange fruit from his lip, just like Goro had; instinctively, Goro looks away.  He doesn’t think about why.

The two of them together get much farther in Mementos than Goro was ever able to himself.  It’s hard to say how many levels it is before they hit the wall.

Goro is still parking his bike when Ren approaches the great slab of concrete blocking their way.  His weight rocks from side to side, long coattails swishing.  “We need to get our name out there.”

The kickstand is stuck.  Goro, who is already way over their earlier almost-fight, swings his foot with excessive force, the bottom of his shoe hitting the metal with a repeated clack.  “That’s a terrible idea.”  Clack.  “What name?”

“Don’t know yet.  Any ideas?”

Clack, clack, clack.  “ No .”

Ren puts his hand to the wall.  “We need notoriety to go deeper,” he explains finally.  “It won’t open otherwise.”

His fingers spread open, as if to feel beyond the barrier and into the next level.  Goro remembers suddenly that there is someone Ren wants to save, and that his condition for working together was picking through Mementos, and that they have checked all available levels thoroughly.

Goro’s stomach twists; his mouth tastes like vinegar.  His words slide out of his mouth in a low, caustic sneer.  “Is that more information from your friend? ”

If Ren is phased by the vitriol, he doesn’t let on.  “No need to be jealous, Crow.  There’s enough of me to go around.”

At that moment, Goro thinks he might hate him.  It’s the only explanation he’s willing to accept.

Ren is still studying the wall.  He looks nice when he’s focused: more tangible, more real.  Mementos’s shadows suit him, blending him in, edges blurry; by contrast, the stark white of his mask is jarring.  Every flashing wave of a subway car behind them brings with it a fresh wave of blood-red light; in the second it takes for Goro’s eyes to adjust, Ren looks like a stranger, faded and unfamiliar, weighed down like the ground will never let him go.

One final kick finally wrenches the kickstand down.  Goro looks away from Ren instinctively when the metal scrapes the ground.

“There must be a covert way, if we must do it after all,” he says, thinking of Shido and his team of people, on what he knows of the Metaverse, on what he doesn’t know.  “Even aside from the risk, it’s tacky to overly self-advertise.”

The oppressive rumble of the passing car shakes the ground; the kickstand’s metal flashes red.  When Goro looks up, Ren is staring at him wide-eyed, shock glinting through the holes of his mask.  For the first time, Goro is grateful for the deafening mechanical roar of the subway, because it means Ren can’t hear the way his breath catches.

They workshop the idea on the way back.  Like when they were deciding what to do about Nakamura’s treasure, Goro has a rebuttal for every one of Ren’s suggestions, and Ren has one for every of Goro’s.  Also like then, the debate is exciting — refreshing, infuriating, stimulating.  Ren shouts to be heard over the sound of shambling Shadows and rubber tires, and Goro shouts right back in a way he hasn’t let himself to anyone else in years.

Ren sees him off at the platform gate.  Goro wills himself not to turn around until he’s certain Ren will be gone, off to catch his own train like he’d said — but when he peeks over his shoulder, Ren is still standing there, staring after him.

I wonder where he lives , Robin Hood muses.  Nearer to school, perhaps?

There’s doubt there in his voice; Goro feels it lurking like sludge in his gut.  Something about the statement just feels wrong.

Another body bumps into him as the subway car’s doors open.  Goro shakes the thought from his head and follows the crowd’s momentum all the way home.

When Ren runs up to him at the platform the next morning, there’s a certain energy to him uncharacteristic of boring real-world Amamiya Ren.  “Akechi-senpai,” he greets before Goro can catch his bearings, “do you have some time today?”

It takes a moment for the smile to take.  “Good morning to you too, Amamiya-kun.  Whatever for?”

Wordlessly, Ren unlocks his phone and spins it deftly to face him.  Goro sees Ohya’s name and a stream of messages, all demanding answers, all dated to this morning.

Goro is so taken with reading and rereading the messages that it takes him a moment to realize that some of the other passengers huddled close, many of whom share their uniform, are staring.  Rigidly, Goro rights himself from his unintentional protective curl over Ren’s phone.

“Ah,” he says smoothly, “are you struggling to write up this report?  Of course I’ll give you some pointers.”

Ren’s eyes flash, somewhere between competitively ticked off and joyfully mischievous.  His voice is so dry by comparison that Goro has to restrain the genuine urge to laugh.  “Thank you so much, Senpai.”

The good mood chases Goro all day like a dog on his heels.  He meets with Ren on the roof, eating their pathetic meager lunches and outlining every point they want Ohya’s article to cover.  When she agrees to publish first thing the next morning, albeit with many complaints about the hit her reputation could take if Nakamura decides to retaliate, they move on to outlining their strategies for the Palace.  “It will have to be the same day,” Ren says, cryptic as ever, “We’ll have to get her Treasure the same day it materializes.”  So Goro says goodbye to his plans of next next week’s homework and meets Ren at the school gate again to gather supplies for their infiltration.

Then, in the crowded aisles of a Shibuya pharmacy, Ren finally says the words Goro has been waiting for.  “I like your gun.”

He always speaks so quietly.  Goro’s eyes slide to him thoughtfully, wondering if he’s like this with everyone, and Goro is just the only one who can hear him.

Then he turns back to the wall of ointments ahead, eyes skimming right over the text.  “Thank you.  I’m quite happy with it myself.”

Yeah, right.  It’s a hunk of plastic, straight out of some cheesy space opera.  His hand, suddenly sweaty, fumbles its hold of their shared hand basket.

Before Goro met Ren, he’d never felt off-kilter like this.  People like Goro only have two options: either stagnate and rot, or go.  In the first months after his mother died, Goro stagnated; he floated through the days with no real purpose, unaware and uncaring of the world around him.  Some part of him died; it rotted; it decomposed.  In the aftermath, Goro had woken from his dream, bruised and greasy-haired, and started running.

He never stopped; ever since, years after the fact, he’s still running.  Chasing his father, chasing his revenge, chasing the destiny he just knows he has — things like hesitation and doubt and regrets are for people with a choice, but Goro never had any choice but this.  He won’t let himself rot again.

Then Ren appeared that one fateful day, and everything shifted.  The car isn’t off the tracks yet, but it’s slowing, no longer fast enough to take the bumps without risk.  Nothing has changed, but everything is different — only that he can’t tell what, or how, or since when.

Ren picks up a box of bandaids — the same type that Goro had swiped from his unconscious body that first day.  There’s something about him: the tilt of his head, the soft jut of his lip, the way his blazer wrinkles and bends around the hand shoved in his pocket.  Something fierce aches in Goro’s chest.

He was right: Ren is making a fool of him after all.

The article breaks the next day.  Contrary to her appearance, Ohya works for a major publication, and the word is plastered practically everywhere; it’s in the mouth of every gossiping passerby and sadistic news anchor.  The article is quick to point out that there’s no proof of anything yet; the immediate rumors of an investigation say that there will be, and soon.

Goro is not too proud to admit that he’s impressed.  It’s a good article — mistreatment of staff, misallocation of funds, bribing various media moguls, fabricating stories.  If it’s true, it will tank Nakamura’s career whether or not Goro gets his hands dirty.  Even if it isn’t, it gives him an in.

The Palace isn’t so dreadfully overwhelming this time around, like all the colors and sounds have been tacked down in Nakamura’s panic.  Even the Treasure is underwhelming: a large, locked box, with an obnoxious yellow question mark painted on it.  When they finally face the ringleader, melted into a monstrous caricature of herself, she’s the brightest, loudest thing in sight.

The great stage is completely surrounded by cameras and mirrors.  Shadow Nakamura has this nasty habit of healing herself every time Goro shoots and slashes one of her arachnid limbs off; damage does nothing but slow her comically-long villain speech.  Then a roving stage light overhead catches one of the mirrors at just the right angle, and the condensed light it reflects cauterizes the most recent wound.  There's a tense moment where a new growth tries visibly to break free, but can’t.

The realization seems to hit Ren at the same time as Goro.  When their eyes meet across the stage, Goro can feel a reflection of Ren’s own grin slashed across his face.

Nakamura falls the way so many powerful people do: she flails as her supports are broken down beneath her, screaming her vindicated woes all the while.  When she’s finally lost her armor and convictions, only the devastated, weak, humanoid version of her remains.

“ Everyone steps on the backs of others to get what they want ,” Shadow Nakamura says, quiet voice hoarse from screaming.  “ It’s the only way to survive .”

Goro shifts his weight on one hip with an errant hand on his gun, just in case.  He’s craning his neck, trying to see where the Treasure got vaulted off to when Nakamura sent them flying into the stage.

Ren stands directly in front of Nakamura, Personas dismissed and weapons tucked away.  His hands are in his pockets, but the expression on his face is serious, and his voice is iron.  “That’s no way to live.”

Nakamura’s face crumples.  Goro isn’t sure whether he wants to join the debate or roll his eyes.

He doesn’t do either, really.  “Go back to your real self,” he says instead, short.  He has no room to talk down to her like Ren does, but that doesn’t change the fact that he hates her, intrinsically and personally, in a way he hadn’t before.  “There’s nothing left for you here.”

More than Ren’s words, that seems to take the fight right out of her.  “ Maybe you’re right ,” she mutters, shoulders slumping, light glittering all around her as her form starts to dissolve.  “ Maybe that’s the only thing left to do .”

It’s ridiculous for someone as powerful as her to feel like she has no choices — that she had no choices, even before Goro and Ren had blocked off the others.  Goro’s hands curl tight into fists, but he holds his tongue as they finish watching her fade away.

Then Goro snatches up the Treasure without hesitation.  He had a whole set of snappy victory quips ready and rehearsed for this moment, but they go on the back burner once the ground starts rumbling.

Instinctively, Goro looks to Ren for answers; straight-faced, Ren provides.  “The Palace is collapsing.  We have to go.”

Then he darts off toward the exit, Goro hot on his heels.  “You couldn’t have mentioned that sooner ?”

Ren’s laugh rings loud and clear over the circus’s collapsing insides.  Dodging debris left and right, Goro chases that sound.

They tumble out of the Metaverse and along the wall outside the Diet Building, still running.  A guard turns to look, but his expression shifts from alarm to annoyance when he gets a good look at them.  “Go play somewhere else,” he calls.

Indignation doesn’t manage to crack the smile on Goro’s flushed, sweaty face.  “Apologies, officer!”

Ren shoots him a look as they both slow to a walk.  Goro suppresses the urge to elbow him.

Normally, Goro doesn’t like to be out when he’s this unpolished — but the Treasure shifted from the ugly box to a conspicuous manilla folder when they left the Metaverse, and he just needs to know.  He follows Ren to a diner near the station, watching the other boy demolish an entire steak while he sips a coffee and ignores his own grumbling stomach.

The documents inside are juicy; they indicate that Nakamura had more or less rewritten her entire family history from scratch after her father was arrested during her early political career.  Goro devours them eagerly until they start to repeat themselves to excess; then, he closes the folder and slides it across the table toward Ren.

Wordlessly, Ren opens it, picking through with considerable focus and what seems to be very little genuine interest.  When it becomes obvious he’s going to take a while, Goro reluctantly pulls a book from his school bag in an attempt to keep his eyes open.

Ren must be similarly exhausted, because the next time Goro looks up, he’s asleep: elbow on the table, face tucked into his sleeve.  A document is still held in his loose fingers.

It’s weird to see him like this.  Ren is so on — all the time, constantly.  Goro has caught him spacing out in rare moments, but the moment Goro enters his peripheral, he sharpens again.

Here, he’s soft: expression soft, body language soft, even his breathing soft.  Ignoring the glare of a nearby waitress, Goro lets him nap for several more minutes before reaching over to wake him.

Ren comes to with the leaden pace of someone who hasn’t been sleeping well, long lashes blinking and blinking.  He makes a low sound and leans instinctively toward Goro’s touch, butting the side of his fluffy head against his forearm like an affectionate cat.  “Akechi?” he mumbles, slow and cottony.

Goro’s empty stomach flips; his ears rush; his breath stalls.  The Metaverse must have taken more out of him than he thought: he can’t remember the last time his mouth was so dry.

He yanks his hand away the second before Ren rights himself.  “Sorry,” Ren says quickly, sitting statue-still, too-big uniform rumpled.

Across the table from him, Goro smiles.  It tastes like plastic; his face feels plastic.  “The Palace must have exhausted you.”  His eyes flick to Ren’s cleared plate.  “I’m sure the large meal helped.”

It’s condescending, and it’s meant to be; Goro is too rattled to force himself to be nice.  But Ren doesn’t take offense like most people, or even laugh it off like he usually does.  He just stares a moment longer and closes the folder.

Nakamura’s Treasure is worthless garbage: fake copies that can’t be used in any real court of law.  Still, Goro takes it home.  He scrolls through trashy news articles about the Nakamura scandal until he’s sick of them, stuffing himself with instant noodles in Shido’s expensive apartment.  Then he goes to bed, and brings the folder with him.

There’s an envelope tucked into the back: opened, then taped closed.  It’s addressed to just Fujiko , no last name, no honorifics.  Even though Ren had leafed through seemingly every page in this folder, he left this envelope untouched.

In the lonely quiet of his own home, Goro doesn’t have that kind of grace.  He opens the envelope and spends the last part of his evening pouring over the gritty, intimate, humiliating details of Nakamura Fujiko’s life, as told by her own mother.  That night, he sleeps easy.

By comparison, Shido seems a little less impressively cutthroat when he calls Goro to his office the next day after school.  Tomorrow is Sunday, but Shido must have been too impatient to wait; he turns in his chair dramatically when Goro comes down, slapping down a newspaper with Nakamura’s repentant face on it.

Two weeks ago, Goro might have been intimidated.  Most of the feelings surging in his veins at the sight of Shido are familiar to him: fury, fear, contempt.  But he’s an actor at heart too, and he recognizes this show for what it is; the contempt runs hotter, the fear toned down.

Shido doesn’t ask if he’s responsible.  He only stares at Goro a long moment before deciding that he is.

“Good work,” he says, and Goro feels like a shaken soda, not yet popped open.  “It was a smart approach this time.  But I have your next job for you, and it doesn’t require the same… gentle touch.”

He slides a folder — manilla and slim, just like the one Goro had shredded at school this morning — across his desk.  Goro takes it before he remembers to smile.

“Thank you, sir,” he says, iron on his tongue.  He’s an actor, too.  “Consider it done.”

For weeks, Goro has been losing sleep over the possibility of not getting a second meeting, of losing his apartment, of failing at his only shot.  There’s no alternate path; stopping isn’t an option, but there’s nowhere else to go.  But he did it; he did this.  Shido told him ‘good work’ and gave him another job.  Everything is going according to plan.

The face in the folder is a familiar one; it has, after all, been mere days since Goro and Ren took him down in Mementos.  Ohya’s target, the suit — the one who’d dropped that sickeningly sweet fruit.  He’d come forward days ago and told Shido that he’d agreed to do a tell-all interview with a reporter.  Shido needs him gone before then.  Goro has the sickening feeling that he knows who that reporter is.

That night, he creeps alone into the Metaverse.  The target isn’t in Mementos — not anymore, not after what he did — but Shido doesn’t care how the job is done, only that it is.

So Goro takes a boxcutter and creeps through the otherworld’s version of the politician’s house.  He enters his bedroom, where he sleeps alone, his estranged wife a room away.  He leaves the Metaverse, and its telltale sulfuric tang is still fresh in his mouth when he slits the man’s throat wide open.

The blood doesn’t follow him back into the Metaverse.  Goro keeps staring down at his white gloves, like stains will suddenly blossom there — but he gets all the way back to his apartment before he steps back into the real world and even realizes he’s bleeding.

A cut across the palm — a rookie mistake, from a slippery hand.  When he clenches it into a fist, he feels the flesh slide together like ill-fitting puzzle pieces.

Goro can play make-believe like a little boy, chase Ren down into Mementos and drag him through Palaces and pretend he’s doing good.  He’s always wanted to be a part of something; maybe he wanted it so badly that he made himself think it could come true.

But things don’t change that easily.  The world doesn’t change, and the past doesn’t change, and fate doesn’t change.  Goro certainly won’t change, either.  Things like hesitation and doubt and regrets are for people with a choice, and Goro never had any choice but this.

He stands there, staring at his own bloody hand, watching the red drip down his wrist and arm.  There’s blood on his shirt too, he realizes.  Once he starts checking, he feels blood absolutely everywhere.  His entire self is drenched in it.  No matter how long he stands in the shower, he can still feel it coating his skin.

There’s a notification waiting for Goro when he gets out.  Shido wired him money — so much money, more money than Goro has ever seen in his life.  Goro feels sick.  He didn’t hesitate.  He doesn’t regret it.

Once when Goro was young, he came home too early, and a man threw a bottle at him.  He put his hands up to protect his face and got a cut much like this one — deep and slippery and angry.  After the man left, Goro’s mother wrapped the cut in a dirty shirt and held it close to her chest, humming a lullaby around tears, saying she was sorry.

He hadn’t gotten stitches then, and it hadn’t scarred.  There’s no reason that should be any different this time, either.  Goro is fresh out of lullabies, but once the bleeding slows, he digs around in his bathroom drawer until he finds a loose bandaid.  Ren’s bandaid.  It isn't enough, but he puts it on anyway.

The next day is Sunday; Goro doesn’t have school.  He unlocks his phone only to stare at his contact list, full of people he doesn’t know and doesn’t care about.  He stares at it like staring will make Ren’s name magically appear.

But it doesn’t, and he’s still alone.  He lies in bed for a long time, hand held to his chest, humming.

Chapter Text

Lately, it feels like every aspect of Goro’s life is going buttery-smooth.  All according to plan; plain sailing, no hiccups.  His ducks are in a row, his chickens are hatched, and you know he’s counted them.

There’s only one problem: exam scores.

Not Goro’s score — at least, not intrinsically.  In this one regard, Goro doesn’t need to be the absolute best; who has time to waste fighting in the viper pit for valedictorian, anyway?  When Goro waltzes into school bright and early that fateful Friday, he finds his own name exactly where he expected: high-ranking enough to wow his peers and keep his grant.  High enough.

The problem doesn’t rear its ugly head until his eyes pan over — not intentionally, just by circumstance, as he turns to leave — to the middle school scores.

Because there, on the third years’ list, right smack at the top, is Ren’s name.

For the record, Goro has not been avoiding Ren.  The Nakamura situation is long-since taken care of, and Shido hasn’t given him a new target.  The only other reason they would have to meet is Mementos, but that’s Ren’s prerogative, not Goro’s, and Ren hasn’t bothered to reach out.

So they haven’t seen each other.  They take classes in different buildings, and even if Goro had been struck with the wild urge to seek him out during lunch, he’s been too busy studying.  Grades are important, after all.

Goro had never gotten the impression that Ren feels the same, considering he never brings a book out on the roof with him and apparently spends his weekends having coffee with beautiful older women.  And yet.

As if summoned by Goro’s rage, Ren appears suddenly at his side.  Though this is the closest they’ve been in weeks, he doesn’t say anything in acknowledgment, or even look Goro’s way; instead, his eyes immediately find his own name, sitting pretty on its lonely little perch.  His brows don’t jump, and he doesn’t comment on it to Goro; expressionless, he pumps his fist once and turns in the general direction of the junior high building.

It’s too early for this.  Goro is one step away from shaking and foaming at the mouth like an angry little dog.

He finds himself trotting to Ren’s side before he can even think about it.  “Amamiya-kun,” he starts, acid on his tongue, eyes curled into friendly crescents, “congratulations on your exam score.”

This is where Ren is supposed to gloat; it’s certainly what Goro would do in his shoes.  Instead, he only glances at Goro from the corner of his eye and says, calmly, “Thanks.”

Mouth foam is feeling like a more realistic risk with every passing second.  Surreptitiously, Goro covers his mouth with one hand, briskly keeping pace with the infuriating rodent of a boy skulking at his side.

“Forgive me for saying so,” he says, and Ren still isn’t looking at him, and Goro hates him for that, “but I admit I didn’t take you for the… studious type.”

Ren’s expression is as mobile as solid concrete, but there’s some change, somewhere in there.  Goro can tell.  He looks shifty.

Another push, then.  Goro already has this conversation by the neck; he just needs to bite until he tastes blood.

“It seems I underestimated you,” Goro says humbly, and walks face-first into a pillar.

The humiliation hits before the pain.  Goro’s face is so hot that for a moment, he’s certain his nose must be bleeding; frantically he scrambles to cover it or wipe the evidence away, only for his fingers to come away dry.

When he looks to Ren, a few steps up the hallway, the other boy is impassive as always.  “I think your classroom is that way,” he says, pointing in the other direction.  Goro stares at him dumbly for a minute, unsure what to say, but Ren doesn’t even have the decency to make a quip at his expense; he only turns and continues on his way to class.

This is a terrible slight; Goro can’t stop thinking about it.  He can’t even revel in the praise of his prattling classmates.  How can their opinions hold any weight when he just lost to Ren and subsequently ran into a pole following after him like a lovesick, braindead puppy?  He almost hopes they never meet again somehow, because his pride is never going to recover from this.

No such luck.  Today of all days, Ren waits for him by the gates after school.

“Akechi-senpai,” he greets casually.  “Are you busy today?”

No.  Yes — he’s busy every day.  But no, he doesn’t have anything in particular that absolutely has to be done immediately.

“Amamiya-kun,” Goro says instead of any of that, “how rare to hear from you.”

Ren’s lip twitches.  Goro’s smile is holding on by a thread.

“Did you need something?” he asks when Ren doesn’t reply, grip tight on his bike’s handlebars.  “I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to make time for you, but if it’s urgent, then…”

He continues walking at the same pace.  Ren falls in line beside him like he belongs there.

“I was hoping to get some of those study tips you mentioned earlier,” Ren lies, characteristic mischief bleeding out from under his thick-rimmed glasses.

He’s up to something.  Is he making fun of him?  Rubbing it in?  Is this code that Goro needs to follow up on his end of the deal and accompany him to Mementos?

“Right,” Goro bites, smile creaking under the strain.  “With your grades, you really need them.”

Ren is so muted that it’s hard to be certain, especially since Goro is attentively not paying attention.  But for just a second, between one step and the next, he swears he hears him laugh.

They don’t study.  Goro leads the two of them to a bakery near the station, explaining its variety of offerings like he hadn’t just read about them last night, and pays for their food like a gentleman.  Ren doesn’t even fight him for the bill, the ungrateful brat — but stepping out the door, sun in his hair and spring in his step, his eyes close all pleased and content when he bites into his pastry; and for some reason, Goro forgets his imminent scathing comment.

It’s warm today; combined with the humidity, Goro feels like he’s being steamed.  Wordlessly, they settle on the shadiest bench they can find; even so, the tree overhead only barely covers half.  Ren squeezes in close to escape the sun, but other than that he seems perfectly at peace in his uniform, oversized blazer buttoned up nice and neat.  Naturally, Goro’s is too, but he’s less happy about it; sweat clings at the back of his neck, and he itches to loosen his tie.

Normally, being close to someone when he’s feeling this warm is unbearable.  But even when Ren settles so close they’re nearly touching, Goro doesn’t make to get away.

Maybe it’s the cold drink.  Goro tears his eyes from the way Ren’s hair curls over his ear, takes a long sip of his tea, and settles in to people-watch, one ankle hooked protectively through his bike lock.

Even so, when Ren looks up from his pastry to eye Goro instead, he can’t help his attention drifting back.  He’s sneaky enough under his glasses, but not so sneaky that Goro can’t tell the instant he zeroes in on his palm.

Cheating the Metaverse item system sped the healing process quite a bit, but still, Goro was left with a certain reminder of his successful, fumbled hit: the clumsy slip of his knife has been immortalized, raised-white and obvious over what his mom had called his masukake line.  Goro has to consciously resist the urge to lower his drink and drag his thumb over it even now.

If Goro had anyone to hide it from, this would be a real problem — but he doesn’t, so it didn’t matter.  Doesn’t matter, even still, even as Ren’s eyes slide across the mark — because there’s no way for Ren to know what he did based only on this, and even if he did, it wouldn’t mean anything.  Ren is in no position to tell, and Goro places no worth in Ren’s opinion of his questionable morality.

Goro has barely thought about the man he killed since the night he killed him.  He doesn’t care at all.

They’re wasting time siting out here; Goro doesn’t know why he didn’t jump straight into Mementos in the first place.

But before he can get up and say so, an interloper appears, stopped dead in front of their bench.

At first, the thing just looks like a speck: a spot in your vision when you hit your head too hard.  Then, he realizes the soot spot has ears.  Little legs.  A tiny, flicking tail.

Big blue eyes slide from Ren to Goro, then back to Ren.  A cat — or a kitten, to be more exact, pitch-black but for its muzzle and socks and the tip of its tail.  Puffed up though it may be, even Goro can tell this thing is a baby.  He could hold its little pill bug body in one hand.

This is really weird.  This area is ripe with people, for one thing.  Animals have never really liked Goro, for another.  Certainly, he’s never had a stray march up to him like this.  Is it somebody’s pet?  Anyway, do cats usually stare this much?

At his side, Ren is as silent and still as always.  When Goro glances over, bewildered, he doesn’t find any help on Ren’s face; he’s just staring at the little kitten intensely, brow ticked ever-so-slightly down, so you know it’s really serious.

Maybe he loves animals, and they love him back, and that’s why this cat wandered up to them.  He seems like the type.

While odd, the sudden appearance of a kitten doesn’t change anything.  Goro is gearing up to stand again when it opens its mouth.

It doesn't meow, though.  Crazy as it sounds, the sound that comes from its mouth sounds almost like—  “Joker?”

Ren freezes.  Goro almost chokes on his own spit.  Is he hearing things?  Have the years of convenience store dinners and energy drinks finally caught up with him?  Is he keeling over here and now, hallucinating a tiny fur ball saying his reluctant ally’s name in his final moments?

“Joker!” it says again, more emphatically this time.  Its tail flicks idly behind it in increasing speed.  “It is you!”

There must be an explanation.  They’re near to Mementos; maybe it crawled out of there.  Maybe it’s a Shadow.  A cat’s Shadow.  A really evil cat.

A sudden movement to the right tears Goro’s attention from the thing.  Ren’s arm is extended, finger pointed straight at the kitten.  “Wow,” he says, in a comically flat, louder version of his usual affect, “a monster cat.”

That’s it , Goro thinks with a sunken, bone-deep finality.  I’m going to strangle him.

The cat rears back, ears flat to its head.  Its tiny kitten body puffs up even bigger, until it’s so round that a slight breeze could send it bouncing away.  “I am not a cat!”

Goro takes a deep breath.  Okay, one step at a time.  Unless Ren has managed to crawl deeper into his subconscious than he thought, there’s no way they’re having some kind of shared hallucination this specific.  The cat really is talking — or something.  Obviously, there’s a lot to this world he hasn’t hammered down yet; magic is real, so cats might as well be able to talk, right?

Right , Robin Hood peeps, equally bewildered.

Whatever you have to tell yourself , Loki says.  Goro can feel his eye roll from here, and he isn’t even completely certain Loki has eyes.

Ren looks at Goro then; his accusatory hand drops in jerky, uncoordinated stages, like a malfunctioning machine.

“Oh,” he says, just as toneless as before.  “Mona, is that you?”

“ Mona ?” Goro hisses between his teeth automatically, head whipping around to stare at Ren’s tense expression and demand an answer.

“For heaven’s sake,” the cat — Mona? — says, hopping up on the bench, one paw on Ren’s thigh.  “Who else?”

Ren turns to look down at the cat, and Goro loses his only clue in this bizarre scenario.  Mona’s face is still visible though, and as stupid as it makes him feel to read a kitten’s emotions, Goro does; he watches Mona go from irritated to surprised to cautious as quick as a whip.

Great, maybe Ren has some kind of feline telepathy.  It seems like the sort of worthless, whimsical thing he’d be into.

After a long, Ren-typical pause, he reaches up to scratch behind the cat’s ears, revealing a yellow collar peeking out under its downy fur.  Mona lets him, though his body seems tense.

“Sorry,” Ren says quietly, “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

Mona opens his mouth, but before he can speak, Ren leans in close.

“This is the other Persona user I mentioned,” he explains quickly, mouth nearly touching Goro’s ear.  It’s a reasonable choice, given what they’re talking about; Goro feels the urge to both move closer and jolt away simultaneously, and settles for staying still as a statue as an uneasy compromise with himself.  “We met in the Metaverse, before you and I met.  He knows a lot.”

Goro frowns.  He could have sworn when they met that Ren had just awoken to his Persona; there had been blood on his face, under his mask—

Ren’s breath tickles his ear; his fluffy hair brushes Goro’s cheek as he pulls away.  He stares at Goro, and at this angle his eyes peek out over his glasses: wide and clear and trusting, waiting for a response, waiting for him.

Well, it had been several weeks ago now, and even then, Goro had the sense that Ren knew too much for it to be his first foray into the Metaverse.  It just makes sense to take him at his word here.  There’s no other reason.

“Right,” he says, feeling strangely breathless under his incredulous smile.  Tearing his eyes away from Ren’s, he fixes them on the fur ball instead.  He can’t believe this is his life.  “Mona, was it?”

“Morgana is fine when we’re out here,” Morgana says suspiciously, eyes flicking between Goro and Ren again at a rapid pace.

Out of the corner of his eye, Goro sees Ren shrug.  Morgana sighs.

“Were you guys headed into Mementos?” he asks, jumping down from the bench.  “I’ll go with you.”

Immediately, Goro wants to object; they have a perfectly functional team-slash-uneasy-alliance-slash-budding-rivalry going as is, thank you.

But Ren gets up without a fight, an invisible eagerness permeating from the usually-lax lines of his body.  And Goro — playing nice, hedging his bets — follows haplessly behind.

The moment they leave the real world behind, Morgana transforms into some sort of… strange, anthropomorphic creature.  Goro nods to himself, getting his feet under him.  This may as well happen.

“I can see why you didn’t recognize him out there,” he tells Ren amicably.  He’s playing this so cool.

And wonderfully, unexpectedly, Ren laughs.  “Thanks for going along with this,” he says, eyes sparkling under his mask, gently bumping Goro with his elbow.  “Mona’s cool.”

Regardless, Goro isn’t really looking for another ally — but then, hadn’t he partnered with Ren in part for his information, and didn’t his information seem to largely stem from the other Persona user he knew?  Morgana is just a cat in the real world, anyway; it’s not like he’s any real threat to him.

Goro’s arm glows warm where Ren touched him.  Maybe it could be okay to go along with this, just for now.

“Very cool,” Morgana agrees sourly, turning around at the turnstiles to cross his arms and stare Goro down.  “Okay, catch me up.  What’s going on?”

It’s weirdly reassuring that this other Persona user is also surprised to see Goro.  He isn’t behind then, really; Ren is just the odd one out, taking things in stride the way he does.

But Goro isn’t going to be left behind; he won’t be bested in this.  If Ren can roll with the punches, then he can, too.

Ren doesn’t seem in any rush to explain, so Goro briefly recounts through their initial encounter and subsequent deal.  Morgana’s eyes keep going wider and wider, but he doesn’t interrupt.

“You can call me Crow, by the way,” Goro finishes.  Temporary ally or not, there’s no need to leap into full names with this bizarre little creature.  No doubt he’ll hear it from Ren soon, anyway.  “It’s your turn now, if you don’t mind.  What exactly are you?”

Morgana seems almost too lost in thought to be annoyed.  “That’s complicated.”

“Are you sure you're not a cat?”

“I only look like a cat.”

“Can other people understand you?  Or do your words sound like meowing to non-Persona users?”

Conspicuous silence.  Morgana’s tail twitches.

“Joker,” Morgana says wearily, “I’m not sure if I like your new friend.”

Defensive tension shoots through Goro’s veins — but Ren only laughs again, hopping theatrically over the turnstiles.  “I’ll explain later,” he says, glancing over his shoulder, eyes curved and mischievous.  He’s as happy and light as Goro has ever seen him.  “Shall we?”

But before they can even get started ramming into Shadows on Goro’s rickety bike, Morgana starts stretching and contorting in strange, uncomfortable-looking angles.  Goro pauses with his foot at the kickstand.  “What are you doing?”

Morgana shoots him a dirty look, which isn’t very threatening, considering he’s about knee-height.  “I should be able to turn into a car.”

Goro stares.  “Should be?” he asks incredulously.  “Says who?”

Maybe the ridiculousness of the situation is catching up with him; there’s a light, giddy feeling in Goro’s chest, and his mouth curves into a smile against his will.

Clearly, Morgana doesn’t see the humor.  “Says me ,” he huffs, continuing to flex and tense and strike weird poses until Joker unceremoniously scoops him up.

“Hey!” he objects, but Joker just puts him in the dead-center of Goro’s handlebars like an ornament without another word.  Goro rolls his eyes at the expectant way Ren stands there but climbs onto the bike first without argument, waiting until he feels Ren’s weight on the seat behind him before kicking off.

“Where to?” he asks, and starts peddling.

Ren’s hit list is short today: an extortionist con artist, a schoolgirl cyberbully, and some gambling-addicted old man ruining his own life.  Morgana alerts them each time there’s one on the floor — “How do you know?” Goro asks; “I just do, okay?” Morgana answers — and Goro tracks them down like a bloodhound.

In between, Goro takes the opportunity to catalog Morgana’s abilities.  If he can flip between Personas like Ren can, he doesn’t show it: his Diego sticks to wind attacks and swinging its sword around, occasionally healing the party.  It’s a different flavor than the healing items Goro has used in the past: less localized, and more of a rush, with a sort of minty-lemony zing that zaps him awake from the toes up.

It isn’t until they’re out of targets and their energy is running low that they hit that wall again.

Morgana puts his paw up as if to feel it out, just like Ren had not long ago.  “I don’t know what I expected,” he says after a long pause.

Goro doesn’t know what Morgana expected, either.  It’s the same as it was a few weeks ago, at the very least; presumably, if he’s made it down here before, it was closed then, too.

Charitable and magnanimous, Goro doesn’t needle him for it.  “Joker mentioned notoriety being the key, before,” he says.  “Since it seems so important that he makes his way into the depths, we were discussing possible methods to do so while maintaining our cover.”

Maybe something he says puts Morgana off, because his ears flick back.  Goro doesn’t know, though; he’s no animal expert.

“Maintaining our cover?” Morgana asks, guarded and leading.  “Is that so important?”

‘Our’ as in Joker’s and my own , Goro wants to say.

“Of course,” he says instead.  After all, any other Persona user drawing attention to the Metaverse can only mean trouble, and it’s hard to find Morgana very threatening to their team’s status quo considering his particular qualities.  “If we’re easy to recognize, we’re easy to track, and if we’re easy to track, we’re easy to identify.”

“That’s assuming some bad actor also has access to the Metaverse,” Morgana retorts, eyes never leaving Goro, like he’s looking for something.  “Otherwise, no matter how obvious we were, no one would ever make heads or tails of it.  There’s no evidence.”

Ren is watching him, too.  Rather than unnerving, it’s exhilarating: a challenge, or a chance to prove himself, some internal timer ticking side by side with his own beating heart.  Ren can ignore him all he wants in the real world, but here in Mementos, he’s vital — a teammate, an asset, an integral piece.

This feels like a debate, and one with an audience at that.  Goro has no intention to lose.

“There will always be some bad actor,” Goro says, putting on his best unaffected intellectual facade.  After all, he’s been thinking it for a long time, too: that there’s no way he can be alone in having this gift, that there must be someone else — stronger and luckier than him, diametrically opposed, ready to bring him down the second he slips.  “Here, or out there — it doesn’t matter; hard evidence or not, if they can trace it to you, it’s over.  You’ll be framed the moment it’s convenient, and there won’t be any real-world evidence to support your side of the story, either.”

There’s a pause.  Morgana’s ears flick back up.  Ren’s expression softens just-so, the line of his shoulders relaxing.

“You’re smart, Crow,” Morgana smiles toothily.  “I like that.”

The light, giddy feeling from earlier seems to spread through Goro’s body at an unsettling pace.  It’s like an infected wound, he thinks: warm and itchy.  He doesn’t think he likes it.

They discuss more specifics on the way back to the surface, Goro and Ren’s old conversation reinvigorated with a new voice.  Goro isn’t entirely certain why they had to put eyes on the wall to begin with, but he isn’t going to make himself look like an idiot and ask when Ren and Morgana seem so in sync with it already; they’re in sync with a lot of things, actually.  When Morgana tells Ren what a particular Shadow wants to hear, Ren is already wheedling a concession from them.  When Ren says he wants to collect Mementos requests, Morgana just starts theorizing how.

“No website,” Morgana says, like that was ever even a consideration.  They’re fresh out of the Metaverse now, but if anyone notices the kitten perched precariously on Ren’s knee, they don’t say anything.  “Any kind of public request system is… probably a bad idea.  Hypothetically.”

In some dark, isolated corner of the subway station, Goro fiddles with an almost-certainly-broken vending machine and listens in, like he doesn’t belong in this conversation.  Maybe he doesn’t.  It’s humiliating how often he has to remind himself that, despite his downtrodden and pathetic appearance, Ren is shockingly good at getting along with others.

Goro jabs his finger against the number pad again, hard.  He already sacrificed 200 yen; there’s no way he’s backing down now.  There’s only two coffees and a handful of sodas left in this thing, but Goro won’t let it rest in peace with his unearned money still inside.

“Obviously,” he fake-smiles, volume low.  All the giddy, light feelings from earlier are settling into bitter sediment in his guts.  “What kind of idiot would even consider a website a good idea?”

A moment of silence.  “Should we become actual ghosts?” Ren asks quietly.

At once, both Morgana and Goro look up to stare at him.  Goro recovers faster, putting a contemplative hand under his chin, taking the opportunity to be in the loop and running with it.  “Ghosts…  You’re suggesting a sort of living urban legend status to both gain traction and maintain anonymity, yes?”

Ren nods, eyes flashing brilliantly behind his glasses; there’s a liquid confidence spilling from him that makes Goro think for a second that he’s still in the Metaverse, watching Joker come up with some brilliant new strategy to knock their opponents down in one shot.

Morgana jumps down from Ren’s knee to the ground, pacing between him and Goro with tiny steps.  “Are we talking literal ghosts right now?  Like dead people?  Or as in—”

“Phantom thieves,” Goro interrupts, leaning back onto the vending machine.  He’s going for ‘philosophical movie star’, cooly unaffected.  “Mysterious, untraceable, incorporeal, and infamous.  It could work.”

Maybe his elbow bumps the pad just-so, because there’s a sudden beep, and then the distinct sound of something falling — then another.  Though Goro had only paid for one, the last two cans of coffee clink against each other on the way down.

Embarrassingly, Goro jumps.  “Look at that,” he smiles, recovering quickly to reach down for the drinks.  “Is Lady Luck sending us a sign?”

Morgana opens his mouth, but Goro doesn’t hear him — because the moment he has his hand through the bottom slot of the vending machine, the thing lets out a large, terrible beep.  It shakes and clatters with a death rattle that would put any of Goro’s past victims to shame before settling gravely still.

Goro’s arm is still inside the machine.  Hesitantly, he takes hold of both coffees and returns to standing.

“Maybe not,” he demurs, at the same time that Morgana says, “That’s it!”

Quick as his little legs can carry him, Morgana runs up to the vending machine and smacks his paw on its hatch.  “We can have people stick their requested target right in here!”

Coffee still in hand, Goro just stands there, staring.  Ren, as bizarre and unshakeable and in sync as ever, doesn’t take this buffer time.

His fist strikes his open palm, expressionlessly expressive.  “I get it.  That’s the rumor.”

What.  “What?”

“The rumor,” Morgana repeats with emphasis.  He looks over at Ren, but Ren is too busy pulling a notebook from his school bag to pitch in, head lowered so his unruly hair is the only thing visible.  “If people start saying, ‘I heard if you put someone’s name in the broken vending machine on platform whatever in Shibuya station, they’ll have a change of heart—’”

This plan leaves a lot to be desired.  Goro frees a hand by tossing a coffee at Ren, pressing his fingers to his brow to signal the headache he feels coming on.  “First off, how would anyone else even know it’s broken—”

Ren catches the can without looking up, spinning it quickly in the air like the showoff he is before lifting the paper he’s been scribbling on.  ‘Out of order’ is written in big, blocky, uneven characters, looking about as professional as a wet rat in a suit and tie.  “Already on it.”

“ That ,” Goro says, pointing at the sign like it’s personally offended him, “is not convincing.”

But Ren’s face doesn’t so much as twitch.  “It does the job.”

Heaving a sigh, Goro thinks about this.  Urban legends tend to be absurd anyway, so the ‘broken vending machine’ angle is just as feasible as any; what are the real, actual concerns here?  “What if someone comes to fix it?”

Seemingly, Ren is prepared for this, too.  “You can just break it again.”

“Ah,” Goro smiles, sarcasm twisting his words around like ribbons.  Of course, it’s right there on his list of professional skills: Metaverse assassin, b-list honor’s student, vending machine destroyer.  “I see.  How silly of me.”

This time, Ren grins, for just a shutter-flash of a second.  “This area is completely deserted.  Have you seen any employees come by?”

He hasn’t.  Goro crosses his arms over his chest, leaning his weight back on one leg; he’s losing ground fast and not even that annoyed about it.  Ren and his sticky optimism are rotting Goro’s brain.

“Fine,” he acquiesces, smooth and gracious, “but even if we do this — how is this rumor going to spread?”

“It can’t start at our school,” Ren says immediately.  And it’s true; that would be an easy way to track them down.  Goro is reluctantly impressed, though he doesn’t say so.

“We could use the internet after all, just to get it off the ground,” Morgana pipes up, sitting beside Ren’s shoe to lick his paw.  “Or… do you know anyone from any other schools?”

Wordlessly, Ren pushes his glasses up.  Morgana’s face seems to fall.

Goro’s skin prickles.  They don’t need anyone else, other schools or otherwise.  Sure, it’s dangerous to try spreading these rumors themselves, but if there’s no other option—

Ren brightens then.  “I might know someone who can help,” he says, whipping out his phone.  Goro wonders if he’s texting Ohya right now, if they’ve met since that day, if she told him that politician is dead.  He wonders who else it could possibly be.

He doesn’t care enough to ask, though.  Smiling with teeth, he plucks the makeshift sign from Ren’s lap.  “You don’t happen to have tape, do you?”

Morgana and Ren have seemingly entered an unspoken agreement to go everywhere together; Morgana climbs into Ren’s bag when it’s time to go, and Goro circles to Ren’s right side so that he can still talk to him without a feline interloper between them.

Someone beats him to it, though.  While Goro is still coming up from behind, a stranger turns the corner and walks straight into Ren.

Ren is not a clumsy person, but he isn’t exactly sturdy either, and the stranger knocks him nearly off his feet.  Luckily, Goro is there to keep him from cracking his head open; instinctively, he grabs Ren by the arms, letting him bump back into his chest.  His grip is too tight, but Ren doesn't wince; he only looks up, eyes wide and gray over the top of his glasses, raised brows hidden under his bangs.  His coffee, unopened, is held tight to his chest.

Immediately, Goro feels strange and hot.  His face is entirely too close to Ren’s.  And Ren is pressed flush, and he’s too vulnerable like this, and Goro is becoming increasingly convinced he has some kind of hidden hypnotism ability that only his ugly glasses keep at bay.

So Goro lets go, stepping back quickly enough that Ren stumbles as he gets back on his feet.  And before he even can, the stranger who caused this mess in the first place grabs Ren by the waist and tugs.

“Excuse me,” he says, holding Ren close; not as close as Ren and Goro had just been, but it’s a near thing, “have we met before?”

Morgana sticks his head out of Ren’s bag, having retreated during the worst of the jostling — but Goro isn’t looking at him.  He’s busy sizing up the new, very human-shaped interloper, tense and ready to tear into him at the slightest provocation.

The stranger is similar in age to Ren and himself, dark-haired and already tall, frame thin and slight like a stretched rubber band.  In spite of his age, his face is sharp and striking, intensified only by the all-consuming intensity with which he stares at Ren.  His hand is still on Ren’s waist.

Who does this guy think he is? Goro thinks, irritation rolling through him hot.

Apparently, Robin Hood agrees.  Unhand him!

Loki doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t laugh this time either.  A low rumble drones under Goro’s skin, like a growl.

Then Ren pipes up, and everything else gets very quiet.  “Um.”

The strange boy releases Ren’s waist to grab his hand instead.  “My name is Kitagawa Yusuke,” he says emphatically, strangling Ren’s fingers between his own, “and I believe this is fate.”

Goro believes he has a very reasonable worldview, considering how bizarre and worthless his entire existence to this point has been.  Many people might deserve to die, but Goro himself is not going to kill them if he doesn't have to; it’s a hassle, for one thing, another bit of extra work in his already busy schedule, and if he puts too much scum down, their stink might linger on his hands.  He has already adopted a strict, business-only murder schedule that he intends to stick to, extraneous circumstances aside.

This, he thinks, might count as extraneous circumstances.

Unaware of the storm brewing dangerously nearby, Yusuke continues staring at Ren with stars in his eyes.  Stiff in the shoulders, Ren extracts his fingers slowly, like defusing a bomb.

“Nice to meet you,” he says.

Immediately, the target of Goro’s murderous intent switches from Yusuke to Ren.  “ Nice to meet you? ” he hisses between his teeth.

But Ren doesn’t even look at him.  From this angle, a little behind and a little to the side, Goro can see Ren’s eyes, uninhibited by his glasses — and Ren is startled, thrown-off, wide-eyed.  Goro is used to the way Ren looks at strangers, which is not at all, and the way he looks at Goro, which is like a puzzle or feral animal or inside joke.  For the life of him, Goro hasn’t yet been able to determine if Ren is laughing with or at him.

Ren isn’t looking at Yusuke like that.  Though his face is barely different than usual, Goro can just tell: there’s an off-guard, vulnerable openness to him.  He still isn’t steady on his feet.  His guts are showing, like a cracked geode.

Goro doesn’t like that at all.

“You as well,” Yusuke says, gravely serious.  “Would you do me the honor of exchanging contact information with me?  The pull I feel toward you cannot be overstated, and I would be remiss to lose the chance to see you again.”

Already, Goro can see it: Ren recovering, Ren getting to his feet, Ren pulling the mask back on.  He pushes up his glasses and looks down to pull his phone out; when he reemerges, his expression is unreadable once more.  “Sure.”

And what is Goro, chopped liver?  Temper at a low boil, he smiles and steps a half-pace in front of Ren.  “How nice to meet you… Kinoshita-kun, was it?”

“Kitagawa,” Yusuke corrects, unfazed.  His eyes finally, blissfully slide from Ren to Goro.

Robin Hood and Loki’s general discontent only ruffle Goro’s feathers further.  He smiles brighter to compensate.  “Ah, I see.  What an unusual name.”

But Yusuke only nods.  “I hear that often.”

Either Yusuke is genuinely stupid, or he’s a veritable master in the art of verbal combat.  Regardless, Goro cannot be deterred.  He opens his mouth to needle him again.

Yusuke strikes first.  Seeming genuinely puzzled, he puts one hand on his hip and looks Goro up and down.  “By the way, who are you?”

Oh, he’s good.

Before Goro can unload a barrage of words that would blast Kitagawa Yusuke back into the trash heap he crawled out of, Ren intervenes.  “I’m going to talk to him for a minute,” he mumbles, twisted around, face near Goro’s shoulder.  “You don’t have to wait up.”

What does that mean?  Does he not want him to wait?  Does he expect him to just leave his co-conspirator alone with some strange boy?

In a moment of desperation, Goro looks to Morgana, head poked out through the gap of Ren’s bag.  But, in so much as a cat can, he looks deep in thought, and is generally of no help at all.

Ren follows Goro’s line of sight and slips his bag off his shoulder.  “Do you want Morgana?”

Goro takes the bag automatically for some reason, and then can’t find a smooth way to give it back.  Morgana’s ears are flat to his head, but uncharacteristically, he doesn’t pipe up.

Fine then, chopped liver it is.  At least this means Ren will have to check back in to collect his hostage, and can’t just run away into the sunset with this string-cheese subway boy.

Plastic and crackling, Goro puts on his best and most violently benevolent closed-mouth smile.  “Alright.  I’ll just… wait for you over there, then.”

He puts as much disdain and derision as he can into spinning on a heel and marching away — but even as he does, he has the distinct feeling that Ren isn’t even watching.

Parked on a bench, far enough to look aloof, Goro pretends to scroll on his phone while keeping tabs on Ren from the corner of his eye.  When that proves insufficient to channel his unease, he turns to Morgana.

He never thought he would be sitting here in a public place, talking to a kitten.  But there’s no one in earshot, and Goro has the good sense to keep his voice low.  Crossing his legs, he brightens himself into something resembling friendliness.

“Ren told me a lot about you,” Goro lies.  “All good things, of course.”

Morgana is slow to respond.  “That’s good,” he says absently, and then, “What kinds of things?”

“Oh, this and that.  That much of his information came from you, for one.  How did you come to learn so much of the Metaverse, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“That’s a long story, too.”

“Clearly, I have the time,” Goro grits, smile stuck in place.  “We’re both waiting on Amamiya, after all.”

A pause; Morgana seems to have no intention of showing his cards.  Fine , Goro thinks sourly.  They’re not friends, and Morgana doubtless has his own selfish agenda.  There’s no reason to expect transparency from a magic cat.

A short distance away, Ren is typing his number into Yusuke’s phone.  Yusuke is watching him, contemplative and still.

Goro grinds his teeth.  “Who would have thought he was so social?”

There’s affection in Morgana’s voice this time, warm and hammered deep.  It doesn’t sound like the kind of affection one has for a recent acquaintance.  “Ren is good at making friends.”

Across the way, Yusuke ducks his head to say something.  Ren’s mouth twitches into the briefest approximation of a smile.

He doesn’t know what possesses him to say it, but without thinking, Goro blurts, “It doesn’t bother you?”

Morgana looks at him for a long moment, as if watching the realization and mortification and irritation swell in Goro’s guts.  “Not really,” he says eventually.  “Ren isn’t really…  He doesn’t always say everything he means, and he doesn’t like to step in, and he isn’t the type for reassurance.  But he’s an easy person to get along with, and he cares more than he lets on.  Knowing that helps, now.”

What an odd response.  Goro’s brow furrows, completely forgetting his own bizarre question that led them here.  “I’m sorry,” he clips, shortly polite as his brain puzzles over the words, “but did the two of you have a… disagreement?”

“No,” Morgana says, watching Ren and Yusuke again, “not really.”

Making small talk with a cat is shaping up to be just as difficult as Goro had feared.  No doubt it's just the company he’s keeping, but he can’t help but feel that he’s losing his conversational edge.

Maybe the silence bothers Morgana too, because just as Ren is saying his goodbyes, he pipes up again.  “It’s good, you know,” he says, cautious and consoling.  “He needs all the allies he can get.”

How condescending.  Goro’s lip curls.  “Whatever for?  It seems to me he’s already drawn a winning hand.”

The absurdity of the situation doesn’t catch up to him until he looks down and sees a kitten staring up at him, gigantic moon eyes taking up all the real estate on its fluffy little face.

Defensive, Goro waves vaguely in Ren’s general direction.  “He’s that kind of person, isn’t he?” he asks, feigning casual, a caustic sort of bitter burning the back of his tongue.  “Luck is on his side.  Even difficult things just fall into his lap.”

Another pause.  Morgana stares back disbelievingly, mouth agape.  “Do you know anything about Ren?”

Of course he doesn’t.  Ren is about as forthcoming as a brick wall, and unnecessarily good at wiggling out of any of Goro’s questions.  He’s busy, distant, absent-minded, and overly alert; Goro can’t wheedle anything from him, can’t charm or pry, can’t lead and coerce.  Whenever they’re together, Ren only provides information on a need-to-know basis, if even that; and apparently, when it comes to his personal life, Goro doesn’t need to know.

Some things, Goro can come to on his own.  Ren has never mentioned his home or parents.  He’s in the same scholarship program as Goro.  He eats lunch alone.  He’s quiet, and vigilant, and impossible to sneak up on, and whenever a man nearby raises his voice or comes too close too quickly, he tenses.  Conclusions draw themselves, building and building until they’re out of control, spinning rapidly away with Goro dragged unwilling behind.

Ren, Ren, Ren — Goro doesn’t want to hear it anymore.  Why does Morgana call him so casually anyway?  No doubt Goro has spent more time with Ren at this point than he has, and he still has the decency to call him by his family name.  His furious, confusing bond with Ren flares red-hot, ruining what was left of his mood.

As if waiting for that moment to announce him, Ren appears suddenly, shoving his phone back in his pocket.  “What about Ren?”

His voice is light, posture loose and easy.  His coffee, Goro notes sourly, is still unopened.

Smile back on, Goro hands Morgana back to Ren like luggage, ignoring the resultant indignant squawking.  “Nothing important,” he says.  “What about you?  Did you have fun?”

There’s a barb there, but Ren doesn’t get caught on it.  “Yeah.”

That isn’t answer enough; that can’t be it.  But Ren doesn’t add anything else.

Taking a long breath in through his nose, Goro quickly scans their surroundings.  Yusuke is gone, skulked off somewhere with Ren’s name and Ren’s phone number and Ren’s smile tucked into his cap.  No one is within listening distance, and he doesn’t see anyone else with their school’s uniform anywhere on the horizon.

All the while, Ren just stands there aimlessly, like an idiot.  It’s getting late, but if he has anyone to get home to or a train to catch, he doesn’t show it.

“This might sound strange,” Goro starts demurely, interrupting the weird staring contest Ren and Morgana are having, “but, well…  As you know, things have changed a lot in the time we’ve known each other.”

Ren, predictably, doesn’t say anything.  Bravely, Goro soldiers on.

“I think it would be best for us to exchange contact information, after all,” he manages to force out.  He’s so good at this.  “For our respective objectives, of course.”

Morgana’s mouth opens, “You don’t have his—”, but Ren holds up a hand to gently shush him.

Ren smiles that smile that means Goro will lose, is losing, has already lost.  “Sure,” he agrees, already pulling his phone back out.

Afterwards, Ren walks him to his platform.  It’s odd, but everything about Ren is odd.  One contact richer, Goro pays it little mind.

“Who did you have in mind for advertising?” he asks curiously as they wait, referring to their Mementos rumor.

“I know a fortune teller,” Ren says, tapping quickly at his phone.

“A fortune teller ?” Goro echoes.  Nothing should surprise him anymore — Personas, a talking cat, Ren — but this is shocking to hear, even for him.

But Ren just shrugs.  “She knows a lot of superstitious people.  It’s worth a shot.”

His fingers are still moving.  Goro glances over as the train arrives, seeing him tab from one contact — Mifune Chihaya — to another.  Ohya’s name stares up at him, accusatory.

“Asking the reporter too, are you?” Goro asks before he can help himself, checking a watch he doesn’t have as passengers flee en masse from the stopped train.  “I can’t imagine she’ll be of any help in this particular regard.”

“I don’t think so, either,” Ren admits, waiting alongside him, idly swaying.  The corner of his bag brushes Goro’s shoulder every now and then, along an empty corner where even a fully-hidden Morgana doesn’t reach.  “She just texted me.”

Goro hums, “I see,” and steps into the crowded car.

In the moment before the throng of bodies makes it impossible, though, he sneaks a look over his shoulder.  He’s expecting to see Ren’s back walking away, or maybe his head ducked down to read his texts—

But maybe he already read them, because when Goro checks, Ren is staring straight at him.

There’s a wildness to him, raw and exhilarating, an immediate understanding and electric frustration; his previous swaying, relaxed and thoughtless, transforms into eerie stillness.  In the low light of the station at night, Goro can see his eyes through his glasses; he can trace the split-second path they take from his phone, to Goro’s scarred palm, to his face.

Ohya’s text must have been interesting indeed — and Ren is all the more interesting, too, for instantly putting it together.

Goro should be concerned.  Ren could tattle on him, for one thing, sell him out to save his skin and ruin his plan.  Or he could, at the very least, pull out of their agreement; he doesn’t seem too keen on murder, and he’s just the type of wretched self-righteous to make that Goro’s problem.

But Ren is his ally, temporary or not, and that bond isn’t so easily shaken.  Goro can already tell, frozen in time, watching Ren’s face: neither of them are going anywhere.

That particular hit still lingers when he closes his eyes, splitting flesh and viscous blood — so Goro doesn’t close them.  He keeps them wide, wide open even as the doors start to close, disappearing into the anonymity of the crowd with a smile on his face.

“Have a good night,” Goro says.

The train pulls out of the station.  The weight of Ren’s eyes follows Goro all the way home.

Chapter Text

Proving yourself as a loyal attack dog has its benefits, it seems.  When Goro asks followup questions about his newest prospective target, Shido doesn’t even hesitate.

“She’s a cognitive psience researcher,” Shido says, throwing an open file down.  Isshiki Wakaba stares up at him, held expressionless in her black-and-white portrait.  “The lab is government-funded, but she’s acting like she owns the place, or like the work she’s doing belongs to her.  She’s even going public with her research, and won’t take no for an answer — and from me, an official!”

He’s upset, yelling and pacing, throwing a tantrum like a child.  Fun as it is to see him like this, it’s disgusting, too; is he so arrogant that he genuinely believes that he alone is in charge of everything the government has its fingers in?  He’s just one mid-level politician.

Instead of saying that, Goro nods, contemplative hand under his chin.  “That does sound serious.”

“Of course it’s serious,” Shido says, slamming his hands down on his desk.  “Here’s a lesson for you: information is the most powerful weapon of all.  And now that I can control the Metaverse, I’m not giving that information up.  Not to anyone.”

Controlling the Metaverse.  He doesn’t know a single thing about the Metaverse.  Loki lets out the derisive snarl that Goro can’t.

He can’t wait to topple him.  He’s going to destroy him.  He’s going to have him begging for death, wringing his miserable hands and saying he’s sorry for everything he ever did to Goro and his mother.

Not now, though.  Now, Shido stares at him through his stupid transition lenses and says, “You’ll take care of it for me, won’t you?”

Goro has been thinking about it more and more: how little he knows of the Metaverse, and how even that is infinitely more than everyone else aside from Ren and Morgana.  How, to keep any of them safe, it is absolutely essential to keep it that way.  Shido can’t know; Isshiki Wakaba can’t know; the general public definitely cannot know.  Even if Shido hadn’t asked for this, Goro would have wanted Wakaba dead.

Even so, this isn’t enough; he needs the keywords, and that means he needs specific, pointed details.  He could do the legwork himself like he had for the last, or, as the most efficient option, he could explain keywords to Shido.

But then, information is his most powerful weapon.  He can remember that.  It’s a lesson from his father, after all.

“I’ll need to meet her first,” he says instead, spreading his fingers over Wakaba’s photo.  One dark eye stares at him between the gaps, lifeless and cold.  “She isn’t a public figure.  I can’t find her in the Metaverse otherwise.”

Lies are easiest when they’re only half-true.  Certainly, meeting her could help him barge into her Palace, if he’s silver-tongued and clever enough.

Shido stares at him a long moment before exhaling loudly from his nose.  “Very well,” he says, and Goro’s smile tilts more genuine, more twisted; he’s so stupid.   “She isn’t planning to put her research forward until September, but I suspect I can create an opportunity for you to meet very soon.  I expect results by the end of August, at the latest.”

By the end of August — and it’s barely June, now.  Goro nods and slips the file under his arm.  He should think about getting a briefcase for these.  “Consider it done, sir,” he says, shallowly bowing before seeing himself to the door.

Ren has been searching for a suitable target for weeks now; if Wakaba has a Palace, then she’s a good find.  Goro is already reaching for the phone in his pocket, itching to check.

Shido rudely interrupts Goro’s thoughts, calling out to him just before he can get the door open.  “You’re a smart kid,” he says, “I expect you know what will happen should you fail.”

Oh, Goro is very familiar with the ultimate fate of Shido’s discarded trash.  More than the bastard knows.

Despite the derision roiling through him, Goro shivers.  “Yes, sir,” he says, and lets himself out without looking back.

A night’s worth of internet sleuthing doesn’t turn up much, but Goro does at least confirm that Isshiki Wakaba has a Palace.  Sitting on the information, he all but springs out of his seat when Ren shows up at the door to his classroom at the start of lunch, at the same time as always.

As Goro predicted, Ren did not try to turn Goro into the police for the murder of Ohya’s suit, nor did he break their deal.  What Goro did not predict, though, is that since then, Ren has been seeking him out with increased tenacity and vigor.  If he’s upset about Goro killing their past Mementos target behind his back, he never brings it up; instead, there’s a not improbable chance he’ll be waiting for him at the school gates, and every day without fail, he’s here at the door at the start of lunch period.

“Akechi-senpai,” he greets, quiet and expressionless.  His bangs and glasses and ridiculous jacket all but swallow him up.

“Again, Amamiya-kun?” Goro asks, but he’s already following Ren out the door.  “What will my classmates think?”

Morgana sticks just his muzzle out the corner of Ren’s school bag, bereaved.  “We wouldn’t have to come get you every day if you would just meet us on the roof like a normal person.”

Goro flipped his lid the first time he realized Ren had Morgana at school with him.  He’s more or less used to it by now.

It’s a good point, unfortunately.  In lieu of arguing, Goro raises a hand, fingers set in a threatening flick-ready position.  Morgana gives him a dirty look, but wiggles back into the bag without complaint.

They eat their peasant lunches up on the roof.  The midday sun is no laughing matter even this early into June but the gym towel Ren strung up as a makeshift awning kind of is.  Even sitting under it, Goro has no clue how the thing stays afloat.

By necessity, that means Goro and Ren end up sitting very close.  Goro hates touching people, even through his clothes, and he’d stiffened the first day Ren’s shoulder brushed his — but it isn’t so bad, now.  He’s used to it, he supposes.  Everyone puts up with unpleasant things for the sake of business.

Along with his bread, Ren pulls two cans out of his bag: one soda, one coffee.  Casually, carelessly, like he does this all the time, he pops the soda open with one hand and hands Goro the coffee with the other.

It’s an impressive display of dexterity.  Maybe that’s why Goro pauses a second before taking it.  “What’s this?”

Difficult as ever, Ren smiles with his eyes.  “Coffee.”

It’s not what he meant, and Ren knows that.  Still, Goro plays the bigger person and doesn’t badger him on it.  The metal is cold on his warm palms, and Goro lets himself enjoy that for a moment longer.  If he were alone, he might press it to his neck.

Ren is watching him from the corner of his eye, satisfaction radiating silently off him,  like a cat dropping a mouse at his feet.  For such a strange person, he’s easy to please.

His voice is quiet.  “It’s hot today, isn’t it?”

Goro isn’t in the habit of taking food or drink from classmates.  A sealed can isn’t enough to stop someone spiteful enough.  But Goro doesn’t even go so far as to check for an expiration date before opening it.

After all, Ren has had plenty of opportunities to harm him.  And anyway, it is hot today.

The coffee is cold, and just sweet enough on his tongue.  He likes it, like he knew he would; it’s the same type he usually buys himself.

There’s no way for Ren to know, and Goro isn’t exactly celebrating anyway — but Goro turns sixteen today.  Inadvertent or not, it’s the first birthday gift he’s received since his mom died.

Today, Ren’s bread smells like curry.  Room temperature as it is, there’s still condensation collecting on the inside of the bag, forcing the already-smashed bun smaller and sadder.  The scent of the spices had all but burst out of the plastic when Ren first opened it, but the small trace of it in Ren’s little breaths is more sweet than anything else.

Goro swallows, looking away from Ren’s mouth and out toward the horizon.  The endless sprawl is familiar and comforting, and Goro counts windows idly as he finishes off his lunch.

“I have a,” Goro starts, pauses, thinks.  They never did discuss what sort of code to use for Palaces.  “That is, I recently came into fresh information, and I have a new…”

“Operation?” Ren suggests.  Too obvious.  Goro ignores him.

Morgana pokes his head out.  “Fish to fry!  And a big one, too, by the sounds of it.”

“We are not using that,” Goro objects, primly dabbing his lips with a napkin.

“Why not?”

“Why would we?”

“It sounds good to me,” Morgana says, high-spirited and unoffended.  “I’m hungry.”

“That’s irrelevant,” Goro sighs, and then, turning to Ren for help, “You agree, don’t you?”

Ren’s eyes sparkle through his glasses; his mouth is curved into a barely-there smile.  “I’m good at frying fish.”

Morgana laughs, high and nasally.  Goro sighs so hard his soul is likely to go with it.

When Ren asks for details, Goro holds back; he has this vision of taking Ren there when he has everything hammered out and wowing him with his abilities.  All he gives up about Wakaba is that her work puts them all in jeopardy; Ren and Morgana share a tense, loaded look, and Goro takes pity on them and confirms that she seems to know something about the Metaverse.  The file Shido had given him hadn’t had a lot of details, so admittedly he doesn’t have much more to add, but even that much seems to have sharpened the whole team’s focus and resolve.

That’s good.  Wakaba is a major threat — to all of them.  They’re going to need all the bloodlust they can get.

Ren isn’t waiting for Goro at the gate that day, off doing god knows what.  Maybe he’s with that prattling fortune teller of his again.

But Goro doesn’t care, because there’s a lot to do.  Sticking his nose into his newest target’s business, on the internet and otherwise, waits for no one.  And he has a strict deadline for his dirt digging too, because for once, Shido made good on his promise: Goro’s opportunity to meet Wakaba is already fast-approaching.

After school on Saturday, Ren asks Goro to go to Mementos with him, and Goro finally has a valid reason to turn him down.

“My apologies,” he says brightly, prim and proper and gentlemanly as he walks his bike to the station.  He could leave Ren behind in the dust, but he has an image to uphold.  “I’ve been invited to a certain party tonight.”

Ren’s face doesn’t move in the slightest, but Morgana does the talking for him.  “You, at a party?” he asks skeptically, shoving his face through the opening in Ren’s bag.  “This doesn’t have anything to do with that target you mentioned, does it?”

“The very same.”  Goro’s smug enthusiasm all but wafts off of him.  “A shame the two of you aren’t able to attend.  Only a certain type of person can be a guest, and — well, it’s invitation only.  I’m sure you understand.”

They arrive at the entrance to the station, but Ren doesn’t go in; he just stops in place, quiet voice drawing Goro back like an arm over his shoulders.  Goro doesn’t even realize his head is turning until it’s too late.

“Good luck,” Ren says, eyes sparkling and mischievous through his glasses.  “Maybe we’ll see you there.”

You most certainly won’t, Goro thinks.  But he isn’t about to embarrass himself more than he already has, so all he does is turn woodenly around and march himself home.

Loki rumbles a purr, no doubt amused by Goro’s humiliation once more.  There’s some real fire in that boy.  He gives you a run for your money.

Meanwhile, Robin Hood is off fretting and ruminating, like always.  I was right.  He must live near the school.  I’m sure of it.

The only thing in Goro’s head, though, is a budding migraine.  Will the two of you can it? he hisses, single-mindedly determined not to mind Ren’s little comment.  There’s no way he meant it, and even if he did, he has no way to make good on it; there’s no chance of seeing him tonight.  I can’t even hear myself think.

It might be more appropriate to call the party tonight a gala instead; Goro isn’t familiar enough with the ways of the upper crust to know the difference.  What he does know is that he doesn’t have the clothes for the occasion, and he’s not about to spend a good chunk of his hard-earned blood money so early if he can help it — but if Shido is concerned about it, he doesn’t say.  When Goro gets into the car in his winter uniform, pressed crisp and neat, Shido doesn’t even look up.

“I’ll introduce you to Isshiki,” Shido says, “so be quick about it.  Don’t do anything unnecessary, and don’t embarrass me.”

Maybe if Goro was more useful, more compliant, quicker to bend and bite, Shido would be nicer to him.  Maybe if he was a sweet, convenient combination of brainless and bloodthirsty instead of having all of these conditions and making all these requests — maybe if Goro wasn’t sharing the secret and risk of the Metaverse and subsequently had nothing to lose, Shido would throw him a kind word.

But Goro isn’t, and Shido doesn’t.  He glares at him a long moment as if to hammer his point home, before scoffing and looking back to his phone.  Goro feels what he is in that moment, clear as day: Shido’s trash, less than his trash.  He was thrown away before he was even born.

“Of course, Shido-san,” Goro says, watching Shido’s clumsy, brutish fingers jab into the number pad — but Shido is already raising a hand to cut him off, someone else’s voice in his ear.

The event is being hosted in some ritzy hotel and paid for by Okumura Kunikazu, the fast food CEO dipping his billion-yen toe into the political scene.  If this is his way of flaunting his money, he’s succeeding; Goro passes at least three fountains on his way to the main hall, and when he sneaks a flute of champagne, there’s tiny specks of what looks like gold floating inside.

And every person here is important; it weighs down the air, how important everyone is.  Heirs and heiresses line the walls, laughing and making small talk or following their parents; every up-and-coming in Tokyo shakes dozens of hands in an endless merry-go-round of connections.  Entertainers, business moguls, politicians — Goro swears he’s seen half these people on television, at least.

There are exceptions, of course.  Stressed assistants and other underlings run around with their heads down, carrying cell phones or clipboards.  Waitstaff waltz carefully through the throngs of bodies with painted, static smiles.  Beautiful young women cling steadfast and reluctant to any arm they have to.  Nobodies, blending into nothing.

There’s a thick line drawn in the sand here; this scene is only beautiful to the people for whom it was set.  And Goro isn’t one of the elite; he knows that.  Regardless of who sired him, he’s his mother’s son through and through.

Okumura can throw around as much gold leaf as he wants.  There’s nothing beautiful about this room.

Shido takes his time greeting everyone he knows and then some; Goro follows behind with a blank, neutral smile.  He scans for Wakaba in between as casually as he can, but even so, he somehow skips right over her until Shido points him straight at the target.

“Isshiki-san,” Shido says, friendly and loud.  The woman unfortunate enough to have caught his eye winces, hand still dug into the buffet-table platter of butter rolls.

It’s the plainest, least bougie thing on that table.  Goro isn’t sure if it’s that or the obvious disgust on Wakaba’s face that sparks some misplaced sense of camaraderie in him.

Wakaba glances around, as if for someone else to pretend to speak to; when she doesn’t find anyone, she sighs, tucking her hair behind her ear.  “Shido-san.  What a surprise.”

“If I’m being honest, I’m more surprised to see you here, Isshiki-san.  Didn’t you tell me yourself that you’re not one for parties?”

“I’m not,” Wakaba says, one eyebrow raised.  “I was under the impression that there was something valuable here.  I see now that wasn’t the case.”

Shido had said something about spreading rumors that some founding cognitive psience researcher would be attending.  Goro is almost sympathetic.

“What a shame,” Shido says, shameless.  “Do let me know if I can be of any help, Isshiki-san.  You are such a dear colleague of mine.”

Wakaba just gives him a look.  Only then does she seem to notice Goro, smiling blankly over Shido’s shoulder.  “Who’s the kid?”

“He’s a fan of mine,” Shido says, waving a dismissive hand.  “He was especially determined to help me with my campaign, so I decided to take him in as an assistant of sorts.  I just brought him here to get him some real-world experience, but please, feel free to pay him no mind.”

“Uh huh,” Wakaba says, shoving half the roll in her mouth.  “A fan, huh?”

Goro admits she's different then he expected.  Weirder, more real.  He isn’t sure what to make of her.

“Doctor Isshiki Wakaba-san, yes?” Goro asks, stepping forward eagerly.  “I’m an avid fan of your work, as well.  It’s shocking to me that it isn’t more widely known.”

“I’m working on that,” Wakaba says, leaning back into the buffet table.  Then, after a skeptical pause: “You said you’ve heard of me?”

“Oh, yes; I read your doctoral thesis.  ‘The Veil Wears Thin: The Cognitive World and its Implications’ , yes?”

A spark flicks through Wakaba’s eyes.  “Okay, I’ll admit it; I’m impressed.  I can’t imagine that’s required reading at school.”

“No, it isn’t,” Goro admits, eyes closing in a modest smile, hand at the back of his neck.  “Just a… personal interest, I suppose.”

Yeah, right.  He speed-read the entire thing along with most other cognitive psience scholarship he could find on the library computers every spare hour he had this week, just in case Wakaba decided to fact-check him.  This is going so well that he feels stupid for having wasted the effort.

Wakaba smiles at him, bright and real.  There’s a few gray hairs sticking out unevenly from her dark bob, and a smudge of red lipstick on her teeth.  Goro is almost sorry he’s going to murder her.

Then Shido claps Goro on the shoulder, and any positive emotion he may have been experiencing flies out the window.  “It’s nice to see the two of you get along.  Isshiki-san, I hope you don’t mind my leaving him in your care for a moment.”

Then, before either of them can respond, Shido leaves.  Wakaba stares after him, mouth incredulously ajar.

“The nerve of that man,” she grits.  “Listen little guy, you’re — what, thirteen?  Seventeen?”

Those are wildly different ages, and as such, Goro — freshly sixteen — has wildly different opinions about being perceived as one or the other.  He juggles a few responses with varying degrees of politeness, only for Wakaba to steamroll ahead without waiting for his response.

“Maybe Shido seems like a cool guy,” she says, “but he’s bad news.  I have a daughter about your age, so I know all about how squishy and impressionable thirteen-year-olds are.  But Shido isn’t cool, and you should get out now, while you still can.”

Goro couldn’t get out now, even if he wanted to — at least, not without a good deal of trouble.  Shido’s Palace is both expansive and roughly-shaped, unpredictable enemies and falling debris littering the path; and even if he got through him, he would have to uncover and murder all of his associates, as well.  It’s a lot of trouble for an outcome he doesn’t desire.  Not yet.

But Goro isn’t here to think about Shido.  He has his sights set on different prey.  No matter how Wakaba may seem on first meeting, no one really knows anybody; even if her very existence weren’t a threat to him and Ren, she has a Palace.  How harmless could she be?

Smiling, Goro tips his head to the side and says, “I’ll keep that in mind.  Thank you.”  Then, before she can respond to dismiss him: “I didn’t know the two of you worked together, Isshiki-san.”

For all the plans and plots and traps and scenarios Goro has rehearsed in preparation for tonight, this meeting isn’t going according to any of them.  Wakaba is — different than he expected.  Chattier.  More normal.  Even now, instead of giving him a stony look or icy comment or nothing at all, she blanches.

“We don’t,” she sighs, “work together.”

Goro waits a moment, but Wakaba doesn’t add anything else.  He’s beginning to suspect that her skill points were allocated away from social graces.

“What’s it like, doing what you do?” he tries again, fishing.  “You have a lab, yes?”

This time, Wakaba brightens.  It’s convenient for him that her work is the thing she’s most eager to talk about; his hunch says it’s the root of her distortion, after all.  “That’s right.  I can’t talk about it in detail, of course — but yeah.  The work is good, and the lab is nice.”

There must be more; there needs to be.  “The people too, I assume?”

Wakaba shoves the last of the roll into her mouth, chews, and swallows.  “The people,” she says, more a statement than an opening.  “Yeah, the people…”  Behind her, her long nails dig into another poor, unsuspecting piece of bread.  “Are you interested in going into academia?”

Goro isn’t planning to live past twenty.  He smiles.  “Yes.”

“It’s a lot like politics,” Wakaba explains, eyes flicking up to meet his.  “It’s not always about the truth, or the public, or breakthroughs for posterity.  It’s like a really boring, tedious game, with a hundred moves and pieces and players you don’t know, and if you have any interest in working in my field at all, you’ll be strapping into that game for the rest of your life.”

Wakaba is not exactly an inspirational speaker.  Goro feels like he’s getting scared straight from a career he’s never even considered.  “Right.  I’ll… keep that in mind, Isshiki-san.  Thank you.”

Nodding, Wakaba stacks four rolls in quick succession in a cloth napkin and turns on her heel.  “Good luck out there,” she says, and before Goro can even process it, she’s gone.

Immediately, Goro sets his untouched drink down and stalks after her, but Wakaba is good at making her escape; she wiggles through the crowd with the slipperiness of an eel, and by the time Goro makes it to the lobby, she’s long gone.

Oh, this is just perfect.  Shido arranged this one meeting and Goro didn’t even get any useful information out of her; he got swept up in the Wakaba tornado and failed to do anything but make small talk about work.  Stumbling dramatically into an offshoot hallway, Goro leans into the wall and shoves the base of his palm into his eye until he sees red.

You did speak to her, though, Robin Hood points out.  You have an idea now of what she’s like.  I’m sure if you and Ren put your heads together—

They weren’t supposed to put their heads together.  Goro was supposed to compile all the information, smooth and easy, then figure out the keywords, then take Ren to the Palace and gloat over how prepared he was.  Ren wasn’t supposed to be involved in the messy middle steps at all.

This is miserable.  It wasn’t supposed to go this way.  She’d mentioned a daughter; maybe if Goro tracks her down—

“Excuse me?” someone calls out, high and girlish.  “Are you alright?”

The mortification of being caught moping with his head in his hands doesn’t catch up to Goro until he’s already locked eyes with the girl at the head of the hall.  She’s about his age, long hair frizzy and obviously lightened, half of it pulled back into what he can only assume is some elaborate twist.  She practically reeks of wealth, from the clothes on her back to the way she stands, and the unsure way she lingers there staring makes Goro’s hair stand on end.

Why did it have to be a rich girl?  Someone his age?  What’s her aim, talking to him?  Does she have a goal?  Or is she just looking for a pet for the night?

The girl’s expression wavers before Goro remembers to smile.  “I’m fine, thank you.”

Short, clipped, with no grounds for questions.  If the girl has half the decorum her station demands, she’ll get the hint.

She blinks at him, long-lashed and doe-eyed, made up like a doll.  Goro can see the way she gets the hint and sets it down, shifting uneasily around it from foot to foot.  “Are you… on your way to the party?”

This must be a socialite’s daughter.  If Goro walks in with her, he’ll draw eyes that would never glance at him normally, sneaking in with the other lowlifes — and his target is already gone, and he has nothing to gain from this.  He isn’t exactly dressed to impress in his school uniform.  It wouldn’t be favorable to say yes.

That, and something about the girl unsettles him.  He doesn’t like the way she looks at him: quiet, hopeful, like they’re on the same team.  Something tells him they aren’t meant to have anything to do with each other.

But he is going back to the party, and it’s too soon in his plan to make any potential enemies — even teenage girls.  Smile crackling back into place, he fixes his posture and fiddles with his cuffs.  “That’s right.  Would you like to walk back together?”

She brightens at the obvious olive branch.  “I would,” she says demurely, and Goro thinks he would dislike her more if it seemed like she was attracted to him, or if her eyes didn’t slide calculatingly across his face.  “I’m Haru, by the way.”

Haru — it suits her, in her pastels and gauzy skirt, silk flowers pinned carefully in her hair.  Goro holds out a hand as he approaches.  “Akechi Goro.  It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

There’s a second’s hesitation before Haru takes his hand and shakes it, grip firmer than is comfortable, like she’s not used to doing it.  “Likewise,” she chirps, and turns to walk at his side without waiting expectantly for his arm.

The bright overheads and nearing crowd make Goro feel as though he’s chewing on wires, but he makes smalltalk all the same.  Haru is here with her father, though he’d arrived first; she didn’t expect to see anyone her age in attendance.  She’s a first-year in high school as well, though they go to different schools.  She doesn’t really know a single soul here, outside of her father; at best, she’s met some once or twice, and she’s never been very good at names.

“To be honest,” she says, with a wistful look to her, “I don’t really like these parties.”

Goro’s eyes slide to her, reluctantly sympathetic.  Not an ounce of bitterness leaks into his airy, friendly voice.  “No one really does, do they?”

Contrary to his fears, no one pays much attention to Haru at all, and their entrance is safely unceremonious; not even her father appears to call after or introduce her. Maybe she’s less important than he’d thought.

As if by unspoken agreement, Haru follows Goro around the perimeter of the main room until they find themselves at the back wall, near windows and balconies, cold wind whistling in through French doors.  Goro revels in it, adjusting his tie, taking in the brief chill with relief; he’s always run warm, and the crowd doesn’t help.  Haru doesn’t seem bothered by it one way or another, leaning back against the wall like it could swallow her up and free her from this event.

She rocks forward on the soles of her feet in a way Goro recognizes, and words spring from his mouth before he can help it.  “New shoes?”

It’s casual, overly attentive, and most importantly, not charming.  Goro wants to kick himself.

If Haru minds, though, it doesn’t show.  Her eyes widen, turning so fast that strands of her hair fall unflatteringly into her face.  “Is it that obvious?”

Images flash behind his eyes: his mother in secondhand heels, worn down in the wrong shape, the imprint of someone else’s foot leaving her toes red and raw.  Bandages over breaking skin, blisters gingerly avoided.  The way she’d laugh off his concern: Brand new shoes are worse, you know?  At least these are soft.

Discreetly, he glances down.  Haru’s shoes are a bright, shiny white, satin gleaming near-metallic.  Even as she shifts, the shoe stays firmly in place, like metal bolted to the floor.

A quick rap against the glass door behind him startles Goro from his thoughts.  Charm back on, he smiles, boyish and meek.  He can play the blushing ingénue, too.  “Not at all.  It only looked like you were a bit uncomfortable.  Are you alright?”

Haru opens her mouth, but Goro can’t hear her over the sudden noise behind him: the same one, loud and quiet all at once, like a pen falling onto a desk, or a bird flying into a window.  Brow furrowing, he turns instinctively so his ear faces the balcony door, listening.

Lo and behold, there it is again: silence, silence, then — rap.   It’s hidden by the music and the voices and the thick-as-smoke ambiance, but it’s unmistakably there.

“Akechi-kun?” Haru asks curiously, head tilted to the side, hand hovering over his arm.

Objectively, she’s a very pretty girl.  Her lack of attraction to him aside, Goro feels that if he were someone else, he might want to stay here with her, making small talk, buttering her up, getting her phone number.  She has the shiny lipgloss and dewey eyes of a magazine cover, practically dripping femininity; Goro can picture any boy in his class tripping over themselves for the chance to make her laugh.

But Goro spares a glance at her wide eyes and the concerned twist to her painted mouth and feels nothing.  All the while, gravity pulls him back toward the balcony doors, toward the source of that suspicious sound — event horizon long-passed, outcome inevitable.

“Sorry, Haru-san,” he says, and his smile is fake and tense, and Haru can tell; he knows she can, “but I think I hear somebody calling for me.  Maybe this is a good opportunity for you to fix your shoes?”

She leans back instinctively, getting the hint.  Goro smiles at her again, mumbles some pleasantry, and spins on his heel toward the balcony.

The night air is chilly, and more refreshing than its compressed, windy counterpart; Goro’s mind clears as he quietly closes the door behind him.  There’s no one standing there with their fist to the door, poised to knock, and no poor bird dead on arrival; immediately, Goro’s eyes scan down for the source of the noise, gaze flitting over the garden below.

It’s all shadows, at first; then, as his eyes adjust, he makes out shrubs, flowers, stretches of grass.  The garden blooms in early summer, hundreds of petals extended up toward the moon, their scent carried sweetly by the breeze.

And there, among the flowers, is a boy.

Goro recognizes the mischievous curve of his eyes first, long-lashed and gleaming; then he trails down, mapping the planes of a familiarly blank face.  There’s a quiet little quirk to his lips, or maybe Goro’s imagining it; maybe it’s just a shadow cast from the party above, crawling over an empty canvas and painting on feelings that aren’t there.

Ren raises a hand in a poor excuse for a wave.  “Yo.”

In a rare moment of agreement, both Personas in Goro’s heart seem to lurch at the sight of him, leaning in and forward as though they could reach straight out of his body and scoop Ren into their arms.  That feeling spreads to Goro, too, aching through his bloodstream; Ren is too far to touch and it would be too strange to lower something down to him like a princess in a fairytale.  He isn’t allowed here anyway; it’s invite-only.  And he certainly isn’t dressed the part, dressed down in jeans and a t-shirt, lightweight hoodie unzipped and trailing over-long down his thighs.

It must be the lighting — Ren’s glasses don’t block his eyes at all.  They seem to absorb the streaming moonlight, clear and sparkling; the longer Goro looks at them, the more he can’t look away.  Ren would be very eye-catching, if he cleaned up, he catches himself thinking absently.  That must be the point.  It seems to be a point of pride for him, his ability to blend in.  Goro understands to some extent, though his own strategy has obviously swung far in the other direction.  It’s still a shame — a waste of a pretty face.

At least Goro still knows.  Even if everyone else passes Ren by, Goro still sees him.

The thought makes something dark and satisfied kick under his skin.

He shouldn’t be here, and Goro shouldn’t encourage him.  Still, he leans an elbow on the balcony, fighting a smile.  “You’re incorrigible.”

Ren only shifts, hands casually in his pockets and posture relaxed, like he isn’t trespassing.  “I told you I’d see you,” he says, and he’s so smug and ridiculous, and the tight ball that has been continuously winding in Goro’s throat all night loosens a little, just like that.

Before he can reply, Morgana sticks his head out of the bag on his shoulder.  Of course.  Morgana goes everywhere with him now.  “This place is huge!  Is there free food inside?”

It’s lucky his kitten squeaks aren’t very loud.  Goro would hate to be caught like this.  “That’s right,” he answers, not offering to get him any, and well-aware that they’re too far away to sneak in.  Then, he turns his attention back to Ren, curious about how and why he’d come — it’s not like anyone should have known Goro would be at this party.

But Ren is busy, it seems: shrugging his bag more securely onto his back, rolling his sleeves up, sizing up the balcony.  Goro has only a split second to prepare himself before Ren launches himself at the wall.

It puts him solidly out of Goro’s field of vision, and he leans dramatically over the ledge to lay eyes on him again.  “Amamiya?” he asks, a laugh on the back of his tongue.

And Ren is there, holding onto a convenient trellis.  His fuzzy head and grasping fingers are the only things visible from above as he scuttles up at alarming speed.

And Goro can’t hold it this time: he laughs, head thrown back, arms crossed loose over his gut.  It’s an ugly laugh, ragged and ill-contained, but Goro is too distracted to even hate the sound tonight.

Ren flops bonelessly over the ledge to sink down on the balcony floor, and even though Goro is actively laughing at him, he doesn’t even have the courtesy to look annoyed.  His face is made of the same ungiving blank stone as always but there’s a certain softness to it, propped up on a palm so that his cheek squishes like a bunny.  Goro’s laugh peters out in quick, jerky, unpleasant stages, and Ren watches him all the while, not saying a word.

Then Ren gets up, pressing his bag into the railing in the process.  Morgana pops free with an indignant cry, shaking himself out once he reaches the ground.  He’s a cute little thing when he isn’t talking.

So naturally, he talks.  “I bet we could steal in there for a snack.”  Then, he turns to Goro.  “Have you eaten?”

He had convenience store soba this afternoon, but his stomach is long empty by now.  Still, he doesn’t want to go in there just yet.  Although Goro was more than prepared to schmooze his way around the party a few minutes ago, he now finds he doesn’t want to leave the balcony.  The breeze is refreshing, after all.

“I have,” he lies, wiping under his eyes.  “I would offer to get you both something, but of course it wouldn’t be safe or polite to leave you here unattended.”

“That’s okay,” Ren says, even as Morgana mumbles complaints from the floor.  “That’s not why we came, anyway.”

He leans his elbows on the ledge right beside Goro, only a short distance away.  Whereas Goro had looked down — at the flowers, at Ren, at the way the light reflects off the grass — Ren looks up, catching the moon and stars in his eyes all over again.  He’s pretty, Goro thinks again, tracing his side profile: long lashes, pouty lips.  It really is good he hides behind his glasses and hair; he truly would be much too striking otherwise.  It would be a nuisance for someone like Ren, to get that much attention from strangers.

You already said that, Loki drawls: not a disagreement, but a dig nonetheless.

Robin Hood’s tone is softer.   We’ll protect him, my liege.

Goro already knows that.  Loki and Robin are a part of him, after all.

“What did you come here for, then?” he asks, leaning back down so they’re in the same position, elbows a hairsbreadth from touching.

Gray eyes slide to meet his, half-lidded and warm.  There’s a quiet amusement radiating off of Ren, like he’s making fun of Goro, or thinks Goro is making fun of him.  “To see you,” he says again, brazenly casual, leaning in to bump his shoulder into Goro’s.  It presses their arms fully together, and even though both of them are wearing long-sleeves, Goro swears he can feel their bare skin touching.  “Like I said.”

There must be something else.  He’s suspicious of Goro.  He’s curious about the target he mentioned.  He’s looking into Goro’s connections.  He’s angry he didn’t go to Mementos with him today.

But Ren doesn’t look angry.  He pulls his arm and gaze away, looking out to the sky again, good mood obvious and contagious.

All three of them are quiet a while.  Even if the glass-paned balcony doors weren’t poorly sealed, one of them is cracked open; music and voices twine together into an unintelligible mass, wrapping around Goro every time he lets it, drawing him back.  Somewhere behind him, a harried-sounding woman speaks quickly into a phone; someone clacks their glass to someone else’s; somebody laughs.  Though they would certainly be able, it’s unlikely anyone will see them: it’s dark out here, and everyone inside is too drunk on themselves and the free booze to pay them any mind.

Goro can relate to Haru in at least one respect: though this is the only party like this he’s attended, he can’t claim to like it.  It’s only a reminder of all of the things Goro already hates about society — the vapid displays of wealth, the nepotism and privilege, the defined line in the sand between the chosen and the lesser.  People like him, scurrying like rats underfoot, desperate to do anything to survive; people like his mother, doing much of the same.

And he hates himself, too: for attending, for playing along, for being another willing cog.  Goro put his sense of justice behind him in pursuit of the only goal worth keeping; he swore a long time ago that nothing would get in the way of his revenge.  And he means that — there’s no point to this life where he has no one to love and no one to love him, other than that.  Other than this.

The party goes on behind them, brilliant and sparkling and stifling, spilling onto Ren’s shoulders, lighting his back in whites and golds.  His hair is wild and his shoulders are loose and his eyes are fixed on the distance, like he can see some future Goro can’t; and for all his mysteries, sometimes Ren is the only thing in this entire world that makes sense.

Inexplicably, Goro thinks for the first time since his mother died that he’d like to see this through a little longer — at least to know what it is that Ren sees out there, where the sky meets the horizon.

“But really, throwing rocks at the window?” Goro asks eventually, breaking the easy silence.  “You didn’t lose my number, did you?”

It makes sense how terrible of a texter Ren is, given his personality; every time one of his messages goes read but not responded to, he can practically imagine Ren sprinting off to some task or another, or talking to someone else, or nodding to sleep.  It doesn’t mean he likes it.

Still, they did chat this afternoon, just a little.  Ren sent him a picture of Morgana talking to another cat, at a silly angle that made it look like he had about five chins.  Goro replied, ‘Charming, ’ ambiguously derisive — though secretly, in the safety of his empty apartment, he’d smiled.

Ren shrugs.  Goro would roll his eyes if he thought Ren would notice.

Instead, he pushes a little more: curious, but not needling.  “What if someone else had come out instead?”

This time, Ren looks at him, though only long enough to flash a smile.  “They wouldn’t,” he says, and Goro is too busy staring to listen at first: at his lips, the way his teeth glisten in his mouth.  “The music is too loud.”

Goro is not so self-loathing as to think there is nothing likable about him.  He’s clever and honey-tongued and easy on the eyes, and he knows when to kneel down or shut up.

But his hearing has never benefited anyone other than Goro, so it isn’t a likable thing.  Most people don’t notice at all.  Some do, but only in bad situations.  His last foster father had noticed, once Goro started staring wide-eyed when he came home with his personal assistant for “private meetings” — only for a moment, before he looked away, but it had been enough.  All it had gotten him was a bloody nose and a gentle suggestion to stay out of other people’s business, and Goro had learned from that faithfully, young though he was.

Ren isn’t gaining anything, though.  He leans weightless on the ledge with a smile on his lips and the stars in his eyes — and for just a moment, the cool breeze steals Goro’s breath away.

The pressing weight of Isshiki Wakaba and her associated deadline feel a little less heavy.  Goro would still like to have everything together to present to Ren when he’s ready, but he has time; they’d finished Nakamura’s Palace in two weeks, and there are still over two months before Shido expects results on Wakaba.  Goro can sleuth; he can break into her apartment, or track down her associates, or take a tour of her lab.  Maybe he can email her, under the continued guise of a devoted fan.  There’s no reason to think it’s over already.

And if all of that fails, then maybe — maybe — he could even tell Ren.  As reluctant as Goro is to admit it, Ren does have good ideas, and they’re teammates now — partners.

Swallowing, Goro inches sideways until their elbows are touching again.  His body goes stiff and his arm seems to tingle up from the point of contact, but Ren doesn’t react at all; he leans ever-so-slightly into Goro, sleepy and distracted as he stares out into space.  The night air seems to light his lenses a bright, vibrant blue.

“Amamiya,” Goro starts automatically, pulling Ren from his daydream.  Ren turns, blinking at him, and Goro doesn’t have any more words prepared on his tongue, but he opens his mouth anyway—

The door clicks behind them.  When Goro spins, expecting to be caught red-handed, he instead finds Morgana dragging a napkin, heavy and tied into a parcel.

“Ren!” he says, muffled near indecipherable by the fabric in his mouth.  His catch is almost bigger than he is, and it keeps getting caught in his stubby little legs, making him trip.  “You’ve got to see what’s in there.”

When he drops the corners of the napkin, it falls flat, unveiling an unreasonably large selection of items.  Goro hesitates at the thought of any of them eating something that was picked up by a cat, dragged on the floor, and then carried in that cat’s mouth, but if Ren has the same concerns, it doesn’t show; he squats down immediately to grab the bundle, presenting it to Goro for them both to pore over.

“You went in there by yourself?” Goro asks, crackly displeasure kept at bay by his curious perusal.  He is angry at the thought of Morgana potentially getting them all caught, but this is a lot of food.

“Nice,” Ren says, picking up some sort of fancy-looking cracker with fruit and cheese and popping it in his mouth.

Morgana sits and licks his paw, looking quite pleased with himself.  “The sandwich is for you,” he tells Goro.  “You’re still growing, you know?”

There in the center of the napkin is a tea sandwich, smoked salmon peeking out from the neatly-cut sides.  It’s probably the least sweet thing in the bunch, and the level of care in this simple gesture makes Goro uncomfortable.

He still takes it, spinning it skeptically this way and that.  “Is this sanitary?”

It seems Ren does not have the same concerns, grabbing a fancy-looking wafer thing next.  “Morgana’s clean.”

There are more concerns to this than whether Morgana cleans himself, Goro wants to say.

Ren takes a bite of the dessert, and his eyes close in happy curves, chocolate stuck to his lip.  Goro stares for a moment, cuts his losses, and eats the sandwich.

He should get back — to networking, to investigating, to work.

But there’s at least a little bit of time for this.  Ren had come just to see him, after all.

Unbeknownst to the three of them, a figure stands on the other side of the cracked-open door, having followed the cutest pint-sized food thief she’d ever seen into accidentally eavesdropping.  Her hand hovers over her open mouth, eyes wide.

“A talking cat?” she murmurs, sneaking a peek through the gap.  In direct contrast to how he’d been earlier, Goro is lit up warm and enthused as he looks at the mysterious boy at his side; from here, all she can make out of him is his slight build and dark mess of hair.  Still, some vague feeling tugs her toward him — recognition, or nostalgia.  A bind of fate, slowly closing in.

If Goro was listening, he would have heard her — but Morgana is talking, and Ren is saying a punchy one-liner, and Goro is staring at him like he hung the moon.  The girl outside takes one last look at the tableau and hesitates, grasping fingers hovering over the handle.

Then she drops her hand and steps back.  With one final pensive look over her shoulder, Okumura Haru walks away.

Chapter Text

Against expectations, there are two Mementos requests waiting for them in the vending machine slot the next time they check.  Ren wants to tackle some twisted high school principal in addition, but the impenetrable wall that stands between them and the lower levels is still very much in place, so they call it quits disappointingly early.  By the time they part ways, Goro is still stuck with that overeager teeth-sinking energy rattling around in him, not quite worked out to satisfaction.

It’s warm again today, though not so much so as to force Goro into inactivity; his hair sticks to the back of his neck where it’s just beginning to grow overlong.  He crams into the subway during the worst of rush hour and makes his way to Isshiki Wakaba’s lab.

The building stands out like a sore thumb: bright white concrete, brutalist architecture, both too large and too squat to do anything like fitting in.  Goro takes a few pictures from across the street, pretending to be texting when someone passes.

“Isshiki Wakaba,” he mumbles to his phone, “lab.”  A pause, reviewing the brainstormed list in his head.  “Portal.”

Nothing.  His fingers tap an impatient, irregular rhythm on his thigh.  “Church.”

The red eye on his screen only stares up at him.  He narrows his own at it, thinking.  What was it Wakaba had said, in that last moment before she slipped away: it’s like a really boring, tedious game, with a hundred moves and pieces and players you don’t know—

“A game,” he says quietly — and the world shifts and blurs and breathes.

Merely entering the Metaverse multiple times in a day is exhausting, and even if Mementos had left him restless, he had no intentions of making significant progress today without Ren.  But even his initial plan to gather intel proves difficult given the Palace’s particular eccentricities.

Ren is just as speechless when he comes head to head with them too, a few days later when they’ve both slept off their otherworld-soreness.  In front of the bizarre structure that had once been Wakaba’s lab, he seems the size of an ant.

Certainly, the Palace doesn’t look like any kind of game Goro has seen before; not from here, at least.  The entirety of the Palace either is or is surrounded by what appears to be a gigantic metal box, walls shooting into the air impossibly high.  They’re painted, but from so close, it’s hard to tell what; it just looks like massive blotches of color, black and yellow and red and green, so neon and high-contrast it hurts Goro’s head just looking at it.

Morgana is a few paces ahead, tapping on walls and pacing around like a professional cat burglar.  Ren only gets his bearings, hands shoved in his pockets.  At his side, Goro watches his mind work furiously behind his mask.

It’s gratifying, seeing him stumped.  Goro doesn’t know what he would have done if Ren had known exactly how to go about this scenario, too.

There’s one particular spot on the wall that seems to grab Ren’s attention: a massive yellow circle with a pie slice cut out of it.  Staring at it, it almost looks like—

“Pac-Man?” Ren asks, hand under his chin.

It is supposed to be a game.  Is this whole metal box just a big Pac-Man machine?  Rather than a border, is this in itself the Palace after all?

Instantly, Goro runs through what Pac-Man-themed possibilities could be awaiting them.  None of them are good.

Morgana’s voice interrupts his thoughts.  “I think I found an entrance!”

There’s still no real building visible once they manage to wiggle inside of the box; not much of anything is visible, in fact.  The whole thing is a maze, and unlike in Nakamura’s Palace, there’s no convenient paper map to lead them.

“Perhaps further inside,” Goro suggests in a whisper, blending into the shadows at Ren’s side to peer over the next corner.  “I suppose it would negate the purpose of a maze somewhat to give us the answer so early.”

Ren’s mouth twitches.  “I suppose.”

Then, before Goro can reply — they see it.

Where Nakamura’s Shadows had been animals and performers — lions, tigers, clowns, and acrobats — this Shadow doesn’t resemble anything Goro has seen in real life.  It’s incredibly large and bulbous, pink body rounded at the top, trailing ragged edges mere centimeters off the floor.  Two cartoonish eyes rest where its face should be.

It’s just as he had suspected: a massive, monstrous Pac-Man ghost.

Immediately, Ren’s body tenses; Goro can feel his pounce before he moves a muscle.

But at that very moment, this hellish music starts.

“What,” Morgana starts, too hushed for their spectral target to overhear — before spikes burst out from the maze walls.  All three of them somersault out of the way, directly into the center of the path.

Out of the cover of darkness, they have nowhere to hide when the ghost turns, in such a fast face-heel turn that it seems to phase through itself.  For a long moment, it just stares at them.

The 8-bit blaring around them is overwhelming; the looming metal walls are stifling.  Goro can already tell this is going to be a long, long day.

“Shit,” he says.

The chase begins.

The ghost is slow; they can keep a distance from it at a steady jog.  They’re nearly at their exit when the second one appears: bright blue, and not so slow.  Goro breaks into a sprint, and Ren scoops Morgana under his arm to do the same, so that he doesn’t have to toddle after them on his stubby little legs.

As soon as they’re near enough, Goro dives headfirst into the crack in the corner that serves as their escape.  Ren is only a pace behind, passing Morgana off to him like luggage before squeezing through, the two ghosts on his heel.

And then they’re out.  For a while, they stand there, staring at the wall and catching their breath.  The music quiets, then stops.  The foreboding aura of the Shadows falls away.

That’s two Metaverse trips in a row that leave Goro restless and unsatisfied.  They hardly made any headway at all today, which doesn’t help; it’s a wasted day, and wasted time.  He steeps in that jerky dissatisfaction all the way to the station, where Ren bumps his shoulder and asks, “Want to go to the arcade?”

He’s been doing that more and more: the shoulder bumping.  Goro doesn’t like to be touched and he certainly doesn’t like to be surprised by touch; there’s no reason to tap him when you could call his name instead.  He never was the type to melt into contact, even when he was a child, and he certainly isn’t a child anymore.

But he doesn’t mind so much, when it’s Ren.  The thought makes him uncomfortable.  He wants to stew on it to death just as terribly as he wants to shove it in a box and never think of it again.

Morgana is staring at him from Ren’s shoulder, as worn out as a puffball of a kitten can be.  Goro ignores him, sighing.

Slowly, haltingly, his arm bumps Ren, too.  “Alright.”

It’s just strategy, of course.  For all they know, Wakaba’s entire Palace is themed around Pac-Man; Goro’s passing familiarity isn’t likely to be much help as is.  Their initial infiltration ended as soon as it started, and clearly, none of them are confident enough to return right away; it only makes sense, to be prepared.  This isn’t a pleasure trip.

The arcade is uncomfortably dark, and sound echoes stifling and uncomfortable in the cramped space, too many bodies and corners and hulking machines to let the echo go.  The radio is playing but it’s impossible to make out over the beeping cries of machines, every patron booing their losses and cheering their victories.  Only a few paces inside, Goro glares daggers at a girl nearby when her game begins and she starts stomping her feet on the dance platform, holding herself up on the metal bar behind her, intently focused — but Ren only watches thoughtfully, light reflecting off his lenses.

“Have you played?” Goro asks, pulling his eyes away from the neon glow reflecting off Ren’s skin to continue the search.  Surely there’s a Pac-Man machine in here somewhere.  It’s a classic.  “You seem very interested.”

It’s hard to picture Ren dancing, much less in a place like this, where everyone could see him.  But then, Ren loves to show off in the Metaverse, and he surprises him all the time.  Maybe he’s a champ at Dance Dance Revolution.

“Not really,” Ren says — avoidant, annoying — and then, “You?”

Goro would rather die than try dancing for the first time in a crowded arcade.  His smile doesn’t reach his eyes.  “Not really.”

There’s a Pac-Man machine towards the back, squished in with other classics; unlike the rest of the place, it’s blissfully deserted.  Goro lets Ren take the lead, standing back to watch him get killed by ghosts over and over.  Morgana chirps advice in Ren’s ear, and against all odds, it seems to work; Ren improves rapidly, until Goro’s own fingers are itching for the controls and the chance to outdo him.

Morgana hops onto Goro’s shoulder when he takes his turn, similarly offering advice.  It’s distracting, but useful — comparable to his words of wisdom in the Metaverse.  He doesn’t realize he’s smiling his vicious, ugly, snarling smile until he catches its reflection on the screen.

“Where did you learn so much about video games, Morgana?” he asks pleasantly in an attempt to reclaim a veneer of composure.

“Careful, it can trap you in that corner,” Morgana says in a rush, claws digging into Goro’s arm.  Then, at a normal pace:  “Well, Ren likes games.”

Goro risks Pac-Man-death to glance at Ren, who shrugs.  From him, in this instance, that’s confirmation.

Ren likes games.  How normal.  Goro supposes he has shown a modicum more enthusiasm since entering the arcade, glancing around wide-eyed behind his glasses and leaning incrementally into Goro’s space when he cuts it especially close.

It’s as productive an evening as can be spent in an arcade.  While Ren plays, Goro takes notes on the ghosts’ behavior and makes a map of the levels, in case they correspond to the Palace’s maze somehow.  Morgana theorizes loudly on whichever shoulder is nearest the machine, mewls hidden by the deafening background noise.  Ren does whatever Ren does during Goro’s turns, disappearing at one point to get them snacks, and winning a small figure in a claw machine of some mascot Goro doesn’t recognize.  Still suffering the Metaverse’s aftereffects, they’re all a little dead on their feet.

The next infiltration attempt finds them slightly more prepared.  The maze is much more complex than the Pac-Man level maps had been and has the added fun element of protracting spikes, but bears enough similarity to be worth the trip to the arcade.  Unlike the video game ghosts, these can turn on a heel — but unlike Pac-Man, the three of them can hide.  Given whatever wall they lean into isn’t trying to stab them, that is, which is always a risk.

It isn’t easy.  Gaining Ren as an ally had made Nakamura’s Palace go from grueling to simply challenging; even with him and Morgana both, Wakaba’s Palace is still grueling.  There aren’t enough eyes to watch out or feel for traps; they even skip a treasure chest, much to Ren and Morgana’s dismay, because of its vulnerable position in a corner.  By the time they make it to the first Safe Room — an employee lounge, comfortably padded — they’re exhausted.

Goro had thought, once he got these powers and settled into the fact that he was in it alone, that any potential teammates would only slow him down.  He has his own goals and his own ways of achieving them, and there’s no benefit another body could provide that would be worth the loss of momentum.  He has his focus, and he’ll stick to it.  He doesn’t need anything else.

Ren wants to go back to the treasure chest before they leave.  “It could be useful,” he says, Joker grin punched hard across his face.  Under the sterile office lights, he’s bright and gleaming.

Now, watching for ghosts as Ren picks the chest lock, Goro can feel Loki creeping into his forebrain; when he laughs, it tickles Goro’s throat like he’d been the one to make the sound.

Loki has never been as close on hand as Robin Hood, but it used to feel he was coming nearer all the time; then, suddenly, he was a million lightyears away.  Now he’s circled back, leaned in so Goro can practically feel his breath in his ear.  Hey kiddo, where’s that resolve of yours now?

Morgana has the other corner, but both of them need to watch for ghosts; these walls have spikes, so if something comes, they need to be ready to sound the alarm and run.

Still, when Goro bristles, his attention is torn from guard duty automatically.  Just as present, he snips.

He means it, too; none of this changes anything.  He’s still going to kill Wakaba, and he’s still going to do whatever he needs to see Shido grovel and beg.  His and Ren’s current objectives just so happen to align, and for whatever reason, Morgana and Ren are a package deal.

In the space behind his own, Goro can feel Loki roll his nonexistent eyes.  You’ve lost sight of your initial resolve, Loki drawls.  Don’t panic, brat; it isn’t gone.  But even a twerp like you must have noticed the shape has changed.

It hasn’t, Goro bites back immediately, words bleeding true in his mouth, trapped between his teeth; it hasn’t changed; nothing has changed.  All of this is temporary, just like everything else in this world.  In this one respect, Ren isn’t special.  One way or another, everyone leaves.

A ghost turns the corner so fast it has Goro on his back before he knows what happened, its big cartoon eyes staring down at him unblinking even as it bursts into Shadows all around him.  Stupid, he’s thinking furiously even as he flips back to his feet, reaching for his sword, for Robin; he shouldn’t have spaced out; what is he even doing.  Stupid, stupid, stupid—

Ren vaults into the snake pit alongside Goro like he’s never been scared a day in his life, Morgana close on his heels.  Ren’s lockpick, still in hand, swipes a Shadow’s neck on the way in.  Goro can see a sword — the chest’s treasure, no doubt — held tight in the other, because Ren is brilliant and savvy, and of course he picked the lock just in time, of course.

As if sensing the direction of Goro’s gaze, Ren tosses him his prize.  “Catch!”

It’s a nice sword: sadistically serrated, with an impressive heft.  When Goro swings, it glows and hisses, leaving a searing trail behind.

It doesn’t erase his negative shift in mood, but it redirects it.  He doesn’t even bother with spells, whacking at Shadows while his new toy sings sweetly.

Still, it’s a hard fight, and they’re at a disadvantage, both exhausted and surrounded as they are.  When Ren fails to dodge two status effects in a row, Goro starts to consider for the first time in a while that they might be in genuine trouble.

Luckily, the Shadows go down right after: a well-aimed shot of Morgana’s slingshot, and a slice from Goro’s blade.  They drop a bead for the trouble, and Goro shoves it in his pocket hurriedly before going to offer Ren a hand.

But Ren doesn’t stagger to his feet, shaking it off like he might normally.  Instead, he stares hard at Goro’s glove as if in a daze.  When he finally takes it, it’s to tug Goro down to his level.

His knees hit the ground hard, but it’s secondary to Ren’s hand in his, pulling him closer.  Their noses nearly bump in the moments before Goro gets his bearings, staring bewildered into Ren’s glassy eyes.

Maybe it’s irritation that twists his voice strangled.  “Joker?”

Instead of offering any explanation at all, Ren only blinks at him, confused and bleary-eyed.  “Akechi,” he says casually, and immediately, Goro freezes in place, “you cut your hair.”

His hand reaches up, fingers dragging slow down Goro’s skull, brushing through the back of his hair.  Goro should shove an item in his stupid mouth and make him swallow it, but he’s too busy thinking about the way Ren said his name: Akechi, not Crow, with no honorific and a warm, familiar ease—  Too busy trying not to shiver as Ren’s fingers coast down, nails pressing light through his gloves to carve a path behind Goro's ear.  Even as he moves on, the trail remains.

“Should it be longer?” he blurts, for some reason.  Do you want it longer?  Do you like long hair?

Morgana appears then, crowding so close into Ren that Goro pulls away on instinct.  Inexplicably, when Ren’s hand falls, Goro’s chest pangs to snatch it back.

“Confusion,” Morgana says after a moment of examination, and then, more worriedly, “Or maybe forget?”

“It could be both, couldn’t it?” Goro asks, fishing an alert capsule and tube of relax gel from his pocket to roll between his fingers.  “He doesn’t usually react like this, after all.”

None of them do.  Effects typically settle without consequence the moment the Shadow has dissipated.  Ren is especially skilled at shaking them off, sometimes even the very moment they’re cast.  Goro supposes he’s forgotten how to do that now.

Even once Ren’s been coerced to swallow the capsule and Goro’s smeared the gel against his neck, Ren still seems dazed: spacey or tired, mumbling unawares.  Eventually, he falls asleep, and is impossible to wake no matter how Goro shakes him.  Goro has to prop him on his shoulder to help him from the Metaverse, and even when they appear back in the alley behind the real-world lab, Ren doesn’t manage to get his legs under him.

It’s annoying.  Morgana hops into Goro’s bag so as not to draw extra attention tailing him, so Goro is stuck literally carrying his entire team back to the station.  Ren is half-asleep, head drooping; Goro has to bend awkwardly and tuck Ren’s face against his neck to keep his balance.  It’s uncomfortable; it hurts his back; his shoulder is going to be sore from the angle.  Ren’s breath keeps hitting him somehow — his neck, hair, jaw — and it’s an extra source of warmth on an already hot day, and Goro is red and sweating and bothered.

He should leave him somewhere.  At the very least, he could drop him on a shaded bench, or at a manga café.  Morgana may be the size of a cantaloupe, but he could probably wail loud enough to scare off potential evildoers.

“What’s his address?” he asks Morgana under his breath as they approach the station.  “In this state, it looks like he needs someone to bring him home.”

And that someone is Goro, obviously.  It’s not like Kitagawa Yusuke is materializing to whisk him away.

Still, Morgana looks unsure.  “Erm.”

A pause.  So he doesn’t want to tell him.  Goro frowns, disproportionately irritated, before coaxing his face into a smile instead.  “I could drop him right here, if you’d prefer.”

Morgana’s ears flick back, deliberating.  “Would you take him down to Mementos?” he asks eventually.  “I’ll keep an eye on him down there until he wakes up.”

Ren must really not want Goro to know his address if even Morgana is this unsure.  Naturally, Goro doesn’t want Ren to know his, either; it crosses some unspoken line in the sand, a boundary too firm to be comfortably bent.

It’s uncomfortable — the irritation, and the extra weight in his bag, and Ren draped over his shoulder.  Passerby mostly keep their eyes to themselves, but Goro can feel the occasional glance even so; in their matching uniforms, he’s sure they must look like friends, but Goro takes the time to occasionally mumble, “Hey, wake up,” in a friendly tone so that no one thinks he’s kidnapping him.  The discontent lasts the whole journey as Goro drags Ren back into a deserted part of the station, safe to disappear from, Ren’s hair in his face.

This many descents into the Metaverse this close together might be taking a toll on Goro’s body; he endures a dizzy spell as Mementos’s familiar red glows behind his eyelids.

When he opens them, that bizarre little boy — Jose, Ren had called him — is standing there.

“Hi, mister,” Jose greets immediately; it takes Goro a moment to realize Jose is addressing him and not Ren.

Then, Jose’s eyes drop to the body slung over his shoulders.  “What happened?” he asks, confused, and then before Goro can reply or Morgana can interrupt him, “He’s sleeping without his stuff?”

Morgana must have jumped down to the floor when they entered; in his anthropomorphized form, he freezes halfway to Jose, wincing.

Goro looks hard at him, then Ren, then Jose.  “His stuff?”

“I hold onto his things for him during the day,” Jose explains helpfully, digging through his little car to yank out a backpack.  “Are you here to pick them up?”

During the day —  Goro closes his eyes, grimacing.  It hits him in stages, each stacked on top of another in their pursuit of an unavoidable truth: Ren lingers at the station, never leaving first.  He doesn’t talk about home.  He said something about safe areas that first time Goro met Jose, whispered low and carefully inaudible.  Based on Morgana’s behavior, he absolutely didn’t want Goro to know where he lived.

The realization comes quick but Goro settles into it slow: there is no home.  There’s only this: only Mementos, dark and swirling, and Ren’s belongings stored for safekeeping at someone else’s mercy.  Only the unreal station, worn down into dust under millions of strangers’ feet.

In his head, Robin Hood and Loki aren’t even forming complete words; their feedback hits him in resounding waves, overlapping and amplifying: alarm, confusion, concern, fear, rage.  It’s bitter and sour and loud, flashing into a headache, vibrating through his bones.  His teeth grind together; his gloved hands ball into fists.

Morgana seems to be expecting Goro’s glare when it turns to him; his ears are back and his tail is down, swaying slowly behind him in obvious discontent.  Still, he meets his eyes defiantly, chin up.

Goro might admire his loyalty, in another scenario.  As is, his voice is grit and gravel.  “Explain.”

“What’s there to explain?” Morgana says — playing dumb or being stubborn.

Either way, Goro doesn’t have the patience for this.  This doesn’t change anything, anyway.  Yes, they’re teammates; yes, they’re partners, at least for now, at least for one more hit.  Until Ren gets whatever he needs from him — his goal in Mementos, his special someone he wants to save.  Until Goro gets left behind again, or leaves Ren behind before he gets the chance.

There’s nothing you can do to make someone stay when they don’t want to, and nobody wants to in the end.  Goro is jagged and ugly and strange no matter how he dresses himself up, and Ren is brilliant, special, larger than life.  Even if Goro left him here now and never spoke to him again, Ren would be just fine.  He’s not like Goro; he always lands on his feet.  There will be someone else to carry him home.

But there isn’t — not now, at least.  And Ren — brilliant, special Ren — doesn’t even have a home to return to.

Goro exhales through his nose, long and silent.  He jostles Ren on his shoulder, readjusting his grip, holding on tight.

“Yes, I’ll be taking his things,” he tells Jose, smile flickering back on like a light.  “Apologies for the trouble.”

Ren doesn’t own much — a backpack, a duffel, a sleeping bag.  It’s a lot to hold though, and Goro is sure they attract many more strange looks on their way, Ren dozing in an available seat while Goro stands over him.  Nearby, a little boy points at them and asks his mother if they’re having a sleepover, and Goro smiles over at him as if to say, That’s right.

The whole time, Morgana is strangely quiet.  Goro is grateful for it; he doesn’t think he could deal with questions about the kitten he’s smuggling on top of everything else.

Come to think of it, Ren had fallen asleep rather easily that day in the diner, too.  That was over a month ago, but it would make sense that he wasn’t well-rested, if he were living in—

Even thinking about it makes Goro feel strange and agitated.  His grip tightens on the handrail.  He stares down at Ren furiously, like he could wake him through sheer force of will alone.

Unfortunately, Ren is impervious to his mental attack.  He’s just as pretty asleep as he is awake — maybe even more so, without his annoyingly smart mouth to distract him.  His long lashes cast shadows over his face; his mouth parts around his breaths.  His cheeks are full and his hair is glossy.  He’s cute.

Instinctively, Goro reaches for his face.  On Ren’s lap, peering through his open bag, Morgana eyes him but doesn’t intercept.

Goro slips Ren’s glasses from his nose.  They’re heavy and, when Goro looks, don’t appear to have a very strong prescription.  He tucks them into his pocket — only for safekeeping, of course.  They could fall right off while Ren is sleeping.  It would be irresponsible to leave them as is.

He dumps Ren on his couch the moment they’re through the door; it’s still brand-new, shiny white and squeaky and uncomfortable.  Goro has sat on it maybe twice in the months he’s lived here.  He’s barely home anyway.

Morgana is gone before Goro turns around, no doubt snooping around.  Goro has hardly anything by way of personal effects, but the thought makes him stiffen anyway; he swings by his room to drop Ren’s things and make sure the door is closed.  It is, of course, but it sets his mind at ease; he’ll hear the click of it opening if Morgana tries anything funny.

Shido’s carelessness and indifference is a boon to Goro today — to all three of them, really.  He’s already swept the apartment inside and out for cameras or bugs and found nothing.

It’s hot today, and Goro can already feel the telltale ache of hard-worked muscles; he desperately needs a shower.  The thought of leaving someone unattended in his apartment gnaws at him, much less two someones — but there’s sweat on his scalp and grime under his nails, and that feels more pressing at the moment.

There’s a washing machine in this luxury apartment.  Goro throws some things in after his shower, but hesitates before pressing start; does Ren have another undershirt for tomorrow?  It’s not as though Goro could just go through his bags to check without good reason.  Does he have pajamas?  He always seems perfectly clean, and surely there’s something in that duffel bag.

Does he have a towel?  A hair brush?  Does he brush his hair at all?  It isn’t sanitary to share.  Goro hides his brush, then paces the washroom, thinking.  He gets out a towel and sets it on the vanity counter.  Then he darts to his room to get a shirt.  And a pair of pants.  Ren must have spare underwear; he is not crossing that bridge.  He doesn’t have spare house slippers, so he gets him socks, too, adding them to the pile.  Then he leaves before the humidity can do lasting damage to his drying hair, washer door open, cycle not yet started.

But as soon as that terrible couch comes into view, Goro stops in his tracks — because Ren is awake.

From here, only the back of his fluffy head is in view.  Then he turns — not to Goro, not quite — to glance slowly around the room.  The summer sun sets late through the half-closed blinds behind him, peachy-yellow bleeding seamlessly into blue, clouds backlit in discordant pink.  It paints a line of gold down Ren’s profile, glowing and soft.

Goro tries to get his feet to move in the moments before Ren inevitably notices him, but can’t.  He’s stuck in place, helplessly awaiting the inevitable shot that is Ren’s attention like a crab on its back.

Ren’s gray eyes are warm and bleary, unhidden by his glasses.  His bangs are rumpled from his nap, pushed up in strange angles, away from his face.  The unfamiliar sight of even a sliver of his forehead makes Goro feel weird.  He wants to touch it — to flick it, maybe.  Just because.

A beat.  Ren blinks, sleepy.  He waves, then yawns.

Ugh, he’s cute.  Goro is going to kill him.  He needs to leave this apartment immediately.  He’s going to throw Ren into the sea to be eaten by sharks.

“How long was I out?” Ren asks quietly, oblivious to Goro’s murderous thoughts.  He fights another yawn, then seems to realize his glasses are missing.  When he can’t immediately locate them in the surrounding area, he turns to Goro again, questioning.

Goro had actually remembered to move Ren’s glasses from his trousers to his pajamas when he changed.  He keeps his hands at his sides anyway, pockets undisturbed.  Ren stares at him, waiting for an answer, but Goro doesn’t know what to say.  He’s off-balance again.  Ren is in his apartment.

Morgana jumps into Ren’s lap then up his shoulder, bumping his head fondly against Ren’s jaw.  “Not too long,” he says, unaware or uncaring of Goro’s emotional turmoil.  “Maybe a couple hours?”

Without Ren’s eyes on him, Goro relaxes a little.  “If even,” he says, voice properly flat and unconcerned.  Then, ruining that effect:  “It’s not like you to pass out like that.”

It’s true — mostly.  Ren tends toward tired, but he must have been in a bad state to take consecutive blows like that in battle and not shrug them off with his usual devil-may-care attitude—

Goro breathes out slowly through his nose.  He’s not going to think about Mementos.  He’s not going to bring it up.  It’s none of his business, anyway.  This is a line they’re not crossing.

Ren shrugs, looking like he doesn’t have a care in the world.  He scratches Morgana behind the ears, then swings his legs over the couch.  “Sorry for the trouble,” he says, as though he’s going to get up and walk right out the door, back to that nonexistent hole in the ground, sleeping on the floor like an animal.

Morgana must sense it too, because he winces, jumping down to Ren’s knee before he can stand.  “Actually, Ren—”

The way Ren freezes at Morgana’s expression isn’t normal: not a pause, not a thoughtful delay.  His muscles lock a split second, turning him to stone; then they relax, just as sudden and forceful and unnatural.

Their psychic bond is as impressive as always, Goro thinks wryly.

When Ren turns to Goro questioningly, he’s completely expressionless even without his glasses.  It’s a careful kind of neutral.  He’s only playing at being cool; Goro can see that now.

The reality of the situation crashes into him all at once.  It wracks the inside of his body, bouncing through his bones, burning up his throat.  It’s too much, too fast.  Hadn’t he already told himself he wasn’t going to show Ren where he lived?  Goro doesn’t tell anyone where he lives.  He doesn’t need friends, and he never asked for a teammate.  He didn’t want this.

This partnership has made a fool of him.  Ren shouldn’t be here.  It’s not like he can stay.

Still.  Ren can’t just — not have a place to go back to.  It’s not right.  Not Ren.

Truth be told, Goro does have questions.  Of course he does.  Ren has provided nothing by way of personal information, and finally Goro has an in, a reason to ask, an excuse.  He found out something Ren had been keeping from him today, kept him from danger, carried him home; some would say he’s owed answers.  And Goro wants to know — desperately, like an ache.  It’s not normal, the way Ren is or the way he’s been living.  Goro needs to know if he’s in trouble, if this is a temporary thing, if he has another brilliant Joker plan in the works.  Who’s supposed to be taking care of him, and where they are.  He needs to know how this happened.

But Ren sits there, shaking like static in his eerie stillness, blurry around the edges and overly exposed — and Goro only sighs and pulls Ren’s glasses from his pocket.

“Your stuff’s in my room,” he says, short and casual and gruff as he strides forward to put the lenses in Ren’s hand; and then, with a modicum more charm, “I took the liberty of setting out some clothes for you in the washroom, if you need them.  There’s a bath too, if you’d like to use it.  If you need help setting up, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

Too many words, too quickly.  Goro can tell from the way Ren blinks, head tilted to the side, processing the shift in subject.  His voice is stilted and delayed.  “Thank you.”

Goro takes a step back toward the hall, waiting expectantly for Ren to follow.  He does, leaving Morgana behind, glancing around once more as he goes.  He keeps his eyes down when Goro leads him to his bags in the bedroom, but his curiosity returns once they reach the washroom.  Goro preens, standing in the doorway.  It is a very fancy washroom.

Ren had brought a stack of pajamas after all, setting them down beside Goro’s own prepared pile.  Goro stares at them like they’ve personally offended them.  “Are those clean?”

With his glasses back, Ren is both more and less readable: less visible, but more expressive, shoulders relaxed and lips quirked in an uneven smile.  “Yup.”

He supposes it’s good that he won’t have to deal with Ren dirtying his clothes.  Still—  “I have a washer, and it was awfully dusty down there.  It wouldn’t be all that much trouble to wash your belongings.  To be safe.”

Ren blinks at him.  Goro’s ears feel warm, for some reason.

“Never mind,” he rushes, stepping back, hand on the doorknob.

But before it can shut, Ren calls for him, quiet and soft and familiar as when he’d been addled earlier today.

“Akechi,” he says simply, but there’s an off-center openness to him that does something strange to Goro’s pulse, “thanks.”

By way of response, Goro slams the door closed.  He stands there a long second, hand over his heart as though he could feel it escaping his chest.  What is this?  Some kind of sickness?  Cardiac arrest?

Robin Hood seems immune to his concerns; his voice is cheerful, and his satisfaction oozes over Goro like candy coating, scalding and suffocating.  Will Ren be moving in then, my liege?

What a horrifying thought.  “Of course not,” Goro hisses, forcing his legs to carry him to his room.

It doesn’t get him any distance from the clowns rattling around in his brain, though.  Unconvinced, Robin Hood is humming off-key, like some wannabe fairy tale princess.  Loki keeps pulling Goro’s eyes in the general direction of the bathroom, as though he could see straight through the walls if he tried hard enough.

Maybe Loki could.  Goro looks away adamantly, ears still unusually warm.

There isn’t any food in Goro’s apartment that he’s willing to show company, so the three of them run down the street to a convenience store.  The events of the day catch up to Goro now that the adrenaline has worked its way out of his system, combat-related or otherwise; he’s exhausted, muscles aching.  Ren, he can tell, is much the same, swaying on his feet and fighting yawns at a rapidly increasing frequency.  His skin is still pink from the bath, and even though it’s the middle of summer, he pulled a sweatshirt on before they left.  He wore his own pajamas after all, but they’re still a little too big on him, as is his way.  He better have that foretold growth spurt soon; he looks ridiculous.  Goro feels silly just going out with him like this.

Ren is studying tonight’s on-sale bento when Goro sees it: a cardboard Featherman cut-out.  His exhausted body carries him closer on instinct.

Someone rounds the corner, then: a small body, moving so fast it’s only a blur.  They crash into Goro with an oof, and he catches them by the shoulders instinctively, if only so neither of them careen into the nearby shelves.

A little girl blinks up at him under huge glasses and too-short orange bangs.  “Oh,” she says at a normal volume, and then, louder and shriller, “my god.  Sorry!”

She launches backwards at impressive speed, leaving Goro’s hands hovering awkwardly in mid-air.  He lowers them to his sides, residually itchy from contact with a stranger.

“No worries,” he smiles.  “Are you alright?”

The girl cocks her head to the side, eyes wide.  “You looked totally creepy and zombified a second ago,” she says, like she’s completely unaware of how rude she’s being, “but are you actually really nice?”

On second glance, she isn’t as young as Goro had thought — a few years younger than him, maybe.  She’s just tiny, and she’s swimming in her t-shirt — like Ren, he thinks.  Maybe the two of them would get along, forming a bond on stupidly oversized glasses and clothing alone.

“Did I?  Apologies,” he grits, jittery with the sudden shift from sleepy to alert.  “I suppose I’m a little bit tired at the moment.”

Her head tilts even further sideways.  “Do you always talk like that?”

Now that Goro knows she isn’t a small child, his willingness to entertain her is completely shot.  “Yes,” he clips, pivoting on a heel.  He doesn’t want to seem as though he’s running away, so he just stays there in front of the Featherman cut-out, staring hard at the fridges lining the walls.

His feigned interest soon turns to real interest, though.  No wonder there’s a cut-out; there are entire rows of energy drinks here with—

“Featherman Blue!” the girl says, swinging the door open so fast it nearly smacks Goro in the snout.  “Finally!”

Hastily, she gathers three drinks in her arms.  Goro holds the door open for her politely, eyeing the fridge’s contents and enjoying the excuse to soak in the cold air.  They have a flavor for every Phoenix Ranger here, brightly colored and proudly printed: Strawberry Argus, Melon Parakeet, Lychee Red—

“Is this curry-flavored?” Goro asks doubtfully, holding a can up to his face.  Yellow Owl stares back, arms folded in his signature pose.

“Those haven’t been selling well,” the girl explains, opening the next door over and leaning into the cold.  It seems she had the same idea as him, then.  “I’ve been all over the city looking for Blueberry Swan, and they’ve all been fully stocked with Yellow.”

Feather Swan isn’t the most popular of the team.  Goro considers her thoughtfully, placing two of each drink in his basket.  “Is Blue Swan your favorite?”

She waves her hand idly, either denying it or getting more air on her face.  “No, no, I’m collecting.”  Then, thinking on it: “But maybe.  Parakeet has the best color, and Falcon has the best character arc.  But Swan is cool, right?”

Well, someone has to be the voice of reason on the team.  “I do like tactician types.”

“It’s not just that!  She’s so smart!  The youngest!  And her gender reveal episode, man—”

An employee passes to stock, eyeing both them and their held-open doors dubiously.  Sighing, they open their mouth, and both Goro and the mysterious girl at his side let go at once.  She starts whistling, faux-innocent.  Goro covers a budding smile with a hand.

“So,” she starts, once the employee has moved on peacefully, “who’s your favorite?”

Normally, Goro would deny knowing anything about the franchise.  He hasn’t had much time to watch it much in years anyway, at least since the last series change; it wouldn’t really be a lie.  More importantly, it isn’t good for his image.  He’s sixteen; he’s not a little kid.  He doesn’t waste his time on dumb cartoons for babies.

Still, it’s not like he’ll ever see this girl again.  Goro thinks, fiddling with the can in his hand.  Falcon does in fact have the best character development, but he hated him when he was younger for his repeated and ill-contrived betrayals of the team, and even though several were against his will or for the greater good, that childish grudge still lingers.  Argus is great in the episodes and side-series that allow her to be more serious and competent, but otherwise she’s painfully power-of-friendship about everything.  Really, if he had to pick just one—

“I’m partial to Feather Hawk,” Goro admits.  The most noble of the Phoenix Rangers stares up at him from his aluminum can, fist raised in approval.  “It’s only natural to like the hero best, yes?”

“They’re all the heroes!” the girl snorts.  “And anyway, no one likes Feather Hawk the best!  He’s the leader, so he’s blank, and he’s boring.”   Goro opens his mouth to argue, but it seems he’s unlocked Pandora’s box; she just keeps going.  “Do you have an embarrassing fave you don’t want to tell me?  Are you one of those boys who’s all weird about liking healer characters?  You can admit it, it’s okay.  Feather Parakeet is cool, no matter what those forum weirdos say about her.”

“There are plenty of valid critiques of her on the forums,” Goro objects before he can help himself.  “You have to admit, her character often—”

“Falls flat, yeah, but she doesn’t get the screen time the others get!  If you look past that—”

Goro sniffs, setting the Lychee Hawk can back into his basket.  “Well.  If you’re willing to look so far beyond canon, then that’s just wonderful — for you.   There’s no accounting for taste.”

The girl’s mouth hangs open, staring at him, three energy drinks still balanced precariously in her arms.  She shuffles them even more precariously under one, then holds out her other hand.  “Phone, please.”

It’s so uncharacteristically polite that Goro nearly does it on instinct.  He squints.  “Why.”

Her hand closes and opens.  Grabby hands.  “I’m tired of arguing with reactionary losers on Reddit about this.  I want to argue with someone with real opinions, in real life, instead.”

On principle, Goro doesn’t give out his number to girls.  He sighs, shifting his weight.  “I’m sure there’s someone else, at school perhaps—”

“There isn’t,” the girl says, serious and unabashed, looking up at him expectantly.  “C’mon, please?”

Ah, fuck.

By the time Ren rounds the corner, Goro’s number is already in the girl’s phone.  She puts hers in his as well: ‘Isshiki Futaba’, accompanied by an ungodly number of alien emojis.  Goro stares down at the screen tiredly when it’s placed back in his hand, brows drawing together.  Isshiki Futaba—

Futaba points at Ren like a cartoon character seeing a ghost, voice loud enough to make Goro jump.  “You!”

Mid-step, Ren pauses.  He finishes making his way to Goro’s side after only a brief delay, glancing curiously into his basket.  There are two bentos and some sushi tucked under his arm.  “Me.”  He smiles at Futaba, eyes crinkling at the corners the way they do when he really means it.  “Hi.”

Slowly, Goro glances between the two of them.  He’s missing something again, and that irritates him.  He likes Futaba as well as he can a stranger who barreled into him and then argued her objectively incorrect opinions at him in public, but he doesn’t like the way Ren is looking at her at all.  “Oh?  Have the two of you met?”

Tellingly, Ren doesn’t say anything.  Morgana is only barely peeking out from Ren’s bag over his shoulder, looking doubtfully between all three of them.  Futaba’s hand lowers in uneven, mechanical jerks.

“No,” she says, sounding unsure, and then, quieter, “right?”

Ren pushes his glasses up, face returning to its normal neutrality.  “Right.”  Then, he looks at the cans in her arms.  “Collecting?”

A smile breaks over Futaba’s face, apparently past her uncertainty.  “You get it!”

The two of them hit it off, chattering with ease.  Goro only stands there, feeling out of place.

It was easier being around Ren when he didn’t care about his opinion.  It twists something ugly in him to think that he does now; he doesn’t want Ren to smile at Futaba the way he smiles at Goro.  He doesn’t want to leave him with her but he doesn’t want to stand here outside of the conversation either.  He’s fettered and ill-content and mad at himself for it.

When Goro tears his eyes away from Ren’s face, he finds Morgana watching him from the cover of Ren’s bag.  Morgana blinks at him, slow.  Maybe he’s tired.  Goro is pretty tired, too.

With that in mind, he pats Ren on the shoulder, distracting him from Futaba’s endless deluge of words.  “It’s getting late, isn’t it?  Maybe we should all be heading out.”

Ren only spares him a glance before focusing back on Futaba.  “Are you okay getting home by yourself?”

“Hm?” Futaba asks, blinking at him.  “Yeah, of course.  The station’s, like, right there.”

It’s a strange interaction.  Ren doesn’t take initiative like that.  Did he want to walk her home?  She looks young, but not that young, and this is a relatively safe area.  All of this is very strange.

Goro is still stewing on it once they’ve paid and made it through the door.  Ren is the same as usual, but Morgana is oddly quiet, glancing back toward the convenience store.

“Hey!” a familiar voice calls after them, disrupting the silence.  “Hold on!”

Futaba grabs Ren by the shoulder, making all three of them jump.  Goro doesn’t even realize he’s reaching for her wrist until Ren brushes his hand with his, stopping him in his tracks.

The moment Ren turns, Futaba asks her burning question that sent her scrambling from the store like a bat out of hell.  “Who’s your favorite Phoenix Ranger?”

Her eyes are practically sparkling.  Goro shrivels up inside, already bracing for Ren to ask, My favorite what?

He doesn’t, though.  “Hm,” he says, hand under his chin, like this is a very serious question.  It is, but Goro didn’t expect Ren to agree.  “Gray Pigeon.”

Goro blinks at him.  Futaba does too, wide-eyed and slack-jawed.  “You played Featherman Seeker?” she demands, other hand coming to Ren’s shoulder so fast her plastic bag of drinks swings into his arm.  “On Famidrive?”

Ren nods.  Futaba makes a shrill, excited noise, jumping up and down.

Then, she extends an arm, palm-side up.  Grabby hands.  “Phone, please!”

Unlike Goro, Ren gives it over without objections.  Futaba manages to, impossibly, cram even more nonsensical emojis beside her name this time.

Only then does she seem to notice the time, cursing under her breath.  “My mom should be home by now,” she explains, breaking out in a jog toward the station.  “I’ll text you!  Both of you!”

It sounds like a threat, and she makes good on it.  Mere minutes later, Goro gets a notification for a group chat with the three of them.  “Phoenix Rangers”, it’s called.  Futaba’s lone message stares at him mockingly: Face it (crowded train) and fight (for breathing room), Featherman!

Immediately, Ren types in three eagle emojis.  Goro sighs and puts his phone away.

Honestly, Ren’s knowledge not only of Featherman lore but of an obscure retro Featherman game that even Goro has only read let’s plays of is lighting something up in his brain.  He didn’t realize this was a viable conversation topic, and now that he has, he wants to jump on it.  Right now.

Still — it’s late.  They’re all tired.  There will be time later, Goro thinks to himself, uncertainly, and then with more confidence.  There’s still time.  He can just bring it up later.

It’s a hot night, and though the blinding sun is gone, the humidity practically steams them; Goro can already feel his hair puffing and frizzing and curling, and resigns himself to wake up early tomorrow to fix it.  They’re too deep into the city for any real cover of darkness; the street is ambiently bright even where the light doesn’t hit.  Between clouds and pollution, there isn’t a single star in the sky.

At his side, Ren is holding their stack of food like something precious.  His hoodie droops low down his back, leaving the entirety of his neck in view.  Goro thinks of how Ren’s hands had felt in his hair earlier, how his breath had hit Goro’s ear when he carried him.  He swallows, wishing he had bought a non-caffeinated drink.  He’s parched, suddenly.

At home, they eat quickly, and Goro downs water at a remarkable rate in between bites.  “I don’t have another futon,” he says when they’re done, leaned in the kitchen doorway.  “We’ll have to pick one up tomorrow.”

Ren pauses in the middle of washing their cups — only for a moment, before starting up again.  “Sure.”

Goro expects Ren to take the couch, but he follows him to his bedroom instead, Morgana on his shoulder.  He looks way too at peace curled up on the floor beside Goro with his threadbare sleeping bag, hoodie scrunched up under his head as a pillow.  Goro hesitates, then makes him move so he can spread out his blanket for extra padding.  It’s thin, and won’t provide much, but Goro can scarcely bear to touch it in this heat anyway.  Might as well put it to use.

When he was a kid, Goro’s mom never let the fan run at night.  Their apartments were small and often windowless, and she believed whole-heartedly that the both of them would asphyxiate under the direct air current.  It was an old superstition, but Goro had bought it too back then, huddled in bed with his mom and withstanding the overwhelming heat, using her heartbeat as a lullaby to fall asleep.

He hasn’t thought about it in a long, long time, but when he goes to turn the fan on after getting the lights, he hesitates.

Ren is still awake, lying on his back like a log, hands folded under his head and Morgana tucked into his side.  His glasses are resting on the small desk in the corner of the room.  His bags are in the closet, in the spot Goro’s futon usually goes.

When he turns to look at Goro, it’s slow: sleepy, relaxed.  His voice is quiet.  “Not tired?”

Goro’s fingers hesitate over the button.  It’s just an old superstition.  It’s fine to leave it in the past, where it belongs.  Ren isn’t going anywhere — not yet, not right now.

“I am,” he says simply, pressing the button.  He steps over Ren slowly, as though afraid to startle or step on him.

It’s most comfortable to sleep on his back; the hard floors hurt his shoulders otherwise.  But lying side by side with Ren — in the same room, the same position, without even a blanket to cover him — is too strange.  Almost immediately, he turns on his side, facing the wall.

Ren’s yawn is just as quiet as his voice.  “Goodnight.”

Goro says it back too, he’s sure — but even turned the other way, the air on his back, the fan takes his breath away.