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Pain is nothing new to Akechi Goro. It’s been a constant companion his whole life. It clung to his hand as a child. It settled as weight on his shoulders as a teen. And now, at nearly thirty years of age, it’s a phantom ache in his chest because he’s been left behind. Again.
Or the tightness he feels is from the several broken ribs on the right side of his body.
“What the hell are you doing here, Akechi?”
The question startles Goro out of his reverie, causing him to flinch with a hiss and glare at one of the monitors that had sparked to life on his left. A woman with bright red hair and a pair of piercing brown eyes meets his own red ones in a silent challenge through the screen. Her mauve lips are pulled in a taut line of displeasure.
“I could ask the same of you, Mitsuru-san,” he retorts instead of answering his boss’ question.
It's very obvious what Goro’s doing. He grits his teeth as a fresh stab of pain pierces his chest as he shifts in the seat he’s not supposed to be in.
“I’m not going against medical advice and returning to work despite having three broken ribs and a concussion,” Mitsuru chides. “You still have another two weeks of medical leave, don’t make me document you. Go home.”
“Mild concussion,” he corrects her. “Which was cleared last week. I’m fine.”
Her expression only darkens.
Should he be at home resting? Yes.
Is he going to do that? No. He’s not.
Instead, he’s going to sit in the command center of the Shadow Operatives headquarters monitoring the frantic communications between the members of a freshly minted team that had requested emergency backup on their first solo mission.
“I understand why you feel compelled to work, Akechi, I do. It’s not easy watching your partner take on a mission without you.”
“Kurusu is not my partner,” Goro lies, and it’s like driving a knife through said broken ribs.
On paper, Goro had been his handler when Akira joined the Shadow Operatives. Their relationship started off rocky with a lot of broken trust to fix. This was expected as Akira didn’t know Goro was even alive until Goro showed up at his doorstep on campus to recruit him for the organization. At the cost of a black eye and three beers later, Akira accepted the offer. He trained under Goro until he could run missions himself with a team. Having to work so closely with each other brought up all the unresolved tension from years prior. Like all things placed into a high-pressure environment, it reached its boiling point and exploded messily, ending in Goro’s bed with bodies entwined and lips sealed. It was against company policy to sleep with your active trainee, but they had moved beyond that stage. It was a bit of a gray area—but when was anything in their lives ever black or white? Rules never stopped either of them before, and certainly weren’t going to stop them now.
A one-night stand turned into many night stands, into “You can have the bottom drawer of my dresser” and “I bought you a toothbrush and the brand of shampoo and conditioner you like to keep in my bathroom” to “Move over, I made you coffee and tried to make eggs. They’re edible. Don’t spill it on my sheets” and “I spilled it anyway so I did your laundry and remade the bed.”
Now, a whole new tension was brewing.
This wasn’t simply ‘fucking it out of their systems’ anymore. It had evolved out of their control into something sweet, something, dare Goro think, domestic. It didn’t just scare him. It terrified him. Good things didn’t last for Goro Akechi. Doomed to break down in a blazing glory by his own hand. The more they avoided talking about it, about them, the more convinced Goro became that Akira was going to wake up one day and realize what a waste of his time this has been and abandon him too.
Goro doesn’t know if he could handle another person he loves—that’s what this is, isn’t it?—leaving him behind again, so he pretends this unnamed thing they have between them is enough.
(It’s not.)
Mitsuru is, unfortunately, uncannily correct in her assumption about his worries of Akira being sent in without him. Naturally, Goro deflects.
“And you understand nothing, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’s been getting worse, Kirijo-san,” Goro says, pulling himself out of his thoughts and refocusing on arguing with his boss. “Rifts are opening up all over Tokyo and at the current rate they’re—”
“And I don’t need to remind you the last time you were sent out, you got gravely injured—”
“Which is exactly why I need to go—”
“Kurusu is more than capable than—”
“He isn’t used to working alone,” he raises his voice, effectively shutting down her rebuttal. “I am.”
“You trained him. You should trust him.”
“I trust him with my life, I don’t trust others with his,” Goro answers immediately without thinking, then instantly shuts up.
The moment becomes increasingly more awkward the longer Mitsuru doesn’t speak, letting Goro’s confession hang between them. As if trying to prove a point. Fuck.
On the mission communication feed, the sounds of fighting pick up with generous swearing and a—a scream? Was that a scream?
“Lotus, get back here! It’s not worth it, let Joker handle it!”
“We can’t just let him do it alone, Amaryllis!”
A garbled, inhuman roar disrupts the dispute, crackling the audio through the speakers. It’s so loud and pitched that Goro flinches with a gasp, a hand flying to his side to press against his ribs. A deafening explosion follows that rattles all the monitors in the room, knocking pens and supplies off desks onto the floor. It’s accompanied by a chorus of terrified screams—definitely human—in the cacophony of chaos.
“Holy shit!”
“What the hell is that?!”
Then Joker’s voice—Akira’s voice—yells over the chaos.
“It’s charging up! Hold formation—on my signal—guar—ahh!”
Akira’s scream tears through him harder than his cognitive self’s bullet had, so many years ago. It’s the most agonizing sound Goro’s ever heard in his life.
Then suddenly, everything cuts out. The screams, the static, the screens, and the room descends into deathly silence.
Goro doesn’t even wait for permission, he takes off out of the command center like a bat out of hell, shoving aside unsuspecting coworkers in his way without so much as a glance backward. The Portal room is only a few scant feet ahead now, he can see its steel bulkhead doors looming in the distance. They use it to traverse between worlds as a safeguard in case anything follows them through that doesn’t belong. It locks down, nothing gets in. Nothing gets out.
“Override!” Goro roars, slamming his palm against the spot beside the panel when it denies him entry. “I don’t care about proper authorization, Aegis, it’s fucking life or death! Let me through!”
To his great surprise, he doesn’t have to kick down the doors because Aegis listens.
“Good luck, Harbinger,” her voice echoes in the cavernous room as the doors hiss open.
Goro storms in, pulling his phone out from his pocket. He barely waits for them to close again before he’s speaking into the navigator, “Mementos.”
The world warps violently and carries him away.
The metaverse is much different without a ruler. When Goro first entered into the cognitive world as a teen, it had been like stepping inside a giant, living, organism. The tunnels had bones and veins, and faintly pulsed, like a heartbeat. Every second spent there alone was a second he flirted with death. Entering alone now as a full-fledged adult, the feeling is not much different. Gone are the bones and blood of Yaldabaoth’s reign. Gone are the clinical tiles and glowing tentacles of Maruki’s manipulation. In its place grew life—overgrown vines and tall grass that sprouted through the railroad tracks. Tall trees took root in the cavernous dead-end rooms alongside rock formations and waterfalls…almost like the place had been healing.
That was until this new rift activity started. Tears in the cognitive world where monsters poured in from the other side, from a different dimension, then phasing into the real world where the veil that separated them was weak. They still had no idea what was causing the instabilities in the metaverse, even with all the top-notch cognitive pscientists racing the clock studying the phenomenon. What they did know, however, was that Personas were an effective way to combat the creatures that crawled out from the rifts, and even freeze some of them.
The sounds of fighting grow louder as he runs through the grass and down the winding tunnel. Finally, when he reaches the opening of the cavern they’re fighting in, does Goro understand the severity of the situation.
The young team is barely holding it together. Three are down, with four standing in front of their fallen members defending them, with one valiantly trying to catch up to—
Akira.
Akira who is single-handedly fending off a swarm of shadow-like monsters pouring out of one of the most massive rifts Goro’s ever seen. The jagged tear glows with crackling light from the otherside, casting out beams of color across the battleground, bathing Akira in a kaleidoscope of colors. His stomach twists itself in knots as he watches the man he loves fight for his life, cleaving through the waves of bodies with Arsene at his side. Akira looks…amazing like this, totally in his element, decimating anything in his path, holding the line…like the sacrificial fool he is.
Goro flat-out sprints through the cave, surpassing the young operative with a white mask—Lotus, if Goro recalls correctly—and shoving him backward. He spares him one heated glare over his shoulder and that’s all it takes for the exposed part of Lotus’ face to turn the same color as his mask and bolt away.
“Hereward!” he bellows, blue flames crawling up his mask as his persona appears at his back, just in time for him to send off an Almighty attack hurtling at the fresh wave pouring from the rip in reality.
Akira whips around faster than Goro thought humanly possible
“What the fuck are you doing here?!” Akira screams at him, disbelief highlighted on his face by the now blue light from the rift. “You’re supposed to be staying back—you should be at home—Crow you’re injured!”
The genuine panic in his voice is touching, but Goro’s teetering the line of going full-on psychotic mode. He’s not exactly in the right headspace for a drawn-out debate on the ethics of appropriate mission protocol at the moment.
He yells back at him, “There’s no point in recovering if I lose you! I can’t afford to, I refuse to let this world take away anyone else I love in my life!”
There’s an explosion to their right where one of Arsene’s attacks goes wide, allowing one of these eldritch-like shadows to close in on Akira and his dumbfounded expression. He nearly gets punched in the face by one of its multiple arms before Goro surges forward, pushing Akira out of the way.
“You idiot!” He roundhouse kicks the creature in the head. The motion snaps its neck and it drops dead to the floor. “Pay attention!”
“You just—you—what did you just say?” Akira stammers, pointing at him, still not quite fully present and that just won’t do. He needs to snap him out of it.
“Must I spell it out for you?”
Goro grabs either side of Akira’s face and draws him into a fierce kiss. He gasps against Goro’s mouth and Goro takes advantage of the opening, parting his own to gently capture Akira’s lower lip. It works like a charm—as it always does—-and Akira melts right into it, kissing him back for barely a second before Goro tears away to keep yelling at him.
“Yes, I love you,” he growls, still cradling Akira’s (no longer stupefied) face, “And I’m going to kick your ass all the way to hell, personally, if we don’t make it out of here alive.”
Goro barely finishes speaking before Akira pulls him in for another kiss.
High off the confession, and feeling lighter than Goro has in ages, he falls in step by Akira’s side with Hereward at the ready. Where he belongs. He knows Akira feels it too, his face alight with the energy woven between them. Together, they mow down the next hoard, swords and guns blazing. It’s a brutal fight to reach the rift, they each take a few near-debilitating hits for the other to gain ground towards it.
“Crow!” Akira calls out with a wicked smile, his eyes tinting with that reddish glow they get before he unleashes a supercharged attack. “Let’s show them how it’s done!”
In a perfect, synchronous flourish, they go all out against the dimensional tear. It doesn’t stand a chance against the repeated assault, slowly shriveling and resealing itself with each blow. When it’s over, and only a faint scar remains shimmering in the air, cheers erupt from the back line and Goro gets roughly pulled back into a crushing embrace. Akira tucks his face into the crevice of his neck and holds him like a lifeline.
Goro wraps his arms around Akira’s waist and hugs him back with just as much fervor, whispering hoarsely against Akira’s temple, “Don’t you ever leave me behind again.”
“Never,” Akira promises, then mouths against his throat, “I’ve waited so long to say this, I love you, too.”
They hold off on the public displays now that the fight is over and more eyes will be prone to wandering. Goro isn’t keen on sharing, and wants Akira all to himself the next time they kiss. Images of Akira beating the shit out of those creatures and looking extremely ravishing as he did it, are playing on repeat in his mind. He can’t promise to keep from spiraling into something else entirely. They trail behind as the new operatives get their bearings together and pick up their fallen, simply basking in their strange post-battle glow.
“What do you want for dinner?” Akira asks as they hobble towards the exit.
It’s such an innocent question, domestic—Goro does dare to call it now—it brings a smile to his face to think how he’s going to derail it completely in a moment.
“I can think of a few things,” Goro says, letting his voice drop low, letting Akira lean on him.
“Oh?”
Goro leans in and whispers something only for Akira’s ears. When he pulls away, he sees Akira’s eyes sparkle with mischief.
“That can be arranged, easily.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Akira smirks and it can only mean one thing, trouble. The kind Goro loves. “Wanna bet on it?”