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Long after he's gone, there are things you will always associate with Goro Akechi.
You will never be able to steadily keep the illusions of winter pea coats within your sight, always losing them around the bends of buildings and streets.
You will hardly resist chasing the trails of birds with black feathers, hoping to be led somewhere by their calls.
It will never feel quite the same to don any pair of gloves, even the red ones that dye your hands as a trickster.
Nor will you peer into a mug of coffee without wondering how many truths—if any—were stirred in among the many lies he told.
The first time you make the mistake of reaching for a stranger's coat, Morgana chides you for it in a tone softer than he should, and softer than he would for your other poor habits or careless decisions.
"I know you miss him, but he's..."
Gone. Neither of you dare say it aloud, as though the word itself were taboo—as though uttering it on its own would seal its reality, breaking some spell tying the tenuous existence of a ghost to the world.
No more words can be uttered regardless as the hustle and bustle of the Shibuya Crossing implores you to continue your trek forward.
Long after he's gone, there will be days when you wake only to find yourself a prisoner—not of a room decorated with velvet walls and an entrancing aria, but of a room with orderly walls and shelves, all insipid and uniform save for one set aside for keepsakes of Tokyo.
The fetters binding your ankles will not relent their embrace even as Morgana yanks you by the hems of your clothes off a stone mattress. For every trudge forward, you will lug behind the weight of a year.
The smell of firecrackers, the exchanges between hearts around a hot pot, and the cozy nights spent at bars and clubs will permeate your memories with a sense of tenderness. Yet acidic tinges remain from the pinches of syringes, an unfinished match of chess, and the echoes of sirens that at one time, flipped the narrative of your life on its head, and at another, stifled the shudders of your breath against shutters.
You will reside in a house in your hometown, but it will never be a home again, not in the same way the smell of coffee and taste of curry created one better than you had ever known. In search of one again, you will look forward to the tears of a calendar page, the company and warmth of a fuzzy companion by your side, and the pings of an IM app—but they will only do so much to ease the yearning in your heart.
You will distrust the stares insistent on keeping you acquiescent. Though they may dare to smother the flames within you, the strength and spirit of your rebellion will not be extinguished. You refuse. But for a while, the openings through which it will be able to cry remain few.
You will survive, but will you truly be living?
You will begin to wonder if this is what he had felt, unable to rest in a place that was meant to be a "home".
At night, you have dreams of accessing the remains of a cruise ship in a ruined, sunken world. You plunge into the depths in search of a body that seems to elude your sight, nowhere to be found within the first hundred meters, nor the second hundred, nor within the—
You always resurface before you can catch a glimpse.
"Oracle," you plea as you gasp for breath. "Is there any way I can—"
Yet your voice vanishes into the same nothingness that swallowed him up.
Your words reach no one. Not Morgana, not Ryuji, not Ann, not Yusuke, not Makoto—
And certainly neither Futaba nor Haru.
Above the lifeless sea, you will remain afloat atop the waters, and you will be all alone.
Long after he's gone, you will return to Tokyo. Even the public will have forgotten who Goro Akechi was. The teenage celebrity that charmed all will remain missing, but never declared dead in absentia, for he will have no caring family to do so.
You will search for proofs of his existence many times: at a club he had called home, at a lounge where a rivalry had been born through a game of pool, and at a café where you once lent him a mask. The brief escapes behind the stage where a detective and a thief abandoned their parts to become two ordinary teenagers.
You will visit Masayoshi Shido in prison a total of once and never again. It will be a pointless endeavor that leaves you with as many questions as you enter with. The emergence of a guilty conscience does not change the nature of a relationship preceding it, after all. It should be expected that the person who saw Goro Akechi only as a means to an end would know him little more than such, yet it will still sting.
You will ask Sae Nijima, who will shake her head and reply, "I can't say I knew him much better than you did." From the account you will nevertheless insist for her to give, you'll learn that Goro Akechi enjoyed traditional sushi, and that he was partial to having dollops of cream in his coffee.
(You will realize that to some extent, he must have lied to her, because the Goro Akechi in your memories didn't have that much of a sweet tooth, unless—
Among the myriad blends of truth and lies surrounding him, you will wonder how many lies he told you.
Perhaps no one knew who the true Goro Akechi was, underneath all those masks.)
The sole fruit of your labors will lie on your shelf in form of an unopened box, the results of a prior December search for meaning behind scrawled words in the margins of a puzzle.
If it were possible, you'd wrap it up and gift it to him without a second thought.
But it's not. And it won't be.
Once, you break into where his apartment supposedly once was, only to find dust bunnies inside empty cabinets and a sheetless mattress beside curtainless windows.
"It's probably too late." Morgana's ears turn downwards. "They might have already cleared this space for someone else to live in, or—"
"It's the wrong address," you reply a little too soon, too hastily. You don't believe in your words.
Long after he's gone, you will sometimes pull a glove from your pocket instead of a phone, and the temptation to chuck it at the nearest wall will prick at you.
But that flicker of resolve will always die before you can muster it. You will hate him for this.
You will hate that you cared so much—that you cared enough to indulge him the first time he sent you a text, cared enough to agree to rounds of billiards and darts and chess even as as they gave birth to forbidden promises and rivalries, cared enough to witness him peel away layers of mask built upon for a decade just to lay himself bare for you to see—and cared enough that upon peering into your heart, a false god decided that out of anything in the world, Goro Akechi was your greatest wish.
You shouldn't have, but you did. You pretended he wasn't your enemy, chose to humor his invitation to a duel, and risked making a promise even when you had both known: this could not last.
"Make certain you never forget: I am the one who will defeat you."
Was that his idea of a joke? Of course you would never forget.
He already had defeated you—in an unannounced, one-sided rematch.
(Your vision had wavered as you gripped blindly at a sleeve, only to be met with an empty doorway and the jingle of a bell.)
"After all this, that's what you have to say? Seriously, you really are..."
His last words to you will always remain incomplete. Your mind can run through a list of possibilities, but you will always wish that you had asked him that January.
Part of you had known, all along, that his behavior that month had been but another mask. You felt it in the ways you were shoved away. You heard it in the wavers of a voice when you fell. You saw it in how his eyes refused to meet your own as he urged that you cut the strings keeping his corpse alive.
You tasted its bitterness when you had realized that not once had he asked about the glove still in your possession. Not once that January had he requested you have your rematch then.
By the time you had thought to chase him down to demand answers, all signs of his trail had long disappeared.
You were supposed to be the great leader of the Phantom Thieves, yet you were bested in stealing a heart. By someone who wasn't a phantom thief at all, but instead a thief who merely littered phantoms and empty cards.
Had any of it meant anything at all, if he was planning to wordlessly exchange a glove for your heart and leave?
(Akechi. You liar.)
In early March, Sumire texts you an artifact that should have ceased to exist following the destruction of that false reality: it's a photo of you beside her—but as "Kasumi"—at the shrine on New Year's.
(Bitterly, you wonder if any pictures of him would have survived in the same way. Scrolling through your gallery yields no results; you had never thought to take any in the first place.)
You're happy for her, of course. Yet you will ache with a feeling almost like envy (almost, because what right do you have to feel envy?) over the truth that she keeps that phantom on her phone without being cursed by it.
After all, the one in your pocket still feels heavy.
Long after he's gone, you will be thrown into several more journeys to purge the corruptions of society and reprise your role as the rebellious leader of the Phantom Thieves.
You will have dreams of him fighting by your side on open battlefields within the kingdoms and jails of people's minds. You will wonder of the kinds of remarks and reactions he would make to certain happenings. Perhaps you'd witness that self-assured smile grace his face when encountering novel challenges of combat. On the flip side, perhaps he would scowl in disgust upon seeing others being puppetted in the same way he was.
You would like to believe that he might choose to become your ally, if he could. No more tentative alliances or makeshift "deals" compelled by the circumstances, and no more higher beings or false gods tying the strings of his fate to yours. Rather than a sense of justice expected of him by others, he would be driven solely by his own.
But such wishful thoughts and what-ifs will be pointless. There will be no time to mourn when you have a world to reform.
Despite that, certain words and certain rituals will remain tangled in the web tied to his memory.
Though you will learn to disguise it, you sometimes won't be able to help the way your body flinches upon hearing the word "justice". Yet you must conceal the shudders in your voice when you declare it on the behalf of the Thieves, lest there spring any doubts about you or your friends.
Every new deal you secure will weigh heavily on your shoulders. With friends, your promises will bind you together like blood oaths. The stakes will rise with every coming battle, yet you will stand your ground. Regardless of how trivial, you will refuse to allow your ends of vows to remain undone.
Yet no matter how many requests you answer and deals you uphold, there will be one that always hangs in the air, waiting for you.
"How do you deal with ghosts?" are the words that thoughtlessly slip from you while sitting at a diner.
She stops stirring her drink.
Part of you wishes that the meaning of your question will be lost on her. But of course, you can't possibly expect this from her.
You've witnessed it yourself: Sumire Yoshizawa is someone well-acquainted with ghosts.
"I don't think they're completely gone," she replies, eyebrows furrowed. "I think I still live with them— With her. It's just... different from how it was before."
"Different how?"
"I suppose... I'm not trapped in her shadow anymore," she says. "I can fly above my own, as Sumire Yoshizawa. But..."
You watch as her hands drift to the ribbon in her hair and lightly tug it off.
"She's always with me, but I choose to pursue my dream not just to honor her, but because I want to." Sumire smiles bitterly. "And even though she's not here anymore, I want to honor our promise."
Long after he's gone, you will chase the phantoms of Goro Akechi.
For even longer after he's gone, his phantoms will chase you everywhere you go. You will see them on platforms besides train windows, hear them within conversations over the phone, read them within textbooks, stroll by them on the displays of storefronts...
"Perhaps there's something rather poetic about that," Yusuke suggests.
Perhaps one day, you will understand.
Long after he's gone, you won't forget him.
Long after he's gone, the flash of a tan coat will dance at the peripherals of your vision in the middle of a crowd.
Repeating an error you will make a hundred times, your hand will shoot forward a hundred-and-first time to grab a gloved wrist.
The chances of it belonging to him are next to none. You've known this. You will always know this.
But Goro Akechi did not cease to exist past the moments his body was buried underneath the debris of a ship. Goro Akechi did not cease to exist past the moment he disappeared that February from a false reality.
The glove you carry in your pocket will always prove it so. And should you lose it, he will instead live within you.
(Why always that one? your teammates will ask you when you summon Metatron for the thousandth time. You'll smile, but you won't admit why.)
You swear upon this. His memory will live on with you. Just as he chose his path, you will be the one to choose yours.