Work Text:
Akira only remembers his dream halfway through his morning shift, right after he cuts his hand.
He swears quietly, wary of the elderly woman at the closest booth not ten feet away, and brings the knife and his hand over to the sink. It’s a small cut, but it still stings as he washes it off. There’s barely a single drop of blood on the knife. Water gathers over it like sea-foam as he rinses and scrubs it clean.
“Are you alright there, dear?” The woman from the booth— Akira recalls her as Ito-san, though she reminds him every time to call her Himari— tilts her head.
“Yeah, I’m good. Just slipped, is all.” Akira dries his hand and rummages under the counter for bandages, hunting for the first aid kit.
“Oh, it’s nothing to be worried about. Happens to me all the time. Well, used to, anyway.” Ito-san takes a long sip of her latte as Akira clatters his way through the bathroom cabinets, eventually coming up with a little metal tin of bandages.
By the time he has his hand bandaged, the carrots chopped, the cutting board cleaned, and the curry simmering on the back burner, Sojiro arrives. He’s right on time, hefting groceries onto the counter with nimble old bones. “Fresh ingredients for ya,” he says, “although I guess you’ve already gotten started on today’s batch.”
“I didn’t want it to go to waste.” Akira wipes his hands on his apron. He sorts through the bags as Sojiro goes through the motions: hat on the rack, jacket off, apron on, tied in the back.
“Good job, kiddo,” Sojiro says, apropos of nothing. “It’s the flower shop next, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Akira says. Bent double in front of the refrigerator, his dream from last night suddenly rushes back to him in full force. “Boss, when was the last time you saw the ocean?”
“The ocean, huh?” He runs a hand through his not-quite-thinning hair. “Not sure. Probably years… You thinkin’ back to the trip you took with Futaba or something?”
Akira wasn’t thinking of that, but he doesn’t want to interrupt Sojiro’s warm smile. “Yeah, kind of.”
“Heh, now you’ve gone and planted the seed in my head. The shop’s running well enough, so I was already thinking about taking a little vacation.” Sojiro goes through the pockets of his apron and tosses a stray cleaning cloth under the counter. “The ocean… not a bad choice, kid.”
Akira finishes putting everything away and begins untying his apron, mostly to give his hands something to do. He keeps thinking back to cold coast breezes and water against rebar. “Did you see Morgana?”
“Yeah, saw him slinking around a little bit ago.” Sojiro perks up at the chime of the doorbell and takes a customer’s order while Akira finishes getting himself together.
“Ask Futaba about an ocean trip,” Sojiro calls as Akira moves to leave. “Get her to bring long-legs too.”
Akira nods, hiding his expression. He waves goodbye and shoulders his way out of the shop. Something about visiting the ocean itself right now puts a pit in his stomach, and it’s not just because of his dream. There’s something more to it, some unnameable emergent property at hand. He hopes that Sojiro will have the foresight to talk to Futaba himself; as anxious as he is, he still feels bad about messing up his pseudo-father’s travel plans.
He avoids the usual streets that Morgana skulks as he makes his way to Shibuya. Ducking into an alleyway, he nearly clips the corner and stumbles. When he turns to correct himself, he can’t help but notice graffiti plastered over the wall. It knocks Akira’s perception even more off-kilter— has he ever seen street art in this part of the city before? The piece is highlighter-yellow and ultramarine-blue, spray-painted against the bricks. The actual design reminds Akira of an eye, but he sees other shapes the longer he looks: stars, waves, trees bearing fruit in the negative space.
He shoulders his bag, keeps his eyes down, and goes to work.
—
Akira Kurusu is twenty-seven years old. He lives with his partner in an apartment that is just big enough for them. He likes his coffee with two sugars and just the tiniest bit of cream. He dislikes it when people order coffee with too much cream, since it dilutes the flavor of the roast, though that hasn’t actually happened in some time. Every person who ever tried to hurt him is imprisoned or dead.
—
The flower shop is just busy enough to keep Akira on his feet, but not busy enough to overwhelm him. He takes a moment to sit back on the stool and wait, idly checking his phone. Futaba’s unsurprisingly had time to send the group chat another harvest of images– her freelance coding jobs have been raking in the dough and leaving her enough time to browse to her heart’s content.
He doesn’t have the energy for a witty reply, though, so he shoves his phone back in his apron pocket and crowd-watches, making up little vignettes in his head for everyone that passes by. That student looks like she’s going on a date later. The man in that suit is going to turn the corner and trip on his shoelaces. The guy over there is–
Akira blinks. He almost thinks he saw a pair of eyes looking right back at him, but a traveler moving through his foreground covered them up much too quickly for them to ever have been there at all. He looks over the rest of the crowd as if they’re going to pop up again somewhere, but all he sees are the usual shades whirling past. Try as he might he can’t tack any stories onto them anymore– they feel like they don’t fit.
Akira hops down and makes his way back into the shop, disappearing among the flowers.
—
He snags himself a late shift and a later dinner, and after texting Goro about his delay (“ How unusual ,” he’d replied, as if that’s a thing that any normal husband would say) Akira makes a point of wandering around. He gets a bottle of juice and sips from it as he takes his sweet time hopping from station to station, occasionally missing connections just to meander more and more. It’s happening again: that cold thrum right through the center of his head, vaguely brewing into a headache but mostly sitting there, like an ice pick.
When he finally gets home it has been oppressively dark outside for several hours. Akira saunters up the stairs and unlocks the door to find that the apartment he shares with Goro is also oppressively dark on the inside, with every light off down to the little reading-lamp by the couch.
Akira knows this place well and knows its occupant even better, though, so he doesn’t have to turn a light on to see Goro on the couch, dozing like a corpse. He always gets this tired after grading papers or waiting up for Akira, and as fate would have it he’s been doing a lot of both lately. Akira thinks, momentarily, about helping organize the stacks of exams upon the coffee table but decides against it– he knows full well Goro has his own system for every little thing, papers included[1].
“Psst,” he whispers, gently laying a hand over Goro’s shoulder. “Sweetheart. Your back’s gonna ache if you sleep out here.” Goro wakes just as quick as he always has. He sits up without paying Akira too much mind, only making a token effort to rub at his eyes. “Here,” Akira says, holding out a hand. Goro does see him, despite the dark, and when he rises he slots himself into Akira’s arms in a perfectly fluid, perfectly natural moment.
“They’re getting smarter on me,” Goro murmurs against Akira’s stubbly chin. “I’ve had to contend with actual arguments in this set. They’re even different arguments– can you believe that?”
Akira chuckles. He’s heard enough about Goro’s philosophy students to fill a book with stories of bungled papers and incomprehensible responses. Beyond all Goro’s complaining, though, is a drive steeped in charisma strong enough to make even the most apathetic high schooler give a shit , which, as far as Akira is concerned, is like magic. He was a high schooler once, of course, but only distantly. He doesn’t think about his time in high school much anymore.
Goro’s gained weight recently– over the years, he’s started to look a bit less “mildly malnourished teenager” and a bit more “guy whose husband can’t stop cooking him hearty curries and stews”– but Akira can still lift him just fine. He scoops him up, bracing his arm underneath his thighs as Goro, yelping, clings to him for dear life. Akira almost thinks he moves more gracefully in the dark sometimes, sidestepping the couch and curving his path right into their room, where he gently sets Goro down upon the bed.
“You should probably also take your coat off,” Akira adds, returning to the living room and switching on just one light in the kitchen to help him on his way. He tidies with yet more of his boundless energy: Goro’s coffee mug visits the kitchen, Akira’s coat returns home to its hook, and Goro’s book on the table is rescued from its spine-breaking pose and bookmarked. Akira takes a moment to look it over. It’s a thin Descartes volume, marked as Meditations on something or other. Goro had probably assigned it as a reading and reviewed it himself ever since; it’s well-dog-eared and there are annotations scribbled on the pages Akira flips through.
The snarky, endearing annotations alone make this an incredibly valuable little paperback. Akira lovingly tucks it into Goro’s messenger bag before he joins him once more in the bedroom. He shucks off his pants as Goro buries himself under the covers. “Hey there, handsome,” he calls, grinning.
Goro raises an eyebrow at him. He sleeps shirtless, but gets cold easily, so he’s covered up to his nose. “You can’t even see that much of me.”
“Yeah, but I can– what was that phrase you used the other day?” Akira slips on his pajama pants and goes to join him. “Extrapolate from incomplete data?”
Goro only moves over minutely as Akira shuffles himself under the blankets. Akira has to encroach on his space to get comfortable, and he does so gladly and without pause. “Menace,” Goro mutters as Akira goes through the process of getting Goro properly tangled up in his arms.
When all is said and done, they are as one there, in the dark. It will be light soon, but Akira closes his eyes anyway. It’s an act of denial.
—
Akira dreams of the sea.
He watches the pink tide, made opaque with pollution and mindborne pathogens, lap at his feet. The sky is so blue it hurts his eyes, so he looks down at the apple-halves resting gently in his palms. He puts them together and they are one creature again. He slices it into nine pieces and puts them back together and they are one creature again. The apple is laid to rest atop a book floating on the sea-foam. When Akira picks it up he sees how each of its fine, ivory pages has been scribbled over by an unsteady hand. He wants to toss it back into the sea but he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he doesn’t. It’s too important for that. He holds the book to his chest and waits for the tide to come back in.
—
Akira wakes unwillingly and slowly. In a procession of minutes he slumps himself upright and checks his phone to see it’s nearly 10– which doesn’t exactly matter, since he’s got work at 2, but he scowls anyway. Goro must not have seen fit to wake him up.
He rises and totters out to the living room. Goro is sitting at the kitchen counter on one of their wooden barstools (presumably not the one that’s recently picked up an unsettling wobble), reading. It takes Akira a whole ten seconds to work through the question of why the hell isn’t he at school? and finally arrive upon the answer of well god damn, it’s Saturday .
“Good morning.” Goro’s tone is clipped, but that’s nothing new. If he were actually upset at Akira, he wouldn’t have spoken at all, or he would’ve said something that was a complete non-sequitur just to make Akira use his brain first thing in the morning. “There’s coffee on the counter.”
It’s been brewed with the stovetop pot, but Akira’s inner coffee snob has no energy to complain. His head feels quieter than usual, and the silence is comparatively unnerving; usually Akira’s brain is a jumble of thoughts and ideas before he gets some caffeine in him. He pours a serving into his favorite mug– the one with a fat little tiger on it, from the Year of the Tiger a couple years back– and is pleased to find it hasn’t gone completely cold.
The relief is short-lived. Goro stands and crosses to the living room, straightening up his stacks of exams. “You slept poorly,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I think you nearly elbowed me a couple of times.”
“Sorry.” Akira isn’t sure why this declaration feels like a death sentence, but it does, and a shiver overtakes his internal organs. It’s happening again. “I don’t remember why.”
Goro smiles, just barely, as if in amusement. “Well, we’ll just have to– ah.” He picks up a thin volume from the table: Meditations . “There you are.”
Akira watches from the kitchen. “I thought…” He trails off, and only when Goro turns to catch his eye can he force himself to speak. “I thought I put that in your bag yesterday.”
“Hm.” Goro leans himself back, crossing his legs as he turns the book over and over in his hands. “Well, good thing that you didn’t– I would have driven myself mad looking for it. I’ve got to get right back into grading today, I’m afraid.”
“Sorry.” Akira is well aware that if he gives one more apology, Goro’s about to start snapping at him about it, so he shuts himself up and hunts for breakfast.
The guilt begins as a twinge in his hipbone, like something’s coiling around it and exploring the top of his femur. It snakes up through his innards and writhes hot-cold-hot up through his spinal cord. By the time he has eaten the leftover curry he’d stashed in the fridge for moments like these he could fly with the force of it tugging him upwards, saying look, look what you did, look what you did wrong .
Akira showers, dresses, and comes to the heart-stopping realization that this is not something he can just stop thinking about . He knows there’s something important there, lurking and writhing, but he can’t bring himself to rip through the discomfort.
More importantly: he has to go to work. He mentally allots the extra hours between now and his shift for distractions, because if he has to be left alone with his thoughts for one more minute he’s going to scream. When he heads out to the living room he throws on his bag and jacket with more speed than strictly necessary. “I’m heading out,” he calls over his shoulder, but when Goro is silent he turns to look.
Goro, still on the couch, looks at him sidelong. “I love you.”
It feels like a promise; it feels like a threat. Goro has a habit of saving I love you s like they’re the last box of a beloved cookie flavor, doomed to go out of stock in a week: savored, hoarded, given only as a special gift. Akira feels like it means something that he’s pulled one out now of all times [2].
“I love you,” he replies, taking one from his own stock and crushing it between his teeth. He steps outside and lets the door swing shut behind him.
—
Akira Kurusu is twenty-seven years old. He lives with his partner in an apartment that is just big enough for them. He likes his coffee with two sugars and just the tiniest bit of cream. He dislikes it when people order coffee with too much cream, since it dilutes the flavor of the roast, though that hasn’t actually happened in some time. Every person who ever tried to hurt him is imprisoned or dead.
If Akira Kurusu keeps repeating these facts to himself, they will become true.
—
Work– a brief morning shift at Leblanc and a lengthy, even more uneventful shift at a local courier service– isn’t much of anything at all. Akira coasts along on a mildly unhealthy amount of caffeine and a haze of unearned adrenaline. When evening falls and he shoulders the door open to the apartment, Goro doesn’t stand to help him with the grocery bags upon his arms.
“I got groceries,” Akira says, and Goro takes a few seconds to look up from the notepad in his lap. “It’s just the usual stuff. We still gotta plan out anything besides the usual dinners for the week.”
‘The usual’, as both of them have come to understand, is four days of Akira’s homecooked curries and stews, two days of whatever restaurants Goro chooses, and one Friday night of junk food over at Futaba’s place, consumed over old Featherman episodes. “Sounds good,” Goro says, and already Akira feels the cold creeping back into his bones. He puts the last of the veggies away and joins Goro in the living room, flopping out next to him on the couch.
Boneless in his after-work sweatshirt and cut-off shorts, Akira feels like he must be exuding an aura of relaxation, which apparently doesn’t seem to be affecting Goro in the slightest. It’s not really affecting Akira either, but it’s a good enough placebo that his heart rate starts to go down for the first time all day.
Goro is keeping his face turned in profile to Akira. He’s sitting up straight, still in his work clothes, cutting a sharp silhouette in tweed and twill. The notepad in his lap is blank; he taps his pen against it.
“Hey,” Akira says, soft and falling.
Goro looks at him sidelong. “I’ve been having… strange dreams, lately.”
Akira’s skin is cold. It’s not from exposure– his half-shaven legs are just as cold as his core under his sweatshirt. “Have you?”
“I have. Do you ever…” Goro trails off, and he seems to be visibly upset at himself. Akira doesn’t immediately feel any frustration directed at him, but he’s not sure. “Do you ever dream that you’re awake?”
Akira blinks. He knows his glasses are catching the light from the kitchen and he can see Goro studying the warped little patterns in his lenses. It’s happening again– ice through his head.
Goro continues, unheeding Akira’s silence. “I have, recently. I dream that I get up from my bed and I go about my day. Sometimes my routine misses steps– sometimes I jump straight from brushing my teeth to my classroom– but it’s always jarring when I wake for real. All day I think to myself: when am I going to wake up again?”
Akira sniffs, trying not to think about how numb his nose is. “Gotta remember to pinch yourself next time.”
Goro gives him a glare that is most definitely directed at him. “It tires me,” he says, and now his glare just looks defeated. “Having to… to look for patterns. To keep examining and asking and wondering when all I should be doing is living.”
It occurs to Akira that he has no idea what Goro is talking about anymore. He knows, after all these years, that Goro is fastidious and– on rare occasions– full-on persnickety, but he doesn’t know what this is. It sounds like vigilance; it sounds like paranoia; it sounds like the hollow beast taking up residence in his own heart over the past few days.
He turns away from the echo.
“Goro,” he murmurs, shifting closer. “Goro, baby, I know you’re tired. I am too, and…” Akira trails off as he rests a hand over Goro’s. He drops his voice down, down, low and near-silent like the echo at the bottom of a well. “C’mon, sweetheart.”
Here Goro turns to look at him. “We should rest,” he says, a little absently.
Akira rises and helps pull Goro to his feet (slowly, slowly). His heart is still beating heavy and hard, but not nearly as fast, and that feels like a tiny victory. He knows it’ll be retaken tomorrow– that it’s nothing in the grand scale– still, he lets himself feel this way. Still he lets himself fall.
—
Akira Kurusu is twenty-seven y— no. Some nights, Akira Kurusu feels like he is seventeen years old. Some nights he feels like he lives in a drafty old attic. Some nights he wants to drink coffee with too much cream in it. His friends make fun of him for drinking a bastardized version of hot chocolate. When did they say those things? When did they jest? He hates when they make fun of him, but he knows it’s all fun and games so he swallows that reaction right back up and lets it burn somewhere in his gut.
Some nights every person who has ever wanted Akira hurt or dead or worse has pressed a knife to his throat and snarled in his face. Some nights he thinks of the click-clack-click of the interrogator’s fine shoes on the concrete. Some nights–
Akira does not dream tonight. His mind is empty, empty, as if someone has gone through and carefully scrubbed each surface clean– not only that, but they’ve taken all the furniture, too. His brain is as blank and thoughtless as a modern showroom. Sharp angles, dustless corners. He’s been burnt before– but where has all the ash gone? Where are the scorch marks hidden under the floorboards?
—
Akira wakes late again: their shared day off. Goro protects Sunday with tooth and claw, viciously grading his way through each Saturday so they have this fragment of time to spend together. It does not, of course, have to begin together, as is evidenced by Goro already moving about the living room while Akira slings himself upright.
He’s used to Goro’s restlessness, but the moment Akira enters the room he feels as though everything’s been tilted a few degrees to the side. Goro is pacing from the living room to the kitchen and back, performing several actions (organizing his books, hanging up his coat, preparing his coffee one step at a time) and not quite completing any of them. Akira stands in the doorway and watches him for a handful of moments, unwilling to enter his space and get run over.
“Everything good?” Akira croaks. His voice always gets gravelly after he wakes; according to Goro he’s in the habit of snoring. Goro opens his mouth to answer but immediately rushes back to the kitchen counter when his phone goes off, sitting astride a barstool and reading something with rapt attention.
Akira knows better than to be nosy about this sort of thing, especially now that his conscious nervous system is starting to kick back into overdrive again. He pours himself a glass of water and pointedly does not look or think in Goro’s direction.
“Futaba says hello,” Goro says, and now that stops Akira dead in his tracks. They’re not exactly on bad terms, but they’ve become the sort of friends where they can only withstand each other’s company with Akira as a buffer. Friday nights are one thing, fine and dandy, but 10AM on a Sunday is another time entirely.
“Tell her I said hi,” Akira says, and against all the laws of social conduct and Akechian physics he decides to ask “what’re you chatting about?”
Goro ignores him at first to finish typing; there’s a small scowl dug into his face. “She’s a Navigator. I sought her expertise. That’s all.”
The kitchen tile is like ice beneath Akira’s feet. “For what?”
Goro turns his phone off and sets it aside to sip at his half-prepared coffee. The sun plods across the room, peeking through the living room window.
“I had a dream,” he says, “that I took a vacation by the seaside.”
Akira leans back against the counter to keep himself from shaking. Goro continues. “There was a little girl playing in the surf– or perhaps two girls, twins. I don’t remember. I sat upon the sand and let the tide go out beneath me, knowing full well that it would not come back in for years. I watched these… these rusting hulks, huge and totally derelict, out in the bay. They were slowly dying, each one, creaking and sinking beneath the waves, chained up and doomed to rot. And,” he murmurs, looking down into his coffee mug, “I didn’t feel a thing for them. I felt free, certainly, being there and watching the girls play– but I felt no pity. I felt no remorse calling those ships to shatter upon the rocks.”
Goro sounds distant and alien, like he’s speaking to Akira from the other side of a vast cavern, and all at once Akira feels like the space between them is warped, somehow. Goro prefers to keep some space to himself, but after all these years when he speaks to Akira he is close , like the tip of a blade held just an inch from his nose. Here and now, though, it’s like a chasm growing between them. Akira isn’t sure who is splitting the earth open– him, or Goro– but it’s happening all the same and it makes Akira’s insides go frigid.
He steps away from the counter: toward Goro, over the chasm. Some of the coldness recedes. He listens, but Goro does not speak until he nods for him to continue.
“Even now, I feel… utterly strange talking about all this. I dislike it immensely.” Goro is looking down, but Akira still gets the feeling that he’s looking directly at him, despite the incongruity. “It all feels terribly auspicious, somehow. That’s part of the reason why I sought Futaba’s guidance, but she’s… not forthcoming.”
The odd phrasing gives Akira pause, which is almost like a moment of respite compared to all the other sensations he’s been wading through. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean she doesn’t know anything. She hasn’t– hasn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary, god damn it,” Goro snaps, and the old anger that runs beneath his body like an underground stream has burst to the surface again.
Akira can’t remember the last time Goro was truly angry.
He does remember, though, how he deals with Goro’s anger: he gives him a direction. It’s never felt healthy or kind to pick him up and point him like a weapon, but he can’t think of anything else. “What do we do, then?”
Goro’s head is still bowed, as if in supplication. He closes his eyes.
“This should be familiar,” he whispers.
It’s happening again: Akira’s felt this before. The realization gets painted over Akira’s face in the same moment as Goro picks his head up, meeting his eyes. Something comes back into focus between them, and all at once Akira is certain he’s been here before, standing across from Goro, agonizing alongside him through something he doesn’t understand. He should know this place and this time for what it is– and he searches his mind and it comes up utterly blank. Not seen-before but never-seen. Jamais vu .
Akira isn’t at all sure why he says “there’s someone we need to see.”
“Very well then.” Goro whispers. He does not ask who it is: he works in practicals. “How will we see them?”
Akira picks up the pair of scissors lying on the counter.
—
Query: how do you catch a god’s attention, when you’re not even sure there’s a god there?
Answer: you catch the devil’s attention and hope a god comes along for the ride.
—
There is a deck of playing cards lying unused in Akira’s desk[3].
He doesn’t remember when it was given to him, but he knows where it is all the same, brushing aside old binder-clips and broken pliers to get to it. It is still in the original packaging. He cuts it open as he turns back to the living room, scissors still in hand. Goro has been following him at arm’s length, watching silently, curiously.
Akira sits down on the couch and gets to work. He deals the cards one at a time, sorting through them and inspecting each design. He knows he’s looking for something , some emergent quality lurking within the cards, and when he finds it in an unassuming little nine-of-hearts and three-of-spades he takes up his scissors and cuts each one in half. Their halves refit together nicely. He turns them over, sets them aside, and begins again.
Goro is across from him, kneeling on the floor and peering over the coffee table. Akira cannot interpret his gaze, nor can he convey to Goro that this is anything but something for himself. Selfish, he knows– but he is allowing himself a moment to be selfish as the cold closes in. If nothing else, he will have discovered something. If nothing else he will have shown Goro something he could never have experienced.
Midway through giving the queen of hearts a lobotomy Akira’s scissors jam. He fiddles with the joint, and he would be more annoyed if his subconscious mind did not immediately whisper a solution to him. He moves decisively to the kitchen, quickly enough that it keeps the space intact, retrieving a cutting board and knife. When he lays it back down upon the table there’s foreboding hanging loosely in the air, swaying gently like a ripened fruit upon a branch. Akira is a consummate chef; he slices through the card in one clean movement, drawing the knife back and watching it gleam in the low light.
There’s a spark of pain: he’s nicked his finger. He continues on.
If Akira has a method to all of this, he doesn’t know what it is, or perhaps he just couldn’t put it into words. There is a selection process ( not this one, not this one, you, and you, and here– ) but its tenets, if it has any, are hidden just as far underwater as the rest of the process. Akira reaches out for the king of hearts, who’s been scattered to the other end of the table, and takes up the king of diamonds to complement him. They cut easy. He’s beginning to feel a bit silly as he turns the cards over–
An intact ace of spades stares up at him.
Akira’s smeared a bit of blood on the edge of the card from the still-weeping cut on his finger and he can’t find it in himself to care. He looks up at Goro and Goro looks up at him. Both of them are playing in a space they do not understand.
There is a knock at the door[4].
Akira sets the knife back down on the table as he rises. Goro stands too, half a second faster than he does (eyes open, heart blazing). Akira is about to ask him what to do when–
On some level, Akira is sure the door had to open for him to have stepped inside, but he doesn’t really remember it happening: he’s just here now. He hasn’t taken off his shoes. They’re fine brown loafers, and they squeak on the floor just a little bit as the man with the strange eyes tips his hat to them.
“My apologies for intruding.” There’s a breathy not-quite-laugh and a vestige of warmth trapped within his voice. He’s smiling, and Akira can’t figure out whether it’s reaching his eyes or not. “I just couldn’t help my curiosity, seeing how all of this has turned out.”
“I know you,” Goro murmurs. Akira knows him too, wrapped in silence though he may be. “Don’t I… I know you?”
The man tilts his head, and it’s solely the change in lighting that makes his smile morph into something a bit more patronizing. “You do, although… based on past experience I’m sure you wish you didn’t.” He sighs, and the smile is gone, replaced with a patchwork disappointed pout. “It’s really such a shame that this treatment didn’t stick. Remission and relapse are all normal ups and downs, but it doesn’t make them any less frustrating to deal with.”
A fragment of a name crawls its way to the front of Akira’s mind. Before he can make a guess at the rest of it, there’s a static shock in the air and the name enters his mind without his permission. Speaking is still his choice; he exercises it. “Maruki.”
The entity that may or may not be Takuto Maruki puts his smile back on. “There we are! It only took a little jog to your memory after all. I suppose the second erasure you requested was starting to wear off.”
“The second erasure?” Goro hisses. He’s gone from shock to bloodless anger, eyes darting to Akira for only a moment.
“Well, yes. Things were slipshod in the early days, and I think it wore down on you.” Any movement he makes comes off as a deliberate action. Nothing about him is unconscious anymore. His chest isn’t moving; he seems to have forgotten to breathe. “It was the guilt that struck you,” he nods to Akira, “and I don’t think you much liked Akechi’s solution either.” He nods minimally in Goro’s direction.
Akira’s head is a quilt torn at the seams– not slashed apart, necessarily, but neatly seam-ripped with a fine tool, and he’s just now starting to recognize the image these parts used to make. He knows, on some level, that Goro is experiencing the same thing (the piecing-apart, the laying-out), even if his pieces are different, more ragged. “And what was my solution?” Goro snarls.
“To burn it all down, naturally. I don’t blame you– it makes sense, considering your history.” Maruki taps the toe of his shoe on the floor just twice. “Kurusu asked, and I made things right. It was a simple solution; inelegant, maybe, but simple.”
“And you dove into our heads and cut everything out, just like that?”
Goro is whisper-quiet with white-hot heat. Akira puts a hand on his shoulder, trying to ground the current sparking through him. “How long ago?” He asks. “How long ago did you– take everything away?”
Maruki, in a shocking turn of events, shrugs. “About eight years, give or take. My recall back then was more… scattered. Acquired godhood is quite a strain on the psyche. I certainly don’t think quite like I used to.” Here he smiles, and it makes black ice gnaw at Akira’s joints. “I think things are better now.”
Another piece slots into place in Akira’s brain and he has the bright and terrible realization that he’s only looking at a cicada-shell on the ground and hasn’t turned to look up at the cacophony in the trees.
“I have to say,” Maruki says, pulling up one of the barstools from nowhere and sitting back upon it. “Despite past misgivings, I do see your– defiance – is a powerful source of strength for you. It’s quite impressive.”
Akira ignores the praise and focuses instead on the feeling of Goro’s shoulder beneath his palm. It soothes him enough to speak again. “What about the first erasure?”
Maruki blinks. It’s the first time he’s done so since he entered. “Oh. Well…” He leans his elbows forward on his knees. It startles Akira how quickly the pose resolves into something familiar– inviting, even. “Both of you turned down my first few offers. That was about what I suspected, but it was still disappointing. And then, well, circumstances intervened and you accepted my offer right away. Then all was as it should be.”
Akira casts his memory as far back as it will go and he remembers: nothing, at first. Only faint images of Leblanc at night begin to coalesce, all wood paneling and warm buzzing lights. He remembers a card and a glove and a handshake and a threat and all the time in the world–
Realization has been striking Akira in waves, and all at once the tide relents. Akira goes calm in the eye of the storm. “I did it to save you,” he whispers, drawing closer to Goro and fully entering the milieu of his distress. “I’m sorry, but I–”
“Oh,” Maruki says, and the sound is like a guillotine blade falling. “No, no, you seem to be misunderstanding.” He points; his shadow does not move. “Akechi accepted my offer right away.”
The eye has passed. Only the wind-scoured seaside remains.
Akira grasps for a scrap of defiance, even now. “You didn’t– you didn’t make the offer to him .”
“Not at first, but as I mentioned, circumstances insisted upon it.” Maruki leans back as if in consideration. “Is that still a bit fuzzy? Perhaps I should show you, for clarity’s sake.”
Silence reigns in the apartment. Goro’s shoulders are still tense; he stands tall, eyes open, unflinching. He looks over his shoulder at Akira. Akira can only see a fragment of his face through the way his hair’s spilled over it, but what he sees is striking enough. Goro nods to Akira. Akira nods back.
Maruki doesn’t move at all. “Don’t close your eyes.”
And Akira–
–it is hollow here, in the garden. He watches from where the vision (illusion? Real or unreal? he asks himself.) bleeds into the apartment. They are a mob of well-coordinated shadows, flitting from one target to the next. He recognizes the bright-red snicker-snack of Crow’s blade and the little glowing cueball of Prometheus on high and the gleam of Queen’s armor, and Akira finds that the sensation blazing through his heart is joy . He remembers, all at once, the beauty and glory of the Thieving days. The rage will come later, knowing that this was all stripped away; for now, it’s joy.
He spots himself vaulting and diving, up and around and through the tangle of tendrils like he’s at play. When the gold-flashing Maruki casts his staff up, Joker steps back defensively, acquiescing to the rhythm at hand. He jaunts away from the beam and regains his stance, and Akira wonders why the memory suddenly sharpens. The sounds go vivid, blooming bright–
A tendril swiftly embeds itself through Joker’s forehead.
Akira looks to Maruki. Shock– pure, human shock– is scrawled across his face, poisoning his eyes. He seems to be whispering something, and it’s only the memory that informs Akira that he’s saying cingulate gyrus . The party stops utterly. Futaba must have told them, or maybe just screamed; he can’t hear her but he knows it must be happening.
All things fall apart. Ryuji is the first to move as he cries out, bashing any appendage of Azathoth he can reach. His face is already wet with tears. Yusuke has collapsed, as has Sumire.
Goro, though– Goro is a pillar of salt. Akira feels his anger just watching him, and feels it so keenly that it loops around to eerie calm. Only when the chaos hits a fever pitch does Goro step forward.
“ I accept! ” He shrieks, a death-knell echoic in the garden apex. When Maruki doesn’t immediately meet his eyes he cries out again. “Look into my head, see my wish for yourself! Autopsy this goddamn world already!”
Maruki regards him with a marbled mix of horror and determination. The other Thieves begin to go still, watching the standoff unfold. Ann murmurs to herself: “accept what?”
It only takes Maruki a moment before he inclines his head in answer. “Lay down your weapons,” he says, “and everything will be the way it should be.”
Goro tosses his blade to the ground, and apparently this is all the answer Maruki needs, because he raises his hands and Azathoth flares with deep-sea bioluminescence before the other Thieves can react.
All things fall away and–
Akira Kurusu is twenty-seven years old and he knows that he should not be.
Goro, in Akira’s peripheral vision, is all gritted-teeth and wide-eyes. He’s turned away from both him and Maruki, nails digging into his palms. “You never would have wanted this,” he hisses to Akira. “I know you now– I know you better than you know yourself.”
Akira isn’t sure if he has a self to know anymore. “Goro–”
In a blaze of motion Goro takes up the scissors from the table and whirls to face Maruki. “I’ll cut your strings,” he screams, charging forth, “leave us alone– ”
Goro is on the floor. There was no motion-blur; he moved between frames. The scissors have gone. Akira immediately kneels beside him, resting a hand over the back of his head.
Maruki is still smiling. “I have to admit, I feel terribly nostalgic watching this unfold. It’s nice that you still carry that old flame within you.” He sighs, and the smile drops away. “Such a shame, the way things have to end. You two have always been little wrinkles in the Metaverse, even now.”
It’s here that the last of Akira’s rage finally ignites within him, holding Goro on the floor of the just-right apartment. He’s speechless with it. Maruki continues on. “All those little changes, all those little evils starting to rise to the surface… I strongly suspect that was your presence warping the cognition around you. The others that returned– they weren’t Wild Cards. They didn’t have contracts or auspices watching over them.” He looks down on Akira, sitting tall. “At the end of the day, you aren’t supposed to be here. I’m afraid a revision is in order.”
The cut on Akira’s hand throbs with pain. He can’t remember the last time he was wounded like this. He can’t remember the last time he dreamed of the ocean, or saw eyes watching him, or felt as though the world was burning down–
“You can’t be serious,” Goro rasps. “Even you can’t just– wind the clock back and pretend everything’s alright.”
Maruki stands. “You’d be surprised. It’s really just a thought away.” He turns to look through the window. “February 2017: simple as that. Same revisions as last time, but I think for completeness’s sake I’ll have to erase Akira’s presence more thoroughly. No ties, no memories. That’ll take more work– he really was quite a linchpin for us all.”
“Neither benevolent nor omnipotent nor omniscient,” Goro murmurs to himself. He’s relaxed in Akira’s arms, but Akira recognizes it for what it is: he’s truly given up.
Maruki turns to leave, hands in his pockets. “This little experiment… it really is a shame that I’ve got to discard it after all this time.” He looks back at them with Azathoth’s eyes burning holes in his skull.
Even here, his smile can’t be real. “Give it a moment. It’ll all be just fine.”
His presence leaves them; they kneel alone together. Akira finally recognizes the cold wreathing his body for what it is: algor mortis . He hopes, desperately and deeply, that Goro still feels some kind of warmth from his embrace.
Goro’s hands grab onto his shirt, curling into claw-grips. “So that’s it, then?” He shudders just once with the force of his breath.
One last spark occurs to Akira. He takes up Goro’s face in his hands, trying to meet his eyes as best he can. “We figured it out once,” he says, a smile breaking through his whispers and oncoming tears. “We’ll do it again. As many times as it takes. He’s still only human– he can’t make a flawless world. Not when we’re still in it.”
Goro meets his gaze. In the shadows his eyes are nearly black. “And if he should find the serpent in the garden? What if he casts it out once and for all?”
Akira’s eyes go blurry with the force of his smile. “Then we’ll be together again.”
They don’t kiss one another; they don’t have to. The world unbecomes.
—
Goro sits upon the stairs across from the construction site, watching the birds circle above the laboratory-in-progress. He inventories his mind and finds that he feels content, but he’s not sure why. The more he examines the feeling the more it seems to disappear. The steps here are attached to the backside of a restaurant, and he’s a bit wary that someone taking their break will trip over him, so he rises.
He can see fragments of his friends around the corner, talking and laughing about everything and nothing. They were going to plan a trip together for graduation, weren’t they? He moves to join them, but on impulse he looks back to the sky above the laboratory.
A feeling rises up through his spinal cord: the suggestion that he should be seeing something else there. Unease follows in its footsteps, but only briefly.
The seaside , he thinks to himself. We’ll go to the seaside and watch the tide come in . He’s never been before– never been allowed to touch the blue depths for himself– but somehow now he thinks he can give himself that gift.
He turns to leave, eyes open.
---
1. Goro does not have a desk of his own in the apartment, possibly because his “system” would quickly overwhelm the average desk’s capabilities. Akira worries for the coworkers in proximity to his aura in the same way one tends to worry for the houses adjacent to a house that’s currently on fire. [ ↺ Return.]
2. The last three times Goro has said “I love you” to Akira have all been past 10PM: quietly after Akira had bookmarked and set aside the book lying neglected in his dozing lap, exhausted after an ill-advised nighttime jog after Akira had brought him some water, and, most recently, after he’d accidentally (and forcefully) poked Akira on the forehead with his pen. Akira has never been sure whether “I love you” means “thank you” or “I’m sorry” to Goro, but he desperately hopes that it’s the former. [↺ Return.]
3. It is not Goro’s desk; it never has been and it never will be. [↺ Return.]
4. It's happening again. [↺ Return.]