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Goro doesn’t let himself think as he walks away from Leblanc, dragging feet that feel like cement one step after another in a path leading back to his apartment. The rage stays in a buzzing simmer under his skin as he rides the too-empty trains and takes too-clean back alley routes to his destination. The world bends in chromatic aberrations around the seams where he knows the unsightly has been excised.
It’s not unlike the night in late November in too many ways. The way he feels the tension drop from his limbs like a puppet cut from strings as he shuts the door behind him with a sound of deafening finality in the thick silence of his apartment. How he attempts to go through his typical motions of the evenings only to move sluggish and clumsily around his own home like a shambling undead. His arms don’t move the way they should, his shoulders feel numb, there’s bile in the back of his throat.
It’s not unlike the night in late November when he grabs a bottle of poison from the back of his cabinet and doesn’t bother using a glass as a messenger between the alcohol and his lips. He drinks until he can’t taste the bitterness and the distorted swirls of this miserable reality are indistinguishable from the dark splotches in his vision.
In a way, he feels like he’s died all over again.
In a way, he feels like Amamiya has slipped from his grasp once more.
When the bottle slips from his hand, he doesn’t bother trying to catch it. It crashes to the ground in a spectacle of glass that sends sparks through his body. He tenses, suddenly all too aware of his surroundings, his situation, the reality (hah) of what’s to come.
And Goro once thought himself worthy of the name traitor.
The words flicker and repeat in his head like a taunt. “We’re taking the deal” he said, looking at Goro with an expression that he couldn’t parse, but made his skin crawl nonetheless.
He’d become used to Amamiya subverting his expectations. Of misjudging him and being pleasantly shocked as the man dodged his every attempt to lock him into one of the neatly identifiable boxes Goro has been able to sort every person into since he was young. It’s what had intrigued him, endeared him to the mystery that was Ren Amamiya. Of course he should have expected that, in the moment it mattered most, he would also reject Goro’s faith in him to do the right thing.
The fury pounding in his heart finally bursts forwards, seeping out of his skin like blood through his pores as he screams profanities into the vacant air. He curses the name of his father, of Maruki, of Amamiya, of every twisted degenerate idiotic enough to fall for this ruse (and at some point wasn’t he one as well, thinking for once that even someone like him could get what he wanted in this world? So he curses his own name, too.)
He shouts until his throat is raw and he can’t tell if the sting in his eyes is from a migraine or if something else has decided to rear its ugly head and poor out of him in the frenzy. Powerless as he’s always been, Goro lets that have it’s share of the stage as well. No use holding in what won’t exist come tomorrow evening. If Amamiya deems fit to gut and lobotomize him then he at least deserves the satisfaction of ripping out everything inside him with his own bare hands first.
By the time he stumbles into his bedroom and falls on top of his sheets his body is numb. There’s a coldness that permeates his entire being. It rolls over him in feverish shudders as he lies motionless, staring up at the ceiling with nothing left to give.
Goro doesn’t so much wake up the next morning as he does snap out of a daze to the sound of his alarm. When he does, it’s lucid, god forbid Maruki allow even something as mundane as a hangover exist in his utopia. He lies motionless for a while, pondering whether or not it would be worth it to pull himself up and go after Maruki himself.
Not long ago had you asked him, Goro would say without hesitation that he would fight to the end no matter what. Never would he allow himself the indignity of resigning to his fate, he would go down kicking and screaming even if it didn’t change a thing in the end.
But in the weakness death had imbued him with, Goro spent the past month picturing that Amamiya would be by his side in that battle. It had been such a certainty in his mind, whether by faith or by a refusal to acknowledge any other possibility, that Amamiya would fight with him against this reality. He didn’t care if the rest of the thieves abandoned them, if everything was stacked against them, he and Amamiya would be the last two on the front lines for the fate of the world. If they failed, it would be as heroes.
Now, alone in this pursuit, Goro knows that his sacrifice would truly mean nothing. His fight will not be noble, it will only be desperate. And then he will be forgotten, overwritten in this ever growing stormcloud of delusion swallowing the world.
The cold creeps back under his skin, constricting around his chest. What will he become when the clock ticks over to the next day? Will he still be conscious, trapped under a plastic film and forced to watch his body act without his will? Will he simply forget everything he knows, filled instead with false memories? Will the homunculus wearing his skin still remember his mother?
The thought of Maruki touching those memories, or worse, getting his inky grasp on her death itself in order to twist it out of shape, makes Goro’s head spin with nausea. Adrenaline cuts through the exhaustion weighing down his body and he finds himself bolting into the bathroom to rid his stomach of the sudden crawling dread.
As he gags over the porcelain bowl, tears pricking his eyes as his body shudders and spasms, he wonders how awful of a son he has to be to hope his mother stays dead in a perfect world. He never knew the kind of person she was before her spirit was broken, but he had always imagined her to be a fierce woman. Someone unwavering in their justice, unwilling to be controlled by someone else. He’d found comfort in the thought that he might have inherited those traits from her.
Would Maruki try to piece her back together? Would he try to unbreak her, like he wants to do to him? Goro doesn’t think he would recognize her without the dead hope in her eyes. It would be paradoxical, because in a world where Shido never touched her, Goro wouldn’t exist. Did Amamiya think of that when he decided to trap him here? Or did he only care about keeping Goro chained to him, damn whatever it takes.
His phone chimes from somewhere across the apartment. Amamiya must have summoned the thieves for a meeting by now to tell them the change of plans. If Goro thought he could stomach the sight of his face he might end up going just to see how the thieves react.
He imagines the unfairness towards Sakura and Okumura, who Amamiya had urged to give up their own revived parents only to cave over the life of his enemy. To Yoshizawa, who had spent all of the past month bracing herself for this, accepting the reality she would have to face when the curtain fell. To Kitagawa, whose wish was so abhorrently misunderstood that he ended up back where he started, complete with a shinier coat of paint to mask the horror of it.
To all of them, who had so much blind faith in their leader, just like Goro did. He hopes they tear Amamiya apart in his stead.
Laughing wryly, he slips from his hunched position and ends up sprawled on his back against the floor. He can’t will himself to move, everything is so heavy. It finally clicks what this sinking chill is inside him, a sensation he’s ignored for so long he barely recognized it. It’s fear coursing through him. Pure, unbridled terror.
With all the energy to be angry seeping out of him in droves, he only has one thing left. What he’s always been underneath it all, every mask he carefully crafted to bury it beyond where its tremors could be felt. Goro is afraid.
Afraid of the chain collar that will soon close around his neck. Afraid of what Amamiya will do with the power now held over his head. Afraid of becoming something he’s not and lacking the sentience to even know it.
And strung through it all, the creeping ice that has kept him on his feet all these years. He’s afraid to die.