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Before bed, during classes and while hot black coffee drips through the siphon, you immure Akechi Goro in your mind.
You think a lot about the mighty high school detective these days. Something fills your gut, dread, vehemence, or premonition, and you plan to seize the advantage while it is unowned. The Phantom Thieves won’t be such easy prey.
Across the table, something fills Ryuji’s gut, too, but as usual, it’s just meat. “Oh, man,” he moans before he’s through chewing. “The chashu is bonkin’ today. Wish I had more cash, I need another bowl.”
He ravenously chopsticks down ramen, buttery porky broth freckling his face. Part of you expects Ann to throw a napkin at him, but she’s much too in love with her moribund slice of cheesecake. You swear you heard it pray. “Okay, the blueberry is definitely good, but strawberry’s still my favorite. Mmm. Maybe I should try the pumpkin one next!”
That’s right: you’re confused again. Ann protects what she cares for, whether that’s Suzui or human goodness or the last crepe on her plate, but responsibility doesn’t assail her the way it does the new girl. Makoto let her petals open once she abandoned sanctimony, at least. At least partly. Even if she’s better company now, your shoulders do relax without censure overlooming them. Ryuji thrives, anyway, buzzed off the adrenaline of a turnstile hop, like he’d hit your arm and laughed about every so often as the train bumped along to Ogikubo. Ann spent the ride on her phone, clover charm swinging, while you thought about the detective’s spotless acuity. Calling him too perfect might suffice, but you don’t, because it sounds like a compliment— not that you want to quite insult him yet. Everything evaporated when the train lurched suddenly enough to toss your bag on the ground, either way, then on only able to imagine how cantankerous Morgana would be at lunch.
“Slow down, it’s not goin’ anywhere,” says Ryuji, catching the breath he’d lost while inhaling his soup. “Don’tcha know eating so much cake is,” he tells her, pausing just long enough to burp, “bad for you?”
“So is running in front of a moving car,” argues Ann.
“Uh, hello, it stopped moving once I ran in front of it, genius.”
Ryuji tends to embarrass you how jumpy, slobbering dogs do their owners. Similarly, you suppose it must be Finnish culture to pop bubblegum in public, and mention a passerby’s outfit could use a cute belt before they’ve fully passered by. You can picture Yusuke’s theatrics if you ever pointed out he’s as dramatic as he is, and Makoto, after snapping and barking, would cry into her bedding because you’re right, really, you’re really right that she ought to show more emotional candor. But, to show yours, you don’t mind your friends being loud or cold or feline. You just like having friends. And it isn’t as if you’re perfect. Not like that perfect detective or anything, of course.
(Truth be told, you’re just irritated you can’t beat him at darts).
October 25, it’s lunchtime again. Your class’s pathetic takoyaki booth isn’t anything you want to claim credit for, but all the same, the dry and witty indifference you’ve always worn as a shield continues to serve whenever justice is unconcerned. Justice, rather, sends you to the front line, dagger in hand. Justice turns you into a different person. You like to think that person’s been inside you all along, but then Akechi Goro leisures up to your table, and you’re distracted thinking of people inside people in other unscrupulous ways.
(What truly distracts is how such a clean person can excite this kind of filth in you. You’ve never known anyone who acts the way others describe you: mysterious and cool, someone that spends the whole night shooting billiards and doesn’t break a sweat. Yet Akechi isn’t actually anything like you, not at your core, the inmate within who may never imbibe the light. He’s so unlike you or anyone else that that’s what electrifies you— and you aren’t ashamed to believe that he does. It’s the same proud nonchalance you’d used to admit you were the first Phantom Thief with his phone number, or how you’d reacted the afternoon Ryuji’d kicked rocks and tried to poke at your disinterest in girls. Whatever, uh, stuff you’re into only bothers him because, between you and Mr. Flaming Artist over there, he’s got no one to gossip about wet t-shirts with. You recall you sort of nose-laughed, indifferently, and Ryuji’s train of thought had stationed at some cringeworthy Mishimaism by the time you realized your rival was being immured again. Because you know why Ryuji’d come to his conclusions, because you know everything despite pretending otherwise. But, regardless, you don’t care to care. Maybe you like girls and maybe you like boys but most definitely, you like the feeling Akechi Goro incites in you, even if you don’t have a name for it. Whatever you’d call the dizziness in having the blood drained from you and returned again. But you digress. You do, and quickly at that, because Akechi’s holding takoyaki now and you’ve just got to see him eat it).
“I love spicy food,” he says afterward, his whole painful face sweating red. You’re entertained and all, yet can’t help wishing he’d just be honest. Akechi, the festival speaker who’d won the vote by a landslide, walks up to your table, and he looks at Ryuji and Ann and Makoto and Yusuke and Haru (who he doesn’t even goddamn know) and Futaba (who can’t meet his goddamn eye) and Morgana (who’s a goddamn cat) but not at you until he’s pinning the warm octopus against his mouth. He holds it in those prissy gloves he’s always got on, even though he claims the kind of morals that wouldn’t make his fingerprints worth hiding. That’s when Goro looks at you, always lastly begging your opinion, as if you’re the best piece of takoyaki in the basket saved for the very savory end. But Akechi isn’t one to nurture patience like that. Akechi goes straight for the heart.
October 26, everything hits the fan.
It ranks for the most exhausting day you’ve lived, perhaps second to those following a night of Ohya’s booze-breathed and compulsive woes; on the 26th of October, Akechi shows the first true color of his rainbow, or pulls his hardest yet on the loose thread he’d bothered out of your knit, and your dad gets stern with you, too, so it is overall a tiring day.
Like nobody tends to offer, you want to lay the facts out before any gallows are fitted for you. Firstly, Sojiro’s no issue. You would let him shout and snort all he wants— in fact, you’d encourage it, feeling his feelings every so often —if it weren’t for the onerous weight inside you whenever Futaba cries. She panics, and then you do, a frantic fiending need to comfort the only sister you’ve ever kinda had, whether that means curry and cartoons or confessing your ties to the nation’s current terrorism. Sojiro, like a good father, doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you get yourself into, so long as you keep your nose clean enough to stay out of real trouble. Sure. Easy, since what he still isn’t privy to won’t hurt him, and Futaba’s a sideline fighter, the theater department’s tech kid, thusly meaning you’ll never have to face the white wrath he tsunamis over those who bruise his baby. Cake walk. But there’s that other thing. You know: the whole Akechi Goro thing. You worry this is only the beginning of the path he’s nudging you down, but you more so fear the day it all will end.
October 26, you notice something is off.
Akechi’s dominoes form an impressive web, you’ll give him that, but they still topple one by continuous one, until all he’s constructed lays flat, and all he has to show for his hard work no longer exists. Really, you don’t blame him for becoming such a striking scarlet target— the Phantom Thieves are a tough bunch, aren’t they?
One month later, he kills you. Akechi Goro puts a bullet in your cognitive mind, and you die, in a way or two, you bleed enough there to satisfy him, and another version of you dies as well, the one who’d ever bought into it. You take the blow, but it’s another's life flashing before your eyes: hands on shoulders and hands on hands, hands tipping up the gaze, mouths not quite so certain. In seconds, Akira or Joker or Ren— somebody kinder than you —grows old with Akechi. They love. They do. For whatever reasons he’s got, he spends his only life loving the enemy, not immuring but holding him, grasping, enamored so tail-chasingly by the rhythm of his heartbeat that he doesn’t hear it fall out of tune. Justice rusts with time, though if the Fool weren’t willing to shine and oil, then he wouldn’t have married a robot. Simple as that. They just love. They just do. In his final moments, he’s happy enough watching the aquarium fish swim by with Goro again. That's all.
But it’s no use talking in hypotheticals. That didn’t happen in reality, and neither did the gunshot. You prevail. Rather, the Phantom Thieves do, and even though Crow untongues the vulnerability of wanting your death on his hands, the self-centered worrier he is, you mourn him once he’s met his own. Nothing’s made you cry perhaps ever since you had your brain fogged by the prosecution’s liquid drugs, or since your mother let you go, but his death pesters you. You lie in your bed and watch the star stickers from Yusuke glow as best as their fifty-yen production quality allows. But it’s plenty of light for an amanita verna like yourself. Akechi, because you think the same kitschy way you act beneath the mask, is a False Morel, which are solitary and virulent and mimic innocence to lure the unwitting. That thought, among acerbic others after Akechi is killed by himself, makes you smirk, and makes you wonder if there’s a lifetime, too, where you and he are just two mushrooms across a field from one another, waiting in the wind for the day you’ll meet a trusting predator. Your toxins, by nature, taste heavenly to you both, though dogmatic, mordant mushrooms like you and Goro have grown used to being spit out. Even after Sojiro’s comment about you sticking things on his rafters, you lie there underneath the glowing stars without much remorse, merely a new ache in between your eyes, right where the bullet had struck.
You know you aren’t done with him yet. When the warship explodes, you let the girls wail, but you’re sure Ryuji’s fine— A Phantom Film Noir wouldn’t sell many tickets if it killed off the dog midway. But it gets you immuring. Whatever puppeteer the masses call God knows Sakamoto-san needed her mama’s boy, and justly must keep Cupid around for his fool. And if he is gone, your angel who’s trigger-happy with his arrows but at least happy at all, so be it: you aren’t above waiting. You’ll wait until you’re mushrooms, or two cards in a deck, you’ll wait until Akechi Goro’s ready for your rematch. You will. You’ll sniff his trail like a wolf no matter what creature you are reborn into. Akechi Goro is your rival, is your prisoner is your passion is the only one who likes 701 matches as much as you do and it leaves you so breathless when he hits the bullseye; he hits every target and it’s breathtaking, it is, and he’s a poser and a bad actor and what weighs on your chest at night more than Morgana curled atop you, but he’s a heartthrob too, as everyone agrees when his opinions lean favorable. You swear you made that pompous customer’s order right, and also that the detective on TV spoke distractingly above your head while you poured it. Akechi, after all, is justice, the thing you’ve obsessed over your whole life and won’t stop in the next. Akira and Goro will be together somewhere, the aquarium or another shoebox-sized café he wants to show you, peacefully, honestly, two corvids on one branch. A crow and a blue jay who beguile each other. That’s what you’ll be once God learns real mercy. But you know you aren’t done with him yet: he’s still got one glove left to whisk at you. You and Akechi Goro will meet again.
For now, you lie awake under fake stars, the neon lights of the Yongen-Jaya laundromat across the street just as lambent.