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When Goro opens his eyes, the first thing he thinks is: fuck.
Because the fact that he’s opened his eyes at all means that he’s failed. Never mind that he’s in what looks to be a hospital room—yeah, that’s an IV drip in his arm. God, what a cruel joke. It’s just his luck that he’s somehow managed to die thrice in less than a year and survive all three times.
The second thing he thinks is: why the hell is Niijima Sae here?
As soon as his eyes open, she pushes herself off from the wall she’s been leaning on and crosses the room, sitting down next to him in a chair to his left.
“Akechi-kun.” Her voice sounds… mildly unsteady, like she’s trying to stay calm and not doing a great job of it. There’s a wrinkle in her brow, a strange look in her eyes. Had she found him? No, he’d hung himself in his room at the shelter. She didn’t even know he was staying there. None of these people knew he was alive to begin with. So why the hell was she here?
“What are you doing here?”
His voice sounds rough, unused. He coughs into his free hand, the one that’s not hooked up to something he never consented to. He wants to rip it out and toss it onto the ground, but that would be useless. He’s died and come back to life enough times by now to get the hint that the universe has other plans. Fuck the universe. Fuck it to hell and back.
“I got a call from the hospital,” says Niijima. “Apparently, I was your emergency contact.”
Oh. Well, shit. A strange sense of guilt washes over him. He vaguely remembers, way back before he met the Phantom Thieves, a time when he visited the hospital for a checkup after some Metaverse-induced internal bleeding—he’d explained away the cause, of course. The receptionist had insisted he fill out the emergency contact information, so he’d given them the first name that had come to mind. Even now, he’s not quite sure why he didn’t just give out a fake number. Everything else about him had been fake, after all.
“They told me about what happened,” Niijima continues, arms crossed and looking down, away from him. “Someone from the shelter found you, and you were in… critical condition, for a while. You’re out of the woods now, but they have to keep an eye on you, so you’ll be staying here for the next few days.” Niijima lets out a shaky breath. “How are you feeling now?”
Goro sits up in the bed, if only to prove a point. He leans back against the headboard. “I feel fine,” he says curtly.
“You tried to commit suicide.” Niijima sighs softly. “There’s no way you’re fine.”
Goro feels a strange, twisted sense of relief that she’d finally spelled it out loud after dancing around it earlier.
“I don’t feel terrible enough to warrant you babysitting me at—” a quick glance at the clock hanging on the wall across from him tells him the time— “three-thirty in the morning.”
It’s true. He actually doesn’t feel too terrible. He can feel the bandages wrapped around his neck, and the muscles there feel a vague, almost phantom sense of soreness that’s being held at bay by whatever cocktail of painkillers they’d given him. The ensuing bruises are going to be something nasty. He can deal with that later.
“You should go home,” says Goro. Niijima isn’t wearing any makeup—it’s the first time he’s seen her without it—and there are bags under her eyes. “Isn’t your sister waiting up for you?”
“Makoto knows I’m at the hospital,” Niijima replies. At the way Goro bristles, she uncrosses her arms and clasps them on her lap. “I didn’t tell her who it was, or why. Just that it was an emergency.” She pauses. “I wasn’t going to breach your trust by telling anyone, and I’m not planning to.”
Bold to assume I trust you in the first place, Goro wants to retort. But he had listed her as his emergency contact. He had no other explanation for that course of action. He was loathe to think of anybody in the world that he really trusted, but he supposed it was some sort of small relief that it was her here with him right now instead of anybody else.
“But thank you,” says Niijima, and though she’s rarely been one to smile openly, her expression seems rather warm. “For your concern.”
Goro huffs. “I wasn’t concerned.”
There’s something fond in her expression again, like she’s talking down to an ornery little sibling. Goro doesn’t like it. At the same time, he doesn’t hate it. “I’ll leave you alone soon,” she says. “I only hoped that I could… talk with you, first.”
Goro exhales. She’s right. Talking to another person right now is the last thing he wants to do, and the exhaustion—both physical and mental—is slowly but surely catching up to him. He doesn’t really have it left in him to fight back.
“Alright,” he says. “Talk, then.”
The hands in her lap tighten. “It’s been a long time coming, but… I want to apologize, Akechi. I truly am sorry. For everything.”
Goro blinks. Then blinks again. “Why?” he chokes out, unable to hide his surprise.
Seeing his surprise, Niijima herself looks slightly taken aback. “Well, this whole time, we were working together. You were always by my side, and still, I had no idea the kind of life you were living, the choices you felt you had to make. It couldn’t have been easy. The fact that you’ve ended up here is proof of that. And it’s proof that I’ve failed you. As a mentor.” She hesitates for a moment. “As a friend.”
So rarely is Goro at a loss for words, after all that time he once spent practicing his reactions for the camera, that he feels himself flounder, drawing a complete blank on how to react. Mostly, he’s just… confused. Of all the adults who had ever done anything unjust to him, who he might’ve once childishly believed owed him reparations, she wasn’t one of them. And wasn’t it ironic that he wasn’t ever going to hear a word of apology from those people, save for his freshly lobotomized asshole of a father?
“You’re not my mentor, and you’re not my friend either,” says Goro. There’s no bite behind it, though—he means it matter-of-factly. “You don’t have any obligations towards me. Whatever’s wrong with me was there far before I met you, and you’re certainly not even remotely responsible for me choosing to end my own life. Which, as you can see, didn’t even pan out.” He gestures vaguely at himself.
There’s probably some kind of disconnect between what he’s saying and how it’s landing, because with every sentence he speaks she somehow looks more upset, more guilty. Goro sighs and runs a hand over his face. Honestly he hadn’t even factored in her reaction to any of this, so little was she on his mind outside of whatever plans he had once been orchestrating. But seeing her like this makes him feel guilty.
Still, the moment of vulnerability on her face doesn’t last. He supposes she and him have that alike. She shakes her head and sits up straighter.
“I understand that an apology isn’t particularly useful. Still, you deserve to hear it—that there are people who care about you. Going back to work after everything, I found myself missing your presence from time to time…” She let out a soft, dry chuckle under her breath. “I could never quite figure you out. You seemed nice and polite enough, but you often nagged at me, too—it was probably a bit of your true nature coming out, no? I remember one time, you told me that stress was bad for my skin, and I thought to myself, ah, if even a kid is noticing, then maybe I should take better care of myself. I stopped by a drugstore and bought a moisturizing cream on my way home.”
Goro doesn’t even remember saying that. He’d probably thrown a lot of passive-aggressive, carefully caustic remarks at both her and her younger sister, out of his own amalgamation of emotions—jealousy wasn’t quite right, because he’d thought himself above those petty emotions, but there was something in him that wanted what they had, some kind of familial tie that wasn’t filled to the brim with resentment, someone he could rely on, could come home to. He supposes, looking at her now, that he does have it in some way. She cares about him? She cares about him. The concept is so foreign that he doesn’t know what to do with it.
“You probably don’t remember, do you?” She laughs again, but this time it’s lighter. “Well, it does feel like ages ago. So much has happened since then.” She pauses, crossing one of her legs before leaning her elbow on her knee, so that she’s closer to him. He can’t exactly pull away—he’s got nowhere to go with the headboard pressed to his back. “I’ve heard that, after you turned yourself in and they gave you your sentence, you stayed at a shelter and did your community service there. One of the staff members who worked at the shelter was here, actually. Watanabe-san, I believe? She was the one who found you unconscious. She was devastated. She told me that you were one of the most upstanding volunteers she’d ever worked with, and that you reminded her of her son.”
Something twists in Goro’s chest. Watanabe Kaori was a short, stout woman in her early forties who had been working there since Goro had first stayed there as a child with his mother. That was a decade ago, and the high turnover meant most of the staff had left, but she had stayed, and against all odds, remembered him from when he was a kid. He hadn’t wanted this. He hadn’t wanted anybody to find him, had specifically planned it for the dead of the night when no one would be around. He had been eight years old when he’d found his own mother dangling lifelessly from the ceiling.
“Is this your strategy? To guilt me into staying alive?” Goro scowls. “I don’t have that much of a conscience. You should know this, considering you know exactly how many people I’ve killed or tried to kill. But if it makes you feel better, I’m not going to kill myself again. I have too much pride to try again at something I failed so miserably at.”
Niijima smiles. It’s disconcerting. “It’s good to know,” she says. “That you still have your pride, I mean. That’s an important thing to have.”
Goro, truly, doesn’t have much else.
“In any case, I certainly don’t mean to guilt you. I just wanted you to know. That there are people who would miss you if you truly were gone.”
Goro knows this. Too well. Sure, he hadn’t expected this from Niijima Sae, or from an employee at the shelter that he had probably had four to five full conversations with in the last two months. But—he thinks of a blue scarf in the dead of winter, of tear-stained eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, a larger-than-life saviour complex and misplaced sense of affection that had led to him being brought to life against his will—and finds himself taking comfort in the fact that Kurusu Akira doesn’t know about this. And that, if Niijima keeps her word, he will never know about this.
“Can I ask you something?”
Goro closes his eyes briefly. Wonders if she truly doesn’t believe him when he says he won’t try again, and that’s why she’s talking so much. “What?”
“Were you planning this for a long time?” She swallows. “Is that why you never told any of the other Phantom Thieves that you were alive in the first place?”
There’s a tightness in Goro’s throat. He scratches idly at the bandages around his neck. “I woke up in the middle of March,” he says. “After Shido’s Palace, I was supposed to have been in a coma, so that was what ended up happening, although I did retain my memories from the fake reality. The first thing I did was turn myself in, and I was slapped on the wrist with eight weeks of community service.” He laughed. “After everything I did—community service.” The rationale that the cops had given him was that Kurusu had already served the sentence while Goro was out cold, but they couldn’t exactly let someone who confessed walk free either. Goro remembers seething, unable to stand the fact that he’d let Joker win again.
“In the end, I just followed my original plan, that was all. I knew the crimes I’d committed, and I had no plans for my life past whatever punishment the law saw fit. I had no intention of living a life decided by someone else, and I still don’t.” He swallows. “So, no, it didn’t particularly occur to me to contact any of them.”
A lie. The first real lie he’d told tonight. He’d spent many, many nights at the shelter staring at Kurusu Akira’s contact information on his phone in the dead of the night, wondering. Wondering why someone like Akira had wished for him to be alive in the first place. Wondering what kind of look he’d wear on his face upon finding out—again—that Goro was alive against his will, that Goro had always planned to die, not immediately, but eventually. And realizing that maybe he’d rather not know the answer.
He looks up at Niijima Sae again. “Does that answer your question?”
Niijima nods. “That makes sense.” She pauses for a long moment, fiddling with the rings on her fingers. “If you truly don’t wish for any of your friends to know, then I’m willing to keep the secret for you.”
“They’re not my friends.”
She brushes right past his comment once again. “But only if that’s what you really want.” She pauses. “Have you thought about it? What you really want, from here on out?”
Goro presses a hand to his temple. “I just found out half an hour ago that my suicide attempt backfired spectacularly, so no, I haven’t thought about what I want to do with the rest of my life.”
Niijima laughs good-naturedly. It’s a relief, somehow. He doesn’t want to see her depressed again, and it’s strange, in a good way, to be able to talk openly about this without censoring himself. “Of course. I can understand that. You really do remind me of Makoto sometimes, you know? Even though you’re so different.”
Before Goro can ask her what the hell that even means, she shakes her head. “Anyway, you’ll have time to think about it. The nurses say they’d like to keep an eye on you for at least the next three days. I’d like to come back and visit, though—maybe not tomorrow, since I’ll have a lot of work to catch up on, but the day after, if that’s alright?”
“I’ll be here,” Goro deadpans. “Nowhere else for me to go.”
Niijima is still smiling faintly. “Before I leave, I wanted to give you one more thing.” She bends down and rummages around in her briefcase, then emerges with a convenience-store-branded plastic bag, out of which she pulls… a small tray of sushi? Goro frowns. Half of what she’s done tonight has been indecipherable, but this is the most confusing puzzle of all.
“You look confused,” says Niijima. “Perhaps you don’t remember this either, but last year, on your birthday, we went out for sushi together.”
Oh. Oh. This, he does remember. They’d gone to a rather pricey sushi restaurant near the precinct. He’d tried to order as little as possible, needing to mind his image as both a respectful younger coworker and a slim, handsome detective prince. The ootoro in particular had been delicious. She’d caught him eyeing it and ordered him another plate.
“And today…” Niijima glances at the clock. “As of four hours ago, you’ve officially turned nineteen.” She smiles. “I wasn’t able to get anything from the place we went to last year, not at this hour, so no ootoro for you this time. I’m sorry, but convenience store sushi will have to do.”
She pushes the tray towards him. He looks down at it like she’s just placed a small animal in his lap. Gingerly, he lifts up the lid, breaks the disposable chopsticks in half, scoops a roll into his mouth and chews. The rice is too dry, the seaweed is too wet, there’s nothing inside but imitation crab and the world’s saddest, smallest chunk of cucumber. It’s better than the ootoro. It’s the best sushi he’s ever had.
“...Akechi-kun?”
He doesn’t register what’s happening until he hears her panicked voice at his side, feels the tray of sushi gently pushed aside and replaced with a box of tissues. He takes one and clutches it in his fist. His hands are shaking and his face is wet and his shoulders are shaking, too. He’s tired, so fucking tired, and he’s alive.
The bed dips next to him. There’s a hand at his back and a shoulder at his side. Suddenly too exhausted to sit upright anymore, he leans his head into the crook of Niijima Sae’s neck and cries for the first time since he was eight years old. Slowly, Sae wraps her arms around him, as though he too is a small animal dropped unceremoniously into her lap that she doesn’t quite know what to do with. In the end, they sit like this for probably no longer than two minutes, but it feels like forever and a second all at once.
He feels the red-hot heat on his face when he finally pulls away. He opens his mouth to say something, anything. Sae looks at him, expectant but patient.
“You don’t have to come see me the day after tomorrow,” he says finally.
Sae shakes her head. “I know I don’t have to, but I want to.”
“No, I mean,” he takes a breath, swiping at his eyes and the mess of his bangs. “I’m sick of this shitty hospital room and this shitty convenience store sushi. I want to go back to the sushi place we went to last year.” Quieter, in a lower voice, he says, “With you.”
The corners of Sae’s eyes soften as she smiles. “Of course,” she says, extending her hand. “Then, it’s a deal.”
He shakes it.