Work Text:
After the first few times Akira had awoken in the middle of the night to an empty bed, he’d come to expect it, so much so that when he was roused by a stream of pale sunlight and rolled over to find Goro’s warm, still-sleeping body beside him, he would ascribe it meaning—today would be a good day. A lucky day, even, because ordinarily, if Goro wasn’t in bed, there was no guarantee he’d be in the house at all. In the beginning, he rarely was, and there was never any way to know when—or if—he’d be back.
Goro had had to be broken in, for lack of a better term. After the first time he'd come into Leblanc—wandering aimlessly, as if in a fugue state, is the way Sojiro had described it to Akira upon his return from the Super Muramasa—he'd continued to do so, lingering outside like a hungry stray until Akira had managed to collar him into a mature, adult conversation.
It'd be naive to think that was the end of it. Akira had anticipated the nighttime disappearances, held his breath for the weeks into months in which he was gone, had reminded himself that any day could be the last day he saw him, no matter how steadfastly he chose to believe otherwise.
And so, his stomach does a little leap now when his eyes spring open and a hand shoots out to collide with nothing. He smacks around a bit, finds the mattress yet to cool and still depressed slightly into the shape of a body. It dips further when he shuffles to align himself with the curves, then presses his face into Goro’s pillow, careful not to fall asleep again. Not that the kick drum of his heartbeat will let him.
Just in case, he raises his head enough to squint over at the nightstand. He can see—facedown and fuzzy in the darkness, but backlit by the moon bouncing off the wall—Goro’s phone. He reaches for it and tips it onto its side to tap the screen twice with his thumb. 03:44, and a candid of Akira in Leblanc as his lock screen, which Goro had set himself, after taking the photo himself, only to wince down at it whenever he unlocks his phone, as if Akira has been forced onto him. As if he’s been encumbered with him by some sanctimonious parasocialite reckoning himself morally superior. Or so he would probably say.
Akira sighs and lays the phone back down. If he’s only just gone, he’ll give him a few minutes.
Rolling onto his back to stare at the ceiling, he’s met with a long plane of black. Truth be told, he doesn’t really know what Goro thinks of him, because Goro doesn’t know that himself, not that he’d even communicate it if he did. He knows they love each other, but when has that ever been enough? Love has never stopped him leaving, didn’t stop him sacrificing himself. Twice. It’s never prevented him deciding what Akira could survive, never kept him from thinking his own presence is somehow optional. From insisting that, if his memories had been toyed with once, then who's to say the same wasn't happening again. And rather than talk to anyone, to share the hypotheses he so loved to build and hold firm all on his own despite how often he was wrong, he'd go out and test them, and, after doing god-knows-what, he'd drag himself back without a word.
His trial had been rough. Not because he didn't trust any of the help he was receiving, but because he didn't respect anyone who afforded him enough faith to listen to what he was saying in the first place. Unforthcoming, he'd entered every meeting with concrete enclosing his body, rime around his heart, and yet somehow left even more frozen-solid, the walls reinforced.
Once, he'd stood without knocking in the dim light of the building's entrance after having been missing for months. Akira, taking out the trash, had glimpsed his silhouette through the window and thrown the door open in a panic, legs turned to mush, and found him barefoot and sopping wet, haunted in a way he'd never looked before.
He'd held him, and Goro had fallen limply into a touch that had hitherto been reserved solely for fighting, and for sex.
He rarely disappeared after that.
From the kitchen, in the present, in the domesticity they'd fought for and almost lost, resounds a harsh whistle that sends Akira into a jolt. It's followed by metal scraping along more metal and a cupboard squeaking open then slamming just as fast. He feels a smile tug at his lips. He'll miss it when Goro finally learns the art of no longer living alone.
Goro had made Akira buy the record player, because for all his pretension and compulsive hoarding of old jazz, he'd never taken the extra step to actually enjoy them. He'd been quite persistent, citing trivialities like sound quality and aesthetics and Akira's "gauche" taste, though notably not the latter's grand total of zero vinyls to slot into the thing in the first place. But it rarely went unused, with many nights like tonight where the distance between bedroom and lounge fills with elegant notes that crackle at predictable intervals, dressed up in imperfection.
His movement from the hallway, to the door, to the folding of his arms and the slump of his body into the frame is all watched by the sullen red beacon of Goro's eyes. They don't budge at all as Akira, smiling, tilts his head and lets the hair Goro so often loves to wrap around his fingers and twirl and tug fall into his face. "There you are."
Goro keeps staring at him—scrutinises him—the way he always does when he's searching for words he isn't sure he should share. He foregoes them, after a while, and settles on a "did I wake you?" instead. It comes out surrounded by a somewhat accusatory sigh.
“You weren’t loud, or anything. I just notice when you’re gone," Akira says, then waits for a response. Goro doesn’t grace him with one, so he continues. “What’s up?”
A cushion gets knocked down as he shifts. “Couldn’t sleep," he says.
“Thinking?”
“Always.”
“About…?”
“Don’t play dumb, Akira," he snaps. He's put his mug down with too much force and a comparably violent eye-roll. The former sends a wave of coffee splashing over the rim and onto the table.
Of course, Akira knows this game, if it can even be called that. The one where he'll verbally dance around, fake-playful and breezily light-footed, to coax him to say what he means, to spell out something they both already know, of which they're both mutually aware. It isn't guilt—it's more like disgust; permanent, and always turned inwards. Curdling, hurting, corroding the very structure of his bones, directed at the parts of him that had decided Akira's life was worth exchanging for a perfunctory pat on the back, parts that had sunk deeper into the vat of blood Shido ordered him to keep on filling until they'd congealed, red and sticky, over all the ones that already knew how badly he'd fucked up.
Regret is a funny thing, asking you to separate yourself from your decisions. Goro had signed away his soul for a cushy apartment and a list of names; he thinks he deserves very little beyond having to continue living with that choice.
Akira thinks very little beyond having arrived in Tokyo two years too late.
His arms drop to hang at his sides, body deflating between them. “I’m over it, Goro. I’ve been over it.”
“I killed you," he says. It’s bitten and bitter and Akira can’t help feeling like he, just maybe, has slightly more of a licence to be upset about this.
He's not going to say that, of course. Feels guilty about wanting to, even.
“You didn’t kill me. If you’d killed me, I wouldn’t be standing here in our living room, and you wouldn’t be sat over there on our couch behind a mug with five little stars and a ‘Barista’s Cute, Would Come Again’ printed underneath them.”
It comes out smug; he brings a finger up alongside his words and points it in the direction of the table, as if either of them needed the aid. It's a stupid mug; a generic mug, and Akira would be lying if he said he hadn't bought it partially to diffuse moments such as these, frequent enough now to warrant the thing in the first place.
Goro's voice is an affected monotone. “I can see you trying not to laugh. It isn’t and has never been funny.”
“Sure, but it is true.” There's a flicker over his face that could've passed for a smile had it not been quashed into an even deeper scowl. Whatever, it was leaning sardonic anyway. “Do you need space?”
The very same scowl softens noticeably. He's learnt to actually consider these questions before deflecting and stubbornly sacrificing his feelings as a consequence.
“No. I want you here.”
“Okay.” Akira pads across the room, slippers making a soft scraping noise over the laminated flooring. Goro has always wanted carpet, something warm and insulated. But Akira prefers this—easier to clean. “Move over, then,” he says when he reaches him.
He does, though he clamps his arm against his side when Akira tries to wriggle under it, and draws his knees up to his chest until he's all curled-up in the corner of the couch, looking away. Looking at the wall.
After a long, long pause, he finally speaks. “Do you pity me? Is that all this is?”
“You… you, uh, might have to walk me through this one?”
“Not in November. I know that wasn’t… you," he grimaces, and Akira watches the memory rise and pass in the barely-there unfocusing of his eyes. “In the engine room, it was different. The way you looked at me, like I was making a terrible decision yet too blind to see it. And in that fake reality, you did it again. You looked at me like I was some pathetic… righteous, self-flagellating moron.” With the way he seethes those four words through his teeth, anyone would think Maruki was right there in the room and on the receiving end of them.
He sighs and leans forward, reaching for his coffee, though it's undoubtedly cold by now. Once it's picked up, he immediately puts it back down again, and instead covers his face with his palms, elbows planted on knees.
“I don’t want to keep you here," he says, measured and muffled, "if your only reason for staying is the more than sufficient evidence I’ve provided telling you I'm some sort of flight risk."
Yeah. It isn't the first time Goro had weaponised Akira's saviour-flavoured reputation to frame the parts of their dynamic for which he simply had no other language to explain. He figures it's unlikely to be the last, too.
“I don’t think that. It was probably disappointment, Goro," he says slowly, trying not to make it sound rehearsed. "I was disappointed, back then. A lot. With you, with my friends, with everything. With myself, because I knew how much better it all could be.”
Goro tries to interrupt. Akira continues over him before he reveals what explanations Akira could possibly have for his own disappointment, because they'd all be incorrect anyway. “Because—”
“—No. Because you're always saying and doing things that remind me how little you think of yourself.”
There's a silence, not so much thoughtful as it is annoyed.
Goro never expects to be noticed, not really.
Akira inches closer and cradles one of Goro's hands whilst the latter pretends not to care. He lets a thumb wander over his wrist. “Did you put this music on?”
“No. It was playing when I came in, actually,” he deadpans.
A laugh. “I always liked that about you.”
“I do hope you’re not referring to my sense of humour.”
“First of all, you’re actually pretty funny, you just take yourself way too seriously—case in point, that look you’re giving me right now. But, no—Jazz Jin, Penguin Sniper. Chess, in Leblanc. You’ve always been soooo pretentious. The aquarium, too. I mean, I did think that one was a little weird. Morgana said so as well.”
The aquarium, a date, filled with glass and water and jellyfish floating formless in every direction. Between them, Goro, though not yet his Goro, eighteen and illuminated in rivulets of blue that made his red eyes glow purple. They'd been trained on a lone crab, climbing the walls of its too-small enclosure, and Akira had realised, for the first time, just how much of the light in them was stolen—from his surroundings, from the script, from the practised plastic smile that never once reached further than the corners of his mouth.
He'd never wanted to kiss someone so badly before.
“I didn’t lie about the tickets. They were from a work colleague, as I said.”
He won't debate that; it doesn't matter. Instead, a wistful edge creeps into his tone. “You messaged me so late at night… I bet you threw your phone across the room after you hit send.”
“I did not.”
“Knew it. Still… I knew you were lying to us, I just didn’t know why. But it surprised me, really, how much truth was actually there, how the more we hung out, the easier you kept making it to see beneath the facade.” I wondered how no-one else had ever done the same. “I’d argue the only lie you really refused to cough up was that you don’t even like sweets.”
Goro scowls and, with no acknowledgement, takes his hand back to pick at a hangnail. “Do you have a point?” he mutters.
“Yes. My point is, you’re human. You like nerdy anime shows and board games and music. You sit up late at night pondering with a cup of coffee and a jazz record playing. None of that is new. You’ve always been this way, even when you were a weapon. Even when you thought you were just a puppet.” He says 'jazz' with a hint of incredulity, like it doesn't fit quite right. Like the act of taking the years Goro had spent being poked and prodded into a perfect assassin and reconciling them with the man sat before him, world-weary yet overly possessive of the kid he'd killed, was laughable. And really, in a lot of ways, it was.
The tragedy, Akira thinks, is that Goro had always been there. It’s just that nobody had ever bothered to get to know him.
“If you think I pay attention to you because you’re unreliable, you’re wrong. I pay attention to you because I like having you around. I notice when you’re gone because I don’t want you to leave.”
“I’ve literally murdered people in cold blood,” he snaps. His hands ball into fists and pulse with the need to hit something before he redirects them into his bangs.
Akira waits a breath, then another. “I wasn’t talking about the past. Besides, ‘in cold blood’ doesn’t make people behave the way you did.”
After Goro starts to work his jaw in lieu of a reply, Akira continues in a hushed voice. “You’ve done terrible things. You still deserve the chance to change. Or have you forgotten exactly what I used to get up to during our teenaged years?”
“…You’re one of the last people who should’ve forgiven me. Even Okumura and Sakura have stuck to their guns, after all this time.”
He doesn't refute that—Goro would refute him right back, and they'd lose whatever conclusion they're building towards tonight. Besides, he needs to hear it from their mouths—see it, in their actions. Words have ceased to mean much to both of them, after all.
"I worry about Futaba-chan…," Haru had said a few weeks back whilst pulling down the shutters in her cafe, as if having her eyes averted had given her strength to mention the unmentionable. "After blaming herself for so many years, she finally has someone to redirect the anger that all that lost time left her with. She's likely relieved, and horrified. But she won't talk about either. She won't talk about it at all…"
Akira had said nothing. The entire time Goro had been gone, then again when he'd been half-gone, she'd come to him at intervals and sheepishly ask if he wanted her to find him, before laughing it off and changing the subject. Clearly, she'd already done so, and was struggling to keep it to herself.
He never pushed, even knowing how much she was fishing for an offered outlet. Selfish as he felt about it, he wanted Goro to come back himself, on his own terms. Akira had done enough chasing; he wanted to be chosen for once.
Through the rattle of coffee grounds and the steady, melodic pouring of water, they'd both remained silent. It wasn't until she'd shimmied into a booth and slid a mug across the table to Akira that she spoke again, nose tinged red from the draught, fingers cupping her own steaming drink. "I don't want to forgive him, I just wish I could learn to trust him. I see how happy he makes you, Akira."
No-one had ever said 'forgive'; they'd all decided enough.
Akira shrugs. “Maybe. But I don’t regret my decisions, and I know you don’t either. I’d spend the rest of my life reminding you of that, if you’d let me. I’d also spend all night holding you, but we both know how that goes.”
“…I’ll never understand you.”
“Mmm, then you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure me out.”
Without waiting for a reply, he pushes Goro further into the couch by his shoulders and slides over him to straddle his thighs. Warm fingers traverse the skin of his belly, dragging the shirt hem with them, and settle atop the scars on his chest Akira swears are sexy. Goro always rebuts with the accusation that he must’ve been dropped as a child.
The skin is raised, taut under the strain of keeping him alive, tectonically shaped where he’d been smashed to pieces and thrown back together again his entire miserable life, and even a bullet hadn’t been able to finish the job.
His heart beats heavy beneath Akira’s fingertips. “I do wonder how you managed to survive, though,” he whispers, and it’s close, but it isn’t quite awe. Because he knows, had always known, that nothing would ever be enough to take Goro away from him.
And, really, Goro had killed him. He had—cognition or not, he’d put a bullet through Akira’s head and slotted the gun between the fingers of his corpse. From his mind, it was all the same, and so, logically, should it be from Akira’s. Sure, he sympathised; he understood. But he was nowhere close to the stereotyped generosity plastered over his every move. Sat in the dingy metallic darkness of the interrogation room, he'd felt, at best, physically battered and bruised; at worst, terrified the shoddily thrown together plan would fall through, and betrayed that for all his persistent patience Goro hadn't, in the end, changed his mind.
The worse, ugliest truth of it all, lodged between two lesser evils, was that nothing and nobody had ever made him feel so desired.
He leans in. Goro's palms are large and warm on his legs, then his hips, then around his jaw and tangling into his curls; he pries Akira's mouth open with his own and spins him round to push him into the cushions.
The record ends. A periodic clicking scores their movements as the needle loops uselessly on its groove.
He doesn't realise sleep has claimed him until a pressure at the crown of his head is stirring him awake. It glides down, replaced by something softer as fingers settle between his top two vertebrae. “Let’s go back to bed,” Goro whispers under his breath and into his hair.
It’s the closest he’s been all night, but Akira’s greedy. He shimmies closer still, buries his face into the crook of his neck, and takes a deep breath of what smells undeniably, indescribably like home.
“Carry me?” he mumbles, vision all blurry with sleep. His mouth tastes funny from where he’s slipped in and out of it.
Goro huffs. Says, “you’ve got legs, haven’t you?”, then shifts around on the couch to scoop him up. His inner elbow digs into the backs of Akira’s knees, so he winds his arms around his neck to lift some of his own weight, then kicks his dangling legs about and hums happily through a grin.
“Stop that. You’re not a kid.” Goro says, and punctuates it by readjusting his grip and hoisting Akira higher in a way that makes the whole room briefly shake, waking him up completely.
“Don’t have to be a kid to enjoy you being boyfriendly,” he jeers once recovered.
He doesn’t need the light to know Goro’s face has morphed into a half-irate, half-incredulous scowl. “That isn’t a word.”
It isn’t a struggle to carry Akira to bed, and he’s done it enough times now to successfully navigate their apartment in the dark. Once they reach the mattress, bathed in a moonlight bisected by the curtains’ shadow, Akira expects to be thrown, and accordingly braces for impact. Goro doesn't throw him; has never thrown him. He lays him down gently, like a chōchin to the water on the final night of Obon. And then he stays above him, staring down at him, and Akira smiles a smile he knows won’t be returned as he's shoved onto his side by his shoulder—repositioned so Goro can climb into bed, curl against his back, and pull the duvet over the both of them.
Akira rolls over to face him and takes hold of his wrists, pulling his arms up to curl loosely around his own torso. Goro doesn't move them, though his eyes are closed and a thin furrow forms above them.
“Goro?”
He grunts, not opening his eyes. “Hm?”
A little smirk audibly colours his voice. “Do you want me to make you pancakes in the morning?”
The silence that ensues is long and, after Akira moves closer to smother his face in Goro's chest, filled only by suppressed, broken giggles.
“Fuck you,” Goro eventually says, but pulls him in all the same.