Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s the day of the party, and it is once again supposed to rain.

Supposed to downpour, actually. Goro isn’t sure where all this ridiculous rain is coming from, and while it wasn’t very annoying at first, it’s now beginning to get a little excessive. Whenever he gets home he has started to make a habit of giving his poor little umbrella a sympathetic glance before putting it away. 

He had stayed at Akira’s apartment overnight again, because now that he’s been here a couple of times, he has realized that it is far nicer and more inviting than his own apartment. And it’s not just because Akira’s here—Goro’s own apartment is simply duller, emptier, and more miserable no matter who is there with him. He doesn’t think painting the walls neon yellow would even do anything to brighten it up.

It’s just miserable.

But that’s a problem to think of another time.

It’s mid morning, and the sun is shining through the window onto his and Akira’s face. The sun won’t be there for long, Goro knows, so he tries his hardest to not be irritated by the fact that it is so horrifically bright. 

At the very least, it’s waking him up. They need to get up early today, because Akira apparently promised Yusuke he’d buy food or balloons or something—he can’t remember which one—and hadn’t gotten around to doing it last night. He spent the entire night doing laundry, and Goro spent the entire night doing it with him, staring at the stupid machines tumble around while they sat on little uncomfortable stools and played a game of chess on their phones. Goro won the game, which meant that Akira had to pay for the laundry. 

Not that Goro minded doing that. Wasting time is a luxury, and a rather foreign one to him at that.

“Akira,” Goro whispers, uselessly, because he knows that Akira is already awake. “We should get up soon.”

No movement. This happens quite frequently, so he’s not going to give up very easily. 

“A-ki- ra ,” Goro tries again, jostling his shoulder this time. “Come on, get up, sit up, open your eyes.”

Akira takes his pillow and puts it over his head in a very huffy fashion. “We have all day to do the stuff Yusuke told me to do,” he says, voice all muffled by the pillow. “I want to sleep more.”

“Yes, but it’s supposed to rain eventually. We should take advantage of the sun—”

“What has the sun ever done for me?”

Goro’s eyebrows knit themselves together. Never before has he heard such a strange statement as that one. “This is no time to be angry at the sun. Come on! You’re already awake as it is!”

Still nothing.  

There’s probably a better way to do this. Goro sits up, flattens his hair and looks around the room for a few moments before his eyes land on a few extra pillows sitting in the corner of the room. Truthfully, he still isn’t sure why they’re there, or what they could possibly be used for—the pillows are ugly, not soft, and do not match any of the furniture in the entire apartment. They’re like the fabric equivalent to the Voynich Manuscript.

With a sigh, Goro clambers out of all the blankets and gets up. He stands by the end of the bed and yanks the blankets off with one swift pull, and they flutter in a sad pile into the floor. 

This gets Akira’s attention, but he still doesn’t sit up. “Hey, what—” 

Before he can say anything else, Goro starts tossing all the corner pillows on top of him, one at a time. There’s quite a few of them, thankfully, or else this would be a pretty useless tactic. If Akira knocks any of them to the floor, Goro simply picks them back up and tosses them back onto him.

It doesn’t take much struggling for Akira to give in. He sits up, still huffy, waving his hands all over the place. “Okay, okay! I’m awake now. The pillows have woken me up. I’m standing, see?”

And, as he said, he does stand. 

“Is someone sleepy?” Goro asks, obviously teasing, but Akira simply gives him an unamused look in response. Perhaps at another time this would have prompted Goro to return a look of his own, but instead, he simply smiles and gives Akira a pat on the head. 

“I don’t understand how you can be such a morning person,” Akira says after he’s been patted. “This is so painful.”

Goro can’t help but disagree at being called a morning person. He doesn’t really see himself as a morning person, or an afternoon, evening, night person—he’s always just done whatever had to been done whenever the time of day was appropriate. He’s not a big fan of any times of day. 

A few years back, each part of the day typically had its own set function. The mornings were for school or television. The afternoons were also for school or television. The evenings were for homework, detective work, et cetera, and the nights were for doing whatever Shido asked him to do. Most of the time, all of these tasks were pretty miserable and draining. 

After considering this, Goro feels the need to at least vaguely explain it to Akira, for posterity’s sake. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that I’m a morning person. It’s just the schedule I’ve been formulated into and it has simply stuck with me.” 

“Huh, well.” Akira fishes through his wardrobe before continuing, and leans down to pick up a towel. “Maybe one day I’ll be good at waking up.”

Goro laughs. “Yes, perhaps one day.”

It took them a while to finally leave the apartment. 

Goro is wearing a t-shirt with some American beach logo on it; Akira explained that Ann’s parents had given it to him after they went on a trip. He thinks that’s perhaps a bit strange, for parents to be giving gifts to young people that are not their own children, but then again, Goro doesn’t know whether or not he can be someone to judge that.

The important part is that the t-shirt is just slightly too big on him, and so he’s had to tie the side of it with a rubber band, and it’s making him feel extremely self conscious.

“You look fine,” Akira says to him while they’re in the grocery store. They’re currently looking at tons of boxes of cookies, and the air conditioner happens to be right above them and is turning Goro’s limbs to ice. 

“I know that I’m physically attractive, it’s just the clothes ,” Goro grits, examining the price on something.

Akira laughs a little too loud. Some of the customers turn their heads and look at the two of them. Goro doesn’t know what he said that was so funny. “The clothes look fine. You picked the shirt out yourself, so why are you complaining?”

“Because I wasn’t aware of how bothered I’d be by the size until now,” he explains, monotonous.

“Well, grumpy, you won’t be wearing it all day. Help me choose something here so we can go back home. You can change into something else then.”

Goro huffs but helps Akira pick something nonetheless. He knows he’s being overdramatic; hardly anyone is going to pay attention to him nor his shirt. 

Though he does find it mildly interesting that Akira has started referring to his apartment as home. As Goro knows, not every house is a home, nor is every apartment a home, et cetera et cetera, and the fact that Akira has started saying home is—he doesn’t know what to do with the implications of that. 

And, to add to it, Akira always seems to say it in a way that implies it’s Goro’s home too. He’s not sure if that’s accidental or on purpose at this point and does not have the gall to ask just quite yet. 

“How about these?” Akira asks, holding out a container with some cat shaped cookies. They’re all colored in a strange way. 

“Doesn’t this seem a bit obnoxious? Would Yusuke mind?”

They both stare at the cookies, contemplating. Goro thinks about how he called Yusuke by his given name and frowns. 

“I think it’ll be fine,” Akira says with a shrug. “And if it isn’t… I’ll just buy new ones, or something.”

“You’re willing to do that?”

“Guess so.” A sigh. “Should we get more than one? I feel like this is a shitty contribution.”

“Perhaps we should look at things other than cookies,” Goro suggests, looking up and down the aisle to see what other options they have. 

“Like what?”

“Hmmm.” He’s truthfully not too sure what types of things are appropriate for events like this. “Hmmm.” 

Additionally, he isn’t sure what to expect from this party. It could be anything at all, really. Goro could walk in and Yusuke might have painted the entirety of Leblanc bright orange and have all the decorations be oranges and he would only be slightly surprised.

It’s the first thing Goro apparently thinks up in his head, though, and for some reason, it has him quietly laughing. Akira looks at him and raises an eyebrow and in a moment Goro has composed himself once again. 

“Did you… see something funny?” Akira asks, appearing both concerned and amused. 

“No, no, nothing funny. I was just remembering something.” It’s not important enough to share, so Goro segues with it. “What about fruit?”

“What do you mean, ‘what about fruit?’”

“Would that be something that we could buy?”

“Uh.” Akira scratches his cheek. “Yeah, I think that’d probably be fine. Do you have something in mind?”

“Oranges,” Goro says immediately, smiling. 

And they buy the oranges and cookies. 

They also buy two popsicles, because it’s hot and because Goro caught Akira wistfully staring at them through the freezer door for a good few seconds. Akira bought the food because he said Yusuke had specifically asked him to do the buying, and Goro couldn’t refute that, so he bought the popsicles instead. 

They had bought the food at the grocery store just around the corner from Leblanc. It doesn’t take them long to head to the cafe and dump all of the supplies onto one of the tables. Sojiro, being the genial man he is, closed early, and so they didn’t have to worry about making a mess. “Yusuke said to leave the stuff here and he’ll do… whatever it is he’s gonna do with it in a little while. Apparently he doesn’t want anybody to see how he’s gonna set everything up,” Akira explains, ripping open the wrapping around his popsicle. 

“I suppose that’s fair,” Goro says, unwrapping his own as well, albeit in a far more mild way than Akira had. “Do you have any more chores to do, then?”

“Oh, they’re not chores… ”

“Would you prefer if I called them errands?” Goro asks.

“No, because that word makes me feel like a middle-aged man.” Akira sighs and stares at his popsicle. “I have no idea what flavor this is supposed to be.”

Goro takes a seat on top of one of the booth tables and gestures for Akira to hand over his popsicle. “Isn’t it supposed to be melon?” he asks, staring at it.

“That’s what the package said, but it kind of tastes like… bananas, I guess? I can’t really tell. Maybe my taste buds are fading.”

Because there’s only one thing he can do to confirm Akira’s statement, Goro tastes the popsicle. He makes a face, wrinkling up his nose and handing it back over. “It does taste like bananas,” he says grimly. “Bananas… left out for a few days too long.”

“Well, I guess it’s fine. I’m gonna eat it anyway.” Akira huffs. “It could be worse. Could be like the takoyaki—”

“Shush,” Goro interrupts, waving his hand around. “I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

“Don’t you? I can refresh your—”

More hand waving. “Shush, shush!” Goro knows how fond Akira is of bringing up that moment, but he isn’t upset by it or anything. In fact, he himself thinks it’s a funny thing that happened, he just has no idea how to react to jokes about it besides in this vaguely embarrassed way. “I remember now! No memory refreshing is needed.”

Akira laughs some more. He’s been doing a lot of that today. “Glad to hear,” he says, obviously pleased with himself.

It’s nice, Goro thinks truthfully. It’s nice to be able to laugh at himself and have others laugh at him too in a way that doesn’t feel like there’s shame hidden behind it. It’s nice, and new, and freeing, and something he hasn’t ever really had the chance to experience before now.

Goro clears his throat. He’s trying to get rid of his habit of overanalyzing absolutely everything. “Anyway, that aside…”  he begins, “I think we should head back now and change. I’d also really like to shower.”

Akira nods, staring sadly at his popsicle. “Let’s get going, then, before Yusuke gets here and kicks us out.”

“Is he on his way?” Goro asks, sliding off of the table and down to the ground. Akira takes his hand the moment he’s standing and for a moment, Goro thinks that something is wrong, but one look at his face tells him that there isn’t anything wrong at all.

Goro has always had the problem of assuming that the worst possible scenarios are the only possible scenarios. He knows, though, that he doesn’t have to anticipate those every time he sees Akira’s face, every time he hears him laugh and every time he sees his crooked tooth when he smiles. Goro knows that for now, it’s better to live in the present, despite how self-help-advice-book it sounds.

“Yeah, he’ll be here soon,” Akira says. “So I guess we should go.”

“Guess so,” Goro replies, and they head back out, hand in hand, mumbling about the popsicles.

  This time around, Goro goes back to his actual apartment, because that’s where all of his nicer clothes are. 

Besides that, he’s got to do a little bit of tidying up. He hasn’t spent much time in his apartment; at least, he hasn’t been spending very much time consciously in his apartment. He’s hardly there during the day and at night time, if he sleeps here, that’s all that he does. Sometimes he showers. Sometimes he rearranges things under the illusion of cleaning to make himself feel better.

He hates his apartment. He’s started hating it now more than he has ever before.

Nevertheless, he doesn’t have any choice but to stop by so that he can pick up some clothes and organize a few things that have been in disarray for just a bit too long, namely the dishes and cups strewn all over the place.

He wastes no time, though, and is out the door in a mere twenty minutes. He hasn’t put his clothes on yet, either—he plans on doing that back at Akira’s apartment. Instead he simply shoved them all into a bag.

The train ride is long, long, long and quiet, as it usually is. 

When Goro rides the train, those are the times when he truly has to wonder whether or not he’s put himself on the right path. He has noticed that he always thinks about things along these lines when he rides on the train. It’s probably because traveling places with his bike was so distracting—it left little room for thinking—while taking the train provides no distraction. For him personally, at least.

Goro remembers quite clearly how much he imagined jumping in front of the train during the time he worked under Shido. He remembers. He could never forget, because it was a feeling all over his body in addition to a feeling in his brain. It became physical, almost, and that was the worrisome part at the time. It was as though the discomfort would go away if only he jumped. If only he got hit. If only he— 

If only.

But he never jumped, and Goro isn’t sure what to make of that. On one hand, he’s relatively happy where he is right now. He’s never felt this good his whole life, and it’s refreshing and Goro doesn’t think he would trade it for anything else. But on the other hand—

That doubtful piece of himself is still gnawing at his skull.

He can’t make it go away.

He exhales when the train comes to a stop, not realizing that he had been holding his breath, and exits onto the platform. It takes him less than a minute to mentally settle himself and then is on his way back to Akira’s apartment, clothes in his bag and frown slowly dissolving from his face. The train ride is over. He is returning to reality. He is returning

Goro takes the stairwell up to the apartment, left foot, right foot, left, right, until he’s made it in one piece and sighs thankfully.

He steps into the apartment, gives an innocuous glance to an animal statue that’s keeping the door open, and heads down the hall.

The door to Akira’s room is open, as it usually is—he prefers keeping it open, he likes having a vantage point or something, as had been explained—and Akira is sitting on his bed, staring at his phone. A shirt is tossed on top of his head.

For the shortest, briefest of moments, something seems off. Something seems as though it just isn’t right.

Something...

Goro pushes the thought aside, telling himself that he’s overthinking and that nothing is out of the ordinary. “I’m back,” he says, a bit slowly.

Akira picks the shirt off from on top of his head and throws it to the floor. “Oh, hey.” He stands. “Got your clothes? Did you…  not shower?”

“Yes, I’ve got them.” Goro shakes his bag full of stuff and then sets it down on the bed. “And no , I didn’t, because I figured I’d just do it here. Unless you’d prefer—”

“No, you’re fine, don’t worry. I was just wondering was all.” 

“Why is the front door open?”

“Huh? Oh, that’s not because of me or anything. I think Ann is taking out trash or something. Doing laundry? I’m not sure. She left it open for some reason.”
“Well, all right, then. Do you mind if I leave this here?” Goro asks, gesturing at his bag of items.

“You can put it wherever you want, honestly. My room is like… an object graveyard.”

“An… object graveyard?”

“Yeah, there’s just stuff everywhere.” Akira spreads his arms out in a swimming motion.

“It’s kind of charming, though,” Goro says, and he’s being truthful about it. Akira’s messiness was, admittedly, a bit of an annoying thing at first, but now it’s become inconceivably delightful. “The object graveyard aside, would you like to shower now?”

“I was going to let you go first,” Akira mumbles. It seems that he has returned to looking at his phone again.

Once more, Goro cannot shake the feeling that something is off. He hates that he can’t put his finger on it, because until he can, it’s going to be nothing more than this baseless paranoia.

“I—well, I thought… otherwise.”

Akira tosses his phone to the end of his bed and laughs out his nose. “Does the detective need help washing his hair?”

Goro lets out a laugh. “Ew,” he says. “That was awful phrasing.”

“Oh, well, you know.” Akira stands up, dusts off something invisible from his pants, and smiles. “I like making things purposefully inelegant.”

That was definitely the truth.

After sitting around for a good while, post-shower and playing half of a game of chess on their phones, Goro and Akira finally decide to get ready. Time has passed at an alarming rate today—it’s already nearing the evening. Goro doesn’t exactly know where time goes when he’s with Akira, but wherever goes, it must be stockpiling.

That aside, the two of them are getting ready for this party, and the clothes that Akira has picked out for himself truly encapsulate purposeful inelegance . 

He’s got on perhaps the most frilly and ridiculous looking white blouse-type-of-thing Goro has ever seen. It is so frilly that it has ended up making him look a bit like a pirate, especially because he’s also wearing horrifically old black pants. It is an absolute wonder where he could have possibly purchased both of these, and for what purpose, but the fact of the matter is that they were hanging up in his wardrobe just like any other clothes would be.

Goro can’t help himself. He has to ask. “Why do you own these?”

Akira is either feigning obliviousness or being genuine about it, because he looks around his room and then down at his clothes. “What, the stuff that I’m wearing?”

“Yes, the stuff that you’re wearing. ”

“Oh, well, you know.” Vague hand gestures. “Me and Ann just kind of… bought them one day. They were ninety percent off, so I figured that I might as well.”

Goro stares at him, mouth open slightly, in awe. I might as well is the excuse he gave as to why he purchased pirate clothing.

“I know that it looks stupid! That’s why I got them.”
“Is that so?” Goro muses, mostly to himself. “Am I supposed to wear something tacky too, then? Is that what this party is going to be?”

“I’m just wearing this because the party counts as an excuse for me to finally show off these stupid clothes. I have a regular t-shirt on underneath this, anyway.”

“Aren’t you going to get… sweaty? With all these layers?”

“I mean, maybe.” Akira looks at himself again. “Probably. But it’s fine. I can take the top shirt off whenever I want.”

“I, um, suppose you can.”

“Do you not want me to wear it at all? Are you going to be too embarrassed to stand next to me on the train if I wear this?” Akira smirks.

Goro pauses mid-reach for his shirt, hand frozen inside his bag. “I never said that,” he replies, indirect as ever.

“I’m touched,” Akira says with a smile, placing a hand over his heart dramatically.

Goro holds in his laugh as he puts on his shirt. It’s a very plain and boring white button-up shirt with a slightly wrinkled collar that he doesn’t have the time to throw a fit about. He’s also wearing black pants to complete the ensemble. Truthfully, it’s more or less the same as every other outfit he wears, the only difference is that this shirt and these pants are slightly more expensive.

He drops his hands to his sides and looks into the mirror, then sighs.

“Hey, you look like me, but if my clothes were normal,” Akira says, putting his arm around Goro’s shoulder and pushing up his glasses with his free hand. 

“Like a watered-down Akira?” Goro mumbles, hardly paying attention to what he’s saying.

Honestly, though, looking in the mirror together like this—they could pull off being each other’s sidekicks, depending on whatever the story is. Something about that is kind of nice, Goro thinks.

“Should we go?” Akira asks, removing his arm and bending down to pick up stray clothes that have been littered around. He tosses them back onto his bed and looks Goro in the eye through the mirror.

“I suppose we should, yes,” he says, answer slower than he had meant it to be. “Do you have an umbrella?”

“Yeah, Ann left it by the front door.” Akira waves his hand to indicate that Goro can make his way out of the bedroom, which he does, right after he slips his wallet into his pocket. This pair of pants in particular has very thin pockets and he had to remove a large quantity of coins from the wallet in order for it to not look so stupid and bulky. He hopes he won’t forget to put them back in later tonight. 

Goro picks up the umbrella that Ann had left for them by the door—it’s an extremely bright green color; he cannot imagine that it belongs to her—and looks at Akira as he undoes the velcro. “Do you know if we’re the last ones to… Ah.” 

He’s trailed off accidentally. The corners of his mouth twitch upwards, and Akira puts on an expression of concern.

“Do I know if we’re the last to what?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.

“To, um, leave. For the party. I apologize, you just look very silly with that shirt on, and I had forgotten already.” Goro turns to open the door while he says this, mostly because he’s trying to hide his smile.

Akira, of course, likely notices it, but all he does is laugh and shove Goro out into the rain before he has the chance to open up the umbrella.

They are, shockingly, the last to arrive at Leblanc. Akira shuts the door as indiscreetly as he can, not wanting to draw attention to their lateness, and Goro faces the Phantom Thieves.

A good number of them haven’t even noticed their arrival, because they’re all busy doing… other things with one another. Goro wasn’t sure what to expect of this “party,” but he supposes that what he’s looking at right now isn’t anything particularly shocking.

Everyone is dressed a little nicer than usual—except Akira, of course, he’s wearing his pirate costume or whatever it’s supposed to be—and most of them are seated at one of the booths, looking at something in the center of the table. Futaba and Yusuke are the only ones not situated with everyone else, Futaba because she’s getting herself a drink, and Yusuke because— 

“I stood here and waited for you,” he says, almost haughtily not but quite, as he stares at Goro and Akira dead in the eyes. “I was worried you wouldn’t come.”
Akira grimaces. “I would have said something if we couldn’t come. We just ended up taking our ti—” 

“What are you wearing?” comes a sudden voice from behind. Yusuke moves slightly and Futaba comes into view with her brows furrowed, eyeing Akira’s clothes very dutifully. That seems to be her thing.

“Do you like it?” Akira asks, flashing a smile. 

“You look like cake frosting.”

“I personally thought he looked like a pirate,” Goro says. “But now that you’ve said it, cake frosting is appropriate as well.”

“Yeah, and you look like Akira, but like… steam rolled. Kind of.” Futaba purses her lips. Somewhere during their short conversation, Yusuke apparently lost interest and walked away to join everyone else at the booth. 

Futaba crosses her arms. “So… are you going to break the news today like you said you would?”

Akira makes a face. “What news?”

“You know, the…” Futaba waves her hands wildly in the direction of Goro and Akira, “...dating thing you have going on. It’d be a pretty opportune time to do that.”

Goro hits himself over the head with a metaphorical brick. He had forgotten about that. In all honesty, he had forgotten not only about that, but also the fact that he wanted to take this party as a moment to talk to all of the Thieves openly about everything that had happened. Maybe he had gotten so distracted by that chess game earlier, or by Akira’s clothes, or maybe he’s trying to make excuses and is in actuality just avoiding the subject, but— 

—the point is, he had forgotten. Unfortunately.

He has to pretend like he hasn’t, though. “Oh, right. I was going to… say something about it later on. I was hoping to address a few things, but wasn’t sure whether or not this would be a good time to do that.”

Futaba pats him on the shoulder, and it’s a little awkward because she’s so short. “Well, good luck with that.” She looks at Akira. “Are you okay? You look a little pale.”

Akira is staring at the booth where everyone else is seated, and—Futaba is right. He does look pale.

Something is definitely, definitely off. 

Goro puts his hand on Akira’s back and repeats Futaba’s question, because he hadn’t answered it the first time around.  

Akira blinks a few times. “Oh, uh… I’m okay, don’t worry. Just hungry, I guess.” Pause. He takes hold of Goro’s hand. “Let’s sit down with everyone else, yeah?”

“All right,” Goro says quietly, giving what he hopes is a smile that doesn’t convey the worry he is feeling.

He lets Akira lead him to the booth and, after what is potentially the most overwhelming flurry of greetings, the two of them slide into the seat. Goro is almost comically squashed next to Haru, and he is trying his very best to give her as much space as he possibly can because he still isn’t sure what she thinks about him.

Goro looks at the center of the table to discover a big posterboard with various drawings of sorts spread out on it. At the moment, Ryuji is drawing a very misshapen skull in the bottom left corner.

“What’s this for?” Goro asks nobody in particular, but he supposes that technically the question was directed towards either Akira or Haru, because those are the people sitting next to him, and therefore the only people likely able to hear him over all the talking.

“Yusuke told us to draw our codenames,” Haru says, voice calm and smooth to an almost startling degree. “As some sort of project, I suppose.”

“Ah.” Goro nods, but doesn’t look at her when he does. It seems a little awkward, ending the conversation right there, and so he fishes around his head for something to continue talking about. “Did he mean that in a literal sense?”

Next to him, Goro feels Akira clutching at his arm underneath the table, in a manner that almost seems desperate. He tries very hard not to frown.

“What do you mean?” Haru asks.

“Um—did he mean draw them literally?” 

“Oh, well, I suppose he didn’t mean it in one particular way or another. Ryuji’s was Skull, as you know, so it makes sense for him to draw a skull, but mine was Noir, so… I just drew a cinema camera and colored it in.”

Goro admits in his head that that is a pretty creative idea. He looks down at the poster again and spots Haru’s camera near the center of the page, right next to a queen chess piece, and smiles. He’s not sure why.

Ryuji continues on drawing his skull and Ann continues to make fun of how bad he is at drawing; amidst this chaos, Goro turns his head to face Akira and gives him what is hopefully a serious look. “Are you okay?” he asks, pointing at their interlocked arms with his eyes.

The answer Akira gives is much too immediate. “I’m okay,” he says. “Like I said, I think I’m just hungry.”

“Do you w—”

“Sorry, Akechi-kun, do you mind getting up for a second?” Haru interrupts with a shoulder tap. “Makoto wants to get something to eat.”

Goro stretches his neck. He had almost failed to notice Makoto sitting there, stuck between the wall and Haru, and he quickly nods, stumbling out of the booth along with Akira, who continues to grip Goro’s arm as if his life depends on it.

Outside, a clap of thunder echoes through the sky.

Goro isn’t oblivious, clearly. He can tell when something is wrong; he can tell that something is bothering Akira—that something has been bothering him since he woke up today—and it has absolutely nothing to do with being hungry. 

Morgana is nowhere in sight, and Makoto is busy with other things. For now, he’s just going to have to keep his eye on— 

“Goro, I’m gonna go to the bathroom and then get something to eat,” Akira mumbles, releasing his grip on Goro’s arm in near slow motion. 

He has just barely a split second to decide the best way to respond to this: be forward and ask what’s really wrong, or play along with it and make sure to watch him for the rest of the evening. Goro decides on the second option for now. “All right,” he says slowly. “Could you get me something, too? Anything’s fine.”

There. Now Akira has—a task of sorts, to make sure he doesn’t disappear, like Morgana said he sometimes does. It really does seem like he’s about to do that.

“Sure, sure,” Akira replies, heading off to the bathroom.

Before Goro has a moment to himself to go over all of Akira’s behaviors, there is a hand on his shoulder. He flinches.

“Oh, sorry for startling you,” Haru says as Goro turns around to face her. “I was just wondering if you had some time to talk.”

For the first time, Goro looks very closely at Haru. 

She is wearing a very nice cream colored dress that puffs out a bit around her waist, and the end has a little lace pattern. Goro thinks that her hair might be a little longer than it used to be, but then again, it also might be shorter. He also can’t tell if she is wearing blush or if her cheeks are naturally the shade of pink that they are right now.

Haru is like a mystery to Goro.

Haru, whose father saw her as not much more than a means for profit, and whose father treated his company employees like garbage, and who was affiliated with Shido. Haru, who, for some strange reason, Goro has never been able to get a completely comprehensive reading on. It isn’t as though he thinks that her head is full of air; it’s the complete opposite. Haru is a kind of intelligent that is so rare that Goro doesn’t know how to act around her.

He has been quiet just a moment too long.

“Of course,” he replies, hoping to sound as natural as possible despite his nervousness.

Haru nods, smiles. It doesn’t look rehearsed or fake and Goro wonders how she’s doing that. “I suppose… we should try and find a quiet place to sit, don’t you think? Though I’m not sure how possible that is…” 

She glances over at Futaba, who is now standing on the table.

Goro laughs through his nose. “We can just sit at this corner seat, if that works for you?”

Haru seems to think this is fine because she takes a seat at the booth Goro gestured to without any fuss. She crosses her legs underneath the table and folds her hands together on top of her lap and gives a sweet smile.

Goro sits down across from her.

Silence.

He knows that his track record as to how he perceives the Phantom Thieves has never been a smooth one, but he expected her to be much more hostile towards him. Maybe she is and he simply cannot read her expression, but—nevertheless, their interaction is not going the way he thought it would.

He supposes, though, that Haru must be an expert in this area. Even moreso than himself.

“You first, please,” he says, gesturing with a hand.

“Oh, I was going to go first anyway, I was just gathering my thoughts.” Another smile. That’s more like what Goro hoped. 

He wants her to be blunt.

Goro nods. “My apologizes.” 

“Not a problem. Listen, Akechi-kun…” She sighs. “I’m not sure what other people might have told you, but I don’t hate you, okay?”

“Oh, um—all right.” 

“I mean, I certainly can’t say that I’m your biggest fan or anything… but I don’t hate you. I’m not going to forgive you, though.”

“That’s understandable.”

“When you first came into Leblanc—you know, when Akira broke the cup and everything—I was sure that I hated you. Or, I guess… I was sure that I was supposed to hate you. You’ve caused me and my friends a lot of agony.”

Goro says nothing.

“But… I could tell, from the way your eyes were, that you’ve caused yourself a lot of agony too. You don’t have to confirm or deny that, it’s just based off your appearance and how you were carrying yourself at the time.”

He continues to use short phrases. “I see.”

“You look a lot better now, by the way. Um, anyway—I both fault you and don’t fault you for killing my father. I understand that you were being manipulated, and in my heart I know that you really didn’t have many options, but at the same time…” She trails off, biting her lip.

Goro thinks he can finish this one for her. “It’s different because he’s blood related. Correct?”

Haru nods. “Yes, something along those lines. And I don’t doubt that my father was a terrible man, either. I can’t quite explain my feelings on the matter. But it seems like you understand what I’m trying to say.”

“Somewhat, yes.” Goro thinks about Shido. He’s not sure the relationship is exactly the same.

“Good, I’m glad. Um… haha.”

He raises an eyebrow. “‘Haha?’”

“I wasn’t expecting this to go so well… I thought I’d lose my temper. Either that, or I thought you’d lose your temper.”

“Oh, well.” Goro coughs into his fist, not sure what to make of that comment. “This is a good thing, right? Civility does tend to be key with these sorts of things.”

He’s trying not to sound bombastic.

Whether he is or isn’t, Haru doesn’t comment on it. “Yes! Definitely good.”

“Oh, and I don’t mean to change the subject—sort of, anyway—and I’m not sure how much this means to you at this point, but I’d like to apologize… for what I did. It’s true that I did it in order to keep myself alive, but I also did it for selfish reasons by proxy, I suppose. I was quite blinded by Shido,” Goro says, voice slow and cautious.

Haru thinks this statement over. “Truthfully, an apology doesn’t really mean much. My father has been dead for a few years now, and there isn’t any way to resurrect the dead—though, maybe you’re an exception to that.” 

“Rest assured, I don’t think that I had died.” Goro wants to say that if I had, I wouldn’t have chosen to come back, but that would be wildly inappropriate and counterproductive to this whole self help thing he’s trying to do. 

He blinks a few times.

Haru hums. “Well… regardless. I appreciate the attempt at an apology, but I don’t care too much. Sorry if that’s too blunt.”

“No, don’t apologize. It’s completely fine.”

“In that case, I’d also like to—”

“Hey, Akechi,” comes an interrupting voice a few feet away. Goro turns around in his seat to find Ryuji approaching him. “Did Akira tell you when he’d be back?”

Goro frowns. “Back from where?”

A very, very specific facial expression comes over Ryuji, and the moment it appears, Goro knows that something has gone wrong. 

“He told us he was gonna go out for a minute or two to get fresh air, but…” Ryuji looks towards the door. “It’s raining.”

“Didn’t he tell you he was just going to go to the bathroom and then get food?” Haru asks, leaning over the table a bit.

“Um, yes, he did say that.” Goro stands up. He pulls his phone out of his pocket. There are no new messages. No new calls. 

Goro wishes he had directly asked Akira what was wrong. 

“Um,” he repeats, “I’ll be right back.”

And then, in what is possibly the quickest motion ever, Goro heads for the door, grabs an umbrella and opens it up while he opens the door with his elbow, and dials Akira’s number.

He isn’t sure where to start looking, but he’s got to at least make some kind of move, so he heads left.

The phone keeps ringing, until it gets to the voicemail. 

Goro bites his lip and redials. He continues down the alleyway, looking in just about every corner he possibly can and stepping in a massive puddle in the process and ruining his socks and shoes and everything. Perhaps on another day he would get very angry about this, but for now, the squish squish that sounds every time he takes a step is nothing at all.

Eventually he makes it to the station, and, after taking a peek around and seeing no Akira, heads back into the direction of Leblanc. His phone once again has taken him to Akira’s voicemail, and he calls his number a third time.

This time, he heads right, and realizes that there is much more area to potentially cover in this direction. As he continues walking and checking behind every conceivable trash can and outdoor plant in the vicinity—even though, really, Goro knows that doing this is a bit silly, considering Akira’s height—his phone still rings. 

It goes to voicemail once again.

“Fuck!” Goro grits. “Fucking stupid fucking rain making this so much fucking worse—”

The voicemail tone beeps. Goro stops walking and decides that, although it feels fruitless, he should leave a voicemail. “Akira,” he says, quickly, “I’m really worried. Where are you? If it’s something I said, or if it’s just the party—we can go home. Or, I mean, I’ll take you home, and—please just call me back. Please.”

He hangs up and does not dial again this time, but keeps on walking instead.

Even when he makes it to an area that is entirely houses, Goro has yet to find, hear, or see any signs of Akira. Instead, all he has is his umbrella, his wet, disgusting socks, and goosebumps all up his arms. 

It’s taking a lot of effort to not smash his phone on the ground.

Goro has done that before. It had been after a particularly agonizing phone call with Shido and he had been walking home through a very gross and dark alleyway. There was something about how the walls of the two buildings seemed to squeeze at him—painfully, almost—and before he knew what he was doing, Goro was yanking out his phone and stupidly, stupidly, stupidly smashing it on the pavement.

He didn’t do that ever again. It caused more trouble than what was worth.

Goro blinks the memory out of his eyes, then, and stares at the puddle he happens to be standing in and wonders what it would be like to be nothing more than bacteria. It must be easier than—this. The weight of living.

Suddenly, his phone rings. He takes it out of his pocket slowly, expecting it to be Ryuji or Ann, but the caller ID reads Akira’s name.

“Hello?” he says, quickly and breathlessly. “Akira? Are you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.” Pause. “I’m really sorry for worrying you, Goro, I just—”

“Don’t worry about it for now. Where are you?”

“Um, in the laundromat. I wandered around a little bit, but… the rain.”

Despite the situation not warranting it, Goro laughs at this. Yes, the rain. “Just—stay there. I’ll be right over.”  

He hurries out of the residential street and back to the cafe. Goro could slap himself for not checking the stupid laundromat.

It doesn’t take him long to get there, considering he’s half sprinting. He closes the umbrella, drops it by the vending machine and steps into the laundromat.

Sure enough, Akira is there, sitting on the stool and staring at one of the empty machines. He’s facing the other direction.

“Hey,” Goro says, testing the waters. He’s unsure how to proceed.

Akira turns slightly. Gives a wave. “Hey.”

The overhead grey clouds and general poor lighting in the laundromat make it hard to read Akira’s facial expression, but it’s definitely something akin to forlorn. As far as Goro can tell, though, it doesn’t seem as though he’s been crying, which could be either a good or bad sign. 

Nevertheless, he steps forward. “It’s raining,” Goro says.

Akira gives a light little laugh at this. “It’s definitely raining.”

“I truly wish that it weren’t.” Goro takes a few more steps forward and then sits himself down on the floor, back against one of the machines, and gives a deep sigh. “I apologize for already asking this—but are you all right?”

“Goro, I know that you’re trying to do this in the most careful way possible, but does running off during the middle of a party and sitting in this gross laundromat by myself seem like I’m feeling ‘all right?’”

Goro says nothing. In hindsight, he supposes that he did ask a bit of a stupid question. He can’t help but wince at the reply anyway.

Akira winces back, sort of. “Ugh, sorry,” he says, running his hands down his face. His glasses are nowhere to be seen. “Thank you for worrying. I’m sorry for suddenly disappearing like that, especially without any warning. It’s… I shouldn’t have done that.”

Goro smiles a little. “Don’t worry about apologies right now. I’m more concerned about how you’re actually feeling.”

“I’m… I don’t know.” He sighs, then reaches down behind himself and picks up his glasses. “I’m just tired.”

“I hate to ask this, but—was it something I said?”

“No, no, it wasn’t. I know I got all weird after you said you wanted to tell everyone we’re dating, but I was planning on doing that at some point anyway. It just…”

“It just?”

“Seeing everyone sitting together at the booth made me… stressed.”

“It made you stressed?”

“Something like that, I guess. It made me feel sad. And panicked. I don’t know why. I’m always worried that something bad is going to happen to me all the time, so seeing them sitting out in the open made it feel like…”

“...like something horrible might happen?” Goro supplies, noticing Akira struggling to get the words out.

“Yeah.” He sighs. “Yeah. Exactly like that. I’ve been having that feeling all day long. The worst part is that I know that nothing is going to happen, so the only thing I could do was… leave. That way, I’d stop thinking about it. I can’t remove everyone else from Leblanc, so I had to remove myself instead. You know what I mean?”

Goro knows what he means. He completely, completely knows.

“That makes sense,” he whispers.

“Yeah. Guess I’m just paranoid about everything now.”

They sit in silence. Goro watches Akira continue to stare at the empty laundry machine.

It doesn’t stop raining.

“We don’t have to go back inside, if you don’t want to,” Goro says quietly. “I can take you home.”

For a quiet moment, Akira only looks at him, lips pursed and eyes narrowed. 

“Did I say—um, are you sure that I didn’t say something wrong?” Goro manages, unsure how to handle this strange scrutiny. 

“No, you didn’t say anything wrong, sorry.” Akira heaves himself up to his feet and holds out his hand to help Goro up as well, who graciously accepts his offer. “As much as I don’t want to go back, I… probably should. Yusuke and Ryuji planned this whole thing, so it’s not really fair for me to just… run off.”

“That’s understandable.” Goro looks Akira up and down a few times. He still looks like the same Akira that he has always been. “Your hair is sticking up a bit.”

“Oh, I’m sure that I’m the picture of style right now,” Akira laughs, pressing down on his hair uselessly with his palm. Goro laughs as well, though he isn’t really sure what he’s laughing at; and then, against his usual habit of not engaging in things first, he wraps his arms around Akira in a warm embrace.

Akira holds Goro back. It continues to rain.

Their hug doesn’t last long, because Goro is quickly pulling back and staring at Akira with a half-grimace. “Your ridiculous pirate shirt is so damp and sweaty,” he says, pulling at said clothing article with his thumb and index finger. 

“Yeah, I know,” Akira replies with a sigh. “It’s kind of disgusting.”

“Why… don’t you take it off?” 

“I don’t know.” He peels it off in one swift motion—one sort of swift motion; it nearly gets stuck around his head—and drops it on top of one of the machines in a sad pile. 

They both stare at the shirt. 

“Are you just going to leave it here?” Goro asks, raising an eyebrow. 

“I don’t really want to bring it back into Leblanc, since it’s so…”

“Disgusting.”

“Right.”

Goro puts his hand on his chin and thinks. Every time he does that—the hand on chin thing—he can’t help but smile, because Ann and Futaba have taken to lightly making fun of him every time he does it. He’s not offended by it, though. If anything, it only makes him do it more; whether that’s a conscious or unconscious choice, though, Goro doesn’t know.

“Well,” he says, removing his hand and instead placing it on his hip, “just leave it here for now, and then after the party, you can pick it back up.”

Akira makes a face. “You don’t think someone’s going to steal it?”

“Will you be hurt if they do?”

The face continues. “No.”

“Then it’s not a problem, is it, pirate?” 

This gets a laugh. “Not a problem at all, detective.”

Goro smiles. He reaches out to Akira, then, and takes hold of his hand with a small, small smile on his face, and they head back to Leblanc.

It’s late.

It’s subjectively late, anyway. Goro isn’t sure whether or not he has a handle on what is considered “late at night” anymore, considering he has stayed up until ridiculous hours of the morning for most of his independent life, even when there was no need to. He either couldn’t sleep, had school work to do, had work to do, had Shido work to do, or had some other variation of work. That’s just how it was. 

It’s also why he is married to concealer.

Regardless of that, though, right now, Goro considers it to be late. It’s slightly past four in the morning; he and Akira came back with Ryuji and Ann and the four of them stayed up and had a very long video game tournament. Goro, who has played about one video game in his entire life, was naturally extremely competitive with the whole thing.

Ann ended up winning.

“I still did pretty good,” he says to Akira, who is laying next to him, watching some video on his phone. “For never having played before, I mean.”

Akira laughs. “That’s a lot of bravado for someone who came in last.”

“I put forth effort, though.” 

“Yeah, you definitely gave more effort than anyone else.” He looks away from his phone. “It’s your move, you know.”

“I don’t feel like thinking about chess anymore tonight,” Goro mumbles, waving his phone around. They are both referring to, of course, their unfinished chess game that they’ve been playing over text. “I’ll send it tomorrow.”

“That’s fine. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t think it was my turn or anything.”

“Trust me, I’d be bugging you instead.” As he says this, Goro drops his phone to the floor with a quiet sigh. It hits the ground with a resounding thump .

Once he and Akira returned to Leblanc after the little laundromat incident, the two of them explained to the group what had happened—in a vague manner, granted—and then continued on to reveal the fact that they are dating one another. Nobody was very surprised.

Afterwards, Goro ate a lot of food and drew a terribly shaped crow on the piece of paper everyone was surrounding earlier in the evening. It was nice. He decided to leave his Discussion-of-Events-that-Happened-in-November for another time, because as he was drawing his lumpy crow, Goro realized that the party was not the kind of atmosphere for such a serious conversation. One day he’ll apologize—or perhaps address is the better word—for what happened, but at a better time. A better place, too.

“Thanks again for earlier today,” Akira says into the silence. He’s turned his phone off; Goro isn’t sure when that happened.

“You don’t have to keep saying that. I know that you would have done the same.”

“I know, but still. It wasn’t like me to act like that.”

Goro makes a fake huffy sound for effect. “Really, Akira, don’t keep worrying about it. It’s all fine.” 

“Okay, okay. Not talking about it anymore. There is something else that I, uh, wanted to ask you, though. It’s kind of—”

“The way you’re phrasing this is worrying,” Goro interrupts. “Just tell me without the preface.”

“Don’t freak out.”

“I’m not going to freak out.”
“You say that now, but just so you know, I’ve been avoiding asking this for like, a week.”

“Because you’re concerned I’ll ‘freak out?’”

A nod. “Yeah.”

Goro sits up in bed and turns to face Akira. Perhaps stern eye contact will make this more convincing. “Try me anyway.”

“Uh.” Pause. “How would you feel about moving in with me? Here, I mean. With Ryuji and Ann, too.”

Perhaps Goro misunderstood exactly what Akira meant by freak out .

He knows that Akira has just said some words, but it’s taking a moment for them to run through his brain. Some blood vessels are blocking the absorption of information. Or something. 

“Sorry if it’s too early to say that, I just—”

“Where did this come from?” Goro asks, not wanting to hear the rest of whatever it is Akira was going to say. 

“Uh. Places. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about for a while. You seem… really miserable in your apartment.”

A very, very distant part of Goro wants to say is this out of pity? But he does not say that, because he knows that Akira is not saying this out of pity. He knows that Akira means well and cares a lot and et cetera et cetera. This is just Goro being Goro. 

“You okay?” Akira asks, waving a hand close to Goro’s face.

“Oh, yes, I’m all right,” he says, half-true, half-false. He’s not sure what emotions are the right ones to have. “Sorry. You caught me off-guard with that question was all.”

“You still gonna be able to sleep?” The way Akira says this is in a more or less joking manner, but Goro wonders if he’s trying to ask it seriously. 

Instead of giving a response, all he does is laugh quietly.

Akira laughs as well in very much the same fashion. “Just think about it a little bit.”

“I will, I promise,” Goro replies. He pauses after saying this and then flops back down on the bed with a sigh. 

He scrunches up his face.

There is a problem that Goro seems to keep coming into contact with. Well—technically, he supposes that he keeps coming into contact with multiple types of problems, but that’s neither here nor there. The particular problem that he keeps having to face now, however, is the fact that he still does not know how to accept kindness. 

Rather, he does not know how to accept care. 

Akira asked Goro to live with him because he cares about him. He asked him because he cares about him, and because he doesn’t want him to continue living in his miserable dinky apartment. Goro can work out that much in his head. What he cannot work out, though, is how he should feel about Akira’s proposal. What is he allowed to feel? Can he even accept something like this?

He has no idea.

He stares at the ceiling. Akira has decorated it with little glow-in-the-dark star-shaped stickers. 

Goro remembers a time, once, when he was a kid, when his foster family went to a festival and left him at home. They came back several hours later with prizes in their arms, smelling like good festival food, with smiles plastered all over their faces. And Goro remembers—he so viscerally remembers—how badly he wished that they had taken him with them to the festival. At this young age, though, Goro had long learned to never ask for anything, because he rarely received. All he could do was hope . All he could do was want . All he could do was wait .

Goro doesn’t want to do that anymore. Here he is, being presented with something good, presenting with something he could only imagine receiving, and yet— 

—and yet?

We could end up hating each other, he thinks. It could go wrong. It’s too early. You shouldn’t be given the option to decide. And yet. And yet. And yet. And yet. And yet. And yet.

Goro takes a deep breath. He is being given the opportunity to go to the festival, and he wants it, but some part of him is still saying no, no. You can’t have things.

Maybe—just maybe—he’s sick of not taking goodness that is placed down right in front of his face.

“Akira?” he whispers, turning his head to the side. 

There are some shuffling noises. “Huh?”

“Oh, I hadn’t realized you were asleep,” Goro says, voice still quiet. Apparently he had been thinking for a longer time than he thought.

“Wasn’t asleep yet.” Akira’s voice is muffled by a blanket. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I was just… um.”

“You can say it.”

Goro takes another deep breath. He closes his eyes. The words are right there on the tip of his tongue; he’s so close to grabbing it, so close to being able to hold it in his hands— 

He can’t keep avoiding benevolence for the rest of his life, or else it will make him go completely insane. Plus, he’s come so far. He’s not dead, which, considering his previous circumstances, is certainly something.

What is holding him back?

“Perhaps it isn’t very much like me to make a decision so quickly,” he prefaces, “but I’m going to say yes to your proposal.”

“Yes to my prop—oh!” Akira sits up a little. “Wait, really? Are you sure? I didn’t mean to put pressure on you or anything—”

“No, I’m made up my mind. If I don’t decide now, I know that I’ll end up saying no, and then end up being mopey.”

“It doesn’t have to be immediate, if you’d prefer waiting.”

Goro smiles, mostly to himself. It’s dark in the room; Akira wouldn’t be able to see it anyway. “Akira,” he says, voice soft in an unfamiliar way, “I promise you aren’t pressuring me.”

There is silence in the first few following seconds. And then: “Okay… okay. I just wanted to make sure.”

Akira kisses Goro’s cheek, tender and calm and timed perfectly, and then pulls him closer to his body. Goro doesn’t know how he can possibly tell Akira how much he means to him, but one day, hopefully he’ll be able to. For now, though… perhaps it’s best to save any more conversation for after they’ve slept. He can already hear Akira snoring. Who knows if he was telling the truth when he said he wasn’t asleep yet.

Goro looks at the star stickers on Akira’s ceiling and makes his very own constellation out of them.