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Goro woke to the smell of coffee. A phone chimed nearby—the meow tone Kurusu insisted on using for texts.
He shifted in the bed, lumpy and unfamiliar beneath him. His back hurt. He blinked his eyes open to dusty, cobwebbed rafters.
Shit.
Goro kept perfectly still as he slowly turned his head, eyes frantically scanning Kurusu’s dirty fucking attic room for any sort of clue as to why the fuck he was there. Goro stealthily pulled the blanket down, and up again.
Good. He wasn’t naked.
Bad. He was wearing ratty sleeping clothes that must pass for Kurusu’s spare pajamas.
Goro’s heart began thundering, but he remained exceptionally calm as he absorbed the information at hand.
By all appearances, he’d slept over at Kurusu’s place.
He could not for the life of him remember why.
They hadn’t done anything, surely, but—he remembered his aching back—he couldn’t really be certain.
The phone meowed again. Anyone in the building was sure to hear it at that volume, but the sound hadn’t summoned Kurusu back yet, which meant Goro still had some time to plan his escape. They were on the second floor, meaning there had to be some sort of fire ladder, unless this haggard old café wasn’t up to code, which was equally possible. Crossing through the café obviously wasn’t an option—there was no telling who might be there to see him leave. Even though he couldn’t hear any chatter in the café yet, the scent of fresh coffee was unmistakeable.
Goro’s questing eyes stopped on the stairs.
Was it Kurusu down there, making coffee? Was he making it for him? Pulling the blend Goro always ordered off the shelf, carefully measuring out the beans as the water boiled, deft hands moving with more certainty every day—
The phone meowed, again, and Goro finally sat up to turn the damn sound off, but it wasn’t on the shelf next to the bed. Neither was his own phone, nor any of his belongings, nor his clothes. The shelf bore only a mug of dusty water and Kurusu’s fake glasses, which he, evidently, didn’t wear when making coffee in the morning. As Goro shifted to get up and start looking for his things—had Kurusu taken them?—he became aware of a weight in the pocket of the sweatpants. He put his hand inside, and closed his hand around something smooth.
Dumbfounded, Goro pulled Kurusu’s scuffed smartphone out of the pocket, and stared at it.
He couldn’t possibly have confused his stylish, monogrammed phone case for this ratty thing, regardless of… whatever they’d been doing last night. As he held it, the damned thing meowed again, screen lighting to display several text messages from a contact called Hegel Guy. One of Kurusu’s eccentrics, no doubt.
Hegel Guy:
Hey
We need to talk
Hey this is an emergency are you awake
Emergency call me when you see this
Hey
Goro set the phone to vibrate. While he could see himself finding common conversational ground with anyone who called themself “Hegel Guy”, this “emergency” would have to wait, as would Goro’s escape. Kurusu had too much to answer for now. Goro whipped off the blankets and began rooting through the sheets for his phone.
Just then, Kurusu’s phone began to buzz with a call from none other than “Hegel Guy”.
Goro watched the screen blink, wondering what the emergency could be. Could Hegel Guy be a student, working on a paper about Hegel? Goro would certainly be able to give satisfactory input in Kurusu’s stead. In fact, he was certain he would be able to give better input on the topic of Hegel than Kurusu himself.
“Hello?” Goro answered. Having just woken up, the word came out deeper than he’d intended. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello?”
“Hey. So. I have to ask—” There was something familiar about the caller’s voice, and something else familiar about the way they talked, but Goro couldn’t place either until about halfway through the next sentence. “Did we switch bodies?”
Goro’s hand flew to his head. His fingers met thick, unkempt hair, perfectly curled despite having been slept on.
It wasn’t his.
“This is Akira—if that wasn’t clear,” said the voice of Goro Akechi, just as he’d heard it on TV recordings, from the other end of the line.
Goro carded his hand through the hair—it was as soft as it had always looked—indignation rising as his fingers refused to meet a knot or snarl.
“You still there?”
Goro fumbled out of the bed, but the sheets caught his feet—not his feet, fuck—and he landed hard on the attic floor. The accompanying groan didn’t sound like his at all, and panic continued to flood him as he scrambled back up, looking for a mirror. Did that attic rat even own a mirror?
The bathroom.
“Hello? Akechi?” the phone said against the bedspread.
Goro left it abandoned on the bed as he flung himself down the stairs, flung the bathroom door open without checking who might be in the café, and locked it shut behind him.
Akira Kurusu’s face awaited him on the other side of the mirror, not quite meeting the eyes as he hunched over the sink, heaving.
“Whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck,” he whispered in the direction of the leader of the Phantom Thieves. This had to be a joke—this had to be a trick—this had to be a mistake.
When he’d been planning his infiltration—this wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
Kurusu’s hands gripped the counter, flexing beautifully below him. Goro recognized them, of course, having appreciated them from other angles—making coffee, hefting a pool cue—
“Kid, where’s the fire?” Sakura-san asked just outside the door before he gave it a little knock. “You all right?”
“Fine,” he called, but the word sounded wrong as soon as it was out. Kurusu would be much more composed than this. He’d just shrug his shoulders and say something bewitchingly vague like,
“I’m fine,” Goro said. “Just a bad dream.”
He heard Sakura retreat from the door. “All right, if you say so.”
Goro waited to exhale until he heard the kitchen sink turn on, then proceeded to shudder at the way the air moved through his ribcage and out his throat in a husky sigh. A baritone like that wasn’t fucking fair.
After what seemed like several minutes, he worked up the nerve to meet the eyes in the mirror again. Their grey was as piercing as always—more, even, without glasses to hide them. Why Kurusu chose to lock his eyes behind cheap, plastic frames was utterly beyond him.
Goro leaned forward, squinting as he touched a hand to his cheek. Kurusu’s skincare routine must be incredible. His hands smelled only of soap, but he must have some sort of bedtime serum to wake up with such a flawless, smooth finish—no bags under the eyes.
Goro crouched to open the cupboard beneath the sink, looking for some sort of cosmetics case, but saw only a bucket of cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and a few boxes of soap—the same kind he’d smelled on his hands.
As he stood, the reflection snared him again. A quick, cursory rub to the eyes confirmed that Kurusu also hadn’t left mascara on overnight, and Goro was forced to face the languishing realization that, yes, Kurusu did just wake up like this.
“Fucking shit.”
Slowly, he brought his hand to touch the hair again.
There had been a long-haired cat, at one of his group homes. He’d liked to comb his fingers through her fur as she laid in the sun, brushing out her mats and then swooping the smoothed hair up into little points that rose like crests in ocean waves, before patting it all back down again.
Kurusu’s hair was thicker, seemingly impossible to tangle, and he couldn’t pull his fingers away. He combed it to one side, then the other, then finally brushed it all back to reveal Kurusu’s bare forehead.
Goro’s hands fell.
Kurusu’s naked face stared back at him in the mirror, dark eyebrows arched perfectly in surprise. Goro pressed forward to get a better look at them. God, he would kill for brows like these. He would, quite literally, kill for brows like these.
There was a rap on the door, and Goro nearly jumped out of his stolen skin. “You planning on getting dressed any time soon?”
Oh god.
He still had to get dressed.
“…Akira?”
“Y-Yes, sir!” he stammered, then cursed himself under his breath. What the fuck was that?
“…I let the cat back in,” Sakura added, as something to fill the air after a long, awkward pause passed between them. “He’s upstairs. Ran right by the food I bought him, too…” he grumbled as he moved away from the door.
Fuck. The cat. The one Kurusu toted around with him, always giving Goro death glares from that schoolbag. With animal instincts like that, it was sure to see through him in a second. He’d have to—catch it? somehow? and put it outside so he could get dressed.
Oh god.
Goro took a deep breath, opened the bathroom door, and wheeled up the stairs as quickly as he’d come down them. At the landing, he noticed the cat sitting on the bed watching him, but he’d deal with it after he’d found where the fuck Kurusu kept his clothes without a closet or dresser.
Surely… not in the nondescript cardboard boxes on the storage shelf.
Goro opened one, and grimaced. Kurusu’s complete school uniform lay inside, packed and immaculately folded. In another he found Kurusu’s casual wear, equally tidy.
“What the fuck is wrong with him?” he whispered under his breath.
“With who?”
Goro whipped around, sending an audible crack through Kurusu’s stiff neck. Ow.
There was no one there. He turned the other way, more slowly. Nothing. Then, there was a quiet little clatter as the cat hopped off the bed and padded towards him.
“Earth to Joker! Did you hear me?”
It took everything in him—all his training for Shido, steeling his heart, every meditation technique he’d studied to calmly navigate interviews about which sorts of girls he liked—not to scream at the top of his lungs.
The fucking cat was talking.
Luckily, it took Goro only moments to deduce how this was possible.
Of fucking course. Of fucking course Akira Kurusu, the most effortlessly talented, needlessly handsome, infuriatingly lucky person ever to walk this earth, could understand cats.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” The cat shifted its shoulders—like it was uncomfortable. “Say something, geez!”
Goro swallowed. “…Mmrrow?”
For a few seconds they just stared at each other, sharing in nothing but the all-encompassing, razor-sharp awareness of how fucking stupid that had just sounded.
“If you’re not going to treat me like a human being”—fucking what?—“then I’m leaving!” the cat said haughtily. Then it ran past him and down the stairs.
“Wait—!” Goro called after it, but didn’t follow—because, actually, why should he follow? It seemed like kind of an asshole, anyway, and anyway, Goro may be in Kurusu’s body, but that didn’t mean he was obligated to make nice with such an easily offended cat who couldn’t even take what had clearly been a joke. Goro would have found a much better companion, had he been in Kurusu’s shoes. Surely there were better conversationalists to be found in this neighborhood alone.
When Sakura began to make pspsps sounds in the café below, Goro turned back to the box of clothes. Not even Kurusu would leave Leblanc in pajamas—and he most certainly had to leave. Thank god it wasn’t a school day.
“Just do it,” he told himself quietly as he transferred an outfit, article by mortifying article, onto the bed. “Just do it. It’s only Kurusu. Kurusu. As if he has anything that would impress you. Hell, he’s probably more impressed with yo—”
Goro’s stomach dropped.
Kurusu was in his body.
Kurusu was in his body.
Goro snatched the phone from the bed and dialed Hegel Guy. He immediately hung up, opened Kurusu’s contacts, changed the name to Goro Akechi, and then dialed again.
“Hey, sorry, I had to hang up before,” came Kurusu, still puppeting his throat like it was no big deal. “You get a lot of calls.”
“Don’t you dare move a muscle,” Goro growled into the phone, fighting off a chill as the command came out of Kurusu’s mouth. “Not until I get there.” An unattended Kurusu in his apartment wasn’t optimal, Goro had to admit. There was a chance he’d left some sort of evidence outside his gun safe, but keeping him contained was better than—
“Um,” Kurusu said. A train announcement sounded on his end of the line.
“Are you on a train?” Goro half-shrieked before he remembered that Leblanc had no insulation to speak of, and lowered his voice. “You—You—How did you—”
“Look, I’m almost to Yogen-jaya,” he said, as if dressing up Goro’s body like his own personal doll and then leaving the sanctity of his apartment to come to Leblanc wearing who knows what was a perfectly reasonable and obvious thing to do. “Have you left yet?”
“No,” Goro said through Kurusu’s teeth.
“Good. Sit tight.”
“As if I’d just—” Goro began, but Kurusu had already hung up.
Goro threw the phone onto the bed and wrenched off the long-sleeved sleep shirt.
If Kurusu had dressed his body, then what did he care if he dressed Kurusu’s?
Goro only opened his eyes for the socks. He was surprised Kurusu’s thick lashes hadn’t gotten tangled, the way he’d been squeezing them shut. Goro had only just managed to tug the second sock over the other perfectly-formed medial malleolus when the café bell chimed, and the voice that had used to belong in his throat said,
“What a charming café, as always! May I be so imposing as to request my regular coffee order?”
By the time the voice finished, Goro was fairly certain he’d never been more furious at anyone in his life, but Sakura only chuckled. “Coming right up,” he responded casually, as if Goro Akechi always sounded like an absolute tool. “Did Akira get in touch with you? Last night he was asking if you’d stopped by while he was out with—”
His voice hurriedly interrupted with, “Yes! Perchance, is Akira home?”
Goro was already thundering down the stairs, turning control over to Akira’s muscle memory to avoid the more splintery-looking planks before sliding to a stop at the bottom.
“Goro Akechi” stood in the café, smiling with too many teeth, one fist propped on his hip like a sentai hero and the other holding his silver briefcase like a Shibuya girl with a pendulous shopping bag, and their eyes might have met if Goro’s attention hadn’t been inexorably drawn to the fucking bowtie tied around his body’s neck.
“Akira!” Kurusu said, all wrong. “What a perfect delight!” He held up Goro’s briefcase. “I brought the research you asked for.”
“Research…?” Sakura said, intrigued and insultingly oblivious to the fact that “Goro Akechi” was behaving like his skull had been trepanned and stuffed with French cream.
“Yes,” Kurusu said sheepishly as Goro stormed forward. “He’s been indispensable with a case I—” Goro grabbed his hand then—somehow Kurusu had picked the right pair of leather gloves—and hauled him bodily to the back of the café. But before he could drag him up the stairs, Kurusu managed to turn back to Sakura and call back too-jovially, “Oh—I suppose the coffee will have to wait, for justice waits for no man!”
The only reason Kurusu was still alive by the time Goro threw him onto the bed was that he had no way of determining what consequences bodily injury might have, but then Kurusu said, “My, you’re so forward,” and Goro settled for lightly strangling him by tugging on the bowtie until it was loose enough to wrench off.
“Ow—hey!” Akira protested with a cough. “I looked up a video to tie that!”
The briefcase slipped out of Kurusu’s grip and fell to the floor from the bed, rattling like it’d been filled with children’s candies. Goro didn’t even want to know. He ground the bowtie into the hardwood with his foot and kicked it across the room. Meanwhile, Kurusu blithely righted himself to a sitting position on the bed, even raising a hand to adjust glasses that weren’t there—God, even the way Kurusu moved beneath his skin—but then he looked back at Goro, and his smirk fell away.
“Shit—quit making that face with my face.”
“Quit making a mockery of mine!” Goro reached to brush over a lock of hair that Kurusu had gotten muffed, only to discover that it was slightly damp.
“Did you wash my hair?”
Kurusu squirmed out of range. “It was so tangled! I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do! And, I only have the bathhouse here, so—”
“You took a shower?”
Instead of answering, Kurusu pursed his lips and let his eyes fall, where they just so happened to land on the briefcase. “Oh, shit, hold on—”
“Don’t you dare change the subject—”
Kurusu twisted the briefcase out of Goro’s snatching reach and flipped it open on the bed, revealing not Goro’s usual case files nor even children’s candy dispensers, but a collection of pill bottles. “Which meds do you take in the morning?”
“Wh…” Goro’s voice died in his throat.
“You set a phone alert,” Kurusu picked out one of the bottles and squinted at it, “but some of them looked old, or like you weren’t taking them. So I wanted to be sure. I drank a protein shake at the station in case something’s taken with food.”
Goro continued to stare. Kurusu had brought all of them—every bottle that still had a pill in it. No wonder he’d needed the briefcase. In fact, he’d probably committed some sort of crime by transporting them all to a second location.
“Goro,” Kurusu said. “Which ones? I’m not planning on adding withdrawal symptoms to whatever else is going on.”
Goro pressed his mouth into a line and pointed silently to his morning medications, bottle by bottle. “One of each.”
Kurusu nodded and diligently began the work, occasionally turning to pick up the old mug of water by the bed and take a sip. One by one they went down, and Goro wouldn’t mind Kurusu’s consciousness coming to visit every morning, just for that.
“Do you have any?” Goro asked suddenly.
“No.” Then, “Probably should.”
Goro’s shoulders relaxed. He hadn’t overlooked them, then. “Get a psychiatrist.”
“Already have a therapist.”
“I’m sure you well know that doesn’t count.”
Kurusu only winked. He took a sip, flicked the last pill into his mouth, and swallowed. “So. What do you think we have to do to swap back?”
Goro put one hand on his hip and raised the other to his chin. Kurusu’s eyes followed the motion like an intrigued cat. “If we knew what triggered this to begin with, we’d have a better baseline to work from, but that is information we unfortunately lack.” He glanced at Kurusu, gauging his expression. “Unless you have some sort of theory…?” Goro had never received intel to suggest the Phantom Thieves were capable of something like this, and Kurusu’s blank expression seemed to confirm that he had little idea of how this had happened. He just shook his head, sending Goro’s hair swishing back and forth like he was in a shampoo commercial.
Goro cleared his throat. “So, if I were to speculate,” he said, “there are many possible solutions. It could be time based. A period of 24 hours, for example. It could be objective based. Some sort of task we need to complete, together or separately. Living a day in the other’s shoes, so to speak.” Goro suddenly remembered a Featherman episode, in which Feather Red and Feather Pink’s souls had been swapped by Dr. Ocelot’s machine. “Or, it could be that we have to—” Goro stopped himself.
“Yeah?”
“It could be that we have no metric or rational goal to work toward. That it’s somehow random.”
“That’s not what you were starting to say.”
“It had no relevance to the situation.”
“How are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Goro snapped.
A very Akira Kurusu expression slipped onto Goro Akechi’s face, settling as if it had always belonged there. As if Goro Akechi’s catalogue of expressions were all just rehearsals and screen tests for what it was really capable of.
“Put on my glasses,” Kurusu said. Casually, he plucked them from the shelf next to the bed and held them out, smirking with the easy confidence that only Akira Kurusu found easy.
Goro managed to pull his eyes down to the fake frames. “Why?”
“The look’s not complete yet.”
“You don’t need them to see.”
“What if it’s a metric?” Kurusu teased.
The glasses were cheap and flimsy and ordinary—probably from a 500 yen shop—but on Kurusu’s face, their frames circled his eyes like a mask, obscuring just enough to keep others wanting more, keep them leaning a little closer in search of the glint of an eye, the flicker of a wink.
Goro couldn’t do that with them. He couldn’t wear Akira Kurusu’s face and the glasses, too.
“Goro?” Kurusu nudged.
“Why are you calling me Goro?”
Kurusu smiled and unfolded the glasses. “Don’t tell me you’re not on a first-name basis with yourself,” he said, winking a Goro Akechi wink. “Plus, I’d think we’d both be on a first-name basis after today.”
Akira slid the frames onto his face before he could flinch away.
Akira's smile dropped. “Oh.”
“What?” Goro asked, self-conscious. “What’s wrong?” He fidgeted, moving his hand to brush a lock of hair behind his ear, but Akira’s hair wasn’t long enough to accommodate the motion. Akira was still staring at him, with an expression he couldn’t name. Goro was finding it harder and harder to recognize the face as his. Like when he saw recordings of himself and couldn’t recognize his smile.
“It’s just,” Akira said, “weird.”
“You’re the one who put them on me—” Goro reached to take them off, but Akira grabbed his hand.
“Keep them on,” he said.
It was then that Akira Kurusu’s body stopped obeying him. Its pulse was steadily increasing, and he couldn’t get it to slow. The casual touches, the way his body moved with Kurusu inside, it was all overloading whatever systems he’d been controlling.
Akira held his hand for so long that Goro wondered if he was having the same reaction. “Oh. Um.” He finally let go.
They sat on the bed, not looking at each other.
“This is just like that episode of Featherman,” Akira said.
Goro remained still, even as he felt Akira turn to look at him. “You know?” he prompted. Goro didn’t. Absolutely not. “The one where Feather Red and Feather Purple switch bodies?”
“Feather Pink,” Goro corrected.
“So you’ve seen it,” Akira confirmed. Goro turned to glare at him, and he winked. “Guess the boxers weren’t just for show.”
Goro’s face fell.
Oh god.
He’d gone to bed in nothing but his Feather Black boxers.
The leader of the Phantom Thieves—his ultimate rival—had seen him in underwear from a children’s sentai show.
It was somehow worse than being seen naked.
Which,
of course,
Akira Kurusu had also done.
“Should we try it?”
“Try what?” Goro said, staring blankly at the floor now. It was all over. He supposed he’d just die in Kurusu’s body, and Kurusu could do as he pleased with his. Nothing mattered anymore.
“If it worked in the episode,” Akira said, uncharacteristically sheepish, “and we’ve both seen the episode, maybe, psychologically…” Akira kept checking his face for a reaction, but Goro was still deep in the depths of mortification. “You know what? Nevermind. Nevermind!”
Akira stood, now charged with a nervous sort of energy Goro didn’t understand. “What haven’t we covered—I guess we haven’t talked about our mornings, really, so: your body woke me up at, like, 5am, feeling awful—insomnia, probably—so I showered and got dressed, but even after that I knew there was no way my body would wake up for at least another hour, so I cleaned your room, and then—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Goro interrupted, shaking his head in case he hadn’t heard right. “You did what?”
“Cleaned your room,” Akira repeated. “Just basic stuff. Changed the sheets, made the bed, took the dishes to the sink—I started on the bathroom too, but then you got the alert about the meds, and figured I shouldn’t wait any longer to come find you.”
Akira Kurusu, waking up in his room. Akira Kurusu, showering him. Dressing him up. Cleaning his room. Akira’s hands on everything that belonged to him, gently putting it all into order.
Goro felt—dirty, but something else, too.
“Now you,” Akira finally said, turning on him when he didn’t say anything.
“What about me?”
“For starters, that’s the outfit I wore to the aquarium.”
Goro looked down, his face heating up. “It’s the first one I thought of—other than your school uniform,” he stammered defensively. The “outfit” was just jeans and a black T-shirt with a white collared shirt over it—absolutely nothing to write home about. It was Kurusu who had worn it—to an aquarium known for being a fashionable date spot, no less. Goro shuddered to imagine what he’d choose to wear to an actual date.
Akira’s eyes fell to his chest, and a teasing smile spread across his face. “…The shirt’s backwards. You get dressed with your eyes closed?”
Goro’s mouth opened slightly, but no sound came out, and that was enough for Akira.
“You—oh my god.” Akira had to bite his lip to keep from smiling. It didn’t work.
Goro tugged his arms out of the white shirt and flung it aside, then moved his arms into the T-shirt to twist it around properly.
“Here—here,” Akira managed, trying not to laugh, and reached to help him.
More hands didn’t help. The shirt got swiveled all the way around, still backwards when Goro got his arm through a hole. He pulled it out and twisted it again.
“Ugh, you’re useless!”
Someone cleared their throat.
They both spun to see Sakura, standing at the top of the stairs, his expression a clear reflection of what he thought he’d just walked in on.
Goro Akechi’s arms dropped from where they’d been tugging on Akira Kurusu’s shirt. Akira Kurusu finally got the thing righted, and put his arms back through the holes.
“Your friend Yoshizawa is here,” was all Sakura said, but his tone spoke volumes more.
Goro’s eyes flicked to Akira’s face, which was dawning with an expression that had to mean something like, Fuck, I forgot about that. His jaw moved silently up and down for a moment, just before he turned to Goro and, as the very picture of innocence, said,
“Akira, why didn’t you say she was coming over? Do the two of you have plans today?”
“Yes,” Goro said through clenched teeth. “Guess I forgot.”
“I’m going to make her a cup of coffee,” Sakura said, making the threat sound perfectly casual as he met each of their eyes, “and by the time I’m done, the two of you will be downstairs to greet her.” Then he turned and descended back down the stairs.
Goro scrambled to pull the collared shirt back on.
“What are you doing with Yoshizawa?!” Goro hissed.
Akira handed him a pair of shoes. “I don’t know! Probably breakfast somewhere. She wanted to hang out today.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that?!”
“I’ve had other stuff on my mind!”
Once they’d both stood and checked over each other’s outfits to satisfaction, they hurried downstairs.
“Senpai!” Yoshizawa called from the bar with a cheery wave. “And Akechi-san!” she added, with well-concealed surprise. Her eyes flicked to the stairs they’d come from, and Goro could practically see her mind playing out all sorts of potential scenarios as she said, “You’re looking nice today.”
“Th—”
“Thank you!” Akira said, cutting him off. “A detective must always look his best! Can’t have the criminals showing us up in terms of style, can we?” He winked, and she laughed politely.
“So, um, did Akechi-san—” she began in Goro’s direction, before hesitantly turning to Akira. “Do you… have plans today, Akechi-san?”
Before Goro could interject with all of the plans Goro Akechi most certainly did have today, Akira put one hand on his hip, and raised the other to his chin. “You know… I don’t think I do! Why do you ask, Yoshizawa-san?”
She hid her disappointment as she said, “Well, Senpai and I were planning to get some breakfast together this morning! Would you like to join us?”
And then Goro Akechi dipped into a Western-style bow, and said, “Why, it would be my pleasure!” He straightened and gave her another wink. “My treat, of course!”
“Oh, that’s very kind of you, but I wouldn’t want to—”
“I insist!”
“Let’s go,” Goro said, trying to end this farce without making it sound too harsh coming out of Kurusu’s mouth.
“Mm!” Yoshizawa nodded, downed her entire cup of coffee, and hopped up from the barstool. “Let’s go!” she chimed.
“After you,” Akira said genially.
Yoshizawa’s ponytail swung around as she did a heel-turn towards the café door, and Goro took his chance to elbow Akira violently in the arm—future bruises be damned. Akira, for his part, had the decency to mouth a long string of curses without actually making a sound before falling into step behind Goro as they made their way out of Leblanc.
“So, what were you guys up to this morning?” Yoshizawa asked on their walk to the bakery. Gutsy question. Goro respected it.
“Akechi’s stumped about a case,” Goro said, before they were forced to “yes, and” their way through a scenario of Akira’s devising.
“Yes!” Akira agreed. “Over the disappearance of a, an officer this month. We think he’s been recruited by the yakuza,” he said, completely out his ass. “But! He only drinks a certain coffee blend, available at only a handful of coffee shops, so I came to get Akira’s thoughts on the matter this morning.”
“Did you… already consult Sakura-san about it?” Yoshizawa asked, and Goro watched as Akira’s face flickered with an expression that looked something like the word“fuck”.
“I wouldn’t want to—endanger or compromise his business,” he said, “in case it gets him involved in something unseemly.”
“Whereas I can handle it,” Goro added, descending into a fuck moment of his own as he debated whether or not Akira would ever say whereas.
“Well, it sounds exciting!” Yoshizawa said. “And dangerous! Be careful, you two.” Goro wasn’t sure she’d believed them. Beyond her clear infatuation with Kurusu, she sometimes became difficult to read.
“Pray tell, what’s this bakery you’ve chosen for us this morning?” Akira asked.
“Oh! It’s a great one—they have foot-long sausage bread called a sausage baguette!” she said excitedly. “I always get two—one for later—but I usually end up eating them both anyway!”
Goro went with a noncommittal, affirmative noise as his eyes flicked desperately to Akira to gauge whether that was a joke or not.
It wasn’t. “It sounds heavenly!” Akira said with a knowing nod.
In the bakery, they used tongs to pick out their pastries as Akira recounted a case that he’d clearly lifted from Detective! Featherman, episode 8, but Goro was more distracted by Yoshizawa, who, as promised, loaded her tray with two sausage baguettes and then an equal quantity of sweet pastries.
Goro Akechi was not paying for this. He patted Akira’s pockets, and tipped his head back in despondence.
He hadn’t brought Akira’s wallet with him.
“How did you get the vent open…?” Yoshizawa asked as they got in line for the register.
“I reached into my pocket,” Akira said, miming Detective Featherman almost exactly, “and pulled out a—”
“—Hundred yen coin,” Goro said. “That you used as a screwdriver to twist off the screws of the vent.”
Akira’s surprise quickly bloomed into the sly look of a shared secret. Goro turned away from him. “Yes, precisely! And the stolen money was sitting right inside!”
“That sounds like something out of a detective show!”
“Not really,” Goro quickly added.
As they neared the front of the line, Akira said, “Remember, it’s my treat,” and Goro got in position to subtly elbow him very, very hard.
“Are you… sure, Akechi-san?” Yoshizawa asked. Goro was waiting for her to glance somewhere else when he realized that the tattered wallet Akira was holding wasn’t even Goro’s. Goro Akechi would never be caught dead with that ratty, peeling pleather thing in his pocket—but Akira Kurusu certainly would. He must have snatched it from his school bag on their way out of Leblanc.
“Of course I’m sure!” Akira was literally just going to pay for it all with his own money. Something about this infuriated Goro.
“I’ll get you back later,” Goro said. It came out like a threat.
Akira gave him a dazzling wink. “We’ll see!” They would. Little did Akira know, he had just purchased the last menu items he’d ever pay for. Goro would cover the rest, until he’d killed him.
They settled at a table with their pastries, and some coffees from the register. Yoshizawa had already made quick and downright impressive work of a few of her smaller baked goods before Goro had even figured out if it’d be suspicious to pick up a melon pan with his left hand instead of his right. (He went with his right.) Across the table, Akira was making slow progress through a croissant, on account of eating it with a knife and fork and gloves on.
After she’d swallowed her latest bite, Yoshizawa scooted her chair toward Goro—closer than was comfortable. She leaned in and said, “You seem off today, Senpai.” Goro stiffened. He knew he’d taken too long with the melon pan. “Is everything okay…?”
His mind raced. How would Kurusu respond? A shrug? A shake of the head? Would he say something mysterious, or nothing at all? Too soon, he was out of time.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I hardly got any sleep last night,” Akira declared. “You see, I’d filmed an episode for a new talk show, and I was up late to see how it had turned out, but the editing was an utter farce. They nearly cut me out entirely.”
Goro had bitched about that to his agent last night. Had Kurusu read the text messages? There was no way he’d stayed up late enough to watch it.
“What a shame,” Yoshizawa said. Then, through her next bite, “What’s it like being on TV, Akechi-san?”
“Well,” Akira began, “you know, it’s different, in the sense of, well…” Goro had been waiting for this to happen. He doubted Akira had talked this much in one day in his entire life, and it was only a matter of time until his bullshitting engine gave out. When he at last couldn’t think of another Featherman plot to cop—and to be fair, Goro couldn’t either—he went with, “It can be difficult. Sometimes they tell you to sit in the wrong chair,” (untrue) “and sometimes they want you to, have all the lines memorized,” (nonsensical) “and sometimes—”
“Have you ever been on TV?” Goro asked Yoshizawa.
She thought about it. “Well, my—well, I had my gymnastics routines filmed a couple of times,” she said, “but I was so focused on what I was doing, I totally forgot the cameras were there!”
“Oh, that’s—” Goro stopped himself. He was beginning to realize that he had never talked so little in one day. “—cool.” He couldn’t do this much longer.
Yoshizawa smiled a shy little smile, put the last bite of one of her sausage baguettes in her mouth—What? When had she—?—and shook her head as she chewed. “It’s not that big of a deal, really.”
As she reached for her next breakfast item, her napkin fell from her lap, and fluttered to the floor opposite her. As Goro leaned to pick it up, his head collided with something hard. Glasses clattered to the floor.
“Ow—!” he and Akira said in unison, pulling back to rub their heads.
They both froze. Slowly, they turned their eyes toward each other, met each other’s gazes,
and found that they were absolutely still in each other’s bodies.
“Damn it,” they hissed.
“It’s just a napkin, guys!” Yoshizawa said, laughing a little as she reached to pick up it, and then dipped down again for the glasses. She handed them back to Goro, letting her fingers linger on his as he wondered what the glasses would look like on Akira without the rest of Akira to go with them. No—that would be too dangerous with Yoshizawa here. She’d see through them, surely.
Goro glanced over at Akira, whose brow was furrowed as he stared fixedly at Yoshizawa’s retreating hands.
“So, actually, Senpai,” she said, fiddling with the hem of her skirt. “The truth is, I wanted to ask you for advice today.” She glanced at Akira. “And, um, Akechi-san, I’m sorry for bringing this up during breakfast—I still don’t really know you that well, so I’d prefer to hear what Senpai thinks first.”
For the first time today, Akira only nodded. Yoshizawa turned back to Goro, closing their distance again.
“I’ve been having a really hard time with gymnastics practice the past few days,” she confessed. “I don’t know what it is—it’s just, when I think about stepping onto the mat, my chest seizes up, and I can’t move a single muscle.” Goro nodded minutely as she spoke. It sounded familiar enough. “Yesterday I only managed to do some stretches before I had to give up and go home.”
“I would assume that it’s most likely psychological—” Goro clamped his mouth shut. He tried again. “Burnout, probably.”
“Burnout…?” Yoshizawa repeated. “I don’t know… I’m studying more, so I’ve actually been practicing less than usual.” She put a hand on his knee, like she’d just realized something, and Akira tensed across the table. “Maybe that’s it? I’m out of practice?”
That didn’t matter. That wasn’t how it worked. There were usually dozens more contributing factors to this sort of dysfunction. Sleep, stress levels, mental state, diet—Goro was taking too long again. “No. Still happens.”
She thought on this. “But… what am I supposed to do to fix it again?”
Goro knew exactly how to fix it—you just bit the inside of your cheek and did it, no matter how bad it felt and no matter how long it took, and then eventually you’d be back to doing it without even having to think about how much you hated doing it—but that wasn’t the sort of advice Akira would give. He’d go for some avoidant, coddling advice like, “Try something else.”
“I should…give up?” she said, sounding hurt.
“For a little while,” he added. “Try something else, like—” he grasped for something frivolous, “—painting. At an easel. Move your body a different way.” Goro had no idea what he was talking about now, just that he was definitely talking too much. His eyes flicked to Akira, but he was staring very hard at the remnants of his pastry with his gloves clenched atop the table. He hadn’t looked at either of them in minutes. “It’ll tell you when it wants to move like a gymnast again,” Goro said. “And it will.”
If she hadn’t known something was off before, she certainly would now, but when Goro finally managed to look back at Yoshizawa, her eyes had gone wet. “Senpai… thank you.”
After Yoshizawa had finished all her food—somehow—they headed back toward Leblanc on the way to the train station. She tried and failed to take Goro’s hand a couple times—luckily, when it came to girls, Goro was practiced at making avoidance look like ignorance—while Akira trailed behind them, uncharacteristically quiet for Goro Akechi, but probably perfectly characteristically quiet for Akira Kurusu.
“Bye, Senpai!” Once they reached Leblanc, Yoshizawa flung her arms around his waist and squeezed him with all the muscles of someone who did backhand springs on the regular. “Thank you so much, really.”
Goro managed not to wheeze as he said, “I’m here for you.” Then, not sure what else to do to move this along, he patted the top of her hair.
She laughed into the fabric of his shirt. “I know. Now more than ever.”
He patted her again, hoping she’d pull away, and at last she did. Goro stole a glance at Akira, and was surprised to see that he was practically scowling.
“I’m afraid I forgot my briefcase in the attic. If you’ll excuse me,” he said, and turned to walk through the door of Leblanc before Yoshizawa had the chance to see his expression.
“Oh—goodbye, Akechi-san! Thank you again for the food!” she called after him, but he was already gone.
Goro and Yoshizawa said their goodbyes—he kept out of hugging range—and after she began walking toward the station, she turned to wave at him again. Goro waved back.
Once she was out of sight, Goro opened the door to Leblanc.
“I think your friend knocked something over up there,” Sakura said as he passed.
Confused, Goro started up the stairs.
The briefcase had been thrown on the floor, sending the bottles rolling in all directions across the uneven floor of the attic. Akira was facedown on his bed, fists balled into the sheets as his back shook.
“What’s wrong?” Goro avoided the bottles—none of them open, thank god—as he hurried over, mind flooding with worry. Was Akira sick? Was he dying? What would happen if one of them died like this?
“I’m so—pissed,” Akira said into the blankets. “Your chest—it’s like a vise that won’t stop twisting—” He unclenched his fists long enough to drag the pillow underneath his face, and proceeded to scream into it.
Goro watched him. This was a familiar enough scene, albeit from an unfamiliar perspective. Now that he thought about it, today had been rather absent of his usual, increasingly Akira-centric, torrents of emotion—torrents it had taken him years to learn to control. Akira had lasted surprisingly long.
“She’s just—It’s not like that,” Akira bit into the pillow, like he was having an argument with someone.
“Akira…” Goro tried, reaching for him.
Something locked around his wrist. Akira had grabbed him. All at once he was upright on the bed, inches away from Goro’s face, eyes wet with jealous tears.
“You—You’re mine,” he choked.
Goro’s mind went blank.
Akira’s breath shuddered between them, and then Goro was being shoved backwards, down onto the bed. “You’re mine,” Akira repeated.
Goro’s heartbeat skyrocketed as adrenaline flooded Akira’s body. It thumped against his eardrums as Akira loomed over him, too close. Dangerous, gloved hands combed Goro’s hair roughly away from his forehead, then moved to pin his shoulders to the bed.
Goro was terrified, and something else.
Akira Kurusu’s body was loving this.
Goro didn’t dare move as Akira dipped his head into the crook of his neck, and as he deposited a line of possessive kisses across the skin, tugging the collar of his shirt out of the way to expose more, Goro did his best to focus all his thought on how embarrassing it was that the leader of the Phantom Thieves was this turned on by danger—but he could only hold out for so long. His mind scrambled for purchase on something—anything else—Featherman—and then he remembered how Feather Red and Feather Pink had switched their souls back.
They’d kissed each other.
His mind utterly capsized with the thought—with how simple it suddenly was—with how much he wanted to kiss Goro Akechi. He didn’t know where he ended and Akira Kurusu’s being began, and it didn’t matter anymore.
Akira drew back to glare down at his claim—it was all happening so fast. Goro’s vision whirled into focus, and his mouth formed the words before his mind did. “I’m yours.”
They dove at each other, and their mouths collided in a rush that stole all the breath from Goro’s lungs. His lips were kissing and being kissed as they broke against each other in a whirlwind current of thought, mingling in each other’s streams, feeling everything and still wanting more, and each time Goro thought he would drown, he gulped in enough air for another taste, another touch.
At last the rhythm began to slow, but Goro’s eyes stayed closed. His lips touched down once, twice, thrice more, and then everything went still.
Slowly, Goro opened his eyes.
Akira Kurusu’s face lay below him, grey eyes wide behind crooked glasses, mop of hair messier than it had been all day. “Holy shit,” Akira said, with Akira's mouth and Akira’s voice.
Goro staggered up off of him, disoriented by his own body. “I—I don’t—” He combed a lock of hair back into place, willing his mind to settle in its proper skull. “I didn’t—” He stepped backwards and nearly tripped on a bottle.
Akira was staring at the ceiling, still catching his breath. “Okay,” he said, “that was better than the Featherman episode.”