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Akira's been different, lately.
Goro has always watched him, during meetings, so he can see the changes. Even before, when he’d sit hunched over the table, spinning his phone, the perfect picture of what he clearly considered effortless cool, he’d still contribute. Lead, in fact, the conversation never leaving his hands, moulded and shaped at every stage, with an uncanny ability to convince his dim-witted friends that they were the ones making all the decisions.
Now, he’s always leaning back, arms folded, barely offering a word. His eyes unfocussed and stuck on some unseen spot beyond the table, beyond the room. Downstairs, in the café, he sits alone at the bar, untouched coffee in front of him and a hand in his hair, and listens to everyone flounder behind him. If approached, he grips the mug—too tight—and smiles weakly, making a show of bringing it to his lips. Then he puts it back, still full, and sighs a sigh that sounds like the entire weight of the world is pushing it out of him.
His glasses hide it well, but the earnest twinkle in his eyes has faded, dark bags developing beneath them. His nails are bitten. He’s always tapping his foot, bouncing his leg. Tugging on his bangs. These aren’t exactly new behaviours, but they’re quite visibly getting worse.
He’s been different, and nobody seems to want to bring it up. Ordinarily, Goro would be the one to. But he’s pretty sure he’s dead, and, imminently, sometime in the coming week, will go back to being so. So he can’t find it in himself to bother.
Akira comes all the way to Kichijoji, sometimes, and asks him to spend the evening together. Standing with his hands in his pockets, eyes downcast, just sort of throwing the request down at his feet and leaving it there to congeal. Goro always tells him it’d be a waste of time, spouts something about him being brainlessly sentimental, and tells him to focus on the mission until he goes away. And then he stays there alone, leaning against the cold wall, gloved hands bunching up in his pockets, and watches the snow fall behind a cloud of his own borrowed breath.
More often than not, he’s there all night, until he can’t feel his face and his toes have blistered. It’s not like anything bad is going to happen to him here, anyway. He pulls out his phone and feels his shivering fingers cramp around it; it always takes multiple attempts to get it unlocked so he can check the time, the date, and make sure both are still moving forward.
He opens up his contacts, stares at Akira’s. He doesn’t have a photo for him, so he just rereads the number over and over again, instead.
Some days, he wants to tell him. He imagines saying it: “I’m dead. I died in my bastard father’s palace with a bullet in my heart by the hand of my own puppeteered self. I’ve been dead for a month. I don’t even have a body anymore”, then imagines what expression he’d get in response. He’d probably be happy about it. He’d probably fight to keep the joy down like bile and Goro would have to stand there and watch him desperately scrunch his face into sympathy. The possibility he’d make any other face is the reason Goro still hasn’t brought it up.
He’d caved and gone to Jazz Jin with him, once. He’d been given the opportunity—he may as well play pretend for a night or two before it was taken from him forever. He likes Jazz Jin, after all. Not that it mattered nor amounted to anything, what with Akira sitting across from him, violently stirring his drink and grinding his teeth. Clenching and unclenching his fist against his pant leg, certain Goro couldn’t see.
His glass was still full when they left there, too. Colour washed out by the melted ice, earlier cubes now thin shards floating on the surface. He can’t remember the last time he’d seen him eat or drink anything.
Still, he isn’t about to invest in repairs when he’ll be long gone before anything breaks completely. He’ll leave the Thieves to deal with that; they could probably use a dose of real life. Besides, none of this had been affecting the mission.
That is, until it did.
There’re five days remaining until their confrontation with Maruki. Normally, Goro would complain they were cutting it fine, but there’s far too much riding on this. He can’t bear to think about the implications of their losing, and so, he doesn’t. If anyone else is, they’re certainly hiding it well, instead keeping busy getting stronger in the new, coolly lit Mementos, and having agreed to do so all the way up until the very last night.
And so, here they are, laser-focussed on a fight with a shadow—a Moloch—when Akira decides to be the most inconvenient he can possibly be, and gets knocked on his ass by a sweeping physical attack.
Takamaki’s shrill cry comes immediately, flying out alongside her whip and downing it. “What was that?!”
“It looked like an oni-kagura, but that shouldn’t be possible!” Niijima yells back, already dismissing her persona and running towards Akira, who’s sat on the floor with a hand clapped over his mouth. It must’ve hit him pretty hard. Kitagawa crosses parallel to her in the opposite direction, positioning himself around the back of the shadow before it gets back up.
“Oracle, what’s the verdict?”
“This shadow should only have forget, but Joker…” There’s a very long, very revealing pause. “…I’m… I’m getting rage. Joker’s been hit with rage!”
“Rage?” Okumura’s already on her way to him, fishing through her pockets for healing items. “Are you sure? On this path?”
Akira’s eyes widen for one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, and he removes his hand to bat Niijima away. “It’s not rage,” he says, voice uncharacteristically hoarse and slightly wavering, “it was a normal physical attack. I’m fine.” He gets up and drops low to avoid getting knocked over again. Whichever persona he’d had hovering above him before is gone.
“That’s not what my readings say—”
“Well your readings are wrong.” A sharp inhale, eyes brighter than usual and flickering a saccade over his friends. “Sorry, I didn’t mean… look, I’m fine, okay?”
“They… they’ve never been wrong,” Sakura says in a small, quivering voice.
For God’s sake. What are they all fussing about.
Goro readies his sabre as the Moloch staggers to its feet. They’ve wasted time. It should’ve been dead by now. It’s a lower-level shadow and they’re all being ridiculous. “We shouldn’t disregard that entirely. None of us know the extent of what Maruki is capable of in this reality,” he says.
In his periphery, Akira’s eyes narrow. He’s shooting him a look he’s never seen before.
“…To clarify, I mean we shouldn’t disregard that Oracle’s readings could, conceivably, be incorrect. Maruki has already proven he can mess with our perceptions, but to conclude he can change the skillsets of a shadow would be a stretch. Now, can we please focus?”
As the fight progresses—cautious, but normal—he doesn’t take his eyes off Akira, because he can see it. They are there, the distinctive red-black curling flames. But they rise and ripple no further than an inch from his back before something snuffs them out. He isn’t imagining it. Rage. Akira has been hit with rage by a shadow that should only have fear in its repository, and something is suppressing it.
He’s not using abilities, obviously, because he doesn’t have access to his personas. But he’s not attacking, either. He should be attacking. They always attack; that’s the entire point of rage.
When Kitagawa downs the Moloch with a mabufudyne, Goro turns back to look Akira over properly.
He’s sweaty and pale and Goro can’t watch him for long because he’s suddenly glowing a bright, emergency-alert red and surging forward, disrupting the air as he flies past. Everyone on field quickly follows, clearly expecting an all-out attack, but the shadow’s torn apart and disintegrating before anyone can even get a hold of their mask.
Akira stumbles backwards out of the carnage, red flames on black dust, and stares down at his hands. He groans, starts rubbing them vigorously on his pants, as if his gloves were blood and he’s killed something he shouldn’t have.
Takamaki is in the party, so she has the shortest distance to cross. Okumura follows, and then Sakura. Goro figures he may as well take a few steps forward, too, if only to pretend he’s invested. Sakamoto goes hurtling right by him.
“Joker, what the hell is goin’ on?!”
He looks up, slowly, the rest of his body curling into itself. He’s about to speak before his hand is back over his mouth and he's biting into the fleshy eminence beneath his little finger.
…Oh.
He’s the one suppressing it.
When Goro catches up, he taps Sakamoto on the shoulder and gestures for him to fall back.
“Joker.”
“What?” he snaps, garbled through the vice of his teeth.
Why are you holding back? Why are you refusing help? Why are you lying? “You need healing.”
“I don’t. It barely grazed me.”
“That isn’t what I mean.”
He takes another step forward, and a whine claws its way out of Akira’s throat.
“Don’t, please, just leave me alone—”
Yoshizawa is lagging behind, has been from the beginning. She’s hesitant, still with an inexpert grip on her persona. She never lets herself get too close to the group, will never offer to be in the party, which Akira will surely have noticed, because Goro noticed. For it to culminate in an opportunity to attack her, though, is not something either of them would have predicted.
Goro gets between them, fast. He shoves Yoshizawa, standing like a skittish, flash-banged forest animal, to the side. Akira goes barrelling headfirst into his chest and knocks all the wind out of it. He takes a thin, burning lungful of whatever’s left and throws both arms around his shoulders.
Akira slides up through them and is about to headbutt him, but his sensibility must be intact enough to not want his face sliced on Goro’s mask, because he redirects it into an awkward backwards jerk and closes on a snarl. Goro’s hands come down to hold his waist, fingers flexed, nails pinning his coat to his body.
Akira dips his head, and grins. “What’s wrong, Crow? I thought you liked a massacre.”
The Thieves are all standing around, frantically rummaging through their inventories. Goro mentally facepalms when he sees all the perfectly reasonable cures tumble out and roll across the floor, ignored. You were right the first time, you morons. It’s rage.
“Joker, snap out of it.”
He leans closer, tilting his jaw to stare up at Goro through the gap in his mask. “You don’t want that," he says. "I know you don’t want that.”
Goro’s hands tighten around his hips.
He opens his mouth to respond when Akira stops being all sharp lines and softens back into panic. He squirms out of Goro’s grasp and into the wall, back and palms and heels flat against it. There’s scarcely more than a second of confused, horrified eye contact before he’s turning around and straight-shooting down the tracks. In a rare occurrence of strategy prioritised over inane empathy, no-one follows him.
Niijima is the first to break the silence.
“W-what on earth…?”
Sakamoto’s ever-unhelpful commentary comes next. “Shit. What’re we supposed to do now?!”
Then: Okumura, her usually soft, silvery voice trembling at the tail-end of her stating the obvious, in the very truest sense of the word. “I’m worried… the enraged status effect has never made any of us act that way before…”
Sakura shakes her head. “His readings weren’t any different; it’s the same ailment we all know. I couldn’t gauge anything about his reaction,” she says.
“It couldn’t have been the same! That was… he was completely unpredictable!” Takamaki cries, increasingly, unsurprisingly, uselessly frazzled.
“And… um… you said that shadow shouldn’t have had rage in the first place, right?” Yoshizawa offers, still shaken-up and with a fist clutching at her chest.
So close. They’re so, so close.
And yet, for the final act, the cat goes on to conclude nothing even in the neighbouring realm of noteworthy. “It shouldn’t have. None of the shadows on this path so far have had it. This is the first time, and Oracle couldn’t detect it, either.”
Goro gives up, literally throws his hands into the air. “Are you all brain-damaged?”
They whip around, startled and all at the same time, like they'd forgotten he’s even here.
“You’ve discovered the situation is abnormal. Congratulations. And what are you missing?”
Nothing. Blank stares, all round.
“You cannot be serious.”
“Just come out with it, dude.”
Incredible. What would they ever do without him? “…Let me handle it. I’ll bring him back.”
Okumura’s face pinches together in protest, as expected. Niijima puts a hand around her shoulder. As expected. “…Crow… um…,” she starts, and then goes nowhere with it.
“Might I ask that you just trust me with this? I have nothing to gain from killing your precious leader now. Quite the contrary—I’d lose everything. Every single one of you is utterly useless on your own, and I refuse to be left trapped in this vomit-inducing fairytale world with you.”
The cat waddles towards him, looks up with an expression that is probably supposed to be intimidating, but really just looks laughably stupid. “Then… what are you going to do?” it says.
Goro exhales, makes sure it sounds as annoyed as he feels. “Something of which I highly, highly doubt the rest of you are capable.”
Goro does not like being involved where he shouldn’t have to be, but the Thieves really are absolutely fucking useless without their leader to corral them and dictate their every move. Sakamoto and Takamaki, hearts on their sleeves—Goro wouldn’t be surprised if it ever came about they were of the same single-celled, smooth-brained hivemind. And Sakura, with all the data and none of the experience to do anything with it. Okumura, too kind for the opportunities afforded her; Yoshizawa, no backbone and even less of a handle on her powers. The younger Niijima sister, with all the ambition and none of the self-esteem to match, and Kitagawa, who’s just… bizarre. Oftentimes, that mangy, whiny cat was the best of the lot, not that it was any great feat.
Then there’s Akira… oh, Akira. Perfect Akira. The golden boy, around whom the world never stopped revolving. Who gave and gave until nothing was left—always available, ever the martyr. He causes plenty of problems of his own.
The path is eerily quiet, so much so that he can hear the faux heartbeat of the tendrils shifting above him. They slither over one another and make noises similar to wet skin rather than the trilling of scales he'd been expecting. Well, it’s not like they’re snakes in the first place. Instead, they’re thick in some places and covered with a luminous, bluish-purple, vein-like structure. In others, they’re deadened and burnt, so dry and pointed they could be snapped like a wishbone, and a strange, ashen substance seems to drop from them and settle into the air.
There’re black pillars, shiny and cracked and splintered, lining the platforms and holding up certain rooms. The floor is overall reminiscent of hard hospital tile, but it’s spongy in some places, like soft damaged tissue. Probably a remnant from the old Mementos—that vile, pulsating, capillary-ridden labyrinth that had him feeling like he was walking through the inside of a body.
Everything is so white, so blue. He thinks of Akira, back in November. Bruises beneath translucent skin.
It’s like kintsugi, in a way. The vines. Tendrils, whatever. How poetic; those jagged blue patterns, like gold in the cracks. That’s probably what Maruki had been going for. Another fucking martyr.
…No. Maruki wouldn’t leave any flaws, no matter how “pretty” they could be made to look. Kintsugi is more like… like…
…
Goro likes the cracks, anyway. Fill them, and there’s no way to weasel his way into somebody. Every move Goro makes is dependent on those around him having them—the choices they accumulate that set them up to collapse.
Goro is full of cracks. That’s why Goro is dead.
Whatever dust was suspended in the air before has been slowly replaced by shadow-debris. It clings to walls, mars the tracks. He walks down the middle of them, spinning his long, serrated blade. When he tires of that, he drags it behind him, listens to it judder against the metal rails.
He finds another room, and uses the side of his body to push open the heavy door.
It’s small. He knows shadows should’ve been lurking here, too, because their residue lingers against the white, like a candle burned too closely to the wall.
He’s been here, then.
“Joker,” he calls out, as he has done in every room, and doesn’t expect a reply, as he hasn’t in any room. Akira moves too fast and needs the distraction—he’ll be gunning to clear out the entire path before he can bear to bring himself back to them.
Goro turns to leave, and a wet cry resounds from somewhere in the corner. Shit. Where is he. He whips back around, scans the room. It’s disinfectant-white and soot-black and breathing; it’s empty, except it’s not.
Against the side of a pillar, hidden from where he’d stood, Akira sits trembling with his hands in his hair. His mask is missing. His coat is missing, sweat prickling over his arms.
Goro strides towards him. “Joker,” he says again. It comes out wrong; his mouth is too dry. He notices, too late, Akira’s gun and dagger, thrown into opposite directions. God, he really hadn’t been looking hard enough.
Akira doesn’t raise his head when he responds. “Crow… where… where are the—”
“—I took care of them. Don’t worry.”
A barely-there pulse of flame stops his trajectory. Akira’s iris slides to the side, sharp and wild, and glares through his fingers.
“You hurt them.”
Beneath his own mask, Goro smirks. Akira can’t see it, but he’ll feel it. He needs to keep him like this, at least for now. “I haven’t touched a hair on their heads, and you know it.” He lifts his chin, looks down through his visor, and brings a hand up to settle on his hip. “If anything, you were the one more likely to be causing any… grievous bodily harm.”
Akira shoots up, another black stain on the perfect white tile.
“Yeah? YEAH? Are you fucking surprised? I shoulder everything for them… their infallible, unbreakable leader—when do I ever get to fall apart, hm? Hm?”
Goro rolls his eyes and steps forward. “God, shut up. You sound like me. Come here—”
“Don’t fucking TOUCH ME.”
He’s shaking, visibly and all over. There’s a sheen of sweat over his face, like he’s been laminated by it, and Goro knows the rest of his body is the same. His eyes are manic and raving and it’s clear the only reason he has his red-gloved fingers pushed into the pillar is because the alternatives are to collapse, or charge forward and rip Goro to shreds.
“…Joker—”
Akira’s other hand comes up to stop him, then claps around his own chest. He’s still holding himself back.
“Ha—ahh, C-Crow, give me the Amrita…”
Goro can see every single one of his teeth, including the strain they’re under. He pulls out the small vial he’d pocketed before he left the others, and presents it to him plainly on a flattened palm. Akira gasps, horrified, and jerks away.
“Croww,” he moans, trying to avoid being parallel to it as Goro follows his movements with the hand. “I hate this. I hate it Ihateithateithateithateit—GIVE IT TO ME.”
His eyes clear, just for a moment, but his body stutters, simultaneously held back and propelled forward by the same muddied axis. As he lurches towards Goro—Goro’s hands—fixated on the vial, Goro clicks it open, and within seconds he’s hissing, whimpering, falling back onto his haunches and coiling up like it isn’t an inch of liquid but rather a gun being levelled at him.
“See? Not going to work,” he deadpans, and gets closer to shake it around like a cat toy. With every step he takes, Akira mirrors it backwards, until he’s almost boxed in against the wall. Then, he snaps his head up, teeth still bared, pupils encircled with a bright, burning red. He runs at Goro, who stumbles on his feet and tries to use his negligible height advantage to get the vial out of reach. But he’s too slow, too caught off guard, and Akira smacks it away with one hand and takes Goro’s neck in the other, spinning him around and slamming him into the wall.
Up close, Akira’s eyes are huge and bloodshot, and flecks of spit fly easily onto Goro’s face. The fingers tighten too carefully around his throat, but a second hand is coming up to double the pressure. Before it can land, Goro’s redirecting it by gripping the wrist and yanking it beside him into the wall. Akira’s weight carries him along the motion, and Goro uses it to punch him clean across the face, gauntlet catching on cheekbone.
He lets go and ducks back, cupping a hand over his face. It’s bleeding. There’s a clean gash following the line of his bone, matching the red on Goro’s knuckles. They’re both breathing hard, but Akira’s expression has rounded, and before he can fully break into a run off to the right, Goro is rushing after him, folding into a tackle, and pinning him to the floor.
He thrashes, sobs. Ugly splutters that have Goro’s heart flip-flopping in his chest. “Get off me—fuck, Crow, please. I’m gonna hurt you. I’m not… I can’t—control anything.”
“Do it,” he says, because what else is there to say, really. Akira stops struggling. His lip quivers. His eyes glow and fade over and over with miry red.
“W-what?”
“Hurt me. Stop trying to control it.”
“Don’t… what are you saying—” as his face draws inwards, his mouth splits apart, canines glistening white, “—get the fuck off me.”
He’s throwing himself up, down, side-to-side; the entire weight of his body is distilled in the arch of his back, the bend of his knees. Goro shoves one of his own between his thighs, grabs his shoulders and pushes himself up, keeping Akira down with the force. “I’m here… to help you,” he grits out, voice straining in effort. “You need to let this kind of anger burn out, Joker. This isn’t fucking good for you. Let me help.”
Akira is flailing, fingers curled into claws that reach for but just barely connect with Goro’s mask. His feet come up to slip uselessly against hips. “I can… handle this—my… self…,” he whines, the ailment dissolving again and a weak, determined desperation flooding the gaps. Goro’s thumbs shift sideways to haul him up and slam him back into the ground. He’s yelling, now, and it’s lilting into something just as desperate, almost as afraid.
“Stop. You’re killing yourself. You can’t suppress this amount of—”
“—I’m gonna kill you.”
His voice is a cold, ballistic promise. He’s still, face calcified. Goro sits back on his heels and waits. There’s a quiet growl emanating from Akira’s throat, and even though he’s not moving, his hands are poised to deal with any sudden change.
Goro barks out a laugh and steps off of him, making sure he has a full view of the flames newly dancing in his palm. He knew he would have to do this. He didn’t strictly want to, because of the consequences it could bring. But consequences didn’t mean much to him these days.
He brings the red cyclone, roiling between his fingers, up to his forehead. “…Yeah? You think you’re able?”
“Crow, don’t you dare.” Akira says, but it’s flat. He’s testing him.
“Show me then, Joker. Give me a fucking challenge, for once.” And then he’s doing it—he’s doing it, pure unfiltered red-hot fucking rage pouring through every vein. Seizing and shattering and burning all his muscles all at once, and suddenly he’s aware, of everything. He can see hear smell taste feel everything Akira feels, and fuck if he isn’t ecstatic.
Akira’s maniacal laugh tears through the muffling layer of release. “Hahaha! You’re crazy, you’re fucking crazy!”
Perhaps he is—he feels it, but he has enough sense to drag Akira up, because it’d be no fun otherwise. He’s a little unsteady on his feet, red- and black-spots whirling at the edges of his vision. Akira outlined in it like an enemy. He watches through this film until the other boy is scrabbling backwards on his elbows, kicking his feet, getting up and dropping into a stance. Beckoning, with his body, for Goro to do, well, whatever he wants.
So, he does. He leans down and shoots forward, direct into Akira’s stomach. They both go tumbling to the ground they’d detached from mere seconds ago, but there’s no imbalance this time, just Goro’s chaos and Akira’s rage.
His body is all lean muscle and much denser than Akira’s, so all he has to do to flatten him against the ground is relax. The writhing he gets in response is intoxicating.
Akira's still laughing, and starts to jerk his shoulder relentlessly until the rest of his arm follows, breaking free for an elbow to immediately connect once, twice, three times with Goro’s helmet. There’s a sickening crunch, and for a moment he can't tell who it came from, until metal explodes all around his eye, Akira makes an odd, strangled noise, and he realises—both of them.
For now, Goro would rather keep his mask, so he rolls off of Akira’s body. If Akira is at all bothered that his elbow is very likely shattered to pieces, he isn’t showing it. Instead, he rolls in the opposite direction and takes off running, keeping his upper body relatively close to the ground, and makes a beeline for one of his abandoned weapons.
There’s a bullet ripping through Goro’s shoulder before he can register Akira snatching up his gun. Crazy fucking bastard—he didn’t even hesitate. Behind the barrel, his eyes are wild, raking over Goro’s body, smile half-formed like he can’t decide how to feel about the escalation until he reacts. He’s stock-still in place, still aiming. Goro is equipped with ridiculous claws, so he has to press the heel of his palm into the wound to stem any bleeding. The pain hasn’t hit, not yet; it feels like a paperweight has been dropped onto him, but beyond that there’s only a dull throb.
He circles, waits. When Akira lowers the gun, Goro collides into him and uses his unoccupied hand to knock it away. And Akira—he knows, he must know, because he drops it so easily.
“No weapons,” he says. Akira nods.
“…I know. I agree.” His mouth starts to form around an apology, but before he can speak Goro’s driving him backwards with the arm crossed over his chest. He crashes into the wall, eyes darting between Goro’s face and shoulder.
He scowls. The pain still hasn’t blossomed. “You shot me,” he says, simply. Akira looks a little confused, a little conflicted, as if, for a moment, he’s not quite sure what's being referred to.
With their faces so close together, he isn’t seeing the pinprick pupils one would normally expect from the ailment. Instead, Akira’s are blown so wide he can see his reflection in them, and his face is flushed a deep, shiny pink. Almost like he’s drunk.
All of a sudden, it’s obvious. Painfully obvious; gloriously obvious. He’s enjoying this.
Goro digs his foot into Akira’s toe, and reels out of him a breathy moan. He feels it condense in the cool air around his cheek. He’s not going to say anything, but he felt Akira’s hips buck forward, too.
Akira wets his lips. “It… felt right,” he finally responds, vision tunnelling onto Goro’s mouth. He gulps thickly, and Goro watches it move down his throat.
There’s a small chunk of flesh hanging out of Goro’s shoulder, and once he’s finished whatever thought he’d been indulging, Akira’s eyes flick downwards to stare at it, entranced. He reaches out with trembling fingers, and Goro is about to stop him, doesn’t like where this is going, but there’s an opportunity in this; an opportunity to win. Win what, he doesn’t quite know anymore, but who cares.
When Akira’s distracted hand curls around his shoulder, there’s a short eruption of burning pain, not at all helped by his thumb just barely slipping into the hole. Goro suppresses whatever sound is creeping up his throat and instead grabs his wrist.
With a knee to the diaphragm, Akira crumples to the ground. His hand is still in Goro’s, fingers sketched red, thumb drenched up to the first knuckle.
Goro unclips his mask and lowers himself to meet him. Grabs his chin and holds him in place to gauge the red still flickering in his eyes. There’s enough, apparently, for Akira to not care for the results of pushing Goro’s helmet clean off. It thumps against his shoulder on its way down, which is inconvenient, really, because it leaves his ears ringing and vision whiting out for just long enough that Akira’s hands can change course and find purchase in his face. His nails create little crescent-shaped divots, Goro’s blood all over them.
But Akira isn’t attacking him, he’s trying to get him away, so when he slams the heel of his palm into Goro’s jaw, desperately tilting his hands this way and that to find the best angle for pushing, Goro leans into the touch, waits, and sinks his teeth hard into the webbing between Akira’s thumb and forefinger when he rotates his hand to dig the digits into Goro’s cheeks. And now there’s more blood, so much blood, more of Goro’s overall but Akira’s on his tongue, so it worked—he’s winning.
He’d figured Akira wouldn’t be doing much else with the arm containing the shattered elbow, but he was wrong—so, so wrong, because it’s in his hair now, pulling, nowhere near hard enough to hurt. But Goro does not like having his hair touched. Hates it, in fact, so he tumbles out of Akira’s grasp and goes skidding across the floor on his hands and feet to put some distance between them again.
The pressure in his shoulder is increasing; there’s a nasty sting ricocheting up and down his arm. Nausea wraps itself around his throat like the tendrils above and crawls, sour, into his mouth.
Akira, the dirty lying cheating fucking traitor, takes two seconds to scan his surroundings before getting up himself. He surges to the left then comes running back at Goro with his newly retrieved dagger. There’s not enough time to get further away, so Goro compromises—shuffles onto his back, weight leaning into his good shoulder, and puts his knees up. Akira is immediately against them, leaning down over them, making a futile attempt to slice Goro’s bodysuit open with the knife.
“Fuck are you trying to do,” he hisses, trying to grab Akira’s wrist, the hilt, even the blade, and failing miserably at all three.
“Wanna fuck you,” Akira mumbles, and he stops waving the dagger to instead plant his hands—or rather, one free hand and the heel of the other—onto Goro’s knees, pushing them apart.
As best he can, he twists his upper body away. “You’re insane,” he spits, and Akira stops. Stares.
Slowly, a smile tugs at the corners of his lips. He takes his dagger and delicately slides it down the length of Goro’s torso—too deep; blood beads in a straight line from neck to navel—and then throws it off to the side. He splays one palm out across Goro’s bare chest. Slips his fingers underneath the two planes of cut material and over his nipples.
Despite himself, Goro’s breath slows, heavy in his lungs. And when Akira pushes his thigh against his erection as if to prove some kind of a point, it sends a warm, embarrassing shudder through him that has his eyes fluttering and mouth dropping open.
“That—is not an invitation,” he manages, but Akira just laughs in his face. Spreads his legs further apart until there’s a burn in the tendons, then hooks his own around them and grinds against him. He bites back a moan, lip pale between his teeth. They’re both rock-hard.
“Oh, but it is,” he says after a second, less restrained moan, “when it’s you and me, it is.”
Through the haze, the all-wrong, addled haze of pleasure and pain and survival and sabotage, Goro takes Akira’s hand from his chest to bite down hard on one of its fingers until bone grinds against his teeth. Akira yelps and pulls back; Goro rides the momentum until their faces are parallel and spits out the digit, spraying him with blood, grabbing the collar of his stupid sleeveless vest and headbutting him before he can fully topple. He gets out from below, swaying, and takes a fistful of his hair to guide his face into an angle from which he can smash it repeatedly into the ground.
“So, this is what you wanted, is it? This whole time? I should’ve known, you sick freak.”
The ground is softer here, with just enough give that all Goro gets in reply is smears of blood, visible only when Akira's head is lifted, and a concurrent series of muted, wet thuds. That is, until he hears something that’s likely supposed to be an inhale but is undeniably much more of a gurgle.
He holds Akira high long enough for him to follow it with speech. “I… want you to do your worst,” he croaks, spits blood to the side, and Goro thinks about how it’ll taste on his lips when he inevitably has to kiss him, “and I’ll do mine. You know I can tell you’re holding back. You know I know your power doesn’t take away your capacity to make half-way logical decisions. You also know I don’t care what you do to me. I just want you to do it with everything you’ve got.”
“Oh, I would love to.”
He pulls Akira’s pants down off of his hips, and takes a moment to dig his talons into the white, unmarred skin of his ass. When he’s happy with the ellipses of blood rising there, he removes one gauntlet, spits onto his fingers, then reaches around to shove them in Akira’s mouth. He groans and laps hungrily at them, tasting as much of Goro as he can. The noise, the wet warmth, has Goro’s dick straining in the confines of his suit, and he finds himself wishing Akira had cut just a little further down.
Once Akira is satisfied, he opens his mouth and rolls out his tongue. Goro takes his fingers from it; they come back lined with little pinkish-red bubbles of saliva. Blood. So much blood. His shoulder throbs again, but the ache in his dick is stronger—even more so once Akira shuffles his knees further apart and pushes his head down into the ground, presenting Goro with his hole. Willingly putting himself into such a vulnerable position Goro can’t help but stop and admire him.
They shouldn’t really be doing this. They’ve taken too long; the others may be incompetent, but they wouldn’t stand around and wait forever—they’re too earnest; it's their biggest weakness. Rarely, so rarely it's scarcely worth acknowledging, it's their greatest strength.
It was one thing for the two of them to be caught fighting. They’d probably expect to catch them fighting—not a one of them would be even a tiny bit surprised. This… was another thing entirely.
God, who fucking cares. Let them. Let them see their leader get debased, find out he’s human too.
Goro pushes his arguably lubed-up fingers into him. Capacity to make half-way logical decisions, indeed.
“Crow,” Akira moans, cheek pressed into the ground. He shifts to burrow his head into the crook of his elbow, panting heavily in time with the motion of Goro’s fingers.
“Hurts?” he replies, mocking. He doesn’t specify what hurts, because everything should.
“Yes.”
“Good. Endure it.”
He uses a fingertip from his still-gauntleted hand to draw a stripe down Akira’s back. His vest slides off in two halves over his arms. He uses the same finger to tear open the remnants of material covering his own crotch, then pulls the gauntlet off with his teeth. His cock springs free and after spitting into his palm, he strokes it. His shoulder is severely restricting his range, but he just about manages to get it a little harder, a lot wetter.
His face is so hot. His whole arm is numb. The fingers inside Akira are burning. He draws them out slowly, making sure to scissor them and press against every spot that makes Akira keen and writhe on the way. Then, after considerably less time than he’d normally devote to this, he replaces them with his cock.
He fucks into Akira erratically, at first. All their clothes are gone, save for the few tatters of Goro’s suit clinging to his neck and shoulders. Akira’s pants around his bent knees. It’s interesting; Goro had always wondered if metaverse clothing could be damaged, removed, and now he has his answer. He wondered now if they’d be able to get it back somehow before the Thieves found them.
There’s blood gushing down his arm, flow speeding up in tandem with the beat of his heart. It’s thick and slippery and compromising his hold on Akira’s hips. He’s literally bleeding out, all over him. He started feeling woozy several minutes ago and hasn’t bothered to mention it.
“Fuuck, Crow,” Akira groans in drawn-out, mindless bliss as Goro slows his pace and starts to roll his hips deliberately, head reeling every time skin meets skin. He’s trying to find it—the rhythm, the pace, the pressure, the exact combination that will satiate Akira’s hunger, and with a lurch in his gut he starts to realise that nothing ever will.
But by God is he going to try.
He pulls him up by his curls, as close as he can get him whilst remaining inside, and puts a hand around his neck. Squeezes. His windpipe shifts and bulges beneath his fingers, and the rhythm of his moans changes with his breath. Trapped vibrations against Goro’s hand when he’s denied, and desperate, gasping, short little bursts of pleasure when he relaxes his grip.
His back is so hot, so wet, hard planes of muscle and bone under sweet, pliant skin. There’s a gap between Goro’s abs and the lower curve of Akira’s spine that he desperately, urgently wants to close. But he can’t, so he pushes his chest out, lets his nipples catch in the friction, and peppers Akira’s nape and shoulders with harsh suctions and sharp bites, until he’s mottled all over.
He brings his nose up to the side of his neck; he wants to smell him, but everything is overpowered by blood, permeated with its coppery, lingering tang.
Still, whilst he’s there, he peeks over his shoulder to watch his neglected cock smack against his belly with each thrust. He traces, lightly, up the shaft, then makes a hole with his fist and positions it around the head, expecting Akira to fuck into it. He doesn’t.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
“You’re not touching yourself,” he says, accusatory. Akira wheezes out a laugh that devolves into a hiccup and then a moan around the oxygen he’s been permitted.
“Am I allowed to?”
“Don’t play dumb. You don’t even want me to, do you? You don’t care. You just want to hurt.”
Silence. Long, heavy, straining silence. Stretched not quite taut enough to snap, yet just enough to bounce Goro’s own idiocy back at him.
He lets him go, and he drops to the ground, flat and without ceremony.
“…Akira. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
His breathing is fragmented, but he slowly gathers enough of it together to respond.
“I think… I think I don’t want anyone else to know about this. About what I am. I’d rather you just… take this for what it is,” Akira says, and every word shudders and dies against the tile.
He can’t see his face. He wants to see his face.
His heart feels uncharacteristically wrung out, like an already-dried cloth. Like there’s nothing left to draw but the tiniest, most microscopic fibres of himself. “I’m not punishing you. Tell me you understand that.”
He’s still just lying there, an awkward, rag dolled mess of limbs, red on purple on white. He speaks again, too quietly to hear. Then again, body coiling tighter and tighter then collapsing into one painful-sounding sob.
Goro lifts him gently back onto his hands and knees. He drapes himself over his sticky back, rests his chin on his shoulder, and listens.
“It’s… it’s just not enough. It’s never enough.”
His head spins around the confession. Everything is vertiginous right now, and he can't pin down the source.
He doesn't know what else he can do, not without killing him. Should he? Would it even help? They have items for this—they should; Akira always stuffs his pockets with Balms and Revival Beads, but surely, surely the rage would just come back with him. Goro can't... he doesn't…
Standing here like an idiot isn't going to achieve anything. He presses his fingers into the back of Akira’s neck and pulls him up. He's still choking on a sob; and then, all at once—he’s silent. The flames erupt around him again and he’s knocking the back of his head hard into Goro's, pivoting on his knees to pounce over him. Goro, dazed by the electric burst of pain, somehow stays on his feet, panics, and lifts one to drill the heel down into Akira’s shoulder before he can do anything else. There’s a second, quieter, more sickening crunch, followed instantly by a resounding wail.
Akira writhes on the floor, clutching at his now completely limp arm. But he’s right—it’s not enough, never enough, and he staggers up, tears in his eyes, face bloodied and bruised, and just… flops into Goro, who’s standing still and defenceless and honestly fucking terrified that he’s just broken Akira’s clavicle, his elbow, probably his nose, and yet still, he’s fighting.
Akira, funnily enough, doesn’t bother with prep at all. Once Goro is on the floor, he’s pushing into him, bottoming out. It burns, and Goro throws his head back and screams.
He’s so full.
He lets a moan battle its way from his body. “Jo—kerrr.”
Akira takes his neck and guides the sound out. “Ha… haha… you like this. You want this. Deliberately riling me up, turning me on. Always fucking turning me on. In Leblanc, in the beginning, looking up at me from the bar all innocent, sipping your coffee. You know how easy it was for me to imagine that same face, that same look, that same mouth, choking on my cock? Or now, when you growl and scream and tear shadows apart with nothing but your hands, even though your sword is right fucking there. Making me… haah, wish that were me, your claws in my skin. You know, don’t you, that this is what you do to me. And you love that I can’t do anything about it. Well? Well, I’m fucking doing something about it.”
His hands are around Goro’s legs. He heaves them over his own shoulders and positions them so his ankle sits right atop his broken bone. He grunts at the contact and leans down, folding Goro in half, stomach flat against the backs of his thighs.
The chaos is wearing off. He can’t feel the majority of his body; his extremities are gone, his limbs are sludge, but his core is igneous and his ass burns. “You’re not coming inside me,” is all he can possibly think to say.
“I’m doing whatever the fuck I want. I never get to.”
Goro’s blood is making the tile slippery, so Akira shifts to stabilise him with his crippled arm, and Goro tries, through the delicious drag of Akira’s cock, to reason through why he wouldn’t use the other. And then Akira starts groaning, biting his lip, nostrils flared, eyes clouding over, and Goro has the cataclysmic realisation—he’s getting off on the pain. This whole time, he’s been getting off on it. It was never pain over pleasure, it was both, all at once; one long double helix he’d been tugging on opposite ends of from the start, only to cinch it tighter, more inseparable than it already was, until every intersection became an embrace.
He’s thrusting into him wildly, badly, just the chase of the high of their bodies so close to each other, so broken by each other, and he feels it at the same time he sees it—they’re both about to come.
With his remaining strength, Goro twists a foot just enough to kick him off. He lands opposite him, legs spread, and Goro immediately takes their cocks in one hand, pumps furiously, grabs him by the hair. He’s kissing him frantically; blood in their mouths, the pitch of their moans arriving home in the other’s throat.
Akira takes both his hands and cradles Goro’s face, holds him so hard, squeezes him so delicately, like he’s trying to drink him in, breathe from his lungs. He kisses hungrily, teeth knocking teeth, sinking into flesh, and he doesn’t stop at his lips, either. He covers every inch of the lower half of his face, like he needs it, like this is all he ever needed. Like this is what the entire fight was for.
The last things Goro sees before his eyes fall shut are Akira’s already-closed ones and his brow tightening above them, and the last thing he feels before hot cum pours over his fingers is Akira’s tongue slipping deftly into his mouth—smooth, elegant, gentle; always, even after everything. Goro widens his mouth and lets him explore every crevice. For once, he doesn’t rise to overtake him, or even meet him there.
His head starts to swim, to plummet. He feels himself fall sideways and away from Akira’s lips, but not before he can press against them the final, tiny, involuntary whimper escaping him. A hand glides up to his temple, between it and the ground, and then the room is drowned in black.
He wakes up in Akira’s arms. His head beside his shoulder, back in the curve of his elbow, and the rest of his body just sort of sprawled across his lap. Akira has one hand against his hip, keeping him in place, and the other slipped beneath his gauntlet to idly stroke his skin.
The pain is gone. There’s a ghost of it in the ache of his shoulder, a throbbing in his head. A bad, metallic taste in his mouth, but nothing he can’t ignore. Their clothes are back, too, which answers the thought he’d had earlier, though his mask is off. Akira must’ve removed it.
He looks around. There’s no blood on either of their bodies, but it remains streaked and spattered over the walls and floor. Goro could probably retrace every movement he made from the droplets incrementally increasing in diameter; they litter the tile in concentric rings, then jagged lines, then a large, smudged pool.
“Feel okay?” He tilts his head back to look up at the voice. In this light, Akira is dizzyingly pale—worried, and trying to hide it.
“You lost too much blood,” he states when Goro doesn’t reply, as if it wasn’t obvious.
He runs a hand down over his face. “I had some Beads in my pockets, that I, uh… fed… to you? It’s… I’m glad I did. God. I thought you were dead. I thought I… that I…”
He’s babbling. Goro puts a hand over his mouth to shut him up and studies his pupils. His eyes aren’t red anymore, but they’re not grey like he’d always thought, either. They’re a very, very muted blue.
He removes his hand. “You’re back,” is all he says.
Akira blinks down at him, lets out a long, measured exhale. “Never left,” he says. And then: “Thank you. You… you knew exactly what to do.”
“Obviously,” he tuts, and he should stop there, because he’s dead and none of this matters. But he doesn’t. “Do you want to talk about this?”
“I mean… I don’t really think there’s much to say?”
There’s a flattened curl stuck to the corner of his mouth that Goro brings his thumb back up to brush away. His eyes are several degrees clearer; he looks several weights lighter. Goro doesn’t think too hard before he’s stretching upwards to kiss him again.
“You like it,” he says when he breaks away and sits up on his own, shuffling out of Akira’s lap. “You like the rage.”
A laugh, an eye roll. Both shaky. “You like the chaos.”
“It’s my own power. I’m allowed to use it. No-one bats an eye.”
“…Hm.”
Goro slides off a gauntlet and presses a finger into his shoulder, feels the newly healed skin dip beneath the pad then spring back into place. Akira’s lingering touch buzzes against his knuckles. “…I can’t believe you shot me.”
“You broke two, maybe three, of my bones, and mangled my face beyond recognition. Call it even?”
He scoffs. “You weren’t beyond recognition. You…” His throat suddenly constricts, and he cups Akira’s face between his palms. The soft flesh of his cheeks squishes upwards to crescent his eyes. “…Akira, you…”
He can’t say it.
Akira’s hands cover his. He detaches them and brings all four down to tangle in his lap.
He doesn’t need to say it.
“I know why that Moloch could inflict rage,” he says, quietly, after a while.
“Do you, now. Well, let’s hear your hypothesis.”
“It was me. It had to have been. Mementos is already a manifestation of the public’s negative emotions, and Maruki’s been trying to eradicate them for good. That’s why there’s only—”
“—Forget and fear on this path, ordinarily. I thought the same. However, to say it was just you is rather self-centred, don’t you think?” He looks down. Akira is tracing his fingers again. “You’re… not the only one like this.”
He's giving no indication of a reply, so Goro lugs himself to his feet. Any second now—he can already hear the footsteps outside, clanging down the tracks.
“Where are you—”
“Your troupe has arrived.”
“Crow! Joker!”
They come charging in—or would have, had they not faltered in the doorway, tripped over one another, and catalogued the room, frozen stiff.
“…Joker… what happened in here?” the cat says, inching forward.
“Rage.” He says quickly. “It was just rage, like Oracle said. Had to let it burn out. We’re both fine, don’t worry.” He very pointedly has not mentioned the blood, and so the Thieves don’t either, conflicted relief visibly deflating them one-by-one.
“Oracle, make sure you log the discrepancy,” Niijima says.
“Already on it! This floor is filling back up again, by the way. You guys wanna get going?”
Ha. Business as usual.
Akira’s gaze sweeps over him as he walks by. Goro follows and, whilst everyone’s backs are turned, wordlessly tugs on his coat.
When Akira stops, he puts his arms around his torso and noses at his neck, searching for the artery thick with his hammering pulse. He finds it, and covers it with his mouth.
He feels Akira shudder in his arms. Feels an incriminating noise that doesn’t quite leave his throat thrum against his lips.
“You asked me when you get to fall apart,” he murmurs, “did this… answer your question?”
His talons sink lightly into Akira’s sides, and he rakes them up and down.
“Yes,” he says, all exhalation and no real sound. And then they stay there a moment, hearts beating, bodies aching. Breathing, just out of sync.
When the Thieves peer back through the door to check the hold-up, Goro has already made it several paces ahead. He looks over his shoulder at Akira, and is met with the first loose, effortless, slightly dazed smile he’s seen all month.
It’s vile. He’s beautiful.
And Goro… Well. Goro is pretty sure he’s dead.