Archive of Our Own ^beta

Five days after Akira dies, Goro wakes up with the worst headache of his life. He isn’t sure if it’s from barely eating over the last few days or if it’s dehydration from nights of useless tears, but he finally decides it’s caffeine withdrawal and gets up to make himself a cup of coffee.

He’s done it enough times by now that he should know the ratios. But his mind is dull and running solely on habit, and he looks at the note on the fridge anyway, reading the neat, carefully-printed letters: 300 mL water / 18 g coffee (for your big mug)

There’s more written on the note below the measurements that Goro keeps himself from reading. But even once he’s turned away from the fridge—once he’s boiled the water and ground the beans and wet the filter—the next words on the note come to him anyway. Settle the grounds, the next bullet point says, blue ink on white paper. Start pouring in concentric circles, from the center out, up to 50g water.

“Wait 30 seconds," he hears. "Then start the concentric circles again.”

Akira probably never said those exact words in that exact order, with that exact punctuation. He was just jotting down instructions. But Goro’s read those words on the note, over and over again, enough times that he can hear them in Akira’s voice.

Goro wonders if this is what it’s going to be like for the rest of his life: losing track of the facts of what Akira didn’t say and never did, replacing the truth with his own constructions until there's nothing left of the real thing.

His hands start to shake, and the concentric circles grow more and more erratic. He can hear Akira chucking, feels the breath of laughter on the back of his neck as Akira leans over to watch him.

“You’ve got to be more patient, Goro,” Akira whispers right into his ear, and Goro’s hands shake so violently that he pours some of the boiling water straight onto his hand.

He jolts in pain, knocking the porcelain dripper right off of his mug.

It falls to the counter, perfectly salvageable save for a few grounds that spill out of the filter, but it’s rolling slowly towards the edge of the counter. Goro could catch it, easily.

He doesn’t.

Finally, eventually, inevitably, it hits the edge of the counter and falls to the floor. The delicate porcelain shatters across the ground.

Morgana runs in at the sound of crashing, and nervously talks Goro through putting down the kettle of boiling water. When Goro starts picking up the sharp porcelain pieces, they cut into his skin, drawing blood, and he keeps going. It takes a few minutes for Morgana to convince him to set those down, too.

Goro doesn’t try making himself coffee again after that.

Threats to Akira’s life are nothing new. He’s faced Shido and God and Goro himself, forces outside of himself that wanted him dead and that he stared down with a smirk. His survival was always so intricately tied up with the world’s survival, with forces of heaven and forces of hell alike working to tip the scales from life into death.

So when he’s told that, in the end, it’s going to be something as mundane as illness—his very cells betraying him—that’s will finally kill Akira—well. It’s the most ridiculous thing that Goro’s ever heard.

It should matter that he’s far bigger than life and death.

It starts out as nothing. Akira loses some weight, his cheeks a bit sharper and his hips a bit more prominent when Goro slides his hands down his sides, but the oppressive summer heat, Akira says, makes it hard to eat as much. It's normal. There’s the occasional stomach pain, the occasional fever—and maybe when Goro lists all those things together, later, it’ll seem so clearly like it’s something. But when they live each moment, each day, they’re just minor inconveniences, and Akira’s fine.

Right up until he isn’t.

He’s in Leblanc, working behind the counter, when he suddenly rushes to the small public bathroom and throws up. Then throws up again, and again, before briefly blacking out on the dingy bathroom floor. When Akira comes to, Sojiro’s there, helping him up and taking him to Takemi’s.

Goro isn’t actually there to witness any of this, of course. He doesn’t even hear about it until Akira’s back home, having taken the subway from Yongen-jaya as always, and he offhandedly mentions that he felt kind of sick, and Sojiro way overreacted. They laugh it off.

It’s harder to laugh it off when, a few days later, Takemi calls to ask him to go to the hospital to get a sample redrawn, a weird result on one of the tests. And then it happens again, asking for even more tests, and then Takemi calls him into her clinic, telling him to bring Goro with him, and suddenly, it goes from nothing to everything—

They have five months, at best.

Seeing the pieces of the broken ceramic dripper in the trash fills Goro with a sudden and uncontrollable fury. He throws out the entire box of filters, and the jar of coffee beans, too. He takes down Akira’s mug from the cabinet and smashes it on the ground, and Morgana’s been screaming something at him for a while, now, but when the mug shatters and shards go everywhere, Morgana finally runs out of his way.

The anger’s still boiling under his skin, an intensity that Call of Chaos could never rival. Smashing the mug gave him a half-second’s relief from the angry heat filling him, only for it to bubble up further, hotter, deeper.

He goes into the bathroom and throws out Akira’s floss, and his shampoo and conditioner, and the comb he couldn’t have used more than twice—Goro breaks that one in half before trashing it, too, another half-second of relief.

He goes into the bedroom and is overwhelmed by how much he can’t stand to have there any more—the books, the clothes, the trinkets, everything that used to be his and aren’t his any more.

He goes to the bedside table, first, and it’s sitting there, right where Akira put it when he took it off and never put it on again.

The moment Goro sees the engagement ring, he knows that throwing it in the trash isn’t going to be enough. He needs to incinerate it in the sink, or drop it down a well, or throw it into a trench in the middle of the ocean, where no one can ever retrieve it, least of all him.

Instead, the moment he takes it in his hand, he collapses, out of rage and out of breath, and with the anger gone he’s left with absolutely nothing. His whole body curls around the ring as he falls to the floor, protecting it from himself.

“Come on, Goro, it’s time to get up,” Akira says too brightly, looming over him with a smile.

Goro pulls the blanket up over his face, groaning. He sticks his hand out, grasping in the direction of Akira’s voice.

Instead of a hot mug of coffee, though, he finds Akira’s cold hand.

“Mrh?” Goro asks, still half asleep, instinctually grabbing onto Akira’s hand, anyway.

Akira uses the proffered hand to pull Goro out from under the covers and partially out of bed, earning a surprised shout as Goro tumbles the rest of the way out.

He’s trying to put together the words to ask what the hell is happening, but Akira’s already leading him by the hand out of the bedroom. “Come on,” he says, “it’s time to make you coffee.”

Goro’s still rubbing his eyes into focus when he mumbles, “You don’t need my help for that.”

“Well, this time, you’re finally going to learn to do it yourself.”

It takes a few seconds before the words pierce through Goro’s sleep addled brain, but once they do, it’s like ice water’s been injected straight into his veins; he’s suddenly very awake, and very, very still.

“And why,” Goro says, a challenge in his voice, “am I going to do that?”

As he watches Akira turn back to him slowly, unable to meet his eyes, the ice in Goro’s veins slowly boils over into fire.

“Please,” Akira says softly, “can we not do this now.”

Goro pulls his hand out of Akira’s sharply. “Stop this shit, Akira. I’m not going to let you go through the motions of—of putting your fucking affairs in order, okay, because that’s just you wallowing in self-pity because you aren’t willing—”

“Please!” Akira shouts. For the briefest moment, he’s staring Goro down, fierce and bright. But then his eyes sink back to the floor, watery and dull again. “Please, Goro,” he says, much quieter this time. “I just—we’ve had this fight already, we can have it again later if you want. But can you please do this for me?”

Goro says nothing, and after a minute, Akira smiles up at him, through his tears. “Hey. What if I told you I was doing the treatment after all? Maybe I’ve just been thinking about all those side effects Takemi told us about, and I’m gonna need you to make me coffee while I'm recovering in bed. So I need to teach you. How does that sound?”

Akira’s smiling at him, a slightly wobbly smile through the tears that he’s trying his best to keep back, and—

The liquid fire in Goro’s veins has hardened into something heavy and aching, something that settles a thick lump in his throat and a mass in his heart and weighs him down, down, deep into the earth—

Because Akira is dying, and somehow, he’s still the one comforting Goro.

Goro’s not sure he can breathe, let alone form words, so he just nods, following Akira into the kitchen.

Akira flitters across the kitchen silently and assuredly, a master in his studio. Goro watches him fill the kettle and set it to boiling. It’s the nice gooseneck one that Sojiro gifted them when they moved in together. He told them he’d gotten better kettles for Leblanc, and this one was taking up too much counter space—though he’d also said the same thing about the grinder, the French press, and the delicate ceramic coffee dripper he’d also given them.

“Hm, should we start with the French press?” Akira says, thinking out loud—mostly for Goro’s benefit, he can tell, to try to clear the air of the thick tension that’s settled. “It’s definitely the easiest, but you don’t really like French press. So we can skip straight to pour-overs.”

I don't? Goro knows, theoretically, that these are all different ways of making coffee, but how they’re different enough that Goro could have a preference—much less a preference he didn’t even know he had—is really beyond him. “I’m glad you think I’m up for the challenge,” is all he says, and Akira smiles as he grabs a filter from the shelf.

This is the first time, Goro realizes, that he’s ever engaged with Akira’s fairly intense coffee hobby, and it’s not even by choice. He’s starting to feel sick, but he doesn’t let himself sit down. He’ll get through this.

“The first thing you do is wet the—well, no, actually, the first thing you do is start the water boiling. But I already did that.” Akira is looking confused, like he was reading from a script only to find the pages out of order, and his earnest confusion is so cute Goro can’t help but smile, just a little.

Finally, Akira nods. “But then, the next thing you do is wet the filter, like this,” he says, looking proud that he’s back on track. “Sojiro told me it’s to get rid of the papery taste of the filter.”

“Surely you can’t actually taste that,” Goro says, just to say something.

Akira beams, like Goro has given the right answer when he didn’t even know he was asked a question. “That’s what I thought! Like, it can’t actually make a difference, right?” His smile turns into a slight smirk. “But one morning I skipped it, and you spit the coffee back out and demanded to know why it tasted like paper.”

Goro feels himself flush, but he laughs all the same. He doesn’t remember that at all; then again, since he’s always practically still asleep when Akira delivers his coffee in bed, the fact that he doesn’t remember is hardly surprising.

What he’s a little more surprised by is that apparently, and utterly unintentionally, he has these exacting standards for coffee. Goro never knew this about himself, and Akira did.

He wonders what that must have been like for Akira—making him coffee every morning, trying out new things and gauging Goro’s half-asleep response to determine where to go from there. Years and years of trial and error, a whole secret recipe and process that he’s perfected and that only he knows, and Goro’s never asked about it once.

It’s the sort of inane secret that would have died with Akira, if Goro hadn’t stumbled upon it. He starts to panic a little, overwhelmed, because how many things like that must there be? How many things he doesn’t know, will never know—

“Come on, we have to grind the beans while the water’s boiling,” Akira says, tugging Goro over to the counter and out of his head.

Akira talks about the grinder, about what grind to use for what purpose—and goes into a spiel, one he’s pretty sure Akira is copying word for word from Sojiro, about why burr grinders are better. Better than what, Goro doesn’t know, doesn’t care—it’s calming to listen to Akira go on and on. It’s not something Akira does often.

“Once you have the grounds all settled, you use just a little water—pour it in circles like this, inside to out, evenly all around. Just enough to get them wet, then hit the little button here on the scale to start the timer. And wait until it hits 30.” He does so, and turns to Goro as he waits for the time to elapse. “This part’s called the ‘bloom,’ and basically, the gasses that were stored up in the coffee beans get released…”

Akira goes on, stopping only when he notices the timer has hit 30, and then resuming the methodical concentric circles with the kettle.

“Hm,” Goro says once Akira’s paused talking for a bit. He steps closer, pressing against Akira’s back and watching over his shoulder as he pours. “Are you instructing me in such excruciating detail just to show off?”

Akira’s movements don’t falter, but Goro can feel his cocky smile bloom. “Well, that’s definitely part of it. I do love showing off for you,” he says, with a laugh. “But also, you tend to remember things better when there’s dumb trivia attached.”

Goro huffs a laugh, but there it is again, that feeling like something’s knotted his heart and stomach together.

It’s another thing Akira knows about Goro that Goro himself didn’t. The feeling of being known so deeply by someone like Akira is a feeling that’s always made his heart soar. Now, though, the realization is sinking.

“I know it probably seems like all these precise little steps don’t matter,” Akira says once he’s finished pouring, and they’re watching the last of the water drip through the coffee grounds, Goro’s head still resting on Akira’s shoulder. “Like, will it really make that much of a difference if you only wait 20 seconds instead of 30? Do you really have to do those stupid concentric circles and keep the grounds even? Will it actually taste worse?” Akira pulls the filter out, tosses it in the trash, and swiftly, expertly, pours the coffee into their two mugs.

When Akira finally sits down on the couch with his mug, he sinks in heavier than he probably intended, letting out a small groan.

Goro hadn’t even thought about whether talking and explaining like that might have been exhausting for Akira.

But after Akira settles into the couch and his grimace passes, Akira takes his cup to his lips, takes a sip, and smiles.

“I like to think those small things matter,” he says. “I like thinking that if you’re just patient enough, if you’re just diligent enough, if you care enough—then things will go exactly the way they’re supposed to.”

Goro takes a sip of his own coffee. Part of him recognizes that it’s delicious, the same comforting taste that he’s grown accustomed to having every morning.

But to another part of him, suddenly, it’s pure acid, boiling his stomach and dissolving it from the inside out.

Goro hates feeling seen, hates feeling known at all, and he's never been more of both than when Lala serves him at the bar. He hates that she knows not to make him talk, he hates that she wards others off from talking to him with her sharp, silent looks, he hates that she’s taking delicate care to stay out of his space and out of his way, coming over only to refill his drink.

Goro hates that when he finally steps out of Crossroads and walks through the bustling neon glow of Shinjuku, he's the one who spots Chihaya. He hates that he could easily slink away without her noticing him, and that he goes over to her table anyway.

He hates himself for wanting her to sell him a hundred thousand yen salt crystal like the one she and Akira had laughed about. He hates that he so badly wants to buy a salt crystal or a charmed necklace or ritual potion—not because he thinks it'll bring Akira back but so he can have something to blame, someone to get mad at, when it doesn't.

He hates that his voice cracks as he asks for a reading, something to tell him what to do. He knows her powers are real, just as he knows that once upon a time, a Samarecarm could bring his not-quite-friends back from the not-quite-dead. That world existed, realities could be changed, so please, he begs tonelessly, not even meeting her eyes, is there anything she can tell him to do, anywhere she can tell him to go, to fix this.

Chihaya just takes his hand in hers—not to read his palm, but to clasp it between her own small hands, and to say simply, "We're going to get through this."

Goro nods hastily, pulls his hand from hers, and walks away, and he hates her, he hates himself, he hates this. He hates the tears that fall and don’t stop, falling like the snow around him.

They call off the wedding— “Put it on hold,” as Akira tells his friends. They hadn’t even sent invitations yet, so there’s no guest list to notify, no reservations to cancel. But they put it on hold anyway, and no one needs to ask why.

This isn't how it was supposed to go. Not after the proposal had been so perfect.

Even after moving in together and spending each day together, Goro felt like he was just waiting, grasping at all the happiness he could until the inevitable day that Akira would leave him. Every day was bliss, and every day was dread.

He never told Akira that, of course. But he did tell Ann, once, while drunk at a bar. She, of course, hadn’t hesitated to tell Akira, who, for his part, said he'd never felt more certain about and committed to anything in his life. He’d never even considered that Goro might be worried he’d leave, but now that he knew, it put everything into perspective—how Goro would frustratingly never make vacation plans for more than a few months out, how he’d just smile ruefully whenever Akira would joke about breaking up with him for not doing the dishes.

The proposal had taken place at Leblanc, in front of their friends, and Goro hadn’t cried. He hadn’t said anything snarky either, though, much as he’d tried to come up with something—because he knew if he’d opened his mouth, he’d cry. He simply took the ring in awe, held it close to his chest, and nodded, and nodded, and nodded, like he couldn’t say yes enough.

The wedding should have been perfect, too. Even if Goro didn't give too many fucks about the specifics.

After all, the proposal had been enough to make him feel, finally, like Akira might be his for good, and the wedding itself seemed a bit extraneous after that. Still, there were a few things about the idea of a wedding that he rather liked.

He did like the idea of a contract—something Akira would sign, writing in explicitly laid out, legal language, saying, this is what I choose.

He did, very much, like the idea of exchanging rings. They’d talked it through with Yusuke, had come up with subtle bands that evoked Hereward for Akira and Satanael for Goro—the deepest evolution of their truest selves, now entrusted with the other.

He very much liked the idea of kissing Akira in front of the world—even if it was just a small subsection of it—of Akira blushing and beautiful and completely, utterly his.

The rest of it, he was fairly apathetic about. They had enough friends who were beyond enthralled with the idea of planning the wedding—Makoto taking over event planning, Haru handling spaces and catering, Ann putting together events, Yusuke commandeering aesthetics—that he felt entitled to apathy. He simply watched email thread after email thread pour into his inbox, watched Yusuke and Ann debate what invitations should look like, saw Haru list out options for catering companies then make the decision herself when neither Akira nor Goro had any opinions to contribute. Thread after thread, calls and texts and meetings all unfolding around him, as Goro watched over with the giddiness of knowing it was all for him, for them.

It all stops after a single email. On hold.

Everyone knows already, of course. They’ve all already made the assumption.

For a while after that, every time he sees the engagement ringer on Akira’s finger, every time he feels it on his own, it sends a painful shock through his heart, leaving it racing in a horrible, nauseating way. But he wants that discomfort anyway, craves it—because if the ring’s still there, it means it’s still just on hold. It means maybe.

Still, it doesn’t surprise him when, one day, while Akira’s taking a nap, Goro notices Akira’s bare finger. He pokes into the bedside drawer and finds the ring, sitting there. Later, Akira will explain that he’s lost just enough weight for the ring to keep slipping off his finger, and he wants to keep it safe.

Goro suspects there’s something more than that—that Akira feels the same painful shock through his heart each time he sees it, only he can’t convince himself of the on hold, of the maybe. Seeing the ring is seeing all the promises that they’re going to break, one by one.

Goro learned that Akira wanted his ashes scattered across Japan from a piece of paper, because he’d been a coward. He’d refused to have any sort of forthright conversation about Akira's wishes for after his death, and Akira had taken it in stride, that Goro refused to be there for him, and had Makoto handle everything.

So Makoto showed him a document they’d drafted, and that’s how Goro learned where Akira wanted his ashes taken. Mostly to places in Tokyo, mostly to places where scattering ashes was probably illegal, ever the Phantom Thief hiding where he shouldn't.

And, last on the list, Akira’s hometown.

In that one strange year when Akira wasn’t in Tokyo, when he’d gone back home to finish high school, Ryuji’d been the one to make the trip to and from Inaba the most, so he tells Akechi he’ll come along.

The town, when they get there, is hardly anything, and there’s a freezing, wet wind lashing at their faces once they get to the floodplain. They sit at a bench anyway, because it feels wrong to quickly dump the ashes and leave.

They sit in silence for a long time.

Finally, Akechi says, “I thought Akira hated this place. So we never visited.”

Ryuji rubs the back of his neck. “It was...kinda complicated. Like, when I came to visit here, he was always, y'know, asking about the city. Asking dumb things like what stores had gone out of business on Central Street. Construction on the subway. He wanted to go back like crazy."

“But…” Ryuji looks out onto the water. “This was still his hometown, y'know? The place that made him.” He suddenly gets a little excited, a small smile on his face. “It was hilarious when we’d go into town, ‘cuz he was always telling me how there was nothing to do here and no one interesting. But as soon as we got into town, there he was chatting everyone up, asking about their lives and getting into all their problems. I guess it makes sense, though—the way he always was had to come from somewhere.”

Goro’s silent. He wonders if Akira had ever wished Goro would ask more about his life growing up.

Ryuji seems oblivious to Goro’s worries, but somehow manages to address them, anyway. “But, still. Complicated. Because this place abandoned him. His parents, his friends, everyone. He came back for a year and was nice and respectful and helped everyone out and shit, but as soon as we got back to his room, he’d, like. Collapse. Like it was taking everything in him to pretend to be who he had to be out here.”

“And yet here we are,” Goro finally says, the weight of the small pouch in his hands feeling like a brick. “Bringing part of him back here, when he never spoke a word about this place to me.”

He must do a terrible job keeping the hurt out of his voice, because Ryuji’s eyes go wide and mouth gapes. “No, dude, he definitely wasn’t, like, hiding it from you or anything,” he says, waving his arms a little frantically. “Sorry, yeah, I can see how…”

Ryuji’s hand returns to the back of his neck, eyebrows furrowed as he tries to find the right words. “Okay, here’s what I think. This place is part of who he is, no question, so he wanted some part of himself to rest here. But it’s like—all the parts of himself he actually liked, the ones he was proud of—those weren’t the parts that came from here. Like, his openness to everyone. Refusing to give up on anyone. That sort of shit, he didn’t learn from these people. Those were all him, that’s what he liked best. And he didn’t need to bring you here to see those parts.”

It’s by far the most consecutive words Goro’s ever heard Ryuji say, and also the most eloquent. Goro must have some sort of disbelieving, vaguely sour look on his face, because Ryuji curls back in on himself a little, saying, “Sorry, maybe that was dumb. I’ve just...been thinking about this sort of thing a lot. Who he was. What made him special. And...yeah.”

They sit in silence for a while longer. The wind has picked up a little, cuttingly cold against his cheeks.

Finally, Ryuji nods, then hops up. “Alright,” he says, “let’s do this?”

They walk up onto the outcropping of rocks, looking out over the choppy, grey water.

“So…” Ryuji says, “are we supposed to, like, say something?”

“Feel free to do so in your head. I’d prefer silence.”

“Cool. Yeah.”

After a moment, Ryuji reaches towards Goro. They grasp the bag together, undo the tie, and as one, they upend it.

The wind swiftly blows the ashes out and over the water.

Goro watches them hover in the air, then land on the surface of the water, then sink down, disintegrating, until each one is gone, and then there's nothing.

That’s it, Goro thinks. All that was left of him.

All the things Goro didn’t know, everything Akira never told him, drowned in the water and dissolved into nothingness.

He’s not sure if he’s supposed to feel some sort of resolution from this. All he feels is cold, cold from the inside out.

"I don't know where to take you for our honeymoon," Goro admits quietly one night.

Akira is reading on the couch, legs in Akechi's lap and head reclined on the pillow, but Goro's words get him to put his book down and look up at Goro. "That's..." he starts, but he doesn't seem to know where to go from there.

Before all this, they’d put an obnoxious amount of effort into keeping their honeymoon unplanned. They set aside double the amount they'd normally need for plane tickets and hotels at whatever destinations normal people went to for their honeymoons, saving that money precisely so they could be stupid with it. All so that they could be free to make the decision at the very last minute of their honeymoon. They would look at each other, make a split-second decision, and go.

"That honeymoon plan was utterly ridiculous," Goro scoffs, interlacing his fingers with Akira's and getting a weak smile out of him. "But then I realized I didn't actually care where we went. I just knew it'd be an adventure, wherever it was, because it would be with you."

Takemi orders them not to go far—within the range of her hospital admitting privileges. And Akira isn't up for much travel, anyway.

So Haru gifts them a stay at one of the most absurdly luxurious hotel in Tokyo. They take a whole array of pills and painkillers and heating pads and lists of emergency contact info, and finally, they’re there. The suite they check into consists of multiple rooms and a canopy over the bed, and when Goro and Akira look it up after settling into the unimaginable plushness of the bed, the per-night figures on the room are in the millions and millions of yen.

With Haru's encouragement, they order every item on the room service menu, except for anything that has a French name they don’t understand, which they order two of. Akira can hardly eat any of it, but Goro manages to take at least a bite of everything, giving long-winded, pretentious reviews like he’s still writing for his food blog.

They take a bath together in the enormous jacuzzi tub. For a while, they just hold each other in the blissfully bubbly water. Then Akira’s hands start wandering, and when Goro’s breath hitches and his cheeks start to color, Akira looks up at Goro with a slight smirk and look in his eyes.

It’s an expression Goro knows very well—the one that says he plans to rile Goro up before letting Goro have his way with him.

Tonight, though, there’s something more in his look: a plea.

Goro roughly towels himself off, then Akira, before carrying him to the bed.

There was a time when treating Akira like he was fragile would have been the most egregious of insults. Their relationship started with each of them taking what they wanted, a competition to force the other to concede, a constant raising of the stakes—and seeing Akira with wrists and ankles bound as he writhed to the tempo of merciless slaps and deep, bloody scratches, Goro knew, would always know, that Akira was the furthest thing from fragile he’d ever seen.

Things are different now, though. Akira sets the pace, and it’s a gentle one, even as Akira’s giving it his all. He’s sweating and a little clammy, but with fierce determination in his eyes as he grinds his hips up and down. He stares Goro down like he’s the most incredible challenge he’s ever faced, the most worthwhile.

When Akira starts to falter, Goro takes over, flipping their positions carefully before slowly pushing deep into Akira. There’s an intensity to the slowness, their building desperation shown not through speed but by how much tighter Akira grasps at Goro’s sides, how much more fiercely Goro holds Akira’s face and never lets go, staring straight into his eyes.

Afterwards, they lay next to each other, sweaty and satisfied. Goro pants, and Akira takes in labored gasps, a wet wheezing sound trapped on each one, until both their breaths finally settle into something quieter.

Akira turns to him, strokes his cheek, and says, “The only thing I want is for us to do that forever.”

Goro doesn’t know what he could possibly say to that. He pulls Akira close, stroking his hair, instead of saying anything at all.

"It was going to be a wedding gift," Ann explains, when she shows up at Goro's doorstep with a thick binder one night. It's a photo album.

On the first page is a picture Goro wasn’t even aware existed: a picture from the TV station. It’s slightly blurry, about half the frame occupied by Ryuji’s back as Ann tries to take the shot in secret. The host is holding a microphone to Akira’s face, and Goro remembers that in real life, Akira had only looked stunned for half a second before pulling his impeccable mask back on, but the camera has captured that fractional second of terror for eternity.

Akira, with his messy hair and rumpled summer uniform, is the intended subject of the shot; but there in the background, without a doubt, is Goro. His posture is unmistakable even in such a terrible shot: legs crossed, hand on his chin, the curious and bemused Detective Prince watching this boy stumble.

The next page holds a photo from just a few months later, with everyone back in their winter uniforms. It must have been in that brief time when Goro was pretending to be part of their team, because he’s with them, right after a run in Mementos. Ann had forced them all to take an exhausted selfie as soon as they’d emerged. In the sea of miserable faces, some of which weren’t even looking at the camera, Akechi stands out, made-for-TV smile perfectly in place.

Goro’s time with the Phantom Thieves was hardly long, so he’s impressed that Ann’s pulled together even a few pages of images for the album. There’s a photo taken in Leblanc during one of their meetings, another of Goro alone sitting at Leblanc’s counter, Akira behind the bar making him coffee. And one from the ill-fated, horribly-executed sleepover Ann had pulled together in November—probably, Goro’s only realizing now, a desperate last-minute attempt to awaken Goro to the power of friendship.

Goro’s certain he’s never seen the shot from the sleepover, and he takes the photo out of its plastic covering for a closer look. It’s a photo of him and Akira, both deeply asleep on the couch after watching a movie. They hadn’t even been sitting particularly close, but in sleep it seemed Akira had gravitated towards Goro’s warmth, his head slumping halfway down Goro’s shoulder.

The scarcity of photos from their high school years is more than made up for by the next section of the album: the first month after Akira had discovered that Goro was alive, and subsequently hadn’t let him out of his sight. There are selfies that Akira sent to the Thieves chat upon their very first reintroduction, Akira beaming and Akechi looking like he’s going to throw up. Then selfies from their meeting the next day, and the next, and the next.

Ann had fun with the scrapbooking here, it seems, because for these shots that were mostly texted to the Thieves or to Ann directly, she included screenshots of any texts Akira sent alongside the photos.

Some are irreverent, like a text that just says “dat ass” with a thumbs up under a photo of them biking together.

Some are more straightforward—Akira telling the Thieves that he’d run into Goro again, quite the coincidence, and now they were getting crepes.

And some leave Goro feeling like he’s choking. There’s a photo of just Goro, asleep on the couch in Akira’s apartment framed by the golden light of sunset. Underneath is Akira’s text:

ann, he’s so beautiful. i don’t know what i’ll do if he leaves me again.

maybe this is too soon, Ann wrote back, but do you think you might be in love with him?

i know i am, is all Akira says back.

Ann and Goro drink their wine and flip through the album, pages and pages of Goro and Akira’s life together as it bloomed from something threadbare and desperate to something rich and sure. Small moments and big, all captured: Goro and Akira moving into a new apartment together, going on vacation together, taking a picture on a walk just because it was a nice day. And on every page, from every picture, their smiles and smirks and laughter all say the same thing with certainty: This is going to last forever. We’re going to be this happy together forever.

But the album says otherwise; every page Goro flips is one page closer to the last one, a final page that they never knew they were headed towards.

Goro feels himself going numb when they get to the engagement pictures: seeing his own look of utter shock, the joy on everyone’s faces surrounding them, Akira looking smug and certain as he held out the ring.

He watches Akira start to get sick, page by page by page, life slipping away before Goro’s eyes. Their life together, almost gone.

There they are at the hotel, and only a few pages left in the album. They’re sitting at the opulent fountain in the lobby, Akira practically in Goro’s lap, weak but somehow still glowing, still beaming his light.

The penultimate page is a group photo. Akira's last day at Leblanc, which they couldn't have known was his last day at Leblanc, but maybe he knew, anyway. Almost all of them are there—Ann is overseas and working desperately to get back home, and she'll make it back in time, just not for this shot. But the rest of them have gathered, a Thieves reunion at their old spot, and everyone is as close to Akira as they can be. Goro's there, but to the side, knowing he's intruding on their moment in some ways. This is for them.

Goro goes to flip to the last page, but his hand is stuck. He can't—the page won't move, his hand isn't moving right, and his vision's starting to get fuzzy. Maybe it's the wine, maybe it's—oh, and he's shaking, and Ann is holding his hand now, asking if he's okay.

"It should have been me," he says shakily. "It—everyone needs him, the world can live without—I wish it had been me, Ann, fuck, why wasn't it me," and he's breaking down, not even sure the words are coming out right but unable to stop them. Ann's crying now, too, saying nice and reassuring and utterly meaningless things to him.

Because he doesn't need anyone to confirm it for him to know it's true. Everyone in that photo needs Akira, loves Akira. Objectively, on every level, Akira's life is worth more than Goro's. Akira would have survived without him, and Goro is falling apart without Akira, is worthless, is nothing.

"Goro, stop," Ann says sharply, and he's not so sure what he's been saying or how many of his thoughts have come out in words, but he quiets himself, anyway. Ann does what he hasn't had the strength to do—she flips the page. The last photo before the back cover, before the end.

It's that same last day at Leblanc, when everyone has gone home except the two of them and Futaba. She must have taken a picture without them noticing. They’re sitting at their chess board, cups of coffee in front of them. They could be eighteen again, the way they sit there, like their whole lives are ahead of them, like nothing matters but the chessboard and the coffee and the rival across from them. But they aren’t eighteen, because Akira is pale and thin and sickly, and Goro doesn’t have to hide that he’s so desperately in love.

Goro finds himself staying up long after Akira falls asleep. Usually, Akira starts dozing unintentionally, in front of the TV or with a book in his lap, drifting off at eight or nine. Goro rouses him before he starts to sleep too deeply, gets him to brush his teeth and take his pills, and then Goro curls up in bed beside him to help fall back asleep.

Once his soft, rattling snores start filling the room again, Goro pulls out his laptop and begins his nightly agony, Akira sleeping deeply as Goro looks at sites with titles like “Life after losing a loved one.”

He isn’t sure if he’s done this much research on a single subject since his days as a detective. But it all feels wrong, now, like he’s going through the process in reverse. He used to put together clues to form a picture of the past; here, he’s scrambling for clues, for anything, that will prepare him for the future.

It doesn’t just feel futile; it feels, above all else, like the cruelest of betrayals. Because Akira is right there, laying next to him, sleeping soundly. Still breathing. And Goro is spending more and more of his time thinking about life without him.

He reads story after story of people losing their loved ones. It’s gone far past the point of being useful and into simply torturing himself, but he can’t help it—he has to read, he has to know, over and over. He’s sure to keep himself silent once he inevitably starts crying; he doesn’t want to wake Akira.

Goro has never grieved this much in his life.

What he felt when his mother died was hardly like this—he’d compartmentalized it without even knowing that's what he was doing. All he felt was confusion and overwhelm as he was taken from institution to institution, and every few months he burst completely in moments of anger that he couldn’t understand, but it wasn’t like this.

He’d never grieved for any of the people whose deaths he’d caused with his own hands—not even once. It wasn’t grief he felt for them.

And grieving his own deaths—even in the expectant months before they happened, even in the unexpected after he hadn’t asked for—was never something he could imagine.

No, Goro knows he’s never grieved this hard, not like this—and Akira is still alive.

And Goro’s afraid, because he doesn’t know what’s going to happen when he isn’t. He’s not sure he’ll survive it, not when just thinking about it right now, night after night, sends him into such pain he can hardly breathe, makes him feel like he’s imploding and exploding at the same time, when Akira is next to him and breathing and alive and all Goro can do is squeeze a pillow and stifle his sobs and grieve, and it hurts.

It feels like a punishment, maybe—all the grief he was supposed to feel, before, that he never felt. All building up to this.

Goro’s never felt grief like this before, but then, Akira was always special.

For just a few moments, Goro’s still half-asleep, not sure if the noises he’s hearing are part of a dream. Then there’s a sharp, loud hacking, and he feels Akira’s empty half of the bed, and he sprints out, grabbing the painkillers on his way out.

Akira’s sprawled on the bathroom floor, his head a heavy, impossible weight lying on the rim of the toilet bowl. The sharp coughing stops, before his body seizes, contracts, and his hands weakly brace himself against the bottom of the toilet bowl as he vomits again.

Tries to, at least. There’s nothing left in his stomach—it seems there hasn’t been for a while—but his body contracts just as hard, just as punishingly, even as all it does is choke a small stream of bile dripping out of his mouth.

And Goro’s there, finally, soothing back his hair, pulling it away from his eyes as Akira struggles to breathe. Akira is clammy, sweat soaking his clothes even as his skin is cold to the touch.

Akira chokes and chokes as his stomach contracts again, and Goro holds him up, trying to support as much of his weight as possible, because Akira’s on the verge of collapsing.

“You should have got me up earlier,” Goro says, one hand still soothing Akira’s hair back as the other holds him, rubbing his arms.

Akira just shakes his head. His eyes are unfocused, and he’s just trying, as hard as he can, to keep himself from throwing up again.

After a few moments of stillness have passed, Akira lets himself lean full against the toilet, and Goro leans against his back, supporting his weight and holding him, eyes closed. He gives Akira a painkiller and a drink of water.

A few minutes pass before Akira's whole body starts shaking, just a little and then harder, violently. It takes a while for Goro to realize it’s laughter, only once the weakest, most pathetic laughs are finally audible.

“Would anyone believe,” Akira says through his laughs, a scratchy, whispered voice, “that this is the great leader of the Phantom Thieves?” Goro pulls Akira up and sees that tears have started streaming down his face, or maybe they have been for a while, laughs and sobs both hardly audible, all he can manage. “Look at me now. Pitiful.”

“Shh, love, it’s going to be okay,” is all Goro mumbles, mindlessly, holding him, rubbing his skin, stroking his hair—anything he can do, anything he can say, to replace Akira’s words.

The laughter has stopped, and now it’s just near-silent sobs, Akira shaking in Goro’s hold.

“I don’t want to die like this,” Akira whispers into Goro’s chest.

“It’s okay,” Goro says. “You won’t. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

Goro considers not going to work the next morning, but Akira looks so much better: there’s a little color on his cheeks, a little more life in his eyes. When Goro asks if he’s sure, Akira says he’s fine. Goro kisses him goodbye.

After work, when Goro walks in, he immediately feels something’s not right.

Intuition, probably, picking up on something—that it’s too quiet. The wheezing sound that’s been in the air for months, with every breath Akira takes, isn’t there.

Goro steps into the bedroom. Sees Akira sleeping peacefully. Sees the open bottle of painkillers on the bedside table, empty.

Goro’s thought about what this moment will be like hundreds of times before. He has a mental checklist all ready with what he needs to do, who he needs to call. He’s expected panic, expected falling to the ground or sobbing or breaking down.

But everything’s quiet and his mind is empty as he walks over to sit on the edge of the bed.

Goro’s angry, just a little. He wishes Akira had let him say goodbye. But he understands. Of all people, Goro understands choosing your own terms.

Goro takes Akira’s hand in his and strokes Akira’s hair, just as he had the night before.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says, over and over and over.

Once upon a time, Akira had said Goro was exceptional, because he’d died twice.

First in the engine room, then after Maruki’s palace—losing Goro, Akira said, was the most painful thing he’d ever experienced, more pain than he thought he could handle, and he had to do it twice. It made Goro exceptional, Akira said.

Akira didn’t know anything. He didn’t know just how many times someone could die.

Akira dies for the first time alone, in bed, setting down an empty bottle of pills and drifting off to sleep.

But Akira dies a second time, too, after they’ve removed his body, when the house is quiet again and Akechi doesn’t know what to do with himself until his body makes the decision for him and he goes to the bathroom to throw up, and when he goes to brush his teeth he sees Akira’s floss and toothbrush on the counter, shampoo and conditioner in the shower, all lined up next to his.

Akira dies a third time at the funeral, when everyone has something to say about the person they all loved and Akechi can’t even stand up, won’t even try, because he knows he’ll fall apart if he even makes an attempt, so his turn passes and the ceremony ends, and he’s said nothing, done nothing.

Akira dies again when the first piece of junk mail arrives for Akira Kurusu, like nothing had ever happened. And again, when a crow flies by the window and Akira isn’t there to point it out. And again, every night, when Goro and Morgana fall asleep just as they used to, Morgana a settled weight next to Goro, only he used to settle in the warm spot between Goro and Akira and he settles between Goro and nothingness, now.

Akira dies again when Sumire quietly puts together a new group chat without Akira’s old number in it, so that they no longer have to see the heading from the old one: Akira, Ann, + 8 others.

Akira dies the first time Goro passes by the jazz club on an errand, the first time he works up the courage to step into Leblanc again, the first time he walks by the bakery without entering because Akira was always the one who wanted pastries for breakfast, not him. When he buys new gloves. When the weather changes and the sun comes out and trees blossom and students across the city change to their summer clothes, when everything changes without him.

Akira dies every day, multiple times a day, sometimes every hour, sometimes constantly. Each time is just as painful. The betrayal of forgetting, of not thinking about it even for a moment; the punishment, living that pain again and again and again, every minute he forgets and remembers.

Until it’s not quite so frequent. Until a full day passes between deaths, then a few days.

Akira dies when Goro smiles again, genuinely, for the first time without him.

One morning, Goro wakes up and Morgana’s not in his bed. There’s a letter on his desk.

The moment he sees it, he starts feeling sick to his stomach, because his name is scrawled across the front of the envelope in Akira’s handwriting.

He slowly peels open the envelope, and he doesn’t want this, he doesn’t, he doesn’t. His heart is racing.

Hi, love.

Just two words in, and it’s already getting hard to read with how hard his hands are trembling. Goro closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and sets the letter down to go make a cup of coffee.

He hasn’t used the new dripper yet, even after Sojiro helped him pick out a replacement months ago. Everything for making coffee is right where it should be—the beans in the cabinet, the grinder in its place, the gooseneck kettle plugged in and ready.

Goro wets his filter and gets to work. He glances at the note on the fridge, just to make sure his measurements are right. He doesn’t think about how messy his concentric circles are.

When the last of the water passes through the grounds, they settle back down in the filter, bloated and spongy and finished. Goro’s careful not to let anything drip as he carries the filter to the trash.

He pulls out his mug, right in front of Akira’s. His smashing hadn’t been so thorough as he’d imagined; the next day, he and Morgana had dug through the trash and salvaged enough of the pieces to glue it back together. It won’t hold liquid anymore, but then, it doesn’t need to.

Goro stirs in one spoonful of sugar. Sits back down at his desk, closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. Takes a sip.

It’s not as good, not even close. But it’s something.

He holds the mug close to himself, feeling its warmth, as he unfolds the letter again. The coffee is rich and sweet as he drinks it.

Hi, love.

If you’re reading this letter, it means Morgana decided he could leave. I’m really, really glad. I know you guys aren’t the best of friends, and this probably wasn’t the best time to try to rekindle a friendship. And I know you hate this kind of paternalism more than anything. But I asked him to stay with you, anyway, however long it took, until he was sure you’d be okay.

In the days after we destroyed Maruki’s reality and I thought you disappeared, Morgana made me get up in the morning, made me go to bed at night, made me take baths and go to school, and I hated him for it. But it also, I think, kept me alive. So I just wanted him to do the same for you—no matter how much you hated him, or me, for it.

You know I’m not the most verbose person, so I’ll keep this short:

I think writing this letter might be one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done. I asked Morgana to wait to give this to you until you’d started to accept that I was gone, but here I am, giving you a little bit more of me. Selfish. And maybe that’ll make you hope there are more little bits like this, and that’s not fair to you, because there aren’t. I didn’t do anything romantic like write you a letter to open every year on your birthday or anything like that—because I was selfish, again, and wanted to spend the time I had left with you, not writing to you.

I’m sorry, Goro, that there’s nothing like that. This is it.

I’m writing because I’m scared. I’m so scared, Goro, and I’m trying to be brave because I know it’s hard for you too. But I’m so, so afraid of dying, in a way I never was back then.

I’ve always been afraid that people will leave me behind and forget me once I stop being useful, and I’ve never been less useful than I am now, or than I will be by the time you read this. I’m so scared you’ll forget me, Goro, scared enough that I want to write letter after letter. Hundreds and thousands of letters, so that you’re stuck reading them for the rest of your life and can never forget me.

It’s funny, though, because another part of me feels the exact opposite of that.

Your first terrible attempt at flirting with me was explaining Hegel’s aufheben. The contradictory, double meaning: the instinct to preserve and the instinct to negate, and only when they interact can you get sublation. Progress.

So maybe you’ll understand when I say that as much as I want to beg you never to forget me, I also want to beg you to forget me as much as you can. Because there’s something else that scares me just as much as dying—it’s the fear that you won’t find love again. I’m so scared you’ll think this is the end for you, Goro, and it’s not, you deserve so, so much more. And I’m scared you won’t see that.

I’m a lot more scared than I used to be, in a lot of ways, I guess.

I was never good at accepting things. If something didn’t go my way, I just refused to accept it. Got angry. And then, usually, some miraculous Metaverse bullshit would happen so that I could change the things I didn’t like.

Like losing you. Part of me never really accepted you were gone. I mean, I grieved and it hurt, that whole year that you didn’t contact me I stayed angry and refused to accept it, and then the universe, stupidly, rewarded me for that. I never had to learn to accept what I couldn't change.

And it’s not fair that you always did, that the same stupid Metaverse that gave me everything I wanted also forced you to accept whatever was handed to you, and punished you when you didn’t. It wasn’t fair, but it also made you strong, Goro. So, so much stronger than I ever was.

That’s how I know you can handle this. I might be here scared shitless, I might be refusing to accept that I’m going to die, but I know that you can, and you will, and eventually you’ll progress. Aufheben.

Hah, I guess I started this saying I’m not a man of too many words, and here I am, having filled almost two whole pages. It’s taken me a few days to write this, actually, so sorry if the handwriting changes have been throwing you off. I’ve been writing it while you’ve been at work, but then I’ll get tired, have to hide it, and finish it later. And maybe I should stop now.

I just keep thinking of things I want to add. I want this letter to go on forever, to capture the eternity of things you’ve given me to think about.

But that’s dumb, because there’s only one thing that’s really important to say in this letter, and you already know it. If I won’t have forever to say it to you like I want to, then I'll just have to do it now:

I love you, Goro.

There’s nothing that could have ever made me as happy as just having the chance to love you, Goro. I wanted to spend forever with you. But spending the rest of my life with you is okay, too.

Thank you for always being my rival. For showing me who I was and who I could become. For completing me.

Thank you for being the love of my life. We never got to have that wedding, but I realized it didn’t matter. The fact that I got to live on this Earth as yours at all, and yours alone, was enough. It was everything.

Thank you for loving me. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for coming back, again and again, to me. You made my life mean something, Goro, and if this is where it ends then I’m just glad I got to spend it with you.

There’s nothing else I need to say. I’ve said the only thing that’s ever been worth saying:

I love you, Goro Akechi.

Forever yours,

Akira