#Final Score | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

strialternatives · 3 months ago

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[[wrote like 5000 words of what amounts to akechi goro crashing out without his boyfriend as a sounding board--this is basically a messy stream of goro pov consciousness i cleaned up a bit about the lead up to a post royal!akechi palace formation! spent too much time poking at it not to share,,,]]

WARNINGS: canon typical references to suicide, minor self-harm RATING: T

Something inside of him is breaking.

Akechi Goro’s wide gaze drills accusing holes into the man on the witness stand, still clad in his prison jumpsuit. His jaw goes

clickclickclick

he grinds down his molars, sawdust gathers in back of his throat, rage up to his damn eyes and he is…Goro is. He’s.

He’s going to kill him.

Goro grips the pen on the table as his attorney looks at him with a troubled gaze.

His entire body is tense, alight with a fire in his core as his frame trembles with every inch of the self-control he’s cultivated since he was eleven.

—Kill him, he’s going to kill him, rip his juggler from his thick, ugly neck with his bare teeth.

Masayoshi Shido looks back at him with a thin quirk of his lips. It sets every inch of Goro ablaze with indignation, while his father effortlessly unravels what amounts to sixteen months worth of legal proceedings in his own case.

Once again this man takes his choices away, beats Goro one last time at his own game, amber eyes steady and undaunted by the sheer disdain on his own flesh and blood’s features. The begrudging affection present there is fit to drive Goro properly insane.

Shido raises his chin, he hammers the final nail in the coffin the two of them built together: “As I’ve said since the beginning, there is no such thing as the Metaverse. The theory itself is an absurd pseudoscience on par with leylines and energy healing. I committed all of my crimes through real world means.”

Son of a bitch.

The rest of the trial is a blur—there’s static in Goro’s ears as the courtroom falls away, his blank, ironed-out expression slack on his bowed face, fists clawing bloody crescents into his palms. Attorneys argue, blindsided, as Shido recounts his hits one by one from top to bottom with zero contradictions, no doubt having rehearsed his statement from every angle.

—Always a step ahead, even with a heart change.

The thought makes Akechi want to scream.

“He was a disenfranchised orphan at the time of our first meeting, and I used that to manipulate him.”

Shut up.

“I arranged his internship with the police department and brazenly used party funds and bribes to push him in the media. I doctored the Detective Prince public image and used Akechi Goro to deter legal suspicion while taking advantage of corruption within the department.”

Shut the fuck up.

“Everything I ever did was for my own ends, my son is blameless in all of it. I’m simply relieved… he never had to bloody his hands.”

Goro stands so fast his chair clatters to the floor, he gets halfway over the table before he’s yanked back by the shoulders, struggling in his seat. The snarls leaving him barely sound human, overgrown bangs shadowing his hellfire eyes.

The humiliation smarts like a slap.

The court, however, is quiet as a grave, stunned to silence; Shido hardly hesitates in wake of the outburst.

Don’t you dare.

“There is no physical proof of this Metaverse nor any of the crimes mentioned in the initial report; I plead with this court that my son's case be dismissed and the records with his name sealed. I will give up all of my contacts and constituents.”

Something deep inside of him is-

“Lastly, I implore this jury allow me to properly atone for my sins with the fullest extent of the law. I do not wish to seek parole.”

-Fracturing.

With that Shido bows, as though heralding the end of a show. His face is fully hidden from view—the lowest a man of his arrogance has likely had to bow ever in his entire life. He looks skinny in his prison jumpsuit and cuffs, shrunken. Weak.

All it does is fuel Goro’s rage.

There’s a second hush in the courtroom as the boy is swiftly restrained again, Goro thinks he might be screaming, struggling, arms wrestled behind his back as he’s all but carried out of the session. He’s spitting and hissing curses like snake venom, veins in his neck straining as he shouts out his damn voice.

Goro doesn’t remember all the words he'd said, half in anger, half in despair as his composure crumbled beneath his feet. But it made the judge look at him with a pity that stings even worse than Shido’s insult of a paternal conscience.

(He thinks he mentioned his mother. Goro hopes not. His mother's name doesn’t need to be spoken in such a wretched, awful place as the Tokyo High Court.)

After the fact, when all things are said and done, he is shouldered with just a year’s probation. —The irony of this specific stretch of time is not lost on him.— A state sanctioned order for therapy in light of his outburst, just shy of shipping him off to a psych ward after his dramatic outburst, Goro bets, he’d thrown quite a few violent death threats Shido’s way, after all.

A proverbial slap on the wrist for the ego death of dozens by his own hand. A clean record and his name scrubbed from the media.

Something in him breaks. There’s a hollowness in his soul.

Gloved hands creak with mounting tension as his court-assigned probation officer’s words go in one ear and out the other, teeth grinding, aching.

Once again, he’s been denied a choice—his fucking choice—by the same wretched, controlling man. Once again, Goro has been denied control of his own destiny by a higher power and there’s not a single thing he can do to repay his debts.

He knows what probation really means in his case. It is protection, a weak excuse for a witness protection program Goro had denied several times. Everyone involved in the Shido case is desperate to keep their star witness from winding up dead in a gutter.

Because, as much as they thought Goro was nothing more than a delusional little boy, manipulated by his own father, that same boy had kept meticulous records in the real tangible world over the years. Obsessive records on Shido's inner circle. Useful records.

And that was not a loss the investigation was willing to risk.

There was no way out of this check he'd been tricked into, no matter which way Goro turns the board, and it is utterly infuriating.

Goro is going to fucking kill him.

///

He is set up in a new apartment with a box of his personal effects not seized for evidence.

Left with strict orders for his probation and house arrest, his brain is still whirling from a week’s worth of appeals and settling of assets.

If he so wishes, Goro doesn’t need to work for the rest of his natural life.

Shido had transferred the keys for all of his accounts to his ‘next of kin’, in consideration for his looming life sentence.

The thought makes Goro want to rage again, the bastard had planned for something like this. The assets the government had seized weren’t anything to sneeze at but they were nothing compared to the scope number of non-governmental subsidiaries and private funds Shido constantly squirreled away for a rainy day.

Paranoid packrat that he was, there were plenty of off-shore bank accounts that were all but untouchable.

Goro’s almost sure making him the sole-proprietor must’ve been some fucked up gene-essentialist backup plan, in case one of his associates stabbed him in the back, or if he couldn’t otherwise flee the country.

(Though, considering what Joker and the Thieves had let slip in January, that particular contingency was probably nothing more than a joke between Shido and his rotten lawyers.)

Even the apartment building he’s standing in is a part of one of Shido’s many (many) real estate ventures, and Goro hates every solitary inch of it.

He despises the sterile, too-clean air, the way everything is a stark, minimalist off-white, the fact that he’s on the top floor with an objectively gorgeous view of the Tokyo landscape—all while Goro should be six feet under.

—Instead, he’s twenty now.

Goro didn’t expect to live past nineteen.

Left alone after the officer leaves, he glares down at the paneled floor, static in his ears as he sways on his feet and peers into the box.

There is a picture frame of a bewitching woman with rich, caramel colored hair that matches his own at the top of the pile, him at six—a fucking parasite, sucking her life away with every breath—clutching shyly onto full sakura-pink skirts, half hiding from whomever is taking the picture.

The only part of him visible is a cautious wine colored eye against a fluffy brunette fringe. The woman smiles brightly with flushed, happy cheeks as she runs manicured fingers through the shy boy’s curls, not at all like Goro’s knife-like grin.

It’s a smile like sunshine—the ‘original’ smile that Goro could only wear as a mask, one he besmirched by using just to get others to want him, to like him. It hasn’t reached his eyes in years. But it always kept Goro safe all the same.

Mama.

His eyes are bone dry as he stumbles over to the sleek, pre-furnished, couch, Goro wouldn’t be caught dead picking out. He takes in the foreign space, the air so still and impersonal it’s downright suffocating.

Everywhere he looks.

White, on white, on.

More.

White.

Every inch of the studio apartment is blindingly white and Goro wants to claw his fucking throat out.

What was it all for, if this was how things were going to end?

Did any of those years spent under his father’s thumb matter? Smiling for his slime ball compatriots? Breaking off pieces of himself and killing them to survive in their snake pit? Lowering himself to the status of an attack dog, twice-kicked, verbally condescended to on a daily basis by the adults around him?

This time Goro’s blunt nails do find his throat as he rasps, breathes quickening as he struggles and fails to draw in air to his lungs.

Bastard. Bastard. Bastard.

How dare Shido take this from him?

How dare the Judge look at him with pity? His social worker. His probation officer. Even his old coworkers whispered as he’d given every name he’d meticulously taken note of during his time at the center of the Conspiracy. It's a small mercy that Sae is no longer involved in the case, that would be a special kind of hell.

All Goro wanted was one thing, to accomplish one right thing, for the sake of enacting real justice.

The mantra is what he has killed every shadow after Isshiki Wakaba for—it was all supposed to be ‘worth it’ in the end. He’d stubbornly insisted to Robin Hood, who’d gone deadly silent after that first death, morose, nestled heavy as an anchor within Goro’s spirit of rebellion until he was needed again.

He’d wanted to set things right, put every game piece back in the box, so to speak. Neat and tidy.

But Goro couldn’t even have that. What better punishment was there for a monster like him, than to be guilty of all of the sins on his shoulders, but still, maddeningly idle?

Free.

A familiar sneer splits Akechi Goro’s lips, sardonic, mocking whilst his body shakes again with the force of his laughs, image of his mother’s bright smile wavering in his vision.

He’d forgotten what she looked like.

Goro hasn’t said her name in years, no one has—did Shido even remember her? Did his mother ever have a choice at all in her fate, or was she yet another game piece for the wretched hand Goro had been dealt from his birth?

He wants to know. He needs to know.

///

Goro stares blankly at the empty sheel on the other side of the safety glass, he is not sure why he did this.

God knows his therapist told him how unproductive it would be. Goro doesn’t blame her—he’s been fading physically since the verdict reading. Complexion pale, fists perpetually clenched and digging bloody into his palms, they’re bandaged under his gloves.

She doesn’t know about them, a lot of people don’t know much about Goro these days.

“What was her name,”

It is not a question. Shido… hesitates.

“I—”

“My mother’s fucking name! Before you go to prison forever, before I never have to see your awful face again, just—!”

The desperation just pours out of him in waves, a weakness that leaves Goro recoiling in self-disgust, his world tilting off its axis as he clutches at his fringe, letting out a breathless laugh. He starts over.

“...Tell me you remember her name.”

There’s a long silence. The prison guard shifts from foot to foot, he should not be here for this, yet, alas, to the chagrin of everyone in the room, on both sides of the glass, there is no better compromise.

But Shido only looks at him with dead eyes, his smile empty along with his convictions.

“I didn’t. Until I ran a background check on you that is, and it finally clicked… It. Was quite unusual, the way Sakura’s name was written.”

Breathe in. Breathe out.

“We met at the same university, she wanted to go into business, really wanted her own space, to be her own boss.”

Goro twitches, irons out his expression, his teeth ache along with the words he forces out, “Just what are you blathering about?”

Shido’s gaze is steady, “She was quite good at marketing, I… she was integral in the campaign we were both working under, went above and beyond despite being an intern.” He exhales, “She didn’t much care for my seedier contacts though, so the relationship didn’t last. I tried to threaten her into terminating.”

“Instead… she ran.”

At that his gaze turns considering, a familiar sharpness showing for a split moment in those eyes before dying like scattered ash—Goro feels his hairs stand on end. “Curious, isn’t it…? How she chose not to get rid of you, in the end… I was simply glad she dropped out of university and out of my way.”

Goro wants to bash his head into the glass, he wants to rip his fucking heart out, it must show in his eyes because Shido inclines his head, lips twitching. It's still not a happy smile.

“Akechi Sakura was close to getting her career on track, you know—? She started pestering me about child support around then because she just needed a bit more to cross that last barrier,” Shido paused, letting out another one of those miserable scoffs, “Bad timing really, I was campaigning. And she was in the way... again.”

The world slows down, there’s a sinking feeling—inside he is screaming.

“Get to the point, old man.”

He almost wishes he hadn’t prompted him.

“She had a job lined up, a real one after groveling to her parents—but that’s not here nor there. She was going to go back to university, she needed a bit of child care assistance and the money to move you both out of that shoebox near the red light district.”

No.

“Sakura…she… contacted me at a critical time during my election. And you know better than anyone how much of a stigma escorts have in this country, boy.”

Shido shrugs, numbly nonchalant, like Goro’s mother is nothing more than a morose footnote in a long list of sins to keep track of. Goro’s fists clench in his lap, irritating his bandages again.

“All it took was a few phone calls to upper management at her parents’ company—ah, they didn’t even know she’d been working as an escort to support you both. Shame, really. They properly disowned her with the quickness after—nasty business, that.”

Goro’s eyes are still dry, so much so it aches. He wants to kill him.

He wants this bastard dead and buried.

He’ll drag him all the way down to hell.

Something

is.

breaking.

“Y,you… it was you—….?” Goro’s shoulders slump.

The static is so loud now that he can barely keep up with the confession.

“It was,” Shido says with a wistfulness he has no right to, “She’d really gotten far on her own, I’ll admit, she even had a full-time gig lined up in case things with her parents fell out again, and was in the process of breaking ties with her regular clients.”

Their eyes meet.

“All for you.”

Goro stares.

“She told me wanted a future for you.”

His fists creak, face blank, mind spinning.

“I… I wish… I’d made an honest woman out of her back then, she really was brilliant. By my side, we could have accomplished—“

SCREECH!

His feet carry him from the visitation area at a brisk pace, chair clattering to the floor. Goro's breaths are even and measured as he bows to his probation officer and politely requests he be escorted out. The mask he puts on is a familiar skin.

—Somehow knowing the reason is worse, knowing his mother truly never had agency, just like Goro. Another tragedy. His fault. Always his. damn. fault.

There’s a quiet horror in knowing that his father had taken everything from him, and didn’t even have the decency to be here and present in any way that matters.

A ‘change of heart’ what a shitty farce.

No wonder the Okumura heiress made his stomach churn, so.

That pathetic, lobotomized thing on the other side of that glass wasn’t Masayoshi Shido, probably never would be again.

He barks out a bitter laugh of his own once he's managed to weasel a moment away from his guards in the men's bathroom after. Perfect. Just fucking perfect.

Mother had always been the optimistic type, unlike Goro with his many anxieties and tendencies to think himself into knots, even at a young age.

In retrospect, her downward spiral had been unusually swift and merciless—she’d started taking clients again despite not needing them for months previously. Goro went to the bathhouse more often.

Things outside of their little bubble suddenly started to crash and burn.

Goro remembers it vividly, Akechi Sakura had tried to brew pork and vegetable soup one of those nights, only to burn and ruin the pot and three days worth of groceries in the process.

The scent of her flowery perfume and her heaving sobs were overwhelming as she’d dropped to her knees and hugged her son tight, rocking him like he was a toddler instead of an elementary student on the cusp of double digits.

<“It’ll all work out, Goro. Mama promises. We’re going to be okay.”>

He’d hugged her back as hard as he could. But her words were nothing more than a pretty lie.

It only took a month—though numbly, Goro acknowledges that mental health isn’t one of those things broken in a single moment. But instead, a psyche meticulously dismantled with micro-fractures across a score of years, full of slights to his mother’s pride, concessions she’d had to give up for the sake of her bastard son, and countless whispers she had to endure every day she was late to pick him up from school.

So, logically, even armed with Shido's confession, Goro knew there were a number of factors that led to his mother stepping off that train platform on the way to her day job that morning.

Logic does not, however account for feelings.

It does not account for the very human urge to cast blame and point fingers.

—For instance: what if someone had given his mother a chance?

If only that client hadn’t stiffed her a week before. If only someone on that train platform had said something about her swaying so close to the safety line. If only her thrice damned parents helped, even a little.

What if. What if. What if–

If only Akechi Sakura had never met one Masayoshi Shido.

(If only Goro had never been born.)

He fantasizes about one day killing Shido.

However, this dream is not something that is remotely realistic.

There is a maximum security prison, and tens of dozens of guards in his path. Goro’s expression had been blank and calculating, taking in the wretched shell of a creature in front of him for weaknesses. Yet, he'd only seen a long, insurmountable corridor, stretching out before his very eyes.

One by one, the metaphorical bulkheads had closed, his vengeance farther than it had ever been.

Out of reach. Always too slow—too late.

It makes Goro want to laugh, and laugh. For the first time in ten fucking years a part of him wants to cry.

Fuck.

All that work, all the time spent sawing off the undesirable bastard orphan pieces of himself for his deadbeat father and the brainless masses, giving up every part of himself that was even remotely heroic—yet vengeance had never tasted so bitter.

Something in him fractures again, he can almost feel it break this time. It's obvious enough that he feels the fissure in his damn soul.

This time, unlike that time in court, Goro pays attention. He takes stock of himself and his muddled head, comes to a conclusion quite alarming:

Akechi Goro no longer revels the chance to herald Ragnarök.

Goro blinks, looks down, his vision doubles, eyes widening as the static space in his head grows into something insurmountable as a black hole.

Before he knows it he's curled over his lap on his haunches right there in the bathroom stall he's scrambled into. Arms tight around his middle, once again struggling to inhale.

He's never felt so cold.

There is no chaos, only his hollow masks left behind. Stillness. Stagnation.

Things haven’t been this silent since Goro signed his life away to Shido in his last year of middle school.

Hereward he normally doesn’t hear unless he reaches, but Loki is different. Loki is chatty.

Goro’s heard his whispers for years—he wasn’t just his malice, he was his passion, where the inferno lived, the part that had given him the means to build Shido up only to tear him down.

(A void where there had previously been righteous fury, of a child brought low and abandoned by his village.)

Goro’s voice is a hesitant croak when he finally finds the will to speak and confirm the truth he’s already grasped. Returning had been a blur, he didn't even know what he ate for dinner if he even ate today at all.

“… Loki?”

The gnawing emptiness inside him hungers. The verbal plea is vulnerable in a way Goro would loath to be around anyone else but…

I am thou, thou art I.

The realization that dawns has him drawing in a sharp breath, Mementos was gone but he could usually always feel his spirit of rebellion.

His chaos, his justice, his defiance.

Over the past year and a half they’d never left him, not truly—they didn’t speak often anymore, but he’d usually at least get impressions. Goro closes his eyes tighter and this time he pulls, he whispers for Loki, he grasps for Hereward, his connection borne of his bond with Joker.

But nothing echoes back in reassurance.

In their places are gaping wounds, fresh, aching and bleeding.

Goro cannot feel their rebellion; the loss is fit to leave him spinning out of control without a motor. For once, Goro doesn’t know how to proceed. His personae were the only things that were always be with him. Never has he felt truly alone until this moment.

Crack.

Goro draws in a calm, measured breath and reaches–

Robin reaches back.

He exhales.

There’s no one else, it's just them again—just like when he was scrappy and fourteen, trapped in a cramped foster home.

Robin Hood to Goro is the first urge he felt to take a hit for a weeping toddler who didn’t know his parents weren’t coming back. Robin Hood is the very first time he shared a bag of candy to share with the youngest children at the bottom of the pecking order in the group home he wound up in after, whispering with a secretive smile that he’d lifted them from the local corner store.

Goro counts to ten over the migraine steadily building in his temples, nails breaking skin once again.

“Are you going to leave me too?”

His words are flat, matter of fact, as though acknowledging something as asinine as water being wet. There isn’t a hint of childish sentimentality in the question—there isn’t.

“I,” Goro breathes in, finds he doesn’t have the air to, “To be honest, I wish you wouldn’t.”

I am thou…

It’s his own voice but a little offbeat, a bit more whimsical. Goro hasn’t heard it since he killed his first shadow for Shido. One by one his fingers unclench, in a show of frankly disgusting vulnerability, he hugs his knees to his chest on the filthy floor.

“Thou art I.”

His quiet response is swallowed quickly by the lonely bathroom stall, lonely voice echoing for no one else to hear. There's static in his head, darkness at his back, deeply entrenched in his rotten spirit.

In that darkness, Akechi Goro wraps himself in masks, as he always has. He doesn’t plan on taking any of them off, he adopts a proper one for the guards, and calmly washes his hands, before strolling out of the men's room with his head held high.

—Robin Hood is all he has, and he’s always taken care of Goro when it counts.

///

The fall out of the trial, along with Goro’s probationary conditions take months to iron out; it feels like the painful final rasp of a slow-to-die houseplant, the constant ticking of a desk clock past midnight doing Sae’s paperwork after hours.

Goro breathes, he survives.

More boxes full of things lost and scattered between transit come to Goro’s literal doorstep while he lies through his teeth to the therapist that makes his stomach churn. Apparently, Shido had collected far more from the background check than he’d let on.

With disgust, Goro finds childhood things he’d thought his foster parents would’ve binned—left as hand-me-downs, rotting away in the attics of their real children or perhaps the odd relatives that had an ankle bitter running around.

And isn’t that just a summary of Goro’s entire life story—? Unwanted but for his possessions and the short term pseudo-comfort he can provide, scavengers picking at his carcass until there was nothing left but the rotting bones.

He often has to blink away the images of rotten flesh circled by crows.

Without fail, Robin’s presence is usually quick to blanket his mind when he spirals, the heated warmth of a security blanket.

He stops looking inside the boxes when his probation officer delivers one full of his mother’s scarves. They’d been sitting in a police locker for a decade, apparently. Lost in transit, just like Goro's true self that died a quiet death in a foster home he doesn't even remember the street name for.

Goro holds the scarf with rose patterns for hours, dry eyes slowly blinking, Shido’s wretched pre-paid apartment tinted warm in the red of the sunset.

He’d forgotten how his mother used to smell. Such a terrible son.

(There is no way forward. Has there ever been?)

///

Goro does everything right at his state sanctioned therapy sessions.

He tears up at the correct pulse points, ‘opens up’ in the ways he’s learned people respond to the best, smiles weakly when he’s congratulated for his ‘progress’... Goro is barely a person, he thinks, only one individual has ever made him feel like anything besides plastic.

But, he’s gotten very good at pretending to be a functional person, one that hasn’t had a million bits and pieces clinically removed across a dozen houses that never felt quite like homes.

There’s a joke about lost causes in there somewhere, but a voice that sounds a bit too much like… ‘him’ keeps insisting that Goro can still be saved. It whispers of a lighthouse among the black rolling rapids in the dead of a stormy night.

Thoughts of that mischievous grin sneak up on him often, as he lay awake in bed between police interviews and therapy sessions he only pays half a mind to. They invade him in the silence, whilst staring blankly at the lone glove on his nightstand—his favorite black pair missing its mate.

It is March again.

‘Kurusu Akira’ should have graduated from high school by now.

(Joker would understand, why therapists and counselors set Goro’s teeth on edge.)

It starts like this—Goro thinks of long, slender fingers versatile as a spider’s legs, he rolls over and buries his face in his pillow, exhaling as his brain whirls with thought of handshandhands, the way Joker twirls his dagger, impatient for his turn in battle, like Akira tends to do with his pens while studying. There's also the way Akira toys with his fringe when anxious, one of his few tells to that infuriating pokerface. The thought of those same damnable hands skating absently along Crow’s waist in the middle of battle as Joker calls forth Maria’s holy light to heal all his hurts on reflex, clenching around his glove that cold night in February, reaching out to cup the side of his neck before retreating, Hereward burning to life in his chest. Undeniable proof that someone in this world would miss Goro when he was gone—

What the fuck.

Goro stares, dumbfounded at the ceiling as he rolls over on his back, the panicked realization tightening his chest feels downright inevitable, even as he struggles to choke it down. He is suddenly blindly, incandescently angry.

(—He really should’ve just saved himself the trouble and shot that boy in the head for a second time.)

He loses track of his days.

Weekly, he is picked up at his apartment. Weekly, he goes through the motions of assisting the officers on Shido’s case, exposing the network the Phantom Thieves had left to rot.

But that wasn’t fair either, was it? They didn’t know what Goro did, not of the filth or the rotten underbelly he’d helped Shido cultivate—because Goro didn’t tell them. Of course not, why would he?

There existed dozens of Kaneshiro’s in Tokyo alone, and even more men at the top just as wretched and disgusting as the young Okumura heiress’ oh, so, beloved father that deserved to 'be guided down the correct path'.

The thieves were nothing more than naive children, with a childish justice to match; it left Goro seething, the envy burning inside him watching from afar had been…

….

He shuts off the train of thought before it festers. There's no point anymore after all was said and done.

At present, Goro inclines his head demurely at the officers on the other side of the table, he speaks in a slow, even voice for the recording.

It was an exhaustive affair, but Goro would much rather spend his months playing janitor than rot in Shido’s fancy apartment for any longer than he has to.

—He’d be dead in the ground before he let a single one of those rats go free to consolidate power. Goro may be barred from carrying out his own justice by what he can only call divine punishment, but, at least, he's mature enough to clean up the messes he himself created.

Kurusu Akira’s full name being in the system was bad enough, worse, it left him open for payback. Open for some very powerful people with axes to grind. And, as strong as the venerated leader of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts was in the metaverse, in 'reality', Joker was still distressingly mortal.

(Self-sacrificing idiot that he is.)

It’s just so easy for people to die, like the flickering light of a candle, or the last gasp of a dying star echoed from a million light years away.

Goro wouldn’t allow Akira, sentimental, clever, earnest Akira with his knife like smiles and infuriating charm to wind up a statistic in a political power struggle.

That shit's just not on.

—Goro owes him a rematch, after all.

This he could put his energy into, a purpose he could focus in on instead of wallowing in the reality of his situation. Robin Hood, who'd made his nest in Goro's soul long ago, trills in united agreement.

Distantly, Goro can’t help wondering if Joker can still feel Arsene under his skin.

For a time the mask smiles and so does Goro.

He doesn’t think about Joker, he tries not to think too long about much of anything,

And then.

There’s always a ‘then’, isn’t there?

He finds himself staring at a pile of diaries and a meek elderly man in a traditional kimono. There are officers on either side of the man on the other end of the apartment's dining table; he looks downtrodden and exhausted.

Goro feels a rush of foreboding he hasn’t felt since that day when his sentence was read in court.

As the meeting wears on, filled with excuses and weak justifications, his eyes are blank and dispassionate. Yet another empty shell, his--'grandfather'--pleading for absolution from a part of Goro's sympathy he had let go to rust a long time ago.

How could someone as bright as his mother have come from such a cowardly worm of a man?

In the dead of night whilst reading his mother’s dying words, the officers and her wretch of a sperm donor finally long gone, Akechi Goro is for the first time, wholly alone.

Something breaks for good inside him, when the realization hits: There is no true justice in this world.

(He can no longer feel the echoes of Robin’s merry laughter, nor the constant assurance of the gentleman outlaw’s masks.)

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[Candidate found!] Akechi Goro. Tokyo Highcourt. Amphitheater.

#akechi palace au #i'm just gonna make that the main tag #writing tag #this is half word vomit half me rotating goro akechi's weirdo mindset and hangups about his own autonomy in my brain :jazzhands:#this is too embarrassing and rough to post anywhere else but tumblr :X #anyways in case it was confusing let me explain!#the court's verdict and his final talk with shido were the catalysts for akechi losing his personas over a score of months #he gets yanked into his own palace pretty fast after but alas i don't have the Timeline Calender:tm: on me rn

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