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There’s a burst of static on the other line.
Phone pressed against his shoulder, Goro’s prodding at a bruise on his arm. It’s one of the many Ren pushed himself pallid trying to heal on their first trip through Maruki’s hell tower. He barely helped. Something about the Metaverse and this world being twisted together, magic and nature melded into a hellish amalgam of shimmering edges and Stepford smiles—some things aren’t working quite right.
Through the receiver, Ren coughs to fill the silence.
At length, Goro asks, “You’re sure about tomorrow?”
His body is sore the way it would be after a head-on collision, not a good workout. Ren can’t be any better. This kind of tired, it lives inside your bones. And all over his arms and legs, Goro’s got a whole field of blooming lilacs.
“She just has to sleep it off,” Ren says.
Goro can imagine him twisting the cord of Leblanc’s old rotary phone, wrapping it around his hands to turn his own marred skin to ash and puce.
Just to make him say it, Goro asks, “Who?”
Ren says her name like it’s a foreign word. “Sumire… will be fine in the morning.”
When they look at her, they both still see Kasumi.
It’s hard not to pity her.
The bitterest parts of Goro refuse to understand her. But more than most, he knows the battle she fought to keep herself alive.
There really must be something in a name; how Sumire means violet. Goro’s only one letter off from that, himself. You could argue that she’s got more of a right to the color of royalty than the Detective Prince ever did. In place of a circlet is the bow from her dead sister’s hair, donned like a coronation, but her kingdom is as much of a lie as his was.
The biggest difference is, she did not earn it.
Not in conquest. Not from betrayal. Not with all the bodies piled in his wake.
If anyone deserves the satin robes and crystal scepter, it’s him.
Tinny with static, Ren’s voice says, “Hey.” It asks, “Will you be okay?”
Fused to his skull as it is, that crown never did come off easy.
“Of course I will,” Goro snaps, and hangs up.
Yoshizawa was not fine.
Truthfully, neither is Goro.
They carry her out of the Palace with a dozen new wounds, physical and otherwise, while dusk hangs heavy overhead. Every night they leave this place, the dying sky gleams that same deep, regal shade.
Everything in this world spits his past back in his fucking face.
Used to be, Goro would look up and snap a picture of every sunset. He’d post it to his page with a thoughtful caption to please the court, to keep the love and auspice of every loyal subject. But it strikes him now that the only ones he’s ever seen have been over Tokyo. The scope of his rule never felt quite this small, even at the end of his reign.
Heavy is the head, indeed; and right now, Goro feels drunk.
Ren’s weight leans heavy into his side as they pile onto the train. Yoshizawa’s dead to the world, limp as a sleeping child. Ren’s jaw goes slack as he starts to doze on his shoulder. There’s at least three black eyes between them.
They must be quite a sight.
Normally, Goro’d be worried about someone in their car noticing. What if they snapped a shot for some trashy grocery-store tabloid? Goodness, they’re a scandal waiting to happen.
Old habits, as they say. Because in Maruki’s world, Goro might as well not have a name.
Across from them, a man with glassy eyes and a Ken-doll smile, he leans in close. He winks one glazed eye. Says: “Partied too hard, eh?”
Goro’s plastered that same smile on his own face a thousand times for the masses. From this angle, it’s nothing but teeth.
So when Goro flashes his back, it’s just to show his canines.
“Why don’t you mind your own fucking business, old man?”
Ren startles fully awake.
“Akechi—” he hisses.
The man’s infected smile spreads wider. He laughs, fractured and off-tune. The sound makes Goro’s trigger finger itch the way a Shadow would.
“I remember those days,” he says, not quite wistful. Like whatever memory he’s got is in fragments, incomplete and missing all the bad parts. “When I was your age…”
And then he won’t shut the fuck up. It prickles his nerves how there’s no even cadence to his voice. It spikes erratically, emphasis in all the wrong places; the way you think of bad actors reading from worse scripts.
If Goro really was in charge, the executions would start promptly with this fucking guy.
And this is what Maruki calls happiness?
Ren sits up, wincing as he adjusts Yoshizawa to lean on his shoulder while she sleeps.
Exhaustion tugging at his voice, he murmurs, “They’re worse than Shadows.”
Goro nods.
It’s like he never even left the palace.
This time, they make it all the way to Maruki himself.
And after he takes Yoshizawa, they barely make it to the fucking exit.
Ren’s favoring his left leg. His breathing is ragged, his face is a mosaic. He looks the way he did in the interrogation room, hours after the beatings and seconds before the gunshot.
And Goro, well—at least he doesn’t have to worry about getting blood on his uniform anymore. His only real claim to Prince Crow’s regality now is the deep, royal purple striping his suit. A cognition dreamt up from back when he sat at the monarchy’s right hand, and the only thought in his head was to overthrow the crooked king and usurp the throne.
Call him crazy, but that color’s been fading for years.
And now, blood soaking through the fabric to turn it only darker, it’s less the shade of precious silks and closer to plums left to rot in the shade.
Him and Ren drag each other the rest of the way. Plastic smiles flash and mechanical hands wave as they both collapse on the cold concrete. Above it all, another stupid fucking sunset hangs, shading to match him like it’s making a point.
Through his teeth, Goro says, “We can’t keep doing this.”
Heaving every breath, Ren says, “Could be worse.”
Goro’s leaving handprints on the sidewalk that look black in the dying light, and his head’s treading water. When he makes himself sit up, a tide of pain spills over. A jagged slice over his ribs tears wider.
They’re half-dead.
What the fuck is the point anymore? Shido is rotting, and the world is no less twisted for it. The king is dead, long live the king, and Goro couldn’t do a fucking thing to stop either of them.
He was always powerless, wasn’t he? It didn’t take an army to dethrone him. It took a years-planned coup, a self-betrayal that left him dead, buried, and resurrected. And to add insult to injury, a generous parting gift from the new monarch: the life he did not want.
Sure, Goro was a fucking prince. Only in the machiavellian sense.
With a sharp breath in, Ren pulls himself to standing. He offers a hand, shaking and pallid.
One final decree when Goro slurs, “I don’t need your fucking help.”
Ren does not budge.
“If you can’t stand up,” he says, steadier than his legs, “then I’ll carry you.”
Goro would rather die.
But then, he’s already done that once.
The last time Goro and Ren stumble out of the Palace, it’s not through the exit. Their only ceiling now is that same dismal sky, but this time they’re ten bodies stronger. Sumire stands tall among them, Ella hovering assuredly at her flank.
God still sits upon his lofty throne, twisting the arm of fate until it strains the bone. Maruki laments that it had to come to this. Goro does not. His battered body be damned, he’s got just enough fight left in him.
Maybe all he’s ever craved is the chaos of battling empires. After all, that’s more regal than any gold trim or purple satin. Every dynasty in history was bloodthirsty. The successful ones, anyway. The Phantom Thieves may show mercy, but Goro wants the fucking war.
After all, when god is dead, Goro knows what’s coming for him.
Maruki says the word, and Azathoth rises before them in glory. Fighting him, it almost takes more than they have.
Almost.
But he bends, and he breaks. The god-king bleeds so dark it’s almost black.
And as it all fades away, storm clouds parting above them, Goro thinks: maybe royalty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.