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Goro Akechi wanted to die.
This was nothing new. This was nothing grand.
He often wondered how people went about their day, complaisant and content. It was perhaps a broad generalization, but he did feel as if most people were happy living lives others want them to lead. And yet they strive for freedom, strive for their own personal happiness. It was all a malevolent fog they worked under, hiding the truth from them to grant them bliss in innocence.
He had lost that innocence when he found his mother hanging from the ceiling, appearing to fly like an angel without wings. His guardian angel gone, pushed into the fiery dark with no way to return.
Or perhaps he never had the chance to be innocent, born to a demon with no wings.
He had tried. He tried so hard, everyday, every hour, to not fall down this spiral. If not for himself than for his friends at the very least.
His lover.
His wonderful lover lying next to him, breathing ever so calmly, pitch black lashes quiet against his cheeks, unaware of his husband’s nightly plight. His beautiful rival, bare underneath the moonlight streaming in, alabaster skin the light amongst their dark sheets, bewitching him. His thoughtful husband, who’d wake up to cradle his face between his hands, kissing his freckles one by one before lulling him back to sleep.
Oh how he wishes he could sleep, for eternity.
Goro lowered his head to Akira’s chest, nuzzling his ear to listen to the steady rhythm of his life. Even in the depths of slumber, an arm came around his shoulders, cooling his feverish presence. It felt protective, almost as if he wasn’t quite as unaware of his turmoil as he should be. A quick peak and his face soothed Goro. He was asleep; he deserved to be.
He hasn’t told him yet that he stopped going to his therapist. It would start another fight, it would make Akira cry, it would show Goro once more how much better he deserves. Akira just wants him to be happy, wants them to be happy. Unlike Goro, he hasn’t seen past the fog pertaining to his life. He just hasn’t grasped the truth.
Hands burrowing into their bedding, he pushed himself up. The sweat building on his hands and feet not helping in keeping quiet, hastily wiping them off—without success—before pulling on a pair of socks. Leaving his sleeping husband behind, he entered their hallway, lined with pictures, gimmicks, and fur.
He hasn’t vacuumed in a week. He didn’t bother to remember.
The unpalatable truth was that there was no helping him. There was no happy end for them.
Just as he had tried, so had his therapist. Medications over medications, years of treatment and group therapy and personal sessions. The longer they kept going, the further his mouth seemed to melt. His speech used to be a free flowing waterfall, opinionated, blunt but honest. Nowadays, however, only pieces of information come through, rocks of molten lava crashing down, burning and deadly.
There is no point. So he stopped going. He was just hurting another person in his disillusioned process to become happy.
The floor was scalding against his feet, even through the layer of cotton. He let his eyes wander over the row of pictures lining the wall, the exuding happiness in stark contrast to his gloom.
He could lie. He could lie to their friends, he could lie to Akira. He used to be able to lie to himself as well. Yet it’s been hard to do so lately, feeling almost foolish to repeat this mantra to himself.
That he was healing, that he had support, the he could be happy, that he was allowed to be happy.
His eyes stopped on one photograph, almost bound to the sight of it. It showed a simple, but undeniably euphoric scene. Two men dressed in white and black, standing in the midst of a lush meadow, embracing themselves and embraced by their friends, tears of joy running down their cheeks, and brand-new rings gleaming on their fingers.
It was a picture of their wedding, Akira’s and his. He likes to think he’d been happy, judging from both their overjoyed expressions.
With one last caress of his thump, smearing sweat over the glass covering their faces but uncaring of this in the moment, he went on to the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.
The crux of the problem was, that Goro was just too fucked up. He’s killed, even if most of them were just as rotten as he’d been, they still visited him in his sleep, in his waking, in his most vulnerable moments. He’s been used, deprived of his purity by his own flesh and blood, sold off to his business partners like the whore his mother had been. And he had died, he knew he had. The fire consuming him in the bowels of his father’s ship had not been an illusion. But when he came to open his eyes in absolute confusion, he’d been compressed by the clinical white of a hospital room.
The gods shouldn’t have had thought to have mercy on him that late in his life.
The crux of the problem was also, how is he supposed to cope, without hurting others in the process? He is a beast, a wild animal in his best moments. Cowering away from any intimacy and caress, afraid of the abuse that will eventually follow. He wishes he could let himself be held by Akira, without crying in despair remembering the plethora of hands grasping his limbs after they make love. He wishes he could look at Futaba without seeing the mother he had sentenced to death, her despairing screeches leaving her mouth as his little sister cackles in delight.
He wishes he could forget. But a murderer doesn’t deserve this kind of mercy. What he deserves is the noose than had once been worn by the mother of the man.
The crux of the problem was, Goro was tired. With every new consecutive day, hell seemed to come closer and closer. No, it has always been there, he has just stopped denying its burning presence. Every interaction has him on edge. Every breath he takes is burning his lungs. He knows, deep down, what is wrong with him. That therapy has helped with. But they have not been able to impart the wisdom of healing. He knows what’s wrong, but he has never been particularly talented at fixing the broken. Born and trained to taint and destroy.
He simply does not want to go on. He cannot see in front of him without seeing nothing. Despair was not the cold dread it was described to be in novels. It was a bouldering, stabbing inferno that threatened to light him aflame. And this inferno wants nothing more than to consume his being—it is tiring resisting it. So so tiring.
Pushing himself up once more, having not noticed he had been crouching on the floor, he approached the bathroom mirror, the burning dread following his every step.
What he saw was what he expected. The face of a murderer. An unredeemable perpetrator that cannot find forgiveness.
The crux of the problem was, Goro knows what death feels like. And there was nothing to be afraid of, when it was something so easy.
He just hoped Akira would move on, happier than he had been.