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Goro waits a few moments after Maruki steps inside Leblanc, just long enough to make sure everyone’s attention will have left the doorway, before he slides across the alley and positions himself to the side of the entrance where his shadow shouldn’t be visible.
He’s a little worried he won’t be able to hear everything here, what with it being far too cold for any windows to be open, but Maruki’s sanctimonious voice comes through clear enough:
“—been concerned about a possible relapse, considering her difficulties with accepting this reality.”
Ah, more false concern for Yoshizawa then. Delightful.
A tense silence follows, and Goro wonders if Ren is too soft-spoken to be heard at this distance.
“She’s just fine.”
He is more difficult to hear, and it makes it even harder than usual to make out the subtleties of his tone. If Goro had to take a guess, though, he’d say Ren sounds tired.
“...You know, I would love for that to be the truth. But people can’t maintain their strength forever, Amamiya-kun.”
Goro rolls his eyes. As if Maruki knew anything about strength and what it cost.
“So…getting down to business…” Maruki says. “I wanted to confirm with you one last time: is there no other way to come to an agreement besides fighting?”
The answer comes immediately this time: “We can’t accept this reality.”
Good. Goro would very much like for his presence here to be an unnecessary act of paranoia.
“The reality I created may seem distorted from your point-of-view…But it’s a reality where everyone is happy. If you just stay, you’ll never have to suffer the pain of loss, or the pain of—”
“Stop.”
The voice is quiet enough that Goro worries he’s going to miss what comes next, so he carefully and quietly steps up to the door itself, positions his ear beside the hinges where the cold floods in.
“Amamiya-kun—”
“Please,” Ren continues, and Goro can hear the exhaustion in his voice more clearly now. It’s been showing in his posture more and more recently—never in the palace, never when he was leading, but in moments in-between it seeped in like the draft whistling past Goro’s ear. “Just—take this and go.”
Goro hears or maybe imagines the softest whisper of a calling card sliding across a table.
Maruki sighs. “That…really isn’t like you, not to let someone say their piece. I know this has been a trying time for you—”
Goro becomes aware of a tiny pinching pain where his nails are digging into his palms.
“—but please, Amamiya-kun, you were the guiding light to my research. You showed me the way so I could make my dream into reality. I have nothing but gratitude for you—not a single ounce of—”
“You used me.” Ren’s voice is still quiet, but there’s something fervent and harsh buried within that makes Goro lean closer despite himself. “All those months, pumping me for information about the cognitive world. And I didn’t even realise that’s what you’d done until…until my father, and you tried to use that too.”
“Amamiya-kun—” Maruki starts again, but there’s a soft thud.
“If you want Ren to listen to you,” comes Morgana’s voice, and Goro matches the previous sound to paws thumping on a table, “you have to hear him out too.”
A small pause.
“Alright. I suppose I do owe you that. Go ahead.”
A silence follows in which Goro’s memory supplies the image of Ren’s face when he tries to figure out how to put something into words.
“I believe you,” Ren says slowly, like every word is costing him something, “that what’s happening to my father would be happening in any reality. But in this one, I’ve spent some of the last weeks he has left here, because of you. And I know you think you’re helping the world. I know you’ve suffered too. But I’m not gonna let you sit there and talk to me like we’re still friends.”
A pause in which Goro wonders whether Ren is looking Maruki in the eye, what Maruki might see there if he is.
“That friendship was a lie from the beginning,” Ren continues. “And whatever was left of it ended when you tried to use my father as a bargaining chip. So, please: you say you’re grateful to me. If that’s really the case, what you can do for me in return is to take the calling card and leave. Now.”
There’s no one to see the smile that spreads over Goro’s face so he lets it come, one last indulgence in this wretched world. Some part of him had been worried, even after the day of those phone calls, that Ren might waver. The worry had been present ever since the day of their solo mission to retrieve Yoshizawa, when Ren had been like a shadow of himself, and had never entirely vanished; Ren was, fundamentally, a bleeding heart, and there had always been a risk he’d be taken in by Maruki’s false benevolence.
Goro expects it to sting, the way it usually does when he realised he’d underestimated his rival once again. Instead, he feels drained of everything but a distant relief. Ren has finally decisively rejected Maruki, and tomorrow they can put an end to this whole miserable farce.
“Well,” Maruki says, “there’s a lot I could say to contest your version of events. But I get the feeling you’re kinda done listening to me talk.”
“If you heard what he said,” Morgana says, “then take the card and go.”
“I would, really,” Maruki says, “but I’m afraid this doesn’t only concern you, Amamiya-kun. There’s more we have to discuss—isn’t that right, Akechi-kun?”
Ah. Goro should have known better than to hope anything in his life could be easy.
Goro pushes the door open and walks inside. Maruki, Ren and Morgana are sitting at a booth, the table empty other than the calling card lying untouched near Maruki’s hand. Goro takes a second to be pleased that Ren had at least refused to show the architect of all this pain proper hospitality.
Ren looks up at him and Goro can’t tell if he’s surprised or not.
“...You caught me,” Goro admits.
“Oh, it was just a hunch,” Maruki says. “Like I said, Amamiya-kun: this issue doesn’t only affect you and your family. Akechi-kun, this involves you, too.”
Goro is honestly a little surprised that he’s still going for it, even with his precious protege’s rejection still hanging in the air. This little gambit has surely grown much weaker than Maruki first envisioned it, but it seems the man just doesn’t know when to give in.
Ren frowns at them both. “Both Akechi and me?”
Goro lets out a strained breath in spite of himself. He wishes he could fast-forward to the end, get an answer from Ren and leave this night behind them, leave it all behind.
“What do these two have to do with…?” Morgana asks.
“The relationship you two share is very unusual,” Maruki says, leaning forward with his eyes fixed on Ren. “A detective and a Phantom Thief. Despite being enemies, your relationship isn’t based on hatred or ill-will.”
Goro had been prepared for this, but he still loathes Maruki’s attempt to summarise them, to reduce him and Ren and all they’d done to and with each other into this convenient narrative.
But he keeps looking at Maruki because he doesn’t want to see what’s happening on Ren’s face right now, the moment when he understands.
Maruki shakes his head sadly. “That’s why I found it so tragic when I learned what happened in Shido’s palace.”
Goro shoves the memory those words summon away as firmly as he can, though a quick glance at Ren suggests he’s failed to do the same, eyes lost in the past. His father’s name in this room makes Goro want to try to gut Maruki here and now, for all the good it would do.
“Say, Amamiya-kun…didn’t you regret how things ended with him? You two came to a deep understanding of one another…yet you had no choice but to leave Akechi-kun to his fate. That’s why I created a reality where you two could have a fresh start together.”
Morgana’s eyes widen. “That would mean the Akechi in the real world is…”
Maruki leans back in his seat, hands resting oh-so-casually together. “Get what I’m saying?” Then he pulls his faux-concern back on like a cloak. “I genuinely didn’t want to tell you like this. I didn’t want to make it seem like I’m holding him hostage…”
Goro barely suppresses a bitter laugh. All the hostages Maruki has tried to use over the last month—Yoshizawa, Isshiki, President Okumura, Ren’s own father—the man still couldn’t admit even to himself that that’s what he was doing.
“But no matter what you may think of me, I just want you to accept this reality and move on with your happy lives.”
“And that matters how, exactly?” Goro cuts in. “Don’t tell me you still think dangling my life before us is going to have any impact on our decision?”
“You knew?” Ren asks, voice ragged. “This whole time?”
Even that day, is what he isn’t saying. “Well, I lacked conclusive evidence. But after I fought against you all, I had a gap in my memory that ended with meeting up with Ren again.”
Goro realises Ren’s given name has slipped out of his mouth unbidden, but that hardly matters anymore. He continues on, voice deliberately light. “There were also the cases of Wakaba Isshiki and President Okumura…Of course I’d find all of that suspicious.”
“I had a feeling the truth of the matter still wouldn’t dissuade you, Akechi-kun,” Maruki says. “But what about you, Amamiya-kun?”
Goro’s miserable excuse for a heart pounds in his chest. He takes a second to be bitter that his own fate is once again out of his hands—because the Phantom Thieves march to the beat of Ren’s drum, and if his resolve fades then theirs surely won’t be far behind, which leaves Goro attempting to defeat Maruki alone.
Goro forces himself to really look at Ren as last: his head is bowed, glasses and hair covering most of his expression. The cat stares up at him anxiously.
“I recognise we’ve discussed a similar matter already,” Maruki continues. “And you…made your feelings rather clear.”
Ah, one of the few moments from the last month Goro is glad to have witnessed—all that brutal power heading straight for Maruki, distinctly not a warning shot but one with lethal intent in its very name.
“But your father’s situation, while tragic, is still…natural. And he’s lived a long, happy life. I thought you might feel differently about the life of someone your own age, stolen before he had a chance to grow into the fine young man he still could be.”
Goro scoffs. It’s disgusting, hearing himself reduced to some trite little tragedy. Like the blood on his hands doesn’t dwarf half the yakuza in this city.
“Is that really the best you can do?” Goro asks coldly.
Maruki opens his mouth to answer, but then Ren lifts his head and looks Maruki in the eye at last, and they all fall quiet.
“Take the calling card,” Ren says, slow and very quiet, “and go.”
A tense, silent beat passes. Maruki sighs. “Well, alright.”
He picks up the calling card at last, though he doesn’t bother to do more than glance at it—Goro doesn’t actually know what it says, either. The wording had been thrown around and debated in the group chat, but Goro had ignored it all. None of it mattered.
“I’ve heard your calling.” Maruki says, standing up from the booth. He pauses for a moment in front of the door. “I’m truly sorry things between us have ended up this way. But I hope you know the door is still open for you to do the right thing. If you don’t show tomorrow, I’ll take that to mean you’ve accepted my reality…See you.”
“What are you gonna do?” Morgana asks as soon as the door shuts behind him.
Goro takes a moment to try and deduce Morgana’s likely position on this and whether keeping him in the room will be a benefit to him—then gives it up and admits to himself that he’s too tired to deal with one more extraneous element right now. “I’d like to speak with Ren.”
Morgana looks up at him. “Akechi,” he says, in that stupid sad little voice. He nods. “Gotcha. I’ll leave the decision up to you, Ren—let me know when you’ve reached an answer.”
Morgana scurries up the stairs.
Ren hasn’t moved from the booth. The overhead light, Ren’s elbows resting on the table, his pale exhausted face—just for a second Goro is out of time, the phantom weight of a gun in his hand. He blinks it away.
“I will carve my own path for myself. I refuse to accept a reality concocted by someone else, stuck under their control for the rest of my days—are you even listening to me?”
Ren is still frozen in place, but he looks up at Goro’s question. The pain in his eyes, the way he moves almost in slow motion like something is dragging him down—at one time Goro thinks he would have relished being able to hurt Ren this easily. Now it just makes him angry.
“Don’t tell me you’re letting that lunatic’s last pitiful plot get to you?” Goro snarls. “I’d thought we were of the same mind in this, at least. You said it yourself: there is no meaning in the life of a puppet.”
Ren’s brow creases further. “I…I wouldn’t have said those things in front of you, if I’d known—”
“Don’t you dare,” Goro cuts him off. “You meant them. You were right. ”
Ren just shakes his head slightly and hunches down again, the light reflecting off his glasses and blocking his expression again. He didn’t have that shield in the interrogation room—although Goro supposes he never saw the real Ren that day, only a cognition. Copies and fakes, even then. Nothing is ever real, nothing ever changes, and Goro is so tired.
“You could have told me,” Ren says softly.
“What good would it have done?” He means it as a reprimand, but the exhaustion creeps through into his voice and it comes out just sounding empty.
He watches Ren try to answer that question and fail—watches as he must recognise what Goro already knows, that this month of unwanted resurrection was always going to be devoid of any meaning, a sick joke by a sick man who thought he could make the world well.
Ren rises from the booth like something unseen has tugged on his strings. “You—you’re here already, sit down. I’ll get us a drink.”
“No,” Goro says. “No more coffee, no more stalling, no more pointless gestures. I want to hear you say it. What do you intend to do tomorrow?”
Ren takes a slow breath, visibly steadying some torrent of emotion inside of him. “Well, I’m having one. You can wait,” he mutters, and heads back behind the counter.
There’s no fussing with beans this time, at least, no endless process when bitter instant did much the same thing. Ren just grabs a mug and pours some leftover coffee into it, then comes back around the counter and perches on a stool. Goro has long suspected that Ren used these little rituals as a chance to pull his mask back together, but if so he’s done a poor job of it this time.
“Well?” Goro asks.”Your decision?”
Ren takes a long drink from the mug then looks up at him. “As soon as I tell you, you’ll leave.”
Seeing right through him as ever, and that doesn’t annoy Goro as much as the constant insistence that he wants Goro around. “So get on with it then, for both of our sakes.”
Ren stares into the depths of his mug for a long moment. “Like you said before, you already know what I think about this. I won’t let Maruki…I won’t let him do this to you, to anyone.”
Goro keeps staring sharply at him. Mercy won’t do either of them any good now. If Ren can’t even bring himself to say it, then Goro can’t count on him to do it.
Ren grips tighter to the mug in his hand. “We’re stopping Maruki.”
And like Ren said, now that Goro has his answer he can leave. There isn’t even a drink in front of him to pressure him into staying—finally, Goro has done enough to get Ren to stop trying to force kindness onto him. Finally he’s changed something.
“Why did you even come here tonight if you already knew what I’d say?”
Goro shrugs. “Perhaps I was just curious if Maruki really would deploy his last gambit. And what angle he’d take to do so—I must say, I expected better than that ‘innocence of youth’ drivel.”
And Goro had known that would hurt, had meant it to, but the heavy sadness hanging over Ren in the aftermath just pisses him off.
“You are aware this is all just displaced grief over your father.”
There’s some steel in Ren’s eyes now as he stares Goro down. “You don’t get to decide what I feel or who I feel it for.”
Goro reflects that if Maruki were to try to make a puppet of Ren, he would surely get this part wrong. Goro has been watching Ren obsessively for almost a year and even he can never quite seem to predict these moments where he turned solid and uncompromising, or sharp and strange, or quietly fierce.
And maybe there is one last bit of curiosity left in him, that old impulse to keep cataloguing Ren Amamiya, building an ever-shifting picture of the boy he’d killed, because Goro finds himself asking: “What’s your father like?”
“Stubborn,” Ren answers. “He doesn’t like to back down, and he’s never once changed his mind about anything.” His knuckles are white as he grips the mug. “He…he never liked going to doctors. I bet there were signs, for a long time. I bet mom told him to go and he didn’t listen. He never—”
Ren puts his head in his hands. Goro dissects, clinically, the anger in Ren’s voice, the love it proved must exist between them despite their estrangement. He puts that datapoint in line with the others and doesn’t think about what it felt like, to lose a parent you loved and were furious with all at once.
Eventually, Ren pulls himself together enough to look up.
“Well,” Goro says. “I suppose that explains at least some of how you got like this.”
Ren holds his mug out to Goro in a ‘cheers’ gesture, acknowledging the dig, before taking a drink. “It would have been so wrong seeing him under Maruki’s spell,” he muses. “Telling me he’s sorry.”
“It’s hard to believe anyone could settle for that,” Goro says, thinking of that puppet Ren again. “Pale imitations, with no challenge or bite to them.”
Ren looks at him silently for a long moment.
“What?” Goro asks, then regrets it instantly.
“Just…I’m glad he didn’t change you.”
It’s awful, standing there under the weight of all that sincerity. Goro wants to snap back, ask Ren if he’s really so sure he’d recognise it if Maruki had changed him—but even he can’t get himself to believe that lie. If there’s one person Goro trusts to recognise a mask, it’s Ren.
Goro shifts from foot to foot, his legs aching from standing, but sitting feels like a concession he can’t afford.
“If…if you survive—” Ren starts.
“I’m already dead,” Goro interrupts immediately.
“But if somehow you aren’t,” Ren insists, “just…promise me you’ll come find me, just to tell me you’re alive. Even if you never want to see me again after that. Just don’t…disappear, again, please.”
Goro glares at him. “I am dead,” he says slowly. “I died. I was shot and I bled out, and what remained of my body was likely pulverised when the palace collapsed and spit out in some nameless back alley—”
“Promise me anyway,” Ren interrupts, like it’s that simple.
“No.”
Ren gives him a sad smile. “You won’t make a promise you don’t think you’ll have to keep anyway?”
“I won’t—don’t ask me to, to imagine —”
Goro slams his hand down on the counter and immediately curses his loss of control. He should have walked out of here the second it became clear Ren wouldn’t be taking Maruki’s deal. He hates being here, hates the memory of the way the afternoon light would filter through the windows as Goro sat and pretended at polite conversation with Sakura, and then Ren would walk through the door and they would start their game again; the only thing that made him feel alive, feel real, even before—
“Okay,” Ren says, his voice small again. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
A long tense silence follows, and Goro doesn’t know he’s going to break it until he finds himself speaking.
“Don’t build me a fucking shrine,” Goro says, and looks away from the immediate crumpling of Ren’s expression. “Don’t try to get the others to pretend they’re sad. And don’t you dare try to hold a funeral.”
Goro watches Ren’s fingers resting on the mug so he doesn’t have to look at his face. It isn’t any better. There are a few chips in his nails—from café work, maybe, or from one of the dozens or other things Ren might have been doing with his time this past month while Goro forced himself to stay away.
“I don’t think they’ll let me host any funerals in prison,” Ren says at last.
Oh. Goro had…forgotten, somehow. Goro’s existence after Shido’s palace was all part of Maruki’s world. Without that, no one stepped up for Ren on Christmas Eve. Ren went to prison, or will go once the world snaps back to itself and Sae’s case against Shido needs a new martyr.
Goro has tried not to imagine anything that came past tomorrow. But when he has, he’s pictured Ren free.
“You could always let Sae’s case fail,” Goro says evenly, “and then murder Shido the second he’s released.”
Ren huffs a humourless laugh. “I’ll keep that one in mind.”
Goro doesn’t let the topic drop. “I still haven’t forgiven you for that, you know. Letting him live. Changing his wretched heart. The world would be a better place with him in the ground.”
Ren drums his fingers on the counter. “Maybe,” he says simply.
Goro balks.
Ren gives him a tired little smile. “What, was that the wrong answer?”
“You’re just telling me what I want to hear. More pity.”
Ren shrugs. “Maybe, a little. But I don’t know. I think…if it wasn’t for what it would do to the others, to be a part of it…I think I might kill Maruki tomorrow.”
Goro watches him for a long moment, searching for the lie. “You wouldn’t.”
Ren shrugs again. “I’m not saying I definitely would. Just that I might. It seems…a lot more possible than it used to.”
And here is Goro’s window. He could tell Ren to leave the others behind, nullifying his objection about their involvement. They could go to the palace just the two of them, right now even, and they could tear Maruki apart the way Goro’s been longing for.
He could do it, months of studying Ren teaching him just how to spin it, how to use all that pity and grief and inexplicable relentless devotion and get what he fucking wants for once. He could ruin Ren, prove that he’s no better than Goro and never has been, turn him into a murderer and then die and leave him alone to live with the fact. After all this time and all this struggle, Goro could win .
Goro stares at the cooling coffee in Ren’s mug, still clutched in his hands even though it surely has no warmth left to impart. All those cups of coffee Ren forced on him, all those invitations even though he knew Goro would refuse anything that couldn’t be linked to their infiltration, nothing left but throwing darts in silence and remembering the times when he’d convinced himself that pretending to have a friend was a necessary part of his plan. What good did any of it do? Ren was sitting there bleeding kindness and grief everywhere and what did it matter, what would it change?
“If I survived,” Goro says, voice quiet and ragged, “which I didn’t, and I won’t. I would come and find you, and tell you so.”
And after that, of all things, Goro feels a sudden rush of power inside of him. The childish dream of heroism he’d pushed aside fuses with the howling viciousness he’d clung to so tightly, changing into something new, something stronger. Hereward .
Ren’s eyes are soft now, whether from Goro’s words or because he somehow knows what just happened. “Thank you,” he says.
The tingling of power starts to fade, and in its place is just pain. The longer he stands here with Ren, the more it starts to seem like maybe he didn’t have to spend this last month alone, dreaming of death, and what good did that do? Whether one of his last acts on earth was to doom Ren or to refuse to, what did it matter?
Something snags in Goro’s mind, Ren’s words from a moment ago replaying in his head. “You really aren’t going to forgive him, are you?” Goro asks. “Maruki?”
“No,” Ren answers. He takes off his glasses and scrubs tiredly at his eyes before looking up to meet Goro’s. “I…I can’t. I won’t.”
Goro believes him, and feels his picture of Ren shift once more. There were people in this world Ren Amamiya couldn’t bring himself to forgive. Goro just wasn’t one of them.
“Good.” Goro turns to make for the door. He can’t stand this anymore, this flayed-open feeling in his chest.
“You could stay,” Ren says, though he doesn’t sound like he expects him to. “It’s late, it’s cold.”
“How many times do I have to tell you to keep your pity to yourself?” Goro asks, though once again the venom he means to put into the words falls flat, and it comes out sounding like a genuine question.
Despite himself, he looks back at Ren one more time. Ren hasn’t put his glasses back on, all the steel and sadness in his eyes on full display. “At least one more, I guess.”
Goro swallows down something that feels a lot like grief, and walks back out into the cold.