Chapter Text
First, as you know, the body must knit itself back together.
Second, as you also know, the synapses must fire , and the brain must wake up .
Third, and this will be the most painful, you must remember.
Everything.
For all of us.
------
He floats in a wine-dark sea, weightless and dreaming. The nothingness is warm as a hot spring and gentle as a mother’s love and he can float here forever, free of all the pains that weighed him down.
This is your fresh start. A voice that offers the relief of a cool hand on a too-fevered brow and soothes like a finally healing wound echoes through the sea. Echoes for him. There’s a door on the horizon, lit up and welcoming, and he can slip through it to a place where no one feels pain. And once he’s through, he’ll never return.
A star explodes into fractured shards, falling into the ocean. The door slams shut with a finality that cannot be breached. The comfortable bed of sea and salt begins to sting at open wounds. It forces him awake. He reaches for the voice, for the door, for his name, but they plunge into the depths. His eyes open. His head aches. Wave after wave comes and he can’t sleep any longer. What had been floating turns to drowning and he struggles to keep his head above water. Whatever genuine peace awaits beyond the ocean goes with the shattered star.
The bottom of the ocean might be nice. Sinking into the blackness where no one knows and no one judges and nothing can corrupt. But there is a more powerful command, one that screams to fight, fight like hell. That all too human urge to survive propels him upwards.
Whoever he was, it’s gone to the ceaseless waves. The water felt unreal, felt wrong, but he is borne forth on an ocean of wishes before he’s tossed onto the shore.
He sits down in the sand and lets the hot sun bake into his skin. It’s so soft, his hands look so gentle in warped black leather, but once there was blood on them. As he tries to grasp the memory it slips away with a strangled laugh, gone into the deep.
The seawater he swallowed churns his stomach. He staggers up the cliff to a bluff overlooking the waves, before he leans over and retches up the entire ocean. Seaweed and little snails, grains of sand and shell fragments heave out onto the long blades of beachgrass. Then his throat aches, and his chest tightens and he vomits freezing cold water and bile, pine needles and oak leaves, roots and thorns. His throat burns so much he might next vomit up the sun. He puts a hand to his lower lip and comes away with blood, his body familiar to him at that moment, at last. Finally, a thing he can shape himself around.
Whoever he is, he doesn’t want to look at the mess he made. It’s distasteful. His hands ache and cramp. He removes the gloves and drops them onto the bubbling pile of sick. They’re stained and distorted from the seawater and when he throws them away he welcomes the breeze on his palms. He staggers away and does not see the gloves and the thorns and the remnants of sea and salt and sun burrow down deep into the earth. Even if he looked back he wouldn’t be able to detect the roots unfurling in the ground, the process of life and dream and cognition coming alive beneath his feet. He cannot feel the screaming things, the sighing things, the biting things forming in the dirt, waiting for him.
He doesn’t even know his name.
He waits on the bluff for a day and a night, arms curled around his legs as the sun sets, the moon rises and the stars arc above. Corpses, he thinks idly, don’t need to eat or drink. He dozes, on and off, the sun baking his skin until it reddens. It’s that haunting pre-dawn hour when the world is painted blue that his throat first aches for water.
But, I’m dead, he thinks, and trying to hold those two conflicting thoughts in his mind makes his skull split, and he has to let them go. When he stares down at his collarbone, when his fingers trace his rib cage and work their way down to his stomach, he finds three distinct bullet holes, three doors slammed shut with the world of the living on the other side.
Corpses aren’t thirsty, his logical mind protests. This is a trick or a game. But his primal lizard brain roars at that nonsense and instinct walks him from the bluff before the sun rises.
This is the first time he looks behind himself and sees the house. He’d been so focused on sea and the sky, mind empty and unthinking, that he didn’t even turn around. He lurches toward it, tripping on every other step.
He drinks from a water pump outside the house. He shudders when the cool liquid spills on his skin, teasing the burns on his arms, face, and shoulders with respite. Off in the distance, lights glow against a backdrop of sea and pink-blue sky, but it’s too far when the house is here and inviting. And no one has been here for a long, long time.
He sits on the porch, giving him some shelter from the beating sun.
He waits.
He gets up and drinks more water from the pump.
When he passes the door, he catches his reflection in the pane of glass. He’s a wild thing, a ghost, a poorly made echo of whoever he used to be. It doesn’t fit.
It fits too well.
He knew someone who lived in a place like this one, old, shabby, full of boxes. Pathetic. A pang makes his chest clench. Something about the memory makes him angry, makes him sad. A life he wanted that he could not possess. But it hides behind a wall of roaring water. The only clue he has are placid grey eyes and an echo of his marrow-deep rage.
He tries, but whoever it is passes without recognition. So he returns to the bluff and lets the sun beat down on his body, before retreating into the shade.
Three days pass like this, with warm metallic water and an ever-growing emptiness in his stomach. There’s a town in the distance, and when he looked at night it was all lit up. People, maybe people who know him. Who know his name, or why he died or where he is. He walks on and on, the burnt skin on his arms and neck sore with every step. The desolate little house on the hill recedes and a small town comes into view, inland and away from the sea.
When he enters the edge of the town everyone stops and gapes at him. Maybe they do know him. He takes another step forward, but no one claims him. An older woman walks toward him and he steps back.
“Who are you?” the old woman asks and he can only shake his head. “Are you alright? Where did you come from?”
“I… I…” He casts a frantic gaze around him, but everyone else is frozen. Shame and fear beat in his heart. The woman steps closer to him, and she tries to grab his hand, but he jumps back on surprisingly nimble feet.
“What’s your name? Do you know your name?” the old woman asks and he gapes at her. No one could ever love him enough to give him a name. He shakes his head and stares, blood rushing to his ears.
“Um.” His given name returns to him, excavated from the corners of his mind. “Goro?” Two other names sit on his tongue, his false family name and his real name. The false name feels like a too-tight skin, but one he understands. The other he rejected to be molded into something else. But as loose and ill-fitting as it is, his fake name, his famous name will get him killed.
“Goro?” She repeats slowly.
“Tachibana.” Goro knows it’s his mother’s name, somehow. He wraps it around his tongue, pushes it through his lips, and lets a knot untie in his chest. A name he hid to keep their past safe from prying, evil eyes. “Goro Tachibana.”
“We need to call the authorities,” the woman looks at him with such concern that it makes shame boil in his heart. Fear follows, panic up his spine. He can’t be found, not like this, not without a plan.
“No, no, you cannot do that.” Goro shakes with fear. He puts a hand up to his forehead and expects to find a mask, but all he touches is sandpapered flesh. “No one can know I’m here.” He remembers enough of himself to hate how his voice hitches on the next words. “Please?”
“Somebody hurt you,” the old woman says. She holds up a hand and approaches him slowly. It’s like this woman is a hunter, and he’s a fucking scared woodland creature.
Goro, swearing, a voice echoes from beyond the sea and his gaze darts around the small town center.
“No,” Goro repeats the word.
“Who did this to you?”
My father?
The woman steps closer and her eyes widen. She’s seen the bullet wound, how it’s still shiny and half-healed. “Did you wash up? On shore? You’re a child.”
“I’m not a child.” Goro steps back. Other people amass around them, whispering and staring. “I wasn’t here. Tell no one.” And then another fucking humiliating request. “Please.”
“Wait.” The old woman stops Goro as he’s about to turn and run. She shoves something into Goro’s hands. His reflexes say it’s a bomb, it’s poison, it’s a blade, but it’s a plastic bag that merely crinkles when she passes it to him.
“You’re safe here,” the woman says. Her voice echoes across the hill as Goro runs to the empty house and the quiet bluff. “No one’s going to tell your secret.”
------
The sun rises, refracting off the broken window shards and into Goro’s face. A lifetime ago he rose with the sun, aware of the limited hours in a day, all he had to do. Then he stopped rising at all, and now he doesn’t know what to do with this body, this soul. He remembers the dull ache of a stomach and being terrified of a slow, agonizing death from sepsis. The relief when another bullet hit his chest and a third struck him in the should, gifting him the quicker death of drowning in his own blood. The pin-sharp agony of actually dying. His body reknit itself in the water, filling him with seawater and leaving him with a map of scars to guide him to the truth.
It takes two weeks for all of Goro’s memories to return He pieces it all together like a torn up piece of paper thrown in the trash. Every new bit of knowledge about himself makes volcano hot rage bubble up and threaten to overflow. When it first starts he wants to remember, to find out who his family and friends are. People might be looking for him, be worried about him or have mourned him.
When he realizes the truth a few hours later, Goro laughs with such manic abandon his already sore throat cracks, and blood stings his lips.
He remembers steel grey eyes and blood on his hands. He remembers detachment, his body sagging, his puppet strings cut. He lived in Tokyo, but he lived in other places too, following his mother who tried and tried but could never move past the pain his existence brought to her.
That makes Goro dig his nails into his scalp until his head throbs. Shame and anger make his whole body hurt. The memories don’t stop for physical pain.
His mother puts her hand on his forehead and whispers to him.
We’ll have a fresh start one day.
And one day he finds her sleeping, wandering away from him to her own fresh start in a place he cannot reach. She opens the door that everyone eventually walks through, and no one returns from and leaves him alone, feet cold on a tiled floor.
Goro was a screaming, biting child who made everything more complicated for everyone. He sinks his teeth into his arm, sharp canines digging into tender skin. Pain jolts him upright and he tries to stop the onslaught of memories. A part of him would like to remain this blank doll, feeling nothing, knowing nothing but then he sees another version of himself. Blank eyed. Smug. Laughing. Holding a gun to Goro’s own body, and of course, it goes off. Everything goes red and rot sets into his stomach and he drowns again, again, again.
It’s patches, piecework, each new memory unconnected from the last. Goro remembers ten apartments in six years and he remembers corporate backrooms and police stations and TV studios. Goro’s father floats across his thoughts, how he turned Goro into a weapon. How much Goro liked it.
He remembers touching minds. He remembers breaking them. He remembers the depth of cruelty of which he is capable. He remembers false smiles and hard hearts. With a steady, practiced hand he brings madness. He brings death. It feels good, all the power he wields from the shadows.
Oh, he is a monster. Goro laughs and laughs at the memory. He lets it drip into his thoughts like blood from a cut. He runs dry and can’t stop another onslaught of images and sounds from forcing their way into his thoughts, playing like a movie screened for one.
He is blinded by light, hot and perceptive, as he smiles that fake smile and lets lies drip from his lips. The adoration of the masses soothes and repels him.
A person smiles at him with flashing grey eyes and says ‘You’re my rival’ and the most intense hatred and the most blinding love twine themselves into a helix around his heart. He tries to close those eyes so they will never open again. He fails. Relief and disappointment braid around the hate and love, propelling him to more desperation.
In the cold steel depths of his father’s distortion he’s shot again and again and again. Goro becomes a splatter of blood and a distasteful amount of gore smeared against the bulkhead of a ship that never was. He feels two other beings go with him, dying, twined with his own mind.
Goro screams the feral screams of crushing sins and hopeless futures. He howls at his memories when they become too intense. He forgets and slowly relearns what it is to be human.
The memories of January are clear as a song underwater. They return, hazy, and with them come headaches. With them come the feeling of a knife permanently cutting up through the top of his spine and into his brainstem, making a mess of it all. He knows what that dead thing is, even as it pains him. He’s felt it die before, but this time it feels worse, more painful. It rattles at the back of his mind.
Detective, prince, killer, corpse. Every phrase feels empty, every one is a skin that doesn’t fit, that itches up against him. Alone. Maybe the only word that can describe him now. He is scorched and salted earth.
This is who he is now, who he was once. It sickens him, and then it settles in him.
The anger is what tells him he’s still alive. If Goro was dead he’d be cured of all his fury, all his disgust. Wouldn’t he be calm and peaceful for the first time in his fucking life, no war within. No watching his body when it frenzies, simultaneously outside of it by inches, but small and trapped within at the. If he was dead wouldn’t he be granted some kind of peace, instead of all this rage and regret.
If he was dead, his body wouldn’t hurt the way it does.
It is a long and arduous journey, coming back to himself. Goro screams and paces, searches the reflection in the door for recognition, he sleeps when he can on the porch or under the stars. He used to have the finest linens, the best mattress, he stayed in five-star hotels on more than one occasion. (he and his mother shared a mattress with broken springs on the floor) His clothes were expensive, his image perfectly planned and styled. (his clothes came from charity shops) And here he is, pulling grass and twigs from his hair, chasing nightmare after nightmare in a never-ending spiral.
Someone leaves food just beyond the hill that leads up to the house. He never sees who it is, but the food waits for him without fail. Goro picks up a few small bentos, wrapped in ice packs every day before he paces back up the bluff to eat and drink metallic lukewarm water.
All his choices led to this.
He’s pathetic, but until all the gaps in his memory return he can’t make any plans. The house’s door isn’t locked, and Goro shambles inside to escape the afternoon heat. Inside it’s almost perfectly preserved, a house as forgotten as him. A thick layer of dust coats everything. He breaks into the cabinets to steal preserved snacks and dry goods, eating like he’s never had a meal before.
It takes two weeks before everything returns. He’s gotten drunk before with colleagues, in backrooms, in seedy bars, in expensive lounges but this hangover is worse than all of them combined. His head pounds so much it might explode. (he wants it to explode, please explode) Goro sleeps on the porch for a full day and night after it’s finished and almost all the gaps are filled. When he wakes up to the sound of birds cawing, he knows he needs to figure out what the fuck he does next.
------
With what must be most of his memories returned, Goro decides to walks back into town. He needs to know if anyone said anything at all and what kind of danger he’s in. He needs to know where he is. He notes a convenience store, a bathhouse, a laundry, a sad little grocery store, a single restaurant advertising noodles and curry on his trip. That one makes Goro’s heart ache, pulling through the numb that has settled over him like a shroud. The locals all watch him approach. No one in the town square is under forty, and most of the people are well past that. They whisper. He freezes and steps back, putting out both hands as a shield. This was stupid but what other path is there? He can’t leave yet but he can’t put off moving forward.
One of the older men notices him coming first. And Goro pulls back, straightening his posture and forcing his hands to remain at his sides. He needs his mask on now more than ever, but it refuses to slot back over his face. People are watching him and he misses his old composure. The Detective Prince, the Black Mask, they would never cower. Goro manages to calm the hammering in his heart when an old man carrying a plastic bag walks up to him.
“Ah,” the man says. “I heard there was feral child haunting the bluffs. I’m Hideo, my wife Kaede talked to you two weeks ago?”
“I’m not a child,” Goro says. He pushes his age up another year, unsure of where or when he is. “I’m twenty years old.”
“Well, everyone was afraid for you,” the old man says and Goro looks away. He doesn’t need pity or concern.
“I’m afraid I was a bit uncouth the last time I was here.” Goro’s pleasant mask slips into place as the lie he rehearsed slips from his lips. “I was sailing and was blown off course. No need for alarm.”
“It took you two weeks to figure that out?”
“Yes.” Goro smiles with teeth, too close to his real smile to match the masking tones in his voice. The old man doesn’t startle, maybe because of the whole ‘running feral thing’. He needs a fucking plan. “And might I enquire, where is here?”
“Nirai-Kanai,” the man leans back, his eyes wrinkling into a smile. “Off the coast of Kagoshima Prefecture. Hours away by ferry.”
The next words out of his mouth can’t be ‘what year is it’ or ‘what month is it’ so he only nods without speaking. He wants this man to stop looking at him, stop trying to figure him out. Goro doesn’t want to be found, not yet. He’s too lost and fuzzy for a next move. Someone will find him and that will be a third death for him. Goro gets to decide when his third death comes for him.
“Huh.” Goro’s eyes widen a little too much, his lip curls a little too barbarically. That other self is dead, isn’t it. And his bones hurt too much from his own resurrection to try to bring him back to life. “Does anyone live in that house?”
“The Mori house?” The man asks, before wincing. “No, it’s an akiya, it’s abandoned. The family left after… it’s been empty for years.” He gestures at the town at large, past the little center and the houses clustered there. “Lots of abandoned houses here. But that one… no, it’s bad luck.”
“Oh?” Goro tilts his and puts his hand on his chin. “How do you mean?”
“It’s not important. No one will look for you there.” The man smiles. “People say it’s haunted. The father, he went mad, murdered his wife and children. No one goes up there.”
“Interesting,” Goro says, trying not to smile his real smile. He presses his lips together and nods. There’s a newspaper stand behind him and Goro tries to get the date. August? End of August. Nine months since the engine room, six months since Maruki. He swallows. Continues. “That suits my needs perfectly.”
While he was dead he turned nineteen. Nineteen, a foreign country whose shores he never expected to reach and now he’s on the other side.
“What?” The man stares at him and Goro sweats in the heat, before the man laughs. “I guess no one would look for anyone there. You’re either brave, thick, or a fool.”
“I’m none of those things. I just need a few days,” Goro says at last. He winces at what he says next. “Please, I was never here.”
“Be careful,” the man says, almost like he cares.
Then he presses another bag into Goro’s hand, and from the warmth and scent Goro knows it’s food. He starts to protest but the old man waves him off. The little gesture burns in Goro’s chest and he steps backwards. Everyone wants something from everyone else, and he’ll have to pay this back eventually. But he’s hungry and disoriented and the skin on his back and legs and neck are peeling off. He runs, shamefaced and angry.
------
Goro stumbles back up the hill, mouth drier than a desert and skin saltier than the dead sea. He’s parched and tired by the time he returns to the house. Six crows wait for him on the path up. Six more roost in the leaves of the cherry blossom tree at the far edge of the bluff. And two massive crows sit on the eaves, watching his every move.
The crows caw in unison and Goro flips them all off. It’s time to plan. When he goes into the house the two large crows follow him to the door. They wait on the railing, watching him patiently.
“No fucking birds in the house,” he mutters and the crows caw like they understand.
Small favors, there’s no one important to see him in this state. Goro looks in the one mirror in the house and laughs. His eyes are hollow and his hair is frizzy. He’s wearing an old t-shirt that he pulled out of a drawer, cheap and thin. No one here will recognize the fallen detective prince. He’ll need another week or two at least, maybe more, before he’s ready to go home. There’s so much planning to be done. The house is empty and what’s one more ghost, one more murderer in a place like this. The bag has food, yes, but also ointment for his burns and a spare t-shirt and a note.
‘No one has said anything.’
Goro laughs at that, but doesn’t rip it up. They really think he’s feral and in need of help. He finally takes stock of the few things that washed ashore with him. He has his phone, turned off yet miraculously intact, and 50,000 yen in his wallet, a few coins scattered across the floor. No weapons, no briefcase, no familiar clothes to hide behind. Not much to work with.
After some searching, Goro finds a red notebook and pen on a desk. He sits down, and gets to work. For now, all he has are his memories, the ones that returned so fiercely to him. He’s always had a head for details, hopefully everything that happened didn’t change that. Shido’s conspiracy might be gone, but there are always remnants waiting for revenge. And Goro was wound so tight up in it, he can’t be too careful.
Goro can’t trust his phone. The instant he turns it on he’ll be tracked. So he writes down passwords and user names, contacts that would not trace him, memories that seem important. Anything that might be useful that he can’t risk forgetting again.
After Goro finishes a heaviness settles over him. God how he longs for his gloves. The sight of his hands sickens him and he turns away.
He wants nothing of his past right now. Stalking to the edge of the cliff, Goro flings his phone into the water and waits until it plunks into the sea. Now no one can trace him. It’s so hot and humid that Goro pulls the futon out onto the bluff. He watches the stars swirl around him, wishing they could fill the emptiness that threatens to drown him.
I had a friend once, he thinks, remembering furtive glances and secret smiles, lips pressing against his own. I had something, a friend or something more, and I killed it. Even when I didn’t kill him, I killed it, snapped our friendship like it was hangnail, excised it like a rotting tooth.
Because that is who he is. It is what he does.
The cicadas and the waves lull him into the abyss. But when he dreams he dreams in red and when terror forces him awake he screams into the night and chokes on the taste of his own blood.
The next morning the phone rests beside his head, without a scratch or dirt or water stain.
------
Goro paces the cliff, gazing out at the never ending sea and sky. His next step eludes him. Tokyo waits but so do people who would see him dead, and people he refuses to face, now he is brought so low. The risk is too great for now.
In hindsight, Goro should have realized what was forming as he put himself back together. He traversed the metaverse before any of the others could even conceive of its existence. It’s the birds that draw his attention to the disturbance. One of the two larger crows swoops down from his perch on the roof and lands on Goro’s shoulder.
“Get off me,” Goro says and the crow flaps into the air, hovering at eye level.
The murder on his lawn take off, circling the house before diving back to the edge of the bluff. He’s avoided that spot since he regained himself. The memory of burning vomit lingers in his throat every time he looks at it, the hallucinations of leaves and snails and dirt. His missing gloves, distended and cracked from seawater, dropped in the grass before being blown out to sea. This is a waste of time, without a clear next step he cannot proceed. But he’s so fucking tired, the kind of weariness that sinks deep into the nucleus of a cell before poisoning his entire system.
The second large crow dives from the roof and circles him overhead. This one doesn’t land on Goro’s shoulder. He flaps in Goro’s face, bites Goro’s arm, and claws at Goro’s hair. Goro tries to fight him off, puts his hand up as a shield to cover himself, but the crow flies back into the air unscathed and smug. Then he hovers in front of Goro, managing to look disappointed and annoyed.
“What the fuck,” Goro glares at the bird, who then settles firmly on Goro’s shoulder before screaming in his ear. They’re leading him to that spot. “Fine.”
There’s a growing thing in the sea grass of the bluff that does not belong there. Goro crouches over it, but it shifts. It vanished into a sheen of oil slick reflective light. It’s the touch of the cognitive world, intimate and sure, an echo of a feeling he had at fifteen.
Goro puts his hand out, as if he can touch it, and he’s hit with cold air and the sound of voices crying out.
We need you, we need you, we need you.
The cognitive disturbance sings to him, it pulls him in so close. He’s enveloped in the sharp and biting scent of pine, the metallic tang of blood.
“No one fucking needs me.” Goro gestures to the ocean and the abandoned house and his old and filthy clothes. He traces the bullet-wound scar on his neck and the one on his chest, not touching the one on his gut, too tender and aching. “The world made that clear.”
We need you. Whatever is on the other side of that hazy, translucent door becomes more insistent. The words echo like a gunshot and sing like a choir.
“What do you want? What are you?” Goro watches the distortion, his arms crossed. It takes form and shape, translucent and shimmering, until a stone door with what must be thorn covered vines wrapping its surface.
We need you, the door asserts and Goro laughs, full of bile and rage. He’d seen his whole life in sharp relief these past two weeks, every vignette more rotten than the last, and he knows where praise and desperation get him.
It is a poisonous thing, the idea of being needed, of being special. He’s found so much trouble chasing that high, done so much damage, been manipulated so easily. But the voices beyond the disturbance whisper with such a lack of artifice that Goro longs to believe them. They might be calling him back through the door everyone passes through. Telling him his resurrection was an accident ready to be rectified.
Goro puts his head in his hands. He’s empty and that familiar feeling of hovering an inch outside his body returns. What else does he have, what future remains for him? This might be the only thing he was ever truly good at and the idea of his magic returning, of his Persona flaring to life at his command, no longer a knot of tension in the back of his skull is more than appealing. It’s power, something he sorely, deeply lacks. It’s got that illicit tang of the forbidden and the irresistible pull of a mystery.
“Fine.” Goro exhales. “But make it quick.”
Whatever lurks beyond the door laughs. Razor sharp thorns slice into his skin and paint the grass with blood. There’s a roaring in his ears. And then he is gone.
