An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Aaaand it’s finished. Really big hugs to those of you who left kudos/comments, I appreciate every single one of you more than you can even ever imagine! I hope you enjoyed this random little fic that started as nothing more than a silly, borderline crack “what-if” and evolved (or, rather, devolved) into what you see before you.
post-canon joshneku angst shenanigans; 1920 words. rated T for Take away my sadness, and Totally did not proofread. warnings: brief, mildly ableist language. | READ ON AO3
All Neku can think is, He looks beautiful, and the thought is less an organic observation born of him and more a fully-formed statement that occurs to him. Another centimeter more, and this light could be a halo...
Neku lives in a place where the dogs don’t bark.
It’s quiet but for his mind; he wastes some moments daily regretting the decision to abandon the city for the sea. The former had been loud with reminders that the world moves ever on by the racket of bike spokes, announcements, train horns, despite the nights when he had thought he could hear the planet winding down on its axis, its unraveling barely audible and easily overlooked. The latter is loud in its abject loneliness, carries itself with the grace of a dying thing still making attempts at dignity. He can hear it through the walls, knitting itself a storm. He only misses the city when he recalls that it does not miss him.
Shibuya does not miss him. It flipped him inside out and then was done, moved on to the next disaster.
He paints the sea now, cold and desolate, the way he had once painted Shibuya: breathing, alive, and devoid of soul entirely. Shiki visits, her hair long, and wearing contacts in lieu of her glasses, and she tells him to paint something beautiful for once in his life. And he tells her that beauty does not depend on the existence of a heart, that despite what of his soul they lack his works are still technically sound (they are), and she smiles as she gently tells him how cruel he can sometimes be. She says he can fool the world, himself included, but that she will always search for him between brushstrokes, and as of yet she had never found him there, he’s only a signature in the bottom righthand corner, only a name, an entity entirely separate from the work, and Neku tells her the artist is dead, and she repeats herself about cruelty before catching the last train home to Tokyo.
Beat emails him photos of the three of them—Shiki, Rhyme, and Beat’s veiny forearm—posing in various locations around Shibuya. Hachiko stands triumphant as Rhyme and Shiki form a heart with their hands. A blurry candid of Beat burning his tongue on ramen. A closeup on Rhyme’s face illuminated by the glow of the summer fireworks. Beat snapping a perfectly-timed selfie with a snowball in motion hurling towards him in the background, Shiki losing herself in a laugh as it leaves her gloved hand.
Neku wishes Beat would stop sending them.
Because every new photograph shaves precious hours off of his already borrowed lifespan. He enlarges them, enhances them, scans them meticulously for reflections that shouldn’t exist, shadows that don’t make sense, light leaks in the vague shape of a person. The smallest of signs. The most hidden of hints. Are you watching? Are you listening? Does your consciousness hang around? You told me you cared, once. Remind me.
Neku saves them all to a locked folder on an external harddrive.
In the beginning he’d been better at excuses. Perhaps the toll of resonating on a human frequency was too much to justify even a brief appearance. Perhaps his work kept him away. Perhaps next Saturday he’d abruptly exist again and they could chat, for a bit, maybe grab coffee at WildKat.
But all the development Neku had undergone once upon another lifetime had done little to shake the fundamental cynicism he still carried to this day, and over time he had once again indulged it, cultivated it, let it fester until it became a bitterness.
So bitter he lies awake at night, and no dogs do bark, and no unmuffled motorcycle engines do frighten away the specters hung like cobwebs from the rafters of his mind.
As he finally brushes his fingers against the door into a waking dream, a loud crash reels him out of it. He sits up, heart beating in time to the downpour outside, and pulls the string on his bedside lamp.
There, standing at the foot of his bed: the phantom he had never found in the photographs, here alive and slightly flushed in the cheeks, and hair slightly frizzed from the moisture seeping in through the ancient windows, and lips slightly parted with surprise, or anticipation, or with other less savory things that Neku’s mind does not immediately suggest because if it had he would have to be very cross with himself.
“You startled me, Neku,” says the ghost. “Isn’t it a little bit past your bedtime?”
“Fuck you,” is the sound Neku’s mouth makes before his brain catches up.
“Oh, he knows what he wants, doesn’t he?” the ghost teases. “But I’m not here for that.”
Neku squeezes his eyes shut and pinches himself.
Before he can open them, the ghost continues: “No, you’re not dreaming. I’m really here. But not for long—unfortunately it’s more difficult for me to keep this form the farther I am from Shibuya, so I don’t have much time...”
“Are you...?” Neku says, slowly opening his eyes. “You’re not. No. No, he wouldn’t do this to me. Not after... years of—“
“But I am,” the ghost interjects, not unkindly. He holds out an arm—as frail as Neku remembers, that pale skin papier-mâchéd over lithe bones and veins that almost seem to glow dark blue—and Neku, swallowing his reluctance along with the mob of other emotions threatening war inside his head, reaches for it and runs the pad of his thumb over the small divot in his wrist. Beneath, the ghost’s pulse hiccups in response.
Neku lets slip a shaky sigh.
So this is where his soul had gone. Yes. His chest recalls its shape. It hasn't disintegrated, hasn't gone missing, has merely chosen to hide away in another place, let itself be kept safe by another until Neku regains the facilities to care for it again himself. And had he?
“Why did you leave?” Neku asks. His voice cracks but it’s from fatigue and certainly not a side-effect of his losing battle against an oncoming flood of violent tears.
“Why did you?” the ghost says.
“You left first.” Breaking, breaking, traitorous vocal chords. “You couldn’t have asked me to stick around like some kind of hopeless idiot, just wasting every day waiting around for you to show up.”
The ghost raises an eyebrow. “You’re still waiting, though, Neku.” He gestures toward the walls of Neku’s bedroom. “The only thing that’s changed is the scenery.”
Self-assured brat, Neku thinks, and that’s more like it. Easier to antagonize the missing piece, force it to hate him, than to have it return but only halfway, mangled and scarred and never again the same.
“Shut up,” Neku tells him. “You can’t blame me for leaving when you weren’t even there.”
“I can do whatever I want. But still, I don’t blame you, Neku.” The ghost lowers himself onto the mattress; Neku brings his knees to his chest and wraps his arms around them. Less surface area for them to “accidentally” touch. Anger wants to make a home of his throat, to ravage and burn with a vitriol he’s long kept caged, but when he looks at the ghost, how the shadows fall around him, all he can think is, He looks beautiful, and the thought is less an organic observation born of him and more a fully-formed statement that occurs to him. Another centimeter more, and this light could be a halo...
“Time passes differently for me,” the ghost says, settling in atop Neku’s bed. “In the UG, I mean. Everything slows down, but it also passes me by at breakneck speed. It feels like I blinked this morning, and ten years were gone.”
“Oh,” is all Neku can bring himself to say. Difficult to understand the sentiment when he himself had experienced every minute of every month of every year in gut-wrenchingly painful detail. Every agonizing second of waiting in vain.
“I tried… to keep an eye on you, you know,” the ghost ventures. Still the same smarmy tone of voice.
“Yeah, well, you could have given me some kind of. I dunno. A sign?” No, that sounds too religious, grants him too much power over this situation. He’s already got the power, doesn’t need to be reminded, doesn’t need to let it get to his head. “Or at least given my friends a message?” If it’s this much trouble just to show up.
The ghost sighs. “Early on I passed the threshold of tardiness where it becomes too late for communication, and past that it only became even more difficult… I’m sorry. I could have said something. You’re right. But the truth is…”
“The truth… ?” Neku prompts after a beat.
“Well, if you ask me, there seems to be a direct correlation between your proximity to Shibuya and your happiness. The farther away from the city limits you travel, the happier you become. And I never could have kept up with you, Neku.”
Neku shakes his head and tugs at a strand of vibrant orange hair that’s found the wrong way to dangle in front of his eyes. “That’s just plain dumb,” he says. “If you feel like you can’t keep up, you should just ask the other person to slow down.” God, he was turning into Shiki. “You never even asked. Besides, you think you couldn’t keep up? Get real. Look at what you do for a living.”
“Neku, Neku,” the ghost giggles sadly. “Even now, you never fail to surprise me.”
“And you’re predictable as ever,” Neku snorts.
A wisp of smoke begins to unfold from the places Neku had touched brief moments ago, and the ghost sighs again.
“Oh, what do you know? That must be my cue to go,” he says. “Seems I’m at my limit. Like I said, I can’t maintain this form here too long.”
Then stay until you dissolve, Neku wants to say. At least that’ll be an ending for the both of us. Some sense of finality. No more half-open doors, just a headstone where lies whatever it was we ever shared.
But instead, he just frowns and crosses his arms. “So what, you show up uninvited after ten years and then fuck back off to Shibuya? Was that some half-assed attempt to give me closure?” Or are you just reopening the wound for the hell of it? Well, Joshua? Which one is it?
The ghost shoots him a dismayed look. “You know I can still hear your thoughts, right? It’s important to me that you know that.”
Begone, thot, Neku thinks as hard as he can. The ghost still covers his mouth when he laughs, and Neku realizes then that the quirk has never been out of politeness, just yet another little addition to that character he plays, the one he never entirely dropped, not even when they were both at their most vulnerable.
“So turn off the light,” the ghost tells him. “Halos never suited me much, anyhow.”
Neku complies, though he furrows his brow at the fact that he’s doing it willingly, not even an ounce of pretend protest. No, he doesn’t have it in him anymore.
“Yeah, but you’ll be back soon, right?” Neku asks, with more hope than he’d really wanted to convey. “You don’t get to just drop by whenever it’s convenient for you.”
But no reply ever comes, and the question hangs in the air like thread unwound.
In the morning Neku wakes and rubs his bloodshot eyes. On the sheets beside him he finds a single silver hair: the last trace of a love that had blossomed, wilted, and then was gone.
// Years after the mysterious disappearance of Akechi Goro, Akira still believes that someone knows what really happened to him, that traces of his existence must still be present, that he has simply gone missing. Desperate for answers, for something to cling on to, he creates a website dedicated to discovering the truth.
// Just when he thinks the surreptitious crossing of their paths might have been a one-time fluke, Ren's end-of-summer party grinds to a halt when Akechi Goro shows up to crash it. | (conclusion to closed casket and wake.)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Khun Aguero Agnis does not pine.
He only sometimes finds himself gazing at Bam in a way that might be described by onlookers as “wistful”. He only sometimes sighs “dreamily”. And he would never ruin a perfect friendship with the strain of unrequited feelings. So he keeps them to himself.
But sometimes his heart grows heavy. And on The Hidden Floor, when Bam's sworn enemy manifests as none other than himself as Slayer Candidate Jue Viole Grace, Khun discovers that the data replica comes fully intact with Bam's memories... and his feelings. With no risk of his own affections being found out by the real thing, and with the replica's erasure imminent, Khun can't help but use this knowledge to his advantage...
First chapter of a little Tower of God fic I’ve been working on! :3c The next one should be up.... soon-ish...
wake | { shuake week day three: neglect | rejection | death. }
// Two (or more) years post-canon, Amamiya Ren finally moves past the first stage of grief. And that, of course, is when he catches a glimpse of none other than the deceased himself standing outside the door to Leblanc fifteen minutes after closing. (companion piece to closed casket.) | Rated G. | READ ON AO3.
At some point he had stopped checking his phone altogether.
It was hard. Took almost a year of actively trying, of saying it aloud to himself (he’s dead, Ren; you can’t speak him back into existence so speak him out of it, anchor yourself by the finality of his absence), of even Haru (of all people) growing impatient with his failure to reconcile his stubborn hope with the truth.
She said to him over coffee one rainy afternoon: “What are you more afraid of, Ren? Accepting that he’s gone, or accepting the fact that you couldn’t save him? Because there’s a very important distinction between the two.”
And Ren couldn’t look her in the eyes for the rest of their time together, found excuses to stare intently at the carpet or attempt to divine the future from the leftover coffee grounds collected in the vague shape of a skull at the bottom of his mug.
His failure to rescue Akechi Goro in those final crucial moments called into question not only his qualifications as the then-leader of the Phantom Thieves, but also his value as a human being. Who is Ren allowed to be now if at the time he failed to protect the one person who most desperately needed the Thieves’ help? Is he entitled to mourning if he is also responsible for that which he mourns? What is permitted to fill the space Akechi left behind?
The look on Haru’s face at his silence said it all.
What “it” was, Ren wasn’t, still isn’t entirely sure. Couldn’t put words to it. Only knows implicitly that his soul understands its shape, and that is enough. And after that conversation, after Haru asked him, spoke aloud the question with which he had subconsciously grappled for months, years—after that, he finally severed from his mind the last lingering hope.
And he stopped checking his phone.
And then, as though whatever powers-that-no-longer-be suddenly decided on a whim to wind up their ironic clockwork universe, Akechi returns to him. Just shows up at Leblanc like it’s nothing, looking a bit worse for wear and decades older but it’s him, all right; he’s still wearing the gloves…
And he even stays for coffee.
And every time Ren looks at him he thinks, Did no one ever teach you that you don’t have to die for something to make it love you? Didn’t you know there’s no romance in a death wish?
Because there was a time—
Back then—
Centuries ago, perhaps—
Eons—
When Ren could have said he—
But he shakes his head, and if one can somehow pour coffee angrily, well, he does just that.
Because the curtains are drawn; the chairs are stacked atop the tables. The shop is closed for the night. Has been closed for awhile now. He has no room left in his heart for people who linger after the lights go down.
// two (or more) years post-canon, Akechi Goro suffers a brief lapse of judgment that leads him to temporarily wander out of his new life and back into Ren’s, an unwelcome apparition from a life Ren left behind. | READ ON AO3.
Against the foggy windowpanes of Leblanc’s familiar front door the rain mimics Akechi and demands to be let in. The first rule Akechi’s ever broken was the one implied by the ancient Closed sign hanging from the peg. Don’t knock, it warns. Don’t be that person. And now, watching Ren manage to remove any trace of affection from the way he moves as he brews Akechi a cup of coffee calls into doubt whether this small act of rebellion was worth it, but seeing as he’s inside (the look on Ren’s face through the window, smeared like watercolor and pale, as though he’d seen a ghost—well, hadn’t he?), and as warm as a drowned rat could hope to be, it must be. Might be.
“How’s post-obituary life treating you?” Ren asks. It’s an accusation thinly veiled behind a joke. He pulls the apron tighter and his lips thinner and Akechi’s stomach tenses in preparation for violence even though there is no threat of violence and then his sides ache like the aftermath of an embrace, like the absence of hands where hands once were.
“Which would you prefer: good news, or the truth?” Akechi responds. The beginnings of a smile twitch at the corners of his lips. Finger by finger he peels off sopping gloves and lays them out to dry on the stool next to him. Ren glances over his shoulder and he’s got a stranger’s eyes, the kind of expression that says if his friends were here he’d be whispering something to them.
“That bad, huh.” Something sizzles and Ren curses. It’s been two years, more, but he still tugs at that single lock of hair that never seems to match the length of the rest, little outlier always sticking out. It eases something in Akechi that hasn’t been eased since long before they watched each other disappear behind opposite sides of an impassable wall in a cognitive world. “I went to your funeral, you know. Closed casket. Sojiro helped cater. I made sweets for the reception.”
Akechi’s shock has never been an act. Even when his authentic self had been buried under layers of sediment and ever-shifting masks, his bruised heart of hearts had always had this annoying habit of crawling up his throat whenever Ren was around. Like it resonated in proximity to his sworn enemy. Like they’d been carved from the same star—
He shakes the sentiment from his head. Now is not the time to wax poetic on years of pining, of loss. Now is the time to apologize.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I—I didn’t realize…”
Ren’s knuckles are visibly white around the handle of the coffee pot.
“You never do, do you,” he tells Akechi. He’s turned around now, not quite able to meet Akechi’s eyes. “I mourned you. We all”—he pauses, shakes his head—“well, a lot of us did. I still do. And part of me still doubted—always did—but do you know what they call that? The first stage of grief. The one I never moved past.”
Akechi searches for somewhere to rest his gaze, somewhere not facing Ren’s brokenness. The cracks he caused. Had he had a choice? No, he couldn’t have. If someone—if Ren tells him, if he even implies that there might have been another path, a path where his betrayal of the Thieves was not a forgone conclusion, where his brief stint among them had saved him instead of serving as yet another reminder of his own shortcomings, that knowledge would destroy him. He could not have changed. Rebirth requires death.
He reassures himself of this, casts the mounting doubt aside (as he always has).
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I suppose I don’t really know why I’m here, other than the fact that in all honesty I expected you to be miles away from Tokyo. I only stopped by for old times’ sake, to see if I could find some small clue as to what you’ve been up to... part of me was sure this place would have collapsed in your absence.”
“It didn’t,” is Ren’s curt reply. He pushes a steaming mug in the vague direction of his only patron before brushing a hand back through his hair (is it shaking?). “Finish it quickly. We’re closed.”
Akechi smiles sadly and holds up his hand to refuse the cup. “No, I…I’m sorry for bothering you. I should leave before I miss the train. Forgive me for taking advantage of your hospitality. I’ll make it up to you someday.”
Ren swallows. His bulky frames—the same ones he wore in high school, but far worse for wear—do little to hide the sheen of the tears that threaten his eyes. He tilts his chin toward the ceiling and wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve.
“You really don’t have to do that. I think you should probably just go.”
Akechi looks down at his bare palms, then balls them into fists. Even after abandoning his favorite tan-coat-and-black-slack combination, after abandoning all aspects of the life he thought defined him, the gloves remained. He’d thought they always would.
