Goro Akecchi:

This writing sample is dated: 02/06/22.

Goro’s sprawled across the bar top, his head cushioned on his arms. He gesticulates with one hand, his fingers curled around a brown bottle of cheap booze. It spills down the side of the glass bottle, pouring over his fingers and flecking against the countertop, his clothes. “Can you believe -hic!- that the p-public really thinks the Phantom Thieves are smart enough to have had such an insidious plan?” he’s saying, thrusting the lip of the bottle into the air like it’s a sword.

“No,” Goro says, and the words are as slurred as his body is slumped forward. He looks like he’s attempted a half-assed disguise, but the black wig he’s wearing isn’t properly fastened and messy tangles of brown hair seep out from beneath it. They frame his face, make him look more striking and suspicious than he would have been without it. “The Phantom Thieves, murderers? The ideology doesn’t fit.” He smears his face against the bar-top and the wig becomes more fully undone, more hair spills out from beneath it.

“What if I were to tell you that I’ve discovered how they change hearts?” Goro continues, his whole body jolting around another hiccup. The people around him glance over their shoulders at him with a vague kind of judgmental interest. One of them looks like he might say something, but Goro talks over him before he gets a chance to try. “There’s a whole other w-world out there, one in our minds with more destr–destructer — bad power than imaginable.”

Goro looks as terrible as he sounds. The make-up caked to his face has been liberated to his sleeve, spread there by the sweat pouring into his eyes from the false heat of the alcohol. There are bags under his eyes like bruises, and his angular cheekbones make him look gaunt from disordered eating. His eyes are bloodshot from either the alcohol or crying, perhaps both, judging by the puffiness of his eyelids.

The bottle slips from Goro’s fingers mid-gesture and shatters against the tiles. He stares blankly at it for the handful of seconds it takes for him to register what happened. “Ah,” he says when it does, “unfortunate. Bartender, a shot of whiskey.” He whirls back around in his seat and taps the bar-top to get Lala’s attention.

She presses her lips together and gives Goro a disapproving look. “I think you’ve had enough, Mr. Fujiwara,” she says, walking around the side of the bar to collect a broom and dustpan. “I’m cutting you off.”

“Nonsense,” Goro protests, twisting at the hips to watch her sweep up the broken glass. “I was j-just getting to the interesting part. The Metaverse — ”

“Honey, I think I’ve indulged you long enough. You should take your sorry ass home before you ruin that public image of yours, Mr. Detective.”

Goro’s mouth falls open in a small “o” of surprise when Lala hints that she knows who he is. He sits there, only faintly aware of the goings-on around him, and struggles to process why it’s bad that she knows who he is. There’s something about it that’s making his skin crawl, but he can’t put his finger on what.

Licking his lips, Goro leans back into the bar-top and startles when something slams into it from behind him. He whirls around so quickly that he nearly spins off the top of his seat. Goro grabs for the bar-top to steady himself as a familiar deep voice coldly asks him if he’d like a cab. Why does the sound of that voice make him feel like he’s going to sick-up? Goro’s eyes jerk from the hands he’d been staring at to the face it belongs to.

The whole world shifts a little to the left.

“Akira Kurusu,” Goro slurs at the same moment he thinks it. “How are you alive?” The hair on his arms stand up and suddenly Goro’s heart is in his throat, a boulder in his gullet. Goro’s already blurry vision worsens and the heat sliding wetly down his cheeks should be unacceptable, but his brain has already stuttered and paused over the sight before him. More tears slide down his cheeks and Goro wipes away a tear track with his fingers, stares blankly at the wetness there like he doesn’t understand his own response.

“I killed you,” Goro says, uncaring of the people potentially listening in on their conversation. “You were dead.” His voice, which had been so lively just minutes earlier, is completely monotone, as stoic as Goro likes to pretend he is inside. There’s a moment of silence before he gesticulates with his fingers, miming an explosion or a gunshot blasting through Akira’s head.

The niggling at the back of Goro’s mind makes itself unignorable, and it occurs to him that Lala was right to cut him off. He must have imbibed too much alcohol if he’s hallucinating that the dead has come back to life. “Yes,” he says suddenly, startling even himself with the loudness of it. He looks around through Akira for Lala, who’s staring between them like she can’t figure them out. “I need a -hic!- cab. I need a cab to get home.”

Header Art by VerinsDemise. | Background Art by Tenshiikisu.

© 2022-2024 Cinderlite. All rights reserved.