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Akira
“I first saw him at a TV station while I was being interviewed about the Phantom Thieves. He was wearing his summer uniform. He appeared like an angel. Out of this filthy mess, he is alone. They... cannot... touch... him.”
—
Goro comes home to an empty apartment. He’s been coming home to an empty apartment for a few years now. Maybe a part of him was foolish to wish for more.
Life after the Phantom Thieves—life after Joker—is a never-ending cycle of loneliness and regret, loneliness and regret, loneliness and regret. Goro knows loneliness well by now—he has for some time—but regret? Not so much.
Regret comes to him in waves. It pairs itself with guilt, and the two dance around him at night in cheerful circles, chanting in his ear about things he shouldn’t care about anymore, but just can’t seem to forget. It’s been three months since Akira left Tokyo. He should have moved on by now.
Instead, Goro finds himself alone in his dreary apartment, desperately searching for a distraction. Even an hour's worth of peace is enough for him, at this point.
So he fishes for his remote and looks for a movie.
He’s been watching movies a lot recently. More than he ever has, he thinks. Whereas before, cinema was just another topic of discussion he could use to please or impress adults, now he finds himself genuinely enjoying the things he watches. He finds himself seeking out specific directors, picking favorite actors, putting more thought into the witty one liners that make up his letterboxd reviews.
(He wonders, absently, what Akira’s favorite movie would have been. He thinks back to those movie nights and sighs. Movie after movie, and none had been his. And despite the many hours Goro may spend on it, despite the countless movies he’s watched—ranging from popular to obscure, from old to new, from acclaimed to laughed at—he can never seem to figure out what it would have been.
The best and worst thing about Akira, he thinks bitterly, is that he’s unpredictable.)
Heat offers itself to him at the perfect time. Three uninterrupted hours of pure distraction. Flashy heists, loud guns, and Robert De Niro in his prime. He’d been saving it for a moment of need. That moment is now, it seems.
He sits back and readies himself for three hours of mindless bliss.
Goro is about to love this movie.
—
Goro hates this movie.
Goro is always reluctant to admit that he dislikes a movie, because he likes movies. He likes them a lot. One might even say that he loves them. He isn’t a critic by any means, and even when he can admit that a movie is objectively bad, he’s never felt personally attacked by one. Sure, he might let out mocking, vaguely repulsed scoffs every now and then, but he’ll never really scream at a movie, never really seethe.
But this time?
This time, he can confidently say he despises it. He despises it on a personal level. He despises it, and he despises Neil McCauley’s cool, collected, infuriatingly attractive way of commanding his band of thieves around. He despises Vincent Hanna’s sheer fascination towards him that's just teetering on the edge of obsession. He despises the heated chase, the strange, unlikely rivalry. He despises the cat-and-mouse dynamic and the quick glances through rear-view mirrors.
An hour and a half into the movie, and he hates it with all his being.
He’d come looking for a distraction, not a fucking reminder. The universe has a cruel sense of humor. Goro has been the victim of it one too many times.
His eye twitches. He almost wants to rip his hair out.
On the screen, Neil McCauley is smooth and perfect. Untouchable. Unmoveable. Unbreakable. Commanding. Confident. Smug. Silent, because he doesn’t have to say anything for things to happen—they just do, somehow, because the world is his. He’s also incredibly annoying. He’s cool under pressure during every heist scene. He never cracks, never falters. He throws teasing smirks and has a weird, effortless charm about him that feels like a punch in the gut for Goro specifically, but acts as a magnet for everyone else. His crew respects him. They move when he moves, and Neil is always on the move.
There’s a quiet confidence about Neil McCauley that Goro wishes he was unfamiliar with.
He throws the remote across the room and muffles his scream with a pillow.
(And yet, hate it as he might, he can’t seem to look away. Because he watches Neil command his crew with that cool conviction and suddenly, he’s watching Joker again. And he’s Crow, and they’re in that lavish casino that, for a moment, for a day or two, seemed like the world to him, seemed like their world to conquer, and there’s something in Joker’s teasing smirk, something in that lilt, in that gentle curve of his lip, in the squint of his eyes under that mask, that drives him crazy. And he’s watching Joker again, and he’s smiling in spite of himself. And he’s watching Joker again, and somehow, everything makes sense. And somehow, nothing makes sense at all.
Akechi feels like he’s watching Joker again. So he clings on to that manufactured thrill and hopes it never ends.)
The diner scene almost makes him throw up. He watches the two main characters—Vincent and Neil, cop and criminal, cat and mouse—converse casually, nonchalantly, like they’ve known each other their whole lives. Two sides of the same coin. Two men who should be different in all respects—should be at each other’s throats, really—talk about their lives like they’re good friends catching up. They give each other knowing smirks and Goro wants to die. They’re the only two people in the world who could ever truly understand one another. It sickens him.
Vincent Hanna is obsessed with Neil Mccauley. Their lives orbit each other with an intimacy they can’t afford to name, but it’s there, and it’s poignant, and it’s the only thing in the world when it’s just the two of them. They aren’t reduced to mere enemies, nor are they allies, either. Instead, they’re something else. Goro picks at the skin on his left hand. He feels the absence of his glove.
“I don’t know how to do anything else.”
“Neither do I.”
“I don’t much want to either.”
“Neither do I.”
Goro curls his lip in disgust.
(“Why did you choose to become a Phantom Thief, Joker?”
Akira had stilled at that. The safe room was practically empty, he remembers, or at least it felt that way. The rest of the thieves were outside, waiting for them to finish preparing. Joker’s eyes glimmered behind his white mask.
“Because it was right,” he shrugged.
He’d tutted, shaking his head with an amused smirk. Joker had watched him.
“That’s no answer,” he’d murmured, “That sounds more like an excuse.”
Joker ignored him. “I wanted to act. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself otherwise.”
Akechi smiled. A thin, polite smile, barely visible under the beak of his mask. “So you saw injustice and figured,” he makes a grabbing motion with his hand, “that you’ll be the one to fix it?”
“I thought someone should.”
“And that someone was you.”
He shrugged. “I guess so.”
A pause. Slowly, Akechi nodded at him. “And you don’t expect anything in return?”
“Why would I?”
“Most would.”
Another pause. Joker smirked at him this time. He gave his mask two small taps with the tip of his index before pointing it towards him with a cocky finger gun.
“I’m not ‘most’.”
Akechi scoffed at that.
Joker laughed. “You know,” he’d started again, “All you are, is what you’re going after.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”)
He throws a pillow across the room and screams. Openly. Without restraint.
He hates how much Akira dismantled his world view. He hates it to his core. He hates how he can watch a movie about the most far-fetched situation, about the most complicated, layered, multi-faceted relationship—no, rivalry—and somehow relate. And above all, he hates how he’d thrown him that stupid, stupid glove, and the fact that he knows that Akira kept it. One day, Akira will find him and ramble on and on about rivalry and promises and some other bullshit. And he’ll pull that glove out, because Goro had been stupid—or maybe dramatic—enough to throw it at him.
He stares at his phone. He still has his number saved, he thinks. He’s been ignoring his calls since February.
He throws his phone across the room, too.
—
That night, between regrets, Goro privately thinks to himself that he’s found it. Akira’s movie.
He goes to sleep with a mix of satisfaction and irritation and sleeps better than he has in months. He despises the power Kurusu Akira has over him.
—
RECENT REVIEWS
godslonely.man
½
I hated it. Great movie.
Akira (again)
“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.”
—
Akira comes home to an empty house. He always does, these days. Maybe a part of him was foolish to have gotten so used to Leblanc.
Life after the Phantom Thieves—after Akechi—is a never-ending cycle of loneliness and regret, loneliness and regret, loneliness and regret. Akira is no stranger to regret—he’s known it well ever since that night in Shido’s palace—but loneliness? It’s been a while.
Loneliness ambushes him when he least expects it. Unlike most, it hasn’t really followed him his whole life. It feels like a new, annoying acquaintance—desperate to get to know him better, and he, desperate to get it to leave him alone. Well, no. He doesn’t want to be alone.
Inaba feels even drearier than it was when he left it. Every time he goes outside he’s reminded of his friends—or the lack thereof. He’d thought that things would have changed, but when he looks at the old shopping center, glances at that glaring department store, drags his feet across the riverbank, he feels as though he’s right back where he always was, as if he never went away. Except this time, there’s that strange emptiness. Like something’s missing that had never even been there, not really.
So he spends nights at home cooped up in his room.
And in between moments of loneliness, he calls Ryuji. They talk about school. Ryuji hangs up—he has to go train. He calls Ann. Ann calls Makoto. Makoto calls Haru. He calls Makoto, Haru, and Ann at the same time. They talk about each other. All three hang up—they have a hangout scheduled. He calls Futaba. They talk about everything. He hangs up this time—their call stretched on for way too long, and she should really get some sleep. He can never call Yusuke—his phone’s never working. He calls Sumire. They talk about him. Sumire hangs up—she has to go train. He stares at Akechi’s contact number. He doesn’t call.
And in between the countless phone calls, there’s loneliness.
It’s been three months since he left Tokyo, and Akira desperately wants to go back home.
—
He manages to schedule a quick, week-long trip to Tokyo. He tells his parents that a close friend's birthday is coming up, and that he’ll be acting as his surprise. The first part is technically true. Akechi’s birthday is on the second, if he recalls correctly. Not like he’ll be able to celebrate it—publicly at least—but nonetheless, it’s good to know. And hey, maybe he will act as his surprise.
His parents send him off like they did the last time. They don’t wave a tearful white handkerchief at the train station, nor do they do much of anything, really. They bid him goodbye that morning over a silent, tense breakfast. He nods in response.
He arrives in Tokyo about 4 hours too early. Sojiro’s arranged meeting time was 4pm—before then, he’d explained, he would be out running errands for the shop—currently, it’s 12 in the afternoon. Thank god Akira knows how to get around. He walks around Shibuya for a few minutes; he revisits the packed stores, the busy sidewalks, stands in the middle of the scramble crossing and lets his eyes ache from staring at the billboards for too long. Somehow, he ends up wandering into a movie theater.
So he decides to catch a movie. Something that starts early and drags on for three hours. Can’t hurt, right? He sends Sojiro a quick text letting him know where he’ll be and is met with a curt thumbs up emoji.
(Suddenly, as he’s looking at poster after poster, he remembers those movie nights. Maybe they should bring them back, if only for the week he’s here. He huffs.)
Eventually, he settles for something out of the cinema’s cult selection. The poster is a dark shade of blue, and two actors he can vaguely recognize—especially the guy on the right with the sunglasses, he thinks, who he’s sure he’s seen before but isn’t quite sure from where—don suits and serious expressions. The actor in the center struggles to hold a large machine gun. Several other silhouettes scatter beneath them. It looks like a simple, flashy heist movie. He’s sure that he’ll enjoy it well enough. Or at least find it entertaining.
He buys one ticket for himself. The cinema is practically empty, he notices, when he takes a look at the seating map. Practically empty, save for one other seat. Awkward.
He buys himself a small bucket of popcorn. He contemplates buying a shake, but decides against it last minute. He settles for a bottle of water instead. The girl at the counter hands them to him with a slight smile. He reciprocates it.
The room is at the far end of the hallway. He walks through lines of families anxiously clutching tickets to see the newest blockbuster, slithers through stampedes of teenagers laughing about the shitty horror film they’d just watched, hangs his head low when he passes by happy sets of couples who just came out of a romcom they’d barely paid any attention to.
By the time he’s reached the cinema, he’s become familiar with the padding of his lonely feet against the red velvet carpet. He opens the door to the room with a grunt. It’s dark inside. He’s too early.
He squints and tries to find his seat number in the dark. Sure, he could technically just sit wherever, but he’d feel bad for the other guy in the off chance that he’d just so happen to take his seat, so. Seat number G6 it is.
Akira has always felt comforted by the silence of an empty movie theater. The ringing in his ears as he stares at that large, blank screen. The quiet anticipation in the beating of his heart. The empty seats, stretching on endlessly, a shadowy sea of red and black.
He wonders if the other person enjoys them as much as he does.
—
For his birthday, Goro buys himself one ticket to rewatch Heat at the nicest movie theater in all of Shibuya. He wants to be completely objective this time. Now that he knows what he’s going into, he’ll tune out what he needs to tune out, close his eyes like a child watching a kiss scene, and watch it like a regular person. He glances at the seating map. Only one other person will be watching with him. It’s better than no one at all, he thinks, because at least something’s holding him back from screaming his lungs out, this time. He can finally be normal about this movie. He can finally be normal.
(And besides, it’s a good movie. At least, from what he remembers.)
By the time he gets to the cinema and pushes the doors open with a small huff, he finds that the movie is already starting. The opening credits fade in identical blue lettering. Robert De Niro. Al Pacino. In the faint blue glow of the movie screen, he squints as he reads the assortment of numbers and letters on his ticket. E8.
—
A faint silhouette shuffles through the sea of seats. Medium length hair. A tired slouch. A pair of plump lips jutting out under a pointed nose.
Akira thinks he might recognize it.
(Tokyo is too big for that. A poorly-timed coincidence, maybe.)
He holds his breath. The person blocks the title screen, an ever present dark form. Finally, they sit down. Heat.
—
The movie makes him sad in a calm sort of way. He thinks he might love it.
Neil talks about the life he chose because he couldn’t afford to pretend to be someone else. Vincent doesn’t try to stop him, doesn’t try to ‘save’ him. Instead, he nods along, looks at him with a small smile, and understands him. They’re so similar that Akira struggles to make out who would be who—between him and Akechi, that is—and he scratches his head with a frustrated whine.
Akira’s thoughts drift, uninvited. Akechi across cafe tables. Akechi asking questions he already knew the answer to. Akechi smiling that knowing smile, like he knew how everything would end and he wouldn’t do anything to change it. Not even when he knew that Akira would give the world for him.
Neither of them asks the other to change. Instead, they curl around each other like matching smoke trails and watch the other fade away. Realistically, he never could have saved Akechi, he knows. But, a small part of him still believes that if he’d been given enough time, then maybe, just maybe—
The credits roll.
The person in front of him stands and Akira waits, watching them.
—
Round two goes better than the first one, that much he’ll have to admit.
Goro exits the cinema with a self-satisfied smirk and a weird sense of longing. He feels, briefly, almost as though he should stay. Like something is waiting for him in that dark room, watching his every move and waiting, waiting for him to turn around. He doesn’t. The credits roll and the screen fades to black.
He steps outside and lights a cigarette, giving a brief nod to the girl at the snack bar counter. She nods back. The cigarette smoke twists in front of him, unusually visible against the evening sky.
He hears someone’s faint footsteps trail behind him. They stop.
Goro doesn’t know who they are. Nonetheless, he wants to pretend. He offers them a cigarette and the stranger becomes him. Like Orpheus, Goro does not turn around, afraid it might break the illusion.
With a sad smile, he asks, “What did you think of the movie?”
—
Akira stops just behind him. He stares at his back and tries not to choke with tears. “They understood each other too well,” he shrugs, praying that he wouldn’t notice his trembling voice. Akechi stills, ever so slightly. The cigarette between his fingers glows. For a moment, Akira thinks that he might finally turn around and look at him. There’s a slight jerk, a slight twitch, and it fills him with hope. Look at me, he wants to say. He wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Look at me.
Instead, Akechi’s shoulders seem to drop. “That was the problem, wasn’t it?”
He takes a long drag out of his cigarette. Akira watches the smoke thin out.
He swallows. “Yeah. I guess so.”
—
Goro smiles to himself. He stares at the ground. “What a shame,” he says, “They would have made a great team, had they worked together. Or maybe it’s the opposite,” he starts, quietly, “And there isn’t a single universe out there where they did.”
A silence. The kind that doesn’t need to be filled. Akira seems to shift behind him. He hears the faint rustle of clothing, the muffled tap of a shoe. The movie echoes between them, drifting among countless memories and words left unsaid. Goro flicks ash onto the pavement with a small hum.
“I guess you were right,” he shrugs, “All I am, is what I’m going after. Did you steal that line from the movie, or was our fate somehow tragically written in the screenplay?” he spits, sarcastic.
“The second option.”
Goro scoffs. He feels something dangerously close to need. He feels almost like he wants the moment to last forever. Almost. So, instead of saying anything, he takes another long drag out of his cigarette before crushing it under his heel, almost irritated that it lasted so long.
He hears Akira step closer. He’s practically breathing down his neck now. Still, Goro does not look. He doesn’t think he can afford to. Akira’s voice is low when he speaks. “What do you say I treat you to a cup of coffee?” he suggests. Goro can hear his smile—whether it’s hopeful or teasing, he isn’t sure—and he hates him for it. He hates him for a lot of things. He hates him for this, too.
—
Akechi barks out a dry, humorless laugh. Like he’d said something ridiculous—maybe he had. Akira’s heart aches.
“You really are unfair, Akira.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“You always do this,” continues Akechi, “You act like everything is some coincidence, like—”
“I didn’t plan it.”
“That’s even worse.”
A car passes by, the roar of its engine deafening. Neither of them moves.
“I didn’t want you to leave without knowing I was in there,” he mumbles, as if to justify himself, “That’s why I followed you. I couldn’t just…”
Akechi laughs again, bitter. Akira thinks he can hear his mocking grin. “You’re selfish,” he reminds. Akira nods, even though he can’t see him. A street lamp flickers to life.
“I know.”
Akira hangs his head low. He purses his lips. Akechi looks to the side.
“I hate you,” he seems to mumble, before abruptly whipping around, looking Akira dead in the eye. Their foreheads are practically touching. Akira blinks away tears.
Akechi looks downward. His eyes flit towards Akira’s lips. They look into his eyes again. Akira wants to grab him and never let go. Instead, he watches.
—
Goro huffs a breath through his nose. “God…” he whispers, as if in disbelief. Akira stares at him like he hung the stars, and Goro wants to punch him. He wants to see him die one more time and hate himself for it. There’s that infuriating light in his eyes, brimming with tears, and Goro hates it and hates, and hates it and thinks to himself, it had to be you.
And then, suddenly, Akira is leaning in.
The kiss is clumsy and entirely too brief. Goro feels the press of Akira’s lips against his, warm and welcoming, warm and tender, warm like Akira’s arms and his smile and his eyes and the feeling Goro gets when he looks at him, and he sighs.
Goro is the one to pull away. He stays close. “You should go.”
—
Akira nods, even though he doesn’t want to. “I should.”
—
He takes a step back. Akira looks like he wants to follow him.
—
Akira smiles. “Take care.”
—
He hesitates.
And then, “You too.”
—
YOUR REVIEW
heymrjoker
★★★★★
“For me, the sun rises and sets with her, man.”
RECENT REVIEWS
godslonely.man
★★★★★↻
“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you aren’t willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat coming around the corner.”