Chapter Text
Juvenile hall was easier than this.
Juvenile hall was coasting on open air.
Here, the Phantom Thieves fill up his space. They come, in twos and threes, acting out the role of partnership. Behaving as if they have a bond.
Goro weighs out their baggage, counts out their change, and faces them with the indifference of a stranger.
They try to smile back and their smiles falter.
He never asked for this.
It was Sae who brought it up first.
"You asked me to stay quiet about your early release, so I did," she tells him over one of their little lunches. She has a folio in her hand that she's just closed, papers pressed like fresh linens, not a wrinkle in sight. A hero on lunch break off to save the victims of the state's misdirected and perverted justice.
"And you've been quite accommodating," he says pleasantly before he tears a bite out of a sandwich that tastes like cardboard. (What doesn't? What has taste? He stopped cataloging the sensation of taste long ago. It certainly made food in juvenile hall that much easier to swallow.)
"I gave you your space," she agrees, and he can see the line she draws in the air as if with a knife, "but I think it's been enough. They're asking about you. They deserve to know, and I think you need it."
He brings the sandwich to his mouth and digs his teeth into it, tears out a vicious chunk; the lettuce and ham weep at the violence. Goro chews, and swallows, and exhales with force when he's done.
"It's your prerogative," he tells her, because he has no choice in this situation. He never had any choice, ever.
She looks at him with something like pity, something that makes his ire rise. Which is ironic, because she toes the line anyway. She keeps her first word.
"Have you looked over the list of potential employers I gave you?" she asks, and Goro breathes out at the change in topic. "I know part-time work isn't particularly glamorous or appealing, but your parole relies on certain conditions, and the trial funds can't support you forever."
"I've been looking over it," he tells her. "I'll give you an answer by Sunday."
They spend the rest of lunch in silence.
Getting out of juvenile hall turned out to be easy, once you knew the rules.
Rule number one: be invisible. That's fine--Goro learned long ago how to make sure no one noticed him. When the older children looked for someone to bully or to blame, they never saw him. When the adults looked for a child to castigate, he was the fly on the wall.
Rule number two: be the perfect victim. If you're caught, be the one with the tragic backstory; be the one they can't hurt without recrimination. Armor yourself in your own suffering and use it to make sure when they hurt someone, whoever it is, it's not you.
Rule number three: when they come for you--because they will eventually, you still belong to the system--you find someone weaker and more pitiable, after all is said and done, to take your place.
There are other boys in juvenile hall for petty crimes--larceny, "arson" that's just burning newspaper in back alleys, self-defense dressed up as aggravated assault.
There are other boys who deserve to be there and other boys who don't.
Goro knows how to out-survive them all. He has a bail bond, and a defense lawyer, and a so-called resource network.
And if all of that fails and the system claims him for life, that's the funniest joke of all, isn't it?
His interview is perfunctory and a matter of formality; Sae knows the owner, Sae vouched for him, and the owner is sympathetic.
Sympathetic or pitying. The former is always preferable, but Goro doesn't care either way.
He wears the only slacks he owns now, paired with a button-down shirt with a plain black tie. A hollow echo of the costume he used to armor himself in when he was the celebrated detective prince.
The proprietress is a hunched-over elderly woman well past the recommended age of retirement. She smiles at him with her whole face when he walks in, which is both ugly and unnecessary. This whole performance is a farce; she already made her decision to pardon the transgressor when Sae first called her.
He bows and says, in his most blandly polite voice, "Thank you for your offer."
"Goro-chan, right?" she says. Goro's stomach roils at the overly-familiar diminutive address. "Sae-chan's father helped my husband and I out when our son died, so when she called, I was happy to help. She says you're a smart boy."
He straightens his back, fixes his collar, straightens his tie. Wishes he was wearing gloves. He hasn't worn them in three years, and it constantly makes him feel too exposed.
"I'm fairly well-read," he replies, because he doesn't know what else to say.
She beams at him through her wrinkles. "That's good to hear. Managing this place by myself has been hard. I thought about closing the store after my husband died, but, well...this was our dream. It will be good to have someone young to help."
She leans on her cane and shuffles around the counter to take his hand and place a worn key in it. Her fingers brush his palm softly; he can't help it, he flinches away. She blinks up at him owlishly, then smiles.
"Sometimes it's just like that," she says, reaching up as if to pat his cheek before pulling her hand away without touching him.
Working at the store is--fine. It's fine. It's a thing to do, mindless chores and acts of repetition. It's disorganized and cluttered; he sets himself to sorting the books by category, by topic, by author's last name. He's vaguely aware that there are library systems for classifying knowledge but doesn't know them, so he uses his own patterns that he used for most of his life.
The books are soft and cool, pages worn, and comforting to the touch. Books are a thing he'd never worn gloves to handle, before. They don't spark and burn against his skin.
Everything in juvenile hall had blistered to the touch, too nostalgic in a painful way because they felt like the group homes. Institutional, indifferent, and cold.
It's far from full-time, gainful employment. Most of his shifts are at night, none lasting more than six hours. But whenever he's with the old woman, she praises his hard work, his industry, how he's organized the cluttered little store. It's--
Cloying.
He prefers the evenings, after she's left. Hardly anyone comes in then, and if they do he leaves them to their own devices, absorbing the quiet until they get the message and leave.
Sae doesn't need to set traps; Sae is a trap in and of herself. He goes to their regularly scheduled luncheons with the expectation that she'll have dug up more ammunition to wield against him.
"Have you been looking at colleges?" she asks, and Goro ticks off a mental point for her on his internal scoreboard.
The chicken he's eating tastes like notebook paper, which is at least a subtle contrast against the taste of cardboard. He swallows his bite and wipes at his mouth, wipes the grease from his fingers. "You gave me quite a list."
"I found a surprising number of universities willing to accept students with a criminal background," she says, straight-laced and straight-lipped. She can tell he's trying to deflect.
Sae looks at him, and Goro knows she knows. This post-change-of-heart, Metaverse-aware Sae is much less susceptible to his particular brand of bullshit.
He looks away. "I'll go over them again tomorrow," he tells her, taking another bite of his meal.
They make small talk. Goro goes back to his apartment and goes to sleep.
He doesn't go over Sae's list of universities-that-accept-convicted-criminals the next day. He goes to Tokyo Tower instead, which is a senseless waste of money he doesn't have, but he doesn't care. He takes the elevator up to the observation deck and looks out over the meaningless sprawl of skyscrapers, high-rises, office buildings, houses, and he contemplates emptiness.
Most people go into life with a plan. Get rich, or die trying. Find the right man, the right woman, whatever, or die trying. Goro had a plan: kill your way to the top, get your piece of shit father to acknowledge you, then drag him down into the gutters. His plan didn't work out that way. His backup plan, to die trying, didn't work either: he can thank Haru Okumura and the frankly ridiculous size of her persona's guns for that.
He gave up his life and his future and everything in it and whatever to the fucking Phantom Thieves, and he doesn't know what the fuck ever he has left to cling to as a way forward. Juvenile hall doesn't teach troubled children how to find a place in life; it sucks them in and spits them back out, complacent in the belief that the delinquents within its walls have gone too far to amount to anything.
He can't look at Sae's stupid list of universities. To look at that kind of list, you have to know what you want for yourself. You have to believe in some kind of future.
Goro just wants to know if he'll wake up in the morning and if there will be a meal in the evening; he's not even sure he particularly cares if either condition is met.
The sky is so blue it's blinding. He wants to shut the colors off, turn on the night and make the lights go away. It's too bright, but he can't stop looking. The blue fades into orange, to pink, to purple. Closing time is coming. Goro knows he should leave. Should go back to his apartment and face tomorrow.
Eventually, because he has no other option, he does.