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vashtijoy · 5 months

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fic excerpt: goro and his mother

I keep needing to refer to this one, so here it is. WARNINGS for childhood abuse (poor, poor Mamakechi is not at her best here).

* * *

The summer Goro turns six, his mother packs their few things into plastic laundry bags, and she ties up their futon and quilt with string, and the two of them leave their single room in Shinjuku for a single room some way to the east, in a place called Yoshiwara. Asakusa and the huge red lantern of Senso-ji Temple are nearby to the south, but Goro and his mother don’t live anywhere so rarefied.

The other rooms in the house hold students, casual workers, foreigners. Goro peeps out of their door to talk to them all. Some ignore him, and he ignores them in return. Others are nice—the older boy who lends him manga, the girl who gives him sweets and ties ribbons in his hair, the foreigners whose words he only sometimes understands. And then there’s the old lady who lives on the top floor by herself.

Her name is Migata-san. She has her own kitchen and her own bathroom, when the rest of them have to share, just like in Goro’s old home. She wears a puffy, quilted vest all the time, and sits in front of her TV. Goro doesn’t have a TV any more; in the winter his mother took it away and it never came back. And since the landlord—who is strident and impatient and everything Migata-san is not—shouts at him when he sees him, Goro often finds himself creeping straight upstairs to Migata-san’s tiny apartment.

His mother leaves him there every afternoon anyway. He reads anything he can find, or takes his borrowed manga, or he sits in front of the TV, and Migata-san feeds him riceballs and cake. The TV rotates through daytime dramas, talk shows, adverts and news, but when something good comes on, Migata-san will let him watch it. Fly, Feather Swan! No, Grey Pigeon, I won’t forgive you!

“I could do that,” he tells Migata-san, watching the Feathermen fly about against a painted-looking stormy sky, and she laughs at Goro while he scowls.

“Oh, no,” she tells him, in the stupid grown-up voice. “Those things only happen on television. How about some milk?”

He accepts the milk, still sulking. But he doesn’t drop the idea.

* * *

When his mother finally comes home in the evenings, she’s tired and seems sick; things aren’t like they used to be. Instead of talking to him while she makes soup and rice over a tiny electric ring, she brings frozen boxes from the konbini and puts them in the microwave. They eat side by side in silence, sitting on the rolled futon.

Goro eats his frozen curry steadily, glancing sideways to his mother. She’s picking at her food like she doesn’t want it. “Why are you sad?” he dares to ask, afraid of upsetting her.

His mother doesn’t look at him. “I’m not sad, Goro-chan. Eat your food.”

He looks back to his bowl. The curry is bright orange. He picks some into his mouth: little red chopsticks, with the rubber grip holding them together. It tastes of a lot, but he doesn’t complain, not when she’s sad.

Are we going home soon? He can’t ask her that, either. He tries to think of something to tell her, making his slow way through his curry. Nothing that will make her lonely. Nothing that will make her cry. Nothing that will make her—

“I’m going to be a superhero,” he says brightly.

She glances to him. She looks right into his eyes and she smiles. “Is that what you’ve been doing today?”

“Mm-hm,” he tells her, riveted to that tiny, flickering smile. “Then you won’t have to work all the time, right? I’ll do everything. I’ll look after you and I’ll fight evil”—sharp eyes staring from a soapbox, a face he used to point out on the TV before the TV vanished, a name he still remembers with a child’s fascination—“and I’ll keep you safe for always, and I’ll always win!”

He runs out of breath and laughs, caught up in the brilliant future he’s painting for her, that he more than half believes in. He only remembers the point of it all when she laughs too, leaning back against the wall. “My little hero,” she tells him. And, still as if she’s terribly tired, she reaches for Goro’s blanket—a new, soft, blue blanket, small enough for him to wear around his shoulders, one of the new things that has made its way into their room.

She removes the brooch pinned at her collar, a glittering snowflake left from their old life, and she pins the blanket around his neck, folding the excess down into a collar. One thin hand gentles his hair aside, strokes his face; he presses against her like a kitten, and she lifts his bowl from his suddenly precarious lap.

Goro feels her happiness like his own. “There,” she says, glowing. “Now you have a cape.”

He beams at her. “Is it a bird cape? I want to be a bird superhero. Like Feather Hawk.”

“Ah, that depends,” his mother says, taking his chopsticks and propelling some curry into his mouth. “Can you fly?”

Goro opens his mouth to reply, and she closes it with her free hand; that’s another thing that’s new. He chews dutifully and swallows. “Of course I can fly,” he dictates. “All the Feathermen can fly.”

“Are you sure?” she asks him. “Maybe you aren’t as good as Feather Hawk, hm?” And then she pops another scoop of curry into his mouth, so he can’t even protest, other than through closed lips; she laughs and kisses him on top of his head.

“I am as good as Feather Hawk,” he informs her when he can talk. “I’m better.”

“Of course you are,” she tells him, with another kiss, feeding him the last of his curry. Her own bowl lies half-full beside her. “You’re my little boy. And you’re going to save the world.”

* * *

After that, Goro plays hero a lot. He wraps himself in his blanket cape and shouts Feather Wing Star Formation!, until the landlord knocks on the door. His mother sleeps all morning, while Goro reads the manga she brings him herself now, and she vanishes to work in the afternoon, when Goro goes upstairs to Migata-san; upstairs to wonder where his mother is, why he can’t stay alone in their room when she works any more, like he always did.

One morning, while his mother is dead asleep, Goro finishes his manga and looks around for something else to read, eventually pulling his mother’s glossy magazine from the table. He isn’t supposed to read it, for reasons that to him seem wholly arbitrary, so he’s careful to leaf through the pages as quietly as he can.

The magazine is creased and old-looking like his manga, and full of tiny text, much of which Goro cannot understand. So he guesses the words he doesn’t know: stories about fashion models and clothes and makeup and dragons, although something tells him he’s read “dragons” wrong. The whole thing smells like his mother. At least—it smells like his mother used to smell, like her perfume. These days she just smells of soap and sweat.

She doesn’t send Goro out by himself at night any more, either. That’s probably good, he thinks uncertainly; it was scary to run down the back alleys by himself, scarier to hide behind the bins so the police wouldn’t see him. But he misses the bathhouse. He misses Boss, who'd let Goro sit up front as his assistant, who’d set out piles of coins for him to count and watched him in the bath.

Looking down unhappily, he spies a piece of paper poking out from under the unrolled futon.

Part-curious, and very bored, he gives it a tug. It moves. Another, more careful tug, and the paper is in his hand. It’s a letter in his mother’s writing. A date, on the left—he knows from Migata-san’s TV that it’s yesterday’s—and a name, lots of big kanji, he can’t begin to make them out. But he sees his mother’s name right next to it, Akechi Mari, half of his own name right next to her loopy kana. At the top, there’s something about frost, and then the writing gets much worse—fortunately most of it is still kana.

The letter talks to somebody called Masa-sama. She talks about their room, he thinks, and about her job; she makes them sound bad. We have no money, he reads, over and over. Goro is a beautiful boy. He’s obedient and clever. Any man would be proud to call him his son. He reaches out, with one tentative hand, to touch those words.

The letter has been crumpled into a ball, and then unfolded; he tries to flatten it, with careful strokes of his baby hands. He reads it again, and again, and again. Any man would be proud to call him his son.

He has no idea his mother is awake. Not until a hard hand grabs his shoulder and shakes him, tearing the letter from him. “Give me that!” his mother yells as she hits him, right around his head, hard against his ear with the flat of her hand. Goro screams and falls to the floor, clutching the side of his head, and as he dissolves into tears and confusion he sees his mother crying too, tearing the letter like a typhoon, smaller and smaller and smaller pieces that she throws and screams at and hurls into the bin.

* * *

Before long, Migata-san comes downstairs, and she knocks on the door, and without a word she takes Goro upstairs, still sobbing, while his mother sobs in a heap on their floor. He sits on his usual cushion, still hiccuping sobs, as Migata-san clucks to him and washes his face and hands.

“There we are,” she says, beady eyes like a bird. “How about some hot milk? And a cake?” Goro nods his head yes, not meeting her eye.

He’s clever. You’d be proud of him. Was that letter to his father?

Your father is a monster! he remembers her shouting, back at the old room when he was small. She had hit him then, too.

Why is his mother writing to a monster? When even talking about him makes her so upset she cries and she hits Goro? They must be in terrible trouble. Is that why she’s asking Goro’s father for money?

… has his father got money?

Goro doesn’t realise that he and his mother are poor. But he knows they aren’t rich, that his mother works every day, works so hard she sleeps all the time and has no time for him. He adds it to his picture of his father: a monster, a rich man. A man who’s somewhere else when he should be with Goro and his mother. A man his mother calls Masa-sama, like he’s a king.

And that evening, when he’s finally home, when his mother is in the toilet and not coming out, he sneaks the fragments of paper with his father’s name out of the bin.

#persona 5 #things i write #goro akechi #mamakechi #masayoshi shido

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icespur · 4 months

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Not shipping related for once. This is a funny cute little scenario I had in my head. It involves Mamakechi and BabyGoro!

We know Mamakechi was a sex worker, and still had her job when Goro was growing up, as she would "bring men home"

For this headcanon Mamakechi would be an employee at---whatever modern Japanese sex clubs or brothels are called.

As her only source of income, what if even after giving birth, she'd still have to work there and bring him along?

Most of her fellow employees don't like it, because this is obviously no place for an infant and it might scare off the clients, but hey, what other options are there if daycare isn't affordable?

So one of the employees that isn't occupied usually has to take Goro and care for him while Mama works.

What if there's one employee in particular that unlike the majority, does not mind Mamakechi having to bring her baby along, and LOVES it?

I don't have a name for her, but this fellow worker, I dunno let's say she's unfortunately infertile so she'll gladly take any interaction with a baby she can get because she's unable to have one of her own.

Mamakechi having a baby was a dream come true for this woman, "free real estate", oh does she adore Goro.

Right when Mamakechi clocks in with Goro in her arms, this lady is right there ecstatically BEGGING Akechi-Chan to let her watch the baby. "Oh, please please please, Akechi-sama, my bff, fellow employee, goddess of beauty, wonderful mother, giver of gifts, angel of earth, etc, please let me watch the baby for you? 🥺"

Her enthusiasm is---overwhelming to say the least, but Mamakechi will take all the help she can get, plus this is the one employee that doesn't scold or roll their eyes when having to be on temporary babysitting duty, so why not?

Mamakechi meekly accepts, and before she can fully finish her sentence, Baby Enthusiast practically snatches Goro from her and into her own arms. Cheering and profusely thanking her, and bouncing in place, while smooching and smothering an understandably VERY bewildered BabyGoro with love.

Unamed Employee OC, considers herself Goro's "unofficial Godmother" and will drop EVERYTHING once she senses Goro in the building.

Yes, not "hear", "SENSES"

This woman has developed a sixth sense to detect the exact MOMENT Mamakechi steps through the door holding Goro.

Currently in the middle of having sex with a client, on top of her?

*suddenly senses Mamakechi and BabyGoro have entered the building*

"Oh, look at that, times up---"

"Bullshit, we just started, I paid for you, you don't get to tell me what to-----"

Suddenly gaining the ability of super strength, she yanks the guy out of her, and now bridal style holding him, cheerfully rambles about "Thank you for your patronage, come again, I hope you enjoyed, Master ❤️ " and yeets him out the nearest window. Calmly dusts off her hands, then RUSHES downstairs for BabyGoro.

Meanwhile on Mamakechi's side, she pauses from talking with an employee and they both look up to the ceiling, hearing running footsteps, numerous noises of crashing and things shattering, followed by employees yelling at whoever the cause was, and the cheerful voice of a particular employee and owner of the running footsteps calling out the baby's name: "GO-CHAAAAAAAAAAAN"

The door flies open, OC faceplants to the floor, but quickly recovers, completely unfazed. "WHERE'S MY UNOFFICIAL GODSON?! GIVE HIM HERE, GIMMIEGIMMIEGIMMIE!"

#persona 5 royal #persona 5 #goro akechi #random headcanon #persona 5 headcanons #mamakechi #funny

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