Chapter Text
The year goes by, and they gain two more teammates. As Yusuke and Makoto get the hang of things, Ren notices something. They seem less affected by the shadows' manipulative spells than Ann, Ryuji and Morgana. It's hard to gauge–in all honesty the brainwashing really isn’t that frequent–but it seems lately like it takes a harder smack to snap the three of them out of it, and the lingering disorientation seems to last longer than it used to. He assumes it's the same for himself. It makes sense, Ren figures, that the founding phantom thieves would be the ones most affected. They've had the worst of it, the most prolonged exposure. The strongest reinforcement.
The slight worsening of these effects worries him, and from their shared glances when one of them recovers, Ren suspects his teammates feel the same way. But he doesn't say anything, scared that speaking the words will make his fears stronger, more true. He doesn't share that his awareness becomes more and more interior, focused on the warm, lethargic feeling that presses against his head from the inside out. He doesn't share that it gets harder for him to remember what happens at all in each instance where he loses control.
-
It's the end of the summer when he notices a new item at Untouchable. Shiny elastic headbands with strips of hard aluminum every few inches, and a small battery powered LED light at the front of each one. "Brain Guards," the tag says. Ren buys one for each of them.
"Interesting choice. Trying to keep the aliens from reading your mind?" Iwai teases.
"Something like that…" Ren smiles awkwardly.
Iwai laughs. "Well best of luck. But I hear it's the government you really gotta watch out for."
-
Yusuke and Makoto protest the headbands. They're hideous, conflicting with Yusuke's carefully curated aesthetic, and he's quite fond of the elegant ring that seems to help him evade fire. Makoto, ever the strategist, asserts that the headbands don't provide a meaningful tactical advantage; there are more frequently occurring risks and weaknesses they could be guarding against instead. Futaba snickers at how silly Ren looks. They don't get it.
But Ren can tell, or at least guess, that he's not alone in the mounting stress of being played like a puppet. Ann and Ryuji take theirs with no objections, just an appreciative nod. Morgana takes one and wears it like a collar. They aren't sure if it will work correctly if it's not around his head, but there's a peace of mind in knowing that they're at least trying.
At any rate, the headbands seem to work. He can rest easy.
-
And resting is easy, as it turns out. When Ren isn’t getting lectured by Igor and the smurfettes, his dreams drift back to the same sensation. His brain drifting, detached, thoughts addled or nonexistent. There’s something he should be worried about, but it’s hard to remember, easier to let go. The dreams used to bother him, but he doesn’t wake up in petrified terror anymore. Instead he wakes calm and fully rested, having indulged in the easy haze of mindlessness without consequence.
It doesn't quite match the real thing. The undercurrent of dread is missing, and the pain, though he thinks–once he's lucid enough to think–that this may be attributed to his own lack of resistance. That realization scares him more than the sleep paralysis ever did.
-
Noir joins the team, and Joker hands over his brain guard without a second thought. It seems unlikely to come up in Okumura's palace, and Joker is willing to risk being trapped in his own head again if it means Noir never has to know what that feels like. He figures he can just buy another one after they finish up for the day.
He's wrong, it seems. Where the tacky headbands once sat in the far corner of Untouchable, Ren instead finds a display of plastic riot masks. Makoto could probably devise strategies for how they would help in battle, ways they could be a hinging point in the team's victory. Looking at them, Ren just feels defeated.
He composes himself and asks Iwai if there are any brain guards left, hoping the desperation doesn't show on his face. He's been told he's hard to read, and it seems to be the case this time. Iwai just shakes his head, saying he didn't see the point in restocking when it had taken months to go through the first order. He's marketing to airsoft hobbyists, not conspiracy theorists, after all.
Ren resigns himself to being vulnerable again. Tactically, it would make the most sense to take back the headband he gave Haru, since she's had the least exposure. But he can't bring himself to put her or any of his teammates at risk like that. It's his responsibility as a leader to watch out for them. He can shoulder this burden alone. Doing otherwise would just be cowardly, selfish.
-
The infiltration runs smoothly as the thieves take down shadows in the form of robotic underlings and mechanized middle management. A long elevator ride brings them out of the atmosphere, where their stealthy movements become floaty and imprecise. Their path ends at an airlock door, with no way forward but to open it.
The vacuum of space is breathtaking in more ways than one. It only takes a few seconds to be flung from one airlock to the next, but within that instant, it feels like eternity. The void holds a darkness so deep and vast that Joker feels he could drift in it forever, sinking down or floating up and away. The difference is only semantic in zero-gravity, he realizes.
A group of shadows meet them at the next airlock. Amid the flurry of battle, one of the shadows casts a spell, and suddenly the recycled space station air goes eerily still around them. Joker orders the team to target this one, but it lets loose another spell before they can take it out. It hits Joker with a flash of recognition, followed quickly by a familiar sinking feeling and then...
"-just say the word, Joker."
He blinks hard, adjusting to the brightly lit space around him. They're in a hangar now, or perhaps a launchpad of sorts. Weren’t they just in the airlocks?
“What word?”
“The calling card, dude! Stealin’ the treasure?” Skull cocks his head towards the center of the room. Sure enough, Joker can see the shimmering amorphous light of a treasure yet to materialize. How did they get here so quickly?
“Right, right.”
He trails behind the rest of the team as they backtrack through the palace, trying to commit the unfamiliar area to memory. It takes what feels like twenty minutes to reach the last place he remembers, but there's no telling how long the trip up had been. Oracle dictates a series of switches to push to navigate the airlocks, the solution to a convoluted puzzle since committed to memory.
When Ren finally gets home, he can't sleep. Rather, he won't let himself sleep, unwilling to lose another several hours to nothingness so soon. He strains to recall that missing time, to push his retraced steps a few feet further, but with no success. His memory glides seamlessly from the first airlock to the treasure in the launchpad, and trying to pry apart the gap between the two only yields vague conjecture. He could ask his teammates, but that meant admitting there was something wrong with him, shaking their faith in him, weakening the team as a whole.
No, he has to figure it out on his own. They still have a few days before their deadline. That will have to be enough time for him to sort his head out.