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“Sorry, I’ve got a shift at the flower shop today.”
Ann looked disappointed, but not surprised. After all, she’d caught him while he was wearing the uniform and apron, on his way to the shop. “Oh, okay. We’ll hang out some other time!”
Ren nodded; he’d really like to hang out with her again soon. Summer vacation was not supposed to be this busy. At least his friends were understanding.
But Ann was still looking at him, twirling one pigtail lazily around a finger. “Hey…Ren, everything’s okay, right?”
“Hm?” Did he look stressed? Maybe it was time to visit the bathhouse for a medicinal soak. Or maybe not. It’d be a splurge right now. “Of course.”
“You’ve been working a lot of shifts recently…the beef bowl shop, the flower shop here, the convenience store, the airsoft shop, and you’re helping Boss out at Leblanc, too, right? I thought we get pretty good money in Mementos, but we’re still coming up short, aren’t we?”
Ren winced and hoped she hadn’t caught it. The Phantom Thieves’ finances weren’t a topic he wanted to discuss at the moment. And he’d thought they’d only talked about the convenience store and the flower shop. How did she know about his other jobs? Well, besides Leblanc, that one was obvious. “I don’t help Boss for money.” More like he helped Boss to make sure he stayed on his guardian’s good side. “He’s teaching me. And I worked out a deal with the airsoft shop owner for a discount.”
She gave him one of those frowns heavy with disappointment, saying clearly that he was letting her down. “It really doesn’t make things better for you to say two of your five jobs are unpaid. Seriously, if we need to make extra cash, tell us. I mean, I don’t expect Yusuke would be able to help, and Makoto has her student council president duties to keep up, but I’ve already got a decent job, and Ryuji could probably find something. Let us help too, okay?”
Morgana rustled in the bag against Ren’s shoulder. “Lady Ann has a point. I’d lend a hand as well if I could. I’m getting sick of watching you eat cup noodles.”
Morgana had said it quietly, but Ann was close enough that Ren knew she’d heard, especially since her eyes narrowed at him at ‘cup noodles’. “It’s for my own pocket money,” he lied. “I’m saving up.”
Morgana muttered something along the lines of “stupid,” pushing into his back with his paws. Ren ignored it, busy trying to think of what he was supposedly saving for. Something that Ann wouldn’t ask to see later on.
“Mona,” Ann said suddenly, her voice dripping sugar and honey. “You know what’s going on, don’t you?”
The bag over Ren’s shoulder went stiff.
“Of course you do,” she continued on, twirling her hair around her finger again, though this time it was more…flirtatious. “You’re with Ren all the time, after all. If anyone would know, it’s you.”
“Don’t do this,” Ren muttered. “This is ridiculous.” He did not need Ann turning on her idea of charm for the cat-shaped friend now rustling restlessly in his bag. Morgana’s major weaknesses: sushi and Ann. But Ann was a terrible actress. Morgana wouldn’t fall for her crocodile tears…probably. In the meantime, it was just going to look weird to the people around them.
“Ren, just tell her!” Morgana hissed. “It’s not that bad!”
Yes, it was, especially if he had to worry about Ann breaking Morgana. Ren huffed and stepped around the blonde, though he tried to soften the evasion with a smile. He wasn’t upset with her, after all. She was just asking inconvenient questions. “We’ll talk later, okay? My shift starts in three minutes.” And right now work was completely welcome. Hopefully he would have figured out a more convincing reason for all his jobs by the end of it.
“Ren…” Ann was now sporting a full-blown pout, but then she sighed. “Okay, I don’t want to make you late. Hey, how long are you working today?”
“Until seven,” he answered without thinking. “…Why?”
Ann smiled at him bright and sharp. Just a tiny bit on the predatory side. “Because I want to treat you after you get off work! How do burgers sound? A lot better than cup noodles, right?”
She had his number. Morgana’s weaknesses: sushi and Ann. Ren’s weakness: free food. He still paused for a moment, but when the model’s bright eyes narrowed at him, he figured she wasn’t going to let this go until he gave her a good explanation. Might as well be over a meal he didn’t have to pay for. “Sounds great.”
Now he just had to figure out what he was going to tell her, since 'I was an idiot and spent most of the group’s funds on rock salt’ was not going to fly.
Technically, both Ren and Morgana had been idiots. Morgana hadn’t had any reservations about buying the so-called “Holy Stone” either, after all. But Morgana was currently stuck as a cat and had amnesia; he couldn’t really be expected to have money sense. (He arguably had more than Yusuke, and that just made Ren worry about the artist.)
That left Ren solely responsible for wasting 100,000 yen, which was probably just as well, since Morgana couldn’t exactly help out with earning it back. Sure, the smallest Phantom Thief made a habit of picking up coins and bills that people dropped around Yongen-Jaya, but he reserved actual thievery for shadows only, so all he had gathered between April and July was about 3,000, an amount Ren could earn in a single shift at any of his jobs. No, it wasn’t fair in any sense to try to put the responsibility for this on Morgana.
Ren still kind of wished he could blame the other thief, though, if only to avoid some of Ann’s disappointment.
The blonde was currently eyeing him, tweaking the straw of her milkshake cup. There was a vase of flowers carefully settled on the booth seat besides her; she’d come back to the mall around 6:30 and asked him for “the best bouquet he could make”, adding in “I want to give it to Shiho at the hospital tomorrow!” If she’d meant to put him under too much pressure to be thinking of excuses, she’d succeeded. This being Ann, though, it seemed equally likely she’d just impulsively decided that she should get flowers for someone if she was going to a flower shop anyway. The vase held pink lilies, yellow carnations, roses of both colors, and lavender chrysanthemums. He hadn’t been able to get to know Shiho in that first week of school, but he remembered the colorful hair ties and clips she’d worn the few times he’d seen her, and Ann had confirmed that her best friend loved bright colors. Hopefully she’d like the arrangement, and it would keep her spirits up.
“So.” Ann’s voice drew Ren’s attention away from the nagging worry of if the best friend of one of his closest friends would be unimpressed by his choice in flowers and back to the worry of said close friend being absolutely disappointed and/or infuriated by his lack of common sense. “Morgana had to stretch his legs, huh? I wouldn’t have minded him tagging along.”
Yeah, she wouldn’t have minded him coming along so she could try pumping him for answers. “He gets antsy in the bag after a few hours,” Ren said, which was completely true, and Ann gave a little hum as she accepted that. It was also true that Ren had suggested Morgana take a walk around Shibuya before Ann came back. The not-cat had taken the hint, even if he’d grumbled at Ren that he really should come clean to “Lady Ann” if she was getting suspicious.
…He’d barely saved 40,000 so far, after what he had to spend on his and Morgana’s personal care… If he’d already made up most of the money, maybe it’d be easier to confess, but he wasn’t even halfway.
“Okay, Ren. You have five jobs. What’s going on?”
Ren took a bite out of his burger and chewed slowly, biding his time. Om nom nom. “Like I said earlier, I’m saving up.”
“Yeah, sure, perfectly reasonable.” Ann nodded. Her milkshake cup plunked down on the table. “Except you’re juggling three paying jobs with two that don’t pay. Plus whatever you do for our first aid. Plus our 'club activities’. …Also, you’ve been helping out a politician?” She sounded genuinely confused on that last part.
“He’s teaching me how to negotiate.”
“Okay, guess that makes sense.” Her tone implied that she considered it to make about as much sense as anything related to their phantom thievery ever did. “You haven’t been able to hang out with me or Ryuji or Yusuke for nearly a month now.”
“It–” Ren stumbled, casting his mind over the past few weeks and several apologies he’d had to make. “It hasn’t been a month.” When had he last hung out with one of them? “Maybe–three weeks?”
“Ren, what’s three weeks?”
“…Nearly a month.”
“Uh-huh.” Ann eyed him with disbelief. “And you score higher than me on exams.”
He didn’t have a good comeback for that, a little appalled with himself. He needed to make good on the yen he’d wasted, and it seemed risky to neglect his deals with Iwai, Takemi or Boss. Yoshida’s coaching seemed like it would come in really handy in the future, and Ohya’s articles and insight into the news and media would likely be important if they were going to keep increasing their reputation to both encourage more people and delve deeper into Mementos. He even had a deal with the fortune teller who had scammed him, Chihaya Mifune, and he had to keep that up for her useful fortune-telling abilities. (Plus, he wanted to convince her to stop scamming people.)
“Somehow you didn’t think any of us would realize you were suddenly never available?”
He shook his head quickly. “It’s not that I thought you wouldn’t realize,” he said. “I just didn’t think it’d be a big deal.” Not compared to the matter of 100,000 yen. He was only one of their friends. Ann hung out with every other Phantom Thief too, even Makoto, which Ren was grateful for since he hadn't had the chance. Ann also had Shiho to visit, now with a bouquet. But if she felt like he’d been ignoring her–and Ryuji and Yusuke probably felt the same, maybe even worse–-he’d been so worried about not neglecting the deals he’d made with adults while he earned back the yen that he’d neglected friendships instead. Great. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it’s not important–-sorry. I’ll make more time for everyone.” Even if that begged the question of what he’d need to neglect in turn. …Yoshida didn’t seem the impatient type. Maybe it’d be safe to turn down his invitations for a time?
He was getting a lot of unimpressed looks from Ann today, and Ren remembered that even if she was a lousy liar herself, Ann could also pick up on other’s lies quickly, had probably caught the uncertainty in his voice. “No. We’re not mad, we’re-–okay, let me tell you about a conversation Ryuji and I had the other day.” She tweaked the straw in her hand, bending its head under her finger, and picked up the paper wrapper the straw had come in with her other hand, positioning it similarly. Straw and wrapper faced each other. “'Aw, man,’” Ann said in a bad mimicry of Ryuji as she crinkled the wrapper. Ren took another bite of his burger, bemused by the sudden show. “'Ren’s too busy to hang out again–-that beef bowl manager’s an effin’ slave driver.’”
Now she put on something close to her normal voice, bending the straw as she answered wrapper-Ryuji. “'What? He doesn’t work at a restaurant, Ryuji, he works at 777. He rang my stuff up when they were having that make-up sale.’”
The wrapper started moving again, energetically this time. “'Forreal? But I know he’s working at the beef bowl place on the same street, I’ve seen him running around in there when the place was packed!’”
Ann-straw. “'That can’t be right. He’s got a job at the flower shop in the mall too, and three part-time jobs is just too much…”
Wrapper-Ryuji. “'Wait, it ain’t just three, 'cause he works at the airsoft shop too, he told me. And I saw him at beef bowl just last week, so it ain’t like he got fired…’”
“'Four jobs? No, five, if you count him helping Boss…’”
Straw and wrapper went quiet for a moment, and Ren opened his mouth to ask if the little performance was done–he guessed that did answer how Ann knew about all his jobs–but Ann silenced him with a hard look as wrapper-Ryuji’s head slowly turned to Ren. He shut his mouth around the straw for his soda instead, taking a long sip as wrapper-Ryuji spoke. “'Hey, Ann. Like, the Phantom Thieves just took care of that Kaneshiro guy, but he’s not the only crappy adult out there. You don’t think Ren’s in trouble, do you…?’”
The soda he’d been sipping on went down wrong, and Ren hastily turned his head away as he coughed. “That,” he said between coughs, “is not how Ryuji said it,” because he needed to stall a few seconds to reevaulate this conversation. And to get the soda out of his throat.
Ann gave him a light kick under the table. “Duh. I’m not going to repeat how Ryuji actually said it in public.”
Okay. Okay. He’d stopped coughing. “You two thought I was being extorted?”
“Let’s see,” Ann said. “Shujin students getting blackmailed has been a pretty big deal lately. You suddenly act like you’re hard-up for cash, and you still won’t tell me what that’s about. Can you blame us for thinking something’s fishy?”
His burger sat heavy in his stomach. They’d been seriously worried about him. Were worried about him. Morgana was right. Time to face the music. “You’re going to be mad.”
“Try me.”
He sighed, casting his eyes up to the ceiling of the fast food restaurant, as though it might open to a burger-shaped UFO that would carry him away from this world. “I’m not being extorted. I did fall for a stupid scam. Wasted a hundred thousand yen. I was trying to earn it back.”
“Oh my god.”
He winced and braced himself.
“We had a hundred thousand yen? How much do we have now?”
…Ann sounded more astounded than angry, and he wondered if she and Ryuji had ever kept track of how much yen passed through the Phantom Thieves’ hands. Then again, they didn’t really need to, since he was the one who handled all the supplies. “Not quite sixty-thousand? It was most of our money, and I’ve only earned about forty-thousand back so far.”
“'Only’. 'Only’ forty-thousand.” Ann shook her head and took a long sip of her milkshake, eventually sucking up all the liquid along the bottom. “Okay, so…did you ever learn the name of the person who scammed you? Because if not, we should have started investigating yesterday. This sounds like a Mementos target waiting to happen.”
Ren shook his head and flipped his phone on the table, tapping the red and black icon in a familiar movement. “Chihaya Mifune, Mementos.”
“Candidate not found.” Just as he’d known it would say. Finding Chihaya’s shadow in Mementos had occurred to both him and Morgana the same night they’d realized the Holy Stone was phony, but it wasn’t that easy.
Ann frowned at the negative result. “A fake name…?”
“I don’t think so. People only turn up in the app if they have distorted desires, but she seems to honestly believe she’s helping people somehow.” He explained the scam in more detail from there. Chihaya’s uncannily accurate and specific predictions of the future, with the unexpected allowance from Boss as the example that had initially convinced Morgana and him, and the Holy Stones she hawked to people with potential misfortune on the horizon.
“So, what did she say to you, that you thought you needed one of those?”
“…It’s been a few weeks, so I don’t remember all the details-–”
“Ren. No. Do not bullshit me on this.” Ann leaned forward on the table, resting her weight on her elbows. “She convinced you and Morgana that spending a hundred thousand yen on a rock was a good idea. Don’t tell me you forgot what she said. I’m not angry that you fell for a scam. I will be angry if you keep lying to me. And then I’ll get the truth from Morgana anyway.”
…Yeah, fair enough. He’d been treading on thin ice this whole time. He just really wasn’t sure how she would react to the prediction Chihaya had made. “She said I’m going to die.”
“WHAAAAAT?”
Ren immediately became aware of every single set of eyes in the restaurant, currently resting on their table. On the blonde who’d shot to her feet and was staring down at him. “Ann,” he said, trying best for a level voice. “It’s okay. Some of the fates she’s read have already changed. Mine will too.” It had to.
Ann stared at him for a few seconds longer before scoffing. “Oh, yeah. It’s okay. She just told you you’d die. No big deal, right?” She pushed away from the table, stepping away from the booth. Paused for a second and turned back around to pick up the vase and set it in front of Ren. “Hold my bouquet for me. I’ll get it from you tomorrow.”
He settled his hands on it uncertainly. “Tomorrow? Where are you going now?”
“Shinjuku. She’s a real fortune teller? Then I hope the cards warned her about me, because I am going to wreck her–”
If they were in the Metaverse, she would be radiating heat waves right now. Her hands were gripped tight as if itching for her whip.
“Wait, Ann–” He’d thought she’d maybe be shocked or afraid at the morbid fortune, or maybe just be skeptical and disbelieving. Instant rage had not been one of the expected reactions.
“–threatening people so she can scam them–”
“–that’s not how it is, I told you–” He could see why she was thinking of it that way, but Chihaya honestly believed in the Holy Stones, that was part of the problem. And Ann was no longer listening to him, already stalking out of the restaurant while being given a wide berth by other patrons. He took Shiho’s intended bouquet into his arms, cradling it as carefully as possible while also hurrying after his friend to catch her before the Phantom Thieves could end up having two members with assault records. “Ann!”
He was too slow with the gift for Shiho in his arms. Thankfully, the train station was far enough away that Morgana spotted and intercepted her; Ren caught up to the two in Station Square. Morgana was bunting his head into Ann's chin, purring comfortingly as she held him. Ann looked...still angry, especially for someone holding a purring cat. But she was at least not getting on a train to Shinjuku. "She's lucky he's cute," she muttered at Ren, and Morgana immediately stopped purring, staring up at her in dismay. "You're lucky Mona's cute."
"I'm not cute!"
"Ah, right. They're lucky you're such a charming gentleman."
Morgana started rumbling again. Putty in Ann's hands. Ren could only shake his head. "If you're going to be angry with someone, be angry with me." He could deal with that. Probably. ...He had some protection, since he was carrying flowers meant for Shiho.
"I'd rather take it up with the scam artist than the victim," Ann pointed out. "...And seriously, 'be angry with me'? Isn't that the whole reason you didn't tell us, because you thought we'd be angry?!"
Morgana slowed in his purring, peeking his eyes open at Ren. They both knew that was exactly the reason. And when Ann sounded so pissed off about that, the words to try to explain himself better lodged in his throat.
Ann frowned at him before crouching and letting Morgana jump down to the ground. Her eyes remained cast downward. "...You want to make it up to me?"
"Yes."
"Then drop the crazy job-juggling. I want to hang out with you this week. I'm sure Ryuji and Yusuke do too. Forget the money. We'll make up the rest over time. If we somehow have to spend more than sixty-thousand yen on short notice--I'm not that great at saving, but I can start putting aside a little from modeling." Her blue-green eyes flicked back up to him as she said, more decisively, "And I do want to meet Chihaya. Maybe not tonight, but if she's going to foretell people dying, I want to see how legit she is for myself. So I want to meet her with you."
"...And that's all you want to do?" Ren asked cautiously. Ann snorted.
"I might have some words for her, but the urge to slap her silly is starting to pass. Can't visit Shiho if I'm arrested, right?"
"It does make it harder to see people, in my experience."
Ann stood back up, idly dusting her skirt off. "Okay. Since I'm not getting into a street fight in Shinjuku tonight, I want those back," she said, gesturing to the flower vase in Ren's arms.
The flowers exchanged hands, and Ren felt a weight sink into his bag as Morgana jumped in, a move that might have sent him off balance if he hadn't gotten used to it over the last three months. The feline thief put two paws on Ren's shoulder as he lifted himself to address Ann. "Thank you for being so understanding, Lady Ann."
"Aww, thanks, Mona." Ann beamed. And then she pointed a finger at Ren. "Next time don't enable this guy. He needs to tell the rest of us when there's a problem." Morgana sputtered protests of how he had tried to convince Ren to tell someone, really, to which Ren gave him a dubious look, because they both knew full well Morgana had been okay with sweeping it under the rug too until Ann got involved. "And Ren? You're not going to die."
He nodded. "Fate can be changed."
"No," Ann said, knitting her eyebrows at him like he was being thick on purpose. "Well, yeah, but I mean--it's going to change, because the next time you're in trouble, you'll tell me and the others. We'll have your back, even if you did make a mistake. Okay?"
Ren hesitated for a split second, because there were some other things he hadn't told Ann or the others about, that only he and Morgana were aware of. The biggest being Goro Akechi's evident involvement in the Metaverse and the likelihood of him using it for his detective work. --But that wasn't a problem yet, he reasoned. Might never be, as long as their paths didn't come close to crossing in the other world. He'd tell everyone if it became an issue. "All right."
His agreement netted him a bright smile from Ann. They parted ways there, but before he was back at Leblanc, Ann had texted him the details of a place she wanted to go with him later in the week.
He texted her back to let her know he'd be available.