Chapter Text
Ren doesn’t cry when he gets arrested. Really, he doesn’t do much of anything. All through the trial, the expulsion, getting shipped off to Tokyo, he sits and listens to people talking at him, speaking in legal terms he doesn’t understand, tones of irritation he does, and he doesn’t cry. Life happens, he watches.
“It’s the ones who benefit from it that want to maintain the status quo.”
Ren angles his head to the right, lifts his chin, and his reflection mimics him, carved from darkness by fluorescent light. On the other side of the glass, grey and blue swirl in a lazy tornado.
“The rest of us—we’ve grown complacent.”
Soft hair, sharp eyes, he is always somewhere in the middle. Conventionally attractive but nothing special. Too friendly to be bullied, too quiet to be popular. Just another fixture of the town he was born in, living comfortably until that town was his entire world. Until every bad thing that happened was just something playing on the news while he ate breakfast.
“You know the saying about frogs and boiling water?”
Ren leans closer to his reflection, blocking the light altogether, and he vanishes into darkness.
A beep and the tornado stills. Then he’s staring at a pile of clothes.
He sits up straight and rubs his tired eyes. The laundromat’s fluorescents paint everything in harsh vibrance while a legislator on Ren’s phone keeps talking, speaking clear and strong.
“Surface-level solutions aren’t enough,” she says. “Lip service isn’t enough. We need foundational changes, changes in our values, we need to fight for a world where—”
Ren tears out his earphones.
If there was anyone messaging him, he wouldn’t have gotten so bored that he scrolled through Twitter until he just happened to click on her trending interview. Above her was an actor being accused of domestic abuse. Below that, a new report on climate change. Somewhere in between, reactions to an article on surveillance states. All while the feed moved with friends from home joking that this isn’t the cool dystopian future they were promised.
Ren gets to his feet and pulls his clothes into a laundry basket, then hoists it on top of a washer and starts folding.
Left arm across a sweater's back. Repeat with the right.
Ryuji would answer if Ren texted him. Ann, too. But what is there to say? Once they exhausted the topic of whatever the hell is going on with that castle and spit every possible insult at Kamoshida, they don’t have much else to talk about. They’re three people that barely know each other, shoved into unfortunate circumstances. Movies, video games, comics… it all seems so petty, so inconsequential.
Fold the left side of the sweater toward the centre. Repeat with the right.
Maybe someone from back home, then. But last time he tried, they were trying so hard not to talk too much about Ren’s arrest that the conversation kept dying, suffering every time they tried to revive it. What do you do when your childhood friend gets arrested for assault? Do you trust him when he says he didn’t do it—well, not really. Blood and stitches tell a truer tale than someone who can’t quite commit to denial. How well did either of you ever know each other?
Sweaters, shirts, pants. Then all that’s left are socks. Lights buzz above and if they don’t give him a headache, then the scent of detergent mixing with floral air freshener will.
Ren sighs: “Fuck.”
Again he’s up for expulsion. Again he’s about to lose everything, again he’s at the whim of someone doing whatever the hell they want because—why? This was supposed to be a fresh start but Kamoshida spread those rumours because—why? He’s trying to get rid of Ren because—why?
Ren rolls one sock over the other, making a tube with the toes hanging loose out the end. Which works, but it isn’t how his mom does it. He pulls them apart, tries again.
He sighs: “Shit.”
Every other human being simply rolls socks up, but his mom folds them into little squares. It never occurred to him to ask how because she was always there to do it for him and it isn’t like he’s some spoiled brat who doesn’t know how to do his own laundry but the thing is he wasn’t supposed to be on his own for years and, God, he really is, isn’t he? Alone.
This time, stronger: “Goddamnit.”
His phone vibrates.
Morgana called Ren lucky a couple days ago and he wonders if that’s what it is when he hears his mother’s voice on the other end of the line.
She wants to know: “How’s your first week in the big city?”
Ren sags his weight to one leg. His hip bumps against the washer.
It really has only been a week.
He opens his mouth and nothing comes out. Everything he can’t tell her pushes against the back of his tongue, choking breath and thought. He leans his weight on his hand, curled around the edge of the washer. He presses down hard until it hurts.
“Fine,” he manages. “Met some people.”
“Oh, yeah? Good, I’m glad. You’ve always been good at making friends.”
Socks lay scattered across the washer. If he asked, she would tell him how she gets those squares.
“And Sakura, he’s okay? He seemed a little rough around the edges when I spoke to him, but he’s treating you well, right?”
The man she’s paying, wasting money on because her son acted without thinking. The man that can’t tell him enough what a pain in the ass he is. But also the man that never lets Ren leave without eating breakfast.
“I dunno.” Ren grabs a pair of socks and drops them in the basket, shoves them deep down the side. Doesn’t look at his reflection in the window. “He reminds me of uncle Ryou.”
His mother’s bark of laughter comes through sharp and dry and Ren can just imagine the way she slaps her thigh and throws her head back. The way she always does. Another pair of socks into the basket.
“You’re right! That’s it, he’s just like Ryou.”
His mom keeps talking, telling some story from when they were kids on the farm. “Did I ever tell you about when—” and she has, more than once, it’s the same story she tells every time the family gets together and it’s stupid and it’s nothing and it’s everything.
A muscle below Ren’s ear starts cramping and his mouth waters like he’s hungry for something. His ear rings.
“What about you,” his mother asks, “homesick yet?”
And right in the middle of that dingy laundromat, Ren starts crying.
Not crying crying. His mouth pulls down at the corners and a couple tears spill out when he blinks, but then they’re gone, smeared by the back of his hand. He never has been one to make a scene.
“Ren?”
“Yeah, sorry, I’m doing laundry.” He takes a deep breath, wipes his hand on his jeans. “Homesick, yeah right. Glad to get out of that dump.”
“That so? Well, at least one good thing came of all this.”
Ren forces a laugh and there it is: the Amamiya family’s usual rhythm. Laugh it off, smile.
This is the same woman that gave Ren’s friend a place to stay when she got kicked out for coming out to her parents. The same woman that taught Ren there’s no point in getting twisted over things you can’t change. Just laugh it off. Smile. Sometimes the world is cruel but what can you do? People won’t change. This is just the way things are. At least we have each other. We will always only have each other.
Ren closes his eyes, leaning his elbows atop the washer, hanging his head until it meets metal. The light melts away from the other side of his lids, plunging his world into complete darkness.
Somewhere far beyond the laundromat walls, a siren wails. Closer, someone shouts, slurred enough to be a patron of the bar beside Leblanc. Inside the laundromat, silence hums with fluorescent light.
Ren presses his phone to his ear.
Closer still and farthest away, his mother’s voice.
“I love you,” Ren says.
Ann takes a step back. Summer sunlight streams through the trees, haloing her head in gold, and oh… Ren is going to hell.
Figures his first time saying this to someone is a joke.
“That’s cheating!” Pink colours Ann’s cheeks and flames lick at Ren’s heel.
There’s no excuse he thinks to give, but it doesn’t matter; Ann is already bouncing back and moving on, lost in thought.
“I kinda feel like this won’t make our Personas stronger,” she muses, and it’s a mark of how much Ren likes her that he doesn’t get snide. He retakes his seat on the fence, hands hanging limp between his knees.
That straightforwardness is part of why he can’t help but tease her. Someone like him can only reflect her honesty back in shallow mockery. But Ann is nothing if not genuine, for better or worse.
“My parents are both fashion designers,” she says, sitting beside him. “They jump from country to country so I only see them for half the year. Maybe less, these days.”
A breeze blows between them, whisper-quiet and louder than anything, barely masking the haze of traffic and concrete and overconsumption just on the other side of the trees. Somewhere beyond is Leblanc café. And Sojiro Sakura. Ren picks some cat fur from his sleeve.
He and Sakura, they’re getting used to each other, but Ren is still never in a rush to go back. Sakura is never eager to stay.
“That freedom sounds nice,” Ren says.
Ann agrees. Not enough to be wholehearted, but enough to deny any kind of loneliness—or at least accept it.
In that glaring sunlight, her eyes are all blue, the kind that promises tranquility and drowning both, and it’s all Ren can do to tear himself away, turning until he’s pointed at the river over his shoulder. Flowing lazily, slowly. Sunlight glitters there too, nothing but a shimmery haze when he lets his gaze slide out of focus. It heats the top of his head, turns the air thick enough that breathing becomes an effort. He curls his hands around the fence’s rough wood, digging his fingertips into where it splits from age and weather.
Ann asks, “What about your parents?”
“Mm…”
What about them?
Debris floats near the riverbank, a tangle of dead branches and leaves swirling as slow as the minute hand of a clock.
“They’re just normal,” is what Ren decides on.
“Normal?”
“We get along,” he tries with a shrug, which is true; he wouldn’t trade them for the world.
Eyes on a woman pushing a stroller, Ann grins. “Normal, he says. If they raised you, I bet they’re real characters.”
And man, she’s easy. Even if she hides behind her bangs, it’s so obvious she keeps peeking sideways, trying to get a good look at him. She chews her lip and her gaze lingers.
Were his parents mad when he got arrested? She wants to know, did they fight? Is that why he’s here?
He won’t say if she won’t, but the answer to all three is no. Sakura was wrong when he said Ren’s parents threw him away. Anger would be so much easier if they had.
“What’s Ryuji’s mom like?” Ren asks. “Have you met her?”
“Couple times, yeah. She’s nice. Pretty quiet, considering she spawned that.”
Ren forces a laugh, gaze fixed on his hands.
“Never met his dad but… I mean—y’know. I knew. I saw.”
“Yeah.”
Without anything to fidget with, Ren cracks his knuckles one by one.
Ryuji and Ann, they want to change the world. They’ve known unfairness their whole lives, the truth Ren was ignorant of until the rug was pulled out from under his feet. Ren, with his easy childhood, friends back home, loving parents—what right does he have to lead them?
He perches his chin on his fist and stares at a line of ants marching by his feet.
In the end, he will finish this year and go back home to his boring, stable hometown. The life he left behind. He’ll pick up the pieces and start over.
But then what? Will it be that simple? His record is stained. Future schools, future employers, that’s all they’ll see. Every friend and classmate will know the rumours. They’ll remember how he disappeared for a year, leaving their imagination to stew and simmer. He’s already speaking to them less and less.
No matter how Ren keeps his voice soft, his head down, hides behind a fake pair of glasses, imitates a normal person—no matter how well it works—he will always know what it’s like on the other side.
He will always be neither here nor there.
The first time Ren and Akechi talk, they’re onstage with twenty people and a camera between them. They never get much closer.
Even after, the first time it’s just them, Akechi opens with the words of some philosopher two-hundred years dead. Ren squints, which gets a small laugh, but what else can he do? This is hardly a conversation. This is hardly someone he’s interested in having one with.
Until, maybe, he is.
Part of Ren will often wonder if Akechi is just playing games when he says, “Few people around me are so willing to speak their minds as freely as you did earlier.” Could be that he’s making fun of Ren, because, “Adults are only interested in using the young, while they simply do as the adults say,” belongs in the mouths of teenage social rejects, not sensational detective princes.
If Akechi thinks that, then—all this marketing and pandering and fame—why is he playing their game?
Despite or maybe because of his doubts, Ren stands a little straighter. His eyes don’t leave Akechi’s face.
Forget philosophers, forget television—that twist to Akechi’s smile is something familiar. Something echoed in Ryuji’s complaints over bowls of ramen, something reflected in Ann’s scowl as she digs her nail along a scratch on that rooftop table. Something in that piece Yusuke painted in another’s name. Something Ren feels down to his marrow every waking hour.
Akechi asks, “Would you mind talking with me again?”
In the space of a second, Ren sees himself refusing. He sees himself accepting.
“If the opportunity arises,” he says.
Akechi smiles. He takes Ren’s number and makes sure it will.
There’s a thousand mile gouge in the earth from Ren digging in his heels.
The world shuts him out so he throws away the key and makes his home in the dark. All he’s ever known is how to move at his own pace, so he gets stubborn—bleeds his edges into nothingness, becoming neither one of them, nor the monster they want him to be. He gets clever—wears a mask of the accepted and picks the lock, passing freely through the door, a fraud surrounded by smoke and mirrors.
A fraud, because no matter the disguise, he does not belong.
Not there. And maybe not here, either.
The golden light streaming through the lock glows so warm. Delicate rays dancing and flowing, a shining beacon cutting through the dark, calling out until Ren kneels, braces his hands against the door, fingers spread wide, and lines up his eye with the keyhole.
Goro Akechi stands on the other side, bathed in a light so bright it washes out his features, and Ren thinks, better to know darkness and the form of things at least.
Still, he can’t tear his eyes away.
But he thinks.
Even if you have to fumble and feel your way around, he thinks, even if you never get a halo like that, reject all false light promised to you. See paradise as it truly is, see the staircase of bodies you have to climb to reach the heavens. Do not look away. Aim your arrow at God’s back and let loose.
Bite the hand that feeds. Make a feast of its sinew, more decadent than the paltry scraps it offered if only because you killed it yourself.
Reject, fraud—
Ren lets out a slow breath.
—hunter.