Chapter Text
"This world is filling with distortion once again," an infinitely wise yet childlike voice fills his head, calling from some blinky, inpenetrable darkness.
Huh?
"The time for the Trickster has risen once again..." He feels like he's drowning, like an endless torrent of crimson, toxic rain is filling his eyes and mouth.
Who?
"Ren Amamiya... Won't you open your eyes?"
He feels the startlingly familiar sensation of his skin peeling off his face like a waxing that's penetrating down to muscle and bone, his irises burning a blinding yellow as a sea of souls screams in his heart, aching to run wild.
He wakes up in his shared apartment, sheets soaked through with his own blood, the name of some long-forgotten figure caught in his drowning throat.
"Sumire...!" He hacks out, instinctively clawing at his own eyes, trying to tear off something that *isn't there.*
"M-Morgana! Hel-"
*What you have feared all along has come to pass.* A deep, growling voice-it can't be his own.
*Call my name and commit all sacrilege in the name of thine own justice!*
"S-S-gah!-"
He keels over, scrambling across his floor, trying to stumble his way into the bathroom, unable to control the instinct to tear off the thing stuck to his face.
He violently shoves past the bathroom door connected to the bedroom he's been sharing with*-can't remember, have to take it off, nothing else matters-* and slams into the bathroom sink, trying to force his eyes to adjust.
He swears someone with a blue inferno in place of a mouth and eyes is grinning back at him.
Someone else is in his body. It chuckles and says what he's struggling to say with his own mouth.
"No... No, you're not Satanael."
He feels it. His fingers dig into his bloodied brow and he feels the mask.
He keeps laughing, despite himself. He feels fearless, a daredevil on a highwire act. He feels like a true rebel for the first time in some five years.
"PER-"
"SENPAI!" A princess with a voice so familiar and comforting it feels like he's falling asleep on his feet calls his name.
"HOLY CRAP!" A boyish voice that his brain is struggling to not confuse with a cat yowling at him shouts.
He feels something like a chain snapping from strain in his head as a pair of deceptively athletic arms catch his collapsing body before it crumbles into the tile.
He tries to cough up name, but it's useless.
"Wh-Ren, what- what happened?!"
His eyes are hazy, like he's seeing through lenses painted with acrylics-but he *feels* everything.
The cat is fumbling around with his phone, trying to dial something with his little cat paws.
Cinderella is crying over his body, which briefly strikes him as ironic in some storybook way.
His persona. He tries to say it, *call it to the heavens so all can hear his will,* but it comes as incoherent gargling.
"Senpai, please stop, you're hurting yourself!"
He realizes she's holding his arms down so he can't grab at himself.
"Sumire," he tries to say instead. He feels a stirring inside himself, suddenly finding himself overwhelmingly grateful. He feels his entire being fill with unconditional love for a moment, then sorrow.
Someone else is over him for a brief moment. It looks exactly like her.
He feels a chain pull at his leg and drag him away.
----------
His eyes open, clear, unclouded, staring at velvet ceiling. It's like he's dragging himself out of bed to go to school after a long vacation, abiding by an old habit, and he sees a child and an old man with a long nose grinning at him.
"Trickster!" Igor greets, as if he were an innocent, doddering old fool.
"This was not my intention..." Lavenza follows, a solemn expression of remorse upon her face.
"..." He struggles to find the words.
"Your name... is Ren Amamiya, yes?"
He nods, too fatigued to question why he was even asked that.
"Then... I have come to inform you your... skills are needed once again."
"I... I think I gathered that." He feels like he was just forced out of the very deepest moment of sleep, body half-paralyzed as his motor neurons try to reconnect with his brain.
"Wait..." He tries to shake off his daze. "Hm...?"
"Your friends have fallen to a terrible fate, opposed to what they once fought so hard for."
He stares blankly, vision out of focus. He can't bring himself to do more. He feels a weight on his face again.
"I would ask you save them once more, that the cycle of hope continue to turn."
He approaches the locked door to his cell, steadying himself on the bars.
"You are not the first guest within the Velvet Room... And we would not dishonor your hardship and strife by having you as the last. But if life continues in this world as it does now... There will not be another. Your world will fail to heal."
"What are you saying?"
"Seek out those dearest comrades you once forged an unbreakable bond with... Reforge your connections, so that your rehabilitation was not all for naught."
"How...?" He shakes his head dismissively. "They all... They left. It's been too long. Sumire... She's the only one who stayed, and I don't want to interfere with her dream... Morgana too, of course, but where could he go anyway?"
The child in blue sighs a deep, painful breath.
"How have you become this way?" She asks, horrified, half-hiding her face behind her book.
"I don't know what to tell you."
He runs a finger down from his temple and down his jawline, a hand from his chin to his forehead.
Something feels wrong with his face, but his drained mind fails to place it.
"I'm 21..." He feels like he's wearing the face of someone older.
"Did you truly fight so hard just to become what you hate? Just to follow blindly after those who wrong you, a slave, unwilling to rebel?"
"...I couldn't tell you."
"You know the answer in your heart of hearts, Trickster. Please for the sake of the love others have given to you... For the hope I have in you. Find us once more."
His dream ends.
He's in a different bed, cold and unfamiliar, with strips of fabric over his eyes. He's alone in this bed, but a soft, familiar hand is holding onto his.
"I love you," he starts, unthinkingly. "-More than anything, anyone, ever. Unconditionally. You're the only person I've ever felt this way about. Do you know that?" He makes his best efforts to speak as clearly as possible, jaw pushing against the bandages. He feels his skin strain against him as he talks, like his body would rather he shut up.
He feels the subtle shift in the air as his closest companion for the last 5 years leaps out of her chair to squeeze him. He feels her wet face pressed into his shoulder, muffled lips moving to repeat the honorific that seemed to have shifted into something more akin to a *pet name* over time.
"I was having a nightmare," he half-lies. "I'm sorry."
"Of course I know...!" She manages to sound both both devastatingly sad and incredibly angry. He pictures her tearful, frustrated scowl like he's seeing it with his own two eyes. He'd rather Shido win his gambit and successfully finish him off than hear-*see,* no, *imagine,* her like that again, he thinks to himself.
Then again, that'd be breaking the promise they made.
He thinks about the last time he cried.
"I know what I said before, but can we talk..." His voice is breaking. It feels so unlike him to himself. "...About the Phantom Thieves, again?"