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Ren’s first memory was a little silly, but it was a good one. He treasured it, revisited it often—a day at the beach with his parents, a fall, a little scrape on his arm, and the fierce determination that comes along the ever-growing self-awareness of a three year-old: this time, I will not cry.
And he didn’t. And his father smiled at him. Told him how big and strong and brave he was. And then Ren ran off and returned to terrorizing the beach, he was sure, though it was at that point his memory failed him.
He spent his days in a quiet town known mostly for its abundant soybean farms, one particularly good ramen shop, and being Ren’s hometown. He enjoyed late walks at night, secure in the knowledge that nothing bad had ever happened there, and nothing ever would.
And nothing ever did.
After he turned sixteen, after many days and days
and days and days
and days and days,
Ren’s parents sat him down and explained that thanks to their work taking them overseas, Ren would be transferring schools for the year.
“This will be good for you,” his father said.
“It will be different, but it will make you happy,” his mother said.
Tokyo, without them. All on his own. It was a big city—huge, enormous, unlike anything Ren had ever seen. Terrifying but in an exciting sort of way, a way that Ren felt when he read stories of heroes and villains and destiny, but this time it was not real.
And it was fine that he was on his own, because he had a family friend to stay with. He met Sojiro, Wakaba, Futaba—
He met Ryuji, Ann, Sumire—
His bag is too light.
He met Makoto, Yusuke, Haru—
He met—
Student Council President Akechi Goro had no business bothering to even look at a random second-year transfer student like Ren. No business giving him shit in the halls, asking him completely random questions about justice and truth and the nature of reality. And yet he did. And he got on Ren’s nerves. Raised his hackles. He pissed Ren off, basically.
“Done with our little talks already, Amamiya-kun? I didn’t think you’d back down so easily.”
But Ren couldn’t stay away either.
“Considering this is you we’re talking about, I’m sure you won’t refuse my offer.”
And… maybe he liked how Akechi pissed him off.
“If you have something to say to me then say it, Amamiya—don’t hold back!”
So when they stayed late after school together for debate club, and when they ended up taking the train home together, and when Akechi hopped off the train to see Ren off at his stop, just the two of them, all alone, it felt like an old story again, like heroes and villains and destiny that Akechi said—
I hate you.
—and Ren quietly responded, “yeah, you can kiss me.”
So Goro Akechi cupped Ren’s cheek, his bare hand trembling in a way that was so human, so intimate, that Ren would always remember that more than the kiss itself. But he would remember the next one.
And the next.
And the next.
Days and days slide past on his calendar.
He goes to school. He does his homework. He wastes time with his friends. He kisses Goro. He attends clubs and sports and goes to sleep a little too late every night.
“It’s tomorrow isn’t it?”
“This year flew by.”
“I’ll miss you.”
So Ren said—
This isn’t real.
—and Goro quietly responded, “I love you too.”
Ren waved to him through his train window. Goro waved back. He had that little smirk on his face, the one that says—maybe I won’t be alright, maybe I will. Either way, you’ll always be guessing. You’ll never truly know me. And Ren loves that too.
“Welcome home!”
Days and days
“Welcome to your last, first day of high school.”
and days and days
“Missed me that much, did you, Ren?”
and days and days.
School and homework and
friends and
Goro
and clubs and sports.
Sleeping
Something is wrong.
and waking.
Ren graduated high school.
Ren graduated college.
Days and days.
It’s not real.
“You’re not my sun. Or my stars. Or my angel or sweetheart or babe or the light of my fucking life,” Goro said, his natural charisma shining on even this stage. Ryuji chuckled behind Ren, along with the rest of their audience, and Ren kept his eyes fixed on Goro. But that was nothing new.
“Amamiya Ren,” Goro said, slipping his ring on Ren’s finger. “You’re everything. That’s all. You’re everything, to me.”
And Ren didn’t cry. But it was close.
But it’s not real.
Haru and Ryuji’s second child was just as adorable as their first—rosy cheeks, tiny nose, tinier fingers. Curled in the crook of Haru’s arm, he slept quietly even while Ryuji chased his daughter around the house, screams and giggles echoing from the both of them.
Ren had never wanted anything more in his life. When he glanced to his side and saw the look on Goro’s face, he knew he wasn’t alone.
Something is wrong.
This isn’t real.
Ren pressed a button to end the call, set his phone down on the kitchen table. He stared at the swirling, patterned wood grain—unchanged from an hour ago. From before. There’s a little water stain by his hand, a crumb that managed to escape his and Goro’s cleaning the night before. He’s going to be a father.
The hand on his arm seized, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and that’s all the warning Ren had before Goro burst into tears.
Something is wrong.
“I can’t believe it,” Goro cried, “I can’t believe it.” Ren pulled him close, kissed his forehead, ran his fingers through his hair, and felt so—
This isn’t real!
“I can’t believe it,” Goro said again, his voice pitched up now in—in terror. The same fear crawled suddenly across Ren’s skin, gripped his pounding heart. His pounding head. Something was wrong.
“Ren? Something is wrong. Ren, something about this is—this world is—”
Colors flashed across Ren’s vision—blacks and reds and whites, blinding white obscured his view of Goro. Goro, his husband, their home—the water stain on the table, the—
“Ren? Ren!?”
Ren gripped the sides of his head, right above his ears, and ripped—
—blinding white.
Ren falls forward, tumbles—explodes in a mess of limbs and pounding heart out of the chair he was stuck in. A helmet clatters to the ground, right beside his hand. The floor, the walls, the ceiling, all spinning, all blinding white.
His lungs are already full, fit to bursting, but Ren gasps for breath anyway. Someone has their hands on him—his clothes are wrong, there’s something on his face—
“Joker!”
Joker.
Ah.
Horror settles in his bones like an old friend.
Everything is different now, nothing will ever be the same and he doesn’t know what’s happening but he does know already that he’ll never recover from this. But it’s alright. He’s used to that. He has his mask to hide behind.
Goro fell somewhere to Ren’s left—he’s got a little crowd of Thieves around him too, hovering awkwardly as he holds his head in his hands and retches. Ren stumbles to his feet, ignores the exclamations, questions, concerns.
They all look so young.
Goro looks so young. Eyes bright and clear, baby fat still visible in his cheeks. The sight makes Ren nostalgic for… for—
He doesn’t touch him—Goro doesn’t like to be touched without warning. Ren just slides into his eyeline, so he knows he’s there.
“Goro,” he says quietly.
“Don’t call me that,” Goro spits out—harsh and wild. Ren shuts his mouth, and Goro breathes once, twice, three times. The Phantom Thieves are quiet.
“Don’t call me that,” Goro repeats. He punches the floor with a heavily armored, clawed fist, screams, “FUCK!”
“What happened?” Futaba asks behind them.
Ren knows what happened.
There’s a room—in his counselor’s Palace, in the Metaverse. They were making their way toward Maruki’s Treasure, but their way into his garden was blocked by a shimmering wall of light.
There were people all around them, still around them, sitting in chairs just like Ren and Goro’s, with helmets on just like theirs. Two open seats, no other ideas, they thought—why not try it?
That first memory of his was false. Just like the rest of it. Generated by a machine, fueled Maruki’s delusional ideas of happiness. Ren wasn’t at the beach with his family, he didn’t scrape his arm—he broke it, and his father shouted at him to shut up and stop crying.
Goro doesn’t look at him, stands up on shaking legs.
“Nothing. It wasn’t real,” Ren says, standing as well and putting his hands in his pockets. Joker is muscle memory, this Persona returning to him as easily as his other self fades away. “How long were we out?”
“Close to a minute,” Makoto answers.
Thirty-five years in one minute.
“It looks like… whatever that was, it didn’t work. We’ll have to find another way past this door,” she continues, because it was only one minute for her. “Are you two alright to move on? We can break here for today if—”
“No,” Goro says, crossing his arms. “Let’s move on.”
They do. It was only one minute.
And the more Ren runs, crawls, jumps, fights—the more his other life slips away from him. Like was all a dream, but it wasn’t. He made choices, he felt joy and loss and—and he experienced every single damn one of those days (and days and days). He can’t remember most of them now, can barely hold on to any of it, no matter how hard he tries, but.
But it was real.
A moment of weakness catches him near the end of the day, trailing the group with Goro beside him. He asks quietly—because this is his best friend, his confidant, the man he spent almost twenty years with, the man he married and loved: “Crow?”
Goro looks at him.
“Our daughter—what were we going to name her?”
Too young and so world weary and failed by everyone in this world but especially Ren, Goro’s face falls behind his mask.
“I can’t remember,” Ren swallows past his dry throat. His eyes sting, but he doesn’t cry. “I keep trying, but I can’t—”
“Let it go, Ren,” Goro says. “It was nothing. It wasn’t real.”
He sets his face forward, marches past Ren and catches up with the others.
All Ren wants to do is catch up with him, shake him, scream that it was real—the world was wrong but they were still them and Ren knows Goro, knows him and loves him, knew and loved him even before he put that damned helmet on and lived a life by his side.
They finish up the day. Ren returns to his attic—not home, but Morgana is back, and that helps.
They stop Maruki, close off the Metaverse for good.
It’s not until a few months later, after days and days and days pass by, alone and quiet, that Ren uncovers Akechi Goro’s obituary in an old newspaper. It comes to him then, out of the blue. A half-remembered dream.
They were going to name her Fumiyo, after Goro’s mother.
Her crib was brand-new, wooden and sleek and so sturdy that Ren had joked it was the safest place in their house. They had drawers and boxes full of hand-me-down clothes and toys from Haru and Ryuji, and of course a thousand other brand-new ones because they just couldn’t help themselves whenever they were out shopping. Goro painted the walls of her room three different colors before he was satisfied, and even then he’d sometimes come home from work with more paint chips.
Ren holds the newspaper to his chest, the smiling image of his husband crumpled, distorted, ripped where his fingers clutch the fragile page too tight. But he doesn’t cry.