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“Who are you?”
Goro stops fiddling with his scarf, the collar of his coat. He turns his head lazily on the brick wall against which he and his companion have posted up for the night—this night, another night, just like the one before and the one before that and the one before that—to find Ren staring straight at him. Just like the night before. And the one before that. And the one before that.
Some of Goro’s hair catches on the rough texture of the brick. He sighs, brushes it back into place. Which in turn makes it staticky from his gloves. Will he ever have peace?
Three more boisterous, half-drunk people join them in the line so, no.
Jazz Jin isn’t due to open for another ten minutes so, no.
Ren is still staring so, no.
“What?” Goro asks lazily.
“Is this who you really are?” Ren says immediately. Undeterred. Those big grey eyes—like he doesn’t even care what he looks like, like no one bothered to teach him any manners at all.
Goro rubs his forehead. Heaves out a sigh. His breath curls in front of him in clean white wisps, disappearing into… nothing.
“This isn’t a question you’ll allow me the grace of avoiding, is it?”
Ren smiles. The way Ren smiles at least, more in those expressive eyes than anything else. “Nope,” he says.
“Then, fine, I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Goro says, waves his hands in the air, wonders if he’ll ever stop being embarrassingly honest in front of his rival. Who knows who they are anyway? Knows for sure? Sakamoto, Takamaki, etcetera, with their one Persona and matching one-note personalities. Boring people. Simple people.
“I haven’t spent that much time thinking about it,” Goro adds quickly. “I have a few more pressing matters on my mind, you know.”
“What about the others? The Prince? Black Mask?”
“No. They weren’t me either.”
Ren nods, and he leaves it at that. Which is the worst thing he could have done.
It’s cold outside tonight. Colder than the night before, and the night before that. Cold enough that Goro’s coat isn’t quite enough to keep him warm. Cold enough that a few errant snowflakes fall daintily into Ren’s hair. Tiny, insignificant specks that vanish almost as soon as they touch him.
This time there’s a group in front of them debating loudly amongst themselves whether they want to stay here or try another club. As if they have a choice. As if their choice matters at all.
Goro wishes Jazz Jin would open. He wishes this night would end. He wishes this month would end.
“I think about Palaces sometimes,” Goro blurts out, because one of Ren’s little curls is pointed in Goro’s direction, reaching out toward him, and a snowflake just landed perfectly on the tip of it. “Each cognitive world matches a certain type of distortion, I’m sure you’ve noticed. Lust, wrath, pride, and so on. What would yours be, do you think?”
“Persona users can’t have Palaces.”
Goro chuckles and it might not even be fake. “Humor me,” he says.
He hasn’t quite forgiven him for yesterday yet, and if Ren gets to be difficult then Goro does as well. A question for a question.
Ren nods.
He takes a moment in the quiet cold of Kichijoji, sharp eyes distant.
Goro likes that Ren always takes him seriously. Even back when he was being fake and plastic Ren took him seriously.
“I think mine would be nothing,” Ren finally says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No, not that I wouldn’t have one,” Ren tugs his bright blue scarf up, burrows his chin inside. Disgustingly adorable, like a cold little bunny rabbit. “Just that sometimes… I have so many masks that sometimes it feels like there’s nothing behind them.” He pulls his scarf up even higher, adjusts his glasses. Huffs self-consciously when he says, muffled into the fabric of his scarf, “Feels pretentious when I say it out loud.”
“No, I understand,” Goro offers.
“I know you do.”
“Are you calling me pretentious?”
Ren’s eyes crinkle up at the corners, completely ruining what had to have been barely a half-second of normal conversation.
Tonight Goro is punishing Ren by paying some much-needed attention to the storefront across their usual wall which is… closed for the night.
There are no signs. No flyers. No pictures. No advertisements to read, which is awfully stupid on their part.
He wonders if that snowflake on Ren’s curl is still there, somewhere. Melted in, fused to the fiber.
He wonders for the thousandth time why the hell it takes Jazz Jin so damn long to open every night.
It was Ren who asked him here, Ren who keeps asking him here, Ren who keeps asking him strange, prying questions every fucking night like who are you. It’s still bothering Goro that Ren dropped that line of questioning, by the way—which means he either never cared about the answer after all, or that he thinks for some goddamn reason that Goro wants and/or needs to get away with not answering.
Either possibility is unacceptable.
So Goro is the one to cut through the silence once again—tells himself it’s more of an attack than a surrender. “Are you familiar with tarot?”
“Mm, a bit.”
“Well there’s a concept in tarot—the zero card, the first of what is known as the ‘Major Arcana.’ Most decks officially call this card Le Mat, or The Fool but I find the name misrepresents the idea,” Goro hums. “It’s a blank slate. Something which is in fact nothing, and can therefore hold infinite possibilities. That is who I imagine I am.”
Or, what he was. Infinite possibilities run out fairly quick when one is on a ticking clock.
Anyway, that’s done. Question answered, finally. As soon as Goro shuts his mouth he realizes he’s managed to go too far with it, again, of course, but lord knows the scruffy-haired endlessly-staring bundled-up busybody bunny rabbit next to him must be used to it by now.
“The Fool?” Ren repeats back at him, a wry smile tugging at his lips.
“Shut it.” Goro smiles back despite himself, then bites the inside of his own cheek. He brushes some hair away from his face for want of something to do that is not grinning like an idiot, tugs the collar of his coat away from his neck to get some air.
“I like it.” Ren holds his arms out wide, “Infinite possibilities. It’s very you. So if you had a Palace it would be… anything? Everything?”
“I can’t help but feel like you’re calling me pretentious again,” Goro grumbles. “‘Nothing’ isn’t so dissimilar to ‘everything.’ Lucky for us, neither are sins. No sin, no Palace.”
“I guess,” Ren hums. He sounds so happy about it.
Goro checks his watch. Jiggles it a little, because it must be broken.
Seven more minutes.
“You know… you went in way more Palaces than us,” Ren says the next night, with absolutely no tact whatsoever. “You really never saw any like ours?”
Ours. Like they share. Cohabitate. Put both their names down on the lease.
“No. Distortion can only come from—”
“The seven deadly sins, right. Like you said: lust, wrath,” Ren counts off on his fingers, “pride, envy… uh…”
“Gluttony, sloth, and greed,” Goro rattles off quickly for him. “Honestly, Joker, how did you get this far?”
Ren shrugs. “I always thought it was kinda stupid.”
“Stupid.” Stupid, Ren says.
“Well there’s way more than those seven things that can distort a person,” Ren explains, like it’s obvious. “Like we were talking about before, with our Palaces. Like… indifference. Emptiness, despair—it seems kind of weird to just limit it to the seven, doesn’t it? Maybe those were the only ones Yaldabaoth controlled…” Ren trails off, deep in thought, like he didn’t just upend Goro’s entire worldview.
Infinite possibilities. Endless distortions.
Goro has everything, has them all, collected his own fatal flaws like Ren collects Personas. He knows the seven by heart because the seven haunted him for years and now… now, very suddenly, there’s more than seven sins to trap him within this eternal hell. Of course there is. There’s complacency, repetition with the expectation of different results (there’s a word for that), and most of all being a fucking dumbass because once again Goro has managed to underestimate his rival.
He’s supposed to be saying something now. Supposed to be firing back. Ren is waiting.
Goro has nothing.
Why had he never questioned it? What the hell is he doing?
“I need a walk,” Goro says. He kicks off the wall, strides past the closed shop across the way, the other people in line. Tells himself this is more of a tactical retreat than a surrender.
“Wait—Akechi!” Ren shouts behind him before appearing again by Goro’s side, hurrying to keep in step with him. “We’re not gonna get a table if—”
“We’ve been waiting for hours for that goddamn hole to open,” Goro says, turning down a random street.
“We were waiting for five minutes.” Ren blinks at him. “Don’t you… do you not want to go to the jazz club?”
That stops him in his tracks, causing both Ren and a woman with a large shopping bag to nearly barrel into his back. He doesn’t give a shit, shouts to the air in front of him. “Why would you think I want—you invited me!”
“Yeah? I thought you liked it.”
Unbelievable. “Ren. I am so fucking sick of jazz.”
Goro can see his grimace even beneath his scarf, as Ren burrows down even deeper inside than he ever has before, somehow. “Oh,” he says, small and dejected.
Now, Goro would love to use this chance to get high and mighty about Ren’s failure to select a quality evening activity. Would love nothing more. But he can see the gears turning behind those eyes—clever eyes, Ren has always been exactly too clever for Goro’s taste which means Ren is about to figure out that the next question he should ask is: If you’re so sick of jazz, why did you still come when I asked?
In fact, why did you come with me every single fucking time I asked, you lonely gay corpse?
He has to change the subject. Goro faces Ren dead on and adjusts his own misbehaving scarf. “Alright. Joker, Amamiya Ren, Palace Ruler of Nothing—whoever you are. There are infinite possibilities within emptiness, and none of them are the fucking jazz club. So, what do you want to do?”
“What… do I want to do?” Ren repeats.
“Yes. What do you want to do?”
He stares at Goro like no one’s ever asked him that and—god, what if no one has ever asked him?
“Right now?”
“Yes,” Goro sneers. “You’re clearly dead-set on wasting my time so I demand you at least waste it on something worthy. What do you want to do?”
So Ren shuffles his feet. Looks anywhere but at Goro. Twists one of his curls between his fingers. Takes a deep breath. Opens his mouth. Closes it.
“For the love of—”
“IwanttogotoMementos,” Ren interrupts, rushed out in an uncharacteristically shaky jumble of sounds. “I want to go to Mementos. But to the higher levels, with all the really pathetic Shadows.”
Certainly not what Goro expected. Kind of strange. He’s finding it hard to figure out Ren’s angle here.
“Those things aren’t good for anything but target practice,” Goro says.
“Yeah.”
“It’ll be like… shooting rats with a rocket launcher.”
“Yeah,” Ren says, bouncing on the balls of his feet a little. He pulls down that enormous blue scarf of his and Joker grins, wicked and wild.
Oh.
Huh.
“Inferno!” Joker shouts, ripping off his mask with a cocky flourish.
Pride, Goro lists off in his head.
A column of pure, white-hot flame manifests in front of them, completely eclipsing a Slime and towering all the way to the blood-red ceiling of Mementos. Goro can feel the heat from here—swirling, raging, just barely under control. Wrath.
When it dissipates the Slime is gone. Obliterated. Not even ashes remain.
“All yours, Crow!” Joker high-fives Goro amiably and pointing at his target: a tiny, shivering Pixie, fluttering frozen in place.
So, maybe Joker has good ideas sometimes. “Laevateinn!” Goro calls out, summoning Loki and letting completely loose, without fear of consequence or retribution. Greed.
Loki’s sword swings down with thundering finality, and Joker and Crow move on to their next “battle.”
They circle the top floor of Mementos for a while, picking fights and doing dumb shit like competing to see who can kick the loose junk they come across the farthest. All the while Goro feels… strange. Manic. Like all his limbs are buzzing. Like a laugh is about to burst free from his chest at any moment.
He’s not sure if he likes it.
Gluttony: after their fifth pass (or sixth… Goro seems to have lost count, which is also strange) around the level, Joker raises his hand for them to stop. He shouts in triumph, wordlessly at the ceiling, and slicks his hair away from his face with a careless hand.
One touch and his hair looks perfect. Goro hates him. Envy, he thinks, and nothing else.
Joker grins. “Now what?”
“Hm?”
“I’ve had enough, it’s your turn,” Joker laughs, still catching his breath. He flips his dagger between his fingers. “Crow, Akechi Goro, Le Mat, whoever you are. What do you want to do?”
What does he—what does he want to do? This was supposed to be about Ren. Goro isn’t prepared for this, is kicking himself because he certainly should have been prepared for this, had plenty of time to come up with something while he was running around dicing up Shadows a toddler could kill. Sloth.
What the hell does he want to do? There are infinite possibilities. He can’t possibly narrow down his choices from everything, from nothing.
He’s. He’s not used to this sort of freedom. And this taste of it, manufactured and temporary, is all the more bitter for it.
The usual suspects flash to the forefront of his mind:
I want to get all of this over with.
I want you to leave me alone.
I want you to…
I want…
I want—
Wrath. Envy. Sloth, gluttony, greed-pride-lu—
“I’m not giving you any help,” Joker says.
“I don’t need your fucking help, I’m thinking.”
Joker chuckles, goes back to flipping his dagger. Up and down, side to side, round and round, easily, like he was born with a dagger in his hand. Goro wants to snatch it away from him. Wants to turn Joker’s attention from it and back into him, where it belongs. Wants to go back in time and study a useless skill like dagger-flipping so he can be the one flaunting his abilities like a cocky little shit instead.
Everything always comes so easily to Ren, even this new game of theirs. Goro has to come up with something adequate, something equivalent, something better, has to rise to Ren’s challenge because otherwise—
“Crow,” Joker interrupts, again. Goro snaps his gaze away from the dagger. “Don’t think about me. Think about what you want.”
Fuck, he lost his train of thought.
“If your intention was to continue not helping you’re succeeding,” Goro snaps. And then, before he can think better of it, blurts out “I want to watch the new episode of Featherman Ultra.”
And then immediately thinks better of it. “I mean—”
“You what?” Joker laughs.
Fuck. “This arc—it’s actually quite good,” he explains quickly. “The episode aired last night, I already have it saved on my computer. I’ve been looking forward to it.”
Is oversharing a sin? A distortion? One he can add to the now-infinite list? Sure, why the hell not.
But Joker just says, “Okay, let’s go,” and grabs Goro by the claw, starts dragging him out of Mementos.
“What?” Goro stumbles along, his heart taking residence somewhere near the top of his throat. “You don’t have to come with me!” he says quickly, catching his feet underneath him.
“You did my thing with me,” Ren fires back easily. It’s not until they’re out of Mementos and halfway down Central Street that Ren stops short, right in the middle of the street. “Wait. Where do you even live?”
Well, it all goes just fine.
Goro has a minor heart attack at the thought of a Phantom Thief knowing where he sleeps at night, but it’s only Ren and Ren isn’t a real threat to Goro so that’s fine. Then has another minor heart attack when he realizes a human being besides him is stepping into his apartment but again, it’s only Ren and Goro doesn’t care what Ren thinks of him and Ren lives in a fucking dusty attic so that’s fine too.
He has too much else to occupy his mind anyway—has to sum up six seasons and a movie along with all the better theories so Ren doesn’t watch this one out of context episode and decide Goro is some sort of pathetic loser.
Thank god he remembered to take out the trash last night.
Goro sets up his laptop on his kotatsu. Still feels strange. Finishes his explanation of the plot best he can. Still manic. Scoots over so Ren has room to sit beside him and watch. Hovers over the button to press play, and feels so ridiculous about this entire situation that a laugh might burst free from his chest at any moment.
He just explained the entire show, has been waiting to watch this episode all week, and suddenly can’t recall one single thing about it.
But then the episode starts and he remembers, so that’s fine too.
“Shit. That was actually good.”
It was good. It was so good that Goro is going to ignore that ‘actually’ comment. “I told you. I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.” He shuts the laptop, makes a quick mental note to follow up on a few of the better theories later tonight. Turns to Ren, and—
Holy god, fuck—
—tempers his surprise at how close he is.
“Well I believe it’s your turn once again,” Goro says quickly, in a completely normal tone of voice.
“Okay,” Ren says.
And that’s it. Goro can see his individual eyelashes. Why the hell is he sitting so close?
Goro swallows. Hours pass.
He’s really fucking hot under this kotatsu, actually. Amamiya Ren is in Goro’s apartment and it’s too quiet and and it’s too hot and Goro wants him out and never wants to see him or his stupid eyelashes again.
“Ren?” he prompts again.
Ren blinks. Nods to himself, short and firm. “Okay. Akechi. What we were talking about the other day—distortions and Palaces and sins and stuff. I was researching it and found another one that I liked. It’s called ‘sinning against the Holy Ghost.’”
Ren seems to be awfully sure of himself so Goro returns his nod, sends his mind racing ahead to figure out where this could be going. “Rejecting god—for which you seem to have a particular propensity. Of course you would like it.”
“Yeah, oops,” Ren chuckles. He looks to the side, starts playing with one his curls—a move he only makes when he’s nervous. “Anyway, it’s less about rejecting god and more that it’s a sin to reject yourself. Who you are, what you want. Some people call it the eternal sin, worse than all the others.”
Okay.
“To be so simple and have such easy wants. I suppose you and I are damned then? Nothing and everything?” Goro riffs, to buy himself more time to think, think, think.
Ren is nervous, Ren has eyelashes, Ren has a fever and is going to die shortly because his body heat is burning at the same temperature as the sun—well, Goro must be exhausted or something because apparently all he can do is make amateur, surface-level observations.
“I asked you what you wanted to do next. Unless this conversation is it?”
“No, it’s not,” Ren says quietly. He lets go of his curl, peers up at Goro beneath those eyelashes. Intense. Dangerous. Danger. “I’m tired of feeling like no one. So I’m going to—uh,” he twitches forward abortively.
Crowds into Goro’s space, burning.
For the first time in his life Goro can’t react quick enough to save himself, fend off the threat—he just sits, frozen, as plastic bumps against his cheek, heated skin presses against skin.
Goro is so slow that he doesn’t realize what’s happened until Ren pulls away.
“Sorry—ah,” Ren laughs, higher and shorter than normal. He’s smiling wide, all lopsided, touching his fingers to his lips. “That’s who I am. That’s what I wanted.”
“That’s… what you wanted,” Goro repeats, slowly. “Why?”
Ren shrugs.
Did Ren just—did Amamiya Ren just kiss him?
“You’re… you’re stupid,” Goro says, like he can’t still feel Ren lingering on his mouth. “You—our alliance is temporary. I’m not your friend.”
“I don’t kiss my friends.”
“Right. Of course.” Goro wets his lips, then immediately regrets doing so. “Right.”
He isn’t overly fond of the smug face Ren is making right now. In fact, he doesn’t like it at all. “So, now—now I get to do what I what. Want. What I want.”
“Yes.”
“Alright. I have a…” he swallows past his dry throat. “I have another video I wanted to watch.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Ren says, “cool.”
And Ren just sits there, still smiling like he’s won some sort of grand prize instead of wasting his opportunity to do whatever he wanted on—well, not that a kiss with Goro would be a waste, of course. Even if Goro wasn’t given a fair chance to respond. Clearly, no matter the quality, Ren is happy with his decision since he won’t stop grinning like a lunatic.
Ren kissed him.
Why the fuck is he smiling so much? Goro feels—he feels absolutely awful. Doesn’t he? His heart is pounding so loud he’s sure even his neighbors can hear it. His head is even more clouded than before. He can’t think at all with Ren staring at him like this, always the endless staring.
I’m tired of feeling like no one—that’s what Ren had said, wasn’t it? So here he is, learning, growing, changing, evolving, like always. Creating new sins out of thin air and ridding himself of them just as easily.
Who are you? What do you want?
The decision is his own. Completely, entirely his own. He knows who he is, and he knows what he wants.
Everything.
So Goro surges forward and he kisses Ren back.