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“We have to win this—no matter what,” Akechi says. And then he strides out of Leblanc, easy and confident as always. The bell rings, the door slams shut, and he’s gone.
He didn’t look back, not even once.
Ren has no idea how he does it. This decision nearly killed him and he’s not even the one who’s probably going to die as a result of it. Or the result of reversing the decision that brought him back in the first place. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.
What does matter is Akechi Goro choosing to die for the sake of stupid Ren and the stupid rest of the stupid world, again.
Ren sighs. Shoves his hands in his pockets. Thinks about time lost, things unsaid, opportunities missed. Then he turns and walks up his creaky attic stairs, alone.
There’s no going back now.
“You’re here aren’t you?” Maruki says. Again. Maybe. There’s a smug lilt in his tone, one that Ren…
Didn’t notice before? Doesn’t remember? Dreamt up? Imagined? What the hell…
Maruki turns to face Leblanc’s door. It’s all going just the way it did before, somehow, so Ren doesn’t know why this would be any different. “Akechi-kun?” he calls out.
Akechi strolls in on cue with his coat and his scarf and his hair all fluffed up from being outside. Just like before. But, was it before?
Mona gasps, again. “Akechi?”
“You caught me,” Akechi says, again.
Ren sits, watches, thinks he’s going a little bit crazy. He’s been going a little bit crazy all day actually—having a sense of deja-vu so strong and pervasive that it can’t possibly be deja-vu, has to be something else. But what? Ren feels jumpy, on edge, his hackles raised in the same way as the very start of the year, when all his friends could talk about were their dead parents. And just like back then Ren is frozen solid. Mind stuck, running in circles.
The only thing that makes sense is that none of this makes any sense.
Akechi walks toward them, hesitantly. His eyes snap briefly to Ren’s and Ren looks away.
“Oh, it was just a hunch,” Maruki chuckles.
Akechi squints even harder at that, looks like he’s trying to kill Maruki with just the force of his gaze and the malice in his voice when he hisses quietly, “Was it really?”
Did he say that before?
God, Ren is getting a headache. The conversation continues without him, but Ren wasn’t really necessary the first time either, was he?
The grand reveal that Akechi is maybe, (maybe not), probably, actually dead isn’t so grand this time around, but it makes Ren feel just as miserable. Time lost, things unsaid, opportunities missed, etc, etc—here he is, hearing this again, sitting in this booth like an idiot when he should have been using the time and warning he was gifted (?) today to do literally anything other than exactly what he’d done the day before.
He could have called Akechi this morning, asked why he kept the truth to himself. Or, why he couldn’t just tell Ren what was really going on so they could solve this together, so they could confront this as a team instead of holding Ren hostage because of course there was no other choice but this one, why, why, why—
“What do you intend to do?” Akechi demands of Ren slowly, carefully. Every word is annunciated precisely, like he’d practiced this in front of a mirror a thousand times before, and his intense gaze bores a hole straight through Ren’s head and out the back of his skull. Again, again, he’s seen this all before, heard this all before. “Answer me.”
“We’re stopping Maruki,” Ren says, again. His voice doesn’t crack this time either, which is nice of it.
“We have to win this—no matter the cost.”
And then Akechi strides out of Leblanc, easy and confident as always. The bell rings, the door slams shut, and he’s gone.
He didn’t look back, not even once.
Okay… so now Ren is worried.
“Sorry for the last-minute visit,” Maruki says for a third time.
Ren just puts his face in his hands and says a quiet prayer to himself: “what the fuck.”
A day happening once makes sense. Once is how everything works. How time works. Should work. Once is how it worked before. And twice is weird, definitely weird. But weirder things have happened to Ren. Twice could be deja-vu, or an anomaly, or an incredibly accurate dream, or one of those premonition things Chihaya keeps talking about or, or, or.
(Ren had a lot of time to think of excuses yesterday and this morning.)
But three times? No, nope, days don’t happen three times. Not today, not this goddamn shithole of a day.
Not this freezing cold morning, this dull snowy evening. Not an earth-shatteringly boring day of school. Not Ryuji telling Ren his ass itches during lunch three days in a row. Not everyone, everyone acting exactly the same, acting like nothing is weird or wrong. Not the nausea and headaches and goddamn heart palpitations that can’t be coming from anywhere but the stress of the knowledge that at the end of this day he’ll have to choose to kill Akechi Goro. Again. Again.
Three times turns out to be the last straw, which is why he almost feels relieved when Akechi bursts into Leblanc, ten minutes and one Maruki monologue early, with a gun.
Almost.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Akechi shouts, barreling forward toward Ren and Maruki’s booth with a wild look in his eyes that—uh oh—Ren definitely recognizes but really, really wanted to forget.
Mona gasps, again. “Akechi?”
“What the fuck are you doing to me?” Akechi shouts again, close enough now that Ren can at least tell he’s pointing his gun at Maruki instead of Ren or Mona. And instead of trying to figure out why Akechi is doing this, or what Ren should do to stop him, Ren decides to waste a moment contemplating how silly it would be for Akechi to point a gun at a small cat.
“Akechi-kun,” Maruki says, annoyingly calm. He stays seated, raises his hands up in surrender. “If you’d allow me a moment to explain, I was just about to tell Ren-kun here that—”
“No!” Akechi jabs his gun forward—god, holy shit, that thing looks real—is that… Ren swallows, watches the artificial light of Leblanc glint off the barrel. Is that the gun? “I’m not talking about your fucking reality, I’m talking about this! Today!”
“Uh,” Ren says intelligently.
“Shut up!” Akechi barks at him immediately, doesn’t even spare him a glance.
Maruki furrows his brows, drops his hands the slightest bit. “Akechi-kun? What are you—”
And then Ren hears the loudest sound he’s ever heard, jumps what has to be three miles into the air from his seat and watches Mona do the same but better, a little black fluff ball floating above the table, his fur all puffed out.
By the time the ringing in his ears calms enough to be only as loud as the pounding of his heart, he realizes Maruki is gone. Not maimed, not dead on the table or on the floor or anything else. Just vanished.
Mona is the first out of the three of them to recover. He shakes out his head and his fur then turns his attention to Akechi—Akechi, with a gun, who seems to be completely frozen, standing in place with his arm still outstretched—and he screeches, “What are you doing, you nitwit!”
That snaps him out of it. “Fuck!” Akechi shouts, then kicks the front wall of the store with all the grace and poise of a tantrum-throwing three year-old.
And that’s when it finally hits him: Akechi did something different. Unprompted. Ren would know, he’s been through this day three times now and he hasn’t had the courage to contact Akechi in any one of those days. No—today Akechi did something totally, completely, entirely different, completely of his own volition.
“Akechi,” Ren says.
“Shut up.” Akechi snaps again, as dismissively as the first time. He stands with his gun resting against his hip, pinches the bridge of his nose and shuts his eyes tight. “Shut up, I need to think.”
“Akechi, have you been, uh,” Ren taps his foot nervously against the floor. Can’t bear to get his hopes up. “Have you been repeating today too?”
Akechi opens his eyes. Turns to Ren slowly. And Ren feels bad—he really, really shouldn’t be happy about this—but he can’t help but smile.
Day four happens after day three. Then day five. Day twenty, day thirty. After a while Ren stops trying very hard to keep track.
It’s a “time loop,” Akechi told him. Popular in science fiction, like most of the strange things they deal with in their day-to-day lives. He gave Ren a series of movies to watch as a form of research on the topic: The Precipice of Yesterday. Palm Desert. Woodchuck Day. And he acted like he’d looked them up on his own for the very same reason.
“Just for research, you see, I don’t usually care for science fiction.”
Ren very nicely does not point out that he watched Akechi carry around a bright blue lightsaber for an entire month.
Well, he doesn’t until day forty, at least.
Maruki is the most obvious culprit. He has the power, the motive, the innate nerdiness that would come up with a time loop as a means of convincing Ren to accept his reality.
But the problem is… Maruki does the same thing every day. And by “the same thing” Ren means the same thing. He and Akechi ran an experiment during a few of their evenings, timing Maruki’s sentences, his breathes, his pauses, and they were all exactly the same every single time.
“He might be a red herring,” Akechi says one day over lunch. They’re skipping school again—thrilling at the start, boring now that they know exactly how not to get caught. “Think about it. Maruki’s dream is realized tomorrow. He gains his full powers tomorrow. Why would he purposely delay the culmination of his work for so long?”
“Maybe he knows we’re going to win,” Ren says. He takes another sip of his milkshake—just as delicious as yesterday. Though he’s sure someday he’ll get sick of this too. “Maybe he knows his only shot is to convince us to accept his reality.”
“Perhaps,” Akechi hums. “Still. It’s worth exploring other possibilities, don’t you think? It’s not as if we’re short on time.” He cuts his nostalgia steak aggressively and grumbles, “Besides, I’m bored to death of hearing that insipid man talk.”
Mementos is normal. Maruki’s Palace is normal. Even the Phantom Thieves are normal—not that Ren thinks any of them would purposely trap him and Akechi in a time loop, if they could. Hell, Ryuji would probably be jealous.
Okay… not probably. Definitely. Ren may have told him one day. And Ryuji may have gone on an hour-long rant on why it’s not fair that poor Ren got stuck with “that damn detective” of all people.
Ren doesn’t think it’s been so bad.
The Velvet Room is probably their next best lead but even they aren’t very helpful. Between Yaldabaoth and Maruki they say their power is almost completely drained, and they reset just like everyone else.
“If what you say is true, whatever force manipulating your sense of time must be very powerful indeed,” Lavenza says, every single day that Ren asks her. “We will do what we can, but please do notify us if you discover anything else of note.”
So, useless.
After so many days with no new leads Ren would have expected to feel restless, desperate. He probably should be, any reasonable person would. But as time passes and he and Akechi investigate more of the city, together and apart, he finds he really doesn’t mind being “stuck” at all.
One day, after what has to be months of February 2nd’s, Ren grows bored of the investigation. They’ve sat at this table in this park a hundred times. They’ve brainstormed and tried a hundred ideas. He watches, still bored, so bored, as Akechi balls up a piece of paper he was using for even more brainstorming and places it on the table next to him. He wonders if Akechi is feeling the same.
Hm.
“Bet you can’t make that trash can from here,” Ren says, pointing at a can that is entirely too far away.
“Don’t be childish,” Akechi murmurs, scratching down something else on a new sheet of paper.
“Fine.” Ren pouts, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms.
Silence falls between them, except for the gentle whistling of the wind, the scratching of Akechi’s pen.
“I dare you,” Ren says.
Akechi looks up again. Stares at Ren like he’s the scum of the earth. Then turns around and whips his balled-up paper way too hard at the trash can, missing it completely and smacking a poor innocent woman square in the face instead.
And so, it begins.
“You’re here aren’t you?” Maruki turns to face Leblanc’s door. “Akechi-kun?”
A cheery jingle sounds by the door, and in walks Akechi Goro. Akechi Goro, with his coat and his scarf and his hair all fluffed up from being outside and his… eyepatch. His black eyepatch, strapped around the back of his head. He looks miserable.
Ren immediately bursts out laughing.
Mona gasps. “Akechi?” Then rubs his little eyes with his little paws and says, “uh, what happened to your eye?”
“I… it at…” Akechi mumbles.
“What?” says Maruki.
“What?” says Ren, joyfully cupping a hand to his ear.
“I lost it at sea!” Akechi screams, then rips the eyepatch off, throws it to the floor, and stomps on it. “There! Done! I win! Next turn is yours, Amamiya, and, ohoho,” Akechi cackles evilly, “I will make you regret this.”
He turns tail and strides right out the door, leaving the little black eyepatch strewn pathetically in the middle of Leblanc’s floor. The room is silent, save for Ren’s sad, useless attempts to choke back his laughter.
“I’m sorry,” Maruki says slowly, hesitantly. “What was that?”
“You’re here aren’t you?” Maruki turns to face Leblanc’s door. “Akechi-kun?”
Akechi Goro walks in on cue. Mona gasps, Maruki smirks. And Akechi strides forward, stops short of the table, and crosses his arms. Stares expectantly at Ren.
Ren really doesn’t want to do this. But, unfortunately, a dare is a dare. It’s showtime.
“No!” Ren screams, at the top of his lungs. Mona startles in his seat beside him, as Ren claws at his own face in what has to be extremely unconvincing fake-grief and then falls from his booth seat to the floor.
“Joker?” Mona yells down at him in concern. “Joker! What’s wrong?”
“No! No!” Ren yells again, grasps at Akechi’s ankles. Notices he’s wearing argyle-patterned socks before going back to shrieking as melodramatically as he can: “Not Akechi! Anyone but Akechi! Please!”
Now, this really seems more humiliating than pretending to be a pirate, not an equivalent exchange at all, but Ren was never one to turn down a challenge. The parts of Akechi that Ren can see, from his position all the way down on Leblanc’s exquisitely clean floor, look like he’s about to explode in laughter.
“My goodness,” Maruki exclaims, scrambling out of his booth seat to join Ren on the floor, like he’s going to try to help. “Ren, I really never imagined—I’m so sorry, but—”
“Nooooooo—!” Ren wails.
“Maybe it’s you,” Akechi says one day. Today is a lazy one—they’re in Ren’s attic, just laying on the floor, head to head with their feet pointing in opposite directions. Trying to plan out their next move, whatever that may be.
“Me?” Ren parrots back. He thinks he might see a pattern in the wood beam above his head. Like, a weird little smiley face. He’s never noticed that before. Probably. It’s getting hard to remember.
“We’ve eliminated many other possible variables. And you’re the only other one this is happening to. You have to admit that’s suspicious.”
“Hm,” Ren considers. It is suspicious, actually. Why is this happening to the two of them? Why only the two of them? “Maybe it is me. I’m kind of surprised you haven’t tried killing me yet.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Akechi sighs, like he’s discussing the weather. As if the weather weren’t the same every single day. “However, we can’t conclusively predict the effect of death in this time loop. I’d rather not be on my own in here, if possible.”
Ren blinks. Turns away from the ceiling pattern, stares openly at Akechi’s contemplative profile. “Really?”
They’ve been stuck together for a while but… he never imagined that if Akechi Goro had a choice between being alone or being with Ren, he would choose to be with Ren. He has chosen to be with Ren.
“Do you remember the research materials I gave you at the start of all this?” Akechi says, breezing right past Ren’s question. “In some of the time loops, there was an entity or event causing the loop. However, in others, there was a lesson that had to be learned.”
“A lesson? Like what?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Akechi murmurs hesitantly. “But I have a feeling… it might have something to do with you.”
With him. Hm. Ren goes back to staring at the ceiling.
“Well?” Akechi asks.
“I’m trying to think if all the weird things that have happened to me are more or less weird than this,” Ren says. Which makes Akechi laugh, which makes Ren return his ceiling beam’s lopsided little wooden smile.
“Favorite color?” Akechi asks.
“Red,” Ren says. “Easy.” He finishes readying the French press for Akechi’s coffee, then throws the question back. “What’s yours?”
“Hm,” Akechi says. He taps his gloved fingers against the counter for a second. Then two. Then three. Ren raises his eyebrows at him, and Akechi finally responds: “Pass.”
“Greatest fear?”
“Ugh,” Akechi scowls in distaste. “Pass.”
“You can’t pass,” Ren repeats for the thousandth time.
“You passed.”
“I did not pass,” Ren says. “I have never passed.” He closes the book he was reading from and places it on the table beside their dinner. The Couple’s Quiz Book, a find in the self-help section of Ren’s favorite Central Street bookstore, which has proven as vexing as it is unhelpful.
Though it is fun, in a sadistic sort of way, to watch Akechi struggle so hard when this whole thing was his idea in the first place.
Akechi grunts, growls, jabs at his sashimi so hard Ren thinks his chopsticks might go straight through the table. “I suppose… my greatest fear is… being ordinary.”
“Being ordinary?”
“Yes,” Akechi snaps. His face is starting to turn red, the same way it does every single time Akechi answers one of these questions. “I don’t want to be just, someone in a crowd. What’s the point of a life if nothing is done with it?”
“Hm,” Ren hums. He taps his own chopsticks against his plate. Says quietly, “You must be pretty miserable here, then.”
“What?”
“Nothing we do here matters. Everything is reset every day. That means there’s no point, isn’t there?”
But Akechi shakes his head. “You’re here. And I’m here. That matters. Besides,” Akechi continues, thankfully not looking up from his food while Ren feels his own face heat up in turn, “it’s still probable that tomorrow could be my last day alive, so I’m starting at a fairly low baseline. Saving reality, being caught in a time loop—you have to admit that neither of these things are ordinary.”
“Tell me your deepest, darkest secret.”
Ren snatches the book out of Akechi’s hands. “What the hell? That’s not a question in here.”
“No, it’s not.” Akechi says calmly. He picks at a loose thread on Ren’s sofa—not the first time he’s unraveled it, and it won’t be the last. “But we’ve gone through every other question, a thousand damn questions. If the universe or an entity or whatever is trying to teach us a lesson we’re not going to learn it via vapid books for childish couples who need a random author to tell them how to form a healthy relationship.”
Fine. He has a point. But Ren isn’t going down that easy. He stretches out, drapes himself across his side of the sofa and fits his head inside the crook of his arm. Comfy enough. “Well, you go first then. Since you asked. What’s your deepest darkest secret?”
Akechi frowns, a moment of hesitation before he stops picking at the thread, pulls himself up to sit straight and proper. “Fine. I’m committed to this plan, and so I will tell you.”
Oh god. A thousand nonsensical predictions float through his head—Akechi once killed a dog, Akechi is sexually aroused by sweater vests, Akechi is secretly his brother, Akechi—maybe this isn’t a good idea after all. Ren’s palms start to sweat.
“You know the whole deal with,” Akechi pauses. Looks away, waves a nervous hand in the air, “my father.”
Oh holy god. “Yeah, I remember that,” Ren says slowly.
“Well I… had this dream. Beyond the revenge. I… I wanted him to.” He watches as Akechi swallows hard, struggles for a moment, takes a deep breath, and Ren very very carefully does not jump to any early conclusions.
“I wanted him to spend time with me,” Akechi finally continues, “because he wanted to. I wanted him to do whatever—whatever the hell fathers do with their sons.” He screws up his face then, grimaces and laughs and refuses to look at Ren even once. “He was vile and evil and I hated every second I spent in his company but every single fucking time I left that man’s office all I wanted was for him to call me back in.”
Akechi’s fists are balled up so tightly they’re trembling. He seems like he’s done, refuses to say anything else on the matter for a while longer, at least, so Ren takes a chance. Reaches out, touches Akechi’s arm. “I think… that’s a normal thing to want,” he says quietly.
“Doesn’t mean it’s right,” Akechi whispers. “Or that I have to like it.” And his eyes are completely dry, his nose isn’t red and he hasn’t sniffed once, but Ren can’t help but feel that this, here, is the closest thing to crying that he’s ever seen from Akechi Goro.
“Yeah,” Ren says stupidly. Squeezes Akechi’s arm.
How does one respond when someone shares their deepest, darkest secret? Well…
“I wanted to kill them,” Ren blurts out. “Kamoshida, Madarame. Shido. All of them. Mona warned us before we started all this that we couldn’t be sure what would happen to Kamoshida when we stole his Treasure, and I didn’t care. I wanted him to die. Kamoshida stood up in front of us at that school assembly and said he was going to kill himself and I was glad.”
Ren closes his jaw with a snap, feels awkward and miserable past even the point of fidgeting—he just stares at the floor and waits. He thinks he might be gripping Akechi’s arm a bit too tight.
“Ah,” Akechi says.
“Yeah… lucky I have the others to keep me from… you know.”
To keep me from becoming like you, floats unsaid between them. Ren doesn’t mean it like that, not really, but it’s still there.
“Ren, I—”
“What’s your type?” Ren blurts out. And then immediately wishes to be killed on the spot.
“Eh?” Akechi blinks, completely thrown off. “My type?”
“Yeah. Like, what kind of girls do you like?” Akechi stares openly at Ren, and if Ren felt like he wanted to fall down dead before, well, now he could swan-dive straight into hell itself. “Sorry, Ryuji always asks that when he doesn’t know what else to say. I thought it would be a funny next question. Break the tension, you know?” he says quickly. “Sorry.”
“I don’t like girls,” Akechi responds in a totally normal, casual voice—the way someone says my eyes are blue or dogs are cute or my favorite color is pass, like Ren should have known this whole time.
Should he have?
Akechi sniffs then, a full minute after being the most vulnerable Ren has ever seen him, tries to play it off like it was a normal thing to do. “I suppose my type is… someone with a bit of mystery about them. Someone who has their own beliefs and ideas that don’t necessarily conform to mine,” Akechi continues, seemingly eager to latch onto Ren’s weird change of subject. “Someone who challenges me.”
Ren smiles, just to be an asshole. Wiggles his eyebrows to be an even bigger asshole.
Akechi scoffs at him. “Challenges me not in an irritating way, I mean.”
“I’m irritating?”
“The most.”
“Awesome,” Ren smiles again. Akechi goes back to picking at the loose thread, and a new idea occurs to him. “What if the time loop is trying to get us together?”
“I’ve considered that,” Akechi says, because of course he has. “Two people stuck together, with only each other to truly confide in. We’re bound to form some sort of attachment.” Akechi stops playing with the loose thread, fixes his intense gaze squarely on Ren. “It’s almost inevitable, really.”
Oh. Oh. Okay.
Okay, this is what they’re doing now. Okay. Yeah, Ren’s okay with that.
His perception of Akechi shifts, ever so slightly, and suddenly possibilities that he was previously too preoccupied to consider before are now open to him. “So… should we try…”
But Akechi looks so shocked at even the barest hint of a suggestion that Ren flies into a panic.
“Never mind, it was a stupid idea,” he backpedals as fast as he can.
“N-no! You’re right,” Akechi says, which makes Ren’s panic climb to new, dizzying heights. “We should exhaust all options. That’s a classic fairytale trope, a—” (His voice cracks. Ren pretends not to notice.) “—kiss to break the spell.”
“A kiss from a prince,” Ren jokes, then mentally slaps himself across the face for saying something as stupid as that.
Akechi doesn’t respond. Just sits there, straight-backed and proper on Ren’s sofa, in Ren’s attic, having just agreed that they should—they should kiss.
Ren’s mind is working overtime, his heart is racing as fast as it does when he pulls off heists. The trouble is: this time he has no plan. He has no idea what to do.
And it seems like Akechi doesn’t either.
The silence is unbearable. How the hell do people do this normally?
“Um,” Ren finally says. “How about you close your eyes?”
Akechi nods, short and curt, then does as Ren asked. He’s so tense in his shoulders and fists that Ren is pretty sure he would have reacted better if Ren had told him to go jump off a bridge instead, but at least he’s not staring at him anymore.
“Okay…” Ren says, a plan forming in his mind. He still can’t believe he’s about to do this. They’re about to do this. “Imagine you’re not stuck in a time loop and everything’s totally normal,” he says, and watches the corner of Akechi’s lip turn up ever so slightly. Alright, that’s good. “And there’s this guy—really hot, mysterious, challenges you in all the right ways. Not irritating.” Akechi chuckles softly, and Ren contemplates how his mouth can feel both too dry and too wet all at once, god, holy shit. “He's been… he’s been into you for a long time and you’ve been into him, even though you’re both pretty dense so it took you a long time to figure it out.”
Really dense, considering Ren is figuring it out even as he says it out loud.
“You’re sitting with him… alone together, and…” fuck, fuck, fuck it, now or never. Ren leans forward and inelegantly presses his lips against Akechi’s, squishes his nose against his cheek along the way.
The most surprising thing about kissing Akechi Goro, besides kissing Akechi Goro in the first place, is that he’s really warm. And soft. Warm and soft. He’s probably more things than that, but Ren’s brain is sort of on vacation right now.
Soft. Warm.
Akechi doesn’t pull away after a nanosecond like Ren thought he would. Doesn’t even pull away after a full second. Instead he starts moving his lips against Ren’s, a hand appears on the back of Ren’s neck, threading into his hair, and that feels… really, really nice. Really nice. Kissing Akechi.
A hundred February 2nd’s have passed, maybe even a thousand February 2nd’s by now. They should have been kissing a long time ago. They should have been kissing on all of them. They should have been kissing since the first one, that very first night when Ren was miserable and Akechi was miserable and, and—
And Akechi pushes Ren back and down, against the arm of his sofa. Ren takes a page out of his book and buried his hands in Akechi’s soft hair, soft and warm and good, so fucking good—
And then he’s gone.
Ren blinks, and Akechi is standing beside the sofa. His back to Ren, straightening his sweater vest. “Surely that must have done it,” he says in a rush, and then—he almost runs down the stairs.
“Akechi?” Ren scrambles off the sofa, trips over his own damn feet. “Wait!” By the time he makes it to the top of his stairs Leblanc’s door is slamming shut, and by the time he makes it outside Akechi is nowhere to be found.
“Akechi!”
So, the kiss didn’t do it.
On the morning of February 2nd, Amamiya Ren wakes up. He gives Mona a pat on the head. Turns toward his phone, shuts off his alarm. Texts Akechi, just like he did last night.
No response.
And there’s no response all day. Or the next day. Or the next.
Ren gives him ten days. Ten lonely, horrible, excruciatingly boring and miserable days before he decides Akechi has had long enough.
“Just tell me you’re okay, please,” Ren says in a voicemail on day eleven. Now it’s not just visions of a ruined friendship that mock him—it’s Akechi hurt, Akechi dead, Akechi trapped somewhere without anyone to help him.
He enlists Futaba to find out where Akechi lives. Visits the run-down apartment complex himself and leaves a note on his door.
A week after that he starts running there, as fast as he possibly can. He manages to cross town at record speeds, refining his route more and more and more, but he can never make it in time to catch Akechi when he leaves each morning.
Or maybe Akechi was never there in the first place.
He’s sitting with Maruki again tonight. He doesn’t really know why—it’s become sort of a routine. A comfort thing.
Maruki’s going to talk about his reality. He’s going to talk about Rumi. He’s going to tell Ren he could live in a world where he’s happy, and Ren is going to remember the one he had before he fucked it up with a kiss. And then Maruki is going to talk about Akechi, and how important they are to each other.
Maybe it’s not comfort, but self-flagellation.
“You’re here aren’t you?” Maruki turns to face Leblanc’s door. “Akechi-kun?”
The door doesn’t open. Akechi doesn’t walk in with his coat or his scarf or his hair all fluffed up from being outside, soft against Ren’s fingers.
He searches the city, but it’s a big city.
He asks Futaba to track down a few more possible locations, but none of them pan out.
He spends entire days in bed.
“I’m in love with Akechi Goro,” he tells Ann over lunch.
He timed it so she doesn’t spit-take her entire drink on him again, but she still shrieks, “What!?” at the top of her lungs.
“I’m in love with Akechi Goro,” he tells Maruki one evening.
Maruki’s here to break his heart, to dangle the life of his friend/rival/love/whatever over his head in exchange for Ren’s cooperation, but Ren got over that around the twelfth time he and Akechi pranked him.
(They’d spent all day making an elaborate cake with a calling card stuck on the top, icing in Akechi’s illegible handwriting that read “go fuck yourself.” It was one of Ren’s favorite days ever.)
Mona gasps, again. “Akechi?”
“I know,” Maruki says.
Which is a surprise. Ren doesn’t find a lot of surprises in this day anymore. “I don’t know what to do,” he says, hates the way his voice wobbles at the end.
“I know,” Maruki sighs. “I’m sorry. And I can’t tell you what to do either.” He leans forward, continues in his genuinely well-meaning, calm, therapist voice: “but you do understand—if you don’t accept my reality, there’s every chance that he’ll be gone. I’ve felt that pain, Ren, no one deserves that. You don’t deserve that.”
Ah, just kidding, Ren isn’t over it. He’s still furious with Maruki.
But accepting Maruki’s deal is still one of the only things they haven’t tried. A taboo, just the same as suicide. They don’t know if it could end the time loop, but that’s the thing—they don’t know.
Ren remembers how terrified Akechi looked those first two nights, desperately convincing Ren not to do it. He misses him so much it hurts.
“I can’t do that to him,” Ren chokes out, deciding again, again, again not to take the deal. “I can’t.”
There are things he can do, at least. He finds comfort in his friends. He spends days and weeks and months planning out the perfect day for each of them in turn, executing it until he’s satisfied that they really are happy. Even if Ren is the only one who will remember.
His favorite day out of all of them, surprisingly enough, is Yusuke’s. Ren takes him everywhere, tries everything, and somehow it always ends in disaster and chaos. By his tenth attempt he just leans into it, gives Yusuke every opportunity to be strange and confusing and ends up having the most fun he’s had in a long time.
“You’re here aren’t you?” Maruki turns to face Leblanc’s door. “Akechi-kun?”
Ren looks—he looks every single time.
The door remains closed.
“Ah, my mistake,” Maruki says, then laughs self-deprecatingly.
He meets new people in the city too—there millions of them, after all. Takes the time to get to know some of his other classmates, like the very cool guy who sat behind him all year and let him keep a cat in his desk and make lockpicks without question.
(Turns out the guy was just terrified of him and thought he’d beat him up if he told, which tracks.)
The regulars of Leblanc, the drunks at Crossroads, the jazz players in Kichijoji. They all have stories to tell, knowledge to impart. They’re all interesting in their own way. But when a new day comes around, none of them remember him.
And none of them are Akechi.
But even on February 2nd, nothing stays the same forever.
“You’re here aren’t you?” Maruki turns to face Leblanc’s door. “Akechi-kun?”
And Ren is on his feet before his brain fully comprehends what he’s seeing—he stands next to the booth he’s sat in night after night after night, braces himself against the table because this time, this time—
This time the door opened.
Mona gasps. “Akechi?”
“You caught me,” Akechi says quietly, his eyes never leaving Ren’s. He looks the same, he looks almost exactly the same as Ren remembered because of course he does—except for the expression on his face.
Ren has never seen it before.
He knew what he was going to say to Akechi when he saw him again. He’d run it over and over in his head a thousand times. He knew what he was going to say, which is weird because he can’t seem to remember it at all.
Maruki talks. Maruki leaves. Ren has seen it all before, heard it all before. He sends Mona off—though this time Mona seems halfway out the door already, and then, like no time passed at all, it’s him and Akechi alone. Again.
Akechi doesn’t say anything. Just stares at the wall behind Ren with his arms wrapped around himself, like he doesn’t want to be here at all.
“I missed you,” Ren says, when his words return. It isn’t what he’d planned to say, but he says it anyway. “I looked for you everywhere.”
Akechi doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.
“Akechi…”
Ren hasn’t been counting the days—he doesn’t have the mind or the sanity for that. But he’s pretty sure it’s been years. It’s felt like years.
He reaches out carefully, brushes the sleeve of Akechi’s coat. He doesn’t pull away. Finally looks at Ren again.
“You can call me Goro,” Akechi says. He places his hand on top of Ren’s, then explains the look on his face that Ren had never seen before, had never expected to see from Akechi, ever: “I’m sorry.”
Which is about all Ren can take. He meets Akechi’s apology with a hug, Akechi meets his hug with a kiss. Ren grabs him by the scarf and hauls him upstairs like he should have done on that very first night, or the night before that, or the goddamn night they met.
Ren can’t count the days anymore—hasn’t tried since they first began. But he can count surprises, discoveries, days that are worthy of remembering.
Today he discovers that Goro’s belt buckle is impossible to undo with shaking hands. Discovers that, surprisingly, out of the two of them it’s Goro who likes having his hair pulled. And discovers that Akechi Goro is just as beautiful between Ren’s knees as he is with Ren’s legs draped over his shoulders.
His mind and sense come back to him eventually—there are questions he needs to ask, answers he’s owed. It seems like Goro is hesitant to broach the topic on his own, which is silly because he has to know by now that everything they think or know or do will come out eventually, one way or another.
“Where were you?” he asks, later in the night when they’re laying peacefully together, catching their breaths.
Goro sighs. Squeezes Ren around the shoulders. “I was looking into what remains of Shido’s conspiracy. Names, evidence, anything I could find. Anything that could be useful to you if we ever get out of here.”
God, of course he was. Ren loves him, but he also hates him a little bit.
“I was careless. One of them—it was one of the stupid little researchers. I didn’t think he would have a gun.”
A gun—Ren sits up in concern, searches Goro’s face for any indicator that he’s—that he wasn’t—
Goro smiles sadly. Takes Ren’s hand, places it gently on his chest, right above his heart. Shit.
“I must have blocked it out—what really happened back in the engine room,” Goro continues quietly. “Some sort of trauma response, most likely. It doesn’t matter. But yesterday… it all came back, and it was the same. Exactly the same.”
“You died?” Ren whispers. Two questions in one.
Goro nods.
God damn it. Damn it. Damn it. “Damn it!” Ren shouts, pounds his fist against his shitty mattress. There’s some furious, miserable emotion buried in his throat, vibrating through the rest of his body as he sits up, buries his head in his hands. “You were out there, bleeding out because of some selfish piece of shit asshole, alone. Again!”
“Ren—”
“Don’t—” Ren snaps. “Don’t say anything,” because if he hears another word of it or has to think about it any longer he thinks he’s going to go mad.
Goro does what Ren asks, surprisingly. He just sits up too, presses his chest to Ren’s back, wraps his arms around him. And it shouldn’t make him feel better, doesn’t solve anything at all, but it does.
He feels like an asshole. Goro is the one who died. Twice. Shit.
“So this is it for you. February 3rd is your last day.”
“Yes,” Goro murmurs against his back.
Ren turns around, holds him back. Buries his face in the crook of his neck, revels in the warmth of him. The heart beating against his chest. He’s alive. He’s alive now, he’s alive today.
“What if this only ends if we accept Maruki’s deal?” Goro asks as he strokes Ren’s hair.
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s the only thing we haven’t tried. There’s no other escape. Not even death.” Goro pulls away, takes Ren’s face in his hands. “It could be this, every day, forever. For eternity. You’re really going to choose to reject Maruki’s reality every single day?”
Easy. Yes. Next question.
“What if it does work?” Ren throws back at him. “We’d be out of the loop and in something else, probably something worse. At least here you’re free to be yourself, do whatever you want. Be whoever you want. At least here you’re alive.”
The worst part of Goro being gone was Ren really didn’t know if he was still alive or not. If he’d done something stupid and gotten himself killed. (Like he had in fact done, so Ren feels kind of justified in worrying over it.) Hell, in his lower moments Ren imagined Goro being so distraught over revealing that he was a real, vulnerable human being in front of another person that he’d jumped off a building or something and left Ren here all alone, with no idea where he’d gone.
But now he knows Goro can’t die. So even if he wants to… wants to go their separate ways again… at least this time Ren knows he’ll be okay.
“Ren, I’m already dead,” Goro says softly, kisses him like he’s made of glass. “You… you understand I’ll never take his deal, right? I’ll keep you trapped here, forever. By giving me my freedom you’re forsaking your own.”
There were a few days at the start of all this, at the very beginning, when the thought of rejecting Maruki’s reality made him miserable. More miserable than he’d been in his entire life. He hated today because at the end of it he knew he’d have to choose Akechi Goro’s death, over and over again.
But now, by rejecting Maruki’s deal, he’s keeping Akechi Goro alive.
It’s like the weight of an entire world has been lifted off his back. Ren lets himself fall back on his bed, smiles openly and honestly, releases a breath he’s been holding since February 2nd the 1st.
“I’m in no hurry to end this,” he says. “I kind of like it here.” He turns to face Goro, smiles even wider. “We’re both free. Whatever you want to do, we can do it. Together. If… that’s what you want?”
Goro looks at him like Ren is the strangest, most confounding thing he’s ever seen, then pulls Ren back up to him and inelegantly mashes their faces together.
Ren finds himself spending entire days in bed once again, this time for entirely different, much better reasons.
Tokyo is a huge city, and thanks to one particular billionaire who keeps all his cards in a very pickpocketable wallet, they have infinite money. There are hotel rooms to rent, restaurants to try, theme parks to enjoy—and that’s only the city itself.
The beaches are cold and the mountains are colder but they’re pretty used to the cold by now. They even make it out of the country a few times, pinching and slapping each other to stay awake for as long as possible before their bodies inevitably force them to sleep and reset the day.
One February 2nd Goro turns to him and says: “I’m going to learn how to play the trumpet,” and then he does. So Ren decides he’ll learn to sing, and then he does.
They never wake up next to each other but they always fall asleep in the same bed. And for Ren, that’s more than enough.
On the morning of February 2nd, Amamiya Ren wakes up.
He gives Mona a pat on the head. Turns toward his phone, shuts off his alarm. Maneuvers his way out of bed, says the line that will ensure he’s left alone until the afternoon: “I’m going on an errand for Boss, I’ll be back later.”
And then he heists a jewelry store.
Okay, calling it a heist is a little dramatic. The place has surprisingly low security and an inattentive attendant, which means Ren can grab his treasure without incident every single day. He does have to go a little out of his way to stop at this one rather than the three others on the direct path to his destination, but Goro wanted a more classic yellow-gold band rather than a modern silver one. And who was Ren to tell him no?
He exits the store with the rings in his pocket and makes a sharp left into a nearby park. He doesn’t even need to check his watch to see that he’s still on time—the man who almost drops his coffee every morning almost drops his coffee at the same time as always, if not for a last-minute interception from Ren.
“Thanks, man!” the clumsy guy says, still cradling his phone in his ear as he walks away.
“You’re welcome,” Ren recites, then continues on his path.
At exactly 7:31 he reaches their table, just as he does every day, just as Goro takes his own seat. He slides Ren’s travel mug across their table, looking especially smug, and sips quietly at his own.
“You’re late,” Ren says, because usually Goro is already here when he arrives.
“Oh, I’m confident about this one.”
Is he? Ren raises his eyebrows in a silent challenge, then takes his mug and sips it. Sips it again. Considers. “You know what?” Goro freezes in anticipation, doesn’t move a muscle. “It’s a little too sweet.”
“Damn it,” Goro hisses.
He’s so cute when he’s frustrated. “It’s good, though,” Ren adds honestly, drinking more of his coffee as it cools. “Probably your best so far.”
“Thank you. Shall we?” Goro places his mug down on their table, fidgets with his gloves as he takes one off. “My hand feels strange. Isn’t it interesting how we can mentally grow used to something here, even if our bodies are reset every day?”
“Yes, dear,” Ren says as he slides Goro’s ring on his finger. Goro takes care of Ren’s, then they set up their chess board and start playing a game.
Then another, and another.
They’re about to break for lunch when Goro holds out a hand—stops Ren in his usual routine of packing up the board.
“I have something to tell you. A secret.”
“A secret?” Ren smiles.
“Yes.”
Goro pushes some errant chess pieces away, takes Ren’s hand across the table. He rubs his thumb along Ren’s ring, like he always does. “I’ve been counting the days ever since the first one. Since we started.”
Ren sucks in a breath. “How?”
“Diligence,” Goro smirks. “And this is day 36,524. Which makes today February 2nd, 2116.”
He knows they’ve been here a long time. He knows it was a long time. It felt like a long time. But hearing it out loud—one hundred years…
“Ren,” Goro murmurs, still rubbing his thumb against Ren’s ring, back and forth. “Those are 36,524 days you gave back to me. You chose every single one, and so I wanted to remember them. I just… wish I could give you your life back in return.”
“You have given me a life,” Ren says immediately, without hesitation. “One with you.”
Goro levels that face at him again, the one that used to be inscrutable before Ren deciphered what it meant. “I hated you from the moment I met you, you know,” Goro says. “You were loved by everyone, so I thought I could never be special to you. So I’ve… selfishly enjoyed that I’m the one you’re stuck with. You irritate me to death, but I think you’re finally mine.”
Ren barks out an astonished laugh. Laces their fingers together against the cold winds starting to blow. “You’re so stupid,” he says. “I was always yours.”
On the morning of February 2nd, Amamiya Ren wakes up.
He gives Mona a pat on the head—except. Except Mona isn’t there.
Mona isn’t there.
It’s just a sheet. An empty spot on the sheet.
Ren sits up, his heart racing in his ears. No. No, no, nononono—
His sheets rustle on his other side and then Goro is peering up at him. So asleep, and then, as suddenly as Ren felt it, so, so awake.
After one hundred years of February 2nd, it’s finally February 3rd. Ren reaches blindly, silently for Goro’s hand, intertwines their fingers to stop his own from shaking. Feels Goro’s thumb rub back and forth against Ren’s ring, like he always does.
Today is the day Goro dies.
After a hundred years of the same, different is jarring, almost impossible. But they get by. Ren and Goro are nothing if not adaptable. The Phantom Thieves meet and make preparations for their final heist and it’s like no time has passed at all. If any of them notice Ren holding Goro’s hand under the table they don’t say a word.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Ren whispers quietly, just to Goro, as the rest of the Thieves are packing up and leaving Leblanc, on their way to Odaiba.
Goro squeezes his hand. “You’ll figure it out.”
“I wish we had more time,” Ren says.
“Ren… we did.” Goro leans in to give him a gentle kiss, as soft as their first. Ren wants him to stay forever, but Goro was always stronger than him—he pulls away, smiles, gives him a single nod. “Thank you,” he says.
Then Goro strides forward, ahead of Ren as usual, out of Leblanc for the last time. Easy and confident as always. And he doesn’t look back, not even once.