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It's been weird since Renzou came back. Konekomaru ends up feeling an intruder in his own room while Renzou lounges with a magazine in hand, legs crossed and stretched out on the bed.
There's things he can't reconcile about Shima these days. What he sees and remembers versus what he now knows to be true. Silence between them is tense and palpable, but Renzou hasn’t offered any explanations besides that half-assed one from two days ago when he came back.
Konekomaru feels his frown deepen, grip taut on his pen but homework long forgotten as he watches and waits for… something.
"You've been staring a while, Neko," Renzou says without looking at him, eyes still trained on the pages of the magazine. A corner of his mouth tilts up lazily, "you can ask whatever, but I can't guarantee I'll answer with the truth."
Then he closes the magazine and turns to face Konekomaru, cheek propped up on his hand, smiling his sedated little smile, and he's so himself that Konekomaru wants to scream.
All the questions seem stupid at this point. He does not know what he could ask that would let him understand Shima.
"Well?" Renzou asks, cocking an eyebrow up, “I know you’re curious.”
"I… I don't even know where to start," Konekomaru answers truthfully. Renzou laughs, such a feel-good sound. Or at least it should be.
“I hope you don’t take it too personally that you never knew,” Renzou says, “I know how much you care about all that honesty and communication stuff. My dad, Juuzou and Kinzou only know because they were there when Sir Pheles offered me the spot. If I had it my way, no one would have known at all.”
Konekomaru feels his face darken. He’s not sure if the emotion digging claws into his heart is anger or despair.
"I blew my cover before I had the greenlight for it," Renzou offers, like talking about his side job as a spy is nothing, "Homare was so mad at me."
That must be his supervisor, Konekomaru thinks. Was it one of the Illuminati members they’d seen? He still knows so little about this organisation that… Renzou’s been part of for over a year.
"What's it like?" Konekomaru asks. He's seeing Shima through frosted glass - there's a familiar shape but the details have all fallen away. He fears that once the glass clears he won’t recognise the person standing there.
Renzou grins, "Exhilarating. Arguably the most fun I've had in my life. They even took me on a mission once, and had me fight using Yamantaka," his smile falters, nose crinkling briefly before it smooths back out, “- which kind of sucked, actually, because I hit my head when I passed out. But still, it was kind of a cool trip.”
Yamantaka, Renzou's terrifying high level familiar, right. The one nobody knew about. Another family secret.
What had Konekomaru even known about this boy before, he wonders? Just his name and face and nothing more?
He grinds his teeth, trying to keep all the accusations and rage someplace safe. Renzou will not hesitate to leave a confrontation. Renzou will climb right out the window when he deems this conversation too much of a hassle. He’s seen him leave in the middle of a dressing down from Yaozou, disappearing into whatever hiding spots he knows in the grounds, to not be found for a full day despite the whole Shima house looking. And it had gotten him in more trouble than he started with, but Renzou had still done it.
Konekomaru needs to keep his cool and try to make answers out of the words Renzou says to him.
"It… makes you happy?" Konekomaru asks, but then he's scared that the answer might be 'yes, much more than everything you could have given me here.'
Renzou's smile turns mysterious and he shrugs, "It's nice. Not sure ‘happy’ is how I’d describe myself, but I mean, sure, why not. It makes me happy." As he says this, the corners of his eyes relax, so that he’s only smiling with his mouth. Renzou-wise, that can be deemed a sad expression.
Konekomaru swallows down a wave of emotion. Shima is a contradiction wearing the face of a childhood friend, and the more he says, the less everything makes sense.
Maybe he should change the subject. “So, uh, you’ve been observing us?”
Renzou’s eyes widen, eerily attentive, “Mostly Izumo and Rin and… Yukio,” he licks his lips and squints, and Konekomaru gets the off-feeling that Renzou thinks he’s said too much, ”...recently, but yeah. I’ve been watching everyone, kind of.”
Konekomaru swallows loudly, “And what do you see?”
Renzou seems taken aback by the question. His smile widens and his eyes shine - it looks more anxious than it does excited. “What do I see?” his voice is a little fragile.
Konekomaru nods, “Yeah, like- for instance, me. When you observe - what do you look at?” He holds Shima’s gaze for long enough that his face stops looking all squishy against the fist propping him up and starts looking more like an act at being nonchalant. He notices now, the slight widening of his half-mast eyes, pupils black as hell as they bore into Konekomaru’s face.
“What I see…” Renzou muses, light as anything, but it’s not the same voice in which he always speaks. There’s a weight there - and Konekomaru’s unsure how long he’d ignored little signs like these. Just the year? Or longer? When had he stopped seeing Renzou when he looked at him?
Renzou rights himself, coming to a sitting position with his knees pulled up. He tilts his head, lips pursing as he thinks. It’s a serious enough expression that Konekomaru fears he’ll regret asking.
“Loyal and smart,” Renzou starts, face carefully blank, and words that would usually sound like a compliment end up sounding like a statistic, “clever enough to pose a problem to the enemy, cool headed and logical enough to take point in difficult situations.”
Konekomaru feels a chill. ‘Shima, just what do you see me as?’ he wants to ask, ‘am I your enemy or your friend? How long have you thought about people this way?’
Renzou’s eyes narrow, tongue poking through his cheek as the cogs in his head spin. Thinking. Konekomaru used to joke that Shima never thinks enough. Now he’s apprehensive of just how much thinking the other boy does.
“Not very independent. Sticks to a group, bad for solo work. Training to be an aria adds to that. Lacks assertiveness, prefers to follow unless pushed to lead,” Renzou says, and it’s jarring how he can say these things in such a calm voice, “Bon is your biggest weakness, and you already know that, but you’d bend for any of your friends. You’re also bad at hand-to-hand, so it’s dangerous for you to-”
“That’s enough,” Konekomaru cuts him off. His heart is racing like a running horse, there are goosebumps all over his body and he feels like there are hives breaking out across the back of his neck.
Renzou closes his mouth and stares blankly for a moment before grinning lazily - expression the same as always but so very wrong now - and shrugging. “Guess you don’t want to hear what I have to say about your deepest, darkest fears?”
It’s supposed to be a joke, Konekomaru recognizes, but it falls horrible and flat. “I really don’t,” he mumbles. He feels his eyes sting and a knot form in his throat.
‘Who are you?’ he wants to shout, ‘what happened to the Shima I knew?’ But he keeps the questions in. It would be in bad taste to ask now, wouldn’t it? Maybe the Shima he knew never existed at all.
“C’mon, Neko, don’t look at me like I’m so scary,” Renzou teases, grins wider and raises his eyebrows, “did I freak you out?”
“I don’t know,” Konekomaru says, and he really doesn’t, “I just - it’s so weird. I think I don’t know you anymore.”
Renzou’s eyebrows pinch minutely, then his face smoothes out. Something that makes Konekomaru’s skin crawl twinkles in his eyes. “You never did, Neko,” his voice is soft and painfully kind, “But don’t worry! No one else did either.” He laughs weakly, then sighs. Renzou looks away then, and suddenly Konekomaru feels like he can breathe again.
“Including me,” Renzou mumbles quietly enough that Konekomaru barely catches it, eyes trained on something far, far away.
Konekomaru wants to say something. He wants to beg Shima to explain. He wants to stand up, walk over and envelop him in a hug. He wants to scream and shake the boy until he stops talking in circles, in fucking riddles.
No words come out, and he can’t force himself to move.
“But,” Renzou says, turning to face Konekomaru again with an easy smile, “Isn’t it more fun this way?”
“It’s not,” Konekomaru says before he realises he’s saying it. His voice sounds a little pathetic. Sad.
Something in Renzou’s expression snaps.
And then he laughs, throwing his head back, shoulders shaking with great guffaws. It’s been a long while since Konekomaru saw him laugh like this.
Renzou doesn’t seem happy. But he’s laughing and laughing and laughing, until he’s gasping for air; until he curls over his lap and hugs tenderly at his stomach where it must be cramping from the laughter. There are tears in his squeezed-shut eyes, running down in streams over his blotchy red cheeks.
“It - hah hah - it really - hah - isn’t - !” he chokes out between peals of laughter that sound more and more like sobs the longer he goes on, “No-one - hah - no one knows! Hah! Sometimes - hah - sometimes I feel like I don’t even exist-!” He brings a hand up to wipe at his face.
It’s like looking at an infected wound. For the first time in a long time, Renzou isn’t acting. Isn’t hiding. And divested of his many shells, Renzou is anything but nonchalant and aloof.
He’s hurting so very very badly, and Konekomaru can’t even comfort him in a way that matters, because he still doesn’t understand. Any words he could say would sound hollow, or worse, come out wrong and hurt the boy further.
Konekomaru balls his hands into fists over his pants so tightly the knuckles turn white and the bones in his palms creak.
Looking at Renzou like this, he wants to cry too.