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This, Makoto thought wryly, might have just been my crowning act of idiocy in a long, long series of idiotic acts.
Natural disasters? Makoto knew them well – as Student Council President, top-scorer in Shujin, and, as of two days and one physics-defying-bank-floating-in-the-sky ago, a Phantom Thief-to-be, it would be more shocking if she didn’t. Ahead of her first-year final exams, she’d pored over her case study notes on Typhoon Vera obsessively – so much so that its total number of displaced casualties, 1,596,855, had become more intrinsic to her addled brain than her phone number ever could be. She still kept all her 179 color-coded post-its and counting – one for each major earthquake in Japan in the past half-decade – as gruesome trophies of war from her second-year midterms.
So why then, in Makoto’s infinite geographical wisdom, did she think that not a single natural disaster could ever hope to rival the destructive potency of the one happening beneath her own feet – the one she was now bringing to the alleyways of Yongen-Jaya, promising to devastate everything within its epicenter of Leblanc?
Don’t overdramatize this, Makoto chastised herself. It’s just a cup of coffee. I’m just going to get coffee.
…If you can’t even convince yourself, who else can you hope to convince, my confused Priestess? There it was again – that smug, self-satisfied voice, far too dignified under Makoto’s blatant lack of dignity; the voice of rebellion Makoto now knew as “Johanna”.
No, really. Makoto tried again – grasping to the last shreds of her confidence like a mountain-climber would a severing rope. Sis comes here often, and Goro Akechi’s food blog gave Leblanc a glowing review too, although I’m of the opinion that his article’s two-page appendix on the subtleties of Jamaican Blue Mountain and their inherent superiority to Japanese coffee beans wasn’t entirely necessary… that pretentious bastard.
She sighed. What was the point of pretending anymore? Loath as she was to give Johanna the inflated vainglory she no doubt would receive, Makoto hadn’t come to Leblanc for Sis, for Akechi, or even for the coffee. No, she was here to see Amamiya-kun – Ren, the traitorous little voice in her mind amended…
…and apologize to him, she reminded herself decisively. Yes; after the catastrophic series of events that had seen her stick her nose into, crash and burn against, and finally – through sheer, undeserved, inexplicable luck – actively participate in Phantom Thievery, she’d felt that Ren-kun was overdue an apology.
When Principal Kobayakawa had roped her into investigating the Phantom Thieves more than a month ago, with his simpering grin and his condescending half-smile that always screamed “you’re going to do what I’m told, and I know it” – when he had puppeted her strings into a collision course with the Phantom Thieves, and Ren-kun, and his unflappable smirk that betrayed nothing yet everything – she had known she would find conflict with the Phantom Thieves, one way or another. But of all the ways she’d imagined all this would end – and she’d imagined a lot, too, because Mr. Ushimaru was a terrible lecturer and she had an overactive imagination – somehow the bare concept of being friends had never registered in her mind. Orchestrating their eventual arrest and defeat at the hands of the justice system, she could imagine; becoming grudging allies for the sake of justice also seemed possible; but even the possibility of an alien spaceship from whichever home-planet had produced a smirk as devilish as Ren-kun’s abducting the Phantom Thieves back to their home planet seemed more likely than friendship. Allies, yes; but friends? That implied a degree of openness and good-will towards each other, and to Makoto, that seemed unconscionable.
It wasn’t as if Makoto wasn’t used to friends. After all, she had Sis, who she had always looked up to, and admired, and who always carried the weight of the world… and she had… and…
Okay, so maybe Makoto wasn’t used to friends. It was a disarmingly dismal thought; the fact that she’d always had people to look up to, to take commands from, and always had people to look down towards, to help from a position of authority as Student Council President – I didn’t want it to be like that, though, I just wanted to help, Makoto thought – but never friends, never equals. What did that mean for her? What did that mean for her burgeoning relationship with the Phantom Thieves, as wrong-footed and nipped in the bud, yet as admittedly promising and hopeful as it was?
Makoto had no idea. But friends implied a degree of trust that she couldn’t hope to reach without her apology for the suffering she’d caused them; and, try as she might, she couldn’t banish the need to express some measure of guilt – small as it would be compared to how she actually felt – to Ren-kun most especially. So as she trudged along the alleyways of Yongen-Jaya towards run-down Leblanc, she would ignore the fault-lines that threatened to break out beneath her trembling feet; she would brush past the raging typhoon summoned by her nervous gait. She would summon the prowess of her Niijima bloodline – her sister was a public prosecutor, for hell’s sake – and prosecute her apology, if he would choose to accept it.
Amamiya-kun, please excuse me for intruding. I would like to apologize for my actions towards the group, and to you, in the past few weeks. I understand that you’ve accepted me as part of your team, but my hostility towards all of you is something that I truly regret, and I hope we can move past it together. I would like to get to know you all better, and be on more friendly terms with all of you in the future.
She’d repeated these words as a mantra to herself, once before bed yesterday, once on the train to Aoyama-Itchome early in the morning, countless times through her nerve-addled brain during the school day like lyrics from a song she couldn’t shake off. She’d typed it out once, twice, three times in a Word document, and copied it in a text message to herself for good measure, just so she could look at it at school (with Ren-kun’s name conveniently blotted out, to save her from the rapidly growing embarrassment that threatened to envelop her face). But it wasn’t enough; for every step she took, a word would threaten to fall out of her memory’s dregs like water droplets falling on Leblanc’s roof. Oh. She had arrived already. What do I do, what do I do, I can’t go in yet, I don’t remember –
She steeled herself – back straight as wood, rigidly propelled by a confidence she didn’t truly feel. Two fingers reached towards the doorbell; two fingers missed, slipped onto the doorhandle, and settled half-heartedly into an improvised knock instead.
Footsteps.
“Sojiro-san,” the amused voice that had haunted Makoto since early May chuckled, opening the glass door with a carefree swoosh, “if you’ve come back just to ask me to deep-clean the toilet bowl again, I’m afraid the answer’s still a –“
Makoto scarcely had time to un-shrivel her ears from the contorted grimace she had twisted them into before she saw Ren Amamiya, apron blown ajar across the doorway, face gawking with a dumbstruck expression she’d thought him incapable of wearing.
But not the Ren Amamiya she had known; not at all.
He was still recognizable to her, of course – no question about that, with his haphazardly-strewn bed of hair that looked as if it had just returned from an involuntary muck-around-the-park amidst the shrub mazes that littered Kaneshiro’s Bank, and the glasses that seemed as integral to his features as Makoto’s hairband was to her. But gone were the harsh, bleeding-mascara lines that circled his eyes in the Metaverse; gone was the tailcoat, the red gloves, the supernatural, larger-than-life manifestation of his psyche that had ravaged Shadows with near-sadistic glee.
His apple-green apron was at least three sizes too big for him, and he was dragging its tails on the floor like a blushing bride’s wedding dress. Someone had taken a marker and scribbled the words “KISS THE CHEF” with astonishing haste across its torso, bolded it, and underlined it twice. Three dirt-strewn clawmarks etched themselves across the bottom of the apron; clearly the site of a brutally violent struggle that had left him decisively defeated. Evidently, he’d placed too much faith in his eyesight; his glasses were brimming with fog like a sauna on overdrive, and if Makoto suspected this had something to do with a tumultuous bonk swiftly followed by a high-pitched, inelegant whine that she’d heard a few seconds ago, she would at least have enough social graces to remain silent.
Standing there as he did – unassuming, awkward, looking primed to steal last spoonful of curry from the pantry instead of stealing hearts – Makoto distantly wondered how her misguided head had managed to paint Ren in adversarial colors just a week past. In fact, she wondered how she could have ever seen Ren as an adversary at all.
“N-Niijima-sen – um, I mean, Makoto?” Ren broke the silence, voice filled with sudden trembling luster, bony fingers brushing against one another with frantic energy. His forearms hugged themselves instinctively around the scribbled writing on his apron – a second too late – and if Makoto didn’t know better, if it wasn’t for Leblanc’s red headrails hanging over their heads, she’d have thought the dim warmth on his cheeks a blush. Was he nervous?
No, it couldn’t be, Makoto thought; and when Ren spoke again, it was as if nothing had ever happened. “I must say, I’ve seen quite a few customers come and go to our little cafe over the months – but none quite as esteemed as you, Miss President. Or should I call you Queen?”
Makoto smiled despite herself. She didn’t think she’d seen nearly enough of Ren to even scratch the surface, but this was the Ren she knew; the same Ren that had left her wondering whether the Phantom Thieves derived their psionic powers from cat-whispering when he had inexplicably interrupted their conversation on the Shujin rooftop, turned one-eighty-degrees towards his cat, whispered the words “something witty” without moving a single eyebrow, then tried to convince her that “he’s an essential member of the team” in the span of forty seconds.
“Ren-kun, I told you already, just Makoto’s fine. And let’s keep any royal titles to a minimum for the time being.”
“For the time being, hmm? Sounds intriguing,” – he had returned to tinkering on whatever divine fountain of flavors Leblanc’s kitchen was unleashing, and though Makoto’s back was turned, she could hear the twinkle in his eyes – “but before that, how about I invite you in for a cup of coffee – and maybe some curry, if you’re so inclined? Leblanc is famed for its top-notch service and hospitality, you know.”
“I don’t see anyone else working in this place. Aren’t you the only source of hospitality around?” Makoto’s eyes narrowed.
“Precisely,” Ren nodded solemnly, “and I’ll have you know that my dazzling coffee-brewing more than makes up for my complete lack of charm as a barista. So why don’t you take a seat?”
If Makoto was in her right mind, her shrill inner-dialogue would’ve already scolded her into oblivion for such an unforgivable lapse in her judgment: she was here to apologize with dignified, proper guilt, not partake in agreeable conversation over curry and Blue Mountain. But the curry smelled too good to resist, the Blue Mountain too intoxicating, and – okay, fine – Leblanc’s resident raven-haired barista too undeniable in his insistent ways; and all in all, Makoto was finding her state of right-mindedness more and more elusive by the moment.
“U-uhm, are you sure? I wouldn’t want to impose –“, she started; but in the blink of an eye, Ren had already hopped past the counter and pulled out two seats, motioning towards her, and she found only the strength to nod gracelessly.
And just like that – footsteps imbued with what mystifying excitement, Makoto didn’t know – Ren’s back was already turned, fingers swiveling across the interlocking notches of the coffee pot with surprising dexterity. Framed by soft light chasing wispy tendrils of shimmering steam, his face looked almost gentle; a world-weary soul whose weariness had departed amidst the warm coffee haze. The look suited him, she decided.
“So,” Ren returned with two billowing mugs in hand, “not that I mind your company, of course, but what brings you to our little hole-in-the-wall? Kaneshiro hasn’t been bothering you again, has he?”
“Kaneshiro?” Makoto questioned, momentarily confused. Then it hit her: Kaneshiro – the Mafia – the Phantom Thieves – she was a Phantom Thief – she had come to apologize to the Phantom Thieves – to Ren. “N-no, it isn’t about that at all. I… um, I came here to apologize.”
“Apologize?” Ren stammered. “Makoto, it’s okay, you don’t have to – I mean, you already told the team –“
“But I need to –“
“No hard feelings from any of us – “
“I need to apologize to you, Ren!”
She could’ve slapped herself for her insolence. Unstoppable force meets immovable object, indeed… Through her vast reservoirs of sheer awkwardness, she had evidently accomplished what ten thousand beings of crystallized malevolence dwelling within the Metaverse could not: pierce Joker’s visage into stunned silence.
“Oh,” and suddenly it was as if her words had torn off Joker’s mask and bled gentle vulnerability into Ren’s eyes, “um, okay! I – I don’t think you really need to, at all, but I can promise to hear you out, at least?”
The uncomfortable silence had continued unabated despite his words, and Makoto grasped desperately into the dark to fill it - something, anything to delay the words she’d prepared for days to say. “Uh – where’s Morgana? Is he still around, Ren-kun?”
“Huh?” Ren stared at her, blatantly jarred by the sudden paradigm shift. “Oh, he’s still here. I had to put him under house arrest for trying to wrestle me into getting my beauty sleep – “ (“I’m gonna put you under bed arrest, Joker”, Makoto hears a muffled voice grumble from who-knows-where) – “but nothing of value was lost from his disappearance, I assure you.” Then the roguish undercurrents that always seemed to lurk beneath his surface returned once more, and he smirked. “Don’t tell me he’s distracting your interest away, Makoto? Figures. Sojiro always told me he’d be the one getting all the cute g – “
Okay, that settled it. He was officially blushing now, all apple-red cheeks and embarrassed half-lidded eyes, and it couldn’t have come at a more frustrating moment; try as she might, she couldn’t fathom what the last thing he said could’ve been before his bizarre, self-flagellating act of censorship. “Sorry, what?”
“Um, nothing,” he replied, rubbing the midriff of his neck up and down so much she thought he’d bruise – cute, her rather unwelcome head informs her. “M–My bad for derailing the conversation like that. I’d really like to listen to what you had to say before, Makoto.”
How strange, she thought. If his utterly uncharacteristic self-consciousness was a ploy to lure her into getting comfortable, then he was succeeding unquestionably; before she knew it, she’d finally tottered head-first out of the silence. “I’d like to apologize again for causing the team so much trouble over the past few weeks – and, um, to you especially. I realize you’ve all graciously accepted me onto the Phantom Thieves, but I had to resort to shamelessly blackmailing all of you to do it. I’m so sorry for – “
“– Yusuke tried to paint Ann nude.”
“What!?”
She could tell the shock and horror that had begun ballooning uncontrollably across her face was just the right blend of sustenance for the sadistic flesh-eating devil wearing Ren’s skin; jolts of amusement were already stirring beneath his pupils, like crackling electricity waiting to latch onto its next victim – her.
“Oh no, not like that,” Ren waved dismissively in that perfectly unintentional way which seemed to imply his previous sentence was anything but unintentional, “it’s nothing weird. Just to be clear, I think Yusuke would probably hug a scallop before he’d ever surrender to the physical charms of a fellow human being,“ – Makoto snorted; from what she saw, he did seem the sort – “and maybe I’m being a bit callous with sharing this, but he tried to blackmail us into having Ann pose nude for him. Even told us he’d call the police and everything. So unless, I dunno, you start feeling the sudden urge to expose Ryuji’s underwear repertoire to all of Shujin –“
“Ren – “
“Tempting, I know –“
“Ren!” she shouted, half annoyed at his prodigious ability to derail the conversation in preposterous ways, half amused despite her best efforts. “I’ll have you know my imagination has managed to not run rampant on that front yet. And I do believe we were in the middle of something before your curious little tangent?”
“Of course,” he nodded with a sober gravity that, thankfully, appeared only to be half teasing.
“I’m sorry for treating the team with such… such undeserved malice over the past weeks – in particular, you and Ann. The way I repeatedly confronted you – tried to antagonize you, even… it’s not something I can be proud of, ever. I stalked you all over Shibuya – “
“– not all over Shibuya,” Ren interjected with annoyingly charming blitheness. “In fact – oh my –“, he slaps his hand across his wide-open lips theatrically, as if somehow a frog had leaped into his gaping maw mid-sentence and he was loath to part with it, “– it seems like you had a few blind-spots here or there. The Shujin boy’s bathroom, for example – how scandalous –“
“What–how–you went there intentionally?!?” Makoto was sure the positively withering glare she was sending Ren’s way was potent enough to petrify even Medusa. No, this was no good; she was getting flustered, disarmed one too many times by his carefree irreverence. She would drag back her last modicum of cool, collected dignity by the jugular, no matter how bloodied and bruised, no matter how much dignity seemed to her as if an archaeological relic buried beneath time-worn sands. He, the leader of the Phantom Thieves, was the last person she could show weakness to – her newfound collaborator, ally, friend…?
“I stalked you all over Shibuya,” she repeated, hoping the shuddering unease she felt hadn’t fully gripped her voice by the throat, “and I’m sure it made you feel extremely uncomfortable – “
“Yeah, but you were really bad at it, so it doesn’t count – “
“Be that as it may,” she stresses with renewed vehemence, “the fact remains that I… followed you around. Without your consent… everywhere. With no respect for your privacy whatsoever, and for no other reason than currying favor with the Principal! I’m so sorry, Ren…”
“You’re right,” Ren concedes finally, though she rather misliked the purposeful glint in his eyes – if this was Ren Amamiya conceding gracefully in defeat, she wasn’t sure the world would ever be ready for Ren Amamiya emboldened and gloating in glorious victory. “It was pretty bad. I should’ve probably filed a complaint with the Student Council President – oh, wait – “
“Ren!” Though it would surely be unfruitful to the extreme, she had half a mind to slam her half-closed fist onto Leblanc’s polished counter – give him a taste of the Niijima family technique, finally startle him past all the humor and the charm. “I don’t understand. Why are you brushing past this like nothing happened at all? I behaved terribly, did terrible things towards all of you – “
“– Makoto, please – “
“And then,” words were flooding desperately out of her mouth now, like a raging fire she’d stoked but couldn’t put out, like a mudslide gathering momentum, rushing irrevocably past the barricades; Ren seemed to sense it, too, and for once there was silence behind his eyes. “And then,” she could hear her own voice starting again beneath the flood, a tightly-wound coil of controlled hysteria: “the moment I was provoked the slightest bit, the moment Ann dared to poke the tiniest hole into all my pettiness and my – my – insignificance! – I rushed right into Kaneshiro’s dirty little hands, all out of some stubborn sense of unworthiness, of – of – foolishly stubborn pride, put you all in danger, put you at risk just like that all because I was so stupid and so useless and – and… – “
She was heaving now; deep, dry, gasping breaths, a gulping animal wounded and spent. First comes the realization, cold and clear, echoing from the deepest recesses of her mind: such weakness, Makoto. He’s never going to see you the same way ever again. Then comes shame; a writhing, shriveled thing, a red-hot fireball tightly contorted. It scorches her earlobes on its way out, brands her brow, suffocates her hollowed cheeks, drowns her in asthmatic sobs until her last incoherently-mumbled whispers fade –
“Makoto,” Ren’s voice is painstakingly, undeservedly, gentle; a lifeline through the murky pulsating haze. “Makoto.”
She sees it before she hears it; his slender fingertips nudging themselves forward towards hers, unconscious and unbidden, light as air. It only dawns on her at this – her crowning moment of irresponsible vulnerability – how intimate of a setting they’ve found themselves in: hands close enough to form valleys against one another in the idyllic comfort of Leblanc, his own home sweet hideaway from Tokyo, the inexplicable tenderness on his face matching the shame coloring her own. Briefly, faster than consciousness itself, she wonders what would happen if she reached out to close the hair’s-width between them; if his hands promised the same warm comfort as his voice, if they felt soft beneath the scarlet gloves he donned –
“Makoto,” he turns to her now, voice as sincere and as self-conscious as she’s ever heard it, eyes brimming with an intensity that made her avert her gaze; he pulls her out of her solemn reverie, and she’s glad for it, too, because she doubts she could manage much beyond indecipherable apologies anymore. “Um, where do I begin? First, I – I’m sorry for not taking this – you – more seriously earlier. I guess that’s a bad habit of mine – a really, really bad habit –“ he rubs his exposed neck again, struck suddenly with a pang of – nervousness? – “but Makoto, whoever managed to drill into your head this weird idea that you’re useless, that – that’s simply not true. I –“
Makoto sees him stumbling, biting back words at the tip of his tongue, questions left gladly – to her – unperturbed; a silence filled with anticipation, almost like he’s daring her to put his words to the sword. She doesn’t.
“I don’t,” he continues with emphatic quietude, “I don’t think you’re useless. None of us do. I know it sounds hard to believe right now, but we’re really, really glad to have you on the team.“ She quirks a brow, half thankful, half disbelieving. “Can I be honest with something? We – the Phantom Thieves – we don’t know what we’re doing. It might be hard to see from a distance, but I’m just – we’re just – a couple of lost kids with some big grudges. I never expected – we never – I just didn’t want to see Ann or Ryuji or Yusuke suffering anymore, you know? We don’t have a code of honor, or a philosophy, or anything like that. We’re just – here, and trying our hardest to break free of – I don’t even know – and to hell with thinking about anything beyond that…”
“But I don’t know what I’m doing either, Ren!“ At last Makoto finds her voice, mousy and hoarse, summoned from within solely to barge in and refute his trust in her, to confess her imprudent weakness. “All these times I was confronting you, it was always – I didn’t know what to do either, I was just pretending to, it wasn’t real and I just didn’t want to look stupid –“
Something settles into Ren’s eyes; for a moment she thinks it’s pity – pooled within his eyes, no doubt commiserating how pathetic she was – and she almost asks him to take it back; she didn’t need it. But then it shifts, and she realizes whatever is there is not pity; it is compassion.
“Um, I didn’t realize,” Ren continues, “I mean – maybe sometimes – but Makoto, we had no idea what we wanted to do as a team after this, you know? We’d taken care of our own big, big grudges, but until you came along and told us, with conviction, that you wanted to take down a mafia boss, until you – charged in there and brought us straight to him – “
“Stupidly,” she interjects.
“Well, maybe a little bit,” he admits. “But stupidly brave, mainly. Until you came in – until you showed us that maybe there were problems a lot bigger than just our own little scores to settle – we really didn’t understand. And Makoto,” his brow arcs consolingly, “please don’t – don’t think that you’re worthless. Please don’t. When you went in there just – just trying to hand yourself over – it just… I dunno, maybe… maybe someone hasn’t managed to tell you this yet, but you are worth something. To – to us, if not to – to someone else. That’s why I felt so,” he swallows viscerally, “so scared…“ Ren trails off with that soft, soft voice, and her heart bleeds – with gratefulness, with bewilderment, with warmth, with what else she did not know. How could he feel that way, towards a total stranger; worse than a stranger; an enemy, a villain?
“And besides,” he recovers quickly, humored twinkle back in his eyes, “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but between me, Ryuji, Ann, Yusuke, and the one surviving braincell we all share, the Phantom Thieves’ intellectual prospects aren’t looking too bright. Not Morgana, though, he’s an academic powerhouse – “ (she hears a muffled “shuck my ahss, Joker” from the heavens, or something resembling it) “– so on behalf of all of us, we welcome you in as the brains of the team. Or did you call it something else?”
“I wasn’t – that was just pretending too!” She mumbles quickly, too far gone to rationalize the cornucopia of secrets she had bared to Ren. “But Ren,” she manages at last, “Why? Why would you feel this way – why would you care so much about a stranger, or – or even worse than a stranger?”
He flushes bright-red again, unbidden; evidently there was something in her phrasing that had seemed disagreeable to him, but she could not tell for the life of her. “Hmm,” he thinks, chin nervously nested in-between fingers in a way that told her he already had an answer. “I guess it’s because…”
“Because?” Makoto questioned expectantly – a little too expectantly.
“Because… I can understand you,” he finally decides. “Or, at least, I can understand parts of what you’re going through – I mean, I’m presuming a lot, and I’m sure I don’t completely understand and I don’t want to pretend like I do, but – “
The last few syllables came out a hurried, fused-together jumble of sheer sound; if Makoto hadn’t gotten herself tripped up by surprise from the parts she’d managed to decipher, she might’ve found it just a little endearing. “What do you mean?”
“I mean – “ his voice ebbed away, caught within rare throes of introspection; and it’s infuriating, utterly maddening, she thought to herself, how two simple words could leave her so infinitely distraught over what he does mean.
“When I came to Shujin,” he began pensively, confessional-like, “I basically just shut myself down. Keep my head down and don’t be a nuisance, right? That’s what Mom and Dad told me, at least. And then the first day I got here, people started running away from me in the hallways and someone asked me if I killed people and Sojiro just said again and again ‘there’s nowhere else for you to go’ and I just said… okay. Okay. Because there wasn’t anything else to say. There wasn’t…”
Makoto wanted to wipe away that tangled knot of grief swelling beneath Ren’s eyes; wanted to nip it at its deformed bud, tell it that Ren’s face wasn’t where it belonged. Because he was Joker – he was Ren Amamiya, dammit, and he was the roguish grin he wielded against the world, the invulnerable charm, the coat-tails and the red gloves, the only one left smiling. Because he had managed to squeeze his way into her heart despite everything, despite the animosity and the aggression, despite the bad beginnings and worse after-beginnings, and he didn’t deserve his pain. But a lump was rising in her throat, and silence was all she could offer.
“Keep my head down,” he echoed like a mantra. “And I couldn’t do even that. And then I thought that maybe… maybe it was better to not do anything at all. To just…” he trails off, all lost thoughts and pregnant pauses.
“But then I went there, inside the Metaverse. I became someone else… Joker. And when I was in that costume… when I became him… I felt like I could finally do something. Be someone. Like I wasn’t just someone for people to pile up on, and kick around – like – like – a piece of rotten garbage, annoying them for even daring to roll around in the muck… and like I could… I could make a difference, I guess. Like I could do some good for people who deserved it, maybe even for people who don’t. Because… that’s all I wanted, really. Change.”
“Anyway,” she hears him clearing his throat, and suddenly she was staring into calm water running down a still brook: visage ironclad, pupils jolly with serene amusement, like almost nothing had happened at all – almost. “That’s… that’s why I thought I could understand what you were going through, when we first met. Because that’s what you were feeling too, wasn’t it?”
Yes, she wanted to tell him. That’s exactly what I was feeling. Because it was true. The powerlessness, the suffocation, the solitude; and the freedom, the hope-against-hope, the sunrise of a better world. All of it. She wanted to tell him how horrible it is that he’d suffered so, and how unjust it was that someone such as he had suffered; wanted to tell him how sorry she was for chasing him to margins’ edge and putting his probation at risk, and how thankful she was that he could share this moment with her. But words had failed her once again, and she could only hope her gaze could convey half the gratitude and warmth nestled deep within her heart.
Then all lingering specks of solemnity escaped from Ren, like little water goblins splashing upon the lake, and she knew she had to steel herself emotionally for incoming utter devastation. ”As Shakespeare or Robespierre or whoever said,” he drawled with unbearable sardonicism, “heavy is the Student Council President’s head who wears the – uhm – headband – I don’t know, I’m not very good at history – “
She sputtered, momentarily frozen in utter confusion; then chortled, full-on laughed, if only for how completely awful that joke was – an ugly sound, not graceful in the least, but she hadn’t the strength to care. “Ren, that was awful!”
“Glad to hear it.” He seemed exceptionally pleased with himself; then flushed bashfulness overtakes his features once more. “But Makoto, I’ve rambled on for all this time because… um, because… I wanted to tell you that I understand, and I… I care, and… I’d like to get to know you better from now on. As a friend.” Then he physically recoils, seemingly ashamed at the audacity of his own transgressions – ha!, Makoto thought subconsciously, as if Ren could ever. “Um, o-only if you want to, that is!”
Makoto closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, she knows it is with unsubduable tenderness. “Of course I’d want to, Ren.”
Then Ren smiles at her with undisguised, unadulterated happiness, with the full force of a blazing sunrise – with an expression she now knew to be uniquely Ren, not Joker, unflappable leader of the Phantom Thieves, or Amamiya-kun, the meek, docile, down-on-his-knees delinquent – and she knows, with her heart full and brimming with the promise of a new dawn, that this was something special.
“Now how about that bowl of curry, Makoto?” Ren asks her, bright-eyed.
“I’d love to,” she responds; and she means it.