Work Text:
"Ren, we can't keep doing this." Goro Akechi snarled under his breath, breaking free of the kiss. He detangled himself from Ren's embrace and let the words linger, a scowl forming as he stared out of the attic window.
Ren's heart sank. It shouldn't have been this soon, he should have more time— they still had time. He chewed his words over before deciding on something that would be up to interpretation.
"…and why can't we?"
Goro turned to glare at him, narrowing his gaze as though baffled that Ren weren't arriving at the same conclusion. He gave Ren's sternum a gentle shove with a finger and rose from the bed, motioning for him to follow.
"Because there are people walking up to the cafe, you horny idiot."
"Oh." Breath returned to Ren's lungs.
"Christ, what would you do without me?"
A frown writhed across Ren's face. He knew all too well what he would do without Goro, and he didn't like the image.
"I'm sure I'd manage," he murmured, trailing off.
"You don't sound too convinced."
What could he say? This whole escapade was in service of keeping Goro around. Maybe he couldn't manage.
Igor and Lavenza, somehow, never seemed to notice the… whatever it was. It would have been hilarious that they were unaware — had anyone on Earth been able to understand the humor in Ren stumbling upon a second layer of "doors nobody else can see" buried in the Velvet Room.
This whatever-it-was, this thing, was the nagging feeling of something just outside your memory. A sense of deja vu. An item you know you put down right here, but it's not here anymore and you're furious that you can't remember. A light bulb that you're sure flickered, but only out of the corner of your eye.
It was like a notebook, full of memories. And Ren could thumb through it, if he let his mind go fuzzy in the right ways while in the Velvet Room. He didn't, at first, have any reason to fear or doubt anything in the notebook — the contents written within were clearly his memories, after all. But he was afraid, at least a bit, of what happened when he had first poked his head into its pages, on a day he'd rather not remember. How the world had fallen apart around him, how every inch of his being collapsed and contorted and twisted and hurt and how he had spent an unknowable amount of time in darkness.
But then, as though waking from anesthesia, he had blinked, and found himself awake, aware, alive. He had found himself in the attic in Leblanc. It was April again. Last April.
The reality of looping through time wasn't quite as convenient as movies and books made it out to be. Most people didn't remember what they did, say, on an afternoon two Tuesdays ago, and Ren was no exception. While it was immediately obvious that he had been again thrust into one of the lowest points of his life — Sojiro was giving him a brutal dressing down, he didn't even have the Metaverse Navigator — it's not like he remembered the day to day of the past year. Broad strokes, sure, but broad strokes wouldn't give him omniscience, or clairvoyance, or anything like that.
Some of those broad strokes didn't even line up neatly with his own memories, each time he went back. It only occurred to him halfway through the first fall that he hadn't run into Ohya but once, focused as he was on just getting through it day by day. He'd barely given Mishima the time of day, and he'd missed half of Yoshida's speeches. It was a deeply unsettling position - these people he had grown so close to hardly knew who he was. Ren could think back on life-altering moments he'd shared with each of them, but they'd have no way to know that, now.
Over his first few trips back, he came to realize that the people he'd come to know and love were still in there, buried under the tides of time. These relationships might have different journeys getting back to their special moments, but he could rebuild and rediscover. And each time he'd learn something new about a connection, or take a new lesson away from a given night.
Bright destinations didn't necessarily mean smooth journies, though. Having to watch Ann and Shiho go through that even once was enough of a trial, let alone a second or a third or a tenth time. Ryuji introducing himself would be like a stab in the chest every time. He couldn't even get in contact with Futaba if it was early enough in the year. He would have to just stare at the house, knowing she was suffering inside.
After the first full loop, he had half a mind to move on, to ignore the whatever-it-was and let time flow forwards into the unknown. He could only take so much.
But something occurred to him, as the school year came to a close. As he stared at that damn glove for the hundredth time, the thousandth time.
Not one, but two Wild Cards at their disposal, and they couldn't find a way to beat fate? He'd put a bullet through a god. Surely he could save a life.
So, he'd returned to the whatever-it-was and steeled himself for the horrors to come.
But before flinging himself back to last April, he paused, flicking through the other bookmarks. He could get a sense of when they were, a feeling of the memories within each portal. Some of them had entry points that felt decisive — a key turning point in a Palace heist, the day before a fateful meeting with one of his comrades — and others more arbitrary, but each marked a place in time and a particular crystallization of possibilities.
Just thinking about it was enough to unmoor him from his sense of self. He couldn't allow himself to dwell. He'd focus on the glove. He had his goal. All he had to do was find a way there.
It dawned on him, just as the task seemed most insurmountable: he could spare himself at least some of the unthinkable pain of having to meet the Phantom Thieves again and again and again. Of getting tortured by Sae Nijima. Of watching Goro vanish from sight on that fucking cruise ship—
Maybe he couldn't survive repeating a year of his life on end, forever, as long as it took. But he might be able to withstand suffering again and again through focused blast of those traumas. Ren wasn't sure the human mind was ready to handle an eternity of re-lived high school years. But he would subject himself to that fucking cruise ship any number of times if it meant that he could bring an end to it all in the way he wanted to.
It would mean going through the transfer process — existentially brutal as it was — more frequently. But he could stomach that. Ren was good at fighting through proper torture. He'd found that out in that godforsaken interrogation room.
Ren began making surgical cuts in and out of the notebook. What would happen if he, at the last second, never finished his conversations with Maruki — or took him up on his deal? What if he yielded to Yaldabaoth? Could he nudge Goro out of the way altogether at one the earliest moments, keep him from the Thieves?
Certain events, he found, resisted change as though they were fixed points on the calendar. Others were more mutable — he could make them happen as and when he desired, but he couldn't seem to finish the winter out without these critical turning points happening.
Spared as he was of the mire of those dark spring days, he was able to press on. The critical moment was before the cruise ship, he increasingly became sure. If he could keep Goro out of that Palace…
Scratch that — he'd tried enough times. Goro always made his way there, no matter what. Just before Shido's Palace, then? Or maybe after, when Maruki and Azathoth made their move? Ren became deeply familiar with the conditions of apocalypse. Metaverse and reality, illusion and truth, all woven together.
It eroded him, even in these shorter bursts. He would fidget with the glove that he kept in his pocket — it, mercifully, stayed with him on his loops — and used it as an anchor. It was a promise for a meeting in the future, a rematch. Pursuing that had to mean something.
But it was not during one of these brutally efficient revisits that Ren found his tryst with Goro so rudely interrupted by patrons of Leblanc. He had needed something of a vacation. Telling himself it was to explore his options in his third semester more fully, he'd selected a bookmark somewhere in early January. Maybe he could work something out with Maruki, if he gave the maneuvering some more time to marinate.
Or maybe he just needed some quality time with Goro. Sue him.
"Hey, Goro?"
"Ren, have you somehow already forgotten that we have something to do downstairs—"
"Hypothetically. If there were a chance we could get out of this — both of us — without taking Maruki's deal, we would take that chance, right?"
Goro stopped cold, foot hovering before its next step. "You know that's not possible."
"Just play this game with me."
"I'm not even sure that would be a good thing." Even standing a stair or two above Goro, Ren could see the way his head dropped, the way his shoulders went slack. "We've been over this. I've done unspeakable things."
Ren shook his head. "Whether it's good or not. Whether you're rotting in jail or whether we're off on a romantic getaway in Europe, whatever the outcome is."
He stepped down and drew an arm across Goro, who nestled his head in the crook of Ren's neck. Ren stared down toward the landing.
"If there were some way we could fight for that, we should take it, right?"
"Obviously, you moron. Of course," Goro whispered, returning the sidelong embrace with his own arm.
"Thank you, Goro." Ren's voice cracked, his vision going misty. "Thank you."
"What the hell is wrong with you today?" Goro squeezed him once more and then began striding down the stairs. "Get yourself together, we have coffee and curry to attend to."
Ren laughed. Another trip to the Velvet Room, then. As many times as it took.