Work Text:
Fear of adultery is ever present. Another of Rin's fears that has only been half mollified by the good turn her life has taken is the fear of being kicked out. It's a fear stemming from childhood, when her parents would continuously use it and the fear of forfeiting their love as a stick to control and discipline her, but the form it takes in her Palace is related to Leblanc, because there was no blood barrier there to prevent such betrayal and nothing to catch her, because Sojiro pummeled her with threats of eviction like he was a professional boxer, and because the terror evoked by Tokyo in the heart of a country girl was ever present and immense.
For the friends inside her mind all her fears are difficult to be subjected to, but this one is especially bad. And it combines more than one inside itself. They find themselves in a recreation of Yongen-Jaya as it was the previous spring, inside Leblanc as it was then, arriving in the middle of a fictitious argument between Rin and Sojiro, an argument occasioned by her being expelled from Shujin thanks to Kamoshida. Cognitive Morgana adds his piece from his spot on the bed under the window, but everyone ignores him.
“What the hell is wrong with you-”
“It wasn't my fault. He's a predator-”
“I don't care. I told you I'd kick you out if you got yourself expelled-”
Rin, who till then had her back turned on the gruff man, spins to face him, an invisible tornado of attic dust following in her wake. “...Please. Please don't. I have nowhere to go.”
"Go home.”
“I can't. Even you said they got rid of me.”
“Too bad. This is the real world where actions have consequences, girl. Now you're just a burden.”
“Sojiro, what the hell…” sobs a disembodied female voice inaudible to the arguing cognitions.
Shadow Rin swallows, and says nothing more, her eyes invisible behind her onyx mop of hair. It is a peculiarity of hers, through personality and trauma, that she will not stay where she is not wanted. Even if Sojiro changed his mind at this point, it would be too late. And in fact she says nothing more to him, ever, but packs up and leaves that night. That hurts him, but he's still an insecure fool in this horror pantomime, with nothing to him but dashed ideals and an empty, desperate life.
The scene changes, reorientating itself around a different part of Tokyo, around Yoshiwara, the red light district. It fixes itself outside a sleazy looking building lit up with neon pink.
“Oh no. Oh no, oh no-” moans a Thief or two. Those in the know.
They are forced inside the building, right behind an exceptionally tall and athletic man with a brutal gait. The chant of “Oh no-” increases in speed and pitch, but the gang is forced to watch Kamoshida pay an exorbitant amount of yen and then stride down a pink corridor, walking like he knows the place intimately. He, and they, end up in a depressing holding pen (‘lounge’) where a bunch of sad, heavily made up girls sit around messing about on their phones. Rin, who is unrecognisable save for her eyes, looks up with terror at her ‘regular’ when he comes to a stop before her, but the Yakuza own the joint, and she has to go with him.