Chapter Text
Detective Bullock barrels down the precinct hallway shoulders first, his beady eyes pinned to the door at the far end. His scowl alone sends analysts and officers alike ducking away from of his path. More than one coffee is spilled in the process. Behind him, a rookie whose name he hasn't bothered to learn flutters at the edge of his vision.
"And he just turned himself in?" Bullock growls.
"Yes, sir."
"No hammers? No threats? No... theatrics?"
"No, sir."
"I don't believe it."
"He was, uh, he was crying. Sir."
That stops Bullock dead in his tracks and the rookie stumbles into him with an undignified yip.
"Crying." He says flatly.
"Yes sir. He's gone through about five boxes of tissues."
Nope. No. Nada. Absolutely not. There is no way on God's green earth that motherfucking Clayface turned himself in on a random Friday afternoon and now sits in a shitty plastic chair in an interrogation room bawling his eyes out. The man's an actor. So therefore this is an act.
But why? There's no way anyone would believe whatever sob story he's concocted. A distraction, maybe? Is he working with someone? Guy didn't even ask for a lawyer.
His train of thought derails with no survivors when he hauls up in front of the interrogation room's scuffed door. Sure, it's not like the precinct is prepared at all times to hold a man who can simply leak out from underneath a door so of course they've stationed guards. The guards, though...
One of them holds a mop and a bucket. Another has a hose, its long coil snaking all the way down the corridor to the women's bathroom. The third...
"Kowalski, what the fuck is that?"
Officer Kowalski, mustering all two of his cajones, meets Bullock square in the eye as he clutches a neon blue and yellow atrocity to his chest.
"This, sir, is an Extreme Edition Sharkquifier 9000 with Fully Automated Squirt Action and Ultra Megalodon Grade Tank Capacity."
"It's a Super Soaker."
"It's THE Super Soaker."
Bullock drags a hand down his face and gives a full-body sigh. "This fuckin' life, I swear to God."
~~~~~~~~~~
One month prior....
Ren falls. Or maybe he's flying? The sound of wind screams past him. He can feel it rake icy fingers through his hair as though trying to snatch away pieces of him. It steals the breathe from his lungs and scrapes every drop of moisture from his eyes when he wrenches them open. All he can see is a carousel of orange, pink, and blue. Ah, he is spinning. But how much of it is real and how much of it is his head? The ground is...
Where is the ground?
He twists in the air, fighting against the drag on his limbs to align them properly and stop the spin. It takes more than a few tries before he evens out but when he does he's relieved to find that his vision does, in fact, stop reeling even if his head is convinced otherwise.
Yet there's still no ground. Only vast twilit sky above and below.
"Arsene!" He calls, but there is no answer.
"Satanael!" Still nothing.
His heartbeat ratchets upwards and he spares a furtive glance at his hands. The sight of his red gloves is a relief. It means he's still either in the Metaverse or the Metaverse is still merged with the real world. In either case the laws of physics might just be suspended enough to spare him from being splattered across the first solid surface he collides with.
Something glints out of the corner of his eye. Frowning, he angles his body towards it and scans the the sky. He has to squint into the glare of the dying sun. Spots dance across his vision until... there! That glint again.
One, no, two forms fall in tandem. The first is all liquid gold, sleek lines, and shuddering familiarity. A chalice. The Treasure. It shines so brightly under the fading light that he almost misses the small, limp silhouette next to it. It has a peculiar shape, one that reminds him of...
"Mona!" He cries.
He tugs his grapple gun from his belt and takes aim, praying to any god that will listen that the line is long enough and the wind doesn't snag it. He lines up a trick shot. The gun goes off, jerking him bodily backwards, and the grapple speeds towards the pair.
It glances off the the side of the chalice, ricocheting past Morgana's limp form and out into the thin air.
"Come on, come on!" He hisses between gritted teeth as the line goes slack and begins to snake in the wind and he desperately spams the retraction button with a thumb. The cord snaps backwards with an audible crack. His breath stutters in his chest when the hook brushes past Morgana.
It catches on his belt.
There's an ugly moment when the gun's mechanism grinds as it fights the staying hand of terminal velocity before Morgana is suddenly rocketing towards him. At the same time, he feels himself yanked forwards. They meet somewhere in the middle, Morgana colliding with his chest and sending them into a brief backwards somersault. Ren throws his arms around him and holds him fast to his chest.
Knowing eyes meet his as Morgana reaches for Yaldabaoth's Treasure. Their little not-a-cat smiles, the resignation in it masquerading as serenity. It's that realization that sends a chill through Ren. This really is the last goodbye. They'll never see their friend again. He'll never again hear squeaky snores from beneath the kotatsu or struggle to keep himself from laughing at whispered comments from his duffel bag during class. He doesn't let it show in that moment, but he can already feel the weeping hole that Morgana leaves behind. It fills with boiling betrayal. How dare he?! After everything how dare Morgana give up now. How could he just accept this fate when he did so much to help them cast off their own? He deserves better!
He deserves the world.
Ren tucks Morgana securely into his coat until only his sagging head peaks out. By now the Treasure is a distant thing, knocked far off course by his shot and drifting farther by the moment.
It's not long before the chalice vanishes in the distance.
The sky begins to darken. First the orange drains away, then the rosy pink blooms into an angry crimson. It settles on a deep red that reminds Ren far too much of blood over Tokyo. And still they fall through a void that is utterly and completely still. But it's the kind of stillness that has a threat to it, like the air just before a typhoon makes landfall. An unquiet quiet.
Then a shape yawns up from below. Then another, and another. Clusters of gothic spires, moldering steeples, and gaudy carnival lights erupt beneath them. Palaces, he realizes, they are Palaces.
There are so many of them.
They hunch over the rim of a vast crater like obscene vultures, parapets bent in a distorted spiral towards the yawning dark of its basin until they are swallowed by the hungry nothing. Accretion disks around a black hole, he thinks, or at least the cognitive equivalent. A black hole that he and Morgana are hurtling towards.
Ren panics as the lip of the crater slides past. As the walls speed by he realizes that they aren't earth but rather cement, asphalt, and rebar. An entire city folding in on itself, bending suddenly at the drop-off so that its alleyways run right down the sides of the pit like woodworm scars.
They need to stop their fall now. Ren looks down and spreads his arms and legs out to slow his descent as much as he can. It barely helps, but it gives him the chance to spy a fast approaching spire below, one close enough to grapple. It's a gangly thing, stretched like smeared paint across the chasm, but he thinks it might have been some kind of clock tower. He doesn't even think before he braces both hands on his gun and fires a line at it to send himself into a parabolic swing.
Physics in the Metaverse is a strange beast when it decides to exist at all. Generally it is far more forgiving since it is literally mind over matter. Unfortunately for Ren, some form of gravity is still very much a consideration in this part of the Metaverse. So when the line catches the amount of force on Ren's arms is enough to pop them out of his sockets and he can feel the torque of it fracture bone. He screams, his hands maintaining their grip just long enough for him to go into an upswing before they slacken and he finds himself flung up over the rim and into the city. He loses consciousness before he ever hits the ground.
~~~~~~~~~~
Awareness comes slowly, trickling in along with the cold and damp. Drops of water splash across Ren's face, chilled by a wind that is a cocktail of dead leaves, acrid smog, and petrichor. It takes a while before his brain has as much as two thoughts to rub together, but the moment it does Ren knows that he is not in the Metaverse much less Tokyo. He's not even in Japan.
It's a litany of subtle tells working in concert that clue him in. The combination of temperature and humidity is ever so subtly off, regardless of season. Even the scent of the leaves is different. The night calls of birds and insects are unfamiliar, too, save for the cicadas. Cicadas on Christmas? Is he somewhere in the southern hemisphere?
His eyes flip open and he regrets it instantly when it feels as though someone's taken a pickaxe to his skull. He moans lowly, vision swimming for a moment before it congeals into a dark tapestry of tree branches above. Trees and smog. Either he's in a city park or he's on its outskirts. His head is too muddled to determine which.
Sitting up only compounds his mistake and bone-grinding agony reverberates up his arms in stomach -churning waves. He thinks he cries out but for all he knows it could be the screaming of his own neurons. Bile threatens the back of his throat.
Certain physicists will say that time is an abstraction, but few know this quite so well as the those who are suffering. Ren wrestles with the onslaught for what could be minutes or could be hours. By the end the pain is still present, but as a vicious eddies rather than crashing waves.
And then he remembers Morgana.
His first instinct is to whip his head around to search for him which is another mistake to throw atop the heaping pile of them as the resulting vertigo nearly has him hurling. It's only then that he feels the warm weight on his chest and that he looks down.
There's a cat passed out underneath his V neck shirt, the same one he wore before Yaldabaoth, its soft white muzzle propped against his neck. He sags with relief, curling over his friend until he feels even puffs of warm breath on his cold cheek. It anchors him through the pain.
He doesn't mean to try to move his arms, but the attempt to cradle Morgana is automatic. It's both good and bad when it doesn't work. Good because it means he didn't just try to move injured arms that could send him into a fresh bout of hellish pain. It's bad because, well, he can't move them. At all. He swallows down the thrum of panic at what that could mean.
Ren staggers to his feet in a manner more worthy of a newborn foal than the leader of the Phantom Thieves. They need help. Badly. And it's not going to come to them on its own. He sways for a moment as he stands, the gray woods around him pitching for a moment before snapping back into place and his arms gifting him with another jolt of pain. And then he starts marching.
If this is a park it is a large one and visited only sparsely judging by the lack of litter. Really, it's all forest. But still the smog hangs in the air and, every now and then the fetid smell of a polluted river wafts by. The drizzle pitter pats through the leaves, soaking through his clothes and down into his very bones. Somewhere an unfamiliar owl calls.
But far ahead through a shroud of fog a warm yellow light illuminates the fog in a soft halo. Praying that it's not just a street light, Ren stumbles towards it.
The trees open up into a small clearing with an old camper slowly decaying at it's center. It had clearly once been a lovely thing, just big enough for a family road trip though built wider than the ones back home. It's the kind of camper he'd sometimes dreamed vacationing in with his family as a kid back when they still talked to him. Or had the time. Or the interest.
But now the camper is a corpse. Fallen limbs dotted with leaf litter mound atop its roof and its front scrapes the ground on a broken axle. Iron sheets have replaced some of the brown paneling, which have faded in the years, possibly decades, since it was last driven. Even so, someone has repaired it to the best of their means. The light comes from within.
An uncomfortable suspicion niggles at the back of his mind. The size of the the camper, the fact that the driver's seat is on the left, the English on the empty propane tanks by the door, the temperate forest... he's somewhere in North America. Which should be impossible because it is clearly not winter here. So that can't be right, can it? He moans at the way it makes his head pound and sets it aside for now. One crisis at a time.
He takes unsteady steps around the propane tanks and shuffles up to the storm door. He hesitates a moment when he hears sniffling from inside. But they can't afford to stay out here. Morgana needs this, even if he's intruding. So he clears his throat.
"He...hello?" He calls in English, and his eyes fly wide as the word falls from his mouth.
Listen. He knows how to greet someone in English. It's basic, something a child would know. But English pronunciation is a whole other can of linguistic worms. And he had nailed it. He had felt it, the way his tongue and lips moved differently.
What the hell.
The door opens a crack and the face of a girl about his own age peers out at him. He can't see much of her, just a single haunted eye with enough bags under it to set up a luggage shop and glimpse of sandy hair.
And now Ren realizes that he has to have a full conversation in English with a possible concussion. It's not like he hasn't been toward achieving Pre-2 Plus competency, he has, but it's been hard to focus on schoolwork when he has to kick the ass of every god, demon, and fairy from here to Sumeria every other weekday. Not to mention the tightrope he's been walking with half the adults in his life.
He takes a deep breath.
"I'm sorry to intrude. You don't know me but I need help. My friend is hurt and I... I think I did something to my arms." The words tumble out, expert and exact. Sentence structures he never would have dared to string together before now. What. The. Hell.
The girl's eyes widen though her expression barely changes. A sunken eye flickers between Ren's face and the Morgana's formless mass beneath his shirt. Then she steps aside, flinging the door wide as she does so.
"Come in," she says quietly, "But don't try anything. I'll know."
"Thank you."
He's too distracted to register the warning as he hauls himself up the camper steps. He understood every word, every intonation, instantly and without thinking about it. What... what is going on?
He doesn't quite startle when a hand placed on the small of his back breaks his train of thought, but it's only because he's become accustomed to maintaining a facade. The girl guides him gently to the back of the camper and encourages him to take a seat on the bed there. He blinks rapidly, forcing his pin-balling thoughts back into the moment at hand.
The inside of the camper is cluttered but well-kept. Boxes of supplies pile in the corners, pots and pans seem to have found permanent residence on the stove top, and a small desk with a lava lamp and microscope abut a window. There is the faintest layer of dust over everything.
The girl kneels in front of him, checking his eyes. Now that he can see her fully he makes note of her school uniform. Between the cut and the plaid it reminds him of Shujin's. More blue and gray than red and black, though.
"Your eyes are focusing correctly. Are you or your friend bleeding at all?"
He shakes his head.
"I didn't see any blood. We fell. I tried to catch us but I think it was too much. I... I don't know what's wrong with Morgana. I didn't see anything obvious and that worries me."
While he talks she pulls a large blanket out from a drawer under the bed and drapes it around his shoulders. He's grateful, even if it smells like wood smoke.
The girl purses her lips. "We need to get you to a doctor and your friend to an emergency vet."
Ren studies the girl from under hooded lids. If he's in the U.S. or Canada, there's no way he has proper documentation and he's not sure if medical personnel have a duty to report. "I don't think I have access to money right now. Or insurance." The latter might not be an issue if this is Canada, but he's heard the horror stories about American medical insurance.
The girl simply tilts her head in consideration, not even batting an eye. Or blinking, really. The thousand yard stare seems to be perpetual. "There may be an alternative. One of my professors is well versed in both human and animal medicine. He doesn't typically work with cats, but I'm sure he has at some point."
Ren arches his brows. "That... that actually sounds like a good plan."
A wisp of a smile flits across her face before vanishing entirely. "I would hope so. You aren't the first reluctant patient I've had to keep secrets for." Ren freezes at that, but she just tugs the blanket tighter and takes her leave to call her professor, murmuring quietly at the front of the camper. Well... at least she didn't pry.
He finds his eyes drifting shut and his muscles relax as the adrenaline ebbs. He doesn't permit himself the comfort of sleep, but he does let his thoughts drift where they may. The injuries are strange. They've all been injured by Shadows before. Downed, even. And it always hurt just as much as it would in reality but at least it was brief. A quick restoration skill or some of Takemi's pills and they'd be good as new. Even a short breather in a safe room did wonders. He supposes it was all about the idea of healing. Once again, the constraints of reality take a back seat.
Never had injuries lingered upon returning to the real world. Well, that's not entirely true. There was one time, when... when he was in custody. Because those were real people, with real needles, and real batons.
He swallows.
Someone snaps a finger in front of his face. His eyes flinch open. The girl is standing over him, her mouth set in a slight frown.
"Ah, I thought you were asleep. You're in luck. Professor Langstrom is around even though it's summer break. He's agreed to see you. The school isn't far, but I must ask... can you walk or do I need to carry you?"
Ren stares at her. She's built like a beanpole. She's also one hundred percent serious.
"I can walk," he says wryly.
She merely nods and helps him to his admittedly shaky feet. "Then let's get going."
"Thank you. For everything. I'm Amamiya. Ren Amamiya."
"Katherine Karlo."