ren amamiya (maruki's ending) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
flightpen) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
personavelvetroomdr2024-02-02 02:51 pm
flightpen) wrote in personavelvetroomdr2024-02-02 02:51 pm
all your mother's weaves and your father's threads
Ren hasn't seen the Velvet Room in a while.
There was at time when he was in here every week, fusing Personas to Caroline's acerbic commentary or listening to Yaldabaoth mutter ominous words of praise. It was different in January, like a lot of things, but the point is that it's gone now. He's not even sure Lavenza and Igor survived what happened.
And yet here he is, in what's recognizably the Velvet Room. But it's changed. It's not a prison anymore, even though this would be the best time for it; Ren's heart is in chains. What was it Akechi said to him? Your heart is free. Maybe back then.
Never mind that. Igor, if it is Igor, is unforthcoming. Make bonds—as if Ren can make bonds when people can't even have a meaningful conversation. He'll be returned to the moment he left—as if he wants to go there. His friends are happy, Akechi is alive, and Ren, like Maruki himself, stands outside the world. When he tries to press, Igor gets cryptic and nonsensical, and that's so fucking familiar lately that Ren doesn't bother to keep trying.
You might find him in the following situations:
1: the rockrose and the thistle will whistle as you moan
Maruki has left him alone, mostly. God's favorite. As far as Ren can figure, it's because he knows perfectly damn well that Ren finds his reality repulsive, and he wants Ren to accept it on his own. The implication there is that Maruki also knows deep down that people aren't themselves once he changes their cognition, but that's not a surprise. Maruki talks a big game, but on some level he must know what he's doing. Surely.
Anyway, like we were saying, he's left Ren mostly alone. But he loses time, comes back to himself with the coffee cold or the sun at a different angle or an awful TV show at the end of its saccharine episode. And although he never remembers feeling what preceded it, he knows. Too much despair, too much bleak hopelessness, and Maruki turns him off like a lightbulb until it's gone again. Can't accept the new world if he's too depressed. The stupid self-defeating hypocrisy of it is annoying as hell—is he meant to accept the new reality of his own accord or isn't he? But there was a time when it would've pissed him off a lot more.
He stands in front of Igor's desk, in a place he doesn't recognize, unsure where he is or what's going to happen to him, or where his friends are, or whether this is a new stage of Maruki's reality or something entirely different, and despair swallows him whole. He waits to be shut down.
And waits. And waits, saturated in misery like he hasn't in weeks. For a split second he almost finds himself grateful to Maruki for taking it away, but he flinches back from going down that road. Like this, frozen, waiting to blink and find that his legs hurt from standing too long, he's barely aware of his surroundings.
2: all the pins inside your fretted head and your muttered whens and hows
Having pulled himself together (and not lost any time, as far as he can tell?), Ren decides that the obvious first stop is the conspicuous board that stands in the strange Velvet Room. It doesn't look... Velvet Room-y. It looks like it was brought in from outside, and as he scans its bizarre contents, he realizes he's right.
The business about Akechis and Rens being fated to be together makes him feel a little sick, so he skims it quickly and moves on. Demons, vampires, okay, that's... he'll deal with that when he has to. But as he reads the list of Akechi codenames, his eyes land on one in particular. In the middle of the corvids and the predators, there's Sparrow.
The description leaves him without any doubt. His stomach sinks. Is Akechi okay? Can he even survive in a place like this? How is Ren going to find him?
3: you gently gift it to me 'cause you've no clue how to sew
In a first, helpless attempt to locate his Akechi (different enough from other Akechis, apparently, to be identified on sight... well, that's true enough), Ren decides to head into Tokyo and go looking for places Akechi still enjoys. Kichijoji is an obvious one, with the jazz bar and Inokashira Park and his apartment, the location of which he kept behind his lips the entire time Ren knew him, only to immediately invite him over in February. But instead of taking the train, Ren walks. Travel is strangely quick, and it gives him time to look at the cognitions, which the board claimed were eerie.
The board wasn't wrong. They don't even seem like the brainwashed people Ren is used to—cognitions is definitely the better term. At least the people back home have some variability in how they act, and at least they have some kind of mild reaction if you inconvenience them. Ren steps in front of them once or twice, sticks out his leg to trip one of them even, and they don't even frown at him.
Maruki's reality is still new. Maybe this is where everyone is going to end up; automatons, puppets, walking around like video game NPCs. His skin crawls. He stands to the side of a busy road in Shibuya and watches, stomach churning.
[[ooc: This is the Ren frompheasantboy's universe.]]
There was at time when he was in here every week, fusing Personas to Caroline's acerbic commentary or listening to Yaldabaoth mutter ominous words of praise. It was different in January, like a lot of things, but the point is that it's gone now. He's not even sure Lavenza and Igor survived what happened.
And yet here he is, in what's recognizably the Velvet Room. But it's changed. It's not a prison anymore, even though this would be the best time for it; Ren's heart is in chains. What was it Akechi said to him? Your heart is free. Maybe back then.
Never mind that. Igor, if it is Igor, is unforthcoming. Make bonds—as if Ren can make bonds when people can't even have a meaningful conversation. He'll be returned to the moment he left—as if he wants to go there. His friends are happy, Akechi is alive, and Ren, like Maruki himself, stands outside the world. When he tries to press, Igor gets cryptic and nonsensical, and that's so fucking familiar lately that Ren doesn't bother to keep trying.
You might find him in the following situations:
1: the rockrose and the thistle will whistle as you moan
Maruki has left him alone, mostly. God's favorite. As far as Ren can figure, it's because he knows perfectly damn well that Ren finds his reality repulsive, and he wants Ren to accept it on his own. The implication there is that Maruki also knows deep down that people aren't themselves once he changes their cognition, but that's not a surprise. Maruki talks a big game, but on some level he must know what he's doing. Surely.
Anyway, like we were saying, he's left Ren mostly alone. But he loses time, comes back to himself with the coffee cold or the sun at a different angle or an awful TV show at the end of its saccharine episode. And although he never remembers feeling what preceded it, he knows. Too much despair, too much bleak hopelessness, and Maruki turns him off like a lightbulb until it's gone again. Can't accept the new world if he's too depressed. The stupid self-defeating hypocrisy of it is annoying as hell—is he meant to accept the new reality of his own accord or isn't he? But there was a time when it would've pissed him off a lot more.
He stands in front of Igor's desk, in a place he doesn't recognize, unsure where he is or what's going to happen to him, or where his friends are, or whether this is a new stage of Maruki's reality or something entirely different, and despair swallows him whole. He waits to be shut down.
And waits. And waits, saturated in misery like he hasn't in weeks. For a split second he almost finds himself grateful to Maruki for taking it away, but he flinches back from going down that road. Like this, frozen, waiting to blink and find that his legs hurt from standing too long, he's barely aware of his surroundings.
2: all the pins inside your fretted head and your muttered whens and hows
Having pulled himself together (and not lost any time, as far as he can tell?), Ren decides that the obvious first stop is the conspicuous board that stands in the strange Velvet Room. It doesn't look... Velvet Room-y. It looks like it was brought in from outside, and as he scans its bizarre contents, he realizes he's right.
The business about Akechis and Rens being fated to be together makes him feel a little sick, so he skims it quickly and moves on. Demons, vampires, okay, that's... he'll deal with that when he has to. But as he reads the list of Akechi codenames, his eyes land on one in particular. In the middle of the corvids and the predators, there's Sparrow.
The description leaves him without any doubt. His stomach sinks. Is Akechi okay? Can he even survive in a place like this? How is Ren going to find him?
3: you gently gift it to me 'cause you've no clue how to sew
In a first, helpless attempt to locate his Akechi (different enough from other Akechis, apparently, to be identified on sight... well, that's true enough), Ren decides to head into Tokyo and go looking for places Akechi still enjoys. Kichijoji is an obvious one, with the jazz bar and Inokashira Park and his apartment, the location of which he kept behind his lips the entire time Ren knew him, only to immediately invite him over in February. But instead of taking the train, Ren walks. Travel is strangely quick, and it gives him time to look at the cognitions, which the board claimed were eerie.
The board wasn't wrong. They don't even seem like the brainwashed people Ren is used to—cognitions is definitely the better term. At least the people back home have some variability in how they act, and at least they have some kind of mild reaction if you inconvenience them. Ren steps in front of them once or twice, sticks out his leg to trip one of them even, and they don't even frown at him.
Maruki's reality is still new. Maybe this is where everyone is going to end up; automatons, puppets, walking around like video game NPCs. His skin crawls. He stands to the side of a busy road in Shibuya and watches, stomach churning.
[[ooc: This is the Ren from
pheasantboy's universe.]]
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Sparrow, too, is proof of that.
"If you're going to righteously claim that you're doing it all for him, then what about what he wants? Because it's not your suffering like this. Not the person he is now, and I don't think the person he would be if he could remember properly could stand to see you in this state, either."
The Shadow of Sparrow, by all accounts, hates Ren for what he's done. But the Shadow isn't the whole self, either. If it was, 'Sparrow' wouldn't exist. The reality of what 'Goro Akechi' would want exists somewhere hanging in the balance between the two.
Shrike can't say with certainty, but he doesn't think that 'Akechi' would be able to stand the person in front of him - not out of anger, but out of pity and disgust.
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"I can't give Akechi what he wants from me. He wants me to be part of Maruki's reality with them, and I—" He shudders. "I try to... to fake it. Being, you know, endlessly happy. He gets worried otherwise, because he can't see me, and—I try. But I can't always make it work."
He could've done better, before.
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It's more somber, almost melancholy of a thing to say. A younger him wouldn't have admitted to it. Perhaps that's why Shrike can't simply dismiss Sparrow as being wrong the way some of the others in this place have. The thing about that idealized world is that it has to have just enough truth to sell itself.
"What happened to that spirit of rebellion of yours, Joker? You're not the kind of person who just takes something like this lying down."
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But at the same time... "However, if anything, that is evidence for my point. If you were the wrong guy, why exert so much influence to keep you in line? Surely it would be easier for your mastermind to hollow you out, like they did him. Instead, he's chosen to torture you into hopelessness, first. What other message could that send, except that hope, and your hope specifically is dangerous to him?"
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It sounds almost like he's defending Maruki, but that's not what he's thinking about. He swallows. "I'm just. I made a decision and now I'm—living with it. Of course he's in danger if I have fucking hope," he adds, with a brief display of bitter anger. "Or despair, I guess. For some reason. But. ...Sorry, I don't know where I'm going with this."
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Torture. The word has such a presence, grim and spiked, larger than the sum of its syllables. Ren associates it with beatings and druggings, not with standing in comfort behind the counter in Leblanc while his friends crowd around a booth, ignoring him.
He searches for a reply. All he finds, dredged up from the back of his mind, is, "...Oh."
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It seems like he may have given Ren more food for thought than his stomach can hold, right now. So he simply says, "Even in a world where people get what they deserve, you don't deserve that."
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Aeon, rank one.
And so instead of saying anything, he just stares in astonishment at Akechi. He didn't think... He thought that part of him was broken, he supposes. Like everything else.