all your mother's weaves and your father's threads

[flightpen]

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 from pheasantboy's universe.]]

Comments

[flightpen]

"Yeah." He can't muster any enthusiasm about that prospect, but maybe Akechi will dismiss it as general exhaustion.

"I want to ask you some stuff later, though. I know you don't want to talk about it now."

Akechi won't want to talk about it later, either, but Ren is going to have to ask about his episodes of blanking out. And the notebooks piled around them scrape at his nerves.

[pheasantboy]

But Akechi blinks at him—or rather, at the tip of Ren's nose, they're sitting so close.

"I don't mind if you want to ask. I'm just worried about you overdoing it."

[flightpen]

Well, if Akechi says it's okay.

"The notebooks. Not—the ones on the table. The rest of them." He gestures to a few. "What are they?"

[pheasantboy]

... and there it is again, that little glare that's so unlike him now. He hates feeling out of the loop now more than he ever knew he could.

"What do you mean?"

[flightpen]

"Um."

His voice cracks. Akechi hasn't glared at him like that in months. He used to not care, used to even welcome it, but now it makes him want to flinch away and curl up somewhere safe. He really is pathetic now, fuck.

He swallows. "There are a lot of notebooks in here. Some of them look like they've been here awhile. We're kind of... surrounded by them, actually."

[pheasantboy]

It hits him like a bucket of ice water; he draws sharply inward, flinching. He doesn't see any goddamned—

Though the little gold traceries in the depths of his mind flicker, over the layers and layers he won't remember, and around the open wound that lies between him and his Shadow, not enough of them break. He swallows, trying to think, sounding strained.

"I don't see any notebooks here, Ren. Just the two on the table. You're welcome to look at them, but I'm afraid there's not much to see. I keep—"

I keep losing them. And then, at the moment he would have understood, he shuts down.

[flightpen]

Oh, fuck. Oh, no. This is one of those—

"Akechi!" He sets his mug down and scrambles out of his seat, kneeling in front of Akechi and touching his shoulders, his face, trying to meet his eyes. He takes Akechi's hands in his and squeezes them tight, trying not to panic. "Akechi, I'm sorry, it's okay. You're right. I'm sorry I brought it up. You're okay. I'm sorry."

His heart is racing; his hands in Akechi's are clammy with sweat. He feels sick.

[pheasantboy]

And Akechi just sits there, face utterly limp, hands limp in Ren's, a puppet with its strings in its master's hand.

It lasts a minute or so, no more. Then he blinks and stirs to life, smiling stupidly for a moment before he sees the look on Ren's face. "As I say, you can ask anything you... Goodness, Ren. What's the matter?"

It's like he doesn't notice anything wrong. Nothing but the facts of the situation before him. Nothing but the now.

[flightpen]

Ren opens his mouth.

"It's... you..."

But what does he even say? How can he look at Akechi and confess that he said something wrong and it made Akechi... Ren did this to him. Still holding Akechi's hands, Ren slumps forward until his head rests against Akechi's knees. He stays there, eyes closed, breathing.

[pheasantboy]

"Ren..." Possibilities rotate in his head. They were sitting on the couch, weren't they? And Ren was sick, wasn't he?

His hand comes slowly to rest on the top of Ren's head, exquisitely gentle and sad; he knows what happened. "Did I... do something?"

[flightpen]

"I'm sorry," he mumbles against Akechi's legs. The hand on his head feels like a benediction he doesn't deserve. "I knew there was something weird going on. I shouldn't have brought it up."

[pheasantboy]

But the hand tenses in Ren's hair, starting to close into a fist before he remembers himself.

"No. No, it's not your fault. I should have known better." His voice trembles; he wants to scream and throw things at the walls. "It's why people here hate me. Or, you know, they dress it up. They pity me. Or I disgust them. Something about me is broken to them."

[flightpen]

Ren lifts his head. "Who hates you?"

There's a dangerous, despairing light in his eyes. The trouble is in discerning whether it's dangerous to Akechi's tormentors or to Ren himself.

[pheasantboy]

"Hate is far too strong. Ah, for the most part." His hand trails down Ren's hair to his jaw, then he takes it back, folding it in his lap. The other is still in Ren's grasp.

"Yoshizawa-san, down the hall, has been very kind—well, that's Yoshizawa-san all over, isn't it? Many people have been kind. Crow, for instance, spent so much time with me. They want to help me. That is, when I don't repel them."

His smile is ghastly, for different reasons than usual. The truth is that, as one awkward encounter has piled on another, and as the sad results of one blankout have reinforced the next, he's increasingly resented the fuck out of his isolation here—and it shows.

[flightpen]

You did this. You did this. You did this.

He tries to ignore it. He sits back on his heels, still holding Akechi's hand. "Do you know why it happens?"

Ren knows the triggers—or apparently just some of the triggers, because he didn't see this one coming—but he doesn't know why. Maruki can't touch Ren here at all, so why is Akechi still having problems?

[pheasantboy]

But he's still observant enough to read the signs of Ren's distress—or maybe the bulk of him beneath the surface doesn't like the question; he reaches to take back Ren's other hand.

"It's not your fault, Ren. None of this is."

[flightpen]

It's not lost on him that Akechi ignores the question. He shakes his head.

"It is my fault, Akechi," he says quietly. "I've tried to explain it, but at home you just think I'm crazy, and then you forget about it. Here you'd probably have another... thing."

[pheasantboy]

"We've never thought you're crazy." It seems far more natural, still, to think of himself as a we; he squeezes Ren's hands. "A little disoriented, that's all. A bit of a blind spot." The sort he considers normal, in their world; the sort that's led to much of the work he thinks he's done, when he thinks about it.

But he sighs. "It's true, though. That's the exact problem I've had. Nobody can explain what's going on to me, because"—he swallows—"I forget."

[flightpen]

"You blank out. That's what Crow called it. And then when you come back, you've forgotten?"

That's what it looked like a few minutes ago. Like what they'd said was erased; like Akechi had been reset to an earlier point in the conversation.

[pheasantboy]

He nods. "Everyone hates it, too. They expect memory to be far less transient than it is."

It's possible this isn't something they've ever discussed. And how would Ren know, otherwise, what Akechi's perception of memory is?

[flightpen]

"Um."

How can he say this? Should he say this? He hesitates.

[pheasantboy]

And Akechi just stares at him with big eyes, struck with an awful misgiving. "What?"

[flightpen]

"...It's like that. For me. Memory. Everyone else at home... Our world isn't..."

He doesn't want to get into I used to be normal for our world, actually, but then everything changed. That sounds like a great way to make Akechi blank out again.

[pheasantboy]

It's like he shrinks a size inside his clothes. "That can't be right," he says, almost pleading, misunderstanding what he's seen back home. "It's not just that we don't see you. You go away too. It seems very much the same thing others describe here with me."

[flightpen]

"I..."

Fuck, how can he say it when Akechi looks so distressed? He stares up into Akechi's face, helpless.