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]

He looks up sharply. "Is Maruki messing around with your reality?"

[reasonliving]

He looks at Aigis with a glare that sort of makes her uncomfortable. "He just began altering reality, yes. I do not think he made a conscious effort to bring my friends back but Iwatodai is rather close to Odaiba." So it was likely it just got caught up in the alterations that had effected Tokyo.

[flightpen]

"Sorry." He tries to dial back his expression. "It's just, um."

He swallows. "To answer your question. I hate that he's been altered. But he's still here, so I don't—I don't know what the right answer was. But just. Whatever you do, keep in mind, Maruki's reality is a fucking nightmare once it really takes hold. I can't... put into words how awful it is."

He knows what the "right" answer was. He just doesn't know if he can commit to being on the right side, this time.

[reasonliving]

"I am sorry that you feel such regret about the outcome." She hesitates to call it a real choice because it seems like he had just let events run their course. "Ultimately in my reality someone like you will make the final choice as well." That said, Aigis's friends were never one to leave a full decision in one person's hands. They'd come to a group conclusion to fight Nyx and had fought tooth and nail over the right to decide how to exit the Abyss of Time. "However, it will not be just up to him, my friends all had their own opinions." Even if exerting them meant nothing other than opinions for Kurusu to consider.

[flightpen]

He glances at her. "That's good. It's too much for one person." Demonstrably.

"You said someone was brought back? You knew them, and they were brought back."

[reasonliving]

"Two. In my time as a Persona user a man named Shinjiro Aragaki and Makoto Yuki both gave up their lives to save others. Both are alive and well in Maruki's reality with no recollection of their passing." The one she wasn't sure if she could bear to lose a third time was Makoto. "I...have had to let one of them go before. I understand the weight of being asked to endure such a thing." She could understand if he buckled under being asked to choose between the whole world or one person that sorely did not deserve their fate.

[flightpen]

"Oh." He doesn't... know what to say to that. There isn't really anything he can say. There are no words that can encompass that nightmare.

"Thank you," he says quietly. "Um. It means a lot. A lot of people have been kind of..." ...Yeah. They've been kind of. That's good enough; he doesn't want to elaborate on how some people have treated him. "I'm really sorry it's happening to you, too." He hesitates, uncertain, but he can't just not offer, so: "Is there anything I can, um. Help you with? I can listen, or... My advice would probably be like, 'Well, I did this, so you should do anything else'."

[reasonliving]

So there were others that disliked him. Probably a lot. Aigis isn't sure she can blame them either knowing everything she knows about the way that Maruki altered reality. "I was accompanying you because you seem troubled." She can't help but smile a little at the fact Ren was leaping to try and make her feel better. "May I ask you something else?" He had nothing but negative things to say about Maruki's reality, so she was curious if he'd thought about trying to change it.

[flightpen]

"Sure."

[reasonliving]

"If you are unhappy with the outcome of your choice why not attempt to reverse it?" He probably had the power to. "You are a Wild Card Persona user like Makoto, and Makoto was able to seal an entity of death away to prevent the elimination of humanity." All that to say that Ren probably had just as much power on his own if he so chose to wield it.

Assuming that losing Akechi wasn't enough to make him falter. "Unless you believe Maruki's reality better than the alternative."

[flightpen]

"Oh." His expression darkens. "I'm not allowed to think about it. I'm so not allowed that I didn't know he was stopping me from thinking anything until I got here."

Whether he believes a dead Akechi is worse than Maruki's reality is still in question, but it doesn't matter.

[reasonliving]

"So you are made aware of the unhappiness of your situation and not permitted to think about changing it?" That did sound like a nightmare. It was something to consider when she went back to her own reality.

"If you do come to that conclusion it would be understandable. After Makoto passed I saw him in my dreams...always out of reach." She admits to him. "I wished to return to being a mere machine at the time." She was helped out of it by her friends, some of whom were struggling with the emotions they felt when he first passed, it'd make sense if Ren decided the grief was too much for him to bear in the end.

[flightpen]

"A machine?"

The next second, he winces. "Sorry. I didn't mean to be rude." It does explain why she seems weird, and looks like that, and what those things over her ears are. If she has ears. He thought they were headphones, maybe.

[reasonliving]

"It was not rude. I did not explain myself. I am an Anti-Shadow Suppression Weapon," she explains to him. "My purpose was to defeat Death, and now my purpose is to live." She was still struggling with that, but she supposed that everyone did. It came with the 'being alive' deal.

[flightpen]

"To defeat Death? Like, so everyone would be immortal?"

He's pretty sure that's not a good idea... but maybe that's hypocritical.

[reasonliving]

She sort of laughs. "Not like that. In 2009 there was a phenomenon known as Apathy Syndrome." He may have been too young to know about that. "Thirteen Shadows that took the form of Death descended to Tartarus with the intent of bringing a mass death it thought humanity wished for. I was created to destroy that, however I was unable to even in it's weakened state." She had asked for Makoto to kill Ryoji so that they may all forget death at the time of the Fall, "after that my friends showed me I could give purpose to myself." Which is to say that even when things are at their most dire there's always hope. She hopes he knows that.