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

[pheasantboy]

"I do think that sounds a miserable existence, Ren. I wish I didn't relate as much as I do." It's the way he can't connect, really, to anyone here; the way he always, in the end, feels they're making allowances.

"It's the worst thing, you know, to be alone. And I've been here so long, it feels I've known that forever." It's far more true than he knows; his face screws up. "Is that really how you felt at home?"

[flightpen]

The dam cracks.

"I am alone at home. I can't tell you why, you'd blank out at the first word. I tried to tell you at home and you really did think I'd lost it, for the, like... thirty seconds you remembered what I'd said. I'm not surprised you don't remember thinking it. But the people here, I talk to any of them for any amount of time and they know who I am and what I did. So they don't like me, someone tried to kill me actually, and I can't even blame them, it's just—"

God, shut the fuck up. He presses his lips together for a moment so he can't speak, then takes a long breath. "Sorry."

[pheasantboy]

There is a long, long long moment, as the words hang between them with the stink of death, as Ren's misery embeds itself in Akechi's mind, as a coin flips in midair. Will he accept it, or will he forget?

His mug lands on the counter, with a slam and a bit of a splash. Even back home, he wasn't a huggy person, but he reaches out. "Come here."

[flightpen]

But Ren flinches, barely there but visible if you're looking. His hands tighten on his mug. He remembers wanting Akechi to touch him, he wanted it so much, he wanted Akechi so much that in the end he made Akechi into someone who would touch him. He can't stand it.

[pheasantboy]

And he sees it right away; he flinches back in turn, covering it with a smile. It doesn't strike him as Ren's fault, and it doesn't seem that important to him; he even laughs a little. "Ah. My apologies. I should have remembered I don't have..."

Takamaki-san's gift, he was about to say. But he stops, and while what he says next isn't how he might once have said it, it's surprisingly close. "Who tried to kill you, Ren?"

[flightpen]

...Oh yeah, he did just say that, didn't he.

"Don't worry about it. I knew beforehand not to go where they were trying to take me. I wasn't in danger."

[pheasantboy]

"Ren!" It strikes him as outlandish that Ren would just say that and dismiss it, and he's not letting go.

"You know we can't have a—a murderer walking around the place. What happened?"

[flightpen]

Ren has already met more than one murderer here, not even counting that Futaba. Or Akechi, for that matter.

"It's just because it was me. Like I said. They recognized me, they knew what I did. I don't... hold it against them."

He's much more resentful about what she had to say about Akechi, to be honest.

[pheasantboy]

"You keep saying that." It may be infuriating that he's following this thread, of all threads, through their conversation. "What on earth can you have done that was so bad?"

We don't even have murder at home, he almost says, and then... he thinks better of it, and bites it back. Something is itching in the back of his mind, like a grain of sand.

[flightpen]

"Akechi." His voice is quiet, not with gentleness so much as with exhaustion. "I can't tell you. It hits, like, every keyword Crow told me to avoid."

[pheasantboy]

His eyes go wide. The conclusion hits before he can articulate it even to himself—it's about those powers they all have, they must exist at home, Ren has them too—and it looks like he'll protest. Then, of course, his eyelids flutter, and he smiles a vacant smile...

"No," he says, with some difficulty, the smile vanishing as if it never was. "I won't forget. What on earth can you have done that was so bad?"

He has forgotten, of course; he's forgotten his conclusion, and said the exact same thing he did before, almost down to the cadence. But he's noticed that he forgot, unprompted—which is a first.

[flightpen]

"You'll blank out. Even right now, it almost happened. Do you want that?"

It's a serious question. Ren can try to tell him and invite the episode, he supposes, if that's what Akechi wants.

[pheasantboy]

"What's my alternative?" His hands have clenched into fists at his sides. "This is all appalling. I have to do something about it. I can't have you walking about—hated by everyone you meet, threatened by murderers.

"If you tell me, and I forget, then I'm no worse off than I was. If you don't tell me—what would be the point of that, except that I was too much of a coward to take the risk?"

All of it is so markedly unlike the Akechi from home, who existed in his friendly pink and yellow fog.

[flightpen]

Ren just... stares at him for a moment, with a strange expression on his face. Not longing, and not grief, but something else, more difficult to name.

"Not everyone hates me," is what he says in the end. "A lot of people have been kind. More understanding than..." He sighs. "Can we at least sit back down? I don't want you to. Fall over or something, when you blank out."

[pheasantboy]

"All right." It sounds fair enough; he gestures again that Ren should follow to the couch, though he doesn't touch him.

[flightpen]

Ren sets his mug down on the table again and does the same with Akechi's, as well. And then he has to fucking—tell Akechi what he did. His throat goes dry.

It might not matter. Akechi might check out before he gets to anything personal. But Ren's stomach churns; pale, he avoids Akechi's eyes.

"We used to have a world like... everyone else's. Um. Someone wanted to—rule it as a fucking god, I guess, and we—me and you and our friends—we were fighting him."

[pheasantboy]

Even though Ren won't meet his eyes, he listens, wide-eyed, desperate to know. But of course, his eyelids flutter again. It doesn't look like much at all.

Again, he knows at once; his shoulders droop. "Ah. Well, that's..." Unfortunate. Regrettable. "I don't like it," he decides. "Perhaps you could put it another way? But this is so much, Ren, and you still aren't well."

[flightpen]

It's so much. Everything has been so much. But Akechi is asking it of him, and after what Ren did, he can't just say no because it's a little stressful.

"Okay. Um." He speaks slowly, putting words together as he thinks of them. "Everyone in our world used to be like me, but someone decided to change that. You and me and our friends opposed him."

[pheasantboy]

Well, he doesn't blank out, at least. What a ridiculous state to be reduced to.

"I think I knew that at some level," he says. "Or perhaps I was just afraid to admit it. I'm as I am here because I don't belong, so logically... you were as you were at home because you didn't belong."

But what a thought. He wasn't always like he is. The world wasn't always how it is. Why would he want that? "Why did we oppose him? I mean—if our world was like the ones I've heard described, surely it's better now? Why don't you like it?"

[flightpen]

He gives Akechi a look that can only be described as anguished. But Akechi said he wanted to push, wanted to take the risk, so he tries to explain anyway.

"People don't have—real emotions. It's always the same fuzzy undirected happiness, and if that's not what you feel naturally, you're made to feel it. And no one remembers anything, and no one has a conversation that means anything, and no one accomplishes anything, because no one has to work for anything, so no one grows, and—and people get changed. If they don't fit this guy's idea of who should be in a perfect reality, he just. Makes them different."

[pheasantboy]

But, he thinks, looking puzzled—he does accomplish things. Didn't he just finish high school, and hasn't he done all that work with Sae? His work with Shido wasn't exactly an accomplishment, but...

His thoughts neatly shift track, just as Ren mentions people being made different. And then, as if on cue, his eyelids flicker and he's gone. A few seconds later, when he returns, he presses his palm to his face.

"Has it been happening this often all afternoon?"

[flightpen]

"No. Until the..." Not the thing about the notebooks. "...the time on the couch, it was just the normal selective attention stuff."

[pheasantboy]

"The normal selective attention stuff," he echoes. "You make me sound like a zombie."

Like the cognitions in the street, that he recognises now are not quite like the people at home. No wonder people don't like him.

[flightpen]

"I'm sorry," he says immediately, his eyes widening in remorse. "I don't mean... Didn't you say you thought it was normal, though? Not to pay attention to bad things? When we were talking about me."

He's not so much looking to poke a hole in Akechi's argument as he is trying to comfort him.

[pheasantboy]

"It's not what you said," he objects. "It's the way you said it. Like something quite normal, the whole way the world is, is a dreadful imposition on you.

"I can't even consider the possibility that you are mad, not seriously. The way everyone here has reacted to me is proof to the contrary."