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]

"Come on, then." He goes to fetch Ren's soup from the kitchen, whisking it up and quickly returning with it. "There'll be some unpleasantness once we're in there, I expect, but I'll take care of that."

[flightpen]

"Unpleasantness?" He follows Akechi with a frown. "What unpleasantness?"

[pheasantboy]

He doesn't look back, stepping back into his shoes as he gets the door. "The existing tenant."

He knows he just said the place was empty, which it technically is, but... it's so hard to think of it that way.

[flightpen]

"Oh." He processes that for a second. "Is it a cognition?"

[pheasantboy]

And then he does look back, in the corridor, feeling guilty that he doesn't feel more guilty. If it comes down to a random cognition or Ren, Ren is always going to win. "So they say."

With that, he knocks on the door to the neighbouring apartment, and steps inside.

[flightpen]

Ren follows, curious despite himself about the unpleasantness to come. The apartment itself has colorful art on every wall and faded, comfortable-looking furniture. A kotatsu sits in front of a television. And that's all that Ren sees on a first glance.

[pheasantboy]

But Akechi, who's rather more used to this and slightly taller to boot, heads for the armchair facing away from the door, towards the TV, where he crouches to address the elderly cognition sitting there. He takes her hand. "Good afternoon, obaasan. I'm sorry to intrude."

oh that's quite all right welcome home dear.

"My friend would like to stay here. He's not well, you see. So if you don't mind..." It doesn't take much more of this before the cognition is tottering out of the front door, still smiling. Akechi watches her go for a moment too long.

[flightpen]

Ren watches her as well, with curiosity, but only for a moment. "Huh."

He wouldn't describe that as unpleasant. It went about as smoothly as any interaction with a cognition can go. But he glances at Akechi's face and hesitates. "What's wrong?"

[pheasantboy]

He rubs the back of his neck, still staring at the door. "It's just not nice, you know. It was her home. I know, I know, they aren't real."

But they seem so familiar, even if they aren't quite like him. They're unlike him the same way he's unlike the others here, the same way (it turns out) he's unlike Ren. Who is he to say what "real" is?

[flightpen]

She'll vanish, Ren expects, or else find another home and then it'll be like she was always there. But he has a feeling that won't comfort Akechi.

"Thanks," he says instead. "For doing that for me."

[pheasantboy]

"You're welcome." It was sad, but he would have done far, far more for Ren, and for all that he's retaining more, most sadnesses still don't linger. He looks around at the room—at the faded upholstery, the old wallpaper, the tiny TV.

"Are you sure this will be all right? It's a little..." Shabby. He doesn't think it's like the places he grew up, just that Ren deserves better.

[flightpen]

"It's homey." That, at least, he can say and mean wholeheartedly. It's not new and shiny, no, but it looks comfortable. Not like it came out of Maruki's lab.

[pheasantboy]

"All right," he nods. "I'll drop you off some food, at least. What would you like?"

[flightpen]

"Oh. Um. I'm not hungry. Thanks, though."

He just wants to hide. He wants it to be over. It's never really over, but sometimes it can be over for a little while.

[pheasantboy]

But he offers Ren a bit of a paternalistic smile. "You may not be hungry now, but perhaps you will be later. And"—some sadness enters his eyes—"I know what you're like about time to yourself."

As bad as he used to think he was back home, holing up in his apartment and not coming out. But he never felt alone—that he recalls.

[flightpen]

Ren doesn't even have the energy to be annoyed about that smile. "If you really want, I can text you if I get hungry? Right now, I don't..." He doesn't think he can even stand to look at food. Maybe he can curl up under the kotatsu once Akechi is gone.

[pheasantboy]

"All right, then. But if I find you've been sitting here miserable and alone, I'll be quite annoyed." Sure, Ren, he'll do whatever you want. He'll fetch a few things and put them in his own refrigerator, he thinks, just to have them on hand. It's just that Ren looks so unwell—he doesn't think unhappy; it's like sandpaper on Akechi's skin.

"Well," he smiles. "I need a few things myself, so I'll go to the shops either way. But then I'll be in all evening. Text if you need anything, even if you just want to talk."

[flightpen]

He'd almost like to see Akechi "quite annoyed". It might even be possible now. It sure the hell wasn't back home, but Akechi isn't the same as he was when Ren talked to him yesterday.

"I will." He won't. "Thanks for everything. Sorry about earlier."

[pheasantboy]

Akechi just blinks at him. Did something happen earlier?.. right, they had a disagreement, didn't they? Or was it more than that? It mattered, didn't it?

His smile fades to nothing as he understands. "No, ah... you know, I think perhaps it was for the best. I'll leave you to enjoy your evening."

And with that, he goes to step back into his shoes, and out of the front door.

[flightpen]

As Akechi steps out the door, a voice whispers in Ren's heart. Not Lavenza; wherever she is, Ren has shut her away. It sounds almost like Ren himself. And it says,

Adjustment. Rank two.

His whole body goes cold. No, that's wrong, Akechi is his Justice arcana, and they were already at rank ten, and Ren felt the bond shatter but he could still sense the shattered bond until the moment Maruki rewrote the world, he can feel it again now—

—and at the same time, at the same time that he can touch the crumbled chains of his bond with Akechi, he can reach out and feel the new bond tucked up next to the others. Adjustment.

Hazily, like he's in a dream, he follows Akechi to the door and locks it. It's not like he hasn't thought before that Akechi is like a different person now, but he thought it was a metaphor, not—not Akechi really being a completely different—

So that means he's dead after all. Ren sold out the world to save Akechi, Ren betrayed Akechi himself to save him, and he died anyway, in exactly the manner he all but begged Ren not to allow.

Cool. Ren's fine.

He wanders back through to the living area. The kotatsu looks comfortable. The art on the walls is cheerful. Yusuke would have thought it lacked substance, before. He'd probably love it now.

Ren hasn't been alone since February 2nd—the first one, that is; if the laugh that emerges sounds a little hysterical then fucking sue him. Like Shrike said, he's been isolated but he hasn't been alone, because even when no one else is around him, Maruki is always there, always watching. Sometimes luck turns out in Ren's favor and he wonders if Maruki did it. A bribe, or a demonstration, or just—because he's trying to be kind. A benevolent dictator. Or maybe it was luck, nothing more, the coin coming down tails when he calls tails, his favorite food on sale, absolutely normal shit, and he's just losing his fucking mind thinking about how Maruki's eyes are on him. All the time. Every minute of every day, waiting for Ren to commit thought crime, apparently, or else for his sadness to surpass acceptable levels.

But he's gone, now. Ren is free of him. He knows, because he's been able to think about summoning Satanael and shooting a giant bullet that vaporizes Maruki's fucking head; and he knows because February 2nd was the last time he felt these wild, keening depths of despair.

A frantic, burning pressure builds in his chest. Tears sting the corners of his eyes—he doesn't even know what for, at this point, but who fucking cares? He takes off his glasses and throws them onto the chair. And then he sucks in a breath that sears his lungs, and, alone alone alone in his apartment that Akechi stole from a cognition, Akechi who's not Akechi at all, he screams.