Ren leans against Akechi. For a moment, he lets himself exist silently in the moment; then he sighs.

"I knew something happened to them. I didn't know about the fucking... brain death. And drowning, or whatever. All I'd ever heard was they got sick."

His orphanage director had still been alive when he escaped, after all. In a bad state, apparently, with blood coming out of the orifices and so on, but people were freaking out for that reason. Not because he'd died.