Chapter Text
Ren locks the door and turns around. The light almost flickers, the smell of coffee’s a little off. He turns back to the door. Unlocks it. Locks it again. Unlocks it. Locks it.
Nothing sits right anymore.
Outside the Leblanc, the street’s quiet. He knows if he wanders out a ways, he’d find a drunk man shouting to the night. Ren considers joining him sometimes.
Makoto told him quietly, sincerely, that everything would get better with time. That the void – the big, gaping void that nothing seemed to fill – would shrink. Grief’s like a box, she said. A box with a ball and a button. Every time the ball presses the button, he feels pain and numbness. The ball starts out massive, and every time he moves it hits the button. But over time it shrinks, like the void, and hits the button less and less.
The pain never fully goes away. The button never disappears. But it gets hit less frequently, especially if the box stops getting rattled.
Ren walks upstairs and shoves everything off his desk to make room for lockpicks. Morgana looks up from where he’d been napping, ears twitching.
Sometimes Ren wonders if Morgana was serious about wanting to find a way to be human. It was unfair. Unfair and tragic that Morgana was still in a cat’s body. He was never a cat – they knew this now – and never a human. He was just… Morgana. One of a kind.
They were all one of a kind, but at least they didn’t lose their bodies the way Morgana had.
Ren lost a lot of things, but he still stood on two legs.
“Whatcha makin’?” Morgana asks. He leaps from the edge of the bed – a real bed, now – and sprawls on the desk. Just like he always did.
“Lockpick,” Ren says.
Morgana nods. “What for?”
Ren shrugs, and Morgana doesn’t press. His eyes shine in the moonlight, distinctly feline. Ren wonders if his vision was different in the Metaverse if his eyes changed so much.
It’s been so long.
He wants to ask, still. But it’s been so long.
Ren went home for the summer. It was freeing, at first. He’d needed a break. They all needed a break. The wind whipping through his hair, the Phantom Thieves packed in the van, the sun shining overhead – he felt so liberated. The Metaverse was so full and intense and demanding. It wasn’t sustainable to live based around that.
“It looks perfect,” Morgana says, voice thrumming with approval. “You’re as proficient as ever.”
Ren nods, but nothing changes.
He walks back downstairs, Morgana following him.
He stares at the door. Morgana presses against his ankles.
Ren grabs a cup of water and returns upstairs.
“It’s been a long day,” Morgana notes as Ren sits back down, “but… did you want to do anything tonight? It’s only a few more days before you return back to university. It’d be nice to spend some time with our friends again.”
He doesn’t need to go to bed on time, now, because there’s no Metaverse he has to be ready for. His body has nothing to recover from.
Ren misses the aches of bruises, the pretty red lines of scabs. His scars have faded to pale white lines, many gone entirely.
He wants to see blood again.
Sometimes he gets to, in the form of papercuts or hangnails. Sometimes he’ll get lazy while shaving and there’ll be a little nick, a little streak of red running down his cheek next to his black hair. Always red. Always black.
The colors make him feel so nostalgic and lost that everything in his dorm room is blue. Blue like velvet.
He wonders what Igor and Lavenza do now. He has so much he wants to ask, about Personas and Wildcards. About the Metaverse.
No matter how grand the plots they faced were, Ren can’t believe that this whole ordeal doesn’t run deeper. His key sits in his suitcase. Other guests of the Velvet Room had received their keys the first time the visited, she’d said. Who were the others?
Ren tries not to entertain these thoughts. He tries to not linger in Shibuya or Shinjuku, looking for a girl who isn’t there. Seeking a door that no longer exists.
They have no more use of him.
Ren pulls out his phone, nodding at Morgana. He texts Yusuke.
Half an hour later, they’re people watching in Shibuya. Yusuke’s pencil scratches hard against the sketchpad while Morgana paws at a moth flitting through the air, and Ren tries to escape his own thoughts by considering those of others.
Spending time with Yusuke is often the easiest when Ren’s feeling like this. Yusuke never pushes for conversation or shared activity. He’s content to just be here, give his company, and stay focused on his own work. His eyes are deep and beautiful, just like his quiet voice.
Ren knows Yusuke misses the Metaverse, but likely for different reasons than the rest of them. To Yusuke, the Metaverse provided endless opportunities to study and understand themes who ached to put into art. He enjoyed battle only as much as it gave him glimpses into the beauty of struggle and the horror of violence. Yusuke disconnected himself from his body, it seemed, and the experiences they all felt – adrenaline pumping hard through their veins, fear mixing with glee as they danced across chandeliers and scraped their arms through vents, power radiating through the very cores of their beings – were something to be dissected and expressed with paintbrush on canvas rather than accepted and pursued.
He shared one thing with Ren, though.
The love of the style.
They both viewed the heists as performances, themselves the dashing actors giving everything to fill the role. Everything about the way they fought was beautiful and elegant, even when they were beaten and bruised, blood drying on their skin. Especially then.
After all, what’s more poetic than calling out the depths of your soul while drenched in your own life force?
“Ren,” Yusuke says. His voice is so deep.
Ren wonders, not for the first time, if his life would be better if he could just forget Akechi and pursue Yusuke. Ren goes through these thoughts with almost all his teammates, all his confidants, wonders if he could just let go. Ren knows he can’t.
“Yusuke,” Ren answers.
They make eye contact. Ren wonders what Yusuke thinks when he sees his own face. Has he ever done a self-portrait? Does he appreciate the graceful curve of his nose, the heavy slant of his eyes?
“You seem to be rather deep in thought as of late,” he says. “Is there anything you would like to talk about?”
How did you move on?
Ren shrugs.
Yusuke waits. He waits the way Ren waits for him, giving him time to organize his thoughts and display them properly.
“I miss the Metaverse,” Ren says, “and I miss Akechi.”
Because that’s all there is to say, really. It’s enough to be honest, but not enough to concern anyone.
He rests his chin on his hand, and a comment Ann made a while back about the oils on one’s hand causing acne plays in his mind. I haven’t had acne in years, he mentally informs her.
Yusuke nods. “Those two were integral to your identity, were they not? The leader of the Phantom Thieves, pioneers of the Metaverse, and your destined rival. You must be lost finding a new mask to wear now that both have been ripped away.”
“Pretty much,” Ren agrees.
“It’s an interesting concept. Identity. I’ve touched on it in works before, but…” He looks away, humming as the crowd shifts in the late evening. The families have disappeared, replaced by young couples and rowdy high school students. “It was difficult when I lost my role as Madarame’s pupil. It felt like everything I knew had been ripped from my chest and put on display for the whole world to see. His fall from grace was so public, and I had been so involved… But I had a new identity waiting for me, with the Phantom Thieves. And I still didn’t lose the most important part of me. I was still, to my very core, an artist.” Yusuke flips the page of his sketchbook and gets back to work. “What were you, before you were a Phantom Thief?”
Morgana’s eyes shine bright as he looks up at Ren, curious for the answer.
Tokyo is so full of people. They crowd every street, every corner, occupy every room of every building. Chatter and mutterings mixed with announcements play with bright screens and colorful shops as if they’re all fighting to overload Ren’s senses.
The Metaverse was louder, though. Its colors more saturated.
The sensations he experiences sitting at a table on the busiest street in Tokyo are a pale shadow of what coursed through him in the depths of Mementos.
“I don’t think I was anything.”
“What did you want to be?” Morgana asks.
Ren did a lot of things before he came to Tokyo. Constantly picking hobbies up and putting them back down. His parents grew frustrated with his inability to commit to anything, tired of his ever-growing collection of uniforms in his tiny wardrobe. Band, figure skating, judo. Science bowl, literature club, ikebana. Jack of all trades, master of none. No wonder he was a wild card.
“I didn’t know.”
“Oh,” Morgana says.
Yusuke hums in agreement. His pencil stills against the sketchbook for just a moment before moving again, movements short and jerky. “A tragic story,” he says quietly. “A lost soul with no name to hold themself together, crushed heavily by a sudden fate. Handed the identity and sense of belonging they could never quite find, they eventually discover it was all manufactured. And it crumbles.”
“Yusuke!” Morgana shrieks. “Why would you say that? His identity wasn’t manufactured any more than the Phantom Thieves were! He overcame the false reality! Jo- Ren is still young, anyways. It’s normal to not know what you want to do! Nothing’s crumbled!”
But it had.
“We should head home before the trains stop,” Ren says, and Yusuke nods.
“Ren, if you would ever like to talk, I would be happy to. You are my dearest friend, and if I can help you in finding your identity, simply say the word. It’s the least I can do.”
Yusuke looks so handsome in his earnest companionship, and Ren wishes, again, that he could forget Akechi.
They stand, a bottle dropping out of Yusuke’s bag in their slight shuffle. It’s red. Crimson. Full of paint.
Some part of Ren screams at him to slip it in his pocket, but he can’t do that to Yusuke. He grits his teeth for a moment before picking it up and nudging his friend.
“Ah,” Yusuke says. “Thank you.”
Ren’s eyes stay focused on the red paint, and he feels something in his brain click.
They bid each other farewell, and before he knows it, Ren is back in Yongen-Jaya. His mind is flashing pictures so brightly that he can barely focus as he stumbles into the Leblanc, barely understands as Sojiro says goodnight. He tells Morgana he needs to step out for a minute, and Morgana swishes his tail worriedly before agreeing. Giving him this little bit of space.
Back then, they were inseparable. Morgana would only leave when Ren was safely deposited with someone else. Ren was never alone, except for that little bit after Hawaii. That was temporary. It sill stung.
But Ren needs space right now, right as he walks down to the small craft store by the theater.
It’s closed, of course, but he can’t wait.
He pulls a lockpick out of his bag. He has so many still, more than just the one he made earlier and left on his desk. He thought they’d go back to Mementos, after all, and never knew when to expect the Palace to end.
Ren picks the lock on the door and the store’s so old there’s no other alarms to go off. He walks to the aisle of paints, neatly assorted in the order of the rainbow, each brand on a different shelf.
He swipes the biggest bottle of red he sees and steals back out into the night, gently closing the door behind him. Morgana studies him carefully.
“I’m going to be up for a while,” Ren says. “You might like Futaba’s better.”
“Will you be okay? You seem really off tonight.”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll call you if I need you.”
Morgana’s tail flicks, and Ren morbidly wonders if he has the lifespan of a cat.
This rattles him.
Morgana nods. “I’ll be back early, okay? Don’t do anything dumb.”
And Morgana’s out the door just as Ren starts to wonder if he should just be maximizing his time with Morgana instead, because Morgana might have the lifespan of a cat and Morgana might be as fragile as a cat and the streets aren’t safe even for people and-
And Ren has red paint right now. Red like the Metaverse. Red like blood.
Ren steps into the bathroom and slides down to the tile floor, hands trembling around the bottle.
He pops off the lid and removes the little plastic stopper.
It doesn’t smell like blood. It smells like Yusuke, but cheap, because the broke student is only poor due to the amount of money he puts towards quality materials.
Ren doesn’t need fancy.
Ren needs red.
It doesn’t smell like blood, but it doesn’t smell completely unfamiliar. Yusuke was in the Metaverse too, close enough to smell during a baton pass, during a harisen recovery. In the Mona-van, they’d squish together in the backseat alongside the stash of treasure, but Yusuke smelled a little less like paint and a little more like blood and violence. The faint scent of warmth and craft pushed so closely against Ren’s nose struggled to compete with the smell of subways and rotting that permeated Mementos.
But this is what Ren has.
He strips off his shirt and dumps the red onto his hands. It’s thick. Thicker than blood. Cold, too. Blood dried before it chilled, unless there was a lot.
Ren smears the paint between his hands, rubbing hard to heat it up, and it starts to congeal. That’s wrong. It’s wrong. But it looks more right, having the paint on his hands, having his hands red, red, red, and he smears it on his chest and on his face. He gets it on his pants before he kicks those off, too, and rubs it onto his legs.
The blood would brown as it dried and glean differently in different lights, so Ren turns the lights off, mesmerized by the red paint he leaves behind on the light switch. He turns on the water and runs it under his hands, watching the red tinted fluid swirl down the drain.
Blood, blood, blood.
There was no pain here. He wasn’t bleeding.
But it was better.
Better with the paint. Better with the red.
He stays like this, water running, over his coated hands, until the adrenaline fades. He awkwardly dries himself with paper towels and throws on the oldest clothes he can find and camps outside the bathhouse until it opens at first light. Morgana will have to wait to see him later.