Chapter Text
Ren comes to awareness slowly, in a few important ways.
First, his surroundings. That gentle sunlight winding its way around curtains and across their bed means they’ve slept in more than usual. Mona’s moved off the bed to his comfy chair, so Ren almost doesn’t even need to check the state of his partner. But yes, there he lies, still sound asleep with limbs askew, either hidden by or splayed atop blankets and sheets twisted up by his trademark Akechi Thrashing.
Second, the memory of what happened last night.
Third, and right on that memory’s heels, the slow creeping realization of what that means for the future. Thrill and fear in equal measure. It’s been a while since he felt that.
Akechi snores.
Ren groans a little, rolls over. His fourth awareness, right on schedule, is how much he needs coffee. He needs coffee now. Coffee.
One of the few good things about being a fully-fledged adult with a house, is his morning routine can be whatever he wants it to be. Today that routine is grabbing his phone from its charger, splashing some water on his face, and saying fuck it to the rest—trudging his way into the kitchen in just his boxers and his disaster hair, and getting to work.
There was once a time when he didn’t have this crippling addiction to caffeine. It’s all Sojiro’s fault. Sojiro and his stupid, delicious coffee.
And now, it’s Ren’s stupid, delicious coffee. He drinks deeply from the well of the gods, breathing in its aroma, and feels himself transform into a human again.
A human with his great love, the sleeping beauty, somewhat awake and standing in the doorway in his cute little sleep shirt and shorts. He must have smelled the coffee.
“Good morning,” Ren says, looking fondly up at him from his seat at their kitchen table.
“Hrmphf,” Akechi answers.
He doesn’t move. His hair might be even more of a disaster than Ren’s, which means he hasn’t found a mirror yet.
Ren takes another sip. Glorious. “Did you wash your face?”
“Rughghmph.”
That means no. “Go wash your face, you always say it helps.”
Akechi trudges away, unsteady on his feet. Ren might not rule out that he’s still a little bit drunk.
From the sheer amount of messages on his phone it looks like everyone eventually made it home safe and sound last night. He can’t recall anything egregiously terrible happening either, at least not while he was around, so he might call the party a tentative success.
Futaba even shared a photo album with their group—the cover of which seems to be Sojiro with a beer in one hand and his other arm around the life-size cardboard standee of Akechi Goro, Detective Prince. Ren is not prepared to open that yet.
The real Akechi Goro shakily sits in the chair beside him, having returned from the bathroom, so Ren closes his phone and gives him his full attention.
His hair is all fixed up now. Bummer.
Ren reaches behind him, grabs an already-brewed cup of coffee and slides it over into Akechi’s waiting hands.
“Coffee,” Akechi mumbles.
“Yup,” Ren confirms. He thinks it was less of a question and more of a prayer, but it’s too much fun not to play along when Akechi is in this sort of state.
Akechi blinks and nods, taking a few deep breaths between careful, hesitant sips. Ren can see him come alive before his very eyes, blooming like one of Ren’s sunflowers, stretching up toward the light.
Not bad for six drinks and a fairly early morning.
“Smoothie?” Akechi asks next, his voice a little raspy and a little more pathetic. Ren is obsessed with him.
“Sure,” he responds, instead of I love you I would take care of you forever please marry me. Their refrigerator may be broken, but he’s got enough goods shoved into their temporary mini-fridge that he can figure something out. “Here, eat this too,” he says, sliding over a plate of toast he’d prepared earlier.
If he knows anyone, he knows his partner. His partner, his fiancé, his groom, his husband, his spouse, his soulmate, his—
He’s getting ahead of himself. The ring is still in his jacket.
Time to get to work on that smoothie.
“Thank you.” Akechi says, completely ignorant to the insanity clouding Ren’s morning brain. He delicately nibbles at his toast. “I’m never drinking that much again.”
“You looked like you had fun, though.”
All he gets in response to that is a long, melodramatic groan.
“Ren,” Akechi says at the end of it, regarding him seriously with frizzy hair and untreated undereye bags. “Could I possibly have convinced you to join the NPSC case last night?”
Ha. Well, that’ll save some explaining. “Yup.”
Akechi blinks at him again. He takes another drink of his coffee, then another bite of his toast.
“I can’t believe I’m going to have to work with Sae-san again,” he says. “Let this hangover kill me.”
“Makoto too.”
“Fuck!” Akechi exclaims, falling theatrically onto the table.
This kind of exaggerated acting means he’s gotta be feeling much better already—Ren takes a moment to feel quietly pleased with his work.
“Investigating the corruption of the corrupt dipshits who investigate the corrupt dipshit police for corruption, while being the private citizen representatives and public faces of the operation,” Akechi muses to himself while he’s down there, his voice a bit muffled by the table.
Ren chuckles at the absurdity of it. “We’re gonna get assassinated so fast.”
Akechi sits up, rips off a chunk of toast with his teeth. “They have no idea who they’re dealing with. I’d like to see them try.”
Then he stands up, rustles around their drawers until he finds one of their billions of scrap notepads and a working pen. A man on a mission.
Ren takes the opportunity to turn on the blender, watching the pineapple, banana, and a few other secret ingredients disappear into a hopefully-delicious slurry.
“The way we’ve been running Wildcard so far, with me as the frontman and you as the phantom—” Akechi says as soon as the blender quiets, pacing back and forth in their kitchen and scribbling notes on paper like he wasn’t deathly hungover three minutes ago. “We can use that to our advantage. If we keep your identity a secret…”
“Then only you get killed,” Ren points out.
Akechi rolls his eyes. “I don’t plan on dying again,” he says, as if it were only a minor inconvenience. “I’m a beloved former teen idol. That might save me from being executed through obvious means, at least for a while.”
They’re talking about the worst shit imaginable, yet Ren can’t keep the grin off his face.
He hasn’t felt like this in years. A vision of the future mixes with the past, Akechi shining on television again, in his element, answering questions and corralling public opinion to his whims like it’s second nature. Their friends and family—their confidants—lending a hand when they need them. And he can see himself—a true phantom thief again: following suspects, breaking into secure buildings, stealing evidence.
Leaving calling cards.
Ren hands Akechi his smoothie, and he can see in his bright eyes, in his excited smirk, that Akechi feels exactly the same.
Here they are, about to leap off the tallest tower they could find, together. Ren can’t wait to see how they land.
Everything is perfect.
Well, almost perfect. Now Ren has just one last thing he has to do.
“Saint Joker, saving my life once again,” Akechi chuckles as he takes the drink, tosses the notepad and pen down on the table for later. He takes a sip, savoring the taste. He’s never looked more beautiful than he does now. “I appear to be in your debt.”
A familiar calm steadies Ren where he stands, letting him feel the room, his body, his target. That perfect moment… it’s nearly here. “How are you gonna repay me?” he asks, easily ushering it along.
“I’ll give you anything you want,” Akechi says.
So Ren responds: “I want you to marry me.”
And that is when time freezes—right now, right after Ren realizes he’s proposed at ten in the morning standing in the middle of his kitchen wearing nothing but his boxers, with his partner holding a pineapple and banana smoothie, and Ren having no ring in hand.
Oh god.
“Uh, wait—!” he quickly drops to one knee, nearly injuring himself on the linoleum floor.
Oh god. Wait. He still doesn’t have the ring.
He stands up again.
Akechi’s looking at him like he doesn’t fully understand what’s happening. Ren doesn’t either.
“Wait one second!” Ren says, and then he runs out of the room.
He doesn’t have time to think what the fuck, but his brain does it anyway, on repeat as he races back into their bedroom, toward the jacket he wore last night and shoves hand into its inner pocket.
What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck—
“Hey!” Mona yells from the middle of the bed, having startled awake. “Where’s the fire?”
Wrong pocket. Other pocket.
He finds the little box and snatches it with completely unearned relief, relief which vanishes as soon as he opens it to check on the ring inside.
It’s not there.
What the fuck.
“It’s not here,” he says, out loud. That doesn’t make the ring magically appear, like he hoped it might. Neither does closing his eyes really hard and then opening them again.
“What?” Mona yells.
“It’s not here!” Ren hisses back in a whisper, showing Mona the empty box with its empty slot where a ring should be but isn’t.
“Huh? How is it not there?” Mona whispers back. “Did it fall out?”
“How the hell could it have fallen out?”
“I don’t know! You’ve had that thing forever, when was the last time you checked it?” Mona pouts, clearly having no context, no idea how dire and time-sensitive the situation is, how Ren just proposed to Akechi and then ran away—
This is the worst thing to ever happen to him.
He runs out of the bedroom, back down the hallway and past the kitchen, because there might be something else he can use as a substitute, just for now.
But not in the entryway—if there’s anything it’ll be back in the bedroom, so Ren has to run back—
And that’s when he spots Akechi through the doorway of the kitchen, sitting calmly at the kitchen table, spinning something between his fingers. Something small and shiny.
Ren skids to a stop. He walks slowly toward him, hypnotized by the movement.
“You’ve been carrying around an empty box for weeks, you know,” Akechi says, still effortlessly flipping the ring across his hand. “It’s awfully embarrassing that you didn’t notice.”
Ren doesn’t understand what’s happening.
“I took it because it’s mine and I was feeling impatient. I hope you don’t mind,” Akechi continues mildly, his intense gaze not at all matching the tone of his voice.
Ren still doesn’t understand what’s happening, but at least one of his most prized possessions in the world isn’t gone forever. “You gave me a heart attack, I thought I lost it,” he says, collapsing down at the table beside Akechi, placing the empty box in front of him next to the half-full hangover smoothie. This still feels like some kind of waking dream, but his soul might be starting to return to his body. “Where have you been hiding it?
Akechi shrugs. “My pocket.” Horror must bleed into his expression because Akechi scoffs and says, “Don’t you start, I’m not stupid enough to lose it.”
Right, fine, maybe he deserved that one.
So the ring is okay. Thank god. Now Ren can… put it back in the box?
No, but Akechi knows about it already.
Ren sits in a thoroughly confused silence for too long, his adrenaline-clouded brain not quite able to parse exactly what this means.
But if Ren proposed, and Akechi has the ring, and Akechi said the ring was his…
“Hold on—”
“Finally, he’s getting it,” Akechi drawls, a truly maniacal grin stretching his grin wider than Ren’s ever seen.
“So… you—?” he can’t finish the thought—his heart seems to have risen up into his throat and gotten stuck there.
“You should get back on your knees, I liked that.”
He’s such an asshole. Ren is so, so deeply in love with him. “Give me my ring!” he finally manages to exclaim, reaching out to snatch it back.
“My ring,” Akechi says, holding it above his head like a child.
“Not for five more seconds you maniac,” Ren laughs, grabbing Akechi by his pretentious collared sleep shirt and kissing him thoroughly enough to expertly pluck his treasure out of Akechi’s palm.
As soon as he does, Akechi shoves him down to the floor. Ever the efficient one, Ren’s partner.
He giddily takes a second to put the ring back in its box, to hide that box behind his back, to adjust his position, make sure he’s just far enough away, and on one knee—none of this is what he thought it would be and everything about it is exactly how it should be. He loves Akechi so much, loves all of him, he always has, and now—
Now they have the rest of their lives in front of them, together.
When he looks up, Akechi’s expression has morphed into something new, something Ren has never seen before.
He already has an answer. Now all he has to do is ask his question, just one more time.
And so, Ren does.