Archive of Our Own ^beta

Sojiro first realised something was up when he came back from buying cigarettes expecting to see Ren taking a sip of the coffee he’d brewed, only to see him still grinding beans. 

They’d gotten this down to a science over the last year; after Sojiro had shown him the ropes, he didn’t like to stand over the kid while he worked. Too much temptation for Sojiro to correct everything he did, and that wasn’t how anyone learned. So he took a walk, bought some cigarettes, took in the night air, and came back in time to have a sip while the coffee was still hot. 

Except tonight. It throws him off kilter, this interruption in routine, enough that he takes a good look at Ren. It’s nothing he can put into words but there’s something…off. And as he watches Ren’s hands move laboriously through steps he’s done a hundred times now, he starts to look back over the last few days. Sure, Ren hadn’t been going out much, had been coming straight home after school pretty much every day, but Sojiro had thought that might even be a good thing, that he was finally getting some rest after everything that had happened.

Now he’s not so sure. 

“You sick or something?” Sojiro asks.

Ren looks up at him and shakes his head. There’s no surprise at the question on his face though. Not much expression at all, really.

Sojiro figures he won’t help anything by chewing the kid out for making coffee too slow, so he lets it be.

Once the coffee is ready, Sojiro takes a sip. In truth he’s known the kid to do better, but it’s still pretty damn good. He pronounces it so, and Ren nods in response. 

“You sure you’re alright?” Sojiro tries. 

Ren swallows, presses his hands against the side of the cup like he’s steadying himself. “Yeah,” he says, a rasp to his voice. “Just tired.”

Sojiro frowns. Maybe the kid is getting sick and he’s just too stubborn to admit it. “Go on up to bed then,” Sojiro offers. “I can take care of the dishes.”

He expects more of a fight but Ren just nods, places his cup neatly by the sink and disappears up into the attic.

Sojiro comes to regret telling the kid to go to bed, because now he won’t get out of it. Sojiro pokes his head up there Sunday morning, reminding Ren to come get breakfast before they open.

“S’fine,” he murmurs, after a pause that’s just a little too long. “I’ll go out for something later.”

“Suit yourself,” Sojiro says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

Hours pass with no sign of life from upstairs. With a lull in customers after lunchtime, Sojiro takes the opportunity to go back upstairs. Ren is still lying in bed, his glasses folded neatly on the windowsill. He looks younger without them, the same way Futaba does.

“Have you eaten anything today?” Sojiro asks.

Ren gestures to his desk, where there are a few empty snack wrappers.

“Not like you to leave a mess,” Sojiro says, somewhere between chiding and worried. “Not like you to be up here all day either.”

Ren shrugs. He hasn’t even sat up.

Sojiro sighs. “Look, if you don’t want to talk to me, talk to one of your friends. Give ‘em a call if you don’t feel like going out.”

Ren smiles at him but there’s something odd about it, like there’s a joke Sojiro isn’t in on. “Yeah,” Ren says slowly. “I’d like that.”

“Alright, good,” Sojiro says, and heads back downstairs unable to shake the feeling that he hasn’t helped at all.

Everything stays silent upstairs, no creak of the floorboards, no murmur of voices. Damnit, kid. Once Sojiro’s finished closing up, he takes a plate of curry and a cup of Mocha Mountain upstairs. The kid is lying in the same position as before, staring at the ceiling, and looks over at Sojiro in surprise. 

“...You didn’t have to do that,” Ren murmurs.

“Too damn bad,” Sojiro replies, putting the plate and cup down on the floor next to the bed and heading back down the stairs. 

It’s unsettling, seeing Ren this placid—like he’d been when he’d come home from the interrogation, languid and spaced out, until the fever had kicked up again and he’d been overtaken by shivering. That was the last time Sojiro had to bring him food too. 

Even that hadn’t kept him down for long, though. Just a few days later and Ren was back to meeting up with his friends, back to their Phantom Thief nonsense before the bruises had even faded.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. Except that it had, a voice in his head whispers. It had happened to Futaba, and not a damn thing Sojiro did had been able to fix it. Ren had been her miracle, Ren and his friends and the weird inexplicable magic they commanded. Magic, he’d been informed, that was gone now. So where was Ren’s miracle?

Sojrio knocks on Futaba’s bedroom door that night. “Can you do me a favour and go see Ren tomorrow?”

Futaba looks up from her computer, a steely determination in her eyes. “Way ahead of you. Mission start!”

As has become routine, the next day Ren gets up late enough that he leaves Leblanc without breakfast, though Sojiro still hopefully sets aside a portion of curry for him anyway. Then he comes home straight after school, nods to Sojiro without a hint of life in his eyes, and disappears back up to the attic. Around half an hour later, Futaba comes marching into the café and heads straight upstairs.

Sojiro gives them a few minutes then follows her up the stairs, hoping he’ll find the two of them playing games or watching a movie or something. Instead, he stops on the stairs at the sound of Futaba’s quiet voice.

“We don’t have to go far,” she’s saying. “Just come walk with me or something.”

Just around the block at least, Sojiro remembers saying to her through the door, back when he still thought getting her to leave the boundaries of the house was within the realm of possibility. The fresh air’s good for you.

“M’not good company right now,” Ren murmurs in response.

“I don’t care about that.” 

Sojiro hasn’t heard Futaba sound so hesitant and small since he showed her the calling card he’d found in her room.

There’s a pause, and then: “I do,” Ren croaks, almost too quiet for Sojiro to hear.

“Ren,” Futaba says. He thinks she might be close to tears and it breaks his heart to hear. “I know it’s not the same, but this is all…really familiar.”

There’s a long silence and Sojiro wonders what silent communication might be happening between the two.

“I just worry,” Futaba continues, “that if you’re acting like I acted, even a little, maybe you feel how I felt. And I don’t want that for you.”

More silence. “I don’t…” Ren starts, then trails off. “I don’t feel like I’m going to die.”

Sojiro puts his hand over his mouth. Futaba has talked to him a little about how things were before her change of heart, but she’s never told him that before. He shouldn’t be hearing this, shouldn’t be spying on them both because he doesn’t know how to help them.

He retreats back down the stairs and stands outside the store smoking until Futaba leaves, giving him a quick silent hug before she goes. 

There’s too damn much Sojiro doesn’t know about the kid who’s been living in his attic for a year, and too many things he’s watched Ren go through in the last year to know which of them could be causing this. 

And even before Ren’s second and third arrests, before truth serums and solitary and the end of the damn world, there was already…something. It was Futaba and Ren’s instant affinity with each other that first clued him into it, made him revisit some of the research he’d done when Futaba moved in. 

That research had made him reevaluate a lot of things about Ren: his chameleon-like nature with his friends, the quietness Sojiro had first misinterpreted as sullenness then shyness, the way he’d kept himself rigidly still until they got to know each other a little more and Sojiro stopped being such a hardass, then gravitated to anything that let him keep his hands busy.

It’s familiar, even if it’s very different from Futaba. Wakaba had talked to him sometimes about her fight with Futaba’s school to get her the adjustments her daughter needed to thrive, but once Wakaba passed Sojiro cursed himself for not having listened better, gotten more information. 

But Ren has living parents, who surely must know a little more than Sojiro about their son and how to help him. So for the first time all year, Sojiro calls the Amamiya household. 

It’s Ren’s mother who answers. Sojiro has spoken to her before but not since before Ren moved in. He’d given all his updates to the court officer, and he had never gotten questions back from the Amamiyas.

“Hi, Mrs Amamiya. Sorry to disturb you; it’s Sojiro Sakura, your son’s guardian.”

“I see. Is there a problem?”

The line isn’t great, making her sound very far away.

“Not exactly, I’m just a little concerned about Ren and was hoping to get some guidance from you. He’s…withdrawing into himself lately, and I—”

A crackly sigh comes down the line. “Is he refusing to speak to you?”

Sojiro almost flinches. “No,” he says slowly. “That’s not how I’d put it. I think he’s having trouble…he’s been through a lot, you know?” 

Sojiro stops, because he realises he doesn’t know how much Ren’s parents really know about his year. 

“Well,” Mrs Amamiya says, “if you’re looking for guidance, we’ve found it’s important to take a firm hand with this sort of thing. Ren is very stubborn, as I’m sure you’ve realised, and if you give him an inch he tends to take a mile.”

Sojiro doesn’t know how to respond to that. He can’t help but hear his own words echoed back at himself, all the things he’d assumed about Ren when he first came to Tokyo, when Sojiro was so caught up in fury with himself for potentially risking Futaba that he’d been blind to the scared overwhelmed kid right in front of him. 

Sojiro keeps his voice very calm. “I think I’ve given you the wrong impression. Ren hasn’t caused any trouble while he’s here.”

Mrs Amamiya laughs. “He was released from prison—what, two weeks ago?”

“That’s not—” Sojiro starts, then forces himself to stop. 

They’d had more than enough character references for Ren, is the thing, An abundance of people had come out of the woodwork to all say the same thing: he’s a special kid, he’s got a kind heart, he helped me even though he didn’t have to. So they hadn’t needed Ren’s parents to contribute to his case, but amongst all the worry it had needled Sojiro a little that they hadn’t. He’d told himself he was getting overly attached, letting himself get possessive over Ren when he’d always known this was a temporary arrangement, letting that bias him against Ren’s real parents.

“Mr Sakura,” Mrs Amamiya says, her voice patient and almost pitying. “You’re clearly a very kind man.”

It took me weeks to show your son an ounce of kindness, Sojiro thinks. 

She continues. “But I think you should know that despite appearances, Ren is a skilled manipulator. He twists people to get what he wants, and he’s not above faking difficulties—appropriating the real struggles other children face—to get the attention he wants.”

The rage that flares in Sojiro’s chest almost bowls him over. It takes him right back to when Ren came home that awful night in November, the bruises and the blown pupils and the fine tremor running through his whole body. The realisation that Sojiro would have buried every one of the cops who did it if he could, and not lost a single moment of sleep over it. 

“I see,” Sojiro says, and he hopes the line is bad enough that she can’t hear how much his voice is shaking. “I won’t take up any more of your time.”

He hangs up the phone and puts his head in his hands, and stays there until he feels able to move without hurling the phone into the wall. 

Sojiro doesn’t know how to help Ren, and when he thinks about the advice Ren’s mother had given him he starts slamming plates around so loud his customers give him nervous looks, but he does know how things started to get better between them all those months ago. He’d put Ren to work, and standing side by side in that little kitchen for cumulative hours had thawed him to the kid, made him realise that his careful politeness wasn’t an act or a trick (skilled manipulator, a voice in his head says, and he wonders how used Ren is to people assuming everything good he does has a sinister motive).

So after he flips the sign to closed for the day, Sojiro heads back up the stairs and says: “Come on. I need some help with the dishes.”

Ren is facing the wall this time, and turns slowly over to blink at him. The pile of wrappers on the desk is bigger now. The plates and mugs Sojiro brought up have at some point been washed and put away, so the kid must come downstairs after Sojiro has left sometimes. It’s painfully familiar, someone inhabiting his space like a ghost, trying to leave no trace of their presence. If only that gave him an idea of how to fix it. 

Sojiro wonders if the kid even heard him, if he should back off or push harder, but slowly Ren rises up out of the bed and obediently starts to follow him downstairs.

Sojiro doesn’t talk as Ren does the dishes, trying not to spook him. He remembers the first time Futaba came out of her room with him in the house, wanting to stand stockstill so as not to scare her off and stop it, damnit, they’re different. Sojiro is going to do it different this time.

As soon as Ren has finished, Sojiro pushes a bag of beans over at him. “Give this one a try. Just came in this morning.”

It came in last month, actually, and had been forgotten amidst all the chaos, but Ren doesn’t have to know that.

There’s a pause and Sojiro thinks maybe the kid will outright refuse him, but then Ren takes the bag and heads slowly over to the counter. Sojiro lets him work for a minute, then his phone buzzes. He pulls it out expecting it to be from Futaba, but it’s from Ren. Ren, who has never once texted him before.

It smells kind of acidic but also like chocolate, the text reads. Then, a moment later: Futaba told me to try talking like this. Sorry if it’s weird. 

Sojiro huffs a laugh. The first time Futaba had spoken to him after she moved in had been through text. It hadn’t even been words, just a link to an online listing for a plug-in mouse she wanted; he’d gotten her a laptop already but figured kids these days used trackpads or whatever. And he’d bought it, and texted back to let her know when the delivery estimate was, and next time she wanted something there was another link, then eventually a request to have ramen for dinner that night, and slowly a fragile little bridge between them had been built. 

“Smart girl, that Futaba,” Sojiro says, then hesitates. “Should I not be talking out loud? I can’t use these damn little keyboards.”

Ren huffs something that could almost be a laugh. There’s nothing wrong with my ears, he sends.

“Well, who would know, you hide ‘em under all that hair,” Sojiro grumbles. 

It’s almost embarrassing how relieved he feels to be having some kind of a conversation with Ren again. To know that he’s still in there.

When Ren serves him up the coffee, Sojiro tells him he’ll definitely need more practice with this one. It’s on the tip of his tongue to say that Ren’s lucky he’s still got time to learn from him, but Sojiro remembers Ren’s mother’s voice, remembers what he’s learned about what he might be sending Ren back to, and lets the kid disappear back upstairs instead.

The next night, Ren slinks silently back downstairs after Leblanc closes, gestures questioningly to the dishes. 

“Never gonna say no to someone else doing the dishes,” Sojiro replies, then realises that with his hands wet, Ren won’t be able to use his phone to talk. 

“Actually, leave those for now. Come help me prep, would you?”

Ren raises his eyebrows but obediently heads over and gets out a chopping board. Acutely aware of his own awkwardness, Sojiro takes his phone out of his pocket and lays it on the counter next to where he’s working. Normally he keeps his phone out of the way in the kitchen to avoid it getting splashed, but that wasn’t important right now. Things could be replaced. 

They work in silence for a while and Sojiro tells himself that’s okay, that it’s good Ren at least isn’t rotting alone up in that room anymore. 

Then his phone lights up. It’s stupid, but I miss the Metaverse. 

Sojiro had just about gotten used to maybe a third of the weird terms these kids say at each other like they make any sense, about the same percentage he gets of Futaba’s computer and video game chatter. Metaverse is one he knows, in the broad strokes at least.

“Yeah?” he asks. “What do you miss about it?”

There’s a long pause, just the sounds of knives on the chopping boards. 

I was good at it.

Sojiro scoffs despite himself. “You’re good at a lot of things.” Kid’s a damn jack of all trades, running around the city with all those jobs and all those friends. 

Not really. Everything else I had to work at a lot. There’s a long pause, but the sound of chopping hasn’t started up again so Sojiro waits. Infiltrating palaces was the first thing where it felt natural. Like that’s what I was supposed to be doing. 

Sojiro gets that. He isn’t a natural chef; he’d had to work at it and rely on other people’s recipes at first and painstakingly refine his motor skills. But coffee had been a revelation, easy as breathing. He tries to imagine losing that and thinks he’d be hiding up in his room too. 

“That’s hard,” Sojiro says, and it sounds so inadequate but he doesn’t know what else to say. Some things just hurt, and all you could do was name that pain for what it was.

Everyone’s talking about how we’re going to need to find ways of doing good without changing hearts, Ren sends. And they’re right, I know they’re right. It’s better that way.

“But you miss when things were easy.”

Ren sighs and Sojiro wishes he were better at this, that he could sweep the kid into a hug without it being anything other than awkward and unwelcome. Yeah. And that’s stupid too because none of it was easy. But…I was good at it. 

“That’s a hard thing to lose.” 

Sojiro turns to glance at Ren, who doesn’t look back but nods silently with his eyes on the work below. It occurs to Sojiro that this is probably the most Ren has ever talked about how he’s feeling to him, even before he started shutting down. It makes him wonder if maybe he shouldn’t be trying to get things back to the way they were before but instead, like Ren had just said, be taking the harder path and trying to forge something totally new.

The next night, Ren is drinking coffee and frowning at his phone. Sojiro busies himself around the kitchen and waits. 

It’s hard to explain, but someone told me I had to strengthen my bonds to give us a better chance of succeeding as Phantom Thieves, comes through eventually. And there were all these other things I could be doing too, making tools and getting stronger. 

Sojiro hums and digests that. “That why you’ve been up in your room so much? It’s hard to know what to do now?”

Kind of. 

Ren is still frowning at his phone, looking a thousand miles away.

“Don’t ruin my coffee by letting it go cold,” Sojiro reminds him. “I taught you better than that.”

Ren meets his eyes for just a moment, gives him an almost imperceptible smile, and goes to take another sip. ‘Skilled manipulator,' echoes through Sojiro’s head. ‘Appropriating the struggles faced by other children.’ Sojiro grips hard onto the side of his apron to quiet the sudden shake in his hands.

It’s harder without Morgana too. He was always nudging me to go get stuff done.

“I miss havin’ him about the place, too,” Sojiro admits. “Too damn quiet now.”

Ren hums agreement. I know he needs to figure things out for himself, and I really do want that for him. But it just reminds me of when he ran away last year. 

“Have you told him that?”

Ren shakes his head. I don’t want to make him feel bad. 

“He probably doesn’t want to be making you feel bad either.”

Maybe. 

Sojiro huffs. “I see how it is. Pretend to listen to the rambling old man in the apron, huh?

You’re not that old. 

“Can it,” Sojiro snaps, trying to hide his smile. “If you’re done with your coffee you can help me clean out the siphons.”

The evenings by Ren’s side ease Sojiro’s worries a little, but the kid’s still coming straight home after school and disappearing into the attic. Futaba visits but hasn’t been able to coax him outside; she lets Sojiro know that Ren told the rest of their friends he’s fine but needs some space.

Sojiro is starting to question the value of space. So the next night when Ren heads down the stairs, Sojiro lets him get set up at the chopping board then says, “I’ve got a project I could use some help with at the house. I’m gonna close up early tomorrow, you good to head over around 5?”

He hesitates, wondering whether he’s pushing too far too fast. The thing is, Sojiro’s pretty sure that if he hadn’t told Ren to come help with the dishes a few days ago, the kid would never have left his room. Sometimes Ren needed a push, and seemed to respond better to being told than being asked. But Sojiro still remembers the vivid rings of handcuff marks around Ren’s wrists, still remembers his mother’s polished voice saying we find it’s important to take a firm hand with these things, and he doesn’t relish the idea of forcing the kid to do anything.

Okay, Ren texts. What are we doing?

Sojiro tries to hide his sigh of relief. “There’s a little office room next to Futaba’s room that’s full of old junk. Gotta sort through it all and try to clear some space.”

He laughs openly at the little frown on Ren’s face. “Yeah, bet you wish you’d asked before you said yes, huh?”

Ren’s tiny crooked smile makes an appearance, and Sojiro takes a breath then pushes forward.

“Bring some stuff over too, if you want. Might be easier to just sleep over there since it’s gonna take a couple of days.”

There’s a long pause and Sojiro braces himself for an immediate refusal, maybe even for Ren retreating back upstairs. He has a vivid memory from years ago of suggesting Futaba come to Leblanc with him for the day and her not leaving her room for three days afterwards. 

Is there somewhere for me to sleep?

“Just the couch,” Sojiro says, trying to keep the relief out of his voice. “But it’s pretty comfortable—I fall asleep on it by accident often enough to know.”

Ren works in silence for a minute, and Sojiro decides to deploy his trump card. 

“I know it’d make Futaba real happy to have you around for a day or two.”

It was one of the core links forged between them: coffee, curry, and wanting to make Futaba happy.

If you’re sure it’s okay.

Maybe Sojiro’s imagining it, but he thinks Ren seems a little lighter for the rest of the evening, a little of the tension bled out of his shoulders. It hurts a little, to realise that maybe he hates being in the attic as much as he feels unable to leave it. Futaba has talked hesitantly to him about her palace, about how her room was the only place she felt anything close to safe but was also closing her in, trapping and suffocating her. Sojiro will be damned if he makes the same mistake twice.

Sojiro wishes he never had to dial this number again, but he’s thought things through a thousand ways; it would be cruel to present Ren with options that aren’t real options, and if his parents are determined to have him come back home then there are ways to try and fight that, but Sojiro is painfully familiar with how slow and lumbering that system is. If Ren’s parents want him home then he’ll be going, at least for the time-being.

And Sojiro hates that part of him is hoping that their bizarre antipathy for their son will mean that they’d be okay with letting him go. It hurts to even try to understand that, to school his voice into politeness, but for Ren’s sake he has to try.

Thankfully, it’s Ren’s father who answers the phone this time.

“Ah, Mr Sakura, hello! How are you faring? I hope business is going well?”

Sojiro is a little taken aback, but rallies in time to give a reasonably polite response. He has customers like this sometimes, and it’s easy to accuse Sojiro of being a cranky old man because it’s true, but he’s never cared for the barrage of politeness approach.

“My wife mentioned that you called recently regarding Ren’s behaviour. So kind of you to take an interest in his wellbeing in addition to housing him for the year. I hope he isn’t giving you too much trouble?”

A stupid part of Sojiro wants to believe that one of Ren’s parents does genuinely care for his wellbeing, but he can’t help but bristle at that word trouble again. How he’d tried to tell Mrs Amamiya her son was in trouble, and she’d only been able to talk about the trouble he must be causing. He remembers Wakaba saying the same thing, when she’d tried to talk to Futaba’s school about the problems Futaba was facing and it kept getting twisted into Futaba as a problem student, despite her perfect grades.

“It’s—it’s not about that, thanks,” Sojiro says. He knows he’s doing a poor job of matching the man’s joviality, but this is the best he can manage. “I was actually wanting to ask…hypothetically speaking, how would you two feel about Ren finishing up high school at Shujin?”

There’s a long silence over the phone. “In exchange for more money, hm?” Mr Amamiya asks. There’s a sharp sort of pleasure in his voice, as if he enjoys having caught Sojiro out, discovered his secret motive. 

“No,” Sojiro answers immediately. “I don’t want your money.” He curses himself, reminds himself again forcefully that he has to be polite to these people if he’s going to achieve anything other than burning bridges. “Ren’s a good kid, he helps me out in the shop plenty already, and I’d be happy to have him for another year. He’s been doing great at Shujin, top of his class in fact.”

“I see,” says Ren’s father. “Well, we always knew the boy had brains, interesting to see that he can apply himself when he chooses to. Under your excellent guardianship, I’m sure.”

He sounds almost…amused, and Sojiro is bowled over again by how little he can understand these people, to be faced with the prospect of your son not coming home and not seeming to care.

“Like I said, I haven’t talked to Ren about it yet. I just thought since he’s been doing so well—”

“Arrests excluded, I assume?”

That fucking amusement again. “Your son’s name was cleared,” Sojiro says very slowly. “His confession was coerced, and that first arrest was—”

“He has you wrapped around his little finger, I see,” Mr Amamiya interrupts, voice still determinedly pleasant. “Yes, well, I’m sure that’s a much more pleasant environment for the boy. Why not, then? I’ll have to speak to my wife but yes, ‘hypothetically speaking,’ you can keep the child for as long as you want. See how you enjoy him without that built-in expiration date, and without the threat of probation curbing his worst impulses.”

It takes Sojiro several seconds to school his voice until something approaching neutrality, croak out a “thank you,” and hang up the phone. 

“Sleepover!” Futaba yells, throwing her arms up in the air. “This is amazing, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! I wouldn’t have made plans!”

She’s off to go see a movie with the Niijima kid and the artist. As much as it warms Sojiro’s heart to see how close she and Ren are, it’s a relief to see that she’s come far enough to feel okay going out without him.

Ren types for a moment and Futaba’s phone buzzes.

“Yes!” she cries. “I’m holding you to that, mister. Super mega movie marathon tomorrow. I release you to go do boring cleaning stuff.”

She ruffles Ren’s hair, leans her head out for Sojiro to pat, then is out the door in a whirlwind. 

The spare room is even more of a disaster than Sojiro remembers. It’s piled so high with boxes they spend most of that evening just moving some of them out into the hallway so they’ll have a space to work, then sweeping out some of the dust to make it easier to breathe in there. 

It made it hard to nag Futaba about her messiness, when Sojiro knows he can be just as bad. He’d spent years putting off having to reckon with all the things he once thought were important. But he wants Ren to have options, and he’s spent months watching these kids be braver than they should have had to be; Sojiro can suck it up and learn to deal with this room piled high with regret.

Futaba brings takeout home and presents it to them triumphantly. “Mwehehe, I have turned the tables! Now I’m the one feeding you two.”

She chatters on about the movie to them both. Ren doesn’t reply, even by text, but he still seems lighter somehow, smiling softly at Futaba’s wild gesticulating.

Sojiro leaves them both in the living room, and when he comes to say goodnight finds that they’re both asleep on the couch under one big blanket, heads together and glasses askew. Sojiro gets out his phone and takes a picture: it’s blurry and dark, and he looks at it for a stupidly long time before he goes to bed. 

Sojiro wakes up a couple of hours later and heads to the bathroom, stopping on the way at the sound of Futaba’s voice coming from the living room.

“I get it but people are way more willing to solo-run conversations than you’d think! Or use chat messages—you guys all did it for me.”

There’s a buzz of what must be Futaba’s phone.

She huffs. “I will fist-fight anyone who tells you what you should and shouldn’t need—you included, buster! Fear my wrath.”

A small silence.

“Look,” she says, “you don’t have to be all strong stoic leader anymore. It’s okay to let people see you fall apart a little.”

A longer pause, then another buzz.

“Well, we’ll figure it out. Just like you did for me—we can make a promise list, even.”

Another buzz, then a rustle of clothing. 

Futaba’s voice, when it comes, is a little more muffled. “Any you is better than no you, okay?”

Sojiro keeps walking, lump in his throat. If he can be one ounce as strong as his daughter, they might just get through this. 

The next day Sojiro and Ren sit on the spare room floor, sorting through years of accumulated junk.

What’s the room going to be for, anyway?

Sojiro clears his throat, wondering if now is the right time to broach this. “Guest room,” he says, then pauses for a moment. “We’ve been having a lot more guests lately.”

Ren’s hands stop still for a long moment, then return slowly to his phone. You don’t need to do that. He sits gripping the phone for a while, and something tells Sojiro he isn’t done. My probation ends soon anyway.

“Well, first of all, this has needed doing for years and this way I get to rope someone else into doing half the work for me,” Sojiro says, keeping his voice light. Don’t spook the kid now. “Futaba’s no good at throwing stuff away.”

A ghost of a smile crosses Ren’s face, and he returns to boxing up the donate pile. 

“Second of all,” Sojiro says, trying to keep up that light tone, “it’s good for you to have options, particularly if the cat’s gonna be off runnin’ around finding himself for a while.”

Ren’s grip tightens on a long-forgotten hairdryer. Sojiro decides it’s better not to put him on the spot, so he continues silently sorting while Ren sits frozen for a little while, hoping he hasn’t already blown this. 

They don’t want me to come back, do they?

Sojiro’s face falls. All his plans for broaching this gently didn’t account for Ren being too damn perceptive for his own good. 

“It’s not that,” Sojiro says. “I…look, I called them because I was worried about you.”

Ren’s breathing picks up a little. Don’t screw this up, Sojiro, come on. He’s been here almost a year, Sojiro should know how to talk to him by now.

“And I also did it because…I had this idea, and maybe it’s a stupid one, but I thought you might want to think about finishing up high school at Shujin.” 

He feels dishonest going at it so indirectly, knows he wasn’t built for subtlety or gentleness, but it’s a piece of things that’s so much easier to talk about than those cold false voices over the phone. 

“You’ve been doing so well with your grades, and after all the crap you kids went through this year…you have a support system here, y’know?”

It’s a phrase Sojiro picked up from his renewed research, and he hears how awkward it sounds in his mouth. He has a sneaking suspicion real qualified guardians don’t have to google what’s going on with their kids. 

“Anyway, just somethin’ to think about. Or tell me to back the hell off, that’s fine too.”

Sojiro forces himself to stop talking. Goddamn these kids turning him into an awkward teenager again. 

They work in silence for a while longer, Ren slowly and methodically taping up boxes. Then he types for a long, long time, and Sojiro is prepared for an essay but what comes through is just: What did they say?

“Well, I kept it all hypothetical since I didn’t know if this was actually something you wanted,” Sojiro says very carefully, “but they were open to the idea.”

Another long pause. 

They were doing fertility treatments before I left. Then, a few seconds later: Second time’s the charm, huh?

Sojiro glances at Ren’s face, which is determinedly, deliberately neutral. Oh, kid. 

“You seem pretty damn charming to me. All those girls marching through Leblanc, huh?”

Ren huffs something that isn’t quite a laugh, recoiling as he always does when Sojiro tries to make out like he’s some ladykiller (in reality, he gets the impression Ren is either profoundly secretive or entirely uninterested in romance, both of which are fine by him). At least that awful, fixed expression has eased a little bit. 

Would they pay you still?

Sojiro takes off his glasses and wipes them on his shirt to give himself a second to think. He doesn’t want to spook the kid, doesn’t want to push too hard…but he also doesn’t want Ren turning back into that creeping shadow of himself he was at the start of the year, afraid to put a toe out of line - afraid of Sojiro, and it had taken Sojiro a long time to realise that and an even longer time to admit to the pit of shame it caused in his stomach. 

“Nope,” Sojiro answers, and then lets it sit there between them, letting Ren digest what he’s said and hoping he understands what it means. He remembers Ren teasing him as he tried to get it together after Futaba called him dad: ‘You have a great daughter.' Smug little idiot, trying to rub salt in the wound. And then the stunned silence when he’d snapped: ‘It’s not just her, idiot!’

Come on, kid. Figure it out. 

How would that work?

There’s a lot of ways to interpret that, and Sojiro isn’t sure where to start. “However you want it to work—it’s your life. You want to keep staying in the attic, fine. If you want to stay here once we clear it out, that works too. Switch between the two if you like.”

Sojiro doesn’t really want to say this next part, but the kid has spent far too long being shuttled around based on what other people want. Sojiro can’t be one more person shoving Ren into boxes because he’s decided that’s where he belongs.

“And if you want to go back home, make another go of it there, that’s fine. I’m not trying to force you into anything.”

They’ve abandoned all pretence of dealing with the mountains of stuff around them. Ren grips tight to his phone, brow furrowed. Sojiro waits.

Why? comes though eventually. 

“Why what, kid?” Sojiro asks and damn, his voice is getting a little choked. This is supposed to be about Ren, not Sojiro and his stupid soft old heart.

Ren shakes his head and Sojiro looks up to meet his eyes. They’re only a little wet, but he just looks…uncomprehending. Like none of this makes any sense, and Sojiro can’t help but agree. It doesn’t make sense that Ren’s parents aren’t clamouring to have him back, doesn’t make sense that they sent him away in the first place. 

Watching Ren for almost a year, watching him make coffee and coax Futaba out into the world and save every damn ungrateful person in the city, mostly what’s been driven home to Sojiro is how hard the kid tries. When he’d first started teaching Ren to make coffee, he’d quietly decided that he didn’t have the hands or the palate for restaurant work. Now Ren’s getting damn close to making better blends than Sojiro. The first time Ren had brought friends over he’d been so quiet, sitting painfully still like anything he did would cause the other shoe to drop. He was still pretty quiet compared to a lot of his friends, even before he stopped talking, but there had been a peace on his face when he sat with them, and a barely-suppressed joy when his dry deadpan comments landed. Sojiro had come up to the attic once and seem him sorting through weapons and toolkits and all kinds of things Sojiro couldn’t guess at, and it was kind of funny to see an almost-grown kid looking at toy guys with such seriousness, but he also recognised the care there. The fact that those toy guns were probably important to keeping his friends safe, and so Ren worked hard at it.

The kid worked hard, at everything, and had only let himself fall apart when there was no work left to be done, and Sojiro just doesn’t understand how any parent could look at him and not be damn proud. 

“I just…don’t want you ever feeling like you don’t have any place to go,” Sojiro says. “You’re family. You always have a place to go.”

Sojiro forces himself to go back to sorting to give Ren a minute to compose himself. Maybe to give himself a minute too, if he’s honest. He can’t understand how he ever thought he needed any of this junk. None of it was important, the way Futaba and Ren falling asleep on the faded old couch together was important. The rest of Japan can fall into the sea for all Sojiro cares. He wants to make curry for his kids, and that’s it. 

I like the attic, Ren sends. 

Sojiro tells himself firmly that he isn’t going to hold the kid to that. They’ll have to talk about it more over the next few weeks, because any kid considering leaving his parents behind is gonna flail and struggle and not really know for sure what he wants. 

But it’s a start. It’s Ren telling him something he wants, admitting that there are things he wants. Sojiro has seen enough to know that that doesn’t come naturally to him, but that’s okay. Like Futaba said, they can work on it. 

“Alright, but we’re cleaning out the attic too. You can’t keep living out of a cardboard box. No one’s gonna take you seriously if you’re all scruffy.”

Okay, but Futaba and Morgana have to help this time. 

Sojiro scoffs. “What, is the cat gonna sort through boxes with his paws?”

He’s lockpicked your front door before. 

“He—he what? ” 

Sojiro looks to the kid in disbelief and watches Ren’s grin turn into a laugh, a real full-body laugh like he’s never seen before. It’s enough to make Sojiro laugh too, taking off his glasses and wiping at his eyes. It feels suddenly like there are still miracles after all, if he’s here with Ren after the weirdest goddamn year of his life, the kid not only alive and free but still able to laugh. It’s something to build on, at least.