Archive of Our Own

Akechi’s descent into this particular hell first begins, as it tends to, with her excellent hearing.

From her seat at Leblanc’s cramped counter, Akechi can’t see anything but the door.  It’s strategic; when Ren had shambled in a half hour ago, just as blank-faced and infuriatingly pretty as always, Akechi had been at the right spot to pretend not to notice her for a moment too long, even after the bell rang.

There are worse places to wait, and the coffee really is very good; Akechi finds that her second cup, brewed by Ren after the owner had run out for something or the other, is even better — not that she’d ever admit it.  Ren is in her summer uniform now, and everything about it — the apron tight around her waist, her exposed legs, the bare stretch of bicep where her short sleeves don’t cover — is almost worth putting off the ungodly amount of work and studying and scheduling she’s supposed to be doing this afternoon.

Akechi’s new favorite hobby is trying to flatter Ren, probe her, get under her skin, and she’d been managing just fine — until a few minutes ago, when another visitor burst inside.

Sakamoto Ryuji has a boisterous laugh and a look so extreme that calling it bold doesn’t cover it.  It seems she’s bold in other things, too, shouting things at Ren from her booth in the back: summer homework, from the sound of it, in all subjects.  To Akechi’s mixed satisfaction and irritation, Ren knows the answer to everything off the top of her frizzy little head.

But when Ren passes behind Akechi to place a glass of something sweet and cold and disgusting in front of Sakamoto, the bottle-blonde’s volume drops considerably.  “Are you doing alright here by yourself?” she whispers, and Akechi assumes at first that she means her, lurking at the counter with her delicious coffee barely touched.

Then she keeps speaking.  “I mean, are your cramps still getting you?  Still woozy?  It’s hot, isn’t it?”

Though she can’t see it from this angle, Akechi feels Ren’s eyes flick to the back of her head.  “I’m fine,” she says, even lower; Akechi has to strain to hear her.  “I’ll… lie down later.”

They’re obviously talking about periods.  Akechi almost rolls her eyes.  It’s a juvenile thing to whisper over; at the same time, it seems too personal to discuss in front of a stranger, much less a customer.  Akechi is almost tempted to sympathy for Ren for having the subject hoisted upon her — but it’s her own fault, really, for the company she keeps.

It’s weird to think about still-as-a-statue, unflappable Ren doing something so human as menstruating.  Akechi files monthly anemia into her mental Ren folder, fully prepared to weaponize it later.

Then Sakamoto coos sympathetically, “Have you tried jacking it yet?”, and all of Akechi’s thoughts skid to a halt.

Does that even help with cramps?  Does it help Ren, specifically?  And if it does, why would Sakamoto know about it?

Somewhere behind Akechi, Ren makes the tiniest startled noise, like a small animal.  “Ryuji,” she says after a pause, and it’s fairly level, but Akechi can’t tell if she’s imagining the trace of a whine there.  “Not in front of…  Not here.”

It’s cute of Ren to want to save face in front of Akechi, even if it is only because they’re mortal enemies.  Akechi tries to focus on that, instead of on Ren, a few feet behind her.  Her room is just upstairs, isn’t it?  Her bed right there, without even a door to separate it from the outside world?

Ren wouldn’t, would she?  Even with this pathetic little shop and its pathetically small clientele, the owner wouldn’t leave it unmanned; and anyway, Akechi is here now, and Ren would never sneak away to get off like an animal with such close company — would she?

She wouldn’t.  Akechi knows she wouldn't.  Even so, she pictures it: Ren, stolen away from her shift to lie haphazard on her lumpy little attic bed; she’s still in her uniform and apron, back arched and mouth open.  In Akechi’s mind, she’s frantically touching herself through her underwear, breath coming in quick and all but silent as she tries to keep from moaning.  But Akechi would be able to hear it.

The picture evolves.  Maybe Akechi calls out for another cup, and Ren doesn’t answer; maybe Akechi hears a strange noise upstairs and comes to check on her like any good samaritan would.  And Ren is there in her daydream, pressed into the back of the room with her face flushed and her fingers streaked with blood —

Akechi takes a long sip of coffee to ground herself.  It’s cooled significantly by now; still, the inside of her mouth is scalding hot.

Sakamoto mouths, “oh,” and any mortifying desire Akechi’s fantasies managed to scrounge out are extinguished just like that.  Then, a modicum louder: “Sorry, man.”

“It’s okay,” Ren murmurs.  “Tell me if you need anything else, okay?”

Akechi has approximately 15 seconds to straighten her expression into something presentable and disinterested before Ren comes back around the corner.  She’s not sure she manages it; there’s nothing in front of her to be convincingly keeping her busy, and her ears are burning.  But it doesn’t matter, because Ren doesn’t look at her anyway.

For all her fidgeting, Ren has a frustrating amount of composure.  All buttoned up and covered behind her stupid long hair and her stupid fake glasses, she can be stupidly hard to read.

Maybe that’s why it shocks Akechi so badly when Ren comes back around the counter and makes a beeline to the kitchen, as flushed as Akechi and then some.

There are a few moments of blissful silence before Sakamoto starts throwing out questions again.  Of course, dutiful Ren answers, and of course, she’s right every time.  Her voice is slightly raised to make it across the room from the kitchen; it bounces this way and that, right into Akechi’s head.

Akechi tries to focus on the document in front of her, but she can’t stop thinking about Ren’s raised voice, low and smooth and different from usual.  Her daydream comes back to her intermittently: Ren upstairs, but louder this time, her voice echoing down the stairs as Akechi checks on her, catches her, pushes Ren’s hand out from between her legs and replaces it with her tongue —

It isn’t a defeat when Akechi leaves without getting another conversation with Ren.  There’s little progress to be made in front of Sakamoto, anyway.  Better to cut her losses now and come back another day, mentally fortified and not daydreaming about blood in her mouth.

The coffee really is delicious.  She abandons it on the counter, half-empty, and leaves without saying goodbye.

—

Akechi is blissfully free of Ren’s period except in the secret depths of her imagination until the night she decides to show her the Jazz Jin.  They’re packing up to leave when Ren quietly excuses herself, swaying on her feet and confirming Akechi’s assumption that the Phantom Thieves hit a Palace today.  She thinks, in a moment of weakness, that it’s cute of her to have still wanted to come out with her, and is furiously resisting the urge to tear her own hair out when Ren comes back to the table.

There’s a strange look on her face, flashing under her glasses: unease, maybe, or fear.  Akechi’s heart picks up automatically.

“Amamiya-san,” she says with a pleasant smile, “are you alright?”

Whatever it is, it must be really bothering her.  Another strange look, and Ren stumbles in her last step to the table.  “It’s nothing,” she says after a moment of hesitation, faux-casual.  She looks so useless and vulnerable that Akechi wants to eat her alive.  “Are you ready to go?”

And really, Akechi should let it go.  She’s trying to be dashing, considerate, princely; she wants Ren to trust her, to rely on her; she wants it to hurt worse than anything Ren has ever felt in her miserable little life when Akechi digs the knife in her back and twists.

Underneath all that, though — stoic, unflappable Ren is wobbly-legged and unsure like she’s has never seen her before, and Akechi is so curious.

Akechi rationalizes it to herself as an extension of earning Ren’s trust and pitches forward in her seat, setting her hand on the other girl’s arm.  It’s narrow and hard with muscle; Akechi wants to sink her teeth into it.  “If you’re not well, there’s no need to be brave about it.  Can I do anything to help?”

Still standing, hand on the back of Akechi’s chair, Ren winces.  Akechi doesn’t like having to look up at her but she does like the way their knees almost touch, and Akechi has a sudden fantasy about grabbing the other girl by the hair and pulling her into her lap.

Instead, she stays perfectly still, watching her.  Ren finally finishes fiddling with her glasses meets her eye head-on.

Her voice is as low and unaffected as ever.  “Do you have a pad, Akechi-san?”

Despite herself, Akechi can feel the smile on her face freeze.  “Sorry?”

If Ren notices, she doesn’t comment.  “A sanitary pad.”  She waits, and when Akechi doesn’t answer right back, she adds, “My period started early.”

Akechi is suddenly gripped with a monstrous urge to whip around and see if Ren’s seat has any blood on it, but resists.  She wants to flip Ren over her lap, check her skirt, run her hands down her thighs to check the tights underneath — and resists that, too.  She takes a steadying breath.

“Oh dear,” she says with a little laugh, as much gentle admonishment as an excuse to find her footing.  “I suppose that happens to everyone sometimes.  Why don’t you sit while I check — oh, though you won’t want to sit, will you?”

She’s very careful to keep her voice playful and light and too quiet for any eavesdroppers — just some gentle teasing amongst would-be friends.  If it’s a little sharper than she’d usually allow, so be it.

Ren’s eyes are endlessly dark past her glasses; Akechi swears she sees something defiant flash there, just for a moment.  But still she remains, standing obediently at Akechi’s side as she pretends to look through her briefcase.

Akechi doesn’t have a pad.  Her own period comes regularly every month — unlike Ren’s, based on Akechi’s memory of that day in Leblanc.  And unfortunately, given how much she’s thought about it, Akechi is fairly confident in that memory.

Still, she opens her case with a click, runs gloved fingers between pages where she knows Ren can see.  In her head, she’s thinking of everything else: the swaying could have been from Ren’s apparent anemia, then, instead of a Palace infiltration as she’d assumed.  Targeting that weakness will be harder if it doesn’t come regularly.  A shame.

There’s something addicting in this: Ren silent at her side, waiting for her word.  Naturally, Ren will be forced to go home empty-handed, and it’s sweetly satisfying to think of her unflappable rival fidgeting, embarrassed, standing alone at the station.  If instead Akechi did have a pad for her, she would be saving her that humiliation, and that thought is at least as sweet.

Next time, maybe.

“Sorry, Amamiya-san,” Akechi finally says, snapping her case shut and looking up with the most beatific, apologetic smile she can manage.  “It seems I don’t have one.  Will you be alright getting home?  I can go to a pharmacy with you, if you’d like.”

Naturally, Ren will say no.  Naturally, she’s in this game just as much as Akechi, and she’ll be losing if she accepts the help.

But Ren only raises her brows, tilts her head to the side, and says, “Okay.”

Naturally, Ren was already a step ahead of her, and Akechi will lose if she backs out now.  So ignoring all the work waiting for her at home, she holds her smile, and they go.

Kichijoji is closer to Akechi’s apartment, but she doesn’t know a pharmacy nearby, so they end up all the way in Shibuya anyway.  In the bright subway lighting, Ren is visibly pale and ashen, but she turns down both the drink Akechi offers her in the station and the open seats on the car.  Akechi wonders if she’s still thinking of what she’d said in Jazz Jin.  The thought makes something pleasant rumble in her chest.

When the car comes to a stop, Ren stumbles.  Akechi catches her by the waist, snarky comment on the tip of her tongue — but Ren is so unsteady in her arms, and her clammy forehead tucks so neatly into Akechi’s burning neck, and the comment dies.

Well, it wouldn’t be any fun to kick her while she’s down — not now, not like this.  She’ll play prince charming now, and find a way to throw this memory back at Ren later, when she can fight back the way Akechi likes.

“Alright?” she asks quietly so as not to be overheard by the other nearby bodies.

Ren doesn’t push her away immediately like she’d expected.  Her grip on Akechi’s arms is tight, her head ducked and face hidden; it pushes her annoying frizzy hair directly under Akechi’s nose.  She smells like coffee and dust and cheap shampoo: artificial, vaguely botanical.

“Amamiya-san?” Akechi prompts again when the doors begin opening, voice inexplicably strained.

“Sorry,” Ren says, finally pulling away.  She turns and leaves so suddenly that it takes Akechi a moment to follow.

She’s different than usual all evening, the sharp edges of her over-awareness ground down.  Now that Akechi knows, she can’t help but notice: Ren’s knees keep shaking, and her eyes are glassy, and her voice is even more subdued than usual.  The neon pinks and greens of Shibuya nightlife reflecting off every plane of her face, she’s nearly vulnerable, almost pretty.

It would be easy to take advantage: probe information, names, plans.

In the high-stacked aisles of the pharmacy, studying price tags and boxes with a furious intensity, Ren looks impossibly small.  Akechi stands just behind her, glaring daggers at anyone who dares to pass by.

Halfway through the next morning, Ren sends Akechi a text thanking her for seeing her home last night.  Scrolling through their message history, Akechi realizes it’s the first time the other girl has ever texted her first.

This is fine; nothing has changed.  Akechi is pursuing Ren because she’s hunting her down, and there’s no need to feel victorious or embarrassed or angry about this message in particular.  Bringing her home last night was only an extension of making Ren depend on her.  Now she’ll trust her even more than she had, be even more vulnerable.

Akechi packs emergency pads in a side pocket of her briefcase, just in case.

—

Joining the Phantom Thieves forces Akechi into Ren’s schedule alarmingly often.  She had plans today — writing a paper, emailing back that magazine, mooching free food off some high-rise dinner party — but Ren had wanted to go to Mementos, and so Akechi had come.

Seeing her with the other Thieves sets a vicious edge to Akechi’s mood.  Sakura Futaba asks Ren if she’ll make her dinner tonight; Okumura barrages her with compliments for every mediocre flip and twist in battle; Kitagawa calls her hauntingly beautiful, hands poised as if to frame her in place.

Ren isn’t like a painting; she’s too quick, too alive.  If Akechi tries to picture her hanging on a wall, it’s as a blur of black and red — you’d have to pin her like a butterfly, limp and dead, to really capture her.

As if reading her mind, Ren glances over Kitagawa’s shoulder to make direct eye contact with Akechi.  She’s in the main party again today at her own insistence, but even so, she’s an outsider.  Ren is the center of the world for everyone here except for Akechi; when Takamaki joins the conversation, she reaches out to touch Ren as if by instinct.  Her pink-clad hands stand brilliantly against Ren’s jacket — but not as brilliantly as white would.

Akechi’s jaw aches with the urge to dig her teeth into something.

She’s been to Mementos with them before.  It’s different than it is when she’s alone: Sakura and the cat navigate them around with an almost frightening level of reliability, and the wheels keep the physical toil low.  Still, sitting in the backseat beside her, Ren is unusually quiet.

It had been shocking to see Ren in the Metaverse the first time Akechi had followed them in.  As opposed to her usual demeanor, everything about her here is loud: her voice, her movements, the tilt of her head and the angle of her grin.  Even once she leaves, the implications of silent, serious Ren and her many masks and her weekly escapades as Joker ring round and round Akechi’s mind no matter how she tries to strangle them.

Ren isn’t like that now.  No matter how her teammates joke or what they talk about or how Akechi pokes and prods, she doesn’t join in.  Her smiles and exclamations in battle grow less and less frequent with time until they slip away entirely.  And now, when Akechi looks, she finds that Ren is only barely keeping her eyes open.

There shouldn’t be anything wrong.  Her health is fine, and she hasn’t been hit with any strange spells or status effects.  But still —

“We’ve done a lot today,” Akechi comments, so abruptly that Niijima looks away from the road to catch her eye in the mirror.  “Shall we return to the surface?”

In Akechi’s experience, Ren is extremely flighty: ambiguous with her words, her looks, her actions.  Akechi has never met anyone less likely to answer her texts.  Some nights, Akechi will invite Ren out and never hear from her, not even to reject her.

But she’s the opposite in the Metaverse.  One by one, her teammates file out with a send off from Ren, some comment or promise or inside joke exchanged between the two of them, until only Akechi and Morgana remain.

Ren puts on as admirable a facade as always.  Leaned against the wall, her hands in her pockets, Akechi doesn’t even think she’d see the way she sways or the gray cast to her face if she didn’t know what to look for.

This is so incredibly irritating; Akechi really has the worst timing.  If she weren’t in the final stage of her plan already, she’d just leave Ren here to faint and die.

“I’ll see you home today, Ren,” she says, pleasant but forceful; before Ren can refuse, she adds, “Truth be told, I have some strategies I’d like to discuss with you anyway.”

Morgana objects, right on cue — but it isn’t about him.  Before the first excuse can finish leaving his mouth, Ren has a hand up.  Quiet.

Past her mask, Ren’s gunmetal eyes are hard to read; they reflect Akechi’s own emotions back at her.  “Okay.”

“Ren,” Morgana hisses, but she hardly looks at him.

“Go on ahead, Mona,” she says, gaze still locked in Akechi’s, like a key in a lock.  “I’ll meet you at home.”

He looks at Ren a while longer.  Probably, if Akechi was focusing on it, she could glean some clues from this look: if it’s just general suspicion, or something more pointed, or if there’s some other moving part to this machine she’s not yet aware of.

But she’s already looking at Ren, and if would feel like losing to look away first.

Eventually, Morgana does leave, threatening all manners of force and panic if Ren isn’t home in a timely manner.  His tail flicks angrily behind him all the walk out.

Then it’s just Akechi, Ren, and Mementos.

Akechi thinks about their duel here earlier this week.  Dull heat swirls in her gut, and fury tinges her tastebuds metallic — like subway tracks, like Ren’s dagger, like blood.

She could kill her here just for the satisfaction of it, plan be damned.  She’d be sacrificing everything she’s ever worked for, but she’d get to stand over Ren’s dead body, keep her last moments to herself, leave her cooling corpse somewhere no one would ever find her again.

Ren shifts on her feet, drawing Akechi’s attention back to the present.  Her legs are objectively irresistible in these heels, hidden though they may be under familiar opaque black.  She must have classmates leering every time she picks up a book or walks up the stairs, jacking off to the mere thought of her bare skin under her tights.  Akechi has the sudden urge to murder every boy at Shujin Academy.

“Akechi?” Ren asks, flat and unimpressed as ever.  Akechi hates her so much her teeth ache.

But she’s playing the prince.  Even after her unplanned, unfortunate honesty the day of their duel, she’s still pretending.  Ren hasn’t changed the way she treats her, so Akechi won’t either.

“Shall we?” she asks, putting her arm out for Ren to take.  “Let’s get a drink for the journey.  My treat.”

She really can’t afford to waste the money, but it’s for the act; call it a work expense.

It feels worth it, anyway, when Ren wraps her gloved hand around Akechi’s bicep.  “Lead the way,” she says, and she isn’t smiling, but the look dancing beyond her mask spells a smile anyway.

Akechi is fully prepared to do the whole song and dance for the evening, too: to buy the drink, and make up some stupid strategy to talk about, and see Ren back to her dusty orphan attic like a gentleman.

But she doesn’t have to, because the instant they exit the Metaverse, Ren faints.

It isn’t that Akechi had expected this exactly, but she’d seen the signs.  The inattention, the sleepiness, the swaying and shifting — she’d guessed not an hour into their Mementos infiltration that Ren was having her typical period-induced anemic episode.  Even if none of her useless teammates had noticed, Akechi did.

She goes down so slow that she’s easy to catch.  Without her gloves, Ren's hands are impossibly cold.

“Are you alright?” Akechi asks, brushing a lock of hair out of the other girl’s face.  She does seem conscious on second glance, if only barely; her flint-gray eyes stare waxy into Akechi’s face behind her pretty lashes.

Akechi still has her in a dip, and they’re garnering attention quickly in the busy subway station.  Bristling, Akechi hauls Ren’s arm over her shoulders and drags her to a bench.  “Hey,” she murmurs close to Ren’s ear, but the other girl only shivers and falls deeper into unconsciousness.

Ren is useless to her; she’s impossible to prod or woo or cajole in this state.  Akechi should probably just leave her here, or at most, bring her home — but Leblanc will still be open at this time.  Akechi dreads the thought of having to explain this to Sakura Sojiro, especially since there’s no doubt he’s in the dark about this Phantom Thief business.  Worse, if it goes wrong, she loses her favorite spot for a cheap cup of coffee.

If she’d known Ren was feeling faint, she shouldn’t have involved herself — better to leave her to her team of adoring, incompetent followers.

Akechi sighs, pinches the bridge of her nose.  Then she bundles Ren up in her arms, jacket sacrificed to hide the tops of Ren’s thighs from leering onlookers, and gets them on the next train to her apartment.

She’s heavier than she looks, all her lithe muscle setting her dense as a rock in Akechi’s hold.  If Akechi were any less strong, or if anyone else was holding her, Ren might fall.  Even now, tomorrow’s soreness is already burning its warning up Akechi’s arms.

The whole trip, Akechi tells herself it’s only her reputation keeping her from swinging Ren out of a bridal carry and over her shoulder.  It’s only her image that has her stripped down to her blouse in the October chill to protect Ren’s questionable modesty.  It’s only her plan that has her glaring at anyone who glances at them, Ren most of the way on her lap and Akechi’s arms wrapped tight around her.

It would be terrible for her if photos of this got out.  It’s getting harder and harder to make excuses for herself.

Ren looks out of place in Akechi’s apartment; her presence only makes Akechi’s total lack of furnishings more apparent.  Her dark hair is like a stain of ink on Akechi’s unused, uncomfortable couch, spilling over the edge and onto the floor.

Maybe that’s why Akechi has such a hard time focusing in her presence.  No matter how hard she stares at the pages in front of her, her eyes keep drifting to Ren.

“Finally awake?” she asks brightly when Ren’s eyes open.  There’s acid in her voice, but Ren doesn’t flinch at all; she only blinks at her, soft and doe-eyed, before glancing around.

“You have a nice place,” she says quietly instead of asking any questions or rising to the jab.  When she sits up, the towel Akechi had laid beneath her scrunches up in a way that must be uncomfortable.  Ren doesn’t move it, though.

Akechi wonders if it’s bunched in between her thighs, if the thick fabric doubled over itself is hard enough to feel like anything.  If Ren is sensitive, and expressive, and if she would make a face Akechi’s never seen before if she watched her for long enough.  She wonders if there will be blood on that towel when she gets it back.

She’d only put it under Ren to embarrass her in the first place, but now Akechi is the one with the red face.

“Thanks,” she says dully, and looks back down at the textbook in front of her.

Out of the corner of her eye, Akechi sees Ren look around a moment longer, though the apartment is obviously bare with nothing to see.  Then she takes her phone out, probably to respond to any panicked messages from her driveling lackeys.  Then she gets up from the couch and walks away, blazer discarded on the cushions.

Akechi bristles, but she wants to seem as unconcerned as possible, so when Ren mercifully heads toward her kitchen and not her bedroom, she just leaves her be.  There’s nothing in the kitchen Akechi cares about, anyway — no secrets, no clues, no personal belongings.

Ren’s voice carries soft through the empty air.  “Do you have a rice cooker?”

“Not sure,” Akechi replies, curt and unhelpful.  Then, to feel less like a sulking child: “Check the bottom cabinet, near the sink.”

The only reply she gets is a soft clatter and a triumphant hum.  The picture of Ren kneeling obediently on her kitchen floor flashes through Akechi’s traitorous mind, wedging itself fiercely behind her eyes.

A few minutes later, a delicious smell wafts into the living room.  Not long after that, Ren sets two bowls of soup, two of rice, and two sets of dinnerware on Akechi’s coffee table.  Then she folds her legs under her and settles across from Akechi like she belongs to be there, like she’s lived here her entire life.

Still hiding in her work, Akechi picks at the food.  Then she eats more, faster.  Even such a simple meal is delicious in Amamiya Ren’s perfect little hands.  Akechi can’t even remember the last time she had a home-cooked meal.

Ren is watching her again when Akechi looks up, homework long-since abandoned.  She almost chokes on her chopsticks.

“Is it good?” Ren asks, the corners of her lips twitching.  Akechi wants to grab her by the hair and shove her face against the table.  She wants to kiss her.

Akechi's expression is too blank to be charming when she lowers her bowl; her voice is too flat.  “I just don’t know what the occasion is.”

“Who needs an occasion?” Ren replies.  The sleep or food or something must have been good for her; some of the color is back on her face, mouth all pink and under-eyes tinged a mischievous red.  “I’ll cook for you anytime, Crow.”

Akechi wants to bark at her like an angry dog.  Instead, she smiles her very best television smile and pointedly doesn’t reply.

Ren leaves with much less ceremony than she’d come in with.  Akechi is distantly aware of her washing dishes, of the sound of the bathroom sink, of her jacket disappearing from the couch.  But she’s determined to not look after her, forlorn like a sighing maiden, and she slips into her reading up to her ears until Ren finally calls out her name.

She’s by the door now, shoes already on; the bag slung over her shoulder is noticeably deflated without Morgana.  She’s more aware than she had been in Mementos, eyes sharp once more and stance steady.  Akechi still feels the instinctive, horrible kick to follow her out and send her home.

“Thanks for everything,” Ren says.

Akechi is pretty sure she says something; she must say something, because there’s no way she just sat there gaping at her mortal enemy like an idiot.  But whatever it is, she can’t remember it.

It’s somehow harder to focus once Ren’s gone.  Akechi can’t stop thinking about why she’d even invited her out, why she’d even brought her here — she’s less than a week out from her plan, and she’s already laid all her cards out right in front of Ren.  She’d had nothing to gain by speaking with her, much less bringing her to her apartment, where she hasn’t brought anyone ever since Shido bought it for her as part of their preliminary deal years ago.

But she did; she’d brought her home.  She’d brought her home wrapped up in her clothes and was disappointed when they weren’t stained with blood.

Maybe Akechi’s libido is just getting the better of her.  Ren is objectively beautiful, and Akechi has spent a lot of time in very close quarters with her recently.  That must be it.  There’s no way she’s getting sentimental — not when she’s so achingly close to everything she’s ever wanted.

She just wants to fuck her; it isn’t that serious.  There are a million other girls Akechi would probably be just as interested in sleeping with.

She doesn’t let herself think about how unusually unsexual this encounter had been.

In the bathroom, the pad Akechi had left surreptitiously on the counter is gone.  In the center of the fridge, there’s leftover soup sealed tight in a container Akechi hadn’t known she had.  Akechi means to toss it out; she really tries to.

Instead, she dips her finger in and licks it clean, savoring the cold, salty, slimy flavor coiling around her tongue.

—

It seems not even death can keep Ren’s period from being the bane of Akechi’s existence.  From the moment Ren had shifted on her shitty attic bed and Akechi had seen red on her sheets, she’s felt her self-control hanging by a thread.

How is it even possible for one person to be so incredibly irresponsible?  Waiting for Ren to come back from the bathroom so they can continue their strategy meeting about Maruki’s Palace, Akechi pitches forward on the couch, buries her head in her hands, and does her best to avoid looking at the smear of blood just across the room.

She bled through her tights, through her underwear, through to the sheets.  Maybe there’s blood all over the insides of her thighs; maybe she’ll have to peel off her tights, and maybe they won’t want to go, stuck to her all red and tacky.  Maybe she’ll have mysteriously run out of pads, and she’ll need to come to Akechi, all red-faced and embarrassed, the way she’d looked that first day Sakamoto asked her if she’d tried “jacking it yet”.

The bathroom sink turns on, and the old pipes in the wall kick and complain.  Akechi thinks about Ren, about cramps, about getting off.  She stares at the bed, at the blood, and wonders if she wasn’t here what exactly Ren would be doing.  Maybe she’d make herself come a few times, to take the edge off.  It probably isn’t that hard.

Akechi reflects on this being Ren’s room she’s sitting in right now.  She wonders if Ren has gotten off on this very couch, sprawled across the seat or kneeling on the floor, her face pressed to the laminated cushions, her knees raw and aching.

She’s so lost in her thoughts that it shocks her when Ren reappears in her field of view.

“Sorry about that,” Ren says quietly; she doesn’t look embarrassed, like Akechi had imagined, but —  “You’d think we wouldn’t even have to deal with this in a so-called ideal world.”

But — her legs are bare.  Her tights are gone, bundled conspicuously in Ren’s hand before she tosses them into a small basket in the corner.  Her thighs are right there, peeking out under the skirt of her uniform; it’s so incredibly short; is it supposed to be this short?  Surely this can’t be up to code.  Ren must roll it at the waist to make it shorter, just to tempt people.

“Not a very good ideal world then,” Akechi manages to choke out.  Her voice sounds strange even to her own ears.

Ren smiles, but she doesn’t laugh.  She might have laughed, with someone else — or maybe with Akechi, too, before all of this.  It’s a strange comfort that even without knowing all of the details, Ren hates this world just as much as Akechi does.  Even designed to trap her, it couldn’t fool her for a second.

She’s the sharpest, brightest, most overwhelming person Akechi has ever seen.  Maruki doesn’t stand a chance.

“Akechi?” Ren is asking, standing before her.  Her hand hovers just between their bodies, never quite touching.  That makes sense; even before Akechi had tried to kill her, they’d barely touched.  Ren isn’t the type to make the first move — passive to a fault, just willing everyone around to look at her, touch her, love her.  And even when there had been something like a chance, Akechi didn’t hate herself enough to stumble into that, to touch any more than the back of her chair or the space where her body had just been.  That hasn’t changed, except in the ways that it has.

She’s tired of pretending to hate Ren — but it’s far too late to love her, now.

Akechi looks straight through her.  “Are you ready to keep going?”

Maybe it’s the way the cold rips straight through the attic.  Maybe they’re just tired from their earlier infiltration.  Maybe Akechi is just a little too distracted, and Ren is a little too off.

Her color isn’t bad.  Beside Akechi on the couch, legs splayed confidently outward so that their calves nearly touch, she doesn’t seem dizzy or disoriented.  The bloodstain does seem to be bothering her, judging by how her eyes keep straying to the bed — but she doesn’t seem overly worried or distressed.

Still, she fidgets.  Still, she shifts her weight, crosses and uncrosses her legs, sets her hands here and there and everywhere.

Akechi spends minutes watching Ren stare off into space and absently massage her own thigh before she forces herself to come face to face with the facts: Ren is horny.

Sakamoto’s comment a half year ago burns like lightning in the back of Akechi’s mind.  How did Sakamoto know this would happen?  Has she seen it?  Had she seen it, even then?  Here, in this attic?

Vengefully, Akechi hopes Sakamoto never regains her memory, and stays jogging with her stupid track friends until this shitshow is sorted out.  She doesn’t think she’ll be able to resist the urge to deck her if they're forced into the same room.

“Are you going to be like this the entire time?” Akechi snaps after watching Ren run her fingers through her hair once again.  “If you’re too distracted to save the world, then by all means, I can leave.  God knows I don’t want to be swimming in your sexual frustration any longer than I have to.”

Ren freezes, caught.  The tops of her cheeks under her glasses dust a faint, diluted pink.  A long moment passes without her saying anything — then two, then three.

She’s so passive.  Akechi laughs, disbelieving and mean, any and all affection fizzling into something bitter.  “Are you really considering it?  Are you so horny you can’t even think for yourself?”

Finally, Ren gets some fight in her, brows jumping into a momentary furrow.  It’s a small expression of anger, but Akechi sees it.  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she murmurs, and then, looking away, “Let’s just keep going, okay?”

“I think I’ve already seen your best effort for today,” Akechi replies, looking down to inspect her nails like her own rising desire isn’t threatening to burn her up inside.  “You’re so distracted I wouldn’t be surprised if you forgot how to get to the Palace, much less what to do once inside.  I’ll just go home for the day, so you can have some time to yourself.”

The last comment is impulsive, stupid, honest.  “Unless you need my help with that, too.”

A silence breaks over the room so intense and delicate that when Akechi finally wills herself to look down, she swears she hears glass shatter.  She keeps a haughty, distant look and pretends she can’t feel her face warming as her words catch up to her, and Ren —

And Ren, goddamn her, looks like Akechi’s never seen her: eyes wide and sparkling even behind her useless glasses, flushed all the way from her bangs to her turtleneck.  Ren, who is always so in control, so stoic, who never rises to the bait in any way Akechi expects her to —

For maybe the first time, Akechi issues a challenge, and Ren is losing.

Akechi can’t help it: she laughs, hoarse and deep.  “Really?”

Finally Ren gets her backbone, straightening up on the couch, shoulders squared and tense.  “You said it, not me.”

Leaning forward to prop her elbow on her knee, Akechi raises an eyebrow at her and smirks.  Ren blinks; she shivers in an interesting way and readjusts her legs.  Without her tights, Akechi can see more details than before: the taught cord of her muscle, the faint scrapes and scars near her knees, the way the soft plushness of her thighs presses and pushes when she crosses them one over the other.

The moment Akechi woke up in this world, awake and aware and definitively alive, she’d decided not to linger more than she had to.  No hanging out, no regrets, nothing unnecessary or sentimental.  It’s unexpected, but it’s just another added leg of her plan.  She doesn’t want this asshole to win, and her own mortality has nothing to do with it.

This isn’t really hanging out, and Akechi won’t regret it, and it certainly isn’t sentimental — but it is unnecessary.  Akechi isn’t a vengeful ghost who needs to fuck Amamiya Ren before she can move on.

Still, with the carrot dangling over her — it’s hard not to reach, at least a little.

“Alright,” she says, “go, then.  I’m not touching any part of this filthy couch with my bare skin.”

Ren watches her uncomprehendingly.  Akechi tuts and motions impatiently toward the bed.  “Go on.”

She unwraps her scarf, and Ren’s eyes follow the motion, shock-still even as Akechi reaches for the buckle of her coat.  After a moment, Ren does rise unsteadily to her feet, but stays where she is; her flush has deepened so much she’s beginning to look overcooked in her turtleneck, even with the winter chill.

This reaction is — interesting.  Akechi knows that Ren is busy, naturally, and she’s never overtly dated someone in the time that Akechi has been keeping tabs on her — she’ll go on outings, let someone buy her a meal and a souvenir while she walks around a popular date spot with them, but Akechi has never seen any overt contact or affection.  She had just assumed there had been someone — like that ugly reporter Ren meets with at that bar at strange hours of the night, or the wannabe-goth doctor just down the street.  Honestly, what teenage girl would ever let a strange man give her drugs just to see what happens?  The first time Akechi had seen her passed out on the exam table through the window, she’d nearly made an excuse to go inside.

And the Phantom Thieves aren’t exactly subtle in their affections for Ren, either.  Okumura lays it on so thick Akechi finds herself choking on it, and Kitagawa is always practically begging to see her naked, and all of them will take any excuse to put their disgusting hands all over her.  That singular comment from Sakamoto — Have you tried jacking it yet?, all knowing and sympathetic, like she’d been in the exact situation Akechi is in before, offering to help — has haunted Akechi for months.

But as Akechi undoes the buttons on her coat, staring into Ren’s eyes all the while, she’s beginning to think she might have been chasing the wrong lead.

“Are you just going to stand there?” she asks flatly.  “I thought you wanted my help.  I can’t get you off if you’re standing in the middle of the room like an idiot."

“Get me off,” Ren echoes.  It isn’t a question, but it tips up at the ends like one, ever-so-slightly.

Akechi finishes sliding her coat off and looks at Ren thoughtfully.  “Changed your mind, Joker?”  She grins like the cat with the canary.  “I should have known it would be too much for you.”

“I didn’t say that,” Ren replies all in a rush.  She stays frozen a moment longer, then begins woodenly undressing.  It isn’t what Akechi asked for, but she appreciates it, anyway: the removal of Ren’s school-issued coat is sweeter now that Akechi knows how well she matches that Yoshizawa kid with it on.  Her winter uniform looks strange in the absence of her tights, but in a bright, exciting way: something missing, something bare.

Ren freezes in her tracks when Akechi strips herself of her gloves.  Her lips part slightly.  Akechi wants to bite her.

As appealing as it is watching her waffle back and forth, neither of them know when someone else will show up; they don’t have the time for this, just in general.  “Get on the bed,” Akechi sighs.  “I’ll take care of the rest.”

And truth be told, Akechi doesn’t exactly know what she’s doing either.  But she’s seen a lot of porn, and she’s read a lot of articles, and she’s had a lot of fantasies — about this room, this scenario, this girl.

The back of her neck burns, but she finishes undressing with little fanfare until only her shirt and trousers remain.  And when she looks up, Ren is sitting on the bed, watching her.

It’s hard to keep Ren’s attention.  Akechi would know; she’s been chasing her for months.  It’s hard to get her out and then hard to keep her; she’s always running off to do something else, to be with someone else.  But now —

Ren looks at her with her big eyes and her pretty lips, messy hair falling all over her face, cheeks flushed — and Akechi holds her attention like a bird in her mouth.

It’s like they're the only people in the world right now.  For all intents and purposes, they are.

“Stop thinking so hard,” Akechi murmurs, kneeling over Ren and pushing her down until her back hits the mattress.  Before she cups her jaw, she lets herself brush Ren’s bangs from her eyes with a tenderness that stings.  “It’s not that serious.”

Their whole time knowing each other, Ren has always been unusually good at picking out Akechi’s lies.  But Akechi doesn’t give her the chance to call her out on this one, because then she’s ducking her head, and they’re kissing.

Ren’s mouth is soft; she’s neither quite as skilled nor quite as clumsy as Akechi had been expecting.  Akechi moves against her with less force than she wants, hand on her jaw, and reluctantly, secretly, covetously revels in the way Ren tangles her fingers in her hair.

Ever daring, Ren is the first to press her tongue to Akechi’s mouth.  Akechi might be indignant if she weren’t distracted trying to get Ren’s turtleneck off of her; there’s no reason for it to be so tight.  As is, she just hums something thoughtful and returns the contact, sliding her fingers under the waistband of Ren’s skirt.  The other girl is always so cold to the touch; she’s not sure if it’s the anemia or just her natural temperature.  It tempers something in her; Akechi sighs into Ren’s mouth before pulling away.

“Off,” she murmurs into Ren’s temple, already tugging the shirt up and over her head.  Ren struggles to help her, briefly incapacitated when her arms get caught — and it’s tempting, in a different way.  If they had time, maybe Akechi would want to explore that, too.

As is, she just helps her wordlessly, then unzips her skirt.

“Why am I the only one who’s naked?” Ren asks breathlessly, though she makes no effort to hide her body even as she reaches behind herself to unhook her bra.  Her breasts are bigger than Akechi’s, not that she’d expected anything different; it would be impossible not to have noticed with the amount of ogling Akechi has done the last few months.  After all, Ren’s Joker outfit does little to hide her generous assets.

“We’re in a rush, and it’s cold in here,” Akechi says shortly as she fumbles with the hook and eye of Ren’s skirt, pointedly not looking at the way Ren’s breasts jiggle when they drop out of her bra.  “But if you want to leave this on and get blood all over your uniform, then by all means, I won’t stop you.”

But Ren always has a smart response; her voice is even, but her one cocked brow betrays her.  “But it’s fine to get blood on your uniform?”

Akechi finally unhooks the top of the skirt, then looks up and meets Ren’s eye levelly.  Then she rears back to sit on her heels and begins slowly, methodically unbuttoning her shirt.

It isn’t really revealing anything; it’s not like she doesn’t have an undershirt on.  Still, the way Ren watches her, hungry and eager, splayed back across the bed with her hair in a dark pool behind her — it’s like Akechi’s revealing her soul to her, like she’s tearing herself open to show Ren all her insides.  It’s vulnerable; it’s uncomfortable.  She doesn’t hate it.

She lobs the shirt carelessly somewhere behind her and yanks Ren’s skirt right off her hips.

And short-circuits.  Ren isn’t wearing underwear.

It makes sense.  Now that she thinks about it, it makes sense.  She’d bled through to the bed, and come back without her tights on; her panties were probably twisted in the same pile she’d brought up with her.  But that means she’d walked up the stairs with no underwear, sat beside Akechi with no underwear, been kissed into the mattress with no underwear —

Akechi realizes she’s staring.  When she finally tears her eyes away to look at Ren’s face, she’s staring back, face bright red.

They should probably put down a towel or something.  Akechi should probably be worried about staining her pants, and the sheets, and how exactly they could clean up discreetly if someone happens to come into Leblanc while they’re in the act.

She doesn’t think about any of that.  All she does is rip Ren’s ridiculous fake glasses off her face, climb back on top of her, and kiss her more.

Ren’s bare skin is smooth under Akechi’s calloused hands.  She touches Ren’s neck, feels her swallow, traces her collarbone and sternum and the sides of her ribs.  She feels her breathe, shudder, gasp; she drags her blunt nails down her sides to the top of her hip, then back up.

In contrast to the rest of her, Ren’s mouth is hot.  Akechi licks over her lips, tongue, teeth, achingly curious about this part of her body she’s never been able to see before.  Her head is buzzing with want.

Under her hands, Ren jerks and jolts.  She digs her nails into Akechi’s scalp, her shoulders, the backs of her arms.  She gasps into her mouth — more quiet than in Akechi’s fantasies, but no less sweet.

“I thought,” she gasps, pulling away from the kiss, “that we were in a rush.”

How like her, to be difficult even now.  Akechi nips at her bottom lip but obliges, trailing up Ren’s side to her chest.

Her nipples are hard and pebbled with the cold; when Akechi touches them, Ren hisses out through her teeth.  Akechi pulls away a little farther to watch her expression with rapt interest, palming at her more than anything more intense; the little furrow in Ren’s brow, the way her lips part and her head tilts, becomes the only thing on her mind.

Akechi’s fingers spread around Ren’s nipple, catching it loosely in between.  At the same time, she dips her head, hair spilling onto Ren’s skin, until her forehead lies against her clavicle.

This isn’t what someone in a hurry should be doing.  It doesn’t stop Akechi from opening her mouth.

Ren wears turtlenecks and jackets and scarves most every day in the winter.  Even indoors, she’s fully covered.  There’s nowhere Akechi could leave a mark that others could see.

But this isn’t for the others — this is for them.  She licks over Ren’s shoulder, kisses it, then sucks until the skin comes away bright red.  A thin gasp escapes from Ren’s mouth, then another, louder one when Akechi bites down.

It has to hurt.  When Akechi pushes Ren’s head to the side to eye it better, the spot just above her clavicle is marked with a not-so-neat ring of red from her teeth.  But she knows Ren can take it, so she doesn’t even pretend to apologize before doing it again.

Ren’s hand pulls Akechi’s wrist away from her chest, and Akechi snaps her teeth at her; she wasn’t done yet.  But Ren only eyes her with that barely-there mischievous smile and tugs her hand down, down, down her body, skimming past ribs and side and the curve of her hip until it rests under her navel, dangerously low.

Akechi is going to eat her alive.  She’s going to keep her on this bed until one of them is dead, carve her name into her skin, devour her so completely she could drown in the taste of her blood in her throat.  She’s going to make a mark on Ren’s very soul that the other girl will never be able to carve out, no matter how long she outlives her.

It’s too late to want her, to desire her, to covet her.  It isn’t fair to her, or to Ren, or to anyone who might want her after, to leave this gaping wound in her wake.

But Akechi doesn’t care much about fairness; she never really has.  She knows it, and Ren knows it, too — had known it well already when she’d pulled her into bed with her.

Akechi’s fingers trace up to Ren’s belly button then back down until she reaches the dark swath of hair below.  Propped on one elbow, she has the perfect view to watch Ren suck a breath in, expression wide open and exposed without her annoying glasses in the way.

Her voice is whisper-low and gravel-rough.  “Last chance to back out.”

Ren laughs at her, because of course she does.  There’s a hint of a tremor in the back of her throat, but she offers no room for doubt, so Akechi doesn’t make any.  “Shouldn’t I be saying that to you?”

Hardly, Akechi thinks.  But instead of answering, she nips her jaw, then lets her hand fall farther between Ren’s legs.

The first thing Akechi thinks is just that it’s very wet.  Ren feels almost how she feels but also nothing like it at all: she’s softer, and pliant already, relaxing into Akechi’s hand with a gasp.  To Akechi’s great satisfaction, Ren is just as sensitive as in all of Akechi’s daydreams; her face flames brighter, her breath comes faster, and these little, soft, wounded animal noises keep leaving her mouth involuntarily.  She smells like blood.

When Ren’s eyes screw shut and her lip catches between her teeth, Akechi finally pushes a finger into her, just to watch them pop open again.

The mad adrenaline Akechi associates with battle and near-death experiences begins thrumming in the background of her mind.  She resists the urge to shove a couple more in right away.

Instead, she curls the one until she finds a spot that makes Ren choke on her breath.  “Look at you,” she says, and she means it derisively, but it comes out disgustingly fond.  “On one finger, Joker?  Really?”

Ren makes to object.  Akechi swipes the pad of her thumb over her clit, slick with blood, smile splitting her face when Ren’s words momentarily fail her.

“You can do more,” Ren says once her tongue is working again.  Her voice is disgustingly even underneath all that breathiness, coasting over the challenge like it’s nothing.  “I can take it.”

Her lips are shiny-wet from kissing; when Akechi looks at her too long, her brain starts flicking on and off like an old television.

Akechi cocks an eyebrow but obliges.  One, then two more of her fingers dip inside Ren, reaching up inside her to hook like a claw.  It’s a tight fit, and Akechi can feel Ren stretching around her; she wonders if it hurts, if it’s too much, if she can feel the way her own body works and works to accommodate her.

Ren makes a raw, weak sound from deep in her throat; her fingers tighten in the bedspread, and her pussy tightens around Akechi’s fingers.  She’s so warm, and Akechi can feel her blood begin to drip down her hand to pool warm in her palm; her arousal is buzzing in the back of her skull, boiling her thoughts into a viscous pool of nothing.

She’s inside Ren right now.  She’s in her bed, kneeling over her, staring at her face and her mouth and her naked body, and her fingers are curled inside like she belongs there.

Ren clenches experimentally around her like she wants to keep them there forever.  Akechi is a little bit dizzy.

Akechi would kill someone to grow a few extra arms right now.  She wants to spread Ren’s thighs farther open, to shove her fingers in her mouth, to choke her, to touch herself.  As is, she just readjusts to kneel between Ren’s legs and grind back on her heel.

Even like this, with three fingers inside her, Ren is so wet and giving.  It’s easy to move: a jerky, experimental in and out, eyes trained carefully on her face, then a more concentrated effort on the finger-curling thing.  It’s difficult to touch her clit at the same time but Akechi is learning quick, and even pressing her thumb over it for Ren to rock against loosely is enough to make the other girl press her head back into the pillows.

She’s so pretty.  Her hair is an absolute mess, but all her thrashing has at least pushed the majority of its mess out of her face.  Her lashes spread feather-light shadows across her red cheeks; her lips stay parted around every panting breath.  She doesn’t seem to know exactly what to do with her arms — they reach for Akechi, for the pillows, for some white-knuckled grip in the sheets.  Her back arches, pushing her chest further out into the air; her nipples are dark and hard and Akechi longs to get her mouth around them, to bite the surrounding skin red and raw.

She’s so pretty, and as near as Akechi can tell, no one has ever seen her like this.  Despite all her assumptions and worst fears, her months of jealous overthinking, her nights spent touching herself to thoughts of Ren’s no doubt numerous exploits — Akechi is the only one.

The sound of Akechi’s own heartbeat crashes like waves into her psyche until she can hardly hear Ren’s needy little whines over it at all.  She’s hot and aching something fierce, but it’s a need she doesn’t know how to satisfy; the only thing she knows is Ren, splayed out before her like a prize.

It’s too hard to reach Ren’s neck from here.  Akechi bites anywhere she can reach instead, thrusting her fingers inside her all the while: Ren’s hip, her thigh, her outstretched hand.  Akechi’s teeth mark around her fingers like a ring.

And whatever Akechi does, Ren lets her; she’s all loose and languid, rolling her hips into Akechi’s hand with her eyes shut and her mouth slack.  She doesn’t speak or object or voice much of an opinion whatsoever until Akechi begins lowering herself onto her front, prying Ren’s thighs farther apart to fit between.

Even then, she doesn’t speak.  One hand slides into Akechi’s hair and grips: not hard enough to restrict, but hard enough to be noticed.

When Akechi looks up, there’s a question on Ren’s face.  It flicks on and off as Akechi continues to roll her fingers inside her, but it’s there.

Akechi rolls her eyes at her and pretends her face isn’t flaming red.  “You don’t think I’m scared of a little blood, do you?”

Ren smiles — a small, uneven, laughing thing, sparking like a broken fuse when Akechi’s fingers nail just the right spot.  “I guess I don’t,” she agrees, but doesn’t back off; she stays propped on a shaky elbow, hand coiled loosely in Akechi’s hair.

And though Akechi would never in a million years admit it, she’s internally thanking every god of fate who’s ever doomed her that Ren said yes, because she has been quite literally dreaming of this.

The inside of Ren’s thighs are red and sticky; she smells like blood and sex, intoxicating and dizzying.  From this angle, Akechi can see her own fingers sunk inside her, the way Ren’s wetness dilutes the blood into something brighter and glassier.  She wants to live here, looking at her forever, feeling Ren’s eyes staring holes into hers, feeling Ren’s nails digging into her scalp.

Akechi kisses the inside of Ren’s thigh and comes away wet, red smeared on the side of her face.  When she opens her mouth and sucks, she gets the first real taste of her, and the rumbling purr of her own desire hardens into something sharp in her body, so distracting that her clean hand reaches immediately for her belt.  Ren gasps and pulls at her hair, and Akechi can tell from her voice that it hurts, that she likes that it hurts — and just like that, even with her belt now fully undone, she’s too turned on to even think about pulling it free or undoing the fly on her trousers to touch herself.  Instead, she ruts down on the base of her palm through her clothes, automatic and primal, and focuses the last few dredges of thought to painting marks on Ren’s pretty thighs.

Her blood has a full, thick taste: not necessarily pleasant on its own, but the knowledge that it’s Ren, Ren’s blood, that it was inside her body, that it’s made of her — it’s almost too much to bear.  Akechi fantasizes about sinking her teeth into Ren’s femoral artery, drinking her blood down in great, gushing bursts; it’s not like it’s too far away from where her mouth is now.  She imagines using her teeth, her serrated sword, Ren’s own knife — imagines Ren handing it to her with trembling, eager hands, imagines the way her flesh would open and split —

By the time she unlocks her jaw and pulls away, Ren’s thigh is raw and tender and covered in evidence of her.  It will probably take a long time to heal — so sore that for days and days even the brush of one leg against the other while walking will be painful.

Akechi likes the idea.  An animalistic rumble of a growl sounds deep in her throat.

The grip on Akechi’s hair loosens.  She looks up to find Ren watching her with a heaving chest and blown-wide eyes, red and trembling.

When Akechi grins at her, there’s blood in her teeth.

Once Akechi pulls her thumb away and puts her lips to Ren’s clit instead, the other girl comes undone shockingly easily.  Her quiet sounds get louder and more frequent; they’re unpredictable, so Akechi keeps herself unpredictable, too.  An especially harsh thrust of her fingers punches a moan out of Ren’s chest; the flat of the tongue to her clit has her gasping for air like she’s being choked.  Akechi wonders if she’s more sensitive on her period, or if she’s just easy to please.  She wants to see it, either way.

It’s gratifying to see Ren lose her composure.  She’s the only person Akechi’s ever met who puts on airs just as easily as she does — like a second skin, like she was born to do it.  Akechi has never managed to wheedle as much authenticity out of her as the other way around; Ren is too quiet, too straight-faced, too dull and brilliant and good to fall for it.

Now, she writhes against the sheets, both hands pushing Akechi’s mouth against her, like there’s any possible way she could get any closer.  Her voice leaves her seemingly against her own will no matter how hard she tries to choke it down, all fragile and airy.  Her body, warm and wet and giving, clenches around Akechi’s fingers, pulling her in, keeping her there.  She takes whatever Akechi gives her.

Over the months, Akechi has watched Ren give, and bend, and never say no.  She doesn’t think she’s ever seen her so openly and selfishly opinionated before.

It’s addicting.  Now that she’s tasted it, she never wants to stop.

When Ren’s gasps get faster and her body starts tensing, ruthless fingers nearly tearing Akechi’s hair out, she knows she’s close to coming.  She surfaces from between Ren’s thighs to watch, laughing when Ren lets out a frustrated whine at the loss.

“Poor thing,” she tuts unsympathetically, trying and failing to resist the urge to grind down on the mattress like a dog.  Her voice is breathier than she’d like, rough and unraveled; it shudders its reception up Ren’s spine, gouging hooks into the remaining vestige of her composure.

She sets her thumb back on Ren’s clit; the slide is made easy with blood.  Akechi thinks about it lingering under her nails and finally slips a hand into her trousers.  The angle isn’t fantastic but it’s hard to care when Ren’s voice is so sweet, when she’s curling in on herself and letting Akechi pull her apart all at once, when she’s holding onto Akechi’s fingers harder and harder and harder as she hurtles nearer to climax.

“Akechi,” Ren is gasping; her fingers card through her hair, nails digging into her scalp, dragging her wherever she wants her.  Deliriously, watching Ren’s face with a hazy blur over her thoughts, Akechi thinks she would follow her anywhere, go with her anywhere.  “Akechi, I’m — ”

All at once, the cord of Ren’s body pulls completely taught.  Her twitching legs straighten and her back arches; her mouth drops open around a rising chorus of moans.  Most of it is nonsensical, but even through her own desperate fervor, Akechi hears repeated, strangled versions of her name.

It could go on forever or it could be over instantly.  Either way, when Ren finally drops like a corpse to the mattress, Akechi still isn’t done — which means Ren isn’t, either.

She flinches and jerks when Akechi moves inside her again, head lolling loosely on the bed to look at her.  There’s a strand of hair caught in her mouth and sweat gleaming on the side of her neck; she looks wrecked, exhausted, and undoubtably interested.

Still, her hips cooperatively roll, and her eyes stay open, watching Akechi watch her.  She reaches for Akechi’s face, hand hovering in the air a half-second before Akechi closes the distance.

Her lips ghost over Ren’s palm: not quite a kiss, not exactly anything else.  When she pulls away, there’s blood smeared bright in the space she’d just been.

“Does it hurt?” she asks roughly, settling back on her front between Ren’s thighs.  She pulls her hand away from between her own legs when her wrist starts to fall asleep from the angle, yanking Ren’s thighs farther open instead.  She’s red all the way down to where Akechi’s fingers dip inside her, dark and shiny and pretty.

Ren seems to consider this a moment.  “It’s sensitive.”

Akechi hums and strokes her pinky along Ren’s lips, like the bare consideration of penetration.  “Do you like that?”

Someone else might not have been able to hear Ren swallow, but Akechi can.

She doesn’t warn Ren exactly before her mouth makes contact with her clit again — but while Ren’s hands in her hair tighten when she gasps, they don’t pull her away.

It’s faster this time.  Above her, Ren is already undone; her legs shake and her voice trembles under the weight of her own pleasure, too much and too soon and addicting.  When Akechi rips her fingers out, Ren chokes a noise like she’s been stabbed; when Akechi replaces them with the fingers from her other hand, she repeats that sound with more volume.

“You’re so easy like this,” Akechi says, and even the exhale of her breath causes some reaction; Ren’s thighs try to snap closed around her face before Akechi stubbornly holds them open, smearing Ren’s blood behind her bare knee.

Ren makes to object, but loses the words when Akechi spends just a few more seconds kissing her clit.

“I should have known once wouldn’t be enough to satisfy you,” she says, pressing her face to the thigh she didn’t get to last time, still pushing in and out at a harsh, steady pace.  The feral, desperate, bloodlust feeling is burning her up inside, and Akechi can’t think about anything, focus on anything; she’s so turned on and her heartbeat is so loud it shakes the bed, rocking Ren’s body up and down on her fingers.  “You were so needy, it made you completely useless.  You can’t even think without someone fucking you, can you?”

Ren gasps shakily, and Akechi laughs at her, low and mean.  “Are you close again already?” she says, grossly affectionate and nearly giddy.  “You really are easy.  My easy, needy, useless girl.”

And Ren, capable Ren, ever difficult and necessary and self-reliant — Ren’s mouth pops open, and her limbs lock in place, and she pushes Akechi’s face against her and keeps her there while her orgasm takes her with the force of a car crash.

Raising her hips, Akechi shoves the bloodstained fingers of her other hand carelessly into her own underwear, circling her clit with a mindless, merciless intensity.  There must be blood smeared over her shirt and stomach, but she doesn’t notice and doesn’t care; moaning and snarling against Ren’s pussy until the girl under her is shaking with a new depth of overstimulation, she chases her pleasure off and over the cliff she’s been at the very edge of for what feels like forever.

The afterglow is harder to revel in when your entire face is caked in blood.  Akechi lingers with her head lying on Ren’s stomach for a precious few seconds, catching her breath.  Then her brain catches up to her, and she rears back upright.

Some part of her is expecting to see Ren in some distress, disgust pulling at her features, reaching for her clothes and glasses now that the fog has cleared.  Clearly, the attraction is reciprocated between them, in presence if not in magnitude — but other than that, their feelings are muddy.  Akechi doesn’t know what Ren feels toward her; she doesn’t even know what she wants Ren to feel toward her.  No matter what Ren could say right now, none of it would be right.

But Ren doesn’t say anything, because she’s asleep: completely passed out, head lolled to the side and eyes peacefully closed.  Akechi hesitates, halfway up already, and lets herself look a moment longer.

Lying flat on the bed, Ren is absolutely covered in hickeys and bite marks, Akechi’s teeth clearly imprinted everywhere from her collarbone to her hip.  Her nipples are raw and red and there’s blood all over her entire lower half, smeared on her thighs and spilled across the sheets.

Akechi’s dead heart thumps painfully in her chest.  She burns to keep her.

Ren is just as uncharacteristically irresponsible with this as she has been with all other parts of her periods, leaving Akechi to clean up by herself.  To her chagrin, Akechi finds blood absolutely everywhere: on her face, in her hair, staining her clothes and pooling on the sheets.  She can’t do much about that, but she shoves a hand towel under Ren’s ass and wipes her as clean as possible with another.

There’s too many layers to Ren’s usual outfits for Akechi to go through the trouble, and her cadaver impression makes it very hard to maneuver her besides, but the thought of someone coming upstairs to see her like this makes her bristle enough that she at least shoves her own sweater over Ren’s head.  Ren’s clothes would be preferable, of course, but Akechi has no idea where to find them; she has a sneaking suspicion they're all stuffed in that horrible dusty cardboard box in the corner, which is just not something she has the energy to confront right now.  With her ratty blanket pulled up over her legs, Ren almost looks believably like she’s just been taking a nap — if you ignore the gratuitous hickeys, and the oppressive smell of blood and sex.

By contrast, it really isn’t that difficult for Akechi to pull herself back together.  She splashes cold water in her face in Leblanc’s closet of a bathroom, uses her ruined undershirt to scrub most of the blood out of her hair, and tries to deal with the rest of her clothes.  Her pants are — fine.  They’re black, so it could be worse.  Her blouse escaped the fray, though it smells like the attic floor now.  When Akechi puts it on, it looks strangely obscene without the underlayer: her nipples, still hard from cold and arousal, are pressed dark and prominent to the fabric, and in certain lighting, the entire garment is see-through.

Beyond that, Akechi is shocked by her own face reflected back at her.  She can’t remember the last time she’d seen herself like this: bright-eyed and red-faced like some starstruck ingénue.  Maybe she never has.

That same feeling strikes her again: the vulnerability, the discomfort.  How she still doesn’t hate it, in spite of herself.

Akechi layers in her coat and scarf and sternly tells herself to forget it.  It’s too late to care about this.  She doesn’t care.  She doesn’t.

When she goes back upstairs, Ren is beginning to wake up.  She’s still in bed, leaned halfway against the wall and looking remarkably comfortable in spite of how uncomfortable it must be to bend her spine like that.  By the time Akechi’s eyes clear the landing, Ren is already looking for her.

“You’re here,” she says, eyes alight and brows raising.  She really is much more expressive without her glasses.

Rolling her eyes, Akechi crosses the room to grab her gloves and briefcase off the workbench.  “Don’t worry,” she answers, and it’s clipped and sarcastic, but there’s a wry secret in her mouth, too.  “I’ll be going soon.”

There’s no objection, not exactly.  Ren only leans forward to rest her elbows on her knees and watches her with that familiar gunmetal gray.  “Giving up on the strategy meeting?”

Forgotten about it, really.  It had completely slipped Akechi’s mind that this was all an excuse to focus in the first place.

“It’s late,” she sighs.  “Let’s just continue tomorrow.”

If they were in the Metaverse, maybe Joker would joke right now, make an innuendo, tease her a little.

But this isn’t the Metaverse, and Joker isn’t here — only passive, stoic Ren, who reaches behind her for her glasses and in doing do sets a barrier solidly between them.  “Okay,” she says, voice quiet but even, and Akechi can’t read her for the life of her.  “Should I walk you to the station?”

Akechi’s other brushes with anemic, wobbly-legged, vulnerable Ren flash through her unwilling mind.  “In the state you’re in?  Forget it.”

Ren is quiet.  She’s wearing Akechi’s sweater and Akechi’s smell and Akechi’s teeth marks, already unruly hair wild and tangled, knees wrapped tight to herself like a child.  She’s so desperately, achingly pretty.

It isn’t regret that’s making Akechi's chest ache and her throat tight.  It’s not regret.  Akechi doesn’t regret it in the slightest, but —

Still, she doesn’t stay.  Stealing out of the attic like a criminal after a few more short exchanges, only her own frenzied memories and the blood under her fingernails convince her that any of it was real at all.

—

And then, of course, because the universe loves to humiliate her — Akechi doesn’t die.

It’s not like she’s stalking Ren.  She’d been curious what she’d do her last day in Tokyo, but it all ends up being incredibly boring, anyway: Ren just buys some shitty last-minute souvenirs, tracks down her friends, and hugs entirely too many people.  On the other end of the subway car or at the end of every block, Akechi isn’t jealous — though something in her does preen when Ren makes a special trip to Kichijoji, just in case.

Even then, she doesn’t reveal herself.  She has no intention to — there’s no doubt they’ll meet again one day, but one day certainly doesn’t have to be now.

But then stupid, useless Ren has the gall to faint at the station.  And without even thinking about it, Akechi runs and catches her in her arms.

None of this is right.  Akechi had grand plans — making a name for herself, new and most of the way legitimate, doing everything on her own terms, meeting Ren on equal standing.  She’s daydreamed a mortifying amount of strolling into Leblanc like nothing even happened, to Ren’s overwhelming shock and awe.  But now —

Now, she looks down, and sees her own shock reflected back at her in Ren’s eyes, the way her lips pop open and her brows shoot to her hairline.  She has a familiar gray cast to her face, and her skin is too cold; suddenly, Akechi remembers that night leaving Mementos, carrying Ren back to her place for no real gain or reason other than that she wanted to.

Though no gawking passerby have collected yet, Akechi is certain she’ll explode if she keeps Ren dipped like this a moment longer.  She needs to salvage this situation, stat.

“As careless as always, I see,” she breathes, and her lips are so close to Ren’s that if either of them gave an inch, they could kiss.

Ren’s eyes curve with a sudden, mischievous smile, and Akechi loses the upper hand, just like that.  “Hi, Akechi,” she says.  “Finally bored of tailing me?”

Akechi realizes all at once that she’s fallen into a trap — this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to her.  Serves her right, really, for trying to help; she should have just let Ren crumple like a bag of bricks to the pavement and left her there.

Her heart thumps; an indignant, undeniably pleased flush of heat runs through her body like a shiver.

She had missed this.

“Not quite yet,” Akechi says, gaining her composure back with a matching, knife-edged smirk.  She keeps her voice even and sweet as she rights Ren with a polite hand on her back.  “How long do you have before your departure, exactly?”

She knows already, of course — not that it stops Ren from telling her, stumbling a step behind as Akechi drags her by the wrist to the nearest bathroom.

A half hour later, Ren boards the train home with shaking thighs and a new number programmed in her phone.  At the same time, Akechi leaves the station in high spirits, torn tights stuffed neatly in her pocket.