There’s a swelling of his heart when Akechi takes his hand, another freeing sensation like a heavy chain breaking in two. Ren hasn’t experienced the same kind of loss as Akechi, but he understands what it feels like to be abandoned. By his parents, when they sent him away to Tokyo for a year, over a crime he didn’t commit. By the rest of the Phantom Thieves, at the start of January, when none of them included Ren as a fixture in their ideal realities. He forgives them all, but forgiving is different than forgetting, and he can never forget how it felt to be so easily discarded.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rank 2.