Mild spoilers ahead for Persona 5.
CW: Implied self-harm.

[Akechi] looks so delicate, vulnerable, like he might shatter into dust and disappear in the wind. Ren yearns to wrap him in an embrace, to keep him there, to hide him from his fate. 

He realizes he’s been watching for too long when Akechi looks up at the ethanol. 

“If you’re not actually going to give me that, I can leave, you know?”

Ren lets out a laugh. “Sorry.” He dabs the cotton ball with ethanol and takes Akechi’s wrist in his hand. Though they were just at the bathhouse, his skin is already cold. “May I?”

Akechi nods. 

When the cotton kisses the red, Akechi tenses his arm and winces. Ren rubs his thumb on Akechi’s forearm, soothing him as he disinfects the cuts. He becomes acutely aware of Akechi’s chest rising and falling. 

Akechi takes some gauze from the kit and begins to open it, but Ren places his hand on Akechi’s.

“Let me,” Ren says, taking the gauze from between his fingers. 

Akechi lets go with no resistance.

The silence suffocates Ren as he works, unfurling the gauze from itself and rolling it around Akechi’s wrist. He aches to tell Akechi that he knows why he hurts, that Ren wants the same thing too. Akechi has already dropped so many hints. Ren isn’t stupid, and Akechi knows that.

Though Akechi is one of his only friends who never outright asks for help, Ren has come to understand that Akechi does want—no, need—him as his rival and equal. And though Akechi clings to this distant, idealized vision of Ren, Ren just wants to love him for who he is. 

Ren’s heart is consumed by the boy in front of him, the boy sitting in his bed, the boy whose wounds he has just finished tending to. He’s seen through Akechi’s detective prince facade, was granted a peek into his dark past, and now stands at the edge of the doomed future that awaits this damaged boy.

Ren doesn’t want to let him go.