“It felt like I did.”

Ren stares down at his hands again, fingers spread out in front of him.

“For weeks, I had to choke on my regrets and pretend I was fine. I had to keep living in a world where you were gone, again.” He breathes out a laugh - bitter, truncated. “I had to fix the world for everyone else, but I couldn’t fix it for me.”

His fingers curl into fists, the fists drop to his sides, and Ren looks up at Akechi again, dark eyes dull with pain behind the mask of his glasses.

“You mean so much to me. Why can’t you care about that, even a little bit?”