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Ryuji hates these kinds of days.
It was the same back in his track days as it is here now—some days are great. Some days you feel like you’re flying. Like you’re unstoppable, your legs are wings and the wind at your back is just carrying you along. And some days even lifting a leg is a struggle.
When cognition gets involved the stakes are higher and the consequences are stranger. When they have bad days in here they’re knocked out, turned around, and inflicted with all kinds of weird-ass shit.
This time it looks like it’s poor Violet’s turn.
Ryuji helps her up from the floor, can feel how badly she’s shivering just from the grip he’s got on her hands. This lab place is air-conditioned as hell but he knows that’s not why she’s cold right now. Though, it can’t help that her outfit doesn’t cover up a whole lot—it’s just a tiny jacket, big ol’ boots, and that sexy tank top-type thing that connects at the bottom. Whatever ballerinas wear, Ryuji forgets the word.
“Hey,” he says, gives her shoulders a quick friendly rub before he remembers she’s a girl and claps his hands back to his sides where they belong. “Uh. You good now?”
“C-c-cold,” she says.
“Yeah. Shit.”
Joker and Crow are farther down the hallway, congratulating themselves on their showtime. And like, that’s fine and all, those guys definitely ended the fight faster than they could without it and the fight really did need to end, but…
Violet shivers violently, crossing her arms over her chest and pulling her ridiculously long and bare legs together.
“This happened to me before,” Ryuji says uselessly. “It sucks.”
“The h-hand w-warmalizer d-d-didn’t w-work,” Violet stutters out. It takes a while.
Ryuji glances over towards the other two members of their party again. He’s not used to being alone with Violet this long, especially not when she clearly needs more help than he’s got, but Joker and Crow are just chatting away about something. Either they haven’t noticed Violet’s condition yet or they don’t care. Or if he’s being smart about it, it’d be Joker who hasn’t noticed and Crow who doesn’t care. Probably. That candy-cane striped a-hole.
“No, something about these bigger attacks just don’t go away if they really getcha,” Ryuji explains. “I got hit with a big ol’ Freeze too, back in December—didn’t feel normal till the next morning.”
“T-that long!?”
Yeah, she took that about as well as he expected.
“Here,” Ryuji says. Part of his super cool, sick-ass Phantom Thief costume is a jacket, and he thinks that could help at least a little. He takes it off… or at least, tries to… wiggles, pulls, and—hell, it’s like, connected to something in the back. Why can’t he get it off? Hasn’t he done this before?
Violet’s watching him greedily, eyeing his useless coat like she’s starving and it’s the only meal around. Yeah, Ryuji remembers that feeling too.
Okay. It’s not coming off. That was embarrassing. But he knows where to get the next best thing.
“Hey!” he shouts across the hall to the rest of their party. “Joker! We need your coat!”
“My coat?” Joker finally looks over, tugging at his lapels like there’s something else Ryuji could have been talking about. Then he finally notices Violet. “Oh! Oh no, sorry Violet. Here,” he says, running over and stripping that giant jacket off in one very easy, very cool-looking swoop. Ryuji isn’t jealous at all.
He hurries over and places the coat around Violet’s shoulders for her. She looks up at him gratefully, and Ryuji might have felt even more jealous but for the fact that when Joker turns away, Violet looks over his shoulder toward Ryuji and mouths a silent Thank you.
Shucks. It’s not like he did anything, not really.
“I suppose that’s it for the day, then?” Crow drawls in his annoying Crow way, ambling over to them at his own pace. “I don’t expect we’ll get much farther in this Palace with an icicle trailing along behind us.”
Ryuji liked him more when he was not-so-secretly a dick rather than this outright, obvious, try-hard dickishness.
“I c-can k-k-k-k-k-k-k-keep… going,” Violet finally forces out.
By the end of it even she seems unconvinced of her own argument.
“There’s a safe room just back down this hallway,” Joker says in his leader-voice. “Let’s head there and regroup with everyone else. We’ve done more than enough today.”
Ryuji taps his feet awkwardly against the floor.
Violet is just a little ways down the same bench he’s on, sitting too proper and suffering quietly.
This is what they decided. Joker and Crow can handle the Palace on their own if they absolutely have to, so it made sense for them to venture out to gather their second party. Violet is in no state to be running around and fighting shadows, so she stayed in the safe room.
Ryuji’s still questioning why exactly he’s here, though.
He knows he offered to stay behind and keep Violet company but he really really really didn’t think she’d take him up on it. Aren’t a girl and a guy not supposed to be left alone in the same room? It feels illegal or something. Not much of anything they do in the Metaverse is probably legal, but this feels extra wrong.
Ryuji fiddles with his mask. Scratches his head. Doesn’t scratch his ass.
He supposes he’s been in a room alone with Ann before, except Ann doesn’t really count. She’s hot and she’s a model and all, but Ryuji still remembers that time she blew chunks in the middle of math class when they were kids.
Violet is a girl girl.
They haven’t spent all that much time together, either. Going to the same school meant they ran into each other here and there, and she’d been on the team for a week or so now, but Ryuji doesn’t think any of that shit counts. You gotta sit down and get ramen with someone to really know them, and Ryuji just hasn’t done that with Yoshizawa Sumire. Metaphorically.
Or not metaphorically. He could actually really go for some ramen. Shit, that spicy tori paitan he had last week… it was so freakin’ good. And it’s been the perfect weather for ramen too. Ramen in the summer is amazing but ramen in the winter is also amazing, and—
“I s-should have dodged it,” Violet says quietly.
“Huh?”
Violet pulls Joker’s coat tighter around her. “If I’d just dodged it, we w-wouldn’t have to—”
“Hey, whoa, don’t start doing that.” Ryuji’s very glad he stayed behind all of a sudden. No spiraling allowed on his watch. “We’re a team, and everyone has their days.”
“But—”
“No butts beside pork!” Ryuji says automatically. Violet gives him a confused look that he definitely earned. “Sorry. That’s something crazy my ma says. The thing is, there’s nothing much we can do about this shit if it gets us, and sometimes it just gets us. Everyone has their turn—remember how Queen ate all our snacks last week? And how pissy Fox got after he was hit with that bad rage? Even Crow was acting weird as hell after he got knocked out by that crazy psychic attack.”
“Oh right,” Violet mumbles, possibly slightly convinced. “I remember that.”
Yeah, that’s right. Ryuji’s had practice after all—those are pretty much all the same things he told himself when he got all froze up, and now that he’s saying it to Violet he actually believes it. See, he can be smart sometimes.
“Do you think they’ll be much longer?” Violet asks.
Ryuji shrugs. “Dunno. Probably not too long, we’ve gotten pretty good at this.”
“Good.”
The room goes silent again, but this time it feels better. Ryuji doesn’t feel quite so itchy.
He tries to go back to thinking about ramen, but finds his mind drifting towards Violet instead.
She’s really had a rough go of it—not that it’s a competition, but definitely one of the rougher ones out of all the Phantom Thieves. Top three, probably. So recently too. Ryuji can’t even imagine learning all that awful shit and then continuing on. And here she is anyway, taking it all in stride. Still fighting.
And man, like, she’s hot too. Why’d all the girls in the Phantom Thieves get to be good at fighting and smart and hot? It’s annoying.
Violet shifts in her seat. She rubs her hands against her bare thighs, like she’s trying to light a fire with them (and she so could (shut up don’t be weird)).
She opens her mouth, like she’s gonna say something. Then closes it. Then changes her mind again. “Um. About Akechi-san…” she says. “He’s k-kind of an odd one, isn’t he?”
Oh man. He’s been waiting for this one. “Don’t even get me started, dude,” he laughs, then looks over and finds Violet blinking at him. Then realizes what he said. “Sorry! Not dude. But dude in a—you know. Whatever.”
“Yeah,” she smiles, and it’s so bright and warm even though he knows from experience exactly how cold she’s feeling. And it’s cute. It’s really freakin’ cute. Shit. Shit, he really is alone in a room with a really cool girl who looks like that.
Be cool. Be cool.
“Okay, yeah. Good,” Ryuji says awkwardly.
Alright, now it’s quiet as fuck. And Ryuji’s more itchy than he’s ever been. They were probably talking about something before, but he can’t remember what it was. And he knows he’s gotta say something, but he feels like he just fumbled in a big way and his brain just isn’t working. It’s not even spinning in circles or stuck or anything, just empty.
“I don’t mind being ‘dude,’” Violet announces out of the blue, managing to push past all of her shivers this time.
“Huh?”
“It’s like—like camarad-d-derie, right? I can be ‘dude.’ If you want.”
So maybe Violet is just a little more awesome than Ryuji first thought.
“Dude,” he replies. And reaches over and claps Violet on the back for good measure. She bursts out in a high-pitched giggle and it sounds so weird, distorted by her condition, that Ryuji can’t help but laugh too.
“I’m glad you’re here with me, Skull-senpai,” Violet says. “You’re a very k-kind p-person.”
Ryuji’s face does that embarrassing thing where it turns into a tomato. Ann would have killed him for that whole exchange—bopped him on the head and called him a loser, and she would have been right, but doing any of that doesn’t seem to be occurring to Violet at all. She called him nice.
Is it bad that it’s making him want to be even more of an idiot? Whatever, he doesn’t care.
“Hey!” Ryuji jumps up, scurrying to a more open area of the room. “I have an idea!”
And then he starts doing jumping jacks.
Violet looks exactly as amused and confused as he’d hoped.
“You do—that gymnastics stuff—right?” he puffs out between breaths. “Exercise—gets you—warm! They’re called—warm-ups—right!?”
Okay, hell, wait, he thought he was in much better shape than this—he’s been running, lifting weights, even his leg hasn’t been bothering him quite as much as it used to. But it turns out… woof, jumping jacks are tiring!
But here’s Violet: still smiling, and laughing, and she throws off Joker’s jacket and joins him.
“I really am very sorry,” Sumire says for the thousandth time.
They all made it out in the end. And the exercise did actually seem to help, amazingly—Ryuji’s kicking himself for not trying it back when he was shivering enough to vibrate a hole into the ground. But Sumire is also clearly still not all the way warmed up, standing there and bundled head to toe in her jacket and hat and things.
Plus it is literally just cold out. Winter sucks.
The Phantom Thieves assure her for the thousandth that it really is fine, and she really should go home and rest up—Akechi the quietest, Ryuji the loudest of them all. And then, eventually, all of them disperse. All of them except Ryuji and Sumire.
Because Ryuji has a plan.
He came up with it around his 30th jumping jack, and he thinks it’s a pretty damn good one. Foolproof, even.
“Hey. Um,” he says, catching Sumire’s attention before she starts walking away. She looks at him expectantly and he immediately forgets the rest. Bad start. Oh god, why does his face feel like it’s gonna light itself on fire, why does it keep doing that? Just ask, do it, do it you coward. “I was wondering—uh, and you can totally say no, it’s whatever, but I was wondering if you wanted to. Grab ramen. With me? Sometime. You don’t have to though. It’s cool.”
Nailed it.
Sumire blinks at him. She’s quiet for the longest moment of Ryuji’s short life. She’s quiet for seven hundred years.
Ryuji did not nail it. Ryuji has ruined everything. He’s not even sure now if what he said were actual words or just dumb sounds out of his dumb mouth. Why did he have to come up with a plan his plans are always bad why does he do this to himself and everyone around him—
“O-okay!” Sumire says.
Okay. Okay? Like, she’s agreeing?
Ryuji is the greatest, smartest, smoothest person in the entire universe. He can’t wait to tell Ren about this, holy shit.
“Or, um, if you’d like, we could go now?” Sumire asks. “I would really love something warm and spicy.”
Holy shit. The spicy tori paitan! “Oh my god, dude I have the perfect thing for you. It’ll heal you right up, swear on my life.”
Sumire smiles again, and it’s cute and cool and hot and adorable and every other word that’s out there that Ryuji doesn’t know. “You haven’t failed me yet, Ryuji-senpai,” she says as she hooks her arm around his, clueless that Ryuji’s flying off to another planet and back. “Please, lead the way!”
Yeah, he can do that.
He’s a Phantom Thief. He’s got a kick-ass team and a kick-ass leader. He may not be a track star anymore, but he’s gonna get some ramen. And most of all, he’s gonna get some ramen with a girl.
Ryuji leads the way and decides that yup, today is one of those good days.