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They fight. Again. Because Uta is a coward and fighting is all he knows. It’s a good fight, a really good one, and it ends with Uta’s heart hammering in his chest, and this wonderful alien warmth spreading down to his fingertips and toes. He just lies there on the rooftop basking in it as the sun sets overhead. Renji stays with him, because Renji is merciful and wonderful and more than Uta deserves, and all Uta really wants to do is ask him to come closer, to lie here next to him, to keep this warmth from dissipating for as long as he can. But Uta is a coward. So he tells himself he’s content with Renji a few meters off, crosslegged and only sometimes glancing his way. That he’s staying here at all is more than Uta ever thought he’d get.
What Renji’s doing, instead of looking at him, is fiddling with his phone. He’s still terrible with it, but he’s gotten much more determined to learn, lately. There’s a group chat between him and Kaneki and Touka and all the others, that’s just pictures of the baby. It’s been going for almost a year now. He suspects it will keep going. He knows about it because Renji added him, without even really knowing what that meant, without asking, and everyone is far too polite to take him off now.
He wishes they would. Its a terrible thought, fitting a terrible person like he is. One he doesn’t dare voice, even to Itori, who might actually understand. Because what kind of monster doesn’t want to see pictures of this baby, this miracle child, this shining beacon of hope?
There is a smile on Renji’s face as he looks through the photos on his phone that Uta has never seen on him for anything else. It’s not so much that Uta wishes that smile could be directed at him. He does, of course, because he’s selfish and greedy, but that isn’t what sours his mood when he sees it. Because it’s enough for him to see Renji like this. So happy. So full of life. So full of hope.
But he’s watching Renji build his entire self back up around this child, around this single fragile life. It’s a jenga tower built on one piece. And what he hates most is that Renji has somehow tricked him into doing that very same thing, using Renji’s own poorly founded tower as the only foundation of his own.
Uta has lived his life with the ability to see exactly where to push to make such towers topple over, on doing just that to see which directions the blocks would fall. Renji wants him to stop pushing, but he doesn’t know how to stop seeing.
By the time the sun as vanished down past the horizon, Uta is cold again. He pushes himself up and heads to the edge of the roof without a word, stands there, watching the oranges and reds framing the buildings. Waits, selfishly, for Renji to say something.
“Heading out?” Renji says, finally.
“Yeah,” Uta says. “Thanks, again,” He forces out, “Renji-kun.”
Renji just hums in acknowledgement. At least he didn’t lie, Uta thinks, and thank me back. That might have hurt more.
Without these fights, Uta’s life would fall apart. Without these fights, Renji’s life would say perfectly intact. Uta shivers, plays it off.
“See you around,” he says, and then steps off the roof before Renji can say anything else, feels the rush of wind past him as he falls. The thought that maybe he shouldn’t break his fall or catch himself crosses his mind as it does every time, and like every time, he ignores it. He lands easily, safely. Takes a deep breath in. Out.
He slides his phone out of his pocket to text Itori, ask her if tonight is a good night to come over and drink, when the screen lights up before he can get to it. He opens the group chat despite himself. To spite himself, perhaps. Tsukiyama has taken to sending out gifs overly adorned with glittery rose stickers and foreign words. He imagines they hurt to look at even for the people who want to be in this chat and see these pictures. The child reaches just off screen for something, over and over and over and over.
He closes the phone, decides against going anywhere but home. Just goes straight to his bed and buries his face in his pillow. He should really shower the blood and sweat from the fight off, but when he does that, it’ll really be over and he’ll just be alone again with nothing at all to show for it. This habit he’s gotten into, of leaving this grime caked onto him as he goes to bed, is disgusting, really. He tries for about an hour to get himself to get up and shower, but to no avail. He settles in and replays the fight in his mind, the echoes of the rush of it washing over him - small waves cresting on the beach as opposed to the tidal waves they had been - but better than nothing.
Eventually, he falls asleep.
He wakes up at three in the morning, shaking and drenched in sweat, nauseous and hungry at the same time. He shoves his face into the pillow and screams.
He pulls out his phone, desperate for something, anything other than the nightmare replaying in his head, but that’s probably the stupidest thing he could have done, because he’d locked it on that group chat, and three more pictures of the kid stare back at him. He throws his phone off the bed and pulls at his own hair.
In his dream, his nightmare, he’d walked to that same cradle, the one he’s seen from every angle in pictures but never once in person, reached a tattooed hand in and lifted up the child, stared at it, at the only think keeping Renji’s world in place, and by extension his own, and as if his buried insanity was acting out of spite for this flimsy, fragile lid placed on it, in his dream - only in his dream - he destroys it all. Renji’s world. His own. The very idea of hope and a future.
What kind of monster is he, that he could even dream of such a thing. He stares out the window at the lights of the city, clutching at his pillow. At this world that had decided to let a monster like him live. A world that had accidentally swept him into this future it only ever meant for ghouls like Touka and Renji, not for him. He knows that. He knows if that lid ever slips off, if he ever loses his self control, that this world will come and correct its mistake.
He thinks about Shikorae, the last he’d seen him, his frame even more stretched and gaunt than before, his eyes devoid of any sanity. He’d asked Roma what it was that she did to calm him down, but she’d always just giggled, said something flippant, “all boys like a cute little girl, of course.” Something like that. But she’s dead now, and whatever she had known dead with her. So all he could do was create a distraction, knock some trash cans over and draw the investigators in the wrong direction and let the boy run away.
Maybe if they’d seen him that day, they would have decided to killed him, too. What would Renji have thought, he wonders, when Tsukiyama Shuu told him that No Face was added to their target list? Well, he thinks, bitterly, that would almost certainly get him taken off that group chat.
The truth of it, the truth that becomes clearer and clearer with every passing day, every text, every new news report, is that he has as little place in this new world as he did in the old. This world might tolerate ghouls now, might be trying to learn not to hate them, but that is never going to be meant for him. He thinks about Roma and Donato and Souta-kun. Maybe they had known that this would happen. That even if everything worked out, the world would still be no place for a clown. From the way Nico tells it, Donato had chosen to die there, to the one person who mattered to him in the entire world. It was the same choice he’d made that day. Only Renji, stupidly, had reached out instead, carried him, laughing, on his back, into this brave new world.
How cruel, Renji. How cruel.