At one point he'd been a lot more connected, and then he'd ran away from all of that and she had stayed. Sometimes it felt to him that the more that he ran away from it, the more that she embraced it, and it showed in how his parents and his uncle had related to him, and how they related to her. And at that point he'd have probably been aware of her presence a lot more easily maybe even when they weren't close - just the proximity of the same town - but he'd also been sort of actively less interested in that to keep from drawing attention. At this point he supposed that she was here, and his Uncle wasn't going to pick up on where he was because, dead. And so what did it matter.
He pointedly ignored her, but the game was attacked with a little more aggression than it had been the moment before. He didn't even really know exactly what it was, but reflexes and intuition got him a fair ways in before the machine flashed a message that he'd died, accompanied by a sad trombone noise, or what passed for it when you were talking arcade games, and trying to hear over the sound of dozens of others.
Ren's eyes narrowed, and in irritation, he smacked at the stick, then both hands came down on the side of the machine and he stepped back, turning around to glare at her. "What?"
There was at least a modicum of awareness that he was not exactly at his best when he was with her. But in some ways that only served as a further irritant because there'd been a half belief that he was becoming a better human being, and the sudden awareness that maybe he wasn't - he just hadn't been faced with his failures quite so much in this place. Self-awareness having kicked in, he added a beat later, aggression vaguely toned down: "Do you even play games?"