Kaneki's opens his eyes a minute before the alarm could ring.
He smells yesterday's pizza slice. He sees white-gray walls of his apartment. There is a bookshelf, to his right, of all his favourite books. From 'Dear Kafka' to 'The Metamorphosis' by Franz Kafka himself, to a collection of works that he studied in University and finally 'The Black Goat's Egg'.
Two copies.
On the loops on his door, he sees the leather jacket that he borrowed from Hide for a date. He never wore leather jackets. They made him look scrawny—a little too big and broad for his shoulders.
The bed creaks.
He sits up and yawns. His head hurts, he feels dizzy and the floor looks too clean to puke on. But Kaneki doesn't remember the events of the night before. Then he stills. Because Kaneki never had a lick of alcohol in his life.
And he doesn't own two copies of 'The Black Goat's Egg' anymore. Great tragedy and fascinating characters, but the resemblance is uncanny to the parallels in his life.
He also couldn't eat pizza, not since that single accident—seven years ago.
And Hide's jacket was returned, seven year ago, after the tragic date went awry. Also Hide was dead.
He glances at the white-gray walls again.
And he vacated this apartment, disappeared off the radar and into the deep, dark ghoul world where he dither-dathered between justice and insanity before he was finally 'killed'.
The alarm on his phone buzzes through the empty apartment.
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.
So he is "human" again.
He runs his finger on the kitchen knife. He watches blood seep to the surface of his skin in tiny beads. He sucks it and stares at his finger again.
He is not "ghoul".
This term simplifies the way he's supposed to act. He eats human food. He talks without fear of someone watching the crevices of his teeth for red stains. He smiles. He enjoys an ordinary human life and laughs at stupid, carefree things. He doesn't think of ghouls. He doesn't wake up with bunches of his white-gray hair splayed over his pillow.
Nightmares of shackled chairs, thick pliers, blood-stained floors, dead mothers, dead dates, and checkered floors are only nightmares—remnants of something Hide forces him to watch the night before.
He sucks his finger. The blood didn't taste bitter—it tasted metallic. In the Black Goat's egg, metallic smells are recurring—especially when she cleans off her hands and knives and picks up her young boy—
Kaneki cleans off his knife. There's no meaning. There's no link. Don't overthink it. He's neither. This life, he decides is not a tragedy.
His finger throbs.
Pain is good, Kaneki told himself. Pain makes you feel. Ghoul tissue heals up faster than the pain receptors reaches his brain. Also, it was the only way this predicament makes any sense.
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Time-travel made no sense. It defies every law of logic out there—but what did Kaneki know.
He was a literature student, not a physics student. His world was made of text.
His world was made of text. He breathed clichés. He sang in prose. He screamed poetry. He thought in the subtext. To Kaneki the world was perceived in his head and then etched onto his surroundings. The world was made of ink and paper and twisted words. He was the text.
He froze.
But who is the author?
Maybe this was Eto's doing, he hums.
"This is sadism," Kaneki tells the kitchen. "Eto and sadism fit together."
There's a link.
It makes sense. Eto crafted such a sadistic universe and stuck him right in the middle of it. He was twisted. She was the author. He was the work. She was the god who loved him and didn't know how to love.
That stupid god.
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He crunches a lettuce leaf and savors the taste.
He leans back against the counter of his kitchen.
The little crisps of granola swirl around in the milk. And beside the bowl were half eaten chocolate bars, yesterday's leftover pizza, cans of soda—all of which tasted just as he remembered it tasting.
There was a bag of tomatoes spilled out from the open fridge and they fell to the floor. Thrum thrum thrum. They rolled in all directions—like a splat of ink on paper.
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Eventually, he peels off his sweater.
And stares at his soft, unblemished body which is untainted with the horrors of torture, of spars and scars of tearing skin over and over and over. In the mirror, he looks back at the jacket on the door hinge.
Hide gives him the jacket for the date. A date that is supposed to be today, after college. He pulls it off the hinge and slings it over the shoulder. The edges of the cuff cover his fingers and his shoulders slump—like a weight.
He stuck the tips of his hands into his jean pocket and puffed his chest.
Twenty-four-year-old Kaneki laughs.
"Still a scrawny brat who reads incomprehensible books."
And twenty-four-year-old Kaneki Ken would tell eighteen-year-old Kaneki Ken that he needed to stop worrying whether or not the jacket looked too big on him or if it impressed Rize.
Because it didn't.
He needed to stop worrying about whether he would score the second date with Rize Kamishiro.
Because he wouldn't.
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And their laughter tinkles throughout the entire coffee shop.
"What the fuck Kaneki? I thought you were bad at this strategy game?"
Kaneki winks at him.
"Well Hide, I'm full of surprises."
He pulls out his ace, rank X Thanatos—the reaper card and Hide lets out a screech of frustration.
"You cheated!" he bellows. "T-this is—! Dammit!"
And that's when they are interrupted by a light cough. There is a girl standing over them, in an apron and a barista's outfit. She holds the tray tightly to her chest and says softly,
"Um…sorry but you guys are being very loud."
And Kaneki forgets how to breathe when Touka Kirishima talks.
He stares at her. She stares back at him with a pleasant and clueless smile.
"U-uhm…" He fumbles with his fingers and drops his cards, much to Hide's glee. "S-sorry!"
Fifteen minutes into their newest game when someone enters the shop. It's a boy with a scruffy bag-pack. He inserts a pinky into his ear and twists it around. The boy is fifteen. He's wears a uniform from the local highschool. His sleeves are rolled up and his bangs are held up by a hairband.
Kaneki twists around to stare at the door. Hide makes a sneaky move and tilts over to look at his cards. And his sister, Touka emerges out of the back-door and frowns.
"I'm working Ayato—" she hisses when she glances over her shoulder. "—what do you want?"
"I want cake," he says and moves past her.
"Got money?"
"Plenty." He snaps a set of white teeth at her.
He past Kaneki and Hide, slumps in the seat and glaring at the shiny table. Touka huffs and moves away form him to greet another guest. Ayato then catches Kaneki staring.
He sneers.
"What…the fuck you want?"
Well then—Ayato Kirishima is still a little shit—Kaneki thinks.
Ayato going to a human school. Ayato in Anteiku. Ayato very much a little shit, but not as though he would drive his knee up his abdomen and kick him around like a pathetic ragdoll.
Then Touka brings this strange Ayato strawberry cake and he digs in. He forks through the cream and sweet red syrup and takes slow bites.
"Yahhh! I won again!" Hide exclaims.
But Kaneki just doesn't want to think anymore.
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He flips through the newspapers again. And again. Over here, Kaneki glances at a news article about a man who won the lottery, was supposed to be an attack on Takada building. The media is silent. So he turns on his computer and tries to find out more.
Either he's dreaming or he's delusional.
Nothing.
The word 'ghoul' is something out of old stories made up by deranged parents who enjoyed scaring children to sleep. They tuck their child in bed and tell them to shut their eyes because the night was made for sleeping and dark mischief.
But the word 'ghoul' scares the sleep away.
It haunts his dreams with mouths rimmed with blood and fingers clawing at him in the dark and of wriggly, spindly, poisonous centipedes in his orifices.
He waits until he calms down.
And he sleeps with the lights on.
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I think we're alone now…
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In this world, Kaneki decides, there are no ghouls.
He twirls her around and into his arms. She laughs. Kimi grabs her boyfriend's hand and plants a kiss on his cheek. There's something different about the way Nishiki looks at her. Like he's not afraid to lose her or maybe in this life they don't have to lose each other.
"You waited for me?" she gushes.
"I'd wait for you forever."
He sends her a charming smile.
"I never knew you to be such a romantic!" She giggles. "Please, now carry my books." She shoves her heavy textbooks at him. He catches them.
"Kimi!"
"~Shhh!"
Kaneki watches them, and then he makes his way to his first lecture.
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And the professor is late.
It is usually advised that students be on time—but to have a late prof is usually very unacceptable. The class murmurs in dissent and someone announces.
"Hey if the prof ain't here in five, we skedaddle outta here and—"
"—you won't get the attendance mark," a cold voice cuts the class off.
Kaneki's blood turns to ice. He widens his eyes as the prof—his professor of Popular Contemporary Asian Literature—walks in. He has a briefcase in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other and a slew of papers under one arm.
He brings up the cup of coffee to his face and sips.
And the coffee fogs his glasses.
He then looks up at the entire class.
"Kishou Arima. I accept Professor Arima—no 'Hey prof' or 'What's up dude' in your emails." He says and slaps the heavy brief-case down. "Read the syllabus. This is a class to read books—" He puts down his mug, pulls off his glasses and wipes it with his tie. "—so obviously reading will be a heavy criterion."
He pushes up his glasses.
"But you all obviously won't so there are three things I don't tolerate in this class, sleeping, talking and checking your phone."
And then that's when Kaneki's phone buzzes.
And Kaneki knocks the phone off his desk—and onto his lap. It buzzes on his lap and he tried to fumbles with the lock-screen and shuts it off. The buzzing drowns out as the screen went black.
Pin-drop silence. Then there is a ripple of sniggers, a few sympathetic looks and whispers of "awh shit."
Kaneki then decides, under Arima Kishou's piercing gaze, that he would very much like to be impaled through the eye instead.
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Hide wants a tattoo.
They splurge at Big Girl's and Kaneki relishes the taste of hamburger—which he hadn't had in years. He takes slow, careful bites, careful to get down every detail of the soft, juicy meat.
"And I thought, how cool would it be to get a Super Sentai tattoo, yeeah?"
Kaneki forks another piece of his hamburger.
"That's the stupidest idea you've ever come up with."
"It's childhood nostalgia, stupid Kaneki. Have some appreciation for our humble beginnings!"
Kaneki likes symbolic and meaningful things, like hand-drawn references to literature. Hide's the complete opposite of him. Hide's idea of symbolic includes inside jokes. Which is probably symbolic too, Kaneki thinks.
They both watched Super Sentai together when they were younger. He recognises that it's Hide and Hide probably has an attachment to their childhood. Nostalgia is a coping mechanism when you are in your twenties and the world might swallow you whole.
"You should get a tattoo too," Hide says.
Kaneki smiles. "Of what?"
"What would you get as a tattoo?" Hide asks him. Then he swallows a bit too much and Kaneki laughs and reaches over to pat him on his back.
"I'm okay," Hide winces. "I might have died, really! Thanks for the help!"
And Kaneki's breath catches in his throat. Hide's grinning at him. There's sunlight in his hair, a breeze in his carefree smile and there are tears in his eyes that remind him of blue skies. He tries to wipe them away and continues eating. Kaneki swallows and the meat feels heavy in his throat.
"Anyway—what would you like to get tattooed?" Hide coughs and wipes off tears and snot.
If his body was large enough, he like to get this world, this place tattooed onto his skin. He'd like that instead of the scars. A literal and metaphorical representation of your life in a nut-shell.
Every patch of his skin would have been filled with Hide's stupid corny one-liners, with Touka and with her brother and with Yomo, Irimi-san, Komo-san, Hinami and Manager and Arima, and their quaint little café Anteiku.
He'd really like that.
"Dunno." He bites into his hamburger meat.
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There's a flower shop around the corner on his way home.
It's owned by a family called Mado. He opens the door. There's a light tinkle of the door and there, behind the counter is a woman. Her white-blonde hair is tied up to the back of her head in little braids over her ears. She looks at him and smiles.
"Hello! What can I do for you?"
He shakes his head.
"I'm just looking."
"Take your time," Mado Akira says. "Just call for me if you ever need help."
And oddly enough, while he's pouring over sunflowers someone enters the shop.
"—and today we learned about water-spouts!" she says to her mother, excitedly. There's a skip in her step and her tiny little bag pack bounces as she narrates the day's events to her. She stops and looks at him.
He realizes he's staring.
"I'm sorry," he chirps. "Just back from school?"
"Yeah!" She grins at him.
"Do you enjoy school?" he asks her.
"We learn a lot!" she affirms.
And then Mado Akira arrives from the back and claps her hands together and announces—
"Hinami-chan and her mother! My favourite customers! What can I do for you today?"
Hinami-chan tears away her eyes from Kaneki and looks up at the older lady.
"Dad's having someone important come over! We need flowers for the house!"
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Can you hear me?
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It scandalizes him. They do not know the irony of their lives.
He thinks that Arima-san makes a good professor. Hide is as lively as ever, and Rize? Rize hasn't responded back to his text since he sent her one, trying to tell her that he cannot make it to their date. She's still a contact on his phone.
But Rize Kamishiro doesn't exist, not in Anteiku, and not even in the eleventh ward. Not anywhere in Japan. He looked her up online, feverishly. He looked through the yellow pages. It's a glaring plot-hole, he decides, but he doesn't want to have to do anything about it.
And he leaves Rize Kamishiro's existence in the dust.
A ghostly reminder that something is off about this world where there are no monsters.
That was one year ago.
The jacket was returned. The apartment was cleaned out, and he moves into a different apartment, one which doesn't contain as many memories of a different life.
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Can you hear me calling out your name?
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And of course Arima would decide to teach 'The Black Goat's Egg.'
Kaneki wants to opt out of the lectures but he needs the attendance. And the attendance is worth 20% of his mark. Arima is too fucking sharp, his eyes scan every face—his especially.
They didn't get off to a good start after all.
"Kaneki, was it?" he asks him. "You don't seem to be paying attention. For that matter, would like to be up here, teaching this course in my stead?"
"No sir." Kaneki puts down his headphones and pushes back his hood, caught.
"Okay then, why don't you answer this question—to display your obvious intellect. Why would the author of 'The Black Goat's Egg' chose to make the protagonist's biological mother the way she is?"
There are no right or wrong answers.
So he answers.
"It's meant contrast to the protagonist's delicate mental capacity. A cruel mother figure, woman who gave birth to him also took so many lives away. I think it's a representation of the hopelessness and the loss and the despair in the author's life."
Arima stares at him. The class is hushed. He continues.
"Art reflects life. Life reflects art," Kaneki narrates. "A cruel mother exposes the reality of a horror story that most people don't want to see. It's a horror novel. A mother is supposed to be caring and gentle and kind—but the protagonist's mother is cruel to him. She hurts him with the same hands she raised him to walk."
Then silence.
He waits.
There's an outbreak of sniggers.
And the class laughs. One of his peers whispers something to the other.
Then Arima speaks after a good ten seconds.
"Have you actually read the novel, Kaneki?"
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He storms through the door of his house and makes a beeline for his closet. Kaneki rips out the box, which was carefully wrapped with tape and thrown into the nether regions of his closet.
And he stares down at the copy of 'The Black Goat's Egg.' And then the other.
The flaps have the same picture on it.
He picks it up like it would burn his fingers. He flips it open and flips through page after page after page—
Two hours in, his eyes are itchy, but he has not stopped reading.
In this life, Takatsuki Sen's work is about a mother who raises her child in a home where there is no father. Her sister had died many years prior. They live comfortably—without needing to spend too much. The boy grows up. And he marries the girl he loves.
It's a very ordinary story. It contains too many glaring plot-holes. It's almost as if the protagonist was written for a different novel. This novel has too many plot holes for it to be a bestseller, he pulls at his hair, this is a debauchery. A cliché.
And the story ends like this.
'The man was imaginative. At nights, with his sweet wife beside him, he dreamed darkly of other lives, of other worlds, of a world with cruel monsters.'
And then right below that—
'He woke up then.'
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And the world around him began to peel away.
He could hear the drowning sound of the buzzing of his phone and of Hide's voicemail in his ear. He was clenching his phone.
"Yo Kaneki! Want to get something to eat…today?" It fizzles out into nothing but static. A crackle.
His apartment had drained of all color. The walls were white—the reds were gray and everything had been painted black with very crude brush strokes, dabbing it all over the shadows and the nuances. The writing is twisted. The writing scratched. The gentle sunlight pouring through his window was cold.
The wall tears away like paper.
Kaneki clutches his head.
"No—nononoo!"
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Because traces of the monsters existed everywhere.
Rize's contact in his phone, remained long after her death.
Yamori's voice remained in his dreams and seeped through his new life.
New life. Life.
And Eto's books and her delicate writing remains as well. Only he didn't know if she was dead or not. He hopes she's dead. She's better off dead.
What a stupid god.
Only he remembered the way her words sounded in his head. The stupid god talks and the walls of his mind ripples and titters in applause—like paper to a rough hand.
She sits on a chair, facing him, the chair was twisted around. She looked at him.
"In The Metamorphosis," she says. "Gregor Samsa is a crybaby who complains about his tragic life, who ended up waking up as an insect. There's no particular logic in that transformation—perhaps it reflected his soul. Perhaps it reflected the way he felt inside. It's reasonable to assume that Gregor Samsa assumed himself a product of the system—a roach slaving in a world where there were people—predators like his boss and his family who were better off than him. Poor Gregor Samsa, poor us—we always have this disposition—this affinity towards tragedy."
She lifts his chin up.
They are opposites.
Her red reflects into his black. His black reflects into her red.
"They say literature is dreary. It's supposed to be fun. But that's never the case, right? Art imitates life like life imitates art."
She laughs. He laughs too all crude and jagged like the edge of a rusted knife.
"You can never hide from who you really are when you write. How could you—how could you, dear Kaneki, forget who you really were? How could you erase the people, your mother, Rize, Yamori and me— your greatest nightmares? You are delusional, boy."
She dips her forehead, to his forehead and rests it there intimately. Her fingers grate against his cheeks.
"But you still are my greatest creation. Ka-ne-ki."
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"He's laughing again."
"That guy is so creepy."
They were looking at the television screen, which looked deep down into the lowest levels of the Cochlea, where the most dangerous ghouls were housed. SS+ rank and above. The television screen flickered as it revealed another camera angle of the man with bandaged empty eyes and swaddled in wrappings.
He rocked back and forth on the leg of his chair.
The first security guard turned to the other.
"Who is he anyway?"
"You haven't heard of First Class Sasaki? The supposedly reformed ghoul? Mentor of the Quinx squad?" His partner asks him incredulously. "That guy's actually pretty strong. He killed Arima—fucking Arima!"
The security guard intakes sharply.
"Why is he even alive? They should put him out of his misery."
"I dunno. But I heard from Michi that the Higher-ups said that he would be CCG's ace in case it gets really bad out there. He's got people. This guy, he's got people who are searching for him. They care for him. They'll come for him."
And they both stared back at the screen.
"He's also their last hope, some kind of ghoul urban legend or whatever of the One-Eyed King or something. Either way—"
He grimaces as Kaneki writhes with laughter. It booms through the speakers. He shuts the speakers off.
"He's still important to them."
Thanks for reading!