This is something that's been in my head for a while, and after lots of pondering, I have decided to upload it.
Rated M for probable future gore.
I've always liked categorizing things, placing them in a light under which they can be observed, scrutinized. Simplified, even, some might say, but I prefer to view it more as a way to understand the world as I encounter it. A way to avoid brushing it off, as a clear majority of people tend to do.
I've done it to all sorts of things: from objects to food to animals. When I was a child, my sight was set on toys; I would line them up in neat little rows based on size, color, material, anything I could think of. I could sit on the cold concrete floor for hours at a time, marveling over the infinite possibilities I had before me.
As I grew, and more and more things presented themselves to my hungry mind, I continued cataloguing them in a system of sorts. Soon what begun as a mere hobby turned into a constant mission of discovery. I would notice everything, down to the most minuscule objects around me, and instantly fit them into my, by then, complexly woven net of categorization.
My favorite thing to study, however, was humans.
They, with their infinite individuality, or at least that's what I perceived it as back then, were like a gold mine, a mosaic of unending pieces to be picked up and beheld. One might think that my love of order and logic would lead me to hate these variating creatures, but to many's surprise, such was not the case. I found great joy in analyzing them. Their interests, their looks, their opinions, their choices; they were all fascinating to me. The seemingly endless differences between their world and mine led me to become almost obsessed with comprehending them. I begun writing my observations down, filling notebook upon notebook with commentaries, facts, anything and everything I came across.
As you might have understood, these nearly obsessive tendencies of mine did nothing to normalize my childhood. I was never one to have a lot of friends. The idea of sharing my life shallowly with dozens didn't appeal to me. I wasn't antisocial, not really, I just preferred less company. Despite my introverted nature, however, I gained a friend who would later come to become one of my most loyal and loved companions.
His name was Hideyoshi Nagachika.
Our friendship didn't have the best of beginnings, courtesy of myself I'm afraid, but before long, we were inseparable. I met him by chance when I was six years old, and he had recently turned seven. He was an orphan, rendered as such after a car accident when he was just a toddler. He didn't remember much about his parents, he once told me, only sporadic and unclear images, mostly of smiling faces and loving stares.
But I digress.
Anyways. After rigorous studying of the human species, I came to the conclusion that most of them could be divided into two separate groups: planners and improvisers. Planners are calm, collected, often intelligent. They are the kind of people who would enter a board game knowing every detail about the rules and possible strategies. Execution, of course, is an entirely different matter, but the idea that life should be planned is a "planner's" most prominent trait, as the name suggests.
At first sight, this group might seem like the superior one, but many forget the planners' fatal flaw. With constant planning, comes an almost obsessive will to adhere to the sketch that has been laid out. The thing about life, however, is that it doesn't follow structured blueprints. It twists, bends, and constantly changes shape. An inability to adapt to those changes will lead to nothing but termination.
The second group, the improvisers, aren't weighed down by the stiffness that so often plagues the planners, but despite their noteworthy flexibility, they too have faults. They are freer in their demeanor than the planners, but as always, that freedom comes with a prize. Improvisers have an ofttimes disastrous habit of rushing in unprepared.
You might have noticed that I said that only most humans fit into this seemingly simple classification. Something I've learned time and time again throughout the years is that there are always exceptions. There are always those who differ from the fixed order, who refuse to conform to the set rules, or in some cases, are unable to.
They are the insane, the senile, the abnormalities. Those who have been rejected from society and from the world.
My mother, with whom I lived at the time, was, despite not being a member of the human race, a clear planner. She was meticulous, painstakingly thorough as she devised the courses of action that made up her life. She didn't, as one might expect, fall victim to her determination to adhere to the plans she made, but rather to the plans themselves.
She was left perplexed by my occupation, partly because my personality and demeanor differed so harshly from her own. She, like so many others, rushed through life. Her entire existence had been an escapade. From her family, from the investigators, from debt collectors, from the world. She had made it into an art, refined her skills to near perfection, and I, as her only child, escaped along with her. I was an illegitimate child, conceived through an affair outside of my mother's marriage.
All this fleeing was, as one might expect, not beneficial to her health.
The years wore her down, tired her out. Slowly but oh so surely, she turned bleak and grey; a mere shell of her previous self. I can still remember waking up in the mornings and crawling over to her side of the bed, only to find her so deeply asleep she would have seemed dead. It was only the ever present twitching, a sign of the nightmares she frequently suffered from, that told me that she remained alive, although not entirely well.
My mother and I rarely spent more than half a year in one place; her paranoia didn't allow us to.
We moved around often, more often than would probably be considered healthy for a child of my age. It wasn't until I was six, around the time when I met Hide, that we finally settled down more permanently. After years of running and evading, and begging from me, she decided that if we were going to stay in one place, it would have to be the 20th ward. It was known as the safest of them all, and also the most structured, from a ghoul's perspective.
My mother was well informed after years of collecting knowledge about whatever place we happened to live in. She knew about Anteiku beforehand, of course. Barging in blindly wasn't an option. After the many months of planning that led up to our trip, it felt as though I'd spent years in the 20th. I knew every nook, every corner, had every neighborhood memorized. My mother had made me study every known ghoul in the area; the seemingly benevolent, and more importantly, the malevolent ones.
Knowing of their hunting grounds was crucial. You see, ghouls are very territorial creatures. We protect what we care about, whether it be objects, family, or prey. The act of taking another's property is always punished by the owner, such are the rules. Stumbling into another ghoul's hunting ground could be a fatal mistake, one my mother made sure I would never make in the 20th.
So we prepared, anticipated every possible outcome of our actions, until it seemed like nothing could catch us off guard. She was wrong, of course, and inevitably something didn't go as she expected it to.
The variable which she hadn't included in her calculations was, in fact, herself.
It's all quite ironic now that I look back at it.
It was her descent into illness, a consequence of her paranoia, that in the end led to her death. Well, that and a couple of ghoul investigators.
Ghouls very rarely fall ill, simply because their bodies are more sturdy than humans'. They don't succumb to disease as easily. Additionally, there are few diseases that can take on a ghoul's superior immune system.
As with all creatures, however, malnutrition and stress weakens a ghoul's body, sometimes so much that they are unable to protect themselves. This was what happened in my mother's case.
She was a kind woman, much to caring to cope with her harsh lifestyle. Taking the life of an animal, as humans do to feed, is very different from killing humans. Animals, while sometimes intelligent enough to notice some of the things that surround them, never have an understanding about the concept of life and death. Humans, however, do.
They are individuals, complex creatures with personalities, bonds, thoughts of their own. My mother lacked the ability to numb her emotions and the resolution required to kill people. Despite not having a deep bond with those whose lives she took, it hurt her. By killing others, she was essentially slowly killing herself.
Naturally, this reluctance to hunt led to a chronic undernourishment. I somewhat shared her hatred for violence, but unlike her, I was able to look past it in order to find food. I did my best to sustain her, but I was only six at the time, and no matter how independent I was, I wasn't capable of taking care of both my mother and myself.
Things changed a bit after we moved to the 20th ward. Anteiku took us in almost as soon as we arrived, and for a while I believed everything would turn out fine for her. Her paranoia, which had been a constant part of her life ever since she was a child, subsided noticeably. Proper nourishment and rest allowed her to relax a bit, something I couldn't remember ever seeing her do before.
After a few months, she started to venture the streets again, and even took a job at the Anteiku as a waitress. It wasn't long before she stopped accepting food from them and insisted on hunting for herself; no matter how safe she felt, her deep rooted fears never really left her. I guess she didn't want to have to rely on them any more that necessary.
So she started hunting again, despite the effect it had on her state of mind, and I, as a child, couldn't do much to stop her.
The first couple of times it all went quite smoothly. She had long since mastered the art of covering her tracks as a result of our constant traveling, and she was effective enough to avoid the investigators. Her victims were, as all other thing in her life, carefully picked out. Homeless people with no connections, mourners who had shown previous suicidal tendencies, drunk, accident-prone teenagers. It was all very skillfully executed, and her confidence grew as she gained experience.
However, when after a particularly nasty incident involving a ghoul in the nearby area, more investigators were sent to the 20th ward, her fear reared its ugly head again.
It started subtly, with the return of the habit to constantly look over her shoulder in case anyone was following her, or being prone to whisper in conversations instead of talking in a regular tone. It only escalated from there, but the real problems didn't begin until she decided to start hunting for the both of us, instead of only for herself.
My appetite wasn't by any means extreme, but she was forced to kill almost twice as much as she had previously been. I tried to tell her that it wasn't necessary, that she didn't have to put herself through the stress. The manager at Anteiku did the same, practically begging her to let them continue taking care of me, but it was to no avail. My mother was an extraordinarily stubborn woman when she wanted to be, and our attempts to convince her to change her mind did nothing but strengthen her resolve. She wanted to avoid dependency on Anteiku at any cost, so that if need arose, we would be able to leave at a moment's notice.
The effect that the exertion had on her was palpable; she became exhausted and irritable and her skin would sometimes pale to such a degree that I could clearly see the veins underneath.
The slip-up was unavoidable in her condition; even I saw it coming, despite my inexperience.
It happened on a cold autumn day, when the wind was blowing furiously, making the trees beside the streets bow to the weather. She had woken up with chattering teeth and drooping eyelids, but my hunger was becoming problematic, and thus, when the sun went down, she left our tiny apartment in search for food.
She was in the middle of the act, incapable of escaping in any way, when the investigators found her. They weren't even especially skilled, but my mother was too weak to put up much of a fight, and she was taken down swiftly and silently.
I didn't find out until the next day, when the news channels reported another ghoul incident.
No matter how much I anticipated her death, how much I subconsciously prepared myself to take the blow, it was still a devastating loss.
She might not have been the best of mothers, but she was my mother nonetheless, and I couldn't help but love her. Hide and I had been friends for a couple of months at that time, and I can honestly say that he was the main reason why I managed to pull myself out of the gloomy pit in which I ended up after the incident.
I didn't talk at all during the first few days. I merely wandered the streets aimlessly, narrowly avoiding bumping into the passers by. It wasn't until four days later that I actually processed the consequences of the occurrence.
My mother was irreversibly, undeniably and permanently gone.
I was seven years old, recently orphaned and in a state of shock. Needless to say, I didn't react very well.
The following calamity resulted in the deaths of three people, none of which were deserving of my rampage.
It was in this state that the manager found me; red eyed, grieving and drenched in blood. It was pure luck that I didn't suffer a similar fate as my mother, killed off by investigators. They would no doubt have found me if it hadn't been for the workers at Anteiku. They got rid of the evidence, gave me a roof over my head and, most importantly, company.
For the next three months or so, I closed myself off from my surroundings and from the people in my vicinity. In my solitude, my anger at the investigators grew into a black, boiling mass of animosity, and the increase of surveillance in the 20th ward did nothing to calm my abhorrence. I rarely ventured the streets anymore; I preferred the privacy of my room above the café.
My entire demeanor changed in only half a year. The fascination and enchantment I had previously felt towards humans turned sour. The world, which had once shone in an array of vivid colors, became gray as my perspective shifted.
Despite the café workers' best efforts, I refused to revert back to my old self. Instead I found solace in literature. Novels, poetry, song lyrics, anything that allowed me to forget my grief was swallowed up hungrily by my despairing mind. I could lock myself up in my room for hours at a time, completely submerged in an illusory world.
I would undoubtedly have stayed in that state if it hadn't been for Hide's constant prodding and support. At the time I saw it as nothing but a nuisance, an unnecessary annoyance, but he refused to leave me be, and after a while I felt unable to continue ignoring him. His unbending positivity was what made me realize that there was more to life than the grief I was going through.
I couldn't tell him the truth, of course; he was, no matter how close we were, still a human. I was never very fond of lying, and it pained me to have to deceive him in such a way, but what was I to do? If there was one thing that my mother taught me, it was to be careful. So I fed him half truths and fabricated stories about my background and strange behavior. The version I made him believe was so simple, so carefree that I often wished it was the actual truth.
I told him my father left us when I was just a baby, which happened to actually be the case, and that my mother died in a car accident, which wasn't even close to the real story. As for my home, I explained it by saying that the manager was an old friend of my mother. It was true, in a twisted sense, and that was enough to at least relieve my guilt somewhat.
Things continued in that manner for years, with me working and living at Anteiku and Hide swallowing whatever lie I made up.
I guess I should have suspected something, considering how easily Hide was believing whatever I told him, but I was too immersed in my own happiness to really stop and think about such peculiarities. Instead I smiled and went along with it happily, chronically naive in my ignorance.
Thankfully, my naiveté didn't have any detrimental consequences, but once again I thank luck for being on my side.
Because it turns out Hide wasn't nearly as unaware as I thought him to be. I had clearly been underestimating his intellect, which is in fact rather impressive, might I add, although I didn't realize that until later on. It's a funny thing, how I, who was raised by one of the most unreasonably suspicious people I have ever encountered, let my guard down so far that I forgot what I was and the baggage that came with.
Being a ghoul is more than just the physical attributes. It's a constant state of wariness brought on by the perpetual danger in which we live. Killing humans is something you get used to, no matter how cold that statement sounds. It's something we are forced to do by our carnivorous nature. To some it's a never ending battle agains a relentless conscience, like to my mother for example. Others find enjoyment and gratification in the act of taking life. Many, and I like to include myself in this category, instead choose to see it from a practical perspective. It's a matter of life and death. Eat or perish, as simple as that.
The key is not thinking, not pondering on the consequences that one's actions have on others. Sadly, this is all a lot easier said than done. I vigorously envy those who are capable of not caring; I was never among them.
Though I might not have inherited my mother's unyielding detestation towards the bloodshed that accompanies the life of a ghoul, I am still unable to dull my conscience as much as I would like.
Oh, but pardon my rudeness. Perhaps I should tell you who I am, now that you know my background.
My name is Ken Kaneki; resident in the 20th ward, waiter at Anteiku café, and full blooded ghoul.
A.N. I'm looking for a beta to help me out with grammar and such, and also perhaps wording. If you happen to be interested, send me a p.m or tell me in a review. English is my third language, so the dictionary tends to be my best friend when I'm writing. Reviews are highly appreciated : )
