Written as a submission for TG Rare Pair Week Day Four "Scars/Piercings/Tattoos" on Tumblr.
Warning: this is not a happy fic.
No one had ever expected to see him again. He'd been listed as dead in action for over two years after all.
Yet, here he was, barely recognisable with his stark white hair and pale complexion and the look of perpetual hunger on his face. There was no doubt about it, though. This crazed ghoul murdering one investigator after another was Seidou Takizawa.
Sasaki dealt him a devastating blow.
In the end it took Arima to finally finish him off.
They took his kagune and his body was bagged and taken away before Akira could even properly react. She was busy calming down Sasaki and making sure he got the medical attention he desperately needed when all she wanted to do was see for herself what everyone else had confirmed to her.
Arima told her not to go in, but she ignored his advice and went into the lab anyway.
The scientists there didn't question her presence, they just handed her a visitor's list to sign and told her she was too early for the dissection.
She said it didn't matter, but deep down she was glad.
The room was chilly and the bright sharp light hurt her tired eyes, but she soldiered on and approached the covered figure in the middle of the room.
Her hands didn't shake as she pulled the white sheet down to his navel, revealing his in death even paler skin, his lax face with the half opened mouth and the jagged holes where his eyes used to be.
He looked nothing like the cheerful boy she'd met at the Academy all those years ago. And still, she could see Seidou in the familiar curve of his lips, now darkened to a deep black – Akira didn't want to imagine where that could come from. She could see him in the slight upturn of his nose, his soft jawline that was still the same, not like his cheekbones that protruded in sharp angles now, so unlike the rounded cheeks she remembered.
She saw him in the tiny scar on his chin, where she'd accidentally nicked him during training and he'd been so angry at her for making him bleed and almost laughing at his indignant screams to boot. He'd gotten her back a few days later when he'd slashed her upper arm in a moment of unawareness and she'd needed five stitches for the wound.
There were new features to him too, like the more pronounced muscles adorning his chest that hadn't been there the last time she'd seen him with his shirt off. She'd walked in on him changing once in their Academy time and he'd yelled at her to fuck off and had tried to cover himself up while she'd just stared and tried not to blush at seeing him half naked. She had been 18 and made aware that, yes, maybe she had a tiny crush on her most beloved rival.
His skin wasn't as unmarred as it used to be either.
There were multiple wounds to his torso that hadn't closed up quickly enough before he was killed.
His left shoulder was surrounded by scar tissue and she guessed that it must have happened some time between the Anteiku Raid, after he'd left her, and becoming a ghoul. It was massive, stretching from his shoulder to almost his neck, down over his pectoral to the second last rib. It seemed to reach onto his back too. Whatever had happened to him, it must have almost killed him hadn't he been turned into a ghoul.
Absent-mindedly Akira touched her fingertips to the scar and she was shocked at the icy cold feel of his skin. The logical part of her brain told her that he would of course be cold, he'd been dead and in this freezing room for hours now, but another part fed her with memories of his overheated skin when they'd trained hand-to-hand, or the comfortable warmth she'd felt that one time they'd hugged.
It was time for her to go, the scientists were already waiting to start their experiments and Akira didn't want to be present for that. Carefully, she pulled the sheet back up and covered his lifeless form, taking one last glance at his strange yet familiar face, frozen in agony.
Goodbye, Seidou.
Maybe she'd thought it, maybe she'd whispered it aloud, she wasn't sure of it as she left the room and her stomach twisted with unease.
The scar in her arm wasn't the only one Seidou had inflicted on her. But this new wound would never heal, not with all the stitches in the world.
The real tragedy here is that Seidou isn't even available in the character section. Where is he?