A/N: As for any Tokyo Ghoul AU fic, please be warned that there will be cannabilism.
I'm just using Tokyo Ghoul's premise and not any of its characters. For those in the Naruto fandom who are not familiar with Tokyo Ghoul, the premise is that: (1) humans and ghouls exist, and (2) ghouls eat humans. Ethical conundrums, violence, and tragedy abound.
Although I try to describe things as they appear, you might also want to check out the glossary below for a quick explanation of the terms used.
"Ao, Ao, look at this," Mei giggles as she shoves her phone into his face.
He clasps her hand to pull the screen away, narrowing his eyes against the glare of the screen to focus on the tiny words. "Anglerfish?" he murmurs, letting Mei lead him through the dark, deserted streets by the arm that he'd wrapped around her waist. A glimpse of the deep sea creature's misshapen face makes him grimace. "I don't think it'll survive in our aquarium."
Mei rolls her eyes. "I know that. I was showing you the paragraph about how glowing bacteria in the anglerfish's lure help them attract prey." She holds her phone before her, shining the lit screen about to mimic the anglerfish's protruding lure. Ao snorts at her antics. "They have a symbiotic relationship, like us," Mei explains with a smirk and a waggle of her eyebrows.
"I resent being compared to bacteria," he says flatly. "And you're far to pretty to be some weird fish." He tries to give her a peck on the cheek but she bats him away, laughing.
As they head deeper into the abandoned residential area, Ao glances at the rundown alleys suspiciously. There were a spate of murders in this region just last week, but there doesn't seem to be anyone about tonight. Ao turns back to Mei, sighing. "Mei—"
"Hold my phone," she interrupts, her eyes glinting. "They're coming."
His gaze snaps up, but he cannot spot anything beyond the dim pools of yellow that the street lights have cast onto the rain-damp tarmac. "Hmm, be careful," Ao murmurs, slipping the device into his pockets as he withdraws his arm from her waist.
Before she can reply, a shadow darts out of the dilapidated house to their right, flying straight at them like a bullet. Mei turns, mask already forming over her face, as she blocks the downwards sweep of a sword-like koukaku with a crimson tentacle sprouting from her lower back. The night lights up in a spray of orange sparks, showering them with stinging particles.
The red-on-black eyes of the ghoul widens comically as he quickly falls back a safe distance away, holding his sword-arm as he eyes the two of them warily. "You're a ghoul," he observes quietly, his voice muffled by his leather mask. "He's with you?"
Mei just shrugs as her kagune tentacles, four in total, wrap and meld against her curves to form a heavy set of armour. "You should have considered the possibility before you tried to take a bite," she says, confidence written in the tilt of her hip. Ao can almost image the smirk behind her fearsome, fanged mask. She looks like some kind of ancient samurai, Ao muses, though there is something supernatural about the way that her long auburn hair spills down her back, like a river of fire against the volcanic-black plates of her armour. ''He's mine," Mei declares, and Ao's heart pounds against his ribcage.
More ghouls have surrounded them. There are three by his count: two women, one with ukaku wings and the other with a bikaku tail, and another man, who has a koukaku sword like the first ghoul who had attacked them. Altogether, they appear to be a well rounded team.
They should be enough to feed Mei for half a month, at least.
The first ghoul holds up his free hand placating gesture, and lets his weapon-arm drop to his side in surrender. "Hey, no harm done." His gaze flickers from Ao to Mei with unease, clearly disturbed by Mei's protectiveness and Ao's lack of crying and begging. "We won't bother you and your pet anymore, yeah?"
"What the hell," one of the female ghouls retorts, her tail slamming into the ground angrily. "Yuro, you coward. It's four against one!"
"He smells tasty. I don't mind fighting for a bite," her friend giggles as she leers at Ao with blatant hunger. Her ukaku wings glitter in the moonlight as she sticks the tip of her tongue out and winks.
Ao scowls and resists the urge to shift under their scrutiny. His skin is crawling. It's different, somehow, when it's Mei pressing her nose against his neck and telling him how much he smells like a five-course meal. When he's with her, his survival instincts roll belly-up.
"You idiots," Yuro hisses, but Ao can already feel Mei's short temper flaring. Her very surroundings heat up when she's angry, and she exhales in streams of dense white fog.
In swift movement that startles everyone except Ao, she tosses her head and spits a thick wave of viscous liquid over nearest ghoul, sending her into pained shrieks as the unusual heat of Mei's RC cells plasters her to the ground and starts cooking her alive. Shouting, her friends leap to her rescue with barrage of blade-like ukaku feathers, but Mei deflects the projectiles easily with another burst of "lava" - as she calls it - from her mask. Her armoured hand seizes the bare blade of the second koukaku-user and with a swift jab of her knee, she shatters the facsimile sword into two. She hurls her portion towards the ukaku-user like a javelin, impaling the woman through the stomach and sending her crashing from the sky. The next second, the koukaku user also smashes into the ground, his neck broken by a good kick to the head and his skull leaking over the road like a cracked egg.
It's all over in a blink of an eye. As Ao expected, these are only small fry compared to Mei. When she turns around, Yuro is scrambling away as fast as his legs can carry him.
"Will that be alright?" Ao asks, watching Yuro disappear with concern. "He saw your face."
Mei shakes her head, her red-black eyes blinking at him from the slitted eye-holes of her mask. "It's fine," she says, her voice distorted slightly. She rounds back and, ignoring the burnt ghoul's shrieking, decapitates each of the incapacitated ghouls with brutal efficiency. Ao swallows uncomfortably as he watches their heads roll, even though he knows that it is necessary. They have faced ghouls with freakish levels of regenerative capability before.
Mei brushes herself off when she is done, her armour peeling away and turning back into her usual rinkaku tentacles before they disperse. Impatient, she breaks off the mask and crushes the shards in her hand. "The ghouls around town are aware about my existence anyway. This might be good for my street cred," she says jokingly. She smiles at him, her cheeks dimpling, as her sclera fades from the black it had been. "And it'll be good for your protection."
Ao exhales heavily through his nose and shakes his head in fond exasperation. He wishes he doesn't have to rely on Mei, but the average human has no chance against a ghoul. Every time he sees Mei dispatch other ghouls without breaking a sweat, he is relieved by her strength. He can't protect her, but she does well enough by herself.
He'll just continue acting as a lure and keep her well fed. Symbiotic relationship, indeed.
Mei draws him out of his thoughts with a brief press of her lips against his. "Hey. Pass me the backpack and I'll be done with this in a moment, yeah?"
He kisses her back and doesn't let his perturbation show on his face. "Sure."
He goes to the side of the road and sits down on the curb, taking out Mei's phone to distract himself from the sounds of corpses being chopped up and packed away. Mei says he has a danger kink the size of Mount Fuji, and Ao can't really disagree when he's married to a predator of his kind, but corpse-processing is a bit much for his stomach. Even after all these years and a fridge dedicated Mei's meals, it still makes him queasy to imagine her eating. He just wishes he were a good enough liar that Mei doesn't know he still feels this way.
If Mei hadn't saved him all those years ago, he'd have long since died as some ghoul's supper. Mei hadn't completed her kakuja transformation then. She'd been half-mad with it, unable to go out in daylight for fear of losing her mind at the scent of people on the street, but by some fateful design, she'd been out hunting that night. She'd fought off the ghoul who had cornered Ao.
"I don't eat innocent humans," she'd gritted out between large bites of the ghoul she'd defeated. Shaking in the corner of the gore-splattered alley, Ao was in too much shock to do anything but stare.
She's a vigilante, Ao discovered later. A consumer of criminals, ghouls, and CCG officers.
At first, it had been obligation (and his danger kink, as Mei likes to remind him) that kept him knocking on her apartment door. But between paying her utility bills and helping her collect special sugar cubes from her favourite coffee shop, something changed. When he lay in bed at night, he'd start worrying about her, out there in the dark fighting ghouls alone so she could eat back her sanity, piece by bloody piece. He'd dream of CCG officers swarming her apartment and wake up in cold sweat, his fingers itching for his phone so he could call her. It was utter insanity, Ao knew. She reminded him as much each time he turned up. But by then, he had already fallen for the tentative smiles that lit her eyes.
Does anyone really deserve to be made into food? Ao doesn't know. They are all still human in the ways that mattered, even ghouls.
Ao hates how their universe works, but he loves Mei more than anything. Even perhaps his own life.
"Deep thoughts?"
His head snaps up and Mei's sad smile greets him. Clearing his throat, he stands and hand her her phone back. The screen had gone dark without him even noticing. "Just wondering whether I should try to glow in the dark next time," he says lightly.
She chuckles weakly, fiddling with the strap of the backpack in an uncharacteristic show of nerves. "I'll string some lights on you. You'll look great."
Ao slips an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close and determinedly not looking back at the mess that the road must be. He presses his nose against her hair, trying to find her sweet scent beneath the metallic stench in the air. "Don't be silly," he murmurs, glad when she relaxes against him. "C'mon, let's go home."
A/N: I don't think this will become a proper story, but I might write a bit more of this AU :)
Hope you all enjoyed! :) I can't believe I need to say this but... disclaimer: I do not support cannibalism in real life. I am actually quite squicked, but the predator/prey dynamics of Tokyo Ghoul are too delicious— I mean, interesting.
Glossary:
Kagune: The predatory organ of ghouls, which they use to fight. They come out from the back and can be categorised into four types: ukaku (wing-like), koukaku (sword-like), rinkaku (tentacles) and bikaku (tail-like).
RC cells: Blood-like cells which make up kagune.
Kakugan: Ghoul eyes which appear as black sclera + red irises.
Kakuja: An evolved, powerful type of ghoul which have stronger/unique kagune. Ghouls can attain this evolution by eating other ghouls.
Commission of Counter Ghoul (CCG): Human organisation which kills, captures and suppresses ghouls.
Investigators/Doves: Humans which work for the CCG.
Quinque: Tools which humans use to fight ghouls. They're made from kagune harvested from dead ghouls and are kept in steel briefcases.