Hinami is the one who asks him, small hand tugging at his sleeve, and he has long ago resigned himself to the fact that if it were within his power to do so, he would fulfill her every wish and whim. (He had also, long, long ago, at the beginning of this road paved towards hell and definitely not with good intentions, sworn to himself that whenever he encountered an obstacle beyond his means to defeat, he would simply rise to the occasion and grow even stronger, until helplessness became as foreign a notion as a ghoul's daily routine had once been.)
"Onii-chan, can we go to the park?"
He smiles at her, which provokes a blindingly bright and earnest grin to spread across her face, and says, "Of course we can. It's a bit chilly out, though, so remember to wear your scarf."
She nods her head with such eagerness her hair bounces under the red ribbon Touka tied into it this morning. He watches while she rushes off to her room to fetch her outerwear and he thinks, heart heavy, even five seasons and two homes later, she has still not unlearned the compulsion to ask permission for her very existence. The day can I turns into I want towill be the day one less burden of guilt weighs down his bowed shoulders.
He is pulled from his inner machinations by Hinami's voice coming from above the stairs.
"Can onee-chan and Hide-niichan come along too?"
"We can pick them up on the way."
The wind outside bites into his cheeks and his breath comes out as steam when he blows onto his fingers to warm them. Hinami outgrew the habit of physically clinging to him when they're out in public at the same time as she outgrew the last pair of shoes her mother bought her, in what feels like a different life. In some ways, it was. A previous life: Anteiku, the One-Eyed Ghoul, the Dove who had bothered to listen to his words, his plea, whom he has known since that first encounter carries deep within him the same conviction that the world is wrong, wrong, wrong. He wonders where the man is now, whether he's still alive, cutting down those that threaten his kind. Whether, from time to time, he spares a moment to ponder on the strange ghoul who begged not to be made a murderer.
They arrive at the bottom of the scant few steps leading up to the town's only library, which, even with its impressive wooden double doors and eerie ancient air, pales in comparison to the university library he rarely frequented during his short stint as a student there. Courtesy of the text message he had the foresight to send, Touka and Hide are already waiting for them at the entrance, the former wrapped in so many layers it's hard to distinguish her face from behind the thick woolen scarf. Hide, on the other hand, has his jacket open with only a t-shirt underneath. After spotting her other two favorite people in the world, Hinami bolts up the stone stairs in record speed to first jump into Hide's arms for a celebratory twirl, which she has thankfully not outgrown and hopefully never will, then hug a disgruntled Touka, offended that Hinami would greet Hide before her.
"Whatever gave you the idea to leave the house on the coldest day of the month, hmm, little princess? Have you lost your mind?" teases Hide as he ruffles Touka's fifteen minutes of hard work back into the bird's nest it was when Hinami woke up.
"I haven't!" Hinami pouts at him, arms crossed across her chest and cheeks puffed out. "It's precisely becauseit's the coldest day that we need to go to the park. It's only going to get colder from now on, and then Hide-niichan and onii-chan will waste all their time under the kotatsu."
Hide laughs, mouth wide open, while Touka glares at him for his unsightly manners. "Blame your onii-chan for that. You know I can't go where he doesn't go. We're like Siamese twins in separate bodies."
"That makes no sense whatsoever," Touka snorts as she gathers Hinami's gloved hand into hers. "C'mon, Hinami, let's leave these two lazy losers behind and see if Toshino-san has brought Koko-chan out for a walk today."
"Koko-chan!" squeals Hinami. She suddenly breaks into a run, dragging a startled Touka as she races ahead. Hide gasps in mock heartbreak, hand clutched on the wrong side of his chest, and leisurely trots his way down the stairs.
"She's never going to stop asking us for a dog, now," says Hide. "You sure it was a good idea to bring her to the park at this time of day, Kaneki?"
He shrugs in response to his childhood friend's quirked eyebrow. "I don't say no to Hinami-chan, you know that."
They trace after the two runaways' steps to the beat of idle chatter, discussing his job at the bookstore and Hide's studies, Touka progressively and begrudgingly moving past having to turn down her first choice university in order to come to this backwater place, not because she wants to but because if no one is around to keep them in check, they'd be on the street by the end of the week. Hide makes him laugh when he brings up Hinami's school assignment, where she tried her best to describe her peculiar familial situation but ultimately caused her teacher to believe her teenage mom was cheating on her husband with her husband's boyfriend.
They catch up to Touka and Hinami at the park and, to their communal despair, realize that Toshino-san is indeed taking her adorable Pomeranian out for a walk and Hinami couldn't keep her hands off the dog if her life depended on it. Hide ditches him without a second thought to join in on the cuddlefest and maybe redirect some of Hinami's attention on him, a futile effort when Koko-chan is around. Touka locates him while she scans the vicinity (a practice neither of them have been able to abandon, and perhaps never will) and, instead of the scowl he is used to receiving, her lips slant slightly upwards. It's gone in the split-second it takes him to blink.
(He wonders when—not if—she'll feel okay enough to smile again. Whether it'll take another month, another three months, another year. Perhaps it'll be when he'll finally summon the courage to flip through a Takatsuki Sen book again, or when he'll feel okay enough to look Hide in the eye when they talk. Perhaps it'll be when Hinami stops throwing a scared look over her shoulder every time she hears the click of a briefcase.)
He gets distracted by a commotion when Hide throws a frisbee for the dog to catch and it ends up caught in a tree. He watches as Hinami and Touka team up to scold him, voices muffled behind their matching scarves, and Hide laughs while rubbing the back of his neck, sheepish.
"Hey, what are you doing over there, standing dumbly by yourself?" calls Touka after they manage to retrieve the frisbee.
"Nothing, nothing at all."
A gust of chilly air blows her hair into her face and Hinami's scarf onto a tree branch and Hide whines because, not again, he hasn't had to climb this many trees since elementary school.
"Yo, this time it's your turn, I think I bust my ankle landing," his childhood friend shouts at him.
"Alright, alright, I'm coming."
(However long it takes any and all of them to heal is fine; however long it takes for them to truly begin to live is fine. What matters is that right now, in this moment, the people he has given his utmost to protect are safe. He knows that he will no longer need to rely on power alone to put the world back in order, piece by piece. He knows that he was never meant to change the world that is still wrong, wrong, wrong. He also knows that becoming the person who gets hurt was never the answer, that self-sacrifice as a way of life was a sure-fire way to guarantee a premature death, that nobody who cared about him would force him down that path. He doesn't know of any alternative, miraculous cures to the malice and the pain that permeates the world, but he does know this: he doesn't want to leave Hide, Touka, and Hinami behind to bury him. Because he wants them to live, he cannot afford to die.)
Kaneki smiles, and he goes.