Sharp as a Feather and Soft as a Blade

White, white everything, too formless to be like snow and too rigid to be like milk. Kaneki cracked his neck to the relieve the nasty little spot of tension settling into his spine and let his eyes wander up with blank, white walls, looking for seams or shadows or something. There had to be something to look at. Occasionally, he found a place where one panel fitted with the next and then trying to follow the line provided by the near-perfect seam. Tracking the almost imperceptible line gave him something to do. The boredom was crushing. He wished they would at least give him a book, but he was not prepared to barter for something so simple. Not yet. Not when he was reasonably sure that his actions, or lack thereof, was chipping away at their resolve one day at a time and steadily gaining ground too. The CCG had apparently given up on more physical means of torture as an avenue to motivate his cooperation, which was a bit of a relief. The attempts at vivisection had been bad. Well, pretty bad, not as bad as other things, but Kaneki thought the boredom might actually be worse. He was by nature an intellectual and having nothing to do, nothing, was torture in its own right.

Having people trying to cut through his skin, clumsily and with tools poorly designed to deal with the toughness of his body was painful, but mostly just embarrassing. They never got very far before his… well…his exoskeleton Kaneki supposed would be the most appropriate term, manifested and put a halt to any of the more scientific attempts to hurt him. A few digits and maybe part of an organ lost, nothing that didn't just grow back a few hours later. The waterboarding was a little bit bad, no one liked drowning, but the Kakuja armor over his face put a neat stop to that as well. They tried to saw through it of course, to cut it with lazers and smash it with hammers, but Kaneki was more than used to having parts of his body burned and crushed and with the armor he barely felt it.

"Fucking amateurs." Yamori snorted from the depths of his mind.

"They have goals." Kaneki whispered back to him or to the echoes of him still lurking in his Kakuja.

"Peh, goals…I had goals too." Yamori argued, cracking his knuckles from the fissures in Kaneki's psyche.

"Your goals were all for yourself. They have external goals. Institutional goals." Kaneki replied, feeling the tension and pain begin to gather in his neck again.

Something about how his bones fit together after being forced to regenerate so many times, a small error of alignment, maybe, or an imbalance in his ligaments, caused his body to be stiffer than before. His joints needed to crack now in order to retain any semblance of comfort. All of Yamori's creations were this way, at least the ones that survived. He cracked his neck again, knowing that the adjustment wouldn't last long.

"Number 20. Please, produce the Kakuja." The voice sounded over the intercom again.

"Wow! Now we're even to the 'please' stage!" Rize laughed, "This is getting interesting."

Kaneki raised his eyes and smiled in what he hoped was a friendly and reassuring way, but stayed exactly where he was and did absolutely nothing. They were getting a little bit more desperate, he thought, or maybe just a little more uncomfortable, tension gathering on the other side of the two way mirror the way it did in his neck and fingers, moving towards an inevitable release. Either way, it served his plans. He counted in his head, curious to see when they would reach for the lever and start the shocks. Last time was almost 9 seconds, quite a bit less than what they were doing yesterday. Two days ago, the interval between disobedience and electricity was always the same, the timing like clockwork, almost mechanical, but now the timing was far more variable. Whoever was on the other side of the white nothing was getting impatient and breaking protocol. A broken protocol wasn't much as far as most negotiations were concerned, but in this case the change was a major achievement.

"Dammit Ghoul! The Kakuja! Now!" The voice snapped, sounding fully irate this time.

"I would like to see Hideyashi Nagachika please." Kaneki said, trying out the smile again.

The white room erupted with electricity, racing in sparking surges of pure agony through hist feet and legs, up to crackle menacingly in his snow-white hair. He jerked at the sensation of seared skin, tissues rent from their anchors as the energy moved through his helpless flesh and into the quivering bones below. He jerked, muscles contracting frantically and hands curled into twisted claws with the force of the shock. His jaw snapped together, the force of it more than enough to crack his teeth, or it would have been if Kaneki was still human. Despite knowing that the shock was coming, his brain was still wiped blank with the excruciating force of the torture, thoughts scattered with nothing but the howling pain to join one moment to the next.

He screamed, lungs expelling air on reflex, the sound more like a rabbit dying than any noise a human would make. Well, he wasn't human. The thoughts wouldn't come together, skittering away like spiders in harsh light. His back arched, shifting the bones in his spine ominously and straining his neck even as the nerves in his muscles sent tingling pops of confused pain back to his jerking limbs. He couldn't breathe. Unconsciousness threatened and Kaneki embraced the blackness, lips drawn back in a grimacing smile that was almost victorious even as his flesh jerked against the ground.

OoOoOoO

Koutarou Amon thought of himself as a patient man, a disciplined man, but even he was growing tired of the daily carnage Dr. Natski Ayo was using in his bullheaded attempt to break the prisoner. It was like watching a semi-literate carpenter trying to do neurosurgery using a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. The whole spectacle was gruesome, but also faintly frustrating as well. Even so, he had grudgingly come to admire Kaneki Ken's unwavering resilience in the face of more than a month of various kinds of torture. The ghoul looked pale and perhaps a bit thinner, more tired, but the expression on his face was as placid as one of the kotokuin Buddha statues he'd prayed to as a child. He supposed such a response was not totally unexpected for someone who'd undergone torture by the 13th Ward's Jason himself. Whatever the research department was hoping to accomplish with the endless procession of failed attempts as vivisection, waterboarding and electricity was clearly not working. On some level, the Eyepatch and his internment was his responsibility and Amon was getting tired of watching Dr. Ayo smash himself against the immovable wall that was Kaneki Ken's resolve.

"Is the idea to tame the ghoul or simply kill it?" Amon asked, crossing his arms.

"He'll cooperate eventually. Just like any other lab animal, the shocks will condition a response." Ayo hissed, hands still twitching.

"Yes, well, I would be curious to hear what response you've achieved thus far." Amon replied dryly.

"Well, the creature…"

"Ignores us most of the time and smiles at us the rest of it." Dr. Riko Shinguya yawned, stretching his arms above his head luxuriously.

"That…that isn't true, this…this strategy…" Ayo sputtered.

"Oh, so you do have a strategy. How reassuring." Amon rolled his eyes.

"This strategy requires time, it…" Ayo started.

"…isn't working." Shinguya finished cheerfully.

Amon raised an eyebrow at the junior researcher. There was something in the man's demeanor that reminded him uncomfortably of Juuzou Suzuya, though Shinguya had nothing of the younger man's boisterous energy or penchant for self-mutilation. The two men looked nothing alike, either. Shinguya was tall, slender and darksome, where Juuzou was petite and albino-looking, but there was just something in the semi-detached curiosity with which they spoke. Despite the content of his words, Shinguya looked purely delighted by the fact that his senior was clearly bungling their project, which either meant that he was a sociopath or that he had a better idea. Amon thought the most likely answer was a little bit of both.

"It is. The bastard is just stubborn. If you would just allow me to employ some of the earlier methods in conjunction as I've already suggested…" Dr. Ayo sputtered, looking red-faced and furious.

"If he were a normal ghoul, that last little stunt would have killed him," Koutarou Amon cut him off, his normally cool voiced chilled with another ounce of censure, "I think I've given you more than enough leeway in this."

"But he isn't so it's fine." Ayo snapped.

"The problem is not that we aren't doing enough, Natski…" Shinguya drawled.

"I told you, dammit, it's Dr. Ayo…"

"…It's that we are choosing inappropriate methods to achieve the desired result." Shinguya finished, unperturbed.

"You have my attention, Dr. Shinguya." Amon said, turning towards the younger researcher.

Riko Shinguya turned to look at him, his smile widening a fraction until the expression was almost a grimace and adjusted his glasses with a lazy finger. His dark eyes were sharp behind the delicate frames, larger than the average person's and bright with just a hint of madness behind the obsidian irises. The younger man was eager, like some small predator waiting for the appropriate moment to pounce, his tail was practically lashing. Ayo glared at him, but Shinguya had already forgotten about him, his focus fully and completely on Amon.

"We give the Eyepatch what he wants." Shinguya said, licking his lips.

"That's ridiculous. The only demand he ever makes is to speak with that Nagachika person, whom none of us know well and who has no criminal or…" Ayo interrupted stridently.

"Doctor," Amon said nodding towards Shinguya and holding a quelling hand in front of Ayo's furious face, "Please continue."

"We simply don't have the means or the, well, expertise to motivate his cooperation through physical pain. This is the individual who withstood Yamori aka 'Jason' and not only lived through it, but ended up breaking the other ghoul in the process and eating him. No matter what we do to him, Eyepatch is not going to give in until he's either dead or too psychologically shattered to be any use…" Riko Shinguya continued, calmly.

"Not true, I have read numerous accounts of…" Ayo sputtered.

"The accounts you are citing come from Ghouls, Ayo-chan. Eyepatch is not a ghoul in the classical sense, but something else entirely. He is a hybrid between a predator and prey species, something unheard of, with the same hybrid resilience occasionally seen in other creatures." Shinguya said, his tone finally bordering on irate.

"And how would giving Eyepatch access to Hideyoshi Nagachika, who is by all accounts a non-entity, facilitate our goals?" Amon asked.

"We have power over something the creature wants, detective. In some sense, I believe we may even have a hostage. I recommend bringing the young man here, allowing him to interact with Eyepatch. Let him see Nagachika, smell him, touch him, know without a doubt that the boy is alive and within our control." Shinguya continued, his tone almost fierce with eagerness.

Amon's initial reaction to the idea was a surge of almost primordial distaste, but he was a careful enough thinker to wait, let the revulsion pass, and consider the information logically. No one really knew what hold the Nagachika person had over the Eyepatch, but the ghoul was captured bringing him back for medical care. Perhaps they were friends, possibly even better if they were enemies. Maybe Nagachika simply knew something that Kaneki wanted to find out. In any case, there was considerable merit to the idea.

"That's tantamount to murder, you sadistic moron! It's the same as putting a rabbit into the same cage with a python! You can't be serious." Ayo scoffed.

"This is a controlled environment. In all likelihood the Hideyoshi Nagachika will be perfectly safe. In either case, cost to the CCG will be minimal compared to what we can learn, what we can do…"

"So you advocate using Nagachika as glorified monster bait. And then?" Amon raised an eyebrow skeptically.

"Then we have control, understand?"

"No." Amon replied pithily.

"Nagachika is only human, some worthless college student without any kind of prestige or even attentive parents to worry about him, just another missing person if something goes wrong. More importantly, he is not a ghoul and so bounded by the same restrictions as the rest of us, we can understand his needs, his motivations and use him to clarify the way Eyepatch thinks and feels. He's a human mirror. Give Eyepatch access to him, assess the character of his intentions and use the motivation to manipulate him. We can threaten to harm Nagachika or bribe him or simply use the base reaction the Eyepatch has to him to tailor our approach. We can hold him hostage against Kaneki, in mind or in body, and I believe the ghoul will give us full cooperation." Shinguya finished with a nod, as if satisfied with himself already.

"Ghoul's eat humans." Ayo sniped.

"The Eyepatch is, as I've already said, not like other ghouls."

OoOoOoO

Hide had no idea what Kaneki could have done to finally break through to them and he didn't really care. The CCG officials, the very same men and women who had served the past two months as his genial jailors, were going to let him see Kaneki for the first time since the night of the battle. He would get to talk to him at least, and the opportunity was not one he intended to waste. Despite the polite conversation and tasty meals that the CCG lavished upon him, Hide knew that they were hurting Kaneki, probably torturing him, maybe even worse. Not that anyone would actually say it, to use a word as ugly and politically incorrect as 'torture' would practically be counter to their culture, but Hide still knew. When he asked about Kaneki, the conversation was inevitably steered in another direction or turned around to press for more details about his friend's surgery, his eating habits, his kagune and the extent of his relationship to ghouls in general. Pleading full, and occasionally semi-retarded, ignorance usually worked well enough to short-cut the interrogation and if not, he could always whip up some quick tears. Hide was an absolute expert when it came to crocodile tears, had been since second grade, and the CCG was either morally opposed to crying or legitimately allergic to genuine emotion.

Weeks passed and Hide managed to slither out of most attempts to troll for information about Kaneki, but he didn't actually acquire much of his own either. Not knowing made him nervous and there were other things too. No one used Kaneki's name, stubbornly referring to him as "the creature" or "the Eyepatch" instead of talking about his friend like a real person. There were the hushed conversations just beyond his door, the ever present cameras and countless areas of the so called "hospital" plastered with warning signs too effusive and infinitely too vague to represent something normal. Late at night, when the low grade white noise from the servers was silenced as the vast computers restarted, he occasionally heard screaming. The sound was always faint, almost faint enough to ignore and sleep through, almost.

Even if Hide was a very naïve person, which he wasn't, that would have been more than enough to raise his anxiety. Bad things were happening. Bad things were being done to one of the few people he truly cared about and who cared about him and all of it was his fault. If he hadn't gotten hurt, or just properly died in the first place, none of this would be happening to Kaneki and even if things weren't perfect, at least his friend would still be free. Despite what he knew the ghoul would say, what Kaneki always said, the truth was just the truth. His best friend was suffering because of his own weakness and that was unacceptable.

So Hide lied, and cried, and memorized the movements of his guards and the trash disposal and the timer on the cameras and a hundred other things that may or may not be useful. He put every ounce of energy his ravaged body could muster into his physical therapy until he was able to move on his own without pulling the staples or losing consciousness. Once the surgical closure was removed, he added additional pushups, excruciatingly painful sit-ups and squats any time he could get away with it unobserved. Hide befriended any and every warm body that came into his space and eventually built enough rapport to get his phone and other electronics back. He prepared as quietly and cheerfully as possible, and waited for a chance to rescue Kaneki.

So, when Akira came to inform him that he would be granted a brief opportunity to see Kaneki, to verify that he was both alive and healthy as she'd said, Hide already had some things prepared. The primary key to a successful escape would be to give Kaneki some way to get out of whatever solitary confinement cubicle they were keeping him. The second part would be to somehow ensure that he was well fed enough to fight like hell. The second problem was both considerably easier to figure out and infinitely more terrifying than the first, so Hide decided to start small: he would smuggle something in. He debated between the Bluetooth earbud, neatly wrapped with a wireless charger, the miniature switchblade still sewn into the sleeve of his old pants or a few grams of plastic explosive paste pilfered from the supply room when everyone thought he was sleeping. Both the switchblade and the explosive might hurt Kaneki if his plan went sideways, so the little communication device would just have to do. Besides, if they could talk, everything else would be much easier. Used judiciously, the earbud would work like a phone for up to eighty hours, even without a fresh charge. Eighty hours was a lot of time.

So Hide smiled with completely sincere relief at the news, thanked Akira and Amon profusely for both their kindness and their humanism and then spent the next week feverishly practicing the tricky maneuver of palming the device from his pants to his hand to his wrist to his mouth and back. Magic was never more than a passing interest, but he knew enough about sleight of hand to make each transition almost invisible. The key was to keep the object moving, resisting the urge to hold it in any one spot, while incorporating other bland looking movements to cover his tracks.

Hide practiced the rhythm of shifting the package from one place to the next until he could do it in the dark and in the shower and with one hand tied to his belt. Electronics, even tough ones like the earbud, which he'd plucked from some hapless underling's collar several weeks ago, would be easily damaged by dampness or electricity. He double wrapped the device in an unlubricated condom, something else lifted from an unsuspecting pocket, and a bit of saran wrap for good measure. He felt the weight of it against his belly walking through the corridor, tucked neatly into the band of his underwear, but kept his hands plenty visible until they reached the final room. Akira smiled at him in the odd, plastic kind of way she had when forced to perform a duty she found distasteful. Amon, of course, hovered beside her, huge, dark and intimidating as an idling tank.

"Just remember to keep 3 meters of distance. It might look like your friend, but the Eyepatch has a long history of aggressive behavior and ghouls don't…eh…do well in captivity." Akira said, sniffing in evident irritation.

"You betcha!" Hide said, beaming like an idiot and using the opportunity to thrust his hands into his pockets.

He snatched the package between two fingers, folding it into the crease to be flush with the back of his hand. He would only be able to hold it there for a few seconds, but that would be plenty of time.

"Hands up. One last check, okay?" Amon said, stepping forward.

"Sure." Hide replied, producing both hands in a flourish, palms up with the package snuggly out of sight against the back.

"Now the back." Amon sighed, sounding bored.

"Right, 'Kay…" Hide replied, slipping it back to his palm.

"Arms up."

Hide nodded, smoothly transferring the package to his mouth, tucking it under his tongue. Amon patted him down, checking the waistband where the little device had been held only a moment before. The check took longer than Hide would have liked and he whistled around the package to ease his nerves, which was much harder than he had initially thought, but produced the desired effect of setting his captors at ease and providing a subtle distraction. Not to mention that since he was whistling, no one bothered to check his mouth.

"Fine. Okay. You can go in now. Just for a few minutes." Akira said, tapping her earpiece and nodding to some unseen operative.

Hide nodded and rubbed his hands together, suddenly even more nervous and allowing the emotion to show for the first time. Amon smiled a little, just a twitch of his lips, the expression probably what passed for sympathy. The outer door slid open without a sound, revealing another door, this one considerably heavier. He would only have one chance at this, just one, and if he failed, they would probably both be killed.

OoOoOoO

Kaneki knew something was happening. The change was palpable, more than obvious in the absence of any electricity for almost a week and in the absolute and unrelenting silence from the intercom. Despite his occasional, and always polite, questions, the voice on the other side of the whiteness was stubbornly silent. He cocked his head, chewing lightly on a fingernail, and resisted the urge to crack his knuckles. His rationed meals increased a bit in size and became more regular, the lights were turned off for 10 hours every day to provide some semblance of regular day and night cycling. He was grateful for the change, but not quite naive enough to think that the small comforts signified any degree of compassion from his captors. Once, he would have thought so, or hoped so, or at least hoped to think so. Now, he observed the increased regularity of the lights and the food and recognized the situation for what it was: a very rigidly controlled environment to support an experiment. Either he had finally truly incensed the primary researcher or interrogator or whatever or the man had been replaced. Kaneki thought the later infinitely more likely given such an abrupt change in his treatment.

Some days he wanted to pace, but resisted the urge, funneling the energy instead into his increasingly rigorous exercise regimen. More food meant more energy. More energy could be used to build more muscle. More muscle meant greater strength, higher endurance and a higher likelihood of being able to protect Hide and the others if he was ever given the chance. Besides, pacing would be a blatant indication to his captors that he understood what they were doing, or thought he did, and that their actions were having an effect on him. His sanity was suffering, Yamori was the first to tell him so and he would know, both he and Rize were practically experts on the subject and they would certainly know. The voices in his head, who had something like hatred for each other, agreed at least on this one point, that the careful fortress protecting his mind was beginning to crack.

Mostly, the damage was coming from uncertainty, from not knowing what the change might mean or how to react. The rest was from trying not to react and perhaps a bit from reacting anyway, Kaneki wasn't sure, he tried not to think about it. Without the voice on the other side of the whiteness, there was nothing to interact with, no nidus upon which to impose a goal. He began counting, backwards from 1000 by 7, the exercise as deeply ingrained into his psyche as the hunger for human flesh was into his body. The numbers were cut in to his desperate brain, over and over, until the scars had scars and they had scars even though he knew that he actually had no scars, none at all really, not on the outside. He wished that he did, that his stubbornly smooth flesh would open and bleed and pucker and scar and that the destruction could have some kind of substantiation. Kaneki thought he was beginning to understand why Yamori killed and tortured and killed again and again and again like some kind of compulsive disease and it wasn't the reason he had presumed before. He thought that the pain and death was a kind of revenge, but maybe it was just a vain attempt to make the outside more like the inside and gain a bit of harmony between the two. The realization was frightening and when he pulled the curtain closed on the notion, tried to ignore the blossoming logic, the fabric was painfully thin. He wanted to scream and didn't. Not today, if it was really daytime, or not tonight or not, not for a while yet, because he still had time. He knew how to endure and they were just beginning to tap his resiliency, beginning, only a scratch so far.

He replayed memories and felt comforted for a while, a long while, maybe even days or minutes or whatever came first. The increased food was having an unfortunate side effect as well, because with more energy his mind moved faster and with better clarity and the crushing boredom was worse. Kaneki resisted the urge to mark days with the periods of light or darkness and instead counted the fibers in the blanket on the platform that was a bed, a chair, a table and occasionally a makeshift operating theater in a pinch if needed. He wrote Chinese characters and sentences in English on the walls and the floor with the condensation from his breath and a careful fingertip and tried to remember passages from books and quote them by heart. He thought of Hide and worked through various scenarios in his mind, building mazes to solve. Of course, as Rize often reminded him, Hide was probably dead. Maybe they both were. He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure he cared. Either way he would get to see his best, his childhood friend again and the notion was more comforting than anything he had come up with for many, many, many heartbeats.

The food increased a little more and Kaneki wondered if they thought he wouldn't notice, or maybe hoped that he wouldn't, or that he would, or maybe the gesture was less important than he thought and simply the product of a need for greater efficiency. Maybe one of the other ghouls died and they thought the extra meat should go somewhere, waste not, want not and all. Rize certainly agreed with the sentiment even if the binge-eating she-devil couldn't be bothered to care about anything else, certainly not who the meat had been or why they had died or if, after all, the body was someone he knew. The thought caught in him a bit, tangled like a rose thorn in a woolen coat, sticking and poking and digging in until it was making him bleed. What if the body was a classmate? What if it was one of his teachers? What if the meat he devoured each and every day in a vain attempt to retain some degree of fighting strength was actually someone he loved? What if it was Hide, and even more frightening, what if he never even knew? Kaneki couldn't decide what would be worse, if the sheer horrific, grotesquery of eating his dearest friend would be worse than Hide simply dying and having his body be thrown into the garbage somewhere. There was a very high chance that he would never know, that he would die here and Hide would live or not live, eaten or not eaten, without anything to indicate one eventuality or the other.

Kaneki thought the thought, over and over and over, until all the color seemed washed out of the idea leaving only the bare, pencil precise outline behind as a kind of formula. He played every scenario, absorbed the pain, watched and studied every sickening detail until it felt almost numb. There was clarity at the end, at the conclusion of every if-then pathway, a kind of relief from the anxiety. If Hide was dead, he would see him when he died too, and that was okay, in the end it was okay, everything would be okay. No matter what death was like, if Hide was there it would be better than this. If Hide lived and Kaneki died, then at least Hide lived awhile longer and maybe could be happy and that was soothing too, the endpoint in stark focus. If the CCG had already killed Hide, killed Hide and fed him to Kaneki as a last sadistic gesture, well, at least maybe in the end it was something like touching, a last connection, an ugly, awful, ugly, ugly substitute for an embrace, but better than nothing at all. Better than if they threw him away. Better than if they fed him to someone else, someone who wouldn't know, wouldn't appreciate, wouldn't ponder and agonize and suffer over every bite like it was made of his own miserable, bleeding heart. Either way, if Hide was dead, there was mercy because then he wouldn't have to watch what Kaneki was going to do to these people when the time finally came.

So Kaneki came to the end of his meditations and counted the fibers on his blanket and then named them and then gave them surnames too, it was only fitting. He did pushups. He did sit-ups. He did every exercise he had ever learned or read about and a few that he made up trying to combine other things. He broke the bones in his index finger and watched as the digit healed, straightened, the livid bruises clearing, all within one hundred and ninety four heartbeats. A kind of peace descended into his mind, a state of emptiness, maybe it was enlightenment or perhaps just apathy, Kaneki was not sure which. He had a plan. He had three thousand four hundred and eighty two plans and the only thing stopping him from initiating any one of them was the last shred of hope that Hide might still be alive, so the answer was to wait and in the end he found that he could. Maybe he could even wait a very long time, maybe even years, or minutes, or heartbeats, whatever came first.

Then, quite unexpectedly, during a cycle of lighting he had come to think of as "day" despite the psychological surrender such a thing implied, a door opened from one of his favorite seams in the wall and Hide walked into the whiteness. There was no alarm, no blinking red lights or escaping steam to indicate that yes, indeed, someone was walking into the room for the first time since the abandoned attempts at torture. No announcement over the intercom, or threats or even the tapping on the wall that occasionally accompanied his meals. Just a wall becoming a door with the scintillating whisper of pressurized air and Hide stepping casually into the room the same way he would on any other day.

Kaneki saw him, the same badly dyed blondish hair and dazzlingly easy smile, the harsh lights catching every freckle, brown eyes as warm and rich as a cup of fresh coffee poured carefully by the hand of someone both familiar and adored. Oh, and the memory of that last cup of coffee, sipped like a shred of salvation in a quiet, comfortable café while shells exploded outside. It was almost over-powering. The tears gathered in his eyes, but wouldn't fall. Kaneki was holding too still, vision swimming, but without the last, minute facial contraction needed to spill the water down his cheeks.

Hide was alive and here, here with him, and not even some kind of hallucination because the badly died blondish hair was quite a bit longer too, brushing well past his shoulders to hang in soft waves against a chest that was thicker with muscle than he remembered. Hide didn't look like a paper cutout from one of his memories or even a bloody cadaver from one of his nightmares, no, he just looked like…Hide. He looked perfectly Hide, smelled like Hide, moved like Hide. Perhaps he was a little more muscular, and a little paler too, and with a bit more steel in his eyes, but unmistakable all the same. Kaneki pulled in a breath, feeling his ribs stretch with the air, but forgot how to exhale.

Somehow, he really didn't know how, Hide was just as he should be: The same as he had been before, but with enough texture, enough growth and change and beautiful inconstancy to be real. Face open and yet furtive, eyes filled with everything, Hide looked as comfortable in his bland, dove gray hospital clothes as he did in his favorite pair of jeans. The smile, like a lady's fan, hiding and revealing at the same time, was even more infectious in reality than it was in his dreams. All of it was normal somehow, miraculously untarnished by the clean, white ghastliness surrounding them both. Hide was immune to it, unvanquished by the sterile prison, alive when Kaneki had forced himself to believe with almost every thought that he must be dead.

Kaneki had been doing reverse crunches with his ankles hooked into the edge of the platform for support, and now he just hung there, suspended half-way between one movement and another. The ghoul was frozen, transfixed, with his back hovering above the ground and the momentum of the exercise still thrumming through his body. His abdomen was quivering with the strain, sweat dripping like acid down his face and the whole position had to look weird, but moving felt almost dangerous, as if everything might shatter and fall apart. As if the very moment, this moment, the moment he spent almost every other moment thinking about might be too fragile to sustain anything else happening and he knew it was real, but felt afraid anyway.

He waited another breath; not his own, but one of Hide's. He still hadn't quite remembered how to breathe, and his own heartbeats were too fast to be reliable. Kaneki finally released the air as he levered into what was almost a seated position, body moving too slowly. Hide chuckled softly as he scuttled onto the platform and the sound was so sudden and wonderful after all the silence that Kaneki thought he might cry. He tried to smile instead and ended up with more of a spastic twitch of his face, but his childhood friend didn't seem to mind. Hide never minded, not even that he was a ghoul, not even that he had to eat people to survive. Kaneki realized he had never actually told him what that meant, how precious it was to have such acceptance. He never really had the chance, everything happened too fast, but Kaneki knew should have. He should have at least taken the time to say thank you, to say something about the way Hide made everything easy, comfortable and normal no matter what was happening.

He was a bad friend. Rize thought so too, but at least on this topic, Kaneki didn't put too much weight on her judgement. She was occasionally quite wise, but both Rize and Yamori were monsters, the worst kind of monsters, the only kind of living, sentient, being he felt a little bit good about eating. Hide took a few more steps, whistling softly as his gaze roved over the whiteness, taking in the nothing that it was while still keeping eye contact. Kaneki stood, suddenly very much aware that his face was covered in sweat from the exercise he'd been doing. He tried to move, to say something, but only his lips moved. Even then, he wasn't quite sure if the motion actually managed to move out into his flesh or if the only part that happened was just the intention in his brain. Kaneki wanted to laugh or maybe scream or maybe nothing, maybe just breathe and bask in the smell of another person, quite possibly his favorite person, after so many heartbeats of scent blindness. He almost managed it too and then Hide's face crumpled from the brave, amazingly brave, perfect, fucking necessary, smile that was more like deliverance than a facial expression had any reason to be and he was struck dumb all over again.

"Hide…" Kaneki managed, voice dry and far too soft.

The word, the name, was barely thrust into the air before Hide was against him, arms wrapped around his shoulders with so much strength that he almost couldn't feel him trembling. Kaneki gasped, surprised, trying to react, lips parting to speak, but the words were lost as Hide's mouth pressed to his own with a desperate kind of insistence. There was something almost like force behind the touch, but without the taint of violence or cruelty. Stubbornness, yes, perhaps stubbornness was a better word. After all, the press of Hide's body was still innocent, frantic and obviously purposeful even though they were kissing, kissing, actually kissing! God!

Mouths angled together like people do in the movies or the way couples sometimes will if they don't care who is watching and Kaneki had never actually done this with anyone before, but he was glad. No one would be better than Hide. His first kiss and it felt so tender. More real than he thought it would be, more intense, more exciting. A kiss stolen in hell, and it was with Hide, and it was beyond anything he had ever known.

Wet heat, spread like melted honey over his mouth, or maybe more like fresh blood, which was actually even better, but not as good as this, Kaneki had never had anything as good as Hide's mouth against his own. The touch of his lips, smooth, dry and so, so, so terribly warm was overwhelming, but stimulating too, stirring like an excellent book or a piece of poetry or a ray of pure evening sunshine piercing through the clouds. His heart was racing and his belly melting, knees almost weak with the searing heat the touch sparked in his numbed and forgotten flesh. Hide's lips were muscular, but somehow still soft, like a silk glove fitted over a swordsman's hand, like nothing he had ever felt or read about or even imagined before. Not the way anyone had ever said a kiss could be. Hide's lips moved, speaking, but without sound, trying to convey something even as Kaneki stood there like a piece of stone in a tsunami, motionless and almost unimportant in the storm of emotion. He wanted to pay attention. He wanted to respond, but he was too consumed by the sensation, because touch was only one facet, one piece, one tiny component of the experience and there was more, so much more than something as simple as touch.

The heat, the softness, the aching strength of such profound intimacy after weeks of isolation and it was nothing compared to the taste of the kiss and the smell of Hide's body. Hide always smelled good, more since he became a ghoul, but nothing out of the norm. A heightened sense of smell was expected, usually more of a problem than not, and most humans smelled sort of appetizing to some degree. This however…this was totally different and what he smelled before was barely an echo in comparison. Rolling waves of something aromatic and rich, luscious and yet familiar. It was a taste like sesame, but warm and reminiscent of cinnamon, sweet enough to resemble a confection, but sharper, finished with a hint of sandalwood musk. A tantalizing and complicated smell, familiar yet unique, more like perfume than food.

Whatever it was, he wanted to be drenched in it, bathe in it, drown in it if need be, anything to keep drinking it in. His lips parted for his friend's questing tongue, wordless surrender as easy as falling through the air, and the taste intensified. Kaneki couldn't resist him. Not that he would resist, not even this, which was so much, so much, more than he could process and god, how had he never noticed how strong Hide's mouth was, how decadent, how utterly maddening? Before he could even think enough to be embarrassed, Kaneki was moaning a little. The sound began more like a whimper and suddenly grew into a snarl, fierce, deep and much too loud. Hide's tongue surged against his own, slick, velvet muscle pulsing into his mouth and stroking, deliberately, and passing an object.

The logical part of his mind recognized that something important was happening. He knew immediately that the kiss was a ploy, a cover used to pass him something without being observed by the ever-present eyes of their captors. He knew that Hide was using the opportunity as best he could. Whatever the slippery little cylinder sliding against his tongue was, it might mean the difference between a slow death and freedom. As soon as he felt the package slip into his mouth, Kaneki swallowed it. He trusted Hide. Kaneki would carefully, quietly, regurgitate it later when there was less chance they would be watching and see what his friend had brought him. For now though, the cool logic that the luscious caress was merely a well-timed diversion, remained a whisper in the cacophony of his thoughts. A molten ache was building low in his belly, and the heat of it combined with the taste of Hide's mouth eclipsed everything else.

The kiss was a maneuver, a strategy, a well thought out trick and nothing more, and he knew that too, but he was also very much aware that he couldn't stop. He couldn't stop holding him, kissing him, tasting him. Ah! The cinnamon was stronger than before, warm on his palate where the succulence of sesame still lingered. Kaneki licked at his lips, chasing the flavor, shivering at the delicacy of the flesh against his tongue. The skin there was so thin, thin enough that he could almost feel the pulsing of the blood underneath, the firm thrill of the life that was his most cherished companion. With a hungry sigh, Kaneki sucked Hide's lip into his mouth. The taste of Hide, the feel of his arms and his skin and of his heart thundering against Kaneki's chest was too sensuous, too luscious and too encompassing to escape. Any thought of stopping, of playing along, of regaining enough space to think rationally and make a plan was incinerated in the mounting roar of the fire coursing through his blood.

Kaneki felt the forgotten flesh of his penis rising between his thighs, painfully aroused, aching the way it had only a few other times in his life. The faint realization that under any other circumstances he would have been mortified, that their friendship might be damaged, that Hide probably didn't even want to kiss him sifted like a vapor through his overheated brain and was consumed in the heat. As Hide pulled back for a breath, Kaneki already knew that it was too late. He needed him. He needed this. He needed more.

OoOoOoO

"I'm…I'm so sorry…Kaneki, I…" Hide began, voice quaking and breathless.

In the space of less than a moment, the pause between heartbeats, there was a thunderclap of movement. The motion was too abrupt to perceive. Hide was suddenly against the wall, the wind knocked from his lungs and his childhood friend's lips pressed desperately against his mouth once again. His body trembled, the shock of the ghoul's inhuman speed still rippling through his flesh. His lungs burned, trying to recapture the stolen air, and Hide was left gasping helplessly in Kaneki's arms like a fish pulled from the water. The sudden and uncomfortable knowledge that his skull had been shielded from the momentum only by the granite cradle of Kaneki's fingers was a dim echo in the mounting roar of feeling, of Kaneki's mouth on his mouth, Kaneki's tongue against his tongue.

The ghoul moved, pressing Hide's shuddering lips farther open with his jaw, tongue mapping his palate with tingling strokes. The sensation was so different from before. The embrace was suddenly filled with deafening emotion instead of simply surprise and a heady kind of relief, the same feeling as drinking water after days of being thirsty or seeing the sun after weeks of storms. Hide knew in some small, marginally sane part of his mind that this was not a kiss of obligation, of necessity, and not something that could be conveniently excused or forgotten for the sake of appearances. Kaneki's mouth was demanding a response, a reaction, something more difficult and profound than unseen contraband passed surreptitiously from the outside. No. The roaring inferno he felt surging against him like a boiling tide was real, true, passion…sexual passion.

Hide wasn't a virgin. He knew what desire felt like, what the glowing need in his friend's eyes meant, but the intensity was startling all the same. Kaneki liked girls or, more accurately, he liked girls in books. He was an introvert, a pragmatist, practically a fucking ascetic most of the time and not the kind of person anyone would ever imagine as seductive. Yet, the way he was moving was too overwhelming, sensual and fast, like a woman pulling off satin gloves or a serpent gliding through warm water. He kissed like he fought, gracefully and without any hesitation, not like anyone Hide had ever kissed before and the experience was shockingly arousing. Here in his arms, in the jaws of a predator, Hide felt a thrill of heat far beyond anything kindled by his prior dalliances and maybe it was because Kaneki was not a girl or because of the sheer magnetism of his body or simply because the arousal was sharpened with fear.

Kaneki pressed him to the wall with the force of a locomotive, cupping his skull the way a king might a crystal goblet, demanding a kind of submission Hide was not entirely sure he could give. Despite the days in confinement and the lingering shadows like bruises under his eyes, his childhood friend was startlingly beautiful. The snow-white hair, as soft as a rabbit's pelt drifted against his fingers, moving in a scintillating gale over mismatched eyes. One eye was the one he knew, the human eye, a familiar pastel-kind of slate for the iris, a black so mild it was almost gray, like rain washed slate or frosted coal, with the crisp white peeking at the edges. It was familiar, expressive and just as he remembered, but the other eye, the glaring ember of a lurid ruby set upon a black sclera as smooth and reflective as obsidian, was strangely aesthetic too. A storm of feeling raged in those eyes, the emotion just a little different in each and yet unmistakably Kaneki.

He blushed darkly as the sinuous creature who had once been his shy, awkward friend mapped his mouth with his tongue, nipping almost aggressively at his lips, sliding one of his cool hands under his shirt. No one had ever kissed him the way Kaneki Ken, another boy, no, a man and a ghoul was kissing him right now. Hide couldn't resist him, opening his mouth, sucking his tongue, obeying the unspoken command for more, more obedience. A finger tipped with an ebony nail brushed his nipple, soft as an autumn wind, curious, but very much aware what such a caress would mean. Hide startled, gasping, but the motion was stifled in his friend's arms. He was caught, held fast in the embrace, ensnared. Moving against Kaneki was like moving against a mountain, the strength flowing through each limb like tension through the steel cables of bridge. The ghoul had one hand cupped over his skull and the other against his chest and the other…Hide frowned. He felt something against his wrist, brushing the skin almost like a finger, close enough that for a moment he thought it was. The touch, always brief, was bath-warm, almost like feverish skin, but soft as the downy top of a dandelion.

He glanced up, looking at where the blood-red and sparkling mauve appendage of Kaneki's Kagune tentatively stroked his wrist, weaving almost indecisively. Hide's eyes widened and for a moment he tensed with alarm. On an intellectual level he knew that Kaneki would have one. Any idiot knew that all ghouls had a predatory organ, the kagune, but seeing it up close while his friend was busy trying to lick every corner inside of his mouth was another matter entirely. Hide sucked in a breath. In a heartbeat, the kagune shifted, solidified, forming a keen edge that looked exceedingly sharp. Knowing that they were already moving into uncertain territory, knowing that in another breath they might both come back to reality didn't change anything. Hide still opened his hand, reached across the centimeter of empty air, and stroked a finger along the broad edge of the kagune's blade. The feel of it was so smooth, almost slick, morphing under his very touch into a more gentle configuration and then Kaneki was moaning, the sound almost tortured with pleasure.

Hide barely had time to wonder. The kagune surged around his wrist and Kaneki's tongue was once against pouring like magma into his mouth, lapping, stroking, sending electrical arcs of pure ecstasy skittering through his jaw. The embrace was as firm and unrelenting as a cobra's coils and Hide knew somewhere in the dark, instinctual part of himself that he should be frightened. Any other person, any rational person, would have been terrified with a ghoul so close, kissing like the next motion could be a bite, but Hide felt the restraint in Kaneki's body too. No matter the situation, no matter how far they went or how fucked up things were, he knew he was safe. With the same deep trust that he knew the sun would rise, Hide knew that Kaneki Ken, the Eyepatch Ghoul, would never hurt him.