As her eyes fell on him, glimpsing a mop of white hair through the filthy window of the small café, she froze, almost dropping the tottering tray of tableware she had precariously stacked in her arms. She would have rubbed at her eyes with her hands had they been free, brain refusing to process the impossible image of the boy on the street, walking by casually.
When the doorbell of the café rang with a pleasant tingle, she remained facing the window, not looking at the door. There was a long silence, and it seemed to Touka Kirishima that the world had frozen, the din of the customers muffled. Then, through the ringing mutedness, cut a boy's voice.
After all the deaths, everything they had been through, the pain, the suffering, his voice had not changed one bit.
"Touka-chan?"
She sneaked a look over her shoulder, determinedly keeping her head turned toward the window, and saw the boy standing timidly in the doorway of the small coffee shop, eyes downcast.
The image of a blackhaired boy with a surgical eyepatch, smiling mildy and scratching the back of his head, seemed to shimmer like a mirage beside Kaneki Ken. Yet as she whipped her head around, almost dropping the pile of cutlery in the process, the smiling boy flickered and vanished.
The whitehaired boy lifted his head, and Touka's eyes slid over him, took in his stange assortment of clothes, those customary amongst the people who have been isolated for so long that they've forgotten how to dress, how to act around other living things.
She had put off eyecontact as long as possible, but when their gazes met she felt hers contract in hurt, a sharp memory of all the agonizing hurt she had felt when he was gone.
Because those eyes, more than anything else, showed the passage of time, and the toll experience, violence and the will to protect one's near ones had taken on an innocent boy, trying to belong in two worlds at once.
They were flecked with red, and seemed to echo aeons of loss, weariness, and pain.
Touka remembered all the times she had ached to leave the café and find him, to see him, to find any sliver of the old Kaneki still inside him.
She set the cups and plates down gently on a nearby table, narrowly avoiding disturbing an old man napping in his wheelchair as she did so. Then she walked toward the door, and turned down the corridor running perpendicular to it, all the time staring blankly ahead, eyes dull and not seeing.
She almost bowled Yomo over in the hallway. Mumbling about a customer in the doorway, she climbed the stairs two at a time, reaching the second floor of the building, where she had taken up temporary residence. Entering her small room, and locking the door behind her, she lay down on her bed, fingers absentmindedly stroking the rabbit trinket that still hung on her phone, a relic of the past, now.
A mixed storm of emotion was raging inside the female ghoul, and she wondered whether she was going to cry.
…
"Can I come in?"
"Yes."
Touka sat up abruptly, smoothing down her hair and the front of her skirt. Her eyes were dry, weary from their inherent staring at the wall and she struggled with her feelings.
The door opened with a soft creak, and a serious-looking Yomo stuck his head inside.
"You could have said the customer in question was the long-lost Kaneki, Touka."
She ignored his comment.
Yomo sighed, and leaned against the doorway.
"He didn't even recognize me at first, you know. And even when I told him it was me, he just grunted a bit. I think he wants to see you, so I sat him down in the common room."
Touka's heart skipped a beat, and yet she struggled to appear calm.
"Did he say what he wants, or how he found us?"
"As for the latter, I have no idea, although he probably has his ways. The only reason he gave me for coming here was that he felt that he couldn't do it anymore."
A small crease formed between his eyebrows.
"Go talk to him, Touka."
"I don't want to."
"Do you want me to force you?"
"Bring it. We haven't sparred in a while, anyway."
The bearded ghoul sighed once more, before opening the door wider and beckoning towards the hall beyond.
"Just go."
She rose quietly, slipping past the fellow shopkeeper without another word. Striding down the hall, she stopped at a door not far from hers. She could faintly smell Kaneki´s scent from the other side.
She wondered briefly if it was one she would have recognized, had she not known who it belonged to.
Touka raised a hand and knocked on the door.