The event was in Akane's files, but it was brief and detached as any report was meant to be. It mentioned the times that the CCG had come into rescue the child, the number of casualties, the type of ghoul, but not the details that happened in between the indisputable facts. The remaining bits and pieces found themselves preserved in one single mind, perhaps the least reliable mind. That did not mean others did not suspect anything. But Arima was too busy wearing an unperturbed face while slaughtering ghouls to probe.
Silence was optimal, but as always, it was impossible. As a child, Akane kept to herself, absentmindedly drawing her pencil across her paper in long, deep lines that smudged when she pressed her finger against them, or carving away at a small piece of wood. Arts and crafts consumed her boredom. She asked for little else.
She deconstructed her narrow confines of silence, a mind barrier that restrained her in a wave of lethargy. There was no real reason or catalyst. Perhaps the soft but repetitive sound of carving wood sculptures was soothing. The blade was rusted and browned, but it did not chip. As she carved a shape, her dexterous hands positioned the wood at an angle. She pressed down, increasing her strength when the knife would not go through.
Up until this time, Akane was always conscious of her abnormal fascination with pain. She had developed a deep loathing towards romanticized stories, real or fake, about those who risked torture and pain for a morally greater task. Logically, she had conjectured, many more people would succumb to torture. She had not found this human tendency despicable, which was why she had tried to embrace it. If a knife were carved into her stomach, she would surrender easily—so she had thought.
Akane wasn't one to smooth over the facets of humanity; she preferred to shake out the depravity with her own two hands and watch it squirm on the ground.
Her parents were ghoul investigators who reeked of an upstanding, hypocritical morality. They killed ghouls. They went up in rank. They killed more ghouls. They further advanced in rank. At the time, although Akane was unaware of the particular hierarchy of ranks, she certainly knew that her parents were senior investigators.
But in that very moment as she sat in the living room and continued to peel away at the wood in her hands, absentmindedly keeping count of the splinters that entered her fingers; Akane's parents were merely a dutiful mother and father cooking in a kitchen with a vindictive and determined rinkaku type ghoul on their trail.
When her exacto knife skidded across the surface of the wood and sliced gently across her skin, she mused how little it hurt. Self-inflicted wounds had always been foreign to her and pain an distant ideal. She almost laughed.
The main door of her house crashed open. The first thing she saw was an enormous, charred red, tentacle-like kagune spear through the large distance from the destroyed door to her stomach.
Akane coughed, letting blood dribble down her chin. "It," she coughed out, "—hurts." And indeed she found that her sensation of pain met an extreme that far exceeded that of a knife slicing her palm. But the strongest impact of pain only met her nerves for a moment before it subsided into a dull fascination.
"Akane!" her mother screamed at the noise. Reaching for her quinque, she snapped open the briefcase and released a bikaku made quinque, tearing the tentacle away from her daughter.
The ghoul itself was a tall man whose face was twisted far too much to decipher his age. He cackled, "Didn't know there was a miniature one of you."
The ghoul launched himself into the room using his rinkaku like springs. The tentacles rampaged around the room, cracking window glass and smashing furniture. "I've come to eat back every single limb that you cut from this body!"
Akane's father bent down to hold her still from swaying. Had she been swaying? "Akane, I know it hurts, but you need to run. Run out through the back window. You won't need to endure it for too long, the CCG should be on their way," he told her quickly. "Mommy and daddy will take care of things here."
Akane stumbled at first, gaining her balance while watching her father attack the ghoul with his own quinque. She held her arm tightly across her stomach as the blood seeped through her fingers. She ran.
Beyond the uneven sound of her footsteps, the splashing of blood that hit the hardwood, the female and male screams that broke through the air, Akane found the smooth, low laughter of the ghoul to stand out from the rest, like the spider lily among carnations. She gripped the edge of the window, attempting to lift it up above her shoulders with a single hand as the other contained her bloodied torso.
"Why in such a hurry?" a voice echoed down the hall. "I hope you weren't thinking about leaving your parents here." Before Akane saw the distorted face, she saw the rinkaku, more reminiscent of a red spider lily's petals than ever. It wrapped around her neck and dragged her back to the destroyed kitchen painted in splotches of red.
The first thing she noticed was that her unfinished wood sculpture still stood on the table dutifully next to her exacto knife. Her eye then fell to the two bodies strewn across the ground in pieces. An arm with a small studded diamond wedding ring was located uncomfortably close below her as she was held in the air.
"Well, what do you think of my decorations?" the ghoul said eying an unrecognizable face that adorned a head nearly detached from the rest of the body. "Not unlike what they did to my friends and me. It's almost a shame that I have to eat this masterpiece. This sweet vengeance." He licked his lips as she struggled to breathe.
Akane wondered if this was what death would feel like: a slow, unnoticed struggle that ended silently to a ghoul's psychotic monologue. The kagune against her skin seemed to burn. "You are," she coughed, "hungry?"
The ghoul flung her to the side as her back crashed into a broken table, tearing at her clothes. He eyes filled with amusement, "Hungry? I don't have to be hungry to eat humans."
The ghoul's statement catalyzed a chain of questions Akane's brain. "For fun?" she whispered, to weak from blood loss to raise her voice.
"For something far more than fun. For pain, torture, and revenge for the ghoul lives your parents ruined with their masks of justice," he replied. "There would be nothing more pleasing than to see the spawn of those investigators break their disgusting ideals."
He picked up the arm, letting the wedding ring slip off, and tore off the index finger with his teeth, chewing conspicuously. When Akane heard the crack and crunch of the bone, she failed to hold in a grimace. The ghoul looked up, grinning with the self-satisfaction that can only come from creative accomplishment. He tossed the remaining part of the arm to her.
"I bet your parents would be ecstatic to see their precious child, the one they raised under their moral, upright ideals," he paused for effect and chewed on the moist flesh, letting the muscle and his saliva drip down the corner of his mouth. "—act like a lowly ghoul. But wait, it'd be even better! Because it wouldn't be just anyone. No, it'd have to be the human child eating its human parents." He laughed, descending deeper and deeper into lunacy that Akane imagined had once been rooted in logic (at least, enough logic to desire revenge).
The rinkaku was positioned close to her neck threateningly. While Akane had no intention in indulging the crazy ghoul's sadistic impulses, she could not help but question his assumption. Was being a human cannibal so bad? Didn't praying mantises devour their mates and hamster mothers eat their young?
A siren sounded and Akane deduced that the CCG was outside of her house. She could probably wait it out and focus the ghoul's attention on a petty conversation about his revenge. But the curiosity and urge within her were becoming tumors, determined to take over her body's functions. She heard footsteps nearing the porch.
She snatched the arm and sank her small teeth into it. The flesh was surprisingly tough but still warm. It tasted revolting, as any raw, uncleaned meat would. But it certainly didn't feel emotionally evocative and if she were a ghoul, it would definitely taste better.
The ghoul's eyes widened slightly, his laughing smile on his face frozen like a portrait, "You. You actually ate…? Don't you care about your family?"
She tossed her head back and coughed again. Eating with an impaled stomach didn't suit her at all. And yet, she wanted to eat. Because she wasn't the heroic CCG investigator, or the crazed and evil ghoul, or even the human martyr who died as a ghoul's meal. She was just a human girl—a cannibalistic parasite, painlessly leeching on other's blood and her own life.
"This is the CCG. Surrender now or we cannot promise a swift death!"
However deep down, as an overly enthusiastic investigator with one over-sized, bulging eye and a hunched back swept in with a quinque, promptly impaling the ghoul, she knew that he had come a second later than necessary to save her had she not eaten the flesh. She'd be the bloodied corpse who refused to eat human (it would make an amusing epitaph though).
It was hardly a conflict of values. Survival versus an act of eating something unpleasant. Quenching curiosity versus upholding some set of socially imposed morals where society was nowhere to judge.
Indeed, she found it very necessary to remind herself that she was a coward.