Let's Binge Again
Amon continued to sweat while he checked the eyes of the girl in front of him. They hadn't shifted at all.
He wondered if she heard the bending of the post behind him. How could she not have? Somewhere, in an adjacent room, Tomoe was probably cursing at him for blowing their cover.
"My, the big boy's that eager, eh?"
The young woman dressed in leather that bounced off the wooden door frame behind her seemed to blend in perfectly with the case file pictures of the Nutcracker in his mind. That was just the problem.
He was neither sure that this was the Nutcracker, or that it wasn't. Perhaps his age was wearing on him, or so it felt.
"Would you mind introducing yourself?" he asked.
Maybe she'd give herself away in overconfidence.
"Well, maybe I'll tell you at the end of our little dance," she replied.
No such luck.
The easiest way out of the situation would seemingly be to simply pull the post out of the ground and study her reaction. But, upon more careful assessment, both the Nutcracker and a normal prostitute, ghoul or human, would run away. He wouldn't gain any sort of advantage from that, and in the time he wasted chasing down a potential human, Tomoe would be in some serious danger.
He'd have to talk his way out of this.
"I prefer to know the names of the women I sleep with," he said.
"Oh I doubt that. You don't seem like that sort of pig," she said.
"Men with courtesy are pigs now, huh?" he asked.
He watched her unhook several leather belts from her shoulders just a few feet away from him. It must have been a pain to assemble all that together, just to take it off.
"No, men with courtesy are beautiful things I love. But this isn't a place full of courtesy, and certainly not love. I don't need men to feign interest in knowing who I am, nor do I really have any interest in knowing who they are," she said.
The twinge of nerve rammed into metal stopped, and sweat cooled under his chin. His body listened to both the microscopic bang of gold leather clips on the floor and her words.
"Inside this room, I would rather not live as myself. Walking in here is like inhaling and leaving is exhaling. You and I are the seconds in between. Men who don't respect that are pigs," she said.
"You read like poetry," he said.
"I imagine you don't read much," she replied.
"You seem to enjoy reading me," he said.
"You make it easy. And I quite like it," she quipped.
Strands of his hair floated down, in front of his eyes. He felt young, like the Amon who had yet to complete his academy training.
The room calmed his mind but twirled his soul back through time.
"You're assuming I don't like leather, I see," he said.
"No, that's not it at all, I just imagine this is going to be one long inhale," she replied.
Those words felt like I slap across the face from an incapacitated blonde woman lying in a hospital bed.
"You know I have a girlfriend," he said.
"No you don't," she replied, "and even if you did I don't think either of us would really care."
He boots clicked their way over to him.
He couldn't waste any more time, he knew that. Either his balls were about to be squashed, or Tomoe was about to be had in some other room.
But he sat still, the metal of his arm tied back to the post. He was letting the answer come to him.
A beeping noise that emanated from his metal arm both awoke him from his trance and startled the woman in front of him.
Touka heard Haise's voice run on from the moment she walked into the hotel, to her current position, tied to a bed post.
It was a slightly warming feeling, though, in the face of perhaps meeting the Nutcracker again.
She was an unreasonable woman, and it made Touka's stomach churn to think about having to use her words and not her strength to convince the Nutcracker that there was in fact a CCG investigator rooms way.
She wondered if she had all the words she needed for the situation. Her vocabulary felt underwhelming, lacking in sharpness and proper poignancy.
Maybe if she listened to Haise run on through her earpiece, she could find the words she needed. She found comfort in all the books he read, confident in his fingers running across the withered pages full of words she could use if he'd just say them.
When the door clicked open, she was relieved that a shorter, thicker woman than the Nutcracker walked in.
"You know, I think I've changed my…"
She was interrupted by several strips of duct tape that wound over her mouth.
The woman gave Touka a squeeze on the shoulder. There was pity in the blackness of her eyes, and a dampness that seemed to eminate off her cheeks.
The tape told Touka why the woman was crying, and normally, she would have been angry.
But all Touka could feel for the woman who pitied her was pity in return.
When the woman let go, she left, giving a final somber smile before closing the door.
Now she wished she had talked to Haise. He continued to ramble in her ear, about their time together, about all bad guys they'd catch in the future. Even a little about Akira, their boss. Why he brought that up, she didn't know.
He seemed incoherent, and it was quite sad to think that there was no way of him knowing she was actually staring a pretty likely death in the face.
She was RC inhibited, and the Nutcracker finding out she was quite the blue-balled individual, to the extreme, wasn't going to make for a pretty sight.
As she heard boots step in heavy rhythm outside her door, drawing closer, she found herself increasingly more pleased with the situation, though.
She'd rather he keep talking like this for as long as possible, before he heard the tussle. She liked listening to him this way, because he didn't sound worried at all; he felt calm.
That didn't make her fearless, but it made her fear less.
"Well, I've talked for quite a while. I imagine you're going to be wrapping up the mission soon, so I'll shut up now eh," he continued.
She smiled with the steps being just a few seconds away. She felt the charm on her wrist, and laughed a little. If she clicked it, Amon might save her, but, that would mean killing the Nutcracker. She'd be responsible.
She started to let go of the charm.
"Just make sure, well, that you'll kick my ass again, okay, Touka?" he asked.
Touka drifted into a coldness that erupted like a pit in her chest. Her soul was many things at once, a cold blackness, hot like a volcano, and empty like a pit. It was like ash, in fact.
She wanted desperately in that moment not to ask how, or why he had said Touka, and not Tomoe, but to simply speak. She wanted to speak to the boy with books, but her mouth was shut.
So she pressed her fingers, hard, into the button on the bunny charm bracelet. This way, Kaneki would stop talking, and Haise would come back. She couldn't listen to Kaneki talk if she couldn't reply back. It didn't feel natural.
"Tomoe? Tomoe? What's happening?!" he asked.
She tilted her head back, a painful reentry into normality.
More painful was the fact that it was not the Nutcracker who opened the door, but a rather bony young woman who couldn't make eye contact with her.
She was a ghoul that Touka knew. One who made Touka glad she pressed the button.
Amon dragged the pole behind him, and past the woman who stood shoulders shrugged. He couldn't look her in the eyes before he left; sure he wanted to save time, but, looking her in the eyes would have made him feel even more like a pig than he already was.
The beep grew louder as he came closer to Tomoe's signal, which was directly ahead of him.
The room he entered burned the insides of his nose, a mix of salty sweat and blood that singed through and into his eyes.
He couldn't speak and he moved slowly. Tomoe was only a few feet in front of him, but she seemed miles away.
He discovered here why no one got in his way as he ran down the hallway. Perhaps they wanted him to enter the room at the end of the hall.
They wanted him to see the sickly paste that acted like skin over the ridges of a spine and points of hips that belonged to the ghoul in front of him.
The bones in her shoulder covered most of Tomoe's body, but her eyes begged for his help. He didn't feel pity; he felt overwhelmed by her agony.
The ghoul turned around as he moved closer. Her jaw lax, inhumanly so, like the mouth of a wood-chipper. Behind her head, Amon saw Tomoe's left arm hanging like the end of a cheap yoyo.
"What the hell are you?" he asked.
"Well they call me the Binge Eater, cutie," she replied.