Corie=27
Kaneki=22
Underneath :re, there were multiple rooms Yomo and Touka had prepared when they first built up the coffee shop. They weren't in any blueprints and no one except the two of them knew they even existed. They had wanted to have a place where ghouls who needed an escape could go when the Doves were hunting them. There was a secret door in the shop to get to them and another entrance that led to the tunnels so ghouls could come and go without being seen.
That was where they decided to keep Amon for the time being.
They extended the offer to Takizawa, but he insisted that it was better for everyone if he made sure there was some space between them. He told them that he would just feel trapped in the tiny rooms beneath the café, and he didn't want Eto to use him to get to any of the :re squad.
Corie decided to move down into one of the rooms so she could watch over Amon and ensure that he didn't go crazy if and when he woke up.
Sometimes, she sat in his room for several hours and watched him sleep, waiting for any other sign of life. There was something endearing about seeing him calm for the first time in her life as he slept. She wondered if would ever be able to be this calm again once he learned what had happened to him.
It seemed difficult to believe that the very investigator who had battled her and Kaneki just two years ago had now become the very thing he had fought to kill for the last several years.
She couldn't understand why she wasn't angry at him. She should hate him. Not only was he a former Dove, but he was also the one to kill Ryoko and he nearly killed Hinami for no other reason than that they were ghouls. Why did she want to continue helping him?
Unsurprisingly, it was several days before there was any change.
Corie was just cleaning up some things in his room when she heard a soft groan. She quickly turned around and saw the former investigator slowly sitting up.
"Hey," she said quietly, keeping her distance. She didn't want to make any sudden movements for fear he would take that as an attack and go crazy with his kagune again. "How are you feeling?"
Amon put his hand to his aching head and cleared his throat. "Like I've been obliterated by a ghoul."
Corie awkwardly fiddled with the end of her long hair. "Yeah, uh, sorry. In my defense, I didn't know I could use my kagune, but I didn't mean to go so hard on you."
Amon finally looked up at her. "Who are you? Where am I?"
"My name is Corie. You're safe underneath a café."
He looked her up and down curiously. "You're…you're a ghoul, aren't you?"
After a small pause, Corie slowly nodded. She cautiously took a step towards him. "If it's all right…I'd like you to tell me what happened to you after the night of the Owl Operation."
Did this woman know that he used to be an investigator? She didn't really seem angry or afraid of him…but he knew all too well that looks could be deceiving.
"To be honest, I don't remember a whole lot," he said without looking at her. "I remember waking up inside a cell next to someone I used to work with. I couldn't see him, but I could hear the things they did to him. We'd been put through some horrible operation to make us half-ghouls. The next thing I knew, I couldn't eat regular food and I had developed a kakugan. I refused to eat anything they served me, but they…strapped me down and force-fed me. They needed to keep me alive for some reason."
Corie rubbed her bottom lip with her index finger as she listened to his story. She wasn't sure how to process this. What she did know was that even if she hadn't made that promise to Takizawa, she was going to make sure Kanou paid dearly for what he had done to so many innocent people.
"Everything after that is kind of a blur. I remember hearing someone yell that my RC count was too high, and then it's all just blank."
"Well, you're safe here, I promise. Hardly anyone knows about this place, and the few who do are people you can trust."
"How long has it been since that operation?"
Corie paused. "Two and a half years."
Amon didn't respond as he swallowed thickly. It had been that long since that awful night? Had the CCG assumed he had been a casualty? What about all of his former comrades? Who was still alive and who wasn't? What had all happened since then?
Things changed dramatically at the CCG in a matter of weeks. How much had changed in two years?
"Get some rest. I'll bring you some coffee. Eventually, you will have to eat something, but that should hold you over for now."
He couldn't understand why someone like her was helping someone like him, but he was too tired to protest.
Corie paused at the door and turned around. "You know…I'd always wondered what would happen if an investigator found out what it was like to live as a ghoul. But I wouldn't wish this on anyone. I'm sorry."
She shut the door behind her, leaving Amon alone in stunned silence.
The next day after Amon had received some proper rest and his body had had more time to heal, Corie knocked on the door and stepped inside. She put a large paper bag on the small table.
"Here, Touka went out and bought some clothes for you. She had to guess your size, but I think they'll fit. Get dressed and then come out. I'm going to teach you how to use your kagune."
She waited outside the room while Amon changed out of the poorly-fitting clothes given to him during his time as an experiment.
He cautiously stepped out of the room dressed in loose pants and a hoodie, and Corie wordlessly led him down to the tunnels through the secret exit out of the café.
Amon took note of the path they took and realized how useful this information would be in an operation if he could get it to his comrades.
Almost immediately, he felt guilty for thinking such a thing. Even if he could get word to his former comrades and they didn't absolutely panic when they learned what had been done to him, he couldn't do something like that.
This woman in front of him had broken him out of the lab of a deranged doctor, watched over him until he awoke and treated him with kindness when he did despite any of her personal feelings, and had even gotten new clothes for him. Was he really so heartless that he would lead a raid to slaughter the ghouls residing here after what they'd done to help him?
They soon found themselves in the same training space where Corie had worked with Kaneki so long ago. Amon remained wary around her, still not fully convinced that she wasn't going to kill him as retribution for everything the investigators had undoubtedly done to her.
"Didn't I nearly kill you when you first found me?" Amon asked. "You don't need to teach me how to use this thing."
"Do you even remember what you did?" Corie said as she continued walking.
Amon started to answer and then stopped.
"Exactly. It's one thing to use kagune in the state you were in," she explained. "It's another thing to have total control over it without losing your mind to it." She turned around to face him. "You're an ukaku and I'm a rinkaku, so I can teach you the general things that apply to all ghouls no matter the RC type, but if you want to learn the specifics, you're going to have to ask Touka, Irimi, or Yomo. Good luck with that."
"I don't know who these people are."
"Yes, you do. But you only know them by their ghoul aliases."
"Did I know you?"
Corie covered the lower half of her face with her two hands. "'We meet again. I admire your tenacity'." She smirked a little as she lowered her hands. "I still do."
Amon's expression didn't change, but his heart skipped a beat. He recognized her. He'd seen her several times during his time as an investigator. He had tried to kill her repeatedly, and yet she had not retaliated, or at least not so much that she had injured him. She would just calmly run off before the fight got too intense, saying that she couldn't die yet.
It was strange to see her now and even stranger to have a name and a face to the ghoul he had fought. This whole situation felt incredibly bizarre and plain wrong. A part of him wondered if he was still stuck inside that awful lab and this was just an incredibly vivid hallucination.
"I wasn't prominent enough for the CCG to give me an alias, at least back then," Corie continued, breaking Amon out of his train of thought. "Recently, I had gotten the name 'Lightning', but I was outed so I now have a new mask and I need to get a new name. Well…I'll try to get one whenever I get back out there. That's not going to be for a while though."
Amon didn't know what to say. Putting a real name and face to a ghoul suddenly…changed everything. He didn't know what to think or do.
"I've taught several people in the past, so I know what I'm doing. You'll probably be easier to teach since you have a lot of actual combat experience behind you." She gave him a dry smile. "And believe it or not, I have experience teaching people who used to be human how to be ghouls."
"What does that mean?"
"I'll explain it later."
Corie went over to the wall and removed her sweatshirt to reveal her black tank top beneath.
This time, Amon's eyes widened a little.
Her back and shoulders had multiple scars of varying length and width.
"How…how did you get those?"
Corie turned back to face him. "There are some wounds even ghouls can't heal from."
He couldn't imagine what kind of injury she must've sustained in order to receive a scar that even her regenerative powers couldn't take care of. And to have that many…?
"Get into fighting stance."
Amon too removed his hoodie.
What Corie wasn't prepared for was just how large his arms were. Every time she had seen him in the past, including the last several days, he'd always been covered with either armor, a trench coat, or just a long-sleeved shirt. And considering that they had each tried to kill each other nearly every time they crossed paths, it was understandable she wasn't exactly focusing on his physique.
She was a little surprised that his muscles hadn't completely deteriorated after all this time, but she guessed that being trapped in some sort of stasis while inside the glass case had allowed him to keep his incredibly muscular stature.
This was new territory.
But she'd been trained to not have distractions during fights, and today was not going to be any exception.
"Can you release your kagune on your own?" she asked.
Amon focused all his energy into his new muscles and managed to release his kagune from his shoulder. It was much smaller than their last fight, but that was to be expected since he was actually in his right mind now.
Suddenly, a purple and black tentacle knocked him off his feet and sent him into the wall.
"What was that?!" he demanded as he stood up. "I had just barely gotten it out!"
"You're right, and it was nice of me to let you get that far. I don't have to tell you that ghouls aren't going to wait for you to get into a good position. Go again."
With little control over his kagune, Amon once again fell when Corie's tentacles came for him. She was even faster than he remembered!
"So that's how it is," he growled. "You're trying to kill me after all."
"You haven't changed a bit. If I wanted to kill you, wouldn't I have done it while you were unconscious?"
"You ghouls live for the fight."
"We took you out of Kanou's horrific lab, brought you somewhere safe, gave you some new clothes, I'm helping you train, and you still think we're the bad guys?"
When she phrased it like that, it was enough to make Amon pause. That was a mistake because she knocked him off his feet yet again.
"Get up. Go again. Focus on keeping your head straight. Feel your muscles working in your back and shoulder and use them to manipulate your kagune to get it to do what you want it to."
Crack!
"Again."
Crack!
"Again."
Amon soon reluctantly saw that she wasn't in fact trying to kill him. She was indeed beating him to a pulp, but that was her way of teaching him. It was how most of the investigators were trained at the CCG too, just against quinques rather than kagunes.
His short temper allowed him to quickly gain enough control to block her blows enough so that he didn't keep getting knocked over. After the fiftieth time, it was just downright humiliating.
They went at it for the next four hours until both of them were dripping in sweat from head to toe. It took a while for Amon to be able to do more than just block Corie's tentacles, but as she continued to attack him, he watched her and learned different ways to maneuver out of her path and inflict damage of his own.
He definitely picked it up a heck of a lot quicker than Kaneki had.
"All right, let's stop for today."
The two of them let their kagunes dissolve and Amon fell to the ground panting. In all his years as an investigator, he wasn't sure he had ever been through so much physically before in his life.
Even that one night doing thousands of push-ups on Akira's balcony didn't compare to this and that was saying something.
It made sense since half of his strength was focused on keeping his kagune under control and the other half tried to keep up with it.
"Anyone…ever told you…you're an impossible teacher?" he bit out.
Corie smiled. "Yeah, and I take pride in that." She walked over to him and held out her hand. "Come on. We'll get you something to eat. That should help you feel better."
Amon paused for a moment before slowly accepting her hand.
He felt a little queasy at the idea of eating, but he supposed he was just going to have to get over it. This was his life now, and he may as well just accept it. It would only be harder the longer he tried to deny it.
The two of them started towards the stairs to get back inside the coffee shop, Amon trying his absolute hardest not limp.
"Why are you helping me?"
"Because you need it," Corie told him as if it was the most obvious answer in the world.
"But I don't understand. I've constantly tried to kill you. I'm sure I've hurt someone close to you. You're supposed to hate me."
"Why are you the one who gets to tell me how I'm supposed to feel?"
Amon awkwardly rubbed the back of his head. "I…I didn't mean…"
She turned to look him straight in the eye which was a little difficult considering he towered over her. "My mom and dad were killed by investigators. But my brother was killed by another ghoul. I have reason to hate both sides. But where would that get me? I know that not all humans are like the ones who killed my parents and not all ghouls are like the one who killed my brother."
Amon was taken aback for the hundredth time in a few hours. Neither her eyes nor her voice held any trace of malice towards him. She was simply explaining things like a parent would to a child who had done something wrong.
All the ghouls he'd ever had contact with had hardened themselves to the world and did not hesitate to take their anger out on the souls they consumed.
Or maybe…that was just he had wanted to see.
"There are some people I'm never going to be able to forgive. But…I can't hate an entire group of people based on the actions of a few. Wouldn't that level of resentment get pretty exhausting?"
He'd had that level of resentment almost his entire life. After the trauma he'd endured at the orphanage, he felt it was just easier to close himself off and harden his heart towards ghouls. It would make it easier to eradicate them. They deserved it. They were the ones twisting this world.
But…what she was saying was true. Holding onto all of that pain and anger had sucked the life out of him. It made him a better investigator, but…was it even worth it?
"I should hate you," she continued. "To be honest, I'm not totally sure why I don't. Maybe it's because I feel sorry for you. Maybe it's because I have a soft spot for half-ghouls. Maybe it's because you don't seem like the same person who murdered a little girl's mother right in front of her. Maybe it's because in all the times we fought, you never really seemed like a heartless killer. You seemed like you were mad at the world and you were taking it out on us."
Amon winced, painfully reminded of the whole Fueguchi case so many years ago. Had he really been so callous and hardened towards an entire race that he had been willing to slaughter a mother and daughter simply because of who they were?
And moreover, why did this woman…seem to understand him more than anyone he had ever met when they weren't even the same species?
"Amon, I know that what you've been through is changing views you've had your entire life. I'll sit down and talk with you and answer any questions you have about me and ghouls and the way we live, and I'll teach you anything you want to know about how to live like one of us." She gave a sad smile. "Kaneki always said that if humans and ghouls would just sit and talk, they could learn to understand each other."
"Kaneki…he's the Eyepatch ghoul, right?"
"Yeah. I'll have to catch you up on everything with both him and the CCG. A lot has happened since the Owl Operation. The coffee shop is closed now, so I'll teach you how to brew a good batch. You're gonna need to know that more than ever before."
She started to lead the way up to the coffee shop while Amon nervously followed.
Corie stopped halfway up the stairs. "You know," she said as she turned her head, "however you may feel about ghouls, it was a human who did this to you."
