-104: Finding Normal-

Nishiki and Touka had both been gone for a few minutes, their coffee mugs cooling in the sink. Neither had looked me in the eye when they had left and neither had said goodbye. My body had been steadily ramping up the internal hurt as if replaying all the injuries from the past couple days. At it was all going to get better from here.

"Allen...How do you do it?"

"Do what?" I replied, shifting up from the depths of my coffee mug, trying to calculate if it was cool enough to chug without scorching my throat. The thought had occurred to me that I could just dump it down the drain.

Kaneki hadn't moved from his place on the sofa, except to set his coffee mug between his feet. He really did look older now, not just thanks to the gray hair.

"Being a ghoul."

"Oh." I set the mug down. "I..." I didn't have a good answer for that.

Kaneki dropped his head into his hands.

"We're just ghouls." He said, the words slipping out breathlessly. "Ghouls ghouls ghouls. We can't eat like everyone else, can't trust anyone else, can't live like everyone else."

"Kaneki." He didn't seem to hear me as he sped up and left my mind stumbling.

"Humans can't grow back fingers or toes—grew them back so many times over and over and over. I'm not even sure I'm Kaneki anymore or just another monster. I don't have anything from my life before. I don't even know how I can g-"

"Kaneki!"

Taking a knee in front of him and dropping my hands on his shoulders, I forced Kaneki upright.

"Maybe you're not the same Kaneki you were before, but you're the Kaneki I know and you're more than a ghoul to me."

He shook his head. "I'm just a-"

"Not 'just'. You are all of your parts, not one. To me, you're the guy who who loves books, makes coffee, thinks too much when he fights."

"B-but I don't know if its really who I am anymore." Tears tracked a shiny pair of paths down his cheeks. "I never got into fights before..."

"Just because one thing about you changes doesn't mean everything has to go."

"E-everything feels like it has though... I don't even know where I'd start."

"You need to find something to balance yourself on. Its not easy, but that's why you've got me and everybody else, right?"

Finally, Kaneki took a deep breath and nodded. It was an uncertain nod, but at least it meant he was listening. "Thanks, Allen."

And then the moment was ruined when a slicing feeling through my knee made me double over on the floor. Hoisting myself onto the sofa, I could be thankful that the pain had stopped as quickly as it had started.

"Allen! Are you..."

"Okay?" I finished, not sure if I really was. "Been worse. Jut not fully healed yet."

Whether my teeth would grow back was another question. I hoped the answer to that was a positive one.

"You got hurt though, because of me. All of you got hurt because of me." His eyes sunk back to the floor. "Sorry, Allen, for putting you through all this."

"You don't owe me an apology." I flopped my head back, trying to unkink my neck. "You didn't do anything wrong: there's nothing to be sorry for."

"It was though. I should've asked you for better training sooner. Then I could've protected Touka and everyone else." A pause. "Allen, can we start up the training again? Just you and me, harder than what we were doing at Anteiku?

"Mmm." Getting better was something we all needed to work at. "I'd like to do that too. But maybe wait a couple days for me to recover, okay? I'm absolutely wrecked from everything."

Kaneki made a noise in agreement, and then we lapsed into silence. The light on the ceiling looked exactly like the one I had back in my Chicago apartment. Funny thing, actually. Sitting here, I felt more at home than I ever had back in that little place. Feeling like you belonged someplace was a funny sensation. Leaving a place you felt as if you belonged was tearing off a bandage.

"I might take the next day or two off, just so you know." Kaneki and I were standing in front of the door, I making one final check that I did indeed have my stuff still in my pockets. "Don't want to come into the cafe behaving like I'm seventy."

"Right." A ghost of a grin flickered across Kaneki's face and disappeared.

"Are you..." I felt like a fool only saying this now, "going to be all right?

"Ah, I'm fine." Finally, a smile emerged as he rubbed his chin. "Just need some rest."

Yes. Rest for him, and rest for me after slinking back to my hotel room. I slept until four in in the morning, which turned out to be almost thirteen hours.

Glaring at the red numbers on the alarm clock, I flopped over yet again. Four thirty now. Apparently, my body had outvoted my brain and decided sleep was out of the question. Television wasn't cutting it either: strange talk show, animated feature, C-list horror movie involving ghouls. Ugh. At least the movies like that back home put some effort in making the kagunes look like the real deal and not like beef jerky. Unable to think of anything else to do, I muttered a few curses, climbed out of bed and pulled on my somewhat clean pair of sweatpants. Running myself ragged in the pre-dawn hours it was.

Winter was definitely in the air. Even running, the chill knifed into my cheeks and the backs of my hands. The only other people on the streets were either fitness nuts or those unlucky enough to have a night shift and neither group cared about what anyone else was up to. Perhaps some ghouls were out as well and braving their fear of the immediate aftermath of the CCG's raid. Not that there was anything to actually fear if the CCG operated anything like the BGA did; a raid—the fear of a follow-up raid—did almost as much to suppress ghoul activity as a blizzard, a fact that was played to its advantage many times.

Just as much as it stretched my muscles, the running untangled my thoughts. Eto had known about the raid and far enough in advance to have evacuated the base of operations. But she hadn't. Why? I didn't know why. Maybe she wasn't as high in the command structure as she implied, maybe nobody had listened to her intel, maybe letting Aogiri get hit by the CCG was a way to remove a rival like Jason or somebody else.

I rounded another corner, passing a businessman looking more like a zombie in a nice suit.

What I did know about Eto wasn't exactly a long list either. I would've bet my life on her being a cannibal from the look of her kagune alone. Not to mention that she was dexterous enough with it to pin me down like a toy. Her being educated was a certainty—or she had one hell of a way with words—from just how many allusions to books she managed cram into our small conversation. Might've just been how nice she sounded, but she sounded at least as smart as Kaneki.

One thing I couldn't exactly place was her scent. Odd because my ability to use my nose in the first place was pretty bad in itself, so being able to have a scent I could call 'her scent' was...I didn't know what to call it. Nice? Pleasant? Maybe not pleasant but being able to know a scent belonged to someone something to be a little proud about. Pleasant would be the memory of the rough touch of her bandage wrapped hands on my face.

Wait a second. I stumbled, nearly tripped, and missed smacking my face into a lamppost. Was I assessing Eto or admiring her?

Stopping dead on another corner, I thumped my forehead into a signpost.

Eto was the enemy. I was supposed to be determining how to best fight her from my past experiences, not look back on them with nostalgic feelings! Straightening up and forcing my composure and bit back a string of curses. Lucky Kaneki being able to say he was okay after Aogiri and Jason. My time with them hadn't been even a quarter of his, and yet my head was still out of whack.

All I could be certain of was that I would be dealing with Aogiri and the CCG again, and that without getting stronger, Eto would have little trouble reducing me to a red smear. Something to figure out sooner than later. First came getting some semblance of normal back.

Work at Anteiku, it turned out, was a fairly good match for what I wanted as normal. Even if some things had changed. Cardboard still covered the window in the meeting room, Irimi giving me a look I couldn't read, a lonely spiderweb in a corner. Jumping back to my previous role was almost too easy; I spent my first day back cleaning the entirety of the second floor.

That first day it was just myself, Nishiki and Kouma—the latter acting as the bright and happy counterbalance to our sleepily gray demeanor. Renji made a brief stop in the afternoon though all I saw was him leaving. Yoshimura was completely absent as well. When I asked Kouma, he said that Yoshimura would be fine and back in a few days. Meaning that he wasn't fine after the Aogiri raid and adding another question to the "what the hell happened" pile from that night. Granted, I had no illusions that most of the questions on that pile wouldn't actually be answered.

"Yo, Allen. Everything's finished up downstairs, want to help me clean up?"

This was the fifth day back. Touka was in today, helping Irimi somewhat behind the counter, but retreating to the back to study whenever the flow of customers allowed and throwing the occasional question at me. I had doubts of how much help I was actually providing. We had officially passed closing time about ten minutes ago and Irimi was doing something upstairs while Touka had been assigned to clean the main cafe area. No doubt that I was being used by her as a way to get out of the chore she hated the most, but I was bored enough not to mind.

No sign of Kaneki today either.

While Touka handled the counter, I started wiping down the tabletops and putting up chairs to get ready for the inevitable mopping. The two of us had exchanged maybe five minutes of conversation in the past six hours, and that was basically all we had needed. The only thing I could see us talking about besides her studies was Kaneki, and he was still nowhere to be found. After this long, that was starting to be concerning.

The door clicked open. As I was technically not supposed to be in the front for a variety of reasons—mostly because of the 'obviously a foreigner' issue—I ducked back around the decorative lattice at the far end of the counter and hoped nobody was looking too eagerly for me.

"We're closed." If there was medal for polite but angry, I'd have nominated Touka for it. "We open tomor—You! What the fuck are you doing here again you-"

"Agh! Ow! Wait a sec!"

Confused, I looked through the lattice and saw that Touka was in the process of punching somebody. So, not Kaneki. Probably.

"Exactly what is going on?" Was my first question as I left the cover of the lattice. "I don't think we usually beat up visitors."

Touka paused, lowering her fist and released her grip on the other man's collar. The other man, who looked like he spent half his days lifting, backed off a step while wincing. When the two of them looked to me, it was then I realized that there had been a note of authority in my statement.

"What the hell is going on?" I repeated.

"I-I'm just here to to talk—" He flinched back when Touka brought up her fist again

"Talk? Like last time?" I had seen that look of murder in her eyes before. "Are we gonna be visited by Aogiri again too? 'Cause that playing nice game isn't going to work twice."

"Easy easy easy! I'm here to to talk with the foreign guy!" I found myself bristling at the moniker and being pointed at. "Kaneki asked me to!"

I stepped between the two, putting them arms length apart. If Touka killed this guy here, we were going to be stuck cleaning it up.

Before either could say anything, I made a decision. "Right. Gym rat, Touka, we're going to the storm sewer. We can have some semblance of safety for this talk there."


I'd like to give a special acknowledgement to the silent readers in my audience. I do notice you in hits and follows, and I thank you for taking some time out of your day to read what i write.

I always love to hear when I've entertained you with an update, especially after a few busy weeks at work and this chapter being fairly tricky for me. What was your favorite line?