-107: Words With Teeth-

It was five in the morning and a late-winter chill was creeping through the windows and coiling about my ankles. Perfect weather to be running myself ragged running around the ward, or exercising, or finding one of the holes still letting a draft in. Instead, I spat another blob of spongy, bloody stuff into the bathroom sink and made sure yet again that the door was locked.

The teeth Eto had knocked out had grown back.

At first, it was just like losing my baby teeth all over again, except faster than I remembered: every week or so, another tooth would be filling in the gap and I could talk a little more clearly. The experience might've been satisfying. But when all those had grown in, my old teeth started falling out, loosened out of place by a sharp replacement. Even if the order they fell out in wasn't random, the when of it was. Flop the wrong way while sleeping, land a little too hard coming down off a rooftop, sneeze? Say goodbye to a tooth.

The replacement teeth were 'off'—Kaneki probably knew a better word—as well. Touka had been the first to notice, when she knocked out two of my old ones during a training session when I had missed blocking and took a kick to the face. 'Creepy teeth' she had called them, and after looking in a mirror...well, she was right. They were a little too angular, a few too many sharp points for me to to feel comfortable about, let alone smile with. Wearing a mask in public would've been the only way to feel comfortable if I had been leaving the house routinely during the day.

That said, I was out usually after dark and then always with my actual mask. At this point, I was fairy sure that mask was more unsettling to the local ghouls than my teeth would've been. Or not; they didn't make biting a chunk out of a troublesome ghoul any harder, so I wasn't about to go hungry anytime soon thanks to that.

I made sure to scrub the pollock painting clean from the sink before heading back to my room; no point in getting Kaneki worried about me, and I didn't want to terrify our other housemate. Not quite like living in a barracks, but close in a few ways.

Living in the sixteenth ward was a strange flip from being the hunter to the hunted, something I was feeling more heavily now that I was no longer sleeping in a hotel bed. On the other hand, this was a learning experience. New words, maintaining a house, new people to train against. On the more practical side, I had learned a few things about the ward from the teammates in Kaneki's coalition. At the moment, this ward was playing as a highway for ghouls moving to and from the eleventh ward. I agreed with the assessments from Shuu and Banjo though; the majority of the movement was to the eleventh and the southwest side of the city. Why ghouls were streaming into wards where the CCG were swarming was far beyond me.

In a similar act of nonsensical behavior, the ward's CCG office was more focused on keeping ghouls out of their 'core wards' and was mostly absent from the northern sections of the ward. Kaneki's perspective on the arrangement was equal parts that they had sent their best to fight Aogiri and 'pride before practicality'. Kaneki was the smart one of the group after all, so that was the best assessment we had.

At least, that had been our operational assumption at the time.

Dressed, I stepped out the back door as dawn began to gnaw into the horizon, and began to run.

Neither the movement from the CCG or ghouls had been making sense until the ghoul grapevine had finally worked its way down to us. In the twenty-third ward of Tokyo, the CCG apparently held a prison, and while the bulk of the CCG was running their massive raid on the Aogiri complex, Aogiri had conducted a raid of their own in the form of a prison break. A very successful prison break, assuming the rumors were true.

From there, everything else kind of fell into place. Success had made Aogiri an even bigger name for itself, drawing in stray ghouls who would've otherwise sat out the fighting. In turn, the CCG was looking to save face and hide the fact that anything hadn't gone smoothly.

No whispers, no evidence, no proof, but it had to be Eto at the heart of it. The more I replayed our meetings in my head, the more I had this...feeling involving her that didn't have a good way of being articulated.

Otherness-flavored familiarity. Those waves that set animals on edge right before an earthquake. The the little dip in pressure when opening a tightly sealed door.

Finishing my loop, I sighed. No point in trying when I didn't know the word. Kaneki and I had been disagreeing about the course of action the past couple nights. He had placed Shuu and I on duty watching Aogiri, but my thought was that we'd be better served focusing on one lead at the time. Our initial goal of kidnapping the surgeon had been only partially shelved and we were essentially attacking each of the ends—Rize, Kanou, and Aogiri—at the same time.

Banjou greeted me back at the house, apologizing for not running with me that morning. Considering how badly we had met, we were getting along fairly well to the point where he'd occasionally join me on a run.

In the kitchen, Kaneki and Hinami looked as if they had both rolled out of bed about the same time I had walked in the door.

"Late night?" I already knew the answer.

"Rereading Sen Tatsuki." Hinami was drooped over the table like a wilty flower.

"...Both of you?"

Kaneki grunted an affirmative between sips of coffee.

Hinami made a full body yawn that nearly hit her own cup. "She's got a new book coming out soon. So big brother and I are rereading her books...and maybe staying up too late..."

"And however much the price of our pleasure, we were willing to defer our suffering." Kaneki nodded, tapping at the cover of the book to the side of his cup.

"Oooh!" Hinami nearly jumped from her seat. "That's from Industrial, right? I just finished it yesterday."

"Ah." Both really were bookworms at heart. "I'm going to clean up, probably going to head out in an hour or so."

"Oh! Allen!" Hinami's voice called me back from the base of the stairs. "I've got a new word for you!"

And so I learned the word for 'inept'.

Incidentally, that was the only way to describe Banjou's combat abilities. How a ghoul had lived that long with such a dearth of combat skills in this city was a mystery. Even with Kaneki and I trying to train him, the progress we had made was best described as 'marginal' and most of it being in defensive ability. Thank my luck he had been better at stakeouts.

"Hey, where were you planning on heading to today?"

Turning from my dresser, I pulled a shirt at random and shrugged to Kaneki.

"Was planning on the thirteenth today." Pulling the shirt over my head, I saw Kaneki looking over the mess of wires and sparkler packages on my desk. "Someplace you wanted me to look at?"

While my usual duties were keeping an eye on Aogiri activities, Kaneki had redirected me to other tasks; keeping watch on Kanou General Hospital for a particular nurse, tracking CCG movements in the sixteenth

"We my have a lead on Rize. An actual person, not just a secondhand story—you remember what you brought us on the ghouls who broke out from Cochlea? One known as Shachi, in particular?"

"Uh. Big guy, CCG game him an SS rank, had some kind of leadership position in the sixth, I think." I'd have to check my notes to see if I had missed anything.

"That's him. He was the leader of the ghouls in the sixth ward before being taken captive in a CCG raid more than a year back. And yesterday, we learned his real name is Mataska Kamishiro."

Kamishiro. That was a revelation. "You think they're related."

"Probably not. Back when I asked Itori about Rize Kamishiro, she noted that the name was probably made up. But to find somebody else with the same family name... I think there has to be some kind of connection; Kamashiro isn't common enough to be a coincidence."

Nodding, I leaned back a bit. "Nothing to lose by checking it out. And since the name is held by another high-profile ghoul, we might be lucky."

"Is this something that happened back in America?"

"Kinda. Territories were held more by families in loose alliances back home. It would've been possible to track a member back to their family's held territory if their name was known."

The look on Kaneki's face was the one he sported when committing something to memory.

I brought the conversation back to its original topic. "What was it you needed me to do today?"

"Ah, right. We're headed to the sixth ward to meet with others from Shachi's group around one and you should be coming along for that."

Not that I told Kaneki, but that gave me basically no time to actually do stuff in the eleventh and I really didn't want to pay for train fare for such a short trip. So I made a call and made my way to my old familiar patrol route around Anteiku's territory. Familiar, but not familiar. I had barely been on the streets at ground level, in daylight, surrounded by people.

If only I was nocturnal. In the eleventh and thirteenth ward, at least the streets were somewhat empty. The crowds wound around me, chattering with half heard words I didn't know. Fighting would've been preferable. And then Hide popped up at my shoulder with a cheery greeting that nearly made me jump out of my skin.

"That bad?"

"Roughly. It-" A pair of students strolled past. "It looks more or less constant jockeying for position when it isn't skirmishes."

"So our red-robed adversaries are winning then?" Shifting in his seat, Hide looked pensive. "I've been digging into the records as far back as I can, and I've never found anything like them. Certainly not in size or scale."

My big fear was that if this tipped back hard into the CCG's favor, they'd have the combat-hardened veterans to start cracking down effectively on the other wards. More than that, they'd have more than enough reason to do so brutally. How many times would Hinami's story play out then would be an unpleasant number.

"Never heard of anything like this back home either." Swirling my vodka on the rocks, I gave silent thanks that this university had a bar. "Too prone to backstabbing, I think."

"So how long do you think?"

"Till what?"

"Do you think they're going to win?"

I snorted. "It's a stalemate. A- they don't have the people skilled to launch a real attack after their fall offensive. Not that your employer is in too much better shape there. They bug out of fights, redcloaks claim it as a win, and the whole cycle repeats. Unless either side brings in 'experts', not much is going to change."

"Heard pretty much the same at the offices. Anyway," Hide flicked a business card across the table. "one other thing I overheard in relation to Cochlea, 'nother two escapees it sounds like."

"You still haven't said what I owe you for all this."

"You're doing this for Kaneki." A trademark smile beamed from across the table. "That's reason enough for me."

"Have you called him yet?"

Hide laughed, this time awkwardly.

"Come. On." Hide was lucky to be out of headlock range. "I swear. I keep telling both of you to get in contact with each other. I tell Kaneki basically daily and he just dances around it like he's afraid of it."

"That sounds about right."

"Hell." And he had been wondering why I needed a drink this early in the day. "One of these days, I'm going to lock the two of you in a room 'till this gets resolved."

Hide had only laughed at the idea, saying that it might be the best idea to clear things up. We had made a little more small talk before he had headed off to either his classes or his job. About a week after the new year, Hide had sent me a text asking to meet and from there it had continued with meetings almost every week. I didn't really like that he was working for the CCG, but on the other hand, I couldn't justify not accepting the information he offered. In return, I offered what advice I could on his new job, but his real motivation had always been Kaneki.

Wish I had a friend that devoted.

"Hey mate. Got room for a couple more at your table?"

English. What the hell? Two very not-Japanese guys stood at the end of the booth, both holding drinks of their own.

"Uh. Sure?"

The pair sat down opposite me, where Hide had been five minutes ago. Both were grinning as if there was some joke I wasn't in on.

"Much obliged. With the place as packed as this, makes sense to find somebody familiar, roight?"

Except the place wasn't exactly busy; it was why Hide had chosen it as our meetup spot. The only people walking past had been leaving.

"So." I was halfway to thinking that this was an ambush.

"Easy there, mate. We're not here to cause you any trouble. Just a couple of helpful Kangaroos, eh." Leaning in, he jabbed a thumb at his buddy. "This is Allen, and I'm Grissom. Now, with your name out of the way, I think we can help each other out."