-109: Loyalties Owed-
"You sure you're okay with this?" Stepping back slightly, Kaneki flexed a sore wrist.
"With what? The plan? I don't have an issue with it." I kind of did, not that I was going to say it.
"Not that, the training. You're pulling punches with me, and you're certainly doing so with Touka as well."
That wasn't something I was particularly eager to admit. "How'd you know?"
"It took me a while to figure it out," Kaneki made a motion, and it took me a moment to realize he was acting out a movement. "but when you fought Giru, you used the same maneuver that Shuu used to break my arm. Except you executed the initial twist so quickly, you broke his wrist. Before then, I'd never seen you move that fast, and the ease you did it with made it pretty clear you were used to that speed. Giru got to you pretty badly, huh?"
"Hah. Yeah." So he had picked up on that too.
Not letting him dig into that any further, I changed the subject.
"You give any more thought to bringing back Touka for our two versus ones?"
Kaneki only sighed and tried to wriggle his shirt around. "I wish she hadn't pulled herself into this."
"So that's a no then?"
Kaneki frowned. "I just wanted to keep her out of...all this. She should be able to live like a human, not running around with us."
"That's still not a yes or no."
"The training? Ah...I guess we could. If nothing else it could mean I could get some actual wins."
Finally giving up on being comfortable in the damp shirt, Kaneki worked to wriggled his way free of it. Seeing a new arrival on the stairwell, I waved up and realized that this might get strange.
"You found our workout space."
Kaneki, shirt mostly off at this point, had to turn his whole body to see who it was. Touka's face moved through surprise and embarrassment pretty quickly, though the sudden color in her cheeks stuck around. Both froze like deer in the headlamps and started stammering out apologies. I was wrong; this was actually hilarious. After taking what felt like a very long look, Touka retreated back upstairs and Kaneki managed to get his shirt mostly back on. Half of me suspected that she was going to ask about sparring as well, but it was more likely she had wanted to talk to Kaneki.
Personally, I didn't see why; she had already gotten Kaneki to make a few adjustments that I understood. None to the part I didn't like, that is to say, my part. I had called it being used as bait. Banjou said it was like using a wolf to lure sheep. Nobody else had said anything, but it was clear none of them were envious, which was unsurprising. Everyone had a part to play though, down to Nishiki and Hinami.
Hinami being involved should've worried me as much as it did Touka, but I was just distractedly hungry to the point where I was finding it hard to focus on more than one thing at a time.
For example; now three days had passed since the plan had been finalized, the operation was happening tomorrow and instead of getting ready, I was lurking out in the thirteenth ward and quietly doing nothing outside of watching the sun slip toward the horizon. It was like taking a run and tuning out everything until stopping at some obscure address. Back home I would've been bonked upside the head for doing something this risky before a big an operation like tomorrow. At this point though, I was having a hard time figuring out why I should care what the proper procedure was.
I heard the incoming blow just in time to dive aside and fling myself onto a neighboring rooftop, using my kagune to keep from sliding on the incline. Who? White Suits? Skull Masks? No, these were unaffiliated ghouls, two of which I knew from the sixteenth. Oni mask and Toothy were punks; I had claimed territory and both of them had decided to pop over and harass me. Separately though, not that taking me on together would've helped. I had thought that having half their kagune eaten would've been enough to teach a permanent lesson.
"Evening." Perhaps they hadn't noticed who I was. "Little far from the sixteenth, aren't we?"
"Not far enough." The unfamiliar one spoke. "The scent of a foreigner carries far further than it has any right to."
Ah fuck. "Giru? This is the thirteenth ward, not the sixth. Fuck off."
Toothy deployed a scrawny-looking koukaku. "That's the point. The ward will pick clean any corpse by dawn."
"I'm not usually not into the whole 'civic duty' thing." Giru's rinkaku emerged as he waved his hand dismissively. "But considering it's you, and that we've got three to your one..."
So that's what this was about. As he brought his kagune up, I could just imagine the unpleasant look under his mask.
"It's two on one, actually." I bounced my finger over each of the trio. "You counted the corpse."
"Corpse?"
Oni mask gurgled and dropped like a rock as I flung myself back across the gap.
Slow, poorly trained and off balance—but even then, something about this fight was scratching an itch. This charge of it was something I hadn't felt like this since my fight with Mado, something I never thought I'd think back on fondly. Even Oni mask forgetting that he was supposed to be dead and jumping back in did more to keep the sensation tingling. There was, I realized, something different about fighting somebody who wanted you dead.
Thank god I hadn't lost my muscle memory from training with Kaneki and Touka. Even if we had never tried to kill each other, being able to operate a little bit on instinct kept small blows from becoming injuries—but I was more than a little surprised at just how hungry the fight had left me.
Munching on the larger part of Toothy's kagune, I counted my luck. A few deep cuts, a few stabs, but nothing that was anywhere important. That was much better than my meal could say, him remaining in almost two parts and draped over an air duct. Oni-mask was in one piece, apart from his head not really being a shape anymore—he should've known to play dead or just run. If my mouth hadn't been full, some snarky comment would've been on my lips. I had other things on my lips though, and more I wanted in my mouth.
Except I was forgetting something. Ah, right. "Giru."
There was an unhappy noise from the middle of the rooftop and the sound of struggling.
It was when I turned that I remembered about spiking him to the roof by the kagune. The whole fight was a bit of a blur.
Giru froze up when I got close. The thought to just kill him then and there was tempting.
"What was said? 'The ward will pick clean any bodies by dawn', was it?" Giru's squirming redoubled in a manner that was so very pleasing. "Relaaax. I'm not going to kill you."
The possible corpse didn't look convinced. His arm was also broken again, though I wasn't sure when I had done that in the fight.
"You do business with Kaneki." Dropping a foot onto his rinkaku, I could feel it twitch through my shoe. "I can't kill you." At least not until Kaneki says otherwise.
Yanking free the shard that was pinning his kagune, I watched him scoot backward and almost collide with a vent. It was only after dropping off the edge of the roof did I hear the sound of him breaking into a dead sprint. The last of the tingle made a final pass, dancing down to bloody fingertips. I probably should've killed him.
"You didn't kill him." I spun to sarcastic applause. "Well done."
That voice—that scent. Gritting my teeth was about all I could do; why did it have have to be her?
Eto nudged a corpse with her foot. "Picky, picky. You're a sheltered little thing aren't you, only nibbling at the kagune and muscle."
I risked taking a glance down at the corpse—had I devoured that much?
"You're letting somebody else write your chapters." The playful reprimand downshifted to mockery. "Being led about on strings, a background character in your own biography. The idea of kinship can be such alluring bait, but being attached like the back cover of a book is such a stupid way to let someone control you."
"He's not-"
"No, he isn't." Eto's reprimand dipped dangerously close to a hiss, keeping me stepping back as she stepped toward me. "Because I am."
Nothing good ever followed a statement like that. Not to mention that the difference between me and her was the same as Giru to me. Unlike him though, I was smart enough to know that fighting her was asking me to level the CCG headquarters with a cherry bomb. Except the building wasn't liable to rip me in half if I made the attempt. That meant knowing the distance from here to the next rooftop was very important, running being the safest thing I could think of doing.
As if reading my mind, Eto noted that running would be 'an exercise in self-harm' with the same air one would have when noting the weather.
"So what do you want?"
"I have an opportunity that most of my usual solutions can't handle. Something you would be uniquely qualified to resolve."
"You mean the ones you didn't lose in the CCG raid." I shot back, realizing I should've kept the snarky tone out of my mouth just a little too late.
Eto only laughed. "You say that like there was anything of value in that raid. A morgue full of rabid idiots is no loss to either side."
That...I actually couldn't disagree with that. Not that it swayed me.
"I'm not going to be helping."
"No?"
"No. I am out. I have other responsibilities besides helping you run your murder party rebellion, so you can find some other solution."
A twisting mass of chattering mouths wrapped around me and my kagune with the sensation of being wrapped in a hot and angry steak, inverting me as if I was a pen running dry. And Eto—it was only technically Eto that was addressing me.
"Let me clarify." An eye the size of my head seemed to exert physical pressure in its glare. "There is not a choice involved. There are no excuses to be made. You belong to me, when and where and how I want."
My response was cut to a squeak when Eto flipped me up into the air and encircled me with teeth. Pitch black, squeezed into a ball by hot and damp flesh, barely able to suck in air. Something in my wrist went snap and I wasn't sure if it hadn't actually broken, or if I was just that starved for air and imagining things. All I could do was hope that I would be spit out and not...chewed.
Cold floor.
Floor? I pressed a palm down onto the cool surface. Floor. Heaving in a breath of cool air confirmed it beyond a doubt. Floor! Being on the floor had never been such a relief.
A bare foot kicked at my hand, hard enough to let me know that it was indeed Eto.
"Finally awake. Enjoy your little change of pace?"
No. "Could've—ah—just asked again after all that."
My wrist set itself back into its proper arrangement as I rolled onto my back. We were indoors, in some generic flavor of executive office with broken windows and toppled plastic plants. The only indication that there was something amiss was that only a faint florescent glow was trying to light the space and the faint scent of old blood.
"I don't think so." Stepping in a leisurely orbit, Eto was playing loose bandages between her fingers. "You needed the learning experience."
Now I understood the bandages; just like Monica, when Eto…transformed, she'd shred whatever she was wearing.
Stretching out her arms as if on a tightrope, Eto gave me a knowing smirk.
"So then, how did you enjoy your time inside me?"
"Like being wrapped in a wet towel and thrown down a flight of stairs."
"Ha!" Twirling with what I could only assume was childish amusement, Eto's red cloak and loose bandages fluttered briefly before settling. "Even you have your moments with words."
Getting to my feet was a little more of a shaky experience than I hoped it would be. Just how long had I been unconscious in her stomach? Actually, I really did not want a number on that. Just the fact that I had been in there long enough for her to get the entirety of my clothes damp down to my boxers was unpleasant to consider.
"Did you get a chance to visit the eleventh when you were with the CCG, Allen?"
"Eleventh ward? No. Didn't even get close."
"In that case, allow me to welcome you to the CCG's eleventh ward field office! We may even encounter bits of the staff on our way around." Eto tossed me my mask and gestured to a cloak draped over a toppled copier. "Now follow me; your work is just downstairs."
The floor below was busier, lit by industrial tripod lights and a number of Aogiri ghouls cracking open computers in a miniature production line, stacking the hard drives in repurposed briefcases. A few others were digging through file cabinets by flashlight. What drew my eye before Eto could direct me was the scorched maw of a doorway near the elevators. It was, according to her, the gold mine; 'the CCG's local bank vault'.
"So what happened?" I had an idea, but humoring her was a good idea.
The frown she replied with—only half covered by the bandages—said not to humor her.
"So somebody tampered with it, triggered some kind of scuttle charge or fail deadly and turned everything inside into a smoothie." I turned back to the ragged hole. "Can't un-detonate this."
"Except, there's a second one." Eto gestured at the opposite side, at a second secure door next to the elevator doors. "I don't intend to lose the other windfall in this nest to idiots who don't know what they're doing, and unlike any other ghoul in this city, you know how to crack this egg."
"Probably. If everybody in here was either downstairs or elsewhere." Quickly adding before I could irritate the one person who would literally eat me. "I don't want distractions. This isn't some noisemaker in a desk."
Nor was I going to leave any chance at letting anyone in Aogiri learn my trade, even if I was starting to get curious about what was in the strongroom as well.
While the Aogiri ghouls were shooed out, I took my mask off and did a little drywall work. It really was just an armored box with a door; probably added when the office was being built and bolted to the floor girders. Nothing special on the sides, apart from some conduit, thought the door had an armored glass vision slit and keypad. The whole thing was bigger than the kitchenette in my CCG hotel room had been by about a half.
Eto reappeared as I pulled down tiles from the suspended ceiling, perching up on a desk and regarding me as if I was a zoo exhibit, as she fiddled with the mesh on my mask. Mercifully, she stayed silent as I climbed up and found the main power supply of two fat cables—and more importantly, a label I could almost wholly understand. The box was commercial—assuming my reading was correct—and had been installed by the manufacturer just a little over thirty years ago. No mention of explosives or any other booby traps being built in—not that a manufacturer would admit to that. Or the CCG had modified the box.
I leaned over the side. "You wouldn't happen to know how long the CCG was in this building, would you?"
"Hm." She had my mask sitting in her lap. Did that mean anything? "No more than the last ten years. If you're wondering who was here before then, I wouldn't know."
This was definitely a commercial room then and not something specialized, unlike a bank vault or an actual armory. Which meant that it was secured against honest men, small fires, and however long it took the police to respond to a break in. And in turn, the mountings for the power cables broke with some ghoul strength to reveal white insulation…as well as taking the panel the mountings had been attached off entirely as well. On my hands and knees on the slippery-clean metal, I still had to give a fist pump even if I almost fell when my knees slid. Somebody had cheaped out on the design and sprung for a smooth polishing to cover up a shitty weld. Or I was just that strong, but either reason worked.
Now if only I didn't have her distracting scent wafting from every fold of my clothes.
A trip to grab a desk lamp and a few of tools left behind by the other Aogiri proved to be enough to draw Eto's attention into something more active. I did my best to ignore as she hopped up to the top of the box with more elegance than I had managed. Despite appreciating her curiosity and the fact that she hadn't ran off, her being in arms reach was a lot more worrying than whatever was below my feet.
And then a pair of bandaged feet slid past my line of sight, accompanied by a displeased noise from Eto. Don't laugh, don't smile, don't do anything that says you witnessed that. I dumped the whole of my attention onto the tangle of wires below and vigorously pretended to have seen and heard nothing. Given what Eto had already done, I didn't want to tempt fate and see what would happen if my composure slipped up as badly as her feet.
A sizable weight settled onto my back. "Really. Do I look like a chair?"
"I like perching in places. One can learn so much with just a little patience and a good vantage point. For example:" Eto's feet tapped out a little drumroll. "Every time you wander out of your little, ah, oasis in the sixteenth ward, you're looking for a fight worthy of a last chapter. If you're so frustrated with your position to wish for that, maybe you should stop deluding yourself."
Resolving to not take the bait, I kept my mouth shut and was thankful that she was only talking. Almost as if she had been reading my mind, there was a sharp pain at the back of my head as Eto gave it a flick.
"Are you listening? I asked how long it took to learn this."
"H-how long?" Realizing I had completely tuned her out, I looked up from using a pair of screwdrivers as a hammer and chisel. "Could be five minutes, if we're luck-ow. What!?."
"How long does it take to learn, not how long until you have something to show for it."
"Uh." I hammered again and was rewarded with the clink of a broken screw. "Few months. Don't you have what's-his-face with the red mask to pelt with questions?"
"Tatara is a one-chapter book. All his character rendered down to a couple pages, his primary motivation so very typical."
"And I'm not?"
Eto poked the back of my head, lightly this time. "Remember what I said on the night of the raid? There has never been quite a ghoul like you. An unknown quantity—a destabilizing element."
"You sure about that? Pretty sure the CCG came after you with an army." I noted, chiseling through another screw. "Could you get off me? I kinda need both hands for this."
"And here I thought you enjoyed my company."
"You knocked out half my teeth."
"Teeth grow back."
"They didn't come back as normal teeth."
Eto stood, and possibly laughed. At least, that was what it sounded like when she applied a solid kick, rattling my ribs and rolling me on my back. I wasn't surprised that she hit me, only at the suddenness of it. Unpredictable as Eto was, I should've seen this coming. She had a level of interest in me that was more than enough to make me uncomfortable.
"I wanna see."
There was an eager tone to her words, in addition to her usual 'obey or suffer' subtext. If I didn't know better, she might actually be curious—not that I had any choice in the matter. Baring my teeth in a reluctant smile was about all I could do to appease the ghoul who was all but sitting on my torso and hooking her fingers into my mouth to get a better look.
Did she really need to be this close?
Eto's left hand was a good deal colder than the other, which shouldn't have been something I cared about. My attention should've been on getting back to work so I could get back home for tomorrow, but there were other things I couldn't help but notice. Like how without bandages, the skin of her hands was soft and seemed to impart a vague taste I couldn't quite place. Or that I could feel the muscles in her legs relax and tense against me as she shifted. That I could tell, by what little light bounced up, that Eto's eyes were green and her bandage mask had slipped to revel lips that—
Nope. Stop thinking, Allen. If she suspects this is going through your head...
Somehow, I managed to force my brain into neutral long enough to chisel through the remaining screws in the room's fuse box, opening a hole I could enter. Well, it was less 'enter' and more 'empty your lungs and wriggle through'. At least Eto's curiosity didn't extend to following me down: her in close proximity was borderline dizzying. Eto in an enclosed space with me was absolutely something I did not want to experience.
Looking around, I could appreciate how correct the term 'bank vault' was. File cabinets, aluminum quinque cases, suspiciously new German rifles sitting in racks: everything needed to make the CCG bleed in any sense of the word. And if they had their way, the whole collection would've been turned to a molten puddle by the little sandbags of thermite wired up like Christmas lights. Professionally, my obligation would've been to destroy all this to deny Aogiri and Eto its use—something I had done before.
But when I pushed the slab of a door open, I had defused the whole array and stacked it on the ground. Eto could not have been happier.
Contrary to popular belief, I'm not dead, just overworked. But, that seasonal nightmare is now on the tail end, so I am back. Not sure what you all will think about this longer-format chapter, so let me know what you think. If you all don't mind longer chapters, I might stick to this format.
It feels good to be back and writing more.
