-110: Dinner Date-
"Earth to Allen." Banjou knocked at the table. "You doing all right?"
The answer was simple, even if the reasons weren't. "Probably not."
Above, I could half hear the indistinct sounds of Kaneki and Touka getting dressed for their part of the plan. There was still about half an hour before Tsukiyama would be arriving to pick them up, so I wasn't sure why they'd want this much extra time to get prepped.
"Do… you want to talk about it? Gotta be something to make you come back from a night out and sleep in the bathtub." He raised a cup to me in a toast. "Plus, apology coffee from Anteiku. It's great stuff, but Kaneki must've been pret-ty unhappy for you to go out and get it."
The scolding I had been on the receiving end of hurt as much as the fully body bruising I still had from my little trip with Eto—bruises I hoped nobody was paying attention to. Hinami's giggling after learning where I had spent the night had been a warning of what was yet to come. I would've preferred to be yelled at rather than the much more quiet chewing out Kaneki had given me later. His being in a bad mood already had probably only made him harder on me.
"What about you and Kaneki? The two of you didn't seem that 'all right' this morning either, and he was doing that walk."
Banjou chuckled nervously, glancing up as if being watched.
"He didn't tell you? Ah, well…keep it between the two of us, ok? Kaneki didn't want to say you'd stick out like a sore thumb for it, but," there was another glance at the ceiling before he quieted his voice a little further, "he wanted to make an attempt at getting to that nurse that was working under Kanou. Just flat out kidnapping."
That was not what I expected Kaneki to do.
"Shit, everything went to hell. Aogiri showed up—White Suits, Shachi in tow on top of that—fought us and grabbed the nurse right out of our hands. Tsukiyama wasn't enough to balance out my uselessness…so yeah, was pretty bad."
Shachi with Aogiri was not what I had expected or wanted to learn. The other bad news of Aogiri going after Kanou was also not what I had hoped to hear. Knowing Kaneki, this would've wound him up like a clock. No wonder he had been doing his walk everywhere today. Shit, I really would need to make sure I'd always be on hand or mister frenchy would become his preferred ally.
Dammit, I wanted to be included in stuff like this. I could've—would've—been able to run back from the thirteenth and help.
Most importantly, helping Kaneki meant that I wouldn't have spent that night enduring Eto's dragging me around. Not to mention that his message had apparently come through while inside of her mouth. With a groan, I kneaded my head, trying to get the perverse thought that spending the night with Eto hadn't been as bad as it could've been.
Fuck.
Unable to unthink that particular idea, I settled for enduring another gulp of coffee.
"Sure you don't want to talk about it? I know trouble with the ladies isn't—"
I all but slammed the mug onto the counter, hard enough to splash my hand with what was still very hot coffee. Any reply had to wait until my hand was under cold water.
"It is not about a woman."
"Really? Two of my guys have some kind of love triangle with some lady in the sixth, Nishiki has his mystery lady, Boss and Touka keep giving each other weird looks. Thought even someone as single-minded as you would be chasing a little tail."
"I am not romantically involved. Nor am I trying to be." Saying that deadpan felt like I was making a press statement for the CIA. "Did Shachi say anything worth listening to?"
"Not really. Just come stuff that came out all flowery. And seriously, you can't be just going out every night to just roam the city; everybody here has some kind of side hobby going on."
Fighting. Downing another gulp of coffee, I managed to suppress a shudder as it burned its way down and avoided Banjou's probing words. "Guess he wasn't much for chat in the middle of an op."
Kaneki emerged from the stairwell. "Aogiri really wasn't there to negotiate."
At the sound of our snappily dressed leader, Banjou nearly dropped his coffee.
"Banjou, aren't you running late?" Despite being dressed like Bond, Kaneki still managed to look like a concerned parent. "You probably should've left by now."
That was one way to get the man to all but run out the door. I was fairly sure his trio of minions were actually supposed to pick him up, but I wasn't sure enough to actually tell Kaneki that. Besides, it was fun to see him on the spot instead of me. Kaneki perked up at the coffee.
"You didn't have to go all the way out to Anteiku for coffee." His brow furrowed. "And I didn't think they offered coffee to go."
"I asked nicely."
Yoshimura had given me a sniff and a strange look, and I had thought he was going to say no, but he had only produced a faint smile and asked Irimi to handle my request.
"You? I didn't think you had it in you to be that convincing."
"Well, very nicely. Plus...I needed to do something to try and make it right."
A long quiet crept over the tiny kitchen.
"I'd like to know what you were doing last night."
"I..." It took a moment to expunge Eto from the narrative of last night. "got into the thirteenth ward's field office. It's stripped; files, hard drives, servers, everything with data scooped up. Still can't wrap my head around how competent Aogiri can be."
"I see." Kaneki seemed to be lost in thought, nodding slowly. "Allen, going forward, I want you to clear with me before you head out."
"I understand. And…sorry. I won't do it again."
"It's not that I don't trust you." His eyes sank down to his cup—the same cup I had filled in his tiny apartment seemingly years ago. "It's just... I can't lose anyone."
Perhaps the apology carried more weight than I thought. Kaneki was silent for a few minutes, no doubt rappelling down some canyon of thought. Eventually, he came back up to worry about the entirety of the day ahead. Just like Touka, he still had misgivings about sending out Hinami with Nishiki as our detection array. The other side of the argument was still that of Hinami being a small happy radar dish and Nishiki being as protective of her as the rest of us were. Then there was who may or may not be at the restaurant, where our person could run t, how the crowd could react. Knowing Kaneki, there were also the hundred other things going through his mind that he never bothered to bring up.
Touka finally coming downstairs was in a black and gold dress was what distracted Kaneki enough to relax a little. Well, at least in two ways—Kaneki was looking a lot more pink when she stepped in for her own coffee. I couldn't deny Tsukiyma's fashion sense: they really did look like a matched pair with how they were dressed. Better them than me though, I was more than happy to not be the one dressed up.
Tossing the house keys to Kaneki as he climbed into the car Tsukiyama had somehow found, I asked if he had any final worries.
"Ah, not too many." He replied, rubbing at his jaw. "At the very least, I know I don't need to worry about you in all this."
One long walk later, everything had gone exactly how Tsukiyama had explained it. Big building, butler, shower, new clothes, waiting room. And yet there was a shiver at the bottom of my lungs and in the joints of my fingers as if I was going to give a presentation. The full body hug of my BGA kit would have been a comfort, or even the weight of my quinque. Instead, all I had was a stiffly starched suit and a cup of coffee I had been warned to not drink.
Of the three others in the room, I hadn't paid any attention to as they nibbled at what was present. At least until one, a lady who looked like her battlefield of choice was a boardroom, took the armchair my eyes were boring a hole in. I didn't have anything specific to do here: in no certain terms, both Kaneki and Tsukiyama had confirmed that I was to cause mayhem while being very.
"You should relax, foreigner. It's a formal dinner, not a trial by jury."
Tense. That had to be what I was feeling, not anxious. Despite the shiver sticking in my lungs like a bad memory, I forced what might've been a smile across my lips.
"Worst case scenario, there's always playing dead." I was suddenly very conscious of how my teeth might be visible.
At that, the smile almost slid from her face before she remarked that playing dead could probably get somebody out of a dinner. What remained fell when the wall behind me slid down into the floor. The theatrics of the entire arena were obvious even to me; cultured crowd above, gladiators below. I doubted Touka cared, but Kaneki was probably appreciating the parallel a little more, with how much he read.
Tsukiyama was— "Ladiiiies and Geeeentlemen! Tonight! For your viewing and dining pleasure, the newest additions to our fine dining society have graced us with only the choicest of guests!"
Tsukiyama was having a little too much fun doing this.
He hadn't told me the specifics of what to expect, and Kaneki had been evasive when I had asked him. Still, I had an idea of what was going to happen. Flicking my eyes back across the crowd as Shuu continued his showboating, I wondered who I'd get to kill to make a scene. The bigger the better to give Kaneki and Touka an opening to grab this 'Madam A'.
That somebody jumped into the arena as the crowd made noises like baseball fans was no surprise. Seeing a seven foot rectangle of muscle land with enough force to feel it through my shoes—that was a surprise. Just going off the proportions, this...thing...was further from human than I was. Just to make it more obvious, the vicious hacksaw it held like a toy was easily half my weight. Looked ornamental, up until it tore the stomach out of the closest man with a wet streamer of intestines.
As the cheering from above spiked, I shoved aside the woman and stepped forward. Not for her sake. There were only three lives in this building who I truly wanted stay that way.
"Cutting line not nice... wait y'turn." Evidently, there had been a trade of brain for brawn. "Bad boys git punsh'ment stick."
My first thought had just been to use my ghoul skin to deflect the rectangle's overhead chop, until some subconscious alarm howled and hauled me to the side. A flash of heat sheared down my arm, and the crowd's noise hit a new tempo.
Quinque? I kept glancing back and forth between the now proud rectangle and the ragged scrap of flesh and cloth that had previously been attached to my arm. Where the fuck did these people get a quinque?
Of course there had to be a quinque; my luck wouldn't be complete otherwise. Above me, I could hear someone directly cheering on the rectangle. An icy feeling sprouted in my gut, as the horizontal follow up forced me to leap backwards. Not thinking, I used my injured arm to catch my balance, only for my hand to leave a bloody slide mark and me smacking my cheek into the tile. Kicking myself for ending up on the ground was enough for the icy feeling to morph into something murderous. The chanting from above was more than enough to have it rip free from its cocoon.
My kagune ripping through my skin and shirt was drowned out, but the scream from the rectangle cut the noise like a knife. The spike from my kagune had gone most of the way through the meat between his neck and shoulder of his weapon arm. Squealing like a stuck pig, a broken wrist was the last bit encouragement for the sweat-damp handle to end up in my grip. It was far heavier than I thought it would be; my quinque was a feather by comparison. As the noise of the crowd started to shift to alarm, I made a two handed baseball swing and sent everything above the rectangle's chin into the crowd.
The cheers cut off as sharply as the screaming.
"What's wrong, you fucks?" I had to use my kagune as leverage in order to point the quinque up at the crowd as a serrated accusation. "You were just chanting for me to kill him! There's your corpse! Where's your cheering now?"
Some of the people shifted back from the railings, and and uncomfortable murmur rippled through the crowd. A sharp whiff of ozone wafted through my nose as I swung the kagune around. And then the simple, simple solution came to mind.
"I know what it is." I looked up at the crowd with a serrated smile. "I didn't kill the right person. That means all I need to do is kill the right person. Right?"
After jumping into the stands, everything went a little...hazy. The sensation was that of watching a favorite movie at triple speed: knowing exactly what was happening through familiarity instead of the moment.
Focus snapped back when Kaneki's kagune lanced in. High to low, three tendrils intended a stab intended as a killing blow. My own kagune intercepted—the quinque was no longer in my hands—deflecting it into the a pillar. And then a duplicate kagune swept in, only to be stopped dead by a third duplicate. Three of Kaneki? I wasn't crazy, or at least not that crazy. The first duplicate swiped in again and were halted with the sound of raw steak hitting a wall.
"I got you, Allen." Kaneki's voice from behind.
So Kaneki had my back.
Ahead in opposition, a pair of ghouls regarded us through similarly striped masks.
"Just as Papa said, the 'one like us'. " The duo traded off sentences. "But he did not tell us there was another 'one eye'."
Behind them, a woman ran for the only exit we had left open, stumbling as she glanced back.
Touka cut off Kaneki's syllable with a terse confirmation that she was on it before launching herself around us by way of bouncing off a wall.
"Follow her." Kaneki's response was terse as he held back the other two. "I have them."
I barked an affirmative and sprinted between the duo. Regardless of whether Kaneki had them or not, I swept the legs of the one on my left as I went. Cursing the cheap dress shoes as I slid, a couple seams on the suit gave up following Touka's route through open doors and bounding onto the restaurant's rooftop. It took me two complete turns before spotting figures on a rooftop.
Touka and Nishiki ceased their passive aggressive snark when I skidded onto the roof. Nishiki nodded to me and then down at his catch. His leg was wrapped in an aquamarine kagune and had his foot planted squarely between the shoulder blades of who I guessed was Madam A. Only starting to come down from the restaurant fight and not trusting my voice, I nodded to both of them instead.
"Where's your radar?" Touka asked, getting me to realize Hinami wasn't on the roof.
Nishiki jerked his head to the side. "Hiding out back there. I wasn't going to carry deadweight."
In rapid succession, the trio of matched kagunes arrived. First came the twin ghouls, landing in near perfect unison and silence on the furthest edge of our rooftop. Kaneki came down with all the grace of an airstrike somewhere behind me, but close enough that I felt him land. I kept my focus locked on the twins, aware I was the first person they'd have to fight through if they really wanted to free the woman under Nishiki's foot. Unmasked, I watched their eyes flick over each of us in turn. And then they stepped back, and turned.
"What are you doing?" An unfamiliar voice rose from somewhere from shin height, "You're supposed to protect-"
The ghoul on the right cocked her head. "Papa said that if push came to shove, we should just discard you."
The ghoul on the left shrugged "No point in risking our skin for something like you."
And then, they were gone. Someone behind me sighed, either in relief of disappointment. Nishiki noted how anticlimactic the whole thing had been. Kaneki, quietly, repeated the same thought that was crawling through my mind.
"Two more...Why did he make two more?"
