If there's anything Kaneki wants to be, he wants to be proud, bold.
Like ginger flowers, their radiance and petals blooming forward, outward, reaching towards the sides and a little to the sky.
Like Hide, who smiles like the sun and laughs like the peonies, like the carp that make their way up the river, arching and turning the bodies once towards the heavens and then back down to the water.
Kaneki doesn't have a choice in what he wants to be - and why would he? He's a pawn, played and sent forward to die, to distract others. But he didn't die, he didn't find pride in death. He didn't want to be the pawn. He wanted to be the hand that controlled the pawn, and that was something that he could do.
Or so, hoped that he could do. Shackles have always been hooked to his skin like needles to a coma patient.
His paths are already paved for him, one far from unkempt with sprawling spiders and crawling vines, and the other stretching away into the shadows like owls and their nocturnal flight. Roads? Kaneki never did stick to roads, always gliding, gliding along and following after a firefly. Lost, like the little girl in the red hood.
Followed, like the little girl. A looming beast, the glimmer of wolf fangs. The red head of a centipede.
And barely, barely does he remembers the fondness in Touka's scowl, the hope in Nishiki's scoff, the bravery in Hinami's clasped hands - the proudness in Hide's grin.
Kaneki stares after the road that reached forward, endlessly towards dusk, towards twilight and towards nothingness. He's never seen something more empty, and that's okay. Empty? Empty, like silence, like forgetfulness.
Strangely alluring, he thinks. Strangely tempting.
And then he steps forward, just like that. Glass shatters somewhere behind him and underneath his feet, but he doesn't hear it over the whispers of a woman with violet hair and bestial eyes, over the clap of a man that held pliers in one hand and a mask in the other.
His left eye ached. His ears rung. And he felt unbearably tired.
But that's okay.
It's okay.