Tokyo Ghoul: Remnant

by With Death Comes More Death

After being defeated in his fight against Arima, Kaneki blacks out and wakes up in the world of Remnant... (Discontinued in favor of re)

8. Chapter 7: The Want to Know

Hey guys and welcome to the real seventh chapter of Tokyo Ghoul: Remnant.

First off, because I want to put a date on when I finished writing this, how have your holidays been? Good, I hope

Wait, what was that? You don't celebrate any of those holidays?

Well, to you, I say that you're a lucky son-of-a-gun because I hate Christmas. Mainly because I feel that the entire day has been commercialized to all hell and is nothing more than a cash grab by corporations, but that's a rant for another time.

Well pessimistic rant about how the general populace has made Christmas all about buying the love of the people that should already love unconditionally, I need to address the elephant in the room.

You may all be somewhat pissed on how I played with your heartstrings with that last post, but if it makes any of you feel better, I got a good laugh out of it and that's all that matters.

Wait, what was that? You think I'm being a bit of an asshat? Well, in the words of Alucard from Hellsing Ultimate: Abridged, "... I'm not apologizing."

So anyways, onto the actual chapter.

To put it bluntly, it's a fourteen (maybe fifteen) thousand word chapter of plot setup and dialogue. One that, fun fact here, I wrote almost entirely on my phone.

Why? I don't know why. My computer works fine except for the fact it drops my wifi signal at times. I just decided that it was better to write most of this on my phone, and totally not because I had school and this allowed me to work on my story there instead of doing my work.

Yeah, totally… Eh, I have a low D in pre-calculus.

Personal woes aside, I need to thank you all for a personal win, which you guys should already know by now. You guys got me over the half a century mark and I couldn't be more happier.

*Wipes proud tear from corner of my eye.*

So, how about we get this party started? You know, after the mandatory disclaimer that I swear will get more aggressive with every passing chapter.

-Mandatory Disclaimer-

How many times do I have to say this? I don't own either of these series.

-Chapter 7: The Want to Know-

Kaneki felt the familiar sting of pain begin to course through him as he felt something slam into the very center of his stomach. His body immediately lurched forwards and his hands soon found their way down to the area the initial blow had impacted.

"C'mon, why don't you hit back?" he heard the person responsible for the pain he was feeling ask him.

He opened his mouth to respond to his attacker, but whatever argument he had prepared was cut off when he felt something collide with the left side of his face and sent him sprawling onto the floor.

Pain radiated from the affected portion of his face like a steady heartbeat and if it were not for the fact his hands were already preoccupied clenching at the also aching flesh of his stomach, he was sure that he would've been clutching the pained side of his face like it could actually remedy his affliction.

A frustrated growl reached his ears right before he felt something much more solid and bumpy smack right into the upper portion of his left bicep.

"You're seriously just going to let me beat up on you?" his attacker spat that question out at him with more venom than a DeathStalker's sting.

"Wow, you're even weaker than I thought you'd be," the attacker continued to taunt him mercilessly. "Then again, I probably shouldn't have expected much from you to begin with, especially since you do nothing but read those stupid books all day."

Kaneki grit his teeth as he felt the shallow pool of anger that had been welling up inside of him the entire exchange suddenly double in size. He wanted to retaliate, it didn't matter if it was physically or verbally, he just wanted to do something to defend himself.

Yet despite the ever-growing puddle of resentment that was continuing to build up inside of him, not a single muscle in his body moved as the words of his mother played once more in his head.

"It's better to be hurt than to hurt others."

Whenever he'd ever be tempted about hurting another person, those words would always ring through his head and remind him that there was never a need for a good person to hurt another, which allowed him the strength to continue lay where he was with his eyes clenched tightly shut.

"Still not going to do anything, huh?" his attacker spat at him, both proverbially and literally.

"Well, how about I-" the attacker began but the sound of his voice was suddenly replaced with the sound of flesh hitting more flesh and then was immediately followed by a pained yelp.

"Well, how about I get my face punched in?" an all too familiar voice mocking voice rang in his ears, which prompted his once shut eyes to fly open and snap up towards where the voice had came from. "Was that what you were about to say?"

There, staring down at his attacker with the same condescending look to her eyes that she always had, was a face that he never expected to see come to his rescue. Kaneki could only stare up at his savior with wide grey eyes as her lips suddenly dawned a wry smile that somehow managed to match the condescension in her mismatched eyes.

"If not, then I'm going to have to advise you to not take any tests any time soon," she continued to mock the downed boy who had been harassing him. "Y'know, since that would mean you're too dumb to even state the obvious."

"N-Neopolitan?" Kaneki stuttered out the name of his savior in a tone that he was sure didn't match the shock he was actually feeling.

He watched with a completely dumbfounded expression as she turned her head towards him and stared down at him with a kind of gaze that he never expected to ever see her use, especially directed towards him.

In the past, whenever she turned her eyes towards him, they would always be filled with the same look she had just given his attacker. This time, however, those same eyes were filled with a softness he had never seen her use with anyone.

Having been so accustomed to the 'holier-than-thou' look that had always made him flinch from how belittled it made him feel, he could only gawk at her in shock as she stared back at him. They remained in their respective dazes for what felt like an eternity, before it was finally when she took a step towards him and knelt down so that their eyes were on the same level as one another.

Reaching up, she placed a warm, soft hand onto his still aching face and caressed it lightly. Almost as if it was like a priceless antique that would shatter when put under too much of an outside force.

"Haise, tell me something," the girl in question called out to him suddenly, the sound of her uncharacteristically serious voice breaking the trance she herself had put him in. "Do you like getting beat up and insulted like that?"

"Wha-what, of course not!" Kaneki exclaimed defensively, completely shocked that she would even assume something like that about him.

Neopolitan shot him an unconvinced look and countered with, "Then why do you let yourself get beat up like that?"

He was half-tempted to ask her why she of all people cared about what happened to him, he even opened his mouth to do so, but he stopped himself and opted for a much more appropriate answer that consisted of shifting his eyes down away from hers.

"You're really going to give the girl who saved you from a bully the silent treatment?" she questioned him in a disbelieving tone that had the tiniest bit of a mocking undertone to it.

Sensing that she would probably never let the subject go if he didn't say something, he opened his mouth and half-heartedly let out a response of, "You don't need to worry about me, I'm fine."

"Really now?" the young girl in front of him scoffed at his response and countered with. "You don't look so 'fine' from where I'm standing."

"I'm fine, I swear," he tried once more to assure her of his condition and as if to prove that point, he shot her a reassuring smile and tried to push himself back up to his feet.

His arms wobbled heavily as he tried to do so, silently threatening to give out under him as he put a majority of his total weight onto them, but he still managed to get himself back to a position that somewhat resembled a standing. He said 'somewhat' because the moment he actually got his feet back under him, they immediately gave out and caused him to fall face-first towards the ground he had just gotten himself off of.

Kaneki clamped his eyes shut in preparation for the wave of pain that he believed was coming, but was surprised when he felt something warm and soft wrap itself around the upper portion of his body instead. His eyes shot open to see what had prematurely stopped his plunge back onto the cold hard dirt, and what he found caused his already wide eyes to widen even more.

Neopolitan, at some point during his collapse, had took a step forwards and caught him in her arms.

"Y'know, if that was your attempt at trying to reassure me that you're okay, then I have to say you're doing a pretty shoddy job of it," she joked lightly as she held him close to her body.

In fact, he felt close enough to her that he began to wonder if she could feel the rapid beating of his heart inside his chest.

"Why are you doing this?" he finally asked the question that had been on his mind ever since she first appeared, his voice being shaky and uneven as he spoke.

Kaneki had never been very close with Neopolitan and the same could be said vice versa. They hadn't even talked to one another for more than a couple seconds up until now and when they did talk, she would always speak to him as if he was one level below her. It made him feel as though she thought of him as nothing more than a pebble in a sea of gravel, and he honestly believed that assumption to be the case.

So why was she going out of her way to help an insignificant person like him?

Was it out of pity for him? A sense of justice that told her to step in on a such one-sided exchange? A simple case of fleeting curiosity?

He didn't know the answer to that question, but that didn't stop him from wanting to know.

"Ah, ah, ah~" she whispered into his ear in a singsong voice before continuing on to say. "You didn't answer my question, so I don't see any reason to answer yours."

Kaneki briefly contemplated not telling her what she wanted to know, but decided against it when he realized that his want to know her answer trumped his want to keep his secret.

"M-my mother," he replied somberly, averting his eyes back towards the ground as an all too familiar pit in his stomach formed once more.

"Your mother?" she repeated quizzically. "What does your mother have to do with you not being able to defend yourself?"

He didn't respond to the question immediately. He instead opted to take a couple of seconds to figure out what he wanted to say. Thankfully, Neopolitan allowed him the time he needed to think of an answer.

"My mother, as you probably already know," he began, taking a moment to swallow the lump that had taken residence in his throat before he resumed speaking, "died a couple of months ago."

"Well, yeah," she cut in suddenly, before bluntly adding, "I mean, you wouldn't be stuck in an orphanage if your parents were still alive after all."

Kaneki flinched at the bluntness of the statement and silently wondered how she could say such a thing so casually, but he continued on with his answer nonetheless.

"When she was still alive, she worked most of the day and all throughout the night to support the two of us." A small smile crossed his lips as he reminisced about his past, "She would even make paper roses in her free time that she would sell for more money."

"Thanks to all of the work she had to do, she rarely had enough time or time to talk with me very much," he stated, his voice getting softer with every word that escaped from his mouth. "But whenever she could, she would always help me read the books in my late father's study, and she always did so without complaining once."

"She was the light of my world." Kaneki could feel tears form in the corner of his eyes as he approached the final part of his explanation, "So when she died, I decided that I would honor some of the last words she ever said to me."

"'It's better to be hurt yourself than to hurt others'," he recited the words that his mother drilled into his head like he had said it a million times before, which wasn't true as this was the first time he's ever said those words outside of his own head. "So that's why I let myself get beat up like that."

Neopolitan remained deathly silent after he finished his explanation, he assumed that she was trying to find the words for a proper response.

Then suddenly, she unwrapped her arms from around him and moved her hands to his shoulders, where she gripped them tightly with her fingers and pushed him away from her body so that he was now facing her face-to-face.

"You know," she began in an uncharacteristically stern tone, "I'm starting to wonder if your mother cared about you at all."

Kaneki wasn't at all surprised by Neopolitan's reaction to his explanation, even he knew that those shouldn't be words a mother should say to their child for any reason. He learned that through watching the caretakers as they interacted with the other, much younger children.

Whenever he watched them, he would always take note as to how they would always never fully condemn the use of violence to the children they were charged with when there was an altercation. They would always explain to the child that there were times where violence was appropriate and times where using it was inappropriate.

Seeing that they were government officials, who were probably all screened for their effectiveness at being surrogate parents before being hired, he assumed that they knew what they were talking about when they spoke with children. Well, at the very least, more than her single mother who had only ever one child ever.

"What kind of mom would tell their own son that it was okay to be a punching bag?" she continued on in a tone that made it clear she was angry.

"First, she leaves you all alone in this orphanage and then she tells you to go live your life by that bull?" she ranted on, "What kind of mother does that to a kid, much less their own son?"

He didn't argue any of those claims because they were all valid points. There were times where he himself would question his decision to follow his mother's words, but then he would always remember that he didn't believe in those fleeting words because they made sense. He believed in them because they were told to him by his mother, the one person in the world he felt truly cared about him.

"Could you do me a favor and forget that she ever said that to you?" she asked him in a way that made the question seem more like a command than a suggestion.

"I…" he began, but the answer died in his throat as numerous questions surged to the forefront of his mind.

What should he do? How should he answer? Did she really care about his wellbeing, and if she did why?

Those were some of the questions that he had asked himself mentally, the most prevalent of which being the last.

It made no sense to him, why did she so suddenly care if he got himself hurt or not? They hadn't even really talked to one another in length up until five minutes ago, and when she did actually speak to him, she would do so with the highest contempt imaginable.

So why? What could make her so suddenly take interest in his safety?

He didn't know the answer. No matter how many times he racked his brain for one, no answer was found.

Kaneki wanted to know the answer. He wanted to know what possessed the girl in front of him to go and denounce the one thing he had left of his mother to cling onto.

So he balled his hands up into tightly clenched fists and asked, "You… you never answered my question did you?"

"Huh, what are you talking about?" she countered with a question of her own, using a tone that made him really wonder if she forgot about it or not.

"Earlier, I asked you why you were helping me and you said that you wouldn't answer my question until I answered yours," he reminded her as he tried his best to keep his voice even. "Now that I answered your question, I think it's only fair that I don't give an answer to yours until you answer mine."

The young girl who was currently holding him by his shoulders didn't respond to the question immediately and instead took a couple of seconds to contemplate an answer.

Then, after about thirty seconds of tension-filled silence between them, she opened her mouth and gave her response, "Sorry, but I don't think it's the right time for me to tell you that."

"T-then, I guess you're not going to get my answer either," he countered in a vain attempt to sound like someone she should take seriously, an attempt he felt failed the moment the first words left his mouth.

Kaneki could feel the hair on the back of his neck stand on end as tension filled the air around them once more, resulting in another bout of silence between them that was as tense as the atmosphere, which was eventually broken by an exasperated sigh that came from the girl in front of him.

"Fine then," she stated as she released the grip she had on his shoulders, prompting his still unsteady legs to finally give way under him from the lack of support.

This time however, he was able to shift his weight so that he would fall onto his backside instead of his face, which he assumed to be a less painful alternative. The pain that resulted still caused him to clench his eyes shut, but he still found it to be the correct decision.

"If you're going not going to give me an answer now then I guess I have no other choice," she began as he felt something plop down to his immediate right, which prompted him to open his eyes and cast them towards where it originated.

Those same grey eyes widened when he found Neopolitan sitting next to him with her eyes cast directly towards him, flashing him a smile that didn't have its usual mocking feeling to it. Then almost as if the world was attuned with his own emotion, a ray of sunlight broke through the overcast that had plagued the sky above them the entire day, and fell directly onto the both of them.

"I'll wait until the day you're ready to give me an answer," she told him in a voice that made his heart skip in his chest, "until then, you can bet your butt that I'm never going to leave you alone."

---

Kaneki's eyes shot open and he found himself staring at an all too familiar plain-white ceiling, which he knew to be white despite the current darkness his room was enshrouded in. His body subconsciously sat itself up and his thumb immediately made its way over on top of his thumb, which allowed him to press down on it and release an extremely comforting crack to ring through confines of his room.

'What…?' he began to ask himself mentally as his mind tried to wrap itself around the event he just saw.

There was no doubt in his mind that what he just saw was a memory of a real event that happened in the past. The memory didn't belong to him however, it instead belonged to 'Haise Sasaki', the man that Neo woman believed him to be during their initial confrontation.

From what he saw in the memory, he and Haise had somewhat similar upbringings. His mother was exactly like his own and seemingly worked herself to death trying to raise him, all the while spewing the same naive bullshit that had lead to most, if not all of the tragedy in his life.

Another thing he noticed to be similar in both scenarios was that Haise seemed to hold a deep love for literature as well, which subsequently lead to him developing an introverted personality that lead to him getting bullied by the some of the other kids his age.

Yet despite the similarities between them, he could still see several things that differed from his story to Haise's.

The first and most obvious to him being that he hadn't been sent to stay with his aunt after his mother had died, and had been sent to live in an orphanage instead. He really couldn't tell what the reasoning behind that decision was, but he assumed that either one of two things happened: either his aunt didn't want to be responsible for him like in his universe, or something had happened to his aunt that made it impossible for her to do so.

The next and less obvious change that he noticed between the two scenarios was that Haise felt older than he was when his own mother had died, but since the memory didn't specify how long it had been since the death of its owner's mother, he really couldn't tell if that statement was true or not.

Then came the biggest difference between their two upbringings, the girl who had walked right up to his other persona, saved him from a bully and uttered the words Haise had wanted to hear the most after the death of his mother, all in one fell swoop, Neo.

Kaneki didn't need to see all of Haise's memories to know that there had been something between the two of them. Hell, he didn't even need the memory he had just seen to figure that much out. Truthfully, the only thing he needed to do so was the pain the first of his inner persona's memories, the first one that he had personally witnessed, gave him.

There was no way a simple acquaintance could illicit such sorrow from him, not even during the time where he was still naive and weak. He was even able to pick up on some regret in the woman's voice when she ran Haise through with her blade, and he noticed some more during his encounter with her at the settlement.

So, it only made sense for the white-haired ghoul to assume that there was something going on between the two. Having only gone through two of Haise's memories up until now, including the one that he just experienced a few moments ago, he really couldn't tell how far that relationship went.

Did the two keep it strictly platonic, or did it enter a much more intimate realm at some point down in the future? Without more information, he would never be able to know and he'd be lying if he said that there was no part of him that didn't want to.

To put it bluntly, Ken Kaneki wanted to know about Haise Sasaki.

He wanted to know the story of the man whose body he was supposedly in, and the part Neo played in it; the reason why she wanted to help him break free from his mother's words, and the answer Haise gave to her proposal to do just that; and he definitely wanted to know what had happened between the two of them to cause her betrayal, and if his supposed other self had any indication it was coming beforehand.

It was almost as if he was reading one of Sen Takatsuki's novels again, where he would scan every sentence on the page multiple times, trying to find and understand every little detail the book offered between its covers.

The only difference being that, unlike those days he spent cooped up in his apartment reading line after line of Takatsuki's works for hours on end, he was the main protagonist of the story. Having read all of her books, he knew that was a distinction would not end well for him whatsoever, which meant that he was more than a little wary of delving into Haise's memories.

Despite knowing the dangers, Kaneki still found himself wanting to know, something he attributed to the fact that he knew looking into Haise's past just might give him some clue as to how exactly he ended up in Remnant in the first place.

He had already spent months living and learning at Beacon Academy, and he still wasn't any closer to finding a way back to his world than when he first arrived, which he recently realized might be due to a lack of effort on his part.

Ozpin was supposed to be the one who would go out and look for information on possible ways someone could go from one universe to an entirely different one, but that didn't mean he should be sitting around just waiting for the headmaster to find something.

The white-haired half ghoul now knew that if he wanted to get back to his universe and the friends he had been forced to leave behind, he would have to actually start looking for the information himself too.

Though something about the entire situation did bother him. Why was he just realizing this after having already spent two months here in Remnant?

He both figuratively and literally shook that thought out of his head the moment it crawled its way up to the surface, knowing that wasting time trying to figure out why he wasted time in the first place, wasn't a good way to spend the few hours of free time he had.

Knowing this, Kaneki slipped himself out from the confines of his bed and got himself ready to go out into the town, which basically meant that he got himself dressed in clothes other than his uniform, put his medical eyepatch on and slipped the mask Uta had made for him underneath his shirt, before exiting his dorm room.

---

"You know, I don't think I've seen Weiss this excited for something ever," Blake commented as she watched the usually calm and collected heiress of the Schnee fortune literally bounce up and down with anticipation for the day to come.

"I don't know, she seemed more excited about that mission we were sent on a couple weeks back," her blonde-haired partner, Yang, replied with the smallest hint of an amused smile on her lips, "Though, that could just be because it was more surprising."

"Yeah, I can see what you mean," the dark-haired teen conceded with a slight nod of her head. "Doing something like going out to 'welcome' the new students transferring in for the Vytal Festival seems like it would be right up her alley, doesn't it?"

"If by 'welcome', you mean go check out the competition for the combat tournament," Yang began in a tone that made it clear that she was able to catch the underlying message of the statement, "then yeah, I would have to say so."

A motherly sigh escaped from the blonde-haired teen before she added, "Well, I guess I should give her credit for her determination, and I suppose it would help to have a clue as to what we might face in the tournament before it actually starts."

"You're not going to get any arguments from me on that front," Blake replied in her usual deadpan tone. "I just wish she would actually just say that outright instead of hiding it behind fake hospitality."

The Vytal Festival combat tournament, the one time in the year where students from all over Remnant could leave the country their academy resided in and convene on a single location to do battle with one another, all for the sake of claiming bragging rights for the academy they represented.

It was the one event that almost every student in Beacon seemed genuinely excited for, something Blake heavily attributed to the fact that they were all heavily reminded about its importance every day during combat class by Professor Goodwitch.

That, and the fact that winning the tournament gave you the right to be called the undisputed best hunter in training in all of the four kingdoms, a title that was never taken lightly by anyone in Remnant. That title would give the winner the respect of millions of people all over the world, which was a detail that happened to be the reason most of everyone competed, since respect is the one thing that every person in their mid-to-late teens wanted in some way or the other.

She too wanted to win for the sake of gaining respect, but unlike her snowy-haired teammate, she only wanted the respect of a single person, not millions.

"You two ready to go?" the two partners nearly jumped at the sound of their ever-cheery team leader's voice coming from directly besides them.

Upon seeing their reaction, the young scythe wielder let out a guilty chuckle and added, "Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you guys."

"Don't worry about it," Yang waved off her younger sister's worries both physically and verbally.

"You and I both know that I've pulled worse on you when we were younger," the blonde-haired brawler continued, tone still cheery and amused as ever despite having just been scared out of her shoes a few seconds prior.

"Yeah," Ruby agreed, a nostalgic smile crawling onto her lips as she continued, "though I'd think I have to scare you a lot more times for me to actually get even with you."

"So, are you two ready to go?" she asked the two awkwardly immediately afterwards, probably in an attempt to change the topic to something that didn't bring back embarrassing memories.

"Yeah, we were just waiting for you to get back actually," Blake answered in a matter-of-fact tone.

"So where's Kaneki?" she continued to ask with a bit too much curiosity in her voice for her own liking. "I thought you were going to his room to go get him."

"That's the thing…" the young team leader trailed off as she began scratching the back of her head sheepishly, "... he kinda, sorta wasn't there."

"What, did you try calling him then?" the bow-wearing bookworm questioned her team leader further.

The young teen nodded and answered with, "I did, but he said that he was busy running some errands and wouldn't be back until sometime in the afternoon."

Blake legitimately didn't know how to respond to that statement, mainly because this was the first time in the two months that Kaneki had been enrolled in Beacon, that he was too busy to not be able to spend time with the four of them.

In the past, whenever she would suggest they do something with one another, he would always put what he was doing at the time on the backburner and give her all of his attention. He would do the same with the others too, so she knew that she wasn't receiving any special treatment. It happened so consistently that it actually became a part of what she understood to be Kaneki as a person.

So for him to be suddenly unable to join them, worried her to no end, especially after she had seen him with tears streaming down his cheeks just a few days prior. If the sight of one of hte most stone faced people she had ever met, crying silently to himself wasn't enough to make her worry about him, then the words he said as those tears were shed definitely did.

"If it's as damaging then emotional things have always had a greater effect on me… I wonder, if that's why it hurts so much right?"

What did he mean by that? What had happened during the time she left him in those woods and time she found him sitting on a nearly destroyed building? What had caused the pain he was feeling?

Those were all questions she asked herself the moment she heard those words come from his mouth, and continued to keep asking herself to this day.

And while Blake wanted to know the answers to those questions, she also knew that they were all very personal questions, and that it would take a much larger relationship with him than the one she currently had.

As of right now, she considered her half-ghoul teammate as a friend on a level higher than her other friends, but that was only because she had a lot more in common with him than she did the others, and so they ended up spending a lot more of their free time with one another.

Yet despite that fact, she was still reluctant to call him a friend she was very close with. Something that she attributed to the fact that, like most of her other friends in general, they really didn't know a lot about one another.

She knew what Kaneki liked and he knew what she liked, and it just so happened that they liked a lot of the same things. That was enough for her to consider him a friend, and the same was probably true vice versa, but there was a difference between being a close friend and being just a friend.

Being 'just a friend', meant that two people were close enough that they could actively spend time with another and enjoy each other's presence, but that was essentially it.

Close friends, however, could tell one another their deepest thoughts without a single moment of hesitation; they could understand what the other was thinking without needing a single word to be spoken; and they could most definitely ask the kinds of questions that the ones the bow-bearing bookworm had festering in the recesses of her mind without batting an eye.

She knew that she would have to get closer to the young man to get the answers she wanted, and she didn't know if she wanted that to happen.

The problem wasn't that she was opposed to the idea of strengthening her friendship with him. She doubted anyone in their right mind would give up the opportunity to have a friendship of that kind and she definitely didn't mind if he'd be the one to fill that role, but there was still the problem of him wanting to return to his own world.

Did she really want to grow close to him knowing that there was a chance he might up and disappear one day?

That question, just like the ones that came before it, was one she didn't quite know the answer to yet, but there was one thing she did know.

It was that Blake Belladonna wanted to know about Ken Kaneki.

She wanted to know what made the white-haired young man tick, what happened to him in the past that made him the person he was today, what motivated him as a person, what he thought about the world around the world, and so much more.

It was almost like those few times in her life where she would be reading a book non-stop, not because the book itself was something that she wanted to read at all the times, but because she found herself so completely enraptured by one of the characters that it contained, that it was hard to stop scanning line after line for details about that one character alone.

The only difference being that, unlike those countless hours she spent tucked away in some far off corner of her hometown neglecting her combat training so she could read one of her precious books, the character she found herself so enraptured with was a living, breathing human being that she could interact with, and not a figment of imagination who was trapped inside the paper confines of a novel.

He could speak to her and she would be able to give a response back that he could actually hear. She could interact with him and it could greatly affect his personality as a whole. She could touch him and feel what he-

"Hey Blake," she heard the all too familiar voice of her blonde-haired partner break through the wall of thoughts that she had unintentionally put up around herself after Rub's announcement, "you still in there?"

Said bow-bearing bookworm blinked herself out of her own self-induced daze and focused her attention onto Yang, letting out a shaky response of, "Y-yeah."

"Really?" Yang asked her in a voice dripping with such a large amount of skepticism that she could feel it radiating off of her like it was body heat.

"It really didn't seem like it from where I was standing," she continued, carrying the skepticism she had earlier over to what she was currently saying. "It kind of seemed like you spaced out when you heard Kaneki wasn't coming with us."

"And forgive me for jumping to conclusions here, but I just couldn't stop myself from thinking that one might've caused the other," she pressed on further, her tone taking on a light teasing tone. "So tell me, my dear oh stoic partner of mine, could you actually be upset that he can't come along?"

For some reason, Blake could feel her cheeks heat up in embarrassment at Yang's claim and she opened her mouth to shoot back a counter, an act she found herself immediately regretting the moment she tried to do so when she heard herself stutter in the beginning, "I-I was just wondering where he was, is all."

Her partner stared at her with skeptical violet eyes, but decided to play along with what she was saying for one of two reasons: either she actually believed what Blake had said, or she was just playing along so she could tease her further.

"Yeah, I am curious as to what he means by 'going out to run some errands'," Yang mused out loud to herself. "Knowing him and his past track record, I bet he's doing something incredibly dangerous and life-endangering."

"You know something like trying to kill fifteen King Taijitu on a cliffside at the same time, or fighting off a posse of gun-wielding gangsters while on top of a skyscraper that's on the verge of exploding," she listed off possible scenario after possible scenario to Blake, none of which actually affecting her very much due to her confidence in him and his overall combat ability. "Oh, I know, maybe he's jumping out a burning BullHead while brawling with a group of assassins sent to kill him."

"Or maybe, he's out actually running errands like he said he would," Blake cut in, knowing that her partner would probably never stop unless she did. "You know not everything he does is intrinsically dangerous."

"You would know, wouldn't you?" the blonde-haired bombshell asked in a way that sounded strangely suggestive to her.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, I'm just saying that you two have been spending a lot of time with one another recently, or at the very least, more so than usual," she explained. "It kind of makes a woman wonder if there's something more than just a two person book club going on when we're not around."

The dark-haired teen fought the blush that once again threatened to seep up to the surface as she opened her mouth to respond, but after remembering what happened last time, she quickly stopped to compose herself before speaking.

"I-it maybe true that he and I have been spending a good amount of our time together," she began in a forced calm tone that was robbed of all credibility by the stutter that started her words, "but I assure you that we haven't done anything of that nature."

Ruby, who had been content with watching the two older teens go back and forth with one another, was now looking at the two with a quizzical expression before asking the two of them in a tone of the same vein as her stare, "Wait, I don't understand, what 'nature' are you guys talking about?"

---

'Why do I have the feeling that someone's talking about me?' Kaneki asked himself, scrunching his nose to force down the sneeze that was threatening to break through to the surface as he approached the front doors of his second destination of the day.

He shrugged the feeling off before opening one of the two doors that made up the double door that lead inside. The moment he did so, he was instantly assaulted by the all too familiar smell of books, lots and lots of books.

Vale Public Library. It was the city's first ever library and the second largest in the city, only second to the more recently built library at Beacon Academy.

'When was the last time I stepped into a library?' the snowy-haired teen asked himself as he walked into the stone-brick made building, his dull gray eyes naturally started to scan the spines of the books that lay on the tall wooden shelves that surrounded him the moment he stepped inside.

That was actually a really good question. He seriously couldn't remember the last time he even thought about going into a library on his own fruition. There were times where he would have to go to Beacon's library to check some books out for studying, but he found that he could always rely on either Weiss or Blake to have the certain book on hand already, so he never actually went to go check it out in favor of actually studying the material he was given.

His lack of presence inside of a library was also due to the fact that he was so extremely far behind his class in terms of his knowledge of Remnant's history, like so much so that he would look probably fare worse than a child at one of his history exams, that he had to spend a good majority of his first weeks in Beacon reading through textbook after textbook, trying to get to a point where he was somewhat close to the level his other classmates were on at the beginning of the year.

There was also the fact that he had been spending a good portion of his free time, or at the very least the free time he didn't spend studying, with his teammates. He very well could've considered this to be a contributing factor to his lack of library time in the past month, but decided against when he realized that doing so would be labeling that time he spent with them as a mandatory thing he had to do because he had no other choice in the matter.

Kaneki felt that saying that would be the same as taking all of the relationships he's built up until this point, pouring an entire gallon of gasoline on top of all of them, burning them until they're nothing but a pile of ashes, and then throwing a live hand grenade on top of said ashes for good measure.

The time he spent with them was not time he felt was at all wasted. He truthfully felt that he needed the time he spent with his teammates, and not just the big moments they shared with one another. He felt as though he needed every single second he spent with them.

The reason as to why he felt that was completely lost to him, but he couldn't deny that was what he felt.

"Ah, excuse me, young man?" he heard a soft feminine voice call out to him from outside the haze of thoughts that he had built around himself by mistake.

He blinked out of his momentary haze and found that he was staring at a row of books on a shelf whose authors all seemed to be under the letter 'M'. There staring right at him from between two other books was the leather spine of a book called Unreliable Truth, written by someone, presumably a woman named Maureen Murdock.

"Young man, excuse me, are you alright?" the same voice that stripped him of his earlier stupor rang out once more in his ear, prompting the artificial half ghoul to glance over to where it had come from.

There staring at him with a pair of crimson-red eyes, which were angled slightly downwards due to the fact that she was slightly taller than he was, was a woman who seemed to be somewhere in her late twenties, or early thirties.

"Um, yeah, I'm fine," he replied in an almost robotic tone due to his vast experience with similar scenarios in the past.

"Really?" she asked in a tone that made it clear that she didn't buy he was saying. "You've been staring at that bookshelf for fifteen straight minutes now."

The artificial half ghoul let out a sheepish chuckle and flashed her a smile of the same emotional vein before replying with, "Yeah, I sort of have a tendency of doing that, so you don't need to worry yourself too much about it."

"So you're a bit of an airhead then? Didn't really expect that."

Ignoring the comment about his tendency to lose focus from time to time, he raised a curious brow and asked, "What exactly did you expect then?"

"One of those strong, serious types who somehow manage to remain focused on something despite what's going on around them," she stated with a matter-of-fact tone to her voice.

"Truth be told, I'm actually kind of disappointed," the woman added with a tad bit of disappointment to her voice before he could voice his response. "We don't get a lot of those types around here and I really wanted to see how many of your buttons I could get away with pushing before you finally stopped me."

"Oh, do you work here or something?" Kaneki asked her after catching what she in her prior statement. "You said something about not getting many of those types around here, so I thought-"

"Caught that did you?" she cut him off suddenly. "So that must mean you're a perceptive airhead then. That's an oxymoron if I ever heard one."

"Oh, and yes, I do work here," she added as if she just remembered he had asked that question. "I'm actually the librarian in charge of this fine establishment."

"Hm, well, that's awfully convenient," he replied, accidentally voicing his thoughts out loud due to his surprise.

"Would you mind telling me if this library has any computers that are open to public use then?" he asked in the same sheepish tone as the fingers of his left hand cupped themselves around his chin. "I was kinda hoping to use one to research a topic for a paper I'm doing."

"Ah, yes, of course we do," the woman let out an exasperated sigh after she said that though, implying that she got the question a lot and really didn't like answering it, which immediately made him regret asking. "They're off towards the back end of the library, near the shelves labeled 'R' through 'S'."

He let out a chuckle that he felt properly emulated the awkwardness he felt inside and attempted to salvage the conversation by asking, "I suppose you get that a lot, huh?"

"You really have no idea," she groaned in a way that made it sound like she meant it to be louder, but held back due to her surroundings. "You know how much time I have to spend everyday arranging these books, and what thanks do I get for my hard work and dedication?"

"Not much?" he offered despite knowing that it wouldn't help his current situation whatsoever.

"None at all!" the dark-haired librarian exclaimed in a way that matched her groan from earlier.

In response, the snowy-haired teen stared at the woman as she composed herself and when she did, she let out another exasperated sigh and replied, "Sorry about that, I bet you have better things to do than listen a dusty old librarian like me rant about rearranging books."

"No, it's alright," he attempted to assure her. "I can totally understand you being frustrated by constantly having your work go unnoticed."

"Does that make it safe to assume that you've had experience with the subject too?" she asked him in a manner that he found awfully similar to a certain blonde he knew. "I'm guessing from your boss at work, or maybe a girlfriend?"

Just then, Kaneki received flashbacks of his time living with his aunt and how she would never acknowledge him as human being, much less as someone who deserves praise, no matter what he accomplished.

"Ah, that's..." he began but trailed off, hoping that she'd catch how sensitive the subject was for him.

Thankfully, she seemed to catch her folly and immediately began trying to do damage control on their conversation, "Oh, my bad, I guess that's a bit too much of a sensitive subject for a stranger to ask someone they just met, huh?"

The rinkaku-type gave a slight nod in response to the librarian's question, which prompted her to let out an awkward laugh.

The moment her laugh subsided, she adverted her crimson-red eyes off to side and asked, "Um, if it's alright with you, could you just forget that I ever said that and just start this conversation over from the beginning?"

"Sorry, but I kind of have some research to do..." he trailed off, hoping that she would understand what he was implying once again.

But unlike last time, she didn't seem to catch the underlying meaning to his words and just kept trying to force the conversation along for some reason that was completely beyond him.

"Oh, I know!" she exclaimed, somehow managing to sound loud while keeping her voice at the volume of a whisper. "I can walk you over to the computers and on the way there, I can try to fix this conversation!"

'Hm, there's something off here…' he thought to himself as he narrowed his eyes a fraction at the woman standing in front of him.

What she was trying to do made no sense to him. This was going way beyond her trying to keep a good first impression with him.

There was no way any normal person would try and keep a conversation this awkward going, and there was no way she would try and lead him into a trap in such a public area.

So what was her goal with trying to keep their conversation going?

"So what do you say? You want to entertain the whims of a dusty old woman like myself?"

'Why do I feel like I'm going to regret this?' he asked himself before nodding his head in agreement, subconsciously knowing that he probably wouldn't be able to get rid of her otherwise.

---

Kaneki let out a tired sigh as he leaned back in the slightly uncomfortable wooden chair the library had provided for anyone looking to use their public-use computers, rubbing his eyelids with the thumb and index finger on his right hand to get rid of the strain the computer's blue light had put on his eyes. Something he desperately needed to do after having just spent the majority of the last hour and a half scouring the internet for any information that pertained to Haise Sasaki.

And unsurprisingly, his search didn't give him any results that actually helped him.

He first tried searching the name 'Haise Sasaki' in Remnant's major search engine, but found nothing other than links to social media accounts with similar names, which of course prompted him to look through the results that were given to him.

Of course, the end result of that search didn't net him the results he was looking for, but he really didn't expect anything to come from it to begin with so he wasn't really disappointed when he ended up finding nothing.

He then tried looking up the name 'Neopolitan', hoping that it would get him information on the person who inspired his search, but that resulted with so many other miscellaneous results that he gave up the moment the page loaded in and presented him with three straight links to recipes for neapolitan-flavored ice cream.

So after failing to find anything on the two people he was specifically searching for, the rinkaku-type started to comb through new stories on major crimes that happened in the area since he knew Neopolitan to be a criminal of some sort and unlike his previous attempts, he actually found something. It wasn't anything that was new news to him, but it was something nonetheless.

Apparently, about six months ago, there was a robbery at a dust shop that was broken up by none other than his team leader herself. The men she managed to defeat wore the same suits as the men who helped Neopolitan take an entire settlement hostage, which probably meant that the two events were related.

That would've been helpful information, if he didn't already know that due to the first stop he had to make today, which netted him much more information with half the incessant boredom attached to it.

'This isn't going to get me anywhere,' he thought to himself while the utter exhaustion he was feeling somehow managed to leak into the voice that he was making in his head.

Truth be told, he really didn't know why he decided to come here. He first assumed that he was doing it because he wanted more information and just didn't want Ozpin knowing what he was looking into, but he now just realized that what he was currently doing would never get him the information he wanted.

First off, the Neopolitan woman was a criminal and if Haise was indeed associated with her, than there was no way he was going to be able to find anything on them by simply looking it up on the internet.

Kaneki wasn't the most tech-savvy person in the world, but he did understand the mind of a person who didn't want to get caught by law enforcement, and he knew that there was no way any logical person would be stupid enough to have a very large footprint online if they didn't want to get caught.

So the question remained, what drove him to even entertain this idea to begin with? He already located and secured a wealthy font of information with his first stop of the day, which would've been more than enough progress for him to justify heading back to Beacon, but even then, he was still reluctant to head back without coming here first.

It was almost as if there was something that was unconsciously drawing him here to this library. Maybe the location itself was tied to Haise in some way?

That really wouldn't surprise him considering that he too had a penchant for literature, but that just raised the question of how he was related to Vale's second largest library.

Did he come here to check out books, or maybe he worked here in his free time?

'I'm doing it again, aren't I?' he inwardly groaned as he ran the black-tipped fingers of his left hand through his white hair.

There was no way he was going to be able to find an answer to that question by asking himself and only himself, and thankfully, he knew someone who could answer that question.

"So how's the research been going along?" asked just the person he was thinking about.

'Well, speak of the devil,' he thought to himself as he turned to face the woman that had called out to him.

He flashed the librarian a friendly smile when she came into view and began scratching his chin with his left finger, before replying with, "Yeah, but I have a question I wanted to ask you."

"Really?" she asked in a tone that made it clear that he had piqued her interest. "Well then, go ahead and ask, and I'll try my best to answer."

Nodding in response to her acceptance, he asked the question that was plaguing his thoughts, "Alright, um, did you ever happen to know a guy by the name of Haise Sasaki?"

She blinked at him owlishly before her crimson-red eyes widened in realization as she gave her answer in the same whisper-yell, "You know what, I actually do!"

"He's actually a regular here, or well, was a regular," she explained. "He hasn't stopped in for over two months now, so I unfortunately had to revoke his status as a regular."

"That so?" Kaneki asked with a raised eyebrow, cupping his chin with his index finger and thumb before he continued speaking. "Were you two close?"

The dark-haired woman chose to not answer his question immediately and instead opted to take a few moments to contemplate what she was going to say before she answered, "Yeah, I would say so."

"I know that this may come as a surprise to you considering my current choice of occupation, but there was a time where I really didn't care much for books," she began to explain in a tone that made it pretty obvious that she was reminiscing on her past interactions with the young man.

"Back then, I actually thought that reading was nothing more than a waste of time, but he helped me find a way to derive some enjoyment from the act," she continued, stopping to gesture to herself with a wide sweep of her arms before adding, "and eventually, I liked reading so much I somehow ended up working here of all places."

Just then, he felt an all too familiar pain begin to grow in the area of his stomach, which he took as a sign that he was heading down the right path with their conversation.

"So how do you know him?" the crimson-eyed librarian asked him. "He wasn't the most social butterfly, so I highly doubt you heard his name in passing."

It was now the snowy-haired half ghoul's turn to take a couple seconds to carefully contemplate his next answer.

"I don't really know him perse," he began, which was actually quite true considering the circumstances. "I have talked to him, but all I really got from the conversation was his name and his recommendation of this library."

She let out a tired sigh and began shaking her head in response to his statement before replying, "Such a sweet boy, hasn't talked to me in months, and he's still trying to get this library business."

"Strange, from the way you're describing him, he really doesn't sound like he's someone who would just stop talking to a friend for two months," Kaneki commented in hopes that it'd get her to say something that might relate back to Haise's past. "Why do you think he just up and disappeared like he did?"

"If I had to put money on a reason, I would have to say that it was probably because of that girl he's so infatuated with," the dark-haired woman grumbled bitterly. "She was one of those people you could just look at and figure out that she was nothing but trouble."

"Really?" he asked with a faux skepticism to his voice. "I don't know him very well and even I know that he doesn't seem like the type of person to hang around someone like that."

"Just my point," she answered with a nod. "He's not someone who you'd picture hanging around people like her, that's why I'm so worried about him."

"Wait, are you implying…?" he trailed off with a shocked expression that was one hundred percent faked.

"Oh, of course not, I doubt she'd go as far as doing something like, well, like that," the dark-haired woman assured him. "At worst, I'm worried about her breaking his heart, not running it through with a knife."

The artificial half ghoul couldn't stop himself from laughing at how ironic her words turned out to be in retrospect. He wanted to keep asking her more questions now that it had become clear to him that she was once a part of Haise's past. But even he with his all-encompassing desperation to learn more about Haise Sasaki, knew that there were limits as to how many questions you could ask someone before they started to suspect something, and he'd rather not ruin the chance of possibly obtaining yet another valuable font of information by accidentally asking said font too many questions.

"I guess I've been reading way too many tragedies," he joked lightly as he stood himself up from his chair and flashed the librarian a smile before initiating his exit strategy out of this situation.

---

Kaneki contemplated what he learned today as he walked down the sidewalk that would eventually lead him to the subway tunnel that would take him all the way back home to Beacon.

There was the fair chance that the young woman he knew as Neopolitan dragged Haise Sasaki into the criminal underworld. If he had to give a guess as to how she managed to do so, he'd wager money that his inner persona had a fear of being alone just like he did, and she manipulated that fear and whatever feelings the young man had for her at the time to get him to do whatever she wanted.

He winced slightly as a familiar pain in his abdomen suddenly surged to life, making it seem like Haise was actively rejecting the idea from deep inside his consciousness, which he highly doubted to be the actual case in this particular scenario.

If that truly was the case and the pain he was feeling was being controlled by an outside force trying to contact him, the question of why it had only sparked up when he started interacting with Neo once again could be easily brought up as a counter argument.

Was it because Neo was such a large part of Haise's life that he didn't feel the need to wake up until she popped back up in it again?

'Yet another question I don't know the answer to, huh?' he thought to himself as he reached up and ran all ten of his black-tipped fingers through his snow-white hair, having to fight down the suddenly growing urge to pull chunks of it out in frustration.

Questions, questions, and more questions. That was the one and only result of his search today.

Any answers he got just seemed to lead to another question, any questions he would ask himself would spawn three more in his head, and any of those other questions seemed to do just the same. It was already starting to feel like he had run around race track a hundred times in preparation for a race he knew was never going to come, or maybe the more accurate comparison would be him trying to bring down a wall made of solid steel by slamming his head against it.

Both would've felt like lost causes from the start, and that's exactly what he felt about his search right now. He didn't realize it until now, but what he was trying to do was basically the same as following a trail of breadcrumbs to find a chest of buried treasure.

To unravel the mysteries of someone's entire life was no easy task and Kaneki was starting to feel that he was having the same problem he had when he first started sparring with Weiss. He felt as though his search was aiming for too high a goal, but unlike trying to learn how to use a sword before a set date, he actually needed to hit that mark to get the results he was looking for.

There could be no settling this time, he needed one hundred percent accurate results and he wasn't going to get it with the information he currently had. He did obtain two new sources of information that he could easily exploit when he needed to, but in the end they were nothing more than more breadcrumbs on the trail for him to follow.

The snowy-haired young man took in a deep breath through his nostrils in hopes that it would quell his frustration, all the while reminding himself that he had gotten somewhat similar results when he first started searching for Kanou. But as he did so, an all too familiar scent of caught in his nostrils and drew his attention away from his thoughts.

'Coffee,' he thought to himself as he turned towards the direction his nose was telling him the smell was coming from, said nose wiggling as he sniffed the air once more to double check that the smell truly did exist.

'There's no doubt that's coffee…' he began when he confirmed the origin of that smell, '... and it smells pretty good too.'

He couldn't fight down the smile that had spread across his lips as he began walking in the direction the smell was leading him.

---

Coffee. Kaneki couldn't help but notice the sense of irony that was contained in every sip.

The deep brown, nearly black liquid was widely known throughout the world as one of the most bitter drinks in mass production. But to him, it was one of the sweetest things he got to consume nowadays, especially when compared to the normally revolting taste of Grimm flesh.

That wasn't to say that coffee was supposed to taste bitter. No, that was a misconception spawned by the intentional burning of beans by mass producers to hide the usually poor quality of their beans.

Good coffee was supposed to have a fragrant taste to it, which was something he didn't even know until he started frequenting Anteiku. Before then, he had read about what coffee should've tasted like, but he couldn't comprehend what that had meant until he tasted it for himself.

He glanced down at the porcelain-white cup that contained said liquid and smiled at it warmly as he brought the vessel up to his lips to take a sip of its contents once more, relishing the familiar fragrant taste of the piping hot liquid traveled over the tastebuds on his tongue and down his throat, leaving a pleasurable warmth lingering in his throat as it traveled down to his stomach.

'Still not as good as the manager's though,' he thought to himself as placed the cup back down onto table he was sitting at. 'But then again, after all the years he spent making it, I doubt that there's anyone out there could even come close to matching his skill.'

"I can't believe we lost that guy," Kaneki heard a gruff voice coming from a nearby stall. "We had him in the palm of our hands and we somehow lost him."

Curious as to what they were talking about, Kaneki brought his coffee-filled cup to his lips and took a discreet glance over at them as he took another sip of the piping hot liquid. There sitting at one of the nearby stalls were two sunglasses-wearing men in the same white dress shirt and black slacks, something he assumed to be an uniform of some sort.

"You're seriously still on about that punk faunus from earlier?" he heard another man with a deeper, smoother voice ask. "I get that you're frustrated, but you need to get your head back in the game so we can get these dust shop robberies all sorted out. You know, before the Schnee Company brings that ship of theirs into the docks."

'Should they really be talking about things like that out in the public?' he asked himself before shaking his head in disbelief and returning his attention back onto his thoughts.

Or rather, he tried to return his attention back onto his thoughts, but was stopped from doing so when he heard the bell that rings whenever opens the front door chime out from directly behind him.

He was going to ignore whoever had walked in, but was forced to pay attention to them when the sound an all too familiar English-accented voice call out to his name suddenly, "Kaneki?"

"Kaneki, is that you?" asked the voice, which prompted him to turn around to see out if his suspicions would turn out to be true.

And it just so happened that they indeed were correct, because the moment he turned around, he found a familiar rabbit-eared faunus standing in the middle of the front door with her chocolate-brown eyes widened in surprise.

The snowy-haired teen opened his mouth to respond, but was cut off by the sound of another, this time unfamiliar voice coming from directly behind her.

"Hey Velvet, what's the holdup?" asked the voice as its owner attempted to lightly push the brown-haired young woman out of the way with a gloved hand. "I thought we were going inside?"

Velvet immediately snapped out her daze and moved to the hand's will, stepping out of the way to reveal a fashionably-dressed young woman of the same age.

"Ah, oh, sorry about that," the rabbit-eared faunus replied as she did as she always did when she was embarrassed and rubbed her elbow bashfully. "It's just that I sorta found someone I know."

"Really?" the fashionably-dressed woman asked before turning her head towards him. "Is that him over there?"

Velvet answered her companion with a sheepish nod before verbally adding, "Yeah, that's him."

The unknown woman strided over to him, bent over so that her eyes were visible from behind the pair of sunglasses she was wearing, and scanned him up and down with a pair of dark-brown eyes.

Having grown rather used to being scrutinized so openly thanks to the time he spent trying to gain allies in the ghoul community back in his own world, he was able to return her stare without feeling the least bit uncomfortable.

The two of them stared at each other for a couple of seconds before she broke their stare down by standing straight up again and saying, "Alright, you pass."

Confused as to what she meant by that, Kaneki narrowed his eyes at her and asked, "Pass what exactly?"

"Physical inspection," the woman replied bluntly. "I was making sure, and don't take this the wrong way, that you weren't as weak as you seemed off first glance alone."

Kaneki's eyebrow twitched at the blatant shot at his less than impressive physical stature and took in a deep, calming breath through his nostrils to quell the annoyance that was growing inside of him.

"Well, you said that I passed your inspection," he pointed out to her, cracking his index finger as he began his counter-offensive, "so I'm assuming you found that old adage of 'looks being deceiving' to be true?"

Velvet's companion simply nodded in response before turning her attention back on the faunus she entered the cafe with and asked, "You called him 'Kaneki', right?"

"Uh, yes, but his full name is Ken Kaneki," the rabbit-ear-bearing teen answered with a nod immediately, albeit both were delivered with a bit of uncertainty. "Most people just call him by his last name due to his own personal preference."

In response to the faunus's almost soldier-esque response, the woman let out a sigh and shook her head disbelievingly as she asked, "Velvet, we've been on the same team for almost two years now, how many times do I have to remind you?"

"Stop treating me like I'm your CO," she finished that train of thought with a tone that made it clear to anyone listening that this wasn't the first time she had said those words.

"A-ah, sorry!" she exclaimed flusteredly as a faint blush began to stain her otherwise pale cheeks. "Force of habit."

Her companion, though at this point she seemed more like the leader than she did the companion, let out an exasperated sigh and replied, "It's alright, but you have to realize how embarrassing it is for me to be treated like I'm your superior when we're out in public like this.

"Sorry, won't happen again, ma'a-" the faunus began to say, but caught herself three-thirds of the way through, "- I mean, Coco."

The companion/leader shook her head once more and let out what felt like her tenth sigh of the conversation before replying with, "Well, I suppose I should leave you to talk with your friend here."

"Oh and Velvet," the sunglasses-wearing woman began as she took a step towards the rabbit-eared faunus and whispered something into her ear that elicited a mad blush.

Kaneki was unable to pick up on what she said due to his lack of the naturally enhanced senses that most full-ghouls had, but he didn't really mind since he knew it probably wasn't meant for his ears to begin with.

He watched as the companion/leader that was apparently named Coco broke away from Velvet and stepped back outside the cafe to a destination he did not know and did not care to know, before turning his attention back onto his chocolate-haired classmate.

"Sorry about all of that," she apologized when she saw that Coco was gone, "I've always had a hard time talking to her, and I was so surprised to see you that I couldn't really think straight there for a minute."

"Don't worry about it," he assured her while flashing her his usual smile, which seemed to both calm her down some and inject her with a dose of confidence the moment it appeared.

"So who exactly was that?" he proceeded to ask. "I'm assuming she's your team leader, right?"

"Was it that obvious?" she quipped as she slid into the chair that was directly across from him, which caused an amused snort to exit his nostrils.

"On a more serious note, however; yeah, she's my team leader," she proceeded to explain. "Her name's Coco Adel, leader of team CVFY."

"CVFY?" he repeated with a faux incredulity. "Why do I suddenly feel like Oobleck had a hand in naming your team?"

"Haha, very funny," she replied sarcastically with a roll of her eyes. "At least my team's acronym actually derives a letter from my name, unlike a certain someone I know."

"Again with this? I thought I already explained this to you. The reason why my name name isn't used in the acronym is because there was no way a K would make an actual word with the other the four."

"What RWBY-2K not good enough for you four?" Velvet asked, which elicited a snicker from the both of them.

Kaneki couldn't stop himself from smiling at the progress the two of them had made since they first met, which was a time where they could barely go a couple of sentences without there being a sudden awkward silence between the two of them.

Now, they were used to one another's tendencies, they were conversing more regularly. They would still encounter a conversational roadblock from time to time, but that was something he believed would also improve with time.

"So what exactly are you doing here?" she asked him, raising a single brow at him as she crossed her arms over chest. "You come here with your teammates, or something?"

The snowy-haired half ghoul shook his head and answered with, "No, I was just out running some errands and I thought I stop in here for a cup of coffee."

"How about you?" he proceeded to ask. "You with your other teammates, or is it just you and Coco?"

"Well, I was with my other teammates when we first left Beacon, but the other two had to go pick some stuff up for our upcoming mission, and-" the rabbit-eared Faunus began but he cut her off halfway into the explanation.

"Wait, what do you mean 'upcoming mission'?" he asked as it was now his turn to be curious about what she was doing.

"Oh, I must've been so busy with prepping that I completely forgot to tell you about it," she replied sheepishly as she once again began running her elbow. "My team and I are being sent out on a mission in a couple days and we probably won't be coming back for a couple weeks."

"Really?" he replied as he blinked at her owlishly. "Well, I suppose this makes us even then."

"Huh, what do you mean?"

"Don't you remember? I went on that week-long mission to the settlement without telling you, so you going on a mission makes us even."

Velvet blinked at him owlishly before a crestfallen expression replaced the dumbfounded one she once wore.

"R-really, that's all you have to say?" she asked in a way that reminded him a lot of a child who had wished for one thing for their birthday and got something else instead.

A stab of guilt ran through his heart as he stared at her deflated expression, automatically knowing what he did wrong.

No one liked going away from people they cared about for extended periods of time, but knowing that those same people were going to miss you while you were gone, made leaving them a little bit easier for most people.

That's probably what Velvet wanted to hear when she told him and he had mistakenly told her a joke instead in hopes of lightening the mood.

Knowing that it was too late to outright say what she wanted to hear, he quickly thought up a way to circle back to it and immediately put that plan into action.

"Wait, were you hoping that I'd miss you?" he asked her, all the while hoping that she would take the bait.

"W-what, o-of course not!" she exclaimed shakily, her pale cheeks staining themselves red once again. "I just…"

"It's just that I missed you when you were gone at that settlement, and I just wanted to know that you'd feel the same if I were to go somewhere," she admitted with a deep blush after a defeated sigh escaped from her lips.

"You know, that's a stupid thing to want to know," he replied to her bluntly as he pretended to absent-mindedly swish the remnants of his coffee in its cup, which made her flinch and hang her head in response.

"I'm sor-" the rabbit-eared faunus began, but he cut her off before she could finish her apology.

"You want to know why?" he asked her his tone as dismissive as before, stopping his crestfallen friend in her proverbial tracks. "It's because you should already know that I'm going to miss you."

Upon hearing that, her head snapped up towards him and she sputtered out a befuddled, "Wait, what?"

"What, did you seriously think I was going to say that I wasn't going to miss you?" he asked her with faux hurt to his voice.

"Velvet, you're my friend and you should know by now that I'm always going to miss you if you go somewhere for any amount of time," he told her as he reached over across the table separating them and placed a hopefully comforting hand on her shoulder.

"And since we're already on the topic, you don't have to feel bad about wanting to be missed," he continued. "Being missed by someone means that you're a big enough part of that person's life that the person would feel sad if you were to disappear from it, after all."

"Truth be told, I would be more insulted to know that you didn't care if I missed you," he finished.

Velvet didn't respond after he finished speaking and instead opted to cast her gaze down towards the ground as her earlier blush deepened, which was something he expected her to do after having seen her do so many times during their nearly two month long stint of friendship.

Past experience told him that it was probably best to let her mull through her thoughts and so, that's what he did. His hand never leaving her shoulder the entire time.

It took her about two minutes, but she finally woke from her daze in a way that made it seem like she had temporarily forgotten where she was.

"A-ah, sorry, I spaced out there didn't I?" she asked, but he didn't answer because he felt that it was directed more towards herself than it was him.

"Thank you," she added with a sheepish smile that coupled with the blush that was slowly fading from her face, he couldn't help but call the sight cute.

Feeling that the situation had been resolved, he removed his hand from her shoulder and decided to switch the topic of their conversation to a more mundane topic, "So what do you want, to drink I mean?"

"Oh, uh…" she trailed off embarrassedly. "This is my first time coming here, so…"

"Ah, then I suggest you get a cup of their dark roast," he replied, picking up his own cup and raising it towards her before taking a sip of it, in a gesture that he hoped she understood the meaning of.

"Oh, alright then, um…" she trailed once more as she glanced over at one of the cafe's waiters, who was busy wiping down the table the two men he assumed to be police officers once occupied.

Having had the same problem before, he was able to understand what she meant by that gesture and called the waiter over once he saw that said waiter had finished.

'I wonder…' he began to ask himself as he simultaneously told the employee Velvet's order, 'Did my social ineptness make me look that cute when I used to do that?'

---

In the end, Kaneki ended up spending the rest of the day in that cafe with Velvet and they hadn't decided to part from one another until it was close to sunset.

"Are you sure you don't want me to walk with me back to Beacon?" he asked his friend with a voice of concern.

She smiled and repeated her previous answer with more explanation this time, "It's alright, I still need to meet up with the others."

"Alright, I'll see you tomorrow in Oobleck's?"

"Yeah," she replied with a nod of her head.

"And, um, if you don't mind me asking this," she began as she started to rub her shoulder again, "Would you mind if I ask that you help me catch up with the rest of the class once I get back?"

He blinked in response to that question and smiled before stating, "You already know the answer to that question."

Her smile seemed to glow brighter as she nodded her head in response and turned to walk away in the other direction, and after a couple of seconds, she turned a corner and left him standing where he was. Completely and utterly alone, waiting for the next bus to take him back home to Beacon.

'So when exactly does the next bus come, again?'

---

By the time Kaneki got back to Beacon, the sun had already set and the moon was now sitting prominently in the sky, already three-quarters of the way through its cycle.

He was walking down the main path, the one that most people would have to take if they wanted to reach any of the main buildings.

The path itself was lined with greenery, from the neatly trimmed grass to also well-trimmed trees, everything surrounding the path was green. Well, everything that wasn't made by humans was green.

Along the way, there were benches painted white and the path itself was made of a smoothed down stone that was very clearly painted over. Then, there was the giant stone statue that marked the diverging of the three paths, each path leading to another, equally important building.

The statue depicted a pair of hunters standing over a cave that contained a beowolf, one hunter being male and the other was female.

When he first saw it, he assumed that it was there to help remind students that, despite the fact the Grimm were an ever present danger, they would always stand over them in triumph and even now, he still believed that was its purpose.

Maybe there was another meaning to it, one that was more profound than what he could see at surface level and he would be able to see if he looked at it for more than a couple seconds, but he never spared that time because he really had more important things to think about.

Now, however, he couldn't take his eyes off the statue. It wasn't because of the statue itself, but because of the person who was standing at its base, staring up at it.

He easily recognized the person standing there from her choice of clothing alone, but there was one article that was missing from her person.

Her trademark bow. The one that never left the top of her head, even when she was sleeping, and made her look like a cat. Without it, she still looked like a cat, but he attributed that to the fact she literally had cat ears poking out from her long black hair.

"B-Blake?" he stuttered out in his shock, immediately cursing himself for that mistake the moment he saw her entire body stiffen.

She turned her head slightly in his direction, giving him the opportunity to see a tiny portion of her face, but what he saw made him freeze when he saw it.

There was something shiny running down her cheek, something he immediately recognized to be a tear.

'She's crying…' he told himself as he stared at her and he probably would've spent the entire night doing just that if the newly-revealed faunus hadn't made a sudden attempt to run away from him.

Driven by his confusion and his want for answers, Kaneki dashed towards her with all of the speed he could muster and closed the distance between them in less than a second.

When she was at the appropriate range, he shot his hand out and latched it around her wrist.

-Chapter End-

Ah, yet another cliffhanger. Don't you just love the smell of salt in the air?

Well anyways, I was really debating whether or not I should end this chapter there, but I decided I should because it makes starting the next chapter much easier for me.

*Dodges the chairs that were thrown at me.*

Oh, come on! Don't hate me! I have real trouble with starting new chapters!

*Clears throat.*

So, peace out until next time you guys. You know, if I don't suddenly decide to stop writing for this story again.

*Dodges gun shots.*

Okay, okay, I get it!