'Ello guys and welcome to the eighth chapter of Tokyo Ghoul: Remnant. We've done this song and dance eight times now, so I won't beat around the bush.
I was being pretty lazy about writing this chapter. Not to say that it affects the quality of the chapter overall, I feel like this chapter is pretty average compared to the others, I was just being lazy about taking the time and writing for this on my phone.
I literally only wrote for this when I had nothing to do. So basically throughout the entirety of my pre-calculus class and when I was at home.
Semester just ended by the way, just barely passed that class after getting a low D second quarter and completely bombing my mid-term.
How did I pass you wonder? I got a solid B first quarter! Yay, the rapid regression of my academic career!
Well, personal problems aside, I actually tried to do something I've never done before and it might be interesting for you guys. I wrote this chapter without ever once going into Kaneki's point of view.
Granted, I only used the point of views of two people who think somewhat similarly to Kaneki, but it's a gradual process for me to work on as a writer because I want to be able to write chapters without Kaneki ever appearing once and branch out the story more. So bare with me while I try to grow as a writer.
So without any further ado, let's get this mother rolling with an even more aggressive mandatory disclaimer, as promised!
-Mandatory Disclaimer-
Oh my god, stop fucking asking me if I own these series. I seriously don't.
-Chapter 8: Halves-
Blake didn't expect a lot of things to happen when she ran away from the others. She didn't expect to suddenly find Kaneki standing behind her as she gazed upon the hunter statue in the courtyard, she didn't expect to find his right hand wrapped around her right wrist in less than a second when she tried to run away, and she definitely expect to find his grip on it to be so light.
It was strange really. She felt as though she easily could've broke away from the grip he had on her arm if she tried, but something was stopping her from doing so and running away like she initially planned.
Instead, she tentatively turned to face the young man who was holding her wrist like it was that of a newborn's, all the while wondering how'd he react to the entire situation.
Would he be angry that she hid her faunus nature from him and the others, especially when he himself willingly revealed his own nature to the team after having only known them for less than two days?
She wouldn't blame him if she did. It was horribly unfair that she hide something so inconsequential from him when he was so open with what he was, and comparably speaking, his problems were way worse than her own.
Seriously, what exactly did she have to hide when compared to him? Now that she thought about it, she really was pathetic.
He was a creature that had to eat people to survive while she was just a creature with the abilities of a normal animal, and she was the one who was too ashamed to admit what she was to people who were supposed to be her friends.
Sure, people might treat her badly like Velvet and the other faunus at Beacon if they found out about what she actually was, but there were people who would actively try and kill Kaneki if they find out about what he was. They would think of him as a monster while they would think of her as at most a nuisance.
The cat-eared faunus knew that what she had done was unfair to him, so she fully expected to find him sporting a look of betrayal, or maybe even disgust, when she turned to face him. But when her amber eyes actually fell upon him, she was shocked to find that he had tilted his head down so that the majority of his face was covered by his bangs.
"Blake…" the snowy-haired half ghoul began but trailed off, leaving them in uncomfortable silence.
Initially, she was confused as to why he was doing what he was doing, but she cast that confusion off to the side the moment he spoke and she heard the lack of emotion in his voice, which sparked her brain to life so she could come up with a way to explain the entire situation to him.
"Kaneki, I-" she tried to say that she could explain the entire situation to him, but he had cut her off before the words could leave her throat.
"Blake, tell me…" he began once more in a way that made her really think that the grip he had on her wrist was going to skyrocket into much more painful levels at any moment.
She flinched her eyes closed in anticipation of the pain, but those same eyes shot open when she felt the calloused skin of his fingers release their grip on her wrist and begin to slide their way down her arm towards her hand.
She watched in slight trepidation as a few of the five black-tipped appendages lightly grazed the skin on the back of her hand, an action that sent shivers down her spine, before he captured her much smaller hand in his own with a squeeze she could only describe as comforting, causing her heart to skip a beat as a strange but not unpleasant warmth began to run through her body.
"Why were you crying?" she heard him ask in a voice that was dripping with an emotion that was absent from his previous words.
Blake's eyes shot back up to his face to find that it was no longer being hidden behind a veil of snow and was conveying nothing but the same emotion: concern. Concern for her, if she had to guess.
The teenage faunus could feel the same warmth from earlier well up inside her once again when she heard the concern in his voice.
She was ashamed to admit it due to how selfish it was, but there was something about seeing him so worried about her that gave her a strange sense of satisfaction, which was something she found to be unusual in on itself because he had been worried about her in the past and it had never elicited that kind of reaction from her.
'Then again, I guess having to hear someone you thought of as a friend debase your entire race like they were nothing more than animals will do that to you,' she mused internally, knowing that the reaction was probably just a side effect of having just went through an argument that questioned her personal ties and moral values.
That wasn't to say that she didn't like feeling the side effects gave her, though. It was nice to know that there was someone who cared more about what made her cry than what she was, but a lot like the pleasant-feeling side effects drugs had, she didn't want to indulge in it too often.
"I-it's nothing," she tried to assure him, but knew that the attempt would fail the moment she heard herself stutter out her first words.
Kaneki's concern expression quickly shifted to one of skepticism when he heard those words and he countered with a question that made what he felt abundantly clear to her, "Do you really expect me to believe that you, of all people, were crying for absolutely no reason."
"You do have a point," she admitted to herself, knowing that compared to most teenage girls her age, she definitely wasn't the most emotionally expressive person in the world, "but trust me, it isn't something you should concern yourself about."
"Weiss and I…" she began, momentarily trailing off as she scoured her mind for the right words to describe her argument, "... Weiss and I just had a clashing of ideals that got a bit too heated for my liking, is all."
"I'm assuming it was something about you being a faunus, right?" he asked in a gentle tone that she would always hear him use whenever he consoled Ruby after she failed to do something, which was something she couldn't help laughing at.
"I know that I must look like an emotional wreck to you right now, but could you please stop acting like I'm a porcelain doll?" she asked him once her laughter subsided and she removed her hand from his grip, an act that she immediately regretted due to the sudden disappearance of the warmth it once caused.
An amused smile of his own crept into his lips as he sheepishly replied, "Ah, sorry, my bad."
"Caring about someone's emotional state is hardly something to be sorry about, you know," she told him. "And to answer your question, no, it wasn't about me being a faunus, but we did talk about the faunus and she said things that I really couldn't bring myself to agree with."
"Like what things?"
Blake let out a sigh and began to summarize the things Weiss had said to her, "Like how the White Fang is pure evil and how they're nothing more than bloodthirsty psychopaths bent on destroying humanity."
The snowy-haired half ghoul didn't respond to her summary immediately and instead looked at her as if what she had just told him had been in another language.
"Did she tell you a reason as to why she thinks that way?" he asked her after a stint of silence that lasted a good twenty seconds.
She nodded her head in response and then proceeded to explain the heiress's side of the story, "She said that she was a victim, that when she was younger, she would be forced to watch people she knew disappear from her life entirely because of the White Fang, that she's seen board member executed just because of their affiliation with her grandfather's company."
"And while I can agree, that's a terrible way for anyone to grow up," she continued, "I just can't bring myself to accept it as justification for her despising the faunus as a whole."
"I mean, if it wasn't for the businessmen and politicians like her grandfather, who constantly put down the faunus and treat them like they're nothing but a variation of animal," she began to explain her standpoint on the situation, knowing that he would want to know it after hearing the heiress's, "we wouldn't need to resort to violence in the first place."
Her explanation resulted in another bout of silence from the snowy-haired young man and Blake waited patiently for his response, but a part of her already knew that he would try to explain Weiss's point of view to her as she knew it was in his nature to try and act the grey in an argument between two people who should've been friends.
"So tell me, which one of my opinions do you want me to give in this situation, my personal or my logical one?" he asked her, his voice returning to that of the stoic young man she was the most accustomed to and comfortable with.
"Both preferably."
"Well, it's a good thing that both of those opinions are the same then," he stated in a way that made it feel like he was thinking out loud.
He let out an exasperated sigh before giving her his opinion on the matter, "Truth be told, I think the entire discussion about which side is more justified is completely and utterly pointless."
"What makes you think that?" she asked, curious as to what made him dismiss a conflict that had caused the deaths of hundreds so casually.
"Past experience, mostly," he answered vaguely before elaborating almost immediately afterwards. "Back in my world, there were two organizations who would constantly struggle with one another."
"The first being the CCG, a group who was bent on the annihilation of the ghouls," he continued, raising his index finger in conjunction with his words and then raised his middle as he added, "the second being a group of ghouls who called themselves Aogiri Tree and were on the opposite end of that spectrum, wanting to wipe the human race off the face of the planet."
"Eventually, the two reached a point where they couldn't co-exist with one another without doing some major changes," he finished explaining. "You see where I'm going with this, right?"
"Yeah, I think I do," the cat-eared faunus replied with a tentative nod of head. "You're basically saying that you believe that the White Fang and the Schnee Corporation are in the same boat and will naturally fight with one another unless the necessary changes are made, but that doesn't explain why you think why you think it's pointless to argue about which side is more justified in their actions."
"It does when you think about it as justifying the actions of two warring nations," Kaneki replied as he crossed his arms over his chest. "One side fights for self-preservation and the other fights just because they don't like the other country."
"One's clearly more justified than the other, but it doesn't change the fact that people died because they simply couldn't come to an accord of some kind." He uncrossed his arms as he finished, "So that's why I think that trying to justify a group's actions is pointless, it just doesn't do anything other than give reason to senseless death."
"Senseless death that wouldn't have happened if both sides were open to talking things out peacefully, which the Schnee Corporation wasn't in this situation," Blake argued at the behest of the people she once thought to be family. "The White Fang tried for years to solve things peacefully, but they just wouldn't listen to anything we had to say them!"
Blake caught her blunder the moment those words left her mouth.
For the second time in the last thirty minutes, she had gotten so caught up in her emotions that she accidentally let it slip that she was once a part of the White Fang, but unlike last time she didn't feel as if she had made the worst mistake of her life. It felt like she revealed something that wasn't really important to her, instead of the one secret she's been trying to keep since she left the organization in the first place.
By the way his one visible eye narrowed slightly, she could tell that Kaneki caught the mistake, but for some reason he decided to make no show that he did.
Instead, his expression contorted back to one of worry and he asked, "Blake, tell me truthfully, do you think the White Fang's actions are justified?"
"What, no-" she began to argue once more but he cut her off before she could, or even contemplate why he even asked in the first place.
"Then why are you trying to argue that they are?" he asked and just like that, she realized what he was trying to do.
He was trying to get her to admit to the fact that she was a part of White Fang on her own fruition, that much was obvious, but the question was: why go through the trouble?
She pretty much just gave the answer away a few seconds ago and she knew that there was no way someone as attentive as Kaneki missed her slip up, so there should've been no need for her to tell him anything.
Was he was doing it out of consideration for her? It sounded like something he would do given the circumstances.
Blake couldn't stop herself from smiling at the implications of that statement and decided on what she would answer him with, "It's because there was a time where I was once a part of the White Fang myself."
"It was back before we turned violent, when I was still a little girl," she continued to explain. "All we did back then was stage peaceful protests against the mistreatment of faunus and eventually, after years of close to what seemed like no progress to To most of us, all of that changed."
"There was a change in leadership and then…" she trailed off, averting her eyes down towards the ground as she searched herself for the words that she could use to properly describe the change her former affiliate had gone through, "... and then, we stopped striving for peace and equality, and started striving for annihilation and domination instead."
"So is that why you're here at Beacon and not still fighting with them?" he asked, his tone solemn as he spoke. "Because you felt they lost their way?"
The cat-eared faunus let out a sigh in response to the question as she really wasn't in the mood to answer such a personal question after having just answered one a few moments prior, and she made sure to convey that message to him with what she said next.
"Look…" she trailed off, hoping the tiredness that was in her voice would be enough to get him off that particular subject.
Thankfully, he seemed to catch the meaning hidden beneath what she had said and nodded his head with an understanding expression splayed across his features.
His almost immediate acceptance of her reluctance caused a pang of guilt to run through her, knowing that he really didn't deserve to be spoken to in such a way after having treated the majority of their previous conversation with more tact than she expected any of her other teammates would have.
So, she immediately went to apologize, but as if he could read her thoughts, he cut her off before the words could leave her mouth.
"You don't have to apologize," he stated in a way that made it seem like he was well used to being rejected in such a way. "It's not like you have to answer any of my questions, after all."
"Well…" she began as she blinked her eyes owlishly at the statement, actually being taken off-guard that he wasn't even the least bit annoyed by her reluctance, "... good."
What came next was an awkward silence that felt extremely foreign to her for one main reason. It being that they never really dealt with awkward silences much before in the past.
Usually in situations where awkward silence took over their conversation, they would be able to fall back on talking about their shared interests to fill the silence, but unfortunately talking about a new book she was reading simply wouldn't do this time. Too many personal topics had been dragged out into the light for them to go back to talking about such mundane things.
"Blake, do you mind if I ask you a question?" he asked, his polite tone having an underlying sense of caution to it as he spoke.
The cat-eared bookworm crossed her arms over her chest and answered with, "That really depends on the question you're planning on asking me."
"Oh, I was just wondering about what you were planning on doing next," he stated, averting his eyes off to the side as he spoke. "You were going to run away from me when you noticed me, so I couldn't stop myself from wondering about what you were planning to do."
She opened her mouth to respond, but closed it almost immediately afterwards when she realized that she herself really didn't know what her plan was if she actually managed to get away from him earlier.
For a moment, while she was staring at the statue, she entertained the idea of leaving Beacon for a couple of days to go and investigate the dust shop robberies that were supposedly done by the White Fang.
'The way I was acting earlier, I wouldn't be too surprised if I had actually tried to go through with that plan,' she lamented to herself mentally, after having shook her head self-beratingly at how she had almost let her emotions cloud her judgement. 'I suppose it was a good thing that Kaneki came along when he did; otherwise, I might've ended up doing something I'd regret in the long run.'
If she had left, there was no doubt in her mind that she would've been gone for a much longer time than just 'a couple of days' as she doubted that an untrained hunter-in-training like herself would be able to find the motive behind a chain of robberies very easily, especially when the police couldn't do so themselves.
"Don't worry, you know me well enough by now to know that I'm not stupid enough to go and do something rash," Blake assured him. "At most, I would've just spent a couple days out in town to look into something that's been bugging me."
"Do you mind telling me what it was?" he asked the very question she expected him to ask, though he asked it with a lot more concern lacing it than she first expected.
She couldn't help but smile at the concern he was showing for her. Selfish as it may be, she couldn't stop herself from enjoying the fact that someone would show her that amount of concern.
"It wasn't anything too big..." she answered him with the intention of leaving it at that, but she felt the strange urge to confide in him further when she finished speaking, making her feel as if there was something inside her that was pushing her to do so. And so, she allowed herself to be taken in by impulse one more time and confided in him once more, "Have you heard about the robberies that've been taking place the past couple of months?"
The snowy-haired young chin cupped his chin with his left hand and replied, "Yeah, I think Ruby said she broke one up before, right?"
She nodded and explained what she wanted to do, "I want to go look into them, I heard a couple of detectives say that they could be connected to the White Fang somehow, and I wanted to see if their claims have any substance behind them."
He blinked owlishly in response to her answer and then adopted a determined gaze before asking a question that completely floored her.
"You mind if I lent you a hand with that?"
Neo turned her head up towards the sky and wistfully gazed upon the few sparkles of light that managed to pierce through the atmosphere and shine like translucent dust crystals in the milky darkness above. She kept her eyes upon the lights for a solid six seconds before she shifted her eyes towards the patch of dead grass next to her and sighed.
'Why do I keep coming back here?' she ran one of her gloved hands through her hair as she asked herself that question mentally, despite already knowing full well why she kept coming back.
This was the spot Haise had shown her all those years ago after one of their earliest jobs together, and the spot they would routinely meet with one another after every job for years afterward.
Apparently, he found it one day while he was out trying to find a quiet place to read away from the compound.
The spot was nothing more than a clearing in the trees and yet, it held more significance to her than even her childhood home. It was farthest thing from large, it really wasn't any larger than your standard waiting room in terms of size and it didn't contain anything that could even be considered close to spectacular, but she didn't keep coming back to it because of its size and grandeur.
No, what kept her coming the spot was the fact it reminded her so much of the boy who had found it. It was an uncompromising peace in the chaotic maelstrom that was her life that she had taken for granted almost the entire time she was aware of it.
The immeasurably large amount of guilt that had been building up steadily inside of her made itself known once more when she thought that and she clenched her hands into tight fists as a result.
She loathed that naive fool she had known since her days in that godforsaken orphanage. No, she believed him to be nothing more than a liability that dragged her down at every step of the way. One that she would've thrown away a long time ago if it wasn't for that promise she made him all those years ago.
Why did she go out of her way and save that weak little boy she hadn't even spoken more than seven words to all those years ago? Why did she promise to never leave his side if she disliked him so much? Why did his absence in her life make her feel as though someone had gouged out a hole in her stomach? Why did seeing him changed so much personality-wise because of her own actions make her feel as though she had committed one of the worst atrocities in human history?
There was no reason as to why she should be asking any of those questions or feeling any of those things about someone as insignificant as him. She's had to carry him on her back for a majority of their lives up until that point and he was the one who decided he wanted to cut ties with her. It wasn't her fault that it had to be taken in a much more literal sense than he would've liked or anticipated, she knew that and yet, despite all of that, she kept finding herself asking a single question.
'Why...?' Neo began to ask herself once more as she rested her back against the cool concrete of a nearby building and slid down the length of its surface. 'Why do I even care about that stupid promise anyways?'
'I can't believe I'm doing this,' Blake thought to herself disbelievingly, crossing her arms over her chest for what felt like the thousandth time as she patiently watched Kaneki unlock the door to their room.
She had never been one to be easily talked into doing stupid things in the past, so how she let herself get talked into sharing a motel room with the one young man who had openly confessed to having eaten other people before in the past was beyond her. Well, that actually wasn't true, she knew exactly how that happened.
She didn't think that she would be able to finish the investigation very quickly on her own and so when he offered his help, she jumped on his offer without thinking about the consequences too throughly. One of those consequences being that they share a room since the only money they had to spend was the money they had in their pockets at the time, which wouldn't have been a problem if she hadn't forgotten both her scroll and wallet on her bed at the dorm.
Kaneki, on the other hand, brought his scroll and was able to look up the fares at some of the nicer motels, and found that he had enough money to rent a single room at one of them for a couple nights, which naturally meant that they share a room.
At first, she didn't seem much problem with it, but that was when they got to the motel where he asked if there was more than one bed in the room, and were promptly told by the tired night manager that the rooms only had one bed. He offered that that they go and see if one of the cheaper motels had more beds per room, but at that point she was so tired that it really didn't matter to her.
Now, that they were standing in front of the room, she was beginning to feel slightly apprehensive about the prospect of having to share a bed with the snowy-haired young man. It wasn't that she had a problem with the thought of sharing a bed with him since out of all of the men in the world, he was one of the two she'd actually be comfortable sharing a bed with for any reason.
'Grow up, it's not like anything's going to happen,' she berated herself internally. 'Knowing Kaneki, he's probably going to offer to sleep on the floor the moment we step foot inside.'
The bow-bearing bookworm was snapped out of her momentary reverie by the sound of the motel door unlocking and when she returned herself to reality, she was met with the sight of it swinging open.
"You sure you don't want to see if any of the other motels have a room with more than one bed?" the young man she was thinking about asked her once more as he turned his head to face her.
She let out a tired sigh and replied with, "Didn't I already tell you already that it's fine?"
To further illustrate how "fine" she was with the idea, she stepped past him and into the room where her nostrils were immediately assaulted by the smell of cheap chemical cleaning products.
Her nose instinctively crinkled in response to the sudden invasion of its privacy, but she didn't pay much more mind to it after that. That was until she heard the young man behind her stifle what sounded like a laugh.
She looked over her shoulder towards said young man and found that he had an amused curl to his chapped lips.
"Something funny?" she asked him with a raised eyebrow.
He used his left index finger to scratch his chin and replied with an unconvincing, "No, don't worry about it."
"Right…" she trailed off before walking further into the room, deciding that it was probably best to leave the topic alone.
Her amber eyes scanned the room that they had been provided with and she found that it looked very basic. The living-area portion of the room only contained a full-sized bed, a two-door closet with brown window shutter-like doors and a flat-screen TV that one would see in most hotel/motel rooms nowadays.
She stepped over into the bathroom and found that it too was very basic-looking. White ceramic sink, similarly-made toilet, and a half-shower/half-bath that was lined with white tile.
Overall, the room could be described with seven words: clean and easy to take care of.
'Now I can see why this room was so cheap,' she thought to herself. 'There's barely anything to it.'
"So which side of the bed do you want?" Blake asked as she walked over to the bed and pressed down on its surface to test its firmness.
When she received no answer from Kaneki for a solid six seconds, she turned her head towards him and found that he was staring at her with a widened grey eyes.
"Um, I…" he began as he started to scratch the back of his head sheepishly, "... I sort of thought that I was going to be sleeping on the floor."
Confused, she raised an eyebrow at him as if to say, "What made you think that?"
"Well, I'm a man and you're a woman…" he trailed off in a way that made it clear he was implying something.
Not quite understanding what exactly he was trying to imply, she replied with, " Yeah, and that's a bed and this is a room. There, now we both just stated the obvious."
The snowy-haired half ghoul adverted his eyes and sheepishly explained what he had meant with a question, "Aren't you worried about something happening when you're sleeping?"
"That depends," she answered. "Are you planning on doing something to me while I'm sleeping?"
"What- no, of course not!"
"Then, looks like I don't have anything to worry about it," she replied, an amused smile of her own creeping onto her lips at the sight of the usually calm half-ghoul looking so befuddled.
She really didn't know why he had so much of a problem with it. Yeah, she was a tad bit nervous about the situation a couple minutes ago, but even she could see how trivial the entire thing was and she was the one who was in danger.
They would only be sleeping in the same bed and she trusted Kaneki enough to know he wouldn't do anything.
"Are you sure?" he asked once more, causing a spike of irritation to course through her. "I mean, I wouldn't mind and I've slept worse places, so-"
"Kaneki, I'm sure," she replied, a little bit of her irritation leaking into her voice, "and besides, you do know that telling me you've slept worse places isn't helping convince me at all, right?"
"It's like taking half of the amount of money that someone offered you originally and then saying it's alright because there were times where you had none at all, and that you're grateful to have any at all," she continued to explain. "It really only makes the person want to give you money even more, you get what I mean?"
Kaneki gave an uncertain nod in response to her explanation and left the topic alone, a decision she believed to be a good one on his part.
Not wanting to sleep in and wrinkle her street clothes, she stepped into the aforementioned bathroom and was about to lock the door behind her before realizing something that made her stop dead in her tracks.
She didn't have any pajamas to change into...
'Maybe the motel provides robes…' she thought to herself as she walked out of the bathroom to see if the closet did indeed contain a robe like she hoped.
When she stepped out of the bathroom, Blake was immediately faced with a sight she knew she had already seen once before, but was forced to stop and take stock of when she saw it again, for a reason that was completely beyond her.
To make a long story short; Kaneki was wearing a black vest, a white button-up, a pair of black dress pants, and a pair of matching dress shoes when he entered the room. He was no longer wearing any of those, instead opting to trade all of them in for a pair of jet-black boxers she's seen before too.
Maybe it was the fact that they were significantly closer to one another relationship-wise than they were when she last saw him standing completely without dress, or maybe it was just her hormones being hormones after having just finished reading Ninjas of Love the other day, but she couldn't stop herself from enjoying the sight that was presented with her slightly more than she did before. That wasn't to say that she didn't enjoy seeing him half-naked the first time wasn't enjoyable for her, but in that instance, her enjoyment stemmed from amusement at how misplaced all those muscles seemed to be on an otherwise scrawny-looking, baby-faced teenager than anything else really.
"Why aren't you wearing any clothes?" she found herself asking him after having taken in the sight for a couple seconds more.
He blinked at her owlishly before shrugging at her question unabashedly and replying with, "I didn't have anything to wear to bed and I didn't want to wrinkle my only other clothes so, this was sort of my only option in terms of bed apparel. Why, does it bother you?"
That was a really good question. Did Kaneki's state of undress bother her?
…
"No, of course not," she told him firmly so that there was no way he could possibly try to argue against it. "I was just curious as to what the reasoning was."
Deciding that it was probably best to do the same and change into something she can sleep in as well, she went through with her earlier plan and checked the closet for a robe just to find nothing but than empty space inside it.
'Of course there isn't a robe in here,' she thought to herself , sighing tiredly as she wracked her brain for a plan B. 'I could just sleep in the clothes I have on now and wash them in the morning.'
'No,' she shook her head, 'that still means I would have to be undressed in front of Kaneki at some point, the only difference would be that he'd be awake instead and truth be told, I'd rather sleep next to him in my underwear than be subjected to that.'
"Hey Blake," she heard the young man call out to her from behind her, prompting her to turn around and find him standing directly in front of her with his button-up hanging limply from in between his fingers. "I'm just going to go out on a limb here and guess you're looking for something to sleep in, right?"
The sudden urge to advert her eyes down towards the side filled her and compelled her to do so as she gave him an affirmative nod in response.
She heard him let out an amused snort from his nostrils before holding the button-up towards her, which had been neatly folded into a square, and said, "Here."
The faunus in hiding blinked at the offered article of clothing several times before she finally realized that he was offering her his shirt to wear for the night.
"Are you sure?" she asked him. "You literally just said that you didn't want to wrinkle your clothes."
"Yeah," he nodded with a finality that made it hard to argue, not enough that it would actually stop her from doing so, but enough to question if she really wanted to or not, "I can always just wash it in the morning, so I really don't mind."
"Ah, ok," she replied as she tentatively took the offered piece of clothing from him, her fingers grazing his as she did so, and stared at it while also contemplating whether or not she actually wanted to put it on.
'Well, it's certainly long enough for me preserve some of my modesty, but he's probably worn it for the entire day already…' she thought to herself as she took a sniff and used her superior faunus senses to confirm her suspicions without having to put the shirt up to her nose.
'Weird, it still smells faintly fresh, almost as if he's already washed it,' she thought to herself. 'It definitely wasn't recently though…' She took another drag from afar as she continued to think, '... maybe a couple of hours beforehand, but definitely not recently given the fact that I can still smell him beneath the chemical detergent.' Blake glanced up at the snowy-haired teen and wondered, 'I understand that he's probably worn this shirt for most of the day now, but why would he have needed to wash his shirt before now?'
After contemplating the topic for several seconds, she shrugged her shoulders and decided that it was probably best not to ask. There were plenty of better times to ask that question and besides, she didn't want to ask the question without having a real reason behind doing so.
The exhaustion that had built up over the day suddenly overcame her like a tidal wave and her body screamed at her to go to sleep, and so she moved back towards the bathroom to change into the shirt Kaneki had given her.
Neo strode through the entrance of the compound with her usual condescending smirk spread across her lips. It looked uncompromising to anyone who looked her way, but she knew that it was nothing more than a frail mask to hide the mess of feelings that was storming around inside her. One that she knew could be easily peered through by anyone who knew her very well, which could really only said by one person and he wasn't anywhere near her at the moment.
"There you are," she heard a voice she recognized to belong to her latest partner in crime, "A little bit longer and I would've started sending out the search parties."
She let out a scoff as she turned to face the owner of the voice and shot back a counter in her usual mocking tone, "Please, you and I both know that a search party would never be able to find me if I really wanted to get away."
"Well, I suppose you're right about that," the man replied with a nod as she idly noted that he was missing a signature piece of his usual outfit, revealing his bright orange hair to the world. "So what exactly were you doing out there at such an hour anyway, Doll? Thinking about an unrequited love or something?"
"As if," the multi-colored haired woman scoffed once more at the notion, this time with much more indignance to her voice, "I'm not the type of person who fails to get what she wants, you know that Roman."
"Really now?" he asked her as he flashed her his usual cocky smile. "The last time I checked there was one puny, little bug that managed to escape that web of yours."
A powerful pang of irritation shot through her as she began clench her hands into tight fists.
Flashing the orange-haired man a rare glare, Neo retorted, "What do you want Roman, or did you come here to try out mocking me again?"
"Strike a nerve there, did I?" he asked with a tone that infuriated her further. "Well, while I do love proving that I'm better at wordplay than you, I do actually have to tell you something."
"What is it then?" she answered brusquely. "I have better things to do than listen to the crap that comes out of your mouth all the day."
"Wow, I need to remember to use that brat against you more often, it gets you more riled up than even I expected," Roman stated offhandedly, the cocky smile on his face growing even larger than before while her irritation did the same. "Well, banter aside, I do have something I need to tell you."
"Spit it out then," she told him harshly, very ready to be done with the conversation.
"Very well," he relented, but his voice sounded a bit begrudging to her, "The boss wants you to do something for her tomorrow in the city..."
Blake fidgeted nervously as she stood in front of the bed the full-sized bed where she would lay her head for the night. The bed where Kaneki now lay on his side with his muscular back to her, which was just barely hidden by the blanket that he draped over himself.
Earlier, she said that she would be able to sleep in the bed next to him with no problem, but now that she actually had to do so, she couldn't stop herself from feeling extremely nervous.
'Why am I acting so nervous?' she asked herself harshly in her frustration. 'I mean, I've literally laid on top of him before and I still haven't ever felt this nervous.'
In retrospect, however; the answer to her question was glaringly obvious. She was about to get in the same bed with a shirtless young man who isn't her partner while she wore nothing but her underwear and said young man's shirt, which just barely fit around her due to two very obvious reasons.
Probably feeling her gaze on his back, the snowy-haired teen suddenly turned himself onto his other side, still completely enraptured in his slumber. Her amber eyes immediately shifted towards his face when he did that and she found a sight that made her earlier nervousness fade away from her almost completely.
His face didn't harbor a single ounce of his usual expressions, which always gave him the feel of someone double his age despite his rather baby faced features. Not even the occasional moment where he would act like an awkward teenager who was trying to ask his crush out on a date while having no prior experience doing so could be called similar.
No, she could only compare the expression that he was currently displaying to that of a sleeping child who was having a pleasant dream.
The small innocent smile that was currently on his lips, when coupled with the sight of him lightly nuzzling his cheek into the pillow it laid on was a sight that she couldn't stop herself from being comforted by. The fact that his faint scent was lingering around her due to her wearing his shirt probably didn't help that fact either.
Tentatively, as to not wake the sleeping teen, she lifted the blanket that was draped over him, slipped underneath it and allowed her body to sink into the clutches of the mattress under her.
Giving into her desire to see that innocent smile of his, Blake turned so that she was facing the young man lying next to her and stared at him as a warm feeling began to course through her.
'You don't ever stop getting more complicated, do you?' she asked the sleeping young man mentally. 'To think that in less than a month, I've seen you cry like a hardened old man and smile like a five year old.'
The fact that he could so easily switch between such conflicting appearances was something that managed to both frustrate her and intrigue her at the same time, further increasing her want to find out more things about him.
As her earlier exhaustion continued to enclose on her and caused her eyes to begin to droop close, she found herself smiling.
Neopolitan sighed as she walked into her bedroom before channeling all of her earlier frustration and slammed the wooden door shut behind her. Her feet dragged her body to the rather plain-looking bed in the corner of the room and she buried her head into the sole pillow.
She laid there as she waited for her earlier anger to subside and when it did, she rolled herself onto her back and focused all of her attention onto the stone gray ceiling above her, silently wondering to herself, 'It's happening again, isn't it?'
Ever since she was just a young girl, Neo had always been confident in her ability to keep her emotions in check. There was absolutely nobody in the world who could keep themselves as emotionally stable as she could and that was the way she preferred it, but for the first time in long time, she felt as though her oh so coveted composure was slipping through her fingers.
The last time she lost it in such a way was when she found out about Haise's intentions to leave her and the group, so it really didn't surprise her to find that it had started slipping once again when she found out that he survived her betrayal.
If his sudden reappearance with a group of young hunters-in-training wasn't enough, his personality and appearance had almost changed beyond the point of recognition.
It was clear to her from the first time she laid eyes on him again that he was no longer that sweet and innocent doe-eyed youth that she had grown so unknowingly fond of over the years, despite how much his absolutely unwavering belief in his stupid mother's saying annoyed her at times.
His hair was snow-white and his gray eyes were hardened to the point. He no longer acted like an awkward little boy when she was near him, now he looked at her like she was nothing more than a nuisance to him.
The change was so obvious that she would've needed to be both blind and deaf to not notice. He was finally acting like the person she always wanted him to be, someone who didn't need her to protect him all the time. Seeing that growth in him should've made her happy, at least a tiny bit, but she just couldn't stop herself from feeling like she got the consolation prize in the exchange and was simultaneously being taunted by the person who won the grand prize.
The girl with three different hair colors reached her hand up towards the ceiling and clenched it into a tightly clenched fist, her mind placing the image of the new-and-improved Haise back to the forefront of her mind as she did so.
"I hate you so much…" she grumbled that to herself before lowering her arm back down to its original position at her side and turning her body so that she was lying on her side, "... Haise."
She never did like getting consolation prizes...
Blake's eyebrows twitched when she felt a faint warmth caress the back of her hand lightly.
'What…' she began as her still sleep addled brain attempted to turn itself back on in response to the sudden stimulation, '... what was that?'
When her brain reached the halfway point of its reboot, she realized that whatever was touching her was actually physical and not just the warmth of the sun coming in through the single crack in the blinds.
The faunus in hiding forced her eyelids open and found herself staring at a sight that she's probably become too comfortable with over the past couple of days: Kaneki's face. The memories of last night returned to her as her mind reached the final stages of its attempted reboot, and the same smile from last night returned to her as well.
Remembering that there was something touching her hand, she turned her gaze down towards said appendage and found that it had somehow caught itself in between the mattress and Kaneki's own hand. A slight warmth grew on her cheeks in response to the sight.
Every rational part of her wanted to move her hand out from underneath his hand, but every other… less rational part of her wanted to prolong the amount of time their hands were in contact with one another for as long as humanly possible, something she heavily attributed to the fact that the strange warmth from last night had returned to her.
The two sides of her fought with one another on how to proceed. Normally, she would've allowed her rational side prevail and moved her hand, but given how many times she's allowed her emotions to dictate her actions over the past couple of days, she felt that she could do so again, one more time.
It took her six seconds to decide that it was best to compromise and just keep her hand underneath hi-
"Blake?" she heard an all too familiar voice call out to her from outside the haze of her daze. "Is there something wrong?"
The hidden cat-eared Faunus blinked out of her stupor and found a pair of dull grey orbs staring back into her own amber ones with the telltale signs of concern weaved inside them.
Having been caught completely off-guard by the sudden question, a spike of panic seized her and forced her to rip her hand out from underneath his as even more warmth pooled into her cheeks.
It didn't take long for the young man with snow-white hair to understand what just happened and he blushed as he blurted out one of his usual sheepish apologies, "Oh, uh, sorry about that. I didn't mean to-"
"No, it's fine," she reassured him, sitting herself up on the bed as she did so, knowing that lying next to each other with their faces mere inches apart was probably not the most appropriate position to have any sort of conversation in.
Not having the stomach to face him after what just happened, she adverted her eyes off towards the left, catching a quick glimpse of the blush that Kaneki was sporting, a sight that gave her a strangely high amount of satisfaction from seeing.
An awkward silence enveloped the two of them as the cat-eared Faunus struggled to find the correct words to start any form of conversation after what just transpired. She would've liked to say that she was bigger than being embarrassed about such a small thing, but she doubted that anyone her age could be able to approach the situation without feeling a tiny bit flustered. Well, there was Yang, but as of this moment, she was the very definition of the term: "outlier".
"Um, did you want to take the shower first?" The question left his mouth in a rather awkward fashion and given the context of the situation, that was pretty much on par with what she expected from him, if anything at all.
"Y-yeah," she answered as she nodded her head in agreement to his suggestion.
In terms of how things should proceed, that was probably the best route they could go down given how awkward things had become between them. She needed some time alone to collect herself and he clearly needed the same, so she decided that it was probably in both their best interests to go along with his suggestions.
Blake swung her legs off the side of the bed and stood up to make her way to the bathroom, only stopping when she heard her teammate call out to her.
"H-hey Blake," he stuttered out, curious about what he could've possibly wanted, she turned to see what the white-haired half ghoul wanted.
She raised an eyebrow at the young man to signify her confusion right before she asked in an smooth tone that surprised even her, "What is it?"
"M-my shirt…" he began nervously as he started to scratch the back of his head, "... I kind of need to wash it."
"O-oh yeah, sorry, I'll be sure to leave it outside the bathroom before I step into the shower." She adverted her eyes off to the side once more as she spoke, still not having the will to stomach to look him in the eyes.
"Alright."
If he did do anything after saying that, Blake wouldn't have seen it because she had turned around and speed-walking towards the bathroom before she could gauge his reaction.
An annoyed huff came from Neo as she walked down the sparsely populated streets Vale.
'I know that it's not exactly rush hour, but one would think there'd be more pedestrian traffic on the streets of the kingdom's capital city,' she thought to herself idly as she glanced around the near empty streets once more. 'It's a good thing I decided to disguise myself before I left the base, or I might've ended up getting recognized out in the open like this.'
With her objective placed firmly at the forefront of her mind, she kept walking down the path that she knew would eventually lead her to it with the same confident-ridden strut that she always walked with, despite how anxious the lack of cover that was currently around her made her.
As she walked, an unimpressive motel came into view and caught her attention for some reason. It wasn't anything special from what she could see, but there was something about it that was drawing her in for some reason that she wasn't about to the waste time trying to figure out. She had a mission to do and she had better things to do than invest-
Right as she turned to leave, an all too familiar figure with hair as white as snow stepped out of the motel before turning around and holding the door open as if someone was coming out right behind him.
Hair as white as snow that seemingly shined in the light of the sun. Check.
Fingernails that were painted a contrasting dull black. Check.
Medical eyepatch that seemingly covered up a perfectly good left eye, but instead hid a color combination that was eerily similar to those of a Grimm. Check.
There was no doubt in her mind, that was the new visage of her older partner.
'Haise…?' she asked herself, her feet that were once filled with drive and purpose, slowed to a halt due to the one person that's been taking both of those things out of said appendages quite a lot lately.
She stared dumbfounded at her former partner as he held the door open, her gaze remaining steady on him up until the point a familiar-looking girl with long black hair that was topped off with a similarly-colored bow stepped out of the building and gave him a brief nod of appreciation.
'Wait, now I remember, that's the girl I talked to over the scroll back during the raid on the settlement,' she noted to herself as she watched the two of them exchange words that she wasn't able to hear from the where she was standing. 'Aren't they hunters in training, what are they doing coming out of a motel…?'
Neo didn't get much time to contemplate an answer to that question because the pair began walking away in the other direction before she could come up with one.
'Should I…?' she began to ask herself, but herfeet had already started moving after them before she finished thinking that.
"A cafe?" Blake asked, blinking at the sign of the coffee shop before turning her head to meet the gaze onto the snowy-haired young man standing besides her. "Kaneki, why are we at a cafe?"
"Wanted a cup of coffee," Kaneki replied with a shrug before he stepped forwards and pulled the door open, holding it open for her like he did at the motel, "Come on, they just brewed a new pot of coffee."
She quirked an eyebrow at the statement as she subconsciously blurted out a question in response, "How can you even tell something like that?"
"You could say I have a 'sense' for these kinds of things," he flashed an amused smirk at her as he answered, tapping his nose twice for added effect.
A sigh escaped from her lips and she shook her head disbelievingly, hoping that doing so would hide the smile that had grew on her face in response to his rather hilariously bad attempt at trying to make her laugh.
"Ah, irony at its finest," she muttered to no one in particular right before she stepped past him and into the cafe beyond. "Come on, I want to start planning our next move as soon as possible."
The half-ghoul gave a quick nod and followed her inside. The pair then proceeded to walk over to one of the few open booths and sat down directly across from each other.
After that, it didn't take long for a waiter to come over to them and take their order. Kaneki got a simple cup of dark roast coffee and she ordered a mocha, after a couple seconds of deliberation.
"A mocha, huh?" she heard the young man sitting across from her mutter under his breath, "Well, now that I think about it, I guess it makes sense."
"Pardon?" Blake asked, curious as to what he was talking about.
"A-ah, nothing," he adverted his gaze away from her as he continued speaking, "I was just thinking that it makes sense that you'd like something like a mocha."
"What makes you think that? Is it that 'sense' of yours acting up again?"
"No, not really. Have you ever heard someone use the expression: 'you can tell a lot about a person by the way they take their coffee'?"
Blake was fairly sure that she knew where he was going with the question, but she felt as though this was the perfect opportunity to question him about his past like she planned the day prior, and so she decided to play along and act oblivious instead, "No, not really. Then again, I suppose if you think about it, you could technically say that I've heard it now."
"You know for someone who's so great at being stealthy and going unnoticed by others, you're a terrible actor," the eyepatch-wearing half ghoul stated, his tone a little bit too matter-of-fact for her tastes, but she let it slide anyways. "What, did you really think I'd believe that you of all people has never seen or heard that phrase used at least once?"
"Well, unlikely as that scenario may be, you have to admit that there's a possibility I may be telling you the truth," she countered his claim with one of her own smoothly.
"You're right," he admitted with very little trouble as he propped his elbow up on the table that separated them and rested the side of his head in palm of the hand connected to said appendage, which she naturally took as a sign that he was preparing a counter-argument of his own, "but as you said earlier, the chances of that actually being the case is very unlikely." A smile then suddenly appeared on his lips as he added, "And besides, you ordered that mocha with very little hesitation, so you've had to have ordered it some time before and that only makes my claim more plausible."
"Touché," she began her own rebuttal, a smile of her own forming on her lips, "still doesn't mean you're right, but it was a pretty good argument nonetheless."
The eyepatch-wearing half ghoul let out a snort that sounded one part annoyed, one part amused as he replied, "Fine then, I guess it really wasn't all that interesting in the first place."
"Stooping to reverse psychology now, are we? I don't know what to be more disappointed in, the fact you can't come up with another way of getting me to shut and listen, or the fact you actually thought it would work on me."
He flashed her an amused smile and she flashed him one of her own.
The snowy-haired young man opened his mouth, but he was interrupted when the waiter appeared seemingly from out of nowhere and placed their respective orders out on the table in front of them.
They both offered their thanks to the waiter and when they turned their attention back onto one another, the bow-bearing bookworm found that the momentum of their conversation had died almost completely, leaving them to sit across from one another in complete silence.
It wasn't an awkward silence, however. It actually reminded her of the bouts of silence they would have with one another in the early days of their friendship. Silences that, she noticed, became more and more rare between them as the days passed by.
'I wonder why that is…' Blake idly mused to herself as she picked her mug up from the table and took a sip of the still steaming liquid, which burned her tongue the moment the two made contact and caused her to jump a little in shock, prompting an amused snicker to come from the half ghoul sitting across from her.
Neo stared at the pair she had been following for the past half hour and clenched her hands into fists that were so tight that she was sure her hands would've been bleeding if she wasn't wearing her gloves.
Haise looked so happy, so happy that it sickened her and hurt her at the same time. She hadn't seen him so genuinely happy in a long time. Sure, during the early days of their partnership he smiled at her quite often and they almost always seemed to be quite genuine, but after a while that happiness gave way to an underlying sadness that ruined any positive emotion behind the smiles.
She knew that she probably should've been glad to see him so happy with someone other than her since it meant that he no longer had any reason to bother her, but it still hurt to see that smile being directed at someone else. It was a preposterous thing for her to say, but she felt as though she just had her favorite childhood toy stolen away from her, which incidentally was something that had happened to her in the past.
Neo remembered it like it was yesterday. Some brat took a doll her mother had given her while she was taking a nap.
To get it back, she didn't go and tell her parents, and she didn't go and beat the little brat up. No, instead she waited for the girl to fall asleep one day and took the doll away from her, and just to make sure she learned her lesson, she replaced it with a dirty, hole-ridden pillowcase filled with manure and a sole water balloon.
The result ended up creating quite the mess when she rolled over to hug the pillow case tightly. The point of the story was that when someone stole something of hers, she didn't just get it back, she made sure to get even too.
'The same tactic should apply here…' A wicked smile spread across her as she continued, '... right?'
"So what do you think we should do about the investigation?" Blake asked the half ghoul sitting across from her as she idly swished the remnants of her now cooled coffee in her cup. "Last night, you said that you knew something that might lead to something," she subconsciously tilted her head in a cat-like fashion as she continued, "so what exactly did you want to tell me?"
"Well, it's actually quite simple," he answered as he rested his chin on his hand and turned his head so that he was staring out the window. "Yesterday, I was sitting here in this very cafe and I happened to overhear two people talking about an incoming shipment of dust by the Schnee Corporation." He turned his eyes back onto her and added, "So if the White Fang are really connected with the dust shop robberies then something like that would be one of the most logical progressions, right?"
"Yeah, I suppose that would be true, but I still don't know what exactly they would gain by going after such a large amount of dust," she explained. "The only people who would need that much dust is an army and the last time I checked the White Fang never needed that much dust."
"Well, that doesn't mean that they don't need that much dust now," he countered in his usual stone cold fashion, "and the only way to find out would be to go and see if they try something on the shipment."
"Yeah, that seems like the most logical next step," the bow-bearing bookworm replied as she stood up from the booth. "So when does the shipment come in exactly?"
"Don't know, but from the way the two I heard were talking, I don't think it's coming in today," he answered as he stood from the booth and paid the bill for the drinks. She normally would've felt guilty about having him pay for everything, but she had more important things to worry about at the moment. "So before we commit ourselves to a single plan, I suggest we go and see if a contact of mine has any information on this."
"'Contact'?" she parroted with a raised eyebrow. "Since when do you have contacts?"
"Since yesterday," he answered promptly, which only made her more confused.
"Wait, exactly how long were gone yesterday?"
"Ten or so hours. Took me the majority of that time to establish said contact though."
"Okay then…" Blake trailed off, feeling as though she should be asking more questions, but decided to save it for a later time and more appropriate setting than the inside of a coffee shop, "... so who exactly is this contact of yours?"
Kaneki smiled a smile that sent a shiver down her spine, cracked his index finger and stated, "Oh, his name is Junior…"
-Chapter End-
Well, that's another chapter ending with a cliffhanger ending… I bet you're all really starting to hate me now.
So how was it? Good, more good, or even more good?
So you all know the drill, expect the next chapter sometime in March and until then, peace out y'all!
P.S: I'm moving this chapter behind the poem after three weeks.