Notes:
+ Chapter Summary: Waiting, fighting, playing human — all of these are second nature to her. Touka, and the years that pass after Anteiku falls. (AU-y post-TG)
+ Written for the Prompt "10 Years Later."
+ Takes place after the fall of Anteiku. At this point in time, I'm only caught up to the first two chapters of TG:Re, soo...this should probably be considered an AU.
+ Not sure if this was clear yet, but I just wanna say in case it isn't obvious: all of these oneshots are unrelated to each other.
+ Hope you like it~
Backburner
1. You'd think she'd be pretty good at waiting by now. Or at least accustomed to it. Or, at least, resigned.
The truth is that waiting is as itchy, as achy, as wrenchingly heavy as ever. But there's so much to do that her concerns go…what was that idiom Yoriko taught her?
On the backburner.
It seems fitting. As Anteiku rebuilds, that silent heat smolders on Touka's spine. Gives an extra bite to the flare of her kagune. Fills her sleep with embers, and smoke.
:::
2. The university is a half-hour's ride from her cheap apartment. The train starts empty and crowds as they enter the city proper. Her eyes skate casually across the head of each passenger, peering beneath hats and hoods, searching for white.
Her gaze lingers, too, on suitcases.
In the registration office, Touka's hand hovers over her course packet for just an instant too long. Then she circles the numbers for a literature class, so sharply that the nib of her pen tears an inky hole into the page.
:::
3. It gets easier to scrape together enough to purchase her textbooks, mostly because it's easier to figure out which ones are strictly necessary.
Takatsuki's novels are featured at the register. While her change is counted out, she lifts one up, turns it over. Wills herself to believe she'd still find them interesting even if she hadn't once seen these covers in his hands.
Strictly necessary.
"Excuse me," she hears herself saying to the cashier. "Sorry. Can you add this on?"
:::
4. The Doves are changing, evolving, becoming hungrier. She can't believe it the first time an investigator bares not a quinque, but a kagune — sharp, fast, and aimed right at her heart. She dodges it by a hair, twists before she crashes into a building, shoves off of it instead, aims a kick right between her attacker's eyes — and they dodge, with horrific effortlessness.
Touka's eyes widen and she can't stop herself from colliding heavily into a bunch of trash cans. She cries out in pain, and it's more of an accident that she rolls away just in time to see a rinkaku tentacle bury itself centimeters deep into the concrete where her head had been.
Adrenaline — and something else — has her on her feet a moment later.
Run! she hears a voice scream inside. Run!
That rinkaku —
— but no, his had been different, hadn't it, at the end?
And yet — the way the Dove had dodged her — as if — they had practiced it a thousand times before —
Run! Run to him!
But those tentacles are arching up again, and her ukaku are starting to sputter, and her legs are weakening, and her black eyes are stinging with tears that she can't swipe away without removing her mask, and she runs, she runs, she runs, away.
Dammit, she thinks, not for the first time, if only he were here — then we would have won, for sure.
(How ridiculous it is, that she still —
No. No. She believes. He'll be back.)
:::
5. The new investigators are severe, and rapacious, and under their guard the ghouls are more cautious than ever. Touka sticks close to her human alter-ego. Graduates, learns how to cook, brings lunch to work. Her way of eating is famously dainty. No one remarks on the plump, stained wads of napkins that always end up stuffed into her lunchbox when she's done.
Yoriko is employed at a bakery cafe, one of the only places Touka visits recreationally.
"We should get out more," Yoriko says wistfully. "We're getting older, you know? It would be nice to have a boyfriend."
Touka shrugs.
"You're really not interested?" Yoriko wonders. "Oh — what about — a girlfriend?"
Touka shrugs again.
Yoriko's brows furrow. She looks up, as if recalling, and Touka wonders if she can still remember him, and the times that she stumbled onto him accidentally. Wonders suddenly if that backburner heat is tangible, if Yoriko hears Touka's jacket rustle as the flesh on her shoulders gives a brisk shiver.
If Yoriko does, she doesn't comment. But she persists with the idea of dating, and the instant Touka responds with something other than pursed lips, the group date is arranged.
"Oh, I can't," Touka says when they drop the glass of sake in front of her, "I'm a lightweight," but it's an unavoidable situation, and she ends up tipping back with the rest of them, first one drink, then two. She excuses herself to the bathroom, stomach clenching. When she staggers out, she freezes.
Yoriko is there, rushing forward, apologizing profusely. But someone else's attention is focused on her too. She doesn't see them, but she feels it. Her ukaku give a harsh twitch. Touka slaps Yoriko's shoulder and mimics her best drunken laugh.
"Oh, no, no, no, come onn, none of that! I looove it!"
When she nears the bar, someone perched on a stool there turns pointedly away from her — ah, there they are, then — that's the watcher. She doesn't dare face them full-on, but out of her periphery she sees their hair is interwoven with white. Someone old, then.
Her heart stops when she sees this mixed-color hair again at Yoriko's bakery cafe, but she keeps her terror concealed. She sits in her usual seat. She feels their eyes, burning into her back. She turns, very slowly, the page of her book. Orders fruit juice, and a scone.
:::
6. "I think he likes you," Yoriko laughs.
Touka snorts.
"You're sure it's a he?"
"Yeah, he told me. Come on, Touka, have you really not even bothered saying hi? Or even looking at him?"
"No. Why should I?"
"Well," Yoriko says, "He's always here when you are. Same days, same times."
"Really?" So Yoriko has noticed too. Touka's heart catches. Not with admiration.
"Yeah," Yoriko insists excitedly. Her voice lowers. She cups her hand over Touka's ear. "You should ask him out."
When she sees him for the third time that week, she finally tells Yoriko she'll give it a chance. Truthfully, she's decided it's time to put an end to his sneaking around.
Yoriko cheers discreetly from behind the counter as Touka approaches, taking a breath, steeling her weakening knees. This whole time she has never brought herself to meet his gaze, too unwilling to confirm that he has been looking for her.
But when she finally sees him, really sees him, her stomach drops. That face —
She had been expecting someone old, not someone young. And certainly not someone — eerily familiar. The casual lines that she had prepared to speak to him crumble on her tongue.
He blinks at her. Closes his book onto a finger and smiles. It's such a kind expression. A familiar expression. Her heart catches. Not in fear.
Could this — is it possibly — is it really —?
"It's — me," she blurts without thinking. "It's — it's Touka. Kirishima Touka."
"Oh," he says. And then: "Nice to meet you, Kirishima-san."
Nice to meet you, Kirishima-san.
It's not him. It can't, it can't, it can't. He would never say something like that. Regard her with distant curiosity, confusion, and zero recognition. He would never look like this, so trim, with a soldier's posture. She finds suddenly, that she is dizzy. Wrecked by the fall from her too-high hopes.
"Excuse me," said a bright voice. It was Yoriko, holding a steaming mug of black coffee. "Thank you so much for waiting! Your drink," she says to him, setting a mug down.
"And," Yoriko continues, "your drink!"
"Oh," Touka says. She hasn't ordered anything. "Thanks."
"Of course," Yoriko says, setting the coffee on the table and pulling out a chair. Touka sits.
"Do your best," Yoriko whispers, and retreats.
"Weird cafe, huh?" he says, mouth curling up. "You know, it's the first time I've gotten a drink accompanied by...company."
He snickers. Touka stares.
"Was that supposed to be funny?" she realizes.
He coughs. "Uh. Yeah. W-well — not too funny. Just…maybe…a little bit."
Touka leans back in her chair.
Yeah. It's definitely not him.
:::
7. The afternoon, and the next day, and the next week, passes in remarkably compatible chatter. Sasaki Haise shares her opinion on books — can share stories about his coworkers for hours — is amusing to watch when he searches his brain desperately for puns (a struggle that happens often).
"Got it!" he says, sitting up straight so suddenly that she jumps.
"Wh — what?!"
"It's made out of metal!"
"S-so?"
"So!" He bangs the cabin's walls, makes them ping. "It's…a ferrous wheel!"
She buries her head in her hands, but not before she can hide a brief spasm of a smile.
He suggests all of their meetings: the ferris wheel, a movie, the observation deck of a tall government building, a ferry that they take at sunset, watching as the skyline lights up.
Every time she meets him she is guarded, prepares herself for what she had wanted to tell him all along — leave me alone.
But instead he makes her laugh. She points out objects of interest and he contemplates and holds them aloft and aglow in a new light. It's in his vicinity that she feels, for the first time in years, that her motions aren't scripted and scrutinized and humanly perfect.
They give each other no labels, and make no promises. She doesn't make the mistake anymore, of saying forever, or keeping an ear open for it.
But instead of leave me alone, their last words end up always being "Goodbye."
And, "See you later."
:::
8. She finds herself completely at ease with him, though she sees him only every once in a while. Sasaki apologizes for how busy his nebulous work keeps him, but the distance doesn't bother her at all. It makes it easy for her to maintain her own work schedule, her free time, her diet.
Still, Touka looks forward to every time they meet, and it doesn't strike her strange that any of their dates ("They're dates," Yoriko assures her with a squeal) involve eating.
"Huhh? Really? That's so weird," Yoriko says.
"Is it?" Touka asks, trying to keep calm. Come to think of it, it is — but she'd been too relieved to notice. It had just been so nice to not worry about it, for once. To live her life as if the increasing number of ghouls being hunted down isn't something relevant to her at all. To live her life without the sense that there's a fire at her back, growing, growling, about to consume her at any moment.
That thought is the one that makes her stop sipping her drink.
(I believe, she thinks. I trust him. He'll be back.)
(But.)
At the station, she waves as Sasaki steps, smiling, off the train.
(There's no rush.)
:::
9. She feels the most relaxed that she's been in years, and that's why she's caught off guard.
Her kagune is almost at her victim's throat when he turns. His back, which had been humped and shuddering and bent, straightens into a soldier's posture. He unleashes a quinque.
Shit — SHIT —
Stupid, stupid, stupid! She's so hyperaware of the hybrid Doves that she forgot the danger of the normal kind, forgot her caution, forgot what a trap looks like. The left ear of her mask is swiped clean off. She bounds backward, flips, rushes forward with kagune flared to scare him, but he doesn't take the bluff — he has a koukaku, fuck — he beats her down, and again, and again, until she shrieks so startlingly loud that he pauses for the single instant that it takes for her to burst ukaku needles into his face and flash away into the night.
Blood everywhere.
She spills it, bleary-eyed, on as many roofs as possible, confusing her trail, even as she tears down someone's shirt from a laundry line and winds it tight. She doesn't go home — doesn't want to risk that they'd follow her back to her single remaining shelter in this world — she sticks to the shadow of an alley, hiding her bloody dress in a stolen jacket.
I'm going to die, she thinks wildly. I'm going to die, and he will never know —
Terrified tears gather on her clenched fingers.
I will die, and leave without a word, and Sasaki will never know.
(She doesn't die.)
(But that last thought stays when she wakes up, alive, in that old alley. That last thought, and its flame-brightness, consuming everything.)
For the first time, she calls him, and asks, "Do you want to go to a bar?"
"Ah…sure," he says. "When?"
"Tonight."
The next time they meet, his eyes behind his glasses are dark beneath. "Had some troubles yesterday," he admits with a humorless chuckle. He eyes the sake she pours for him. They exchange glances, then cheer each other, and tip the glass back, and another. She visits the bathroom before they leave, checks her appearance and evaluates her stomach, which feels…mostly fine, thank goodness.
He doesn't protest when she follows him into his neighborhood. His home. His door. He turns toward her with his exhausted eyes and without further ado she smooths a hand over his wrinkled brow. Removes his glasses and folds them into her collar.
Presses her mouth to his. Feels him sigh against her, and return her kiss, winding a tongue across her upper lip, winding his arms around her waist and beneath her blouse. His hands are so much larger than she remembers his being, and her body is so much hungrier than she remembers, too. Her heart is swollen with years of waiting, years of desire for closeness that he had never given her. It had all been so long ago — maybe it was just an illusion.
He kicks apart his messily-folded futon and they collapse onto it, she tearing at his jacket and shirt, he pulling her dress over her hips. She finds her breath coming raggedly, feels her vision constrict as her human eyes recede, and she presses her hand on his eyes and says, "Close them."
"Kirishima-san," he whispers, and she blushes but repeats, "Close them."
He does. No argument, no puns. For good measure she finds his discarded tie and wraps it around his head, and he doesn't protest. Doesn't make noises of alarm when her kagune glimmer faintly as he runs his fingernails over her shoulderblades. She fumbles with his zipper, sets her legs on either side of his waist. His nails dig in with a sharp inhale as her weight settles and twists down.
"Touka," he gasps, and pulls her close, holding her closer than he ever had. His hands rest everywhere she wants them to, and it's like he knows her already, to the marrow.
"I feel," he murmurs, "like I've been waiting for this for a long time," and she kisses him, sucks the tip of his tongue, and each of his trembling, curling fingers.
She murmurs back. "Me too."
:::
10. Nothing lasts.
You'd think she'd be pretty good at understanding it by now. Or at least accustomed to it. Or, at least, resigned.
The truth is that hope is as itchy, as achy, as wrenchingly heavy as ever. But there's so much to do that her concerns go on the backburner. Somehow, even after everything that's happened, she thinks, This will last.
(And she believes it — even when there's a knock on her door — even when she realizes she's staring, unmasked, straight into the face of an investigator — even when she tears out of her apartment window like a wild creature with them all chasing her, quinques biting and slashing at her ankles, her arms, anything they can reach. They're yelling, they're yelling, they're yelling — incomprehensible things, furious things, things that she can barely understand even once they finally flick her like a fly into an alleyway.)
(Her ukaku are almost out.)
(This is it.)
(As their shadows loom on her, she thinks, I didn't come back after all, and maybe it's the loss of blood, or RC cells, but when she looks up the blurry shades around her coalesce into someone that looks very much like Ka…no, Sasaki. She feels a stab, of relief. At least she can say it — at least she can say it, all the things that people never told her before they went. She spits blood.)
"Goodbye," she manages.
And, "See you later."
She expects her Sasaki-ghost to smile. Instead, when she looks up, his face is filled with shock. He's sweating, panting. One eye, the left, is black.
"Touka-chan," he breathes.
And.
She believes.
Her eyes water. Her teeth, her fists, clench. Her heart races; her body fills with incredulous heat. Suddenly, she knows. No, no, no.
I can't die here.
"Please," she gasps, trying to push herself to her feet. "Help me."
And his hand grabs hers.
End note: this is kinda silly, but the pun that Haise is making in my mind when he says "accompanied by…company" involves the words "oyatsu" ("snacks") and "yatsu" ("person"). ...hahahahahaha o_o