Akira's poppin' bottles
Touka adamantly refused any sort of party or baby shower. A few weeks before her due date, Yoriko finally ambushed Touka with an obscene amount of food and some baby clothes. The way Touka told it, it was more like a reverse breaking-and-entering the way her friend barged in and refused to take 'no' for an answer.
The ghoul always made an effort to eat Yoriko's food, but she had to admit defeat and call Akira in to take some off of her hands before it went stale.
Touka was in her living room, watching a movie and reluctantly picking away at a huge persimmon Danish—catered by Yoriko, of course—as she organized a pile of gifts.
"She certainly is a generous friend."
"Best I ever had. At least between Yoriko and Nishiki I have two decent babysitters on deck."
"Really? Him?"
"He asked nicely." The ghoul looked askance at Akira and asked sarcastically, "Why, you jealous? Do you want on the list?"
Akira held up her hands. "Not so fast. I haven't even met this baby yet. I might not like the kid."
Touka laughed as she set a stack of clothes aside on the floor next to an unopened large plain box.
"What's in that box," asked the blonde.
"Nursery furniture's been arriving the last few weeks. One guess, no prizes."
Akira looked skyward in exasperation. "What does your friend know about your husband?"
Touka shrugged. "I told her the truth, mostly. He's someone from my past that I reconnected with, and he's never around because he travels so much for work. Yoriko doesn't pry."
The ghoul was distracted by screaming from her TV—the horror movie had erupted into carnage, and she started laughing at it.
"You do understand that this is a bad look from my point of view, right?"
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry—it's just the special effects are so terrible." Touka gestured for Akira to have a seat.
Onscreen, another coed was stabbed to death. "See? No matter where anyone gets stabbed, there's so much blood flying everywhere. It's like they think humans are just high-pressure bags of blood with organs floating around in them."
Akira sat and considered the bloodbath happening onscreen. Some starlet shoved a knife into her attacker's stomach, then appeared to have trouble following through once the weapon had pierced the first inch or so of tissue. "Yeah. Are they…stabbing each other like there's more resistance once you get through the skin?"
Touka nodded. "They sure are."
Both women had done more than their fair share of stabbing. It was a strange moment of camaraderie when they looked at each other and laughed at the ridiculous idea of organs and tissue tougher than skin.
"Wow, that's terrible fake blood. The color's too bright, it's too see-through, it's not viscous…Oh, did that idiot just throw a hissy fit and go off alone when there's a murderer running around?!" Akira sat on the floor and settled in to focus on the film more fully.
"Yeah, what dumbasses."
Over the next hour, the women heckled the terrible movie as they assembled furniture. It was…surprisingly fun. It reminded Akira of the few sleepovers of her childhood, before she got so serious and standoffish that no one wanted to be friends with her anymore.
After she left (with several containers of food), she pressed her lips together as she turned towards the café rather than the direction of her home.
The place was quiet. Yomo was there behind the counter. He noted her entrance but otherwise kept doing his sudoku puzzle at the counter.
"I'm actually here to talk to you," said Akira in a deadpan voice.
"What," he mumbled.
"I don't like Touka being by herself so much at this point. We're going to come up with a schedule, and one of us is going to stop by her apartment and spend a little time with her at least every other evening. If you can find her baker friend's number, include her in the rotation. Just don't let Touka know."
The ghoul behind the counter sat up and considered Akira for a long moment, then nodded and returned to his puzzle.
"You can take the first shift the day after tomorrow, then me. Great chat, bye." She spun around and left.
For the next several weeks, watching terrible horror movies and soapy medical dramas with Touka became Akira's pretext for stopping by.
The rotation rolled along smoothly, by the end including Yoriko and most of the employees of Café :re. If Touka found it strange that suddenly people were finding all sorts of excuses to visit her nearly every day, she kept it to herself.
It was oddly heartwarming how everyone came together to offer company and support once Akira got the ball rolling. It seemed like the ghouls, especially, were so used to being on their own most of the time that the thought simply hadn't occurred to them yet.
Akira was grabbing a quick dinner by herself at a local restaurant—close enough to the CCG offices that she didn't have to worry about any attacks—when she got the call.
It was Yomo on the other end. When he spoke, his usually gruff voice sounded…soft?
"Touka said I should probably call you. Come over to her apartment soon. In a day or two."
"Alright…why?"
"There's a baby here. She thinks you might want to meet her."
She looked around at the other restaurant patrons, feeling strangely alone that none of them understood the significance of that moment. "Oh…Really? Everything went ok, then?" It was a little ahead of schedule, but only by a week.
Curt as always, Yomo answered, "Yes. As of this morning, everyone's fine."
"I'll stop by after work tomorrow. I look forward to it."
She hung up and looked down at her table and whispered to her dinner, "We just cleared the biggest hurdle. Wow." I honestly didn't think we'd all survive this long.
Yomo let her in when she knocked. "She just woke up from a nap. Give her a couple of minutes."
"That's alright. I want to give you something," Akira said. She held out a key on a chain, the one she'd stolen from under Dr. Chigyo's nose. "This is a key to a CCG safe house. We use them sometimes if an investigator is worried that a ghoul might target their family during an investigation."
Yomo reached out and grabbed the key, turning it over in his hand with suspicion.
"It should be a seldom-used location. The address is on that tag," she added. "I don't know how or when, but there's a chance this apartment and the Café will be targeted by someone one of these days. She needs a place to go in a pinch. They should be unmonitored for privacy reasons, but there might be some panic buttons so don't push them out of curiosity."
The brusque ghoul nodded once and put it in his pocket. "I want to check on the café. We had to leave Nishio in charge over the last couple of days. Touka wouldn't want him to drive off all the customers."
Akira nodded. How times have changed. He's trusting me alone with his niece and her newborn.
As he was leaving, he looked back and motioned to the fridge. "I got a gift for you and your friend, as thanks. Take it with you."
She was only waiting a moment, flipping through some book left on the end table, before she heard a quiet call from the bedroom.
"Hello? Is that you, Akira?"
She opened the door to the bedroom, and there was Touka, lounging in her bed and propped up against a bunch of pillows, looking tired but wearing a warm smile.
And holding a bundle in her arms.
All this fuss over something—someone so tiny.
"Why didn't I get a call until everything was over?"
Touka's smile faltered. "It started in the middle of the night—I woke up with contractions, and Kaneki must have been here sleeping on the couch because he rushed in to check on me. I called him…some names…and begged him to stay with me. He held her, and he helped me name her. Then he left and I called Yomo."
There was, indeed, a paper left on top of her bedside table with several false starts crossed out. Circled was the name "Ichika" in what appeared to be Haise's handwriting, followed by a couple of practice attempts in what must be Touka's less-confident script.
Akira muttered, "He's a fool who needs to figure out that we're on his side."
"He's so resilient, he can bend so far before he breaks that I don't think he knows how to handle it when he finally does break. But he can't change who he is at heart. Not really. So it's ok. I can be patient…" She yawned and leaned her head back against the stack of pillows behind her. "I should have told him to stop running away, but I wasn't in the right frame of mind to think of that. All I did was say that I was going to kill him for getting me pregnant."
"Death threats aside, I think you've been more patient with him than he deserves," Akira pointed out.
"Maybe. But I picked him, you know? There's a responsibility to that." She laughed. "As if anyone else would put up with me. I know I can be a bit…abrasive. He was always too nice to take it personally."
The room was quiet and calm. Akira looked down at the sleeping newborn in Touka's arms, looking as soft and innocent as any other baby.
"Ichika is a nice name, though. I like it."
"It is nice." The ghoul stared down at Ichika for a lingering moment, then looked up at Akira. "She deserves a good life."
"Yeah," Akira agreed. "She does."
The last of Akira's loyalty to the CCG dissolved as she looked on at the baby that was alive and well, and not an orphan, largely because of her. Akira now felt partly responsible for the life of this…half-ghoul.
They chatted quietly for a while longer, about easy topics like which outfit to dress the baby in first. With Touka's permission, Akira snapped a quick photo to send to Hide. It seemed like a nice thing to do.
He responded almost instantly: She looks so grumpy, like she already hates it here. I like her! They should name her after me.
Too late, wrote Akira. Her name's Ichika.
Dang. Next one then!
After a while, the chitchat died down as the ghoul drifted back to sleep. Akira smiled and gently took the sleeping baby out of her arms, settling her into the crib at the bedside.
She had virtually no experience handling infants, and that might have been a source of anxiety for other people. Akira had the logical outlook that every single one of her ancestors had managed to keep at least one of their offspring alive to adulthood, so taking care of a baby must not be too difficult.
Besides, she was used to the heart attack of trying to keep her colleagues alive as they ran headlong into danger. A newborn who mostly slept and stayed where you put her was a refreshing change of pace.
She grabbed the gift Yomo had mentioned—it was very easy to find as the bag was practically the only thing in the fridge—and left.
As she quietly let herself out of the apartment, she shut the door behind her with immense care. She was startled to turn around in the hallway and find herself face-to-face with Haise.
"What are you doing here," he said in the coldest voice she'd ever heard from him.
"Congratulating the mother and child. What else would I be doing here?" She frowned. "Haise, if you would just sit down and talk with me instead of lurking around—"
"Stop." He cut her off. There was a moment of frigid silence from him. "I don't know what you're up to, Akira, but if you hurt either of them I'll kill you."
She narrowed her eyes at him. After all she had done, everything she had put up with, to have some ungrateful brat talk to her like that…
Looking down her nose at him, she hissed, "Do you think I'm scared of you? I've seen you sniveling on the ground, begging Arima to let you die. You're too weak in your heart for all the power you've been given. You'd better lose the attitude with me and think long and hard about who your real friends are, because you're on a fast track to being erased a second time, Kaneki."
In her fury, she shoved Haise out of the way and stomped down the hall. He was too stunned to react, and dumbly watched her go.
Akira's frustration had run its course by the time she got back to her apartment. She set her gift on the counter. Peering inside, she saw that it was a bottle of Bollinger champagne and an unmarked carafe of that questionable burgundy liquid that ghouls seemed to favor.
Akira laughed. Look at me now, storing ghoul beverages in my fridge.
Amon stopped by that night after doing the rounds of her neighborhood, perfectly on schedule. Akira directed him to grab some pillows from the couch and set them out on her balcony, while she popped the cork on her champagne. After pouring glasses for herself and Amon, she cued up some instrumental music to play on her sound system and joined him outside.
It was a balmy summer evening, cooling off quickly but with some of the daytime heat still wafting through the air.
She handed him his glass and sat herself down next to him.
"What is this," he said suspiciously.
"It was a gift from Yomo, Touka's uncle. He's not the most expressive sort, but I think he's very excited about the new baby. I'm feeling unusually sentimental, too."
She looked at Amon's apprehensive expression. A deep fondness for him washed over her. "Drink. The good times disappear fast whether we cherish them or not. We're all alive, we've made it this far, the baby was born safe and sound. We're celebrating, today."
He looked down at his glass, then out at the city lights against the sunset. "You're right. We're alive, and there's plenty to celebrate."
They clinked their glasses together with a subdued "Kanpai!"
As the night settled into a deep blue, they sipped their drinks while Akira recounted her visit that day, then the two reminisced about the past and wondered, cautiously, about the future.
They stayed out there talking late into the night.
The other night, I discovered a horrifying centipede as long as a human finger in my sink. It escaped while I was trying to catch it dead or alive, and now for SOME weird reason all I can think is "What if it crawls in my ear while I'm asleep?!" So thanks for that fresh nightmare, Tokyo Ghoul!
Next week: Akira has the most anxious macchiato of her entire life