(i'm so sorry, kame)
Title: Flesh and bones
Pairing: NaKame
Word Count: 4.8k
Rating: PG13
Warning: descriptions of gore, cannibalism(kind of)
A/N: This is a Tokyo Ghoul AU that was also supposed to be a drabble but ahahaha nope. I’m hoping to continue this as well. This fic should be easy enough to follow even if you haven’t heard about or watched Tokyo Ghoul (although I highly suggest you do because it is great!) For the definition of kagune, please see this.
Summary: Kame doesn’t know what real hunger is until he meets Jun.
It started with a chance encounter at a coffee shop, a bump of the shoulders and flying books and apologies. They were carrying the same books and Kame’s interest was suddenly piqued because the man didn’t seem to be the type to be interested in The Science of Hitting. He was slim and tall but far from lanky, with graceful, untrimmed arms that peak from the sleeves of his polo shirt.
He went by the name of Matsumoto. Kame knew this because he had been coming to the coffee shop ever since, peeking over baseball statistics to the table by the window where Matsumoto sat, licking his fingertip briefly to flip a page. Kame always looked away quickly when their eyes meet. It was the first time Kame had been interested in a man and it was unsettling because he had only ever found girls pretty before.
Matsumoto was pretty though, in a weird, unexpected way. He sported a funny, flippy hairstyle that would make anyone else look like a ponce, like the kind of person who raises a pinky when drinking from a cup. Matsumoto didn’t, though; he sipped delicately on his chai tea whenever the shy waiter boy brought it over. He never ordered anything to eat. Matsumoto had a funny face too but his lopsided grin made everything forgettable.
So when he approached Kame saying that he was looking to get into baseball and if Kame could teach him some tips, Kame said sure before he could even finish. It’s a date, Matsumoto replied with his lopsided grin ever in place.
Kame led him to a field where he had spent most of his childhood diving into base after base until he returned home caked in dirt. The field wasn’t too far from the coffee shop and Kame glanced shyly at Matsumoto as they walked, the overhead news reporting the usual warning of ghoul attacks. They were so common now that they had become white noise, rising and falling every month like a murderous tide.
The field was secluded, cornered by an alleyway of dumpsters and a construction zone but there were still some kids playing catch ball or soccer with a rubber tire and Kame waved to them, happy that the home of his memories hadn’t been abandoned completely. He dropped his shoulder bag and pulled out a scuffed bat and a soft mitt-his treasures-and tried not to come across as a complete baseball fanatic as he taught Matsumoto how to swing a bat. He didn’t seem to mind when Kame’s hand lingered on the smooth skin of his wrist longer than was necessary. In fact, he seemed rather pleased which only made Kame swallow and blush like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Matsumoto, despite his pale skin and soft muscles, lasted longer than Kame would have guessed. He asked Kame to continue, said he wouldn’t stop until he made his first hit, even though the sun was setting and the sky was bleeding orange, red, and finally a deep, unfathomable blue. Kame was sweating, the back of his shirt damp and sticky, while Matsumoto was as fresh as when they had first arrived. It figured, Kame thought as he ran to catch another off-course ball while Matsumoto stood by the fence, swinging his bat apologetically. He finally made a proper hit when the first set of stars began to peep from the sky.
“The book made it sound so easy,” Matsumoto said with a slight fold to his lips, helping Kame pack up.
“You’ve been gravely misled,” Kame returned, cracking a grin and missing the sharpness of Matsumoto’s as he ducked to grab his bag. He offered Matsumoto a snack of dried seaweed, something to sustain them as they headed home, but he declined and Kame looked at him incredulously. It had been hours. “Aren’t you starving?”
Matsumoto smiled. “Positively famished. But I don’t want to spoil my dinner. I have a special meal planned for tonight.”
That made Kame halt with a thought, his stomach suddenly tight with ridiculous dread.
“Are you… are you by any chance,” Kame took a deep breath and met Matsumoto’s eyes, or tried to from under the shadows that had blanketed over them, “…seeing someone?”
Matsumoto’s grin uncurled slowly, like liquid, like venom, lopsided and dangerously sweet.
“I thought it would have been obvious by now.”
When he moved in, Kame’s eyes fluttered closed of their own accord. He was curious, so desperately curious to know what Matsumoto felt like, what he tasted like, if it would be any different than the kisses Kame had experienced in the past.
It was entirely different. Shockingly. Painfully.
Beyond painfully.
Kame didn’t understand where the sudden pain was coming from until he saw-heard-his own blood gush forth, splattering the pavement like rose-petal rain. So red and vibrant, alive.
It was the colour of Matsumoto’s eyes, the red pupils pulsing like a beating heart in his black eye sockets, sending a map of spider-like veins to stretch out over his eyelids. The telltale mark of a ghoul.
This was the moment, Kame knew as he heard the distant sound of his bag dropping to the ground, that his life would become a nightmare. A short one.
His chest felt as if it had been split open, his ribs cranked apart with a crowbar and his flesh churned inside a case of broken bones. The blood continued to squelch out of him, his body nothing but a sponge that Matsumoto wrung out viciously with the spears of his kagune that bent like ropes, constricting and choking, piercing.
“Matsu..mo..t-” Kame choked, tasting his own blood and bile, and Matsumoto’s face drew closer, his voice a syrup-like drawl.
“I would like to hear you call me Jun just once.”
A burst of molten instinct burnt through Kame and he crashed his skull into Matsumoto’s with all the force he could manage. There was a scream-his own-and then he was hitting the ground and for a moment, that terrible stretching moment where he thought this is it, everything went black.
And that was it.
Until the world burst back into colours-explosions and explosions of colour that made his eyes squint and his head ache-and Kame came to life tucked in the safety of his bed, like he had just awoken from a nightmare.
A nightmare. Nothing more.
Kame was starving.
Eat, said a coiling, cloying whisper and Kame lurched up, his heart hammering and his knuckles white. The door and windows were closed, the tv was powered off, his apartment was empty.
His stomach rumbled, queasy from hunger.
Eat.
Kame jumped out of bed and rolled a baseball underneath. He heard the soft thunk as it hit the wall on the opposite side without an obstacle and then took a steadying breath. It was the nightmare; he hadn’t shaken it off yet.
Eat.
His heart wouldn’t stop hammering and Kame scanned his apartment once again, the clean counter tops, the empty couch.
The bathroom.
Kame entered it with a baseball bat in hand, the same one he had carried in his nightmare, angry and scared and ready to swing it.
It fell from his grip when he looked in the mirror, clunking on the linoleum floor just as a scream ripped from his lips.
Eat, Jun whispered and it was all in his head.
In his red, pulsing eye.
---
He gagged and choked, purging what little food he had managed to swallow before his body rejected it. Everything tasted like ash and dirt-eggs, rice, oranges, bread-all disappearing down the drain as Kame heaved, bent over the basin. His mouth was lined with a sour taste, like rancid milk, and still his stomach rumbled.
Meat, Jun’s voice whispered. You need meat.
Kame felt outside himself when he swung open his freezer, pulled out a bag of frozen raw chicken, and sunk his teeth into it just like that, suckling at the ice and congealed blood.
It tasted like garbage. Like mushy banana peels and rotten tomatoes and tears formed at the corners of his eyes as he flung it away ruthlessly, curling up on the kitchen floor with his arms around his stomach as it rumbled and rumbled.
Meat.
Kame bit down on his lip and the taste of his own blood was delightfully sweet, better than anything he had tasted before. He clenched his eyes shut and felt the tears run down his face.
Meat, you fool, Jun snarled at him and Kame refused to move.
Locked his muscles tight and didn’t budge when, hours later, there was a knock on his door and he heard Fuku’s voice call for him. Fuku the boy next door who had taken to calling him big brother after Kame had retrieved his kite for him from the greedy clutches of a tree.
Fuku with his reverent eyes and supple skin, the flesh tender and juicy underneath… All Kame would have to do was open his door and invite Fuku inside. It would be so easy, so fast, the gastric acid licking at the walls of his stomach satiated at last.
Every cell in him quivered with the want.
Kame bit down on his forearm instead, hard enough to tear skin, and prayed with everything he had that Fuku would leave.
He did, eventually, and when Kame dislodged his arm from the grip of his teeth, his jaw sore and unforgiving, he watched his flesh come together and become whole again, any mark of a wound erased from his skin.
He released a muffled cry and slowly lifted his shirt, hoping, wishing to see a scar, but his torso was bare and smooth; the spot where he had been pierced just above his heart showed not a single scratch. A fist-sized hole had been carved right through him and there was absolutely nothing to show for it, not even a raw, puckered pink.
It wasn’t normal. Wasn’t… human.
You’re not human. He could feel Jun’s voice lick at his ear, between the twisted coils of his brain, laughing faintly in the background.
Kame stared at his wavy reflection in the gray metal of the refrigerator, saw his left eye open and close around a red pupil that sat in a black sclera like an apocalyptic moon, throbbing with thirst. The red veins stretched over the moles that bordered his eye. Beauty spots, his mom had once called them while his brothers had snickered.
There was a knife just inches away from his knee.
“I’m still dreaming,” he said, lips raw and peeling. He was still in the nightmare.
He just needed to wake up.
The knife was in his hands now, caressing the pale skin of his belly as it continued to groan and slosh with acid and a begging emptiness.
He just needed a scar. Something to prove he was still human.
---
Kame hadn’t eaten for two days. Hadn’t left his one-room apartment for fifty-six hours.
All his phone calls went directly to voice mail and Kame deleted them all without listening. He couldn’t, not like this, not when he could use any weakness, any excuse, to call someone over and-Eat.
He could feel himself slowly fraying under Jun’s commands, like there was no flesh left to him, just bones and teeth with strings attached. He trembled whenever he heard voices, people walking by and leaving a waft of aroma that slipped through the cracks of Kame’s door and straight into his skin, his gums, his clenching abdomen.
He was slipping and Fuku would knock on his door again tomorrow morning before he headed to school, his voice high with worry. Kame needed to leave before then.
When he finally left the musty stagnancy of his apartment, the night was dark and well settled, the shadows cosy in their place. Kame tucked the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and walked with his eyes on his shoes. His long brown bangs fell across his left eye like a veil. He wouldn’t be cutting them any time soon.
The sudden, heavy scent of human flesh assaulted him all at once when he hit the streets, ducking under the bright lights of bars and late night restaurants. For a moment, the scent paralysed him, attacking him from all sides, making his knees wobble. It was too much. Like walking into a perfume store and becoming nauseous, becoming utterly delirious with the sheer power and variety of scents.
Kame’s mouth was flooded with saliva instantly, like a starving dog surrounded by piles of succulent bones. It took all his will power to not grab the brunette batting her eyes at him curiously and sink his teeth into the curve of her shoulder.
He ran until he entered a quiet neighborhood, the kind of neighbourhood where garbage littered the streets and no one cared, with twisting alley ways that served as conference rooms for illegal business. If someone were to disappear from here, no would care. It wouldn’t even make it to the news. A lowly criminal going missing in the dead of the night in a sketchy part of the city… No one would think twice.
Kame tried to convince himself that there would be no loved ones left waiting either. It wouldn’t matter if there were because he has loved ones too and he could never be with them, or with anyone, if he didn’t fucking eat.
A thin figure knocked into his shoulder at the corner of a sidewalk and before the man could say anything, Kame had a hand to his throat and was dragging him into an abandoned alley.
“What the fuck, dude! I’m sorry, okay? I wasn’t looking!”
The man writhed against the wall, under his grip, and Kame could feel the pulse of his jugular vein against his thumb, the blood bubbling underneath. His arm was being scratched and clawed at by desperate fingers-they’d be so crunchy between his teeth-and Kame didn’t understand why the man couldn’t throw him off. Kame was weak, all bones and strings, starving…
“Please,” the man choked and Kame looked at the piercings in his ears, nose, along his eyebrows, in the center of his soft, fleshy tongue and realised how young the man was. Not a man at all; just a teenager.
Eat, Jun ordered and Kame’s stomach was screaming at him to listen but-he was a boy. A kid. A human like Kame-Jun’s laugh was loud, bouncing in his skull-and he couldn’t do this. He wouldn’t. He would rather die.
Kame threw the kid to the ground, meters away, and begged him to run as he folded in on himself, pleading his predatory muscles to obey and let him go.
The kid was scrambling onto his knees when his head flew off, cut cleanly off his neck before it rolled into the darkness.
Kame stared numbly as the body fell into a pool of its own blood, too horrified to make a sound. There was a scream lodged in his throat.
“Encroaching on my territory, hmm?” A tall woman with long black hair plaited into a braid and a purple dress stepped forward and Kame knew instantly by her eyes that she was a ghoul. Her boots left red footprints as she walked through the blood towards him. “What is this curious smell… It’s almost as if you’re human…”
“I am,” Kame said at once and the scream he had been holding back coughed up at last when he was pulled off the ground by his hair. He squinted through the pain and found the ghoul staring at his left eye. Her red lips curled up into a smile that hid a blade.
“You’re neither a human nor a ghoul,” she drawled and a swift movement found Kame thrown against the wall with a punch to the stomach, the bricks crumbling under the force. He heard his spine crack and splinter before building together again. His bones ached terribly.
“So, tell me, little monster,” the ghoul drawled and Kame felt something sharp and thin slap his back like the strike of a whip, almost blinding him with pain, “what are you and why are you in my hunting territory?”
“I’m human,” Kame croaked, remembering the wide, wrinkly smile his grandma gave him whenever he dropped by to help her in the rice field, the warmth spreading through him faster and stronger than sunlight. He remembered his parents cheering for him from the bleachers at his first baseball match, his brothers dog piling him later with congratulatory punches even though his team had lost. The simple delights only a human could experience.
Kame refused to give them up.
Another two strikes criss-crossed his back as he laid face down in the dirt before another voice entered the alley like a fog, slow and steady, calming and weightless. Quiet until it became obvious and dangerously obtrusive.
It was… familiar in a way.
“Leave him, Anne. You’ve had your catch.”
“Ara. Are you giving me orders now, Nakamaru?”
There was a challenge in those words but even so, the strikes had stopped. When Kame found enough strength to roll onto his side, he realised it was because the new arrival-Nakamaru, she had called him-was standing between them.
Kame could barely make out his profile but from his loose jeans and plaid shirt, his bony shoulders that sat hunched on a thin frame, the man felt too… normal; too human to face a ghoul. Like paper versus scissors. He’d be torn into shreds.
“Don’t,” Kame rasped, going unheard.
“No,” Nakamaru spoke to Anne, “I just didn’t think you’d be the type to play with your food.”
Anne’s eyes narrowed wickedly, the red pupils inside them gleaming. “And what will you do with him then? Serve him coffee and biscuits? It’s all you can manage these days, isn’t it?”
“I’ll see to it that he won’t get in your way again,” Nakamaru said without inflection until his voice dipped lower, “but keep in my mind that this no longer your territory, Anne. You lost it.”
“Matsumoto is dead,” Anne returned viciously and Kame felt his heart pound in his chest. Jun, they were talking about Jun. He was dead but Kame could hear him, feel him in his pulse. How had he died?
“Which means this territory belongs to no one. Not mine, not yours, not his.”
A clicking footstep. “Shall we fight for it, then?”
“I’d rather not,” Nakamaru said softly, although he was already beginning to roll up his sleeves. “You won’t win, Anne.”
Anne’s laugh was high and crisp. “Against a coward like you? Perhaps not. After all, you might run away.”
“Thirty seconds,” Nakamaru said flatly, “whoever sheds blood first loses. Thirty seconds and then it stops.”
“You and your quickies,” Anne said with a smirk and even in the dark Kame could see his defender’s ears begin to glow.
The countdown began instantly, Anne’s serpentine kagune cutting through the air and cracking the walls, leaving slices in the ground that steamed from the friction of the blow. It was dizzying and terrifying to watch Nakamaru jump, duck and dodge, no ghoulish-ness to him. Kame realised with a sick dread that he was going to see him die.
What was more shameful than to have someone die for him was the fact that, while the humanity left in him worried and cared, the rest of him was eyeing the beheaded body left forgotten. It had grown cold now but Kame could still smell it, could still fantasise about licking the blood off the pavement if that was all that was left for him. Like a scavenging, disease-ridden coyote that needed to be put down.
He wasn’t worth protecting.
And yet, when Anne’s kagune came flying at him, curving down from the sky in a way that would cleanly cut him in half, there was Nakamaru-his eyes gone black and red, and that was the first clear view Kame had of the man who looked all too human from the back.
There was a sound, a sizzling sound like burning electricity and metal on metal and when Kame looked up, he found himself shielded by what looked to be a beautiful snowflake made of icy red crystals, like chips of frozen blood that shined brighter than rubies.
It was Nakamaru’s kagune, Kame realised belatedly as he watched Nakamaru push back at Anne’s-a cold, impenetrable red against a fiery, mutable red. He watched as Nakamaru’s kagune not only shielded, but with a heavy grunt, sent Anne’s kagune flying back at her.
She dodged it in time, but not before it could graze her arm. A faint, horizontal scratch the size of a paper cut. It oozed a single drop of blood.
“Zero seconds,” Nakamaru said curtly and Kame watched in awe as his kagune dismantled and was reabsorbed into his back. “That’s what you get for cheating.”
Anne glared at him and for a moment, Kame thought she would make another attack but the moment passed and her kagune disappeared too, slithering under her dress.
“I knew you’d go for him,” Anne said with a light shrug, like she hadn’t just tried to kill them. Maybe she hadn’t; maybe she had only intended to kill Kame and injure Nakamaru. Kame wouldn’t be surprised if this is how foreplay worked in the ghoul world. “You shouldn’t make your weaknesses so obvious, Nakamaru. Someone could take advantage of them.”
Nakamaru’s ears were glowing again. “Someone like you?”
Anne nodded. “Like me.”
She turned to the beheaded body and ripped off an arm as if she were plucking a french fry. The sounds of twisting bones and snapping tendons, of tearing flesh and dripping blood, Kame heard them all as loud as his heartbeat.
His stomach growled louder and he could feel their eyes-four red pupils-turn to him just as a streak of drool escaped down his chin.
He felt wrecked and humiliated and lost, more ghoulish than the two ghouls before him who called humans prey and killed them to survive.
Anne twisted off another arm before she stood and made to leave. “Feed the rest to your little pet. He looks like he might die.”
“Thanks,” Nakamaru called out with a wave and when he tore off a chunk of the teenager’s flesh and brought it to Kame’s lips, Kame reeled back with a sob because he wanted it so desperately-wanted the blood and flesh to fill every crevice of his mouth-but he couldn’t.
“I don’t-” his voice was thick around his saliva. “I don’t want it.”
Nakamaru looked down at him with pity, his eyes now a normal combination of black, white and a comforting brown. Large, round, pretty, pitying human eyes. Kame didn’t want them to see him, not like this, broken on the floor of an alley way, salivating at the sight of flesh.
“When did you realise-how long has it been since you’ve eaten?” Nakamaru asked hesitantly, changing track mid-way like he had been about to say something wrong and upsetting.
How long had it been now? Kame laughed dry and scratchy in the back of his throat because his memories from a few days ago felt like they were from another lifetime altogether, like something out of a storybook.
“I had… dinner three days ago.” He tried to shuffle through his memories, remembered buying fresh mushrooms and garlic, and smiled when he caught it. “Pasta.”
“…Pasta?” Nakamaru intoned, voice completely neutral but looking as if he had tasted something as vile as foot fungus.
“I made it myself. Chopped the herbs and everything.” He darted a look at Nakamaru shyly. “I bought the noodles though.”
“Oh. O-okay. That’s good. Um.” Nakamaru was holding out the chunk of torn flesh again. “You should really try this though. I don’t think-I don’t think pasta will hit the spot in quite the same way.”
It was true, Kame knew. He was starving and the thought of having pasta right now made him want to puke. He would never be able to cook or taste anything again. Nothing except for-
He swatted Nakamaru’s hand away viciously even as tears streaked down his face. “I’m not like you. I’m not a ghoul.”
He heard Nakamaru tsk under his breath though he didn’t look angry, just continued to pity Kame with his round, round eyes. “What’s so good about being human? You would only become weak.”
Kame’s laugh broke into a cough. There was no energy in him. Whatever he had left had been used without his accord to mend his bones.
“S’not like I can do much of anything like this either.” His vision was already beginning to blur along the edges.
“You can. Let me show you.” He felt hands picking him off the ground, making him sit. When he was eye level with Nakamaru, he saw him wince, felt him brush the hair out of his face gently, as if in apology. “This is going to hurt.”
Kame doubted he could feel anything at this point-but then Nakamaru tore a hand through his stomach and whatever connection Kame had to himself snapped into chaos. He was moving, lunging and attacking but he couldn’t see anything. He was moving so fast everything was a blur. He was crackling, driven by nothing but instinct while his conscience had detached and now drifted in the backseat.
It was peaceful, not being burdened with the obligation to care.
All he needed to do was eat.
It was easy. The flesh filled his mouth like a decadent slab of rare cut steak. It made him moan, made his entire body hum with pleasure because he had never tasted something so delicious before in his life. He swallowed, the blood washing it down easily despite how little he had chewed, and resurfaced on his second bite.
“Wh..a..” he said brokenly as he came to, seeing his blood-soaked hands for the first time. He scrambled back from the headless body until he hit the wall. He was trapped. He had-he had-eaten.
Well done, Jun crooned. I knew you had a ghoul in you after all.
No, Kame thought desperately, no. He bent over onto his hands and knees, trying to make himself throw up and surrender the flesh he had bitten. He could still go back. He could still be human.
“Hey, no, don’t,” Nakamaru said softly and Kame heard the distress in his voice. He’d plunged a hand through Kame’s gut and now he was worried. Kame tried to push him away but everything was swimming and why wouldn’t his body let him throw up.
He caught Kame around his midriff and pulled him back until he was lying across Nakamaru’s knees. Kame couldn’t stop crying.
“It’s okay,” Nakamaru said, his hand landing on Kame’s forehead, his palm soft and cool against Kame’s feverish skin. “It’s been rough on you, huh.”
He brought a small piece of flesh to Kame’s lips again. It was the size of a brownie.
Kame turned his head away.
Nakamaru’s voice became serious, though it still carried a soft and reassuring cadence as if he was talking to a stray animal. “Listen, you won’t live if you don’t eat. Ghouls have to eat at least once a month to survive so just take this and you won’t have to eat again for another thirty days.”
“I won’t,” Kame said just because he had to. There wasn’t much fight left in him now.
“You don’t have a choice,” Nakamaru said grimly and then offered Kame a shaky, uncertain smile. “It’s not so bad being a ghoul once you learn to accept it.”
A fresh squeeze of tears dripped down to Kame’s lips, the sorrow combining with a ferocious anger at everything that had made him this way. “I’m not a ghoul.”
Nakamaru looked stung by this, the emanating self-hatred that extended into hating Nakamaru’s kind as well; still, his hand continued to stroke Kame’s forehead in cool, fluttery touches, as if he was too self-conscious to let it sit for too long.
“You’re right. It doesn’t matter wha-who you are. You just need to live.”
“Why do you care?” Kame asked helplessly. Just let me die. Why won’t you let me die?
Nakamaru’s smile looked pained this time, like he was trying to make himself believe he wasn’t hurt and the struggle showed on his face.
“You might not remember me, but I know a lot about you, Kamenashi Kazuya.”
Kame opened his mouth in surprise and Nakamaru took that chance to slip the brownie-sized morsel past his lips. Kame swallowed instinctively.
---
(tbc. possibly.)
Pairing: NaKame
Word Count: 4.8k
Rating: PG13
Warning: descriptions of gore, cannibalism(kind of)
A/N: This is a Tokyo Ghoul AU that was also supposed to be a drabble but ahahaha nope. I’m hoping to continue this as well. This fic should be easy enough to follow even if you haven’t heard about or watched Tokyo Ghoul (although I highly suggest you do because it is great!) For the definition of kagune, please see this.
Summary: Kame doesn’t know what real hunger is until he meets Jun.
It started with a chance encounter at a coffee shop, a bump of the shoulders and flying books and apologies. They were carrying the same books and Kame’s interest was suddenly piqued because the man didn’t seem to be the type to be interested in The Science of Hitting. He was slim and tall but far from lanky, with graceful, untrimmed arms that peak from the sleeves of his polo shirt.
He went by the name of Matsumoto. Kame knew this because he had been coming to the coffee shop ever since, peeking over baseball statistics to the table by the window where Matsumoto sat, licking his fingertip briefly to flip a page. Kame always looked away quickly when their eyes meet. It was the first time Kame had been interested in a man and it was unsettling because he had only ever found girls pretty before.
Matsumoto was pretty though, in a weird, unexpected way. He sported a funny, flippy hairstyle that would make anyone else look like a ponce, like the kind of person who raises a pinky when drinking from a cup. Matsumoto didn’t, though; he sipped delicately on his chai tea whenever the shy waiter boy brought it over. He never ordered anything to eat. Matsumoto had a funny face too but his lopsided grin made everything forgettable.
So when he approached Kame saying that he was looking to get into baseball and if Kame could teach him some tips, Kame said sure before he could even finish. It’s a date, Matsumoto replied with his lopsided grin ever in place.
Kame led him to a field where he had spent most of his childhood diving into base after base until he returned home caked in dirt. The field wasn’t too far from the coffee shop and Kame glanced shyly at Matsumoto as they walked, the overhead news reporting the usual warning of ghoul attacks. They were so common now that they had become white noise, rising and falling every month like a murderous tide.
The field was secluded, cornered by an alleyway of dumpsters and a construction zone but there were still some kids playing catch ball or soccer with a rubber tire and Kame waved to them, happy that the home of his memories hadn’t been abandoned completely. He dropped his shoulder bag and pulled out a scuffed bat and a soft mitt-his treasures-and tried not to come across as a complete baseball fanatic as he taught Matsumoto how to swing a bat. He didn’t seem to mind when Kame’s hand lingered on the smooth skin of his wrist longer than was necessary. In fact, he seemed rather pleased which only made Kame swallow and blush like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Matsumoto, despite his pale skin and soft muscles, lasted longer than Kame would have guessed. He asked Kame to continue, said he wouldn’t stop until he made his first hit, even though the sun was setting and the sky was bleeding orange, red, and finally a deep, unfathomable blue. Kame was sweating, the back of his shirt damp and sticky, while Matsumoto was as fresh as when they had first arrived. It figured, Kame thought as he ran to catch another off-course ball while Matsumoto stood by the fence, swinging his bat apologetically. He finally made a proper hit when the first set of stars began to peep from the sky.
“The book made it sound so easy,” Matsumoto said with a slight fold to his lips, helping Kame pack up.
“You’ve been gravely misled,” Kame returned, cracking a grin and missing the sharpness of Matsumoto’s as he ducked to grab his bag. He offered Matsumoto a snack of dried seaweed, something to sustain them as they headed home, but he declined and Kame looked at him incredulously. It had been hours. “Aren’t you starving?”
Matsumoto smiled. “Positively famished. But I don’t want to spoil my dinner. I have a special meal planned for tonight.”
That made Kame halt with a thought, his stomach suddenly tight with ridiculous dread.
“Are you… are you by any chance,” Kame took a deep breath and met Matsumoto’s eyes, or tried to from under the shadows that had blanketed over them, “…seeing someone?”
Matsumoto’s grin uncurled slowly, like liquid, like venom, lopsided and dangerously sweet.
“I thought it would have been obvious by now.”
When he moved in, Kame’s eyes fluttered closed of their own accord. He was curious, so desperately curious to know what Matsumoto felt like, what he tasted like, if it would be any different than the kisses Kame had experienced in the past.
It was entirely different. Shockingly. Painfully.
Beyond painfully.
Kame didn’t understand where the sudden pain was coming from until he saw-heard-his own blood gush forth, splattering the pavement like rose-petal rain. So red and vibrant, alive.
It was the colour of Matsumoto’s eyes, the red pupils pulsing like a beating heart in his black eye sockets, sending a map of spider-like veins to stretch out over his eyelids. The telltale mark of a ghoul.
This was the moment, Kame knew as he heard the distant sound of his bag dropping to the ground, that his life would become a nightmare. A short one.
His chest felt as if it had been split open, his ribs cranked apart with a crowbar and his flesh churned inside a case of broken bones. The blood continued to squelch out of him, his body nothing but a sponge that Matsumoto wrung out viciously with the spears of his kagune that bent like ropes, constricting and choking, piercing.
“Matsu..mo..t-” Kame choked, tasting his own blood and bile, and Matsumoto’s face drew closer, his voice a syrup-like drawl.
“I would like to hear you call me Jun just once.”
A burst of molten instinct burnt through Kame and he crashed his skull into Matsumoto’s with all the force he could manage. There was a scream-his own-and then he was hitting the ground and for a moment, that terrible stretching moment where he thought this is it, everything went black.
And that was it.
Until the world burst back into colours-explosions and explosions of colour that made his eyes squint and his head ache-and Kame came to life tucked in the safety of his bed, like he had just awoken from a nightmare.
A nightmare. Nothing more.
Kame was starving.
Eat, said a coiling, cloying whisper and Kame lurched up, his heart hammering and his knuckles white. The door and windows were closed, the tv was powered off, his apartment was empty.
His stomach rumbled, queasy from hunger.
Eat.
Kame jumped out of bed and rolled a baseball underneath. He heard the soft thunk as it hit the wall on the opposite side without an obstacle and then took a steadying breath. It was the nightmare; he hadn’t shaken it off yet.
Eat.
His heart wouldn’t stop hammering and Kame scanned his apartment once again, the clean counter tops, the empty couch.
The bathroom.
Kame entered it with a baseball bat in hand, the same one he had carried in his nightmare, angry and scared and ready to swing it.
It fell from his grip when he looked in the mirror, clunking on the linoleum floor just as a scream ripped from his lips.
Eat, Jun whispered and it was all in his head.
In his red, pulsing eye.
---
He gagged and choked, purging what little food he had managed to swallow before his body rejected it. Everything tasted like ash and dirt-eggs, rice, oranges, bread-all disappearing down the drain as Kame heaved, bent over the basin. His mouth was lined with a sour taste, like rancid milk, and still his stomach rumbled.
Meat, Jun’s voice whispered. You need meat.
Kame felt outside himself when he swung open his freezer, pulled out a bag of frozen raw chicken, and sunk his teeth into it just like that, suckling at the ice and congealed blood.
It tasted like garbage. Like mushy banana peels and rotten tomatoes and tears formed at the corners of his eyes as he flung it away ruthlessly, curling up on the kitchen floor with his arms around his stomach as it rumbled and rumbled.
Meat.
Kame bit down on his lip and the taste of his own blood was delightfully sweet, better than anything he had tasted before. He clenched his eyes shut and felt the tears run down his face.
Meat, you fool, Jun snarled at him and Kame refused to move.
Locked his muscles tight and didn’t budge when, hours later, there was a knock on his door and he heard Fuku’s voice call for him. Fuku the boy next door who had taken to calling him big brother after Kame had retrieved his kite for him from the greedy clutches of a tree.
Fuku with his reverent eyes and supple skin, the flesh tender and juicy underneath… All Kame would have to do was open his door and invite Fuku inside. It would be so easy, so fast, the gastric acid licking at the walls of his stomach satiated at last.
Every cell in him quivered with the want.
Kame bit down on his forearm instead, hard enough to tear skin, and prayed with everything he had that Fuku would leave.
He did, eventually, and when Kame dislodged his arm from the grip of his teeth, his jaw sore and unforgiving, he watched his flesh come together and become whole again, any mark of a wound erased from his skin.
He released a muffled cry and slowly lifted his shirt, hoping, wishing to see a scar, but his torso was bare and smooth; the spot where he had been pierced just above his heart showed not a single scratch. A fist-sized hole had been carved right through him and there was absolutely nothing to show for it, not even a raw, puckered pink.
It wasn’t normal. Wasn’t… human.
You’re not human. He could feel Jun’s voice lick at his ear, between the twisted coils of his brain, laughing faintly in the background.
Kame stared at his wavy reflection in the gray metal of the refrigerator, saw his left eye open and close around a red pupil that sat in a black sclera like an apocalyptic moon, throbbing with thirst. The red veins stretched over the moles that bordered his eye. Beauty spots, his mom had once called them while his brothers had snickered.
There was a knife just inches away from his knee.
“I’m still dreaming,” he said, lips raw and peeling. He was still in the nightmare.
He just needed to wake up.
The knife was in his hands now, caressing the pale skin of his belly as it continued to groan and slosh with acid and a begging emptiness.
He just needed a scar. Something to prove he was still human.
---
Kame hadn’t eaten for two days. Hadn’t left his one-room apartment for fifty-six hours.
All his phone calls went directly to voice mail and Kame deleted them all without listening. He couldn’t, not like this, not when he could use any weakness, any excuse, to call someone over and-Eat.
He could feel himself slowly fraying under Jun’s commands, like there was no flesh left to him, just bones and teeth with strings attached. He trembled whenever he heard voices, people walking by and leaving a waft of aroma that slipped through the cracks of Kame’s door and straight into his skin, his gums, his clenching abdomen.
He was slipping and Fuku would knock on his door again tomorrow morning before he headed to school, his voice high with worry. Kame needed to leave before then.
When he finally left the musty stagnancy of his apartment, the night was dark and well settled, the shadows cosy in their place. Kame tucked the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and walked with his eyes on his shoes. His long brown bangs fell across his left eye like a veil. He wouldn’t be cutting them any time soon.
The sudden, heavy scent of human flesh assaulted him all at once when he hit the streets, ducking under the bright lights of bars and late night restaurants. For a moment, the scent paralysed him, attacking him from all sides, making his knees wobble. It was too much. Like walking into a perfume store and becoming nauseous, becoming utterly delirious with the sheer power and variety of scents.
Kame’s mouth was flooded with saliva instantly, like a starving dog surrounded by piles of succulent bones. It took all his will power to not grab the brunette batting her eyes at him curiously and sink his teeth into the curve of her shoulder.
He ran until he entered a quiet neighborhood, the kind of neighbourhood where garbage littered the streets and no one cared, with twisting alley ways that served as conference rooms for illegal business. If someone were to disappear from here, no would care. It wouldn’t even make it to the news. A lowly criminal going missing in the dead of the night in a sketchy part of the city… No one would think twice.
Kame tried to convince himself that there would be no loved ones left waiting either. It wouldn’t matter if there were because he has loved ones too and he could never be with them, or with anyone, if he didn’t fucking eat.
A thin figure knocked into his shoulder at the corner of a sidewalk and before the man could say anything, Kame had a hand to his throat and was dragging him into an abandoned alley.
“What the fuck, dude! I’m sorry, okay? I wasn’t looking!”
The man writhed against the wall, under his grip, and Kame could feel the pulse of his jugular vein against his thumb, the blood bubbling underneath. His arm was being scratched and clawed at by desperate fingers-they’d be so crunchy between his teeth-and Kame didn’t understand why the man couldn’t throw him off. Kame was weak, all bones and strings, starving…
“Please,” the man choked and Kame looked at the piercings in his ears, nose, along his eyebrows, in the center of his soft, fleshy tongue and realised how young the man was. Not a man at all; just a teenager.
Eat, Jun ordered and Kame’s stomach was screaming at him to listen but-he was a boy. A kid. A human like Kame-Jun’s laugh was loud, bouncing in his skull-and he couldn’t do this. He wouldn’t. He would rather die.
Kame threw the kid to the ground, meters away, and begged him to run as he folded in on himself, pleading his predatory muscles to obey and let him go.
The kid was scrambling onto his knees when his head flew off, cut cleanly off his neck before it rolled into the darkness.
Kame stared numbly as the body fell into a pool of its own blood, too horrified to make a sound. There was a scream lodged in his throat.
“Encroaching on my territory, hmm?” A tall woman with long black hair plaited into a braid and a purple dress stepped forward and Kame knew instantly by her eyes that she was a ghoul. Her boots left red footprints as she walked through the blood towards him. “What is this curious smell… It’s almost as if you’re human…”
“I am,” Kame said at once and the scream he had been holding back coughed up at last when he was pulled off the ground by his hair. He squinted through the pain and found the ghoul staring at his left eye. Her red lips curled up into a smile that hid a blade.
“You’re neither a human nor a ghoul,” she drawled and a swift movement found Kame thrown against the wall with a punch to the stomach, the bricks crumbling under the force. He heard his spine crack and splinter before building together again. His bones ached terribly.
“So, tell me, little monster,” the ghoul drawled and Kame felt something sharp and thin slap his back like the strike of a whip, almost blinding him with pain, “what are you and why are you in my hunting territory?”
“I’m human,” Kame croaked, remembering the wide, wrinkly smile his grandma gave him whenever he dropped by to help her in the rice field, the warmth spreading through him faster and stronger than sunlight. He remembered his parents cheering for him from the bleachers at his first baseball match, his brothers dog piling him later with congratulatory punches even though his team had lost. The simple delights only a human could experience.
Kame refused to give them up.
Another two strikes criss-crossed his back as he laid face down in the dirt before another voice entered the alley like a fog, slow and steady, calming and weightless. Quiet until it became obvious and dangerously obtrusive.
It was… familiar in a way.
“Leave him, Anne. You’ve had your catch.”
“Ara. Are you giving me orders now, Nakamaru?”
There was a challenge in those words but even so, the strikes had stopped. When Kame found enough strength to roll onto his side, he realised it was because the new arrival-Nakamaru, she had called him-was standing between them.
Kame could barely make out his profile but from his loose jeans and plaid shirt, his bony shoulders that sat hunched on a thin frame, the man felt too… normal; too human to face a ghoul. Like paper versus scissors. He’d be torn into shreds.
“Don’t,” Kame rasped, going unheard.
“No,” Nakamaru spoke to Anne, “I just didn’t think you’d be the type to play with your food.”
Anne’s eyes narrowed wickedly, the red pupils inside them gleaming. “And what will you do with him then? Serve him coffee and biscuits? It’s all you can manage these days, isn’t it?”
“I’ll see to it that he won’t get in your way again,” Nakamaru said without inflection until his voice dipped lower, “but keep in my mind that this no longer your territory, Anne. You lost it.”
“Matsumoto is dead,” Anne returned viciously and Kame felt his heart pound in his chest. Jun, they were talking about Jun. He was dead but Kame could hear him, feel him in his pulse. How had he died?
“Which means this territory belongs to no one. Not mine, not yours, not his.”
A clicking footstep. “Shall we fight for it, then?”
“I’d rather not,” Nakamaru said softly, although he was already beginning to roll up his sleeves. “You won’t win, Anne.”
Anne’s laugh was high and crisp. “Against a coward like you? Perhaps not. After all, you might run away.”
“Thirty seconds,” Nakamaru said flatly, “whoever sheds blood first loses. Thirty seconds and then it stops.”
“You and your quickies,” Anne said with a smirk and even in the dark Kame could see his defender’s ears begin to glow.
The countdown began instantly, Anne’s serpentine kagune cutting through the air and cracking the walls, leaving slices in the ground that steamed from the friction of the blow. It was dizzying and terrifying to watch Nakamaru jump, duck and dodge, no ghoulish-ness to him. Kame realised with a sick dread that he was going to see him die.
What was more shameful than to have someone die for him was the fact that, while the humanity left in him worried and cared, the rest of him was eyeing the beheaded body left forgotten. It had grown cold now but Kame could still smell it, could still fantasise about licking the blood off the pavement if that was all that was left for him. Like a scavenging, disease-ridden coyote that needed to be put down.
He wasn’t worth protecting.
And yet, when Anne’s kagune came flying at him, curving down from the sky in a way that would cleanly cut him in half, there was Nakamaru-his eyes gone black and red, and that was the first clear view Kame had of the man who looked all too human from the back.
There was a sound, a sizzling sound like burning electricity and metal on metal and when Kame looked up, he found himself shielded by what looked to be a beautiful snowflake made of icy red crystals, like chips of frozen blood that shined brighter than rubies.
It was Nakamaru’s kagune, Kame realised belatedly as he watched Nakamaru push back at Anne’s-a cold, impenetrable red against a fiery, mutable red. He watched as Nakamaru’s kagune not only shielded, but with a heavy grunt, sent Anne’s kagune flying back at her.
She dodged it in time, but not before it could graze her arm. A faint, horizontal scratch the size of a paper cut. It oozed a single drop of blood.
“Zero seconds,” Nakamaru said curtly and Kame watched in awe as his kagune dismantled and was reabsorbed into his back. “That’s what you get for cheating.”
Anne glared at him and for a moment, Kame thought she would make another attack but the moment passed and her kagune disappeared too, slithering under her dress.
“I knew you’d go for him,” Anne said with a light shrug, like she hadn’t just tried to kill them. Maybe she hadn’t; maybe she had only intended to kill Kame and injure Nakamaru. Kame wouldn’t be surprised if this is how foreplay worked in the ghoul world. “You shouldn’t make your weaknesses so obvious, Nakamaru. Someone could take advantage of them.”
Nakamaru’s ears were glowing again. “Someone like you?”
Anne nodded. “Like me.”
She turned to the beheaded body and ripped off an arm as if she were plucking a french fry. The sounds of twisting bones and snapping tendons, of tearing flesh and dripping blood, Kame heard them all as loud as his heartbeat.
His stomach growled louder and he could feel their eyes-four red pupils-turn to him just as a streak of drool escaped down his chin.
He felt wrecked and humiliated and lost, more ghoulish than the two ghouls before him who called humans prey and killed them to survive.
Anne twisted off another arm before she stood and made to leave. “Feed the rest to your little pet. He looks like he might die.”
“Thanks,” Nakamaru called out with a wave and when he tore off a chunk of the teenager’s flesh and brought it to Kame’s lips, Kame reeled back with a sob because he wanted it so desperately-wanted the blood and flesh to fill every crevice of his mouth-but he couldn’t.
“I don’t-” his voice was thick around his saliva. “I don’t want it.”
Nakamaru looked down at him with pity, his eyes now a normal combination of black, white and a comforting brown. Large, round, pretty, pitying human eyes. Kame didn’t want them to see him, not like this, broken on the floor of an alley way, salivating at the sight of flesh.
“When did you realise-how long has it been since you’ve eaten?” Nakamaru asked hesitantly, changing track mid-way like he had been about to say something wrong and upsetting.
How long had it been now? Kame laughed dry and scratchy in the back of his throat because his memories from a few days ago felt like they were from another lifetime altogether, like something out of a storybook.
“I had… dinner three days ago.” He tried to shuffle through his memories, remembered buying fresh mushrooms and garlic, and smiled when he caught it. “Pasta.”
“…Pasta?” Nakamaru intoned, voice completely neutral but looking as if he had tasted something as vile as foot fungus.
“I made it myself. Chopped the herbs and everything.” He darted a look at Nakamaru shyly. “I bought the noodles though.”
“Oh. O-okay. That’s good. Um.” Nakamaru was holding out the chunk of torn flesh again. “You should really try this though. I don’t think-I don’t think pasta will hit the spot in quite the same way.”
It was true, Kame knew. He was starving and the thought of having pasta right now made him want to puke. He would never be able to cook or taste anything again. Nothing except for-
He swatted Nakamaru’s hand away viciously even as tears streaked down his face. “I’m not like you. I’m not a ghoul.”
He heard Nakamaru tsk under his breath though he didn’t look angry, just continued to pity Kame with his round, round eyes. “What’s so good about being human? You would only become weak.”
Kame’s laugh broke into a cough. There was no energy in him. Whatever he had left had been used without his accord to mend his bones.
“S’not like I can do much of anything like this either.” His vision was already beginning to blur along the edges.
“You can. Let me show you.” He felt hands picking him off the ground, making him sit. When he was eye level with Nakamaru, he saw him wince, felt him brush the hair out of his face gently, as if in apology. “This is going to hurt.”
Kame doubted he could feel anything at this point-but then Nakamaru tore a hand through his stomach and whatever connection Kame had to himself snapped into chaos. He was moving, lunging and attacking but he couldn’t see anything. He was moving so fast everything was a blur. He was crackling, driven by nothing but instinct while his conscience had detached and now drifted in the backseat.
It was peaceful, not being burdened with the obligation to care.
All he needed to do was eat.
It was easy. The flesh filled his mouth like a decadent slab of rare cut steak. It made him moan, made his entire body hum with pleasure because he had never tasted something so delicious before in his life. He swallowed, the blood washing it down easily despite how little he had chewed, and resurfaced on his second bite.
“Wh..a..” he said brokenly as he came to, seeing his blood-soaked hands for the first time. He scrambled back from the headless body until he hit the wall. He was trapped. He had-he had-eaten.
Well done, Jun crooned. I knew you had a ghoul in you after all.
No, Kame thought desperately, no. He bent over onto his hands and knees, trying to make himself throw up and surrender the flesh he had bitten. He could still go back. He could still be human.
“Hey, no, don’t,” Nakamaru said softly and Kame heard the distress in his voice. He’d plunged a hand through Kame’s gut and now he was worried. Kame tried to push him away but everything was swimming and why wouldn’t his body let him throw up.
He caught Kame around his midriff and pulled him back until he was lying across Nakamaru’s knees. Kame couldn’t stop crying.
“It’s okay,” Nakamaru said, his hand landing on Kame’s forehead, his palm soft and cool against Kame’s feverish skin. “It’s been rough on you, huh.”
He brought a small piece of flesh to Kame’s lips again. It was the size of a brownie.
Kame turned his head away.
Nakamaru’s voice became serious, though it still carried a soft and reassuring cadence as if he was talking to a stray animal. “Listen, you won’t live if you don’t eat. Ghouls have to eat at least once a month to survive so just take this and you won’t have to eat again for another thirty days.”
“I won’t,” Kame said just because he had to. There wasn’t much fight left in him now.
“You don’t have a choice,” Nakamaru said grimly and then offered Kame a shaky, uncertain smile. “It’s not so bad being a ghoul once you learn to accept it.”
A fresh squeeze of tears dripped down to Kame’s lips, the sorrow combining with a ferocious anger at everything that had made him this way. “I’m not a ghoul.”
Nakamaru looked stung by this, the emanating self-hatred that extended into hating Nakamaru’s kind as well; still, his hand continued to stroke Kame’s forehead in cool, fluttery touches, as if he was too self-conscious to let it sit for too long.
“You’re right. It doesn’t matter wha-who you are. You just need to live.”
“Why do you care?” Kame asked helplessly. Just let me die. Why won’t you let me die?
Nakamaru’s smile looked pained this time, like he was trying to make himself believe he wasn’t hurt and the struggle showed on his face.
“You might not remember me, but I know a lot about you, Kamenashi Kazuya.”
Kame opened his mouth in surprise and Nakamaru took that chance to slip the brownie-sized morsel past his lips. Kame swallowed instinctively.
---
(tbc. possibly.)