Chapter Text
Kaneki had been wandering for hours. Or it felt like it. Time had been moving strangely, fast and slow, sticky and slippery all at once like the yolk of a soft-boiled egg. He kept moving, leaning his hand on the wall next to him even though his toes had long since grown back, and there was no need for him to hobble. It just felt like he would float away if he wasn’t touching something solid.
His stomach hurt. His hands and feet hurt. His ears hurt. His head hurt. He was hungry. Like he had never been before. Like Touka had warned him he would be. He hadn’t eaten anything since the last time Jason-
Anyway. Kaneki took another step, and stumbled when the wall to his left vanished. He looked in that direction, wondering where it went, and realized that there was an alleyway. The wall was a building, and it had ended. Then he saw something odd. A shoe, laying on its side. He stepped toward it, and his bare foot made contact with something warm and wet which was pooled on the ground. Before he could process anything else, his senses exploded with food. The smell. The slight taste in the air. The sound of labored breathing.
The man prone in the alleyway, trying to drag himself further in.
It felt like a fog was receding from Kaneki’s mind. Instead of lashing out pointlessly, his senses were united in this one purpose. There was no more pain, no more memories, just food, life, in front of him.
Kaneki crouched down next to the man and turned him over onto his back, ignoring his pitiful resistance. He had been beaten, badly, and shot in the side. Kaneki tilted his head slightly, listening carefully to the crackling sound his broken ribs made as he breathed. One of them had pierced a lung, and each gasp was worsening his pneumothorax. Kaneki knew the feeling. He also knew that, with swift medical attention, this man could live. The gasps came faster and faster, and Kaneki corrected himself. With immediate medical attention, this man might live. But as the situation stood, the only one here was Kaneki, and he was not a creature made for saving lives.
He cracked a knuckle as his kagune pierced cleanly through the man’s skull. Kaneki could not give salvation, but a swift death was a mercy he could provide.
A pale, slender hand wrapped around Kaneki’s own, guiding him to the body’s abdomen. A pale pink nail traced along the bruised skin.
“Start with the organs,” Rize whispered, her voice just behind his ear. “They’re the most nutritious.”
Kaneki did.
It wasn’t easy or clean, and Kaneki wished that he had a knife, or that his kangune had been made more for slicing than for piercing.
“If wishes were horses, I’d eat the whole herd,” Rize taunted him. Now she was kneeling across from him, bloodied, kakugan shining. “Rip him in half if you need to.”
He didn’t need to. He pressed his fingers into a hole in the flesh, one he had made or one left by this man’s enemies he no longer knew, and tore the skin away.
“How disappointing,” Rize tutted. She indicated one of the lumps in the body cavity with a finger. “That’s liver cirrhosis. Kidneys are failing too. His lungs are full of tar. Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes. God, even his pancreas is fucked up. What a pathetic pig.”
“Is it dangerous?” Kaneki whispered, barely a breath.
Rize’s hands clasped his face and he stared into her dark eyes. “You don’t get to be picky, Kaneki. Eat. Now.”
Kaneki did.
As a ghoul, eating always made a sort of haze come over him. It didn’t numb him to his surroundings, but sort of separated him from himself. His body acted on its own, and he was simply present while it did so. It was nice, in a way, not to be responsible for every bite he took, to only have the sensation of food in his mouth and the alleviation of the constant hunger that now defined him. Anguish was for before, guilt was for after, but during, there was nothing but a comforting reprieve. The effect was magnified now, the relief as sharp as the pain of hunger had been, and Rize’s motherly gaze steeping each movement in her approval, her kagune writhing in delight behind his back.
Once he was full, fuller and more sated than he had ever been before, he just sat back on his heels and looked up at the sliver of sky he could see between the buildings. It was a greyish yellow. He thought of making it into a painting and hanging it in a gallery. City smog at daybreak, he would call it. No, that was too obvious. He thought of the Black Goat’s Egg. Am I a monster to be what I am? That’s what he’d call it.
He looked at the deep red smear on the dirty concrete in front of him and imagined a companion piece entitled Yes.
---
Matt was having a shitty night. It had started as a shitty day, when the coffee machine at the courthouse was broken and then the deposition they had scheduled went to shit because their client had withheld crucial evidence, and then when he and Foggy finally made it back to the office Karen bought them donuts. Which in itself wasn’t shitty, but the fact that the donut place had neglected to clean their fryer oil for far too long was and so was the fact that the burnt taste was so subtle only he could notice it, so he didn’t even get to complain.
So yeah, shitty day.
It became a shitty night when he suited up to release some pent up aggression on the wrongdoers of Hell’s Kitchen only to find a near-total lack of suitable punching bags. He’d been patrolling for nearly six hours and he’d only stopped one mugging. One. And the guy didn’t even have a gun, just a switchblade and desperation. So his fists were itchy, and he was reduced to very nearly hoping a crime would happen just so he could do something which only made him feel guilty. Because wasn’t this why he put the mask on in the first place? To make this city a better place, with less crime? Shouldn’t he be happy he wasn’t needed?
He was contemplating heading home and calling it a night, unsatisfying or not, when the smell of blood caught his attention. Now, a little blood was normal, at least in Hell’s Kitchen. There were always people walking around with poorly-treated injuries, too poor or too suspicious to seek proper medical attention. But not like this. This smelled like someone had been literally torn open. Two, no three blocks away. South.
He dove off the roof he was perched on and onto the neighboring one, tucking into a roll to break his fall and coming up running. Whatever was going down, he needed to be there.
Just as he was about to leap down into the blood-drenched alley and put the fear of the Devil into whatever unfortunate soul he found there, he heard something unusual. It was a rasping, slithering noise, like the coils of a snake sliding over themselves. He tilted his head, concentrating on forming a better mental picture of the situation.
He could hear one heartbeat, fast and erratic, matched with shallow, panting breaths. There was also a repetitive popping sound, like someone cracking their knuckles. There were two bodies. One laying down, still, silent, and growing cold, the other knelt above it, though there was no metallic smell of a weapon. There was a scent of something, but beneath all the blood it was nearly impossible to scent anything else accurately, especially something so weirdly organic. He still couldn’t place the odd slithering, which emanated from just behind the person kneeling in the alley. Although the person kneeling was still, besides their heaving chest, the air in the alley was being churned like something large was moving through it, or rather within it. It felt like a slow moving ceiling fan, almost.
Then the person in the alley spoke. His voice, because he could tell it was a man, was a broken whisper, barely audible even to Matt’s sensitive ears.
“Homerunante iranaiyo, Rize-san.”
It was Japanese. Stick used to throw it around back when Matt was a kid, and although he never learned enough to understand it (aside from a few insults) he still recognized it. The Yakuza? He wondered. Based on what Nobu had done to him, this level of bloodshed didn’t seem impossible for them. But the man in the alley didn’t have the controlled heart rate and breathing that had characterized Nobu’s presence. Maybe he was a civilian, uninvolved except stumbling on to something he wasn’t supposed to see.
There was a sharp intake of breath, and the slithering sound abruptly stopped, and a moment later the air in the alley stilled. Then there was an explosion of movement, not out of the alley but up, toward Matt on the rooftop. The man from the alley was scaling the walls, faster than should be possible, and faster than Matt could react to. Something smacked him across the face, hard, as the man emerged from the alley, and sent Matt sprawling backwards. He laid on the roof for a few moments, dazed, probably a little concussed, and trying to work his jaw back into the correct place. He staggered to his feet as fast as he could, ready to chase after the man but he could already hear his footsteps disappearing into the distance, swallowed by the cacophony of the city waking up.
Matt spit a wad of bloody saliva onto the roof, thinking. He couldn’t catch that man, the only known witness and probable perpetrator of whatever was causing the alley to smell like the dumpster behind an unscrupulous butcher shop. What he could do was gather data, figure out what exactly he was dealing with, and maybe find some clue that would tell him who he needed to punch. He made up his mind with one last stretch of his jaw, and began scaling the wall down into the alley.
There was no fire escape on the side where he was standing, but whoever or whatever that man had been, he’d left convenient handholds in the wall where he’d crushed the brick with his fingers. And with something other than fingers. Matt paused halfway down to investigate a hole pierced into the wall. He unstrapped a glove with his mouth and ran his fingers over it. Perfectly round, almost like a bullet hole, but it was much larger, maybe three inches across, and it tapered as it went deeper in, like it had been created by something conical. Matt frowned, worked his glove back on, and finished climbing down, jumping the last few feet.
He nearly retched.
The smell had been bad up on the roof, but it was almost unbearable here. It would probably be sickening even to someone without Matt’s senses. It was like the worst parts of a hospital and an abattoir mixed together, old blood and new blood layered together. Which was odd, once he thought about it. New blood was obviously the corpse, but the old blood? Where was that coming from? He braced himself and took a deep breath, trying to focus on just that smell and not be overwhelmed by everything else. It was fading, he noticed, fainter with every breath, while the other odors lingered. Beyond that he couldn’t tell.
He switched to examining the body itself. He crouched, held his hand out and focused on feeling the heat radiating from it, contrasting with the cold cement (even as they were rapidly becoming the same temperature, and the hot blood was obscuring his senses). It had been literally torn open at the abdomen. Below and above seemed pretty much intact. Beyond that, there also seemed to be a significant amount of… mass missing. Matt didn’t even want to think about what that meant. Especially given that the temperature of the body and the volume of blood meant that he had died here, very recently. A dirty alley wasn’t exactly optimal for organ-harvesting so where were this man’s insides?
He didn’t have time to keep thinking about it, though. He could hear the rhythmic pounding of hard-soled shoes on pavement approaching from the south, the jingling of a handcuff chain, and the crackle of a radio. Cops. Matt had no desire to make this night even shittier by getting the Daredevil accused of yet another murder he didn’t commit, so he swung his way onto the rooftop using the fire escape on the opposite wall, disappearing over the edge seconds before the footsteps stopped at the mouth of the alley.
There was shuffling, then a faint click indicating the cop had pulled out a flashlight. “Jesus Christ Almighty,” she whispered. “What the fuck.”
My thoughts exactly, Matt thought.