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Old Yomo-san had warned her and he had been right. This had been a mistake. Touka now realized she had been stupid for falling into his arms, into his bed – foolish to think that she could turn his apartment into her home too. Naive enough to believe she could set aside her morals and beliefs to follow her silly heart like some love-sick teenager and not grow to hate herself for it.
She knew what she had to do. She had to go. She had to go back to Re: and to Yomo-san and Shitty-glasses, finally leaving all this behind her. Leaving him behind her, too. She missed the cafe and she missed her friends desperately. But she knew when it was all said and done she would probably miss him more.
It didn't matter, she had to do this. She needed to at last sever herself loose from this man wearing Kaneki Ken’s face and sharing his memories without carrying his name or his innocence.
Investigator Sasaki Haise – The Black Reaper. He wasn’t Kaneki anymore. Kaneki Ken wouldn’t kill ghouls. Kaneki Ken wouldn’t leave devastation and fractured families in his wake. He wouldn’t reek of death and feel like misfortune. It didn’t matter that he remembered everything. It didn’t matter. It didn't matter. It didn’t matter.
The fact of the matter was that he was an investigator who exterminated her kind. He was a part of the CCG and she was just a ghoul. Sooner or later things would catch fire around them. Again.
She had to run away. She had to be strong and deny the deeply ingrained urge to stay with him. To ignore the part of that was willing to die with him, die for him.
It's funny, she had waited so long for him only to be the one ready to let go.
She wasn't sure how exactly he knew but he did. He knew that she was preparing herself to make that final move to cut that string of fate that for so long had united them. She could tell he knew by the more intense sorrow in his gray eyes, by the extra passion he attempted to lavish on her as well. Even his touch had become a plea. With his hands that had killed so many somehow, he managed to touch her with gentleness. As if he loved her.
It didn’t matter.
She had to do this. She was dying within. She was becoming someone she didn't want to be. Someone she couldn’t allow herself to be, not even for him.
Today. This is the first thing she thinks when she opens her eyes. Instinctively she reaches out her arm. His space in the bed was cold and empty. Touka wondered briefly if he had been beckoned into work early until her mind registers the hiss of the showerhead in the next room.
For a moment she reflects on if she should leave while he’s showering. She could disappear like a ghost never to return. In the end, she decides against it, thinking it cowardly. She wanted to talk to him one last time, anyway. Something to hold her over for eternity.
She walks into the bathroom to speak to him but once inside she doesn't fight her urges and takes off her nightgown. Quietly she slides in with him under the water that is just short of scolding.
He doesn't even notice her at first. His hands are posted against the wall and his head hung low. It takes her a moment to realize he’s crying. The mighty feared Black Reaper was crying.
She hesitates for the briefest of moments. The whole thing scene makes her feel awkward. When she sees his shoulders shake with a particularly heavy sob all uncertainty retreats and suddenly he's Kaneki Ken again, the half-ghoul boy begging her for help. Without a second guess, Touka wraps her arms around him and lets the water fall on their shared bodies. The hum of the water falling and hitting their skin was a small comfort.
“Just please.” Sasaki's tense voice broke the silence. With shaky arms, he wraps them around her securely. “Stay.”
She breathes. “You know I can’t.” She can't but she wishes she could. She wishes she could scrape out the last bit of dignity she had and stay with a man who butchered innocents. A man who would murder her too had she been any other ghoul.
“Please,” he pleaded, his voice sounding notably small. “Just stay with me for a little while longer.” A little while longer. Her heart is pounding a painful staccato in her chest and her mind is racing at such a breakneck speed that she doesn’t catch the unusualness of his wording until much later when it's too late.
“I can’t.” She stays firm though inside she’s shattering, her heart fragmenting more than she ever thought it could.
“But I love you.” And there it is. Out in the open. That four-letter word that neither dared to speak in fear that it would be the last word that would finally close the chasm that was between them.
And in a way it does. But it's too late.
You’re so cruel, she thinks, willing herself not to crumble in front of him.
Her silence must frighten him because he pulls back just enough to see her eyes. “Do you love me?”
She looks away from the pitiful sight before her. She wonders if lying would make things easier but somehow the thought of telling him she doesn't love him is almost as unpleasant as leaving him. “You know that I do, Haise.”
“Then say it,” he’s desperate as if it’s his final wish. "Please. Just say it."
She takes a deep breath. Worries her lip. This will be the first and last time she'll ever tell him the words that have been secured inside her heart for years. What good her confession will do she isn't sure but she'll tell him anyway. She can spare him this one last kindness at least. “I love you.”
The words barely have time to settle in the air around them before he is kissing her with frenzied intensity. Despite herself, she returns it with equal fervor. “I love you.” He tries to infuse her with those words as he whispers them against her lips. “I love you and I’m sorry for everything I put you through. Everything.”
"That's a lot of things, Haise," she jokes with a forced smile that is wavering, her eyes are misting. After that, she isn't sure what to say. She wrecks her brain with what to say next because this is her last chance. Her mind haywires when he pressed his lips to hers again, this time kinder and softer. It hurts more.
It dawns on her that this is their farewell kiss.
Unlike all the times before it doesn’t go further than kissing despite their state of undress. Both are too overwhelmed, too raw to think beyond this moment, this final kiss. When his lips finally leave hers he rests his forehead against hers. His gaze focused on her face like he's drinking her in one last time...
Because this is how their story ends.
She feels nauseous and clammy like she had some of Yoriko's cooking. She needs to go.
She pulls away first. “I-I have to get back to my life." Her voice trembles and his hands reluctantly and slowly fall away from her waist. The water cascades between their naked bodies. They feel further apart than ever before.
Haise looks at her with defeat. God, he looked so tired. She wants to ask him when is the last time he's slept - really slept more than a few hours but she chides herself. It isn't her concern anymore. "You should get back to yours, too."
“I’ll miss you,” he tells her softly. With downcasted eyes, he adds, “Maybe it's selfish of me...but – but I hope you'll remember me.”
Maybe under different circumstances, she would have laughed in his face. The comment is ridiculous. As if she could ever forget him even if she wanted to.
With what might be some lingering pain in her heart from the years she spent alone she cannot help but think he’ll be just fine without her. He was once before, after all. He’ll continue to work at the CCG and he'll keep annihilating lives. Men, women, children. No ghoul held a chance against the Reaper. Over time he might even become more infamous than the White Reaper. Maybe his name will become one whispered in terror between ghouls in dark alleys. She doesn’t want to think about it.
And maybe he'll find someone else and eventually break her heart too with his mournful eyes. She wants to think about that even less.
“Goodbye, Sasaki-san,” she murmurs against his cheek as she gives him one last, chaste kiss.
“Ken,” he corrects calmly. With his eyes, he is begging her not to forget, to remember. “Ken.”
She leaves his apartment fully believing that in time he'll be fine.
She just hoped the same could be said for her.
*
In her dreams, she still can see him. She still misses him too. She'll never stop missing him.
In those dreams, if only for a short time she is allowed to forget that he's not with her. For a peaceful while longer she is allowed to forget that he had died during the Cochlea raid. It gave her time to believe he hadn't met his doom in his mission to rescue Hinami.
Just stay with me for a little while longer. She wishes she had.
He had brought Hinami back into their lives at the cost of his own life, just as he had planned all along. She still feels like an idiot for not seeing through his lies and discovering his plan earlier. Maybe she could have stopped it. Yet Touka was thankful for his gift – for him giving her back Hinami.
He had unknowingly given her another gift, too.
On the nights when those dreams are too much, she wakes up crying. Those nights the only thing that brings her any comfort is smoothing out the unruly, dark locks of the snoring little boy that had snuck into her bed yet again.
She had given their son his name.