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“Hide,” Kaneki admitted finally, “I’m scared.”
Mud from the riverbank clung to his shoes, its grip relentless. He felt stuck. He couldn’t move. He watched the water rush downstream with his heart protesting in his ribs.
This fear of death. Maybe it was a blessing to fear it rather than welcome it, but it had curled around him for so long that he had forgotten it was there. Fear had become a protective sleeve around his heart, but now it was bubbling to the surface, unbidden. Kaneki’s throat constricted when he looked down into the riverbed, at the rocks gathered there.
“It’ll be fun!” Hide promised with a smile. “Like when we were kids, remember?”
Kaneki did. The summer before fifth grade, when Hide would surface from the pool only to shout towards the bleachers, where Kaneki would sit with a book loaned from the library. Interminable weekends, when time was still sticky as molasses. When they used to walk back to Hide’s living room to watch their favorite Saturday detective cartoons, a lost artifact they could no longer find on DVD. When they could still stand back to back in the shower, laughing; back when it was still bearable to tumble into Hide’s bed in the dimming afternoon sunlight, because the weight of two growing boys were just two bodies, and a bed was only a bed.
Kaneki hadn’t said anything, but Hide placed a finger beneath Kaneki’s chin and guided his face to meet his eyes. He was smiling, if possible, even brighter.
“So you do remember,” Hide said, satisfied.
Kaneki squeezed Hide’s hand. He didn’t remember taking it, but Hide squeezed back without hesitation, and Hide’s confidence grounded him as it always did. He breathed out.
“I could drown,” he said. “Look at the currents. Doesn’t that scare you?”
“You won’t drown.”
“Yeah? How do you know that? You can see the future now, huh?”
Hide laughed, and it was such an easy laugh that Kaneki was ashamed for saying something unkind. “It’d do you some good to trust yourself,” Hide pointed out. When Kaneki’s grip on Hide’s hand only tightened, Hide’s brown eyes softened, and Kaneki looked away with a building pressure in his chest. “Okay, change of tactic. Do you trust me?”
Kaneki thought about this—and then found that he didn’t need to. The answer, the weight of it at once heavy and light, settled in his mouth for only a brief moment before he set it free: “Of course.”
“Right.” Hide blinked, and Kaneki smiled to himself—at the discovery that he could still, after all these years, catch Hide by surprise. “Okay, take my hand—no, smartass, I meant my other hand—okay. Take your shoes off.”
“I have to let go of you first if I want to take them off, genius.” When Hide cast him an exasperated look, Kaneki couldn’t help laughing. “Alright, alright! I know what you meant.”
Kaneki toed off his shoes, kicking them aside to lie in the dirt next to Hide’s sandals. Hide walked with his back to the water first, and then, carefully, guided Kaneki into it with him. Kaneki held his breath. His nails dug crescents into Hide’s wrists, and he was so terrified of the river that his fear of looking at Hide seemed, suddenly, inconsequential.
No—that wasn’t right. The river was less frightening than the threat of Hide letting go. After Kaneki’s eyes had settled on Hide, they were too tense to leave.
“Like that,” Hide crooned. “Just look at me. Easy there.”
They waded further in; they ventured a little bit downstream. The water lapped up at Kaneki’s ankles, then caressed the skin halfway up his calves. It was cold, and a little grimy, and Kaneki couldn’t help thinking that when they got back home he would wrestle Hide for the first shower, if it came to that—only it wouldn’t, because Hide was far too selfless for his own good.
Now that he was standing in the middle of the currents, Kaneki’s hummingbird heart went quiet. He relaxed his vice-like clutch on Hide’s hands, so he could hold them leisurely. He stole a glance at their fingers still laced together, a loose latticework that neither of them had commented on.
“This reminds me of my dream,” he said.
Hide looked at him. “I was in your dream?”
“Well, maybe not really a dream. More like a vision.” Kaneki sucked in his bottom lip; he watched Hide watch the movement of his mouth. Strange, he thought, that Hide’s eyes warmed him, when Kaneki was too afraid to look back in turn. “I don’t know if I should talk about it.”
“Don’t do it if you don’t want to,” Hide said generously. “I’ll wait for you.”
“But that’s what you always do.” Kaneki almost wished the currents would mask his voice again, but Hide heard him anyway. “And it’s not fair.”
“But you’ll come this time, yeah?”
“I don’t know. I want to. It won’t scare you away, will it?”
Hide waved a hand. The gesture was meant to be dismissive, but by now Kaneki could see that it was a little sad. “Of course not.”
Do you trust me? Hide had asked. And Kaneki had said yes, but here he was, withholding himself like he always did.
They hadn’t gone too far away from shore, but the riverbank was a hazy earth-dark streak in the distance. They were already here, Kaneki reasoned—away from prying eyes, miles away from the heart of too-fast, too-busy Tokyo. Already alone, the trees casting them into shadow from the sun. Already—finally—holding hands as men, and not boys.
“I saw you at Cochlea,” Kaneki ventured.
Hide’s brow furrowed. “I was never at Cochlea. That was the one area I could never figure out how to break into, even when I was CCG personnel.”
“No, no, let me finish. I broke into Cochlea. I wanted to die. But you—” Hide opened his mouth to speak, but Kaneki rushed on, because if he stopped he would never start again, “—I saw you. I was going to drown. But you pulled me up. You saved me without even knowing.”
“Aw, really? What did I say?”
“You made fun of me for missing you. Like the jerk that you are.”
The one corner of Hide’s lip that could still curl upwards did so. “Yeah, that sounds like me.”
“Called me a rabbit and everything, too.”
“Yeah.” He had Hide laughing again. It was like a balm, that laugh, and Kaneki could never truly express how grateful he was that Hide’s automated voice box had preserved it. “You know me.”
But that wasn’t it, either. For all his time studying the structure of words, Kaneki still didn’t have any of his own. He didn’t have the scaffolding to admit that his mind had projected Hide to him because a chunk of his heart didn’t just know Hide, or belong to Hide; it was Hide. Even at his loneliest, that part of him knew that Hide would have wanted him here on this impromptu camping trip; knew that Hide wouldn’t want to see all the world had to offer with anyone else. Hide—beautiful, boisterous Hide—wanted Kaneki just because he could. Hide would have wanted him to live—so he lived. It was the least he could do.
And Kaneki was already here.
So he took the plunge.
“I love you,” he said. “I missed you. That’s what it made me realize.”
Hide dropped Kaneki’s hand.
He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, and Kaneki finally understood how Hide could have waited all those years for him: Love had made him patient. Kaneki would stay around for however long it took Hide to arrive at a decision, an answer.
This must have been the weight of Hide’s love. It was only fair that Kaneki carried it, too.
“I was thinking it might’ve been fun to go swimming,” Hide said finally. “But now that we’re here, maybe you were right after all. It’s kinda scary. The current’s so fast.” Hide kicked uselessly at the water to prove his point.
Kaneki sought his gaze, but Hide was staring into the river’s mossy depths. He tried to smile, but he had a feeling it came out looking a little wry. “Could’ve swum upstream.”
“You realize that’s the hard way, right? Against the current? That’s asking for more trouble than life is worth. Like salmon,” Hide mused.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Kaneki rolled his eyes. “You be the salmon. I’m good with staying human. Ghoul. Whatever.”
Hide shoved him—just roughly enough so that Kaneki could tell he had crossed a threshold, slipping past good humor and into genuine perplexity. He was nervous. Kaneki did the only thing he thought might alleviate Hide’s anxiety: He shoved him back. His grip lingered on Hide’s shoulder, and he thought, But life is worth so much. Ask me to swim upstream. I’ll do it with you.
“Let’s go back, then,” Kaneki suggested, because Hide clearly wanted to. “It’s pretty lame of us to just loiter around here. What if someone sees?”
Kaneki was beginning to feel unsure of himself as well; was an admission of love still worth anything if no one else could see? That had felt the most honest to him, but he didn’t know if Hide felt the same. Maybe he’d been hoping for something—more.
For someone more. There it was again, the tight feeling in his chest. Maybe he’d been wrong, after all.
“Don’t be like that,” Hide chided. “It’s hot as balls, but the water’s cool, and you get to be with your awesome best friend in a mysterious forest. This was not—what did you say—lame.” Hide wrinkled his nose at Kaneki’s choice of vocabulary, which was a fascinating reaction considering Kaneki had written half of Hide’s essays in college. Kaneki opened his mouth to remind Hide of this, but then Hide said, “This was a dream.”
This was a dream; this was Kaneki’s vision come true, he thought privately. The words stuck in his throat, though, so Kaneki only offered his hand again. Hide considered it. He knew what it meant—or rather, he must’ve known what it meant to Kaneki, to take the hand of someone that you knew was in love with you.
Hide accepted it, and Kaneki led them back to shore.
It was Hide’s choice to wait until dark, and it was Kaneki’s to dim their little lantern and set it aside. Peace in Tokyo, no matter how taciturn, had allowed the two of them to escape the city for a while, but it was a ruthless summer, and Kaneki felt the bare skin of his arms stick to the sleeping bag below him. From the uneven breathing beside him, he could tell Hide was still awake. He looked up at the curved roof of their tent, waiting.
“Kaneki?” Hide lowered the volume on his speaking apparatus, so Kaneki’s name was soft as a whisper.
“Yeah. I’m awake.”
“I was thinking,” Hide said, and then he stopped. Kaneki moved so that his back was to Hide’s, so that Hide could feel the warmth of his spine and know he was still there, even in the silence.
Hide was skilled with the lock he had on his emotions, but Kaneki, through years of trial and error, had learned how to pick at it. Maybe—and this was one of Kaneki’s guiltier thoughts—it helped that the metal had rusted during their years apart, too, so sometimes it didn’t click shut properly. A habit of touching his cheek meant he was nervous. Staring at Kaneki only to flit his gaze away when Kaneki noticed it meant he wanted to ask something, but was afraid of the answer. In this case, he had been thinking about Kaneki’s confession since Kaneki first gave voice to it. That much, at least, was clear.
“I was thinking,” Hide tried again, “if I said yes. How would we work?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, well. Just think about it. Like if I had to confess to you. What would you want me to say?”
“I wouldn’t want you to ask me,” Kaneki teased him. “Now you’re just making me look bad.”
“How could I ever make you look bad?”
“Well, I wasn’t selfless enough to ask you. I just went for it.” Kaneki took a second to turn the scenario over in his mind, one last time, just in case he had missed anything. “I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you otherwise,” he admitted.
Hide was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I guess the fact that I asked in the first place is already kind of a confession too. We’re the same, aren’t we?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“But you knew anyway.” It wasn’t a question. “That I feel the same.”
Kaneki had not; or, if he’d known, then he hadn’t been certain. Bursting Hide’s confidence was a risk that Kaneki didn’t dare take, so they didn’t speak for a while after that. Kaneki closed his eyes, content to sleep before the drive back home tomorrow morning. Hide had insisted he would help navigate from the passenger seat, but they both knew that Kaneki always let him off the hook. The sway of the roads on long car rides always lulled Hide to sleep. It was a habit that had never evolved, not even since high school.
“If we were—if we were.” Kaneki heard Hide swallow. “Would you ever want to kiss me?”
Kaneki’s blood thrummed in his veins at the question, every cell awakened in an instant. “I—yes. I would.” He hesitated. “I do.”
“Really?” Hide sounded doubtful. “Still? I mean, we’ve kind of done it before, but—”
“What do you mean, before?”
Hide touched his face absently. Neither of them had ever spoken about it directly before; Hide kept saying it was no use to dwell on the past, but Kaneki was already ashamed of the conversation he knew they must have in the future. His own cowardice never failed to sink its teeth into his throat.
But Hide did not say, In the sewers. He did not say Anteiku; he did not mention Arima’s name. Instead he said, “When we were nineteen.”
“That doesn’t count. It wasn’t by choice.”
“What do you mean, it wasn’t by choice?” Hide sounded almost offended. “I came down and found you. I offered.”
“I was dying,” Kaneki reminded him. “I didn’t want to do it. I wasn’t in my right mind. I don’t—I barely remember it. I’m sorry.”
“You still knew it was me, though,” Hide said stubbornly. Kaneki didn’t realize he’d absently pressed two fingers to the bottom of his own chin, but Hide reached out, pulling his hand away from it. “There was still enough of you left in there to know that it was me. I chose to offer, and you accepted me.”
“Not like that, though. That’s not how you would’ve wanted it to go, was it—your first kiss?”
“How are you so confident that you were my first?” Hide laughed. Kaneki was beginning to understand that this was another of Hide’s personal intricacies; his lighthearted banter was a thin sheet concealing something heavier. “Maybe I had fifty boyfriends and fifty more girlfriends in the time that you were gone.”
“But you said so yourself,” Kaneki reminded him, “that you would have waited for me.”
Hide fell silent; this one truth had stolen all of Hide’s lies. The fabric of his T-shirt rustled as he rolled over to look at Kaneki’s back.
“So what do you think constitutes a choice, then?” Hide asked at last.
Kaneki turned to look at him, too. Their tent was large enough so their sleeping bags didn’t need to be crushed against each other on the floor, but they were anyway. Force of habit. They’d slept like this when they were boys, too, their faces less than an inch apart, alternating between ghost stories and petty school gossip, stifling laughter into their pillows—but they were men now.
In the sharp gray moonlight, Hide’s eyes were so dark that they looked almost black. Kaneki could descend into them and never find his way out, but that didn’t scare him. If he lost himself again, Hide would always find him.
When Kaneki reached out to touch Hide’s cheek, Hide didn’t move away.
“This,” said Kaneki. “This is a choice.” He pressed his lips to Hide’s forehead, softly, so Hide could turn his face away if he wanted; but he didn’t. “And this.” A kiss on his nose. “And this and this.” One kiss for each scarred cheek, and Hide’s lips parted slightly in surprise as he registered the route that Kaneki had mapped. “And this.”
And he kissed Hide’s lips. At first Hide didn’t respond. Kaneki’s arm had settled around his waist, but at the lack of reciprocation he began to lift it away, cold and lonely with shame. But then Hide asked, tremulously, “Is this really okay?”
“Yes,” Kaneki bit out. As soon as he registered it, he hastened to reel back the harshness of his own voice. “Yes. Why would it not—?”
And then Hide pulled him back with an unexpected roughness. Kaneki gasped when his front teeth scraped against Hide’s, and Hide swallowed the sound as soon as it left, for once unthinking.
It was wet, Kaneki thought distantly, like the earth outside, scorched by summer rain. It was Hide’s tongue; then, to Kaneki’s wonder, it was Hide’s tears. Kaneki broke away to press his lips to Hide’s damp cheeks, only for a second, before Hide pulled him back down and caught his mouth again. Teeth in his bottom lip. Kaneki had always been afraid that he was too zealous of a lover, but now this fear melted into a distant memory, because he realized that Hide was just the same.
“I love you,” Hide said breathlessly. “Did I tell you already?”
“Tell me again,” Kaneki murmured, so Hide did, and they kissed again, and again, and again.
Hide sighed. “I love you,” he said one last time. “It feels good to tell you, finally.”
“I’ll never tire of hearing it,” Kaneki admitted quietly. “I love you too.”
Years ago, a truth this heavy would have settled in his liver, an agony to digest. It would have sent him running into the wilderness—that he was Kaneki, Kaneki Ken, and he was a person who had become a man, and still he loved men, and still he loved his best friend. It had sent him running. Howling. Screaming. Kaneki Ken, Eyepatch, Centipede, a banshee mourning his coming demise, condemned by the depths of his own love. But it was lonely in the woods. Hide heard him through the foliage, and he was here now, in Kaneki’s arms, and Kaneki loved him. This was his life; Hide was his choice.
Finally, Kaneki was quiet. There was nothing left to say, nothing else to scream for, because it was safe to be in this love.
Cicadas outside. A songbird.
A tender hand cradled Kaneki’s cheek, and Kaneki followed the movement, guided back to Hide’s eyes. He smiled with his heart full to bursting, then caught Hide’s hand to lace their fingers together.
“We should get some sleep,” Kaneki decided. The ache in his chest had somehow grown even wider, and he was so happy that he was afraid it would trip over into another melancholy. “Long drive tomorrow.”
“Long drive for you,” Hide corrected. “One more kiss can’t hurt, right?”
“You,” Kaneki said fondly, “are so annoying.”
“It’s me that you love.” He could tell this was meant to be a teasing comment, but Kaneki could hear the childlike awe in Hide’s voice. Nishiki had told him that he was aging at an unnaturally rapid rate, but still it made him feel young again. “I like it here. It’s peaceful. We can kiss forever and ever and no one will see us.”
That sounded nice, too. Like they could make up for all the years they’d lost to Hide’s fear and Kaneki’s shame. If they stayed here, never again would they have to face the city. Never see the towers half-rebuilt, the streets half-repaved, the CCG half-reformed.
“We really are the same,” Kaneki said. “I don’t want to be seen, either.”
“But we’ll have to go back home eventually.”
“Yeah. Eventually. I’m done with running, anyway.”
“I hate that word, you know. Confess. As if this—” Hide gestured between the two of them— “was a secret.”
It was sort of funny, and terribly endearing, that Hide had just spent what felt like an eternity kissing Kaneki so jealously, clutching him almost desperately, only to shy away from putting words to their new relationship before Kaneki did. Hide’s thoughtfulness—and the depths of his insecurity—surprised Kaneki at every turn. One day, Kaneki hoped he could tell Hide that it wouldn’t scare him, to be Hide’s lover, because he had dreamed of it when he was a boy. Instead he said, “Was it not?”
Hide didn’t answer immediately, but Kaneki was content to wait until his thoughts reshuffled. The thin T-shirt Hide slept in exposed his freckled arms, and Kaneki ran his knuckles down his skin. After everything, it was a wonder that Hide allowed Kaneki so close to his bare flesh. This was trust, Kaneki realized. It was a little scary, but Kaneki found comfort in knowing that he was still capable of holding Hide gently, too; it filled him with wonder, to discover that his blackened nails could still soothe.
It wasn’t just scary—it was exciting. For the first time, he was looking forward to a new forever.
“Well,” Hide started at last, “we both knew it, and it was because you knew that you booked it. So in that sense, no, it wasn’t a secret. I never tried to hide it. You just wouldn’t look.”
Hide didn’t sound accusatory at all; Kaneki was grateful for it. “I’m seeing you now,” said Kaneki. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
Hide shook his head. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. There’s no such thing as the wrong time. Whatever we decide—if it’s right for us, that’s how we’ll know.”
Kaneki closed his eyes. Even after Hide had given Kaneki his voice, Hide kept speaking for him, picking at the words that had settled in Kaneki’s throat and setting them free. Hide had spoken for him all these years, and Kaneki would spend many, many more trying to pay him back.
“Hey,” Hide said, as if he knew what Kaneki had been thinking, and Kaneki realized he probably did. “I’m just glad we’re both here now.”
Kaneki had spent a lifetime trying to hold water steady in his hands, but when Hide grinned, Kaneki let himself fully drink in Hide’s beauty for the first time. His kindness, his humor, his steadfast loyalty—all of it shone in his blackberry eyes, the tilt of his smile ripe with an offering of new life, of old love. Why had Kaneki ever been afraid? It was the most natural thing in the world, to share this silence with Hide.
Tomorrow they would return to the city, but for now they slept, dreamless at last.