Chapter Text
"My mind tortures me with happy thoughts while I'm falling asleep. When in reality when I wake up; I know things won't be okay."
- A lonely soul
Kaneki screams until he can't swallow-- until his throat cracks and blood chokes him. His bleeding tongues follow Mr. Lizard Eyes who slices his spine with a shriek of shivering ecstasy, making even Kaneki salivate. His mouth gapes open in a black plead for mercy that refuses to slip his crooked lips. Idle, meaty hands reach into the slit and past lovely muscle, fingering for the spinal cord's protruding, white nubs. Meaty fingers prod deeper, eventually tempting veins around a bloody, pulpy mess, clotting around a slimy artery that throbs with each shuddering breath. Mr. Lizard Eyes watches him with redeeming pleasure in his eyes.
His ribs are bleached and bruised; perverted skin peeling from the enamel. Intestines are atoning, leaving behind blinking bile as they crawl from his belly. A tongue, drowned in teeth, darts from a pair of lips, sweating with sadistic pleasure. A grotesque crack of bones leaves Kaneki's lower jaw hanging in a distorted manner; a skeleton's smile. Hunger crawls from his tongue. More, More, more, mORe, moRe, MOre, MORe, MOrE, morE, MoRE.
He wants to gouge out his ear canals and end the aching voice plaguing Kaneki's fleeting humanity with numb words. Screaming -- his -- denies his ears: blurring to a white silence. A glassy tear at the back of his skull resembles someone cutting his eyes out, but he never lost his eyes. Right? As blood runs down his empty sockets and binds him with his darkness; Kaneki begs at his sallow skin with revolting disgust, soured muscle and veiny tendons frame only his false bones.
He opens his eyes. Butterflies flit drearingly around Kaneki's black head with curved, ebony wings. Ghosts against plastic paper. He smiles. The wings begin to melt, dripping to the floor as candle wax. They dribble onto his skin, uncomfortably warm and sticky, gnawing at translucent skin. Yet, his smile does not falter. His eyes become terribly sad.
Lips dance along his jaw and fingertips roam his barren shoulders. He can feel the breath of eyelashes and the seductive curve of eyelids along his cheek. She looks familiar, but he doesn't want to remember pain, or the way her skin eloquently tightens around joints, or how her hair is pulled the side of her neck, exposing the soft, alabaster flesh underneath, or the way her sardonic lips move when she teasingly bit the rims of porcelain cups full of coffee.
"You are my sunshine," She breathes into his ear, tracing it with the stencil of her lips, "My only sunshine,"
The tar rises, staining his skin with black ink and bleaching his hair to an ugly white; it floods his raw throat and nostrils. Kaneki wants to stand but the chains wrapped around him urge him to sit and drown for a little bit. The tar climbs above his eyes. He shuts them, and sinks into the black depths, ignoring the startled gasp of his constricting lungs. Since when was his eye so red?
So they talk to him."Mother? Mother? Is that you? Why are you screaming? Delightful, isn't it?"
"You make me happy, when skies are grey." again. again. again. again. again. again. again. "You'll never know, how much I love you."
Sometimes a devil, hunched over a corpse (if either is human he does not mind anymore), kneels in front of Kaneki. He only sees the curve of its spine, each nub prominent beneath the black jumpsuit it wears; stretched across its body as a second skin. The sickening squelch of flesh being shamefully chewed and swallowed; needles in his ears! The demon holds a serpentine tongue between its fingers, forked and pale pink, above its head poising to eat it. Slurping the tongue in a single, fluid motion; it stands, back to Kaneki. Its white hair is matted with streaks of deluded scarlet. Blood runs down its arms as in small prayers down his chalky skin.
"I'm hungry, hungry, hungryhungryhungry, h u n g r y," The devil is redundant in its rotting sins; voice identical to the one in Kaneki's head. Shivers of lust race down its back; snapped breaths and ragged gasps tear from its throat. Laughter bubbles around its mouth, but it sounds panicked, almost forced. Its lips morph into a twisted smile.
"C-Centipedes-s i-in my ear-rs," It hysterically complains slowly, as its neck twists around. Kaneki's screams leap in pitch attempting to swallow the room. It is so noisy, please just, just... silence. White silence. A horrifying, hooked beak bulges over its face, like the masks medieval doctors wore to not become plagued by the black, but he's already so black. In the center, a red, glassy iris gleams with an onyx sclera. Spidery, crimson threads run from the iris and onto skin, at the corner of its eye. Madness--pure insanity--possesses its body. The devil's smile slightly wavers and its eye twitches-- a violent turmoil. Its knees buckle and it yanks at its hair, holding the silver strands with curled knuckles; a fallen angel who has long since been martyred.
"White child, have I hurt you again?" It screams (such a sad sound?) beside panic. Abruptly the creature silences and stands, taking an unsteady step forward with an arm outstretched in Kaneki's direction. Kaneki squirms, a guttural noise tears itself from his ruined throat.
"Kaneki, you are a dead Savior." The creature chides mournfully as it stands in front of him. Softly, its fingers brush across Kaneki's cheek. Ice cold and dead. Goosebumps bloom across Kaneki's arms in a disgusted, sick recoil. The devil tentatively steps toward him and wraps around his chest; one hand over his heart and the other along his collarbone. Kaneki doesn't shove the dead hands from his body, he's too afraid of what might happen (nothing happens). In an instant, warm slender arms replace the repulsive cold. He closes his eyes. His illusion of home slips through his cage of fingers like fine sand. And so when the liquid sun rises and melts silver shadows painted by the moon, the only thing remaining is a broken promise and the touch of clammy skin against his. Only echoes fade with time, but the words never dilute.
"So please don't take, my sunshine away."