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“UggggghhhHHHHHH!!!!”
Kaneki groaned, trying not to throw up in the sink he had his head wedged in. He had a migraine unlike anything he’d ever experienced before and his body was in the kind of constant pain he hadn’t had to go through since becoming a ghoul. The light hurt his eyes, loud sounds hurt his head, and he was pretty sure that if Koutarou was awake and speaking to him, he’d kill him.
“Am I dying?”
He asked himself, dry-heaving once more. Maybe he’d caught some kind of ghoul flu. Maybe his body was finally getting weirded out by the kakuhou wedged into his back by a crazy doctor. Maybe-
A blurry memory tugged at him and he seized it mentally. He remembered visiting Uta before all of this began. Then he ran into an investigator on the streets…?
Koutarou.
He’d called him Koutarou.
There was an investigator in his bed and HE’D CALLED HIM KOUTAROU WHICH MEANT HE KNEW THE INVESTIGATOR’S FIRST NAME!?
Kaneki was freaking out, dry-heaving, and desperately trying to remember if the other ghouls were staying in the apartment with him today or if, by some miracle, they had gone out. Did Uta poison him or something? How did he bring an investigator here and not get killed?
Oh God, did he kill the investigator? Kaneki was pretty sure the one in his bed, if memory served, was the one that he liked. He really hoped he hadn’t killed him.
He sat up straight, stumbling a little and ignoring the pain in his head, and rinsed his mouth out. He had to see if the investigator was dead, but if he wasn’t, Kaneki didn’t want him to smell his ghoul-vomit breath. To his nose, it smelt like regular old puke, however a human might detect the lovely scent of corpse in there.
Lurching forwards and being generally uncoordinated, Kaneki made his way over to the bed. There was a large figure cocooned in blankets nestled right into the middle of it. He couldn’t see past the blankets to detect the rise and fall of breathing or any other vital signs.
The whole place was silent, so at least the other ghouls were out.
Cautiously, Kaneki tugged on the edge of the blanket. His blurry mind made him slow to react when arms shot out from the cocoon and flipped him over, pinning him to the bed. His favourite investigator shoved him down hard into the mattress and blinked at him sleepily.
“Oh, good. You’re awake. Can you finally explain why you dragged me he-“
The investigator (Koutarou, man it was weird to know his name) began, suddenly trailing off and running a finger over Kaneki’s face,
“Why aren’t you wearing your mask?”
Kaneki groaned inwardly, a snide comment bubbling up his throat (“I’m not wearing it because I like to be able to vomit NOT on my own face.”) due to throbbing pain making itself known all over his body once again. He chose not to respond, feeling it would be a bad idea to puke on the man on top of him.
“Eyepatch? Does this mean you were planning to kill me?”
Kou- the investigator (don’t go getting all chummy!) asked quietly, drawing back out of Kaneki’s personal space. Kaneki was a bit worried he’d reach for his quinque, wherever that may be, and so he spoke quickly,
“Wha- no! No! I don’t even know why I brought you here! I don’t remember last night at all!”
His outburst gave the investigator pause. Kaneki watched in fascination as the man’s face alternated between very very pale and very very red. Finally, it settled on red.
“I didn’t know ghouls could get drunk.”
The investigator mumbled, hiding his face in his large hands,
“I guess that would explain…they always said I was an open book – I thought you were just sed- I mean convincing me to come here. That maybe you, uhh, needed something but – Oh Lord.”
Kaneki cocked his head in confusion, then winced at the particularly painful throb that brought to his temples. He massaged them, squinting at the horribly embarrassed man sitting on his bed.
“What did I do?”
Kaneki asked, letting his tone go low and dangerous. He had a bad feeling about whatever behavior he couldn’t remember.
“Nothing! Nothing! You didn’t do anything! We talked a little, you dragged me here, then fell asleep immediately!”
The investigator cried out, waving his hands frantically. The loud sound made Kaneki wish he could throw the man out a window, but that would be poor hospitality (he had forced K- the dove to come here).
“And you just…slept here next to a dangerous ghoul?”
Kaneki sharply replied, wondering how to cure the ghoul equivalent of a hangover. He hoped it didn’t involve eating.
Heh, he was a ghoul. Everything always involved eating.
He hadn’t thought that Koutarou (fuck it, the guy slept in his bed. He could call him by his name) could get any redder, however he was proven wrong. It was actually kindof cu-
Nope. Don’t go there.
“I couldn’t exactly leave your house unlocked and I wasn’t going to steal your keys. I wound up falling asleep after trying to wake you up so many times.”
Koutarou muttered, running a hand through his hair is exasperation and worrying his lip. Kaneki watched his teeth scrape over it a couple times as if he were in a trance. He snapped out of it quickly, and decided that he wasn’t going to deal with anything else today.
Throwing his legs under the covers and shoving Koutarou down onto the mattress (revenge), Kaneki curled into his pillow. Koutarou was stuttering in confusion, his hands hovering over Kaneki’s shoulders and his eyes wide, so Kaneki decided to give an explanation before he finally fell asleep:
“I don’t want to be awake right now and you talk less when you’re unconscious.”
(It’d be his little secret that the warmth was comforting and that, despite the headache, he slept better next to this man than he had in almost a year)