"No, don't add that much salt," Kaneki said as he stopped Amon from putting in another pinch. He waited a few minutes before announcing, "And that should be enough. The soup is done."

"How do you know that?!" Amon nearly yelled.

Kaneki had to stop himself from grinning. He had been slowly watching as Amon grew more and more annoyed by his failures at making every other dish, and was waiting for the pent-up emotions to burst out.

Switching off the flame, he smiled serenely. "It's only a matter of experience, Amon."

Taking a spoonful of the soup, he turned to his five-year-old daughter, who was happily playing with her toys on the kitchen floor. "Would you help Papa for a moment, Ichika?"

"Okay!" the girl said happily, putting down the blocks she was holding and then walking over to him.

Touka would be furious if she learnt that Kaneki had let Ichika inside the kitchen along with all those little toys of hers—she believed he spoiled their daughter too much, and with good cause—but thankfully his wife was unaware of this, being on bed rest in the last month of her pregnancy.

She wasn't the only expectant mother he knew, though.

Ichika swallowed the soup and gave a firm nod. "It's good!" She then looked at Amon. "Do you want to play my cooking games, Mister Amon? They're easier than what Papa does."

Kaneki stifled a laugh as Amon, with some effort, pushed aside his annoyance to pat Ichika's head and tell her that it was alright.

A week ago, Kaneki and Amon had been casually talking over the phone, when the conversation turned to their wives and Amon revealed that as Akira was often tired since she had become pregnant, he wanted to cook something nice for her.

Apparently Akira had mentioned to him that Kaneki was excellent in the kitchen, so Amon wanted to learn from him. Kaneki had only been all too happy to help.

It wasn't going as smoothly as either one of them hoped, though.

"How can you tell when you can't even taste the food?" Amon whispered heatedly to him, once Ichika had gone back to playing by herself, building some sort of skyscraper with her blocks.

"Well, first of all, you should notice the colour and texture." Kaneki took a ladle of the liquid and let it slowly fall back into the pot to illustrate what he meant.

"Next is the taste, actually. It'll always taste terrible but there are different levels to it, and food will usually taste worst to us when it's at its best. And lastly, you should stick to the recipe without any deviation. All the fine-tuning comes in once you've made a lot of the same thing." His voice took on a nostalgic tone as he continued, "The Quinx really helped with that. Saiko and Shirazu had the stomachs of ghouls, and Urie was very particular with what he ate. Mutsuki tried hard to save my feelings, but I caught on to what he liked and disliked too."

That faint pain was replaced by a proud smile. "Now Ichika is my taste-tester."

Amon's eyes tracked the girl. In some more months, he too would become a father. Kaneki was sure he would do well—he always seemed to have a soft spot for kids—but Amon wasn't so confident in himself.

Kaneki couldn't really blame him. He himself had been like a headless chicken during Ichika's birth, and even after being a father for so long, he was just as anxious this time about his second child.

After a minute of silence with both of them lost in their thoughts, Kaneki startled as Amon turned to him with renewed determination.

"What are we doing next?"

Akira's eyes narrowed as she caught a whiff of something nice in the air.

That was odd. Amon rarely cooked. For one, he didn't need food. For another, he simply wasn't all that good at it, and so he had instead taken up nearly every other household chore to lessen her burden.

Putting down the puzzle book she had been working on and pushing herself out of bed, Akira walked to the kitchen. She opened the closed door—another oddity—to peek in.

Amon was hunched over the stove, his back to her. Though she tried to be silent, the creak of the door alerted him to her presence and he spun around.

"Akira! You should be in bed," he said, looking as if he had been caught red-handed. For what sort of crime, Akira didn't know.

"I'm pregnant, Koutarou, not an invalid," she replied, folding her arms over her chest. "What are you doing?"

"N-nothing!" At her disbelieving look, he corrected himself. "You'll find out. Just… give me a bit more time."

"Sure you don't need my help?"

He nodded quickly. "Don't worry about it. Just wait at the table."

Amon looked so serious about it that Akira didn't press the issue, instead sitting down at the short-legged dining table.

As he had promised, Amon didn't take very long. She was inspecting the wooden grains of the table for a lack of anything else to do when he appeared, holding a plate in his hands.

Cooking for her, huh? That was rather sweet of him. She wondered what it was.

"Try it," he said with a nervous smile, and placed the food in front of her.

It was a plate of curry rice.

Her first instinct was to refuse, having an inkling of what exactly the curry was, but Amon had made it with such obvious love and effort that she didn't have the heart to do so.

Instead, she took a spoon of it and tried it slowly. The way the taste of vegetables and meat complemented each other was very familiar (though a bit overcooked), as was the heat that bloomed on her tongue.

The Mado family curry.

The heat wasn't just in her mouth though. To her surprise, Akira felt her eyes prickle with hot tears, a sudden stuffiness taking shelter in her throat.

"Is it that bad?" Amon asked, looking concerned by her unusual reaction. "You don't have to eat the rest, I'll throw it away—"

"N-no, it's…" She shook her head, and embarrassingly, the movement made the tears actually fall, trailing a silvery path against her cheeks. Raising her hand, she hastily wiped her face and swallowed hard. "It tastes alright."

It tastes like memories.

Akira hadn't made this curry since she had started living with Amon. It just held too many good memories for her—ones that she worried she would irrevocably taint with the truths she had been struggling to accept just a few years ago. Even though she had now come to realise the full extent of her father's cruelty and didn't shy away from that knowledge, she wanted to keep the past pristine.

She hadn't told Amon that. He had no way of knowing that decision of hers.

But her worries were unfounded. Many of the things that she fondly recalled were marred by hindsight, but the happiness of those times remained as it was. The happiness not of the person she was now, but a resonance from the person she had been.

"Akira?"

She snapped out of her thoughts to find that Amon was leaning close to her now, his hands cupping both her cheeks. He was tenderly wiping at the skin with his thumbs—

Oh, she was crying again.

"I'm sorry…" he said softly with a frown. "I didn't mean to make you cry…"

She laughed weakly. "You didn't. I'm fine, I promise."

"Are you sure?"

Akira breathed in deeply, letting her emotions settle, and nodded. He pulled away, though his eyes were still trained on her, like he was trying to see through her words. But he didn't question her about it, and she was glad for that.

"How did you learn to make this?" she asked as she started to eat it.

There was no way Amon had ever had this curry, or even touched it with a ten-foot pole considering how spicy it was.

"Eyepatch taught me."

Haise. Akira remembered giving him the recipe, back in the days when he had been so desperate to win her approval, doing whatever he could to please her. Making her favourite food had been one of the things he had tried.

"It's a shame you can't taste it," she commented with a smirk.

He looked horrified by the thought, probably remembering the last time she fed him curry. "I think I'm glad to be a ghoul."

Akira ducked her head to hide a giggle at that, and Amon cracked a smile.

Looking at him, feeling a sudden lightness in her heart, Akira couldn't help but think that no matter what happiness lay in the past, it couldn't hold a candle to what she had in the present.

Haise: "Akira, there's curry too. I made it just the way you like it. It's an exact reproduction of the Mado family recipe."

Akira: "Mmm, delicious. It reminds me of home."

-Tokyo Ghoul:re, episode 7

Note: I wrote like ten different endings before settling on this one. Hopefully it's good enough.