Well, this is embarrassing. Hi, how are you guys? Sorry, but life happened and it and school punched my free time in the face. I wanted to write, but I'm gonna save you the excuses and move on to the chapter!
Hope you like it!

Within all the people, all around the globe, lies the ability to mask the truth, to pretend.

It's an unspoken fact. You meet people who deserve to be handed an Oscar for their mind blowing pseudo personas enough to make one question all things known as intellect. Some are quick to draw it out. Others usually need a world changing force to utilize it.

Touka couldn't refine hers to its perfection. There has always been a missing ingredient. But there was a reason why she had been able to slip herself in the normalcy of her classmates. It was there, developing more tediously than she'd like. Hence, it wasn't too unusual for her classmates to be at the receiving end of her death stare, no matter how religiously Touka tried to control it.

Thank god, It wasn't enough to arose suspicion.

She wondered what they considered it to be, A different set of circumstances? Different shoes which had been woven and tired and torn apart?

Sometimes, she'd entertain herself with thoughts of changing hers. Changing what made her Touka. Then she'd remember, She had never been born with shoes to begin with.

She wasn't like Riza. Someone who'd take the useless piles of rubbish and make out of it things which were better than the ones anyone had. Hers was the ability to destroy. Not fix or mend to her liking.

She wanted to be like Riza, at times. Even though, her end was much awaited and predictable. Show off her trash to an extent that everyone gets the need to want a thing or two out of it. Walk with a sureness and a swag, attract her preys without lifting a finger (she wouldn't do that anymore, though. With Anteiku and Kaneki and Yuriko and even Hide. How could she ever harm someone who wasn't, intentionally asking for it?)

Then she'd remember what she felt when Riza got crushed under steel bars.

Good riddence, the world doesn't need another pretty face like her.

But evidently it wanted a lesser, somewhat acceptable version of her. Hence the world created Kaneki Ken.

Kaneki seriously fucking Ken

Because Hell be damned, he was a bloody good actor.

Click

Click

"Juuzo?"

He lets out a grin, but drops the spoon back to the table wordlessly at the older man's disapproving glance. Shinohara sighs, and faces him with a apologetic expression before he asks,

"CCG still strongly believes that Riza was a Ghoul."

"And I strongly believe that she wasn't. Shinohara-san, please consider what you are saying. If Riza, was truly a ghoul, then I was given a ghouls organ." Kaneki swirls the liquid in his cup and he speaks again when the cold glass touches his chin." That thought as unsettling as it as, is entirely impossible. I would have had some side effects, wouldn't I? And other than a new perception, nothing has changed." He lets the cup drop down to the table a bit more dramatically than he intended but it sends the desired message.

A statement

He gives the man the broadest smile he has made since coming back.

The man, in turn, gives him a confused look instead.

"I'm sorry Kaneki-kun, but if it isn't too much of a bother, I want you to tell me whatever details you can recall about the incident, Riza and especially Doctor Kanou." His voice seemed more like a request than an order. Shinohara pauses for a second, then adds as a consideration. "Just making sure. One last time"

Black hair brushes his temple when he eyes the woodwork of the table. How thought out.

How precise the working is.

Kaneki knew the man in front of him wasn't in any terms, ssomeone he'd hate. He had that kind and welcoming aura. A lone men set out to fix what he could, in the way he was best. Shinohara must have been the hero of so many stories.

Including the one of the boy who sat besides him.

But, he couldn't forget that the man was just as much as a villain of many other.

"Well, I will try to at the best of my ability." Kaneki pauses for a moment and caress his chin. "I think.. It went something like this..."

The tap drips the last drops of water. Kaneki walks out, rubbing the towel through the folds of his hair and it leaves a smudge of black on the white threads behind.

She points to the spot he missed and he thanks her before wiping the paint away. Th, as itatgoing to was stupid in her eyes, though, she thought, Why waste precious money on hair sprays every time he had to become (old) Kaneki rather than buying a bloody damn wig once and for all? "It's summer. The wig would have been too hot."

That was reasonable enough for her and she stirs back to the issue.

"Do you think they believed you?"

For a moment, Kaneki is silent, complementing. "No. Shinohara still isn't convinced. I would have had him, though, if it wasn't for that kid."

She remembers the dead silence and that boy's sharp, unsettling gaze.

" It was a close one, that kid... He's something else but... You did pretty good dodging the bullet with that one."

'Pretty good' was an understatement. It wasn't like that.

He was unruffled. So bloody charismatic and sly that he went right pass the radar. If it had been her, Shinohara would have opened his suitcase and the two would have been brawling out on the streets even now. Unless, one of them was already dead.

The white hair boy smiles, opening the door of the wardrobe. "Thank you, Touka-chan. You did great too. "

"All I did was hold a mask of indifference." Touka-chan replies. He moves the other side of the door and changes his shirt. Her eyes glance at the street from the window as if she's half expecting a CCG squad readying themselves before busting Anteiku's door. "Not anyone could have walked away without any sort of struggle after they have been accused of being within a ghoul base. An Aogiri's base much less."

Kaneki glances sideways. " I guess it was a win, then" he answers.

Touka chews with her lips for a second. Then she leans forward and grips the corners of one of his sleeves.

"Kaneki, you do know what this means though?"

He stares in her eyes, a sparkle of an emotion she can decrypt Before he nods and says. " Yeah. I do. We still have to do what I told you But"

"But?" She echoes and her voice muffles out at the end.

This is one of those moments, Touka thinks, when you know that everything you have been doing up to the point was just a slow transition, a steady graduation before the real deal kicks in and you know lethargically, that the mundane-ss has ended. It all is going to be a big black, rushing, adrenaline pumping blur from now onwards. Apparently, Kaneki knew it too if she guessed correctly, the reason why his eyes take on a darker shade than that she has seen for a while, as if more sorrowful because no matter how utterly slow paced life had been since the raid, since the restaurant for him, it was all them, everyone needed and wanted.

Peaceful Days.

A horrible, gut wrenching, unforgiving cold feeling told her that they were about to end.

"We have to work with urgency" Kaneki replies.

That's. .. Short. But it's a start so that counts for something. Review!