-105 Alliance-

"All right, Banjo. Let's make sure I'm getting this straight."

"It's, uh, Banjou." The little whorl of a mustache had been a distraction through his story.

The two of us were sitting on a pair of folding chairs in the middle of what was usually our sparring space.

"Sure." I flicked aside the detail and listed off the points. "You're a member of Aogiri and was present when Jason kidnapped Kaneki."

"Unwillingly a part of that, though..."

Touka had sat down at the halfway point on the basement stairs and was presumably the cause of the many nervous looks being thrown over my shoulder.

"You ended up having Kaneki in your group after Aogiri determined him to be worthless as an asset."

A nod.

"Later on, you, Kaneki and a few others tried to escape and got dragged back and locked up."

"...They killed a bunch of us too, back there." I didn't particularly care who had died back there.

"And now you and Kaneki have—somehow—linked back up and he asked you to find me and take me to him."

"Well...yeah." Banjou rubbed the back of his neck. "So can we head out soon? Kaneki did ask me to hurry."

Behind me, Touka made a noise of contempt that bounced from the concrete walls like an audible middle finger. She started to follow it up with an insult, but I cut in.

"I'm a guy who's not that good at smart decisions, but I am in no way stupid enough to believe any of that. The only part of that story that is actually verifiable is where you're part of Aogiri and were here the day Kaneki was kidnapped." I jabbed a thumb back at Touka. "And that's only because she wanted to beat the shit out of you. Probably still does."

"Ka-"

Touka cut him off before Bajnou got to the second syllable. For the sake of letting her work it out of her system, I let her be angry and assumed it would be quick. It was not quick. After basic training, I could appreciate a good rant, though this was less amusing more straight abuse. The mention of Kaneki had my curiosity.

"All right, Touka. I'm pretty sure you're about out of curses." I flipped my attention back to the man with the swirled goatee. "You were saying something about Kaneki."

Banjou shifted uncomfortably. It occurred to me that he might have been sent back to Anteiku by Aogiri to grab me in the same method as Kaneki. That was a maybe though; this man at the minimum, didn't seem to the mindset that ended up in groups like Aogiri. Too easily startled.

"Ah. Yeah." "He said to tell the foreign—Allen, I mean—that 'we're the only ghouls in the city who can see one-eye to one-eye'. So, uh, yeah."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Another angry interjection from the lurker on the stairs.

"Touka." Perhaps this was the closest I had ever had to an 'in-joke'. It meant that this was indeed Kaneki. "Banjo-"

"Banjou."

"Close enough—head upstairs. Give me two minutes and we can go."

Once Banjou had headed upstairs, I gave Touka a few instructions in spite of her statements that he was 'weak as hell'. Even if he was, that didn't mean that Eto or Tatara wouldn't show up once we had left Anteiku. At that point the line between 'plan' and 'brace for impact' were a little blurry. The closest thing I had to a plan was to tell Touka that if I didn't send her a text per hour for the next three hours she was free to take my hotel key and help herself to whatever she wanted of my stuff. The brace for impact part was just me hoping I wouldn't get hit in the mouth again.

A stray snowflake drifted past my nose as I followed Banjou off of the crowded train. We had made the trip in complete silence, standing just far enough apart to look like we weren't traveling together. We weren't in the eleventh ward; we had gone east instead of south, plus the surroundings were in significantly better condition.

Unfortunately, my travel companion decided he had to break the silence after we turned down a very residential street.

"I thought you'd say something by now, asking where we're headed, or something like that."

"No." There was no point in asking, after all. I didn't know the wards, and the 'who' of the end of this trip was more important than the 'where'.

If it was Kaneki, what was he doing out here? This wasn't the twentieth ward and we were nearly in the opposite direction from his apartment. And if it was Aogiri, the same question remained—there wasn't any tactical worth in having a house on some residential street. Unless it was for an ambush. I was half-expecting to see an Aogiri mask until Kaneki answered the door.

"Allen, I'm glad you came." Still as soft spoken as ever, Kaneki waved us in. "Everyone else is here."

"Everyone else?" I repeated as we passed through the dusty entryway. "Touka isn't on that list?"

Kaneki didn't say anything, waving me toward a living room where 'everyone else' was waiting. There was Banjou, three very similar-looking ghouls, Nishiki and Tsukiyama. At this point he was appearing like a streak of bad luck. He smiled and waved in my direction and I did my best not to scowl back. Naive; the events at the church would've been more than enough back home to spark a vendetta, and here, where everything felt as if it was turned up to eleven made me paranoid about what kind of long game he had in mind.

Or I was reading everything incorrectly and this was 'defeat means friendship' kind of thing.

What Kaneki had pulled us all together was fairly daring, to say the least. He wanted to dig into his origins by kidnapping his surgeon. I approved and was also more than a little curious about what answers we would get. As for actually doing the deed, I was a little mixed—it would be the most illegal thing I had done, and I was theoretically supposed to be on the right side of the law. More risky was the goal of finding a way to hinder Aogiri, something I didn't know how we'd figure out how to do, let alone actually enact with less than ten people.

Banjou had somehow ended up as leader of the trio of ghouls, and his current concern was more on the establishment of some kind of territory around the house if this was going to be their—that is, our—base. Nishiki noted that he wasn't going to be helping in that regard. Tsukiyama waved the pair's concerns off, noting that the sixteenth ward was one of less contended wards and ensuring we wouldn't have to deal with unwanted ghouls would be easy.

"How plausible is any of this actually?" If Nishiki's tone made it clear he was, at best, doubtful. "Territory, this doctor Kanou, delaying Aogiri—not much use if one of them is going to get us all killed. And I don't have the time to help out with more than a few things."

"Aogiri will be hardest," Kaneki conceded, "but our focus is going to be on Doctor Kanou once we get settled in."

"Yeah, about that..." one of the identical ghouls started, "I know you were planning on moving in, but this house Tsukiyama recommended is, well it's not in great shape."

Tsukiyama shrugged as if to say, 'best I could do'.

"I was actually hoping Allen could help with that. Plus, this house has a few extra bedrooms, so I was thinking living here might be better than living in a hotel room"

"That sounds good on both counts..." On one hand, I was actually feeling a tingle of excitement at the thought of this change, but also, embarrassment. I just wish you hadn't advertised to everyone else that I was living in a hotel.

More details followed. Planning out training days for, figuring out when to go dig up information on Kanou, weekly reconnaissance for any local Aogiri activity. Admittedly, a fair bit ended up going through my head without me paying much attention. Planning out these kinds of things just wasn't my forte; all dry and crunchy like a stale corn chip. Tactical planning was what I could soak in like a sponge—maybe if I had stuck around at the BGA for a few more years, I could've been one of the agents doing operational planning. That was not reality, though.

Reality was that Kaneki and I now had a house to be responsible for.

"What's the damage on the house?" I asked, running a finger through the thick layer of dust on the kitchen counter. "Doesn't look like anyone's live here for years."

"Tsukiyama said this place has been uninhabited for longer than he can remember. Claimed it's owned by some ghoul who the CCG knows by face, so he had to abandon it." Filling a glass from the sink, Kaneki winced as the initial cup was tinged brown. "Apparently the guy had a taste for drunken salarymen, picked on a drunk CCG who got away."

Rubbing the dust on my fingertip into a ball, I flicked it into a corner. "Think any of it is true?"

"I did my research." The faucet burped air as Kaneki let it run. "It's been on the local real estate pages for at least four years without a seller's name, and about five years ago, a ghoul's wanted poster went up with a photograph but was never caught. Then this week, the notice vanished from the local papers."

"Probable then."

"Looks like it." A glass was filled, this time with clear water and poured into a coffeemaker that looked oddly like the one at Kaneki's apartment. "We've got water, electricity and gas. Heater almost works. No phone lines or internet hookups, no air conditioning units and I swear I feel breezes in every room. It's going to take months to make this place actually livable."

"Well, at least it's not haunted." I quipped. "And it's still not the worst place I've lived in."

That prompted a grin. "I suppose that's one upside."

When I recognized the mug Kaneki pulled from the cabinet, I realized that he must've already moved in. How long was just a guess, but at least a couple nights for him to look this 'at home' in this dusty kitchen. Thinking back to the past few nights, I tried to recall how cold it had been, but couldn't.

"What was the place worse than this?" Kaneki's hands were wrapped around the freshly filled mug. "Can't be that much worse than this."

I snorted. "There was this barracks-ish building I subsisted in with my unit when I was in Brazil. One of those pre-fab corrugated metal things—basically just like this, no air conditioning, no running water, cheap shitty lighting and one ventilation fan. Then squeeze in ten ghouls wearing full gear over a South American summer, daily patrols for us to cook in our armor, and we quickly found out how poorly we got along."

"Sounds like you guys were at each others throats."

"In the literal sense. I ended up with this" I tapped the scar on my arm, "from that time. They had to pull us out of that before it got any worse."

"Wow. You've lived some crazy stuff."

"Yeah." I just had to hope I wouldn't relive any of it. "Where's worst place you lived?"

"Oh, well." Rubbing at his chin, Kaneki shrugged. "I guess this would have to be the worst place for me. I don't think I've ever slept in a colder place."

Guess my first step would be to work out what was going on with the heating. I had no idea how bad winter in Tokyo was, but if it was anything like a Chicago winter, then a partially working heating system was going to be absolutely essential.