Mourning Doves | Tokyo Ghoul

18 | J a i l b r e a k

"Oniisan...What did they do to you?" Etsuko whispered, her voice trembling in despair. Her eyes were wide, brimming with tears as she stared at him in shock.

Takashi.

He let out a sigh and looked away disdainfully, though the look in his eye remained composed; it was the only real indication that told her that this creature standing in front of her was still that ghoul she had grown to love the most.

The ghoul who had been kind to her.

"It doesn't matter what they did to me - " he started.

"Of course it fucking matters!" she exploded, the rage inside of her boiling hot, causing her body to tremble in fury. "They did this to you! They tortured you! How can you think that it doesn't matter to me?"

Takashi clenched his jaw, the pained expression upon his features daunting and utterly frightening to her. It hurt her to see him in such a state, and it enraged her knowing that the CCG had done this to him. What did those disgusting humans do to him?

"Why?" she wailed, burying her sobbing face into her hands. "How could they do such a thing? How could they do this to you? You're the one who had the most faith in them, and yet..."

She let out another wail, Takashi unable to do anything but stand there with his marred face spread out in a look of utter disbelief.

"I'm sorry," she wept, her voice hitching in between sobs. She curled her fingers, scratching at the white skin that stretched across her agonized face, her pink lips pressed tight and her body rigid like marble. Her sobs had stifled after a few seconds, her mind swirling and building up the composure she needed so dearly in a time like this. Oh yes - definitely in a time like this. She brought her eyes back up, a hardened stare with crimson irises swirling against a flowing pit of black tar; they had been emptied of the pain and anguish that had twisted itself within her glare, and instead, only the immense madness raged on like a black storm.

Takashi was sent aback, frightened by not the scowl she made towards him, since he was used to seeing this back when she reigned the Fourteenth Ward as its Bloody Duchess, but the intensity and concentrated essence of determination shimmering within her eyes; this was something he had not seen in all of his years with her, and that one look dragged out the remaining wisps of his staggered breath.

"They're coming," Etsuko murmured, pushing herself back up onto her feet and swerving around on her heel, taking a few steps towards the mess of broken kagune and warped metal at the entrance of the cell. She snatched up a length of her own kagune and snapped off a chunk with her teeth, crunching the crystal and swallowing it before going to take another bite; she offered the remnants to him. "Eat. You're going to need the strength."

Takashi gawked at it in disbelief, his mouth slightly ajar.

"I can't," he said solemnly, his disfigured face turning down into a sorry frown. "After everything they did to me in the lab, I've been permanently disabled from using my kagune anymore."

She scowled, snarling a little before scarfing down the rest of her own kagune shard, whipping back around to slam her hands against the side of the door; she crumpled the metal to a distorted mass of chrome with significantly less effort, as though it were clay, and then motioned for the other ghoul to come out.

"Stay close to me. I'm breaking you out," she seethed.

The shouts of incoming guards echoed throughout the facility, unaware of the wrath they would soon taste from the ghoul they had infuriated. Her eyes flashed, and were then swallowed up once more by the inky black armor.