Black Water | Tokyo Ghoul

Chapter 4: Riddle Me This.

After the strange visit Rize Kamishiro had blessed him with and a good four hour long nap that followed quickly after, the boy was left sitting in his room, drowsy as he simply stared into the air, thinking of what to do for the rest of the day.

At the present, he was working as a freelance photographer named Erin Murakami. To get more money to that, Rin was also recruited in a band, suddenly being called to work with four other boys when they saw and heard him fooling around with the drums at one music cafe he once visited. So since both of his jobs didn't have a permanent time frame, he was as free as a bird today.

'School?' he thought. He scoffed right after. School was out of the question. He would lose his invisibility.

Since he wasn't a registered citizen and his mother was a very paranoid woman who never failed to worry about her children's lives, she never let them go to school. Her mother was sold by the idea of them being invisible from human eyes. She thought like their father that, yes, it would make their lives easier.

Other than that, registering for school would instantly begin a questioning of why he and his brother were never registered as citizens in the first place. Then surely, the most dangerous question would be brought up.

"Are they ghouls?"

So, they were forced to learn all they could from their mother's books. She was an avid reader and would buy all the second hand books she could get her hands on while their father was actually one of the top college graduates from Kamii University's department of Medicine. So it wasn't such a problem to learn just as much as normal students.

Rin could still remember the smell of their mother's study. The faint scent of lemon in the air accompanied by the robust musk of the pages of old books.

Rin felt a small smile rise on his face, his lids sleepily falling lower again before he sighed and closed his eyes, carefully lying back down on the bed, the thought of sleeping again finally sounding a lot more irresistible than before.

'Jin's favorite was that weird manga mom found.' Was it Death Note? Something about a red eyed demon who loves apples...and a guy with a messiah complex...Jin never got to finish it and Rin never got over him not being able to do so.

Right then, his cell phone started ringing, the sound of the alarm crashing through his ears and shattering his peaceful thoughts.

Rin groaned loudly, stretching his arm out to the foldable side table vibrating loudly right next to his head.

"Fuck." He hissed when he couldn't feel his phone. After a few more agonizing seconds of high pitched ringing, his palms came across, not his phone, but something smooth and short.

Knitting his brows, he finally sat up, bouncing back up on his bum like a spring. With a grimace on his face, he rubbed a hand over his features and looked up from under long lashes and froze.

The alarm stopped ringing and the air turned stale with silence.

Under his hand was a photograph.

He blinked, dazed as he pulled his hand farther away and almost stopped breathing to see his brother staring right at him.

Someone must've caught him in the middle of a nap but even so, he still looked like the younger version of Rin working as a supermodel. Rin despised that. Despite Rin actually being the younger one, Jin still managed to make it look like he was the fountain of youth turned human (well, a not so human).

Under the mess of light blonde hair, Ishikawa Jin stared at the camera with a half-lidded gaze and Rin caught himself feeling the pained expression on his own face, the thing in his chest suddenly wringing itself after a long time of it staying frozen and numb as his eyes stared right at the thick and pale brows hovering over long lashes sitting above orbs that seemed to be almost the color of bronze.