Chapter Text
Hinami uses the card as a bookmark, that way it's a reminder, when she has to do something, that she needs the strength to do it. Kaneki needs her help on the twelfth day, so she places the bookmark at the twelfth page, and it's lucky, because the twelfth page there's a line that says danki, and the weather that night is expected to be warm and balmy, and what a coincidence that it's twelve days after her preliminary journal entry for the month, where she plans to write about Kaneki, and how she still can't find him, and she misses him.
And that day comes up.
And she still can't find him.
She stands on the roof of the nearest building to Anteiku they can manage without drawing suspicion, takes a deep breath and lets the smells of the ward fill her lungs, lets the sounds in that radius fill her ears until she can filter them down into information. It's all so overwhelming it takes her hours to process, but by the end, she comes to a conclusion.
Kaneki isn't here.
Kaneki isn't anywhere.
Touka stops by one day, a few weeks after the doves' numbers in the ward have dwindled from a swarm to a steady, oppressive stream, and she can pass through the streets with a hood pulled tight over her hair without drawing suspicion.
It's been all over the news: that popular cafe in the 20th Ward was run by ghouls. And Touka's face, as the poster girl of Anteiku, is too familiar around here.
Banjou lets her in after peering cautiously through the peephole, and shuts the door quickly behind her. Once Touka is inside, she pushes her hood back and shakes out her hair.
"I brought supplies," she says, handing a freezer bag over to Banjou. "But it's the last I'm going to be able to bring for a while. I can't afford to keep stopping by so frequently. I'm too recognizable around here."
"I understand," Banjou says, taking the bag and hefting it, trying to judge by its weight how far this will get them, before they need to hunt on their own, or go looking for bodies the way Touka's group does. Hinami won't be happy if they have to--
"Onee-chan!" Hinami's voice rings out along with the sound of feet pounding across the floor, and Hinami dives at Touka with such force that Touka stumbles back and has to catch her weight. Her voice is muffled by Touka's hoodie when she says, "Oops. Sorry."
"Hey, Hinami-chan," Touka says breathlessly, rustling her hair. It's growing out now, without Kaneki around to cut it. "How're you holding up?"
"I'm okay," Hinami says brightly, but it sounds hollow, false. There's a sort of tired sorrow hiding in the shadows under her skin, the same tired sorrow the rest of them feel anymore. They all lost something precious that night, but Hinami's lost more than most in such a short time. Her dad, her mom, her home, Kaneki, her home again. Touka exchanges a glance with Banjou over the top of Hinami's head. "I've run out of new books to read, though. Can I go outside yet?"
Touka pulls back a little so she can look down into Hinami's face, one hand resting at the side of Hinami's head, threading the fine strands of Hinami's hair between her fingers. "Not yet. It's still too dangerous right now. Sorry."
"Oh," Hinami says, looking a little crestfallen. "But I can come stay with you and Yomo-san soon, right?"
Touka smiles, but it's just a mask, just pretend reassurance. "We'll see. Can I talk to Banjou for a bit?"
"Okay," Hinami says glumly. She walks slowly back to her room, and looks once more at Touka before she shuts her door.
She tries to focus on her book--she's rereading Monochrome Rainbow, because it makes her think of Kaneki and even though thinking of him right now feels painful, it feels better than not thinking of him at all--but she can hear Touka and Banjou through her door.
They're talking quietly, but neither of them realize the extent to which her senses have developed, how acute her hearing has grown. Sometimes loud noises too close to her feel painful. Sometimes she hears things she'd rather not hear: a man hitting his girlfriend, the sounds of two people engaged in something intimate, a bullied child crying. It's just at the very fine edge of her control: some moments she can shut out the sounds and smells, and at others they overwhelm her.
She's not strong enough to control this by herself, but there's no one who can help her.
"--need to get her out of here," Banjou is saying. "Have you gotten any intel about which ward we should move to?"
"Not yet," Touka says. "Yomo-san has tried to reach out to that friend of his, the information broker who runs that bar, but they're shut up tight these days. I think what happened in the 20th Ward really spooked people."
"Well, the doves haven't mobilized in those numbers since--"
"Yeah."
"Do you guys even have a proper base yet?"
"No." Touka sighs. "It's lucky Yomo-san has so many safehouses around the city. The doves have been so active, it's been hard to get food. We keep having to move every couple of weeks so we don't set up a pattern that can be traced."
"That sounds tough." Banjou sounds frustrated. "I wish I could help, but as it is, I'm barely just capable of taking care of Hinami-chan."
Their conversation changes track, and Hinami tries to push their voices away until they're a mumble in the back of her head.
So Touka wants Banjou to take her somewhere else. And it's hard for Banjou to take care of her.
She's a burden.
"I wish I was strong enough to help everybody," she mumbles, pulling her knees to her chest and resting her head against them. Strong enough to protect herself. Strong enough to protect the rest of them.
Will Touka disappear one day too, the same way Kaneki did?
Music blares from someone's car, roughly three blocks away. Hinami shudders.
As it is now, she's just weak.
"Hey, Hinami-chan!" Banjou says one day as he returns from one of his errands outside. "Guess what Touka sent us!"
Hinami sets her book aside and gets up from the living room couch to help him set his bags on the table. She starts to unpack them. Shampoo, soap, deodorant, laundry soap, garbage bags--a book!
Hinami pulls it out of the bag and turns it around in her hands wonderingly. It's by an American author, about a girl who had tripped into another world that fit her perfectly, until one day she winds up back where she started, in her own world, and sad. Her parents send her to a special school to try to make her normal again, but she longs for the world she found.
It's sad, Hinami thinks, to find a place where you belong, and to have everything go back to the way it was before.
But at least she has a new book. At least she has words. The apartment, which had been growing steadily claustrophobic as the months pass, suddenly expands in size and feels filled with fresh air.
"Oh, yeah, she sent that too," Banjou says, nodding at the book. He's rustling around in another bag. "But what I meant was--here!"
He pulls out a small box and hands it to Hinami, beaming with pleasure, like he bought her a gift himself.
Hinami looks from the box up to Banjou. "A...cell phone?"
"Great, isn't it?" Banjou grins. "They're called 'burn-er' phones. You pay for 'em up front and then you can use 'em until your time runs out, and if someone finds out your number who shouldn't have it, like a dove, you can throw it away and get a whole new one for dirt cheap. Maybe with this you can give your onee-chan a call, huh? I know you've been missing her."
"Yeah..." Hinami takes the box in her hands delicately, like she's afraid she'll break it. She's never had a cell phone. The one pictured on the box is small, with a tiny screen at the top and a number pad at the bottom, the two pieces connected by a hinge so the phone can be closed like a clam's shell. It doesn't look anything at all like the fancy phones Kaneki and Touka had used before.
She can talk to Touka again.
And what will Touka say to her? Did you like the book? It probably sucks but I'm new at picking books out. You probably would have picked out better, but it's still not safe. I'm sorry, Hinami-chan, you still can't go outside. I'm sorry, Hinami-chan, I still haven't heard from any of the others. I hope you're safe, Hinami-chan. We'll keep you safe. We'll protect you.
She can call, and she can call, and she can call, and then one day Touka won't pick up. Hinami will go outside and listen.
And Touka won't be anywhere, either.
Hinami is lying on her bed that night, flicking through her journal, when a card falls out.
It flutters to the floor and lands with the tiniest brush of sound, something only Hinami can hear. She leans over the edge of her bed and picks it up.
T A K A T S U K I • S E N
author
0 X X X - X X - X X X X
Oh...she'd forgotten about this.
It seems like a lifetime ago, when she'd been living with Kaneki and the others, and Kaneki hadn't been...happy, but...at least he'd been there. And Hinami had felt better about herself, because she was doing something to help him. She was by his side, supporting him. And that one day after he and the others went to find the doctor, they'd gone to meet Takatsuki Sen, to cheer Kaneki up because he'd shut himself away for so long in his pain.
And then later, when she was with Tsukiyama at that cafe, she'd met Takatsuki there.
I don't think there's anything you can do to help him, chan Hina, Takatsuki had told her.
It was the first time someone had ever treated her like an adult.
If you ever need someone to talk to, you can call me, Takatsuki said, slipping her business card into Hinami's hand.
The first time someone didn't try to coddle her or hide the world from her.
Hinami picks up her phone.
She has to wait until a day when Banjou and the others are out, the rare day Hinami has the entire apartment to herself. The kind of day she normally dreads, confined within these walls, but today she's excited.
Today she's going outside.
She pulls her hair into low twin tails, digs out a pair of wire glass-frames with normal lenses from the closet, and dresses in the most neutral clothing she owns, so that if anyone sees her, she won't look like Fueguchi Hinami. (And if Banjou and Touka find out, she can say she went out prepared. Maybe they'll be impressed by her planning--though really she knows Banjou will fret, and Touka will be mad.)
She doesn't go to the same cafe as before, but to a little bookstore Hinami has never been to, right on the border with the 19th Ward. The shopkeeper is a friendly old man with a sleepy look to him, and the shop itself is a little dingy and in disrepair.
She's not sure where to go from here. She'd only been told the address and how to get there. But inside, the store is bigger than it looks from the outside, and hallways wind off from the main room leading to different sections. Should she stay here in the front? No, that would be too suspicious. She picks a hallway and decides to follow it and see where it leads.
She passes through sections with medical texts, spiritual guidebooks, encyclopedias of plants and animals and stars. One turn takes her from a shelf of travelogues to a collection of poetry, and the hallway after that leads to a room full of books printed in other languages. Psychology, classic literature, science fiction, cooking, needlework, architecture, history, economics--there's no rhyme or reason to this place. It's like a maze, and Hinami is lost. Did it really look this big from the outside...?
Then she turns a corner and sees a hanging sign that says CHILDREN'S FICTION. And standing on the opposite side of the room, her back to Hinami and her nose in a book, is Takatsuki Sen.
"Takatsuki-san..." Hinami pauses to catch her breath, bracing her weight on her knees.
"'But I don't want to go among mad people, Alice remarked,'" Takatsuki says.
"H-huh?" Hinami looks up at her, confused.
"'Oh, you can't help that, said the Cat. We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.
"'How do you know I'm mad? said Alice.
"'You must be, said the Cat, or you wouldn't have come here.'"
"Takatsuki-san...?" Hinami ventures when it doesn't seem like she's going to continue. Alice who? The cat what?
Takatsuki snaps the book closed and twists around to look at Hinami, grinning. "Have you ever read Lewis Carroll?"
"Lewis Carroll...?"
"A British author from the 1800s. He's famous for Alice in Wonderland, a story about a little girl who falls through a rabbit hole and arrives in an upside-down world of magic. It's a classic. There's an American cartoon movie about it. Something-or-other-Disney."
"I haven't seen very many movies, but it sounds familiar," Hinami ventures.
"I like the book better. The movie's not as weird, and I like weird. Anyway," Takatsuki turns around fully, so she's facing Hinami. She has the book in her hand, resting thoughtfully on her chin. "That's not what we're here for. My very dear chan Hina asked me to come meet her, at a mysterious time, at a mysterious place, to talk about something mysterious. What brings you to my doorstep, chan Hina?"
Now that she's here, she doesn't know what to say. She wanted to talk to someone who wouldn't talk down to her, who would treat her like an adult, who would acknowledge her limitations and tell her what she should do to work above them.
"Um," Hinami begins, worrying at the hem of her blouse with her hands, "well, I mean, I guess it starts with my onii-chan."
"Oh, the cute, nerdy guy you were with before."
"R-right. Him. A few weeks after you and I met last, he...went missing."
"Oh, no!" Takatsuki exclaims. "That sweet boy? Is anyone looking for him?"
"Yes, a lot of people," Hinami says. "We're all...searching for him as hard as we can."
"Have you filed a missing persons report?" Takatsuki asks.
"Well," Hinami says, "it's complicated."
"Hmmmm," Takatsuki says. "It's okay, I'm listening."
So Hinami continues, in as many details as she can share or imply. She can't talk about Anteiku, the raid, the people they've lost, the terrifying presence of the CCG on their doorstep, Touka and Yomo and Banjou, about Kaneki and what he did and why he's missing. But she talks about how her family (her friends) are scared. How they're afraid for Hinami's safety, and talking about moving her, about how hard they're working to protect her. About how afraid she is of losing them. How badly she wants to protect them.
(She doesn't see it, the way Takatsuki is watching her, the almost predatory slant to her eyes.)
"I'm too weak," Hinami says. "I'm not strong enough to protect them with my power."
"You're not weak," Takatsuki says, and Hinami looks up at her in surprise. Takatsuki is smiling at her gently. She'd been expecting her to say something like, You are weak. There's nothing you can do, in her straightforward, adult way. Instead she says, "You're not weak, chan Hina. You just haven't learned how to unlock your full strength yet."
A way to unlock her full strength...? Is it even possible? Would Touka allow it? Can she do it, living her days quietly, alone, while Banjou protects her? If she was strong enough, would they let her protect them?
"I want to become stronger...I want to become stronger!" Hinami twists her hands into the fabric of her skirt and bows. "Takatsuki-san, if you know how I can become stronger, strong enough to stand up for not just myself but to protect the people I care about, please tell me!"
She can feel Takatsuki's eyes on her in the heavy silence. Outside, a bird sings. A car backfires. A girl cries out in elation, singing, I did it, I did it, I did it! A man stumbles drunkenly home from a bar, muttering insults towards his boss. A mother lifts her baby from its cradle and lifts it to press her face against his cheek, telling it, I love you. Mama loves you.
Hinami, live!
"Say, Hinami-chan," Takatsuki asks, "have you ever been to a tea party?"