Binge eating

      "Yoriko, I think I've had enough..."       "Nonsense! You've barely eaten anything!" with these words the schoolgirl stubbornly shoved an onigiri, which she lifted in the air with chopsticks, under Touka's nose. "Moreover, you didn't even bring a jam sandwich with you today. Yesterday, too, come to think of it... Why is that, by the way?"       "Why do you think? 'Cause I'm gorging myself to hell with your homemade cooking!"       Embaressed, Yoriko giggled nervously.       "Do you at least... like it?"       "'Course I do! That's the problem, you know? I don't even know how to stop myself... sometimes," her friend didn't even realize that Touka was talking about something completely different.       "In any case, a single extra piece won't do you any harm!"       Yoriko's classmate snorted with displeasure, moved closer and, doing her a friendly favor, consumed another triangle of boiled rice right from her hands. She chewed on it for a few seconds with a straight face and jokingly striked her best friend's forehead with a flick. The recognizable cymbals of the school bell announced the end of the lunch break.       Despite the promise to stand in for Koma in the afternoon, Ken Kaneki didn't show up at "Anteiku" at all. Touka didn't spend her shift in a good mood that day, to put it lightly.       "Grh! Where the hell is that slob when I need him?!" she thought, while feeling her aching stomach under the bar or locked in the bathroom; she lost count of all the coffee breaks that didn't seem to help her in any way. "Did I really overdo it with him yesterday?.. No, that misunderstanding should've known his place better. Should've sooner realized that it's right here, inside of me, and nowhere else... You better recover quickly, Kaneki, if you don't wish to end up tied to my toilet with lower and upper limbs missing... Oh, how simple would that have made everything!"       In the evening, having entered the alley through the back door, she could no longer see any traces of what had happened yesterday in the vicinity of the garbage collector: no human liver, no blood, not even the dent in the iron wall of the container. She wasn't sure if she should consider this suspicious or convenient. Suspiciously convenient?..       The seventeen-year-old girl spent quite a long time searching for Ken's housing complex, the address of which she had once stored somewhere deep within her memory. But even when she found the door that seemed to be the right one, the handle didn't respond to pressing, any knocking and ringing remained unanswered as well — no one seemed to be at home.       Sitting unnoticed on the roof of the complex, she guarded the cherished door for hours — and all to no avail. Her working/school uniform didn't suit the early December weather as well as it may have appeared to Touka in the morning: the dry frost chilled her to the very bones and, as it seemed to her, to the intestines, too. The offended moans of her tormented gut, which were let out by it more and more often, could not but portend something bad coming.       Almost full grown, the moon, rising, illuminated Tokyo's peacefully sleeping twentieth ward with its cold light. Touka's drained cell phone showed almost midnight, but Kaneki still left the dozens of messages and calls she sent and made unanswered for some unknown reason.       "Are you late? How badly? You promised to stand in for Koma today."       "Don't think you'll get off unpunished. Mr. Koma might simply take offence , but I'm going to make you beg for forgiveness on your knees."       "So you're not coming at all? Meet me at the train station as usual then, at seven, without delay."       "I'm hungry, Kaneki. Really so."       "Well, guess it's finally time to pay you a home visit. I'll be there in half an hour ~ "       The high school student exhaled a cloud of warm breath from her mouth, folding the phone in half.       "This is exactly what obsession tastes like, isn't it, Shuu?" these days, she thought of Tsukiyama every time she happened to notice the moon in the sky .       Touka was no longer sure if, come he back to life now, the "Gourmet" would remain her sworn enemy or suddenly become an understanding friend. She had never felt so lonely in her entire life: without him, so well suited for understanding her present situation, without her brother, without... Kaneki? What a strange feeling, truly... Which inside of her, really, was hungrier: the stomach or the heart? The only thing that could be said for sure was that both of those right now were empty.       Finally giving up, Touka went down from the roof to the shared veranda and, dejected, wandered home. She didn't even have the desire to hunt for suspiciously looking men that night, which was completely new, — that's how down she was feeling. A little less than an hour of walking led her to her own complex, and it was only when the ghoul girl reached for the door handle that she suddenly noticed that the front door was already slightly ajar.       "Have I, maybe, just forgotten to lock it when I left?.. No, no way in hell!"       With a loud clang, Touka broke the door to her apartment open with a kick of her loafer. She wasn't mistaken: an intruder had broken in, indeed. Except it was none other than Ken Kaneki himself.       Turning around at the very end of the hallway, he looked both puzzled and enlightened; the half-ghoul must have only recently made his way inside, but had already, as it seemed, inspected her kitchen. Touka's kitchen.       Even the midnight darkness was more than enough to make everything out: the countertops throughout the room were impenetrably filled with uncovered pots of homemade human cuisine dishes. In between, dozens of emptied packages of strong laxative pills, cups with cooled coffee grounds and gnawed coffee beans had accumulated.       "Touka..." silently outlined Ken with his mouth, exuding a sympathetic pain with his eyes, which from afar finally met with her own.       In a split second, a veil of darkness covered her eyes, and the feeling that had been sucking under her shoulder blades for a long time finally poured out, not sparing the fabric of her blouse.       "Kaneki!!!"       In truth, what else could Touka have screamed as she ran down the corridor, choking on her own saliva? Making her ferocious dash, she didn't even notice which side had Ken slipped away to, and therefore, having flown into the hall connected to the kitchen, she backed away in confusion for a short time, studying the interior of her apartment in almost pitch darkness. Iridescent, semi-liquid streams of RC cells running endlessly from her kakuho shone behind her with a barely constant cloud of deadly flame, resembling a purple, vibrant, pulsating wing, manifesting in reality all the inner beauty and ugliness of its owner — a wounded, slingshot-hit "bird", lonely and entangled within her own self.       The slightest hint of movement — instant crystallization strengthens the composition of her ukaku, and a burst of crystal "shrapnel" penetrates through the defenseless upholstery of the living-room sofa. With a maddened, carnivorous gaze, Touka continued, licking her lips, the search for her prey around the room, smashing into splinters any furniture, behind which it could hypothetically hide.       Deftly jumping over a partition of countertops, the young man temporarily hid behind a rectangular column that separated the kitchen from the hall. He managed to do this a single instant before all the furniture around his temporary shelter was rendered unusable by a single long-range attack, accompanied by the sound of broken glass.       "You have nowhere else to hide or run away from me to. I will devour you, slowly separating limb from limb, I will drink all your tears, I will gnaw your bones, I will digest your meat. I will destroy you once and for all, I will process you into dead shit you have always deserved to be, I..."       Suddenly, she dropped to one knee, vulnerably leaning on an understated table, scratched by one of her attacks. The floating kagune weakened and partially returned to its original form. At the most unfit of all moments Touka had to feel clumped lumps of rice grains — the chewed onigiri — scrape against the sensitive walls of her intestines in an attempt to move further, causing sharp, agonizing pains throughout the abdominal cavity. For comparison, one could imagine the torment of any person who swallowed coin batteries and didn't cough them back in time. With frantic, inhuman moans, she curled her other hand into a fist and began mercilessly and thoughtlessly beating herself on the stomach with it.       Ken appeared from behind the pillar and took a small step towards her with concern.       "Touka..." he said earnestly, with the intention of pacifying her.       However, having come to her senses and overcome the agony, Touka didn't let him say anything more, showering him with another volley of hardened RC cells. This time, Ken didn't have time to completely dodge it and, grunting, crouched against the nearest wall. The sparkling mottled crystals, like gunshot bullets, firmly embedded themselves in the delicate tissues of his side, which was now bleeding. The girl grinned maliciously, getting closer to her cherished goal. But then, the last shards of sanity remaining in her head made her take something important into account.       "Just now, a few seconds ago, Kaneki has... spoken? That's right, he pronounced my name. This means his tongue must have completely healed by this point, isn't that right? Then, doesn't that also mean..." torn away from her thoughts, she became horrified; what tore her away, in fact, was the utter and complete disappearance of the guy who was just a moment ago still standing a couple of meters away from her.       Touka didn't have the time to even blink — quite on the contrary, the orbits of her eyes spread across her face as wide as they had never spread before. Slowly lowering her gaze, she now not only felt, but also witnessed how the spotted purple tentacle of rinkaku, which pierced straight through her female abdomen, slowly crawled back. From the edges of her frozen lips, two maroon streams of blood silently ran down.       "'Best of dreams', Touka."       The one-eyed ghoul was breathing right down her neck. His vengeful sneak attack, delivered with lightning speed, seems to have put an end to this duel. Leaving a wide hole in the opponent's torso, he took his flexible ghoul "claw" back out of it.       Touka's buckled knees inertly crashed into the floor covering, breaking with a loud crack. The first one down, starting to dangle freely in the air and stain the skirt, hung the large intestine — a thick ribbed rope of tough dark flesh. Right after it, as one tight-knit bunch, came all the other ones, all of the same tenderly delicate pink shade. Landing on the floor with wet, squelching slaps, Touka's slippery insides, spreading over it in one soggy meaty pudding, abundantly covered its clean linoleum with dirty, bloody stains. Their thin, rope-like shapes were here and there altered by noticeable, lumpy thickenings: yes, the eye didn't have to be armed to determine which segments of the tract the undigested rice had already penetrated; being lightly pressed with one's thumb in any coil of the small intestine, its harmful contents, it just seemed, could be easily pushed in any direction the same way a pea could be in its pod. No matter how great the differences in digestive systems of humans and ghouls were, from the inside, both, as Ken helped to find out, looked exactly the same. The "same" being, equally nauseating.       Kirishima felt that with each endless moment the heart in her convulsively heaving chest was contracting weaker and weaker. Her eyes closed shut without a given command, her senses soon completely slipping away...