He was a coward. That was the only thing he ever was.
He could try to disguise all of his real intentions behind pretty words about trying to protect the people he cared about, but deep down, he always knew that the only thing he was trying to do was protect himself. To protect himself from the one thing he feared most in the world.
And yes, he always was afraid.
Afraid of being left alone in this terribly unfair world again.
He thought by becoming stronger that he would be able to save himself from having to go through that despair again and so, with that motivating him, he pushed himself and pushed himself and pushed himself to become stronger .
He refused to be left alone again. He refused to allow the situation with his mother to repeat itself. So, to make sure that it would never happen, he fought with every ounce of strength he had, but in a cruel - yet admittedly expected twist of fate - his struggles only resulted in more tragedy.
His own situation ended up becoming a direct parallel to what it shouldn't, and he didn't even notice until it was too late.
His mother died because she bit off more than she could chew, working herself to the bone day in and day out.
All to support the two people she cared about most in the world: her leech of a younger sister, who would consistently borrow money from her under the guise of desperation, and her only son, the last remaining remnant of the husband who passed long before he should've.
At first, he thought his mother a strong person for being able to support both with nary a complaint. He ended up thinking that most of the nineteen years he's been alive, but then, like all things tend to do, things changed.
He had been tricked into going down that alley by Rize, he had been crushed by steel beams courtesy of a clown, he had been turned into a ghoul by Kanou, he had been taught the basics of ghoul society by the ghouls at Anteiku, and, last but certainly not least, he had been sent through the wringer both physically and mentally by Yamori.
He could still remember the days he spent in that chair, being forced to be subject to Yamori's cruelty. If he was remembered things correctly, then he stayed - chained to that chair by his arms and legs - for a total of ten days before he managed to convince himself into renouncing what his mother had taught him. That his mother, despite how long she held out, was the farthest thing from a strong person. That her inability to cut her leech of a sister off was because she was too weak to do so.
Those just so happened to be one of the things that pushed him over the edge and finally made him accept the side of him that he had been repressing ever since that day - the day he first found out that he had been turned into a half-ghoul - or to be more specific, his ghoul side.
The moment he finally accepted that part of himself, he simultaneously let go of the part of him that had been unable to save anybody, not even himself.
The part of him that was directly responsible for why he had to go through all that pain and suffering. The part of him that had lived most of his life being directed by the rule: "it is better to be hurt yourself than to hurt others".
Or, to be more specific, his human side.
At that moment, he refused to allow anything to stand in his way. He would even sacrifice his own humanity if needed, and it just so happened that the only thing that was holding him back from being strong was indeed his humanity. So, he got rid of it. Threw it off to the side like a piece of trash, before fully embracing his ghoul side and the undoubtedly bloody road ahead that came with it.
Without having to deal with those limitations, he was finally able to take full advantage of the superior speed and strength that came with being a half-ghoul. Making it so that, for the first time in his life, he could no longer be considered to be just a crybaby who endangered everyone around him.
After that, people considered him to be strong. Strong enough to kill anyone who dare cross him or anyone precious to him. That effort eventually garnered him so much fear from the doves that they rated him a S-rate ghoul. Definitely not a rank they just handed out willy nilly.
No, it was something that was given to only the most dangerous ghouls.
One might think that with all of that respect and fear that had been directed towards him, that he'd be content with the platform he built up and focus on protecting his loved ones and yet, you'd be terribly wrong. Because, despite all of that, he still wanted to grow stronger. Strong enough to not just protect those he cared for, but to eradicate anyone and anything that stopped him from doing so.
To help accelerate that process, he took up the suggestion of the man who tortured him and began eating other ghouls. Because apparently, consuming another ghoul would allow the consumer to absorb the RC cells of the one being eaten, and with a high enough concentration of RC cells, a ghoul would be able reach a form very few of their kind ever reached.
These select ghouls were called "kakuja" by the doves.
They were ghouls whose RC cells had mutated so much that it caused their kagune to change alongside them. This new kagune gave its wielder immense amounts of raw speed and strength, but while the mutated kagune benefited its user on a physical level, another one of its more notable aspects was the toll it took on the wielder mentally.
The kakuja often times made the wielder lose absolute control of themselves when they used it and, more often than not, made the ghoul certifiably insane. There were some whispers going around the wards of ghouls who have been able to maintain control of their kakuja in the past, but unfortunately those cases seemed to be usually uncommon.
And as it turned out, he was not one of those lucky few.
The first time he drew out his kakuja, he lost so much control of himself that he actually attacked Banjou in his craze, nearly killing him with an arm through the stomach.
The second time got him to where he was right now...
In some unknown location down beneath the streets of the twentieth ward. Blood pouring profusely out of his left eye, which had been stabbed clean through just a few moments ago.
The perpetrator of said act of violence was standing over him. The weapon that he had used to take said eye in hand, holding it just a few centimeters above his one remaining good one.
It would've been quite the terrifying sight, if not for the fact he wasn't scared at all. Something he greatly attributed to the fact that he wasn't where he was supposed to be.
As of that moment, he should've been on the ground, waiting for his opponent to plunge the weapon through his head and ending his life as he knew it, but he wasn't.
No, now he was standing directly in the middle of his childhood home, staring at the figure of his mother hunched over the dining room table, clearly taking a short rest from all of the work she had been forcing onto herself.
If he remembered correctly, the exact same thing happened to him when he had been tortured by Yamori.
At the time, he didn't know how to explain it, but after having some time to think, he finally realized that it was his own mind attempting to block out the pain he was feeling. Doing so by making his innermost thoughts seem like they were reality.
Back to his days in that chair, there was no Rize trying to convince him to accept the fact that he was a ghoul. She was simply the manifestation of his repressed ghoul instincts trying to break through to the surface. The only reason she even started appearing was because his mind was slowly breaking under the pressure being put on him.
This time, the manifestation that was facing him was the childhood version of himself, which he assumed to be there to embody the humanity that he threw away so he could become stronger. He had to admit, the boy did a pretty good job of it, though it was sad to have such an epiphany just when he was about to die. Then again, wasn't he the one who said that if his life was ever a story, it would've been classified as a tragedy?
A bitter smile grew on his lips when he saw the tip of his opponent's weapon start to grow in size, which he assumed to because it was starting to approach his eye.
He didn't know what would happen once this final blow was dealt, and truth be told, he really couldn't bring himself to care anymore.
Whatever happened after this series of moments happened, and he would be absolutely powerless to stop it.
Though, he couldn't deny that a very small part of him wished for a miracle to happen in his tragic life, but then again... what were the odds of that happening?
After all, it was called a miracle for a reason .
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"Hey guys, I think he's coming to!"
Was that a voice?
No… it couldn't be!
So how was it possible that he could be hearing voices?
Another hallucination maybe? No, it definitely couldn't have been. Something he greatly attributed to the fact that he didn't recognize that voice at all.
That voice was foreign to him in almost every aspect.
Three things about the voice stuck out to him: the first being that it belonged to a female; the second being that whoever it was held no ill intent towards him, actually it sounded quite concerned; the third and final thing being that it sounded as if it belonged to someone who hadn't quite reached her adult years yet.
He could tell thanks to his experience living with Hi- Wait, why did that voice sound so concerned about him?
From what he could tell by voice alone, he didn't know who she was nor did she know him, so why did she sound so concerned about him?
Was she one of those people who helped anyone in danger just because they thought it was the right thing to do?
If so, she should probably stop thinking that way.
He knew better than anyone that state of mind was nothing more than a weakness. A weakness that most people and ghouls alike would exploit given the chance.
She was lucky that he wasn't like most ghouls, however, or she would've been food by now, though something about the whole situation bugged him.
Why was she acting so calmly?
If he remembered things correctly, and he probably did as this was literally a few moments ago, he should have two gaping holes where his eyes should've been. Definitely not the kind of injury someone that young should be so calm about.
There was concern in her voice, yes, but not the kind that one would show for someone with such a grisly injury. From the way she spoke, it sounded like she had simply found him lying on the ground unconscious, and not mutilated beyond all belief.
If that was the case and he wasn't injured to the extent he believed, he knew that he must have regenerated his missing parts at some point, but that was something else that bothered him about the whole situation.
To have regenerated from such a devastating injury, he would've needed some form of subsistence to fuel his regeneration, and to have gotten subsistence he would have needed to hunt.
That, of course, brought up the question of how much time passed since Arima dropped that quinque of his through his skull.
He estimated that the window he had to get the food he needed to regenerate was less than a few minutes. Mainly because people who've been impaled in their heads rarely lived past a few seconds.
It was clear to him that, like a lot of things, the same thing didn't necessarily apply to ghouls.
Before getting hit with that finishing blow, he took a spear through the head and continued to fight for several minutes afterwards. A fact that the artificial half-ghoul attributed that to the fact he only got impaled in one side of his head.
Having once read in a medical textbook that a human could live through getting impaled through the brain if damage was limited to one side of it, and since ghouls were built naturally tougher than humans, it only made sense that he would be able to move around after something like that. Taking that amount of damage to both hemispheres was another story entirely.
He didn't know much about ghoul anatomy, but if they were anything like their human counterparts, he should've been dead the moment Arima's quinque pierced his right eye.
But he wasn't dead, so what exactly happened?
Dammit, this was getting him nowhere! What was he even doing trying to answer questions he couldn't possibly know the answers to. Why was he acting like he could find the answers to any of them by simply mulling through possibilities through in his head?
That girl probably knew something.
The people she called over probably knew something.
So he opened his eyes and just then did he become acutely of how heavy his eyelids felt, but no matter, he forced them open and the first thing he saw was… the color red.