Mourning Doves | Tokyo Ghoul

6 | T e m p t a t i o n

She woke up in the midst of some cruel, festering nightmare; she was laying in her bed, the sheets strewn in every direction and her thin white hair frazzled and frizzed up into knots. Her eyes, a mushy yellow color, snapped open as her mouth let out an earthshattering scream.

She sat up in an instant, the blood rushing from her head and causing her eyesight to blur and a stabbing pain to bash at her cranium. A bony hand immediately went up and slammed against her temple, clutching at her skull as the pain slowly ebbed away like arctic snowmelt. She groaned, struggling to level out her wheezing breath when she heard heavy footsteps headed her way. She tried to leap out of bed as an instinctive response to any incoming threat, but her knees buckled and she landed on her hands and knees, moaning as the pain inside her head intensified.

"Etsuko-san!" a familiar voice called out to her, stimulating a pang of annoyance from her lips.

She scoffed.

"What are you still doing here, idiot?" she hissed at him, the end of her palm pressing against her forehead. Her eyes were shut tight as if to block any more pain from infiltrating her body; however, her attempts were futile and useless; she once again felt the hunger and ache punch at her with a blinding force.

She broke into a coughing fit, gasping for breath as she remained doubled over on her knees. She felt the bile rise in her throat, but she fought to keep it back; she had to keep it back. A scuffle of footsteps began to draw nearer, and she let out a threatening hiss, flinching back into the side of her bed with her white hair shielding her face in messy clumps.

Etsuko cracked open on eye, glaring up at the door with a large silhouette of a man blocking the entrance. Even with the blackness of his figure, she could see the panic in his dark eyes, sparkling like fragile autumn dew. She scoffed again.

"You collapsed," Ichijou explained in huffs, his broad shoulders rising up and down dramatically. "So I decided it would be safer if you had someone to look after your health. At least for tonight."

Etsuko scowled, growling as she snapped her head away from him, turning her head towards the wall. It was only then when she realized it was still dark outside.

"What time is it?" she asked blandly.

"Three in the morning," Ichijou responded without any hesitation. "You've been asleep for at least fourteen hours."

Etsuko rubbed her fatigued face in her skeletal hand, sighing deeply as she closed her eyes once more. From her thin, bony fingers, she could feel her cheekbones jutting out from her face like branches on a tree, and she could feel the frail thinness of her skin in the dips of her cheeks. Her lips were chapped, she could feel that without her hands, and her eyes were wide and irritated; the rims were red and swollen from tears and her sclera were so bloodshot it seemed as though they were woven from crimson threads themselves. Resting in that pool of veiny stuff were two dark, mustard-colored irises, no longer emitting the light they had once harbored, and instead fading with every second that ticked by; she was dying, and though the agonizing tolls of starvation were intensifying still, she grew to accept it.

It wasn't like she could eat, anyways.

She grew suddenly fatigued, unable to support herself any longer as she leaned against the bed, her head wobbling from side to side as a futile attempt to keep it up.

"Water..." she rasped, her slender hands creeping up her throat like spider legs. "Water."

"Let's get you up on the bed first, Etsuko-san," Ichijou murmured, his voice tender. He ambled up to her and crouched down on one knee, wrapping long, sturdy arms around her starving figure. "Come on. Up you go now."