Mourning Doves | Tokyo Ghoul

5 | H u n g e r

It had been weeks since she had last gone out; still, she couldn't bring herself to eat the contents sitting inside her fridge, and she only sipped the coffee inside her apartment absentmindedly as the flesh rotted and festered in the chilled darkness. It had been weeks, and though her stomach growled and snarled for substance, every time she would reach for even a sliver of meat, his face would appear before her, and in consequence, she couldn't bring herself to do it. Not with him haunting her.

He had loved humans, strangely enough, and being with him had apparently made her soft.

She paced around her home; her fridge had long been emptied from the gory chunks of flesh and bone, and she decided it was best to just take a hot shower. With a seething scoff, she whirled around and headed towards the bathroom, where she stripped herself from the nightgown and stormed into the shower stall.

She flipped on the hot water, which doused her skin until it turned bright red, and stood under the showerhead as the steam rose up into the cold air, drifting off to condense onto the bathroom mirror. She swallowed a hard lump forming in her throat, and let out a strangled sigh. She stood there, unmoving, dipping her face in and out of the pounding hot water.

It was only after some time when she decided it was time to wrap up the wash, and the first thing she did was reach for the auburn bottle of shampoo in the corner.

She froze.

She cursed under her breath, clenching her jaw tightly as she stared at the bottle. She hadn't paid attention to it until then, and now that her undivided attention was drawn towards it, she could smell that dreaded aroma stronger than before. It was nostalgically sweet, similar to blood but different in the way it rolled off the tongue; it tingled her senses, both in a good way and in a terrible one. Her pupils dilated and her nostrils flared, the hot needles of water stabbing into her flushed back.

Sucking in an enduring breath, she went ahead and scrubbed her scalp with the caramel shampoo and quickly slathered on the conditioner, only to beat it out a minute later.

She had stripped herself from the first three layers of skin with her loofa by the time she had gotten out, and she threw back on the nightgown she had worn. She sulked over to her couch and plopped down like a dead body she resembled; her eyes were bulging out like billiard balls and her cheeks sunken in like shadows from the hunger, her lips crackled and chapped and her ribs showing through her white translucent skin, thin as paper.

She sat there in the darkness of her apartment, swallowed up by the shadows and her yellowed eyes staring blankly into oblivion, bereaved and fragmented. There was a sense of mourning within her gaze, hard as a stone but crumbling still. She was befuddled, stunned into madness with her most recent tragedies, and it was clear that it began to slowly take over her mind and body. Slowly, she began to rot.

There was a knock on her door; three solid raps, deliberate like punches to the nose. Her ears pricked up suddenly at the noise, her nostrils flaring and drinking in the air like some beastly creature. Her mustard irises swirled into a bloody crimson as she realized the scent was, in fact, human. Her lips curled up into a threatening snarl, staring at the door with her body rigid and frozen as if she were a statue, her eyes unblinking and her eyes glinting with malicious intents.

There was another round of knocks, and she slowly approached the door, her limbs moving seamlessly through the shadows of her apartment. The scent of ghoul mingling with human drifted through the cold air, along with hints of crisp paper and ink. She could hear the shoes shuffling about from the other side of the door, and she let out another growl; it was an investigator - that she was sure of. Maybe they had found her after all these years and came to take her away; she wouldn't mind, anyways - there was nothing left to live for anymore. She couldn't eat, she could barely sleep without nightmares raining down upon her like fire, and she couldn't even go outside for even one second. Her damn shampoo was the only thing that she clung onto, and she'd spend hours on end just standing naked in the bathroom, smelling the scent of caramel that twisted her heart in that deliciously miserable way, and staring at the two animal figures engrossed into her translucent skin.