Pairing: kuroo x afab!reader (not in the prologue)
Summary: Aggressive mimicry. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s hard to recognize something as a monster when it looks just like you.
You just never expected him to be one.
After narrowly surviving a deadly encounter with a ghoul, creatures that look human but can only survive by consuming human flesh, you’re exposed to a world you were never meant to be involved in. Meanwhile, a binge eating ghoul has begun terrorizing the Nerima Ward, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. [tokyo ghoul!au]
AN: Was this written for the cummunity tender/taboo collab? Yes. Am I extremely late with little to show for it? Also yes. This is a multi-part fic now. I haven’t posted anything in over a year. Had a crisis writing this. Bon appetite!
➤ Tender/Taboo Masterlist
➤ Asphyxia Masterlist
Warnings: violence, gore, implied cannibalism, implied abuse and kidnapping
The job went wrong nearly as soon as it started.
It was supposed to be simple. A routine tracking mission, just like the others they’ve done before. It’s not easy finding someone in Tokyo, but they’d gotten good at it. No one could stay hidden from them for long. This job should have been no different.
Then Ota Ward went under lockdown.
Glass crunches beneath his boots as he shifts his weight from one leg to the other, fingers drumming against his thigh and beating an uneasy staccato rhythm. Outside, the downpour has only gotten worse. Rain beats against the tile roof, and each clack causes his irritation to grow.
For two weeks, they hid in plain sight. Watched the number of Doves grow in preparation for a raid. Kept narrowing in on their target as they tried not to get caught. Difficult, but not impossible. Maybe that made them cocky. They should have pulled out right away. Should have contacted their boss and waited until the Doves left, but by then they’d tracked their target to a half-mile radius and he hadn’t wanted to leave without finishing the job.
The Doves cornered them. It had been raining all day, and they were caught off guard.
“Fucking Doves,” he sneers, leaning back against a wall covered in peeling paint. Even inside, he doesn’t dare remove his mask, and the skeletal mouth twisted into a fanged snarl does well to hide the mirrored curl of his lips. Jawbone, the investigators have started calling him, his mask the only discernable feature they can make out in the darkness. Red eyes glowing beneath his hood and that sneering, skeletal grin.
Jawbone’s head rolls to the side. “All right, Piero?”
He looks down at his partner, still resting on the floor where Jawbone set him earlier. The other man makes a quiet sound in the back of his throat, but otherwise doesn’t answer. Behind the white and gold harlequin mask he wears, it’s impossible to gauge Piero’s expression as he prods at the dark stain on his thigh. His fingertips come away red.
Eventually, Piero shrugs. Remaining silent, he casts his gaze around the room, taking in the sight as Jawbone continues to swear under his breath.
Thin cracks are spread across the walls like veins, stretching out behind the layers of graffiti and grime. The building they broke into is an old apartment complex, left abandoned in the middle of Tokyo. It’s unkempt. Shards of broken glass on the floors. Dirt and debris. Furniture left to decay. And there’s a musky smell in the air. Mold. But beneath that something else. Something rotten.
Piero’s nose wrinkles.
Beneath him, the floor is slick with blood.
Jawbone yanks his phone from his pocket. Seeing that it’s dead, he snarls a curse under his breath and kicks at a corroded piece of wood on the floor, sending it hurtling across the room as his temper boils over. It smashes against the far wall and splinters into pieces with a loud crack.
Piero stiffens. Widened eyes slide to the far corner of the room, where a lone closet is built into the wall. His back is stiff, muscles tensing, but he doesn’t dare turn his head. Jawbone doesn’t seem to notice the odd reaction. Continuing to swear under his breath, he turns his back on the room, glaring out the window, but Piero doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink.
It was quiet. Nearly imperceptible beneath the downpour beating against the tiles on the roof and the howling wind and the string of curses from beside him, but he heard it. Small and muffled.
Piero cocks his head to the side, still unblinking. “There’s someone here.”
To his left, Jawbone’s eyes narrow beneath his hood. It’s his only noticeable reaction to Piero’s observation, made too low for anyone but him to hear. “One of us?” he asks, watching Piero out of the corner of his eye.
That smirking harlequin mask stares back at him blankly. Piero shakes his head.
“A Dove?”
A shrug, this time.
Jawbone swears again. “Don’t move.” Turning his back on the window, he storms across the room, leaving Piero on the floor. Those empty harlequin eyes burn into his back, but Piero stays where he is, content to listen and wait. It’s easier if he stays out of the way.
This time, Jawbone hears it, too.
The soft hitch of a breath—a muffled sob.
Lip curling, he reaches for the edge of the door, open just a crack.
It’s the smell that hits him first. Beneath the layers of mold and musk, there’s something pungent. The familiarity of it makes his stomach roll. There were rats, once, in the apartment where he lived as a child. They used to crawl into tight spaces and smother themselves. He’d only find them when the carcasses start to decay, when the smell became so bad it made his stomach sick.
There’s a moment of hesitation before Jawbone rips open the sliding door, nearly tearing it from the wall.
Big, brown eyes stare back at him, pupils constricted into pinpricks.
A woman.
She cowers back against the wall when the door is ripped open, trembling. An involuntary sound escapes her, muffled by the hands clasped over her mouth tightly in a vain attempt to smother the uncontrollable string of whimpers and sobs wracking her frame. Tears drip down her cheeks, leaving tracks in the dirt on her face. She’s filthy, covered in grime, her chestnut hair matted and stringy with grease and dirt. When she curls her legs closer to her chest, there’s a metallic scraping sound, and his eyes drop to the chain locked around her ankle.
The chain jingles as she forces her back tighter against the wall. Jawbone follows it to the opposite side of the closet, where the other end is locked around a metal post. There’s something else there, too. A mass that’s hunched on the ground in a heap, unmoving.
The taste of decay and rotting flesh crawls down his throat.
“What the hell?” he chokes out, stumbling backwards a step. His gaze snaps away from the mutilated corpse in the corner, hacked to pieces and barely recognizable. Her hands are covered in blood, he notices for the first time. Little rivets trailing down her bare arms, startlingly bright against her sickly pale skin.
Her expression shifts when she sees him. Relief mixing with raw fear. Still shaking, her hands drop into her lap, revealing a mouth that’s smeared with gore. “Help me,” she pleads in a voice that’s barely louder than a whisper.
Behind Jawbone, Piero suddenly lurches to his feet.
“Tora—”
The front door is smashed open. Wood splinters outwards. A mass of pulsing, red flesh bursts into the room. Jawbone’s arm snaps up to cover his face as he stumbles backwards away from the door. The muscles beneath his shoulder flex. Livid tissue bursts from his back and crawls up his arm.
It’s not fast enough.
The woman in the closet makes a strangled sound as Jawbone is speared through the chest and tossed sideways into the wall. It caves under his weight. He grunts as he slams onto the floor in the adjacent room, choking on the blood and saliva in his mouth.
A masked figure steps through the splintered door only to stop when a barrage of ruby crystals embeds itself in the wood on either side of him. Crystal shards burrow into his forearm, piercing through his skin. When he lowers his arm again, the room is empty.
In the closet, the woman presses flush against the grimy wall, curling her legs to her chest to make herself smaller as heavy footsteps cross the room. Tears leak out from the corners of her eyes, squeezed shut tightly in a feeble attempt to make things stop. She squeals when she’s suddenly yanked forward by her ankle, dragged by the chain. Caught off guard, her head slams backwards into the wall. Her eyes snap open.
Red eyes stare back at her from behind the face of a jackal.
He tilts his head to the side, looking at her for a second before lashing out. Her teeth grind together as he grabs her by the jaw, fingers digging into her cheeks.
“Please,” she gasps. “Yu—”
His thumb rubs against her skin, smearing blood and tissue. He tilts his mask up with his other hand. “You should eat, Dove,” he says, releasing her. As he stands, he places the tip of his thumb between his lips, licking it clean. “Before I get back.”
Without another word, he turns away from her, stalking over to the hole in the wall. He chuckles when he sees the room is empty, blood staining the floor where he tossed Jawbone. There’s blood pooled under the window, too.
“All right,” he muses, pulling his mask back down before shoving his hands into the pockets of his dark coat. “Let’s play.”
