Scars fascinated Kaneki as much as they disgusted him. He himself had so many scars, and there was a story behind each of them, a story he hated to tell and hated to have told to him constantly. There was no hiding many of them either; the patch covered up his eye, but thin, spidery white lines stretched across the skin of his cheek beneath them. There was no mistaking his black nails either, the way one of his fingers was always bent incorrectly, the limp he could never quite get rid of. He knew many ways to get scars, and had experienced many of them.
Yet for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out where the person who sat next to him in the computer science class he’d taken (and god knows why he did that to himself) had gotten the scar on his lip. And he certainly knew better than to ask, but it did make the other interesting.
Maybe that was why, when he ran into trouble with his coding, he knew exactly who he was going to ask. Or maybe it was just that the other seemed friendly, and he’d never so much as made eye contact with anyone else in the class.
“Uh, Abel, right? My name is Kaneki; I know we’ve never really spoken before, but you seem like you know what you’re doing and I really, really don’t.” The words rushed out of him like water, pouring out before he could think to stop them or pace himself. “Would you... mind taking a look at what I’ve got, see what stupid thing I’ve managed to do to the program?”