Fandom Mirror Image (Tokyo Ghoul AU) [Gossip & Toacho]

[Toacho]

[ A roleplay with me and Gossip ]

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Ino Keisuke stepped out into the fresh evening air, savoring the feel of the rain on his skin, almost as if he were trying to wash away the quiet fact that a man had killed himself over the phone today. The parking lot was barren, he'd heard there were five cars out searching for the man -- more primarily searching for the woman that he had heard sobbing from some distant spot within the man's location. As the rain poured, and Ino recognized the sun would be out tomorrow, the world would not mourn the man's absence. Ino just wished he had been able to say a few more words to convince the man otherwise.

As taxing as it was, this was part of the job description. He was just hopeful that the woman on the distance would be able to be found.

It was already growing dark, a misty type, with the neon lights of the city reflecting back upwards from the rain puddles to paint the city in a series of vivid greens, purples, pinks, and blues. These colors, mixing with the yellows and golds of the sunset, gave the city an almost surreal tinge, like painting some glasses with all the colors of the rainbow. If someone were to look out in the distance; however, this surreal beauty would be quickly ruined as the familiar feel of strange dread would surface. As he found his eyes tracing up towards the skyline, like so many people these days tried to avoid, he would see the reminder of a horrible calamity lingering just distantly in the future. Two buildings, exactly identical, on opposite sides of the city. They carried the same angle, same shape, same color scheme. Even the lights were exactly the same in both buildings -- not a single room or detail off from each of them. That is, save for a single room at the farthest top left corner of the Southern building, in which the light of that office had a faint flicker -- a fact that did not carry over to its Northern counterpart.

It had been so subtle and yet so sudden. At first, just a couple of stories drifting around news outlets and forum boards. Most of the stories had been from the Northern America region, leading them to be dismissed as a weird sort of 'A.R.G.' by some teens. I saw my brother board the train on the other side of the platform today. For just a second before the trains began departing their separate ways, we locked eyes. We must have felt the same exact way. Terrified. My brother died from Leukemia three years ago.

As the stories continued to drift around, more and more surfaced, but it wasn't just from the Western Hemisphere, there were stories from Europe, places like England and Ireland, Scotland had a wave of them. It became a sort of joke. Ino remembered gathering around a coworker with some others as a friend wrote his own mock-story of the events. I met my fifth grade teacher again today in the grocery store. When I said her name, she was surprised, but did not remember me. I decided to stop doing shrooms before grocery shopping. A little harmless joke, but a few days later, he came to work a little more pale and refused to talk to anyone.

Months went by, and more stories started to surface. Though this time, there was proof. I went to the third floor in my office building and it wasn't my floor. An IT support tech man had mumbled to a friend while Ino was getting coffee. This is not my son! He doesn't smile the right way! He's a monster! A frenzied woman had shrieked over the phone to the police station while threatening her two kids, a young girl and her twin brother, with a kitchen knife. Right up until -- Hey Ino, I don't think this is just our city anymore.

A quiet whisper from his mother in the middle of the night as she shook him awake, bringing him outside to point a shaking finger at the distance. Rows and rows of buildings. He may have never even noticed it on his own -- perhaps it was there the entire time -- but way off at the edge of the city, he could see buildings. Buildings that already existed. Buildings that were only a few blocks away -- he could see them easily from his spot here. Yet as they had looked out, he could have sworn that the exact same buildings were way off at the horizon. As he searched, he even spotted a single disturbing fact. He could almost make out his mother's apartment, way at the far edge of the city where the buildings should have turned to grass and trees.

There was panic at first. They were not the only ones to see it, a few others caught wind of it and would try to show their friends only for the city to seem completely ordinary. Hell, every night he looked out, he would just see the plain edge of the city where the mortar met the treeline. There was nothing special about it. Only occasionally would he catch glances of those strange situations. A tree that looked almost identical to one he had seen earlier in his walk. A homeless man in a blue raincoat that Ino could have sworn was yellow the first time he passed. Of course, the building in the distant -- seemingly the most common appearance of the city despite the fact that nobody had been able to even confirm it existed. Every time they tried, the streets would just seem to send them in a loop.

That was a few weeks ago. There had been no nothing new since. Ino still went to work. Still helped the people he could. Still answered calls and tried to talk people down from harming themselves or others. It's strange, how there was so much shock in the beginning, and now it was so quiet. Just lingering there as if nothing had changed. As he looked up to the shrouded buildings in the distance, the fourth glance this week, it was almost like looking at the shadows of monsters lingering just at the edge of the city.

He looked back down, shaking his head slightly as he tried to push back the unsettling feeling. Pulling the collar of his jacket up, his uniform mostly covered by the large dark grey jacket that unfortunately had no hood, he would continue on his way towards his apartment. Briefly, as a gust of wind blew past, he would feel the edge of his jacket get caught in the wind, causing it to blow up and expose him to the rain. With a soft sigh of annoyance, he quickly tugged it back down, his sleeve catching briefly on his lanyard, causing it to be lightly tugged partially from his pocket, leading him to briefly look down to fix it as he continued to walk on the barren street.

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[Gossip]

Something was going on lately, something neither humans nor ghouls could quite explain. There were strange sights in the horizon where a set of buildings looked just a little bit off, the windows just a bit lower or the brick made old and dilapidated when it should have been fully renovated the year previous. It was also with a familiar smell that was suddenly found on the other side of town, or that was even just different enough to give one pause. Hell, it sometimes even was as simple as a friend looking at you as you passed them in the street like you were just a stranger.

It started small, as all-important changes did, and as it were it took months for the rumours and urban legends to make their way out from the deepest confines of the internet into the daily life of the people who dearly wished all that strangeness would pass like a bad dream. It didn’t, and soon it got worse.

Keisuke took a bit longer than most to notice it, as set in his ways as he was. He wasn’t much of a social butterfly anyway, and in the last few months, he passed no less than two of them deep into the mountains surrounding the city he had lived in for most of his life. As it was, the…. Shift… as it was now called in hushed whispers had just started when the young ghoul had decided to leave the constraints of faked humanity behind for the freedom of the great outdoors. So while the world outside the great towers of the city slowly awakened to the fact that reality split and merged at seemingly random, the albino roamed the wilderness like a monster out of a traumatized child’s nightmare, free to run and slaughter as his unnatural nature saw fit.

For months on end, he let loose, and when he finally came back to what passed as civilized living for a ghoul like him, it took maybe a month more before he finally noticed; there was something wrong here. The route he took to work was always the same, but try as he might there were days when he ended in a completely different part of town than he was supposed to, merely by walking the few thousand meters separating his simple flat to first the subway station, then the small bookshop he worked six days a week.

The thing was, getting lost shouldn’t happen; not for as short a trip as he took most days, and certainly not for someone like him who could easily orient himself in the middle of nowhere as he often did when pretending to care, to be something less than a monster in human skin, got to be too much for his short temper. It was a fact: Keisuke Ino NEVER got lost. That was as simple as that… until it wasn’t.

A few weeks of his mind playing tricks on him led to something even worse in his opinion: some ghouls now smelled human, and some ghoul territories were suddenly devoid of the proper scents to them. The first time Keisuke happened to come face to face with a ghoul he could swear he had killed a week ago in a territory dispute only to face her once more with the distinctively sweet aroma of human meat clinging to her and nothing else was a shock to him; he probably stared too long, froze with what no doubt was an ugly expression on his face. The strangest thing, though? That ghoul turned human that was supposed to be dead asked him if he was alright like she never met him at all and couldn’t tell that she should go away as fast as she could. That was wrong, she was wrong. Why was she wrong?

It didn’t make sense, none of this made sense! As he quickly made his way out of the coffee shop without his usual brew of black Columbian coffee he shook his head angrily, fingers nearly painful on his closed eyelids as he rubbed away at what surely had been yet another hallucination; yet another way that his mind told him he should be here yet, that he should have stayed away longer.

His head hurt, his nose itched, and his jaw ached as his teeth ground together on a rainy afternoon as he furiously made his way through yet again strangely unfamiliar street in search of prey to kill; to fill his hungry stomach, to fill the void of his life… to stain his hands red so he wouldn’t be so out of sort, so frustrated all the time.

This couldn’t continue, but Keisuke had no way of stopping it; he had no way to even START understanding it all! So he pushed on, meandered through the darkest alleys he could find for some unfortunate soul to feed his thirst for blood and his ravenous hunger for human flesh, and maybe just for a moment forget that everything was wrong and just off and that maybe he was losing his mind after all-

No, he had to focus! There; on the next corner of that alley, there was something tasty right there!

His head turning sharply to the right, the albino felt his eyes turn into their true hue as he stalked forwards, not making a sound as he crept his way through the narrow passageway between an abandoned apartment building and what once could have been charitably called a pub around these parts. What Keisuke found in the dark was a pitiful sight; a homeless man clutching a bottle wrapped in a dirty paper bag, his smell repugnant save for the umami flavour emanating from the entrails hidden beneath filthy clothes, stringy muscle and savoury fat.

Saliva pooled in his mouth, and a wide, beastly grin split the ghoul’s pale face as Keisuke made his way over, taking full advantage of the man’s intoxicated state. That one wouldn’t fight for shit, but that didn’t matter, he would die slowly anyway, once the younger man tore his throat out to prevent him from screaming too loudly. There was no rush, after all; nobody would miss either of them for a while yet…

As the rain pelted on the rusty pipes crossing overhead, one seemingly harmless youth made his way towards the half-collapsed form of his victim…

…

It was nearly half an hour later before Keisuke stopped ‘playing’ with his food. The blood on his hands and clothes coagulating to murky rusty-brown and the corpse looking unrecognizable from the human being it once was. Turning his face towards the thin sliver of sky that could be seen in such a confined place, Keisuke just stood there for a while, eyes closed and a near peaceful smile softening his features from the truly demonic grimace it had warped into during the last few moments of the homeless man’s life.

Stomach now full and the adrenaline in his veins diluting to nothing as his heart slowed down to a normal beat, the white-haired ghoul let himself be washed of blood and gore by the rain before snapping out of his post-hunt haze. Eyes now back to their human mimicry, he felt his rinkaku recede into his skin as he put on surgical gloves and got the kitchen knife and various plastic bags out from the letterman’s bag he had carried with him for the specific purpose of stocking up on much needed human meat.

Putting on the gloves was somewhat difficult due to everything being soaked through by the rain, but Keisuke managed somehow. The rest was a piece of cake, for the ghoul had been getting his meals ever since he was old enough to kill by himself without being caught, all the way back when he was ten years old. His old man had been no use at all, of course, but at least the boy he once was had been fortunate enough to stumble upon enough ghouls feeding to get the gist of it all mostly down before he was able to try it for himself. The rest was like most skills he possessed; practice, practice and more practice.

Still, being a ghoul allowed his obsession with learning as many different ways to fight and kills as he could at least a moderate outlet, and when he got on road trips or a camping trip in the middle of nowhere he could get as creative as he wanted, so it made his mostly boring everyday life worth it if only for those few months a week he could get away from it all.

With one last skillful slice of a knife separating the last choice piece of muscle from the corpse’s calf, Keisuke deemed his reserves good enough to last him through next year, and with that, he cleaned everything up as best he could by dumping the now mutilated carcass into a nearby dumpster bin to be found much later in the week, as that part of the city usually had its garbage day end up the day previous. Dumping his gloves in with the rest before closing the container with a clang, the ghoul put both his knife and his stored meat into his bag, making sure no trace of blood or other bodily fluids were evident on his person before making his way back out.

Passing a lazy hand through his pale fringe to get the white strands out of his eyes, Keisuke made his way back home in an unhurried manner specifically designed to keep the Doves off his back should he be unlucky enough to cross one this early in the evening. As it was, by now he was pretty confident in his ability not to get caught, and so when he happened to bump into a human passing him hurriedly by in what seemed a futile effort to evade the rain, Keisuke merely scowled in annoyance, appeased with the violence he had unleashed but an hour previous.

Adjusting the bag hanging off his shoulder brought off a strange scent, however, and it was with a strange feeling of displacement that the ghoul slowly turned his head back towards the figure who had so rudely passed him by only to find it walking away a few feet behind him, a rather fortuitous gust of wind bringing back the strangely familiar scent along with a sight that froze the blood in his veins;

That guy had his face.

His heart somersaulting in his chest, Keisuke froze for a moment before his own body decided to move on its own, his feet following the impostor in a way that allowed him to keep an eye on his strangely human counterpart while still being away from view, the meat and knife in his letter bag momentarily forgotten in the more immediate need to assure himself of his sanity.

The street moved, the people resurrected from the dead and now he had a doppelgänger on top of it all. This could not stand!

 

[Toacho]

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"Sorry," Ino said in a short sigh, glancing back briefly but feeling his sleeve snagging on his lanyard, leading him to turn his gaze back down to untangle the ribbon from the button and tuck it back down with his thumb. After the small collision, something seemed to linger in the air for a moment. He could not quite put his finger on it, but there was a sort of peculiar air to the world. Despite the initial unsettling feel, Ino briefly casting his gaze back up to the skyline. Two buildings. Exactly identical, save for such a small detail as a single light.

He wishes the second building would just go away.

Drawing his eyes back to the puddles across the ground, he made a left turn and slightly picked up his pace to hurry out from the rain.

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By all means, it was a plain apartment. A single bedroom, a single bathroom, a single living room that shared itself with the kitchen space right by the entryway. Sparsely decorated with a few cluttered boxes at the edge of the living room and bedroom as if he were in a perpetual state of a fresh move-in. With how little he spent at his own home, then perhaps that could actually be a true statement. The only furnishings consisted of the most basic items, a couch, a small television, a table, and anything else that could be noted upon in any ordinary house; nothing special.

The only thing out of place were the rows of boxes, pieces of papers peaking out from all of them and a couple of them simply having stacks of papers resting on top of them, discarded to be put up another day. It's not like there was much to hide anyways, merely some mandatory paperwork for situations that have been long resolved. Anyone could find them with a bit of research or a little bit of knowledge of how to search the web.

He passed by a few of the stacked boxes as he entered, sliding his jacket off while taking the lanyard from it and tossing it onto the counter top, the jacket being similarly discarded onto the boxes. He then crossed the foyer, sliding the curtains open before opening the windows. For just a moment, he stood by them, enjoying the fresh air with a slight sigh. His room was one of the lower rooms, only resting on the third floor and level with a couple of nearby buildings, leading his own window's sight to be blocked from viewing the skyline. Hey, it was a cheap apartment, he couldn't complain?

After spending a second or two by the window side, he turned his focus back to the inside of his room and proceeded to the kitchen. With little gusto, he took a pot from a nearby hook, set it to the stove and made the beginning preparations for pasta. After putting back the salt, he would pause at the counter, reaching to his waist and toying with the buckle slightly before removing the holster, briefly glancing to ensure that the safety was on just as always. With the final check, he removed the item before tucking it into one of the kitchen drawers alongside some old gift cards and clipped coupons from his mother. Then, setting a hand on his waist, he ran the other briefly through his hair while looking back to the stove.

"Well," He hummed softly to himself as he traced his eyes to where he really cared about. Of course, the wine cabinet.

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There was little more to the preparation after he poured his drink. Some pasta in the water. An egg. Some soy sauce. Green onions. At the end of the day, it was just some basic noodles. A couple of taste tests had proved it to even be a little bit less than ideal -- nothing that his drink couldn't solve.

Approaching the living room, he set his two items onto the short table before turning his focus to his phone after feeling a light buzz of a notification in his pocket. Just the news it looked like. He couldn't help but give a slight frown as his eyes skimmed over the usual headlines. With nothing out of the ordinary, he turned his attention back away and to his meal while continuing to search the news for anything of interest, completely unknowing of the events to approach.

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