Work Text:
Sometimes, the truth of a person can be found in the smallest of gestures. The way his hands curl around his warm coffee cup, or the tilt of his head when he smiles. In those motions, a nostalgic familiarity can be found. In those motions, you can also find an unspeakable difference. This person that you had once loved has been destroyed, but you can still find what you loved about him in this newcomer.
It’s rather painful, Hide thinks. To loose someone you had known for so long to a thing as basic as change, but to still find him everywhere. The image of Kaneki reading a book while sipping at overly sugared coffee had become irreconcilable with the Kaneki that Hide finds before him.
Still, Hide supposed, nothing had really changed. Kaneki was still Kaneki, even as he turned bitter in conjunction with his new coffee. Hide wasn’t sure he loved this Kaneki -- he was more harsh, more blunt than the person Hide had fallen in love with. He no longer carried that air of softness that Hide had so treasured. Despite this, Hide would still die for Kaneki. He would die for the memories they had shared, for the future that could have been.
If possible, of course, he would prefer that they both lived. He was sure he would come to love this Kaneki with time, to find comfort in the gestures that the present and past Kanekis shared. Every time Kaneki touched his chin while lying, every Takatsuki Sen novel he picked up, would in time allow for love. If only the corpses littered at his feet could promise them that time.
Hide kneels in front of the person who he had spent his life with, who he did not know at all. “Let’s just go home already,” he smiles, knowing that neither of them know where home really is, anymore.