“Kill or be killed.”

That sentence was all twenty year-old Nishio Nishiki had ever known. Kill or be killed. In a ghoul versus man world, that was all he ever had, especially after his sister died. He had to learn how to fend himself - the world was not kind to his people. Ghouls were murderers. That was music he could never bring himself to face as a growing boy even when his parents were killed by humans, because he knew they never had the choice for what they could eat - it was never their fault for how they were made so different!

But his kind were exiled. Like the tens of thousands of ghouls, they were hunted, and tracked down like animals to a slaughter - doctors, students and lawyers all the same. Teachers, artists, and preachers, it could not have mattered any more to the Doves of the CCG than a farmer killing his cattle. Because that was all they were to them. Cattle dying in a flock of flames for something they never even had a choice in, no other way to survive. Because their world was so different from humans. Eat, or starve.

Nishiki was similar to other ghouls - killing the ones that would kill in his hunting grounds until he was forced out of them by a purple haired woman named Rize. Then he resorted to picking off weaker ghouls, ones of questionable resource but food nonetheless. It was repeated over and over like it was never a new skill for him - his quinque became his own other limb, as it was intended. It grew on him like a separated appendage like a tail that coiled around his leg (which it did, it was too long for his build) - one he had gotten too comfortable using. To some ghouls, it made him a devil. A snake. But, what did that make them?

Nishiki had his sneaking suspicions of everyone around him. People he would call friends at the university were just another risk of danger - who would be the first to call a report with the CCG for ghouls on the campus, people at the local cafe, Anteiku, which he worked at (aside from the staff seeing as they were all ghouls, too) who would catch a staff ogling for a moment too long, and make a report, too? Sneaking suspicions that lasted him far too long, too many missed opportunities out of fear and mongering.

But you were an abnormality in his life. A square peg trying to screw itself onto a round nut. You were just… different. And that scared him. You were curious - too curious for your own good. Nosy, even. You always seemed so on the tip of things, your fingertips poking right into the boiling water of someone else's life and being spot on with the assumptions. What if you figured him out, and just stayed in waiting for when he made a mistake?

It hurt to be scared like this, only because you had slowly grown to be something to him. But fuck, pain has never felt so good.

Sometimes, he’s killed what he grew to love. He didn’t want the next thing to be you. Because after all, in his world it was different.

Kill, or be killed.