Kaneki:

The car moved surprisingly quickly through the mid-morning traffic, the early rush hour of morning commuters having subsided relatively fast. Kaneki sat uncomfortably in the passenger seat, wedged against the door. The aftershave had been a good trick, while it had lasted, but the overpowering scent was gone now, and the boy was trying his best to ignore the scent radiating off of the man sitting only a few feet away. Shinohara had noticed quickly, the occasional conversation between them dying away to be replaced by the occasional glance. Ken kept his breathing slow and tried to shift a little further away from the other man. The hunger he'd been feeling near constantly over the last few days was getting harder to ignore by the second.

Minutes passed in uncomfortable silence, before the investigator reached down and pressed a small button on the car dashboard. Kaneki felt a movement behind his head as the window moved, the glass pane shifting downwards and allowing a flow of fresh air into the cramped vehicle. The relief was small, but it was something, at least. The teen gave a word of thanks, before craning his neck slightly and pressing his face against the gap in the glass, breathing as much fresh air as he could manage.

When the boy was feeling a little more settled, he relaxed back into his seat with a groan. "Sorry about that," he muttered. "The senses are all kinda new, I guess."

Shinohara shrugged. "My fault," he admitted. "You've been running on a liter and a half of blood since the change, I should have figured you'd be hungry. We'll head over and grab you something from one of the prep houses."

"Prep houses?" Kaneki asked, raising an eyebrow at the older man.

"Where we store the meat we give to prisoners," Shinohara replied quietly. "Guess that's where we'll be getting you fed from now on."

Kaneki nodded. "I... I see."

The investigator cocked an eyebrow at the boy, glancing across at him for a few moments. "Problem? You don't exactly sound thrilled."

Kaneki cocked an eyebrow in turn, mildly offended. "Of course I'm not," he replied, his voice icy. "Would you be looking forward to eating person for the first time?"

Shinohara shrugged. "No, you're right. I wouldn't be," he answered casually. "But you're a ghoul now, at least partially. It was entirely possible that you could have been looking forward to it," Shinohara noticed the disgusted look on the boy's face and amended slightly. "Don't get me wrong. You seem like a good kid, but from what I've seen, a hungry ghoul can get pretty single minded about food. I guess you're the first chance anyone's had to see how much of what we know about ghouls is purely instinct based."

The teen considered the idea for a moment, mulling it over in his head. "In that case... Look, I guess a part of me is looking forward to it, but it's not really any different from the part of me that looked forward to meals when I was human. I mean, it's stronger, but hunger is hunger, I guess."

"Maybe," Shinohara replied, not sounding convinced. "To be honest, I think the hunger's probably gonna be worse the next time you feel it."

"What makes you say that?"

"Remember how you cut your hand back at the coffee shop?"

Kaneki nodded.

"At a guess, I'd say you were able to cut yourself because whatever's happening to you, this transformation thing, it probably isn't complete yet. A regular ghoul couldn't cut themselves on a china cup." Shinohara repositioned slightly in his seat, returning his eyes to the road. "I expect the hunger'll be stronger when you're more like a ghoul."

Kaneki turned his own eyes to the road. He didn't like the idea that this would all get even worse. Not one bit. "Maybe," he admitted after a few minutes silence. "But then again, like you said, I'm the first person like me anyone knows about. Maybe I got cut because this is just the furthest the transformation goes. Maybe I won't get all the powers and maybe I won't get all the instincts."

Stolen novel; please report.

"Maybe," Shinohara conceded. "But I survived this long because I'm a plan for the worst kind of guy. I'm telling you that it could get worse, and saying maybe you should be prepared if it does."

"... Thanks for the warning." Kaneki grumbled eventually, arms folded as he leaned once more against the window.

The mildly awkward silence that followed was broken by the sound of the investigator's phone chiming a text alert. Shinohara waited until they hit a set of traffic lights, before pulling it out and reading the message. "Hmm," He grunted, holding the phone out for Kaneki to take before returning his eyes to the road as the lights went to green. "That was my partner," he explained, a slightly disappointed tone to his voice. "Said they went to investigate the hospital where you got the transplant, but the place was cleared out. Can you text him back and tell him I got him a sandwich?"

Kaneki nodded, turning his eyes to the phone. His thoughts turned to the doctors who'd done this to him, if they had disappeared already, that pretty much ruled out any chance that he'd been made this way by accident. His eyes skimmed briefly over the contents of the message before he began writing out Shinohara's reply. Hang on a moment... His eyes returned to the contents of the message in the smallest of double takes. "Uhhh, Mr Shinohara? Did you say your partner wrote this?"

"Yup," the investigator nodded. "Juuzou, nice kid."

"... He writes like a third grader."

Shinohara chuckled. "Yeah, it takes a little while to get used to. Juuzou never really did much reading or writing as a kid."

"Well..." Kaneki said slowly, still very confused. "Okay, I guess... but this is borderline illiterate. And why are there so many emojis?"

Shinohara shrugged. "Juuzou thinks it's important to express emotion when he's texting, the emojis let him do that."

"So then why are they all cat faces?"

The investigator snorted. "If you ever meet him, you'll notice that my partner very rarely displays emotions that aren't the cat emoji."

"... Huh," was all that Kaneki could think to respond. Shrugging, he sent back a reply. 'Shinohara's driving, he says he got you a sandwich.' Ken waited for a moment or two, before experimentally picking the phone up again. Shinohara shot him an inquisitive glance as he typed in a very short follow up message, ':3' and pushed send.

The response was almost immediate. The phone pinged. Before Kaneki had a chance to look at the first message, it pinged a second time, then a third. He looked at the screen. Cat emojis. Kaneki scrolled up to view the previous two messages. Both messages were nothing but repetitions of the same set of symbols, again and again. In the time it took him to check, the phone pinged again.

Shinohara sighed. "You sent him an emoji, didn't you?"

"Uhh... shouldn't I have?" Ken replied, uncertain.

"Which one?" The investigator asked, in a voice of deep resignation.

"Um..." Ken hesitated. "The... cat emoji?"

"Turn the phone to silent." Shinohara said with another sigh. "I'm gonna have to change his plan before he burns out his credit again."

The teen fumbled briefly with the phone, the device continuing to ping every couple of seconds in his hand. He gingerly set it back down on the divide between their seats and resolved not to touch it again. The two were silent for a time, before he spoke up, mildly curious. "Do you always get his breakfast?"

Shinohara nodded matter-of-factly. "Yeah, every day. We used to let him fend for himself, but then I found out that he was pretty much just living on a diet of stolen office lunches and bugs, so I started bringing him food."

"Bugs?" Kaneki asked, mortified. "Why?"

Shinohara shrugged. "Far as I can tell, that's what ate as a kid, so he figured it was normal and kept doing it. We tried teaching him to cook, didn't take. Kid kept disappearing every time we tried."

Ken stared at the older man, appalled. "What kind of abusive asshole feeds a kid bugs their whole life?"

"Oh, they didn't feed him," Shinohara replied, his fingers clenching almost imperceptibly on the wheel. "That's why he ate bugs."

Ken sat in silence, staring at the older man and trying to figure out if he was lying. He couldn't think why he would be, but the alternative didn't seem any more likely.

"Makes you think, huh," Yukinori murmured, eyes forward. "Even with what's going on now, some people out there have it worse than you."

Kaneki didn't respond to that, primarily because he had no idea what to say. He gazed down at the phone, the screen still silently showing more cat emojis, albeit every few minutes now instead of every few seconds. Some time later, Ken was brought back out of the trance when he noticed that the car had come to a stop. He glanced up at the investigator questioningly, and the older man pointed out of the window.

"We're here," he said coolly, gesturing to the grey wall of the large building they were parked against. "Prep house two. Hope you're still hungry."