Blossoming Fissure | Tanjirou Kamado

3. Kazuya the Terrible and his grandmother

The existence of demons had been no surprise.

And Kazuya had been desperate enough to accept a deal with one of them.

His grandmother had warned him about them every night, painting around the house with wisteria incense to protect them from the man-eating monsters. He had never really been scared, the war against the Russians and his father's life had been a bigger fear eating up his mind.

It was exasperating, how his grandmother worried more about monsters she knew from the mouth of the prior generation instead of the real danger of her son dying, and eventually doing so, in the snow and the cold for a country that failed them. But even so she continued, painting around the house with incense, even if no demon had been seen for centuries and food grew scarcer by the day.

When her legs were too weak because of malnourishment to do it herself, she asked Kazuya.

But Kazuya threw that goddamn incense across the woods, watched it disappear in the snow and the cold like his father had done, and that was how he lost them both.

It felt dirty, to work with the same kind of monster that killed his grandmother, but he couldn't care any less.

It smelled of metal inside the wagons, and in the distance he smelled the charcoal that fed the train. The awl with which he had to destroy the "spirit core" didn't feel heavy on his fingertips.

The hand with an eye looked at them from the floor, the sight didn't move him like it should have had.

"They're already asleep," he confirmed, using that mouth on the back of his hand, so proper to a creature such as a demon. Kazuya craned up his neck to look above the seats, at the sleeping humans. They must have been dreaming sweet fantasies, he envied them because of it. "You must tie the ropes around their wrists without touching them or you'll wake them up, the demon slayers' instinct is that sharp. The sooner you destroy the spirit core, the sooner you'll have sweet dreams."

"Then let's get started," pressed in a whisper the boy by his side, the one sick with tuberculosis. The hand appeared to give them a last nod and slid outside the wagon with his skillful fingers. The others, as miserable as Kazuya (or at least enough so to accept such an alternative) silently spread over the wagon, each of them choosing a swordsman.

"Hey," one of them muttered to draw their attention. He pointed a finger to the black haired boy that didn't wear a slayer's uniform. "This one too? Although he doesn't have a sword or anything, he's with them."

"Someone get on his dream," said the girl tying the rope around the blond swordsman's wrist, pushing his worries aside. "He's gonna die absorbed by the train either way, best not to risk it."

Kazuya looked by the corner of his eye as one of them tied their wrist to the boy's and proceeded to do it himself to the swordsman assigned to him.

He had to admit that the girl was pretty. When he leaned over her to take her wrist he was hit by a pleasant, familiar smell, and although she was as pale as a corpse, the mole on the cheekbone made her face look pretty. In other circumstances Kazuya would have asked her out on a date. Maybe a wife would be able to improve the crude and unpleasant reality he lived in, but the warmth of a woman would never wash away the guilt about his grandmother's death.

So with one last sigh, Kazuya sat down and started. "One, two, three..."

ᵒᵒ✿ᵒᵒ✿ᵒᵒ✿ᵒᵒ

There was no red.

There were no footprints or traces on the snow.

There should have been, Tanjirou felt he had to apologize, so he did, and that scared his siblings.