Beautiful

Chapter 4

Fear is beautiful. It's a gorgeous evolutionary response to push survival, to invoke decisions. It creates life as much as it ends it. Fear pushes fight, fear pushes to run faster. Fear breeds safety while breeding twins of love and hate.

But fear is also ugly, and it claws and fights, fear pushes death, fear creates what's ifs, and could've beens and if only it happened early, if only it were different.

And then there's Muzan. Fear created beauty. Fear created trust. As the night sky turned over to the sunny sky, Muzan finally let go of her cramping muscles. Yoriichi will be home soon. Yoriichi will be here and he'll take care of everything, Yoriichi will-

"Yoriichi!" She screams once his scent breached her nose. Muzan could take pain, she'd had it her whole existence, but today, pain was riddled with what ifs.

What if she doesn't make it, what if her baby can't make it out. She could feel him running to her, she could feel his footsteps.

On impulse, the woman stand, Kimono draping down her body, stomach poking into the beautiful silk of it. She had clawed at her own neck, but that pain couldn't distract her from the pain of this.

She wasn't being scarred or torn apart, her contractions weren't anything fatally harming her body, but there was nothing to regenerate and nothing to heal. Just her baby, ready to come into this world.

Yoriichi's scent was stronger than ever, she could feel his heart in her hand, his blood pumping, his worry, his sympathy. His pain. His shoulder hit a tree on his way back, running as if the night did nothing to him.

She stood, and walked into the sunlight, as if that pain didn't hurt her, as he came into her eyes, the father of her child's silhouette burned into the back of her head.

"Muzan..." he said, running faster as if reaching her would stop the sun. She could only take three steps from the house before she could register the sensation. The immense heat that used to be a warm glow as a human, now killing her. Destroying her.

She burned in front of him, she was on fire, melting, spreading ash in front of the grave of the woman who used to love him.

She didn't scream, she only held her arms out. Muzan looked down at herself, her burning skin, her deteriorating body and then back at Yoriichi. Her face didn't show anything, nothing but her, her face as she looked at Yoriichi try to make it to her.

He watched as her organs burned, her spin turned to ash, but when he reached her, she was gone. Only her kimono left to speak her story.

Yoriichi fell to his knees, the monster slayed by the one thing she was most careful about. Her kryptonite that her body made sure to follow everyday. The rise and fall of the sun and moon. Time dictated her survival.

Muzan feared time. It was the one thing in her massive existence she couldn't control.

As he went to touch the kimono, shrill cries muffled beneath it sounded, distraught cries. New cries, desperate pain from the gravel beneath it. It clawed at the sink and fought it, crying for it to be removed and to be picked up from the hard ground.

Yoriichi picked it up, red hair sparsely scattered along the head, her eyes closed tightly, her fists and feet moving as she wailed, trying to take in her first breathes.

Yoriichi picked her up, moving fast to gently wrap her small body in the kimono still full of the scent of her mother. She's not bloody or moist, just eager to start living.

She was immune, she was alive, breathing, heart beating. He stood up, holding her in his arms as her crying came to a slow stop. She was here.

She was here.

"Hello." Yoriichi said to the baby. His baby, his newborn. His child.

Her eyes lifted open, small slits reveling the bright red, bloody eyes of that woman.

She grabbed the kimono wrapped around her, her wails turned to silent coos as she embraced that warmth Yoriichi emitted.

All he could do was look at her. How much she resembled himself, how her nose scrunched from the silk, how the light made her eyes close again.

He quickly pulled her inside, keeping the baby in one arm. Searching for the old bottles for when he and uta were expecting. He poured some goats milk into the bottle with one hand, the other rocking her softly as she fussed at the scent of it.

He brought it to her lips, and her arms naturally came up to touch his larger hand.

"You're here now." He sighed, hand gently stroking the kimono as she fed. The baby drank audibly, small noises here and there as she swallows thickly, some milk dribbling past her lips.

"You're here."