Stone Cold | Tanjirou Kamado (old version)

18. What must be done to live with oneself

For some unknown reason, Kanao Tsuyuri didn't entirely dislike Ayaka Iwamoto.

It wasn't that she liked Ayaka, she actually found her loud and mean, but she wasn't exactly scared off by those traits either.

If there was something she could compare her with, it would be with a stray dog, constantly biting whoever dared to get too close before they could bite her. Kanao didn't know why, but her presence brought a breath of fresh air in her small hollow heart, where she believed nothing would ever fit that wasn't the desire to kill demons.

Kanao's eyes allowed her to see more than others, small movements that any other wouldn't see, but as powerful as they were, emptiness remained in them before everything, would it be a demon or her sister's death. She could see, but it was no use with a heart that didn't throb.

Something she could see, too, was that Ayaka's eyes weren't like hers.

Ayaka didn't see like her, but that wasn't what made them different. In her eyes stayed the embers of a prior Sun that had shone and made flourish entire meadows, now leaving on its path frozen valleys and icy mountains. But in Kanao's there weren't even ashes, because her Sun had been extinguished before it could burn and she nearly believed to be jealous, but that was impossible because for her everything was numb. Even so she couldn't avoid listening to the whispers in her chest that rose higher every time against the wall of her own silence, that didn't stop yelling, and Kanao, for once, felt something, and it was confusion.

She had listened to her sobs the day she arrived, and that was something Kanao had been deprived of, the right the gods gave her to cry. All that made her human had been snatched away from her just like that, and she couldn't even wonder if she was truly human once or if she had always been a doll.

And she tried, with all the strength her heart could gather and a golden coin, and with time she could decide if she liked meat or fish the most, if she wanted to join the Demon Slaying Corps or not, the surname she wanted to be called by, but it wasn't enough.

If she had other eyes, maybe it wouldn't matter so much, but she was cursed with being able to see and the smiles, the frowns, the smirks, they all show themselves in every detail, and they only emphasized on the fact that she will never be able to smile genuinely, she won't be able to get annoyed by the smallest details and she won't be able to scowl when something disappointed her.

Because Kanao Tsuyuri was a doll with a soul that abandoned her long ago, and feeling nothing was torture.

If Kanao didn't feel, Ayaka felt too much. She made sharp remarks, bickered viciously and laughed with her friends, her tongue appeared to have a life of her own because she never held back the thousand thoughts that appeared on her mind, as distasteful as they may have been. And Kanao found herself looking at her too much, hoping something rubbed off on her so she too could express herself with such freedom.

Such was her luck that she had the opportunity of looking at her all day, because Kanao was assigned as her caretaker until the arm she broke healed, as if she had to fix the harm she did in some way.

An arm less, Ayaka was, what one would say, useless. She couldn't even hold a spoon, so, of course, the sword was off limits.

Rui's threads hadn't only left permanent scars on her forearms and under her knees, but the one that licked her back turned to a horrible purple colour that soon started to spread all over her body. According to what Shinobu had said, the demo used part of his blood. As it was no ordinary blood, her body reacted as it would with poison, strongly fighting against it and shutting down her legs, where the blood had gone from the main injury, leaving the lower part of her body paralyzed. She healed, slowly, but bit by bit she was the only one left bedridden from her friends.