Stone Cold | Tanjirou Kamado (old version)

20. Conversations left in the middle

"I was right when I thought I'd found you here." The cloud of white smoke that came out of Ayaka's mouth as she talked was enough to remind her the night could be cold, even for her.

Zenitsu's nichirin sword clanked on its sheath, overwhelmed by the trembling of his hand.

"1," he said, as he grabbed onto the handle.

"2," he continued, when his thumb stretched to push the blade out.

"3, Thunder Breathing, First Form," before he finished uttering the name of the form Zenitsu, in the usual clothes of a Butterfly Estate patient, appeared a few meters ahead. And he didn't even use the breathing, he just practiced the form time and time again.

«Fast as thunder» Ayaka thought without being surprised. She had been the first two, three, even four times (and the next five, she had been having troubles to sleep), but she had seen Zenitsu practice too many nights since they were on the Butterfly Estate. And this one, she hoped, wouldn't be the last one.

Even so, the nights were still damn cold and the thin pajamas both of them wore didn't keep them warm enough for it to be bearable.

Zenitsu's blond head turned around to her and Ayaka had to push down the urge of digging a hole and burying herself there. The only thing that kept her on Zenitsu's field of vision was the weight that came with not having shared Shoichi's letter. It had been in her pocket the last three days and she didn't have that much time on the Butterfly Estate to afford doubting this in the first place. That, at least, kept her feet on the ground.

If someone ever called her brave she'd point to this scenario and tell them to reconsider, Ayaka Iwamoto was strong, Ayaka Iwamoto was tough, Ayaka Iwamoto was a mountain, what a load of bullshit.

"I thought you still couldn't walk," Zenitsu said without breath, once Ayaka walked off toward him in a trembling pace and both of them sat at the wooden porch that faced the garden. "Is your arm okay?"

She gave him a shrug and rubbed her arm with a hand, eyes lost in the fence that marked the limits of Shinobu's Estate.

"It still hurts, but it's better than having miss perfect following me around everywhere," she explained, exhaling something that looked like a huff before turning to him. "The demon's poison stopped working, didn't it?"

She sent discreet glances at Zenitsu's arms, that appeared to regain their usual size after so much time in the form of small radishes.

"I can train," he simply said. "I heard from Tanjirou you were training with your grandma?"

"Something like that." Ayaka didn't bother to explain she had abandoned that training because it simply didn't work.

It had been quite a long time since she last remembered how it felt to be at the start of a path when the hill was steep and rocky and she had to dig her nails on the floor in order to keep going and not roll down. There must have been something else to her eyes because they didn't see how she needed it when she needed it, which left her blind in whatever her grandmother instructed her to do instead of the familiar physical training from Himejima-shishou. What affected her the most, instead, was the void in her chest that felt as foreign as seeing nothing.

Ayaka pondered her options again, and she found a preference for telling Zenitsu herself instead of him hearing from someone else.

"Actually, I gave up," she said. Zenitsu stayed quiet, as if waiting for her to say something else, but there was nothing else so over them fell a silence yelling to be teared apart.

Or maybe it was just Shoichi's letter waiting finally to be shown to Zenitsu, so that was what she did, taking it out from her pocket.

"Shoichi wrote to me, I thought you'd want to read what he said." The letter on her hand was wrinkled, a corner torn apart because of her crow's pecking who had been bothered by having it on his paw. Shoichi mustn't have been used to using crows, she didn't blame him for it. (What she did was give her crow an extra meal for the hassle, Ayaka wasn't a monster.)