“I. No. Su. Ke. … Inosu. Ke.”
“Yes! You did it! You said it!” With a cry of delight, Inosuke somersaulted into the air. At long last, he’d succeeded in getting Nezuko to speak his name.
When he’d been brought to Butterfly Mansion the previous afternoon to have his injuries treated, he’d learned that Nezuko was learning to talk again, and he’d been excited to teach her a few words. “Boss” still came out more like “boff,” but now she could manage “Inosuke.”
The short-tempered Demon Slayer had shown surprising patience in this endeavor, making his joy at success all that much greater. He was so excited his feet didn’t touch the ground.
After a number of somersaults, Inosuke made her say his name again, determined to make the newly vocal girl into a proper minion.
“Inosuke?”
“Yeah!”
“Inosuke!”
“That’s it! Keep saying it! It’s the name of your boss, after all!” Inosuke’s proud voice echoed through the courtyard of Butterfly Mansion. “You did real good, so here’s your reward. One shiny acorn.”
He handed her the smooth nut. Nezuko held it up to the sun. Fangs still gleamed in her mouth, and her eyes still glowed red; she remained a demon. Even so, Tanjiro had been thrilled that his little sister could once more stand in the sunlight.
Remembering Tanjiro’s smile, Inosuke looked at Nezuko, standing before him in the middle of the day, and felt a funny, warm, fluffy feeling inside. It was a feeling he often got around those two. Usually he pushed back against it, not wanting to let mushy feelings make him stupid, but this time he felt like he could let it happen. After all, an underling’s happiness was a boss’s happiness too.
Snorting with satisfaction, Inosuke envisioned lording over his growing army of minions. His fantasies were interrupted by a girl’s scream and the sound of something thudding to the ground in the laundry area in the corner of the courtyard. The voice belonged to Kiyo Terauchi, one of the three nurses at the mansion.
“What’s going on?” Inosuke whipped out his sword and charged, Nezuko hurrying behind him. “Enemy attack?”
It turned out to be only the laundry pole falling. Freshly laundered sheets and nightclothes spilled across the ground, covered in dirt. Kiyo sat before the mess, weeping into her hands. Aoi Kanzaki and Kanao Tsuyuri tried to comfort her.
“Who did this?” Inosuke demanded, still out for blood. His skin pimpled into gooseflesh. “A demon?”
“A crow,” Aoi replied.
Beneath his boar head, Inosuke scowled. “A Kasugai Crow?”
“Of course not,” Aoi snapped. “Why would a Kasugai Crow do something like this? It was an ordinary crow.”
“An ordinary crow...until it tried to devour your face!”
“Enough of your violent notions!” Aoi rolled her eyes. “It was raining for days, you see, and the laundry was piling up...”
Excited to wake up to a clear morning at last, the girls had set to work cleaning the mountain of dirty bedding and nightclothes. They’d finally finished the washing and were hanging the clean laundry out to dry when a crow swooped down out of nowhere and snatched Kiyo’s hairpin. Kiyo lost her balance and fell, taking the laundry pole down with her.
“Hair fin?” Inosuke frowned. “That some kind of fish? Can you eat it?”
“Not ‘fin,’ ‘pin.’ See?” Aoi gestured to the butterflies in her own hair.
Now that it was pointed out to him, Inosuke could see one of the butterfly decorations was missing from Kiyo’s head. But why was he supposed to care? He wouldn’t even have noticed anything different if the girls hadn’t made him look.
What? That’s all?
The wind went out of his sails. “She hurt?” he grunted.
“No,” said Aoi. “Just scraped her knees a little. Right, Kiyo?”
Kiyo, still sobbing, bobbed her head. Kanao patted her back awkwardly. Nezuko followed Kanao’s lead and stroked Kiyo’s hair. “It’s okay,” she said, clumsily trying to comfort the crying girl. Kiyo nodded gratefully.
Inosuke started to feel that this was really stupid. Why was she even crying? She wasn’t injured, and the bird hadn’t taken anything important, like food.
“Quit crying,” he snapped. “It’s just a thing, y’know.”
Kiyo’s shoulders hunched and her sobs rose to a yelp. Aoi’s sharp almond eyes narrowed at Inosuke. But the first to speak up was not Aoi, but quiet, cheerful Kanao.
“It is not!” she said fiercely, splotches of indignant red blooming on her pale cheeks. “That hairpin’s not just a thing to Kiyo! It’s a precious gift from our sister Kanae. It’s proof that we’re family!” With that, Kanao turned on her heel and ran off.
Inosuke gaped after her.
“Oh, Kanao,” Kiyo whispered through her sobs.
“It’s okay,” Aoi cooed as she helped the small girl up. Her eyes met Inosuke’s. You wanna start something?
He braced himself. But Aoi only looked at him reproachfully and moved silently on.
“So that’s what happened. Girls, huh?”
Inosuke sat cross-legged on the bed where Tanjiro lay, recuperating from injuries he’d sustained in the swordsmith village. Inosuke’s face was that of a little boy telling his mother about some playground indignity.
The mohawked boy in the next bed groaned with disgust. “I’m trying to sleep here. Make him pipe down, Tanjiro.” He yanked the blankets over his head.
In a flash, Inosuke was ready to start punching. “Say that to my face, weirdo head! I’ll take you!”
As always, Tanjiro was quick to smooth things over. “So then what happened, Inosuke?”
Inosuke clicked his tongue dismissively and resettled himself on the bed. “It wasn’t the shrimp who’s always yapping about something. It was the quiet one. She just blew up at me out of nowhere.”
Aoi was forever lecturing him about something or other, so Inosuke had developed a tolerance for her sharp tongue. When she got angry at him, he just shrugged and filed the complaint away. But Kanao hardly ever spoke. He hadn’t expected her to scold him, much less over such a little thing. The more he thought about it, the more unfair it seemed. His breath grew ragged.
“She said it wasn’t just a thing,” he grumbled. “It was, I dunno, a present or something. And then she up and ran off.”
“Huh.” Tanjiro looked thoughtful. “Kanao did that?”
“It was just a hairpin. And the pipsqueak wasn’t even hurt, so what was she crying over? I don’t get it.”
Tanjiro listened without interrupting. In his head, Inosuke could hear his gentle reproach. Are you sure you’re not the one in the wrong here? Is that the way to talk to someone? In reality, Tanjiro didn’t say a word. But neither did he nod along to anything Inosuke said. He only gazed at him with gentle, sad eyes.
That jerk. Why couldn’t he say what was on his mind?
Those eyes knocked Inosuke off his stride. He felt the same discomfort as he had when Aoi had simply stared at him in silence. On the bed, he squirmed uncomfortably.