They sure are calling me an idiot a whole lot. And the way Inosuke constantly gets my name wrong is really something.
Swallowing hard, Tanjiro tentatively slid open the door. “I’m back.”
Inside the room, Inosuke was holding Zenitsu up by the throat.
“Whoa! What are you doing?! Stop it, Inosuke!” Tanjiro hurried over to break them apart. “Let go of Zenitsu.”
“Shut up, Butajiro! This guy’s making fun of me! I’m not stopping till I knock him through the roof!”
“I keep telling you, it’s against corps rules for members to fight! Let go of him right now!” Tanjiro barked. He somehow managed to separate the two.
“Tch!” Inosuke clicked his tongue.
“Unnh, Tanjiroooo.” Zenitsu clung to him.
Tanjiro patted Zenitsu’s head gently and asked, “Where’s Nezuko? In the box?”
His sister poked her head out from inside his own blankets and gazed at them silently.
“Well, well. So that’s where you were?” Tanjiro perked up.
He excitedly pulled out the flower he had tucked carefully away in the pocket of his uniform. It was just the slightest bit bent, but not wilted at all. He gently held out the shining beauty toward his little sister.
“I brought you this. It’s a vine lantern.”
Nezuko stared at the flower.
“With this, you’ll be able to marry the person you love and be the happiest girl in the world,” Tanjiro told her, grinning.
But no matter how long he held it out, his sister did not reach for it. He cocked his head to one side.
She seemed unhappy somehow. Maybe he had caused her to worry by disappearing like that. If that was the case, he had wronged her.
“Sorry for worrying you.” His voice grew even gentler. “The flower’s pretty, right?”
Nezuko looked at the flower silently, took it from his hand, and put it in her hair. Seeing Tanjiro break out into a grin, she smiled too. And then she took the flower from her hair and affixed it to his head.
“Hm? No, Nezuko, that’s not what I meant,” Tanjiro said. “I don’t need the flower. You …”
The smile disappeared from her face, and her eyebrows rose up in concern.
Ah …
Her eyes looked incredibly sad. He felt like he’d seen that emotion in them somewhere before, a long time ago.
The younger sister stared at her older brother. As if reproaching him. He caught the scent of something like pity.
“Sorry …”
Unable to do much other than return her gaze, he abruptly remembered a moment from the past.
“Stop apologizing, Tanjiro. Why are you always saying you’re sorry?”
Tanjiro gasped. He forgot why now, but his little sister had been angry for once that day. She had looked at her brother with a rare sternness.
It was—right, it had been a cold day. The falling snow was icy, enough to freeze him to his core.
He was pretty sure it had been not long after their father died.
“Is it because we were poor? Did you feel unworthy because you wore a tattered kimono?” his little sister said, glaring at her big brother. More than anger or annoyance, he could smell sadness.
“We tried as hard as we could, but it didn’t work. It’s no one’s fault. Things don’t go exactly the way we want them to. We’re only human.”
The Nezuko in his memory overlapped with the Nezuko of the present. His heart cracked at those eyes brimming with such deep sadness.
No.
No, that’s not it, Nezuko.
I just … I wanted you to be happy.
“You get to decide where your happiness comes from. What’s important is now.”
“Oh!”
When Nezuko’s words came back to him, he suddenly felt like he’d been punched hard in the head.
Right.
His little sister had said that to him after he kept on apologizing because their family was poor. He couldn’t dress her up in beautiful kimono, they did nothing but work day in and day out, their beloved father was dead, and Tanjiro was always asking his little brothers and sisters to be patient.
Stop apologizing, she’d said.
“I know you understand. You know how I feel.”
Ohh …
Understanding dawned on him. He and Nezuko felt the same way.
Above all else, he wanted to make Nezuko human again. He wanted her to live the lavish life of a girl her age. He prayed she would do it alongside a boy she loved.
I want her to be the happiest girl in the world. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t have this thought.
Yet, Nezuko felt exactly the same way. Just as Tanjiro held his sister in his heart, she held him in hers. That was why she had given him the flower that brings happiness.
Alive now, with a future ahead of her, Nezuko was not an unhappy girl. Their family had been slaughtered, she had been turned into a demon, and they would certainly come up against other hardships. But she had been accepted by the leader of the Demon Slayer Corps, she had friends who cared about her, and she even had a boy who loved her and cared not at all about her being a demon. Tanjiro himself was fighting for her happy future.
“Thanks, Nezuko.” He pulled his sister to him and hugged her gently.
Nezuko responded by squeezing her brother tightly.
At this certain, warm pressure, tears spilled unbidden from his eyes, and for a while, he simply hugged her silently.
“Hey, why’re you crying?” Inosuke asked curiously. “You hurt or something?”
“Inosuke,” Zenitsu chided him quietly through his own tears as the moment’s emotion swept through him. “Read the room. If you can’t, then at least shut up.”
“So?” the boy in the boar head replied. “Why’d Soichiro go traipsing around the mountain, anyway?”
“You—! Were you not listening to a word I said? He went up there to pick the vine lantern. See? That.” Zenitsu pointed at the flower in Tanjiro’s hair.
Inosuke glanced at the flower lazily and said casually, “But that’s not a vine lantern.”
“Huh?” Tanjiro and Zenitsu replied in perfect unison, gaping.
“It’s, uh, too bad about yesterday, huh?” Zenitsu said timidly to Tanjiro the next morning. Tanjiro was absently lying in the yard and bathing in the sun.
In the center of the yard, Inosuke was racing around, shouting, “Boar super charge!”
Next to Tanjiro was the wooden box that held Nezuko.
The flower that Tanjiro had picked the night before turned out to be not a vine lantern, but a boar winterberry. Because the petals were terribly sweet, animals generally devoured them. For some reason, boars wouldn’t touch them, and because of that, they bloomed quite often near boar dens.
In other words, the boar the previous night hadn’t read Tanjiro’s mind, but had simply invited him back to its den as thanks for saving its life and treating its wound.
This flower didn’t only bloom on the night of the new moon, apparently. It also bloomed the night of the full moon and in the morning and afternoon, as one would expect from a flower.
“It’s because I was saying all that stuff about making girls happy and that maybe the flower actually existed, huh? I feel kind of bad.” Zenitsu hung his head.
“No, I decided to do this myself. It’s not your fault at all.” Tanjiro shook his head with a smile. “Yesterday, you said that I sounded weird, right?”
“Huh? O-oh, yeah, I did. And?”
“I didn’t really get it myself at the time, but when I saw Toyo looking so happy, this beautiful bride, I thought how miserable Nezuko must be not being able to bathe in sunlight.”
And then there was him, not being able to dress her in beautiful kimono. Not being able to let her live in the light of the sun. Dragging her into bloody battle, hurting her, not being able to give her a single one of the joys of a girl her age.
He’d felt so bad about all of it, he could hardly stand it. He hadn’t known what to do.
“But Nezuko …”
Zenitsu looked back at him in silence.
Nezuko was not a girl to be pitied and assumed unhappy. Just like she had when she was a person, she was trying to live and be present in the moment. Nezuko was the one who would decide what happiness looked like to her. Maybe that meant marrying someone she loved and running away together. Or maybe not.
Either way, it definitely wasn’t something he could push on her as her older brother. And yet he had jumped to the conclusion that his little sister’s “now” was unhappy and pitiable, and tried to push his “happiness” on her.
“I need to defeat Muzan Kibutsuji and make Nezuko human again as soon as possible,” Tanjiro announced, facing forward. “I have to avenge our family.”
“Tanjiro,” Zenitsu said, sniffling. “I’ll do whatever I can to help. I’m super scared, though. And to be clear, I’m totally useless, weak, and I’m sure I’ll die soon. I need you to not rely on me at all, but … I’ll fight wherever I can, so …”
“Zenitsu …”
“I really need you not to count on me at all, though.” He lacked confidence to the point where he felt the need to repeat his statement. Even so, his kindness made Tanjiro happy.
“Hey! You guys gotta run around until you puke blood too!” Inosuke shouted so loudly that it echoed not only through the courtyard but the entire town, abruptly shattering the tender moment. “We’re gonna take down the demon boss to make my third underling human again, right? So we gotta get stronger! Don’t sit there whining your life away! Stupidjiro!
“Who’s this third subordinate?! How dare you talk about Nezuko—” Zenitsu erupted in indignation.
“You’re exactly right, Inosuke.” Tanjiro laughed. How straightforward, how unwavering Inosuke could be, was truly dazzling. “We have to get stronger.”
“Right?!” Inosuke cried.
“What are you talking about, Tanjiro?” Zenitsu said, exasperated. “You’ll break your ribs again, you know? And just when they’re finally almost healed. Why should we come here to rest and then have to throw up blood? The whole thing is a terrible idea!”
“Come on, minions! Follow Lord Inosukeeeee!” Inosuke’s ferocious roar drowned out Zenitsu’s complaints.
Tanjiro heard the excited cry of a young villager on the wind. “The bridal procession’s coming!”
He gently closed his eyes and saw the fresh and unsophisticated bride-to-be Toyo in his mind, Hisa’s gentle smile, and Akane and Akari watching over them, eyes glittering, cheeks flushed.
He stroked the wooden box next to him with one hand, and a sound came from inside, as if in response. A small, very gentle sound.
Smiling, he looked up at the deep blue sky.
It was a perfectly clear day, not a cloud to be seen.