As Things Should Be

-20- Discussion

Everything smelled wrong.

They'd walked into a house full of dangers and, as Akaza beckoned, had knelt down before a table as bowls of food were placed in front of them with the strange bloodied ice-smelling demon apologizing for making too little food for their unexpected guests...

The Demon's voice had made Zenitsu pale as he'd explained something about not expecting so many guests so late. The demon's stance had made Rengoku tense. The demon's words had gone over Tanjiro's head as the smell nearly overpowered him from where he knelt, his heart hammering in his chest. That demon was immensely powerful and clearly unsettled by their arrival. 

The warm air of the house smelled thick with the residue of demons, but even that demonic scent had a firm and terrible metallic hint to it. Not a fresh scent of blood, but a deep one, like something had been left to soak in crimson for years. It clung to every demon of the house...

Except the youngest.

The little girl sat across from Tanjiro, slurping up her very-normal noodles as noisily as Inosuke before she finished first and slammed the bowl down. She smelled like Nezuko in a way, an off-putting scent of something inhuman, but it was very faint with a smell of a beating heart, hardly noticeable over the stench of Tanjiro's surroundings. 

Perhaps she wasn't a demon at all...

"DONE!" she cried, throwing her hands in the air as Inosuke gasped and slammed his bowl down next, also empty.

"No fair! I had more than you!" Inosuke cried indignantly.

"Nu-uh, I won fair and square onii-chan," she smiled sweetly, crossing her arms in smug satisfaction.

"Mom! Tell Miku I had more than her!" Inosuke cried as he looked to the head of the table.

"I can't do that," the table's head laughed lightly. "Besides, you two know your manners."

The woman who sat there, next to Tanjiro, was graceful in every sense of the word. There was a level of control in how she held herself that was very out of place with the predatorial demons that sat around her. She didn't look fearful or intimidated... she looked comfortable and smelled loving. She looked down both sides of the table, smiling as she gazed past Inosuke to the demons, her smile fading into something small and polite as she regarded the demon slayers. The demons who knelt on the tatami mat for the meal chose the opposing side of the demon slayers, save for Inosuke of course. It almost felt like a line being drawn in the sand and no one was sure if they should cross it.

There was Akaza, across from Rengoku, and the two of them seemed to simply stare at each other. Akaza was offered no meal and Rengoku hadn't touched his which was very out of character for the usually famished flame-hashira. Tanjiro had given the meal a good sniff and deduced that if it was poison... it was well masked.

"What are you two; animals? Use your damn chopsticks!" The ribbon-demon demanded as she walked past Inosuke and his sister, gently slapping both of them in the back of the head with a ribbon. She smelled sickly sweet, like perfume mixed with rotten corpses, reeking of danger. There was power in those ribbons that probably could've sent Inosuke's head flying off his shoulders but Inosuke only scoffed and his sister merely giggled at the gentle taps.

Zenitsu shared a side-ways look with Tanjiro that said he too had expected Inosuke to go flying.

"Gyutaro doesn't eat with chopsticks," the little girl teased as the demoness made her way to the windowsill to perch with the sickle demon who smelled like his sister, if not even more rotten.

"Stop fucking snitching!" The said sickle-demon demanded, looking over his shoulder with a horrified expression that would've been comical had Tanjiro's sanity not been climbing up his throat at the sickening smell of power and death.