I will always follow

Less than

Every month Giyuu would take his kids to the graveyard and let them help him clean the growth from around the gravestones, but once a year, Giyuu would find a moment to go on his own. Every July, Giyuu would climb down to the nearby town and would work on restoring the gravestones from sunup to sundown. The girls, and now also the boys, would visit the graveyard later, and they would go to the festival and stay up late, but he wanted to pay special respects to those who were directly under his care.

Against popular belief, Giyuu did not have a disproportionate amount of work. Most of the past Water Hashira had been buried next to all the other demon slayers that had passed away doing their duty, in the graveyard that Oyakata-sama supported and the kakushi kept clean and tidy. But in the town next to the water estate there were three special graves that were under Giyuu's care. Once he died, if his body was recovered, Giyuu would also lay there, next to those graves of people that he had only read about.

First and foremost, his mission was to protect the town and those who live there, and he would, even after death.

He started with the monument to the far right, he kneeled by its side and cleaned the growth of ivy and grass that had grown at its base. He made sure there were no roots damaging the stone and scraped moss and fungi with utmost care. The old carvings in kanji read 'Iku Family' in the front, the long list of dead relatives was carved into the left side, of those, Giyuu only knew about the last two: Iku Kasumi and Iku Sakihime.

Kasumi's wobbly art was still pasted in some walls of the Water Estate, she was in the watermelon plants around the estate and in the old recipes with rhubarb that nobody else knew about. Kasumi was barely spoken about in the old parchment rolls but most of the information he had about alphas was relating to her.

Sakihime was everywhere else, her awful calligraphy littered most of the secret parchment rolls and books in the library of the Water Estate, her strong coconut scent stubbornly clung to the ancient sheets of paper, even after so many years, and her doodles tarnished the margins of her sister's recipe book.

Giyuu could almost imagine them as Suki and Aiko, painfully similar and incredibly different at the same time. He could also imagine them as the Kocho sisters, Sakihime as Shinobu before her sister died, moody and annoying but always worried for everyone else and Kasumi as Kanae, gentle and happy and naturally good at everything.

The monument that lay beside it was also a haka, a family grave, but to the left there were only three names engraved: Adachi Yori, Adachi Yuuki and Adachi Yamane. The first Water Breathing user and his family, the one that had made the promise that Giyuu was still trying to fulfill. Yuuki had also been an avid writer and even when very valuable information was hidden in the outrageous amount of entries he had made, most of it were the ramblings of a teenager deeply in love... and probably in the depths of a strong heat.

He was also one of the few kitsune of whom there were any records and Giyuu had committed every single page to memory. Maybe, one day he could make good use of that information that seemed useless at that moment, that was useless to demon slaying but probably not to marriage... but Giyuu was not one to think about those things.

In the third and last grave there lay only one person: Hasegawa Kano. There was not much information about him in the Water Estate, only a couple of cooking instructions, a rating in the cookbook and the musings of Yuuki in his books. There were no records that reflected a relationship or a mating bond between them, there were no records of Kano living in the Water Estate previously to Yuuki's death or even after it, only one letter in perfect calligraphy that was dated to five years after Yuuki had been killed that was an apology, a goodbye and a love letter at the same time. That lone letter was the only information Giyuu had about what came after the first Water Hashira's death, about the rest of Yamane's life and about the way the world had kept turning even after everything seemed to have been shaken out of place.