~BRAVE~ (Tanjiro X Reader)

The key

"That must be hell. Missing a kid." Inosuke said. He placed his bowl down and waited for me to finish.

"Yes, it's a sad reality we live in. People go missing all the ti- wait a minute..." I paused. Missing people in the red light district was often, but depending on the time differences, they may relate to this thing. I left the bowl to grow cold. Hundreds of missing people's papers filled the boards. "Grab all of them," I demand Inosuke. "We need all of them."

"What the hell? Why?" He asked. He began to rip the papers from their pins on the board. I followed suit.

"If these missing people can relate to our mission, we need to ask these people's relatives directly. First, we need to find time frames. Demons usually eat once a month right? So we need to find those dates on all the papers and make a connection. We are solely relying on the fact that they may be related to demons in some way." I shuffle through the papers to try to look at the dates.

Finally, after collecting all of the papers, we see Tanjiro and Zenitus still arguing about what we should do. They were almost about to punch each other in disagreement but Nezuko was there to stop them. It was around seven in the evening.

"I've got it!" I yelled at them from across the street. They draw their attention to me.

"What do you got?" Zenitsu asked. His hold on Tanjiro's haori grew light and he let go to listen.

"We need to do some organizing," I said. Smiling at the two.

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I gripped my head in frustration. "No no no! This isn't right at all!" I cried.

"But (Y/n), they're all timed as you said," Zenitsu held a stack of papers in his hands and scanned them over. Tanjiro looked over my shoulder at the papers I laid out in the boy's room. Nezuko's body was sprawled over the majority of them in exhaustion, but we could still see the important ones. Inosuke slept on one of the beds. I was surprised he hadn't fallen yet.

"That's not what I'm talking about. Look, there are monthly missing people on this pile, but on this other pile its the same with just slightly different times."

"There's more than one?" Tanjiro asked.

"I mean, Kanao did have her mission here so maybe that's it, but I think we should still keep our eyes peeled." I smiled at our victory, but a slight inconvenience.

"So we'll look around for these families tomorrow?" Zenitsu asked. The papers flew from his hands as he lunged himself onto his bed. "Good! I'm tired." He started to snore and I laughed.

"Nezuko, we should probably head to our own room." I yawned and tried to stand up, but my knees gave out on me. I fell right back down into my spot and Tanjiro laughed at my minor failer.

I was baffled. I mean sure we had walked all day and arrived to the district no later than six in the evening. But not only was I physically drained but mentally too.

Nezuko whipped her head around at the loud sound of a 'thud'. She kicked her legs through the air and rolled around to see both her brother and me.

'No.' her eyes read. She leaned on Zenitsu's bed and started to doze off. I was alone with Tanjiro once more.

"Would you like me to walk you to your room?" He asked me. My attention diverted from Nezuko to her older brother. His smile was soft. I peeked at him from the side before turning my head to hide my blush.

"Ah, no that's okay. I don't want to be a burden. I'm sure you're tired from all of your hard work today." I stayed on the floor, a bit scared to stand up after falling. I started to gather the papers on the floor. It left the room messy.

"(Y/n)?" Tanjiro said. His hand gripped the clothes on my shoulder to grab my attention. The sudden Action made me blush but I had no choice but to look at him.

"Yeah?" I gripped onto the papers tightly in nervousness. Though I didn't know what I was nervous about.

"You ask me to tell you stories all the time but, why don't you share your own?" He asked.

My own stories? Now that I thought about it, the only one who I told my stories to was Nezuko. "Are you sure? It's really late."

Tanjiro's hand gripped my own eagerly. "Absolutely!" The shine in his eye was clear. Even though I was tired, that didn't mean I wanted to say no.

I placed the collected papers down on the floor and leaned on Tanjiro's empty bed. "Hmm. My childhood wasn't exactly exciting. It was only just my brother and I at the house most of the time."

"I'm the same. My family sold charcoal down our mountain. We worked with fire." Tanjiro said.

"Fire? That's so cool! Wait a minute, didn't you say something about your family's new year dance and fire?" I asked. He had mentioned it on the way to my mother's estate two days ago.

"Yes. I had talked with your mom about it while you were gone. She gave me a book about all of the traditional dances and their history, but the dance of the fire god wasn't in there. Would you like to take a look at it?" Tanjiro sat next to me on the floor. I wasn't used to all of the closeness, but my exhaustion prevented me from caring.

"That would be cool I guess. I just know my family's story about our dance. Not where it came from."

Tanjiro nodded his head. "There's surprisingly a lot in there."

"My mother always possesses the weirdest things. Like her soup ladle? I've remembered it since I was a little girl." My eyes sparkle at the fond memories of Diakoku and I getting in trouble for eating the berries in her garden.

"What do you mean?" Tanjiro smiled, tilting his head ever so slightly in curiosity.

"It's kinda weird, but my mother kept all of my brother and I's baby teeth." I grimaced.

"Baby teeth?"

"Yes, Diakoku's set is completed. But I swallowed a lot of mine." I laughed out. "We didn't pull on them or anything, we let them fall on their own."

Tanjiro winced at the misfortune. "You're right, that is weird. Though, my mother was always fond of collecting our hair after it was cut. I thought it was for charity, but when I asked her she said it was a habit. It made me wonder what she would've done with it."

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Original release date: June 14 2020
Days until authors birthday/ special chapter: 3