Stone Cold | Tanjirou Kamado (old version)

11. The duty of a sibling

«That wasn't how it happened», Ayaka thought, once she got rid of her drowsiness and processed that had only been a dream.

Or was it? It had been so long since she thought about it, details escaped from her grasp, like birds flying away through a small gap in a window left half open, wind rising along the beating of their wings and scratching her with their beaks and claws as they escaped. There was no way to make them stay, to close the window, but she didn't want to close it either, because maybe this way they would leave her alone for good, but they always came back... One way or another, they always came back.

It didn't matter how accurate the details were, if sometimes she had the sword on the left or right hand, if sometimes Takeshi grabbed her chin or caressed her hair, those details held no importance. The end was always the same, with his head on the floor and the words that came out of his mouth echoing on her mind.

That both of them were drowning in the end brought a certain peace, because at least Ayaka knew that if she drowned she wasn't alone while doing so. But Takeshi was dead, she was the one to kill him, and there was no stone to grab onto to stay afloat in such a dark and immense sea, so she'd have to drown alone.

It had been a while since she felt like drowning, or maybe because she had gotten used to it, but she supposed it was Yuu's fault, for stirring up that way a past she didn't want to remember. Yuu was to blame for a lot of things.

«Kobayashi», she suddenly thought. «Kobayashi is to blame for a lot of things»

Maybe Takeshi had been crazy, maybe he had been rotten to the bone, but he hadn't deserved to die, wasn't he just like her? Hadn't they been raised in the same village? The same child songs, the same stories to listen to before bed the same games to play with friends, then what was it that made them different?

«He turned into a demon», the deepest part of her mind whispered into her ear.

«What does that matter?», she thought back. Nezuko's existence threw all of that out the window, maybe he could have been someone like her, but his head had been torn apart from his body before she discovered that.

«Being close to Tanjirou for so long is taking its toll on me», she supposed in a bitter tone, because she knew demons didn't deserve any sympathy, and even then she was still letting all those stupid thoughts wander through her mind.

Leaning on the doorframe with a sigh in between tired and exasperated, Ayaka opened the door to find herself face to face with who she had correctly supposed was behind it.

"You don't look so well, do you want me to call the doctor?" That was the first thing Tanjirou said when looking at her more thoroughly, eyes stopping on trembling fingers and the way her head appeared to rumble at the beating of her heart.

For once, Ayaka admitted on her head she must have looked quite bad or horribly terrible. Both of them worked.

She could imagine herself, close to fainting on the door and skin two tones paler than it usually was, gray eyebags and a thin shining sweat layer like a cherry on top.

It was surprising Tanjirou didn't take her for a demon, so she supposed she, at the very least,must have looked human.

She was in such a fantastic condition for him to break into her room in the middle of the night.

Completely great, totally perfect.

"Do you need something?" She asked instead of giving him an answer, deciding to skip that part of the conversation all together. She tried to appear casual and collected to keep away the reality that she was a blink away from collapsing.