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There’s a scar on Shinobu’s back- a long one that stretches from her left shoulder blade to her tailbone. All jagged flesh and once-torn edges. From a demon attack many years ago, she explains, when Mitsuri touches it with tentative fingers. Sliced her open from shoulder to sacrum with claws that turned her flesh black with poison. It ruined her uniform, she laughs, but the sound is empty as she tells of stitching her haori back together piece by piece.
They’re at a hot spring, beads of water rolling down the planes of Shinobu’s back, down the length of that twisted scar. They’ll walk back to the Butterfly estate after this, and Mitsuri will pretend that she’s holding Shinobu’s hand so they don’t get lost. That the flush upon her cheeks is from the warm weather and nothing more.
She fans out her fingers across that scar, with its crooked edges and uneven lines, and feels her heart race doubletime, tripletime. Traitorous, that heart is. With its telltale boom-skip as she scrubs the last of the dirt and blood from Shinobu’s hair.
Delicate, gentle, tiny under Mitsuri’s own hands. A butterfly perched by the edge of the hot spring with paper wings and a scar slicing its back in two. The scar is ugly in the same way Mitsuri feels her hair is, her appetite is, her strong arms and powerful legs are.
The difference: Mitsuri learned to love Shinobu’s scar the moment she saw it.
She was envious at first- of the way Shinobu carried herself with grace, of the delicate way she moved, the way she walked as if she were floating, the way Mitsuri could wrap one hand around both of her wrists with ease.
“For your own good,” Her oldest-younger sister had told her, as she helped her stain the pink out of her hair over a basin in the garden. “You’ll never get married otherwise.”
“For your own good.” She had told herself, as her head spun from refusing another meal.
“For your own good.” Shinobu had told her, when they first met. Mitsuri had finished her bowl of rice in seconds, and all Shinobu had done was smile, and fill it for her again.
(Not envy- says that traitorous heart of hers. Would jealousy make your heart skip like that?)
She taps Shinobu on the shoulder- the one opposite to the scar, and turns so Shinobu can return the favour of washing her hair too.
-
She once said she joined the demon slayer corps to find love- a person stronger than her, protective and kind. Just find a matchmaker- they had told her. Don’t be so foolish. Don’t put your life on the line.
Love isn’t that important.
But it is- she thinks, heart beating in her chest, because love is all she has. But it is.
Shallow, they call her- a foolish child. Out of her depth. Love cannot save you, love cannot help you. You will never find it here.
There’s more to it than she tells them- never mentions that creature of the night that descended upon their household, wearing the face of her oldest-younger sister. Doesn’t mention how she- it- had taken their youngest-younger sister in its hands ( claws) and snapped her neck in two. Doesn’t mention how her mother- fortitude and iron will and strength- had crumpled to the ground in fear.
Doesn’t mention how her oldest-younger sister- demon or not- died at her own hands.
They move on as a family- but there will always be two empty seats at the dinner table.
“I joined to find true love!” She says, because it’s easier than telling them that it’s hard to forget the feeling of bone splintering under her bare hands.
There’s a scar on her arm from it. Jagged teeth marks from fangs that weren’t her sisters, but were all in the same instance. They won’t come off, no matter how hard she scrubs at them, how raw she wears the skin.
Find strength and marry into it- so you never have to shatter bone with those hands again.
Mitsuri joined the corps in search of strength- and she found it.
Found it in the anger that scorches behind those bright smiles, behind those gentle fingers. In the fury that burns in the same way ice does, in the same way venom does. Where Mitsuri is filled with love, growing in her heart like vines until it’s almost painful to breathe- Shinobu is filled with anger. It festers and rots her away from the inside, and it’s the most beautiful thing Mitsuri has ever seen.
-
It’s not that she doesn’t see others.
She notices Obanai's quick wit, Kyojuro’s broad shoulders as he wields his sword, Amane’s demure smile as she leads Oyakata-sama into the sunlight.
It’s just that, with Shinobu around, none of them can even come close.
-
“I burned it,” Shinobu flashes the scar on her upper arm, the flesh pulled taut in the way burn scars often are. (Mitsuri has one on her thigh from a spilled oil lamp, so she knows all too well.) “I was distilling something flammable, I wasn’t careful enough.”
It’s no secret that Shinobu deals with poisons- cyanides, mycotoxins, belladonna. There’s a part of the butterfly estate, a part nobody can enter, a garden filled with plants that can kill. A part of the estate where Shinobu reigns. She walks out with baskets and gathers toxins as if they were bouquets for display upon the kitchen table.
Mitsuri watches sometimes- as she does now- while Shinobu strips off the leaves and cuts up the flowerheads, crushing them under her pestle and mortar. In go the wisteria petals, in goes the nightshade, in goes the hemlock. The final product which she bottles up is small, collected from the bottom of her distillery apparatus in tiny vials. Small, but more than enough to kill. There’s something about the way she stares at those vials. Bitter, angry, rotten to the core.
She deals with poisons- and in turn, she has become one of her own.
“Did it hurt?” Mitsuri asks. She isn’t sure if she means the burn scar- or whatever it was that turned Shinobu’s insides to venom.
-
“My sister died.” Shinobu tells her one evening, clutching the edge of that butterfly haori. (Mitsuri always thought it didn’t fit her quite right.) She’s tending the wound on Mitsuri’s side- skewered on the bony horns of a demon- an injury that she will carry with her as scar tissue, that much is sure.
She says nothing, because this is one wound that no salve or ointment can soothe.
“I cannot rest- not until this earth is free from the one that took her from me.” Shinobu is staring at the pattern- butterfly wings, too long for her own fingers. That she never grew enough to fit into. Mitsuri would reach out a hand and press it over that cold, broken heart, if she knew it would do any good.
When Shinobu looks up, there’s something dangerous in her eyes- a scar, a brand, a poison deadly enough to kill thousands.
“Though- No death I can provide will be enough.”
Mitsuri suppresses a shiver- because it feels like the air in her lungs has turned to ice.
-
“why is she so angry?” Mitsuri hears them ask, because they will never understand.
It’s not her place to do so- but if she could, she would tell them as such:
The world has wronged her many times over- and it deserves what it has coming for it.
-
She sees Shinobu with her patients, the slayers that wander into the estate with shattered bones wounds that bleed. Mitsuri is a common visitor herself- because Shinobu told her she was always welcome, always home. The butterfly girls know her by name, know her favourite foods, favourite weather, favourite flower. Favourite part of Shinobu’s face (her eyes, because every other part of her tends to lie).
She sees the way Shinobu smiles at those patients, and it turns her heartbeat rotten.
It’s fake, that smile is. Took her a while to notice, a while to see. She wears it like a costume. A good girl playing the role- the smiling lady of the mansion, with hands that heal and a flower garden blooming outside. Don’t let them see, she must think, don’t let them see those poison words which sit below your tongue. It’s not proper, not ladylike.
Mitsuri knows the feeling all too well- knows it in dyed hair and skipped meals. Knows it in that smile, one she has worn herself all too often. Sometimes they sit side by side in the garden, drinking tea and ignoring the swords that rest at their hips. (Who opened the door and let the masquerade party in?)
“You need to act like a lady.” Her oldest-younger sister had said. “Sit straight, don’t talk, or you’ll never get married.”
She wonders sometimes, what it would be like had she never been born like this, with hands meant to swing a sword and lungs meant to breathe in six different forms. Whether she would marry, raise children, make her family proud. A good wife, a good mother. What is expected of her. Free of those scars, those bite-marks on her arm and the claw marks down her ribcage.
Would her heart still beat so passionately? Would she still wake up each morning to watch the sunset, filled with the joy of being alive?
Would she still know Shinobu- doctor, slayer, apothecary- the butterfly girl with the fake smile and poisons growing in her garden.
She drinks her tea- no need to sit straight, talk as much as you want- and she knows that, with Shinobu around, she could never make her family proud.
-
It’s been week since they’ve seen each other- the demons rest for no man after all. And so they sit up on the roof of the butterfly estate, passing a bottle of some sort of alcohol between them, one which shinobu pulled from the cellar, one they shouldn’t be drinking, but do so anyway.
It’s a warm night, the moon high in a sky that’s stained a deep indigo, and Mitsuri shakes the tension of many days of exertion from her muscles. Up there on the rooftop, Shinobu teaches her how to breathe again.
“it’s from when I was a child,” Shinobu explains, as Mitsuri notices the faded scar upon the skin of her palm. “I tripped in the garden, right onto the pathway. Screamed bloody murder until Kanae came and picked all the pieces of gravel out of my hand.” She laughs, and if she ignores the bottle that sits between them, Mitsuri can almost pretend the flush high on Shinobu’s cheeks is just for her.
Somewhere in the middle, before the crescendo, Shinobu’s laugh fades.
“I always clung to her when I was a child. Always followed her around wherever she went.”
Mitsuri takes those hands (too weak to behead a demon) in her own (too strong for their own good). Doesn’t say a word, just runs a thumb over that scar, where splinters of rock were once buried.
There’s pieces of stone left over, fragments stuck in Shinobu’s heart, where Mitsuri cannot hope to reach them, to pull them free.
So she kisses that scar, kisses the tears from Shinobu’s cheeks, and then kisses her lips, because she’s never wanted anything more- and she hopes it’s enough to at least distract her from the pain.
-
Mitsuri knows about the scar on Shinobu’s back, on her arm, on her hand. About the one under her chin from a demon’s claw, the ones on her ankles from where she was torn at by thorns, the one on her stomach, where she sliced herself open to remove a projectile under her skin mid-battle.
She knows her anger, her fury, that rotten heart, which Mitsuri loves with all of her own overflowing one.
For someone who has searched for love for so long, Mitsuri doesn’t know what to do with herself, now that she knows she has found it.
Love takes the form of her butterfly girl. Monarch, painted lady, swallowtail. Takes the form of both the paper thin wings that crumble under the gentlest touch, and the tongues that drink from poison flowers for breakfast.
Love takes the form of scars from spine to shoulderblade, poison gardens and rooftop talks.
And oh, how Mitsuri falls.