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They find the bodies in the morning, long after Rui had tidied up (in a sense) and went on his way.
There wasn’t much left of the family to identify them by. Muzan had watched with a soft smile and eyes harder than diamonds as Rui had taken a knife to his father and mother — his fake father and mother. Their blood was red and their flesh stank and it tasted heavenly, sliding down his throat and settling deep into his gut, but they weren’t his parents.
They weren’t his true parents, the mother who’d embraced him and cried or the father who’d stared at him before smiling brighter than the sun when Rui had sat up for the first time since Muzan cured him. They were just two weak and selfish things that looked like his parents, once, and nobody would know which bit of flesh or splatter of blood was his or hers when Rui was done with these fakes.
“All this was your parents’ fault for not accepting what you’ve become,” Muzan tells him when he’s done, kneeling on the tatami irrevocably stained red. “Be proud of your strength.”
He is, he wants to say. He can walk without stumbling and coughing, can be like all the other little boys and girls whose laughter echoed in the house and left Rui yearning, and he is strong. Rui lifts his head so he can say so, see the pride in Muzan’s eyes that would no doubt be reflected back…
Except he doesn’t, because Muzan isn’t his parents either. Only his parents ever looked at him with pride (mingled with pity, mingled with self-loathing and sadness) and for all that Muzan saved him, he is not Rui’s mother or father.
They’re out there, Rui tells himself when he leaves the house and its stench of lies behind. They’re waiting for me to be their little boy again.
Rui learns, much later, that they burned the fakes’ bodies and tore down the house while priests blessed the soil. He smiles at that, then laughs — and if he slits someone’s throat for asking him why he’s crying, it’s not like anyone will ever know.
There was, after all, no need to mourn what had been fake.
He settles in a town two nights’ walk away from his (fake) hometown, with a couple whose laugh-lines and body shape match the memories in his head. They have (had) a son almost his age, Rui learns from whispers in the town, a sickly little boy who was sent away in a last-ditch attempt to cure him.
They’re so happy to have him back — and on his own two feet, even! — that the mother embraces him and cries. The father stares before smiling brighter than the sun, patting his head with a hand that shakes too much for it to be all that comforting or comfortable, and Rui snuggles into their embrace with his own little smile.
“My precious son,” his mother cries over and over again. “We’ll never leave you again.”
“I’m back,” Rui says, a little muffled. It’s loud enough that even his father has tears in his eyes when he peeks out of his mother’s arms though, so he doesn’t need to repeat himself.
This is his real family, his true parents. It doesn’t matter that the house isn’t the right size and the villagers are not the ones Rui knows, or that his father smokes on the veranda when he never used to smoke at all and his mother’s hands are coarse against his cheeks, instead of soft and smooth like his memories told him they should be.
They feed him and pamper him, don’t question why he lingers inside the house during the day and watches the moon before he’s shooed off to bed.
Rui pretends to eat what his parents give him and politely vomits it out into the neighbour’s shrubs. It’s close enough to the sewerage system that nobody questions the stench, just like how his parents are too busy sleeping to ever notice Rui hunting for actual food.
It’s perfect, for all that he’ll never be like the other kids in the village. His parents think he’s just too attached to them to leave the house proper, and it’s a truth (delusion) Rui’s all too happy to stick to.
It’s perfect for all of six weeks, until two stern-faced police interrupt their loving family dinner. A travelling salesman had spotted their son crouched in an alleyway at night, the police tell his parents, and Rui turns big eyes and a wobbly, pouting lip on his mother.
His parents have provided for him for so long. Surely they’ll protect him from this horrible, baseless rumours.
His parents talk in hushed whispers with the police until they leave, then urge Rui to finish eating like nothing had happened. They hadn’t believed the police — had protested, in fact, with voices that sounded distressed enough — but they move their futons to either side of his after dinner.
“We don’t want anything happening to you,” his mother says with a trembling smile and shifting eyes.
“Let your mother and I protect you,” his father says right after, in a rush of words Rui almost doesn’t understand.
They mean well, he knows. They’re just trying to protect him because they think he spends his nights asleep, like other normal children.
It’s fine the first night, when he feigns sleep in his mother’s embrace and keeps his teeth carefully clear of her throat. It’s fine the second night, when he curls his hands into fists so his claws don’t sink into his father’s arms.
It’s the third night, when his mother reads him a story about a hunter and a rabbit, that the mention of blood makes him scratch at his mother’s arm — but when he looks into her eyes, there’s only fear and a horrible, dark understanding.
Rui almost chokes on a stringy bit of her arm when someone finally hears his mother’s screams and begins hammering on the door, but it’s not like he’ll die from choking. Not like his fake mother’s fake love, all gone in the face of self-interest as she curses him with her dying breath, or his fake father’s fake bravery, which disappeared once he got a good look at Rui's face.
They were all fake in the end. Children lashed out and had accidents all the time, so why were they calling him a monster for his reaction?
So he had sharp claws and dark red sclera and blue pupils when his bloodlust had overpowered his reason. So what? They hadn’t cared about his lilac hair when theirs was all black, so why should these changes matter?
“You were the ones who failed me,” Rui tells his fake mother’s punctured eyeball. “It’s all your fault.”
It doesn’t do anything but ooze something weird and pinkish-white, but that’s all right — he doesn’t want to hear their fake words, anyway.
There isn’t enough time to clean up after himself when he’s done punishing the fakes and whetting his appetite, but it doesn’t matter. These parents were fake, the village was fake, and there was no use in crying over these severed, fake bonds.
His next set of parents don’t have a son, according to local gossip, but they’re so desperate for one that they’ve raised their daughter as a son anyway. It’s the sort of behaviour that Rui can’t wrap his head around, but the woman’s voice sounds so much like his memories that he finds himself following her home.
She doesn’t notice him until a man that looks nothing like Rui’s father asks, “Who’s that?”
Rui stands by the door, hands carefully tucked into his sleeves, and peeks at them through his fringe. His first impression of the man is that he’s not exactly well-fed, but he’d make for a decent meal if he doesn’t kick up a fuss.
Already, he’s readying himself to leap forward and snap the man’s neck — until the woman gives him a once-over and whispers, “Dear, I don’t think any boy with parents wouldn’t be home when it’s this late.”
Rui pauses, gaze assessing. The man licks his lips, takes a step towards him, and kneels so that Rui doesn’t have to crane to see his face.
“Do you have parents?” the man asks in a thin, trembling voice. “Do you — do you want us to be your parents?”
His parents didn’t pick him up from the streets (or let him follow them home, to be more precise), but the love and hope and sincerity makes Rui swallow louder than he usually would.
“You could have an older brother,” the woman says, when it’s been silent too long, “or an older sister, if you don’t want an older brother. Whatever you want, child.”
My name is Rui, he wants to say, but what comes out is a hoarse, “Will you love me and protect me?”
“Of course,” they say almost in sync.
“Mommy, I’ll do whatever he wants too,” a small, hopeful voice says from behind a half-open door.
It’s not his true family, but if they’re offering a little safe haven when the search has been so long and arduous…
Well. He’s always wanted to know what it’d be like to have a sister who’ll protect him too, and they all look happy enough to have him.
They give him a room and put more food in his bowl than all three of theirs combined. There are new stories to listen to and an extra pair of hands to cuddle him when he’s staring up at the moon. It’s everything he wanted, even if he knows it’s not right, and there are moments when he almost thinks that these, perhaps, are his true parents.
Except, one week in, Rui hears his sister complain about how he never plays with her. His mother tries to take him out shopping and send him to school during the day, and no amount of tantrum-throwing or begging makes her change her mind.
“You can’t stay at home like this all the time,” she scolds him. “What if something happens to us one day? You have to know how to do things on your own too, or we’ll worry for you!”
Worry for him? When he was scared of being burned in the sun and other people realizing that he wasn’t human their real son?
“You said you’d love me. You said you’d protect me.”
“I don’t want a brother like you!” his fake older sister yells. “Mommy, make him go away!”
Rui looks up into his mother’s — the fake’s, the food’s — eyes, but there’s only suspicion and disgust and what might be fear.
Parents weren’t meant to be like that. Mothers and sisters, in particular, weren’t meant to be like that.
It turns out that the family, for all the eccentricities in raising their daughter as a son and adopting a stranger as their new son, are well-known and well-loved in the village. There’s a literal river of blood by the time everyone’s learned their place and gone away, shrieking for someone to save them.
It’s funny, really. Rui’s certain he saw a couple throw their child at him so they could escape (not that they managed to), and they looked alike enough that they were likely blood-related. His fake father had taken one look at the guts crammed into Rui’s mouth, then turned around and ran away instead of protecting his family — or even checking to see if the fake mother was alive (which she wasn’t, because it was her guts in his mouth, but whatever).
So what did that mean? Did none of them have true parents or children? Were they all fake, and it was a service for Rui to expose and snap those ugly bonds?
Maybe it was like Muzan said. They couldn’t accept him — couldn’t even accept each other, human and blood-related as they were — so in the end, his parents meant nothing.
After all, they were all fake anyway. His memories, his longing, the tears in those first fake’s eyes and the words those first fakes said — if they weren’t true, they wouldn’t hurt.
Rui wonders, sometimes, if God really existed. It’s hard not to when his true parents had once prayed for a God to cure his body, or when he passes through towns and sees priests chanting nonsense at the top of their lungs.
If there was a God out there, then why hadn’t they cured him earlier? Why didn’t that God give his parents, who had loved and protected him up until his body became whole again, the ability to stay with Rui?
Didn’t Rui matter to God?
Or was Muzan God, and what he took was payment for Rui’s deepest wish?
He’s careful not to think too hard about whether Muzan really cured him, not after pain screams through his body and a deep, malicious chuckle rippled through his thoughts one time. He’s grateful (as much as a demon can be) for his new lease on life (or whatever this night-locked, blood-infested existence is). It’d be perfect, he thinks, if he had parents who loved him and protected him, who would tell him he did good in exposing all the ugly lies in all those fake, broken families.
If God was real and he was Muzan, if the price for his healthy, blood-dependent body was his true parents — if being a demon meant that he could see all the lies in the world, and that meant no family would ever be the same as his fading, crumbling memories…
Rui stares down at his hands, gaze raking over the dried flecks of blood beneath his chipped nails, and presses his lips together.
Health and loneliness, or death and peace?
I’m here, aren’t I? Rui asks himself over the sacrifice he would make the perfect mother out of. If I try a little harder, if they worked a little harder, what would be impossible with my strength?
He could accept what he’d become. He was proud of his strength, and soon there would be a Mother and Father and Older Brother and Older Sister who would be proud too, when he’d made them.
If God was fake and the world was fake, then only Rui and the things he created were true.
I’ll get them back. I’ll get them to love me again.
He closes his eyes to the joyous (agonized) screams of his new (found, fake) family, and laughs until he cries. This time, nobody asks him why — which is the way it’s meant to be.
If he must live in hell, then his true parents should be here with him — together.