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Blood downs its face, thick and wallowing at first, soiling the corpse’s upper lip in crusty beads before pouring down the incline of human snout. The volume increases, ballooning at neck like rain, blooming across the front of a shirt crunchy with oxidized rust. The eyes are dry and stick to the branch that pokes it, eyelids refusing to close. Everything stinks of decomposition, discreet and flat and languid.
The smell of loss. The smell of death, more obviously. Spread by the howling wind, which has for now calmed to sing a quiet soprano.
A socked foot pokes it in the meaty side and something not so much rolls as falls out with a squelching plop; the foot immediately rescinds its intrusion. “It’s been here awhile.”
The earth swallows its bounty kindly; the sword plunges into the newly formed hill and listens to prayers whispered fondly and requiems doted over. If the metal could grieve, it would.
He straightens and examines his nails, yellowed with dirt and scuffed from scrapes and speckled with blood, and frowns.
“That’s the last of the squad, I think.”
“I’m starving!” The second boy slams into his side with gusto and oomph.
“Show some more respect for the dead,” the first shrieks as he stumbles into the base of the hill and immediately recedes with a snappish flinch, “You’ll get cursed!”
The trees part before them, whistling with flowery laughter at the boys who step through the branches. One trips and falls headfirst into a trunk. Leaves crunch underfoot with tired sighs as a red eyed rabbit wanders under a speckled bush, notes their presence and scurries away.
Looking up at the magenta horizon, patterned comfortably with the dappled shadows of leaves against fragile eyes, Zenitsu sighs and sags. “The sunrise is so nice.” He rubs the hilt of his sword with an anxious self-absorption, the weathered gold reassuring. “What do you think?”
Finding his companion trapped in persistent tendrils of ivy, he turns to the sun and groans - long, drawn out, frustrated - then turns back around with a self-deprecating manner to begrudgingly assist in a freeing of peak idiocy.
“Your leg is kind of an issue,” he notes.
“The great king of the mountain will not be stopped by a scratch!” Inosuke screeches, takes a step forward, and promptly falls on his face with a belligerent slap. A hand claws at the air but sinks sheepishly as numerous ascensions of a failing nature serve to embarrass the great king of the mountain further, and he does not move, and Zenitsu curls his lip.
“Seriously,” he leans on his knees and pulls him up by the wrist, “I can’t hear any wisteria houses nearby.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Inosuke chugs proudly, and then shrieks when his foot drags over a particularly tall tree root, yet continues with a strained, “I’m the best there is!”
Zenitsu pats him on the deranged head pitifully. “Let’s get you calmed down.”
The wind sighs, starting to pick up outside.
The clearing is dry and wide, ground covered in a thin layer of what seems like thick dust that puffs up in agitation, makes him sneeze when he settles down. Zenitsu rolls up his sleeves, pats himself down and emerges with a roll which he puts to the side before unbuttoning his shirt - black and glossy and bloodstained - saying, “Take off your shoes and lie down. It might hurt.”
Inosuke’s leg is indeed a problem. It sits at an odd angle. Additionally, there is heavy bleeding starkly visible through the black fur of his sock that, when the sock is removed, originates at what looks to be an angry red line of bleeding which circumvents the lower ankle.
The bandages unravel gracefully at the tips of his fingers, and break into pieces with a pleasant number of snaps as he bites down on the strip decisively. It tightens in place with some strange sticky stuff, plastered all alongside the lower leg, and wraps thickly about the ankle before overlaying just as thickly around the arch of the other’s foot. Zenitsu gives the wad a little pat before working to tie up his own lacerations. “Don’t scratch it,” he says in response to a dirty frown. “We’ll be here for a couple days.”
“Lame,” returns a sullen sneer. Inosuke immediately sits up and scratches his ankle.
“I would wash it, but there’s no water,” Zenitsu states simply, muffled slightly by the gauze between his teeth. “Don’t get it infected, please.” He scrapes off some residual blood from his cheek and frowns as it sticks, and works at it energetically as Inosuke leans forward and licks it off in what appears to be assistance.
Zenitsu turns around with speed to impress a snail, tense and rigid and unmoving. Laughs nervously.
“What?”
“To stop the bleeding,” Inosuke says quite reasonably and leans back.
The wind loathes being confused, is nothing without direction, and this odd turn of events, this detour, has made it particularly agitated.
“Oh.” An awkward pause. “I see.”
“You mad? ”
“I’m too tired to be mad,” comes the stilted answer. “But that’s weird.”
“It works,” he grunts simply, and goes back to aggressively scratching his ankle. Zenitsu touches the side of his face, a twitch of thick eyebrows breaking out into a frown that mars his fair complexion, and wipes off the spit as any rational person would do.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” He asks in his most professional voice. The sun falls in shards of star shine, something he can more taste in the air than see, like rich candy. Inosuke looks at him (or so Zenitsu suspects; the dead blue gaze is rather unnerving, with no shine or facial muscles or anything to indicate any sort of emotion whatsoever.) Inosuke looks at him for one moment, and then another.
A growl warps the air; Inosuke grows very stiff as Zenitsu blinks, correctly sensing an oncoming outburst of temper. He ruffles around in his jacket and finds a napkin which unwraps to reveal a tantalizing ball of rice that is proffered cautiously, as if feeding a wild animal, to deescalate the situation. The boar doesn’t move, and Zenitsu presumes that his attention wavers from him to his ankle to the food that he so desperately craves, or something.
It disappears in one quick go. Inosuke crosses his arms and turns and huffs, as if having received what was originally his, and Zenitsu feels the faint, vaguely irritating impression of giving tribute to a condescending empire.
The sun pirouettes into the west and baby blue transubstantiates into deep, despondent black. There’s tossing and turning and audible sighs, loud and dramatic, more than once.
“Shut up,” Inosuke finally yowls as Zenitsu flips over once again and cries noisily.
“I’m scared,” comes the caterwaul, and multiple sniffs of a snotty nature. “You have to protect me. I don’t want limbs to be picked apart by those cannibals, promise me you’ll bury me and my severed fingers and tell everyone I love them and maybe send Nezuko-chan my h - ”
“ Get off! ”
Even in the dim light it is easy to make out the deep-seated cowardice in Zenitsu’s bone structure, the skin made out to be a comedic dead grey under the clawing canopy of branches and he worms forward, tentacles wrapping around every bit of stability he can find as he moans and groans ceaselessly without even pausing to consider taking a hot breath. Neither harsh diatribes nor physical means can make the guy shut up for little but a second.
With little but a vague recollection of boars and sleeping in piles of safety, Inosuke rolls over, smothering the source of disruption. Blessed silence commences.
He nearly falls asleep to the quiet coos of doves and giggles of grass.
“Your dumb mask stinks,” Comes a complaint, though muffled. “I hate it.”
Expended of all patience, the boar head flies into a nearby tree where it rolls to the ground with a hollow thud. It then walks its comfortable way back to between the arms of its owner, who hugs it much like a baby would hug a tattered, utterly dilapidated blanket.
“Good night,” Zenitsu grovels, a leg somehow thrown over his back restraining most movement, reply a cacophony of immediate snores. Slowly, he stretches his elbow out where it’s pinned to the ground and faces the sky, free arm reluctantly on his colleague’s cramped back, and painstakingly fluffs the haori over the both of them and layers atop of that his shirt before relaxing.
He closes his eyes.
And the wind blows, beating against the trees like wings in a hurricane, its heart uncertain yet steady and firm.
(It is much later that he wakes in some glorious position only the purely asleep can find, awkward and close and warm. That despite the discomfort of sweaty clothes and oily faces and the dreadful morning breath, it’s hard to budge without some semblance of regret.
Let him sleep longer - eyelids flickering, gently, gently. Remain in the last of his dreams.)
The wind's prior confusion is gone, replaced with a cozy stillness to the air, dressed with pleasant hints of petrichor.
“Onwards, minion!” Inosuke cackles, thrashing against his back, an fist thrust powerfully into the air as if he was an imperial soldier galloping into battle atop a valiant horse.
“This was a mistake.” Zenitsu says, benighted.
The trek is long and tedious, an unforgiving uphill slope laid with bumpy pitfalls and flattering rocks, and it is only all the more tiresome with an uncooperative companion. Zenitsu trips and almost falls many more than one vexing, harrowing time, the only evidence being a variety of creatively shaped stains which make him appear like a scuffed sack of angry potatoes.
“Are we there yet?” Inosuke says with a healthy dose of contempt, pulling on his hair as if they were reins that would increase their acceleration. “You were way faster the other day!”
“That’s completely unrelated!” Zenitsu squawks, tear squeezing out the corner of a narrowed eye, attempting to regain his balance and composure. The weight of the world that rests atop his shoulder teeters and totters like an academically unstable seesaw, and Zenitsu bemoans his agonizing duties as a medevac carrier. “Maybe if you were nicer , I would!”
Abruptly Inosuke stills, so abruptly that Zenitsu certains he was knocked in the head.
“Tanjirou,” he whines to fill the silence, “Lend me your strength,” and then releases a long yowl of horror listing the litany of stressors that ache his back muscles and his arms and oh man his legs are burning up right now with exhaustion. Followed up with a howling, “ Nezuko-chan! ”
“Shut up,” Inosuke says with little heat, and points to the yawning mountain range long ago and far away, hazy and shy with indigo distance. “Look over there.”
Zenitsu obliges him.
The sun is a warm orange, a foggy canary-red lining the ends of the sky, and hot pink streaks across the canvas in soothing patterns not unlike the embellishments of a worn out kimono. It looks like how a mandarin tastes, or a hot bowl of noodles in a howling winter, the warmth of a hand where things look grim; small segments of sunshine bursting at the seams.
“Oh,” he breathes, staring at the sunset, the epitome of childish wonder.
Leaning down his shoulder with an awkward shuffle, Inosuke says, “It looks a lot like.” Pauses, to readjust his positioning, and then a gruff specification. “Like you care about it.” His flat tone leaves much to be debated, and he coughs as his companion stays silent.
“It’s beautiful,” Zenitsu smiles.
There is a warmth to his expression that Inosuke had not noticed before.
He falls, nearly toppling off if not grabbing onto shoulders like one grabs a bicycle’s handlebars. This evokes Zenitsu's ire and the screaming starts up again as they teeter back and forth in the grass, lurching back into the comfortable space between the line of sun and shadow marking the boundary between forest curious and forest serious.
They disappear into the tall weeds swaying side to side, bickering.
The quiet of their absence: sweet. The opposite of tumultuous, nothing if not confused.
Filled with clarity.
The daisies note that nevermore do they return.