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Tamayo is a pomegranate, cultivated high on gnarled branches and held to the tree by a thin, inundated twig. She is insect-mottled skin wrapped thick around a million festering hearts that push against her skin, begging for the eventuality that gravity will split her against the ground.
She is sure of only one thing—her family is dead.
It happened while she was out helping a man who had been attacked by an animal. The wounds on her family match the ones she saw on the man. She’s spent hours checking them for signs of life, clutching at their bodies when she finds none, checking again. When she gets home, they are still warm, and they’re cold when she leaves, clinging to her in the redness of her clothes and the stickiness of her skin.
A temple, she thinks, walking in a dream to wherever her feet might take her. She will need to arrange funeral services. She needs to find a hunter to slay the beast. A doctor.
She pauses in the middle of a bridge she knows but doesn’t recognize.
No, not a doctor.
The moon reflects her sorrow, white light dancing like mercury in the river below. Earlier it had rained in the mountains, and now the river is swollen from it, raging.
She could jump.
It seems like a good idea.
She reaches for the splintering wood railing when a hand stops her. It belongs to a man who she hadn’t noticed before, his grip as cold and unbreakable as stone.
“What has happened?” His voice is sympathetic, but his eyes glow like cinders against the darkness.
Tamayo opens her mouth to find that even her voice has left her.
“I see. So you were attacked.”
She is immensely relieved that he understands. It seems as if the world is swirling in on itself, everything she’s ever known melting together into something monstrous. She doesn’t remember her way home, so she points in the direction she came from. “An animal.” Her voice is small as it comes back to her, fleeting. “My family.”
The man shakes his head. “An animal did not attack your family.” He tells her of demons, flesh-eating monsters that stalk the nights in search of the weak and helpless. People like the man she’d gone out to heal, he says. Like her husband. Like her baby. And they cannot die but at the hands of another demon.
She feels numb. Angry. Powerless.
“Would you like to get revenge?” he asks. His eyes glow like fanned embers, making it so she can barely see the pointed smile that’s slithered across his face. The river roars in her ears, distant.
She does want revenge.
So he plucks her from her tree. He holds her in his hand so that she will never feel the ground, crushing her between his fingers until she bursts from herself, running down his arms, becoming something new and unrecognizable.
“Go,” he bids her. “Devote yourself to becoming stronger.”
And she does.
Yushiro is a child when he meets her. He has a weak constitution, so they take him to her often, to her little hospital with its blinds shut tight, so that the sun cannot spoil her medicines. The pungent salves she dispenses make other children say cruel things to him, running when he approaches. Yushiro doesn’t mind. His body never well enough to play the games they like, anyway.
To him, she is a god flown from the heavens, so gentle and beautiful that when she is in a room there is nothing else. Medical tomes line her shelves. Yushiro picks one up one day, and she goes through it with him, finger scanning the words as she reads. Her smile is delicate and tragic at once, reminding him of slowly-burning incense. It flickers across her face as she explains the meanings of words, growing when he recognizes a plant, fading when he fails to.
Yushiro begins studying medicine just to have something to share with her.
His body is his ally until it isn’t. Being weak is what brings him to her. It allows him to study without temptation. It’s what brings him to her again when he’s sixteen and his family no longer has the means to take care of his failing body, placing him in her care permanently.
For years, his days have been bridged by dreams of being with her, together in her hospital. This is not what he dreamed.
Still, she comes to wipe his brow when he’s feverish. She lifts his head so he can drink, and when his condition worsens, she reads to him like when he was a child. She dries his tears when the nostalgia mixes confusingly with his sorrow and the yearning is too much to bear.
One-by-one, the days wear him away. Yushiro convinces himself that there is no better way to die than here, under her care. Sorrow clings to her in the moroseness of her movements as his condition worsens, her voice growing even softer, barely a whisper.
Maybe she will remember him. He hopes she will.
He wakes one night to her in his room. He knows it’s night because he feels the breeze from the open window, hears the songs of crickets and frogs on the wind. She sits beside him, a whale oil lamp flickering shadows across her face.
“I must leave this place tonight,” she says, sounding regretful. “I would like you to go with me, but you cannot come as you are now.”
She tells him that she is a demon. She expects it to surprise him, but she has always been more than human to him. He thinks, what is demon but another name for god?
She says that she could make him one, too.
God or demon, monster or ghost. Yushiro would become anything if it meant he could be with her. It’s all he’s ever wanted.
Consuming humans is like a potent drug. In the beginning, when Tamayo is weak, she needs little. As she grows more powerful, the amount she needs increases proportionally. Hunger is irrelevant. She must become stronger to defeat the demon that killed her family, and the only way is to consume. Muzan taunts her with the idea of a blue flower, but she cannot find a way to produce it. Her progress is slow and fruitless.
Other demons provide a short-term solution. They’re a more efficient source of fuel, but if she’s not careful the blood within them will destroy her from the inside out. She expects it to work like a poison: by giving herself small doses, she will build up an immunity, until she can consume demons like she would a human.
The hypothesis proves incorrect. Her body never develops a resistance.
Thus, her method becomes to first strengthen her body using humans, and then strengthen her blood using demons. She is used to research and experimentation. Framing her own strength in such terms allows her to get absorbed in the process of building it.
The breath users change everything.
Life with Tamayo is peaceful, for the most part. They live town-to-town, staying only as long as they need, changing their faces every time they move. She has brought him because she needs an assistant. He’s proven himself smart. Capable. Willing is a word she uses, but Yushirō knows its meaning: he is pliant in her hands, eager to please. It isn’t an assistant she needs, but a servant, so Yushirō dresses himself in servitude.
It is peaceful. Relatively.
Working as doctors lets them live close to humans, providing them with a source of blood and bodies. “Anything more is meaningless.” Tamayo says this frantically at times, like it’s herself she’s reminding. “We need people with more nutrients. These ones will get us nowhere.”
When the villagers come in with their shallow injuries and mundane illnesses, she treats them with the same featheriness that she had once treated him, back when he was her patient. Yushiro hates them for it.
Occasionally, someone will come from outside of the village. Tamayo is especially hospitable to these people. They get their own rooms and extra portions for meals, and she checks up on them often, asking questions about their lives. Many are merchants, while others are travelers who encountered misfortune on the way to their destination.
The rest, usually, are the demon slayers. That is when the peace falls from them, scattering about their feet like the pages of a book that was never bound.
She loves the breath users. The techniques they’ve come up with to defeat demons are fascinating—medical anomalies that she struggles to understand. Breath is only possible by training the body extensively, from muscles to organs to the senses themselves. It’s the result of humans fighting their own biology until they finally reach a form that approaches demonic.
She loves the breath users. They are delightfully nutritious.
“The demon slayers once saved someone very important to me,” she tells them, although the story changes every time. A cousin. A friend. A parent. Yushiro, she says once, but learns not to. The boy cannot lie convincingly.
They stay with her for days. Weeks. Months, even. If they suspect her, they are subtle about it, calling for her when the sun is out and leaving their blinds wide open.
But illusions are her specialty. She lets them see what they want and the moment passes.
It isn’t until they’ve said their goodbyes that she comes for them.
If she can help it, she prefers to eat them in their prime, so Yushiro hides her as she opens her skin, releasing the poison trapped under it. Her blood perfumes the air, dying it in vibrant colors that paint swirling patterns and images, memories mixing with needs with promises of fulfillment. They leave the world peacefully, never knowing they’ve passed.
If she can help it.
A demon’s sadism is like a tide. Sometimes the waves reach up so far that she cannot but give herself up to it, letting it do to her body as it pleases. It bids her shed her cover, to show herself to the demon slayers so that they can see her for what she is. Sharp features. Arms exposed, clawed-through, blood dripping down and then up, dissolving into the air, transforming into cloying smoke that surrounds her with dreams come to life. Nightmares. Her rage. Her desire.
They try to fight her, but humans are so susceptible to poisons, and she has gotten so good at creating them. A man can only go so long without oxygen, a breath user without breathing. Swords cut through illusions of herself, and even when they do reach her, Tamayo’s blood is corrosive, consuming everything it touches. She splashes it on their hands so they can’t hold their swords, drips it in their eyes and pushes her fingers inside their mouth, letting her blood run down their throats and dissolve their innards.
Seeing them die is sad but she has no choice. She has someone she must defeat, after all.
One day, she pauses in the middle of a hunt. She must defeat someone, but who?
It’s been so long that she’s forgotten.
Yushiro adores her at all times. He adores her absorbed in research. He adores her covered in soil, having failed yet again to make the sun rise in the west and set in the east. It’s been more than a century and she still hasn’t given up the fool’s errand Muzan’s sent her on. He adores that about her, too. He adores her smile when she sees something beautiful, and the creases on her face as she mourns a patient delivered too late.
He adores the peace as well as the madness.
Madness had always been within her, stretching her thin, emerging only in flashes. After she starts trying to remember, it gets worse. She bares her teeth as she smashes furniture and shelves of medicine. She leaves long gashes in the walls, on the ceiling, through the tatami. He approaches to stop her and she tears him to pieces like a cheap toy, leaving him scattered across the ground. It’s only after she destroys him that she remembers herself.
“Yushiro.” Her voice is hushed, thick with despair. “I’m so sorry, Yushiro. I didn’t see you.”
She gathers him up and puts him back together, shaking. “You can’t die,” she says. “Please, I can’t lose you, too.” He won’t die from such a small thing, but she forgets this as she presses the torn edges of himself in place, urging them to heal faster. The entire time, she pleads to him, to god, to anyone who will hear.
She’s sorry. She didn’t mean to. She never should have left the house.
There are times when her own words cause her to still, eyes widening in the silence between them.
“I had a family,” she whispers, amazed, as if she can hardly believe it herself. When she stares down at him, it’s like she’s seeing him for the first time. Like she doesn’t see him at all.
“What have I been doing all this time?” she asks, the blood draining from her face. “Yushiro, I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
By then, his body has mostly mended itself. He sits to face her, knelt before him, her white doctor’s robes dyed red. Yushiro reaches for her and she lets him thread his fingers through her hair. It feels like silk, smooth and warm against his palms.
“That day my family died was not a mistake. It was him. He orchestrated—”
Yushiro’s fingers dig into her scalp, and she looks at him with eyes like glass beads, lost and horrified, as he drives his consciousness into her. The first time he did this, she fought him, her mind nearly impenetrable, but now she goes slack, calming at the familiarity.
He’s imagined what it might be like to let Tamayo retain her memories. He thinks it would be nice, for a bit. They’d stop serving Muzan. Stop living like humans. With his blood techniques, they could run forever, just the two of them, and no one would ever find them. But he alone has been subject to her vengeance all these years, and so he knows how it consumes her like a fire in the capital, jumping from one home to the next until the neighborhood is in flames, insatiable until the entire city is burnt to the ground.
And Muzan is not a man who can be killed by the fury of a single woman.
Which is why Yushiro disconnects the memories. He scoops unnecessary information from her head and rearranges her mind so she’ll never notice it’s missing, like he’s done countless times before, so that they can continue living as they always have when she wakes.
“Was I sleeping?” she’ll ask, confused, because they both abandoned the need many centuries ago.
He’ll nod. “Just for a few minutes.”
“I feel as if I’m forgetting something important.” She’ll be disoriented as she puts a hand to her forehead, looking to him for answers.
“You must have been dreaming,” he’ll tell her.
And because they have been together for so long, because she trusts him, she will accept this.
Just as she always does.