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It is too cold for a funeral.
Though it has not snowed yet, the wind is blowing fiercely, shaking the remaining leaves on almost-bare trees. It has frozen twice already, any vegetation surrounding where Shinobu is standing now merely a skeleton of its former self. Dead leaves skitter over the gray pebbles of walkways.
Because it is too cold for a funeral, the children have been sent inside and the maids told to light a fire in the stove. They had been crying, strands of dark hair sticking to the salty tears streaking their cheeks. Only Kanao’s face was clear, though her eyes, which had taken so long to gain life, seemed empty once more.
Shinobu stares at the place where what remains of her sister is buried, dimly aware of the cold working its way into her skin. After joining the Demon Slayer Corps, Kanae had made arrangements for what would happen after her death, and Shinobu had followed suit: they had decided that they were both to be cremated and the ashes buried beneath a maple tree in the back of Butterfly Manor.
Now, a small granite tablet marks the place where the gray dust had been mixed with the dirt. The inscription carved into the stone face reads KOCHOU KANAE - FLOWER HASHIRA, and her date of birth and death. Only seventeen years separate the two numbers.
Shinobu can’t help but wonder how many years will separate the numbers on her stone when she dies at the hands of a demon. More than seventeen? Fewer? She is fourteen now, and knows that after three years pass there is a very good chance that she will be dead as well. To be as young and weak as she is, in a world of demons that can never be left…
“Shinobu?”
She almost doesn’t recognize the voice. It is only when she turns around that she realizes it was Kanao who spoke, just a few feet behind her, hands clasped tightly in front of herself. As soon as she sees Shinobu turn, she takes a step back, looking ready to bolt at any moment. After Shinobu remains silent, still slightly stunned, she takes a shaky inhale and continues. “I—ah, I wanted to…see if you were all right. So I came back.” She pauses. “If—if you need me to leave, I can go back, I just-”
“No,” Shinobu says. When she hears her own voice, she is shocked—it’s oddly disembodied, quiet and flat, with no trace of emotion. Somehow, she knows that if she were to be angry, nothing external would reflect that.
Insects cannot feel pain, but butterfly wings corrode when touched by human hands. She feels brittle and crumbling, her wings torn off, but she cannot feel a single thing.
“No,” she repeats, turning around completely to face Kanao. “Thank you for coming back. That was kind of you.” The implications of Kanao’s actions are still swirling around in a small part of her mind—she had wanted to come back? She had wanted something of her own? Had she flipped her coin, the coin Kanae had given her, or was this greater than that?
Kanao still looks unsure. She shifts her weight on the pebbled walkway and looks like she’s hovering between speaking and the much more familiar action of staying silent.
Shinobu knows her eyes are glassy and unfocused, her hair falling in wisps around her face. If Kanae were here, she would instantly reassure Kanao, knowing exactly what to say and how to say it—she had always had a much deeper connection with her than Shinobu had. Perhaps it was because they were so similar, not just in their fighting and breathing styles but their mannerisms and personalities. Kanae always made a point to give Kanao the choice of either flipping the coin or deciding on her own, making steps to slowly draw her out of the hard, turtle-like shell she had spent so long hiding inside.
Kanae was kinder than Shinobu, more understanding, less brash and hotheaded, always a level voice of reason even in the midst of turmoil. She chose the happiness and contentment of others over that of herself. Everyone would feel her loss and feel it deeply.
If it had been Shinobu that had died, instead of Kanae, so much would have been better.
But she can’t think about that now.
Her mind seizes upon one statement with utter clarity, the only distinct thought she’s had in hours, like a mountain suddenly rising up from a grey fog.
To make the loss less deep, to make the people around her feel it less, she has to become her sister. Shinobu could never reassure anyone, could never bring happiness to light in the midst of loss, could never keep a level head. She was the loud one, the angry one, the one who let her actions speak for her words. She hadn’t minded that before, as Kanae would always be next to her, ready to balance her out.
But without Kanae, Shinobu knew her own soul was incomplete. So she had to change it.
“It’s going to be all right, Kanao,” she says. Her voice still has that same disembodied tone.
Remember to smile, Shinobu. You have such a beautiful smile.
So she does.
And when Kanao sees her, sees her smile though she has dead eyes and a voice that is almost not her own, Shinobu can see a tiny spark of life return to her wide purple eyes.
Something in her breaks then, watching Kanao give her a short bow and scurry back to the manor. It had hurt so much to smile. But if that was the only thing that would keep life shining in Kanao’s eyes, she would continue smiling until her death. And no one would know of the pure, boiling anger that stirred just below the surface.
Kanae’s haori and butterfly hair clips are on a small table right next to the side door of the mansion. Shinobu remembers taking the clips and cloak from her sister’s lifeless body, too numb to truly know what she was doing. She had given them to someone right before the cremation, though she can’t remember why—it had been Sanemi, his eyes looking almost as dead as hers did.
And now he had returned them.
She fingers the cloth. There is no tradition in the Kocho family about what to do with a deceased loved one’s belongings. She should probably put them in a wooden chest somewhere, lined with cedar to protect it from moths, never wearing it to preserve it exactly how it had been.
No.
She is going to start a tradition—right now, her butterfly wings torn but numbed to all pain, eyes dead but knowing she needs to smile. This was the haori of a warrior whose blood runs through her own veins. Kanae’s memory deserves better than that.
She puts it on. The fabric is light and smooth, almost like water. It is cold, too, after being out in the near-frigid air. She picks up the two butterfly clips—they, too, are cold, and heavy in her hand. Her hair is too short for two clips, and she’s never worn it in any other way than the single clip style.
So she enters the manor and the two pink-and-green edged clips are tucked into a drawer lined with velvet, in a low set of cabinets in her room. Shinobu doesn’t know whether she can go inside Kanae’s room yet.
After the clips are tucked away and the haori is secured around herself, she takes a deep breath and exhales, staring out a window at the deserted, barren gardens.
There are two deaths in recent memory. The first was Kanae’s, her life draining away in Shinobu’s arms. The second was Shinobu herself, out in front of her gravestone, smiling with her torn wings to keep the light in Kanao’s eyes.
Shinobu Kocho is dead. She has to be, for her vessel to continue to smile.
And she will likely never return.
“I will ask you once more.”
The demon’s eyes are wide on either side of the sword driven into its forehead. Shinobu had encountered it while walking through a forest on the outskirts of a small mining town, just a bit over two months after Kanae’s funeral. She had left Butterfly Manor to clear her head, leaving Kanao and the other girls in the care of Hoshino, their maid. This demon had killed a small child last night, before Shinobu had arrived, and had been hiding in the forest to plan its next move.
It had been too easy to track, having not even bothered to disguise its footprints in the fresh snow. When it had spotted Shinobu, it had immediately attempted to kill her with its blood demon art, something that let it control the branches of the trees around it with hand movements. Shinobu had quickly managed this by slicing off its hands at the wrists—the lumps of flesh were now slowly disintegrating a few yards away with poison circulating through them. Perhaps she could not cut off a demon’s head, but wrists were much easier.
With its main attack neutralized, and the poison in her blade making sure the hands didn’t grow back, the demon had attempted to flee, but Shinobu had leaped above it and knocked it to the ground, driving her blade through its forehead and pinning it down. Because she had not cut off its head, it could not die immediately, but the poison quickly circulating through it was making sure it was in utter agony as it did.
She leaned over it further, twisting her blade slightly. It cried out in pain, eyes full of fear. A few tears dripped down its face and onto the thin layer of snow on the ground.
Shinobu smiled sweetly. “I have a question for you. Tell me, who is the demon with a number on his eye and a bloodstain on his head?”
She hadn’t forgotten what the demon that had killed her sister looked like. She doubted she would ever forget.
The demon shrieked as she twisted the blade in deeper. “Stop, stop! I do not know, I do not know!” More tears came from its eyes. The flesh around the blade was veined with deep purple from the poison, and the stain was spreading. “I don’t know that demon, I don’t, I don’t! Spare my life, please!”
Shinobu just continued to smile.
The demon kept gabbling on. “If—if you can’t spare me, just kill me quickly! I can’t suffer through any more of this, I can’t, I can’t! Cut off my head! Please cut it off!”
“Oh, I can’t do that ,” Shinobu responded happily. “That would require much more strength than I have, and I’m perfectly content with letting you die as slowly as possible.” She leaned in closer, until she could almost smell the human blood on the demon’s teeth. “Because you...deserve...every...second...of it.”
The demon made a strangled gurgling noise and then was still.
The top of its head began flaking away.
With a sigh, Shinobu wrenched her sword out of its forehead and wiped it on the snow. Was this how it would always go? Would none of these demons, even on the verge of an extraordinarily painful death, tell her who the bloodstained one was? That simple question was all she asked, and judging by how powerful she remembered him being, his name must be known in at least a small inner circle...
No matter. She would kill as many as it took to find out. Somewhere, that demon was living and eating, not knowing who she was or how much she wanted to kill him. And somehow, she was going to find him and stay alive long enough to watch the life drain from his eyes.
And he would crumble to ash instantly, without even a body to burn or bury, or anyone to remember him. A sad existence that she would end all too happily.
She gave a soft, humorless laugh as she watched the demon’s body disintegrate. A thought had just struck her. To become a hashira, one either had to kill fifty demons or a member of the Twelve Kizuki. She was fourteen, and at the rate she was killing, she would become one before she reached sixteen. If she didn’t die first.
Sheathing her sword, Shinobu turned and walked back through the forest, not truly knowing where she was going. Kocho Shinobu, Insect Hashira. It was a large, bold title, with some of the fiery brashness of her former self. Could it be hers?
Don’t become a Demon Slayer, Shinobu.
Kanae had wanted her to leave. To throw aside her sword and uniform, and live far away from the bloody, tumultuous mess they had both been a part of. Those had practically been her dying words. Shinobu had considered it, she truly had. She could take Kanao and the other children, spirit them away to a mountainside village, and raise them among a new family. Several of them were young enough that they might even forget about demons entirely within a few years. It had been a tempting possibility.
But then she had looked at the haori that she wore and remembered the blood that had streaked it and the coolness of her sister’s body in her arms, and the dozens of demons that had died at her blade, eaten from the inside out by a poison of her own making. She had realized that this was who she would always be, and this was the world she would always know. It was, in addition, a world that could never be left, both physically and emotionally--when she closed her eyes she could sometimes see cold, inhuman ones staring back at her, pupils slitted and sclera bloodshot.
Sometimes, one of the eyes had a number engraved over the iris.
So no. She could not leave. She would not leave. That decision was the only time she ever disobeyed her sister. Some things were indestructible, unlike brittle butterfly wings: the love of a sister, the anger of a senseless loss, and a bloodstained thread wrapped around her wrist and tied to her sword, connecting her to this world—this cold, hard, brutal world.
The world she would always be a part of.