Work Text:
Giyuu had forgotten how much he hated sewing.
The needles pricked his fingers, piercing the calluses there and drawing tiny beads of blood to the surface. His stitches were usually small and even, the product of dexterity born from hours of practicing with swords, but he frequently miscounted them and had to undergo the painstaking process of slowly undoing the flawed length.
He sighed, staring down at the half-made haori in front of him. This would take days of work, and even then it wouldn’t be perfect. When he had needed his first custom haori, he had gone to a tailor and picked the fabrics, then returned in a week. There had been no sharp needles, no unraveled thread. He should have done that here.
But he had to do this. He had to continue.
Picking up the needle again, he resumed attaching the patterned fabric to the dull maroon of the base. He’d decided to re-make the entire haori himself instead of altering his old one, something that was turning out to entail a great deal more hemming than he had originally thought. To get the fabric he needed, he’d carefully cut the stitches from the green-and-gold pattern on its right side until only a single large piece was left. He’d only realized then how faded it was, creased and spotted from the years it spent joined to its other half.
The second fabric he needed was a bit harder to come by.
After all, Shinobu’s butterfly clip had been the only thing left.
Finally, after searching nearly every market in the area near Urokodaki’s mountain home, he’d sketched the pattern with charcoal, marking the colors, and gave it to a small seamstress’s shop at the edge of a nearby town. The girls had agreed to embroider the complicated pattern as long as he paid what was due, but had almost immediately raised the price when he offered to pay them up front. Still, it wasn’t anything he didn’t have, and he’d received the finished fabric just over a week later.
Even though he knew what would happen as soon as he saw it, he’d still stared at the neatly folded length for several minutes before managing to turn away. It was almost a perfect likeness to the fabric of Shinobu’s haori--her “wings”, she’d called it once--down to the way the pink and green bands blended and overlapped near the edge. Though the original haori had come from her sister, a petite woman, it had still practically swamped her, especially when she was younger.
“You’re almost drowning in your own clothes. It can’t be practical for fighting.”
She’d been fourteen then, and not quite as adept at concealing her emotions, so he’d caught the flash of annoyance in her eyes as she’d turned around. “I seem to be managing perfectly fine how I am,” she’d said, flicking the blood from her blade. They’d killed a demon on the outskirts of an impoverished farming village, its severed, purple-veined limbs now disintegrating to ash around them. “Anyway, you’re not exactly qualified to criticize my fashion choices yourself. Could you just not pick between a pattern and a solid color and decided to go for both?”
He hadn’t answered. It hadn’t been a conversation he particularly wanted to have. She’d lost a sister, he’d lost a friend. They both wore the clothes of the dead, both attempting to emulate the original wearers in their own way.
Now, he wondered what she would say about his new creation. Two patterns on the bottom edge and sleeves, one of green-and-gold triangles and the other exactly like a butterfly’s wings. Two people who he hadn’t been able to save as they met their end at a gruesome, meaningless death.
Ghosts are not those who have left us, forsaking the mortal world for the starry sky or cool earth. They are the ones we leave behind, blood soaking the ground behind us as we cannot bring ourselves to turn around. Trapped, as the living move farther and farther away. That was all Giyuu knew of the dead.
His divided haori had been the product of a boy’s attempt at honoring the dead, numb and red-eyed with sadness and self-disgust after the loss of his only friend. This was…different, somehow. With every stitch in the fabric, he was sewing great stones into his clothes, adding another weight to the burden dragging at his feet.
He remembered a proverb, spoken by a masked instructor years ago. The man with a thousand regrets sews a thousand stones into the seams of his clothes, to remind him of what has been lost and to keep him moving forward, for if he stops, the weight will bring him to his knees and he will never be able to move again. This last part was usually spoken with a shout, as Urokodaki would rap his and Sabito’s ankles with a bamboo switch as they stumbled up the mountain with packs tied to their backs. He had never thought about the proverb at the time--had never really thought about anything but how to avoid the bamboo switch, really--but now, he believed he understood it.
He was the man with the thousand regrets. And these were the stones in his clothes. A concealed laugh, bottomless eyes, quick footsteps, and a closed door. A wide smile, bruises from a wooden sword, a thick scar, and a loping gait. Each enclosed in a piece of fabric, each heavier than a thousand stones. Each regret sewn onto his haori, displayed for the world to see, yet understood by few.
But they had yet to bring him to his knees, so he would continue to move forward.
He visits Sabito at the boulder as soon as he finishes. It is a cool spring night, with cicadas and crickets drowning out his footsteps as he treads the now-familiar path through the forest next to Urokodaki’s cottage. He’s been living there for nearly a month now, apologizing for his intrusion but never acquiring the courage to leave. After all, this was one of the only homes he had ever known, and now that he was here, he felt as though if he left, it would vanish in a puff of candle smoke behind him.
There is another reason, too, but he refuses to acknowledge it.
He rarely goes into the forest at night, so it takes him a while to find the sliced boulder. When he does, Sabito is already sitting on top of it, fox mask in his lap, looking down at him with laughing gray eyes. A moonbeam pierces the canopy and silver-white light bathes them both.
“What took you so long?” he asks as Giyuu sits down on the other half of the boulder.
“The forest isn’t as navigable at night,” he responds, tugging at the sleeve of his haori. He made one a bit longer than the other, but it isn’t very noticeable.
“Mmm,” Sabito says, the tone of his voice making sure Giyuu knows he would never get lost. “Anyway, you did something. You look different.” He squints at him across the gap between their perches.
Not for the first time, Giyuu wonders just how much separates spirits from humans. Sabito is solid and can touch and hold objects in the same way a living person can, but there are certain times where his eyes go blank as he tries to recount something, or he looks at Giyuu like he can’t quite remember who he is. Sometimes Makomo joins them, small and slight in her flowered kimono, and she is less easy to read, what with her dewy eyes and impassive face, but Giyuu detects something in her too, like the two siblings are loose pebbles in a mortared street, just slightly out of place.
“I made a new haori,” Giyuu provides. “Is that what you mean?”
Sabito snaps his fingers. “Yes! That’s right. You look different because you’re wearing something different.” He looks a bit angry at himself, but quickly brushes away the accident. “You made it yourself, huh? Sure you didn’t get one of the girls in the village to do it for you?”
“I did make it myself,” Giyuu says, almost insulted. Sabito hides a laugh, and for a moment his image flickers, turning into the nine-year-old boy Giyuu had once known before reverting back into his adult form. “And, as a matter of fact, you’ll recognize one of the patterns.”
Sabito leans forward, trying to see what he means. He seems to not be able to pick out details at first glance, like his perception of the world is blurred at the edges. “Is that…” he mutters. “That’s from your old one, right? So it’s mine.” They’d already talked about the right side of his old haori, during one of the long afternoons atop the boulder. “The other one...is that butterfly wings?” He paused for a long time, staring at the pattern. Finally, he said almost tentatively, “That’s from someone else, isn’t it?”
Someone else who died. Someone else who was your friend. Someone else you loved. Someone else you weren’t there for when it mattered. Someone else you couldn’t shed tears for until you made sure you were well and truly alone.
Someone you still can’t seem to let go of, even in death.
They were both all of that. And more.
“Yes,” he manages.
“Fellow demon slayer? Hashira?” Sabito asks quietly.
A concealed laugh, bottomless eyes, quick footsteps, a closed door. “Both.”
“Ah.” He’s silent. Then: “I wish I could have met them.”
If only life had turned out that way. If only life had been good to both of them, to all of them, if it hadn’t closed its viselike iron grip over Shinobu’s and Sabito’s throats, and the throats of so many others, draining them of life and leaving those who had loved them to watch the remaining pieces of them fall through their fingers.
And Sabito was falling through his fingers, he could see that, for no matter how solid he seemed, there would always be something missing. Giyuu knew it was partially his own selfish need for what was already lost that kept Sabito how he was—the other part was Sabito’s own vitality, his own sense of duty and enjoyment of living. It was the vitality that defined Sabito in his life that now sustained him after death, but Giyuu still knew he was being selfish of the long-dead man sitting in the moonbeam, refusing to let go of what he thought he knew even as he watched it turn to dust and sunbeams, never having truly existed in the first place. One cannot truly hold a dream, only chase it until they wake and forget it soon afterwards, while cursing themselves for not being able to remember.
It is only the stones in his clothes that keep him from drifting away entirely as well, as it seems everyone around him has done. It is only those that make him move on, for if he stops, they will bring him to his knees and he will never move again.