Work Text:
Zenitsu doesn’t realize that he’s crying until a few minutes pass.
It’s—it’s quiet, his sobbing. Almost passive, the tears simply slipping down his cheeks without his usual drama and fanfare. Nothing like Tanjiro, who sounds like his heart is being torn out of his body, like the people who infiltrated their dreams somehow succeeded in shattering his spirit. Not even like Inosuke, who’s literally choking on his tears, though it’s muffled by the boar head mask. He’s even quieter than Nezuko, scratching furiously at the inside of her box as she listens to her brother’s wails.
Nothing, though, is quieter than the drip-spread stain of Rengoku’s blood, still warm, a dull red in the dawning light. In the back of his mind, he wonders if Tanjiro can smell it through his own tears. He hopes not.
His friend has smelled enough blood for a hundred lifetimes, and Zenitsu knows he’ll smell much more.
“Come on,” Inosuke gruffs, grabbing the back of Tanjiro’s haori. “We—we’re gonna train our butts off. Yeah! Because he believed in us, so we—we have to. Let’s go!”
But Tanjiro doesn’t go with him. He grabs at the ground, towards Rengoku, like he can somehow bring this corpse back to life if he just stays and doesn’t leave. When Inosuke doesn’t budge, he slumps, only held off the ground by his friend’s grip, and the shuddering breaths he takes almost drive Zenitsu to his knees.
He doesn’t fall, though. Nezuko is on his back, and if he fell he’d land in the puddle of still-warm blood trickling from the kneeling form of the man he’d just been allowed to call brother , and Inosuke can’t drag all three of them.
Zenitsu stays standing, and breaths in, and feels his tears drying. He wonders when he stopped crying.
“Tanjiro,” he says, soft as he can while still being heard. His friend is shaking on the ground, quiet, hitching with his breaths, his cries, his grief. Zenitsu feels his own heartbeat align out of sheer sympathy, and tries again before he crumbles under the weight of Tanjiro’s grief. “Tanjiro, can you stand?”
It feels cruel, distracting him with his own pain, but it works. Giving Tanjiro a goal always helps. Inosuke helps too, half-lifting Tanjiro off the ground, and lets him lean against his chest when he can’t straighten. Zenitsu leads the three of them over to the train, where he knows there’s a doctor who’d been traveling home for vacation. He’d pulled the man from the wreckage himself. He’s still treating people.
“He’s hurt,” Zenitsu says quietly to the doctor. Tanjiro grunts and tries to move away, back towards the silent body of Rengoku, but Inosuke holds him tight. “Can you help him?”
The doctor’s eyes slide from Zenitsu to Tanjiro, to his wound, and then over to Rengoku. Even at this distance, the sheer amount of blood is unmistakable, and it's brightening as the sun rises. The doctor nods, and Inosuke lowers Tanjiro to the ground. Zenitsu sits next to him, grabbing his hand.
Tanjiro’s quiet, but he’s still crying. Zenitsu isn’t.
Strange. The last time he cried like this, he’d been dying of poison beneath the moon. Before that, his heart had been failing as he fell in Gramps’s arms, blind from lightning. Before that, the girl he loved had left him broken and empty.
Then again, Rengoku had agreed to be his brother. Crying like this over someone else—that’s just what it means to be family. Or at least, he thinks so.
Inosuke mumbles something about swords and runs off to the forest. Tanjiro makes a broken sound as he goes, and then a wholly different one as the doctor pulls the bloodied fabric off of his wound. Zenitsu squeezes his hand.
He’s tired. His brother is dead, they’re in the middle of nowhere, and the brief glimpse he had at a perfect life in that dream has once again shattered. He’s had to be strong because Tanjiro couldn’t, and it’s not something he’s used to, especially after so much fighting . Protecting Nezuko, and seventy-five or so passengers, and then pulling them all out of the wreckage as fast as he could because Rengoku’s moves had saved their lives but he was only a single man, in the end.
He’s so tired he wants to run away and find a safe spot to hide and sleep, like he used to growing up.
He doesn’t move. It takes all his strength, but he doesn’t leave.
Tanjiro pulls their hands to his chest, grabs Zenitsu’s with both of his own, and cries in a mixture of pain and grief as the doctor presses down on his stab wound. The sunlight slips over the train to catch on his tears, and Nezuko stills in her box. Inosuke is crashing through the bushes in the distance. The four of them are here, safe, if anguished.
Rengoku is dead.
And Zenitsu doesn’t cry.