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There’s a boy.
Giyuu doesn’t know his name. Doesn’t remember his face. But he sees him in his dreams, in that limbo between consciousness and sleep that sometimes makes his legs and right arm twitch with muscle spasms just as he starts to fall underneath. Not every night, but frequently enough. It’s one of the first memories he has.
Not of his face or name, but a presence. A feeling of warmth. It makes him feel safe. Giyuu’s never known how to explain the boy to anyone else, not even Sabito, who sometimes touches the right side of his face too long as he stares off into space, brows slightly furrowed, like he’s looking for something, or Makamo, whose dreamlike voice grows quiet at strange times and becomes more distant. He’s not even sure how to explain it to himself.
As far as anyone is concerned, Tomioka Giyuu is a perfectly normal, if occasionally odd, boy. Despite the early tragedy he barely remembers that resulted in the deaths of his parents, Tomioka Giyuu was a soft-spoken, somewhat socially awkward but kind and intelligent young man with short dark hair, bright blue eyes, a gentle smile and affinity for swimming. His sister, Tsutako, was happily married to a man who adored her and Giyuu, welcomed them both into his family, patchwork as Giyuu’s own family is. His adopted father, a sometimes gruff but loving, gentle-eyed man named Sakonji, and his best friends in Makamo and Sabito, whom he can’t see himself without. Giyuu feels full, blessed, and so, so grateful some nights in a way he can’t explain.
Yet, despite all that, there comes the boy with hair like fire whose face Giyuu never remembers.
It feels important, like there’s a name on the tip of his tongue, sitting on his mouth, but he can’t get the vowels out and it frustrates him. It feels like something he’s missing. Something unfinished.
He grows up, and he wonders about poetry. He still dreams about the boy with hair like fire and a voice like a drum, a voice that has shed youth and embraced a deep timber. Still, he can’t make out his face. He wishes he could remember, but every time he wakes up, all he has are the colors red and yellow.
He doesn’t want to allow himself to forget.
So, Giyuu writes.
*
I wait for you
in the grassland
where small lilies bloom.
On the corners of the field
the rainbow shows up.
(Yosano Akiko)
*
There’s a boy.
Kyojuro loves his family more than anything. He and his father have always been close, growing closer even when Senjuro was born and especially after the scare of his Mother’s cancer diagnosis. There’d been a moment of friction, when his Mother was in her worst condition, unable to leave the hospital for days at a time, where his father seemed so brittle, so hopeless that Kyojuro had been struck with a sudden fear that he would never recover. He’d been only ten years old and he was afraid of the man that would come out of his father if his mother didn’t make it. Senjuro had been too little to understand what was going on, only that he seemed to know the distress in the family, and he was prone to crying not for himself, but for his brother and father.
He dreamed of still water, crystal clear beneath his feet, and a soft voice that told him— he didn’t remember what the voice said, but it made him feel at ease, as if cooled by a gentle tide.
When he woke up one day after his mother had been in the hospital for days to undergo major surgery, he found his father sobbing in front of his bed—not out of despair.
“She made it.”
His mother came home a week later, and the fiery glint of his father’s warm eyes never left. Rengoku Ruka still had to mind her diet, the amount she exercised so that she doesn’t exert herself, but the flush has returned to her skin, she put back on weight that she’d drastically lost, her cancer is in remission and she lives her life as she normally did before the diagnosis. She gets to see her youngest son grow up to be a kind, gentle and shy boy, who always comes to either of his parents when in need. Rengoku Ruka and Shinjuro love and adore each other, and Senjuro aspires to be a nurse who can take help people. Although his little brother is shy, mild-mannered and soft-spoken, he smiles easily, without fear or worry, and Kyojuro’s heart is so, so full.
But still he dreams of crystal clear ocean waters and of a boy.
He never sees his face, or if he does, he does not remember upon waking up. His voice is so quiet that it’s barely above a whisper, but in his dreams, Kyojuro finds himself compelled to listen. The sound of that voice is unbearably sad, as if burdened by an impossible weight, and Kyojuro wants nothing more than to ease his pain. And yet when he wakes up, unable to remember what the voice sounded like, no matter how clear it felt, Kyojuro feels as if he’s committed some horrible failure. As if he has broken a promise and it makes him feel sick.
Sometimes, he wakes up to a spasm in the middle of his abdomen that burns, pulses and tears. Other times, he jolts from a nightmare clutching at his left eyes, rushing towards a mirror to see if it’s gone because it burns, it aches and throbs as if it’s been crushed—but when he turns on the light, both of this eyes stare back at him. It’s always gone in under a minute, but the pain always jolts him awake. He doesn’t know what this means, and he’s not sure he wants to know.
Other times, he thinks he imagines ocean blue and calloused hands. They soothe him, and he wants. He doesn’t remember anything else.
So, he paints.
*
“I wanted to see you grow old. You’re too early. I’m sorry. I wanted you to grow old first.”
“It’s okay. I always knew that that was never going to be this life for me. Perhaps… in the next one—”
*
It was all supposed to be mere legend, but Giyuu’s small circle of friends were abuzz with the newest exhibit at the Tokyo National Museum in Taito that was said to feature artifacts, letters, clothing and other pieces of art that were believed to have belonged to a mythic group of people called ‘Demon Slayers.’ Even Sabito, who was usually far too restless and full of energy to find himself able to stand still and be quiet long enough to walk around a museum without being a menace (finding them generally boring to boot), seemed compelled by the exhibit.
Giyuu had blinked widely when Sabito suggested that they go. “Really?”
Sabito scowled. “Don’t make that face at me.”
“I wasn’t making a face.”
“Yes, you are! Your judgy face. The one that makes you look like an old turtle—“
“It does not—“
“Yes it does, now clear up your Friday so we can go.”
And, well. One could hardly say no to Sabito when he was determined. Besides, no matter how much Giyuu tried not to show it, he was also beheld by the sheer magnitude of the legends behind Demon Slayers and the monsters that they killed in secret—so it was said. The exhibit was a marvel of discovery: after decades of nearly being scrubbed from obscurity, there’d been a massive excavation of artifacts from the Taisho era when an old estate outside of the Tokyo metro area was being renovated for historical preservation. Clothing, weaponry, armor, vases and even letters and journals were found and were now on display at the National Museum for public viewing. Some of the items were even donated to the exhibit by families and collectors who’d been holding onto them for quite some time, over decades. It was a marvel, because Demon Slayers were thought to be mere rumor and not a true, non-lawful group of defenders from some unknown ill.
As soon as Giyuu stepped through the doorway into the exhibit, passing by a small gallery of paintings (almost all painted blue, scenes of the ocean, of storms and rivers and snow mountaintops that stirred something in him) he felt a shudder run through him. His right arm spasmed, right at the joint where it met his shoulder, and he exhaled as he walked through the foyer.
It wasn’t long before Sabito wandered towards a different part of the exhibit, eyes following the white clouds on an old blue yukata, where Giyuu was left to his own devices. As always, he carried one of his journals in hand, pen between his fingers, as he walked around, jotting down notes about the artifacts that most held his interest and would be worth writing about in a poem or an essay. He never went anywhere without it. He wasn’t the best at talking to people verbally or in person unless he knew them well, but writing proved to be the best method for reaching people: through poetry or lyrical essays, it was how he managed to convey his thoughts and feelings in a way that could be more easily understood. It was also the only way he could piece together the visions of the boy—now, man— who’d haunted his dreams all his life.
As Giyuu walked through the exhibit, he rubbed his bicep where the birthmark wrapped around the muscle, as if it were a faded incision line. No one knew why he had such a precise birthmark.
It was just another thing that Giyuu couldn’t explain, amongst others.
He was almost finished with the exhibit when he saw the flash of color out of the corner of his
eye.
“Don’t die.”
A decorative flame. Bright red and orange. Faded with time, but polished with upkeep and
obvious care.
“I won’t.”
Giyuu stood in front of the glass case and stared at the sword guard that carefully sat on a velvet cushion, shielded from the elements. The blade itself was rusted, broken and shattered close to the hilt, but the chips of faded deep red remained. The guard was polished into the shape of a flame, curved and shapely as a bonfire, and the wrapping around the handle was frayed from time and wear.
The source was unknown. The owner was unknown. It was a donation from an anonymous source. It was almost a hundred years old.
The caw of a crow. Talons gently wrapping into the soft fabric of a haori, then a quiet whisper.
Giyuu felt his throat begin to close up and thicken.
“..I see.”
You lied to me. You promised .
His right arm throbbing, Giyuu swallowed hard and clenched a hand against his aching chest, sudden caught by an unfamiliar wave of grief that wasn’t his own and yet was. He looked at the sword guard, an artifact from a time when carrying a sword was a punishable crime, and felt a sudden urge to weep.
Pull yourself together, he told himself, exhaling sharply, so focused on gathering himself he didn’t hear the sound of footsteps approaching from behind.
Hands shaking, he clenched them into fists and looked at the next artifact that was sitting next to the sword guard, on another pillow. He blinked.
It was a deep blue chord. Frayed at the edges, held together by a blue-black bead, with intricate knots holding it together. One that would be used to tie back hair.
Source : Unknown.
As if by instinct, Giyuu rose his hand to the back of his head, his fingertips entangling with the soft ends of his black hair, where they curled against the nape of his neck. He felt at the air, pressed his fingers against his skin, and frowned.
It feels like it should be longer.
It had never occurred to him to grow out his hair before.
Were it not for the quiet press of shoes against the tile floor and nails against the plaque that sat in front of the exhibit counter, Giyuu never would’ve noticed him. He saw the hands first, then the arm—
And then he saw the burst of color and all of the air punched out of him.
At the small, little noise he made that seemed to crawl out of Giyuu like some desperate animal he didn’t know he was holding captive, the man looking at the same artifacts glanced up, and Giyuu was struck by warm, ember gold.
Fiery gold eyes blinked at him, thick eyebrows raising on his forehead, the bright colored hair on his head swept back into a messy tail to keep it out of his face, skin flush and clear and alive and Giyuu felt something in his chest rise up. It made him want to sob. But realizing that the man was staring back at him, no doubt confused if not put off by his attention, Giyuu sharply looked away, tips of his ears burning. Making sure his face was completely out of view, Giyuu rubbed at his suddenly burning eyes and sniffed. It did nothing to stop the sudden staccato in his chest.
He couldn’t have seen the shutter of conflicting expressions on the other man’s face: mild surprise, to a gradual realization that even he didn’t fully understand, a deep, unrelenting sorrow and regret, and then hope. All mixed together in a kaleidoscope. All things he had yet to understand in how they came together.
But that was all right.
A slight clearing of the throat.
“Do you think they were real?”
*
The dark-haired man, appearing roughly the same age as himself, started: a slight jolt of the shoulders, then blue eyes shifting to look at him, surprised.
They’re brighter now, Kyojuro thought, unsure of where the thought came from. The light isn’t gone.
“What?”
A faint smile curled on the bright-haired man’s lips.
Giyuu found himself surprised that it wasn’t unrelenting: it was warm, but not overpowering. There was something more— not restrained, but organic, about it.
Weightless.
“Demons. It’s what all the plaques said these Demon Slayers fought. Do you think they were real? Or just a stupid myth?”
Kyojuro observed the dark-haired man and his bright, oceanic blue eyes as he tilted his head at him, peering at Kyojuro from beneath his dark bangs. The man looked at that placard and hummed. The sound shook through Kyojuro like water.
It felt familiar. At the sound of it, it felt as if something were finally slotting back into place.
Instead of ignoring him, the dark-haired man gave the question serious thought, brows slightly furrowed together. They began to relax and the man closed his eyes.
He felt his chest seize at the sight of a little smile on the dark-haired man’s face.
“..Something about that guard tells me it was used, not just for decoration. It’s got little scratch marks on it,” he murmured. “Ridiculous as it might sound…”
Blue eyes turned to meet amber.
“…I think there are other things just as unbelievable. So, I like to think they were.”
Kyojuro felt his smile widen.
A faint flush coloring his cheeks, the corner of the dark-haired man’s eyes crinkled.
“Me, too,” said Kyojuro. “I think these slayers did their job well.”
The dark-haired man’s gaze turned towards the sword guard.
“Yes,” he said softly. “I think they did. We’re here, after all.”
*
He was twenty-five, and he was ready. The mark had taken its toll, taken its price, and he was ready.
*
“I’m Rengoku Kyojuro,” he suddenly blurted, stepping forward just when it appeared that the dark-haired man was about to walk away. The sudden introduction, raised to a volume that drew annoyed stares from other visitors, made his cheeks color, but it was all he could do to not reach for his hand.
The dark-haired man blinked rapidly. Slowly, his face softened. He began to smile.
“…Tomioka Giyuu.”
*
He was tired, so very tired and he was ready. The four years he’d lived were as full as they could be, and he only had the same regrets he’d brought with him, no new ones. The world was safer now. It was worth the cost of his arm, of the time he could’ve had otherwise. All of it was worth it.
Now, he could rest.
Now, he could see his best friend. His first love. His family. His sister.
He could see his beloved again.
He was tired, and he would go in the sunlight, where his lover was waiting.
‘I’m coming home, Kyojuro.’
*
“Tomioka Giyuu…” breathed Kyojuro. Somehow, his expression seemed to brighten, his smile widening into an impossibly wide grin. “It’s nice to meet you! And, if you do not mind my asking, and I apologize if I sound too presumptuous but I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again— would you mind walking with me around this exhibit a little bit longer? Maybe get tea or coffee after, if you’re not busy or preoccupied?”
More and more of the museum patrons were giving them side-looks of annoyance as Kyojuro’s voice started to rise in volume, enthusiasm and nervousness coloring his tone, but Giyuu, for once, couldn’t find it in himself to care.
It was bold, and unusual. Normally, Giyuu would be put off by such a sudden request from a stranger, a man he’d just met and barely knew— but he looked at the other man and found nothing to be wary of. He was too— sincere. It was endearing.
They’d just met, and yet Giyuu felt safe.
He smiled, and it felt easy.
“I think I’d like that.”
*
The day before he died, Tomioka Giyuu gave Rengoku Senjuro his old blue chord that he once used to tie his hair back. It’d been a gift, and he no longer had a home nor use for it. The young man barely held back his tears, but he smiled and took it, thanking Giyuu quietly. He put the blue chord in the same box that held a flame shaped sword guard, gifted back by Tanjiro, and put it to rest.
Tomioka Giyuu died the next day, his body found on his engawa with the sun rising high in the sky, and a faint smile on his lips. He was twenty-five.
As he died, he reached out to the hand stretched towards him, gentle and warm as he remembered, and knew they would make sure to get it right this time.
*
How invisibly
it changes color
in this world,
the flower
of the human heart.
(Ono no Komachi)