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Fuck! Dirt under his nails, again. Blood too, probably. Tanjiro was just far away enough, halfway around the next corner and across the street, that shouting the complaint wouldn’t land. He did it anyway.
“What did you say?” Tanjiro asks, eyes wide and honest. He stands up and flicks the last of the blood off his blade, the last hints of ashes vanishing to the early morning’s cold wind. The sun is just about to peak over the far edge of the horizon, and the air is dry, lifting up under the edges of his uniform as icy little tendrils. It’s his favourite time of the day. Tanjiro looks a little watery in the eyes, so Zenitsu just presses his lips together and shakes his head, pulling his haori closer to block the chill.
“Ok,” he says, used to Zenitsu’s strange touch-and-go concerns. “Let’s get somewhere warm and eat. Have you seen Inosuke?”
Tanjiro knows that Zenitsu hasn’t seen Inosuke, because Zenitsu hasn’t left Tanjiro’s side since they reached this town, and Inosuke split off from them earlier that night to chase down something out of sight while Tanjiro was blinded by his own priorities. Zenitsu rolls his eyes at the reminder as they fall into step side by side; he takes comfort in the sound of the dirt shifting under Tanjiro’s steps, which slide maybe half an inch, depending on how fast they’re going, at the heel before his toe comes down. It's his worried walking pattern. He can also hear Nezuko scratching her nails together in her sleep. Zenitsu didn’t memorize these things on purpose, but they’ve come in handy before, especially everyone’s walking patterns. Aside from being able to track everyone in tight situations, he always knows who’s in a room with him, when he can get away with pretending to sleep, and when someone’s watching him. Tanjiro watches him sleep a lot, actually. Zenitsu can tell when he faces back before he leaves their (typically) shared room in the mornings because he can hear the tap-slide of his heel twisting to face him. Inosuke, though, must be able to feel some extra tension from Zenitsu when he wakes up, which is always after Tanjiro but before Zenitsu sits up, because on the mornings when Tanjiro watches him sleep for a few extra moments before he leaves, Inosuke rolls over and kicks Zenitsu in the shin once Tanjiro’s out of sight.
A typical slow morning goes something like this: Zenitsu wakes up first, and immediately has to work open his jaw, feeling aggravated from the pain caused by his teeth grinding and tightening muscles throughout the night. He lies still for however long it takes for Tanjiro to stir. When Tanjiro wakes up, he sits up immediately and sighs. He’ll typically stretch and stand in the same motion, and wait a moment to move again as all the blood rushes around inside his head. When that rush subsides, he checks on Nezuko. If she’s awake, they’ll chat for a few minutes in their own mixture of murmured questions from Tanjiro and little noises of assent and indecipherable grunts that Tanjiro translates effortlessly. Even with his hearing, Zenitsu still has trouble judging her tone.
Tanjiro usually leaves the room before Inosuke wakes up. Inosuke’s breathing always quickens in the moments before he wakes up, like his body is preparing him to spring into action. When his head pops up, eyes wide open, his breathing slows back down. He always turns, from side to side or front to back or in any other direction. More often than not, he’ll turn to face Zenitsu. He watches the side of his head for a few seconds before shooting out to nudge him with a toe.
This morning, Zenitsu doesn’t reward him with jerking back or opening his eyes at all. He just mumbles “fuck off” before lifting his blanket higher over his ears. He’s still tired from running around the entire town in the sunrise hour looking for Inosuke himself. He and Tanjiro had been slowly slipping into a sticky panic, huffing as they turned every corner and failed to spot Inosuke time after time and sharing wire-tight glances from the corners of their eyes as the streets slowly filled with the usual bustle, making the hassle of locating Inosuke a slimmer and slimmer task.
They’d given up when the whine of Tanjiro’s newest fraction got too grating for Zenitsu to stand.
“Come on, we both know he’s fine. That thing he chased off wasn’t that big of a deal, and if he’s lost, he’ll be able to find us.”
Tanjiro looks down at the place where Zenitsu’s fist is bunched up in the fabric of his sleeve without really seeing. His eyes are glossed over with worry, but he relents when Zenitsu tugs a second time, letting himself be pulled in the direction of the building they're sleeping in.
“What if he’s hurt and can’t walk?”
“Even if he couldn’t walk, he would walk.”
“But we should be able to stop him from doing that sort of thing.”
“He’s not hurt.”
“He could be. Maybe that little rabbit thing took him to a worse demon.”
“It didn’t. It was probably fleeing for its life.”
“Maybe.”
Tanjiro pauses. Zenitsu lets him chew mentally while they walk along, his hand limply gripped in Tanjiro’s sleeve, near the bottom hem. He knows from experience that there's no stopping the build and inevitable overflow of worry. He's currently watching his own thought pattern spiraling into a wreck, but just tightens his grip on Tanjiro. Inosuke will be fine. He's fine. That's how Inosuke, inexplicably, always is. They’ll find him somehow soon, even if they have to wait in their room refusing to fall asleep waiting for another two hours.
“What if he—”
“He didn’t. You know he’s fine. We just have to wait him out.”
Tanjiro sighs. Zenitsu releases his sleeve, smoothing down the fabric before he pulls away completely. Tanjiro turns to face him. One strap of Nezuko’s box had slipped a single millimeter down his shoulder. Tanjiro shrugs it back into place with a pained smile. “I hate not knowing where he is. I always feel like he’s off finding extra trouble and getting hurt.”
Zenitsu nods with a tight frown. He's worried too. Tanjiro knows that, so he doesn't have to say it out loud. “He can solve his own issues. It’s his fault if he gets his ass kicked.” The lines around his eyes and the cowering slope of his tone give him away, but it's better than giving into the shakiness starting in his fingers. He just hopes that him worrying about Tanjiro worrying about Inosuke wouldn’t make Tanjiro worry more—
“Nevermind,” Zenitsu says suddenly, cutting off his thoughts and probably Tanjiro’s too. They're standing inside now, the warm shadows from the interior lights slowly submitting to the pale, blue light creeping in from the cracks around doors and shutters. “I can hear him snoring.”
All the worry falls away from Tanjiro’s face, giving way to a stone-hard look of unimpressed annoyance. “At least he’s okay.”
“That asshole left the rest all to us!”
Tanjiro’s eye twitches at Zenitsu’s vulgarity. “He probably had his own hands full. Let’s get in bed too.”
Zenitsu heaves a sigh of a completely different nature than his previous anxiety, all the worry draining into the familiar catharsis of annoyance. They find him exactly where he thought they would, sprawled across Tanjiro’s and Zenitsu’s futons, nowhere near his own. While he only expresses exasperation, the sight makes something in his chest well up and tighten at the same time.
And now the asshole is kicking his leg to let him know he knows Zenistu isn't really asleep. Zenitsu lets the blanket do all the work in hiding the way his ears were turning a little red. It makes a pleasant pocket of heat under the blanket, which is a vast improvement over the air of the room, the reason that the tips of his fingers and the tip of his nose are all ice cold.
Usually this is the point that Inosuke would get up and leave the room too. Zenitsu is currently waiting for this development so he can rub his toes back to a human temperature in peace. Instead of that, though, Inosuke huffs indignantly and crawls over to the side of Zenitsu's futon, lifting the blanket up by the edge. Zenitsu frowns and turns to snap at him to fuck off, but stops short when he sees Inosuke's face for the first time that morning glaring down at him, probably for the fact that he wasn’t able to get a rise out of him. It’s Inosuke’s own version of asking what’s wrong. At the memory of what actually was wrong, he shoots upright in a fury, almost knocking their heads together. “You fucking pig!” he shrieks, probably to the distant distress of Tanjiro, who would surely be able to hear any number of rooms away at Zenitsu’s current volume (disregarding entirely Tanjiro’s newly developed sixth sense for a starting fight between the other two), “you ran off and left all the heavy lifting to us last night! You fucked off completely without a word! What the hell is wrong with you, bastard?! We wasted a whole hour last night looking for you!”
To his own shock and horror, Zenitsu’s eyes sting with tears by the end of his outburst. It's not uncommon of him to scream and cry at the same time, but never before have any of his Inosuke-directed outbursts involved that kind of emotional investment. It’s made worse by the fact that he knows his outburst was actually fueled by a desperate worry in the first place. His anger cracks open and starts leaking tears that divulge a greater interest in Inosuke’s well-being.
Inosuke looks between Zenitsu’s hands, which are now catching tears held out in front of him, and his slick cheeks in a split-second of panic (the kind that screams “you’ve done something wrong! You made this person cry!” ) wherein all blood drains from his face.
Before that panic can translate into Inosuke’s default defense mechanism of covering his confusion or weakness with confrontation and aggression, the door flicks back in a fast but incredibly silent little slam! making both of them whip around to face Tanjiro, whose cheeks are stuffed like he really wants to chew them out by yelling for himself but still wants more for them all to keep quiet to make themselves less of intrusions to their current hosts.
“Hush!” he whispers. A little bit of the blind rage that clouds over at all breaches of acceptable behaviour around Tanjiro fades enough for him to see the state of their exchange. Zenitsu watches as concern takes over in his eyes when he sees the respective panic and tears. Somehow these tears have come across to both of the others as different from Zenitsu’s usual blubbering. “Oh no. Let me—let me—” in an absurd break of character, Tanjiro seems to trip over his thoughts verbally, head whipping back and forth between Zenitsu’s face and back down the hall. That’s where the kitchen is, Zenitsu remembers. “I’ll be right back,” he decides on, and disappears at a speed indicative of a little water breathing.
In fact, he’s back before Inosuke’s face can even change, though some of the blood has come back to it. Probably, Zenitsu thinks, because he feels slightly less stranded in a complex, emotional conversation that he can’t fight his way out of with Tanjiro present. Zenitsu can’t fully pick that apart before Tanjiro is back in the room permanently, kicking the door shut behind him, with three trays balanced on either arm. These he deposits onto the nearby chabudai after he drags it over to their futons with a foot.
It’s probably something like dinnertime, Zenistu realizes, looking at the state of the light shining underneath the shutters, which is later than it usually is for them to wake up on the day after an eventful night. That he can probably attribute to the nature of their current hosts, who were overly kind enough to ignore Tanjiro’s request to wake them at an earlier hour. It was an older couple harbouring them in this town, who had begun to badger them to take better care of themselves before they were even completely over the threshold on their first meeting.
Tanjiro glares them into place, side by side, on the opposite side of the table. They eat, as commanded, before speaking again. Tanjiro watches them curiously for a moment before starting himself. As was probably intended, the food calms Zenitsu down enough to think clearly, meaning his tears dwindle to a sniffle and his breaths are normal in a few slow minutes of quiet chewing.
Inosuke, with his impressively horrendous eating manners, is typically the first of the three to finish a meal. He’s eating a little slower than usual, and his heartbeat is haggard in his chest, but still empties his dishes while the other two have half way to go.
Zenitsu reaches out and drags his thumb across Inosuke's cheek, where some rice is lingering, blushing furiously and still a little teary-eyed. His fingers are still shaking and freezing, but Inosuke doesn’t flinch. Tanjio watches this happen with wide eyes. Zenitsu isn’t willing to meet either of their eyes, and keeps eating silently with red-hot cheeks. Inosuke’s face wasn’t more than neutral shock when Zenitsu did it, but his heartbeat speeds tremendously afterwards. After a few moments, he stands and leaves the room.
“I can hear you smiling.”
Tanjiro giggles a little in response. “Sorry.”
Zenitsu chances looking up to glare at him through his eyelashes. Tanjiro isn’t quite quick enough to look down at his food nonchalantly like he hadn’t been staring.