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Thump, thump, thump, thump.
You’re awake now and everything hurts but nothing hurts so badly as the fact that you can hear Inosuke’s heartbeat thumpthumpthumping in the distance, slower and slower and slower with each passing second—no, nothing hurts more than hearing it and being unable to move, unable to budge even the smallest muscle, to get to him, to—
To what, exactly?
You don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know, but you have to get to him, you can’t just stay where you are, useless, useless, useless—
—
“Stop acting like you’re useless, Zenitsu!”
Inosuke’s voice cuts through your thoughts, the sound as robust as it is piercing—especially to you now, tucked as you are in the fetal position several paces away, trying most ardently to avoid getting back up to train with the crazed mountain boy again.
“But I am useless!” you shout back, screwing your eyes shut even as you hear his footsteps drawing nearer, quick and relentless, just like him. Useless. Your entire being radiates with the truth of it. Even training has you on the ground, exhausted and bruised and spread so thin you think you might disappear if you turned sideways. How can Inosuke have this much energy? How can he have this much strength? And how can both he and Tanjirou have so much determination? It feels as though all the energy and all the strength and all the determination in the whole world is used up by your two friends. It’s no wonder that there isn’t any left for you.
“Hey! I don’t want to hear you calling yourself useless again!” Inosuke retorts, and his tone leaves no room for argument. You’re not sure if it’s just some tactic, trying to pump you up to the point where you at least open your eyes, but, damn him, it’s working—because you can’t stay in the grass like this forever, especially not when Inosuke’s talking to you like this, telling you that you aren’t the horrible, ugly thing you’ve always, always believed yourself to be. You can’t ignore the way it makes your heart beat faster, to hear someone as useful as Inosuke telling you that you have use, that you matter. “Calling yourself useless is useless!” Inosuke insists, without, predictably, lowering his voice even though he’s standing over you.
You open one of your eyes to look up at him. “But it’s true, Inosuke,” you tell him, pushing back. “How I’ve made it this far is a mystery! You’d better have your goodbyes prepared: I’ll probably be dead after our next mission.” You’re whining, now, but you can’t help it. Inosuke said you aren’t useless. You want him to prove it. You want him to tell you why.
—
You have to move, have to get closer, have to do something other than lie uselessly in the rubble, barefooted and still in your torn kimono, your body carrying agony so heavy in places you didn’t even know could bear weight. Maybe that’s why you’re still on the ground, pressed down by the sheer density of your pain. What happened? One minute you were facing certain death at the hands of an Upper Rank demon and the next you’re here, lying face first in the dirt and aching everywhere but nowhere more than your heart as you listen to Inosuke’s heart sputter in its struggle to keep beating. You want to scream so you do. You know he can’t hear you. No one can. And that makes you want to cry so you do, because that’s all you’re good for, anyway, isn’t it?
—
“Oh, would you shut up!?” Inosuke growls, still looming over you. “You’re always going on and on about how useless you are! But I’ve seen you fight! I know you aren’t useless at all! Saying you’re useless is good for nothing and it won’t work on me!”
Your heart beats, fastfastfast, faster than you think is possible, and you feel your face getting hot and your throat running dry and your palms beading with sweat and it doesn’t have anything to do with the blaze of the sun overhead or the stillness of the summer air, nothing to do with that at all. “Inosuke…” you whisper, or maybe you just think it in your head. Either way you’re hearing it over and over, shooting through your body, ringing in your ears: his name, his voice, his heartbeat, all twining together to shape the most incredible sound signature you’ve ever heard. A harmony in three parts. A symphony in three movements. And then one two three you’re up again, dizzied, but training sword grasped at the ready. You plant your feet in the ground and you look at that boar mask in front of you but see straight through it to the face of the boy underneath—the face of the boy who looks back at you and sees value, sees worth, sees purpose.
It will be for him from now on, you think to yourself: every minute spent alive now, every second, will be for the boy in front of you. For the boy from the mountain who says you aren’t useless.
—
Why are you still alive? How are you still alive? And would the alternative be better than this? Than this unbearable torture, listening to the faint, broken sound of life fading from Inosuke’s chest?
Thump, thump, thump.
It’s always been in the back of your mind—the racing heartbeat of the boy from the mountain. Ever since you first heard it all those months ago, beating beating beating, heady from the thrum of battle as it neared you and finally overtook you while you wrapped yourself around Tanjirou’s box—yes, you’ve always known the sound of Inosuke’s heart as closely as you’ve known the sound of your own. Inosuke. The way his heart pounds with a vigor only you have the ears to appreciate; the way you can swear it skips, just slightly, whenever the two of you are close.
(Or maybe that’s just your own.)
Inosuke’s sound signature has always been fast, always been wild and vibrant and fierce, pulsing with a fervor and intensity that no one, not even Tanjirou, can match. You’ve always felt that the sound of Inosuke’s heart is what the sound of yours wishes it could be: the tenacity of the former a perfect foil to the timidity of the latter.
And in that symmetry of bravery and cowardice the two of you meet to create something like balance.
Thump, thump.
The thought of Inosuke’s heart stopping threatens the balance of your entire world and you swear you can hear it tilting on its axis now, edging dangerously close to spinning out of orbit and out of control.
—
“Just try to keep your movements and breathing more controlled! It isn’t hard, Zenitsu!”
He may be giving you orders and you may hear them but you aren’t listening to them, not really, not when you’re still reeling from the words he spoke moments before—the words that roared through your body with all the force and brilliance of lightning.
This is what it really feels like to be struck by lighting, you think, with sudden clarity: to be standing in the presence of someone who sees you for what you are.
You aren’t sure what to do with this gift Inosuke has given you. You wish you could pull it from your mind and hold it in your hands, for the words would surely take the shape of lightning and if you could just hold the spark of Inosuke’s belief in you then you know you’d truly be as capable, as unstoppable, as he seems to think you can be. But the memory of the words is enough to sustain you now: to center your breathing, to steady your stance, to fill your whole body with light and thunder and electricity.
Inosuke Hashibira told you that you aren’t useless.
You could move mountains if he asked you to.
—
You try again to stand, to move even just a little, but you can’t. Inosuke. You have to get to him but you’re weak, weaker than you’ve ever been, and the helplessness is gutting. Your thoughts are flashing quick as a thunderstorm in your mind and you remember that day during training, you remember that gift he gave you, and you try to summon the flash of strength you felt then. Inosuke. You’re dragging yourself by your hands; you’ll crawl to him if you have to. Inosuke.
Thump.
It’s getting slower and slower and slower and it feels like your chest is caving in because you’ll never make it in time, you’ll never get to him fast enough and, besides, you don’t know what you’d even do if you did—what you’d possibly be able to do for him in this state. Even if you weren’t in this state you don’t know what you’d be able to do to help, how you’d be able to make his heart beat faster, how you’d be able to convince his body not to give up on him like he never gave up on you. Inosuke.
And then—all of the sudden—Tanjirou and Nezuko appear within earshot and you call to them, feeling like you could cry from relief. You are crying, you remember suddenly, the tears hot and wet on your face. Crying and screaming, of course. And at first you’re complaining because that’s what you always do, what’s expected of you—you complain and blubber and sputter and whine and wonder what happened to your body because you’ve been blacked out for so long and then, once you’re through, you tell Tanjirou about Inosuke, because Tanjirou can reach him, Tanjirou can save him. Tanjirou has to.
And you will try not to resent him for it—for being the savior you can’t be.
And you will close your eyes and refuse to succumb to the pain in your body, continuing to drag yourself along, bit by bit, until you reach Inosuke, too.
You listen to Tanjirou’s attempts to rouse Inosuke and hold your breath, gritting your teeth against the pain shooting through your body in waves as you put your hands in the dirt and pull yourself, inch by inch, toward the building where Inosuke lies inert. Come on, Tanjirou. And then there’s a silence, followed by a flash of pink light, and you hear it—Inosuke’s voice—and everything inside you is screaming to move faster, to get up, to run to Inosuke.
But you are so weak.
So you listen as Tanjirou weeps over him, holding his body like you wish you could—and tears run freely down your cheeks that have nothing to do with the pain arcing through you, getting worse with every passing second. You hear Tanjirou and Nezuko leave and you wonder why Inosuke didn’t go with them, why you can hear only his heartbeat now, thumpthumpthumpthump, rapid and feral and wild like always, like it’s supposed to be.
“Hey! Sleepyhead!”
You open your eyes (you hadn’t realized they’d been shut) and you see him kneeling in front of you, still weakened from battle, looking at you through the boar mask and reaching out a hand.
“Inosuke!” is all you manage to cry out in reply, lifting your arm, weakly, to take his hand. He pulls you up with a gentleness unlike anything you’ve ever felt from him before and now the two of you are seated upright, leaning on one another and just—breathing.
Well. Inosuke is breathing. You’re wailing.
“Come on, no crying!” Inosuke says, though he himself is sniffling. “We did it, Zenitsu! We did it.” One of his arms wraps around your shaking shoulders and you feel it again, lightning inside you, zigzagging from your heart to your toes. You sag into him, your head resting on his shoulder as you sob.
“I thought you were done for, Inosuke!” you wail, a hand pounding with mock anger against his chest. “Don’t ever scare me like that again!”
Inosuke, somehow, finds it within himself to laugh. “It would take a lot more than that to kill the Lord of the Mountain!” he says, puffing out his chest against your fist and in spite of yourself you laugh, too, in between tears. You’re so relieved to hear his voice, his heartbeat, his bombastic sound signature again that you could kiss him.
You could kiss him.
You hear the words in your head, bouncing back and forth, over and over—you could kiss him you could kiss him you could kiss him—and suddenly you realize—
You want to kiss him.
You want to kiss Inosuke.
“What? What are you looking at me like that for!?” Inosuke demands when he sees your face, but he isn’t moving away from you.
His arm is still around your shoulders and you say nothing, only shrug out of his grasp to cant forward with both hands and begin to pull the boar mask up and over his head. You expect him to resist but he doesn’t, the sound of his heart doing that thing again where you almost swear it skips a beat.
“Zenitsu…” he begins, and you can see his lips now, bloodied and bruised, as the mask slowly moves up his face.
“Inosuke,” you breathe, and the mask is over his nose now, almost to his eyes, when—
Tanjirou and Nezuko appear from around the corner and the moment between you is instantly shattered. You blink, drop the mask, and before you know it Tanjirou has wedged himself between you and Inosuke, arms around you both as he weeps, freely, and declares his gratitude for the four of you making it out of this nightmare alive. You’re weeping again, now, heart still racing from the feel of Inosuke’s boar mask in your hands, and you hear Inosuke finally succumb to his own tears, too, so that the only one of you who isn’t weeping is Nezuko. “You guys…” Tanjirou says, “I’m so glad you’re alive!”
That’s what you try to focus on: the miracle of it all, that the four of you made it out of this battle alive.
You try not to focus on how desperately you’d wanted to kiss Inosuke moments before; and you try not to focus on the thoughts running through your head about what his lips might have felt like—if they’d have been as soft as they look, if they’d have tasted more of his blood or of yours, if he’d have kissed you back or called you a creep and pushed you away.
You suppose it’s probably a good thing you may never know any of those things. What matters most, anyway, is that you’re still alive to wonder them—and that Inosuke is still alive, too. You listen to the tangle of your heartbeats but his is still the strongest, and you’ve never felt gladder to hear his sound signature so loud, so stubbornly loud, above the rest.
And you decide that the fact that you’re still alive to hear it is enough, for now. Enough for you to renew your promise—that each breath you take from here on out will stand testament to the truth that Inosuke Hashibira believes in you.
Thump, thump, thump, thump.
You close your eyes and listen to the song of his heart and smile because, truthfully, right now—
It isn’t just enough.
It’s everything.