Work Text:
Yushiro watched as the demon slayers sobbed their relief. They cried, laughed, and hugged each other, marveling at their success and survival and mourning the ones they lost. There were far too many losses, but it was over and they had won. For all intents and purposes, demons would be, and stay, things of fairy tales. Legends. No one would ever die to another one.
Yushiro couldn't bring himself to celebrate with them.
Lady Tamayo was dead.
He slid down the wall that blocked him and the sun and wondered if he should just step out into the light, catch fire, and crumble away. He contemplated it, he really did. He was a demon, after all. He should rid the world of demons entirely, and finish the job. But Chachamaru pressed his head against Yushiro's ankle and Yushiro had never wanted to cry so much. He swept the cat into his arms, buried his face in its fur, and breathed. He breathed.
He couldn't breathe.
He cried.
---
Life without Lady Tamayo to guide him was just as bad as Yushiro feared it would be. It was bleak, lonely. No one to scold him when he needed it, no one to teach him. No one he could care for, no one he could admire.
Yushiro wondered again if life without her was worth it.
It wasn't.
There was a faint jingle and the soft, familiar meow of Chachamaru as it blinked into visibility, carrying another letter for him.
Kanao. The former slayer had taken it upon herself to keep in contact with him, therefore keeping many of the other slayers in touch as well. Yushiro wasn't looking forward to them dying, too.
Yushiro will continue to lose everyone, he realized. He would never see them again in a few short years.
Yushiro stared blankly at the letter Kanao had sent him. An invitation to her wedding.
He picked up his brush.
---
The first time Yushiro painted someone, it was Nezuko. He knew he wouldn't be good, of course, but he definitely didn't think he would be so bad. He studied the failed painting. It was smeared instead of blended in all the wrong places, the proportions looked all wrong. He didn't have colors, so he just watered down some black ink and used a couple shades of grey to mimic shading and it all dripped and mixed horribly, and yet...
It was the best thing he'd done since his Lady's death.
So he did it again, and again. He called Nezuko to model for him because he soon realized it was better than trying to go off his memory. He painted Kanao when he visited her to talk about medicine, and he painted Uzui's wives.
When Yushiro picked up a brush, his mind blanked. When Yushiro painted, he zoned out, and he loved that.
The first time Yushiro painted a man, it was of Inosuke. So, it didn't count for much seeing as he was so feminine and pretty looking, but Yushiro figured he could start small. Paint pretty men before slowly figuring out how their anatomy differed from women's, how their faces changed in subtle ways to look just a bit more masculine. When painting Inosuke got boring and easy, he moved on to Uzui, the former hashira still pretty, but much more masculine than the former.
Yushiro lost himself in his painting, and, twelve years later, he could paint from memory well enough.
He didn't try painting Lady Tamayo yet.
---
The first person who had commissioned him was Tanjiro.
Tanjiro, much older now, had knocked on Yushiro's front door with his entire family, and with a kind smile asked for Yushiro to paint them a family portrait.
It wasn't technically a commission, since Yushiro did the painting first, without asking for payment and not expecting it, but when Tanjiro came back two weeks later to get the finished painting, he pressed his payment into Yushiro hands and refused to take it back.
Yushiro used the money to buy more supplies and decided to paint a picture of Nezuko when she was a demon for him.
He wasn't sure what made him paint Nezuko as a demon, but this painting was the first one Yushiro did with Lady Tamayo in it.
It showed Nezuko and his Lady hugging, his Lady laughing and petting her, Tanjiro panicking in the background and himself, being held back from pouncing on the girl.
Yushiro never finished the painting.
He painted Nezuko standing in the sun with her beaming smile and sharp teeth and gave them that instead.
---
The next time Yushiro tried painting Lady Tamayo, he ripped up the canvas. It didn't look right. It wasn't perfect. The colors were wrong, her hair didn't look right, and her eyes looked the wrong shape.
But the painting was still undeniably Lady Tamayo, so Yushiro curled up and sobbed when he saw the canvas torn up, fluttering across the floor like the dusting of a demon in the sun.
He stitched the canvas back together.
---
Yushiro tried again. It still wasn't right, but this time he examined the painting, trying to find what was wrong.
Eventually, he got it. What was wrong.
He'd been mashing everyone he's painted together, because when painting from memory didn't quite work out, he'd used his other paintings as references. He had given her Kanao's eyes, Inosuke's face shape, Nezuko's hair color, and so on.
So, Yushiro did what every artist does best, and searched for references.
It was hard. He could only go outside during the night, and he had to find women, even men, with the exact same features as Lady Tamayo, and paint them. If they'd let him.
He'd tell them he was an apprentice and they caught his eye, and they would let him paint them, sure, but usually they wanted the painting. It took a while to gather enough paintings of people who, mushed together, would make up the features of his Lady.
When he finally painted the perfect picture of her, he cried again, but this time in happiness. He hung the painting in her old workroom, where he knew she loved to be the most.
---
Kanao died first. It was a shock, getting the letter to her funeral. She was so young, barely twenty-five. The funeral was horrible, but it was also the first demon slayer to die of something other than a demon. No one knew how to feel about it.
And Tanjiro… No one liked seeing Tanjiro so broken.
Yushiro did what he only could, painting Kanao on a small canvas, giving it to him with understanding eyes.
Yushiro would only continue to lose them, he remembered again.
---
The next few to die, Giyuu and Sanemi, Yushiro realized what it was. Tanjiro, red-rimmed eyes and a defeated expression on his face, visiting Yushiro for solidarity, had figured it out as well.
The mark.
Tanjiro wouldn’t die to the mark, he knew. He used sun breathing.
Yushiro and Tanjiro were in the same position.
Giyuu and Sanemi were already pushing the limits of the mark, having not died for years after their time was up, but time caught up with them and they died together, hand-in-hand together in the official demon slayer’s grave site.
They were buried next to each other, in-between their loved ones.
---
Time drifted on by, and one by one the demon slayers’ numbers dwindled.
Tanjiro invited Yushiro to his home in the mountains and Yushiro witnessed the Dance of The Fire God for the first time, safe in the shade of the house. He sketched the movements onto spare parchment, finding good practice in dynamic poses and miming movements.
Zenitsu was bent over a notebook, writing furiously. Next to him was Nezuko, sewing together a haori with purple and black squares. The two were talking in hushed voices, occasionally stopping to tell something to the children running around.
Inosuke and his wife were going through the motions of the dance with the oldest child of the house, Tanjiro’s son, teaching it to him. Had Kanao been there, she would have been teaching him how to breathe correctly. As it was, Aoi was the one doing so.
They were alive.
They were okay.
Yushiro scratched the image into paper, giving it to Tanjiro so they could never forget.
---
Zenitsu was the next to go.
Nezuko couldn’t be comforted, just like Tanjiro.
Yushiro, as he was painting Zenitsu holding his sparrow with cupped hands for her, wondered when it would be Inosuke’s turn.
---
In a turn of events that no one expected, Nezuko passed that summer. She’d fallen sick with the same disease that had taken her and Tanjiro’s father, but unlike him, she couldn’t fight it for long. Her immune system was ruined due to her lack of eating anything and rabid healing for the year that she was a demon, and when she was turned back into a human, it caught up to her. Her own version of the demon slayer marks time limit.
Yushiro felt for Tanjiro. The man, because he was nearing twenty-eight years old now, had lost nearly everyone he’d ever cared for, and he would continue to lose them.
Yushiro wouldn’t be able to handle the pain.
---
Yushiro continued painting. He painted a lot of things at first. He painted the demon slayers, the survivors, Lady Tamayo, landscapes, families of the slayers he knew, Lady Tamayo, Chachamaru, Lady Tamayo, until eventually all he was painting was her. He painted her with facial expressions she never used, he painted her working on her remedies, he painted her portrait, he painted her out in the sun, even though she’s never been able to do that, he painted her with himself.
She became the only thing he could bring himself to focus on, again. His paintings of everyone else, all of them, had gone either to the remaining family members of them or to Kiriya, who, miraculously, was still alive. Pretty soon he was running out of blood to keep himself from going hungry, and time was moving so fast now, everything was getting so advanced, and Yushiro found himself selling a few paintings to art galleries so he could get money to keep himself alive, as well as buy new supplies.
Eventually he fell into a routine. He would paint two paintings of Lady Tamayo and sell one of them, buy art supplies and iron supplements, because with those he wouldn’t need to buy packets of blood, and he would paint more. Somewhere along the way he became well known for his paintings of his lady.
It was never his intention to become well-known for his works, but regardless, life is surprising that way.
Eventually theories started coming out about him. People suspected he was a vampire, people who were more ‘reality’ inclined believed he was multiple people who taught and learned to paint just one thing, Lady Tamayo, and simply painted her over and over throughout the generations. Regardless, none of them, event the ones who suspected him of being something supernatural, would believe his status as a demon.
One day, a year or two after Yushiro bought his first computer and learned how to use it, he got an email. It was inviting him to an art gallery where his paintings would be featured and he would meet his fans. Yushiro didn’t even know he had fans.
He was simply doing what he could to live.
But this in itself was a great way to do that. He would be getting paid tremendously, and his appearance at the gallery would boost his paintings— his Lady’s— worth by a lot. He would be able to sell them for a lot more than he currently does.
So he went.
And, there, he saw her.
She was staring at a painting of his, a painting of her.
His Lady was alive, and was standing directly in front of him.