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Morning arrives at the Kamado household like it always does: the sun rising from above the mountain line, peeking behind the trees, bringing the summer warmth to the home, and… Zenitsu is screaming like his life depends on it.
And considering Inosuke also lives with them, maybe it does.
He’s been here for, what? A few weeks? And this continues to happen? Genya covers his head with his pillow and grunts.
It’s things like this that almost make him miss his time at the hospital. At least he could enjoy some quietness in the morning. Then he remembers everything else that the hospital entails and rises from his bed to go help with breakfast.
As expected, the four of them are in the kitchen cooking. Tanjiro handles the firewood stove, preparing the dishes; Nezuko sits next to Inosuke at the table, wrestling him for his Nichirin blades that he keeps trying to use to chop veggies; meanwhile, Zenitsu’s curled at the corner, face pale as he clutches a small knife and a half peeled carrot. So that’s what the screaming is about.
Not for the first time, Genya stands and watches them from outside the kitchen — from outside the house dynamic.
Looking past the chaos and the loudness, the four of them do well together, maybe so well that they don’t need a fifth person in the kitchen. Or in the house. Tanjiro invited him to live here, but for all intents and purposes, he’s effectively just a guest. Genya frowns to himself.
It’s not an issue with them, really. It’s him. Nothing has felt like home since… forever.
Well, he doesn’t have anywhere else to go now, so he’s gonna have to find a way!
“Morning,” Genya grumbles as he sits next to Inosuke, looking around the table for something to do.
Everyone greets him at once, shuffling slightly to the side, so he can sit by the table. Someone slides him a small cutting board, knife, some vegetables, and a block of tofu without him having to ask, and the tension inside him uncoils.
“What’s for breakfast?” he asks as he wraps his fingers around the knife, uncoordinated and stiff. He should stretch his limbs more, like people in the hospital told him to; he just keeps forgetting.
“FRIED THINGS!” Inosuke yells, always excited.
“We have some meat that Inosuke caught today too,” Tanjiro completes. “And soup!”
“Are you sure we can eat that?” Zenitsu asks, crinkling his nose. “It looked… gross…”
“Hmmm…” Tanjiro pokes it with his chopsticks and draws in a deep breath through his nose before concluding: “Probably,” with a shrug.
“What do you mean ‘probably?!’ That’s a terrible answer!”
Genya huffs a laugh and turns to his chopping board, resigned to only listening.
Chopping vegetables proves to be a challenging task for his recovering body — his hands feel weird and stiff. Being alive after being cut in half feels weird. And his stupidly long hair doesn’t do him any favors, with how it keeps falling in his face all the time.
It takes him an eternity to get through his share of vegetables, between rearranging the knife in his clumsy fingers and blowing his annoying fringe away, but they all get there eventually.
“Thanks for helping today, Genya!” Tanjiro says in earnest, sitting beside him to eat.
“No prob,” Genya mumbles half-heartedly, shaking his head for the nth time. Tanjiro doesn’t need to be nice to him when he barely helped, but he won’t rebut it. He doesn’t want to get sternly hyped up for the second time this week.
Tanjiro’s so weird. He gets so heated over negative self-talk. Genya huffs as a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth.
Just like the other days, eating breakfast takes just as long as prepping the food, since they’re chatting nonsense the whole time. Not a moment of silence in this house, Genya thinks, a little annoyed. It beats eating every meal alone, at least. He misses the quietness of being by himself sometimes but not the loneliness.
Although it’s kinda impossible to not feel lonely after everything that happened, even with constant company.
Without meaning to, he zones out of the conversation and only comes to when everyone’s picking up the plates, a couple of worried stares thrown his way. Genya flusters under the others’ gazes and gets up, quickly making his way to the kitchen to wash his own bowl. He needs to get his shit together.
He turns around to go back to the bedroom, wanting to change out of his pajamas, when Genya hears Nezuko calling.
“Pssst.” He hears her but doesn’t stop, doubting it was for him. Then she repeats, “Pssst, Genya, will you come here for a minute?” and Genya’s heart immediately goes to his throat. They see each other every day, yet his awkwardness is still relentless.
“...Yes?” He hesitantly walks towards her. Nezuko looks at him with the same eagerness as Tanjiro. They look a lot alike. “Do you need something, Kamado?”
“Oh, don’t be so formal with me. You can call me Nezuko.” She waves at him dismissively.
“...Nezuko…” he mutters with great difficulty to Nezuko’s glee, her smile wrinkling the corner of her eyes. “D-Do you need something?” She shakes her head.
“Kinda! I think we can help each other with something!” Genya tilts his head in question, and Nezuko pats the ground in front of her, beckoning him. “Can I braid your hair before you go?”
That makes sense, he thinks, observing the brush, hairpins, and ties that are strewn across the floor before it dawns on him. Genya can barely talk to Nezuko, and she wants to braid his hair?! Oh gods… His face burns, but it only takes another pat to the ground for him to surrender.
“I don’t… get why you’d want to… but…” He gestures vaguely at his hair, and Nezuko chuckles.
“I noticed you were struggling with it this morning,” she explains as she picks up his hair and starts to brush. Genya freezes under her touch, painfully aware that he hasn’t washed his hair in a while. “So I thought this might help you with it!”
“Ah… Thanks…” He’s starting to feel lightheaded.
“You’re welcome,” she replies, giggling. There’s a second of silence before Genya realizes something.
“...What do you need?” he asks, trying to peek behind his shoulder before Nezuko holds his head still with a firm hand.
“Hm?”
“You said we could help each other out. What do you need?”
“Oh! No, it’s fine! You’re already helping!”
“Hah?!” Oh, shit, he shouldn’t be this rude, he thinks after it already jumped out his mouth. Nezuko simply laughs it off.
“Letting me braid your hair is already helping!” she explains cheerfully, but her pitch goes lower as she continues: “I used to braid my own hair quite a lot, as well as Hanako’s… but after what happened to her, and I became a demon, I… mostly forgot how to. So I’m trying to get back to it.”
“Oh…”
A heavy silence follows. Vaguely, Genya wishes that he was a better person to have this conversation with because he can’t think of any comforting thing to say, and his tongue sits heavily in his mouth. He flexes his fingers.
Tanjiro had mentioned to Genya in passing about the rest of their family, yet it wasn’t until this moment that he realized how similar they were. He hadn’t fully turned into a demon by some twisted sort of luck, he supposes, but he could’ve been just like her.
Or be dead, actually. Sanemi wouldn’t do what Tanjiro did. Either way, Nezuko and him have some eerie similarities.
Losing his family is a distant memory now. Still, he feels his heart twisting in his chest as Nezuko handles his hair — he can’t properly remember the last time that someone handled his hair with this much care because the only other people who would care to do this for him were his family. At most, Genya vaguely remembers his little sisters tying ribbons to it, but he might’ve dreamed it. It doesn’t hurt him as much, but the type of pain is the same.
Eventually, Nezuko tries to clear the air.
“But they wouldn’t want me to sit here moping about it,” she says with renewed energy. Genya grumbles in agreement, head reflexively bobbing before Nezuko stills him once again. “We should keep going in their stead, right?”
“Right.”
“Besides, it’s not like we lost everyone,” she muses as she puts the brush aside and starts to braid. Genya immediately tenses. “I still have Tanjiro, and Sanemi’s still here for you, right?”
“...” He hunches his shoulders, curling in on himself a little.
“...You two haven’t talked yet?”
“...No.” Nezuko goes completely still behind him. When Genya peeks behind his shoulders, she’s pouting with that worried look on her face again.
“Don’t you want to?” she asks in a tiny voice, putting a hand on his shoulder. His head snaps back to the front.
“No!” He proclaims and crosses his arms. His anger crumbles soon after, and his shoulders sag. “...I don’t know how he’ll react.”
Things with Sanemi are so confusing now. Genya doesn’t miss the animosity that they had before, but at least it was cut and dry. Anger is concrete. Sanemi seemingly hated him, and that was the end of it — but the fear of death does things to people, and while Genya only remembers bits and pieces of what happened before he lost consciousness during the final battle against the demons, he remembers apologizing to Sanemi and seeing his crying face staring down at him before everything got blurry. Hospital staff claimed he visited a couple of times while Genya was asleep, and he keeps thinking that they just said that to make him feel better.
It doesn’t help though. It just makes him confused. What does Sanemi feel about him? Now that the world has no demons around, can they make amends?
“I’m not sure why,” Nezuko interrupts his train of thoughts. “But… from the last time I saw him, I…” She stops to think it through. “I don’t think he’d be mad at you if you tried.”
“And what do you know about him?”
“That he can be very mean,” she asserts, then pauses. “But… If I were him, I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life away from what little family I have left in the world.”
Genya doesn’t respond. The lump in his throat won’t let him. Nezuko lets him stew in it as she works diligently on his hair, moving it around and twisting it in her hands. Her words hurt like she was poking him with a hot stick, yet he can’t even say she’s wrong. He doesn’t know what the hell is going on in Sanemi’s head. Besides, Genya doesn’t want that future for himself either.
He’s making this place — and his friends — into a home for himself, but all he wanted for the past few years was reconciliation.
As if she knows Genya’s starting to calm down, she starts drawing comforting circles on his back with a hand.
“You should write him a letter someday,” she suggests.
“What? How? I don’t know where he is,” he splutters.
“You don’t need to send it! Just to get your feelings out!”
“Urgh, that’s stupid…”
“It’s therapeutic!” she corrects him, but Genya just sighs and lets his head fall backwards. “It’s like journaling, but you can pretend the person’s there to listen!”
“Sure.” Genya rolls his eyes, but then he considers. “Even if I do write a letter, how am I gonna send it without an address?”
“You can send it through your crow,” Tanjiro interjects from the corner of the room, spooking them both. “They’re still working.”
“You were listening?!” Genya’s head snaps to the bedroom door, earning him a scolding from Nezuko.
“ Careful ! I could’ve ripped your hair out!”
“Kinda,” Tanjiro says unapologetically. “I could smell the conversation getting sad.”
Genya huffs indignantly and crosses his arms again. He only notices Tanjiro getting closer when he sits next to him.
“Nezuko’s not wrong, Genya. I think he still cares. He seemed… different after we defeated Muzan. He was even nice to Nezuko. He might be nicer to you too.”
That information shocks him. “I… I don’t know. What if he hasn't changed?”
“I can fight him for you again,” Tanjiro affirms with absolute seriousness.
“Don’t!” Genya and Nezuko protest in unison.
“Ok, I won’t because you asked!” he huffs. “But I can’t make promises.”
They chuckle for a bit, and Genya’s suffocating feelings calm down somewhat. He smiles meekly at them, and they smile back.
“You don’t have to write unless you want to,” Nezuko adds, and Tanjiro nods along.
“I know… I’ll think about it.”
And thinking he does. Excessively. Genya thinks about it for the rest of his day, pacing around the house and fiddling with the neatly tied tip of his braid whenever his mind and hands aren't busy with some chores.
Something about writing a letter makes him even more nervous than the idea of reaching out to Sanemi in person. He’s so, so bad with words.
It’s his only choice at this point though. Sanemi could be anywhere in Japan, wandering for gods know why, and he hasn’t shown any signs of coming back for Genya any time soon. Genya’s gonna have to toughen up and take the first step.
Oh, but what if they can’t see eye to eye? A single apology can’t undo everything that they said and did. There’s only one way to find out!
Genya’s resolution comes and goes throughout the day, but by nightfall he finally settles. When they’re sitting in the living room after nightfall, unwinding after dinner time, Genya picks up some inks and papers from their shared drawers and sits by the table, clutching the pen and scrawling out anything he could muster.
The first three ones get stuffed under his pillow, sort of like a journal. Nezuko’s right; it’s kinda therapeutic. Maybe he should get one the next time that they go to town. When he has five letters, he decides to send them.
Sanemi doesn’t write back. Genya sends another one, no response. Then again and again.
He’s about to give up when something finally gets sent back. Genya opens the door to the outside one morning and sees two crows sitting at a nearby tree — his own crow and one that he doesn’t recognize — and the two birds look at him expectantly. When he tries to take a step forward, his feet tap against something.
Looking down, it’s… a bunch of gifts. A box of sweets, some money on an unsigned envelope, and a large, shining watermelon wrapped with a ribbon. There’s no message or signature, but he smiles, knowing that only one person would know and remember his favorite food after all the years.