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In the end, Tanjirou makes his choice: he holds onto Nezuko.
He will shield her with his useless body until either one of them breathes their last breath.
Decision made, he redoubles his efforts into pulling his desperately shrinking sister into his embrace. She curls into herself as he whispers words of hurried comfort to her, not recognizing the sounds coming from his own mouth.
Her exposed skin is horrifically burned away in patches, and the knowledge that she can regenerate as a demon does not remove the instinctive horror from his heart. This is his little sister—his imouto—and the smooth, flawless skin that had once blushed under the sun is now charred unforgivingly beyond recognition.
Tanjirou had held her in his lap, once.
He had been three years old and she had just been born. He had held onto the little bundle of her so tightly, afraid he would let her fall.
This is not the same—Tanjirou knows nothing is the same anymore, it can’t be the same when all the other faces decorating that faded memory have long since blurred out of recollection—but this twisted parody of fate leaves him breathless in the middle of the battlefield. Just a little.
These hands that had waved in chubby fists at him are now clenched in agony, bloody and wafting fumes of death. The smell of terror and sadness and fury and pain, pain, PAIN from his little sister hits him in the face, and he cannot breathe as he clings to her with hands that have failed to save before, and will not save now.
Tanjirou has gone through this before, on a blood-soaked morning years ago, but this time is almost worse because it is happening right before his eyes.
Nezuko kicks him.
He is flying—tumbling heels over head—the blue sky flipping through his sight—and he remembers that a human in its prime is still no match for the strength of a demon.
In the end, he is unable to save Nezuko even from herself.
He lands with an impact that jars his bones. The swordsmiths are screaming. They have been the whole time, but only now is he aware of the fact. The demon is screaming, too, as he catches sight of Tanjirou on his trail.
Tanjirou watches himself from another place as he draws the ancient sword and cuts Hantengu’s neck.
The screams stop.
All of them.
Tanjirou collapses and does not rise. The lingering echo of one scream above the rest resonates like a torture sequence in his mind.
Although she can no longer talk, Nezuko’s screams still sound the same.
They still sound the same.
He weeps.
And then—because hope does not quite leave him yet—he slowly makes his body turn.
A figure, clothed in black, rises from the place where his sister had knelt. Tanjirou’s heart leaps into his throat—before he recognizes the white-striped uniform. A Kakushi. He bends and appears to be gathering something from the ground.
A piece of clothing.
A light pink kimono. Empty.
He does not know himself what happens next, only that in the next heartbeat he is suddenly standing over a pile of garments on the ground, holding the terrified Kakushi at sword’s length.
“Do not,” he growls, voice guttural, “touch these.”
“M-my apologies,” the masked man stammers, backing away. “They looked stained, so I was just going to take them away to be burned—”
Tanjirou sees red.
Later, he is told that it takes Mitsuri, the Love Hashira, to finally restrain him. He does not remember any of this, nor the fact that when he was unceremoniously knocked out and transported to the Butterfly Mansion to recuperate, no one was able to take the torn piece of pink kimono from his clenched fist out of fear of breaking his fingers.
Later—much, much later—Tanjirou receives his first visitors.
He does not look up when he hears the door open. He already knows who they are from their scent.
“Gonpachirou!”
A series of running footsteps is the only warning he gets before the full weight of an overly-muscled teenager lands on the side of his bed. Tanjirou is jostled, but he does not fall. His nose is hit with a mix of dirt and concern.
“Tanjirou, we’re so sorry to hear what happened to Nezuko!” Zenitsu’s usual, anxiety-tinged scent comes next.
He still does not look up at his two friends, but Zenitsu contorts himself and forcefully meets his gaze.
“Tanjirou? You look—”
“Awful!” Inosuke crows. He settles into an odd crouch over Tanjirou, cocking his head like a boar-headed sparrow. “This room feels too still! Like nothing’s moved in here!” He noses closer until the tip of his boar mask is an inch away from Tanjirou’s nose. “Shinobu said you’ve been awake for a day now, but what’ve you even been doing in here? Huh?”
Tanjirou looks away.
“Nothing. Thinking.”
His voice is dreadfully hoarse. It’s his first time speaking in a while.
“Well—um—we came to visit you! And just know that you’re not alone, okay?” Zenitsu shuffles beside the bed, fiddling with his hands before clasping them in front of himself. “We’re mourning with you.”
Tanjirou doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing.
A silence starts to fall, but Zenitsu interrupts it to point at the thing Tanjirou has been playing with in his hand. “Is that—”
He opens his palm. It’s a piece of pink cloth, with one edge jagged and frayed. It was torn from the corner of a kimono. A little girl’s kimono, worn beyond its use, that ought to have been replaced a long time ago.
Inosuke bounces on his heels a couple of times, making the bed frame rock unsteadily. For once, the normally decisive and energetic boy seems to be at a loss of what to do.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Tanjirou,” Zenitsu whispers.
Inosuke’s head perks up. “Yeah, me too—I woulda pummeled those demons!”
“There’s nothing you could have done.”
A beat.
“I know. But I still wish I was there.” Zenitsu pillows his head on his arms at the edge of the bed. Inosuke picks at the strands of yellow hair at the top of his skull.
“Don’t think, ‘If only I was there, I could have done something about it’,” Tanjirou tells him. “That kind of thinking will poison you. There’s always something you could have done—been faster, stronger, smarter—but what’s done is done. Don’t blame yourself.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“Oi, Zenitsu, you’ve got a white hair growin’ here!” Inosuke prods at his head gleefully with a hand that is roughly shoved away.
“Inosuke!” Zenitsu scolds. “Stop that! This is literally the last place or time for your shenanigans, so read the room!”
“You read the room!”
Tanjirou closes his eyes as the two dissolve into familiar bickering inches away from him. His head pounds anew.
The door slams open, and all three jump at the sight of an angry Aoi. “You two—quiet down, or you’re getting kicked out! Tanjirou needs his rest!”
A longer silence falls this time, after Aoi leaves.
“How’re you feeling?” Zenitsu asks Tanjirou, valiantly ignoring Inosuke’s renewed tugging at his hair.
“Fine.”
Shinobu had informed him that Nezuko’s kick had broken three of his ribs. It still aches, there, but Tanjirou almost wishes that the pain won’t fade in a few weeks like Shinobu had said it will. That kick had been Nezuko’s final act for him—an act of love and unimaginable self-sacrifice.
Even now, he is proud of her for that—as proud as he is angry and so, so gutted.
Inosuke huffs. “You better be, if you wanna heal up soon and get back to fighting demons!”
Tanjirou blinks at his friend. Once, twice. He decides to say what has been brewing on his mind. “I don’t know if I will, Inosuke.”
“Hah? Whaddaya mean?”
“What?” Zenitsu sits up with a wide-eyed expression, hissing in pain when the motion inadvertently rips out a few hairs still in Inosuke’s grip. “Are you—are you planning to retire?”
“I don’t know. I…”
Every time he thinks about going back on missions, hunting demons and clashing swords, his mind goes to the empty box in the corner of his hospital room. He will never have its weight—so burdensome in the beginning, but by now no more than a second skin—on his shoulders again.
“What’s the point?” are the words that end up coming out of him. He finds them overflowing as he is unable to dam the flow of thoughts that come rushing out. “I joined the Demon Slayer Corps to save Nezuko. She’s—was—the only one I had left.”
His hands start to shake as his vision finally blurs.
“She was the only one I had left.”
Back in the lonely days of training with Urokodaki, when the nights had gotten too dark, Nezuko’s warm presence next to him had been the only thing staving off the memory of four others that were no longer crowded with him.
The feeling of loss gapes wide open when he realizes:
It wasn’t just Nezuko.
Because it was also Takeo, his stubborn little brother who had tried so hard to be grown-up, to mirror everything Tanjirou did, who denied every accusation of being a ‘kid’ but had secretly preened under every bit of praise he got from his older brother.
It was Shigeru, who had worried Tanjirou to no end for always getting into fights with his twin sister, Hanako—and also for her honor when the other village boys taunted her—and who would never have admitted that they loved each other as much as they fought.
It was Hanako, the flip side of the same coin, who had known how to play Tanjirou like a fiddle, cajoling him into catering to her littlest whims—she had been a brat, really, but Tanjirou could never have hated her.
It was little Rokuta, whose personality Tanjirou had just begun to get to know, who loved to get thrown in the air and caught again—to the disapproval of their mother—and who would have grown up without knowing their father except in the stories they were going to tell him when he was older.
And because it was his mother, Kamado Kie, whom Tanjirou had at least known he was going to outlive, but he hadn’t known—how could he was known?—that it was going to be this early, by this much.
And because it was even his father, Kamado Tanjurou, who at least had died before he could have seen the tragedy that would befall the family he was leaving behind.
Because Kamado Tanjirou, at the tender age of fifteen, has outlived every person he has known and loved in his childhood—as the eldest son is never meant to do.
And because seven ghosts are a heavy weight to bear on one soul.
Inosuke and Zenitsu stay and do not leave him, not even the next morning when Aoi finds them sprawled over Tanjirou, snoring, and yells for them to get out.
It does not make the grief leave, but it is easier to breathe under the burden when Tanjirou can feel warm bodies snuggled next to him, as he had not felt since he was a child—which was a long, long time ago.