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The first part of Shinobu that Giyuu ever really noticed was her wrist.

It was long ago, before he had been able to accustom himself to the idea of noticing anything about Kochou Shinobu at all, and much less anything so difficult to notice by accident as her wrists. But he noticed all the same: the cuff of her haori slid back when she gestured and it struck him how very small it was.

Giyuu had gone home and thought about that far too much. And then it was impossible not to see it: the birdlike delicacy of the bones in that wrist, the bony protrusion where it gave way to her hand, and then how small her hands were, how slender her calloused fingers, and how unlikely it all seemed that such fine and delicate hands could be so lethal.

They might have made some sense as the hands of a physician, agile and deft and skilled. But they did not fit the part of her that glinted when she smiled, that worked at her formulas and thrusts and parries until they drained the color from her face.

For a while Giyuu let himself believe that was all that fascinated him so about Shinobu’s wrists, and then her hands. Now that they lay limp and useless against the white coverlet and a hollow needle situated in a vein feeds fluids into her bloodstream and he has nothing but time to examine them, he is not quite so certain that was really ever the case.

The undersides of her wrists are tinged a sickly blue with veins. They look as sick as her face does even at unconscious rest. And the day Giyuu is so tired that it seems reasonable enough to reach for the arm that is not set up with the needle and fluids and examine it, he finds that it is insubstantially light and that his thumb and forefinger wrapped around her wrist overlap halfway, its circumference is so small.

He tucks these observations carefully away in the pocket of his heart where he keeps things that are not appropriate to dwell upon and sets her hand back down very gently against the coverlet, not knowing in the least that there is something about him not quite the same after that.

There isn’t much going on at the Butterfly Mansion anymore these days. Mostly they’ve been discharged, and the ones who have not are in such sorry states that they cannot much disturb the peace. No one is here, then, except to sit vigil, and Giyuu ought to have gone back to his estate. But no one is so uncouth as to ask why he hasn’t.

The quiet there isn’t like the quiet here. He doesn’t think he could bear it.

Maybe people know that, but they don’t say so if they do, so he doesn’t ever admit it, and if everybody thinks he’s still sleeping on the floor in a spare room because he is too anxious for Tanjirou to go very far, that is all perfectly well. It’s halfway true.

But it’s Kochou’s bedside at which he invariably seems to find himself when it becomes apparent that Tanjirou’s condition is no better this day than it was the last. Funny thing that is.

And not one that has gone unnoticed, apparently, because Kanae has begun to smile at him in a way that implies some kind of knowledge, and Shinazugawa doesn’t tend to bark threats of violence if he doesn’t go away every time he passes Giyuu in the halls, and all the girls who live here have started to look a little pitiful when he’s around. He has proof of this the day that Kanae finds him sitting on the engawa and settles in beside him with tea and that same intimating smile that still unnerves him so.

He does not think he would be smiling intimatingly at anyone if it were his sister who might never wake. But he doesn’t tell her this.

“It’s good of you to stay,” are the first words she says, and Giyuu only lowers his eyes to his lap and nods.

“I think it helps them,” Kanae goes on. “Having a kind presence at their bedsides.”

She is sitting on her hands now, swinging her feet over the edge like a child on a swing, and Giyuu is not given to noticing such things, but it occurs to him then that this has to be some sort of front. He needs only to look up and see the bluish half-moons beneath Kanae’s eyes to be certain of that. 

“Oh,” Giyuu says, then, “um. Maybe.”

“It’s what got Sanemi-kun back on his feet.” She smiles, no less forced now but a little more convincing. “Kiho asking all the time when Papa was going to be awake.”

Giyuu does not think that a toddler’s questions could have had any measurable impact on the length or thoroughness of Shinazugawa’s recovery, but then, he is not a father, so he simply nods as if this makes absolute sense. Kanae is the very doting wife of a man who has only just made his way off of death’s doorstep; even he is not so tactless as to correct her.

Probably, in her position, were it his wife – what a strange thought, it makes his throat constrict – who might not wake, and if he had a little daughter who asked every day when her mother – goodness, what a thought – was going to hold her again, he would convince himself of something similarly irrational. Watching Kanae, helping her with Kiho when neither she nor her husband has the strength for her tantrums, has made him think about that often these past days. It must be dreadful having a family at a time like this.

So all he says to Kanae is, “I see.”

He does not see. All the same, he sleeps in the spare room, helps Kanzaki and Kanae and the girls when they ask, watches the shallow rise and fall of Shinobu’s chest by her bedside. He wonders incessantly why he does and always finds he doesn’t truly want the answer. He becomes a diligent student of Kochou Shinobu, coming to know the lines of her face and her upturned palms all too well. And – this is a special skill of Giyuu’s – he waits.

Nobody comes to fetch him when she wakes just past midnight one evening in a cold, thrashing sweat. He has to find this out himself when he wanders into her room the next morning to find her surrounded and fears for a moment that she’s died after all. But this is not a grudge he carries for long.

Later, when they’ve all been reasonably reassured that Shinobu is not going to leave them and filed out, Giyuu remains silent at her bedside, not really looking at her propped against the pillows, until a finger jabs weakly at the stump of his missing arm.

“So gloomy,” she says, sickly-faced and hoarse and not at all believable. “You’d think you were waiting to hear that I’d died.”

Giyuu doesn’t mean to give anything away. He never does. But he knows from the shock in Shinobu’s sunken eyes when he meets them that his face must look as mallet-struck with horror at that comment as he feels.

It is, of course, that precise moment at which Giyuu allows himself to be aware of the depth of his desire for her not to die, and to accept, because Shinobu’s surgical precision in needling him always has the effect of bringing him to these sorts of unhappy conclusions, that perhaps he would not have cared so much to keep watch if he didn’t feel he stood to lose something.

It is not because Shinobu has woken that he finally leaves the mansion, but because he has an awareness now that he does not want, and he doesn’t think he can bear it.

**

Giyuu doesn’t have a great deal going on these days. Being out of a job will do that. He counts on his fingers about three friends, two if he does not count Nezuko because counting her feels rather awkward, and both of the remaining ones are in comas if he counts Kochou (which is a stretch). And anyway that does him no good, because attending to his friends would mean he had to return to the Butterfly Mansion. And Giyuu is not going to return to the Butterfly Mansion.

It is much nicer to sit in the gloom of his empty estate trying not to think than it is to go back there and be looked at and spoken to and have to try to keep himself from skittering away in fear when he hears the name Kochou spoken aloud, as if it will burn or bite or maybe sting him, all of which it probably would.

He thinks about her wrists sometimes. When it’s lonely. Then he spends some rather long and gloomy hours afterwards thinking about what a lout he is. It is at least better than thinking about the utterly empty docket of his future in the world he fought so hard to create, one-armed and down a life’s purpose. And it is in this state that he receives from a very worried Kanzaburo a summons from Urokodaki.

Giyuu does not want to go and see Urokodaki.

He doesn’t want to be looked at with pity, or spoken to in soft, low tones, or, heavens forbid, thanked. Maybe Urokodakiwould do none of these things; Giyuu can’t say. But lately he’s become so shy of people and conversation in all forms and contexts that he can’t seem to recall what it was ever like to talk to Urokodaki or if it would be the least bit bearable now.

However, Giyuu also has manners, at least in writing, and unfortunately he can feel Tsutako’s little finger jabbing at his shoulder from the grave about how shameful it is to deny his cherished teacher a reply, so he takes out a sheet of writing paper with about as much excitement as he might have facing an Upper Moon and writes a proper reply.

Of course, this is a horrible mistake, and it doesn’t take much for Giyuu to become aware of this.  

He is, as he knew he would be, out of practice in conversation. Mostly Urokodaki talks, or else asks questions which invariably make Giyuu panic and answer in as few syllables as he possibly can. There is absolutely no reason for this—if there is anyone in the world not currently in a coma who is safe to talk to, it is Urokodaki—but nevertheless Giyuu can barely raise his eyes when addressed.

It wasn’t always this bad. Perhaps he’s been worse-shaken by the loss of his arm or the near-loss of so many comrades than he thought. Perhaps; that doesn’t excuse it, though, this silence and stammering, and in an hour Giyuu thinks he might cry with frustration, so unsure is he when or why this perfectly pleasant conversation feels so arduous.

After a while Urokodaki stops asking questions. Giyuu sits and stares at his lap and does not know whether to be thankful or terribly ashamed and decides after a while to be both.

“Giyuu,” he asks after this has stretched on too long even for him, “have you given any thought to your future?”

“No,” he says truthfully, and Urokodaki frowns.

“Well, you have time.” Urokodaki lets a moment sit so his words will settle and then says, “but I do think it would do you some good not to be alone so much.”

“I…I’m well.”

Urokodaki is gracious enough not to refute this. “The company of your comrades at a time like this might be…beneficial.”

“I’m doing well,” Giyuu repeats uselessly.

“Or you might consider looking for a wife.”

Giyuu does not think he has heard this correctly for a couple of beats, and then he thinks unbidden of a very small wrist, and thereupon he realizes that it is not at all correct or logical for such a thought to follow the suggestion that he go out and find a wife because his anxious silence is worrying his Cultivator. His face becomes very warm and very red. He does not appreciate its doing this.

Clearly the only remaining course of action which might salvage even a scrap of his dignity is to stand too quickly and bow too hastily and thank Urokodaki too profusely for his hospitality and leave.

Urokodaki doesn’t follow, and Giyuu’s face burns the hotter for it, because he has just done a horribly rude thing to a man he cares for very much and he ought to be—and is, in fact—ashamed of himself.

But he also has a desperate need just now to go back home and throw off all of his outside clothes and crawl into his futon where, in the little-boy logic that appears to be dictating all his choices just now, nothing should be able to get him. Where the specter of Kochou’s tiny, bluish wrist does not mean anything and no one has ever even implied something so preposterous as the idea that Giyuu ought to get himself a wife.

But, of course, Urokodaki’s crow is not nearly as inefficient as Kanzaburo, so it isn’t very long before the tapping of a beak at the door drags Giyuu unwillingly from his protective cocoon to receive a brief note saying that it was very impolite to leave so suddenly and that if there is someone Giyuu fancies, perhaps his Cultivator could be of help.

Giyuu crawls back into his futon after that.

**

Giyuu does not fancy anyone. That is a ridiculous accusation to level at a man whose life from the age of thirteen until now consisted of little but taking missions. Sometimes he would have time for a little tsume shogi. Maybe. That was all. He certainly cannot honestly claim he’s ever looked at a woman in anything but a professional light.  

Giyuu also spends much of his walk to the Butterfly Mansion after he receives word that Tanjiro has awakened from his coma thinking about how he is going to avoid seeing, speaking to, or otherwise crossing paths with Kochou, and when she is the one who greets him first upon his entrance, he makes every effort to turn tail and flee until Shinazugawa catches him by the back of his haori at his sister-in-law’s direction and nearly rips it (the brute) dragging him back inside.

This, he knows, is the exact opposite of fancying.

He absolutely does not fancy Kochou, because as far as he has ever been aware, fancying somebody does not come with the burning desire to flee from their presence and hide somewhere cool and dark until they’re gone.

This thought comforts him. He fancies Kochou no more than he fancies being hunted for sport. And if he is vigilant and good about dodging, he can certainly visit his friend without taking the coward’s way out of his second social encounter in as many weeks.

This is what Giyuu thinks, at least, until he approaches Tanjirou’s room to the sound of what must be half a dozen voices, and opens the door to twice that many people, at very least, seemingly all trying to talk over each other, and why, oh why, did every single one of the loudest members of the Corps have to gather in this one little room?

So Giyuu backs out of the doorway, pushes his back to the wall, gives himself a moment to accustom himself to the din inside. He closes his eyes, inhales very deeply, picks out the voices of the dandelion boy and the one with the boar mask and a very disgruntled Kanzaki first. Then Rengoku (the husband) jumps in, and the other Rengoku (the wife) follows, and a couple more people whose voices he can’t pick out, and Giyuu is trying to work up his courage to go inside and take the brunt of all that when Shinazugawa (the husband) comes storming down the hall fit to smash a hole in the tatami with his foot and passes Giyuu without a word to stick his head inside and shout at everyone to shut up.

Which they do, but mostly, Giyuu suspects, because they are so shocked to see Shinazugawa.

“Kiho is taking a nap,” he tells them, that time much more sedately.

He slips in while they’re all apologizing in what passes for a whisper with this group and considers that to be the best he’s going to manage.

**

Giyuu intended from the beginning to make his visit to the Butterfly Mansion as short a visit as he could politely manage. The shortest visit he can politely manage, though, becomes exponentially longer when Nezuko pulls him aside and asks if maybe they could go out to the engawa where it’s quieter and have some tea.

Usually Giyuu would refuse the request, but he owes Nezuko his haori and therefore about half of his life, and also she is a kind girl who reminds him not unpleasantly of a mouse in this once-again-human form and he would much rather consort with a mouse than the flock of screeching parrots that have invaded her brother’s room, so he does not.

Thus, he makes himself a sitting duck.

It is at first not unpleasant. Nezuko is gracious and a truly good conversationalist, not merely the kind who can say interesting things but the kind which knows when and when not to push, and soft-spoken, and does not see fit either to tease him or to ask about his future plans, which he still, probably shamefully, does not have. So he has almost forgotten the danger.

But this was a mistake, because it means he isn’t prepared at all when Kochou approaches soundlessly from behind him and sits down just near enough to poke at the shoulder of his missing arm.

“You thought you could hide, didn’t you,” she says, and when he turns horror-struck to look at her, she hides her laughing mouth behind her opposite hand. “How silly.”

“Ko…chou.” No, he thinks, without really even knowing why, no, no, no, no, but what he says instead is, “I…was talking to Nezuko-san.”

“Oh? Am I not welcome, then?”

Giyuu gapes at her and waits, perhaps delusionally, for Nezuko to say the right thing and rescue him, but alas she does not. He looks to her and she seems to be watching all of this with a kind of knowing amusement that makes him feel infinitely worse.

“Wh…why are you here?” he blurts out.

“Goodness, Tomioka-san, it’s my house you’re a guest in.”

“I…I mean…I mean.”

She does not, to his surprise, answer him right away. If anything, the knowing, needling affectation vanishes from her expression as she waits, as if she really doesn’t know why he’s being so strange around her, and she truly wishes she did.

This also lets him notice how pale her face still is, though, how evident the frailty of her health still is upon inspection, and for several moments so informative that he forgets they’re embarrassing, he simply examines her face.

It’s pale, a little too bluish in its undertones for his liking. Her eyes are not so bright as they were, her lips dry and cracked, and there is no softness left in her gaunt cheeks. But it is also small and heart-shaped and her eyes, softer now than they tend to be when he’s teasing her, are a pleasantly mellow shade of violet, and her nose turns up just so at the tip, and all of this pleases him.

When Giyuu realizes this, of course, he averts his eyes and starts to stammer out some excuse not to be here, and Kochou, who how seems merely confused, calls after him as he stands that they haven’t finished their tea yet.

And of course, because whatever higher powers there may be have decided today that they hate him, as he is fleeing as fast as he can without losing what little is left of his dignity, he crashes headlong in the hallway into Rengoku Mitsuri, who was, of course, running somewhere, and she then has to ask, “where are you off to?”

“Running away from Kochou,” he says, and keeps on walking.

And then he must endure being chased down and all but tackled for information, and asked in a million ways if he might happen to be in love with her, and told how wonderful it is if that happens to be the case, and regaled with the entirely confusing and totally unprompted story of how Mitsuri acquired a husband by ambushing him with an earnest proposal while he was convalescing, and nowhere in all of that is he given a second of time to inform Mitsuri that he is not, in fact, in love with her at all.

In fact, he is afraid of her. That he apparently likes to look at her face and thinks she has beautiful wrists and would perhaps enjoy it if he could take her hand and kiss the pale bluish underside of that wrist does not overwrite this very fundamental fact.

Perhaps Kochou is beautiful, and perhaps before he realized this it used to make him happy when she would come up and talk to him when nobody told her she had to. They did always work well together. But Kochou also doesn’t ever say what she really thinks, and to Giyuu, who is all too well aware how much he tends to miss of what people really think of him, this is the most frightening thing of them all.

Yes, he must keep that in mind. That he is very much afraid of her, and that if there were ever a thought in his head of feeling anything for her except that, it would only make her laugh. She’s not the type he imagines would take too kindly to something like that.

So he does the wise thing, for once. He cuts his losses, he pretends that dreadful conversation with Mitsuri never happened and therefore she isn’t going to tell anyone about it, he goes home, and he doesn’t think about Kochou at all.

This is easy enough to do. He needs to give serious thought to the kind of life he’ll lead now that the Corps has disbanded, and anyways life gives him enough trouble now that he’s out an arm that simply navigating is distraction enough. Tying clothes on is difficult this way. Feeding himself. Things so simple they almost amaze him.

It's probably better for him to be off by himself anyway, given all of that. This way his struggle against the inevitable facts of things being harder one-handed and life feeling so very lacking in purpose is a private one, and no one’s burden but his. He finds that to be appropriate penance for a survivor.

So the days pass like a sledge dragged through the mud, one by one, and Giyuu does not hope to hear from her, because if he did he would just ignore it anyway, and then he would open it out of morbid curiosity and find that she really only wanted to see how he was getting on, and if she knew, she would laugh, which is probably why she would have written in the first place, and she probably knows he thinks about her wrists, and she’d laugh at that, too, and anyways she would never understand, having a skill besides cutting down demons to fall back on and a whole family and plenty of people who love and admire her and-

No, Giyuu isn’t going to hope for that. Nothing good would come of it if he did.

**

It has been a month since Giyuu was last forced to risk a face-to-face encounter with Kochou when he receives word from Kanae that she has fallen ill.

Kanae is not specific about the details of this illness, but it’s clear enough that straits are dire. She would never have contacted Giyuu, of all people, unless she truly felt that her sister were in imminent danger, and perhaps she assumed because of the way he sat with her when she was comatose that he’d want to know if she was going to be lost after all.

He most certainly should not, but it is in light of this that Giyuu decides once more to go to the Butterfly Mansion and at very least pay her what respects she’s due as a fellow Hashira before she meets her end.

Thus, it is immensely befuddling to Giyuu that it is Kochou herself who greets him when he arrives.

She is most certainly not dead. She doesn’t seem anywhere close to dead, actually. She is exceedingly pale and wearing a blanket around her shoulders, and her eyes are sunken and dull, but she seems in no greater danger of death than she did the last time they met.

Only quieter, more sedate. She tries to smile but can’t really do it. He doubts she would have the energy to tease him in this sort of condition.

“Tomioka-san,” she says weakly. “Did my sister send for you?”

He inclines his head. “She did.”

Kochou sighs.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I can go.”

“No, it was kind of you to come.” Kochou clasps her blanket around her neck in one hand so the other will be free to rub at her tired eyes. “Thank you.”

What?

“Oh,” is all he says in reply, unable to manage anything more.

They take the tea, which Kanzaki prepares and then brings to them with a surly look at Giyuu that he probably deserves, on the engawa. It’s chilly for April, but not terribly so. Kochou wraps her blanket tighter around herself. She does not, he takes a moment to notice, reach for her cup of tea.

Neither speaks for a while. Giyuu sips his tea, though his heart is beating so quickly that he can’t focus on any sensation but its incessant pounding against his ribcage and it tastes like nothing, because Kanzaki is a good girl and he should respect her kindness in making it for him even if he doesn’t feel like it. But mostly they just sit there, silent and unsure what is supposed to come next.

Finally, Shinobu asks, “what did Nee-san tell you?”

“That you were ill.”

“And only that?”

“Only that.”

Shinobu makes a disgruntled noise in the back of her throat. “Right.”

Then they fall quiet again. There are things Giyuu is surprised to find he wants to ask her, but considering how frequently he’s found himself fleeing the scene lately where Shinobu is concerned, he thinks it’s wisest not to. He thought, after all, that he was going to spend this visit sitting quietly at her bedside like he did before she woke up.

“Nee-san told me you’d sit with me,” she says. “When I was unconscious.”

“…oh.”

“She thinks it means you’re in love with me,” Shinobu goes on. She can’t even affect her old airy tone anymore. “And I wager now she wants me married off.”

“What?”

“Isn’t that silly? I’m sure she wants someone keeping a closer eye on me.”

“…what does that have to do with-“

“I’m not that sick, Tomioka-san.”

“Oh.”

“My sister has been scheming again.”

“Oh.”

“She’s not very happy with me right now.”

Giyuu doesn’t bother with even a handful of syllables this time. He simply looks at her and waits to see what she’s going to say next.

He has never known Kochou to be so forthcoming with private matters before. Now he isn’t quite sure what he’s meant to make of it.

“She’s probably inviting men to come see me hoping one of them will want a wife,” she says, and this in all possible ways feels like a conclusion.

It also makes Giyuu’s throat tighten.

Frankly, he doesn’t believe for a second that Kanae’s asking him to come visit has anything to do with marriage. She probably just assumed from Giyuu’s constant presence at her sister’s bedside that they were closer than they are and his showing up here might raise her spirits, which do indeed appear to be flagging. But Kanae is much too good, always seeing the best in people who really don’t deserve it. There’s precious little good he can do by being here.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, instead of any of that, because he can think of no more adequate response.

“What, you’re saying you wouldn’t want me for a wife?”

That teasing sounds so very wrong when it’s delivered so wearily. It is nearly enough to make him forget the substance of what she’s saying.

No, in truth, he would not. He may be beginning to accept that there are certain things about her he finds attractive, but as far as he has ever known, a wife is supposed to be a companion, somebody trusted and understanding with whom he can safely say the things he feels, and that is not what Kochou is or has ever been. That he’s even here now, speaking with her so intimately, is almost beyond his comprehension.

But the question still makes him swallow hard. Why she’d think he could answer that when he can’t even figure out how to ask her what’s making her look so pale and wan is beyond him, too.

So instead of trying to articulate any of that, let alone all, Giyuu swallows and screws every ounce of courage he has left to the sticking-place and asks, “are you going to die, Kochou?”

She is momentarily so stunned that she doesn’t say anything, and then she looks very pointedly away from him and says, “we’re all dying, last I heard, Tomioka-san.”

“…um.” 

“Some of us faster than others,” she says. “So yes, by that standard, I am dying.”

“Oh.”

“No faster than you are, I’m sure.”

“Then why are you sick?”

“Sick? Goodness, Tomioka-san, aren’t we jumpy today?”

“You look ill.”

“How rude.”

“You’ve looked ill for a very long time, Kochou.”

She turns to him and tries – so very clearly tries – to look like she used to when she was teasing him, but he’s not the least bit convinced. “I didn’t know you kept track of me like that.”

“It’s obvious.”

Shinobu reddens; it nearly makes her cheeks look like they ought to, like they did back when she was first made a Hashira and she hadn’t yet begun to look so pallid.

“You’ve been watching me,” she says. “How sweet.”

“I haven’t.”

He really hasn’t. It’s just blindingly obvious that Kochou hasn’t been well in a very long time. Anyone who’s taken a close look at her these past few months would know it.

Have I been taking close looks at her…?

“I’m all right.”

She is not. But it must not be Giyuu’s business to know why and how that isn’t true, so he says nothing.

**

Giyuu does his best to forget about that afternoon with Kochou. It wants to go on replaying endlessly in his head, and it takes hours upon hours of lonely tsume shogi to keep it at bay, but he thinks he mostly succeeds. He is not thinking about Kochou’s pale face, her tiny pale hands clasped around her blanket, the unfamiliar vulnerability in her face and the slump of her shoulders, how protective it made him feel when he thought back on it. He is not thinking at all about taking her into his arms (well, arm, he supposes) or about asking her what’s really wrong and pressing until he got an answer.

Then a tapping at his door alerts him to a message, and he cannot continue lying to himself that he isn’t hoping that it will be En come to deliver something from her, so that blows a hole in the whole not thinking about Kochou operation.

Come see me, she’s written. Noon tomorrow is best.

And he is there, of course, twenty minutes early, so clearly he has not been as successful as he wants to believe.

**

Kochou is still the lady of this house, so if she is going to choose to ask Giyuu to visit her for reasons he still cannot entirely comprehend, there isn’t anyone to object. Kanzaki is always polite, and usually Tsuyuri is too shy to say much to him anyway. The little girls smile at him before the skitter off into the rooms lining the hallway as he’s coming up the corridor to meet Kochou on the engawa. So while it continues to baffle Giyuu with every visit and every cagey conversation why Shinobu insists on his presence here, there doesn’t seem to be much of a risk of anything.

It is on the sixth such visit in three months that Shinazugawa arrives shortly after he does and abducts Giyuu in short order, probably to kill him.

This would be expected enough. Shinazugawa hates Giyuu and is very loyal to Kochou, even if she says he’s been angry with her lately, so probably he intends to pummel him for taking the liberty of speaking to her so intimately and often. It won’t be much of a fight with Giyuu down an arm. He prepares himself for this. But it never comes.

Shinazugawa pulls the fusuma closed behind him, leans against it, watches Giyuu from the corner of the room that he’s retreated into, and finally says, “she’s sick.”

“I’m aware,” he replies.

“She tell you? Doubt I buy that.”

“Uh…no. She just looks sick.”

“Figures she wouldn’t.” Shinazugawa tsks. “Probably wasn’t ever gonna.”

“Yes,” Giyuu says stiffly. “So you shouldn’t, either.”

“Don’t care much what she wants anymore.” Shinazugawa pushes himself off the wall, arms still crossed, and stalks across the room to lean against another one like a caged tiger pacing in its cell. “Kinda thing you gotta know if you’re gonna be her little pet.”

“Her…pet?”

Shinazugawa scoffs. “You really that stupid?”

“Um…”

“She’s practically got you on a leash,” he says. “You know it’s only because she’s sick, don’t ya?”

“Um, I…I thought so.”

“She thought she was gonna die, yannow. Didn’t plan on living to see the day anyone had enough time on their hands to notice.”

“Notice…?”

“How sick she made herself.”

Giyuu frowns. “Made herself?”

“Think, idiot, how’s a girl who can’t behead a demon gonna kill an Upper Rank?”

“With…with poison,” Giyuu says, puzzled. “Is that not…”

Oh.

“Oh,” he says, very quiet.

“No one knows how long she’ll last, with how much she took.”

Hard as Shinazugawa tries to sound cold saying that, there is a little wobble in his voice that gives him away, and when Giyuu looks up at him, his face is only trying to scowl. He rather looks like he’s going to cry.

“Oh,” Giyuu says simply.

“’s not that complicated, Tomioka,” he says. “She doesn’t care who it is. You’re just an easy dupe.”

“…what?”

“She’s dying, idiot. All she wants is a warm body.”

Giyuu doesn’t say anything more to Shinazugawa after that. Probably Shinazugawa thinks he’s going to leave like that, without seeing Kocho, like he’s left so many shameful times before, but he isn’t thinking about that just now.

Kochou is in her bedroom. Giyuu is also not thinking just now about that fact, or really any of them except that her face is pale and she looks so small propped up with pillows against the headboard of her Western-style bed and that maybe she’s dying after all.

She lied about that. He tells her so, and at first she only looks confused, and then a stormy kind of vexation settles over her face and she looks rather like she would rather he left.

“Where,” she says coldly, “did you hear that?”

“I…I just did.”

That’s about when his throat starts to tighten. It is embarrassing beyond all belief that it does, but it does, and he thinks – he can’t help it – about the fact that he was indeed a fool to think they ever could have ended things with so few casualties as they have thus far had.

“Well,” she says, chin beginning to tremble, “forget about it.”

“No.”

“I said to forget about it.”

Later it will make him angry that she ever thought she could ask that of him. That she could have his company for whatever it is she wants it for and still keep things from him. It will strike him as far more selfish than he knows Kochou to be, and indeed it is. But it is also best that he knows. He will conclude that, too.

It means that when she stops asking him to visit her he can send crows every so often to inquire as to whether she has managed to stay alive and at least, when he receives a reply from Kanzaki or her sister and not from Kochou herself, he can know that she hasn’t gone and died.

This is, at least, the report he makes to the Kamados when they come to visit him and he finds, in the worry he feels for Kochou which crowds out all the voices which usually instruct him not to tell people things. 

This is, of course, probably not especially good form. This information is probably private. But he can’t think of anything else to say except that – Kochou is dying – and then he is, of course, obliged to explain.

He doesn’t know why he even brought it up to begin with. Death is not something so strange in the world they are all a part of that it warrants this kind of uncharacteristic verbosity. But he hasn’t seen her in weeks now, and he doesn’t know if she still looks as ghostly as she did or worse, and it wasn’t ever supposed to be Kochou who fell into Kibutsuji’s lair ready and willing to die.

Kochou who has sisters who adore her and children who depend on her and friends who would mourn her. Kochou whose life’s purpose – to heal, really, that has always been what she was shaped for – was, unlike everyone else’s, left intact when the Corps dissolved.

Kochou who is not alone, and who would be missed, and who is absolutely not under any circumstances supposed to wonder – as Giyuu does nearly every day he finds himself awake in the morning once again – why he’s still here. That Kochou.

It is one thing to know that death is always near. People in their line of work had to learn this or else meet it much sooner and in a wholly unnecessary panic. It is another entirely to plan for it, to use it as a weapon, and then to be so unmoored when it doesn’t come.

He doesn’t say all this to the Kamados, of course, who already look stricken enough just to be informed that Kochou is ill. But it probably shows on his face. That and the dawning knowledge that she is going to be very angry with him for saying all of this when the news inevitably spreads, but that he doesn’t think he cares anymore.

**

Giyuu is not often correct about people, but he was correct about this. Kochou is angry with him. Shinazugawa is angrier with him. He still, that said, sets out for the Butterfly Mansion one rainy morning in June and does not have any intention of being turned away, and at least there is one person who doesn’t greet him with a scowl.

He does not know what to do with Kanae embracing him, exactly, but it doesn’t seem to mean that she’s angry with him, so he stands there with her arms stiff at his sides because it seems the polite thing to do and anyways, Kanae has endured a great deal. She can be untoward if she would like, knowing herself the experience of nearly dying and its requirement that she reckon with a life where she is not nearly what she was before, and then having to watch her sister face the same sort of future with a much greater chance of an unhappy ending.

At least Kanae had always planned on living. At least she found somebody she loved and a child in need to raise as her own and at least she was glad, in the end, because she is loved and needed, that she did not meet her end in that final confrontation so many years ago. How frightened she must be that the same seems to have befallen her sister when she has none of those things, or perhaps doesn’t see that she has any of them, to inspire in her her the grit it must have taken Kanae not to give in.    

He doesn’t say anything and blinks at her owlishly until she says, “take good care of her.”

It’s going to be a handful of years before Giyuu has even an inkling of what she meant by that. But Kanae is holding his hands now, and looking up at him with so much earnest desperation that he can’t think to do anything except to nod and say, “all right,” as if it makes absolute sense for this to be a job which is given to him of all people.

It does not. But Kochou, pale and drawn but organizing the contents of medicine chest in what appears to be an attempt not to seem so very doomed, softens a little when she sees him.

She probably wants the company badly enough not to remember how angry she’s supposed to be. And that is something that Giyuu can understand. He is not the sort to ask for the things he needs, but there have been more days and nights than he could count that all he has wanted – in his heart of hearts where raw, uncovered things burn so hot that all the lies he tries to tell himself burn up with them – has been the warm, quiet presence of someone beside him.

Maybe, he will reflect later, that’s why it has lately frightened him so when people sought him out. When there was no reason at all for anyone to want or need his company and yet people sought it anyway. Nothing strikes terror into the heart of an unhappy man so easily as the threat of getting exactly what he has always wanted most.

In the days and weeks that follow, when Shinobu finds tasks with which she claims to need his assistance and summons him to the estate, there is plenty of time to think about those things. And he does, in the quiet that falls so heavily over every room they enter together. Neither asks after the other but there are simple tasks that require his attention and the rustling of fabric as someone – a colleague, a fellow-worker – moves beside him.

It is in these afternoons at the Butterfly Mansion, and in the mornings when he wakes in a spare room in the same clothes he arrived in to Kanzaki or one of the little girls with a tray of breakfast because they took him here without his remembering it when his head started to bob, that the thoughts Giyuu has chased from his head like nuisance birds collecting on a porch step begin to take a shape he can nearly see and hold and wish for.

He does not know why Kochou wants his company. He does not know how long it will last, or if she is imminently going to die and it won’t matter anyway. But she has not uttered a teasing word in weeks, barely any at all that do not concern the task at hand, and in that quiet he can see the places where she is pocked by a melancholy as heavy and unmoving as his own.

And he can also see the ways that, when she lets go that need she once had to poke and prod and get a rise out of him, she is so very easy to desire.

Kochou has always been competent, sharp as her own blade, and he has always admired her for it. That, he could easily have admitted if ever he were asked. But she has always seemed a little frightening, too. She only seems to speak to him if she wants to make him the butt of a joke, and has always given him the impression of someone who is hiding a great many things, and for the last year or so she’s seemed very sick. Shinobu has always been untouchable in her way.

He hadn’t known how much less so she would be when he knew the truth, and the false parts of her fell away so quickly.

She seems at once resigned and resolute, going about these odd jobs she finds for them to do as if the fate of the world depends upon it like it once seemed to depend on her skill with a sword. She doesn’t joke or dance around things. She is eerily quiet. And in those things, she doesn’t feel so terribly far from Giyuu anymore.

She is so beautiful, and so delicate, and his chest tightens so painfully when he thinks about her turning for the worse one day and taking to her bed never to leave it again. She asks nothing of him except that which he already wants to give.

He doesn’t know exactly what all of these things put together mean he ought to do, but he knows that he would like to keep being here with her doing busywork in silence for as long as he could, and if that meant he could do it until the poison takes her, he would find that a very dear thing indeed.  

But Giyuu has no intention of ever telling her any of that, quite frankly, and when he summons the audacity to ask her a question she isn’t going to like, it isn’t that, but, “why?”

Shinobu has decided today that they’re going to go through an ancient linen closet in an unused room of the mansion to determine what is and is not still of use, and she’s examining a stack of mothbitten pillowcases that might still be useful if ripped up for bandages when he asks. She looks up at him and says, brow furrowed, “the moths have only been at the corners.”

“What?”

“They’re still perfectly good for bandaging.”

Giyuu shakes himself. Of course she was talking about the linens.

“I meant why did you poison yourself.”

Shinobu returns to her work and doesn’t say anything to him for a moment, so he thinks that she isn’t going to answer and accepts this by the time she speaks again.

“I hardly think,” she says, “that being ready and willing to die in combat was very unusual in our line of work.”

“No,” he agrees.

“I wasn’t counting on my brother-in-law to plow in swearing bloody vengeance.” Shinobu forces a smile that for a moment returns all the cold politeness that once made Giyuu feel so far from her to her face. “And really, how else was I supposed to kill him?”

“…Shinazugawa?”

“Upper Two, Tomioka-san, do keep up.”

So she is like this, he concludes, when he talks of the past. “Oh.”

With another forced smile, she finishes, “I hardly expected to live long enough to be sick.”

Giyuu nods. All of this, of course, makes perfect sense, and to the slayer that he was, it would not have sounded a bit unusual. He would not, probably, have found it abnormally tragic if Iguro or Himejima had tried such a thing.

But they are not Kochou.

He doesn’t say this, only adds a few yellowed linens that he imagines the girls wouldn’t want to use to dress beds anymore to a growing stack that they will later tear up for bandages. But he thinks it at length. They are not Kochou. He would not mourn them any more than decency demanded, for there are many he respects but it is dangerous to have too many people one would mourn. They are nothing like Kochou.

“My sister was only seventeen when he attacked her,” Kochou says after so long that Giyuu does not expect to hear her speak again before he leaves.

“Oh.”

“I suppose that’s not really young,” she says. “But it feels young to me.”

Giyuu nods so she’ll go on.

“She wasn’t yet twenty and her heart and her lungs were so damaged she couldn’t make tea without needing to lie down.”

“I, uh, I understand.”

“There was so much he took from her.”  

Giyuu watches Kochou’s face for signs of a response she wants from him, but she doesn’t see one. He thinks of Kanae, then, how she manages that gentle smile even now, and how everywhere she goes there are people who love her for that reason alone, and how sad she would be to hear her sister say something like that when she has found what contentment is available to her and she, unlike her sister, never wants for company, never sleeps alone, never has to call upon a colleague she probably only tolerates to keep the loneliness at bay.

But this must be said more delicately than is Giyuu’s ilk.

“Kanae-san is…reasonably content.”

Kochou inhales sharply, as if she’s steeling herself for something, and Giyuu watches her until she can get herself to say the words.

“They were married when she was only eighteen,” Kochou says quietly. “It was barely six months after that.”

“What…?”

“They hadn’t even known she was carrying it.”

Oh.

“Nee-san always said it was a girl.” Kochou’s voice is starting to show the strain of talking about this. “I can’t remember if she started saying that before Shinazugawa found Kiho or after.”

Giyuu doesn’t know exactly why this makes his throat constrict. He is not especially close to Kanae and certainly not to Shinazugawa. Nevertheless.

“It wasn’t just that,” Kochou says hurriedly. “She’s…weak, and can’t do very much, and…and she hates feeling helpless.”

“Of course.”

Shinobu takes a pillowcase and rips it clean down the middle. “But she still talks about that baby.”

“I see.”

She places the two halves back to back, rips that piece down the middle too. “Calls it her instead of it.”

Giyuu waits for her.

“Keeps on hoping there’ll be another one when everyone’s told her there won’t.”

Oh.

“Nee-san,” she says, “has never wanted anything more than that.”

“A baby?”

“She just keeps on hoping.” A clean tear divides one stack of strips in half again. “It’s going to kill her, hoping like that.”

“…oh.”

“He didn’t kill her,” Kochou says.

“No.”

“But he damaged her in ways no one could fix.”

Giyuu considers this, weighs whether to say the thing he really means.

“Losing you, I think,” he says, “would make it worse.”

Kochou’s head whips around to glare at him. “That’s not for you to guess at.”

He says nothing in response to this.

“I had to kill him,” she says simply. “That was all.”

**

Giyuu hasn’t left the Butterfly Mansion in a week now.

He never set out to stay so long. There isn’t truly enough to do here to warrant his presence. But he stays, day after night after day, does whatever anybody finds around the house in need of work, eats meals in silence with Kochou and asks her nothing. He has, in some way, all the information he needs.

He knows better than most the things a person will be driven to when someone far better is faced with a crueler fate than their own. It had simply never occurred to Giyuu that Kochou, so needed and so loved, would be so vulnerable to the suggestion that her death might right the score.

That part sickens him and it is strange, because the idea of his dying at the call of duty never once struck him as unjust in all his time as a slayer, but perhaps it’s different when it’s Kochou. His life has never been so dear to him as hers has started to seem now that it seems to be ebbing away.

When he breaks his silence, then, after a whole week, it is only to ask her that – if she thinks she’s going to die – and they are having tea on the engawa. Those are the moments he feels her guard is lowest and when the hammering of his heart is most noticeable, when he most wants to say things he ought not to, and this time he turns himself to her and does.

“I don’t know,” she tells him.

He just looks at her, then, and she at him, and maybe she can see in his eyes how inadequate an answer that is, because she smiles – small and frail, nothing like her false one – and says, “sorry,” and then Shinobu raises herself up on her knuckles and presses her cool, dry lips to his.

He returns home that evening to a horridly empty house and sets out the next morning for Mount Sagiri before he as even received a reply.

**

This is terribly awkward, and Giyuu had known that it was going to be.

He did not leave this place gracefully last time and this necessitates a great deal of mumbling apologies and groveling which are met with what Giyuu can only interpret as stern amusement. Urokodaki waits for him to have said his piece with a look on his face which seems to fit no other description.

Then, he says, “you were rather vague in your last letter, Giyuu.”

Giyuu’s cheeks flush. “I’m sorry. I wanted to explain it myself.”

He had said nothing more in his perfunctory letter to his Cultivator than that he was in need of counsel. This could have meant anything, though the amused part of Urokodaki’s stern amusement seems too knowing for him not to have picked up on a great deal. That had been on purpose.

It is quite frankly too embarrassing to put down in writing, and there is also the fact that if he tries to make it so concrete as that he might find out it never happened at all.

“Well,” Urokodaki says, “by all means.”

“…I believe I may have compromised a woman.”

“What?”

“I…I mean, her…honor.”

Urokodaki stares at Giyuu for a moment in what looks like amazement before he says, “what in the world?”

“I...you see, I had…no idea she might ever have…harbored those kinds of feelings for me, and…and I don’t know what she intended for me to think or do and she’s the sort of woman who would expect me to know the proper course of action, but I don’t, since a woman has never-“

“Are you saying, Giyuu,” Urokodaki asks, “that you were…seduced?”

“…seduced?”

“It sounds,” he says, “as if a woman convinced you to sleep with her.”

Giyuu’s face heats. “Sleep with her?”

“Is that not what you’re implying, Giyuu?”

“Shi…Kochou didn’t sleep with me.” His voice comes out quiet; most of his brain is lagging behind his mouth, occupied in processing the shock of the implication. “I…I didn’t sleep with Kochou.”

Urokodaki kindly disguises a surprised sound from his throat with a poorly-acted cough.

It takes a moment for him to ask, after that, “Kochou as in the Insect Hashira?”  

“Yes.”

“Kochou is the subject of this-“  

“She…she kissed me.”

“Ah.”

“What does that mean?”

Urokodaki chuckles. “You weren’t the aggressor in this…encounter.”

“The aggressor?”

“May I presume,” he asks, “that she kissed you, and you did nothing and then fled the scene?”

“…I didn’t flee the scene.”

“Oh?”

“I…sat there.”

“Saying nothing.”

“And then we finished our tea.”

“And you didn’t ask her what she meant by that.”

“No.”

“And?”

“Then I went home.”

Urokodaki sits back on his heels, examines Giyuu a moment more, then says, “well, Giyuu, I believe I have excellent news for you.”

“You do?”

“I don’t think you’ve compromised anybody’s honor.”

Giyuu frowns. He is no expert in matters of the heart, but kissing one’s colleagues impulsively on the engawa does not seem like the sort of thing one’s honor can withstand.

So, “Oh,” is all he says in reply.

And then both are quiet again, and it is in this quiet that Giyuu cannot help but ask: “so…it’s not necessary for me to ask for her hand?”

“Because she kissed you?”

“Well…yes.”

“What exactly is the nature of your relationship with Kochou, anyway?”

“We’re colleagues,” he says. “She kissed me.”

“And before she kissed you?”

“We were colleagues.”

“You’re not the sort of man who has tea with his colleagues, Giyuu.”

This is true – he isn’t – but Giyuu has never thought of it that way before. “Maybe not.”

“So why Kochou?”

“She asked me to.”

“Have tea?”

“Come visit her.” He thinks back to the beginning of all of this. “When she started to get sick. And then she kept asking.”

“I didn’t know Kochou-san was ill.”

“She ingested wisteria poison,” Giyuu tells him. “She wanted to kill an Upper Rank.”

“…goodness.”

“She’s going to die,” Giyuu says matter-of-factly, because perhaps if he says it enough times without wavering it will feel less like a mallet to the chest each time. “Which complicates things.”

“Imminently?”

“She doesn’t know.”

Urokodaki frowns. “I believe I’m beginning to get a clearer picture of things.”

“You are?”

“You visit her often,” he says.

Giyuu nods.

“You’re…on good terms?”

“I think we are.”

“Has she ever…made an overture like that before?”

“No.”

“Have you?”

“No.”

“Is she aware of your feelings for her?”

Giyuu up to now hadn’t even known that Urokodaki was aware of said feelings, and flushes. “No.”

“Have you tried to make her aware?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It’s not appropriate.”

“Because?”

“She’s dying.”

“Because?” Urokodaki repeats.

“…she’d laugh at me.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“I’m not the kind of person somebody would want to have feelings for them.”

“Didn’t she kiss you?”

Giyuu’s face, somehow, grows even hotter. “Yes.”

“So?”

“I wouldn’t be able to see her anymore,” he says. “If I told her.”

“Tell me something, Giyuu.”

“Yes?”

“What is it that you do together when she invites you to visit her?”

“Chores.”

“Household chores.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“She always needs help with something.”

“Ah.”

Giyuu does not ask what this means.

“I believe, Giyuu,” Urokodaki finally says, “that it would be most appropriate for you to express your interest in her.”

“…I don’t want to do that.”

“Well, you need to.”

“But-“

“It’s rather compromising to your honor, you know, being the kind of man who can’t speak clearly for himself.”

Giyuu shrinks.

Of course his Cultivator is right. But he didn’t have to say it.

**

This is all truly a terrible idea.

Shinobu is probably going to be disgusted, and it’s much too hasty, and anyways she’s ill and probably not thinking straight and certainly has never once indicated that she wishes for such a thing. But if Giyuu is going to proceed, he’s going to do it in the proper way. Urokodaki was right about that much.

That is how he finds himself hesitating on the threshold of the Wind Estate and hoping against all hope that Shinazugawa (the husband) will not be home.

He hasn’t been to the Wind Estate before, but it’s lively this morning. Giyuu forgets sometimes that Shinazugawa and Kanae are caring for Oyakata-sama’s orphaned children now, but today two of the eerie identical girls are doing some sort of gardening while little Kiho sits between them grabbing handfuls of dirt for some unknown purpose, and they both raise their heads to greet him. He thinks about asking them for Kanae’s whereabouts but then thinks better of it.

“Kanae-sama is in,” one of them says before Giyuu can even ask. “Please go inside.”

He will not ask how they knew what he was here for. Giyuu bows in grateful acknowledgement, carefully slips off his sandals in the genkan, announces himself, and steps inside hoping that they know what they’re talking about.

They do. Kanae is sitting at a low table in one of the front rooms, writing in what looks like an account book, and when Giyuu enters, she exclaims in surprise and stands.

He stands in the doorway a moment, then looks at her – really looks at her, head to foot, noticing the prim way she’s begun pinning back her hair and her pale blue kimono and the pristine kappogi she wears over it – and thinks about what Shinobu has told him, about a baby that never was and a hope that will never be realized, and he can only swallow.

“Shinazugawa-san,” he greets her, inclining his head. “I was hoping to speak to you about your sister.”

Kanae smiles knowingly and invites him to sit. They settle into a weighty, awkward silence before either says anything. Then, finally, Kanae is the one to break it: “have you finally figured it out?”

“…I’m sorry?”

“Shinobu’s feelings for you?”

“Her…” Oh. Yes. That. “Sort of.”

Kanae laughs softly. “Sort of?”

“She, um, kissed me.” Then Giyuu reddens. This is all very improper to be saying to her sister. “I’m…I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Anyways. Yes, I suppose I have…figured it out.”

“Kissed you?” Kanae raises her eyebrows. “My. I hadn’t expected it had gone that far.”

“It…hasn’t.” Giyuu’s face reddens. “Sorry. I’m very sorry about all of this.”

“Don’t be,” she says. “I’m glad that she has company.”

“It benefits me as well.” Giyuu swallows and his throat tightens a little as if to stop him. “Um. I understand that Shin…sorry, Kochou is ill, and things are uncertain, but, um.”

“If anything,” Kanae says, “I think that makes her need for companionship even more urgent.”

“Perhaps.”

“You’ve been such a comfort to her.”

“I have?”

Kanae nods. “I knew you would be.”

“…what?”

But she says nothing more, so he presses no further.

“If she wants it,” Giyuu goes on, “I think…it would probably be most appropriate for us to be married.”

“Oh. Goodness.”

“Sorry, is that inappropriate?”

“No, just very sudden.” Kanae does not, at least, look angry. “Have you discussed this with Shinobu?”

“Um. No.”

Kanae frowns. “Is Shinobu at all aware that you feel this way?”

“…I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t you sort that out first?”

“I’m going to. I just wanted to…to know before I did.”

“To know what, Giyuu?” Kanae asks gently.

“Well, if you would approve.”

“I probably ought to say no.”

“Oh. I see.”

Kanae sighs. “Shinobu…isn’t well.”

“Oh.”

“I sent for you because I was dreadfully angry with her, you know.” She shifts, sitting her chin on a closed fist. “I knew if I tried to keep her company I would only say something I could never take back.”

Giyuu swallows, nods. “I see.”

“You…wouldn’t.” Kanae sighs. “You have…a certain way of keeping cool.”

“Oh?”

“A calm presence. I thought it made you suitable.”

“Oh, all right.”

“And, of course, my sister liked you, so there was that.”

“Did she?”

“How many times, Tomioka-san,” Kanae asks, “has she asked you to visit her for no other reason than to help her with a job around the house that nobody actually needed to do?”

“Um. A lot.”

“She wanted you to come and spend more time with her, you see.”

“…that’s what that was?”

“Goodness, you’re dense. Yes. That all meant she liked you.” Kanae smiles and looks in that moment far too worldly for twenty-one. “But Shinobu hasn’t coped well at all with…things.”

“Things,” Giyuu repeats. “Yes, I’d say.”

“And I can only do so much for her.”

“Hm.”

“I ought to say she’s in no state to be married to anybody, and sick on top of that.”

Giyuu nods.

“But instead I find myself thinking what a relief it would be to know she had someone to love her and look after her where I couldn’t.”

That word makes Giyuu’s stomach twist. Still, he nods again.

“I’m a sentimental fool and I know it,” Kanae says. “But you’re a good man, Tomioka-san.”

“Um…thank you.”

“You would be a kind husband and a faithful companion, and that’s the most I think I could possibly ask.”

“I would try to be.”

“I can’t promise she would be as good to you as she should.”

Giyuu ducks his head so as not to meet Kanae’s eyes. He has never once imagined Shinobu would ever love him very much if she were to accept, or would ever grow to trust him so as to tell him what she truly thought of anything, but there is a great roiling mass of longing in his gut telling him that these things don’t matter. He deserves so little. Simply to be her companion, to be at her side, to be able to sleep beside her – he thinks that is already more than he deserves.

“But,” Kanae says, “I can promise that she cares for you.”

“That’s enough.”

“Then yes,” Kanae says. “As long as you aren’t hasty.”

**

Giyuu is not hasty, he thinks.

The first week he returns to the Butterfly Mansion without being asked. When Shinobu does ask, he simply states that his feelings for her compelled him to return, and to please give him a job to do, and she does not so much as blush before she gives him a list of household expenses to sum up. There is a new job each time he finishes the last, and each time, Shinobu looks him up and down as if appraising him for sale, then nods approvingly. They do not discuss things but Shinobu looks at him occasionally with something simmering in her eyes, as if she would like to eat him, and Giyuu has to go in another room for a while.

By the second week, he is once again sleeping in a spare room of the Butterfly Mansion instead of returning to his own. He gathers all his courage to ask her if she would like to discuss what prompted that kiss, to which she huffily says that it ought to be obvious and reddens and then has to turn around to say that he ought to try it himself if he’s so uncertain. By the close of the week he does.

Shinobu got it into her head to make tsukemono the day he does. Everything smells like vinegar, and Shinobu’s hair is slipping out of her usual butterfly hairpin in curly tendrils with the midsummer heat. That heat has raised a little of the old color in her cheeks, and so she is rather rosy, and softer and more inviting in a kappogi over her summer yukata than Giyuu thinks he has ever seen her, and so he does.

It is mostly a better kiss than last time because it is not the sort of hit-and-run that Shinobu attempted before and also because she opens her lips this time, and holds his face in her hands to pull him down to her height, and it tastes not unpleasantly of vinegar and lasts a great deal longer and makes Giyuu’s chest feel very hot and his honor feel very compromised.

He tells Shinobu promptly that, while terribly pleasant, this activity is terribly inappropriate to be doing whilst they remain unwed, and for the rest of the afternoon Shinobu looks very peaky with him. But she needn’t be.

By the third week, when the girls have convinced Shinobu and Giyuu to come with them to collect fireflies, he is certain of himself. And the courage finally comes to him while they’re watching Naho and Kiyo run around with wide-mouthed jars held aloft, Shinobu leaning a little but not much against his shoulder, and he thinks perhaps he could get used to this.

“It would be appropriate for us to marry,” he tells her.

There will be days years later, when Giyuu and Shinobu both are far more beloved than they are now, that she teases him for his choice of words that night. Appropriate, indeed. But he thinks there are lots of meanings of that word and many of them fit.

And whatever the reason, she agrees, so perhaps she secretly thought the same.

She kisses him that night until his lips feel bruised and he isn’t quite sure if his lungs will ever fill up properly again, and he is terribly embarrassed and rather ashamed but curiously certain that in not too long he’s going to start to cry with the sweetness of it all, of finding his feelings so desperately returned, and it is not one month before they have managed – not in style but in what way they must – to have themselves wed.

**

It is the least eventful of weddings they could manage, as both of them wanted, and when it happens there are still a great deal of things that have yet to be said and griefs which have yet to be set aside. There is no less poison in Shinobu’s veins than there was before she was a wife and Giyuu has no more clue what he is meant to be or do in this new world now that he is a husband.

Except, perhaps, to do exactly that. To be a husband. To try, gracelessly and laboriously, to help Shinobu out of her furisode and into a bath in which he washes her with his sole shaky hand and tries ever so hard not to look at her, because he desires her and it frightens him, because he can see her ribs and the skin that is always covered is so blush-pale and the strangest urge to cry floods his tightening chest when he remembers that. To be tender. She is badly in need of it.

But then, he would not cry when Shinobu worked a lather of soap into his hair if he were not just as badly in need. He would not feel so very comforted when she put her arms around him.

Shinobu has been passionate occasionally and coy often but she has never, in Giyuu’s memory, been tender before. He thinks he will remember the gentleness of her laugh when they are drying themselves and he thanks her all the rest of his days.

She is the one who tells him, in the end, not to be ashamed, because she started this if anyone did, and they are her desires that they pantomime on the night of their marriage, not his own, and really he is only doing a favor to a sick, sorry woman who doesn’t yet know how to love properly. But he doesn’t think he really needs to be told anymore.

There is so little purpose in this new world, so little direction, but there is Shinobu, there is watching her face and listening to the intakes of her breaths carefully to learn what she likes and what she does not, there is falling asleep warm and content with her tucked neatly into the curve where his body curls around her, there is waking slowly and finding that he doesn’t want to leave his futon if Shinobu is there and warm and will let him stay.

There is whatever he’s meant to call this strange tenderness between them, and it is not enough, not yet, but perhaps it is the best start he could have found.

It’s morning, a muggy August day too hot for doing much of anything, and Giyuu nudges his lips into Shinobu’s mussed hair. She stirs but doesn’t wake; there is nothing especially to wake for, anyway. And for once in all the later years of Tomioka Giyuu’s life, nothing is looming, and nothing threatens to break open like a cloudburst, and there is something he can call his own.

He breathes in, breathes out, breathes in again the faint soap-bar scent of Shinobu.

Yes. Life is different indeed these days.