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The demon calls its blood demon art the “portrait of a thousand faces,” but in the end it doesn’t matter what its technique is called.
It can all be summed up in one word in the end.
Torture.
It’s torture.
[ONE.]
Tanjirou stumbles upon the scene by pure coincidence.
He's heading back directly from another mission, and the sweat hasn’t even fully dried from his skin when the faintest scent of human despair and demon, demon, demon wafts over him. It sets his already frayed nerves instantly on edge.
Ignoring his crow’s startled caw, he leaps off the forest path and plunges through the trees. The morning’s snow churns under his feet, and branches snag unforgivingly at his haori. One catches on a hole that had already begun to form in the seam of the garment, ripping it open like a wound. Even as his heart weeps, he doesn’t slow his pace.
I’m sorry, Mother. I’ll mend the haori you sewed me as soon as I get home.
A demon crouches over a slayer whose sword hand lies slack at her side. Her sword itself rests only a few centimeters away, but her fingers don’t even twitch toward it—even as the demon’s dripping jaws unhinge over her exposed neck. Tears pooling in the slayer’s eyes fill the air with their salty, heartbroken aroma. The snow around them is scuffed in a rough circular radius, exposing hints of brown earth.
Tanjirou bursts into the clearing like an arrow loosed from a warbow, sword raised in preparation for the third form of Water Breathing.
The demon’s head snaps up the instant his foot connects with the bare earth.
His eyes—
—oh heavens, the eyes—
—wheeling discs of spring green, the shade of new leaves and young shoots—
“Nii-san?”
Kamado Takeo tilts his head, his mouth pulling to the side in a motion Tanjirou has seen a thousand times. The mole under his right eye moves as he squints exasperatedly.
The sword slips from Tanjirou’s numb fingers.
“What are you doing here?” His ten-year-old brother crosses his arms. “I thought you’d be out until dinner. I haven’t even finished cutting the firewood yet, y’know.”
“T—” The word refuses to leave his lips.
“Finally changed your mind, did ya?” The smile crossing Takeo’s face transforms him from a petulant preteen to an exuberant child. “Are ya gonna let me help you this time?”
A tear rolls down his cheek.
“Takeo,” he rasps, and is about to run forward to embrace his brother when—from somewhere far enough off to be laughable—alarm bells start ringing in his head.
“D-demon.” He looks around wildly, trying to shake off the odd haze that had fallen over him at some point. “Takeo, you—you have to run. There’s a demon! A demon around here.”
“A demon?” His brother’s voice is filled with skepticism. “C’mon, stop playin’ pretend. Come here, will ya? I got somethin’ to show ya.”
He beckons Tanjirou forward with one hand. The other is hidden behind his back. Red—blood? Why does he smell blood? Why is there blood on Takeo’s hand?
Why is the entire clearing saturated with the smell of blood?
The pounding in Tanjirou’s head intensifies.
Why—why is Takeo here? Why are they both here? What was he doing, again?
There’s something on his back. The familiar weight of the family charcoal basket. So maybe he was on his way to the market, like Takeo had said? But, wait…usually the smell of charcoal is so pungent and all-consuming that it’s all he can smell on his way to town. Right now, there’s no charcoal scent at all.
“Nii-san. Come here.” Takeo’s tone grows more insistent. Demanding. “Come here.”
He takes one dragging step forward. The weight on his back shifts and bounces against something strapped to his side.
A numb hand creeps down to trace out its shape. He knows this.
A sheath.
A sword sheath.
A sword sheath for a nichirin sword.
A bolt of panic shoots down his spine.
“Takeo, have you seen where my sword went?” His voice goes wild with alarm. There’s—no, there’s definitely something wrong.
“Sword?” Takeo’s frowning again, no smirk in sight. “What does that have to do with anything? Just come here, will ya, Nii-san?” He’s upset now—practically stamping his foot.
Tanjirou shuffles forward another step, as if through molasses. “It’s important. I need my sword. I—think I dropped it somewhere? Have you seen it?”
Dismissively, “Don’t worry about the stupid sword.”
“I need it.”
“You don’t.”
Then, on the third step, the toe of his sandal connects against something that reverberates all the way up and down his body and through his bones. He knows without looking that it’s his sword.
He tears his eyes away from his brother with what feels like Herculean effort to see his sword lying, curiously, abandoned in the disturbed snow. For a moment, all he can do is stare at it stupidly.
A flash of movement.
Tanjirou ducks and brings his sword up just in time to block a razor-tipped swipe from Takeo that would have taken off half of his skull.
No. Not from Takeo.
From the demon.
Takeo’s skin is ghost-pale, his eyes wide and trembling. “Why are you fighting me?”
He doesn’t answer, choosing instead to press a hand against the slash across his shoulder. His brother—no, the demon wearing his brother’s face—grits his teeth.
“Why didn’t you take me to the village that day?” the monster with Takeo’s voice cries in a loud voice that buries into his eardrums. “Why did you leave me at home to be slaughtered with everyone else? You could’ve at least saved me, but you didn’t. Why, Nii-san? Why? WHY?”
Tanjirou sobs as he fends off blow after blow, each one powerful enough to kill on impact. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, Takeo! I didn’t know!” Red lines appear on his brother’s arms with each deflection using his blade, but they quickly seal up in between blinks.
“I TRUSTED YOU, NII-SAN!”
Even when the demon’s physical attacks don’t land, every word strikes true into his very heart.
“YOU LET ME DIE AND YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TO SAVE ME!”
The tip of a claw slips past his guard and gouges deep into his side. Locked into close range, he looks into his brother’s teary maroon eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he wheezes.
Water Breathing, First Form: Water Surface Splash.
A red line appears across Takeo’s thin neck, and he’s already panicking—already heaving—he should’ve at least chosen the Fifth Form, why didn’t he, why didn’t he—
After an awful eternity, Takeo’s head slides off his body and thumps softly into the snow.
[TWO.]
Tanjirou slumps down into the slush, not even having the energy to stand. He stares at the head, feeling empty. Even in death, the demon looks like Takeo—down to the eyelashes casting long shadows over his brother’s soft cheek.
How dare he.
The clearing is silent. The other demon slayer—the one he had saved from the demon—has dragged herself to the trees. Her face is as blank as before, but the smell of her agony pours off of her like a steady stream. Her right arm hangs strangely. Broken.
She mouths something at him.
“What?”
He makes out something about the body, watch the body—
He whirls in time to see the demon’s remains do the impossible: they melt into a nauseatingly green sludge that coalesces upward into slim legs and a peach-colored kimono and…
Tanjirou’s stomach turns over, even as his heart gives an unwilling pang.
Hanako’s blunt bangs slide over her forehead. She tilts her head to peer up at him with clear maroon eyes. Kamado eyes.
“Nii-chan? Why are you crying?”
Her high voice sounds just the slightest uncertain, as it always does whenever someone displays an emotion that makes her uncomfortable.
“Do I need to punch Shigeru for you? I bet he pulled one of his stupid pranks again…I keep telling him they’re not funny, but he’s just a blockhead like usual…”
He laughs wetly, even as his hand gropes on the ground for his sword again.
“I never thought I’d hear your voice again, Hanako. Not even to insult people.”
“Whaddaya mean?” His sister plants her tiny fists on her hips. “Did you hit your head or something? Silly Nii-chan.”
Her bell-like laughter breaks something in him.
“‘Why,’ you asked, earlier,” he sobs hoarsely. “Me too. Why? Why are you doing this to me?”
“Come here, and I’ll tell you,” Hanako replies sweetly in the exact tone she always uses to wheedle a promise out of her older siblings. Tanjirou, especially, has always been weak to her. She knows it.
He can’t—he can’t kill his sister.
Please. Don’t make him do it again.
“Please,” he breathes aloud, and the demon’s face twists in a mockery of sympathy.
“You’ve been so lonely without us, haven’t you, Nii-chan? Don’t you want it to end? It can, you know. You can be with us again.”
The demon shuffles closer and extends a small hand that Tanjirou wants so, so badly to take. His—her?—voice is soft and inviting.
“It’ll be over in a second. I promise. Before you know it, you’ll join us in paradise. Don’t you want to be a family again?”
“I…”
Closer. “You can see me again. All of us again.”
A half-frozen tear drips from his open mouth.
Closer. “You want that, right?”
“I…want…”
Closer—close enough to see each strand of her choppy hair.
Tanjirou swings.
His nichirin sword sweeps clean through her neck like it’s made of nothing.
“I want to see you again, Hanako—after everything’s over, I want to see you. The real you.”
The disembodied head cackles even as it melts back into green sludge.
[THREE.]
Tanjirou is ready this time.
He doesn’t flinch, even when the demon transforms into a young boy with Hanako’s mirrored features and a buzzed head of dark hair.
“Nii-chan!” Shigeru lunges toward him, arms outstretched, and gets both hands lopped off for his troubles. Blood spews from the stumps for a moment before they are reformed as new. He ignores the way the sight makes him want to throw up.
“You can’t fool me a third time,” he grits. “This trick is getting old.”
“Oh?” Shigeru puts a finger to his lips. “Ya know… I’ll never get old. Thanks to you, I’ll be seven forever even when you get old and gray, Nii-chan. Is that a good price to pay?”
“Shut up!”
He refocuses on slashing the demon’s neck. The thing keeps dodging while spewing poisonous remarks, seeming to have given up the act entirely.
“You’re useless for a protector! How could you call yourself our older sibling when you couldn’t even be there for us?”
He hates how it hurts even when he knows it’s the demon talking, not his brother.
“Hanako died first, ya know?” Shigeru’s voice cracks. “I had to watch her get torn limb to limb trying to shield me!”
“You’re lying!” he can’t help but cry.
“You think I’m lying?” For a second, Shigeru’s maroon eyes turn slitted as the demon underneath surfaces. “Muzan-sama’s blood is in me, little slayer. I’ve seen it.”
Tanjirou falters, horror bleeding through. “No…it’s not true. It can’t be true.”
Shigeru is back, spitting vitriol. “In denial, Nii-chan? You don’t wanna hear about how we died without you there to save us?”
In a fit of fury, Tanjirou hacks his brother’s legs clean off and pins him down when he falls.
“I don’t need you to tell me these things!” he screams, raising his sword. “I tell myself often enough, so—stop it—”
“You—”
Shigeru’s words die on a gurgle as his head is cut off.
[FOUR.]
The body melts. Reforms.
I can’t do this, Tanjirous thinks as he readies his sword in bruised and bleeding hands. However, it’s his heart that’s in the worst shape. He feels shattered. Crushed. In a million pieces like the expensive vase his mother had bought from the village once.
He can’t run. A glance tells him that the female demon slayer had passed out. He can’t carry her and run fast enough. Not in this state.
So, mind made up, he turns to face the unsmiling form of his mother.
He blinks.
“What—no Rokuta?” The words slip out before his tired brain can stop himself. Looking at the previous order of apparitions, he had expected his youngest sibling next.
“Rokuta.” His mother’s lips quirk into a cold grin. “My baby. I thought you’d take care of him, you know, as the eldest brother. After all, you know how hard it’s been since your father passed.”
“Let’s not do this again.” He hefts his sword and closes the distance.
The demon doesn’t let him win that easily, dancing sinuously out of his reach. As the forms progress, they seem to retain less of their original personalities—perhaps sensing that he was becoming harder to fool—while becoming more difficult to defeat in combat.
“I loved you, my child.”
Slash.
“I thought I’d be able to see you grow up.”
Swing.
“Meet a girl. Get married.”
Swipe.
“Have children. My grandchildren.”
Thrust.
“You were my darling son—”
“DON’T SAY THAT WITH MY MOTHER’S FACE!”
Tanjirou follows with a swipe so vicious that it parts the flesh from navel to chin. It closes instantly with a wet snick.
“Mommy’s boy misses his mother?” the demon returns venomously.
He parries, feeling tears run anew. “Yes,” he admits.
Kamado Kie.
Mother of six children.
When he was little, his mother had seemed like the absolute best person in the universe. Her lap was the safest haven from nightmares. Her arms turned the whole world.
Does he miss his mother?
Does the sun rise in the east? Does Polaris shine in the night sky?
What a pointless question.
“I miss my mother,” he allows himself to admit. “That’s why I feel sorry for you, you know. Demons don’t have mothers to miss.” Slash. “When I send you to the afterlife, you might be able to see your mother again. Your human one, I mean.”
This, at last, seems to send the demon into a fury.
Emotion makes it clumsy. Tanjirou separates his mother’s head from her shoulders in one smooth exhale.
[FIVE.]
He thinks with a touch of irony that, out of everyone, his father might be the easiest to handle.
Kamado Tanjurou died a year before the attack. Of natural causes, the doctor said. His father had been untouched by the tragedy—had not even known it would happen. There’s a kind of blessing to that, he thinks.
“Tanjirou,” his father says, face wan and drawn in the way it had been during the months of his illness. “It’s been a long time.”
“It has.” He raises his sword. “Let me show you what you taught me, Otou-san.”
They clash in a blur of blade and claws.
He doesn’t know why—maybe it’s because it’s his father—but this time, the battle feels like a dance. Each dancer steps in a rhythm that could have been rehearsed. Here, one ducks the swing of a black-edged sword. There, the other sidesteps a crushing blow and aims a counterattack in the same breath.
Left, right.
Back, forth.
The flame in Tanjirou ignites.
He leaps forward in a burst of speed, in time to nick his father’s hanafuda earrings from their strings. Once disconnected from the demon’s body, they vanish into ash.
Close, he thinks. I’m close.
“You will never become like me,” his father breathes.
“Thank you, Otou-san, for all you’ve done for us. Let me carry on where you’ve left off—to do as best as I can.”
He’s soaring on wings of flame.
“I may never fill your shoes, but you will watch me grow into mine.”
His sword descends, the edge bursting in a blaze of red and gold.
Almost sounding panicked, the demon cries, “I’ll never forgive you for failing as my son!”
He smiles. Says nothing.
His father’s head rolls.
[SIX.]
Ah, he thinks as he watches the sludge reform. There you are, Rokuta.
The toddler’s figure ripples into shape, bowl cut falling over large maroon eyes. Tanjirou waits for Rokuta’s mouth to open and for cutting barbs to spill out, but—nothing.
His youngest sibling stands there, stock-still in the tiniest blue kimono.
His mother had been so excited to dig out Shigeru’s old clothes, he remembers. Tanjirou’s had been passed down to Takeo, who had worn them threadbare in rough play. Their mother had made brand new kimonos for Shigeru as a baby, and they’d been ready to repurpose for the last baby.
Rokuta, barely even a year old.
Nezuko and Hanako had fought over trying to teach him their names as his first word, but neither had gotten very far. Their mother had only laughed and said that it might take a while before Rokuta could begin to speak.
Tanjirou had handled plenty of babies before him, but had still marvelled at how small he was when he first held him. Little Rokuta had fit perfectly in his arms like a puzzle piece.
For a long moment, neither moves. Tanjirou stares at Rokuta. Rokuta stares back at Tanjirou.
He had raised this baby practically from birth.
And now, he is going to cut off his little head.
No.
A forbidden memory comes back to him, then.
Back in the house…on the day of his return, on the day he came home to tragedy…Rokuta had been the last one he’d found.
His body had been under Nezuko’s, still sheltered under her outstretched arm.
Tanjirou remembers turning the toddler-sized body over. Remembers dry-heaving at the sight of what was left of his face.
No.
No.
No.
“Rokuta,” he says. The deep, hoarse whisper is dragged up from his gut. “R—Rokuta.”
The demon blinks his baby brother’s eyes back at him.
He stumbles closer until they are less than a meter apart. He falls to his knees. Holds his brother’s tiny, birdlike shoulders.
“Rokuta.”
Their father had died too young. Tanjirou had, basically, become a de-facto father to this fragile infant at twelve years old. He’d been woefully inadequate, of course.
But he’d done his best.
He’d done his best.
He’d done his best.
He’d done his best.
Heavy sobs wrack his body. “Rokuta.”
He pulls his brother closer, not caring that it’s really a demon. He will hug a demon if it means having his baby in his arms one more time.
For some reason—perhaps because he can also sense the impending end—the demon lets him.
Tanjirou rests his forehead on Rokuta’s shoulder, shoulders heaving.
They stay like this for a long time. Too long, certainly, by the standards of any demon slayer watching this scene, had they been there. Tanjirou and the demon, Tanjirou and Rokuta, alone in the circle in the woods. One kneeling on the bare earth exposed under snow.
He feels laid bare. Rubbed raw. His bleeding, bloodied soul out in the open for any who care to see.
“Why do you cry?”
The voice is not that of a toddler. It’s the deep voice of the demon—his normal voice.
The voice is curiously empty of malice. Just confused.
“Does seeing your dead family really sadden you so?”
Tanjirou lets go. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t understand. You’re a demon.”
Rokuta’s brows furrow. His eyes melt into green. “My ‘portrait of a thousand faces’ shows me who humans want to see the most, you know. I’ve seen it all. Spouses, parents, children, lovers, friends.” Maybe it’s only because he’s wearing the body of a child, but his tone is strangely innocent. “What does it all matter? What makes them all lower their guard enough for me to kill them? They’d let me rip out their throats without fighting back. Why?”
Tanjirou shakes his head. “You need to be human to know the answer to that. Love isn’t something to be puzzled out with your head! You need to feel it. You need to choose it.”
The demon sighs. “Spare me your words. Kill me already.”
Tanjirou raises his sword one last time. He pauses.
“You may not understand this, but I hope you will someday. It’s strange, but…I hope you find a place free of pain, because…”
Swish.
“...somehow I can find love in my heart for you, too.”
The demon’s head flies.
Bounces.
Rolls.
And, with a round-eyed look of surprise frozen on its face, begins to disintegrate in the winter sun.