Chapter 20

WELCOME BACK, MY FRIEND 𓂃🖊

╭──── · · ୨୧ · · ────╮

╰──── · · ୨୧ · · ────╯

新黎明

Shinreimei

The second batch of the new medicine did not want to exist.

This was the only explanation—words that matched the two-month-long struggle. The failure felt deliberate, as if the medicine possessed its own will. It resisted chemical logic, separating into incorrect layers overnight despite your absolute certainty that the calculations were finally correct.

Three nights ago, you worked until dawn, witnessing a sample remain stable for six hours. This private triumph led you to record the formula with confidence, certain the next day would provide definitive proof.

Morning brought failure.

The medicine had pulled itself apart in the dark while you slept. You stood at the worktable in the grey early light, staring at the evidence of your failure with something that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite despair.

Something closer to a tired, grudging respect.

You began viewing it as a person: stubborn, picky, and uncooperative. It refused to yield until you had earned the right to ask, an honest defiance you admired despite your frustration.

You muttered the words cyclic interrupt for the fourth time that week and stared at the glass beaker on the table before you. The liquid sat in its container with an air of quiet defiance, the layers clearly visible, the line between them sharp and mocking.

Why won’t you just work?

“You’ve said that again,” Shinobu noted. She did not look up from her microscope.

Her voice had that particular quality it always held in the laboratory—focused, sharp, but with a warmth underneath that never quite left you, no matter how absorbed she seemed in her own work. She sat at the other end of the long table, her dark hair pinned back, her hands steady on the instrument before her.

“It helps me think,” you said.

“It helps you waste time.” She turned a small knob as she softly spoke. “You say it when the math is not working, and you need to feel like you are still moving forward. You are just marking time.”

You did not argue.

She was not wrong.

That was the thing about working beside Shinobu Kocho.

She noticed everything, especially about you.

She noticed the way you tapped your pen against the edge of the table when you were stuck—three taps, always three, a rhythm you had not been aware of until she mentioned it one afternoon.

“Mm, ______-san? You tap your pen, you know that? Three times.”

She noticed the way your shoulders dropped when a test failed.

“Sit straight up, ______-san. You’ll have back pain on the long run. Take it from me.”

She noticed the exact moment your focus drifted from the problem to the window and back again, that brief, quick glance toward the wisteria trees outside.

“Eyes here, ______-san. Let’s not drift away now, hm?”

You also noticed she loves to call your name.

She kept all of it somewhere behind those violet eyes that never seemed to miss anything. She only brought it out when it was useful, or when she wanted to win an argument before it started. Which, you had come to understand, happened often. Shinobu Kocho enjoyed winning arguments the way other people enjoyed good food or music—as a real pleasure, something to be savored.

You had stopped finding it unsettling around the end of the third week.

The first week, it had felt like being watched by a very elegant predator.

You caught yourself watching your own movements, trying to be stiller, quieter, less obviously out of place. You wondered if she was measuring you against some hidden scale.

The second week, you realized she was not judging you.

She was just paying attention. The same way she paid attention to her experiments and her patients and the butterfly girls who ran through the halls. It was not suspicion. It was just how she moved through the world.

By the third week, it had stopped feeling like anything at all. It became simply a fact of the laboratory, as constant as the smell of wisteria and the soft scratch of pens on paper and the chamomile tea that appeared on the corner of the table every morning without either of you ever talking about it.

Now it just felt like being known.

· · ─────── · 𓅪 · ─────── · ·

Mornings were for the medicine.

You arrived before the household woke up, before Aoi’s voice sharpened into its first command of the day, before the sounds of wooden swords came from the training yard, before the sun had fully cleared the wisteria trees.

You set up your measurements in the quiet. Glass slides in careful rows. Labeled vials waiting for their contents.

On hard, sleepless nights, Shinobu arrived earlier, her exhaustion masked by rigid composure and faint shadows beneath her eyes.

Observing this, you remained quiet, ensuring tea was ready for her arrival.

Like clockwork, the chamomile pot appeared twenty minutes later, positioned perfectly for shared access.

This unspoken ritual provided wordless comfort, a pattern born from your shared time.

Afternoons shifted to collaborative debate, fueled by the vibrant energy of two minds working in tandem.

You talked through problems the way other people walked—without really meaning to go anywhere in particular, and then suddenly finding yourself somewhere new, somewhere you had not known existed until you arrived.

Shinobu debated methods with the focus of someone who relished the productive friction of opposing perspectives. She systematically dismantled your theories, waiting with a knowing smile for you to reconstruct them with greater strength.

Initially, you hesitated to challenge a Hashira with years of experience. However, she subtly signaled that she sought a partner rather than a subordinate—someone to identify flaws in her reasoning and meet her on equal ground.

She seemed to like it better that way.

And you had discovered, a little to your own surprise, that you liked it too.

Shinobu’s hand was elegant and precise; yours was the round, uncertain script of a learner, each character a victory over the language gap.

She never commented on your handwriting, but you once caught her watching you write with a quiet, open expression you couldn’t name. It vanished as soon as she noticed you, replaced by her familiar mask.

The evening continued silently, yet you remembered that look—feeling worth watching for no reason other than the watching itself.

The breakthrough eventually arrived from an unexpected angle. Discovery rarely enters through the prepared front door; it slips through forgotten windows or the unfocused edges of attention.

· · ─────── · 𓅪 · ─────── · ·

There were no momentous calculations taking place.

You were simply tending to the lamp, replenishing the oil as the flame faltered, weary of straining to read your notes in the fading light. The night had deepened around you, a familiar extension of the workday, with Shinobu still occupied at the opposite end of the long table.

Beyond the glass, the wisteria trees stood as obsidian silhouettes against a horizon where the first stars were just beginning to blink into existence.

Your consciousness had slipped into that aimless, meditative state that accompanies repetitive, physical tasks.

Then, unbidden and without a conscious spark, a thought materialized: the medicine does not truly fail when it meets the air; it simply loses its intended course.

You placed the oil container down.

The realization lingered, delicate and untested, like a bubble suspended in a breathless room. You remained perfectly still, tethered to the spot by the fear that even the slightest movement might shatter the insight.

“Shinobu.”

At the subtle shift in your tone, she looked up. You knew she had come to recognize that specific tone—the one that signaled a change in the air, marking the moment a hidden door swung open where there had previously been only a wall.

“We have been thinking about this wrong,” you said, returning to the table to arrange the past week’s failed samples. Your hands moved instinctively, revealing a pattern you were just beginning to grasp. “We assumed separation meant instability, that the medicine couldn’t hold its shape. But look at how it separates.”

Shinobu rose instantly, her exhaustion replaced by sharp focus as she leaned over the table. You felt her close beside you—the scent of wisteria in her hair barely masking the laboratory’s chemical air.

“It is not random,” you said, pointing to the row of samples. “Look. Every single one separates the same way. The same direction. It pulls toward the same side of the slide, every time, no matter how we change the formula. If this were just the medicine falling apart, the separation would be random, messy… but it is not.”

Shinobu leaned in, her shoulder nearly brushing yours. With the intense focus she reserved for things of consequence, her violet eyes traced the pattern of the samples you had arranged.

“The edge where the cells are,” she said quietly. “Every time. It is pulling toward where the cells are.”

“Every. Single. Time.”

A silence fell between you—one you recognized from weeks together. It signaled her mind was racing ahead, mentally deconstructing and rebuilding everything to view the problem through an entirely new lens.

When she spoke again, her voice was slow and careful. Each word felt for its weight before she said it. “If the medicine is not failing… if what we are seeing is not instability but direction…”

“Then we have not been measuring failure,” you finished, the words coming out fast. “We have been measuring choice. The medicine is not falling apart. It is picking a direction. It pulls toward living tissue. Every time. That is why it separates overnight— it is turning toward the cells in the storage medium. That is why the separation is always the same. That is why—”

You stopped because Shinobu had turned her head and was looking at you directly.

In the low lamplight, with the first stars showing through the window behind her, the expression on her face was something complicated and completely open. It was the look of someone who had just watched a problem she had been carrying alone for weeks—for months, maybe, long before you ever arrived at the Butterfly Mansion—shift on its axis.

Become something new.

Become something solvable.

And under that, something else.

Something that looked almost like pride.

“Get the demon tissue samples,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but there was nothing quiet about the energy suddenly running through her. “The preserved ones from the last three missions. We are testing every sample tonight. Everything. I want to see if the pattern holds for all of them.”

“It is nearly ten o’clock.”

“Then we will be awake at ten o’clock,” she replied, already writing with familiar, elegant precision. “Bring the lamp closer. And do not touch the third set of samples; I re-labeled them today, and you still struggle with my handwriting.”

“My reading of your handwriting is fine.”

“You called sample C-7 ‘cucumber’ for an entire week, ______-san.”

She didn’t even bother to hide the amusement in her voice.

You moved the lamp closer without saying anything else.

· · ─────── · 𓅪 · ─────── · ·

The subsequent hours blurred as time was measured by tested samples and confirmed hypotheses. Patterns emerged from the data like shapes surfacing through fog.

The directional trend remained consistent across every variation and tissue type Shinobu retrieved from the storage cabinets. The new medicine pulled toward living cells with the steady precision of a compass pointing north.

You documented every detail as Shinobu filled her notebook with precise observations. While you managed the slides and equipment, the two of you developed a seamless, quiet rhythm that required fewer words as the hours passed.

It was well past midnight when you finally admitted that your body was not going to cooperate anymore.

Past midnight, exhaustion finally took hold. Numbers and letters blurred into illegibility, and you unknowingly recorded duplicate, nonsensical notes. Your vision felt coarse, and your mind drifted into the hazy, floating sensation caused by severe sleep deprivation.

Shinobu silently took your pen and set it aside with a movement so fluid you barely noticed. Though still at the table, exhaustion made it difficult to remain upright.

“Go,” she directed.

“I am fine,” you countered.

Looking down, you saw your pen had drifted, sketching… something in the margins.

Attempting to sound dignified, you claimed, “That is the cell diagram”.

“It has a tail.”

“The cell diagram is… artistic.”

“It has gills.”

You looked at the drawing again.

It did have gills.

You had no memory of drawing gills. You had no explanation for the gills.

Silently, you set aside the second pen you had used to continue working after she confiscated the first. Pushing back from the table, you stretched your aching joints, enjoying the small cracks from your back and shoulders as they found relief.

Sitting bent over a table for hours, you reflected, was not what the human body was made for.

Shinobu did not say anything about the fish again. She did not say anything about the stretching or the cracking joints or the way you had to hold onto the table for a moment when the blood rushed back to your legs.

Shinobu walked you to the laboratory door despite her quarters being on the opposite side of the building. You recognized the layout of the Butterfly Mansion well enough to know she was going out of her way.

You remained silent about this.

At the threshold, she paused, lamplight silvering her hair.

“The direction idea is right,” she said warmly. “We are not starting over or behind. Those weeks were not wasted; we just finally found the right question tonight. That matters.”

You watched her standing in the laboratory doorway you had shared for months. Her work clothes were wrinkled, and her dark hair, loose from its pins, fell past her shoulders. In the dim light, a faint ink stain marked her hand.

She appeared exhausted yet determined, clearly prioritizing her work over rest.

Purpose always outweighed sleep for her.

Though she affirmed that your work was significant with the absolute conviction of someone who only spoke such truths when certain. She intended for those words to stay with you as you went to sleep.

“…Good night, Shinobu.”

Shinobu’s expression softened slightly, her usual control loosening.

“Good night, ______-san,” she replied warmly. “Sleep. The medicine will still be flawed tomorrow. We can fix it when you are not drawing fish.”

You reached your room, still smiling.

· · ─────── · 𓅪 · ─────── · ·

The arrival of the first letter from the Ubuyashiki Estate on a Tuesday morning transformed everything.

Delivered by crow during the peak of breakfast, its timing commanded attention. Amidst Aoi’s disciplined reporting, the girls’ morning chatter, and Inosuke’s focused eating, the bird’s sharp caw brought the room to a sudden standstill.

Silence fell as everyone recognized the prestigious Ubuyashiki family seal.

Hopping to the table, the bird fixed its gaze on you. The letter was addressed specifically to you by name, not to Shinobu or the Mansion. It was written in a meticulous hand, clearly transcribed for someone else with absolute precision.

You sensed the gravity before breaking the seal. Aoi watched you sharply from across the table, and the younger girls fell into a wary silence. Even Inosuke paused, his mask turned toward you with uncharacteristic focus.

Opening the letter, you read:

To the one staying at the Butterfly Estate,

My husband is very interested in your work. He has reviewed your notes on the wisteria medicine and is grateful for your unique problem-solving approach, which reminds him of someone he once knew. He considers this his highest praise.

He also wonders if your knowledge of future events could explain why three individuals linked to the Sound Hashira have gone silent. Their prolonged absence worries him, and he hopes you might have some insight.

Oyakata-sama doesn’t wish to alarm you, but he asks for your honesty. If you have information you can safely share, he trusts you to do so; if not, he trusts you to be direct.

In either case, he looks forward to hearing from you.

— Amane Ubuyashiki, in place of Kagaya Ubuyashiki

You read it twice.

The first reading revealed only the surface—polite words and a careful, undemanding question. The second reading engaged your deeper mind, burdened by the knowledge held since your arrival in this world.

You recognized the three missing individuals as Uzui Tengen’s wives. You knew they had entered the Yoshiwara district for intelligence, and their silence would inevitably draw Tanjiro and the others into the entertainment district to face an Upper Moon demon.

You had anticipated this arrival, much like the train and all else. This knowledge resided in your mind like a heavy, immovable stone—a burden you carried daily and could never truly set aside.

But knowing it in your head and being asked about it directly by the leader of the Demon Slayer Corps were two very different things.

Setting the letter down, you finished your tea with a steady hand, proud of your composure.

Across the room, Aoi avoided looking at you, her professional discretion ensuring you had the necessary space to process the gravity of being questioned directly by the leader of the Demon Slayer Corps.

You would need good paper. The kind you used for official letters. And you would need to think very carefully about what words to use. Because every word you wrote to the Ubuyashiki Estate would carry weight you could not fully predict.

The Yoshiwara district, you wrote later in the solitary morning light of the laboratory. Your hand, though still mastering the characters, remained steady as you focused. I believe that is where you should look. I cannot explain fully how I know this, only that I do know it, and that I believe time matters here. The situation is already moving. People are already in danger. I would ask that you trust me in this, the way you trusted me before the train, when I told you what was coming and could not explain how I knew.

There is more I could tell you. There are details I could share that might help. But knowledge of the future is a dangerous thing to give, even to people who would use it well. I will tell you everything I safely can, when I can safely tell it. I only ask that you let me do it at a pace that keeps the right people safe… the people who will be needed for what is coming.

With respect and gratitude for asking me directly instead of through others.

Using the seal Shinobu provided once your correspondence with the Ubuyashiki Estate became regular, you dispatched the letter via crow.

You did not tell Shinobu about the letter.

Not yet.

Not because you did not trust her.

You did. More than you had ever expected to trust anyone in this world, more than you had trusted anyone in a long time.

But the weight of what you knew was yours to carry.

You had learned, in the months since you arrived, that sharing it without care could do as much harm as good.

Shinobu already had enough to carry. You would not add to it until you had to.

So you put the knowledge away. Tucked it into the same locked room in your mind where you kept everything you knew about the future.

You went back to the laboratory. The medicine was still waiting.

The work was still there.

And for now, that was enough.

· · ─────── · 𓅪 · ─────── · ·

You were looking looking for a spare lamp lick.

The one in your room had burned down to nothing at the wrong hour of an evening when your mind was too awake for sleep but too tired for reading.

The hours between midnight and dawn had become familiar ground. A strange, in-between space where thoughts moved differently and the line between past and future felt thinner than it should.

You decided that the supply closet at the far end of the east hallway would have it.

The hallway was silent, filled only with the settling of old wood and the rustle of wisteria trees.

From behind the laboratory door came the faint, rhythmic scratch of a pen. Shinobu was still awake, ignoring her own advice about sleep.

You had grown accustomed to that sound. It was a comforting reminder that you weren’t the only one awake at this hour.

You walked toward the supply closet at the end of the hall, passing the eastern garden window and the girls’ training storage. Finally, you reached the door you had learned to avoid looking at directly.

But tonight, it was slightly open.

A thin line of darkness. The width of a curious hand.

You had known of this room from the start—a familiar piece of mental furniture as constant as your knowledge of the train or the mountain.

You had spent two months not opening this door.

You told yourself it was out of respect and privacy, but in truth, you were afraid.

Seeing her would make her real, shifting her from a distant piece of knowledge to an undeniable person.

But the door was already open.

Through the gap, bathed in pale moonlight, sat a wooden box—larger and more beautiful than expected, crafted with protective purpose.

Watching from within were the gentle, unafraid, sunrise-colored eyes of a girl.

…Nezuko.

She looked at you with a rare, agenda-less gaze—devoid of judgment, measurement, or calculation of risk.

She simply observed, seemingly grateful for your mere existence.

You stood frozen in the silent hallway, your errand forgotten as moonlight pooled between you. The girl in the box watched with sunrise-colored eyes, and the world seemed to hold its breath.

She blinked.

As she blinked, you distantly recalled she was meant to be asleep, recovering and guarded as a vital secret within the house.

She did not look like a secret.

She did not look like a demon.

She did not look like any of the things the world would call her if it knew she was here.

Taking a quiet, steadying breath, you pushed the door just an inch further—enough to slip inside the room where the scent of old cedar and dried herbs hung heavy in the air.

The floorboards remained mercifully silent under your weight as you stepped into the moonlight.

You crouched down slowly, bringing yourself level with the gap in the door. The movement was careful—you did not want to startle her, did not want to break whatever quiet permission had let this moment happen.

For a long breath, you just stayed there.

Communication between you happened without words.

She moved first, a small gesture.

Through the gap of the box, she extended a hand with slightly inhuman nails and placed a dried wisteria blossom before you.

The flower was fragile, its purple petals thin and nearly colorless. Whether kept in her box or kimono, she had saved it for something, deciding with quiet certainty that this was the moment.

You looked at the blossom, then at her, and picked it up.

Her expression softened with a silent satisfaction. She had accepted you unconditionally, deciding without hesitation that you were already hers.

Holding the fragile, dry wisteria blossom, you felt the weight of its importance. “Thank you,” you whispered, truthfully adding that you had long hoped for this meeting.

She tilted her head, her curious gaze silently asking for more.

“Your brother, Tanjiro,” you said, watching her eyes widen at the name. “I know what he has done to protect you. You are deeply loved, Nezuko, and I wanted you to know that I see it”.

She was very still for a moment.

Then her eyes crinkled at the corners—the particular crinkle of a smile that could not reach her mouth but found another way out.

She reached through the gap again.

This time, her fingers brushed against your hand, just for a moment. Just long enough to feel the warmth of her skin, warmer than a human’s should be. The heat of the demon blood that had changed her but not taken her.

From somewhere down the hallway, outside the room, you heard the soft sound of footsteps stop.

You did not turn around. You already knew who it was.

You stayed where you were, the wisteria blossom still in your palm, Nezuko’s hand still near yours.

Nezuko looked past your shoulder toward the figure behind you. Whatever she saw there must have satisfied her, because she did not flinch or pull back.

She just tucked herself more comfortably into the box, her chin resting on its edge. Her sunrise eyes moving between you and the doorway behind you with something that looked almost like contentment.

Letting you know, without words, that you were all welcome to stay.

You heard Shinobu take a slow breath, the kind of breath someone takes when they are steadying themselves against a feeling they did not expect.

Then you heard her walk forward, her footsteps quiet on the wooden floor. You felt her presence beside you as she crouched down, her shoulder pressed lightly against yours.

She looked at Nezuko. Nezuko looked at her.

In the moonlight, Shinobu’s face lost its usual armored smile and focus, revealing a raw tenderness—the vulnerability of one who had lost much yet still possessed a deep capacity for love.

Reaching into her robe, she produced a small sweet in crinkly paper, the kind favored by the girls of the estate.

She held it out through the gap.

Nezuko took it immediately. Her small fingers closed around the sweet. A soft, happy sound came from her—the first noise you had heard her make. Her eyes crinkled again in that almost-smile. She held the sweet to her chest like treasure.

Nezuko accepted the sweet immediately, clutching it like a treasure and making a soft, happy sound. Beside you, Shinobu’s usual mask softened into a subtle, genuine smile.

“She likes sweets,” Shinobu said gently, her voice stripped of its sharp edges. “I visit her sometimes, when I can’t sleep. She’s usually awake at this, though not for long.”

You watched her, noting the faint color in her cheeks—the embarrassment of someone confessing to an unexpected kindness.

“You have been visiting her,” you noted.

“Someone should.” Her voice was very careful. Very controlled. “She has been alone in the dark for a long time. Even when she is sleeping, I think… I think she knows when someone is there.”

You reflected on Shinobu Kocho, the Insect Hashira, who had sacrificed her life to avenge her sister. You imagined her visiting this room during sleepless, grief-stricken nights when her smile faltered.

There, she found wordless solace in the company of a silent demon girl.

You thought about the wisteria blossom still in your hand.

“She gave me a flower,” you said.

Shinobu nodded slowly, as if this made perfect sense. “She does that. She has good instincts… she knows who can be trusted. I do not know how, but she does. She always has.”

The three of you stayed like that for a while.

Crouched in the dim hallway, the wisteria trees moving softly somewhere outside, the moon tracking slowly across the sky.

No one spoke.

No one needed to. The silence was full instead of empty, held by the simple fact of three people being together in the quiet dark.

Until Nezuko’s eyes began to grow heavy.

Her blinks came slower and slower. Her grip on the sweet loosened.

She tucked herself back into the box with the easy movements of someone who felt safe enough to sleep. Within moments, her breathing evened out into the slow rhythm of rest.

The small paper sweet was still curled in her hand.

Oh, Nezuko…

Shinobu rose with her usual grace, and you stood beside her, your joints stiff from the long silence.

For a moment, standing in the hallway with the closed door between you and the girl neither of you had talked about aloud before tonight, you were both simply quiet.

The kind of quiet that held more meaning than words could carry.

“You knew she was here,” Shinobu stated.

“Since I arrived,” you replied.

“I just… I can’t believe that you never asked… or tried to see her.”

“I told you before… it was not my place.” You turned the wisteria blossom over in your fingers, careful of its fragile petals. “She is not a curiosity. She is not something to study. She is a person. She was sleeping. She did not know me. I was not going to push into that just because I knew her name.”

Shinobu was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was very soft.

“Most people would not have thought of it that way, ______-san.”

“Most people do not know what it is like to be studied instead of seen.”

She looked at you then with the same intensity she applied to her laboratory work, trying to categorize something unfamiliar. Holding her gaze, you saw a shift in her expression, as if a long-held question had finally been answered.

“…You never fail to surpise me.”

“You should get used to it at this point, Shinobu.”

She let out a soft chuckle.

“Come,” she said, heading toward the hall. “I will find you a lamp wick”.

You walked beside her, carefully holding the wisteria blossom.

Behind you, Nezuko remained in the closed room, sleeping like a small kitten, content with everything around her.

· · ─────── · 𓅪 · ─────── · ·

The lamp wick Shinobu found for you was exactly the right size. You had not expected anything else.

She handed it to you at the door to your room.

Her fingers brushed yours for just a moment in the passing.

The touch was brief and small. The kind of contact that happened a dozen times a day in the laboratory and meant nothing at all (as much as you wanted to think it was nothing).

Except that she held on for just a second longer than she needed to.

Lingering touches, longer thoughts, unresolved tension…

Ever since the grove, a part of you reminded yourself.

“Tomorrow,” she started softly, a tone reserved for you, “we start testing the direction idea against fresh tissue samples. The Kakushi brought new specimens this evening. I want to see if the pattern holds in real time, not just in preserved ones.”

“I will be there.”

“I know,” she replied simply, as if stating an inevitable law of nature. “Good night, _____-san.”

“Good night, Shinobu.”

She lingered her gaze on you for a moment longer, before she turned and walked back down the hallway, her footsteps fading into the quiet of the sleeping house.

You watched her go until she turned the corner, then you went into your room and lit the lamp with the new wick.

The flame caught, steadied itself, and filled the room with subtle, warm, golden light.

You set the wisteria blossom on your bedside table, somewhere you would see it first thing in the morning.

Then you lie down in the lamplight.

Despite everything—the letter, the medicine, the weight of all the things you knew and could not say—you fell asleep almost immediately.

And somewhere behind the closed door at the end of the east hallway, in the quiet dark of a room that held one of the war’s most important secrets, Nezuko slept too. The small paper sweet was still curled in her hand. Its wrapper crinkled and was soft.

She slept with the complete certainty of someone who had just made two new friends and found nothing surprising about it at all.

Because why would she? The world, in her experience, was full of people worth loving.

She had simply found two more.

╭──── · · ୨୧ · · ────╮

╰──── · · ୨୧ · · ────╯

大正コソコソ噂話 — Taishō Kosokoso Iwasubanashi

After that night, Tanjiro wept when Kanao shared Aoi’s report of the hallway encounter. Sumi had witnessed the meeting while passing by in the night and told Kiyo, who told Naho, who told Aoi at breakfast. By sunrise, the entire Butterfly Mansion knew that Shinobu, the researcher, and Nezuko had shared sweets and wisteria blossoms.

Even the Love Hashira, Mitsuri Kanroji, learned of it (how??) by noon, attributing her awareness to the mysterious ways of love.

Moved by these rare happy tidings, Tanjiro wrote Nezuko a three-page letter. He expressed his joy that she was not alone and had found friends, reaffirming his love as he did in every letter. He kept the letter in his pocket as proof of her safety and significance until he could read it to her weeks later.

When he finally did, Nezuko listened intently before presenting him with a dried wisteria blossom she had saved specifically for him.

He still has it.

A/N

Welcome back, everyone!! I’m back and alive with the first chapter of season 2!!

It has nothing going on for now huhuhuh, but it will get much more… eh…? MORE in the coming chapters (wink wink).

I just want to thank everyone for their support for the previous chapters, I am so happy to see that there is more interest coming into this book. I hope I can still keep everyone to keep on looking forward to this story :))

Love you all, see you next time!