Chapter 3

ｎｏｗ ｌｏａｄｉｎｇ．．．

“異界の目覚め”

Ikai no Mezame

「 ｖｅｒｉｆｉｅｄ」

The silence that followed your own voice was somehow way worse than any answer could have been.

You sat there, blinking, just—just trying to process everything. You took stock of the situation with the kind of methodical calm that only exists right before a person completely loses it.

Butterfly Mansion. Demon Slayer. Kimetsu no Yaiba. The anime. The manga. The one you watched on your laptop at two in the morning while eating cereal dry because you’d run out of milk and couldn’t be bothered.

Yeah, I’m about to lose it.

“Okay,” you whispered to yourself, pressing both palms flat against your thighs. “Okay, let’s just—okay.”

This is truly your finest moment.

Second to getting slammed by a truck, of course.

You swung your legs over the side of the bed with all the grace of a newborn deer, and the resulting protest from every single muscle in your body was immediate and vicious.

A noise escaped you that you would never, under any circumstances, be repeating in public. You gripped the bed frame and breathed through it like you’d seen athletes do in those sports documentaries.

In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Don’t you dare cry.

The floor was cool under your feet when they finally found it. Polished wood, smooth and pale. Real. Solid.

Undeniably, horrifyingly real.

You pressed down on it with your toes just to be sure.

Still real.

…Right then.

You straightened up slowly, taking the room in with fresh eyes now that the initial wave of existential crisis had crested and—not passed, exactly, but rested into something more manageable.

The futons around you were empty, neatly made, which meant either you were the only patient currently in residence or everyone else was already up and going about their day. The light slanting through the windows was warm and unhurried. Morning, then. Late morning, maybe.

The samue you were dressed in was clean and a little too large, the sleeves pooling just past your wrists. Someone had changed you.

You weren’t sure how you felt about that, but you shelved it under problems for later, alongside how do you get home and Muzan is a real thing that exists and will eventually try to kill everyone you’ve just mentally categorised as fictional characters.

You needed to move. Standing still felt like giving the panic permission to catch up.

The shoji screen at the far end of the ward slid open before you’d taken two steps.

The girl who appeared was small and serious-faced, with dark hair pulled back neatly, carrying a tray with both hands. She stopped the moment she saw you upright, and for one suspended second, you stared at each other.

Aoi Kanzaki. The name came to mind immediately, with all the familiarity you had practiced. Blue eyes, sharp and assessing. The kind of face that had never quite learned to be soft, but wasn’t unkind for it.

“You’re awake,” she said, because apparently stating the obvious transcended the boundaries of fiction and reality alike.

“Apparently,” you managed.

She crossed the room efficiently and set the tray down on the small table beside your bed—some kind of broth, pale and steaming, and a cup of water. She then looked you up and down with the clinical eyes you always saw on your laptop screen.

“You shouldn’t be standing. Sit.”

“I’m fine, I jus—”

“Sit.”

You sat.

She wasn’t unkind about it, just firm in a way you guessed as someone who had repeated this particular instruction enough times that they no longer saw any value in softening it. You watched her check the sheets, straighten things that didn’t need straightening.

Don’t think about what you know about her. Don’t do that.

Too late. You were already thinking about it.

“How long was I out?” you asked, wrapping both hands around the cup of water.

“Two days.” She didn’t look up from whatever she was examining. “You had no obvious external injuries, but your body showed signs consistent with severe blunt force trauma. Wisteria-scented clothing, though no demon activity was detected in the area you were found.” A brief pause.

“We don’t know who you are.”

That last part landed deliberately. An opening. An invitation to explain yourself.

“Right.” You cleared your throat. “I’m—”

And you stopped.

Just like that. Mid-sentence.

Your name. Your actual name. Modern. Completely out of place in Taisho-era Japan. You hadn’t thought about it—you hadn’t had time to think about it—and now you were sitting here with Aoi staring at you with bright, sharp, waiting eyes, and you had to make a decision.

How much of the truth were you willing to tell?

Your name, the sensible part of you said. Start with your name.

Just say your name.

But your name was a thread, and threads could be pulled, and pulled threads led to the full tapestry of how you had actually gotten here, and you were not remotely ready to have that conversation with someone who might relay it directly to Shinobu.

“I’m… ______. I’m not from around here.” True enough. “I don’t really know how I got here.”

She looked at you then, properly. Whatever she saw in your face seemed to satisfy some thoughts in her mind, because she didn’t push further. She simply nodded once.

“Eat,” she said, gesturing at the broth. “Shinobu-sama will want to speak with you when she returns.”

The name went through you like cold water.

Shinobu.

You picked up the broth and drank it before your expression could reveal anything.

You were left alone after that, which gave you approximately forty minutes to have the quietest, most contained breakdown of your entire life.

It wasn’t dramatic. You didn’t cry, mostly because your body seemed to have decided it had already been through enough and wasn’t going to perform additional distress on request.

You just sat on the edge of the bed with the empty bowl in your lap and thought very hard about the shape of the situation you were in.

The facts, as you understood them:

One. You had been hit by a truck. This was almost certainly fatal by any reasonable metric.

Two. You were not dead. Or if you were, the afterlife had significantly more period-accurate architecture than any religion had adequately prepared you for.

Three. You were in the Demon Slayer universe. You weren’t entirely sure of the specific timeline, which was a problem, because the specific timeline determined who was currently alive and who was… not.

Don’t go there. Not yet.

Four. Shinobu Kocho was coming back.

You pressed the heels of your hands against your eyes and breathed.

The thing about knowing how a story ends is that it doesn’t actually make it easier to be inside one.

All the knowledge in your head… The arcs, the deaths, the moments you’d rewound and rewatched until you’d memorised the exact frame.

None of it felt like power right now.

It felt like a weight. Like carrying a secret that would curdle in your chest if you held it too long.

She dies. That’s the thought you’d been avoiding. She dies, and it’s horrible, and I watched it happen on a screen, and I was so devastated, and now she’s going to walk through that door, and she’s going to be real, and I’m going to have to look at her.

“Get it together,” you told yourself, quiet and firm. “Get it the hell together.”

The shoji screen opened again.

You expected Aoi. Or one of the younger girls, Naho, Kiyo, or Sumi, all of whom you’d clocked hovering in various doorways throughout the morning with the unsubtle curiosity of children who had been told not to disturb the patient and were interpreting that instruction as creatively as possible.

You did not expect the woman who stepped through.

She was smaller than you’d imagined, which was absurd, because you had watched hours of animation rendering her precise height.

But there’s a difference between knowing something intellectually and having it standing in the same room as you, and the difference hit you somewhere behind the ribs with the force of something you didn’t have a word for.

Shinobu Kocho moved like she always had something faintly amusing in her peripheral vision. Her haori settled around her as she came to stand at the foot of your bed, and she smiled the way she always smiled; butterfly-light, pleasant, and entirely unreadable.

“You’re looking better than when they brought you in,” she said, tilting her head. “That’s encouraging. We were briefly concerned.”

Her voice was much much softer than you had expected.

“I heard,” you said. “Thank you. For—” You gestured vaguely at the room, at yourself, at the whole situation. “All of this.”

“Of course.” She studied you the way Aoi had, but where Aoi’s gaze was practical, Shinobu’s was something sharper, more curious. You felt like melting under her careful gaze.

“Aoi tells me you don’t know how you came to be here.”

“That’s accurate.”

“Mm.” She pulled a stool from beside the nearest bed and sat down, folding her hands in her lap with ease. “Where are you from?”

How do I answer that?

“Far,” you decided. “Really far. A place you wouldn’t know.”

Her smile didn’t waver. “I know quite a lot of places.”

“Trust me on this one.”

She considered you. You held very still under the weight of it, the way you’d hold still if a very beautiful and extremely dangerous butterfly had landed on your hand.

“You’re not afraid of me,” she observed, and it wasn’t quite a question. “Most people who wake up here are at least a little afraid. It’s the smell of the medicines.” She glanced around the ward pleasantly. “It puts people on edge.”

“I like the smell,” you said, which was true. You’d thought so the moment you woke up.

Something in her expression shifted. Very slightly. Enough that you noticed it and weren’t sure what it meant.

“How interesting,” she said, soft and considering. “Well.” She rose, smoothing her haori. “You’ll need more rest before we discuss anything further. But I think, once you’re recovered—” her eyes found yours, and there was something underneath the pleasantness now, something watchful, “…you and I will have quite a lot to talk about.”

She left as neatly as she’d arrived, the shoji screen closing behind her with a whisper.

You let out a breath that had apparently been living in your chest since she walked in.

Yeah, you thought. We really will.

꩜

ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁

大正コソコソ噂話 – Taishō Kosokoso Iwasubanashi

Back in your original world, your “finest moment” was eating dry cereal at two in the morning because you had run out of milk and were too lazy to buy more. You were watching the Demon Slayer movie, where everyone fights Muzan right before the accident.