Most retired (rather, surviving) Hashira kept in contact with Master Ubayashiki. Zenitsu had watched the crows fly out from Gramps's quarters a hundred times, and wondered just what all the old man had to write about. The students' days were full of the same ceaseless grinding labor. It hardly seemed worth the crows' time to report. But when Zenitsu had suggested sending telegrams instead, he'd been met with blank stares. He'd been a street rat, but one in an outlying metropolis, and many of the wannabe Corps were country rubes. Technology often seemed like an intruder into the ancient practices of swordsmanship.
"You know, wires?" he'd said, gesturing haplessly. For disciples of lightning, they were awfully slow to appreciate electricity. He tried to explain how lightning could move fastest in currents. After all, wasn't that what Thunder Breathing was about? Kaigaku sneered and the students shrugged, but Gramps merely puffed on a tobacco pipe and watched him.
Later, after Zenitsu had passed Final Selection in an utter daze, he figured that news must have made its way by crow too. What had Gramps written to the Master then? Had he mentioned it was by total chance Zenitsu had become a swordsman at all?
If he hadn't come across that stupid shamisen, Zenitsu might not have been in the wrong place at the worst time. Or maybe not. Gramps hadn't seemed that surprised. If anything he had the wild smile of someone who'd triumphantly confirmed a deep suspicion, and merrily proceeded to upend Zenitsu's life.
It figured.
Most of Gramps's students had taken up the sword to exact revenge on demons. The stories were all depressingly familiar. Zenitsu supposed that personal tragedy, not a Final Selection, was the true initiation into the Corps. Lucky I've got no one to avenge, he thought fervently.
So what was he doing there? Sweeping the floors and cooking rice, that's what. He'd escaped indentured servitude to become something rather the same, but he didn't mind. He liked gruff old Master Kuwajima, who he already thought of as Gramps, and it beat training to kill monsters. Let them swing away at necks and breathe all over demons if they wanted.
But sometimes when he watched the students at practice, he wondered they seemed so slow. Even when the whistling sound of the impending attack was, well, telegraphed from a mile away, they often did not react in time and ended their days bruised.
But anyone who didn't have to do something could criticize how someone else did it, so his kept his mouth shut (about that, at least.) He just scrubbed the floors and complained about splinters and tried to ignore the disparaging looks from students who resented the presence of a young, healthy man who wouldn't share in the danger. (He still had to wash their nasty uniforms. Talk about danger! Sweaty teenagers made laundry duty its own hazard and small thanks he ever got!)
One day, not a week after he'd arrived at the compound, he'd discovered a shamisen and pick left behind by one student who hadn't returned from the Final Selection. That night, sitting next to a window thrown open to the sounds of cicadas, he plucked it to chords he remembered floating above the night market in his hometown. Sometimes he liked to see how fast he could pick the chords. He played contests with the cicadas, and a couple times he thought he strummed faster.
The next day Gramps sent for him. Zenitsu assumed he was there to make tea but when he entered the room, he found instead the biggest koto he'd ever seen sitting on a low table above the tatami mat. After a double-take he realized it had seventeen strings instead of the usual thirteen. Seventeen!
Half a dozen pupils were kneeling on the mat and staring at him. Kaigaku didn't deign to acknowledge Master Kuwajima's pity case, but Sadakane and one or two others nodded.
Gramps sat on a cushion with his bad leg stuck out like a cat and puffed on his pipe. "Do you play the koto?"
"Sure," said Zenitsu. He'd made a small amount of money playing one in cheap kabuki theaters and establishments around the markets, some reputable, some not. "I've never seen one with this many strings." He wandered over to admire it. Even to his untrained eye, it was expertly made. He was always having to fix the piece of junk he played for the kabuki actors.
Gramps puffed. "Play 'Sakuras in the Storm.'"
Zenitsu gaped at him. That was the hardest composition he knew of. He'd only ever heard it played once, very imperfectly, in a pitiful kabuki whose actors couldn't even keep time with their marker notes. One look at the composition, copied on faded yellow paper (he had scavenged enough literacy to follow) had put him in a cold sweat. Cicadas wouldn't even stand a chance. "Don't you want something more...relaxing?"
"No, I'm in the mood for a storm," said Gramps with a strange snicker.
In the mood for a stroke, more like. 'Sakuras in the Storm' was liable to send his heartrate through the thatched roof. "My fingers will fall off!"
"I'm willing to take that chance."
"I don't know how to play with seventeen strings," whined Zenitsu. Kaigaku huffed audibly and turned his face to the window.
Gramps seemed to think this a fair point and rose from his cushion. Despite the false leg, he moved lighter than most men on two good feet. He went over to the koto and settled down beside it. For Zenitsu's benefit, he plucked each of the extra chords once to show their notes. To Zenitsu's ears, it was like adding four colors to the visible spectrum. Four new notes!
Then Gramps began moving his hands over the koto and Zenitsu was enchanted. The old man never seemed to actually pluck the strings. Instead his deceptively athritic hands glided almost invisibly over them, twitching the wire so deftly the plucks were little more than shudders of the fingers. Interested though he was, Zenitsu shut his eyes to listen better. He could hear every flower petal tossed by the gale. The additional four notes were the sounds of thunder and distant lightning strikes.
When it ended the pupils gazed at Gramps with new appreciation, who addressed them for the first time. "You must learn to move as fast as every note," he told them, tapping his cane for emphasis. "Faster than the speed of sound! You must create the note with every stroke of your sword, and let the sound follow."
That seemed a tall order to Zenitsu, and from the looks on their faces, a taller order to the students.
"You," he said suddenly, jabbing his cane at Zenitsu, "play it now. And you," he stabbed the cane at the pupils, "will race him. You will complete your sword motions before each new note."
Race? Dubiously, Zenitsu took his place at the koto while Gramps arranged the pupils and circled his room. At his nod, Zenitsu began strumming 'Sakuras in the Storm,' falling easily into the pattern. He never needed to hear anything twice to repeat it and it was true now. Eyes vacantly on the strings, he could hear the students' efforts to keep up. Soon their huffing and puffing and the swish of their swords filled his eardrums, but over everything was the sound of thunder.
"Think you could take it easy?" hissed Sadakane when Gramps had circled out of earshot. "It's a lot harder on this end!" The other students glared as well, too winded to curse.
Fingers throbbing, Zenitsu scowled. But when he slowed it down a fraction, Gramps thumped him on the head. "No slowing!"
After the third 'Sakuras in the Storm' Zenitsu was covered in sweat and everyone else was on the floor, lungs heaving—except for Kaigaku, who bristled from his place in the center; and Gramps, tapping his pipe. Kaigaku hadn't matched every note, barely half of them in fact, but he radiated with vicious focus. Zenitsu was seriously impressed. He'd have collapsed twenty notes in.
Then he looked at his fingers. "Ahhh!" he yelped at the sight of the developing blisters. "Next time warn me so I can tape my fingers!"
Sadakane looked fit to kill from down where he was trying to suck oxygen through the mat.
Gramps, however, looked pleased. "You will come again this time tomorrow," he told Zenitsu, and dismissed the students. They filed out, some dragging. All gave Zenitsu strange looks. He yammered internally so he couldn't overhear stray thoughts. He didn't look forward to dinner with them that night. Kaigaku roughly shouldered him aside without apology.
Obediently, if reluctantly, Zenitsu returned the next day with fingers taped and expecting to find the koto again with a group of students. But now, only Gramps stood in the room holding a apple in one hand and a wooden sword in the other.
Zenitsu looked around. "Where is everyone?" Did their lungs explode? Heaven have mercy if demons ever played the koto.
Gramps snickered and tossed the sword at his feet with a clatter. "Pick it up."
Unthinkingly, Zenitsu knelt to pick up the wooden sword.
The air thrummed like a koto string. Zenitsu's hand jerked up before he knew what he was doing and slapped at the air, sending the apple back with a mighty thwack—straight at Gramps's head!
Before he could yelp out a warning, Gramps caught the apple with a twitch of his hand just as it was about to flatten his nose.
"What did you do that for?" Zenitsu howled. "You could have brained me! I could have brained you!"
Gramps grinned and bit into the apple. "Not at this point you couldn't."
"What point? What are you talking about?"
"You," said Gramps, calmly wiping juice from his chin, "will begin training as a swordsman alongside my other pupils."
Zenitsu froze so completely and for so long Gramps actually lowered the apple in concern. Then:
He hit the roof.
Hysterics...happened.
"WHAT?" he shrieked. "Have you lost your MIND?"
The old man couldn't be serious! Zenitsu, a swordsman? To fight DEMONS? Why? Why? Was Gramps going senile? His head was going to explode!
"Why me?" he wailed a minute later, when he'd stopped hyperventilating enough to speak again. "I thought you liked me!"
During all this commotion, Kuwajima serenely finished his apple. "I'm glad your lungs remembered themselves. You were still so long I thought you'd invented a new breathing technique."
"What makes you think I'd be any good at this?" Zenitsu waved the wooden sword in the air. Just its hilt felt wrong in his hand. He'd always heard stories of samurai who knew their destiny the moment they touched a katana. Not him. It wasn't like when he'd held a shamisen for the first time. Any sword would always feel like it utterly belonged to someone else.
"Call it a hunch."
"Because I can play the koto?" Then any idiot from the night markets could do it! He'd once witnessed Moriari Sou chew off a toenail and use it to pluck a biwa. Was he a swordsman too? "What's that got to do with anything? I thought you had standards!"
"Oho, I do." Right then Kuwajima looked a demon himself with that grin. "Lad, there are hidden depths to you, and I will peel them away if I have to use a paring knife to do it."
By the look of him, he'd do it.
Unexpectedly, Gramps grew grave. "Zenitsu," he said somberly, cutting off the lad's next protest before it emerged. "You spoke of electric currents. Lightning is speed, and so is sound. Speed creates sound. Sound follows the lightning. The threads connecting these things is tenuous and difficult to grasp... it is seen most easily from the corner of your eye, but drifts away like smoke when you fix your gaze on it. But it is there, and it must be felt. Thunder Breathing depends on it."
Smoke trailed from his pipe and curled lazily in the air.
Zenitsu's words died on his tongue. Those words sounded familiar. Had he heard them somewhere before? No... or...was Gramps simply stating what Zenitsu had known since arriving at this place, but been unable to put into words? The sound of an impending strike... to strike faster than sound... It all swirled in his head, and Gramps was right, it made him dizzy to think on too hard.
"Several of the Breath techniques prize a particular sense above the others," Gramps went on. Zenitsu was silent, and listening as hard as he had to 'Sakuras in the Storm.' "The greatest among Water Breathers have possessed keen senses of smell. Others value sight. Thunder Breathing is sound. It is a whisper, or it is a roar. It is the blood pumping through veins and the oxygen in your blood. It is the race along the current. All," he waved his hand in the air, "is a current."
Was he pulling the thoughts from Zenitsu's head, like plucking notes from strings? It was all the same. It all, strangely, made sense to him.
"Can you hear my thoughts?" Zenitsu said suddenly, startling the old man.
"Thoughts?" he repeated, and stared hard at Zenitsu. "Do you hear mine?"
"Not if I don't want to."
"When a demon thinks to end your life," said Gramps, with a savage, triumphant look, "you'll want to."
No, he didn't. He never wanted to get close enough to hear what a demon thought about.
But Gramps grinned and Zenitsu knew he was done for.
.
Later, years later, when Muzan's terrifying fury filled his vision and his ears roared with the demon's hate, all he could think was: Muzan Kibutsuji must have been an excellent koto player.
.
..
...
note: I know Zenitsu probably started training right off the bat but it was fun to imagine this way. This was written a little slapdash so I hope it tracks. I'm new to the series and just caught up, and naturally this hot mess was my favorite (tho I love em all.)
If you're sequestered at home, hope this provides a fun lil distraction. Thanks for reading!