A/N: I can't believe my dumb ass is seriously going to try to juggle between two DouShino fics rn. :|
I need therapy.
...Or just more DouShino. (this one)
Disclaimer: This is a work of fan fiction inspired by and using characters and elements from Demon Slayer/Kimetsu no Yaiba, creative property of Koyoharu Gotouge.
Blood Of The Monarch
I
'I don't have a heart anymore...but I feel like it's beating.'
'Is this what people call love?'
She remembers hearing him say this as they fell to the floor, lain in stains of their own blood, their bodies broken. She feels such a desire to just sleep then, until the clattering of metal hits the ground, its ringing sound loud enough to startle her eyes back open. Her sword falls and rebounds away in pieces just out of sight. Two golden fans follow—one splitting apart as the red cord holding its blades together snaps on impact.
'This feeling really exists, huh?'
Her exhausted eyes struggle to see through the stinging blood seeping into them. Her head has split open somewhere, it seems. There's so much of it. She can't tell where. Everything hurts. But his voice seems to direct her line of sight. There, she sees him lying just a distance away. Those seven colors staring right back, directly across from her. He looks so elated. So pleased. Even with blood on his lips and a shattered body burning from the venom she'd injected, now coursing through his veins, the bastard finds something to be so damned happy about.
Why won't he just die?
She curses and curses. Damns his soul to hell. Hates him, hates him with every fiber of her being. Hates herself for failing so catastrophically in this single, solitary task she'd devoted her entire existence to.
"I don't have a heart anymore...but I feel like it's beating," he utters to her. "Is this what people call love? This feeling really exists, huh?"
She can't believe this creature's audacity. Love. How he even dares to speak the word. Like heresy. He's just as well as blasphemed against the gods and all of heaven itself by merely whispering it. She wants to run him through again with whatever remains of her sword. To scream and curse him until her tongue bleeds. But she can't will herself to move anymore. She can't even utter a sound. Even breathing hurts now. None of her mastery of any techniques is of any use, already lying in tatters like this.
What she would give to be rendered blind in that moment now. Seeing with damnable clarity how he still looks to her so endearingly. His smile so complacent. Beholden, even. So reverent. Even his face seems to have gained in color. Though she can't truly tell if it's that or the red of all the blood that's marred her vision. Either way, the sight makes her feel sick to her stomach.
"...You're cute, Shinobu."
The way he breathes this aloud makes her entire being tremble with scorn. She feels a weight bearing down all around her then. The space closing in on her. The ground swallowing her whole. She's suffocating. Perhaps it'd been her torn lungs failing her at last. She violently fights against her heavy eyelids. Fights to keep her breath flowing. To keep her blood pumping. Her heart beating. It feels like drowning.
Deep.
Darkness.
Nothing.
.
.
.
By the time she wakes again, she finds herself lying in a bed. For days, she's eventually told. Her broken body now bandaged. Blood cleaned. Still aching all over. She'd awakened in the infirmary at the Butterfly Mansion. Her own private room.
She would learn, within the same day, of the other Pillars who had survived, all still recovering in their own quarters. Some even worse off than her. Within the same week, she regains enough strength to walk again. Coming just in time to attend the funerals of the ones who had not.
There are times when she remembers this day. The memory is always vivid. Always visceral. It comes with guilt. With sorrow. And always, with more anger. With memories like these, it is the face she hates most that fills her mind. His reverent gaze. His exultant smile. His enraptured words spoken like some blessed revelation of the utmost divine. A curse for her sin. That she had lived while others had not.
It is in these moments that she wishes she could have given her life in their stead.
II
He remembers losing consciousness. When was the last time that had ever happened? He tries to recall.
(When he was still human, probably.)
He continues to replay the entire encounter in his mind. Even manually jostles his brain a bit, hoping that more details might reveal themselves. After enough obsessive runs, he finds he has exhausted the memories. Pared them down to the most elementary neurons that make them up. They're no longer enough.
They also have failed to explain this new thing to him. This...love. That beating heart he'd felt. The figurative one, of course. He knows well that the anatomical thing inside of him is and has always been pushing his blood through his veins. Now, it feels as though the task of simply keeping his life from ending is just no longer enough.
For weeks, he has cloistered himself in his chambers. Dismissing visitors. Ignoring those needy voices and pleas asking to see their fair and blessed savior again. There are far greater conundrums to solve than how to bring rapture and enlightenment upon the mortals of this earth.
Shinobu.
He would speak her name aloud to himself. Delight in the ring of each sound and syllable. He would hum it sometimes—sing it, even. He would scrawl each of the characters to paper at the end of his brush. In as many colors as there were within his own eyes. If he'd had any talent in portraiture, he would even commit her image to canvas. Anything to evoke her presence again, like a spell, an incantation to beseech the entity herself before him.
Still.
Nothing had been enough.
What was it that made his hand float toward that metaphorical cavity in his chest? Once a void, now filled with the movements and the ticking, tinkering of something very much alive. Like a sleight of hand, a cheater's game played by an illusionist's ghost that may or may not have ever even existed—itself a simple trick of the eye. Ghost or not, he was a demon. What a fool even an imaginary being would be to elude a very real one like him.
...Was that what love was?
Not what he imagined.
He goes back to that moment—the moment when he'd felt the thing inside stirring. What had that felt like? An infant's first crying breaths. The first memory the mind retains about waking from slumber. Breaking the water's surface. Lying in the fresh snow. Almost dying. Dying.
And experiencing all of that over again.
Or...no. Not quite. These are all experiences he remembers having. None of them are particularly unique in any way. Even the dying.
Why?
Because none of these things ever made him feel.
Not like when he'd witnessed for himself the full range of her being. How strongly she could feel for someone like him. Even if it'd been such a terrible feeling as raw, unbridled hatred. He'd never known even that. And deeper yet—he had witnessed in her, that the source beneath all that hate had been love. For her sister and her dead family. All the comrades she had ever known. Each and every one of those lives she'd pledged her tiny being to as she raised her blade to him. She hated so deeply, only because she'd loved them all so dearly.
So potent these feelings in her had been (far more so than any dose of her poisons), it'd been as though their living, ethereal touch had sought out the dead and withered counterpart within him just as soon as he'd taken her fragile little body into his arms. The way heat seeks out the cold. Or the way matter seeks to fill the void. The waking outpour, like a deluge from the broken dam of a shattered soul, rushing down into the darkened well waiting to swallow it all.
He'd felt the touch of empathy, then, for the first time in his entire, long-lived existence.
Where he'd ever only known before to mimic others, to reflect and project back little more than what he'd observed in them, without any sense of knowing what any of it truly meant. Having learned the nuances of such emotions without any understanding of their origins or their source. He could mime it all to perfection, being the observant and astute child he was in life. He'd done it so well, that he'd been utterly beloved by every soul he had ever graced. Perhaps, even fooled himself into believing he was no different from those he'd impersonated. Deluded into never knowing that he'd been nothing but a parody of a living being. A counterfeit soul.
Until that day—that moment, when he'd felt that dormant heart of his break its silence for the first time ever, reaching with its ephemeral, phantom's touch for its counterpart in Shinobu. Like the weight of gravity drawing in all caught in the wake of its influence. By the time he'd felt it, there had been no way to break from its pull. It'd enveloped him, tethered him, dragging his existence in a spiral along its path—to where, even, he couldn't possibly have guessed. This was uncharted territory, this once empty space inside of himself. He hadn't even known the expanse of its void until something had reached too far and fallen in. The same way one had no means of understanding the nature of absence without first experiencing its causal effect. All it takes, then, is an outside force. A displacement of the perceived stillness and silence. A ripple to change its state of being.
Then came its shape. Its form. Materializing into focus from the haze in remnants and exerting its influence fraction by fraction. The vision of Shinobu in all of her anger. Her hatred. Her sorrow. Her grief. All the alien things incongruous to his own existence up until that point. And now he understands these things make up the negative space he does not occupy. There lies even more, he suspects. And he can't shake the feeling of incompletion. Of incoherence and imperfection.
This isn't enough.
He resolves, then, to see her again. He wants to hear her voice—all the notes, cadences, and tones evoked by its sound. He wants to see her many-faceted smile, seeming to bear as many colors within it as his own eyes had. He wants to know her musings, her habits, what she likes and dislikes—the trivial little things that altogether in their collective, formed the elemental construct of being that was Shinobu Kocho.
He wants an answer to the conundrum. A meaning to this parable. What had this thing that drew him to her been? He understands the nature of such forces. All actions begot reactions. Things were always fundamentally exchanged or transmuted in equal parts. The natural world always sought balance, even if in some convoluted, roundabout way.
Shinobu is his opposite. His equal. His unequivocal other half. What, then, had he exchanged with her for his empathy? What had been so broken in her, impaired enough that it had drawn that piece of himself out of its contented, lifelong dormancy, back through her fractures and into her void?
What is it that can possibly be done for Shinobu's love?
III
If heaven and hell do exist, which one of us follows the other? It seems there will forever be a distance destined between us. A century's time of an entire bygone era. The blood of one who is cursed, and the other who seeks to eradicate it. A newborn heart that has slumbered for the length of several lifetimes, having only felt the touch of a single other. And its mate that has long perceived the full depth of but one, embraced by the arms of the rest entwined with it.
.
Is this the distance between love and hate?
.
I am not afraid.
I will traverse any distance.
I don't want to destroy these feelings.
A/N:
The ideas start coming and they don't stop coming-
Fics, plots, and ships-I've got MS word running.
Didn't make sense not to write for fun,
Your brain gets hyped but your hands get numb.
So much to type, so much to read,
So what's wrong with not getting some sleep?
You'll lose your flow if you go slow,
You'll never post if you stop, bro...
.
:D
At the height of my ADD-assed brain's 'productivity,' somehow Smash Mouth came into the picture and this happened...
This ship has me so fucked up all around sideways. Like...to the point where I can tell I'm probably becoming annoying to everyone around me, including myself, all the jerks on my friends list I barely even remember or know, along with everyone else on their friends lists I definitely don't know. Like...my overly plot-OCD, barely-ever-updates-shit-cause-I-sit-on-shit-and-think-too-much-about-shit ass keeps wanting to post more DouShino garbage. Nonsensical, disorganized, unfiltered dumpster fire fodder.
I shouldn't. But I can't not. And I know if I sit on these stupid notes and snippets forever, NOTHING HAPPENSSSSS...! GARBAGE-POSTS ARE THE ANSWERRR. Screw patience and planning—CONTENTTTT, BECAUSE BRAIN HEMORRHAGE.
I need the anime to catch the hell up so we can watch these idiots in color (because we NEED to see Douma's eyes ALL. THE. TIME.), on-screen (I demand seizure-inducing visual stimulation, dammit!), with voices and music and stuff (DYING TO HEAR WHAT DOUMA WILL SOUND LIKE). Now. Amazon-Prime-Next-Day-Delivery, now. :|
...Thank you for reading and indulging my unhealthy obsession with this pairing. :)
8/17/20