In hindsight, that was most probably the rudest thing she had ever done to anyone.
Rejecting a marriage proposal hadn't been as bad, given the sheer amount of logical reasoning that had gone into it.
Swiping what was probably the boy's first kiss was controversial, given that she had done it on top of trying to convince him that they were not in love.
But knocking him out and stealing his memories away?
Well.
That took the cake.
Dropping him off, unconscious and unharmed, at his residence did little to assuage her guilty conscience.
With her vines, she had had him gently lowered onto his house's doorstep and carefully arranged into what she hoped was a comfortable enough position to wake up in, alerted by means of enhanced hearing to the timely presence of the youngest Rengoku.
Watching Rengoku Senjurō dash worriedly over from a short distance away to grab his unresponsive older brother and shake him roughly awake by his shoulders, she had briefly shoved her guilt to the emotional backseat in favor of marvel at the sheer physical resemblance between father and sons. It was as if the only parts of Rengoku Ruka inherited through birth by the Rengoku offspring were the elegant shape of her eyes and her heart.
Her good, kind heart.
With that same beautiful, understanding heart, she would forgive Saki for erasing her son's memory of her existence.
After all, the youth was a demon slayer, slated to officially take up the position of Flame Hashira with the Corps following his father's retirement.
He would go on to slay innumerable demons.
She could be one of them.
She could be a demon, and a victim, unable to do anything but simply watch as him tear himself apart choosing between taking his own life or hers both as a demon slayer and the man she had been watching over.
And so, she made him forget her.
In that instance, she witnessed Shirahara Saki fading completely away from the past fifteen years of Rengoku Kyōjurō's young life.
On that crisp fall evening, Saki never waited in the sanctuary of nightfall to bloom apricot flowers in well-wishing of baby Kyōjurō's birth.
On that sultry summer night, toddler Kyōjurō never glanced out of his bedroom window, glimpsed the pretty, pretty sway of apricot flowers in the wind and came seeking his Fairy Big Sister.
On that balmy spring evening, Saki never languished in heartbreak over Rengoku Ruka's withered grave for the fifth night in a row.
Kyōjurō never scouted the area for five nights in a row.
They never found each other on the fifth night.
He never mistook her for a threat, never attacked her, and never tried to decapitate her.
She never defended herself against him, never wrapped him up in vines, and never dangled him like a caterpillar halfway through pupation from the tree over his mother's grave.
She never looked at his face, insulting his handsome looks. He never looked back, picking at her unearthly beauty in return.
He never asked her to marry him again, never asked for her name again, never remembered their kiss again, never remembered having had his memory of all that taken away…
And he, Rengoku Kyōjurō never saw his fairy big sister again.
"You were mad, weren't you? No. No, no, how could you be when you couldn't even remember?" Furiously, miserably, Saki shook her head. "But say you did, say you remembered what had happened to you, what I had done to you, would you be?"
She glanced over her shoulder, the same one Kyōjurō had stabbed through years ago. "Mad, I mean."
"You would be." Bobbing her head back and forth to an odd little rhythm discernible to no one else but herself, blinking green eyes rolled leisurely around.
"I know I would be. Mad. I would be mad, furious, bitingly so. See this? Remember this?" Her jaws snapped once, audibly and with much hilarious deliberation. "Fret not. I did tell you before that you didn't look delicious enough to eat." A bubble of mocking laughter escaped inflated lungs. "That was… a lot of weirdness we had had going on between us over such a short period of time."
"You. And me. You calling me 'Big Sister', thinking of a demon as a fairy. Rengoku brat and his 'Fairy Big Sister'."
"Going on and on about…"
"…making me your 'fairy bride'. Ugh." She pulled a face. "I can't help it, all right? I can't get over that. It's been so, so long and I still can't get over that. Who in the world proposes to a girl the way you did?"
"You were only a kid then. A loudmouthed brat, with chatter for brains. An ignorant brat, who clearly had no clue what marriage entailed and wanted to marry me just to learn my name."
"How… unromantic. How… uncreative." Saki rolled her eyes, shaking her head. "And no way was I saying 'yes'."
Then, she remembered.
She remembered, clearly, how actively he had been trying to speak despite impediment.
She remembered, clearly, how hard his mouth had strained against her palm.
She remembered, clearly, how fiercely his volume and attitude had intensified while she prepared to wipe his memory of her.
Evidently, he had been trying to speak to her. With her.
With no one and nothing around to hold her back, Saki could not help but wonder now what it possibly was that he had been trying, no, fighting to tell her.
After hearing her say that they weren't in love.
Truth be told, half of that was true. Her truth. She was not in love.
She had loved him unconditionally, like how Ruka knew she would when she first laid her hand over her pregnant belly.
However, she hadn't been in love.
She had… found him lovable enough as a kid, albeit in an annoying, clingy sort of way.
However, she hadn't been in love.
And he certainly wasn't. He couldn't have been then. She was sure Ruka would have told him exactly that when he had rushed back to gleefully inform her that his fairy big sister was going to wait for him to grow up so that they could marry.
"…Then, the years went by. You were fifteen, soon sixteen…"
Fifteen-year-old Kyōjurō pinning her down and confidently telling her that they were going to be married had set her maiden's heart aflutter.
Just the slightest.
It wasn't her fault. It wasn't her weakness.
He had said that without the least bit of blushing or awkwardness. As if it wasn't a confession but a reminder. As if it wasn't casual daydreaming but reality eagerly awaiting.
Was that love?
She could ask Ruka but there was no more Ruka around to ask.
"Was that love?" Saki wondered aloud. "Was I in love with your son?" Turning to her right, she asked Ruka's tombstone. Looking over to Kyōjurō's, she asked again. "What about you? Were you in love with me?" Chuckling good-naturedly, she shook her head. "Better that than marry just to learn my name. Especially when we both know how unfair it will be for me, having learnt your name ages ago. Remember you shouting it into my ear when you were just a brat, brat?"
Imagery of toddler Kyōjurō, with his bright gaze and even brighter hair, flitted hazily past her eyes in between slow blinking, eventually replaced by facial features turned masculine in physical maturity. Right above the hairline rose a shock of unruly blonde hair grown out of its childhood fuzziness into something reminiscent to a lion's mane. Untamed, fierce and attracts the eye to the rest of the man, who Saki learnt to appreciate but never learnt to get over her embarrassment.
Until now.
"I-I'm only saying it now because you can't hear me saying it but you were… really handsome." Turning her face away from the smaller tombstone, as if Kyōjurō's spirit was going to emerge from it to regard her with triumphant grinning, Saki prattled on in her embarrassment. "…A real looker. You did a great job growing up. Thank your mother for that. Did you ever?"
Looking back and forth between both mother and son, she chose to direct her attention to the former. "Did he ever, Ruka?"
Picturing gentle smiling in response, Saki broke, down and shattering when it advertently roused memories of a happily-pregnant Rengoku Ruka.
Oh. Oh gods.
How she wished they could go all back.
Back to when Ruka was still pregnant with her eldest boy.
Back to when they were able to discuss his future as a demon slayer while it still laid ahead.
Back to when she had had every opportunity to dissuade the mother-to-be from allowing it for her boy, and given it all up.
She wouldn't have given up on trying to convince Ruka. She wouldn't have given up on meeting with young Kyōjurō in hopes of dissuading him from becoming a demon slayer.
She wouldn't have cared so much about going against Ruka's teachings if it meant keeping that spot next to her tombstone empty and cold until time ripened and the young man was withered and gone.
Yet, years after their last encounter, she found herself staring down with disbelieving eyes at Rengoku Kyōjurō, frozen in time at age twenty and six feet under, their unmoving feet touching through weather-beaten soil where she stood at the foot of his grave.
More furious denial of cruel reality than excruciating acceptance at the devastating sight of mother and son reunited in death, the inhumane ferocity of her scream, which she had immediately unleashed into the frigid winter night had, over months straight, effectively deterred people from entering the graveyard.
Sometimes, they still speak of it, in hushed whispering and with the same fear her anguish had struck their hearts in the middle of that one stricken night.
"Ruka…" Pulling her legs up to her chest, she wrapped her arms around them, burying her face into bent knees. "Did you get to see your boy?" Swallowing tears before they came, she choked from the sheer exertion of doing so. "Did you get to receive him? Was he in a lot of pain? I didn't…" Stress gradually translated into quiet sobbing. "…get to see him at all. Kyōjurō… He- He had been lowered to rest by nightfall." In between gasping for breath, she gasped beneath the weight of her regret. "I couldn't…"
To her grief, words succumbed and she surrendered. Around her visibly-disconsolate figure, surrounding wild vegetation came unanimously alive at a random gust tearing through the ringing stillness of death, scattering foliage and upsetting more than few arrangements of offerings.
However, in the vicinity of the Rengoku burial ground, the wind whistled past without much natural disturbance. Over the two Rengokus, not a shred of leaf or splinter of twig drifted, as they had both remained so over so, so long.
Of course, the surviving Rengokus' daily attendance and maintenance of their late family members' graves had contributed majorly to their overall tidiness and condition. However, what went unseen and unknown was a demon whose unconditional love and impeccable manipulation of nature had all along been shielding that precious area from natural disturbance unforeseeable by man.
For once, in her unfairly-prolonged life since becoming acquainted with the Rengokus, she found herself unbothered by her ugly, shameful existence.
She had neither the heart nor time to be bothered about that anyway, confronted with the inevitable extinction of demonkind everywhere. How it had happened was shrouded in mystery and hampered by rumoring. What she did know, for a fact, was that with each and every single day that passed her by, fewer and fewer of her kind remained.
Until their numbers, once gloried, dwindled to a mere human hand.
Until there were almost none.
Until she was the only one still around.
That much she could feel in her bones. She had no idea why and how she was the last, left behind amidst the bitter dust of those gone ahead. Perhaps, it was heaven's final shred of pity towards her kind, bestowed upon her undeserving self so that she could come to Ruka and Kyōjurō with her goodbyes.
By now, they were surely no more beneath the soil while she still remained.
But soon… very soon… she too, would be here no longer.
That too, she could feel in her bones.
She was weakening.
Not in the same way Ruka herself had been, from sickness. Not in the same way Kyōjurō himself had been, from battle.
But weakening nonetheless.
Her body was growing heavier with each passing second. Overnight, she had gone from sitting to leaning. She had gone from keeping her head raised and casually bobbing in one-sided conversation to lowered in resignation into a cradle of tiring limbs. She had gone… from lamenting what had happened to imagining what could have been.
"Take me to your husband, Ruka… Tell him. Show him the very thing incomprehensible to the world but yourself, a demon that understands what it means to protect a human…"
Faintly, she spoke to the listening ears of no one.
"Show him… Tell him…"
Fingers slender as bamboo shoots curled and uncurled against her sheath of kimono, seemingly in search of something to grasp onto.
"Come and sit with us under the full moon. We can listen to your boy chatter all night long about the silliest things, like him taking me for his bride…"
Had she the energy to look, she would have clearly seen through her hands, noticed how her already pale skin was rapidly draining of its color, noted the way the fierce red tint was fading from her hair to leave it darkening back into in its original shade of rich auburn.
"Tell you what, kid… grow up. Grow up and stand proud as that fine young man your mother always knew you would. Grow up, then come back…"
Burying her face into a cradle of bent knees and arms, she was not surprised to find it nearly impossible to recover from that position.
"You won't be a demon slayer… I won't be a demon… You won't end up killing me or dying before I marry you…"
Unexplainable exhaustion had her leaning heavily against the newer, smaller one of the two tombstones, a limp arm around it and the other motionless across the soil at its foot.
"My name… is Shirahara Saki… I'm telling you now, kid… Rengoku Kyōjurō… Kyōjurō… come next… life, I will be sure to find you…"
Saki closed her eyes.
By the time the first rays of a new day scattered across the human graveyard, the last of accursed demonkind was long gone in the throes of dying to feel it burn.
When Rengoku Senjurō arrived at his family's burial ground at daybreak for routine cleaning, it was to a pair of unexpectedly tidy graves, his mother's and older brother's, with a generous cluster of wilted vines sprawled across the latter.
And a promise uttered to none but was set to survive the passage of time to be relieved in a still far away future through reincarnation.