'Every time I look at demons,' Ayaka had told Tanjirou a few months back, 'I only see a black void.'
Those were the words that rumbled on her head when walking around the main street of the Red Light District.
She hadn't told him that it was the black of hell nor that it was the black of sinners, ambition and hunger for something they wanted to achieve by stepping on others.
It was a very ugly black. She, at the very least, hated it.
The entire place was full of that black; men that wandered around the place with money on their wallets that they would spend on fleeting distractions, women who, furious (would it be at themselves or at the world) made up for what they lacked with arrogance. The children stole, the babies cried, she tried to avoid looking at the corpses that piled up on the corners, but it was hard to do so.
The Red Light District was perfect for demons to thrive, like Uzui had guessed, but not because of what he believed.
How many of them would have accepted turning into demons just to escape from all that suffering? Ayaka knew that it would be many, and she didn't like the idea.
Suddenly she felt a pair of eyes on her back and Ayaka stopped on her track. When looking at the corner of an alleyway, she found two dirty faces that belonged to a pair of children dressed in rags; an older boy and a little girl, holding each other's hands.
The oiran of her house, Warabihime, was as capricious and impatient as she was beautiful. Until then. the chores assigned to Ayaka, who, contrasting with Zenitsu, was very bad at playing the shamisen, were about running around the district looking for a very long list of presents and other luxurious items that the oiran asked for everyday.
Carefully looking at the kids, Ayaka hugged the bag with shiny clothes she had just bought and walked up to them.
"Um… where are your parents? Isn't it a little too late for you to be out here?" She asked, kneeling before the boy who only looked at her in silence. However, the girl hid behind her brother's back. Ayaka raised her hand, in an attempt to brush away the dirty hair from the boy's face, but his big, watery eyes filled with fear and he walked back a few steps, so Ayaka didn't try to touch him again.
In the silence of the boy a small, weak grumble was heard. A moment later the cheeks of the boy were tinted of a light red, as the girl sniffed, Ayaka was sure she had pushed down a sob and thought about the sweets that rested on her pocket, destined for the oiran.
Even if she went back to the store to buy more, it would be closed and she'd be accused of stealing the money that was gone.
'Maybe the oiran won't care.' She gave the children a smile and unwrapped the packet to show them the brilliant sugary sweets.
The girl was the only one to react, tiptoeing so she could look at the sweets that Ayaka was leaving on the floor in front of them, hugging her brother's arm.
At seeing the smile that started to appear on the face of the girl, suddenly Ayaka stopped caring about the consequences. She was stretching out her little hand, ready to touch the frosting on the sweets, but the boy tugged her hand back, looking at Ayaka with a suspicious glare, and the girl was forced to go back again.
"You can eat it if you want," Ayaka said, thinking about Oyakata-sama's smile and how to imitate it. "There's no danger."
And even if she distanced herself from them, walking away from the children, they made no attempt to take the sweets from the floor.
Ayaka frowned, walking up to them again. This time, they didn't flinch away from her. She kneeled before them and took some coins from her pocket that she offered them on her open palm.
"What's your name?" She asked, pushing the coins closer to them. The girl still had her eyes on the sweets, the boy, instead, was busy looking at the coins.
"Shi-shizuka," the girl shily whispered. Ayaka smiled wider.
"That's a very pretty name, Shizuka, I'm sure your parents loved you very much to call you that," she said, but for some reason Shizuka's eyes watered and she hid her face on her brother's back.
"Shizuka wasn't named by our parents." The boy talked for the first time. "I did, they died."
"Oh." Ayaka tried not to look very shocked. "I'm very sorry for your loss, I didn't know that-"
"Leave us alone," the boy growled. "We can take care of ourselves."
"Nii-san," Shizuka mumbled with a broken voice.
"I'm sure that you can take care of yourselves," Ayaka replied, serene. "But sometimes a bit of help is good, for your and your sister's sake."
Jin's hostile expression relaxed. Ayaka smiled at them again:
"My name's Ayaka but please, call me Aya. There's a noodles stall nearby, would it be better if I bought you both dinner there? So you can see the food's safe."
Shizuka started to lean on her brother with eyes wide open but Jin still looked at her harshly.
"What do you want?" He asked, giving her a squinting glance. "If you want to sell my sister to some house you had better give up because I won't let you-"
"I don't want anything in exchange, I won't ask you to work for me or do anything at all." Ayaka raised a single hand in the air, the other holding her purchases. "If it makes you feel better, I'll only buy the food and then I'll leave. You won't see me ever again unless you want to, of course."
Jin looked at her through narrowed eyes, still suspicious, but Shizuka was tugging at his dirty clothes time and time again in cheerfulness.
"You're very weird," he said, finally coming closer. Ayaka smiled.
"I get told that a lot."
It took only a little while, or maybe she still wasn't distrustful enough to be a street rat, Shizuka started babbling non stop, holding onto her brother's hand, who only looked at Ayaka with a frown. She joked about him never smiling and Jin growled, but Shizuka laughed and his cheeks turned red once again.
There was a little noodle restaurant not too far away from the Kyogoku house. Shizuka and Jin sat on the chairs next to one another, gaining the nasty glares of the clients around them, but the vendor said nothing once Ayaka showed him the money.
"So you're a maiko." Since they hadn't told her to leave, Ayaka now sat beside the two siblings as they ate voraciously.
"I was sold a little while ago, so I don't know very well how everything works here," she said, playing with the glass of water they had served her. "My sister and I are working on the Kyogoku house and I have a friend on the Tokito house that you would surely love." Ayaka smiled, absentmindedly touching the flower behind her ear.
Jin raised a single eyebrow and silently continued slurping his noodles. 'Friend'.
"Um, I wanted to ask, you both have been living here for a long while, haven't you?" A smiley Ayaka continued.
Shizuka nodded, nearly choking on her noodles as her impatence and hunger got the best of her.
"Well… it's just that I don't know… what geishas do…" Instantly, Jin started coughing and Shizuka ran to pat his back. Ayaka gave him her glass of water and he gulped down nearly half of it.
"You have… you have no idea?" Jin looked at her in confusion and Ayaka only stuttered negative answers. "Even if you're a maiko, you don't know what geishas do, what kind of person sold you?"
"Grandma, what's a geisha?" Ayaka wondered, as she pondered between a lotus patterned kimono or a tadpoles one. "Uzui says we're gonna disguise ourselves as maikos and that after that come the geishas, but I don't know what any of those things are, not even the Red Light District itself."
"Well, a geisha is a woman who-," Aoi started, suddenly being interrupted by a wide eyed Kaede.
"You don't need to know," her grandmother told her, patting the top of her head.
"I see," Ayaka simply smiled. "Okay!"
«Maybe I should have pressed further on the matter…» Ayaka clumsily thought. Meanwhile, Jin bursted out laughing.
"You don't know!? You really don't know!?" Jin repeated, hitting the table with his fists. Shizuka was fast and took the noodles as well as her own, as Jin, the kid who she had only seen frowning, laughed endlessly.
Even if he was laughing at her, she guessed, Ayaka liked that he was showing a little bit of joy.
"A geisha…" Jin stopped laughing and caught his breath," is a girl you pay to have sex with."
Ayaka tried not to look too ridiculous in front of the two children, but her shocked expression showed more than what she wanted. Jin started laughing again.
"Oh," she said, suddenly thinking about Tanjirou and covering her face with her hands in an attempt to hide her blush. "That's why no one wanted to tell me…"
"Really, you're very weird," Jin repeated a second time, going back to his noodles after wiping a single tear that had bloomed from his eyes. "It's very funny."
"I'm so embarrassed," Ayaka muttered against her hands. "Two children knew about something like that and I didn't."
"I'm sure you're a bumpkin," Shizuka commented without malice, and Ayaka's blush only increased.
"The city is so confusing," she said, biting her lip. "There's so many people and so many lights, everything's so loud I sometimes get a little dizzy. How could you possibly live here?"
Jin smiled proudly, both fists at the sides of his waist, "Shizuka and I are gonna leave this dumpster! Once we save up enough money we'll go to capital! And there our lives will get started for real! Isn't that right, Shizuka!?"
His sister nodded, smiling from ear to ear:
"I want to have real dolls! And eat white rice every day!"
"And we will! I promise!" Jin continued, taking his sister's shoulders. "We'll go see the Imperial Palace! They say there's a lake around it and that the gardens are endless! I wanna go there so bad!" Jin stopped on his tracks and looked at Ayaka, who only stared at the siblings with a soft smile.
"I'm sure you will," she said, that time when she tried to brush the hair off Jin's face, he didn't flinch. "When you're there, send me a letter, will you? I'll pay you a visit."
Jin cleared his throat, pushing away Aya's hand. "Hey, don't you have to leave already?"
She blinked.
"You're right!" Aya exclaimed, getting down from the chair. "I already took care of everything so don't worry about the money. I'll tell the madam of the house that I'll pay with my work and she'll probably feed me once a day to make up for it… I hope she at least feeds-"
Shizuka wrapped her arms around her tightly and Ayaka's skin felt her smile through the fabric. "Thank you so much, Ayaka-san."
They stayed like that for a little while, unmoving. It took a few moments for Ayaka to react and wrap her arms around her too, at which Shizuka buried her face against the crook of her neck. Her little hands held tightly onto her kimono, and it was painful to make her let go when the 'little while' became 'minutes'.
"It was no problem, I promise," she whispered on top of the little girl's head.
By the time she waved the children goodbye, the image of Shizuka's pure smile had been engraved on her mind like fire. If this was how it felt every time, Ayaka thought, smiling to herself, she could understand why her father had spent his life helping other people.
Both siblings stared at her until the cherry blossoms on her purple kimono disappeared from their sight.
"Maybe we shouldn't have done that," Shizuka started hesitantly, playing with her empty bowl. "She was very nice."
Jin shrugged, taking his sister's hand and guiding her back to the alleyway. "It's how it is, Shizuka, we can't let our guards down because she fed us once."
"I guess that when she realizes what we've done, she'll hate us," the girl mumbled and Jin raised his eyebrows when seeing her eyes watered.
"What does it matter? We have one another and that's what I care about," he said, although his gaze wandered, involuntarily, to the corner where Aya had disappeared.
He nearly felt bad about it.
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The oiran Warabihime rose, slender and beautiful, on the doors of her room. Ayaka stayed still in front of her, holding her purchases.
It was the first time she saw the oh so famous oiran that had given a reputation to that house. And just with one stare Ayaka was able to recognize that the woman in front of her was very beautiful.
"You're the new errands girl, aren't you?"
Ayaka blushed unintentionally. "Um, yes! My name is-..."
"Listen carefully," she remembered her grandmother saying in the middle of the bathroom, still holding the brush with which she had rubbed their skins until peeling off, "you can't use your real name under any circumstances."
Aoi clicked her tongue. "Then which ones are we using?"
Her grandmother shrugged. "Suit yourself."
"Kaede." The oiran gave her a weird look. "My name is… Shinazugawa Kaede."
"You should drop the surname, it doesn't matter here." She bent down, and Ayaka noticed she was even more beautiful face to face. The oiran's sharp nail grazed her lip. "You're very pretty, Kaede. Maybe you'll take my place as an oiran once I stop being beautiful."
Ayaka only blushed more strongly at her unexpected kindness. "Thank you, oiran."
"But you're also very dumb," the oiran said, after looking her up and down once. Ayaka furrowed her eyebrows but before she could reply, Warabihime pointed at her with her cruel fingers. "A little bird told me you were with some kids when you were out in the streets. Check your pockets."
And she did. When sticking her hand in her pocket she didn't find the remaining money from the shopping. Without a warning, the oiran slapped her so strongly that she was left looking to the side.
"Those street rats have robbed you," she bitterly said, as if her own words were poison. One of her pointy hands took an iron hold of Ayaka's shoulder, squeezing tightly.
Ayaka thought about how strongly Shizuka had held onto her. It couldn't be… The oiran continued with her cruel smile:
"You're still a maiko, right?" Ayaka silently nodded. "Well then, here you have some advice from your senpai. Just so you know that around here good deeds are for fools." Warabihime kneeled to her height and looked her right in the eye, whispering in her ear. "Or for the dead."
She kept squeezing her shoulder stronger each second, so strongly she could have broken a bone.
"I don't care," Ayaka strongly claimed. The oiran furrowed her sharp eyebrows. "I won't say that the fact that they stole from me is good, but the only thing I've done is feed hungry children, and I refuse to believe that's a bad thing!"
"In what kind of place do you think you are?" Warabihime hissed, getting so close to Aya that her lips were a sigh away from grazing her juicy flesh. "They're not the only orphans and they won't be the last ones, do you expect their lives to be better this way? That a warm meal will save them from a life of misery?"
She then slapped her a second time and Ayaka crashed against the floor.
The oiran only stared at her motionless body and let out a little laugh.
A bruise on Ayaka's cheek started to blossom in the form of a red swollen mark.
"Have you ever heard the story of the spider's thread?" she weakly muttered from the floor, sitting up.
Warabihime stopped on her feet, looking down at the little measly human with mountains for eyes.
"They say that one day, Buddha was on a walk in one of the gardens in Paradise and that, when looking down through a lake, he saw a thief in Hell, in the Lake of Blood, to be precise." Ayaka talked as if the blood gushing out of the injury on her head didn't make her feel dizzy. "Buddha remembered that Kandata, that was the thief's name, had spared the life of a spider once by not stepping on it, it was only once, but that small good deed proved that he wasn't a heartless criminal like what everyone believed."
She caught the breath she had lost, trying not to tremble.
"So Buddha took a spider thread and used it as a rope that reached where Kandata was. When seeing it, Kandata started climbing up, trying to reach Paradise, but there was a problem," she continued, wiping off the blood that now dripped down her forehead. "When looking down, he saw all the sinners that were with him in the Pool of Blood, they were climbing up the spider's thread too. So, fearing that the thread would break and that he would fall down again, Kandata decided to cut off the thread to save himself without thinking about the others. But because of Kandata's selfishness the thread got torn apart and he lost his opportunity to get out of hell."
Ayaka dedicated the oiran and her black a long stare.
"I think that Buddha will give him a second chance and that Kandata can learn from his mistakes and get out of hell."
"So you're still awake." And that was the only thing the oiran Warabihime said about the matter.
«Oh, Tanjirou» Ayaka thought, in yearning. «I really hate the black of demons.»
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