Chapter 3: Family Tree

"Nanashi" was an orphan without a name, with weak legs that could carry her no further than ten paces an hour a day. She had been stuck in the village she was born in since her birth, though she never truly was able to understand the concept of that in and of itself, and spent her days watching the clouds to take her mind off of her famished stomach.

The one thing she cherished in her short life was an expensive watch with a broken face—its hands ticked nonetheless, even though she suspected that the time it showed was incorrect. She had found it discarded on the side of the street, thrown away by a rich man who saw no use in something that could not fulfill its purpose—but Nanashi disagreed. Though she could have sold it for scraps of food, or even simply tossed it aside for being a burden to carry in her frail hands, she saw it as a beautiful thing whose tick-tock lullaby drew her mind away from her hunger at night.

She was content living that way, clutching a broken watch in her hands and sitting in the corner of a dark alleyway in a time-worn village, but it appeared that nothing lasted forever, even for an orphan waiting to die.

Her memories were wiped when Muzan forced his blood into her and burned away her humanity, and though she had long lost her watch, the sound of grounding clockwork stayed close within her fractured mind, but it had become a reminder of something long gone to her; as a demon, it had become an unscratchable itch—something that bothered her, and tried to remind her of something.

The demonic instincts overriding her own had made her believe, at first, that it must have been the hunger for human flesh common among all of them. That had been her theory at first as well, but when the people she devoured did not ease that feeling, she simply stopped doing it. One might have thought that it was an oddity as far as demons went, but had Nanashi been conscious of the length of time she went without eating people, she would have answered that it was her time as a human that had taught her to be content with what she had.

That had lasted till she came across Saburo—a human whose smell she immediately knew as marechi. His smell watered her mouth and barraged her nose all day from when she first saw him, and it made her days so vitalized, so meaningful. For the first time since she came into existence, be it as a human or a demon, it was the first time that Nanashi felt something at all—the watch might have been something she had clung on to, but Saburo's blood was the anchor tied around her feet.

That was why she did not kill him—could not bring herself to. She was afraid that when she did, that feeling would go away as well, and she would be forced to simply bear the unending sounds of the watch that had long disappeared; of a phantom past she had forgotten.

However, it was also why she had slaughtered his family when they grew to conceal his smell with theirs. Saburo, who had become her meaning, had become dimmer to her—and she could not take it when the sound she had been escaping for so long returned to haunt her. The demon slayers could detect her after she had killed them, and that was why she had run for so long after that.

Years passed during her escape, and the starvation and the loss of the wonderful feeling grew to take a toll on her form. Her body was wracked with all manners of pain, and she could not bear it—the veins under her skin expanded and became gnarled, as though to accommodate her malnourished form, and to escape that pain she had restructured her body forcefully; if her humanoid form tortured her so, perhaps she could perceive the pain as something else in a different type of body.

She did not know when exactly it was that she returned to that mountain that bore her "meaning"—something that had morphed during her time away from it—but it felt like returning home to her nonetheless.

It was why a violent, strangely frightening anger ignited within her when she saw that young woman live with Saburo. After having had to run for years away from home, she would have to repeat that process alone. Her veins shifted under her skin, and the blood of the dead progenitor within them boiled.

For months she watched the young woman from afar, with intensely hateful eyes that Nanashi herself feared; she did not understand what had taken over her, but it was something more foreign that her demonization had been, and even though the beats of her heart had become louder with it to drown out the clock's sounds, she did not know whether to feel happy about it or fearful.

There then came a time when she observed her habits and her hobbies, her explorations into the woods, the chores she helped with in the house, the exotic nightly prayers she held for herself when the marechi was asleep, the lessons in language that he gave her, and the meals that she and Saburo had together—she saw them all, and her envy lit.

When the toxins from the young woman's body burned her away, it also turned the blood of the vile demon inside her veins to dust. She did not hear the sound of the acidic venom melting away her flesh, but the unending sound of the clock in her mind grew loud enough to become deafening, and eventually it was all she could hear.

That woman who had suddenly entered the life that Nanashi had made with Saburo on that mountain had reawoken something strange within her. A feeling of longing—but it was different from the longing she felt when she was hungry, for example, but it was only in her last moments did she realize it was jealousy—an oddly human thing to feel.

As the last of her being burned down, the sound stopped—and she finally realized what it was: The clock she treasured as a human had been reminding her of the days long gone; of her humanity, and for the last time, it lulled her to sleep.

[]

Hassan did not know when she woke up, or where she did, but it was all she could do to watch the ceiling of the shelter she was in and try to make out the obscure details of the woodwork in the darkness. She felt like a slab of concrete, or cement, wrapped up in a hard pipe where she laid, unable to feel a thing in her body aside from her own breaths. She did not think; for a while, she merely was.

The obscure darkness was like wisps of smoke in the air; where her eyes had adjusted to it, the wisps gave way and covered the other parts and periphery of her vision like a spiral, and like a haze, it began to make it harder for her to breathe. It smelled of something damp, and her wheezes became more labored and more audible to her own throbbing ears, ringing in the darkness.

She did not know how much time had passed like that, but the longer it went, the more apparent it became to her that her breaths were accompanied by the light snoring of others in the room.

She was vaguely aware of how warm she felt in the sheets covered over her, but it did not stop the fact that her skin was still cold. The soles of her feet were numb with a prickly sensation of an uncontrollable chill, the slight folds of her skin at the bottom accentuated the slightness of what she felt. For a while, she stayed in that position and did nothing but rub her toes together, trying to make her feel something at all, even if it meant that the resulting friction only made her feel clammy underneath. She was not thinking the entire time; she was merely awake, but not conscious.

After a while, she suddenly stopped, closed her eyes, and drifted off to sleep again, not noticing the robed figure that towered over her form, cloaked in darkness. Had she been sober, perhaps she would have reacted to it.

Perhaps.

Likely not….

[]

What first infiltrated her consciousness was a tiny pinprick ray of light perforating the earliest of many entrances into her waking mind. As the light spread to her eyes, Hassan's body stirred in its deep slumber, before she finally opened them to see the world again.

What greeted her was an unfamiliar sight: There was a girl, strangely small, with long black hair and pink irises and a short length of bamboo in her mouth, seeming to function as a gag of some sort. Yet, she did not appear to be a hostage, and despite her neotenous appearance, she did not look to be of an age where she needed a pacifier…

Upon the meeting of their eyes, the girl perked up, but before Hassan could react—she could not, after all—she stood up to her full height, which did not go beyond the size of a ten-year-old, and sprinted away in an almost-comical manner, her steps making pitter-patter noises that echoed clearly through the room. Spurred on by the thought of Saburo's whereabouts and safety, Hassan made to sit up, with a lot of effort and pain, and found her back propped against an empty side of the wall of a spacious living room.

It was a humble place, without much decoration, and the furniture within were simplistic-looking things that served one purpose or another. There was a thin layer of dust that had gathered on the surface of some things, such as the tabletops as well as some drawers, but instead of giving it the look of an abandoned house, it instead breathed an air of misdirected nostalgia to her. It might be due to the fact that other places in the room had the slight sheen of droplets of water over them. Planting a hand on the cool floor outside her futon as she made to rise, the air began to assault her skin with slight licks of chill where the blanket no longer covered her.

Not long after Hassan sat herself up and tried to reorient her senses while taking note of the medical patches placed on several parts of her body, the girl who had scuttled away reappeared at a doorway leading to the room she must have had entered earlier, but as she stepped out, Hassan met her eyes with the person who followed the girl's emergence from the room behind her.

The word that she would use to describe him was "warm", like the sun. The boy radiated kindness like an aroma, and the burdens on her body seemed to be lifted for the moments he came into view. He had bright burgundy eyes, a rounded face, and dark hair slicked back to show off peculiar markings on the left side of his forehead, which resembled something like inky flames. When his eyes turned toward hers, they lit up, almost too similarly to the way the little girl's had earlier, and he quickly made to set aside the damp towels he was holding on the top of a nearby drawer before approaching her, the little girl following by his feet like a small pet.

Hassan tried to move, but flinched when something in her abdomen seized up and clamped down, which made her clutch her stomach in pain and bend over forward, her elbows sinking into the thick blanket. She barely registered the boy's pace speeding up when he suddenly appeared right beside her, and he said something to her, the concern seeping into his voice apparent despite her understanding little of his words.

It took several moments for the pain to subside, but the boy did not leave her side throughout all of it, laying her down only when her muscles relaxed. Hassan did not think of how he knew when the pain had gone, just that he did. When she resisted a bit, the boy communicated something to her differently, and this time she deciphered a bit of it; he was telling her to lay back down, and she only reluctantly agreed after a second of worry. The little girl with him was making calming motions with her hands, where she lowered them both repeatedly as her fingers pointed at each other.

She looked at her, trying to figure her age out—the girl was not a child, that much she knew, but she seemed so much like one despite the level of intelligence she could see within her eyes, and it baffled her to no end in her pain-riddled mind at the time. Hassan only let up on her thoughts when the girl gave her a smile—almost difficult to tell due to the bamboo mouthpiece she wore, but conveyed nonetheless from how it reached her eyes.

As she laid back down, she could not help but worry about where Saburo was, when the boy spoke with simple Japanese, "My name is Tanjiro Kamado. What's yours?" It sounded like his name. Tanjiro…Kamado… He had an easygoing smile that carried an amicable air. Hassan could not help but relax herself at the sight.

She blinked at him, noting that he must have picked up on her difficulty understanding him earlier, before responding with the name she had given Saburo months earlier. "I am Hassan."

In truth, Hassan was not her actual name—but it was the one name she had as far as she remembered, and one that could at least work as one for introductory purposes. It was, for her, a reminder of her roots, even though she sometimes would have preferred for it not to have been that way, and also something that reinforced the practices she carried out each evening, or since she began to live with Saburo, each night.

The small girl suddenly hopped onto the blanket and made herself comfortable on it, reclining herself. Hassan had expected an impact where she landed, but she hardly registered a weight being applied on her knee.

"Ah, Nezuko!" Tanjiro yelped, but mindfully kept his voice toned down. He stood up a little and went to pick her up by her underarms, to which Nezuko responded as though she was being held like a baby. "I'm sorry, Nezuko tends to get carried away with meeting new people sometimes. I guess she particularly finds you approachable…."

Hassan, while she would respond in a variety of different ways, ranging from telling him that it was alright and that Nezuko did not bother her, to thanking him for his thoughtful consideration, but not only was her Japanese not as proficient as she would like when comparing how her responses sounded in her native tongue, but the question of where Saburo was weighed on her mind more and more as time went on. Her anxiety that he might no longer be around had grown to an unbearable level.

Against her volition, she felt her body heating up towards that concern.

As she barely registered Tanjiro talking about how the "Kakushi" had repaired his home during his time in an organization whose name she could not quite make out, and other things, like where they were located at the time compared to the previous night, she slowly rose out of the futon, and that time, she flinched only once, and bore through with it. On shaky legs, she scaled the house toward the entrance, the medical patches falling off as she kept her left hand along the wall while her body grew accustomed to the pain and dulling it as she went.

She felt Tanjiro and Nezuko approaching slowly from behind, but chose to ignore them for the time being—their company had been nice, but she had other things in mind at the time.

Things important to her.

"Wait," Tanjiro suddenly said, his voice somehow more loud and clear than before, stopping her in her tracks. "Uncle Saburo said that he'll be waiting for you. He didn't say where, but…that's what he asked us to tell you."

Hassan slowly nodded at him, realizing that she was wearing a warm kimono that he had put over her shoulders some time along the way to the door. "Thank you, Tanjiro Kamado."

With that, Hassan began her walk toward the tree of the knowledge of life and death.

[]

The walk to find Saburo felt somewhat surreal. Perhaps it was the pain that she internalized that made the cold tolerable, or waking up in a stranger's home that felt odd, but Hassan moved, nonetheless. She let the numbness her body took felt from the snow to strengthen herself. There was no wind, just a stagnant chill, the wintry winds having died down in favor of a frigid atmosphere hanging in the air. Where the trees did not block her view over the hills, she looked into the horizon and saw a sky enveloped with cascading clouds, as though it was a wall built by an army to prevent breaches from the other side.

She stepped out of the clearing the house she exited had been built upon, and found a trail of footprints left in the snow, and followed it into the woods outside. As she stepped her sandals into them, she looked around her, and saw the woods through Saburo's eyes, where he walked. A branch that had multiple twigs sprouting at the end, a tree whose trunk looked like a spiral, branches high above which bifurcated into two, one going up and the other pointing downward…

The trees began to thin out, their trunks becoming narrower as she moved further along into the woods, and down the hills. She stepped over gnarly trunks with prickly splinters, scratched a toe on one of them, and stepped onward further, following his footprints steadfast. She stepped on a fallen log, filled with snow, but whose outside lent her no chill, and as she went, she found several more that were all but dying, each more hollow than the last. Along the way, she found many nests, filled with feathers shed by departed birds on the branches closer to her height, but they became more sparse as she walked.

Upon the stumps of dead trees she found freezing sprouts, yet found no snow collecting on their little leaves. She went further in, and suddenly found a curtain of snow slowly descending through the air. It thickened as she went on, the trees growing closer and more huddled together this time, as though forming a roof. Saburo's footprints grew less and less apparent as roots covered more ground, but she followed where the snow collected in the earth, suspecting that she was no longer walking the path he took.

The trees began to look damaged, marked with claws too deep to be that of a bear's, to torn apart to be caused by a hatchet, yet they looked to be old marks, snow filling them in where she found them, while other seemed misshapen and dark. She saw faces on their bark, of narrow slits looking like eyes, branches pointing toward her like daggers.

The trek continued for a little longer, before she finally came to a clearing where she found a final nest on the ground, the feathers in it plucked apart and scattered in the snow around it almost fully disappeared from view by the powder ice that fell over them. On the other side was Saburo, his back facing her as he looked at a tree larger than the rest whose trunk was concealed from her by his form. He was dressed too lightly for the snow, and in his hand was a hatchet. His shoulders were slumped, and the curtain of snow that descended earlier had ceased its fall for the time being. Behind him was a miniscule pile of fabric—his own kimono that he had discarded.

A clear trail of footprints led up to where he stood then, but Hassan had emerged from another side. She walked towards him, approaching silently, leaving behind footprints of her own that joined his where he stood.

They were silent for a while. Hassan did not peer around him to see his face, but Saburo had acknowledged her presence when he sighed, letting out a long puff of perspire into the frigid air.

"Hassan," came his gruff voice. It was a tone he did not usually use, darker than usual, and indicative of upset, but she noted a slight difference from its normal sound. It carried resignation in his breath. "Thank you for coming."

She was silent before she found the words to respond with. "I attend to you as you wish, Master Saburo." She felt it was not all she wanted to say, and thus continued, stiffly, with her limited vocabulary, "I am glad to see you are safe."

He waited a bit, as though hesitant, before he gestured to her to stand beside him, moving away from the tree and making space for her beside him. Wordlessly, Hassan understood he wanted her to see it. Upon its bark were characters in Japanese, engraved with a knife. There were a few of them, spaced out as though independent words where the characters separated.

Hassan noted something interesting about them: All of them were crossed out by something larger than a knife, like a thick claw—all of them but one, which was carved into the middle of the tree with whatever it was that had scratched out the rest, messily, and brutally.

"三郎"

Sa. Bu. Ro.

"They are the names of my family that I carved into this tree," Saburo said, placing a hand on the bark, his fingers slightly shaky as he spread them out to feel. "I have visited this tree almost every evening for twenty years now, ever since I lost them to the demon you slew last night."

Hassan recognized the tree. It was the one she had fallen unconscious by the previous afternoon, when she went on her exploration into the woods. The characters she saw were names of the family Saburo had had long before she even arrived in his home…

"Every evening I came here to talk with my children, till one evening seven years ago I found this place turned into a list." As his tone rose towards the end, Hassan's heart pumped heat through her blood, and she noticed Saburo's grip on his hatchet tightening, before it went slack again, willfully. "For a long time I could only fear for my own life and mourn the dead. But ever since you came, I visited this place less and less.

"I've been afraid of making a new future for myself. I didn't understand whether it was even possible or not. 'The demon could follow me if I moved.' 'The demon could attack me if I went out past eight.' 'The demon could devour the Kamados if they did not flee the mountain.' It was only two years ago that I realized that no matter how much I feared things, they happen nonetheless. That was when I began to think about the future."

He chuckled a bit, bitterly and angrily, rubbing his face with his free hand. "I've considered yelling at the demon to eat me for the past several months before you arrived," he said through his hand. At that, Hassan breathed in more deeply than before, her anger suddenly quelled. "And only recently, I've been thinking that if it's with you, I think I can be brave enough, even just for a bit, to look forward. I've been considering taking you to this place for the past week. I think this was the perfect time to do it.

"Arigatō, Hassan." Saburo tensed up, readying his hatchet, and swung at the tree. It took her a few moments to realize what he was doing, and by the time she understood, he had struck two more blows into it. Splinters flew away from the impacts, but not wildly, and not dangerously. They scattered themselves onto the snow around the tree as it shook with each strike, his pace slow and steady, focused and measured, but before long, Saburo's breaths had grown heavy, and he started to slow, weak, yet he showed no signs of stopping, but something was clear to her—his voice, then raspy, contained a hollow grief he desperately fought back with each strike.

Before she realized it, she had taken a step closer to his slight frame, aged with stress and grief. Watching his back tremble with effort incited a determination within her, and right before the hatchet in his hands slipped out of his thin fingers, she reached out for it and caught in her palm, wrapping her other hand around his as she linked the fingers holding the axe with his own.

They looked at each other, and the both of them affirmed their wills. With a heaving breath that felt stronger than any other breath Hassan had taken in before, they swung the axe together, burying its blade within the trunk of the tree deeper and deeper than the last blow they delivered. They repeated this process, with bodies in sync and drives aligned. With every reiteration the names on the bark grew more obscure and unrecognizable, and Hassan watched them closely as they tore away, little by little, burning the images into her memory—and she knew that Saburo did the same, but far more intently.

She could not imagine what kinds of thoughts were going through his mind at the time, but she knew it must shake him much more profoundly than it did to herself, yet they did not stop. She felt his arms steadfast beside hers, his breaths no longer trembling, but still labored from the exertion, and the mental toll the felling was putting on him. Despite that they continued, till finally they landed the last swing of the hatchet to the tree that toppled it into the ground with a resounding crash.

The descending snow hung in the air for several still moments—their breaths were all that they could hear around them, their lungs frozen cold by the chilly air they had sucked in, and their limbs hot under the fabric tightening around them—before it resumed with Saburo dropping backward into the snow, sitting down in it with a thud, the hatchet falling down nearby. Hassan stayed standing, looking on in awe at their handiwork.

Waiting a few moments and breathing in and out several times to calm down her heart rate, Hassan took off her kimono and covered his shoulders in it, offering her hand to him, which he accepted. She helped him stand up and held him close to her to steady him, and after a few more relaxing breaths together, they made to return to the Kamados'.

That was, until a loud, haughty voice echoed throughout the clearing.

"I thought I was watching a scene out of a drama written by an amateur playwright for a while, there! Well, at least you managed to occupy my attention for a short moment."

From within the woods nearby emerged a blond man in a garish hakama and a flowing coat with gold embroidery etched along its edges. He wore fanciful geta with white socks, which looked more expensive than footwear had any right to be.

"I was beginning to think that you were going to stand there alone forever," he continued, stifling a yawn mid-sentence in a way that Hassan was both impressed at and baffled by, "and I was beginning to think that my trip here had been a waste of time! I was just ready to leave the place when she entered, and because of it I got to watch a cheesy moment play out!"

A dagger… If only she had a dagger to throw at his smug face… He might be a man, but she wouldn't hesitate punching his face in if he did not stop belittling them… Hassan's fingers twitched at her side for a belt that was not there…till she realized something peculiar: She understood every word he said.

"Mmm? What's with that look? Mongrel, —" What. "—you seem both vexed, and dumbfounded by the fact that I would grace common peasants like the both of you with my presence." His talking…did he ever stop? She wondered when he would stop speaking and insulting Master Saburo, till he mentioned something interesting about her—"Very well! I am in a generous mood today. If you wish to continue basking in my splendor, then have at it! After all, nothing could improve my day when I find the last Storm Slayer ready for recruiting, who's also a middling Breath User at best!"

"King Gilgamesh," Saburo began, bringing her attention back to him with those two words, the latter of which sounded like a name to her. King? "You didn't sleep with us last night. Was young Tanjiro's abode not lavish enough for you?"

"It's not a matter of luxury, Mister Saburo—" Hassan was relieved he didn't address him the same way he did her. "—I had all but discarded whatever expectations I had had for that when I first stepped foot on this small, primitive country of yours. It's rather a matter of," he paused as he dug his hand under his haori and pulled out a very familiar-looking sword; "looking into this ōdachi, you see, and whether or not this really is the final Blade of Calamity in Japan."