When the biwa's string thrummed, sending a vibration through his body with a strength that made his teeth rattle, Akaza felt the pang of dread, the familiar threat of the leash tightening around his throat, around his entire being. As the Infinity Castle materialized around him, he bowed his head and dropped to his knees without looking or thinking.
He stayed motionless for many moments, and although he was aware of his master's presence before him, he was even more aware of his own infuriating offspring kneeling at his side. Akaza focused all of his will on locking down his mind. He understood with one hundred percent clarity that if the master wanted to look closer at his thoughts, he could do so as easily as opening a book and flipping through the pages. But his attention was drawn elsewhere, and so Akaza smoothed out his mental edges and endeavored to look as subservient and pious as he could.
When he'd found Tomioka that day, months ago (or maybe it was a year ago? five years ago? he couldn't keep it all straight anymore) he'd been fascinated by the Hashira. He was a cold, beautiful thing whose fighting spirit was sharp and frigid with howling, yawning depths. To look at it was like drowning in a whirlpool or a flood or a massive tsunami, it was to be crushed in freezing darkness. He'd brought everything that existed in that spirit to bear during their fight, and did not care at all if he died in the wielding of it.
All that power with nothing to lose - he was lethal, unyielding death.
Akaza, who had fought and killed Hashira before, who had in fact fought a Water Hashira at some point during the past fifty years, had been very impressed. He became positively overcome with the wish, no, the yearning, to take this Hashira and make him his own. To possess him would be to create the ultimate companion, someone with whom he could fight and rage against forever.
Akaza had been a demon for a long time, centuries it seemed, and while he still needed to eat, it no longer held the same allure. (If he had been human he might recognize that what he wanted was connection, that he was in fact terribly lonely.) Since he was a demon, and a rather old one at that, all he found he wanted was someone who was strong enough to fight against, who wouldn't grow tired and break and die, someone to set his strength against, to push him to new levels.
To possess this Hashira proved to be far easier said than done to Akaza's unending delight, as the Hashira was formidable and put up a fantastic fight for many hours. It went on for so long that Akaza actually became worried that he would have no choice but to kill him when the dawn came. And when he caught the faint scent of death coming from the Hashira's weakening body, sensed the stutter of his heart and perceived the dark blood that was pooling inside of him in such a way that he could not survive, he felt panicked, that he was going to lose this one…and who knew when he might stumble across another?
When the Hashira made his final stand and Akaza gripped him tightly, he saw nothing but hatred and defiance in his eyes, and he relished it, because he knew that this Hashira would make a very compelling companion.
Being a demon, Akaza would not have felt much remorse over changing him against his will anyway, but the fact that the man never said a word about it one way or another made him all the more sure that this was meant to be.
Now on his knees before their master, Akaza waited and wondered why they had both been summoned. The master had of course known of Tomioka's existence. He'd plucked that information out of Akaza's mind like he was pulling a weed shortly after he'd been turned, and although his master reveled in it for a few moments, that the fact of it might cause his old rival at the Demon Slayer Corps some pain over the loss of one of his own – and the master planned to make sure that said rival knew it was not just a loss, but that his Water Hashira had been changed, he'd been taken to be one of his own – the master had soon moved on to other things.
Akaza had received a small reprimand for making another demon (all of his senses, even his preternatural ones, had been stripped and not returned for several harrowing days), but his master knew that this was something that Akaza had wanted for quite some time, and he indulged him, much in the same way that he did regarding his aversion to killing women. Akaza knew that all indulgences could be rescinded in the blink of an eye, so he worked to become stronger and execute his mission in order to keep his master happy.
"Akaza."
It was the master's terrible voice, the one that lived inside his head but which now filled the cavernous room and held such power and weight it buzzed in the air, turning it into something heavy, something crushing.
"Yes, Master," Akaza said reflexively, keeping his eyes trained on the floor.
"Your pet has done something that is rather vexing."
And although Akaza tried very hard to squash it before it bloomed in his chest, he could not help the fear that he suddenly felt for himself but also his offspring, and the surprise of it made him tip his hand to his master more than he wanted.
The master sneered sinisterly.
"Curious, your concern for the thing – I certainly feel no such thing for any of you. This is why I don't like any of you making other demons. It makes you weaker…more sentimental."
Akaza bowed further to his master, but said nothing, trying in vain to hold himself together.
~ I don't care I don't care I don't care ~
"It doesn't matter whether or not you care, Akaza," his master said wearily, "What matters is that we have a problem."
"What is that Master?"
"It seems that your offspring has found the thing that you have been searching for, for all of these long, long years."
Akaza's eyes shot up, looking at his master in a panic, before his gaze finally slid to Tomioka who knelt by his side. The other demon's face was alert, but calm. Akaza knew that he must be aware of the danger he was in, as it thrummed through the room oppressively. Akaza's eyes flitted back to his master's feet.
"I know you did not know," the master continued. "And while I do have questions about how it is that he knew anything about the Blue Spider Lily –
(The master has questions? But the master knows everything!)
– it seems that he stumbled upon it, and then did a very, very stupid thing."
Akaza was so stunned that he could not ask the obvious question, but instead shot a look at his demon-child. Doing stupid things made you get punished, painfully, for many hours, sometimes days, and yet stupid Tomioka knelt next to him all in one piece, suddenly looking for all the world like he was bored .
"You are wondering what it was that he did," the master mused. "Go ahead – ask him for yourself."
Akaza waited for a few moments to see if it was a trap, before he turned his head fully to Tomioka.
"What did you do?" he asked quietly, under his non-existent breath.
Tomioka turned his cool gaze to Akaza, and Akaza saw it again, the look of pure defiance that he'd seen that night, right before he ripped into Tomioka's shoulder with his teeth, before he mixed their blood together, before he pushed it into his wounds, into his mouth and down his throat, before he opened his chest cavity and flooded his dying heart with his own blood.
"I ate it," Tomioka stated laconically, as if the very fact of it would not get them both killed. As if the master wasn't standing right there with all of his monstrous power to bring down bloody, putrefying pain and death on both of them in whatever manner he saw fit. Indeed he felt the sharp edge of the master's rage pressed against his own flesh menacingly, and yet he could not tear his eyes from his offspring, who seemed to be miraculously unfazed by the wrath of their god.
"I can rip him open, Master," Akaza said – his voice trembling and becoming beseeching in a way that he hated – as he continued to stare at Tomioka. "I will do that for you – I will rip down into his gullet and get–"
"I could do that for myself, you groveling fool!" Muzan took a few steps toward Tomioka, and Akaza's eyes widened and he swallowed reflexively, steeling himself for what he was sure was to come. But the master went on talking instead.
"However – there is something unexpected – and it's made me reluctant to react rashly," the master snarled under his breath, now leaning over Tomioka, who turned his gaze away from Akaza, who looked up, up, up all the way to the master's eyes.
The audacity! The impudence! What the fuck was he thinking?
Akaza hazarded a quick look between them, the master and his demon-child, who held no power, whose body was more fragile than his own by leagues and leagues of time, who barely had a grasp on his Blood Art, who was nothing, nothing compared to their king. And yet he looked up at their master as if he was looking at Akaza… indifferent, empty, and–
(Akaza perceived it and something in his chest fell and blew apart. He did not even try to hide it.)
Separate!
Tomioka was a separate being from the master! Unleashed, untethered, no bond between them! He was not reborn human, Akaza could catch no whiff of humanity on him at all. Still a demon, and yet not of the master.
Not anymore.
Akaza knelt in total unfettered terror, trying desperately to figure out what any of it meant.
"He will walk in the sun tomorrow morning," the master seethed–
( would have crushed him, destroyed him, eaten him immediately if not for the broken bond. What if consuming the flower broke the bonds? All of them? What if I lost control of my legions? )
– "And then we will see. We will be moving against the Corps soon, and if I can harness the power of Sunwalking before then, it could seal my victory. Perhaps it can be extracted from his body – I will find a way – but for now, due to this unforeseen side effect, I will not risk everything because of the fickle nature of this flower."
A thought entered Akaza's head, unbidden, and he knew a split second after it happened, that he was well and truly fucked.
If a demon like me had found the flower…if I had been the one to eat it…if I were free…what would happen?
Spikes of molten rage pierced him, pegging him to the ground, pushing through his body in dozens of places. He was held to the floor as the master approached him. He stepped on his hand, crushing it into the floor, then his arm, and finally his throat. The pain was stunning, but Akaza raised his eyes.
"You would have done no such thing, Akaza, because you are one of my sheep, no different from the others. That you are old and therefore powerful against human foes is nothing, nothing . You are a moth and I am a hurricane."
The master stepped away then, though the bonds held.
"You will accompany him at dawn. You will find a spot where you can hide and you will watch. If he survives you will return him to me and I will figure out what to do with him. Perhaps I will eat him whole…"
But the master seemed unsure.
(imagine such a thing!)
Akaza grit his teeth and forced himself not to imagine anything. He focused on the pain and the pain only. He closed his eyes and let it wash over him.
The biwa sounded, deep and insistent and when he opened his eyes he had been transported to the woods. He was still kneeling but his back was pressed to the ground just like it had been when he'd been in the Infinity Castle. He knew that time was sometimes warped in the Infinity Castle, and though they'd been summoned during the afternoon, and their conversation had not lasted very long, the sun was about to rise. He wondered vaguely if they were even still in the same part of the world, but he decided that it was a problem for another time.
Because there was a threat that hung in his mind like a noose made of fire, like a cage at the bottom of the sea, like a dozen spikes in his eyes. (No, they were not far, not nearly far enough, if such a place even existed.) He rose to his knees and then his feet. He turned.
Tomioka was still on his knees on the ground next to him.
"Why?" Akaza spat with quiet venom, unable to come up with a more precise question. He was angry, of course, but he was also astonished at the audacity. To eat the flower, to face the master so brazenly! Akaza did not know if he wanted to tear him limb from limb or open up his head to look inside to try to understand him. But Akaza knew he would only find brain matter in Tomioka's head, which he had already seen many times before. He did not have the ability to look into his offspring's mind, unlike the master, who could do so with him and every other demon in the world.
Well, almost every demon.
Tomioka looked up at him.
"I am not sure, Akaza," he said solemnly, all earlier hostility vanishing, and seemed to be considering the question with an expression that Akaza had never seen and did not recognize on his face. "It seemed like something I should do…perhaps to keep it, or hide it."
Akaza put all of his power, everything he had, into suppressing the processing of that information in his mind.
Instead he looked to the eastern sky.
"The sun is rising, Tomioka," Akaza said flatly, and he began to walk toward a thick copse of trees.
His demon-child rose behind him and followed.
Akaza did not pay very much attention to where he was going. He just knew that he needed to get them to a location where he could take shelter from the sun and stay in close proximity to Tomioka who would be walking out into it. The idea of it was madness and it caused a rending sensation in his chest that he ignored, trying to push it out of his mind, to keep it private, but it was there, not just in his mind, but in his throat too as it clenched.
Fear of the sun lived in Akaza like a burrowed animal. It clawed and scratched at the inside of him near the approach of every sunrise, urging him toward the dark at all costs. But now the cost might very well be Tomioka, if the master's flower did not work. The master had already misjudged an aspect of its power…did he know anything about it with certainty?
Akaza knew these thoughts would get him into trouble, but between his own dread of the coming dawn and the crushing feeling in his chest that seemed to peak whenever his mind turned to the fate of his troublesome offspring, he was overwhelmed by an exhaustion that was not physical in nature.
When they reached the edge of a clearing, Akaza turned to Tomioka and gestured back over his own shoulder.
"This should be fine," he said dully.
He barely understood himself. All of the things he wanted – to find the Blue Spider Lily for his master and to find a demon to fight with forever were all wrapped up together inside his infuriating demon-child who he was sending to a very uncertain certain death.
Tomioka merely stared at him and said nothing. Akaza imagined that he was probably thinking he was hungry, or some other boring and unimportant thing.
But then he surprised him.
"The sun is about to rise, Akaza. You should go into the trees."
Akaza paused and studied him, wondering a little that Tomioka would suggest that he do such a thing. It was as if he was urging him to move away from danger.
Was that what it was?
Akaza had been a demon for a long, long time. Demons who were in danger did not express concern for the safety of other demons. They usually used other demons as shields.
Akaza stared at Tomioka, wondering what he was thinking, but the little beast inside of him was working itself up into a tizzy of panic – The sun! The sun! It is coming! Akaza took a step back and looked for evidence of a similar feeling of panic on his offspring's face, but he only stared back calmly.
And Akaza felt very, very uncertain that this would work. He wondered if it was all a trick – if the Blue Spider Lily was a myth to trap the master – that all it did was break bonds and spin tales of Sunwalkers to lure him, to hasten all of them, to a sudden, fiery death.
Akaza searched Tomioka's face for some clue – did he know it was going to work? Or did he not care if he burned? Akaza did not think he had ever known a demon who went willingly to their death. The thought of it made something turn over inside of his abdomen, and yet, when he looked at his demon-child, saw his composure, he felt something crack and fracture in his chest, and both the sensation and his incomprehension of it sent ripples of rage and something else – something deep and cold and shattering – throughout his body.
"I will be alright, Akaza," Tomioka said serenely, holding his gaze.
And now Akaza's feet walked backward of their own accord, urging him toward the safety of the dark. But he could not tear his eyes from Tomioka. He wanted to say things to him, but he couldn't find the words, because truly, being a demon, there were none. So it amassed in his throat as a strange tangle of blood and brutality and connection and possessiveness and…and…emptiness! He would be empty without his demon-child! Who would he be? Who would he fight? And now without a mission…depending on if this worked…if the master did try to eat Tomioka whole—
(try?)
The sun crested the horizon at that moment and its rays hit Tomioka. He turned his face toward it and Akaza's non-breath caught at the sight, for his child was illuminated by the rays of the sun! The pale flesh and mass of blue-black hair that fell to his waist, the waves of water that seemed to flow over his shoulders. Akaza watched as he closed his eyes and seemed to lean toward the light, as if he was soaking it in. Akaza stifled a mad laugh. His own child was beautiful and perfect and free to walk in the sunlight!
Tomioka turned his head to look over his shoulder at Akaza and finally (finally!) he was able to find the words, the one word, that he was looking for. And even as he heard the monstrous thrum of the biwa and saw from the corner of his eye the wall of light open beside him, as he felt white-hot chains of rage wrap around his body and begin to drag him away, he looked to where he'd led his child – his untethered child! – to the stretch of open land with an uncovered sky, where he could walk for miles and miles without the threat of shadow. So Akaza screamed the word with every particle of his being that did not belong to the master (which he only now realized existed, incorporeally anyway) –
"Run!"
