[fic wip/abandoned] kny, akaren, inktober 2019

[hexmix]

having to cobble this one together from several different inktober prompts from back in 2019: freeze, ash, and overgrown. it's akaren, and a "what if akaza forcefully turned rengoku into a demon" au, but also, you guessed it, largely an akaza-centric piece. my interest in this pairing is so lopsided bc while rengoku is fine and i like him alright, i absolutely have zero interest in him beyond his relationship with akaza lmao.

there are two akaza pov sections and one rengoku pov. think i'll leave my notes for where the second part was going to go since i don't have plans to finish it. also leaving the epigraphs bc they were very important to me at the time.

warning for: gore; cannibalism

“It is not a poetic rhythm that freezes the heart”

 

Just once would do

I’d love to see things with eyes that are not human

I’d love to feel things

 

I want to look at things

I want to look at the sky

unaffected by the sightless sculptor “Time”

 

--”A Green Thought,” Tamura Ryuichi

 

Rengoku Kyojuro does not take to the blood. He’s been laid up in bed for weeks. He’s dying.

 

At the foot of the mountain is a small farming village, all peasants descended from peasants descended from peasants. They smell like the mud and stagnant water of rice paddies. Akaza thinks that if he were to eat one, their blood would taste like it too.

 

There’s an older woman in one of the more central houses, huts really, and he has to make his way down the steep mountain path, through the paddies checkering the outskirts, past the storehouses, winding his way finally to her door. She can’t see, from an accident rather than illness or age, and her right palm is badly burned. Akaza doesn’t care to know anything more about her save that she makes a tea that seems to be helping stave off death.

 

He raps on the door as he’s been asked, has to do it twice before she notices him, beckons him in. She’s cooking, leaning over a pot on the fire. It’s probably little more than gruel, he doubts she can afford anything else, but it looks like it’s warm.

 

“Give me a moment and I’ll fetch your tea,” she says. Akaza moves to squat down next to her. She jumps a little, more from the sudden movement than anything else. He can tell she doesn’t hold the least bit of fear for him.

 

“How much for that?” he asks.

 

“The tea? The same as always.”

 

“No, what’s in the pot. How much for a bowl?”

 

She smiles over in his general direction, reaches out to fumble for his hand where it’s resting lightly on his knee. She grips it briefly, then pats two times. “Nothing. No one goes hungry in my house.”

 

“It’s not for me.”

 

“No one,” she repeats with a nod. 

 

Akaza watches her busy herself over the pot, then watches her struggle to her feet--he thinks her back is bad--and move into the back room where he suspects she sleeps. When she emerges she’s carrying a small bag of burlap, what she usually uses to hold the tea. She holds it out for him, and Akaza has to rise to go get it from her. She smiles at him again on her way back to the pot. Without speaking, she ladles some of the gruel into a bowl, which she in turn hands over. It’s warm against Akaza’s palm when he takes it. He’ll have to move very quickly so it doesn’t chill.

 

“Here,” he says, shoving the packet of tea in a pocket and digging around for the coins he’d stolen to pay for it. She holds out her hand, the one with the burn scar, and he places the coins directly in the center. 

“If you’re hungry, you can come back for more,” she says to his back once he’d turned.

 

“Lady, I told you it wasn’t for me.”

 

He has to bolt back up the mountain, holding the bowl close to his chest, hunching over it and covering the top with his hand. It becomes almost instantly wet with steam. At the top of the mountain is an abandoned temple. Akaza has a vague memory of one of the lower moons killing and eating all the monks there. It seems like something a lower moon would do, anyway.

 

He brought Rengoku here over twenty days ago. 

 

The temple grounds are all overgrown, and the inside, despite Akaza’s attempts to clean it out, smell persistently of wood rot. The temple’s halls are swept clean, and the main hall itself is devoid of clutter. The only real object of veneration left is the remains of a gilded statue of Buddha. Its head was nowhere to be found when Akaza had made his way through the, admittedly small, complex. He assumes it was that lower moon that removed it.

 

He had placed Rengoku back in the monk’s living quarters, where he’d remained ever since.

 

Akaza’d been straining to hear his heartbeats the moment he’d made it into the temple complex. They’re as weak as usual. Akaza kneels down next to his bed, setting the still-mostly-warm gruel down beside him. Rengoku appears unchanged; just slightly paler, slightly more faded, slightly more shrunken. Every time he looks, Akaza feels this is the case. He can’t help but watch for a while, seeing the repeated struggle Rengoku has in a single inhale.

 

He bends over him, one arm tucking back behind his shoulders to lift him. He moves himself behind Rengoku enough that he can position him leaning back against Akaza’s own chest. This frees up his hands so he can grab the gruel. After that, he sits for a while holding it, not sure what step to take next. He has no utensils, and Rengoku can’t exactly drink it; it’s a lot thicker than water.

 

“Fuck,” Akaza says. The bowl grows ever cooler.

 

Clicking his tongue and shifting them both, Akaza ends up with Rengoku propped up on his legs. The position isn’t ideal, as Rengoku’s now more in a reclining position, but Akaza has to work with what he’s got.

 

He sets the bowl down to rest on Rengoku’s lap, and takes his face between his fingers, gently prising his jaw open. He scoops a bit of the gruel out on his fingers, and wipes it off on Rengoku’s tongue. He releases his face, hoping Rengoku will swallow automatically. He doesn’t at first, but Akaza rubs his throat a bit and it’s then that he does. 

 

Akaza isn’t sure how he knew to do that. 

 

He doesn’t let it bother him, instead works slowly to feed Rengoku as much of the gruel as he can. He’d tried feeding him blood at first, human and then demon, and neither had worked, had just made him sicker. Had just poisoned him.

 

Akaza shakes his head, setting the rest of the uneaten gruel aside and repositioning Rengoku. He’s got to steep the tea.

 

It’s easier to keep track of Rengoku’s heartbeat once he’s been there at his bedside a while. It follows him around the temple as he goes to light the stove, to draw the water from the well out back, to heat it to boiling. He knows exactly how much of the leaves to measure out, how long to let it steep. He listens to Rengoku’s heartbeat like it’s counting down the seconds for him. He’ll give Rengoku his tea and then he’ll try the next town over. He hasn’t been there before, but he’s heard from the villagers that there’s a doctor there. Akaza can drag him out here, make him help.

 

+

 

He had thought it would be too much of a waste, so he’d taken Rengoku with him. He’d already been pretty close to dying, and Akaza would be too if he didn’t get out away from the oncoming sunlight. He’d found them a place to hide, and then he tore a strip from his wrist. Rengoku, impossibly alive, had refused to drink, so Akaza’d had to hold his mouth open while he filled it with his blood. 
 

Rengoku kept trying to spit it out, and Akaza, losing patience, had torn the wound in his arm open wider, covering Rengoku with his blood. Eyes, nose, mouth. 

 

He started turning a while after dawn. He hadn’t screamed when Akaza’d impaled him during their fight, but he’d screamed then.

 

+

 

He doesn’t make it to the doctor’s. He’s halfway down the mountain when he feels it, the buzzing displacement of the infinity fortress sucking him in. He’s suddenly on tatami, and blanks his mind.

 

It’s a while before Muzan deigns to show himself. No one else is there, save the biwa-playing demon, and him, and Muzan.

 

Muzan’s appearance is inexplicable. He looks like an old man, and is sitting posed as if preparing to begin a rakugo performance. Akaza makes himself think of the dried-blood-brown of Muzan’s hakama, then loudly think about not thinking about how pissed he is at the biwa demon, then a quiet shushing of why is Muzan an old man before sharply focusing back on his hakama. Muzan has told him before that he finds Akaza’s mind exhausting. This is something that Akaza never thinks about when Muzan is nearby.

“Upper Moon Three,” Muzan says. 

 

“My Lord,” Akaza says into the tatami, having moved into seiza at Muzan’s appearance, quickly shifting to bow low enough that his nose is pressed into the floor.

 

Muzan is silent, so Akaza waits. Allows himself to think of his anger at the biwa demon, his annoyance at her demon art, his further annoyance at that fucking demon slayer kid, is persistent in thinking-not-thinking of why Muzan might be appearing as an old man. After a while, Muzan begins speaking, and Akaza blanks his mind of everything save for the shape of his words.

 

“Upper Moon Three,” he says again, and Akaza can feel his displeasure grate down the inside of his skull. Failure, useless, waste of meat, it says to him, and Akaza lets his mind echo it endlessly, empty of everything else. “You haven’t done what I asked.”

 

There’s heat at first, and Akaza braces himself, his mind turning to the appendage that’s jutted out from Muzan’s side. He keeps his eyes trained on the tatami. He’s seen Muzan mutate like this only when he’s been at his most displeased. Muzan has never turned it on him before.

 

Akaza can feel the slick mass up against his side. It’s all teeth where his left arm had been. He thinks only of what’s being done to him. Thinks of it only in the objective.

 

My arm is gone. He’s eaten my arm. He thinks-doesn’t-think that the blood pooling underneath him is too much.

 

“It was a simple task. Three other demon slayers from the train. Three measly weak humans to kill.”

 

He’s absorbing my shoulder, my ribs. Everywhere he touches burns.

 

Pain, Akaza long ago realized, is the easiest. It blocks out everything else for him.

 

“And yet,” Muzan hisses, using his mutated arm to squeeze now, to lift Akaza till his toes barely brush the tatami, “you haven’t managed it.”

 

My rib has punctured my lung. I haven’t killed--

 

He hits the tatami so hard he blacks out for a few moments, coming back to see Muzan’s feet right in front of him. The appendage is gone, as is most of Akaza’s left half. When he tries to sit up part of his intestines tumble out. Both of his legs are broken, the tatami ripped up where Muzan slammed him into the floor.

“My Lord,” he says. It’s hard to get the words out, his mouth is too full of blood, so he mostly thinks them. My Lord, My Lord, My Lord.

 

Muzan’s hakama are dried-blood-brown.

 

“You have until the next full moon.”

 

Akaza hits the forest floor, strangling his scream before it can escape his throat. He can still hear Muzan, scraping around in his head, Don’t disappoint me again.

 

+

 

He has to move Rengoku. He knows that there’s nowhere he can move him that will be safe, but he also knows he can’t keep them here, now. 

 

It takes him a while to get back to the temple, healing, trying to beat the sun. He can barely hear Rengoku’s heartbeat over his own labored breathing, even right next to him, he can hardly make it out.

 

He curls up next to Rengoku’s futon, mind still mostly hollow from his encounter with Muzan. He finds himself drifting off again and again, always jerking back to full consciousness to check immediately that Rengoku is still breathing. 

 

Somewhere around midday he remembers the tea. 

 

What’s wrong with me, he thinks, having to all but crawl to where he’d put the tea the night before. He’s mostly healed, but he aches, all over, and his hands won’t stop shaking when he goes to pour the hot water. The tea steeps, and Akaza leans back against the wall and feels like he’s being wrung out, like wet laundry.

 

He has to be careful of the tea, because of his hands. Rengoku looks paler, more shrunken, more faded. It’s all Akaza can do to prop him up, half against Akaza’s side, and tip the tea into his mouth. Most of it dribbles out, down the sides of Rengoku’s mouth, down his neck. Akaza, for the first time that he can remember, feels like crying.

 

It isn’t until hours later that Akaza realizes that it’s been twenty days since he’s eaten. That he’s starving.

 

He makes it down the mountain. He’s taken this path so many times that he can do it mostly without thought. The village comes into view and it’s much later than it is when he usually comes here. He doesn’t rap at the door.

 

She’s not asleep. He follows her humming to where she’s sitting at a low table. She has several baskets of herbs, divided out, and she’s working on sorting more. When he grabs her she gasps, shoving out at him, catching him on the chin. The uneven skin of her scar rasps against his jaw. She doesn’t scream, he remembers later. Just that one gasp, and then nothing.

 

+

 

Rengoku had kept fighting him at first. When his strength had left him, he’d merely stared up at Akaza with shining eyes. 

 

“You’re gonna fucking die, moron! You have to eat!”

 

“Just,” Rengoku’s voice was as weak as the rest of him, “just end this.”

 

Akaza couldn’t explain why those words strike him as a blow. 

 

He’d kept trying, but the blood he’d managed to get Rengoku to down just seemed to make things worse. The gaping wound in his chest healed, but the rest of him turned sallow, skin hanging off his bones. He’d changed the bandages diligently until the wound healed, washed Rengoku’s skin till all the traces of blood and grime were gone. Hunted and killed a human and given Rengoku his blood without letting him know the difference. Rengoku got sicker.

 

He’d come back from his meeting with Muzan bloodied, and Rengoku had eyed him as he methodically went about brewing the tea that seemed to be the only thing Rengoku could keep down. The whites of his eyes had gone sickly yellow, dulled. He’d watched Akaza as he kneeled next to the futon, held out the tea.

 

Rengoku’s fingers had closed around his wrist. 

 

+

 

Akaza dreams of fireworks every night after he’s spit back out of the infinity fortress. He wakes after that first night, covered in dried blood, at the top of the stairs leading up to the temple. It’s mere minutes from sunrise. He stumbles back into the monk’s quarters and watches as Rengoku’s breathing stutters, stops.

 

He can’t move, jerks forward in mere aborted motion. Rengoku opens his eyes.

 

Akaza can tell that something’s wrong; something feels off. When he can finally make himself move, after he draws closer, he can smell that something is off.

 

Rengoku doesn’t smell like a demon, but he doesn’t smell like a human, either.

 

Akaza watches as he sits up, the moth-eaten blankets Akaza had managed to salvage slipping down to bunch at his waist. Rengoku lifts his hands from the blankets to stare at them. “What have you done?” he asks finally. His voice is rough with disuse.  He doesn’t look over to Akaza.

 

Akaza has no answers for him.

 

+++++

“To feel your tug at my soul” // addicted to bad ideas

 

The whole world is made of flames and ashes

of the parts that are burning, and the parts that are burnt out

It is a relationship among parts

 

--“A Green Thought”, Tamura Ryuichi

 

Some decades ago, Akaza had fought and killed a pillar who used a long bow. She hadn’t been particularly strong, or remarkable in appearance, and although her aim was impossibly accurate, she didn’t have the stamina to keep pulling back the string of her bow. Akaza had killed her easily. Hadn’t bothered to ask her her name. There was something, though. He’d remembered her all these years, after all. 

 

She’d been sick, had a persistent cough. He smelled blood every time she’d cough into her fist. She was dying long before she’d run into him.

 

He didn’t know why that had stuck with him, why decades later it picked at him like a splinter. 

 

He’d felt it all the more those first few days when Rengoku’s body was rejecting the blood. He’d kept gagging and coughing it back up. It’d gone black and rank, rotting away inside Rengoku. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Akaza had thought. He’d been helping, so why had--

 

That sick pillar again. He can’t escape the image of her, still doesn’t know why.

 

Now, Rengoku is staring at him. He’s holding himself propped up on one arm while the other he has wrapped around his stomach.

 

“You’re awake,” Akaza says stupidly. His thoughts keep snagging, circling back endlessly to Rengoku’s open eyes, to his scratchy unused voice. He’s dreamed things like this.

 

Rengoku struggles to get up, and Akaza can only watch him for a few moments, before it occurs to him to get up and help.

 

Rengoku jerks back when Akaza tries to touch him, and Akaza freezes. He wants to reassure Rengoku that he won’t hurt him, has to check the impulse again and again. 

 

They stare at each other, Akaza still not sure he’s not just dreaming, and Rengoku looking like he’s just as confused. “Water,” he croaks at last. Akaza goes immediately to comply with the request. Grabs the earthenware mug he’d been using for the tea, fills it quickly. He’s half afraid Rengoku will be gone or unconscious again when he returns, but he’s exactly where Akaza left him. Akaza freezes again, caught all over again by surprise.

 

It’s like seeing someone come back from the dead.

 

He has to help Rengoku hold the mug, has to force Rengoku to drink slowly. When he’s finished, Akaza sets the mug aside. He should get him something to eat, too, but the gruel’d have gone bad by now, and he’ll have to wait till nightfall to go back to the village. Maybe that woman would--

 

He remembers suddenly. He’d been so weak and he’d--

 

They’ll really have to move now. He’d killed her, certainly, and that will just bring demon slayers down on them. He can’t imagine Rengoku would fight them, even if he wasn’t as weak as he is now, he’d just let them kill him, wouldn’t he? He hadn’t wanted to be a demon in the first place--

 

He keeps thinking of that fucking pillar with the cough, even now--

 

A hand curves around his shoulder, and Akaza slaps it away without thinking. Blinks the room back into focus. Rengoku.

 

He’s staring at Akaza, frowning. “You’re really not alright, are you? What in the world happened?”

 

I killed someone I shouldn’t, Akaza thinks, and it feels like an echo of something he’s felt before. He hadn’t eaten a single woman in all the years he’d been a demon, yet now--

 

He lurches to his feet, he can’t think about this now. 

 

“We have to get out of here,” he says.

 

“We,” Rengoku says.

 

Akaza stares down at him. “Yeah,” he says, “we.”

 

“There is no we here. I can’t fathom why you haven’t just killed me, but it’s my duty to--”

 

“Duty? There’s no fucking thing like that for you anymore.” 

 

“You’re mistaken. Whatever you’ve done to me, I will not fail in fulfilling my duty.” He’s like steel, unbending, which is what had so attracted Akaza to him in the first place, but now it’s just fucking annoying.

 

“You’re gonna get yourself killed.”

 

“So be it.”

 

“Not by me, you dumbass, by your demon slayer friends.” He realizes immediately he shouldn’t have said it. Rengoku’s expression shutters.

 

“Then you succeeded after all,” he says.

 

They really don’t have time for this shit. “Look, we’ll talk about your duty or whatever later, we need to get out of here.”

 

“I told you, there is no ‘we’.”

 

It’s like banging his head against a wall.

 

Akaza goes to make tea.

 

Rengoku calls after him, but he ignores him. There’s something telling him to lay off, that Rengoku is convalescing and can’t afford to get worked up. Mostly he’s just worried he’ll haul off and hit him and undo all his work keeping Rengoku alive these past weeks.

 

He’s staring down at the kettle, willing it to boil faster, when he hears the rattle of the fusuma sliding open. He’s been alone for so long it takes him a moment to realize what that sound means.

 

He bounds back into the main room, and sure enough, the screens are open to the outside. The orange light of the setting sun spills into the room, and it’s so bright to his eyes, he can’t see Rengoku at all.

 

He can’t leave.

 

He can’t let him leave.

 

He doesn’t register the burn at first, instead just keeps blinking against the light, trying to sight Rengoku. He’s out in the courtyard, and he turns at the sound of Akaza jumping down from the engawa.

 

“What are you doing?” he’s yelling.

 

He’s beautiful, Akaza thinks. He was made for this light. He’s pale, sallow-skinned from his sickness, and yet his hair catches the sunset, licking around his ears, his face, like a flame.

 

Akaza drops, confused at first until he catches himself and sees his arms eaten up by fire. His right arm collapses into ash and he topples onto his side. Oh, he thinks. He remembers his father. That’s why that pillar with the bow had bothered him, he thinks.

 

There’s something wrong with him, he needs to check on Rengoku, there’s something wrong with him.

 

He dreams of fireworks, he dreams of flames.

 

[akaza wakes up at the temple and freaks out when he can’t find rengoku. The blind woman is there though, and so he thinks for a while he’s dead, but he hadn’t killed her afterall, had collapsed from hunger and she’d realized what he was, and fed him enough of her own blood to get him up and moving; he’s disoriented, half-listening, and half-remembering his past; his anxiety about rengoku keeps spiking and is exacerbated by his memories of his family dying when he wasn’t there; 

 

Rengoku returns, after akaza has calmed down some and the old woman has left. Akaza wants to know why rengoku didnt just let him die, rengoku turns the question back on him. Says he heard from the old woman how long akaza had been caring for him, that he’d near-starved himself doing it. Akaza is still mostly burnt up; he doesn’t know how to deal with his newly returned memories, can just say that he didn’t want rengoku to die.

 

Anyway rengoku decides to stay with him “to return the favor” and some bits of rengoku taking care of him, akaza basically dying bc he still hasn’t eaten. He gets increasinly delirious, confuses some of his memories with reality, i.e. insists he has to get back to his father or his fiance bc he has medicine for them, he deteriorates until rengoku, out of desperation, tries to feed akaza his own blood (this is when akaza is at his most delirious, so it should be very unclear what’s going on)

 

Akaza improves somewhat, and is actually aware the next time rengoku feeds him blood. Takes it bc he’s starving but demands to know what rengoku has been eating. Turns out regular human food. It doesn’t make him sick, and light doesnt hurt him either. Akaza is dumbfounded but then kind of scared shitless bc if muzan finds out--he tries to warn rengoku but rengoku brushes off his concern. “It’s my duty to fight muzan”

 

A few days of akaza experiencing more human guilt and anxiety, rengoku’s still feeding him, and he’s almost back to normal, is outside with rengoku, arguing about rengoku returning to demon slayer corps when he’s sucked up by the infinity fortress again.

 

Akaza does everything he can to keep muzan from learning about rengoku, even as muzan is torturing him/punishing him for failing. It’s the full moon, he realizes. His deadline.

 

His last thought/non-thought before blacking out is that at least he managed to protect someone this time

Ambiguous ending. Not clear if akaza is dead or not, just that he sees his family again, they’re pointing, and when he turns its towards a setting sun. rengoku is at the center with his back to him, and he’s lit up all in reds and oranges.]

+++++++
 

His enhanced senses give him an advantage the others just don’t have, so he makes it to Muzan first. He’s unsheathed his sword, throws his strength into the arc of it, and brings it down onto nothing. The room he finds himself in is small, empty. Distantly, he can hear the thrum of a biwa and he’s in a corridor suspended over a vast nothingness. Stairways bend over and down and in every impossible direction.

Rengoku doesn’t know where he is, but he smells something familiar.
 

He moves without thinking, adjusting quickly enough when the world shifts around him. He can tell he’s getting closer somehow, can just feel it.
 

He knows he needs to get back to Muzan, to finally end this, but what he’s moving towards is sharper, brighter, than the sense he gets of Muzan. Besides, whatever it is feels like a candle about to go out. It’s flickering, and he knows if he turns from it now, he won’t be able to find it again later.
 

Someone needs help, and Rengoku’s duty is to help those who need it.
 

He thinks he must be moving farther from Muzan, from the sounds of the biwa. This place, whatever it is, is seemingly endless; a repetition of rooms, hallways. The floor ends abruptly at the end of the corridor and Rengoku stands at the edge, looks out at singular rooms floating in pitch. It’s somewhere out there, he can tell.
 

The closest room to his location is below and slightly to the right. It’s empty, but he can move from it to another room, provided he lands correctly.
 

Rengoku backs up down the hall a ways, turns back and, without pause, breaks into a run. He leaps when he’s right at the edge. He knows he’s stronger now, but it still surprises him when he easily sticks the landing. And from there it’s easy enough to jump across to the next room, and then to the next. He’s heading down, for all that “down” means anything in this place. The rooms are becoming more and more sparse, and by the time he’s sure of his destination, there’s almost no way to get to it.
 

It’s not even a room, just a platform, and there’s barely any light making it down there, but he can still make out something, some kind of mass.
 

He jumps almost at the exact second he realizes why the scent had been familiar.

His right leg breaks when he lands, but he’s always had a high pain tolerance, especially so now that he’s no longer human. He forces it to bear his weight and makes his way over to the far side of the platform.
 

Now that he’s closer, he can start to make sense of the shape. He feels sick, his stomach plummeting, when recognition hits.
 

Akaza, he thinks. “What happened to you?” he says. It’s practically a whisper, and nausea hits him hard. Akaza is awake.
 

His eyes roll over to Rengoku, and Rengoku wonders how much he can actually see. He knows he won’t be able to speak; Akaza’s bottom jaw is missing.
 

He has to get him out of here. Everything narrows to just that single thought. He’d thought, with so much relief, that Akaza’s disappearance was a good thing: he was free to rejoin the Corps.
 

Had he been here, like this, this whole time?
 

He’s not sure what the fleshy substance is that surrounds Akaza, just that it doesn’t smell like him, and he doesn’t seem bothered when Rengoku slices through it, pulls it from what’s left of his body with his bare hands.
 

It’s hot, and blood-wet when he tears into it, just like living tissue.
 

Most of Akaza is just. Gone. What’s left is in parts that Rengoku has to fish out of the mass. He’s not sure how long it takes, realizes halfway through that Akaza is crying, that he himself is crying. Even for a demon, that he’s still alive is impossible. It’s horrific.
 

Rengoku has to arrange the parts of him after. He sits, blanking his mind, in the center of the platform and holds up Akaza’s mostly intact torso while his remaining limbs reattach. Akaza is missing an arm and most of both his legs. The parts of him that are missing aren’t regenerating. Rengoku wonders if they ever will. If what he’s doing is just prologing the torture. He hadn’t been able to find Akaza’s jaw and he wishes that that at least would regenerate, so he could talk to him. Tell him to end this if that’s what Akaza wants.
 

He has no idea how long the two of them are down there in the dark.
 

“We’re going to move now,” Rengoku finds himself narrating his movements, still unsure if Akaza is even registering what he’s saying. “I have to get you out of here, and then I have to get back to Muzan.” He holds Akaza in his arms and hopes he’s strong enough to do just as he’s said. No. He has to be, so he will be.
 

Rengoku jumps.
 

He has to quickly switch Akaza to a one-armed grip so he can reach for the edge of the room he was aiming for. He just barely manages to grasp it, and from there to pull himself and Akaza up. That was the farthest distance he needed to cross. 
 

The trip back up passes quickly. Rengoku picks up speed as the rooms gather closer and closer together. By the time he’s made it back to his starting point there are other demon slayers there. Mostly those from the lower ranks, but he also easily picks out the demon boy who accompanied Tamayo. 
 

“Please,” he says, making a beeline for him, “we need your help.”
 

The boy looks visibly ill at the sight of Akaza, but he nods, pulls them aside.
 

“Do you know what was done to him?”
 

Rengoku shakes his head. “He was embedded in, in some kind of,” he doesn’t know what to call it, settles on “material.”
 

“Likely Muzan’s doing,” the boy mutters, but he’s already pulling a small pouch from his uniform pockets. 
 

Rengoku lays Akaza down on the floor, trying to be as gentle as possible. Akaza’s eyes are fixed on him still, and Rengoku feels like he’s failed somehow. 
 

He shrugs off his haori and bunches it into a makeshift pillow, slipping it under Akaza’s head. When he looks up, the demon boy is staring at him. 
 

He says, “I’ll make you a deal.”
 

“Anything,” Rengoku says. He refuses to fail here, to fail to save Akaza.
 

The boy snorts. “Just like that? That lack of circumspection really doesn’t give me much faith in you Rengoku-san, just so you know.”
 

“I understand. But please, save him.”
 

“I’ll do what I can,” the boy says. “And in return, I want you to do something for me.” The boy looks him dead in the eye. Rengoku waits.
 

“Save Tamayo-sama,” he says at last. “Kill Muzan, and save her. You can do that, can’t you?”
 

Rengoku bows. “Yes, I will do as you ask. And in return, please see that my friend survives, that he heals.”
 

“Friend, huh?” Rengoku lifts his head, but the boy isn’t looking at him, is digging around in the pouch. “Better get a move on then. I’ll do what I can here.”
 

Rengoku looks back to Akaza once more. His chest feels rent by something sharp, by something that bites. “I’ll be back,” he promises. 
 

He moves forward, Akaza at his back and Muzan deep, deep at the center of this fortress.