[fic wip] kny, himejima/sanemi, inktober 2019

[hexmix]

so this one i am actually determined to finish at some point!! there are a few of the fics that i wrote for these inktober prompts that mean a heck of a lot to me and this is one of them. i have enough notes left for myself that i do think i can finish this one at some point.

anyway, it's very tangentially inspired by the film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...And Spring, but like literally only in the sense of the frame and also uhhh the Buddhism i guess. (note not only for this fic but any fics i write involving Himejima: i'm not an expert on Buddhism by any means; doing my best here tho.)

the prompt for this one was "pattern."

warning for: grief (loss of a family member); suicidal ideation; also there's some gore bc after all it is kny

“Come here,” Himejima says, patting the empty space in front of him.

 

Sanemi stays where he is, sat out on the engawa, one leg tucked under him, the other dangling down over the edge. His toes brush the gravel of the garden. “You can’t even fucking see,” he grumbles, half hoping Himejima doesn’t hear him.

 

Himejima hears him, snorts, and rises to his feet. Sanemi watches him approach. He’s never moved like he’s a blind man, not in all the time Sanemi’s known him. He knows better, but a part of him is still loathe to let anyone touch him.

 

Himejima lowers himself to the engawa next to Sanemi. He’s brought his small pouch of medical supplies with him. Sanemi watches as Himejima unrolls the pouch, sets aside the small scissors, bandages, and salve. He tries to force himself not to tense up.

 

“Your shirt, Shinazugawa,” Himejima says once he’s done.

 

Sanemi thinks about refusing to cooperate, to make Himejima do it himself if he’s so fucking keen on this whole enterprise. 

 

He takes off his fucking shirt.

 

Himejima selects the scissors, tapping Sanemi’s elbow lightly to get him to raise it, which he does, biting back curses. Himejima’s fingers trail down his side till they meet with gauze. He feels out the edge and slips his fingers under. Sanemi refuses to watch what he’s doing, staring straight ahead out into the garden. Everything’s gone sort of hazy in the way spring is. Himejima keeps saying the sakura are going to blossom any day now.

 

Sanemi feels the chill of the scissors against his skin. Himejima is careful, lifts up the gauze enough so that he has enough room to cut through without grazing Sanemi’s skin more than that first frigid touch. Aside from the birds outside and the steady skim of the scissors, it's utterly silent. Sanemi is careful to control his breathing. He can’t help the goosebumps that follow Himejima’s touch, though, and there’s a part of him there beyond the anger that’s embarrassed at his reaction.

 

Finally, Himejima cuts through the rest of the gauze. He sets the scissors back down to unwind the length from Sanemi’s torso. “You know I could fucking do this myself,” he reminds Himejima.

 

“I don’t doubt that you could, Shinazugawa, but we both know that’s not the issue.” Himejima pulls the rest of the old gauze from him, balls it up and sets it aside.

 

Sanemi grinds his teeth. Reminds himself not to tense up. “Oh we fucking do, do we? What’s the issue then? I’m not some fucking child for you to play parent to.”

 

“Is that what I’m doing,” Himejima sounds distracted, and when Sanemi turns to him, his brow has furrowed. His gaze, such that is is, is downturned. After a moment he shakes his head, sighing. “If I could trust you to take care of yourself, none of this would be necessary.”

 

Sanemi has to bite down hard on his first reply to that, on his second. He jerks his head back around to stare at the garden. I’m not your fucking concern, he’s said this before, multiple times, in as many ways as he can think of. The response is always the same. There’s so few of us left now, Shinazugawa, and I’m not going to lose one more. Sanemi is sick of hearing it. It’s been none of this fucker’s business from the start. Maybe if you hadn’t taken Genya in in the first place, made him a demon slayer, there’d be one less death on your conscience. 

 

Sanemi had only spoken that thought the once. It had hurt him more than it had Himejima, once spoken.

 

“It seems like everything is healing well enough, despite your neglect,” Himejima says. Sanemi, not for the first time, wonders what all his abilities let him see. He hasn’t seen his own wounds since the last time Himejima changed his bandages. He looks down now. Everything’s raw, puckered, sure to be a mess of scar tissue, but there’s no more infection, hasn’t been for a while, and he can tell just from a glance that the wounds will heal up fine, even without any help from Himejima.

 

The salve is next. Sanemi isn’t sure what it is, assumes it’s from the Butterfly Estate. It smells earthy, painfully so, and it tingles once it’s been on his skin a while. Himejima always warms it up by rubbing it between his fingers. He finds Sanemi’s wounds unerringly, and even though the salve is skin temperature Sanemi still jerks at the first touch of Himejima’s fingers. They’re rough, as callused as Sanemi’s own, but Himejima is gentle in his movements, careful of how much pressure he’s exerting. Sanemi has to remind himself again not to tense up.

 

“Is this really still fucking necessary?”

 

“I’ve been assured it will speed up the healing process, as I’ve told you.”

 

“I’m fucking fine, ain’t I? You said so yourself.” Himejima’s already finished up, is leaning back for a new length of gauze, so Sanemi knows he’s just whining at this point. Like the fucking baby he accused Himejima of treating him as.

 

“Shinazugawa,” Himejima says, leaning closer to pass the gauze around under Sanemi’s right arm, “quite frankly, I don’t trust you not to undo the tremendous progress you’ve made thus far.”

 

Sanemi bites down on the inside of his cheek, and says nothing. Tastes his own blood, and says nothing. Fists his hands where they’ve been resting on his thighs, digs his cracked and jagged nails into his skin, and says fucking nothing.

 

It seems to take forever, for Himejima to finish. Sanemi waits until he’s packed away all his medical supplies to say, “I don’t fucking owe you anything, least of all my life.”

 

Himejima, about to rise to his feet, pauses. Sanemi continues before he can open his mouth to interject, “What you did wasn’t saving me, you got that? Stop fucking acting like I’m putting you out when you’re the one who--” he gets to his feet, he needs to get out of here. “Is this your idea of penance then? What, death not enough for me?” He spins on his heel, needing to look at Himejima just as much as he dreads it.

 

Himejima is crying, of fucking course he is, he’s holding his pack of medical supplies otherwise Sanemi figures he’d have his fucking beads out. “He wouldn’t have wanted you hurt. I will honor that, even above your own desires, Shinazugawa.”

 

Sanemi feels like he’s been cut open all over again, moves to press his gut before he realizes what he’s doing. Drops his hand in disgust and spins from Himejima. How dare you, how dare you, you don’t get to be concerned with what he’d want, fuck you, Sanemi somehow gets his shoes on, and bursts out into the bright spring day. Himejima’s somewhere back inside, Sanemi can’t stand him. Can’t stand the preachy disapproval, the saintly concern. Can’t stand how Himejima forces himself to be so fucking gentle when he touches him.

 

In the end, Sanemi had accomplished nothing; hadn’t been able to save the person he loved the most, the one person he most needed to save. Himejima wouldn’t condemn him for it. It was a balm and a bane, and he kept coming back here like a fool looking for salvation, looking for recrimination, and receiving only a measured, patient indifference to his sins.

 

++

 

There’s no more demons for them to slay, but Sanemi throws himself into his training all the same. What else is he supposed to fucking do? His whole life had been kill demons and now there’s nothing left for him. There’s never a moment that he doesn’t think he should have died in place of Genya.

 

“Shinazugawa-san.”

 

He doesn’t stop right away, finishes the series of kata he’d been in the middle of. He turns only once he’s done, finds the Kamado brat standing at the gate, waiting.

 

After a brief consideration, Sanemi leans his bokken up against one of the training dummies and makes his way over. It’s been a hot, dry summer and the grass is limp and faded beneath his feet. “Yeah?” he says as he comes to a stop on the other side of the gate. Doesn’t bother to open it or invite Kamado in.

 

“Kiriya-kun asked me to give you this,” Kamado says, holds out a white envelope. He looks tired.

 

“Ubuyashiki-sama,” Sanemi corrects, taking the envelope. 

 

Kamado inclines his head. “Take care, Shinazugawa-san,” he says, bowing into it, and then turns to leave. Sanemi watches him for a while, wonders what he’s doing playing errand boy when he’s supposed to be living happily out with his sister somewhere.

 

He turns back to the letter, figures it doesn’t much matter one way or the other what the kid is doing. It’s none of his concern.

 

The missive is brief, and to the point. Kagaya’s son wants a favor.

 

++ 

 

Himejima is there, because of fucking course he is. He’s already sitting seiza, quietly praying over his beads as he waits. Sanemi takes a seat some ways away from him. 

 

“Shinazugawa, it’s good to see you’re well.”

 

Sanemi glances at him out of the corner of his eye, resists the obvious joke. “I’ll bet,” he says instead. 

 

Himejima smiles, of all things.

 

Kagaya’s son makes his entrance then, and Sanemi turns his gaze from Himejima to the tatami, bowing low.

 

“Thank you both for coming,” he says once he’s sat before them, asked them to raise their heads. “It is good to see you both, but I’m afraid I am going to have to ask something of you.”

 

“Of course, my lord,” Himejima says, “we are at your disposal.”

 

“Whatever you need,” Sanemi echoes, forcing assurance he doesn’t feel into his voice.

 

Kiriya taps the fan he’s holding lightly against his fingertips. He looks, for a moment, very much like his father. “The remaining lower rank members of the demon slayer corps have, as you both know, spent the past months combing the country for any sign of any surviving demons. Until yesterday, there had been none.”

 

Sanemi feels as if parts of himself that have been long rotten and decayed come to life at that. He waits, barely able to stand it, for Kagaya’s son to continue. 

 

“Several kakushi had gone missing en route to the relocated swordsmith village,” he says, looking from Himejima to Sanemi, “one of our men who went to investigate also went missing. We sent a small team in three days ago, and heard back yesterday that all but one were slaughtered. The survivor managed to get to her crow before she, too, was killed. It is thanks to their efforts that we have a description of this demon. Gyomei, Sanemi,” Kiriya says, like his father, putting the weight of his trust behind their names, "I would like the two of you to take care of this demon. I won’t have any more lives lost.”

 

“Yes, my lord,” Sanemi says, hearing Himejima echo him. He rises as Kiriya gestures to him, moving to take a small bound package that is held out in his small hands.

 

“The location and details of your mission are contained within,” Kiriya says, “including the description of the demon we were given. Please,” he adds when they rise to leave, “come back safely home to us.”

 

++

 

It’s not a demon. Sanemi doesn’t know how he feels at first, too busy chasing some preternaturally strong madman through the woods. He’ll kill him all the same. Himejima seems to be of the same mind, and he’s as fast as always, pulling ahead to corner the man before even Sanemi, wind-driven, can reach him.

 

It’s easy to fall into step with Himejima, even though they haven’t fought together since--

 

Sanemi barely dodges in time, curses as the madman’s blade slices the bridge of his nose. It’s deep, and he feels his own blood rush down his face, tastes it when he opens his mouth to yell at the fucker. He’s laughing at the both of them, and it’s a demon’s laugh, easy to see why the lower ranks thought that’s what he was.

 

Himejima closes in, throws his ax, forcing the man back away from Sanemi, who circles to his back, following the arc of Himejima’s chains. Sanemi blanks his mind of everything except the fight, and they finish him off quickly after that. Sanemi brings his blade up and through the man’s side when he moves to dodge Himejima’s flail. It’s a clean cut, and he dies almost instantly, almost as soon as the two halves of him hit the dirt.

 

Tokito lasted longer, Sanemi can’t help but think, and then he’s shaking, loses his grip on his sword, stumbling backwards until he trips, landing on his ass. He whirls to the side just in time to avoid vomiting in his own lap.

 

He can smell blood and entrails, and now bile, and he’s barely able to hold himself up as he heaves again, he’s shaking so bad.

 

An arm circles down around his chest and he’s thrashing before he registers Himejima’s increasingly distressed repetition of his name. He lets Himejima pull him up and away from the pile of vomit, pull him back till he’s virtually in Himejima’s lap. “Shinazugawa, you have to breathe,” he hears it, but it’s just sounds. His blood is roaring in his ears, he can hear what it sounded like when the halves of Genya hit the floor. It’s deafening.

The arm around him tightens brutally, holds him for a beat just too long before releasing, and Sanemi takes an instinctive breath in.

 

“There,” Himejima is saying, “keep breathing.”

 

He’s been staring unseeing out at the woods around them. He focuses on inhaling, exhaling, and picking out individual trees until he can process what he’s seeing as more than just a depth of shadows.

 

Himejima is talking, whispering, but Sanemi can tell quickly enough its not to him. He turns just in time to see Himejima’s crow take flight, watches it become nothing in the night sky. “Let go of me,” he says.

 

“We should get back to the inn, I’ve asked Ubuyashiki-sama to send a cleanup team.”

 

“Let,” Sanemi spits, “go of me.”

 

“Shina--”

 

Sanemi elbows him, hard, and throws himself forward and up, only stumbling briefly and spinning when Himejima rises to come after him. He doesn’t know where his sword is, or what he’d even do with it if he had it.

 

Himejima has his hands raised, palms outwards, placating. 

 

Sanemi snarls at him, struggles to get the words out. “Shut the fuck up, get the fuck away from me.”

 

“I won’t come any closer--”

 

“Fuck you, fuck you think you’re doing. I’ve told you, asshole, I don’t need to be saved by you.”

 

Himejima, damn him, has tears in his eyes. “Alright,” he says, “alright. But we should leave here. He’s not a demon, he won’t disintegrate.”

 

Sanemi makes the mistake of looking over at the corpse.

 

“Fuck,” he manages, before he’s bent double, dry heaving. What’s wrong with him, what the fuck’s wrong with him.

 

“The inn,” Himejima says, closer now but not close enough to touch. “Shinazugawa, let’s get back to the inn.”

 

Sanemi realizes he moved to block his view and feels unwanted relief. “What’re you waiting for then? Get a fucking move on.”

 

“You go on ahead, I must pray for him.”

 

For who, Sanemi wants to ask, briefly confused, forgetting the dead man. Himejima had prayed for hours on end when--

 

His sword, he has to get his sword. He scans the ground, sighting the glint of it, growling when Himejima makes to follow him. Having it in hand makes him feel better, more grounded. He wipes the blood from it, forcing himself to think of nothing but his motions. Once the blade is sheathed he turns back to Himejima. His tears are flowing freely now, and he looks strange, standing there moonlit with his gaze fixed both on Sanemi and beyond him. What the fuck, Sanemi thinks, do his abilities even let him see.

 

“Fucking pray for him then,” Sanemi says, already moving into the woods. “Lot of fucking good it’ll do him.”

 

Himejima doesn’t follow him, but he doesn’t hear the murmur of his prayer start up, either.

 

++

 

They have to stop again, halfway back to the Ubuyashiki estate. Himejima rents them a single room at an inn, and moves immediately to the farthest corner to meditate. Sanemi ignores him as much as possible, first sharpening his blade, then flicking disinterestedly through a newspaper left out for them. There’s an article about a local artisan who went missing that sets his teeth on edge when he sees the man’s picture. He crumples the paper back into a rough square and sits back, resting on his hands. He’s not the least bit tired, and there’s nothing else to look at in this fucking room except Himejima.

 

He’s sitting completely still, beads drawn up between both hands and he chants over them. Sanemi listens for a time, is vaguely familiar with whatever sutra it is Himejima is chanting. He’s blanked his face, seems completely at ease as he moves through the same words over and over again. After a while, Sanemi has to move to light a lantern, as it’s right at the edge of dusk. He notices the mosquito netting as he does, and moves to go ahead and set it up, working it through the hook on the ceiling and spreading it out over the unrolled futons. He has to pass close by Himejima to get to the window but Himejima doesn’t appear to notice him at all. He opens the room up to the outside, inhaling the cooler nighttime breeze as he does. 

 

The scream of cicadas is harder to ignore like this, and the mosquitos will find their way inside quickly enough, but it’ll be cooler, and he has the screen. Moving back past Himejima he idly wonders how many mosquitos would have to bite him to drag him out of meditation.

 

Sanemi removes his haori, picking up one of the yukata provided by the inn and some bathing supplies before closing the door on Himejima’s still form.

 

It’s a smaller, cheaper inn, and the bath is hardly fit to even be called that, but Sanemi is covered with grime from the road, and sweat from the hot day, so he’s mostly just relieved there’s a bath at all. 

 

Himejima, Sanemi thinks, scrubbing off, had been going out of his way to leave Sanemi alone. Since he’d gotten back to the first inn. All he’d done was ask if Sanemi wanted to use his medical supplies to clean the cut on his nose. Sanemi’d told him to fuck off.

 

He rinses, moves to the bath and lowers himself in. Pity Himejima couldn’t have got the fucking message months ago, he thinks.

 

His hand finds his stomach under the water. The ridges of his newest scars tear through the old, and, he thinks, it feels disgusting.

 

He can only stand the heat of the water for so long before he has to get out. He dries off and switches into the clean yukata, which is threadbare but soft for all that. His clothes bundled under his arm, he walks the silent halls of the inn back to their room.

 

Himejima is right where he left him.

 

Sanemi spends all of ten minutes putting his things away, crawling under the mosquito net and laying out on his futon before he’s tearing out from under the netting, cursing himself. The hook is in the center of the room, but it’s a cheap inn, and the room’s fucking small. He slides the futons over to the corner by the window, having to put them closer together so they’ll both fit beneath the netting.

 

It’s going to pull the netting awkwardly, but there’s nothing Sanemi can do for that, so he just curses himself one last time and throws the netting over Himejima. It is, as he expects, an awkward fit, the netting resting right up against Himejima, so that mosquitos could just fucking land on it and still bite him anyway, but at least the side of him closest to the window is protected.

 

He crawls back under the netting, over the futons, and works to spread it out around Himejima as much as possible. Himejima’s chanting’s all but blended into the cries of the cicadas, so Sanemi doesn’t notice at first when it stops. He’s pulled a cushion over to hold down one edge of the netting on Himejima’s right side, and has just managed to situate it to his liking when he sits back, only realizing when he does so how far into Himejima’s space he’s gotten. It’s then he notices the chanting’s stopped.

 

Sanemi looks over, and sure enough, Himejima’s staring right at him, the weight of his attention far more telling than his eyes.

 

“What,” he asks, feeling defensive and hating it.

 

“Thank you, Shinazugawa, that was very considerate of you.”

 

“Oh, fucking--shove it,” he feels himself blushing and moves away, back to his futon. “Just don’t let any fucking mosquitos in when you get up.”

 

Himejima tries to thank him again, but Sanemi lays down with his back to him and tries aggressively to ignore him.

 

Sanemi is dozing when Himejima finally leaves for the baths, and he only wakes up out of habit when he returns. He’d extinguished the lantern when Himejima had left, and now he watches in the near-pitch as Himejima sets his things down and moves to carefully duck under the netting. He settles it gently around their beds and lays down next to Sanemi. His bulk is still giving off the heat of the bath. For a time, Sanemi listens in silence to his breathing. 

 

“I wanted to die,” he says into the dark, feeling a strange allowance about the night, about the silence between them, “I hated you for not letting me die.”

 

“I know,” Himejima says. “I’m fine with you hating me, as long as you’re alive.”

 

“Because you think he’d want that?” Sanemi still can’t say his brother’s name aloud. 

 

“Yes, and because it’s what I want. I told you, we lost too many. Letting you die would have been another victory for Muzan.”

 

Sanemi snorts, his anger distant now. “He’s dead, fuck victory. What’s it matter if we won?”

 

“It matters to me, to Ubuyashiki-sama, to the others. He wanted to take all of us with him, and he didn’t succeed. We didn’t just defeat him, we made a failure out of him.”

 

Fuck lot of good that did for Genya. As if he’d heard him, Himejima reaches out to him, presses his shoulder, just once, drawing back before Sanemi could rouse himself to annoyance. “The hardest thing to do is to live in this world, that’s what the sutras say, and it’s what I myself have found to be true. Here in this current cycle, all we can do is pray for those who have gone to be reborn to a much kinder existence, and for ourselves to meet them again, when we too are reborn.”

 

“And it’s that fucking simple for you?”

 

“Nothing about it is simple. Detachment is the hardest aspect to achieve, I myself struggle with it.”

 

Sanemi snorts again. “Says the picture of detachment.”

 

“Shinazugawa, I would hardly be unmoved if you were to die.”

 

Something about his tone has Sanemi looking over, but he can only just make out Himejima’s form in the darkness. 

 

When Sanemi says nothing, he continues, “Do you still wish you had died?”

 

Every day, Sanemi thinks. He turns away, puts his back to Himejima again.

 

Himejima sighs. “Good night, Shinazugawa,” he says.