Chapter Text
The human mind is a.. funny thing.
It’s interesting how easily a human is similar to a blank canvas, where the blank white can quickly be tainted by smudges of color. Like fingers sunken into dark brown mud, staining pale skin with smears of cocoa that will dry into grey. Sometimes those dirty stains remain on clothes for a day or perhaps centuries, like rice wine on wedding clothing.
Shinazugawa Teiko, who had just crawled out of a dirt grave with her bloodied hands, is a blank slate. She blinks through unfamiliar eyes, breathes in strange night air, licks lips that aren’t hers with a tongue that doesn’t sit right in her mouth. She feels like a newborn baby, taking in the moonlight through bleary eyes before her vision adjusts and she can see every grey splotch upon its circular form.
She is a blank canvas, who stares at grains of brown in her hands and spots the dried red that sticks to her skin.
She looks around, onyx eyes blinking and slowly widening when the mounds of dirt around her become one-two-three and just keep growing, varying in size. It’s a gravesite, a burial.
“Shit!”
The injury beneath her eyes suddenly begins to sting. It burns and her dirtied hands immediately reach up as if to cup it warmly, to soothe it or maybe try and retain control over the pain.
It’s a long cut, severed messily over her right cheek that stretches even past the bridge of her nose. If she were to look into a mirror, the image of the wound would be absolutely gnarly.
Shinazugawa Teiko, who feels raw blood creep from the injury over her face and onto the tips of her brown-dusted fingers, is a blank canvas.
That is until she remembers.
She’s a blank canvas; knees digging into the dirt and hands desperately grasping at her tangled hair, head against the ground and soundless screams of pain escaping her throat. She feels a bloody pain, not so dissimilar from the pain that she feels all over her small frail body.
A metal rod is being drilled into her head, breaking through skin and bone and then making space within her brain. It stretches muscle, tears apart flesh and she wants it to go away.
Images.
Images make itself glow within her eyes.
She remembers her eldest brother killing their father in a fit of revenge, because he’s left too many colors on their fragile yet brave mother, whittling her down until she could barely see the sunlight through bruised eyes.
She remembers Sanemi, that’s his name. She remembers her hands holding out a ball covered in red bean, bumpy and not at all pretty. Yet her eldest brother smiles wide, like he’s been gifted gold, and he takes it to savor as if it were precious.
Her mother sings to her while braiding her hair, telling her that she has to be just as strong as her older brother, because she’s the oldest sister.
She remembers Hiroshi and Shuya, fighting over a piece of pickled radish with their worn chopsticks and they do it oh so loudly. Genya, Genya, parts the fight by stealing the last radish with dainty movement.
Genya.
Genya cradles her after a nightmare, shaking in his little arms because the smell of their father’s drunken breath will never escape her innocent mind.
Sumi shares potato mochi with her, the treat stretching between their chopsticks and with enough pulling and tugging, the two giggle with silly smiles curling at their lips.
Koto is her twin, born just minutes earlier than she was. He holds her hand as they sneak off through the village, wanting to pluck flowers for their mother’s upcoming birthday. He knows his sister best after all, having shared the same womb.
Then their mother is screeching.
Her nails are long, sharp and overgrown. Her eyes are animalistic, teeth soaked in saliva as she eyed the flesh of the children that slept around her.
Their mother is no longer human.
The wood planks are soaked darkly, like ink in the darkness. That thing, it chased after them like it was starving. It drooled in hunger, eyes hunting them whilst it’s hair tangled into itself.
Shuya’s lifeless corpse falls to the floor, slumping like he was just exhausted. It was graphic, traumatizing. Teiko couldn’t breathe at the sight, lungs still but heart thumping at a pace faster than her mind could catch up to.
Sumi is torn apart.
Koto.
Koto.
Hiroshi has a knife in his hands, but he’s weak. He’s weak in the sense that he can’t raise it against his mother. He knows, deep down, it isn’t his mother. But it’s her face and her soft lips and her palms are rough but they’re always so gentle.
Teiko screams in an attempt to drown out Hitoshi’s own screams of pain, running away on shaky legs and in bloodied clothing.
She trips, foot catching onto her brother’s body. Koto’s body.
And Teiko had died.
Still against the dirt, she cries. She sobs, messily and ugly. It’s dirty, the tears are salty and not at all delicious.
Surrounded by the corpses of her family, she’s alone. Her older brothers are nowhere in sight and she can’t think, can’t breathe with how hard she’s shaking as she cries.
(Kimetsu no Yaiba is full of graceful tragedies.)
Shinazugawa Teiko continues to cry, as if it’ll bring back her family. As if it’ll bring back her brothers. As if it’ll shoo away the overwhelming guilt that begins to settle atop of her shoulders like stacks of hay.
She cries, gasping at air and hands digging into dirt.
The memories of a stranger, it floods her mind like ocean waves thrashing against stone. The salt and force of the ways continue to carve into the stone, slow but it happens.
She gets the memories of Shinazugawa Teiko.
She gets those memories and mourns the loss of a family that wasn’t hers yet she cries, desperately yearning for some reconciliation but she’s in such a small body with too big of emotions and she feels like crumbling.
Shinazugawa Teiko is dead.
So someone wakes up in her place and for the time being, mourns what she couldn’t.