Life used to be peaceful in her village, if not a little boring and slow. Mai had big dreams, she had always had them: travel around the world, make hundreds of friends in any town she passed through. Her mother had also had big dreams, her father had had them. A family of dreamers, that was what they were and what they always had been, and her parents had always encouraged her to run after her dreams because life was there to be lived and enjoyed.
Her father was a healer, he went from villages to towns meeting different types of people who were sometimes way too similar and other times completely different. Her mother came from a very conservative family, she had run away with the healer two days before her wedding to a high class alpha, descendant of a samurai who thought too much of himself in her humble opinion.
They had had to hide for some time in fear of persecution and had walked through as many villages as they needed to feel safe, settling down only when the woman was too heavy with child to walk all day without exhausting herself.
She had come soon after, a difficult birth after a difficult pregnancy, but her mother had survived against all odds, as the fierce woman that she was, she had fought her way away from death and had decided, in her headstrong way, that she was not going to be taken away from her husband and her newly born daughter that easily.
And that had grown to be the most important descriptor for both women, they were headstrong, brave and fierce and they would not go down without a fight… and what a fight they would give. To them most hills were worth dying on and her father, a very calm and quiet man, would just go out for a walk and let them exhaust themselves in their anger. Not many people were able to deal with them, it took a very special kind of man and her father was that kind of man, the kind that made her and her mother try and change their ways.
Being married to her mother could not be an easy task for her father, just as it was not easy to be her daughter. She was not delusional though, she had the same damn temperament as her mother, but her father had stuck to them through thick and thin and Mai would always admire him for that; she would have abandon herself if she could, and she would have left her mother to rot in a damp room more times than one, but her father did not, he did not even even falter, he never thought about leaving. He had married for life and he was there for better and for worse.
Her mother had some redeeming qualities though, as much as she herself had them, they had the strongest will power her father had known and while he tended to give up easily they would push through any hard time, eating scrapes and soup or not even eating for a day if they did not had enough money to buy supplies, they would even push him towards his goals, come hellfire, or high water.
And now she was the sole survivor of the family of dreamers, and her dreams had grown to become grim and dark. She had nowhere to come back to from her dreams to share them, she had neither her gentle father nor her hellbent mother, she had no will of her own anymore, her fire had flicked out: there were no patient hands to keep her safe from the strong winds and no hellfire surrounding her to ignite her again.
Everything hurt, inside and out. She was not sure why she was still alive or how, she remembered the sharp claws ripping her throat apart and, judging by the pain blooming in her neck, it had not been a nightmare.
She remembered, unfortunately she remembered everything. Her father leaving the house when the first wounded arrived at their door, the girl covered in blood standing in the middle of the street, her mother running towards her to help, her mother’s warm blood spattering her face when that monster that looked like a child tore her body apart to sink its sharp teeth into her skin.
Her family had been killed like pretty much everyone else in their village and she had been spared for whatever reason, higher power or cruel curse.
She was awake with her eyes closed, who knew where she was, or how she was. She did not really care. The pain was almost unbearable, her arm felt hot, as if it was resting on burning coals. Her throat was even worse, she was not sure if it was burning hot or burning cold but it was the worst kind of pain she had ever experienced. It felt swollen, breathing was a big problem, swallowing was almost impossible.
“How are you feeling, Hamasaki-kun,” said a sing-song voice, it was quite gentle, soothing even, and Mai could tell that the owner of that voice was smiling.
Mai cracked one of her eyes barely open, as if to observe her surroundings without giving away that she was actually awake.
“My leg still hurts, but I was able to put some weight on it during the last training session, Kocho-sama,” another voice said. Mai recognized the voice as that of one of the funny dressed kids with katanas that had tried, and failed, to kill the monster child that had attacked her village.
“Aoi will be modifying your rehabilitation training routine then,” she said, walking over to Mai’s bed.
She knew that she had been sleeping for some time because her heat had gone, or they had given her something to cut it short, but she would bet her neck it was the first option, not that her neck was worth much in the conditions in which it was.
“Ara ara, what do we have here? Our guest is finally awake,” the woman said from the foot of Mai’s bed, who had no other option but to open her eyes.
The place she was in was some kind of hospital or healing house, she could tell by the rows of beds on either side of the room, pushed into the walls and under a good amount of windows. Mai knew that good ventilation was a must to keep infections away, her father had drilled it into her head saying it every morning while he opened every single window in their little cottage.
Mai tried to speak but the pain in her throat advised otherwise, so she just tried to wrap her hands around her neck in a very protective gesture. It would not change her pain or make her heal faster, but there was something inside her that called for her arms to shield her throat from pain, somehow.
“Do not try to speak just yet,” said the woman, Kocho-sama, whoever she was, “You got really hurt,” she explained. “Your vocal cords may have been compromised, we are not sure yet, and your throat is still very swollen, so you may find it difficult to swallow or breathe,” she continued. “I am going to ask yes or no questions, nod or shake your head to answer,” she instructed.
Mai tried to nod carefully, her neck complained at the movement but she believed that she could bear that pain if she got some information about what had happened and where she was.
“Do you remember what happened?” the woman asked. She was beautiful, a very petite young woman with a small frame who looked the part of an omega but was not. She had a big butterfly-shaped pin on the back of her head that held together her yakai-maki bun and large purple eyes with no pupils. Beautiful and terrifying, Mai would have said if her throat had worked.
But she said nothing, she just nodded with her head carefully, not one hundred percent sure if she knew what had happened or if she had gone insane.
“Do you know where you are?” the woman asked again.
Mai gently shook her head from right to left and vice versa.
“This is the Butterfly Estate,” the woman said, “it is a recovery base for injured demon slayers and well… for you. You were way too injured to be left in the hands of just anyone, so the kakushi brought you here with Oyakata-sama's authorization,” she explained, or she tried to because Mai barely understood a word.
“Kocho-sama,” the young man sitting on the next bed said, “I do not think she knows anything about demon slayers or even demons as a whole,” he said.
He was cute, brown hair with lighter tips barely trapped in a messy bun at the nape of his neck, honey-colored eyes almost catlike shaped, and a soft, genuine smile. That was the kid who had stood in front of the monster child, injured and trembling, after his companions had been ripped to pieces in front of his eyes, he had stood there to save her or to save himself, it did not matter, he seemed to have succeeded.
“Oh my!” she said, still smiling, “do you know what demons are?”
Mai shook her head.
“That child-like thing in your village, that was a demon,” the boy said, “there are many different types of demons and they do not look like children all the time,” he explained.
“Man-eating demons, that is what we call them, they eat people and only come out at night,” the woman said. “And we are demon slayers, we kill demons,” she continued, resting her hand on the hilt of the katana she kept hanging at her hip as if to accentuate her words.
Mai thought she could not be in any more pain than she already was, but a headache was building in the forefront of her mind, she had so many questions and no answers at all, she was not even sure if she wanted the answers. The world seemed much harder and much bigger than her and suddenly she could not understand anything, she could not even ask about it because she did not have a voice for the time being.
“We will let you rest, you still have plenty of resting and healing to do,” the woman said. “My name is Kocho Shinobu, if you need anything, there are other girls who will come to help you and give you medicine. Butterflies are our signature, if you want to know,” she said, pointing at her own butterfly clip on the back of her head. “Hamasaki-kun can answer any question you have in the meantime, but I advise you to rest,” she added, turning around to leave the room.
“Kocho-sama, may I have some ink and paper?” the boy asked, “It may be easier for her to communicate that way,” he explained.
“Of course,” she said, chirpy and animated, tilting her head to the side, looking almost innocent.
Hamasaki Hiroshi, she had learned, was a sixteen-year-old alpha who had joined the demon slayer corps two years ago. He was a Tsuchinoto, whatever that meant, and he used something called mist breathing technique. He had lost his family partly to illness and partly to a demon, and a retired demon slayer had saved his life.
There were not many demon slayers who survived enough to retire, only the best ones or the luckiest got that honor. He had told her that his master had been a Hinoe, another rank in the corps that, from what she had understood, was somewhat higher than Tsuchinoto. Above all ranks were the Hashira, they were the most powerful and skilled demon slayers and Kocho-sama was one of them, the Insect Hashira.
According to Hiroshi, as she had taken to calling him in her head, the two of them knew another Hashira, the Water Hashira, who had saved them both from the demon and her, in particular, from bleeding to death. Hiroshi had spent a fair amount of time praising the Water Hashira and his technique with his nichirin sword which was a special type of katana used by demon slayers and was about the only thing other than the sun that could kill demons.
Mai went to sleep somewhat comforted, listening to Hiroshi’s babbling as he told her stupid stories, the pain was forgotten in her sleep and, that night, the nightmares were somehow kept at bay, maybe it was Hiroshi’s company, maybe it was because she felt safe, maybe it was because she was way too tired and way too hurt, and her body did not had enough energy to summon any kind of terror.
But soon enough Hiroshi was completely healed and went on a new mission and Mai was left to be alone again, her throat had barely improved, her spirit was definitely worse.
At that time she was introduced to heat suppressants, Kocho-sama had shown her the pills and taught her the correct way of taking them. She had slept through the three days of heat that month and she could get started on the suppressants if she wanted to. She was not one hundred percent sure about them, so she had been avoiding them for the time being.
She had also had the chance to meet Aoi and Kanao, she liked them both, Aoi was very much like her mother, the anger and deep care and concern of everyone in her vicinity mixed under her hard surface. Kanao was quiet and easy to be around. Now that she could not speak, it was comfortable to sit in quietly without worrying about answering questions with easily misinterpreted hand gestures.
Sumi, Kiyo and Naho were in charge of her recovery, they gave her medicine and got her to move around every day a little more. Her physical strength and elasticity had come back stronger than ever, her voice, on the other hand, was not getting much better.
Kocho-sama was the only one caring for her injured throat and the best they could manage out of it was some weak raspy thing that sounded like sandpaper against nails… and honestly felt like that too. Kocho-sama had said that she might not be able to get her voice back the way it was but what she had at the moment was down right painful to both produce and hear.
But if she knew something was that her parents would not be glad if she gave up that easily, even if it would not have been considered easy to anyone but her, so she got out of bed every day at dawn and trained tirelessly well into the afternoon until Kocho-sama considered her healthy enough to be discharged. Her voice was still raspy and barely audible but it did not hurt anymore and for the time being that would have to be enough.
She had decided to join the corps, or she did not, it was not exactly a decision, she just knew that she could not live with herself if she decided to do nothing, to not give her heart and soul to slay demons after what had happened to her family.
The world had become such a big place full of evils that she did not know of, full of dangers, dangers that attacked defenseless people, people she could choose to protect, or die trying to protect like all those young demon slayers had done. They had given their lives for her to live, it did not matter what their main personal goal was, the fact was that they had died there and she had not and the least she could do was give back a little bit.
She thought of Hiroshi, scared and badly injured, facing a demon he could not defeat. He had confessed to her, one of those nights when neither of them could sleep, that his plan was to buy time, to wait for someone better than him to be on their way to save the day even if they could not save him, his plan was to go down fighting in that village that was not his own, laying down his life for people he did not know, all to stop that demon before it hurt someone else. For Mai it was altruistic, for Hiroshi it was life, that was what demon slayers did, give their life and receive nothing in return, not even a safe-conduct to travel with their nichirin sword, nor push the knowledge of the existence of demons, not even recognition, a pat on the back and a ‘thank you’. Most of the time, the police would put them in jail for running around with katanas and people would laugh at them when they heard the word "demon".
Some demon slayers were there for the money, of course, and some were there because of family ties, but the vast majority of them had turned to demon slaying for vengeance. Hiroshi himself was one of them and she would be just another one, she wanted to destroy as many demons as came her way, if she did not she was not sure what kind of person she would become, she would rot from within and become a different kind of monster, God knew that there was no need for demons, people could be evil without the need of any inhuman help.
So she wrote a letter to Hiroshi because that was the only demon slayer she had kept in contact with, she had nowhere to go and did not have the nerve to impose her presence on the Butterfly Estate for longer than necessary, since she had been healed for free and, except for her voice that would never go back to the way it was before the attack, she was one hundred percent ready to go back to her life…or start a new life because no one could go back to what they were after what she had had to live through.
Hiroshi was really the only person she had in the whole wide world, the only person she could turn to, and it was a very foreign concept to her since she had always been rather independent and he was a year her junior. But her grandparents knew nothing about her and she was not sure if they would welcome her with open arms or with ‘open fire’ since her mother had run away from them and did not seem to hold their memories in good esteem so she decided that Hiroshi was her safer shot.
He was patient enough and was in imperative need of an omega. His living situation was dire, to put it mildly, so while he tried, and failed, to teach her Mist Breathing, she managed to teach him how to clean, cook, and keep his things fairly organized.
“Unless you have a nasty amount of money hidden somewhere, no omega that has a teeny tiny amount of self love will settle for you. You are a mess,” she said, once they had already warmed up to each other, which had taken them three days tops.
“Well, I do not have money, but I can save you from a demon, so maybe I do have something to bring to the table,” he replied, picking up his dirty kyahan from the floor and hiding them behind his back.
“You are a disaster,” she concluded, folding his shirt neatly.
The living and sleeping arrangements varied from night to night, sometimes they were lucky enough to find a Wisteria House and they were well taken care for, and sometimes some good people Hiroshi had saved before offered them a little square of space in their kitchen or dining room or even in the engawa from time to time and they slept with a roof over their heads and had breakfast in the mornings, some other times they had to sleep under a tree and find firewood to cook something and in the worse case scenario, they had to sleep in a dirty alley at the back of a building and wait until a food cart opened to eat.
Most of the time they slept during the day and traveled at night, they did not have the willpower to change their sleep routine every few days, or rather they did not see the incentive to do so, which had led them to some ugly situations in which Hiroshi had to fight against some peculiar individuals, or rather some aggressive alphas that though that any unmarked omega belonged to them.
Hiroshi had been right in one thing, he could save an omega from demons and not only from the kind of demons he was used to killing, but also the ones that he could not kill if he did not want to end up in jail for far more than carrying a katana.
She had finally settled on taking the heat suppressants, it would have been very irresponsible for her to travel and sleep next to an alpha and not take them while he was suppressing his rut, so she had kissed her uncomfortable and inconvenient heat goodbye for the next four months. They would find a solution once the time of her suppressants break came, for the moment they did not know if they would be alive to welcome the next sunrise.
But not every alpha used rut suppressants and not all alphas learned to control themselves as Hiroshi had. He had told her a lot about his sensei: an elderly alpha man who had lost his right hand in battle and even though he had learned to use his non-dominant hand to defend himself and his wife, had retired from demon slaying.
Hiroshi’s sensei was a very patient person but also very strict, his wife had been attacked by a group of alphas in the past, before they even met for the first time, and even if none of them had bitten her, they had assaulted her and he was very protective of her as well as he was very critical of any alpha who consciously chose not to control their impulses.
Hiroshi had taken his teachings to heart not only because he truly admired his sensei, but also because his sensei’s wife was almost like a grandmother to him and acting on anything but his best behavior felt like an insult to her suffering.
And Mai thought that she should be very proud of him.
Mai remembered one incident quite neatly, it was almost daybreak but not quite yet, the city was still sleeping and they wandered the deserted streets munching on the remains of the few onigiris they had gotten in the last Wisteria House they had slept in two nights ago. There were some people on the streets: a baker venturing in his dark shop to have the bread ready for when the city awoke, a half-asleep, haggard-eyed parent trying to soothe their young offspring by walking around, and some people who had not found their beds the night before: some were laying against a wall, bottles still on hand, some were hugging street pillars, exchanging poems with the wind, and some were trying to walk around swaying from left to right and the other way around. But there was one that was not swaying enough to be discouraged from pursuing an omega around town. Mai had been unlucky enough to be that omega on that specific night.
She remembered a bare, hairy chest that crossed her line of vision, positioning itself right in front of her. He was wearing a yukata that was barely holding itself together, an old pair of zogi, and a bottle clutched in one of his hands. If it had not been for Hiroshi's quick reflexes, she would have collided headfirst into the stranger, but her partner had thrown an arm between them, successfully stopping her in her tracks.
She looked up… up… up until she saw his face. There was nothing special about him, a small scar on the right eyebrow, brown eyes, and a strong sake breath that nearly knocked her out when he spoke directly into her face.
“What is such a cute little omega doing out here, all alone, at this time of night?”
Hiroshi cut the conversation short by giving Mai a little push, almost as a sign for her to get away from the alpha, and inserted himself in between the two right before she could say something as superfluous as “it is already daytime,” or something equally stupid and that would end with a slap or a punch being thrown in her direction and neither she nor Hiroshi were out and about looking for a fight, or they were but not with a human, they were actually looking for a demon they had not been able to find just yet.
“She is not alone,” Hiroshi said. He looked like a child next to such a tall man and somehow, Mai remembered him standing in front of that demon child ready to fight to the death, trembling from head to toe but holding his katana steadily. This time, Hiroshi was not even holding his katana and he did not seem overly concerned about the prospect of a fight with a measly man, so she decided to not ‘overly concerned’ herself either.
“And what are you going to do, little man?” the man said, crowding Hiroshi’s personal space if he had any left after inserting himself in between the two individuals as he had done.
“I will kick out every single one of your teeth one at a time as soon as you put your filthy hand anywhere near her,” he said. All the smiles and the pleasantries that Hiroshi seemed to share with just about everyone all the time had flown off, there was someone who was not a demon that would get none of either.
“I would like to see you try,” the man laughed, pushing him aside quite easily and reaching for her arm…
FAMOUS. LAST. WORDS.
The poor imbecile did not see it coming, Hiroshi was way too fast for that man to even process what in that forsaken piece of earth had happened before the first tooth flew out of his mouth… or rather, the first few.
Hiroshi’s nichirin sword and its saya were thrusted into Mai’s hands, who caught it unimpressed, she was rather waiting for him to throw something at her: if it was not his haori bothering him, it was his earrings or his hair tie that had fallen off. By then it was Mai's job to pick up or catch Hiroshi’s belongings, at least until she was actually more useful with a blade than a hazard to herself and to Hiroshi. Fending off demons was one thing, going up against a reckless Mai meanwhile fighting a demon was probably the fastest recipe for disaster.
Hiroshi attacked again, a loud crack and a scream, a splatter of blood on the ground and Hiroshi landed in front of her, who had put some distance in between her and the ongoing one-sided fight. One-sided because the alleged attacker did not have the slightest chance of laying a finger on Hiroshi if Hiroshi himself did not want him too.
The man doubled over himself with both his hands covering his face, blood pooling in them and flowing down his forearms to his elbows to drip onto the dirty floor. He was breathing heavily and looked at Hiroshi with a mixture of anger, fear and resentment. Hiroshi stood tall in front of her and looked down at the man, his mouth still in a stiff rigid line, stern and forbidding. Mai was not used to seeing that version of him.
“Now, I am not sure how many teeth I am leaving behind still attached to you, but I am positive that you will not be able to mark anyone. If you did not learn anything from this encounter, at least I know that some omegas will thank me when you attack them but you are completely unable to mark them,” Hiroshi said. He no longer looked like a child with the man cowering at his feet, curled up in a tight ball. “I hope that every single time you think about going after an omega, you think of me, that broken nose and those missing teeth will surely help refresh your memory every time you look at yourself in the mirror,” he added.
With all the time in the world, Hiroshi retrieved his katana and its saya and secured them to his belt before taking her hand and leading her away. Hiroshi might have been a year her junior, but he sure thought of her as his little sister and Mai was completely fine with that, she liked being pampered and she liked being protected even when she was trying to learn to protect herself. She learned that both things could coexist in peace and harmony and that she could pick up discarded clothes, fold shirts, and teach Hiroshi to cook something edible while she learned to swing a sword and leap through the trees.
Somehow, she had never felt so lost and scared as she was out there, chasing demons and running after crows, not knowing if it was her last sunrise or the first of many, but she had also found a new part of herself, a new family that was connected by other things than blood ties and a feeling of freedom she had never experienced before.
And the truth was that she liked it.