Chapter Text
The good part of Shinazugawa Sanemi’s life began like snowfall during the night. One morning he woke up, surrounded by the goodness he spent years chasing, and then more years thinking he didn’t deserve. It found him silently, softly, and he wouldn’t have believed it, if it weren’t in front of his eyes, changing the color of the world. For someone who spent so long wrapped in the cold of suffering, he never thought winter could be warm.
Out of all them, Sanemi’s relationship with the water Hashira was the most tenuous. And that was saying a lot, considering his short fuse and daily habit of chewing out at least one other Demon Slayer Corps member.
Tomioka Giyuu never yelled. Tomioka watched, and his flat eyes never gave away anything besides a flicker of annoyance when pushed too far. Even though he spoke as little as Muichiro Tokito, the mist Hashira, Sanemi was convinced that Tomioka noticed far more than Muichiro ever did. And worse, that he locked all that awareness up inside himself to cast judgement on everyone around him (most especially: Sanemi).
Sanemi’s mental landscape was a wasteland of rushing thoughts and emotions, with no barriers to stop them from overwhelming him and bursting out. Tomioka seemed to be constructed of nothing but barriers.
It had taken Sanemi an embarrassingly long time to wrap his head around why the man rubbed him the wrong way so strongly.
Around two years after he joined the Demon Slayer Corps, Sanemi had a training spar scheduled for daybreak. While not an infrequent event, this morning he crashed through the gate to the sparring fields keyed up, his own thoughts hot on his heels like ankle-biting dogs.
His recurrent dreams had burst him into consciousness before sunrise, skin dripping in sweat and muscles even more tense than he’d gone to bed with. His brother Genya stirred awake from the bed on the floor next to him, groping around and finding Sanemi’s hand with his eyes still closed.
Sanemi snatched his hand back, the contact on his skin feeling unbearable while he struggled to drag himself out of the mires of his dreams. He managed to tamp down his emotions long enough to stalk out of the room without saying anything, snatching a towel on his way out.
The showers seemed damp but were suspiciously devoid of steam. Sanemi thought he saw massive, wet footprints leading away from the showers and his heart sank.
With a turn of the water knob, his suspicions were confirmed. Gyomei must’ve gotten back from a mission late last night and taken one of his infamous 3 hour showers. The water blasting from the faucet was cold enough to make his balls shrink back up into his body.
Still buzzing from his dreams—nightmares, really, but he hated admitting that he still felt fear from them—and with his testicles still not descended from their involuntary ice bath, Sanemi soon found himself getting absolutely wiped into the floor by Tomioka during their spar.
“Get your knee out of my side, you little shit,” Sanemi hissed as he failed an attempt to dodge the full-body maneuver Tomioka had just pulled on him. Tomioka ignored him and clenched his second knee on the other side of his torso, trapping Sanemi between his legs and pulling both of them into a roll. He was trying to separate Sanemi from his sword using one those damn lightning-fast grappling techniques that tended to end in a pin.
After two years of sparring with the man, Sanemi saw it coming. He threw himself into the roll with Tomioka’s motion, the extra exertion ruining whatever rotation Tomioka had planned to reach in this maneuver. His raw strength edged out Tomioka’s by a fair bit and catapulted them both across the yard.
Sanemi was breathing hard when he opened his eyes, feeling for confirmation that the pin he had on Tomioka was solid. It was rare that he ended up on top once Tomioka managed to get them on the ground. Sanemi always performed better with traditional swordsmanship, not whatever the hell Tomioka trained in when he wasn’t relying on his weapons.
He looked down and his gaze immediately met the cool, still-water eyes that must’ve been watching the entire time.
The buzzing in his skin ramped up.
He barely had a second to take in their position—his hips flush against Tomioka’s, his forearms pressing pale wrists into the ground—before he felt the rush of blood descend to his lower body and deliver feeling to his balls for the first time since his arctic shower.
Sanemi choked on air, his hips involuntarily jerking into Tomioka beneath him. Tomioka arched slightly, and for the first time Sanemi saw something other than annoyance cross his eyes: uncertainty and another thing unidentifiable.
If Sanemi thought he was experiencing a blood rush before, it turned into a veritable tsunami now. He ducked his head before the heat could reach his face and spat out nonsensically, “Get the fuck off me.”
He was already on his feet and stalking off towards the house with a hand on his burning forehead before Tomioka could deliver one of his usual sarcastic quips about Sanemi needing to get off first.
The realization dawned on him like an alien ship casting a looming shadow over a helpless planet. “Unbelievable,” he thought. That smug little asshole turned him on.
Mercifully, Genya was nowhere near the room when Sanemi reached it. If he were, he would’ve found himself unceremoniously deposited in the hallway without a word of warning before Sanemi locked the door. It wouldn’t have been the first time. But Sanemi was especially thankful for the empty room at this moment in particular, because it meant he would *never* have to explain his full-body blush and the tent in the front of his pants. He wasn’t even sure how he walked like this. It was bordering on painful, how quickly every blood cell in his body was intent on claiming real estate in his dick. Only one way to solve this problem, unfortunately.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he muttered to himself as he unfastened his pants and dropped them. The second Sanemi touched his bare dick, his mind zinged back to Tomioka’s arching back.
Maybe he was letting his imagination run away with his lust, but in his head he saw Tomioka’s mouth open slightly in a soundless gasp from the pressure of their hips grinding together. What would it feel like to sink his tongue between those lips and swallow that gasp? What would it feel like to sink his fingers between those lips while his slick cock slid against Tomioka’s, smearing precum all over each other until they lost control?
Sanemi was immediately dizzy from the clenching pleasure that swept through his stomach at the image. One hand wasn’t enough. He fisted the base of his dick with a second hand; the rhythmic wet sound of him jerking himself off filled the room with downright pornographic noises.
What if it was Tomioka’s hands clenching around him, making those sounds? Would Tomioka defy expectations and moan for him if Sanemi did the same to him? Or would he squirm, silent and flushed with desire, making Sanemi work harder to find all the places on Tomioka’s body that elicited little whines and groans?
“Fuck,” Sanemi moaned, on the cusp of orgasm as soon as the idea of wringing every ounce of pleasure from Tomioka, inch-by-inch, crossed his mind. And maybe because he could think of nothing else—burn for nothing else—he came in almost unbearably intense shivers, gasping out “Giyuu!”
Emotionally, it felt like the dust and blood settling after a fight with one of the lower 6 kizuki. Sanemi was unwilling to look at the mess he made of himself, but he sure could feel it coating both hands, his thighs, and stomach. He flailed around blindly and found his towel from that morning, quickly scrubbing off all evidence of his mortal sin.
He figured eating something would help settle him, because he still felt stirred up in about twelve different ways. Arranging his clothes back where they were meant to be, he unlocked the door and moved to step out into the hallway. His sword almost tripped him. It was laying horizontally across the threshold. Which meant…
Which meant someone had noticed he left it on the sparring fields when he ran off earlier and brought it back to him.
While he was *audibly* moaning the name of his publicly-acknowledged Demon Slayer Corps nemesis.
Sanemi prayed that the ground would swallow him up, but only after it swallowed whoever the fuck heard what he had done.
——————
Tomioka never brought up that morning’s spar.
Which was surprising, because Sanemi ran off halfway through the session. He also didn’t find Sanemi to request any more training with him in the following weeks, and Sanemi sure as shit wasn’t going out of his way to ask Tomioka for it.
That in itself was suspicious to Sanemi. Tomioka was the type to find a weakness or a tender spot and dig in with pointed little questions or remarks.
Shinobu, the insect Hashira (and perhaps the only person who seemed to remotely enjoy Tomioka’s company), said it was because he wanted to understand behaviors that didn’t make sense to him. Apparently all of Sanemi’s triggers didn’t make sense to Tomioka, because he managed to push *every* button possible on a regular basis.
It had now been four weeks with a blessed peace of zero buttons pushed. Sanemi was still internally weighing the enjoyment of the new normal with his looming suspicions when his crow flapped down with a new mission.
Typically, he would take a couple of the regular corps members with him to tackle demon nests. They were always helpful in dealing with the low tier demons that latched onto the powerful ones, but weren’t dangerous enough to cause infighting amongst the nest. It was rare to see real nests with more than one demon that needed a Hashira to take it down. Demons tended to move as solitary predators, or team up in duos, rather than move as a pack.
In the rare occasions when a higher threat level was indicated and he was sent out with another Hashira, he usually took Iguro Obanai with him. The serpent Hashira had a breathing style that meshed well with Sanemi’s wind breathing. And more importantly, Iguro wasn’t some depressing bastard who chose to stew in his own thoughts rather than participate in normal conversation.
In this instance, however, Iguro happened to be posted up in Shinobu’s infirmary nursing a nasty leg wound from his last mission digging out a nest in the mountain caves.
Iguro had unendingly complained to Sanemi about the absolute misery of fighting demons in caves during Sanemi’s daily afternoon check-ins. The demons aren’t bound to the night in the darkness of the caves. The fight took weeks and Iguro hadn’t even managed to clear the full cave system before getting every tendon in his knee severed by some lower 6 contender.
It seemed that the caves required more attention.
Sanemi was being sent out to finish up the job, and wasn’t looking forward to it. Whatever demons Iguro eliminated didn’t appear to be the real source of destruction that was decimating the villager populations in the valleys nearby.
Sanemi stopped by the infirmary on his way up to the main house to collect relevant details from Oyakata-sama, the Demon Corps leader. Iguro looked more ashen than usual when Sanemi gave him the mission news. He clasped Sanemi’s hand as Sanemi made to get up from the chair next to his bed.
“Give em hell, Shinazugawa,” he said. “But bring yourself back, yeah? I don’t want to get sent to the caves again, even if it’s to dig whatever’s left of you out of them.”
Sanemi grunted in affirmation. That was as close as Iguro as going to get to expressing worry for him. And Sanemi, for one, was glad they weren’t wasting breath on sentimentalities.
Oyakata-sama was waiting for him on the meeting porch of the main house. More troublingly, so was Tomioka.
“Thank you for taking on this mission, my children,” said Master in that smooth tone that usually soothed Sanemi’s perpetually sparking nerves.
Today it incited nothing but panic. Both of them? Master was sending both of them on the cave mission?
“WHAT??” barked Sanemi.
“Master,” Tomioka interjected, bowing his head. “I’m sure this matter can be handled by one of us alone.”
Sanemi was surprised that *Tomioka* was the one bringing up objections first. Oyakata-sama smiled benevolently back at him.
“I’m confident in your strength, and in that of Sanemi as well. The reports we received from our members fighting there after the return of Obanai are quite troubling. We already have one Hashira in Shinobu’s care, Giyuu. We found it necessary to dispatch you both as a precautionary measure.” Master smiled a second time, and that was that.
It was a weeklong journey to the mountain caves.
Sanemi and Tomioka made good time on the first day, silently running on the side of the wide dirt roads that filled with carts and travelers between the villages. Sanemi kept five paces ahead of Tomioka. Surprisingly, Tomioka didn’t fight for lead and instead matched his speed from that distance. It seemed like Sanemi wasn’t the only one who needed space.
They stopped at an inn at nightfall, where Sanemi left Tomioka in the quarters upstairs and slipped into the tavern on the first floor to gather information from the locals.
There were only rumors circulating from travelers and relatives of the locals who sent letters from out of town. Nothing concrete. He kept his steps light as he returned to his quarters, on the off chance that Tomioka had gone to sleep already.
The room was dark when Sanemi slipped in, but the light from the doorway illuminated Tomioka moving around in the corner. It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the dim space, but he still caught Tomioka facing away from him, pulling up a pair of pants. He must’ve been in the middle of changing.
Tomioka froze for a second when he heard the door open, and then quickly shoved himself into the pants. He didn’t turn around to greet Sanemi before climbing onto his futon on the floor.
Sanemi shut the door and plunged the room into near darkness again, stripping off his uniform rather than changing into something to sleep in. He preferred it that way. Sanemi preferred a lot of things; chief among them was keeping a clear head (not that he ever came by that easily). Apparently he would be losing out on all fronts this trip, because his head veritably swam with visions of Tomioka’s pale skin and dimples that kissed his lower back.
The Water Hashira was modest to a nearly excessive degree, preferring even to bathe alone in the bath houses. Sanemi couldn’t recall a time he’d seen more than an inch below Tomioka’s collar bones…until today, at least.
It was going to be another restless night.
Sanemi wouldn’t normally wish to revisit his recurrent dreams, but if he had to choose between them and the mental images of Tomioka’s milk white and surprisingly well-muscled thighs, he would’ve chosen the nightmares.
——————
“What the FUCK are you wearing?” Sanemi blurted out, as soon as he was able to close his mouth.
Tomioka had dressed before the crack of dawn, left for an errand in town, and returned to the room to fetch Sanemi and their belongings. Except, strangely, he wasn’t in his usual uniform.
Without fail, Tomioka was always covered in layers of his buttoned-to-the-neck Demon Slayer Corps uniform, leg wraps, and mismatched haori.
Standing in the doorway was a Tomioka look-alike who had donned a lightweight yukata open well past his collar bones. Most alarmingly, his muscular arms were covered in painted-on, skin-tight black sleeves that came to a point over his hands and secured in a loop around his middle fingers.
This surely couldn’t be the same Tomioka who refused to use the training ground showers, wear anything except his uniform *even to celebrations*, and tied up the boar-headed kid for trying to swipe his haori. No, this had to be a demonic mimic of some kind.
Tomioka had the decency to look unsettled at Sanemi’s enraged red-faced glare. He tugged at one of the tight sleeves uselessly, and turned his face to the wall.
“We need to blend in with the crowds. This is what I usually wear on missions through the city areas. It covers more than your uniform, and Kanroji’s, you know,” he said.
Sanemi looked down at the open chest of his uniform, as if forgetting what he wore every day.
He wasn’t prone to flashy displays the same way Uzui Tengen was; he hadn’t chosen the uniform for that reason. In fact, it was Kanroji Mitsuri herself who actually inspired it.
The uniform given to her by the bastards in the textile division had a huge keyhole in the front that didn’t leave anything to the imagination. And her skirt was shorter than even the micro-shorts Uzui wore during summer training to torment them all.
The first time Kanroji joined the rest of the Hashira in her new uniform, she walked stiffly from the direction of her house, holding down the hems of her skirt. Sanemi caught her eye and as soon as their gazes met, her lip quivered. Sanemi had turned heel and stormed off to the textile department to first: wring necks. And second: demand a similarly cut top for himself.
It wasn’t fair to Kanroji to be the only one with exposed skin. He knew all too well how it felt to have all eyes on him.
The scars crossing his chest, arms, and face never failed to elicit curious, or even outright fearful stares. He was used to it, and figured if he was giving onlookers something just as distracting to stare at, it would take half the eyes off her.
Sanemi strode into the Hashira meeting a week later in his new uniform, shirt open nearly to his navel. Iguro had choked on the tea he was drinking, Uzui threw an arm around him in approval, and Kanroji beamed.
Truthfully, he was surprised Tomioka even knew what Sanemi’s uniform looked like. When the man bothered to look at someone, he stared straight in their eyes with an unwavering, vaguely uninterested gaze. Sanemi never even once saw Tomioka’s eyes drop to Kanroji’s cleavage, and that was a Herculean feat to be sure. If he wasn’t looking at Kanroji, he sure as hell wasn’t sneaking an eyeful of Sanemi’s chest.
When Sanemi didn’t reply to his comment, Tomioka walked by him to the mirror placed on their small dresser.
“It’s getting hot out. And it’s already humid, there could be storms rolling in.” Tomioka said, untying the leather cord holding his hair back in the low ponytail he wore day in and day out.
Sanemi watched incredulously as Tomioka lifted his hair up in a high ponytail, like some kind of painting of a warrior ancestor, and secured the cord once again. The elegant arch of his neck was completely exposed like that.
“For fucks sake,” Sanemi breathed. He must’ve said it out loud instead of thinking it; a flush crept up the back of Tomioka’s neck.
The man didn’t bother to dignify Sanemi’s words with a response, instead leaning over to smoothly swipe his sword from its resting place against the dresser. Once it was secured against his hip, Tomioka exited the room without a glance at Sanemi.
Sanemi scrubbed a hand down his face.
It was going to be a long day. A very long day.
He didn’t bother to dress differently; his uniform already had plenty of air flow. And there would be no blending in for Sanemi, not with his excessive facial scarring.
He gave the room a once-over for any remaining belongings. On the floor, half kicked under the dresser, one of Tomioka’s hair cords lay coiled up. For reasons unknown to him, Sanemi picked it up and wound it around his wrist, tucking it under his cuff.
Sanemi followed Tomioka this time, telling himself that he needed to make sure the man hadn’t lost his mind on this trip.
*If he was dressing completely out of character, what’s to say he wasn’t liable to take off and disappear into the crowds? *Sanemi reasoned.
For miles, he watched the sway of Tomioka’s ponytail against his shoulders and how the black hair slowly grew damp at the ends with the sweat collecting there.
They neared the only city between the Demon Slayer Compound and the mountainside villages. It was a port, bordering an expansive harbor that fed into the ocean.
Tomioka was right, Oyakata-sama had warned Sanemi about incoming weather patterns the crows spotted moving up from the south.
Dark clouds gathered along the distant horizon, threatening arrival by nightfall. They still had five days of travel left, and that was five days more than Sanemi wanted to spend in close quarters with Tomioka. He mentally resolved to keep traveling through the rain and wind that might be headed their way. Tomioka was a suffer-in-silence sort, and Sanemi didn’t anticipate him giving any pushback to these plans, miserable as they might be.
Sanemi dropped some coins into the hand of an innkeeper at a seedy looking place. He and Tomioka were dressed as low class foot travelers, it wouldn’t make sense for them to have the money to stay in one of the nicer hotels in the entertainment district of the city.
This inn sat just on the outskirts of the district, next to what appeared to be an unsanctioned gambling den in a bar. Sanemi had stayed in far worse places growing up, so he wasn’t as perturbed by grimy quarters are some of the other Hashira. To Tomioka’s credit, he said nothing when Sanemi tossed him a key and pointed to the steps of the inn.
Tomioka nodded and took a left towards a side road that smelled like street cooking. Sanemi had packed light provisions for the journey, generally not trusting the street vendors to have any of the same sanitation standards that the cooks at the Corps headquarters did. He might be willing to slum it in whatever bed he could find, but Sanemi would rather get stabbed again than be subjected to food poisoning on the road.
Sanemi was upside down when Tomioka returned to the room.
He preferred to get his stretching in as soon as he finished training, and it was no different on the road. Shinobu suggested to Sanemi a while ago that he try integrating stretching and movement techniques she learned from texts acquired from some Indian traders. He knew she was suggesting it in a tactful directive to try to help him address his anger issues.
Sanemi’s initial reaction was to scoff and tell her to mind her own fucking business. He changed his mind when he happened to observe Kanroji training the newest recruits in some of those yoga techniques, and saw the previously struggling recruits picking up new sword movements in days thanks to that training.
Sanemi begrudgingly reappeared at Shinobu’s mansion to ask to borrow the texts. She had teased the hell out of him, and he almost left without them.
A year later, Sanemi was pretty advanced in his yoga practice. He felt Tomioka’s footsteps stutter when he opened the door to find Sanemi on his head, legs neatly crossed in the air. Tomioka recovered quickly, though, and dropped a paper-wrapped package near Sanemi’s head.
That sparked a flare of anger in Sanemi, who had been—in that very moment—diligently trying to expunge all his swirling irritation with this trip. He dropped his legs and flopped out of position. Sanemi landed on his side, facing Tomioka’s turned back.
“What the hell is this, Tomioka?” Sanemi asked.
“Ohagi,” Tomioka replied simply.
“Why would you think I want this?” Sanemi ground out.
“Tanjiro said it’s your favorite food,” Tomioka said. He paused for a second, considering whether to say more. He must’ve sensed the vibrating waves of irritation from Sanemi because he finished quickly, “He said he could smell ohagi and green tea on you every morning during training.”
“I’m going to smack the nose off that kid’s face if he tries to *smell* me during a training ever again,” Sanemi grumbled.
To his complete shock, Tomioka laughed. Had he ever heard Tomioka laugh before? It was a low, bell-like sound.
“It’s not his fault, Shinazugawa. He has a sensitive nose,” said Tomioka, with a note of fondness in his voice.
Logically, Sanemi knew Tomioka cared for the boy—having saved his demon sister from execution—but Sanemi never expected to see Tomioka display any of those emotions. He hadn’t even lashed out at Sanemi when Sanemi stabbed the demon girl to goad her into attacking. Who was this man, and what had he done with Tomioka Giyuu?
Adding to the list of things he would rather face mutilation than admit aloud, *Tanjiro was right*, Sanemi thought. And the street vendor ohagi was good too.
——————