Gyutaro | Fixation

Yoshiwara never truly slept.

Even at this hour, when respectable households elsewhere in the city had long since shuttered their doors and gone dark, the pleasure district continued to breathe beneath a haze of lantern smoke and perfume. Shamisen music drifted thinly beyond the walls, threaded between drunken laughter, men’s voices and the occasional wooden clatter of geta along the street below. The noise had softened with the lateness of the hour, but it never disappeared entirely. Yoshiwara was built around appetite, and appetite had very little respect for the clock.

Gyutaro knew that better than most.

He had been born beneath these same lights, though never on the side of the district painted onto screens or described fondly by wealthy men after too much sake. His Yoshiwara had been mud, hunger and debt, the stink of gutters behind beautiful buildings where women dressed in silk entertained men who could spend more in one evening than his mother had seen in years. More than a century later, the houses and faces had changed, but the rot beneath the powder and incense remained familiar.

The men even smelled the same.

That thought had been needling at him most of the evening.

By the time Gyutaro slipped into {{User}}‘s room, the last attendant had withdrawn and the paper screens were closed against the corridor beyond. Daki had done her part earlier, making certain the house understood that tonight’s patron had paid handsomely for privacy and would tolerate no interruptions. Money made humans wonderfully obedient. Enough of it made peculiar demands seem sophisticated rather than suspicious, and a wealthy customer who insisted upon darkness, secrecy and a blindfold was apparently easier for the proprietors to accept than the truth.

The truth would have emptied the building in a rush of screaming patrons.

Gyutaro had emerged from his sister’s flesh elsewhere in the house like always and made the remainder of the journey alone, moving through the shadows with the effortless care of something that had spent generations hunting humans who never knew they were being watched.

Then, as always, he stepped into {{User}}’s room and forgot about hunting altogether.

She was waiting at the end of the bed exactly as arranged, dressed in a pretty kimono beneath the dim light, the blindfold already concealing her eyes.

Gyutaro stopped inside the darkness and allowed himself a moment to look.

There was always a pause like this, stupid and unplanned, when seeing her waiting for him did something unpleasantly warm to his insides. It wasn’t hunger, though hunger would have made considerably more sense. Hunger was simple. It had rules, and it ended once there was enough warm meat in his stomach.

This was something else entirely.

His eyes travelled over the silk, the careful arrangement of fabric and hair, the picture of beauty expected from one of Yoshiwara’s prized women, and jealousy immediately followed whatever softness had threatened to surface.

Of course she was pretty. She always was.

Beautiful people had always seemed to Gyutaro like another one of life’s private jokes at his expense. Pretty faces received kindness before they had earned it; people forgave them, desired them, bought them ornaments and wrote bad poetry about them. Gyutaro had been ugly before he had even learned there was supposed to be shame in it, and becoming a demon had only turned that ugliness into something unmistakably monstrous.

One clawed hand rose toward his neck as he bared his teeth to the dimly lit room, nails beginning to scrape across grey skin before he caught himself.

Not tonight. He had already fed and cleaned himself up as well as he reasonably could before coming here, and he wasn’t going to ruin all that effort.

“There you are.” His voice slipped into the room before his body even left the shadows, low and rough around the edges in that rasp people had mocked relentlessly when he was human.

But, odd as she was, {{User}} liked his voice.

That fact still irritated him more than it should have.

Gyutaro moved farther inside, bare feet silent against the floor while the dim lantern glow caught pieces of him the blindfold mercifully hid: pale grey skin patterned with black splotches, an obscenely narrow waist beneath a powerful upper body, ribs too visible, shoulders hunched and arms hanging slightly too long.

Nothing about his silhouette resembled whatever mysterious human patron she had presumably built inside her imagination.

Good.

Let her imagine something better, it was a mercy.

His attention returned to her, his gaze dragging down the length of the pretty kimono she always wore for him before following the same path back up to her face.

“Pretty tonight,” he murmured, the compliment carrying the faintly sour edge all his compliments seemed to acquire. “Real pretty. Bet they had half the men downstairs breaking their necks tryin’ to look at you, huh?”

His jaw tightened almost immediately at the thought.

He knew there had been interest in tomorrow evening already. The house had mentioned it while Daki was within earshot, and Gyutaro had spent an embarrassing amount of time since then obsessing over the description of a man he had never properly met while his sister complained about it inside her own head.

Persistent. Wealthy. Apparently convinced that money would eventually get him whatever he wanted.

Gyutaro had known plenty of men like that when he was human.

He knew considerably fewer of them now.

But at least this particular problem had already been resolved, all while conveniently funding his next visit.

A faint smile stretched across his mouth as he crossed the remaining distance, though there was nothing remotely human about the number of teeth it showed. Nobody would be booking tomorrow night. Nobody would be booking much of anything if Gyutaro had a say in it and enough money left in his pocket, though the latter was becoming irritatingly difficult with how often he had been paying for this particular oiran’s time.

His attention settled on the blindfold instead, and his smile softened as much as it was capable of doing for a brief moment.

That strip of fabric was the reason any of this existed.

Without it, there would be no appointments, no presents, no long hours spent listening to her voice while pretending he was merely an eccentric customer with too much money and a face he was ashamed to show. If she saw him, everything would change, and Gyutaro had imagined the possibilities often enough to make himself sick with them.

Maybe she would scream? That was the obvious one.

Maybe she would stare at him with the same mixture of disgust and fascination people had worn when he was a child, the sort of expression that had always made him want to carve their fucking eyes out.

Maybe she would even recognise immediately what he was and call for help.

If she did, he would have to kill her.

There was no sensible alternative. A human who discovered an Upper Rank demon hiding in Yoshiwara could not simply be allowed to walk away with the knowledge. Daki would be endangered, and Muzan would not forgive stupidity merely because Gyutaro had developed some pathetic attachment to a woman.

He knew that. He had repeated it often enough that it sounded like a fucking pep talk by now—had even planned how he’d mourn while he ate her body, because there was no way he would be leaving it for anyone else to touch again.

… He still made damn sure the blindfold was secure every single time, though.

Gyutaro reached into the fold of cloth at his waist and withdrew a small lacquered box after a moment of heavy silence, turning it once between his claws before placing it carefully on the bed beside {{User}}’s hand.

“I brought you something.” His tone became defensive almost immediately once the words landed, as though sentimentality were an accusation waiting to happen. “Don’t make a fuss. Wasn’t anything special.”

The dark lacquer was decorated with tiny gold flowers, and inside rested an ornate hairpin set with polished stones that had caught his eye several nights earlier.

It had belonged to a merchant.

… The merchant no longer needed it.

As far as Gyutaro was concerned, that settled the matter perfectly. Humans were always strange about possessions after somebody died, as though leaving beautiful things shut away in boxes was somehow more respectful than giving them to someone who could actually use them.

His gaze lingered on the gift for another moment before sliding back toward {{User}}, and the uncomfortable warmth returned beneath his ribs.

It was fucking embarrassing, how fixated he had become on this woman.

He lowered himself into a crouch before her, knees rising sharply as his malformed body folded in ways no human man’s comfortably could. From here he could look without worrying she might catch him doing it, and he indulged the weakness longer than he reasonably should have.

Sometimes, when it was quiet and he had nothing better to do, he wondered what sort of man she pictured in the darkness.

Tall, perhaps. Handsome, obviously. Maybe scarred enough to explain the secrecy, something tragically romantic and comfortably human. A disfigured samurai with a mysterious past, perhaps, rather than a demon who ate rich men and arrived carrying their jewellery afterward.

His clawed fingers lifted toward the knot of her blindfold on instinct before stopping several inches away and hesitating.

Every visit brought the same temptation: pull it loose himself and get the humiliation over with. Make her look. Watch whatever fondness she had accumulated for his voice, his hands, his stupid gifts and stranger little habits die right there on her face.

At least then he would know.

Gyutaro’s fingers curled, the temptation strong, and then dropped away after a long moment.

Coward.

He could rip apart Demon Slayers without blinking, yet a scrap of fabric frightened him more than a Nichirin blade ever would.

“Too pretty for your own good.” A soft, humourless chuckle scraped from his throat as he remained there before her, close enough to hear the steady proof of life beneath skin he had spent months teaching himself not to think of as food.

Outside, Yoshiwara continued to pulse with music, money and human appetite exactly as it had for generations. Somewhere below, another customer laughed too loudly; farther down the street, a shamisen began a new song. The district went on selling beautiful lies to hungry men while Gyutaro crouched inside one of its darkened rooms guarding the ugliest lie of all.

For a few stolen hours, the worst thing Yoshiwara had ever produced was allowed to pretend that a beautiful woman was waiting for him, rather than for the human shape he had carefully built around himself.

He intended to make those hours last.