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Tanjirou and Zenitsu were fighting, and, for once, he watched.
Inosuke had been doing much more of that lately; watching, observing, instead of yelling. The more time he spent with his friends, the more apparent it became to him that there was a lot about the world he didn’t understand yet and needed to learn about from other people. Like what the fuck a train was, or how to read Japanese, or why Zenitsu was so obsessed with finding a wife.
Which is what he was currently at war over with Tanjirou. Zenitsu was interested in the little demon, or something, and wanted to… take her? Oh, take her out. Well, Insouke thought that was dumb. Everyone was fucking interested in Nezuko’s existence, she was a demon who didn’t eat people! Nobody, Inosuke included, had ever seen something like that before. Anyone who didn’t find that fascinating was blind or deaf or both. Or dead, he supposed. So many people were dead. Shit. What was he thinking about again?
“Tanjiroooou!” Zenitsu was whining now, like he always did. It made Inosuke growl from his spot on the floor. He was busying himself by shoveling food into his mouth at top speed, but Zenitsu’s voice was so goddamn loud and grating in his ears that he was forced to pause, if only briefly, and pay attention.
Tanjirou was sitting on top of his weird box, legs and arms crossed. “No.”
“Tanjirou… !”
He sniffed. “Nezuko is my sister, Zenitsu. She’s still young, and she shouldn’t be dating anyone yet. Not even you.”
Especially you, Zenitsu, Inosuke’s mind supplied, making him chortle into his rice bowl.
Zenitsu made an angry hmph noise through his nose, stood up abruptly, and threw the sliding door open. “Whatever! Fine!” He raised his chin at Insouke with stormy eyes, and he wondered what he had done to warrant such a piercing gaze. “Just cause you’ve got a stupid boyfriend now, the rest of us have to die alone!”
“Huh?” said Insouke.
“Wh—Zenitsu—”
Zenitsu hmphed for a second time, turned tail, and slammed the door shut.
The resulting silence was so deafening that Inosuke even quit eating, and he really didn’t stop a meal for anything. He knew he wasn’t good at reading the room—whatever it was called—but if he could recognize anything as an awkward atmosphere, this would be it.
Tanjirou stared at the floor for a long time with an expression Insouke didn’t understand. There were birds outside, he noticed. They began to fly around in little circles, squawking and periodically swooping down to investigate in between blades of grass. Birds were such weird fuckin’ creatures. There was nothing down there to eat, idiots!
Tanjirou was still looking at the ground. He was also an idiot.
He slurped a noodle. “Oi, Gonpachiro.”
“Hm?” Guess he was thinking too hard to offer an indignant protest to the name, even though they both knew Insouke did it on purpose. It was funny to him, how riled up it made him. Maybe they were past that now.
“What’s a ‘boyfriend’? And why am I yours?”
Tanjirou fell off Nezuko’s box with a scream.
“A boyfriend,” said Tanjirou the following morning, “is—hey, stop that.”
Inosuke frowned. He was only banging a rock into the tree in front of him—a harmless endeavor, really—but he decided to listen to Tanjirou. He figured that if someone went out of their way to teach him something, he should be… nice.
Ugh. Or, try to be. He put the rock down.
“You’re my friend, and you’re a boy, is that it, huh?” Inosuke lifted Tanjirou’s sleeved arm with a finger and roamed over it as if to confirm his deduction that Tanjirou was, in fact, a human male. “So Zenitsu is also my boyfriend, too. Rrr, why didn’t any of you tell me!”
“No!” There was Tanjirou’s squeaky voice. He used it whenever he got nervous or embarrassed or flustered, usually. Not that he paid any attention. “No, no! Um, a boyfriend is much different. You know what a husband is? A wife?”
“Huh? Do you think I’m some sort of dumbass? A wife’s all that yellow idiot ever talks about. It’s when you do some dumb shit like get married or somethin’, yeah? With the gold bands and the flowers.”
Tanjirou’s smile, though still strained, stretched a little wider. “Yes. So, a boyfriend, or alternatively, a girlfriend, is… the previous step, I suppose.”
He blinked and waited for an elaboration as patiently as was possible for him.
“So, you like someone, and then hopefully, you get to date them, and then you’re their boyfriend. And then, when you’ve been their boyfriend for a long enough amount of time, you get married. And then you’re a husband instead of a boyfriend.”
“Like someone?”
“Yeah!”
Inosuke frowned deeper. “You and Zenitsu are my friends. I like… friends. Should I be the boyfriend of all of the friends I get? That’s dumb. I don’t want to do that.” Since the rock was forbidden, he settled for stabbing a stick into the dirt. He pretended the stick was his sword and the dirt was an ugly demon, and he laughed.
Tanjirou’s face was pink when he looked up. “No, no, I don’t… I’m not talking about that type of like. I mean, the other kind, you know.” Inosuke furrowed his brows. “Where you get butterflies in your stomach, and—”
“Shinobu!” roared Inosuke, standing up so quickly his knees strained with the effort. “I knew she had something to do with—”
“No!” Tanjirou said again, only this time, he was laughing. A genuine Tanjirou Laugh at that—crinkled eyes, wide smile, all teeth and scrunched noses. Inosuke found that he had to look away, even when he patted the ground for him to sit again. “When you like someone, it’s in a way that’s more than friends. They make your chest feel funny and your heart beat faster and you want to do romantic things with them.”
Inosuke stabbed the ground again. Tanjirou understood the message and nodded, getting ready to speak again. He hid his smile in his arm. “Romantic things… you want to hold their hand. And, um. Kiss them, too.”
This pissed Inosuke off. “Huh! Why would I let someone hold my hand? I can’t hold both my swords with only one hand! They’re trying to lower my defenses, and then what…”
“It’s nice,” Tanjirou explained through a grin, “even when it’s with someone you don’t like romantically. I love holding hands with Nezuko. It strengthens our family bond.”
Inosuke began to glare at his open palm. A touch like that…
Maybe he looked too pathetic to handle, sitting there and staring at his stupid hand, because then Tanjirou said something equally stupid in retaliation.
“... I can show you.”
Inosuke’s head snapped up, hard. He wanted to be angry, but he couldn’t really find a reason to be, not really. Tanjirou had his arms threaded behind his knees, gazing patiently at him, always, always letting him take all the time he needed. And then he found he couldn’t really find a reason to say no, either. Even though submitting a vital part of himself to someone else scared him, it was Tanjirou, and with Tanjirou, he felt safe.
He held out his arm, swallowed, and screwed his eyes shut tightly. Inosuke, a boy adept at suffering, braced himself for a foreign sensation, something uncomfortable and wrong.
When Tanjirou’s fingers slipped between his own, everything about it felt terrifyingly right.
His palm was soft but calloused from swordsmanship. It was nothing poetic; rough knuckles met sweaty skin, and every part about it was imperfect, but it felt whole, somehow, to Inosuke. Tanjirou’s cheeks regained that pretty pink color, and that talk about stomach insects started to make more sense to him now. Damn Shinobu.
Tanjirou squeezed their hands together once, and then it was over.
“Oh,” Inosuke said gruffly, dumbly.
Tanjirou nodded silently, but he didn’t return to his old spot against an adjacent tree. He began to pick up dead greenery and thread some long stems together with nimble fingers. Fingers that had just been against his own. Something burned in Inosuke’s chest.
“Oi. What about that other thing?”
“Sorry?”
“K…” Damn it, what was the word? “Keh-sing…?”
Tanjirou’s cheeks went from soft pink to a bright, obnoxious red before he had time to blink. The transition was actually sort of captivating. “Oh! Kissing!”
That was the squeaky voice. This had to mean it was something good. Inosuke grinned. “Show me!”
Tanjirou screamed just like he had yesterday, maybe higher this time. “What!” He looked like a demon had just popped up in front of them or something. Inosuke found it funny.
“Show me!” he bellowed, punching a pectoral for emphasis. “If I’m ever someone’s boyfriend, I gotta be the best one there is! Even better than you, Monjirou! So show me about this kissing!”
Hands waved frantically in front of his face. “I don’t—Inosuke, you wouldn’t want me to do that, I—”
“Hah? I just said I want you to! You hit your head or somethin’, moron?”
This time, it was Inosuke’s turn for patience.
Something he was not good at. But he liked holding Tanjirou’s hand, and because of that, he wanted to know kissing, too. Lately, he seemed to be resigning himself to do a lot of things for Tanjirou. Like being patient for him. It was grating, honestly, but they were in the Demon Slayer Corp together. He should try to do whatever he could for Tanjirou. He had to, probably, but he also just wanted to.
Tanjirou took a steeling breath. “Okay. I owe it to you to figure out what all of this is so someday you understand when you... like someone. But… I’ve really only kissed someone once, this girl from my village during a festival, and it didn’t really mean much. Also, please try not to freak out. Or punch me. Or beat me up at all, really.”
“Eh?”
“I’m serious, Inosuke, okay?”
Tanjirou was pouting. Fuck. “Okay.”
“Close your eyes.”
Ugh, already on a scary start. He didn’t like being so defenseless, so vulnerable. Being vulnerable meant being weak, being weak meant getting killed…
“Hey, you’re okay, I promise. Do you trust me?”
“Course I do. Idiot.”
He closed his eyes.
When he felt Tanjirou’s palms on his cheeks, he fought the panic rising in his chest. His face did feel like it was on fire, and his heart was doing strange things, but he managed not to flinch or bite his head off. It was pretty quiet, save for the birds in the trees and the wind weaving through the forest and the ghost of Tanjirou’s breath on his mouth.
On his—wait, what—?
And then Inosuke couldn’t breathe. Literally.
Tanjirou’s lips pressed against his own, and he sucked in a breath and kept it there. He was completely frozen. Goddammit, what the hell was happening to him? He should’ve never asked, he should’ve—
Tanjirou tapped his shoulder with two fingers and made a cute little noise from the back of his throat against Inosuke’s mouth. Something in his stomach swooped low and hot, and then he released a breath. The tension that was coiled around his entire body followed suit.
Oh.
Alright. Okay.
This was way better than holding hands.
Tanjirou’s lips felt smooth and warm from their place in between Inosuke’s. Suddenly, he felt bad. If he had known that they would be kissing and that kissing would involve lips, he would’ve made sure they weren’t so chapped. Currently, though, his buddy didn’t seem to pay it any mind.
Their faces shifted, somehow, and Inosuke felt their mouths fit together more correctly. It sort of felt like when Tanjirou’s fingers went in between his own earlier; how did he describe it then? Terrifyingly right? He felt it now, too.
Tanjirou pulled back. There was a string of saliva that followed, since they obviously had very little idea of what the hell they were doing and therefore were largely clumsy with the technique of it. If Inosuke didn’t spend the majority of his time with his head inside a boar mask, he might’ve found it a little gross.
“Why did Zenitsu say I’m your boyfriend, Tanjirou?”
Inosuke wasn’t sure if Tanjirou flushed from the question or the usage of his real name, but he liked the way the color of his cheeks matched that of his mouth. “Joking. Trying to get a rise out of me, I suppose.”
Inosuke couldn’t even find it in himself to frown. He felt like he was on top of the world.
“Oi, Tanjirou.”
“Yes?”
“I think want to be your boyfriend not as a joke.”
Tanjirou paused, but only for a moment. “Me, too.”
“I think I want to kiss you some more right now.”
The smile Tanjirou gave him then would be burned in the back of Inosuke’s eyelids for the rest of the day, he was sure. “Me, too.”