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"I can’t."
The two words, uttered in a tone so heartbreakingly gentle, don’t even register until Inosuke is being pushed backwards - gently, of course, too gently by far.
He blinks his eyes open, looking downwards to the hand on his bare chest. It’s not shaking, at least not that he can see, but he feels a tremor, a hesitance, and he doesn’t understand.
Tanjirou doesn’t make him ask.
"I can’t do this to Kanao."
He doesn’t make Inosuke any less confused however. There are definitely clues in his face, he shows his emotions freely, but there are too many of them at once, it’s too strange a mix to read. Inosuke has the intrusive thought that Kanao would be great at deciphering this particular code. His lips are still tingling.
"You’re with me way more than her anyway." Inosuke does not like the way his own voice sounds saying this.
For a moment Tanjirou looks as confused as Inosuke feels, but his face smoothes out almost immediately. His hand is still on Inosuke’s chest. He changes it, somehow, makes it soothing instead of what it was before. Inosuke takes a step back and the hand slides off awkwardly, fingers leaving cool trails on his skin in the night air.
A gust of wind ruffles the leaves of the surrounding trees and it’s not enough to make him shiver, but still feels like it’s waking him up from something.
"I’m with you more often. I’m... with her in a different way."
Tanjirou’s Patient Explainy Voice annoys Inosuke on a good day. Right now he wants to punch it in the throat.
"So be with me that way." Obviously.
But this is the wrong thing to say, judging by how fucking sad Tanjirou looks all of a sudden. Inosuke shifts uncomfortably, watches Tanjirou’s hand twitch like it wants to reach for him again. He wishes he had his proper head with him. It’s inside the house with the others, placed beside the futon he should be sleeping on right now. Beside Tanjirou’s futon.
"Inosuke," Tanjirou says, and he says it all wrong, all sad, and it makes his teeth itch because here he thought he was gonna make Tanjirou happy, and still, still the way the guy says his name makes Inosuke’s heart beat faster, if only because he knows without a doubt that he’s the only thing in Tanjirou’s mind when he speaks it. "If you’d told me that a few years ago..."
And then he just trails off, and gives him the saddest, dumbest smile.
"I didn’ know a few years ago, stupid. Woulda kissed you ages back if I did." Impossibly, this makes Tanjirou’s smile wider and sadder at the same time.
"Course you would." he says, smiling not even at Inosuke but at the fucking ground, and that’s it—
"So why not now?" Inosuke demands - not asks, even now he still hates having to ask sometimes - taking an angry sort of pleasure in the way that smile is wiped off Tanjirou’s face as his eyes snap back to him. They briefly dart towards the inside of the house, but two different volumes of snoring can still be heard from within. Nezuko is the loudest, as always.
"Inosuke— people don’t— You see Nezuko and Zenitsu together. Do you think they would ever go around kissing other people?"
"Monitsu’s been crazy about Nobuko since he first saw her," Inosuke means this in the most derogatory way he can. "And she’s not much better. You haven’t... you were friends with Kanao for years. Before somethin’ changed. Right? And we’ve been—" Tanjirou’s frown makes him falter and fuck, Inosuke hates how uncertain he feels having to actually say all these stupid words out loud. Humanspeak is so useless, when Tanjirou is obviously just upset he didn’t tell him sooner, when the idea of being with Inosuke makes him smile, makes his hand— it’s simple! So simple if Tanjirou could fucking stop making the words ruin it.
"So why can’t that change?"
Asking feels like begging and his voice is too low. Instincts tell him he should be screaming.
Tanjirou only sighs, rearranging himself on their engawa so that he can dangle his legs off the edge rather than face Inosuke.
Inosuke doesn’t move.
"I thought about it a lot, when we were getting to know eachother. But you... it wasn’t that you seemed uninterested in me in particular. It just seemed like none of that stuff even occurred to you at all. Don’t take this the wrong way, but when it came to certain things, you seemed so... young."
The diplomatic choice of words makes Inosuke snort. He was young back then. The vast majority of his life spent on that mountain, and still all those years seemed impossibly far away now. Something to do with having so few human words attached with the memories there, most of them bound up with the boarspeak he so seldom uses anymore.
Tanjirou joins him with a funny little exhale. He keeps his eyes down though, rubs at his knee with his good hand.
"After a while I figured it would never occur to you. And if that was a part of who you were, then I didn’t want to ruin that. But it’s good to say out loud now. I thought about kissing you so many times. Among other things."
Inosuke thinks about other things, and meets Tanjirou’s eyes when the man inevitably smells it on him. The fact that this, too, is another thing Tanjirou can scent makes something stir low in his stomach. It’s too dark to clearly see the way the man in front of him flushes, but Inosuke can feel the heat coming off him, the beats of his heart - suddenly faster - hitting his own bare skin through the air between their bodies.
"Okay," Inosuke mumbles stubbornly, "But that didn’t change."
Tanjirou gives him a long look.
"It has, because I’m with Kanao. I don’t want to make her unhappy, because she makes me... well, really happy." The thing is, he doesn’t even need to be told. She’s as much of a sister in arms as any of them; Inosuke knows Kanao makes Tanjirou happy and she makes him happy too, even though he instinctively understands that there’s a difference, that something shifted between the pair of them a few months ago. It felt pleasant. He’d liked being around them, feeling it in the air. Until a few minutes ago, he thought Kanao was pretty much the best girl to be invented since Nezuko. He doesn’t want to not feel like that.
He tells Tanjirou as much. He declares that if Tanjirou makes Kanao happy, then he can make her twice as happy, if that’s what it’s about, and either way the sparkly guy has three wives, and... And Tanjirou just listens. That’s how he knows it’s not up for discussion. This is Tanjirou patiently waiting for him to let out steam until he doesn’t feel like punching something anymore and accepts whatever Tanjirou knows is best.
The realization makes him go quiet, though it does nothing to lessen the desire to punch something.
"I’m not like Uzui. I— I’m sure it’s fine, however it’s done in ancient clans like his, or in the big cities, or on your mountain. But as for how I’m raised, it’s one person. One heart, for my one heart. I’m glad you told me, Inosuke," he says it so sincerely, taking Inosuke’s hand in his, and Inosuke didn’t notice when Tanjirou got back up close, but he grabs at his other hand — the difference between the withered and the healthy, strong one never really stops feeling strange when you hold both at the same time — only for Tanjirou to look right inside of him to say, "and I’m sorry. I hope you understand."
Then there’s a Look that Inosuke has no time to decode before Tanjirou’s turning away, stepping into his sandals and mumbling about a walk, don’t worry, just go to bed, I won’t be long.
Inosuke can only watch as he turns into a dark blob on the edge of the surrounding forest, treading through the dark underbrush slow and careful as always since his loss in depth perception.
The nightly sounds of the mountain fill his head for a moment - birds, bugs and distant bats suddenly louder in Tanjirou’s absence - but soon the noises fade away, the rustle of leaves in the wind, the bubbling stream a few minutes’ walk from where he stands, it all bleeds out to nothing as his brain does a slow reboot, going gradually from not knowing what to think, to not knowing where to fucking start—
There is a very real temptation to wallow in that he was too slow in realizing, in reaching out and grabbing something while he had time, but luckily Inosuke remembers that that’s dumb as hell because it’s in the past already, one of the very few places he can’t go and change things up the way they should be. Tanjirou and the others have really managed to instill some proper human bullshit in his head for it to even go there, and— and what the fuck was that "on your mountain" comment anyway? When Tanjirou knows full well he was the only human there? Did he mean the animals?
While true that animals have a personhood of their own, different but no less tangible to Inosuke than any human’s, he has never been one of them. He’s Inosuke!! He just allowed them to teach him some of the stuff most human people have apparently forgotten.
His feet start picking up speed along with his thoughts, which are increasingly consisting of the word bullshit. Tanjirou’d always shared himself with everyone; his family, friends, fellow Corps members, hell, basically all of humanity at one point if you look at it that way. Inosuke always accepted that Tanjirou should be shared, he’s very selfless that way - Inosuke, that is - but for Kanao to— No. And where’s the happiness Tanjirou boasted of earlier? Inosuke can see him right up ahead now, can practically feel the misery radiating off him, the feeling just as clear as the dry leaves and twigs breaking apart under his bare feet.
Reminding himself to never again let stupid words get in the way of facts he can so clearly sense with his extremely capable body, Inosuke crosses the remaining distance between them and all but throws Tanjirou against a tree. Taking advantage of the man’s indignant surprise, he manages to grapple him around to lean at least somewhat comfortably with his back against the rough bark. Tanjirou has clothes on to protect his skin, it’s fine.
Inosuke kisses him. Insistently, again and again, closed-mouth kisses because those are the only ones he knows how to do. Covering Tanjirou’s mouth with his own every time the man tries to get a word in — nothing as soft as what Tanjirou turned down, no words allowed — he can shove Inosuke away just fine if he wants to.
The thing is that he doesn’t.
He has a hand on Inosuke’s side, fingers digging into bare skin, neither pulling closer nor pushing away. Interpreting this as being held onto, Inosuke presses further into his space, persuading him as best as he can even when he has no fucking clue what to do other than what he’s seen at a distance. Didn’t want to ask anyone, he’ll figure it out himself.
Tanjirou seems to have run out of words, so Inosuke lets him have part of his mouth back, familiarizing himself solely with Tanjirou’s lower lip for a long moment, and it’s good, it’s even better than what he expected.
His hands loosen their grip on Tanjirou’s wrists - never forceful to begin with, only trying to make him listen, to something that isn’t spoken - and stroke roughly up his arms, taking in the marked difference in the skin, up to his biceps where it all starts to match again because that bastard never got farther, thank fuck. There’s a clear difference in muscle mass; Tanjirou naturally favours the healthy arm, and Inosuke squeezes, fingers fascinated by the asymmetry.
Skimming over old scars, he pushes in under the loose sleeves of Tanjirou’s haori, feels the warmth of skin not chilled by the night air and reaches his sturdy shoulders, gropes at either side of his strong neck. Tanjirou lets out a very quiet little noise and Inosuke kisses at the side of his mouth rather than his lips, giving him space to make more little noises because that one was very nice. Somewhere along the way, a bit of the tension has bled from the man, leaving him softer, more pliant, and it’s definitely an improvement but still not close to what Inosuke wants.
"Kentaro," he says into Tanjirou’s ear, tickling himself on the cool metal of his earring, and Tanjirou snorts — little more than a rough exhale, but helplessly amused because he gets it, his fingers grip harder on Inosuke’s skin and then the tightness in Inosuke’s chest is almost too much to bear for a second, but he manages.
He messily makes his way back across Tanjirou’s face, nosing at his cheek, scenting, tasting the skin at his temple where sweat always seems to take the exact same path whenever he exerts himself; sensing Tanjirou in all the most intimate ways Inosuke can think of. His own breath comes faster simply from being allowed to experience the man in a way he’s never seen anyone else do. Idly he wonders if Kanao has done this on other nights, if rubbing her cheek against Tanjirou’s jaw makes her just as light-headed as he feels. A part of him hopes not, but then again, for Tanjirou’s sake, hopes so.
When he reaches his mouth again, Tanjirou moves with him, barely doing anything but all out of breath from all the thoughts Inosuke can feel buzzing around inside his head. He takes his hands out from his haori to hold him better, one at his back and the other at the back of his head, to protect him from all this thinking that he doesn’t even need to be doing.
They’re closer this way, pressed chest to chest, and then Tanjirou’s fucking— tongue darts out to— Inosuke’s doesn’t know, make his lips less dry, maybe, but Inosuke’s own tongue automatically investigates what’s touching his mouth, so they touch, and holy shit he had no idea that was a thing but it totally is, he’s licking inside Tanjirou and the man moans, open-mouthed. Inosuke can feel embarrassment wafting off him over the loudness of the noise.
Pulling away, taking in Tanjirou’s flushed face, he
intends to say something teasing, but all that comes out is, "Does she do this to you?" and that’s not actually a question he wants answered at all.
It’s not a question Tanjirou wants to hear either because he goes all frowny again, Inosuke can feel the muscles of his back tense through the fabric of his haori, even as he tries to kiss it off him, roughly, eliciting something almost like a whine, shit— before Tanjirou is turning his head to the side, away from Inosuke’s mouth.
"It’s not that," he says breathlessly, "You’re— it’s just exactly how I imagined you’d go about it."
He’s still frowning, guilt-ridden and also desperate, though the exact ratio is unclear to Inosuke, who only has a very vague understanding of guilt (Nezuko gently explained it once after he ate all the food they had with them while a snowstorm was raging outside the cave they’d taken refuge in. Inosuke had wanted nothing more than to fight the howling icy winds with his bare fists. And also not look at anyone.) and pushes Tanjirou harder against the tree. Doesn’t go for his mouth again, but finds his hands and grips them tight, pushes his face into Tanjirou’s hair to overwhelm himself with the smell of woodsmoke, the softness of the skin behind his ear, the taste of his neck.
“Tontarou,” he says, and Tanjirou doesn’t laugh this time, but his healthy hand grips his.
Inosuke can sense the sadness on him, mixed strangely with the hot feeling that he still doesn’t have a name for but has come to know very well, especially during the last few weeks. Inosuke has seen Nezuko and Zenitsu sneak kisses for what feels like ages, and he likes being around the intimate type of happiness that surrounds the pair of them - it’s a warm feeling, but nothing like the uncomfortable, cloying heat he started to feel around Tanjirou sometimes after the man’s shift in relationship with Kanao. Sometimes they’d just be sitting together, cutting vegetables or something equally inane, and Inosuke’s brain would suddenly remind him that actually Tanjirou is also someone that sneaks kisses, probably, and the thought could be so intrusively overwhelming that he wished he was wearing a fucking shirt, just so he’d have something to take off, to cool down.
A few times that feeling had made Tanjirou stare at him, face unreadable aside from the twitching nose that had told Inosuke he was giving off some sort of scent. He starts to make more sense of it, over time, but still finds himself utterly unprepared for how it feels to have that reciprocated, to have that heat reverberating between the pair of them.
He goes for Tanjirou’s mouth again, with his own mouth, goes for Tanjirou’s entire body with the rest of himself, and loses touch with the rest of the world for a little while. Somewhere along the way, their lower halves start meeting and that’s— exhilarating in a different way, stupefying, something that feels natural and yet like it would be embarrassing if Tanjirou didn’t have the exact same, very verbal reactions to the pressure as Inosuke. His mind is rapidly fogging over and it’s amazing, but he needs room, to breathe, needs to—
“Tan—!”
There is a hand. Cupping him. It is not his own hand.
Tanjirou opens his eyes and immediately reads Inosuke as taken aback— shit, no, that tightness is back in his face, like he feels bad about the possibility of wanting this more than Inosuke. Nobody wants this more than Inosuke, damn it! So what if he maybe didn’t see things going so far, he— this is good!
(At the back of his mind, in the pit of his stomach, there’s something else there, hyperfocusing on the ambivalent tension in the man in front of him, going this is your only chance - take what he gives you. It’s very far back, or deep down, or whatever, don’t worry about it.)
Tanjirou’s hand is. Not pulling away yet, frozen in place, but Tanjirou is opening his mouth and Inosuke doesn’t want to be babied, doesn’t want anything to stop, so in a display of shameless bravery, he wordlessly pushes into Tanjirou’s hand, face the very picture of determination as he shoves it into Tanjirou’s shoulder. He is not hiding. He just. Doesn’t have his head, so.
Tanjirou gives him more pressure and promptly fries his brain at the same time. He’s being kissed again and that’s more familiar already so he tries to focus on that, and also breathing, but then Tanjirou starts to find a rhythm to what he’s doing with his hand and Inosuke can only hold on, helplessly overheated as Tanjirou pushes his own face into Inosuke’s hair, huffs hot breath into his ear and presses into him with his entire body, presses into his own hand still cupped around Inosuke, the pleasure centered around him.
Inosuke hazily thinks that’s not quite how it should be, makes a fumbly move to reach down between Tanjirou’s legs, but this apparently starts off a chain reaction of fumbling on Tanjirou’s part, starting with Inosuke’s pelt being tugged away and— there’s more steps, but the most important one is that Tanjirou takes him out of his pants— fingers that aren’t his own wrap around him and it makes sense, it’s not that, and he has thought about it before, but hasn’t— it was down the line, quite far down, not—
He’s faintly aware that he’s making a lot of noise.
So is Tanjirou.
“Inosuke, do— do you think we’re out of earshot?” he says in a tone that’s almost laughably polite given the situation. It’s also a stupid question. Zenitsu can demonstrably sleep through a war, but if he does wake up, no, they both know this is not out of earshot.
Inosuke settles for replying, “He’s slept through louder,” because it seems like this might be another thing Tanjirou needs help convincing himself about and sure enough, the guy goes right back to making his brain melt out of his ears.
He tries to reciprocate, finds Tanjirou’s length and hears how his breath stutters, feels the smooth warmth of him under his palm and wants to appreciate it, but he can’t focus on anything other than the heat building in his own body — the way his toes curl against cool earth and feel like they’re on fire, the way everything is just so absolutely, overwhelmingly unlike doing anything to himself.
His hand falls limply away from Tanjirou, only to come back and clutch at his arm a second later, when all the man does is speed up and mumble encouragement. There’s fabric between their skin there — there shouldn’t be any, it’s so rushed, he really thought they’d only kiss—
“Mmhmonjirouh,” Inosuke garbles, in some last ditch bid for normalcy, but Tanjirou won’t let him have even that.
“Inosuke,” he says, right in his ear, voice all molten and breathless, help, “Can you say my name right? Please?”
So Inosuke does, again and again, and he thinks it feels at once too formal and intimate, until he doesn’t think at all anymore, only hears the way his name makes Tanjirou moan right into him and go even faster— toofast— and then Inosuke is whiting out into oblivion and holding on for his life, with his hands, his lips, anything.
Gentle as always, Tanjirou pets at him through his orgasm, mumbling praise that he can’t quite make out the words of through the haze of… everything. Coming down on the other side, he feels barely any less warm, or breathless, everything still feels floaty and fast at the same time. Lifting his head from Tanjirou’s shoulder, he realizes why. Tanjirou— gorgeous, flushed, panting, sweat dripping down his temples — is still moving his arm, working himself now, and the sight makes another small wave of tight, ticklish pleasure wash over Inosuke.
Tanjirou takes his hand off of himself at the first touch of Inosuke’s fingers, but wraps his hand back over Inosuke’s as it becomes clear that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing at this angle, it’s really quite different from touching himself and also the aftershocks of his own orgasm are still twitching through his limbs and threatening to make his legs give out from under him. But after a few pumps he thinks he’s got it and either way he doesn’t need his literal fucking hand held for this.
Inosuke bats away Tanjirou’s hand with enough annoyance to make the man laugh, but the sound quickly chokes off into a groan. Take that.
“’S so good, Inosuke.” Tanjirou mouthes it into his skin, voice drunk with pleasure, “Knew you’d be so good at this, so great for me.”
Inosuke’s dick twitches weakly and he has the vaguely embarrassing revelation that if he could get hard again right now, Tanjirou’s praises, in that voice, would probably be enough to bring him over the edge.
Tanjirou follows him fairly soon, or it just feels soon, though he makes him work for it, Inosuke panting himself lightheaded as he watches, hypnotized, how Tanjirou falls apart trapped between himself and the trunk of a random tree, tipping his hair back into the bark as Inosuke twists his wrist and picks up his pace.
He wants to tumble him into the underbrush until the fallen leaves tangle in his hair, until his naked body bears indents of twigs all over, chips of bark clinging to his sweaty skin, knees scraped raw from the rough forest floor— Tanjirou makes a desperate, punched out noise and Inosuke doesn’t know if he was saying any of that out loud or just did a really neat thing with his thumb, but that’s it. To experience Tanjirou coming undone right in front of him — arms squeezing around him — is almost an out of body experience. He drools a little against Inosuke’s collarbone in the aftermath.
Then it’s done.
Tanjirou is the first to straighten up, though he waits patiently for Inosuke to take a step back on his own time. They straighten themselves out wordlessly, though the quiet is still peaceful, warm like embers after a bonfire. Tanjirou reaches a hand out to Inosuke to get him going and Inosuke resolutely does not need help to walk, but he takes the hand anyway, if only to not let go of it. Their fingers tangle together, and Tanjirou sends him a smile, but then he starts walking and Inosuke can only follow, for once not at all interested in taking the lead in the too-short trek back through the woods.
He leans his head against Tanjirou’s shoulder as they walk in silence, with some vague hope that the warmth and weight of it can keep Tanjirou’s muscles from going taut again, that Inosuke will be able to feel any dark thoughts forming inside his brain from this distance. It doesn’t work that way.
The air around Tanjirou changes no matter how close Inosuke presses. It’s like the finality the man tried to assume earlier, when he shot Inosuke down, is starting to actually take effect now.
After the fact.
Their silence is cold now, a hard and tangible thing and their house is right up ahead, Inosuke should make himself say… he doesn’t know what. Not speaking was the way to go earlier, but it’s too clear now that this isn’t something he can solve by slamming Tanjirou into another tree.
He doesn’t want to be something Tanjirou regrets, he won’t—
At his side, Tanjirou stiffens.
Looking up from the underbrush, Inosuke sees the cause of it. Zenitsu did wake up. And woke Nezuko, apparently. He can’t make out their faces much at this distance — can still feel their love for Tanjirou, and himself, and it burns because it’s tied up with so much noise, another puzzle he lacks all the pieces of, a thing he can’t put together by sheer force. Nezuko feels more sad and Zenitsu feels more angry, for Kanao, he guesses, but it’s hard to read and he knows he’s missing something because the four of them all still love Kanao, right, but the air is so fucking heavy.
Inosuke turns his head, looks to Tanjirou, but the man only stares ahead at their family, pinned in place by whatever he can read on their faces.
He drops Inosuke’s hand.