Become Human Again (Sasori in Demon Slayer)

A crescent moon hung low in the night sky, casting pale light over the forest that ran parallel to the speeding train. Akaza, hidden within the shadows of the dense trees, moved in perfect sync with the train’s rhythm, his presence barely noticeable against the cool breeze. His sharp eyes flicked to the train’s roof as the steam billowed upward. His anticipation grew with each passing night, waiting…. There was no doubt in his mind that soon, someone worthy would come. Someone strong. And when they did, he would be ready.

He grinned to himself. He did not pity Enmu, Enmu was just a bug to be crushed by his next great fight… he hoped it would be a Hashira.

***

Sasori's eyes went wild as he looked up at the angry man who was now on top of him. 

His hand still on the blade that stabbed into his target’s gut, and his other hand closing in on his throat. 

“You're going to ruin everything!” Was the last thing he cried, right before Shinobu's injection into his neck knocked him out.

The man fell to the side, and the demon slayers caught their breath…

“Damnit!” Sasori cursed angrily, as he tried to set up… only too fast. He recognized the pain immediately, he had been stabbed in the liver. “Get off me brat!” He snapped at Muichiro, swatting at him with his arm. 

“I was only trying to help,” Muichiro said, taken aback. “But if you want to die of your wound then I won't stop you.” Sasori was too busy glaring at the unconscious conductor to care what Muichiro said. 

“Sasori-san,” Shinobu said, sensing her teacher's anger, and hoping to assuage him before he put a civilian through a living hell, “you've been seriously injured! Please focus on healing yourself, I promise that we will punish the demon, I'll capture him alive and you can experiment on him to your heart's content!” As much as she was trying to calm him down before he hurts someone innocent, she truly meant those words, and this did not go unnoticed by Sasori.

 “You're beginning to talk like a warrior,” he said. “Even if you are too weak to actually kill a human.” He looked over to the conductor. “You gave him a non-lethal concoction didn't you? No matter, you won't be able to protect him from me when this is all over, now go, Go and show me what you can do.”

In spite of everything, including her own moral compunctions, Shinobu felt a twinge of pride… 

“Shinobu, you and Muichiro-kun run and find the demon,” Kanae directed. “I’ll stay here with Sasori-san”

“He's at the front of the train,” Sasori said, owing this knowledge to Kinuta’s hearing.

Shinobu and Muichiro nodded. “Good luck Nee-san!” And with that they were off. 

Kanae knelt by Sasori's side, and tried to get a good look at his wound. “I'm fine” he growled, as he put his hand over the stab wound. A bluish greenish light began to emanate from his hand, and Kanae watched in awe.

“It's just a simple medical Ninjutsu,” he said. “I used the same thing on you.”

“That's amazing!... But…”

“What were you expecting?” It's not going to magically heal me in an instant!”

Kanae frowned. Her intuition now revealed to her that this technique Sasori was using required an immense amount of concentration, and since he was performing it on himself while in severe pain… “Here, let me help you” she offered, retrieving a balm from her waistpack. 

“What do you think you're doing?” He asked.

“It's a surgical ointment, it should numb the area around your wound, and also help stop the bleeding at least a little bit.”

“Then I'll apply it myself,” he said, snatching it from her hands.

“That was so stupid of me,” he muttered. “I should have seen that coming! Even if I didn't have Kinuta!!” the harshness in his voice directed at himself.

Kanae didn't know what to say… she looked at Kinuta's head, and remembered with a pang of sickness that this thing of wood and metal had once been living flesh. Then, back to Sasori, wincing in pain as he treated his injury… the opposite was true for him. He was now flesh, and lamented the weakness that came with it. Memories of Shinobu telling her about what she had seen in Sasori’s workshop, and memories of what Sasori had told her the second time they spoke on the master’s engawa, replayed through Kanae’s mind. 

Sasori spoke of the limitations of being human, and she had told him that their respective values could not be reconciled… She felt she understood him at least a little bit better now than she did then.

“I know what it's like to feel inadequate,” she said kindly, wondering if she was letting her openness get the better of her. “Ever since that night, I haven't been as strong as before. I want to protect my younger sister but at the same time, I understand how useless I am now as a fighter”

“You were inadequate before that” Sasori scoffed, “precisely because you took your sister to the battlefield with you. The battlefield is no place for family ties, you must sever them-GAHHH!” Sasori-doubled over in pain.

“Sasori-san!? Are you alright!?” Kanae cried as she rushed over to his side.

“Yeah,” he grunted. 

“You need to be more gentle with yourself,” Kanae admonished. “You need to remember that you’re flesh and blood now.”

“I know…”

“and… ” She continued. “The dynamics in your family, whatever they were, are not the same as they were with my sister and me. Please keep that in mind.” There was a fierce defensiveness in her voice as she said that.

For an intense moment, no response came from Sasori. Kanae braced herself.

“Fine,” he finally said. There was the edge of a chuckle on his voice.

***

The wind howled around the front of the train as Muichiro and Shinobu stood, the air thick with smoke belching from the stack. Shinobu coughed, her hand reflexively covering her mouth, and coughed into the sleeve of her Haori as the acrid scent filled her lungs, but never took her eyes off of the demon. 

Muichiro narrowed his eyes, his sharp gaze focused on the figure standing before them. Enmu turned to face them, his pale face twisted into an unsettling smile. “Well, well,” He said, his voice soft and lilting. "You two shouldn’t look at me with such hostility you know. I showed you both such pleasant dreams… I could’ve instead shown you nightmares."

Shinobu's brow furrowed, her grip tightening around her blade. "Is that supposed to comfort us?"

Enmu chuckled, his eerie laughter carried on the wind. “It should. After all, I know what makes you wake up screaming in the middle of the night.”

Muichiro gave a soft cough, and popped a peppermint into his mouth before taking a step forward. “Do you rehearse your evil lines in front of a mirror or something?” *cough

“Oh my,” Enmu said with mock concern, “Is the smoke of this train too much for you? Sorry, I know how delicate your lungs are, let me help you.” he held out his hand.

“Its not that,” Muichiro said in a slightly hoarse voice, “I’m just allergic to your corniness.”

Those words had barely reached Enmu’s ears when Muichiro took a low stance and blitzed forward! 

Mist Breathing, Third Form: Scattering Mist Splash! 

Enmu held out his hand, and tried to use his blood demon art.

“Go to sleep” He sang, but Muichiro was too quick! And Enmu had miscalculated Muichiro’s movements!

Muichiro’s Katana sliced cleanly through Enmu’s neck, and his head fell from his shoulders.

Yet… the body did not disintegrate… Muichiro looked back in shock. Shinobu saw it as well… The sleep Demon Enmu’s head, still smiled and laughed, connected to the roof of the train by a long tumor of flesh.

“Those are such lovely expressions on your faces, ufufufufu…”

Muichiro dropped into a low stance, and attacked again! Enmu’s head was severed for the second time, and then slashed as it fell mid-air.

And then the flesh began to wrap around Muichiro’s legs.

Shinobu was about to run to protect him, when he heard the voice again from behind her.

“Cutting off that head will not kill me, because that isn’t my real head. Ufufufufuf! That man has given me so much more blood to kill you demon slayers! My body, my flesh and bones, is now one with this train!!!”

The sheer evil in his voice, the sheer malice he had for them, the sadistic intent… was greater than any demon Shinobu or Muichiro had ever fought before…

Walls of flesh shot up like towers from the ground, and before Either demon slayer could see what was going on, the eyes blinked….

Go To Sleep.

Shinobu blinked, her vision distorted by the fog of a dream she hadn’t realized she’d slipped into. The sensation hit her all at once… a sticky, spider's web clinging to her limbs. She tried to move, but the more she struggled, the tighter the silk wound itself around her body, binding her in place. Her breath hitched in panic as she looked down, seeing the coarse fibers of the web sticking to her skin, their texture setting off an involuntary shudder of revulsion.

Suddenly, from the dark edges of her vision, they came… Spiders… massive, grotesque creatures, each one covered in thick fur. She could feel their steps reverberating across the web, they moved slowly and deliberately. Their legs scraped along the silk, drawing closer and closer to her... 

Her muscles tensed in a futile effort to free herself, her heartbeat hammering in her ears. She squirmed and struggled against the web, but she was trapped… unable to fight back or even flee…

The spiders moved closer, their hairy legs brushing against her skin, sending electric pulses through her. The texture made her stomach churn, her mind spiraling into a deeper pit of anxiety. The weight of their presence was unbearable, and her senses screamed with the intense, visceral discomfort they triggered... 

The spiders’ closeness amplified her terror, each bristle that touched her skin feeling like an electric shock, like something disgusting that would infect her, while she remained trapped, unable to defend herself…  No matter how strong she tried to be, here she was, utterly powerless, with nothing but her terror and those horrid hairy creatures closing in.

It was dark. The Shadows were everywhere, and she could barely see in front of her, but on the floor, looking up at her… she could see the cold glow of his brown eyes, and the fiery red of his hair.

"Sasori-san!" she cried out, “help me!”

The Spider's faces manifested the faces of demons she had killed before, now she was helpless, and their hair positively seemed to dance and bristle with disgusting pathogens and irritations… they threatened to drown her in it...

Their numbers grew with the mocking faces of every demon she had ever defeated! They swarmed her! Crawling over her! Covering her!

And Sasori remained unmoving.

"Please!" Shinobu sobbed, her voice cracking. The spiders were beginning to bare their hideous enlarged fangs that stretched their mouths so unnaturally, as slobber pored out of them. "Help me!"

Sasori remained still, unmoving. His eyes didn’t even flicker…

"Why won’t you do anything?" Shinobu choked, her tears falling freely now. "Why...?"

Then, with a deliberate slowness, Sasori raised his hand and flicked his fingers.

From the shadows, a figure began to emerge, stepping into the dim light cast by the flickering flames of Shinobu’s deepest fears. The figure was Kanae. Her sister. Her heart leaped with hope for only a moment, but something was terribly wrong. The way Kanae moved—stiff, unnatural—her once-bright eyes were dull, lifeless.

"No..." Shinobu whispered in disbelief, shaking her head as she realized the truth.

Kanae wasn’t alive. She was a puppet.

Behind her, more figures followed… Shinobu recognized them all.

“Himejima-san!” She cried with horror. “Shinazugawa-san! Tomioka-san! No!!!!” The Hashira, each of them, now mindless marionettes, their movements jerky and wrong… people whom she loved and looked up to… they were all Sasori’s creations now, their strings hidden in the shadows like invisible threads of fate that only he could control.

Terror gave way to cold dread…

“NEE-SAAAAANNNNMNNN!!!!"

But there was no answer from the puppet that wore her sister’s face. Only the empty eyes stared back.

Shinobu shut her eyes, afraid to open them, and began to forcibly calm herself down…

“This isn't real… these spiders are not real. ”

The prickly and disgusting feeling of their furry legs crawling over her certainly felt real.

“Calm down Shinobu, he's using your doraphobia against you… he's using your loved ones against you… this is just a dream…

…This demon’s weakness… it lies with the fact that when the dreamer is aware, they have some aspect of control .”

She remembered Sasori's words… and she felt her sword materialize in her hand…

Sasori's words came back to her once more… and the resolve he carried, to make such a suggestion as though it were nothing.

“I cannot escape from these webs, but I can escape from this illusion!”

She jerked her arm towards her own neck, with the blade facing her…

***

Shinobu awoke to the cool air and blistering winds! She staggered, wind whipping her face as she struggled to keep her footing on the roof of the speeding train. Each step felt like a battle… but the sight of Muichiro ahead... She couldn’t see the look on his face, but his body was trembling with terror. His sword fell from his fingers, and the blade lodged itself in the roof of the train, She reached out, but the wind roared, tearing her voice from her lips. “Muichiro!” she cried, her words swallowed by the gale.

The train rattled beneath her feet, the force of the air currents pushing her back, making every inch of progress toward him feel like a leap. Her legs trembled, threatening to buckle as her breath came in shallow, pained gasps. Despite her fatigue, she fought with everything she had to move forward! Muichiro needed help! His body was writhing violently as the storm inside him raged far fiercer than the one outside.

She could not reach him, and her voice barely carried over the howl of the wind. She cursed herself for her own weakness, her fingers grasping at nothing as she tried to force herself closer. Every time she thought she’d made progress, the wind slid her back...

Muichiro’s panicked cries, though faint, began to reach her over the chaos.

"Mom...! Dad...! Nii-san…!" His raw voice cracked.

The gusts continued to push Shinobu back, and her fatigue slowed her down even further...

She collapsed to her knees, clutching the roof of the train for stability as she gritted her teeth. There was no way she could get closer, no way to pull him from the abyss that Enmu had dragged him into. She could only watch helplessly as Muichiro’s past swallowed him whole.

A bridge came into view, as Muichiro knelt down and gripped his head in his hands, his screams being eaten in the wind.

Enmu’s voice carried over the wind with more success.

“Yes, remember my child. I’ve shown you your past… the past that has made you you.”

“NO!” Muichiro cried. “Nii-san! Save him PLEASE SAVE HIM! HE’S BLEEDING SO MUCH!!! NII-SAN!!!! NO!!!!”

“ENMU YOU DISGUSTING BASTARD!” Shinobu cried with such anger that she felt it tear her throat. Enmu’s laughter echoed about the train in response. She tried to inch forward, but she was now hanging on for dear life. “Please,” she prayed, “Please Muichiro, just hang in there!”

The train rattled violently as it crossed the bridge, the wind cutting sharper now, howling through the gaps between the beams. Shinobu struggled to remain upright as the gusts continued to wash over her life powerful waves of wind, forcing her to cling to the roof to avoid being thrown off. Her wide eyes locked onto Muichiro, whose body now swayed…. He could no longer stand on his own, and was thrown against the roof of the train.

His body did not react. Muichiro was no longer conscious, his body now passively slid down the sloped side of the train’s roof…

Shinobu’s heart dropped.

“No!” she screamed, pushing herself forward, only to be hit again by the brutal wind, her body betraying her in the moment she needed it most.

Muichiro’s body plummeted through the night air, his form limp and helpless as it tumbled down toward the rushing darkness below. Shinobu’s heart seized as she watched, her voice lost to the roar of the wind. She reached out desperately, her legs too heavy to move, her body too weak to act. The bridge below seemed to stretch forever, like an endless fall into oblivion.

“Muichiro!” she screamed, her voice swallowed by the storm of wind and steel. Her limbs refused her commands, exhaustion and panic clawing at her as the nightmare unfolded in slow motion. The world tilted; everything felt distant, unreachable, as Muichiro's unconscious form disappeared from her sight.

Then, a shadow flickered in the corner of her vision.

A swift, black silhouette shot past, cutting through the wind with unnatural grace—a puppet, sleek and birdlike. The Karasu II dove with precision, and caught hold of Muichiro in the nick of time!

Shinobu's breath hitched, her chest tight with a mix of relief and disbelief. The puppet swiftly flew back up, and settled on the train platform with his arms securing the boy’s limp body in place.

Shinobu could not rise to her feet, her body trembling from the effort, the wind no longer feeling as cruel against her skin. Her heart hammered in her chest, the panic still gripping her as she struggled to process what had just happened. But before she could react further, two familiar figures landed beside her on the roof of the train.

“Sasori-san...” she whispered, her voice weak with relief as she looked up to see him standing there. His presence brought an unspoken reassurance, but her eyes caught the blood still seeping from his abdomen, the wound from earlier having only grown worse. She had seen it happen, watched as he took the injury without flinching, and yet here he stood, his focus as sharp as ever.

Sasori's face was cold, devoid of any outward emotion, but the flicker of tension in his jaw betrayed the pain he was in. Behind him, Kanae landed with the grace of a whisper, her eyes immediately locking onto Shinobu with warmth and concern.

“You did well,” Kanae said softly, kneeling beside her younger sister and gently resting a hand on her shoulder. “I am so proud of you.”

Shinobu’s breath caught in her throat, as she leaned into the comfort of Kanae’s presence. 

“Rest now, Shinobu,” Kanae continued, her voice steady, through her eyes flickered with the faint worry she always hid so well. “You’ve done more than enough. We'll take care of it from here.”

With that, Kanae turned to Sasori, whose sharp eyes never left the horizon, scanning for the next threat.

“Oh my, you made it,” came Enmu’s voice, as a tumor rose from the roof of the train, forming the shape of his body. “But now that you two are here, who is protecting the civilians on the train? It was your pesky attacks that prevented me from eating them earlier. Now that you both are here…”

Enmu’s voice trailed off. Sasori gave him a knowing smirk.

“W-what did you do?” Enmu asked as his form rapidly crumbled. 

“By fusing with the train, and attacking the passengers,” Kanae shot, “all you did was make yourself a bigger target.”

"It was a fast-acting neurotoxin that paralyzed you,” Sasori explained. “And I mixed it with Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid, so that you wouldn’t realize you’ve been poisoned, until it was too late. That part was the Hashira’s idea.”

“This way,” Kanae added with a note of triumph in her otherwise gentle voice, “you’ll die without being able to derail this train, or causing any harm to the passengers.”

All along the train, Enmu’s demonic flesh began to melt, and leak out of the box cars as it began to disintegrate in the night, when suddenly, the Kinuta’s senses picked something up.

“That sly dog,” Sasori said, a wolfish grin spreading on his face, “He’s trying to cut away his excess flesh before the poison can fully take him! Hah!”

Sasori about-faced, and shot forward, ignoring both the pain in his stomach, and Kanae’s pleas for him to wait.

Enmu was at the caboose, back in his original body, which he had salvaged from the least damaged cells of his formerly massive body. He crawled away, weakened and naked, when the arms of the Black Ant II grabbed him, and yanked him into it’s abdomen!

Puppet Master Jutsu, Secret Black Move: Iron Maiden…

The limbs of Karasu II danced in the air, poisoned blades protruding from them, before they entered through the slits in the black ant’s stomach, paralyzing Enmu there…

***

“Sasori-san!” The Kocho sisters called out in unison when they met him again on top of a the caboose's roof, (which was more level, and thankfully easier to stand on). The unconscious Muichiro was gingerly transferred from Karasu’s arms, to Kanae’s, as she let him down. “You saved him,” Shinobu breathed with immense relief and disbelief. “Sasori-san, thank you…”

The movement of the train along it’s tracks filled the silence of Sasori’s lack of an answer. “I have captured the demon Enmu for myself,” He said, holding out a scroll, and sealing the Black Ant within it. (A spectacle which still amazed both Kocho sisters as they watched.) “Soon I will be able to turn him into a puppet, and then I will have his blood demon art for myself.”

Shinobu and Kanae caught their breath.

“Even with that wound your frightening Sasori-san,” Kanae muttered. But her voice still carried immense relief. They had won…

The boxcar’s speed suddenly lurched to a slower crawl. “AHH!” The Kocho sisters cried in unison as they were thrown forward. Sasori staggered backwards, clutching his wound with his hand as he grunted in pain.

“Oh no! We’ve been separated from the train!” Kanae cried, as she turned around. The caboose was coming to a gradual halt, as the Mugen train chugged on ahead of them. 

The boxcar rolled to a stop, sitting still on the tracks.

“Someone intended to separate us from the rest of the passengers,” Shinobu whispered. “But who?”

The culprit now revealed himself, leaping up from the couplers below, and the eyes of the Kocho sisters, and Sasori as well; followed the figure as he landed on the edge of the boxcar in a squatting position, his eyes staring past the sisters, and directly at Sasori.

Written in them were the Kanji: Upper moon three.