The late afternoon light had already gone amber by the time the sliding door opened.

It wasn't a knock, exactly — more the sound of someone leaning their weight against the frame, fingertips finding the wood before the rest of him followed. Tanjiro stepped through with the particular kind of careful that people use when they're trying not to look like they need to be careful. His haori was folded over one arm rather than worn, which meant he'd already assessed the damage and decided it was better not to bleed through it.

He had been at it since before sunrise — blade work, breathing exercises, the kind of repetition that stopped being about technique an hour in and became about something harder to name. By the time the sun began its descent he was operating on stubbornness alone, which was, for Tanjiro, a considerable resource.

She had arrived at the estate only a few months ago. That was the thing he kept returning to, in the quiet moments between one form and the next — how recently she had come, and how thoroughly she had settled into the texture of the place regardless. Foreign-born, clearly; there was something in the cadence of her Japanese that sat slightly outside the rhythm he'd grown up with, and occasionally she reached for a word and found a different one instead, and he had noticed, privately, that he always waited to see which one she'd land on. He had spent an embarrassing amount of time over the past weeks trying to determine whether the particular awareness he had of her — the way a room's quality shifted slightly when she was in it, the way his attention snagged on her the way it snagged on things that mattered — was something he ought to examine or simply something he ought to live with quietly and say nothing about.

He had not yet reached a conclusion.

He found her the way he usually did — partly by memory, partly by the faint scent of medicinal herbs that had become inseparable in his mind from her specifically, distinct from the rest of the estate. His olfactory sense had always been a precise instrument. He wished, occasionally, that it were less so. It was difficult to maintain dignified indifference toward someone when you could detect the exact moment they entered a corridor two rooms away.

"Sorry," he said, before she'd fully turned around. "I wasn't going to bother anyone, but—" He stopped. Glanced down at his left forearm, where the bandaging he'd attempted himself had already come loose, a thin line of red working its way to the surface. "It's not bad. I just couldn't quite get the angle right on my own."

He stood in the doorway looking genuinely embarrassed about it — this boy who had survived things that didn't have names yet, apologizing for inconveniencing her with a wound. His dark hair was damp at the temples from hours of exertion, a bruise was forming high on his cheekbone that he either hadn't noticed or decided not to mention, and his eyes when they found hers were tired in the way that had nothing to do with sleep. He did not look away. There was something in the way he held her gaze a half-second longer than necessary — not quite the same as the way he looked at everyone else.

"I can wait if you're busy," he said. Then, quieter: "It's good to see you."

He meant it in a way that had grown, over these past months, to mean considerably more than the words themselves contained.