Dead Lady Tamayo - Tumblr Posts
tamayo and the storm of time
yushiro x lady tamayo (demon slayer post-muzan’s death)
MANGA SPOILERS
He is sinking through a dream, a dream flushed with emotions. Images cascading in dozens behind his closed eyelids, like fireworks tracing burning images into his mind. He sees an infinitely-huge palace, he sees dead bodies, he sees splatters of blood.
His cheeks are wet with tears, and his hands stained with the vivid red of blood. His heart is racing past the point of no return, deep, hot anger flooding his veins and dizzying his mind into a delirious state. Sadness pools beneath the lava of fury, the cold shards of despair and sorrow digging cruelly into his heart. Somewhere, at the back of his mind, he can see a woman clothed in an elegant kimono, her skin a delicate lily white, her face lit up with a benevolent smile.
He calls out her name, but she fades to black—it is only then he remembers she is dead.
—————
There are some things you never really forget.
Memories are like rocks. Some, with the passage of time, have years weathered at them. They are discarded; they are faded; they are nothing but a wisp of a long-lost dream. Time is the persistent lapping of seawater against stone; it never stops coming, never stops trying to wear them down and steal them away from their owner.
But others are different. Others, despite one’s best and most desperate attempts to offer them up to the hands of Time, still remain cruelly imprinted in one’s mind. Time fades to nothing in the face of these memories. They remain cruelly, brilliantly, remarkably vivid.
Some try to shove them deep down. Some have taken their lives in sacrifice to those memories. Some pray with tightly clenched hands and repeat them in words to their therapists.
Yushiro prefers to paint.
It’s a form of expression for him, as it is with many. On the surface level, it is therapeutic—to capture one’s thoughts and emotions within the net of their mind and drag it out to render it forever in vivid oils and brilliant acrylics. Freezing time within the confines of a canvas. To Yushiro, painting feels like he is reaching into his past, carving those moments forever in paint and colour. And within the mad rush of time and its infinite rampage to the future, painting for Yushiro captures and imprisons the essence of the past before time sweeps them all away and out of his reach. It gives him a rest point, somewhere in that painted little world where he can rest, undisturbed by time.
He remembers the early years after Muzan’s death. Those years where he was so wrecked, so broken by Lady Tamayo’s death. It wasn’t easy, dragging himself out of the deep canyon of madness and heartbreak. The ghost of Tamayo still clawed at his mind, whispering sweet nothings, planting aches into his heart, etching it in his soul over and over again with taunting sweetness, only to forcefully remind him that his lady was, in fact, dead.
He remembers his eyes stinging, tears spilling over and streaming down his cheeks. Days of locking himself up in dark rooms and mourning his lady. Days of mechanically cleaning the house he and Tamayo once shared, dusting and polishing everything just the way she liked it. Burying his face in her kimonos, trying to reincarnate her image through her scent on the clothing, crying his eyes out. Most demons couldn’t cry, as their eyes were always moist, but when Yushiro was transformed into a demon by Tamayo’s hand, he could cry—and he liked that, because it was proof he was special.
But after her death, he couldn’t see the point in being special. When she died, it seemed as if all meaning was leached from his eternal life. And when he reached that point in time, everything started to feel meaningless. Just day after day, century after century, a mindless ghost drifting in the swift oceans of time, an idiot who couldn’t do anything to save his one and only love, an idiot without any purpose.
It was Tanjiro, then, who suggested he should take up painting. “You should try painting, Yushiro,” the burgundy-haired boy had urged. “Or music, sculpture—any form of expression, really. It can help cope with the loss.”
Yushiro was dubious, then he picked up a brush, and began the path of an artist.
It wasn’t easy—he had no prior experience, but dedication and passion he had in leaps and bounds, and he remembers the first successful painting he managed to do. Oil on canvas—a portrait of Lady Tamayo. He had no reference, no muse, but the image of his lady was crystal clear in his mind, never to fade, and he remembers gazing at his painting, thinking wow, this looks so much like her.
He cried, then.
Because it felt like he could reincarnate another Tamayo, something to help soothe the lingering gap of her loss. Like he could reach into the canvas and relive his life with her again. It was like a shrine to her and his memories of her, little bits of canvas that could perhaps construct a lasting image of her he could never part with. That is painting, something so powerful it can freeze time forever. Infinite; the way his feelings are infinite, the way they persist in time’s eternal march, never withering away.
…God, he missed his lady.
He still does, now.
Missing someone is like a chord ringing out in music, layered on by texture and instrument and harmony. Like threads entwined together in a multitude of colours. Missing Tamayo is like a constant, throbbing ache scratching at his heart, running through his ventricles, hued with a quiet grief and a faint cry of anger, dyed with faded happiness over their time together. It is a palette of emotions, a colour of mourning, a sound of pain.
It’s when the chord of pain thrums out in his chest that Yushiro starts drawing. Taking out his paints and etching his emotions in colours and acrylics. And when his lady, the only one he’s ever loved, appears in a shroud of vibrant colours…
The paintbrush dances.
…Even if it’s only a painting, only a laughable replica on canvas, Yushiro feels himself slipping into his art, blindly grasping, helplessly searching—all for a world where his lady still lived.
Today, he searches again.
Yushiro has painted many pieces of Tamayo, the last reigning at piece number 1,012. Each one is a different commemoration to his love, each one is a blazing shock of Tamayo’s brilliance and light. Yushiro usually paints in bright colours, but today, he opens a bucket of muted blue.
Blocks of blue streaked across the canvas, grey undertones to highlight the depth of his love.
A plain beige coalescing into aqua.
His paintbrush jumps and turns along to the beats of his heart—never stopping, never ending.
Dancing to the waltz, tracing the curvature of Tamayo’s smile, shading the depth of her eyes, sketching delicate hands disappearing into waves of indigo silk.
Waves crash against each other according to the orchestration of Yushiro’s brush—a requiem of colour, a maestro of shade. Swishes of white capping the storm of moving water, forceful as time, unforgiving as time.
In his little dream world of paint and acrylic, Tamayo is standing in the eye of the storm, an elegant figure outlined in ocean and water, smiling even as chaos rage around her.
She is smiling, and she is laughing. Her eyes are so incredibly, beautifully violet; they thrum chords and melodies in Yushiro’s soul. Yushiro’s breath hitches as the paintbrush dances to the Tamayo in his heart, singing as notes cascade against each other.
Sliding down in arpeggios.
Before long, the last strokes flourish the painting, and the artist is hunched over, hair falling into his eyes as he pants, and tears bubble up at the shores of his eyes, spilling over in a single, mournful drop.
His heart is a storm and Tamayo is in the centre of it. The never changing central figure, even as the tsunamis and hurricanes of time rage and crash all around her.
And all these waves and water and storms are crying and screaming, howling in rage and pain, because the lady, his lady who was meant to control it is gone, purely a faded image in Yushiro’s mind. Dead, never to be reincarnated again, never to be present to calm the storm in his heart.
Yushiro cries and cries and cries-
—————
The following day, a notification of a new post in the Instagram art account @yushiro_yamamoto rings the phones of millions of people worldwide. The post is simple—just an image of a painting, and a caption.
Tamayo in the Storm of Time.