The Great Deception (Demon Slayer Muzan Kibutsuji x Reader)

10

"Yaaaay! Daddy's House!!" Your daughter's eyes lit up and she broke into a run.

"Pumpkin, wait!" You went to run towards her, never quite sure what was happening in the house of a million steps. Muzan, however, grabbed your shoulder and stopped you. He knew it was safe inside the house, not only having baby-proofed it so that falling off the stairs was impossible, but by having already briefed those inside and waiting for him. "It's fine, then... Go ahead."

Muzan smiled a rare smile-- one that was soft and happy. Feeling this way was unique to him in that it only really occurred with those he felt were family. Family, to him, was rare. When he was human, something he loathed to remember, his biological family had marked him as dead and abandoned him within months of his diagnosis. In the thousand years since, he had tried having a family only three other times before his current wife, you and his daughter. The first was only about one hundred years after his turn. There was a beautiful girl in a village not far from where he resided that sung so perfectly that he thought his heart would resonate at the very sound of it.

She had originally been interested in him-- Muzan was beautiful and he knew it. They married quickly, as was customary for the time, and the first few years went by mostly uneventfully. There were lies, of course, such as why he wasn't eating the food she would make. He felt, however, that the mistake was made in not creating the appropriate boundaries. "Don't go in the hut to the west", he had told her. He had even reminded her every so often. But humans were curious creatures, he remembered, and saying not to go somewhere was equivalent to saying she had to go there. Just shy of their tenth year together, she followed him to his hut. As she gazed upon the several human bodies, hung up by their feet, her eyes went wide and any semblance of love drained out of her as if he had pulled a crucial log from a dam.

She was consumed swiftly, with much disappointment. This relationship prevented him from even attempting another for a few hundred years. The next family he found was in a demon nest. Although he was technically the father of all demons, his early progeny had spread out enough and created enough of their kind for him to no longer feel any type of connection to the newer ones. In this nest lived a father and a son, both having turned. Muzan had thought, due to his naïveté he assumed, that he might find better family in an organism which would better understand his needs.

It was slow to start. Muzan began by winning the trust of the son, through small gifts of food and good conversation. Perpetually stuck in a child's mind, it was easy enough for the Demon King which is what he thought of himself as. But things didn't quite go to plan.