#Centuries-old newlyweds lmao

[nightlight-stardust-and-rain]

But what if Koyuki became a ghost, like, mere hours after her death? She was so very determined to not let her fiancé suffer another awful loss that she just noped out of heaven. She has a wonderful boy to marry and cherish, thank you very much!

Sadly she gets to him after Muzan does. At which point Hakuji is busy being driven insane by the hunger of a newly-born demon. Good thing that there's precisely sixty-seven freshly killed bodies near him!

Point is. Koyuki being with him as soon as he regains his senses (she had the very good idea to stay away from Muzan, he gave her a very bad feeling). Obviously he doesn't remember anything but I think having a living breathing reminder of his past with him would make him remember real fast. So he would still go by Hakuji I think.

Koyuki learns how to make herself solid enough to touch things after a few months or a few years, and Hakuji and her spend a very long time not letting go of each other's hands. Once she is able to touch things, being a ghost becomes much less sad. She can stay with Hakuji forever, there is literally no downside to that!

Koyuki being a ghost is also much less angsty than it sounds because now she's functionally invincible : she can't die of old age, blows and blades go through her, and she can't be poisoned since she can't eat. Really, not being able to eat is the saddest thing about being dead, but she figures that since Hakuji is unable to eat human food now it's only fair that she can't either! The vows say in sickness and in health after all.

Speaking of. They don't actually stay engaged that long. Of course, the wedding of a ghost and a demon sounds like a joke, but once Hakuji masters shapeshifting enough to make himself look human it's not that hard to find a priest who'd marry them (really the hardest part is to convince the priest to hold the ceremony when the sun's down). So they've actually been married for a long time when canon comes in!

Koyuki thinks that Hakuji's pink hair is soooo cute. She's also aware that his hair color and the snowflake of his demon art come from her, and she's super touched. She kind of regrets not being able to change clothes, she'd like to wear things blue like Hakuji's eyes!

Obviously having his memories since almost the beginning means that Hakuji faces a certain dilemna when it comes to eating. Koyuki helps him with finding a solution, and after a while they figure that Hakuji can go the scavenger route - find bodies that have been freshly killed so he doesn't need to kill - or eat horrible people, which is still murder but eh you do what you gotta do.

Koyuki and Hakuji, free from human restrictions, travel the whole country several times over. They don't fear illness or the elements anymore - they can play in the rain or in the snow and climb freezing mountains and neither of them needs to breathe so they can dive into the oceans mingling with the fish for hours. For Koyuki, who's always been so restricted by her frail body, this is nothing short of a dream come true. And she gets to spend eternity with her husband!

Koyuki manages to avoid Muzan's awareness by virtue of being able to be invisible and having no presence to speak of. Hakuji can feel her spirit like he can everyone's, but she has no smell and no mass and she is dead so if she goes invisible no one can know she's here except Hakuji.

Hakuji and Koyuki don't try to break the curse Hakuji is under because they're not aware it can be broken. They don't like Muzan at all but they don't have any other choice.... Of course Hakuji once tried to tell Koyuki that she wasn't bound to his master, so she could leave if she wanted to, but he didn't even get to finish his sentence before getting yelled at. At some point they learn of Tamayo, though, and, well.... It's a very interesting thing to learn.

Also! Koyuki being dead means that she's absolutely sturdy enough to learn Soryuu! I think she would want to learn to honor her father and also because Hakuji finds so much joy in it and she wants to share that with him. She's not much for fighting, and they both try to avoid demon slayers because those guys are just doing their job and they feel bad if Hakuji has to kill one of them (and anyway Hakuji is actually pretty low-key as far as demons go, what with being mostly a scavenger... And they move around a lot so they're pretty untraceable - all in all Hakuji is pretty much never specifically hunted by demon slayers).

They spend much of their time holding hands because even after centuries they're still ridiculously in love, and they may in fact have some separation anxiety (you can't blame them, the last time they were separated ended very badly for both of them).

They go see the fireworks every year and visit Keizo's grave often to tell him about their travels :)

Also! Just thought about this but I remember reading somewhere that Akaza's demon marks were actually related to his thief tattoos in the sense that they were marks of his crimes. But like. Are we talking murdered-67-swordsmen kind of crimes or killed-and-ate-people kind of crimes? Because if it's the latter, then it means that the marks developed over time (weird to think about) but also that in this au he might not have those marks at all since he kills. WAY LESS people than he presumably does in canon. Like he's mostly a scavenger which still falls under "eating humans" but....... Idk the point is that in this au Hakuji might have way less or different demon markings.

[moonmeg]

me and my little cousin are big fans of your comics and now she is studying what society was like in the 1600s and she got curious about how caleb and Philip reacted to women on the islands having the same rights as men (it's her favorite topic and she asked me to ask you because it is difficult for her to speak English)

greetings❤️💛

Thank you very much!!

I am no historian. I'm a history-enthusiast but the 1500s are really not my favorite century and I barely informed myself on them (not as well as on 18th or 20th century at least) but I'll just say what I think here.

Firstly we'd have to figure out what Caleb's and Philip's perception of women is in order to form a theory on how they might've viewed equal rights for both.

As they were raised in Puritan beliefs and society it can be assumed the boys had an idea of women being less valuable than men and their purposes included being a wife, have a bunch of children to take care of and be responsible for the household. In Puritan society women also partook in working the fields and could function as breadwinners of the family, though latter was not exactly average, but overall the image of the ideal woman to Puritans was: obedient (to men), humble, modest.

It's something that has been preached to the brothers since childhood and it's highly unlikely their mother was a modern disney "i-don't-take-shit-from-no-man" girlboss for them to have ever seen something different than that lmao.

When you've been taught something since childhood and never in your age of development changed that environment it's difficult to break those beliefs.

Sadly canon doesn't let us know how old Caleb was when he first met Evelyn but judging by the ponytail and the way Philip still looks like he could be 10 years old at best in the Hollow Mind portrait, I'm guessing he's something between 13 and 15. That's a crucial age in your development - you're starting out puberty or are already in the middle of it - and we all should know how easily influenced an adolescent mind can be. If Caleb was introduced to the image of a girl that doesn't align with what he's been taught in that age, it's likely that the moment he started living in the BI wasn't as big a surprise or shock to him as you'd think. He'd probably still be taken aback a little but I can see him adapt to it quite quickly. Not to say his ideas of what a woman is and how men are superior etc. just vanished the moment he met Evelyn (it likely took months if not years for Eve to even crack his perception of women and their roles) but if he and Evelyn met again and again over the course of years before running away to the BI together, it's likely by the time he came to the Isles' he was already very weakened in those ideas.

I remember I had a comic written out that tackled this concept of newlywed Caleb and Evelyn/Cat having different images of what a marriage is and Eve/Cat putting him in his place, telling him that just because she's his wife now it doesn't mean she's his possession, his maid or is going to be submissive to him. It's an idea I threw away because... time and it didn't exactly contribute to the story so... eh.

Philip was unlikely to have abandoned those ideas (completely) but it's kinda difficult to say in his case hdbdjdnnd