FIC: of things past and present (Gintama, 1/1)
Title: of things past and present (1/1)
Fandom: Gintama
Words: 5,838
Summary When a pair of jaded, financially strapped assassins returned to their drab little town a decade after the war, they hardly expected to find anything or anyone worth their interest. Little did they know- (or: I wanted to write a Yorozuya Takasugi-chan AU and raised myself another challenge of making it not-crack.)
Characters: Takasugi, Matako, Bansai. (Bansai's POV)
Warning:[Spoiler (click to open)]non-canonical character death
A/N: This fic is partially inspired by the amazing Ask Takasugi and her eloquent partner-in-crime Ask Bansai.
To leave one's hometown a young and ambitious man and return to it penniless ten years after was not, shall we say, the most ideal of all circumstances. Time was hard, and it was harder still for men whose trade depends on the excesses of the wealthy and powerful. Sex and assasination were the most timeless industry in all of galaxies, but it is evident from the job market that only one of these two will survive. Sadly, it wasn't mine. Don't get me wrong-I know I have little to envy from those whose livelihood depends on borrowed lust. Matako used to work her gunslinger skills for one such house, fending off troublesome visitors and guarding the women from the dangers of the night whenever they traveled. It was a small operation run by women and with profits shared as fair as could be managed, but even so it was not a happy workplace. When we met at a tavern outside Venus, Matako was on her way to becoming overly familiar with the liquor, and it was fortunate that she was able to pull herself together, because the loss of her deadly sense of accuracy and that steady hand to alcohol would be too tragic a waste.
The loss Earth suffered in the war against the Amanto, on the other hand-it was inevitable. A logical and much deserved outcome, if I must say so myself. Matako would object to my lack of allegiance for our shared planet, but any assasin worth his certificate would be able to see the poor sense displayed by the samurai, for what chance would a sword have against the overpowering technology possessed by their enemy?To have one's side lose so soundly in war was terrible advertisement for Earthlings assassins of all skills, and soon we found our business dwindling. Six months after meeting Matako, six months of shared Monday night beers complaining about our work, we decided we might as well try our luck back home. No doubt it was a less exciting place, full of defeated eyes and drab colors, but it was a break from the aimless sojourn we have applied ourselves to. Perhaps, by returning to where we started we might discover some new way of living.
-
Matako and I had planned to share a lodging between us. We had barely enough to cover two months of rent at those run-down inn types, but we have completely forgotten the archaic social customs of this damned town. Disapproving frowns and sardonic looks were tossed our way frequently as we traveled from one prospective lodging to another, a man and a woman in foreign clothes and not a wedding ring between them. It wasn't hard to see what they were thinking: "You? Siblings? Yeah, right." In retrospect, it was an ill-thought cover story as she and I looked and sounded nothing alike. In my defense, though she was not in fact my sister by blood, I'd been accustomed to thinking of her as a sibling. It seemed a sensible course when befriending a young woman who would casually change clothes and walk around in her underwear while in the same room as myself, a friend of only three months history between us, with nary a thought. Thinking of her in a proper platonic way prevented unfortunate situations such as nosebleeding and having the barrel of a gun, held by a skilled gunslinger, on one's forehead.
It was nearing dusk when we found ourselves sitting at the foot of the steps of a dilapidated inn with two backpacks, when the owner, impatient to see us leave his premise, shouted from the window, "if you wanted a place to nyan-nyan around like young immoral things, go to Kabuki-cho instead!" And off we went.
The average rent at Kabuki-cho were far cheaper, but they came with dodgy neighbors. We could easily defend ourselves against most small-time bandits and drunks loitering this seedy district, but if we were to work as professional assassins it would be best to have a home to rest in without fear of panty thieves. The sky was darkening, our stomachs were growling and our legs were tired. Exhausted, we agreed to set aside our problem for the moment and carried ourselves to a teahouse to get some dinner. That was when we met Otose-san, who overheard our grief and offered a solution.
"Oh, are you two looking for a place to stay? There's a room upstairs, if you want. You have to share it with that guy, though." And here her smile took a wicked turn, as if realizing the brilliance of her suggestion.
"That guy?" I asked. That guy sounded like the way you would refer to a bad housemate, the kind who left dirty plates in the sink and clogged up the washing machine with damp laundry.
"He's a useless slob who never paid the rent on time." The fondness in her voice was palpable. "He should be upstairs at the moment. Let's have you meet each other."
-
That guy turned out to be a samurai named Takasugi Shinsuke. I have heard of him, briefly, anecdotes passed between those who survived the ghastly war. The fearsome leader of the Kihetai army, invincible until a vicious battle cost him an eye and a friend. They said he was never the same, after.
When we met outside the teahouse, just as he was returning from somewhere, I must admit to being surprised. From the stories, I pictured a tall, imposing, statuesque man, and was quite surprised to see that he was rather short and slight. He must have endured various height-related jokes over the years, the way he glared daggers upon noticing my considerably taller build. Perhaps I should be more concerned about the fact, seeing as he was carrying a blood-soaked sword with one hand. But the fact that he carried a rooster with the other appeared to be the more interesting question.
"Whose rooster is that?" asked Otose-san, who appeared oddly unconcerned about the sword. "You can't just steal people's pet for dinner."
"Who's going to eat rooster for dinner?" Takasugi said. "If I were to steal a rooster I'd steal a fat one, and I would have it beheaded outside, rather than causing a mess in the kitchen." He glared at the hapless rooster, who flapped his wings vigorously, probably having understood the word 'beheaded' and fearing for his life.
"This is Peto-Peto-chan. Peto-peto-chan went missing yesterday. I tracked him to a yakuza den."
"A yakuza den," Matako repeated in her best skeptical tone, often employed to chastise people trying to swindle a free beer out of her.
"They mistook him for Queen Victoria, the shogun's rooster," Takasugi further explained in a curiously flat, displeased expression. I began to realize it was his default expression.
"The shogun's rooster," I repeated, as perplexed as Matako was.
"Yes, the shogun has a rooster. He has a whole zoo, in fact. For his nephew. Waste of taxpayer money, it truly is. He should be beheaded."
It surprised me to hear such slanderous remarks against Edo's puppet head of state. Should those words be heard by someone desiring monetary reward from the government, he could get carted off to jail. Then again, given the odd glint in his eye and the disturbing cackle that followed his commentary about the Shogun, I wasn't sure if he had enough presence of mind to consider a fine thing like self-preservation.
"And now," the samurai excused himself, "I must return Peto-Peto-chan to my client."
-
Against our better judgment, we decided to take the room, at least until we had gathered enough money to move to a better lodging.
For his part, Shinsuke (although he didn't seem like such a laid-back fellow, he instructed us to call him by his first name) seemed unruffled by the new arrangement. It looked like he barely noticed there had been two addditions to his living space. He still talked to himself during lunch and dinner, stuff about artillery preparations and decoy trails and camouflage and please masturbate more discreetly, the entire camp can hear.
There were several pleasant surprises as well. For one, he cooked really well. I suppose it made sense, given that he lived on his own. He played shamisen quite skillfully, although the tunes always came at odd hours when a normal person should have been sound asleep, not sitting by the windowsill playing ancient instruments.
Somehow, we found ourselves roped into his little business as well. It was business in the flimsiest sense of the word, as he rarely got paid for his trouble. Sometimes it seemed as if he forgot to demand payment at all, and at times he would simply demand his clients to recite the Bakufu is rotten the Bakufu is rotten the Bakufu is rotten a hundred times and then he would be pleased to write off their supposed payment.
What did he do for his business, you ask? He did all sorts of odd jobs for all sorts of people. Children who lost their pets. Old men who lost their wigs. Widows. Grandmas. Old army friends. It was a business model with little sense, given his insatiable appetite for expressing morbid scenarios involving the Bakufu.
"Don't worry, your husband may have cheated on you but if you report his joui activities to the Bakufu, they'd have his head on a stake in no time at all."
"Don't worry, your little hamster will be fine, unless it was trapped under the wheels of a Bakufu patrol car."
"Don't worry, you'll get that money back, but you'll probably lose it to the government swindlers' tax schemes."
Then invariably, he would giggle into the uncomfortable quiet, forcing us to smooth the situation.
"I'm sorry," we would say, "he is not feeling so well today, had too much to drink yesterday."
-
In the next few weeks, we alternated between feeble attempts to look for jobs and helping our temporary housemate execute his various missions. We rescued cats from roofs, painted the sides of buildings ("we should paint them red with the blood of Bakufu officials," Shinsuke announced once, to mine and Matako's alarm), threatened a few crooks and a few snot-nosed bullies, saved a boy from being eaten alive by an Amanto prince's pet, and entertained a few bad-tempered Shinsengumi swordsmen.
There were little point to these jobs. They did not change lives or alter the course of history in any significant manner. Whatever value there was to be found in these pedestrian tasks were mostly sentimental and temporary. Fortune and misfortune were parts of an ever changing wheel. The lady would soon find herself under different kinds of debts; the young boy will meet bigger bullies and bigger temptations to defend his family's honor, and Matako and I were left off knowing nothing about our perplexing housemate, except to wonder at how a man of such legendary repute and ability would choose to make a living doing such silly, trivial, sometimes downright idiotic activities.
There were times where even I wondered: was this man truly the legendary Kihetai commander? Identity could be easily assumed and discarded after the war. Despite the show with the bloody sword, steel gleaming in defiance of the sword edict, he had rarely ever used the weapon to kill. The blood in it wasn't even real. It was red paint, the same he'd used to write the banner advertising his Yorozuya Takasugi-chan agency. We found the empty tins in the garage.
Most often, he relied on his threatening presence and the very obvious way he wasn't put back together right to intimidate those small-time crooks. And there was the odd silliness. The way he'd make us play UNO with him, doing endless rounds until he squeezed a win at least once. The way he could draw the whole map of Edo as if it was a military battleground, with every government building neatly marked with Xs, but always got lost on his way to the public bathroom. The way he could recite the lost languages of Edo but spoke Engrish with the kind of awful that would make anyone's ears bleed, even for something as simple as 'would it offend you if I were to fart here?'
So who was to say he was the real Takasugi Shinsuke?
But if he wasn't, I would be left with no logical explanation for the infuriatingly convenient and lucky ways he found people willing to hide him in their barn or their roofs or their palanquins whenever he found himself in a tight chase. I have seen these helpers of his, all around Edo. Ragged ronins who lit up upon seeing him, all gratefulness and devotion, willing to do absolutely anything. The way Shinsuke would thank them by scolding them for their past faults, 'You, pimple-face who once burned our rice and kept the battalion starving for three days while we trekked the damn mountains. What kind of idiot burned rice, anyway?' (I resisted the temptation to point out that he did, three days ago, when he left the kitchen to strum out a tune and fell asleep in the living room instead.) "Three hundred squats, now!"
Matako and I frequently wondered what we were doing, following this man around and helping him at the cost of our dignity. Assassins were, after all, a prideful a lot, I am unashamed to say. She pointed out that we needed him to share the rent, but the truth was, with the little freelance assignments we'd gotten here and there, we possessed enough to move to a better place. Matako couldn't stop complaining to me about Takasugi's peculiarities, but she did it in the same manner she liked to complain about the amount of fats in her favorite coconut ice cream. I suppose we weren't ready to admit to the strange truth that we liked this most unusual creature after all.
Along came the moon princess.
-
The moon princess was the name he gave her, a moniker taken from a long-forgotten lore of our land. It might sound overly extravagant saddled to a girl barely fourteen. Girl? More like gigantic rice basket, complained Matako bitterly.
I suppose you could parse from our encounter with the moon princess three cautionary tales. The first was brought by our client, a baldie who claimed a Yakuza gang had kidnapped his daughter. A perfectly sound and upsetting scenario in most cases, were it not for the peculiar details. You see, this man and his daughter were Yato, and the girl, Kagura, had been trained to excel in martial arts since no later than her fourth birthday. A yakuza gang would have no chance overtaking her. Shinsuke said as much bluntly.
"It would be natural for a young girl who's been abandoned half her life by her father, who'd just recently lost a mother, to enthusiastically follow a job prospect that comes with promises of luxury. Given her standard of living, it wouldn't be hard to make her salivate. So, don't worry, it is likely she is working for them as a hired muscle. She'd be treated well. Probably got a bit of fame as well. You can see her in ten years when she's owned ten yakuza syndicates and a heart black as tar."
That was the first cautionary tale: don't leave your family for eight years without once checking up on your daughter, especially when your wife is dying. That one was for Baldie.
The second cautionary tale was for our lunatic samurai, who had seen the girl's round face and wide eyes, her bluntness and childlike expressions, and miscalculated both her strength and the fact that he was less of a cold bastard than his own estimation. The result was a duel that need not have taken place if we had explained ourselves properly. It ended with three broken ribs on his part and a fractured wrist on her end. Had he not withdrawn his sword at a critical second, the both of them would die: she by the blade severing her carotid artery; he at the hands of her father. So it was fortunate, the way it ended, given how it began, but fortunate wasn't a word that came to our mind when he began hacking off blood-tinted coughs. We had to carry him to the hospital. Matako was crying. The last time I saw her cry was, well, never. She was very much plastered the night her good friend from the whorehouse died, but crying wasn't Matako's thing. Somewhere in this, lay the third cautionary tale-hers and mine.
Shinsuke was right as rain a week later, and it was all worth it, he declared, because now we had a new television courtesy of the reward and compensation money the client gave us, and the television had a satelite and a sharper resolution.
"I can't see any difference," Matako complained, hopping between channels impatiently.
But something between us changed that day.
-
Somehow, I had become the person to go to for impromptu confessions
There was Matako in the rain, where I'd picked her up from the grocery store, telling me that she lied before. Her brother hadn't died, he just wasn't the same after the war. He couldn't remember her face. She used to be his closest confidante. I patted her shoulder and asked if she'd like more tubs of coconut ice cream, because I had money to splurge that day and treats were easier than words. I didn't ask the why of the story, because it seemed fairly obvious to us, though we couldn't quite make sense of it.
And then there was Shinsuke, fiddling with the television trying to get reception from outside the Milky-Way, randomly muttering about living someone else's life, and how he wouldn't have been stuck in this if that bloody idiot hadn't gone and died. I didn't ask who or why.
As for mine, I wasn't much into pouring my heart out, though I suppose I did my own kind of confessing. The perk of staying with someone like Shinsuke was the ability to talk about my other job openly, the way I couldn't with most city people. Things like:
'"Today's job was messy, I nearly missed the artery, nicked a tendon instead. The target screamed like he'd been bloody murdered, though I suppose since he was about to, the reaction wasn't unreasonable. Laundry bills would be a grief."
Well, that kind of thing. In the old days when the urge to complain rose I would visit a tavern and sit next to the fellow likeliest to forget everything in the morning and talked, but half of them still jumped and ran away screaming halfway through the conversation anyway. It was refreshing, to be able to talk about one's job openly and received reasonable (if somewhat critical) responses.
"That' s why you should have slit his throat from the start." He must have been difficult to impress as a commander.
The television buzzed with the sound of broken static, whites and greys and then, finally, colors.
-
New year's eve brought us the case of the tragic terrorist.
It began peacefully. We had a large bounty after a successful mission and cooked ourselves a hotpot in the living room. Shinsuke had gone to buy meat and vegetables, a whole cart of them. He chopped the meat with his sword and I could see Matako trying, with commendable effort, to stop herself from complaining about food hygiene. The soup had just boiled when a shadow appeared at the entrance, followed by a loud crash and there, bleeding at the porch, was Shinsuke's old comrade Katsura Kotaro.
He used to visit Shinsuke with his spherical pocket bombs, cajoling him to join the splintered, defanged joui movement. Then the visits ceased, and rumors from the grapevine said he'd been shacking up with the pretty lady from the soba house and got mellow. So it was a surprise to see him in such a sorry state. We dragged him in and patched him up, Shinsuke muttering obscene words about the Bakufu every five seconds. He was about to depart with his sword (still smelling like onion chives) when Matako threatened to shoot his kneecaps.
"Sit down and eat your hotpot. We'll hunt the party responsible after Sleeping Beauty wakes up."
Surprisingly, he obeyed. It wasn't the gun, or even Matako. He looked at her and yet past her, as if someone had once done and said this much to him, kept him from his worst impulses, and he remembered.
I refrained from asking Matako what she meant by 'we'. It was a relief seeing him put down the sword and pick up his chopsticks, because it was one thing to avenge your friend, and another to go on a suicidal rampage, and if the possiblity of ending up in jail or on the gallows should be so dire, it should be fair to hope that the deed was worth it. And Matako was right to stop him, after all, for it wasn't Bakufu's men who had their run at Katsura. Instead, it was the bunch of pirates who had been making the news lately, as the man informed us upon returning to consciousness. I have brushed paths with those pirates, though they left little mark in my memory. Their music was dull, chaotic and predictable, hardly deserving of any lasting thought.
Shinsuke, on the other hand, was startled upon hearing the name, and his averted gaze spoke of guilt uncharacteristic of him. Katsura caught it as well. "You made a deal with them," he said, quiet but fiery.
"They wanted to destroy the three underground bunkers where Bakufu kept their explosives," Takasugi said, sounding a little defensive. "When strategic interests aligned, I've never hesitated striking deals even with the unscrupulous."
"And look where that got us!"
For a moment, Takasugi moved as if to hit his friend, before pulling back, his eyes lit up with focus. "What do we do, then?"
-
While Edo's citizens gathered to watch splashes of firework over the temple, the four of us scurried across town to track the Harusame's cargo vessel and foiled the plan to blow up Edo's space terminal, our hotpot cold and forgotten. Matako didn't seem to mind. In fact, she looked pretty delighted fo pass the year dueling pirates on a spaceship about to be blown to smithereens.
A woman like that, I'd been told, came once in a thousand years.
Shinsuke and that war buddy of his stayed in the vessel until the last possible second like the two madmen they were, hurling fond insults at each other, something about bad hair day and being too short his enemies couldn't see him. It was like witnessing a twisted form of schoolmates' reunion, with decapitated Amanto heads flying all around them.
Later, back at Yorozuya headquarters, while Shinsuke lay unconscious from the sedatives Matako gave him. I complimented Katsura Kotaro's impresive swordsmanship and expressed my interest to a private duel in the future. He gave me an odd look.
"A friendly sparring, sure, but I'd rather not hurt the few crazy ones willing to stick by him, not after Gi-after everything."
"Wouldn't that make you crazy as well?" I asked, deflecting the temptation to demand Shinsuke's history out of this man.
"Not crazy, Katsura." Then we heard the distant sound of approaching sirens, and the fugitive made his exit.
-
The following three months passed in relatively mundane peace. Matako got herself a fling and a one-night-stand, which ended awkwardly when Shinsuke popped by their room in the middle of the night asking if they'd like to play UNO or participate in the 4am cross-country drill.
(We'd never held 4am cross-country drills.)
We did, however, had some teatime on the roof when the sky was unusually clear and awash with stars.
"I have a friend who's got a thing for space," he said.
"Ah," Matako said, nearly choking on her tea. Shinsuke didn't volunteer facts about his past everyday, and never in such casual fashion. "Where's he now?"
"In space."
Our ex-client, a busker with a talent for ridiculous wordplays, found stardom, and named me her personal songwriter. It meant producing pop junk, mostly, but pop junk took our finances from 'barely there' to 'afloat and comfortable,' which meant being able to refit our windows with grills (although we left one where Katsura liked to make his unwelcome entries) and retiled the roofs.
Shinsuke found himself being invited for tea once, twice, and the third time we ended up helping the Shinsengumi due to 'aligned interests, and nothing more,' as Shinsuke emphasized. The fourth time, they had him choose either tea or arrest, and he was about to opt for a night in the Bakufu cell when I accepted on behalf of the three of us. And so we went and got ourselves awful cups of tea, and listened to the gorilla commander's endless sonnets about his crush, who happened to be our first client. After the third pint of sake, Shinsuke loosened enough to order three plates of gyoza in an attempt to bankrupt the police officers.
We drew the line at mayo-infused tea, however.
-
In hindsight, however, those peaceful and pleasurable months were our most dangerous enemy. Like a sweet paralytic, it lowered our guard, blinding us from noticing the shifts of habit, the dangerous signs, as Shinsuke's late-night walks stretched from one hour to two, as he'd snuck out at night after dinner more and more often. I hadn't thought much about it. After all, summer nights were warm and sticky and beautiful, and best spent outdoors.
Matako noticed. In hindsight, I saw it in her eyes. The wondering.
And then the vice-commander paid us a visit. Said that our boss (boss?) had been seen hanging out with one of their own. Former own. If the circumstances had been different, if Shinsuke had been here listening to Hijikata Toshiro complaining about a rat in his department, he probably would've found it amusing. But this was no laughing matter.
Shinsuke didn't return home that night, or the night after. There was a letter in the kitchen, telling us to sever all connections with him and please keep Otose-san safe although her cigarettes would probably kill her first.
There was no apology, that bastard, but at least that meant the letter was his.
-
But I apologize for getting ahead of the story. Wasn't fair to you all, wasn't I? Much like he hadn't been fair with us. But here, let me rectify that. Let me take you to the beginning.
There was a boy. A clever, ambitious, lonely boy who longed for somewhere to belong. His name was Kamatarou Itou, a rising star in the Shinsengumi. But he didn't rise fast enough to his liking, and in his discontent he hatched a foolish plan and struck one match sure to burn him.
Perhaps, in the back of his mind, he knew.
-
There was another clever, ambitious, lonely boy, who also longed for somewhere to belong. He's had it, and lost it, and whenever the ghosts came knocking he could never turn them away. I found him by the bridge, smoking his pipe, ready to let all those ghosts in.
"Meeting someone?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, simply.
"Perhaps you should reconsider that meeting." I rested my wrist on the hilt of my sword, though my limbs were heavy with the knowledge that I couldn't, wouldn't, follow through.
Shinsuke laughed. "Oh, a duel, now?" But he continued to regard only the stream of water in front of us.
"I would rather not. If we were to fight each other right now, I would be defeated."
He seemed surprised by my admission of inferiority, but a swordman who couldn't objectively assess his ability against that of his opponent had no use for his skills at all.
"So why throw your life away? Are you turning patriotic now?" His one good eye was focused on me, silent and mocking.
"No," I said. "This whole country can burn." I tried to think of something else to say, something profound, but in the end-
"You still owe me three thousand yen for the new rice cooker, and you owe Matako a new set of those doki-doki panties you mistook for tea towels, and we both still have to pay granny the repair cost for the door we broke trying to run that cat thief with a stolen motorcycle. So, before you go and kill yourself in some pointless way, settle all that."
He blinked. I continued with more sympathy, recalling what I heard him say before. "You told me you don't want to live someone else's life, so don't. Go and find your own."
And then I left him, because one couldn't save a man who didn't want to be saved, and I'd done my part.
-
The next morning the Shinsengumi received an anonymous letter warning an assassination plan awaiting them at an inn called Ikedaya, where the top brass were supposed to be going for the weekend. Along with the letter was a direction to pick up one of their "good-for-nothing" in front of their pavilion.
Waiting there was Itou, who looked as though he'd been through some grueling (if quick) duel and I supposed an earful of lecture, threats, or other, given the readiness by which he admitted to his plot. There wasn't much mercy for traitors among these lot, but behind closed doors, who knows? Even wolves had their own sense of solidarity.
"Broken bones, shallow wounds, mostly used the back of his sword," Hijikata recited dispassionately. "Mercy from the devil, eh?" He was reading Itou's statement distractedly when his eyebrows knitted up in obvious dismay. "You might want to find your boss soon. Got a feeling he's off doing something dumb."
-
This is how it went:
The Shinsengumi had been chomping at Harusame's drug trade for years, causing enough damage to the business to warrant elimination. They spotted an opportunity in Itou's dissastisfaction and instructed him to find an easy ally and scapegoat for their plot. If the man should be so infamous for hating everything Bakufu, all the better.
This is what we should've noticed:
Shinsuke still hated himself for being fooled into helping Harusame before.
This is what we always knew:
He was also, on too frequent occassions, incredibly stupid, especially for someone who once called himself a strategist.
-
Then again-that was why he had us, wasn't it? Yorozuya Takasugi-chan? Dumb name, that, but I'd grown fond of it. I'd grown fond of us.
-
Matako and I borrowed one of Shinsengumi's patrol cars, since they had so many of those and surely we'd earned a right to it, Shinsuke having just handed their own (son child comrade) traitor to them. The vice-commander kept yelling at us from the intercom. Such good spirits in the morning, really, these hardworking officers.
Flippancy aside, we were worried. About what those ghosts wanted Shinsuke to do. What he thought those ghosts wanted him to do. Because while it was true that the dead always got the last word, it was equally true that the living often got it wrong.
And as we raced to beat the clock, it occurred to me that we might have been running out of time for a while, the three of us. People whose job necessitated constant flirting with death should never have been so cavalier with their time.
-
Time let us in after all, but only barely, a tiny sliver of a crack we pushed through. Shinsuke would never admit to it but he was outnumbered and if it wasn't for Matako's bullseye shot, he would not have been able to spot, let alone parry the lethal strike aimed at his back.
As it was, the pirates' spaceship (which had crashed into the side of a mercifully empty road) was in a pretty bad place by the time the fighting ceased, and we weren't faring much better. Matako was grazed on the shoulder and Shinsuke looked eight kinds of misshappen, although he was scowling and glaring, which meant he'd probably be alive.
From the distance, I could hear Hijikata swearing at all the property damage and shouting something or other about dumb vigilante action and taxpayer money, as though he and his people hadn't been jumping in on the action as well.
"Bakufu dogs," Shinsuke muttered under his breath.
Perhaps if we pledged to drink mayo-infused tea for breakfast every morning, the vice-commander would be more inclined to wave off our charges.
-
I supposed we should be grateful to have gotten the royalties from Otsuu's first album, after all.
We had to walk very slowly because of Shinsuke's injuries. Despite his protests, Matako had carried him, bridal style (my own left arm was terribly sprained, or so I told him) and set him down only after the familiar street came into view. The sky had turned a pale shade of peach by then. Gran was waiting at the front, even though it could not have been any later than five in the morning. Her eyes had spots of grey under them, hours burned outside in the night where she should have been resting. The still-burning cigarette was her only company.
"Saving the country?" she said in affectionate mockery as we walked past her and up the steps, Shinsuke glaring when I offered my arm for support. "Wasn't like you." She sounded quite pleased.
Shinsuke snorted. "Country?" He slid the door open. "What country? I have no country."
But he left the door open for us and I could have sworn I saw him smiling. Call it the trick of the morning light.
We came in and shut the door and made our breakfast (burnt rice and leftovers) while he told us the story about the late Sakata Gintoki.
-
fin
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Fandom: Gintama
Words: 5,838
Summary When a pair of jaded, financially strapped assassins returned to their drab little town a decade after the war, they hardly expected to find anything or anyone worth their interest. Little did they know- (or: I wanted to write a Yorozuya Takasugi-chan AU and raised myself another challenge of making it not-crack.)
Characters: Takasugi, Matako, Bansai. (Bansai's POV)
Warning:[Spoiler (click to open)]non-canonical character death
A/N: This fic is partially inspired by the amazing Ask Takasugi and her eloquent partner-in-crime Ask Bansai.
To leave one's hometown a young and ambitious man and return to it penniless ten years after was not, shall we say, the most ideal of all circumstances. Time was hard, and it was harder still for men whose trade depends on the excesses of the wealthy and powerful. Sex and assasination were the most timeless industry in all of galaxies, but it is evident from the job market that only one of these two will survive. Sadly, it wasn't mine. Don't get me wrong-I know I have little to envy from those whose livelihood depends on borrowed lust. Matako used to work her gunslinger skills for one such house, fending off troublesome visitors and guarding the women from the dangers of the night whenever they traveled. It was a small operation run by women and with profits shared as fair as could be managed, but even so it was not a happy workplace. When we met at a tavern outside Venus, Matako was on her way to becoming overly familiar with the liquor, and it was fortunate that she was able to pull herself together, because the loss of her deadly sense of accuracy and that steady hand to alcohol would be too tragic a waste.
The loss Earth suffered in the war against the Amanto, on the other hand-it was inevitable. A logical and much deserved outcome, if I must say so myself. Matako would object to my lack of allegiance for our shared planet, but any assasin worth his certificate would be able to see the poor sense displayed by the samurai, for what chance would a sword have against the overpowering technology possessed by their enemy?To have one's side lose so soundly in war was terrible advertisement for Earthlings assassins of all skills, and soon we found our business dwindling. Six months after meeting Matako, six months of shared Monday night beers complaining about our work, we decided we might as well try our luck back home. No doubt it was a less exciting place, full of defeated eyes and drab colors, but it was a break from the aimless sojourn we have applied ourselves to. Perhaps, by returning to where we started we might discover some new way of living.
-
Matako and I had planned to share a lodging between us. We had barely enough to cover two months of rent at those run-down inn types, but we have completely forgotten the archaic social customs of this damned town. Disapproving frowns and sardonic looks were tossed our way frequently as we traveled from one prospective lodging to another, a man and a woman in foreign clothes and not a wedding ring between them. It wasn't hard to see what they were thinking: "You? Siblings? Yeah, right." In retrospect, it was an ill-thought cover story as she and I looked and sounded nothing alike. In my defense, though she was not in fact my sister by blood, I'd been accustomed to thinking of her as a sibling. It seemed a sensible course when befriending a young woman who would casually change clothes and walk around in her underwear while in the same room as myself, a friend of only three months history between us, with nary a thought. Thinking of her in a proper platonic way prevented unfortunate situations such as nosebleeding and having the barrel of a gun, held by a skilled gunslinger, on one's forehead.
It was nearing dusk when we found ourselves sitting at the foot of the steps of a dilapidated inn with two backpacks, when the owner, impatient to see us leave his premise, shouted from the window, "if you wanted a place to nyan-nyan around like young immoral things, go to Kabuki-cho instead!" And off we went.
The average rent at Kabuki-cho were far cheaper, but they came with dodgy neighbors. We could easily defend ourselves against most small-time bandits and drunks loitering this seedy district, but if we were to work as professional assassins it would be best to have a home to rest in without fear of panty thieves. The sky was darkening, our stomachs were growling and our legs were tired. Exhausted, we agreed to set aside our problem for the moment and carried ourselves to a teahouse to get some dinner. That was when we met Otose-san, who overheard our grief and offered a solution.
"Oh, are you two looking for a place to stay? There's a room upstairs, if you want. You have to share it with that guy, though." And here her smile took a wicked turn, as if realizing the brilliance of her suggestion.
"That guy?" I asked. That guy sounded like the way you would refer to a bad housemate, the kind who left dirty plates in the sink and clogged up the washing machine with damp laundry.
"He's a useless slob who never paid the rent on time." The fondness in her voice was palpable. "He should be upstairs at the moment. Let's have you meet each other."
-
That guy turned out to be a samurai named Takasugi Shinsuke. I have heard of him, briefly, anecdotes passed between those who survived the ghastly war. The fearsome leader of the Kihetai army, invincible until a vicious battle cost him an eye and a friend. They said he was never the same, after.
When we met outside the teahouse, just as he was returning from somewhere, I must admit to being surprised. From the stories, I pictured a tall, imposing, statuesque man, and was quite surprised to see that he was rather short and slight. He must have endured various height-related jokes over the years, the way he glared daggers upon noticing my considerably taller build. Perhaps I should be more concerned about the fact, seeing as he was carrying a blood-soaked sword with one hand. But the fact that he carried a rooster with the other appeared to be the more interesting question.
"Whose rooster is that?" asked Otose-san, who appeared oddly unconcerned about the sword. "You can't just steal people's pet for dinner."
"Who's going to eat rooster for dinner?" Takasugi said. "If I were to steal a rooster I'd steal a fat one, and I would have it beheaded outside, rather than causing a mess in the kitchen." He glared at the hapless rooster, who flapped his wings vigorously, probably having understood the word 'beheaded' and fearing for his life.
"This is Peto-Peto-chan. Peto-peto-chan went missing yesterday. I tracked him to a yakuza den."
"A yakuza den," Matako repeated in her best skeptical tone, often employed to chastise people trying to swindle a free beer out of her.
"They mistook him for Queen Victoria, the shogun's rooster," Takasugi further explained in a curiously flat, displeased expression. I began to realize it was his default expression.
"The shogun's rooster," I repeated, as perplexed as Matako was.
"Yes, the shogun has a rooster. He has a whole zoo, in fact. For his nephew. Waste of taxpayer money, it truly is. He should be beheaded."
It surprised me to hear such slanderous remarks against Edo's puppet head of state. Should those words be heard by someone desiring monetary reward from the government, he could get carted off to jail. Then again, given the odd glint in his eye and the disturbing cackle that followed his commentary about the Shogun, I wasn't sure if he had enough presence of mind to consider a fine thing like self-preservation.
"And now," the samurai excused himself, "I must return Peto-Peto-chan to my client."
-
Against our better judgment, we decided to take the room, at least until we had gathered enough money to move to a better lodging.
For his part, Shinsuke (although he didn't seem like such a laid-back fellow, he instructed us to call him by his first name) seemed unruffled by the new arrangement. It looked like he barely noticed there had been two addditions to his living space. He still talked to himself during lunch and dinner, stuff about artillery preparations and decoy trails and camouflage and please masturbate more discreetly, the entire camp can hear.
There were several pleasant surprises as well. For one, he cooked really well. I suppose it made sense, given that he lived on his own. He played shamisen quite skillfully, although the tunes always came at odd hours when a normal person should have been sound asleep, not sitting by the windowsill playing ancient instruments.
Somehow, we found ourselves roped into his little business as well. It was business in the flimsiest sense of the word, as he rarely got paid for his trouble. Sometimes it seemed as if he forgot to demand payment at all, and at times he would simply demand his clients to recite the Bakufu is rotten the Bakufu is rotten the Bakufu is rotten a hundred times and then he would be pleased to write off their supposed payment.
What did he do for his business, you ask? He did all sorts of odd jobs for all sorts of people. Children who lost their pets. Old men who lost their wigs. Widows. Grandmas. Old army friends. It was a business model with little sense, given his insatiable appetite for expressing morbid scenarios involving the Bakufu.
"Don't worry, your husband may have cheated on you but if you report his joui activities to the Bakufu, they'd have his head on a stake in no time at all."
"Don't worry, your little hamster will be fine, unless it was trapped under the wheels of a Bakufu patrol car."
"Don't worry, you'll get that money back, but you'll probably lose it to the government swindlers' tax schemes."
Then invariably, he would giggle into the uncomfortable quiet, forcing us to smooth the situation.
"I'm sorry," we would say, "he is not feeling so well today, had too much to drink yesterday."
-
In the next few weeks, we alternated between feeble attempts to look for jobs and helping our temporary housemate execute his various missions. We rescued cats from roofs, painted the sides of buildings ("we should paint them red with the blood of Bakufu officials," Shinsuke announced once, to mine and Matako's alarm), threatened a few crooks and a few snot-nosed bullies, saved a boy from being eaten alive by an Amanto prince's pet, and entertained a few bad-tempered Shinsengumi swordsmen.
There were little point to these jobs. They did not change lives or alter the course of history in any significant manner. Whatever value there was to be found in these pedestrian tasks were mostly sentimental and temporary. Fortune and misfortune were parts of an ever changing wheel. The lady would soon find herself under different kinds of debts; the young boy will meet bigger bullies and bigger temptations to defend his family's honor, and Matako and I were left off knowing nothing about our perplexing housemate, except to wonder at how a man of such legendary repute and ability would choose to make a living doing such silly, trivial, sometimes downright idiotic activities.
There were times where even I wondered: was this man truly the legendary Kihetai commander? Identity could be easily assumed and discarded after the war. Despite the show with the bloody sword, steel gleaming in defiance of the sword edict, he had rarely ever used the weapon to kill. The blood in it wasn't even real. It was red paint, the same he'd used to write the banner advertising his Yorozuya Takasugi-chan agency. We found the empty tins in the garage.
Most often, he relied on his threatening presence and the very obvious way he wasn't put back together right to intimidate those small-time crooks. And there was the odd silliness. The way he'd make us play UNO with him, doing endless rounds until he squeezed a win at least once. The way he could draw the whole map of Edo as if it was a military battleground, with every government building neatly marked with Xs, but always got lost on his way to the public bathroom. The way he could recite the lost languages of Edo but spoke Engrish with the kind of awful that would make anyone's ears bleed, even for something as simple as 'would it offend you if I were to fart here?'
So who was to say he was the real Takasugi Shinsuke?
But if he wasn't, I would be left with no logical explanation for the infuriatingly convenient and lucky ways he found people willing to hide him in their barn or their roofs or their palanquins whenever he found himself in a tight chase. I have seen these helpers of his, all around Edo. Ragged ronins who lit up upon seeing him, all gratefulness and devotion, willing to do absolutely anything. The way Shinsuke would thank them by scolding them for their past faults, 'You, pimple-face who once burned our rice and kept the battalion starving for three days while we trekked the damn mountains. What kind of idiot burned rice, anyway?' (I resisted the temptation to point out that he did, three days ago, when he left the kitchen to strum out a tune and fell asleep in the living room instead.) "Three hundred squats, now!"
Matako and I frequently wondered what we were doing, following this man around and helping him at the cost of our dignity. Assassins were, after all, a prideful a lot, I am unashamed to say. She pointed out that we needed him to share the rent, but the truth was, with the little freelance assignments we'd gotten here and there, we possessed enough to move to a better place. Matako couldn't stop complaining to me about Takasugi's peculiarities, but she did it in the same manner she liked to complain about the amount of fats in her favorite coconut ice cream. I suppose we weren't ready to admit to the strange truth that we liked this most unusual creature after all.
Along came the moon princess.
-
The moon princess was the name he gave her, a moniker taken from a long-forgotten lore of our land. It might sound overly extravagant saddled to a girl barely fourteen. Girl? More like gigantic rice basket, complained Matako bitterly.
I suppose you could parse from our encounter with the moon princess three cautionary tales. The first was brought by our client, a baldie who claimed a Yakuza gang had kidnapped his daughter. A perfectly sound and upsetting scenario in most cases, were it not for the peculiar details. You see, this man and his daughter were Yato, and the girl, Kagura, had been trained to excel in martial arts since no later than her fourth birthday. A yakuza gang would have no chance overtaking her. Shinsuke said as much bluntly.
"It would be natural for a young girl who's been abandoned half her life by her father, who'd just recently lost a mother, to enthusiastically follow a job prospect that comes with promises of luxury. Given her standard of living, it wouldn't be hard to make her salivate. So, don't worry, it is likely she is working for them as a hired muscle. She'd be treated well. Probably got a bit of fame as well. You can see her in ten years when she's owned ten yakuza syndicates and a heart black as tar."
That was the first cautionary tale: don't leave your family for eight years without once checking up on your daughter, especially when your wife is dying. That one was for Baldie.
The second cautionary tale was for our lunatic samurai, who had seen the girl's round face and wide eyes, her bluntness and childlike expressions, and miscalculated both her strength and the fact that he was less of a cold bastard than his own estimation. The result was a duel that need not have taken place if we had explained ourselves properly. It ended with three broken ribs on his part and a fractured wrist on her end. Had he not withdrawn his sword at a critical second, the both of them would die: she by the blade severing her carotid artery; he at the hands of her father. So it was fortunate, the way it ended, given how it began, but fortunate wasn't a word that came to our mind when he began hacking off blood-tinted coughs. We had to carry him to the hospital. Matako was crying. The last time I saw her cry was, well, never. She was very much plastered the night her good friend from the whorehouse died, but crying wasn't Matako's thing. Somewhere in this, lay the third cautionary tale-hers and mine.
Shinsuke was right as rain a week later, and it was all worth it, he declared, because now we had a new television courtesy of the reward and compensation money the client gave us, and the television had a satelite and a sharper resolution.
"I can't see any difference," Matako complained, hopping between channels impatiently.
But something between us changed that day.
-
Somehow, I had become the person to go to for impromptu confessions
There was Matako in the rain, where I'd picked her up from the grocery store, telling me that she lied before. Her brother hadn't died, he just wasn't the same after the war. He couldn't remember her face. She used to be his closest confidante. I patted her shoulder and asked if she'd like more tubs of coconut ice cream, because I had money to splurge that day and treats were easier than words. I didn't ask the why of the story, because it seemed fairly obvious to us, though we couldn't quite make sense of it.
And then there was Shinsuke, fiddling with the television trying to get reception from outside the Milky-Way, randomly muttering about living someone else's life, and how he wouldn't have been stuck in this if that bloody idiot hadn't gone and died. I didn't ask who or why.
As for mine, I wasn't much into pouring my heart out, though I suppose I did my own kind of confessing. The perk of staying with someone like Shinsuke was the ability to talk about my other job openly, the way I couldn't with most city people. Things like:
'"Today's job was messy, I nearly missed the artery, nicked a tendon instead. The target screamed like he'd been bloody murdered, though I suppose since he was about to, the reaction wasn't unreasonable. Laundry bills would be a grief."
Well, that kind of thing. In the old days when the urge to complain rose I would visit a tavern and sit next to the fellow likeliest to forget everything in the morning and talked, but half of them still jumped and ran away screaming halfway through the conversation anyway. It was refreshing, to be able to talk about one's job openly and received reasonable (if somewhat critical) responses.
"That' s why you should have slit his throat from the start." He must have been difficult to impress as a commander.
The television buzzed with the sound of broken static, whites and greys and then, finally, colors.
-
New year's eve brought us the case of the tragic terrorist.
It began peacefully. We had a large bounty after a successful mission and cooked ourselves a hotpot in the living room. Shinsuke had gone to buy meat and vegetables, a whole cart of them. He chopped the meat with his sword and I could see Matako trying, with commendable effort, to stop herself from complaining about food hygiene. The soup had just boiled when a shadow appeared at the entrance, followed by a loud crash and there, bleeding at the porch, was Shinsuke's old comrade Katsura Kotaro.
He used to visit Shinsuke with his spherical pocket bombs, cajoling him to join the splintered, defanged joui movement. Then the visits ceased, and rumors from the grapevine said he'd been shacking up with the pretty lady from the soba house and got mellow. So it was a surprise to see him in such a sorry state. We dragged him in and patched him up, Shinsuke muttering obscene words about the Bakufu every five seconds. He was about to depart with his sword (still smelling like onion chives) when Matako threatened to shoot his kneecaps.
"Sit down and eat your hotpot. We'll hunt the party responsible after Sleeping Beauty wakes up."
Surprisingly, he obeyed. It wasn't the gun, or even Matako. He looked at her and yet past her, as if someone had once done and said this much to him, kept him from his worst impulses, and he remembered.
I refrained from asking Matako what she meant by 'we'. It was a relief seeing him put down the sword and pick up his chopsticks, because it was one thing to avenge your friend, and another to go on a suicidal rampage, and if the possiblity of ending up in jail or on the gallows should be so dire, it should be fair to hope that the deed was worth it. And Matako was right to stop him, after all, for it wasn't Bakufu's men who had their run at Katsura. Instead, it was the bunch of pirates who had been making the news lately, as the man informed us upon returning to consciousness. I have brushed paths with those pirates, though they left little mark in my memory. Their music was dull, chaotic and predictable, hardly deserving of any lasting thought.
Shinsuke, on the other hand, was startled upon hearing the name, and his averted gaze spoke of guilt uncharacteristic of him. Katsura caught it as well. "You made a deal with them," he said, quiet but fiery.
"They wanted to destroy the three underground bunkers where Bakufu kept their explosives," Takasugi said, sounding a little defensive. "When strategic interests aligned, I've never hesitated striking deals even with the unscrupulous."
"And look where that got us!"
For a moment, Takasugi moved as if to hit his friend, before pulling back, his eyes lit up with focus. "What do we do, then?"
-
While Edo's citizens gathered to watch splashes of firework over the temple, the four of us scurried across town to track the Harusame's cargo vessel and foiled the plan to blow up Edo's space terminal, our hotpot cold and forgotten. Matako didn't seem to mind. In fact, she looked pretty delighted fo pass the year dueling pirates on a spaceship about to be blown to smithereens.
A woman like that, I'd been told, came once in a thousand years.
Shinsuke and that war buddy of his stayed in the vessel until the last possible second like the two madmen they were, hurling fond insults at each other, something about bad hair day and being too short his enemies couldn't see him. It was like witnessing a twisted form of schoolmates' reunion, with decapitated Amanto heads flying all around them.
Later, back at Yorozuya headquarters, while Shinsuke lay unconscious from the sedatives Matako gave him. I complimented Katsura Kotaro's impresive swordsmanship and expressed my interest to a private duel in the future. He gave me an odd look.
"A friendly sparring, sure, but I'd rather not hurt the few crazy ones willing to stick by him, not after Gi-after everything."
"Wouldn't that make you crazy as well?" I asked, deflecting the temptation to demand Shinsuke's history out of this man.
"Not crazy, Katsura." Then we heard the distant sound of approaching sirens, and the fugitive made his exit.
-
The following three months passed in relatively mundane peace. Matako got herself a fling and a one-night-stand, which ended awkwardly when Shinsuke popped by their room in the middle of the night asking if they'd like to play UNO or participate in the 4am cross-country drill.
(We'd never held 4am cross-country drills.)
We did, however, had some teatime on the roof when the sky was unusually clear and awash with stars.
"I have a friend who's got a thing for space," he said.
"Ah," Matako said, nearly choking on her tea. Shinsuke didn't volunteer facts about his past everyday, and never in such casual fashion. "Where's he now?"
"In space."
Our ex-client, a busker with a talent for ridiculous wordplays, found stardom, and named me her personal songwriter. It meant producing pop junk, mostly, but pop junk took our finances from 'barely there' to 'afloat and comfortable,' which meant being able to refit our windows with grills (although we left one where Katsura liked to make his unwelcome entries) and retiled the roofs.
Shinsuke found himself being invited for tea once, twice, and the third time we ended up helping the Shinsengumi due to 'aligned interests, and nothing more,' as Shinsuke emphasized. The fourth time, they had him choose either tea or arrest, and he was about to opt for a night in the Bakufu cell when I accepted on behalf of the three of us. And so we went and got ourselves awful cups of tea, and listened to the gorilla commander's endless sonnets about his crush, who happened to be our first client. After the third pint of sake, Shinsuke loosened enough to order three plates of gyoza in an attempt to bankrupt the police officers.
We drew the line at mayo-infused tea, however.
-
In hindsight, however, those peaceful and pleasurable months were our most dangerous enemy. Like a sweet paralytic, it lowered our guard, blinding us from noticing the shifts of habit, the dangerous signs, as Shinsuke's late-night walks stretched from one hour to two, as he'd snuck out at night after dinner more and more often. I hadn't thought much about it. After all, summer nights were warm and sticky and beautiful, and best spent outdoors.
Matako noticed. In hindsight, I saw it in her eyes. The wondering.
And then the vice-commander paid us a visit. Said that our boss (boss?) had been seen hanging out with one of their own. Former own. If the circumstances had been different, if Shinsuke had been here listening to Hijikata Toshiro complaining about a rat in his department, he probably would've found it amusing. But this was no laughing matter.
Shinsuke didn't return home that night, or the night after. There was a letter in the kitchen, telling us to sever all connections with him and please keep Otose-san safe although her cigarettes would probably kill her first.
There was no apology, that bastard, but at least that meant the letter was his.
-
But I apologize for getting ahead of the story. Wasn't fair to you all, wasn't I? Much like he hadn't been fair with us. But here, let me rectify that. Let me take you to the beginning.
There was a boy. A clever, ambitious, lonely boy who longed for somewhere to belong. His name was Kamatarou Itou, a rising star in the Shinsengumi. But he didn't rise fast enough to his liking, and in his discontent he hatched a foolish plan and struck one match sure to burn him.
Perhaps, in the back of his mind, he knew.
-
There was another clever, ambitious, lonely boy, who also longed for somewhere to belong. He's had it, and lost it, and whenever the ghosts came knocking he could never turn them away. I found him by the bridge, smoking his pipe, ready to let all those ghosts in.
"Meeting someone?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, simply.
"Perhaps you should reconsider that meeting." I rested my wrist on the hilt of my sword, though my limbs were heavy with the knowledge that I couldn't, wouldn't, follow through.
Shinsuke laughed. "Oh, a duel, now?" But he continued to regard only the stream of water in front of us.
"I would rather not. If we were to fight each other right now, I would be defeated."
He seemed surprised by my admission of inferiority, but a swordman who couldn't objectively assess his ability against that of his opponent had no use for his skills at all.
"So why throw your life away? Are you turning patriotic now?" His one good eye was focused on me, silent and mocking.
"No," I said. "This whole country can burn." I tried to think of something else to say, something profound, but in the end-
"You still owe me three thousand yen for the new rice cooker, and you owe Matako a new set of those doki-doki panties you mistook for tea towels, and we both still have to pay granny the repair cost for the door we broke trying to run that cat thief with a stolen motorcycle. So, before you go and kill yourself in some pointless way, settle all that."
He blinked. I continued with more sympathy, recalling what I heard him say before. "You told me you don't want to live someone else's life, so don't. Go and find your own."
And then I left him, because one couldn't save a man who didn't want to be saved, and I'd done my part.
-
The next morning the Shinsengumi received an anonymous letter warning an assassination plan awaiting them at an inn called Ikedaya, where the top brass were supposed to be going for the weekend. Along with the letter was a direction to pick up one of their "good-for-nothing" in front of their pavilion.
Waiting there was Itou, who looked as though he'd been through some grueling (if quick) duel and I supposed an earful of lecture, threats, or other, given the readiness by which he admitted to his plot. There wasn't much mercy for traitors among these lot, but behind closed doors, who knows? Even wolves had their own sense of solidarity.
"Broken bones, shallow wounds, mostly used the back of his sword," Hijikata recited dispassionately. "Mercy from the devil, eh?" He was reading Itou's statement distractedly when his eyebrows knitted up in obvious dismay. "You might want to find your boss soon. Got a feeling he's off doing something dumb."
-
This is how it went:
The Shinsengumi had been chomping at Harusame's drug trade for years, causing enough damage to the business to warrant elimination. They spotted an opportunity in Itou's dissastisfaction and instructed him to find an easy ally and scapegoat for their plot. If the man should be so infamous for hating everything Bakufu, all the better.
This is what we should've noticed:
Shinsuke still hated himself for being fooled into helping Harusame before.
This is what we always knew:
He was also, on too frequent occassions, incredibly stupid, especially for someone who once called himself a strategist.
-
Then again-that was why he had us, wasn't it? Yorozuya Takasugi-chan? Dumb name, that, but I'd grown fond of it. I'd grown fond of us.
-
Matako and I borrowed one of Shinsengumi's patrol cars, since they had so many of those and surely we'd earned a right to it, Shinsuke having just handed their own (son child comrade) traitor to them. The vice-commander kept yelling at us from the intercom. Such good spirits in the morning, really, these hardworking officers.
Flippancy aside, we were worried. About what those ghosts wanted Shinsuke to do. What he thought those ghosts wanted him to do. Because while it was true that the dead always got the last word, it was equally true that the living often got it wrong.
And as we raced to beat the clock, it occurred to me that we might have been running out of time for a while, the three of us. People whose job necessitated constant flirting with death should never have been so cavalier with their time.
-
Time let us in after all, but only barely, a tiny sliver of a crack we pushed through. Shinsuke would never admit to it but he was outnumbered and if it wasn't for Matako's bullseye shot, he would not have been able to spot, let alone parry the lethal strike aimed at his back.
As it was, the pirates' spaceship (which had crashed into the side of a mercifully empty road) was in a pretty bad place by the time the fighting ceased, and we weren't faring much better. Matako was grazed on the shoulder and Shinsuke looked eight kinds of misshappen, although he was scowling and glaring, which meant he'd probably be alive.
From the distance, I could hear Hijikata swearing at all the property damage and shouting something or other about dumb vigilante action and taxpayer money, as though he and his people hadn't been jumping in on the action as well.
"Bakufu dogs," Shinsuke muttered under his breath.
Perhaps if we pledged to drink mayo-infused tea for breakfast every morning, the vice-commander would be more inclined to wave off our charges.
-
I supposed we should be grateful to have gotten the royalties from Otsuu's first album, after all.
We had to walk very slowly because of Shinsuke's injuries. Despite his protests, Matako had carried him, bridal style (my own left arm was terribly sprained, or so I told him) and set him down only after the familiar street came into view. The sky had turned a pale shade of peach by then. Gran was waiting at the front, even though it could not have been any later than five in the morning. Her eyes had spots of grey under them, hours burned outside in the night where she should have been resting. The still-burning cigarette was her only company.
"Saving the country?" she said in affectionate mockery as we walked past her and up the steps, Shinsuke glaring when I offered my arm for support. "Wasn't like you." She sounded quite pleased.
Shinsuke snorted. "Country?" He slid the door open. "What country? I have no country."
But he left the door open for us and I could have sworn I saw him smiling. Call it the trick of the morning light.
We came in and shut the door and made our breakfast (burnt rice and leftovers) while he told us the story about the late Sakata Gintoki.
-
fin
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