PROMPTS ⇌ 「 Gintama 」 Takasugi-Centric. ``The Last Snowflake & Two Days Later``
Once again in gargleblasted, there was a meme for NaNoWriMo, since we're all lazy assholes. I took prompts with the condition that each scene had to be set to a color and, naturally, the only ones I'm fond of involve Takasugi. Derp. Ironically, all of them are pre-canon! ...Well, Pre-Game anyway.
Winter in Kyoto and alizarin, requested by Xy.
The candle's wax drips on to the oak table. It hasn't been lacquered in years, and it the liquid runs like deep blood staining gout-locked joints, into a texture that seems like bark. If its oils let off a scent, he couldn't smell it anymore. All he can smell is war-blood... and gun-powder... and pipe-smoke. The lazy thrumming of a shamisen fills the as thick as that unknown aroma might, but only one of his ears is handicapped. The colloquial music is hardly enough to drown out the sound of footsteps crunching in the snow.
The Shinsengumi's reach doesn't extend this far. The bakufu dogs choking on their own collars can't get far enough off the leash to sink their bloody maws into his exposed, chilled skin.
In that long, cold season, he starts burning up inside more... and more... and more hate.
By the time there's an unfamiliar knock on his door cutting through the instrumental notes (the look behind the recently-acquainted Kawamaki Bansai's sunglasses gives him enough of a red-flagged warning), he has already lost the last strands of affection.
"Come in," he smiles more than he says.
He expected Katsura.
The man before him is hardly a war-ghost. He's too young for that, too wet behind the ears, too invested of his job and his superiors. It's that very commitment that Takasugi will use to slaughter him. Oh, he's heard about the country boy who chopped off his hair and left it at the gates of the city, stepping through the wrungs as a new man -- as a samurai. He's even heard about his formidable skills with the sword... but he doesn't have the experience on Takasugi. Not even The Slayer Kawakami, paranoid eyes hummingbird fluttering behind his glasses, has near the amount of bloodshed as Takasugi.
In war, you survived by the pint.
"Do they know you're here?" He asks in a voice that's as surprisingly smooth as the tea he pours into two cups. Hate may have been beaten into him by long nights of isolation (not all of which were snow-covered), but manners had not yet been beaten out, even to his own chagrin.
"No. Sougo and Kon--" Hijikata Toushiro, in his new gold-trimmed leathers, is off-kilter, and Takasugi quietly delights in it. "That is, Okita-San and Isao-San--"
"I know who you are referring to."
" -- Right. ...They just know I'm here on personal business."
The elder can't help but laugh, shrill and as frozen as the soil. "Hohhh? I am 'personal business', am I, Toushi?" He doesn't miss the way his company grimaces and tries to hide it in his teacup.
He hates him already.
Good.
"There have been a lot of rumors about you lately. About the old Jouishishi... about a resurrected Kiheitai."
A silence lulls. Takasugi feels no immediate need to respond; Hijikata feels no need to requestion. It's not an interrogation. It's not a man tied upsidedown with rub-'em-raw rope and dipped into a tank of scalding-hot water. He came here of his own free will, for whatever young-and-stupid-and-wreckless reason that Takasugi very much doubts even he knows.
Takasugi stands and crosses the room, and miliseconds of moving gives the path for Bansai to exit. Already, they move as a unit, the taller man clapping headphones over his ears and finding the carving to the door Takasugi's shadow had carved out.
Wax, sticky, clings to Takasugi's fingertip. He rips the roots from the table's surface, and returns to the kotatsu's breadth.
"Those demons we claimed to be back then..."
The flame's crackle lights up his jaw, his too-wide mouth, flickers on his teeth, reflects in crazed eyes.
It falls across Hijikata's neck like fresh blood without a wound, sinks too hot into his skin, cuts off his breathing as it burns, burns, burns.
"Our eyes are a so much more red now, Toushi," he laughs manically, and just before Hijikata's sword rips into Takasugi's chest, his hands are stopped as threads rip fresh cuts into his knuckles. Too late, he sees Bansai from the other side of the paper doors of the balcony.
He just now realizes he can see his breath in that tiny, cold room.
"Send Gintoki and Zura a message for me, naa?"
It's the only time Hijikata ever really thought he was going to die, and his life is spared for something as pathetic as a message.
"Tell them to rot with our comrades."
The message doesn't find its intended by Hijikata's word (instead, years later, on a ship in the sky with three men who are practically different people outside of this winter), and only Sougo asks why Hijikata returns from Kyoto smelling like spice and fear.
Joui4, various shades of green. Two happy moments and one that isn't. "Sins and seeds." Requested by Rabid.
i.
s e e d s
Ink splashes across Takasugi's left eye, brighter than the murky green of his own eyes, and he squints it out, grimacing up at the perpetraitor.
"A-aa, deepest apologies! I could not see where I was--"
"I'm gonna kill you, Zura!"
They are rowdy children, enthusiasm barely tethered back by a capable sensei. Katsura tries to clean his face of the frighteningly permanent ink and Takasugi fusses, making the job all the harder. Gintoki barely catches word of the bickering from where he lazes in the window, soaking in sunlight like a cat. The oldest child in the terakoya, he only sometimes asserts himself, and with Takasugi looking ridiculous is a good time to qualify within his "when I feel like it" category.
Everyone gets a hearty laugh at the stained Takasugi... for now.
"Oi, oi, Bakasugi, shut up already. He's trying to fix it."
"And he should, he's the one who did it!" His exaggerated movements make Katsura's fingers bonk right into his eye. "Ow! Idiot, watch what you're doing!"
Takasugi's father is a standard-bred warrior, and Katsura is from a rich family. He could get in a lot of trouble for everyone, but Katsura wants only friends despite his weirdness and would never bring it up.
Still, the lowest-born orphan among them is the one who's the most insulting.
"Relax already! How about this, we get you cleaned up and then bug Sensei to take us out for Taiyaki?"
They all know it's a plot for sugar and not real pacifism, but they all go along anyway.
Two days later, they shuffle through the ashes, finding only bones and bubbled fats. They could save their one school book alone, its green face charred in various places.
ii.
g r o w i n g
War is not what any of them expected.
Takasugi expected glory. Katsura expected smiles over campfires, leaning on a comrade's shoulder. Gintoki expected nothing.
They were all wrong. Still, there is happiness to be found in miniscule ways.
Takasugi finds rightness in yelling orders to his men, demon-streaking into enemy camps when they're unguarded, from the scarce information they receive. He is the leader of a hell-risen regime, his words the only ones that ring out in the silence of the night. He is in command, and he is tragically fit for it.
It is enough. The muscles of his cheeks learn new movements as he turns fierce, brooding grimaces into smirks. It is a coping mechanism, slowly self-beaten into him by repetition. When he shares it with Gintoki and Katsura, it is ignored.
Rightfully so.
Katsura leads them tactically, stabbing small knives into the heart of big red x's on maps, offering bowls of rice that are half the sizes any man is used to. The injured of body seek him for salves, the injured of mind seek him for kind words spoken in harsh vowels.
It is enough. It's such a pity he couldn't see his closest comrade beginning to schism. Once a week, he reads them passages from their deceased Sensei's book -- words that most suit the tragedy of a lost comrade, or the coming cold, winter winds, or of what an honor it would be to die in this place.
He doesn't notice when Gintoki stops paying attention and Takasugi just scoffs and walks away.
Gintoki, most of the time, feels like he's bitten off more than he can chew. He swings his sword and screams like a beast, losing all control on the battlefield. He's had the fewest lessons among the three, yet he is the most savage and, ultimately, the most in control. He doesn't care about how Takasugi mentally tallies his kills and compares them to his own, and he doesn't care about how Katsura mentally tallies his kills and frowns a little more at each growing number, each passing day.
Blood soaks so deeply into his clothing that his white clothes are permanently stained, lye and the closest river never enough to scrub them clean.
It is not enough. It will never be enough. He feels lost.
They all lay their heads down next to separated skulls. Two days later, they meet a man named Sakamoto Tatsuma, and the imminence of their choices begins to come clear.
"Let's take a walk," Takasugi says at a meeting one morning, glaring levelly at the newcomer. "Just the three of us."
To his relief, Katsura and Gintoki agree. To their relief, Takasugi is smiling a real smile as they walk alongside a river bank (the same one they drank from, the same one Gintoki uses to try and wash his filth out), talking of old times that involve ink and ice cream and lit-up paper laterns and origami lessons. To everyone's surprise, he unifies their hearts for a few, scant hours.
Two days later, blood runs down Takasugi's face in thick streams --
-- and he never once screamed.
iii.
b l o o m e d
Two days later, they find him swinging wildly on an old battlefield, blood streaming on one side of his face, tears streaming down the other, feet dug into the rows of corpses, and screaming until his lungs give out. The skies themselves cry, opening up in a heavy downpour, thunder rumbling out angrily when his throat finally quits.
There's no more need for the jokes about ink. The saturated bandages fall from his face the more he swings his sword at ghosts that aren't there, showing the deep, seeping wound that goes from the bridge of his nose to the rounded edge of his ear.
None of his comrades could ever figure out what was going on in his head, but it seems now they can peer right into it.
Gintoki thinks, irony tight in his throat: A Black Demon. He's only here because Katsura dragged him away from his guard post, saying things like Takasugi is no longer in the medical tent, and I am concerned for him, Gintoki, please follow me.
Now, not for the first time, he wishes he hadn't come.
Katsura is frozen still, paralyzed by coldness, not at the hands of the rains. He watches Takasugi collapse, fight a futile battle with his own tired body, stab his sword into the ground, and lift himself with it again.
Trembling, he rips bandages off angrily, tears the flag-coils from the hilt of his sword, and resumes swinging.
All of them are feverish with wanting.
"Why would you never look at me?! Why?!"
Katsura and Gintoki don't know who he's talking about, and they exchange nervous glances, uncertain of what to do or make of all this. He's not the first man to snap in their long war, no, but they never thought...
They leave him there to scream and cry and pound his fist angrily at the sky, collecting him only when he's spent himself too much to move anymore, sobbing uselessly into the mud.
Katsura bathes him, cleans his wound, tries to speak to him through the lull of warm waters and his in-and-out consciousness. Takasugi will have none of it, feels no effect to that kind-words-harsh-tones tactic the man employs on his men.
He says only one thing, with a smirk that has not been beaten into him nor that feels unnatural: "I feel better."
Katsura is startled still with coldness once again.
Two days later, Gintoki is carrying a mortally injured Katsura from the battlefield, throwing down his (their) resignation of a losing battle into anyone's shitty little face.
Takasugi is left alone with his demons -- all of them -- on the battlefield.
Not for the first time, he decides, as he wraps his own bandages.
x.
s i n s
They all should've known how it would turn out... but they started in such good soil.
Maybe it's distance from the ground in that airship that made them all say such hateful words.
Winter in Kyoto and alizarin, requested by Xy.
The candle's wax drips on to the oak table. It hasn't been lacquered in years, and it the liquid runs like deep blood staining gout-locked joints, into a texture that seems like bark. If its oils let off a scent, he couldn't smell it anymore. All he can smell is war-blood... and gun-powder... and pipe-smoke. The lazy thrumming of a shamisen fills the as thick as that unknown aroma might, but only one of his ears is handicapped. The colloquial music is hardly enough to drown out the sound of footsteps crunching in the snow.
The Shinsengumi's reach doesn't extend this far. The bakufu dogs choking on their own collars can't get far enough off the leash to sink their bloody maws into his exposed, chilled skin.
In that long, cold season, he starts burning up inside more... and more... and more hate.
By the time there's an unfamiliar knock on his door cutting through the instrumental notes (the look behind the recently-acquainted Kawamaki Bansai's sunglasses gives him enough of a red-flagged warning), he has already lost the last strands of affection.
"Come in," he smiles more than he says.
He expected Katsura.
The man before him is hardly a war-ghost. He's too young for that, too wet behind the ears, too invested of his job and his superiors. It's that very commitment that Takasugi will use to slaughter him. Oh, he's heard about the country boy who chopped off his hair and left it at the gates of the city, stepping through the wrungs as a new man -- as a samurai. He's even heard about his formidable skills with the sword... but he doesn't have the experience on Takasugi. Not even The Slayer Kawakami, paranoid eyes hummingbird fluttering behind his glasses, has near the amount of bloodshed as Takasugi.
In war, you survived by the pint.
"Do they know you're here?" He asks in a voice that's as surprisingly smooth as the tea he pours into two cups. Hate may have been beaten into him by long nights of isolation (not all of which were snow-covered), but manners had not yet been beaten out, even to his own chagrin.
"No. Sougo and Kon--" Hijikata Toushiro, in his new gold-trimmed leathers, is off-kilter, and Takasugi quietly delights in it. "That is, Okita-San and Isao-San--"
"I know who you are referring to."
" -- Right. ...They just know I'm here on personal business."
The elder can't help but laugh, shrill and as frozen as the soil. "Hohhh? I am 'personal business', am I, Toushi?" He doesn't miss the way his company grimaces and tries to hide it in his teacup.
He hates him already.
Good.
"There have been a lot of rumors about you lately. About the old Jouishishi... about a resurrected Kiheitai."
A silence lulls. Takasugi feels no immediate need to respond; Hijikata feels no need to requestion. It's not an interrogation. It's not a man tied upsidedown with rub-'em-raw rope and dipped into a tank of scalding-hot water. He came here of his own free will, for whatever young-and-stupid-and-wreckless reason that Takasugi very much doubts even he knows.
Takasugi stands and crosses the room, and miliseconds of moving gives the path for Bansai to exit. Already, they move as a unit, the taller man clapping headphones over his ears and finding the carving to the door Takasugi's shadow had carved out.
Wax, sticky, clings to Takasugi's fingertip. He rips the roots from the table's surface, and returns to the kotatsu's breadth.
"Those demons we claimed to be back then..."
The flame's crackle lights up his jaw, his too-wide mouth, flickers on his teeth, reflects in crazed eyes.
It falls across Hijikata's neck like fresh blood without a wound, sinks too hot into his skin, cuts off his breathing as it burns, burns, burns.
"Our eyes are a so much more red now, Toushi," he laughs manically, and just before Hijikata's sword rips into Takasugi's chest, his hands are stopped as threads rip fresh cuts into his knuckles. Too late, he sees Bansai from the other side of the paper doors of the balcony.
He just now realizes he can see his breath in that tiny, cold room.
"Send Gintoki and Zura a message for me, naa?"
It's the only time Hijikata ever really thought he was going to die, and his life is spared for something as pathetic as a message.
"Tell them to rot with our comrades."
The message doesn't find its intended by Hijikata's word (instead, years later, on a ship in the sky with three men who are practically different people outside of this winter), and only Sougo asks why Hijikata returns from Kyoto smelling like spice and fear.
Joui4, various shades of green. Two happy moments and one that isn't. "Sins and seeds." Requested by Rabid.
i.
s e e d s
Ink splashes across Takasugi's left eye, brighter than the murky green of his own eyes, and he squints it out, grimacing up at the perpetraitor.
"A-aa, deepest apologies! I could not see where I was--"
"I'm gonna kill you, Zura!"
They are rowdy children, enthusiasm barely tethered back by a capable sensei. Katsura tries to clean his face of the frighteningly permanent ink and Takasugi fusses, making the job all the harder. Gintoki barely catches word of the bickering from where he lazes in the window, soaking in sunlight like a cat. The oldest child in the terakoya, he only sometimes asserts himself, and with Takasugi looking ridiculous is a good time to qualify within his "when I feel like it" category.
Everyone gets a hearty laugh at the stained Takasugi... for now.
"Oi, oi, Bakasugi, shut up already. He's trying to fix it."
"And he should, he's the one who did it!" His exaggerated movements make Katsura's fingers bonk right into his eye. "Ow! Idiot, watch what you're doing!"
Takasugi's father is a standard-bred warrior, and Katsura is from a rich family. He could get in a lot of trouble for everyone, but Katsura wants only friends despite his weirdness and would never bring it up.
Still, the lowest-born orphan among them is the one who's the most insulting.
"Relax already! How about this, we get you cleaned up and then bug Sensei to take us out for Taiyaki?"
They all know it's a plot for sugar and not real pacifism, but they all go along anyway.
Two days later, they shuffle through the ashes, finding only bones and bubbled fats. They could save their one school book alone, its green face charred in various places.
ii.
g r o w i n g
War is not what any of them expected.
Takasugi expected glory. Katsura expected smiles over campfires, leaning on a comrade's shoulder. Gintoki expected nothing.
They were all wrong. Still, there is happiness to be found in miniscule ways.
Takasugi finds rightness in yelling orders to his men, demon-streaking into enemy camps when they're unguarded, from the scarce information they receive. He is the leader of a hell-risen regime, his words the only ones that ring out in the silence of the night. He is in command, and he is tragically fit for it.
It is enough. The muscles of his cheeks learn new movements as he turns fierce, brooding grimaces into smirks. It is a coping mechanism, slowly self-beaten into him by repetition. When he shares it with Gintoki and Katsura, it is ignored.
Rightfully so.
Katsura leads them tactically, stabbing small knives into the heart of big red x's on maps, offering bowls of rice that are half the sizes any man is used to. The injured of body seek him for salves, the injured of mind seek him for kind words spoken in harsh vowels.
It is enough. It's such a pity he couldn't see his closest comrade beginning to schism. Once a week, he reads them passages from their deceased Sensei's book -- words that most suit the tragedy of a lost comrade, or the coming cold, winter winds, or of what an honor it would be to die in this place.
He doesn't notice when Gintoki stops paying attention and Takasugi just scoffs and walks away.
Gintoki, most of the time, feels like he's bitten off more than he can chew. He swings his sword and screams like a beast, losing all control on the battlefield. He's had the fewest lessons among the three, yet he is the most savage and, ultimately, the most in control. He doesn't care about how Takasugi mentally tallies his kills and compares them to his own, and he doesn't care about how Katsura mentally tallies his kills and frowns a little more at each growing number, each passing day.
Blood soaks so deeply into his clothing that his white clothes are permanently stained, lye and the closest river never enough to scrub them clean.
It is not enough. It will never be enough. He feels lost.
They all lay their heads down next to separated skulls. Two days later, they meet a man named Sakamoto Tatsuma, and the imminence of their choices begins to come clear.
"Let's take a walk," Takasugi says at a meeting one morning, glaring levelly at the newcomer. "Just the three of us."
To his relief, Katsura and Gintoki agree. To their relief, Takasugi is smiling a real smile as they walk alongside a river bank (the same one they drank from, the same one Gintoki uses to try and wash his filth out), talking of old times that involve ink and ice cream and lit-up paper laterns and origami lessons. To everyone's surprise, he unifies their hearts for a few, scant hours.
Two days later, blood runs down Takasugi's face in thick streams --
-- and he never once screamed.
iii.
b l o o m e d
Two days later, they find him swinging wildly on an old battlefield, blood streaming on one side of his face, tears streaming down the other, feet dug into the rows of corpses, and screaming until his lungs give out. The skies themselves cry, opening up in a heavy downpour, thunder rumbling out angrily when his throat finally quits.
There's no more need for the jokes about ink. The saturated bandages fall from his face the more he swings his sword at ghosts that aren't there, showing the deep, seeping wound that goes from the bridge of his nose to the rounded edge of his ear.
None of his comrades could ever figure out what was going on in his head, but it seems now they can peer right into it.
Gintoki thinks, irony tight in his throat: A Black Demon. He's only here because Katsura dragged him away from his guard post, saying things like Takasugi is no longer in the medical tent, and I am concerned for him, Gintoki, please follow me.
Now, not for the first time, he wishes he hadn't come.
Katsura is frozen still, paralyzed by coldness, not at the hands of the rains. He watches Takasugi collapse, fight a futile battle with his own tired body, stab his sword into the ground, and lift himself with it again.
Trembling, he rips bandages off angrily, tears the flag-coils from the hilt of his sword, and resumes swinging.
All of them are feverish with wanting.
"Why would you never look at me?! Why?!"
Katsura and Gintoki don't know who he's talking about, and they exchange nervous glances, uncertain of what to do or make of all this. He's not the first man to snap in their long war, no, but they never thought...
They leave him there to scream and cry and pound his fist angrily at the sky, collecting him only when he's spent himself too much to move anymore, sobbing uselessly into the mud.
Katsura bathes him, cleans his wound, tries to speak to him through the lull of warm waters and his in-and-out consciousness. Takasugi will have none of it, feels no effect to that kind-words-harsh-tones tactic the man employs on his men.
He says only one thing, with a smirk that has not been beaten into him nor that feels unnatural: "I feel better."
Katsura is startled still with coldness once again.
Two days later, Gintoki is carrying a mortally injured Katsura from the battlefield, throwing down his (their) resignation of a losing battle into anyone's shitty little face.
Takasugi is left alone with his demons -- all of them -- on the battlefield.
Not for the first time, he decides, as he wraps his own bandages.
x.
s i n s
They all should've known how it would turn out... but they started in such good soil.
Maybe it's distance from the ground in that airship that made them all say such hateful words.