Gintama; Blind Sight
Title: Blind Sight
Rating: PG
Fandom: Gintama
Pairing: None (Gen)
Characters: Takasugi, Nizou
Word Count: 501
Summary: Half lucid, half-drunk tensions.
Watching Nizou, Takasug thinks that Nizou hates sake, hates alcohol. So he raises his cup, remembers to pour, and with hooded snake eyes, commands 'drink'.
Hates how it seems to seep through his body, like a kind of not-flower blooming through his red body, extending tendrils of a rot-vine into his veins, curling into his bones. Hates it, wants to take a sword and crush it all, crush every liquid drop.
The moon sets behind strewn streaks of cloud, frail like the wisps from a pipe left to provide its own breath. It is unseen, the windows and portholes are closed. Instead, the room fills with its own clouds of pipe smoke. It is an affirmation of life, the smoke, of the body's ability to take poison within itself, and it's suffocating, dense, langorous. The sake, often, tastes of it - a bitter, sour, herbal, sweet taste.
But recently there are times when Nizou loves sake, loves alcohol. What he does when he loves it, every liquid drop, is to pour it into his mouth like a swordeater with a fluid sword. The gleam of the sake like the gleam of his newly acquired sword. He revels in how sake-thorns seem to scrape the skin on the inside of his throat and would have described it as a itching-tearing-bloody-caress (he had heard the word used somewhere in Kabukichou, and he had liked the slithering, untender sound of the word). This too, seems new, how his senses seem more eager to explore and acquire. But yet, there is something that still has not changed - when he drinks, it is a battle. When he wins, ready to let spill from his swordeater's mouth a trail of wet thorns. Commands, 'drink again', pours, fills his cup. And he is filled with what for him can be named joy when he wins because this is what he imagines the loss of sight must have been like: the sudden blooming of red, dark like the sound of a deep drum, and a thorn-like burning. he feels it as an affirmation of death and loss, and there is joy again.
'Hey...you...' Nizou hears the sound of the sake being flung from Takasugi's cup before he feels it soak into the cloth at his shoulder, followed by a rough, languid, fast stream of profanities. He tastes from the air how the smoke is laden with alcohol and notices that the other man is drunk, realizes that Takasugi had meant for the sake to land in his eyes rather than on his shoulder. The smoke mingles with the alcohol, Takasugi's sake with his clothes; the affirmation of life with the affirmation of death. And Nizou smiles, because he thinks that he will win this battle. He remembers when he had tasted a similar mixture of bitter, sour, herbal, sweet: two days ago, passing a funeral pyre. It is the unburdened dying and lost who survive, not the living, not those who lock a beast's claws into the past.