"Dishonorable Tactics" (Gintama, Gintoki/Katsura)
Title: Dishonorable Tactics
Fandom: Gintama
Pairing: Gintoki/Katsura (or rather, given that this is set in the omake novel AU, Ginpachi/Katsura)
Author: Isolde (gamera)
Recipient: Murasaki Makoto
Rating: PG
Warnings: A bit of one-sided background het, because you can't write the ensemble cast without Sacchan being herself. AU, but a canon one (the Ginpachi-sensei novel).
Summary: Ginpachi's students decide the school needs a kendo club. Naturally, bad things ensue.
"I think," Kondou said loudly, "that we should have a kendo club."
"Why would you want a kendo club?" Ginpachi, the poor abused teacher that he was, asked flatly. Really, the nerve of these kids-- he worked all day to impart knowledge on them, and they repaid him by demanding clubs and activities. Next thing he knew, those foreign exchange kids were going to start asking for Japanese lessons. "You should go outside and run around the yard if you're that bored. We'd have thought we were really lucky to have that schoolyard when I was a kid, you know, because all we had in my high school was a basement to run around in."
"You went to this high school! It doesn't have a basement!" Hijikata protested.
"It doesn't now." Gin stopped erasing the chalkboard and turned to face them with his dead eyes (dead from students like this sucking the life out of him, demanding extracurricular events like he was some kind of babysitter). "Because they had it filled in after the students in the old kendo club got into a terrible accident in the boiler room. Horrible, they were finding body parts all over the first floor for days. So they disbanded the kendo club and denied the existence of a basement, and that's why you can't have a kendo club and need to be grateful that you have a nice outdoor yard to kill each other in."
"That didn't even make any sense," Katsura said loudly. "Last week you told us that this school didn't have a basement because it was built on a samurai graveyard, and if they dug one it would have disturbed them and put an eternal curse on the entire prefecture. Make up your mind about which it is."
"Make up your mind about which wig you're going to wear, Zura." Gin turned back to the chalkboard and started erasing again, wiping out the remainder of the day's lesson on how tortoises related to the laws of physics. He didn't need any reminders about that lesson, not with Kagura yelling for translations with her mouth full and Sacchan coming up with all the right answers to the questions but with examples that related the laws of physics to exotic bondage techniques she wanted her teacher to use on her that night in the school's nonexistent basement. "You think those dead samurai want to see some girly cosplayer who wears such bad wigs running around dishonoring their memory with a kendo club?"
"It's not Zura, it's Katsura! And I don't wear a wig!" Katsura snarled, but everyone ignored him.
"We already have approval from the principal and all the adminstrators," Kondou continued, as if their teacher hadn't just protested the idea. "We just need a faculty supervisor, and they all agree you would be perfect for the job!"
"Like hell. Go change your nickname from Gorilla 13 to Gorilla 14, if you need a hobby that badly." Gin was interrupted, though, when someone took him by the back of his collar and swung him over onto his desk.
"I think," Okita said quite pleasantly, looming over him, "that we should have a kendo club."
"Right, kendo club." Gin swallowed hard. "First meeting's tonight at five, in the cafeteria. Bring your own swords."
---
The kendo club's starting members turned out to include pretty much his entire class. Oh, there were a few people who hadn't shown up-- Katherine and Elizabeth and Hammy didn't really seem the kendo types, and who knew what Sakamoto got up to after school, he was weird-- but most of them were, and with the most bizarre assortment of items that passed for swords he'd ever seen. Evidently asking them to bring their own had been a very, very bad idea on his part.
"When are you gonna teach us to kill people like they do in the movies?" Kagura asked, brandishing a baseball bat like a sword; she'd changed out of her school uniform and into a yellow tracksuit at some point. Her glasses were nowhere to be found, but she was stuffing her mouth just as much as she did in class. "That's the important part!"
"That's dishonorable," Katsura spat. He and Hijikata were the only two people in the entire room who had real swords, which sort of grudgingly raised them in his esteem. Well, until he looked at Hijikata again and noticed the guy was eating a mayonnaise sandwich. That was just gross. "But I would expect it from a filthy alien."
"Ahaha, Zura, I think we need to send you back to that sensitivity class!" Kondou laughed, clapping him on the back. He had what appeared to be a two-by-four in place of a sword. "You can't say things like that about exchange students! We live in a modern era of shared ideas and cross-cultural understanding!"
"They cancelled the sensitivity class after Okita beat the teacher with his own yardstick, remember?" Yamazaki asked, tossing his badminton racket from one hand to the other. Okita looked quite proud of the fact he'd scared a sensitivity training teacher from the central administration into early retirement. Gin could tell from the way the little psychopath was holding his cricket bat and eyeing Kagura like said pride needed defending.
"So, Ginpachi-sensei, when are we starting?" Shinpachi asked, shifting nervously where he stood. He'd brought a real bokken, at least, although he looked more concerned with the fact that his sister and Kyuubei and Sacchan were talking together and probably plotting something infinitely terrible than he did with actually learning kendo. "I have to be home by seven to cook dinner!"
"All right, then," Gin said loudly, trying (however futile it was) to talk over all of them. When they kept on arguing with each other about who did or didn't wear a wig and who the hottest teacher in the school was and who would win in a deathmatch, Kagura or Okita or Godzilla, he took his sword and walked up to the one person who was listening to him: Shinpachi. "Since you need to be home early, you can go first, Shimura."
The sound Shinpachi's bokken made as it shattered got everyone's attention.
"Now, you ingrates, you see the power of the mighty sword Touya-ko." Gin's bokken didn't appear harmed by the impact in the slightest, despite the fact Shinpachi's was in pieces. "Its spirit will crush your weak wills and your weaker weapons until you beg me to disband the kendo club. Now, who wants to go next?"
"Oooh, me!" Kagura said, jumping up and down.
"No, me." Okita pushed ahead of Kagura, and on her next jump up she brought the baseball bat down on top of Okita's head with what, on anyone else, would have been skull-shattering force. Okita didn't seem fazed, and smashed the cricket bat right into her face. As the two of them tried their best to kill each other, Gin looked expectantly at the rest of the kendo club.
"The only wooden sword of yours I want is metaphorical," Sacchan purred, but she'd lost her glasses at some point and was talking to the coatrack. "Ah, yes, of course, I should hush, shouldn't I, and let the moment speak for itself? You always know the right thing to say-- or not say-- at times like this, teacher." Otae and Kyuubei, incidentally, made no move to tell their friend she was coming precariously close to making out with a piece of furniture.
Ten minutes later, only Hijikata, Katsura, and Otae (well, and Okita and Kagura, but they didn't count since they were fighting each other and not their teacher) remained. Otae was a given, seeing as she was a demon beast right out of hell, and the other two actually had real swords instead of pieces of junk they'd picked up off the ground on the way home from school.
"Sister, please don't kill anyone," Shinpachi groaned from the floor.
"And what's with that stupid Superman shirt?" Kagura shrieked, smashing Okita in the kneecaps with her bat.
"I don't know, what's with that stupid tracksuit?" Okita asked conversationally, getting Kagura right in the gut with his own bat.
"Oh, teacher," Sacchan murmured to the coatrack.
"This is stupid," Katsura said loudly. "I don't know why I came today. My ancestors are probably ashamed that I brought their sword to this mess of dishonor."
"Fine, then, Zura. You can fight me next." Gin stood ready (Otae looked crestfallen that it wasn't her turn to kill someone yet, and Hijikata looked bored and angry like he always did, damn kid), and gestured for Katsura to come forward. "You'll regret saying that Touya-ko isn't good enough to destroy the sword of your ancestors." He raised his sword and brought it down, fully prepared to destroy yet another sword and crush another young warrior's ambition. The sword of Katsura's (probably wig-wearing and alien-hating) ancestors had other ideas, however, and had the audacity to parry his thrust without so much as cracking.
"A worthy challenger appears!" Kondou boomed from the sidelines, evidently recovered from the beating and the loss of his two-by-four. "Show him the might of your wig-loving and alien-hating ancestors, Zura!" And when Gin was having the same train of thought about this as the class gorilla, it was time to stop spending so much time at the school-- and that meant defeating his last three students and getting the hell out of there before someone died or invoked an ancient samurai curse or stumbled upon a door to a haunted basement that shouldn't have been there.
"It's not Zura, it's Katsura!" Katsura roared, swinging hard enough to send his teacher stumbling backwards. They kept up their back-and-forth for another ten minutes, heading steadily backwards, until Gin sent Katsura tumbling right through the doors to the kitchen. He still managed to parry from the ground, though, and got right back up. Maybe starting a kendo club hadn't been such an amazingly stupid idea, after all. Maybe.
"Heeeey, I didn't know the kitchen was unlocked!" Kagura squealed. Okay, starting a kendo club had been a very, very stupid idea, he'd been right the first time. She ran right past them and dove into the walk-in refrigerator, presumably looking for something she could eat with a minimum of thawing. They both ignored her in favor of continuing their fight.
"...you're posing," Gin suddenly observed, shocked. "Here we are, having a serious battle between men, and you're standing around and posing like someone's taking pictures for Dark and Brooding Student Monthly." It was true-- Katsura was definitely posing like he expected someone to come in and take his picture during the fight, and he wanted to look his depressing and dramatic best for said photograph. He would toss his head so that his hair fell down around his shoulders, and hold his sword at the most flattering and dramatic angle that was still effective.
"I'm doing no such thing." Katsura was lying, because even as he said that he was making sure his uniform was unbuttoned just enough to make him seem a romantic rebel against authority. "You're just jealous because no one wants to see someone with a nasty natural perm pose for anything."
"I'll have you know I posed for the teachers' pinup calendar last year. I was their most popular model, too." Gin shoved Katsura into an open cabinet, and would have closed the door on him and declared another win for himself had Katsura not reached out and gotten him by the collar. They both tumbled back into the cabinet, the door swinging shut and latching behind them. Neither of them noticed that small detail, though.
"Sarutobi was the only one who bought that calendar," Katsura snorted. "And we all had to listen to her for weeks, going on about how men with natural perms are better lovers than men with straight hair. It was ridiculous."
"She's right, you know." Not that she had any proof of that, unless she'd been making out with someone else with a natural perm (or more likely, something else, given that she couldn't see six inches in front of her). It was still true. "It's a sad truth, Zura, but I'm sure you'll come to accept it someday."
"It's Katsura! And that is absolutely not true!" Katsura slammed one hand into the closed door of the cabinet. "Not that you would know, since nobody with normal hair would touch you."
"Oh, yeah?" Gin asked, dropping the mighty sword Touya-ko and grabbing Katsura by the hair. "We'll just see about that."
"Is there anything in here?" It was Kagura, and she opened the door to the cabinet so violently that Gin lost his balance and fell out right onto his back. Katsura, still caught by his hair, fell out right after him. "Woah, wait, they're gonna serve you two for lunch tomorrow? I thought people only did that on my planet!"
"You must be so proud." Katsura started combing his fingers through his hair, trying to straighten it out. "That has to be the closest you've ever gotten to someone who wasn't related to you in your entire life."
"You're just upset that you didn't get to find out just how good men with natural perms are." Gin picked up Touya-ko and walked back out of the kitchen. "I win. All right, Hijikata, get out of the condiments-- don't think I see you in that mayonnaise-- and fight me already. I want to get out of here before my show is on."
"This fight isn't over," Katsura said menacingly, doing his best High School Rebels With Causes Monthly cover pose.
"You're going to have to fight with Sacchan for it if you want to see me after this," Gin warned, and was rewarded for it when Katsura turned a rather interesting shade of red. "It's all right. I understand how irresistible I am, especially after you came so close, being locked in a cabinet with me and all."
"Like hell!" Katsura said, and stalked off. In his flustered state, though, he forgot his sword.
He'd be back for it. He wouldn't be able to fight Sacchan for the privilege of seeing him after school without it.
Fandom: Gintama
Pairing: Gintoki/Katsura (or rather, given that this is set in the omake novel AU, Ginpachi/Katsura)
Author: Isolde (gamera)
Recipient: Murasaki Makoto
Rating: PG
Warnings: A bit of one-sided background het, because you can't write the ensemble cast without Sacchan being herself. AU, but a canon one (the Ginpachi-sensei novel).
Summary: Ginpachi's students decide the school needs a kendo club. Naturally, bad things ensue.
"I think," Kondou said loudly, "that we should have a kendo club."
"Why would you want a kendo club?" Ginpachi, the poor abused teacher that he was, asked flatly. Really, the nerve of these kids-- he worked all day to impart knowledge on them, and they repaid him by demanding clubs and activities. Next thing he knew, those foreign exchange kids were going to start asking for Japanese lessons. "You should go outside and run around the yard if you're that bored. We'd have thought we were really lucky to have that schoolyard when I was a kid, you know, because all we had in my high school was a basement to run around in."
"You went to this high school! It doesn't have a basement!" Hijikata protested.
"It doesn't now." Gin stopped erasing the chalkboard and turned to face them with his dead eyes (dead from students like this sucking the life out of him, demanding extracurricular events like he was some kind of babysitter). "Because they had it filled in after the students in the old kendo club got into a terrible accident in the boiler room. Horrible, they were finding body parts all over the first floor for days. So they disbanded the kendo club and denied the existence of a basement, and that's why you can't have a kendo club and need to be grateful that you have a nice outdoor yard to kill each other in."
"That didn't even make any sense," Katsura said loudly. "Last week you told us that this school didn't have a basement because it was built on a samurai graveyard, and if they dug one it would have disturbed them and put an eternal curse on the entire prefecture. Make up your mind about which it is."
"Make up your mind about which wig you're going to wear, Zura." Gin turned back to the chalkboard and started erasing again, wiping out the remainder of the day's lesson on how tortoises related to the laws of physics. He didn't need any reminders about that lesson, not with Kagura yelling for translations with her mouth full and Sacchan coming up with all the right answers to the questions but with examples that related the laws of physics to exotic bondage techniques she wanted her teacher to use on her that night in the school's nonexistent basement. "You think those dead samurai want to see some girly cosplayer who wears such bad wigs running around dishonoring their memory with a kendo club?"
"It's not Zura, it's Katsura! And I don't wear a wig!" Katsura snarled, but everyone ignored him.
"We already have approval from the principal and all the adminstrators," Kondou continued, as if their teacher hadn't just protested the idea. "We just need a faculty supervisor, and they all agree you would be perfect for the job!"
"Like hell. Go change your nickname from Gorilla 13 to Gorilla 14, if you need a hobby that badly." Gin was interrupted, though, when someone took him by the back of his collar and swung him over onto his desk.
"I think," Okita said quite pleasantly, looming over him, "that we should have a kendo club."
"Right, kendo club." Gin swallowed hard. "First meeting's tonight at five, in the cafeteria. Bring your own swords."
---
The kendo club's starting members turned out to include pretty much his entire class. Oh, there were a few people who hadn't shown up-- Katherine and Elizabeth and Hammy didn't really seem the kendo types, and who knew what Sakamoto got up to after school, he was weird-- but most of them were, and with the most bizarre assortment of items that passed for swords he'd ever seen. Evidently asking them to bring their own had been a very, very bad idea on his part.
"When are you gonna teach us to kill people like they do in the movies?" Kagura asked, brandishing a baseball bat like a sword; she'd changed out of her school uniform and into a yellow tracksuit at some point. Her glasses were nowhere to be found, but she was stuffing her mouth just as much as she did in class. "That's the important part!"
"That's dishonorable," Katsura spat. He and Hijikata were the only two people in the entire room who had real swords, which sort of grudgingly raised them in his esteem. Well, until he looked at Hijikata again and noticed the guy was eating a mayonnaise sandwich. That was just gross. "But I would expect it from a filthy alien."
"Ahaha, Zura, I think we need to send you back to that sensitivity class!" Kondou laughed, clapping him on the back. He had what appeared to be a two-by-four in place of a sword. "You can't say things like that about exchange students! We live in a modern era of shared ideas and cross-cultural understanding!"
"They cancelled the sensitivity class after Okita beat the teacher with his own yardstick, remember?" Yamazaki asked, tossing his badminton racket from one hand to the other. Okita looked quite proud of the fact he'd scared a sensitivity training teacher from the central administration into early retirement. Gin could tell from the way the little psychopath was holding his cricket bat and eyeing Kagura like said pride needed defending.
"So, Ginpachi-sensei, when are we starting?" Shinpachi asked, shifting nervously where he stood. He'd brought a real bokken, at least, although he looked more concerned with the fact that his sister and Kyuubei and Sacchan were talking together and probably plotting something infinitely terrible than he did with actually learning kendo. "I have to be home by seven to cook dinner!"
"All right, then," Gin said loudly, trying (however futile it was) to talk over all of them. When they kept on arguing with each other about who did or didn't wear a wig and who the hottest teacher in the school was and who would win in a deathmatch, Kagura or Okita or Godzilla, he took his sword and walked up to the one person who was listening to him: Shinpachi. "Since you need to be home early, you can go first, Shimura."
The sound Shinpachi's bokken made as it shattered got everyone's attention.
"Now, you ingrates, you see the power of the mighty sword Touya-ko." Gin's bokken didn't appear harmed by the impact in the slightest, despite the fact Shinpachi's was in pieces. "Its spirit will crush your weak wills and your weaker weapons until you beg me to disband the kendo club. Now, who wants to go next?"
"Oooh, me!" Kagura said, jumping up and down.
"No, me." Okita pushed ahead of Kagura, and on her next jump up she brought the baseball bat down on top of Okita's head with what, on anyone else, would have been skull-shattering force. Okita didn't seem fazed, and smashed the cricket bat right into her face. As the two of them tried their best to kill each other, Gin looked expectantly at the rest of the kendo club.
"The only wooden sword of yours I want is metaphorical," Sacchan purred, but she'd lost her glasses at some point and was talking to the coatrack. "Ah, yes, of course, I should hush, shouldn't I, and let the moment speak for itself? You always know the right thing to say-- or not say-- at times like this, teacher." Otae and Kyuubei, incidentally, made no move to tell their friend she was coming precariously close to making out with a piece of furniture.
Ten minutes later, only Hijikata, Katsura, and Otae (well, and Okita and Kagura, but they didn't count since they were fighting each other and not their teacher) remained. Otae was a given, seeing as she was a demon beast right out of hell, and the other two actually had real swords instead of pieces of junk they'd picked up off the ground on the way home from school.
"Sister, please don't kill anyone," Shinpachi groaned from the floor.
"And what's with that stupid Superman shirt?" Kagura shrieked, smashing Okita in the kneecaps with her bat.
"I don't know, what's with that stupid tracksuit?" Okita asked conversationally, getting Kagura right in the gut with his own bat.
"Oh, teacher," Sacchan murmured to the coatrack.
"This is stupid," Katsura said loudly. "I don't know why I came today. My ancestors are probably ashamed that I brought their sword to this mess of dishonor."
"Fine, then, Zura. You can fight me next." Gin stood ready (Otae looked crestfallen that it wasn't her turn to kill someone yet, and Hijikata looked bored and angry like he always did, damn kid), and gestured for Katsura to come forward. "You'll regret saying that Touya-ko isn't good enough to destroy the sword of your ancestors." He raised his sword and brought it down, fully prepared to destroy yet another sword and crush another young warrior's ambition. The sword of Katsura's (probably wig-wearing and alien-hating) ancestors had other ideas, however, and had the audacity to parry his thrust without so much as cracking.
"A worthy challenger appears!" Kondou boomed from the sidelines, evidently recovered from the beating and the loss of his two-by-four. "Show him the might of your wig-loving and alien-hating ancestors, Zura!" And when Gin was having the same train of thought about this as the class gorilla, it was time to stop spending so much time at the school-- and that meant defeating his last three students and getting the hell out of there before someone died or invoked an ancient samurai curse or stumbled upon a door to a haunted basement that shouldn't have been there.
"It's not Zura, it's Katsura!" Katsura roared, swinging hard enough to send his teacher stumbling backwards. They kept up their back-and-forth for another ten minutes, heading steadily backwards, until Gin sent Katsura tumbling right through the doors to the kitchen. He still managed to parry from the ground, though, and got right back up. Maybe starting a kendo club hadn't been such an amazingly stupid idea, after all. Maybe.
"Heeeey, I didn't know the kitchen was unlocked!" Kagura squealed. Okay, starting a kendo club had been a very, very stupid idea, he'd been right the first time. She ran right past them and dove into the walk-in refrigerator, presumably looking for something she could eat with a minimum of thawing. They both ignored her in favor of continuing their fight.
"...you're posing," Gin suddenly observed, shocked. "Here we are, having a serious battle between men, and you're standing around and posing like someone's taking pictures for Dark and Brooding Student Monthly." It was true-- Katsura was definitely posing like he expected someone to come in and take his picture during the fight, and he wanted to look his depressing and dramatic best for said photograph. He would toss his head so that his hair fell down around his shoulders, and hold his sword at the most flattering and dramatic angle that was still effective.
"I'm doing no such thing." Katsura was lying, because even as he said that he was making sure his uniform was unbuttoned just enough to make him seem a romantic rebel against authority. "You're just jealous because no one wants to see someone with a nasty natural perm pose for anything."
"I'll have you know I posed for the teachers' pinup calendar last year. I was their most popular model, too." Gin shoved Katsura into an open cabinet, and would have closed the door on him and declared another win for himself had Katsura not reached out and gotten him by the collar. They both tumbled back into the cabinet, the door swinging shut and latching behind them. Neither of them noticed that small detail, though.
"Sarutobi was the only one who bought that calendar," Katsura snorted. "And we all had to listen to her for weeks, going on about how men with natural perms are better lovers than men with straight hair. It was ridiculous."
"She's right, you know." Not that she had any proof of that, unless she'd been making out with someone else with a natural perm (or more likely, something else, given that she couldn't see six inches in front of her). It was still true. "It's a sad truth, Zura, but I'm sure you'll come to accept it someday."
"It's Katsura! And that is absolutely not true!" Katsura slammed one hand into the closed door of the cabinet. "Not that you would know, since nobody with normal hair would touch you."
"Oh, yeah?" Gin asked, dropping the mighty sword Touya-ko and grabbing Katsura by the hair. "We'll just see about that."
"Is there anything in here?" It was Kagura, and she opened the door to the cabinet so violently that Gin lost his balance and fell out right onto his back. Katsura, still caught by his hair, fell out right after him. "Woah, wait, they're gonna serve you two for lunch tomorrow? I thought people only did that on my planet!"
"You must be so proud." Katsura started combing his fingers through his hair, trying to straighten it out. "That has to be the closest you've ever gotten to someone who wasn't related to you in your entire life."
"You're just upset that you didn't get to find out just how good men with natural perms are." Gin picked up Touya-ko and walked back out of the kitchen. "I win. All right, Hijikata, get out of the condiments-- don't think I see you in that mayonnaise-- and fight me already. I want to get out of here before my show is on."
"This fight isn't over," Katsura said menacingly, doing his best High School Rebels With Causes Monthly cover pose.
"You're going to have to fight with Sacchan for it if you want to see me after this," Gin warned, and was rewarded for it when Katsura turned a rather interesting shade of red. "It's all right. I understand how irresistible I am, especially after you came so close, being locked in a cabinet with me and all."
"Like hell!" Katsura said, and stalked off. In his flustered state, though, he forgot his sword.
He'd be back for it. He wouldn't be able to fight Sacchan for the privilege of seeing him after school without it.