Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right
Title: Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right, But Sometimes Two Idiots Can Make a Genius
Fandom: Gintama
Pairing: Gintoki/Katsura
Genre: CRACKERY-CRACK
Warnings: DEAR LORD, THE MPREG. I NEED TO DIE FOR THIS.
Summary: Gintoki and Katsura being idiots and having ass-babies.
Notes: For 10_whores - the prompt was "Belle Epoque/The Golden Era". I was going to do Joui era for this prompt, but no, seriousness is not my friend. I took "golden" and ran with it. Ran like the wind. Like that kind of wind. (Like farts.)
“Gintoki,” Zura says in his deadly serious tone. “I’m pregnant and you’re the father.”
Gintoki stares back with his dead fish eyes, and then lifts his hand to dig his pinky into his nose. Dig left, dig right, dig up. Hook and pull it out. Flicking the booger into the wild blue yonder, Gintoki squints a little, examining the other man’s face.
“Oi, oi, Zura… Are you sure it’s not just scurvy? Nmaibo doesn’t have enough Vitamin C in it. You’ll die if you keep eating those.”
“It’s not scurvy; it’s pregnancy! It’s not Zura; it’s Captain Katsura!”
The horror of the situation slowly sinks into the pit of Gintoki’s stomach like the weight of a thousand parfaits, but with none of the deliciousness he would have expected to be lingering on his taste buds.
They’re sitting across from each other in a generic booth of a generic restaurant, waiting for their generic food to arrive. The sign outside the establishment just says “Restaurant”. Zura chose this place because he said they needed to be incognito, and Gintoki had said, “A man walking around the busy streets of Edo during rush hour in pirate cosplay is not exactly what I (or the Shinsengumi) would consider incognito,” and Zura had said, “Are you questioning my abilities? I’m a master of disguise! And you shouldn’t be arguing with the person who’s paying for your food.”
They had left it at that.
But now… Now, Zura, who is a man, is talking about pregnancy. Zura, who is his childhood friend and former sometimes-fuck-buddy-because-guys-get-lonely-out-at-war and current sometimes-slightly-more-than-a-fuck-buddy-but-the-exact-term-will-remain-unsaid-because-Gintoki-is-not-a-sap, says that he’s pregnant.
“Haha! Haha… Men can’t get pregnant. Give me some credit here - I’m not stupid enough to fall for that.”
“Look at this,” the space pirate deadpans, and slips out today’s copy of the Edo Daily from under his swashbuckling coat. Gintoki warily takes it, all the while suspiciously keeping an eye on Zura’s creepy eye-patched stare.
He looks down at the newspaper and the front page reads AMANTO VIRUS ENABLES MALE PREGNANCY. Oh. Well, then. If an Amanto virus could cause rapid hair loss or turn everyone into Unibrow Zombies, then there was no reason an Amanto virus couldn’t make it possible for men to give birth.
“Waitaminute! What?!”
“As I said, I’m pregnant and you’re the father. When I heard the news, I thought perhaps there was a reason I’ve been feeling nauseous and vomiting lately.” Zura slips his hand back into his coat and pulls out a picture of a…something.
He sets the something in front of Gintoki. It’s black and white and there’s a funny shape in the middle that kind of looks like a messed up seahorse with three tails and little arms.
“…What the hell is this?”
“…It’s our child.”
“…Ah.”
And that’s when it really sinks in. It sinks in like a thousand parfaits on a luxury cruise liner that just hit an iceberg. Gintoki is going to be a father. For real this time - none of that mysterious bastard child business. His first voiced fear is this:
“We have to go to the doctor and straighten out the baby’s genes right away! I promised never to inflict this cursed natural perm on any child sprung from my loins!”
His second voiced fear is this:
“…Zura, we’re not cut out to be parents.”
-----
It’s six months into his pregnancy and Katsura can no longer hide his condition behind baggy clothing and excuses such as bloating from food allergies or Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Last month, Katsura had given his men a lecture on IBS, also known as spastic colon, a functional bowel disorder characterized by chronic abdominal pain, discomfort, bloating, and alteration of bowel habits in the absence of any detectable organic cause. His men had nodded dumbly and allowed him to continue working, so it was assumed that they had bought his fabrications.
Katsura has mulled over his situation - meditated on it. He is a samurai and a terrorist. Not just an ordinary terrorist, but the leader of an influential rebel faction. He can’t very well be jumping from rooftops or chucking homemade bombs at those Bakufu dogs while having a baby jump on his bladder like an Olympic trampolinist every few minutes. It would be bad for his image, not to mention very possibly fatal to his unborn child. After all, trampolines are dangerous.
With this in mind, Katsura enters their current hideout. His loyal followers are passionately engaged in card games and chatting about TV dramas.
“Ahem.”
His loyal followers are passionately engaged in card games and chatting about TV dramas.
“Ahem!”
They snap to attention.
“Everyone, we must continue to fight for our country, but we must also know when to retreat. One such time has come for me. I am…afflicted with a condition that will render me unable to take up the sword for a number of months, and that is why… Starting from today, I will be on maternity leave!”
The room is silent, but for the slight crunching sound of a dropped Nmaibo stick. Corn potage flavored, Katsura notes.
“Thank you,” he says, concluding his speech. Katsura turns on his heel and heads back out into the streets, aiming for the Yorozuya.
When he gets there, he knocks on the door and Shinpachi lets him in.
“Good evening, Katsura…san… You’re…”
“I’m pregnant. It’s Gintoki’s.” Katsura says this as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“What?!” Shinpachi looks like he’s about to faint. Then Kagura bounds over to see what all the fuss is about. He tells her the same thing when she asks, and the sukonbu falls from her mouth to hit the floor with a mild splat.
Is this some kind of conspiracy? Katsura has never had so much perfectly good food drop to the ground in his presence before.
The sound of a toilet flushing comes from the distance. A moment later, Gintoki wanders out of the bathroom and into the living room, idly scratching his stomach. It comes to his attention that everyone is crowded around the front door, and he slowly turns his head in trepidation.
“H-hey, it’s you. Haha…” Inside, Gintoki is screaming. Oh my GOD, Zura! You look like a whale! Like Moby Dick, but without the Dick! There’s no way you could find a Dick under all that Moby! How do you take a piss these days?! Did I do this to you? Are you here for revenge???
“Gintoki,” Katsura starts speaking as he walks in and helps himself to the couch. Gintoki twitches a little in fear at that, but waits for him to continue.
“I think I’ve gained a mutant superpower! My strong mental connection with Elizabeth must have been honing my telepathic abilities and now I’ve evolved and become a telekinetic.” He leans forward, the long black hair sweeping dramatically as he hisses out, “I can make people drop their food…with my mind.”
“…Huh?” The Odd Jobs trio stare at Katsura. Shinpachi looks like he wants to claw his eyes out at the sheer stupidity of every person surrounding him. Kagura picks up her dropped sukonbu and eats it.
Eventually, Katsura gets around to filling them in on everything. Eventually, he gets around to asking for a place to stay (and hide from the police) until the child is born. More than once, Shinpachi screeches about the impossibility of such a situation while Kagura expresses her joy about the fact that the baby will ‘definitely be a girl I can train in the ways of the Amazon warrior princess! You should name her Xena’.
When the kids are gone, Shinpachi having walked back to his house and Kagura having turned in for bed, Gintoki plops down next to Zura on the couch and flings an arm over his friend’s shoulders. He’s not sure what to make of this situation, really. But then again, Gintoki’s always been flying by the seat of his pants.
Gintoki isn’t a sap. Demons don’t do declarations of undying love, so he settles for giving what he can. He simply says, “I’ve got your back,” just like all those years ago.
Zura’s lips curl into a slow, seductive smile. He doesn’t turn to face Gintoki as he softly says, “You’re an idiot.”
Gintoki whispers back as he stares straight ahead, “You’re more of an idiot than I am.”
“You’re the idiot.”
“You are.”
“Your hair is stupid, you stupid perm-head.”
“Your hair makes you look like a girl, you stupid girl.”
“Jump-obsessed slacker diabetic man-child.”
“Crazy video game-obsessed okama. I bet you have wet dreams about Italian plumbers.”
“Mario’s more of a man than you’ll ever be.”
“Why you…”
Gintoki smirks and feels that everything is going to be all right. Zura is still Zura, and ‘Gintoki and Zura’ are still ‘Gintoki and Zura’, just like they always have been and always will be, even when they’re doddering old men who are completely senile and only have the mental capacity to argue with each other about whether the Nintendo Famicom is better than the Sega Mega Drive.
They continue their furiously whispered bickering throughout the night.
-----
Gintoki is out on a job, and Katsura is in the bastard’s bedroom, reading through the bastard’s Jump collection. Suddenly, he feels the baby kick. It’s a monstrous kick, and Katsura takes this moment to revise his hypothesis about their child being an Olympic trampolinist. No, this child is clearly a kick-boxer. Or perhaps the reincarnation of Bruce Lee.
Martial artists are cool in their own way, but Katsura has his pride as a samurai. He secretly hopes that what he’s feeling isn’t Bruce Lee kicking the crap out of him, but rather that their child is wielding a wooden practice sword within his womb.
“I wonder if it’ll hurt when the sword comes out of my… Wait. Where will the sword come out?” Katsura is terrified as he realizes he has no vagina.
The baby kicks again and Katsura doubles over as he feels…contractions.
Oh. No.
“Elizabeth!”
The sight of his beautiful angel Elizabeth is enough to lift Katsura’s soul. She runs into the room as fast as her hairy-old-man legs can go.
Katsura?! What’s wrong?!
“Elizabeth, I’m about to go into labor!”
Gasp!
Elizabeth manages to contact Otose-san, who calls for a taxi. Katsura tries his best to move outside, and with Elizabeth’s help, the two of them manage to get him into the car and on his way to the hospital.
When they arrive, the first thing Katsura demands of the nurses is, “Do I have a vagina?!”
“…You’re pregnant, ma’am. Of course you do.”
“It’s not ma’am; it’s Katsura! And I’m a man! It’s that Amanto virus that was going around a few months ago! Do I have a vagina?!”
Answer the question! Elizabeth’s sign says. Everyone turns to stare, but Katsura pays them no mind.
“W-well, y-yes,” the nurse stutters. “It’s a Magical Temporary Vagina. It’ll disappear once you give birth.”
“Good answer.”
They rush him down the halls of the hospital. Katsura is breathing heavily, grimacing in pain as the baby tries to kick its way out of his Magical Temporary Vagina. It’s at this moment that Gintoki barges in.
“Zura!” he shouts, running alongside the gurney. “Zura! I’ll be waiting for you!”
His brow dotted with cold sweat, Zura heaves as the nurses tell him to take deep breaths. He turns to look at his oldest friend just before they wheel him into the operating room. Their eyes meet.
“It’s…not Zura… It’s Katsuraaaa~!”
And Gintoki is left standing outside, their profound lovey-dovey moment shattered like the dreams of so many fangirls.
Congrats on entering the hell of parenthood, Elizabeth writes. Gintoki merely grunts as they settle in for a long wait. And it’s a long wait. Long and nervewracking. Gintoki paces and bites his nails and eats five candy bars from the vending machine down the hall, which just makes him extra jittery with all the sugar rushing through his system. He’s about to lose his mind when a nurse steps into the waiting room.
“Sakata-san? You’re the father, correct? You may come in now. Congratulations! It’s a boy!” she chirps.
He follows her, still trapped in a half-dream state. This is all so surreal, but Gintoki shakes the fog from his mind and thinks of Zura. He enters the room and strides up to Zura, who looks pale and weakened. He pulls up a chair and notices the swaddled bundle against Zura’s chest.
“Is this…?”
“Our son, yes.”
The baby is an ugly pink thing, wrinkled like a prune, or an old man, or an old man surrounded by prunes. The baby is their son, and Gintoki smiles as he brushes a finger lightly over the kid’s pudgy-wrinkly cheek.
“Hey. How are you doing?”
“…Good. I’m fine.”
“Really? It looks like something’s bothering you.”
“Ah, well, it’s just that… In the pregnancy books, they only tell you about the Miracle of Childbirth. They never tell you about the Excruciating Pain of Childbirth.”
“Come on, Zura. That’s not all that’s worrying you. We’ve been sliced and stabbed a dozen times. Pain isn’t new to us.”
“It’s Katsura. And no, I don’t think you understand. I don’t mean physical pain. I suppose I meant that the pregnancy books never tell you about the Excruciating Humiliation of Losing Control of All Bodily Functions and Shitting and Pissing All Over Yourself As You Give Birth to a Prune.”
Gintoki pauses, horrified. “I didn’t need to know that.”
“Excuse me…sir…” The nurse feebly squeaks out. Her eyes are wide like she can’t believe the beautiful mother before her is actually a man. “Uh…sir, we didn’t have time to fill out any forms when you arrived. Could we get a surname for the baby’s birth certificate?”
“Sakata.”
“Hey, he popped out of your man-womb! He should take your name!”
Zura turns to glare. “That’s impossible and you know it. Take responsibility, Gintoki!”
“All right then, Sakata it is. Did you have a given name in mind, or would you like some name books?”
Gintoki is about to say, “Yeah, give us the books,” but Katsura beats him to it.
“Kintaro. The child’s name is Sakata Kintaro.”
“Zura, you bastard!”
“It’s not Zura; it’s Katsura!”
“Zuuuuuu~raaaaaa~” Gintoki calls Zura Zura because Zura hates being called Zura. “I can’t believe you would pick that kind of name! Do you have any idea how many times I was called ‘Testicles’ as a child? Of course you do! You were there!”
“I didn’t name him Kintoki. I named him Kintaro. It’s a wonderfully regal name taken from the tale of a great Heian era warrior. It is a name befitting a future samurai.”
“Kintoki, Kintaro! And I’m saying that’s the same thing! You’re forgetting that in the legend, Kintaro was just a nickname. His real name was Kintoki! And either way, it has 'Kin' in it and this is Gintama, so Kintama is naturally going to come up! Testicles! They’re going to call my boy ‘Testicles’, and who knows? He might even inherit this damned wavy hair, and they’ll call him ‘Pube-head’, too!”
His friend merely gasps and says, serious as always, “…Gintoki,” like he’s been severely betrayed.
Gintoki gives in and the red prune in Zura’s arms officially becomes Sakata Kintaro.
-----
Sakata Kintaro is a weird looking kid. He has black hair, which is normal. It’s wavy and refuses to be tamed by any styling products, which is not. It’s the look in his eyes, however, that sets him apart more than the natural perm. Kintaro has two expressions - deadly serious is one, and lazy as all hell is the other.
Despite his odd looks, Sakata Kintaro is a genius. No one knows how this happened. No one knows how Gintoki, best known for slacking off, and Katsura, best known for being completely unhinged, managed to produce a child with both ambition and common sense. The current theory, postulated by Auntie Kagura, is that he somehow managed to suck in all of his parents’ bad traits, only there were too many of them, so the gods reversed everything. Otherwise Kintaro would have sucked so much that he would have become a human black hole.
Whatever the theory is, Kintaro is a force to be reckoned with. Some people even say that he’s the antichrist. Those people are usually wusses, though.
The kids on the playground used to call him “Testicles” and “Pube-head” until he blackmailed them with nudie pictures that he threatened to sell to the porn mags.
“I know this guy, Hasegawa-san,” he had said nonchalantly. “His wife left him so he has to make do with a massive collection of porn. He has every magazine and video imaginable, so I’ve got ALL the addresses of the adult entertainment companies.”
They used to pick fights with him until he showed them all how the son of two of the fiercest war heroes (and the student of a frighteningly strong Yato girl’s ‘lessons in how to be a warrior princess’) was born to kick ass. Then they made him King of Kabuki-cho’s Playground. Auntie Kagura was very proud of him for succeeding her throne.
Sakata Kintaro is a genius, but he’s also a little boy who loves his two daddies very much. Although he doesn’t show it very often, what with his severely limited facial expressions and all, Kintaro is happy that his two daddies love each other very much, too. But sometimes, when he watches them being idiots at each other, it hurts his brain a little.
Fandom: Gintama
Pairing: Gintoki/Katsura
Genre: CRACKERY-CRACK
Warnings: DEAR LORD, THE MPREG. I NEED TO DIE FOR THIS.
Summary: Gintoki and Katsura being idiots and having ass-babies.
Notes: For 10_whores - the prompt was "Belle Epoque/The Golden Era". I was going to do Joui era for this prompt, but no, seriousness is not my friend. I took "golden" and ran with it. Ran like the wind. Like that kind of wind. (Like farts.)
“Gintoki,” Zura says in his deadly serious tone. “I’m pregnant and you’re the father.”
Gintoki stares back with his dead fish eyes, and then lifts his hand to dig his pinky into his nose. Dig left, dig right, dig up. Hook and pull it out. Flicking the booger into the wild blue yonder, Gintoki squints a little, examining the other man’s face.
“Oi, oi, Zura… Are you sure it’s not just scurvy? Nmaibo doesn’t have enough Vitamin C in it. You’ll die if you keep eating those.”
“It’s not scurvy; it’s pregnancy! It’s not Zura; it’s Captain Katsura!”
The horror of the situation slowly sinks into the pit of Gintoki’s stomach like the weight of a thousand parfaits, but with none of the deliciousness he would have expected to be lingering on his taste buds.
They’re sitting across from each other in a generic booth of a generic restaurant, waiting for their generic food to arrive. The sign outside the establishment just says “Restaurant”. Zura chose this place because he said they needed to be incognito, and Gintoki had said, “A man walking around the busy streets of Edo during rush hour in pirate cosplay is not exactly what I (or the Shinsengumi) would consider incognito,” and Zura had said, “Are you questioning my abilities? I’m a master of disguise! And you shouldn’t be arguing with the person who’s paying for your food.”
They had left it at that.
But now… Now, Zura, who is a man, is talking about pregnancy. Zura, who is his childhood friend and former sometimes-fuck-buddy-because-guys-get-lonely-out-at-war and current sometimes-slightly-more-than-a-fuck-buddy-but-the-exact-term-will-remain-unsaid-because-Gintoki-is-not-a-sap, says that he’s pregnant.
“Haha! Haha… Men can’t get pregnant. Give me some credit here - I’m not stupid enough to fall for that.”
“Look at this,” the space pirate deadpans, and slips out today’s copy of the Edo Daily from under his swashbuckling coat. Gintoki warily takes it, all the while suspiciously keeping an eye on Zura’s creepy eye-patched stare.
He looks down at the newspaper and the front page reads AMANTO VIRUS ENABLES MALE PREGNANCY. Oh. Well, then. If an Amanto virus could cause rapid hair loss or turn everyone into Unibrow Zombies, then there was no reason an Amanto virus couldn’t make it possible for men to give birth.
“Waitaminute! What?!”
“As I said, I’m pregnant and you’re the father. When I heard the news, I thought perhaps there was a reason I’ve been feeling nauseous and vomiting lately.” Zura slips his hand back into his coat and pulls out a picture of a…something.
He sets the something in front of Gintoki. It’s black and white and there’s a funny shape in the middle that kind of looks like a messed up seahorse with three tails and little arms.
“…What the hell is this?”
“…It’s our child.”
“…Ah.”
And that’s when it really sinks in. It sinks in like a thousand parfaits on a luxury cruise liner that just hit an iceberg. Gintoki is going to be a father. For real this time - none of that mysterious bastard child business. His first voiced fear is this:
“We have to go to the doctor and straighten out the baby’s genes right away! I promised never to inflict this cursed natural perm on any child sprung from my loins!”
His second voiced fear is this:
“…Zura, we’re not cut out to be parents.”
-----
It’s six months into his pregnancy and Katsura can no longer hide his condition behind baggy clothing and excuses such as bloating from food allergies or Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Last month, Katsura had given his men a lecture on IBS, also known as spastic colon, a functional bowel disorder characterized by chronic abdominal pain, discomfort, bloating, and alteration of bowel habits in the absence of any detectable organic cause. His men had nodded dumbly and allowed him to continue working, so it was assumed that they had bought his fabrications.
Katsura has mulled over his situation - meditated on it. He is a samurai and a terrorist. Not just an ordinary terrorist, but the leader of an influential rebel faction. He can’t very well be jumping from rooftops or chucking homemade bombs at those Bakufu dogs while having a baby jump on his bladder like an Olympic trampolinist every few minutes. It would be bad for his image, not to mention very possibly fatal to his unborn child. After all, trampolines are dangerous.
With this in mind, Katsura enters their current hideout. His loyal followers are passionately engaged in card games and chatting about TV dramas.
“Ahem.”
His loyal followers are passionately engaged in card games and chatting about TV dramas.
“Ahem!”
They snap to attention.
“Everyone, we must continue to fight for our country, but we must also know when to retreat. One such time has come for me. I am…afflicted with a condition that will render me unable to take up the sword for a number of months, and that is why… Starting from today, I will be on maternity leave!”
The room is silent, but for the slight crunching sound of a dropped Nmaibo stick. Corn potage flavored, Katsura notes.
“Thank you,” he says, concluding his speech. Katsura turns on his heel and heads back out into the streets, aiming for the Yorozuya.
When he gets there, he knocks on the door and Shinpachi lets him in.
“Good evening, Katsura…san… You’re…”
“I’m pregnant. It’s Gintoki’s.” Katsura says this as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“What?!” Shinpachi looks like he’s about to faint. Then Kagura bounds over to see what all the fuss is about. He tells her the same thing when she asks, and the sukonbu falls from her mouth to hit the floor with a mild splat.
Is this some kind of conspiracy? Katsura has never had so much perfectly good food drop to the ground in his presence before.
The sound of a toilet flushing comes from the distance. A moment later, Gintoki wanders out of the bathroom and into the living room, idly scratching his stomach. It comes to his attention that everyone is crowded around the front door, and he slowly turns his head in trepidation.
“H-hey, it’s you. Haha…” Inside, Gintoki is screaming. Oh my GOD, Zura! You look like a whale! Like Moby Dick, but without the Dick! There’s no way you could find a Dick under all that Moby! How do you take a piss these days?! Did I do this to you? Are you here for revenge???
“Gintoki,” Katsura starts speaking as he walks in and helps himself to the couch. Gintoki twitches a little in fear at that, but waits for him to continue.
“I think I’ve gained a mutant superpower! My strong mental connection with Elizabeth must have been honing my telepathic abilities and now I’ve evolved and become a telekinetic.” He leans forward, the long black hair sweeping dramatically as he hisses out, “I can make people drop their food…with my mind.”
“…Huh?” The Odd Jobs trio stare at Katsura. Shinpachi looks like he wants to claw his eyes out at the sheer stupidity of every person surrounding him. Kagura picks up her dropped sukonbu and eats it.
Eventually, Katsura gets around to filling them in on everything. Eventually, he gets around to asking for a place to stay (and hide from the police) until the child is born. More than once, Shinpachi screeches about the impossibility of such a situation while Kagura expresses her joy about the fact that the baby will ‘definitely be a girl I can train in the ways of the Amazon warrior princess! You should name her Xena’.
When the kids are gone, Shinpachi having walked back to his house and Kagura having turned in for bed, Gintoki plops down next to Zura on the couch and flings an arm over his friend’s shoulders. He’s not sure what to make of this situation, really. But then again, Gintoki’s always been flying by the seat of his pants.
Gintoki isn’t a sap. Demons don’t do declarations of undying love, so he settles for giving what he can. He simply says, “I’ve got your back,” just like all those years ago.
Zura’s lips curl into a slow, seductive smile. He doesn’t turn to face Gintoki as he softly says, “You’re an idiot.”
Gintoki whispers back as he stares straight ahead, “You’re more of an idiot than I am.”
“You’re the idiot.”
“You are.”
“Your hair is stupid, you stupid perm-head.”
“Your hair makes you look like a girl, you stupid girl.”
“Jump-obsessed slacker diabetic man-child.”
“Crazy video game-obsessed okama. I bet you have wet dreams about Italian plumbers.”
“Mario’s more of a man than you’ll ever be.”
“Why you…”
Gintoki smirks and feels that everything is going to be all right. Zura is still Zura, and ‘Gintoki and Zura’ are still ‘Gintoki and Zura’, just like they always have been and always will be, even when they’re doddering old men who are completely senile and only have the mental capacity to argue with each other about whether the Nintendo Famicom is better than the Sega Mega Drive.
They continue their furiously whispered bickering throughout the night.
-----
Gintoki is out on a job, and Katsura is in the bastard’s bedroom, reading through the bastard’s Jump collection. Suddenly, he feels the baby kick. It’s a monstrous kick, and Katsura takes this moment to revise his hypothesis about their child being an Olympic trampolinist. No, this child is clearly a kick-boxer. Or perhaps the reincarnation of Bruce Lee.
Martial artists are cool in their own way, but Katsura has his pride as a samurai. He secretly hopes that what he’s feeling isn’t Bruce Lee kicking the crap out of him, but rather that their child is wielding a wooden practice sword within his womb.
“I wonder if it’ll hurt when the sword comes out of my… Wait. Where will the sword come out?” Katsura is terrified as he realizes he has no vagina.
The baby kicks again and Katsura doubles over as he feels…contractions.
Oh. No.
“Elizabeth!”
The sight of his beautiful angel Elizabeth is enough to lift Katsura’s soul. She runs into the room as fast as her hairy-old-man legs can go.
Katsura?! What’s wrong?!
“Elizabeth, I’m about to go into labor!”
Gasp!
Elizabeth manages to contact Otose-san, who calls for a taxi. Katsura tries his best to move outside, and with Elizabeth’s help, the two of them manage to get him into the car and on his way to the hospital.
When they arrive, the first thing Katsura demands of the nurses is, “Do I have a vagina?!”
“…You’re pregnant, ma’am. Of course you do.”
“It’s not ma’am; it’s Katsura! And I’m a man! It’s that Amanto virus that was going around a few months ago! Do I have a vagina?!”
Answer the question! Elizabeth’s sign says. Everyone turns to stare, but Katsura pays them no mind.
“W-well, y-yes,” the nurse stutters. “It’s a Magical Temporary Vagina. It’ll disappear once you give birth.”
“Good answer.”
They rush him down the halls of the hospital. Katsura is breathing heavily, grimacing in pain as the baby tries to kick its way out of his Magical Temporary Vagina. It’s at this moment that Gintoki barges in.
“Zura!” he shouts, running alongside the gurney. “Zura! I’ll be waiting for you!”
His brow dotted with cold sweat, Zura heaves as the nurses tell him to take deep breaths. He turns to look at his oldest friend just before they wheel him into the operating room. Their eyes meet.
“It’s…not Zura… It’s Katsuraaaa~!”
And Gintoki is left standing outside, their profound lovey-dovey moment shattered like the dreams of so many fangirls.
Congrats on entering the hell of parenthood, Elizabeth writes. Gintoki merely grunts as they settle in for a long wait. And it’s a long wait. Long and nervewracking. Gintoki paces and bites his nails and eats five candy bars from the vending machine down the hall, which just makes him extra jittery with all the sugar rushing through his system. He’s about to lose his mind when a nurse steps into the waiting room.
“Sakata-san? You’re the father, correct? You may come in now. Congratulations! It’s a boy!” she chirps.
He follows her, still trapped in a half-dream state. This is all so surreal, but Gintoki shakes the fog from his mind and thinks of Zura. He enters the room and strides up to Zura, who looks pale and weakened. He pulls up a chair and notices the swaddled bundle against Zura’s chest.
“Is this…?”
“Our son, yes.”
The baby is an ugly pink thing, wrinkled like a prune, or an old man, or an old man surrounded by prunes. The baby is their son, and Gintoki smiles as he brushes a finger lightly over the kid’s pudgy-wrinkly cheek.
“Hey. How are you doing?”
“…Good. I’m fine.”
“Really? It looks like something’s bothering you.”
“Ah, well, it’s just that… In the pregnancy books, they only tell you about the Miracle of Childbirth. They never tell you about the Excruciating Pain of Childbirth.”
“Come on, Zura. That’s not all that’s worrying you. We’ve been sliced and stabbed a dozen times. Pain isn’t new to us.”
“It’s Katsura. And no, I don’t think you understand. I don’t mean physical pain. I suppose I meant that the pregnancy books never tell you about the Excruciating Humiliation of Losing Control of All Bodily Functions and Shitting and Pissing All Over Yourself As You Give Birth to a Prune.”
Gintoki pauses, horrified. “I didn’t need to know that.”
“Excuse me…sir…” The nurse feebly squeaks out. Her eyes are wide like she can’t believe the beautiful mother before her is actually a man. “Uh…sir, we didn’t have time to fill out any forms when you arrived. Could we get a surname for the baby’s birth certificate?”
“Sakata.”
“Hey, he popped out of your man-womb! He should take your name!”
Zura turns to glare. “That’s impossible and you know it. Take responsibility, Gintoki!”
“All right then, Sakata it is. Did you have a given name in mind, or would you like some name books?”
Gintoki is about to say, “Yeah, give us the books,” but Katsura beats him to it.
“Kintaro. The child’s name is Sakata Kintaro.”
“Zura, you bastard!”
“It’s not Zura; it’s Katsura!”
“Zuuuuuu~raaaaaa~” Gintoki calls Zura Zura because Zura hates being called Zura. “I can’t believe you would pick that kind of name! Do you have any idea how many times I was called ‘Testicles’ as a child? Of course you do! You were there!”
“I didn’t name him Kintoki. I named him Kintaro. It’s a wonderfully regal name taken from the tale of a great Heian era warrior. It is a name befitting a future samurai.”
“Kintoki, Kintaro! And I’m saying that’s the same thing! You’re forgetting that in the legend, Kintaro was just a nickname. His real name was Kintoki! And either way, it has 'Kin' in it and this is Gintama, so Kintama is naturally going to come up! Testicles! They’re going to call my boy ‘Testicles’, and who knows? He might even inherit this damned wavy hair, and they’ll call him ‘Pube-head’, too!”
His friend merely gasps and says, serious as always, “…Gintoki,” like he’s been severely betrayed.
Gintoki gives in and the red prune in Zura’s arms officially becomes Sakata Kintaro.
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Sakata Kintaro is a weird looking kid. He has black hair, which is normal. It’s wavy and refuses to be tamed by any styling products, which is not. It’s the look in his eyes, however, that sets him apart more than the natural perm. Kintaro has two expressions - deadly serious is one, and lazy as all hell is the other.
Despite his odd looks, Sakata Kintaro is a genius. No one knows how this happened. No one knows how Gintoki, best known for slacking off, and Katsura, best known for being completely unhinged, managed to produce a child with both ambition and common sense. The current theory, postulated by Auntie Kagura, is that he somehow managed to suck in all of his parents’ bad traits, only there were too many of them, so the gods reversed everything. Otherwise Kintaro would have sucked so much that he would have become a human black hole.
Whatever the theory is, Kintaro is a force to be reckoned with. Some people even say that he’s the antichrist. Those people are usually wusses, though.
The kids on the playground used to call him “Testicles” and “Pube-head” until he blackmailed them with nudie pictures that he threatened to sell to the porn mags.
“I know this guy, Hasegawa-san,” he had said nonchalantly. “His wife left him so he has to make do with a massive collection of porn. He has every magazine and video imaginable, so I’ve got ALL the addresses of the adult entertainment companies.”
They used to pick fights with him until he showed them all how the son of two of the fiercest war heroes (and the student of a frighteningly strong Yato girl’s ‘lessons in how to be a warrior princess’) was born to kick ass. Then they made him King of Kabuki-cho’s Playground. Auntie Kagura was very proud of him for succeeding her throne.
Sakata Kintaro is a genius, but he’s also a little boy who loves his two daddies very much. Although he doesn’t show it very often, what with his severely limited facial expressions and all, Kintaro is happy that his two daddies love each other very much, too. But sometimes, when he watches them being idiots at each other, it hurts his brain a little.