Chapter Text
Word of what’s happening spreads quickly with the APB. Half the Shinsengumi, probably every officer who isn’t on duty, gathers in the courtyard for the second time today, all standing at attention for their orders.
“Gintoki is missing?” Harada asks from the front of the group.
“In a sense. I don't know where he is.”
That’s enough for them to follow Toushirou without question. Kondou is on duty so he’ll have to explain why dozens of officers are being sent out to search for someone Toushirou fired later, but their chief would understand. Hell, he probably would’ve recommended him do this yesterday right after Gintoki left.
Toushirou sends the first and second divisions out to check city jails and hospitals, because Gintoki has a habit, at this point, of getting into trouble. The third and fourth divisions are given the general order of patrolling the streets of Edo and just trying their best to spot him in the crowds, which is easier said than done considering the city’s size. He orders the fifth division to go to Kabukicho specifically, and gives them the address of the old woman’s bar, since she seemed fairly observant and fond enough of Gintoki to notice him if he were around.
It’s a lot of manpower to dedicate and it shouldn’t be surprising when he gets a call an hour later saying they’ve found him, but such a fast turnaround has him dreading the ringtone more than anticipating it. The fact that his ringtone is currently the Doraemon theme tune only makes him feel worse.
It’s Takeda on the line - fifth division then. “Otose-san, the barkeeper, says she’s letting him stay with her. She won’t let us see him - should we enter by force or..?”
“No, no, we can’t just break into a civilian’s house without any warrant, idiot. I’ll come down and speak to her.” He hangs up before Takeda can suggest any other bad ideas.
Kabukicho is barely a twenty minute trip, but Toushirou breaks a few laws to get there in under ten. He just puts the siren on and swerves around pedestrians; he probably traumatises a few cyclists but overall no damage done and he’s outside the bar in no time. The whole fifth division are gathered in front, with the old lady (Otose?) smoking and definitely ignoring everything they are saying.
Seeing her pipe, Toushirou pulls out his own cigarettes. He marches over to her and gestures for a light. If she’s surprised to see him, it doesn’t show on her face.
“So you’re the one sending all these cops after Gintoki?” She asks like she already knows the answer. She’s accusing but she still lights his cigarette for him.
Toushirou nods, “we had a disagreement yesterday. I want to reconcile.”
“Kabukicho is a safe space and Gintoki isn’t in the mood to see anyone,” of course he went directly to the most crime-infested district to avoid the Shinsengumi. Was that his plan in getting to know the residents this whole time? “I want to open my bar in a few hours and government dogs won’t encourage any drinking - now you know he’s not on the streets, you should lay off.” Otose directs that at the officers milling around, looking purposefully away from Toushirou. He gets the hint.
“Leave us be a minute,” he tells the men, “in fact, go back to HQ and recall the other squads.”
Otose waits for them to get in the cars and turn around the corner before she speaks again, her tight lips loosening just barely. “Why are you really putting so much effort into finding one member?”
“Did Gintoki tell you what happened?” Her silence betrays that that must be a ‘no’. “He goaded me into firing him and I want him to come back, that’s it. He’s not in trouble and I don’t care about what he’s done since I last saw him; I’ll deal with it if you let me talk to him.”
She pauses like she’s thinking hard about something, dissecting Toushirou’s expression for dishonesty. He supposes that it must be in her nature to assume the worst of people, especially the police when living in this district. With how much ‘seppuku’ is thrown around, she might have thought Gintoki leaving the Shinsengumi would be a death sentence.
Taking another drag from her pipe, she says “My husband was a police officer, you know. He was conscripted into the joi war years ago, and he went and died at the Bakufu’s command.”
That’s the end Toushirou will probably have, but still - “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I don’t need your sympathy; it was years ago. Gintoki just… Reminds me of him. I don’t want the Bakufu getting him hurt too.” She stares at Toushirou, still searching for something. “I know you care about him but I don’t think you realise what sort of situation he’s in. It’ll be easier to leave Gintoki with me and forget about him. Go back to your headquarters and leave him be.”
“I can’t.” Because that would be so much easier, and that’s exactly what he wants to do. Toushirou is used to pushing people away, but being pushed away in return? It hurts and “I won’t have an easier time without him, I’ll look after him, I swear. Just let me talk to him?”
He thinks she might be planning on ignoring him forever, but then she turns. Otose moves out of the doorway to unlock the bar, letting Toushirou in first courteously. The lights are dimmed and there’s a faint disinfectant scent, like she had needed to scrub the floor recently. She let Toushirou in before her so he heads toward the only door, passing into the backroom. It appears to be a downstairs apartment, assumedly Otose’s, and he bends to remove his shoes.
As he crouches, he spots a white tuft sticking up from the sofa and he drops the pretence of politeness. One shoe kicked off haphazardly with the other still hanging on, he scrambles toward the sofa with Gintoki’s name on his lips.
“I…” Gintoki is laying, pale and sweating, in one of the poorer conditions Toushirou has ever seen him in, which is an accomplishment. Face bruised worse than the drunken brawl left over, wash cloth on his forehead making blood run in pink rivulets down his cheeks. Toushirou groans in frustration so that he’s not tempted into a more humiliating reaction. “You really never let me catch a break, do you?”
“He came in like that,” Otose explains, “all bruised and battered, but there’s an infected wound on his abdomen that’s causing the fever. I told him I would take him to a hospital, but he didn’t even want me to clean him up. This was a compromise.”
Toushirou recalls Katsura’s compromise with Takasugi, to keep him alive. Thinking too much about Gintoki always seems to lead back to those two.
“His abdomen..?” He asks, but then - “he was in a fight at Kada’s casino three days ago,” Otose scowls “he got stabbed but the hospital stitched him back up. He was fine until -” he seemed fine, but then they got into that fight on the lift. Did that pussy lizard amanto actually get a hit onto him, or did…
Toushirou kneed him in the stomach during that fight, and Gintoki had been hunched over himself the whole rest of the meeting. He had his jacket tied around his waist in the jail cell, and let Toushirou shove him to the floor when they were arguing. He must have opened the wound up and Gintoki was hiding it, for whatever idiotic, self-destructive reason he thought had merit at the time.
“I won’t take him to a hospital if he was so stubborn about it, but the Shinsengumi barracks have an infirmary with proper medical supplies.” He says, already pulling out his phone to have Yamazaki set up a bed. “Sorry, Otose-san, but I’m not going to argue about this.”
She rolls her eyes, “I would rather your idiot assistant not die either, this is fine by me. Just,” her voice drifts closer to stern, maybe protective, “keep him safe? I want him back on our patrol.”
~~~
“Either God hates you or he really, really likes you.” Toushirou says when Gintoki blinks to proper awareness a few hours later. They’ve set up an IV with antibiotics and an actual nurse came to clean him up, because even though Toushirou has significant experience he would still prefer a trained professional be in charge of Gintoki’s wellbeing.
Gintoki smirks up at him, which is significantly more relieving than he would like to admit. “What happened to letting me fuck myself up on my own?”
“You were being selfish, I realised. You didn’t even give me a chance to fire you on my own terms; completely undermined my authority as vice-chief.”
“I bet Soichirou-kun had a field day with that.” He replies.
Toushirou fakes his most genuine smile and places a hand on Gintoki’s cheek, turning his head to look straight into his eyes. “You will have no field days after this. I’m not letting you leave again. House arrest time.”
Three days with three almost arrests and two near hospitalisations? This is why he didn’t want Mitsuba to get emotionally invested in a man who lives by his sword.
“Hijikata-kun,” Gintoki tries meaningfully, pushing his hand away. “I meant what I said.”
“Me too.”
“Then why are you telling me to stay?” The light answer is that he doesn’t want Gintoki to win their little game, and he considers using that. Gintoki might accept it and Toushirou would be lulled back into their easy dynamic, trying not to pay attention to the other man’s attempts to push him away.
Toushirou shrugs instead, and counters: “Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”
“It wasn’t important. You were annoyed and it would have just distracted from the issue.”
“But you were trying to distract me,” Toushirou pushes, leaning into Gintoki’s space again. “You got into that bar fight so I wouldn’t realise I was the one who hurt you.”
It’s a guess, actually. The bar fight might have been where he reopened the wound, and Toushirou just coincidentally hit him there too earlier that same day. But putting himself in harm’s way to at once protect Toushirou’s feelings and try to stamp them out of existence is exactly the kind of dumb thing Gintoki would do.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gintoki defends, pushing himself into Toushirou’s space too, even though he still looks a bit woozy. Toushirou steadies him by the shoulder. “I just wanted to let off some steam and ended up a bit roughed up.”
“Seems like you’re getting ‘a bit roughed up’ a lot.” He accuses, not unkindly. “What happened last night? I doubt you started a fight with pus leaking out of your abdomen, feverish enough to go to that old barkeep for help.”
“These are old injuries,” he lies, and when Toushirou raises an eyebrow, “it wasn’t anything dramatic, just drop it.”
He looks like he’s going to turn away so Toushirou grabs him by the chin, checking over the bruising more closely. Swollen lip and a second black eye, both fresh, but there’s a strip of pinking flesh from his temple to his jaw. When he runs a thumb over it, Gintoki hisses at the contact.
It’s pretty obviously not from a sword fight - it kind of looks like someone dripped acid down his face. Under his battered yukata (he didn’t resign with his uniform, that might be his most respectful act yet as a member of the Shinsengumi), there are more marks that look like they’re from the same substance. However, his clothes aren’t singed at all, just torn up and a bit bloody.
“Amanto,” Gintoki mutters when Toushirou has been staring too long, “those lizard guys…”
“You went after them again?!” He snaps and the other man flinches back.
“No! I listened, I wouldn’t lose control -” Gintoki stops himself, carefully. “I didn’t do anything, okay? They found me and they were still mad about their dumb coffee boy so…”
Quietly, Toushirou seethes. He doesn’t let it show on his face. “Okay, good. Did you fight back?”
Gintoki doesn’t reply, pressing his split lips into a line. It doesn’t indicate an answer, but if they managed to drip acid down his chest then they probably had at least one guy holding Gintoki’s arms back so they could access it better.
“They’ve gotten worse,” Toushirou brings up, pointing at the sores to move past his last question. If they’d been this obvious earlier then the nurse would have bandaged them.
“It’s their venom; it absorbs into your skin and reactivates when you take antibiotics.” He doesn’t ask how Gintoki knows that. Maybe to soothe his worries, he says “It doesn’t hurt as much when it reactivates though - it’s fine.”
Must have hurt a lot, earlier then. Based on Gintoki’s blatant reaction to Toushirou lightly touching the mark on his cheek.
“I never filed your resignation forms.” He brings up, “so you’re still my assistant. If you want them processed you’ll have to do your job and sort them out yourself.”
“So mean, Hijikata-kun,” Gintoki brightens up a bit, and Toushirou pretends it’s because he’s happy to have an excuse to stick around.
Maybe it’s because they’re still so close together or because Toushirou has been ignoring his feelings for months or maybe it’s the reminder that Gintoki has been pushing away from him with as much force as he has, and yet they’re still barely centimetres apart.
“You know, earlier Sougo said that you’d been telling him about masochism.”
“Not on purpose! He’s a mini pervert and takes everything I say out of context, I swear.”
Toushirou flicks his forehead - “it just makes more sense, now, why you kept being disobedient and irritating me.”
Gintoki flushes, past the pallor of his still sickly skin. “Hey - you’re my boss, this isn’t some steamy romance novel and you can’t tease me -”
He kisses the idiot because he doesn’t want him to make a joke and ruin the moment. Maybe Toushirou already ruined it by bringing up Sougo, actually, but Gintoki still kisses back nonetheless.
He pulls away, mostly to stop himself. Gintoki is still hurt. “I should have done that ages ago.”
Gintoki smiles at him but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “You’re going to regret this.”
“You kissed me back,” he threads his fingers through wavy hair, “just let yourself be happy.”
“I’ll try my best.” And Toushirou finds himself believing him.
~~~
Finding the lizard amanto is easy with the Shinsengumi resources at his disposal. He makes a mental note to apologise to Kondou later for taking the Gintoki approach of stab first, follow the law later.
The amanto are staying at a four star hotel near Shibuya. It’s only 8pm when Toushirou knocks on the door, and he can hear them talking inside. It seems like they booked out the whole third floor.
It’s the dumbass errand boy who answers, wad of gauze over his whole snout. Toushirou takes pleasure in punching him in that same snout, sending him to the floor with a crash before he’s even registered who he is. The other amanto come to their feet, panicked and clearly tipsy already, despite the early hour. Perhaps they were drunk when they attacked Gintoki, perhaps they can’t even remember hurting him.
They’ll still pay. “I got the right room, thank goodness, that could have been really awkward.”
“Wha -” one of them tries, wearing his neat suit with the shirt untucked. “You’re from the other day, the Shinsengumi vice-chief?”
“The very same.”
“We don’t want any trouble with you,” he says, raising his hands, “we already settled our score.”
Of course. Gintoki gets to defend Toushirou and the amanto get to defend their errand boy, what a lovely little bow they’ve wrapped these loose ends into. “See we were even, before, but then you attacked my assistant in some dark alleyway for revenge. I didn’t arrest your errand boy for looking at me wrong and you forgave Gintoki, wasn’t that the deal?”
“Arrest him then.” The wimpy amanto groans on the floor and Toushirou kicks him for good measure, forcing a pained yelp.
“I think you all ganged up on my assistant though, so one arrest hardly seems fair. I’ll be taking you all down to the station for aggravated assault on a police officer, harassment, might even sneak in a stalking charge since you managed to find Gintoki so easily.”
There are five amanto not including their errand boy, and they all square up at his words. “Be reasonable here, vice-chief, we’re important. You can’t arrest us like you can those joi scum.”
They’re not entirely wrong. Filing charges against amanto without permanent Earth residency is a headache. Sort of thing he could occupy Gintoki with until he trusts him to go outside again without coming back either injured or immersed in illegal activity. But he’d rather spend that alone time doing something other than paperwork, before he wastes away all of his teenage years on bureaucracy and drags Gintoki with him.
“You called Gintoki a rabid dog, back then. He’s pretty violent and he definitely has a sadistic streak but,” Toushirou unsheathes his blade, angling it so the lamplight glints on the edge. “I think you will find that I am much crueller towards the bastards that hurt my subordinates.”
They flinch back but Toushirou is on them before they can scatter properly. He can't kill them, he wouldn’t be able to justify that level of excessive force against unarmed opponents, but he'll put them all in twice as bad a state as they left Gintoki in.
By the time he’s done, the amanto have been slashed into bloody ribbons and Yamazaki is already on standby with an ambulance on route.
~~~
They fall into mundanity easily. Gintoki recovers and Toushirou writes off the amanto as problematic. He thinks Kondou might call in a favour to get them deported before they manage to get Toushirou in any trouble, but he's got the sense to be grateful instead of worrying.
Even though he kissed Gintoki, and Gintoki kissed back, it's still tentative. Or at least their feelings are.
"So you weren't kidding about house arrest? Hijikata-kun, this is definitely a scene from a porno." Gintoki is back on his lap, and now he doesn't have to worry about 'feelings' it's kind of nice.
"Fuck off." He still says, pressing the ankle monitor onto his leg. "We're compromising right now."
Gintoki nods, "yes, vice-chief-san, I am a naughty criminal you have arrested. How ever will I convince you to let me go?"
He flutters his eyelashes disgustingly, and Toushirou has put the ankle monitor on now so he throws him off his lap. Gintoki clings onto his shoulders and drags him down too, until they're a scrambling pile on the floor. Gintoki isn't injured anymore so he pins him down and pinches the lobe of his ear.
"We are not roleplaying."
"Is it a roleplay? What about what I just said is false?"
"You are not a criminal!" Technically. He hasn't been charged with anything so a couple of arrests keep them safely out of the bad porno realm.
"That's what you think." Gintoki winks underneath him so Toushirou pulls on his ear harder, until he's slapping his bicep and begging - "ow ow, please, vice-chief-san, I'll be good ~"
Maybe he should just sleep with him, to shut him up. He probably wouldn't be annoying with a dick in his mouth - and apparently he has practice. Would that be a reward? Shouldn't he be disciplining-
Gintoki smirks up at him, "you're thinking about it, right? I'm totally convincing you right now. You're so kinky, vice-chief-san."
"If you call me "vice-chief-san" one more time I will kick you out of my office and you can roleplay superheroes with Sougo whilst you babysit him until he's 18." Bringing up sadistic children helpfully takes Gintoki away from any nsfw thoughts he was having and to abject terror.
"No, please - I'll shut up, don't make me babysit."
Toushirou flicks his nose, "but Sougo likes you so much and it'd give you a great pastime until I let you leave the barracks again."
Eight years isn't an overreaction. It's a reasonable response and Gintoki will be grateful when he's still a free, alive man aged twenty-six. And the threat of being put on Sougo duty will surely only make the other men fear his authority more. Or fear Sougo more. Based on Gintoki's expression though, it might just ruin their relationship before it starts.
So he kisses him on his cute little pout and it's kind of nice, even if he is giving in first.
"I won't make you babysit Sougo -" Gintoki perks up "- yet. Just let me do my job and please do yours for once? And I'll take off the ankle monitor in a week." Or two, but he doesn't say that.
"Aww, you're such a softie now you've gotten a taste of Gin-san." He flutters his eyelashes again but Toushirou refrains from response. It's nice to have fun with him.
"Yeah, you're right."