Archive of Our Own

Gintoki is ten years old and he has nightmares so bad that he wakes up every hour and his clothes are always soaked through with sweat and the blankets are always thrown across the tatami from where he's kicked and flailed. He covers his face with his pillow and tries to block out the memories of them, the flashing images of his own hands picking through the clothes of corpses he recognizes, of crying birds and scurrying rats, of houses scorched and fields razed to the ground. When that doesn't work, he pads barefoot out into the yard of Shoka Sonjuku and washes his hands in the slow-running water of the sōzu there, over and over and over, until his hands are cold and numb and his skin is raw and he can't feel the phantom sensations of blood and dirt under his fingernails anymore. When that doesn't work, he finds himself in front of Sensei's door with his dirty feet and cold hands.

He doesn't always go in. It's not often, actually, that he does. Usually he just stands there and watches the listing flicker of the candles in Shoyo's room against the screens, the shape of him moving around in there. Usually he sits back against the doorframe and falls back to sleep there, soothed by the small noises from inside, and then starts awake when Shoyo rises that morning and slides the screen door across, and Gintoki falls backwards and hits his head on the floor and gets tangled in the legs of his smiling Sensei.

Some nights are worse than others though, and that's when Gintoki quietly opens the door and goes inside. Shoyo is always sitting there, cross-legged on the mats, and never asleep. It's almost like he's been waiting. He turns to Gintoki with his smile soft in the waxy candlelight and wordlessly guides him toward the futon in the center of the room. Gintoki lays his head on his Sensei's knee, or curls into his hip, and Shoyo will untangle the knots in his hair with deft, calming fingers that never pull hard enough to hurt. He'll use that special low voice of his to tell Gintoki unimportant stories, about what he's going to make for breakfast tomorrow, eggs sunny-side up, or how he's going to fix that leak in the roof—

Gin will fall asleep there, and by the time he wakes again, Shoyo will always be gone.

"Gintoki."

It's Zura. His flat voice is unmistakable, and so is the sound of his breathing, the distribution of weight on each of his feet and the length of his gait as he pads against the hardwood and then against the tatami. He's memorized the sounds of Zura and Takasugi and their sensei, so he doesn't get alarmed by every footstep or bump in the night.

Gin's dragged his futon to the edge of the mats, to where the screen is cracked to let fresh air from the yard in and chase out the oppressive stench of teenage boys. He's laying there on his side, staring out. The yard is usually green and prosperous, but it turns eerie shades of blue and grey and black in the night, all hazy and strange. The stars still outnumber the glints of invading airships, and if he's lucky, he'll see the dark shape of an owl swoop from tree to tree, or a rat run along the retaining wall. If he's not, he'll just get bitten by mosquitos.

"Gintoki, are you awake?"

"No," he mutters, hugging the covers closer to himself like he could maybe disappear in them. "Piss off."

He waits for Zura to leave, but there's no sign of it. He can still feel him standing at the edge of the bed, the weight of him and the shadow he's casting there. Gintoki feels a trench form between his eyebrows— can the guy get the damn message already? Doesn't he know it's weird to watch people sleep?!

A moment, and then he feels the other boy kneel beside him.

"Gintoki."

Gin starts upright. "What?!" he yells, fed up. His hair's ruffled like a scared cat or a bird's nest or something, his pyjamas all sweaty and hanging off. He must look pathetic as shit. If Zura asks, he'll just say he was jerking off.

Zura leans back like he's surprised, the white moon reflected in his wide eyes. "Ah," he goes. "I thought you were asleep."

"I was, until you got here!" he lies.

"Sorry, Gintoki," the other boy says in that way of his that's sincere-to-a-fault. Then, without pretense, he lays down and tucks himself into Gin's futon like he belongs there. Suddenly, there's cold feet brushing up against his legs and Gintoki's screaming at himself to push the freakazoid away already but he can't bring himself to actually do it or even complain and ah, Zura doesn't smell like acrid sweat and musk like every other teenage boy, and actually he smells kind of nice, like clean laundry— and yeah, that makes Gin's brain hit the brakes so hard there's skid marks on the inside of his skull. Zura's hair tickles his neck, every time one of them breathes out. That hand is touching the front of his pyjama shirt, rucking up the fabric a little, and it's too soft for a samurai, goddammit. All the blood in Gin's body rushes in different directions like it's trying to draw and quarter him. His face flushes red-hot, and, well—

"What are you doing, asshole?" he croaks out at last.

Zura fluffs Gintoki's pillow beneath his head and snuggles in deeper. In the moonlight, this close-up, his eyelashes look unbelievably long. "I couldn't sleep. I thought a change of scenery might help. Or, I don't know— you could tire me out, or something. A general needs his beauty sleep, after all."

Gintoki can't pretend that he isn't in the deepest, darkest, most wretched and mouldering throes of puberty— not when the words you could tire me out bring such pixellated images to the front of his mind like that. He's always thinking about something dirty, but this is the first time he's imagined Zura that way— it makes him feel guilty, and all weird-in-the-guts. He wants to tell him to go annoy Takasugi instead, but the words clam up in his throat again.

Even at this age, sex isn't unfamiliar to him. It's something that gets talked about in giggles and whispers by the other boys at Shoka Sonjuku, who are all just starting to notice the way Ame's chest has been growing, the way Mitsuru's wearing a shorter kimono than the other girls. None of them know how it works— hell, most of them still think girls don't poop, or that girls have balls too. They're all tripping over themselves over something as plebian as a glimpse at Mitsuru's panties, meanwhile Gin's spending a large chunk of his free time peeking through finger-shaped holes in brothel and bathhouse walls. Zura's got a point, crushing on that widow— peeping on a grown woman is so much better than chasing those flat-chested girls around and pulling their pigtails. That, and the girls his age all snicker at him. They remember him when he was a dirty and bloodstained rat, digging through their garbage for food. They all say he ate Ame's cousin, when he died in a skirmish and was left for the birds. They've only just stopped holding their noses. They think his hair and eyes are weird.

Zura's prettier than all of them. The girls with their parasols and the whores with their painted faces. His hair and face and skin are almost like a woman's, too. Maybe if Gin were any better-socialized kid, he'd know that thinking that kinda way about another guy is weird and bad. But he isn't, and he doesn't, so he rolls onto his side to face the long-haired boy. His face is squished against the thin futon and his inky hair splayed out like an octopus, and Gin can hear his heartbeat and can feel sweat running down the back of his neck and shit, Zura's lips part slightly to suck in a breath and Gin zeroes in on it and shit shit shitshitshit, what is he doing, it's just boring old Zura, he sees him every day, is he fucking stupid—

He kisses Zura. He can't help it. It feels like he's possessed— like once he started thinking about it, he had no choice but to do it or he was gonna fucking explode and there'd be chunks of him dripping off the ceiling. It's all Zura's damn fault anyway…

His lips are as soft as he thought they'd be. He realizes its probably Zura's first kiss. The guy's too stuck up to have any fun without him. He opens his mouth around Zura's bottom lip, like he's seen people do— it's just kind of wet-feeling. He really thought there'd be more meat to it, or something.

The boy puts a hand on Gintoki's forehead and pushes them apart.

"Ew," he goes.

Gintoki feels his face heat up again. "What do you mean, ew?!"

Zura wipes his mouth on his pyjama sleeve. "You spat on me," he says, matter-of-factly. He should be madder, probably, or more embarrassed. "And you smell bad."

Gintoki gives himself a cursory sniff— okay, so maybe he's a little musky, but girls dig that shit— and then balls his hands in the blanket until his knuckles have surely turned white. There's this… there's this awful feeling in his chest. He can't explain it, but it's making him want to yell and run and hide. His voice is piercingly loud in the pre-dawn quiet, drowning out the crickets and the creaking rafters and the sōzu tipping, back and forth. "Get out, then!" he snaps. "If you're not gonna make it worth my while, go somewhere else!"

Zura tilts his head at him like a confused dog.

"Don't you have your own house? What are you even doing here, ah?!" He rolls over and pulls the duvet up to his neck, giving Zura the cold shoulder. The heat coming off his face is almost unbearable. "Go sleep there!"

Fuck, the sane part of him thinks. Why is he doing this? Any of it? He needs to get his shit together, dammit. The poor guy probably just had a nightmare. If anything, they'd both benefit from sleeping in the same bed. It'd be a weight off Sensei's back, anyway. Instead, he's just forcing Zura to do what he does every night— sit there in the dark and bite his nails and clench his asshole and jump at fucking shadows until the sun comes up. Fuck. Fuck!!

Zura leaves without saying anything else. Out in the yard, the sōzu tips again with a dull thunk.

"The hell do you think you're doing?"

He's still got splatters of alien blood on his clothes and his sword at his hip and he's honestly too young to be drinking. The noise of the other soldiers causing a merry ruckus inside drifts through the ryokan's thin walls, just like the honey-colored light that seeps through the wooden slats and runs rivers along the ground. She's older than him. Way older. Old enough that, if he knew the exact numbers, it might be kind of a problem, but he doesn't, so it isn't. She looked at him across the room and let her kimono fall off her shoulder, revealing a swathe of porcelain skin gone gold. She asked him if he saw something he liked. He said he did.

"What? I got bad breath or something—?"

As unfortunate as the circumstances of the war are, a part of Gintoki likes being in a place where no-one knows him. Where he's just another soldier with a sword, and no-one recognizes him as that kid, that fucking kid. He likes the way the other soldiers respect him, the glint of fear in the enemy's eyes at the sight of his white clothes, the way the women turn their heads and beckon him in closer.

Her hand is on his cheek, pushing him away. "Don't kiss me. It's disgusting."

"Ah, okay," he agrees, stupidly. With the way she's palming him through his pants, having second thoughts is as foreign a concept to him as how those flying machines lurking above stay in the air. He doesn't really know how to kiss, anyway— not a woman at least— so he'd probably just embarrass himself and spit all over her or something. And, honestly, that same part of him is glad. He doesn't really want to kiss her, either. He just thought you kind of had to— that it was just how these things went.

"Save that kind of thing for your girlfriend." Her hand curls around and fists tightly in the curls at the back of his head, pulling just hard enough to sting. "I can think of a better use for that mouth, anyway."

He lets her drag him down, until his knees are in the dirt, and she parts the fabric of her kimono just so until—

—

The back door of the ryokan slides open with a rattle and there's the sound of a familiar set of geta on the pavement, but Gin couldn't care less. The sound of him thrusting into her is obscene— she's warm and slick and her skin tastes like salt, where he's biting that exposed shoulder, trying to muffle the winded sounds getting eked out of him. He's pushed her up against the wall, her hair and nails catching on the timber, and fuck, maybe if there was just a little bit more friction, maybe if he angles his hips and fucks harder against the inside wall of her cunt—

"Gintoki—"

He doesn't stop. If anything, she rocks against him harder now that they've got an audience, but she does gather her kimono to cover her tits as they bounce— the best Takasugi's getting from him now is a gradual slowing, a release of his stiff, grip-white toes against the ground. His eyes wander over. Takasugi's fucking staring. Doesn't even have the goodness in his heart to politely look away while his friend's pounding the midnight oil— his eyes are locked on the place they're joined together, the motion of her ass white as the moon and Gin's sticky cock moving in and out of her. Gin gets it, he does. It's like trying to look away from all the wrinkly old people at the onsen.

He tries to make some stupid joke, but his mouth is weirdly dry and thick and tastes like cunt. The nameless woman beats him to the punch with a fucked-out smile.

"What," she slurs, and it's almost a moan. "You wanna join in?"

Even as he wobbles and slips out, rubbing against a wet thigh, Gintoki can see the way Takasugi's cheeks color, and then he tears his eyes away, carefully studying some point on the retaining wall. He's always a prude when it comes down to it. "Captain's looking for you," he tells the wall through gritted teeth. "You should— you should finish what you're doing."

He finally turns to leave, and the woman calls him a rude word under her breath, giggling and expecting Gin to do the same. She reaches down and guides Gintoki back into her—

"Didn't know you'd changed professions," Takasugi sneers out, laying on his futon. He's got his back to Gintoki, and he's sleeping in his day clothes like any good soldier, ready to jump at the slightest creak of a nightingale floor. Even in the rare times of celebration, he doesn't relax.

Gin strips off his arm braces and shirt— the bandages beneath it are wet and bloody. Lucky it didn't seep through too much. If he'd gotten blood on her kimono, she probaby would've castrated him with her teeth. The inn room is dark and empty, all the other soldiers off drinking or fucking or making fools of themselves. He falls down onto his own bedroll beside the other man with a sigh. Maybe it's the blood loss or maybe it's the orgasm or maybe it's the alcohol, but he feels more exhausted than he's ever been. He feels tiny and heavy and floppy all at same time, his brain working overtime to get his thoughts in the right order, the conveyer belt up there's all jammed and half his staff are striking for better pay and the manager's jerking off in the back room and all he can smell and taste is sex—

"I'm a prodigy with all kinds of swords." He'd make a docking gesture with his hands, but Takasugi isn't looking.

The other man just grunts and curls in on himself.

Gin rolls onto his side to face him and it only hurts a little. This position— its like they're kids gossipping at school camp, goddammit. "What, ah? You jealous or something?"

Takasugi scoffs. "Please. I'd sooner die than be jealous of a woman like that. You should check yourself for strange rashes."

Gintoki feels a weird, woozy smile creep onto his face. "I meant jealous of me."

The dark shape of his friend and comrade stiffens. They've kissed a few times, out of both anger and teenage curiosity. Every boy's gotten half-mast on the sparring mats, it's a natural consequence of hormones and skin and musk and knees where they shouldn't be and faces too damn close together— it's just that Gintoki's the only one stupid (or maybe carefree) enough to actually act on it. And, yeah, they've jerked off in the same room a couple times, sharing the same creased and faded dirty magazine, and maybe Gin's eyes have wandered away from the model and her out-of-style hair, on her head and elsewhere, and towards Takasugi's spit-slick hand pumping his dick, his pink lip caught between his teeth. There was one time where he offered to suck Takasugi off, half as a joke and half just to see what it was like— but they haven't had sex. Not like that.

"The sentiment still stands," Takasugi huffs out after a moment, quietly. His voice is small in a way Gintoki doesn't like, doesn't want to hear. "I just— I don't know how you can do that. How you can forget about— not when Sensei's—"

"I can't forget. I'm always thinking about it," Gintoki admits. His subconscious taunts him. How dare he waste time on things like sleep or sword drills or wiping his damn ass or changing his damn bandages when there's a war on, when their sensei needs him. How dare he be human still. But every day he brushes closer and closer to death. Every day the enemies get stronger and the bullets graze deeper. Most of their comrades are older men, with wives and crotch goblins waiting for them to come home. They've lived hard but fulfilling lives. They talk about things like women and sweets and sake like there's nothing better on the face of the earth— and Gin could die tomorrow and miss out on all of it, every single thing that makes their lives worth living and their country worth dying for. Every single mundane thing that Shoyo would tell him he had to do tomorrow, in that space between midnight and morning where Gintoki laid with his head on his knee, like airing out the laundry and making a new batch of pickled radishes. Every single thing that Shoyo picked him up out of the mud and taught him to live to look forward to. He doesn't want to let the war take it from him, even if it does kill him. "Thought it'd clear my head. Maybe let me get some sleep."

"Did it... work?"

The glow through the screens, of the orange tinted oil lamps in the hallway, lights Takasugi's lumpy silhouette across from him like he's just a shadow on a wall, a hand making the shape of him there. If it weren't for the blood loss, or the alcohol, or the cum drying on the ground outside, he'd reach out. He'd let them both find out the answer. But instead he feels like lead on top of the bedroll, like a ghost has got him pinned down, and his eyelids are drooping—

"I dunno," he yawns out, and lets his eyes fall closed.

For the first time in a long time, he sleeps 'til morning.

They're losing the war. More and more every day. It's obvious, now, in how the amanto fronts seem to expect every move they make, in how few friendly supply ships make it through the blockades, in how many more men they lose each time. Every one of them knows he's fighting a losing battle, and it's a hopeless chain reaction that eventually leads to them not dodging the last bullet in time. The war effort is held together by empty hope and the human spirit, the weight of everything that's already been lost, and the stupidity to never fucking surrender.

Gintoki doesn't care if Earth loses its sovereignty, if all of this bloodshed and inching back and forth like tug-of-war has been for nothing. The politics of it all, the who-owns-what and who-controls-who doesn't mean jack shit to him. He won't stop until he gets Shoyo back or dies trying. Everything else can go to hell, he thinks.

Well…

Speaking of that—

Gintoki wakes with a gasp and a hunch inwards as pain erupts all over his body, white-hot enough to blank the residual images from his mind. His eyes adjust to the dark— the rotting walls of their makeshift barracks, the faint glow of the moon through the criss-crossing windows— the same way his skin adjusts to the feel of his bandages, to the timber floor cold and almost sticky beneath him. He's laid out on the floor, wrapped up to his damn neck in gauze that's been used before and boiled just enough to get the stink of death out of it. The crude infirmary is very full, enough so that he doesn't even have a bed in it, and the moans and shaking breath of dying men is a strange but familiar treble to the bass of bugs humming outside, to Gin's heart still beating in his chest.

He's covered in small, nasty cuts and punctures from some kind of amanto-made shrapnel explosive. Lucky it didn't blow his head clean off. From the way his vision's doubled and the way it hurts to breathe or move or even think about doing either, the external wounds might actually be the least of his problems.

Despite all that, he gets to his feet. Like he always does.

(

In the corner of his eye, there's a flash of red.

He turns his head quickly enough to snap a lesser man's neck, and he sees the flare of the laser just before it dissipates into the ground, the blood that squirts like bad horror movie FX out of Takasugi's throat.

He's running before he even realizes it. The white of his clothes is a symbol— one of power and fear, of notoriety— but before that, it's a target, making him almost glow on the battlefield, through the lens of a scope. It has its pros and cons. He distantly registers the whistling sound of a projectile. In his split-second assessment, it ranks less important than cutting that chicken-headed motherfucker's dick off, or holding Takasugi's blood in.

He doesn't end up making it to either of them.

)

There's a man standing watch by the infirmary door. The end of his cigarette flares as he stares out into the night, and he doesn't notice Gintoki shuffling up to him, holding his bruised ribs. Some guard he is.

Gin reaches out and scruffs him.

The guard's cigarette drops from his mouth. "O-oi—"

He pushes him up against the wall with a creak of old, weathered wood, and his hands scramble for purchase against Gin's bandaged arms, pulling the careful wrappings apart. "Where are they?"

"You need to stay and rest, Shiroyasha—"

"Spit it out. Where's Katsura? Takasugi?!" He's got the guard by the collar so tightly that his feet aren't even on the ground, and his face is getting darker by the second. "Where is he?!"

"Katsura— on patrol—" he chokes out. "'sugi— he's—"

It's like Gin's waiting to hear a pin drop. To hear that that tiny bastard didn't make it. That it's all Gin's fault, because he wasn't there in time to take the bullet for him, wasn't there to watch his back—

"—in the storehouse. We— overflow. No space for—"

Gintoki drops the man and flexes his hands to chase out the tension, relief draining into his body, lightening him by what feels like kilos. The coughing guard doesn't try to stop him from stepping over him and out onto the engawa.

The storehouse is lit only by the flare of a lantern inside, the soft glow through the door still bright in the black night. The grass between is wet with condensation and cold to boot, against Gin's bare feet, and combined with the chill air it makes him shiver. The storehouse door is propped wide to prevent the coming-and-going sounds of medics waking the wounded from what little sleep they're getting. Gin slips in silently, eyeing the dark shapes laid out in there, between the barrels of rice and gunpowder and racks of drying fish. There's aren't many. Five, and from their breathing, one's already dead. Takasugi's on flattened sacks at the back, between the stashes of bokutōs they use in drills, and Gin's chest clenches tight when he realizes his breath is steady and slow, peaceful at least in his medicated sleep. As he stalks towards the makeshift bed, he sees the gauze on Takasugi's neck, the dirt and blood still dark on his pale face. He kneels down to sit beside him, the aching and stinging of his own wounds a distant, irrelevant thing, and reaches out to smear the ash still on his cheek, to push his stupid bangs out of his stupid eyes.

He's alive. He's—

(

He's got Gin's arm looped over his shoulders and he's dragging him through the mud. Their whole squadron has just been wiped out by an amanto warrior four times the size of their biggest man and Gintoki finally got the jump on the bastard by letting himself get hit square in the stomach by his spiked club and letting Takasugi take his head off. Dark, scary blood is pouring from Gintoki's gut, over the white-knuckled clasp of his other hand trying to hold it in.

"Almost there." Takasugi's voice is low and gritted. He's been muttering for a while, but Gin's having trouble putting one foot in front of the other, let alone getting his mouth to make words. Gin thinks Takasugi's talking more to himself, anyway. "You're alright, you're gonna be—"

Gin drools out a glob of spit and blood. Woozily, he hopes the look on his face is at least close to a smile. The words dribble out the same as the blood, lethargic and slurred. In another life, maybe his words are slurred with liquid courage, with a little flirtatiousness, and poor Takasugi's just carrying his drunk friend home. "Worried about me?"

The other man groans as he keeps pushing them forward. "One of us has to be. Otherwise you might do something stupid like—"

The words don't come, but Gintoki hears them anyway. Like take a kanabō to the stomach and rupture all your fucking organs and die.

Gin's pained huff is almost a laugh. "Leave it t' Zura," he breathes out. "Better at it. Prettier, too."

"I'll keep that in mind next time you're bleeding out. He can carry you."

"Jealous—"

)

He knows how it feels, now. He wants to shake Takasugi awake. He wants to grab him and tell him he was worried too, goddammit. Wants to say it— I'm happy you're not dead. But Takasugi needs his rest, and even if he didn't, it's not what they do. They don't do feelings like that. Not when they were jealous kids vying for their Sensei's attention. Not when they're two to a bunk and he's bucking into Takasugi's wet fist, biting his arm to keep quiet— not when they've worked out they can use sex to slow time between now and their next failure. Especially not now. Not now, when Gintoki's willingly put himself in the line of fire to try and slow his friend's bleeding, when Gintoki's sitting at his bedside and watching him sleep.

It's hard to admit to himself. That feelings like this are something he even has. Tatsuma and Zura and Takasugi are his comrades, his peers, admittedly even his friends— but they're different from Sensei, he thought. Shoyo is someone he loves, someone he'd give up everything for. Someone he'd die for. Being away from Shoyo hurts. Not knowing where he is hurts. Waking up without him hurts. He didn't think— didn't think that they— that he—

Every time he's shared a shitty bedroll with Takasugi— every time he's had to sneak back into his own bed with his hands dirty and his lips sore and his brain full of fucked-out fog, it's hurt a little, and waking up alone has stung. He told himself being able to sleep was worth it. He's a grown man— he's the Shiroyasha, for fuck's sake, he shouldn't want to stay there. He shouldn't want to lower himself to the storeroom floor and press himself into Takasugi's side. He shouldn't want to, but—

Against his chest like this, Gin can feel the steady beat of the other man's heart, and his eyes slowly drift shut. Tomorrow's a new day.

Tatsuma's only in Edo for the night. Some trade deal he couldn't miss out on, or whatever— Gintoki doesn't ask, but secretly, he assumes it's drugs, because the only exports out of Earth are drugs, minerals, sexually-transmitted diseases, and idiots that don't die when they're killed. Gintoki hasn't seen him since the injury that took him off the front lines and boy, the way Tatsuma's fingers twitched with phantom impulse from all his cut nerves, the strip of pinkish bone exposed in his sword-hand— it's something Gin will never forget. The guy hasn't changed much, outside of being a little taller and lither, a little less wrought with fever than he was when they parted ways. He's become more of a man, maybe. The kind that can adapt to this terrifying future they're living in, the new technological age. That's always been part of what separates him from them. If anything, the new world suits Tatsuma better.

They're in bed together. Some shitty love hotel. There's bug-eyed zoo animals painted on the walls beneath all the smoke stains. Tatsuma told him he comes here every time he's back in Edo, that the owner gives him a 'special discount', but Gin knows that really, it's because it's one of the only hotels outside Kabukicho that'll let two men in. Tatsuma's also smoking now, apparently.

"You smoking now?" Gintoki asks him, staring at the trails of paw-prints painted onto the roof.

Tatsuma laughs that obnoxious, barking laugh. "Only when I'm in Japan," he answers. "Excise and UST out past the belt is, uh—"

The cig perched between his fingers shakes, but you'd only notice if you were really looking. That's his bad hand.

"—out of this world."

He laughs again, and then puts the thing in his mouth. "You know me. Can't pass up a good deal."

So that's what he's shipping— semi-legal tobacco out into the far reaches. Probably a lucrative business, but Gintoki doesn't really know shit from clay about the economy or taxes or shipping costs. He has to re-count the 230 yen he spends on Jump three or four times before he gets to the counter.

Gintoki grumbles and rolls onto his side to face the other man with a sour expression. "What, not gonna offer me one? Stingy bastard."

"Oi, oi, no need for that," goes Tatsuma, and he reaches down beside the bed to rummage around in the pocket of his discarded pants. He tosses the packet of Mayoboros at Gin's chest. "Help yourself."

Gintoki lets the packet sit there for a long while. Smoking's never really been his thing— but it's the thought that counts, you know? Gin-san feels emasculated, getting laid and then watching someone else smoke. He feels like the blushing woman, goddammit. He feels lke he's only around to show the audience that the protagonist isn't some 40-year-old virgin, he can get with any woman he likes, he just leads a dangerous and hard-boiled lifestyle that isn't conducive to long-term relationships—

The man beside him lets out a long breath of smoke, and mutters to himself, like he's cursing the silvery air— "If Mutsu saw me doing this, she'd prob'ly twist my nuts off."

Gin doesn't know or ask who Mutsu is. With the way Tatsuma is, she's probably some flat-chested hostess or serving girl the guy's gone and got himself obsessed with. Probably thinks it's true love too. Poor girl probably doesn't even know his name. Gin also doesn't know whether he's talking about the smoking or the fucking his old war buddies on a work trip.

"Say, Kintoki," Tatsuma says to the still room. Gintoki's fingers curl around the cigarette packet, and he tells himself it's with irritation, and not something stupid like nerves.

That's the thing, with Tatsuma. Gin meets his eyes across the flimsy water-stained mattress. They're earnest and good, and blue as the sky.

"You could come with me."

He's looking at Gintoki like he loves him. But that's just how Sakamoto Tatsuma looks at everything. At serving girls and field medics and rocks on the side of the road and cheap cigarettes. Maybe that's why he wears those glasses all the time now. His eyes are too earnest for his own damn good.

Tatsuma rolls onto his side and props himself up on an elbow. He smiles easily around the filtered cigarette. "Now I know yer a landlubber, Kintoki, but— it might not be all bad, eh?"

It's not the first time he's asked Gin this. You're much too good to stay cooped up on this tiny planet, echoes the blurry, bright-eyed Tatsuma in his memory, laid on the roof tiles, looking at the huge oil-slick of the universe spilt in the sky up there. Gintoki didn't understand it last time, either. He'd rolled over and pretended to sleep. Why him, and not Zura? Not Takasugi? What made him different from them, in Tatsuma's eyes? If he were a woman, he might get it— puppy love's a hell of a drug, that stupid obsession that'll convince you that breaking up with your junior high girlfriend is worse than what happened to Planet Vegeta. If he were a woman, he might even say yes to being Tatsuma's arm candy as he larks around the known universe. The guy's handsome, with his loose curls and the way it hangs over his eyes when it's too grown out, the way his softer body feels now under Gin's still-calloused hands. His stupid eyes. And he's got money to burn— enough to waste on coming to earth on a sub-par deal just to see him, anyway.

But Gin isn't that naive little girl, the kind that all the rich pervs like Tatsuma go for, the kind that would go with him— he's the fucking Shiroyasha, and Tatsuma's seen him tear amanto soldiers twice his size apart with nothing but his hands and teeth. This thing they have is just a leftover from the war. A ghost of desperation and hopelessness, the reprieve of another body against yours, just like Zura and Takasugi, he tells himself, just the bliss of forgetting long enough to come. Gin was young and hormonal, fucking just about anything that'd say yes. When Tatsuma showed up again all this time later and propositioned him, he should've said no, and left the past where it belonged, but the promise of food and drink and some above-average sex and a proper bed for the night, instead of the bare floorboards he's sleeping on above the snack bar, was just too persuasive. Still. Tatsuma knows all this, and he's asking Gin to go to space with him anyway.

Now that he's looking for it, there's a well-hidden desperation in Tatsuma's voice, at the corners of his mouth and eyes. He really does want Gin to say yes. He probably thinks he has nothing left in Edo anymore. That he's just floundering aimlessly, another damn ghost left behind after the war.

He thinks about it, for a second. What it'd be like if he joined this new Kaientai and went to space with Tatsuma. How nice it could be. Too bad he's such a stubborn bastard. He's not a ghost, not yet— for now he's still just an old dog on his master's grave.

"I can't," Gin says with a put-on nonchalance. "I got a job here."

Well. It's not a flat-out lie. He's not just making shit up on the spot, he was already thinking about it, alright, so—

Tatsuma shoots him a surprised look. Gin has to look away, this time— at the wall with its painted cartoon elephants and lions, its peeling and cigarette-yellow paper.

"I'm starting a yorozuya."

He feels the other man settle— and then that stupid-eyed mophead is forcing his way back into Gin's line of sight, propping himself up on his arms to lean over him, block the overhead light and silhouette himself with a halo of grimy fluroescence. The motion catches Gin off-guard, and he instinctively pulls the duvet higher up his chest— here you are again, o bashful maiden— as Tatsuma cages him in with his arms. This position is way too lovey-dovey, dammit. It's getting too weird! Is it so much to ask, to have sex without having to sort through all the sticky emotional baggage afterwards? Is it so much to ask, to get everything he wants and more?

"Well, worth a shot," goes Tatsuma, an effortless smile on his face, and then he gives that laugh again, way too loud when they're this close. Laughs and smiles like it means nothing. Like Gin's heart isn't clenching in his chest like it's holding in something brown and terrible. The other man gets in closer, until his nose is touching Gin's cheek and his breath is against his ear and his lips are getting even closer and closer— "If this business of yours ever needs a humble trader," he says, a cheesy whisper. "I'll give ya the staff discount."

Gin puts his hand flat against Tatsuma's cheek and pushes him off him, hard. "Don't kiss me, asshole— ugh—"

Tatsuma just leans his full weight into Gin's palm and laughs, and laughs—

—

When Gintoki wakes up, the sun is streaming through the blinds over the tiny love hotel window and a concerning amount of dust is lit up in the air. Tatsuma's gone, and the zoo animals are staring at Gin like they're not homophobic, they just don't want to know about it. He's naked and sticky-feeling and maybe a little hungover.

On the dresser beside the bed, there's the remnants of last night's escapades in crumpled foil, the pack of cigs, and an invoice beneath them for 300 yen. Gin swings his legs over the side of the mattress and finally flips open the packet. It's empty, aside from a lone stick and a business card.

Gintoki swears under his breath.

Stingy bastard.

Blood's pooling around his feet. It's creeping up and making his socks all wet. The darkness is thick and cloying but somehow he can see the corpses around him in greyed-out detail, like there's a moon shining over his shoulder— but when Gin looks back, there's nothing in the sky at all. The weight on his back is crushing.

'It's not like you to have a nightmare,' Zura had said, when he woke up after getting tossed in the garbage by that cosplaying drug-pusher. If it were any other time, Gin would've laughed. If only Zura could see himself now— his gaunt face and dead eyes, his limp body twisted awkwardly as Gin steps over him. He's fine. He's always slept with his eyes open like that, hasn't he?

This dream is an old friend of his. Stepping over chatterbox corpses for miles and miles, never getting any further. Old, distorted memories of sun-bleached bones and picking birds and sneering faces and dead friends. He feels like a child for still getting scared by it after this long. He should be used to it, dammit. He should know all the tricks in the book by now. It's ironic, maybe, that this is still what he dreams about. He's been chewed up and spat out by war, he's taken Shoyo's head off his shoulders, he's seen Takasugi clutching his bleeding face and screaming raw into the dirt, he's spent weeks in an amanto prison cell— and he's still tormented by the same dreams he had as a child. The fundamentals never change; only the details. How old he is, who he's carrying, the faces he's stepping on.

Kagura and Shinpachi could've been hurt so easily when those Harusame thugs dosed them with tensei-kyō. He wants to say Kagura was spared an overdose by her Yato tolerance, that the pirates deliberately didn't give Shinpachi enough to stop his heart so they could still interrogate him later— but really, he knows it was just luck. They were so damn lucky to get away with just feeling woozy-boozy.

On his shoulder, Shinpachi tells him as much between his shallow breaths. He's holding the brat piggy-back style, just like he did on the way back from the harbor. His eyes are all black with the high and there's blood running down his top lip and powder in the spit across his chin and he's shaking, just enough to let Gintoki know he's still alive with every step they take. There's still time— there's still hope. He can still save him. He can do it this time— this time it'll be different—

The end of his kimono catches on something, and he hears a small, high-pitched whimper, almost like an animal in pain. His eyes drift down to small, pale fingers clutching in the fabric, then further to her red hair and scared eyes and—

Gin wakes with a start so bad he has to bite his hand to stop himself from yelling.

It takes a second for his eyes to adjust, for him to realize that he isn't still stuck in the dreamy darkness. The unfamiliar walls, the futon that smells like a different brand of cheap detergent— they both belong to Katsura's safehouse, the one he was brought to last time. Gin has to will his knuckles to unclench around the blanket, and they come away stiff and sore. That's right, he tells himself, the shaky voice inside his head trying to talk over the noise of his staccato heart, Zura helped him with Hamuko. He got the payout from her sweaty father and begrudgingly talked himself into giving Zura a cut. Without him, they'd probably all be dead, and not even Gin can take that lightly—

The image of Kagura's face in the dream flashes behind his eyes, like a genuine physical shock and not just a lingering memory. His breath quickens and his knuckles get all tight again and fuck, he needs air. The blanket feels like it's suffocating him, coarse against his skin. He needs to get out of here. He needs to— he needs to go. The walk will clear his head, and without him around, the brats have probably been running amok— hell, they're probably still sitting awake even at this ungodly hour, getting square-eyed from the TV and eating the pudding he stashed in the back of the fridge, and he should really get back and scold them for it, and also, you know, make sure that everything's alright, because he's the responsible adult, and all that, and…

He stands up quickly and looks for his clothes in the dark, tripping over his pants and making his belt clink loudly. His hands are unsteady as he tries to shimmy the damn things on, stumbling every time he has to stand on one leg to pull them up.

"Gintoki?" goes Zura, bleary with sleep. "Are you looking for a time machine?"

Ah. Honestly, he forgot the other guy was still here. Cross-his-heart that he hasn't done something like this in… god, a pathetic amount of time. It's hard work being an anime protagonist, okay? There's genre standards and codes of conduct and stuff— he's legally prohibited from getting his freak on right now, alright?! He had to be on his best behaviour before they'd let him on the air. There's a reason this scene skips the juicy parts. They're still in the timeslot for children's anime. He can't be waking up half-fucked and barely knowing where he is anymore, he's got adventures to go on and friends to make! He really thought he was done sleeping with the ghosts of his past after Sakamoto, but fuck, it's like he can't help it. It's just ingrained in his nature, or something, a holdover from all the desperation and who-gives-a-fuck-ness of back then. He handed Zura that thin roll of cash, held together with one of Kagura's rabbit-shaped rubber bands, and made some dumb joke about paying Zura for his services, and that was it. Straight back into it, this ugly pantomime of what they used to be, of people who care about each other. Maybe it's the only way he knows how, anymore.

If Gin unfocuses his eyes, ignores his flat chest and thick arms, he can say that Zura still doesn't really look like a man, propped up there on the futon with his hair messy and his skin white in the struggling moonlight. He can tell himself that maybe that's why he did it, that's why it was so easy. That maybe it doesn't count. There's an obvious, dark indent of a mark on his shoulder, mirroring the sticky wound he patched up on Gintoki's. His heartbeat thumps away in it, a familliar, healing song. He's also shivering, he realizes, and it's not even a little cold. A part of him wants to reach back out and tuck himself back into the divot between Zura's chest and armpit and squeeze his eyes together until his whirlwind of thoughts and regrets and fears settles back down into a breeze.

(Honestly, though? Like, really honestly? The first thought he had when he saw Zura again at that amanto embassy was that he looked like Shoyo. His loose hair and his long robes— is that why he's here? Is it that weird and awful? Fucking a man because he looks like your sensei and maybe you can sleep better next to him. Gin's no better than a stupid girl marrying a clone of her father.)

The nightmare's still hovering behind his eyes. Images of the kids on the dock, their clothes and skin all sweaty and not just with the heat of the afternoon sun on the water. Hamuko deathly still in the corner of the room. Zura holding out the baggie of translucent powder…

A bigger part of Gintoki knows he needs to leave.

He finally gets his pants over his ass.

"Zura," he asks, unable to look at the other man. Unable to sound as confident as he wants to. "The tensei-kyō—"

Zura's warning voice is already an answer. "Gintoki—"

"You didn't blow it all up, did you?"

The man hefts himself to his feet on the futon, and any other time, Gin might leer or joke at his nakedness, but what comes to him now is embarrassment more than anything. Shame. Zura pulls his arms through his blue kimono and adjusts the fabric around his shoulders, still hanging open at the front.

"I thought it wise to retain some," he tells him, easily now that it's not a secret. Gin knows he's overreacting about it— that he's channeling all these feelings he doesn't like into just being angry at Zura again. Like they've always done. Maybe part of it's because it's not what the old Zura would've done. The old Zura was proud and honest, even when he was back-to-back with Gintoki on the battlefield, even when he was fighting dirty or running away. It came with being the head of his family so young. And now… almost a decade of hiding and rallying two-bit thugs under his banner and resorting to underhanded tactics to gain any footing at all on bakufu turf… of course a decade of being a criminal has fully turned him into one. "These are unprecedented times, Gintoki. Sometimes you have to fight with unprecedented weapons."

"So Hamuko's miraculous recovery—"

"Was because I gave her some of the remaining product, yes. Going without like that would've killed her. Quitting is something she's going to have to do gradually, and with the kind of medical help I couldn't offer her."

"It could've—" killed my friends, he doesn't say. Doesn't admit, more like it. It's put new fuel on the dream I was just getting used to, dammit. "It's not like you, Zura."

"Is that so…?" goes Zura, wistfully into the night. The shoji screens will be glowing with morning light, soon. The birds are starting to wake up and rub their eyes, and the roar of Edo commuter traffic is waking up beside them. "I suppose 'unprecedented' might've been the wrong choice of words. Perhaps 'changing' would've been better. And when the world changes…"

You either change with it or get left behind.

Sakamoto's making a name for himself in space. Zura's here, leading his army of mice against the cat, justifying civillian casualties to himself. From the wanted posters Gin sees on every noticeboard, Takasugi's some kind of big shot over in East Blue. They've all changed, haven't they? Except Gintoki. He's the one that forced Zura and Takasugi to change like that, and he's so hypocritical he can't even do it himself. He's still scared by the same nightmares he had before his balls dropped and he's only good at killing people and he can barely scrape together enough yen to feed the dog, let alone himself. He almost laughs about it, sourly. Maybe he's just old-fashioned. Analogue-style.

He pulls his shirt on as Katsura slides into his white overcoat, and looks around for his socks.

What a bitter morning routine.

This time, he wakes up stuck to a leather seat. The car windows are tinted, but the gentle sunrise peeking between the tea shops and skyscrapers is still like getting flashbanged. He peels himself from the seat, head swimming, feeling disoriented as all hell— the car smells like those tree-shaped air fresheners, but, like, not the normally scented ones, the ones called 'Black Ice', or whatever, and beneath that, like cigarettes, and beneath that, something kind of awful and acrid that makes his nose wrinkle. He sits up and realizes his kimono is draped across him like a blanket.

In the front seat sits the unmistakable outline of one Hijikata Toshiro, blowing smoke out the crack of a frosted-over window.

Gin collapses back onto the seat with a groan.

Maybe there's some universe where the doomsday scenario hasn't occurred. Maybe he's just been arrested, and the vice-chief was nice enough not to throw his best buddy Yorozuya Gin-chan into the watch-house with the rest of Edo's drunk and disorderly. Yeah, that sounds like them. Surely public intoxication is an easier swallow for the network than implied gay sex in a police car.

"H-Hijikata-kun," he stutters out, and he hears the cop grind his teeth at the sound of his voice. "What am I doing here?"

In this universe, though— Gin can tell by the chill in the air and the twist in his gut that something terrible has happened. He's woken up at Ground Zero.

Hijikata leans over the central console and gives him a Look— the kind with a capital L. "You seriously don't remember?"

(

Gin scored at pachinko. He might love gambling, but he loves money more— and because of that, he takes his collection of semi-legal tokens and cashes them into the semi-legal vendor next door and doesn't immediately feed his winnings back into the pachislots. He does, however, walk half a block down to the nearest dive and order himself the sweetest damn drink on the menu. He loves money, remember? If he goes home, those spoiled brats of his are gonna divide it amongst themselves and call it reparations and poor old penniless Gin-san will be right back to square zero with nothing in his wallet but moths and a condom. Spending it all immediately and reaping the benefits is the obvious strategic play— that way, he gets to enjoy a blissful couple hours of having money, and then a blissful couple hours of being too drunk to care that he doesn't have money anymore. Everything after that is a problem for Ashita no Gin-san, fighting for tomorrow.

And, you know, Gin's feeling pretty good right now. It's a lively Sunday at whatever-the-hell this place is called, with music over the sound system just loud and indistinguishable enough to drown out his thoughts, and the liquor cheap enough during the three-hour-long happy hour to drown any sorrows that still slip through. His eyes rove across the floor, taking a mental inventory. Sticky tables and string lights. Pretty girls in business casual and kimonos cut far too short for their own good. Not all of them have boyfriends. Not all of their boyfriends are here. It's too early in the night— the standards are still too high and the crowd is still too young. He's after someone more experienced with alleyways. Good thing he's got time up the wazoo, and looking's half the fun anyway—

)

Come on, thinks Gintoki to himself, putting a hand over his face in frustration. Hurry up and get to the juicy bits already. This flashback is just making him look lecherous and pathetic. Gin-san's still a young stallion, you hear? He's not a madao yet!

(

Hijikata's tongue is weird in his mouth and Gintoki shifts to slot a leg between the other man's own. The bulge of his cock is—

)

Oiiiiiii!

He feels a cold sweat break out on his neck.

No, no no no no. No way. What the hell is that? That's too juicy— that's not medium rare, that's raw, dammit! It's still walking around!! How did we get here, huh? How did we get from A to B so quickly? Oh, fuck, the network's gonna tell him to disembowel himself over text. They won't even want to make eye contact after this.

He peeks through his fingers. The vice-chief is frowning at him over the center console. He looks lurid, all of a sudden, in Gin's guilty conscience— his eyes look dark and his fingers look long around his cigarette and Gin's looking for any kind of evidence that that last flashback was real. Marks, rumples, anything. That cold sweat is suddenly hot.

"We didn't…" he trails off. "Did we?"

Hijikata rolls his eyes like an obnoxious woman and clicks on the overhead light.

(

Of course that good-for-nothing bakufu lapdog shows up to ruin old Gin-san's fun. And just when he was getting on track to the main event with that pretty little blonde thing across the way— there was eye-fucking going on, for sure! She winked with both eyes in his direction! Now the only eye-fuck he's getting is more of an eye-fuck-you with this bastard, and Gin's trying to hide underneath the bar because every single individual of the feminine gender and then some within a 2-mile radius has turned to gawk at prettyboy Hijikata Toshiro in his shirtsleeves.

As a flashback— and a flashback that's eighty-five-percent sure he's already fucked said prettyboy— Gin can admit the vice-chief looks pretty good without the stupid jacket and vest and neck-thing. He looks almost normal, like a salaryman or something. It's kind of… nice?

"What," he grits out like a man scorned, just to combat that last thought. "You the fun police now? Here to arrest me for malicious intent?"

The cop clicks his tongue.

"Get real. And get your own seat while you're at it," he has the gall to say, when he's just walked in here and planted himself next to Gin-san. One of the things Gin likes the least about the cop is that he can't admit that he likes starting shit just as much as the rest of them. The holier-than-thou act is painful. Speak of the devil— "Some of us like to relax, and not just pester other people like you and your lot."

"That's awfully rude, when you're the one ruining my relaxing evening by showing up here with your ugly mug. You're scaring off all the birds."

The cop gives the place a once-over like there might actually be birds roosting in the ceiling.

Gintoki, bored of this song and dance already, leans forward on the bar top to rest his chin on his hand. He projects his voice, annoyingly loudly over the drum and bass, on purpose. "What's the scoop then, ah? They cooking something a little different out the back here? Hiring illegal—"

Hijikata yells right back. "Is it so hard to believe I'm here for the same reasons as you?"

"Full offense, Oogushi-kun— yeah." As much as women fawn over his bishōnen looks, he doesn't think the vice-chief has the guts for the back-alleys-and-glory-holes lifestyle. Part of him suspects he doesn't even have the guts to hold hands. His eyes travel over the writhing floor, all the chu-chu and the muni-muni-mura-mura— "Who's your pick of the litter, then?"

He flushes in a way that confirms he isn't actually here for the same reasons as Gin. Gintoki, in turn, relishes in the embarrassment like a cat rolling in 'nip. Hijikata obviously picks someone at random.

"Ah, the safe option. Well-endowed, pretty enough for anyone with eyes to agree. The kind of girl that's gonna accuse you of something just because you touched her shoulder on the way past—"

"You can't just say that—"

"See her friend, though? Those conservative, shy types are always freaks in the sack—"

"I think you watch too much anime—"

)

(

The night's warm, and it's made warmer with the flush of alcohol, and the summer rains have left the alleys and shopfronts of Kabuki-chō damp, mouldy, and smelling of wet combustible trash and a little like vomit and a little like lotion. They've just been kicked out of the bar for fighting. They're arguing about something— god knows what, Gin's just being contrarian for the sake of it at this point.

"Nuh-uh," he slurs out, stumbling and catching himself against the wet bricks of the alley behind the bar.

Hijikata's face blows up like a balloon with frustration. He swings around to grab Gin by his collar and only misses a little, grabbing some of the hair around his ears and pulling it out with a sharp sting. Gin winces, and the crown of his head hits the wall, and the vice-chief has lifted him onto his tip-toes to snarl in his face—

"Can't you just shut up for once in your life?" Hijikata grunts out. His breath is warm on Gintoki's face and smells like shochu. "D'you always have to push my buttons? I don't want to be this angry anymore, goddammit."

Gintoki's almost drunk enough to care how out-of-character this admission is for the guy. Almost, but not quite. Instead, he gives him a woozy smile and says the worst possible thing:

"I like it when you're angry."

Later, he'll find out about the whole Baragaki thing and how hard the Hijikata he knows has tried to better himself and stop being that violent, angry motherfucker, and he'll feel slightly bad about it. He'll recognize the look the vice-chief is giving him— a mix of anger and shame and embarrassment and pride and the hair-trigger urge to beat Gintoki within an inch of his life— for what it is. For now, though… he just likes seeing the vein throb on Hijikata's forehead.

Hijikata leans in and that's it. It's been in the cards for a long time— since that first fight on the roof. It's just how it is, with Gin. They could never be friends. The moment the cop planted his firm ass on the seat beside Gintoki, every alternate world-line convened at a single spot, the multiverse collapsed, and Gin was sure to end up with Hijikata's tongue in his mouth by the end of the night. He doesn't have time to wonder if it's what Hijikata wanted to happen. Like this, he can feel the day's worth of stubble that's just breaking the surface of the cop's chin, the sweat on his skin, and in his alcohol-fucked head, Gin's sucking his face like a bad actor, tongues and hands everywhere. Hijikata himself is exactly how he expected. All teeth and nails, pulling and scratching and crushing them together like this is less making out and more headbutting each other into submission.

Distantly, Gintoki wonders if it's this bad because the demonic vice-chief has never kissed anyone before, and fuck!!!!!!!, go the screaming remnants of Gin's sobriety, and then they beam a dusty old memory into his head.

The vice-chief kisses like Takasugi.

)

"No, we didn't."

Wait— huh?!

The cop laughs, a little something that Gin could call bashful, if he was still drunk, or maybe charming, and fuck, he really doesn't have his head on straight, does he? He must be getting sick. "Don't look so upset."

Gin runs a hand through his gross hair. "Why am I still here, then? Should've thrown me in jail for sexual harassment or whatever, ah?"

Hijikata gives him that damn look again.

"You were the one that called it off."

(

Maybe it's just the act of kissing a man that reminds Gintoki of him. He hasn't really done it since then— and, well, kissing Zura isn't like kissing a man. He got a bit loose after that time with Sakamoto, fell back into the familiar habit. Girls from the street, smoke-smelling hags from the pachinko parlor, the snack bar— anyone who wanted him, really. Having a roof over his head and a futon to fuck on still felt too good to be true. He only got back on the rails because the old bitch downstairs started thinking he was running a different kind of business, and Gin swore off bringing anyone else home with him after that. He honestly prefers it this way— without even the pretense of a bed. Saves him the ordeal of kicking them out afterwards, of having to explain that it didn't mean anything, not to him. These days, he's confined to a life of short and nameless shags in bathrooms and next to porno-mag vending machines and never, ever with men. Girls are easy, and he likes them, and they don't remind him of them.

Alright. Once more, with feeling—

Hijikata's tongue is weird in his mouth and Gintoki shifts to slot a leg between the other man's own. The bulge of his cock is obvious, even the thick fabric of his pants doing nothing to disguise it, and Gin presses his knee against it just enough to hurt. The groan that snakes its way out of Hijikata's throat is weird, too.

In another life, Gintoki can do this. Gintoki can have extremely drunk and extremely angry sex with this extremely handsome man against the wall of this extremely disgusting alleyway and then again, hopefully, in the backseat of that patrol car and then they can laugh and bicker and Gin will wipe cum all over Hijikata's work shirt where he can't see it and maybe they'll do this again sometime. Every second Saturday. Twice a week. But this Gintoki isn't that Gintoki and this Gintoki has some issues with men and honestly with getting his dick up sometimes and as much as he came here with the intention of landing a quick fuck, the stubble rash on his face and the strong hands on his waist and the inexperienced way Hijikata sucks face are all sending him back in time in the worst kind of way. His dick is wilting away like a delicate flower and there's no way Hijikata hasn't noticed.

If they do this, it's going to mean something. He doesn't want it to. He wills his tongue out of Hijikata's mouth and the noise the other man makes, fuck—

He knows Hijikata's a virgin. He'd laugh about it any other time— hey everyone, the demonic vice-chief doesn't know how to please a woman! He knows he was saving himself for Mitsuba. He knows rubbing cocks with a guy he hates beside a dumpster isn't the best way to lose your V-card. It's a far stretch from missionary with the lights off, anyway. Beneath those sweaty bangs and those dark, fluttering eyelashes, Hijikata's not thinking about Gintoki. He can't take it too personally— it's not like he's any better.

Hijikata's thinking about Mitsuba and Gin's thinking about Takasugi, and Katsura, and Sakamoto, and everyone else there's ever been, and Hijikata's trying to block out the myriad ways Gin isn't the woman he loves and Gin's comparing every movement Hijikata makes to someone else. Theyre just too fucked up to be doing this. Or maybe they're perfect for each other, who knows, and Gin fucking hates that so he puts his hand on Hijikata's chest and pushes them apart and clears his throat and slurs, "Oi, oi, Toshi-kun, let's put our thinking caps on for a second…"

Hijikata looks like he's ruined him. Like one of those ice creams with Spiderman's melting face on it. Like a Picasso original. He's red as the damn sea and he starts to yell again and that sick sense of satisfaction settles in Gintoki's guts, or, wait, maybe that's—

)

"And then you threw up all over me and passed out, you bastard. Cleaning up vomit isn't exactly my idea of Sunday Night Fever."

Gin doesn't even have a comeback for that. He can't really keep up the persona when he's just thrown a kind-of sexuality crisis and the contents of his stomach up all over the guy, as well as turned his golden balls a worrying shade of silver.

"Now piss off already. My shift starts in an hour," the cop says around his cigarette, and Gin realizes that he is, in fact, now fully dressed for work, and that pale neck which surely boasts some souvenirs is hidden beneath his jacket collar and cravat. Workaholic, he thinks. Keeping a change of clothes in the car. This was probably his first night off in months, and he's spent it babysitting a drunkard.

Gin wipes the smeg from the corners of his eyes on the upholstery. It's a cop car, there's probably been worse. "Why didn't you just toss me out with the recyclables?"

"Believe it or not, I am a police officer. I got a duty to protect even good-for-nothings like you," he answers, pouting. "And a duty not to drive around drunk."

Ah. Basic human decency, huh? He doesn't want to address why it makes him feel so weird inside. "But you don't have a duty to not fuck dirty old men in the back of your patrol car. I see how it is."

Hihikata doesn't object to the idea of fucking in the car, which is surprising. "We're the same age."

"Objection, irrelevant."

That vein starts to thrum away again on Hijikata's forehead. "Sorry, I didn't realize you were the only one allowed to make mistakes while he's drunk off his ass. I'll try to be more careful in the—"

"Oi," Gin goes. His head swims a little when he sits up and cracks the door, but the fresh morning air on his skin makes him feel a little better. He's talking to the dirty ground outside, the morning dew sparkling on the tarmac like lipstick on a pig— "Thanks."

The cop waves it off.

"Expect a bill from the dry cleaner's."

He never got the bill. He did reach into his pocket and find a sheet of aspirin, though, and that somehow made him feel more weird and uncomfortable than actually thinking he and the vice-chief were boning on the sly now. He's on the couch with one hand in his pants and the other up his nose picking at a scab. The dog's having a nightmare, and his nails are scratching on the floor.

"Bad news for all Libras today—" goes Ketsuno Ana from the television, beautiful in all her pixellated CRT glory. "Rejection is in your future. The stars say you're destined to a life of loneliness— always wanting more but finding yourself unable to satisfy others in return. Honestly, you should spare everyone the heartache and just die already!"

Damn, Gin thinks. They should really promote whichever stylist put her in that little yellow number. The tighter floral obi cinching her waist, the lower neckline exposing a long line of pale, supple flesh— is that a mole? Just above her collarbone, see— she must be doing it on purpose. She knows Gin-san's watching. Oedo TV viewers, look away; this is a private showing and it's about to get a whole lot more X-rated. Now if she'd just reach up a little and— yeah, like that, that's right— fuck—

"Oh, and to that Libra with the dead stare and naturally curly hair—"

On the screen, Ketsuno Ana points at the camera with a cheerful smile and a playful wink.

"No, I won't go out with you!"

"Charming as always! Thank you, Ketsuno-san—"

The sun is high in the sky over a free Yoshiwara and Hinowa says she'll grant him one wish. He's the Shangri-la's saviour, after all, even if he's tried to shrug off the title and tell them it was more of a group effort, really; but to the victor go the place's finest spoils, or whatever they say. Unfortunately for Gintoki, he's lost a lot of blood in the past 48 hours, and there's barely any left to direct southward— he'd probably pass out before he even got Chin-san out of his pants. Such a luxurious offer deserves better, even if a sex-related hypoxic brain injury seems like a pretty good way to go out. He also imagines the courtesan could use some time to get to know that new brat of hers. To get used to seeing the sun again. What can he say? Old Gin-san's an empath, after all.

He asks Hinowa for her promise in writing.

The woman laughs brightly, and then asks to borrow a pen.

—

Some time later, he returns to Hinowa's humble dwelling between the Soaplands and sex stores and finds the woman perched in her chair in a patch of sun, the cobblestones warm and hazy beneath her and a book between her long, white fingers. It's one of those dollar-store porno paperbacks, the ones all the old, lonely hags read— it's got a set of glistening disembodied abs on the front cover. For how insecure it makes Gin feel about his own barely-maintained physique, it makes up for in making him feel a bit better about doing the sex equivalent to day drinking.

Gin waves with his fingers splayed wide, and she gives him that unwavering, perfect smile that he knows has been honed in the mirror like a knife. He plants himself heavily on the bench just behind her.

He knows that even though Yoshiwara's sky has opened up into a perpetual morning, Hinowa's still a lady of the night. Even though she's a mom nowadays, and all her involvement with the underground city's fledgling government, sex is still her skillset, just like the sword in his belt is Gin's. If the money's right and the man handsome enough, well— Gintoki reaches into his kimono and brandishes the crumpled IOU.

"Ah, Gin-san…" she goes, her face darkening a little like a cloud's passing over it. "Are you sure you want something like that?"

"Are you kidding?!" he barks out, frowning at that ugly, hesitant look on the courtesan's face. Stop looking like that, dammit! It's making Gin-san feel weird and bad! "Isn't that why every sad son-of-a-bitch is in this place?"

"You're not wrong, but… I think that mutual friend of ours might kill you."

He bites off a hangnail. "That bitch is a thousand years too early to kill me. She can suck it up. Ah, unless—" His thoughts devolve into a horrifying monster of flushed skin and too many shaking legs and minimalist mosaic censors— he decides not to count his chickens before they hatch. "You made me a promise! A good woman never goes back on her word, so pay up already. Gin-san wants the deluxe package. Foot stuff included!"

For the record, he's joking about the foot stuff. He's just equal parts horny and tired, and he's been saving this self-indulgent genie in a bottle for the perfect occasion. But, you know, it's also bad to live life like the guy in an RPG who saves all his rare items until he needs them and then never ends up actually needing them— so he's decided today is that occasion. A roll in the hay with Edo's most beautiful woman is definitely the nicer cure for insomnia. The other option is a bar fight.

Hinowa peers at the faded paper in his hand intently, like she's searching for something. Then— "Oh!" she goes, pointing at it. "Gin-san, this coupon is expired!"

"Huh?!" Gin goes back, whipping his head around to look at the paper he's seen a million times since he stood here in the char and the warmth of the freshly liberated underground and watched the courtesan carefully write it, like it might suddenly say something different. IOU, It says, simply, followed by a delicate signature— just like it always has. She's letting him down easy.

He thinks for a moment. If he pushed it right now, she'd do it. She'd let Gintoki take her to bed and lay her down and have completely lovely and inoffensive sex with her in the middle of the day and let him put his head between her breasts until his breathing evens out and proper sleep takes him for the first time in days and then they'd never mention or repeat it and things might be a little weird afterwards or maybe forever. If she were just a whore and he were just a rowdy samurai, she'd do it. Fuck, if he'd just accepted that sub-par lay in the first place, as just the Sun and the Savior of Yoshiwara, she would've done it. But they're friends now, aren't they? And that must mean something to her. More than what it means to Gintoki, apparently, and that's a little embarrassing, when the other's a prostitute and casual sex is her job. Maybe he really should change professions.

Gin lets out a dramatic sigh and crumples the memo.

"It's really October already?"

It's a clear, cold day. The trees at the park are at the very end of their season, late enough that the awe and beauty of the colorful flowers has given way to wet brown mush all over the ground. Gin's sitting on a bench with Hattori Zenzo, watching the rugged-up citizens of Edo walk their dogs. About 15 seconds ago, Zenzo dropped his copy of Jump, and now he's reading it upside-down.

"Look," the shaggy ninja says, absently flipping a page. "I know all the assplay suggests otherwise, but I'm really not into dudes."

Gintoki slumps. Zenzo peers at him sideways from beneath his fringe, and then—

"I don't know. Maybe if you put on a wig and gained 100 pounds."

They're in a booth at Snack Smile. Gin's putting his drinks on Kyuubei's tab without them noticing. They're trying really, really hard to not stare at the hostess serving them's boobs, but the shimmery silver thing she's wearing, as opposed to the usual semi-formal kimono getup they have at Smile, is making it a difficult feat. Gintoki, on the other hand, has no problem staring directly at that slipped nipple. Actually, a drop of blood is starting to run down Kyuubei's upper lip. The young master could really use a lesson in perversion, if an innocent nip slip is still nosebleed territory.

The hostess gets called off for some reason, and she shuffles across the floor in her heels, her ass swinging back and forth like an excited dog. They're both waiting for Tae to finish her shift, and neither of them can stand to watch her flirt with disgusting old men, so they're drinking in comfortable silence together in the back corner.

Gin puts his arm along the back of the bench seat, positioned just so to rest against Kyuubei's solid back. This is something he's learnt he can do, since the goukon incident— touch them with plausible deniability, just to make the young master squirm.

He tries to imagine a very pixellated scenario. He's not even sure how it would go— who'd put what where and how. It's intriguing for that alone, and Gin has an insatiable thirst for knowledge, or whatever.

"Oi, Kyuubei-kun," he goes. "D'you like me?"

They hum over the rim of their glass of dom peri. "Ah, well. You've helped me and the Yagyuu clan several times—"

"No, no no no no no—" Gin waves a hand in dismissal. "You like-like me, right?"

After a few moments of shocked coughing and spluttering, Kyuubei answers a little stiffly, "That's irrelevant. Don't you like—" They whisper the word like it's top-secret or taboo— "Girls?"

Kyuubei's exclusion of themself in that category is something for them to dwell on, later— Gin doesn't have the mental bandwidth to care about all that. "Yeah. Love 'em," he answers easily. "Gin-san likes boys too, though."

The young master's dark eyes get very flat and unimpressed-looking. "Liar," they spit. "Lecherous, homophobic pig— saying all that just to get me to sleep with—"

"Oi! Homophobe???" He'll admit to being a liar, sometimes a lech and oftentimes a pig, but he hasn't been homophobic a day in his life. There's a difference between saying something for the bit and truly believing it— he's The People's Gin-san after all, right down to his soul. "I'll have you know I've been sucking dick since you were still sucking your thumb."

It's closer to being true than he'd like, honestly.

The young master's eyepatched face suddenly turns a little sad. "I love Tae-chan. But she doesn't—" and there it is again, that she-who-shall-not-be-named whisper, "— like girls. I know I should move on, but… if you were a woman, maybe I could—"

Really? Twice in one day? Gintoki thinks, watching Kyuubei as they purse their lips and set their flute down with a sharp noise against the glass-topped table.

"Sorry, Gin-san. I just don't like men that way."

Gin spent a half-hour digging through the couch cushions and in the pockets of his dirty laundry for the change he's counting out, sliding it into the vending machine's greedy silver mouth. Above him, the sky's turning an angry grey color, the clouds sitting heavy like pregnant bellies, the wind and snow flurries kicking and turning. He punches in the number for a hot can of coffee.

"Gin-san…" Hasegawa's leant against the machine beside him, dressed the same as ever despite the turning weather and frost on his lenses. "Do you— do you remember episode 240?"

The machine makes a horrible, grating sound, and the half-dispensed coffee can gets stuck between the shelf and the glass. The damn thing might as well burp as it swallows his money. What a terrible omen.

Hasegawa puffs on his smoke, looking away over the rim of his glasses. "Maybe we could do that again, sometime."

"Gintoki."

He looks up at the woman, the sun almost blinding white through his eyelashes. Standing over him, Tsukuyo eclipses the fiery orb like her namesake. Across the cobbled street, the masked guardians of Yoshiwara are still trying to repair the damage Jiraia's webs of fire did to the place. Gin's intentions at this particular tea house, watching the women in their short clothes and tall boots get all sweaty as they carry supplies back and forth, as they hammer in nails and lay new shingles, as they order each other around in stern voices, are not entirely innocent.

"Tsukky," he answers, finally swallowing a stubborn mouthful of dango.

The woman reaches into the breast— yahoo!— of her kimono and pulls out an envelope. The top is unsealed, and as Gin flips through it, he sees a lot more money than is currently inside his starving wallet. He raises his eyebrows and looks back up at Tsukuyo expectantly.

"I've got a job for you," the Courtesan of Death tells him, like it's an order and not a request. Since that nasty business with her old master, she's had a darkness around her eyes and a kind-of drabness to her that tells Gintoki she hasn't been sleeping, despite the apparent weight off her shoulders. He knows the look well because he's been wearing it himself. Watching Tsukuyo and Jiraia's relationship culminate like that… It brought back a lot of memories. A lot of dreams in black and white. He doesn't have to imagine what this is like, for her. "You'll do anything, if someone pays you enough, right?"

Gin leans back against the wobbly table out-front. He can hear the women the next shop over starting to gossip behind their hands, like they're schoolgirls and not dressed-up prostitutes on display like jewellery in a cabinet. "That's the name of the game, yeah. Well— not anything, obviously," he says, then picks his teeth and flicks the gooey remnants in their direction. "Gin-san doesn't do nantaimori."

Tsukuyo just stands there. Between the envelope and the weird, almost anxious stance she's got, Gin's brain is quick to draw up a one-liner about feeling like he's just been confessed to on the school rooftop. He decides a joke at her expense is probably the last thing she needs right now, and spears another dango with his toothpick. "But, for you—" he adds, chewing with his mouth open. "I could make an exception. Sushi's on you, though— ah, well, I guess it's on me, but, you know—"

"Will you have sex with me?"

Gin chokes on the dango. After a few moments of gross coughing and punching his chest, he spits a glob of dough onto the ground. From Tsukky's perspective, and the way she's pretending not to notice the chewed-up mush on her shoe, he must've looked like sex personified.

"Lady, I've seen what you call flirting, and this isn't it." There's not nearly enough grievous bodily harm involved, he thinks grimly, and isn't that just the way, with all these damn women? No wonder he's progressed from a pussy dry spell to a pussy extreme drought. "What's your ulterior motive, ah? I know we have obvious sexual tension, but some things are sweeter when they're not satisfied. Leave it to the reader's imagination, or whatever."

"So that's a no, then."

"I didn't say that," he goes quickly, side-eyeing her. It must be the sun making his cheeks hot. This is just work, after all. They're just boss and client discussing a transaction, after all— ah, fuck, who is he even kidding? With a grumble, he holds the envelope of cash back out to Tsukuyo. "This might be Yoshiwara, but Gin-san's not some cheap whore, you know."

Tsukuyo takes the thing and clutches it to her chest, wrinkling the brown paper slightly. "I can pay you—"

"I don't want your money." Gintoki stands up, ignoring the way his joints crack ominously, and looks down at Tsukuyo in his shadow. For such a tall and proud woman, she sure looks small there. If she looked up to meet his eyes, the top of her head might brush his chin or cheek, that soft, straw-colored hair— but she doesn't, and her eyes stay firmly locked on the ground. Gin takes a chance— dancing with death, you could say— and puts a hand lightly on her shoulder. The black fabric there is sun-warm. "I'm serious. What's going on?" he asks her, quiet between them. Then he smirks, of course. "You a virgin or something—"

She finally slaps his hand away and looks up at him with a little offense, and a little of something worse, too. "I'm not a virgin."

If it was going to happen between them, Gin imagined them both much drunker than this. And yeah, he'll admit to imagining it, alright? She'd probably clobber him over the head with a sake bottle until he's battered and bleeding and can't think straight, then she'd try and mop up the blood on his face with a flushed, sad expression, but really only spread the blood around more and poke at his wounds and get antiseptic up his nose. And, because he's drunk and bleeding and can't think straight, if she kissed him, then, he'd let her. Kind of a sad image, huh? If he's a mess even in his jerk-off fantasies.

He catches her hand, still between them. Her fingers are long and soft. "But?"

"How do you know there's a but?"

Maybe in another life, he'd take her on a proper date. Flowers, and all that. Show her what it could be like. How good it could be.

"Everyone's got one."

He puts Tsukuyo's hand on his own shoulder, a mirror of where his just was. Just above his heart. She can probably feel the lazy thump of the damn thing through his clothes, through some vein or other between his chest and neck. Tsukuyo— for a woman propositioning him for sex, she doesn't look too happy about it. He likes some good tsun-tsun as much as the next guy, but Tsukky doesn't even look horny. She just looks a little mortified, in the cracks of the face she's trained hard to keep neutral. That, or she's trying to squeeze a fart out without making any noise.

"I've never…" the woman in black whispers. "With a man. Not because I…"

Not because I wanted to. Gin knows this already. He knew from the moment she stiffened at hearing that spider's voice, down at the docks. Before that, maybe. Not like it matters.

"I was talking with Hinowa, about— some things," and of all of this, that's what makes her cheeks flame red— "She said it might be good for me. To try again."

He can hear Hinowa's voice in his head. He can see them sat there at the table, in the soft morning light. He imagines the courtesan's intentions in telling Tsukuyo to go and get fucked probably didn't extend to the actual object of her affections, but moreso some polite and faceless stepping stone on the way there. She really couldn't account for the woman waltzing up to Gintoki with a wad of a cash— but monkey see, monkey do, and all that. Deep down, Tsukky's stupid like the rest of them.

Gintoki sighs, and looks out at the street. No-good drunkards already stumbling around so early in the afternoon, no-good fathers not wanting to go home to their frigid wives and ugly kids, no-good businessmen coming to Yoshiwara on their fucking lunch breaks. The leering courtesans and the proud Hyakka, like night and day. "Who cares what Hinowa thinks?"

Tsukuyo tilts her head like a dog. "Huh?"

"You don't gotta fuck to be happy," Gin tells her, like it's obvious. Maybe it is. Maybe it should be, for other people. "Hell, look at all these sad sons of bitches. Where's it got 'em, ah?"

Drunkards and dads and salarymen, all palming their dicks through their pants pockets, glimpsing at the cleavage they can't afford. If only he could follow his own advice. What a sad son of a bitch.

"What they think is normal or good—" He watches a nearby man trip over his own sandals and eat shit on the pavement. "It doesn't matter. You shouldn't push yourself to do things just because of what other people want. What matters is—"

"I want to," Tsukuyo cuts him off by saying suddenly, and ah, what the fuck? For real? With him? Is he getting sick? His chest feels kind of tight—

Gin clears his throat and pretends to wipe away invisible snot with his sleeve. He definitely wasn't trying to wipe away something else, like blush on his cheeks, like some teenage girl in a different kind of anime. "Well. That's a different story, then, isn't it?" he goes, looking down at the woman one more time. With her free hand, she's clutching that envelope to her chest like a lifeline, now. Gin's heart beats an odd rhythm in the palm of her other one. "Oi, Tsukky—"

He reaches up and flicks the envelope of cash and Tsukuyo startles, like she might've forgotten where she is or what she's doing in the space between this paragraph and the last one. Her eyes are big and wet where they meet Gin's.

"Wanna get drunk?"

—

"I don't think I can do this," Tsukuyo mutters into her shoulder, and ain't that a hell of a thing to hear with your head between a woman's thighs and your dick halfway out your pants?

Gin slides down and back and sits with his forehead against the tatami, almost like he's grovelling.

"Ginto—"

He raises a hand like a white flag and waves her off. "Okay," he goes, voice weak and lips numb. "Jus' give me a sec."

God, he's so hard. The position he's in is giving him a great view of his own unbuttoned fly and bulging member, like Mount Fuji through the clouds. He can see his heart thumping beneath his clothes, beneath his skin. He takes a few deep, stuttering breaths, trying to calm both organs down. Think unsexy thoughts, dammit. The dog shitting. Kagura picking her nose and eating it. Shinpachi's back acne. Gran's wrinkled up old milkbags—

"I'm sorry. I thought I could take it."

Gin sits up so quickly it makes him lightheaded. Or maybe that's the blood alcohol, or maybe it's from how many times Tsukuyo's hit him over the head today. The ceiling looks dark and endless, a labyrinth of cherrywood beams, glowing red and wet-looking in the light.

Don't they say dinosaurs had a second brain in their asses because their bodies were too big for just one brain to handle? Well, the significant growth in his lower half must've caused a similar phenomenon, and now a slightly different nerve cluster has taken the reigns.

"Oi," he grunts out, trying to ignore the way the woman tightens her grip on her kimono, clutched across her sweaty, bruised chest. The words might as well fall out of his mouth and splat against the floor. "You've fucked girls before, right?"

What the hell is he even saying? This is just another odd job, for crying out loud— this isn't gonna help her with—

"Yeah," Tsukuyo answers easily, nodding slightly. "Once or twice."

"Was it good?"

"Huh?"

Gin rubs his hands on his thighs anxiously. "I mean— did you like it?"

She seems to consider this. The flush of sex and alcohol makes her look breathtaking, splayed out there on the floor. A mess of delicately patterned cloth and hair and pink flesh. After a moment, she nods again.

You shouldn't push yourself to do things just because of what other people want, he said. He was a hypocrite then and he's a hypocrite now. You shouldn't be uncomfortable— you shouldn't push yourself— you shouldn't force yourself to—

He curls his nails into his palms. "You could fuck me, instead. If you want."

Tsukuyo's eyes get all wide. This is Yoshiwara, fuck’s sake– it’s not an empty promise. There's definitely ‘equipment’ somewhere in this godforsaken tea room. Gin can't tell if the feeling in his gut is regret or acid reflux, and well, it's not like he's new to having dick in his ass– he remembers enjoying it, even, it’s just– like, you know, he hasn't done it since– he likes to feel in control, and– and it reminds him of— and oh my god can he get laid one time without thinking about all this shit? Please?? It's the same old song and dance every damn time with him, mouths and hands and skin and the war and his dick going soft and maybe Takasugi wasn't exaggerating when he said Gin's face is burnt into his eye. He can feel Fujiyama-san rapidly losing interest down there!! He's supposed to be good at this!! How’s he gonna explain that to Tsukky, ah?? Ah??!??

The woman, gone pink from her tits up, gives him yet another short nod. “Okay,” she says, and Gintoki feels the metaphorical Sword of Damocles above his head come crashing down–

—

They have sex. It's good, of course it is. Tsukuyo's a gorgeous woman and Gin's not an amateur in any way you can swing the ol' cat— he likes sex, and beneath all her armor and circumstance, he's thinking Tsukuyo might, too. He's laying on the floor, sweaty, naked except for his socks. Tsukuyo's brushing the knots out of her hair with her fingers, and the bitch has the gall to still look bashful after all that. The lube running down between his asscheeks almost feels like a real load. He wants to make some joke, about having to go get Plan B— but he just genuinely doesn't have it in him. Turns out his laugh box is right next to his prostate, and they've both been milked dry. The good part is, he just spent the past hour getting his brains fucked out with a Magic Johnson, and that's the kind of thing that forces you to live in the moment instead of the sorrows you've half-drowned in the toilet. The bad part is, she fucked him sober, and sober Gintoki is feeling very vulnerable right now, and his ass is very sore.

He hasn't bottomed since— well, he's going to tell you it was that last time with Takasugi, back when he still had both eyes and their Sensei was still a light at the end of the tunnel. His subconscious aversion to both men and anal sex after his stint in that Naraku p— well, after he executed Shoyo and he lost Zura and Takasugi and all the comradery and desperation the war brought, and wanted his own head off his shoulders so badly he turned himself in— was something he didn't even realize he was doing until he'd already well and truly formed the preference. He told himself the holdovers from the old days didn't count, that the damage there was already done so one last time couldn't matter, and he let Sakamoto take him to bed as some kind of symbol, of self-control, or whatever. He thought maybe these more recent things with Zura and Hijikata were part of an upward, maybe even healthy, trend— or maybe a downward slope, all the way back in time. He's not sure whether this is the cherry on top or not, and if it is, if it's garnishing getting better or getting worse.

Gin sounds winded when he speaks. His limbs feel like jelly. "Can't you do your old friend Gin-san a solid and let him stay the night?" he asks, a secret attempt to guide Tsukuyo over to that unmade futon so he can make the most of the familiar exhaustion that's setting in.

The woman pulls her shoulders up high around her red ears. Unable to meet his eyes, and with that old, cracked-stone facade slipping back down over her face, she holds up two fingers. "That'll be two million yen."

He gets it. She wants him gone so she can ruminate. He wants to stay so he doesn't have to.

Gin stands, unsteady, and the slap of his feet on the tatami sounds like its the loudest thing ever in the quiet between them. Tsukuyo watches him like a fox as he stumbles around in the poor lighting, looking for his abused and forgotten underwear. She doesn't tell him til he's almost out the door that he's got his kimono on inside-out.

"It's a fashion statement," he says, rubbing away that pesky invisible snot from beneath his nose again. "It's actually really in at the moment."

Tsukuyo smiles at him gently from across the room, her teeth catching the light. Like the gloss on a damn maraschino cherry. He wiggles the ends of his fingers in lieu of a wave, and she wiggles hers back. He thinks it might not be all that bad in the end.

The bar is lit with a soft and warm light, the kind that makes your eyelids heavy, and the usual patrons of the place are starting to stumble out single-file. Gintoki's plan for tonight was to get so drunk he gets kicked out of this lovely establishment and then passing out in a puddle of shochu and his own vomit. Unfortunately, even through the cushion of liquor between his body and his brain, he can still recognise the footprints behind him, the small gait and toe-heavy weight distribution, the sound of their owner's breathing, the way he smells beneath the spilt alcohol and cigarette smoke and other people's cheap, musky cologne. His hand instinctively goes to the sword at his belt and tightens around the hilt.

Gintoki pries his head from the sticky benchtop and looks up at Takasugi between his blurry eyelashes. He looks weird, in a casual setting like this. Like the place knows he shouldn't be here. Gintoki's only known him on the battlefield and on sparring mats and in backyards chasing beetles. In his brain, some shitty dive in Kabuki-chō just isn't on the list of places Takasugi Shinsuke can be. Precisely because of that, Gin isnt one-hundred-percent convinced he isn't just hallucinating some specter of his old friend. It wouldn't be the first time, after all.

It's a brave move, showing himself here. The bar's lights and strong, waxy shadows do a lot to hide his features, make him look soft and baby-faced in a way the adult Takasugi just isn't— make him unrecognizable from the sharp and devious facade on the wanted posters pasted up outside. The false youth suits him— or maybe it's just the sake talking, Gin's superimposed memories of his happy, laughing face. Takasugi holds a wide hat to his chest.

Gin reaches out. His depth perception is fucked with the drink, and his hand moves like the signals from his brain are just a suggestion. He's shocked, vacantly, when Takasugi catches his dumbly outsretched hand in his own before it can touch him or tug on his fancy kimono, that his fingers don't just phase right through him; his grip is a little crushing.

"So this is how the fabled Shiroyasha dies?" his sultry voice mutters out, sounding almost disgusted. "Not with a bang, but from liver failure?"

Gin lets his head fall back against the table.

"All the cool kids are doing it," is what he tries to say, but it comes out more as a series of slurred vowels and spit.

He watches the outline of Takasugi signalling to the 'keep to cut him off for the night. Shit, he even watches the guy pay his tab, and that thing's about a kiloparsec long. Guess the intergalactic terrorism business really rakes in the dough— or Gin is just so cosmically poor that having more than 300 yen on-hand feels bougie. Either way, he's drunk enough not to complain about the charity, even if it is from Takasugi, of all people.

Gin's pretty sure the guy isn't here to put him out of his misery. The tsujigiri special just isn't flashy enough— and it's not proper enough either, because beneath the edgelord exterior, Takasugi's still all rich boy pomp and honour. Judging by the calendar date, he's either here for a fistfight, or— well.

The only two things it could ever be.

Takasugi doesn't smell even faintly of booze. He's not like Gin, not the kind of guy who can drink and gamble his sorrows away. Maybe that's why he does it. Maybe that's why he stands over Gin until he slithers out of his seat at the bar, why he stalks exactly one wobbly step behind him the whole way back to the shop, why he waits with his hands in the sleeves of his kimono while Gin throws up in the combustible trash. Gin's still half-expecting the guy to shank him, despite what he said, and maybe if he were more sober he wouldn't dare let the other man see his back—

The shop is dark and quiet above the usual din of the snack bar. Ths kids don't want to be around him this time of year; Kagura and the mutt are basically living out of the Shimuras' sitting room. Takasugi's geta barely make a sound on the steps. Again— maybe if Gintoki were more sober. Maybe he wouldn't let him in. Maybe they'd be punching the shit out of each other in the dusty street outside. Maybe this and maybe that. But the unique combination of sake and self-destruction has him slumped up against the toilet door, staring at the outline of the smaller man as he toes off his sandals in the genkan like it's something fucking enrapturing and obscene— a whore slipping off her dress through a finger-shaped hole in the shoji.

He has nothing to lose with Takasugi. It's not like with Zura or Tatsuma, where it feels like an overplayed continuation of something from worse times, something he should've grown out of like training wheels and let them move on, with their new people. It's not like with the vice-chief, where they're both stand-ins for other people, or Tsukuyo, where everything's new and terrifying. After that thing with Hijikata, he can't pretend he's grown out of wanting to fuck men, and after Tsukuyo, he can't act like he's scared of getting fucked anymore either. The only thing stopping him would be morality, and Gin hasn't had that since he was in diapers.

He stumbles into the bathroom and gargles just enough mouthwash to chase down the taste of vomit. When he re-emerges, Takasugi is still in the main room, bathed in the pale moonlight and looking like a premature ghost.

This time of year, around the anniversary of Shoyo's death, Gintoki wants to be hurt. He wants to galivant around and get into fistfights and have less-than-safe sex with strangers and wake up hungover and sticky and beat-up— more than usual, that is. Half because it feels like he's getting what he deserves, and half because it helps him forget— the nights are dreamless, at least. So, Gin wants to be hurt and Takasugi wants to hurt him. Both and neither of them want to die. It's a zero-sum draw.

"You've gone soft, Gintoki," the shorter man mutters out, taking in the week's worth of mess and empty bottles and unswept dog hair and stale, stinking air.

"Mhm," goes Gin. His mouth doesn't really feel attached to him when he speaks. "You should try it sometime."

Takasugi steps forward, tilts his head, and speaks into Gin's mouth.

"You stole that future from me."

Takasugi's angry, yeah— but he feels guilty, too. For his anger, for not being able to save Shoyo, for not being able to die in his place. For the inferiority, for not being the one that got to make that choice. Gintoki knows it well, because he feels it himself— jealousy, too, at Takasugi for not being the one with the sword in his hand. He'd never wish it any different. It's a cruel, burning feeling but it's something he'll push away forever, in favor of not making Shoyo's disciples bear the weight of killing their master. The kiss is biting and mean enough to say all of this. Takasugi tugs at his hair. They're like two cats fighting. Gintoki felt like nothing without Shoyo. Felt like he didn't deserve anyone, didn't deserve to keep living, with the goodness he'd snuffed out of the world. He wasn't good enough to make up for that— he never could be. It felt like there was no point in even trying. He was just scared— still is, really. Scared shitless, because all those years that other people spend building places for themselves and lives to live, forging themselves into a person they could be— he spent in blind service to his Sensei up until Shoyo's head came off his shoulders. All those years suddenly meant nothing, and when Shoyo's body stiffened and stopped bleeding, Gintoki became nobody. No-one outside of the remnants of the Jouishishi and the dead even knew who he was. Nothing but another demon. And then the bakufu took his sword, too.

The difference between them, Gin has started to piece together, is that Takasugi likes being that way— scared and angry. Consumed by that black beast, or whatever he'd said. He thinks it's easier, and Gin agrees, in a fucked-up sort of way. Being a demon is easier than fumbling around and trying to become a person out of nothing. He's been this demon so long now that it's impossible to even try, and seeing Gin build this place for himself, even if it's just a kingdom of fruit boxes and glue—

Gintoki breaks the kiss with a scrape of his teeth against Takasugi's bottom lip. The man's intricate coat hangs off his pale, slender shoulders like a Yoshiwara woman. Gin's seeing two, maybe three of him.

“You know,” he hics out against the man’s neck. “When you've gotta do the dishes, but they're– they're really gross, and you really don't want to do ‘em, and you think, ah, I’ll do ‘em in the morning, but then something comes up, and you don't do them in the morning, and then– and then you get back and you're really tired and the dishes are really gross, so you leave ‘em til the morning, and then in the morning there's mold in the rice cooker and roaches in the sink and the dishes are even more gross than when you started? Now you have dishes and roaches.”

Takasugi gives him a flat look. “What are you trying to say?”

Gintoki shrugs.

“No idea.”

Takasugi isn't there when he wakes up. Not that he expected him to be, obviously, but the killer hangover mixed with the anniversary mixed with the post-coital clarity and subsequent bad mood are teabagging Gin's psyche. The alarm clock is grating and he picks the damn thing up and smashes it against the wall. It has the audacity to still ring a couple more times, in pieces strewn across the floor with all the empty bottles and balled-up tissues, before it finally shuts its trap. Gin slumps his way to the fridge in his underwear and downs half a beer for breakfast— he'd call it hair of the dog, but with the way that mutt of theirs sheds and the miraculous ways the shed hairs end up inside sealed packages, it's probably more literal than he wants it to be.

He goes to wash the fuzzy feeling and bad taste out of his mouth in the bathroom.

A familiar purple flash joins him there, brushing her teeth in the mirror. Their toothbrushes are a matching blue and pink. She's babbling some nonsense that Gin can't understand through the brush in her mouth and the foam dribbling down her chin, but they've done this routine so many times now that Gin can hazard a guess that it's something about whether he wants breakfast, a bath, or her first. Normally Sarutobi's energy is just annoying, but today, even looking at her feels cruel— she obviously wasn't hiding in the rafters all night, or he might've found her shoes and a suicide note this morning. She probably wouldn't like seeing Gin getting bent over his desk by Edo's Most Wanted… or, wait, actually, maybe cuckoldry would be a turn-on for her—

Looking at her punishingly happy face this early in the morning, and looking back to his own stubble and the bags under his eyes that could fit a million yen and the scratches and bite marks and bruises all over him, makes something break. He gives up. He might actually hit rock bottom.

Gintoki spits into the sink. "Alright," he goes. "Let's fuck."

Sarutobi's toothbrush snaps in her mouth. Robotically, she spits out the plastic shards and leans under the tap to rinse her mouth. "U-um, G-G-Gin-san—"

She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. Gin crowds in closer to her, boxing her in against the bench. He puts one arm out against the mirror, a lousy kabedon. "What? It's what you want, right? However you want to do it, let's do it."

The woman looks like she's about to explode. Her face is pink and her nostrils are flaring and her skin is wet with a sudden nervous sweat, her perfume getting really heady about it. "Y-you mean… all of my wildest fantasies… of XXXing my XX and XXXX-style and hardcore XXX XXX XXXX with Gin-san…"

"Yeah." The word fogs up her glasses. Gin leans in—

She squeals and pushes his face to the side with so much force that he bites the inside of his cheek.

"Kyaa! I never thought this day would come!" Sacchan yells, and then squints one sly eye open to peer suspiciously up at Gintoki. "S-surely, any minute now, Gin-san is going to say he was only joking and throw me out of his house for not understanding his very obvious joke—"

Gin sighs. It couldn't ever be easy, huh? Is he actually the M here, dragging it out and humiliating himself like this? No, it can't be, if he got off on this kind of thing, life would be a whole lot easier. He wouldn't have to leave the house, he could just listen to Ketsuno Ana's degrading Libran horoscope every morning and paint the walls with—

"I'm not joking, Sarutobi."

Her face falls. Her voice gets very serious, all of a sudden, and the thirsty, blushing facade has fallen away completely. The hand on Gin's face drops down to rest lightly against his shoulder, right where the imprint of Takasugi's teeth is giving him stink-eye.

"Don't you think this is a little— I don't know. Outside our usual dynamic?" she says, with a confused tilt of her head. "I mean, I don't expect you to ever say yes. Chasing after a sexually unavailable man is kind of the appeal for me."

Gintoki just gives her a flat look.

She pats his shoulder. It hurts a little.

"I think I'm just going to leave," Sarutobi tells him, and then awkwardly ducks underneath his arm to get away. "Let's just pretend this never happened, okay?

The shinobi even gives him a polite bow on the way out of the bathroom and slides the door across behind her.

Gintoki stands there for a long time. Looking at the broken plastic in the sink, and the smudged handprint on the mirror, and the red marks on his skin.

The taste is foul in his mouth. Maybe if they were the freshly deceased, it wouldn't be so bad, but these corpses have been sitting here in the sun getting swarmed by birds and buzzing insects for days. There's an upside to it, he supposes, and it's that your mouth goes numb eventually, and after that, all you really notice is the texture— wet and an unpleasant mixture of too soft and too chewy and gritty sometimes with dirt, and of course the slight sting of an ant or larvae against his tongue.

When the man approaches, the crows don't scatter. They all turn to look at him, pointed heads with black or blue or red eyes. Gintoki— though he doesnt't have that name yet— is essentially one of them, the scavenging animals, and turns his head too. The first thing Gin notices is how clean he is— untouched by the blood and mire of the battlefield, even his white socks and the end of his robe pristine like they have minds of their own and wouldn't dare deface their wearer by dragging in the mud. The second thing he notices is the intricate sword he's holding. He's not the first that's come out here to slay some demon-or-other, and turned away when there's nothing but bodies and scorched ground and beasts chewing the bones. All the pockets have been picked and all the fights have been had.

The man, his face soft and round and kind of like the moon, smiles, then opens his mouth to speak. "Oi," he says, calmly. "Wake up. Your session's over."

Gin blinks, and the man disappears, and the birds scatter, turning into crying black flecks in the air. His small hands are inside the mouth of a severed head, trying to get at that untouched tongue, preserved by the teeth around it from the bugs and the sun. Long, sand-colored hair spills around the head like a halo, like the rays of the rising sun, and as Gintoki watches, life begins to seep back into the man's dead eyes, growing clear and focused, and his wet mouth moves around Gin's fingers. He pulls them out before it can bite him and scrambles back on his grazed knees, dropping the head back into the dirt.

It looks at him, half-buried there, and it speaks in that same soft voice. "Come on, man, I got other clients waiting."

Gintoki wakes with the distinct feeling of cold drool on his face. The world is dark and lit with a sleezy pink light, and when he tries to move, an eruption of pins and needles stops him in his tracks. When he squints his eyes open, it's not an angel or an overbearing mother or the lonely head of his Sensei talking to him, but a half-naked woman with a sharp, square haircut and dark eye makeup at odds with her concerned expression. Also at odds with her soft eyes and perfect tits and cute voice is the harness over her leather pants and the huge black Diet Member strapped to it. Gin makes eye contact with it.

"Ah," he slurs out, talking to the plastic dick. "Sorry, Johnson-san."

"Joseon?" the dominatrix asks, looking confused. "I'm from Kanazawa."

Gintoki demounts the wooden horse on wobbly legs, his sack so numb it's concerning— his kids are probably gonna come out like Helen Keller. The world swings a little, like he's at sea in rough weather, and he stumbles through the dimly-lit maze of pixellated S&M paraphernalia, through the brothel lobby and out into the rainbow-colored Kabuki-chō street. It's cold as fuck out here, and the wind tunneling through the buildings almost freezes the sweat on Gin's skin. All the drunk and shady passersby are dressed like snowmen, with scarfs and hats and a different type of carrot sticking out the front. Beside him, there's a poster girl hawking for the brothel. She looks miserable, stood with her hands under her armpits for warmth, dressed in a pleather bunny costume so form-fitting that it leaves little to the imagination.

"She really did a number on you, huh?" she says, looking him up and down with wide eyes. "You okay, nii-san?"

Gintoki, feeling awareness seep back into his body, realizes he didn't put his boots back on. Even worse, looking down at his bare feet against the filthy sidewalk, he realizes he didn't actually put anything back on, and is currently standing out in the cold, naked except for his heart-print boxers. Even worse, his hands are still bound together at his front with a pair of soft leather cuffs. Taking this all in, Gin turns his head up to the Edo night sky, the clouds of frigid breath rising to meet the grey-black ones that hang low up there. Snow flurries catch the lights from shopfronts and neon signs as they fall.

He sighs.

"I just need to get some sleep."

Tae's hand comes up to his cheek and holds his face, an unusually gentle act for her.

"I'm sorry, Gin-san," she says. Her lips, which Gintoki now knows are as soft as a baby's ass, form that familiar mask of a smile. "I just don't like you in that way. Maybe you should try Hasegawa-san— I'm sure he'd love to stay over."

Gin leans into her palm, like a cat. The tea candles in the genkan flicker. "I can't afford to get the place fumigated again."

He's sure, through the thin wall of the Shimura house beside them, that those brown-nosed brats of his are pressing their ears against the fusuma. It's past their bedtimes, dammit. Kids are supposed to stop existing once the ads for phone sex and viagra come on TV. He feels like a stick whittled too thin. One swing and he'll break. It's fucking pathetic. He's a grown man too scared to sleep alone sometimes, a child trying to crawl into someone's bed after a nightmare. He wants someone— anyone, he doesn't even have to like them, they just have to stay, and he figured there was worse things than being shallow like that— to watch over him, wants the weight and the warmth of them beside him to soothe him to sleep, into pleasant dreams where he isn't reliving that cloudy day on the cliff. Wants someone to wake him gently from the sweating and thrashing. Wants his fucking Sensei.

Sex is a damn good cover for it. Vulnerability, that is. It's easy, and it feels good, and he's better at it. He still wonders, sometimes, if most people only get married for the companionship, that they don't actually care who's looking after them, they just want someone to do it. He really is at rock bottom— thinking that fucking Otae and leading her on is easier than just being honest with her. He's acutely aware, right now, of how disgusting he is for this kind of behavior.

Gin lets out something halfway between a laugh and a sigh. The idea of actually having sex with Tae turns his stomach a little, but it's a feeling he's gotten real good at ignoring.

"Sorry, Tae," he says, open for once. "I don't like you like that either."

Her brows meet in the middle. "Then why are you here, Gin-san?"

What a terrible woman, he thinks. How dare she. She has no right, making him feel like that kid again, standing in his Sensei's doorway, too proud to go inside but too weak to leave. There's no way he can tell her. He can't find the right words. Every word that he can find is so vulnerable it makes him feel sick.

Gin ducks his head. He's got one foot turned to leave—

"You can stay the night," Otae's stern voice tells him, too loud in the quiet and the settling dust of the genkan. She puts a finger up as if to scold him. "But no funny business! I don't want Shin-chan getting the wrong idea."

—

That's how he ends up laying next to Tae on her small futon, his face hidden in her bunny-print comforter. It's similar, but not quite the same as when he got injured by that freak Nizou. She's probably not going to maim him if he gets up to piss, for starters. The woman's hand cards through his hair, pulling a little too hard when she tries to untangle the small knots there.

"Goodnight, Gin-san," she says.

"'Night," he says back, and sleeps through til morning. When he wakes with the birds and the sounds of Shinpachi in the hallway trying to coax the dog out for a bio break, he'll realize Otae is still next to him, curled up on her side. Her hand has reached out and grabbed his upper arm for comfort like he's some kind of oversized plush toy. He'll laugh to himself a little.

Her sleeping face is just that ugly.

Gintoki's in the kitchen chopping spring onions. Shinpachi's due through the front door in any second, and Kagura's snoring in the closet. He slides the little green rounds off the chopping board and into the egg mix. Sure, scrambled eggs isn't exactly the breakfast of kings, but he was so unpleasant and the kids were away for so long that he feels a little guilty, and nothing says you're sorry like a plate of food, except for maybe the words 'I'm sorry'. He stirs the onions in with a chopstick and tips it all into the pan, sizzling and turning pale around the edges instantly.

Sarutobi's suddenly beside him again, stirring natto like she belongs there and hasn't just dropped from the ceiling and messed up her hair and knocked her glasses halfway up her forehead on the way down. The woman clears her throat awkwardly.

"Michiko from work— you know, the one with the face and the—" Grimacing, she takes her chopstick hand and makes a motion in front of her chest that indicates huge fucking tits. Besides that, who the hell is Michiko? Work?? Is it a hotdesking type of situation? Is there some kind of communal break room for freelance assassins? Are they standing around the water cooler gossipping about Agent 47's new toupee? "She was crying to me but like, performative crying, you know what I mean? And she asks me if—"

Actually, this is the first time Gin's seen her since what he's mentally calling the incident. Maybe dropping in and ranting like this is her way of checking if they're still okay, and there's no hard feelings, and shit, Sarutobi's literally stalking him, why does he give even half a damn about this no-good woman's feelings? Why does he care if things are awkward between them or not? They should be! He should be filing for a protection order! He slides the chopstick under the gently bubbling eggs to stop them from sticking, folding them through a couple times.

"—and I go noooo, what? But like, secretly, yes, bitch, you know? And don't even get me started on her—"

He gets an extra bowl and square plate down from the cupboard and piles them with food— fluffy eggs and steaming rice from the cooker— and slides them across the kitchen bench towards the woman. She's lucky he always cooks extra servings for Kagura. Sacchan's looking at the food like he's just served her a severed head on a sushi plate.

"Breakfast," Gin mutters, like it might not be obvious, stacking the other plates and bowls. He means to say something else. Obviously. Just like she does. "Now help me take this into the other room, will you?"

Sarutobi squeals so hard she trips over her own feet and falls face-first into the eggs.

“Ah, Gin-san!”

He’s halfway out the window. His fly is still undone and Hinowa is definitely getting an eyeful of his strawberry-print shorts but hey, she's definitely seen worse. Still. Tsukuyo’s meagre bedroom looks like it's been hit by an extremely localized typhoon. There's sex paraphernalia all over the place. One of her fishnets is hanging from the light fixture. Distantly, he can hear the shower running. Hinowa seems to ignore everything, including the fact that Gintoki is balls-to-the-windowsill.

“Do you have time to stay for lunch? I’ve been trying some new snacks for Seita’s bento, but I don't know if they're any good.” Her sunny smile falls into that manipulative pout that only a mother can wear. “I’d ask Tsukuyo, but– well. She’d tell me anything is good.”

Gin swings his leg back over the sill, and his head throbs with the movement. So do the marks around his neck. Damn woman. With that look on her face, there's no way he can say no.

He ends up sitting at their dining table, nursing his hangover with the aspirin and water and the wonky bear-shaped cakes of rice that Hinowa’s passing over to him. He listens to her talk about how anxious she is about Seita’s sleepover, and doesn't gripe back about how the kid was literally a dirty street urchin for years. He tells her the food is good when it's really more like fine. Eventually, Tsukuyo emerges into the house proper in a light kimono, with her hair down and bags beneath her eyes. Death warmed up, this morning. She looks a little surprised that he’s still here, but wearily takes her seat at the table.

The light cascading into the room is bright and clear, and it hits spice bottles and sun catchers and the earrings that Hinowa is wearing today and casts rainbows and flares across the floor. The room is filled with the sound of oil gently bubbling, and the squeak of her wheels as she moves back and forth. Despite the red-light bustle and grime of Yoshiwara, this has become a relaxing and safe place. A home.

He winks at Tsukuyo across the table.

She kicks him beneath it, but smiles back.

He opens his eyes to yet another unfamilliar ceiling, and fuck, Gin-san, haven't we had enough of this yet? He has to be getting close to max level at doing the walk of shame by now. What's that thing they say? Every relapse is a step closer to quitting for good, or whatever? His eyes are locked on the roof while he mentally steels himself for looking over and potentially seeing another wrinkly old bag in bed with him— or worse, Hasegawa. He tries to focus. Does his dick feel weird? Does it feel like it's swollen, down there?? Is he going to have to see a doctor again??? It's then that he feels it: the gentle back-and-forth of a ship over water.

He turns his head and meets Mutsu's eyes, where she's sat in an out-of-place armchair across the room, reading some girlie tabloid. The headlines read 'Dogstar Sex Dwarf tells all!' and 'Centaurian PM dead after Famichiki incident'. Gintoki quickly scans the bed— at the very least, Sakamoto isn't in it, and Gin is clothed to a reasonable degree, so it's plausible this isn't the remnants of some poorly-advised threesome and Mutsu hasn't been relegated to the c*ck chair.

When he looks back, Mutsu's closed her magazine and is glaring at him with her cold, amber-colored eyes. "That idiot's always bringing home strays," she says, in lieu of an explanation.

Gin scrubs a hand down his face. His eyes are stinging and there's a painful weight behind them that's forcing him to frown. He figures Mutsu is the type of woman it's easier to be straightforward with.

"How did I get here?"

Her face suggests she expected this. "Someone spiked your drink at Snack Smile's holiday party."

Ah, thinks Gin. With his memory jogged, he can vaguely recall an instance of Kagura spitting in his drink, upset that he could drink the punch but she couldn't, courtesy of it being alcoholic and all, so he swapped it out with the vice-chief's on the sly. That damn sadist…

"I took you and the boss with me before you two could embarrass yourselves anymore."

Gin sits up suddenly in the bed, fatigue spiking through him. "Tatsuma got spiked too?"

A tiny smile graces Mutsu's features at his concern. "No," she explains, folding the book under her arm. "He's just an idiot."

A tightness he didn't know he was holding drains out of him like he's sprung a leak somewhere. He hasn't relapsed into shagging his old war buddies when he's drunk and sad. The words just slip out—

"That's a relief," he says.

Mutsu's looking at him strangely. "What is?"

His face feels inexplicably hot, all of a sudden. Must be the leftover alcohol in his system. Yeah. Definitely. Not the fact that he's stuck in a room with his ex-something's current-something and has just vaguely alluded to his history of fooling around with said mop-headed something. It's not like him to be bashful about these things, dammit.

"Ah, just, y'know—" Gin wipes at his cheek like maybe he could lift the heat away. "Glad there aren't pictures of my derrière in that magazine."

—

He's staring out a window in the hull of the Kaientai ship. They're docked in the harbor, so it's not space, but the darkness of the ocean just before dawn is such that it could be— the lights of the city and the shipyard across the rippling surface are doing a piss-poor imitation of stars, but they still deserve to be paid for their work.

"Aah, Kintoki—" For someone who didn't get his drink spiked, Sakamoto Tatsuma sure looks worse than he does. He's got a split lip and a purpling bruise under his eye and several worrying lumps protruding from his unruly hair. Gin would be worried, if he didn't know Tatsuma to be the kind of guy who can make all damage completely disappear by the next paragraph. "Good to see you've made a full recovery."

He's holding a mug of thick, black coffee. Steaming and sugary as anything. Gintoki pries it from his hands, takes a wanton sip, and hands it back. Mostly just to be annoying. He's never been a coffee kind of guy, even when it's got enough sugar to rot your teeth straight out.

Tatsuma doesn't seem put out by it, though. Instead, he leans forward and puts his chin on Gin's shoulder, following his eyes to look out at the ocean, too, and the fake galaxies beyond it. It's a weirdly intimate position, for him. They're standing there like lovers. There it is again— that oh-so familliar knot in his stomach.

"Tatsuma," he asks. If he takes his gaze off the horizon, the vision of stars will disappear like an oasis. Beautiful but ethereal. He doesn't want to look away, just yet. "Why'd you want me to come with you so bad, back then?"

The mophead laughs stiffly. Gin really wants to be imagining that pinkness to his cheeks. "Ah, well," he goes. His eyes, too, are fixed out there— and then they turn to Gintoki with the same reverence. "A guy can dream, can't he? Honestly…"

A moment passes. Ships and rockets and harbor lights blink in the night.

"Truth is, I wanted you all to myself."

And what a grand and ridiculous dream it is, he thinks. A Sakata Gintoki that can belong to one person… one that isn't a tapestry of flesh and red string all held together by the pinkie fingers of countless other people… isn't really Sakata Gintoki at all, is it? He just isn't the type of creature that can be tied down by silly things like love or sex or marriage. His soul is just too damn big for that kind of thing. If it was any smaller, he'd be dead by now.

"You ever think about it? If I went with you."

Tatsuma sighs. "Nah," he answers, bring his coffee cup up to his mouth. It's a lie, obviously. "I ain't built for dwelling on the past like that. But y'know, Kintoki—"

The twist in his gut tightens up, waiting for the metaphorical piano to drop. Waiting for words he doesn't want to hear—

"I'm glad you didn't."

— and then it loosens, all at once.

(That's a relief.)

Tatsuma's smiling, that blinding, shit-eating grin of his. A light that can never be blocked out. A second, tiny sun on his shoulder.

"When I said Earth was too small for you, I was wrong," he tell Gin, stepping back and away, his footsteps loud in the belly of this massive tin-can. He winks, cheeky blue-eyed bastard— before taking his sunglasses out of his chest pocket and slipping them on. "Turns out she's just your size."

(

The pig-faced amanto grunts.

"Humans all look the damn same to me," he huffs out, his breath hot and steamy against Hijikata's cheeks. His beady eyes peer down at him, and he turns his head like he's trying to piece Hijikata's face together from multiple different angles. "Surely this one's good enough?"

Hijikata sucks in a long string of bloody saliva and then spits it on the floor, just missing the amanto's foot. His pink hand comes up to grab Hijikata by the chin and drag him up from his loose-limbed slump, sniffing him curiously all over. The chains around his wrists jangle all the way up to the roof, and it's a grating, harsh noise in his sensitive ears— he probably has a concussion, if not worse.

A second amanto comes into view. He's tall, thin, with slimy-looking blue skin, and his voice is garbled and high-pitched. "We'll just shave his head. The boss'll never be able to tell he's not that white-haired one."

"It should grow back in white enough anyway," the pig agrees with a snorting laugh, and then hits Hijikata in the stomach again.

This is what he gets for daring to eat at the same oden stand as that bastard. He doesn't know how long he was out cold, but it couldn't have been long. It's still dark out. If he listens hard enough over the sound of his own ragged breathing, he can hear the ocean, hidden amongst the chatter of the thugs and the metal walls a-creaking. It's a warehouse, two-storey, built for dockwork most likely. The windows in the loft storey are covered in old newspaper. He estimates there's about twenty-five, thirty men hanging around, polishing their guns. He might be able to break the pulley on the roof that's pinning his arms up, but the cuffs around his ankles mean he wouldn't get very far even if he did.

Something starts buzzing.

He took the weekend off. No-one at the Shinsengumi will report him missing until at least Monday's roll-call, and even then, they might pretend not to notice. Hijikata's kind of on his own here— he needs to find an opening ASAP before they either kill him or get him off the planet. He takes stock of weapons within reach, blind spots, loose fucking floorboards. Yeah, his best chance is still probably that thing with the pulley.

He flinches to the side just in time to avoid a stripe getting shaved into the side of his head. The pig amanto baulks, and then holds him in place with both crushing hands, swearing and laughing as Hijikata tries to bite and swing at him any way he can. The tall and thin one starts to laugh, too, and he presses the stuttering electric razor down against his head, leaving a patch of silvery scalp behind—

There's a gurgling cry from down below, and a heavy wet noise. Then another, and another— the tall one drops the machine and dashes to the edge of the loft, a stanza of screaming and laser-gunfire suddenly erupting from the army of amanto Jimmies. His three-fingered hand is reaching for the gun at his hip, and his mouth is opening to yell, and then there's a flash of silver and he's shooting backwards and a flying sword has pinned him through the back of his open mouth to the warehouse's far wall. Hijikata just stares as it holds his weight there for a few moments before he starts to slide downwards, a strange-colored fluid pouring from the growing trench in his face like tree sap.

Hijikata blinks—

He can't hear cannons, or engines, or sirens. Whatever's happening, it's not the Shinsengumi's doing.

— and then he headbutts the pig square in the snout. He doesn't recoil all the way back but he does startle with a loud squeal, and it's enough for Hijikata to grab the knife in the shoulder of the alien's utility vest between his teeth and stab it back down into the soft, fatty folds of his throat. He stumbles backwards this time, gripping his bleeding neck.

Hijikata will call it luck, the way a laser richochets off the tin roof and vaporizes part of the chain tying him up. He'll wonder otherwise, though, when he uses all the strength left in him and all the give in his shackled ankles to push the scrambling pig-man to the loft railing, trying to tip the fucker over it under his own weight— when another laser pierces a perfectly round hole through his chest, just barely singing the top of Hijikata's head— when he topples to the floor below with a crash, when he's left staring at the visage of a bloodied Sakata Gintoki aiming an alien gun at his head. Their eyes meet for a split second, and there's a wild animal kind of look there— and then the yorozuya pivots and bashes the empty gun over another amanto's head, finishing him off with the knife from the pig's neck and a spray of black-looking blood.

Fuck, he thinks, standing there and looking down at the whirlwind of violence on the warehouse floor— the white demon looks more like a red one tonight.

)

"Damn tax-thief, making good samaritans do his work for him," Gintoki grumbles as he shambles over to sit beside Hijikata on the harbor wall. The cop's beat to shit, his head hanging crestfallen between his knees, the only signs of life being the trail of silver smoke rising up into the night. It's all superficial, at least— just bruises and bloody gums. The bullet wound in Gin's shoulder and the seeping singe-mark across his gut are pretty bad, but maybe the cop hasn't noticed. Gin's sleeves and hair are dripping with the remnants of about a dozen amanto thugs, looking black under the buzzing streetlights. Toya-ko at his belt isn't much more than a toothpick.

Hijikata's voice is quiet, exhausted. Maybe a little ashamed. "How'd you find me?"

"Jii-san at the shop said he saw some crooks knock you on your ass. Picked up your sword for you, too," he says, casually, like it's still at his hip and not sticking out the back of some Jimmy over there. Gin sticks a finger up his nose. "Should've kept you waiting longer."

Hijikata doesn't move. He barely even breathes. He's either concussed, or just that lost in thought, staring out at the ocean like that. The ashes of his cigarette blow away like fireflies— the lights of the city are less like stars and more like a gross oil spill across the water's wavery surface, this time. Gin flicks his booger at the cop in faux annoyance.

"What, no response?" he crows out, like a big-noting chicken. "Not gonna blush and splutter over Gin-san's selfless deeds, ah? Must've really done a number on you in there—"

"Doesn't that hurt?"

When he meets Hijikata's eyes, they're locked on the slowly weeping wound he's trying to cover with one hand. Gone honest with the pain, Gin gives him a woozy smile. "Like a bitch, Oogushi-kun."

Before Gin can process it, Hijikata's on his feet— reaching down and trying go pull Gintoki up by his arms. They both stumble messily into each other.

"Oi—" starts Gintoki, but he must be really off-kilter tonight, because for some reason he's let the vice-chief position himself under his good arm to hold his weight, despite the fact he can walk just fine— well. Fine enough, anyway. With his wits about him now, Gin baulks at the contact, turning his face away from the other man. "Tryin' to cop a feel of ol' Gin-san? Sheesh, guys like you are the reason we need women-only spaces—"

"Stop talking. You need medical attention. I'm taking you back to the barracks—"

Hijikata tries to take a step but Gin digs his heels into the concrete. He pouts and shakes his head, the filth from his hair getting everywhere. "No, no no no no— nuh-uh."

"What are you, five—"

"You really want that gorilla worrying about all this blood? And the reports! Aah—" Gin spouts, in a rambling, dismissive tone. "I'll pin it all on you, Toshi. I'm a good samaritan, remember?"

It looks like Hijikata's gritting his teeth that hard to stop himself from taking an angry bite out of Gin's face, because he's a bad, bad dog. "I'm a police officer. I can't just hide my involvement in something like this."

"It was me they were after. None of this is your problem, so butt out—"

"Bullshit! It became my problem when they—"

"Arrest me, then. If you're so law-abiding," Gin tells him, confidently, meeting the other man's eyes. Just like he's bluffing in poker. He leans against the vice-chief, boneless compared to the way every sphincter in Hijikata's entire body is clenched to the point of medical retention, and forces him to hold his weight. "I just killed more people than you have pubes. You should throw me in the joint for life."

He feels Hijikata falter beneath him before he sees it on his face. It feels almost like a compliment— that he knows the demonic vice-chief would never arrest him, not anymore, not even when he has every reason to and then some. It makes Gin smile all over again. Or maybe that's the blood loss, making him feel giddy. It doesn't really matter, in the end.

"Good boy," he says, and lets them take that first step home. "I got first aid back at the shop."

—

Asshole cop's got Gin sat on the edge of the bath like an overbearing mother. He decides to say as much, to fill up this weird space between them—

"What are you, my mom?" he whines, batting at Hijikata's hands where he's trying to soak a cloth in antiseptic. "I can clean myself—"

Hijikata bats him right back, slapping at him with the wet cloth and the way Gin flinches makes his shoulder wound get all pissed off again. "Shut up, asshole," he grumbles, putting the isodine on the sink. "Let me do this. Get naked already."

Gin pouts but starts shrugging off his disgusting kimono anyway. It's unsalvageable. He's gonna have to burn it. "Gosh. Buy a girl dinner first."

"You human?" The cop suddenly asks, bouncing his leg where he's sitting on the shower stool. Gintoki, peeling his undershirt from where it's stuck to his crusty wounds, looks at him like he might've misheard the two-word question. "I need to know. For first aid purposes. Some common amanto species have reactions to—"

Gin laughs dryly. "Liar."

Hijikata's frown deepens but he manages to keep the volume of his voice under careful wraps. "I'm serious—"

"Yeah, but that's not why you're asking. Besides—" he kicks the first aid bucket for emphasis— "we buy all the special shit for Kagura anyway."

If Hijikata were really worried about that, from the perspective of a professional trained in first-aid, he would've used the more sensitive products by default. Instead, the Oogushi-kun sat in front of him is just a nosy bastard.

"When you fight—" he says, in that same uncharacteristically low voice. "I've never seen anything like it. It's like you're—"

Gin leans back over the edge of the tub. In his head, he can pretend the motion makes him look sexy, mysterious, with his shirt off like this. In reality, he's bloody and sweaty and stinky and still half-drunk when it really comes down to it, and he's showing off the gut he can barely keep in line and the gross, weeping laser-welt in it and the scars on his chest and arms that just aren't nice to see in the first place. In reality, Hijikata isn't even looking.

"A demon?" he suggests, sarcastically, at least to himself.

Ah. Just like that, Hijikata's blue eyes ride up to look at him.

"Immortal. It's like you're immortal."

Gin takes a deep breath. His grip tightening makes the bath tiles squeak. "I had a good teacher." He's watching the antiseptic drip from the wrung cloth, over Hijikata's calloused fingers, and onto the floor, wasted. "I'm human. I mean, I've never been tested. My pops could still be the Ox King or something."

The vice-chief breaks out of whatever came over him and reaches forward to wipe at the hole in Gin's shoulder. He hisses and bites his lip. Sometimes it's like cleaning the damn things hurts more than getting shot in the first place.

Hijikata's hands are points of unfamilliar coolness against the heat of his skin. As he slowly wipes the gunk and congealed fuckshit away, the rag balled up like he's cleaning a child's sticky face, Gin thinks this might be the softest the cop's ever touched him. Which is weird, because, you know. They've almost touched tips a couple times. He just watched Gin fight thirty men without flinching. He could stand to be a little rougher. This kind of care is a weird look, on him.

Having said that, Hijikata fingering a wad of gauze into the clean wound is the worst kind of surprise. His head hits the other man's shoulder with a groan as more isodine gets poured liberally into it, making everything turn wet and pink. Not the good kind of wet and pink, either.

"I don't understand you," Hijikata bites out. Looks like they're having a real heart-to-heart, huh? Guess that's something that happens when you save a guy from getting trafficked and killed by space pirates. He wishes it wasn't— and if Hijikata knew the type of things the Shiroyasha's enemies would've done to him had he not shown up, the cop would probably be grovelling at Gin's feet right now. Or he wouldn't be here at all, more likely.

"You must be slow, then," Gin answers into his shoulder. The cop baulks in confusion and Gintoki leans back away from him. Hijikata looks offended. His shoulder's throbbing and stinging like there's a whole ants' nest in there. "I'm not that complicated."

Hijikata peels the backing off a square bandage with more force than is probably necessary and slaps it down across the wound, patting it again for good measure— and just to torture him. He's really shit at this. He'd make a terrible wife.

"Why were those thugs after you, anyway?"

"What's with all the questions tonight, ah? Pig wants to know all of Gin-san's secrets? Wants to know where he keeps his dirty magazines—"

He's interrupted by Hijikata suddenly getting to his knees in front of him. He looks up at him through his stupid bangs, bracketed by Gin's legs. His dark, sure eyes and the bruises and the red gums are doing something horrible to Gin's insides.

"Humor me," he says, and gets to work cleaning up Gintoki's stomach. It's way too close to a different kind of problem area. Below all the stinging and the aching, Hijikata's hand tight againt his inner thigh and the other one gently working against the sore, sensitive skin on his gut are still managing to make his cock twitch with interest and his groin feel all tight. It's fucked, is what it is.

Gin takes a shaky breath. His muscles jump at the cold contact of the cloth. "Ah, well, you know—" he starts, his eyes roving across the room for anything of interest at all. "Those guys were from the video rental. I couldn't afford the late fee. If I knew it was gonna be that serious, I would've at least kept the DVD. I mean—"

Hijikata sticks down another bandage with some medical tape and the meat of his palm.

"W-who knew that 'Your accent has gone away since we last met (smile)' was in such high demand, huh? It wasn't even that good. Now, if it was 'In any case, this news anchor is a cheerful babe' I could understand the commotion—"

"You nervous?"

All things considered, reckons Gin, sucking at his teeth— two out of three straight answers ain't bad.

"Of course I am," he huffs out. There's no confidence in his voice at all. He presses his knees lightly against Hijikata's sides. "Look at this shit. After all of this, I don't even know if you—"

Like me, he was really going to say. If you actually like me, or if you just feel guilty. If you're only here because you can't walk away from anyone anymore, not after her.

Unfortunately, Hijikata's reached up and kissed him before he could get the words out. His hand's on the back of Gintoki's neck, scruffing him like a dog, pulling him down. The kiss is bitey and tastes like the iron in blood. It's just how Hijikata is. Funny, Gin thinks, opening his mouth into it, that he relates every shitty kiss to Hijikata now. You could maybe call it healing, or moving on, or something. Gin doesn't want to call it anything, though, so he doesn't.

He doesn't have to wonder if Hijikata's thinking about her. Their busted lips scraping together and the forehead pressed hard against his and the way Hijikata whispers a rude name at him as they part tells him everything he needs to know.

The chief puts a hand flat on Gin's chest and pushes him away. An embarrased pink has joined the impressionist shapes of purple, black and yellow across his cheekbones. "Thanks," he mutters, short but earnest. He's pulling and brushing at his bloody and tattered yukata, like he could somehow regain a semblance of composure there, but it's too far gone and has been this whole time. "I have to go make that incident report before—"

Gin grabs his wrist. Untangles his hand from the navy-grey fabric.

"Stay?" he asks. It hurts. Fuck, it hurts.

Hijikata looks down at their joined hands. The way his face twists— it's like he doesn't know what he's looking at. Like something impossible has just happened, like there's no world where Gintoki would ever touch his hand like that and speak to him with a small voice like that, and before tonight, well, maybe there wasn't. But this is Edo and impossible things happen every second Saturday, or maybe twice a week.

The vice-chief clicks his tongue and leans back in.

"You're lucky it's my day off, you bastard."

His bedroom window bursts open in the middle of the night, moonlight and cold air streaming through it. Gintoki, rudely awoken from his light sleep, sits up on instinct and grabs his bokutō from above his pillow–

And comes face to face with Katsura Kotarō.

“Act natural. That sadistic dog is on my tail.”

The guy’s pupils are blown wide, and his hair is damp and stringy. For some reason, he's done up in his female visage, looking like he's just come off a kabuki stage– his purple flowery kimono rumpled beneath the usual white overcoat, his white and red makeup patchy and running.

Before Gintoki can push him away or even complain, Katsura wedges his sweaty body underneath the duvet and beside Gintoki on his meagre futon. He hides his face between Gin’s bare shoulder and neck, and Gin can feel his dry lips and his warm breath and for some reason, his cheeks get really hot and little Chintoki down there is very, very confused at this turn of events, happening so suddenly he can barely parse if this is reality or just the usual fucked-up fantasy of his that's left him waking up feeling disgusting and sticky for the past twenty years—

As per usual, the Shinsengumi pig busts his front door down without so much as a warrant– and that has to be illegal, right? Surely Gin-san can sue for damages? There’s the hollow sound of footsteps approaching, and goddammit Kagura, always sleeping like the fucking dead, wouldn't notice if a Spirit Bomb got dropped on top of her–

Okita throws the tatami shutter open and surveys the four corners of Gintoki’s bedroom like a hawk with his cannon perched over his shoulder. His eyes then focus on the futon on the floor, the shape of Gintoki and his long-haired lover tucked into his side, and surprise colors his features. Gintoki feels an anxious sweat bead on his forehead.

“Ah, sorry, danna,” says the young officer, his voice too loud in the small space. “Didn’t mean to, uh, interrupt anything.”

Gin grits his teeth. Without thinking, he pulls the motionless Katsura closer to himself beneath the covers. “L-learn to knock, you brat.”

“My bad, my bad.” Okita gives him a sunny smile and steps over the threshold, immediately looking in Gintoki’s cupboard and out the open window. “Say, you haven't seen Katsura around here, have you? Thought he came in here, but maybe my eyes are getting bad. After all, all I can see is danna and a pretty lady.” The kid’s gaze zeroes in on them, and he feels Katsura stiffen. This damn sadist, making Gin-san squirm on purpose.

Okita, seeming satisfied with his half-hearted inspection of the premises, gives them a thumbs-up with his free hand. “Anyway, I’ll leave you’s to it. Go an extra round for me.”

Gin just gives him a weak smile, and the kid sidles out of his house with a deadpan wink like he hasn't just blown the front door all the way to Namek. When he's thoroughly exited the scene, Gintoki sits up and throws Katsura off him and onto the tatami with a thump and a squeal. He clicks his tongue.

“That little asshole. He knew.”

When he looks over at Zura, the guy's gone red all over— Gin can even tell in the dark like this. Act natural my ass.

"Oi, Zura—"

Without acknowledging him at all, Katsura gets to his feet and pads gently out of the room. After all these years, his footsteps still sound the same. Gin honestly thinks the guy's made a quick exit until he hears running water from the next room over, and Zura eventually reappears with his face cleaned of running makeup and one of Gin's towels likely boasting a smudge in his likeness.

“Thank you, Gintoki," the long-haired man says. "My apologies for the state of the house’s facade.”

Gintoki, cross-legged on the futon, grunts at him and waves a wanton hand. “It’ll be fixed by the next scene. That’s the magic of animation, or whatever.”

"Animation?" Zura parrots, looking around the room like it might suddenly turn 2-D, or maybe into words on paper. "I think it would be for the best if I laid low here, for a while. The Shinsengumi seem to respect you enough to not come knocking again, at the very least."

Gin's already had the cops blow his front door to smithereens. He's got basically nothing left to lose, he figures, so he just falls backwards and rolls onto his side, away from Zura. "Do whatever you want. Just don't wake Kagura up—"

Before he's even finished his sentence, Zura's lowered himself back down onto the futon at Gintoki's back and started to tuck his legs under the duvet.

"Oi???" goes Gin, turning back to him in annoyance. This is starting to feel weirdly familiar, but he can't quite pick why. "The hell are you doing?"

Zura's face is open and innocent, like he never even considered a different course of action than just getting into bed with another man without even asking. Well, technically, Gin guesses he did say he could do whatever, but still— "Oh, well, it's just that we've been bedmates so many times before, I thought you wouldn't mind if—"

Gin groans. Bedmates. He cant work out if the term is less or more than what they are. Infantilizing or too mature— if they're friends or fuck-somethings or just two kids having a sleepover. "Don't call it that," he grumbles, then makes the mistake of watching Zura as he strips off his grubby white overcoat, revealing more of the floral, shapely fabric beneath it. His lewd thoughts fall face-first into a pit of nostalgia. Thunk, goes the sōzu. Dull wing-beats of an owl snatching a small mammal from the yard, chirping of crickets and short-lived cicadas—

"Besides, beauty sleep is important for any true samurai—"

Tiny, soft hands on his arm. Tiny, soft footsteps back out into the empty, lonely hallway of Shōka Sonjuku. They've done this before.

Gintoki forces himself to relax. "What about my beauty sleep, ah?" he grumbles half-heartedly, just for the sake of it. "And why are you dressed like that?"

Katsura shuffles into a laying position, pulling the blankets up to his neck. Like this, he's taking up more of the meagre mattress than Gintoki is, and it's his damn bed. "I was helping Saigō-dono. The bar has been understaffed, lately."

"That stiff. He better be paying you." Ugly bastard only ever paid him in tips. Said it's ‘cause he's got no ‘assets’. Not pretty enough for the bonafide chasers, but still too pretty for the guys into hardcore fuglies. If there wasn't money on the line, he'd consider it a compliment.

"They've been good to me, and to our cause. The least I can do is lend a hand when needed." The tone of Zura's voice suggests that moonlighting at an okama bar is the highest of samurai honors.

"I think you just enjoy it."

It was the wrong thing to say, probably, because Zura goes rigid beside him and his breathing gets very slow. Gin looks over at his side-profile, a cast of a very worried-looking porcelain doll. Gin's stupid, stupid mouth gets the drop on him, a few words escaping before he can clamp the damn thing shut.

"Zura," he'd said, with far too much weight, far too much care than the bullshit nickname deserves. "You know you can just—"

Just what? What was he even going to say? Something horrible, probably. Something they've both known, in all honesty, for a very long time.

Zura's face turns down, sad, and then his whole body turns with it to give Gintoki the cold shoulder.

"It's not about what we enjoy, Gintoki."

The words almost force a snarky, sarcastic laugh out of Gin. What an absolutely ridiculous thing, he thinks, for this absolutely ridiculous person to say.

He refuses to let Katsura snub him in his own damn house— in his own damn bed, no less. He refuses to let that high-strung general persona take him over again. He refuses to let Zura walk out of here again, into the dark that's full of strangers and creepy-crawlies and danger in the form of cops with bazookas. Gin scootches over to him, closer and closer, until Zura's back is pressed to his front and his hair's tickling Gin's face and Gin can feel the way he's pouting just through the tightness in the air. He snakes an arm through Zura's, across the expanse of rich, silken fabric far too good to be sleeping in, and gradually works Zura's obi tie loose. Not out of any lecherous intent, he swears— just out of an intimate familiarity with how uncomfortable women's clothing can be. When he's done, he takes Zura's hand in his own and Zura lets him— in fact, he grips Gin's fingers harder and brings the joined things to his chest, tucked tight and safe under his chin.

He whispers some words. It might be a goodnight, or it might be something else entirely. It's another one of those things that doesn't matter, to either of them. They both mean the same thing.

When Gintoki is woken by his usual alarm, Katsura is still held close to his chest, and Gin's arm has a killer case of pins-and-needles.

He knows something's up when the dog starts growling at nothing. That something ends up being a gentle knock at the door that sets off a domino effect– Sadaharu’s ears prick and he jostles Kagura from her half-sleep and she rolls onto the floor with a yell, which startles Gintoki into shifting just so on the couch to press the TV remote’s channel button with his asscheek and the thing starts to cycle through daytime serials fast enough to give a weaker man a seizure. At the same time, Shinpachi shouts from the kitchen that he answered the last five doors and he'll die before he answers a sixth, and Gintoki digs the remote out of the couch crack just in time to throw out rock to Kagura’s scissors with his other hand and grin as she screams in frustration and starts to writhe around like poor little Regan MacNeil. She kicks Gin hard in the shin before she slithers off to the genkan.

The door slams shut again as quickly as she opened it. Gin’s still rubbing his sore leg when he sees Kagura walk silently– weird for her– into the kitchen and emerge again with a worried-looking Shinpachi in tow.

The door opens and shuts again. He can hear muttering– he can also hear an annoyed vein start pumping. He opens his mouth to yell–

The kids tip-toe back into the main room with white faces and wide eyes. Pattsuan is tugging at the collar of his kimono anxiously.

“U-um, Gin-san–”

“Gin-chan–”

– they go at the same time, and then share an equally anxious look.

“It’s for you,” is what Shinpachi eventually lands on. The yato brat has no such qualms–

“Our house is haunted,” she says, so matter-of-factly that Gin is almost inclined to believe her, and he feels a cold shiver run down his spine. He grunts something out about kids these days and the entitlement of the modern consumer to expect every damn business to be open on weekends all of a sudden, but his palms still prickle as he approaches the abused front door.

It’s going to sound insane, but–

He can smell him. Like when you're minding your own business and all of a sudden the air smells like being a kid again. Malt and sweetgrass and smoke. Expensive angel-hair tobacco. It’s nothing like that cancer-ridden shit the cop huffs. He’s always been a flowery bastard.

(Beneath all that– a memory of a memory of a…)

(Blossoms. Still and dark water. It’s almost a foul scent, heady and decomposing.)

(A beautiful moon.)

In Kagura’s defense, there is a dead man at the door.

He looks younger. Smoother. More than Gin’s scarred old bones– and what kind of tragic main character is he anyway, if everyone gets to come back from the dead but him? There's less lines in his face, the ones carved in there from thirty years of frowning and grinding his teeth and sucking on his pipe, less shadow under his eyes.

“Gintoki.”

He’s got two of them. Eyes. Beneath his black overcoat, the fancy kimono looks too big for him. For a second, Gin lets his brain run wild– lets himself believe he's looking at some bastard son or alien shapeshifter. Some bad dream. That he's gonna wake up any second, alone again, half-crushed by the world on his back. But the recognition in those eyes is unmistakeable. The pain and the guilt held there belong to someone that could only ever be Takasugi.

He says Gin’s name simply, like he always has. Like it's a fact, like it's a rock in his mouth. Like he didn't die in his arms.

Gintoki wants to reel it in. Smile and laugh, make some dumb fucking joke. Put all the emotions aside to process later, in the dark, sweating in his futon. But he can't. He can't stop his face from twisting in anger– in grief. He heard from Katsura, that the remnants of the Kiheitai found something, but he cut him off and talked over the man before he could finish. He told him he didn't care. There was no way, and even if there was, he wasn't going to spend any longer hoping for reincarnation for someone he loved and let die. He walked away from Shoyo, back then, and accepted that he was going to have to keep living in that terrifying world without him. Accepted that he was going to have to put all his love and guilt to bed and keep moving forward. He thought he could walk away from Takasugi, too– but of course the bastard’s like his sensei, and the both of them come back to haunt him.

Gintoki is surprised to find that he's just as angry about the similarity as he is about all the grief he's wasted. The anger’s voice is small and jealous, and he’d die before he said it out loud– how come Takasugi’s the one that gets to be just like him? It’s not fair. That should be him.

The anger grabs his hand and throws a punch. Takasugi dodges back and to the side just in time to avoid the follow up elbow aimed at his guts. He catches Gin by the arm, and their eyes meet over the combination of straining muscle there. They're both wondering if this is going to be a fight. If they want this to be a fight. Takasugi’s fingers are as long and deft as they always were on his skin, but they're different now, too– missing all the callous marks from fretting and gripping swords and fistfights. He’s weaker than he used to be, too. The rapid growth has probably upped his metabolism so much he can't put the weight back on. Gin’s pushing him back easily, his sandals making awful wood-on-wood noises as he loses grip. His heels hit the threshold between the balcony and the first step.

“You’re right,” he says, his short nails digging into Gintoki’s arm. He’s looking at Gin like he’s the violent animal between them, and fuck, maybe he is. “I shouldn't have come here–”

Gintoki trips him. In the same motion, before Takasugi’s new eye can even get wide, he scruffs him by the collar and stops him from falling all the way down the rickety steps onto the dirt at Otose’s door.

“Don’t you dare,” he grunts out, and yeah, he thinks. That’s an animal noise, alright. His eyes sting. His hand holding the other man up is shaking– he'll call it anger. It’s easier to call it anger. “Don't make me kill you again, you dumb bastard.”

And then he pulls Takasugi back onto his feet.

—

Kagura and Shinpachi presented their new guest with what they called tea, which was really a terrifying concoction of all the foul shit left to moulder in the communal yorozuya fridge. As it turns out, dying doesn't immediately assuage you of all your past mistakes. Maybe it's because he knows this, that Takasugi actually drinks the deadly mixture, and the only break in his facade is a small cough. Gintoki has to order the kids to take the damn dog for a walk, just to make sure their next practical joke in the name of vengeance doesn't drop him dead a second time.

“Is it weird?” he asks. “Having two eyes?

The last time they were in this room together, Gin had his dick in his mouth and they both hoped he'd choke and die on it. Takasugi looks small, perched there on the arm of the plasticky blue couch and Gin’s scared to blink.

“There was a learning curve.”

He idly sticks his little finger up his nose and wipes the remnants on his pants. “Shame the altana couldn't add a couple more inches, ah? What a ripoff.”

The other man scowls, but it's more at the green smear on Gin’s leg than the man himself. “I don't know whether you're talking about my height or my dick but I’m offended either way.”

Gin can be normal. He can be so normal, about this. He can open his mouth and say 'both, obviously', like Takasugi and everyone else behind the screen that isn't even on anymore and the producers that only call him to show up in PopMart collaborations and in crossover illustrations with Sakamoto Days want him to.

Who is he fucking kidding, anyway?

“It’s good to see you," is what he says instead, the words dropping between them like an anvil, or a ten-tonne hammer, or some other equally comedic device.

Takasugi answers him dryly.

“Don’t lie, Gintoki.”

In that case–

Part of him wants to blame him. For the ache in his chest. The one that's always there, behind everything else. That thorn in his fucking side. Gin didn't choose to love him– didn't even want to, dammit. He hates that he never gets a choice.

It isn't good to see him. The best it’s ever been is bittersweet. When so much of their lives have been lost, on war, on revenge, on grief– when Takasugi gets a second chance at it all, gets a chance to move on, and Gin is still the same hounded dog he's always been, stuck bearing scars and burdens he didn't ask for but ones he'll shoulder proudly all the same–

The words that come to him are from a lifetime ago.

“I’m happy you're not dead.”

He’s not sure, really. It might still be a lie. He’s never really been sure of anything when it comes to Takasugi.

“I was,” the man answers, a sigh in his voice. He sounds far away. “Dead. This is just– some more rotten luck. God’s sent me back just to humiliate myself.”

“So, what?" Gin baulks, rudely. God. What a joke. "You're here for your ninth step? Making amends because the big man says you have to, or some shit?”

The sound of Takasugi laughing is a distant memory. It's like a weird cough, or the raspy yipping of a fox. "Fuck that," Takasugi tells him. "I'm just a selfish bastard who wanted to see his old friend."

The word is as weird as the laugh. Things better suited for a younger, less-scarred version of Takasugi Shinsuke. But, in a way, this young man sitting on the arm of Gintoki's couch is that version of Takasugi. The altana that reincarnated him didn't just give back his eye— it gave him back the pieces of his heart, too. Too bad the magic can't put it back together for him, too.

(In reality— the reason for Takasugi's visit is both less and more simple than just visiting a friend. Just like back then— he wasn't able to get Gintoki's face out of his mind. Burnt into the backs of both eyes. The worst days of his fucking life. The smile of his friend. The uncontained love in his eyes, spilling over. He thought that maybe if he could see Gintoki, maybe it'd go away. Maybe he'd be able to sleep.)

"Friends, huh?" echoes Gin weakly. He doesn't know if it's something the two of them have ever been. Maybe this is their shot to try.

He pulls Takasugi into a hug and manages to bury his surprise that the smaller man even lets him touch him that way, especially when Gin's idea of a welcome back was a clenched fist. He squeezes him like he's trying to commit the feeling to memory— just like he did the last time they saw each other, Gin's fingers leaving white stress-marks in his bloodied skin. Like he'll disappear again. Like Gin'll pry his eyes open and he'll be clutching the empty shell of his kimono, draped over air.

It's kind of like embracing a mannequin. Takasugi doesn't know what to do with it, and the hug has already been far too long and far too awkward before he lifts a hand and places it on Gintoki's arm. It's the best he can do at returning the gesture, right now, and Gin has to be okay with that. He has to be.

"I have to—"

"Yeah, I know," answers Gin too quickly, stepping back from the other man but not away entirely, not yet. He brings his hand up to the curve of Takasugi's jaw, brushes his unkempt hair where it still falls over his eye. His hand looks too big, there, even though it's a face he's held— a face he's kissed, a face he's spat blood on, a face he's done all manner of filthy and intimate things to— many times before. It's never been too big before. Biting his lip to hold back an embarrassing noise, or an untimely laugh, or some more words he doesn't mean, or maybe even tears— instead, Gin ruffles Takasugi's hair like they're snot-nosed kids again, poking and kicking each other. "Stay for dinner next time, alright?"

Takasugi's face twists up into that weird smile.

"Alright, Gin-san."

"Gin-chan…?"

He tries to grumble something like what could you possibly want at this time of night, you damn brat, and just when I was finally getting to sleep, too, fuck!, but, like his words often do, it comes out as an incomprehensible string of vowels and drool on his pillow. When he wrestles his eyes apart, he's met with Kagura kneeling beside his futon in her pyjamas, her pillow clutched white-knuckled to her chest. Her hair is all over the place and her eyes are puffy and there's snot running down her face. Gin rolls onto his side and throws an annoyed arm over his face.

"What," he barks out, but there's no real heat behind it.

Poor kid looks ashamed. More upset by the fact she's upset, than whatever bad dream she's had could ever make her feel in the first place. Gin gets it. It's the kind of shit that makes you feel weak and stupid. "I can't sleep."

Like this, Kagura looks younger than she is— younger than Gin's ever known her, honestly. Just a little girl sitting in the rain on that godforsaken shithole of a planet, waiting for a dad that never comes home. It would be so easy to tell her to run around the block again, or that she just can't sleep 'cause she's hungry— sixteen years old is almost an adult, after all, and there comes a time in every young woman's life when crawling into bed with her father becomes obscene and unthinkable.

Gintoki lifts himself wearily to his feet.

"I'll bring the TV in."

—

The light of the television cascades softly over the floor, over the lumpy futon, over Kagura's pale leg where she's thrust it out from under the blankets when she's gotten too hot.

"Libras, I know it can be tough sometimes, and other times it might even feel impossible— but love will find you, eventually," says lovely Ketsuno Ana, holding the stick she uses to point at the displays to her chest. No-one at the network has noticed that the pointer hand on the end isn't pointing at all, but is instead showing them all the middle finger. "I know it's not the kind you see on TV, but please don't turn your back on it. Happiness sometimes comes as a surprise."

On the futon, Gintoki's let Kagura curl into his side. She's half-hiding her crying face and half-blowing her nose on his pyjamas. He's got one arm around her back, keeping her safe from whatever could be hiding in the dark back there, and the other in her hair, where he was untangling the knots there with his fingers, never pulling hard enough to hurt.

"Oh," goes the woman from the screen, like she might've forgotten. "And that silver-haired Libra? The one laying in front of the TV right now, with his eyes shut? Are you still listening?"

In the dark of the Yorozuya building, no-one stirs. Not even Sadaharu, running in his sleep and scratching the hardwood. In the bedroom, snores echo from the futon, where both Gin and Kagura have been lulled into sleep by the gentle voices and ad jingles from the TV.

Ketsuno Ana smiles to herself.

"Goodnight, Gin-san."