A/N: the notepad on my phone is exploding with oneshot prompts, so I'll be gradually publishing them onto here.

And for the record, I am so sorry I haven't been updating as of late. School has started a couple weeks ago and I have so many story ideas to publish and barely enough free time to work on them because *heavy sigh* piles and piles of essays that I still have to do. . .But don't worry, I'm not dead. I'll just be updating very, very slowly.

DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN GINTAMA IT BELONGS TO SORACHI HIDEAKI

Enjoy~

After

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She is six when Kamui leaves. With a red umbrella and a new mask and hair that is as red as her mami's blood; he doesn't even look back, even when she asks him if she can go too. He's going somewhere distant, her mind thinks, somewhere horrifying and dry and bloodier than what this planet is already capable of, and that's a thought more terrifying than any monster she has encountered so far.

"I have no use for weaklings."

It's been seven days since he left. Papi, she means. He hasn't come home yet; says he has to go and make money for them, clear his head, clean his wound, keep them alive. Kagura, at the traumatized age of six, thinks he's damn wrong.

He won't admit it, she knows that for a fact, but her papi's already made his choice after she's barreled her delicate body in between them, using herself as a shield and watching as he dismissed a dead arm and a dead son, because none of them will be coming back to him. He's already severed the connection between him and her beloved brother, cut away in choppy ribbons of blood and betrayal and old traditions, and all there is left of it is an old, crippling sensation of deranged smiles and an aching stump.

She wonders if he's changed his bandages yet. Mami always does it for him when—if he comes home.

But she's tired, and there's a fine line between tired and clueless when papi yells at her for stopping him and Kamui, Christ, Kamui just looks at her with those eyes that can pierce the skies and bring the gods down to earth—just like in the stories he tells her—and the first signs of tears are so familiar to her now when the haze starts to scratch at the back of her eyes but Kagura-chan has already cried for a lost brother and a father who has already given up. She'll save the rest of the tears for when mami gets better and papi comes back and Kamui is just, there.

The house smells of blood and sickness and old hydrangea leaves. She stopped tending to them seven days ago, and doesn't care to look back at the rotting fruit nor the sink filled with Kamui's old clothes. She'll burn them later, she tells herself, and then tells herself the same thing the next day.

Her footsteps are quiet as she walks through the hallway, no more duckling pittering nor pattering in this ruined wood-rotting house. She really doesn't want to know what compels her to come to this room—this abomination of a room that was the place which spawned her brother and later on, her. Come to think of it, it was around her birth that mami started to faint more often. . .

She sometimes wonders what it would be like if she wasn't born at all.

And then she remembers the events from seven days ago and goes to the bathroom and curls into a ball and trembles in place at all the red and the gore and the bone and the eyes.

He's lost his color; that stupid older brother of hers.

But she doesn't run under the sink this time. There are no more invisible monster to hide from, because her brother was the biggest one of them all. Not anymore, she thinks with childish drive. Her eyes are still stinging but she pays no mind to them as her tiny hands slide the door to the room open. She pinches her nose and lets in a small gasp and she wants to cry.

It smells of rotting rice grains and dirty clothes and a faint musk still lingering on the bedsheets. Kagura holds her breathe for a moment longer before letting go; of herself, of her powerlessness, and of papi. And she just stands there, dumbly registering it all and feeling the numbness inside her slowly creep away.

She burned everything he owned; his tea cups, his books, even the toys he would bring home—all by herself. It's just the clothes. Those damn clothes.

But as she breathes the air circulating in this dream-like state of a room, she remembers why she didn't have the heart to burn it all to the ground; break the windows, shatter the poles, rip up the bedsheets and toss them in the mud.

She knows.

And it is so sad. Such a sad excuse for a reason—for a yato to be mourning for what she has already lost and will never get back. Even at the age of six, she understands the uselessness of her situation, and she hates it.

Someday, she says to herself. Someday, I will this this planet and go somewhere else. Someday she will, she definitely will, because there's no way in hell she's going to stay on this dying planet, littered with blood and body parts and when it's too late who is she going to go to? Mami? Papi?

She laughs, dry and bitter and filled with acid, and then it slips. Finally. That one moment, that one tear, that one second where she runs to the bed sheet in a frenzy and starts scrubbing the tears off of her face using the grey-stained blanket. And that's when the sobs start coming, and then the hiccups, and that's when she buries her head in the bed and carries her body onto it in order to hush her state of miserablia. Mami's still sleeping, she tells herself. She can't wake up mami.

So she drowns herself under the blankets, drowns herself under the things she needs to burn and the things she wants to forget but can't and takes a deep breath in order to stop her sobs, and the smell is stronger than ever because this room is special and this bed is special and she can't bring herself to carry her six year old body out the door. Because rather than crying and crying and crying until she is just an empty husk and incapable of feeling no more, she finds some sort of messed up solace under these dusty bedsheets, this abandoned room. And then, to her horror, she realizes.

Onii-chan is everywhere in this room. The smell is more than enough confirmation, and despite herself she can't resist burying her nose inside his pillow and barely registers the fact that her breathing is evening out and her sobs have stopped and her eyelids are drooping, drooping, drooping.

It is such a sad, sad thing. Because where she is right now, she is only staring into the eyes of an apparition that has abandoned her, and for every night to come before disaster strikes again and papi leaves for good and mami breathes her last breath and she will step into the sun, she is an entity of red haired China buns and yellow raincoats and big blue eyes that are slightly dimmer than what they usually are. This is it. A tiny, salvaged moment of a fragmented peace.

Her eyes are in dangerous territories now, drooping very, very low as she clutches the pillow and snuggles into the blanket even further. Her breathing evens out exactly sixty seconds later in this ironic situation as she tells herself that it's all just a dream until she wakes up. Just a dream. Just a minute, she says to no one in particular, just a minute more, and then I'll go back and give mami her medicine.

But of course, those thoughts are lost as she begins to see hazy blurs lining her vision and staining the area with dark splotches of her ugly, retched feelings, so unbefitting of a yato. But she doesn't care. And as she finally sinks so low into the abyss, her last thought is if papi decides to come home today, she won't tell him she fell asleep in a traitor's bed.

A/N: One down, twenty thousand more to go.

Hope you guys liked it! Leave a PM or review if I made a mistake, and yes, I probably did because proofreading is such a drag and I really need some sleep. A thousand apologies .

Til next time~