A Tale of the Four-eyed Eight-Tails
A Gintama x Naruto crackover
By
EvilFuzzy9
Shipwrecked. Stranded on a deserted island, slowly dying of malnutrition and exposure.
Shinpachi had never expected this was how he would go out. Maybe getting trampled at an Otsu-chan concert, or food poisoning from his sister's cooking, or getting his skull bashed in by Kagura-chan during one of her more rambunctious episodes.
But this?
No, he had never thought he would die like this. Not in this day and age! Who could believe that there were still uncharted islands on earth, with all the amanto and everything else Frankly, it was just inconceivable.
And yet.
And yet, here he was. Day two hundred on this island, and still there was no sign of other people. No sign of civilization, rescue, or anything.
Just the sea and the forest.
And that cave.
Shinpachi shuddered.
He did not like going into that cave. While he had given its inhabitant a proper burial, performing what funeral rites he could remember, still the place gave him a distinct impression of unease. He was not necessarily a superstitious fellow, but he wasn't about to discount something like ghosts or hauntings in such a situation as this. And he had a lot of time to think about the possibilities.
Oh, gathering food and maintaining shelter could take a lot of work at first, but once he'd gotten the hang of it (and figured out which plants were poisonous and which ones weren't) it only amounted to a couple of hours of work each day. Even fishing was surprisingly easy when you only had one mouth to feed and all the time in the world.
So, okay. Maybe those earlier comments about slowly dying weren't actually accurate. In fact, maybe if anything, being stranded on this desert island and being forced to fend for himself actually had him in better overall health than he ever had been back in civilization. Just from foraging various foods from here and there, he was getting a pretty balanced diet. Hell, he felt like his eyesight was actually improving! And, as mentioned earlier, since foraging and curing food only took him so long, Shinpachi found himself with a lot of free time.
After making a knife from a sharp rock, Shinpachi had found a good piece of fallen timber and whittled himself a nice wooden sword. And to keep his mind off of his friends, and his family, and the seeming futility of his situation, Shinpachi trained.
A lot.
He was actually improving with his swordsmanship at a remarkable pace. Being stuck on this island with nobody to rely on but himself had really done wonders to make him mature into a decisive and proactive young man. Fending for himself in this forgotten wilderness gave him a certain confidence that he had lacked before, and focusing just on the simple, day to day aspects of life had really helped him to understand the philosophical tenants of bushido and swordsmanship in general.
Oh, he was lonely. He longed for companionship, and the creature comforts of life back in Edo. But then Shinpachi had never had many friends, and honestly even the ones he did have weren't that great. So he was sad, at times, but he kept himself busy. He did his damnedest not to think about what he was missing.
Of course, he had still erected a sizable stone structure on the beach to draw the attention of any passing ships or aircraft, but so far he had seen nothing.
Almost a year, Shinpachi had passed in total solitude with nothing but the wind and the waves to keep him company. Living alone in the wild sharpened his senses, strengthened all manner of skills, even awakened a more primal sort of manhood in the teen. But it had not done his mind any favors.
Oh, he was sharp, more cunning than ever in fact! But humans are gregarious by nature. They crave companionship and affection, and a sense of belonging. Prolonged isolation from one's fellow man could do strange things to a body.
So perhaps Shinpachi had started to go a little loopy, with nothing to do but fish and forage, and train his swordsmanship. He had taken up meditation, just to help pass time, and a lot of things had begun to make sense to him. Not necessarily because he was nearing enlightenment, mind you, so much as his sense of logic was simply growing more and more unhinged.
Or perhaps those two things were one and the same. Maybe enlightment was really just a kind of spiritually inclined madness. Maybe the Buddha was just some prince who had walked out of the palace one day and lost his marbles. Shinpachi didn't know.
But he had a lot of time to think. Too much time, some might even say.
The mind was a dangerous thing. Its power was nothing to scoff at. The brain ruled the body; it was the sense of self, and the perception of the world around us.
And after a year spent alone, castaway, shipwrecked on some godforsaken island in the middle of nowhere, Shinpachi started to really lose it. He heard voices from time to time, sometimes faintly, and sometimes more clearly. In his sleep, he dreamed of the strangest things. He dreamed his glasses were alive.
It was really weird.
Especially since Shinpachi had not seen his glasses since the shipwreck...
...that is, until the day, exactly one and a half years after getting stranded on this island, that he found them sitting on his bare chest, staring right at him.
"Yo! Wake up, konoyaro, bakayaro! This ain't no drill, it's time to go!"
Shinpachi blinked, staring at his glasses.
Glasses he hadn't seen for a year and a half. Glasses that should have been lost at sea or destroyed in the crash. Glasses, that for all the world he could have sworn were talking to him.
In rhyme.
"...eh?" said Shinpachi, staring at his spectacles. "H...have I finally lost it...?"
The voice came to him again, seemingly emanating from his glasses.
"No, ya damn fool, you're as sane as ever! Now get the hell up, or your ballsack I'll sever!"
Gulping nervously, Shinpachi immediately shot up out of his bed, which was fashioned from leaves and springy boughs from young, green trees woven together in a makeshift mattress.
"I'm up!" he yelped. "I'm up!"
He then blinked.
"Eh?" he said, squinting his eyes and looking around curiously. "Where did my glasses go?"
"Mmrpaphmr mmrmbler," came the voice, sounding distinctly muffled.
Shinpachi paled, sweating a little nervously.
He looked down at his feet.
"...oops. I stepped on them," he said sheepishly. "I guess Ane-ue will need to get me a new pair, once I find a way home..."
And so Shinpachi spent the rest of his days on that island, never realizing that the Hachibi had been sealed inside his glasses at birth.
"Wait... what?!"
A/N: Just a silly little crack notion I had that I wanted to employ into something. So I set it on an alternate version of the Ryugu Palace arc, where Shinpachi really is all alone on the island. Which is another plot bunny that has tickled at me for a while. But it just seems somehow weirdly fitting that the Eight-Tails (and apparently Killer Bee too? XP) would be sealed into Shinpachi's glasses.
His glasses, is the key part.
I'd idly mused about the idea of him having Hachibi just because he has the word 'Eight' right there in his name, and Gin-san and Kagura are always overshadowing, but I've never gone through with it because that felt like it would be a little Sue-ish...
But to have it sealed into Shinpachi's glasses? That would be just ridiculous enough to be perfect for a Gintama fic. XD
The way I ended it, of course, was because I already have a ton of other chapter fics that I'm doing, so it's a lot easier just to do it like this.
Chapter added: 2-10-14
TTFN and R&R!
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