Obviously anything here from Gin-chan's past was made up, since Sorachi hadn't given us much detail about him. Honestly, it's a little frustrating (and that Birth of Shiroyasha movie prank, which they did twice, was so cruel D:). But yeah, I was thinking about the time Gin said he'd gotten his bokutou on a school trip, and bam - this thing appeared. So yeah... enjoy :D (Oh, I don't own Gintama or its lovable, quirky characters. Derp.)
Only a Nerd would use the Word Geothermal
There was a large, vaguely human-sized boulder set to the right of the path. Three words were inscribed on the side facing them, the red paint in the lines of the carving faded and peeling. He mouthed them silently to himself.
Tou. Ya. Ko. Lake Toya. They'd traveled weeks to see this? What was so special about an oversized puddle of water and some mountains? And the stupid, cramped horse cart – the only method of transportation they could afford, apparently, which wasn't surprising considering the fact that they were pretty much traveling across half the country – had driven over every single pothole in Japan.
"Sakata-kun, if you stand there all day, we'll leave you behind," his teacher warned him gently. He shuffled forward after the rest of his classmates, his ever-present sword lightly tapping his left hip with each step he took.
"Kids, do any of you know how Lake Toya was formed?" Zura was the only one raising his hand. Of course it was Zura. He always had his nose buried in one book or another.
"It was formed when water filled a volcanic crater," he said. "You can see an active volcano in the distance. There are a few onsen in the area from the geothermal activity, which also causes the lake to not freeze over during the wintertime." Of course he would use words like "geothermal" that no one else knew. Zura was a weird one.
They neared the lake, and several people exclaimed how beautiful it was, how clear its waters were. So it was transparent. Glass was too, but nobody goggled at glass. Unless it was in the shape of one of those pyramid thingies that made rainbows appear. This lake apparently never took on a solid form, if Zura's geo-whatchamacallit explanation was correct, which meant it most certainly did not take a pyramid-ish shape and did not make rainbows appear.
"Can any of you tell me what kinds of birds those are?" Shouyou-sensei asked, pointing to a large flock of noisy ducks flying directly above their heads. Gintoki willed them to take a dump on someone's – preferably not his or his teacher's – head. Anything to make the trip interesting.
"Ducks!" Takasugi shouted. He was a weird one too. He seemed to have some sort of inferiority complex and was always competing with Zura in everything, though he wasn't the sort who liked books so he was forever behind in studies. The two of them had some sort of love-hate friendship going on, and rumor was that Takasugi had been the one who had given Zura his nickname.
"What kind?" Shouyou-sensei asked as the ducks in question flew out of sight. Takasugi looked around as if he could find the answer written on a tree or in the clouds. Or in the ducks' flight pattern. They could've been super-smart mutant animal experiments, like from that one book Zura had read once.
"Mallards," he finally said.
"They're wigeons actually," Zura corrected him, "but that's an easy mistake to make seeing as the mallard is more well-known. The males of the wigeon species are of dull colors, whereas mallard drakes have bright green heads."
"Shut up, Zura. How am I supposed to know which ones are male and which ones are female?"
"It's not Zura, it's Katsura!" He cleared his throat, ignoring Takasugi's taunting 'takes one to know one, Zura'.
"But you have to wonder; how would those wigeons feel if they knew they were always being confused with another species of duck?
Hanako ran out of the house in tears. Her mother called after her. 'Nanako, Nanako, what's wrong?' The rain soaked through her clothes as she repeated angrily in her head, 'I'm Hanako. I'm Hanako.' Why did everyone call her Nanako? Why did everyone mistake her for her dead twin sister – a twin who had died years ago? Did she not matter? Was her sister somehow better than she was?
She had known it all along; everyone wished she, not her sister, had been the one to die."
Zura read too many books.
Well this was bad. He couldn't find his sword anywhere – the sword he'd picked up from a dead man's side. Could it be…?
It was Zura's fault. It was all Zura and his stupid "let's read ghost stories together at night when we should be asleep" nights, and stupid Takasugi and his inferiority complex and his competition to find the most bloodcurdling story. Why, oh why, did so many of them take place in hot springs?
He was not afraid of ghosts. There was no way that was possible. Not him; not the one who had managed to survive so long by himself in a whirl of bloodstained battlefields. He could eat a rice ball, stolen from a dead body, in the midst of more dead bodies. Some stupid ghost wasn't going to frighten him.
The floorboards creaked behind him; he barely had enough time to think how awfully cliched it was before his instincts took over and he threw the nearest object – incidentally, it was a vase, possibly Chinese in origin; how cliched – into the darkness of the hall. The dull thud of it striking something solid – it wasn't a ghost after all – was surprisingly not followed shortly by the sound of it shattering on the floor. Was it one of those things that sucked up stuff in the universe – a black hole?
He heard the vase being set down, and a match was struck, the frail light transferring to a candle. Shouyou-sensei blew out the match and approached Gintoki, who visibly relaxed once he realized it was his teacher and neither a ghost nor a black hole.
"Sakata-kun, is something wrong? It's not good to throw other people's belongings too; you never know how important it might be to them."
Gintoki didn't reply, just stared at his teacher's face, half illuminated by the light. How did he see with so much hair in his face? What color were his eyes? For someone who had saved his life, Shouyou-sensei had given out very little information about himself. You'd think he'd at least let the guy he'd saved know the color of his eyes.
"If you're looking for your sword," he said, "I had to give it to the hotel manager for now because he didn't want it floating around without supervision, even though I assured him I would keep an eye on you." Keep an eye on him? How? With all the hair in his eyes, could he really see anything? Maybe he was really one of those superheroes Zura read about that could sense things with their ESP. And what was with the mindreading? Did he practice everyday or something? Gintoki had a sudden mental image of his teacher sneaking around in the bushes as he and his classmates played games outside. Really, it was ridiculous.
"I bought this wooden sword for you to keep right now," he continued, slipping it out of his obi and offering it to Gintoki. "You looked lost without something to hold." It wasn't that he felt lost without something to hold. It was that he felt vulnerable without something to protect himself with. Something to batter away his fears with.
He took it. There was a carving on the handle. "Lake Toya", it read. Tou. Ya. Ko. What a cheap-looking souvenir.
His first impression of Sakamoto Tatsuma was that he was an idiot. Only an idiot could laugh and smile as he did, knowing that any day now could be his last day, that any day could be the day he got cut down. Just because they hadn't been attacked so far didn't mean the relative peace would hold out.
And there was his stupid laugh. His way of apologizing for everything he did wrong, which was pretty much everything. All. The. Time. His limitless optimism – there was no place for it here on the battlefield. He didn't belong there. Someone whose spirit was as free as the stars in air didn't belong rooted to a hopeless cause.
His name was Gintoki, dammit, not Kintoki. Did his hair look gold? No, it was silver through and through. His soul was silver too, through and through. It was "Gintoki", not "Kintoki". Only a total idiot could still get someone's name wrong like that after the number of times he had been corrected.
"Zura" was an exception; everyone called him that.
He awkwardly patted Zura's shoulder as another spasm passed through his body and he retched again. Around them, several other people were clearly still experiencing the shock of killing someone – something – for the first time. It was hard to get over the feeling of cutting something down, and not through necessity. Well, in a way, it was – kill or be killed.
Zura puked again, except all the food he'd eaten had already made its way back up, so it was mostly bile. He was beginning to look like he was going to cry or something. Takasugi looked pale and shaken, his eyes closed as he leaned against the tree. But then again, that was how he looked almost all the time. Pale and leaning against a tree, that was. And Sakamoto wasn't faring too well either; poor guy, with his cheerful naiveness. It wasn't going to pretty watching him lose that to the war.
And beside him, his friend threw up again.
"Hey, Zura, pass the – " he blocked the punch easily. No one was going to ruin his parfait this time. Nope, this time he was going to finally enjoy some much needed sugar.
"It's not Zura, it's Katsura!" Zura shouted, throwing the saltshaker at Gintoki's face for good measure. "How many years has it been? I've told you to call me by my real name."
"I wanted the sugar, not the salt," Gintoki said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Sugar goes with sugar, but salt doesn't. By the way, is it okay for a wanted terrorist to be eating in a cafe in public like this? And using his real name too? I'm doing you a favor here, Zura."
"It's not Zura, it's Katsura!" he shouted again, throwing the box full of sugar packets this time. Once again, Gintoki caught it with his nose. "Somewhere out there, Hanako is crying in the rain!"
Ah, he still remembered that story.
Sakamoto Tatsuma, with all his optimistic, stupid, and naïve glory, had not changed one bit. It was a relief; the stars keep shining after all. But still, one would expect a twenty-something-year old – they'd never really talked about ages or birthdays, always assuming they'd be dead before it mattered – to have more common sense than a teenaged idiot, but apparently the world did not operate like that.
And there it was; the elusive sound of his stupid laughter. Tomato juice? Tomato juice? It was clearly blood, for heaven's sake. Tomato juice didn't have a metallic taste. Tomato juice didn't turn brown and flaky after prolonged contact with air. Maybe an idiot like him deserved to have his head bitten by a giant alien dog every once in a while. Maybe that would shove some sense into his head. Who knew? Maybe there was something in giant alien dog drool, some sort of alien bacteria perhaps, that transmitted common sense and slight pessimism. Contrarily, there might've been something in there that transmitted stupidity and – worst-case scenario – optimism. One of those or option C, which was that it transmitted rabies. Which wasn't likely, as neither he nor Shinpachi – Sadaharu never bit Kagura; what a sexist dog – had started foaming at the mouth and losing control of their bodies yet.
"Ahahahaha! Kintoki, could you help me out here?"
Not if he called him by the wrong name. Idiot.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. Something about a beast and eating. He liked eating, especially if it was something sweet. It wasn't fair that if you ate too many sweet things you got health problems like cavities and diabetes, but if you ate too many vegetables nothing bad happened. What was the big deal about vegetables anyways? He hadn't eaten too many of them as a kid – in his defense, he didn't like the taste – and he'd turned out to be a perfectly fine adult. Okay, maybe he had a problem with buying Jump, but that had nothing to do with sugar. Sugar wasn't to be blamed.
When was Takasugi going to shut up? Couldn't he see that he couldn't care less about his rant? He wasn't even paying attention; there was something about the government – everyone complained about politics; it was like a civic duty or something – and burning stuff – burnt marshmallows didn't taste as good as lightly toasted ones, in his opinion.
And he had definitely not forgiven Takasugi for the incident at the festival either. He drew his wooden sword, the one he still ordered with a "Lake Toya" etching after all those years, and interrupted Takasugi mid-speech. Takasugi's eyes – eye, to be accurate – narrowed with anger, and his parry was more forceful than it had to be.
His complex was acting up again.
"Yeah, the usual. 'Lake Toya', you know. Yeah, I'm the Lake Toya guy. Wait, is that what you usually call your customers? I thought the customer was God. You can't just call God 'Lake Toya guy'. Huh? Why don't I order a different etching then? You don't tell God what to do. I happen to like Lake Toya. And if you don't stop asking questions, I'll tell the factory manager and he'll fire you. What? You're the factory manager? Why is the factory manager taking customer calls? What kind of cheap factory is this? You know what, forget it. Just send me my Lake Toya sword already. A freeloading Amanto broke my last one after I spilled curry on it."
a/n: I assumed that they were studying in Edo (for the "traveling across half the country" thing)... but now that I think about it, that doesn't make as much sense anymore. I realize the title isn't very accurate, and if you think the term "nerd" is offensive or you use the word "geothermal" and don't consider yourself a nerd and are offended by the title, I'm sorry. I used the word geothermal, so if it makes you feel better, I guess I would be a nerd too. And I just realized the pieces of this pretty much have nothing to do with each other, but poetic license man, poetic license.