A/N goes at the bottom... is anyone even reading this?
Chapter 2
Rise of the Black King
I woke up to the smell of bacon and the sound of fat sizzling away on a frying pan. Rubbing my eyes blearily I tried to shake the last recesses of sleep from my foggy mind before kicking off the unfamiliar bed covers. I wrinkled my nose at the heavy scent of mothballs wafting off my body and did a mental reminder to get those sheets aired out first before I slept in them again. Eyeing the time on my phone, I frowned. Unless I had acquired a ghostly butler without realising… Who the fuck is cooking breakfast at 7am?
Grabbing my sword from next to my nightstand, I stumbled out of the dark haven that was my room and made my way to my joint living room/kitchen. Images and scenes from various movies danced around in my head... A lonely cop, living by himself, waking up to a villain cooking him breakfast and getting served with a bullet to the heart. Clichéd but classic.
Squinting from the doorway to the hall into the kitchen, I saw an unfamiliar blonde with a head of curly hair expertly frying bacon and eggs at the stove. If it had been some other time after 12pm, I would have kissed the stranger in thanks for cooking, but seeing as they were interrupting my much needed sleep, a peevish attitude was all I could charitably manage.
"Oi, who the fuck are you supposed to be?" I asked grouchily above the sound of their cooking and should I also add, severely off-key humming, highly irritated to be awoken so early in the morning on the first day of my break.
The blonde turned 'her' head towards me with a ten thousand watt smile, completely ignoring my foul mood, "Good morning darling! Hurry up and go take a shower so you can change into your new uniform! Don't want to be late for your first day of school!"
"..." Seeing as I did not move or reply, the blonde who was role-playing what I could only assume as a mother continued in 'her' obviously falsetto voice.
"Baby don't walk around in just your boxers in the morning, you might catch a cold!" 'she' cooed in a very scary version of motherly affection that sent the North Pole racing down my spine, if I was anyone else other than myself, I was sure my balls would have abandoned my body.
My left eye twitched at the visual horror before me. Honestly I would have gladly taken a bullet to the heart if I had that choice.
"Yamazaki... what the fuck?" I asked flatly before drawing my sword.
"Nononononononononono," the terrified spy instantly unarmed himself by dropping the frying pan and started waving his hands around like a dying seal, "the vice commander aske- OH fuckfuckFUCKKK,"
Had he not been lucky enough to drop a red hot frying pan onto his foot, I would have served him my own form of punishment. Seeing as he was in enough pain and I was starting to grow nauseous watching a tranny flail around my apartment smelling both of bacon and mothballs, I sheathed my katana and turned around.
"Clean yourself up before I get out of the shower or I'm going to make sure you take the train back to Tokyo naked and live off nothing but anpans for the rest of your life," I called behind me before escaping into the bathroom.
Ten minutes later I was once again standing in my own kitchen with a towel over my wet hair, wearing a pair of black school pants, a pressed white shirt and a beige coloured jumper. Taking a generous swig from a carton of orange juice, I turned over a new load of bacon trusting Yamazaki to have washed the frying pan. I was not going to eat Yamazaki's foot bacon.
"Captain, you are supposed to wear your blazer when you are walking to and from school," Yamazaki chastised from the square dining table, now wigless and dressed in his normal work clothes, thumbing his way quickly through a dossier.
I glared at him and forked a piece of bacon into my mouth straight from the pan, hissing slightly as the hot meat burnt my tongue, "So? What's the mayoholic putting me up to this time?" I asked anyway for the sake of conversation even though I had a very decent idea already.
I must have proven to be an easier conquest than Yamazaki had anticipated for he instantly stopped nagging me about my appearance and started pulling out pages of classified information and profile printouts. I frowned to myself as he began sorting out the paperwork. I should probably take back all my apartment keys off him for future reference.
As soon as he was ready, he cleared his throat. "Tokugawa Tarou Tarou is the third son of the Shogun's uncle's brother's illegitimate child raised by his mother. Apparently lately he's been getting mixed up with the wrong crowd and may be in danger. Your objective is to make sure he is kept out of danger in his final year of high school-"
He stopped as I started choking on my orange juice and eyed me curiously.
"Captain?"
"His final year of high school? You mean I have to babysit this little piece of shit for the WHOLE year?" I asked, just in case there was a microscopic chance that I have been wrongly assigned or if the residual earwax in my ear canals were playing cruel tricks on me.
"Well..." I could see Yamazaki fumbling and drying up under my very intense death glare while Hijikata's metaphysical heinous laughter filled my brains, "it's not reeeeally a year if you take into account of the holidays. Hijikata-san said to think of it as a vacation where you'll be doing minimal amounts of work!"
"I'll be waking up even earlier than I usually do for normal work," I shot back before crossing my arms defiantly.
"You can sleep early since you don't have to study! Besides, there'll be heaps of pretty high school girls!" he was trying so hard to be positive.
"That's illegal."
"No paperwork!"
"There'll be homework."
"No bloodbaths or dangerous work!"
"Menstruation and hormonal teenage girls."
"Knee high socks!"
"Not my fetish and like I said it's illegal."
"Captain please don't decline this, my life is on the line with the vice commander," Yamazaki pleaded with a defeated sigh as he prepared to fold himself into a human origami in order to beg for my service. Clearly he should know I do not care for his life by now. "If you are really mad, there's a secondary objective for you to bust up the crowd Tokugawa is mixed up with," he added hopefully.
I considered his words while munching on my last piece of bacon thoughtfully trying to find a loophole. "Yamazaki, if I just uproot the bad crowd he's in with and make sure there's no way he'll die before high school ends, can I terminate this mission early?"
"I- I guess?" he answered uncertainly, "Anyways, you'll be posing as the American exchange student Okita Souichirou, joining the class-"
I looked at him as if he had grown a pair of testicles on his chin, "Why American?!"
"Apparently that's where you spent your last year of high school according to the vice commander," Yamazaki shrugged as he continued to brief me in a drone that I had tuned out.
That stupid mayo freak must have spoken to my sister within the last 24 hours to have found that out. Frowning, I started to concoct another scandal I will be telling her about over Skype in an attempt to defame him. How dare he still talk to her after returning to Japan like that and leaving her all alone in America?
"Captain? Captain!" Yamazaki was waving his hands over my face to snap me out of my reverie. Kind as this gesture was, it also placed him within punching vicinity. In a vain attempt to ease my anger, I threw my towel at his face vaguely noting I should have stabbed him with my sword by now.
"I'm going to be late, you better drive me." I griped as I snatched up my school bag, "And make sure you clean up this mess before you head back to Tokyo or I will personally recommend you to the third aunty to replace me in my absence."
I was definitely being too nice.
In my very own biased opinion, high school was just a battleground of popularity, self-esteem, peer pressure and growing pains. If you only wished to scrape by in high school, you do your best to melt into the background scenery or perhaps seek out souls in a similar clique and cling to them as a way to identify yourself. Numbers meant power and power meant security from potential downgrades of self-worth and victimisation.
Play your cards right in this cutthroat setting however and you will basically win the game and succeed at high school instead passing through as another nameless individual. The recipe for high school conquest was simple but sordid as I discovered throughout the years. It followed one rule and one rule only. That was - do not listen to your mother when she said "just be yourself" on your very first day of being a freshman or any occasions of preparing to integrate yourself into a pre-structured social hierarchy system.
Spoken as a naked albeit ugly fact, from as young as a child, the media has taught us to gravitate towards everything attractive or glamorous on the surface with no regards toward internal values such as morals or integrity. We were taught to believe that all gorgeous things were good without ever fully grasping the concept of what is good.
The complexity of morality and other formless aspects of the human nature did not surface until we finally make a blind walk into betrayal believing the good-looking cheerleader will see beyond our social status as a geek and agree to a date; or the homecoming king would ever throw a second glance at you peeking at him from behind the Anne Frank novel he will never be interested in reading.
Suddenly stereotypes would start springing up everywhere as people hurriedly try to identify themselves and hide behind a label in order to justify their very existence. Some find comfort in this identity while others loathed it and struggled to make another ascent up the social ladder every day.
Thus high school becomes a brutal theatre of war as you fight to deny yourself of you are while floundering to stay afloat in a sea of labels, trying so hard to contort yourself into new facade that would make you a more popular you.
For that very reason, those that have accepted the universal ugly truth of high school do much better than others. It did not matter how much few people liked you, it mattered how many people liked you. It was a mere battle of quantity over quality, and to brave it all and come out on top I established that a person has to abandon their sense of self and become the personification of charisma. Be friends with anyone and everyone, but never let someone discover your true nature, discard your inherent sense of self and adopt a principle to fake everything in the most convincing manner possible.
For someone who rarely ventured into the responsibility of caring for others, I excelled naturally at this. Doing it all a second would only be too straightforward considering this time, it was nothing more than a game for me.
The end of my philosophical journey also took me to the end of my car ride, as I exited the smooth black vehicle used primarily for escorting high priority figures, I finally realised how I was going to entertain myself for the rest of the year. Smirking inwardly at the whispering and attention my unusual entrance was already garnering, I decided upon my sadistic ambition. I was going to become the king and rule this school.
My crusade for domination was already looking like a piece of cake as I strolled through the gates of my lacklustre high school. Heads were turning as I moseyed through the sea of murmurs gaining some form of attention from everyone I passed.
"Hey you!"
I stopped in my tracks and tilted my head in the direction of the sound, watching with mild interest as a girl who was a good head shorter than me shoved her way through a cluster of giggling high school girls. She took a deep breath before marching towards me, each step echoing with forced authority her petite frame just was not ready to carry. Judging by her immaculate uniform, thick rimmed glasses and unstyled waterfall of black hair; she was probably an influential member of the student council.
"Yes?" I intoned as I regarded her coolly, my posture lax and my school bag slung over my shoulder.
"Where's your blazer?" she enquired while giving me a once over finally resting her average brown eyes against my dark red ones.
I gave a pause as I pretended to ponder, "I don't think I have one..."
"It's against school regulations to travel to and from school without a bla-" she started her recitation.
"Your hair is really pretty," I interjected expertly while reaching out gently for a lock of her long hair. Looking at the tresses in my hand appraisingly, I gave her one of my most charming smiles. "What's your name?"
She froze up and I observed with delight as every fibre in her body struggled to comprehend and compose some form of sensible response to this flirtatious, male attention.
"S-S-Sonohara Y-Yuriko." The girl finally managed to articulate, having been demoted from an imposing figure to a blushing teenage girl by nothing but a smile and the slight taboo of physical contact.
"Yuriko you say? That's a really pretty name! May I call you Yuriko-chan?" Cutting straight to the most intimate way I could address her, I smirked inwardly as the girl looked like she was on the verge of a facial haemorrhage. Deciding to deal the final blow, I gasped and dropped her hair quickly. "Oh god, I'm so sorry Yuriko-chan, I really shouldn't be touching you so casually, you see I've only just come back from America and everyone there is well..." I trailed off shyly while covering my mouth with my hand expertly diverting attention away from my inability to blush.
The girl looked like she was about to faint, "No! No it's fine! You...you can touch me whenever you like," she protested automatically, too busy racing through the flower fields of womanhood in her mind to pay attention to what she has just said in front of half the school.
As the horrifying reality slowly settled like the fog on her glasses though, she clutched her hands to her mouth in an action mimicking mine. Too bad spoken words were not something you could simply sweep under a carpet. Just like what has been seen cannot be unseen, it was just as hard to 'unhear' something. She looked up at me in trepidation as the world slowed around us. We both knew what was going to happen next - the collapse and restructure of her precious social standing as a member of the student council... many years of hard work and perseverance to be a perfect role model. It was all about to change. For someone that has been living that role for possibly her whole high school life, the very idea was terrifying.
The social tsunami hit us both, engulfing us in a tidal wave of comments more colourful than the spectrum of the rainbow. All around us people were whispering, judging, comparing, admiring, fangirling, nosebleeding, wondering, scrutinising, raging, screaming and gossiping. The hail of opinions showered down around us like a badly tuned primary school Christmas choir.
"Isn't that the Student Council President?"
"Did she just say that?!"
"What a slut."
"So she's one of those kinds of girls huh?"
"I thought she was proper..."
"I know what I'll be thinking about tonight ;)"
"Another exchange student?"
"Oh my gosh he's from America!"
"Those two are so brazen!"
"He's so hot!"
"Which year is he in?"
"Have my babies!"
"That guy's a god!"
"Teach me!"
"Oh my god, touch my hair!"
I watched impassively as the aftermath of the storm rippled about in a riot of assorted opinions. The unfortunate girl looked like she was about to drown in the sea of voices, absolutely unsure of how to deal with this sort of mixed attention. She reacted exactly like how I predicted she would and fled with an arm over her face, running blindly in what I assumed to be the direction of the bathroom, most likely to cry and reconcile with her sense of self.
Feeling no remorse whatsoever, I offered her a silent thanks as she became the first stepping stone to my ascent of this school's social food-chain As the last man standing in our impromptu display, I could safely assume, without overconfidence, that I was already more famous than half of the student body would ever be.
Just as I was preparing myself to soak up the last few moments of my precious victory, I felt a hand clasp firmly onto my shoulder. Arching my back to allow myself a glimpse of the overly friendly stranger, I met the familiar spectacled dead-fish gaze of a man standing in a formal shirt and pants combo underneath a white lab coat, sporting the most ridiculous silver perm I had ever witnessed.
"Oi oi Casanova-kun, take it easy with the charisma here. These young minds are highly impressionable. Last thing I need on a Wednesday morning is an insurrection of high school girls in heat."
"Ah… my bad," I shrugged as the man slung his hand over my shoulder fully invading my personal space but with no consequence. Now that he was in closer proximity, I heard him whisper just to me.
"And I am aware you are here to bodyguard a twerp, not to break hearts."
"Danna… you disappeared so long I never thought I'd find you at a high school posing as a teacher," I murmured back, genuinely surprised to find the mercenary now working as a figure of guidance.
"What can I say? I love knee high socks," the older man remarked casually as he popped a lollipop into his mouth.
Not being able to resist my sadistic instincts, I asked him with a dark smile, "Done anything illegal yet?"
"If I told you, you'd have to arrest me." He replied ambiguously. I could not discern whether he was been serious or not so I made myself a mental note to arrest him at the end of the school year just for good measure.
"Okita-kun, there's paperwork you need to fill out before you are properly enrolled, come with me to my office," Gintoki announced loudly. Deciding our little talk was extending a bit too long for a quiet scolding, the former White Demon wheeled us both around and proceeded to guide me towards the school building, nonchalantly informing the rest of the student body the show was over and to proceed with their normal pre-school activities.
Once safely behind the doors of his office, Gintoki slouched into his chair instantly and propped his feet onto his desk. "So how's your investigation going?" he questioned conversationally.
Finding no reason to keep him out of the loop, I settled myself into the much less comfortable looking chair opposite his desk and proceeded to tell him of the events from yesterday, hoping his position as a teacher in this school would allow me to glean some useful information off him.
"…and so I have that one loose end I'll probably need to tie up," I concluded my recount and idly turned my attention towards the school gates only to find the said 'loose end' from my story ambling through the school gates with her vivid head of orange hair and a her striking purple umbrella. Without even thinking, I found myself asking, "Danna… who is that girl?"
Following my line of sight, I observed with interest as his face darkened and he turned to me seriously. "That girl is the only girl in this school you shouldn't have anything to do with,"
Putting a lid over my own piquing interest, I managed my question in my least fascinated voice possible, "What's it to her?"
"On the surface, nothing," Gintoki shrugged and produced another lollipop from his seemingly endless lab coat pocket, popping the candy end of the stick into his mouth he continued, "Her brother however, is in deep with criminal organisation Harusame over in China. She seems to be trying very hard to live a new life in Japan on her own though."
"Not hard enough considering she's following directly in her brother's footsteps," I revealed flatly earning myself a raised eyebrow. "She's the loose end I mentioned."
"Ah… how complicated," he yawned as he scratched his hair lazily. "In that case you should probably try and make peace with her considering she's been trying to get clean and the only way for her to do that is to chop up the royal vegetable left in your care. It might even prove to be beneficial for you if you plan on uprooting the whole organisation to have her as an informant, provided you can guarantee her safety."
As I was just contemplating the suggestions he made and questioning myself on whether I wanted to take responsibility for not only one but two insufferable adolescents, Gintoki's voice knifed through my thoughts.
"Now, we have five minutes left. I have to talk to you about something very important." He said solemnly, holding onto a stack of papers. "Which club do you want to join?"
I narrowed my eyes and gazed seriously into his half lidded ones. "Do you honestly have to ask?" I intoned suspiciously.
"Well of course! I have to take into account of everyone's interests," he replied with a little too much enthusiasm, "We have swimming, baseball, calligraphy, art, photography, cooking, gardening, track, basketball, volleyball, soccer, foreign language, everything under the sun, even drama! The choice is yours,"
My left eye twitched, he had definitely left out the most obvious one on purpose. "Danna-"
"It's sensei now Okita-kun, we are at school."
"Alright, sensei. I want to join the ke-"
"Calligraphy you say!" he interrupted ardently and slapped an application form in front of me. Glaring at the form and back at him I pursed my lips.
"I don't want to be in the calligraphy club."
"Now, now it's good to try new things! There's many more here if calligraphy isn't to your liking." He ushered and dropped the pile of club application forms in front of me.
I thumbed through the stack of papers, a petulant expression slowly making its way onto my face. As I scowled accusingly at Gintoki for hiding the application form to the one club I actually wanted to join, he shrugged and escaped to the window, busying himself with staring at the last trickle of students rushing through the gates.
Realising her was going to ignore me until I signed myself over to some random club I have no passion towards, I picked up a ballpoint pen from his desk and decided I was not going to bend easily to his whims. His reason for ousting me was irrelevant to my interests.
Scribbling my details quickly on a form, I passed the paper back to him just as the bell rang for class. Picking up my school bag I was already out the door when he realised I had made a farce of the baseball application form.
"Okita-kun, missionary is not an acceptable position in baseball."
A/N - I apologise in advance for the lack of Kagura in this chapter, my original intention was for them to run into each again this chapter, but got sidetracked with writing about Sougo's sadistic personality and admittedly had a lot of fun. Too much fun even.
As this is told in Sougo's POV, I did take the opportunity to explore his personality a bit since my intention for this fic is to show a process of growth and change, so I need him to be a bit more varied in emotions and thought processes outside of just pure sadism. Bear with me, our lovely heroine will make a return next chapter. :)
A big thank you to everyone that read, reviewed, favourited and followed. Your support means the world to me. If you have the time, please shoot me a review or a PM, I love hearing your feedbacks.
Orion