a/n: A combination of writer's block and general desire to finish most of this story in order to prevent incomplete fics on my profile is the reason why I've posted this so late lmao. Anyways, this fic takes place post-canon and will have around six chapters. Let me know what you think - reviews are always appreciated and motivate me to push out new chapters.
-x-
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
-x-
"Seperation", W.S. Merwin
-x-
The first time he's alone with her, they're at a graveyard. It's not exactly memorable, or even a comfortable encounter for either of the two, but this is the story of a lost samurai and kunoichi, not a fairy tale princess whose Prince Charming is there to whisk her away to some Happily Ever After destination. He wouldn't know what that would entail for a person like her, anyways. Would she even want that kind of thing?
For a minute, he just watches the scene unfold with a detached eye. It's been a while since they've met each other face to face ever since the cabaret party at Snack Smile, and he's trying to settle down in Edo again. The two years of wandering all around rural Japan were not unlike the days where he'd been a nomad, traveling alongside Shoyou-sensei's every whim and fancy, right before his teacher had built a school.
He knows who's lying under that particular grave, and his stare is impassive when she looks up, her instincts just as honed as his.
She blinks, once or twice before there's a strange type of smile curling up at the corner of her lips - a kind of smile that spoke of a confidence that wasn't there the last time he'd seen her two years ago. He can't put a finger on exactly why he finds it particularly charming, but he returns it, all the same.
"Gintoki," she greets him, a bit more cheerful. "I wouldn't expect you to be here, of all places."
He shoves his hands into his pockets. "I was here to clean somebody's grave. Got finished earlier than I expected, so I took a walk."
The truth is more complicated than that.
Sure, maybe his kids have started to wear their old clothes again, but the fact is, they're relying on him a lot less than they used to. He's getting a bit tired of walking into an empty house, and the momentary pleasures of his daily habit of pachinko isn't hitting the serotonin highs as it used to. The rest of the time, he's wandering around town, because he doesn't want to be left alone with his thoughts for too long.
Is this what two years of living like a monk has turned him into? he muses. His train of thought is promptly cut off when he sees her mouth slanting into a concerned frown.
"I'm sorry to hear about that," she says.
"'s alright," he says, shrugging. He doesn't want to admit that he's guilty for yet another death. "Was a while ago. Happens, y'know. What brings you here?"
She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. "I had to replant the orchids. Shishou mentioned he really liked them once, but um, I never was all that good with taking care of plants... I mean it's not like I had much experience in that kinda thing, anyway."
Once upon a time, Shoyou-sensei had given him and the boys a class project, and the task had been to plant a green onion. Needless to say, they'd argued for days over how much to water the poor plant until a week had passed with nothing to show for it, not even a single sprout.
"I'm sure he'd like it. Though in my opinion, you're more used to destroying things, so I'd doubt if he expected anything different."
He's expecting a kunai to his forehead, but to his surprise, she just laughs - beautiful and clear. It sounds like a bell.
"So you must be a gardening expert. Well, with that shaggy forest of yours growing on your head... "
"Hey! Don't be like that! I'm saving up for a Brazilian blowout, just you wait. When Gin-san has straight hair, watch out, world! They won't know what hit them!"
"And who is 'they', in question?" she inquires gingerly.
"Girls, of course!"
The corner of her mouth lifts, enough for him to notice. "Oh? Has the shonen hero finally come to his hometown to settle down?"
"Not really," he retorts. He's at least self-aware to know that there's a zero chance in hell that's happening. But his hair deserved defending.
"Didn't think you were interested in that kind of thing, anyway," she laughs, and something clenches uncomfortably in his stomach.
-x-
It was Shoyou-sensei who used to insist on holding picnics when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, and Gintoki would have slept for most of it next to him while the other children were preoccupied with their usual games of kick-the-can and spinning tops. Shoyou would have taken out paper and a brush, preferring to compose poetry, and Gintoki supposed this had made a strong impression later on with both Katsura and Takasugi, especially as they entered adolescence.
This is what he's dreaming about until there are footsteps approaching him.
Gintoki wasn't surprised when the first thing he registered as he blinked his eyes blearily, was the cold hard concrete ground on which his cheek rested on.
No one bothers him when he drinks these days. Maybe that's why he's stuck onto this thinking abyss, where he peers into the depths of memory like a dilapidated attic, where things haven't been dusted for ages.
The clinging of the jail cell keys didn't help his hangover any.
Still, a handsome officer unlocked the door anyway, his clear blue eyes remaining neutral at the situation. As usual, a cigarette was stuck in his mouth with the familiar orange tip lit up, the flicker of his lighter having been there moments before.
Hijikata pulls up next to him. It's not the first time they've had this conversation, but it doesn't make it comfortable for either of him.
"Still smoking those cancer sticks?" Gintoki asks wryly, before pulling himself together and standing up. His head was throbbing.
He lights up a cigarette, and takes a drag, all before he addresses him. "Yorozuya," he said, his voice more tired than usual. "This is the fourth time this month."
"I hadn't noticed, Oogushi-kun," Gintoki replied blithely. "Now, if you would excuse me - "
"Wait."
The newly promoted Commander of the Shinsengumi takes another drag, slowly before staring at him long and hard. Gintoki avoids his eyes, anything to stop him from dissecting the situation.
"Lunch?" he asks while pushing the key into Gintoki's handcuffs, releasing the latch. "My treat," he says, while taking the cigarette from his mouth.
Well, if he put it that way...
"Fine."
-x-
The day Takasugi died in his arms, Gintoki had stared at the sky once his friend had closed both his eyes, and saw the pine trees in the distance.
He held his friend after a minute or two of watching Takasugi passing into the void. Something in him had shattered permanently, and yet the outside of him remained fairly intact.
It wasn't the first time anyone had died in his arms. He'd been down that road enough times to familiarize himself with the soundless bitterness of heartache, of regret that would settle into his very bones.
But this time, it hurt him, and he knew it would continue to profoundly hurt him for a long time. So he'd sat there, right until it was too dangerous for him to stay in the Terminal and the rubble had started to crumble underneath his feet.
He remembers thinking at the time, isn't this way it always goes?
For a while, the shock was simply too much for his system to comprehend, and Gintoki had chosen to compartmentalize all of those memories into neat little boxes inside his head out of pure necessity. Then months seeped by, the depression hit him like a train, and it began to proliferate through his dreams.
He was okay, until he wasn't.
At first he was confused. Shouldn't he be used to it, by now? He was a friend of death, and had made his peace with its everlasting presence in his life. Some people died, and he didn't, and that was that. He had his family to be with and everything on paper was technically perfect.
Regardless, it wasn't like this wave of apathy was anything new. Sakata Gintoki was used to it. If guilt and shame were people, he would have been embraced them like an everlasting fog. Some things never end, he thinks.
Still, he manages the muster the energy needed to put on a show. You're fine, he thinks. In a minute, he'll think of something to snark at Hijikata, probably an insult or two about his dog food of choice. A cheeky grin that doesn't quite manage to reach his dead fish-eyes, or so they say. Hide, because at the core of it, he's a fundamentally dishonest person.
It's better that way.
Safer.
He doesn't realize that he hasn't been paying attention for the last five minutes when Hijikata hasn't said anything to him, choosing instead to keep on smoking like a chimney. As always, the officer's order is a grotesque caricature of food - a bowl of rice, topped with an obscene amount of mayonnaise. He passes Gintoki's own meal with a careful look, as if he's about to collapse from what - stress? Heartbreak?
"What?" Gintoki finally bites back.
"Nothing," Hijikata says, but the two of them are intelligent enough to read each other, enough to know that there's an ulterior motive or underlying issue to warrant this unexpected kindness. Whether or not they'll ever talk about it, it's a fact that the Shinsengumi owes Gintoki one too many favors. And if Gintoki was being honest, he owed them more than a few, too.
Hijikata stubs his cigarette on the nearby ashtray and says - in a voice that's deliberately neutral - "I've started talking to someone. Um. You know - a professional. New era, new me, I guess."
"Are you saying I need help?" Gintoki asks, his voice just as flat.
"No. I'm saying that I did. Still do." Hijikata pulls out another cigarette from a Marlboro box. "Especially when it came to her." He lights it up, waiting for the flame to turn the tip orange before lowering his lighter. "It helps, you know. To sort of get your thoughts out there, in the open."
The careful emphasis on "her" lets Gintoki know exactly and who he is referring to, and his immediate thought is: Fuck.
He just had to bring her up, and something in Gintoki's gut twists violently, eradicating any semblance of his appetite. He'd been there on the rooftop of that hospital years ago, crunching on the same spicy crackers - the few that she hadn't managed to touch.
"I see."
Hijikata pulls out his wallet; he fishes out a card, and slides it across the counter. Gintoki picks it up, knowing he's not even going to take a second look. Ever.
To say he blames himself for what happened would be like putting a plaster over the cracks of a fissure on the edge of a canyon. No amount of talking is going to help that.
Still, he's a gentlemen, not an asshole.
"I'll think about it. As long as you don't stage some sort of pathetic intervention, Oogushi-kun~ "
"Like hell I will," Hijikata said, tapping the ash away on an nearby tray. "I'm nice, but not that nice. If you wanna drown in your own puke, you'd be doing all of us a big favor."
Without another word Gintoki tucks the card in the folds of his yukata, and Hijikata thankfully doesn't press the subject any further. He digs into his food, and Gintoki does the same.
After two minutes of this, Hijikata takes a generous swig of his tea to wash it down. "By the way, someone's bailed you out every time you've been arrested, so you won't have to pay the fee for disorderly conduct. Though truth be told, I don't know how the hell you managed to sucker someone into doing it."
Gintoki ignores the easy lob - the Shinsengumi's First Captain was pretty much responsible for the vast majority of disorderly conduct, in his opinion - and focuses on the more pressing matter. "Who was it?"
Hijikata sets down his cup. "That woman with a scar from Yoshiwara. Why, did you knock her up?"
Gintoki lobs his chopsticks at the former Vice Commander, hitting him squarely in the forehead - enough to hurt. The reaction is instantaneous.
"You wanna go, asshole?!" Hijikata cracks his knuckles, after settling his own utensils down.
"After that disgrace to all of humanity by creating that dog food of yours? Hell yeah I'll go all day, mayo freak!"
When Hijikata starts bitching about his beloved adzuki beans, Gintoki can pretend that things are back to normal.
-x-
"D'ya ever miss your old man?" Gintoki once asked Takasugi, back when they were fourteen, waiting for the sun to rise up on New Years' Day. It'd been a year or so before Shoyou's school would burn down. They'd sat on the rooftop, wrapped in Shoyou's old haori, but their bodies remained somewhat cold - so they had ended up huddling together for warmth. It was a matter of pragmatism rather than any genuine extension of affection, and the darkness was making the two of them yawn. Katsura had already gone to bed, waving his white flag of defeat once they'd caught him snoring with his eyes open three times.
"Hell no," Takasugi said, and was rubbing his eyes. "Do you?"
"Dunno," Gintoki said. "Never had one. I guess Shoyou-sensei was really the only dad I ever knew."
Takasugi had given him a thoughtful look back then, somewhat subdued by sleepiness and the darkness of the night. The very faint glow of the oil lantern wasn't enough for anyone to see most of Gintoki's expression at the time, but it was bright enough for him to remember Takasugi's slightly sympathetic smile, his eyes softened by the rare moment of shared vulnerability.
He could count on one hand the few times he'd seen his friend with such an expression.
"You're not missing out on anything," Takasugi said, after a minute or two. "Trust me on this."
Gintoki had just shrugged, but his classmate had understood enough to know that he said the right thing. And even though Gintoki's eyes had closed for a moment, the brisk shake on his shoulder had been enough for him to catch the first few rays of the sun. He'd even been nice enough to refrain from shouting in Gintoki's ear, unlike their usual mornings filled with kendo practice.
"Happy New Years', asshole. Wake up, already."
-x-
The real reason why Gintoki never kept too much cash on handy in the past was because he had a bad habit of spiraling into a cycle of chronic alcohol abuse, having been down that path a few times, and then some. If he tips into that hole, then it'll be too much work to crawl out. And at this point, it's not so much pathetic as it is a pain in the ass, not to mention that at thirty, it's getting more and more obvious that his liver functions aren't handling the booze as well as it used to.
But lately, in order to keep his head from going in the direction that it wants to go to these days, he either works. Or drinks. Both are good for numbing everything, and he figures that's the way it's got to be for a few months until his head has compartmentalized everything, and he can get to a place where the voice inside his head stops telling him that he ought to die in a ditch or something along those lines for saving the world, yet again.
He's done this before.
He's fine.
It's the damn ghosts who keep popping up at night, who have no right to be there.
Back in his early twenties, it'd been all dark in his dreams; and Shoyou used to kneel with his corpse crumpled at Gintoki's feet while the executioner himself stood there, silent, unable to take another step forward or backwards. His teacher wouldn't say anything except for "Thank you," again, and again, and again, until Gintoki would eventually wake up with damp cheeks and a pressure on his chest so heavy he could barely breathe.
This time, though, someone shows up, unwanted and in his opinion, shouldn't have been there in the first place.
"You know," Takasugi says, "You're a lot more pathetic than I thought, and that's saying something, coming from me."
"Shut up," Gintoki replies back. "You're just a damn ghost. What do you know?"
The phantom grins anyway, and they sit on the boat in this dreamland. Takasugi just smokes while Gintoki looks at the abyss, right into the water, and wonders if he'll wake up if he jumps over the edge.
-x-
"I'm your alter ego," Takasugi says a week later, after Gintoki has hammered a weeks' worth of tiles on a rooftop of a nearby shop, not too far from Otose's Snack House. "That's why I keep popping up. I guess your subconscious is trying to tell you something."
He's dressed in his old Kiheitai uniform.
"Well, beat it," Gintoki snaps, and though he refuses to look at himself, he feels the weight of his wrist shields clamped around him, heavy and repressive. He's worn the outfit of the Shiroyasha long enough to know that he's covered in bloodstains. "You're not telling me anything I don't know already."
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that he's doing a shitty job at fulfilling his role as a protector. He's tried to the atone for the sins of his past, by taking baby steps. For every classmate of Shoka Sonjuku that he couldn't shield in time, for every death near his hands whether by accident or not, he tries to make up for it, one by one.
Mathematically and logistically, Katsura could point out how ridiculous this was. Who was there to keep count of the dead corpses on the battlefield, back in the second Joui war when they were all kids playing war? He even knows of course, back when he was even smaller with no conception of words and language, there must have been an instinct to survive that involved more than a few lives at stake.
"Doesn't fucking matter," Gintoki says to no one in particular, and now the two of them are standing on the edge of the shore, where Takasugi is lighting up a cannon to sink one of their own warships in order to prevent the enemy from capturing it. "I'm trying my best, aren't I?"
"You're going mad," his friend cackles, and the explosion is loud enough to where Gintoki wakes up, violently gasping for air, only to find Sadaharu the only living soul in the apartment.
-x-
"Mucchi wants me to come work for her in space," Kagura says conversationally, over the last pudding in the refrigerator. "She says there are things she wants to teach me, Yato to Yato."
"Who?" Gintoki asks again.
"Mutsu. You know, Sakamoto's vice captain?"
"Oh, right, that scary bitch with the straw hat."
Kagura hits him with a playful slap, which hurts of course. "Gin-chan, that's not true at all! She's actually quite nice, yes? I was on the phone with her yesterday."
"... And?"
"I haven't decided, yet. But the offer is still on the table."
Gintoki remembers being sixteen, too. Raring to go out, making his own mark on the world. He takes a careful sip of his strawberry milk (the many things he'd missed on his two years' absence from Edo) and swallows. She's grown up a lot, actually. Even with her old hairstyle, the little things betray her burdgeoning adolescence. Small tubes of clear lipgloss, rolling around. Romance mangas, dog earred and left on the coffee table. The crumpled up balls of used sheet masks, lazily peeled off after it served its purpose. They're starting to clutter the closet in his room.
"Why not?" he asks.
"Because I like it here," Kagura says. The look in her eyes says otherwise, and for once Gintoki doesn't care to analyze it.
She's got the wanderlust again.
Everyone is looking at him in different ways, as if they're not sure what to expect from him. He's the same guy, he'd like to say, but no one believes him. Two years isn't a long time in the scheme of life, but it's long enough for everyone to change in ways he doesn't quite expect.
-x-
On a sultry night in the pleasure district, Tsukuyo finds him sitting under the canopy of a dango stand, chewing on a stick. They always seem to find each other - it was just a matter of time. He supposes it's because the city is so small that inevitably someone is going to spot its savior.
"Yo," he says. "Heard you bailed me from my fuck-ups."
Tsukuyo scowls. "I told him not to tell ya."
"Oh, is this one of these cop things? Secret service stuff where you guys share intel on the citizens of your respective cities?"
"It ain't that," she scoffs, but finally takes a seat across from him. "It's just that Kagura and Shinpachi are worried about ya especially when you're in trouble, and they know that I got the most money outta all yer friends. I'm basically a glorified rich aunt," she says, crossing her legs. "They care about ya. That's all."
"Nice to see I have a sugar mommy," Gintoki remarks, and is promptly rewarded with a kunai to his forehead.
"You are seriously the worst!" she complains, a little red around the ears. "I've got half a mind myself to cage ya."
"So, how do you want me to work this one off?" he asks, removing the knife from his skin. It doesn't even hurt that much, really. "I could be your slave for a day, or whatever twisted sexual fantasies you might have... "
"Gintoki!" She's so taken aback with his audacity to push her boundaries that she's rendered speechless. It never fails to entertain him; some things haven't changed between them, even from the first time he's met her. Her nose curls up in an expression of disgust. "Don't flatter yourself, you beast."
Her eyes soften after he lifts an eyebrow. "Just come every other Monday," she says. "I could use some extra help here now and then."
"Okay," he says, and polishes the rest of his confectionery. "So, next Monday, then?"
She nods. "Yeah."
-x-