a/n: Yes, this is my (twisted) version of a Final Fantasy ending, and no, I'm not ashamed of admitting that.
Katsura shows up to the apartment with a pack of UNO cards and a basket of expensive looking peaches for the kids.
"Peaches," Gintoki says, deadpan, but Kagura digs in anyway after chirping a delighted, "Thank you!"
He might have complained about her appetite back when she was a snot-nosed brat of fourteen, but now as a full-fledged teenager, it's getting to a ridiculous level where he's happy to take any help he can get. He's already written to Umibouzu, requesting a higher food stipend and an industrial sized rice cooker, to which he'd finally gotten after penning numerous veiled threats of kicking Kagura out of his house.
Not that he'd ever do it, but Umibouzu doesn't know that.
"A gift from the Prime Minister," Katsura says, taking out a penknife and daintily cuts a peach into slices for Shinpachi, still busy sweeping the floor. There's a rerun of a Ladies Four episode on TV, and Kagura, as usual, is transfixed.
"She'd be better off sending us a deluxe pack of sukonbu," Gintoki replies, but sinks his teeth into the fruit all the same. "Tell her I send my regards."
Still, he can tell this is an Important Talk. Normally he would have shooed the kids away, but times are different now. They're older and a bit more grown up, so if Katsura wants to spill some state-sanctioned secrets that they happen to hear, it's all water off his back.
"I came here to talk about Takasugi," Katsura says, and in that moment, there's a shift in the atmosphere. Kagura keeps chewing on her peach, and Shinpachi continues to sweep the floors in that methodical, meticulous way of his, but Gintoki can feel their ears attuned to the conversation already.
Gintoki gives Katsura a tired look. "We gave him a gravestone, Zura. What else is there for us to talk about?"
His friend carefully slices another peach and places the segments on the fruit dish that Shinpachi has courteously laid out on the coffee table. "The Kiheitai found evidence that another Altana being was reincarnated. He looks like the person we used to know when we were boys."
Gintoki thinks he's never going to completely understand the rules of Altana, and every time someone comes up to explain it to him, he just gets more confused.
"Oh."
There's a measured look in Katsura's eyes when he asks the next question. "Do you want to see him?"
Gintoki's answer is short and to the point: "No."
He'd rather this strange alien creature - if it really is Takasugi, in the flesh - seek him out, rather than the other way around. He's not one to beg for forgiveness, and he's not someone to hope for an outcome that can't be guaranteed.
He's too old for that anymore.
There's a pause that lingers too long, with neither of them wanting to break the silence. It goes on for so long that Shinpachi finally sets aside his broom, clears his throat, and says pointedly, "C'mon, Kagura-chan. I heard the latest volume of Hana no Keiji came out a few days ago."
She opens her mouth, but thinks better of it after taking a glance at the three of them, and hops off the couch. "Sure. Let's go, Sadaharu."
Katsura keeps on cutting another peach, and doesn't stop until the sliding door of the apartment shuts behind the two kids and dog in tow. Then he sets down his knife.
"Why?"
Gintoki lets out a deep sigh, and he feels it in his bones.
"Because I don't want to kill him again, even if it's to save the world again."
Another pause, another silence. The gravity of the words weigh down on both of them, but Katsura's expression doesn't change.
"He's only a child."
"I took care of Utsuro as a child, once," Gintoki replies bitterly. "If only I'd killed him back then..."
Then maybe Takasugi - the human one, not the Altana being - would have been saved.
He rubs his eyes tiredly. "I'm so fucking sick of this. I want to wash my hands of it - whatever he is, I don't want to be near it, and I don't want to care about it anymore. We both know that if Takasugi made better choices in life, he'd be here with us, right now. Maybe he'd be in prison, or maybe he'd be camping in the mountains. I don't know. But at least the person we actually grew up with would be here with us, alive, instead of rotting away under all that rubble."
Life wasn't fair, but at least he didn't fucking wallow. It'd taken Takasugi ten years to figure out something painfully obvious that Gintoki had known the day of Shoyou's execution.
"Gintoki..."
"Look, I just wanted a normal life, okay?"
And suddenly, the anger fills him up with no warning, and his fist clenches in a futile effort of trying to hold it all together, again.
"I just wanted to live with Sensei, and wander around with him for the rest of my life. Was that too much to ask, Zura? Was it?"
It's the first time he's ever talked like this, the first time he's given a voice to his feelings instead of letting them fester inside his heart like a black hole. He doesn't know if he's angry at himself, or the world, or even his teacher for making him believe that things were normal back then. That it was never a demon traveling with another demon, under the false pretense of a master and his student; they'd just been two lone souls with nary else to care for.
Still, with the overwhelming swirl of grief - of what could have been, once upon a time - he takes a deep breath, letting himself calm down. It's in the past, and he can't change anything he's done. Slowly, Katsura shifts and turns to him.
"No, it wasn't. And I'm sorry, Gintoki."
"I wasn't looking for sympathy," he replies, but the residual resentment is enough that his throat tightens, making it hard to breathe normally.
"No. Please don't misunderstand." Katsura's eyes are kind. "I broke my promise to you. I wanted to take the burden off your shoulders, but in the end, it was you who carried it for all of us again."
"Zura..."
"That day on the cliffs, where you had to choose between us and Shoyou-sensei..." Katsura swallows. "What I should have done was to follow you. I shouldn't have left your side - I had no right to. You were always more important than the country. And I'll never forgive myself for doing that to you, for carrying the burden for the three of us."
It's an apology Gintoki never thought he'd ever need. But for once, he takes it.
"It's all right," he says gruffly. "You're the general. You're not supposed to follow your soldiers; you're supposed to lead 'em."
Katsura had been the one to orchestrate the battles. He, too, had shouldered the burden of more than enough deaths on his shoulders.
Gintoki had only followed his plans.
Uncharacteristically, Katsura's eyes are somewhat misty. "Of course, Gintoki."
They'd all been too young back then. They'd all been boys playing at the game of war. Too young, really, to understand the full repercussions of everything, and too innocent to conceive of the horrible tragedy that would lie at the end of the war, and of how the wretchedness of Gintoki's choices would all shift their lives fundamentally until they had no choice but to accept the world changing at a pace they couldn't have ever anticipated.
Katsura slices another peach. "Do you want to know why I put that gravestone in the cemetary, even though there wasn't a body to bury?"
Gintoki considers it. "I have an idea, but go on."
"I wanted to remember him. Not as a tortured soul, but as Shoyou's student. That person who used to get in trouble with you, doodling on Shoyou's scrolls. Or the person who went along with your hijinks when you wanted to play hooky, even when he really didn't want to. That's the sort of person I wanted to remember, after all these years."
"Zura, that's an admirable sentiment, but all you're doing is papering over the fact that he was always an emo edgelord."
"Of course he was," Katsura says gravely, so serious that it almost makes Gintoki laugh. "But that was part of his charm, too. I'll make sure that this reincarnation won't turn out as badly behaved as you two were back then."
The TV is still blaring on, so they finish the rest of the Ladies 4 episode, and then Katsura heads off once the credits roll down the screen, leaving Gintoki in probably a better mental state than he's felt in a few months.
-x-
Monday night comes around, and today is another patrol shift. It's almost something he's starting to look forward to, almost being the key word here. His head is getting too gloomy for his personal taste, and he just wants a bit of an escape from his thoughts once in a while.
"Kagura came here the other day," Tsukuyo says while they're walking down a block of teahouses. "The girls and I took her shoppin' for hair pins."
"Oh yeah?" Gintoki asks while picking his nose. "What for?"
"She wanted some advice from us. Apparently a boy asked her out on a date, and she wasn't sure how to respond to him."
Gintoki stops dead in his tracks, and Tsukuyo turns around.
"What?"
"Her father is going to kill me," he groans and puts his hands in his face, completely horrified. "What the hell. You should've told me way sooner!"
"It's already too late," she says, but there's a sly twinkle in her eyes. She takes out a pocket watch from the inner folds of her kimono and checks the time. "By my estimation, her date should've started about an hour ago."
He starts to run in the direction of the elevators. She trips him, and he almost lands on his face, his instincts only saving him from chipping a tooth on the ground.
"You haven't finished your contract yet," she growls. "Where do ya think you're going?"
"What the hell, woman! You don't understand the emergency that I'm going through here!"
"Shut up and calm down," Tsukuyo drawls. "Yer just as bad as Hinowa. Once she found out Seita had a crush on one of the girls in his class, she went completely crazy and started giving him advice to the point where he just completely gave up."
"That's the point! Soon, he'll be on the escalator towards adulthood, and you'll be the one sorry that you pushed him there so early!"
"Relax," she says. "This isn't Porori-hen anymore, and besides, Kagura can protect herself, right?"
"Not emotionally! She thinks these Korean dramas are the end all, be all of love. She'll set her expectations too high and then when some asshole breaks her heart, I'll have to go out there and actually kill him. You know, I had to beg the Bakufu already to expunge my criminal records - there's no way that I can ask them to do it again!"
"I'm telling you, she'll be fine." There it was again, that fond smile that he had no business receiving. "Or... are ya actually just scared of her growin' up, Gintoki?"
He sighs. Trust the damn workaholic to be reasonable and down to earth. "Maybe I am," he admits, and shoves his hands into the pockets of his pants. "I left this old town behind without a kid, and now she's... gone. " He sighs again. "I came back to find a young lady in her place."
Even with reruns of Be Forever Yorozuya showing on the TV now and then, he doesn't think he'll ever get completely used to walking into his apartment with Kagura lying around, reading a ladies magazine while half-heartedly attempting to paint her toenails, or putting on those sheet masks that Otae sometimes gives her when she stops by the beauty shops. Though her innocence is still there, her face grows more slender day by day, giving him a preview of what her mother must have looked like, long ago. It all makes him sad, and proud at the same time.
"I don't think anyone stops growin' up, if ya ask me," Tsukuyo says, and she takes a puff of her kiseru. The smoke curls into the night air like a ghost. "Funny enough, how would you feel if it was Shinpachi who was going on a date?"
"He did go on a date once," Gintoki replies, somewhat distracted by the change of topic. "It turned out that she was actually a pickpocketer with cat ears. Episode 34."
"Huh. Guess I'll have ta watch that one soon."
"It's a great episode. One of Patsuan's finest," he says, and pretends that the dimple in her cheek doesn't charm him. At all.
"Now, from my point of view," she says, and her tone is reasonable, "I don't quite understand why you don't personally worry about Shinpachi, compared to Kagura."
"His father was Shimura Ken, not the strongest alien hunter in the galaxy," Gintoki replies matter-of-factly. "And with that in mind - " He turns away, intending to leave.
"Hold yer horses," Tsukuyo said, firmly gripping the back of his haori (where on Earth did she keep that strength?). "If you finish yer shift, I'll tell ya the name of the boy she's going out with."
He scowls. "What kind of bargain is that?"
"A fair one?" Her eyes sparkles in amusement.
"Damn you, woman," he growls, but continues walking stridently, and somehow isn't annoyed when she serenely keeps up with his pace.
The odd paradigm of it is that they're talking about his kids while passing by the sex toy shops with various objects displayed in the windows for sale, a Yoshiwaran dichotomy that secretly amuses him. Tsukuyo is the same way; she is a woman who will fiercely defend the right of the courtesans to make a living the way they know best, but when confronted by her own feminine woes, comes up short on how to gracefully deal with them.
"Gintoki."
"Hm?"
"I know ya probably get this question a lot... but... " Tsukuyo lets out a puff of smoke from the corner of her mouth. "Where were you, for the last two years?"
He stops. "If I tell you that I was trying to save the world, would that be enough for you?"
There's a measured pause as she considers it, tilting her head. "I guess so, yeah." And she doesn't ask him any more questions after that.
-x-
Gintoki spots Soichirou the next afternoon - yes, he knows it's Sougo, and no, he doesn't care - walking along the street with his ears plugged with headphones from whatever shiny new sword the new budget allows the Shinsengumi to waste it on. With a practiced nonchalance, he walks up to the sadist, who upon seeing Gintoki, widens his eyes.
"Morning, danna - "
With a pivot of his feet, Gintoki slams him into a wall, his hand delicately gripping the policeman's pulse point, knowing that Okita was allowing him do so. Still, his grip only allows the barest amount so that the twenty year old can only take shallow breaths.
"It's the afternoon, and Kagura came home at 1 am last night," he growled. "Is this what the cool kids do these days? Benefits with friends?"
Okita, to his credit, doesn't flinch, but there's a trickle of blood running down his forehead. "It's the other way around, Danna."
"Whatever. Is that what's happening here? Because if it is, you'd better expect Gin-san to teach the real meaning of sadism, and it ain't just the S from BDSM."
"Danna, you'd know I'd never play with someone's emotions that way - not after seeing the way that man treated my sister. Believe it or not, I'm doing nothing... dishonorable."
Gintoki lets go of him, a bit miffed that he'd played the "Invoking the dead" card. Sometimes he just missed beating someone up without the guilt trip.
"So explain why she came home late. And no, the movie being two and half hours long doesn't count - I know you brats can look that up on the internet app, so please don't try to pull one over me."
Okita massages his throat, but doesn't break his gaze away from Gintoki. "Prance Prance Revolution. I told her there was no way she could beat my world record, so she wanted to give it a try, and wouldn't stop dancing until the machine broke down at the arcade because she got so frustrated with it. They couldn't kick her out, on account of her being a Yato and stubborn."
The reason is so ridiculously Kagura-ish that at this point, Gintoki actually would prefer that fornication was the actual reason why she came back home late. Fucking weirdos. Back in his day, they'd just lie to Shoyou-sensei as if he didn't already know that they'd already snuck out to check out the red light district.
"Fine." He turns his back. "Touch another single finger on her hair, bring her home late one more time, and you'll wish you'd never met the likes of me."
Okita, uncharacteristically, is compliant. "Yes, sir."
At least Soichirou understands his balls are at stake, so Gintoki supposes this thing between them is serious enough for him to be reassured that Kagura is in safe hands, whatever label they're choosing to use or, perhaps ironically, not use. With his role of parenting done, he starts to walk home.
"Hey, Danna... "
Gintoki turns to the policeman again. "What?"
"She's worried about you." The sandy haired captain's eyes are solemn. "She wishes you'd open up from time to time."
"Don't be ridiculous," Gintoki snaps at him, and walks back home for good this time.
-x-
To say Gintoki feels betrayed by Shoyou-sensei would be a lie, because how could you promise someone was mortal?
He sits on the same spot where Takasugi once landed a point on his chest. Damn asshole had popped his loser cherry. He doesn't think he'll ever get over that.
Two years ago, he had started to pull out all the weeds, trying to release that knot of anger from his chest. He remembered being angry at Utsuro. Angry at the world for monopolizing Altana. Angry that Shoyou had lied to them and left them here, to pick up all the pieces when it all went to hell. Angry that a silent pain would eat inside him for years, especially with the deaths he'd force himself to remember during the Joui war. His hands started to bleed after a while, but he continued at it until he couldn't spot any more of the weeds.
The tremendous shift that had happened the first time he'd ever fought Utsuro probably fucked him over two ways from Sunday, but it wasn't like cataclysmic shifts hadn't happened before.
If everything he knew to be true was proved wrong, he'd reinvent himself. If he can't be the Shiroyasha anymore, maybe just existing as a homeless bum would be good enough. Do it again, and again; come up with anything else - a different job, a different persona, and maybe you'll forget where you come from. Forget that you ever murdered the only person that gave you a home. Forget until you keep it inside and then when it all comes bursting out like a tsunami, avoid places near the water so you don't throw yourself and drown, like the way you should have done the day he died. Forget and forgive, people say, but what happens when the protector needs protecting?
He probably took us in, knowing we'd save him someday, Katsura said once.
Then why does it feel so shitty? Gintoki had retorted back.
Katsura didn't have an answer for that.
As Gintoki contemplates his own questions of existential dread - of what death means for those who have a second chance, and for those who don't - he notes how the hallowed ground remains deathly quiet. It exists, as an ode to an absurd tragedy for both the betrayer and the betrayed. Even to this day, the entrance to the school is still standing upright, despite the decade or so that has passed by since the fire.
Someone ought to fix the school - make it come back to life, he thinks, but as he has neither the capital nor energy to do so, it remains a frivolous thought, forgotten as quickly as it comes.
"Sensei, should I visit him?" he asks.
There isn't an answer. Gintoki sighs, feeling ridiculous.
He's spent his entire life afraid of ghosts, so why is he looking for a sign from one? Still, the allure of closure compels him to keep asking for answers he knows he won't get.
"Everyone I know is telling me to. Zura, and Sakamoto... they think I should. But... " He pauses. "... Would it be okay if I... didn't?"
No answer. He trudges on.
"I'm just... tired," he admits. "I want to feel okay about seeing him. But I'm not. I don't want to see him, because they're telling me he doesn't remember the past. And I... "
Gintoki takes a deep breath.
"... I just want to move on. I think he'd want me to do that too, don't you think?"
The only noise that comes from the school are the rustling of the pine trees.
-x-
He arrives at the front step of his apartment no wiser than the day he left. But at least it's home.
No one dares to ask about his trip once he comes back to Kabuki-chou, but there's a sense of relief when he enters the small apartment on top of Otose's Snack Bar. The first thing the kids do is to rush to his arms, even though they're practically grown up. And for a good minute or two, he doesn't let go.
-x-
"You're afraid," Takasugi says, as he taps out his ash from his kiseru. He's not wearing a bandage around his head anymore, and so Gintoki takes a look around and remembers that this is the ship that they escaped to, right before he found out Takasugi was dying a slow death from the Altana poisoning his blood. The ship is rocking back and forth, swaying gently in the breeze, and he can see the edge of the sea melding into the line where the sky begins.
Gintoki takes a breath. He's not keen on fighting his subconscious today.
What he really needs, is to understand why his head is doing this to him.
"Of what?" he gently asks Takasugi.
"Forgiveness," his friend says. He tilts his head towards Gintoki. "It'll eat you alive if you can't forgive yourself for the things you've done."
"But you're dead," Gintoki retorts. "How am I supposed to move on? From you, or Sensei?"
Utsuro had said it best. If you cut down your master for your friend, and you cut down your friend for your master, what exactly do you have left?
Gintoki remembered at the time telling the sham of his undead teacher that he wasn't empty. That behind his actions were the benediction of Takasugi, and the wish to protect Shoyou.
The problem with his words was this: Nowhere on this Earth, is there a single confessional booth where he can confess to his sins, and be granted absolution.
If it had been that easy, he would have forced himself to forget about Shoyou a long time ago. It eats away at him, the guilt that pulverizes him into a powder, dissolving himself into a sea of despair. He'd answered back then, to Utsuro - that he still had others - and it was true. That there were others to take care of him, that he knew people loved him enough to go out of their own way to protect him, too.
He just never got close enough to believe it completely. It never felt good enough.
Takasugi doesn't answer his question. He turns his head away, and says, in that half-ironic, half-not way of his, "If you don't, you'll end up like me."
-x-
a/n: Some writers interpret Takasugi's reincarnation and Gintoki's feelings towards it in different ways. My opinion about it changes every so often, so I can't make a definitive statement on it right now. Sorachi has said that the ending of Takasugi's fate is up to the reader, and thus, I believe that everyone's opinion of what really happened are all equally valid.