you can tell a writer's out of ideas when they fall back on amnesia as a key plot device
He forgets the small things, at first. Things like Yamazaki's first name and Kondo's troubles in love.
Then he starts to forgets about mayonnaise, the Shinsengumi, his own identity.
One of the last things he forgets is a certain smirking, perm-headed bastard.
Hijikata has a neurodegenerative disease and is losing his memories. No one knows how to cope.
He makes the announcement on a gentle June morning.
The shoji doors of the conference room glow citrine in the morning sunlight, and dust motes swirl languidly between the black-clad bodies filing into their seats as the Shinsengumi gather for a routine morning assembly. It's destined to be a beautiful day - Ketsuno Ana has promised a reprieve from the sweltering heat that's settled over Edo in recent months, and the officers are looking forward to a day of patrol without sweat matting their hair and drenching their stuffy uniforms. Kondo and Hijikata are seated at the front of the room, on the same careworn cushions they've always occupied, and Sougo meanders over their way to trade morning greetings with Kondo and death threats with Hijikata.
All in all, it's a normal, if not above-average day.
Hijikata goes over the day's assignments like he's done a hundred times before. Nothing changes - a newbie's phone goes off and Hijikata demands he commit seppuku on the spot - and no one is the wiser - Kondo holds the demon vice commander back until he calms down enough to click his tongue and light a smoke - until he reaches the end of the agenda, but no dismissal comes. The silence of the meeting room leadens and uneasy glances are traded - what now? - as the Shinsengumi officers shift their weight from knee to knee. Then Hijikata opens his mouth again, and the men nod to themselves. He has something else to add to the agenda, of course.
"I have a personal announcement to make."
Ah, he has a personal announcement to make, of course.
Of... course...?
It's not like Hijikata to breach protocol, and speculative murmurs ripple through the crowd before he silences them with a single, pointed look. Kondo tilts his head in a subtle question - he's just as in the dark as the rest of his men.
"As of today, I am resigning my position as your Vice Commander."
Another murmur spreads through the gathered men, and even Hijikata's fiercest glare does little to quell the whispers of surprise. He takes a deep drag from his cigarette before speaking again on the exhale.
"Rumors that I have been... unwell have been circulating for a few weeks. They're true."
Sougo, purveyor of said rumors, rocks back on his heels, stricken. "Toshi...?" Kondo's desparate whisper seems to echo across the room.
Hijikata pushes on. "Last month, I was diagnosed with a neuro... a neurodegenerative disease that is rendering me unfit for duty. Accordingly, I am resigning before my actions have the potential to bring shame upon the Shinsengumi. First Captain Okita will be your new Vice Commander, and you will treat him with the same - if not more - deference and respect that I demanded from you. You will follow the Kyokuchuu Hatto Is that clear?"
His words are more oppressive than any heatwave could ever be. Kondo reacts the way Hijikata knew he would - the leader of the Shinsengumi wails his vice commander's name as fat tears bead in his eyes and snot wells in his nose. Sougo glares, as he always does, but there's no trace of familiar hatred in his darkening eyes, just a glint of impotent anger colored an overwhelming shade of hurt. Something in the troops wilt, surely as if Hijikata had announced his own death, and they stare in shell-shocked silence until Yamazaki begins to wail, piercing and nasal, in harmony with their commander.
Yamazaki. Good old reliable, stalker-slash-spy Yamazaki. Yamazaki, whose first name Hijikata can't recall anymore. He takes a deep breath.
"It has been my honor to sit among you, to fight alongside you. But I am no longer fit to serve with you." Hijikata slaps his hands on his knees and bows forward, so low to the ground that his V-bangs brush the tatami. "Thank you, for allowing me to lead as your Vice Commander." He pauses for a moment. There's something caught in his throat, something heavy and thick that might be mayonnaise he ate with breakfast, and he straightens up with a harsh swallow. "That will be all."
His eyes scan the room as the hall echoes with a resounding, "Yes, Vice Commander!" that's punctuated by a few sniffles and warbling sobs. It physically pains him to see his men so dejected. It's a meager consolation that some day, some day soon, Hijikata thinks as he meets several watery gazes, he'll forget every face in this room.
"Toshi!" Kondo's hand wraps around Hijikata's forearm as he strides down the main hall of the barracks. 'Toshi, hold on!"
Hijikata doesn't falter in his step. He has some packing to do.
"Toshi, please!" Kondo wails. "Let us help you!"
No response, just the rapid click-thump of boots on weathered pine.
"Toshi, why are you giving up without a fight!?"
Hijikata stops at that. He stops and spins on his heel so abruptly that Kondo stumbles, hard, into the barrack wall, and gulps. Toshi is beyond furious. The muscles in his jaw are clenched so hard, Kondo can hear the creak of enamel-on-enamel as his teeth grind together, and the veins at his temples throb with each heartbeat. For a moment, the two men are frozen in space like haphazardly posed dolls - Hijikata in a half-lunge, head downturned and arm raised to shake off Kondo's hand, and Kondo twisted shoulder-first against the wall, legs bent at the knee and one hand pinned painfully behind him. But soon enough, the moment passes and Hijikata pulls himself to his full height before flicking his chin up and staring down his commander.
The heat of Hijikata's glare is blistering, but what's truly overwhelming is the helpless despair surging up against the brittle glass surface. Those are the same cobalt eyes Kondo remembers from their first meeting, when Toshi was just a lone baragaki raising hell in Bushuu, and Kondo approached him after the younger man had been battered and beaten in a fight with impossible odds. That's when it dawns on him, right before Hijikata opens his mouth to speak, that maybe his demon vice commander didn't give up without a long, lonely fight. Not at all.
By the time the Shinsengumi return from their patrols that evening, Kondo's eyes are puffy and cryworn to hell, and Okita refuses to take off his sleeping mask. Their ex-vice commander is already gone.
"Oi, Oogushi-kun!"
Hijikata grinds down on the cigarette clamped between his teeth until it threatens to tear. Of all the people to run into on his first day as a civilian, it had to be Sakata Gintoki. He contemplates how to react - ignore the silver-haired bastard and enjoy his day, or pop an aneurysm demanding who the hell he thinks he's calling "Oogushi-kun". He's leaning towards the former when a hot breath puffs past his cheek and the hairs on his nape prick up. "Ooo. Guu. Shii. Kunn."
Then a suspiciously wet finger slips into his ear and - Oh, hell no. That permhead did not -
Hijikata's brow begins to twitch, and when he hears the squeak of rubber boots as that dumbass Yorozuya hops back a few paces, he's ready to unleash his full wrath on the permy bastard and throw high blood pressure to the wind.
"You fucking -" he spins around in a flash, fingers grasping where a sword should be... and drawing away with nothing but the cloth of his yukata.
Hijikata deflates at the sensation of fabric between his fingers, and his hand drops to his side, pulling his yukata down to his shoulder with it. "Fuck," he curses, more to himself than anyone, "I forgot."
"Oi, oi, oi, Oogushi-kun...? Come on now..." The taunt is tentative this time, equal parts cautious and confused when Hijikata doesn't move. He just stands in the middle of the street, head hanging so low that his V-bangs obscure his face in a swath of V-shadows.
'Is the Demon Vice Commander that embarrassed to have the saliva of the great Gin-san in his ear? If you eat your earwax, that counts as an indirect kiss, you know~"
Hijikata takes a long, deep breath without glancing up. Gin skitters back another couple steps, but not before Hijikata is hiking up his sleeves, raising his sword arm, and dropping a devastating karate chop down on Gintoki's sorry mop of a head.
"Who the hell do you think you're calling Oogushi-kun!?"
When Hijikata sets out for a walk along his old patrol route and realizes he no longer knows the way one sunny autumn day, he finds his way to a bookmaker that he does remember how to get to and makes a rather large purchase. And from that day on, Hijikata writes. He writes a record of his life, of things he still remembers, and, increasingly, of things he's forgotten.
Every day, he wakes at the crack of dawn and writes until dusk, because he's racing against his faltering brain and every day he wakes with less memories than before.
He writes his mother's name, his father's name, his brother's name, his own name - Hijikata Toushirou - because he'll soon forget that too. He spends his days filling volumes and volumes with his childhood, his adolescence, his young adulthood, his present. To the casual observer, his obsession with documenting every detail of his life might seem compulsive and narcissistic. Hijikata knows, though, that one day he will read these records and they will be as foreign to him as the life of a complete stranger.
In the beginning, these writing spells are punctuated by visits from familiar faces. Kondo drops by almost every day, barraging Toshi with tales of his latest romantic failures. Yamazaki swings by between stakeouts to chat about badminton or extol the virtues of anpan. Even Sougo stops by every now and then to fill Hijikata's mayonnaise bottles with laxatives, hair removal cream, or an ungodly mixture of both.
Kondo barges into Hijikata's room one night, tears glistening and snot dribbling in the pale moonlight, to lament about Otae-san's remarkable cruelty, and how it only makes her more beautiful.
"Toshiii!" he wails, flinging droplets of bodily fluids every which way as he pounds his chest like a gorilla, "Toshi, why won't Otae-san accept me?" Hijikata turns from his seat at his desk, brush in hand, and cocks his head to the side in genuine confusion. "Kondo-san? What are you doing at this time of night - and who is this Otae-san?"
Yamazaki swings by one sunny afternoon with a grocery bag full of anpan and a pair of badminton rackets -
"Hello! Hijikata-san~! Hijikata...san-? Hijika-AHH!"
Hijikata uses the rackets to beat the intruder within an inch of his life before tossing him onto the street, ruined anpan and all.
Sougo knocks on Hijikata's front door on an early autumn morning, and shoves a gift basket into a drowsy Hijikata's arms. "Huh? Sougo, what are these? Jumbo size lotions? Oi, what exactly do you think I'm doing in my free time, that I'd need so many bottles of lotion?"
The brunet clicks his tongue. "It's mayonnaise, you dumbass." (It's actually a laxative paste, but Hijikata can find that out on his own.) "You know, the disgusting condiment that suits your disgusting existence?"
But Hijikata only stares at the red-capped bottles and wrinkles his nose. "Oi, oi, oi. This is a prank, right? There's no way... eugh. There's no way anyone in their right mind would eat all of this... this dog food, Sougo."
Slowly, the visits stop.
It's October when Hijikata runs into Yorozuya and his brats again. His mind is fraying but he still remembers his favorite cigarette brand and most of the days in the week. Today is Tuesday. He's forgotten what tomorrow is, but the day after is... Thursday. The smoke shop closes on Thursdays, so Hijikata's braving the chilly, late-autumn winds to buy a few packs of Mayoboros. (Hijikata's not sure why he buys Mayoboros when they're several yen more expensive than other brands, but something about the empty, red-and-white cartons littered about his home tell him they're the only way to go.)
He's nowhere near where Yorozuya lives - he doesn't remember where that is, exactly, but he knows where it's not - yet here the perm-headed bastard is, slouching along down the street, a finger half-buried in his nostril, like he has no care in the world as his kids follow along dutifully behind. The glasses boy and the China girl. Hijikata used to use their nicknames out of playful spite - now he can't address them by their real names, even if he tried. So he turns around and hunches deeper into his haori before the trio can recognize him. He's not in the mood for a confrontation, not since his memories turned to sand and his brain a sieve.
"Oi, Oogushi-kun!" He hears a man's voice call out behind him, but it barely registers as he makes his way in opposite direction. It seems like someone's run into an acquaintance on this busy thoroughfare. Good for Oogushi and his friend- maybe they'll stop to chat for a minute before continuing on their separate ways. Maybe they'll duck into one of the izakayas lining the street and bask in the warmth of sake and shared memories until night falls. Either way, it's none of Hijikata's concern, and he pulls out the hand-drawn map he always carries around to chart out a new path. He'll have to take a roundabout route to the smoke shop now, but that's no issue. You develop a strange sort of calmness in between accepting your fate and forgetting it entirely - the calm before the storm of confusion and agitation that overcomes you in the late stages of memory loss - and Hijikata's once-formidable temper has been all but extinguished. It would be quite a feat to anger him now, when he's careful to treasure the days he has left as Hijikata Toushirou and not some unnamed amnesiac.
Then something long and wooden and suspiciously bokuto-shaped rockets into the back of his head with so much force that it ricochets off his skull and into the cloudless sky, twinkling out of sight. A vein pops in his forehead and he spins on his heel, calmness be damned, and growls an irritatingly familiar name.
"YOROZUUYAAA!"
Inevitably, one day Hijikata wakes up and writes no more. His inkstone dries out, his carefully bound journals lie blank, and dust settles on their unopened, untouched covers. He's forgotten about the writing, too. Hijikata's not sure why he has so many journals laying around, why they're filled from cover to cover with made-up stories about a dismal character with his own name. Well, he can't be certain they're made up - he has never been able to recall much of his past, after all - but Hijikata's not sure why they're in his bedroom to begin with, so he packs them away in the farthest recesses of his closet, and makes a mental note to throw them away. He forgets that, too.
Hijikata loses his name as the first snow falls over Edo. He wakes with the weak winter sun and meanders onto the porch, smiling as the tiny snowflakes drift down, one by one, until they've blotted out the familiar landscape with swaths of shimmering ice. Forgetting is a subtle, painless affair - nothing forgotten is missed, because how can you miss something you don't remember? - and Hijikata Toushirou melts away like the snowflakes lacing his lashes and feathering his hair.
He's sitting on a bench outside a dango shop, nursing a cup of tea and admiring the blossoming trees that line the main road. He's not alone - other people cluster around the shop, tearing at skewers of sticky-soft rice balls with their teeth and staring appreciatively at the flower-laden boughs trembling overhead. There's something warmly familiar about the blushing blossoms and the teardrop shaped petals that break free in the breeze, and he supposes he knew their name, once. He supposes knew his own name, once, but he can't bring himself to care, not on such a beautiful day.
His eyes fall from the treeline to the bobbing heads of passerby bustling to-and-fro. The frenzy of colors never ceases to amaze him. He's not sure what those colors are called, exactly, but he enjoys them - the warms and the cools, the brights and the darks - nonetheless. He breaks his gaze from the rush of people, and takes another sip of his tea, relishing in the way heat pools and tingles at the base of his tongue before sliding down his throat. He looks up again as the warmth of the tea radiates to his core, when a certain head of hair catches his eye. It's an uncommon color, like the color of muddy rainwater or coffee with too much milk, but it's achingly, painfully familiar and he's on his feet, pushing his way through the crowd towards the person before he realizes what he's doing. If only he could remember the name of that color.
"Mm...milk? No, it starts with that sound, but... it's...mmm... it's, it's... mi... mitsu... mitsuba?"
"Mitsuba!" he almost-shouts, and the slight figure turns around in shock. Oh. The hair and the eyes and the uniform are nostalgic, somehow, but he doesn't know this mitsuba-colored person.
"I'm sorry," he begins to say, but the smaller person cuts him off.
"Do you..." the person starts with wide, sunset-colored eyes. "Do you remember Okita Mitsuba?"
A million scenes flash through his head unbidden, a spinning kaleidoscope of someone's - of his? - memories. A young boy and an older girl, siblings with the same remarkable hair and eyes, sitting together on a porch. The same girl, gazing up into his own eyes as she laughs delightedly. The siblings, older and sadder now, together in a too-bright room. Then... nobody, just a storm-darkened horizon and a foil packet of super-spicy senbei.
For a heartbeat, Hijikata remembers.
Hijikata reels back and clutches his childhood friend's wrists, as if they'll keep him moored in reality in the sudden undertow of memories rushing through his head and drowning his senses. "Sougo?" Blue meets red as Hijikata's head jerks up to stare into the younger man's face. "Sougo, my god. My god. How could I forget her, Sougo? How could I forget - ungh -"
Pinpricks of pain spike behind his eyes, and as his vision flashes bright, the images in his mind flicker-fade away, just like the vague dreams he can never remember in the wake of an afternoon nap.
The other person - the mitsuba-colored person, he recalls, is staring at him in unabashed shock. He frowns. Why did he approach this person again? What was so important? He's never seen this person before in his life!
"Sorry," he says apologetically and runs a hand through his jagged bangs. "But... who is Sougo? Am I Sougo?"
The other person doesn't reply. He just clicks his tongue and turns away before the other man can catch the dampness darkening his eyes. He strides off in the direction he came from - he'll be taking a little detour from his usual patrol route. There's no one to stop him. No one to admonish him for slacking off, shouting inches from his face with a breath that reeks of smoke and mayonnaise. Not anymore. He's the Sadist Vice Commander of the Shinsengumi now, after all.
Kagura's gnawing on a piece of sukonbu as she lounges under the kotatsu, and Gin's reclining at his desk with a pinky finger lodged in his nose when their front door opens with a slam. Kagura chokes on sukonbu. Gin's finger jerks deep into his nostril in shock. Okita Sougo comes striding in without ceremony.
Gin scrambles to stem the fountain of blood spurting from his freshly-punctured nostril, and Kagura turns mid-cough to send the slight brunet a glare.
"Eh? Eh? Okita-kuuun?" Gin sputters as blood trickles between his lips, "If you're here about the warehouse that exploded the other day, I had nothing to do with it!"
Kagura ejects the rest of the sukonbu from her windpipe and grinds out, "Ohhh? Have you finally come to deport me, aru? Well I hate to break it to you, Sadist, but - "
Sougo flicks Kagura's forehead without breaking his stride, stalking further into the room until he's so close to Gin's desk that the butt of his sword is flush against the weathered pine. "Danna," he says, as he splays both hands on the tabletop. Gin looks up from the brunet's hands to his stony face, wincing as a spray of blood splatters in a line across the desk and onto Sougo's uniform. Sougo doesn't flinch.
"Danna, I need your help."
And that mess was... a very old sad(?)fic from the depths of my notes app. Hijikata's my favorite character, but I love seeing him suffer for some reason? Hope you do too.
I wish I had an idea of how to properly continue this, but I don't, so please make do with this open ending (open beginning?) where Sougo enlists Gin and the kids' help in finding a cure for Hijikata.
In my mind, their relationship would blossom into a nice GinHiji coupling... I teased that a bit in the summary, but it's not very apparent as their interactions are limited in this fic, so I apologize for that. As for where the story goes, well, maybe Gin figures out how to cure a supposedly incurable disease and he and Hijikata fall in love along the way. Maybe he doesn't find a cure after all, but Gin and Hijikata fall in love anyways, a la 50 first dates.
Maybe I'll suck it up and write a continuation one day. But like the title says, you can tell a writer's out of ideas when they fall back on amnesia as a key plot device, so don't expect too much, please. ^^;
At any rate, thanks for reading. Happy 5/5 :')