Heads or Tails
kingfishers' game
Chapter 6: HAPPIEST
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Notes: Welcome back, dear readers! I'm really enjoying hearing from you, especially since these past few weeks have been pretty nightmarish IRL. I won't bore you with the details, but it involves a lost wallet, several internships, and two very adorable cats in an apartment where cats are expressly forbidden on the lease (whoops). Thank you for your patience!
This chapter, HAPPIEST, is one of my favorites. It's also a bit longer and more than a bit angsty-er than those preceding. It's a Be Forever Yorozuya AU (from the Gintama movie). Enjoy!
Maybe Sougo's a bad person. No, there's really no question, no 'maybe'—he knows he's a bad person.
The White Plague has destroyed Edo more quickly and more terribly than any Amanto army ever could. The Yorozuya's Danna has disappeared, leaving Kagura and Shinpachi to split up and roam the city looking for a purpose that has been gone from the world for five years. The Shinsengumi is a band of rogues, the government is in shambles, and so many are dead. Hell on Earth is just Earth.
Kagura stays in the old Yorozuya building. Sougo knows she could have left—left the house, the city, even the planet, if she wanted to. She could have gone back to the rain-soaked planet she came from. But she stays, on Earth, in the Yorozuya, if only so she can sleep in Gintoki's old room and hold on to that feeble hope that he will come back and be happy to have someone waiting for him.
Sougo often sleeps at the Yorozuya too, but for different reasons.
The Shinsengumi is officially disbanded early on, and Sougo moves in with Kondou. When Sougo starts leaving his bed empty most nights, Kondou teases him, asks him who his new girlfriend is. Eventually he stops asking. If Hijikata ever wonders, he keeps his inquiries to himself.
Kagura has nightmares sometimes. From what Sougo can see, the worst kind are the quiet kind. Not the kind that leave her screaming the whole block awake, but the kind that seep in silently and twist up her heart. The kind that leave her with dark bruises under her eyes in the morning. Sougo has become a light sleeper—always on alert, waiting for the blankets to go slack, waiting for her to leave the space next to him, waiting for her to creep away, to go to the balcony and look up at the night. He wants to know what she's thinking when she does that, if she's asking her mother for advice or wishing on the North Star for Danna to come back or praying to a God Sougo isn't sure anyone believes in anymore for a reason to keep fighting, keep living—
—or what.
She always looks so alone, standing there at that balcony with only the stars over her head. Sometimes, Sougo wants to stop her, pull her back into the blankets, and tell her I'm here, I'm right here, stop waiting for the people who left you to come back. But the image of her lone silhouette against the stars always reminds him: oh, this is a sadness I can't intrude upon.
Kagura never invites him to the Yorozuya. He shows up and she opens the door. They treat each other like strangers in public. In Sougo's opinion, they treat each other like strangers in private, too—other than sleeping together.
'Sleeping together', because fucking sounds abhorrent in his head. So does making love. He wishes there was a way of saying it that could encompass both the strangeness of it and his certainty that it is right. He has never once failed to be surprised at how warm her skin is and how her hair is incredibly long and soft and thick and how her breath is so, so hot. He has to coax the voice out from her, has to make her heart beat faster, has to make sure she isn't going anywhere. Because if she ever decides to take her father or her brother up on their subtle offers to provide passage away from Earth, Sougo knows she will never,
ever
come back.
He hasn't yet found a word that describes all that.
He doesn't know what she wants from him. Then again, he doesn't know what he wants from her, either—other than that he wants her to stay.
Sougo worries more often than he wants to that Kagura loved Gintoki, loved him in a way other than as a parent or a sibling. It's possible. She was young when Gintoki disappeared, young enough to have nurtured a one-sided crush on a man she relied on. She certainly acts like a widowed young wife, pining and pining, closing herself off. Or maybe not—Sougo knows well enough that familial love can break your heart just as cruelly as romantic love.
He's never asked her. He doesn't really want to know the answer. It doesn't matter, anyway—Gintoki is gone, and Kagura's heart is broken.
Sougo's a bad person, because he hopes Gintoki stays gone. He hopes Kagura will stop waking up to nightmares, or at least that one day instead of leaving the room to go look out at the sky she'll turn toward Sougo and realize that she isn't alone.
Because even if Kagura never loved Gintoki as anything but family, she was still happiest when she was with him.
And, eventually, when Gintoki returns, having both sent out the plague and helped to eradicate it, and he can ask no forgiveness from his two young wards (not that he doesn't receive it of course; Shinpachi and Kagura loved him, after all, and there is nothing they could not forgive)—Sougo is a bad person, because he was happiest when Gintoki was dead.
Notes: You know that joke that prompts like this really bring out a writer's true nature, because we'll just twist the prompt to suit our interests? This story feels like that to me. HAPPIEST? Yeah right, lol.
I really do love Be Forever Yorozuya AUs. Maybe I'll do a full-length story in this universe one day.
Next time, Chapter 7: WIND