Chapter Text
Vice Commander:
Here are the transcripts you were requesting. Pages 1-8 cover Captain Okita’s in-depth interview with Hanano Saki, pages 9-13 cover his appearance on Tamo-san Hour, pages 14-18 detail his time on Oedo TV’s 6 o’clock news segment, and pages 19-21 list the soundbites he gave out to local radio stations.
I like to think the PR backlash on this won’t be as bad as I think it will be. I like to think that.
Yamazaki Sagaru
Hanano: Sogo-san, Kagura-san, thank you for sitting down to talk with me. Our viewers have been eager to hear more about just what happened to our city.
Okita: [loudly chewing gum] I just saved humanity from certain destruction. No big.
Kagura: [loudly sucking sukonbu] That loser didn’t do anything. I was the one who saved everyone. Gin-chan begged me to leave my super amazing vacation to fix things because he was too weak to do it himself. Now where are my finger sandwiches? You said there would be finger sandwiches. What sort of fingers are in them anyway? Human fingers would make me super uncomfortable.
Hanano: They don’t actually have fingers in them! And you’ll have a chance to eat after the segment. [coughs] It was recently confirmed that the missing Ruoma leader had actually been posing as a bartender here on Earth, taking many humans under its powerful sway. How did you actually get Ucreu Vimit to leave our planet in peace?
Kagura: I tried punching it, but it was really goopy and gross. And it got more goopy when I yelled at it. I think that was its version of snotty tears.
Okita: Brute force wasn’t cutting it. But luckily for us, my superior officer, Hijikata Toshiro, Vice Commander of the Shinsengumi, personal phone number XXXXXXX, was under the creature’s control and had been shoehorned into the pathetic role of mindlessly documenting its plan. From those documents we learned that Hijikata is too incompetent and dumb to be capable of holding his position of Vice Commander and should be condemned in the court of public opinion immediately, and also that Vimit was here trying to learn how to be suave and get the ladies.
Kagura: That was our way in.
Hanano: So you taught the creature the human art of romance?
Kagura: Yeah. We took it to a convenience store and got it a couple of Cosmo mags.
Okita: After reading for a while, it bought a box of donuts and took the first flight off world. I think it was inspired.
Hanano: In what way? What is it going to do with the donuts? I feel really grossed out without knowing why.
Okita: You know why.
Hanano: No! No, I don’t!
Kagura: Don’t worry, Saki-chan. I think Cosmo puts a bunch of tips in there, so if the donuts don’t work I’m sure –
“ENOUGH! ENOUGH ALREADY!” Gintoki yelled, as he slammed open the sliding door waving an angry fist. “IT’S DONE! I DECREE IT’S DONE! I, THE MAIN CHARACTER, SAY WE’RE FINISHED! I’M USING MY VETO! I WAS SAVING THAT VETO FOR A RAINY DAY, AND NOW THE KETSUNO ANA IN MY HEART SAYS IT’S POURING FOR THE WHOLE FIVE DAY FORECAST! NO MORE LETTERS! NOT ONE MORE! YOU HEAR ME?”
Hijikata looked up from the broadcast report he’d been skimming over in a steadily deepening despair and fury to stare incredulously at the Yorozuya screaming nonsense in the middle of his room at the Shinsengumi headquarters. Whoever let that guy in was really going to need to commit seppuku.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.
“Filing an official complaint. This is unfair. I call foul. Red card!” Gintoki snapped, pulling an actual red card out of his kimono and throwing it hard enough to slice a nasty papercut right across the middle of Hijikata’s forehead.
“No really, what the fuck are you doing?” Hijikata repeated, but this time with a small trail of blood trickling down his cheek that he refused to acknowledge.
They stared at each other for a long, tense moment before Gintoki began staggering in Hijikata’s direction with the gait of a man walking straight toward a firing squad. His face grew paler and sallower with each step until he collapsed on the floor, letting his head hit the table next to Hijikata’s documents with a dull thud. He covered his face with his hands.
“I can’t do this,” he mumbled, running his fingers despairingly through his perm, fluffing up his hair to the level of an impressive and disastrous tumbleweed. “It’s too much. I can’t do this. Why are you making me do this?”
“Vimit’s off world. It can’t-”
“Not that fucking Amanto!” Gintoki growled and pointed, pushing his finger right into Hijikata’s papercut in a way that was more obnoxious than painful. “YOU!”
This close, Hijikata could smell the Yorozuya’s breath, and alcohol wasn’t on it. Maybe he was high, then.
“I’m not making you do anything,” he said breezily in the tone he often used with drunks and disorderlies who were so far from their right mind that it was questionable as to whether or not they would ever truly find it again. “How about you go home and sleep this off?”
“Don’t you think I tried?!” Gintoki spit and poked Hijikata’s papercut repeatedly and aggressively until Hijikata slapped the finger away. Gintoki then focused on slapping the hand that slapped his. An eye for an eye, a slap for a slap, and all that. Slaps turned into punches as Gintoki continued his rant. “All I’ve been do – Ow! Fuck you! – all I’ve been doing is trying to sleep it off, drink it off, pachinko it off, jerk it off. But it doesn’t work that, ngh, way! It works every other way but that way! It’s like if someone asks you not to – Gah! – not to think about pissing, what are you going to think about? KAYAKING DOWN NIAGARA FALLS, YOU SONOFABITCH!”
“THEN GO FIND A TOILET AND GO FUCKING KAYAKING!” Hijikata roared, throwing a punch at Gintoki’s solar plexus with the incoherent rage of a man whose patience had abandoned ship far too many sentences ago.
“THAT’S WHAT I’M DOING RIGHT NOW!” Gintoki yelled and head-butted Hijikata in the papercut.
Hijikata staggered back with a grunt, but he was far more concerned for the tatami mats than his head, glancing awkwardly at Gintoki’s crotch.
“I’M NOT ACTUALLY PISSING, YOU ASSHOLE!”
“YOU’RE NOT MAKING ANY FUCKING SENSE!”
Gintoki held his snarl for a while longer until he sighed out all the air and exasperation in his lungs in one melodramatic heave. He slid his hand inside his kimono and pulled out a few balled-up sheets of paper crumpled to the point of near-disintegration, and covered in a rough and heavy scrawl.
“That night you spent with Vimit, you spent a whole damn lot of it writing to me,” he said. “Soichiro-kun handed me over the goods a couple days back. He said he was going to use it as blackmail material, but apparently it was too disgusting for him to deal with.”
Hijikata turned to stone - a sweaty, clammy stone that wanted to throw itself off a cliff.
“That Sogo, pulling his damn pranks again,” he laughed with a bravado he dug out from the very bottom of the barrel. Even with a quick glance, he could already tell that was his handwriting. No ifs, ands, buts, or oh-fuck-please-nos about it. Hijikata made a short, desperate grab for the paper. “I didn’t write anything that night.”
Sneering softly as he kept the prize just out of reach, Gintoki said, “Now you know how it feels to be on the other side of the drunk letter. None of the memory and all of the shame.”
“I didn’t write any letter!” Hijikata repeated in pure desperation. “I’m telling you it was Sogo!”
“So Okita-kun knows about Dr. Boroboro then?” Gintoki asked a little too innocently.
Hijikata instantly bristled.
“I’VE TOLD YOU TO QUIT CALLING HIM THAT! WHY WOULD AN ELEPHANT BE A DOCTOR?”
“He keeps showing up in your dreams with a monocle, so obviously he wants you to know he is well educated,” Gintoki drawled, sliding the letter back into his kimono, and thereby freeing his finger to dig around in his ear. “It’s the equivalent of someone inviting you into their home, and their degrees from Toityhoity U are hanging in gilded frames in the foyer.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions,” Hijikata accused. “The monocle isn’t necessarily an accent piece. Maybe he just has bad eyesight in one eye!”
Because who would wear whole glasses if they could just wear half of one?
“Then you do the normal thing and bandage over that side of your face!” Gintoki proclaimed, because that was what people actually did.
“Oi, Shiroyasha-dono. You need to check your definition of normal,” Hijikata deadpanned. “Anyway, it’s just a weird elephant. There’s never any deep meaning when he shows up.”
“I’ll agree with that. In your letter you mentioned a dream where I told Dr. Boroboro where the fortune cookies were. It sounded too stupid to be deep.”
Clenching his fist hard enough for any camera to deem worthy to cut to it for a dramatic close-up, Hijikata remembered that dream. It wasn’t one he would have been raring to recount to Gintoki over breakfast. It wasn’t one anyone would be better off knowing about. So why the fuck had his drunk self felt the need to write about it and who knows what else?
Standing up and dusting themselves off in the wake of the mess Vimit had made was going to be awkward enough without Hijikata’s subconscious barfing bullshit on everyone’s shoes. How did you come back from this sort of thing? Was there a Rocky inspirational training montage or two Hijikata could go through that would make all of this go away? Was there a sunset he could run toward?
Running sounded good, actually. Running away sounded great. This might be the perfect time to take a long vacation someplace far away from anyone who even had a second cousin who might recognize him.
“I see you agree that this is all really stupid,” Gintoki continued, looking at him with half-lidded eyes and a bland expression that was somehow still really fucking judgy.
And there was the crux of Hijikata’s confusion. If whatever he had written had been so disgusting, wouldn’t staying far away be the better option?
“Why are you here, Yorozuya?” he asked.
“I already told you,” Gintoki said. “To put a stop to this. No more letters.”
“Vimit is gone, so it’s done,” Hijikata confirmed, taking a seat and picking up his papers and shuffling them in a way he hoped made him appear uncaring and businesslike. “Now get out of here.”
“No,” Gintoki said sharply, looming over Hijikata in a way that made it clear this was not, indeed, done. “Stop shoving this on the Amanto. I’m talking to you. No more letters.”
Hijikata looked up from his briefing about something or other – he couldn’t remember the details – to lock eyes with the Yorozuya. Did the guy really think Hijikata was going to start hiding love notes under his pillow? Had he stepped so far out of bounds with whatever he’d written that night with Vimit that he had traveled into the same mental category where Gintoki stashed his ninja stalker?
Swallowing heavily, Hijikata struggled to keep his expression neutral.
“I get it, already!” he snapped. “I won’t write to you. I won’t do anything to you. You have my word.”
If this was the way Gintoki wanted to end the months long farce a stupid, horny alien had compelled him to participate in, Hijikata figured he could suck it up and let him. He owed the asshole at least that much. After maintaining eye contact long enough to convey he was being genuine, Hijikata returned back to his work. He fingered his pocket for a cigarette, and made a grab for his lighter only to find it gone.
“You really really don’t get it, do you?” Gintoki spoke with a deceptively casual air, using Hijikata’s lighter to set fire to the crumpled letter he’d been carrying. “I’m saying no more letters, because they won’t cut it. That’s not enough now. That’s a bunch of monologues with no team work. That’s two people shouting from opposite sides of a ravine, and not actually crossing the divide to see what the grass looks like on the other side. For you and me that’s not good enough.”
He lobbed the burning heap into the ash tray.
In lieu of a reply, Hijikata simply lit his cigarette on the dying flames and took a drag. He still had no idea what the hell Gintoki was going on about, but this was good riddance to a letter that should have never existed in the first place.
Gintoki let out a snort that almost sounded fond, and sat back down on the floor right next to Hijikata so that their shoulders were nearly touching, but not quite.
“Obviously there are no words strong enough to dig their way through the wax clogging your ears, so it’s all gotta come from someplace deeper,” he said. “So you’ll actually get it.”
“Maybe you just need to learn to talk better,” Hijikata retorted.
“I’m talking just fine, and I’m saying I’m tired,” Gintoki replied, yawning wide enough to back up his claim, and to grace the world with a clear, unobstructed view of his uvula. “You’re exhausting. Now give me your hand.”
“What? No.”
But it was too late. Gintoki had already snatched him by the wrist, placing his arm palm up on the table, before laying his head on top.
“The table’s too rough. I need a pillow. Your bony hand’s not much better, but it’ll do.”
It was the sort of scene that had occurred more and more frequently as of late whenever the two of them were in the same room for one reason or another. Hijikata would be occupied with something like arguing on the phone with Harada or watching that fucking tearjerker of an ending to Aliens vs. Yakuza 6: You Snooza, You Yakuza, and all of a sudden he would notice that his hand was stuck on top of a permy head, absentmindedly rubbing the curls and scalp, as the owner of the hair flipped through an issue of JUMP or snored and drooled against his shoulder. He had never caught Gintoki in the act of depositing his hand where he wanted – the Yorozuya always managed to do it when Hijikata was occupied enough to not pay the background noise any attention –, and Hijikata never brought it up when he actually noticed minutes or hours later. It wasn’t anything that had ever needed to be discussed.
Hijikata looked at his own hand now, limp and motionless beneath a smooshed cheek and a messy head of hair.
“Gin…” he said, the syllable escaping his mouth before he realized it.
The fucker just looked up at Hijikata like he was the idiot. Like he was a big, gigantic idiot. Like his idiocy had grown to the point that it had its own local gravitational pull. Like he had just been proclaimed president of the idiots after a unanimous idiotic vote in his favor. Like Hijikata was utterly, irredeemably an idiot, but… in spite of it all, he would bear the burden of putting up with him.
“No more letters. Don’t make me say it again,” Gintoki said with a rough snort, and settled against Hijikata’s hand.
Hijikata was silent for a beat before huffing and turning away. Watching the wind brush roughly against the leaves on the trees outside his room, he took another drag of his cigarette with his one free hand, and threaded his fingers through soft, silver curls with the other.
“Alright already. No more letters,” Hijikata said. “Don’t get fussy.”
Out of the corner of his vision, he saw Gintoki smile and close his eyes. He felt a pair of lips press lazily into the dip in his palm.
And so they spent the morning.