Chapter Text
IX.
Tsukuyo only has to take one look at the men who wander through the streets of Yoshiwara to know what a powerful aphrodisiac loneliness can be. For a while, she had told herself that this was the reason she had found herself thinking of Gintoki on the evenings when patrol was quiet or when she was lying alone on her futon in winter, shivering even beneath three blankets. Not love – not even lust, really. Just a mistake, brought on by having too much time on her hands in which to think, something her brain threw up to confuse and distract her while she was trying to do her job.
Just because that had turned out not to be the case with Gintoki doesn’t mean it isn’t still true: loneliness can make someone behave in the stupidest of ways, see things that aren’t there, feel things that aren’t –
Tsukuyo cuts herself off before she can finish the thought, swallowing, feeling her cheeks colour. She wants to chew at her lower lip, but she forces her features into what she hopes is a mask of calm, reflecting nothing of the churning in her gut or the tightness in her chest. She doesn’t want to think about this. Her brain’s only useful to her if it’s being used to command her limbs – thinking has never led her anywhere good.
She doesn’t allow herself to hesitate before she rounds the final corner leading to her home. Seita isn’t kicking his heels in the dirt outside, and Tsukuyo isn’t sure what to name the feeling that stitches itself into her heart in that moment. It’s not relief, and it’s not regret. She can’t even say it’s disappointed expectation. She hasn’t seen Hijikata for several days, and she can’t even tell if she wants to, even though it would be foolish to let something like that come between them – whatever stupidity that loneliness and a sudden reminder of her own mortality had caused. They have done a lot of good together. And she likes him.
She’s had so few friends over the course of her life – or at least, few that she had realised were friends at the time – that perhaps she hadn’t known it for what it was at first. But she does like him. As a friend.
As a friend, she repeats to herself as she slides open the front door, steps out of her boots – and looks up to see Hijikata sitting on the tatami in the living room, a cup of Hinowa’s tea halfway to his lips.
For a moment she simply stands there staring at him, as he stares back at her, though what he has to look so surprised about she’s sure she doesn’t know – it’s her house. Vaguely, she’s aware of the faded bruises that still mottle his jaw and the fact that his hair has grown longer since the first time she saw him here, and now reaches down his neck almost to his collar. But mostly, her mind is blank, her muscles frozen. Tsukuyo has the fleeting thought that this might continue indefinitely, if not for the fact that Hinowa and Seita appear from the kitchen just at that moment with a tray of senbei.
“Oh –” Hinowa’s soft exclamation is the only thing that breaks the silence. Tsukuyo knows that Hinowa is capable of detecting awkward tension in the air, even if she usually chooses to gloss over it with her charm – but this time she seems to withdraw a little, placing the senbei on the table, before saying brightly, “Well. I won’t interrupt – in fact, it’s a lovely day, and I feel like going out into the sunshine. Seita, won’t you come with me?”
Evidently, Seita knows well enough when one of Hinowa’s suggestions isn’t really a suggestion at all, because he follows her without so much as a peep of protest, putting on his sandals before guiding her chair down the ramp and out the front door.
None of it can have taken more than thirty seconds, but to Tsukuyo, it might as well have been a year. When they’re finally gone, she still finds herself dithering as if this isn’t the entrance to her own home, before Hijikata takes a breath and says, “Your hair – it looks... good.”
Tsukuyo blinks, raising her hand to where her hair now sits in a bob just above her jaw – Hinowa, with a lot of muttering, had done what she could with it, but Tsukuyo honestly hasn’t thought much about it. The only thing of importance is that the cut across the back of her head is healing well.
She’s guessing, though, that Hijikata hasn’t come here to compliment her haircut. She steps onto the tatami, kneeling across from him. It’s good he’s come here, she thinks, looking down at her lap. It means he doesn’t mind what happened – they can forget about it. They can go back to what they were doing before. It means nothing.
“What’s happening?” she asks, when she thinks she can trust her voice enough to speak.
There’s a slight pause.
“I’m leaving Edo,” he says.
Tsukuyo looks up, blinking. She opens her mouth, but the only question she could ask would make her sound inane. But he reads the question in her eyes anyway, before he looks away, taking out a cigarette and lighting it.
“It’s been decided things might go easier if the Shinsengumi – ex-Shinsengumi – made themselves scarce for a while. Politically speaking.”
“Politically?” she asks, though she knows what he’s talking about: the nascent government that’s dragging itself out of the ashes of the old. No shougun, no Bakufu – something new, something different, and something that would prefer to distance itself from the chaos of the recent past.
Hijikata doesn’t answer her. He takes a drag on his cigarette, having apparently decided it’s okay to smoke as long as Hinowa isn’t here to see it.
“So where will you go?” she asks finally, looking up and catching his eye, if only for a moment.
He doesn’t answer her right away. They sit in silence, smoke hanging in the air between them like a scarf. She waits, suddenly not sure she wants to know the answer to her question – it feels almost as if she’s asked some other question entirely or inadvertently spoken about something she shouldn’t.
“During the clean-up,” Hijikata eventually says, voice low, “we were going through the rubble of some buildings the Bakufu was using to store old documents – records dating back to Sada Sada’s time.” He pauses. “The Kansei Purge. Government lists of dissidents, arrest and execution orders. Things the Tenshouin Naraku carried out.”
Tsukuyo is quiet, staring at him. Jiraia might have wished for her to grow up ignorant, but she can read and has educated herself about this country’s history, and she knows about the senseless brutality of the purges – and she knows firsthand what the Naraku are capable of.
She waits. Hijikata lights another cigarette.
“I didn’t know what I was reading until I’d read it,” he says, and Tsukuyo believes she can hear the unspoken, And I wish now I hadn’t.
“There was a school. A teacher. He was arrested – several times. But he kept going back to his school. No matter how many times they arrested him, he kept going back to his students. Until one time, he didn’t come back, and his students went to get him back.” He pauses, tapping ash from his cigarette, though he doesn’t lift it to his lips again. “Though it didn’t do any good, in the end.”
She could ask, Why are you telling me this? What has it got to do with anything? but she knows there’s only one reason why he’d be relating such a story to her. Tsukuyo feels sweat prickle at the back of her neck, sliding down her spine. She hears her own voice as she crouches beside Gintoki: Gintoki! Did your master –
Her breath catches, her throat closing too tight to let it pass. She knows what Hijikata is saying, and why he’d rather not know. Why it would have been better if he’d never stumbled across those papers in the course of cleaning up yet another of the messes left behind by the Tendoushuu. For a moment, anger flashes through her – Why did you make me know it too? – but then it’s gone. She can’t truly blame him.
Tsukuyo looks down to find her fists clenched in her lap, her nails cutting crescents into her palms. With conscious effort she relaxes her hands, spreads her fingers out across the tops of her thighs.
“I understand,” she says, voice soft. She swallows, forcing herself to look at his face. But he doesn’t look up, his head downturned.
“They’re at least giving me the choice of where I go, as long as it’s not Edo,” Hijikata says. He crushes out the cigarette he’s let burn down to the filter, not meeting her gaze as he lights another. “I heard the countryside down south is nice. The school’s not there anymore, but I figure it’s as good a place as any to start.”
To start…? she thinks, blinking. Hijikata still doesn’t look up, the fall of his hair obscuring his eyes. When he speaks again, his voice is barely higher than a low mutter.
“I’ll drag him back and dump him on your doorstep.”
She holds in her exhale, but only just. She opens her mouth, her mind blank, her ears filled with the thudding of her heart.
“What makes you think I’d want such a mess on my doorstep? Dump him on your own.” She can hear the shake in her voice, and she pauses just long enough – just long enough – to watch his eyes widen as they finally flick towards her, watch the way his throat moves as he swallows. “Or into the first ditch you come to. I don’t care.”
They don’t look at each other as Hijikata finishes his cigarette, crushing it out in the ashtray Hinowa always lays out when he’s here, even though before now he’s never used it. Tsukuyo knows she should say something, offer something – but she feels almost as if she cannot take in everything he’s told her. It feels like the sun: look too long or too directly at it, and it will leave you blinded.
“What about your gorilla and your brat?” she blurts out finally, as the silence becomes unbearable. “Do you trust them to look after themselves?”
“No. But Kondou-san is in someone else’s hands now. And Sougo never listens to me anyway.”
She looks down at her hands, still resting in her lap. They look calm; no one watching her from afar would guess at the way her heart is beating.
The words I could come with you rise in her mind. Somehow, she knows already the possibility is there, hanging formlessly in the air between them – all she’d have to do is say the words to give it shape. For a moment, she can feel herself trembling on the edge of it – It would be easy, to give myself this one thing – before she quietly, gently closes herself off from it. Hijikata’s not leaving by choice – he’s leaving because he has to. For her to go, when there are so many people here who rely on her… it would be nothing but selfish.
She looks up at him, and she thinks she can see expectation and maybe even hope in his eyes. It doesn’t matter, though, Tsukuyo decides – saying it would only place upon him the burden of saying either yes or no, and right now, she can recognise that neither of them know which would be the more difficult answer.
Perhaps he hesitates a moment longer before he rises and picks up his sword from where he’d left it by the door, and perhaps it takes her a moment longer to rise than she wants it to. He pauses as he steps into his sandals, turning to look at her, his hand on the door.
“I meant what I said.”
She returns his gaze levelly. “So did I.”
So they’re at an impasse, it seems, and there’s nothing left to say. Tsukuyo crosses her arms over her chest, wishing she was better with conversation – that she could give him some sweet parting words like Hinowa would, or say something flippant and infuriating, like –
“Take care,” she says, just as he begins to open the door. He doesn’t answer her, but he turns back slightly, nodding, before stepping out into the street and closing the door behind him.
Tsukuyo forces herself to count to five before she steps down into the entryway and opens the door to look after him – but he’s already gone, swallowed up by the crowds of the Yoshiwara street.
X.
Tsukuyo wakes in the quiet dawn, just as the first ragged stripe of sunlight begins to struggle its way through the gap in her window. To be honest, she’s surprised to find herself waking at all – she doesn’t remember going to sleep, though she remembers putting her head down on the pillow and staring at the wall for what seemed like hours, listening to her heartbeat drumming in her ears.
When she sits up, she’s surprised at how unfatigued she feels. But despite the lightness of her limbs, her head feels blank, as if she’s holding back her thoughts – though perhaps it’s better that way. She’s used to saving her thoughts for when she has time to think them. Rising, she opens her window, letting the first of the day’s light in, and looks out over the streets of Yoshiwara, which are only just now beginning to subside after a long night’s activities. Tsukuyo only pauses here a moment, but it’s long enough; she takes a breath and feels her heart tighten within her, and she has to press her fingers against the wood of the window frame before she can force herself to turn away and cross the room to kneel before the butsudan, bowing her head.
But focus eludes her, and eventually she slides away from the shrine, not wanting to sully it with things as trivial as the loneliness that curls inside her – loneliness she doesn’t even feel entitled to, since she has Hinowa and Seita, and every other friend she’s made. She has the women of the Hyakka. She has the streets of Yoshiwara; she has the city of Edo. She has the promises she made, spoken and unspoken, to people both present and absent.
It’s better not to think about what Hijikata said to her before he’d left yesterday. She understands him, and she knows he understands her, and that’s why they both know the words are futile. Kneeling in the half-light, Tsukuyo can almost let her mind wander to other places, other possibilities; almost without her conscious will, she raises her hand and touches her lips briefly, remembering the warmth of his against them. She wonders if that had been her one kiss to give, gone now, brief as a summer lightning strike... but as she clenches her fist, she finds the kiss she would have spent on Gintoki is still there within her – or perhaps it’s only that she can now bring herself to believe she has the space inside her heart for more than one kiss, spent or unspent. It seems like a trivial distinction when she thinks about it.
She’s not waiting; waiting implies something static, unmoving – a pause between breaths, the moment between one life-giving inhalation and the next. And this is not what she is doing.
Edo is remaking itself before her very eyes, becoming something more and perhaps something better than it was before – and the only thing she needs to do is stand up and put one foot in front of the other and keep her eyes focused forward. This isn’t the first time she’s forced open the door to a new world and, after hesitating a moment on the threshold, forced herself to step out into it.
It is the cusp of a new day; she rises and goes to work.