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Everything he touches turns to ash.
There’s just no use for a god of war outside a battlefield. Gintoki tries, he really does. But it always goes wrong, somehow.
He wanders from town to town after he leaves. He doesn’t do much.
He does farm. Someone somewhere will always need an extra pair of hands, and one day’s labor often means a home-cooked meal and a warm place to rest for the night. Shouyou, at least, taught him how to do this. He had given Gintoki a sword but that had been abandoned with the rest of the war, so all Gintoki has now is the hands that Shouyou once held while he lied through his teeth and said, “Gintoki, you’re not a monster.”
It’s backbreaking work, and he spends the nights sleeping on his stomach so as to not disturb the welting sunburns on his back, and his hands callous in all the wrong places, nothing like his firm grip around the handle of his sword. But it can’t last. If he stays too long, the crops die standing in the fields, the land sours. Fishermen pull up nets of dead fish. Cows give birth to calves with two heads, women don’t give birth at all. He leaves.
Most ex-soldiers end up in the city, like trash thrown in the ocean washing ashore for tourists to step on. They scratch out a meager living outside the law’s eye, doing jobs no one else acknowledges the existence of. When Gintoki finds his way there, a piece of glass sharpened by the ocean and not-quite buried beneath the sand, he sees at them at night, carting away shit from rich neighborhoods and selling it to the grocers’ as fertilizer, or slaughtering cows for the tanners, or cremating the dead. They build families, rent rooms in the ghettos, and tell their children the sword is nothing more than a generational difference, the mark of old men as much as the smell of their pillows and receding hairlines.
Gintoki tries to do the same. He scrapes excess flesh from the backs of rawhides and packs them in rock salt until he can barely breathe for the taste of it in the air; he sits with legs crossed in front of funeral pyres and fans the flames, keeping his head down to avoid the eyes of crying relatives. With the money, he buys himself a wooden sword, because he finds he can’t sleep without the smooth weight of something in his hand, and a blue scarf, which he uses to cover his nose and ears so he can’t smell the bodies roasting and the crackle of flames licking skin is muffled. He doesn’t talk to anyone.
Gintoki stays on the streets, catching moments of uneasy sleep in alleyways, his knees pulled up to his chest and his head resting in the corner between a wall and a doorframe, his toes turning blue against his straw sandals. If unpaved dirt is the skin of Edo, Gintoki always has his fingers on its pulse. He knows it can’t last.
The authorities begin to take notice of the growing population of soldiers. Soldiers are criminals, they say, thieves and murderers. The already limited jobs become nothing; people are afraid to hire them. Soldiers become desperate. Undesirable jobs turn into illegal ones, and then the police crack down. Gintoki watches bands of police—groups of five or six, far too large to justify—kick down the doors of men whose only crime was following Gintoki, once upon a time, and it's not just the soldiers they take. Wives and children scream as their husbands and fathers are cut down in front of them, and then they too are dragged away, only for their heads to be left out for the crows on the banks of the river that divides the city into rich and poor.
There’s a traitor. Gintoki hears whispers of it among men who are packing meager belongings and fleeing. The police know too much. Families who move once, three times, are tracked down as quickly as those who stay in their homes and cower.
Gintoki thinks it’s time for him to go as well. It is just like the farms. Just like the war, just like Tatsuma, just like Zura and Takasugi, just like Shouyou. There is nothing he can do here, and his disappearance will benefit more than his presence. He’ll follow the river, walk down it towards the sunset until he is far away from everything.
“Please! Spare my life!”
Gintoki tries to ignore the voice. It's a man, desperate, and coming from the direction of an alleyway that Gintoki knows is a dead end. From the sound of it—multiple bootsteps paired with the slight metallic rattle of a sword in its sheath as it bounces with the gait of its owner, and a pair of sandals flip-flopping against the heels of a someone running—it’s another arrest.
“I know!” the man says, close to tears and out of breath but exhilarated with desperation, “You can have my daughter as proof of my loyalty! After all, she’s just a leech some whore gave birth to and abandoned before the war.”
Gintoki walks into the street, behind the man, and draws his sword. It is only luck that it is the dull edge of a bokuto that swings into the man’s gut and slams him into the wall of a house so hard that the wooden siding buckles and cracks under his weight. The man collapses into himself, clutching his stomach and coughing up blood from a bitten cheek.
“Greetings,” Gintoki says to the three policemen, and his voice is creaking with disuse. “Who am I, you ask? Indeed, I am this idiot’s daughter.” He grins, and it hurts. “I don’t recall ever doing anything to anger you, but you can have this scum’s and my, the Shiroyasha’s, head.” He lets go of his sword, prying his fingers away from the grip one by one. It falls to the ground, and Gintoki suddenly feels like the world is tilting, that he lost a limb and doesn’t know how to balance against its missing weight. “In return, don’t go after the others anymore.”
He is taken in. The name of the Shiroyasha means nothing to these men. His hands are tied behind his back and he is led like an animal to the prison. The policemen strip him, rip away his scarf and give him nothing but too-big drawstring pants to wear. Gintoki thinks they might ask him questions, but—
They tighten the ropes around his wrists until they rub his skin raw, and weigh polished wood in their hands before bringing them down heavily against Gintoki’s skin. Fists to the jaw, knees to the gut, feet against the back of his neck. It’s invigorating, the energy and hatred that is directed so specifically against him. Gintoki revels in it. In war, the pain was so miasmic. It never mattered that it was him getting injured, or if it was anyone else. The horseback riders didn’t care who their lances hit, and the cannonmen didn’t aim their bombshells at him.
And so it goes. In some ways, it’s like his childhood. In some ways, it’s better than it’s ever been. He knows where he’s going to sleep every night, even if it is in a cell too small to lie down properly in, not even straw given as a barrier between his bare skin and the cold stone floors, and a bucket to piss in by his feet. He has food and water, if not ever quite enough of either. The only blood is his own, metallic too-red, like the fireworks that burst in his skull everytime an interrogator brings their truncheon down. He barely has to
move, besides a daily stumble from his cell to the interrogation chamber, and clenching his abdominal muscles and thighs when they order him to stay upright. And importantly, he doesn’t have to make decisions. Doesn’t even have to think.
This can’t last either. Gintoki hopes that death will put a stop to it, and he’s almost satisfied. A man walks in one day while the policemen are beating him, and yanks the truncheons from their hands. Gintoki is too far gone to realize anything has changed until whole minutes pass by without new pain, and he looks up. One eye is glued shut with blood from a deep cut on his temple, and the other is blurry with concussion and dehydration, but he can still make out the outline of a new figure. It’s taller, bulkier, than the policemen, and its robes are a subdued grey, contrasting with the dark blue of the police uniforms.
“Sakata Gintoki?” the figure asks. The man asks.
Gintoki tries to speak, but his chapped lips seem impossible to open, and if he tries to nod he knows he will tip forward and keep tipping forever until he falls onto his face.
A policeman kicks him. “Answer him!”
The man turns to the policeman, and maybe he says something or maybe it’s just the look on his face, but the policeman steps back. “Sakata Gintoki, also known as the Shiroyasha, you have been sentenced to death. You have been granted the honor of permission to commit ritual suicide. Your kaishakunin will be me, the 16th Ikeda Yaemon. Until the day of your execution, you will be held in the cells of the Ikeda clan.” He bows. “However short our partnership may be, I look forward to working with you, Sakata-san.”
The new cell—his last cell, the last cell he’ll be in until his soul is gone and he is nothing but cells which will die and decay until he is just one last cell and then he’ll just be memory and soon there won’t even be that—is a lot different from the old ones. It’s spacious, for one, and the emptiness of it is like the opposite of a punch to the stomach. It doesn’t feel real, and he doesn’t feel real. When he closes his eyes he can feel the world spinning around him, spiraling off into dizzying infinity, and when he stretches his arms out he touches nothing. The other big difference is the little girl who stands at the door of purgatory and watches him, all light hair and big eyes and pink kimono.
The first few days she just pokes her head around the door frame and blinks at him, but as time passes she grows bolder, venturing into the building and making a show of examining the other, empty, cells, though Gintoki sees her glancing at him every time she thinks he’s not looking.
“Excuse me,” she says, when she finally approaches him, her little hands clasped behind her back and her shoes politely left at the door. She really is young; her proportions are all wrong, as childrens’ are when their bodies haven’t figured out who they’re going to be yet. Her ears are a little too big for her head, and her legs are too short. Her eyes are the light blue of a newborn kitten’s, and Gintoki would think she was blind if he hadn’t been watching her watch him for weeks. “Why have you been locked up here? Did you do something bad?”
“Yeah,” Gintoki says, barely more than a grunt. “I’ve done loads of things that’d make you piss your pants, so I gotta lose my head.” Up close, he sees that the pink kimono has light pink flowers embroidered into it, and her yellow obi is tucked tightly into itself. He has no idea what a rich, well-taken-care-of kid like this is doing here.
She brings her hand up to her mouth, and her eyebrows pull down. “Really?”
“Yeah,” Gintoki says. “Now get lost. You’re annoying me, you damn pipsqueak.”
“But the executioner was saying you weren’t really a bad guy!” she says, suddenly adamant. Her hands clench into tiny fists.“That all you did was protect a poor little girl!” She fidgets a little, looking down at her toes. “But now you…it’s so sad.” She perks up, a smile lighting her face. She’s missing a canine, and both her incisors are banded brown. “Oh, I know! One day, when I become a great executioner, I’ll take your head for you.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep! I’ll cut it nice and good so it doesn’t hurt! I’ll send you to heaven in peace! So promise me—until I become a great executioner, you can’t die, okay?”
Her hair is far lighter than it should be, an almost ashen blonde that hangs limply from her head like straw, though it’s obvious that a great amount of effort has been put into washing and brushing it. Her arms are a little too thin for a child her age, her skin stretched tightly across the bone. It’s hard to tell under the bulkiness of the kimono, but Gintoki thinks a slight curve around her stomach betrays a swollen abdomen. Her cheeks are round, but the shadows around her eyes are dark and her lips are chapped.
Gintoki smiles despite himself. That explains it. It’s good to know that not everything turns out for the worse. “That so?” He leans his head back against the concrete wall. His neck cracks; he realizes he doesn’t know how long its been since he moved from this position. “In peace, huh? Sounds good.”
“So it’s a promise?” the girl says.
“I dunno, kid,” Gintoki says. “I’m not too good at promises. Plus, how do I know you’re gonna hold up your end of the bargain? I don’t want to wait around for twenty years while you figure out where the head is.”
She stomps her foot. “I know where the head is!” she says. “I thought you were supposed to be a good guy.”
“Not a bad guy,” Gintoki corrects. “One day you’re gonna learn that not-bad guys are worlds away from good guys.” He looks at her face, and sighs. “Alright, alright. I’m in your hands.”
She leaves with a harrumph, and Gintoki works up the energy to turn himself around and lean his back against the bars of his cell, the curve of his spine between two steel bars and his head nestled against them. His joints ache with disuse, but some demons are best left unseen.
Behind Gintoki’s back, the 16th Ikeda Yaemon peels himself away from the shadows and sits down on the other side of the bars, a mirror image slightly to the left.
“I’ve never known a demon to talk kindly to a little girl,” says Ikeda.
“I’ve never known a shinigami to rescue the starving daughter of a bastard and a whore,” says Gintoki.
Ikeda laughs, and it's the bitter laugh of old men who don’t think life is worth any emotion stronger than melancholy humor. “I wish I could think of it as a rescue. She is an innocent who I’ve cursed. A human who I’ve brought into a family of shinigami.”
“Shinigami, huh?” Gintoki leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “She seems happy. Most children would say yes to undeath if they got a family in the deal. But make sure that your decision now doesn’t force her into making some shitty choices later.”
“You seem to speak from experience.”
“And you don’t seem like too bad a guy, for shinigami. Take care of her, okay?”
“Shall I promise?” Gintoki can feel the smile.
“I’ve reached my daily quota of promises, old man,” Gintoki says. “Just do it out of the kindness of your wrinkled heart.”
“Do you think you are a sinner, Sakata-san?”
Gintoki shrugs. “I’ve had a heaven on earth, and I’ve had hell. Any sins I committed were in hell, so what am I supposed to take away from that?”
“A fallen god is not a pretty thing,” Ikeda says. “When sinners fall, the only beings capable of lifting them back to earth are neither the demons that take human heads nor the shinigami that take their souls, but sinners who sever their sins to save their own souls.”
“Do you want me to repent?” Gintoki says to the opposite wall. “Do you want me to get before you on my knees and beg for forgiveness?” Gintoki’s fists curl; his fingernails dig red trenches into his palm. “‘Sinners who sever their own sins’ you say. My sins are mine, old man, and I’ll drag them behind me until the day my head leaves my shoulders.”
“I see,” says Ikeda, and stands up. “It was a pleasure to talk with you, Sakata Gintoki.”
Gintoki waits until he hears the door to the building click shut and the back of his neck no longer prickles with the feeling of being watched, and then he turns around. Where the shinigami had been sitting, there was a neatly folded pile of clothes with a pair of woven sandals on top, close enough that he can reach through the bars and pull them in. They are the old threadbare grey of clothes that have been washed so often that their original colors have been lost to time. And tucked inside the sleeve of the robe is a small, silver key.
It’s winter. The snow crunches under his sandals and bites at his toes. His robe fits badly, and hangs open at his chest, and the sleeves barely cover his elbows, let alone his hands. His legs are numb, each muscle so taut that the screaming pain has canceled out to nothing but a background haze.
He keeps on walking. His sandals are soaked through. He feels as if he is floating half out of his body, not entirely aware of each plodding step forward. He walks out of the temple of death, out of the heathenous city, out of the small suburb outcroppings, out of the farmlands, out of places with people and warmth and comfort, out of things to fall in love with that crumble in his grip, out of unkept pinky-promises, out and out and away forever.
He collapses in a graveyard. Gintoki tries to keep going, he does, but his legs won’t hold him up any longer and after he falls, he can’t move his frozen fingers enough to claw at the ground and pull himself forward. He manages to prop himself up on a gravestone, and he leans his head against the stone and lets the cold seep into his skull, into his bones, ice in his blood. Gintoki closes his eyes.
He is awoken by a voice, praying. Gintoki doesn’t open his eyes, doesn't move, but he can feel the warmth of the person’s devotion against the back of his neck, sending shivers down his spine. He’s been too cold to shiver, lately.
It’s an old woman. Her voice creaks on every word. She tells the gravestone about the goings-on in her village (the fishmonger’s daughter from down the street ran away with the fifth son of the tax collector), how the weather has been (too cold for these old bones), about her cat (caught trying to eat the pearls on her necklace).
She must see that Gintoki is there, quietly appropriating her husband’s grave as his own. But she doesn’t mention it. Gintoki can feel his tongue, filling up his mouth, and thinks he will choke on anything he attempts to say. It’s not until he hears the clink of a plate being set down that Gintoki’s brain unfreezes enough to string together: “Oi, granny. Are those manju? Can I have some? I’m starving to death here.”
“These belong to my husband,” says the old hag. “Ask him.” She stands up with the huff-puff dignity of the arthritic, and leaves.
Gintoki reaches around and tries to grab the buns. His fingers are too cold to grip anything, and he ends up pawing at the buns until he hits the edge and the wooden plate flips over, leaving the manju in a heap on the snow. Gintoki has to use both hands as clumsy shovels to pick one up, and even then he ends up craning his neck forward and tears at a bun with his teeth. He wishes he could say that his mouth explodes with flavor, that he tears up with the first bite. But they taste like nothing, and his jaw aches too much to chew, so the bread ends up sitting in his mouth until it dissolves into a mush from his saliva, and even then he chokes as he swallows.
“What did my husband say?” The hag is back the next day, leaning on a walking stick Gintoki is sure she didn’t have last time. She didn’t even bring a blanket. Bitch. She probably killed her husband. Her husband was probably grateful to be dead, with a cold-hearted wife like her.
“Beats me,” Gintoki says. His jaw hurts so much now that the words come out slurred. He’s not even sure if he’s saying them, or if this is just another dream. “The dead don’t talk.”
“You’re just asking for it. Don’t blame me if you get cursed.”
“The dead don’t talk and they don’t eat dango,” Gintoki says, and it’s true. “So I made a one-sided promise. ‘I won’t forget this debt,’ I said. ‘Your wife doesn’t have that much longer to live, but I’m going to protect her in your stead.’”
“Protect me?” the hag says, and laughs. “What can a half-frozen corpse protect me from?”
“Having leftovers,” Gintoki says. “It’s criminal, wasting food just because you still cook for two.”
“I see,” the hag says. “But coming out here everyday is hard on my knees. You better stay at my house until you help me figure out a serving size.” She hands him the walking stick, and drapes her own shawl around his shoulders. “And you ought to carry these for me, they’re too heavy.”
Gintoki looks at the stick in his hands. It’s not a walking stick, or a cane, but the smooth lacquered wood of a bokuto. “Got it, grandma,” Gintoki says, and uses it to lever himself to his feet.
The hag introduces herself as Otose, and the first thing she makes Gintoki do is root his ass in front of her fireplace and make sure it stays stoked all night. For payment, she makes him lukewarm tea that goes down his throat like boiling water poured on ice, and in the morning, slightly warmer but flavorless broth.
She’s a priestess, or at least she was once. Now she sells sake to the town’s cheapest drunkards, does emergency midwifery, and makes charms for wives to hang on their doors. She has a mottled brown cat that she insists is just a stray, even though she leaves the door to her bedroom slightly open so it can come curl up on her futon. It steals shiny objects and hordes them under the bar, and it hisses at Gintoki if he even thinks about petting it, or more often, feeding it cream until it chokes.
The bokuto was her late husband’s. Gintoki doesn’t ask, and Otose doesn’t tell. He keeps it on him all the same. A bokuto is useless for anything more than getting splinters in the palms of beginners, but the weight on his hip keeps the world balanced. Sensei’s sword, given to him before the man even reached out to take Gintoki's hand, has been long abandoned, left behind on a battlefield with no name. Driving it into the ground and leaving it upright like a flagpole had seemed too ceremonious; so had burying it in the mass graves with the soldiers.
Otose seems immune to Gintoki’s curse, or maybe she’s too stubborn to realize any misfortune has befallen. Gintoki wouldn’t put either past her. She puts Gintoki in the room above hers and leaves him to his own devices.
It’s almost fun. There is a brief yet torrid affair with a beautiful fleshy woman that ends up with at least four people being thrown into a cold river for their own good, Otose feeds him almost every night even if she complains about freeloaders, and his borrowed bokuto never leaves his hip.
He hears nothing about Takasugi, Zura, or Tatsuma. But then, that’s to be expected. Gintoki sits outside and thinks about Tatsuma, who has to be some hot-shot trader by now. Tatsuma had disliked isolation in all its forms. Gintoki tries to imagine him in some undefinable elsewhere. Somewhere beyond the horizon. What Zura is doing is harder to think about. Gintoki can only think of the last time he had seen him, and can’t imagine how Zura managed to get back to his feet. Can only see him in stasis, trapped in a time where Gintoki is always swinging his sword down, down.
Takasugi, he is sure, is long gone.
But mostly, as Gintoki lies on his futon, staring up at the ceiling, he thinks about pasts. Alternates.
A fantasy: Shouyou doesn’t find Gintoki.
It’s an easy dream. Shouyou never should have found him anyway; it was a miracle (a curse) that he had. All kinds of gods are born in war, the kinds that fester in people’s hearts and are meant die with them. A child living among corpses is nothing. Shouyou should have heard the story and laughed, not come looking. In this fantasy, he and Gintoki never meet. Gintoki fades from relevance like whatever war had mothered him, had peeled away young men’s flesh and ground down their bones and shaped the remains into the Shiroyasha. He disappears, and Shouyou forms a school without Gintoki at his side, and he never meets Zura and Takasugi because Gintoki is not picking fights with other schools behind Shouyou’s back. Shouyou doesn’t get a reputation for raising demons. He dies at home, of old age, and there are students (different students) at his side, and they hold his hand and cry but there are no promises to keep.
A fantasy: Shouyou gives Gintoki his sword, and Gintoki says no.
The memory of that day is hazy, even in Gintoki’s imagination. He hadn’t known any words back then. There had only been feelings, which Gintoki now struggles to translate. A sword, sharp-glintsinsun-hurts-protectscare; the dead notthreat-smell-foodmaybe; the living, threatdangerous-strange-dontknow-no. Shouyou should have been terrifying. Had been terrifying. Gintoki should have been paying attention. He should have run away before Shouyou got anywhere near him. Shouyou should have tried to give Gintoki his sword and Gintoki should have known nothing but pain could come from it.
A fantasy: Gintoki chooses Shouyou.
They say, “Your disciples have done just what they were taught.” They say, “Will they choose the path of dying with you?” They say, “Or with their own hands, will they choose the path of survival, even if it means killing their master?” They say, “Martyrdom or sacrifice.” They say, “Your master or your comrades.” Shouyou’s pinky curls behind his back, and Gintoki knows what to do, but he can’t. He looks at Zura—Katsura—and Takasugi. And. And he had warned them, when they were children, years before they had any concept of forever, that their humanity was forfeit, and they had just laughed. And what are these two to him? What puts them above any other one of Shouyou’s students, who Gintoki had been happy to ignore and whose deaths, even now, feel like nothing? What are they when stood next to Shouyou? Shouyou, who is everything and more than everything. Gintoki’s sword comes down once, twice.
Gintoki tells Otose about it, one night after begging for one cup of sake turns into begging for another bottle. He rambles. His words don’t make sense, even to himself, but Otose listens anyway, refilling his cup. Ash from her pipe falls into the sake. Gintoki doesn’t care.
“One day, I’m going to get you to talk to me without alcohol on the table,” Otose says. “What is it that you want to do, Gintoki? You can’t stay here forever.”
Gintoki knows. Gintoki knows he can’t stay just as surely as he knows that he has nowhere to go. He shrugs, possibly; he feels disjointed, not quite connected to his body, like the dreams where he’s already woken up and bathed, and wakes up again not really knowing what’s real or what he’s done. He doesn’t think it’s all due to the alcohol.
“Dunno,” he says. Of all the futures and pasts he’s imagined, not one involves him continuing. They all end.
Otose comes around from behind the bar and sits next to him. He pours her a drink, but his fingers slip on the bottle and the neck knocks over the cup, spilling sake onto the table. Otose grimaces and takes the bottle from his hands. “I don’t let drunkards serve me,” she says.
“Must not get served a lot,” Gintoki mumbles. He’s not at his best. He uses his sleeve to wipe at the spilled sake.
“No,” Otose agrees, and sets her cup back upright. She empties the bottle into it. “Have I ever told you about my husband?”
“Met him once,” Gintoki says. “Bit cold, I thought.” He nudges her with his elbow. “Bit of a stiff.”
“He was a lot like you,” Otose says, ignoring him. “Our town loved him, and he loved it. And I loved him.” She takes a sip. “Tatsugorou was very local, of course, but that made it special. He was our own patron. And he was kind. Children brought him flowers.”
“Sounds like a nice guy,” Gintoki says. “Gimmie that, willya?” He gestures at the pipe Otose has balanced in her left hand while she drinks.
Otose passes the pipe over. “The town was peaceful, for the most part. Domestic disputes, and such. It was big enough for a red-light district, but even the prostitutes felt like they could pray to him. It was mostly merchants and shopkeepers. Some farmers on the outskirts. Artists. When I was a girl, I thought it was heaven.”
“Wait,” Gintoki says. “Your husband—”
“He didn’t have to do much. Good harvests, easy births, safe travels, that sort of thing,” Otose continues. “But then the war came.”
Gintoki doesn’t ask which war. It doesn’t matter. There used to be wars everywhere. Still are, somewhere.
“Our men were swept into the fervor. The prayers changed. My husband suddenly needed to become something more.” She takes a drink. “But we weren’t ready for it. We tried—he tried—but it wasn’t what we were made for. The town was destroyed. I’m sure you know the look, if not the feeling. And Tatsugorou died.”
“Oh,” Gintoki says. He takes a long draw from the pipe, breathes out a cloud of fragrant smoke. The lip of the kiseru tastes like Otose’s safflower red rouge. “I thought miko were all virgins.”
Otose slaps him upside the head, but gently. Gintoki barks out a laugh, and puts the pipe back to his lips.
“Was it worth it?” he asks, smoke falling from his lips with the question.
“What?”
“Was it worth it? Your life now—was it worth his death?” Gintoki taps out the ash in the bowl of the pipe into a wooden ashtray. “Is this a future worth living in?” He puts the pipe down on the table between them; the counter is sticky with spilled sake. “A future…a future is built upon all the choices made in the past. Was your choice to love him worth losing him?”
“A bad past does not mean a bad future, Gintoki,” Otose says.
“A good future is the one that makes the past worth living through,” Gintoki says. Suddenly, he can’t stand to be here, sitting in a room that smells of smoke and alcohol and old lady perfume. Otose is sitting in the chair next to him, half a foot away, and the rest of the bar is empty, but he feels too pressed in. He gets up, grabbing the table for support. The brush of Otose’s sleeve against his arm as he walks past her makes his skin crawl. “G’night, grandma.” .
One more fantasy: Gintoki can die.
(The lead up, he can imagine. He’s seen it plenty of times. But past dying, to have died, to be dead, is beyond him. He wants to see Shouyou one more time, wants to look up at him [and Gintoki knows that he is taller now than Shouyou was, but the third to last time he saw Shouyou he was still a kid clutching at his hand, and the second to last time Shouyou was on his knees, and the last time he was down a head] and see his smiling face and ask him one last question, receive one last explanation).
The next day, Otose drags him out of his bed, even though the sun is too bright and his mouth is filled with cotton and his brain is actually pulsing against his skull. He had tried to escape by hiding in the bathroom, but Otose had gone outside and thrown wood into the heater until he was steamed out. His hair is still wet and plastered against his scalp, and he’s sweating through his yukata when Otose sits him down in front of a pile of blank wooden placards and hands him a brush.
“What’s this?” Gintoki asks.
“We’re writing good luck charms and fortunes,” Otose says.
“Why?”
“We’re going to sell some,” Otose says, pulling an ornate red-gold-mahogany box out from under the counter. She flips open the the two gilded clutches. “And the rest we’ll give to the local temple.” She takes an inkwell and an inkstick from the box. “It doesn’t matter what you write, just spell them correctly and make sure there are slightly more good fortunes than bad ones.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Gintoki says.
“I’m tired of you lazing around the house all day,” Otose says, tying up her draping sleeves. “So you’re going to work with me.”
“I went to work with you yesterday,” Gintoki complains.
“Coming downstairs to drink does not count,” Otose says, pouring water into his inkwell.
“But I wasn’t a customer,” Gintoki said. “I know you’re going senile, but customers pay.”
“Some customers have a running tab,” Otose reminds him.
A look of genuine concern flashes across her face. Gintoki isn’t even sure if he saw it. “You do know how to write, don’t you?”
Gintoki points the tip of the brush at her. “You can’t just assume every schmuck you pick up in the streets has had access to the same kinda education you did,” he says. He leans forward and wiggles it centimeters away from Otose’s nose. “You’re gonna make me cry. I probably have a complex.”
Otose snatches the brush from Gintoki’s hands. Gintoki sits back and watches as she makes her ink, then writes four fortunes in quick succession: worst luck, bad luck, good luck, best luck. She puts them in front of Gintoki, lifting them up with the tips of her fingers so as not to smear the ink.
“Even you can copy, right?” she says, picking up his right hand and putting the brush in his palm. Ink runs down from the tip and onto his wrist.
“Trademark, maybe,” Gintoki says. The ink is crawling down his forearm and pooling in his elbow, leaving a grey-stained vein mapping out the contours of his skin. The weight of a brush in his hand is no longer a familiar one.
On his thigh, he digs the nails of his left hand into his flesh, gouging. His wrist begins to cramp with the tension.
Gintoki carefully places the brush back onto the table. He is not sure if his hand is shaking, or if his breath is rattling ragged, or if the vague nausea building up in his chest is the start of a fever. He does feel hot, and his head is throbbing, and his throat is dry, so maybe it is a fever.
Otose is explaining stroke order and how to balance the characters. She moves the inkwell with her ink to Gintoki’s right.
He wants to stand up and leave, but can’t find the energy to get to his feet. Gintoki can feel Otose’s eyes on him, and that knowledge makes his headache worse. He doesn’t want to write today, but that’s not an excuse.
“Gintoki?” Otose says.
Gintoki sets both hands on the table and levers himself upright. The nausea increases, and he has to lean against the wall to regain his balance. He can see Otose out of the corner of his eye, still sitting on her knees, looking up at him, but she’s out of focus. Gintoki wraps an arm around his stomach and another across his mouth and gags. The spilled ink smears across his lips. It’s not even real sickness, he knows this even as he sinks to the ground, coughing so hard tears form at the corners of his eyes. His stomach isn’t upset, it's just that no part of his body wants to stay inside him. He’s faking it, he must be, and that makes it worse.
Otose’s at his side, saying his name, and her voice is excruciating, a cheese grater smacked against his temple and dragged back and forth, grinding down his skull and soon it's going to greet the soft meat of his brain and grate that down too. Gintoki takes his arm away from his stomach and flails at her, trying to ward her off. His toes curl. He bites down on the hand covering his mouth until he tastes blood, and now his flailing hand seems too far away from his body and its unbalancing, so he threads his fingers in his hair and presses his nails into his skull and the back of his neck.
He stays like that for a long time, or maybe only a few minutes. His heart slows, though he can still feel every beat knocking at his throat. Gintoki slumps against the wall, lets both hands fall to the floor, and stares ahead, unblinking.
It hits him again—has hit him many times before, but he’s not sure he’s ever understood, not sure if he’s understanding now—that he is never going to see Shouyou-sensei again. Gintoki looks at his hands. There is dead skin and dandruff and a little bit of blood under his nails.
Otose isn’t in the room. Probably left a while ago. Gintoki stands up slow, his joints creaking, and walks to his room, taking each step one at a time. He unties his obi, lets his yukata slip to the floor. His every movement is mechanical, studied and deliberate. He lays out his futon, straightening the corners with his foot. Drops the pillow onto it. He lies down for a second, then sits up, his back creaking. He reaches down to his feet and pulls the blanket there up over his chest. Gintoki settles onto his back, his arms straight at his sides, and looks at the ceiling until exhaustion overtakes him. The afternoon sun is still shining through the window.
Otose stops haranguing him for a week, and only mentions it once. Gintoki’s having dinner at the bar, though he’s found it hard to look her in the eye recently. Otose’s drying cups, and the cloth she’s wrapped around her hand squeaks against the glass as she twists it around inside each one.
“I can avoid it if you tell me what it is,” she says, apropos of nothing. There’s no change in tone, just a simple statement of fact. Gintoki thinks he would appreciate the lack of pity more if any thought of the incident didn’t put him off his food.
Gintoki shrugs, pokes at a dumpling with a chopstick.
Otose eyes him. Then she shrugs too, and returns to her cups.
When she next forces the issue, yukata season has come and gone, and Otose waits to ambush him until after he’s finished repairing the low fence around her meager garden plot, destroyed by the rainy season’s strong winds a few weeks ago.
“Wash your hands,” she says, as if he hadn’t dirtied them spending three hours trying to figure out how to nail planks of wood together for her tomatoes. “I need your help with the protective charms.”
Gintoki is so, so tired. He wipes his hands on the back of his pants and doesn’t look Otose in the eye. “Are you going senile now?”
Otose crosses her arms. “I made them all myself,” she says. “You need to tie strings onto them so they can be hung.”
Gintoki lets out a breath. “All you do is nag, nag, nag,” he says, following her back inside.
He drills two-hundred holes into the tops of two-hundred wooden plaques, and loops thin red strings through all of them. It’s mind-numbing work, and the end of string keeps splitting. He wets the ends with his tongue to stick the strands together, but it doesn’t ever seem to help much. And his hand isn’t steady enough to push the split string through the hole; the more he concentrates, the shakier he gets. It’s like when he grips something hard enough that shivers run up and down his arm.
It’s not relaxing. He doesn’t enjoy it. But the hag gives him sweet cakes afterwards, and it fills a few hours of his day, which has been harder and harder to do recently. He’s been sleeping a lot, just because it’s more interesting than sitting around and thinking.
Otose is more persistent after that. The next week, she lures him downstairs with the smell of cooking sausage, and then tells him, “We’re going out,” when his mouth is too full to protest. If Otose had been an enemy strategist, the war would have ended at the first rumble of a stomach.
“I don’t like having you sit around all day,” Otose says as Gintoki stumbles along behind her. The strap on his sandals cuts into the space between his big toe and the rest when he drags his feet. “It makes me look bad. I don’t want the neighbors to think I’m running a charity.”
“You can stop running anytime now,” Gintoki says. “What’s the big hurry? Anyway, doesn’t it just look like you replaced your husband with a hot young stud? They should be happy for you.”
Otose slows her pace until Gintoki is walking beside her, instead of struggling to keep upright as she pulls him along. Then she slaps him upside the head.
“I want you on your best behavior,” she says. “Better than your best. Pretend you’re someone halfway respectable for a fews hours.”
“Hours?”
Otose pulls him into a grandiose home.
Gintoki is still pulling off his shoes and trying to surreptitiously smell his feet and clean out the lint between his toes while the mistress of the house greets Otose and they go through the usual formalities that Gintoki has never listened to nor cared to understand. Otose grabs Gintoki’s ear after she decides he’s stalling and hauls him upright.
“My assistant,” Otose says, by way of explanation, though in the same tone someone else would say my good for nothing nephew, whose mother sent him to me to beat some character into him, you know how it is, kids these days.
Otose is a good five centimeters shorter than him, but she manages to get her hand on the back of his neck and her elbow on his spine, and she pushes him into a bow. “It’s nice to meet you,” she hisses, when his bow has forced his ear to about the level of her mouth.
“S’nice to meet’cha,” Gintoki mumbles.
The woman gives an uncomfortable laugh, and leads them into her own chambers. She’s middle-aged, just the beginnings of lines showing around her eyes and mouth; the kind of lady Zura would write misguidedly erotic poetry about. Her kimono is probably pretty nice, though Gintoki’s no judge, and her makeup is a lot like what he sees geishas wear in woodblocks, or what he sees prostitutes with high hopes wearing in red light districts. Her hair is tied up in intricate knots that Gintoki has a hard time believing are real; he has enough trouble figuring out the weird pinned up monstrosity that Otose has. And he had once been proud of himself for learning to braid Zura’s hair.
Gintoki sits down cross-legged behind and a little to the left of Otose. While the woman isn’t looking, Otose leans back and slaps his thigh. “On your knees!”
“Heard that one before,” Gintoki mutters, and pulls his knees under him and sits back on his heels.
“Thank you for coming,” the woman says. “It’s nothing major, but—” and she launches into a tale that seems to stretch back ten years and revolves around her inability to keep her candles lit and a quarrel with her mother-in-law and her husband’s daughter from his first marriage.
Gintoki wiggles his toes in an effort to keep his legs from falling asleep.
The room is nice too. Everything’s very clean, without the smell of smoke and alcohol that haunts Otose’s place. There’s a scroll hung up, with calligraphy so ornate that Gintoki can only make out one word out of ten. There’s a vase with a single pink flower in it, which Gintoki can guess is very high-class. The closet is a fraction of an inch open, as if someone had closed it in a hurry and the door had bounced back against the frame, and Gintoki thinks he can see the corner of a mosquito net peeking out, which he certainly doesn’t have. In the summer, he just has to choose between shutting the windows and doors and sweating so much he drowns, or being eaten alive.
Gintoki stares at the space just above the woman’s left shoulder. If he really focuses on keeping his eyes open, maybe he can take a nap with no one noticing. Some people dream of pissing and wake up to wet sheets, or dream of a banging babe and wake up to sticky sheets; Gintoki’s going to dream of being awake and someplace interesting.
“I understand,” Otose says. “My assistant and I will stay the night and keep watch.”
The woman nods. “Can I provide you with anything—blankets, perhaps?”
“We will not be sleeping,” Otose says firmly. “A few candles will do.”
“Ah,” the woman says. “Then I see your assistant is preparing for the long night ahead.”
Gintoki catches himself just before his chin touches his chest and he slumps over. “M’wake,” he says.
Otose sighs.
They set up camp for the night in the woman’s bedroom. The woman is asleep on her futon, her thick blanket rising and falling peacefully. Otose had told him, with a stern look, to behave himself, but Gintoki had never slept in a room without other people until recently, and besides, perving out over seeing a mom in her nightclothes is something middle school boys do at sleepovers. If Gintoki’s going to take up with a mom, it’d be a nice lady in her late thirties who knows exactly what she likes in bed and wants to do something fun and casual while her kids are at school. Something uncomplicated like that.
This is actually turning out to be one of the least sleazy jobs he’s ever done.
The woman had lit three candles, and set them a good distance away from her bed. She lets them burn down all night, she had said, because she’s got cash to waste and fear of the dark that could be traced back to her girlhood.
Otose’s sitting on her knees by Gintoki’s side, staring at the candles. The way the flickering light catches at her wrinkles makes it look as if her face is full of holes.
“Shut up,” she says, though Gintoki didn’t think he had said anything.
“Don’t bitch at me because you haven’t had a smoke in ten minutes,” Gintoki whispers. “It’s not my fault you’ve got an addiction.”
“You were humming,” she says.
“Well, it’s creepy in here, isn’t it?” Gintoki says defensively.
“Calm down,” Otose snaps.
“I’m plenty calm!” Gintoki says. “You’re the one as tense as a—oh, sorry.”
The woman turns over in her sleep, and Gintoki brings his voice back down to a whisper. “C’mon. Tell the lady she’s got a drafty room and go home. Or, hey—you want to solve it? I’ll come back tomorrow and insulate a bit, I promise.”
Otose doesn’t look away from the candles. “Why do you think I brought you here, Gintoki?”
“‘Cause you hate me?” he tries. “Because you think I’m lazy? Because you think my path towards a respectable occupation can be found by hanging out in married women’s bedrooms? Because you really hate me?”
“Hm,” Otose says. “You really are an idiot. Sit still.”
“My legs are falling asleep,” Gintoki complains, and then—stops.
There’s a quiet sound, as of something walking across the room. It’s too light to make the floor creak, but the tone reminded Gintoki of unsheathed claws tap-tap-tapping on wooden floors. Gintoki can’t see anything; but that doesn’t mean nothing’s there.
The first of the woman’s candles is snuffed out, going from dancing flame to thin trails of acrid smoke floating up from the burnt wick without even so much as a flicker.
“Granny?” Another candle goes out.
“Quiet.”
The candles are slowly extinguished one by one, as if someone is licking their fingers and pinching out each burning wick as they walk from the door to the woman’s bed. Gintoki’s hand goes to the hilt of bokuto, his fingers wrapping around the lacquered wood. He makes to stand up, but Otose grabs the back of his yukata and pulls him back down.
The last candle goes out.
The woman sits straight up, her long hair wild around her shoulders, and screams.
Gintoki waits outside while Otose calms the woman down. He wishes the old biddy would come and calm him down. His heart is still beating fast enough that he feels lightheaded. When he closes his eyes, he can see those three candle flames seared against the backs of his eyelids, and the hairs on his arms prickle. It’s silly to be afraid of ghosts, but he doesn’t like the idea of the dead watching him; dead fingers snuffing out living lights is even worse.
The sun is pulling itself over the horizon when Otose finally comes outside and gets Gintoki. As they walk home, Gintoki trying to slick back his bedhead with a spit-dampened hand and Otose looking as put-together as always, Otose asks, “So what do you think?”
“I have a stone in my sandal,” Gintoki says.
“You have a stone in your skull,” Otose says. She looks at him. “I don’t expect you to have an opinion now. But I want you to think about what happened.”
“What did happen?” Gintoki asks. “I have no idea what the hell went down.” He stops and pulls off his shoe, turning it over and shaking out the pebble.
“She’s scared of the dark,” Otose says, as if that’s an answer.
Gintoki jogs to catch back up with her. “So what? Plenty of people are. Not everyone is haunted by a candle-snuffer.”
“She’s her husband’s second wife,” Otose continues. “His daughter is only a few years younger than her. The daughter was resentful, and worked with her grandmother to play a prank on her. Harmless enough. They figured out her fear, and gave her candles with a faulty wick, so they went out in the middle of the night.”
“Huh.” Gintoki can think of much worse pranks.
“That’s not an evil act unto itself,” Otose says. “Blowing out candles is not evil. But unlit candles mean darkness, and darkness is where evil thrives. And fear doesn’t ever help matters.”
Gintoki whistles. “Act unto itself? Thrives? You’re gettin’ pretty eldritch, grandma.”
Otose rolls her eyes up to the sky. “The daughters prank paved the way for the demon—it’s a hikeshi-baba, I think—for the demon to enter. And the baba makes it dark, and the darkness breeds fear, and the fear is going to invite much worse, much more dangerous, demons into that home.” She nods at a passerby. “Do you understand, Gintoki?”
“No,” Gintoki says. “No, I don’t.” He strides in front of her, suddenly wanting nothing more than to be home. He stops just outside the door to the bar and says, without turning around, “So what are you gonna do about it?”
Otose pushes him aside and opens the door. “The goal, Gintoki, is not to destroy the creature, but to change the emotions that invited it in.”
“‘Invited it in?’” Gintoki repeats, incredulous. “It’s not her fault that she’s afraid of the dark. You can’t blame her.”
“I’m not blaming her,” Otose snaps. “But bad feelings invite bad things. We need to—”
“What should she have done? She’s not allowed to—it’s bad to feel bad because maybe some other people will feel bad too?”
“You’re deliberately misunderstanding.”
“I am not!” He can hear Sensei telling him petulance is unbecoming, and cares as little now as he did then. “It’s not her fault she’s scared!”
“No, it’s not,” Otose says. She shrugs her haori off and hangs it off the back of a chair. “But it’s our job to find out why. She’s not to blame, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be part of the solution.”
“She’s not the one who should have to change,” Gintoki argues. “The daughter and the grandmother—they’re the ones who caused this. It’s their fault. Go and mess with their heads.”
“It’s her fear that’s inviting monsters,” Otose says. “It would have happened eventually without their interference.”
“So, what? You’re not allowed to be scared because others think that’s scary? You’re not allowed to be sad because that might make other people sad? Am I not allowed to mourn? Do I always have to, what, hide what I’m feeling so no one else has to be uncomfortable?”
“Yes!” Otose exclaims, slapping her hands down on the bar. “Yes, you can feel sad, and it’s fine to be sad, it’s natural to be sad. But you can’t let that be your natural state! You can’t think that it’s normal to be miserable. You can’t forget that happiness exists.”
“Why—you can’t just tell me what I should be feeling!” Gintoki says. “I can’t just feel better because you said I should.” He digs his fingernails into his arm.
“I’m not saying that you can.” Otose takes a deep breath. “But you must have noticed. The way you feel impacts the world around you. You think you’re cursed, so misfortune follows you.” She taps her long fingernails on along the edge of the bar. “Look, Gintoki, you’re—this isn’t going to be figured out in one day. Just…think about it. Think about what you’re doing to yourself.”
Gintoki stares at her. She folds her arms across her chest.
He turns on his heel and walks out of the bar.
Even after he’s calmed down, he’s too embarrassed to return. The outside air is cool, but not unbearable. He sets up camp under one of the small bridges that straddles the river on the outskirts of the town. Rocks dig into his ass, and sand slips between his shoe and foot, scouring his toes. Gintoki sits on the bank of the river and puts his chin on his knees.
Otose doesn’t come looking for him. She does come drag him home after he was locked up for unruly behavior at another bar, and someone snitched and said he had seen Gintoki with Otose once.
“You again,” Gintoki says when he wakes up, brain pounding against his skull.
“If you were trying to get out of here, you weren’t making a very good job of it,” Otose says. “You owe me bail.”
Gintoki covers his eyes with hs forearm. He’s never returned somewhere before. Once he’s gone, he’s always been gone for good. “Fuck if I have the money for that.”
“I don’t care what you do to get it,” Otose says. “But I’m charging ten percent interest.”
Gintoki goes with her to more exorcisms. He’s the brawn. He doesn’t argue with Otose—at least, not more than usual—and after a year, people are asking for Gintoki by name, and Otose decides she’s too old to be traveling. He hitchhikes out of town and into remote villages on the back of farmer’s wagons, buys alcohol and sweets with the coins he barely ever collects from people living in haunted hovels, and keeps his wooden sword at his side.
The first real lucrative job Gintoki gets is from some warlord or some shit, Gintoki doesn’t know. When he arrives at the front gate, there are buff men in armor lining the garden pathway up to the door, and even buffer, though armorless, men can be spotted walking around the giant courtyards.
“Um,” says Gintoki when he is presented to the lord. “Nice place you got here.”
The warlord presses his forehead to the ground. “Please, venerable one, help my son.”
The son has barricaded himself inside his room and has refused to come out for almost a year. Food is left outside his door, and empty plates are found later, but no one ever sees him open the door to take it.
Gintoki tugs at the door. It’s firmly locked. “So you’re not even sure if the kid’s alive.”
“We find notes on the plates,” the lord says. He pauses to hack out truly disgusting cough. “They’re in his handwriting.” He takes a slip of paper from his sleeve and hands it to Gintoki.
Gintoki unfurls it. “This is a shopping list,” he says. He crumbles it up in his hand. “Listen, dad. He’s a growing boy. This kind of things happen. Leave him some konjac or a cantaloupe next time and he’ll be out soon enough.” He looks at the lord. “Alright, alright, calm down. You don’t have to look at me like that.”
“A warlord’s son shutting himself out…” the lord says. “I—my reputation is everything. I’ve been so concerned about how it would look that I haven’t confronted my son face-to-face. And by the time I had realized it, a year had passed. I’m responsible for driving Utsuzo into going this far.” The lord tugs on his white beard, smooths his thumbs down the folds of his robes. “I’m willing to do anything to get my son back. But as pitiful as this sounds, I don’t know what I should do. What should a parent do in a situation like this?”
Gintoki begins to tie up his sleeves. “Fine, fine. If you feel that way, leave the rest to me. You people aren’t comfortable with delicate work, right?” He draws his bokuto and taps it against the wooden frame of the door. “So, essentially, you want me to drag him out of there.” Gintoki brings both hands to the hilt of the bokuto, and raises it up like a club. “Alright-y, stand back,” he calls.
The lord grabs the end of his bokuto and pulls down. He’s stronger than he looks, but that doesn’t take much, because he mostly looks like an old man. “Do you even know what delicate means?”
“I’m going for efficiency here, old man, do you want your son out or not?” Gintoki asks. He lowers his sword, and flicks the paper coating the door with thumb and forefinger. “You realize this is not like, an impermeable boundary, right?”
“You’re a man of god,” the lord says. “We wanted you to dispel the demons inside him.”
“Yeah, and I’ll do that once I can get at’em,” Gintoki says. “Before that, I have to use my special holy staff to dispel these cursed barriers by hitting them until they fall to bits.”
“Did you really go and hire an exorcist, my lord?” says an exasperated voice. Gintoki turns. It’s a young man, fresh-faced and cocky. “I told you it was no use. He’s not coming out.”
Gintoki nudges the lord. “Who’s this brat?”
“My second, Kyojiro Nakamura,” the lord says. “Utsuzo thought of him like a brother, back when he was still out and about. He knows Utsuzo better than I do.”
“My lord, please,” Kyojiro says. “Don’t hurt Utsuzo more than you already have. I won’t let you forget what you did to him.”
“Ah, I’ve got it,” Gintoki says, hitting his palm with a fist. “Okay, for plan two, I need a charcoal burner, and some high quality meat. I call it the ‘Huh? That Looks Like Fun. When He Opens the Door to Peek Out, We Drag Him Out!’ plan. How does that sound?”
“Like the story of the sun goddess’s cave,” the lord says. “Kyojiro, this man is a well-respected exorcist.”
“You richies really have no patience, do you? Did you think I would come up with such a simple-minded plan?” Gintoki scoffs. “This plan has two stages! Let me explain! If he doesn’t show interest in our party, we’ll leave the food on the brazier and use it to smoke the kid out. How about that?”
Kyojiro raises an eyebrow. “Is he?” He bows in Gintoki’s general direction. Gintoki is vaguely aware that he should be offended by the lateness of this introduction. “Then I thank you for your time, reverend, but I do not think demons are our problem. Lord Mashiro, your doctor is here. You should go to your room before he realizes you have been disobeying his recommendation of bed rest.”
The lord heaves a sigh. “Thank you, Kyojiro. Sakata-sama, please—” He coughs, and Kyojiro rushes forward to grab his arm. “—stay with my son.”
Gintoki does. There’s not a whole lot else he can do. He settles down in front of the door, legs crossed, arms folded across his chest. This kind of job was usually Otose’s; Gintoki dealt with things that evolved hitting things with a stick, and Otose dealt with people getting all emotional. He’d tagged along on a few child-argues-with-parent-so-they-must-be-possessed cases before, even a few kid-locks-themselves-in-their-room cases. What was the matter with Japan’s youth these days, so on and so forth. Usually it was a matter of waiting it out, and tackling the first time they ventured out for food.
This is the kind of thing that gets on Gintoki’s nerves, especially with the dad doing his best to hack out a lung out.
Gintoki shoos away a few retainers trying to set food outside the door, though he does accept the offered pillow to sit on, because his ass was beginning to fall asleep and he was worried that he’d fart and accidently shit himself without noticing. After the third or the fourth food-laden retainer reluctantly leaves, Gintoki begins to notice that the house is nervous. He asks the sixth retainer; turns out the lord collapsed, hacking up stomach lining as he went down.
Gintoki is about to nod off when he hears Kyojiro’s soft footsteps, socks on tatami mats, and the man settles down next to Gintoki. He sets a tray of food and drink between them.
“How cruel is that?” Gintoki asks, not looking up. “His father’s sick, but he won’t even budge.”
“Your client collapsed,” Kyojiro says. “Just as he made it back to his room. The doctor doesn’t have a lot of hope. There’s no reason for you to remain here.” He shifts in place, and lifts a tall bottle of sake from the tray.
Gintoki looks askance at Kyojiro. Unusual. As soon as anyone in a household gets so much as a sneeze, they’re at Otose’s door. “I just want to see his face,” Gintoki says finally. “The face of the obstinate son who won’t budge even as his father is about to die.” He says the last few words a bit louder, trying to project them through the tightly closed door.
Kyojiro pops open the bottle of sake and begins to pour. “You suspected, didn’t you?” He hands Gintoki a cup. “What the lord did was that bad.”
“Hey, is this okay?” Gintoki asks. “Isn’t his stuff for the idiot son?”
Kyojiro doesn’t answer. “I’ve known him since he was a kid. He was meek, gentle, and despised our way of life even then. Went off to work for a textile merchant as soon as he was old enough.”
So he’s a talker. Gintoki brings the cup to his lips. It’s strong stuff, and burns in a way Otose’s never does.
“The lord tried to bring him back. Kept on showing up at the store he worked at and harassing the owner. Once people found out they were related, Utsuzo was immediately fired. The old man’s just making a big fuss about getting him out after ignoring him all this time because he knows his death is imminent. He’s desperately trying to make his son succeed him before he dies.” Kyojiro looks at Gintoki. “Is that a good story? Don’t you think that’s a selfish reason?”
Gintoki finishes off the cup and sets it back down. “I don’t know all the messy details, but…” Gintoki shrugs. “Does a parent who wants to see his child before he dies need a reason? Does a child need a reason to see his parent? Do father and son need a reason? They want to see each other’s faces—isn’t that reason enough?”
Kyojiro stares down at his cup. “You’re a good man.” He’s got an odd expression. Gintoki tries to flip through his repertoire, but it’s harder to decipher strangers, before Gintoki’s built up a good catalogue of their faces.
Gintoki settles for scoffing. “Hearing that from a guy doesn’t make me happy at all.” He puts his hands on his knees and hauls himself to his feet. He’s tired of waiting, he’s uncomfortable, and he wants to go back home. “Sorry. Regardless of whether this son has his heart in a shell, I’m dragging him, shell and all, to his father. Come on out!” he calls. “We’re going to punch your dying father in the face.” He reaches out to tug at the door, but it slides open easily under his touch, and he stumbles forward under the unexpected momentum.
There’s a hunched over figure sitting in the middle of the room. It turns as Gintoki falls through the door frame. A plain-looking young woman is sitting in the center of the room with a blanket pulled up over her legs, a plate balanced on her knees, and a pair of chopsticks holding a dumpling halfway to her mouth. Not the son.
“Oi, isn’t this early for a shift change?” the woman asks. Her eyes widen slightly, and she drops the dumpling.
It would be too much to say that Gintoki sensed the movement. He didn’t. There was just one moment where he was standing, staring at the woman in Utsuzo’s room, and one moment where he was blocking Kyojiro’s sword with the hilt of his bokuto and he was swinging his foot around to plant in Kyojiro’s chest. Kyojiro staggers back, but stays on his feet. Impressive.
“Where’s Utsuzo?” Gintoki demands. He flexes his wrist. He’s holding the sword at an awkward angle, had drawn it too quickly to really get a good grip on the thing, but he doesn’t want to adjust his stance. This kid looks pretty nimble.
“Not here,” Kyojiro says. Gintoki takes him in. He’d recovered his balance and is balancing on the balls of his feet. His expression is still twisted into something unreadable. “He left this world long ago. All that’s left of his shell are bones. The young master will forever remain in his shell in here, even if my lord dies. Too bad for the Lord Mashiro, but he’ll see his precious son in the other world.” He levels his sword at Gintoki. “I did ask you to leave.”
Gintoki is suddenly, unexpectedly, furious. He’s going to make this hurt. He takes a step forward, subtly adjusting his grip, but as his foot hits the ground, his heart gives one, hard thump that sends shudders through his body. And stops. Gintoki clutches at his chest, sinking to his knees. He can feel his heartbeat, but it is so, so slow.
“The sake was poison,” Gintoki says.
“And I was beginning to think poison doesn’t work on fools,” Kyojiro says. He still doesn’t look pleased.
“So the reason it tasted so bad wasn’t only because it was poured by a man,” Gintoki says. Fuck, he’s going to throw up. He needs to throw up. There’s something thick and chalky coating the back of his throat, and he can’t breath for the weight of it. His voice comes out like a wet cough. “Did you kill him?”
“I was born to nothing, and now I’m going to inherit this whole land,” Kyojiro says as an answer. Instead of an answer? He doesn’t know. The pounding has spread from his heart out to the whole world.
Gintoki grips his bokuto and levers himself to his feet. The room swims. His spine isn’t obeying him, and he curls forward, clutching at his stomach, and vomits. That’s going to soak into the tatami, he thinks, and they’ll never get the smell out.
“I’m impressed,” Kyojiro says. “Are you the real thing? And here I was thinking Lord Mashiro had hired a scam artist.”
“You’re not far off,” Gintoki says, and stands up. Pain lances through his abdomen. He staggers back, through the open door to Utsuzo’s room. The woman is staring at them, food forgotten, wide-eyed. This job is not going well.
Gintoki blocks Kyojiro’s next thrust, then sweeps his legs out from under him. Before he can get up, Gintoki takes off in a shambling run.
This is a manor, and the lord can afford to prioritize his constant access to water over a farmer’s access to fertile fields, so there is a river running just outside the back gate in the high fence encircling the gardens. Stretching over the river is a bridge. Gintoki stumbles towards it. His head his pounding; with every heavy footstep his vision fades. He needs to detox.
Gintoki makes it halfway over the bridge before his stomach ceases up and he once again falls to his hands and knees and vomits. He couldn’t even make it to the railing to puke off the side. Gintoki hacks until there are tears in his eyes and there’s nothing but bile coming up, and all he wants to do is collapse right then and there, to lay loose-limbed on a wooden bridge next to a puddle of his own sick.
The bridge creaks as someone steps onto it. Gintoki groans, and staggers back to his feet. He has to prop himself up on the railing, and he can barely bring his fingers to tighten enough around the grip of his bokuto so that it won’t fall from his grasp. He can hear the sound of rapids beneath him.
Gintoki straightens up, just in time for Kyojiro to step forward, avoiding the puddle of vomit, and drive his sword through Gintoki’s gut.
Gintoki looks down. Blood is soaking through his clothes. Kyojiro pulls the sword out, slowly, and Gintoki can feel it slide through him. He’s on fire, pain is pulsing through his torso and fighting with the already arrhythmic beating of his heart. “Shit,” he says. “Now you’ve done it.”
Gintoki leans back, let his body go limp. And then he’s tumbling over the railing, and into the inky water below.
After Gintoki washes up on a riverbank, lets himself sit there for a few days while his stomach knits itself back together, steals some non-bloody clothes, and walks back into town, it’s not too much work to get back into the house. Apparently, the death of a lord is a big deal, and the ascension of an unrelated street-trash heir is even bigger. There’s a lot of people coming and going, and no one’s looking out for a dead man. Utsuzo’s murder seems to be common knowledge though; it’s on the tip of everyone’s tongues. The funeral was a few days ago. Now it’s all about if the people will accept the man who murdered their lord’s heir.
Gintoki finds out where they’ve set up the shrine for the old man. It’s a pretty grand thing, all gilded edges and imported incense. Gintoki kneels down in front of it, lights a stick of incense, and claps his hands together.
He needs to stop making promises to dead men.
There’s a painted screen behind the shrine. Gintoki moves it forward so there’s just enough room between him and the wall, almost kicking through the paper in the process, and squeezes behind it.
It doesn’t take very long from Kyojiro to come. Gintoki knew he was a softy. He only gets halfway across the room before he gets to his knees and prostrates himself in front of the picture of the old geezer.
“Now, let’s not be so formal,” Gintoki says. Kyojiro’s head jerks up, and Gintoki steps out from behind the screen. “Yo,” he says, raising his hand in greeting. “You’ve got a lot of people over, dontcha? Is this a birthday party?”
“You,” Kyojiro breathes.
“I thought we were friends,” Gintoki says, frowning. “You could’ve at least invited me to your party. But I do intend to pay you for the present you gave me the other day.”
“You’ll never get out of here alive,” Kyojiro hisses.
“Is that so?” Gintoki’s pinky makes a foray into his left nostril.
“Was it because of Lord Mashiro?” Kyojiro asks, rising to his feet. Gintoki lets him. “You intend to take on the entire domain for the sake of a dead warlord you met once?”
“Nah,” Gintoki says. “Men like you and I have nowhere to go once we’ve lost our humanity.” He rests his hand on the hilt of his sword. “It's important to remember to be human.”
Kyojiro laughs. “I forgot that long ago. Are you here to put me down, demon-hunter? There's no need for you to dirty your hands: rumors of my actions have gotten around inside and outside my own house. No one ever had any intention of allowing me to become boss. They're after my life.”
“Betrayal's a bitch, huh?” Gintoki says. “Was it worth it?” It's a question he asks himself a lot.
Kyojiro draws his sword. “Yes,” he says. He looks at the old man's shrine. “I was born from nothing, you know. I lived in the streets. Parentless. I barely survived day to day. He found me and adopted me into his household. I never had a father, but I thought—”
He drops his sword by Gintoki’s feet, steps forward, and sits down cross-legged, elbows on knees, head bent slightly forward. His hair parts, exposing the pale skin on the back of his neck. “Kill me.” He looks back up at Gintoki. “It’ll be payback for the hole in your belly. I’ll let you take my life. Having a guy like you kill me would give me something to boast about in the other world.”
“You didn't kill the son,” Gintoki says.
“He killed himself,” Kyojiro says. “Days after he came back. It was a dishonorable death.” He's staring at the tatami mat. “And I was too cowardly to tell the old man. He was dying. I couldn't tell him his only son was dead.”
“You came here knowing what would happen, didn’t you? You came here planning to die.” Gintoki feels sick. It’s becoming a familiar feeling. His skin prickles.
“I’m done,” Kyojiro says. “I have nothing left to protect.”
He turns around, facing away from Gintoki. Gintoki can’t stop staring at the back of his neck. This doesn’t feel right. Gintoki wants to stop all of this, wants to call for a time out so he can sit down for a minute and think. But the words keep on pouring out of him, not a single one checking into his brain.
Gintoki says, “I told you, I only came to fulfill my obligation to the old man. I promised him, you know, that I’d bring his foolish son back to him. So stand up and draw your sword.”
“You understand, right? I was the guy who tried to take your life.”
“That kind of thing wasn’t going to kill me,” Gintoki says, truthfully, then lies, “I was just going along with your lousy playacting.”
“You—”
“I saw right through you. You’re a shitty actor,” Gintoki says. “You would kill me and shoulder all the blame to keep the secret hidden. You were going to die and take everything to your grave? Stop trying to make yourself look good.”
“You won't do it,” Kyojiro sighs. He looks at the sliding door that he came through. Behind the thin paper, Gintoki can see shadowy figures moving. “It doesn't matter. I killed their heir.”
“If you really think of the old man as your father, if you’re really doing this for his sake—live! Bring even a single lousy flower and go visit him at his grave! I won’t allow any more of the old man’s sons to die. I won’t let you die! I’ll drag you to that old man’s grave if I have to. So again: stand up, and draw your sword!” Gintoki grabs Kyojiro's wrist and hauls him to his feet.
Kyojiro's eyes are wide. “What—”
“I'm breaking you out of that shell,” Gintoki says. “So you can say ‘Sorry’ to your father's face.” And he kicks through the door.
The beefy men who had lined the path when Gintoki arrived are now lining the hallway, their swords all drawn. An ambush, then. Gintoki loosens his grip on Kyojiro's wrist and raises his wooden sword. Behind him, he sees Kyojiro draw his own sword and take a steadying breath.
They've surprised their would-be assassins, but not much. They'd been ready for a fight. Gintoki loses Kyojiro in the melee. He stabs through weak spots in armor and swipes at tendons. When the sword isn't enough he bites and kicks. His skin turns wet and warm and sticky. It's good. This is what Gintoki was made for. This is what he knows. None of these touchy-feely intrigue plots. His hands are shaking.
Kyojiro and Gintoki meet eyes as Kyojiro takes down the last man standing by pulling his sword from his gut.
“You really are the real thing, aren't you?” Kyojiro says. “A man of the gods.” And then he presses his hand to his abdomen, and falls to his knees.
Gintoki's at his side in an instant. He pulls aside the chest of Kyojiro's yukata. There's a deep wound, gushing blood, just under his ribs. Gintoki presses his hands over it. Blood bubbles up between his laced fingers. “A doctor,” he says. “We can get a doctor.”
“No,” Kyojiro says.
“You’re—you can’t let something like this stop you,” Gintoki says.
“No,” Kyojiro says. “This is how it should be. Besides, it hit me in the worst spot.” He puts his hands over Gintoki's. “I can’t face him. I couldn’t protect what was precious to him. You’re a man of god, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you realize this is divine punishment?”
“Kyojiro,” Gintoki tries.
“He helped me so much, but I couldn’t do a single thing for him,” Kyojiro says. “Once a stray, always a stray.” And then he died.
Gintoki sat there for a moment, as Kyojiro's hands fell away from Gintoki's. Blood still pulsed up from the wound. Gintoki took his hands away, and wiped them against the floor, leaving finger-shaped smears on the tatami. He stood up. He looked at the old man's shrine, still visible through the kicked open door. And then he went home.
Otose eyes him as he walks in. She's sitting at the counter, a bundle of straw on the table, and a sandal with a broken strap in her hands. “Lord Mashiro was a good customer.” Gintoki's still covered in blood. No one had bothered him on the walk back.
“He's dead,” Gintoki snaps.
She sets down the sandal. “I see,” she says. “He was a very sick man.”
“In more ways than one,” Gintoki says.
“Real demons are much rarer than humans,” Otose says.
Gintoki says, “I'm going to sleep.”
She doesn't ask him about payment.
Most jobs aren't as eventful. People think of Otose as a cure-all. Gintoki rescues treed cats and fetches groceries for sick old men. Sometimes he runs the bar while Otose is out. He's there for two years.
Otose sets down a plate of fish in front of Gintoki. “I have a job for you,” she says as Gintoki begins to portion the white meat off with his chopsticks.
“You always have jobs,” he says. “Hire some help already.”
Otose raises an eyebrow.
“Fine,” he says. “What is it?”
Otose says, “There’s nothing more I can do for you here.”
Otose says, “My husband had a temple, up in the mountains.”
Otose says, “I want you to go.”
Otose says, “I’ve learned to cook for one.”
Otose says, “Gintoki, are you listening?”
Gintoki is listening, but he’s not sure he’s hearing. There’s something dark forming in his chest and sitting on his lungs. He wishes he could get used to this. He stares down at the white-bellied fish. “Oh,” he says.
“It’ll take a long time to get there,” Otose says. “But I’m worried about it. If it’s left empty for too much longer, they’ll stick a junior priest up there, and it's a hard district to manage.”
“Kids these days,” Gintoki agrees, monotone.
“You don’t have to go right away,” she says. “Take your time. There’s a lot to see out there, and you’re still young.”
“Yeah,” Gintoki manages, and stands up. “Well. I’ll be see—thanks for everything, grandma.”
“Where are you going?” Otose asks.
“Out,” Gintoki says.
“It’s too late to be out doing good,” Otose says. “And you shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach.”
“My stomach’s not empty.” It’s full of bile. “Don’t get all concerned now.”
Otose reaches across the bar and grabs his arm. Her fingers are cold, and callused from years of stirring drinks. Her grip is oddly strong, and Gintoki can feel the delicate bones in his wrist grinding together.
“You know you need to move on,” she says, not unkindly. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I know I’m not it.”
“I’m not lookin’ for a damn thing,” Gintoki snaps. He turns back towards her. “Everyone’s always going on about some grand-ass purpose the world’s got planned out for me, but no one seems to have the faintest idea what it is.”
“That’s life,” Otose says. “You’re a child—”
Gintoki isn’t listening. “And you know what? You know what? Surprise surprise, not a single person who’s lectured me about destiny and purpose has ever seen it through. Who gives a fuck.” He waves his free hand in the air, searching for a way to convey the anger bubbling inside him. He feels hot. “They want and they want and they want. They want me to have a reason to exist, and they want me to go off and find that reason and then come back and tell them. But I don’t care. And why should I spend all my time alone just to make someone else satisfied? Why can’t I just exist?”
“You’re acting like a child, Gintoki,” Otose snaps back. She drops his wrist. “You can’t think of anyone but yourself. Do you think that you’re special? Do you think you’re the only one with a purpose to ignore?”
“What—”
“Someone says you should find a purpose in life—something that makes you happy, instead of moping around all the time and begging to be pitied—and you hear, ‘Oh, Gintoki! You’re the only man in Japan with any worth! Let me live vicariously through your struggles!’” Otose snatches a glass from her bucket of dirty dishes and begins to dry it so vigorously her fingers turn white. “I’ve had a lot of strays wander in here, Gintoki, and I’ve told every single one of them to shape up.”
“Again, with all this purpose purpose purpose blah blah blah. I don’t care! I just don’t—I can’t bring myself to give a shit.”
Otose slams the glass back on the counter. “You’re just trying to make yourself unhappy. You don’t want to get better. You want to sit around and act pathetic and world-weary because that’s what has always made you different. That’s how you’ve gotten everything. No one would have paid you the slightest bit of attention otherwise, and now that you have the chance to make something of yourself, you decide to that the easiest thing to do is to stay miserable and hope someone else picks you up.”
“You—” Gintoki starts. “First of all, I’m not miserable or pathetic or whatever. Second, you think I want to be like this? You think anyone wants to be like this?”
Otose takes a deep breath. “Not ‘want.’ I think you’re a coward. You’re too scared to try and change.”
Gintoki’s hands curl into white-knuckled fists. He stares down at the floor. It’s good, solid wood, recently washed. There’s a varnished down whorl by his toe.
“But,” he says. He draws in a shuddering breath. “Granny, even you’re leaving me.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Otose says. “I’m making you leave me.” But she softens. “Gintoki, you can’t let the fear of future sadness prevent you from ever seeking happiness again. Haven’t your good times been worth the bad?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Gintoki asks the ground.
“Leave,” Otose says. She begins to clear away his plate. “Everyone has to find something worth the cost of existence, Gintoki. And for you, it’s not here.”