Chapter Text
I.
There’s a thin crescent moon in the sky by the time Tsukuyo wakes from the few hours of sleep she usually manages to snatch between patrols. She’s still tired, a fatigue that feels like lead running through her veins weighing down her arm as she raises a hand to run her fingers through her hair, but it hardly seems to matter. There hasn’t been a moment in the last two months when she hasn’t felt tired, though perhaps it’s simply that now she feels it more than she usually would.
She forces herself to her feet despite it and, aware of Hinowa and Seita sleeping in the next room, pads silently across the tatami to the butsudan by the wall. It’s become a habit before she goes out – kneeling before it, lighting the incense, and bowing her head. She’s never been religious or even agnostic, but this, she thinks, is the least she can do for the Hyakka who've been cut down obeying her orders, the women who’ve died to protect their home. The dead may grow more distant with each day, but Tsukuyo can at least offer them this – this small remembrance, a reassurance that to her, if very few others, they will never join the legions of the nameless, distant dead.
She doesn’t close her eyes when she presses her palms together, watching the way the pale scars on her knuckles and across the backs of her hands pull at the skin; they are remnants of her childhood, unavoidable when making the first inexpert attempts to wield a kunai. Tsukuyo tries not to feel like a fraud in these moments – it’s still hard, after all, not to hear Jiraia’s voice the one time she had asked him about these things, after she had watched Hinowa bowing her head before the butsudan in her room. He had smirked at her and said, What gods do you imagine would hear the prayers of people like us? And who do you imagine you’d be praying for?
At the time, she had simply choked out the words I don’t know, even as in her mind she’d instantly answered Hinowa; but she’d already seen the incandescence of Hinowa’s spirit in her eyes, a spirit that not even the seeping grime of Yoshiwara under Housen’s rule could diminish, and knew that Hinowa had no need of the prayers of a girl like her.
Tsukuyo understands Jiraia’s words for what they are now, but the question still lingers nonetheless: who is she, with her scarred hands and stained soul, to sit here and pretend that there are any spirits or gods who would listen to her voice, much less grant her requests?
There might still be a question mark at the end of that sentence, but Tsukuyo knows, at least, that she’s someone who still has a home to protect – still has people who depend upon her. Even here in the rubble of Edo, she still has the task she set herself to do before she even truly understood what it meant. Even so, it’s tempting to stay here just a moment longer, and then a moment after that, until the tug of duty within her heart pulls her upright. She doubts sometimes that she’s doing any good here; it sometimes feels like she’s trying to hold back water flooding through a burst pipe with her hands. It’s something else that doesn’t matter, though – she does what she does because it has to be done, and she doesn’t want it to fall onto anyone else’s shoulders. And so even on nights like these, when all she wants to do is sink back down into her futon and close her eyes and sleep, she raises her head, stands, slides open the door, and goes out into the blue dark of the night.
II.
It’s raining the next morning, and though it’s become little more than a light drizzle by the time it reaches street level in Yoshiwara, it’s steady enough that the eaves of the shops are dripping wet, the smell of damp wood is in the air, and the women are using paper umbrellas to protect their hair.
Tsukuyo lights her kiseru and leans back against the outside wall of a shop. Her feet ache, but even now, even after everything that’s happened, the business of Yoshiwara has barely slowed, and there are always men who need reminders, both gentle and not-so-gentle, to mind their manners.
Just after dawn is the slowest part of the day, however, and she’s almost made up her mind to return to her rooms when she senses a change in the atmosphere – a surge of energy in the sluggish morning air, like a sleeping creature that has stirred to sudden, alert wakefulness. Tsukuyo looks up and sees the ripple of parting umbrellas in the street, hears the incongruously coy calls of Lookin’ for a good time, honey? and For you, I’d offer a discount, but evidently whatever man is passing by either isn’t in the market for fun or has a fetish for getting gouged on prices, since the parting of umbrellas doesn’t stop, and she hears the soft chides of You don’t know what you’re missing, darling, as he moves on. She doesn’t care as long as he’s not making trouble, and she glances away, about to push herself up from the wall to go home, when she realises that the man, whoever he is, has stopped in front of her, a dark shape in her peripheral vision.
“Keep walking,” she murmurs, just loud enough for him to hear, and it’s only when he doesn’t that she gives him her full attention and then, with a jolt, recognises him.
It is him – Hijikata Toushirou, the Demon Vice Commander, standing with one wrist draped over the handle of his sword, his haori wet with the rain, and staring at her as if he’s trying to tell if she’s the person he’s looking for. Or sizing her up for a fight.
Tsukuyo had known him as more than a name mainly because she’d heard Gintoki talk about him, usually briefly and insultingly – “If you ever need a surly prick on call, he’s your man, but beyond that I don’t know what the use of him is,” – since it had seemed that, for a man with Gintoki’s dubious legal standing, he’d spent far too much time in the at least somewhat friendly company of the police. She’d once questioned him about the wisdom of this, but he’d simply given her a lazy wave of his hand and said, “It’s fine, you wouldn’t believe the things that jackass owes me,” and she’d known better than to try to persuade him further and let it drop.
The Shinsengumi had never darkened the streets of Yoshiwara – at least, not while on duty – partially because Yoshiwara has always been autonomous and Housen would have carved them up for mincemeat for intruding on his turf, but mostly because any arrests the Shinsengumi could have made here would only have embarrassed the government anyway. As far as she’d been concerned, the Shinsengumi had never been anything more than attack dogs for the Bakufu; but the Bakufu doesn’t exist anymore, and now they’re just dogs, sniffing around right where she doesn’t want them. She’d once told Seita off for saying the police in this country were going to hell, over his protests that that was what all the kids at temple school were saying and despite the fact she hadn’t wholly disagreed with the sentiment, but it all seems to matter very little now. Too much has happened for her to draw the petty lines in the sand she might have drawn before.
Nonetheless, there’s no need to be overly friendly either, she thinks, as she watches a bead of water roll down his neck and into his collar.
“Is there something you want?”
His eyes flicker up to her face, and he withdraws his hand from his sleeve, flicking a small, square card onto the shop counter by her elbow.
“This is a courtesy call,” he says. “Clean up your mess, or I’ll clean it up for you.”
Tsukuyo pauses before she picks up the card between two fingers, making a show of touching it as little as possible. It’s flecked with blood – she supposes she doesn’t need to ask where that came from – and in its centre is the swooping curve of a crescent moon, printed in pitch-black ink.
The Black Crescent. She’s heard the name and knows who they are: the leftovers of the Harusame, deserters, the ones with too great a sense of self-preservation to’ve let the Tendoushuu tell them what to do. They’ve been creeping like weeds into the open spaces left behind by their former comrades, substituting one poetic-sounding name for another and continuing to do what they’ve always done, dealing in drugs, weapons, slaves and anything else they can get their hands on.
It's clear that to Hijikata's way of thinking, if the Black Crescent have set up here then it’s because she’s either failed to notice them or because she’s allowing it, and Tsukuyo’s not sure if he’s trying to insult her by forcing her to ask what the card means, or if his silence means he expects that she already knows, one way or another. Whatever the case, she taps the ash from her kiseru before she answers him, fixing him with an unimpressed stare.
“A courtesy call, huh.” She raises an eyebrow. “Are you trying to scare me? The Shinsengumi don’t exist anymore.”
There’s a cold flash in his eye. “If I wanted you to be scared of me, you would be. And I’m not here as the Shinsengumi.”
Gintoki really hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d called him a surly prick. But despite that, he’d still willingly spent his time with him apparently, and Hijikata had more than once been dragged into Gintoki’s elaborate messes, so she’s willing to believe there has to be something other than surly prick to him, even if it’s not readily apparent at this exact moment. The other times she’s heard his name spoken haven’t been any more complimentary – Jouishishi muttering that the Shinsengumi had arrested their comrades, or criminals warning each other off certain dates, or the word that had gone around in the early days of Nobu Nobu’s ascendancy: the Demon Vice Commander’s a regular beat cop now and so broken up over his gorilla boss that if you wanted his head, you could probably just walk up and take it; hell, he’d probably thank you.
She swallows.
It hadn’t been her concern at the time. Politics have never concerned her (she hadn’t intended to get involved in a coup that time – she had only wanted to force a rotten man to keep the promise he’d made to the mistress he’d long since discarded). It was a parade of one rotten man after another, none of whom cared about any of the things she cared about.
But this – her eyes flicker down to the card between her fingers, anger simmering in her stomach – this she cares about. She’s responsible for this, and she can acknowledge that not having known about it is at least half the reason for her anger. These are her streets, and the things that happen on them happen under her watch. He’s right, and this is her mess to clean up, her house to keep in order. By coming to her first rather than charging in himself, swinging his sword around like a barbarian and creating an even bigger mess, she supposes Hijikata is, at least, acknowledging that. The thought curls her lip, a sour taste on her tongue; if he’s trying to be polite, this is probably the least effective way to go about it, though she’s not sure, given his reputation, why she should expect any different.
Raising her eyes, she opens her mouth to tell him she’ll take care of it, but he’s already turning away, moving back through the crowd, the wall of paper umbrellas closing up again behind him.
III.
The Black Crescent are surprisingly easy to find, once she begins looking. It’s the usual: money laundering through shopfronts in Yoshiwara, with staff who’re on the books as courtesans but who turn out to be Amanto with illegal weapons and bad attitudes, guarding crates stamped with a black crescent moon.
Tsukuyo feels both gratified and indignant – gratified that they’re so easily rooted out but indignant that she should have let this slip past her.
It’s because you allowed yourself to be diverted from your path. It’s because you became distracted by thoughts of –
She cuts the thought off before it can fully form. She no longer believes these things, but it’s surprisingly difficult to break the habit of this way of thinking.
In any case, the Amanto she corners talks easily enough once she has the point of her tantou pressed to his throat and tells her that their shipments aren’t coming through Yoshiwara, but through Edo Harbour and transported here later. It’s enough for her to let him live, his running footsteps fading on the street outside as she leans down to pick up one of the cards that the Black Crescent carry as identification. It’s identical to the one Hijikata had flicked at her, of course, except the blood on hers is fresh and bright red, smeared wetly across the dark crescent on its face.
Tsukuyo turns it over in her fingers before tucking it into her obi – her back protests as she rises, and she can feel knots of fatigue in her shoulders, a tiredness that seems to want to pull her down into the ground she’s standing on. She doesn’t let herself yawn as she signals to the naginata-wielding Hyakka standing by the door that they can go in and start cleaning up the mess. The shift leader, Etsuko, pauses before she goes in, her eyes narrowed, even if the rest of her expression is concealed behind the black fabric of her mask.
“Is there anything else I can do, Tsukuyo?”
Tsukuyo lowers her eyes as she lights her kiseru, telling herself Etsuko can’t see the way her fingers ever so slightly shake, the flame of the match wobbling as she touches it to the tip of the pipe.
I’m just tired, she thinks. I’ll sleep longer tonight.
“No,” she says, exhaling a long, thin stream of smoke, then frowns. “But I need to go up into Edo for a few hours. I won’t be long.”
It’s been a while since she’s ventured out into the streets of Edo – she’s let many of the Hyakka who still have contact with their families return home to help with the clean-up, but it’s meant that she’s had to spend most of her waking hours on the streets of Yoshiwara, watching over their patrol routes.
She smokes as she walks, kiseru balanced in her fingers, through the rubble-strewn streets, the districts left in ruins first by the Altana Liberation Army and then the monster Utsuro. The rains have washed the streets clean and put out the remaining fires, leaving people to dig through the shattered remains of their former homes.
Tsukuyo isn’t certain where she’ll find him, so she picks her way towards Kabukichou, finding a path through the wreckage of the city. The sun is out, the day isn’t yet at the height of its humidity, and there are plenty of people out on the streets, but none of them pay her any mind, too preoccupied with heaving buckets of rubble along in human chains to be dumped into shipping containers and hauled away. The taste of ash and dust coats her tongue, sticking in her throat when she tries to swallow it away. It reminds her of the fire in Yoshiwara and how the acrid stench of charred wood and burned plastic had lingered for months, since even then Housen wouldn’t allow the roof to be opened to let the smoke escape.
She could send more of the Hyakka to help here, she thinks – any of them would volunteer, and she can take their places in the streets of Yoshiwara. If she returns before noon from the morning patrol, she can sleep for half an hour before going out again for the afternoon shift, and then perhaps she can –
She stops in her tracks as she reaches the end of the rubble-transporting human chain. For an organisation that no longer has any official standing, the Shinsengumi do seem to be awfully attached to their uniforms, though most of them have shed the long black jacket and are passing the buckets of debris to each other in their vests and shirtsleeves. Tsukuyo glances around – where there’s Shinsengumi, there has to be someone telling them what to do – before her eye finally falls on him, standing with his jacket slung over his shoulder as he leans down to scrutinise a map being held by a tall, bald man with sweat shining on the dome of his head.
There’s no need to interrupt, Tsukuyo supposes, so she waits, standing and smoking until he apparently senses her eyes on him, turning to look at her, his back stiffening. At least he doesn’t make her wait, saying something to his bald friend before making his way over to her, his face stony.
“Over here,” he says, jerking his head and walking behind a pile of rubble, as if he expects her to join him.
She follows him, rankled though she is, but she takes her time about it. “Ashamed to be seen talking to a woman of Yoshiwara?”
“It’s not that.” He doesn’t say what it is, however, though Tsukuyo notices one of the other officers, some baby-faced boy who barely looks old enough to be out of school, let alone in the Shinsengumi, staring after them with slightly narrowed eyes, and she wonders if that might have something to do with it. She doesn’t feel like explaining to him, however, that if he’s worried about his men thinking he’s keeping a secret woman, then bundling her off behind a pillar of rubble to have a clandestine conversation is hardly likely to allay anyone’s suspicions.
“What do you want?”
The answer she gives him is to untuck the Black Crescent calling card from her obi and flick it towards him. He doesn’t even make an attempt to catch it, so it bounces off his shoulder and flutters to the ground by his feet. She assumes he’ll know it’s not the same one he gave her, since the bloodstains are different.
“It’s not just my mess,” she says, “though my part of it is cleaned up now. Maybe you should be keeping a closer eye on the harbour.”
His eyes flicker down to the card, eyebrows drawing together beneath the dark swoop of hair that hangs down over his forehead. “The harbour?”
Obviously, he heard her so she’s not going to repeat herself, taking a long draw on her pipe instead, watching him, noticing the grey sickles of shadow beneath his eyes. A moment later, she realises with a jolt that she recognises them – because they’re the same as the ones she sees beneath her own eyes when she wakes after too few hours of sleep, and goes to a mirror to dully scrape her hair back from her face before she heads out to patrol.
“If that’s all, I’ll be going.” Her voice sounds crisp and sharp even to her own ears, but she can’t really bring herself to care – he was the one, after all, who came barging into Yoshiwara telling her to clean up her mess, and perhaps she had let some rats creep in under her nose, but not before they’d crept in under his first. She thinks she’s entitled to a little snippiness.
Hijikata glances up at her – and he does at least have the grace to look a little sheepish, though it’s quickly cancelled out by the scowl that crosses his face. He glares at her, reminding her, absurdly, of a cat that’s just been rubbed the wrong way and hasn’t made up its mind yet about how much more of such treatment it’s going to put up with.
“Thank you,” he finally gets out, as if he has to dredge the words up from some long-forgotten corner of his vocabulary. He stoops, picking up the card, turning it over in his hand before sliding it into his pants pocket. “I’ll… take care of it.”
Somehow, she can sense something unspoken in the air – the knowledge that ordinarily she might have asked Gintoki for help with this, or even if she hadn’t, he would have found a way to involve himself anyway. Tsukuyo isn’t certain why, but she knows that the Shinsengumi Vice Commander knows it – but then, she supposes, ordinarily he wouldn’t have put in an appearance himself in Yoshiwara.
The Shinsengumi had often been on the side of a law that concerned itself very little with justice, and she had spent her life meting out a justice that was well beyond the bounds of any law. There was no reason why the Demon Vice Commander and the Courtesan of Death should have crossed paths; and besides which, why would they have needed to, when Gintoki could so easily pass between both of their worlds, a gulf that had, at least until recently, seemed too vast to cross?
Things have changed now, Tsukuyo thinks, as she looks down at the ground, the rubble that lies at her feet. It seems stupid that she should think of herself as an outsider here, after all that has passed, and she feels the prickle of responsibility creeping down her spine.
There’s no law now, no shougun, no Bakufu, and very nearly no Edo. And Gintoki….
Like it or not, she’s part of this place now; her blood is here amongst the ruins of the city too, soaked into the ground along with everyone else’s who bled to save it. Her life has been tangled with theirs, perhaps irrevocably.
“I’ll come with you,” she says suddenly, catching even herself somewhat by surprise. “Tell me when, and I’ll be there.”
Hijikata stares at her as if she’s just blabbered out something utterly incomprehensible or sprouted an extra head or something else equally unlikely, and Tsukuyo feels irritation and impatience rise up within her, her tiredness making her less inclined to suppress them than she ordinarily might be.
“Or I won’t, suit yourself,” she snaps, turning, her fists clenched by her side. She can feel a flush of anger creeping up her neck – anger at him, but also at herself for offering her help when it so obviously isn’t wanted.
“Tomorrow night, then. Here.”
His voice stops her cold in her tracks. She swallows, nods once, and continues on her way, the rubble crunching beneath her boots.