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Once a year, every year, the Yorozuya must brave the arduous task of deep-cleaning their flat.
Well—that was the idea. A noble cause, even if it was implemented more in spirit than in practice.
“Yo, Patsuan!" Gintoki hollered as he rounded the corner, banged-up broom in hand. "I need you to go downstairs and steal Tama's vacuum cleaner."
"...Again?"
"Duh. The floors need cleaning, and this overgrown hairbrush isn't doing shit." He whacked the sad little broom against the floor to demonstrate. A puff of dust lingered in its wake.
"I just... I mean, isn't it about time you bought your own?"
The derisive scoff from the kitchen was his only answer. Shinpachi sighed, set his shoulders, and got ready to do battle with a crazy robot maid.
"If you would just commit to deep-cleaning regularly," he muttered under his breath, "You wouldn't need to steal industrial-strength vacuum cleaners from your crazy landlady's weird robot daughter-slash-maid-slash-personal weapon."
It wasn't that Shinpachi hadn't tried to advocate for this practice. Last year, he had the audacity to propose a biannual deep clean; the idea was apparently so revolutionary that it incited a full-on mutiny from the other two Yorozuya, who insisted their freedoms were somehow being infringed upon.
(For Gintoki and Kagura, "Freedom" was apparently the catch-all term for being an absolute hazard to society and facing no consequences for it).
Initially, Shinpachi remained undeterred. He was no quitter! He may not actually live in the apartment himself— a fact which made the laziness of its actual occupants all the more egregious— but he was there every day anyway, and was sick of finding dog hair under the couch and expired food in the fridge. God forbid he take some pride in his workplace! Which was how Shinpachi ended up coming in bright and early the next morning, armed with his best apron, a feather duster the size of an umbrella, and a bucket filled to the brim with enough cleaning chemicals to make mustard gas look merciful.
He was met with a locked door.
Furious, he hammered on it for a bit, huffed, puffed, and hurled all manner of insults to no avail. As Shinpachi made his tactical retreat, he resigned himself to the inevitable—they'd left him no choice. It was time to bring out the big guns.
Shinpachi returned the following day with his sister in tow. Otae, force of nature that she was, kicked the door down so viciously that the wood splintered.
The Shimura siblings were immediately met with a horrific sight: Kagura and Gintoki had, in fact, prepared for battle. In their own special way. Shinpachi's laziest coworkers lay on the floor, surrounded by piles of dirty, mysteriously sticky laundry. Even Otae had her limits: she refused to so much as touch the offending items with a ten-foot pole. (For her dignity, you understand. She was a lady after all.) Shinpachi gave up on traversing the minefield himself when his foot skidded into a puddle of goo.
"What's the matter, Patsuan?" drawled Gintoki from his position on the floor. "We're cleaning, just like you asked."
"Yeah," Kagura chimed in, "How do you like our special new laundry detergent?"
"This stuff looks toxic." Shinpachi choked out.
"Don't be dramatic," said Kagura, rolling her eyes, "It's a perfectly safe substance—for aliens, anyway. Not sure what it does to humans. But Gin-chan is holding it together fine so far, yes?"
She poked the man in question from her place on the floor. He merely groaned in response.
"...I hate you guys."
The next day, Shinpachi recruited Tama and her infamous vacuum cleaner to his cause. She had nodded seriously throughout Shinpachi's explanation, then patted him on the shoulder in a way which might have been comforting, had not come from a killer robot who hadn't yet grasped her own strength. As it was, Shinpachi only barely managed to hold in his whimper of pain at the force of her blow.
"Do not worry, Shinpachi-sama," she deadpanned in her usual monotone. "I shall quash this rebellion immediately."
Shinpachi realized his mistake a moment too late—just as Tama activated the flamethrower setting on her vacuum cleaner and leveled it at the wooden door.
A house fire was only narrowly averted, thanks to a swift, last-minute intervention by Otose. Their grouchy landlady hauled her robot ward back downstairs, but not without shooting Shinpachi a truly menacing glare.
"The next time you fools cause property damage, I'm going to start charging interest. Two-hundred percent, at least. Add that to your idiot boss's debt, and see how he likes it when I sic the cops on his ass."
He swallowed.
"Yes, ma'am."
Shinpachi tried to pivot into stealth with his next attempt, roping Sacchan into the fray with the promise of pilfering Gintoki's hairbrush—what she planned on doing with such a thing, Shinpachi didn't know, but he'd long since stopped questioning the ways of Edo's number one stalker-ninja. That was between her, Gintoki, and God.
True to her name, Edo's number one stalker-ninja promised to sneak Shinpachi in through the vents; the hope was that he could take Gintoki and Kagura by surprise and drive them out of the house with the threat of real (human-approved) cleaning supplies.
To his despair, Gintoki was basically impossible to sneak up on. The last true samurai grabbed both Shinpachi and Sacchan by the collar without so much as blinking an eye, and promptly threw them out the door.
Sacchan throughly enjoyed this treatment. Shinpachi started seriously contemplating murder.
This back and forth continued for about a week, only coming to an end when Katsura (Edo's second most-wanted criminal, and the Yorozuya's third or fourth most-annoying acquaintance) jumped through their second-story window in an attempt to shake the cops on his trail, subsequently bringing down the Shinsengumi's full wrath upon them all.
Okita's (frankly unnecessary) bazooka attack ended up destroying half of their wall, and a good deal of their living room. Hijikata punished the trigger-happy brat by making him pay for the repairs out of pocket. Unfortunately, whoever the captain hired to patch up their wall made a serious error: they took the time to wax their floors and wash their windows. For free.
Kagura and Gintoki, as was their nature, took this random stroke of luck as some kind of cosmic reward for their laziness. They even started brainstorming insurance schemes for the next few days (before inevitably getting bored and deciding the whole thing would be too much effort. Typical.) Worse still, absolutely nothing else in the house got cleaned— the shelves were still dusty, the bathroom was still a mess, and the kitchen was probably incubating several varieties of mold. Yet it seemed that no amount of cajoling could convince the flat's tenants to do anything about it.
At least there was one thing that all three Yorozuya could agree upon: the greatest injustice of all was the fact that, amidst all the commotion, that wig-headed bastard Katsura had gotten off completely scot-free.
(When it came to lucky escapes, Zura truly operated in a league of his own.)
Suffice to say, the biannual idea turned out to be a bust.
In the present, Shinpachi hauled the borrowed vacuum cleaner of Edo's second-weirdest robot up the stairs and into the Yorozuya suite. Once inside, he began to unwind the cord before getting interrupted by a loud crash from beyond the hall. He gingerly stepped around scattered trash bags and peeked into the living room.
He was met with the sight of the Yorozuya's youngest and strongest member lying splayed on the floor, feather duster clutched in her hand, and smothered by a frankly ungodly amount of manga and DVDs. Gintoki's collection, no doubt. Shinpachi sighed, put away the vacuum cleaner for later, and reached down to help Kagura up off the floor. The man in responsible for this crime emerged from the kitchen, leaning against the wall with a mild expression.
"Damn," he said, scratching his chin. "Try to be more careful when you're dusting the shelves. You could've damaged my Shonen Jump collection."
Shinpachi let out a beleaguered sigh. This wouldn't end well.
“Shut up, Gin-chan!" Kagura whirled to face Gintoki, clutching her bruised elbow. "It’s your fault for having this much manga in the first place. I mean, c'mon! It's just gross for a grown man to own this much Shonen Jump." Kagura then gestured dramatically at her rapidly healing bruise (a courtesy of Yato biology) and shook her fist in Gintoki's face. "And now you've really gone and done it. Your greed has wounded your lovely daughter!”
Gintoki just scoffed. “No daughter of mine would disrespect Shonen J—"
But Kagura was too wrapped up in her theatrics to hear. “—Truly, this is a metaphor for the impact of addiction on a family, yes? First your parfait cravings, then shonen manga, then the pachinko machines... It's sad! Sad old man things!”
“Oi, don’t bring my parfaits into this. I give you brats food and shelter, and this is how you repay me?”
“Food and shelter, yes, but no wages? That's what they call 'indentured servitude.'"
"Indentured what-now? Who the hell is teaching you these words?"
"Zura. He said I oughta join the revolution and 'seize the means of production.' But I dunno if he actually knows what he's talking about; I went to the convenience store and seized all the products off their shelves, but they didn't like that very much."
"...That's called robbery, dumbass."
"Don't call me a—"
"I can't believe you listened to a word that wig-headed idiot said to you—"
"That's rich coming from a permheaded—"
“Enough!!!” Shinpachi bellowed.
For a moment, Gintoki and Kagura stared at him in mild surprise, as if they'd forgotten he could talk.
Typical.
“This is silly." He said, more firmly. "Gin-san, Kagura is right: you should be paying us wages, rather than blowing all our savings on slot machines and trashy manga. But Kagura, come on. There's no point in making such a big fuss over a small scratch; I’ve literally seen you do a backflip while riddled with bullet holes! You both need to stop wasting time arguing and get over yourselves long enough to finish some very basic chores!"
Kagura and Gintoki blinked, turned towards each other, and immediately got on the same wavelength.
“Oh, Gin-chan,” Kagura cried, and fell dramatically to the floor. “I think I’m really going to die...it's over...the light is calling to me... but Shinpachi doesn't even care about my definitely-super-duper-fatal injuries!"
“Yeah, you're gonna die alright," Gintoki said gravely. "Shame; we'll have to order another tanning booth coffin, and those things are expensive."
"Not a chance in hell," Kagura growled, temporarily breaking character. "I am not letting you put me in one of those things again. Just give me a Viking funeral in space like a normal person."
"That doesn't make any sense. How do you have a Viking funeral in space? It's not like you can just shoot an arrow and light a raft on fire. That's like, against the laws of physics."
"I dunno, you'll figure it out. Put me in a pod and then fire a cannon blaster at it or something."
"That is infinitely more expensive than a tanning-bed coffin. You know that, right? Please tell me you have the common sense required to know that."
"Stop being so stingy! I'm dead, and you still won't waste money on me?"
"Oi, I've never wasted money a day in my life—"
"The slot machines say otherwise."
"Oh yeah? Well, you tell 'em they've got another thing coming, because I've been building up a lot of good karma recently and it's only a matter of time before the universe rewards me."
"That is soooo not how karma works! You would know that if you stayed in school like a good boy instead of running off to chase your dreams of being a star. You know this isn't Hollywood, yes? Dreams don't come true, and no one gets free handouts."
"... Ok, now you're starting to sound like my daughter."
As their argument faded into the background, Shinpachi mournfully considered the merits of abandoning the annual cleanings and opting for the safer, more realistic solution: blowing up the entire goddamn building again.
It's a good thing Okita's so trigger-happy with his bazooka.