Chapter Text
Takasugi is three years old when he first brings it up, and it's not anything Gintoki expects at all.
He'd known (vaguely, somewhere in the back of his mind, somewhere that he stayed as far away from as possible) that this might happen. Shouyou had remembered, too, after all, but Shouyou had never actually been normal. That said, Takasugi couldn't be called normal anymore either.
They're eating dinner. Takasugi has his Yakult instead of water, as usual, but he's picking at his food instead of eating it. Kagura, all of nineteen and with a great appreciation of anything edible, questions his behavior.
“Why're you not eating, Sugi?”
Takasugi pushes some rice around. “I remembered something.”
Takasugi is three. There's not many memories for him to have, but Kagura encourages him to elaborate. It doesn't occur to Gintoki yet that he's not remembering anything from the three years he's been living, he's remembering things from the three years he's been dead.
Clearly he's uncomfortable at Kagura's line of questions. He doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't know what to do with what he knows, so he would rather have just not known. He doesn't want to be Takasugi, he just wants to be Sugi of Odd Jobs Gin-chan. Gintoki can gather the first bit of that himself.
“If he doesn't want to talk about it, leave him alone. I'm trying to eat in peace.”
“He wouldn't bring it up if he didn't want to talk about it, 'kay. Right, Sugi?”
There's a moment of hesitance before he speaks. “Everything hurt, and Gin-chan was gonna cry, and there was a lot of blood.”
It's like dead weight. Except this has the weight of an elephant, and that elephant is stepping on Gintoki's stomach. “Is that all?” Gintoki asks, wrestling the weight away with all his might. It hardly budges. If Takasugi is remembering his own death, then… fuck. Gintoki has no idea what he's going to do.
“I don't know,” Takasugi says, but his gaze keeps flicking away and he's not making eye contact with any of them. “Sometimes I think of other things, but… that one was scary.”
Takasugi doesn't know about the circumstances of his birth—or lack thereof—so it's a bit worrisome that he's identified that these thoughts are memories and not his toddler-brained imagination. Gintoki supposes he should treat this like a nightmare. Not tell him that it wasn't real, but the method of comforting him.
“Come to think of it, it was pretty scary,” Gintoki says, ruffling Takasugi's hair. “This calls for ice cream.”
“You just want to eat ice cream!” Kagura yells. “The Bargain-Dash is mine, wench.”
“Oh, but you'll share with Sugi-kun, won't you? He's upset,” Gintoki says, smiling widely. You can't keep ice cream from a crying kid.
Kagura loses the moment she hesitates. Takasugi is still doing the sad eyes, but now there's greed in them, too. His dinner sits untouched, the Yakult bottle is empty, and there is ice cream in the freezer. “Sugi can have some,” Kagura bites out. “Only Sugi can have some. He's the one who's upset, after all.” If she gets some for herself, she'll be obligated to get some for Gintoki, too. She'll make certain sacrifices to make sure that doesn't happen.
“So what were the other things you remembered?” Gintoki asks, turning his attention back to Takasugi. Kagura stands to go to the kitchen, understanding that this battle has ended in a draw. “The not-scary things.”
Takasugi puts his hands on the table and plays with his fingers. “We were playing a game to find a rock, and it was fun, but you cheated and Zura won.”
Gintoki can recall the game of trying to find the rock with Shouyou's name on it. It was an effective way to keep the three of them occupied when they started to become restless and subsequently annoying. Takasugi shows no signs of thinking that it's weird. He doesn't think it's strange that he has memories of Gintoki and Zura as kids. For what memories are returning to him, he still has the brain of a three-year-old.
The instance that Shouyou had been with Gintoki, when he'd just told him that he remembered him just fine, he'd seemed like an adult in a child's body. With Takasugi, it looks like it's going to be more of a case of a child trying to live with an adult's memories.
Nothing about this can go well. Not with the way their lives went. Takasugi's death, in comparison to the other things he'd experienced, was far from the worst of it.