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"You're such a level-headed boy," his grandmother would say to him. "So calm and sweet. Listen to me, Kotaro. Listen to me." She held his childish face in the wrinkled well of her palms. "Calmness is a blessing. Numbness is a curse."
After she passed, he kept that safe, soothing calmness tucked safely in the space within his ribcage and people kept telling him, "you're such a good student, Katsura-kun" and "it's a shame your family was so poor, Katsura-kun" and "no offence, but your face makes me angry sometimes" and "Zura, are you a shrine maiden or something? I don't think I've ever seen you upset. Are you scared of getting wrinkles on your face, is that why? I didn't expect you to be so vain, I thought you were a goody-two-shoes sort, huh, but you're actually kind of preppy. Hah, I knew you weren't as nice as everyone thinks you are—" and that final one was really annoying and totally uncalled for, but as always, Kotaro. Was. Calm.
He did not punch Gintoki. Plenty of people already did that, anyway. Especially Takasugi, who once ranted to him his theory that Gintoki was the inhuman manifestation of every possible microaggression that could exist in the world and Sensei used him as a daily test of mental strength to keep his students from getting too comfortable with life.
Usually people didn't think Takasugi was a very talkative person. But Kotaro knew the truth, and the truth was that Takasugi was sometimes a bigger nerd than he was, and also that he thought heaven was in the sun.
"But the sun's really hot," Kotaro had said. "Won't everyone burn up? Then everyone would be dead twice over! No, that can't be right, that's too depressing, Takasugi. That's an unrealistic place for heaven to be. Wouldn't it make more sense if you just retreated into the space of your own soul? That way it's individualised to your own understanding of happiness; over the course of your life, you build your own heaven, and when you die, it'll be like coming home, won't it? Well, I haven't been dead before, but—"
"Zura!" said Takasugi, looking put on the spot and wide-eyed. "It's just a metaphor."
"Oh," said Kotaro. He looked back at Takasugi. "That's a nice metaphor."
Takasugi nodded at him. "Yeah. I was going to write about it for my assignment. Like a poem," he said. "Do you—do you want to join me? It's raining outside anyway. I don't think you can visit the duck pond today. You'd get sick."
"Oh," said Kotaro. "Stay inside. That's a good idea." He tapped his fingers against the hard planes of his kneecaps. "Okay. I should calm down."
"What do you think happens after you die?" said Kotaro to a Gintoki who was dozing face-down in the grass with drool running down the side of his chin. "Takasugi thinks that heaven is in the sun."
"What?" blustered Takasugi, looking betrayed. "What? No I don't! Zura, stop spreading misinformation!"
Gintoki just shrugged his shoulders and made strange noises into the blades. He turned to the side laboriously and said, still with saliva sticking to his face, "Mmmm, I dunno. When people die, their bodies start to smell and their skin melts. It's gross."
"Don't describe it in such disgusting detail then," said Takasugi, glaring at him. Gintoki stared back dully. " No one wants to hear it."
"Oh, sorry Takasugi-kun. I forgot about your delicate, noble constitution. Is it so gross that you're gonna throw up? Huh?"
"I'll take my delicate, noble constitution and shove it down your throat," said Takasugi, glowering even harder. He made no move to lunge for Gintoki's infuriatingly deadpan face, but if he were not carefully holding a scroll of some antiquated writings that Sensei had slipped him earlier, Kotaro was sure that Gintoki would be sporting new bruises on his back in the shape of Takasugi's pointy little knees. "We'll see who's throwing up then."
In response to that, Gintoki began to open his mouth.
"I have a delicate, noble constitution that demands you pay attention to me," said Kotaro, drawing their attention back to the matter at hand. "We're having an extremely important conversation. No one's allowed to throw up. Especially not now. It's situationally inappropriate."
"You sound like a dictator," said Gintoki. "I could throw up if I wanted to."
"You obviously don't know what a dictator is," said Takasugi immediately after. "Also, that's not something you should be proud of."
"Hey, stop it. I want to talk about death," said Kotaro and sorely enough, he was ignored.
One time, when Kotaro was younger and his grandmother was still well enough to take him down to the river, he found a little snake curled up in the grass near the bank. It was an unassuming shade of light brown and its mouth had fallen open, draping limp over the river-smooth pebbles, and Kotaro thought, I should bury it.
His grandmother was crouched at the base of some tall tree, gathering herbs and other plants, and Kotaro flexed his fingers, twisted them deep into the sand, scooping out a hollow for the small, stiff body at his feet. He sat for a while with his legs tucked under him in an almost-seiza position, scratching the rough bark of a twig with his nails to make a clumsy pole that stuck out of the ground like a sword handle.
It wasn't really all that gross, he thought. Not like the maggots that nested under the fur of drowned rats after warm, wet storms—this was a dry sort of death, neat and tidy like pre-packaged seaweed flakes.
When they returned home, he could still recall the cool feeling of its scales, like stone, and it reminded him of their family grave, the one labelled Katsura that had pale weeds sprouting all over it and moss, too, thick as a bed mat, that was dark and fibrous like his grandmother's hair and the sheets she took to sleep when it was cold.
"Where do you go?" Kotaro wondered, tilting his head—not to the side, the way that Gintoki did sometimes, and the crows too, but upwards—up at the sky. He rolled his aching shoulders and folded into a loose squat, coming closer to the damp ground.
"Ahaha, Zura!" said Sakamoto, only a little hysterical. "That's a weird question to ask, this is a weird place to ask that, don't you think! We really don't have a lot of time for philosophy right now, haha! Can you keep your head out of the clouds, please!"
"Difficult questions wait for no one," Kotaro replied serenely. "When the time comes for you to seek your own answers, you'll understand."
"Uuuuuuhhhhh," said Sakamoto, blinking furiously, the corner of his mouth quirked up like a curtain to show the white grimace underneath. "Uhhhh, alright."
"Yes. Now, where was I?"
Kotaro resumed, looking plaintively at the corpse before him. The sockets of its eyes were gaping and its drained face gazed back wordlessly. "Right! Do you happen to know where you go after death?" He asked politely.
There was a strong scent of blood, not from the body, but dripping from Kotaro's sword, hanging at his side. The smell of the battlefield itself was something Kotaro had learned to ignore, and the terrible rot of it felt more like pressure in his nostrils and his sinuses than it did an odour.
Blood, on the other hand, was different, and he nurtured an acute sense for it, just because it got so busy sometimes that it was easier to follow the sharp, metallic bite than it was to see. Takasugi had his own way of going about it, some pulsing sting in his chest that led him like a compass needle; Sakamoto seemed to feel the sword like a guiding star in his hand. Gintoki's eyes just saw.
Kotaro breathed shallow, copper on the tip of his tongue. The body didn't say very much at all. Its hand was cold and limp at its side, and its skin looked unpleasantly wet.
"Are you at peace?" he wondered.
The thing about Gintoki was that a lot of the time, he looked like a dead thing. The theory went that he was just born like that—dull-eyed and not very lively—and also that he was some sort of scarecrow animated with voodoo magic and that's why he was allergic to baths.
Unsurprisingly, this was Takasugi's theory, and he was as adamant about this one as he was with his last, that is, the one that implied that Gintoki's presence was a test of willpower for everyone who was in his vicinity and had recently been proved a law.
On his part, Kotaro didn't think Gintoki was a cursed scarecrow. He was just a no-good classmate who was at a horrendously high risk of challenging his position as Onigiri Club President, having guessed six out of seven onigiri flavours at their last club meeting despite attending approximately zero sessions overall, and was secretly kind of fragile the same way that some stones were kind of brittle.
The point was that Kotaro didn't put a lot of weight into the theory that Gintoki was born already dead, because that's just not how babies work. Babies cried and screamed and laid around and did things like vomit on people because they were dragged into life and had a lot to prove, and Kotaro was sure he could see the remnants of infancy in Gintoki.
His napping, for example. Gintoki obviously had the sleep schedule of a baby.
"Where the hell didja get that idea?" said Gintoki, pretending to be oblivious.
"My excellent deductive reasoning," explained Kotaro plainly. He implored in the privacy of his mind that Gintoki would learn to embrace his living state.
"That's not real, you idiot," said Gintoki, and Kotaro squinted at him and let him say all manner of very bad words, storing them away in his head to dutifully deliver to Shoyo. Gintoki would come to class the next day with pinched ears and a sour face, as he had done only the day before yesterday for calling Takasugi a bastard who wouldn't stop popping his loser cherry.
He kept getting into trouble with really avoidable situations. It wasn't that hard not to call people rude words. Oh, but maybe Gintoki was a special case.
Kotaro sometimes contemplated to himself whether Sensei had given him too many bumps on the head. Maybe he'd evolve. Like Kotaro, whose head was now very hard, and stronger than steel.
"I don't think it's a cherry anymore," Kotaro had whispered to another one of their classmates watching the fight, receiving a giggle in reply. "It's more like bubble-wrap now."
"Hey!" said Gintoki, leaping up. He evidently had not learnt his lesson. "I heard that, moron!"
One week after Kotaro's grandmother fell asleep in her bed and failed to wake up, Kotaro went down to the river and sat himself neatly in front of the tiny grave he made for the snake he found in the sand, dead and slightly coiled.
The flimsy twig had long been flung away by the wind and the pooling rain on the gravesite formed an innocuous depression in the ground that was filled with water. It only came up to his wrist when he dipped his hand in and placed the palm flat to the earth, and looked like a miniature pond—a tiny, tiny, ocean.
"The afterlife is mysterious," Kotaro said to himself, "unknown."
He touched the tip of his fingers in the small, shallow puddle and wiggled them to make ripples in the surface. He looked in and saw his own pale face stare back, framed by straggly weeds, a pair of solemn eyes locking with his, and he thought about the white bones hiding underneath.
"Where do you think we go after we die?" Kotaro asked, his head propped up on Gintoki's lap. It was evening and they were tired after a long day of lessons.
"Uuhh," said Gintoki, blinking himself awake. "Wha? Didja say something?" He pulled Kotaro's sleeve loose and tugged it up to his mouth, wiping off the drool. Kotaro scrunched his nose and headbutted him until he wheezed.
"Then how about this," said Gintoki, his back hunched and his chest heaving under the weight of his breath, "why don't you live beautifully until the end?"
The sky was dark with rain clouds and the air was damp, pressing in on them from all sides; there were cold, angry eyes on all sides—rage and fury and killing intent—and Kotaro did not feel calm. He did not feel blessed.
He dragged himself out of the grave-dirt, mud clinging to his armour. Gintoki's back met his, the lines of their spines slotting up next to each other like tectonic plates, closing the gap between them.
"Listen to me, Zura" said Gintoki, turning his head the slightest amount, and Kotaro could see only the tips of his short lashes and the shadow over his eyes. His sword kept dripping blood at his side, and his vision narrowed down to what he could glimpse of his trembling hands, clasped around the leather handle like it was a walking stick.
"Even if you aren't calm," said Gintoki, his back warm and his voice low, like sunlight at dusk, buried beneath the leaves, "we're getting out alive."