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The first thing that the Boy learns is that humans are cruel. Or maybe just cruel to Amanto, but once the Boy learns that Amanto have stolen people's homes and forced the country to abide to them, he can't honestly be too bitter towards them.
But he can be fearful.
In the beginning, he was never quite sure what had set him apart from everyone else. He knew what he was, knew what his parents were, but he couldn't figure out how other people knew. At first he thought it could be his skin. It was an awful lot darker than everyone else's and that was the only thing he could think of. That was before he saw his reflection in a pond he was drinking out of. The Boy was so shocked by what he saw that he fell straight into the pond, almost drowning himself before his fingers grasped the edge and pulled himself back out. Wet and shivering, he peeked back over the pond and the same face stared back.
He looked almost identical to the person who had given birth to him, the same person who had tried to kill him mere minutes after conceiving him. The Boy had their curly white hair and red eyes, even his skin looked similar to theirs; not in color, which he knows is from his human father, but in the way it looked soft and perfect. He had the same high cheekbones, mostly hidden by baby fat, and the same slant to his eyes. But the most shocking thing to him was how pointy his ears were and the strange markings on his face. There was a little red diamond-shaped mark in the middle of his forehead and thin blue lines striking his cheekbones. They didn’t stand out too much on his dark skin like they had on his parent’s pale skin, but they were noticeable enough.
No wonder the humans treated him like shit; he looked nothing like them. He looked like a monster.
So, the Boy learns a new way of surviving: adaption. He lets his hair grow wild, hoping that the curls will hide the slight point to his ears, and strategically places dirt and mud on his cheeks and forehead.
But then he learns that human cruelty is indifferent towards species. He may look more human, more normal, but that doesn’t increase the amount of food or money he receives begging. It only decreases the amount of scary men with swords following him around; and even then, the amount never reaches zero. Before he was a dirty, begging Amanto child; now he’s just dirty and begging.
The Boy also never truly adjusts to living around people, preferring the quiet solitude of empty battlegrounds and forests, but he does know that his best case scenario for his survival is to be around them. The winter months are hard to live alone and sometimes it becomes impossible to find food without searching through garbage or stealing when nobody's looking.
And if you want to steal, don’t get caught or don’t do it at all.
He runs as fast as he can, which granted isn’t all that fast considering how short his legs are and how his father’s katana keeps tripping him up, but he tries. Sometimes just trying isn’t enough, he supposes.
One of them men yank him back by his yukata and the Boy does everything he can to get free. He kicks his legs back, trying to hit something useful, and succeeds when he hears the sick crack of something breaking.
“Ow, fuck! You little brat!” The man screeches, throwing the Boy to the ground before grappling at his own leg and falling on his ass.
“What’s wrong, Ibuki? Did he bite ya?” says another man as he catches up. The four other men laugh. Ibuki continues to cuss and whimper, saying nothing in return.
The Boy had briefly considered throwing the sword away the third time he almost fell while running, but as the realization dawned on the other men that Ibuki wasn’t just playing around, the Boy felt grateful that he had kept it. The men drew their swords and stared at him with a hate that the Boy had only ever seen once before.
His Amanto parent.
He saw red. And the next thing he knew, his father’s katana was drawn and his hands were shaking, the alleyway splattered with blood. All six men were on the ground, silent, with their guts strewn across the ground and their blood seeping into the soil. His hands were shaking so bad his grip on the sword loosened, it clattering to the ground. He didn’t pick it up this time and instead, turned and ran.
He never stole again after that.
The next thing the Boy learns takes him almost eight years to figure out; immortality. Well, not so much immortality and more he stops ageing when he reaches six. He doesn’t really notice the first year; he suspects that maybe he’ll get a growth spurt the next year, or that maybe some of the baby fat will melt away. But by the time he reaches eight years old and realizes he hasn’t grown a single inch in two years, he thinks maybe something isn’t right. He’s not quite so sure about how much he weighs, but he suspects that hasn’t changed a lot either.
The Boy doesn’t really worry about it a whole lot. Who wants to be a scummy adult anyways? All they do is bitch and moan and try to kill things when they don’t get what they want. Also he could use this to his advantage, couldn’t he? More people would trust an Amanto child than an adult one, surely? Also, no one wants to give food to a begging man when there’s a begging child around.
He survives that way, begging and searching through trash, until he reaches ten and finds an easier way to find food; on the corpses of dead soldiers. From what he overhears, there’s something called a Joui War going on, and that means there are a lot of battlegrounds around. Alive soldiers need to eat, but dead ones don’t.
Also nobody is trying to kill him.
He drifts from battlefield from battlefield, searching through every corpse before moving onto the next. It’s a good idea, he finds. No one really bothers him, save for the few people that come wandering past, and he doesn’t think they ever see him; they always run the other way.
He’s also not completely lonely; he has the crows. He strikes up some kind of bargain with them; he shares some of the food he finds, the real good stuff, and they bring him trinkets. Some of them are useless, like shiny buttons or broken pieces bits of armor, but sometimes he gets good stuff; a few coins here and there, necklaces or rings that he can sell in town.
He doesn’t count it as stealing; you steal things from living people, people who need those things too. Dead people don't need things. He’s not hurting anybody, so nobody will hurt him. He likes it that way; he likes the quiet, the solitude, the black and white.
It doesn’t stay that way for very much longer, but he doesn’t really mind.
“Only a demon could eat peacefully while surrounded by corpses.... and how about you? To be honest though, you seem too cute to be a demon.”
The weight of a hand on his head has the Boy looking up at the man above him, eyes wide.
He smacked the man’s hand and jumped back a good few feet, drawing the katana he had found on the ground and throwing the sheath away. Where the hell had he come from? If the Boy wasn’t so startled, he would probably be quite impressed at the man’s sneaking skills. But he wasn’t impressed, mostly because this man was a lot taller than him and had a sword at his hip.
“Did you find that among the corpses as well?” The man continued, referring to the Boy’s sword. The Boy stayed quiet.
“Hiding here alone among corpses… is that the means you choose to protect yourself? I’ll say it… I am impressed. However, you’re not using that sword correctly.”
The Boy gripped the sword tighter, his heart racing a bit faster, and lowered himself in defense position. Don’t draw the sword, don’t draw the sword, don’t draw the sword, don’t draw the-
“There’s no meaning in simply wielding a sword if it’s just to scare others and protect yourself.” The man gripped the hilt of his sword and…
Flung it at him.
The Boy caught it in surprise, the weight sending him stumbling back a few steps.
“This is my sword… Go on and take it,” the man turned around, “If you’re interested in learning more about that blade, follow me. However from now on you must understand, the blade is not to cut down your enemies… nor is it to cut away your own weakness. A sword isn’t meant to protect your body. A sword… is meant for protecting your soul.”
The Boy was shocked and he stared at the man in confusion. His soul, huh? The Boy thought for a second, weighing his options as the man began to walk away. He could stay here and let the man walk away or…. What was his soul? He guessed he was intrigued enough to try and find out. He dropped the scavenged katana and ran after the man. He slowed to a walk a couple feet behind him, still cautious but not wanting to get left behind. He didn’t find falling behind much of a problem; the man seemed to slow down just enough to allow the Boy to keep up effortlessly.
“What’s yer name anyway?” The Boy said.
The man looked over his shoulder at him, “Oh, so you can talk!”
The Boy huffed; the man laughed.
“My name is Yoshida Shouyou,” he said. “And you?”
The Boy gave him a look, “Me what?”
“What’s your name?”
The Boy stopped walking. The man stopped walking as well, turning around to gaze curiously at him, waiting for an answer.
The Boy thought about it. His name? He was never given one, and he never really minded. Nobody ever talked to him and nobody ever asked. He had always been content being nameless, but now he wasn’t so sure. What did he tell this Yoshida Shouyou?
“My name is,uh,” Protecting your soul, your soul, your soul, “Gintoki.” He blurted out.
Shoyou was silent for a moment before, “Did you just make that up?”
“Shut up!”
Gintoki noticed how Shouyou’s shoulders were shaking and was about to ask what was wrong with him before realising he was laughing.
“Seriously! Shut up!” Gintoki barked at him, but he just laughed harder, “Honestly! You should repay me for this humiliation!”
That made Shouyou stifle his laughs to giggles. He side-eyed Gintoki. “Repay you? How?”
Gintoki lifted his head up and hiked the katana higher, “A piggyback. You laughing at me has made me tired,” he faked a yawn, “Also, dinner.” He added.
And that’s how he got Shouyou to give him a piggyback ride; granted, his reasoning for one made no sense, but he was tired. Constantly watching over your back was tiresome, and for once he didn’t need to rely on himself. Here was someone willing to help him and carry him. He’d never had that before.
He was suspicious of the man at first, but he didn’t really seem like a bad guy. A man that can pull off a whole speech like that and throw away his own weapon in front of someone willing to kill him can’t be all bad. Well, he might be stupid, but Gintoki kept his mouth shut.
Shouyou kept his promise and carried him all the way to the next town and bought him dinner (warm food!). Gintoki couldn’t help but scarfing it down. He also had a feeling Shouyou was laughing at him again.
They travelled a lot after that, drifting to town to town; Shouyou carrying Gintoki when he needed to and teaching him things when he should. It wasn’t exactly hard to teach a kid morals and life lessons, but when a child has been living lawless his whole life, there is something taxing about it.
Shouyou thought maybe it was because he pitied him.
They had learned a lot about each other really quickly. Gintoki knew that Shouyou wanted to open a Temple School, but still wasn’t quite sure on how and where to do it, and Shouyou had learned that when Gintoki’s nightmares got really bad he fled to high places. The both learned, rather embarrassingly, that both couldn't swim.
Gintoki learned a lot of things from Shouyou, different things than he had learned on the street. He learned new sword techniques that he had never thought existed and some conversational skills. One morning as Gintoki was tying up his yukata, Shouyou looked at him and said “Did you know you’re doing that backwards?”.
One cold night they set up camp in a forest where the trees had dense leaves that protected them from the rain. Gintoki was very adept at creating campfires- something that Shouyou had never needed to teach him. He sat there, warming his hands near the flames as he waited for Shouyou to come back from hunting.
A brush rustling alerted Gintoki of Shouyou’s arrival back and the grip on his katana loosened. “I got a rabbit and a pheasant. Which one do you want?”
“The pheasant,” Gintoki replied instantly.
“It’ll be harder to eat.”
“I hate rabbits,” he said, reaching for the dead bird.
Shouyou was right about it being harder, but Gintoki already knew that. Plucking pheasants aren’t that hard, but it requires a lot of patience; but considering how many times Gintoki has had to do it, he can say he’s almost a master at it. He’s even skinned one with a katana once; it was messy, but it doesn’t matter when you’re starving.
Gintoki’s least favorite part about it all is waiting for them to cook. There is silence between the two of them, the only noise the crackling of the fire and the sound of the wind and rain. It wasn’t uncomfortable, it never is, but Gintoki always feels like he should say something. He’s been living in solitude his entire life and he should be more than fine with the quiet, but he thinks there are words he should be saying. Gintoki suspects that maybe all the words he hasn’t said over the past eight-plus years are coming back for him.
The only thing he can think of saying is, “Y’know I’m an Amanto, right?”
Shouyou looks at him in surprise, clearly not expecting him to have said anything at all. His long brown hair glows in the fire light and he doesn’t say anything for a second before, “Yes, I know.”
Gintoki had suspected as much. He had tried to keep it hidden, but there’s something odd about a boy with dirt always in the same spots now matter how many times he washes and curly hair trying to hide pointed ears.
“Well, I’m only half-Amanto,” Gintoki continued, “My father was human.”
Shouyou cocked his head at that, but let him continue, but Gintoki was running out of things to say.
“And I don't age anymore,” he finished lamely.
“You don’t age?” Shouyou interjected, much to Gintoki’s relief.
“Well, I don’t think so. I haven’t gotten any taller in, I don't know, maybe four years since I started counting. I mean, that’s weird right?”
“Hmm, that is strange. Oooh, look! Foods done!”
They ate in silence and this time Gintoki didn’t feel like he needed to say anything.
Life was unusual for Gintoki after that; he stopped rubbing dirt on his face and asked Shouyou to cut his hair a little shorter. When they went into town, he received looks that he hadn’t been given in years. Looks of disgust, hatred, and sometimes even fear. The children his size avoided him like the plague and adult men three times his size followed him around if Shouyou wasn’t there. He knew that they were waiting for him to turn onto an empty street and he feared what would happen if he did. A sword is meant for protecting your soul.
Gintoki tried to stick as close as he could to Shouyou when the went into town, mostly because he didn’t want to get left behind (Shouyou would never leave without him anyways) and there was the perk of men only glaring instead of stalking. He never told Shouyou about it, but Gintoki figured he suspected anyways. The fact that Shouyou tried to keep an eye on him at all times was proof enough of that.
The next town they went to was really quiet, but quite large. The main streets were big and full of vendors but the alleys were narrow and filled with different types of sellers and buyers. Gintoki wasn’t stupid; there may have been things he never learned how to do, like read and write, but there were a lot of things he learned living on the streets. Women were always unsafe, men were always suspicious and children were always naive. That’s just how it was.
“Help! Someone help! My daughter, oh god, my daughter!” Some man was yelling at a street corner, breaking down in tears. Normally, Gintoki would have ignored it. Someone always needed help, but it wasn’t really his problem. He couldn’t even help himself, so there was no use in trying to solve someone else’s problems.
But Shouyou went straight over to the wailing man, so Gintoki was obligated to follow.
The man was short, middle-aged and already balding. Tears and snot were running down his face and onto his patched clothing. Gintoki noticed how his calloused fingers wouldn’t stop shaking.
“What’s wrong? What can I do to help?” Shouyou said to him.
The man looked up startled, like he didn’t realise someone would actually try and help him. He wasn’t speechless for long though.
“My daughter! She’s missing! She-she was helping me in the library and helped some young man trying to find a book and then I couldn’t find her! She just vanished! Oh my god, where is she.. what did he want with her… my daughter…” The man collapsed into fresh tears, his shaking hands wiping at his face.
“It’s OK,” Shouyou said, soothingly, “Take deep breaths. Can you tell me what she looked like? What the man who took her looked like?”
Gintoki was surprised the Shouyou managed to get a full description of both the girl and the man. The Bookkeeper’s daughter Chieko was around ‘Gintoki’s height’ with black hair in pigtails and a pink yukata with yellow ducklings on it. The man was ‘taller than Shouyou’ with black hair cropped close to his head and a dark blue yukata, similar to Gintoki’s.
Shouyou looked down at him, “Why don’t we split up? We can cover my ground that way.”
Gintoki stuck his finger in his nose to hide his surprise, “Sure. That’s if you really wanna entrust that much responsibility to me.”
Shouyou laughed and then was gone. Gintoki huffed and did the logical thing when looking for something; take to the roofs. Being half Amanto was good for some things; he could scale buildings like nobody else and could effortlessly jump the gaps between them. He peeked into the alleyways underneath him and saw a lot of things he really wish he hadn’t and searched nearly the whole town before realising that they’d probably be in a building by now. Stupid girl; honestly, she ought to have known better than to trust a stranger.
Gintoki thought about that for a second, stopping. Well, it wasn’t really her fault was it? She couldn’t be blamed for someone taking advantage of her kindness. It was that guy’s fault. He shouldn’t have taken her. Right?
“Please, I want to go home!”
“Shut up!”
Gintoki looked over the edge of the roof down to the alley below. There was a little girl with little pigtails and a duckling yukata with a scummy looking man in a blue yukata. He had her by the arm and was trying to pull her along, but she was trying to pull back.
Gintoki almost saw red.
But instead, he focused on the blue. The blue of the little girl’s tears as she begged to go home, begged for her daddy, begged for him to stop pulling her.
The man was saying something about how much coin she would fetch before he was eating dirt, Gintoki’s feet slamming him into the ground. The little girl stumbled back a few steps in fright, but Gintoki was looking at the man underneath him.
“You really are a dirtbag, aren’t you? I wonder how much I’ll get if I cut off your balls, huh?” Gintoki pushed his head further into the soil with his foot before turning to the girl.
“I’ve been looking for you. Chieko, right?” She nodded, “Your dad has been crying for you. Lemme take you home?”
She nodded again and he reached out a hand to her without thinking. She took it before he could pull back. Gintoki got off the unconscious man before reaching down and grabbing the back collar of his yukata. He took Chieko home while dragging her abductor with them.
The Bookkeeper cried when he saw her and Chieko also broke out into fresh tears. Gintoki dropped the man onto the ground and looked up at Shouyou, who seemed to have gotten back before Gintoki.
“Let’s go. I’m starving,” Gintoki said, to which Shouyou replied by ruffling his hair.
“Wait,” the Bookkeeper exclaimed, “Surely there must be some way to repay you! I don’t have much money, but I… I have a lot of books!”
“I can’t read,” Gintoki muttered.
Shouyou hummed, “More reason to get one. Can we take a look?”
The Bookkeeper let them walk around his library as he babied his daughter at the counter, hugging her and kissing her cheeks and crying all over her. Gintoki looked around, not really understanding what to do. The library smelled like paper and ink, something Gintoki had never really been around, only seen. Shouyou was looking intensly at the spines of the books on the shelves, sometimes taking them out to look at the covers before putting them back. Gintoki went up to the shelves and started looking too; he didn’t know what for exactly and the letters on them made no sense to him. He took out a couple big books just to open them and then putting them back before finding a book with a colorful spine and pictures on the cover. He flipped it open.
There were pictures everywhere, and some words, but Gintoki didn’t focus much on those. It looked cool; people fighting and doing things that looked oddly heroic. He didn’t really get it, but he liked looking at the drawings.
“Gintoki, come look at this.” Shouyou called. He reluctantly put the book back on the shelf and walked over to where Shouyou was holding a small, but thick book. He opened it up and pointed to a page with a bunch of words on it and a picture of some weird looking man on his knees.
“Y’know I have no idea what that means, right?”Gintoki deadpanned.
“It’s a book about Amanto,” Shouyou explained.
GIntoki put a finger in his ear, trying to dig out a ball of wax, “So?”
“It mentions half-Amanto.”
“...”
“And how one can seal their abilities into an object.”
Gintoki dug the wax out and flicked it onto the floor, “So you’re saying this book can seal my Amanto abilities away? What’s that matter?”
Shouyou looked at him with an expression akin to excitement and apprehension, “You could grow up.”
Gintoki stopped for a second. Grow up? He had never really thought about it before. He had just accepted that he’d be a kid forever, contempt with it even, but now that there was a possibility…. There was something alluring about being an adult, about growing up and having those experiences. About people looking at him and not seeing a monster, but seeing a boy grow into a man. He’d could be stronger, able to protect himself better and-
Able to protect others better.
People like Chieko, who can’t protect themselves. He could be a person that he had wished for in those alleyways. Someone like Shouyou.
“How d’ya do it?” Gintoki said, eyeing the book suspiciously.
Shouyou looked down at the book in his hands, “I’m… not sure. I haven’t read it all. Should we get this one?”
“Well, there isn’t really anything else worth readin’,” Gintoki said, “Not like I can.”
Shouyou went over and talked to the Bookkeeper, who agreed almost immediately and thanked him profusely. Chieko waved at him from her father’s lap. He gave a little wave back, a little unsure.
They slept in the hotel across the street that night. Well, Shouyou did. Gintoki, unable to fall asleep, had grabbed the book and was flipping through the pages. Unsure of the words and unsure of his future, unsure of what it would mean for him. The endless possibilities were a lot similar to counting sheep and he drifted into sleep eventually.