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If anything connects them, it's the string of violence. Pain rooted in shared experiences, common enemies, similar events that transpired individually, but followed the same script for two different people in different times and different places.
They saw each other tattered and bloodied more often than unscathed, on the battlefield and in life-or-death situations more often than in the loud, but still somehow civil bustle of the huge city. Even on the peaceful streets of Edo they were always able to find something to get enraged about, with fists flying faster than the insults sliding off the tongues.
Toushirou doesn't think about "when". When did Yorozuya become another staple in his life, another chaotic variable that amplified the general insanity of his existence. He’s already thought about that, spent countless hours tossing under his blanket, trying to find the answer — and failing. Yorozuya is a sneaky bastard who shimmied his way into Toushirou's life inconspicuously, and then acted like he'd always been there.
The fact that Toushirou didn't mind that was horrifying. Then again, a lot of things were. The mayonnaise crisis felt much more daunting; the news he heard about the declining chicken population filled him with unease.
So when he plops on the seat in the cafe, nursing his bruised cheek, he's not surprised to see Yorozuya with a similar gash to his own. This time though, Toushirou was not the one who added some color to his pale mug. But he's pretty sure it was more than justified — the bastard's always asking for it.
"Rough day?" he hums, motioning to the waitress. Yorozuya slides on the table with a whine, tapping fingers on the menu.
"It’s just started."
"So on-brand for you to start your day around noon," Toushirou smirks, the lighter pleasantly heavy in his hand. "And get your face painted instantly."
"For the record," Yorozuya whines into the table, "that was completely unprovoked. And I could've dodged it."
"But you didn't."
"Let's just say I understand the reasoning behind such actions."
"You just said it was unprovoked."
That forces Yorozuya to move his head a little just to be able to glare at Toushirou. It doesn't seem to be effective. If anything, it looks horrifyingly cute. Or, well, the cuteness itself is not horrifying, but the fact that Toushirou finds the sight of Yorozuya splayed on a cold table pouting and peeking at him behind his fringe is.
"Can you just for once drop your sniffing cop act and not dig into whatever I say?"
"I'm working," Toushirou huffs, nodding at the waitress as she sets the coffee in front of him, and proceeds before Yorozuya opens his mouth. "Just on a lunch break right now. So no."
The air conditioner hums in agreement, shushing Yorozuya up. The parfait that lands in front of him helps, too.
"You're not really looking your best self today either," Yorozuya mumbles with the spoon in his mouth.
Toushirou eyes the heap of mayo on top of his coffee and, considering it big enough, stashes the bottle back into his jacket.
"As I said, I'm working," he repeats. "And my job has some consequences."
"You're not gonna say you could've dodged that?"
"My ego is not as fragile as yours."
Yorozuya huffs, the droplets of ice cream bubbling on his lips. He licks them off, the tongue minutely peeking out, and gets the ones that were swift enough to slide down his chin with his thumb.
"Sure, you humiliated yourself on national TV enough to just get rid of it."
And maybe Yorozuya is right, because when Toushirou allows himself to admit that he's hypnotized by the way the skin of Yorozuya's chin creases under the pressure of his thumb, his mind doesn't show him alarm messages, and just silently agrees.
"Your dignity is nonexistent," Yorozuya proceeds, scooping the mix of ice cream, strawberries, and chocolate sauce from the sides of the glass. "It's rent was due when you let that otaku inside, and it got evicted on episode 166."
Toushirou doesn't want to think about whatever transpired back then, because, a) he's eating, damn it; and b) currently he's pretty busy tracking the movements of the long spoon that vanishes inside Yorozuya's mouth, cataloging the way his lips squeeze around the thin handle and the way his cheeks hollow as he sucks the parfait in.
"Says a permhead whose yukata I had to hold in my hand when he was shitting all over the toilet," he quips, forcefully dragging his gaze away and putting a cigarette in his mouth.
"Sometimes we have to sacrifice substance over style," Yorozuya shrugs, digging into his parfait again. "Your silhouette is forgettable, but mine? Easily recognizable even after 20 years since the debut. And he even wanted to make you the protagonist. What a joke."
Busying himself with a coffee and cigarette seems like a wise choice, but maybe along with his dignity, Toushirou threw away at least a little bit of his wisdom, because even through the thick smoke he watches the movements of the spoon, the arc it follows from the glass to Yorozuya's mouth, the striking pink of his lips enveloping the cold metal, the nearly translucent droplets of ice cream on them.
He watches it all as if in slow-motion, sounds of the spoon clinking reaching him through the haze with a delay, the whirring of the air conditioner stretched out in time. His only point of focus is that metallic spoon, its sides glinting almost mischievously after being oh so skillfully licked clean by Yorozuya's traitorous tongue.
He sees Yorozuya's lips moving, not around the spoon but around some words, and he's sure they are not very pleasant, because nothing this bastard says ever is, most of the time. But sue him, he's entranced by this idiot, and he only lives once, and as this morning proved, shit can happen when he least expects it. What if he dies without getting really closely acquainted with this mouth?
"Go out with me," he breathes out with the smoke and, the coward he is, covers his mouth with the coffee cup the next instant. The heap of mayo wobbles dangerously on top of the cup and reassuringly licks the tip of his nose. The cluttering of the spoon is the answer enough, though.
Toushirou allows himself to glance over the mayo to the motionless Yorozuya. He's too still, too stiff, too rigid, too puzzled. He'd never seen him like that.
Even in his laziness, Yorozuya bursts with vitality. He breathes with his full chest (oh, how full is that chest), he keeps track of things with these half-lidded eyes, the fluttering of his eyelashes being the only indication of him paying attention. He changes the pitch of his voice from simply teasing to unnervingly annoying, and if anything, he doesn't keep as still as he wants people to think he is. Toushirou knows. Toushirou has watched him for far too long: first as a suspect, then as a nuisance, now — as someone he can't take his eyes off.
So seeing Yorozuya frozen does ring some mental alarm bells, so he carefully puts the cup back on the table. Who knows what the fuck will he do. Maybe he'll be needing both hands to protect himself.
That was, probably, his biggest mistake, because now he can see the way Yorozuya looks at him. And he doesn't like that.
His eyes look terrified. Toushirou is pretty sure he'd look like that after hearing the news of the destruction of the Mayorin factory.
The daze lasts long enough for Toushirou to go through five rejection scenarios and one acceptance, all of them including some sort of strenuous physical activity. But when life seeps back into Yorozuya, it does so with a bang. Literally: he slams his palms on the table with a loud thud, and an accompanying jitter of the spoon.
The terror in Yorozuya's eyes gets replaced by something akin to worry and anger, but Toushirou doubts that it's directed at him. His gaze turns a little bit wild, searching, roams over Toushirou's body, never staying on his face for long enough aside from the bruise on his cheek.
And then Yorozuya starts rambling.
"Have you been hit with some serum? Aphrodisiac? Do we have to fuck to keep you alive?"
And that sounds normal enough for Toushirou to exhale and answer sincerely: "No, no, and no."
"I can't do the fucking!"
"I'm not asking you to."
"Good. No! You do! Going out implies that!"
"You're speedrunning the process," Toushirou mutters into the heap of mayo, trying to cover his irritation. Nothing ever goes the way he predicts if it involves Yorozuya. The bastard is too random, his brain is one big lump of candied tissue judging by the amount of sweets he inhales. His parfait, however, sits forgotten on the table as Yorozuya buries his fingers in his perm and starts swaying from left to right, muttering something unintelligibly.
Toushirou broke him. And somehow, that doesn't make him feel even slightly satisfied.
"Are you done freaking out?" he asks calmly, peeking over the cup.
Yorozuya stills again, untangles his hands from his hair, and looks Toushirou directly in the eyes. His gaze feels way too heavy, too unguarded, and, dare he say, wounded.
"No," he says simply, shaking his head.
And then he leaves. The remnants of his parfait sit half-molten, and Toushirou thinks that maybe he finally fucked up.
***
On the one hand, he knows the first rule of being a perfectionist: if you want something done right, do it yourself. On the other hand, he also knows the first rule of an effective manager: delegate and allocate tasks amongst your subordinates.
There were moments, however, when it was hard to choose which way to go, and Toushirou was choosing the most suboptimal one. Like now.
He has plenty of boys who can do stealth missions. He has plenty of boys who can qualify as a one-man-army (even though ordering those around usually ends up being a royal pain in Toushirou's ass, because ordering somehow turns into convincing and bribing, and nobody cares about subordination in the barracks, right, Sougo?). He has plenty of boys who would follow him to hell and back.
But aside from his boys and some rules from MBA 101, he has a thing called a hunch. And the hunch told him that Yamazaki looked a little bit too terrified submitting this report, the text wasn't as infested with anpans as it usually would be, and the location seemed pretty weird for simple electronics smuggling. If anything, the electronics probably weren't that simple.
Also the hunch told him that he should probably investigate it himself. Of course, with a backup available one click of a button away.
The problem is, there are some battles when it's hard to get a proper breath in, let alone reach the phone, and the one that started in the rusty warehouse was, sadly, like that. He hates gunfights: the sword is at a big disadvantage against something that can work from a distance, no matter how skilled Toushirou is. The sword can be used as a projectile only once, and reaching those who prefer to fire at him some meters away requires some creativity.
Toushirou wouldn't become a Vice-Commander if he wasn't creative enough, though. After all, he had to learn how to deal with groups of enemies since he was a brat. Now the groups just have flashy guns on top of flashy swords, so it's no big deal, right?
He briefly thinks about enforcing an advanced stretching routine on his boys as he evades another shot in a manner that makes the dude firing it gasp and whistle, and this minute confusion costs him life.
But Toushirou is not the one who ends it. It's the whirlwind of white and blue that oh so graciously falls from the roof right into the center of the huddling group of gunmen. They scatter around, trying to hide both from him and from Toushirou, but some fail.
Yorozuya kicks the lid from one of the boxes that houses so-called electronics and grimaces in disgust. Toushirou agrees: while the tubes with the green liquid can pass as electronics, the humanoid-shaped creatures in them sure can't. He effectively moves through the Yorozuya-induced panic, bitterly thinking that he actually had it under control and he didn't need any help from the resident permheaded nuisance.
But then Yorozuya looks straight at him, for the first time in five days since Toushirou's badly timed proposition, and Toushirou sees something familiar in his eyes.
It's not terror, not disgust, and not something that made Toushirou question his life choices and smoke pack after pack for five nights straight, filling his idle time with as much field work as possible (yes, this stupid mission included, don't trust him spouting the bullshit about the hunch). What he sees in that brief gaze is a well-known mix of adrenaline, trust, and mischief. Somehow, that fills him with comfort and ease.
He knows that now he can rely on someone else. And that someone else, however random and unpredictable he may be, won't let him down.
"If your body count is larger than mine," Yorozuya spits out, landing a hit so thunderous the dude's ribs break with a crack that's audible even in all the ruckus, "I'll go out with you."
Toushirou never backs down from a challenge. Especially the one that he has all the chances to win.
He doesn't win that one.
But he prides himself on not disturbing the boxes with the unknown bodies in these weird tubes. And he prides himself on standing somewhat straight, even with a gash on his hip and more than a few bullet holes in his jacket.
He finally fishes his phone out of the pocket and dials Kondo-san.
"Yeah, it's me," he rasps into the slider, wheezing. His ribs took a nasty hit from one of the boxes when he was trying to evade the shot. That he doesn't pride himself on. "Send a couple of cruisers, a body wagon, and an ambulance. Don't tell Yamazaki he was right. But let him sleep a bit later."
He hears a huff from Yorozuya and sends him a glare.
"No, I'm not a softie, you are," he answers Kondo-san's cooing. "Yes, I'm fine. I'll get back with the boys."
The click of the slider in the silence barely interspersed by hushed mechanical whirring and some pained moans is more satisfying than he thought it would be. That relative silence, however, doesn't last long.
"You're a tsundere," Yorozuya drawls, limping to him and kicking the stray whimpering idiot on his way. "You're a softie by design, just badly covering it up."
Toushirou slips the slider into his pocket, exchanging it for the pack of Mayoboros, and doesn't dignify him with an answer.
"And I gave you a headstart, mind you," Yorozuya proceeds. He's close now, pointedly looking somewhere above Toushirou's shoulder. Toushirou briefly thinks that red suits him way too well. His round pouty cheeks contrast with the speckles of blood on his skin. "How dare you disappoint me? Do they teach you nothing at your tax-thief school?"
Toushirou chuckles. "Sounds like you wanted to lose," he huffs and pats his pocket for the lighter.
Yorozuya turns even farther to the side and busies himself with scraping the dirt off one of his boots with another. If anything, he succeeds at making more mess than there was initially. As he mutters something and steals a gaze at Toushirou — a really brief one, barely noticeable, he shakes his head with a smirk, and continues ruining his boots.
Something about that looks way too amusing. Maybe it's the fact that Yorozuya is still that childish mess of a human that can transform into a killing machine in an instant, and Toushirou can entrust him with his own life that prompts him to draw his own lips into a smirk.
"Oh I'm sorry, my ears don't work that well from all the millions of taxpayers' yen that have been shoved in them. Care to repeat that?"
Yorozuya now promptly faces the opposite wall, no longer trampling with the aesthetics of his boot but instead examining his torn sleeve. The mumble seems more coherent now, but what Toushirou hears makes him think that maybe his ears really are filled with the wads of cash.
"Us poor uneducated pigs can't decipher your wonderfully elaborate speech, Sakata-dono," he muses, creeping a bit closer.
And maybe it's the honorific, maybe it's the sound of his surname instead of the usual title, but Yorozuya swirls around and nearly crashes into Toushirou. His cheeks are red, and it's not blood. Maybe it's adrenaline, sure, but the blotchy rosiness covers his nose, too, and fuck, it looks way too cute on someone who just leveled down seven more guys than Toushirou did.
"Maybe I did," Yorozuya blurts out, finally, and doesn't meet his gaze. His voice is tiny, way too tiny for someone who's usually so boisterous and loud and tries to fill the whole world with himself.
And Toushirou can't help it.
"Who's the tsundere now?" he asks, breathing out a tiny laugh, and it sounds way too soft even for him. Yorozuya's eyes snap back to him, wide and still a bit unsure, but mischief creeps back into them, prompting Toushirou to step just a tiny bit closer. "Deal's off," he whispers.
And Yorozuya agrees with him in a most fitting way.
Kissing him feels right. Kissing him while surrounded by mangled bodies, some still moaning in pain, feels oddly correct. They're fucked up like that, violence connecting them at the most important plot points of their life, and if anyone dares to say that it's not an important point in Toushirou's life, he'll force them to commit seppuku.
Yorozuya's fingers cradle his bruised sides — so softly yet so sure, as if he can't believe that Toushirou is actually here, under his palms, and that, surprisingly, calms Toushirou down instead of making him feel excited.
He's done everything right. He's doing everything right. He knows the cruisers will arrive in a few minutes, so he can allocate some time to bask in that blissful, easy satisfaction that fills him with nice warmth instead of uncontrollable heat.
"You sure you still wanna go out with me?" Yorozuya mutters when they separate for a moment. There's still a bit of distrust in his eyes, but Toushirou tries to reassure him by licking the small gash on his split lip.
"I'm stubborn," he breathes out. And he feels Yororzuya's lips stretch into a smile under his.