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Edo is filthy.
It’s worst in the summer, when the garbage and waste in the streets are left piled up for days on end, filling the air with a foul, rotting stench.
Hijikata kicks half-heartedly at an empty beer can, the tip of his sword dragging behind him. It’s sweltering in his uniform, and he’s miserable. The sparring mats at headquarters stink of old sweat, and his room stinks of old memories, the usual summer-borne ones, those ridiculous, balmy nights with a ridiculous samurai.
“Bastard,” he says under his breath.
They called him a demon, still. Only now they gave him other names. Ghost, monster, wraith. It was all true enough. Hijikata spent his nights haunting the streets of the city, smoking so heavily that he always reeked of it, the click of his lighter and the slick slide of his blade the only traces he left in Edo. It was the best that he could do. Kondo worried. Sougo swiped at him more. It made no difference.
Hijikata hears it, then. A soft rustling, the clink of steel. On the outskirts of town he rarely sees another soul on nights like this, just the occasional drunk slumped in a doorway or a wayward stranger fanning himself slowly with last week’s newspaper. He keeps walking, lights another cigarette, and blows the smoke out in a long sigh, tilting his head back to look at the sky. He can’t even see the stars, the smog’s so thick. He comes to a slow stop.
“Alright,” he says. “Have at it, then.”
The knife sails past his head. Easy dodge. Hijikata spins around and lunges forward, sword at his assailant’s neck, ready to cut, eager for the hot spray of blood—except, his hair. It gleams in a stray shaft of moonlight, a momentary, startling silver, and he hesitates. The second knife finds his side. Burst of static behind his eyes, the sharp bite of pain. Instinct moves him, and his sword finds its home. The man crumples to his knees, head bowed and throat gurgling, and when Hijikata draws close, his hair isn’t silver after all. It’s a trick of the light, moonlight caught in unruly white strands, now spotted with red. Only Hijikata still can’t catch his breath.
For a moment, he’d wondered.
It was a moment of weakness. Hijikata swears quietly. The men are going to have a field day with this one. He presses a shaking hand to his side, hand slipping over warm blood. The air stinks, the tinge of metal mixed with festering rot. He hates this damn city. Hates it.
***
The next week’s no better.
“You’re wasting your time,” Tsukuyo says. “Get up, samurai.”
Smoke curls out of her mouth. Hijikata wrinkles his nose. The sake’s too bitter. He takes another long pull.
“You’re the same,” he says, clearing his throat against the burn. He lights another cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame. “Why else are you here?”
“I thought you were better trained than this,” Tsukuyo says. She casts a scornful look over his slumped body, his head bowed over the bar. “Dog. Where’s your master?”
“Fuck off,” he grits. He swings out a hand, searching blindly, clasping the cool bottle to his chest. He feels her leave, the light floral touch of her perfume fading with a sighed curse. No matter. He’s busy thinking about the way his face used to look when he was drunk, the lazy tilt of his mouth, his drowsy, half-closed eyes, the tease of his voice around his name, the way he’d say it into the curve of his neck, his shoulder blade, the bend of his thigh. Hijikata, Hijikata-kun. Slow and drawn out, a sugared spill, the sweetness stretched into the early morning hours, another dawn, another day.
Let me go to where you are, he’d said once, voice low over the phone. Let me come. Hijikata had been dodging strikes from Katsura’s bombs, shouting incredulously into the receiver for him to speak up. He could hardly hear a thing, could only hear the warm timbre of his voice, could imagine him wasting his day away, sprawled out in his chair, the blue-and-white yukata slipping off his shoulder, one hand idly scratching his chest. When the smoke had cleared, Katsura had been gone, and then he’d had to start dodging Sougo’s sword.
Okay, he’d agreed anyway, gasping for breath. Come. Just make sure the brats have dinner. Already the tension of the day had begun to slip from his shoulders, imagining the soft smile he’d see on his face when he showed up with a bottle of sake and a bag of sweets in the evening.
He stumbles outside. When he’s done throwing up, he buries his face in his hands. Maybe this is what the memory of his voice has trained him into being. Just another drunk. He used to clean up after these men, used to pull them stumbling off the street to sleep it off. He couldn’t do anything about what they were drinking away. Former samurai, most of them. Old fools who reached for a bottle when they couldn’t reach for a blade, hopeless men who sneered at Hijikata’s neatly pressed uniform and laughed raucously at the wooden sword.
These men wandered into bar after bar, passed through hostess clubs and food stalls, transient figures with nowhere to call home. Edo was all they had, its filthy underbelly, its gleaming night lights, the endless churn of pachinko and sake’s easy swell. Hijikata couldn’t blame them. He was disgusted by their weakness, shrugged them off his shoulders, but he never forced them to the ground, used his handcuffs even less. They didn’t have anywhere else to go but deeper into the city, traveling further and further into its brash, useless heart. What kind of man did you have to be to miss a war?
Now he’s one of them. Just another drunk samurai, calling out for a ghost, stalking the old haunts of a city that would never need him back.
***
The kids are quieter these days. They’re running Odd Jobs just fine on their own, but there’s something vacant in Shinpachi’s eyes, something harsher in Kagura’s shouts. For the first few months after he disappeared, Hijikata visited them with pointless jobs, enlisting their help out of the desperate, stubborn hope that one day the door would open and his samurai would be there, picking his nose and grunting in irritation.
Foolish. Now Hijikata visits every other week, nodding politely to Otose and filling the fridge upstairs with an assortment of groceries, neatly unloading bags of vegetables and refilling the pantry with rice. Once a month, he replaces the expired, untouched carton of strawberry milk with a new one, turning away from the sickly sweet smell.
It’s not charity, it just is what it is. He doesn’t mind the routine. He loves the market, loves wandering through the bustling stalls, knocking his knuckles on watermelon to check for their hollow sweetness, smoothing his hands over fresh lotus root, wiping the earth from his palms. He doesn’t have to be anyone here. He’s just another customer, another man in the way, another face in the crowd of an endless spill of people. No different than the woman who sweeps the street in front of her stall singing old pop songs or the man who buys a pound of clams for his wife every week.
The warm frenzy of it is a welcome change from the kids’ favorite place, the sterile chill of the convenience store around the corner, simultaneously overpriced and frustratingly limited. He lets Kagura bully him there on days that he feels particularly indulgent, buys packs of fresh meat and konbu and ignores Shinpachi’s searching gaze when they return to the apartment laden with bags.
“You don’t have to do this, Hijikata-san,” Shinpachi had said, after the third time. “We’re doing just fine.”
“I know,” Hijikata had said.
He’d wanted to leave it at that. He hadn’t wanted to get into how he couldn’t give up the routine, still spent his nights dreaming of the long, sticky days they’d spend weaving through the stalls together, how he’d put on a show of weakness for Hijikata, complaining about how tired he was, about the morning he’d spent chasing down a lost cat or the evening before, when he’d spent hours laying bricks for the new ramen restaurant across the street, wheedle and prod and kick until Hijikata agreed to carry the basket in exasperation, hauling it onto his shoulder and sweating through his shirt, ignoring the tender ache in his chest at the small, pleased smile that’d spread across his face.
Shinpachi had adjusted his glasses, straightening up.
“Kagura-chan’s taking advantage,” he’d started, but he’d been interrupted before he’d been able to continue much further.
“Oi! I can hear you, dummy!”
The girl had burst through the doors, her enormous dog trailing behind her, heading straight towards Shinpachi. She’d been wearing his clothes, the loose fabric of the yukata bunched up at her waist and spilling onto the floor over her boots, blue hem dragging behind her as she’d strode threateningly towards Shinpachi. It’d been a shock, how small she’d looked in his clothes, smaller than usual. Hijikata’s heart had trembled with something terrible. The collar had reached so high that it’d grazed her ears, and she’d looked strikingly young, so much taller since he’d left, but still so young. Still just a girl.
Hijikata had let himself out when they'd started fighting in earnest, skipping the stairs and ignoring Otose’s narrow-eyed stare.
The two fought recklessly, but they’d been raised into it. There was a man whose voice should’ve been raised with theirs, a man who was reckless with money, reckless with drink, and reckless with people, a man who found homes for the perpetually homeless, who drifted through the city like its guardian, not the ghost that they used to call him.
He was careless with his body, careless with his life, and for Hijikata, whose heavily regimented world always fell helplessly apart in the face of Edo’s frenzied excess, it was endlessly frustrating and appealing. He longed for it, longed for him, missed the way he dragged him down into the filth of the city with him, missed how much he loved the mess of the place.
His feet have taken him back to the convenience store. The air conditioning is broken. Hijikata stands in the aisle looking at the cartons of strawberry milk, savoring the chill of the fridge on his skin. He’s never really had a sweet tooth. He leaves without buying anything.
***
Sometimes the worst part about him was how much he respected Hijikata’s work and the reputation that came with it. For all he mocked the Shinsengeumi for being the bakufu’s dogs, for all the times he dragged Hijikata, drunk and careless across the city, he was never too sloppy with him in public, never clung to him the way he loved to do in private when he’d had more than a few drinks.
At first, Hijikata had thought that he hadn’t wanted him the same way, that he hadn’t been desperate to stay close the way Hijikata always felt in his presence, but then they’d stumble into an alleyway or behind a bar and sink straight into each other, unable to keep their hands off of each other for another second.
They respected each others’ privacy, knew the rumors that followed them around town, but sometimes, Hijikata wanted to be seen, wanted to give into the hot mix of affection and irritation that burst through him every time he saw him wandering into a fight or waking up in his bed, silver curls tousled with sweat, smile slow and sweet, everything about him so carelessly beautiful.
Hijikata doesn’t patrol by the love hotels anymore, avoids Yoshiwara even more. These parts of Edo always feel hopeless to him, the red-orange glow of the neon signs casting the profiles of their occupants in hazy relief. Under that indecent light there was no such thing as love. That’s what he used to say to Hijikata, at least.
Hijikata always wanted to disagree. What is this, then, he wanted to say. What are you and I? Only he never let the words escape him, just turned over in bed with a snort, waited for him to drape an arm around him and draw him back into his chest. What is it, he’d say, voice deep and hoarse, calloused fingers tracing circles over his hip. Hijikata-kun. Tell me. And Hijikata would sink back into his warmth, close his eyes before he pushed him back against the bed and climbed over him, sitting on his hips and letting the bitter taste in his mouth recede under the way he’d look up at him, struck dumb and pleased, hands smoothing over his thighs, those perpetually half-lidded eyes sharpened with desire.
It was stupid. But he couldn’t stop coming back, needed him desperately, betrayed by his own longing. It was too much. It was never enough. It was the city closing in on him. And he felt stupid, felt like some blind, stumbling fool, always trying to catch up, never reaching him.
This city held too much of him, its transience, its hideous beauty, its mess, its lovers. Because that was the truth of it, terrible as it was. Whenever he remembered something about Edo, he was remembering something about Gintoki. He couldn’t stay anywhere else, wouldn’t take up his sword for anything else. It was too complicated. It drove a knife into the tender, stinging bruise in his chest, the one that still saw her ghost in the sweep of a stranger’s pink-and-green kimono. But he wanted him. He’d never wanted anything so badly in his life. He was ruined for anyone else. He couldn’t live without him, and the thing he did now could hardly be called life. Come back, he called, every night that he haunted the streets, helpless and exhausted. Come back.
***
Hijikata nearly dies before he sees him again. The battlefield is blackened, covered in acrid smoke, and when he catches sight of the silver stained with blood he stumbles, narrowly dodging a blade. He swings out with his sword blindly, searching desperately, and when he finds those red eyes, that savage grin, the sight of his broad back strikes him to his core, sinking straight through bone, and, trembling, he draws a breath, raises his sword. Feels it all come rushing back, time swept away by the sweet, sharp tide of relief. All his longing finally breaking on the shore.
“We wouldn’t come here in such an age to see you,” he says. He knows he’s smiling by the way he bows his head, the way his shoulders relax under the torn yukata. Come on, he thinks, come on, and, drawing a deep breath, he calls his name, calls him home.
“Shiroyasha.”
Gintoki. Gin.