Chapter Text
Toshirou emerged from a pile of paperwork that really should be added to the list of wonders of the world—since every time he finished and removed a document, ten more magically took its place—as Kondo shuffled into his room with a posture far more crushed and gorilla and crushed gorilla than normal. He dragged himself directly in front of Toshirou’s paperwork table and sighed with enough force to topple the paperwork pile into a paperwork floor.
“Is everything okay?” Toshirou asked between gritted teeth as his hands sorted scattered papers.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kondo pouted where he stood, arms folded tightly, radiating discomfort.
The room descended into silence and paper shuffling.
After another minute, the paper shuffling ceased and pen scratching took its place.
Eventually, Yamazaki entered with three more armfuls worth of papers to add to the recently reformed pile, looked quizzically from the clearly distraught Kondo to Toshirou, who only shook his head minutely, before quickly backing out the way he came.
Toshirou took one of the new papers from the top of the pile and, after a rough scan, realized he would have to kill Sougo later.
“I have to believe that some people don’t realize how cruel they are,” Kondo finally said. “If they did know, there’s no chance they’d behave in such a way!”
“Mm,” Toshirou said around a well-needed cigarette, underlining Sougo’s name on the report and putting SEPPUKU above it.
“We’re all just people. We all have hearts. We do!”
“Mm.”
“And hearts are the heart of the matter, aren’t they? That must be it.” —Kondo nodded to himself—“I just have to convince them that disbanding the Shinsengumi would hurt the people within this city, and they would have to change their minds.”
“Mm… Wait, what?”
“Thanks for talking this through with me, Toshi. I feel much better,” Kondo said, straightening as he trotted out his standard, implacable grin. “Now, I can see you’re rather busy, so I’ll leave you to it.”
As Kondo made his way outside, Toshirou vaulted over the table to walk alongside him.
“Busy? You mean all that?” he said, vaguely waving toward the perilously teetering tower of red-taped bureaucracy behind him. “It can wait.”
While the papers were mostly labeled and highlighted and stamped in ways that clearly indicated they absolutely could not wait, if Kondo pushed forward alone with some strange, heartfelt plan to save the Shinsengumi when its future was hanging in the balance, none of those papers would matter in the end, because there wouldn’t be a Shinsengumi around to make them matter.
“Tell me about this disbanding the Shinsengumi business. Not that I don’t trust you to handle it, but I want to help,” he coaxed.
At this, Kondo stopped on the deck right outside of Toshirou’s room, looking thoughtful, hand stroking his chin. A sudden peace seemed to capture his features as he gazed at Yamazaki losing his grip on his badminton racket in the middle of a particularly hard overhead swing, accidentally flinging it into the middle of Teams’ 6-8 sword practice. Screams erupted like a pack of disturbed seagulls, echoing through the yard, as the stupid accident made its mark on far too many trained fighters.
No, that wasn’t quite right, actually.
Reevaluating the moment, instincts pricking with a subconscious discovery, Toshirou realized a rock had hit Yamazaki’s knuckles right when his racket was at zenith, causing him to drop it mid-swing. So not an accident then.
From the direction the rock had come from, a sadistically shaped shadow huddled in the bushes before skittering away.
“Our men are worth protecting,” Kondo stated, lips pressing firmly together as he gazed out into the distance.
From others? From themselves?
“Of course. Sure, yeah,” Toshirou said. “What can I do?”
“Well, there is one way you could make a big difference right away,” Kondo murmured, eyes suddenly sparking with poorly contained excitement. “How about it?”
“Are these the ones… trying to disorganize the organization?” Toshirou tried vaguely due to the many prying ears now surrounding them.
“Why would they want to?” Kondo guffawed and ordered another round of drinks to the sound of heavily manufactured cheers around their table in Snack Smile. “This joint’s best worker is in a epic ‘will they won’t they’ romance with me, and why would anyone risk collapsing that amazing love story by putting me out of work?”
“Put you out of work? With your paycheck?” a group of hostesses tittered with bright, predatory smiles, like a gang of spiders rubbing their legs together in front of a struggling prey caught in their web.
Kondo missed this particularly vivid visual as his eyes peered desperately in the direction of Shimura Tae living it up with customers very much not him. Half of his ‘will they won’t they’ romance was definitely alive and smelling up the room—the ‘they won’t’ part, in particular.
When Kondo had asked for his help and led him here, Toshirou had wondered for a moment if a fundamental threat to the Shinsengumi was actually hidden somewhere within the sultry jazz and fatal doses of cologne and perfume wafting out the door toward their position in front of the shop on the street. When, upon entering, the receptionist had looked from Kondo to Toshirou with a long sigh and said, ‘As long as you have an escort who will take responsibility, I suppose we can let you in a couple days earlier than the official length of your suspension,’ Toshirou realized he really was that fucking gullible.
“Hijikata-han, let me pour you another drink,” the hostess at his left shoulder said, syrupy warm, the liquid already filling his glass before his assent.
“Yeah, thanks,” he said, before elbowing Kondo roughly enough to return his attention to their table. “So is there really any threat, or were you just stringing me along so you could come here?”
“I would never lie to you,” Kondo exclaimed immediately. “There is a problem, and you are helping by bolstering my spirits and courage, giving me strength that I will use to take commanding action!”
“We’re here for you too, Kondo-han~,” said the group around the table, excluding the hostess sitting to the left of Toshirou who murmured, syrupy soft, just to him, “Bosses, am I right? Always causing trouble.”
Ignoring her, Toshirou said, “You could just skip this part and take commanding action now though.”
“Tomorrow is soon enough. I will handle this, I promise,” Kondo said firmly. “But for now I need to spend enough money so that Otae-san will notice me and come to our table so I can apologize for—!”
A hairpin shot into his open mouth with a professional sniper’s level of precision, causing him to gag and cough up spurts of blood.
“I told you never to mention The Incident to anyone, anyplace, anytime, gorilla,” Shimura growled from across the room.
“But I just—”
Another hair pin met the back of his throat in a volcanic spray of red.
Sighing heavily, Toshirou maneuvered his way out of the booth and mumbled to a hacking, writhing Kondo, “I’ll be outside whenever you’re ready.”
In this case, ‘whenever you’re ready’ meant whenever Kondo was unceremoniously kicked out of the establishment while begging, bleeding, and pleading, but it all came to the same inevitable conclusion in the end.
Blowing smoke up into the night, Toshirou stood outside Snack Smile as the evening crowds shuffled around him, voices loose with alcohol and warmed by good company or their search for it. As long as Kondo didn’t cause anything as severe as a diplomatic incident back in the club, Toshirou was confident he could wheedle the Shinsengumi issue out of him tomorrow. Based on his commander’s behavior, this whole thing wasn’t extremely time sensitive… probably.
Maybe the wrong politician’s brother had gotten caught in the crossfire of a Joui raid. Maybe Pops Matsudaira had decided to mellow out in his old age. Maybe the Mimawarigumi had decided to lean into their gigantic asshole roots.
Whatever it was, Toshirou would handle it. That was why he was here, after all.
“It is a nice evening,” said a voice, syrupy sweet, behind him. “In a way, it does feel wasteful to spend it inside, in the club.”
One of the hostesses must have come out to check on him—or maybe it was already time to drag his boss out of whatever shit he had decided to dive into headfirst.
“Is there a problem?” he asked.
“Oh no, Kondo-han is still hanging on for dear life. He hasn’t fallen yet, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said in a way that made him not entirely sure if she was speaking literally or in metaphors. “Would you like some company?”
“No,” he said, taking another long drag of his cigarette, watching the tendrils of smoke disappear into the darkened sky.
The hostess fell to silence, but she didn’t leave. Suddenly, the atmosphere grew heavy enough that a weaker man would have flinched. Toshirou, on the other hand, kept his spine carefully straight.
As he turned, realizing he might have to defuse the situation, the woman shouted, “Don’t look at me!”
He paused.
“Huh?”
“Without looking, I need you to tell me the color of my eyes.”
“Huh?”
“I was sitting next to you in that club for almost an hour. In that whole time, did you look my way and see me even once? Did you notice me at all?”
Thinking back, Toshirou could remember that while Kondo was sitting on his right at that table in Snack Smile, someone else definitely sat on his left. Probably… a woman? Something woman shaped?
How tiresome. He didn’t ask for her in the first place, so what right did she have to demand his attention?
“Of course I remember,” he lied. “Your eye color is brown.”
Statistically, he was most likely right.
“Brrrzt!” she made a buzzer sound with her tongue and teeth. “Wrong! They’re coffee!”
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?!
“Popular men are the worst,” she snapped, the syrup now congealed and uncomfortably sticky, still situated right behind him. “You think the world belongs to you and you’re all that matters. Everyone else is just a bunch of worms slithering at your feet, ready to be stepped on without you even realizing we’re there!”
Biting his tongue to smother the replies his brain wanted to snap out, rapid fire, Toshirou instead offered, “I wouldn’t step on you.”
That was probably the right thing to say here, right?
“Not stepping on me would mean you would actually have to be aware of my existence, which you seem utterly incapable of doing!”
Toshirou would definitely prefer to live in a world where he had never met this person he currently wasn’t allowed to look at. Alternatively to a complete undo or memory-wipe, he was more than fine with leaving her here and never coming back just as soon as his commander finished making an ass of himself for the evening.
Was it really so hard for Kondo to fuck up badly enough to get thrown out of the hostess club already? He constantly took things too far; why wasn’t he making those kinds of mistakes when Toshirou wanted them to happen!
“You really don’t have anything to say for yourself?” the woman snapped into the heavily drawn-out silence.
Taking another cigarette out of his pack, he lit it as he thought to himself… did he really have anything to say here? Anything at all?
Finally, he uttered, “Stop trying to get me to notice you and find someone who actually wants to.”
The frost behind him cracked into a deeper, more primordial chill.
“I see,” she said with an empty laugh. “You really have no idea what it means to be discarded—to look for feeling, recognition, warmth and find nothing. What you’re failing to realize is that the people who shower you with attention don’t actually care as much as you think they do. I’m sure no one truly values an asshole like you.”
Who was showering him with attention? Was he missing something?
“Let’s put it to the test, shall we?” The voice behind him turned bitingly bright. “I’ll make it so everyone in the world forgets who you are, except if you are their most important person. We’ll see how much adoration you receive when it’s you versus the rest of the universe!”
Behind him a pair of fingers snapped, and a malicious cackle echoed through the snow-laden street. By the time Toshirou turned around in an attempt to face his mysterious adversary once again, she was gone.
With a sigh mixed with exhaled smoke, he wandered his way back into the club.
Heading toward the reception booth, he said, “I’d like to lodge a complaint.”
A tired-looking woman, her brown hair in two droopy buns, opened an old notebook fat to bursting with what looked like receipts, reports, and compromising pictures showing far too much skin.
“Yeah, go ahead,” she said.
“One of your employees tried to curse me.”
The woman, who hadn’t once made eye-contact through the course of the conversation, raised her head to look at him.
“She said bad words?”
“No, like a magic curse.”
“A magic curse?”
“I think so.”
“‘He thinks so,’” she muttered before returning her gaze to the notebook. “Which one?”
“Which curse?”
There were different kinds of curses that were standard in hostess clubs?
“No. Which girl?” she asked, already far more tired with him than could possibly be warranted.
“Her eyes are coffee colored.”
Wordlessly, the woman flipped to one of the last pages in the notebook and turned it around to show him. It was a list of names.
Mariko
Bibi
Karina
Sayo
Aya
Ruri
Forsworn Killvengeance
Yayoi
Marianne
Sakura
…
“Forsworn. That one,” he said, pointing.
What else could the name imply except that this hostess was a terrible cursing curser who tried to curse people?! How was she even hired? What kind of standards did this joint have?
With a grumble of assent, the receptionist called out, “Forsworn Killvengeance!”
After a few moments, a short girl in a brightly colored kimono, a scarf draped around her neck that almost hid where her tan line stopped and her pale skin began, shuffled over. Her hair was curls upon curls of blonde, and her eyes were extremely gray.
Shit.
“Yeah, what?” she said in a heavy Kansai accent with the low, raspy tone of a heavy smoker that didn’t share Toshirou’s fortunate genetics.
“This guy said you tried to curse him,” the receptionist said dully.
“He wishes,” Forsworn scoffed and flipped her curls from one shoulder to the other.
Okay, so it definitely wasn’t her. That was Toshirou’s mistake, but it was a mistake anyone would easily make! With a name like that! Was this why she was working in a hostess club? To change the name? Was she saving up to change the name?
Shuffling back to her table after giving him a look overflowing with stink eye, Forsworn Killvengeance slowly faded from view, leaving Toshirou with an increasingly irritated receptionist.
“If you can’t tell me who it was, you should probably just go,” the woman suggested.
He couldn’t agree more.
While he certainly could go around to the different tables looking for coffee-colored eyes and listening for a syrupy voice, it was possible that the woman had already left for the day, and, if he were being honest, Toshirou’s heart really wasn’t in it. He had far better things to worry about—or at least things that were more immediately pressing for him, such as a looming pile of paperwork steadily growing back at the barracks.
“I’ll leave as soon as Kondo’s done,” he said easily enough.
“Ah, you’re here for him?”
It hadn’t seemed possible earlier, but the receptionist’s opinion of him suddenly dropped considerably lower.
“I think he was deposited behind the booth in the back just a minute ago. You’re welcome to go retrieve him and go away.”
Toshirou didn’t need to be told twice. He quickly made his way to the back of the club to find the corpse of his boss tangled around itself in a way circus contortionists would envy. He kicked it once, and Kondo took a gasping breath back to life.
Through pools of drool and blood that had clearly been collecting in his mouth, he dribbled, “I think I’m started to grow on Otae-san.”
“Yeah, like a tumor,” Toshirou muttered mostly to himself, lifting him up by the shoulders, dragging him to the door.
“Do you think I should say goodbye?”
“No.”
“You’re right. Best to leave some distance for desire to grow. I’ll play it cool.”
As the dry, frosty air of the wintry outdoors hit his open wounds, Kondo hissed, but kept smiling, eyes bright.
“What a nice evening. It’s almost a shame not to walk through it, but I believe a taxi is in order.”
He waved his hand to flag one down and quickly stepped in. As Toshirou made to follow, he instead found the door slammed shut in his face. Before he had fully processed what had happened, Kondo rolled down the window, looking up at him.
“Thanks for your help. I’d give you something for your troubles, but I spent all the money I have on lady love just now,” he said. “However, if you ever run into difficulties in the city, know you can always call on the Shinsengumi. I may not look it, but I am their commander. If it’s within my power, I’d be happy to help you in the future.”
Toshirou said nothing, silently watching as the taxi sped away into the darkened distance.
Either Kondo had one serious head injury or Toshirou really had been cursed by that jilted hostess to be forgotten.
As Toshirou walked the streets, the mixture of fearful and antagonistic gazes that always suffused the air whenever he was near were profoundly absent, helping him to confirm that Kondo’s head probably hadn’t sustained an injury that broke his brain any more than was standard fare.
Fortunately, Toshirou had enough cash in his wallet, so renting a room for the night was well within reach. It gave him time to catch a few hours of sleep until someone began frantically banging on the door, demanding to know what vagrant had slipped into one of the empty rooms. Clearly, the hotel staff had forgotten he had existed relatively quickly after he checked in.
It seemed like this curse didn’t just take care of people who had known him before it had been placed; it was forward-thinking too.
When he tried to sit down in a restaurant to get some breakfast, the waiter took his order easily enough, but after vanishing into the back, the man returned a few minutes later to take his order again, looking slightly miffed that Toshirou had apparently decided to sit down at a booth without his guidance—even though he had been the one to take him to an open seat when he arrived.
He ended up having more success with street vendors, who constantly had him in eyesight from the time of his order to the moment the food was in his hands. It seemed that the curse didn’t bother to work mid-interaction, so as long as he was talking with someone, maintaining some sort of dialogue or just existing in direct proximity, he kept his identity to whoever was involved.
All things considered, he found himself thinking, it wasn’t too bad.
Which was surprising. Why wasn’t he more upset about this?
He pondered his circumstances as he stuck another cig in his mouth, resting on a bench near one of the larger parks, covered in the dappled shade of a sprawling pair of elms. Leaning back, he gazed at the canopy of green above him interrupted by sparkling flecks of cerulean. Like a gentle giant breaching the waves of the sea, a concept—a state of being—that he rarely encountered rose in his mind.
Hijikata Toshirou was feeling relaxed.
Without anyone to chase after him or to place their demands on him, he was finally getting the vacation his carpal tunneled fingers had been aching for. Now that he apparently didn’t exist in the Shinsengumi, he was sure someone else was getting assigned all that paperwork and would plan the next strategy for the next raid and would find Yamazaki’s secret anpan stash he thought he was being so covert about and make sure whoever was trying to disband the Shinsengumi didn’t…
Toshirou shot to his feet, tensing back into sharp awareness.
Shit, that’s right! Kondo had been about to tell him who was trying to shut the organization down, but he had forgotten about Toshirou before he could do so! There wasn’t time for a break with this kind of crisis on his hands. He was going to have to get to the bottom of this, and he had to do so before an unknown deadline imposed by an unknown foe who was working to take the Shinsengumi down. He had to figure out who was plotting what, and cut them off before they could take any action. Fortunately, his newfound curse could very well benefit his efforts.
Toshirou was able to walk right up to Katsura Kotarou and ask to join the Joi rebels without a hitch. They were apparently desperate for newbies right around now, because he was ushered right into the meeting hall without so much as a ‘what’s your deal?’ He introduced himself to the floor with a ridiculously fake name—Toshizou—and listened in as they talked about trying to form a team to compete in the Edo Breakdancer Regionals.
“What about the Shinsengumi though?” Toshirou had asked. “Are we planning to take them down?”
“They’re too stiff,” Katsura had replied far too quickly. “If they enter with a team of their own, we will finally have the opportunity to completely defeat them—on the dance floor.”
After spending another few days trailing Pops Matsudaira, which was incredibly easy, as Toshirou only needed to step into an alley out of sight for a few moments to be forgotten, the old fart decided to get smashed in a bar and whine about his daughter. Sidling up next to him, taking the adjacent stool, Toshirou listened as Matsudaira bemoaned Kuriko’s newest hobby: base jumping. Apparently her new-found thrill of parachuting off of tall buildings was brought on by encouragements from her newest boyfriend with vague connections to the criminal underground.
Without the slightest bit of empathy, Toshirou asked, “As long as the Shinsengumi is there to keep the city safe, including your daughter, what’s the problem?”
“The Shinsengumi better not even think about rescuing Kurrrriko-chan. She’s off limits,” he growled. “I spoil them almost as much as I spoil her, and not just because their popularity is near the highest its ever been, but more because of the purrrre kindness in this old man’s heart, so they know better than to let her float into any arms but mine. Otherwise I might start thinking about giving them trouble when they currently are receiving nothing but kindness from me and the rest of the higherr ups. Maybe I’ll take a couple percent off their holiday bonuses.”
Without any clear threats from Joui rebels or the upper brass, Toshirou found himself at a loss. Where was this mysterious problem Kondo had encountered? Where was the danger?
He stood looking up at the gates that had always allowed him entry to the Shinsengumi barracks, but were now firmly closed. Straining his ears, he felt like he could almost hear the huffs and sharp calls of sparring practice, and the laughter and garbled nonsense of groups heading for the mess hall. He wondered how it all was without him.
Surely not much had changed. There was enough of them to fill whatever his shoes had been. However it had originally started, Toshirou was confident that the organization had now grown large enough to absorb his absence. He just wanted it to continue onward, whether he was a part of it or not. If he could just solve Kondo’s problem, he knew everything would be okay.
Since no one had been trying to attack or ambush him over the past week, a part of Toshirou’s eternal vigilance had melted away, an unneeded burden quietly shed. Like a muscle no longer used or a mouse no longer shocked, his state of being quickly atrophied down the path of least resistance, which in this case happened to be a less militant state of constant awareness. And so he stood, lost in thought, almost oblivious enough to his surroundings that the sudden sword swipe took his head.
With a quickly sucked-in breath, the animal in him ducked just in time to survive.
From a crouch, he stared up to meet the unblinking, poker-faced stare of Okita Sougo.
Far far more than anyone, Toshirou knew how violent this asshole could get. He had borne the brunt of it on a daily basis, as well as a nightly basis, as well as in space when there weren’t days or nights, but he didn’t realize Sougo had gotten quite this bad around everyday civilians he didn’t even know.
“What is wrong with you? You could have killed me!”
Sheathing his sword with a sigh and a shrug, Sougo bitterly replied, “Don’t remind me of my failures. I was already trying to forget.”
Toshirou reared up to argue and scold, but stopped himself abruptly, lips thinning into a grimace. None of it mattered. As soon as he stepped out of sight, Sougo wouldn’t remember he had been there. What was the point of discipline if it would all be lost in the next moment?
Dusting himself off, he shook his head, letting out a sliver of a bitter smile. This is why he hadn’t come back to the barracks. This is why he had tried to help by gathering information from others, at a distance, because this is where that stupid hostess’ curse actually mattered. It was here that he truly could no longer be the Shinsengumi’s Vice Commander.
At that moment, the third squad marched past, heading inside the barracks. They all stopped to greet Sougo, a mixture of bowed heads, grins, and jostled shoulders, completely ignoring Toshirou’s existence except for one casually muttered ‘sorry bout that, mister’ from Jiei, who had stepped on his foot.
Within the rush, Toshirou was separated from Sougo and the growing disdain in his gaze, freeing his body to slide silently away into the night.
...
Or so he had thought.
Just when he had settled into his seat, about to take the first sip of his beer at a bar on the other side of town, Sougo ambled in, casual as could be, taking a seat three stools down from Toshirou. There was no one sitting in those intervening stools. There was no one in between Sougo and the person to which he was giving a wide-eyed, coldblooded stare.
“Master,” he said loudly to the bartender without breaking eye contact. “I’ll have whatever that piss-stained, piece of shit, waste of space is having,” and gestured with a disdainfully pointed finger at the liquid just barely wetting Toshirou’s lips from his half-tilted glass, frozen in place.
Any part of the bartender that might have balked at that particular flavor of command was easily overshadowed by the part of her that was having a staring contest with Sougo’s uniform and sword and generally murderous person.
“Coming right up.”
Toshirou finally finished tilting his own glass back and took a longer sip than he had initially planned. He was going to need it now that he had gained himself a violent stalker for the evening.
Had Sougo actually been so pissed off with Toshirou’s dodging his assassination attempt in front of the Shinsengumi barracks that he had followed him across town, keeping him in eyesight constantly, which meant his memory wouldn’t be wiped by the curse, just so he could terrorize him in a bar? Most importantly of all, how come Toshirou hadn’t noticed he was being tailed?
“Dammit,” he murmured, feeling uncomfortably shown up.
A sideways glance confirmed for him that Sougo had received his own beer, which rested in front of him, untouched, as he stared, unblinking at Toshirou. Why had he even ordered it in the first place if he wasn’t going to drink it? What kind of power move was he trying to pull here?
Finally, Sougo grasped the drink and flexed his fingers to the point where a crack appeared, slicing through the glass just enough to be visible but not quite enough to sprout a leak, before placing it gently back on the counter.
“Don’t you have anything better to do than be vaguely ominous?” Toshirou finally snapped.
Sougo settled back into his stool, crossing his arms as if to give his question some legitimate thought. Throughout this whole exercise he still refuse to break his searing eye contact with Toshirou—as if the gaze itself was charging up a critical attack that couldn’t be interrupted.
“No,” he said.
“It sounds like you don’t have much to do then,” Toshirou replied.
“I do like to keep it that way.”
Sougo reached into his jacket and pulled out a pile of terribly familiar-looking papers, slapping them on the counter and sliding them across it in a way that gave the bottom sheet a tour of the worst stickiness and crumb collections the surface had to offer. They flew past the three empty stools and fluttered to a stop right next to Toshirou’s half-empty beer glass. Quickly flipping through, Toshirou confirmed that these papers composed roughly a fifth of the most critical bureaucratic work the Shinsengumi had going on right now.
“Just because you managed to do the rest of the world a favor by allowing them to forget you exist, it doesn’t mean you get to shove your work off on me,” Sougo said. “Either I kill you here, or you finish all this paperwork, get it back to me before sunrise, and then I murder you somewhere else. Choose wisely.”
Toshirou let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding in. Maybe for days.
“You know who I am,” he said.
Sougo remembered him. That shitty, murderous asshole knew who was actually supposed to be doing the top priority Shinsengumi paperwork.
“I know you should go and die,” Sougo said.
Toshirou smiled into his beer. At least he wasn’t a complete ghost.
“Once I kill you, I’ll be sure to forget your corpse exists like all the rest of them, don’t worry.”
Sougo was standing up, clearly itching to leave now that the paperwork transfer was done. The eye contact he had been so determined to maintain was a broken relic of the past.
Watching him, Toshirou started to consider what it meant that Sougo remembered him. When everyone else, including Kondo and even the cashier at the convenience store where Toshirou bought his mayonnaise, couldn’t remember him at all, how could Sougo of all people keep him in mind?
Had he accidentally stumbled upon some secret solution to the curse? Was Sougo’s cursed existence enough to out-curse other curses? Or maybe his hatred for Toshirou was too strong for even some weird magic to snuff out...
Suddenly, the words of that apparently coffee-eyed hostess came tumbling back to him.
I’ll make it so that everyone in the world forgets who you are.
Except…
If you are their most important person.
…
Their most important.
Person.
Toshirou felt the blood leave his face.
“You know who I am,” he said again, but this time with horror.
“Believe me,” Sougo said as moved to exit the shop, “I wish I—”
He paused as Toshirou’s expression apparently made it into his periphery. His eyes quickly flicked across the bar and its patrons, looking to try and find the context of whatever had Toshirou vibrating, pale on the stool, but seemed to find nothing other than Toshirou himself, staring back at him.
Sougo cocked his head, chin lifting up like a bloodhound catching a scent. Suddenly, smooth as poisoned butter, a sharp smirk filled the edges of his lips. The instincts he relied on to be a terrible human being were clearly working overtime at this moment.
“I do know you, don’t I? Hijikata,” he said, carefully enunciating each syllable of his name.
It felt like a physical slap. There was no denying it, Sougo knew him. He knew him when no one was supposed to know him.
If—and it was legitimately a rather big if—that woman had been honest with him as she cursed him, this meant that Sougo…
Well, it was just the Kara Kookies situation all over again.
When the Shinsengumi was in its first few months of existence, and Sougo was still short and inexperienced enough that Toshirou could kick his ass in a fight a couple times in ten, a street sweets stall—Kara Kookies—had established itself a block away from the barracks. The waitress-slash-owner, Kuibira Kara, with her knock-out smile and sugary service, was making money hand over fist from the parade of lonely, country-bumpkins-turned-big-city-transplant samurai who were suddenly in possession of significant paychecks they needed to learn how to spend. Even when the Kookies themselves started uncomfortably clogging the Shinsengumi digestive systems and Shinsengumi toilets, Kara continued to do rather well.
Toshirou remembered spotting Sougo there on the Kara Kookies bench, sipping on a sugary lemonade, more than once. A few more times than once.
It made sense. This kid had been dragged away from his home and everything he knew, and now there was this woman who, if you squinted and looked at from your periphery, might bear a passing resemblance to a certain family member he had left behind.
At the time, Toshirou had sensed enough of the fragile emotions at play there to leave the situation well enough alone, but Kondo sure hadn’t.
“Now that I think about it, Kara-dono looks similar enough to Mitsuba-dono that they could even be mistaken for twins. I see why you visit her so often; it must be nice to have such a sweet-filled reminder of home!”
It took less than twenty-four hours following that comment exclaimed loudly in the Shinsengumi mess hall for a twitchy-looking food inspector to show up at Kara Kookies, and a few hours less than that for the stall to be shuttered for good. As a teary-eyed Kara had loaded her goods into her car, Sougo had stared, unblinking, from across the street, playing the part of the mafia boss who had just executed a hit in broad daylight and felt no need to run, because the town was completely under his thumb.
This was the kind of thing that happened to people that Sougo… well, whatever constituted a connection in that warped brain of his. Whenever he realized he was partial to them and particularly if he realized others had realized the same, he made sure they suffered. Grievously and publicly.
Sougo remembered who Toshirou was, and if he learned why… if Sougo learned that there was some way for the universe to interpret his feelings toward Toshirou as important—that there was some metric by which Toshirou was considered his top person...
That was potentially world ending. Everyone was going to die, and Toshirou was going first.
Sitting in that bar, having the terrible realization in real time, Toshirou made himself a fervent vow.
Sougo could never know. He could never find out what this curse was about.
Unfortunately, Toshirou had already slipped up once. Through this exchange, Sougo now knew that him still knowing his VC’s identity was in some way terrifying for said VC, and his interest was clearly piqued. He wanted to know more; he wanted to know why. Toshirou’s fear had always been a good draw for the little shit.
A bead of sweat traveled down his forehead to the tip of his nose, wobbling there with frenetic energy. Sougo watched it with the enthralled gaze of a kid murdering ants with a magnifying glass and observing their final struggles.
“Am I the only one who remembers you?” he asked in a tone that always sounded innocent enough.
Toshirou swallowed and tried to find the carefree smile that had come to him so easily before!
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Stop spouting nonsense,” he managed.
Everybody was done for.
Actually, no. Wait. Toshirou could salvage this.
Quickly, he leaned over the bar counter toward the bartender who had been watching their exchange with the jitters of someone wondering to themselves who they were supposed to call when a cop was the problem. Toshirou was overly familiar with that particular expression and paid it no heed as he whispered a few rushed words into her ear.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“Just trust me. Please.”
Glancing over at Sougo, who now seemed to be in no particular rush to leave, the bartender shook her head and asked, “If you don’t mind, sir, I’ve been wondering…”
“Yes.”
“Who is it you’ve been talking to all night? You’ve been my only customer at the bar counter for the past hour.”
Toshirou did his best to look like a regretful ghost, gazing off mournfully into the distance.
Sitting immediately next to him, Sougo tapped his own ear and said to the bartender, “I’ve just been on a conference call. Anyways, it’s hot in here. I’m sure you won’t mind my chopping up the air next to me with my sword so I can cool things down a bit.”
Dammit Sougo!
After what counted as a mild scuffle where that asshole was concerned, Toshirou wiped the blood off his lip and began limping away from the bar with as much of his own pride as he could still carry. Sougo trailed along beside him, hands in his pockets, whistling a tune that sounded like a strange amalgamation of all the theme songs from every horror movie ever made. How was he even doing that?
“What’s so scary about me being the one to remember you?” he asked. “If I cared, my feelings would be hurt.”
Sougo’s feelings were the critical part in all of this!
“Not everything’s about you,” Toshirou shot back with as much convincing aggression as he could muster. “I’m upset because the world has forgotten about me. You have nothing to do with it.”
All he got was a mild hum in response, but Toshirou could feel a set of deceptively casual eyes on him—tracking and absorbing. It was times like these that forced him to acknowledge that Sougo had become a damn good detective, and a terrible person to lie to.
That was the bad news, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Even with his suspicions, Sougo didn’t—couldn’t yet know what this was actually about. Toshirou still had time.
He just had to use that time effectively to break the curse before Sougo could connect the dots into his personal noose.