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rainsometimesI finished the fourth chapter of my GinTakaZura WIP! This one is set entirely after canon ends, so spoilers, speculations, conjecture and wishful thinking abound.
I had the privilege of receiving beta and encouragement from both Sparda and plipdragon for this chapter! I am very grateful to them, and to everyone else who's encouraged me.
Constructive criticism and other feedback is very welcome!
Fic title: There's No Together, There's No Apart, There's Only Impossible Longing
Chapter: 4/5 (plus prologue)
Chapter title: Follow The Brook Back Up To The Mountain
Word Count: 9372 [...what. did not realize it was that many words until now!]
Fandom: Gintama
Fic status: in progress
Pairing: Gintoki/Katsura/Takasugi: Gintoki/Katsura, Katsura/Takasugi, Takasugi/Gintoki
Rating: G for this chapter I think; PG-13 or PG-15 for the fic as a whole
Spoilers/Setting: see above: many spoilers for the manga ending in this chapter.
Flavour: Angsty, but hopefully with a relatively happy ending (that's the plan at least)
Summary: A story about Gintoki, Katsura and Takasugi told through various scenes and fragments.
Author's notes and disclaimer in the prologue post
Continued from Chapter 3
The boy’s full name is Shinsaku Hikawa, but he's rarely called that. Aunt Matako always calls him Shin-chan except on the rare occasions when she has to introduce him to some important grown-up. Then she can get this odd look on her face almost like she's forgotten what his full name sounds like (but isn't she the one who picked it?). The shorter form, Shin-chan, feels more like his real name. If he has a real name.
He knows the story of where he came from very well: Aunt Matako has told it to him many times like a bedtime story, telling him that she was lost and alone, drifting from town to town not knowing what to do with her life. Then in one small village she heard a strange cry from inside the hollow of a tree. She looked into that hollow and found a tiny baby there. When she asked the village elders, they said that nobody knew where the child came from, that the gods must have meant for Aunt Matako to raise the child. Aunt Matako had listened, had taken the baby, had found a place to stay in a new town, and here they were now.
Eventually, by the time that he was almost three (and as big as other children who were eight or nine), he found out that Aunt Matako had told the town's officials that he was the son of Matako's dead sister, who had died from an illness, and that his father had died in an accident months before he was born. When he asked what that was about, Aunt Matako replied that officials just wouldn't believe in babies being found in trees, and Uncle Takechi, on a visit right then, backed her up. But in reality, she claims, she’s never had a sister. Shin-chan wonders what to believe.
It's only when he's a bit older that he will realize that he’s been very lucky in how the people in that small town have reacted to him growing up so quickly. Matako told officials that he has an unusual illness, with documents to prove it (and he supposes it’s not wrong, even if he doesn’t feel sick). He has a dispensation from attending regular school as long as he can pass special exams twice a year, though he does go to calligraphy lessons and kendo lessons in town. The school people are understanding, and so are the priests in town. Takechi seems to get well on with the priests, and while they insist on him going to shrines now and then and taking part in various annoying ceremonies, that seems to be about trying to give him good luck. At least the priests don’t act like he’s cursed.
As he grows up, there are kids who stare at him and won't go close, and some call him ”Princess Kaguya” and laugh (he could bear being called ”Bamboo Shoot”, but a princess is just too much, so those kids he has to fight). Most kids he knows aren’t like that, they’re more relaxed -- still, it’s not easy to keep your friends when you outgrow all your playmates. He's lucky, again, that there's a neighbourhood family of four boys, the youngest born two years earlier than him, and all fairly ready to play and chill about him growing older. By the time he's three his regular playmate is the second youngest son in that family, having outgrown the two younger brothers but often having to babysit them.
Grown-ups come by on visits at times. Uncle Takechi comes by every few weeks. He also sends money they need – Shin-chan knows they need it because sometimes Aunt Matako looks worried and grumbles under her breath when that money is later to arrive than usual. She probably doesn't earn much money at her part-time job at the fish-cleaning place in town. And yet they have a housekeeper – or a babysitter for him, he's not sure what to call Asuna. If she were a pain he would object that he's big enough and can stay alone the whole time at home while Aunt Matako is working, instead of just a few hours now and then. But he likes Asuna, and Auntie trusts her.
Asuna stays with him overnight now and then, not very often, when Aunt Matako packs her bag, hugs him close and then leaves for several days. She’s restless beforehand and much calmer when she comes back. She says she’s just done a bit of extra work. He’s never allowed to look into her bag when she goes away those times.
The serious-looking man with the long hair comes rarely, only twice a year – right after New Year's and in Golden Week. Katsura is his name. He only really speaks to Aunt Matako while the boy is out playing or in his room, and he never stays for long, but he leaves a few gifts like crayons and notebooks and souvenir food as he leaves, and weird mascot figurines. He might also be sending money to Aunt Matako, but Shin-chan isn't sure about that.
Much more often a wild young woman with red hair and Chinese clothes comes by to challenge Aunt Matako to a fight. They yell and insult each other and charge one another wildly outside the house. Usually Uncle Takechi is the only one the boy sees Matako beating up, when he's being too stupid, but this girl is an exception. There's a man in glasses that comes along too and tries to keep the woman in check, fails and apologies and leaves them some money to pay for all the food his friend has just scarfed down after the fight. Then they go and the fridge is all empty. Aunt Matako acts annoyed by all this, but she always seems to be in a good mood afterwards. Shin-chan has to ask Uncle Takechi for their names, because Auntie only calls them “you two-!” when they're there, and “those idiots” after they've left.
Every now and then men in rough clothes, scarred bodies and tough faces who look like they've seen a lot of trouble come by, and Aunt Matako always serves them tea. They talk a while in low voices, they'll try to give her a little bit of money (although they usually look poor themselves) and she tries to refuse and to give something to them instead. Sometimes she does accept the money reluctantly, though. The men leave and never come back. They often give the boy strange glances, but when they leave they look more peaceful than when they come.
Aunt Matako is often quiet a good while afterwards. But maybe that's not bad. Shin-chan doesn't know.
He also doesn’t know what to make of Tatsuma Sakamoto at all. A loud man who doesn’t come around all that often either, full of silly laughter and sudden motion sickness and dumb jokes and gifts that can be either really neat or really weird; it could be the latest cool videogame or it could be some kind of toy that only Amanto with four arms can play correctly. He seems like an idiot, he laughs too much, and he's just so... so weird. And he always dashes off again just as quickly as he came, just when you were trying to come up with good questions to ask him. Shin-chan is dubious of the man's claims to be the head of a space-faring merchant fleet, but Aunt Matako says it's the truth when he asks her, with a regretful sigh as if she would rather wish it weren’t.
Finally there's two people who never knock on the door, never speak to Auntie, and maybe they have nothing to do with him at all and show up in his neighbourhood at times for other reasons. But he doesn't think so. The first one is a tall lady with long dark hair carrying a very long sword, and looking like she wouldn’t hesitate to use it. She makes the boy feel that she's full of secrets, but if you say the wrong thing she will never talk to you. Several times he's stood and watched her from a distance, working up the courage to approach her and start to ask her important questions, but before he could even take the first step, she had vanished again.
And there's the man with white hair.
The boy only sees him clearly a few times, always at a distance. He's hard to make out from the surrounding shadows, and vanishes again really quickly. The boy doesn't think the woman with the long sword minds if he sees her, at least not briefly. She just doesn’t want to be spoken to, it seems. But he gets the feeling that the man in white hair doesn't want to even be seen.
Once, he was careless. He'd been exploring the overgrown area to the east where there are abandoned houses and a lot of earthquake damage. He'd made a mistake as he balanced on the top of a high stone wall, when he hadreached a part that had partially crumbled where there was a lot of moss on top of old rubble. He lost his footing and fell down on the other side of the wall, twisting his ankle when he landed.
Now he was in a very overgrown enclosure with the ruins of a house in the middle. High stone walls surrounded it on all sides, except for one part which had a high iron fence instead, and a gate closed with a huge lock. He did try to climb up the wall again, but with his hurt ankle it was impossible to gain footing. Shin-chan wasn't totally unfamiliar with this place, he'd actually come here once before to explore it, but then he'd had a friend with him.They’d brought a rope and a ladder, and it hadn't been close to sunset like now.
The trees were high, the bushes were thorny, the undergrowth was everywhere and blocked out the last rays of the setting sun. The boy didn't think of himself as easily frightened, but he felt colder than usual right then, swallowing and wondering if he should risk the blow to his pride and start to yell for help, or suck it up and stoically spend the night here. He was also uneasily aware that even if he did start to yell, nobody might be close enough to hear him.
He spun around as he heard rustling behind the closest wall, the sounds of climbing. Then suddenly a head full of unruly white hair appeared above it. The boy stared. It was that guy, there was no question about it. He'd never been this close before.
The man stared down at him for a long moment.
He opened his mouth, closed it, took another look at the boy, and a few seconds later the man was standing on top of the wall in his usual traveller's clothes. Then he crouched down and held out his arm towards the boy, and when he saw it wouldn't reach him, he held out his wooden sword, grip first. “Can you grab that? Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice a little hoarse.
Then, after Shin-chan had explained about his ankle, the man directed him to how he should stand, where he should put his balance, and then somehow the man didn't topple over at all as the boy grabbed the wooden sword tightly. Instead he actually managed to lift him up higher, with his full weight dangling from that sword, until he'd swung him in an arc and put him right on the wall again, where they were sitting face to face for a few seconds.
The man sighed, rubbing his head. “So dumb. What an idiot, falling like that. You've got some luck I was around to see you.”
And then the next moment he'd jumped down on this side of the wall, where the ground was closer. He reached up, grabbed Shin-chan and put him on the ground. “Just go home,” he muttered, and the next moment he was gone.
In his strange, sped-up childhood, most of the time things weren’t bad, just intense and often mysterious. He was a weird boy, he knew, but he had people he trusted who cared about him. He had good playmates, but didn’t make any extremely close friends -- though perhaps he had no strong need for such, either. As he would say much later, his second childhood was both less and more lonely than his first. And certainly more peaceful.
But there were also other times -- times when he felt he could taste and smell something much larger and stronger, but also darker and sadder, than his real life. That would make his real life feel less real by comparison.
One of the ways that happened was a dream that would keep coming back. It wasn’t like the regular nightmares when he dreamt about zombies and monsters and witches and being stuck while something unspeakable was hunting him. It wasn’t as directly scary as those. But it felt heavy. And it lingered inside his chest even after he’d woken up, even in the morning, much more than the nightmares did.
He was walking up a hill. The hill was steep and he was very tired and hurt, with blood dripping down from a wound somewhere (the dream varied in where the wound was, where the pain came from: his leg, his side, his chest, his shoulder...). In his arms was a big, heavy brick he couldn’t put down. He had to get to the top of the hill carrying the brick, but each step seemed to take forever. His body was aching, and he thought he must have been walking there for years, now.
Blood dripped down and the sun shone, and far away birds were calling. He was himself and also not. He kept walking, the weight pressing him down, but he always woke up before reaching the top.
In waking hours, he would sometimes feel like he was being watched. For a long time he hated that feeling. It wasn’t like when the mysterious Long Sword Lady or the White-Haired Man came around: this sensation went deeper, and it would last even if he ran fast, even after he came home. Each time it would lessen gradually and then go away after an hour or so, but he could never force it away himself.
The boy grew older, and smarter. He learned about the recent history of his country, and when he wasn’t satisfied with what the books said, he started to ask and ask and put more and more questions about it to Aunt Matako and Uncle Takechi and Asuna (who now only came in once a week to help with the laundry). He snooped around and found hidden boxes in the house, with photos of people he didn’t know, of Auntie when she was younger. He found two different sets of passports with photos of Auntie, of himself when he was a baby, but now they had other names entirely. Fake papers, clearly. But maybe the documents he knew were fake, too?
He found notes and letters that were hard to understand when he didn’t know where they came from, but still held exciting clues: Take care of the new shipment of.... Meet up with F. in the harbour tomorrow... Rakuyo, City X, 4th temple you pass when climbing uphill to the north… Tell Bansai that… (the text was smudged). The White Yaksha was last seen north of the village of Y… You could probably make up a whole video game just using clues like that. And one word that came back several times: the Kiheitai.
And he took all of this knowledge together and got better and better at eavesdropping on the adults and occasionally asking a few carefully selected questions -- and by the time he had lived for nearly four and a half years, and was as big as normal children were at twelve or thirteen, he had become more and more aware of the other one.
The man they were all thinking about. Not just Auntie and Uncle Takechi, not just the men with harsh faces who would only come once. But also serious Katsura and goofy Sakamoto and the Tall Sword Lady and the White-Haired Man and maybe also the brute girl Kagura and meek guy Shinpachi Shimura, although with those last two he wasn’t as sure. But the other ones, yes. They all had that other one in mind. He knew it.
It made him shiver to think about, but not with fear exactly, rather with a kind of vertigo: he felt as if there were dark tendrils reaching out to him from a place of deep power, and if he didn’t step back and keep himself anchored down to everyday life he would get sucked up into that darkness, swallowed whole.
Yet somehow it didn’t terrify him.
But he knew this: he wanted it to be on his own terms. Something he chose for himself. Even if it should prove to hurt. He hadn’t made up his mind yet, but he’d rather choose to step into the reach of that darkness than run away and build a fortress against it forever. Perhaps he wanted to grow his own tendrils.
Around this time he started to keep a diary. If he did end up swallowed by the darkness, he wanted there to be something that was left of him as he was now.
“Zura, things are happening.”
“It’s not Zura, it’s Katsura. Things are always happening, Sakamoto.”
Sakamoto inches his chair closer, though the noise in this bar isn’t as loud now as it was a few minutes ago. Katsura has tried to make them go to a soba restaurant for once, but Sakamoto has an uncanny ability to make them wind up in the type of place he likes the most, proving much stronger than Gintoki in that regard. To be fair, Gintoki can’t really match either of Sakamoto’s two special moves, namely Offering To Pay The Tab and Leavin’ Earth Again In A Day Or Two (And Who Knows When We’ll See Each Other Next, Ahahahaha). And somehow Katsura doesn’t mind it all that much. He doesn’t even mind helping Sakamoto throw up on the street as usually happens after they’ve gone drinking like this.
But right now the Loud Fellow is still only on his second glass. “Yeah, that’s well an’ true,” he says, nodding, “but some of those things that are happening right now are the kind that never did before. And they are just too freaking cute…” He reached inside his coat and brought out a stack of photos, with some holograms mixed in. Katsura peered at them, angling his head to see better.
“See?” Sakamoto continues. “Look how big Ruby’s gotten! Ain’t she just the cutest li’l lady in the galaxy?” Beaming even more than usual, the man waves one of the photos right in front of Katsura’s nose. “Look at this one, she’s holding her ma’s hand! An’ here she’s sailing a toy boat down the brook!”
“She is indeed fairly cute,” concedes Katsura about the young girl in the photos, looking around five or six years old. “Is she attacking a huge wild animal in that last photo?”
“She is, she is.” Sakamoto, looking even fonder now. “That’s a li’l Yato girl for ya. But I’m sure the dumb beast had it comin’, ahahahaha!”
“Really, Sakamoto,” mumbles Katsura, sipping at the glass of wine that Sakamoto poured up for him. “It’s a little late for you to come waving around your own Final Fantasy delusion at this point.”
“Ahahaha, whaddya mean, Zurakichi? Jus’ ‘cause folks are so quick to jump to conclusions--! All right, all right, I know what you’re gonna say. She does look like she could be Mutsu’s daughter, right?”
“I didn’t say that,” Katsura comments prudently. “And she certainly doesn’t look like she has any of your stupidity in her. And it’s not Zurakichi, it’s Katsura.”
“True, the girl’s pureblooded Yato. But we only found out ‘bout her this past spring. Came as a complete surprise to Mutsu to find that she has a first cousin that survived the pirate wars all along and was smart enough to fake her own death and run away with her secret sweetheart! Even better, both of them were fed up with bein’ mercenaries or pirates. Wanted somethin’ new for their kid. So they set up on this one remote planet that hasn’t been too exploited, ‘cause it’s ultra volcanic an’ the giant carnivorous beasts there are just too much for most ta deal with. But y’know, that’s one way to handle that famous Yato bloodthirst - they just go out huntin’ huge beasts when they need an outlet! Plus, they can also earn money that way, sellin’ game trophies to space merchants.”
“So all in all, you have no true relation to this girl,” says Katsura, “and Mutsu-san is only her first cousin once removed.”
“Ah, but but!! She’s become her honorary aunt now! An’ maybe her only livin’ relative ‘cept for her folks, even... So we decided to give both her an’ her parents shares in the Kaientai. Now they have a steady income apart from just huntin’! One day in the future that girl might hop aboard on our fleet an’ go see the galaxy! Become a great merchant! Don’t ya think that means I qualify as an honorary uncle?”
“It seems she could use a few more relatives, so I guess even you might do,” admits Katsura, holding out his glass so Sakamoto can fill it up, then returning the favour. There’s a lot of life in Tatsuma’s voice and face as he talks about this child, making Katsura wonder if the merchant hasn’t wished for children of his own one day, though he can’t recall him ever mentioning it. Possibly at some point back in the war… But if so, the stars always pulled on him that much more.
“Mutsu’s pretty darn happy ‘bout it, you know, Zura,” says Sakamoto, head resting sloppily in his palm, slouching with his elbow on the table.
“It’s not Zura, it’s Katsura.”
“See, she’s told me in the past before, more than once, that she can’t imagine having kids, but… it’s bad for the Yato, getting fewer and fewer. That’s been naggin’ at her. So to find these people, and seein’ they’re tryin’ to find a new way forward, too, that they ain’t raisin’ their daughter into crime an’ bloodshed… That’s been great for her, I’m tellin’ ya. She seems that much calmer and happier now.” Sakamoto’s voice drops lower, and sounds a shade warmer as he adds, “I feel that now, I can picture us keep travellin’ in space for years to come. Wasn’t too sure ‘bout that, just a year ago…”
So if things have changed for you, it’s really just in a way that can enable you to go on without changing? Katsura thinks, nearly says out loud, but then doesn’t. He swallows it down. Sakamoto getting things to change around him so he doesn’t need to change himself is just standard procedure, and Katsura, in truth, prefers it that way.
“‘Uncle Tatsuma’ sure has a nice ring to it, huh?” says Sakamoto, his voice just a tad maudlin.
“You’ve had too much to drink,” Katsura consequently tells him.
“Ahahaha, I’m fine! I wasn’t just goin’ ta tell ya about our little Ruby-chan! D’you know who never got to callin’ me Uncle Tatsuma? S’pose I didn’t show up often enough for the sprout for that to happen…” sighs Sakamoto.
Katsura tenses up, hand a little unsteady as he takes another drink. “The sprout” is what Sakamoto calls young Shinsaku Hikawa.
“Did you intend to come on visits more often, over there?” he replies, drawing himself up as he puts his cup down. “Or did you just not foresee him growing up so quickly?” Understandable, of course, but it had been clear from the first year that the child grew abnormally fast.
Sakamoto chuckles to himself, rather than letting out his usual laugh. Then he looks out into the air, a distant look on his face. “I reckon I was just hopin’ for good radio waves,” he says nonsensically; then, abruptly, “That sprout’s been writin’ ta me, y’ know. Startin’ ta ask some real questions.”
Katsura gave him a quiet look, then stood up, went to get water, and poured it up for Sakamoto. “Take some water,” he urged. “I don’t want you to throw up right now.”
“Hey hey hey, I’m not that bad!” But Sakamoto does obligingly take a mouthful of water, even if he makes a face. “Zura,” he says again. “I’m leavin’ the planet again the day after tomorrow, I don’t want to talk about this the whole rest of my time.”
Katsura knocks him on the head. “But you do want to talk about it.”
“Stop that!” whines Sakamoto. “I do, I do, I doooo… but… Zura, he’s been askin’ questions, and I think he’s turnin’ ta me exactly because I’m all but a stranger to him. But he’s still not askin’ the real BIG questions, y’know? I reckon that means... I reckon that means he’s holdin’ back, and when a kid that age… well not lit’rally that age but the age he kinda is right now but not on paper... anyway… when kids like that are goin’ round with thoughts too big for their heads that they can’t talk about fully, means it’s all over but the shouting. I mean. He could do it.”
“What? I’m not following you.”
Sakamoto sighs theatrically. His breath is boozy. “I meeean. It could be done, y’know? Ain’t no end to all the stuff Altana can do…”
“It’s way too plot convenient that way,” Katsura agrees, starting to guess what Sakamoto means. A shiver comes over him. He buries his hands into his sleeves, aware they’re not quite steady.
Sakamoto nods. “An’ if he finds a Dragon Vein, or some other type of boost… Might be he’ll find himself a way ta remember.”
“But…” Katsura swallows again, but rallies, trying to force himself into calm. “...First of all, it might not even be him. We all just assume so, but… it’s not certain.”
“Right, right, right,” says Sakamoto, ordering a third bottle of booze.
“Second of all… even if he is, reincarnations aren’t supposed to remember their past lives, no matter what extraordinary substances they might come in contact with.”
Sakamoto gives him a look over his sunglasses; for once, he’s not smiling. He fills up his own glass and then Katsura’s cup, and says nothing.
Katsura shifts position, suddenly aware that the din of the bar has sunk down to just a background murmur. He sips on the alcohol, feeling the burn in his throat and stomach. His head is spinning. But he lowers his voice, and continues in a whisper, “Third of all… Third of all, even if…” Cold now, a cold feeling despite the warmth of the drink. “Even! If! Memory isn’t the same as personality. Even if he remembers, he might not actually… he might not actually become like he was. It might just become a horrible burden to him. Memories like that.” His tongue starts to trip on his words; he gestures inarticulately. Sakamoto is smiling his goofy smile again, the serious look gone. Katsura wants to explain to him much more, and he also wants to take back the words he’s already said; he wants to cling to him tightly and to push him away, all the way back up to space.
He wants to put his head down on the bar counter and not raise it for ages and ages. Like Gintoki does, sometimes. He wants to feel the waves of inebriation pass over him, wants the thoughts to slow down and murmur instead of their incessant buzzing.
They don’t, of course: the thoughts are as busy as ever, it’s just the ordering of them that gets harder in his drunk state. He reaches out and pats Sakamoto on the head without really knowing why. That silly hair of his just looks like it needs petting. Sakamoto is starting to look a little green in the face, though.
“He’s too much of a brat, he wouldn’t let that happen,” mumbles Sakamoto, words slurred, and Katsura doesn’t quite follow. Let what happen? Be burdened by memories? Regaining memories in the first place?
He reaches over and fishes out Sakamoto’s wallet to pay their bill, then gets up and drags him into the bar’s bathroom where he helps him throw up. A breeze of night air is coming in from a window high up near the ceiling, easing the stench a little. Cold and buried in his chest, he doesn’t put his last line of argument into words, but they echo inside him.
Fourth of all…
Fourth of all, even if he does become his old self again… that doesn’t mean he will want to have anything to do with us.
They had failed him, after all. Failed to keep him in the light. Failed to follow him into the darkness.
He trembles. In his mind’s eye that figure is always turned away. It hurts to try to hope, when you know you shouldn’t.
Matako called him on a still, silent evening right around when he would normally have dinner. Hours ago, he’d come home from a job that took half as long as expected and he’d sat himself down at his desk. The air was thick and still around him, he put his feet up and just remained there. He couldn’t have said why he couldn’t make himself get up and move. Quiet as a stone statue, as if the brooding, sombre air mustn’t be disturbed, even his thoughts had slowed down and moved like shambling zombies in his head.
For a while his sluggish mind couldn’t even remember why Shinpachi and Kagura were nowhere to be seen and hadn’t even called to tell why. It was nothing alarming, that he was sure, they’d told him this morning they’d go somewhere, right? And they’d taken Sadaharu with them. Slowly it came back, something about a geek event in town where Shinpachi intended to look for Otsû merchandise and Kagura had decided to join him to look for merch of her own bizarre favourites. Right.
In that quietude into which the din of the city didn’t seem to penetrate, the telephone rang suddenly, shrilly, making him start and nearly topple over in his chair, regaining his balance only at the last second.
“Yeah?”
“White Yaksha.”
He sat up straight, recognizing the voice after a few seconds’ reflection. Goddammit, why did she still have to call him that? Well, it was true they didn’t really...well, didn’t really talk at all, normally, but it was still a dumb thing to stick to after all these years.
“It’s Gin-san, you know that, lady.” His voice sounded hoarse. “Hey. Been a while.”
“You… You know what this is about, don’t you?” Her voice was low, but seemed incredibly clear.
He opened his mouth, then closed it. Swallowed. Dusty thought, dusty words. “I -- I don’t know.” One moment, to collect himself. Then, softer, “I’m not sure.”
“Ah.” A pause; she seemed to collect herself, too. And just when enough seconds had passed that he was gearing up to make a dumb remark about the dramaticness, she said, “Well. He’s vanished.”
“Va...nished?”
“Gone from the house this morning.”
He struggled to keep up. “What… Where did he… How big is he now?”
“Who even knows?” she said, a touch of bitterness in her voice; a touch of sadness. “Two weeks ago, I would say he looked 13, 14. Now…” Another pause, then, “Yesterday, I thought: he looks almost as old as I was when my father died at the end of the war. As old as you all were when you went out and fought in it.”
He wondered what she had learned about their past. She seemed more informed than he had thought. It wasn’t allowed to just get that kind of info by simply reading the manga, was it?
“Do you think he left town? Came here? Is that why you called me?” he asked, expecting her to say yes, that she wanted him to look for him, to bring back the boy who she had raised for years now, or to bring back the man she had followed unreservedly in the past, and had been in love with. Either one of those. Surely that was why she had called him.
“He can’t be found anywhere in town,” said Matako Kijima. “But I called because I wanted to warn you, White Yaksha.” Then silence again, as if her voice was swallowed up by darkness.
“Why do you think I need to be warned?” he asked, lowering his own voice now, leaning forward over the desk.
But she didn’t answer the question. Instead, she said, “You should go talk to Imai. I think he went and saw her, two weeks ago. When she came to this region for her work.”
He opened his mouth intending to ask her why she wasn’t calling Nobume directly, then, but again she spoke before he could, and this time her words were fast, hurried. “Because I can trust you to look out for him.” Then, a click. She’d hung up.
He put the handset down on his ancient black telephone that he still stubbornly refused to replace. A few more long, dense seconds passed, as he looked down at his scarred hands, at the grainy surface of his office desk.
Then he tsk’d to himself as he finally stood up and dusted his hands. “So does the bullet chick think I keep some kind of tab on what doughnut girl is doing? Maaan, some people,” he grumbled out loud into the air. He was suddenly much more aware of the street sounds and the traffic din of the big city, now that time seemed to be moving again. Two minutes later he was standing in the street outside his house and turned to walk towards the city centre. But he wasn’t aiming for the police headquarters or any other government buildings. There was a much different venue he would try first.
He found Nobume in the second bowling hall he went to. She’d picked up this interest last year and hadn’t abandoned it yet, even though she found it hard to get people to compete with her after many spectacular wins or outrageous losses. When she was out with Kagura and Otae and the others, she would come up with new challenging ways to throw the ball and/or take down the pins, whether blatantly against the rules or not: Gintoki had nothing against that kind of thing in principle, but he knew better than to compete with that rowdy gang when they were all out together. He had to look out for the safety of his own balls, thank you very much.
Tonight, however, Nobume was bowling alone, launching ball after ball in a straight line with little stopping. She was out of uniform. wearing a simple cotton kimono with a checkered pattern in grey, light violet and white, with a fringed shawl in white and light blue on top. Gintoki walked up to her, stood there quietly for a moment or two; she didn’t look up or otherwise acknowledge his presence, so eventually he leaned over to snatch away her bowling ball as it came rolling back, letting it spin on his index finger.
Then her gaze did sweep over him from top to toe. She nodded, a tiny bit. “Want to compete?” she asked, the tip of her sword suddenly pressing against the underside of his chin.
“Hey! Make up your mind if you want a swordsman duel or a crazy bowling competition!” he protested, backing and tossing the ball away behind him. Some random patron was swearing in the background, perhaps from getting hit by the ball. “And no, I don’t,” he added. “Can we go get a bite to eat? There’s a place across the street that has doughnuts.” Come to think of it, that’s probably why she was here and not in that other bowling hall that was closer to her office.
She sheathed her sword and kicked up her bowling ball, which Random Patron had just rolled in her direction, putting it into her bag. “I’m not paying for your food, too,” was all she said as she switched shoes and left the building, Gintoki trailing after her.
He had some money on him from this day’s job and bought himself a strawberry milkshake and a café au lait. As he waited for her to finish her order by the counter, he checked his mobile phone (cheap, beat-up, second-hand) just in case, though he didn’t get texts very often since people knew he tended to forget, lose, or destroy his mobiles. No messages. Shinpachi and Kagura might chew him out later for being too secretive, but stuff like this wasn’t something you could tell people over text, and he wanted to get a little more of a feel for the situation before he called them on the telephone.
“Bullet chick said I should talk to you,” he opened once she came back to the table with her haul and a cup of black coffee. “Heard the boy has run away and you might know something about that.”
“He has?” she asked, giving him a sharp look. “Since when?”
“This morning, and she thinks he might have left town.” He added more sugar to his coffee and stirred it slowly, giving her a long look.
She bit into her first doughnut thoughtfully.
“Two weeks ago there was a ceremony in another town in that prefecture, opening a new, up-to-date police headquarters staffed with graduates from Edo’s new police school,” she said, wiping crumbs off her face. “After it was over he shoved his way through the crowd and said he had to speak with me. He’d seen my photo in the newspaper and realized who I am.”
“Bound to happen eventually,” commented Gintoki. “You just weren’t sneaky enough, skulking around like that.”
“You’re one to talk. Anyway, I could have had him thrown out and pretended I had no idea who he was, but that didn’t seem fair.” She shrugged. “So I went to talk to him at an old, abandoned temple in the middle of the forest at midnight.”
“That’s too much! That’s absurdly dramatic! You’re indulging that mini-edgelord!”
“There was also a full moon, but there were clouds in the sky, so I carried a traditional lantern with me as well,” she continued.
“Oh wait, sorry, I was wrong all along. You’re the edgelord here. Reliving your teenage years already.”
Unperturbed, Nobume continued her account.
“Huh,” commented Gintoki. “He’s still so damn young, you know. You had no qualms telling him all of that?”
Nobume finished her fourth doughnut and drank more of her coffee. “If I was barely going to tell him a thing, I wouldn’t have agreed to come to that meeting in the first place. Besides, it seemed to me he’s grown up with enough evasions.”
Gintoki’s spoon clattered to the table. He sat staring at Nobume, mouth half open, milkshake forgotten.
“You dumped all that stuff on a sheltered adolescent kid and gave him a fucking sword to top it off? Bloody hell, girl! Have you gone absolutely crazy? Is it the stress of the office? Did you get kidnapped by some weird-ass Amanto and had your brain exchanged for a doughnut at some point??”
Nobume sipped from her cup of coffee. “He may not be that experienced, but he does have some training. I didn’t want him to meet any dangers that could be out there while weaponless.”
“A damn sprout like that? He’s as likely or not to cut his head off by accident with a real sword! And that’s not even counting mental and emotional instability into the bargain! Dammit, woman, you’re supposed to be the chief of police in this country? You may just have created the middle-school serial killer par excellence!!”
She sighed, reaching out for a napkin to wipe her mouth. “You should give him more credit. You’ve only ever watched him from a distance. If you’d talked to him before this…”
“Don’t give me that. You’re the one making a damn stupid sentimental gesture just because you’re just as cowardly. You couldn’t talk to him either, this whole time.” He leaned back and finished his milkshake angrily, spitefully. “Of all the bone-headed things to do…”
She drew herself up and reached for her purse and sword, having finished her sixth and final doughnut. “Well, there you have it, at any rate. I will help look for him, of course. I have yours and Kagura-chan’s mobile phone number in case I find him or a solid lead before you.” She got up and swept her shawl around her. “I’m sure we both have some ideas of the kind of places he could have gone. But… personally, I simply feel more at ease knowing that he has a way to protect himself now.”
“Because you could tell he would soon run away from home, right?” muttered Gintoki, glowering at her.
“In this kind of situation, it seems inevitable at some point,” she said. “If it were me… It’s possible I would have left much earlier.”
She seemed lost in thought for a moment. Maybe she found it hard to truly imagine a version of herself that had grown up safe and loved since early childhood, and what that version would have done if put into the strange circumstances that the boy was in. Then she simply nodded to him, and left. Having nothing left to say, it seemed.
Gintoki’s leg twitched for a moment, but instead of getting up right away, he decided to stay put a few minutes and think.
It’s happening.
He looked down at his hands, kept them held out flat on the table. Forcing them to keep steady.
No matter how you look at it, it’s clearly happening. Or -- trying to happen, anyway.
Shôyô, is this wrong? he asked silently. Should we have done more to keep him from his past? But he’s a free individual, his own person… Shôyô would not have approved of them trying to keep Shinsaku Hikawa clouded in ignorance, blissful or not, not when the boy so fiercely wished for that shroud of clouds to disperse. He might still have mourned the loss of innocence, however, and the return of too much pain…
A chill ran down his back. He swallowed, trying to corral his thoughts, trying to be just a bit rational.
So. Matako said that the boy had come back from his talk with Nobume having aged even faster than usual. And now, two weeks later, he had apparently skipped town telling nobody where he was going.
Nobume had given the boy two obvious trails to look up: finding people who had knowledge about how Altana worked, or finding out more about dragon holes. Of course, if he could find knowledgeable people, and if they were as free with their knowledge as Ane and Mone had been to Gintoki, he would also find out about dragon holes.
Those miko sisters… Perhaps Shinsaku had come to Edo in search of them. Their shrine could be a place for Gintoki to start looking. However, it was a fair bit away from where he was right now.
The boy might also not have come to Edo at all. Or maybe he would be here later.
Or he might have come here but for a different reason: if he had found out about dragon holes already, perhaps he would want to visit the ones in the capital first. Gintoki knew of five such places here in Edo. He had memorized the countrywide map of all known dragon holes that time years ago, and his mind, fuzzy as it could be in other respects, still retained that knowledge: he could place each single opening of power on the map, those places where the Altana emerged from the ground.
The smallest and weakest of the dragon holes in Edo was where the miko sisters’ current shrine was. Two larger ones were claimed and worked by Altana mining companies, one entirely Amanto-owned and one partially Earth-owned. But both companies seemed determined to squeeze out as much Altana as they could before the government could finish fine-tuning the new, more stringent regulations that had been talked about for ages. Both those places were cheerless, charmless places under strong guard.
The fourth dragon hole in Edo had previously been on ground leased by an Amanto embassy, whose planet’s reputation in the galactic community had suffered in recent years. Those guys had used the dragon hole as their own internal power source, but the government had reclaimed the area after the embassy’s lease ran out. However, debate now raged on what the city should do with it, and so it lay temporarily quiet and undisturbed, if not completely unguarded.
And then, of course, there was the space terminal.
Gintoki didn’t want to go there.
He really didn’t want to go there for this purpose particularly.
He clinked his spoon against the empty glass of milkshake, trying to use the dissonant sound to shake his mind free, to stop it from going heavy and torpid again. Might not be in Edo. Might be looking up other sources of information, elsewhere in the country. Might journey to the ruins of the school and to Oboro’s grave. To the dragon hole where he had been found as a baby. To the marine dragon hole where Shôyô had been found as a baby. To that one picturesque shrine with the rocks… or that one in the grove… or that one by the spring… The boy’s hometown didn’t give much of a geographical clue: there was no notable dragon hole right there, and the ones closest to it were three or four sites all in completely different directions.
Gintoki’s head felt hot and heavy. He leaned his chin on his palm, elbow on table, letting out a small groan.
He should call Shinpachi and Kagura. He could already picture their accusing looks if he waited till later.
He really should call Zura, too.
And that was when he found out his crappy second-hand mobile phone had already run out of power. “Seriously?!” he burst out. “You’re choosing now of all times to bail on me? They’re all going to think I clammed up and didn’t call them on purpose!” Shinpachi would tsk-tsk at him, Kagura would give him a flat look… and Zura would cross his arms and look Disappointed... crap, he might even look hurt, and for real. “Gimme a break!” Gin said out loud. People turned to stare. He got up and trudged out of the cafe, then picked up his walking pace, and a few minutes later he had started jogging.
No, he didn’t want to go to the space terminal. A heavy weight was lying on his chest at the thought, but he knew that kind of weight; it was the kind you had to take responsibility for and pick up, and deal with.
Besides, he actually did want to call the other three. Maybe not relishing the conversation in advance, but he didn’t want to be the only one knowing. And the space terminal was one of the few places in this benighted era where you could still find public payphones.
He ran through the glittering, crowded night streets of the most modern part of the capital, swerving to avoid passersby. His heart was pounding hard, his bokuto was solidly in place, his hands and feet were cold, and it didn’t fully feel real. He kept trying to go faster, to force his legs to move those extra seconds that would mean it would finally feel real.
Gintoki had reasoned and guessed and assumed, and then finally, reluctantly, gone with the least appealing choice (because wouldn’t it be just like that bastard to make things harder for him).
There was a thought behind his choice.
But he was still completely wrong.
Concluded in Chapter 5
I had the privilege of receiving beta and encouragement from both Sparda and plipdragon for this chapter! I am very grateful to them, and to everyone else who's encouraged me.
Constructive criticism and other feedback is very welcome!
Fic title: There's No Together, There's No Apart, There's Only Impossible Longing
Chapter: 4/5 (plus prologue)
Chapter title: Follow The Brook Back Up To The Mountain
Word Count: 9372 [...what. did not realize it was that many words until now!]
Fandom: Gintama
Fic status: in progress
Pairing: Gintoki/Katsura/Takasugi: Gintoki/Katsura, Katsura/Takasugi, Takasugi/Gintoki
Rating: G for this chapter I think; PG-13 or PG-15 for the fic as a whole
Spoilers/Setting: see above: many spoilers for the manga ending in this chapter.
Flavour: Angsty, but hopefully with a relatively happy ending (that's the plan at least)
Summary: A story about Gintoki, Katsura and Takasugi told through various scenes and fragments.
Author's notes and disclaimer in the prologue post
Continued from Chapter 3
The boy’s full name is Shinsaku Hikawa, but he's rarely called that. Aunt Matako always calls him Shin-chan except on the rare occasions when she has to introduce him to some important grown-up. Then she can get this odd look on her face almost like she's forgotten what his full name sounds like (but isn't she the one who picked it?). The shorter form, Shin-chan, feels more like his real name. If he has a real name.
He knows the story of where he came from very well: Aunt Matako has told it to him many times like a bedtime story, telling him that she was lost and alone, drifting from town to town not knowing what to do with her life. Then in one small village she heard a strange cry from inside the hollow of a tree. She looked into that hollow and found a tiny baby there. When she asked the village elders, they said that nobody knew where the child came from, that the gods must have meant for Aunt Matako to raise the child. Aunt Matako had listened, had taken the baby, had found a place to stay in a new town, and here they were now.
Eventually, by the time that he was almost three (and as big as other children who were eight or nine), he found out that Aunt Matako had told the town's officials that he was the son of Matako's dead sister, who had died from an illness, and that his father had died in an accident months before he was born. When he asked what that was about, Aunt Matako replied that officials just wouldn't believe in babies being found in trees, and Uncle Takechi, on a visit right then, backed her up. But in reality, she claims, she’s never had a sister. Shin-chan wonders what to believe.
It's only when he's a bit older that he will realize that he’s been very lucky in how the people in that small town have reacted to him growing up so quickly. Matako told officials that he has an unusual illness, with documents to prove it (and he supposes it’s not wrong, even if he doesn’t feel sick). He has a dispensation from attending regular school as long as he can pass special exams twice a year, though he does go to calligraphy lessons and kendo lessons in town. The school people are understanding, and so are the priests in town. Takechi seems to get well on with the priests, and while they insist on him going to shrines now and then and taking part in various annoying ceremonies, that seems to be about trying to give him good luck. At least the priests don’t act like he’s cursed.
As he grows up, there are kids who stare at him and won't go close, and some call him ”Princess Kaguya” and laugh (he could bear being called ”Bamboo Shoot”, but a princess is just too much, so those kids he has to fight). Most kids he knows aren’t like that, they’re more relaxed -- still, it’s not easy to keep your friends when you outgrow all your playmates. He's lucky, again, that there's a neighbourhood family of four boys, the youngest born two years earlier than him, and all fairly ready to play and chill about him growing older. By the time he's three his regular playmate is the second youngest son in that family, having outgrown the two younger brothers but often having to babysit them.
Grown-ups come by on visits at times. Uncle Takechi comes by every few weeks. He also sends money they need – Shin-chan knows they need it because sometimes Aunt Matako looks worried and grumbles under her breath when that money is later to arrive than usual. She probably doesn't earn much money at her part-time job at the fish-cleaning place in town. And yet they have a housekeeper – or a babysitter for him, he's not sure what to call Asuna. If she were a pain he would object that he's big enough and can stay alone the whole time at home while Aunt Matako is working, instead of just a few hours now and then. But he likes Asuna, and Auntie trusts her.
Asuna stays with him overnight now and then, not very often, when Aunt Matako packs her bag, hugs him close and then leaves for several days. She’s restless beforehand and much calmer when she comes back. She says she’s just done a bit of extra work. He’s never allowed to look into her bag when she goes away those times.
The serious-looking man with the long hair comes rarely, only twice a year – right after New Year's and in Golden Week. Katsura is his name. He only really speaks to Aunt Matako while the boy is out playing or in his room, and he never stays for long, but he leaves a few gifts like crayons and notebooks and souvenir food as he leaves, and weird mascot figurines. He might also be sending money to Aunt Matako, but Shin-chan isn't sure about that.
Much more often a wild young woman with red hair and Chinese clothes comes by to challenge Aunt Matako to a fight. They yell and insult each other and charge one another wildly outside the house. Usually Uncle Takechi is the only one the boy sees Matako beating up, when he's being too stupid, but this girl is an exception. There's a man in glasses that comes along too and tries to keep the woman in check, fails and apologies and leaves them some money to pay for all the food his friend has just scarfed down after the fight. Then they go and the fridge is all empty. Aunt Matako acts annoyed by all this, but she always seems to be in a good mood afterwards. Shin-chan has to ask Uncle Takechi for their names, because Auntie only calls them “you two-!” when they're there, and “those idiots” after they've left.
Every now and then men in rough clothes, scarred bodies and tough faces who look like they've seen a lot of trouble come by, and Aunt Matako always serves them tea. They talk a while in low voices, they'll try to give her a little bit of money (although they usually look poor themselves) and she tries to refuse and to give something to them instead. Sometimes she does accept the money reluctantly, though. The men leave and never come back. They often give the boy strange glances, but when they leave they look more peaceful than when they come.
Aunt Matako is often quiet a good while afterwards. But maybe that's not bad. Shin-chan doesn't know.
He also doesn’t know what to make of Tatsuma Sakamoto at all. A loud man who doesn’t come around all that often either, full of silly laughter and sudden motion sickness and dumb jokes and gifts that can be either really neat or really weird; it could be the latest cool videogame or it could be some kind of toy that only Amanto with four arms can play correctly. He seems like an idiot, he laughs too much, and he's just so... so weird. And he always dashes off again just as quickly as he came, just when you were trying to come up with good questions to ask him. Shin-chan is dubious of the man's claims to be the head of a space-faring merchant fleet, but Aunt Matako says it's the truth when he asks her, with a regretful sigh as if she would rather wish it weren’t.
Finally there's two people who never knock on the door, never speak to Auntie, and maybe they have nothing to do with him at all and show up in his neighbourhood at times for other reasons. But he doesn't think so. The first one is a tall lady with long dark hair carrying a very long sword, and looking like she wouldn’t hesitate to use it. She makes the boy feel that she's full of secrets, but if you say the wrong thing she will never talk to you. Several times he's stood and watched her from a distance, working up the courage to approach her and start to ask her important questions, but before he could even take the first step, she had vanished again.
And there's the man with white hair.
The boy only sees him clearly a few times, always at a distance. He's hard to make out from the surrounding shadows, and vanishes again really quickly. The boy doesn't think the woman with the long sword minds if he sees her, at least not briefly. She just doesn’t want to be spoken to, it seems. But he gets the feeling that the man in white hair doesn't want to even be seen.
Once, he was careless. He'd been exploring the overgrown area to the east where there are abandoned houses and a lot of earthquake damage. He'd made a mistake as he balanced on the top of a high stone wall, when he hadreached a part that had partially crumbled where there was a lot of moss on top of old rubble. He lost his footing and fell down on the other side of the wall, twisting his ankle when he landed.
Now he was in a very overgrown enclosure with the ruins of a house in the middle. High stone walls surrounded it on all sides, except for one part which had a high iron fence instead, and a gate closed with a huge lock. He did try to climb up the wall again, but with his hurt ankle it was impossible to gain footing. Shin-chan wasn't totally unfamiliar with this place, he'd actually come here once before to explore it, but then he'd had a friend with him.They’d brought a rope and a ladder, and it hadn't been close to sunset like now.
The trees were high, the bushes were thorny, the undergrowth was everywhere and blocked out the last rays of the setting sun. The boy didn't think of himself as easily frightened, but he felt colder than usual right then, swallowing and wondering if he should risk the blow to his pride and start to yell for help, or suck it up and stoically spend the night here. He was also uneasily aware that even if he did start to yell, nobody might be close enough to hear him.
He spun around as he heard rustling behind the closest wall, the sounds of climbing. Then suddenly a head full of unruly white hair appeared above it. The boy stared. It was that guy, there was no question about it. He'd never been this close before.
The man stared down at him for a long moment.
He opened his mouth, closed it, took another look at the boy, and a few seconds later the man was standing on top of the wall in his usual traveller's clothes. Then he crouched down and held out his arm towards the boy, and when he saw it wouldn't reach him, he held out his wooden sword, grip first. “Can you grab that? Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice a little hoarse.
Then, after Shin-chan had explained about his ankle, the man directed him to how he should stand, where he should put his balance, and then somehow the man didn't topple over at all as the boy grabbed the wooden sword tightly. Instead he actually managed to lift him up higher, with his full weight dangling from that sword, until he'd swung him in an arc and put him right on the wall again, where they were sitting face to face for a few seconds.
The man sighed, rubbing his head. “So dumb. What an idiot, falling like that. You've got some luck I was around to see you.”
And then the next moment he'd jumped down on this side of the wall, where the ground was closer. He reached up, grabbed Shin-chan and put him on the ground. “Just go home,” he muttered, and the next moment he was gone.
In his strange, sped-up childhood, most of the time things weren’t bad, just intense and often mysterious. He was a weird boy, he knew, but he had people he trusted who cared about him. He had good playmates, but didn’t make any extremely close friends -- though perhaps he had no strong need for such, either. As he would say much later, his second childhood was both less and more lonely than his first. And certainly more peaceful.
But there were also other times -- times when he felt he could taste and smell something much larger and stronger, but also darker and sadder, than his real life. That would make his real life feel less real by comparison.
One of the ways that happened was a dream that would keep coming back. It wasn’t like the regular nightmares when he dreamt about zombies and monsters and witches and being stuck while something unspeakable was hunting him. It wasn’t as directly scary as those. But it felt heavy. And it lingered inside his chest even after he’d woken up, even in the morning, much more than the nightmares did.
He was walking up a hill. The hill was steep and he was very tired and hurt, with blood dripping down from a wound somewhere (the dream varied in where the wound was, where the pain came from: his leg, his side, his chest, his shoulder...). In his arms was a big, heavy brick he couldn’t put down. He had to get to the top of the hill carrying the brick, but each step seemed to take forever. His body was aching, and he thought he must have been walking there for years, now.
Blood dripped down and the sun shone, and far away birds were calling. He was himself and also not. He kept walking, the weight pressing him down, but he always woke up before reaching the top.
In waking hours, he would sometimes feel like he was being watched. For a long time he hated that feeling. It wasn’t like when the mysterious Long Sword Lady or the White-Haired Man came around: this sensation went deeper, and it would last even if he ran fast, even after he came home. Each time it would lessen gradually and then go away after an hour or so, but he could never force it away himself.
The boy grew older, and smarter. He learned about the recent history of his country, and when he wasn’t satisfied with what the books said, he started to ask and ask and put more and more questions about it to Aunt Matako and Uncle Takechi and Asuna (who now only came in once a week to help with the laundry). He snooped around and found hidden boxes in the house, with photos of people he didn’t know, of Auntie when she was younger. He found two different sets of passports with photos of Auntie, of himself when he was a baby, but now they had other names entirely. Fake papers, clearly. But maybe the documents he knew were fake, too?
He found notes and letters that were hard to understand when he didn’t know where they came from, but still held exciting clues: Take care of the new shipment of.... Meet up with F. in the harbour tomorrow... Rakuyo, City X, 4th temple you pass when climbing uphill to the north… Tell Bansai that… (the text was smudged). The White Yaksha was last seen north of the village of Y… You could probably make up a whole video game just using clues like that. And one word that came back several times: the Kiheitai.
And he took all of this knowledge together and got better and better at eavesdropping on the adults and occasionally asking a few carefully selected questions -- and by the time he had lived for nearly four and a half years, and was as big as normal children were at twelve or thirteen, he had become more and more aware of the other one.
The man they were all thinking about. Not just Auntie and Uncle Takechi, not just the men with harsh faces who would only come once. But also serious Katsura and goofy Sakamoto and the Tall Sword Lady and the White-Haired Man and maybe also the brute girl Kagura and meek guy Shinpachi Shimura, although with those last two he wasn’t as sure. But the other ones, yes. They all had that other one in mind. He knew it.
It made him shiver to think about, but not with fear exactly, rather with a kind of vertigo: he felt as if there were dark tendrils reaching out to him from a place of deep power, and if he didn’t step back and keep himself anchored down to everyday life he would get sucked up into that darkness, swallowed whole.
Yet somehow it didn’t terrify him.
But he knew this: he wanted it to be on his own terms. Something he chose for himself. Even if it should prove to hurt. He hadn’t made up his mind yet, but he’d rather choose to step into the reach of that darkness than run away and build a fortress against it forever. Perhaps he wanted to grow his own tendrils.
Around this time he started to keep a diary. If he did end up swallowed by the darkness, he wanted there to be something that was left of him as he was now.
“Zura, things are happening.”
“It’s not Zura, it’s Katsura. Things are always happening, Sakamoto.”
Sakamoto inches his chair closer, though the noise in this bar isn’t as loud now as it was a few minutes ago. Katsura has tried to make them go to a soba restaurant for once, but Sakamoto has an uncanny ability to make them wind up in the type of place he likes the most, proving much stronger than Gintoki in that regard. To be fair, Gintoki can’t really match either of Sakamoto’s two special moves, namely Offering To Pay The Tab and Leavin’ Earth Again In A Day Or Two (And Who Knows When We’ll See Each Other Next, Ahahahaha). And somehow Katsura doesn’t mind it all that much. He doesn’t even mind helping Sakamoto throw up on the street as usually happens after they’ve gone drinking like this.
But right now the Loud Fellow is still only on his second glass. “Yeah, that’s well an’ true,” he says, nodding, “but some of those things that are happening right now are the kind that never did before. And they are just too freaking cute…” He reached inside his coat and brought out a stack of photos, with some holograms mixed in. Katsura peered at them, angling his head to see better.
“See?” Sakamoto continues. “Look how big Ruby’s gotten! Ain’t she just the cutest li’l lady in the galaxy?” Beaming even more than usual, the man waves one of the photos right in front of Katsura’s nose. “Look at this one, she’s holding her ma’s hand! An’ here she’s sailing a toy boat down the brook!”
“She is indeed fairly cute,” concedes Katsura about the young girl in the photos, looking around five or six years old. “Is she attacking a huge wild animal in that last photo?”
“She is, she is.” Sakamoto, looking even fonder now. “That’s a li’l Yato girl for ya. But I’m sure the dumb beast had it comin’, ahahahaha!”
“Really, Sakamoto,” mumbles Katsura, sipping at the glass of wine that Sakamoto poured up for him. “It’s a little late for you to come waving around your own Final Fantasy delusion at this point.”
“Ahahaha, whaddya mean, Zurakichi? Jus’ ‘cause folks are so quick to jump to conclusions--! All right, all right, I know what you’re gonna say. She does look like she could be Mutsu’s daughter, right?”
“I didn’t say that,” Katsura comments prudently. “And she certainly doesn’t look like she has any of your stupidity in her. And it’s not Zurakichi, it’s Katsura.”
“True, the girl’s pureblooded Yato. But we only found out ‘bout her this past spring. Came as a complete surprise to Mutsu to find that she has a first cousin that survived the pirate wars all along and was smart enough to fake her own death and run away with her secret sweetheart! Even better, both of them were fed up with bein’ mercenaries or pirates. Wanted somethin’ new for their kid. So they set up on this one remote planet that hasn’t been too exploited, ‘cause it’s ultra volcanic an’ the giant carnivorous beasts there are just too much for most ta deal with. But y’know, that’s one way to handle that famous Yato bloodthirst - they just go out huntin’ huge beasts when they need an outlet! Plus, they can also earn money that way, sellin’ game trophies to space merchants.”
“So all in all, you have no true relation to this girl,” says Katsura, “and Mutsu-san is only her first cousin once removed.”
“Ah, but but!! She’s become her honorary aunt now! An’ maybe her only livin’ relative ‘cept for her folks, even... So we decided to give both her an’ her parents shares in the Kaientai. Now they have a steady income apart from just huntin’! One day in the future that girl might hop aboard on our fleet an’ go see the galaxy! Become a great merchant! Don’t ya think that means I qualify as an honorary uncle?”
“It seems she could use a few more relatives, so I guess even you might do,” admits Katsura, holding out his glass so Sakamoto can fill it up, then returning the favour. There’s a lot of life in Tatsuma’s voice and face as he talks about this child, making Katsura wonder if the merchant hasn’t wished for children of his own one day, though he can’t recall him ever mentioning it. Possibly at some point back in the war… But if so, the stars always pulled on him that much more.
“Mutsu’s pretty darn happy ‘bout it, you know, Zura,” says Sakamoto, head resting sloppily in his palm, slouching with his elbow on the table.
“It’s not Zura, it’s Katsura.”
“See, she’s told me in the past before, more than once, that she can’t imagine having kids, but… it’s bad for the Yato, getting fewer and fewer. That’s been naggin’ at her. So to find these people, and seein’ they’re tryin’ to find a new way forward, too, that they ain’t raisin’ their daughter into crime an’ bloodshed… That’s been great for her, I’m tellin’ ya. She seems that much calmer and happier now.” Sakamoto’s voice drops lower, and sounds a shade warmer as he adds, “I feel that now, I can picture us keep travellin’ in space for years to come. Wasn’t too sure ‘bout that, just a year ago…”
So if things have changed for you, it’s really just in a way that can enable you to go on without changing? Katsura thinks, nearly says out loud, but then doesn’t. He swallows it down. Sakamoto getting things to change around him so he doesn’t need to change himself is just standard procedure, and Katsura, in truth, prefers it that way.
“‘Uncle Tatsuma’ sure has a nice ring to it, huh?” says Sakamoto, his voice just a tad maudlin.
“You’ve had too much to drink,” Katsura consequently tells him.
“Ahahaha, I’m fine! I wasn’t just goin’ ta tell ya about our little Ruby-chan! D’you know who never got to callin’ me Uncle Tatsuma? S’pose I didn’t show up often enough for the sprout for that to happen…” sighs Sakamoto.
Katsura tenses up, hand a little unsteady as he takes another drink. “The sprout” is what Sakamoto calls young Shinsaku Hikawa.
“Did you intend to come on visits more often, over there?” he replies, drawing himself up as he puts his cup down. “Or did you just not foresee him growing up so quickly?” Understandable, of course, but it had been clear from the first year that the child grew abnormally fast.
Sakamoto chuckles to himself, rather than letting out his usual laugh. Then he looks out into the air, a distant look on his face. “I reckon I was just hopin’ for good radio waves,” he says nonsensically; then, abruptly, “That sprout’s been writin’ ta me, y’ know. Startin’ ta ask some real questions.”
Katsura gave him a quiet look, then stood up, went to get water, and poured it up for Sakamoto. “Take some water,” he urged. “I don’t want you to throw up right now.”
“Hey hey hey, I’m not that bad!” But Sakamoto does obligingly take a mouthful of water, even if he makes a face. “Zura,” he says again. “I’m leavin’ the planet again the day after tomorrow, I don’t want to talk about this the whole rest of my time.”
Katsura knocks him on the head. “But you do want to talk about it.”
“Stop that!” whines Sakamoto. “I do, I do, I doooo… but… Zura, he’s been askin’ questions, and I think he’s turnin’ ta me exactly because I’m all but a stranger to him. But he’s still not askin’ the real BIG questions, y’know? I reckon that means... I reckon that means he’s holdin’ back, and when a kid that age… well not lit’rally that age but the age he kinda is right now but not on paper... anyway… when kids like that are goin’ round with thoughts too big for their heads that they can’t talk about fully, means it’s all over but the shouting. I mean. He could do it.”
“What? I’m not following you.”
Sakamoto sighs theatrically. His breath is boozy. “I meeean. It could be done, y’know? Ain’t no end to all the stuff Altana can do…”
“It’s way too plot convenient that way,” Katsura agrees, starting to guess what Sakamoto means. A shiver comes over him. He buries his hands into his sleeves, aware they’re not quite steady.
Sakamoto nods. “An’ if he finds a Dragon Vein, or some other type of boost… Might be he’ll find himself a way ta remember.”
“But…” Katsura swallows again, but rallies, trying to force himself into calm. “...First of all, it might not even be him. We all just assume so, but… it’s not certain.”
“Right, right, right,” says Sakamoto, ordering a third bottle of booze.
“Second of all… even if he is, reincarnations aren’t supposed to remember their past lives, no matter what extraordinary substances they might come in contact with.”
Sakamoto gives him a look over his sunglasses; for once, he’s not smiling. He fills up his own glass and then Katsura’s cup, and says nothing.
Katsura shifts position, suddenly aware that the din of the bar has sunk down to just a background murmur. He sips on the alcohol, feeling the burn in his throat and stomach. His head is spinning. But he lowers his voice, and continues in a whisper, “Third of all… Third of all, even if…” Cold now, a cold feeling despite the warmth of the drink. “Even! If! Memory isn’t the same as personality. Even if he remembers, he might not actually… he might not actually become like he was. It might just become a horrible burden to him. Memories like that.” His tongue starts to trip on his words; he gestures inarticulately. Sakamoto is smiling his goofy smile again, the serious look gone. Katsura wants to explain to him much more, and he also wants to take back the words he’s already said; he wants to cling to him tightly and to push him away, all the way back up to space.
He wants to put his head down on the bar counter and not raise it for ages and ages. Like Gintoki does, sometimes. He wants to feel the waves of inebriation pass over him, wants the thoughts to slow down and murmur instead of their incessant buzzing.
They don’t, of course: the thoughts are as busy as ever, it’s just the ordering of them that gets harder in his drunk state. He reaches out and pats Sakamoto on the head without really knowing why. That silly hair of his just looks like it needs petting. Sakamoto is starting to look a little green in the face, though.
“He’s too much of a brat, he wouldn’t let that happen,” mumbles Sakamoto, words slurred, and Katsura doesn’t quite follow. Let what happen? Be burdened by memories? Regaining memories in the first place?
He reaches over and fishes out Sakamoto’s wallet to pay their bill, then gets up and drags him into the bar’s bathroom where he helps him throw up. A breeze of night air is coming in from a window high up near the ceiling, easing the stench a little. Cold and buried in his chest, he doesn’t put his last line of argument into words, but they echo inside him.
Fourth of all…
Fourth of all, even if he does become his old self again… that doesn’t mean he will want to have anything to do with us.
They had failed him, after all. Failed to keep him in the light. Failed to follow him into the darkness.
He trembles. In his mind’s eye that figure is always turned away. It hurts to try to hope, when you know you shouldn’t.
Matako called him on a still, silent evening right around when he would normally have dinner. Hours ago, he’d come home from a job that took half as long as expected and he’d sat himself down at his desk. The air was thick and still around him, he put his feet up and just remained there. He couldn’t have said why he couldn’t make himself get up and move. Quiet as a stone statue, as if the brooding, sombre air mustn’t be disturbed, even his thoughts had slowed down and moved like shambling zombies in his head.
For a while his sluggish mind couldn’t even remember why Shinpachi and Kagura were nowhere to be seen and hadn’t even called to tell why. It was nothing alarming, that he was sure, they’d told him this morning they’d go somewhere, right? And they’d taken Sadaharu with them. Slowly it came back, something about a geek event in town where Shinpachi intended to look for Otsû merchandise and Kagura had decided to join him to look for merch of her own bizarre favourites. Right.
In that quietude into which the din of the city didn’t seem to penetrate, the telephone rang suddenly, shrilly, making him start and nearly topple over in his chair, regaining his balance only at the last second.
“Yeah?”
“White Yaksha.”
He sat up straight, recognizing the voice after a few seconds’ reflection. Goddammit, why did she still have to call him that? Well, it was true they didn’t really...well, didn’t really talk at all, normally, but it was still a dumb thing to stick to after all these years.
“It’s Gin-san, you know that, lady.” His voice sounded hoarse. “Hey. Been a while.”
“You… You know what this is about, don’t you?” Her voice was low, but seemed incredibly clear.
He opened his mouth, then closed it. Swallowed. Dusty thought, dusty words. “I -- I don’t know.” One moment, to collect himself. Then, softer, “I’m not sure.”
“Ah.” A pause; she seemed to collect herself, too. And just when enough seconds had passed that he was gearing up to make a dumb remark about the dramaticness, she said, “Well. He’s vanished.”
“Va...nished?”
“Gone from the house this morning.”
He struggled to keep up. “What… Where did he… How big is he now?”
“Who even knows?” she said, a touch of bitterness in her voice; a touch of sadness. “Two weeks ago, I would say he looked 13, 14. Now…” Another pause, then, “Yesterday, I thought: he looks almost as old as I was when my father died at the end of the war. As old as you all were when you went out and fought in it.”
He wondered what she had learned about their past. She seemed more informed than he had thought. It wasn’t allowed to just get that kind of info by simply reading the manga, was it?
“Do you think he left town? Came here? Is that why you called me?” he asked, expecting her to say yes, that she wanted him to look for him, to bring back the boy who she had raised for years now, or to bring back the man she had followed unreservedly in the past, and had been in love with. Either one of those. Surely that was why she had called him.
“He can’t be found anywhere in town,” said Matako Kijima. “But I called because I wanted to warn you, White Yaksha.” Then silence again, as if her voice was swallowed up by darkness.
“Why do you think I need to be warned?” he asked, lowering his own voice now, leaning forward over the desk.
But she didn’t answer the question. Instead, she said, “You should go talk to Imai. I think he went and saw her, two weeks ago. When she came to this region for her work.”
He opened his mouth intending to ask her why she wasn’t calling Nobume directly, then, but again she spoke before he could, and this time her words were fast, hurried. “Because I can trust you to look out for him.” Then, a click. She’d hung up.
He put the handset down on his ancient black telephone that he still stubbornly refused to replace. A few more long, dense seconds passed, as he looked down at his scarred hands, at the grainy surface of his office desk.
Then he tsk’d to himself as he finally stood up and dusted his hands. “So does the bullet chick think I keep some kind of tab on what doughnut girl is doing? Maaan, some people,” he grumbled out loud into the air. He was suddenly much more aware of the street sounds and the traffic din of the big city, now that time seemed to be moving again. Two minutes later he was standing in the street outside his house and turned to walk towards the city centre. But he wasn’t aiming for the police headquarters or any other government buildings. There was a much different venue he would try first.
He found Nobume in the second bowling hall he went to. She’d picked up this interest last year and hadn’t abandoned it yet, even though she found it hard to get people to compete with her after many spectacular wins or outrageous losses. When she was out with Kagura and Otae and the others, she would come up with new challenging ways to throw the ball and/or take down the pins, whether blatantly against the rules or not: Gintoki had nothing against that kind of thing in principle, but he knew better than to compete with that rowdy gang when they were all out together. He had to look out for the safety of his own balls, thank you very much.
Tonight, however, Nobume was bowling alone, launching ball after ball in a straight line with little stopping. She was out of uniform. wearing a simple cotton kimono with a checkered pattern in grey, light violet and white, with a fringed shawl in white and light blue on top. Gintoki walked up to her, stood there quietly for a moment or two; she didn’t look up or otherwise acknowledge his presence, so eventually he leaned over to snatch away her bowling ball as it came rolling back, letting it spin on his index finger.
Then her gaze did sweep over him from top to toe. She nodded, a tiny bit. “Want to compete?” she asked, the tip of her sword suddenly pressing against the underside of his chin.
“Hey! Make up your mind if you want a swordsman duel or a crazy bowling competition!” he protested, backing and tossing the ball away behind him. Some random patron was swearing in the background, perhaps from getting hit by the ball. “And no, I don’t,” he added. “Can we go get a bite to eat? There’s a place across the street that has doughnuts.” Come to think of it, that’s probably why she was here and not in that other bowling hall that was closer to her office.
She sheathed her sword and kicked up her bowling ball, which Random Patron had just rolled in her direction, putting it into her bag. “I’m not paying for your food, too,” was all she said as she switched shoes and left the building, Gintoki trailing after her.
He had some money on him from this day’s job and bought himself a strawberry milkshake and a café au lait. As he waited for her to finish her order by the counter, he checked his mobile phone (cheap, beat-up, second-hand) just in case, though he didn’t get texts very often since people knew he tended to forget, lose, or destroy his mobiles. No messages. Shinpachi and Kagura might chew him out later for being too secretive, but stuff like this wasn’t something you could tell people over text, and he wanted to get a little more of a feel for the situation before he called them on the telephone.
“Bullet chick said I should talk to you,” he opened once she came back to the table with her haul and a cup of black coffee. “Heard the boy has run away and you might know something about that.”
“He has?” she asked, giving him a sharp look. “Since when?”
“This morning, and she thinks he might have left town.” He added more sugar to his coffee and stirred it slowly, giving her a long look.
She bit into her first doughnut thoughtfully.
“Two weeks ago there was a ceremony in another town in that prefecture, opening a new, up-to-date police headquarters staffed with graduates from Edo’s new police school,” she said, wiping crumbs off her face. “After it was over he shoved his way through the crowd and said he had to speak with me. He’d seen my photo in the newspaper and realized who I am.”
“Bound to happen eventually,” commented Gintoki. “You just weren’t sneaky enough, skulking around like that.”
“You’re one to talk. Anyway, I could have had him thrown out and pretended I had no idea who he was, but that didn’t seem fair.” She shrugged. “So I went to talk to him at an old, abandoned temple in the middle of the forest at midnight.”
“That’s too much! That’s absurdly dramatic! You’re indulging that mini-edgelord!”
“There was also a full moon, but there were clouds in the sky, so I carried a traditional lantern with me as well,” she continued.
“Oh wait, sorry, I was wrong all along. You’re the edgelord here. Reliving your teenage years already.”
Unperturbed, Nobume continued her account.
He had gone through another growth spurt. The last time Nobume had seen him before this, back in his hometown, he had been on the verge of adolescence, and now he was clearly in the middle of it. (“Please tell me he has pimples now,” commented Gintoki.) His hair was long and unkempt, hanging over his eyes, but straight and shiny. (“Eugh.”) He was wearing Western clothes this time around, a black polo-collared sweater and skinny black jeans. The effect, she felt, was that of a tryhard fan of rock singers, who has an outfit in mind but neither the budget nor the height to complete the look. (“Now that’s harsh. Hey, since when did you turn into a fashion guru, anyway?”) He’d been shining an electric torch of his own, but he shut it off when Nobume arrived with the lantern. Then the moon came out of the clouds, and she blew out the lantern as unnecessary.
“Good evening, Shinsaku-kun,” said Nobume, since there was no use pretending she didn’t know who he was.
“Good evening, Imai-san,” he replied. “I was surprised to find out you’re the Edo Chief of Police. You’ve kept an eye on me a lot, haven’t you?”
She shrugged. “Only when I really did have time over. I never neglected my duties over it.”
He frowned, drew himself up and crossed his arms over his chest. “Was it because you didn’t want me to come to harm? Or because you were worried I might become a danger to other people?” Nobume blinked; she hadn’t expected him to guess at the second part.
“I’ve been reading up on things,” the boy went on. “They’re all trying to shield me… But you don’t have a right to do that. You never even talked to me before.”
She inclined her head slightly. “You may be right.”
“I -- so.” He stopped, then took a deep breath. “Shinsuke. Takasugi. That old terrorist. That’s the one -- that’s the one they all see when they look at me? Isn’t it? It’s the only one that really fits. And they think I’m him. That I will turn into him. Isn’t that it?”
“Ah.” She was silent for a long moment, then said, “It’s true that there’s a belief that you may be his reincarnation. Because as a baby, you were found in mysterious circumstances, and because you look a lot like him. But it’s not certain. It could just be coincidence.”
“What about the fact that I grow up so quickly?”
“Well, that’s not something he himself was known for doing, but…” She hesitated, then said, carefully, “You would know about Altana, of course.”
“Of course,” he said impatiently. “That’s what the whole last war was about. Is it true it really used to be a secret here on Earth even though it was so famous and important out in space, for the Amanto?”
“Well, the Amanto didn’t really want the Earthlings to realize the value of Altana as a resource. But the knowledge did trickle out over time to some of us, even before the war started.” She paused again. Then, slowly, “There was… There was a man that Shinsuke Takasugi knew very well. He alone had the ability to take in and absorb Altana directly and without side-effects. He could heal very quickly, and once, after he was ‘killed’ in a sense, he was reborn again and grew very quickly, too. He went from being a baby to looking about six years old within a few months. This is hearsay, but it’s from a good source. (“Well, thank you for that.”) And then… It’s complicated, but before he died, Takasugi also got some Altana into his body, even if he couldn’t use it to anywhere near the same extent. But because that happened… it’s one more reason to think the two of you could be connected.”
“Huh,” commented Gintoki. “He’s still so damn young, you know. You had no qualms telling him all of that?”
Nobume finished her fourth doughnut and drank more of her coffee. “If I was barely going to tell him a thing, I wouldn’t have agreed to come to that meeting in the first place. Besides, it seemed to me he’s grown up with enough evasions.”
“So what will happen in my future?” said the boy testily, hands in pockets. He looked at her steadily, but his feet and shoulders were shifting restlessly, like a nervous purebred horse. “Am I going to die of old age before I turn 25?”
Nobume raised an eyebrow at him. “You certainly don’t back away from the unpleasant scenarios.” She looked up at the moon, stepping out from the fuzzy shade into the moonlight. “In truth, nobody actually knows what will happen. What I do know is that there are people here on Earth and people in space with knowledge of Altana and other things that could perhaps prove useful. There’s nothing that says you would have to blithely accept a fate like that.”
The boy huffed and didn’t reply for a while, looking away and crossing his arms over his chest. He muttered, “That’s easy to say, but I’m the one who’ll decide…” then trailed off, sitting down at the steps of the temple, and drawing a hand through his hair. Nobume remained standing.
Eventually, the boy asked, his voice sounding small, young and tired, “D’you know if it’s true, then? What Aunt Matako says… that she found me as a baby inside a hollow tree? It just sounds like a fairytale.”
“I wasn’t there,” she said, shrugging, “but I have no particular reason to doubt it. That tree must have been one of the dragon holes.”
He raised his head, staring at her again, eyes gleaming in the moonlight. “Dragon holes?”
“That’s to do with Altana as well,” she replied, “and the dragon veins where it flows. But this is all I can tell you, Shinsaku-kun. By all means, find out more if you wish -- however, I must warn you to think closely about what you actually wish to achieve before you act on your knowledge.” She walked over to her lantern, struck a light, and lit it once more. She added, “Especially since you could get hurt for very mundane reasons. That man who was maybe your preincarnation was a great fighter. But you’re a child of peace. You don’t even own a sword, do you?”
He shook his head. “I’m the best one at kendo practice in my age group,” he said, “but I know it’s nothing compared to those who fight with real swords to survive.” He sounded a bit sulky despite this admission.
She nodded. “You’re a smart kid.” Then she undid the sheath of the sword she’d been carrying into the forest and put it down on the ground, at the bottom of the temple steps. “Here. My regular sword is too long, it takes too much time to get used to, so I took another one with me tonight. You can have it.”
He started, rising to his feet. “What… You… How…” he spluttered, staring wildly down at the sword, up at her, back and forth.
She had started to walk away from there, but now she stopped and looked back at him with a small smile. “There was a bond of sorts between me and that other man, though I’m still not sure if he ever learnt about it. I never managed to find a way to talk to him about that while he was alive. So, for that reason…” And she left the temple and walked away into the forest.
Gintoki’s spoon clattered to the table. He sat staring at Nobume, mouth half open, milkshake forgotten.
“You dumped all that stuff on a sheltered adolescent kid and gave him a fucking sword to top it off? Bloody hell, girl! Have you gone absolutely crazy? Is it the stress of the office? Did you get kidnapped by some weird-ass Amanto and had your brain exchanged for a doughnut at some point??”
Nobume sipped from her cup of coffee. “He may not be that experienced, but he does have some training. I didn’t want him to meet any dangers that could be out there while weaponless.”
“A damn sprout like that? He’s as likely or not to cut his head off by accident with a real sword! And that’s not even counting mental and emotional instability into the bargain! Dammit, woman, you’re supposed to be the chief of police in this country? You may just have created the middle-school serial killer par excellence!!”
She sighed, reaching out for a napkin to wipe her mouth. “You should give him more credit. You’ve only ever watched him from a distance. If you’d talked to him before this…”
“Don’t give me that. You’re the one making a damn stupid sentimental gesture just because you’re just as cowardly. You couldn’t talk to him either, this whole time.” He leaned back and finished his milkshake angrily, spitefully. “Of all the bone-headed things to do…”
She drew herself up and reached for her purse and sword, having finished her sixth and final doughnut. “Well, there you have it, at any rate. I will help look for him, of course. I have yours and Kagura-chan’s mobile phone number in case I find him or a solid lead before you.” She got up and swept her shawl around her. “I’m sure we both have some ideas of the kind of places he could have gone. But… personally, I simply feel more at ease knowing that he has a way to protect himself now.”
“Because you could tell he would soon run away from home, right?” muttered Gintoki, glowering at her.
“In this kind of situation, it seems inevitable at some point,” she said. “If it were me… It’s possible I would have left much earlier.”
She seemed lost in thought for a moment. Maybe she found it hard to truly imagine a version of herself that had grown up safe and loved since early childhood, and what that version would have done if put into the strange circumstances that the boy was in. Then she simply nodded to him, and left. Having nothing left to say, it seemed.
Gintoki’s leg twitched for a moment, but instead of getting up right away, he decided to stay put a few minutes and think.
It’s happening.
He looked down at his hands, kept them held out flat on the table. Forcing them to keep steady.
No matter how you look at it, it’s clearly happening. Or -- trying to happen, anyway.
Shôyô, is this wrong? he asked silently. Should we have done more to keep him from his past? But he’s a free individual, his own person… Shôyô would not have approved of them trying to keep Shinsaku Hikawa clouded in ignorance, blissful or not, not when the boy so fiercely wished for that shroud of clouds to disperse. He might still have mourned the loss of innocence, however, and the return of too much pain…
A chill ran down his back. He swallowed, trying to corral his thoughts, trying to be just a bit rational.
So. Matako said that the boy had come back from his talk with Nobume having aged even faster than usual. And now, two weeks later, he had apparently skipped town telling nobody where he was going.
Nobume had given the boy two obvious trails to look up: finding people who had knowledge about how Altana worked, or finding out more about dragon holes. Of course, if he could find knowledgeable people, and if they were as free with their knowledge as Ane and Mone had been to Gintoki, he would also find out about dragon holes.
Those miko sisters… Perhaps Shinsaku had come to Edo in search of them. Their shrine could be a place for Gintoki to start looking. However, it was a fair bit away from where he was right now.
The boy might also not have come to Edo at all. Or maybe he would be here later.
Or he might have come here but for a different reason: if he had found out about dragon holes already, perhaps he would want to visit the ones in the capital first. Gintoki knew of five such places here in Edo. He had memorized the countrywide map of all known dragon holes that time years ago, and his mind, fuzzy as it could be in other respects, still retained that knowledge: he could place each single opening of power on the map, those places where the Altana emerged from the ground.
The smallest and weakest of the dragon holes in Edo was where the miko sisters’ current shrine was. Two larger ones were claimed and worked by Altana mining companies, one entirely Amanto-owned and one partially Earth-owned. But both companies seemed determined to squeeze out as much Altana as they could before the government could finish fine-tuning the new, more stringent regulations that had been talked about for ages. Both those places were cheerless, charmless places under strong guard.
The fourth dragon hole in Edo had previously been on ground leased by an Amanto embassy, whose planet’s reputation in the galactic community had suffered in recent years. Those guys had used the dragon hole as their own internal power source, but the government had reclaimed the area after the embassy’s lease ran out. However, debate now raged on what the city should do with it, and so it lay temporarily quiet and undisturbed, if not completely unguarded.
And then, of course, there was the space terminal.
Gintoki didn’t want to go there.
He really didn’t want to go there for this purpose particularly.
He clinked his spoon against the empty glass of milkshake, trying to use the dissonant sound to shake his mind free, to stop it from going heavy and torpid again. Might not be in Edo. Might be looking up other sources of information, elsewhere in the country. Might journey to the ruins of the school and to Oboro’s grave. To the dragon hole where he had been found as a baby. To the marine dragon hole where Shôyô had been found as a baby. To that one picturesque shrine with the rocks… or that one in the grove… or that one by the spring… The boy’s hometown didn’t give much of a geographical clue: there was no notable dragon hole right there, and the ones closest to it were three or four sites all in completely different directions.
Gintoki’s head felt hot and heavy. He leaned his chin on his palm, elbow on table, letting out a small groan.
He should call Shinpachi and Kagura. He could already picture their accusing looks if he waited till later.
He really should call Zura, too.
And that was when he found out his crappy second-hand mobile phone had already run out of power. “Seriously?!” he burst out. “You’re choosing now of all times to bail on me? They’re all going to think I clammed up and didn’t call them on purpose!” Shinpachi would tsk-tsk at him, Kagura would give him a flat look… and Zura would cross his arms and look Disappointed... crap, he might even look hurt, and for real. “Gimme a break!” Gin said out loud. People turned to stare. He got up and trudged out of the cafe, then picked up his walking pace, and a few minutes later he had started jogging.
No, he didn’t want to go to the space terminal. A heavy weight was lying on his chest at the thought, but he knew that kind of weight; it was the kind you had to take responsibility for and pick up, and deal with.
Besides, he actually did want to call the other three. Maybe not relishing the conversation in advance, but he didn’t want to be the only one knowing. And the space terminal was one of the few places in this benighted era where you could still find public payphones.
He ran through the glittering, crowded night streets of the most modern part of the capital, swerving to avoid passersby. His heart was pounding hard, his bokuto was solidly in place, his hands and feet were cold, and it didn’t fully feel real. He kept trying to go faster, to force his legs to move those extra seconds that would mean it would finally feel real.
Gintoki had reasoned and guessed and assumed, and then finally, reluctantly, gone with the least appealing choice (because wouldn’t it be just like that bastard to make things harder for him).
There was a thought behind his choice.
But he was still completely wrong.
Concluded in Chapter 5