Gintama: Toll (2/?)
Feb. 6th, 2011 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
what_we_dreamTitle: Toll (2/?)
Series: Gintama
Pairing: Gin/Zura
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Semi-graphic war depictions.
Notes: This has (accidentally) trended a bit heavily towards Gin/Zura so I've changed the pairing label, but you could read it as strong friendship if you chose.
Beta: The wonderful![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
frauleinfrog, who is beating sense into this fic.
Summary: The Yorozuya get sent on an exorcism. Unsurprisingly, things do not go smoothly.
Chapter 1: It's Always a Mistake to Turn Around
Gintoki parries the thrust, the sharp edge of the katana sliding evenly over his bokutou and harmlessly past his shoulder. A moment later he’s parrying again, a standard head-blow that feels like a feint. Gintoki narrows his eyes and pushes back, forcing his opponent into the lighter room and staying on the balls of his feet. But no trap comes, and he blocks the next strike easily, still feeling as though the blows are trying to manoeuvre him towards something.
Gintoki doesn’t bother asking Zura what the hell he thinks he’s doing. He doesn’t need the spine-tingling dead-flesh ki to know that despite it being Zura’s hand on the blade, his opponent isn’t the Jyoui rebel. Zura’s style is precise and finished, more elegant than most thanks to his childhood tutors, and more exact than nearly all thanks to years of fighting for his life against overwhelming odds. This man has none of Zura’s elegance and not much of his exactness. And he keeps missing opportunities to capitalize on the open spots he is trying to drive Gintoki into.
Against Zura, he would be fighting for his life. Here, he’s fighting simply to buy himself time to figure out what the hell’s going on. But then, if there’s one thing ghosts are famous for, it’s possession.
“Oi, oi, no need to be angry.” He ducks a whistling strike at his head and sidesteps to avoid being backed into a corner. “No one wants this shitty house.”
“We are waiting for you,” says the damp voice, in a tone entirely different from Zura’s stupidly serious one. It is worn and rough like a man with a cold, and has a wet catch to it. Zura’s probably going to have a hell of a case of laryngitis when he wakes up. Not necessarily a bad thing.
“Great, because –” begins Gintoki, and is interrupted.
“They are coming for us, Shiroyasha. Where are you now?”
Gintoki can fight half conscious, half asleep, and completely drunk. This is all very fortunate, because it means his instincts kick in to keep him moving while his brain stalls at the sound of his old name.
How like you not to know whose house this is. Zura’s stupid comeback echoes in his mind. Zura, who blathers like a madman but who rarely passes up a chance to build a second layer into his words, and who never says anything he doesn’t mean.
Gintoki can count on one hand the number of people in Edo who know him as the Shiroyasha. But then, that’s because the dead keep their secrets.
Gintoki tightens his grip and parries another blow, eyes hard now. He catches the next with a neat curve and pushes it away so hard he can hear the other man taking a stumbling step to keep his balance. The ancient floor gives a creaking whine. “Who the fuck are you?” he demands, straining his eyes to pierce the gloom. He can only see Zura’s vague silhouette moving smoothly through the darkened room, stalking like a panther.
“Can you hear them screaming? They are cutting us to pieces and leaving us to drown in our blood.” The voice is difficult to pin down, seems to come from all around him. Gintoki forces out a breath and relaxes his shoulders.
“That was ten years ago, you goddamn zombie. Snap the fuck out of it.”
As he stands waiting for the next blow with his sweat cooling on his clothes, Gintoki realises that the room is cold, much too cold. Colder than the worst days of winter, when icicles line the roofs and the sun looks pale and distant in a washed-out sky. The smell of must and rotting tatami is being overpowered by a metallic tang – iron. Blood.
“Your past is our present; your failure is our deaths. The humming of the guns, the screams of the wounded are our only prayers.”
The katana whistles as it slices through the air; Gintoki parries and moves, sensing the feint and avoiding it. No follow-up blow comes.
“Give me your name, and I’ll hire a monk to pray for you. A nice long ceremony, plenty of incense.” His jaw is starting to lock up with the cold; speaking is becoming more difficult.
“You are trying to buy our forgiveness? There is no price for what we gave. Shall I show you my scars, Shiroyasha?”
Gintoki braces for an attack, and only realises the shift in his opponent’s intentions when the floor doesn’t creak in time with the sound of his blade being raised. Gintoki sprints across the space between them, bokutou already in motion, and catches the katana before it can stab downwards into Zura’s thigh. His deflection causes the blade to slice straight into the floor with a heavy thunk.
“Who the hell are you, you fucking bastard?” Heart pounding now, Gintoki kicks out to scythe his opponent’s legs out from under him, and meets with a right cross to his jaw. He stumbles away, head spinning, and hits the wall with a clatter of thin wood.
“Don’t you know? You gathered us, you protected us. You said you would give your life for ours. Where is it, Shiroyasha? Where is it, Sakata Gintoki?”
There’s a soft metallic ringing as Zura’s katana is drawn from the floorboards. “All I see is you, alive, while I am dead.”
***
Once this past summer, Catherine cut off the power to the Yorozuya apartment for a whole week to try to starve them into paying their rent. On the sixth day Kagura got up in the morning and, still half asleep, went to the fridge and drank straight out of the milk carton.
She imagines her expression then was a lot like Shinpachi’s is now.
“H-hey, Shinpachi. What’s wrong? Did you suddenly think of something terrible? Was it Gorilla-san? Gorilla-san dressed as a French maid stripper?”
NURSE STRIPPERS TOO, contributes Elizabeth. Kagura nods.
“That’s right, Shinpachi, listen to your elders. You shouldn’t think about things like that, your brain will melt. You should go wash it out with soap. Shinpachi?”
Shinpachi’s expression doesn’t change as he takes a wavering step forward, and she and Elizabeth both take one backwards. “Sh-Shinpachi? Was it worse than Gorilla-san?” Kagura, mind boggling, tries to imagine such an impossible thing. Her eyes widen in horror. “Was it Ellie? Shinpachi, you pervert!”
Shinpachi takes another step forward, and Kagura backs up into the wall, trying to paste a smile on her face. It’s like trying to glue egg yolk to wet glass. “Shin –”
“I am not Shinpachi, little girl,” moans Shinpachi, in a high wavering voice like a sick goat. His eyes, she can see now, are wide but unfocused, and there’s a tiny dribble of saliva running down from the side of his mouth.
Kagura blinks, and then raises a trembling hand to point. “G-g-g-ghost!”
“I wouldn’t mind some pictures of French maid strippers though. If you have them handy.”
Kagura blinks again. Then she punches Shinpachi straight in the jaw.
***
The smell of blood is almost overpowering now, the air cold and moist like the foggiest spring nights. In the darkness Gintoki knows only what he can smell and feel.
His senses tell him he is back on the battlefields of Hakodate in the last days of the war, with heavy night mist rolling in from the ocean while his hands and face slowly go numb from the near-freezing northern spring. Hakodate, where the rivers ran red and the soil was sown with corpses by the time the fighting stopped. Hakodate, where the Amanto brought in gunships rather than troops to finally end the war, and vaporized hundreds of samurai from the waist up.
Gintoki stands still, panting softly. If there were enough light, he knows he would be able to see his breath fogging. He can’t hear the other man breathing at all.
“We all carried our lives on our own shoulders,” he says slowly, tongue heavy, as he steps away from the wall. “I was no leader, and you were no follower.” Not by Hakodate. By then there was nothing left but to fight for their lives. A fight very nearly all of them lost.
“We died screaming for you. Died begging for you. And you left us in the mud.”
The floor creaks, and Gintoki parries again and remains ready to go on the offensive. Defending against the attacks, even in the dark, isn’t much of a challenge. But the strain of fending off attacks while stopping this bastard from hurting himself – from slicing Zura to ribbons – is already beginning to knot his muscles.
It’s a familiar tension. Barely being able to move at the end of the day with muscles stiff as iron rods from hours of protecting not just himself but anyone else he could reach, any one of dozens of men whose life might rest on his sword at any minute. The ever-present tension of trying to watch so many movements, so many battles, so many lives. And the unbearable awareness of what just one slip will mean choking him like wire around his throat.
He’s shivering, Gintoki realises from afar, as though he were watching someone else. Here in the dark, he isn’t fighting a man. Isn’t fighting Zura’s form, Zura’s weight, Zura’s sword. He is fighting the past. Fighting, as he does in all his nightmares, the weight of the faceless dead he couldn’t save.
“Where were you, Shiroyasha? Where was your blade when we were torn to pieces?”
In the bright sunshine, on the Amanto-ridden streets of Edo that are now all iron and glass and neon, Gintoki has learned to live with the past. Has learned to lock away what he can, and keep a hawk-sharp guard on the rest.
But this isn’t Edo. This is Hakodate, and even the Shiroyasha can’t fight hundreds of dead men.
His movements are slowing, he can feel it. He’s a spectator, watching everything from afar. Gintoki’s throat is ringed with wire again, muscles knotting tight as he tries to watch for strikes aimed at Zura and the fear builds in him that he won’t be fast enough. He coughs, and nearly steps into a shoulder-strike, only dodges by the skin of his teeth.
His skin is numb with the cold, head filled with the scent of blood and death. It’s been too long, he’s forgotten how to live with this. How to fail so many without breaking. How to walk through a field of corpses and not scream.
“Show me what you promised us, Shiroyasha. Let me cut the life out of you.”
***
“You’re just a perverted old fart!” accuses Kagura, kicking Shinpachi in the back of the knee and catching him in a headlock. “Let go of Shinpachi, he’s too young to become a pervert!”
“Choking… me…”
“Good! Get out!” She lets go of her stranglehold and slips her arms around his waist from behind, preparing to do the Heimlich. “Gin-san says,” she gives a jerk, “if you get something bad,” another jerk, “caught in you,” another jerk, “you’ve gotta get it out!”
In her arms, Shinpachi makes an ugly puking sound, and she releases him before he can retch on her arms. He collapses face down on the carpet, in a vaguely grovelling aspect.
“Shinpachi?”
“If I say yes, will you leave me alone?”
Kagura raises a fist, and the ghost backs away with its arms up in surrender. “Please,” it wails piteously, “listen to me. Your friend is in danger.”
“Gin-san?” Kagura pauses, considering. “Are there a lot of parfaits? Gin-san gets sick if he eats too much sugar, and he’s already had one this week. It couldn’t be – did you put laxatives in them? That’s cruel, you –” she takes a step forward, and the ghost cowers.
“No, no! No parfaits. It’s my son.”
Kagura shrugs. “That’s not a problem. Gin-san beat up a crazy Amanto elephant last week. I got to ride it afterwards. I fed it peanuts, and it was sick all over Shinpachi. There aren’t any peanuts where it’s from, Gin-san says, although I think that’s just lazy importing. Peanut butter is one of the great glues of the cosmos, how can you not have it?”
HAS ANYONE SEEN THE TOPIC RECENTLY? Inquires Elizabeth’s sign; Kagura ignores it.
“My son fought in the war,” continues the ghost, speaking mostly to himself. “He’s been waiting, all this time. Revenge is all he thinks about. Ah, his poor mother, it would have broken her heart…”
“I’m telling you, your stupid son can’t beat Gin-san. Or even Zura, probably,” she concedes.
KATSURA-SAN IS AN EXCELLENT SAMURAI.
“We loved him too much, I suppose; kept him alone too much. He learned to look up to others, not to make friends. I used to walk him home from kendo practice every evening; the dojo was more than an hour away, past Yoshiwara even.”
“You just wanted to go to Yoshiwara, you perverted geezer.”
“And his mother, she made his lunches herself every day, mended all his clothes herself despite all the servants…”
“Get to the point.” Kagura crosses her arms.
The ghost nods vaguely, and shifts to sit cross-legged. “Are you an only child, girl?”
Kagura narrows her eyes, but shakes her head.
“Then you won’t understand Kenji.” Kagura opens her mouth, but the ghost continues on without noticing. “He was the centre of his own world – a rich heir to a prominent family. Such a serious, single-minded boy. He learned to respect his superiors, and ignore his inferiors, and that was all. He had no friends, no equals. Just himself, and Kenji learned very young how very valuable he was.
“And then the Jyoui war broke out, and the Amanto invaded Edo. Of course, the rich districts were the primary targets – so easy to cripple a country by crippling its economy. We sent Kenji away to Kumamoto… he was safe there. I should have sent my wife as well. He should never have lost both parents at once.”
Kagura blinks; the ghost wipes at Shinpachi’s glasses.
“Of course, the young fool went and joined the Jyouishishi at once. Poured most of our family money into their coffers. He was a very good swordsman – all that practice, you know. A natural at such a difficult style. And absolutely dedicated to the cause. But that wasn’t enough.
“He never had friends there, I don’t think. Never learned how – not so much shy as uncomprehending. He had idols instead. I told you he only knew how to look up to others, or look down on them. The leaders there, he worshipped. Gave them everything: his money, his loyalty, his life. But he always knew, knew, how much he himself was worth. How much what he had given was worth. And he thought he deserved so much – deserved everything in return for that.” The ghost sighs. “If only he could have met a pretty girl with a nice rack, he would have learned to interact more reasona –” Kagura’s fist connects with his cheek, and he is bowled over.
“I told you, old man,” she says, rubbing her knuckles absently. “Gin-san won’t lose to your stupid son.”
“You’re too young; you don’t understand. It is my son’s obsession – his conviction – that he has not received what he is owed that is dangerous, not my son. He won’t be fighting my son.”
The old man gets up slowly. Turns to look at her with a pitying look in his eyes; Kagura feels a chill run down her spine.
“He will be fighting himself.”
***
Gintoki ducks a strike, and is forced to roll hastily when the rubber of his boot catches abruptly on the floor. For some reason he’s having trouble keeping track of where the walls are, keeps bumping into them. They seem wrong, shouldn’t be here. They should be out in the open, on softer ground. He can smell the sea air, thick and choking. That and the blood, scent so heavy he can taste it at the back of his throat.
“You don’t even think about us, do you, Shiroyasha? Easier to forget. The past doesn’t matter. Your promises, your friends, your betrayal, they don’t matter. It’s just so much simpler to forget us all. You can just put us up on a shelf and pretend we are just one more closed box. Pretend our blood hasn’t stained you black.”
For an instant, Gintoki almost imagines he hears the sound of the sea, the gentle rush of waves over pebbles. He shakes his head, and barely avoids a slash at his stomach.
“Do you hear it now, Shiroyasha? You can’t pretend anymore. It’s time to give up what you promised us.”
There are other sounds in the distance, so faint he can barely make them out. Like a subtle flaw in a pattern or a low buzz of static in a song track, his attention is drawn inexorably towards it. He ducks a blow by instinct rather than thought, sluggishly parries another cutting towards his throat.
“Archers! Second volley, fire!”
Gintoki makes a low sound in his throat. But the sounds are growing louder, coming closer.
“Regroup, regroup!”
“There’s another division coming in from the north!”
“Third volley, fire!”
This is wrong. It happened like this, but it’s wrong. He was there, it was like this, smelled like this sounded like this. But … it’s wrong. His mind is fighting to be heard, trying to tell him why, trying to be heard.
But it is like this. They are here on this windy beach, and nothing can change that now. There is no way out, no way back and only one way forward. Somehow they never really believed it would come to this. Couldn’t believe it would come to this.
They are all going to die here.
Gintoki steps around a fallen body, feels another blow deflected and hears the ringing of his katana’s steel. There are gunboats coming in, he can hear the low hum of their engines over the waves. Dozens of them, hovering like dark ravens in the stormy sky, waiting to pick over the dead. He hears the men shouting desperate warnings.
“Clear the beach, clear the beach!”
“Holy fuck – from the south, the south!”
“Clear the goddamn beachhead, they’re –”
And then the electric buzz of the beam cannons. They are brighter than fireworks, brighter than the sun. And they slice, sharper than steel, straight through the army of samurai. Blades, shields, armour, none of them make the least bit of difference. They are like cobwebs under a hail of arrows. In a single flash of light, dozens of men he knew are gone. Dead, without ever knowing what hit them. And they are the lucky ones.
The screams echo over the open fields, carried by the biting sea breeze. Men shouting for help, shrieking in agony, begging for someone to save them. They are all around him, crying out from everywhere – dozens, hundreds. Their voices, frantic and piercing, drown out all other sounds.
Gintoki trips, stumbles and rolls over the hard earth. His bloody blade slices a furrow in the ground. There are hands grabbing at his ankles, cold fingers digging into his flesh. Men desperate not to die here on this godforsaken beach are latching feverishly to his legs, begging him to save them.
“Where are you, Shiroyasha? Where are you? Why won’t you save us?”
He stumbles to his feet, panting hard, and feels a blade slice across his ribs. He hardly notices the stinging pain. His sweat is dripping off him, hair cold and damp in the fog. All around him the dying are screaming, and still the beam cannons are firing, cutting down more, more, more. Too many to know, too many to understand. Nothing makes sense, he can’t, can’t, can’t…
The ocean is turning red, the foam tipping the waves pink. The only thing he can smell is blood, thick as tar and in his nose, his mouth, choking him. He gags, tries to suck in air. Dead hands are pulling him down, down, down into the dirt to die with them.
“Help us – help us – help us! Shiroyasha! Where are you?”
Gintoki screams.
He spins, katana slicing a bloody line in the air. Tries to free himself from the blood, the cries, the desperate pleas. They are pressing in on him, smothering him, crushing the air from his lungs and pouring black blood down his throat in replacement. Gintoki slices blindly at the air and strikes something. He reaches out to grab it and barely misses, the tips of his fingers passing over cloth. Someone steps by him, and he feels long hair brush against his cheek as he swerves. Smells, just for an instant, a scent other than blood: sweat and soap and a hint of bitter citrus.
Zura.
Zura, who fought beside him at Hakodate.
Zura, who should be here right now.
To Gintoki it seems that the world tilts very suddenly, so sharply that he stumbles to keep his balance. And somehow, like a two-lane road that becomes one with no warning, half of the world cuts out.
The air is still cold and reeks of blood, but there is only silence now. No screams, no cannons firing, no waves lapping against the beach. The ground beneath him is the solid smoothness of a wooden floor, not of an uneven field by the shore.
There is no katana in his hand, just a bokutou.
In the silence, he can finally hear his thoughts. Hear the mantra they have been trying to get through to him: That was the past, this is now. That was the past, this is now. That was the past, this is now.
Gintoki takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“Zura,” he pants, back bent in exhaustion, “get your lazy ass out here.”
Series: Gintama
Pairing: Gin/Zura
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Semi-graphic war depictions.
Notes: This has (accidentally) trended a bit heavily towards Gin/Zura so I've changed the pairing label, but you could read it as strong friendship if you chose.
Beta: The wonderful
frauleinfrog, who is beating sense into this fic.Summary: The Yorozuya get sent on an exorcism. Unsurprisingly, things do not go smoothly.
Chapter 1: It's Always a Mistake to Turn Around
Gintoki parries the thrust, the sharp edge of the katana sliding evenly over his bokutou and harmlessly past his shoulder. A moment later he’s parrying again, a standard head-blow that feels like a feint. Gintoki narrows his eyes and pushes back, forcing his opponent into the lighter room and staying on the balls of his feet. But no trap comes, and he blocks the next strike easily, still feeling as though the blows are trying to manoeuvre him towards something.
Gintoki doesn’t bother asking Zura what the hell he thinks he’s doing. He doesn’t need the spine-tingling dead-flesh ki to know that despite it being Zura’s hand on the blade, his opponent isn’t the Jyoui rebel. Zura’s style is precise and finished, more elegant than most thanks to his childhood tutors, and more exact than nearly all thanks to years of fighting for his life against overwhelming odds. This man has none of Zura’s elegance and not much of his exactness. And he keeps missing opportunities to capitalize on the open spots he is trying to drive Gintoki into.
Against Zura, he would be fighting for his life. Here, he’s fighting simply to buy himself time to figure out what the hell’s going on. But then, if there’s one thing ghosts are famous for, it’s possession.
“Oi, oi, no need to be angry.” He ducks a whistling strike at his head and sidesteps to avoid being backed into a corner. “No one wants this shitty house.”
“We are waiting for you,” says the damp voice, in a tone entirely different from Zura’s stupidly serious one. It is worn and rough like a man with a cold, and has a wet catch to it. Zura’s probably going to have a hell of a case of laryngitis when he wakes up. Not necessarily a bad thing.
“Great, because –” begins Gintoki, and is interrupted.
“They are coming for us, Shiroyasha. Where are you now?”
Gintoki can fight half conscious, half asleep, and completely drunk. This is all very fortunate, because it means his instincts kick in to keep him moving while his brain stalls at the sound of his old name.
How like you not to know whose house this is. Zura’s stupid comeback echoes in his mind. Zura, who blathers like a madman but who rarely passes up a chance to build a second layer into his words, and who never says anything he doesn’t mean.
Gintoki can count on one hand the number of people in Edo who know him as the Shiroyasha. But then, that’s because the dead keep their secrets.
Gintoki tightens his grip and parries another blow, eyes hard now. He catches the next with a neat curve and pushes it away so hard he can hear the other man taking a stumbling step to keep his balance. The ancient floor gives a creaking whine. “Who the fuck are you?” he demands, straining his eyes to pierce the gloom. He can only see Zura’s vague silhouette moving smoothly through the darkened room, stalking like a panther.
“Can you hear them screaming? They are cutting us to pieces and leaving us to drown in our blood.” The voice is difficult to pin down, seems to come from all around him. Gintoki forces out a breath and relaxes his shoulders.
“That was ten years ago, you goddamn zombie. Snap the fuck out of it.”
As he stands waiting for the next blow with his sweat cooling on his clothes, Gintoki realises that the room is cold, much too cold. Colder than the worst days of winter, when icicles line the roofs and the sun looks pale and distant in a washed-out sky. The smell of must and rotting tatami is being overpowered by a metallic tang – iron. Blood.
“Your past is our present; your failure is our deaths. The humming of the guns, the screams of the wounded are our only prayers.”
The katana whistles as it slices through the air; Gintoki parries and moves, sensing the feint and avoiding it. No follow-up blow comes.
“Give me your name, and I’ll hire a monk to pray for you. A nice long ceremony, plenty of incense.” His jaw is starting to lock up with the cold; speaking is becoming more difficult.
“You are trying to buy our forgiveness? There is no price for what we gave. Shall I show you my scars, Shiroyasha?”
Gintoki braces for an attack, and only realises the shift in his opponent’s intentions when the floor doesn’t creak in time with the sound of his blade being raised. Gintoki sprints across the space between them, bokutou already in motion, and catches the katana before it can stab downwards into Zura’s thigh. His deflection causes the blade to slice straight into the floor with a heavy thunk.
“Who the hell are you, you fucking bastard?” Heart pounding now, Gintoki kicks out to scythe his opponent’s legs out from under him, and meets with a right cross to his jaw. He stumbles away, head spinning, and hits the wall with a clatter of thin wood.
“Don’t you know? You gathered us, you protected us. You said you would give your life for ours. Where is it, Shiroyasha? Where is it, Sakata Gintoki?”
There’s a soft metallic ringing as Zura’s katana is drawn from the floorboards. “All I see is you, alive, while I am dead.”
Once this past summer, Catherine cut off the power to the Yorozuya apartment for a whole week to try to starve them into paying their rent. On the sixth day Kagura got up in the morning and, still half asleep, went to the fridge and drank straight out of the milk carton.
She imagines her expression then was a lot like Shinpachi’s is now.
“H-hey, Shinpachi. What’s wrong? Did you suddenly think of something terrible? Was it Gorilla-san? Gorilla-san dressed as a French maid stripper?”
NURSE STRIPPERS TOO, contributes Elizabeth. Kagura nods.
“That’s right, Shinpachi, listen to your elders. You shouldn’t think about things like that, your brain will melt. You should go wash it out with soap. Shinpachi?”
Shinpachi’s expression doesn’t change as he takes a wavering step forward, and she and Elizabeth both take one backwards. “Sh-Shinpachi? Was it worse than Gorilla-san?” Kagura, mind boggling, tries to imagine such an impossible thing. Her eyes widen in horror. “Was it Ellie? Shinpachi, you pervert!”
Shinpachi takes another step forward, and Kagura backs up into the wall, trying to paste a smile on her face. It’s like trying to glue egg yolk to wet glass. “Shin –”
“I am not Shinpachi, little girl,” moans Shinpachi, in a high wavering voice like a sick goat. His eyes, she can see now, are wide but unfocused, and there’s a tiny dribble of saliva running down from the side of his mouth.
Kagura blinks, and then raises a trembling hand to point. “G-g-g-ghost!”
“I wouldn’t mind some pictures of French maid strippers though. If you have them handy.”
Kagura blinks again. Then she punches Shinpachi straight in the jaw.
The smell of blood is almost overpowering now, the air cold and moist like the foggiest spring nights. In the darkness Gintoki knows only what he can smell and feel.
His senses tell him he is back on the battlefields of Hakodate in the last days of the war, with heavy night mist rolling in from the ocean while his hands and face slowly go numb from the near-freezing northern spring. Hakodate, where the rivers ran red and the soil was sown with corpses by the time the fighting stopped. Hakodate, where the Amanto brought in gunships rather than troops to finally end the war, and vaporized hundreds of samurai from the waist up.
Gintoki stands still, panting softly. If there were enough light, he knows he would be able to see his breath fogging. He can’t hear the other man breathing at all.
“We all carried our lives on our own shoulders,” he says slowly, tongue heavy, as he steps away from the wall. “I was no leader, and you were no follower.” Not by Hakodate. By then there was nothing left but to fight for their lives. A fight very nearly all of them lost.
“We died screaming for you. Died begging for you. And you left us in the mud.”
The floor creaks, and Gintoki parries again and remains ready to go on the offensive. Defending against the attacks, even in the dark, isn’t much of a challenge. But the strain of fending off attacks while stopping this bastard from hurting himself – from slicing Zura to ribbons – is already beginning to knot his muscles.
It’s a familiar tension. Barely being able to move at the end of the day with muscles stiff as iron rods from hours of protecting not just himself but anyone else he could reach, any one of dozens of men whose life might rest on his sword at any minute. The ever-present tension of trying to watch so many movements, so many battles, so many lives. And the unbearable awareness of what just one slip will mean choking him like wire around his throat.
He’s shivering, Gintoki realises from afar, as though he were watching someone else. Here in the dark, he isn’t fighting a man. Isn’t fighting Zura’s form, Zura’s weight, Zura’s sword. He is fighting the past. Fighting, as he does in all his nightmares, the weight of the faceless dead he couldn’t save.
“Where were you, Shiroyasha? Where was your blade when we were torn to pieces?”
In the bright sunshine, on the Amanto-ridden streets of Edo that are now all iron and glass and neon, Gintoki has learned to live with the past. Has learned to lock away what he can, and keep a hawk-sharp guard on the rest.
But this isn’t Edo. This is Hakodate, and even the Shiroyasha can’t fight hundreds of dead men.
His movements are slowing, he can feel it. He’s a spectator, watching everything from afar. Gintoki’s throat is ringed with wire again, muscles knotting tight as he tries to watch for strikes aimed at Zura and the fear builds in him that he won’t be fast enough. He coughs, and nearly steps into a shoulder-strike, only dodges by the skin of his teeth.
His skin is numb with the cold, head filled with the scent of blood and death. It’s been too long, he’s forgotten how to live with this. How to fail so many without breaking. How to walk through a field of corpses and not scream.
“Show me what you promised us, Shiroyasha. Let me cut the life out of you.”
“You’re just a perverted old fart!” accuses Kagura, kicking Shinpachi in the back of the knee and catching him in a headlock. “Let go of Shinpachi, he’s too young to become a pervert!”
“Choking… me…”
“Good! Get out!” She lets go of her stranglehold and slips her arms around his waist from behind, preparing to do the Heimlich. “Gin-san says,” she gives a jerk, “if you get something bad,” another jerk, “caught in you,” another jerk, “you’ve gotta get it out!”
In her arms, Shinpachi makes an ugly puking sound, and she releases him before he can retch on her arms. He collapses face down on the carpet, in a vaguely grovelling aspect.
“Shinpachi?”
“If I say yes, will you leave me alone?”
Kagura raises a fist, and the ghost backs away with its arms up in surrender. “Please,” it wails piteously, “listen to me. Your friend is in danger.”
“Gin-san?” Kagura pauses, considering. “Are there a lot of parfaits? Gin-san gets sick if he eats too much sugar, and he’s already had one this week. It couldn’t be – did you put laxatives in them? That’s cruel, you –” she takes a step forward, and the ghost cowers.
“No, no! No parfaits. It’s my son.”
Kagura shrugs. “That’s not a problem. Gin-san beat up a crazy Amanto elephant last week. I got to ride it afterwards. I fed it peanuts, and it was sick all over Shinpachi. There aren’t any peanuts where it’s from, Gin-san says, although I think that’s just lazy importing. Peanut butter is one of the great glues of the cosmos, how can you not have it?”
HAS ANYONE SEEN THE TOPIC RECENTLY? Inquires Elizabeth’s sign; Kagura ignores it.
“My son fought in the war,” continues the ghost, speaking mostly to himself. “He’s been waiting, all this time. Revenge is all he thinks about. Ah, his poor mother, it would have broken her heart…”
“I’m telling you, your stupid son can’t beat Gin-san. Or even Zura, probably,” she concedes.
KATSURA-SAN IS AN EXCELLENT SAMURAI.
“We loved him too much, I suppose; kept him alone too much. He learned to look up to others, not to make friends. I used to walk him home from kendo practice every evening; the dojo was more than an hour away, past Yoshiwara even.”
“You just wanted to go to Yoshiwara, you perverted geezer.”
“And his mother, she made his lunches herself every day, mended all his clothes herself despite all the servants…”
“Get to the point.” Kagura crosses her arms.
The ghost nods vaguely, and shifts to sit cross-legged. “Are you an only child, girl?”
Kagura narrows her eyes, but shakes her head.
“Then you won’t understand Kenji.” Kagura opens her mouth, but the ghost continues on without noticing. “He was the centre of his own world – a rich heir to a prominent family. Such a serious, single-minded boy. He learned to respect his superiors, and ignore his inferiors, and that was all. He had no friends, no equals. Just himself, and Kenji learned very young how very valuable he was.
“And then the Jyoui war broke out, and the Amanto invaded Edo. Of course, the rich districts were the primary targets – so easy to cripple a country by crippling its economy. We sent Kenji away to Kumamoto… he was safe there. I should have sent my wife as well. He should never have lost both parents at once.”
Kagura blinks; the ghost wipes at Shinpachi’s glasses.
“Of course, the young fool went and joined the Jyouishishi at once. Poured most of our family money into their coffers. He was a very good swordsman – all that practice, you know. A natural at such a difficult style. And absolutely dedicated to the cause. But that wasn’t enough.
“He never had friends there, I don’t think. Never learned how – not so much shy as uncomprehending. He had idols instead. I told you he only knew how to look up to others, or look down on them. The leaders there, he worshipped. Gave them everything: his money, his loyalty, his life. But he always knew, knew, how much he himself was worth. How much what he had given was worth. And he thought he deserved so much – deserved everything in return for that.” The ghost sighs. “If only he could have met a pretty girl with a nice rack, he would have learned to interact more reasona –” Kagura’s fist connects with his cheek, and he is bowled over.
“I told you, old man,” she says, rubbing her knuckles absently. “Gin-san won’t lose to your stupid son.”
“You’re too young; you don’t understand. It is my son’s obsession – his conviction – that he has not received what he is owed that is dangerous, not my son. He won’t be fighting my son.”
The old man gets up slowly. Turns to look at her with a pitying look in his eyes; Kagura feels a chill run down her spine.
“He will be fighting himself.”
Gintoki ducks a strike, and is forced to roll hastily when the rubber of his boot catches abruptly on the floor. For some reason he’s having trouble keeping track of where the walls are, keeps bumping into them. They seem wrong, shouldn’t be here. They should be out in the open, on softer ground. He can smell the sea air, thick and choking. That and the blood, scent so heavy he can taste it at the back of his throat.
“You don’t even think about us, do you, Shiroyasha? Easier to forget. The past doesn’t matter. Your promises, your friends, your betrayal, they don’t matter. It’s just so much simpler to forget us all. You can just put us up on a shelf and pretend we are just one more closed box. Pretend our blood hasn’t stained you black.”
For an instant, Gintoki almost imagines he hears the sound of the sea, the gentle rush of waves over pebbles. He shakes his head, and barely avoids a slash at his stomach.
“Do you hear it now, Shiroyasha? You can’t pretend anymore. It’s time to give up what you promised us.”
There are other sounds in the distance, so faint he can barely make them out. Like a subtle flaw in a pattern or a low buzz of static in a song track, his attention is drawn inexorably towards it. He ducks a blow by instinct rather than thought, sluggishly parries another cutting towards his throat.
“Archers! Second volley, fire!”
Gintoki makes a low sound in his throat. But the sounds are growing louder, coming closer.
“Regroup, regroup!”
“There’s another division coming in from the north!”
“Third volley, fire!”
This is wrong. It happened like this, but it’s wrong. He was there, it was like this, smelled like this sounded like this. But … it’s wrong. His mind is fighting to be heard, trying to tell him why, trying to be heard.
But it is like this. They are here on this windy beach, and nothing can change that now. There is no way out, no way back and only one way forward. Somehow they never really believed it would come to this. Couldn’t believe it would come to this.
They are all going to die here.
Gintoki steps around a fallen body, feels another blow deflected and hears the ringing of his katana’s steel. There are gunboats coming in, he can hear the low hum of their engines over the waves. Dozens of them, hovering like dark ravens in the stormy sky, waiting to pick over the dead. He hears the men shouting desperate warnings.
“Clear the beach, clear the beach!”
“Holy fuck – from the south, the south!”
“Clear the goddamn beachhead, they’re –”
And then the electric buzz of the beam cannons. They are brighter than fireworks, brighter than the sun. And they slice, sharper than steel, straight through the army of samurai. Blades, shields, armour, none of them make the least bit of difference. They are like cobwebs under a hail of arrows. In a single flash of light, dozens of men he knew are gone. Dead, without ever knowing what hit them. And they are the lucky ones.
The screams echo over the open fields, carried by the biting sea breeze. Men shouting for help, shrieking in agony, begging for someone to save them. They are all around him, crying out from everywhere – dozens, hundreds. Their voices, frantic and piercing, drown out all other sounds.
Gintoki trips, stumbles and rolls over the hard earth. His bloody blade slices a furrow in the ground. There are hands grabbing at his ankles, cold fingers digging into his flesh. Men desperate not to die here on this godforsaken beach are latching feverishly to his legs, begging him to save them.
“Where are you, Shiroyasha? Where are you? Why won’t you save us?”
He stumbles to his feet, panting hard, and feels a blade slice across his ribs. He hardly notices the stinging pain. His sweat is dripping off him, hair cold and damp in the fog. All around him the dying are screaming, and still the beam cannons are firing, cutting down more, more, more. Too many to know, too many to understand. Nothing makes sense, he can’t, can’t, can’t…
The ocean is turning red, the foam tipping the waves pink. The only thing he can smell is blood, thick as tar and in his nose, his mouth, choking him. He gags, tries to suck in air. Dead hands are pulling him down, down, down into the dirt to die with them.
“Help us – help us – help us! Shiroyasha! Where are you?”
Gintoki screams.
He spins, katana slicing a bloody line in the air. Tries to free himself from the blood, the cries, the desperate pleas. They are pressing in on him, smothering him, crushing the air from his lungs and pouring black blood down his throat in replacement. Gintoki slices blindly at the air and strikes something. He reaches out to grab it and barely misses, the tips of his fingers passing over cloth. Someone steps by him, and he feels long hair brush against his cheek as he swerves. Smells, just for an instant, a scent other than blood: sweat and soap and a hint of bitter citrus.
Zura.
Zura, who fought beside him at Hakodate.
Zura, who should be here right now.
To Gintoki it seems that the world tilts very suddenly, so sharply that he stumbles to keep his balance. And somehow, like a two-lane road that becomes one with no warning, half of the world cuts out.
The air is still cold and reeks of blood, but there is only silence now. No screams, no cannons firing, no waves lapping against the beach. The ground beneath him is the solid smoothness of a wooden floor, not of an uneven field by the shore.
There is no katana in his hand, just a bokutou.
In the silence, he can finally hear his thoughts. Hear the mantra they have been trying to get through to him: That was the past, this is now. That was the past, this is now. That was the past, this is now.
Gintoki takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“Zura,” he pants, back bent in exhaustion, “get your lazy ass out here.”
