Chapter Text
If someone put a sword to his neck and told him to tell them the root cause of all of this, Toshirou would probably tell them to fuck off and get back to work, Sougo, but in his own head he might admit to himself that it was all sleep deprivation. Taking an extended leave from your futon got to you after a while. As you gradually lost control of your motor functions, your mental functions slipped off the rails too. Your trains of thought started careening toward stations they weren’t supposed to be going to, and those stations were closed off for good reasons. Some of them were so well sealed shut that even Toshirou had no idea what existed in there and that was fine.
He was pretty sure everything would have stayed fine if he hadn’t been running on three hours of sleep in as many days when he stumbled past a loud, heated argument between squad captains Matsubara, Inoue, and Sougo in the middle of the Shinsengumi mess hall. After failing miserably to catch the bastards making that graffiti of the Shogun and numerous Amanto in compromising positions on the walls lining the most crowded thoroughfares in the city, all Toshirou had wanted to do was inhale some food and pass out for a week, but he just so happened to be in the wrong fucking place at the wrong fucking time.
“That was just a fluke!” Inoue was saying. “No way our guys are covering your team’s bathroom duty for a fluke.”
“What do people call it when the fluke happens every time?” Sougo asked with a lazily feigned air of innocence. “Isn’t that the opposite of a fluke?”
“Well, we’ve only seen him do it that once with the commander, and she’s Kondo’s answer to everything, so it’s hardly proof! No deal,” Matsubara harrumphed.
Toshirou was barely giving the conversation an ear when Sougo caught his shoulder.
“What?” he growled.
“If it works on this guy too, that’d be proof enough right?” Sougo said, ignoring Toshirou’s glare to instead pat his bicep dismissively. “Everyone here knows what Hijikata-san’s answer would be, and how he’d never actually say it if he knew the question.”
Matsubara and Inoue looked at each other for a moment before nodding.
“Fine,” Matsubara said. “If he can get the Vice-Commander to say that name.”
“What name? Actually, I don’t care. Get back to work,” Toshirou snapped and shrugged off Sougo’s grip.
“Don’t be that way. It’ll only take a minute,” Sougo wheedled.
Intent on ignoring him, Toshirou made it a few steps away until Sougo added, “I’ll do all my paperwork correctly and on time for a month.”
“You’re supposed to be doing that already,” Toshirou replied, his words in direct contrast with the back peddling of his feet as he did an about-face and sat down at their table. “So what do I have to do?”
“Nothing,” Sougo replied easily. “Just let Kumanaku-san do his thing.”
Kumanaku. That overly fastidious member of Sougo’s team who was obsessed with toilet hygiene. Based on his admittedly scant interaction with the guy over the past few years, Toshirou wasn’t sure he wanted to just let Kumanaku do his thing, but before he could ask what exactly Kumanaku’s thing was, Kumanaku’s hands were firmly massaging Toshirou’s temples and Kumanaku’s voice was saying, “Vice-Commander, I would ask that you close your eyes and listen to my story.”
If Toshirou had been even a fraction more awake, he really would have given Kumanaku a friendly uppercut by now, but the head massage was doing wonders for the stress migraine he had been fending off for the last ten hours. Plus, Sougo was offering paperwork here. What choice did he have? Toshirou closed his eyes and let himself relax.
After a moment, Kumanaku began:
“You have been chopping wood in the forest using your trusty ax. This ax has been trusted not only by you, but also by your father, and his father before, as this is no ordinary ax. It is not made of iron or steel or gold or silver, but of a material unknown. Unknown and unbeatable. Through generations of your family the ax never fell against an object it could not cleave, or encountered a tree it could not conquer, or witnessed a marriage it could not split up.”
“That last one doesn’t really make sense,” Toshirou said.
“The ax is unrivaled in its power of splitting,” Kumanaku continued. “It splits apart intangible relationships as easily as it does physical objects. The invisible threads that bind one human to another are severed by this merciless ax as swiftly and as cleanly as if they had never been there at all.”
“That’s because they weren’t,” Toshirou said.
“This is why happily-ever-afters do not last long in your family. Months after they had their first son, your grandfather and grandmother split apart, just like your mother and father split apart mere weeks after they had you. The ax is a blessing and a curse, splitting whatever it encounters. It has no conscience, it knows no distinction between what should be split and what shouldn’t, it only does what it is made to do, and it does so perfectly.”
“It just sounds like my family was really dysfunctional and blaming their marital problems on an ax. Tell a better story.”
“Right you are, Vice-Commander,” Kumanaku agreed. “That is what you want: a better story. You want more than tragedy from this ax now that it has fallen to you since Carmentia finally felled your father.”
“Who is Carmentia? Wasn’t my family just a group of lumberjacks? Why does it seem like you’re implying that my father was just murdered by his sworn rival?”
“Shut up and listen to the story, Hijikata-san,” Sougo drawled.
“You want to stop this endless cycle of splitting up and falling down,” Kumanaku proclaimed. “You know there must be a way to stop that indiscriminate pain brought to those that hold this mystical tool in their hands.”
“Holding it does seem to be the problem. I put down the ax and leave,” Toshirou said and moved to get up and away from this ridiculous waste of time, but Kumanaku’s hands kept his head in place.
“You refuse to leave this ax for anyone else to discover. This is a burden that has been passed down through your family, and it is a demon your family’s own flesh and blood must conquer. You embark on a quest to figure out how to change this ax that is so determined to split objects apart into an ax that puts things back together.”
“Determination has nothing to do with it. It’s an ax.”
“You exit the forest you’ve lived your whole life, crossing mountains and deserts and oceans. You wander through town after town, meeting thousands of faces speaking in dialects and languages you’ve never imagined existed. You step along the outskirts of battlefields, utopias, parades, and executions. You see the sun rise along horizons that change its personality and color enough to make it different each and every time. You see the world from edge to edge, nook to cranny, sea to sky. You travel for years upon years upon years with the axe at your side, searching but never finding yourself any closer to the answer to the impossible question: how do you change nature? How do you change the very laws of existence?”
Kumanaku paused and lifted a hand off of Toshirou’s head to take a quick sip of water. The group was silent as he drank. He cleared his throat once, twice, and resumed:
“You spend your life on this quest with nothing to show for it. You sacrificed your soul for this mission, but the ax is still as sharp as it ever was. As a defeated old man, your beard long and gray, you make your return home. Eventually you reach the familiar forest of your youth and approach the cabin you were born in, as your father and grandfather were before you. At the threshold of your childhood home, you cannot help but wonder what will happen to this ax at your death. You never had any children of your own, so there is no one to succeed you in carrying this burden. The ax will remain, but you, inevitably, will not. In one last act of desperation, you leave the cabin and travel a few hundred yards over to the lake where your grandfather told you as a child about a fairy with great magical powers that had made its home there.”
“Why didn’t I start my quest at this lake?! That kind of seems important!”
“When you reach the lake you try your best to summon the being your grandfather told you about. He said it was a creature that gives you a glance and you at once feel Understood. It has a face that reminds you in no uncertain terms that from the fires of chaos and blood, goodness will not only rise, it will soar. It will conquer. It is a being you trust wholeheartedly, and who you would give everything in service to if only you had the chance, because you know their strength and vision will lead us out of the shadows and into a brighter world. You believe in this being’s heart. You believe in this being’s soul. Do you understand, Vice-Commander?”
Somewhat thrown to find himself suddenly addressed, Toshirou took a few seconds to muster up a subdued, “Yeah.”
“Immerse yourself in the emotion of what is before you. Don’t think, feel. Consider how your heart beats when faced with this creature, and watch as that very being rises from that lake. It rises to meet you and together you will finish this quest. Together, you will reach the end. There is no doubt in your mind that together you can dull the edges of this ax.”
Toshirou nodded slowly, but he wasn’t entirely sure if he initiated the movement or if Kumanaku’s hands made it happen.
“You want to be surprised when you see that this creature looks like someone you know, but you can’t be surprised. Deep inside, you already knew. You already knew who it would be. Tell me their name, Vice-Commander.”
“Huh?” Toshirou said. His tongue felt strangely heavy.
“Don’t think, feel. Who is it? Who is in front of you?”
Out of the darkness of his mind’s eye, he saw a head of hair emerge from the lake. Rivulets of water ran down a forehead, a nose, a chin, and shoulders – shoulders covered by a bright yukata that flowed around them with an ethereal lightness despite the wet. They rose taller and taller in the lake as they walked to its very edge and stood directly before Toshirou staring right into the very center of him.
Finally, the being opened its mouth and said, “If you want my help with this, you’d better be prepared to pay up a pretty penny, mayo bastard.”
Toshirou opened his eyes to see four sets of them trained intently on his face.
“Who was it, Vice-Commander?” Kumanaku asked.
“It was the fucking Yorozuya,” Toshirou said. “Are we done now?”
Matsubara and Inoue jumped up immediately, clapping each other on the back and grinning victoriously at Sougo.
“Hah! He didn’t say Mitsuba-dono, so that’s our win, Okita-san,” Matsubara jeered. “It looks like it’s double bathroom duty for your team.”
Noticing Toshirou’s look of confusion, Inoue jumped in to explain: “Kumanaku-san was claiming he could get anyone to say who they were in love with by doing his weird hand thing and telling that story. He got the commander to say Shimura Tae, but it didn’t work on you! Thanks for proving us right, Vice-Commander!”
Time froze.
Suddenly wide awake and thrumming with adrenaline, Toshirou quickly attempted to track down the conductor of his last train of thought where he’d had that strange vision of the permy idiot rising up from the lake. It had to be some sort of mistake – some lazy misfiring of neurons. It didn’t have to mean anything significant. The Yorozuya wasn’t anything to him. Matsubara and Inoue knew it. Everyone knew it. Everyone knew this wasn’t –
Toshirou felt a strange presence to his right, and looked up to see Sougo staring at him with the widest, most monstrous sneer he’d ever witnessed.
“Shut the hell up!” he hissed.
“How rude. I didn’t say a word, Hijikata-san,” Sougo replied, demonic expression unchanging. “I should be the one angry at you for making me lose a bet, but somehow, for some strange reason, I just can’t seem to manage it.”
Injuring your subordinates in the middle of their meals tended to be frowned upon here, Toshirou reminded himself. Although, Sougo was more than capable of defending himself, and Toshirou would be more likely to exit the skirmish as the injured party than vice versa, but he preferred to use the first excuse when talking himself down.
Deciding to firmly ignore the little shit for the time being, Toshirou finally got the conductor of that train of thought on the line. When frantically questioned, the conductor calmly informed him that the train in question had been rolling in to Feelings for Yorozuya Station at the time of the incident; apparently a lot of passengers had bought tickets there so the conductor had made an executive decision to switch up his route to get them all where they wanted to go. When the conductor refused to be convinced that no such station could possibly exist, Toshirou then asked him if there were any terrorists on that train who might be willing to blow up that station at which point the conductor hung up the phone because he was on a schedule, and also entirely imaginary.
Back in the real world, Toshirou lit a cigarette in a desperate attempt to clear his thoughts.
Kumanaku cautiously mentioned to him that he was trying to light the tip of his sword on fire, which he found to be strange slang for cigarette, but he wasn’t hip with the kids anymore, so what did he know. He put the cigarette in his mouth, which tasted strangely metallic and bloody, but he really didn’t have time to waste on small details right now. He just needed to calmly reconsider all of his life choices, find the one of them that brought him to this point, and go back in time to kill the him that made it. This would be simple. This would all be fine.
“Toshi, what are doing?!” Kondo was screaming and running across the room toward him like there was something to be concerned about, but there wasn’t. Toshirou would solve this. It would be fine. It would be just fine. But why was this cigarette so damn heavy?
When he woke up 12 hours later, Toshirou greeted the world with the firm hope that yesterday had been a simple fever dream. Or maybe he’d been high on paint fumes from when that graffiti terrorist had sprayed him in the face in order to make a getaway. Or maybe he had temporarily stepped into an alternate dimension and now he was back. Anything, really. He was rooting for any possible alternative.
He cautiously contacted the senior conductor in charge of all his train (of thought) stations, and the guy reported that Feelings for Yorozuya Station had officially become part of the main line. Since that first train had arrived there, the station had become so popular that it just wouldn’t be economically feasible to close it off again right now.
“Am I in hell?” he asked his ceiling.
Toshirou felt the sword tip digging into the back of his neck and decided that this was the last fucking straw.
“To think I would catch the Demon Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi off guard, staring into the window of a sweets shop, no less!” the rebel fighter crowed and laughed uproariously. “Were you trying to figure out which cupcake to buy?”
He had actually been looking at the selection and idly wondering which treats the Yorozuya might be interested in, but that was even worse.
The only saving grace about this situation was that the guy was laughing so hard he didn’t even notice that Toshirou had grabbed the blade of his sword until the hilt was slammed into his face. Toshirou repeated the movement a couple more times for good measure.
As he began dragging the bleeding, moaning man through the snow and to the station, Toshirou considered his options. Something had to be done. If he didn’t regain his focus soon, the end of his life would come sooner.
It had been the same sort of mess when Feelings for Mitsuba Station opened up back in Bushu. The smallest, most inconsequential shit would bring her to mind. A deer with a high-pitched sneeze, peppers, warm colors… He got his ass beat in practice more times in that one month than he did during the whole rest of the year.
Toshirou had regained his footing once he realized that he was no good for her. She could never live well with him and the life he chose to live, so what was the point of thinking about any of that? From then on, despite his feelings, he was no longer distracted. Her station remained and still does to this day, but the trains of thought only occasionally passed through.
Unfortunately, the same tactic was not going to work here. The Yorozuya was rotten to the core and the opposite of delicate, so Toshirou wouldn’t be protecting anyone but himself by staying away. The possibility remained open in his mind, which left him here. Distracted.
So that was it. He had to find some way to annihilate any shitty hopes he was subconsciously harboring
Goddammit.
Finally the solution came to him a week later as he was unwinding with a drink after the end of his shift. It sat down on the stool next to him, waved to the bartender, and said he would be ordering drinks on Mr. Vice-Commander’s tab.
Toshirou let him because seeing the bastard in the flesh for the first time since this all started caused a train pileup at Feelings for Yorozuya Station and he forgot how to use his mouth to form words until Gintoki was halfway through his second glass. However, when they were both on their fourth glass Toshirou found his plan. He knew how to take care of this one-sided infatuation once and for all. It was almost too easy.
Obviously the Yorozuya didn’t feel the same way, so Toshirou just needed to get him to say it, because his train conductor needed to hear it, and there was one surefire way to get that done. The Yorozuya had no problems turning people down. That’s all he ever seemed to do when girls approached him with interest. If Toshirou just asked him out, the idiot would stomp on his feelings, spit on the remains, and be on his way.
No more uncertainties, no more maybes, he could fix his problem through one short moment of humiliation. He could do this. He would do this. Now.
“Yorozuya,” he said.
“Hmm,” the Yorozuya replied mid-sip.
“Go out with me.”
“Where?” the Yorozuya asked.
“No,” Toshirou said, insistently, “go out with me.”
“And I said where?” the Yorozuya snapped. “I’m not going anyplace too far. It’s cold as balls tonight.”
“NO!” Toshirou stood, slammed both hands on the counter in frustration, and yelled, “I’m not asking you to go out with me to a place; I am asking in the gay way! I’m asking because I’m in love with you, dumbass!”
There. Now all the cards were on the table.
The bar went silent.
The Yorozuya’s face seemed to malfunction. His mouth was still scrunched in the mild irritation it had started to carry when he had thought Toshirou had wanted him to go outside in this weather, while his eyebrows were raised high enough that they seemed only one twitch away from flying toward the ceiling, physics and biology be damned, and the tips of his ears were flushed a bright, unsubtle pink. There was a disjointed Picasso of emotion going on there, and Toshirou wondered for a moment if he’d gone a bit too far.
Maybe he should have just asked the guy for a quick fuck. The ‘L’ word was probably easier for someone like the Yorozuya to brush off and turn down when there was a hotel attached to the end of it. A casual proposition would have been easier on everyone, even if it wasn’t exactly true to his own feelings. Toshirou had always been an all or nothing kind of guy, but there was a time and a place to broadcast that shit, and the here and now was looking more and more likely to be neither of those. Toshirou maybe should have given himself some time to think this plan through when he had been a little more sober.
Oh, well. Too late now.
He leaned forward toward the Yorozuya, eyes narrowing and mind focusing with the level of intensity he only spared for the most difficult of Shinsengumi missions, life-or-death battles, and midnight mayonnaise runs. Toshirou faced him with all that he was. Now come, Gintoki! Shoot me down! Let me feel for you without consequence or obligation!
“So,” Toshirou pursued, “what’s it going to be?”
The Yorozuya opened his mouth once, but no sound came out. Silence reigned for what felt like half a day, but was probably a little less than that.
He opened his mouth again and… put some beer in there.
It was hard for Toshirou to ignore how awkward this was getting, but his boss was Kondo after all, so he did have some experience standing in rooms of people where some terrible social faux pas had just been committed, and the atmosphere weighed on you like a couple of full-sized 18 wheelers. Someone patted him on the back, and he looked over his shoulder to see an old man giving him a trembling thumbs up. An old woman who must have been his wife or mistress or something was nestled in the crook of his non-thumbs upping arm, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and smiling mistily in Toshirou’s direction.
Oiiii! Yorozuya! Toshirou beamed his thoughts in the idiot’s direction. The bar is getting emotionally invested in this! Cut it off at the pass, you dumb shit! Just say no! You’ve never had problems with the word before!
His right leg jackhammering like a woodpecker with a deadline, the Yorozuya set his beer down, took a breath, cleared his throat, and… started coughing.
Coughing on what? Air? The terribleness of this situation manifested in physical form? Toshirou heard a rough snap and that’s when he noticed he was gripping the counter hard enough that cracks were starting to appear. He should probably stop doing that.
Someone slid a glass of water in the Yorozuya’s direction, and he nodded his thanks before gulping it up. He put the glass down and… started coughing again.
Enough was enough. Toshirou had thought the Yorozuya would have had the balls to be a bit more direct than that, but avoidance of the question was an answer in itself.
So that was it then. He felt lighter already.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Toshirou said. “You don’t have to worry. Unlike some of the stalkers out there, I only ask once.”
Leaning back with a smile, he put on his overcoat, told the bartender to close his tab, and started to walk past the Yorozuya, who, in between hacking up his lungs, choked out a “Wait one… goddamn second!”
Toshirou stopped in his tracks, and locked eyes with a still-convulsing Gintoki, whose whole face was now redder than the cherries on the top of the parfaits he loved so much. Globs of spit and snot decorated his chin and cheeks. He looked just as earnest as he did disgusting, and Toshirou found himself suddenly reminded of that strange, stupid vision he’d had of the Yorozuya rising from the lake before quickly banning the association from his thoughts.
What could possibly be so damn important to the Yorozuya that he was willing to keep this train wreck of an encounter going in order to spit it out?
Oh. Of course.
“I’m not opening up my tab again tonight no matter what you do, so don’t even try.”
This mooching train was leaving the station. Toshirou’s smile grew as he stepped out into the snow. Everything was finally getting back on track.
“That really was some excellent work, Toshi,” Kondo said, grinning warm and wide. “You’ve been unstoppable this week.”
In an effort not to appear too obviously pleased, Toshirou looked out the window at the passing scenery just as the train hit a curve and threw the sun right into his eyes. He casually returned his gaze to the two men seated in front of him, trying not to blink too much.
“Don’t worry. I’ll stop you one day, Hijikata-san,” Sougo assured him with a blank stare that was somehow hard enough to combat Kondo’s cheer. The kid never took it too well when Toshirou fell too deep into Kondo's favor.
Too bad for him. Toshirou was planning to keep on bowling strikes.
“The spirit you’ve shown of late almost reminds me of when you started getting along well with Mitsuba-dono,” Kondo recalled, and that wasn’t too far off point.
When Toshirou reconciled himself to the reality that there would be no opportunity for him to hold Mitsuba, he started landing more hits during practice again. Her train station became inspiration for him to do better, to fight for a world where she could be happy. He wasn’t thinking of being with her anymore; he was just thinking of her. The reach of his sword grew in order to enact her will.
He was fighting for Gintoki now too. That idiot believed in a world that included spaces of goodness for good people, and Toshirou wanted to protect that.
Shifting through intel documents over the past few days, he found it easier to differentiate signal from noise, predict enemy movements, and focus on getting those hostages out of that hole-in-a-wall on the outskirts of Kanazawa before the terrorists could extort any more money out of the government. Now as they all rode the train home to Edo, the Shinsengumi members present were in a rather celebratory mood.
Toshirou hummed vaguely in response to Kondo’s comment, which his commander eagerly jumped on as a sign of admission.
“Does that mean I’m right?” Kondo crowed. “Have you met someone? Toshi, you dog!”
Kondo laughed and ruffled Toshirou’s hair, while Sougo took the opportunity to stealthily spit on Toshirou’s shoe.
“It’s nothing like that,” he demurred as he tried to rub his wet shoe against Sougo’s pant leg, but instead met the empty space where the little shit’s leg had been milliseconds before. “They’re not interested.”
“Maybe not yet,” Kondo harrumphed, “but I can’t see a woman resisting your charms for long! You had better introduce me soon, so I can put in a good word for you.”
Toshirou chuckled wryly, “That Shimura girl will agree to go out with you before mine even gives me a second look.”
And that was how he liked it. He felt strengthened without being weighed down. He could fight for him without fighting with him. Unreciprocated feelings were power!
“You say that like Otae-san will never accept my love. You say that like pigs flying is more likely!” Kondo cried, surprising Toshirou out of his self-indulgent reverie.
Snapping to attention, he realized just what he’d said and how he’d said it. Shit.
Kondo had both his hands tightly clasped on his knees, his head hanging down to leave his face in shadow, but Toshirou could still make out a wetness in his eyes. Shit shit shit.
“Kondo-san, I didn’t mean it like that. I just–”
“Just what, Toshi? You just don’t believe in me?”
“Yeah, Toshi? Why do you have to be such an ass?” Sougo asked gleefully.
“Stop it, Sougo,” Kondo said. “I am in the wrong here.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong!” Toshirou immediately leapt to his defense.
Well, technically he should have been arrested a hundred times over for continuously stalking an unwilling party, but that wasn’t what they were talking about, were they?
“I did,” Kondo insisted. “I led poorly by example. I am the reason you don’t have the confidence to chase your own happiness.”
Say what now?
“You and the rest of the Shinsengumi have watched me pursue a woman day after day who has yet to accept my feelings. After seeing your commander fail so many times, you must have absorbed the lesson that failure in love is normal,” Kondo continued, nodding sadly to himself.
“No, I don’t think any of us thought that was normal,” Toshirou said.
“You must not be led astray by my mistakes! A strong heart and a romantic head can overcome any obstacle, so don’t you dare give up!” Kondo cried clasping both of Toshirou’s hands strongly in his own. “I have knocked you off course with my failings, but we will get back on track together!”
“I’m really okay though,” Toshirou attempted.
“Promise me this, Toshi,” Kondo said intently. “If I succeed in my love, you will stop at nothing to succeed in yours.”
Well, pigs really would fly before Kondo landed that woman, so Toshirou didn’t see the harm in appeasing his commander.
“Sure. Okay.”
It was only 48 hours later when Toshirou turned away from a TV news broadcast about a group of local scientists who had successfully attached working wings to a group of originally flightless mammals, as Kondo strode into the room with a woman in tow.
“Toshi,” he said warmly, “I wanted you to be the first to know. Otae-san and I are engaged to be married.”
“Look! Look!” Ketsuno Ana was crying through the TV. “The pigs are flying! They’re all flying!”