Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Attis is a tiny planet on the furthest edges of the galaxy, and its name sounds ominously like 'attic' for a damn good reason. It's tiny and mostly unnoticed, which of course means that, to all the criminals and people who don't want to be found, it stands out like a beam of light in a pitch-black room.

Besides being filled with fugitives and criminals, the planet is filled with impoverished families and grey streets that match the peeling paint on most of its buildings, as well as underhand dealings and a bad connection to the universal network.

"Tama," Otose says, for the tenth time in two hours. "Can you get that damned hologram to work?"

Tama shakes her head. "It's burnt out," she says, and Otose contemplates throwing a cup at the useless machine because what sort of holographic television gets burnt out? So far from anything on the galaxy, Attis gets three hours of electricity on a good day, so it's not like the damned thing has to work very hard.

Tama, who Otose is very glad runs on batteries and gasoline, holds out a black stick that can only be described as 'fried-looking'. Otose has to stare for a few moments before it clicks that the thing happens to be the television's antenna.

"What the hell," she says, voice rising very close to a screech.

"It was not my flamethrower this time," Tama informs her expressionlessly. She could be lying; Otose wouldn't know, since she's a machine and can easily change the inflection of her voice and cancel all signs of it.

Catherine, cleaning tables around the drunken aliens that have either passed out or become too intoxicated to carry out coherent conversation, mutters what must be a sarcastic comment under her breath, mouth twisting in a smile that looks more like a sneer.

"Catherine, if you're going to say something, say it to my face!" Otose yells.

Catherine chucks the dirty cloth towards her. "It's your own damn fault for smoking all the time! Did you set the damned thing on fire?"

Otose screams at her for being a damned ingrate; criticising one of the few pleasures an old woman has left, the nerve. They're hollering at each other, probably loud enough to hear from halfway across the town, when the door opens.

Two figures step in, faces hidden under wide-brimmed straw hats.

It's surprising to have clients so late, surprising enough that Otose and Catherine fall silent to stare. Otose scans the two with sharp eyes, searching for threats.

The first, taller figure has its shoulders pulled back, one hand resting on the sword by its side. Not threateningly, but casual, natural like breathing - a swordsman, Otose thinks, and a good one at that.

The second figure is easy to identify as a child. It's small and swimming in a too-big cloak, one little hand fisted in the swordsman's clothes.

"What sort of customers visit at two in the morning?" Otose asks. "The bar's about to close."

"I'm surprised that it's not already," the swordsman says. His voice is rough and low.

Otose shrugs and takes a puff from her cigarette, crossing an arm over her chest. "Stuff happened today," she says. "It was more profitable to keep the place open."

"Oh?" He moves into the bar with fluid grace. "What stuff?"

"Some factory collapsed," Otose replies, eyeing him carefully. The child follows at his heels, scampering a little to keep up, and he turns at the sound of hurried footsteps on the chipped wood floor.

"Sorry," he says, voice suddenly gentle, and slows his steps so that the child can keep up. A small hand reaches up and he catches it in a large one.

Then the still-hidden face turns, and Otose feels the his gaze on her, strange and intent. "You had a notice," he says. "A room for rent."

Otose takes another long drag from her cigarette. "I do," she agrees. "But I don't rent out my rooms to people whose names I don't know."

Even as she says it, she watches the gentle way he guides the child onto the tall barstool, the way he adjusts the kid's hat with careful hands. She likes that he's kind to the child, and she's half won over already.

The swordsman pushes back his hat, revealing dark burgundy eyes and curly silver hair. His face is startlingly young, thin and tired but with the barest hints of baby fat still on his cheeks.

A human boy, Otose thinks, vaguely surprised. It's rare to see other humans anywhere, now, after the Amanto got pissed with the war on earth and blew the whole planet to smithereens. The news was everywhere when it first happened six months ago, and now it's common knowledge. Humans are an endangered species.

And this boy is carrying a sword. That's even rarer; the Amanto don't take kindly to humans in general, but they're especially brutal to those with weapons.

"Sakata Gintoki," he says, and he taps the child on the back, twice, with a finger. Small hands come up and pull the hat back eagerly, and suddenly Otose is staring at tired but bright blue eyes and a small, childish face.

"Kagura," the little girl chirps. Then she turns to the boy (he can't be older than eighteen); "I'm hungry, Gin-chan," she says. "Can we get sukonbu?"

-x-

When Otose quotes her price for the room - the price that was on the sign, and thus a price he should already know - the boy's face stays blank, eyes dead.

"I can't afford that," he says bluntly.

"That's too bad," Otose says, wiping a glass. "It's one of the best deals on the planet."

Gintoki doesn't flinch; she can see that he knows that already.

"I can protect you," he offers, and she almost scoffs at the idea. He doesn't look a day over eighteen.

But she remembers the way he scanned the room as he entered, the fluid grace with which he'd walked, the way he'd kept his hand on his sword, and swallows down her laughter. She was friends with Jirochou, and married to Tatsugorou. She knows a good swordsman when she sees one.

Kagura, well into her third bowl of rice, says a food-muffled jumble of words that Otose must translate wrongly, because what she makes out is "Gin-chan took down a spacecraft, uh-huh", which is absolutely impossible.

Gintoki just tells Kagura not to talk with her mouth full and asks if she remembers what they talked about on the way here.

"Sorry Gin-chan," she says, mouth only half-full this time. Otose can't tell if that's her attempt at being compliant or showing defiance; Gintoki just rolls his eyes.

"I'll be your bodyguard," he tells Otose easily. "Lemme have the room for a month; it'll be a trial run. If I'm not good enough you can kick me out."

Because Otose is an idiotic, soft-hearted old woman - traits that would serve her so much better in places nicer than this dingy little planet, but then she wouldn't be able to help as many people - she gives them the room with a bare minimum of rent and a warning that if he's no good, she's not putting up with any freeloading. By the way the boy's face relaxes by the tiniest degree, she sees that this is affordable, and he flashes her a quick grin.

"Thanks, old lady," he says, something soft and grateful edging into his rough tone.

Otose just smacks him upside the head and asks him who he's calling old.

-x-

Kagura falls asleep on his arm half an hour later, hat sliding off her head to reveal bright, fiery red hair. Gintoki catches it neatly in one hand and smiles gently at the snoring child.

"She's still such a brat, huh?" He asks, words rough but voice so soft and kind. Otose snorts at his obvious affection for the kid.

"She's still a child," she agrees. It really shouldn't be surprising; the girl's head barely comes up to Gintoki's waist - she looks no older than three, with her round face and tiny, tiny hands. Gintoki had actually tried to cut up her food for her, before she'd snatched the bowl away and said that she could do it herself. (She did not, in fact, cut up the food, just inhaled it like some sort of mutant vacuum cleaner.) "What else would you expect?"

Gintoki just smiles, looking at Kagura and, at the same time, at something very far away.

He says, "I don't know," and the look is gone as soon as it came. He scoops Kagura up with careful, steady hands - she shifts, mumbling in her sleep, and he snorts, readjusting her in his arms.

Kagura curls towards his warmth with a soft sound of contentment and Otose shakes her head; Gintoki cradles the little girl like her hair is made of rubies and her eyes are made of sapphires, like he's holding sunlight and magic and every good thing in the world. He thinks he masks it, with his gruff voice and callous words, and Otose doesn't have the heart to tell him how wrong he is.

"I'll bring her up to sleep first, I guess," he says, moving with easy grace towards the stairs, movements so fluid that the girl doesn't even stir.

"Well," Catherine comments after he's gone. "We could have done worse."

Otose thinks of men who would, on a planet like this, sell a pretty young girl like Kagura to pimps or slave traders, or the men who would have taken wine and given the kid a bowl of rice, instead of ordering four bowls of rice and egg and giving the kid three.

She stubs out her cigarette on the counter and Catherine gripes at her for giving her more work to do, can't she just use the ashtray like a nice, normal old lady.

Yes, she thinks. They could have done a lot worse.

-x-

Gintoki has something hurting and tired beneath the apathy in his eyes. He leaves the apartment at odd hours of the night and his hand sometimes shakes when he's not careful; there is something haunted in the lines of his face and he is always, always watching.

He scans his eyes over the people in the bar each morning, eyes the door whenever someone enters. Even when he's drunk, there is something sharp in the way he looks over people, eyes lingering over hands, weapons, the arch of their backs; and yes, it's wariness, that split-second evaluation of a potential enemy's skill, but there's also something else in his posture and eyes - the way his gaze stutters over long hair, or cuts over at a certain sort of boisterous laugh. The way it stops on green eyes. He's not just wary - he's searching.

"Who are you watching for?" She asks him one evening. He's had enough sake that he should be drunk out of his mind by now, but his dull eyes are alert in his flushed face.

"A wig and a mop," he slurs. "And a pipsqueak."

Otose snorts and turns away; if he doesn't want to tell her, that's none of her business.

-x-

"You look tired, punk. Haven't you been sleeping?"

"No. The brat has nightmares." Gintoki leans against the counter, pushing a hand through his hair.

"She looks more well-slept than you."

"She snores. Oi, how do I make the nightmares go away? It's damn hard to sleep when she keeps waking up at night."

"Feed her hot chocolate and sit by her, then. They'll go away with time."

"Really?" Gintoki looks over at her, and it's the hope that she doesn't see in his eyes that brings a faint ache to her chest. She's seen the flashes of emotion in his eyes, joy and warmth and anger and pain - split second flickering sparks that fade out in moments - but she's yet to see hope.

"Sometimes," Otose confesses. Gintoki snorts.

"Some help you are."

He has bags under his eyes and his skin is too pale; Kagura, on the other hand, is bright-eyed and active and made of pure energy.

Otose doesn't think Kagura is the one with nightmares at all, but she's not sure how to make his nightmares go away.

-x-

"She's a Yato," Otose remarks a few days later. Kagura is sleeping in the apartment and Gintoki should be too - he acts fine, yes, but he looks far too tired for Otose's liking; worn and thin like an old coat. Instead of resting, though, he's drinking at the bar with tension humming beneath his skin.

"So? I didn't take you for one to discriminate against Amanto."

"Stop being stupid, punk. Of course I don't."

"So?"

"She's not related to you."

Gintoki sets down his glass and crosses his arms on the counter, leaning his weight against them. "No."

Close enough, though, is the message Otose can read. It's in the way his voice goes just a little too light, touching the word with deadly gentleness; in the way the tension in his frame has snapped into something focused and still. Close enough that he'll watch out for her, and feed her, and help her through nightmares even when he's running on far too little sleep himself.

Otose knows all about picking up strays and families of choice, so she just smiles. She reaches out, and pours him another drink.

-x-

Yorozuya, Gintoki calls himself. Odd jobs. He'll do anything, he says, for the right price. Otose isn't so sure. He tells her the stories at the bar, some nights, about lying clients and opponents turned victims, and he changes sides according to his morals and rules the way a shadow changes with the light.

Sometimes, when the jobs don't look dangerous, he lets Kagura tag along. Kagura loves it, comes back with a wide wide grin on her face and stories about helping people. Her eyes are so bright, and she so genuinely wants to help that Otose's old heart goes soft. Gintoki, for all his roughness, is bringing her up kind.

Gintoki, though, is very careful about the jobs he brings her on.

"I don't want to get you killed," he says, ruffling Kagura's hair.

He's not always successful. Sometimes Kagura is hurt in easy, mostly safe jobs - a scratch on her arm that she shows off to Otose ("I got this when I messed up with a nail, but I helped fix the roof!") or bruises from getting into a fistfight with another kid her age ("He was a bastard anyway!" "Was Gintoki the idiot that taught you the word bastard?") - and that's fine, but other times she's in more danger. Bruised knuckles - "I got these punching out the bad guy! Gin-chan said I did really good!" - and gashes on her arms.

Once Kagura came back with a huge bruise across her face. There was a downright ugly edge to Gintoki's eyes, something fierce and protective in the way he kept her close with one too-tense hand.

No matter how beat-up and bloody Gintoki is after the more dangerous jobs, Kagura never has more than a few minor wounds.

And Otose doesn't ask what happened to the ones who hurt Kagura.

-x-

It's a tired day. Otose was up till four cleaning up the bar, and Gintoki and Kagura were up for a job at five. Otose is aching and exhausted, Gintoki has bruises beneath his eyes, and Kagura is tired and grumpy.

She's clearly ready to pass out, but she's stubbornly, noisily refusing to sleep, clinging to Gintoki's back and whining in his ear. It's the sort of tired, rambling grouchiness that goes on and on, the girl so tired she looks like she wants to cry.

Gintoki, sweeping the bar, returns her grumbling with a few choice retorts. He's less animated than usual, worn like old faded jeans; Otose doubts he's slept much in the last few days at all.

Somehow, though, the litany of exhausted whining trails off, replaced by something slow and rhythmic.

It takes Otose a long moment to realise that Gintoki is singing. She looks up, stares at him for a long moment.

He's not going to be winning any awards for singing, that's for sure. He's somewhat off-key, somewhat hesitant, and his voice comes out rough and low where Otose thinks it should come out high. But it's deep and soothing, Gintoki's voice touching the syllables the same way he handles Kagura - gruff and carefully gentle. The song is something old and time-worn, about age-old mountains and the shifting of the tides; the way the sun rises and falls and rises again, the world going in circles and coming back again.

Gintoki's eyes are very far away.

When the final notes of the song have drifted off, the bar is quiet, and Otose feels like something in her chest has settled.

"I didn't know you sang," she remarks. Gintoki blinks and looks up at her, eyebrows drawing in.

"I didn't know either," he says eventually.

On his back, Kagura stirs. "Keep going, Gin-chan," she whines groggily, half-asleep.

"Okay, okay," Gintoki replies, and Kagura settles down with a drowsy smile. "Brat," Gintoki says. She lets out a little sound of displeasure and wriggles on his back.

When the humming starts again, not quite perfect but decent enough, Otose takes a drag from her cigarette and lets the sound carry her up with the breeze.

It's a few weeks later when the setting sun paints the world crimson from where it shines through dark grey clouds, dipping the planet in an interesting combination of grey and red. Gintoki, humming quietly to Kagura as he goes around wiping the bar's tables, glances out of the window.

Otose can't see his eyes or his expression, but for a moment he just stands and stares. He's a dark shape against the bloody grey backdrop, as if he's been captured in a photograph, never to move again.

His humming falters for a moment, and slowly, like a storm rolling in from the sea, the tune changes. The sound of waves becomes the beat of drums, and the whistling wind becomes the march of a hundred, a thousand feet. It's low and dark and powerful, forcing Otose's heart to match the beat of drums, the sort that makes your blood crackle with fire and adrenaline.

The sort that soldiers play, on their march to war.

Otose just watches and listens, observing how Gintoki's shoulders set and his hand tightens around the hilt of his sword; the way he doesn't move - not as if he's frozen, but as if he's a hunter watching his prey, waiting for the time to strike.

"Gin-chan?" Kagura shifts on Gintoki's back, raising one hand to rub at her eye

The spell shatters like glass. Gintoki's hand drops from his sword and the humming goes silent, the only sound left in the bar the whirring of the fans. "Where'd you learn that song?"

Gintoki shrugs and turns back to the tables, and Otose sees that his expression is just the same as always, dead eyes in a blank face.

"I fought in the war, remember?" He says, and that's all he says; but to Otose, it's enough.

-x-

It's when Gintoki fights off a gang of ten Amanto in her bar that Otose realises exactly who she's dealing with.

Gintoki fights with devilish speed and devastating blows, his sword a silver blur beneath the lights of the bar. Blood splatters to stain his face and arms; Otose catches his blank expression and realises that he's not even trying.

Then an Amanto grabs Kagura - little four-year-old Kagura, who'd been watching from the corner - and presses a knife against her soft white neck.

And hell, the whole bar goes cold.

Otose feels icy fingers dragging down her spine, and her eyes fly to Gintoki - Gintoki, whose expression is harder than stone, eyes gone steely-hard and ugly, teeth set and shoulders tense. And he's seventeen, he'd told Otose so, looking so damn young, but for all his youth he looks like nothing less than a predator right now, coiled tighttighttight and ready to strike.

"Close your eyes," Gintoki tells Kagura, and when she does the smile that creeps across his face is a cruel, ugly thing - cold and furious and tight with malice, an expression that better suits a demon.

He launches forward with such speed that Otose can barely see him, just colour blurring between two points. The Amanto has no time to blink, let alone react. Bar lights gleam off an arc of steel.

(And a name creeps into her mouth, leaving iron at the back of her throat, rumours of a white demon and a blade faster than light.)

Gintoki and his sword blink out of existence; there's blood spraying everywhere, there's a thump that rocks the bar - and Gintoki's blade is buried deep in the Amanto's throat, pinning it against the wall, his bloody hand steady around the hilt. The Amanto is bleeding all over the wood floor, and its arm has been severed - the limb lies a distance away in a pool of blood, knife lying near limp fingers. Tama says, "Otose-sama-" and Catherine breathes out a quiet curse.

Gintoki skewered the Amanto through the neck, driving it into the wall. But he cut off its arm first, so that the knife wouldn't touch Kagura, so Kagura is now splattered with blood that's not her own.

"Gin-chan?" She calls anxiously, reaching out small hands for him. For once, Gintoki does not take her in his arms. "Gin-chan?" Kagura asks insistently. Gintoki looks up from his bloody sleeves, and sighs.

"Yeah, brat?"

"Can I open my eyes now?"

"Wait." Gintoki pulls the sword from the Amanto's neck, steps back. The Amanto crumples lifelessly to the bloody wood floor. Gintoki wipes the blade off on his clothes, moves with catlike grace around the blood to stand in front of Kagura. "Don't look behind you," he says. Kagura opens her eyes slowly and steps forward, towards him. Two, three more steps and she's wrapped her arms around his waist, clinging tight, like he's a lifeline cast into raging seas. "Oi, don't come so near me, you'll get blood on yourself."

"Don't care."

"It's no good for a brat like you to be covered in blood-" Kagura just hugs him tighter, knuckles going white. "Come on," Gintoki says, his voice a sigh, almost pleading. "Let go."

"No."

Gintoki sighs. "Let go, I'll get you dirty."

"I'm already bloody."

Gintoki shuts his eyes.

The sword slips from his fingers, clanging against the wood floor.

-x-

"I don't want anyone to die in my bar," Otose tells Gintoki later, after he's successfully sent Kagura up to their apartment to wash off the blood. "It's bad for business."

Nine of the Amanto are unconscious. One of them is lying with its head tipped back, ripped-open jugular still spilling dark blood. Otose is very grateful that all of her customers ran off when the Amanto began getting violent.

Gintoki bends over the corpse. "Sorry," he replies, though he doesn't sound sorry in the least. Otose doesn't blame him; she can't quite muster up sympathy for the creature that threatened Kagura, either.

"At least you can get off with self-defense," Otose comments. It's fortunate that her guard dog won't be arrested.

"He threatened a brat," Gintoki replies absently. "I had no other choice." Otose can't tell if he's serious or not, so she sighs and takes a drag from her cigarette.

"I'm more interested to know how I ended up hosting the Shiroyasha in my apartment," she says. Catherine makes a stifled noise from where she'd been quiet beside her, and Tama's joints creak as she reaches for her broom; but it's Gintoki Otose is watching, Gintoki whose shoulders stiffen under his old, thin yukata. He freezes for a split second, as if panic's a literal ice settling in his bones.

He stands with slow motions, different from his usual careless efficiency. When he turns with a hand on his sword, his eyes are dark and sharp.

"How did you find out, old lady?" He asks, with false calm that's not fooling anyone; not himself and certainly not Otose. She's seen hundreds of soldiers, knows the carefully tamed wildness in his eyes.

Few of the soldiers had fangs like these, though.

With visible effort, Gintoki drops his hand from the hilt of his sword. He keeps his eyes on her, dark and steady.

"I used my eyes."

"Damn," Gintoki says. "That easy?" He smiles, but his grin is brittle and breaking and frayed at the edges, old and tired and worn. "Kagura will be disappointed that we have to move again."

"Who said you had to move out?"

Gintoki blinks. He stares at her, eyebrows furrowed, eyes searching. "What?"

"I got a demon for the price I'm paying for a guard dog. I'm not the sort of idiot that would let this sort of deal go." She looks at him from the corner of her eye; he looks like he's been hit very hard on the head, but he doesn't look unhappy, just very stunned. "If you kill someone in my bar again, though…"

"I won't," he promises, still looking amazed. Catherine snorts, and Otose is suddenly reminded that Gintoki isn't even eighteen. Not yet a man. You wouldn't know it, to look at his eyes and mannerisms and the way he looks after Kagura like a father.

"Otose-sama, am I now permitted to use my flamethrower on Gintoki-sama if he is late paying his rent?" Tama asks.

Gintoki's look of blank amazement disappears quickly after that.

-x-

Kagura doesn't take well to being taken hostage. The next time Amanto get violent in the bar, she balls one little hand into a tight fist and breaks their leader's nose. Then she kicks it in the crotch and slams her fist into it's kidney before delivering a roundhouse kick to its head, her eyes shining bright and fiercer than fire.

She stands over the fallen creature, triumphant and defiant, levelling a glare at its comrades in a silent challenge, and Otose watches as monsters three times her size back away quickly, dragging their defeated leader in their wake.

Gintoki smiles so proudly it aches, high fives Kagura, and lifts her onto the bar seat for a celebratory drink - "Apple juice, brat, no sake till you're my age."

"But that's old," Kagura whines. Gintoki thwaps her upside the head and she launches a return blow that knocks his chair over and sends him sprawling.

He grumbles and gripes and screams at her, but Otose can see pride in his eyes, warm and bright like the embers of a lit flame.

-x-

"Why?"

"Because you're a kid and it's important."

"But why?"

"Because there are bastards that won't let you do anything without a certificate."

"Why?"

"Oi, brat, I don't care how many questions you ask. You're still going to school."

"I never had to go to school before," Kagura returns.

"That's cause you were too tiny. Now you can go."

"But I don't wanna."

"Too bad."

"Gin-channnn-"

"No."

"Pleeaaseee?"

"No."

"Why don't you have to go to school?"

"I went already."

"So I just have to go one time?"

"For a few years, yeah."

"Gin-chaaaannnnnn!"

"Sorry, brat, that's how life works."

Kagura glares at Gintoki. "You're mean, Gin-chan," she says.

"So I've been told."

"I hate you."

"Okay."

"If you don't make me go I'll give you all my sukonbu."

"Who wants your sukonbu, brat?"

"Who wants to go to school?"

"No one. But you're going anyway."

"If you make me go I'll run away."

"Where?"

"To a place where no one needs school!"

"Oi, brat, places like that aren't any fun. Remember the war on earth? You didn't need school there."

"I'll go to a good place!" Kagura snaps. Gintoki waves a hand at her.

"Good luck with that."

-x-

Kagura doesn't run away, and Gintoki enrols her in school.

Kagura is screaming when Gintoki drags her down the stairs. By the legs, of course, because her arms are a whirlwind of nails and hands balled into little white fists.

"Go," he grunts, "to school!"

"I DON'T WANNA!" Kagura claws at the stairs, dressed in a rumpled red shirt and white shorts, and her hair is sticking up at all angles like it hasn't been brushed. Otose suspects Kagura fought too hard for Gintoki to brush it, and Kagura certainly wasn't about to brush it herself.

"Come on, it's just four hours!"

"I'll put you in hell for four hours!"

"You've never even been to school!"

"And I don't wanna!"

Gintoki gives Otose a distressed look, hair sticking everywhere and eyes comically wide. Otose gives him a look back, a look that means "do it yourself", and stubs out her cigarette before her second-hand smoke gives Kagura lung cancer.

("I had to throw her into the classroom," Gintoki says later, sleeve slipping down his arm to reveal long red scratches and welts. "Shit, I have to do this again tomorrow?")

(Otose lights a cigarette and smiles.)

She doesn't say anything when Gintoki leaves the bar too early to pick Kagura up from school - for a punk, he's doing pretty well raising that brat of his.

Kagura comes home with Gintoki somewhat sulkily, but after a bit of prodding and a bribe consisting of orange juice and two bowls of rice, she starts to talk about the friends she met, especially the little girl with black hair who's gonna set the classroom on fire with her tomorrow.

Gintoki gives Otose a look and Otose hides her matches.

-x-

After that school gets better. Kagura gets up and gets dressed and brushes her teeth and Gintoki makes her breakfast - or, on mornings where he's too tired to get up any earlier, when he's slept badly or just had a tiring job the previous day, he brings her down to the bar and orders them breakfast; he brushes and buns up Kagura's hair while they wait. Kagura actually walks into the school compound on her own. ("As compared to, you know, me dragging her into the damned classroom," Gintoki says, when he's telling Otose about things. He looks pretty damn pleased, despite the grumbling.)

Then Gintoki gets a call and finds out that Kagura and her new friend have been skipping class.

"How the hell does a little brat skip class?" He asks.

The answer is apparently: by hiding in a corner of the school and readying pranks.

("Four water ballon attacks, one paint bomb, and attempted arson in her first week of school," Gintoki says, sounding part disbelieving and part amazed.)

(Otose tells him to stop looking so damn proud, he's the one who's going to tell her off.)

-x-

He is bad at parenting, that is one thing that can be said about Sakata Gintoki.

Otose has never seen a lecture about not skipping school dissolve into an explanation of how to "play pranks while artfully paying attention in class so that no one suspects her as a culprit". She has never seen a parent eat with as few table manners as a four-year-old Yato.

"Teach her manners, dammit," Otose says, eye twitching as the two of them suck down their rice.

"What the hell did manners ever do for people? Anyway, she's a brat, she can get away with it."

"She won't be a brat forever."

"Eh, I'll figure it out then. If I tell her it's a method of infiltrating high-class places to eat better food, I bet she'll listen."

He is no good at manners or getting Kagura to focus on her education; he can't seem to bring himself to care about either - "What good have they ever done?" He always asks, and Otose can't find an answer to that. Manners save no lives on the battlefield, and sure, they might make your life easier, but so will the other things he teaches Kagura.

Don't pick fights you can't win. Keep your soul alive even if your body's half-dead. Never ever take the weight of a world on your shoulders. Protect the people precious to you at all cost, even if you've gotta destroy a planet or two in the process.

"It's not very moral," Otose tells him one night, and Gintoki snorts.

"I never said I was a good person."

No. He's never said that. He's just a boy who'll give anything to keep the people precious to him safe - Otose can see it in the steel of his eyes. He'll steal and kill and destroy and become a demon to protect them, and it's not righteous or good or kind; he's not righteous or good or kind. Not in most books of the world.

I'll keep them safe - that's his rule, his goal, his driving force. He doesn't give a damn about the other stuff, just his friends, and Otose doesn't know if that makes him a hero or a villain.

-x-

A few nights later, Gintoki flies down the stairs and into the bar in something that looks a lot like running away. His face is blank, but his skin is pale and grey and his eyes are more haunted than usual.

"Old lady, pour me a drink, will ya?"

Otose obliges, and Gintoki wanders over to sit at the counter. He gulps the sake down and sets the glass on the counter with shaking fingers.

"I can't use my sword anymore," he mutters, staring down at the table. He doesn't seem to mind that, exactly, but whatever brought him to that realisation has shaken him; Otose can see the tremble in his fingers and the way his lips keep trying to curl into a frown while he fights to keep his expression neutral.

He looks up at Otose. "Hey, old lady, any idea where I can get a wooden sword?"

Otose glances over at him. "Did Kagura play with your sword?" It seems unlikely - Gintoki always keeps it strapped to his side, and he'd never let Kagura handle the blade. He shakes his head and his hand tightens around his empty cup.

"What happened?" Otose asks. Gintoki keeps his eyes on the counter and his voice low, so that he's barely audible above the din of the other drunken patrons.

He shrugs, still trying to be casual. "I was asleep," he mutters. "We both had shitty dreams; the brat tried to crawl into my bed." His knuckles are white around the glass. "I didn't know where I was. Had my sword against her neck before I woke up properly."

He lets out a tired breath and pushes a hand through his messy mop of hair, looking about a hundred years old. His shoulders shudder, and he shakes his head as if to shake off the memory, cursing softly. "Drew my sword on a little brat." Gintoki laughs bitterly. "Damn sick."

Otose hums, chest aching for the broken pair, the boy and girl who are at once far too old and far too young, and at the boy who looks like he's got the entire weight of a shattered world on his slumped shoulders. He looks tired - not so much lost as resigned and sickened.

"How's Kagura?" Otose asks. Gintoki glances up.

"Eh, she's fine." He waves a hand in the air. "She's a tough brat. Yelled at me to wake me up then punched me when I lowered the sword." He shrugs. "Still, I'd better find something else to use. She's a lot of trouble, but I don't want to wake up with that brat dead."

Already, the horror is bleeding from his expression, falling away to be replaced with nonchalant laziness and apathy. Gintoki is very good at putting on masks; then again, he'd have to have learnt, as a boy in a bloody war.

It once occurred to Otose that maybe Gintoki wasn't good at putting on masks; that, rather than being a superb actor, he simply doesn't care - that the war killed off his humanity and compassion and conscience. Shiroyasha, after all.

She'd taken a look at Gintoki, who'd been watching Kagura draw, and she'd almost laughed. No one who looked at a little kid that way could possibly be lacking in compassion or humanity.

"I'll look into it," Otose says, and Gintoki nods.

"Thanks, old lady."

Something in his voice tells Otose that he's not just thanking her for helping him look for a substitute sword.

-x-

A boar Amanto walks into the bar with a group of friends. When they begin to drink and shout and grunt, Gintoki freezes like there's ice in his veins.

Otose blinks at him, waving a hand in front of his face, but he doesn't respond to her words or her calls.

His knuckles have whitened on the counter, and he's shaking, eyes dark, hardly breathing, breaths trembling with something like fear. He just sits there and trembles; Otose has seen others with flashbacks, has seen grown men shout and yell and cry and whine, but Gintoki just sits and shakes with a terrible look on his paper-pale face. Somehow, the desperation and hurt she can feel from him makes everything so much worse, but she's helpless in taking away the pain. All she can do is stand there and watch him shiver, watch his hands clench into fists that shake from the force of his grip.

Otose has seen flashbacks before. She's seen veterans and soldiers throw tables and smash cups and scream profanities over and over, and she seen them break down and plead and cry and beg for forgiveness. Gintoki does none of that; it could be because his memories are nowhere near as bloody, but he's the Shiroyasha and she doesn't think that's possible.

More likely, he's too stubborn, too guilty, to ask for help or forgiveness or even lash out. Or maybe he's just frozen. Otose has seen that, before, too, more often than not.

Gintoki's eyes look like open wounds in his breaking, tired face; dark and bloody and raw and painful to see.

The first breath he takes is a drowning man's gasp - a sound that borders on a sob, a desperate, desperate gulp of air drawn into tired lungs. His shoulders shudder, jerking up and down in a sharp motion, and he shakes his head with what's almost anger, throwing back the rest of his sake.

"Shit," he mutters. He shuts his eyes and takes in a breath that stutters like a sob. "Sorry, old lady."

"You didn't do anything," Otose says, taking a drag from her cigarette. "Just sat there."

"Ah," Gintoki says softly. He pushes out his cup with a shaking hand. "Can I have another cup?"

Otose pours him one without remarking on the cost. Gintoki takes it in his hand and sips it; all at once he looks ancient and exhausted, and Otose is terribly reminded that he is all of seventeen years old. On some planets, on this planet, he's not even allowed to legally drink.

It hits like a punch to the gut; Gintoki looks tired and pale and drawn, a tired soldier at seventeen, a veteran of war before he's a legal adult. He looks haunted, bone-weary.

So Otose begins to talk. Sweet nothings, because that's what brought Jirochou from the bad memories of war - he'd confessed, once, that the little things were the things they'd missed most. Hot food, a soft bed. Safety, mundane peace, people who - and he'd laughed, here - talked without the coarseness of the soldiers, who were gentle and soft the way no one on the battlefield could afford to be.

She talks about how they need groceries, about the weather, about the people who frequent her bar. She talks about the brats on the planet, the way they run around the streets screeching at the tops of their voices and kicking footballs that inevitably break windows, the way they laugh, sometimes, loud and happy, heads thrown back and eyes squinted shut with joy.

Gintoki sits and listens, and slowly, ever so slowly, the tension bleeds from his shoulders. And slowly, he begins to breathe again.

-x-

Here's the thing about Sakata Gintoki, that makes him more hero than villain, more good than bad.

He cares.

He'll do anything to keep the people precious to him safe. But once he's met someone, once he's seen them or talked to them or even bumped into them on the street, it's become personal.

"I'll pick up the stones in my path," he tells Otose once, as he's working his ass off to help an amanto who came to him for assistance. He's got scratches on his face and bruises beneath his sleeves, but his lazy smile is confident and fearless. "And help those I can."

"That sounds a damn lot like trying to save the world."

"Nah. I can't save the world for shit." He grins. "I know my limits."

Chapter Text

"Oi, brat, what are you doing?"

"I gotta make a family tree," Kagura says. She has a pot of soil in front of her and is pushing dirt over her drawing of a family. "By Monday. But I dunno if my tree will grow that fast."

"You sure that's how you make a family tree? What sort of fruits will it grow, huh?"

"Dunno. Mamis and Papis and stupid big brothers, maybe."

"Ah, that makes sense."

"How the hell does that make sense?!" Otose yells, throwing a rag at Gintoki's face. The damp cloth impacts with a loud thwap.

"Owww! The hell was that for?!"

"What sort of useless things are you teaching her?!"

"How am I supposed to know what a family tree is?!"

"Even if you don't know that, you should know something as basic as: 'families don't grow on trees'!"

"Shuddup! Do you wanna tell the brat about the birds and the bees? Hah??"

"Gin-chan?" Kagura lifts her head. "What about the birds and the bees?"

"Ah? Birds and bees are born in things that look like seeds," Gintoki says, avoiding the girl's eyes. He's sweating, Otose notes. Serves him right for being such an idiot.

"Oh," Kagura says. "Do they grow on trees?"

"Of course. Where do you see bird nests and beehives?"

"Oh," Kagura says. She gives the damp soil in the flowerpot a final pat-down. "Okay. I'm done."

"Aa, good job, just remember to water it, or else it won't grow-"

"That's not how you make a family tree!" Otose yells.

-x-

"Do you have a picture of your father?"

"Nope."

"You'll have to draw him, then," Otose says, and wonders how she ended up helping Kagura with her family tree. Gintoki is sitting to the side, watching with mild interest.

"Oi, brat," he says.

"Yeah?"

"Why's your dad got fangs?"

"Papi's always fighting," Kagura says. "So he gets fangs."

"Oh, okay."

Ah. Otose remembers now. Gintoki is utterly useless in school work. His math is awful, he can't speak formal, and his science probably consists mostly of: these are the vital organs. Hit here and they die fast, hit here and they die slow, hit these spots to incapacitate them and these spots to maximise pain.

Clearly, Otose needs to take matters into her own hands.

"Do you have pictures of your mother?" Otose asks Kagura.

Kagura shakes her head. "But Papi said I look like her."

"Great," Gintoki says. He lifts the polaroid camera Otose dug out of the storeroom. "Come here, brat, we'll just take a picture of you and edit it."

Kagura undoes her hair and lets it fall loose around her shoulders, smiling a strange, serene smile that Otose has never really seen on the child before. It's a moment before she realises that Kagura must be imitating her mother's smile.

The camera makes a valiant effort to blind the girl with its flash.

"Okay, good, now one more for you. Does your brother look like you, by any chance?" Gintoki asks, getting up to put Kagura's hair back into the two buns. Otose passes him a hairbrush that she's taken to keeping beneath the bar counter so that Gintoki doesn't run up the stairs every other morning because he's forgotten theirs.

He accepts it with a 'thanks', and begins gently untangling Kagura's hair.

"Yep!" Kagura says. "But he braids his hair."

"I can do that. Geez, why's your homework so troublesome, huh? Why do teachers need to know every little thing about your life? What if ya don't have a family? Are you supposed to just stick your picture there?"

"Stop complaining and take the damn picture already," Otose tells him, handing him the camera. He snaps another shot; Otose notes that, in this photo, Kagura beams the big wide smile she learnt from him.

She's fairly certain that it means something.

Gintoki goes back to Kagura's hair, undoing the buns and splitting it into three bunches for braids with an efficiency that suggests a sister in his family.

"Where did you learn to braid?" Otose asks.

"Had a friend with stupid long hair," Gintoki replies. "I used to braid flowers into his hair while he was asleep." He grins, sharp with a trace of nostalgia. "He never cut it. Wanted to be a samurai like our teacher, and he figured that all samurai like our teacher had long hair." The braid comes out neat and shiny, and Gintoki takes another picture.

"Next, grandparents."

Kagura looks up at him, confused. "What's that?"

"Your parents' parents."

"Papi and Mami had Papis and Mamis?"

"Aa, everyone has a Papi or a Mami."

"Even Gin-chan?"

"Sure."

"Even the old hag?"

"Yeah."

"Even the old hag's old hag?"

"Absolutely, though they'd be dead by now-"

Otose whacks Gintoki on the head for being an insensitive idiot. "Who are you calling an old hag?!"

"Hah? Do you have Alzheimer's, old lady? Who's the one with all the wrinkles, huh?"

"Who's the one with silver hair?"

"Leave my hair out of this! Anyway, you probably dye yours-"

"I do not!"

Otose is nearly blinded by a sudden flash of light. She looks up and is caught by another flash, right in the eyes.

"Oi, Kagura!" Gintoki yells. "The hell are you going?"

Kagura lowers the camera and grins, big and wide. "I need your pictures for the family tree," she says.

"Hah? The hell do you need my picture for-"

"You're family," Kagura says, examining the developing picture. "Gin-chan and granny and Tama and cat-lady… Ah! Tama! Smile!"

Gintoki stares at Kagura, eyes wide, face wiped clean in a moment of perfect shock.

He's such an idiot, Otose thinks. Thinking that he could take in a child and not be considered family.

He's such a stupid, stupid fool.

-x-

Kagura's fifth birthday is noise and mess and screaming from Gintoki's apartment, and a silver-permed idiot running past the bar at irregular intervals screaming over his shoulder - "Brat! Don't you dare eat the other ingredients before I get back!"

At around seven, Gintoki starts yelling down to the bar: "Oi! Old hag! Tama! Catherine! Get the hell up here before the brat eats this cake as wellllaaaagggghhhhhhhh!!!"

Otose glances out the bar door. "So should we go up or not?"

"Who knows?" Catherine says, wiping off another counter. Gintoki told them to shut the bar by six so they could go up for cake, and Otose had decided to indulge - "for the brat," she'd said, "and because there'll be free food."

It's already an hour late, though - as far as Otose can tell, Kagura has spent the day methodically eating through all of Gintoki's ingredients before he could finish the cake. Shutting her in the cupboard, his room, and in the bar have all failed miserably in light of Kagura's tremendous strength.

"The hell are you doing down there?!" Gintoki shouts. "Get up here now!"

Otose sighs and puts down her cigarette. "Guess that's our cue."

The cake Gintoki made isn't bad, actually. It's covered in smooth pink frosting, layered relatively nicely, and has sukonbu stuck onto the top layer to form the number 5.

He's also got it on a silver tray, and is dancing around trying to keep it out of Kagura's reach. "Oi, brat! The old hag's finally here. Wait for another three minutes, dammit, you've already eaten three cakes worth of ingredients anyway!"

After Kagura's settled enough for them to sing happy birthday and Gintoki has wrestled about half the cake out of her control - "Brat! You've had enough cake today!" - Gintoki collapses onto the sofa with a groan and a slice of cake.

"Why are you sitting here, Gintoki? Only old people sit down and watch parties," Otose says, from where she's standing beside the couch.

"Shut up, I was standing all day. It's damn hard to bake a cake with that black hole around. And anyway, doesn't that mean that you should be sitting down, old hag?"

"Respect your elders, punk."

"Oi, oi, I'm showing concern here. Arthritis must be setting in, no normal person would take so long getting up here for the party."

"I was just wondering if you were going to run screaming from the house again." Like he did at least four times today.

"Brat kept eating the ingredients," Gintoki says, not rising to the bait. "Had to bring the icing to the supermarket with me so she wouldn't finish it off."

"You left her in the house alone?!"

"I asked Tama to watch her! Geez, old lady, what sort of person do you think I am?"

Otose just smiles and watches Kagura, still shovelling cake into her mouth, kick Catherine in the head. "So. The brat's birthday, huh?"

"Aa? Oi, oi, is Alzheimer's really setting in, old lady? I told you about this last week, didn't I?"

"Shut up, punk," Otose says, smacking his head. "You went through a lot of trouble setting up a birthday party for her."

"Hah? It's no big deal," Gintoki says, shrugging and resting his feet on the table. "Brat's never had a party before, and I didn't have a job today, anyway."

"Hm," Otose hums. "So? When's your birthday?"

"Adults don't have birthdays," Gintoki says idly. Tama is chugging down gasoline like it's beer; she'd better not throw up later.

"You're not an adult yet, brat," Otose says. "And everyone's got a birthday."

Gintoki shrugs. "It's over, anyway. You don't need to do anything for me, old hag, just cut the month's rent."

"Who said I was giving you anything? I just want to know when it'll be legal for you to drink."

"Hah? I drink anyway."

"Illegally."

"You don't complain, though."

"Shut up. Just tell me, stupid brat."

Gintoki sighs. "Tenth October," he says, sounding resigned.

Otose hums and tries the cake. It's not bad.

"I'll give you a month off your rent then," she tells him.

"Huh." Gintoki watches Catherine pour half a glass of sake onto Kagura's head; "Oi, don't waste the sake, dammit!"

"Thanks, old lady" he says eventually, and Otose just smiles.

"No problem," she says, and settles down beside Gintoki to watch the party.

-x-

"Gintoki."

"Yeah?"

"Relax."

"Aa? What are you talking about? I'm completely relaxed. Are you blind, old hag?"

Otose sighs. He's been wound tight these past few days, hand always reaching for where his sword should be, shoulders hiked up a little higher, a little more defensive. He turns faster and watches more, hands curling into loose fists by his sides.

Swordsmen rely on their blades and strength, Otose supposes, and being unarmed in a room full of potential enemies must be wearing him thin. Gintoki hides it alarmingly well; Otose only notices because she knows him, because she's seen the same things in Jirochou, because she's seen thousands of soldiers fresh from war in her bar before, all defensive, all watching, all wary.

Gintoki hides it alarmingly well, but Otose has seen this before.

"Here," she says, and pushes a box across the table. "It's poor quality, but it'll work for now."

Gintoki blinks at her, reaching out to take it. "Hah? Why're you giving me this, I told you my birthday was over-" He looks into the box and stops short, and Otose watches the barely-present tension in his shoulders drain away.

Then he grins, a smile spreading across his face slow and sharp as a drawn blade. It's not the smile he has for Kagura - this one is sharper, a little fiercer, a little more relieved, and he never smiles at Kagura with anything this sharp, as if he's afraid that it'll cut her.

"Thanks, old lady," he says, and Otose can tell that he means it. He reaches in and lifts out the bokuto, swings it across the air in a few practice strikes, testing its weight. "This is good."

Gintoki runs a finger across the smooth, rounded edges of the wooden sword, tracing his fingertip across polished wood.

Otose smiles. "You're welcome," she says. She blows out a breath of cigarette smoke. "Go get another one soon. Knowing you, this one won't last very long."

"Aa," Gintoki says, examining wood. "I ordered one in the mail; should have pretty strong wood, since the planet exports wood. Geez, if nothing had happened I'd have gotten one from Lake Toya."

"On Earth?" Otose asks, mildly surprised.

"Yeah. Bokutos from that place are made of diamond or something. Our dojo had some - damned things never broke."

Every once in awhile he does that. He'll say "our dojo" or "our teacher", or "all of us", but never specifies who they are. Otose isn't sure if he even notices when it slips out; whenever it happens, his eyes are dull and dead and she can't read what goes on beneath them, but he looks like he's very far away.

It's like he's used to being in a specific group of people, has gotten so used to sharing things with them - his memories, his teacher, his past - that he doesn't question it anymore, just refers to himself as a part of their group. Sometimes Otose wonders who they are.

Sometimes Otose wonders if they're all dead, and she never asks.

Instead she says, "Hard to believe that things on Earth were that good."

"You'd better believe it, it had the best damn chocolate parfaits in the galaxy. Damned Amanto, blowing up universal treasures like that," he huffs, sliding his new bokuto into his obi. Otose notices that he doesn't have to retie it to accommodate the bokuto, which means that he's tied it to accommodate a blade ever since his sword was taken away, which is-

-to be expected, Otose supposes. A soldier won't change his habits so quickly. Still, it makes something in her chest twist - he won't even be eighteen for another year.

She hums and glances up at the clock. "Bar's closing," she says, "help me close up."

Gintoki heaves himself off the bar seat, still grinning slow and lazy, shoulders relaxed. He has one hand resting on his new bokuto's polished hilt.

He's completely relaxed now that he's got something like a sword. It makes Otose ache for him, a dull, hollow ache - too young to be a soldier, too young to be so old - but she takes a drag from her cigarette and pretends she hasn't noticed.

Chapter Text

"Gintoki!" Otose yells. He doesn't answer, and she scowls, promises over the phone that yes, Gintoki will be at the kindergarten soon, and sets it down.

Usually the school calls Gintoki at the Yorozuya hotline, but as far as Otose can gather, Kagura broke the phone in a fit of childish rage last week and they've yet to get it replaced. She sighs, tells Tama to keep an eye on the bar, and heads upstairs to find the idiot.

He really needs to teach Kagura things like social conduct, Otose thinks, as she pounds on his door. "Gintoki! Kagura's gotten herself into trouble in school again!"

"What was it this time?" Gintoki calls back. "If it's just water balloons, tell them that brats can handle a little water, dammit!"

"She beat up four classmates and knocked her teacher unconscious. And some Amanto are unable to handle excess humidity, punk."

"Haaah? What sort of useless species can't handle water? If they die it'll just be natural selection anyway-"

"I'm coming in," Otose says, deciding that it's stupid to keep yelling through the door. She opens it before Gintoki can object.

The idiot is sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by bandages and antiseptic, bloody yukata lying limp on the ground beside him. He's pressing a damp cotton pad against a gash running down his side, blood slick on his scarred skin.

And he has dozens of scars on him, some ragged and raised, some fainter, thinner. Otose has treated her fair share of wounds - on Jirochou, who always fought, and Tatsugoro, who got into the worst trouble possible. And picking up as many strays as she has, she knows the look of old injuries; knows the difference, too, between those acquired in battle and those inflicted with slow deliberate malice.

Gintoki has plenty of both, and he's too thin, like he's gone a long time without enough to eat. Concern flashes through her like a flash flood, followed by a faint, tired ache for the idiot boy.

"Haven't you ever heard of knocking?" Gintoki asks, running the cotton down the wound and wincing. "Dammit, old hag, what the hell, Gin-chan could’ve been indecent, you know-”

"What the hell did you get yourself into?" Otose demands, staring at the ragged rip in his flesh and the blood that's dribbled to stain the floor. His ribcage is a colourful garden of purple and yellow and angry red, and it makes her want to wince in sympathetic pain.

"Ah?" Gintoki glances up at her, then down at his chest. "I got into a fight," he says. "Bastards took me by surprise."

"Careless," Otose says.

"Aa.” Gintoki lifts a needle and begins to thread it, holding it up against the light. Stretching his arms that way, he looks even thinner, and scarily pale. "How long before I need to be at the brat's school?"

"You're not going," Otose informs him. He glances over at her, looking somewhere between surprised and alarmed.

"Oi, oi, of course I'm going, the brat will think I've ditched her otherwise."

"I'm going for you," Otose tells him, as Gintoki lifts an alcohol swab and uses it to sterilise the needle. "You're not going there in your condition, you stupid punk."

"I've done worse," Gintoki says, and pushes the needle through his skin. His teeth sink into his bottom lip and and he scowls, but doesn't hesitate.

He pulls the needle out the other side of the wound, steel stained with a dark crimson, and repositions the needle for a second stitch. His movements are expert and practised, like he's done this a hundred times before.

Otose takes in his too-old eyes and steady hands; she watches him push the needle through red, raw flesh without flinching, and thinks that maybe he has.

"The point," Otose says matter-of-factly, "is that you don't have to."

"Oi, old lady-"

"Take care of yourself for once," Otose says, turning and sweeping out of his apartment. She picks his bloody yukata from the floor on her way out.

-x-

"Old lady?" Kagura asks, as Otose lets herself into the headmaster's office. The headmaster is a tiger Amanto, Otose notes, with intelligent-looking eyes and dark orange fur.

"Gintoki couldn't make it," Otose says.

Kagura folds her arms, kicks the table sulkily. "Stupid Gin-chan."

"He was out on a job," Otose says. "I made him stay at the apartment to clean himself up; he'd have gotten filth all over the office."

"And he works as what, exactly?" The headmaster leans forward, eyes bright and watchful. Otose casts him a dismissive look.

"Odd jobs," she says. "The Yorozuya does anything for the right price."

"Odd jobs?" the headmaster repeats, somewhere between surprise and consideration.

"Gin-chan saves people." Kagura's eyes are made of flames, scowling at the headmaster.

Otose sighs, ruffles Kagura's fire-bright hair. "What have you gotten into now, brat?"

"She knocked her teacher out," the headmaster says. "We do not encourage such shows of violence, even among warrior races."

"She said that you and Gin-chan can't be my family," Kagura says angrily, kicking the headmaster's desk again and taking a chunk out of the wood. The headmaster levels a look at her and she glares right back, blue eyes glittering with fury. "She said that Tama and Catherine shouldn't be on my family tree."

"Why not?"

"There's a bio- bioblock-icle thing."

"Biological families," the headmaster says. "We wanted her to diagram her immediate family, but it appears that she has a father, a mother, and a Gin-chan."

"That's not an issue."

The headmaster dips his head in a nod. "It is not. However, attacking the teacher that attempted to correct her interpretation the assignment is strongly disapproved of."

"Kagura, what did Gintoki say about attacking people?"

"Crush the balls of anyone who tries to take you away from your family!"

"No, the other rule."

"… Don't pick fights with everyone," Kagura mutters, and Otose nods. "But-"

"No buts."

"They were saying Gin-chan wasn't family!" Kagura sets her jaw, balling up little hands. "Gin-chan's family." She lifts her head defiantly, glaring at Otose.

"You don't get to knock your teacher out for that, brat."

Kagura scowls, setting her jaw. Otose sighs and commences diplomatic relations with the principal and manhandles Kagura out of the office before she can demolish the desk in a fit of childish rage.

She still has to snatch Kagura out of the air before the brat breaks the poor Amanto's nose, and she thinks that she's really getting far too old for this.

-x-

“Gin-chan’s hurt?” Kagura’s eyes are very wide.

“He’ll be fine,” Otose assures her. “The idiot just needs to sleep. Don’t punch him in the stomach or anything, brat.”

Kagura bites her lip, nods. Her little hands are balled into white fists by her side.

On impulse, Otose reaches out to ruffle Kagura’s soft hair, and Kagura turns wide blue eyes towards her. “He’ll be fine,” Otose repeats, and Kagura nods, leaning into her side.

Otose really can't blame her for getting so angry. It's not the brat's fault that Gintoki is the closest thing to family she's got.

(On impulse, she and Kagura stop by a little convenience store on the way back. She grabs a pack of cigarettes and four cartons of strawberry milk, and buys Kagura a giant pack of sukonbu that makes the girl laugh with delight.)

-x-

She washes Gintoki's yukata for him, watches reddish water run down the drain. The fabric is sliced apart, trailing threads, and badly stained with dark blood. Everything looks bright and sharp beneath the harsh bathroom light.

"Stupid punk," she mutters, scrubbing at the bloodstain. Red runs down the sides of the white porcelain sink.

-x-

Gintoki is in the bar that night, steady on his feet and mostly managing to conceal his limp. He winces as he settles into the bar seat across from her.

“Oi, old lady, the hell have you been telling the brat, hah?”

Otose raises an eyebrow. “Nothing you shouldn’t have taught her first.”

“She’s been telling me that I need more sleep,” Gintoki says incredulously. “The hell’s that about?”

“Stupid punk, you’ve got a damned hole in your side, and you don’t think you need sleep?”

“It’s no big deal, dammit.” Gintoki scowls, and Otose considers smashing a bottle over his head. Decides against it, because she’s had to wash out enough blood today.

“Do I have to make your four-year-old monitor your bedtime?”

“No! And she’s not mine, damn it!”

Otose snorts. “Face it, punk. She’s yours.” She takes in his pale skin and bone-thin wrist, the dark bags beneath his eyes. Kagura is his, and he's been wearing himself too thin because of it - Otose suspects that he wasn't in the best of shape even before he took her in. She pulls the carton of strawberry milk from the fridge, shoving it at him.

"Drink," she says, interrupting his spluttering protests. "Then go to sleep. I'll bring Kagura to school tomorrow, and keep an eye on her through the day, so get some rest."

Gintoki stares at the strawberry milk, and his lips curl up in a faint smile. "I thought this was a bar for pleasure and drinking?" He takes the carton, though, and takes a long drink. It makes something settle in Otose's chest. "Anyway, old hag, you definitely need your beauty sleep more than I do."

"Are you calling me ugly?" Otose thwaps him on the head with a damp cloth. "Stupid punk, get some rest before I get Tama to knock you out herself."

"I'm fine," he says.

"Of course. But get some rest anyway, I have a job for you tomorrow night, so be rested for it."

"Ah?" Gintoki looks mildly interested. He swipes at his mouth with his sleeve, and stands. "Alright, then. I should be awake in time to pick her up."

It's enough of a concession that Otose doesn't argue, just dips her head in a nod and waves him towards the stairs. He grins lazily, turning to go.

"Thanks," he says, gruff and careless, and Otose smiles.

"Get some rest, punk."

She goes into the apartment to wake Kagura the next morning. The girl's sleeping in Gintoki's room, and it wakes him when Otose comes in; his head comes up, face tired and pale in the predawn light, hair sticking in every direction.

"I've got her," Otose says. He nods, eyes bleary and tired.

Kagura pads across the room, kneeling by his side and giving him a hug. Her face presses briefly against Gintoki's shoulder, small hands curling in his pyjamas; he reaches up to press one hand against her back, the motion so easy and familiar that Otose knows the morning hug to be a routine. She smiles in spite of herself, crossing her arms across her chest.

"Rest well, Gin-chan," Kagura says. Gintoki nods, patting her gently on the back.

"Have fun at school. Don't blow it up."

Kagura smiles at him, sleepy and sweet with it. "Only if you sleep," she chirps, running over to Otose and taking her hand.

Stepping out of the bar, later, Otose shivers at the biting cold, drawing her coat tighter around herself and pulling Kagura's beanie down over her ears. A thought occurs to her, and she says, “It’s Christmas next week, did Gintoki tell you?”

“Christmas?” Kagura blinks, eyes big and blue.

Gintoki is a useless guardian if he can’t even tell his kid about Christmas. This is why Otose has to take Kagura’s education into her own hands. “It’s a human holiday. People give each other presents.”

“Presents!”

“Tell me if the stupid punk doesn’t give you anything, I’ll ban him from the bar for a week.”

Kagura beams. “Thanks, old hag! What’re we giving Gin-chan?”

Otose smiles.

-x-

"You said you had a job for me?" It's the middle of the afternoon and Gintoki is sitting at the bar with Kagura, downing a bowl of rice and a carton of strawberry milk. 

"I forgot to tell you," Otose says, carefully casual, shoving another bowl of rice at him and dishing out another serving of eggs. "Turns out that Tama and Catherine got it done yesterday, and I don't need your help anymore." 

Gintoki's eyebrows furrow, and he looks up at her. Seeing through the lie, probably, but Otose pretends not to notice. "Old hag-" 

"Don't worry about it. You probably had to avoid taking a job or two to make space for it, but you won't lose any income; I'll cut your rent for this month - it was my mistake, after all." 

"You don't have to-" Gintoki stops, stares at her for a long moment. He shakes his head, sighing - "Stupid old hag." 

Otose smiles, and hands him another carton of strawberry milk. "Shut up, stupid punk." 

-x-

"Oi, brat."

"Yeah, Gin-chan?"

"I haven't gotten any calls from your school recently. Have you been skipping class again?"

"No."

"You haven't been plotting to blow up the school, have you?"

Kagura smiles, bright-eyed and sweet and sunny. "No."

Gintoki narrows his eyes. “Brat. Are you lying, huh? Don’t lie to me, I’ve got lie-detector eyes dammit."

“What the hell are lie detector eyes?” Otose demands. Gintoki pointedly ignores her.

Kagura puffs out her cheeks. "How mean, Gin-chan! I've tipped over a new leaf!"

"Turned over a new leaf, you mean.”

"Shut up," Kagura says, crossing her arms. "I've changed."

Gintoki raises an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Yep!" Kagura grins and scampers away.

"That brat is plotting something," Gintoki remarks.

"What, you can't believe that she'd turn over a new leaf?"

Gintoki gives Otose a long look, then sighs like the whole world's turned against him. Otose smiles, and goes back to wiping the counter.

-x-

It snows the next day.

Kagura presses her face against the window and stares with wide wide eyes, and Otose can't find it in her to scold the brat for smudging the glass. Gintoki wraps Kagura up in scarves and coats while the girl fidgets impatiently; throws an old, worn scarf around his neck before standing to go.

"Put on something warmer, dammit," Otose says. Gintoki blinks at what he's got on and shrugs.

"Aa, I couldn't find anything my size," he says, and that's bullshit, he clearly bought Kagura those clothes- they're brand new, all soft fabric and bright colours and warmth, so why-

Otose wonders, suddenly, how much the Yorozuya earns. Odd jobs, to pay for rent and the feeding of one very hungry Yato girl- and how much does that school of Kagura's cost, anyway?

She sighs. "Wait here."

"Oi, old lady, I can't wait- dammit, brat, stop trying to rip my arm off, do you want poor Gin-san to die? We're going, we're going- stay away from my Kintama, dammit-"

The coat Otose throws him catches him across the face. He stumbles backwards, trips over Kagura, and ends up on the floor. "The hell, old lady?"

"Take care of it," Otose says, watching as he paws the old, faded blue coat from his face. She drops a beige scarf onto his lap. "It belonged to my husband."

Gintoki blinks at her, eyes wide, and Otose taps cigarette ashes onto his face. "Put it on, idiot, and take the brat outside before she dies of excitement."

"Yeah, Gin-chan! Put it on so we can go outside!"

"Old hag-"

"Shut up and go. I'll kill you if you get blood on it, punk, so you'd better be careful."

"Alright, alright, dammit, I'm going, I'm going."

-x-

Kagura trashes Gintoki in a snowball fight.

"Dumb punk, this is the first time the brat's seen snow, what the hell is wrong with you?"

"Shut up," Gintoki mutters, trudging in with snow clinging to his coat and scarf and making him look like he was caught in some sort of powder explosion. Kagura is clinging to one mittened hand, bright and beaming and covered in snow and looking like the queen of the entire world, and she looks at Gintoki like he is the galaxy and every single one of her suns and moons and stars.

Otose suspects, from the way he's limping, that Gintoki's opened his wounds again. She also knows from the warmth in his eyes that he does not care.

"Stupid punk," she says, and then she invites them both to an on-the-house dinner to celebrate Kagura's first snowball-fight victory. It's just a bonus that she'll be able to keep an eye on the punk, just in case he keels over.

-x-

Gintoki slips into the bar seat late that night, the coat in his arms.

“Here.” Gintoki holds it out to Otose, so damn carefully despite the careful callousness in his voice. “Thanks, old lady.”

Otose glances at him. “Keep it.”

“What?”

“Are you deaf, you stupid mop head?”

“Oi, oi, old lady, this was your husband’s, you know? You don’t just give that away, what the hell?”

“Why not? He’s not going to wear it, anyway. He'd rather you have it.”

Gintoki stares at her, eyes wide and easily readable if you know where to look. He’s so lost, this too-old teen, so confused, and Otose does not reach out because she knows he will flinch away.

“Keep it,” she repeats, going back to wiping the counter. “It’ll be a pain if you get sick.”

He lowers the coat, still looking so confused. Fists one hand in his worn yukata and scowls. “Thanks, old lady,” he says, and he sounds rough and lost and so damned grateful that Otose has to scoff to hide her stupidly aching heart.

She smiles at him and takes a draw from her cigarette, and he looks away; but that's okay, because she thinks that's a blush rising on his cheeks, pink and uncertain what to do with kindness but happy all the same.

Chapter Text

"Merry Christmas," Otose says, when Gintoki comes into the bar. He stops and stares at her for a moment before wandering over.

"They celebrate Christmas here?" he asks, settling into a bar seat.

"No," Otose says, "but I do. As promised, you don't have to pay this month's rent."

Gintoki hums. "Thanks," he says. He reaches into his gi and pulls out a small, messily-wrapped box, handing it over to her. "I didn't know what to get you."

Otose raises an eyebrow, taking the package into her hands. "So you did know that I celebrate Christmas."

Gintoki snorts. "No, but I do." Parroting Otose's words. She smiles, wrapping her fingers around his present.

"Thank you."

"Haah? You don't even know what's in it, dammit. Aren't you going to open it?"

"Patience, brat. I just need to take a photo of this - your terrible wrapping is enough to make someone go blind-"

"You would know, wouldn't you, old hag? You're half blind already."

"At least my hair hasn't gone white."

"Leave my hair out of this, dammit!"

Otose snorts, tearing open his present. He's given her a new ashtray, and two packets of those cigarettes she likes. She feels her lips curling into a smile, something warm and gentle softening in her chest.

"Don't smoke them near the brat," Gintoki grumbles. He digs a folded piece of drawing block from his gi, hands it to her. "She made you this, by the way."

Don't make a big deal out of his present, he means. Otose smiles and takes the folded card, turning it over in her hands.

"Did she tie the ribbon?"

"I had to help."

"No wonder it's so terribly tied."

"Ungrateful old hag."

"Useless punk." She undoes the ribbon, opens the card to see multicoloured crayon lines and painstakingly coloured drawings, stick figures that Otose thinks are supposed to be her and Kagura and Gintoki under a triangle that's maybe meant to be a roof. There are hearts scribbled all over and dried, pressed flowers lying in the middle of the card.

"The brat wanted navy flowers." Gintoki is watching Otose carefully, something sharp behind his dull eyes. "Couldn't be blue or red or pink or orange or even light blue- had to be navy. She said they were your colour. Do you know how hard it is to find navy flowers, dammit?"

"Then why are there orange ones here, too?"

"We couldn't find enough navy," Gintoki replies. Otose hums, folding the card back gently with the flowers safely inside.

"Have you seen what Kagura got you?"

Gintoki jerks his head up, eyes wide and surprised. "The brat…?"

Otose smiles, taps her cigarette over his head and rains now-cool ashes over his curly hair. "You've got to wait to find out."

-x-

"Old lady!" Kagura dashes into the bar, bright hair and bright eyes and bright yellow nightgown, smile like the sun itself. "Did Gin-chan give you my present?"

"You could have just given it to her yourself," Gintoki scowls. Kagura kicks his barstool.

"I had to do stuff."

"What sort of stuff does a brat like you need to do?"

"Important stuff."

"Like hell."

Kagura sticks her tongue out at Gintoki and clambers into the seat beside him. "Old lady, two cups of hot chocolate!"

"Haah? Who said you could order that, huh, brat?"

"Gin-channnnn, it's Christmas!"

"All right, all right, dammit."

Kagura beams. "Did you like the flowers, old lady? I chose the navy ones, and Gin-chan chose orange!"

"Brat, I didn't-"

"I said navy was your colour, but Gin-chan said orange was better! What do you think?"

Gintoki is scowling at Kagura, shooting wary looks at Otose. Kagura is watching her with brilliant blue eyes. Otose smiles, shrugs.

"I don't know," she says. "I like them both." She flicks a glance at Gintoki, lips twitching into a smile. "Not enough navy, huh, Gintoki?"

"Shut up, old hag. Orange is easier to find, is all. Brat, what's this I hear about you buying me a gift, huh?"

"I didn't buy you anything-"

"Aa, that's alright then-"

"-I won these for you!" Kagura rummages through her huge pockets, comes up with a small messily-wrapped package, eyes big and bright like the summer sky. "That's what I had to do just now! I had to wrap it all up properly!"

Gintoki's eyes have gone wide. "The hell?"

Kagura pulls a card carefully from one pocket, a dog-eared envelope that she tries to uncrease with a scowl. "I made you a card, too!"

"Oi, Kagura, what the hell?"

Kagura looks up, eyes wider than Gintoki's. "You don't like them? You haven't even opened it, Gin-chan!"

"What-"

"I won them in class," she says. Gintoki looks helplessly at Otose and Otose snorts.

"They have quizzes every day, punk. They can win prizes for giving the right answers."

"That's why she-" Gintoki blinks, scowls like maybe he can squint the world into focus. "Brat, you're not supposed to-"

"Gintoki." Otose levels a look at him. "Shut up and open your present."

He sighs, tearing into the wrapping paper. He comes up with two fistfuls of candy, eyes wide, and then Kagura is in his face, beaming, asking if he likes them.

Gintoki reaches out to ruffle her bright hair. His hand is big and calloused and so achingly gentle on Kagura's head. "Aa. These are my favorite sweets."

"Really?!" Kagura's eyes are shining, bright enough to light up the whole sky.

"Yeah." His voice is gruff but so grateful. "Thanks, brat."

Kagura laughs, young and bright as only a child can be, clambering up into his lap. She fits snugly against his chest, safe between his arms.

"Santa brought me meat buns last night," Kagura says, beaming up at Otose. It's so bright that Otose has to smile back. "And Gin-chan gave me five packs of sukonbu!"

"Oh? Are you happy with your presents?"

"Yep!" Kagura grabs her hot chocolate, lifting it to her mouth with both hands and blowing carefully, just like Gintoki taught her.

Gintoki is looking down at Kagura, and she tilts her head back, her hair against his chest, to meet his eyes and beam. His expression only goes blank for half a second before he grins back, eyes so soft and so warm that Otose feels a curl of protectiveness in her chest. Gintoki and Kagura - they're both so young.

"Merry Christmas," Otose says. Kagura grins, showing all her teeth - Gintoki's smile, Otose thinks, and her smile softens to match.

"Merry Christmas!" Kagura parrots. Gintoki looks at Otose, and his eyes are happier, more content than she's ever seen. His voice is rough but so gentle when he says,

"Yeah. Merry Christmas."

-x-

Kagura runs down to the bar alone two days later.

"Gin-chan's sick," Kagura says. She's got a hand fisted in Otose's shirt, grip tight in a way Otose associates with bone-deep fear. "His skin's really hot. And he keeps coughing."

"I thought idiots don't catch colds," Otose mutters, raising an eyebrow. Kagura shrugs.

"Old hag," she says. Her voice is so small. She's trying to hold it careless like Gintoki's, but she's not as good, can't keep her expression as blank or her words as steady. "He says he's fine, but I dunno what to do."

Otose sighs. "He'll be alright." Kagura just tightens her grip on Otose's shirt. "Let me see what's wrong with him, okay?"

Kagura nods, biting her lip. "Okay."

Gintoki's lying in his futon upstairs. Despite Kagura's claims of cluelessness, she must have some idea of what she's meant to do, because he's got a damp cloth on his forehead. He's wearing a mask, too, to keep Kagura from catching the flu.

Otose stands over him and raises an eyebrow. "What have you done to yourself now, punk?"

"Nothing," Gintoki mutters. Otose snorts. She kneels and touches a hand to his forehead, frowning at the heat that warms her palm.

"Your wound?"

Gintoki shakes his head. "It's not infected."

"Must've weakened your immune system." Otose shakes her head. "You dying?"

"I'm not dying, dammit! The hell did the brat tell you?" Gintoki turns to look at Kagura, who sticks her tongue out at him. Her hands are fisted so tight that her knuckles have gone white.

"She told me that you were sick." Otose sighs. "Do you need medicine?"

Gintoki shakes his head. "I'm fine." He reaches out to poke Kagura on the forehead. "I'm fine, idiot. Gin-san doesn't die so easily, remember?"

Kagura whacks him on the arm. "Shut up! You couldn't even stand up properly, stupid Gin-chan!"

"Kagura-chan," Otose says, voice held a careful calm. "Will you go down and get the first-aid kit from Tama?"

"Oi, old lady, I have one under the sink-"

"I want mine, stupid punk." Otose raises an eyebrow and Gintoki wisely falls silent. His eyes, though glassy, gleam like knives. Kagura nods, thumping out of the room, and Otose calls, "Don't run, brat!"

They're silent, for a while after that, listening to Kagura go. Then Otose lifts the cigarette from her mouth and raises an eyebrow at Gintoki.

"What have you done to yourself this time?"

"Nothing," Gintoki grumbles. "It's just a cold."

"That's what you get for having snowball fights with those wounds."

Gintoki snorts. "I'm fine, dammit. Why did you chase the brat out?"

Because she wants to ask him questions that they may not want Kagura to hear the answers to. Because she figured that he might lie for Kagura, but he may be marginally more honest before Otose alone.

"What happened to you, stupid punk." It is not a question.

"Nothing. The brat's been having nightmares, dammit, I haven't gotten much sleep."

Otose wonders if it was really Kagura having the nightmares. She chooses not to say anything about that, lets it slide. She has her suspicions, and those are enough.

"Is she alright?"

"Hah?" Gintoki squints at her. Otose sighs.

"Kagura. Is she alright?"

"Yeah, she's fine. Don't worry so much, old hag."

"Why was she so scared, Gintoki?" Otose narrows her eyes at him, searching for injuries that he neglected to mention, any signs of pain. She comes up with nothing, but Gintoki is a master at ignoring pain. It doesn't mean anything.

Gintoki sighs. "The brat's mother got sick," he says. "Really sick."

"And then she died." Otose's voice is flat. Gintoki nods, and his eyes are so damn tired. Otose feels that same exhaustion weighing on her shoulders, settling in her bones - but Gintoki, Gintoki is seventeen and young, far too young to look that old. She sighs, reaches out and cards her fingers through his tangled hair, just once. "Get some rest, Gintoki. I'll get the brat meals, and I'll bring up some soup later."

He doesn't smile. His eyes slide shut, and she realises how exhausted he must be, seventeen and lost, seventeen with a little girl to look after and an entire planet to mourn (an entire world he could not save). She is suddenly, fiercely grateful that he's got Kagura as an anchor, someone to hold onto and think about, to draw his attention to childish pranks and Christmas candy instead of blood and war.

"Thanks, old lady," he says. "I'll pay you back."

"I'll put it on your tab, so you'd better get well and pay it soon."

"Yeah, yeah." He waves a hand at her, and Otose smiles. She reaches out and pushes his fringe back, adjusting the cloth on his head; he doesn't open his eyes, but his expression goes a little blank with surprise.

Otose pokes him on the forehead, the way he did with Kagura. "Rest well, Gintoki."

His breath huffs out in something like a very tired laugh. "Yeah."

She turns to leave as Kagura's footsteps pound back up the stairs.

-x-

At lunch, Kagura eats her weight in rice, and insists on helping Otose bring Gintoki his soup. Otose eventually hands her a spoon to hold.

Gintoki is awake when they enter, but it's probably the sound of the door that woke him. His eyes are glassy with fever and sleep, and his cheeks are flushed, hot. When he reaches for the spoon, his hand trembles and he frowns at it until it stills. Kagura looks up at Otose with wide, terrified eyes, and Otose drops a reassuring hand on Kagura's head.

"Thanks, old hag." Gintoki's voice is hoarse.

"Kagura carried the spoon," Otose says. He smiles.

"Ah? The brat's growing up helpful."

Kagura beams, and Otose swallows a laugh. Gintoki finishes the soup quickly enough, and Otose brings Kagura down to the bar to let him rest.

"He's not gonna die, right?" Kagura asks, looking up at Otose as they go down the stairs. Otose snorts.

"No," she says. Kagura stares at Otose for a moment more, then nods resolutely.

"Gin-chan doesn't die so easily."

"Of course he doesn't, brat." Otose reaches out to ruffle Kagura's hair. "Don't worry so much."

Two hours later, though, Kagura slips away when Otose isn't looking. She has Tama and Catherine scour the premises while she climbs up the stairs to Gintoki's apartment.

She stops just inside of his room. Gintoki is lying in his futon, giving Otose a tired, exasperated look. Kagura is lying curled-up against his side, her hand fisted in his gi, her head pillowed on Gintoki's outstretched arm.

Otose smiles, something soft and warm in her chest. She turns silently and leaves.

Chapter Text

It's an hour till midnight on New Year's Eve and it's clear that Kagura isn't going to last.

"Oi, brat, just go to bed," Gintoki says, eyeing the girl.

Kagura sways a little and rubs her eyes fiercely. "No," she says, all stubborn determination and balled-up fists. "I wanna greet the New Year with you."

"Brat, it's not all that fun."

"Why do you want to stay up?" Otose asks, and Kagura blinks sleepy eyes at her, mouth opening in a wide yawn.

"I wanna be like Gin-chan," she says. "All the grown-ups stay up like this. I'm gonna grow up big and strong like that, so I gotta practice. Mami said

practice makes perfect, uh-huh!"

"You won't grow up big and strong unless you sleep, brat."

Kagura sets her jaw stubbornly. "No," she says. "You can't make me sleep yet, Gin-chan, you promised to let me stay up."

Gintoki sighs and rubs a hand through his hair. "Can't I just give you your presents now so that you don't pass out?"

A group of Amanto roar with laughter, getting steadily more drunk, and Gintoki side-eyes them, hand edging towards his sword. Kagura had insisted on waiting in the bar till midnight, and Gintoki is (understandably) uneasy about having her so close to drunken patrons again.

Kagura shakes her head fiercely and Gintoki sighs. He really is far too soft.

"Fine," he says. "Two cups of hot chocolate please, old lady."

Otose didn't keep the bar stocked with hot chocolate until Gintoki and Kagura came along. She supposes it's a sign that she is far too soft as well.

Fifteen minutes later and Kagura has fallen asleep, slumped against Gintoki's arm. It's partially Gintoki's fault - he told her to close her eyes for "just five seconds, you don't have to sleep, just rest your eyes", and Kagura is too young to know that it was a trick. When you're that tired, closing your eyes for just five seconds ends in sleep for sure.

"Dirty trick," Otose remarks.

"You do what you must," Gintoki says, drumming the fingers of his free hand on the table. He glances down at Kagura - "Brat's gonna wake with a stiff neck."

"You could just bring her upstairs."

"She'll kill me if I let her sleep past midnight." Kagura's last tantrum had involved chairs being thrown and the wall of the apartment being cracked.

"She's got you wrapped around her little finger," Otose says. Gintoki scowls.

"Shut up, old hag, it's not like you can talk."

"And what does that mean, you idiotic permed brat?"

"Taking in strays all the time, feeding the cats… You're practically wrapped around the finger of every pathetic stray on the planet."

Otose hums, lifting her cigarette between two fingers and exhaling a thin stream of smoke. She would blow it into Gintoki's face, but she doesn't want Kagura to contract lung cancer or something. She says, "Guess you're one of them, punk."

Gintoki's eyebrows furrow; for a moment, he looks like he's been hit hard over the head, trying to squint the world into focus.

He doesn't understand. Otose doesn't feel surprised, just quietly, tiredly resigned.

Then the creases smoothen out and he smiles at her, not happy but not unhappy either, a thin small strange thing. He tosses back the rest of his hot chocolate.

"Guess so," he says. "You should hurry up and get yourself out of this mess."

Otose raises an eyebrow. "I'm not stupid enough to let you go," she says. "Even an idiot like you has to protect his fingers."

Gintoki blinks at her, then smiles that strange smile again; like he's just going through the movements, reacting on cue. "You're really too soft, old hag."

-x-

A few minutes later, an Amanto swaggers over to the counter.

It's huge, taller than Gintoki and twice as bulky, towering over the seated samurai like a tree. The tusks on its furry face curve outwards, sharp hard ivory things, large and threatening.

Gintoki's eyes flick over to the Amanto, cataloguing the sword sheathed by its side and the long tusks on its face, his own expression schooled to a perfect, carefully dead blankness.

He's a damn lot like Jirochou, Otose thinks, and wonders if Gintoki is thinking what Jirochou would have thought - if Gintoki is wondering how hard and at what angle he'd have to kick to snap those too-long tusks in two.

"What've we got here?" The Amanto asks, bending over low to sneer at Gintoki. Gintoki flicks a dismissive look at the creature and lifts his drink to his lips, wary but nonthreatening. "An earth ape with a toy sword?"

"Guess so," Gintoki agrees, setting down his drink. "Oi, oi, didn't your mother ever teach ya manners? Don't come so close to my face - did you brush your teeth today? Gin-san's not interested in ugly guys like you, so-"

The Amanto's eyebrow is twitching, and Otose thinks that Gintoki really shouldn't be aggravating the creature like this with Kagura close by.

Gintoki looks up and for a split second Otose sees dark bloody fury in his eyes, sees fire-red skies and lifeblood spilling onto the ground. For a fraction of a moment he looks furious, itching for a fight, but the look is gone before Otose can blink.

The Shiroyasha, she thinks. It was there, that tightly-leashed anger he's kept from the war, twisting and turning with no way out. The instincts of a soldier (a killer).

And of course, she thinks, of course - he's angry because the Amanto is close, too close, too near. It's in his space - worse, it's in Kagura's space, teeth and claws too near the girl's sleeping figure, and how many people has he watched torn apart by claws just like those? She's seen the looks in his eyes, the way his expression sometimes curls into something grim and empty and blank, and she wonders how many people he's watched die.

"Gintoki," Otose says sharply. He looks over at her, and she levels a stern look back. "No fighting in my bar."

What she really means, what Otose suspects Gintoki knows she really means, is: no murder in my bar.

"Yeah, yeah, I've got it, old lady." The tension droops from Gintoki's shoulders, and he looks something like disappointed, something like relieved. His face goes even more dead, even more blank.

The Amanto grins, sharp and mocking. "Aww, the poor earth ape can't fight," it says, getting right in Gintoki's face. "Good thing your mummy's looking out for you."

"Oi, oi," Gintoki says. "I think you've got the wrong person. I ain't got a family. But at least I brush my teeth." He reaches out and shoves the Amanto's huge head away. "Go away. I'm not in the mood to deal with oversized pigs today."

The Amanto's lips draw back in a furious snarl. "I am no pig."

"Could've fooled me." Gintoki picks up his cup again, lifting it to his mouth, and Otose sees the exact moment the Amanto's fury solidifies into something hard and dark. It leans over towards Kagura and drawls, "What's a little kid doin' here, eh?"

Gintoki is tensing again, going rigid, expression edging towards something sharp and hard - "She's mine." And his eyes cut over to the Amanto, razor-edged and deadly, his hands setting the cup on the counter with deliberate care. "Leave us alone."

His voice has gone low and cold, carefully casual with malice tucked beneath the surface. Otose thinks that this could get ugly very fast.

"That a challenge?" The Amanto leans forward, teeth bared in a sneer. "I'd like to see ya stop me." It reaches out, claws a hair's breath from Kagura's face, and Gintoki's eyes widen - flash a vicious, bloody red.

His hand snaps over to grab the Amanto's arm, faster than Otose can see, and then he's standing and pushing his chair away, repositioning Kagura with his free hand so that her head rests on the counter. The Amanto opens its mouth to roar something, arm curving a dangerous arc towards Gintoki's side-

-and Gintoki slams his boot into its nose with the crunch of breaking bone. There's something nasty in his eyes and a dark look on his face, and his expression is stony-hard as the Amanto falls.

"Don't make so much noise, geez," he says, "you'll wake the brat."

The rest of the patrons in the bar are already rising to their feet, half the Amanto baring their teeth and raising their claws, drunk and ready for a fight. Gintoki stands over the fallen Amanto, hand around the hilt of his bokuto. His eyes are sharp and hard, bloodied weapons all on their own. There is tension drawing the air taut, and a single twitch of a blade, a claw, a tooth, will tear the bar in two.

"If you start a fight in my bar," Otose says, voice reverberating around the room and drawing all eyes to her, "I won't let you set foot in here for the next three years."

An Amanto snarls, "Shut up, you stupid Earth ape," but no one attacks. The Snack Bar is fairly popular, and nobody wants a three-year ban.

Gintoki's eyes are still dark, bloody, threatening - hand still wrapped solidly around the hilt of his wooden sword and muscles coiled tight, ready to strike.

"Gintoki," Otose says, and for a split second he turns that demon's stare on her. There is steel beneath his apathy and fire beneath a dull exterior.

It smoulders away even as he turns towards her, blades sinking back into the murky depths of his eyes.

"Fine," he says, but he doesn't move an inch. Otose sighs.

"All of you," she says, waving a hand at the Amanto, "sit down or get out. Gintoki, get back over here, it's five minutes till midnight."

Gintoki looks over at the Amanto - and, as the creatures reluctantly begin to sit down, he slowly relaxes his grip on the wooden sword. He turns away and Otose feels her shoulders begin to relax as well.

"Oh," he says, low and almost casual; almost like an afterthought, but too chilling to be friendly. He turns his head to look over his shoulder at the Amanto, hand clenching abruptly around his bokuto. His killing intent creeps insidiously into Otose's veins, chilling her blood.

She can't see Gintoki's face, but she watches the colour drain from the Amantos'; watches them shrink away from his fury.

Gintoki says: "Just in case - touch the brat and I'll kill you."

-x-

Gintoki wakes Kagura up and the first thing she does is punch him in the face, sending him sprawling halfway across the bar.

"What the hell, brat!" Gintoki yells. Kagura stands by her seat, fisted hands held up in front of her face and eyes half-shut and bleary. She looks like some sort of drunken martial artist.

Gintoki stands up and steps over towards her, putting a hand on her shoulder as he walks past.

"Come on, brat, we'll greet the new year-" Kagura grabs his wrist and his eyes widen, sliding in horror down to that tiny hand wrapped around his forearm.

"Hoyaaaaaaa!" Kagura screams, as she twists like a top and sends Gintoki flying, screaming, across the bar to crash into the wall. He hits it face-first and the wall collapses on him in a pile of rubble.

"You stupid punk!" Otose shouts, lifting her cigarette from her mouth irritably as cold night wind rushes in to chill her to her bones. "You're fixing that wall tomorrow!"

"What the hell, old lady!" Gintoki yells back, picking himself out of the splintered wood and wincing at his newly acquired bruises. "I nearly died, dammit!"

"This is why I told you to teach her manners!"

"The hell do manners have to do with this?!"

The clock ticks over to twelve - Kagura blinks, once, twice, and her blue eyes widen, turn clear. She looks up at the clock and gasps.

"Gin-chan!" she shrieks, sounding outraged. "You were gonna let me sleep!"

"Oi, brat, I tried to wake you, dammit-" Kagura pounces on Gintoki and Gintoki dissolves into screams.

The bar's patrons, who'd usually still be drinking and toasting to the New Year, begin slinking quietly out of the bar, looking terrified by the violence. Otose, yelling at Kagura to get that stupid perm-head and teach him a lesson, finds herself too busy to care.

-x-

"So? Are you going to tell me what happened yesterday?"

"Haah? That stupid pig was being a bastard, and I was drunk."

Otose raises an eyebrow at him, and Gintoki looks back, near expressionless, holding her gaze for a minute before he lets his shoulders slump with a sigh.

"Dammit," he says, running a hand through his mess of hair. "Sorry, old lady."

"I don't want to hear an apology, I want to know what happened." Gintoki looks away and Otose lets her voice soften. "Are you okay?"

"Haah? Of course I'm okay, that slow bastard didn't put a scratch on me-"

"I'm not talking about that," Otose says, and his mouth snaps shut. He looks down at the table, lacing his fingers together so tightly that his knuckles turn white.

"It's nothing," he says.

Otose raises an eyebrow. Gintoki blows out a breath.

"Really," he says. Hesitates, then says, "It was the new year", like it's a concession. Like giving her that statement of fact is the same as giving ground.

What, Otose wonders, does New Year's Eve mean to him?

"Do you usually start the new year with a fight?"

"Shut up, old hag. I'll have you know I fought with a bastard at the beginning of every year! Our teacher called us the official noisemakers!"

"You shouldn't sound so proud of that!"

The smile on Gintoki's face is something crooked and distant and old. Otose feels her humour fading. She lifts the cigarette from her lips for a deep exhale - "So? What happened to that bastard? We could use him to keep you out of trouble, I'll even give you the title of the official noisemakers if you're good enough."

Gintoki's shoulders go a little more rigid, and the smiles slips off his face like it doesn't belong. His eyes are shadowed, hooded things, ghosts and corpses playing in the tired lines of his face.

"I don't know," he says.

Chapter Text

"They say the Shiroyasha got captured and killed in the last battle," an Amanto says. "And that Runaway Kotarou was killed a while back."

Gintoki, sitting at the bar counter beside Kagura, stills as the Amanto laugh; Otose isn't even sure he's breathing. He has one shaking hand clenched around a glass of sake, and his knuckles have gone white.

"Guess he couldn't run away from death, eh? And the Shiroyasha went to hell where he belongs."

The cup shatters in Gintoki's hand, glass shards cutting into his palm. "Oi," Otose snaps, worry curling in her stomach, biting in her tone.

Gintoki blinks up at her, eyes big and empty and terrifyingly bleak. His face is white, and blank, and it's like he's not there at all.

His irises are the colour of old, cold blood.

"Sakata Gintoki," Otose says, and he doesn't move, like he doesn't recognise his own name, like he's lost somewhere in blood and old fear and war. His breaths are tightly controlled pants, ragged with desperation and fear and loss. "Punk."

He's not moving, not shaking, just staring up at her with those soulless eyes, looking half-dead already and empty, listless and wrecked-inside and gone. He looks so tired, worn down to less than ash and bone.

"Gin-chan?"

Gintoki blinks at Kagura's small voice. He still looks bone-tired and worn out, empty of everything but exhaustion and pain, but maybe that's a flicker of life beneath the blankness.

"Gin-chan," Kagura repeats. She reaches out, touching Gintoki's arm with one tiny hand, blue eyes wide with concern. "Are you okay?"

Gintoki flinches at the touch, and suddenly he's back. That's him in his skin and eyes, seventeen and terrified, still broken wide-open for a split second. He looks down at Kagura, small sweet Kagura who brought him back when no one else could, and blinks once, twice, the blood in his eyes congealing into tired apathy again. He shakes his head, blinking hard like he can shut the horror away.

"Fine," he tells her. Even Kagura can call him out on this lie.

"Your hand," she says, and Gintoki looks down at his bleeding hand like he doesn't recognise it as his. Slowly, mechanically, his shaking fingers uncurl. Glass falls to wood counter, wet with sake and blood.

Otose sighs like she didn't just watch him go blank and empty, reaching out to catch his wrist. He flinches at the touch, still looking uneasy in his skin.

"Punk," Otose says, keeping the sharpness from her voice. If she were to snap at him now, she's not certain if he'd draw his own blades to parry, or if the words would cut him to his bones. "Didn't I tell you to look after yourself?"

Gintoki snorts quietly, watching her pull glass shards from his skin. They glitter like bloody, broken blades.

In the corner, the Amanto roar with laughter, and Gintoki takes a breath.

"Zura wouldn't die so easily," he mutters, like a promise, like a prayer. Otose doesn't know who he's trying to convince. She's not sure he believes it himself, with the shadows in his expression, the scars in his eyes. "Idiot isn't so easy to kill."

"You know him?" Otose asks, tiredly unsurprised. "Runaway Kotarou?"

She wonders if he's the one Gintoki's been waiting for. She hopes that the Amanto are wrong, that Katsura (Zura. The wig. The Nobleman of Fury, of course. Gintoki is the Shiroyasha - Otose hadn't forgotten, but she hadn't really remembered, either) isn't dead.

"Eh, I guess." Gintoki shrugs, shoulders hiked-up and defensive, as if he's trying to shield himself from the Amanto's words. "He's a tenacious idiot."

He's still holding out hope, then. Otose hums, dabbing his bleeding cuts with antiseptic and wrapping his hand with a bandage. Kagura climbs into Gintoki's lap, uncharacteristically silent, curling her fingers in the fabric of his sleeve when he wraps his arm around her.

They stay like that for a good while, Kagura and Otose keeping Gintoki company while he relearns how to breathe.

-x-

Gintoki drinks too much that night, eyes still haunted beneath the apathy, still looking too tired and too old.

He passes out on the counter, flushed cheek pressed against the dark wood, and Otose has Tama bring him upstairs. The next morning, he wanders down after Kagura with dark bags beneath his eyes, flinching at the brightness of the bar lights.

"You look like shit," Catherine remarks. Gintoki just groans, sitting beside Kagura and resting his head on the tabletop. Kagura pokes him with one finger.

"Gin-chan? Are you gonna die?"

"No. And why do you sound happy about me dying, huh? Do you want poor Gin-san to die?"

"If you die I won't have to go to school," Kagura says, pouting a little.

"I thought you liked school." Not true. Otose knows for a fact that Kagura likes plotting to blow up the school, and she tells Gintoki as much.

"Yeah, Gin-chan! Why're you so stupid?"

"Leave poor Gin-san alone, is this all the thanks he gets after working his ass off to feed you?"

"Don't use bad language in front of her, idiot!"

"It's okay," Kagura chirps. "I know a lot of bad words! There's **** and **** and-" Gintoki clamps a hand over her mouth, looking horrified.

"Oi, oi, what sort of things are you saying in public, huh, Kagura?! Where the hell did you even learn those, huh?"

"Didn't you call that bastard with the sword an asshole the other day?" Kagura asks, words muffled by the hand over her mouth. Otose reaches out and swats Gintoki on the head.

"What the hell are you trying to teach her, huh? What's with all this indecency in front of your kid, you stupid perm-head?"

"Shut up, you old hag! I didn't teach her all that! Who the hell would say such things in front of a brat?!"

"Papi used to say them, and the ugly cat lady says a lot of it-" Otose reaches out to throttle Catherine - "What are you teaching the innocent child?" she screeches. Catherine claws at her hands.

"How is that monster girl innocent?!"

"Oi, don't call Kagura a monster just cause there's something wrong with your eyes," Gintoki says, raising his head to send a blurry glare in Catherine's direction.

"Yeah!" Kagura says. "I'm a amazing fighter princess!"

"An," Gintoki corrects.

"An amazing fighter princess!" Kagura declares.

"What the hell is a fighter princess?!" Catherine shrieks.

"You don't know?" Kagura gives her a pitying look - 'how are you so stupid', it reads. Otose thinks it's hilarious. "It's like those fighter airplans-"

"Planes," Gintoki puts in.

"Planes! Those fighter airplanes, except made into princesses!" Kagura pulls out her bag and rummages through it; pulls out a crumpled piece of paper marked by too many pencil lines and dark spots where she pressed the lead in too hard for it to erase clean. There's something that looks like a girl with plane's wings on her back, drawn right in the centre, with a triangle for a dress and lopsided circles for eyes. "These are the wings, and this is her rocket launcher, and this is the jetpack! I'm gonna grow up like this!"

"Oh? What happens if you can't?" Otose asks.

"Then I'll grow up just like Gin-chan!"

Gintoki chokes on his milk and sprays fine white mist into Catherine's face. Catherine screams at him as he slams a fist onto his chest, coughing and spluttering. "Oi, Kagura, what did you just say?"

"If I can't grow up like this," Kagura jabs a finger at her drawing, "Then I'll grow up just like you!" She beams, big and wide. Gintoki's eyebrows furrow, drawing in confusedly.

"What the hell are you going to do? Why the hell would you want to grow up like me?"

"I'm gonna be the Yorozuya with Gin-chan."

"Aren't you already, huh, brat?" Gintoki asks, tracing a bandaged finger over the counter idly.

"When I grow up you'll gimme money," Kagura says, folding up her drawing and slotting it into her bag. "Then I'll buy as much sukonbu as I want and eat ice-cream for dinner every day."

"Oh?" Gintoki's shoulders slump with something like disappointment (something like breathless, aching relief). "It's just about that."

"Of course," Kagura says, shoving her last spoonful of her second bowl of rice into her mouth. "What else would it be about?"

Gintoki looks so relieved, and Otose wants to tell him to stop being stupid, of course that's not it, doesn't he know that every kid wants to grow up to be like their parents?

She sighs instead, shakes her head, and tells Gintoki that they're about to be late; throws a wet tablecloth at his head when he curses, scooping Kagura into his arms and pounding from the bar.

-x-

A few afternoons later, Gintoki walks into the bar with a tiny boy in his arms.

"Oi, old lady, got any hot drinks?" He calls. Under the warm bar lights, his hair is damp and even messier than usual, and the little boy is shivering.

"This is a bar for pleasure and drinking, not for hot chocolate, how many times do I have to tell you?!"

"C'mon, old hag, make an exception just this once. Look, Shinpachi's freezing."

"What did you do to the boy?"

"Why do you assume Gin-san did it? I was the one who saved him, dammit!"

"Oh? And you couldn't be bothered to dry him properly before bringing him out again, so now he might catch pneumonia because of you." Otose raises a disapproving eyebrow at Gintoki.

"That's why I asked you to get hot chocolate, dammit!"

"Why didn't you dry him off first?!"

"We ran out of towels," Gintoki snaps.

"How did you run out of towels? And use one of your shirts to dry him off first, you could at least do that much!"

"Oi, old lady, you've got it wrong. We haven't done the laundry in a month. This is my last set of clothes."

Otose stares at him. He can't be raising a child, someone this irresponsible should not be allowed anywhere near small, impressionable young children - stupidity and laziness might get transmitted via diffusion, and-

-and Kagura has already picked up Gintoki's habit of picking her nose; Kagura has Gintoki's smile and Gintoki's spirit and Otose knows they're screwed; knows, and wants to laugh anyway.

"Get your laundry done by tomorrow," Otose says, "or I'll double your rent for stinking up my apartment."

Gintoki scowls. "This is called the abuse of a client," he tells Shinpachi, "don't grow up like that old hag- all embittered and angry at the world."

"Papa says you should respect your elders," Shinpachi says, shivering, fisting one hand in Gintoki's gi. "And anu-ue says that if you don't do your laundry, a naginata will fly out of nowhere and stab you in the heart."

Otose wishes that for once - she's not even asking for repeats! - just once, Gintoki would bring back someone semi-normal. Little kids who think they'll die by the blade if the laundry isn't done is not her idea of normal, thankyouverymuch.

"Gintoki," she sighs, "get that boy over now before he freezes to death. What happened to him, huh?"

"He got pushed into a river," Gintoki says, ruffling the boy's damp brown hair. "Had to jump in after him."

"I thought you can't swim."

"I can't." Gintoki looks supremely unconcerned, frowning as if this is a minor annoyance instead of a life-threatening factor. Otose has seen him look more upset over a spilled parfait.

She wonders if it's possible to smack his priorities in order.

"So? Did some poor fisherman end up fishing up an idiot instead?"

"Shut up! I managed to grab onto a rock, alright? Geez, poor Gin-san gets no recognition at all." He looks over at the boy, who's eagerly downing his hot chocolate. "Isn't that right, Shinpachi?"

Shinpachi looks up from his drink, blinks, and sneezes.

"Oh, my bad," Gintoki says. "Old lady, you got any towels?"

Otose tosses him a clean hand towel and he catches it neatly, throwing it over Shinpachi's head and scrubbing it through the boy's hair.

"Gin-san, I can do it myself-"

"No way. If I let a brat like you do it, you'll fall sick, and your family will drown poor Gin-san."

"They wouldn't!"

"Stop moving so much!" Gintoki scowls, scrubbing harder. "Geez! You're as bad as Kagura!"

"Ah?" Shinpachi blinks big brown eyes from beneath the towel, protests forgotten. "Who's that?"

"Gintoki's kid. You'll like her," Otose puts in, wondering what Gintoki will do.

"She's not my kid," Gintoki says, exasperated. "She's just a brat I picked up after her mother died." He removes the towel from Shinpachi's head, leaving the boy with hair sticking up at odd angles, almost as messy as his own.

"What happened to her father?" Shinpachi asks.

"Who knows? Kagura says he left for work." Gintoki pokes Shinpachi on the forehead. "When you grow up, don't be a bastard like that. Protect your family. If you wanna be a decent human being, at least do that much."

Shinpachi stares up at Gintoki, eyes big and shining behind his glasses, and Otose can tell that he's taking every word to heart. "Okay! I'll be a great samurai and keep them safe!"

Gintoki ruffles Shinpachi's already messy hair, adding to the chaos, and Shinpachi asks, "Who's your family, Gin-san?"

"Ah? I don't have one."

Shinpachi frowns. "How can you not have a family?"

"They all died or went missing," Gintoki says, smacking the boy's head with the towel. "Geez, you're not supposed to ask questions like that, dammit, haven't you heard of tact?"

"Sorry," Shinpachi says, having the decency to look embarrassed. Whoever taught him clearly instilled more manners in him than Gintoki did Kagura. "I'll be your family, Gin-san," he says earnestly, recovering quickly.

"Oi, don't say things like that so easily, do you know what it means to be part of a family, huh, brat?"

"You look after each other," Shinpachi says. "You protect each other."

"Right. That's part of it, at least. So don't go promising to protect people so easily. You don't know what you'll get into."

Shinpachi frowns. "But-"

"No buts. Don't go trying to make me part of your family when you don't know anything about me, dammit." Gintoki looks down at Shinpachi with his dull eyes; Shinpachi is staring at his lap, looking small and sad and disappointed, very much six years old.

Gintoki sighs. "Okay, okay, fine," he says, caving like the softy he is. "We can be friends, alright?" He reaches out and ruffles Shinpachi's messed-up hair, looking like he regrets it already. "Then when you know more about me you can decide if you still want to be my family."

Shinpachi looks up, smile breaking like dawn on his small face, eyes shining like stars.

"Yes!"

-x-

"Old lady!" Kagura bursts into the bar, eyes bright, insane grin on her face. She really looks a damn lot like the permed idiot.

It's been two hours since Gintoki brought Shinpachi in; an hour since he left to drop Shinpachi off and pick Kagura from school. He always leaves way too early to pick Kagura up, like he thinks the world might end if he's late.

Now, though, he's busy lunging after Kagura, trying to catch her without hurting her or doing anything drastic.

"Kagura, don't you-" He tries to grab her around the stomach and clamp a hand over her mouth, but she dances away.

"I saw Gin-chan during break time today!"

Otose raises an eyebrow. "Gintoki, how did she see you at break time when you were busy drowning in the river?"

"Gin-chan floated past us!" Kagura says cheerfully, clambering onto a barstool. Gintoki has gone red. "He was screaming cause he doesn't know how to swim!"

Otose grins; Kagura is beaming with the force of a thousand suns, with an evil gleam in her eyes and a sharp edge to her grin. She learnt that from Gintoki, Otose is fairly sure - Gintoki, who's gone crimson-cheeked and looks like he's contemplating strangling Kagura.

He won't, of course - he cares about the brat, despite all that nonsense about not having a family. (Not noticing that you have a family is not the same as not having one, dammit)

"What was he saying?" Otose asks, amused. So the Shiroyasha can still look like any other seventeen-year-old on the planet - can still stand in the bar with a red face and glare at Kagura, looking almost exactly his age.

"Old lady-" Gintoki protests, and Kagura twists around in her seat.

"Shut up, Gin-chan, it's rude to interrupt!"

"You little brat-"

Gintoki lunges for Kagura and Kagura jumps off her barstool, sending it clattering to the ground, and while Gintoki chases Kagura around the bar and Catherine yells at them to stop making a ruckus, Otose lights a cigarette and smiles.

Chapter Text

"No, Kagura-chan, not like that- see? The stroke is like this, not like that-" Shinpachi is bent over Kagura's workbook with her, markers spilled across the floor. The two are curled up together in a corner behind the bar counter in a little red and white bundle of cotton and pillows- Shinpachi’s grown quite attached to Gintoki. He seems determined to become part of their little family, or maybe to draw them into his.

"Gintoki," Otose says, "How is it that a seven-year-old is more help with homework than you are?"

"Oi, oi, I helped with the family tree, didn't I?"

"The family tree she nearly got suspended for?"

"That wasn't my fault, dammit." Otose raises an eyebrow and Gintoki scowls. "It was your fault for telling her all that shit about me being her family in the first place. Am I supposed to be her Papi now, haah?"

"You're doing well enough," Otose points out, and Gintoki snorts, looks away.

“Gin-chan always draws the stroke like this,” Kagura argues loudly.

“But the teacher says you’re supposed to do it like this-”

“Gintoki,” Otose says levelly. “Do you know how to write?”

“Um,” Gintoki says, looking away. “O-of course, what sort of stupid question is that?”

Otose stares at him for a moment while the pin drops.

“You don’t know how to write at all, do you?!”

“Of course I do, stupid old hag! It’s just that Gin-san isn’t very good at formal, okay!”

“What sort of useless guardian are you, teaching your brat shitty writing?!”

“She’s not mine, dammit! How many times do I have to tell you, old lady?!”

“Are you blind, you stupid perm-headed idiot? Do you have bad eyesight to match your white hair?!”

“Ahhhh? Have you looked in the mirror recently? Or is your eyesight so bad there’s no point in looking?”

“Shitty punk!”

“Ugly old hag!”

“Are they always like that?” Shinpachi asks Kagura. Otose glances over to see Kagura nodding.

“It’s okay, though! Mami said that if you can fight and still be friends, that means you really like each other, uh-huh!”

Shinpachi tips his head. “Really?”

“Uh-huh! We should try it sometime, pachi! We’ll fight and then stay friends and then we’ll know we really like each other, cuz that’s what family does!”

“Ehh?? But I don’t want to fight you!”

Kagura looks at Shinpachi for a moment. There’s something strange and solemn in her blue eyes - something vulnerable in the curl of her shoulders - when she says, “Never ever?”

Shinpachi nods with steady seriousness. “Never ever.”

Kagura considers him for a moment, then her face breaks out in a grin that’s brighter than the sun. “Okay! Let’s make a promise! We’ll never ever seriously fight each other, and we’ll be family forever!” She holds out a little hand to Shinpachi, pinky extended.

Shinpachi smiles and his eyes are solid, warm, dependable brown- and Otose hopes to the ends of the planet and back that Shinpachi is just as dependable as he looks, that he is just that solid, just that warm.

Because that was a lifelong promise they just made, and Otose knows it like she knows that the sun will rise again. Because Kagura’s a little kid, yes, and she made that promise almost casually, but she’s been taught by Gintoki that promises are forever, and that pinky promises especially should never be broken. She’s stubborn like Gintoki, with a certain ferocity that’s all her own, and she’ll uphold this promise until the end of time.

Otose glances at Gintoki. He’s watching the children carefully, something dark and unreadable in his eyes, face falling into something blank and apathetic.

Then he catches Otose’s look, and turns away.

-x-

The thing about Attis is, practically everyone on it is a refugee.

It’s like the Kabukicho of the galaxy - a hundred times smaller than Earth, it’s less of a planet and more of a tiny star. Full of strays and castoffs, the interplanetary scum collectected on a single planet; a place for criminals trying to escape the law, and refugees of planets engaged in war. Not quite the slums, but lawless, and ugly.

And the town Otose lives in is one of the shittiest on the planet - that’s why Gintoki chose it, she thinks. No official will find him here, not with the utter disorder of the place. And he’d have no problem establishing a place in the pecking order, not with his swordsmanship.

But there’s a certain sort of charm to it. It’s like Kabukicho, familiar, with people eking out a living from nothing but dry dirt and bleeding hands. Plus, when everyone’s worth shit and they know it, there’s no point in discriminating against any single race.

There are pissing contests, yes, and brawls, and certain Amanto have certain grudges against others, or against humans, but it’s not generalised, species-based discrimination. It allows for a certain sort of diversity, Otose supposes, if you ignore the frequent brawls and arguments. There’s a certain sort of equality even in that: bite and get bitten, give and take. Everything’s dependent on your own ability; survival of the fittest. A twisted kind of meritocracy.

Some idiot official classified this as multiculturalism, once upon a time, and established a day of celebration, or some bullshit.

“I gotta bring a Yato dish to school,” Kagura tells Gintoki. “It’s a cul- cull-chair festival!!”

“Cultural,” Shinpachi corrects. Kagura nods.

“What the hell is a Yato dish, haaah? I didn’t see anything like that on your shitty planet; it was lucky if you had food at all.”

“Gin-chaaaan! It’s rice over eggs!”

“How the hell is rice over eggs a cultural dish?!”

Kagura crosses her arms, glaring up at him stubbornly. “It is. And Shinpachi’s is rice balls, so you gotta help us cook, Gin-chan!”

“Haaah? Why don’t you ask the old hag, dammit- and why are you coming to me, huh?” Gintoki swings around to point at Shinpachi. “Go ask your family, dammit!”

Otose throws a rag at Gintoki’s head. “I have a bar to run, punk! Feed your brats yourself!”

“They’re not mine, dammit!”

"Anu-ue and Obi-one can't cook," Shinpachi puts in. "And Papa's busy." He looks nervously up at Gintoki. “Kagura-chan says that you make good rice balls.”

There’s doubt in his expression, and his hands are working anxiously in his shirt. Gintoki looks down at him for a long moment, eyes unreadable and dull.

“Brats,” he mutters, and Otose knows that he knows he’s lost.

-x-

Gintoki’s cooking isn’t half bad. It’s actually good, if Otose is going to be honest.

She swipes another of his rice balls. “Oi, punk, quit doing your stupid odd jobs and be a chef in my bar.”

“Stop stealing Kagura’s food, old hag. What sort of dishonest piece-of-crap adult steals a kid’s lunch?” Despite the fact that he’s munching on a rice ball, too, huh?

“Gin-san’s really good at cooking,” Shinpachi says, completely honest. Amusingly, it’s the genuine, undisguised compliment that makes Gintoki uncomfortable.

“Idiot,” he says, looking away. “From what you tell me, anyone would be good compared to your sister.”

“Pachiiiii,” Kagura whines, tugging at Shinpachi’s sleeve. “I wanna learn to make black eggs, too! Bring boss lady over next time, okay?”

“Why’re you already calling her boss lady?!” Gintoki yells. “Brat, I don’t need you learning to make possessed eggs. I can just buy charcoal from the supermarket.”

Kagura puffs out her cheeks and kicks Gintoki in the shin.

“Ah, Shinpachi! Gimme some of your rice balls!” Kagura grabs Shinpachi’s lunch box as Gintoki hops on one leg, clutching his shin and spewing unintelligible curses. She sets the boxes side by side, kneeling on one of the bar stools, and starts redistributing the food with her chopsticks.

“Ka- Kagura-chan? What are you doing?” Shinpachi stares at her, wide-eyed.

“Brat, stop stealing his food!” Gintoki takes a half-hearted swipe at Kagura’s head. Kagura ducks to avoid it, still transferring food.

“I’m not stealing! I’m giving him some of mine, too!”

“Weren’t you supposed to take food from your own culture? Am I going deaf, haaah?”

“Gin-channnn,” Kagura whines, putting the lids back on and snapping the lunchboxes shut, “Stop being stupid!”

“Brat, you’re a thousand years too early to-”

“Shinpachi and you and the old lady are part of my family,” Kagura continues, and Gintoki goes still. "So I must be part Earthling too! That's why I gotta bring some rice balls!"

“Brat,” Gintoki mutters, looking away, “I’m not-”

But Otose’s old heart has grown bigger and warmer in her chest, and Shinpachi is smiling, eyes soft brown and so bright with joy. "And Kagura-chan's part of my family," he says, voice breathless and delighted with understanding, "and that makes me part Yato."

“That’s not how it works!”

"It is too," Kagura insists, steamrolling right over Gintoki’s arguments. "You just have to learn to use your umbrella right!"

"Oi, brat, have you been teaching Shinpachi how to fight with umbrellas?"

"No, but I should! Gin-chan, you're so smart!"

"No, that wasn't what I meant-"

"Shinpachi! Bring your umbrella next time okay?"

"K- Kagura-chan, I don't think-"

"Bring it!"

"Okay."

Gintoki groans, thumping his head against the counter, but Otose sees the ghost of a grin on his lips, and his eyes look a little less dead.

-x-

And suddenly, there is a bear-dog in the apartment.

“What the hell is that?!” Otose demands. Gintoki is covered in bandages and teeth-marks, but Kagura is cuddling with the monster like it’s giant a soft toy. Her eyes are shining like stars.

“His name is Sadaharu!” Kagura declares. She has her hands fisted in thick white fur, so tiny against the beast. If she leant against it, Otose thinks, they’d lose her under all that fur.

Great one, huh? Well, it’s certainly great in size. And isn’t keeping overgrown dogs around children a safety hazard?

The dog yips happily, baring enormous fangs against Kagura’s throat. Kagura just giggles, cuddling closer; Otose sees Gintoki eying it warily, one mummified hand curling loosely around his bokuto.

At least he’s keeping an eye on it.

“If that thing destroys my apartment,” Otose says, “You’re paying for the damages.”

Later, when Kagura is asleep, Gintoki explains, “The brat’s always wanted a pet. Says she accidentally crushed the last one to death.”

“What’s with that horror story?!”

Gintoki nods. “Right? So I thought that it’d be better to give her an indestructible pet, before I came home to a sea of red.”

“You could just ban her from having pets.”

“Oi, old lady, weren’t you ever young? Little kids always sneak home pets behind their parents’ backs.” Gintoki shrugs, folding his arms. “Anyway, it’s good for brats to have pets, right? It teaches them responsibility and stuff, doesn’t it?”

Otose raises an eyebrow. “The mother always ends up taking care of the pet.”

“Oi, didn’t I tell you that the brat’s mother is dead?”

“Really? I seem to be staring at a pretty fine one.”

“Who are you calling a mother, haaah? Gin-san’s still got a terminal between his legs, ya know!”

A father, then. He doesn’t know what a huge concession he just made, does he?

Otose smiles, and stubs out her cigarette on the counter.

-x-

This is the second time Otose has had idiots dripping water all over her floorboards, but it’s the first that they’ve had a giant furball to haul in what must be half the lake. There’s enough water in the bar to drown a lesser man.

“I just cleaned the floor!” Otose does not shriek. She is far too dignified for that, regardless of what Gintoki complains.

And he does complain. Loudly, and at length. “Shut up, old hag! Do you want us to go deaf, haaah? There are children here, children!” Ironically, Gintoki is so loud that Shinpachi, cradled in his arms, has his hands clamped over his ears.

“You’re just as loud, punk! What the hell are you doing, do you want the brats to catch pneumonia?! And why are you dragging that water trap into my bar?!”

“The stupid dog jumped into the water! And this idiot-” Gintoki raps Shinpachi on the forehead, lightly enough that the boy doesn’t even flinch “-tried to stop it, so he got dragged in. And Kagura thought that they’d drown, so she jumped in after them-”

“Gin-chann, it’s not my fault! You can’t swim!” Kagura, clinging to Gintoki’s back like a tiny red monkey, has some sort of river plant in her hair.

“That’s got nothing to do with the dog, brat! And you can’t swim either!”

Otose can see it now. The dog jumped into the river, dragging Shinpachi with it. Kagura, brave and reckless, followed. And Gintoki, idiot that he is, dove in to help, even though he can’t swim for shit. Presumably, at this point, the dog had to save them all, because there’s no other way three idiots who can’t swim would’ve made it to land.

Otose has the three most foolish humans on the planet freezing in her bar.

Kagura opens her mouth to retort, but sneezes explosively instead. This has the unfortunate effect of startling Sadaharu, who flinches, careening into a table. Apparently the dog’s fur is actually a sponge, because so much water is squeezed from it that Otose thinks she should just call her bar a wading pool and be done with this whole thing.

She is not being paid enough to deal with this.

“Get them in the shower,” Otose orders. “Tama, Catherine, clean this up.”

Catherine shoots a death glare at Gintoki. It’s enough to burn wood, Otose thinks. Which is probably good - maybe it’ll warm those idiots up.

There’s a lull in business about an hour later, so Otose heads upstairs to evaluate the damage to her apartment. With the amount of water they dragged in, she’s surprised that the ceiling hasn’t started to drip.

The apartment is surprisingly quiet. When no one responds the first time she knocks, she raps the door again, and it creaks open.

Gintoki peers at her, hair dried but in absolute chaos, wearing a white yukata with a towel slung around his neck. “Ah, old lady, you’ve learnt to knock.”

“I always knock,” Otose says, affronted.

“You call that hammering knocking? And there was that time you came in when I had my shirt off…”

“You weren’t answering the door,” Otose returns. His floor is surprisingly dry; Gintoki sees her looking, and says, “We spent almost an hour wiping the floor. Had to use a hairdryer on the dog - electricity bill’s gonna go through the roof.”

She stops in the living room, where Kagura and Shinpachi are lying curled against Sadaharu, sharing a blanket. There are cartoons playing on the TV, and empty mugs lying beside them. The children themselves are fast asleep, Kagura’s head in the crook of Shinpachi’s neck and Shinpachi’s head resting on top of hers. Sadaharu lifts his giant head to glance at them as they walk in, then lays it back down, shutting his eyes.

“Old lady.” Gintoki’s voice is quiet; Otose turns to look at him, and he grins, raising a bottle towards her.

“What sort of idiot drinks at noon?” Otose asks. “Give me tea instead.”

She sits on the sofa while Gintoki makes the drinks in the kitchen, watching the cartoon play. It’s some show about a group of penguins trying to fly, building bigger and wilder devices to do so even as the other penguins snicker behind their backs.

Gintoki sets two steaming cups of tea on the table, and moves silently to turn off the TV. He kneels in front of the children, gently pulling the blanket over their shoulders, and touches Sadaharu’s head when the dog turns to look.

The old, squishy couch sinks a little beneath his weight. Gintoki hands Otose her tea, and leans back, propping his feet on the table and sipping from his own steaming drink.

“You work too hard, old lady.” Otose turns to look at him, but Gintoki is looking at the TV, as if there’s something on it other than a black screen. “The bags under your eyes are like black holes.”

Like he’s any better. Otose snorts. “What kind of monster are you comparing me to?”

“The worst monster of all. An ugly old hag, a reminder of the mortality of mankind.” Gintoki sips thoughtfully from his mug. “Want some help in the bar? It won’t come free, though. Rent’s not cheap.”

His rent is very cheap, thank you very much. Otose would know. “Your rent’s the cheapest on this planet. And I don’t need the help of a mop monster to scare away the customers.”

“Aa, you can do it just fine on your own.”

“Shut up, you little punk.” Glancing over, he looks exhausted, but he’s smiling, too, like despite the cold, he’s warm.

They’re a matched pair, aren’t they?

“I heard that there’s some flowers blooming around this time,” Gintoki says, offhand. “Thought I’d bring the brat to see, since it’s a holiday. We’re having a picnic tomorrow - Kagura wants you to come with Tama and Catherine.”

Otose smiles, lifting the mug to her lips. “Oh? That sounds interesting.”

“Shinpachi’s bringing his siblings. Maybe his father, who knows.”

“Alright. I’ve got to shut down the bar for a while, anyway; can’t have patrons seeing the waterlogged floor.”

“Can’t have that,” Gintoki agrees, a grin playing around his lips.

Geez, Otose thinks. It’s cold outside, but this apartment really is warm.

Chapter Text

The field Gintoki brings her to is burning.

It’s orange and glowing, and Otose thinks of candles and fireplace warmth, of fire blazing bright. When she blinks and looks again, she realises that it’s not flames but flowers, growing tall and brilliant and wild. They’re spread out in front of her like a blanket, like a sea, and above them the sky is a perfect, impossible blue.

Kagura cheers, running ahead, her giant hat sitting lopsided on her head. She has one hand wrapped around Shinpachi’s wrist, pulling him forward, and he stumbles behind her, eyes huge and bright. Shinpachi’s sister, Otae, runs beside them, nudging Shinpachi along. Sadaharu barks, diving after them, and the three children dissolve into laughter and shrieks.

A noisy, laughing teenager who calls himself Obi-one chases after them, his light brown hair turning gold beneath the sun.

“Worth the walk?” Gintoki slants a grin at Otose. She snorts, folding her arms across her chest, but there’s a smile spreading across her face all the same.

“It’s not bad.”

Shinpachi’s father laughs, warm and booming. “Not bad at all!”

“See?” Gintoki says, deadpan, slinging an arm around the man. “Tamaguchi gets me!”

“That’s not my name!”

“Ah, sorry, Tamago.”

“How did you even get that?! Where does the ‘Tama’ come from, am I a cat?!”

“Tama is a robot,” Kagura says, reappearing by their sides with a big, beaming smile. “Gin-chan, I’m hungry!”

“Right, right, just give me a few minutes to unpack the food. Mitarashi, come help me-”

“It’s Hisayoshi! What’s with all the food references, you’re hungry too, aren’t you?!”

“Obviously.” Gintoki shakes out a blanket beneath an alien tree with strange, translucent purple leaves. “It was a long walk.”

“You’re talking like an old man, Gintoki.” Otose kneels on the mat to help him unpack their picnic basket.

“You would know.”

Otose smacks him in the head and Hisayoshi snorts, pulling out apple juice and strawberry milk. Like a dog to the hunt, Kagura skids over as soon as the rice makes an appearance, followed closely by Obi one. Behind them, Shinpachi is holding tight to Otae’s hand, and Otose can hear him chattering about how good Gintoki’s rice balls are.

The boy drops down beside his father, grinning huge and kid-bright. Kagura settles beside Gintoki, still talking eagerly with Obi-one, even as Gintoki hands her a sandwich and a pack of sukonbu. Otae ends up beside Otose, somehow, and pours all the children apple juice.

Obi one grins at Otae. “Thanks, Otae-chan!” He produces a flower from the folds of his clothes, tucking it gently behind her ear. “You look real pretty!”

Otae ducks her head, face turning red. Her smile is as bright and warm as the sun.

The wind is cool Otose’s her face. Above her, sunlight filters through the leaves, lending it a lavender tint. By her side, flowers are spreading out like an endless sea of flame. But despite that beauty, Otose only has eyes for the idiots in front of her, stupid and noisy and warm. Gintoki slings an arm around Hisayoshi’s shoulder, leaning in pretend-drunk to whisper something like a secret in his ear, and the man smiles. Hisayoshi has sad eyes, Otose thinks, and too many lines on his old face, but his laugh, when it rings out, is bright. And it grows brighter still, when Shinpachi drops into his lap, biting into a kachik - a fruit native to Attis, brown and hard on the outside but bright pink and juicy when sliced open.

Neon pink juice runs down Shinpachi’s pale arm, staining his sleeve. Hisayoshi curls an arm around Shinpachi’s waist, smiling soft and fond.

“Ah! Shin-chan! You’ve gotten your clothes dirty!” Otae chides. Shinpachi blinks up at her with wide eyes.

“A- anue-ue, would you like a piece?” He asks, offering food as appeasement. Otae opens her mouth to scold more, but she’s cut off by Kagura, who pounces on her from behind, slinging one arm around her neck.

“Boss lady! You gotta try some! It’s almost as good as your eggs!”

“Catch, Otae-chan!” Obi one tosses a kachik at her, and Otae catches it neatly in one hand.

She huffs, but drops by Shinpachi’s side without another word. When she slices it open with a knife and bites into it, pink juice runs down her arm as well.

“Otae-chan! You dirtied your clothes too!” Obi one laughs. Otae finishes off the kachik with a savage bite and hurls its husk at his idiot head.

Kagura giggles, cheering for Otae. Grabbing another sandwich, she drops back against Gintoki, using his side like a backrest. Gintoki wraps an arm absently around her waist, and smiles down at her for a moment - and it’s a little like Hisayoshi’s smile, a father’s smile, soft and fond and warm.

-x-

“I’m surprised that Attis had nice flowers like these,” Otose remarks, when the kids have finished their food and run off to play. Obi one has been dragged along - apparently he’s the only one who knows how to make a decent flower crown, and the children have demanded to learn.

“These flowers aren’t native to Attis.” Gintoki says. “They’re weeds from some other solar system.”

Otose looks out at the fiery plants. “Weeds, huh?”

“Yeah. Some idiot gardener brought them here, planted them in this field. It was a custom, in that planet, to plant flowers when you gave birth to a brat. Dunno why - it seemed pretty dumb.”

“He planted weeds for his brat?” Hisayoshi asks.

“She,” Gintoki corrects absently. “Yeah. She said that it was better for brats to be like weeds, and keep growing even when no one wanted them around.”

“Why here?”

“Her brat was born sick. She did a bunch of shitty things to get money for medicine, got the cops on her trail, and had to run here to get away from them.” He’s silent for a moment, watching Kagura and Shinpachi braid flowers into Sadaharu’s fur. Obi one is sitting on Sadaharu’s giant back, dropping a flower crown onto the dog’s massive head, while Otae pretends to tie up Sadaharu with an impossibly long flower chain. Apparently the flower crown lessons have gone a little off-topic. “She got her brat treatment, though, and left the kid with her husband.” Gintoki’s smiling, maybe at the antics of the children, maybe at telling a story that has something like a happy ending. “Was gone for years; her brat should be Kagura’s age by now. She finally decided it was safe to go back - did some laser surgery, changed her face, forged some papers, and caught a ship back just before Christmas. Easy.”

“Oh? And how did you meet her?”

“Some asshole stole her ticket, and she couldn’t afford another one so soon. She wanted to be back by Christmas.”

A happy ending, Otose thinks, or close enough. It sits warm and unfamiliar in her stomach, a smile tugging at her lips.

It grows warmer still when Kagura and Shinpachi and Otae dart over with matching grins, and, as one, set flower crowns on Gintoki, Hisayoshi, and Otose’s heads. (For a girl with as much brute strength as Otae displayed, her little hands are surprisingly gentle on Otose’s head.) Obi one stands behind them like some sort of proud captain, still laughing, his grin as wide and warm as Gintoki’s own smile. He must be a decent enough teacher, even if his lesson had been derailed; when Otose touches her fingers to the crown on her head, it holds well.

“We should take a picture!” Kagura declares. None of them have a camera - Otose left her polaroid at the bar, and they don’t even own a shitty Earth cellphone, let alone those shiny, high-tech Amanto communication devices with high-res cameras installed - but Obi one indulges her by making a rectangle with his forefingers and thumbs.

“Smile! Remember our dojo’s rule - laugh like your lives depend on it!” Obi one tells them, and they do, making the most ridiculous faces as force out laughter, until they’re laughing for real, just looking at the stupid expressions on each others’ faces. Obi one says, click! in a ridiculous imitation of a camera, and it doesn’t matter that the picture isn’t tangible or real - Otose is certain that she’ll remember this, or at least the most important bits of it, until the end of time.

The important bits: Laughter brighter than sunlight in the air. The smiles on Gintoki’s and Hisayoshi’s faces, like two fathers, happy and proud.

The way that, when Otose looks closely at the flowers in Gintoki’s hair, she recognises them.

Otose had been curious about the flowers on Kagura’s Christmas card, had researched them on days where business was slow. Kagura had chosen navy flowers - native to Attis, Otose had learnt, flowers that bloom in in the very darkest of storms. Gintoki had chosen orange ones - easier to find, he’d said - but no matter how much Otose had searched, she hadn't been able to find a mention of them on the local database.

No wonder - if they were from offplanet, of course no one would have logged them onto the local database. And with the planet’s shitty connection the universal network, Otose hadn't been able to do a proper interplanetary search.

But here they are. Weeds, Gintoki had called them, and Otose might be inclined to take offense, but she likes what they stand for.

Weeds, the lot of them, growing where they’re not wanted. Living even when no one wants them around. Burning bright, like fire, like a public disturbance.

The important bits, Otose thinks, of Earth. Or close enough that it counts, anyway, and Otose takes a spiteful kind of pride in the knowledge that, try as the Amanto might, humans are still here. Weeds, and she likes it - that no matter how useless they might be, no matter how unwanted, how pointless, how struggling, humans are still alive.

They are still alive.

And, weeds though these flowers may be, they are bright enough to set a whole field alight. Bright enough to glow like crowns of fire in Shinpachi and Otae’s dark hair, and make three children laugh with all the warmth of the very sun. They aren't as useless as people think.

Otose left her cigarettes back in the bar; but there’s contentment curling in her lungs, warmth sitting in her throat, and just for now, she doesn’t need them at all.

-x-

They’re walking through the forest, back towards the town. The children are crowded onto Sadaharu’s back, the regular, even rhythm of the dog’s step lulling them to sleep. Obi one is settled behind them, sacked-out, but his arms are curled around them like steel bars; like, even fast asleep, he knows well enough not to let them fall.

Around them, the trees have grown taller than the Edo’s trees ever did, the canopy far, far above their heads. Light filters through blue-green leaves, lending everything a strange, ethereal air. It’s like they’re underwater, with the occasional beam of light streaming weakly between leaves, turning everything it touches to gold.

“Thank you,” Hisayoshi says, voice quiet and rough. He isn’t looking at Gintoki, but the words are directed at him all the same. “I haven’t seen them so happy since we left the Earth.” He casts a glance at the sleeping children. Sprawled quiet and calm on Sadaharu’s back, they look like faerie children from a fantasy tale, as much a part of this forest as the reddish grass growing beneath Otose’s feet.

“Oh?”

“I think they miss their home. They lived in that dojo since they were born. Leaving our home and our planet was like leaving part of our soul.”

Gintoki is silent for a moment. “Maybe it was like that for you, old man,” he says, eventually, “But they look plenty happy here to me. Kids are adaptable; it’s not so easy to take away their souls.”

“You didn’t see how sad they were, when we had to leave.”

“That’s life, though.” Gintoki glances up at the canopy, stretching turquoise and endless above their heads. “You’re always sad, when you have to leave. But you don’t lose your soul - not as long as you have your important things with you. And their important things were always right there.” His eyes flick over to Hisayoshi.

Hisayoshi looks at him for a long moment, and smiles. There are still weathered, exhausted lines on his face, but for a moment, he looks a lot less old. “Thank you,” he says. “You are very wise, for a boy.”

“Oi, Gin-san is a man, dammit.”

Otose or Hisayoshi might have retorted, but they exit the forest just then, stepping out from beneath the trees; and above them, the sky is burning with the light of the setting sun, red and orange and gold.

“You know,” Hisayoshi says, voice quiet. “I always wanted, once again, to see the clear Edo sky. But I suppose that this is close enough.”

Gintoki smiles, silver hair turned bronze beneath the lights of the sky. Not gold, not quite, but close enough; and better still is the peace on his face - not tired, not worn, simply happy.

And for just this moment, it’s more than enough.

Chapter Text

A month later, Kagura is trying to teach Shinpachi how to fight.

“No!” Kagura spins in a blinding roundhouse kick, slamming Shinpachi’s umbrella out of his hands and straight into an early grave. “You gotta go like this, see-”

Otose doesn’t see what this is, because she’s too busy glaring at Gintoki. “Punk,” she grits out, “my bar is starting to look like a graveyard.”

Gintoki traces lazy eyes over the destruction his brats have caused; defenseless, ordinary umbrellas are not designed for Yato tactics, and it shows. Otose’s bar has broken umbrellas sticking from shattered wood in a shitty imitation of a mass grave.

Shinpachi has not broken a single umbrella. Kagura seems to take this as a personal offense.

“What do you want me to do about it, haah? Kids will be kids.”

“They’re your brats!”

“Oi, oi, both of them are on loan. Gin-san’s gonna return them real soon, you know-”

“On loan?! I’m gonna put this on your tab, you perm-headed idiot!”

“Haaaah?! I’m telling you, go charge their actual parents, stop extorting the babysitter!”

Otose is about to shoot a retort back when Shinpachi starts to cry. Gintoki’s head snaps up towards him; he sighs, but he shoves himself off the barstool and meanders over to Shinpachi’s side.

“Pachi,” Kagura is saying, eyes big and wide and blue. “Don’t cry! Remember what boss lady and your dad and Obi-one say, you gotta smile-”

Gintoki reaches down and scoops them both effortlessly into the crooks of his arms. Kagura turns to cling to him, automatically curling one hand into the fabric of his gi, her eyes still stuck on Shinpachi. Shinpachi just balls his hands into fists and scrubs at his eyes, sniffling hard.

“Brat.” Gintoki bounces Kagura in his arm. “What did you do to him, haaah? Did you hit him on the head? How many of his bones did you break?”

“I didn’t!”

“Why’s he crying, then?”

“I dunno, I just said he’s never gonna be a proper Yato like that, he’s gotta earn his place-”

Shinpachi sniffs loudly. “I don’t want to fight like a Yato,” he says, and his voice shudders on the words, wet and thick with tears. “I want to be a samurai, like my father and Obi-wan. But everyone says there’s no place for samurai anymore.”

And they’re right, Otose thinks. They’re right. There is no place for samurai anymore, no place for people. Their home planet is ruined and the whole universe is speculating on how long it’ll take for the last remnants of their species to die out. And Otose would feel sorry for him, this little samurai boy with the entire galaxy against him, so lost and afraid, but...

Kagura blinks at him. “So?”

Shinpachi lifts his head, eyes huge and wet.

“Gin-chan’s a samurai, an’ there’s always a place for him, ‘cuz I’m here. The old lady and I make a place for him. You can be a samurai too, we’ll make a place for you. We’ll be the Yorozuya together, yep yep!” She grins wide, that stupid smile that Gintoki taught her, but it doesn’t look half bad, set beneath her blazing eyes. “The Yato are different, cuz to be a proper Yato you gotta earn your place. But it doesn’t matter what you are, yes? We’ll make a place for you.”

We’ll make a place for you. It’s that easy, isn’t it? Gintoki has a family, because Kagura made a place for him. Gintoki has a home because they are there. And so does Shinpachi, and Sadaharu, and Otose and Catherine and Tama and Hisayoshi and every other stray they’ve slammed into on their wavering way.

Kagura grins. She’s stubborn, but she knows when to be kind. She knows well enough that sometimes you have to stop fighting to help someone else up.

She sticks her hand out to seal the deal. “You’ll always have a place with us,” she promises. “So c’mon! Gin-chan says the most important promises are pinky promises, uh-huh!”

Shinpachi blinks at her, and threads his pinky through hers.

His smile is like the sunlight breaking through the clouds.

-x-

A week later, Kagura borrows Otose’s camera.

“Shinpachi,” she says. “Smile!”

Shinpachi looks up and is assaulted by the camera’s too-bright flash. He reels backwards as the camera spits out the photograph; “My eyeeeees!”

“What was that for?” Otose asks, though she already knows.

“I gotta add Pachi to my family tree in school,” Kagura says, leaving the picture face-flat on the counter so that it can develop.

“Brat,” Gintoki complains. “You’d better not get suspended. Your school’s cheaper than trying to feed you all day - at least it’s the school’s responsibility to provide snacks during snacktime. Think of it as a buffet, a buffet. Gin-san’s about to go broke, feeding you and that dog.”

“Do you want to come over for dinner?” Shinpachi asks.

Gintoki narrows his eyes at him. “Who’s cooking?”

Shinpachi’s eyes slide away. “My father,” he says, and he’s sweating.

“Liar!” Gintoki yells. “It’s your sister, isn’t it? You traitor-”

“You can’t make me eat it all by myself!” Shinpachi wails. “Obi one and father have classes, so they’re definitely gonna take the food to class and throw it away!”

“Then learn from them, brat! It’s about time you learnt some stealth!”

“She’ll kill me if she finds out!”

“Then don’t let her find out, idiot! You’ll die if you eat it anyway!”

They’re still bickering as they leave the bar for their next job, and Otose snorts as they go.

She doesn't say, take care of yourselves, stupid brats.

Doesn't say, I need you idiots to be safe.

Doesn't think the words need to be spoken for them to know.

-x-

Later, she wonders briefly if she should maybe regret her silence. Doesn't.

Things would have gone bad either way. What would've been the point of adding to their pain?

-x-

This is how it goes wrong: It's late afternoon, and the city is washed grey with winter, and in the distance, someone screams.

And Otose goes cold.

The sound is knife-sharp and desperate, plunging into Otose’s heart, and she’s running before she even thinks of it, before the air has rushed back into her suddenly-empty lungs. She’s running even though screams are common on this shitty, cruel little planet, even though she is too old to run, even though her knees ache and her lungs hurt, because that scream was a name and Otose’s heart is spilling blood down into the endless pit where her stomach used to be.

She knows that voice. She knows that name.

(Kagura’s young voice, rising into the air like a wounded thing, bleeding and screaming and twisted around the handle of a blade-

-“Shinpachiiiiii!”)

And they were just in her bar a few hours ago, just laughing and joking and complaining and alive, still healthy and well, so how, how, how? Except she knows how, she does. She knows how easy it is for everything to go wrong.

She runs until her lungs burn, until her bones ache, until she feels like she will run forever and not find them, until-

-until she’s in the mouth of an alley, breathing hard, staring wide-eyed at three idiots and five doomed Amanto.

Kagura is kneeling over Shinpachi, eyes wide and wet, her face a mess of tears and red hair sticking to her cheeks like blood. Her hands are dark with near-black blood, and Shinpachi is so small on the concrete ground, his gi plastered against a bleeding stomach, his face a corpse’s white.

He’s breathing, she sees, but his breaths are shallow and ragged. There is so much blood on the floor and on his clothes that Otose can barely breathe. Kagura’s shaking fingers are tangled in a long strip of fabric cut from Gintoki’s gi, pressing hard into the wound, and for once Shinpachi isn’t crying, but Kagura is, and the reversal is somehow worse.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair, they are both so young.

Otose wishes, suddenly, painfully, that Shinpachi had been able to break her bar’s floor even once. That he’d been able to fight like this, like Kagura said, that he’d been able to shatter at least one umbrella. That he’d been able to turn her bar into a shitty graveyard because she’d rather that than see him in a grave. It feels like a cosmic joke. It feels like a personal offense.

The air is cold even for winter, and breathing hurts. Otose is inhaling sharp chips of ice; they cut into her lungs and leave her tasting blood.

Her eyes slide over to the source of the chill, the ragged heart of the bloody storm. The Shiroyasha is standing in front of the children, impossibly dark and fever-cold. The demon’s face is a terrible thing: hollow eyes in a blood-black face, the grave hungry for bones. His lips curl away from white teeth that gleam like blades in the dim light.

Otose inhales, exhales, lets the ice sluice through her veins and goes cold with it, goes calm. She knows this demon; she knows his name. He will not be the one to take her.

“Gintoki,” she says.

He does not look at her; he keeps his eyes on his prey, the five amanto who do not know yet that they are dead.

His voice is a low, terrible calm. “Old lady.”

The amanto are frozen, pinned by his gaze.

“Stop wasting time,” Otose tells him, folding her arms and leaning against a building’s brick wall. “Hurry up and take out the trash.”

“Take the brats. Shinpachi…” His voice cuts off, sliced to pieces on his teeth. “He can be treated.”

Like she’d ever walk away, like she’d ever leave him or anyone looking like this - stripped raw and aching, cut down to the bloody bone.

“Take him yourself, Gintoki. I’m an old lady.”

“I thought,” he murmurs, “you told me to stop wasting time.”

“That’s right.” Otose raises an eyebrow, though he does not see it. “So make it fast.”

“The brats-”

“Are stronger than you think. Didn’t you say that?”

His breath is white in the frozen air. She can’t tell if the noise is a word or an exhale. “Aa.”

Then he moves, and the world explodes.

He’s more devastating with the bokuto than an actual sword; she’s seen him with a real weapon, moving quicksilver-fast and deadly, killing before his opponents have time to feel the pain. But the blunt wood of the bokuto crushes rather than cuts, and the smooth flow of his fight is gone, warped into a terrible relentless strength.

He smashes into the amanto like a wave crashing against the shore. Wood rams into soft throats, cracking jugular and bone, and the force of the hits slams the amanto into the ground, shattering concrete. The floor cracks with a sound like the earth is breaking, and his expression is a feral thing, hungry and bleak, blood in steel-cut eyes, iron between sharp teeth.

He is a typhoon; he is a storm. His bokuto slams straight through an amanto’s gut and he follows through with the strike, driving in with all of his weight and pinning the amanto against a wall, his shoulder against its chest, bokuto buried to the hilt in its stomach.

It’s over as soon as it came. Blood is spilling across the icy ground, tinting piles of slush red and pink. A frozen tableau: a demon surrounded by bodies, and red the only colour in a grey world.

Gintoki isn’t breathing hard; the amanto aren’t breathing at all.

A heartbeat, two. Gintoki exhales in a long white cloud, and he pulls away, dragging his bokuto with him. The amanto slides gracelessly down the wall, leaving a long smear of blood down grey concrete.

Gintoki studies his bokuto with hard eyes, following the wet slide of blood all down the wood. He kneels, wiping it down on the amanto’s shirt and tucking it into his obi.

Then he’s rising on his feet, moving with fluid grace to the kids’ sides. He gets on his knees beside Kagura, head bowed so that his hair obscures his face.

“Gin-chan,” Kagura says, and her voice is worried and scared and small. “Shinpachi…”

Gintoki raises one hand as if to rest it on her head; freezes with it hovering over her hair. His fingers are dark with sticky blood.

He drops his hand.

“Pachi,” Kagura says. “Wake up. Pachi-”

Gintoki works his hands beneath Shinpachi’s still body, lifting the boy easily and curling him against his chest.

“Idiot.” His voice is low and rough. “He’s part of your family, right? He’s part Yato. Do Yato die of something as small as this?”

Kagura stares as Gintoki rises to his feet, his head still bowed protectively over Shinpachi. Then she shakes her head, scrambling upright and swiping at her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

“No way,” she says, sounding steady again, and fierce with it. “We’re the strongest, uh-huh!”

Gintoki starts on his path towards Otose, striding past her without catching her eye. She steps up beside him, matching his pace.

“Aa. So stop crying, brat.”

“I’m not crying, stupid Gin-chan!”

“Haah? So what’s that water on your face, huh?”

“It’s snow, uh-huh! You were so slow I started falling asleep, so I needed to use snow to stay awake!”

“Who’re you calling slow, dammit?”

Otose glances sideways at Gintoki’s face. Despite his words, his tone is flat and dull, and his expression is blank, is tired, is dead.

All around them, the world is a little bit grey.

Chapter Text

“He’s fine,” Otose says, standing in the hospital corridor.

Gintoki is sitting hunched-over in a plastic chair, bloody hands dangling over his knees. His gi is stained with dark blood, drying stiff and crackly. Kagura is curled sleeping in the chair beside him, her head resting on his leg and tucked securely beneath the line of his arm. She is small and motionless with a terrible, bone-deep exhaustion.

The white fluorescent lights are too bright above them, too harsh. It makes the blood on their skin stand out too darkly against the sanitised halls.

It makes them look like they’re being eaten alive.

“Obviously. I told you, didn’t I?” Gintoki tips his head back to look at her; his eyes are dull and apathetic, like he couldn’t care less.

He doesn’t say, I thought he would die. He doesn’t look like he thought it, even for a second; except that he does. He looks emptied-out and bled-dry, like the blood on his clothes would be far easier to bear if it were his own.

He doesn’t say, I thought he would die. He doesn’t need to. Otose has watched her fair share of fights; Otose knows that moment when the blade cuts open someone you love and your own heart is cut open in your chest - that moment where you’re not sure if your husband, brother, family, friend, is going to take his next breath and you wish, you wish it had been you instead. She knows the look Gintoki wears because she’s worn it before, she’s lived it before, when you stare down at bloody hands and wish that the blood were your own. When you think, I almost lost him. I almost-

And the thought chokes you like a garotte wire, bleeding out of your throat without ever becoming words.

She raises a cigarette to her lips. Gintoki’s eyes slide down to his hands. “What sort of person smokes in a hospital?”

“You think anyone here actually cares?”

“Keep it away from the brat.”

“Like I need you to tell me, punk.” She breathes out a mouthful of smoke; stubs out the cigarette. He’s right, damn him. He’s right. Not in front of Kagura. Not today.

Gintoki's eyes are bleak.

“You saved them. You made it in time.”

He doesn’t reply. Footsteps ricochet down the hallway, too loud in the silence. Running steps, and they both know whose they are before Otae bursts around the corner and launches herself towards them.

“Shin-chan!” Her voice is so loud, so desperate, so raw. Gintoki rises to his feet, sliding Kagura’s head gently from his lap. His own head is tipped down, his hair falling to hide his face. Otose wonders if that’s why he keeps his stupid fringe so long. “What happened to Shin-chan?!”

Otose is so, so glad that Kagura sleeps like the dead.

Gintoki exhales in a sigh, forced out of him like even his lungs are too heavy for him to hold up.

“He’s going to be fine,” Otose tells her, before he can say a word.

Otae’s eyes are wide and wet, shining beneath the lights. She turns to Gintoki, snaps, “How could you let him get hurt?!”

Gintoki face is hidden in shadow. “Aa. It was my bad.”

Otae bares her teeth, hands fisted by her sides, but suddenly the anger is gone and she just looks...

She looks lost.

Obi one laughs, rounding the corner with Hisayoshi behind him.

“That’s not fair,” he says, and grins so wide and relaxed that Otose wants to relax, too. “Otae-chan, stop worrying so much- Shin-boy’s strong, ain’t he? He cries a lot, but he ain’t gonna cave.”

Hisayoshi smiles, a calm, gentle thing. His eyes are serious but soft, flicking over the bloodstains on Gintoki’s gi, his hands. “Looks like you did your fair share of work.”

Gintoki raises his eyes to meet his. He is a dark creature in the overbright light, shadows hanging over his eyes, blood clotting his clothes stiff. “My bad,” he repeats.

“He will be fine,” Hisayoshi says, glancing at Shinpachi’s room. He strides forward, clapping one calloused hand on Gintoki’s shoulder. Gintoki doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move. His gaze is dull and dead on Hisayoshi’s. “You did what you could. Thank you for saving him.”

“Oi, I think you’ve got it wrong. Clean out your ears, old man - don’t you know it was my fault in the first place?”

Hisayoshi just looks at him. “You did what you could.”

“As if you’d know that.”

“I know.” Hisayoshi’s hand tightens on his shoulder. His gaze is very steady. “I know.”

Gintoki looks at him for a long moment. “You’re an idiot, you know that, old man?”

“Who the hell are you calling old, brat?”

Turning away, Gintoki dips his head and hides his stupid, empty expression behind his stupid, too-long hair. He raises a hand in farewell.

“Aa,” he says. “I’ve got another job to do. Old lady, keep an eye on the brat, won’t you?”

“No way,” she replies. “Come back and look after her yourself.”

-x-

So he comes back.

It’s not until he walks into her bar at four in the morning with blood soaking through his gi that she realises: she wasn’t sure he would.

“Gintoki,” she says.

“Oi, oi, is this some sort of parental inquisition?” Gintoki asks, standing motionless and cut-open in the bar like an open wound. His voice is very flat. Otose cannot see his expression beneath his stupid, blood-matted hair.

Hisayoshi, sitting at the bar counter with Otose, tosses an damp cloth at him. Gintoki catches it without raising his head, red fingers curling around white rag.

“Yes,” Hisayoshi says, grinning a steelier version of Obi one’s too-wide grin. “You’re grounded, young man.”

Gintoki rubs at his face with the cloth. “Aa, shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t you old folks be in bed by now?”

Hisayoshi laughs, warm and almost paternal. “Now, now, we’re not the ones staying up late, partying, doing drugs, losing our heads-”

“Oi, old man, are you sleep talking? My head’s still attached.”

Hisayoshi asks, still smiling, “Are theirs?”

Gintoki tosses the rag back onto the counter. It’s covered in red blood and black grime. “Mostly.”

“Gintoki,” Otose says.

“I didn’t kill them, old lady.” He rolls his head back, massaging his neck with one hand. His face is pale beneath the grime and the bar lights; the skin on his cheek has been shredded off, like someone grabbed him by the back of his head and dragged his face across asphalt. Otose thinks of the careless way he scrubbed at his face with that rag and wonders how he could care so little.

He glances at Hisayoshi and his eyes are utterly dead. “Any complaints, old man?”

“Yes,” Hisayoshi says aimably. “I know that you’re a teenager and you think that you can do whatever you want-” Gintoki snorts flatly; Hisayoshi’s grin widens - “But growing boys like yourself shouldn’t be staying out so late fooling around.”

“Oi, oi,” Gintoki says. “If you want them dead, do it yourself. Old fogies, always foisting the work on young people and then accusing them of fooling around-”

“How did you even get to that?!” Otose demands. Hisayoshi laughs.

“Listen here, young man-”

“Alright, alright, stop your nagging.” Gintoki starts towards the stairs. “The brat sleep alright?”

“She went to the Shimura house,” Otose says. “She’s very angry, Gintoki.”

He stops. “Oh?”

“You left without her. She wanted in on the action, too.”

Gintoki makes a sound that, with a thousand times more energy and exasperation, could maybe pass as a harrumph. “Little kids always want to do things like the grown-ups. It’s only when they become adults themselves that they miss the golden days of their youths.”

“Oh?” Otose raises an eyebrow. “Then perhaps you should stop acting like an adult yourself.”

Gintoki smiles at her - a flat, blank thing. “Aren’t parents supposed to be the ones telling kids to grow up?”

“Nope,” Hisayoshi says. “We’re the old fogies telling children to enjoy their youths.”

“Go home and tell that to your actual kids, then, old man.” Gintoki starts up the stairs. “Gin-san’s being a good boy and going to bed.”

“Gintoki.” Hisayoshi’s smiling, but there’s something very still and serious behind his voice. “It’s alright.”

Gintoki pauses.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he tells Hisayoshi, his voice a monotone. He disappears up the stairs before they can say anything else.

Hisayoshi sighs. “Boys, right?” he asks Otose.

Otose pours him more drink. “Are you his father now?”

Hisayoshi raises an eyebrow. “Would that make you his mother?”

“Sorry, my husband was much more attractive than you.”

Hisayoshi laughs. “My wife was the most beautiful lady you’ve ever seen,” he says, with a determinedly cheerful sort of nostalgia. “Otae takes after her, you know. Looks, personality, cooking…” He drops his fist into his palm, as if he’s just thought of a great idea. “If either of you would like to come by our dojo sometime, we’d be happy to part with some of her food.”

Otose leans back against the bar counter and lighting a cigarette. “I’m not planning on parting with my life any time soon,” she informs him, “but I’m sure that Gintoki would love to join you for lunch tomorrow.” She feels absurdly like a mother arranging a playdate for her child.

“Anytime,” Hisayoshi says cheerfully. “The sooner the better. The more often the better. There’s always plenty of Otae’s specialty black eggs to go around!”

-x-

The next morning, Kagura storms into the bar and up the stairs. Otose nods good morning at her and polishes the sake glasses as she listens to the ensuing screaming, crashing, banging on the walls. Otose thinks that this may be the first time she's seen Kagura actually angry at Gintoki - sure, the girl had had her childish tantrums, and a certain amount of well-justified doneness with Gintoki's bullshit, but this is the first time that Otose has seen real rage blazing in those blue eyes.

She begins shelving the glasses as Kagura shrieks, “Why didn’t you take me along?!”

To which Gintoki responds, very maturely, “Brat, you were in such a deep sleep that I thought you were dead! Gin-san was all ready to make you a grave, here!”

“You are just lazy, yes?!”

“Who are you calling lazy, coma-sleep girl?”

“I’ll put you in a coma, you stupid perm-head!”

By the time they come downstairs, they're both in frazzled, unkept states that suggest that Kagura and Gintoki did a lot of hair-pulling and clothes-yanking respectively. Otose raises an eyebrow at them.

“Did you break my walls?”

“Gin-chan started it!” Kagura shouts, which means yes. Otose is going to make the two of them repair their apartment themselves, because Gintoki certainly cannot afford the price of fixing it.

“Oi, brat, I wasn’t the one who started beating on me-”

Kagura rounds on him, and there’s something glittering sharp and bitter in her eyes and voice when she shouts, “Why didn’t you ask me to come?!”

Gintoki looks away. His eyes are very tired.

He says, “Don’t go thinking that it was your job. There was no reason for you to have been a part of it.”

“I let him get hurt!” Kagura’s hands are fisted tight. Her lips have peeled back from her bared teeth, and she’s bowed her head, hiding her eyes. Otose thinks, not for the first time, that she and Gintoki really are too alike. “I let him-”

Gintoki sighs, putting a hand on her head. “Brat, that wasn’t your job.”

“It was!” Kagura throws back her head to look at him, and the expression on her face is too old for her round cheeks and big eyes, all desperation and fury and gritted white teeth. “I should have blocked that guy - I let him get past me -”

“Brat -”

“You taught me that I gotta take responsibility, yes?” Her eyes are skies in fractured ice, shattering apart. “You taught me that I have to protect my friends. Why won’t you let me take responsibility for this?”

Gintoki looks at her and he looks terribly old. “You should have been able to let the adult handle it.”

“But you cannot always be there to protect me, yes?”

“I was there, brat.”

“And who was there to protect you?!”

Gintoki looks up, expression a bored apathetic blank. “I’m not like your family. You don’t need to be watching out for me all the time.”

“But then you guys will slip away!”

The hurting, jagged edge in Kagura’s voice sends Otose’s stomach into a low swoop of pain. The girl’s expression is pulled wide-open, sharp with furious hurt.

This is a child who was left, Otose thinks. This is a child who, according to Gintoki, was the thin scared stitch trying to hold a breaking family together; who tore in two when her open wound of a home finally split apart.

Gintoki says, “Who’s leaving, huh?”

“Shinpachi -”

“He’s still here, isn’t he?” Gintoki asks, and his voice is gruff but painfully gentle. “We're not going anywhere.”

Kagura looks up at him, face tear-sticky and still hurting, but the bleeding gash in her expression has closed up just a little.

“Kids like you don’t need to try so hard, you know,” Gintoki says. “We’re all still here.”

“You were almost gone.” Kagura scrubs the back of her hand across her eyes. “Pachi almost - and when I woke up you were -”

“Almost means that it didn’t happen."

Kagura shakes her head - like a you don't get it, but also like she's shaking off her hurt and fear and grief. When she looks up, there’s something fierce and bedrock-steady in her eyes. “Next time, I’ll be strong enough to hold on to everything, so that you can’t go no matter how far away you want to be.”

“Uh, that’s starting to sound like a real scary hostage situation.”

“And then I’ll grow super-strong laser beam eyes,” Kagura continues, ignoring Gintoki completely, “so that if you even think of going, I’ll kill you with my extra-beautiful looks -”

“I don’t think your beauty is going to be the thing that kills me!”

“You just don’t appreciate my special attacks,” Kagura says, striking a pose as if her eyes aren’t still swollen and a little red. Otose marvels a little - hurts a little - at the way she's learnt to shove away pain and push straight through her problems; to fight sadness with stupid jokes and smiles.

“What is this, some stupid action manga?!" demands Kagura's no-good teacher-father-older-brother-idiot-thing. "Special attacks don’t happen in real life, you know. Look at Sadaharu - he’s the biggest dog I’ve ever seen and all he has going for him are just an extra-big appetite and giant pieces of crap -”

“He just hasn’t released his true potential! The mikos who we helped last week called him special, yes?”

“Special in the head, probably -”

“Don’t badmouth Sadaharu!” Kagura howls, jumping up to kick him in the face. Gintoki falls onto the bar floor, shouting all the way down, and Otose smiles, because she thinks that they’re all maybe going to be okay.

#

Around lunchtime, Obi-one runs into the bar and up the stairs. From where Otose stands at the bar, rubbing grainy eyes and scooping rice into her bowl, she can hear Gintoki squawking and the boy yelling.

Good, she thinks, smiling a little as Tama slides a - perfectly edible - egg onto Otose's rice. Kagura left for Shinpachi’s house earlier, but Gintoki begged out on account of a lack of sleep and, more importantly, a strong disinclination to be in attendance while Otae taught Kagura how to make possessed eggs. It all sounded very logical and displayed a sense of self-preservation highly uncharacteristic of Gintoki, but Otose had looked at the bags beneath his eyes and the slight hunch of his shoulders - at the bandage taped across the ragged ruin of his cheek - and thought that this wasn’t about logic or self-preservation at all.

Knowing the stupid boy, it was about self-recrimination; it was about guilt. And Otose understands that, too - can see how a failure to protect someone might hurt after he’s fought a war and failed to protect a whole planet already - but that doesn’t mean she’ll condone it in her bar.

Obi-one drags Gintoki down the stairs, talking about about how "Shin-boy's been asking for you, and the two girls made you eggs - Kagura-chan found a way to give them some extra kick--”

“What the hell is extra kick?! What sort of demonic thing did they even make?!”

“It’s definitely out of this solar system!”

“My soul will be out of this solar system soon if I eat something like that!”

“You don’t know until you try -”

“I don’t want to try!”

“- and anyway Shin-boy and Otae-chan’s father is going to beat you into the floor if you don't get over there in the next - oops, we're already late, sorry, I got distracted by an ice-cream shop on the way, look, I bought Otae-chan Haagen Dazs -"

"I'm gonna get killed either way, aren't I?! And how the hell did you get ahold of Haagen Dazs when the Earth has already been destroyed?!"

Despite all his protests, Gintoki’s letting himself be pulled along, barely putting up a fight. There is something that’s not quite relief in the edges of his eyes, something he’s not letting himself feel.

It’s not quite relief, Otose thinks, but it wants to be.

“Feel free to use him as a punching bag,” she calls, careless and offhand. “He’s a week late on his rent. You might as well collect the interest.”

“Roger that!” Obi one flashes her a bright, sharp smile and a thumbs-up. It's not just for the offer - there's a complicit sort of camaraderie in the action, fierce and warm and I’ll take it from here.

One day Gintoki will really have to open his eyes and learn that he’s like a damn magnet. The rest of them, they’ve got spines made of steel, and there’s not a single one of them who could unstick themselves from his sides; not a single one of them who would.

“Oi! I told you I’d pay in a couple of days, shitty old hag -”

“Watch you damn mouth, punk!”

“Like yours is any better!”

When Gintoki gets back that evening, he has Shinpachi on his back - "Don't even think of walking, brat, what'll poor Gin-san do if you drop dead?" - and the boy is plastered with bandages but also a beaming grin that Otose thinks could stop a lesser woman’s heart. Kagura is sitting on Gintoki’s shoulder because "It's no fair that he gets piggyback and I don't, Gin-chan!", and -

- and Gintoki’s still not letting that emotion in his eyes bloom into relief, but when he slides into the barseat that night, his expression is lazy and unbrittle at the edges, and he orders strawberry milk instead of sake.

Otose slides it to him, even though this a bar for pleasure and drinking, even though she vowed that she wouldn’t stock up on strawberry milk again until he paid his rent and possibly his tab.

His lips curl up at the edges, calloused fingers curling around the plastic box.

“Thanks, old hag,” he says. She doesn’t have to look at him to know that he’s not just talking about the milk.

Otose snorts. “You’re paying for it, punk.”

She thinks about the warmth in the bar - the newfound laughter and love and life, the way everything feels a little more full in ways that nothing has since Tatsugorou died. She thinks about Gintoki screaming and complaining and hustling Kagura out of the apartment for school, about birthday parties and picnics in fields of flowers that burned like a hundred million suns.

Otose isn't just talking about the milk, either.

Gintoki tilts a smile at her and downs the box.

-x-

And that should be it. That should be all the miracle they get - the calm before the storm, the gasping breath of a drowning man, before a riptide drags him under. It’s a shitty planet, and a shitty world, and people die every day, and there is no room for miracles in this unyielding ice.

That’s the way they live. One step forward, two steps back.

But Gintoki… Gintoki is a magnet. And they all, every single one of them, have steel in them; in their hearts and spines and eyes.

And so there is this:

A travelling monk stops by her bar one day.

At least, that's what he claims to be, but Otose isn't an idiot and she can see the shape of a sword beneath his lumpy robes. He’s not trying to hide it. Not quite.

It’s terribly reminiscent of the night she met Gintoki; the same wide-brimmed hat pulled low over the eyes, the same battle-weary tension in the shoulders, the same fluid stride. The only thing he's missing is the child dogging his steps.

It is way past midnight and far too late. The patrons in the bar are drunk or passed-out and Otose wonders if all hunted swordsmen think the same way; if they plan their visits for times when no one will notice they’ve arrived. When they can be dismissed as ghosts, apparitions, things from half-forgotten memory made faded and indistinct by the haze of sake.

“You look like you’ve come a long way,” Otose says, as he slides into a seat at the counter. For all of his grace, there is something exhausted in the hunch of his shoulders, bled-dry and worn.

“Perhaps I have.” The man rests his palm on the counter. His fingers are long and calloused; they belong to a swordsman’s hand. “I have been… searching for some people." There's something rough and tired beneath the smooth baritone of his voice. "I have been searching for a long time.”

“Oh?” Otose raises an eyebrow.

“Three men. Not together, I think. One rather short, with green eyes and an angry face. One with curly hair and blue eyes and a weak stomach. And the last with white hair like an old man’s, though he has the mind of a child.”

White hair like an old man’s. Silver, he calls it, but, but, but-

“And what,” Otose asks, carefully casual, “Would be your business with those men?”

“They are my friends.” Otose would dismiss the claim as unlikely - that’s an easy enough lie for any person to tell - but on the counter, the man's fingers curl briefly, helplessly, with the words, in something halfway to a prayer. “I would like to know if they are safe.”

She wonders if she should call Gintoki. She looks down at the man; there’s steel in his spine, but it’s chipped, and worn. Not breaking, not yet, but - there is something there that aches.

And then it doesn’t matter, anyway, because Gintoki is standing on the stairs like the idiot that he is, always with the worst possible time and yet impossibly good time, always exactly where he needs to be, even if it cuts him down to his bones -

- and right now, he looks cut. He looks like something’s torn straight through his marrow. He’s frozen, like he’s got ice under his skin; his breaths are shallow and barely there, half-dead things buried beneath snow. His eyes are wide and desperate and suddenly filled with a painful, terrible hope.

And his voice doesn’t crack, but it sounds like it wants to, fracturing beneath the burden of something hammered together from a wish and a plea and a prayer.

“Zura?”

The fake monk does not move. For that pleading, empty second, Otose thinks that his heart might not even beat. And then one hand pushes back his hat, and his strong swordsman’s fingers are shaking, and -

- with his face uncovered, Otose can see that he’s not a man at all. A boy, with long raven hair and brown eyes. The moment is at once beautiful and terrible, a knife lancing an infected wound, two boys staring at each other and dying a thousand deaths before they each take a mirroring breath.

The swordsman-boy grins, sharp and delighted, and there is a thank you in his voice, not shaking only because it is too heavy to shiver, the weight behind it too tired and cold and worn, like a frozen man handed a small, bright flame.

“Gintoki.”

Gintoki inhales, a drowning man breaking the water’s surface, gulping in a lungful of air.

Then he throws himself off the stairs and kicks the boy in the face.

The boy hits the floor and skids, the barstool clattering across the wood. The bar's patrons are too inebriated to react.

"What the hell took you so long, you bastard?” Gintoki has his hands fisted by his sides, and everything about him is shaking. His lips pull back from his teeth, and his voice is furious, but his eyes - “I thought you were dead, dammit!”

- there is something breaking in his eyes, wide-open and shining and wet and raw like dawn opening across the sky.

The boy pushes himself up on one arm. The movement is smooth and graceful, but his hand is shaking against the wood boards. When he tilts his head up, there is something gleeful and achingly relieved behind the primness that Otose can already see is a mask.

"It is significantly harder to find one man in a galaxy than you seem to think, Gintoki.”

"You know me.” There is something tight and broken in Gintoki’s voice, blood or warmth or tangled, twisted relief caught in his throat. "You know the places I'd go, you stupid, stupid bastard."

"There were things that I needed to settle, and you could have searched for me -" Something probing and soft in those words - you could have searched for me - and everything in Gintoki goes tighter.

"I couldn't search, you stupid bastard!” he snaps, a furious wretched heat spilling out to speak unvoiced words - I couldn’t search. I couldn’t search, but I wanted to. More than anything in the world, I wanted to. “And don't give me your damned excuses! You could have popped by; Gin-san almost wasted money making you a damned grave -"

"Aren't you the one making excuses? What do you mean you couldn't search? You know something like that would not be sufficient to kill me."

"That's why I was waiting, you bastard!" Gintoki's voice rises too sharp, too loud - it sounds like it grates against something inside of him, something a lot like bone.

“I’m sorry.”

The boy dips his head in apology. Something drains out of Gintoki - and Otose has seen him cut to his core, has seen hope and happiness bleeding out of him like lifeblood spilling to the dirt, but this is not that. This is poison draining from a deadly wound, ragged edges left sore and bloody but capable, now, of healing.

That’s all any of them have ever needed, really. That vague possibility - that small, unkillable hope.

"You’re still such an idiot, huh, Zura?” Gintoki asks, and offers the boy a hand. The boy takes it - gripping tight, too tight, like neither of them could ever bear to let go - and Gintoki hauls him to his feet.

"It's not Zura," the boy says. He grins, standing firm, the steel in his spine suddenly, impossibly, made whole. Unbreakable, this boy, with his sharp grin and molten eyes. "It's Katsura."