Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Takasugi had no idea how things ended up like this. How could he? If anyone deserved to be hogtied from the ceiling like a half-naked piñata, it should be Gintoki—not him.

Naturally, once he got out of this, his first order of business was clear: kill Gintoki. Then go after the Tendoushu. He was certain that silver-haired bastard was behind all of this. Somewhere in his gut, he knew Gintoki had something to do with this humiliation.

Everything should’ve gone according to plan. His disguise was foolproof. Hijikata hadn’t even glanced twice at him. The hired decoy was supposed to throw Gintoki off. But no. He underestimated just how chaotic Edo could be.

It all unraveled thanks to a mob of children and their relentless lust for free balloons. They tore his costume apart like a pack of feral dogs. And just as he was about to slip away, that damned bespectacled ninja woman—foaming at the mouth and muttering about “her dear Gin-san”—cornered him in broad daylight.

Now here he was: hogtied, dangling from the ceiling beams of some random room, stripped to his underwear, with a pair of someone else’s worn panties flopped humiliatingly over his head.

If the Kiheitai ever found out—if Makoto found out—he might just take the honorable way out.

How had he let it come to this? He was the man who brought a nation to its knees. One of the Four Heavenly Kings. Leader of the Kiheitai.

Was this what Gintoki and Katsura did in their spare time? Was this what “home” meant to them? Ridiculous slapstick rituals and public humiliation?

He scowled at the four women standing before him, but the glare held no weight. Not while he was trussed up like an undignified offering and practically in his undies.

“So,” he asked coolly, “what is it you want?”

The women exchanged glances, whispering conspiratorially, until the blonde with the scar finally stepped forward.

“We’re looking for Gintoki,” she said sharply. “And we want to know why you’re in Edo.”

Takasugi smirked. Of course he wasn’t going to tell them the truth. But he could bend it.

“My reasons are none of your concern,” he said smoothly. “As for Gintoki… last I saw him, we parted ways before entering Edo.”

Not a lie, really. More like a strategic omission. He’d split from Gintoki to keep him out of the incoming storm.

The women looked at each other again. Eyepatch’s cheeks flushed with rage.

“Should we put him through the belt?” she muttered angrily. She hadn’t stopped glaring. Her eye burned with rage as they landed on his head. “When are you giving those back?!”

Takasugi blinked, then looked up with slow, smug amusement. “These?” He wiggled his head, making the panties bounce slightly. “If you want them, let me go. Deal?”

“You’re seriously trying to negotiate with panties on your head?” Eyepatch deadpanned. “Otae-chan, he really thinks he has leverage.”

“Shh. Don’t be mean, Kyu-chan,” Otae said gently. “He’s probably still recovering from the shock of losing his final boss status.”

Takasugi’s smirk strained. A vein twitched visibly in his forehead.

“She’s right,” the scarred woman added flatly. “Takasugi-san, you have no room to bargain. Remove the panties, and maybe we’ll consider cutting you down.”

Final boss status lost? What the hell had Gintoki been telling them? Were they all idiots?

They must be. Idiocy seemed to orbit Gintoki like satellites

“I’ll keep these panties for as long as I’m tied up,” he declared, defiant, smirking again through the shame.

“Oi! Just because you’re not the final boss anymore doesn’t mean you get to become a pervert!” the scarred woman snapped.

“I’m not a pervert!” Takasugi shot back, voice cracking as he twisted in his bindings. That title belonged to Sakamoto and Takechi, not him. But the more he struggled, the tighter the ropes bit into his limbs—Sarutobi’s handiwork was terrifyingly precise.

He paused. Looked down.

And felt his stomach drop.

They weren’t looking at him with fear. Or awe. Or even anger.

They pitied him.

Twelve years of building his image... ruined in one afternoon.

Tied up. In his underwear. Wearing panties on his head.

This was it. This was how the infamous Takasugi Shinsuke lost everything.

All because of Gintoki.

He’s going to fix this, Takasugi thought grimly. The silver-haired idiot got me into this—he’s getting me out.

He looked up at Otae and forced a charming, lazy smile.

“Otae-chan, he’s looking at you!” Kyu-chan shrieked, flinging herself in front of Otae. “If you plan to violate her with your eyes, then violate me!”

Takasugi blinked. “What? I’m not trying to—”

“Pervert!” the scarred woman growled. “How dare you threaten Tae-san!”

“The only one who should be violated is me!” Sarutobi screamed, “—and by Gin-san! So just tell me where my beloved is!”

Takasugi stared. Were they serious? All of them?

This is real, he realized. This is really happening.

And then, inspiration struck.

He tilted his head with feigned concern, voice smooth. “…I thought Tae Shimura was the love of his life. Last I heard, he was shopping for a wedding ring.”

Silence.

All four women froze.

Perfect.

Let Gintoki dig his way out of this one.

Takasugi smiled. He may have fallen from grace… but he wasn’t going down alone.

Chapter Text

Otae stared at the man who once terrorized the nation.

Shinsuke Takasugi—once the dreaded instigator of civil war, the mastermind behind the assassination of the late shogun Shigeshige, the name whispered with trembling reverence in both rebel camps and Bakufu offices—now dangled before her like a dollar-store piñata. He hung awkwardly in midair, suspended horizontally like some tragic roast pig, worn panties stretched proudly across his forehead, blood trickling from his nose, and not a shred of dignity in sight. Courtesy, of course, to her sadomasochistic ninja friend and an industrial-strength rope harness.

This… wasn’t how she imagined meeting the infamous Takasugi.

She’d pictured something dramatic. An ambush in the night. A blade to her throat. A piercing glare. Something that screamed “final boss.”

But this? This was just a headache in pants or rather underwear. Honestly, it looked like he had lost a bet to a drunken monkey and the monkey was still somewhere laughing.

Was this truly the elusive leader of the Kiheitai? The walking threat that almost brought down the Shinsengumi? Because it had taken her and the girls less than an hour—to track him down, subdue him, and strap him into this humiliation simulator. Maybe once, before Rakuyou, before Utsuro ripped his spotlight away, before his legend got filed under “mid-boss,” he had been terrifying. But now?

Now he was just a very loud, very confused man in bondage, with Kyuubei’s underwear on his head.

Otae sighed.

She remembered the stories. The rumors that circled like smoke.

Takasugi—the devil in the dark, the chaos engine who tried to pull Gengai into an assassination plot. The one behind that near-fatal clash where Gin-san returned bleeding and silent, not once, not twice, but thrice. The first two were done by his lackeys, but Gintoki told her Takasugi was the one behind the final one.

Shinpachi and Kagura never said much about it, but the way they tensed whenever Benizakura or Takasugi was mentioned said everything. What made her fear Takasugi before all this was how Kagura and Shinpachi talked about him, in voices that always fell to a hush, like speaking his name too loudly would summon something ancient and wrathful. Like a god fallen from the sky, now dragging his broken halo through blood and fire.

“Aneue, I never saw such hatred from a man,” Shinpachi once whispered after waking up from a nightmare, “he cut down Elizabeth-san like it was nothing and smiled when he was cut by Katsura-san. There’s something about that man...something wrong”

Tae had just hugged him tighter, her fingers brushing through his sleep-messed hair, silently blaming herself for letting him go into that kind of danger. He was her kid brother, but more than that—he was still soft, still not used to seeing what war makes of people. And Takasugi wasn’t war anymore—he was what came after. An amalgamation of pure rage.

Kagura was even more straightforward, in her usual, jarring honesty.

“Anego,” she said one day as they sat in their home enjoying a ladies day to themselves, legs swinging beneath her chair, “why does Gin-chan know him?”

She didn’t mean it like an accusation. She meant it like a child asking why her father had once been friends with a monster.

“That Takasugi—I saw anger in him. The same kind as my baka Aniki had. That hunger to destroy everything because they can’t destroy what’s inside.”

Tae had no answer for her. Just silence. She looked at Kagura, still so young in so many ways, and hated that she even had the vocabulary to recognize that kind of darkness.

“That man is terrifying,” Kagura said simply, eyes shadowed.

Later that night when Tae and Kagura were watching the stars together.

“Anego,” she asked again while picking pieces of meat from her bento box, “why does Gin-chan still look at the stars like he’s waiting for someone?”

Tae said nothing.

Kagura didn’t let it go. “That Takasugi,” she mumbled, Tae didn’t say anything, “—he had Gin-chan’s heart, huh? Not like in a kissy way—okay maybe a little kissy—but like he owned part of him. And now it’s broken.”

She feared Takasugi not just because of what he’d done—but because of what he represented. He wasn’t just Gin-san’s past—he was a wound that never healed, a song Gin-san never stopped humming under his breath.

Tae never wanted this man in her life—not now, not ever. Sometimes she looked over her shoulder, thinking he’d appear behind her, smirking that sadistic smile. A smile that meant he knew things she didn’t. Things about Gin that Gin himself refused to share. And Tae hated that. Hated that someone else had once held a piece of him that tightly.

She feared him because she knew Gintoki. And if Gintoki was once close to this man, then what kind of abyss had Takasugi crawled out from?

When she learned he was the reason why Shigeshige died—and that god-awful Nobunobu was appointed in his place—she hated him with all her heart.

But she also knew she couldn’t voice those things around Gin-san. Because he... he cared for him.

She remembered when Shinpachi returned to her home with a bloodied Gintoki, and as she patched him up, he whispered that name—Takasugi—in anguish. He didn’t cry, didn’t even shake. But the way he held Gintoki’s unconscious hand like it was the last thread holding them all together told her enough.She never brought that up when he awoke because she knew one thing that Gin-san hated was bringing up or asking about the past and Tae respected that. But she watched. She listened.

Gin-san, if awake, only ever muttered about him when drunk. Sometimes with Katsura-san and Sakamoto-san as they got drinks at times at Snack Smile. When she served them, she sometimes heard tales of their time from the war. She often forgot that these three idiots were veterans, hardened by tragedy and loss, beneath their ridiculous antics and bizarre conversations.

“Ahahahaha, remember Kintoki when I found you and Takasugi inside the closet together and he was on top of—” Sakamoto was elbowed by Gintoki before he could finish his sentence.

“How many times do I have to tell you, I was the one on top of him!” Gintoki barked.

“That’s your problem,” Katsura mumbled over his sake.

Then the veterans argued about semantics and debts and whose fault it was that they all got cheated when they went to the red light district. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that Takasugi had cheated them out of 10,000 yen during a mission involving food.

Tae leaned against the seats, arms crossed, pretending not to listen too closely. But then the jokes got quieter.

Sakamoto took a long drink and muttered, “Still weird not hearing him laugh with us.”

Katsura only nodded. “Even if he betrayed everything… he was one of us.”

For once, Gin-san was silent.

Later that night, Tae found Gin-san on her porch, lying across the engawa, head resting in her lap.

He hadn’t said anything when she joined him. He just reached up, gently tugged on her sleeve like a child asking for comfort, and she knelt down beside him, letting his head rest there, tangled silver hair against her thighs.

“I can still hear him laughing,” he said quietly. “Like a damn ghost every time we drink.”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” she whispered.

“I don’t want to forget,” he murmured.

A pause.

“I just want to stop the bleeding when I remember.”

She threaded her fingers through his hair, slow and rhythmic.

“You’re not bleeding,” she said, bending down just enough to press a gentle kiss to his forehead. “Not anymore. You made it back.”

He blinked slowly. Something in him unwound, just a little.

“Maybe,” he said, voice hoarse. “But sometimes I wonder if the part that made it back isn’t me.”

Tae’s heart ached. She could handle the jokes, the mess, the debts—but this?

This wounded, grieving man who carried dead friends and lost dreams like armor?

She could only stay.

And maybe that was enough.