Chapter Text
the aftermath
Sougo supposes it started during the party at Snack Smile.
Now that the chaos was over and done with, it hits him finally, that after two years, everything was back to normal, or as normal as it could ever be in Kabuki-cho. It had been two years, and no one had changed. He expected that they would all just go back to the same old, same old, and he was glad for it, or at the very least content.
But then China had rested her elbow on his shoulder, without a care, the movement so natural that he didn’t even register it at first. He supposes he might have something to do with it. If he hadn’t stood so closely to her, then she wouldn’t have so impertinently turned him into an elbow rest.
He expected the insults, something about how he was only meant to be a footrest for her, so it surprises him when none come. Instead she’s laughing and grinning, as if everything was right and everything was back in its place. He thinks as always; she lets her guard down too much. It wasn’t even a few hours ago that they’d been in a serious fight. But maybe this is on him too, because despite his leg remembering the trauma she can wrought (it still aches from time to time), somehow or the other he finds himself gravitating toward her in the first place.
He gives it a moment or two, because it’s not as if he hates the sensation of her skin, the warmth that he feels through his jacket. He just finds it…odd. Because in the past she’d always shy away from being near him except when they fought. She’d make exaggerated disgusted faces, befitting for a brat like her as if moaning about cooties or something. Inside, he’d scoff. If anyone should worry about infectious alien diseases, it should be him. The only contact they’d make, the only time their fingers would interlace as if in a parody of a lover’s hold, was when they fought. Their weapons were their pen and paper, while violence was their language, so this almost peaceful contact, while it doesn’t disgust him, he has to admit, at least in the privacy of his mind, unnerves him.
Because he is who he is, self-sabotaging sadist extraordinaire, and because she is her, still so easily riled-up despite slightly maturing, he moves away so that she ends up unbalanced (despite knowing that he could have done something much worse, like forcefully bash her to the ground, the slight is almost innocent). Even he feels contentment and doesn’t want to ruin the general air of peace. And yet, he wants to see the fire in her eyes. He wants their routine, some hint that nothing really has changed.
She stares him down with vitriol and he matches her with a pout. Despite that the most important things haven’t changed, he notes with slight surprise, that some have. He notes that her blue eyes are closer this time around as compared to before when he could so easily look down on her. Although he’s gotten taller, he frowns to himself because he does have to admit that it’s not by much. In contrast, it’s as if the weed in front of him has suddenly shot up.
He knows from their fight that she’s gotten stronger. He also can’t help but notice earlier that her hair had gotten longer. When before, as in when she’d puked her guts all over a perfectly good barbecue, it had been a rat’s nest, the slight glimpse he’d had of it earlier showed that her hair now swayed loosely with the wind, like a silk waterfall of fire. Sougo winces. He thinks he’ll also have to barf or commit seppuku for such disgusting words to cross his mind.
Of course she’d gotten taller, what with her legs getting longer as well. End of the world or no, it was pretty hard to ignore when she wore a dress with such high slits. He thinks he’ll have to arrest her for public indecency. What on earth was Danna doing, allowing her to go out like that?
Routine is something that Sougo is familiar with. He was a simple creature who preferred the usual comforts – a good assassination attempt, a good fight, a good nap. No one had changed that much in these past two years, so he thinks with irritation, why had she?
And is his irritation only because of her changes? Or because of his as well?
One way or the other, the fight gets brought up.
“I really thought you’d gone over to the dark side. But well, I always knew you were a twisted bastard, yes?” She teases with a mocking grin, and her hands on her hips.
“Of course not Kagura-chan! Okita-san was only pretending. He wouldn’t have actually hurt me…maybe…probably,” the glasses mutters unconvincingly.
Slight annoyance flares when she hugs the glasses stand from behind. “Still, you could have seriously hurt my daughter, yes? Even if you think Patsuan has gotten stronger, you shouldn’t play with him like that.”
Outside he keeps a blank face, but inside he scoffs. That was rich considering that it was the both of them who had turned the glasses stand into a human cannon ball.
“You’re the one who said my strikes were too slow,” he shrugs.
“Who’re you calling your daughter?!” Shinpachi sighs, pushing up his glasses on his nose. “It’s not that Kagura-chan. It’s because Okita-san believed in you, that you would never let anyone get hurt.” Shinpachi remembers Okita-san shouting that she wouldn’t be able to rip his hands off her, and he finds it sweet, albeit in a homicidal sort of way.
Kagura blinks, uncomprehending.
Sougo just turns away, surprised at the unexpectedly sharp insight coming from the other boy. It turns out that he was more than a glasses stand after all (‘I always was!’). He’d never let her stoop so low as to become a coward. He expected more from the person he swore he’d defeat. Him and no one else, and that meant he couldn’t let her lose to herself as well. But there was no other way to covey that besides through death threats – at least for him. He wasn’t like her Patsuan who could coax her with encouraging and gentle words. Even if that was what she wanted, that wasn’t what he could do. That wasn’t him, it wasn’t him at all.
She would always be too soft, and he’d always be too bloodthirsty.
“I can’t help it Pachi. He plays the bad guy role scarily well. Who orders a weapon of mass destruction on the black market like that, besides villains?”
“Kagura-chan…you are aware that you just called yourself a WMD right?”
“Now, now China,” he smirks, knowing his next words were sure to set her off, “Didn’t we promise we’d overthrow the Bakufu together? With the world’s strongest weapon, and a first-rate assassin, if the both of us ever ended up on the dark side, Edo wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Shinpachi shudders at the mental image that paints, while Kagura is still deciding whether that was a backhanded compliment or insult. She decides she doesn’t care and launches herself at him with a feral grin on her face to start a fight for old time’s sake.
They don’t use weapons because neither of them wants to anger anego, but he relishes the challenge and welcomes her with a punch aimed at her smiling face.
then
If only Shinpachi was right and he’d only been pretending. However, enemies in the dark were always harder to deal with than enemies who came at you straight up. In that sense, peacetime was more treacherous than war time. Leeches would always exist, and back then the work of rebuilding the country took its toll on everyone. With its boss gone, the Oniwabanshu by itself couldn’t keep up with everything that needed to be done.
Hijikata-san had sacrificed his position. Kondou-san had sacrificed his love. They both had sacrificed what was most important to them and not for something as abstract as a country, but so that they could repay a debt, and for the hope that they as the Shinsengumi could fight by their side once more. Okita Sougo was the Captain of the First Division. He could do no less.
“Are you sure about this?” Nobume had sat behind the Commander General’s Chair with a weight on her shoulders. Despite the dirty work he knows is ahead of him, he still infinitely prefers it to being in her place.
“Why’re you asking now? Didn’t you suggest it, because it was me?” The both of them know that neither Kondou-san nor Hijikata-san could be stained. Precisely because of their shared understanding (I know what you are in the dark), she could order him to do this.
She peers at him, as if trying to dissect him. Sougo doesn’t let anything show. “You could have gone with either of them, and yet you chose to remain here. It doesn’t have to be you per se. Lord Matsudaira could hire assassins if he had to.”
Sougo could say that it was because it was his turn to fulfill a promise. She had gone, so it was his turn to stay. And he wouldn’t budge an inch from here, no matter what it cost him. If the boss and glasses were still scattered by then, she’d need someone to welcome her home - not that she’d appreciate it, that brat. Instead he says, voice void of emotion, “I have some lost kids to look after. Even if I’m wearing the mafia’s uniform now, it’s just a change of clothes. We can’t have our hooligan cops abandoning their duty now can we?”
Something flickers on her face. It could almost be called a smile. Almost carelessly she says, “I do not trust you the best of times, especially with neither your sheath nor target here. How about it? Do you want to let off steam with me once in a while?” She flicks up her hilt to ensure he wouldn’t misunderstand what she meant.
Not that he would have. He raises a brow at that. Part of him is insulted that she thought he was a mindless animal who would easily lose control if he couldn’t go all out once in a while. And anyway, that wasn’t how they worked. They fought because they were once on opposing sides. They had fought with the serious intention to kill. Briefly he thinks of stall games, and beetle fights, snowball fights and video games. For some reason, such silly days seemed so far away. He shakes his head. “No thanks. If I fought my superior, you’d probably slash my salary or something.” Forget that he used to regularly try and kill his superior every day.
A ghost of a smile steals across her face. She returns her sword back to its sheath, and turns away from him to look at the Edo night sky. The moon is particularly bright tonight. “I see. With your sheath and target gone, you don’t look like you have much life at all,” Sougo never felt uneasy but he wonders where she was going with this. She turns her head slightly at him. “I miss her too, and the Princess does as well. Hopefully with Katsura’s plan, we can once again see the familiar sight of those three causing chaos.” Despite him having refused her offer for a duel, why does it feel like she’d punctured his throat with her sword?
But well really, he shouldn’t be as surprised as he is for such words to come out of her mouth. After all, there were three who had dragged themselves from the ground, limped and crawled, bruised, battered, and broken. He remembers a small body putting itself in harm’s way. He remembers with perfect clarity that look that had been on her face, so achingly sad and so full of wisdom. Someone as young as her shouldn’t have seen the things that she did. But he wasn’t that much older either, and neither was his opponent, and despite their youth, they had still seen and done fucked up things in this fucked up world. The world was no less harsh to the young than it was to the old.
He understands with painful clarity, though he doesn’t want to, that she had also been a sheath for the woman in front of him.
He leaves her office without another word.
The Commander General couldn’t have been more wrong. She’d thought that he would lose control surrounded by blood, but all he felt was…empty.
The killings had been routine. Taking lives had almost been pathetically easy.
He’d been surprised when the rest of the Shinsengumi decided to go with him. They could have also gone with Hijikata-san back to the country. It would have been familiar. It would have smelt and felt like home. Instead by sticking with him, all they smelt was blood.
With his reliable sketchpad, Shimaru nii-san had explained.
‘Our friends will be back soon, and the Shinsengumi will reunite again.’
‘In the mean time, we didn’t want you to feel even more lonely, Sougo-kun.’
‘We were worried about you.’
‘You don’t look like you’re having fun.’
The last one had been followed by a page full of ellipses. Sougo had waved Shimaru nii-san and his worried eyes away, although he did appreciate the company. Here he was, living a perverted version of his dream, at the top leading the Shinsengumi, and all he felt was hollow. It was only the knowledge that they were doing this for something bigger than themselves that kept him going. No way was he going to lose to Hijikata.
In moments of weakness, he’d take out his flip phone. As part of modernizing the force, Lord Matsudaira had offered to upgrade their phones to MEPhones, but he didn’t take up the offer. He preferred his old, red one. It was adequate enough when he had to coordinate and communicate with Kondou-san, or Hijikata-san when they had to share information, and most importantly he had the pictures he had stored there.
There was one folder where he stored all the pictures he took of aneue, when they spent the day together with Danna. His only regret was they had been too poor to afford phones when he was younger, and so he didn’t have any photos of aneue back then, when she’d been healthier. It probably wouldn’t have mattered though since he was still a coward who couldn’t go through those photos despite the years that passed.
There were various photos of people and animals of Edo in different states of humiliation. Those gave him great comfort, especially those photos where he’d successfully executed a make-Hijikata’s-life-miserable plan successfully. He had plenty of when the Demon Vice-Chief was in his Otaku Toshi phase. Ah, good times. He was starting to regret deleting the picture of Danna doing dogeza though.
It wasn’t all bad. There were also cute pictures of cats (after he tortured them by withholding food from them) here and there.
They were plenty of pictures of the Shinsengumi, in various states of inebriation. He’d lingered on one with Kondou-san, Hijikata-san, and Itou. There were even some photos from the hanami and the janken-pon tournament.
He scrolled back and forward thinking that he must be more sentimental than he’d thought, before stopping at one particular picture. His mood sours. It was that picture of China grinning victoriously at the camera, with him and their opponent underfoot. How dare she turn him into an M? She was the worst team mate ever. She had probably injured him more than their opponent at the time.
It had escaped him them, and still does now, to just delete the photo. Instead he had used it as motivation for vengeance. Every time he’d defeat her or get a chance to humiliate her (far too few times for his liking because she gives as good as she gets, as his b*lls can attest), he’d take a picture. Each one he scrolls through gives him great joy (some of his favorites are from when he planned her funeral, that had been a blast) until he gets to one of those that had given him the greatest feeling of victory.
She had been smiling foolishly, twirling a paper umbrella different from her usual one. She’d been so silly posing in front of glass windows, as if just begging to be made fun of. And yet, despite the sadist that he was, he hadn’t gone to her, because he knew that if he had, they would just go back to their usual routine, and that rare smile would be off her face faster than she could say, ‘Do-s’. And so he had hung back, and yet some impulse had driven him to dig out his phone and zoom-in to capture a picture of her face. She must have been so out of it that she didn’t notice his presence nor the flash.
He looks at that photo now. It was a smile he’d never seen from her before, because it was one she’d never direct at him. Looking at it, you would never know that she was an alien who could level mountains and break bones. You would never know that she was a crass gorilla. You would never know that she waded through blood and defeated enemies that grown men would run from. She just looked like a normal, happy, young carefree girl, on a day out with her beloved dog.
He considers it a victory because it felt like he had taken something from her right from under her nose, for his to keep. It didn’t matter that it’s a smile she’d never show to him willingly – a smile reserved only for her closest family – because he had it here in the palm of his hand. It didn’t matter that looking at it for too long made something in the vicinity of his chest hurt like nothing else, not even by getting run through by a sword. Che, it was probably just heart burn from eating too much tabasco.
Two years stretch by too long, and yet pass by in a blink of an eye.
Of course she doesn’t smile at him (not that he’d expect her to), but he can’t seem to wipe the one on his face.
Later, when Shimaru nii-san is patching up his injuries, he holds up his sketch pad for him to read:
‘You look like you’re having a blast, Sougo-kun’.
now
Those slight changes don’t take forefront and center of his mind. There are far too many important things to do – like assassinating Hijikata-san. And yet they simmered like small annoyances. He feels a bit off kilter as if he’d failed to do something in his schedule – like assassinating Hijikata-san.
The changes surrounding them don’t just come from him and her, but even from the people around them. He would never show his thoughts on his face, but he was irked at how everyone had started treating her differently all of a sudden, just because she grew up a little.
He had been on a regular patrol with Hijikata-san, when they came across Danna and China. She’d been pouting and whining about getting Danna to buy something for her with Danna refusing because “We don’t even have enough money for food because you went through puberty!”. She had been simultaneously clinging to him and trying to pulverize him before clasping her hands and showing him teary eyes, and whining, “But Gin-chaaaaaan……”
“Oh no you don’t. You’re ten years too early to be trying feminine wiles on me.”
Because she was being a general menace society, clinging and whining like that, he felt it was only right for him to do his civic duty and take her away from Danna so he could arrest her. Just as he was about to call a vulgar insult, something about how she looked like a cow with all her snot running down her nose like that, he hears a sigh from beside him.
“Oi, Kagura.”
To say he was shocked was an understatement. The same surprise seemed to have been reflected in Danna’s face as well, but China had only turned to their direction while sniffling.
“Stop being such a cheapskate you perm-head. It’s only 300 yen right? Isn’t it her birthday soon?” For Hijikata’s part, even if it was only for a while, he had spent time as the Yorozuya’s leader. In that sense he felt some responsibility towards them. Try as that overprotective permhead might to deny it, those nostalgic backs were getting broader and taller. They wouldn’t be kids forever, and as fellow samurai who had fought by his side, he would treat them with the respect they deserved.
With that resolve, Hijikata nods self-assuredly to himself, before he feel an enormous force barrel into him, knocking his cigarette, breath, and most likely his soul out from him. “Yay, thank you Toshi! Looks like you’re more than a useless mayora after all, yes?”
“Oi.”
While the once China girl, and now young woman, skipped happily to buy the childish hair clip she was prattling on about, Hijikata was forced to dodge as he felt a bokuto try to hit him. Unfortunately, because of that, he failed to evade the bazooka blast from behind.
“Ehhh. Not only is Hijikata-san a useless, good-for-nothing, cigarette-brain-addled, mayonnaise-ingesting, pile of sh*t, he’s also a useless, good-for-nothing, cigarette-brain-addled, mayonnaise-ingesting, pile of sh*t lolicon.”
Sougo looked normal, but Hijikata had enough otherworldly experience to notice a dark aura seemed to be surrounding him. Lucky or not, he might not be able to make it out alive this time around, especially with the other member of the sadist combi at his back.
“I’ve told Kagura time and time again. Men are scum. What’re you doing bribing her for, huh? Want her to be a tax robber like you? You a fetishist or something Oogushi-kun?”
He’d had enough. They were being too harsh for what Hijikata thought was just a good deed.
As Hijikata-san argued with the perm head that he wouldn’t have to do that if only he paid his employees on time, and as Danna replied with equal the vitriol, and even more volume, that it helped children build character if you didn’t spoil them and could the tax-robber not interfere please, Sougo noticed China exiting the store wearing a new bunny hairclip with a happy-go-lucky smile on her face. As much as the annoyance he was feeling pushed him to get into a fight with her so that he could accidentally destroy it in the scuffle (oops), something in her smile made him stop.
He just settled with calling it childish, and insulting her taste in gross old men, and getting into a verbal sparring match, beside their still shouting companions, as everyone on the streets gave them a wide berth.
It looked like those small annoyances weren’t as small as he’d first thought and he’d have to do something about them, like say, oh, killing Hijikata-san.
The next time had been when he’d been by himself and he’d gone over to anego’s to retrieve the Shinsengumi’s pet gorilla, ehem, Commander. He’d come across Kondou-san, with China and the glasses. It was an unusual trio to be sure, so he went over to them to ask what they were doing.
“I was just helping my brother-in-law-“
“Who’s your brother-in-law?!”
“-with writing another letter for his pen pal!”
Sougo racked his brain for a brief spark of memory. “Oh that one-shot, suicidal, megane girl? The one that looked like she could be glasses’ gender bend version?”
Shinpachi looked reproachfully at him. “Her name is Kirara-san, Okita-san.”
Shinpachi sighs like some sort of failed shoujo manga hero. “I don’t even know if Kirara-san likes me. And there’s also Pandemonium-san and Otsuu-chan to think about.”
China looks at the glasses stand unimpressed, and he’s sure the look must also be mirrored on his face. “Oi Patsuan, get out of your delusions for a second. The closest this anime has to a harem protagonist is Gin-chan.”
“The anime is over, so can’t you let a young boy dream for a minute?!”
China spits. “Tsk. Cherry boy.”
“Oi!”
Sougo can’t fully tune in to their conversation, since he’s staring at the hairclip China is still wearing. He wonders if he can convince her it had a mayonnaise curse on it or something.
Just as he was musing about how he’d say that she’d get infected by the mayonnaise virus the longer she wore that thing, the glasses stand tries to catch his attention.
“Ano, Okita-san,” he says slightly unsure, “Urara-san also wanted to ask how you were doing.” Well to be honest, she had written ‘master’, but no way was Shinpachi going to say that out loud in front of the sadistic prince.
To be honest, Shinpachi had always been slightly jealous of Okita-san. Despite them being near the same ages, he was already a prodigious swordsman nearly on par with Gin-san. He still remembers having to be saved from Utsuro. He sighs deeply. With looks, skills, and money, Okita-san didn’t look like the type of person who would ever have love problems. The world could be so unfair sometimes.
And yet despite thinking that, Shinpachi observes how Okita-san suddenly stills, and looks at him. It must be Shinpachi’s imagination that he looks like he’s studiously avoiding looking at Kagura-chan’s direction. He makes no move to take the letter in Shinpachi’s hand.
Kagura-chan purses her lips in a picture of disgust. “Even if I think any girl must be dumb and brain-dead to end up liking you, and even if I know you’re scum of the earth, you sadist bastard, I hope you wouldn’t end up falling so low as to be a scummy bastard that would ignore his girlfriend, yes?”
Okita-san’s hair hides his eyes, so it’s hard for Shinpachi to guess at what he’s thinking when he says, “Why do you think she’s my girlfriend?”
Kagura-chan only blinks innocently in response. “Because Shinpachi told me the story, yes? And I also exchanged letters with my boyfriend before, though we are only friends now.”
Shinpachi suddenly feels sweat falling down his neck for some reason, as Okita-san gazes at him with an inscrutable glare, before he feels a hard slap on his back.
As if to dispel the strange tension, Kondou-san laugh uproariously. “My, my, first Shinpachi-kun, Sougo, and even China-san talking about boyfriends and girlfriends? It’s like the three of you have grown up so fast.”
Sougo shrugs off Kondou-san’s friendly arm on his shoulder. “She’s not my girlfriend Kondou-san, and you,” he says while poking Kagura on the forehead, “Don’t go making assumptions now.”
Kondou-san and he leave the two Yorozuya members, especially China, looking bewildered.
“My bad, Sougo,” Kondou-san says sheepishly while rubbing at his neck. He raises a brow, silently asking what Kondou-san was apologizing for.
“I’m serious about Otae-san, so I realized that I have to treat her family members like family too. It’s not just Shinpachi-kun. Though they aren’t related, I know Otae-san loves that girl like the sister she never had.”
Sougo doesn’t respond, and just waits for Kondou-san to get to the point.
He twiddles his fingers, and to see such a grown gorilla do such a thing is such an image gap that Sougo has to look away in second-hand embarrassment. “I was thinking of calling China-san, ‘Kagura-san’,” there it is again, that unexplainable lurch that Sougo feels, “She’s now a young lady after all. But as it turns out, I couldn’t do it. I thought you wouldn’t like it since you were the one to call her China.”
Kondou-san looks at him as if expecting to be rebuked, but it’s now Sougo’s turn to be bewildered. “Kondou-san what should it matter to me what you call her? Whether I call her China or not, or pig, or miss piggy, or idiot woman, or ugly,” Kondou-san’s face ashens at hearing the list of unflattering names, “shouldn’t matter to anyone either.”
Kondou-san looks like he wants to say something else, but for once is tactful, and refrains. The rest of the walk back to the compound is noticeably silent.
The third time is with China herself.
He ends up meeting her at their bench. At first it had only been his, his regular bench where he’d sleep after a hard day’s work, and yet before he knew it, his bench had somehow become theirs.
Something is wrong with the China girl. That much he can tell. By now she would have already shot him or tried to swat him away with her umbrella. Part of him hopes that she’s not suddenly so mature now as to be above their petty fights, he thinks in disgust. He sees her with her parasol being supported on her shoulder as she curls, her arms loosely around her legs she’s brought up to her chest. Those damnable slits expose her legs and she’s still wearing that damnable hair clip. For once her hair isn’t tied up in her p*nis sheaths, but instead left loose and long.
He holds his breath. Part of him thinks that it isn’t China sitting there, she looks far too different from the girl he’s familiar with, the girl he grew up with, and that thought doubles when she looks up at him with such a sad look in her eyes.
He pokes her with his sheath with enough force for her to fall off the other end of the bench, before he places himself on the other end of it. As expected, that lost look disappears from her eyes, and she shouts expletives at him, about where he could shove his ‘sword’, preferably in a blender, and if he’d like, she’d be kind enough to do it for him.
“A pig like you shouldn’t cry. You’d look even uglier than usual.” It doesn’t matter that he’ll never be one of those people she’d be vulnerable enough to let her tears show. That’s how he prefers it. If he can help it, he doesn’t want to ever see her look sad, lost, or unsure in front of him. Troubled sure, especially because he was the one to push her buttons, but still full of fire, and with that overinflated ego and bow-down-to-me attitude.
“I wasn’t going to cry, yes?” She rubs at her head with a scowl, and sits next to him in the same position. Softly, she asks him, “Hey Sadist, I haven’t changed that much, yes?”
He inclines his head to show her he was listening. There were so many things he could say, instead he snorts, “Of course not. Didn’t I say we were the same as ever? You’re still the same ungraceful, vulgar, bratty China from back then.”
Despite the insult, for some strange reason unbeknownst to him, she smiles, “And you’re still that annoying, pervert Chihuahua, yes?” She sighs before continuing. “Some of my friends have become so weird. They don’t play with me anymore, or if they do, they look at me weirdly.” Some of his unexpected anger must breach his usual nonchalant face, because she smiles and says, “Don’t worry, I break their wrist when they try to touch me. Like you did. I still haven’t forgiven you for that by the way,” she huffs.
He smiles wryly in response, “I said sorry for that, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t actually.”
“Well, then I’m sorry.” She looks at him suspiciously at his unexpected show of maturity. She must be wondering what the catch was. There was nothing. He just wanted to hear her talk. And so she does, about someone called Yocchan, playground bully turned stuttering admirer, and someone called Hisashi, and from her voice, he can tell she’s fond of the boy. She is annoyed at her playmates fighting over her, and shares what her ex-boyfriend Dai-chan once said, that love meant wanting to keep someone to oneself. She doesn’t understand a selfish love like that. He thinks that’s because she had a selfless nature.
Because he himself is a selfish person, he perfectly understands the words of someone he’s never met, but instantly loathes. He can’t pretend not to know what the wrenching feeling in his chest is - not anymore.
They talk until the sun sets, and it’s peaceful, and it’s calm. It’s a change in their usual routine, but one he finds he doesn’t mind.
“Hey Sadist, you said we were the same as ever. Promise me you won’t change.” And what else could he say to that, especially when she’d shot him an uncharacteristically (at least for him) sweet smile.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” he mutters, already feeling that something like his heart was sinking.
He looks away, but jumps slightly in surprise when he feels her fingers go through his bangs. “Did you cut your hair?” She asks curious, not even having an inkling of what he’s feeling. Such a hypocrite this girl, asking him not to change, but being the one to act out-of-character instead. He hates growing up.
“Keep your paws off me, you gorilla,” he says, while pinching her cheeks. He’s grateful for the excuse. He thinks they’re unbelievably soft. He’d thought so before, and he still thinks so now, only now he has this wild thought of biting one to see if it’d be softer than dango. (He thinks they would be, and more delicious too.) Before he becomes a full-blown cannibal, he takes the chance to run his finger through her hair, and ‘accidentally’ displaces her hair clip (oops), and because she asked him not to change, he pulls violently to signify the beginning of another fight.
Master procrastinator that he is, he resolves to deal with all of these troublesome feelings later.
The fight had gone on longer than expected, well into the night, and because he’s not a complete bastard, he offers to escort her home.
Most people thought that he was empty-headed. Although that much was true, because he rarely said what was on his mind, he was often left to his thoughts. He’d struggled to identify what exactly about the situation had annoyed him so much.
As much as he pretended and let it fly over his head, he was self-aware enough to know that he was a selfish and jealous bastard. As much as he wanted things to have remained the same, he realizes it was him who had changed. He is disgusted at his own weakness. But perhaps, he has to admit, it’s not as if anything really had changed. It’s not as if his worldview of her had drastically become different.
Rather it was the changes in her that had forced him to confront himself. She’d still fight and make fun of him in equal measure. If he attacked, she’d retaliate. She’d never give in to him, he knew that. But in the same way these two years hadn’t been kind to him, it had also taken its toll on her. Somehow she’d realize the importance of closely grasping what was important to her, and so despite her tendency to still ingest an unholy amount of food, despite that she still butchered the language, and smeared snot all over the place, she had matured in the ways that counted. The feud between the Yorozuya and Shinsengumi would always be there, but somehow something had shifted and she’d come to consider them part of her expanding definition of family. And so she’d become softer, with everyone, and not just him. In other words, he wasn’t special. He sometimes hated that part of her. No matter how many years passed, she would always be too soft.
She’d matured while he had not. He felt as if he was left behind and two years had gone by without him. Even if he’d never admit it, he appreciated the changes, but it wasn’t the change he wanted. As he said, he was a selfish bastard. He didn’t want those changes to be for everyone – only him. As he’s also said, he was a jealous bastard. He’d wanted to keep aneue to himself, so was it any surprise that this was no different?
He hasn’t changed at all from the eighteen-year-old brat who first met her. He still wanted her only for himself. Only then he had just wanted to defeat her. Whoever said that with age comes wisdom had it right on the money. And yet he still wanted to kill that bastard anyway. Because if growing up was the reason he realized he wanted more, Hijikata-san didn’t have to say anything, he’d commit seppuku himself.
Therein lie the crux of his problem. She was too honest for her own good. Everything showed on her face. To him, she was an open book. That was why he could tell when she was faking dying, or faking being her daughter, or clone, or whatever. It was the rest who was weird. How could they not tell something so obvious? Especially from a little hellion like her, her schemes were plain as day to see. And because he can read her, he can tell that this is exactly what she wants. She didn’t want more. She wanted the same.
She stops in the middle of the street. Annoyed at his increasingly turbulent thoughts, he wants to call out to her to hurry up and that he didn’t have all day to escort lost kids, but instead his voice dies in his throat.
She gazes at the full moon. Alone she basks in the light. Her skin looks like it’s absorbing the glow.
She’s always looked human, but here, in this moment, he’s afraid to blink because if he does, he thinks she’ll just vanish like some celestial maiden. The wounds from their fight already look like they’re fading, and he feels like swallowing bile. Soon nothing will exist on her skin to prove his existence, to prove that he was ever a part of her life. Meanwhile, she is permanently etched into his body in each of his scars dealt by her. Each one is a story he can read perfectly in the dark.
A strange panic overtakes him. For some reason, he thinks if he doesn’t say something now, she’ll disappear among the stars, just like she did two years ago, with him none the wiser.
He thanks kamisama his voice doesn’t shake when he shouts, “Oi, you think you’re a werewolf or something? Fat chance. I think being a piggy is the best you can do.”
Broken out of her strange spell, she looks at him scowling. And yet her eyes still look as blue as the night sky.
Sougo is starting to get confused as to who exactly between them is the wolf or the rabbit, because her eyes as they alight upon him devours, and oh he must be moon drunk too because he thinks he wouldn’t mind being consumed by that gaze.
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