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The first time Takasugi kisses him they are eight years old.
They’re fighting behind the school, a weekly occurrence that no one but Sensei thinks anything of anymore, and Sensei is busy in the school giving the girls a lesson on calligraphy so there’s no one around them to stop them from going hog wild.
Gintoki doesn’t even remember how the argument starts. It’s probably something stupid--it always is--but here they are, rolling in the dirt, Takasugi dripping blood from his nose, Gintoki with a split lip. Their only spectator is Zura, fretting to the side, hollering for them to stop, threatening to get Sensei.
Eventually Zura’s mortification at the concept of interrupting class wins over his aversion to seeing one of his friends brain the other with a rock, so when Gintoki finally gets Takasugi pinned to the ground and makes a reach for a stone he hollers one last time for Shouyo and takes off for the terakoya (this must have been one hell of a fight, Gintoki thinks in retrospect twenty years later, if Takasugi had pissed him off badly enough for him to have to stoop to dirty tactics like grabbing bugs from under a rock and rubbing them in Takasugi’s rich little face).
As soon as Zura turns the corner, Takasugi surges up beneath him with enough energy to break Gintoki’s hold on his shoulder. It’s a terrible kiss: their faces crash together, Takasugi’s cracked nose smashes into Gintoki’s, and their teeth clack together, but it has the intended effect. Gintoki freezes.
Takasugi sucks in for good measure, ensuring a healthy pop when their lips break apart and Takasugi flops his head back down into the dirt. Gintoki stares at him, motionless, the fistful of worms in his right hand forgotten.
“What...”
Gintoki has a moment to think before Takasugi curls his knee and shoves him right in the gut. GIntoki lets out a hearty oof and backs off, just in time for Shouyo to come sweeping around the corner with Zura in tow.
“Boys,” he says in the tone of an exasperated parent, a boys that the two of them have heard a million times. Takasugi’s chest is heaving and his lips are burning and his mind is racing, and he opens his mouth to say something, but Gintoki beats him to it.
“He kissed me!” Gintoki scrubs at his mouth with his kimono sleeve, smearing blood and spit across his face. Takasugi sees Shouyo’s eyebrows shoot up and feels a pang of worry in his stomach. “I was going to use my special move and he kissed me !”
“It made you stop,” Takasugi pants as he sits up. He takes Zura’s offered hand and pulls himself to his feet. “And I won.”
That gets him. “You won ?!” Gintoki flings his handful of worms at him. “Dirty tactics! Dirty tactics!”
And the argument begins again, the kiss forgotten by all but Shouyo’s watchful green eyes.
Shouyo asks him to stay after school has dismissed. He’ll probably be scolded for the fight, Takasugi thinks, perched on the walkway overlooking the garden and picking dirt from under his fingernails. Gintoki is nowhere to be found, probably off in the rooms he shares with Shouyo.
Footsteps approach on the creaking wood and Takasugi looks up. Shouyo approaches with two cups of tea in hand. He wordlessly hands one to Takasugi and drops gracefully to sit beside him. For a moment they sit in silence, watching the dragonflies flitting about in the late afternoon light.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Shouyo says finally. “About what happened earlier.”
“He started it, I--”
Shouyo smiles and holds up a hand. “I’ve heard that both ways a hundred times. That’s not what I wanted to talk about.” He chooses his words carefully-- in a hundred lifetimes this isn’t a conversation he’s had to have with anyone, much less an eight year old boy who’s never heard the word “gay.” “Do you like girls, Shinsuke?”
Takasugi thinks. Girls are fine, he thinks, for girls. Girls don’t practice swords, or collect beetles in the woods, or threaten to smash bugs in his face when they’re losing in a fight. “Not really,” he decides.
“Alright,” Shouyo says, taking a sip from his teacup. “What about boys?”
“Of course I like boys,” Takasugi protests, “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Gintoki says you kissed him earlier.”
Oh. The dread settles back in Takasugi’s stomach, a nagging feeling that this is something that should have been between him and Gintoki alone. He’s seen boys kiss girls, has heard the ways some of his male classmates talk about their female counterparts. He knows something is different. But talking about it…
“I want you to know there’s nothing wrong with you, if you feel those feelings.” Shouyo’s hand, broad and dry and reassuring, lands on his shoulder. “It’s not something to be ashamed of.”
Shouyo remembers the missionaries. He has read their literature out of curiosity, and remembers the harsh condemnation of relations between men. He’s glad, in this moment, that those teachings didn’t spread far from the Portuguese ships they came in on.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he says with finality. “Being different isn’t a bad thing.”
Takasugi sits quietly for a moment. “Please don’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t.”
“That I kissed Gintoki.”
“I won’t.” Shouyo squeezes his shoulder gently, and this is one of the times where Takasugi feels like he is exactly where he belongs. The ache in his chest lessens, and the tension drains out of his body. He takes a long drink of his tea, even as it burns his tongue. Another thought enters his head.
“What if I have to get married? I don’t want to marry a girl.” He knows his parents didn’t marry out of love. Even to a child it’s clear as day from the way they move and interact with each other. He’s the heir of the family, and one day, samurai or not, he will have to take a wife and have children, carry on the family line.
Shouyo sighs. “That’s a tough question, and I don’t have an answer for you. But it’s your future--you shouldn’t feel bound by what you feel like society says you should do. You have a choice, Shinsuke.”
The conversation ends. They finish their tea, and Shouyo gives him a hug, and Takasugi walks through the quiet school, back to the home where he feels like an outsider.
He does not notice the fluffy head of hair and sharp red eyes, hiding behind the shoji and listening to every word.
Thoughts of boys and the future remain on Takasugi’s mind, but he doesn’t have to worry long: before the next spring comes, the terakoya burns, Sensei is secreted away into the dark, and stories of strange, otherworldly visitors begin to reach their little country town. There are more important things to worry about than who would wear the tsunokakushi if he married a boy.
When the rebellion begins, the three of them leave the village under the cover of darkness and trek across fields and rolling hills to the dojo where the rebellion grows. They are young, but the spirit of Japan burns bright and the samurai are eager to take new warriors into the fold (a glimpse of the boys’ swordsmanship does not hurt their chances).
In a blur of bokuto and tactics lessons and hall-wiping duty, ten years pass. Boys become men and students become samurai, and suddenly the three of them are thrown into a war that no one is sure about anymore.
The past ten years have done nothing but slowly intensify the feelings he hides. The innocent thoughts of a child, of sitting with his feet in a stream and kissing some imaginary boy, burn hotter with each passing year. To his dismay, a familiar face keeps appearing in his fantasies, and too often he thinks back to that day behind the terakoya, with a bloody nose and the threat of worms in his face.
The war is a unique opportunity for Takasugi. There are men, he finds, like him. Some of them, like him, have repressed themselves for years. Others find that after the intensity of a close battle, the hands of your brothers in arms are just as good as those of the beautiful women left back home.
There is a thrill in a tryst on a moonlit night behind the stables, or in fumbling in someone else’s futon in the dark. He takes his fill of these adventures--they scratch an itch, and they keep him going during the dreadful trips to brothels Gintoki insists on dragging him along to (and if he can’t finish with a woman, that’s no one’s business but his and hers).
Three nights after Shouyo dies, Takasugi lays in his tent and stares at the canvas around him with his remaining eye, trying not to think about how it’s the same color as Sensei’s hair as it drifted, severed, to the ground. The bandages covering his eye are dirty with blood and pus, and distantly Takasugi knows his eye is infected and will have to be removed. His head swims with fever, and he thinks of Gintoki.
He thinks of Gintoki often on any other day, either with irritation or longing, and used to daydream on long marches of doing things with him. Sometimes they were innocent things--kissing him, holding his hand (as if Gintoki would ever allow it). Other times he lets his fantasies run darker, thinks of the feeling of Gintoki holding him down, of the long-sought-after feeling of him inside of him.
Now, in his fever-rattled brain, he thinks of blame, and guilt, and of the tears rolling down Gintoki’s face as he made that choice that will change their lives forever. He thinks about doing something about it, but doesn’t know what.
He stands on weak legs, and leaves his tent. The night watch doesn’t notice him or doesn’t care as he crosses the clearing to Gintoki’s tent. He knows Gintoki is awake, because Gintoki looks more haggard and sleepless each day, and if Takasugi can barely sleep then Gintoki surely isn’t getting any. He stands in silence, contemplating in his feverish head what he should do. He wants to kill Gintoki. He wants to hold him.
“Don’t just stand there,” comes a rough voice from inside the tent. “If you’re going to be fucking weird, do it in here.”
Takasugi pushes the flaps open and ducks inside. Gintoki lays on his bedroll facing the wall. He doesn’t move when Takasugi sits next to him. A million thoughts run through his head, and he chooses one at random. He crawls onto the bedroll and stretches out, staring at the back of Gintoki’s head.
Minutes pass. Eventually Gintoki sighs and turns over. Takasugi wonders if he should move, but Gintoki answers for him in the form of an arm slung over his waist, tugging him closer. Under happier circumstances this would be one of Takasugi’s nighttime fantasies come to life, but now he’s just tired. He lays his arm over Gintoki in turn and tucks his head into the space between Gintoki’s neck and shoulder.
Gintoki stinks. His eye aches. It doesn’t matter.
“Takasugi,” Gintoki starts, but Takasugi shakes his head.
“I don’t care,” he slurs out. “I don’t fucking care.”
Gintoki hmphs in acknowledgement, and his grip around him tightens. His fingers on Takasugi’s back curl against the thin fabric of his kimono and start to stroke. Takasugi pulls closer.
After a while, another fever thought passes through his head.
“Do you remember when I kissed you?”
The fingers stroking his back still. “Yeah.”
Takasugi smiles. “You were going to rub worms in my face.”
“Mmhm.”
One thought comes after another and spills out of his mouth. He tells him about the things he thinks about on marches, and about how Gintoki’s muscles look good when he bathes in the river, and about how he once slept with a recruit because his hair was wavy and if Takasugi closed his eyes and pulled his fingers through it he could imagine it was Gintoki’s.
Gintoki lies very still, listens without a word. When Takasugi finally runs out of words, Gintoki’s fingers resume their work on his back. Eventually, Takasugi croaks, “I think I’m dying.”
“You’re sick. You’re not dying,” Gintoki snaps, harsher than he meant to sound. He sighs. “Try to sleep. You’re delirious.”
“ You’re delirious,” Takasugi slurs, but his eyes are already heavy, and the motion of Gintoki’s fingers on his back is soothing. In his haze he feels Gintoki turn his head, and the feeling of lips pressing against his hair. Another fantasy, checked off the list.
The next day Gintoki carries him unconscious to the medic’s tent, and his eye gets scooped out of his head.
When it all falls apart, he isn’t even sure what happens.
Takasugi staggers back into camp and half their troops are gone. Losses have been bad but they haven’t been this bad in a long time.
Gintoki is gone. Takasugi didn’t see his body but surely it’s out there laying in the mud and muck, pristine white stained with filth. Sakamoto deserted weeks ago. Zura has had a nervous breakdown and has been in his tent for days.
Shouyo is dead, and his students are dead or dying.
He doesn’t really make any decision, just packs his things and leaves. It’s clear the war is a lost cause, and the things he wanted to protect are dead anyways, so what’s the point in staying? He says goodbye to Zura through the canvas of his tent, and if Zura hears him he doesn’t respond.
Takasugi treks through old battlefields and the ruins of forests that the Amanto have burned. He doesn’t know where he’s going, only that it’s away. Edo seems a likely choice, but Edo will be overrun with the very beasts they’ve been dying in droves to repel.
Mercenary work suits him. He passes a few years wandering about, taking heads for money, and doesn’t think about how easy it is for him to kill humans and monsters alike now.
How ironic, he thinks, that a girl is going to be the reason his path changes.
Matako is sharp. She learns quickly and kills without remorse. She isn’t anything like the girls at the terakoya or the women he forced himself to sleep with during the war. She loves him, he realizes in time, but there’s little he can do about it. She has lost people to the post-invasion furor and it has made her strong enough to be called Kiheitai.
Takechi becomes a vital member of the new Kiheitai. His political acumen is priceless to their cause: he can move in public spaces and corrupt those that need corrupting, and he has a natural leadership that adds a cohesiveness to their growing faction. Takasugi is less than impressed at his non-Joui interests, but as long as he doesn’t get himself arrested he doesn’t really care.
Nizou makes for an excellent left hand of his operation. The man is a natural born killer, highly trained and extremely deadly. If Takasugi sends him to kill, he knows the job will be clean. His blindness doesn’t impede him in the least.
Which leaves Bansai.
If Nizou is his left hand, Bansai is his whole right arm. Deadly and intelligent, the musician quickly becomes key to their operation. He can manage the Kiheitai in Takasugi’s stead flawlessly, and his dedication to the cause burns brighter than any of them. Bansai was born to destroy.
Oddly enough, it’s Bansai that initiates the strange relationship they develop. The first time they sleep together Takasugi feels like something heals within him. He doesn’t love Bansai, not like he loved Gintoki, but feelings are there and they’re certainly reciprocated, which is enough. When he wakes shaking in the night Bansai is there to soothe him back to sleep. When the fire in him burns too bright and threatens to overtake him, Bansai can talk him down. Years later, when he dies on the Heavenly Bird, Takasugi feels another part of him break off and die too.
The new world is strange, but there is a place for them.
Gintoki is alive.
Honestly, Takasugi had figured he was dead. Blown to bits by an Amanto cannon, sliced to pieces by some beastly abomination’s axe.
Rumors make their way to him through the tendrils of the Joui. Gintoki is alive, and working in Edo. He lives with two children. Does odd jobs for money. He’s met up with Katsura.
Takasugi still loves him, desperately, but he is losing his mind. His thoughts aren’t clear anymore. His purpose is unwavering, and Gintoki is on the wrong side of it all.
If Gintoki won’t see the light, then he will burn with the rest of them.
For all the planning he does, Utsuro is something he can’t see coming.
When he wakes from his coma there’s no time to brief him. Suddenly he is thrown into an uneasy alliance with the men he left behind, and there’s a monster wearing Shouyo’s face trying to destroy them. His mind has cracked long ago, but the new development only adds to the despair.
But he fights. He kills Oboro on Rakuyo, and he nearly kills Enshou on the Heavenly Bird.
It’s when he’s collapsed on the floor with dozens of Amanto retrieving the bodies of the Tendoshuu around him that he thinks of Gintoki. He’s facedown in a puddle of his own blood and he can’t move his fingers or his legs, and all he thinks of is how he’s missed out on twenty years of kissing Gintoki. He’ll never get to feel Gintoki’s hands on his bare skin, or lay chest to chest with him in a bed with the sweat of sex drying on their skin.
There is a way. He doesn’t want to do it. It’s the reason this whole mess started.
It takes a monumental amount of effort to pull himself to his knees. Unluckily for him, the bag of ashes is still tucked in his coat--part of him hoped it had fallen out and spilled on the floor.
He grasps the ashes and his sword.
He thinks of Gintoki, and he moves.
Twenty-two years after Takasugi kisses him behind the temple school, Gintoki hauls himself out of the ocean and onto the Kihetai ship.
He has the heart. That’s all Takasugi wants. He wants this to be over. He wants to die.
They sit in the cabin and talk for a long time. It’s probably the longest time they’ve talked since they were kids, Takasugi thinks. He doesn’t want Gintoki to know what he’s done, but of course his body betrays him, and damn Gintoki, because he is the good man that he is and that Takasugi never was, he frets over him.
“You need to lay down.” Gintoki stoops to help him stand from where he’s crouched on the floor, blood dribbling out of his mouth and spattering his kimono. Against his better judgement Takasugi relaxes against him and lets him lift him to his feet.
“I don’t think a nap is going to help,” he says before bursting into another bout of bloody coughing.
Gintoki practically tsks at him. “It’s non-negotiable.” He half-carries Takasugi through the doorway to the cabin’s bedroom and deposits him on the bed.
There’s a strange pause then, while they both watch each other.
Takasugi lifts a hand and catches Gintoki by the sleeve of his kimono. “Stay,” he whispers. “Just for a little while.”
Gintoki sighs and pulls away. A moment of fear strikes through Takasugi but then he realizes: he’s just moved to set the heart out of the way. He kicks off his sandals, sets his bokuto aside, and crosses to the other side of the bed. Takasugi squirms to one side, and Gintoki slides in behind him. A little fumbling and they’re both under the blankets. Gintoki slips an arm around his waist and pulls Takasugi against him.
“Do you remember the last time we laid like this?” Gintoki says in his ear. His hand resting on Takasugi’s stomach splays wide and Takasugi can feel the warmth of his skin through the fabric of his kimono.
The memory is hazy. “I was… sick. It was after…”
“You just fucking showed up,” Gintoki says, “and spilled your guts to me.” His hand slides up Takasugi’s belly. “You tell me all this shit, and then you pass out.” He shifts behind him, and Takasugi flinches when Gintoki’s lips land on his neck. “You didn’t let me get a word in edgewise.”
A shiver runs up Takasugi’s spine. “What… were you wanting to say?”
“I don’t really know,” he says, “but I should have said something if you’d been miserable for as long as you said you were.”
Takasugi thinks for a long moment, then shoves himself up onto his elbow, enough to turn in Gintoki’s grasp to face him. “You can say something now.”
Instead, Gintoki kisses him. It’s easy and chaste, but it sends waves of warmth and strength through Takasugi’s body and makes him feel alive like he hasn’t in years. He tosses his free arm around Gintoki’s shoulders and pulls him closer. The fantasies he’s harbored for twenty years can’t hold a candle to the real thing.
“Are you okay?” Gintoki murmurs against his mouth.
“I’m okay enough,” Takasugi responds breathlessly, catching Gintoki’s mouth again for a deeper kiss.
“What do you want?”
“Everything. Anything.”
Gintoki gently presses into his shoulders and maneuvers him onto his back. He peppers kisses down Takasugi’s neck, sucks a bruise onto his collarbone. Takasugi turns his head for easy access, breath catching in his throat, and when his eye opens it falls on the heart sitting on a table across the room.
Sensei , he thinks as Gintoki’s hands slip his kimono off his shoulders. Thank you. You said I had a choice.
This is my choice.