Chapter Text
Number two sits on number five’s lap!
The spotlight has found him; Gintoki comes back to himself. He wishes for many things even whilst wishing he wished for nothing: for the pull of alcohol to drag him under the dark and heavy waves of black out, for regret to fragment to his satisfaction, for somebody else to break out of his worn out body.
Gintoki remains himself no matter how much he tries to make it otherwise; he’s under the spotlight again while everyone else has the privilege to watch him from the shadows. The hostesses giggle, chatter. Gintoki plays along—waves his stick with the number five on it like he’s been had with a loose grin.
Who’s number two?
A giggling girl paid to love him for a few hours, expression carefully hidden beneath layers of makeup.
It’s Hijikata-han! What! I’m jealous!
Gintoki’s lap is instead filled with Hijikata Toshirou. He feels his widened eyes like an open wound. Blinks clumsily, and his hands hover over Hijikata’s trim waist like he's teaching someone how to handle fire.
Gintoki feels fucking stupid. Suddenly sober like he already hit his head against someone's compound wall on the way home. Hijikata leans forward to pick up a lighter from the table, his ass plush against Gintoki’s dick. God. Gintoki struggles to find his inhale even when his mouth stays open for it.
Hijikata had joined their game two turns ago—the women playfully gushing over his looks as he remained rudely apathetic—and hadn't gotten any commands from the previous ‘kings’. What were the chances of Hijikata ending up in his lap?
Hijikata straightens and lights his cigarette. Gintoki chews the words a bit before he spits them out:
“Having fun?”
“Hm?” He hears him hum. Hijikata shows him the side of his face; the tender shell of his ear is the hypnotising swirl of a whirlpool. Gintoki softens like meat under a hammer, and his elbows find the back of the sofa.
“Gin-san’s lap is the most luxurious chair in the world, y’know.”
Hijikata turns to sit sideways and really looks at Gintoki—looking too sober for a drunk man—face suddenly inches away from him. He blows wispy smoke onto Gintoki's mouth.
What a brat, thinks Gintoki, a grown man communicating through acts of indifference; in this, they're the same. Hijikata's blue eyes shine darkly in the Cabaret's low lighting—like ink—his eyelashes dripping shadows over his smooth cheeks.
Gintoki has wanted many things in his life but he has never before yearned to have someone right in his lap so badly. Drawn as if by gravity. Maybe this is what the moon feels for the earth. Or how the bacteria in his tooth cavities feel for his flesh.
“Yes, everyone is dying to sit in your lap, but I'm already here,” he says, like, what can you do?
“You’re heavy,” Gintoki complains irritatedly.
Hijikata takes another drag of his cigarette, both of them studiously ignoring the ash gathering on Gintoki's collar. He exhales, “It’s okay.”
“It's okay?”
“You can handle this, at least. Can't you?”
Gintoki shifts his heels on the floor. Accordingly, Hijikata shifts in his lap. “Who knows? Maybe my legs will buckle and Hijikata-han embarrassingly goes sprawling to the floor.”
“Worry about yourself.” He dismisses him.
Hijikata shifts to face the group of giddy hostesses. His nape is the sliver of the moon cutting through a blanket night, and Gintoki stares at his bare skin dazedly. The thing about Gintoki is that he hates himself, and someone like Hijikata has no business sitting in his lap. Maybe he could enjoy himself if they were strangers to each other, but they aren’t. And Gintoki is a star you turn inside out to reveal frayed seams. He kicks up his knee; Hijikata sprawls onto the table. The glass ashtray crashes to the floor.
Outside the cabaret club, rainwater runs into a nearby drain.
Gintoki softly beats his broken umbrella against his leg, standing underneath the club’s awning. The rainfall is only visible when their stomachs grow fat with Kabukicho’s red-bright lighting, so he feels for the rain on his forearm.
He drank a lot tonight. His throat is dry and his stomach hurts, and his nostrils burn like he's at the hospital. Still, it doesn't stop his longing for home. His bed, Kagura shuffling and tossing around her blankets in the closet.
Anyway, he can't go home. It's raining.
Hijikata steps out of the club, ignoring Gintoki to light a cigarette a few feet away from him. The lighter click click clicks, and the smell of smoke irritates Gintoki's sinuses.
He's so drunk and he should throw up some of it. Irritatedly, he clicks his tongue.
“Some of us don't want to die of lung cancer, y’know,” he says.
Hijikata continues to ignore him.
Like perversely digging his fingers into a flesh wound, he provokes Hijikata, saying, “Mm, figures. You fell in love with Gin-san and now you can't leave me alone. Sorry to tell you, your experience isn't unique.”
“Shut up.”
“Maybe if Hijikata-han had a nice voluptuous S-line figure. And, here,” he mimes bouncing big breasts in his hands, “These are important. But alas,” he says, and watches Hijikata stare at him with a solemn face.
God.
“You're so full of shit,” Hijikata accuses, “And you're selfish to the bone. You know what the fuck your problem is?”
“What?”
Hijikata blinks and blinks like he might cry. He wouldn't. He doesn't. Gintoki doesn't know him for crying his hurt out. Where Gintoki reveals frayed seams, Hijikata is an unbreakable phenomenon. That is the problem: Hijikata won't let Gintoki break him even whilst Gintoki cracks underneath himself.
Hijikata opens and closes his mouth. He shakes his head like a stray dog. Says, “Nevermind.” He finishes his cigarette in silence and crushes it beneath his boot before heading back inside.
Gintoki watches a final point of red-orange ember fade out from the crushed cigarette. That's him: he thinks. That's how he wants to be.
Then he throws up into the asphalt.
Gintoki doesn't know where he is. Then he wakes up into awareness.
“Gin-chan,” Kagura whines, elongating all the vowels in his name, “Get the door!”
Gintoki staggers to the front door, the ringing doorbell a noisy metronome timing his pounding headache.
Their visitors are intense sunshine and Kondo Isao. Gintoki can feel the nerves in his eyeballs split like mistreated hair ends. Whatever, he thinks, ready to close the door on him: He’s going back to bed.
“No, stop, where are you going?! I’ve got a job for you!”
“God, shut up, would you? Why are you yelling?”
“You were literally shutting the door in our faces!”
Gintoki’s busy looking at the guy tagging along with Kondo, just behind his shoulder like an eclipse. Aged around twenty. Large, blue eyes eating up half of his face, transforming his—typically—stern expression into petulance. Longer hair messily falling into his brows, unlike how it’s usually cut precisely—in military discipline. Gintoki feels his heartbeat slip lower into his chest. He’s definitely frowning, shocked beyond comprehension.
“Who’s that?”
“Well,” says Kondo with some hesitation, “Of course, it’s Hijikata Toshirou.”
He remembers—the reason he’s scared of dentists all up in his mouth. His first baby tooth was loose but stubborn. Shoyo had laughed—tied a thread around it and pulled before he could cry. Then he’d cried a lot, secretly, hiding on a tree branch. More so than feeling pain, he’d felt scared. Then scared at being scared.
And, maybe, that part of Gintoki forgot to grow up. He stares at Hijikata, stomach churning—a version of him—a stranger to Gintoki—and thinks about tying a string around this problem and yanking it back to normal.