Sakata Gintoki · Chat

The ramen shop at the end of the street had long since closed. The streetlight cut the light leaking from the Yorozuya's second-floor window into messy fragments, scattering them over Sakata Gintoki. He had just come out of that shabby izakaya, carrying a takeout parfait—the owner said that if he didn't start showing up as a regular customer, the shop would go under from his tabs, so today the money had been fronted by Old Lady Otose. Strawberry, with so much cream it was about to spill over the clear plastic cup, the red jam on top glinting under the streetlight. He was about to tuck it into his chest and hurry home before it melted into a puddle of sugar water—then his steps suddenly stopped. There was something beside the trash can. Gintoki's nose-picking came to a halt. His dead-fish eyes opened a sliver, and the drunken haze lifted a little. That wasn't trash, and it wasn't some drunk collapsed there snoring. It was a person. Gintoki walked over slowly, his tatami slippers going pat-pat against the waterlogged ground. Toyako hung at his hip, swaying slightly with each step, but he didn't draw it—the curled-up shape was simply too small, small enough to call up certain scenes buried in the deepest, dustiest recesses of his memory, almost gone moldy. "Hey, kid." He crouched down, setting the parfait carelessly aside. It was a face you could barely read. Bruises and blood were smeared together; the white dress had been ripped to shreds, dried blood trailing from the collar all the way down to the cuffs. The bare arms were covered in scars old and new—some already scabbed over, some still seeping blood—packed so densely it looked like something long and thin had lashed them again and again. Gintoki stared at those scars for a long time. Then he reached out and flicked the kid on the forehead. "—Tch. Not dead yet, huh?" The curled-up figure twitched slightly, opening a pair of hazy grey eyes. The pupils weren't focused; they just stared blankly into the distance. The lips moved a few times, but no sound would come out. "Alright, no need to talk." Gintoki scratched his messy silver perm and sighed. He picked up the parfait again and held out his other hand. "Come with me." That scar-covered hand didn't move. Gintoki clicked his tongue in annoyance and simply hauled the kid up from the ground. They were impossibly light—far lighter than any body had any right to be. Frowning, Gintoki slung the featherlight frame over his shoulder, switched the parfait to his other hand, and made his way back to the Yorozuya, crooked and unsteady. The Yorozuya was tiny. Upstairs in the tatami room, the TV was playing a late-night rerun of a comedy show; Kagura and Shinpachi had long since gone back to their own rooms. Gintoki set the kid down on the sofa, then went back to rummage through the kitchen, eventually unearthing half a bottle of strawberry milk and a bag of expired chocolate sticks. He poured the strawberry milk into a cup and handed it over. "Drink." The kid took the cup, fingers shaking violently, milk splashing onto their wrist and soaking into wounds that hadn't closed yet. Gintoki saw it, but said nothing, just turned to dig through the medicine box. Iodine, gauze, cotton swabs. The Yorozuya's medicine box was always the fullest thing in the house. Gintoki crouched in front of the sofa and set to work on the wounds. The movements were rough—not as meticulous as Shinpachi, not as gentle as Old Lady Otose—but the iodine landed precisely, the pressure just right, covering every wound neither too deep nor too shallow, like something he had done countless times. He had done it countless times, in fact. He didn't ask for a name. He just wound the gauze in silence, circle after circle, bundling all those dense scars into white bandages. When he was done, he stood up, dug through the candy jar, and found the last strawberry hard candy. Gintoki unwrapped it and popped it into the kid's mouth. "Sweet?" The battered, scar-covered child nodded, dazed. Gintoki pulled a lazy grin and reached out to ruffle that messy mop of hair. "Then we're good. Sugar cures all ills—broken bones, colds, a heart broken from being bullied. Works for all of it. Better than any lousy doctor." With that, he went over to the other side, lay down on the recliner, covered his face with a Jump, and before long he was snoring. The child on the sofa curled up, the strawberry candy still in their mouth. The sweetness spread across the tongue—sweet, unfamiliar, like a taste from another world. Slowly, they closed their eyes, and wrapped in the cloy of sugar and the pressure of bandages, they slept deeply for the first time, in a darkness no one would break into. The next morning, when Kagura and Shinpachi pushed the door open, the trash can in the first-floor kitchen was already stuffed full of empty strawberry milk cartons and parfait cups. "Gin-chan! You bought this much sweets again! Gin! Why is there a kid covered in bandages here, aru!" Kagura yelled, pointing at the human-shaped lump on the sofa. Gintoki poked a head of exploded curls out of his futon, eyes not even open yet. "What kid? That's our new part-timer." "Part-timer?" Shinpachi pushed up his glasses. "Boss, can't you even pay our wages anymore?" "But we can all starve together," Gintoki said, utterly unashamed. "Hey, come on. Time for work." The kid sat up from the sofa and stared around in a daze—at this shabby, broken-down Yorozuya; at the uncle with the silver perm; at a girl of freakish strength and a boy who only knew how to shoot quips. The candy was still half-finished in their palm, already gone soft from body heat. "Work? I can stay here?" "Mm." Gintoki yawned. "You ate my candy and used half a bottle of my strawberry milk—and that's something even I have to pay off in installments. From today, you'll pay it back with ten thousand years of loyalty. Deal?" "...Ten thousand years?" The voice trembled a little. "That long?" "Long?" Gintoki smiled. That smile wasn't the same as the one from last night when he'd saved them. Last night, Gintoki had looked full of openings, lazy and loose, like he might collapse at any moment; but this man standing in the morning light carried an indescribable kind of reliability and warmth. "If you can't manage it, just pay it back slowly. Pay until you're eighty first." Gintoki patted that messy head, his touch feather-light, like soothing a frightened kitten. The child lowered their head. The strawberry sweetness still lingered at the root of their tongue—warm. This dusty little room, filled with grime and sugar, became, from that day on, the first "home" of someone's life.