1If you will not behave befitting of your birthright, then you are not deserving of it.
He wakes up sweating, damp cloth binding his arms and chest and shoulders. Shinsuke scrunches up his face. His eyes are bleary. Sleep-dust has gathered on their corners, sticky residue mixing with the water welling up at his tear ducts. He breathes heavily for a few moments, lungs heaving beneath the blanket, and reaches tentatively to wipe it away. Something moves. He freezes.
A pale, fluffy head shifts in the corner of the room, thumping slightly against the wall. Shinsuke almost flinches, but then he realises that it's only Gintoki, and he's probably just trying to scare him on purpose. It's just Gintoki. Everything's alright.
Everything's great, actually, because Gintoki is getting up and moving away. That's great. Shinsuke can't sleep with him nearby because he wriggles around like a rabid earthworm. It's really terrible. Some mornings, they even wake up to find that Gintoki has migrated across the room, from the tatami mat closest to the middle of the school all the way to the floor next to the outside door.
"What's wrong with you?" Shinsuke spat at him once. Gintoki had just looked at him blearily and rolled over to go back to sleep, nose smushed into the ricepaper.
"What's wrong with you?" Shinsuke says now, his voice rough and nasal from sleep. He rubs his face quickly with his sleeve and sits up. "What are you doing?"
Gintoki stills on the other side of the room, his hand on the shoji. The sliding door is half open and Shinsuke shivers from the coolness of the breeze. His father's house had been guarded by neat walls but Shouyo's humble temple school is unbarred and welcoming to even the wind and Gintoki is an unaware heir to that double-sided blade of a legacy. Goosebumps rise on his bare arms.
"Stop letting the wind in," Shinsuke scowls. His words fall on deaf ears and half-lidded eyes because the door remains wide open. "Why're you even going outside?" He says suspiciously.
Rust-red eyes stare back at his. Quietly, Gintoki steps out into the night.
Shinsuke wrenches himself indignantly from his tatami and storms over, finding Gintoki already barefoot on the grass. Fueled by offense at being dismissed he gets ready to shout, his teeth sharp and jagged in his mouth. But something stops him. Maybe it's the realisation that he'd wake everyone else up, or the dryness of his throat, or the tightness of his chest when he sees the limp set of Gintoki's shoulders framing his face, shadowed with an odd expression.
Shinsuke stalks up to Gintoki. "What's wrong with you?"
It's not that Gintoki's crying. He's not crying. He's standing on the grass with dark bags beneath his eyes and messy hair and his chest moving so slowly it seems like he's not breathing at all. People do that sometimes. It shouldn't matter so much. But Gintoki's eyes are tired and hollow and his pale cheeks look gaunt and ghostly in a way they usually don't. He looks like a wraith–the kind that Zura's grandmother told them stories about, along with the samurai and the gods and the demons. The kind that come from dying children.
"I'm becoming a man," Gintoki says blandly. "All adults are dead inside, you know. I'm just getting a headstart." He peers at Shinsuke. "Don't worry Chibisugi, your own time will come."
"Don't lie to me." Shinsuke says.
Gintoki pauses. Shinsuke takes a step forward, angry and unsettled at this stranger who'd replaced his friend, this dull, forlorn mask. "You can't sleep, right?"
"That's not what I said," the other boy evades.
Shinsuke frowns even deeper. "Fine," he says, "Be like that!"
"Be like what?" Gintoki says in affront. "This is your fault, you know, I can't sleep because you snore too loudly and I can't concentrate on dreaming!"
"Snore? I don't snore!" Shinsuke bites back, his hackles bristling. "And what do you mean, 'concentrate on dreaming'? Dreams aren't something you concentrate on! You're really stupid, aren't you? You don't know anything, do you?"
Gintoki gives him a pitiful look, as if he's the one who'd just revealed their absolute cluelessness about normal human behaviours. Then–doing something even dumber and stupider than he already is–he walks further out onto the grass, right near the trees, and sits down. Shinsuke nearly throws his hands up in the air, but he manages to stop himself before he gives Gintoki any more ammunition against him.
Night hangs thickly on the branches of the canopy, dripping down the bark like ink. The sky tonight looks like a beleaguered parchment, as if a child had taken to it with a divine brush and swiped carelessly across the abyss. Gintoki's faded figure hovers in the middle of it, the night threatening to swallow him up.
Shinsuke trudges after him; Sensei wouldn't be happy if he lost Gintoki in the woods. Of course, Gintoki would be in trouble too, but it wouldn't mean much if Sensei couldn't scold him because he was dead in a ditch. He ends up with his arms crossed under the tree with Gintoki, fuming at his stupid fluffy head. Gintoki doesn't even have the decency to notice; he's too busy gazing vacantly at the moon.
"You have nightmares, right?" Gintoki says to him suddenly. His eyelashes are brushing the tops of his cheeks as he drifts slowly into sleep. At least, that's what Shinsuke used to think he was doing when his eyes got all droopy. But he rethinks it now. Maybe Gintoki wasn't sleeping all those times he hid way up in the trees. He sure can't seem to sleep now, since he's wandering around in the cold and all that. A minute passes and Shinsuke registers the question. He snarls.
"That's none of your business!" He doesn't want to talk about it. Not to anyone, and certainly not Gintoki! He already thinks about it more than he wants to. The other boy tilts his fluffy head up and stares out into the forest, where all the beasts are shuffling around in the shadows.
"You're really noisy when you sleep Takasugi," Gintoki continues blithely, either oblivious to or resolutely ignoring Shinsuke's furious glare.
"And you get snot all over your face. It's pretty gross." Shinsuke stiffens despite himself.
Gintoki won't tell anyone that he cries in his sleep. He won't taunt him about it, he knows, because he didn't say anything when Zura told him about his grandma. After he vomits out his little monologue, he won't even bring it back up, except in his eyes when he gets into those weird, absent moods and his words become all feathery. He'll just listen, when people talk, when people whisper, like when Shinsuke had his nightmares and he laid there just listening to the sobs muffled into a pillow beside him. Somehow that's so much worse.
But then Gintoki stops talking about Shinsuke and starts talking about himself.
"Shouyo picked me up a while ago," he begins and Shinsuke, shoulders lowering in his confusion, wonders what Gintoki will add to the story Sensei had already hinted at. "From a battlefield, blah, blah, you know how it goes." Oh. That's. Oh.
"He probably told you about it." Not enough, obviously, because Shinsuke is trying to regain his composure. "Anyway, before this place, poor Gin-san had to sleep on the dirt and stuff."
The other boy looks out into the sky, not meeting Shinsuke's eyes. He doesn't know what 'stuff' could possibly mean, but he has a terrible idea. "The temple school's the first place I've had somewhere safe to sleep. Shouyo's stronger than any monsters that could be out there, so he says to leave the worrying to him."
Here, Gintoki hesitates, looking small and pale. More than a wraith–or even a demon like some of the village men say he is–he looks like a child, sad and tired and weary.
"But I still can't fall asleep at night." Gintoki finishes. His voice is soft, which you'd think he wasn't capable of, but Shinsuke has come to learn that Gintoki is capable of a surprising lot, like not blinking for a ridiculously long time, and gulping down four onigiri in a single second, and keeping secrets, and sharing stuff about himself without Zura relentlessly interrogating him about it over the course of three weeks. Either way, it's not the softness that strikes Shinsuke; it's the uncertainty.
What's he uncertain about? Shinsuke doesn't know. It's kind of an unnerving sight. He feels like he's seeing Gintoki through a gauze; he seems fuzzy, and unclear, and very, very pale, almost too close to the colour of death. The shadows beneath his eyes remind Shinsuke of the sticky mucus still crusted in his. But Gintoki's not like Shinsuke. He doesn't get nightmares.
But he can't sleep. Shinsuke turns in his blankets, Gintoki lies motionless, gazing hollowly at the ceiling. Sleep is hard for them both, it seems, and it's very telling in the way that Gintoki shuffles out of the room every night and stares at the moon and tucks himself next to the cold shoji where no one else has laid their tatami. Where there's no one to accidentally step on if he needs to go outside again. A weird kind of consideration, Shinsuke thinks.
"I've long been disowned," Shinsuke replies, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. Pale hair ruffles as its owner raises his head. They look at each other; Shinsuke keeping his face carefully still and Gintoki listening silently, as always.
"But when I was there, my father used to scold me the most out of my siblings." He hasn't said this to anyone. Zura knows, of course, but Shinsuke didn't tell him. He just knew, like Zura always did. He and Gintoki, though, troublemakers, the both of them, they take a little longer to learn things. That's why Shinsuke's explaining this.
"He got fed up eventually."
"Okay," nods Gintoki. He tilts his head thoughtfully. "Your dad sounds like a pretty shitty guy."
Shinsuke barks out a laugh. Of course Gintoki would say that. He thinks about how incensed his father would be if he knew about Gintoki's foul mouth, and how he would have dragged Shinsuke away to box his ears if he found them talking, like they are now. Then he laughs even harder. Shinsuke's father is gone, now. He doesn't have any say in who Shinsuke hangs around with, now, in fact he doesn't have any say in anything. Shinsuke can leave the past behind.
Gintoki looks at him carefully, out of the corner of his eye, and Shinsuke can see the tiny smile that he's trying not to draw attention to. It's a welcome change from the ghost he'd followed out onto the grass.
"Yeah," Shinsuke grins, "Yeah, he was."
They sit there together under the branches in the dim, dark forest in the middle of the night just trying to tame the curl of their mouths, laughter fluttering in their chests. Gintoki pulls out a box of fruit he'd hidden beneath the school and passes a few to Shinsuke, and when he bites into it, the flesh gives sweetly beneath his teeth. Neither of them are sleeping, but this time, it's not fear that keeps them awake.
They're troublemakers; it's a rite of passage to stay up the whole night eating contraband food.
"Wanna sneak out tomorrow night?" Gintoki whispers to him with bright eyes.
"What?" Shinsuke asks. "Why?"
Gintoki gives him a mischievous look, his cheeks fruit-flushed and dimpled: "So we can steal some parchment and draw ugly pictures." Who those pictures would be of, Shinsuke doesn't ask, but he's touched by the idea. Gintoki catches his eye and grins and Shinsuke thinks, beaming back, his skin buzzing with the headiness of exhilaration and his head pleasantly clear as his eyelids drift slowly closed, that maybe Gintoki isn't too bad.
His face isn't the worst thing to fall asleep to, really.
