Gintama Fan Fiction ❯ salarymen go to heaven ❯ part 9 ( Chapter 9 )

I don't own Gintama. It's not my fault. It's because I have a natural perm.

 

 

* * Part Nine: Which Has No Title Because I Couldn't Think of Anything * *

 

 

“Make yourself at home,” Okita said in a voice that couldn't have been interpreted as welcoming in any culture.

 

“You tricked me,” pouted Kagura, deciding to do just that in revenge and flipping her boots to lie all over the entrance platform before throwing herself in front of the short table.

 

“You tricked yourself,” stated Okita.

 

Kagura snorted, displeased, and helped herself to a snack displayed on the table in a rather ornate bowl. It was super spicy, burning her mouth to match her anger. Chewing it violently, she looked around the room. Some papers Okita was obviously working on were scattered around a lamp propped in front of the TV. It was set on mute even though the evening news were on. “Don't tell me you have a crush on the weather girl as well?” she asked haughtily.

 

“You can eat those?” said Okita, ignoring her question. The tone of his voice made her look up to his face. He was looking at the bowl as if it was something no mortal could touch, yet Kagura did it with such ease it should mean she was blessed or something. He seemed at once bewildered, confused and somehow profoundly sad.

 

“Yeah,” said Kagura testily, not able to say if he was angry. “Why?”

 

“…no, never mind,” said Okita and walked the length of the room to sit amongst his papers again. Picking up a pen, he bent over them and continued scribbling where he left off.

 

“Hey, I don't care if you're not taking me out, but you can't ignore me!”

 

“Yes, I can, China,” said Okita, not looking up from his papers. “Do I have to tell you again? You said I have to treat you to dinner. I could've ordered you pizza and had them send it to your address, but I thought this might be more fun.”

 

“…you are such an incredible bitch it's just…mind-boggling.”

 

Okita smirked.

 

Kagura didn't give up. “But, you know, this is pretty sad, right? Living in the same place where you work, right?”

 

Okita looked up from his papers for a fleeting second. “…you have no room to talk. You live with the master Freelancer, isn't that so?”

 

“But he is my friend. And we never really work,” she mumbled, taking another cathartic snack.

 

The silence stretched with only the sounds of Kagura chewing and Okita scribbling on the paper. He looked so much unlike himself it was akin to a glimpse into what he could become in a decade. Not so much older, but mature. Weighted down by the experiences if not the years. And how old was he anyways?

 

He wasn't nearly as absorbed in this as he was when they fought, but the infinite boredom and detachment were mutated into solemn concentration. Eyebrows came together on his forehead slightly, knotting in thought as he came across something in his papers. He flipped through a few pages, looking to the floor for reference and suddenly Kagura felt fleeting shame for intruding in his sacred hours of work.

 

She turned from the sight and circled the room again. It was nothing as elaborate as she imagined it to be. She saw, in her occasional sprees of liberate imagination (which had become a lot more frequent as of late), a display of weapons and tubes with animal insides next to photographs of freak car accidents. Well, no, not really, but something along those lines. For one, she certainly didn't picture him having a flower pot on a high shelf where the sun would reach it with its first light.

 

And for some reason she thought his room would be much more of a mess, but that was perhaps because she lived with Gintoki.

 

Okita raised his head to approaching footsteps. “Ah, food,” he said, relapsing into his customary disdain once more. Kagura wanted to strangle him for ever making her feel ashamed about bothering him. How can this person look thoughtful and serious one moment but then destroy the entire impression with a single word?

 

A slim man with nervous eyes entered Okita's room in a low crouch. This person seemed so accustomed to all sorts of horror, that the massive dosage of fear and insecurity he had to face every day transformed into a single, chronic twitch in the corner of his lips. “Captain, miss,” he said leaving a lacquered trey with two sets of everything on the table in front of Kagura and then walking out with a hasty bow.

 

Kagura noticed he had a badminton racket strapped to his back in an uncomfortable way.

 

As the man shuffled away in the same quick, disquieted series of steps that announced his arrival, Okita sat opposite Kagura and mumbled, “That's right, Yamazaki, go report.”

 

Kagura threw him a quizzical look. “Who's that guy?”

 

Okita smiled into his warm soup. “He is the spy.”

 

 

* *

 

 

I avoid using Japanese in an English text. Things like clothing or food indigenous to Japan cannot be translated so I don't go to ridiculous descriptive lengths, but writing stuff like “taichou” and “o-jou-san” for “captain” and “miss” makes me feel nauseous. Also, I avoid suffixes indigenous to Japan which don't really have an equivalent in English. So no “-san”, “-kun”, “-dono” and only one “-chan” because it's canon. Bear with it.