When Otose went to visit her husband's gravestone that day in winter, she found something peculiar sitting at its base. A frozen piece of dog crap. Some bozo had let his dog take a dump on her husband's grave and hadn't cleaned it up. Also, who took their dog for walks in the graveyard? The blasphemy. She had heard the patrons at her bar lamenting about it into their beers and sake every night, how Japan had changed since the Amanto had won the war. And sure, the buildings had grown taller and the lights in Kabukicho had gotten stranger with all the flashing neon signs, but they had whiskey now, and karaoke machines, and the girls all had jobs ever since the hostess club had hung out its shingle. So, while her customers complained, Otose had just smoked her cigarette in silence. Change, she had thought, wasn't always so bad.

The fat doo-doo left on her dead husband, however, made her wonder if she had been too generous. Clearly, the world was on the verge of anarchy if men were walking their dogs over the dead in the middle of January.

And then there was that other thing she had found under her husband's headstone: the man in a yukata. Otose had ignored him because she thought he was dead, not only because she doubted anyone could survive a wardrobe malfunction as terrible as his in this snow, but also because bodies turned up on the street all the time. Officially, the war was over, but a second one was being quietly waged as the new government zealously worked to stamp out any surviving Joui Patriots hiding in the shadows. Sure it was tragic, but these were the times, and the man was definitely dead.

Then, the dead man spoke.

The cold had gotten to his head, and it was a bit hard to tell what he was doddering on about, but Otose figured it had something to do with the steamed buns she had set out for her husband. So she let him have it, and the man rambled on some more— something silly about protecting her—before demanding that she help him to his feet because how was he supposed to look after her while sitting on his ass?

Otose had made the incisive point that she had never in fact agreed to such an arrangement as she slung his arm across her shoulders and gripped him by his torso to get him to his feet. She was getting on her years, but the man—a young man, actually— practically still a kid, good lord, she realized when she got a clearer view of his face—was unnaturally light, and she could feel the ridges of his spine through the thin fabric of his yukata.

"Don't slow me down now, old lady," he muttered as he slumped against her, and Otose instantly knew he'd be a handful.

She momentarily let go of his arm to tug the shawl off around her neck, throwing it over his shoulders. "As long as you don't turn into a corpse on me, I think I'll manage," she replied dryly.

He chuckled at that, and the two made their slow way to Snack Otose as the snow drifted softly around them.

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Like everyone else, Otose had heard of the Shiroyasha. Even since the first day of the war, news trickling in from the battlefront had never been great to begin with (swords and arrows versus spaceships, go figure), but the latest stories had reported nothing but loss after loss, and everyone was growing tired of waiting around for an inevitable defeat. Why couldn't the Shogun just throw in the damn towel already? This was just a waste of taxpayers' money! And then, the buzz began about a group of warriors who had appeared out of nowhere on the battlefield like a strike of lightning. There were four all together, but the one name Otose had repeatedly heard passing from lips in her barrooms and while running her errands was the Shiroyasha—The White-Haired Demon, Hero of the Human Race and Fiend to All Alien-Kind, Though Rumor Has it He Can Be Kind of a Dick.

Tales of the four and their victories swept across the nation like wildfire, and suddenly, defeat didn't seem to imminent, and some even dared to hope. Just when people were beginning to warm up to the idea of not being ruled by Alien Overlords, news came that the Shiroyasha and his merry band had been captured. Someone, though unclear who exactly, had been beheaded. The Résistance, was over. While its citizens were still reeling from the painful blow, the old Shogun collapsed and that sly fox Sada Sada turned around to let the enemy in.

It had occurred to Otose that this white-haired man in prisoner's robes, who she had stumbled across so closely on the heels of the announcement of the Shiroyasha's escape from prison, might've been the fabled White-Haired Demon himself. But the war was over, so she waved off all the ifs and maybes, because as far as she could tell, Gintoki was just some skinny brat who was half-frozen and probably more trouble than he was worth.

So Otose put Gintoki upstairs in the old office between all of her dead husband's things, and she didn't fully understand what she had brought under her roof until one evening at Snack Otose. It had been more crowded than usual that night, maybe on account of the full moon, or something, she never understood what forces pulled people to her bar. Point was, Oishi Kabuto was there that night too, and there were a lot of witnesses around to see what happened.

Oishi was a prick. A large, muscle-bound prick who knew he was large and muscle-bound, which made him even more of a prick. Then, Satan had decided to tie a bow on top of it all by making him ugly as sin and pumping him full of cash. While he was horrible enough sober, adding alcohol to the mix made him an abominable wretch. "A right little wiener," as her late husband would say.

Generally, rowdy customers were nothing new in Otose's line of work. Saigou had voiced his concern about her running the bar alone on multiple occasions ("As one Madam of Kabukicho to another"), and Otose would just answer him with an exhale of her cigarette, and rasp, "Occupational hazard. Like your ingrown hairs," while nodding in the direction of his badly waxed legs.

So when Oishi started throwing glasses against the walls and sloppily went off about how this town basically belonged to him (it did not) and how he was practically the Fifth Deva of Kabukicho (he was not), Otose took another draw of her cigarette and figured she'd just add the broken glassware to his tab. And when he grabbed her by the front of her kimono and squealed unintelligibly, well, Otose just kept smoking and eyed him like the stupid little pig he was. The whole thing would've probably just ended there—a few broken glasses on the ground, a rumpled kimono, a bit of hog-spittle flecked on her face—but then Gintoki, who had been quietly sitting just a few seats down, had suddenly grabbed two bottles of her best sake by their necks and smashed them together with Oishi's head in between.

It had been a few weeks since she had found Gintoki on the verge of becoming a human popsicle, and up until that moment, he had scarcely made himself known. He'd come down from the office every once in a while to pour himself a drink from behind her bar, keeping away from the other customers before eventually drifting back upstairs like a ghost. Other than the times she shooed him off to buy her groceries, she didn't think he ever left Snack Otose. Sometimes she wondered if she really had found a dead man at her husband's grave.

Then this.

Oishi howled out in pain, both from the lacerations and the alcohol burning into the fresh cuts. His face was a bloody wreck. The cigarette might've fallen out of Otose's mouth. Heads turned to stare, stunned by the sudden violence of it all. And then, as if that hadn't been enough, Gintoki grabbed the still screaming man and savagely slammed his face into the bar top and the broken glass that now littered its surface. Oh, it was absolutely horrific. A few men had gathered their wits and quickly hauled Gintoki off of Oishi, who had gone unnervingly quiet.

It could have ended there, but Gintoki roared like a man possessed as he struggled wildly against the men's grip, lunging for Oishi like a mad dog at the end of a chain. In the chaos, someone threw a punch (probably Gintoki), and things quickly deteriorated into an all-out brawl, zero allegiances and every man, woman, and occasional underaged drinker for themselves.

As the Battle Royale pushed and pulled against the seams her little bar, Otose lit herself another cigarette in the corner, watching the white-haired kid with dead fish-eyes she had picked up in the graveyard explode to life.

She'd been right: absolute anarchy.

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"Here," Otose said as she held out a folded piece of paper towards Gintoki before he left to buy the groceries. His left eye was turning a weird shade of purple after a girl with gorilla-like strength had slugged him with a nasty right hook during the bar fight a few nights ago. God, he hoped he never had to deal with the likes of women like her ever again.

"What's this?" He grumbled as he took the paper, giving it a good squint with his one good eye. "Your incontinence prescription?"

She took a draw from her cigarette, considering him and the petulant little frown on his face. A right little wiener. "It's a favor for a friend."

"Are you whoring me out?" He shrilled.

"No, you idiot!" Otose resisted the urge to shove her cigarette into his ear. "It's a job. Mr. Iwase down the street needs someone to help him change the roofing on his store. He'll pay you."

"You are whoring me out!"

This time Otose gave into her earthly desires and kicked Gintoki out the front door. "Stop being such a bum and go earn some rent. Plus you're going to pay up for destroying my bar. Do you know how much those two bottles of sake cost? You'd have to sell both your livers!"

He rubbed his back where she had landed her kick. "That's cheap, you old hag. I'm giving you a white-glove protection service, and you expect me to shell out rent? I even go buy you your incontinence pads!"

Otose threw her husband's old scooter keys at his fat head. "The only thing I need to protect around here is my bank account from grubby free-loaders like you. So get to work." Otose slammed the door shut on him.

Eventually stories about the Shiroyasha and the four warriors faded from people's day to day conversations as the war grew into a distant memory. Even the government seemed to ease up on their search for Joui Patriots in an attempt to move society forward into the future. Wanted flyers of the escaped White-haired Demon were no longer plastered across every conceivable surface, and his status as a criminal at large was made apparent only on the government's website, which no one ever bothered to check anyways. The buildings in Kabukicho continued to grow taller, the neon lights stranger, and a pachinko parlor had opened up on one of the corners. Word also began to pass from lips about Snack Otose and the strange company the Deva kept there, about a mad dog and a young man who would do odd jobs for the right price.