Welcome Home, Mister Death

A Gintama thingamawhatsit

By

EvilFuzzy9

How long had it been, he wondered? He couldn't remember the last time...

Steel and ash. Fire and blood. Brimstone and sulfur. These odors stained his nostrils, clung to every inch of his body. The scars of old wounds ached unceasingly, muscles pushed again and again too far past their limits.

He could no longer see. His eyes had failed him a long time ago, so long ago. Eyes which once had gazed upward into the blue skies of Edo now saw naught but impenetrable darkness.

His ears were ringing. It hurt his head, his skull. The sound of it bored straight into his brain, a constant companion which he knew would never leave. Echoes of gunshots and cannonfire, fiery explosions, the ring of clashing blades. These sounds were tattooed painfully onto his inner ear, following him even in utter silence.

His hands used to be so soft, didn't they? At least compared to now. Hard and calloused, every inch of his palms and his fingers were layered with an unfeeling lamellar of thick, dead skin. His hands had become numbed to pain, inured to the ache of knuckles and wrists jarred and abused in the bone-trembling impacts of sword upon sword. He no longer even felt the little day-to-day cuts that accumulated from the handling and the wielding of a samurai's katana.

He felt so old. It had been so long... far too long. So many years since he had breathed the air of Japan, of his home, of Earth.

But there was no going back. Not now. Not in this time.

It was gone. They were dead.

The way of Heaven was that of caprice unfeeling. The Tendo Sect nor knew nor cared what pains they wrought upon innocents and innocence. Earth was shattered, broken. Moreover its people, its sons and daughters in humanity, were lost, scattered, wandering even as the Israelites in the Wilderness.

The Land of Milk and Honey was now forever beyond their reach. The Promised Land was destroyed. Their home was reduced to less than ash.

They were gone. He had failed them. He had been too weak to protect them, any of them.

Always, too weak.

He was a failure, not even as a samurai, not even as a man. He had failed as only a worm could. He was lower than the maggots which glut themselves on rancid, rotting flesh.

How many lives had he taken with those two hands? Surely the number was beyond any count. So many years spent fighting every day, swinging his sword and shedding the blood of any who tried to fell him.

Death was always two steps behind him. He was the envoy of calamity, an harbinger of conflict and war. A grim spectre, some called him. A living ghost, a sword demon.

Ken-ki.

That was what they called him. It was a title, not a name, but still he bore it as one. Not out of pride, but because it was the only name that an oni like himself deserved to be called. He could not, in good conscience, sully that name which had given to him by his father and his mother, that name by which his sister and his friends had known him, in happier times.

Even if they were all gone from this world, still he would not shame them like that.

He could not.

"That's it? The Ken-ki? He's only a human!"

The silence was broken. Free of thought, a hand moved to the hilt of his weapon. It was smooth, worn down, but it melded perfectly into his arm as his fingers curled around it.

He tilted his head, listening. He took a breath through his nose, sniffing.

The scuffing of boots on pavement. The sound was distinctive in a way that only an experienced ear could discern. There was considerable weight where the soles met the ground, the weight of a large and likely muscular body.

He smelled blood. Gunpowder and oil.

Fire.

"You don't seem like much yourself," he remarked lazily – wearily – drawing his sword from its sheath.

"Put that thing away, old-timer," said the newcomer. The sneer was virtually audible. "We wouldn't want you to get hurt now, would we?"

"I could say the same for you," the old man wheezed, shoulders stooped with the burden of decades. His bones ached, but still the stance came to him like second nature. It was easier than breathing, for him. "People have a bad habit of running into this thing whenever I take it out." He grinned, in spite of himself. "Kids really should watch where they're going, these days."

A snarl, and a growl.

"Don't make light of us, ya bastard! Who the hell d'ya think you are? Some washed up old samurai?!"

"Ahh..." the man let out a soft sigh. He smiled, almost nostalgically. "Samurai... it has been a very long time since someone has called me that. Most people don't remember... It was a long time ago, back when I was still young... but, yes, I suppose I used to be one, once upon a time. A samurai. But I cannot call myself that anymore. I've not been able for many, many years..."

A snort. The sound of a blade sliding from its sheath.

"Tch, enough of your reminiscing, geezer! Get outta here! You damn humans don't belong in space, y'know? Just some dirty apes swinging around a bunch of sticks, is what you are!"

The old man scowled.

"Do you begrudge the gutter to he who has nowhere else to go?" he murmured. "Among us humans, those who have cardboard boxes to call home are the lucky ones. Ever since then..." His demeanor darkened, stance shifting subtly. His lips curled firmly into a snarl. "Ever since you amanto... Since the Tendo...!"

Eyes like pearls flashed with anger, unseeing but not not unexpressive. A blade whistled wickedly through the air, sinking into flesh with a grisly sound.

He smelled blood, and the foul reek of spilt guts. A body fell to the ground with a gruesome shriek, gurgling and rattling and thrashing for seconds.

Then it went still, silent.

He smelled the stench of death.

"Again, the reaper's scythe fails to take me..." the old man murmured. His body drooped, tired. "When can I sleep? I am too old for this." His muscles hurt, they were crying out in agony, burning and stinging.

He fell to his knees, all at once. With a strangled gasp, he felt a pain in his breast, a numbness in his sword arm.

He had been stabbed, run through from behind.

"Ah... is this death?" he whispered, feeling weak. The blood was draining from his body. He felt faint, almost delirious. "How sweet it is... to be released at last..."

Shinpachi awoke all at once. He groped blindly, instinctively in the darkness for his sword. When he could not find it, grasping sightlessly through the sheets, he became panicked.

An unthinking terror gripped his heart. He was weaponless! Defenseless!

He nearly had a heart attack before he finally realized.

I don't have a sword. Because of the ban...

Shinpachi shook his acing head, perplexed, confused.

Ugh... he thought. What happened...? I feel like Kagura-chan was playing taiko drums with my skull...

Glancing around in the darkness of early dawn, Shinpachi squinted his eyes, seeking his glasses. He couldn't see them, though.

Wait.

He couldn't see anything. It was never this dark. Not in Edo, at least.

The panic set in again.

"I'm blind?!" Shinpachi cried out. "What the hell kind of gimmick is this?! What else has that damn gorilla author came up with to torment me? Auuugh! I'm blind!" He shot up out of his futon, staggering drunkenly to his feet.

Right before the pain hit.

Then he toppled right over, knocked off his feet by what could only be described as a punch to the gut of every cell in body. It was agonizing. He felt so stiff...!

"Ack!" Shinpachi yelped. In his panic, he felt his body seize up. His heart was burning. Literally, he could feel a physical, burning sensation in the muscle which pumped the blood throughout his body.

It was agony. Pure hell.

I'm dying! he thought. I feel like I'm dying...! And this wasn't that much of an exaggeration. His body was in unbelievable pain. It was maddening, he felt like he had been dunked a mile underwater, so far from the surface that he couldn't even see any light. It was akin to the instinctive, unthinking terror of drowning, and Shinpachi's limbs were flailing wildly, uncontrollably as he rolled across the floor.

Right up until he opened his eyes.

Shinpachi awoke in a cold sweat. He was still in his futon. He could see as poorly as ever. His body didn't particularly hurt.

Eh? he thought, disoriented. His heart was hammering in his chest, and he felt like he was freezing, so drenched in sweat. Eh?! What... was that really just a dream...?!

Grasping around for his glasses, Shinpachi couldn't help but feel more than just a little peeved.

"Another dream like that..." he muttered irritably, finding his spectacles folded up by his bedside. "This is getting a little ridiculous."

Sighing, the samurai-in-training shook his head, before sitting up. His covers falling down off of him, he noticed that his chest hair had grown back again. It was even thicker than yesterday, a rug to rival even a middle-aged general growing from the lean chest of a teenaged male.

He glanced at his arms, and his knuckles, seeing they were also looking incredibly shaggy. For a Japanese boy of his age, at least. Maybe it would be normal for a westerner, to have at least this much body hair, but Shinpachi felt distinctly out of place with it.

"Ah... How in the world does it grow back so fast...?" he wondered to himself. Certainly his father had been a fairly hairy man, but Shinpachi didn't like being so furry. He shaved the hair as neatly as he could, recently even having graduated to regularly waxing, but it always seemed to come back after a couple of days, even thicker and bushier than ever.

Shinpachi glanced at his clock.

6:15 A.M.

He sighed. Gin-san and Kagura-chan may have thought of this as ungodly early, but lately Shinpachi found himself waking up around this time every day. He had never been a late sleeper like his colleagues, but these days the budding Shimura was finding himself to be a seriously early riser. It just happened naturally, hardly without any input from him.

Standing up, Shinpachi grabbed a clean change of clothes and headed to the bathroom. He knew he wouldn't be getting back to sleep even if he tried. He just wasn't tired.

Secretly he was a little grateful for that. The dreams he'd been having lately were more than a little disconcerting...

Practically moving on autopilot, Shinpachi washed up. Took a quick shower, brushed his teeth, briefly combed his hair. He didn't shave though. It didn't even cross his mind, once he stepped into the bathroom. He was too busy puzzling over various important things.

Like what Otsu-chan looked like naked.

Hey.

He was a teenaged boy, alright? He had to do SOMETHING to take care of certain... daily difficulties. His sister might have considered it obscene, but it really was the simplest, and quickest, way to get himself down to a point where he could put his hakama on straight.

And once Shinpachi was dressed up, washed up, and woken up, he grabbed a training sword from the dojo proper and headed outside to train in the cool morning air.

Even with his sandals and his socks on, Shinpachi could feel the dew on the grass. He could smell the air, not clean exactly but fresh. The air still had the faint nip of night to it, and the sun was just starting to rise in the distance.

Shinpachi moved.

He went effortlessly through the basic kata, movements he had been drilling in for nearly as long as he could hold a sword. These had been taught to him and Otae by their father, back when he was still alive, and still had the strength to teach. The fundamental stances of the Shimura style, a modest school of swordfighting from a family that had once been a minor nobility.

Oh, the Shimura family had not been prestigious like the Yagyuu, or wealthy, or particularly powerful or outstanding in any real way. But as a samurai family of Edo they had naturally been vassals of the Shogunate, one of many clans which had pledged loyalty to the emperor and his shogun, in the old days.

But then, the old days had passed. They had been gone even before Shinpachi was born.

Shinpachi felt warmer, almost hot now as he continued going through the repetitive movements, slowly drilling every slightest tensing of muscle and angling weight into the memory of his body. His motions gained more fervor, and became faster and sharper.

Shinpachi didn't really hate amanto. He wasn't a joi zealot clinging blindly to a past that was gone forever, faded away into the mists of time. The amanto had become a part of human culture and trade. Not just in Japan, which had been one of the countries most resistant to the arrival of these sky-people.

Most every nation in the world had made treaties of some sort or other with the amanto. Some, like France or the British Empire, had met the aliens effectively as equals. They had made trade deals with the amanto more or less as readily as they would with any human state. Others, like Prussia or the United States, had been more leery of letting amanto come and go as they pleased, and had made fair amounts of grandstanding to assert their sovereignty (while eagerly adopting and reverse-engineering amanto technologies to augment their own military power).

Some had been disinterested, particularly in more rural or wild parts of the world, and still others had been outright hostile to the amanto. Of these powers, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Japan had been the hardest to subdue, but Japan held the dubious distinction of this rebellion against the amanto NOT being state sanctioned. While the Turks had technically won more strategic victories in the field, and Russia had been a bloody meatgrinder and brutal war of attrition, the samurai of Japan had stood out to the amanto in just how they had been willing to fight not only these outsiders, but their own government.

This, more than anything else, was why when most amanto spoke of human warriors, they spoke of samurai. While the strong warrior races of the amanto may have looked down on humans in general, that stubborn refusal to back down even against superior enemies had certainly earned the samurai a certain degree of respect from offworld veterans of the Joi Wars.

Shinpachi honestly didn't hate the amanto for what had happened to Japan. Realistically, academically, he knew that even if the amanto had never come to earth, the Japanese era of closed borders could not have lasted forever. Eventually either internal or external pressures would have forced them to open up trade with other nations once more.

But.

While he did not hate the amanto...

...he had no love for the Harusame. Not those pirates.

He grit his teeth, thinking about Kagura's brother, and that man who had driven her to the brink of madness. That Abuto, who had nearly killed him, whom he had been unable to even lay a hand on.

Shinpachi grit his teeth, once more redoubling the furor of his exercises. It galled him to think about it, to recall all the times his friends had needed to protect him while he was powerless to do anything. It wasn't like he wanted to be the strongest swordsman in the world, or anything...

...but he was tired of feeling like he was being left behind. It was suffocating, how hopeless he felt when he considered how far beyond him Gin-san and Kagura-chan were. They were his friends, yet if things got so bad that they needed help... well, there would be nothing he could do for them. Not as he was.

Shinpachi gnashed his teeth, swinging his bokken so swiftly and fiercely that it whistled shrilly through the air. He did not lose the careful precision of his movements, but they became faster, more powerful and furious the hotter his thoughts burned in his mind.

He twisted his torso with the movement of his blade, striking down invisible foes one after the other. The style taught at Kodokan Dojo was one of overwhelming attack, swift and powerful, "a blitzkrieg bujutsu" as Hajime had once put it. The chief tenant was to strike the foe down in as few cuts as possible, the epitome of its teachings to be found in one hit, one kill. Blows powerful enough to pierce armor, yet deliberate enough to pass through a flower garden without bending a single stem.

Shinpachi's arms were burning as he moved through the advance sets. These he had studied largely from scrolls left behind by his father, and some he had incorporated from observations of the styles of Gin-san, and the Shinsengumi, and others. To become a true martial master one had to not simply drill in a singular style. You had to find those movements which best suited you, those strategies of combat most congruent with your personal philosophies. To become a master swordsman was, in essence, to create your own unique style that you could use better than anyone else.

Or something like that.

Shinpachi stopped paying attention to that tangent somewhere around the halfway point.

"The start of this story really was poorly paced," he muttered, sweat trickling down his brow. "And what was with all that melodrama...? Is this supposed to be a serious fic, or something?" He snorted, continuing with his kata. "Now THAT's a laugh," he said under his breath.

"Ken-ki...? What's that? Some kinda new manga? Is it like Maken-ki? Is that it?"

Gin-san was never any help.

"Ehhhh? A dream about some old guy who keels over of a hear attack, aru? What is that? Only a stupid four-eyes like you could have such a lame dream, aru!"

Neither was Kagura.

"Shin-chan, if you have time to waste with dreams, you have time to get a real job~ ❤"

And ane-ue was just plain cruel.

"Why am I asking people about this dream, anyways?" Shinpachi asked himself, sighing as he sat down on the front doorstep of Snack House Otose. "It's just a stupid dream about some stupid geezer who dies at the start of some stupid fic. Why am I here?"

"Why are any of us here?" queried the verdette gynoid Tama. "That is one of life's great questions, is it not? Are we here because of some cosmic coincidence? Or were we created by some higher intelligence with a plan for us?"

Shinpachi stared at the robot maid, eyes half-lidded behind his spectacles.

"Eh? You were definitely created!" he said. "You're a robot! You couldn't have just evolved from a pocketwatch!"

"That is a very bold philosophical statement to make, Patsuan," stated Tama, sweeping the steps as she spoke.

A vein was visibly twitching above Shinpachi's right eye.

"You're making fun of me, aren't you?" he muttered.

"I can neither confirm nor deny that," stated Tama blandly.

"I hate you all."

"WE HATE YOU TOO, FOUR-EYES!" came Kagura's voice from the Odd Jobs office.

Shinpachi got a matching twitch over his left eye.

"SHUT UP, KAGURA-CHAN! YOU DAMN SNOT NOSED PSEUDO-LOLI!" he shouted back.

"YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE WHO CARES ABOUT THAT, YOU LOLICON IDOL OTAKUUUUU!" hollered Gin-san, joining in on the shout off.

Shinpachi scowled, crossing his arms over his chest. "No respect," he muttered. "I get absolutely no respect around here."

"Should I initiate operation of subroutine: play world's tiniest violin?" queried Tama.

Shinpachi glared.

"I'm going to kill all of you," he said, eerily calm. "One of these days I am going to snap and murder every last one of you fucking assholes."

"I will be certain to add that to my internal day planner," stated Tama.

"I fucking hate you."

And that was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Ohwait.

Wrong genre. Also wrong point in the story.

AND THAT WAS THE END(?) OF A REALLY WEIRD FIC.

CHAPTER.

I DON'T KNOW I'M JUST MAKING THIS SHIT UP AS I GO.

A/N: I wanted to do a serious piece with a badass Shinpachi. Then I realized that would be boring, the way I was writing it.

So I changed it so that Shinpachi is now like some kind of Rodney Dangerfield/Leonard Church hybrid. I don't know, I thought it was amusing. Also it is a great way to channel hatred for everybody around me.

...which I may or may not have. Depends how good a day I'm having.

Chapter added: 2-2-14

TTFN and R&R!

– — ❤