Sakamoto Tatsuma arrives on a ship and the first thing he does is throw up on Gintoki and Takasugi, and no one can tell if he's skilled or just plain stupid - no one can tell if he'll be a liability or an asset until he makes his first trade negotiation and comes back with more weapons than Gintoki's seen in a year.

"What the hell? There's no way they'd hand over so much!"

"Ahahaha! Kintoki, it's all about how you use your words!"

"My name is Gintoki, dammit! And what the hell did you do? Did you steal it?"

"I told you," Sakamoto says, grinning, "It's all about how you use your words."

"You cheated the suppliers."

"Ahahaha! Of course not! It's just simple wordplay, Kintoki!"

"It's not Kintoki! And that's definitely cheating, dammit!"

He's decent on the battlefield, too, cutting through the Amanto with his sword and holding his own. After Sakamoto's first battle, Gintoki finds him perched on the roof of the temple they're using as a base.

Gintoki climbs onto the roof and settles comfortably beside him, enjoying the cool breeze (for once the air does not smell of blood, even if only because the wind is blowing the stench of the battlefield away from them).

"So," he says at last, when Sakamoto doesn't seem inclined to say much besides "hello Kintoki" and Gintoki's established that Kintoki is not his name. "First battle."

The soldiers had made a big deal about Gintoki's, Takasugi's and Katsura's first battle, asking how it was, laughing, saying that they were amazing on the battlefield. Crowding in, asking if it was too much, if they were going to leave, go running home to their mothers. Katsura's hands were still shaking where they were hidden beneath his bloody sleeves and Takasugi looked half-crazed if you knew how to look, and when the soldiers suggested that they run home Gintoki thought Takasugi might rip their throats out. He'd grabbed Takasugi and Katsura and shoved through the men until they were far, far away from the soldiers, hidden in the forest. Then he'd helped them wash the blood off their hands.

Sakamoto is different. He's been laughing since the battle, smiling big and wide like he might fall apart if he doesn't, and if his laugh has taken on a desperate, shaky edge no one mentions it, just like how Gintoki won't mention that he caught Sakamoto throwing up in the woods right after the battle. He's of age, or at least he's not a child in a sea of men, and the men leave him to get over it himself.

"Ahahaha! Yup!"

"What do you think?"

"What do you mean, Kintoki?"

"It's Gintoki. And you know what I mean."

Sakamoto's quiet for a long while. "It's real ugly," he says at last. "But we've all got to do our part, right?" He punctuates that with a laugh.

"Hm." Gintoki hums. He stares up at the sky. "If it suits you better, stick to swindling our suppliers. We don't need some half-assed idiot getting himself killed out there."

Sakamoto laughs. "How mean, Kintoki!"

"It's not Kintoki, dammit! Stupid empty-headed idiot."

"Ahaha!" Sakamoto grins.

Gintoki shuts his eyes, relishing the quiet - it won't last long

Sure enough, Sakamoto's voice sounds out a while later, quieter than usual. "What about you?"

"Hah?"

"What do you think, Kintoki?"

Gintoki doesn't open his eyes.

He thinks about Katsura, he thinks about Takasugi, he thinks about Shouyou. He thinks about the people who will die if he can't keep them safe, the people who have died because he wasn't able to protect them.

"Didn't you hear Bakasugi?" Gintoki asks. "I don't think."

-x-

People are getting sick.

The soldiers have always gotten sick, of course. What's a war without tuberculosis, pneumonia or typhoid? They've always gotten sick. Gintoki has watched them die. Sat by their sides, trying to treat them but not knowing how, because all of his medical knowledge involved gashes or burns or broken bones; something he could see, something he could bind. Sickness is something else, something he can't fix, and sitting by their sides helplessly as they die is one of the worst damn things he's ever felt.

This is different. This is worse, because what the hell- their hair turns white and they lose their sight and this- this is like nothing they've ever seen. It spreads faster than a damned wildfire.

"His hair looks like yours," Takasugi had commented when the first man succumbed to the illness. "What did you do, get jealous and dye it?"

Now the illness has been raging for three days. Three days isn't much, but half their camp is sick and dying and that first man is dead.

How do I fix you? Gintoki wants to ask. He keeps his mouth firmly shut whenever the urge arises; spends the days mopping the soldiers' brows with cool cloths and telling them to hang in there, damn it.

I can't see, they say, and their voices tremble with horror and fear - even if they recover, their eyes will never be the same. The tent for the sick is filled with the stench of urine and sweat and death and fear. The entire camp is on edge, nerves like a rubber band stretched to breaking point.

When the first man dies beneath his shaking hands and litany of curses, Gintoki swallows down a sob and stands. He tries to ignore how the tent for the sick is slowly becoming a funeral ground.

They have to do something.

The teasing has stopped; the joking has fallen flat.

"Can you get ahold of medicine?" Gintoki asks Sakamoto.

"I could if there was one." Sakamoto sounds as pained as Gintoki feels.

"What is this?" Gintoki asks. Sakamoto shrugs and shakes his head. For once the idiot doesn't laugh, brown eyes hard and expression stony. The men who died were their friends, their comrades, their brothers in arms.

And they're gone, gone, gone.

-x-

The soldiers begin to look like caged animals, the ones that are kept in a too-small space with too little to do. They pace the camp with sharp, tense motions - some sit by the sides of the dying, others wander among the dead, and still others stay far away and try to avoid the scent and heavy tension of death.

Katsura marches around the sickbay, giving orders for more medicine, more herbs, more poultices (even when nothing works and the soldiers die anyway and Katsura stares down at the corpses with his face stony in a way that really means he just wants to cry). Takasugi kneels by the sides of those approaching death and talks to them quietly, listening to their last words. Sakamoto alternates between the dead and the living, laughing and drinking and trying to relieve the tension, but it isn't working and they all know it.

And there's Gintoki, who goes around the camp incapable of easing the fear of the living and doesn't know if there's a point trying to treat the sick when they just die, anyway. He takes after Takasugi and speaks to those on their deathbeds, and if it hurts like hell when the dying men talk to him about the families and lovers they left behind, he refuses to let it show.

Sometimes, in his darker, more hopeless moments, he thinks that they should stop wasting resources on the men with the new disease if they're just going to die anyway. He forces it back down with vengeance and throws it into the darkest corners of his mind, but he can feel them lurking there, with their shadows and logic and reasonable coldness.

Sometimes he thinks about the brat he used to be, the way anything was acceptable as long as it kept him alive, and sometimes he misses how easy it was, knowing that his decisions were made purely on logic and calculated odds.

It's harder to come to terms with your decisions when you know that you lose too much and don't gain a thing at all.

(Gintoki is not a good person.)

-x-

They burn the bodies every night, spend the days bringing the corpses to the edge of the camp. The pyre of dark smoke goes unseen in the darkness of night.

Smoke and ash paint Gintoki's white clothes grey and black - Gintoki never thought that he'd prefer blood to anything in the world, but he looks down at the ashes of his friends on his hands and realises just how wrong he was.

They haven't stepped onto the battlefield for nearly a week, but they've lost a third of their men.

"What are we going to do?" He asks Takasugi.

Takasugi deals with everything in fighting and schemes. Gintoki thinks it's a aftereffect of the guy being (sort of) abused by his parents as a kid.

The Commander of the Kihetai stands and rests a hand on his sword.

"We'll get rid of the Amanto before they hit the camp," he says. If the men are attacked while they're sick, things will go to hell. It'll be less of a war and more of a slaughter.

Gintoki nods and follows.

He's always been more of a fighter than a healer. Death and blood come to his fingers far more easily than poultices and medicines.

-x-

The Amanto are closer to the camp than they'd predicted. Far closer - near enough that they couldn't possibly have missed the camp. Which brings to mind the question: why didn't they attack?

"How did the scouts miss this?" Gintoki asks, voice a tight growl. His sword whistles through the air and carves a bloody gash through a Yato's chest, erasing the smirk on it's porcelain-pale, blue-eyed face.

Gintoki snarls and carves his way through more of the enemies, and there's blood on his face and blood in his eyes and blood trickling through his fingers and he feels better. Finally, after a damn week of watching his comrades die, after a shitty, cursed week of not being able to do a thing, of being helpless as their heartbeats fluttered and stopped, finally he's doing something.

When he laughs, the cold, tinny sound echoes over the battlefield, rising above the roars and screams and clangs of metal. Blood slips into his mouth and down his throat and he mashes his lips together, but they're still pulled up in a devilish grin, and shit, he's a demon, he's a thrice-damned monster-

But he's doing something, and the world is separated neatly into right and wrong and targets and allies and all he needs to do is swing his sword, nice and simple. It is so much better than being helpless. He laughs and the way his chest convulses makes it feel more like a sob, his shoulders hitching even as he explodes through the Amanto and drags his sword through their guts.

So simple. So simple compared to watching everyone die, so damn simple compared to standing with his hands by his sides as his comrades die one by one.

He's a damned monster. And maybe it doesn't matter - maybe it will never, ever matter. He roars and brings his sword around in a gleaming arc, and there, the Amanto are dead, all five of them, all ten of them, all twenty of them, and all these lives he's taken aren't enough to make up for the lives he couldn't save.

oOoOoOo

There are strange Amanto on the battlefield, with beads around their necks and red capes fluttering in the breeze, standing in a group on top of a crashed ship.

Takasugi is screaming from wherever he is, and Gintoki can hear fury and desperation making his words raw and his voice rough.

"Get them, Gintoki!" He yells, and his voice carries above the clash of swords and the cries of battle. "Kill them all!"

Takasugi is not his commander. But Takasugi is his friend, and Gintoki can hear the need in his voice, the terrible aching desperation that is nearly suffocating him.

So Gintoki goes, calling his comrades to his side, and they're running, swift as the wind to where the creatures stand.

oOoOoOo

His comrades are fast and strong and so damn brave.

He wishes that that could have saved them. As he always tells Katsura, if bravery or steel or determination could save a person, none of the samurai would die.

Too bad they keep dying, then. The creatures are shockingly fast and they have some sort of power or whatever - they can use the dangling cloth of their robes like tentacles, except faster and sleeker and sharper.

The man to his side twists away from one, feints away from another, and is stabbed through the throat by a third. Gintoki doesn't even have time to scream before the man is falling, blood rushing from the wound, and there's no time to mourn because there's more coming for him.

He can taste blood and acrid smoke in his mouth, and he's so sick and tired of everything, of watching people die one after the other, again and again and again. His stomach rolls and there's a lump in his throat and emptiness in his chest, and he weaves through the tentacle-things and stabs the Amanto straight through the neck, just like it killed his friend.

Gintoki pulls away with his lips pulled back in a sneer, twisting and slashing another Amanto in two, and his eyes flash a brighter, more ferocious crimson than even the Amanto's, not that he'd ever know.

He cuts through an Amanto, blade sliding between its ribs to puncture a lung, then yanks his blade out and jumps over its falling body, cutting through yet another of the stupid creatures and spinning forward.

Blood splatters onto his face and soaks his hair, damp stands slapping his face as he slices through another three creatures, and there's wetness on his arms and bloody tissue all over him. Someone moans behind him and it's a knife to his heart, because that sound was human, very human, and that's another friend dying or dead; another friend he didn't save.

"Demon," one of the monsters says, and Gintoki almost laughs.

Kill my friends then call me a demon, will you?

His sword carves through its soft flesh so easily, too easily, and when he steps on its face to jump over it as it falls, he can't even pretend that he's not doing it out of spite.

Kill them all, Takasugi said.

Gintoki does.

oOoOoOo

His comrades lie around him, dead, bodies mixed with those of their enemies, blood spilling onto the ground.

And Gintoki remembers why the battlefield isn't any better than watching his friends die of sickness.

Because it's easy, when there's an enemy in front of him and a sword in his hand, but afterwards, that's when things get hard. He's won the battle, accomplished his goal, except that his friends are still dead, his friends still die, and nothing he does will help them, and it's the same damn thing. It's the same as standing in that tent with his friends dying and nothing he can do about it, because he can't save them all.

Well, damn.

Shiroyasha, right? He's a demon. He's a screwed up demon that can't do anything - can't cure illnesses and can't cut fast enough to save his friends. So what can he do?

Nothing, that's what. Not one damn thing.

A demon is only good for killing people and watching friends die.

oOoOoOo

He makes it back eventually, stumbling and taking slow, painful steps.

The moment he steps into the camp, Takasugi's in his face, hand fisted in Gintoki's bloody shirt and green eyes wild, searching and frantic and desperate.

"You got them all?" He asks.

"Yeah." Gintoki pushes at him to get him off, and is mildly surprised by how easily Takasugi lets go.

Takasugi staggers back, eyes still fixed on Gintoki.

"All of them?" He asks again, double-checking what he already knows in a manner completely uncharacteristic of him.

"Oi, Bakasugi, how many times do I have to repeat myself? I got them all. What the hell's up with you?"

"It was them," Takasugi replies, and for a split second he looks young and desperately relieved. He looks his age, he looks small and sixteen and it makes something in Gintoki's chest twist, seeing this boy in armour, seeing this child in a war. "It was them all along."

"What?"

"Those Amanto are known as Enmi," Katsura says, striding towards them. "They are mercenaries, known as world destroyers." He looks at Gintoki, brown eyes dark and serious. "They were the ones causing the sickness."

Gintoki stops. He's heard somewhere before that when your heart stops you are considered medically dead, and he's pretty sure he dies in that moment, because his heart definitely isn't beating.

Then it starts again, hard and fast as if to make up for lost time. "How did you find out?" he asks Katsura. His breath trembles on the exhale.

Katsura shrugs, but his eyes are sharp and something in the set of his mouth is awfully smug. "Takasugi got ahold of a very self-satisfied Amanto. From there, it was a matter of extracting information."

What a very interesting way to say that an Amanto blabbed, Takasugi captured it, and the two of them tortured it until it spat out the details.

Huh. Katsura was always good-hearted. Besides Shouyou-sensei, he's the most righteous, upright person Gintoki knows. And now even he has no problems with torture.

War really does mess you up. Gintoki feels something twist (maybe snap, he doesn't know, so many things in him have broken he doesn't care anymore) in his chest and a distant sense of loss, but it's overshadowed by a brilliant, triumphant hope.

"So it's over?" he asks, trying to kill the stupid hope that's blooming in his chest. It's too soon to hope-

"It's over," Katsura says.

"It could have been lying," Gintoki points out, because it seems too good to be true. Katsura looks calmly at him.

"Shouyou sensei always taught us to cross-reference our sources," he says.

Ah. So Katsura and Takasugi tortured more than one Amanto. Haha.

It's over it's over it's over it's over it's over - they're saved. He doesn't have to watch his friends' hair turn bloody white or watch their eyes cloud over again. It's alright, it's over-

He made it in time. He cut the Enmi down in time to save some.

Gintoki tilts his head back and laughs, a ragged sound that comes in tattered, shuddering gasps. He pretends that he's just shaking because he's tired.

They're saved. They're saved. They're saved.

Maybe miracles do happen, after all.

Suddenly all of them are laughing, high and wild and happy and fiercely relieved. They're drunk off joy and relief and the sheer thrill of being alive. Of having friends and comrades who aren't going to die, of being together for just another day.

The next night, for the first time in weeks, they don't burn a single body.

And for once - for once in the entire damn war - it's enough.

oOoOoOo

The day after that they burn six bodies, and Gintoki knows that it will never be enough.

oOoOoOo

He catches Sakamoto throwing up around the corner a few battles later.

It shouldn't be a big deal. Sakamoto throws up whenever they get on a moving vehicle, or an airship, or even if they just spin him around a few times.

But Sakamoto's shoulders are shuddering in a way they never do, and they haven't done anything to mess with the idiot's stomach - there's been a huge battle, and they haven't had the time or energy to hassle the idiot.

Sakamoto's hand, pressed against the wall for balance, is stained with dull, drying blood.

It's a shame, Gintoki thinks. It's a damn shame. Sakamoto is strong, strong enough to be one of their best men, but he's too damn kind, so fiercely desperately kind that he tries to save their enemies on the battlefield; he'd rather incapacitate than kill, and it takes a lot of strength to do that in wartime.

The irony, Gintoki supposes, is in the fact that Sakamoto is so good at fighting when killing makes him sick.

He sighs as he leans against the wall, patting Sakamoto's back a few times.

Sakamoto laughs between retches. "Ahahaha! I'm sorry, Kintoki! I get land sick sometimes, too!"

Bullshit, Gintoki thinks. But maybe that's true, in a roundabout way. Maybe they're all land sick sometimes.

Because damn, Gintoki's sick of looking at the corpses and bodies. He's sick of watching people die. He's sick of being the one to survive when everyone else in the camp deserves to live more than he does. He's sick of looking at the bloodstained dirt.

He sighs and rubs his shoulder - it always aches, now, from days of wielding a sword and because some old injury there likes to make itself known frequently.

"Idiot," Gintoki mutters. Sakamoto tenses subtly, as if bracing for a blow - Gintoki doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry. "If it's so hard, just leave."

"Ahahaha! That's harsh, Kintoki!"

Gintoki hums, looking up at the sky (it's choked with black smoke).

"Is it?" He wonders out loud. "It's pretty sickening, isn't it, watching them all die? Having that blood on your hands?"

Sakamoto gags and retches, dry heaving more than anything. Still, he's listening, Gintoki can tell. "Aren't you tired?" Gintoki asks. "Of watching this?"

(Gintoki's tired. He's so damn tired, and so damn sick of it all.)

-x-

Time passes, and eventually Katsura's UNO cards become too bloody to play with.

Katsura argues that they're not, that they're waterproof and anyway you can still make out the numbers and even the colours of the cards if you squint - if there's enough light, Gintoki allows, enough light definitely being more than the flickering glow of the campfire that's about the most the soldiers can offer half the time - but then the deck is sliced in half by an Amanto sword that came dangerously close to gutting the idiot and it becomes a moot point, anyway.

Because they still need a way to ease the tension of the soldiers - because something has to be done - they eventually invent a new game that involves sticks and stones and, as a penalty, swords and the chicken dance. Nobody quite understands how it came about or how it's actually played; the only reason why the soldiers or anyone at all seems to participate is because of how utterly ridiculous it is. At any given point of time all of the four inventors of the game - Katsura and Gintoki and Takasugi and Sakamoto - are at odds about the rules, which seem to change in favour of each person whenever the need requires, and there are only two things that are absolute about the game. They are:

One, that it inevitably ends with two unfortunates doing a strange hybrid of the chicken dance and a sword fight; and two, that nobody can make heads or tails of the rules or how they even get to the end point anyway. In all of the games there are, more often than not, just as many sets of rules as there are participants, sometimes more.

That said, it accomplishes its purpose: it relieves the tension of the soldiers and makes the camp more lighthearted, and if it's absolutely fun and makes everyone laugh a laugh previously unique to Sakamoto - obnoxiously loud but so damn happy that you have to pardon the annoyance, until the annoyance gets to the point where that's really impossible, no matter how freaking happy the idiot sounds - well. That's just a bonus.

Those times - sitting around the fireplace with tired muscles relaxing and idiots laughing and finding his mouth curving into a grin - those are good times. Shining moments in a bloody world, spent in bloody clothes with sweat drying on dirt-crusted skin - not perfect, dirty and flawed and fit together with broken pieces, but good nonetheless.

They're happy, and Gintoki knows that in this sort of place, happiness is almost more than you can ask. It's a miracle and a privilege and a luxury and as he laughs he leans against Katsura and pokes fun at Takasugi and tells Sakamoto to shut up if he doesn't want to call the entire Amanto battalion onto them, does he not know the meaning of stealth?

He grips the moment tight and holds it close and draws more warmth from the happiness than from the campfire. And for a precious, imperfect-but-still-good moment, everything is alright.

oOoOoOo

Those aren't perfect days, but they're good, and by Gintoki's (admittedly low) standards, they're close enough that they count. There are other days, too, not exactly perfect but damn near close, days where they find a comrade they thought for sure was dead, days when said comrade can be fixed up by just a few bandages and a good night's sleep.

There are days that are much, much worse; days spent on the battlefield after days and nights of fighting, with blood and sweat in his stinging eyes and a steady, screaming burn in his muscles and the dead all around him. Days of stumbling through the dead to look for survivors and not finding any; not finding anything but blood and staring eyes and twisted limbs and shitshitshit he's going to be so sick because he knew them, he knew them, he bantered with them and laughed with them and laughed at them, and now they're dead and he can't do this. Days where the bloodlust and fury thrums through his veins long after the battle is over, and he strides around the camp with blood drying on his clothes and guts still on his arms and everyone shrinking away from him like prey avoids a predator; Katsura and Takasugi and Sakamoto are all on dangerous missions and he can't help them.

Sanity and humanity are surprisingly fragile things, easy in peacetime and easy to shatter in war. And Gintoki knows that he's walking a thin, fraying line.

oOoOoOo

Sakamoto gets injured. Sakamoto is crippled, trying to protect an enemy soldier of all things. The tendon in his wrist practically severed, and he's brought back on a stretcher, pale and shaking and smiling like that frail desperate stretched-too-thin smile is all that's holding him together.

Of course Gintoki knew this was going to happen. How could it not? This is war, this is a place of death and fire and blood where you can barely save your comrades, let alone your enemies. And Sakamoto, who burdens himself with the injured Bakafu soldiers, who acts like he'd like to save the whole world, was always going to end up like this. He's just lucky he's not dead.

Of course Gintoki knew that. But Sakamoto was so strong, so constant, so persistent in his kindness, that Gintoki never really believed it.

Sakamoto covers his eyes with his uninjured hand, a shining tear running down his grimy cheeks, and something else in Gintoki breaks, snapping straight in two and dropping from his chest like a bird with severed wings, shattering in his gut and sending fragments stabbing through his stomach.

Takasugi smiles like he's going to cry and Katsura goes grim and stony and still. Gintoki grabs Takasugi and they go for revenge.

They like stupid wars, Gintoki and Takasugi. The need for revenge claws in their blood, their bellies, their throats, desperate for release. And they let the beasts out, laughing, desperate, breaking, two boys on a battlefield, two children playing war. They let the beasts out and they go for revenge because revenge is a stupid battle, because it doesn't fix anything - doesn't make Sakamoto better or Katsura stop looking so grim or stop each other from breaking-

-but it makes them feel better to let the fury out. So they meet the bastard who did it, they draw their swords and release their beasts. And Gintoki can't pretend that it's not out of spite.

He wants to ruin the world for hurting his friends. And maybe he'll be sorry.

But maybe he won't.

oOoOoOo

Sakamoto won't get better. Gintoki can tell from the stony look in Katsura's eyes, from the way Takasugi glares at the ground like he wants it to burn to ashes, from the scars on his own body - the marks of that decade-old battlefield that still ache when it's cold.

Sakamoto won't get better. Gintoki turns away and pretends that it doesn't hurt.

oOoOoOo

A/N:

Aww, dudes, thanks so much for all your reviews! They made me so happy. Especially LeChick, who reviewed on EVERY ONE OF MY GINTAMA STORIES HOLY HECK. You're amazing. Every one of you who reviewed is amazing. :)

Welp, in Be Forever Yorozuya Zura said that they'd fought the Enmi in the Joui war and Hijikata (or was it Zura? I can't remember) said that the Enmi decimated a large number of the Joui forces. I was wondering why no one had taken advantage of it in Joui war fics.

Yeah, well, thanks for reading, and I hope you liked it! Please drop me a review if you've got time - it'd make me really happy, and that'd be cool. XD

God bless!