Chapter 3:

The Samurai

Novaturient (adjective)

Desiring or seeking powerful change in one's life, behavior, or situation.

His awareness of the Enmi nanomachines inside him emerges gradually. It begins with a strange, absent buzzing in the center of his chest that he rubs away with the passing thought that he had drank too much the night before. Next that follows are the dreams of darkness, space, and a presence strengthening around him with a starvation so fierce it makes his head pound with migraines. Yet, despite the ravenous howling of his nights, when he awake he can barely find it within himself to look at food without feeling incredibly nauseous. Not even a parfait can tempt his dwindling appetite.

Gintoki wakes up one morning with a burning sensation on the side of his right bicep, but there is not so much as a scratch on his skin. Shortly after, he experiences coughing fits at random that increase incrementally in severity with every cough that suffocates his lungs. He manages to avoid worrying Kagura and Shinpachi, miracle of miracles, but the old hag watches him with too-perceptive, worried eyes that eventually make him avoid the bar altogether. Hijikata bumps into him one day, looks angry enough to bite off his cigarette, but then he stops and eyes Gintoki up and down with a peculiar look in his eye before asking Gintoki, in his own unique brand of insults, if he is alright.

Gintoki rarely leaves his bedroom now, and the kids have noticed something's wrong.

The final straw that clicks the symptoms together in his mind is when he walks in the bathroom one night after one of the worst dreams yet. Gintoki washes his crusty face, looks up at his reflection in the mirror, and gawks at the snowy-white shade of his formerly silver hair. It disappears the moment he blinks, but Gintoki knows what he saw, and his mind races with suspended disbelief because the Enmi had been slain by his own hand, with his own sword, ten years ago. His throat seizes and he bends over the sink until he's nearly convinced he's hacked up a lung with the amount of blood that falls from his mouth. He wipes his face with toilet paper that he hides beneath other trash in the dumpster, stands in the alleyway beside his home, and begins to plan.

Witnessing the destruction of Edo without any control over his actions is a strange, terrifying sight. It's a nightmare that has trapped and sucked him in as the demons of his past force him to raise his sword, make his face grin, and deal the final blow. Edo burns and the Enmi core hums with vengeful satisfaction in his chest as it reaches out with invisible arms to corrupt the very planet's heart. There is nothing more Gintoki can do to prevent it.

The core gains sentience, and along with it strength. As it razes town after town, slaughters families, and crosses the ocean with a desperate hunger to destroy, Gintoki stirs in the depths of his mind that now serves as his iron-barred prison and observes with worried eyes. He witnesses the core's ever-growing power and it's relentless need for blood and death, and he wonders if the preparations he's made to change the future will work. If he, the White Demon of the present, cannot defeat the Enmi, then how can the White Demon of the past?

Gintoki thinks of the old hag, of the Shinsengumi, of his old friends and new enemies, and of all the comrades he had met over his years in Kabuki after the Joui War. He thinks of the Yorozuya Gin-san sign hanging on the railing outside his home. Gintoki thinks of Kagura and Shinpachi as they stare up at him with judgemental eyes.

Stop being stupid and letting an alien virus control you, they tell him.

Brats, he says softly, don't tell me what to do.

He stands on the ruined rooftops that oversee the graveyard stretching for miles just outside Edo. He sees his past self walking down the steps with the time machine trailing several paces behind the shell-shocked man. The Enmi core purrs in smug confidence as it sees these new enemies, jeering at the plan it knows that Gintoki had hatched, but he only smirks.

It's time to save the future, with or without Sakata Gintoki.