Gintoki cursed under his breath as the red tinted sky stretched out above him, and the field began to clamor with the moans of the dying. The nightmarish scene was ripped right out of hell itself. Still wary of the last time he'd approached the piles of corpses, Gintoki began to step forward and do what he always did when he had this dream: try to find survivors. Not even in a dream could he tolerate the thought of leaving a man to die.

"Hold on!" He yelled as he clawed through the Amanto corpses, the human corpses, and the juicy remnants of gore. "I'm coming to save you. Just don't you die on me, you bastards!"

A brown haired man with an arrow shaft lodged in his leg, gulped greedily at the air once Gintoki lifted the Amanto corpse off him. To the white haired samurai, the man was a godsend, and he smiled for the first time in what felt like an eternity.

"Can you stand?" Gintoki asked, relief coloring his voice. The man grimaced, and shifted his weight, checking to see if his injured leg could hold him.

Seemingly satisfied, he said, "The leg'll hold with your help, that it will. Name's Kenji by the way." He held out a calloused hand and Gintoki clasped it, pulling him to his feet. He seemed about to fall for a moment, but the white haired samurai steadied him, and draped Kenji's arm around his shoulders. Like that, the two began moving away from the corpses, across the desolate landscape without even the green of plants to distract them from the blood red world around them.

"What I wouldn't give for some water." Kenji grumbled after a few minutes. It wasn't water he was in dire need of, but antiseptic, maybe even a doctor. In an hour at most, he'd be suffering from a high fever. Death by infection had happened to many men in the battlefield, and if Kenji died before Gintoki could find help, he wasn't sure what he was going to do.

Even though he had trained so hard for so long to be strong, he still couldn't protect anyone. Precious friends slipped through his groping fingers like grains of sand.

Kenji spoke up again. "My daughter isn't going to be happy with me." Gintoki continued to trudge forward without pause, but he grunted a little so the man would know he had his attention. "When the Amanto raided our village, my wife had been out buying groceries. I never found her body. Though I might have if the alien scum hadn't burned all the corpses."

The stink of human flesh burned and twisted its way back into Gintoki's thoughts. He tilted his head back, casting a sideways glance at the man before breathing in the acrid air. It sucked the moisture from his throat so fast he had to choke back a cough.

"So where is she? Your daughter?"

Kenji shrugged. "I'm not entirely sure. I left her with some friends of ours, but she could be anywhere now." This drew a contemptuous snort from his companion.

"All the guys I could be dragging along and I've got to find the one who abandoned his daughter. When you get home, you better buy her lots of chocolate. Then you can apologize until your knees bleed."

That's right. It was fine. He was going to get this one man back to his daughter if it was the last thing he-

Something thin and hard, like bone, scratched at his cheek. He brushed it off, figuring it was some tree branch, but then he remembered where he was. He was in a valley of the damned and the dead, all the trees had either been trampled into the dirt or burned.

Slowly, dreading what he was about to see, he turned his head to find a skeleton, clad in Kenji's samurai armor, still clinging to his yukata. With a shout, Gintoki cast the skeleton away from him, and scrambled away from it. A voice like the rustling of leaves hissed from between the skeleton's mandibles.

"You said we weren't going to die."

He had said something like that. It was before the battle, Zura had been trying to build moral but the men weren't listening. They stared at each other with dead eyes, as though their deaths were already predetermined. There was no way they were going to win the war if all the soldiers had already resigned themselves to dying. So when Zura failed, and when Takasugi's attempt only made them more depressed, Gintoki knew it was his turn to step up to the plate.

"It's alright, men. Do your best out there. Zura-" "Katsura!" "Takasugi and I are going to cover you. Why waste your time worrying about death when you've got a couple demons like us on your side?"

One by one his comrades had died in places he couldn't reach, until Zura was the only one still fighting by his side. It would have been better if he had never spoken up at all, because in the end, their deaths accomplished nothing.

The skeleton's bare eye sockets stared up at him unnervingly, but Gintoki couldn't help but point out that he had never actually said they weren't going to die.

The skeleton managed to sound like it was shrugging, "Details."

The white-haired child sat slumped and broken, surrounded by the bodies of his fallen friends, with the stink of blood saturating the air, coating him. It filled his mouth, his nose, he couldn't breath without choking on it.

Where was Zura?

Where was Takasugi?

Where had all his friends gone?

These bodies couldn't be them.

That didn't even make sense. His friends could laugh, they could sing, they could breath. To say the rotting flesh around him were his friends was a dirty rotten lie. Of course it was. It had to be.

Shouyo-sensei… He'd promised him, hadn't he? Promised him he'd take care of everyone until he came back. And Shouyo-sensei…

WASN'T FUCKIN BACK YET!

He wasn't back, so no one could die. He wasn't back, so he couldn't let them. He wasn't back, so the bodies all around him so the stench in the air, the suffocating heat and thickness of it, wasn't real at all. And all the sounds of the dying, the moans, and the foreign cries for mothers coming from both human and alien mouths, that was all… it was all real.

Gintoki wasn't sure he could take this. How could he go on living when he had failed everyone so badly? If everyone was going to die on him, they should have taken him with them. But they hadn't. They hadn't and he was all alone. Alive and alone on a field full of corpses.

The white haired boy threw his head back, and a scream ripped his face in two.

"I never wanted this! I never meant for this to happen!" Breathes ragged, he clawed at the wet earth beneath him until the world seemed to blur, "I-We… just wanted to save you. We just wanted you back."

Red freckled his hands, his clothes, his hair, it was everywhere he could see, and if tearing his eyes out would erase all this red from his vision he might just consider it. But it wouldn't. When he closed his eyes he still saw red. When he pressed his hands against his ears and ground his forehead into the dirt, he still heard screams. It was simple. It was true. He had failed.

Although it had only been a few minutes, Gintoki felt as though he'd been resting on his knees for hours. His whole body ached as he struggled to his feet. One leg buckled under the weight, sending him back to the ground.

If Zura had been there, he would have caught him.

No. He couldn't afford to think like that. If he did he'd go crazy, and he hadn't earned that privilege. He hadn't even earned the right to cry, he knew he hadn't, but it was so hard not to.

Red eyes glared at the ground as he struggled to his feet again. In the end, he used his sword to hold his body upright, though he still staggered a bit.

Through gasping breaths, he allowed himself a small smile. Even a man with nothing to live for can be glad to get off the ground.

The piles of men and Amanto hadn't moved anywhere, but Gin was sure he could hear moaning about 20 yards away. After this, he didn't believe in a God or a Buddha, but he sent a thanks up to the sky, anyway. Shouyo-sensei would have appreciated the gesture.

Just as Gin began to hobble his way to the moaning soldier, a voice he didn't recognize called out, "Gin-san!"

Behind him stood a boy about his age and a girl slightly younger than him… She was an Amanto.

"You bastard, did you betray us" The white demon growled, fangs bared. He was injured and exhausted but he'd take their throats out with his teeth if he had to.

The black haired boy – no, traitor – appeared startled by his hostility, he took a step back and placed a restraining hand in front of the Amanto girl when she tried to move forward. Something was wrong with that girl. He'd heard of her race before, and they were bloodthirsty monsters, but she stared at him with bright, innocent blue eyes. It was insulting. "Gin-san, don't you recognize us?"

In response, Gintoki snorted and spat at their feet, "I don't know you. I don't want to know you, so either kill me, help me, or stay out of my way. I have people to take care of." He began to walk away, before adding, as the realization had just struck him, "You two didn't fight in this battle. You don't have a speck of blood on you, you ain't sweaty, and your eyes… You haven't harmed a sole in your lives, have you?" Kagura opened her mouth to deny this but Gin hushed her with a glare. "Get out of here. You too, alien girl. I don't have the strength to protect you, and you don't belong here anyways. Go home to your perfect little lives and leave the dead to rot."

Kagura cried, "You're not dead, Gin-chan!" Then sent a teary glower at Shinpachi who still refused to move, but her eyes softened slightly upon seeing the state he was in. Hands clenched at his sides, he appeared to be fighting off tears.

As Gin turned to walk away again, Shinpachi let loose a roar and charged at his back. Gintoki sidestepped the blow meant for his face, and gave the offender a good kick in the balls for good measure. All without the slightest hint of interest on his face. If one were to name the look he wore as he stood over Shinpachi, who had collapsed from the sudden shocking pain, it would be bored. Maybe even a little annoyed.

"Gin-chan!" Kagura shouted, as she rushed to Shinpachi's side. She knelt by him and looked up at the strange Gin-san in front of them, her disbelief evident from the look on her face.

"What's wrong with you? Didn't your sensei ever tell you not to attack an injured man from behind?"

The black haired boy grimaced in what was obviously meant to be a smile, "He told me to do whatever it takes to win. Fair or not fair, that stuff doesn't matter in a fight."

"Yeah, and that's real good advice, but we weren't fighting. You attacked an injured man with his back turned, and I was walking away, brat. Whoever your sensei is, I bet he's crying right now."

Shinpachi stared up at the boy, stricken. "Actually, sneering would probably be accurate." His sounded so broken, but Gin couldn't understand why, and he couldn't bring himself to care.

Too many people he had cared lay dead his feet for him to care about hurting someone's feelings.

A/N: Wonder if any of you can guess what's going on? Anyway, I hope you liked it^^