The calm before the storm
It wasn't too long ago when the planet Pattooine could barely be considered inhabited. Shoddy constructions of dry wood planks and bent nails littered the cracked dirt roads for miles. All together, those slapped together booths and dilapidated buildings were the closest thing the people had to a market place. Hardy clothes were put on display for the traveler unprepared for the blazing heat of the Pattooine sun and dried meats and fruits could be traded for or purchased at high but unavoidable prices. Recently, humans and displaced Amanto had begun flocking to the arid planet like rats from a sinking ship. While Pattooine at first relished the increase in attention and economy, they quickly realized that the population was growing too quickly and many of the refugees brought nothing to the planet but the clothes on their backs, having spent all their money on escaping as quickly as possible to the only habitable planet they could afford.
And so, garbage and crime quickly became the most prevalent features of Pattooine. The small police was wiped out within the first few weeks of the population boom and no one was willing to risk their own lives in an attempt to rebuild it. Boats and oil crowded the sea, making catching anything almost impossible for the local fishermen. Regardless of the near hopelessness of the task, many men, young and old, could still be seen fishing off of the docks, trying to lure in any sea creature, regardless of species, that might be lurking under the hull of a merchant ship or a travel vessel.
Leathery and tanned from years of working under the close Pattooine sun, an old man, already slick with sweat, suddenly noticed a large fish taking interest in his line. Nearly giddy with excitement, he clamped down on a shout, but didn't quite manage to smother the goofy grin that lit up his face as the tasty Three-Eyed Worm fish nudged his line, gave it a tentative nip, and then…
"Bleeeaarghhh!"
Vomit the color of spoiled milk rained down on his meal ticket. His face stayed frozen in a grim rictus of joy, eyes unseeing and skin bloodless as the man hunched over beside him continued to expel a seemingly endless amount of bodily fluids into the sea. Once the color began to return to the old man, it returned with a vengeance. Skin mottled with purplish bruising and puce splotches, he leapt to his feet, "What's wrong with you?! I was finally going to catch a fish, after all this time." Despairingly, he cradled his head in his hands.
"Oh, I'm sorry." He heard an obnoxiously cheerful voice say and lifted his head so he could get a better look at the man he was speaking to. If the seasick fellow had just come off the large spaceship he'd tried to fish under, then it could be assumed that the man was a merchant, and since the white shirt he wore and the scarlet jacket draped around his thin frame seemed to be in good condition, it could be also assumed that he was a good one. Round, tinted sunglasses held fast to his face, giving him an eccentric appearance that might have even been cool if he weren't currently sheepishly wiping bile from his chin. The only thing that truly seemed out of place was the spongy hair encasing his head. How did one even end up with hair like that? "I get seasick easily. Ahahaha!"
Bristling, the old man retorted, "This is no laughing matter. That fish was my livelihood. How am I going to eat now?"
The merchant straightened, one hand rubbing his neck, and smiled, "That's okay. I'll compensate you." He reached under the flaps of one of his jackets and pulled out a wallet bursting to the brim with yen.
"Idiot!" While using his body to shield the strangely moronic merchant from view, the old man forced him to put his wallet away. "Are you trying to get us both killed? If anyone sees you flailing that much money around, they'll kill you."
"And he'd deserve to die," a cold, feminine voice said from behind them. They spun around to see a young woman with flawless pale skin and long hair the color of wet straw. Like the merchant, her clothes also seemed unnecessarily heavy for the warm weather, but at least she had the sense to wear a wide-brimmed hat.
Recognition lit up the merchant's face, "Mutsu! So-" His head rocked back, blood spurting from his scalp as the old man registered with horror that the cool young woman was now holding a smoking pistol.
She lowered her weapon. "Don't worry about him. He bounces back." At her words, the merchant straightened again, his smile still at full blast and with only a trickle of blood dripping from his scalp and down his nose.
Even if the bullet had only grazed him, wasn't that relaxed attitude unnatural? What sort of monsters were these people?
Once Mutsu's attention was once more fully on the merchant, and not on the quivering, ghost-white fisherman, she added, "What did I tell you about wandering off, Captain?"
"Ahahaha, but Mu-" Another bullet whizzed through the air, slicing through a few of the merchant's curly hairs as a warning.
Eyes clear as glass and hard as stone, Mutsu said, "I told you not to. And now that man has lost his catch." She drew 500 yen from under her violet cape and tossed it at the fisherman. He was so on edge and traumatized that he fumbled the catch and had to grope frantically for the falling notes as though his life depended on it. "That should make up for what my stupid captain cost you."
Eyes wide with wonder, he allowed himself a long look at what he grasped between his fingers. The money was more than enough to compensate for the fish. It was probably even enough to pay for a meal. His gaze hardened slightly as he wondered if it would be enough to feed any of the other homeless and hungry mouths that lurked around the market place, but decided that he should simply thank the woman and her pet merchant before he pushed his luck.
"Thank yo-"
Only to be cut off by the sight of that very merchant waggling his butt in the air and vomiting in his bait bucket. Veins bulging, the old man shook his fist, shrieking, "Whatever! I don't care, anymore. Just keep this idiot away from me! Keep him out of my sight and as far away as humanly possible!" The merchant's owner was already dragging him away by his hair at this point, but the old man still made sure to shout after their retreating forms, "If I ever see him again, I'll use him as bait!"
"I wonder what must have happened to upset that old man so much," Sakamoto pondered as he and Mutsu trudged through the sea of sweat and bodies that made up the planet's marketplace. Due to the heat, Sakamoto, at least, had shed his outer layers, wrapping his jacket and scarf around his arm while his Yato companion made due with a hat that kept her mostly in the shade.
She replied, without skipping a beat or even turning in his direction, "I believe you happened, Captain."
The merchant placed a hand the back of his afro and laughed, conceding the point. Once it became clear Mutsu wasn't in a mood to carry a conversation, he allowed himself to take proper scope of his surroundings, though he did his best to continue to appear as harmless as ever, especially since his gun holster was fully exposed, thus making it even more important that he not appear a threat.
He'd asked the Kaientai to dock on Pattooine because it was the closest planet with a bar, but he hadn't realized just how poor the conditions were. Behind the booths, he could see houses constructed from what looked like a mix of wood, mud, and cardboard. A rainstorm would knock them down in a minute, but what disturbed him most were the formless bodies he could see scuttling in corners and dark spaces. Every now and then, the sun would flash on a head of white hair. Without knowing what it meant, he could only assume that even the elderly were being forced to live in such conditions.
"Do you really have to do this every year, Captain? Certainly, you could just toast to your old comrades on the ship."
"No, no" he insisted, still smiling as his eyes searched for a bar, though the smile no longer quite reached his eyes, a fact well hidden by his sunglasses, and continued, "I'm proud to toast to my fallen comrades."
"That may be true, but even after fifteen years, I don't think the Amanto will appreciate you toasting your Joui comrades on the anniversary of their victory. Those who win a war can toast to their comrades whenever and wherever they wish, but those who lose must grieve in silence." Her eyes lighted on a shady looking place with a tilted sign and a trio of already wasted men loitering at its enhance.
Sakamoto saw the same place, nodded approvingly, and firmly said, "They weren't just my comrades, Mutsu. They were my friends. A man should never be afraid to toast to the memory of his friends." With that, he strode ahead, tripped on a rock, quickly scrambled to his feet, and entered the bar. Sighing, Mutsu followed. If she knew her Captain, he'd be needing back-up soon.
The three men sneered drunkenly at her as she passed and she ignored them, the way one would flies flittering around a horse's head.
The building the Bad News Bar was located in could only be called a building in the sense that it had four walls and a roof. The flooring consisted only of dirt, dust, and sand, and the windows looked as though someone had used them to try and shovel some of the sewage off the streets. A yellow film grew over much of them, preventing anyone from seeing in or out of the bar, and for the bar's patrons that was probably preferable. Few people come for a drink so they can think about the problems that lie in wait just outside of it.
Mutsu found her captain already seated in the corner at a low round table with two cups and a small pitcher of sake. There were three rotund, amphibian Amanto seated at the counter, shouting rowdily. Their faces already flushed from drink and sun, making them the most likely candidates for who would be trying to bash her captain's head in in the near future. As she joined Sakamoto for his toast, she unbuckled her holster, making sure her gun was available for quick and easy use.
It wasn't until the Amanto's unintelligible voices drifted over to their table like poison gas that she noticed just how hard her captain's usually slack features had become. Sweat glistened on his chest and forehead; hand paused mid-pour over her glass, suspended like the marble hand of a statue. His entire focus was on the Amanto at the counter, so she listened closely, choosing their voices out of the cacophony of the crowd, and finally heard what he heard.
"Man, all these humans crowding the streets like roaches sure are a nuisance." Beer spilled as the Amanto sloppily tried to pour it down its frog-like gullet. "You know, I really thought that plague might end being good pest control, but all it's done is spread the monkeys to other planets."
Fire is the usual response for those of Yato blood. They burn when they love, when they hate. They burn when they fight. Mutsu, however, was not a usual Yato. She grew cold when others would burn, and as those words slapped her in the face, as images of two dorky children and two equally foolish samurai came to focus in her mind, she felt the ice in her heart grow.
The squalor in the streets and the overabundance of humans should have been obvious hints that something was wrong. They just hadn't wanted to notice. And the dead look she'd glimpsed in some of the eyes she'd passed, the look she'd once seen in slaves who had seen the darkest humanity had to offer and crumbled from the sheer weight of that knowledge. Some part of them must have known. The other shoe had dropped ages ago, they'd just been too far away to hear the sound until the event had long passed.
Another well dressed and obviously well fed Amanto spoke, responding to the first, "Maybe someone will do us a favor and spread that plague here. Then we'll get all the food and jobs back those monkeys have taken."
Once the tabletop began to splinter under the pressure of her grip, she cast a wary glance at her captain and immediately relaxed. Even with his sunglasses hiding them from sight, she could tell. The light in his eyes had gone dark.
Sakamoto left the table with the ghost of his previously jovial expression still lingering around his lips and entirely absent from his hidden eyes. Various customers did attempt to get him to stop and apologize when he bumped into them, but they cut themselves off, because in the split second Sakamoto was forced to stop for them, to endure another word of those sadistic taunts about his home, they sensed a monster swimming beneath the man's skin, a dark shadow that was barely restraining itself from eating them alive. Letting him pass wasn't courtesy. It couldn't even be attributed to fear. What they felt went deeper than that. They let him pass because of an innate desire to live to see the next minute.
One of the frogmen at the counter, the first speaker, noticed the merchant, and jeered, "Well, what do we have here? It's a monkey."
A smile now firmly plastered on his face, Sakamoto scratched the back of his head and laughed. "Yep, that's me." He leaned over on the counter, ignoring the smell of overripe fish and alcohol, and continued, "So, I overheard some interesting conversation and couldn't help but wonder which planet you three were talking about? I'm afraid I'm not up to date on current events. Of course, that's to be expected." The ever-present grin took on a sardonic edge. "I'm just a monkey, after all."
Laughter croaked from the throats of the three frogmen, their throats swelling in unison. "Would you get a load of this guy?"
One of them, the one neither Sakamoto nor Mutsu had heard speak yet, wiped a tear from his eye and said, "Sorry to break it to ya, pal." And Sakamoto almost warmed to him, before the Amanto frowned, adding, "Well, not really. You see, a large part of Earth's population was wiped out thanks to a plague, and that makes things easier for traders like us. Less competition, you know?" For an instant, he almost seemed apologetic. "It's nothing personal."
"To hell it isn't!" The frogman sitting in the middle made to take another swig of his beer, only to share his drink with the floor, his lap, and the front his shirt. "I hate the smarmy little bastards. Rotten-"
Cold, black metal pressed against his temple. He looked up to see the merchant hadn't moved an inch. He was still smiling placidly like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
"Say another word, Frog" Mutsu warned. "And you'll never speak again."
He gulped audibly and visibly, swallowing the nervous bulge of saliva while his bulbous eyes swiveled side to side, finally settling on the owner of the pistol currently branching off from his head.
She looked human, and for an instant, he thought, ' I could take her. My tongue can knock the gun out of her hands before she pulls the trigger.' Just as the tip of his tongue came slithering out of his wide mouth, though, he saw how the confrontation would play out in the cruel glint of her eyes.
He promptly closed his mouth with a pop and kept it closed.
His companion, not understanding the danger, grabbed Sakamoto by the scarf, "Hey! What's the big idea?! He's just drunk. He wouldn't say that stuff if-" Yelping in pain, he drew his hand back as if burned from the merchant's death grip, quieting when the sunglasses cleared and he saw just how grim the man appeared, a stark contrast from the smiling merchant he'd approached them as.
Sakamoto shook his head slowly, like it was all he could do to stand with the weight of it, "He meant what he said. He wouldn't have said it if he didn't mean it. Now" Something indefinable flashed across his countenance. "my day has just taken a very sudden and very definite turn for the worst, so I suggest you and your friends clear out of here before I ask Mutsu if she'd be willing to cook up some delicious frog stew tonight for me and the rest of the crew." He looked up and bared his teeth in an alarming distortion of his usual grin, "What do you say?"
Clenching his fists impotently and working his mouth seemed to be the most the Amanto was capable of for a few seconds, but when their third companion leapt to his feet, he grabbed his arm, motioning for him to keep silent. "We'll go." It wasn't until the two had reached the front door that Sakamoto nodded and Mutsu released their final companion. He snarled and shook his fist at them on his way out.
With his back sagging against the counter, Sakamoto massaged his forehead and asked the bartender, a burly fellow with fists the size of watermelons, if he could have a another glass of sake, since the first lay toppled and abandoned on their table.
"Well, I would, but seeing as you just kicked three paying customers out of my bar" Three rows of fangs made themselves known, much to the merchant's displeasure. "I don't suppose you have 60,000 yen on you to give me?"
Mutsu grabbed Sakamoto by the afro-
"Time to go."
-and launched him through the air like a football, sending him spiraling through the bar's front window in a spectacular show of shattered glass.
Pain stung him where the shards had embedded themselves in his skin. Usually, the jacket he wore would have blocked most of the damage. It seemed taking it off, even if he'd done it because he was slowly dying of heat stroke, had been a miscalculation. To be fair, his disagreement with the Amanto hadn't actually ended with violence. It was Mutsu who'd decided throwing him head first out a window would be a more expedient exit than simply walking out the front door.
A quick glance over his shoulder revealed that the patrons of the bar were still upset- well, that was just rude - but they weren't moving beyond the confines of the bar, so he wasn't moving until he'd finished plucking the glass from his hair, scalp, and arms.
Blood spurted from the back of his head when he pulled the final shard free from his skull. Luckily, his body was used to head wounds, and the gash clotted easily in a few seconds.
His shirt, on the other hand, was not used to being ripped and torn and would not heal itself. Shifting in the dirt to get into a more comfortable position, the people passing by giving him odd looks as he continued to bleed without seeming overly concerned about his injuries or the entire group of intoxicated men and Amanto screaming for his death no more than five feet behind him, he thrust a hand under his white sheet and despondently wiggled it through the jagged tear across his chest.
Warm air hissed through clenched teeth. "Granny isn't going to be too happy with me when she sees this."
Glass clinked, falling from his clothes in a shower when he stood and brushed himself off, then he gave his shirt a slight tug, peeling the slick sections away from his warm skin.
It was part of a merchant's job to be well informed. Panicking now that he'd heard some unsavory tale from some unsavory men on a planet that happened to back up said tale wasn't enough to convince him that Katsura and Gintoki had been endangered. Honestly, those two were probably fine. Knowing them, the plague had caught one glimpse of their scary mugs and kept clear of Kabukicho.
"Ahahaha! That's right!" He glanced impatiently at the front door. "I'm overthinking this." Another impatient glance. "Those guys are probably fine." Tapping his foot now and crossing his arms, he waited, nearly buzzing, for Mutsu so he could get moving. He had a terrible inkling she'd sat down and ordered a beer herself after throwing him out the window.
Instinct is something everyone is born with. Battle can hone it into a razor edge, a taut wire, gathering dust in the back of an abandoned room until someone comes along and triggers it. It was because of this instinct that Sakamoto didn't need to see the form moving in the darkened space behind the rotted stack of wooden planks and broken pottery in the narrow gap between the buildings across the street. He sensed it.
Killing intent.
Since a large part of surviving an ambush comes from not letting your opponent know he has lost the element of surprise, he decided to clamp down on his own rising killing intent while simultaneously pretending to fidget with his gun, staring at the weapon like it was a toy he didn't quite know how to work. The action wasn't overly suspicious, especially if the hidden assailant had been watching him long enough to grasp a basic idea of his usual character, and he had his gun ready for use.
The feminine form of his second in commander exiting the bar distracted him momentarily from the heat under his skin and the chill on his neck. With her arms firmly crossed against her chest, she gave him an appraising look, "You always end up like this, Captain."
His lips pulled back in a parody of his usual smile, "That's why I need you around to take care of me, Mutsu." Inwardly, he noted that the whole reason he'd been injured in the first place was because she'd thrown him out a window. It wasn't that he really minded or anything. Bringing it up just seemed unwise.
The chill on his neck strengthened when she pulled the bandages out from under her violet cape and started wrapping his wounds. Feigning exhaustion, he lowered his head close to her ear, whispering, "We're being watched." At the same time the woman treating his wounds stiffened, the sound of wood scraping on stone could be heard. Whatever lurked in the shadows was moving.
"What should we do, Captain?"
In the end, Sakamoto never got the chance to answer.
Far quieter than any living being should be, a large Amanto with a golden staff emerged from the shadows. It was the sort of thing he'd only seen in one place and had ardently wished never to see again. "How did you know I was there?"
Smiling, Sakamoto worked his crimson jacket onto his uninjured arm and cocked his gun. "I sensed your killing intent." Mutsu quickly tied off the bandage she'd wrapped on his other arm and aimed her own gun at the suspicious presence, glancing surreptitiously back at her slightly paler than usual captain as she did so.
"Killing intent?" To their surprise, the Enmi seemed shocked. "But I didn't come here to kill you. There shouldn't be any… Oh." One of his hands lifted, setting the former Joui and Yato on edge. It didn't move to attack them, though. Instead, it came to rest at the scarlet lapel hanging from the Enmi's beaded necklace. The seals around his neck crinkled at the touch. "This killing intent isn't aimed at you."
Well, wasn't that cryptic?
Sakamoto clicked his tongue, deliberately placing his finger on the trigger. "Why are you here?" Memories of comrades afflicted with a disease that cursed them with white hair, paralysis, and blindness, before finally taking their lives flashed through his mind. The last memory was a head of white hair he'd just seen, peering up at him from darkness.
What if that hadn't been the head of an elderly person? What if that had been the head of an infected person?
Keeping his voice low, Sakamoto aimed the pistol at the pink iris he could see the nanomachines running through, inquiring, "Did you spread the plague on Earth?"
The speed of the nano machines picked up at his words. Mutsu nudged him, suggesting a retreat since people were beginning to gather and fighting on a narrow road would put them at a disadvantage.
Right when he was beginning to think she may be right, the Enmi growled, "Why should it matter to you?"
"What?" Out of all the things he'd expected to hear, that hadn't been one. "Of course it matters!" Damn, he was starting to lose his cool. Mutsu gave him a warning glance, even though he could already feel the rein on his emotions slipping. "Earth is my home."
"Wrong." Its staff clanged, emphasizing the accusing tone it threw at him. "You abandoned that planet. You left your comrades to die." A pause. Just long enough for one, exhausted breath. "There's no one waiting for you anymore."
In the second it took the sun to flash across Sakamoto's sunglasses, he'd fired six shots at the Enmi's head, all of which the Enmi dodged only by moving several increments to the right and left, and followed the shots by leaping into the air, slamming a roundhouse kick against the Enmi's side.
The alien rolled with the kick's momentum, avoiding most of the damage, but the move sent it skidding back several feet, kicking up a billowing cloud of dust and forcing the alien into a sliding crouch.
"I didn't come here to hurt you."
Sakamoto, running for another attack as he refilled his cartridge, flatly replied, "Then stand still."
Grumbling, the Enmi muttered under its breath, evading another roundhouse kick and ducking when two bullets whizzed by as it did so. "Man... this really is the worst."
Even if the enraged merchant had heard his muttered comments, there's no guarantee he would have stopped his assault. After all, Amanto were notorious for considering the human race beneath him. Even Mutsu, who had been trying to talk him down from a rage like she'd never seen him in, couldn't reach him. As it happened, it wasn't anything the Amanto or his second-in-command said that stopped the ferocious onslaught, but the sound of a woman screaming.
Upon hearing that, the two opponents froze.
The Amanto looked ahead, already expecting to see Sakamoto's retreating form, and was instead shocked to discover the merchant hadn't moved a step yet. He was hesitating. Obviously torn between his desire for answers and his desire to run to whoever needed him.
"Well?" the Amanto sneered. "Aren't you a samurai?"
The taunt wasn't enough. Not even Mutsu snorting in disgust and running ahead was enough, so the Amanto added, "I'll answer your questions when you return to your ship."
The thought of this devil aboard his ship made Sakamoto grind his teeth, but the woman's panicked scream rent the air again and he disengaged from the fight, dashing through the streets without stopping or apologizing, because he didn't know what had begun to come over him but someone needed his help.
The Enmi watched him leave for a few seconds and rubbed its head.
"You had me scared for a second, but it looks like you're still the same empty headed moron, after all."
AN: More Sakamoto up next! And then we'll finally move on. Seriously, I had no idea how much I was going to write about this guy.