ONLY DIRTY THINGS ARE BORN IN THE WASHROOM
The chicken-tender popped a cigarette out from his shirt pocket and lit the end up, hazing his vision with a thick veil of smoke and totally ignoring all the carnage and screaming happening behind him. The Harusame squealed in bloody-murder as blood painted the walls with an oozing red, while body parts were thrown over the counter in front of the chicken-tender.
"Dammit...I just had the counters cleaned too." He huffed out a thick cloud of smoke.
Canarie flung the blood off her sword and stood in the middle of the dance/blood floor with an annoyed looked resting on her face. She groaned deeply and looked over her shoulder at the terrified Harusame who just witness a massacre.
The woman was untouchable. They go near her and body parts and blood start flying before they could even see her blade move. And when she wasn't moving fast, she was agile enough to stay out of reach. Was she even human? It felt like their weapons were phasing right through her body. It was almost like she was a ghost, and not just that, her whole persona seemed twisted in a way. Her face hasn't changed at all since the blood began to fall. Her eyes were empty and her lips were stretched thin, almost as if she was bored or bothered by their presence. Not threatened.
They were outgunned...by a single small woman.
"Are we done here?" Canarie spoke. "Because I would like to find my silver-haired samurai and get the hell out of here." She twisted her body around, sheathing her sword and making a break for the bathrooms.
The Harusame took a moment to react. "A-After her! Don't let her get away!" They shouted
The pirates took chase to the woman while one amanto stood back. He reached into his coat and pulled out what looked to be a gun of some sort.
He smirked. "I'd like to see you dodge this." He snickered with himself and followed his men after the ghost-like woman.
Gintoki carried the ham-woman outside the washroom and saw that they were surrounded by armed and scary Harusame.
Gintoki cracked a joke. "Hey, hey, is everybody happily going to the washroom together? There aren't enough urinals." He said. He directed his gaze across the sea of scary looking amanto and saw Canarie's small figure skidded around the edge and immediately honed her eyes in on his silver perm, like a beacon of some sort. "Canarie?" He said.
Her eyes lit up. "Ginto-" She suddenly stiffed her body as this shock ripped through her veins as if acid was injected. Electricity sparked up and she let out a sharp shriek as her body crumbled to the ground, wires embedded in her back from a stun gun.
"Finally. We got her." A group of amanto walked around the corner, one holding a taser in his hand that attached to the wires in Canarie's back. "What the hell...she's still conscious?"
It wasn't much but Canarie's body was twitching very slightly and her eyes were wide open. Her skin was burned and her hair was smoking a bit too.
Gintoki felt as if his own body was suddenly shocked by a taser too. It was electric at first, then it just started to burn. "Cana..." He grit his teeth. "The hell do you think you're doing to her, you little shits!" He screeched his lungs raw.
"You're an eyesore."
The captain of the Harusame troop suddenly jabbed his sword into Gintoki's shoulder and shoved him up to the window, shattering it and throwing him and the ham-girl out of the building and disappearing into the deep darkness.
Canarie's fingers began to clench tightly. "Gin..toki..." Unfortunately, her body had no strength left in it to fight and her world turned black.
The world was a solid, unbreakable black that was filled to the heavens with smoke and bloody mist. The floor, or the muck, was covered in bodies of Gintoki's fallen comrades who remained motionless. Gintoki dragged his feet as he shuffled through the battlefield or slaughterfield with a woman strolled beside him, the woman being none other than the one who had always haunted his dreams.
Kurojina Kashira.
"You can't save them all." She spoke in a ghostly whisper. "Sometimes you can...most times you cannot."
Gintoki's voice was low and gravely, void of emotion and life. "I know...I guess saving you was out of the question, huh?" He said in a monotone voice, yet his eyes refused to meet her brown ones.
Kashira took in a deep breath and stopped walking beside him, no longer able to follow besides him, for her time had already long since past. "Yeah, sure seems like that...but know this, Gintoki." Her lips fought a frown and were replaced with a smile. "What happened to me...was not your fault. No one could have seen that coming...and neither did I."
Gintoki stopped with his endless march and turned around. Empty. Nothing was behind him now. No bodies, no friends, no Kashira. His best friend was gone and he knew that more than anyone, but he knew that her fate could have been twisted and changed...she could have been saved...he could have saved her. She could have returned home to her little sister...Canarie...
Gintoki's eyes shot opened and he quickly sat up...in a bed? He was in a bed, in a room he had never been in before.
Okay, now he was confused.
The door slowly slid opened and Katsura walked in, quietly closing it behind him. "It's unusual for you to have something like a nightmare. Did you have a dream about the past or something?"
Gintoki stared at him with blank eyes. "Zura? What the hell are you...?" His mind suddenly flashed to Canarie and realized she was still missing. "Canarie!?" he made an effort to get out of bed when a sharp pain shot through his body and he fell flat on his face.
"It's best not to push yourself. On top of not being able to use your left arm, you seem to have broken most of your ribs." He gestured to the ham-girl who laid unconscious across the room. "The person over there seems to be more severely injured. Because you shielded her, she doesn't have any external wounds. She has been drugged. She may have been disabled to the point of death."
Gintoki sat up and held his throbbing head. "Damn brat. So she was taking them," he said.
"Speaking of which, what the hell were you doing at a place like that?"
"Speaking of which, why did you save me? Speaking of which, apologize from earlier, you bastard!" He shot back.
Katsura turned more serious and pulled out a small plastic bag filled with white powder. "Speaking of which, do you know what this is?" He asked. "It's a drug that's been distributed on the black market called 'Tenseikyou'. It's made from a special plant that they say only grows on a remote border world. Even a whiff of this will bestow a strong sense of pleasure, the strength of the addictive qualities can't be matched."
Gintoki cocked a brow. "How do you know this?"
"My team and I were gathering information on it. It was there that you fell. If my comrade had not been there, who knows what would have happened. Speaking of which, why were you in a place like that?"
"Speaking of which, who the hell are those guys anyway?" he referred to the wannabe gangster-looking amanto.
"Harusame. Space pirates. The crime syndicate said to be the biggest in the galaxy. For them to be able to corner you like that...they seem to be quite a formidable opponent. This may be a bit premature." Katsura looked up and saw Gintoki heading to the door and grabbing his yakuta on the way. "Hey, were you listening."
"Doesn't really matter who they are," Gintoki said and slung his yakuta over his shoulder. "They took Canarie so now I gotta save her ass." He spoke in a bored tone but his words hid a deeper meaning that Katsura noticed.
"You really think you can win with that body? Tell me, Gintoki. Are you saving her just because she's Kashira's little sister?"
Gintoki stopped and leaned against the sliding door. "Well...I thought that at first, thinking that I need to look after her because I was responsible for Kashira's death, but that ain't it."
Kasura furrowed his brows. "What is it then?"
Gintoki took in a deep breath of air and gave Katsura a small wave before walking off. "That pain-in-the-ass, sharp-tongued brat. Kashira has nothing to do with it. I'm getting her back just because it's Canarie."