a/n: This chapter is a bit longer than usual, but I hope y'all enjoy it! And happy birthday to Gintoki!

22. void (part II)

(six years ago)

There had been a grimy underground cave that Kankou had been instructed to go to, and though he would have usually ignored such unusual requests at the best of times, Kouka's health was starting to deteriorate at an alarming rate.

If he was lucky enough to complete the job, the money would be enough for him to be able to take six months off work. Not to mention, the anonymous requester had thrown in something intriguing.

The promise of immortality.

Kouka had told him long before he'd fallen deeply in love with her that she could live nowhere else; that her mutation served as an eternal chain to the planet of Kouan. If she was to leave, the lack of Altana compatible with her DNA would cause her to become mortal again. He'd known that, and had tried to suppress his feelings for her as best as he could back then - for he could not live on Kouan, either. But the choice had been ripped away from the both of them ever since Utsuro had chosen to wreak havoc on her home. After that, he knew he couldn't leave her behind. Not without a home.

"Maybe you could live for fifty more years," he had said optimistically, for he did not wish to die before she did. "That would be enough time for us to be together, I think. Enough time for us to see our grandchildren."

And she had agreed easily enough at the time.

For a while, everything had been fine. But there were signs lurking beneath the surface, and though she had tried her best to ignore the symptoms of poor health in the beginning of her pregnancy, he had eventually realized that she was dying after Kagura's birth.

He had tried everything; he had flown in doctors from all over the universe, and had consulted as many health experts as he could. To his despair, they'd all been perplexed at her condition, and refused to believe that she was old as she was. It was an anomaly, they declared. It wasn't possible for such a mutation to exist, and even though he tried explaining it over and over again, they all thought he'd been playing a joke on them.

The only thing that had helped her sickness were the tiny crumbs of Altana crystals he'd scour the universe for, and even those would only temporarily lift her symptoms for a month at best. Her mutation simply made it impossible for her to naturally heal her body.

So here he was, deep in the cave with only a flashlight and a headlamp to keep in company so far. It'd been pretty spooky so far, and he decided that if this anonymous requester didn't come in five minutes, he would bail.

Then he heard footsteps.

He tilted his head, hand gripped on his umbrella and ready to attack.

The stranger in question had silvery, curly hair and a uniform with full armor. His skin was pale and he looked as if he hadn't slept for a good year or so.

"Umibouzu. Thank you for meeting me here."

"The pleasure is mine... Oboro, you said?"

"Yes."

He extended his hand, and Kankou took it - and marveled at how warm it had been. For some reason he'd expected his palms to be ice-cold.

"Why meet here, Oboro... san?" He still struggled with honorifics.

"I don't want to be overheard," the man said. "And you can call me whatever you like in person."

Kankou couldn't help commenting on how strange it all was. "Pretty drastic measures to avoid eavesdropping, don't you think?"

Oboro stared at him.

"Just joking," the alien hunter backtracked. "Er, about the job... "

"Yes. Well, I've been told that your wife is sick."

"She is... but what does that have to do with the job?"

"That's what you're here for, right? You want to help your wife to get better."

Kankou nodded. "I'd do anything for her to recover."

"Anything?"

"Well, I suppose if you had to get specific... I'd do almost anything. I wouldn't kill my own children over it, if that's what you mean."

"What if I need you to build me an army?" Oboro asked.

Kankou blinked. "What?"

"An army," Oboro repeated. "We'll need one to fight a monster."

Now the alien hunter was confused. "Just one monster?"

"Yes."

"But why pick me? I'm just one person."

"You're the strongest person in the universe, are you not?"

Now Kankou grimaced. "I hate that nickname. And I'm not."

"People will respect and recognize you. I need someone to work in the daylight while I keep in the shadows."

"Wait, hold on, hold on - you haven't told me who we're killing yet!"

Now Oboro finally smiled, and Kankou had the distinct, nasty feeling that nothing would ever be the same.

-x-

(present day)

-x-

Katsura's men had greeted him with enthusiasm, and some of them had even shed a few tears upon seeing the Shiroyasha.

"We thought you were dead!" some of them said.

"Well, I managed to escape, didn't I?" Gintoki said, although his heart warmed at the sight of them. "And here I am. What have you sorry lot been up to?"

"Not much," Katsura admitted. "We've been negotiating with the Choshu and Satsuma domains to see if we couldn't recruit any more soldiers from their militias, but they put their foot down after they saw that you'd been captured."

Gintoki couldn't help himself from laughing. "Of course they wouldn't. You overestimate the public's taste for putting their necks out on the line." Katsura, for all his faults, couldn't be criticized for his patriotism.

"More importantly, Gintoki, where did you get this? Did you hijack it from the Bakufu?"

"Oh, this?" He eyed the spacecraft, and grinned. "Really really long story, Zura. Can't really talk about it here," he drawled, knowing that others were listening to their conversation.

Katsura nodded, and then put his hand on Gintoki's shoulder. "You look... better, somehow. We should talk in my tent, then."

-x-

Gintoki had told him everything, sparing no details of what had happened since his arrest after Shoyou's execution. He had half expected Katsura to express doubt halfway through the story, but instead his frown had gotten progressively deeper and deeper.

"... And so now they want me to recruit you guys for the last showdown against him," Gintoki finished, and when he did, he saw that Katsura had closed his eyes, deep in thought. "Most of the recruits are staying in Edo, you know."

"Hmm," was what he heard. Gintoki took the opportunity to pour himself a lukewarm cup of barley tea.

Then he heard Katsura sigh.

"Well? Is it too silly to believe?"

"No... You're not the kind of person to lie. Maybe about the little things, sure, but not something like this. "

"So, what do you think?"

"I can't exactly sacrifice the last of the Jouishishi on a gamble. Plus, there's a matter of convincing our men fighting alongside the Amanto. To them, it'll seem like we're turning our backs on the very men we lost while they were fighting against them."

Gintoki had expected this sense of logic, and yet felt somewhat disappointed. "I see."

"I suppose this means you'll be leaving soon?"

"Yeah. I can stay for a few days but there's other potential recruits who might be open to joining the Altana Liberation Army."

Katsura nodded, and then asked, "How'd you find us?"

"The Coordinator... he's got a pretty big network out in space and on Earth. Not that I've actually met him before, but Kankou seems to really trust him and follows all his commands, so... " Gintoki shrugged, never one to be overly suspicious.

"You don't think there's an Amanto spy within my troops?" Katsura asked, and the frown had returned in full force.

"Could be. But if they were, it's not to lure you guys into a trap." Gintoki took another sip of his tea. "This is a lot bigger than Amanto versus the samurai, despite what your men might think. It's the goddamn apocalypse."

"You seem convinced."

"I went to a planet that our teacher destroyed," Gintoki replied, not liking his friend's insinuation. "It was ugly, Zura. The people were suffering... they were lost, as if they didn't know what to do with themselves. Imagine us being forced to live somewhere else other than Earth. Maybe Tatsuma wouldn't mind, but we have many people dear to us living here."

"It was really Sensei who did that, huh?"

Gintoki nodded. "I didn't want to believe it at first, either. But I saw him walking like it was nothing - regrowing things that went against unnatural order. His head, Zura. I saw his head form back like I'd never cut it off."

"I suppose reality can be stranger than fiction," Katsura mused. He glanced at the tent, where he half suspected his men would be listening to the two of them.

"What's your next step, then? I assume you're not going to stay in Hagi forever, either."

"Well, we were going to go to Edo soon..." Katsura's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "The Bakufu hasn't brainwashed you, have they, Gintoki?"

"I would never," Gintoki protested. "You know as well as I do that I think they're corrupt assholes."

Katsura had smiled approvingly at that. "Good. They're planning on opening the Edo Terminal soon. We're thinking of doing a classic hit and run - you remember that assault in Kyou? Something similar like that."

"But... civilians will get hurt."

"It's our last stand. Once it becomes a legitimate operation, the Amanto will come in droves. Then... the war will really be lost."

Gintoki sighed. "Well, I can't change your mind, Zura. But I'll probably meet you in Edo when that day comes, I think."

Secretly, he'd been relieved. He had no desire to lose any more of the comrades he made along the way, especially his closest friends.

"I didn't say I wouldn't come with you," Katsura objected. "I just said I wouldn't bring my men to this fight. I'll have them recruit for the Jouishishi until I come back."

"Eh?"

"After that day, I promised myself that I'd never put myself in the same position where you had to make the hard decisions." Katsura's eyes were flat. "You can't be the one to kill Sensei again, Gintoki."

-x-

Takasugi had spent most of the day reading the pile of newspapers that had been stored in Oboro's spaceship. Most of them were clippings detailing the destruction of a city, or a small planet, and he'd taken in the information with gusto, all while having a conversation with the assassin in the first place. In the meantime, Oboro had been steering his ship back to Edo.

"So these were his crimes against the universe," the commander mused, and carefully placed another finished article on the dashboard. "Well, he certainly was prolific."

"You seem to be taking this better than I expected," Oboro said.

A lone green eye swirled to meet his former enemy. "Don't get it twisted. I will obey Sensei for now. But I'm not finished with you yet."

After all, it was pretty damn hard to get over the loss of an eye. True, Takasugi had understood on a deeper level now why Oboro had done things the way he did... but that didn't mean he had to go all in without a sensible amount of caution.

Everyone he'd ever met and fought with always had a hidden agenda to fulfill, and he had learned that the hard way. Even his childhood friends wouldn't have acquiesced to his ultimate wish to destroy the nation from within; they believed too much in the grey spaces between right and wrong. He could put aside those differences back when he had believed they were working towards the same goals. Now, he wasn't so sure anymore.

To his surprise, Oboro had only given him a look of approval. "Sensei was prepared for that, too. When this whole thing is over, I plan to die. If you want to kill me then, I wouldn't blame you for that."

Eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. He knew the natural order of things.

Takasugi frowned. "And exactly how will I accomplish that, considering that you're a quasi-immortal?"

"Sensei's blood, which he gave to me when I was very young, only extends life. If I keep getting injured, it'll only save me for a limited amount of time because the Altana degenerates when it's apart from Utsuro's body. And that is a secret that the Tendoshu Elders don't know. They've been allowing me to get away with a lot of things on the promise of immortality, but... " Oboro shrugged. "When they find out the truth, they'll be quite angry, I suppose."

"So they've been engineering this farce of a war over Altana and the prospect of living forever," Takasugi said, his frown growing progressively deeper. "Why did you keep supporting their barbarism?"

"I couldn't escape back then as a child." Now Oboro's eyes looked very tired. "Maybe now, I could break away from the Naraku if I really wanted to. But I've still got duties to fulfill before I start living selfishly for myself. That means I've got blood on my hands, but if it means more of the good people stay safe than not, I'll know that I've done right by Sensei."

It wasn't easy to be a double agent and to keep the organization more or less intact. Takasugi hated to admit it, having fought (and lost) against the crows more than a few times, but even Oboro's sentiments was worthy of his grudging respect.

"What did Sensei do for you to gain such loyalty to him?"

"The same as you three," Oboro replied. "He gave me a home to belong to."

He'd been starved for affection just as equally as either three of them, and had counted himself lucky enough to spend a few years with Shoyou before he was forced to leave him behind in the forest that day. Still, after the Naraku had finally hunted Shoyou down, he was able to spend a good five years with the teacher, plotting the god's demise.

Sure, he'd been jealous that he wasn't able to become a normal student while Shoyou had opened his school. There were moments where he thought he'd give into his darker desires of being close to Shoyou-sensei once more, to turn his back on what his teacher would have wanted. But eventually, he'd taken pride in protecting it as best as he could, trying to hide its location and tipping off Shoyou-sensei ahead of time whenever the organization was about to close in on him. He was lucky enough to get at least a decade of undisturbed peace for his teacher, right before the other members of the Naraku had gotten ahead of him during the Kansai Purge and had burned the whole school down. Even Shoyou-sensei had praised him for doing the best that he could in private, once Oboro had been put in charge of his imprisonment.

So far, everything had gone the way it'd been planned.

Gintoki won't believe in joining us until you show him that others have suffered at my hand, Shoyou had told him conversationally. As for Shinsuke, he'll only take me at my word and no one else.

And for Katsura? What about him? Oboro asked.

If either of those two ask him for his help, Kotarou will follow them without too many questions, even if he pretends otherwise. The more important matter is convincing those two first.

As usual, Shoyou-sensei had been right. He'd always been right.

-x-

When Oboro landed his spaceship in a forest, Takasugi had raised his eyebrow in suspicion. Shoyou-sensei had claimed he was trustworthy, but he still couldn't believe it. If he was leading him into a trap, then this would be a death wish.

As if the assassin could read his mind, he said, "This was the house Sensei was held under arrest a few days right before he died. I had moved him from the prison to here, and I thought you would be interested to see it."

He was.

It was a homely little cottage, and though there weren't any pine trees in the yard like the way it had been at Shoka Sonjuku, Takasugi could instantly see the little touches that inevitably belonged to his old teacher. Scrolls of the finest calligraphy that emphasized honor - diligence - discipline - had hung from the walls. A neat shelf with containers filled with brushes of all shapes and sizes caught his eye, and it had brought him a lump to his throat. His teacher had always been particular about their handwriting, insisting that a proper samurai would know how to write just as well as wielding his sword.

Swallowing, he could even see a shamisen resting in the corner of Shoyou's room. His mother had been the one who'd taught him how to play when his father had left on magistrate's duty, but his teacher had been the one who'd allowed him to practice freely whenever he wished.

"What did he do, before... before... " He couldn't say it out loud, but Oboro knew what he'd been trying to say.

"He was planning, right up to the very last minute. He was trying to figure out all of Utsuro's potential moves before the day came for me to take him away. And when the Bakufu came to his door, he just... accepted it that day, saying that he'd done the best that he could've, in the end."

"He's a better man than I could ever be," Takasugi said.

"He was too good for humanity," Oboro agreed. "He saw the best in everyone... even me."

There was the sound of someone shuffling to the door, and Takasugi's hand flew to the hilt of his sword before Oboro put his hand up. "At ease, commander. I asked her to come meet you."

A little girl, who had short blue hair and red, expressionless eyes slid open the shoji. She was dressed in the Naraku uniform.

"Oboro-sama," she said simply, and turned to the other man. "It's very nice to meet you, Takasugi. You don't look weak at all."

"This is Mukuro," Oboro said. "Right before Shoyou was ordered to die, she was one of his very last students. He tried his best to get to know more of the Naraku, to try and get them out of the organization, but she was the only one who was half-way interested."

"Sensei has told you about me?"

"Of course," Mukuro said, and it was a bit unsettling how she hadn't been blinking even once during their conversation. "He talked about his old students all the time."

"Mukuro is one of the best assassins in the Yatagarasu, but she's been planning to defect for a while now," Oboro explained. "For now, while Utsuro gets used to his body, we've decided to lay low for a while, to monitor the situation."

"Makes sense," Takasugi said. "Information about the enemy is always useful."

"Oboro-sama, a crow came for you this morning," Mukuro said, and handed the assassin a scroll. He opened it, scanning the contents before his jaw tensed.

"What's wrong?" Takasugi asked, for a strange expression had come across Oboro's face.

"Tonight is the night," he said, his tone of voice dark and anticipating. He rolled back the scroll and tucked it into his pocket. "I must leave for a few hours, but please, make yourself at home," he told Takasugi. "Mukuro, we'd better get going."

-x-

When Utsuro had emerged from the empty husk of Shoyou's body in flames, he had, for a moment, basked in the glory of regaining his old form once more.

It had been fifteen years. He'd been fighting to get out under Yoshida Shoyou's stream of consciousness, but the teacher had been ruthlessly dominant, choosing to suppress Utsuro at all costs while he had the opportunity to use the immortal body. Still, it wasn't as if fifteen years was a long time. To humans, it was a sizable chunk of their pathetic lives, but as he already lived for over a millennia, fifteen years to him was the equivalent to a drop of water in an ocean.

These personas were truly going to be the end of him. At first, it'd been an exercise in mental preservation, but now it was getting to be a complete nuisance.

After all, he certainly wasn't the enemy here. If anything, he and Shoyou had the same goal in the end. They might have differed on how to get there, but like yin and yang, they balanced each other out, which by now was necessary to exist as a ... somewhat sane immortal being, if the concept was even possible.

The older he grew, the more pointless it had all been.

He just couldn't understand humans anymore, and had stopped trying to after a few centuries. They killed each other over the most ridiculous things, like having more coins with somebody's face on it, or because one group of people came from the east part of the river, and the other group came from the west part of the same exact river. Some of the humans he'd been unfortunate enough to learn about even killed in ways that made him shake his head, and he'd been an assassin for centuries by now.

If Shoyou valued the lives of humans to this day, knowing what they had done to him, then he was obviously a deviant. It wasn't as if he was doing something much different than Utsuro, either; he had effectively raised a bunch of children who'd grown up to be just as bloodthirsty as any member of the Tenshoin Naraku.

Whatever he'd done wouldn't have changed anything in the end, except to waste a few more years on Earth. Prolonging the inevitable destruction of its wretched inhabitants might have caused its own sort of cancer, and he was looking forward to finally pulling the trigger on it all.

And then, maybe then... he would be able to grant himself death.

In the beginning of his third century, he'd started to really take advantage of immortality; he'd spent the first century at the hands of humans, who were either desperately trying to kill him or putting him into prison. He then spent the second century in complete darkness until the prison rotted around him, allowing him to escape, and by his third century of being alive, he started to think about other options that could be expounded on other than sinking into a pit of despair.

Figuring out how he was immortal had been a challenge, for sure, as there'd been no one else other than him. But he'd gotten a vague idea of it when he got close to certain places; his body tended to respond positively when he was near sources of Altana.

The humans didn't even have a name for it until he was nearly seven hundred years old, for God's sake.

For a while, wreaking havoc on the worst of humanity had been fun. It'd been a delightful endeavor to kill the descendants of the people who'd gouged out his eyes only a few decades earlier, wiping out their bloodlines for all eternity. Slowly, he began to take it one step further, and kept destabilizing the peace of countless political eras. Finally, the ultimate step was to create the ultimate mercenary group, perfectly designed to be used by any corrupt leader, of which humanity never lacked in any given era.

But eventually, even that had gotten boring. Waging wars, causing destruction in everyone's midst, hearing the screams of humans in utter despair... over time, with each increasing century, those things had no longer brought joy to him. Even defeating the most powerful warriors of the century had gotten stale; what was the point if he could slaughter them in mere minutes, if not seconds?

Like the cycle of life, everything had came back in full circle, and faced with the mind-crushing prospect of utter boredom for eternity, he'd been in pursuit of death once more.

When the first Amanto ship came crashing on planet Earth by complete accident, he'd taken one without a second thought. He had to murder the poor alien who'd been unfortunate enough to come across his way, but he'd gotten a joyride out of it.

And then he found that it wasn't only Earth that had sources of Altana.

The first planet he'd ever destroyed wasn't really a planet. It was more of a satellite - about fifty light years away from Earth - and it had revolved around a much bigger planet. He'd gone near the Altana port - unguarded and abandoned, by the looks of it - and had stuck his hand in experimentally, marveling that he could change the usual blue-green energy into a different color.

Then it started to explode. He was lucky enough to get back into his spaceship just in time so that he could observe the beautiful destruction of it.

It had occurred to him that if there were Altana ports on different planets, there would have been other immortal beings out there, too.

He'd found one after two decades of searching in space, but to his disappointment, she simply had done nothing with the chance of immortality. She had been too afraid to live, but was too afraid to pursue death, either. And so, rather than to leave her alone to rot away for a millennia, he had taken it upon himself in order to force her into making a choice. The last time someone had heard from her was to anyone's guess.

He'd been very efficient with destroying all the Altana ports until an army of aliens had the bright idea to push him directly into a crater, and that was when he found himself reborn as someone else.

Thus, he'd became Yoshida Shoyou, sent back to planet Earth, and the rest was history.

-x-

The three Wings of the Naraku were waiting for him as Utsuro had risen up from his slumber. Each of them had a crow resting on their shoulders.

"Master," Mukuro said, her eyes expressionless, like any good member of the Naraku. "The Elders have requested your presence."

"Have they?" Utsuro asked, stretching out his shoulders. "What do they want this time?"

"Your blood, master. Now that they've received word that Yoshida Shoyou is dead, they are excited to receive immortality."

"I see."

He patted her head, and her red eyes blinked slowly at the unexpected show of affection. "Master... ?"

"Oboro has trained you well," he said. He'd been very impressed with her performance so far; her kill count had easily surpassed most of the senior members of the Naraku. On the right, the man himself - a faithful servant, the one to allow Utsuro to emerge after years of suppression - stood at attention. On his other side, Hitsugi had taken left flank. Lately, the three of them had insisted on guarding him as if he was a delicate human, unable to protect himself.

"Thank you," she said, and lowered her eyes in a sign of respect.

"Well, how soon do they want me?"

"In an hour, Master."

"Hmm. Well, it wouldn't do for us to tarry." He pulled on his cloak and mask, and they soon followed after him afterwards.

The organization wasn't as weak at it looked on the outside, having lasted five hundred years by now. When Yoshida Shoyou had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, someone had replaced him and Oboro had been groomed to take over since he was a child. As he had a special talent for cultivating supernatural abilities which had naturally meant he could murder people without leaving any traces behind, that sort of thing wouldn't go unnoticed.

Even the Naraku had paperwork to do at times. If one leader died, it wasn't as if someone couldn't be replaced.

They all understood from the beginning that Utsuro was immortal, but due to the nature of the job, the average lifespan of each member tended to last under twenty years, if that. The open secret remained one inside the organization due to how ridiculous it seemed, not to mention that assassins tended to keep their mouths shut. It wasn't as if their spare time was spent on making friends outside of, well... work.

Though to be fair, with the advent of video recording technology, things could get a little more questionable. If Utsuro was actually interested in wreaking havoc for another century or two, he'd have to be more secretive about things.

Thankfully, he wasn't. Death was the aim here, and so was the apocalypse.

-x-

Utsuro had insisted on going alone, and after a bit of an argument, the three of them promised they would stay at the entrance of the spaceship. Despite his general lack of empathy towards most of humanity, he always had a soft spot for the humans who pledged loyalty towards the Yatagarasu. Unlike most other people, they shared a similar perspective with him in common, and they all collectively agreed that most humans were a waste of space.

When he destroyed the world, he hoped they'd be smart enough to escape.

He stood in the middle of the circle as one by one the Tendoshu Elders materialized onto their pillars. With a smile, he looked forward to this exchange, and set out his box of blood samples. They'd been freshly collected about half an hour before he set foot on the ship.

"Good evening," he said, his voice pleasant. "I know it's been quite some time."

"Welcome back, Utsuro," the head Elder said, and his voice was equally as pleasant. "It's very good to see you again. We thought we'd never find you."

"I'm glad to be back," the immortal said. "To commemorate such a happy occasion, I've bought a small gift for you all."

A servant from the ship had passed all of them a vial of the immortal's blood, and they all waited until each member of the Tendoshu held one in their hand, the dark red hue glittering underneath the lights of the pillars.

"To immortality," the head Elder said, and drank it down.

"To immortality," the rest of them repeated, and did the same.

Once they set down their vials, Utsuro smiled. "Happy, now?" he asked.

"Of course... you don't know how long we've waited for this... "

Utsuro waited. He stood in silence, patiently waiting until one of them had already fallen off his pillar, choking before turning limp.

"Now, imagine my disappointment when I heard that you all had been keeping away a very big secret from me," Utsuro said, and now, his smile had turned feral. "You promised me you would give me all the keys to the Altana ports on this planet. The deal was explicit, was it not?"

"Utsuro-sama ... !" Another one of the Elders collapsed to the ground, writhing in pain before his body slowed to a complete stop.

"I want the key to the last port on Earth," he said, his voice dark and hollow.

"But we - we've already given it to the humans!"

Now the immortal's smile slipped, and he sighed. "What a pity, then. I hope to see you all in hell soon."

With a snap of his fingers, every one of the individuals in front of him fell to the ground, poisoned by his command once they imbibed his blood.

-x-

When Utsuro exited the ship, he was pleased to see that his children were still waiting for him.

"Burn it down," he told them.

And they did.

-x-

- tbc -

-x-

a/n: So today I watched the trailer for the very last Gintama movie that will be adapting the rest of the chapters. I nearly cried. I am glad I picked the right time to get back into Gintama again, and this story has really helped me appreciate the series that has given so much to me in the past.

Thank you very much for sticking with me on this journey. Please let me know what you thought of the chapter!