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The first time it happened in, Gintoki almost threw him out the window.
It was a typhoon night, rain lashing the rooftops of Kabukicho. A pounding on the Yorozuya door, more desperate than any client’s. Gintoki opened it, a curse on his lips, and found a ghost leaning on the frame.
Takasugi, hair plastered to his pale face, kimono soaked through. He was burning up, a fever-glaze in his single visible eye, and shivering violently. He didn’t say a word. Just stared, defiant and vulnerable all at once, before his knees buckled.
Gintoki caught him. Of course he did. He dragged the dead weight of his sworn enemy inside, grumbling about tracked-in mud and inconvenient timing.
He stripped off the wet clothes, toweled the damp hair, and forced bitter herbal tea down a resistant throat. As he sat in the dim light, listening to ragged breathing even out, he was thrown back a decade.
A lean-to in the rain, the smell of wet earth and blood. A younger Takasugi, teeth chattering with a wound-fever, stubbornly refusing to sleep. "I'll keep watch," he'd slurred. Gintoki had shoved him down with a rough hand. "Idiot. I'm here. Just sleep." And he had.
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Katsura was different. He didn’t collapse; he manifested. Gintoki would come home from a frustrating pachinko loss to find Zura sitting perfectly straight in the middle of his room, a noble statue… with a bright red nose and glassy eyes.
"Gintoki," he'd say solemnly, voice thick with congestion. "A revolutionary must not succumb to petty ailments. But my head feels… fuzzy. The plan to liberate the local temple's donation box is… escaping me."
"You have a cold, you moron," Gintoki would sigh, already moving to the kitchen. He'd make a horribly spicy ramen, the kind that cleared sinuses through sheer terror. He'd throw an extra blanket at him. He'd listen to the increasingly delirious revolutionary ramblings ("The shogun... is a nose hair!") until they faded into the soft snores of a man who finally felt safe enough to be useless.
In a war-torn village, hiding from patrols. Katsura had caught a chill, his elegant speeches interrupted by sneezes. Gintoki had stolen a lemon from an abandoned field and hot water from a campfire. "Drink this, Zura. And shut up about your noble sacrifice until you can say it without coughing up a lung."
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Sakamoto was the loudest about it. He’d arrive with a booming, congested laugh, arms full of extravagant "get-well" gifts for himself.
"Hahahaha, Kintoki! This common cold is a real menace, hahahaha" He'd sprawl on the couch, a mountain of cheerful misery. He’d demand entertainment, tell grandiose stories between sneezes, and somehow rope Gintoki into playing shogi with a fever-addled brain.
Gintoki would insult him relentlessly, but would also make sure the kettle was always full for tea, would adjust the pillow behind his back, and would silently replace the cold compress on his forehead.
In a damp cave that served as a temporary base, Sakamoto’s booming optimism had hit a wall. A brutal flu had laid low their strategist. "Don't you die on me, Tatsuma," Gintoki had muttered, checking his temperature with a hand on his brow. "Your big ideas are a pain, but they're the only ones we've got." Sakamoto, for once quiet, had just given a weak, grateful smile.
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They always came. In war, it was because he was the strongest, the one who seemed immortal, the unshakeable center. In peace, it was for the same reason, just dressed differently.
They came with their rivalries, their ideologies, their cosmic business deals. They came as the terrorist, the revolutionary, the entrepreneur. But under the fever, under the fatigue, under the weight of the worlds they carried, they were just Shibusen—sick, tired, and instinctively seeking the one place that had always, always been a refuge.
And Gintoki, cursing and complaining, would put down his Jump, get up, and take care of them. He’d brew the tea, fluff the pillow, and sit in the quiet gloom of his apartment. The war was long over, but some duties never ended. He was, and would always be, their anchor.
The three idiots who shaped his destiny, and who still, after all this time, knew the way home.