High Priest Genjyo Sanzo despises children.

They are liars by nature and blunderingly oblivious, besides. They are bound tightly to materialism, and curiously attached to love. They change themselves out of that same love or shame, in a sort of selfless risk that they don't regret. They are loud and needy and don't understand the meaning of the words calm or concentration.

They do, however, understand love and other primitive thoughts like food and sleep with a startling clarity.

It is one such awkward creature that he considers by the silver-blue light of the stars. The child is curled into himself, a little ball of tangled hair and ripped clothing. He hasn't spoken since Sanzo's initial bad-tempered command to shut up, and seemed content to stare with wide golden eyes at everything that moved...but especially Sanzo. The unfamiliar scrutiny made the young priest jumpy, and he is relieved that the boy—did he have a name?—has finally collapsed from exhaustion in a lush meadow at the base of the mountain. Those luminous eyes are finally squeezed shut in sleep.

Sanzo eyes the child and resists the urge to sit on his itching fingers that ache for the shape of his gun or a cigarette. His restless gaze finally comes to a stop on the soft luster of the boy's diadem. What could possibly have moved him—a seventeen-year-old priest, Sanzo or not—to take on a demon child who is dangerous enough to warrant a power limiter and imprisonment in the middle of nowhere for who-knew-how-long? He knows the answer, and thus it is a stupid question: it was the boy's voice. It was an incessant flow of both wordless emotion and soft pleadings, an aggravating stream akin to no let me out need you now despair sadness let me go take my hand please?

Sanzo shifts uncomfortably and reflexively digs in the deep folds of his formal robes. This weight of his small revolver is reassuring against his surprisingly cold fingers. But, then again, it is a surprisingly cold night, and he is for once grateful of the cumbersome uniform required of him. He darts another glance at the boy—he must have a name—and notes with some relief that he seems oblivious to the crisp breeze.

Odd, considering his fascination with the sun. The child refused to step into even the slightest shadows, preferring instead to walk in the blazing sunlight—not difficult, considering it was early afternoon as they descended from the mountain's summit. He had turned his face up to the sun at every opportunity, as if he was drinking in the light as glitteringly golden as his eyes. Even now, it is obvious that his skin is crimson with sunburn, and Sanzo bitterly anticipates a day rife with complaints. The boy will begin talking sometime, after all. He seems the type.

It is minutes or hours of slippery time later when the wind picks up and a spark of youryoku flares to life in the trees. Sanzo swears softly and tenses, leveling his gun at the darkness beyond the meadow's edge, a silver ember against endless black. There is only one of them, and it is cautious, keeping a safe distance into the trees. After a long moment, the aura fades and moves away, the youkai apparently deciding that one dangerous human isn't worth the trouble.

Sanzo sits back and scowls. He hates sitting in the meadow, exposed as it is, but the boy with him is heavier than he looks, and as hard to wake. He has no choice but to wait until the little youkai wakes up, which will hopefully be soon. The night's renewed breeze will only carry the conspicuous scent of a human through the trees.

Sanzo shifts again, and sighs in exasperation. He glances behind him and scoots back in order to lean his aching back against an obliging rock. The heavens open themselves to his eyes, the stars tracing unreadable symbols across the sky. He stares at them until they begin to chime and bleed together, and then he stops caring about the meadow altogether.

He dreams. Time has raced forward and jerked to a stop, whirled into space and snapped back into its rightful place. A gale shrieks and a breeze whispers, and the scorching sun and frozen moon twine into the same white light. The line between youkai and human has blurred into nothingness and winked out of existence. Cold stars have crashed to the earth in showers of fire. He feels claws on his face, curiously gentle against thoughts of the end of the world.

Something rises and swells, like a song for the gods, a ring of endless radiance that rivals the sun. The sun...a flash of gold against gold, eyes following him...a voice, that has known his name since the beginning of time itself, whose presence he has missed since before he knew what it was to regret.

When he opens his eyes, goose bumps pepper his skin. His head feels muddled and his spine complains bitterly, and he isn't sure yet what is real and what is part of the fading dream. The stars are still in the sky, the sun is nowhere to be found, and even the boy is unmoved from his curled position a few feet away.

Somehow, though, that strange, swelling song is still there: a thrumming storm of energies beats against his spiritual sense like a thousand little wings. It takes his dream-fogged mind a few endless seconds to grasp that this is how it feels to be surrounded by youryoku.

Sanzo promptly stops breathing, and then lets out a soft, "Fuck." He begins to reach for his revolver, and then realizes that it had never left his hand in the first place. With a grim smile, he stands and pulls his stiff fingers back to their cramped position. He aims where the demonic aura is strongest and fires.

There is a shriek, and then a cloud of black arcs to the sky and funnels straight down, aiming for its human prey. The soft snap of wings betrays them to be a colony of bat youkai, and their eyes glint bright blue in the light of the stars. Sanzo takes careful aim at the pair of eyes at the head of the horde, and wonders in the back of his mind if his eyes are going bad. He squints and tenses his index finger.

Just as he pulls the trigger, something collides with the backs of his knees, and he goes down with a muffled yell. The gun fires wildly at the stars, and he falls heavily on his back, his breath gone. A black shape darts in front of him and snatches something from the air, and then the bat youkai are upon them. Curiously, none attack; they stream around in a river of ebony fur and fluttering wings that goes on forever.

Sanzo slowly focuses his eyes on the scene before him: that child, that cursed little youkai boy, has a terrified bat clutched in his hand. Sanzo waits for the clawed fingers to crush the life from the little beast, for blood and smashed bones to fall to the meadow's grass, but it never happens. The boy opens his hand, and the bat youkai trembles in his palm. After a long moment, the bat opens its small jaws and screeches something, then launches itself away.

The torrent of fur and wings thins and spirals away into the night, leaving only a well-rested youkai boy and a sore human priest, together too entirely dangerous, even for a whole colony of bat youkai. With their passage, the meadow and surrounding trees are too quiet.

The boy turns his too-bright eyes on Sanzo and doesn't blink. "About my name," he says. "It's Goku." He cocks his head to the side and adds, "And I'm hungry."

Sanzo stares at him, and then remembers: he despises children, with good reason.

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